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Quotes of the Day:
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other."
- John F. Kennedy
"Be great in act, as you have been in thought."
- William Shakespeare
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 27, 2023
2. Entering the age of artificial truth
3. War, Ukraine and Adaptation
4. 'Quit being a little girl': What report reveals about women in Army special operation forces
5. UN experts say Islamic State group almost doubled the territory they control in Mali in under a year
6. Ukraine used 3% of US defense budget to destroy half of Russian army — Lindsey Graham
7. Ukraine says it liberates strategic southeastern settlement
8. China says its ban on Japanese seafood is about safety. Is it really?
9. A.I. Brings the Robot Wingman to Aerial Combat
10. The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland's Railway System
11. A Global Cyber-Scam Industry Is Booming in Plain Sight in Cambodia
12. China Ponders Russia’s Logistical Challenges in the Ukraine War
13. America’s Military-Industrial Base Needs a Revival
14. The Future of Algorithmic Warfare Part III: Stagnation
15. What Does Victory Look Like for Ukraine?
16. Chinese Political Warfare: A Strategic Tautology? The Three Warfares and the Centrality of Political Warfare within Chinese Strategy
17. Attacking foreign corruption blunts China’s malign economic influence
18. Opinion: Is Russia Now Weaponizing Music?
19. SOCOM Needs New Tech Old Approaches Vice Commander Says
20. Too Many Managers, Too Few Providers? Watchdog Tells Defense Health Agency to Reexamine Its Market Structure
21. China’s Road to Ruin
22. US Army Engulfed In Crisis; American Youth Disillusioned With Military Service, Recruitment Goals Falter
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 27, 2023
Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-27-2023-0
Key Takeaways:
- Ukrainian forces reportedly advanced in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area and in western Zaporizhia Oblast amid Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in southern and eastern Ukraine.
- A Ukrainian soldier likely operating in the Robotyne area offered further tactical details on the prepared Russian defensive positions that Ukrainian forces have penetrated and on those that are currently ahead of them.
- The composition of Russian defensive positions in southern Ukraine and the ambiguities about how Russian forces are manning and equipping them continues to obscure how the next phase of fighting will transpire.
- Russian forces conducted missile strikes against targets in Ukraine on the night of August 26 to 27 and reportedly targeted a Ukrainian airfield in Kyiv Oblast.
- The Russian Investigative Committee announced on August 27 that genetic tests confirm that Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin was among 10 people killed in a plane crash on August 23.
- Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) had been actively setting conditions to halt Wagner Group’s operations in the Middle East and Africa prior to Prigozhin’s death on August 23.
- The Russian MoD may be more intensely focused on disbanding the Wagner Group than Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in western Donetsk Oblast, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast but did not make confirmed advances.
- Russian authorities continue efforts to coerce migrants and foreigners living in Russia to fight in the war in Ukraine in exchange for Russian citizenship.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 27, 2023
Aug 27, 2023 - Press ISW
Download the PDF
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 27, 2023
Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Nicole Wolkov, Angelica Evans, and Frederick W. Kagan
August 27, 2023, 6:35pm 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 cut-off for this product was 1pm ET on August 27. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 28 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.
Ukrainian forces reportedly advanced in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area and in western Zaporizhia Oblast amid Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in southern and eastern Ukraine. Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun reported that Ukrainian forces are advancing in the directions of Novoprokopivka (13km south of Orikhiv), Mala Tokmachka (9km southeast of Orikhiv), and Ocheretuvate (25km southeast of Orikhiv) in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[1] Shtupun also stated that Ukrainian forces advanced near Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) and Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and achieved unspecified successes near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) in the Berdyansk direction (western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area) and in an unspecified location in the Melitopol direction (western Zaporizhia Oblast).[2] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction.[3]
A Ukrainian soldier, likely operating in the Robotyne area, offered further tactical details on the prepared Russian defensive positions that Ukrainian forces have penetrated and on those that are currently ahead of them. The Ukrainian soldier stated that, in the Robotyne area, there is a system of interconnected Russian trenches, dugouts, and limited underground tunnels that allow Russian forces to facilitate the movement of personnel, weaponry, and ammunition from different tactical positions along the front.[4] The Ukrainian soldier stated that anti-tank ditches and minefields stretch across fields in front of and in between these interconnected layers of defensive positions.[5] The soldier added that all “unexcavated” areas around these prepared defensive positions are heavily mined and that Russian forces have narrowly designated unmined paths in their defensive layers to allow Russian forces to reach firing positions.[6] The Ukrainian soldier did not indicate whether the Ukrainian forces had passed through the densest minefields but suggested that Ukrainian forces still had to demine areas at a gradual pace before advancing further.[7] ISW previously assessed that areas near the next series of prepared Russian defensive positions may be less heavily mined to give Russian forces operating north of these positions the ability to retreat, although the Ukrainian soldier’s reporting suggests that this may not be the case in the areas where Ukrainian forces are currently approaching the next Russian defensive layer.[8] Ukrainian forces are now within striking distance of the next series of Russian defensive positions, which appears to be comprised of a relatively more contiguous array of anti-tank ditches and dragon’s teeth anti-tank obstacles with Russian fighting positions behind these obstacles similar to the previous layer of Russian defenses.[9] The highly interconnected systems of trenches and dugouts that the Ukrainian soldier described is the result of months of Russian preparation and it is unclear if Russian forces extended that system throughout subsequent series of defensive positions further south.
The composition of Russian defensive positions in southern Ukraine and the ambiguities about how Russian forces are manning and equipping them continues to obscure how the next phase of fighting will transpire. ISW recently assessed that a lack of observed uncommitted Russian forces in the area may suggest that a subsequent series of Russian defensive positions may be less heavily defended than the positions that Ukrainian forces already penetrated to the north, although this remains unclear.[10] Russian forces have reportedly conducted additional lateral transfers to the Robotyne area with elements of the 76th Guards Air Assault (VDV) Division from the Kreminna area in Luhansk Oblast and are also reportedly redeploying unspecified elements from the Kherson direction to the area.[11] Russian forces committed elements of the 7th VDV Division immediately to combat after laterally transferring them to the Robotyne area in early August, although the Russian command could decide to commit these new reinforcements to strengthen the next series of defensive positions south of the current Ukrainian advance.[12] Russian forces committed a considerable amount of materiel, effort, and manpower to hold the series of defensive positions that Ukrainian forces are currently penetrating, and it is unclear if Russian forces will retain the advantages they have held if they cannot commit the same level of resources and personnel to these next layers of defense.[13] The next Russian defensive layer will, nevertheless, very likely pose significant challenges for the Ukrainian advance.
Russian forces conducted missile strikes against targets in Ukraine on the night of August 26 to 27 and reportedly targeted a Ukrainian airfield in Kyiv Oblast. Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian forces intercepted four Russian Kh-101, Kh-55, and Kh-555 cruise missiles out of eight unspecified Russian projectiles launched at Ukraine.[14] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian military airfield near Pinchuky, Kyiv Oblast.[15]
The Russian MoD appears to have unsuccessfully attempted to silence Russian milbloggers’ concerns over the alleged mistreatment of a Russian brigade operating in occupied Kherson Oblast — sparking further criticism from the ultranationalist community. A Russian state-affiliated war correspondent released a video on August 26 claiming to show five Russian servicemen of the 205th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (49th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) currently operating on the Dnipro River delta islands in a trench.[16] The servicemen asked that Russian milbloggers stop spreading complaints on social media concerning the brigade’s alleged lack of artillery support and accused Russian milbloggers of harming the brigade’s operations in the delta area. The servicemen also called on milbloggers to fight on the frontlines if they wanted to help the Russian war effort. ISW reported on August 25 and August 26 that Russian milbloggers claimed that elements of the 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade were suffering significant casualties under Ukrainian artillery fire on an island in the Kherson direction and that commanders were ignoring the personnel’s calls for artillery fire.[17] Several Russian milbloggers responded to the appeal and claimed that the video was clearly staged to deflect criticism from the brigade’s leadership and the Russian MoD.[18] Russian milbloggers claimed that the servicemen appeared to be wearing new uniforms, which the milbloggers noted is inconsistent with claims that these servicemen are fighting in trenches. The Russian MoD had consistently tried throughout the full-scale invasion to silence criticisms in the Russian information space by accusing Russian milbloggers of violating Russian operational security.[19]
The Russian Investigative Committee announced on August 27 that genetic tests confirm that Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin was among 10 people killed in a plane crash on August 23.[20] Wagner commanders and representatives have refrained from commenting on the announcement and called on Russians to stop spreading rumors and fake news.[21] Wagner’s official Telegram channels were likely referring to Telegram channels that claim to be affiliated with Wagner and are baselessly speculating that Prigozhin is still alive.[22]
Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian MoD had been actively setting conditions to halt Wagner Group’s operations in the Middle East and Africa prior to Prigozhin’s death on August 23. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger amplified reports that Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov visited Syria and Libya to coerce local officials into severing their cooperation with Wagner forces.[23] Yevkurov reportedly told Syrian officials to block Wagner’s logistics to the Central African Republic (CAR) that originated in Syria and prompted Syrian Defense Minister Ali Mahmoud Abbas to deliver Wagner an ultimatum demanding that Wagner hand over weapons and leave Syria by September 20.[24] The reports noted that Yevkurov will likely be meeting with African officials to set similar ultimatums for Wagner personnel in other countries. Yevkurov also reportedly told Wagner representatives in Syria that there have been no decisions regarding who will oversee the Wagner contingent after Prigozhin’s assassination and urged them to enlist in the Russian MoD-affiliated “Redut” private military company (PMC) as well as preparing to disarm soon. The Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that the Russian MoD is trying to fully reassign Wagner personnel to either a “volunteer corps” based out of “Patriot” Park in Moscow Oblast or to the “Redut” PMC.[25] The milblogger added that the Russian MoD negotiators are afraid of directly pressuring Wagner personnel and are instead pressuring Middle Eastern and African officials to sever their ties with Wagner – leaving the Wagner personnel without a choice. The milblogger observed that Wagner cannot independently exist following the Russian MoD’s June 1 announcement that volunteer formations cannot be independent of the Russian MoD.
The Russian MoD may be more intensely focused on disbanding the Wagner Group than Russian President Vladimir Putin. Former BBC Russian Service investigative journalist Andrey Zakharov, citing unnamed sources, reported that Putin allowed Prigozhin to continue Wagner operations in the Middle East and Africa but instructed him to not intervene in Ukraine or Russia during one of their two meetings after Prigozhin’s armed rebellion on June 24.[26] Zakharov added that the Russian MoD, on the other hand, intensified efforts to “strangle” Wagner in Syria and Africa, and Prigozhin together with Wagner’s leadership flew to Moscow to attempt to resolve this issue before his assassination. Zakharov added that currently, the fate of “Prigozhin’s empire” — inclusive of his military contracts and contracts for the extraction of oil, gas, and gold — in the Middle East and Africa is unclear. The Kremlin-affiliated milblogger noted that a third party, possibly another Russian force structure, should adopt Wagner’s foreign assets rather than having the Russian MoD do so to prevent tension and the destruction of these assets. A Russian source also claimed that the Russian MoD may have been rushing to disband Wagner because the Kremlin had yet to decide on Wagner’s fate and because the MoD wanted to be the first organization to assume control over Wagner’s leftovers.[27]
ISW cannot independently confirm the validity of these reports, but if these accounts are true, they may indicate that Putin is not micromanaging the dissolution of the Wagner PMC but rather has passed this responsibility to the Russian MoD. The surge of these accounts across Russian milblogger and opposition communities, however, may also be an attempt to separate Putin from Prigozhin’s assassination and the prospective dissolution of Wagner.
Key Takeaways:
- Ukrainian forces reportedly advanced in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area and in western Zaporizhia Oblast amid Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in southern and eastern Ukraine.
- A Ukrainian soldier likely operating in the Robotyne area offered further tactical details on the prepared Russian defensive positions that Ukrainian forces have penetrated and on those that are currently ahead of them.
- The composition of Russian defensive positions in southern Ukraine and the ambiguities about how Russian forces are manning and equipping them continues to obscure how the next phase of fighting will transpire.
- Russian forces conducted missile strikes against targets in Ukraine on the night of August 26 to 27 and reportedly targeted a Ukrainian airfield in Kyiv Oblast.
- The Russian Investigative Committee announced on August 27 that genetic tests confirm that Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin was among 10 people killed in a plane crash on August 23.
- Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) had been actively setting conditions to halt Wagner Group’s operations in the Middle East and Africa prior to Prigozhin’s death on August 23.
- The Russian MoD may be more intensely focused on disbanding the Wagner Group than Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in western Donetsk Oblast, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast but did not make confirmed advances.
- Russian authorities continue efforts to coerce migrants and foreigners living in Russia to fight in the war in Ukraine in exchange for Russian citizenship.
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 Ukranian 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 offensive operations on the Kupyansk-Svatove line but did not make territorial gains on August 27. Kremlin-affiliated milbloggers claimed that Russian forces concentrated their efforts on attacking remaining Ukrainian positions in southern Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk).[28] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces successfully advanced in the Kupyansk direction on August 26, but did not provide evidence or specify the location of the claimed advance.[29] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces captured three Ukrainian positions in the Kupyansk direction and are advancing around Synkivka.[30]
Russian forces continued to attack Ukrainian positions on the Svatove-Kreminna line but did not advance on August 27. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated that Russian forces are shifting their focus from the Kupyansk direction to attacking in the direction of Novoyehorivka (15km southeast of Svatove) and that Ukrainian forces repelled 10 Russian assaults near Novoyehorivka.[31] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces attacked near Novoyehorivka and Bilohorivka (13km south of Kreminna).[32] Yevlash observed that elements of the Russian 4th Guards Tank Division (1st Guards Tank Army, Western Military District) are conducting offensive operations on the Luhansk Oblast frontline and that this division has one tank regiment. The 4th Guards Tank Division previously suffered significant personnel and equipment losses during Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kharkiv Oblast in fall 2022[33] A Russian war correspondent claimed that elements of the 80th Guards Tank Regiment (90th Guards Tank Division, Central Military District) are continuing to operate on the Svatove-Kreminna direction.[34] Russian milbloggers also claimed that elements of the Russian “Moskva” volunteer battalion operate near the Serebryanske forest area.[35] The “Moskva” volunteer battalion is reportedly composed of fans of the Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) and soccer as well as athletes, and its commander previously served in the 45th Guards Spetsnaz Brigade (VDV).[36]
Ukrainian forces continued to counterattack Russian positions on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line but did not advance on August 27. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian counterattacks near Synkivka, Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove), Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna), the Torske salient (13km west of Kreminna), and the Serebryanske forest area south of Kreminna.[37]
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 offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction but did not make any confirmed gains on August 27. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction, where there were 14 combat engagements during the past day.[38] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful assaults near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[39] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that Ukrainian forces are continuing to attack Chechen ”Akhmat” Spetsnaz elements holding positions near Klishchiivka.[40]
Russian forces continued counterattacks near Bakhmut on August 27 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut) and Klishchiivka.[41] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces recaptured up to half of their recently lost positions near Klishchiivka, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of recent Russian gains near the settlement.[42] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also conducted unsuccessful counterattacks near Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut) and Dubovo-Vasylivka (7km northwest of Bakhmut).[43] Yevlash stated that Russian forces in the Bakhmut area typically conduct assaults with designated assault detachments, sometimes without artillery support, that are then followed by regular Russian personnel.[44]
A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that both Russian and Ukrainian forces are conducting rotations in the Bakhmut area and deploying reinforcements to the area.[45] A Ukrainian commander operating in the Bakhmut area stated on August 24 that Russian forces transferred “fresh” elements of unspecified newly created units and elements of units from unspecified Russian-occupied areas in Ukraine to the Bakhmut direction.[46] ISW has previously observed Russian milbloggers describe likely tactical rotations in place as rotations.[47] The milblogger is likely not describing rotations wherein Russian forces would replace a committed unit with a previously uncommitted unit or formation so that the initial unit could rest and reconstitute, as Russian forces likely lack the required operational reserves to do so.[48] ISW has not observed evidence of additional Russian units or formations recently arriving in the Bakhmut direction. Ukrainian forces have recently conducted rotations in other sectors of the front and likely possess operational reserves to conduct further rotations.[49]
The Russian MoD claimed that elements of the Russian Southern Grouping of Forces repelled two Ukrainian assaults near Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka) and Nevelske (14km southwest of Avdiivka) along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front on August 27.[50]
Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front on August 27 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Stepove (8km northwest of Avdiivka) and Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka).[51] A Russian milblogger also claimed that Russian assault operations in Marinka were unsuccessful.[52]
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
A Russian milblogger claimed on August 27 that Russian forces counterattacked on the outskirts of Vuhledar (30km southeast of Velyka Novosilka) but did not specify an outcome.[53]
Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area on August 27 and reportedly advanced. Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun reported on August 27 that Ukrainian forces advanced in the Urozhaine area (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) and were successful near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) in the Berdyansk direction (western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area).[54] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces have continued to attack the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area throughout the past week.[55]
Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 27 and reportedly advanced. Shtupun reported that Ukrainian forces are advancing in the directions of Novoprokopivka (13km south of Orikhiv), Mala Tokmachka (9km southeast of Orikhiv), and Ocheretuvate (25km southeast of Orikhiv).[56] Shtupun also stated that Ukrainian forces advanced near Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and were successful in the Melitopol direction (western Zaporizhia Oblast).[57] Russian sources claimed on August 26 and 27 that Ukrainian forces attacked near Kopani (12km southwest of Orikhiv) and advanced near Robotyne and toward Verbove (18km southwest of Orikhiv).[58] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Robotyne and near Balka Uspenivka (11km southeast of Orikhiv).[59]
Russian forces reportedly conducted offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 27 but did not make any confirmed or claimed gains. Russian sources claimed that Russian forces counterattacked in Robotyne on August 26 and 27.[60] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces pushed Ukrainian forces back to the center of Robotyne, while Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov and other Russian sources claimed that Robotyne is contested.[61] Shtupun reported that Russian forces have increased the number of airstrikes in the Zaporizhia direction and stated that this indicates that Russian forces cannot stop Ukrainian offensive operations with other forces or means.[62] Footage published on August 26 purportedly shows elements of the 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) operating in the Orikhiv direction.[63] The reported commitment of elements of the 76th Airborne Division and the reports of increased Russian air activity on the Melitopol axis are indications that Russian forces already defending the area are not sufficient to stop the Ukrainian advance themselves. It is unclear whether the reported reinforcements and increased air attacks will be sufficient.
Russian milbloggers continue to claim that Ukrainian forces are operating on unspecified islands in the Dnipro River delta in Kherson Oblast. Russian milbloggers claimed on August 26 and 27 that fighting is ongoing and that Ukrainian reconnaissance groups continue efforts to secure positions on islands in the Dnipro River delta.[64]
Russian and Ukrainian air and naval forces have reportedly skirmished around gas and oil platforms in the Black Sea recently. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on August 27 that a Russian aircraft fired on a Ukrainian vessel operating near a platform in the northwest part of the Black Sea last week.[65] The UK MoD also noted that Ukrainian forces have struck several Russian-controlled platforms and that Russian and Ukrainian forces have periodically stationed troops on them.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin stated on August 25 that the Kerch Strait Bridge should open completely by November 1. Khusnullin said in an interview with Kremlin newswire TASS that Russian authorities will finish the first stage of repairs to the Kerch Strait Bridge on September 15 and then will close the currently open section of the bridge for repairs.[66] Khusnullin said that Russian authorities plan to finish the final restorations by November 1.[67]
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian authorities continue efforts to coerce migrants and foreigners living in Russia to fight in the war in Ukraine in exchange for Russian citizenship. Russian independent media outlet Horizontal Russia 7x7 reported on August 27 that Russian authorities refuse to consider citizenship applications from Tajik and Uzbek migrants in Kaluga Oblast until the migrants sign military service contracts.[68] Several migrants stated that Russian authorities continue to deny their citizenship applications despite the military enlistment office declaring them ineligible for military service.[69] Russian sources reported on August 26 that the Russian State Duma will consider a bill proposing that Russian authorities revoke the acquired citizenship of foreigners who fail to register for military service within two weeks of receiving their Russian passport or otherwise attempt to evade military duty.[70] The bill also proposes that Russian authorities deport foreigners after revoking their citizenship.[71]
Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Ukrainian sources reported that Russian occupation authorities continue to bring Russian citizens to occupied Ukraine to artificially alter its demographic composition. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that occupation authorities are seizing the apartments and houses of locals who have left occupied territories or been arrested.[72] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian citizens are then moving their families from Russia into the seized residences in occupied Ukraine.[73]
Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)
The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on August 27 that Tajik and Kyrgyz military contingents arrived at the airfield in Baranavichy, Brest Oblast, to participate in the “Combat Brotherhood-2023” joint operational-strategic exercises.[74] The exercises are a part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s annual command staff exercises and will have five centerpiece component exercises including combined arms combat exercises, special reconnaissance exercises, and logistics exercises.[75] Belarus plans to hold the “Combat Brotherhood-2023” exercises from September 1 to 6.[76]
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.
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
2. Entering the age of artificial truth
This has important implications for PSYOP practitioners and anyone concerned with influence in the human domain.
The referenced study, Misinformed: Implications of Foreign Influence on the Information Environment that Launched Operation Iraqi Freedom (which is worth studying) can be accessed here: https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/EXP_Misinformed_Ferguson_PDF.pdf
I love quotes but I have been duped more than a few times by the internet. Though even in those cases the message was worth sending out even if it was misattributed or falsely attributed. I guess we should heed the sage advice of Abraham Lincoln who once said - "don't believe everything you read on the internet" so you can be one of the people never fooled all of the time.
'(You can fool all people some of the time and some people all the time. But you can never fool all people all the time. ')
Wise counsel in this conclusion:
AI’s threat to society therefore looks less like James Cameron’s vision of a cyborg Armageddon and more like a hopelessly polluted information environment in which everything is disputed and meaningful communication is impossible. Advanced search tools can reinforce rather than refine the prejudices or policies of their human masters, which hyper-accelerates human bias online.
AI itself poses less of a risk to humanity than malign actors who seek to abuse it or those who put misplaced faith in its role as a gatekeeper of human knowledge. If Washington and Silicon Valley wade into the age of artificial truth without a clear strategy for managing its risks, America could end up drowning in a sea of incoherence.
Entering the age of artificial truth
BY MICHAEL P. FERGUSON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 08/27/23 12:00 PM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4172906-entering-the-age-of-artificial-truth/
Gary Marcus, cofounder of the Center for the Advancement of Trustworthy AI, has for years been highly critical of generative artificial intelligence and large language model applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These programs consume vast quantities of data to perform various functions, from creating new cocktail recipes to sharing insights about the folding sequences of proteins.
Marcus recently wrote that there are “not one, but many, serious, unsolved problems at the core of generative AI.” He isn’t alone. During an interview earlier this month, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku dismissed AI chat bots as “glorified tape recorders” that are only a “warped mirror of what’s on the internet the last 20 years.”
Yet that hasn’t stopped popular culture, business blogs, and tech enthusiasts from contemplating their supposedly revolutionary implications. There are many unknowns about general artificial intelligence and its role in American society, but one point is becoming clear: Open-source AI tools are turning the internet into an even murkier den of confusion.
One of Marcus’s chief concerns is that these models can create self-amplifying echo chambers of flawed or even fabricated information, both intentionally and unintentionally. AI researchers Maggie Harrison and Jathan Sadowski have each drawn attention to what the latter cleverly termed “Habsburg AI,” which appears when AI-generated information is fed back into another AI program on a loop. What results is a sort of information “inbreeding” that drives the AI mad, causing it to spew abominations of data. Yet even absent these conditions, human influence on the information filtering process creates opportunities for additional forms of distortion.
Practices known as search-engine poisoning, keyword stuffing, or spamdexing involve programmers boosting the visibility of certain sites or products artificially by manipulating a search engine’s indexing system. Unfortunately, AI can supercharge these manipulative schemes. But malicious intent aside, the sheer breadth of online data can lead programs to mistake such volume for veracity. Take, for instance, something as simple as a famous quote.
“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools” is one of the most misattributed phrases on the internet. Google and Bing searches yield an avalanche of results giving credit for this wisdom to the fifth-century B.C. Athenian general Thucydides. Indeed, the quote is one of ChatGPT’s top three responses to the prompt “Thucydides quotes.”
Though he was a warrior and a scholar, Thucydides never wrote those words. The quote, transformed over the years through endless paraphrasing, is from a biography of British General Charles George Gordon written by Sir William Francis Butler and published in 1891. Ironically, another quote frequently misattributed to Thucydides is that “knowledge without understanding is useless.”
Yet according to the dominant search engines — increasingly popular sources of human knowledge — Thucydides did say those things. This is one example of an artificial historical fact. The problem might seem trivial when quoting an ancient Athenian, but what about when vetting U.S. foreign policy for historical context, responding to a rapidly evolving pandemic or trying to make sense of potentially cherry-picked declassified intelligence that could lead a nation to war?
