Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners


Quotes of the Day:


“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible and invisible labor. To contemplate it to toil. To think is to do.”
- Victor Hugo

 "Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will." 
- Mahatma Gandhi

"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent." 
- Abraham Lincoln



​1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 15 (Putin's War)

2. RUSSIAN VOLUNTEER UNITS AND BATTALIONS

3. China’s Economy Is Now In Free Fall

4​. China stands in the way of Biden’s Saudi outreach

5. Shadows in the night; Polish, German SOF train with U.S. Special Forces

6.​ Lessons from Ukraine: Exploring Technology for SOCOM’s Urban Missions​

7. The Five Laws of Disinformation

8. John Spencer is a world-renowned expert on urban combat. Here’s how he thinks the war in Ukraine is going

9. ‘A Real Chilling Effect’: A Lefty Scholar is Dumping CAP — For AEI

10. Ukraine Gets First M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems

​11. ​Plan To Train Ukrainian Pilots On U.S. Jets Passed By House Of Representatives

​12. ​Opinion | What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East

​13. ​Beijing’s Propaganda Support for Russian Biological Warfare Disinformation, Part 1: Accusations Concerning the War in Ukraine

​14. ​Beijing’s Propaganda Support for Russian Biological Warfare Disinformation, Part 2: Historical Context and Contemporary Motivations

​15. ​Opinion | What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East​ (NY Times Editorial Board)​

​16. ​Western ‘dictator envy’ ignores the far greater strengths of democracy

​17. ​'Bang, bang': Children live and play near Ukraine front line

​18. ​Worst Is Yet To Come: When The Center Does Not Hold – OpEd

​19. ​Jordan Peterson Is Wrong About Russia, and the West

​20. ​West Point alumni accuse academy of 'anti-American woke political indoctrination' in letter

21. Biden administration warns of criminal drone threat to Americans

​22. ​It's time to root out white supremacists in the military and law enforcement





1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 15 (Putin's War)


Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-15



RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 15

Jul 15, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Layne Philipson, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

July 15, 7:25 pm ET

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

Russian forces are likely emerging from their operational pause as of July 15. Russian forces carried out a series of limited ground assaults northwest of Slovyansk, southeast of Siversk, along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway, southeast of Bakhmut, and southwest of Donetsk City.[1] These assaults may indicate that Russian forces are attempting to resume their offensive operations in Donbas. The assaults are still small-scale and were largely unsuccessful. If the operational pause is truly over, the Russians will likely continue and expand such assaults in the coming 72 hours. The Russians might instead alternate briefer pauses with strengthening attacks over a number of days before moving into a full-scale offensive operation. A 10-day-long operational pause is insufficient to fully regenerate Russian forces for large-scale offensive operations. The Russian military seems to feel continuous pressure to resume and continue offensive operations before it can reasonably have rebuilt sufficient combat power to achieve decisive effects at a reasonable cost to itself, however. The resuming Russian offensive may therefore fluctuate or even stall for some time.

Ukrainian HIMARS strikes have likely killed or wounded four Russian 106th Airborne Division deputy commanders. Russian news outlets reported the deaths of 106th Division’s deputy commanders Colonel Sergey Kuzminov, Colonel Andrey Vasiliev, and Colonel Maxim Kudrin, seemingly confirming Ukrainian claims that HIMARS strikes on Shaktarsk on July 9 killed or wounded a significant portion of the 106th's leadership.[2] Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications claimed on July 12 that one unspecified 106th Airborne Division deputy commander remains in critical condition.[3]

Key Takeaways

  • Russian forces are likely emerging from their operational pause, launching ground assaults north of Slovyansk, southeast of Siversk, around Bakhmut, and southwest of Donetsk City.
  • Russian forces continued to defend occupied positions in the Kharkiv City direction to prevent Ukrainian forces from advancing toward the Russian border in Kharkiv Oblast.
  • Russian forces continued their systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure targeting residential infrastructure, recreational facilities, and educational institutions in Mykolaiv City on July 15.
  • Chelyabinsk Oblast officials announced the completion of a volunteer battalion on July 15.
  • Russian occupation authorities continued to institute new societal control measures in occupied territories.


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

  • Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts)
  • Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
  • Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
  • Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
  • Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
  • Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces continued to launch localized attacks and continued shelling north of Slovyansk on July 15. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces have repelled a Russian assault on Bohorodychne, approximately 20 km northwest of Slovyansk.[4] Geolocated footage shows Ukrainian artillery striking a Russian armored mobility vehicle in Bohorodychne on an unspecified date, which may indicate that Russian forces are attempting to advance through the settlement.[5] Russian forces continued to shell Slovyansk and settlements southwest and southeast of Izyum.[6] The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) released footage of the aftermath of Russian shelling at the Sviatohirsk Lavra (a monastery approximately 19 km northeast of Slovyansk), which indicates that Russian forces have not crossed the Siverskyi Donets River in the area.[7]

Russian forces continued to launch assaults in the Lysychansk area in an effort to advance toward Siversk. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to capture Spirne (approximately 13 km southeast of Siversk), likely to interdict Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) along the T0513 highway.[8] The Ukrainian Joint Forces Operation (JFO) published footage confirming that Russian forces did not capture Siversk on July 14, contradicting claims by Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Assistant to the Interior Minister Vitaly Kiselyov.[9] Russian forces reportedly continued to shell Kramatorsk, Hryhorivka, and Zakitne and launched an airstrike on Verkhnokamyanske.[10]

Russian forces continued offensive operations northeast of Bakhmut, likely in an attempt to seize the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway.[11] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked Nahirne and Bilohorivka along the T1302.[12] Geolocated footage showed Ukrainian artillery shelling a Russian ammunition depot in Nahirne, which indicates that Russian forces have likely advanced within the settlement but did not secure access to the T1302.[13] The Luhansk People’s Republic claimed that Russian forces seized Nova Kamyanka and Stryapivka, along the T1302, but did not provide any evidence to support the claim.[14] Ukrainian forces also reportedly repelled assaults on the Vuhlehisrka Power Plant, Vershyna, and Kodema, just southeast of Bakhmut.[15]

Russian forces resumed assaults on settlements east of the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border on July 15. The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to advance toward Vodyane and Pavlivka, approximately 40 and 50 km southwest of Donetsk City, respectively.[16]


Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces focused on preventing Ukrainian forces from advancing toward the Russian border in Kharkiv Oblast on July 15.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued to shell civilian and military infrastructure in Kharkiv City and settlements to the north, east, and northeast of the city.[18] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted aerial reconnaissance near Prymorske on the eastern side of the Pechenihy Reservoir.[19] Russian forces previously conducted aerial reconnaissance in the same area on July 14, likely indicating that they have not retained control over some settlements on the eastern side of the Pechenihy Reservoir.[20]


Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)

Russian forces continued to shell Ukrainian positions along the contact line along the Southern Axis on July 15.[21] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched airstrikes in the areas of Velyke Artakove and Olhine, along the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast borders.[22] Ukrainian officials confirmed on July 15 that Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian ammunition depot in Radensk (approximately 26 km southeast of Kherson City) and unspecified Russian positions in Nova Kakhova on July 14.[23] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Russian Su-35s conducted three unsuccessful attacks on Ukrainian ground attack aircraft over Nova Kakhovka, deep in Russian-controlled territory, suggesting that Russian forces may lack sufficient ground-based air defenses in the area.[24]

Russian forces continued to launch missile strikes at Mykolaiv City on July 15. Mykolaiv Oblast Administration Head Vitaly Kim reported that Russian forces launched at least 10 missiles on two Ukrainian universities in Mykolaiv on July 15.[25] Russian milblogger Yuri Kotyenok claimed that the universities served as temporary housing for Ukrainian National Guard servicemen.[26] ISW cannot independently verify Kotyenok’s claims.


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

Russian forces continue conducting accelerated training for combat volunteers. Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov claimed on July 15 that hundreds of volunteers are arriving daily in Grozny, Chechnya, for an accelerated training course before deploying to unspecified areas of Donbas.[27] Kadyrov claimed that volunteers receive unspecified state guarantees and train at the Russian Special Forces University east of Grozny in Gudermes, likely to entice prospective volunteers with promises of comfortable compensation and living conditions.[28] The governor of Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast announced on July 13 that the region is forming the “South Ural” and “South Uralets” volunteer battalions.[29] An 81-person detachment of Russian military volunteers of the 263-person South Uralets Battalion reportedly left Chelyabinsk on July 15 for an accelerated training course in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.[30]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Russian occupation authorities continue implementing societal control measures in occupied territories. Russian occupation governments of Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts criminalized speech on July 14-15 that criticizes the Russian Federation, Russian Armed Forces, or the invasion of Ukraine, effectively expanding the Kremlin’s domestic censorship law to occupied territories.[31] The Kherson Oblast occupation government law decrees that authorities will deport violators from Kherson Oblast to unspecified areas, likely filtration camps or penal colonies in Russia.[32] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Territorial Defense encouraged pregnant women in Mariupol to register with the DNR motherhood support registry to receive medical care and benefits, and DNR Head Denis Pushilin signed an amendment that provides funds to support non-essential benefits for children, including sports participation fees and Christmas presents.[33]

Advisor to the Head of Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Marina Filippova announced on July 15 that the LNR government established an organizational headquarters to support and hold a referendum on an unspecified date to join the Russian Federation.[34] The LNR will likely hold the referendum alongside those of other Russian occupation and proxy governments in Ukraine.

Russian military correspondent Alexander Khodakovsky claimed on July 15 that Russian city and oblast governments acting as patrons for occupied areas of Ukraine are largely absent from reconstruction efforts despite public promises to help rebuild occupied territories, hindering reconstruction efforts.[35] Khodakovsky claims he formed his assessment after meeting with various deputy-level officials in unspecified Russian city and oblast governments.[36]

[2] https://myslo dot ru/news/tula/2022-07-14-zamkomandira-tul-skoj-106-j-divizii-vdv-pogib-v-hode-specoperacii-na-ukraine; https://t.me/AFUStratCom/4134; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1547812939884744705https://archive dot ph/UllSY#selection-173.0-173.163; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1547735785691942915https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1547732993434796033

[29] https://www.1obl dot ru/news/o-lyudyakh/iz-chelyabinskikh-dobrovoltsev-na-donbasse-sformiruyut-imennye-batalony/

[30] https://www.1obl dot ru/news/o-lyudyakh/iz-chelyabinska-na-ukrainu-otpravilis-pervye-boytsy-batalona-yuzhnouralets/

[31] https://t.me/VGA_Kherson/2503; https://t.me/stranaua/52602https://www.kommersant dot ru/doc/5468395

[33] https://glavadnr dot ru/doc/ukazy/Ukaz_384_15072022.pdf; https://t.me/prav_dnr/2583; https://t.me/TRO_DPR/4733

[34] https://www.business-gazeta dot ru/amp/557167; https://t.me/stranaua/52579; https://www.interfax dot ru/world/852331

understandingwar.org



2. RUSSIAN VOLUNTEER UNITS AND BATTALIONS


Map at this link: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-volunteer-units-and-battalions


RUSSIAN VOLUNTEER UNITS AND BATTALIONS

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko with George Barros and Frederick W. Kagan

The Russian Federation has launched a large-scale drive to form volunteer battalions in the 85 “federal subjects” (or regions) that comprise the federation. Recruiting for some volunteer battalions began in June but has intensified in July, with new volunteer units being reported daily. The battalions apparently will consist of roughly 400 men each aged between 18 and 60. They will belong to various branches of service including motorized rifle, tank, and naval infantry, but also signals and logistics. Recruits are not required to have prior military service and will undergo only 30 days of training before deployment to Ukraine.

This recruitment effort will likely be expensive if it comes close to meeting its targets. It appears that the Russian Ministry of Defense will pay the volunteers’ salaries while the “federal subjects” will pay their enlistment bonuses. Salaries generally start at roughly $3,000 per month per soldier or about $1.2 million per month per 400-man unit. Enlistment bonuses offered by at least some units appear to be roughly a month’s salary. If the effort generates 85 battalions each of 400 men it would bring an additional 34,000 volunteers into the fight at the cost of about $102 million per month in salary alone. Considering that the 30 days of training the volunteers will receive before entering combat will not produce combat-ready soldiers, that price is very high. The volunteers will receive veteran status and benefits if they serve in Ukraine, moreover, in addition to their salaries and bonuses, a commitment that will add to the Russian Federation budget for decades.

This drive will likely produce “soldiers” of lower quality than the normal conscripts in the Russian army at close to professional-soldier prices. It is a remarkable expedient that suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin remains unwilling to compel his people to fight and unable to attract them to fight voluntarily without considerable incentives.

This report will be expanded and updated as new data becomes available.


Primorsky Krai

“Tigr” Battalion (Naval Infantry, part of 155th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade): Russian outlets reported that “Tigr” is recruiting volunteers with or without military experience ages 18 to 60, on July 9, but it is unclear when the recruitment drive begun in Primorsky Krai.[1] The governor of Primorsky Krai reported that the battalion is enrolling only residents of the krai and has the highest number of registered volunteers of any federal subject in Russia.[2] “Tigr“ will undergo a 30-day, two-stage training period with officers of the 155th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade at the Bamburovo and Gornostay Training Grounds and will replenish the naval infantry brigade.[3] Social media videos show that some servicemen are already exercising at an unspecified training ground, but it is unclear if ”Tigr” has formally deployed for its 30-day training period.[4] Distinguished servicemen in the unit will receive a 50,000-ruble bonus ($860) after two weeks of training, and all servicemen will receive a 150,000-ruble payment ($2,575) after completing the training. Funds will be drawn from the Primorsky Krai budget.[5] “Tigr” servicemen will receive a monthly salary of 200,000 rubles ($3,430) and veteran status. Social media users noted that footage of the “Tigr” battalion shows that the recruits are older than traditional military age and are likely in their 50s to 60s.[6]

Kursk Oblast

“Seym” Battalion (logistics): The “Seym” Battalion is a volunteer logistical support battalion that began recruiting volunteers on July 11.[7] The Kursk Oblast Administration announced that the battalion will focus on transporting fuel, food, ammunition, with servicemen up to 60 years of age receiving monthly salaries of 200,000 to 500,000 rubles ($3,430 to $8,580) depending on the time spent at the frontlines.[8]

Moscow City

“Sobyanskiy Polk” Regiment: Moscow officials began recruitment for the newly-established “Sobyanskiy Polk” regiment on July 1 and are offering over 200,000 rubles per month (approximately $3,400) to volunteers drawn from the Moscow City budget.[9] Russian opposition outlet Meduza noted that most of the volunteers came from regions other than Moscow City as of July 13. Meduza stated that former commander of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Militia Roman Vysotsky is one of the recruiters for “Sobyanskiy Polk,” but it is unclear if the regiment will merge with DNR forces. The “Sobyanskiy Polk” volunteers (up to 60 years of age) will undergo training at the Mulino Training Ground in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast before deploying to Ukraine.

Republic of Tatarstan

“Alga” Battalion: The Republic of Tatarstan created a joint Telegram channel to recruit for the “Alga” and “Timer” Battalions on June 23, but had likely already begun the recruitment drive as the unit reportedly had 300 registered volunteers on June 24.[10] The official recruitment channel claimed that the republic had recruited over 500 volunteers for the “Alga” Battalion on July 1even though the original recruitment target had been 400.[11] The Republic of Tatarstan dispatched the “Alga” volunteer battalion for a month-long training program in Orenburg Oblast on July 8.[12] The battalion will then deploy to Nizhny Novgorod Oblast where they will receive their combat assignments before entering Ukraine.[13] The Republic of Tatarstan will pay servicemen 3,000 rubles (approximately $53) per day in addition to a one-time 260,000 ruble payment (approximately $4,450) for enlisting drawn from the republic’s budget.[14] Republic of Tatarstan also offered an additional 8,000 rubles (approximately $140) per day spent in combat, but it is unclear if the Republic or Russian Defense Ministry will sponsor the payment. The Russian Defense Ministry will reportedly pay servicemen a starting monthly salary of 150,000 rubles (approximately $2,600).[15]

“Timer” Battalion: The Republic of Tatarstan is forming the “Timer” Battalion as of July 1, and 300 to 350 men had already passed the selection process by that date.[16] The battalion will reportedly have over 400 volunteers.

Orenburg

“Yaik” Battalion (motorized rifle battalion): Orenburg City officials announced the establishment of the “Yaik” volunteer motorized rifle battalion on July 8.[17] Any Orenburg Oblast men ages 18 to 50 can enlist, and a military commission will certify the health and clean criminal record of volunteers. Servicemen will receive a salary of 200,000 rubles ($3,430) for serving in Donbas.[18]

Nizhny Novgorod Oblast

“Kuzma Minin” Tank Battalion: Nizhny Novgorod Oblast announced the formation of the “Kuzma Minin” Tank Battalion on July 1 via the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast Russian Union of Afghan Veterans.[19] The battalion is recruiting men ages 20 to 50 for a six-month contract. Nizhny Novgorod Oblast offers 200,000 ruble ($3,430) one-time payment upon signing the contract and a 220,000 to 350,000 ruble monthly salary ($3,775 to $6,000). Nizhny Novgorod Oblast offers volunteers veteran status, unspecified military training, and a full social package for the serviceman and his family.