Earlier this month, I published a study describing how disinformation made its way into trusted sources and shaped the consensus to invade Iraq in 2003. If available at the time, AI-powered news filters could have further reinforced that narrative and stifled or altogether silenced opposition. Such a predicament emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, as social media platforms banned what they considered suspect reports that wound up being true. Society’s insatiable demand for rapid and continuous information access has also become a lucrative market that large language models are perfectly suited to exploit.
Questionable AI-authored literature now floods online bookstores, luring buyers with trending topics and promises of expertise on a budget. One error-riddled book about the recent fires in Maui appeared on Amazon within two days of the disaster. It had the same title as Michael Wolff’s wildly popular 2018 book on the Trump administration, “Fire and Fury.” The book was #1 in the natural disasters category before Amazon took it down, and this incident is far from isolated.
If these practices are not curbed, they could produce a Tower of Babel effect by creating an online ecosystem of self-replicating fictions. Americans read fewer books, have less faith in the news, view higher education as less important and rely more than ever on TikTok for their news, all of which makes the modern world fertile ground for algorithmic manipulation. Making matters worse, traditional checks on specious information — such as expert knowledge, reputable publishing agencies and hard news sources — have lost much of their influence.
AI’s threat to society therefore looks less like James Cameron’s vision of a cyborg Armageddon and more like a hopelessly polluted information environment in which everything is disputed and meaningful communication is impossible. Advanced search tools can reinforce rather than refine the prejudices or policies of their human masters, which hyper-accelerates human bias online.
AI itself poses less of a risk to humanity than malign actors who seek to abuse it or those who put misplaced faith in its role as a gatekeeper of human knowledge. If Washington and Silicon Valley wade into the age of artificial truth without a clear strategy for managing its risks, America could end up drowning in a sea of incoherence.
Capt. Michael P. Ferguson, U.S. Army, is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is coauthor of “The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age.” The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of the U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Defense or U.S. Government.
3. War, Ukraine and Adaptation
More than a book list, IMportant advice for all of us.
Excerpts:
One of the most important institutional responsibilities of senior leaders in military and national security institutions is providing the incentives for innovation during peace time. This allows appropriate organisational constructs and leading-edge technology to be combined to provide an advantage against adversaries in war.
It does however require a cultural predisposition to learning and sharing lessons widely, accepting failure as an opportunity to learn, and a well-honed understanding of risk. In his book, The Culture of Military Innovation, Dima Adamsky writes of these prerequisites for adaptation, describing how:
In the future, both state and non-state actors will continue to develop military knowledge, and security experts will continue to uncover foreign military innovations. In each case there will be a need to figure out the tools of war (hardware) and anticipate their application (software). The task with regard to “software” will be much more demanding, and a cultural approach will be indispensable for it.
War is a learning opportunity for military institutions. But to exploit learning and adapt, some knowledge of the theory of adaptation and its application to military institutions is required.
To that end, I present below a list of some of the best book and publications on adaptation and its application to the profession of arms. I am certain that there are probably some books not on the list that should be there. However, these are the publications I have found most useful over three decades of study of war and the military profession. Enjoy!
FUTURE OF WAR
War, Ukraine and Adaptation
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/war-ukraine-and-adaptation?utm
MICK RYAN
AUG 27, 2023
Image: ZelenskyyUA Twitter
I am tempted indeed to declare dogmatically that whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on now, they have got it wrong. I am also tempted to declare that it does not matter that they have got it wrong. What does matter is their capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives.
Sir Michael Howard, Military Science in an Age of Peace, 1973
Frequent readers of my work, here at Futura Doctrina or in my other publications such as my 2022 book, War Transformed, will have recognised that one of the central themes of my examination of the phenomenon of war – and the war in Ukraine in particular – is the concept of adaptation.
Exploration of the theory of adaptation has its origins in early advances in the biological sciences. English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, Charles Darwin, produced a theory of evolution. This theory explored the causal mechanism to account for evolutionary changes in the natural world. Darwin, with his theory of natural selection, sought to understand and describe how new animal species emerge and how others disappear in nature.
The exploration of adaptation has resulted in the development of concepts that underpin understanding of how adaptation occurs and how it can be applied. In military literature, the best-known adaptive cycle is Colonel John Boyd’s OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop.
In the 21st century, adaptation research has shifted well beyond the work of Charles Darwin and John Boyd. Adaptation theory is now applied across a variety of scientific endeavours. The theory of adaptation has become important in the examination of the optimum organisation of societies, businesses and other organisations as they attempt to improve their effectiveness in changing environments.
The breadth of change, and the speed at which it is occurring, must be considered to ensure all levels of military institutions are open to opportunities and resistant to the effects of surprise. Regardless of industry, the generation of a competitive advantage in an era where change is rapid is becoming more difficult. When an advantage is generated, it is likely to be more fleeting than in previous ages. As Rita McGrath wrote in a Harvard Business Review article, we now exist in an era of transient advantage and that successful institutions must spark continuous change and avoid the rigidity that leads to failure.
The transient nature of sources of advantage means that nations need to pursue approaches that harness all aspects of national capacity. To retain relevance and remain at the forefront of best practices, military organizations must possess and continuously update their mechanisms for environmental scanning and adaptation. Generating diverse options within military organisations, and in the wider national security community, is crucial to sustaining a competitive edge on the battlefield and beyond in the twenty-first century. As Peter Schwartz notes in The Art of the Long View, “resilient companies continually hold strategic conversations about the future.”
Adaptation in War
It is unreasonable to expect military institutions and their leaders to foresee every possible future contingency or to predict the reactions of an enemy. There is an infinite array of interactions and situations to consider, even in the smallest tactical actions. The Clausewitzian idea about the fog of war is as relevant today in the digital age as it was when he wrote On War two centuries ago. Because of this, an important design feature, and cultural stance, for military organizations in peace and war must be the ability to learn, and to be able to adapt to unexpected events.
In war, those who plan and lead the fighting must constantly seek to outthink, out-maneuver and to out-fight the other side. New technological innovations are introduced into service, the geography or objectives in the war are expanded or evolved, and new tactical and operational concepts are developed to exploit evolving organisational constructs and achieve evolving theories of victory. This constitutes, as I explored in War Transformed and other articles, an Adaptation Battle.
This adaptation battle has been taking place throughout the war in Ukraine. Both sides offer lessons in how contemporary military institutions might develop and sustain the learning culture that underpins adaptation – and success - at every level of military operations.
There are multiple examples of adaptation – from tactical to strategic levels – by both sides in this war. In the Ukrainian offensives so far, there is an example of tactical adaptation with the Ukrainian Ground Forces starting to use dismounted, distributed minefield breaching instead of heavy, mounted breach operations. The recent article in The Economist on this topic by Oliver Carroll was excellent.
Operationally, the Ukrainians appear to be adapting their main effort between the east and the south, possibly deceiving the Russians about follow-on phases for their offensives.
At the same time, the Russians have also been adapting. An important adaptation has been their response to the introduction of HIMARS in mid 2022. Since then, the Russian have evolved their C2 and logistics to make it harder to target and more survivable, which will complicate the Ukrainian deep battle in their 2023 offensive. They also adapted their operational posture to assume a more defensive stance in the south and the east, including the massive construction of obstacles and minefields.
Some of my previous articles on the topic of adaptation in the Ukraine War include:
A military organization’s learning capacity, and the ability to share lessons across the institution, is at the heart of every successful military organisation. Whether it is pre-war innovation, tactical learning, or the constant adaptation to military strategy during a war, learning and adapting is an essential component in military operations.
The competitive learning environment of military operations reinforces the requirement to develop and exploit the adaptive processes of military institutions. This adaptation occurs at multiple levels. It takes place with individuals at the individual level, and occurs at many levels in units, formations, and commands within military organisations.
But as Cohen and Gooch explore in their excellent book, Military Misfortunes, not all learning or adaptation in wartime results in battlefield success. Part of this is because some institutions are not able to quickly or efficiently absorb new technologies – or ideas. Alternatively, some fail to anticipate the array of future threats or are unable to judge which threats are the most serious. A final cause for adaptive failure is that enemies actively seek to interfere with and degrade their opponent’s ability to learn and adapt.
Image: @DefenceU Twitter
Adaptation and Organizational Learning Cultures
One of the most important institutional responsibilities of senior leaders in military and national security institutions is providing the incentives for innovation during peace time. This allows appropriate organisational constructs and leading-edge technology to be combined to provide an advantage against adversaries in war.
It does however require a cultural predisposition to learning and sharing lessons widely, accepting failure as an opportunity to learn, and a well-honed understanding of risk. In his book, The Culture of Military Innovation, Dima Adamsky writes of these prerequisites for adaptation, describing how:
In the future, both state and non-state actors will continue to develop military knowledge, and security experts will continue to uncover foreign military innovations. In each case there will be a need to figure out the tools of war (hardware) and anticipate their application (software). The task with regard to “software” will be much more demanding, and a cultural approach will be indispensable for it.
War is a learning opportunity for military institutions. But to exploit learning and adapt, some knowledge of the theory of adaptation and its application to military institutions is required.
To that end, I present below a list of some of the best book and publications on adaptation and its application to the profession of arms. I am certain that there are probably some books not on the list that should be there. However, these are the publications I have found most useful over three decades of study of war and the military profession. Enjoy!
The List
Dima Adamsky, The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the U.S., and Israel, Stanford Security Studies, 2010.
Dima Adamsky and Kjell Inge Bjerga (eds), Contemporary Military Innovation: Between Anticipation and Adaptation, Routledge, 2012.
Alexei Arbatov, The Transformation of Russian Military Doctrine: Lessons Learned from Kosovo and Chechnya. Marshall Center Papers, No. 2., The Marshall Center, 2000.
Australian Army. Adaptive Campaigning, Australian Army, 2006.
Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen, Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier, Basic Books, 2000.
Nora Bensahel and David Barno, Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime, Oxford University Press, 2020.
Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, O’Reilly, 2010.
Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton University Press, 2006.
Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, Gotham Books, 2006.
John Boyd, Patterns of Conflict: Warp XII. Unpublished briefing. Alfred Gray Research Center Archives.
Risa Brooks and Elizabeth Stanley, eds. Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness, Stanford University Press, 2007.
Serena Chad, A Revolution in Military Adaptation: The US Army in the Iraq War. Georgetown University Press, 2011.
Michael Chase, et al. China’s Incomplete Military Transformation: Assessing the Weaknesses of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). RAND Corporation, 2015.
Eliot Cohen and John Gooch. Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War, Vintage Books, 1990.
James Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg, University Press of Kansas, 1992.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, Random House reprint, 1998.
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Penguin Books, 1995.
Norman Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Basic Books, 1976.
Trevor Dupuy, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare. Da Capo Press, 1984.
Theo Farrell, Sten Rynning and Terry Terriff, Transforming Military Power since the Cold War: Britain, France, and the United States, 1991–2012, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Theo Farrell, Military Adaptation in Afghanistan, Stanford Security Studies, 2013.
Meir Finkel, On Flexibility: Recovery from Technological and Doctrinal Surprise on the Battlefield. Stanford University Press, 2007.
Meir Finkel, Military Agility: Ensuring Rapid and Effective Transition from Peace to War. University of Kentucky Press, 2020.
Aimee Fox, Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914–1918, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Anne-Marie Grisogono, “Success and Failure in Adaptation.” Paper for the Sixth International Conference on Complex Systems, Boston, 25–30 June 2006.
Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918. Praeger, 1989.
Grant Hammond, The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security, Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.
Frank Hoffman, Mars Adapting: Military Change During War. Naval Institute Press, 2021.
Michael Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Michael Horowitz and Shira Pindyck, “What is a military innovation and why it matters”, Journal of Strategic Studies 46, No. 1 (2023), 97-98.
Michael Horowitz and Stephen Rosen, “Evolution or Revolution?”, Journal of Strategic Studies 28, No. 3 (2005), 437-448.
Michael Howard, “Military Science in an Age of Peace.” RUSI Journal 119, no. 1 (March 1974): 3–11.
David Johnson, Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917–1945. Cornell University Press, 2003.
MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, eds. The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Margarita Konaev and Owen J. Daniels. “Agile Ukraine, Lumbering Russia: The Promise and Limits of Military Adaptation”. Foreign Affairs, 28 March 2023.
Andrew Krepinevich, The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2002.
Andrew Krepinevich, The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers, Yale University Press, 2023.
Sean McFate, The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder. William Morrow, 2019.
Allan Millett and Williamson Murray (eds). Military Effectiveness, vol. 1: The First World War. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Williamson Murray, Military Adaptation in War: With Fear of Change. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Williamson Murray, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Rita McGrath, “Transient Advantage.” Harvard Business Review, June 2013. https://hbr.org/2013/06/transient-advantage.
Michael O’Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare. Brookings Institution, 2000.
Kenneth Payne, Strategy, Evolution and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence, Georgetown University Press, 2018.
Stephen Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military. Cornell University Press, 1991.
Mick Ryan, “How Ukraine is winning in the adaptation battle against Russia” Engelsberg Ideas, 24 August 2022, https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/how-ukraine-is-winning-in-the-adaptation-battle-against-russia/
Mick Ryan, “Implementing an Adaptive Approach in Non-Kinetic Counterinsurgency Operations.” Australian Army Journal IV, no. 3 (2007): 125–40.
Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1991.
Richard Simpkin, Race to the Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-First Century Warfare. Lancer Publishers, 1997.
Don Starry, “To Change an Army”, Military Review, March 1983, 20-27.
Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe. Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity. Jossey-Bass, 2001.
4. 'Quit being a little girl': What report reveals about women in Army special operation forces
Certainly a clickbait title. The Fayetteville Observer is catching up to the reporting that began more than a week ago now.
Again, I think it is important to remember that USASOC directed this study on its own and not as a result of any outside investigation or pressure.
As I have been reflecting on the study I was wondering why I haven't seen any references to past studies and work by USASOC, namely Project Diane (named for the code name of the famous OSS operative Virginia Hall, the only civilian woman awarded the Distinguished Service Cross) as far back as at least 2013.
Integrating Women into U.S. Army Special Forces: Every Day is a 'Selection Event'
by Alex Quade
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/integrating-women-into-us-army-special-forces-every-day-is-a-selection-event
Women's Foundation Releases Findings From Project Diane Research
Study Shows Barriers and Potential Benefits to Gender Integration in the U.S. Army Special Forces
https://united-we.org/news/project-diane
Project Diane: Women’s Foundation of Greater Kansas City Final Report Alesha Doan, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; Political Science Shannon Portillo, School of Public Affairs & Administration
https://united-we.org/s/PROJECTDIANEFinal-Report.pdf
Excerpts from the Fayetteville Observer article:
The study, undertaken by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command in 2021, was conducted “to identify and break down barriers to serving in USASOC units,” Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOC commander, wrote in the report.
“This is a change-driving study, but we have got a long way to go to change the culture,” Braga said during a conference call Monday.
Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann, who became USASOC’s first female senior enlisted leader in May, said the study is about readiness and ensuring the best are recruited, assessed, selected and retained in Army special operation forces.
“This is really about understanding ourselves, and (Army Special Operations Forces) is not perfect,” Naumann said. “I’ve been in ARSOF formations over 20 years, and there’s no place I would rather serve.”
Leaders said the intent of the study is not to change standards for women in the special operations ranks but rather to learn the challenges they face and what changes will help them become better soldiers.
'Quit being a little girl': What report reveals about women in Army special operation forces
https://www.fayobserver.com/story/news/military/2023/08/28/what-women-say-about-serving-in-army-special-operation-forces/70648509007/
Rachel Riley
Fayetteville Observer
AD
0:08
SKIP
A report released this week about the challenges faced by women in the Army special operation forces reveals female soldiers face sexism, gender discrimination and equipment challenges.
The study, undertaken by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command in 2021, was conducted “to identify and break down barriers to serving in USASOC units,” Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOC commander, wrote in the report.
“This is a change-driving study, but we have got a long way to go to change the culture,” Braga said during a conference call Monday.
Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann, who became USASOC’s first female senior enlisted leader in May, said the study is about readiness and ensuring the best are recruited, assessed, selected and retained in Army special operation forces.
“This is really about understanding ourselves, and (Army Special Operations Forces) is not perfect,” Naumann said. “I’ve been in ARSOF formations over 20 years, and there’s no place I would rather serve.”
Leaders said the intent of the study is not to change standards for women in the special operations ranks but rather to learn the challenges they face and what changes will help them become better soldiers.
Who participated in the study
Monica Moore, a senior operations research analyst and lead researcher for the study, said many of the findings from the study are “gender agnostic,” and that it captures challenges also in the Army and United States.
The study includes responses from an anonymous survey, moderated focus group discussions and command team interviews.
According to the report, there are 2,300 female soldiers and 470 female civilian employees assigned to USASOC. Three of the soldiers were Green Berets during the time of the study.
“Although a majority of female study participants held support military occupational specialties, the findings in this study infer that until all barriers are universally removed, comprehensive integration of women into Special Forces and Ranger career fields will not be possible,” the report states.
During Monday’s conference call, Braga declined to say how many women are currently in Special Forces to protect identities, saying only there is more than one and fewer than 10.
The survey, conducted from February 2021 to May 2021, included 5,010 male and female active-duty and civilian participants assigned to the command. Of those participants, 1,001 were women.
Among those women, 837 were soldiers, with the following 435 female soldiers being from Fort Liberty where USASOC is headquartered:
• 60 from USASOC headquarters
• 42 from the 1st Special Forces Command headquarters
•56 from 3rd Special Forces Group
• 81 from 4th Psychological Operations Group
• 40 from 8th Psychological Operations Group
• 65 from 95th Civil Affairs Brigade
• 38 from 528th Support Battalion
• 22 from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School
• 25 from the 1st Special Warfare Training Group
• Six from the 2nd Special Warfare Training Group
The USASOC research team, led by an organizational psychologist, also held 48 focus group meetings with 198 female enlisted soldiers and officers at subordinate command installations across the U.S. from April 2021 to August 2021, followed by 25 command-team interviews at the group, battalion, and company level.
Of the 198 female focus group participants, 112 were from Fort Liberty.
What was said about gender bias and sexism
According to the report, during the study “it became evident that gender bias is deeply embedded into staff processes and equipping,” at all units “creating additional barriers,” with 40% of the female service members saying it is a challenge.
The report states that during the survey, focus group and interviews the research team found “an overtly sexist sentiment” primarily among male senior noncommissioned officers and company-grade officers.
“I dread the day a woman arrives on a Team and I hope I am retired by the time that happens,” an anonymous male warrant officer said during the anonymous study. “There are opportunities for women in (special operation forces), but not on a Team or in a team house in a remote location in third world (expletive)holes. We have enough problems and don’t need females to make more.”
One noncommissioned officer said he decided to retire so he wouldn’t have to lead a team with a female soldier, while another noncommissioned officer asked why women “ask” to go to special operation forces units.
“Do you think they are pursuing career opportunities? Please. Be honest with yourselves. They are looking for a husband, boyfriend or attention,” the latter said during the study.
The report states that “numerous male soldiers” also shared support for women serving in special forces operational detachments as long as standards were maintained during assessment, selection and training.
The report also found that gender bias “was not found exclusively within the male service member population” and described it as “Queen Bee Syndrome” in which senior women can fulfill career aspirations while “disassociating themselves from their gender” and “contributing to the gender stereotyping of other women.”
The report states that some women were instructed early in their careers to pick between two stereotypes.
“One participant explained that when she arrived to her unit she was counseled by another female soldier stating 'there are two types of women: b***** and whores. Pick which one you’ll be,’” the report states.
“While not the case for all women who participated in this study, a great deal of female service members have examples throughout their career where senior leaders, ranging from first-line supervisors to commanders, were consistently 'much harder' on subordinate women,” the report states.
The report also found some of the women reported “benevolent sexism,” in which male soldiers made decisions on their behalf without the female soldier’s input.
In one instance, a female junior noncommissioned officer reported that she was removed from a deployment and “replaced with a guy” because her senior leaders did not think she was tactically proficient, despite pre-mission training not having yet started at the time of the removal.
In other instances, women believed or were told they weren’t selected for promotion to first sergeant, senior noncommissioned officer, or a job because they were female.
Some reported that less qualified male soldiers were selected for the positions, while some women felt that being put in a position should be based on qualifications and not just to fill a spot with a female.
“The solution isn’t to just throw numbers of women into positions, please don’t lower the standard,” a junior noncommissioned officer told researchers.
Others reported pressure to be perfect in their jobs and the inability to speak up.
“When a man is aggressive, he’s strong but if I am, I’m a (expletive),” a female company-grade officer said in the study.
In response to combatting the biases and sexism, researchers recommended generating professional courses to teach at the Special Warfare Center and School and for USASOC senior leaders to “consider sending a message to the force that clearly communicates gender bias and sexism will not be tolerated in any form.”
“This is a change-driving study," Braga said during Monday’s conference call. "Some of the statements are disappointing, and I don’t think represent as far as where I am or where I think we need to be."
Naumann said she doesn’t think Army special operation forces have a “monopoly on misogynists.”
“I think education gets rid of ignorant comments,” she said.
What was said about sexual harassment
The study identified sexual harassment as a concern for 30% of the female service members and civilian employees who responded to the survey, with most instances starting with “an incident of unprofessional behavior.”
Meanwhile, an average of five female service members reported sexual harassment to the USASOC Sexual Harassment Assault Response and Prevention Program office during fiscal years 2016-2020, according to the report.
The report notes that barriers to reporting sexual harassment are fear of reprisal, distrust in the system, fear of retaliation, confidentiality concerns and distrust in the command.
One junior noncommissioned officer told researchers that during a deployment, she was sexually harassed by a senior member.
“I tried to make a sexual harassment complaint and my (officer in charge) told me to quit being a little girl and said that if I complain that’s how I’ll be known throughout the regiment,” she told researchers.
A senior noncommissioned officer told researchers that intimidation tactics are normal and “retaliation happens all the time.”
Another senior noncommissioned officer said, “It all comes down to how much you are worth, (Special Forces soldiers) cost more to make so they are worth more which means they’ll get rid of me if I report something.”
Twenty-three percent of male soldiers reported fear of interacting with female soldiers because of the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response Program training.
“The SHARP Program has made me hesitant to talk to members of the opposite sex without other individuals present to serve as witness,” a company-grade officer said in the report. “This is particularly true as an instructor, where I must provide feedback to females. I am afraid that if I fail a female who fails to meet the standards, she can end my career by claiming SHARP.”
Researchers recommended educating and empowering junior leaders while noting that commanders are required to initiate a commander’s inquiry or investigation when receiving formal or informal sexual harassment complaints.
Researchers said some units are working on posting “justice reports,” that explain a violation and subsequent administrative or punitive actions taken by the command.
“Although some units are currently providing these types of reports, a USASOC-wide report would be dual-purpose as it would demonstrate the command's commitment to the Soldier while also deterring would-be violators,” researchers recommended.
What was said about equipment not fitting
While 44% of women in the study reported equipment didn't fit them properly, researchers said some of the issues extend to male soldiers and those who are 5 feet 5 inches tall.
During focus group discussions, soldiers detailed issues with body armor not fitting properly and issues with combat helmets, ruck systems and urinary devices, which create challenges when shooting, moving or communicating.
During focus groups, soldiers said they had issues with marksmanship because of the body armor's length limiting access to holstered pistols and the collar pushing up to the throat, while others reported not being issued side plate armor because of a lack of inventory or a limited availability of extra small and small sizes.
USASOC staff found that inventory menus for Fort Liberty’s Central Issues Facility where protective equipment is issued “had not been updated in several years.”
Soldiers also reported issues with their combat helmets tilting forward and covering their eyes during marksmanship training and that ill-fitting helmets caused issues during airborne operations.
While women under a certain height reported frame and weight distribution issues and straps that were too wide with the standard issue rucksack, researchers found that most were unaware that an All-Purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment, known as an ALICE rucksack, has a smaller frame, straps closer together and the ability to distribute weight more evenly.
Researchers said that the Army also issues urination tools for female soldiers, while some reported dehydrating themselves or the inability to urinate in the field.
“I had to go pee so bad, but we were on a three-hour convoy in Iraq and couldn’t stop due to the threat, the pain was unbearable and I wound up with a complicated (urinary tract infection) because I had to hold it,” one soldier told researchers.
According to the report, since the study, USASOC has conducted limited-user assessments on the Army Modular Scalable Body Armor, Army Integrated Helmet Protection System, and multiple urinary devices.
The 95th Civil Affairs Brigade is leading a USASOC Female Operator Modernization Forum focused on fitting issues with body armor and helmets and assessing a new armor vest, the report states.
There are also three ongoing evaluations for the wedge body armor prototype, helmet straps adjustable for hair and additional urinary devices.
Other findings
Some soldiers reported postpartum challenges of returning back to work after having a child, while others said they were granted enough recovery time during miscarriages. Researchers said Army policies have been updated since the study, with updated policies being those about its body composition program, combat fitness test requirements, administrative absence for reproductive healthcare and a directive on pregnancy, postpartum and parenthood that provides wellness guidance.