Krasnoyarsk Krai

Unknown - Ukraine’s Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) obtained a document stating that Krasnoyarsk Krai allocated 120 million rubles (approximately two million dollars) to recruit 400 servicemen from the region.[20]

Republic of Chechnya

“Vostok Akhmat” Battalion: Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov announced on June 29 that Chechen officials successfully formed the “Vostok Akhmat” Battalion that will shortly move to a permanent base.[21] Kadyrov also reported that the Chechen Republic is building new bases and military facilities for servicemen.[22]

“Zapad Akhmat” Battalion: Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov announced on June 26 that Chechen forces formed a West-Akhmat battalion “in the shortest possible” time and claimed that the unit would deploy to a well-equipped base in Chechnya. The unit is subordinate to the Russian Southern Military District. Its commander is Islaim Aguev.[23]

“Yug Akhmat” Battalion: Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov announced the formation of “Yug Akhmat” on June 26, but did not provide any additional details.[24]

“Sever Akhmat” Battalion: Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov announced the formation of “Sever Akhmat” on June 26, but did not provide any additional details.[25]

Republic of Bashkortostan

“Shaimuratov” Battalion: The Russian organization “Veterans of the Marine Corps and Special Forces of the Navy” announced the creation of the battalion at the end of May and noted that servicemen will receive a month of training in Orenburg Oblast before deploying to Ukraine. Some pro-Kremlin media outlets announced the deployment of a new volunteer battalion from the Republic of Bashkortostan to Donbas on July 6, while some sources claimed that the battalion arrived in Orenburg for training.[26] The battalion had reportedly arrived in Alkino, Republic of Bashkortostan, on July 2.[27] The Republic of Bashkortostan recruitment Telegram channel reported that the ”Shaimuratov” Battalion had registered 250 volunteers as of June 16 and is seeking to recruit a total of 800 volunteers split between two battalions.[28] The Republic of Bashkortostan and the Russian Defense Ministry financially incentivized servicemen by offering 200,000 rubles ($3,430) for signing the military contract and 2,000 rubles ($34) for every day served, but it is unclear whether this payment refers to service in a combat zone. Volunteers will reportedly receive monthly salaries of 220,000 rubles ($3,775).[29]

“Alexander Dostavalov” Battalion: A local Ural region outlet reported that the “Alexander Dostavalov” Battalion is deploying to a place of unit coordination in Ilishevsky District, Republic of Bashkortostan, on July 14.[30] The battalion began recruitment prior to June 25.[31]

Perm Oblast

“Parma” Battalion: Perm Oblast officials announced a recruitment campaign for the “Parma” battalion on May 25.[32] The recruitment campaign offered volunteers a 300,000-ruble monthly salary ($5,150), federal housing, higher education grants, and social benefits.

“Molot” Battalion: Perm Oblast officials stated that they are continuing recruitment for the “Molot” Battalion as of July 7.[33]

Chelyabinsk Oblast

“Uzhnouralets” Battalion: Governor of Chelyabinsk Oblast Alexei Teksler announced on July 13 that the region has been forming two battalions as part of the Central Military District: “Uzhnouralets” and “Uzhnyi Ural.[34] The region held a departure ceremony for 82 servicemen of the battalion that deployed to the training ground in Nizhny Norgorod on July 15.[35] First Deputy Regional Minister of Public Security Vladimir Gusak said that ”Uzhnouralets” has in total 263 volunteers, including the recently deployed servicemen. Local news reports said that the youngest serviceman is 21 and the oldest 54.[36]

“Uzhnyi Ural” Battalion: First Deputy Regional Minister of Public Security Vladimir Gusak said that “Uzhnyi Ural” had recruited 251 volunteers as of July 15.[37]

Republic of Chuvashia

“Atal” Battalion (Signals): Republic of Chuvashia Head Oleg Nikolaev said that the Republic is currently forming the “Atal” Battalion as of July 11.[38] Nikolaev said that volunteers will receive a ”lump-sum cash payment” of 200,000 rubles ($3,775) when enlisting into the unit.

Republic of North Ossetia–Alania

“Alania” Battalion: The Alania Battalion is the first Russian volunteer battalion that ISW observed operating in Ukraine in 2022. Alan Valerievich Mamiev – a Russian combatant who fought in the Donetsk People’s Republic’s “Vostok” Battalion in Donbas in 2014 – announced the formation of the Alania Battalion in January 2016.[39] The payment, benefits, and deployment terms promised to Alania Battalion fighters to fight in Ukraine in 2022 are unclear. The Alania Battalion deployed to Ukraine likely around late May or early June 2022 and participated in combat operations on the southern axis in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.[40] Head of the Republic of North Ossetia Sergei Menyailo visited the Alania Battalion and reportedly received a concussion near Hulaipole.[41] A unspecified T-62 tank unit (likely a platoon-sized tank unit) reinforced the Alania Battalion on June 20.[42] Combat imagery from early July documented the Alania Battalion’s loss of at least one of the tanks that reinforced the battalion.[43]

[1] https://vostokmedia dot com/news/society/10-07-2022/oleg-kozhemyako-rasskazal-o-formirovanii-dobrovolcheskogo-batalona-v-primorie; https://t.me/milinfolive/86692?single

[2] https://vostokmedia dot com/news/society/14-07-2022/put-silnyh-put-luchshih-primortsy-o-zemlyakah-dobrovoltsah-na-svo

[3] https://vostokmedia dot com/news/society/12-07-2022/kak-vstupit-v-dobrovolcheskiy-batalon-tigr-dlya-uchastiya-v-svo; https://t.me/milinfolive/86692?single

[5] https://vostokmedia dot com/news/society/12-07-2022/kak-vstupit-v-dobrovolcheskiy-batalon-tigr-dlya-uchastiya-v-svo

[8] https://www dot rbc.ru/politics/11/07/2022/62cc14a49a79473c0c85cb14

[9] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/07/13/v-moskve-sformirovan-sobyaninskiy-polk-v-nego-nabirayut-naemnikov-dlya-voyny-v-ukraine

[12] https://prokazan dot ru/news/view/159738; https://t.me/armytatarstan/20https://t.me/armytatarstan/17

[13] https://www dot business-gazeta dot ru/article/556433

[16] https://www dot business-gazeta dot ru/article/556433; https://t.me/armytatarstan/18

[17] https://yuzh-ural dot ru/obshhestvo/iz-orenburgskoj-oblasti-na-donbass-otpravitsya-dobrovolcheskij-batalon-yaik/

[18] https://ntsk dot ru/news/46105; https://vestirama dot ru/novosti/20220707-20.47.10.html

[19] https://vk dot com/wall-145724301_9079

[26] https://ufa dot rbc.ru/ufa/06/07/2022/62c5536c9a7947cca005eaa8; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1544596996324999168https://ufa dot rbc.ru/ufa/23/05/2022/628b83ba9a7947dc1417cba3; https://ufa dot rbc.ru/ufa/26/05/2022/628f32f39a79479bda239f38; https://t.me/bashbat02/97https://t.me/bashbat02/87 https://t.me/bashbat02/73

[28] https://t.me/bashbat02/6https://t.me/bashbat02/149?single; https://www dot proural.info/society/bashkirskiy-batalon-imeni-aleksandra-dostavalova-otpravilsya-na-boevye-ucheniya/

[30] https://www dot proural dot info/society/bashkirskiy-batalon-imeni-aleksandra-dostavalova-otpravilsya-na-boevye-ucheniya/; https://t.me/bashbat02/147https://t.me/bashbat02/148https://t.me/bashbat02/158https://t.me/bashbat02/160https://t.me/bashbat02/162

[32] https://svb59 dot ru/novosti/1077-permyaki-vas-zhdjot-na-sluzhbu-batal-on-parma-za-rossiyu-za-pobedu-maksimal-nyj-repost.html

[33] https://svb59 dot ru/novosti/1138-permskij-batal-on-molot-za-pobedu-za-rossiyu.html

[35] https://www dot 1obl.ru/news/o-lyudyakh/iz-chelyabinska-na-ukrainu-otpravilis-pervye-boytsy-batalona-yuzhnouralets/

[36] https://www dot 1obl.ru/news/o-lyudyakh/iz-chelyabinska-na-ukrainu-otpravilis-pervye-boytsy-batalona-yuzhnouralets/

[37] https://www dot 1obl.ru/news/o-lyudyakh/iz-chelyabinska-na-ukrainu-otpravilis-pervye-boytsy-batalona-yuzhnouralets/

[38] https://regnum dot ru/news/polit/3643993.html

[39] https://rusvesna dot su/recent_opinions/1452539613; https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=812137158912353https://ru.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/a-birdie-is-flying...https://zlobnig-v-2.livejournal.com/1293612.htmlhttps://myrotvorets dot center/criminal/mamiev-alan-valerevich/

understandingwar.org



​3. China’s Economy Is Now In Free Fall


Excerpts:


Xi believes in a state-dominated economy and has been steadily reversing the liberalizations sponsored by Deng Xiaoping, the successor to Mao Zedong. Xi, like Mao, has been closing off China to the world with, among other things, his self-sufficiency campaigns.
Periodically throughout Chinese history, rulers have sought to centralize control and isolate China from the outside. As Fei-Ling Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology pointed out in The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power, such attempts result in disaster for China.
And that is the most fundamental reason why China’s economic problems are not merely a blip. The country is now led by an ideological leader who does not accept the modern world as it is.
The Chinese people are bound to pay the price. And not just last calendar quarter.



China’s Economy Is Now In Free Fall

19fortyfive.com · by ByGordon Chang · July 15, 2022

China’s economy grew 0.4% in the just-completed second quarter, compared with the same period last year, according to the official National Bureau of Statistics.

According to almost everybody else, gross domestic product shrank in Q2. As Max Zenglein of the Mercator Institute for China Studies told the Washington Post before the announcement, “The government will not acknowledge a contraction.”

China’s economy not only contracted, but it is also heading for a free fall. Chinese leaders, for many reasons, cannot now stabilize the situation.

The Communist Party makes the case that trade will lift China toward the announced goal of “around 5.5%” growth for 2022. Two-way trade jumped 9.4% in the first half, year-on-year. Yet the economy is weak, something evident from the composition of trade. While exports skyrocketed 13.2%, imports, an indicator of domestic demand, increased only 4.8%.

In any event, overall growth is on a downward path. The economy, according to Beijing, grew 4.8% in the first quarter of this year.

Analysts blame COVID-19 lockdowns for Q2’s poor results. The draconian measures in the eastern part of the country—most notably in Shanghai and Beijing—dented consumer spending, of course, but the disease is still hitting the economy.

Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s draconian “dynamic zero-COVID” policy is now shutting down neighborhoods across the country. Shanghai has been locking down areas and, there have been similar measures imposed in, for instance, Xian and Lanzhou. Xi, seeking an unprecedented third term as Party general secretary, obviously feels he cannot walk back from his economy-killing disease-control tactics.

There are, however, more fundamental problems. First, there is debt. To avoid the worst effects of the 2008 global downturn, Beijing went on a massive debt-fueled spending spree. Xi is beginning a new round of stimulus, but there is a limit as to what he can do.

Why? There is general concern about the total level of indebtedness. The country could have debt equal to about 350% of GDP. Moreover, there are new worries that China is running out of borrowing capacity.

China’s budget deficit at all levels of government widened to a record 5.1 trillion yuan ($758 billion) in the first half of the year according to Bloomberg calculations. That represents an increase of 610% over the same period last year.

Local governments, which rely heavily on land sales to keep the lights on, are extremely hard pressed. China’s fiscal revenue, even according to official figures, fell 10.2% in H1 2022 from the same period in 2020.

The property sector, accounting for perhaps as much as 30% of the Chinese economy, is in extreme distress. New home prices in 100 cities dropped by more than 40% in the first half of the year, compared with the first half of 2021.

In June, sales at the 100 largest property developers fell 43% from a year earlier. Big developers, triggered by the failure of the giant Evergrande Group, have been defaulting on debt, one after the other. For instance, Shanghai-based Shimao Group did not pay interest or principal on a US$1 billion bond this month. As CNN notes, the property sector “has been lurching from one crisis to another since 2020.”

At the moment, hundreds of thousands of buyers have halted mortgage payments on more than 200 unfinished projects across China. The mortgage boycott, as it is now called, has spread to about 80 cities. Prospective homeowners now believe that the apartments they have contracted to buy are unlikely to be completed by ailing developers.

“It certainly looks like it’s going to be endemic because people have been walking around Chinese cities looking at half-built, looming buildings that are empty, property after property, and saying to themselves, ‘Oh, in another five years this city is going to look like New York, or it’s going to look like London or Paris,’ or something like that,” said J Capital Research’s Anne Stevenson-Yang to John Batchelor, host of CBS Eye on the World, on Wednesday. “It may be that we’re at the point where the veils come off their eyes and they say, ‘Oh, damn, these are just empty buildings and nobody is doing anything.’ ”

Banks across China have been hit by the snowballing boycott. Some were in trouble even before the movement, not able to pay back deposits. At the beginning of this week, more than 3,000 depositors protested in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, on the steps of the local branch of the People’s Bank of China, the central bank. There have been depositor demonstrations around China.

Chinese banks—and the Chinese banking system—are unlikely to withstand the troubles in the property sector. Even banks in Shanghai, the country’s financial capital, have had to limit withdrawals.

It is no wonder that foreign investors beginning in March, have been dumping Chinese bonds.

So far, China has been sustained by the inflows of equity investment, engineered by Wall Street cheerleaders like Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates and Larry Fink of BlackRock. Yet as Xi Jinping continues his assault on Chinese companies—he shocked markets by fining tech giants Alibaba and Tencent this week—inward equity flows will eventually reverse.

Xi believes in a state-dominated economy and has been steadily reversing the liberalizations sponsored by Deng Xiaoping, the successor to Mao Zedong. Xi, like Mao, has been closing off China to the world with, among other things, his self-sufficiency campaigns.

Periodically throughout Chinese history, rulers have sought to centralize control and isolate China from the outside. As Fei-Ling Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology pointed out in The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power, such attempts result in disaster for China.

And that is the most fundamental reason why China’s economic problems are not merely a blip. The country is now led by an ideological leader who does not accept the modern world as it is.

The Chinese people are bound to pay the price. And not just last calendar quarter.

A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and The Great U.S.-China Tech War. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.

19fortyfive.com · by ByGordon Chang · July 15, 2022



4. China stands in the way of Biden’s Saudi outreach


It is not hard for China to turn a blind eye to Saudi human rights since it so easily turns a blind eye to its own abuses.


Excerpts:


Saudi officials appear grateful to Beijing for turning a blind eye to Riyadh’s rights record — which includes what Human Rights Watch calls “routine repression” of dissidents, independent clerics and women’s rights activists as well as “systematic discrimination” against religious minorities — and regularly return the favor by parroting Chinese government responses to criticism of China’s rights record.
“[We] staunchly support China’s legitimate position on such issues concerning core interests as Xinjiang, resolutely oppose any interference in China’s internal affairs and firmly safeguard the rights of all countries to choose their own political and human rights paths independently,” bin Salman told Xi during a phone call in April.
Biden’s Saudi Arabia visit may succeed in draining some of the rancor from the bilateral relationship. But it is unlikely to alter Riyadh’s willingness to leverage its deepening ties with China to pressure the U.S. to make its Saudi alliance an exception to the Biden administration’s avowed foreign policy guided by “American values, including a commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”
“Like during the Cold War … Saudi Arabia tries to play great powers off against one another.” Singh said. “If you are worried that the U.S. will drive too hard a bargain, a great way to mitigate that is to engage in flirtation with Moscow and Beijing, to tell every visiting American delegation how much more reliable the Russians are as an ally, or how the Chinese are offering you cooperation in this military area which the U.S. won’t like.”



China stands in the way of Biden’s Saudi outreach

Politico

A soured U.S.-Saudi relationship has given Beijing a diplomatic windfall. Can the president claw it back?


Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, left, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on Feb. 22, 2019. | Liu Weibing/Xinhua via AP

07/15/2022 04:30 AM EDT

Updated: 07/15/2022 05:01 PM EDT

President Joe Biden will travel to Saudi Arabia on Friday to try to repair a rocky relationship that threatens to create a power vacuum.

Biden isn’t hiding his concerns about the threat China poses. Washington has been long been Riyadh’s superpower patron of choice, but Beijing is waiting in the wings.


In a Washington Post op-ed published last week, Biden argued that improving U.S.-Saudi relations was essential to positioning the U.S. “in the best possible position to outcompete China.”


Biden’s problem is that he self-sabotaged his own efforts “to reorient — but not rupture” U.S.-Saudi relations with his 2016 campaign trail rhetoric that accused the Saudis of “murdering children” in Yemen and promised to make Riyadh a “pariah” over the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Those comments, along with Biden’s move to revive the Obama-era Iran denuclearization pact that former President Donald Trump killed, ruffled Saudi feathers and alienated Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

It also fueled doubts in Riyadh about U.S. reliability, boosting China’s efforts to position itself as a rising superpower alternative.

“The United States has been somewhat missing in action, has called [Saudi Arabia] a pariah and several administrations have said there’s a need to pivot towards Asia, inferentially meaning away from the Middle East,” said Robert Jordan, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and diplomat in residence at Southern Methodist University. “That makes it more attractive for them to turn to their largest customer as a country of considerable influence. China also has the added benefit of not lecturing the country on human rights.”

Working to Beijing’s advantage is a close economic relationship with Riyadh lubricated by China’s dependence on Saudi oil. China and Saudi Arabia sealed a “strategic partnership” in 2016 tied to “stable long-term energy cooperation.” It’s payed off: bilateral trade was valued at $65.2 billion in 2020.

By comparison, U.S.-Saudi bilateral trade — dominated by Saudi oil sales and the Kingdom’s purchases of U.S.-produced automobiles and aircraft — was a meager $19.7 billion that same year.