The report states that USASOC is working with Army and unit-level physicians to inform and educate soldiers in areas such as field hygiene, postpartum care, urinary health and more.
Meanwhile, researchers recommended creating a USASOC miscarriage policy and ensuring lactation policies and spaces are up to date.
During the survey, 50% of women and 35% of men acknowledged that childcare is an issue.
According to the report, Department of Defense Child Development Centers are often at capacity with wait times from nine months to a year, and junior soldiers struggle to find childcare for schedules that include early-morning airborne training.
Researchers recommended commanders allow service members sufficient time to identify, review, and select their short-term caregivers.
The report found that 57% of those who participated in the study think that women are in a better position in Army special operation forces than conventional Army units and 62% of women want to remain in special operation forces.
“I am a SOF soldier, not a female SOF soldier. This is the biggest change in equality I’ve felt since switching to SOF,” a company-grade officer told researchers.
Meet these female Army trailblazers who have served at Fort Liberty
It also revealed that 72% of women and 64% of men said they would support their daughters serving in Army special operation forces.
“As a dad, I know I would feel proud and safe if my daughters chose to be in these ranks,” Braga said Monday.
What else is being done
Researchers recommend creating a Women in ARSOF Initiative, which is a pre-command course in the Special Warfare Center and School and overseen by Lt. Col. Rachel Cepis.
Cepis said the initiative focuses on what can “optimize female warfighters,” while recognizing “anatomical and physiological differences,” and looking “at something as simple as cycle-based training to understand menstrual cycles and preventing injuries.”
The initiative is helping cultivate mentorship and sponsorships for female soldiers and supports stories being shared during seminars
Since the report, a newsletter series has been created “to inform and educate the force on the findings and ongoing actions related to the study.”
“Change of culture takes time,” Braga said Monday. “It’s not just one briefing. It takes time. I think we’re well on the way. We have to be better. We must be better because our nation depends upon us for that.”
Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.
5. UN experts say Islamic State group almost doubled the territory they control in Mali in under a year
UN experts say Islamic State group almost doubled the territory they control in Mali in under a year
AP · August 26, 2023
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Islamic State extremists have almost doubled the territory they control in Mali in less than a year, and their al-Qaida-linked rivals are capitalizing on the deadlock and perceived weakness of armed groups that signed a 2015 peace agreement, United Nations experts said in a new report.
The stalled implementation of the peace deal and sustained attacks on communities have offered the IS group and al-Qaida affiliates a chance “to re-enact the 2012 scenario,” they said.
That’s the year when a military coup took place in the West African country and rebels in the north formed an Islamic state two months later. The extremist rebels were forced from power in the north with the help of a French-led military operation, but they moved from the arid north to more populated central Mali in 2015 and remain active.
In August 2020, Mali’s president was overthrown in a coup that included an army colonel who carried out a second coup and was sworn in as president in June 2021. He developed ties to Russia’s military and Russia’s Wagner mercenary group whose head, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was reportedly killed in a plane crash on a flight from Moscow this week.
The 2015 peace agreement was signed by three parties: the government, a pro-government militia and a coalition of groups who seek autonomy in northern Mali.
The panel of experts said in the report circulated Friday that the impasse in implementing the agreement — especially the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants into society — is empowering al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, known as JNIM, to vie for leadership in northern Mali.
Sustained violence and attacks mostly by IS fighters in the Greater Sahara have also made the signatories to the peace deal “appear to be weak and unreliable security providers” for communities targeted by the extremists, the experts said.
JNIM is taking advantage of this weakening “and is now positioning itself as the sole actor capable of protecting populations against Islamic State in the Greater Sahara,” they said.
The panel said Mali’s military rulers are watching the confrontation between the IS group and al-Qaida affiliate from a distance.
The experts cited some sources as saying the government believes that over time the confrontation in the north will benefit Malian authorities, but said other sources believe time favors the terrorists “whose military capacities and community penetration grow each day.”
“In less than a year, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara has almost doubled its areas of control in Mali,” the panel said, pointing to its control now of rural areas in eastern Menaka and large parts of the Ansongo area in northern Gao.
In June, Mali’s junta ordered the U.N. peacekeeping force and its 15,000 international troops to leave after a decade of working on stemming the jihadi insurgency The Security Council terminated the mission’s mandate on June 30.
The panel said the armed groups that signed the 2015 agreement expressed concern that the peace deal could potentially fall apart without U.N. mediation, “thereby exposing the northern regions to the risk of another uprising.”
The U.N. force, known as MINUSMA, “played a crucial role” in facilitating talks between the parties, monitoring and reporting on the implementation of the agreement, and investigating alleged violations, the panel said.
The 104-page report painted a grim picture of other turmoil and abuses in the country.
The panel said terrorist groups, armed groups that signed the 2015 agreement, and transnational organized crime rings are competing for control over trade and trafficking routes transiting through the northern regions of Gao and Kidal.
“Mali remains a hotspot for drug trafficking in West Africa and between coastal countries in the Gulf of Guinea and North Africa, in both directions,” the experts said, adding that many of the main drug dealers are reported to be based in the capital Bamako.
The panel said it remains particularly concerned with persistent conflict-related sexual violence in the eastern Menaka and central Mopti regions, “especially those involving the foreign security partners of the Malian Armed Force” – the Wagner Group.
“The panel believes that violence against women, and other forms of grave abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law are being used, specifically by the foreign security partners, to spread terror among populations,” the report said.
AP · August 26, 2023
6. Ukraine used 3% of US defense budget to destroy half of Russian army — Lindsey Graham
Not sure of th veracity of any of these "statistics."
Ukraine used 3% of US defense budget to destroy half of Russian army — Lindsey Graham
news.yahoo.com · by The New Voice of UkraineAugust 23, 2023 at 1:35 PM·2 min read1.6kLink Copied
Having spent less than 3% of annual U.S. military budget in security assistance, Ukraine managed to cut Russia’s combat capacity in half, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said at a press conference in Kyiv on Aug. 23.
Earlier on that day, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with three U.S. senators visiting Kyiv — Richard Blumenthal, Lindsey Graham, and Elizabeth Warren.
According to Zelenskyy, the discussion focused on improving Ukraine's defense capabilities.
"Discussed the situation at the front and the urgent issue of further strengthening Ukraine’s defense capability," the president said in a Facebook post.
At the press conference, Graham highlighted that the United States had spent less than 3% of its annual military budget to aid Ukraine in its war against Russia. He noted that the Ukrainian Defense Forces "have destroyed half of the Russian army."
"This is the best investment for American security ever; Ukraine is a fantastic partner — we have not seen such a partner since Churchill," the senator said.
Additionally, he pointed out that U.S. intelligence had made an error ahead of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, greatly overestimating the strength of the Russian army.
“When the Russian invasion began, we were told that Kyiv would fall in four days, and the country — in three weeks,” Graham adds.
“This was the biggest misunderstanding of Ukrainians and overestimation of the Russian army by our intelligence. I myself thought the Russian army was better than it is.”
The Washington Post reported that the total amount of aid provided by Washington to Ukraine now exceeds $66 billion.
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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
news.yahoo.com · by The New Voice of UkraineAugust 23, 2023 at 1:35 PM·2 min read1.6kLink Copied
7. Ukraine says it liberates strategic southeastern settlement
Ukraine says it liberates strategic southeastern settlement
Reuters
KYIV, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Ukraine said on Monday its troops had liberated the southeastern settlement of Robotyne and were trying to push further south in their counteroffensive against Russian forces.
The Ukrainian military said last week that its forces had raised the national flag in the strategic settlement, but were still carrying out mopping-up operations.
Ukrainian forces believe they have broken through the most difficult line of Russian defences in the south and that they will now start advancing more quickly, a commander who led troops into Robotyne told Reuters last week.
"Robotyne has been liberated," Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar was quoted as saying by the military.
The settlement is 10 km (six miles) south of the frontline town of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region on an important road towards Tokmak, a Russian-occupied road and rail hub.
Tokmak's capture would be a milestone as Ukrainian troops press southwards towards the Sea of Azov in a military drive that is intended to split Russian forces following Moscow's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Maliar told Ukrainian television that Kyiv's troops, who began their counteroffensive in early June, were now moving southeast of Robotyne and south of nearby Mala Tokmachka.
Ukraine's success in retaking Robotyne, which Russia has not confirmed, follows media reports of a meeting this month of senior NATO military chiefs and Ukraine's top general on resetting Ukraine’s military strategy.
'VERY HOT' ON EASTERN FRONT
Ukrainian forces are also fighting Russian troops in eastern Ukraine, and progress has been slower than had been widely expected in the counteroffensive because they have encountered vast Russian minefields and trenches.
Maliar described the battlefield situation in the east as "very hot" in the past week. She said Russian troops were gathering new forces there and regrouping, and Moscow was aiming to deploy its best troops there.
Ukrainian forces had continued to advance south of Bakhmut, she said, referring to the nearly devastated eastern city that was captured by Moscow's troops in May after months of fierce fighting.
She added that in the past week Ukrainian forces had retaken 1 square km (0.39 square mile) around Bakhmut, and Russian troops had not made any advances.
In the latest of Russia's frequent air strikes on Ukraine, two people were killed overnight when a vegetable oil plant was hit in the central Poltava region, the region's governor said.
Russia said it had shot down a Ukrainian drone flying towards Moscow in the early hours of Monday, in an incident that briefly disrupted flights over the Russian capital.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the situation on the battlefield of the reports of the latest attacks.
Reporting by Tom Balmforth, Writing by Anna Pruchnicka, Editing by Timothy Heritage
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Reuters
8. China says its ban on Japanese seafood is about safety. Is it really?
An attempt at Chinese economic warfare against Japan?
China says its ban on Japanese seafood is about safety. Is it really?
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/27/business/japan-fukushima-water-china-import-ban-intl-hnk/index.html?utm
By Kathleen Magramo and Michelle Toh, CNN
Updated 3:33 AM EDT, Mon August 28, 2023
CNN —
In the busy streets of Hong Kong’s Central district the lunchtime queues snake around the swanky Japanese restaurants where high-end sushi can sell at $150 a pop just for a tasting menu.
At Fumi, one of the more popular joints, the floors are packed with over a hundred people chattering away and chowing down.
“It’s just as busy as ever,” says Thomason Ng, Fumi’s general manager. “Only a small portion of people have asked where the food is from. They’re here for the dining experience and great hospitality alongside the food.”
The great economies of Asia are clashing over the sea once again, but from the look of these customers either nobody told them, or they simply don’t care.
The move by Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, to release more than 1 million metric tons of treated radioactive waste water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea has prompted a furious response from its neighbor and longtime rival China, the world’s second-largest economy.
Soon after Japan began pumping the water into the ocean on Thursday, China announced that it would ban all seafood imports from its neighbor – vastly extending earlier restrictions it had implemented on sea food imports from Fukushima prefecture in the wake of the plant’s meltdown in 2011.
Even as the import ban kicked in, tables were filled at Japanese restaurant Fumi in Hong Kong on August 24, 2023.
Kathleen Magramo/CNN
Hours before China’s announcement, the Asian financial center of Hong Kong – a semi-autonomous Chinese city – imposed its own ban on aquatic product imports from 10 Japanese regions including Tokyo and Fukushima.
But while the well-heeled, international crowds populating Hong Kong’s sushi joints may have largely shrugged off the local government’s warnings, on the Chinese mainland the public’s reaction has been rather less forgiving.
Calls for boycott
Chinese media – traditional and social – has exploded with anger at Japan’s actions, with several state media outlets running critical editorials and opinion polls. A hashtag blasting the release gained more than 800 million views on the Chinese social media platform Weibo within just a few hours of Thursday’s release.
China insists the ban is necessary “to prevent the risk of radioactive contamination of food” and has accused Japan of an “extremely selfish and irresponsible act that disregards the international public interest.” It has repeatedly rejected Japan’s claims that the water has been adequately treated and contains negligible amounts of radioactivity.
Many users on Chinese social media – or at least the vocal ones – appear to support their government’s position, while many more have called on authorities to go a step further with a more wide-ranging boycott.
“We should ban all Japanese products,” read one top comment on Weibo. “The Japanese are irresponsible,” read another.
Japanese entities suffered a wave of harassment phone calls originating from China, prompting Japan’s vice foreign minister Masataka Okano to summon the Chinese ambassador over what he called an “extremely regrettable and worrisome” situation.
In a statement on Monday, the ministry also urged the Chinese government to take “all possible measures ” to ensure the safety of Japanese citizens in China.
Experts say the strength of the response in part reflects the long history of animosity between the two Asian giants, which dates back to and beyond World War II and includes a variety of maritime territorial disputes.
Calls for boycotts of Japan are relatively frequent, breaking out whenever old grievances rear their heads or territorial disputes flare, they point out.
In 2012, trade relations sank to a low point when Japan nationalized a group of islands in the East China Sea claimed by both Tokyo and Beijing, fueling violent anti-Japanese protests across cities in China. The boycotts turned into violent attacks against Japanese-owned or branded factories in China as well as automakers and home appliance retailers.
Hitting where it hurts
That level of vitriol is not present this time round – or at least not yet – even if the ban appears designed to hit Japan where it hurts.
Despite their bitter histories, Japanese cuisine is hugely popular in many parts of China and business is booming.
There were 789,000 Japanese restaurants in China in 2022, with the sector valued at around $25 billion and growing. There are actually more Japanese restaurants in China now than there were before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019.
Those restaurants are likely to be hit hard by the ban, as are trade ties more generally.
Last year, Japan exported seafood worth about $942.4 million (137.7 billion yen) to China – its top trading partner, while Hong Kong accounted for another approximately $432.3 million (63.2 billion yen), according to the Japanese government.
Then there is the Japanese fishing industry to think about, with local fisherman reeling from what they see as disastrous publicity.
Japan will start releasing treated radioactive water this week. Here's what we know
The JF Fisherman’s Cooperative Association, a nationwide body representing fishermen, has urged Tokyo to “take immediate action to address the reputational damage that has already been caused by rumors.”
“Fishermen nationwide are feeling increasingly anxious at this very moment,” said the group’s chairman, Masanobu Sakamoto, following a meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“We fishermen hold only one hope, namely that our fishing industry will continue to operate in peace,” Sakamoto added.
‘Not remotely harmful’
Critics have accused China and Hong Kong of hype and double standards, suggesting they are using the issue to score political points over a regional rival at the expense of scientific rigor.
The state-owned electricity firm Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) points out that in the years since the 2011 disaster the contaminated wastewater has been continually treated to filter out all the removable harmful elements and that it will be processed for a second time and highly diluted before being released over a period of decades.
The process will remove almost all radionuclides from the wastewater, apart from tritium – a naturally occurring form of hydrogen that is the weakest of all of radioactive isotopes.
Many scientists back Tokyo’s position that the water being released is safe.
In Fukushima, TEPCO says that some 7,800 cubic meters of water containing 1.1 trillion becquerels of tritium will be released in the initial 17-days of release.
That’s equivalent to 0.003 grams of tritium – the weight of about 10 strands of human hair – said Nigel Marks, an expert on radioactive waste and an associate professor at Curtin University in Australia. By contrast, he says, there’s currently about 8,400 grams of tritium already in the Pacific Ocean.
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CNN goes inside the Fukushima nuclear plant where wastewater is being treated
03:36 - Source: CNN
“It’s not even remotely harmful,” Marks said, adding that people are exposed to more radiation on an airplane flight.
“(Japan’s release is) completely consistent with past practice all over the world. There’s 60 years worth of scientific data of releasing tritium into waterways exactly like this and typically at far higher quantities, and nothing has ever happened.”
Much more tritium has been released by normally operating nuclear power plants into the north Pacific Ocean from China, South Korea, and Taiwan, said David Krofcheck, a physics lecturer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
“Tritium is produced naturally as part of our normal environmental background radiation, and it travels via rain or rivers into the world’s oceans. The water release is designed to have seven times less tritium per liter than is recommended for drinking water by the World Health Organization,” Krofcheck said.
According to a study by the Japanese government, China’s own Fuqing nuclear power plant discharged 52 trillion becquerels of tritium in 2020.
But these discussions are largely missing from China’s state media coverage and on its heavily censored internet.
A number of articles trying to explain the science behind the discharge — including one from a Chinese nuclear expert who formerly worked at a government-linked institute — have been scrubbed after gaining traction on social media.
A drop in the economic ocean?
While some critics are accusing China of hyping the risks, there are others who wonder too if it has overestimated how much leverage it ultimately has over its neighbor.
China is Japan’s top seafood export market but it accounts for only 15-20% of Japan’s food exports, and food exports account for only 1% of Japan’s total exports, said Stefan Angrick, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics.
“To put this into context, even in a ‘worst case’ scenario involving a Chinese ban on all food imports from Japan, the direct impact on Japanese GDP would be about 0.04%,” Angrick added.
That’s not to say Japan needn’t be concerned. It is. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has reportedly “strongly” requested via diplomatic channels that China “immediately overturn” the ban.
But Tokyo may be barking up the wrong tree if it thinks arguments about the science will sway China.
Fei Xue, a senior analyst covering Asia at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), said the reactions of regional governments to Japan’s actions have largely reflected the status of their diplomatic ties with Tokyo.
Still, Fei too thought that the bans from China and Hong Kong would have limited impact on Japanese trade.
“Seafood exports accounted for just 0.3% of Japan’s total goods exports in 2022, among which shipments to mainland China and Hong Kong represented 35.8% of the total amount. Consequently, even considering the reputational damage for Japanese seafood products, Japan’s overall exports will not be materially undermined,” Fei said.
So long and thanks for all the fish
Back in Hong Kong, it remains hard to detect any lingering sense of either concern or outrage at Japan’s actions.
Indeed, the release appears to have had very little effect whatsoever on the appetites of the crowds queueing round the restaurants in the Central district.
Part of the reason for this may be that chefs and restaurateurs saw the ban coming, with Hong Kong authorities hinting from the start of the year that it was on the horizon.
Many responded by widening their supply lines, sourcing their seafood from suppliers in Japan’s Hokkaido, Kyushu and Kagoshima regions – which are not covered by Hong Kong’s ban – as well as from Norway, Australia and Canada.
Because of that the menu at Fumi hasn’t needed to change much, except for a little card letting diners know that the restaurant has followed the new import controls and sourced its ingredients from around the world.
At a shopping mall nearby, diner Cara Man, 33, was tucking into her lunch at sushi chain Senryo. She said that people still craved their favorite Japanese dishes, regardless of the news.
“People might start paying more attention to the radiation levels in their food if there are reports of people getting sick, but that isn’t happening right now,” she said.
“So we’ll probably keep eating Japanese cuisine like nothing happened.”
CNN’s Francesca Annio and Emi Jozuka contributed reporting.
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9. A.I. Brings the Robot Wingman to Aerial Combat
Is this a real game changer?
A.I. Brings the Robot Wingman to Aerial Combat
By Eric Lipton
Reporting from Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., and Washington
An Air Force program shows how the Pentagon is starting to embrace the potential of a rapidly emerging technology, with far-reaching implications for war-fighting tactics, military culture and the defense industry.
The New York Times · by Eric Lipton · August 27, 2023
The Air Force’s pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft is run by artificial intelligence.Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
An Air Force program shows how the Pentagon is starting to embrace the potential of a rapidly emerging technology, with far-reaching implications for war-fighting tactics, military culture and the defense industry.
The Air Force’s pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft is run by artificial intelligence.Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
It is powered into flight by a rocket engine. It can fly a distance equal to the width of China. It has a stealthy design and is capable of carrying missiles that can hit enemy targets far beyond its visual range.
But what really distinguishes the Air Force’s pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft is that it is run by artificial intelligence, putting it at the forefront of efforts by the U.S. military to harness the capacities of an emerging technology whose vast potential benefits are tempered by deep concerns about how much autonomy to grant to a lethal weapon.
Essentially a next-generation drone, the Valkyrie is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle. Its mission is to marry artificial intelligence and its sensors to identify and evaluate enemy threats and then, after getting human sign-off, to move in for the kill.
On a recent day at Eglin Air Force Base on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Maj. Ross Elder, 34, a test pilot from West Virginia, was preparing for an exercise in which he would fly his F-15 fighter alongside the Valkyrie.
“It’s a very strange feeling,” Major Elder said, as other members of the Air Force team prepared to test the engine on the Valkyrie. “I’m flying off the wing of something that’s making its own decisions. And it’s not a human brain.”
The Valkyrie program provides a glimpse into how the U.S. weapons business, military culture, combat tactics and competition with rival nations are being reshaped in possibly far-reaching ways by rapid advances in technology.
The emergence of artificial intelligence is helping to spawn a new generation of Pentagon contractors who are seeking to undercut, or at least disrupt, the longstanding primacy of the handful of giant firms who supply the armed forces with planes, missiles, tanks and ships.
The possibility of building fleets of smart but relatively inexpensive weapons that could be deployed in large numbers is allowing Pentagon officials to think in new ways about taking on enemy forces.
It also is forcing them to confront questions about what role humans should play in conflicts waged with software that is written to kill, a question that is especially fraught for the United States given its record of errant strikes by conventional drones that inflict civilian casualties.
And gaining and maintaining an edge in artificial intelligence is one element of an increasingly open race with China for technological superiority in national security.
The Valkyrie is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle.Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
Military planners are worried that the current mix of Air Force planes and weapons systems — despite the trillions of dollars invested in them — can no longer be counted on to dominate if a full-scale conflict with China were to break out, particularly if it involved a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
That is because China is lining its coasts, and artificial islands it has constructed in the South China Sea, with more than a thousand anti-ship and antiaircraft missiles that severely curtail the United States’ ability to respond to any possible invasion of Taiwan without massive losses in the air and at sea.
After decades of building fewer and fewer increasingly expensive combat aircraft — the F-35 fighter jet costs $80 million per unit — the Air Force now has the smallest and oldest fleet in its history.
That is where the new generation of A.I. drones, known as collaborative combat aircraft, will come in. The Air Force is planning to build 1,000 to 2,000 of them for as little as $3 million apiece, or a fraction of the cost of an advanced fighter, which is why some at the Air Force call the program “affordable mass.”
There will be a range of specialized types of these robot aircraft. Some will focus on surveillance or resupply missions, others will fly in attack swarms and still others will serve as a “loyal wingman” to a human pilot.
The drones, for example, could fly in front of piloted combat aircraft, doing early, high-risk surveillance. They could also play a major role in disabling enemy air defenses, taking risks to knock out land-based missile targets that would be considered too dangerous for a human-piloted plane.
The A.I. — a more specialized version of the type of programming now best known for powering chat bots — would assemble and evaluate information from its sensors as it approaches enemy forces to identify other threats and high-value targets, asking the human pilot for authorization before launching any attack with its bombs or missiles.
The cheapest ones will be considered expendable, meaning they likely will only have one mission. The more sophisticated of these robot aircraft might cost as much as $25 million, according to an estimate by the House of Representatives, still far less than a piloted fighter jet.
“Is it a perfect answer? It is never a perfect answer when you look into the future,” said Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe, who until this summer was in charge of setting requirements for the air combat program, as the Air Force works to incorporate A.I. into its fighter jets and drones.
“But you can present potential adversaries with dilemmas — and one of those dilemmas is mass,” General Jobe said in an interview at the Pentagon, referring to the deployment of large numbers of drones against enemy forces. “You can bring mass to the battle space with potentially fewer people.”
The effort represents the beginning of a seismic shift in the way the Air Force buys some of its most important tools. After decades in which the Pentagon has focused on buying hardware built by traditional contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the emphasis is shifting to software that can enhance the capabilities of weapons systems, creating an opening for newer technology firms to grab pieces of the Pentagon’s vast procurement budget.
“Machines are actually drawing on the data and then creating their own outcomes,” said Brig. Gen. Dale White, the Pentagon official who has been in charge of the new acquisition program.
The Pentagon has spent several years building prototypes like the Valkyrie.Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
The Air Force realizes it must also confront deep concerns about military use of artificial intelligence, whether fear that the technology might turn against its human creators (like Skynet in the “Terminator” film series) or more immediate misgivings about allowing algorithms to guide the use of lethal force.
“You’re stepping over a moral line by outsourcing killing to machines — by allowing computer sensors rather than humans to take human life,” said Mary Wareham, the advocacy director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, which is pushing for international limits on so-called lethally autonomous weapons.
A recently revised Pentagon policy on the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems allows for the autonomous use of lethal force — but any particular plan to build or deploy such a weapon must first be reviewed and approved by a special military panel.
Asked if Air Force drones might eventually be able to conduct lethal strikes like this without explicit human sign-off on each attack, a Pentagon spokeswoman said in a statement to The New York Times that the question was too hypothetical to answer.
Any autonomous Air Force drone, the statement said, would have to be “designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.”
Air Force officials said they fully understand that machines are not intelligent in the same way humans are. A.I. technology can also make mistakes — as has happened repeatedly in recent years with driverless cars — and machines have no built-in moral compass. The officials said they were considering those factors while building the system.
“It is an awesome responsibility,” said Col. Tucker Hamilton, the Air Force chief of A.I. Test and Operations, who also helps oversee the flight-test crews at Eglin Air Force Base, noting that “dystopian storytelling and pop culture has created a kind of frenzy” around artificial intelligence.
“We just need to get there methodically, deliberately, ethically — in baby steps,” he said.
The Pentagon Back Flip
Portraits of a century’s worth of Air Force leaders and aircraft in the Pentagon highlight the iconic role of the pilot.Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times
The long, wood-paneled corridor in the Pentagon where the Air Force top brass have their offices is lined with portraits of a century’s worth of leaders, mixed with images of the flying machines that have given the United States global dominance in the air since World War II.
A common theme emerges from the images: the iconic role of the pilot.
Humans will continue to play a central role in the new vision for the Air Force, top Pentagon officials said, but they will increasingly be teamed with software engineers and machine learning experts, who will be constantly refining algorithms governing the operation of the robot wingmen that will fly alongside them.
Almost every aspect of Air Force operations will have to be revised to embrace this shift. It’s a task that through this summer had been largely been entrusted to Generals White and Jobe, whose partnership Air Force officers nicknamed the Dale and Frag Show (General Jobe’s call sign as a pilot is Frag).
The Pentagon, through its research divisions like DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory, has already spent several years building prototypes like the Valkyrie and the software that runs it. But the experiment is now graduating to a so-called program of record, meaning if Congress approves, substantial taxpayer dollars will be allocated to buying the vehicles: a total of $5.8 billion over the next five years, according to the Air Force plan.
Unlike F-35 fighter jets, which are delivered as a package by Lockheed Martin and its subcontractors, the Air Force is planning to split up the aircraft and the software as separate purchases.
Kratos, the builder of the Valkyrie, is already preparing to bid on any future contract, as are other major companies such as General Atomics, which for years has built attack drones used in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Boeing, which has its own experimental autonomous fighter jet prototype, the MQ-28 Ghost Bat.
A separate set of software-first companies — tech start-ups such as Shield AI and Anduril that are funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital — are vying for the right to sell the Pentagon the artificial intelligence algorithms that will handle mission decisions.
The list of hurdles that must be cleared is long.
The Pentagon has a miserable record on building advanced software and trying to start its own artificial intelligence program. Over the years, it has cycled through various acronym-laden program offices that are created and then shut down with little to show.
There is constant turnover among leaders at the Pentagon, complicating efforts to keep moving ahead on schedule. General Jobe has already been assigned to a new role and General White soon will be.
Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe was in charge of setting requirements for the air combat program until this summer.Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times
Brig. Gen. Dale White is the Pentagon official who has been in charge of the new acquisition program.Credit...Hailey Sadler for The New York Times
The Pentagon also is going to need to disrupt the iron-fisted control that the major defense contractors have on the flow of military spending. As the structure of the Valkyrie program suggests, the military wants to do more to harness the expertise of a new generation of software companies to deliver key parts of the package, introducing more competition, entrepreneurial speed and creativity into what has long been a risk-averse and slow-moving system.
The most important job, at least until recently, rested with General Jobe, who first made a name for himself in the Air Force two decades ago when he helped devise a bombing strategy to knock out deeply buried bunkers in Iraq that held critical military communication switches.
He was asked to make key decisions setting the framework for how the A.I.-powered robot airplanes will be built. During a Pentagon interview, and at other recent events, Generals Jobe and White both said one clear imperative is that humans will remain the ultimate decision makers — not the robot drones, known as C.C.A.s, the acronym for collaborative combat aircraft.
“I’m not going to have this robot go out and just start shooting at things,” General Jobe said during a briefing with Pentagon reporters late last year.
He added that a human would always be deciding when and how to have an A.I.-enabled aircraft engage with an enemy and that developers are building a firewall around certain A.I. functions to limit what the devices will be able to do on their own.
“Think of it as just an extension to your weapons bay if you’re in an F-22, F-35 or whatnot,” he said.
The Test Pilots
“It’s a very strange feeling,” Maj. Ross Elder said. “I’m flying off the wing of something that’s making its own decisions. And it’s not a human brain.”Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
Back in 1947, Chuck Yeager, then a young test pilot from Myra, W. Va., became the first human to fly faster than the speed of sound.
Seventy-six years later, another test pilot from West Virginia has become one of the first Air Force pilots to fly alongside an autonomous, A.I.-empowered combat drone.
Tall and lanky, with a slight Appalachian accent, Major Elder last month flew his F-15 Strike Eagle within 1,000 feet of the experimental XQ-58A Valkyrie — watching closely, like a parent running alongside a child learning how to ride a bike, as the drone flew on its own, reaching certain assigned speeds and altitudes.
The basic functional tests of the drone were just the lead-up to the real show, where the Valkyrie gets beyond using advanced autopilot tools and begins testing the war-fighting capabilities of its artificial intelligence. In a test slated for later this year, the combat drone will be asked to chase and then kill a simulated enemy target while out over the Gulf of Mexico, coming up with its own strategy for the mission.
During the current phase, the goal is to test the Valkyrie’s flight capacity and the A.I. software, so the aircraft is not carrying any weapons. The planned dogfight will be with a “constructed” enemy, although the A.I. agent onboard the Valkyrie will believe it is real.
Major Elder had no way to communicate directly with the autonomous drone at this early stage of development, so he had to watch very carefully as it set off on its mission.
“It wants to kill and survive,” Major Elder said of the training the drone has been given.
An unusual team of Air Force officers and civilians has been assembled at Eglin, which is one of the largest Air Force bases in the world. They include Capt. Rachel Price from Glendale, Az., who is wrapping up a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on computer deep learning, as well as Maj. Trent McMullen from Marietta, Ga., who has a master's degree in machine learning from Stanford University.
Pilots at Eglin Air Force Base planned to fly their F-16 fighter jets in tandem with A.I.-directed jets.Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
One of the things Major Elder watches for is any discrepancies between simulations run by computer before the flight and the actions by the drone when it is actually in the air — a “sim to real” problem, they call it — or even more worrisome, any sign of “emergent behavior,” where the robot drone is acting in a potentially harmful way.
During test flights, Major Elder or the team manager in the Eglin Air Force Base control tower can power down the A.I. platform while keeping the basic autopilot on the Valkyrie running. So can Capt. Abraham Eaton of Gorham, Maine, who serves as a flight test engineer on the project and is charged with helping evaluate the drone’s performance.
“How do you grade an artificial intelligence agent?” he asked rhetorically. “Do you grade it on a human scale? Probably not, right?”
Real adversaries will likely try to fool the artificial intelligence, for example by creating a virtual camouflage for enemy planes or targets to make the robot believe it is seeing something else.
The initial version of the A.I. software is more “deterministic,” meaning it is largely following scripts that it has been trained with, based on computer simulations the Air Force has run millions of times as it builds the system. Eventually, the A.I. software will have to be able to perceive the world around it — and learn to understand these kinds of tricks and overcome them, skills that will require massive data collection to train the algorithms. The software will have to be heavily protected against hacking by an enemy.
The hardest part of this task, Major Elder and other pilots said, is the vital trust building that is such a central element of the bond between a pilot and wingman — their lives depend on each other, and how each of them react. It is a concern back at the Pentagon too.
“I need to know that those C.C.A.s are going to do what I expect them to do, because if they don’t, it could end badly for me,” General White said.
Capt. Abraham Eaton, a flight test engineer on the project, is charged with helping evaluate how well the drone performs.Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
The human pilots require safety harnesses and helmets.Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
In early tests, the autonomous drones already have shown that they will act in unusual ways, with the Valkyrie in one case going into a series of rolls. At first, Major Elder thought something was off, but it turned out that the software had determined that its infrared sensors could get a clearer picture if it did continuous flips. The maneuver would have been like a stomach-turning roller coaster ride for a human pilot, but the team later concluded the drone had achieved a better outcome for the mission.
Air Force pilots have experience with learning to trust computer automation — like the collision avoidance systems that take over if a fighter jet is headed into the ground or set to collide with another aircraft — two of the leading causes of death among pilots.
The pilots were initially reluctant to go into the air with the system engaged, as it would allow computers to take control of the planes, several pilots said in interviews. As evidence grew that the system saved lives, it was broadly embraced. But learning to trust robot combat drones will be an even bigger hurdle, senior Air Force officials acknowledged.
Air Force officials used the word “trust” dozens of times in a series of interviews about the challenges they face in building acceptance among pilots. They have already started flying the prototype robot drones with test pilots nearby, so they can get this process started.
The Air Force has also begun a second test program called Project Venom that will put pilots in six F-16 fighter jets equipped with artificial intelligence software that will handle key mission decisions.
The goal, Pentagon officials said, is an Air Force that is more unpredictable and lethal, creating greater deterrence for any moves by China, and a less deadly fight, at least for the United States Air Force.
Officials estimate that it could take five to 10 years to develop a functioning A.I.-based system for air combat. Air Force commanders are pushing to accelerate the effort — but recognize that speed cannot be the only objective.
“We’re not going to be there right away, but we’re going to get there,” General Jobe said. “It’s advanced and getting better every day as you continue to train these algorithms.”
Officials estimate that it could take five to 10 years to develop a functioning A.I.-based system for air combat.Credit...Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
Eric Lipton is a Washington-based investigative reporter. A three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Washington Post and The Hartford Courant. More about Eric Lipton
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The New York Times · by Eric Lipton · August 27, 2023
10. The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland's Railway System
The new deep attack.
Excerpt:
This disruption of Poland's rail system doesn't appear to have required any such ransomware or even a penetration of a digital network. But Olejnik cautions that the simplicity of the attack shouldn't lead anyone to underestimate its effects, which may continue to play out given the difficulty of preventing the radio attack on Polish trains' unauthenticated communication systems.
“When you’re a hub of support to war-stricken Ukraine, you’re indeed a target,” says Olejnik. “Low-hanging fruits are always the best approach.”
The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland's Railway System
The sabotage of more than 20 trains in Poland by apparent supporters of Russia was carried out with a simple “radio-stop” command anyone could broadcast with $30 in equipment.
Wired · August 27, 2023
Since war first broke out between Ukraine and Russia in 2014, Russian hackers have at times used some of the most sophisticated hacking techniques ever seen in the wild to destroy Ukrainian networks, disrupt the country's satellite communications, and even trigger blackouts for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens. But the mysterious saboteurs who have, over the last two days, disrupted Poland's railway system—a major piece of transit infrastructure for NATO's support of Ukraine—appear to have used a far less impressive form of technical mischief: Spoof a simple radio command to the trains that triggers their emergency stop function.
On Friday and Saturday, more than 20 of Poland's trains carrying both freight and passengers were brought to a halt across the country through what Polish media and the BBC have described as a “cyberattack.” Polish intelligence services are investigating the sabotage incidents, which appear to have been carried out in support of Russia. The saboteurs reportedly interspersed the commands they used to stop the trains with the Russian national anthem and parts of a speech by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Poland's railway system, after all, has served as a key source of Western weapons and other aid flowing into Ukraine as NATO attempts to bolster the country's defense against Russia's invasion. “We know that for some months there have been attempts to destabilize the Polish state,” Stanislaw Zaryn, a senior security official, told the Polish Press Agency. “For the moment, we are ruling nothing out.”
But as disruptive as the railway sabotage has been, on closer inspection, the “cyberattack” doesn't seem to have involved any “cyber” at all, according to Lukasz Olejnik, a Polish-speaking independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant and author of the forthcoming book Philosophy of Cybersecurity. In fact, the saboteurs appear to have sent simple so-called “radio-stop” commands via radio frequency to the trains they targeted. Because the trains use a radio system that lacks encryption or authentication for those commands, Olejnik says, anyone with as little as $30 of off-the-shelf radio equipment can broadcast the command to a Polish train—sending a series of three acoustic tones at a 150.100 megahertz frequency—and trigger their emergency stop function.
“It is three tonal messages sent consecutively. Once the radio equipment receives it, the locomotive goes to a halt,” Olejnik says, pointing to a document outlining trains' different technical standards in the European Union that describes the “radio-stop” command used in the Polish system. In fact, Olejnik says that the ability to send the command has been described in Polish radio and train forums and on YouTube for years. “Everybody could do this. Even teenagers trolling. The frequencies are known. The tones are known. The equipment is cheap.”
Poland's national transportation agency has stated its intention to upgrade Poland's railway systems by 2025 to use almost exclusively GSM cellular radios, which do have encryption and authentication. But until then, it will continue to use the relatively unprotected VHF 150 MHz system that allows the “radio-stop” commands to be spoofed.
The only real limitation of the train-paralyzing radio attack, Olejnik says, would be that the saboteurs would have to be relatively close to the target trains—somewhere from hundreds of feet to miles, depending on the power of the radio equipment used in their disruption operation. (Olejnik was careful to note that he hasn't tested the attack himself.) Given that the disruptions appear to have occurred in three different Polish administrative regions across the country, getting that equipment close enough to all the target trains would likely have been the biggest challenge for the saboteurs. “It is really a cheap operation,” Olejnik says. “The biggest risk is the need of being in proximity.”
Polish State Railways didn't immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment. But a statement from the railways agency notes that the train disruptions were due to “unauthorized broadcasting of the radio-stop signal” sent “by means of a radiotelephone by an unknown perpetrator.” The statement adds that “receiving a radio-stop signal results in an immediate stop of all trains whose radios operate on a given frequency.”
Despite those automated emergency stops, the railway agency wrote that “there is no threat to rail passengers. The result of this event is only difficulties in the running of trains.” The Polish Press Agency reported no injuries or damage as a result of the radio sabotage operation.
If Russia or its supporters have in fact sabotaged the railway system of Ukraine's ally, the operation wouldn't be without precedent. In fact, Belarusian dissident hackers known as the Cyber Partisans protested Belarus's support of the Russian military by launching their own rare political ransomware attack against Belarus's Railways' IT network in January of 2022, in an attempt to prevent Belarus's participation in the invasion that came just a month later.
This disruption of Poland's rail system doesn't appear to have required any such ransomware or even a penetration of a digital network. But Olejnik cautions that the simplicity of the attack shouldn't lead anyone to underestimate its effects, which may continue to play out given the difficulty of preventing the radio attack on Polish trains' unauthenticated communication systems.
“When you’re a hub of support to war-stricken Ukraine, you’re indeed a target,” says Olejnik. “Low-hanging fruits are always the best approach.”
Additional reporting by Lily Hay Newman.
Wired · by Condé Nast · August 27, 2023
11. A Global Cyber-Scam Industry Is Booming in Plain Sight in Cambodia
A Global Cyber-Scam Industry Is Booming in Plain Sight in Cambodia
By Sui-Lee Wee
Reporting from Phnom Penh and Koh Kong Province in Cambodia
Aug. 28, 2023,
5:00 a.m. ET
The New York Times · by Sui-Lee Wee · August 28, 2023
Despite announcing a crackdown last year, the illegal operations have continued to flourish, protected by powerful officials with close ties to the government.
Barbed-wire fences outside a compound in the coastal city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, where authorities said they had recovered evidence of human trafficking, kidnapping and torture during raids last year.Credit...Cindy Liu/Reuters
Aug. 28, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET
Around the world, reports of cyber-scam schemes targeting unsuspecting victims online have proliferated rapidly. Southeast Asia has become a center of gravity for those criminal syndicates, often in remote and war-torn corners. But in Cambodia, the scam industry has been flourishing well within the reach of officials.
For much of last year, dozens of nations reported that criminal gangs operating in Cambodia had lured tens of thousands of people into the country with the promise of high-paying jobs and free housing. Instead, they were forced to work for online scam mills while under intense surveillance in nondescript compounds, part of a multibillion dollar industry that has entrapped victims on both sides.
Under pressure, Cambodia announced a crackdown in August 2022. Since then, the authorities have said they have rescued more than 2,000 citizens from other countries, shut down five companies and detained 95 people. But New York Times interviews with law enforcement, rights groups and rescued victims detail how the shadowy industry has nonetheless continued to thrive because of powerful businessmen with close ties to senior officials in the Cambodian government, and a system of patronage that protects the mills from being investigated by the police.
Despite the crackdown and well-documented evidence linking well-known Cambodian officials to the mills, the country has not arrested any major figure.
The victims say they answered ads that they thought were legitimate, promising high salaries. Once trafficked into these scam compounds, they were held captive and forced to defraud people. Many were told to entice victims online with fraudulent investment opportunities, the promise of interest-free loans or the chance to buy items on fake e-commerce apps. If they performed badly, they were sold to another scam mill. Those caught trying to escape were often beaten.
Nathan, a Filipino national, was promised a job in customer service in Thailand. Instead, he found himself in Cambodia, being ordered to defraud strangers online and beaten for refusing. He managed to return to the Philippines but still fears retribution. Credit...Ezra Acayan for The New York Times
Roughly 10,000 people from around the world are trapped in such compounds in Cambodia, according to the U.S. State Department; many of the victims are from China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. The governments of these countries have worked with Cambodia to rescue their nationals, but the efforts have mostly been on a case-by-case basis.
In June, Interpol said tens of thousands of people had been trafficked into Southeast Asia, starting first in Cambodia and then expanding into Myanmar and Laos. It warned that the trend of entrapping people to work for cyber-scam mills was multiplying, turning what had been considered a regional crime threat into a “global human trafficking crisis.”
One Victim’s Escape
In April, a 23-year-old Vietnamese man escaped from a white building in Cambodia’s Koh Kong Province, telling police he had been confined and ordered to work from 5:30 p.m. until 11 a.m. daily, according to a senior police officer from the area who spoke to The Times the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Map locating Cambodia’s Koh Kong Province; the northwestern town of O’ Smach; and a coastal resort city, Sihanoukville, in the south.
By The New York Times
The man told the officer that he was forced to cheat victims online and had asked to leave, but his captors demanded a ransom of around $2,000. To escape, the man jumped from a window and ran into a jungle.
The senior police officer he spoke to was aware of what was happening at the compound — many victims had also asked to be rescued. But the officer knew that it was nearly impossible to get inside.
To do so, he said, required special permission from the Interior Ministry because of who is said to own the building: Senator Ly Yong Phat, one of Cambodia’s wealthiest tycoons and a personal adviser to Hun Manet, who took over from his father, Hun Sen, as prime minister last week.
Somkhit Vien, the deputy governor of Koh Kong, said the authorities had rescued 17 foreign nationals from India, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand from compounds belonging to Senator Ly Yong Phat or his company, the LYP Group, since January. Mr. Ly Yong Phat did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Characterizing the issue more as a workplace dispute than a crime, Mr. Somkhit Vien said there had been no reports of torture and that, in some instances, people asking for rescue wanted to leave but were not allowed because they had not cleared their “debt” with the companies. Many victims say that after being trafficked into the compounds, they were told that they could not leave until they paid a debt, or ransom, of thousands of dollars.
No evidence has emerged that directly links Senator Ly Yong Phat to the cyber-scam operations. But activists say tycoons like him play a crucial role: providing the cover to evade police scrutiny.
Cyber Scam Monitor, a group documenting the abuses that take place in the industry, has identified seven people it says have ties to businessmen who manage buildings that house cyber-scam operations. Some are senators, including Mr. Ly Yong Phat; others are officials, tycoons or relatives of officials or tycoons.
Even if the owners of the compounds are not directly involved in human rights abuses, they still bear responsibility “by virtue of their linkage to those businesses operating within the compounds,” said Pichamon Yeophantong, the chairwoman of the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights.
Mr. Ly Yong Phat’s footprint extends to other compounds in Koh Kong and the northwestern town of O’Smach, where foreign workers said they had been confined and eventually rescued, according to local law enforcement and government officials. These buildings are often rented out to Chinese nationals whose identities are unknown, the officials said. Making arrests can be hard because many victims do not know the identities of their captors.
“The international community has been inconsistent in dealing with the political realities of power and crime in Cambodia,” said Naly Pilorge, the director for outreach with a Cambodian human rights group. There “needs to be a more coordinated and stronger response from regional and international actors” to address operations with such a large scale, she added.
The senior police officer in Koh Kong provided the account of the escaped Vietnamese man. Thkov Bunke, a local official, confirmed that a Vietnamese man had escaped from the area.
The ‘King of Koh Kong’
For decades, Mr. Hun Sen maintained power by giving a select group of wealthy supporters opportunities to make money. In return, they built schools and roads that Mr. Hun Sen’s party — the Cambodian People’s Party — took credit for.
Hun Sen, the former prime minister of Cambodia, casting his vote in July, during the general election. This month, he handed power over to his son.
This patronage system helps explain why it is unlikely that any officials implicated in an online scam operation will be held accountable, said Sebastian Strangio, the author of “Hun Sen’s Cambodia.”
“These powerful individuals that are involved in these things are people upon whom Hun Sen relies,” he said.
In the province where the Vietnamese man escaped, Mr. Ly Yong Phat is known as the “King of Koh Kong,” the owner of tracts of land and sugar refineries, and the businessman who financed a bridge linking the province to Thailand.
Last week, the Cambodian government announced that Mr. Ly Yong Phat had been appointed an adviser to Mr. Hun Manet, giving him a rank equal to that of a cabinet minister. Mr. Ly Yong Phat was previously an adviser to Mr. Hun Sen. These connections have made him virtually untouchable in the eyes of many Cambodian police officers.
A Botched Raid
Over the past year, law enforcement officers from China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam have sought to rescue their citizens trapped in Cambodia. Several have found themselves stymied by the Cambodian police.
Thailand’s deputy national police chief, Gen. Surachate Hakparn, has accused the Cambodian police of being complicit in the country’s online scam operations and of not doing enough to hold officials responsible. When he arrived in the country last April to rescue more than 3,000 Thais he had identified in 17 locations, the Cambodian authorities tried to sabotage the mission, he said, and only about 100 were rescued.
During one operation in the coastal resort city of Sihanoukville, General Surachate said he knew victims were on the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of a hotel building. But on the day of the raid, he received a tip from an informant who said Cambodian authorities had moved the workers.
A building in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, where authorities said they found evidence of human trafficking, kidnapping and torture.Credit...Cindy Liu/Reuters
General Surachate said he confronted Cambodia’s then-police chief, Neth Savoeun, and accused him of trying to wreck the mission. “He deflected, saying the hotel owner didn’t cooperate,” General Surachate said. Last week, Mr. Neth Savoeun, who is married to a niece of Mr. Hun Sen, was promoted to deputy prime minister. He did not respond to a request for comment through a police spokesman.
General Surachate called the crackdown in Cambodia “all drama,” and said he is holding out hope that a coming joint operation with the Chinese police with the permission of the Cambodian authorities will help him rescue the remaining 3,000 Thais trapped in Cambodia.
Shutting any individual mill or rescuing those inside does not address the larger problem, said Jacob Sims, an adviser at the International Justice Mission, a human rights group.
“Without a strong focus on perpetrator accountability, one compound may close, but another will likely open in its place as long as the risk to doing so remains low,” Mr. Sims said. He estimates that the overall revenue generated from these operations in Cambodia could exceed $12 billion a year, based on official figures and victim statements.
‘I Could Have Died’
In May, a Filipino man named Nathan found himself in O’Smach, near the Thai border, after he was promised a customer service job in Thailand.
He said he realized something was amiss when he arrived at the Cambodia-Thailand border crossing and saw the barbed wire and high walls of the building he was supposed to live and work in.
On his first day, he was told he would not be working in customer service, but would be defrauding British and American citizens by striking up a romantic relationship with them through dating apps like Tinder.
Nathan, who spoke on condition that he be identified only by his nickname because he feared retribution, said he tried to leave, but was kicked, punched and beaten with a baseball bat and a metal pipe by six men as punishment. “I thought I could have died that day,” he said.
A photo on a mobile phone shows bruises Nathan sustained while still in Cambodia.Credit...Ezra Acayan for The New York Times
Nathan endured the beating and was finally let go by his overseers; he is not sure why. Now back in the Philippines, he said the owners of the compound need to be held responsible for what happened to him.
A reporter for The Times traveled to O’Smach and tracked down the building where Nathan was held. Two local officials said that the building belonged to Mr. Ly Yong Phat.
On June 22, the town had a groundbreaking for a new secondary school. Pen Kosal, a local official, wrote on Facebook that it was “a gift from Prime Minister Hun Sen via tycoon Ly Yong Phat.”
Muktita Suhartono and Camille Elemia contributed reporting.
Sui-Lee Wee is the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The Times. She was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for public service for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. More about Sui-Lee Wee
The New York Times · by Sui-Lee Wee · August 28, 2023
12. China Ponders Russia’s Logistical Challenges in the Ukraine War
Excerpts:
Certainly, in considering an invasion of Taiwan, many of the challenges faced by Russia in Ukraine might be further exacerbated for China in a military campaign focused on capturing an island separated by open ocean and thus completely lacking in direct and relatively simple ground lines of communication for resupply. However, it’s a safe bet that China would be better prepared from the outset of a Taiwan scenario than Russia was at the start of its invasion of Ukraine – not least because PLA planners are closely watching and learning from the Ukraine War.