Riyadh took the China relationship one step further this March by announcing its intent to abandon U.S. dollar transactions for some of those oil sales and switch them to China’s currency, the renminbi.

Beijing has positioned itself as a nonjudgmental partner to Riyadh and as a counterpoint to a U.S.-Saudi diplomatic chill that hit new depths after Khashoggi’s 2018 murder.

Beijing enticed Saudi Arabia in 2021 into becoming a “dialogue partner” in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-initiated regional security and development grouping whose members include Kazakhstan, India, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has positioned the organization as a defiant counterpoint to U.S.-dominated multilateral groupings — with their pesky commitment to democracy and rule of law — by urging SCO members to “refuse sanctimonious preaching from those who feel they have the right to lecture us.” China is also seeking to connect its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure development program with Saudi Arabia’s domestic infrastructure construction scheme.

“The Chinese have worked for access and for influence not just in Saudi Arabia, but in the Gulf as a whole. … They survey the situation in a given country, they see where there may be points of advantage to them or access to them, and they move,” said David Satterfield, former principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and director of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

China also has a longstanding role as Saudi Arabia’s military hardware and technology supplier of last resort by providing Riyadh equipment that the U.S. refuses to sell due to concerns about sparking a regional arms race.

That relationship began with the sale of intermediate-range surface-to-surface missiles in 1988 and culminated in December with U.S. intelligence agency revelations that China had sold equipment and technology that allow Riyadh to manufacture its own ballistic missiles. A month later, China’s Defense Minister Wei Fenghe reaffirmed that cooperation by pledging that China would “maintain strategic communication with the Saudi military.”

But that doesn’t mean that China can easily wean Saudi from decades of dependence on U.S.-provided weapons systems.

“The Chinese can provide missiles and missile technology that our Congress probably still would be too anxious to provide, but the interoperability of American military platforms is so important in the relationship with Saudi Arabia that it would take five or six years to recalibrate and reorient to some kind of a Chinese wave of new military assistance,” Jordan said.

Saudi Arabia currently deploys U.S. weapon platforms that include Terminal High Air Area Defense anti-missile systems, M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tanks and Multi Mission Surface Combatant ships.

Despite Beijing’s diplomatic inroads, its relationship with Saudi Arabia is hampered by China’s ties to Riyadh’s nemesis, Iran. Beijing’s purchases of Iranian oil provide the sanctions-choked Tehran regime an economic lifeline, and China and Iran inked a 25-year Strategic Cooperation Agreement designed to supercharge bilateral trade and cooperation. That relationship breeds suspicion in Riyadh.

“We all need to take a deep breath when it comes to Saudi-Chinese relations. Yes, they are strengthening, going beyond simple transactions of oil sales. Yes, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman surely appreciates not being asked by the Chinese about Jamal Khashoggi, just as the Chinese appreciate not hearing criticism about the treatment of Uyghurs from MBS,” Jeffrey Feltman, the former U.S. assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, said in a statement. “But in the end, China is not concerned with Iran, which Saudi Arabia considers its #1 existential threat. The United States is concerned. Despite complications, the United States will remain Saudi Arabia’s essential partner, however uncomfortable that partnership often is for both sides.”

Mindful of the decades of U.S. blood and treasure squandered in Afghanistan and Iraq, China has adopted a resolutely neutral position on the multitude of regional tensions in the Middle East.

“China over the last several decades has had very balanced relationships with countries across the Middle East, whether it’s Saudi or Israel, or Iran or Turkey, and I just don’t see any deviation from that,” said Dawn Murphy, associate professor of national security strategy at the National War College. “They don’t want to be perceived as an external power taking sides.”

China’s tip-toe regional approach is calculated to provide Beijing access to needed resources and markets without risking the potential blowback of an overt challenge to traditional U.S. dominance in the Middle East.

“China is looking to increase its own influence, undermine American influence, [and] reap strategic gains from the region, but it is deliberately trying to do all of this in ways that don’t pick a fight with the United States to try to stay under Washington’s radar,” said Michael Singh, former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council and managing director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Where China does make noise that appeals to the Saudi leadership is in its aggressive rejection of foreign criticism of Riyadh’s human rights record.

“China does not mind what internal policies the Saudi government takes toward the Saudi population including minority groups or dissidents,” said Tong Zhao, senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and visiting research scholar at Princeton University.

Readouts of bilateral meetings between senior officials invariably include a ritual denunciation of such criticism.

Saudi officials appear grateful to Beijing for turning a blind eye to Riyadh’s rights record — which includes what Human Rights Watch calls “routine repression” of dissidents, independent clerics and women’s rights activists as well as “systematic discrimination” against religious minorities — and regularly return the favor by parroting Chinese government responses to criticism of China’s rights record.

“[We] staunchly support China’s legitimate position on such issues concerning core interests as Xinjiang, resolutely oppose any interference in China’s internal affairs and firmly safeguard the rights of all countries to choose their own political and human rights paths independently,” bin Salman told Xi during a phone call in April.

Biden’s Saudi Arabia visit may succeed in draining some of the rancor from the bilateral relationship. But it is unlikely to alter Riyadh’s willingness to leverage its deepening ties with China to pressure the U.S. to make its Saudi alliance an exception to the Biden administration’s avowed foreign policy guided by “American values, including a commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

“Like during the Cold War … Saudi Arabia tries to play great powers off against one another.” Singh said. “If you are worried that the U.S. will drive too hard a bargain, a great way to mitigate that is to engage in flirtation with Moscow and Beijing, to tell every visiting American delegation how much more reliable the Russians are as an ally, or how the Chinese are offering you cooperation in this military area which the U.S. won’t like.”


POLITICO



Politico



5. Shadows in the night; Polish, German SOF train with U.S. Special Forces



​More photos at the link: ​


​CTAC is an enw acronym for me. I suppose the organization is what us old guys new as the CINC's In-Extremis Force (CIF) (Later the Commander's In-Extremis Force)​


​Excerpts:

“CQB is a kind of universal language,” said a Special Forces senior sergeant with the Critical Threats Advisory Company, 10th SFG(A). “Having [partners] out here training with us, working together, sharing [tactics, techniques and procedures] is crucial. Once guys understand the basic principles, getting thrown in together is not that big an issue.”


The CTAC partners with premier SOF personnel who conduct direct action missions within the U.S. European Command area of responsibility.


Shadows in the night; Polish, German SOF train with U.S. Special Forces

dvidshub.net

Photo By Staff Sgt. Anthony Bryant | Green Berets assigned to 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), conduct...... read more

Photo By Staff Sgt. Anthony Bryant | Green Berets assigned to 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), conduct Close-Quarters Battle shoulder to shoulder with German Special Operations Forces personnel on Fort Carson, Colorado, May 24, 2022. Polish and German Commandos honed CQB tactics and techniques alongside Special Forces Soldiers assigned to the 10th SFG(A) Critical Threats Advisory Company from May 2 – June 3. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Anthony Bryant) (This photo has been altered for security purposes.) | View Image Page

FORT CARSON, CO, UNITED STATES

06.03.2022

Story by Staff Sgt. Anthony Bryant

10th Special Forces Group (Airborne)

FORT CARSON, Colo. – It’s 11 p.m. and cloud cover obstructs illumination from the moon. Disguised in darkness, Special Operations Forces Soldiers maneuver stealthily inside a mock village. To the naked eye, nothing is distinguishable.


A deafening explosion punctuates the quiet. Yells and gunshots emanate from inside a building followed by the detonation of another bomb. The crack of rifle fire betrays the assaulters’ faces for a split second and then darkness again.


From May 2 – June 3, 2022, Polish and German Commandos honed Close-Quarters Battle (CQB) tactics alongside Green Berets assigned to 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), on post.


“CQB is a kind of universal language,” said a Special Forces senior sergeant with the Critical Threats Advisory Company, 10th SFG(A). “Having [partners] out here training with us, working together, sharing [tactics, techniques and procedures] is crucial. Once guys understand the basic principles, getting thrown in together is not that big an issue.”


The CTAC partners with premier SOF personnel who conduct direct action missions within the U.S. European Command area of responsibility.


“It can be chaotic to some folks who aren't inoculated to it—shooting live rounds, flash-bangs, explosive breaching—but it doesn’t even come close to the reality of [having] real bad guys that are moving and shooting back at you,” the Special Forces senior sergeant continued. “It’s pretty important for CQB to be as idiot-proof as possible.”


A Soldier assigned to GROM, a SOF unit within the Polish Armed Forces, said CQB tactics were generally similar among the participating units but with some nuance.


“We’re comparing our tactics here to see where we can improve,” the Polish Soldier said. “The opponent is getting better and better, so we’re taking what we learn here to Poland to improve our own techniques.”


Though English wasn’t the first language of the invited countries, mission planning, execution and after-action review (AAR) were all conducted even despite language barriers.


Bilateral cooperation is not only a chance to share theoretical and practical knowledge but also to develop common standards and procedures, which are crucial on demanding battlefields.