The PLA has always taken logistics incredibly seriously. From its early days in the Korean War, the modern Chinese military learned through very painful experience that exposed supply lines will be attacked by the adversary and that troops on the front lines cannot perform well if they lack vital supplies. In a Taiwan scenario, the PLA will most certainly opt to prioritize securing the most vital logistics nodes by aiming to rapidly seize Taiwan’s airfields and ports. Nevertheless, they are also quite likely to implement more unconventional approaches as well, including the rapid engineering of artificial piers, as well as aerial drops to include perhaps the extensive use of drones shuttling across the Taiwan Strait.
China Ponders Russia’s Logistical Challenges in the Ukraine War
China is paying close attention to how Russia’s logistical failures hampered its invasion of Ukraine – particularly as China will face an even steeper logistical challenge should it attack Taiwan.
By Lyle Goldstein and Nathan Waechter
August 26, 2023
thediplomat.com · by Lyle Goldstein · August 26, 2023
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In shaping patterns of future warfare, there is little doubt that militaries across the world will be seeking to absorb the key lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War, ranging from the employment of tanks to the use of anti-ship cruise missiles and the ubiquitous drones. For the Chinese military, these lessons might even assume a greater importance, since the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) lacks recent major combat experience, and has also leaned heavily on Russian weapons and doctrine for its rapid modernization over the last few decades.
Chinese media coverage of the war in Ukraine has been extensive. The close nature of the China-Russia “quasi-alliance” means that Chinese military analysts have not engaged in the ruthless critiques of Russian military performance that have been commonplace in the West. Yet, Chinese military analyses are still probing deeply for lessons to understand the shape of modern warfare. They have taken particular interest in the U.S. employment of novel weapons and strategies.
To fully grasp the scope and depth of these Chinese analyses it is important to take assessments from a full range of Chinese military media, which is more extensive than is often appreciated in the West. These articles are generally associated with research institutes that are directly involved in the Chinese military-industrial complex.
This exclusive series for The Diplomat will represent the first systematic attempt by Western analysts to evaluate these Chinese assessments of the war in Ukraine across the full spectrum of warfare, including the land, sea, air and space, and information domains. Read the rest of the series here.
A saying attributed to General Omar Bradley notes that “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” Any attempt by China to use military force to seize Taiwan would be an immense logistical undertaking requiring moving large quantities of troops and materiel across the Taiwan Strait. What then, are Chinese observers learning from the logistical realm of the war in Ukraine?
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In this edition of our series on Chinese lessons learned from the war in Ukraine we summarize a recent assessment from a Chinese defense magazine that has consistently provided detailed coverage of the war. The article analyzes Russia’s initial logistical missteps, how it has pivoted, and the enduring logistical challenges the Kremlin confronts in the conflict.
In this Chinese analysis three different stages of the war are identified pertaining to logistics. These are, in chronological order, the pre-war buildup and initial attack; a second phase that essentially corresponds to the period after the abandonment of the northern front; and the current situation as it has evolved in 2023.
Referring to the initial phase, the article notes the use of deception in advance of the “special operation” to build up war materiel at strategic points prior to the conflict: “Before the operation began, troops and supplies were amassed under the guise of a war game.” Interestingly, the article fails to mention that Moscow’s deception efforts ultimately failed to achieve strategic surprise.
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Once the war had begun, Russia attempted to “control key hub cities and establish front line logistics support centers.” Here the article also notes that Russia benefited from short lines of communication and the use of Russian railways to move supplies to the front lines. It says that at this early stage Russia also “set up small-scale damaged vehicle collection and repair points in the border areas.”
After the initial assault floundered, especially proximate to the northern cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv, the Kremlin was forced to pivot. In this “second phase” of the war, Russia abandoned its northern front due to a “poorly performing offensive caused by logistical issues.” As a result of poor preparations prior to the conflict, Russia was forced to quickly improvise in an attempt to cobble together the necessary logistical support it needed for a longer war. This included, according to the Chinese analysis, “mobilizing a large number of civilian vehicles to achieve the transportation of goods for military use and basically fulfill the warmaking needs of the front-line troops.”
The rest of this Chinese analysis provides a blunt review of what the Russians have done wrong. First there is a recognition that fundamentally “Russia underestimated the Ukrainian army and failed to make adequate logistical support plans.” The article calls attention to unwarranted confidence in success that was rampant through the entire chain of command, leading to a lack of preparedness. “Before the war, high-level Russian army leadership generally underestimated the enemy, and believed the operation would quickly achieve victory.” Because of the brushing aside of Ukraine’s actual military strength, “insufficient supplies of equipment and ammunition were prepared.”
Much attention has been focused on how quickly all types of munitions are being expended in the war by both sides. On this point, the article observes, “In the beginning, the Russian army carried out large-scale strikes using precision-guided munitions. By the second phase, the Russian army’s precision-guided munitions were in short supply. This led to the use of more and more unguided artillery shells, rockets, and tactical missiles from the ground forces. The Russian military’s long-range strike capability was severely constrained.”
One can be quite certain that this recognition by Chinese strategists of how quickly munitions of various types have been consumed will have People’s Liberation Army (PLA) planners also reviewing their own war stocks with the understanding that military conflicts often go on longer than initially anticipated.
The next lesson taken up by these Chinese strategists concerns Russia’s available logistical means not matching the Kremlin’s preferred strategic goals. Here the article says that “the logistics supply lines were too long; the number of troops and available supplies were not sufficient to meet the requirements of Russia’s multi-front operations.” Problems associated with this mismatch are further identified as “slow-moving resupply” and a lack of adequate logistical support troops. Russia’s failure to seize Kyiv within the first few days of the war is here primarily attributed to the “inability to use rail and road transport… quickly and efficiently… [which] made it impossible to continue an effective offensive.”
While these initial lessons focused on Russia’s errors, the rest of the observations highlight challenges posed to Russia by Ukraine and its Western supporters. First among these include successful efforts by Ukrainian forces to interdict Russian logistics. “Supply lines have been harassed by the Ukrainian army, causing logistical support to not operate normally. The Ukrainian army used small-scale targeted strikes to destroy the bridges and rail lines used to resupply the front-line combat troops.” In addition to the targeted attacks, Ukraine has conducted successful “ambushes in order to bog down logistics convoys.”
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These attacks succeeded in part due to Russian transport vehicles being “older equipment without the requisite self-defense capabilities and lacking the patrol vehicles needed to protect convoys and ensure the safety of the supply routes and rear areas.” This analysis, while not directly crediting irregular partisans, seems to acknowledge the danger of guerrillas and special forces operating behind the front working to disrupt lines of communication.
The impact of modern weapons and Western support for Ukraine is next addressed. The Chinese analysis notes that the “Ukrainian army has used drones to bomb and attack Russian logistical support nodes.” These attacks have included “strikes in border regions outside of Ukraine including Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk” and “targeted oil refineries with the intent to cut off the supply of oil to Russia’s military.” Applying this lesson to a Taiwan scenario, PLA strategists may attempt early on to target Taiwanese weapons systems that could reach into mainland China and potentially disrupt key logistical nodes and support infrastructure.
This Chinese analysis highlights that the “West’s continuous aid to the Ukrainian army has put increased pressure on the Russian military’s logistical support.” While Russia has since adjusted its supply lines to deal with HIMARS attacks, the article notes that “HIMARS supplied by the U.S. have been used… to attack ammunition depots, fuel depots, supply stations, and other logistics supply bases and supply lines, giving the Russian army’s logistical support a great deal of trouble.” (In a previous installment of this series, we examined Chinese assessments of the HIMARS directly and its applications to a Taiwan scenario in greater detail.)
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In addition to military weapons provided by the West that have aided Ukraine’s ability to degrade Russian logistics, the article also mentions Western sanctions as impacting Russia’s defense industry. Sanctions have caused the Russian “defense industry to be unable to quickly replace parts used in certain Russian military equipment. This presents a long-term supply chain issue.” This seems to be a greater admission of Russian military production issues than commonly seen in reports on regular Chinese media.
Of course, there is some irony here given that such disruptions may form a market opportunity for the Chinese defense industry – although that issue is not mentioned here. Evidence suggests that Beijing is currently supplying Moscow with certain critical subcomponents for the Russian military.
While the article is heavy on analysis of Russian problems, it is light on predictions as to whether and how Russia might adapt to the difficulties identified. There appears to be little optimism that Russia can fully overcome the logistical challenges it faces. It should also be noted that the article does not cover how corruption might have degraded Russia’s logistical support systems in advance of its war against Ukraine.
Certainly, in considering an invasion of Taiwan, many of the challenges faced by Russia in Ukraine might be further exacerbated for China in a military campaign focused on capturing an island separated by open ocean and thus completely lacking in direct and relatively simple ground lines of communication for resupply. However, it’s a safe bet that China would be better prepared from the outset of a Taiwan scenario than Russia was at the start of its invasion of Ukraine – not least because PLA planners are closely watching and learning from the Ukraine War.
The PLA has always taken logistics incredibly seriously. From its early days in the Korean War, the modern Chinese military learned through very painful experience that exposed supply lines will be attacked by the adversary and that troops on the front lines cannot perform well if they lack vital supplies. In a Taiwan scenario, the PLA will most certainly opt to prioritize securing the most vital logistics nodes by aiming to rapidly seize Taiwan’s airfields and ports. Nevertheless, they are also quite likely to implement more unconventional approaches as well, including the rapid engineering of artificial piers, as well as aerial drops to include perhaps the extensive use of drones shuttling across the Taiwan Strait.
GUEST AUTHOR
Lyle Goldstein
Lyle Goldstein is director of Asia Engagement for the Washington think tank Defense Priorities. He is also visiting professor at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University.
GUEST AUTHOR
Nathan Waechter
Nathan Waechter is a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, he lived in China for close to a decade, working in the quantitative market research industry. The views expressed here are the authors’ alone.
thediplomat.com · by Lyle Goldstein · August 26, 2023
13. America’s Military-Industrial Base Needs a Revival
Conclusion:
A war with China may well be looming. Beijing is certainly preparing for one. To have any real chance of deterring it, let alone prevailing in one, the nation must reinvigorate its defense-industrial base. The hour is already late. There is no time to waste.
America’s Military-Industrial Base Needs a Revival
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/americas-military-industrial-base-needs-a-revival/?utm
A worker examines a 155mm artillery shell at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Scranton, Pa., February 16, 2023.(Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
By ELBRIDGE A. COLBY
&
ALEXANDER B. GRAY
August 26, 2023 6:30 AM
Listen to article
With Ukraine support showing the limits of U.S. capacity and conflict with China possible, the country needs a national mobilization of its defense-industry capacity.
Bottom of Form
President Biden recently admitted what should be clear to all: The United States is woefully ill-prepared to provide the weapons and matériel needed for our nation’s security. For the last year, there has been growing recognition that the nation’s defense-industrial base is inadequate to supply Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia while also equipping U.S. and key allied forces for a possibly impending war with China. Above all, U.S., Taiwanese, and other allied forces need to be ready to confront China’s forces in a conflict centered on the Taiwan Strait — yet the best analysis publicly available, most recently from the RAND Corporation, indicates that neither the U.S. nor its allies are as ready as necessary for such a momentous conflict.
Multiple studies and news reports have documented how inadequate U.S. defense production of key munitions and platforms is, and how long it would take to rectify this situation under current policies. The president’s admission to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that America could not even sustain Ukraine with relatively simple 155-millimeter shells shows how far our defense industrial base is from meeting even basic requirements.
China: Two Cheers fora Slowdown
This is an unacceptable situation. The United States simply cannot afford to lose a war with China in the Western Pacific, as such a defeat would have catastrophic implications for Americans’ prosperity and freedoms. At the same time, the enormous U.S. economy should be able to produce the weapons to help our allies in other parts of the world — such as NATO and Ukraine in Europe and Israel in the Middle East — assume more of the responsibility for their own defense in these important regions. It is, frankly, ridiculous that the United States, the world’s premier economy and once its greatest industrial powerhouse, is unable to produce the basics required by our military, ranging from specialty chemicals to munitions and aircraft castings to submarines. It does not have to be this way.
This is especially important because the Ukraine crisis should finally and fully drive a stake through the assumption of recent decades that the wars for which the nation should be prepared will be anything but long, hard, and resource-consuming. Above all, a war with China would almost certainly involve bewildering amounts of matériel, munitions, and platforms on the scale of what we planned for in the late Cold War — or more. Ensuring success in such a war — and thus effective deterrence — requires entering any such conflict with considerable resources held in reserve, starting with a significant expansion of the National Defense Stockpile to ensure the United States has the critical minerals and key inputs needed to reconstitute a military that would be lost to attrition in real time.
To rectify the situation, the country needs a national mobilization of its defense-industry capacity — right now. This requires both leveraging its remaining assets and fundamentally revising a broken model. The United States cannot simply pour more money into the existing, deeply broken paradigm. At the same time, it cannot hope to produce a revivified defense industry from one day to the next. Fortunately, a clear agenda for such a mobilization exists.
First, Washington must leverage what is available for the near term. The threats the country faces are here and now — China above all — not in some distant future. So Washington should quickly prioritize and direct investment in the “organic” industrial base that already exists: a network of government-owned and government-operated arsenals, depots, and shipyards across the country that produce everything from small-arms ammunition to tank barrels and that repair significant quantities of Navy and Air Force ships and aircraft. This industrial base requires immediate expansion, with additional weapon systems that struggle for sustained private-sector investment placed within its remit. Such expansion of key organic industrial-base functions has occurred before, including during the Iraq War.
Second, the administration should use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to direct investment in the highest-priority national-security efforts — revitalizing our ability to produce weapons and military platforms at scale, with particular focus on the capabilities required to deter China. Title III of the DPA exists to incentivize defense functions the private sector has failed to undertake. Congress should dramatically increase, by an order of magnitude, the funds available under Title III to direct the administration’s significant resources to begin working with industry partners. The goal would be to expand the key facilities needed to fulfill the nation’s strategic requirements. These kinds of funds may be hard to come by under existing caps for appropriations. If this proves true, given the urgent need to strengthen our nation’s defense, then Congress should shift funds from other programs, including defense programs, to support Title III.
Third, the United States must ensure a more open, accessible, and fairer defense industrial base. The American people will not support more money going into the current system, with the terrible results that it has produced. Instead, we need a return to the kind of robust competition among many more defense companies that existed in the Cold War. Congress should couple needed increases in investment in the defense industry with incentives and guidance to expand the number of industry participants — including but not limited to a budgeting process that gives nondefense companies the confidence required to enter the market or existing companies to expand their offerings. This will produce more variety and competition for the military from a broader set of industry players while providing more value to the taxpayer.
A war with China may well be looming. Beijing is certainly preparing for one. To have any real chance of deterring it, let alone prevailing in one, the nation must reinvigorate its defense-industrial base. The hour is already late. There is no time to waste.
Elbridge A. Colby, a principal at the Marathon Initiative, served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development (2017–18). Alexander B. Gray, a senior adviser at the Marathon Initiative, served as chief of staff of the White House National Security Council (2019–21) and special assistant to the president for the defense-industrial base (2017–18).
14. The Future of Algorithmic Warfare Part III: Stagnation
Conclusion:
To realize sustained change, the heart of these initiatives will need reside in planning and how the military reimagines the proverbial man on horseback as part of a larger disaggregated decision network. Understanding the balance of human judgment, creativity, and model-generated perspectives will prove essential for operational art in the twenty-first century. To understand how best to fuse data and the mind for war, though, requires bold experimentations and wargames that test different combinations of systems. The future is still in the making. Every military professional, as well as concerned citizens, whether AI/ML enthusiast or skeptic, should become part of it.
The Future of Algorithmic Warfare Part III: Stagnation - War on the Rocks
BENJAMIN JENSEN, CHRISTOPHER WHYTE, AND SCOTT CUOMO
warontherocks.com · by Benjamin Jensen · August 28, 2023
Editor’s Note: What follows is an excerpt from the authors’ forthcoming book, Information in War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence.
What would a complete failure of the current race to field artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) systems across the U.S. military look like? The American military profession is equally blessed and cursed by technological determinism and the belief that new gadgets will solve old problems. This line of thinking pervades notions about offsets and the belief that precision can counter mass in modern war.
The scenario below is a premortem of sorts, welcoming the reader to imagine a world in which technological change moves backward as much as forward and is uneven. This red team technique is meant to illustrate how failure emerges as a way to prevent it. The analysis builds on the earlier scenarios published by War on the Rocks that explored how a broken bureaucracy and a failure to create a common understanding of how AI/ML affect the character of war. All of these scenarios are adapted from our recent book — Information in War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence. In the book, we use a range of historical cases on the adoption of information technology to imagine how the U.S. military will react to the latest wave of interest in AI/ML. Based on these diverging histories, we see different futures on the horizon that call for prudence and a more robust dialogue about how people, bureaucracy, and knowledge networks collide with any new technology.
In the scenario below, the future is bleak. Old ideas about war combine with industrial-age bureaucracy to limit the extent to which any new technology can produce an enduring advantage. AI/ML becomes another false promise sacrificed on the altar of the clash of wills. The defense bureaucracy struggles to adapt and falls back on enduring ideas about war despite the availability of new technology. The man on horseback remains nostalgic and lost in dreams of past battles that leave him unable to adapt to the future of war.
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In this alternative future, the U.S. military never escapes the gravity of old ideas about war and legacy bureaucracy. Despite the current wave of enthusiasm about AI/ML, there is a non-zero chance of this future. Yes, services are in a race to develop new battle networks, but the extent to which they become new doctrine and fighting formations is still uncertain.
* * *
It is 2040. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff drives to the Pentagon in a refurbished antique sports car with a security drone escorting him and his digital personal assistant reading him the daily news. The traffic was heavier than normal. It was a beautiful spring morning with cherry blossoms adding color to the otherwise blurred labyrinth of white and gray marble, concrete, and steel buildings etching Northern Virginia. Many drivers like himself opted to enjoy the morning commute and drive themselves rather than turn on their limited automated driving mode, which restricted them to a boring fifty-mile-an-hour experience. He preferred to drive but have a machine read to him, cataloguing the information he found useful and highlighting for his staff the questions he wanted answered when he pulled into the office. Truth be told, he didn’t like reading that much anyway.
The old general had tailored his personal assistant, Chesty, to sound like an antique Devil Dog. The algorithms scrapped old audio files and even tailored period-specific metaphors from World War II. It was another example of the fun but trivial ways software mediated everyone’s engagement with the world. Chesty grunted and read him the headlines.
“Air Force General Stops Swarm Experiment Testing Automated Airspace Agents Citing a Need to Better Integrate Human Air Traffic Controllers and Pilots.”
Chesty added to the headline, “We make generals today based on their ability to write a damned letter. Those kinds of men can’t get us ready for war.”
“New Report: Chinese AI-Driven Simulators Rely on Scraping Social Media to Replicate U.S. Military Decision-Making beyond Doctrine Struggles in Early Tests.”
Chesty added to the headline, “There are not enough Chinese communists in the world to stop a fully armed Marine regiment from going wherever they want to go.”
“Army Surgeon General Requests Additional Psychologist and Social Workers for Marriage Counseling Citing Critical Deficiencies in Digital Physician Services Providing Bad Couple’s Counseling.”
Chesty added to the headline, “When the Marine Corps wants you to have a wife, you will be issued one.”
The general asks Chesty to limit the commentary and provide an overview by a congressional committee on the status of AI integration across the U.S. military. He had been forced to review these reports ever since he was a company commander at infantry training exercises in Twentynine Palms. He remembered his first of many of these tedious experiments. It was an especially hot summer day, and the company had been operating in the field for five days with a mix of fragile tablets, cheap drones, and all sorts of weird antennas. His Marines were dirty and tired, but the scientists and industry reps, clad in tactical-chic pants and polo shirts etched with melting sun block and company logos, kept asking why whatever the latest AI gizmo was didn’t work. He always felt there was an undertone of “you Spartans don’t get it” when they spoke.
As a young captain, he assumed he had to participate in these experiments because money was on the line. The Marine Corps wasn’t going to change as much as it was going to take some sucker’s money and try crazy stuff in the desert. These experiments even produced some good laughs.
He remembered during that iteration how a lance corporal snuck up on an automated sentry designed to detect enemy movement around secure patrol bases by placing a tortoise shell in front of his face. The machine assumed he was an endangered species and sent a message causing all sentries to stand down. It was always this way. In those days, the generals got briefed on magic, but grunts saw the truth.
The latest report signaled that despite increasing data and analytical optimization in the private sector due to years of 5G connectivity, new chip designs, and better algorithms, there remained real concerns about transforming the military. The report interviewed more than one hundred combat leaders from across the services. Even though it was anonymous, he knew them, or at least how they thought about war. The robots could go screw themselves.
During his career, years of counter-insurgency and gray zone campaigns left many officers suspicious of how much technology could change war. As junior officers, they got their first taste of combat hunting elusive enemies and finding their firepower curtailed by rules of engagement and groups that seemed to disappear in valleys and villages. These same officers took command of larger formations and heard leaders preach the gospel of great power conflict, as if the 2020s were somehow the 1980s or — worse — the 1930s. They planned freedom of navigation patrols and updated war plans, learning to see time and distance factors and task organization as more important than any exquisite new capability. They fought to remain in the cockpit of aircraft and at the helm of Navy ships, upholding a view that no machine despite its speed could replace the essence of master and commander and human judgment. In war colleges they wrote long, philosophical monographs about traditions, command and control, and historical cases that saw the past as almost prelapsarian, a place where legends commanded regiments, groups, and flotillas that outfought determined adversaries.
There was no leader to this movement. Over the years it coalesced in Slack, WhatsApp, and Signal diatribes and articles in War on the Rocks. At some point, a civilian author named the movement the “Clausewitzian Third Wave.” The group saw the benefit of technology but avoided hard decisions over force structure and testing new concepts, preferring to see war as an enduring human struggle. A favorite topic in these forums were Generals Charles Krulak and Al Gray. Countless war college papers revisited, and even retold, their legacy, distorting the past to justify a combined arms renaissance and the importance of small unit tactics and decision-making. These debates spilled over into procurement decisions, with the number of people historically in a squad defining the design parameters of combat vehicles and the need for a human in the cockpit creating spiraling costs.
Over the course of his career, the Chairman remembered being on the margins of this group. He watched as civilians, usually millennials with grand ideas and thin resumes, were appointed to new administrations and pressed for technological change. These civilians called the old ways outdated and a relic of twentieth-century warfare. He watched as the movement pushed back, using social media and whispers in the halls of Congress to limit the extent to which any new whiz kid could challenge age-old traditions and fundamental human truths about war. Networks of gray beards and retirees fostered the insurgency.
He saw these battles in the latest Congressional commission reports. A cohort of business leaders, LinkedIn charlatans, and beltway bandits all outlined why the military again was behind in integrating commercial AI applications. These people didn’t have a clue. They hadn’t seen the legacy contracts and legal red tape around sharing data that distorted training any algorithm. They didn’t realize that battlefield bandwidth wasn’t as fast as the network of sensors that let their civilian ass effortlessly disappear into shady virtual reality worlds. They didn’t understand the constant intelligence requirements to take pictures of enemy vehicles at every angle and in every weather condition to train AI image recognition software. They were novices who failed to realize the war was not reducible to simple patterns like the purchasing habits of consumers.
The old general knew he was now part of an old guard defined by the Clausewitzian Third Wave. He knew he could trust that the next cohort of junior officers would discover the same hard truths and keep the nerds at bay. The geeks just didn’t understand combined arms, what it took to create a fighting force, and, most of all, killing. They never would.
* * *
A cursory look at historical cases beyond a desire rooted in Whig history to see the past as progress to the present illustrates why U.S. policy-makers today need to prevent the scenario outlined above. From early experiments with radar to the development of a global network of unmanned aerial surveillance and strike capabilities, there are more failures than success stories. For every radar success story like the United Kingdom and the Chain Home early warning radar network, there was a wide range of half-baked ideas about death rays across major global powers in the interwar period. Despite the success the United States experienced in fielding a new generation of unmanned attack and reconnaissance aircraft after 2001, there was a rich, underreported prehistory of drones that failed to break the enduring image of battle as a human endeavor.
Yet the past need not be prologue. The current moment calls for a widespread embrace of AI/ML capabilities and ushering in a new era of bottom-up experimentation. Just as the Ukrainian society through initiatives like DELTA COP has shown how to build narrow AI/ML capabilities from the bottom up, the U.S. military should accelerate current experiments like the Global Information Dominance Exercise. There are also a growing number of service-level initiatives to reimagine warfare, such as the ongoing Marine coding effort integrated with the Army’s Futures Command in Austin, Texas. This effort has already produced an invaluable algorithm that enables maximizing commercial radar sensing capabilities to meet fleet and joint force maritime domain awareness `requirements.