“I think what’s most important is cooperation and planning together all the time because we've got different habits on how we do things and sometimes different meanings to words,” said a Polish SOF Operator with JWK. “The longer we’re together the better we understand each other.”


The CTAC is slated to train with SOF counterparts in Europe later this year.

NEWS INFO

Date Taken: 06.03.2022 Date Posted: 07.14.2022 17:21 Story ID: 424979 Location: FORT CARSON, CO, US Hometown: COLORADO SPRINGS, CO, US Web Views: 699 Downloads: 2

PUBLIC DOMAIN

This work, Shadows in the night; Polish, German SOF train with U.S. Special Forces, by SSG Anthony Bryant, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.

dvidshub.net


6. Lessons from Ukraine: Exploring Technology for SOCOM’s Urban Missions



Lessons from Ukraine: Exploring Technology for SOCOM’s Urban Missions

7/15/2022

By Mikayla Easley

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Mikayla Easley








Marine Corps photo

TAMPA, Florida — U.S. Special Operations Forces know from experience in places like Iraq and Afghanistan that urban combat presents a host of tactical and logistical challenges. Russia’s struggles in Ukraine not only reinforce that fact but provide important data that industry can use to develop technology to support future U.S. missions.


Modern cities are challenging environments for special operators, said Bartlett Russell, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Buildings, underground spaces, civilians and other objects clutter the area, only adding to the list of elements a commando needs to worry about.


“You have a lot of density, a lot of obstruction, a lot of things — not just buildings, but things — in city environments,” she said. “It’s also an unstable environment, so there might be a lot of debris and things left behind like burnt out cars.”


The complexity also creates large amounts of data to sort through, another distraction for a warfighter who is trying to locate targets, she added.


Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corp. who studies land warfare and Russian military capabilities, said establishing and maintaining situational awareness in a city is crucial.


“[The Russians] don’t have great situational awareness now. They have some — which is better than they had in the beginning,” he said.


Because urban warfare often favors the defenders with knowledge of the area, providing geospatial data directly to special operators during raids can help them navigate the city, locate threats and adjust routes to avoid barricades and enemies. To address these challenges and keep them focused during urban missions, industry has built a range of, situational awareness tools, advanced communications, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities — all augmented by artificial intelligence.


U.S. adversaries have improved their ability to perform GPS-denial and GPS-deception attacks with jammers and spoofers, said Kevin Betts, director of position, navigation, and timing, or PNT, for defense contractor Leidos’ Innovation Center.


Leidos is addressing the threat by building visual PNT for places where an adversary can disrupt radio frequencies used to determine position coordinates.


“Let’s just assume there are some environments — especially in urban warfare — where the adversary is just going to be able to overwhelm the radio frequency signal no matter what you do,” Betts said. “And so, how can you use other [non-radio frequency] sensors that you might have on your platform to try to maintain a GPS-level of accuracy?”


Leidos recently showcased its assured data engine for positioning and timing, also called ADEPT, during the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, organized by the National Defense Industrial Association, in Tampa. The navigation tool provides PNT capabilities for platforms in all domains, as well as for individual operators on foot, using data from satellite imagery and multiple types of non-RF sensors, Betts said.


“We just basically have the camera on board, and it’s taking that live image — it’s usually infrared so it works day and night — and we also carry that satellite imagery database. Then, we’re matching features across those two and that allows us to locate ourselves even without GPS — all on a low size, weight and power processor,” he said.


By coupling sensor data and satellite imagery, ADEPT can decrease situational uncertainty in unstable environments so a special operator can focus on the mission at hand, he said.


Ron Keesing, Leidos’ senior vice president for technology integration, explained how AI can bolster situational awareness by using data from open source information.


“All of these pieces of information occur at a speed and scale that’s very hard for humans to actually deal with and often also would put humans in harm’s way to collect or understand,” he said.


He pointed to lessons learned in Ukraine as examples of AI’s contribution to situational awareness. For example, Ukranians used unmanned drones to locate Russians so they can be better targeted by conventional systems.


Being able to accommodate for rapidly changing conditions in unfamiliar cities is also crucial, said Lynn Bollengier, the president of integrated vision and communication systems at L3Harris Technologies. Special operators are constantly moving between spaces in urban environments, and they need to orient themselves quickly and find their next position, she noted.


“Maybe you expected to come out of the southwest corner of a building, but you ended up in the northwest. You need to be able to get your own place and direction,” she said.


To give this flexibility to special operators, L3Harris developed its fused panoramic night vision goggle. Combining field-of-view and multispectral night vision technologies, the goggles allow users to see in all light levels across 97 degrees, she said.


The system uses image intensifier tubes that provide high-resolution imagery while adding an infrared thermal camera, Bollengier said. This gives special operators a daylight experience in low- to no-light conditions that is able to detect moving and shrouded targets in cluttered environments, she added.


The system is a “networked goggle,” Bollengier said. The goggles are able to connect with a tactical assault kit, and display data such as waypoints, troop movements and other points of interest in the field-of-view of the special operator using augmented reality technology, she said.


The image intensifier tubes in the goggles also greatly reduce the “halo effect” around lights that can occur when moving from a very low-light environment to a bright one, Bollengier said.


“That can be distracting in an urban environment where troops may be moving in and out of dark to light environments,” she said. The minimized halo effect can improve an image’s clarity and reduce distortion around streetlights or other luminaries in cities at night, she added.


U.S. Special Operations Command awarded L3Harris a low-rate initial production contract worth $7.9 million earlier this year for the goggles. The company announced in May that it has begun production of the systems.


RAND’s Boston said because of how essential optic capabilities are for urban environments, a special operator should be confident their optic systems can take a hit from an adversary’s fire.


“You need to have degraded modes so that if someone fires a heavy sniper rifle and takes out your thermal sensor, you’ve got some way of being able to at least still operate and be able to fight degraded,” he explained.


Bollengier said the L3Harris system does include a replaceable window on the outside of the primary optical surface, adding an extra layer of protection.


While all of this technology is important for special operators, U.S. forces won’t be able to use them properly in urban areas without reliable communications. The added layers of buildings and other three-dimensional elements present unique challenges to a warfighter’s traditional communications systems, which in turn could prevent them from receiving or sending crucial decision-making data, said Jack Moore, vice president of business development at communications company Persistent Systems.


The company has developed technology that streamlines communications regardless of the mission environment with its MPU5 mobile ad hoc system. The device uses three different transmission and receiving antennas to multiply its capacity — a technology called multiple-input and multiple-output.


Persistent Systems also uses its own network dubbed “Wave Relay” to route communications data around various obstacles based on the specific system and its surroundings, Moore explained. As a result, the added reflections from obstructions in a city become part of the data transfer.


“We can bounce off walls, bounce off of windows, bounce off of buildings, tunnels … to ensure that three separate packets of information go out, whether it’s voice, position, location or video,” he said.


The MPU5 is integratable with a special operator’s tactical assault kit, allowing operators to input data from sensors, videos and other sources onto their dismounted situational awareness capabilities, he added.


But before special operations forces can even enter a city, they need to have reconnaissance on the area and determine who is a friend or foe.


It’s one challenge Russell’s program with DARPA is trying to solve. The Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy program aims to improve how smaller autonomous systems are deployed for ISR missions in urban environments rather than sending in dismounted warfighters, she said.


“With the ubiquity and maturity level of various unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles with relatively smallish form factors, they can fit in and around urban spaces … giving you better access to these environments,” she said.


The DARPA program seeks to address the added element of civilians in urban environments. By combining commercial-off-the-shelf robotic ground and air vehicles with algorithms that use knowledge of human behaviors and responses, the systems can more accurately discern between enemies masking as civilians and innocent bystanders, Russell said.


“Now that you have those vehicles in and around the urban space, you can get the vehicles to interact with the population in ways that drive down the ambiguity,” she explained. “We can’t assume that somebody’s a threat because they’re running, for instance. They could be just running to a bus stop.”


The project is partnering with a group of small businesses that specialize in unmanned technologies and AI to help the vehicles determine those specific nuances. This could benefit special operators when conducting missions because it gives them detailed information about a setting before stepping foot in the environment, she said.


In addition, using unmanned aerial systems for ISR keeps special operators out of harm’s way in austere environments, said C. Mark Brinkley, a spokesperson for General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.


“Air-crewed assets face the same environmental challenges that UAS face,” he said in an email. “The advantage a UAS has in those environments is completely negating the risk to human life, which gives UAS the edge to lower platform costs, increase platform performance and invest more in advancing the technology effects that are needed in modern warfare.”


Specifically in urban terrains, long-endurance unmanned systems offer both persistence and highly accurate real-time intelligence needed to make decisions quickly, Brinkley added.


nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Mikayla Easley



7. The Five Laws of Disinformation


The five:


1: Disinformation Easily Turns Into Misinformation
2: Disinformation Twists Truth to Prey on Confirmation Bias
3: Disinformation is Antithetical to the Society it Targets, Which Benefits an Adversary
4. Successful Disinformation Cannot Be Obvious
5. Disinformation Can and Must Be Combated Whenever Possible

The Five Laws of Disinformation — SMERCONISH

smerconish.com · July 14, 2022



Photo by Carlos PX | Unsplash

The world has just witnessed what a motivated country is willing to do to ensure that their goals are met. However, while the current situation in Ukraine has been heartbreaking for most of the world, it's important to understand that the first shots fired in the invasion were not on February 22, 2022. The attack started years before with a vast disinformation campaign that subtlety drove a wedge into Ukrainian society which, in turn, helped to destabilize the legitimate government in Kyiv.

This article is not about Russia or Ukraine, but rather about exemplifying the framework that disinformation falls into so that we may understand how incredibly harmful it can become to its target, by virtue of what it inherently is.

So, without further ado, here are the Five Laws of Disinformation:

1: Disinformation Easily Turns Into Misinformation

While disinformation and misinformation tend to go hand-in-hand, there is one core difference between them; intent.

Disinformation is blatantly false information created with a willing intent to deceive its intended targets. Misinformation is information that is spread by unsuspecting individuals who believe that the content they’re absorbing is accurate. This misinformation is typically alarming to the observer in some way, and therefore, they feel an ethical obligation to help by sharing it as much as possible, intending to inform others.


This is how disinformation morphs into misinformation. Those with malicious intent are banking on the poorly informed to spread their crafted lies with earnest intent. Combine the motivation of an unsuspecting population with free and open social media platforms that connect the world, and a serious problem arises: the primary drivers of disinformation, usually nation-states, are essentially given access to a supercharger to spread their fake news.

2: Disinformation Twists Truth to Prey on Confirmation Bias

The most successful disinformation campaigns throughout the Digital Age are those that modify truth, or partial truth, to suit the purposes of the perpetrators. Furthermore, their lies are crafted to seem believable to a targeted population who already agrees with the original truth that is being, unknowingly, corrupted.

For the disinformation to spread quickly online as misinformation, this perversion requires the confirmation bias of the targeted population.

One of the most successful examples of this problem is Russia's Internet Research Agency which, during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, crafted thousands of paid advertisements on Facebook that were designed to drive a wedge into American society. On the same day, simultaneous ads both supporting and deriding U.S. law enforcement were released to specific political populations, with the intent of driving the two sides of the debate further away from each other.

Using the truth that the United States has a history of police brutality towards minorities, the disinformation ads intensified the rhetoric for the political right by saying that the police are being unfairly targeted for something that isn't a problem so it's important to support "Blue Lives Matter.” Conversely, an ad targeting the political left was released that posed the question: "How many more black men have to be killed…" with ruthless impunity.

Note that the truth is there, yet blown out of proportion to rile up, essentially, everyone involved. Confirmation bias is what made both of these disinformation campaigns go viral on both sides of the political aisle.

3: Disinformation is Antithetical to the Society it Targets, Which Benefits an Adversary

The core goal of disinformation is to degrade and destabilize society, thus benefiting one of the society's adversaries.

China has launched disinformation campaigns against the populations of Hong Kong and Taiwan with the intent of destabilizing each region. If China can sow doubt and discord into both populations, then the net benefit is an easier time gaining control over each region. In Hong Kong, disinformation campaigns helped the Communist Party of China easily take over the city and established rule under their handpicked local leaders. The disinformation campaign blitz included demonstrably false information about the democratically-elected leaders that they sought to replace.

If disinformation has to benefit its perpetrators, then it would be pointless to utilize it.

4. Successful Disinformation Cannot Be Obvious

Hiding in plain sight is the name of the game in disinformation. While disinformation often utilizes hyperbole, the most successful campaigns will tone down the hyperbole in an attempt to make their claims seem rational, therefore, believable and plausible.

A textbook example of this is using the real problem of child trafficking as a gateway into conspiracy theories that just feel right to the reader. No one can deny that child trafficking is a serious issue. So, when it is exacerbated by demonstrably false information, such as the claim that children are being sold through the retail website Wayfair, it could seem logical to the targeted audience.


5. Disinformation Can and Must Be Combated Whenever Possible

Left unchecked, disinformation damages a society, deeply. The United States seems to have such a vast political divide, when in actuality, studies show that most of the population is more in the ideological middle, and simply tired of all the "screaming" by a rather vocal minority on both sides of the political aisle. Those minorities are the ones being pumped full of disinformation that’s urging them to act out both online, and sadly, in person as well.

However, not all is lost as disinformation can be combatted by proper education. Training a population on critical thinking and how to spot fake news goes a long way in lowering the amount of disinformation and online rhetoric related to it. Finland identified a large disinformation campaign created by Russia during their 2015 election. So, the Finnish embarked on a nationwide educational campaign that successfully thwarted Russia’s attempts.

Ultimately, the goal of any society should be to live harmoniously with each other. Conflict will always be present, but so can rational discourse to amicably debate and resolve the issue.

If a population begins to lose its democratic roots, then the world is lost thanks to the machinations of the autocrats. Here's hoping we all learn just how much damage we have experienced, and take the actions to stem the tide.


Nick Espinosa

Nick is the founder and CEO of Security Fanatics, the Cybersecurity/Cyberwarfare division of BSSi2 dedicated to designing custom Cyberdefense strategies for medium to enterprise corporations. As a member of the Board of Advisors for Roosevelt University's College of Arts and Sciences as well as their Center for Cyber and Information Security, the Official Spokesperson for the COVID-19 Cyber Threat Coalition and a board member of Bits N’ Bytes Cybersecurity Education as well as Strategic Cybersecurity Advisor for the Private Directors Association, Nick helped to create an NSA certified curriculum that will help the Cybersecurity/Cyberwarfare community to keep defending our government, people and corporations from Cyber threats globally. In 2017 Nick was accepted into the Forbes Technology Council, an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives, and is a regular contributor of articles which are published on forbes.com as well as smerconish.com.

smerconish.com · July 14, 2022


8. John Spencer is a world-renowned expert on urban combat. Here’s how he thinks the war in Ukraine is going


Excerpts:


Washington Examiner: Wars are by nature unpredictable. What does your gut tell you about how this might end? Is there any possibility it could end this year, as Zelensky hopes?

Spencer: You know from researching, reporting, and studying this, it's so hard to say. I would say, given what we know about what's expected to be delivered, the commitments we've made, my own feelings from visiting Ukraine, seeing the entire country on a war footing, I don't think this will go on for years. I think this will go on for months.
Would I give it until Christmas? Maybe. But I don't agree with estimates that this will go on for years. I think the Ukrainians will fight and eventually destroy the Russians in Ukraine.

John Spencer is a world-renowned expert on urban combat. Here’s how he thinks the war in Ukraine is going

Washington Examiner · July 15, 2022

In his 25 years in the Army, John Spencer rose from the rank of private to major, did two combat tours in Iraq, and served as an instructor for the elite Army Rangers. Upon retirement, he transitioned to what he calls his “dream job,” traveling the world studying classic urban battles as chairman of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum. Spencer is now an internationally recognized expert who regularly consults for the Army. Spencer helped create the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy and served for a time as its deputy director. He shared his insights on the state of play in Ukraine with the Washington Examiner magazine's Jamie McIntyre.

[The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Washington Examiner: You returned recently from Kyiv. What are your impressions of how the war is going?

Spencer: I went there to study the battle of Kyiv, which is, in my opinion, the most decisive, strategic victory of the modern era. I mean, this small country with a small army that wanted to fight for their freedom stood up against the second-biggest military in the world and defeated them in the battle of Kyiv.

Washington Examiner: What has most surprised you about what has transpired in Ukraine?

Spencer: The biggest surprise is really the will of the Ukrainian military and people. I've personally never studied a war where tens of thousands of civilians were handed AK-47s and actually fought. Everybody says [the Ukrainians] have a culture of resistance. But I was amazed at stories of father-son teams, grandpas, grandmas calling in airstrikes, of the Ukrainian people's resistance to Russian occupation.

Washington Examiner: It’s been roughly three months since the Russians suffered their failed attempt to seize Kyiv. The battleground has now largely moved to the eastern Donbas region, where Russia has mercilessly leveled towns with numerically superior artillery fire.

Spencer: Yes. By early April, the Russians gave up on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and most of the major cities and basically directed all their 100,000 plus forces, who were already mauled, with many of the best units destroyed, and focused them on the east and said, "OK, I just want you to take the Donbas so I can call it a political victory.”

And the Ukrainians have really struggled, to be honest, to keep the Russians from doing that because they're outmanned, outgunned, and because the Russians are willing to sacrifice thousands of soldiers to make minor tactical gains.

Still, the Ukrainians have made some amazing stands in places like Severodonetsk, where it took the Russians six weeks to really take a very small Ukrainian force and the Russians sacrificed around 5,000 soldiers to do it.