To realize sustained change, the heart of these initiatives will need reside in planning and how the military reimagines the proverbial man on horseback as part of a larger disaggregated decision network. Understanding the balance of human judgment, creativity, and model-generated perspectives will prove essential for operational art in the twenty-first century. To understand how best to fuse data and the mind for war, though, requires bold experimentations and wargames that test different combinations of systems. The future is still in the making. Every military professional, as well as concerned citizens, whether AI/ML enthusiast or skeptic, should become part of it.
Become a Member
Benjamin Jensen, Ph.D., is a professor of strategic studies at the School of Advanced Warfighting in the Marine Corps University and a senior fellow for future war, gaming, and strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Christopher Whyte, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Col. Scott Cuomo, Ph.D., currently serves as a senior U.S. Marine Corps advisor within the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. He helped co-author these essays while participating in the Commandant of the Marine Corps Strategist Program and also serving as the service’s representative on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.
The views they express are their own and do not reflect any official government position.
Image: AI Generated art by Dr. Benjamin Jensen
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Benjamin Jensen · August 28, 2023
15. What Does Victory Look Like for Ukraine?
Excertps:
Would Russia agree to such terms? If it loses the war, yes: it would have no choice. If Putin is deposed and a more or less pro-Western coalition succeeds Putin, then also yes: Russia would want a durable peace.
To repeat: Ukraine can win, but only if the West lets it win. A Ukrainian victory would obviously enable Ukraine to rebuild, but it would also provide Russia with a historic opportunity to abandon fascism and imperialism and take a serious stab at democracy.
What Does Victory Look Like for Ukraine?
What, then, would a Ukrainian victory look like? The minimum would be a withdrawal of Russian forces from the territories it occupied in 2022. The maximum would be a complete withdrawal of the territories Russia seized in 2014—the Crimea and Donbas.
19fortyfive.com · by Alexander Motyl · August 26, 2023
What would a Ukrainian victory look like, and is it achievable?
Seemingly demoralized by the ongoing Ukrainian offensive’s slow progress, many analysts have predicted that a Ukrainian victory is impossible.
Russia, so the argument goes, can hold its defensive lines indefinitely because its resources are greater than Ukraine’s.
Hence, a long-lasting war of attrition is unwinnable for Ukraine—as well as, possibly, for Russia.
Since stalemate is unavoidable, negotiations should begin sooner rather than later. Neither side may get what it wants, but at least fewer lives will be lost.
Ukrainians roundly reject this scenario, while Russians generally endorse it, even if not openly. That’s significant, testifying to Ukrainian confidence that they can win and Russian uncertainty about their current capacities.
Naturally, both sides could be wrong, so a closer look at the reasoning outlined above is worthwhile.
Ukraine’s Offensive in Trouble? Not Exactly
Has Ukraine’s offensive stalled? Yes, but only if one measures progress in territorial gains, which, though not insignificant, have been modest. If, alternatively, one broadens one’s notion of progress to include Russia’s entire war-fighting capabilities—which include ammunition dumps, infrastructure, communications, fuel depots, and the like—then the answer has to be a resounding no.
As the United States Military Academy’s Jan Kallberg rightly says:
Intelligence analysts may look at the map of Southern Ukraine and see distances; military planners will apply the military math and see something very different. They know that to crush the Russian army and strangle the troops in frontline fortifications, they don’t need to advance 50 miles. 10 miles will do it.
Why? Because although it would be great if Ukrainian troops broke through to the shores of the Sea of Azov, they do not have to. Instead, they can achieve a significant operational outcome by bringing Russia’s ground line of communication (GLOC) under their guns.
Indeed, says Kallberg, having liberated the village of Robotyne, some 55 miles from the Sea of Azov, “the Ukrainians need to advance by a further … 7–10 miles, in order to range their guns on Russia’s east-west transport routes that are critical to the ability of its army and armed forces to fight.”
Kallberg’s conclusion is worth underscoring: “If Ukraine can interdict these road and rail links, it’s very hard to see how the Russian army can continue to fight.”
There is every reason to think that Ukraine’s General Staff shares Kallberg’s analysis, especially as they know that a large-scale frontal offensive of the kind impatient Western analysts and commentators would like to see would be suicidal without the air power the West has refused to supply.
Russia’s Resources: Greater Than Ukraine?
Are Russia’s resources—as measured in numbers of soldiers, armaments, etc.—greater than Ukraine’s? Well, of course they are, and they always were. And yet, as the failure of last year’s invasion showed, the quality and morale of the fighting forces, leadership, and equipment are arguably more important than sheer numbers. Ukraine demonstrated the truth of this proposition four times in 2022: when it stopped Russia at Kyiv’s doorstep, when it forced the Russians to withdraw from Kyiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv provinces, and when it recaptured parts of Kharkiv and Kherson provinces.
Moreover, Ukraine’s resources aren’t all that matters. Western assistance to Ukraine has been of immense importance and to no small degree accounts for Ukraine’s ability to liberate about half the territory seized by Russia in the months immediately after the attack. The West’s resources aren’t infinite, and its willingness to provide them may also be limited, but the West could, if it wanted, ensure a Ukrainian victory.
Can Russia Fight Forever?
Finally, can Russia fight indefinitely?
Well, yes, if one simply looks at the numbers. With a population of about 140 million, Russian casualties appear tiny. But numbers, again, aren’t all that matters. Will Russian men continue to go blindly to their deaths? Will the Russian population tolerate indefinitely such a self-slaughter? Will Russian elites?
After all, the elites know that this is Vladimir Putin’s war. His position, as both the Prigozhin Mutiny and his seeming demise have demonstrated, is shaky at best. Will Russia continue to fight if Putin dies or is killed? Just asking these questions suggests that the answers are anything but obvious.
What, then, would a Ukrainian victory look like? The minimum would be a withdrawal of Russian forces from the territories it occupied in 2022. The maximum would be a complete withdrawal of the territories Russia seized in 2014—the Crimea and Donbas. Both scenarios would have to entail Russian reparations, which could be as high as $3 trillion, continued Western armament of Ukraine, some form of security guarantees, and serious movement toward European Union and NATO membership.
T-90M from Russian Military in Ukraine.
Would Russia agree to such terms? If it loses the war, yes: it would have no choice. If Putin is deposed and a more or less pro-Western coalition succeeds Putin, then also yes: Russia would want a durable peace.
To repeat: Ukraine can win, but only if the West lets it win. A Ukrainian victory would obviously enable Ukraine to rebuild, but it would also provide Russia with a historic opportunity to abandon fascism and imperialism and take a serious stab at democracy.
About the Author, Dr. Alexander Motyl
Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”
From the Vault
‘You Really Oughta Go Home’: F-22 Raptor Stealth Fighter Flew Under F-4 From Iran
A Second American Civil War?
Something Is Terribly Wrong With Former President Trump
19fortyfive.com · by Alexander Motyl · August 26, 2023
16. Chinese Political Warfare: A Strategic Tautology? The Three Warfares and the Centrality of Political Warfare within Chinese Strategy
We must not get distracted by those uninformed politicians who are using "political warfare" to describe the partisan politics in the US. Our adversaries are conducting real political warfare and we need to understand that.
Conclusion:
All told, by looking at the development of the Three Warfares concept and its implementation in the context of disputes in the South China Sea, it becomes clear that China does not merely conduct political warfare in pursuit of various individual geostrategic objectives. Rather, it is fundamentally integrated within China’s broader maritime strategy, which, in turn, translates into China’s grand strategy of national rejuvenation. This deduction is further underpinned by China’s long strategic legacy, which firmly resembles Kennan’s definition of political warfare. Chinese political warfare should, therefore, not be considered separate from the larger strategic context because China’s conception of national strategy incorporates all levers of “comprehensive national power,” as defined by Xi Jinping himself, leading to the symbolic characterization of Chinese political warfare as a strategic tautology, as political warfare seems fundamentally inherent within Chinese strategic thinking.
Following this assessment of political warfare as a systematically incorporated aspect within Chinese military thinking, it remains to be seen how its synthetic integration with conventional military operations will play out. In practice, this would involve attempts to take advantage of the previously established peacetime operations—implemented through the Three Warfares—to ultimately develop favorable conditions to seize the initiative and go on the offensive. Thus, as China has already demonstrated its efficacy concerning the political dimension of geostrategic competition, a better understanding of the integration of the Three Warfares will continue to have immediate and real-world relevance for both the stability within the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific region at large.
Chinese Political Warfare: A Strategic Tautology? The Three Warfares and the Centrality of Political Warfare within Chinese Strategy
thestrategybridge.org · August 28, 2023
Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked civilian and military students around the world to participate in our seventh annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy.
Now, we are pleased to present the First Place winner from Pieter Zhao, a student at the the Paris School of International Affairs.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
—Sun Tzu
The United States (U.S.) National Defense Strategy of 2018 prominently stated that the “fundamental” challenge to American national security came from “the re-emergence of long-term strategic competition” by revisionist powers such as Russia, North Korea, and specifically China. It further emphasized that this competition encompassed “all dimensions of power,” with the leadership in Beijing pursuing “efforts short of armed conflict by expanding coercion to new fronts, violating principles of sovereignty, exploiting ambiguity, and deliberately blurring the lines between civil and military goals.”[1] This description tellingly echoes the words of the American diplomat George F. Kennan, who famously characterized the concept of political warfare as “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.”[2] Given Joseph Nye’s insight that conflicts in the 21st-century are increasingly about hearts, minds, and opinions rather than kinetic force, the concept of political warfare has gained renewed attention.[3] The idea that whose narrative wins may be more important than whose army wins rings even more true if one’s rival avoids a kinetic engagement altogether.
George F. Kennan (Ullstein Bild/Getty)
Indeed, the main perceived rival of the United States boasts a long strategic tradition in which political warfare is considered central to the art of war, as the opening quote by Sun Tzu illustrates. In fact, the modern iteration of China’s official political and information warfare strategy—the “Three Warfares” concept—refers directly to Sun Tzu’s strategic legacy, as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) issued a hundred examples of the Three Warfares, which cited Sun Tzu thirty times.[4] However, when western observers analyze Chinese political warfare, specifically the Three Warfares concept, these operations are often considered in their own right, separate from the larger strategic context. Yet, such an approach risks overlooking key dynamics surrounding the Three Warfares concept, as it should be considered within the larger context of Chinese political warfare and strategic thinking. Accordingly, this paper argues political warfare, specifically the Three Warfares concept, forms a central element within Chinese strategic thinking, as it directly translates into China’s wider grand strategy and reflects Xi Jinping’s conception of holistic national security. In doing so, the paper will use the South China Sea (SCS) dispute as a case-study and a prominent example of this integrated effort. The first part will consider the concept of political warfare in relation to China’s strategic legacy, followed by an analysis of the conceptualization of the Three Warfares. Afterward, the case-study of the South China Sea will be considered in order to illustrate the fundamental role of the Three Warfares, as an instrument of political warfare, within China’s broader grand strategy.
Political Warfare and China’s Strategic Legacy
American officials and policymakers often lament that the West increasingly faces actors employing various asymmetric measures to influence, coerce, intimidate, or undermine its interests.[5] Indeed, such asymmetric measures can be characterized under a concept that is generally not as well-established in western strategic usage and doctrine since the end of the Cold War, but instead became a mere term “that seems useful for describing a spectrum of overt and covert activities designed to support [the accomplishment] of national political-military objectives.”[6] The concept of political warfare is often attributed to George Kennan, who turned Clausewitz’s oft-quoted maxim of “War as the extension of politics by other means” around by postulating that political warfare is “an extension of armed conflict by other means.” In his memorandum titled “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” Kennan observed:
We have been handicapped… by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war, by a tendency to view war as a sort of sporting context outside of all political context… and by a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations, the perpetual rhythm of [struggle, in and out of war].[7]
Following this observation, Kennan postulated the nature of the Soviet threat and defined political warfare as follows:
In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures… and “white” propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare, and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.[8]
Kennan’s key observation regarding the “handicapped” position of the west in contrast to the Soviet Union, along with his definition of political warfare, rings as true today in relation to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As opposed to the western strategic tradition, China’s strategic legacy has a long tradition of blurring the lines between peace and war, dating back to the writings of Sun Tzu. In fact, the Chinese conception of political warfare has further evolved since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power, in ways that were not yet fully understood in 1948.
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Despite the current emphasis on the PRC’s growing non-kinetic capabilities in the so-called gray-zone between peace and conventional war through the Three Warfares concept, it is essential to consider these concepts within China’s broader strategic context. While the West’s strategic understanding considers political and information warfare operations in relation to activities conducted during military operations, or wartime, the Chinese view considers these operations as a constantly ongoing effort, whether in wartime or peacetime.[9] The origins of this more comprehensive approach can be traced back to China’s strategic legacy, which is underpinned by Sun Tzu’s frequent emphasis on deception and the manipulation of information to undermine the morale of an opposing force to ultimately achieve victory without resorting to kinetic force. China’s ancient strategic texts teach of the importance of deception because it allows China to inhibit its opponents from “fully converting latent into kinetic strength,” thus diminishing an opponent’s “power of resistance.”[10] In modern China, these texts are mandatory educational material for both Chinese officers and enlisted soldiers and sailors. High-ranking officers, such as those in the Central Military Commission, are said to even memorize The Art of War, illustrating its centrality within the Chinese strategic leadership. As a result, despite lacking behind the West in certain military technologies, Chinese strategic thinking can be considered more comprehensive because it includes non-military means through political and information warfare as a fundamental aspect.[11]
Moreover, the roots of the CCP as a revolutionary and clandestine movement have further centralized political warfare within China’s strategic modus operandi. When western observers attempt to explain Chinese political warfare operations through the ill-defined concept of hybrid warfare, they overlook two central elements. First, Chinese political warfare operations are not exclusively conducted by China’s military, security, or intelligence agencies, and second, the importance of political warfare within China’s current strategic environment is primarily defined by the centrality of the CCP.[12] In contrast to western militaries, the PLA is the armed wing of the ruling party, not of the state. Its primary purpose is therefore to create political power in support of the party. Mao Zedong, who often echoed Sun Tzu, specifically instructed his comrades against thinking that “the task of the Red Army…is merely to fight.”[13]
The Chinese Red Army is an armed body for carrying out the political tasks of the revolution…the Red Army fights not merely for the sake of fighting but in order to… help [the masses, i.e., CCP] establish revolutionary political power.[14]
Mao Zedong in 1966 (Britannica)
Hence, returning to Kennan’s observation, the CCP has always operated on a basis that does not recognize a clear distinction between peacetime and wartime. Instead, political warfare operations are considered a central aspect in implementing China’s grand strategy, whether it concerned the political tasks of the revolution in 1929 or the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation by 2049. This integrated aspect is further reflected in Xi Jinping’s emphasis on a holistic approach to national security, which combines the western concepts of state security with regime security.[15]
Political Warfare Strategy: The Three Warfares
In line with the centrality of political warfare within Chinese strategic thinking, in which there is no clear distinction between peacetime and wartime, the PLA has developed a flexible political warfare doctrine that serves as a powerful and effective means of leveraging Chinese informational power to gain and maintain influence over both external and internal target audiences.[16] Indeed, echoing Sun Tzu, Chinese military literature stresses the role of the Three Warfares in subduing an enemy without fighting or ensuring victory when a conflict erupts. Accordingly, the Three Warfares concept is not only emblematic of Chinese political warfare but also provides the modern operational implementation. [17]
Although the concept only emerged in 2003, its contents can be traced back decades within the PLA’s lexicon. Indeed, from the start of the Chinese revolution, the CCP continuously sought to exploit foreign contacts and audiences to shape the narrative of the revolution, gain support, and discredit adversaries.[18] Moreover, the content of the Three Warfares is consistent with guidelines issued to the PLA’s Political Work Department since at least 1963, which directed:
Give full play to the combat function of political work: organize public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare; do a good job of disintegrating the enemy’s activity; and prevent the enemy’s efforts to incite discord.[19]
Additionally, external stimuli also influenced the development of the Three Warfares concept. These include the lessons learned by the Chinese strategic leadership following their analyses of American military activities in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan between 1991 and 2003. For instance, the U.S. mobilization of Congress, the United Nations, and NATO in formulating the legal right to use force, in combination with its efforts to shape domestic and international public opinion through media outlets, and psychological warfare activities to undermine the morale of Iraqi troops—had important effects on Chinese thinking at the strategic, technological, and operational levels.[20] These observations further confirmed the idea that non-military operations and non-kinetic capabilities were central to contemporary conflicts. Accordingly, this observation eventually became conceptualized under the rubric of “unrestricted warfare,” which was introduced in a publication by two high-ranking PLA officers in 1999. The book sought to address the question of how a technologically inferior nation such as China could engage a superior adversary (such as the United States) by arguing that contemporary warfare should not merely be characterized by using “armed forces to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will,” but rather by using “all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.”[21] Moreover, the authors emphasized that “all boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, should be totally removed” to conduct unrestricted warfare successfully.[22] This is a view that largely coincides with Kennan’s definition of political warfare.
These assessments collectively fed into the development of China’s official conception or strategy of political warfare, which the Central Military Commission officially introduced in 2003 as the Three Warfares. The Three Warfares provides the PLA with a dynamic, flexible, and nuanced strategic approach to political and information warfare operations consisting of three interconnected elements:
- Public Opinion or Media Warfare,
- Psychological Warfare, and
- Legal Warfare or Lawfare.[23]
Collectively, these elements are intended to control the prevailing discourse and influence perceptions to advance China’s interests while undermining the capability of adversaries to respond. According to official Chinese guidelines, they are designed to seize the “decisive opportunity” for controlling public opinion, organize psychological offense and defense, engage in legal struggle, and fight for popular will and public opinion. Accordingly, the Three Warfares encourages efforts to unify military and civilian thinking, divide the enemy into factions, weaken the enemy’s combat power, and organize legal offensives.[24] Yet, the execution of the Three Warfares is not limited to the PLA, as a range of organizations across both the party and the state perform various functions to contribute to China’s political warfare strategy.
For instance, the Ministry of Education surveils, organizes, and rallies Chinese students on both domestic and international university campuses; the United Front Work Department mobilizes overseas Chinese to support friendly politicians and official narratives; the Ministry of State Security uses think tanks to present official lines in appealing ways while conducting covert operations; and China’s propaganda apparatus mobilizes overseas Chinese-language media to extend Beijing’s reach.[25] Hence, if the U.S. Navy hypothetically attempted to gain port access in a particular country, for instance, China would implement the Three Warfares by mobilizing its considerable organizational infrastructure to adversely influence public opinion (e.g., through media channels), exert psychological pressure (e.g., by threatening with boycotts), and mount legal challenges (e.g., through the UN General Assembly)—all intended to render the environment unwelcoming to American objectives.[26] As a result, the Three Warfares reflects China’s strategic legacy that considers war as not simply a military struggle but as a more comprehensive engagement proceeding in the political, economic, diplomatic, and legal domains as well.[27]
Case-Study: The Three Warfares in the South China Sea
This section considers the case-study of the dispute in the South China Sea to further analyze how the Three Warfares forms a fundamental element within China’s broader strategic context as an instrument of political warfare. According to the Introduction to Public Opinion Warfare, Psychological Warfare, and Legal Warfare published by China’s National Defense University in 2014, the execution of the Three Warfares should be guided by certain basic principles. These principles stress the integration of national-political and diplomatic struggles revolving around the launching of military operations, rapidly taking advantage of the decisive opportunity, engaging in offense and defense, emphasizing offense, and the integrating peace and war.[28] These principles suggest a highly integrated approach involving proactive peacetime operations to enable China to rapidly seize the initiative in the event of a conflict or crisis while simultaneously advancing its interests during peacetime. Hence, the Three Warfares can be considered as how Chinese leadership conceptualized the various political warfare operations intended to shape the environment in which the PLA operates.[29]
Hu Jintao (Xinhua)
The dispute in the South China Sea can be considered part of China’s broader maritime strategy, which seeks to build China into a “great maritime power,” as stated by former president Hu Jintao during the CCP’s 18th Party Congress.[30] According to Hu, becoming a maritime power is fundamental to achieving China’s national objectives, a view that has been emphasized further by Xi Jinping, who includes maritime power as an essential element of the “Chinese Dream” of “National Rejuvenation.”[31] The consolidation of Chinese claims within the disputed waters of the South China Sea is therefore considered vital for its abundant resources and the security of China’s sea lines of communication, contributing to its national security. As a result, China has engaged in a strategy of so-called salami-slicing that pursues repetitive but limited faits accomplis to gradually expand influence within a local context while avoiding potential escalation. This basic notion—gaining ground slice by slice instead of all at once—manifests itself in Chinese operations in the South China Sea.[32] For example, China has gradually consolidated its control by constructing artificial islands and establishing military installations, sending maritime militia and coast guard vessels on patrol in contested waters, and declaring air defense identification zones.[33] In pursuit of this strategy, China has mobilized its complete organizational infrastructure of political and information warfare means, in line with the Three Warfares concept, to achieve its greater geostrategic objectives.
As an instrument of political warfare, the Three Warfares provides valuable options for China to in pursuit of its grand strategic interests while simultaneously preventing escalation into conventional conflicts. When looking at psychological warfare—which aims to influence, confuse, and/or intimidate foreign decision-makers to facilitate acquiescence to Chinese-desired outcomes—the Chinese ambiguity regarding the definition of the South China Sea as a core interest provides a telling example.[34] Following the U.S.-China Joint Statement released in 2009—which included the statement that “the two sides agreed that respecting each other’s core interests is extremely important to ensure steady progress in U.S.-China relations”—China disseminated conflicting narratives regarding whether or not the South China Sea constituted a core interest, as opposed to its sovereignty claims to Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang for example.[35] According to an official Pentagon report, this behavior can be considered an attempt to “manipulate perception and psychology to condition the operational environment in China’s favor,” which contributed to China’s probing behavior aimed at gauging the opposing state’s power and will to maintain security and influence over a region.[36] In doing so, China practically conveys to the hegemon that supporting the regional status quo is no longer cost-free while avoiding significant escalation and simultaneously generating regional doubt concerning U.S. commitments and capabilities.[37] Additionally, the deployment of maritime militia vessels reinforcing its claims causes further confusion amongst regional states, as they are uncertain how to respond adequately.
Consequently, to reinforce its claims and the psychological impact, Chinese lawfare efforts have involved the exploitation of domestic and international legal systems in claiming the legal high ground, asserting legitimacy, and constraining the operational freedom of adversaries. These activities have included claims of de jure sovereignty based on historical titles, such as Zheng He’s 15th-century voyages, or post-1945 arguments stressing Japan’s forceful annexation of Chinese claims in the South China Sea, which should consequently be returned to China; and assertions that the artificially created islands in the South China Sea constitute extensions of Chinese territory, such as the village of Sansha on the disputed Paracel Islands.[38] Internationally, China surprised the UN General Assembly in 2014 by presenting a position paper on its maritime dispute with Vietnam, which was replete with selected references to international law in support of China’s position.[39] Finally, China’s psychological and legal warfare activities have been further augmented with various efforts that seek to influence global and domestic public opinion to support China’s objectives while discrediting diverging narratives and dissuading contrary actions.[40] Central themes within such media warfare include items that emphasize the historical validity of China’s claims, the humiliating loss of Chinese territories due to the century of humiliation, and the selective disregard of international law as a tool of imperialism.[41] Overseas-oriented media channels, such as the Global Times, People’s Daily, and Xinhua often push a similar narrative with an extra emphasis on the responsibility of the U.S., Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, among others, in aggravating the regional tensions and their lack of respect for Chinese law.[42] In doing so, the Three Warfares practically enable and facilitate China’s consolidation activities in the South China Sea, which are, in turn, continuously in support of—and integrated within—China’s broader grand strategy.
A PLA Parade (People’s Daily)
Conclusion
All told, by looking at the development of the Three Warfares concept and its implementation in the context of disputes in the South China Sea, it becomes clear that China does not merely conduct political warfare in pursuit of various individual geostrategic objectives. Rather, it is fundamentally integrated within China’s broader maritime strategy, which, in turn, translates into China’s grand strategy of national rejuvenation. This deduction is further underpinned by China’s long strategic legacy, which firmly resembles Kennan’s definition of political warfare. Chinese political warfare should, therefore, not be considered separate from the larger strategic context because China’s conception of national strategy incorporates all levers of “comprehensive national power,” as defined by Xi Jinping himself, leading to the symbolic characterization of Chinese political warfare as a strategic tautology, as political warfare seems fundamentally inherent within Chinese strategic thinking.
Following this assessment of political warfare as a systematically incorporated aspect within Chinese military thinking, it remains to be seen how its synthetic integration with conventional military operations will play out. In practice, this would involve attempts to take advantage of the previously established peacetime operations—implemented through the Three Warfares—to ultimately develop favorable conditions to seize the initiative and go on the offensive. Thus, as China has already demonstrated its efficacy concerning the political dimension of geostrategic competition, a better understanding of the integration of the Three Warfares will continue to have immediate and real-world relevance for both the stability within the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific region at large.
Pieter W.G. Zhao is a graduate student in International Security at the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, Paris. He also holds a BA and MA (Cum Laude) in History specialized in maritime history and international relations from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests include Geostrategy, Maritime Security, and the Indo-Pacific region.
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Header Image: Chinese Flag, Shanghai, China, 2019 (Alejandro Luengo).
Notes:
[1] “Summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge” (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2018), 2.
[2] George F. Kennan, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” (Wilson Center Digital Archive, April 30, 1948), https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/george-f-kennan-inauguration-organized-political-warfare-redacted-version.
[3] Joseph S. Nye, “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 94–109, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716207311699.
[4] Fumio Ota, “Sun Tzu in Contemporary Chinese Strategy,” Joint Force Quarterly 73 (April 1, 2014): 78, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/577507/sun-tzu-in-contemporary-chinese-strategy/https%3A%2F%2Fndupress.ndu.edu%2FMedia%2FNews%2FNews-Article-View%2FArticle%2F577507%2Fsun-tzu-in-contemporary-chinese-strategy%2F.
[5] Duncan Hollis, “The Influence of War; the War for Influence Notes & Comments,” Temple International & Comparative Law Journal 32, no. 1 (2018): 31–46.
[6] Carnes Lord and Frank R. Barnett, Political Warfare and Psychological Operations: Rethinking the US Approach (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1989), xi.
[7] Kennan, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare”; Kerry Gershaneck, “To Win without Fighting: Defining China’s Political Warfare,” Expeditions with MCUP, June 17, 2020, 4, https://doi.org/10.36304/ExpwMCUP.2020.04.
[8] Kennan, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare”; Gershaneck, “To Win without Fighting,” 4.
[9] Deputy Secretary of Defense, “Department of Defense Directive 3600.01,” DoDD 3600.01 § (2017), https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodd/360001p.pdf; Edwin S. Cochran, U.S. Department of Defense, Retired, “China’s ‘Three Warfares’: People’s Liberation Army Influence Operations,” International Bulletin of Political Psychology 20, no. 3 (September 7, 2020): 11–12, https://commons.erau.edu/ibpp/vol20/iss3/1.
[10] Stefan Halper, China: The Three Warfares (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2013), 88–89.
[11] Ota, “Sun Tzu in Contemporary Chinese Strategy.”
[12] Michael Clarke, “China’s Application of the ‘Three Warfares’ in the South China Sea and Xinjiang,” Orbis 63, no. Spring (January 2019): 189–94, https://doi.org/doi: 10.1016/j.orbis.2019.02.007.
[13] Peter Mattis, “China’s ‘Three Warfares’ in Perspective,” War on the Rocks, January 30, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/chinas-three-warfares-perspective/.
[14] Mao Zedong, “On Correcting Mistaken Views in the Party,” in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, 1929, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_5.htm.
[15] Clarke, “China’s Application of the ‘Three Warfares’ in the South China Sea and Xinjiang,” 194; Katja Drinhausen and Helena Legarda, “Confident Paranoia: Xi’s Comprehensive National Security Framework Shapes China’s Behavior at Home and Abroad,” China Monitor (Berlin: Mercator Institute for China Studies, September 15, 2022), https://www.merics.org/en/report/comprehensive-national-security-unleashed-how-xis-approach-shapes-chinas-policies-home-and.
[16] Edwin S. Cochran, U.S. Department of Defense, Retired, “China’s ‘Three Warfares,’” 23–24.
[17] Gershaneck, “To Win without Fighting,” 7–9.
[18] Peter Mattis, “Contrasting China’s and Russia’s Influence Operations,” War on the Rocks, January 16, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/contrasting-chinas-russias-influence-operations/.
[19] Mattis, “China’s ‘Three Warfares’ in Perspective.”
[20] Halper, China: The Three Warfares, 31–32; David Lai, Andrew Scobell, and Roy Kamphausen, Chinese Lessons from Other Peoples’ Wars (Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute: U.S. Army War College, 2011), 158–59.
[21] Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999), 1–9.
[22] Clarke, “China’s Application of the ‘Three Warfares’ in the South China Sea and Xinjiang,” 191; Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare, 1–9.
[23] Edwin S. Cochran, U.S. Department of Defense, Retired, “China’s ‘Three Warfares,’” 3–4.
[24] Elsa Kania, “The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares,” China Brief 16, no. 13 (August 22, 2016), https://jamestown.org/program/the-plas-latest-strategic-thinking-on-the-three-warfares/.
[25] Mattis, “China’s ‘Three Warfares’ in Perspective.”
[26] Halper, China: The Three Warfares, 12.
[27] Ibid, 30.
[28] Kania, “The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares.”
[29] Mattis, “China’s ‘Three Warfares’ in Perspective.”
[30] Similar maritime boundary disputes are present in the East China Sea and Yellow Sea. But this paper focuses on the South China Sea due to space constraints.
[31] Michael McDevitt, “Becoming a Great Maritime Power: A Chinese Dream” (Arlington: CNA: Analysis & Solutions, June 2016), 10–14, https://www.cna.org/news/events/china-and-maritime-power.
[32] Richard W. Maass, “Salami Tactics: Faits Accomplis and International Expansion in the Shadow of Major War,” Texas National Security Review 5, no. 1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/21615.
[33] Gershaneck, “To Win without Fighting,” 14–15.
[34] Doug Livermore, “China’s ‘Three Warfares’ In Theory and Practice in the South China Sea,” Georgetown Security Studies Review, March 25, 2018, https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2018/03/25/chinas-three-warfares-in-theory-and-practice-in-the-south-china-sea/; Clarke, “China’s Application of the ‘Three Warfares’ in the South China Sea and Xinjiang,” 194–96.
[35] Brian Montopoli, “In Full: U.S.-China Joint Statement,” CBS News, November 17, 2009, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-full-us-china-joint-statement/.
[36] Halper, China: The Three Warfares, 30–31; Clarke, “China’s Application of the ‘Three Warfares’ in the South China Sea and Xinjiang,” 194–96; Jakub J. Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 43, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178264/the-unquiet-frontier.
[37] Grygiel and Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier, 66.
[38] Clarke, “China’s Application of the ‘Three Warfares’ in the South China Sea and Xinjiang,” 198; Liza Tobin, “Underway—Beijing’s Strategy to Build China into a Maritime Great Power,” Naval War College Review 71, no. 2 (March 27, 2018): 20–21, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol71/iss2/5; Gershaneck, “To Win without Fighting,” 9.
[39] Carl Thayer, “China’s Information Warfare Campaign and the South China Sea: Bring It On!,” The Diplomat, June 16, 2014, https://thediplomat.com/2014/06/chinas-information-warfare-campaign-and-the-south-china-sea-bring-it-on/.
[40] Halper, China: The Three Warfares, 28–30.
[41] Linh Tong, “The Social Media ‘War’ Over the South China Sea,” The Diplomat, July 16, 2016, https://thediplomat.com/2016/07/the-social-media-war-over-the-south-china-sea/.
[42] Clarke, “China’s Application of the ‘Three Warfares’ in the South China Sea and Xinjiang,” 199.
thestrategybridge.org · August 28, 2023
17. Attacking foreign corruption blunts China’s malign economic influence
Excerpts:
If we don’t adequately disincentivize foreign bribe demands, we open the door for foreign officials to act with impunity and undermine democratic institutions in countries that are already under stress. Across the Global South, China’s state-owned companies are signing opaque deals that send developing countries into debt distress, while their leaders see millions of dollars flowing to their personal pockets.
Fighting China’s corrupt and malign influence in fragile economies requires recalibrating the consequences for the blatant bribe demands by the foreign officials. FEPA would strengthen the law enforcement toolkit against these officials, encouraging a fairer and more transparent process that changes the calculus on one of China’s main avenues for influence.
FEPA also places the United States on the side of ethical business practices and American financial values, lending its full support to a powerful and increasingly vocal community of like-minded countries saying “enough is enough” to foreign corruption and business extortion. Now is our opportunity to counter China’s corruption machinery and reinforce our rules-based financial system, showing the world the power of positive American economic engagement.
Attacking foreign corruption blunts China’s malign economic influence
BY ELAINE DEZENSKI AND SCOTT GREYTAK, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 08/23/23 3:00 PM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/4165883-attacking-foreign-corruption-blunts-chinas-malign-economic-influence/
China is building its influence throughout the Global South with infrastructure, cheap cash and bribes. With promises of easy financing, splashy new railroads and ports, and opaque deals that hide kickbacks and secret payoffs, China is sidelining American companies in the race for critical resources, partnerships, and contracts. Corruption and opacity are not incidental effects of Chinese engagement but central features. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes it a crime for U.S. companies to bribe foreign officials, so American firms cannot imitate their Chinese rivals without risking steep fines and even jail time.
However, Congress can level the playing field by holding corrupt foreign officials to the same standards as U.S. companies, adding consequences to the widespread bribery demands that bedevil law-abiding Americans and benefit China’s state-owned businesses that are willing to pay up. A bipartisan bill passed by the Senate last month as part of the annual must-pass defense spending bill known as the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA) would allow U.S. law enforcement to prosecute foreign officials for demanding or accepting bribes from American individuals and companies, from any company listed on a U.S.-based stock exchange, or from any person while present in the United States.
This proposal would bring U.S. anti-bribery laws closer to those of other democracies like Germany, France and the United Kingdom. By joining this group of allies, the U.S. adds its significant enforcement heft to the fight against global corruption.
Most importantly, it would reinforce ethical business practices and promote American democratic values to the world — a strategic advantage over China’s corruption-driven meddling. This gives the U.S. an opportunity to reset the dialogue about the rule of law and its place in international commerce.
Under the FCPA, individual Americans and companies listed on a U.S. stock exchange risk criminal prosecution, fines and jail time for offering or giving a bribe to a foreign official. And yet the official who demands or receives such a bribe typically faces no consequences at all. An OECD study found that 80 percent of foreign officials faced no punishment at home for demanding or receiving bribes. And once an American company turns down a solicitation, the responsible official frequently moves on to a Chinese state-owned enterprise, which is generally all too willing to bring gift boxes filled with cash.
Corrupt officials may hold positions of power on the other side of the world, but frequently, their cash, homes and lifestyles are in the U.S., parading their stolen money on the beachfronts of Malibu. Corruption has a direct impact on America even when foreigners both give and take the bribes. Those who amass millions in dirty money often hide it in U.S. real estate markets, private equity funds and Midwest factories. Perhaps most damagingly, dirty money also filters into our political system, putting our democracy at risk. Corrupt foreign officials bankroll lawyers and lobbyists that work tirelessly to influence politicians and policy at the expense of ordinary Americans.
Corruption is also not merely a matter of cash and securing contracts — corruption fuels wars, torture and broken countries. For example, the former president of Guinea, Alpha Conde, engaged in human rights abuses, killed unarmed protestors and children, and oversaw endemic corruption. This past March, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission found that payments by mining company Rio Tinto were made in order to bribe a high-ranking Guinean official on behalf of Conde, and the company had to pay millions of dollars in fines under the FCPA. Conde and his allies got off scot-free. After a 2021 coup, Conde fled the country, presumably with his cash, but still the U.S. lacked the tools to prosecute Conde, who lives comfortably in exile in Turkey.
Before he was forced from power, Conde agreed to a massive $2 billion hydroelectric dam project under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The project displaced 16,000 locals who will likely never see any of the electricity the dam generates, which will be used for mining companies and for export. The people of Guinea suffer, while Chinese businesses and the country’s elites benefit. It is time for the U.S. to add a powerful new tool to its global anti-corruption arsenal.
If we don’t adequately disincentivize foreign bribe demands, we open the door for foreign officials to act with impunity and undermine democratic institutions in countries that are already under stress. Across the Global South, China’s state-owned companies are signing opaque deals that send developing countries into debt distress, while their leaders see millions of dollars flowing to their personal pockets.
Fighting China’s corrupt and malign influence in fragile economies requires recalibrating the consequences for the blatant bribe demands by the foreign officials. FEPA would strengthen the law enforcement toolkit against these officials, encouraging a fairer and more transparent process that changes the calculus on one of China’s main avenues for influence.
FEPA also places the United States on the side of ethical business practices and American financial values, lending its full support to a powerful and increasingly vocal community of like-minded countries saying “enough is enough” to foreign corruption and business extortion. Now is our opportunity to counter China’s corruption machinery and reinforce our rules-based financial system, showing the world the power of positive American economic engagement.
Elaine K. Dezenski serves as senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Scott Greytak is the director of Advocacy of Transparency International U.S., where he manages the office’s legislative agenda and oversees its Anticorruption Policy Lab.
18. Opinion: Is Russia Now Weaponizing Music?
Excerpts:
The West has consistently chosen a policy of accommodation towards Vucic’s regime in the hope of preventing him from siding with Moscow. This approach is misguided as the approach would only embolden both Vucic and, in turn, Putin both politically and financially. Given the history and geopolitical realities of the Russo-Serbian relations, Vucic has little logical reason to distance himself from Russia.
As is being seen now in Africa, Russia has sought to take advantage of its longstanding contacts to uplift its otherwise global setbacks. However, Moscow's inability to leverage its longstanding ties with Belgrade have shown that Europe is a different set of rules. Policy makers must remain consistent in assuring that those who have backed the Putin Regime know that there is no place for them in Moldova - or in Europe.
Opinion: Is Russia Now Weaponizing Music?
Russia has resorted to a wide range of tactics to keep nations within its orbit. Now it’s taken to using music to win over foreign public support.
By Ivana Stradner
By Jason Jay Smart
August 23, 2023, 5:44 pm | Comments ( 1)
kyivpost.com · by Ivana Stradner
Goran Bregovic, a Serbian musician and composer, well-known globally for his Kalashnikov song, has been banned from performing in Moldova. This week, Bregovic was on his way to the Guitar Festival when the organizers of the festival announced on Facebook that he would not be able to perform. They cited “reasons beyond the control of festival organizers or artists,” and that the artist was stopped by Moldova's border police upon reaching Chisinau Airport.
The Moldovan Interior Ministry, on Aug. 21 cited a ban on Bregovic because of his pro-Russian views as the reason for his and his band's denial of entry into Moldova over the weekend. Specifically, Moldovan Interior Minister Adrian Efros informed journalists that Bregovic supported Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, which substantiated his pro-Moscow views.
In a statement from the Moldovan Border Police on Aug. 20, they asserted that based on the “risk analysis” and information exchanged with the Moldovan Intelligence and Security Service (SIS) and international partners, 29 foreign citizens aiming to enter the Republic of Moldova were denied entry within the previous 24 hours.
Moldovan Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Alaiba shared these suspicions, quoting on his social media that “to dance today to the music of Goran Bregovic is like dancing on the graves of all Ukrainians who died as a result of the armed conflict.”
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Russia has been taking advantage of anti-colonial sentiment in Africa to gain support in the Global South. Ukraine, with Italy’s help, could present a counterweight.
Bregovic seems to be confused why he was refused to perform in Moldova. He claimed, “I’ve toured with my musicians all over Europe many times and never had any difficulties anywhere.” This seems odd as he was previously banned from performing in Poland and Ukraine after performing in Crimea in 2015, leading the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry to state that he could “face up to a 15-day administrative arrest, fine or entry ban” for his actions.
Bregovic has a long history of maintaining a solidly pro-Russian viewpoint. In 2015, he declared that “the Balkan people have always felt Russia's grandeur,” adding that “I think the West has always been a little paranoid about this. I hope they will eventually get over it.”
This decision did not bode well for Belgrade. Serbia’s Foreign Ministry requested an explanation from Chisinau. Serbia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivica Dacic, one of the leading pro-Russian voices in Serbian politics, who was awarded the Medal of Friendship from Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018 for his dedication, asserted that “this decision does not correspond to traditional friendly relations between Serbia and Moldova.”
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic downplayed Moldova’s concerns, insinuating that the country was overreacting in its concerns over Bregovic’s song “Kalashnikov” and mockingly expressed amazement that some countries could react to “such nonsense that comes from social media.” However, this ban has little to do with the Kalshnikov song.
Former Moldovan President and leader of the opposition Socialist Party, Igor Dodon, reacted with ire to the Bregovic's ban, claiming that Moldova’s President Maia Sandu, a staunch supporter of Moldova's future membership in NATO and the EU, was personally responsible for the ban. Sandu, who succeeded Dodon to the presidency, has been a recurring target of attacks by the former president who has regularly claimed that Sandu is overstepping her boundaries as president. Dodon, earlier this year, was released from home arrest for charges related to public corruption.
Tensions between Moldova and Serbia
This is not the first time that Moldova has banned Serbian citizens. This past February, Chisinau took the unusual move of blocking Serbian football fans from entering the country to attend a FC Sheriff of Tiraspol - FK Partizan of Belgrade match, which was announced by the Moldovan Football Federation within days of the game. At the time, Moldovan officials expressed concern that Russian-backed thugs, in the guise of being Serbian soccer fans coming to support the Transnistrian team, might have arrived in Chisinau with the intent of overthrowing the democratically elected government. President Sandu expressed that Montenegro, Belarus and Serbia were in cahoots in the plot to unseat her.
The Republic of Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, had been one of the few post-Soviet states to still cling to its Soviet past, having finally unseated the communist party during the 2009 elections. Since that time, Moldova has had a number of pro-European leaning parliamentary factions. A polling by the IRI found that 63 percent support Moldova's EU ascension, whereas 33 percent reject the idea. Of Moldova's nearly 4 million citizens, the IOM estimates that there were 1.16 million currently living abroad – predominantly in the EU.
As Moldova has drifted its geopolitical alignment closer to the West, Serbia has remained a staunch ally of Moscow by playing a delicate balancing game between Washington and Moscow. Due to Russia’s influence over operations in the region, combined with Belgrade’s reliance on Moscow’s energy, Belgrade has firmly placed itself in the Moscow camp, and has led efforts to extract financial support from the West in its bad faith effort to pursue EU membership.
Some in the West believe that Serbia is moving toward the West as it has also used its ostensible condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the United Nations to present diplomatic consistency in framing the NATO intervention in former Yugoslavia as illegal and to protect Belgrade’s interests related to Kosovo. Furthermore, despite the diplomatic condemnation of the invasion, Serbia has refused to impose sanctions on Russia and has facilitated Russian sanction evasion by welcoming Russian businesses that enable such practices.
The West has consistently chosen a policy of accommodation towards Vucic’s regime in the hope of preventing him from siding with Moscow. This approach is misguided as the approach would only embolden both Vucic and, in turn, Putin both politically and financially. Given the history and geopolitical realities of the Russo-Serbian relations, Vucic has little logical reason to distance himself from Russia.
As is being seen now in Africa, Russia has sought to take advantage of its longstanding contacts to uplift its otherwise global setbacks. However, Moscow's inability to leverage its longstanding ties with Belgrade have shown that Europe is a different set of rules. Policy makers must remain consistent in assuring that those who have backed the Putin Regime know that there is no place for them in Moldova - or in Europe.
The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.
kyivpost.com · by Ivana Stradner
19. SOCOM Needs New Tech Old Approaches Vice Commander Says
SOCOM Needs New Tech Old Approaches Vice Commander Says
nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Sean Carberry
JUST IN: SOCOM Needs New Tech, Old Approaches, Senior Leader Says
8/25/2023
By
Defense Dept. photo
AUSTIN, Texas — While Special Operations Forces have spent most of this century countering terrorists and violent extremists, those missions are now taking a backseat to a new imperative: integrated deterrence, which requires updated technologies and a return to pre-Global War on Terrorism force roles, said the vice commander of Special Operations Command.
“That ship, the GWOT ship, has sailed,” Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Francis Donovan, said Aug. 24 at the Fed Supernova conference in Austin. “That's important, because we want to leverage what we learned in those 20 years and some amazing abilities to fuse operations for very distinct effects on the battlefield, and … take what we learned and move forward because times are changing.”
Today, 20 percent of the SOF mission is counterterrorism, which is now more challenging as it requires flying through air defense systems to get to the target, he said. Countering violent extremist groups is down from 80 percent of the SOF mission to 20 percent.
Sixty percent of the SOF focus is now integrated deterrence he said. “That term right now is really hard to put your arms around — what exactly does that mean?”
For the last 20 years SOF could set persistent surveillance and reconnaissance over a target, fly close air support, stage a quick reaction force, have casualty evacuation ready “and wait and then attack on our time and place of choosing,” he said.
“Take it all away, throw it all away,” he said. “That's no longer valid.”
Going forward, SOF won’t be able to call the timeline and the shots against a peer competitor, he said.
“And so we're thinking, and this is kind of back to square one,” and why SOCOM was at the conference speaking to industry and asking for help, he said.
Some of the command's technology and equipment priorities are: collaborative autonomy, contested communications, maneuver in contested environments, maritime domain capabilities and next generation intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, he said.
“And I think really, I woud add here maneuver in contested environments would equate to contested logistics, contested and congested logistics,” he added.
In addition to new technology, SOCOM needs to restructure the way the force units operate, he said. Instead of SEALs, Green Berets, Marine Forces Special Operations Command, or MARSOC, and Air Force Special Operations Command, or AFSOC, units all kicking in doors, they need to return to their historical specialties.
“Down low, frogmen in the water — don't need them raiding villages, need them back in the boats, back in the mini-subs, down on the seabed floor … they're doing surface and sub-surface activities,” he said. “Then you have MARSOC and the Green Berets, AFSOC up in the sky. We have different programs working right now — how do we synchronize all that in time and space to ensure a Joint Force effect for that Joint Force commander?”
And learning how technology can support the mission is another part of the equation, he said. What if all the kit special operators use with local partner forces can support local forces and also pull data, open-source intelligence, and push that back to commanders so they are always prepping the environment? he asked.
“And that the data is backhauled. How far back? I'm not sure,” he continued. “We're still trying to figure out where's the server stack? Where's the cloud? How does all work? We're working on that right now.”
Then the forward team, “whether they're subsurface, on the surface, ashore with allies and partners in key locations — how does that at the time required, we can flip that force, and that sensor becomes absolutely capable at a moment's notice?” he said. And that sensor puts data into the joint fires network, “and we can deliver a very precision effects for the Joint Force as they fight their way back in against a significant peer threat,” he continued.
“So that's the journey we're on right now,” he added. “And in the command, we've made great strides and some of the things we're doing — testing the force, training the force — we're making remarkable linkages, seabed to space,” but the command needs industry’s help with that, he said. “There are some gaps in that I think you all can help us cover.”
But industry needs to recognize SOCOM’s needs and budget restrictions, Donovan said.
“I'm telling you as vice commander of SOCOM, if you’re not on that journey of seabed to space, I'm not interested, honestly,” he said.
SOCOM’s budget has remained flat for the last three years, adding that has meant a loss of buying power due to inflation. The command has had one year’s worth of total obligational authority in the last three years to apply to modernization, he added.
“We're doing some great modernization,” he said. “And we have to figure out what's the size, the force and how we want to move forward.”
Special operators need to step back into the shadows a little more, he said. “But be in the right place in the world to help the Joint Force commander give, from the president down, that Joint Force commander options that are big — they're built by an incredible bottom up operating force that has a great mixture of operators [and] enablers that come together to provide the nation a capability that doesn't reside anywhere else in the services and the Joint Force and that's kind of the path we're on.”
Donovan stated that he’s skeptical of the promises of what technology can deliver and how quickly.
“I was in Europe a little over a year ago leading a task force in the Black Sea and over in the eastern Mediterranean … and I get all the promises, all the tech, all that,” he said. “I'm a cold, hard, wet, dark night guy. Does it work? Kind of work on demand? Is it actually supporting me, or am I a slave to the machine that you promised this great result?”
“The key is that we see promise — we don't know where it all fits in right now,” he continued. “And I see like data, everyone's buying data right now. … People talk about data like ISR was 20 years ago. We all want an ISR, the unblinking eye, and I'm not sure that was all correct either, but so I'm kind of still in the journey myself.”
Donovan said he was using the visit to Austin as an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the industry and ecosystem. The Defense Industrial Unit was of particular interest to him in helping modernize SOCOM.
“We're going to try to jump onto there and understand their world better and help kind of cross lines much, much better between SOCOM-DIU, DIU-everybody,” he said. “But since we're a little bit different, unique, I think we can move forward faster with them.”
Topics:
nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Sean Carberry
20. Too Many Managers, Too Few Providers? Watchdog Tells Defense Health Agency to Reexamine Its Market Structure
Too Many Managers, Too Few Providers? Watchdog Tells Defense Health Agency to Reexamine Its Market Structure
military.com · by Patricia Kime · August 24, 2023
With the Department of Defense's reorganization of its health system complete, the Defense Health Agency should reevaluate its administrative structure and focus on ensuring that military treatment facilities are fully staffed, according to the Government Accountability Office.
As part of military health system reforms launched by Congress in 2016, the focus of the military medical commands shifted to supporting mainly active-duty military personnel and training for military missions, while DHA was responsible largely for providing care to non-military beneficiaries in military facilities and streamlining programs like administration, information technology (IT), logistics and training that once existed in triplicate under the separate Army, Navy and Air Force medical commands.
The reforms also included the management transfer of roughly 700 military hospitals, clinics and dental clinics from the Army, Navy and Air Force, which was completed in November 2022.
With the arrangement, the military services are to provide personnel to staff hospitals and clinics while DHA is responsible for augmenting the uniformed providers with civilians or contractors, or shifting them from nearby military facilities.
But staffing military hospitals and clinics with uniformed providers has always been a challenge, given not only a nationwide shortage of doctors, but also the demands of military duty -- frequent training, deployments, permanent change of station (PCS) moves.
The COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to this strain, with providers called away to support the nationwide response to the pandemic.
DHA has been working to mitigate staffing shortfalls at those facilities, according to a Government Accountability Office report published Monday, but the challenge has been enormous.
In one case, at Naval Hospital Jacksonville, Florida, officials told GAO that the shortages were so bad, they expected they would not be able to provide around-the-clock services in the emergency room in the summers of 2022 and 2023.
The hospital was only able to keep the emergency room open 24/7 by using military providers from other military treatment facilities temporarily "despite Navy-wide shortages of such providers," according to the report.
The Defense Health Agency is working to fully staff facilities by shifting civilian providers from nearby facilities, forging agreements with the military services, establishing a new system for monitoring human capital and instituting a new program to track and analyze staff shortages, according to GAO.
But while it is focused on improving staffing at the hospital and clinic level, it has not reviewed the number of personnel it needs to staff the administrative structure that oversees these facilities.
And that, GAO auditors said, may be problematic.
DHA has clustered hospitals and affiliated clinics into 36 "markets" overseen by 22 offices, with a staffing requirement of more than 1,400 people, a vast increase from 2018, when DHA envisioned two regions with two offices each.
GAO said the Defense Health Agency needs to reevaluate this structure, because the estimate of 1,400 personnel in 22 offices "could be higher than needed and exceeds expected budgetary and personnel resources."
"Until DOD reevaluates the efficiency of the market structure and updates personnel requirements, DOD may risk not accomplishing its vision for an integrated health delivery system that efficiently uses available personnel and budgetary resources," GAO auditors wrote in the report.
GAO noted that its analysis of the Defense Health Program budget, which encompasses the Defense Health Agency, the military treatment facilities and non-military health-care programs like Tricare, in addition to all overhead, has shown that in terms of military treatment facility operations, the budget has remained constant when adjusted for inflation.
DoD officials told the GAO that the transition is likely to lead to future savings as the Defense Health Agency matures, but GAO found that the extent to which the Defense Department has realized or will realize savings is "unclear."
GAO recommended that DoD reevaluate its market management structure and establish performance goals for the reform initiatives and for monitoring savings.
The Defense Department noted that it is currently reviewing the market-based management organization and partially agreed with the recommendations for setting performance goals.
The leadership now in place is responsible for ensuring the undertaken reform initiatives improve "readiness, clinical outcomes, patient safety and patient experience," wrote Seileen Mullen, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, in the DoD response to the report.
-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter and Threads @patriciakime
military.com · by Patricia Kime · August 24, 2023
21. China’s Road to Ruin
Excerpts:
Some will no doubt frame such reforms as “anti-China.” In truth, however, they are simply the steps necessary to protect the principles of transparency and comparability in sovereign debt restructuring. Western countries must be able to stand up for key elements of the rules-based international order when they are imperiled while still cooperating with China, which is an important member of that order.
Finally, these reforms are the only way to protect the IMF from the fallout of the BRI debt crisis. Conflicts over BRI debt will continue to impede debt-relief efforts, undermining both the economic health of indebted developing countries and the effectiveness of the IMF. Only a reformed IMF can reverse the damage—to developing countries and to itself.
China’s Road to Ruin
The Real Toll of Beijing’s Belt and Road
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/belt-road-initiative-xi-imf
September/October 2023
Published on August 22, 2023
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, the largest and most ambitious infrastructure development project in human history. China has lent more than $1 trillion to more than 100 countries through the scheme, dwarfing Western spending in the developing world and stoking anxieties about the spread of Beijing’s power and influence. Many analysts have characterized Chinese lending through the BRI as “debt trap diplomacy” designed to give China leverage over other countries and even seize their infrastructure and resources. After Sri Lanka fell behind on payments for its troubled Hambantota port project in 2017, China obtained a 99-year lease on the property as part of a deal to renegotiate the debt. The agreement sparked concerns in Washington and other Western capitals that Beijing’s real aim was to acquire access to strategic facilities throughout the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the Americas.
But over the last few years, a different picture of the BRI has emerged. Many Chinese-financed infrastructure projects have failed to earn the returns that analysts expected. And because the governments that negotiated these projects often agreed to backstop the loans, they have found themselves burdened with huge debt overhangs—unable to secure financing for future projects or even to service the debt they have already accrued. This is true not just of Sri Lanka but also of Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, Montenegro, Pakistan, Tanzania, and many others. The problem for the West was less that China would acquire ports and other strategic properties in developing countries and more that these countries would become dangerously indebted—forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other Western-backed international financial institutions for help repaying their Chinese loans.
In many parts of the developing world, China has come to be seen as a rapacious and unbending creditor, not so different from the Western multinational corporations and lenders that sought to collect on bad debts in decades past. Far from breaking new ground as a predatory lender, in other words, China seems to be following a path well worn by Western investors. In so doing, however, Beijing risks alienating the very countries it set out to woo with the BRI and squandering its economic influence in the developing world. It also risks exacerbating an already painful debt crisis in emerging markets that could lead to a “lost decade” of the kind many Latin American countries experienced in the 1980s.
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To avoid that dire outcome—and to avoid spending Western taxpayer dollars to service bad Chinese debts—the United States and other countries should push for broad-based reforms that would make it more difficult to take advantage of the IMF and other international financial institutions, imposing tougher criteria on countries seeking bailouts and demanding more transparency in lending from all their members, including China.
HARD BARGAINS, SOFT MARKETS
In the 1970s, the Harvard economist Raymond Vernon observed that Western investors had the upper hand when negotiating deals in the developing world, since they had the capital and know-how to build factories, roads, oil wells, and power plants that poorer countries desperately needed. As a result, they were able to strike bargains that were highly favorable to themselves, transferring much of the risk to developing countries. Once the projects had been completed, however, the balance of power shifted. The new assets could not be taken away, so developing countries had more leverage to renegotiate debt repayment or ownership terms. In some cases, contentious negotiations led to nationalizations or sovereign defaults.
Similar scenarios have played out in several BRI countries. Major Chinese-funded projects have generated disappointing returns or failed to stimulate the kind of broad-based economic growth that policymakers had anticipated. Some projects have faced opposition from indigenous communities whose lands and livelihoods have been threatened. Others have damaged the environment or experienced setbacks because of the poor quality of Chinese construction. These problems come on top of long-standing disputes over China’s preference for using its own workers and subcontractors to build infrastructure, edging out local counterparts.
The biggest problem by far, however, is debt. In Argentina, Ethiopia, Montenegro, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Zambia, and elsewhere, costly Chinese projects have pushed debt-to-GDP ratios to unsustainable levels and produced balance-of-payments crises. In some cases, governments had agreed to cover any revenue shortfalls, making sovereign guarantees that obligated taxpayers to foot the bill for failing projects. These so-called contingent liabilities were often hidden from citizens and other creditors, obscuring the true levels of debt for which governments were liable. In Montenegro, Sri Lanka, and Zambia, China made such deals with corrupt or authoritarian-leaning governments that then bequeathed the debt to less corrupt and more democratic governments, saddling them with responsibility for getting out of crises.
A Chinese-funded railway near Nairobi, Kenya, May 2023
Thomas Mukoya / Reuters
Contingent liabilities on debt to state-owned enterprises are not unique to the BRI and can plague privately financed projects, as well. What makes BRI debt crises different is that these contingent liabilities are owed to Chinese policy banks rather than to private corporations, and China is conducting its debt renegotiations bilaterally. Beijing is also clearly negotiating hard, because BRI countries are increasingly opting for bailouts from the IMF, even though they often come with tough conditions, rather than trying to negotiate further relief from Beijing. Among the countries that the IMF has intervened to support in recent years are Sri Lanka ($1.5 billion in 2016), Argentina ($57 billion in 2018), Ethiopia ($2.9 billion in 2019), Pakistan ($6 billion in 2019), Ecuador ($6.5 billion in 2020), Kenya ($2.3 billion in 2021), Suriname ($688 million in 2021), Argentina again ($44 billion in 2022), Zambia ($1.3 billion in 2022), Sri Lanka again ($2.9 billion in 2023), and Bangladesh ($3.3 billion in 2023).
Some of these countries resumed servicing their BRI debts soon after the new IMF credit facilities were in place. In early 2021, for instance, Kenya sought to negotiate a delay in interest payments for a struggling Chinese-funded railway project linking Nairobi to Kenya’s Indian Ocean port in Mombasa. After the IMF approved a $2.3 billion credit facility that April, however, Beijing began withholding payments to contractors on other Chinese-financed projects in Kenya. As a result, Kenyan subcontractors and suppliers stopped receiving payments. Later that year, Kenya announced that it would no longer seek an extension of debt relief from China and made a $761 million debt service payment for the railway project.
The stakes for Kenya and the rest of the developing world are enormous. This wave of debt crises could be far worse than previous ones, inflicting lasting economic damage on already vulnerable economies and miring their governments in protracted and costly negotiations. The problem goes beyond the simple fact that every dollar spent servicing unsustainable BRI debt is a dollar that is unavailable for economic development, social spending, or combating climate change. The recalcitrant creditor in today’s emerging market debt crises is not a hedge fund or other private creditor but rather the world’s largest bilateral lender and, in many cases, the largest trading partner of the debtor country. As private creditors become more keenly aware of the risks of lending to BRI countries, these countries will find themselves caught between squabbling creditors and unable to access the capital they need to keep their economies afloat.
HIDDEN FIGURES
Beijing had multiple objectives for the BRI. First and foremost, it sought to help Chinese companies—mostly state-owned companies but also some private ones—make money abroad, to keep China’s huge construction sector afloat, and to preserve the jobs of millions of Chinese workers. Beijing also undoubtedly had foreign policy and security goals, including gaining political influence and in some cases securing access to strategic facilities. The large number of marginal projects Beijing undertook hints at these motivations: Why else fund projects in countries with huge political risks, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Venezuela?
But accusations of debt trap diplomacy are overblown. Rather than deliberately miring borrowers in debt in order to extract geopolitical concessions, Chinese lenders most likely just did poor due diligence. BRI loans are made by Chinese state-owned banks through Chinese state-owned enterprises to state-owned enterprises in borrowing countries. The contracts are negotiated directly, rather than opened to the public for bidding, so they lack one of the benefits of private financing and open procurement: a transparent market mechanism for ensuring that projects are financially viable.
The results speak for themselves. In 2009, the government of Montenegro asked for bids on a contract to build a highway connecting its Adriatic port of Bar with Serbia. Two private contractors participated in two procurement processes, but neither was able to raise the necessary financing. As a result, Montenegro turned to the China Export-Import Bank, which did not share the market’s concerns, and now the highway is a major cause of Montenegro’s financial distress. According to a 2019 IMF estimate, the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio would have been just 59 percent had it not pursued the project. Instead, the ratio was forecast to rise to 89 percent that year.
Not all BRI projects have underperformed. Greece’s Piraeus port project, which expanded the country’s largest harbor, has delivered the win-win outcomes Beijing promised, as have other BRI initiatives. But many have left countries suffering under crushing debt and wary of deeper engagement with China. In some cases, the leaders and elites who negotiated the deals have benefited, but the broader populations have not.
China’s BRI does pose problems for Western countries, in other words, but the primary threat is not strategic. Rather, the BRI creates pressures that can destabilize developing countries, which in turn creates problems for international institutions such as the IMF and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to which those countries turn for assistance. Over the last six decades, Western creditors have developed institutions such as the Paris Club to deal with issues regarding sovereign default, to ensure a degree of cooperation among creditors, and to manage payments crises equitably. But China has not yet agreed to join this group, and its opaque lending processes make it hard for international institutions to accurately assess how much trouble a given country is in.
CAUTION AND PRESSURE
Some analysts have argued that the BRI is not a cause of the current debt crisis in emerging markets. Countries such as Egypt and Ghana, they point out, owe more to bondholders or multilateral lenders such as the IMF and World Bank than to China and are still struggling to manage their debt burdens. But such arguments mischaracterize the problem, which is not simply bad BRI debt in the aggregate but also hidden BRI debt. According to a 2021 study in the Journal of International Economics, approximately half of China’s loans to the developing world are “hidden,” meaning that they are not included in official debt statistics. Another study published in 2022 by the American Economic Association found that such debts have resulted in a series of “hidden defaults.”
The first problem with hidden debt occurs during the buildup to a crisis, when other lenders do not know that the obligations exist and are therefore unable to accurately assess credit risk. The second problem comes during the crisis itself, when other lenders learn of the undisclosed debt and lose faith in the restructuring process. It does not take much hidden bilateral debt to cause a credit crisis, and it takes even less to shatter trust in efforts to resolve it.
China has taken some measures to ease the strain of these debts, hidden and otherwise. It has provided its own bailouts to BRI countries, often in the form of currency swaps and other bridge loans to borrower central banks. These bailouts are accelerating, with one working paper published in March 2023 by the World Bank Group estimating that China extended more than $185 billion in such facilities between 2016 and 2021. But central bank swaps are far less transparent than traditional sovereign loans, which further complicates restructurings.
China’s preference for not disclosing lending terms and renegotiating bilaterally may help protect its economic interests in the short term, but it can also derail restructuring efforts by undermining the two foundational elements of any such process: transparency and comparability of treatment—the idea that all creditors will share the burden equitably and be treated the same.
It does not take much hidden bilateral debt to cause a credit crisis.
The IMF’s policies for lending into murky distressed debt situations have evolved over decades, growing more flexible so that the fund can lend into and “referee” debt restructurings. But although the IMF was well suited to this role when the creditors were Paris Club members and even sovereign bond hedge funds, it is not well positioned to deal with China. Moreover, the mechanisms that the IMF and Western creditors have developed to alleviate the worsening sovereign debt crisis among BRI countries are insufficient. In 2020, the G-20 established a Common Framework intended to integrate China and other bilateral lenders into the Paris Club’s restructuring process with IMF oversight and support. But the Common Framework has not worked. Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia have all applied for relief through the mechanism, but negotiations have been extremely slow, and only Zambia has reached a deal with creditors. The terms of that agreement, moreover, were underwhelming for Zambia, Zambia’s non-Chinese official creditors, and, most important, for the prospects of future restructurings.
Under the deal, reached in June 2023, Zambia’s official creditor debt was revised down from $8 billion to $6.3 billion after a major BRI loan was reclassified as commercial (even though it was covered by Chinese state-backed export credit insurance). Furthermore, the agreement may only temporarily reduce Zambia’s interest payments on official debt. If the IMF concludes that Zambia’s economy has improved at the end of its program in 2026, the country’s interest on official credits will ratchet back up. That creates a terrible set of incentives for the Zambian government, whose cost of capital will increase if its creditworthiness improves and could cause friction between the IMF and China down the road. These results are not surprising: the Common Framework provides the carrot of IMF support but lacks a stick to deal with a recalcitrant creditor, especially one with China’s geopolitical leverage over borrowers.
Another initiative aimed at easing the brewing BRI debt crisis is the IMF’s Lending Into Official Arrears program. In theory, the program should allow the IMF to continue lending to a distressed borrower even when a bilateral creditor refuses to provide relief, but it, too, has proven ineffective. In Zambia, China holds more than half of official debt, making it extremely risky for the IMF to extend additional financing. Even in other cases in which China does not hold a majority of official debt, China simply has too much economic leverage over borrowers relative to the IMF, and the fund’s staff and leadership will always err on the side of caution when attempting to resolve conflicts between member states.
As long as the IMF continues to exercise such caution, Beijing will continue to use its leverage to pressure the fund into supporting borrowers even when it does not have complete visibility into their indebtedness to China. To prevent future debt restructurings from becoming as challenging as the ongoing ones in Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and Zambia, the IMF will need to undertake substantial reforms, strengthening its enforcement of transparency requirements for member states and taking a much more cautious approach to lending into heavily indebted BRI borrowers. Such a course correction is unlikely to originate from within the IMF; it will have to come from the United States and other important board members.
SLOW LEARNERS AND FAST LENDERS
Some analysts have argued that China is going through a “learning process” as a debt collector, that Chinese lending institutions are fragmented, and that the process of building understanding, trust, and organized responses to sovereign debt crises takes time and cooperation. The implication is that Western creditors should be flexible while Beijing grows into its new role—and that the IMF should keep cutting checks in the meantime.
But patience will not solve the problem because China’s incentives (and those of any other holdout creditor) are not aligned with those of the IMF or creditors who wish to expeditiously negotiate the restructuring of debts. This is why the IMF must strictly enforce requirements that oblige member states to be transparent about their debt obligations.
Even if the Chinese lending landscape is fragmented, moreover, the IMF and the members of the Paris Club should treat the Chinese government as capable of organizing its state-owned entities and providing a state-level response in debt restructurings. Beijing appears to be capable of doing so in bilateral debt renegotiations. In 2018, for instance, Zambia announced plans to restructure its bilateral debt with China and to delay ongoing BRI projects because of debt concerns. But after meeting with China’s ambassador to Zambia, then President Edgar Lungu reversed course and said there would be no disruption of the Chinese-financed projects, suggesting that Beijing had been able to coordinate with a number of Chinese state-owned enterprises and state-owned banks to avert a blowup. If China could do so bilaterally, it should be able to do so multilaterally, as well.
One drawback of adjusting the IMF’s approach to the BRI debt crisis is that it would slow the fund down, preventing it from responding quickly to new crises. This is clearly a tradeoff. The IMF cannot act as both an unequivocal lender of last resort and an enforcer of the norms of transparency and comparability. It must be able and willing to withhold credit assistance when its requirements are unmet. The non-Chinese taxpayers who fund the IMF should not see their money pay for bad Chinese lending decisions.
GOOD FOR THE IMF, GOOD FOR THE WORLD
Members of the G-7 and the Paris Club have several options for addressing the BRI debt crises. First, the United States and other bilateral creditors could assist BRI borrowers in coordinating with one another. Doing so would improve transparency, enhance information sharing, and enable borrowers to negotiate with Chinese creditors as a group instead of bilaterally. China’s approach of conducting renegotiations secretly and bilaterally disadvantages BRI borrowers, as well as other creditors, including the IMF and the World Bank.
Second, the IMF should establish clear criteria that distressed BRI borrowers must meet before they can receive new credit facilities from the fund. These criteria should be agreed on by a number of IMF board members in order to insulate the fund’s staff and leadership from conflict with China, which is also an important board member of the IMF. Transparency related to BRI debts is not the only area that these criteria should address. The IMF should also set much clearer criteria regarding which BRI loans will be considered official credits, as opposed to commercial ones. China has claimed that some major BRI loans are commercial rather than official loans because they are priced at market rates, even though they come from state-owned lending institutions such as the China Development Bank. The IMF has considered these classification questions case by case. But this approach is proving unworkable, since it enables scenarios such as the Zambian one in which a sizable portion of official debt suddenly becomes commercial overnight, enabling China to seek better terms. A continued ad hoc approach by the IMF will likely lead to similar gamesmanship and conflict in future restructuring negotiations. The IMF should simply clarify which BRI lending institutions will be considered official creditors in any restructuring process.
Under some recent IMF programs, borrowers have continued to service BRI debts through their state-owned enterprises while receiving sovereign debt relief at the national level. The only way to prevent this behavior is for the IMF to require borrowers to identify and commit to including all state-owned enterprise debts with sovereign guarantees in restructuring processes. Otherwise, BRI lenders will simply pick and choose which state-owned enterprise loans they would like to include in restructurings based on whether they think they can get a better deal through restructuring or through a bilateral renegotiation on the side.
A Chinese construction project east of Cairo, Egypt, January 2023
Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters
Requiring distressed countries to meet these criteria before they get new credit facilities would make the IMF less agile and limit its ability to respond quickly to balance-of-payments crises. But it would give borrowers and the sovereign finance industry much-needed clarity and certainty on the requirements for IMF intervention. It would also insulate IMF staff and leadership from recurring conflicts with China during every debt restructuring.
Some will no doubt frame such reforms as “anti-China.” In truth, however, they are simply the steps necessary to protect the principles of transparency and comparability in sovereign debt restructuring. Western countries must be able to stand up for key elements of the rules-based international order when they are imperiled while still cooperating with China, which is an important member of that order.
Finally, these reforms are the only way to protect the IMF from the fallout of the BRI debt crisis. Conflicts over BRI debt will continue to impede debt-relief efforts, undermining both the economic health of indebted developing countries and the effectiveness of the IMF. Only a reformed IMF can reverse the damage—to developing countries and to itself.
- MICHAEL BENNON is a Research Scholar and Manager of the Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
- FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy at Stanford University.
22. US Army Engulfed In Crisis; American Youth Disillusioned With Military Service, Recruitment Goals Falter
US Army Engulfed In Crisis; American Youth Disillusioned With Military Service, Recruitment Goals Falter
eurasiantimes.com · by Ritu Sharma · August 26, 2023
As the US readies its military to counter China in the Indo-Pacific, its forces face a more significant challenge back home. The US Army that enforces the American writ in territories far away from its borders and distant lands now finds it difficult to get people to wear military boots.
While the US Military finds many people unfit to join forces, Gen Z is not particularly enthused about joining the all-volunteer force and fighting wars in other countries, resulting in the US military recruitment reaching crisis levels.
The last two decades of war have caused public confidence in the US Army to plummet, with only 60 percent of respondents saying they have confidence in the US military. The Gallup poll statistics are the lowest in over two decades. The US Military personnel were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq during this period.
Matthew Gault, defense writer for the Vice, while enumerating reasons for the US Army’s worst recruitment crisis in five decades, said: “I think the probably the biggest one right now this immediate drop is the end of the war in Afghanistan, the American withdrawal from it and how quickly the Taliban was able to retake it, there was a lot of terrible optics, there’s a lot of terrible footage, a lot of horrifying stories that happened in the immediate wake of that.”
He added, “Confidence in the military goes down when America loses a war.”
In the early morning of August 31, 2021, the last American soldiers lifted off from Kabul airport, officially ending the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest in US history. At its peak in 2011, the US had approximately 100,000 troops across at least ten military bases from Bagram to Kandahar.
As per the Pentagon, more than 800,000 US soldiers served in the war. But when the troops left, Afghanistan was not better than what it was earlier, and America was not any safer than what it was.
File Image: US Army
The just retired US Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville accepted in January 2023 that the Army has fallen behind its recruitment goals, making it double back on its retention goals. But the Army was still 12,000 short of its goal of 465,000 soldiers.
The Pentagon has swung into action to make the armed forces’ job more lucrative and fix what is fast becoming a national security issue.
The US Congress in 2023 approved a five percent increase in military pay, the highest in the last two decades. The military has pushed the enlistment bonuses as high as US$50,000 and is offering a ‘quick ship’ cash incentive of up to US$35,000 for recruits who leave for basic training within 30 days.
The military is loosening its restrictions on neck tattoos and other standards to widen its recruitment pool. In 2022, the Army briefly dropped its requirement for a high school diploma before reverting to the older requirements.
No Sunlight On The Horizon For US Army
In 2022, the US Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Joseph M. Martin, informed a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness hearing that the Army is going to fall by nearly 19,000 soldiers in fiscal 2022, and in 2023, it will be only short of 18,000 people.
The representative in the senate called the situation alarming. “There is no sunlight on the horizon,” Senator Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said at a hearing on recruiting and retention on September 21.
“It’s becoming clear the all-volunteer force that has served our country well for the last 50 years is at an inflection point. …The truth of the matter is unless we do things differently… I believe every service except for the Space Force is at risk of missing their recruiting mission over the next year, and we need to act,” he said.
As Americans ponder where the soldiers have gone, the suggestions to make the Army lucrative for Gen Z include accepting that the youngsters today are much more medicated.
According to Dr. Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College, the US Army has taken steps to allow more Americans with a history of specific mental health issues to serve, but unnecessarily exclusive policies still exist.
For example, she said that rules saying recruits need to be off medication for conditions like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for 15 months or more don’t reflect a world in which both diagnosis and treatment of these conditions are much more prevalent than in the past.
Experts also seek relaxation in fitness standards as future warfare might not entail everyone picking a weapon and becoming an infantryman. People in cyber units don’t require the same fitness levels as infantry personnel.
The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the following 10 countries combined.
The actual number may be even higher as not all data is published by the Pentagon. With 120 active bases, Japan has the highest number of US bases globally, followed by Germany with 119 and South Korea with 73.
These long-distance deployments take a toll on the family life, tarnishing the sheen of military jobs.
Ritu Sharma
Ritu Sharma has written on defense and foreign affairs for over a decade. She holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies and Management of Peace from the University of Erfurt, Germany. Her areas of interest include Asia-Pacific, the South China Sea, and Aviation history. She can be reached at ritu.sharma (at) mail.com
eurasiantimes.com · by Ritu Sharma · August 26, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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