Washington Examiner: You first came to my attention when I saw you publicly offering advice to the Ukrainians on how to conduct defensive urban warfare. Did they follow your advice?

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. I started tweeting at the minute I saw Russia invade because Russia was headed to the cities. The president had instituted martial law, which said that basically any male from 18 to 60 couldn't leave the country. Civilians were being asked to help defend the country.

Maybe Russia thought that they wouldn't, but they did. So I started putting out advice because I've studied urban warfare and this, clearly, was going to be an urban fight. Those messages turned into a book called The Mini-Manual for the Urban Defender, with very commonsense advice on how to use the urban terrain and the defense to achieve great success.

Washington Examiner: How have the Ukrainians employed the rules of urban warfare to frustrate the Russians?

Spencer: Take Severodonetsk. The Russians put artillery in front of them, but eventually, they had to get in there and take out any resistance. And that's where the rules of urban warfare and the Mini-Manual come in. What the Ukrainians are doing is fighting smarter, right? They're not going to say, "I'm going to defend to the death, this urban terrain.” Instead, they’re saying, “I'm going to defend it for a while. And if you want it, come forward, and I'm going to attrit you. I'm going kill as many Russians as possible and destroy as much Russian equipment." If you're going to defend urban terrain, it's a very effective defense, and I think it's a great strategy and it's working.

Washington Examiner: The Pentagon announced this month another $400 million package of arms and ammunition, including four more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, the deadly accurate multiple-launch system that can hit a target 40 miles away with GPS precision. How important is that?

Spencer: In deference to the massive amounts of fires that the Russians have, they don't really care about accuracy, right? When they're trying to hit a weapons depot or a fuel station, they don't care if they hit a kindergarten instead.

These precision, long-range, guided munitions are taking out Russian control points, Russian forces, because even if the Ukrainians have to retake land, they're not going to destroy it like Russians would. They're going to be precise. But we only gave them four of these systems. That's pretty crazy if you think about war. I'm going to give you four pieces of equipment.

Washington Examiner: The United States did add four more and then another four, bringing the total to an even dozen, but I'm not sure as we talk if they’re there yet.

Spencer: They're not there yet. They need 50. They need 60 to even match, in any sense of the word, what they're facing with Russia in front of their faces. Clearly, they're fighting smarter. It's been amazing. The U.S. has been the biggest [contributor] with, I don't know, $30 billion, whatever it is. But nobody has given them even half of what they need for Russia to be defeated in Ukraine.

Washington Examiner: President Volodymyr Zelensky has never missed a chance to say how grateful he is for the steady flow of weapons and ammunition from the West, in particular from the U.S., but at the same time, he never misses an opportunity to say he doesn't have enough to win.

Spencer: I 100% agree with that. We're basically taking a very protracted, episodic approach to arming Ukraine. This war is five months in, and we'll take a month to discuss a single piece of equipment to give them that will help, such as artillery. Then we'll take another month to discuss and announce HIMARS, long-range rocket systems, which, as soon as it eventually gets into Ukrainian hands, has immediate battlefield impact.

But they needed it all yesterday. They need more. Originally, we first announced we were going to give them artillery — it was like 40 pieces of artillery. And I was like, "That's not going to do much." Even though the Russians are not as well led, not as well motivated, not as well trained, they do have more of everything and outnumber the Ukrainians 10-1.

Washington Examiner: Given Russia's vastly greater resources and President Vladimir Putin's wanton disregard for civilian life, even the lives of his own troops, his willingness to commit war crimes and absorb casualties that are beyond anything we've seen in modern war, the big question is: Is it realistic to think Ukraine can win?

Spencer: Yes, I think so. I mean, so there are limits to Russia's capability. Russia's fighting with what it has, and that's all it has to fight — and what it has now is falling apart at the seams. They're bringing in Syrians. They're bringing in the people like old, obese people that were in the military 40 years ago because they're really struggling. They've lost a lot — some estimates up to 30,000 soldiers. They're trying to achieve something with the remaining forces they have who vary in composition and quality greatly, and there is a limit to what they can achieve.

The Ukrainians, on the other hand, will fight this war for as long as it takes. Everything's on their side, aside from the fact that they don't have the weapons to fight. They have the motivation, they have the will, they have better-led soldiers, a better leadership model. They have 50 nations supporting them.

The Russians will achieve a culmination point, and I think at that point they'll sue for peace just to give themselves a chance to rebuild. It's going to take them years to rebuild. The Ukrainians will defeat Russia eventually. But now it's a question of, at what cost to the Ukrainian people?

Washington Examiner: Wars are by nature unpredictable. What does your gut tell you about how this might end? Is there any possibility it could end this year, as Zelensky hopes?

Spencer: You know from researching, reporting, and studying this, it's so hard to say. I would say, given what we know about what's expected to be delivered, the commitments we've made, my own feelings from visiting Ukraine, seeing the entire country on a war footing, I don't think this will go on for years. I think this will go on for months.

Would I give it until Christmas? Maybe. But I don't agree with estimates that this will go on for years. I think the Ukrainians will fight and eventually destroy the Russians in Ukraine.

Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.

Washington Examiner · July 15, 2022


9. ‘A Real Chilling Effect’: A Lefty Scholar is Dumping CAP — For AEI


Center for American Progress and American Enterprise Institute.




‘A Real Chilling Effect’: A Lefty Scholar is Dumping CAP — For AEI

Politico · by LIS SMITH

Magazine

Ruy Teixeira predicted Obama’s rise. Now he’s scorning DC’s liberal think tanks for caring more about diversity than class.


Scholar Ruy Teixeira is leaving the left-leaning Center for American Progess, saying liberal foundations are too focused on identity. | Matthew Busch

07/15/2022 04:30 AM EDT

Michael Schaffer is a senior editor at POLITICO. His Capital City column runs weekly in POLITICO Magazine.

Ruy Teixeira is one of Washington’s most prominent left-leaning think-tank scholars, a fixture at the Center for American Progress since the liberal organization’s founding in 2003. But as of August 1, he’ll have a new professional home: The American Enterprise Institute, the longtime conservative redoubt that over the years has employed the likes of Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, and Robert Bork.

Teixeira, whose role in the Beltway scrum often involved arguing against calls to move right on economic issues, insists his own policy views haven’t changed — but says the current cultural milieu of progressive organizations “sends me running screaming from the left.”


“My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he tells me. “It’s class.” We’re sitting in AEI’s elegantly furnished library. Down the hall, there’s a boisterous event celebrating the conservative intellectual Harvey Mansfield. William Kristol, clad in a suit, has just left the room. Teixeira’s untucked shirt and sneakers aren’t the only thing that seems out of place. “I’m just a social democrat, man. Trying to make the world a better place.”




How Teixeira came to be talking about the essentiality of class politics while sitting a few feet from a stack of books by Lynne Cheney says a great deal about the state of the American left, where the 70-year-old researcher felt alienated — and about the American right, where a once-dominant think tank that fell afoul of Trump die-hards has brought him aboard.

To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP, and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms. It also makes people nervous about projects that could be accused of giving short shrift to anti-racism efforts.

“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” he says.

Teixeira’s bill of complaints will be a familiar one for many who have followed the internal battles of the left over the past half-decade, or spent an afternoon on left-wing Twitter. Politically, as a strategist, he thinks the Democrats need to win culturally moderate voters if they’re going to ever create the kind of coalition that can get their policies enacted. And personally, as an employee, he’s none too fond of the institutional dynamics that he says are driven by younger staff but embraced by higher-ups afraid of a public blow-up.

“I’d say they have been affected by the nature and inclination and preferences of their junior staff,” he says. “It’s just the case that at CAP, like almost any other left think tank you can think of, it’s become very hard to have a conversation about race and gender and trans issues, even crime and immigration. You know, ‘How should the left handle these?’ There’s a default assumption about how you’re supposed to talk about these things, even the language. There’s a real chilling effect on all of these organizations, and I think it’s had an effect on CAP as well.”

Like a lot of older and whiter veterans of liberal think-tanks and foundations, he also says he’s exhausted by the internal agita. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”

The folks at CAP say they’re mystified by Teixeira’s move. “I am confident that he is unable to give expression to a single example when either his research or his thought leadership found resistance in the organization,” Patrick Gaspard, who took over the center last year, tells me. Gaspard says he encouraged Teixeira to raise his issues. “If you go for it you will find me applauding your questions,” he says he told Teixeira. “In my conversations with him I encouraged him to continue to be counterintuitive.”

As for the bigger issue of progressive organizations’ priorities, Gaspard also pushes back: “We are only going to turn around the attraction to illiberal autocrats if we are not focused with a laser-like intensity on issues of economic inclusion and creating a broad prosperity,” he says. “There is excitement in our ranks about the kind of pluralistic conversations we’re able to take up every single day about the economy.”

Unlike some of the other conflicts in the now-voluminous older-normies-versus-young-graduates canon, Teixeira’s does not involve claims of being snubbed or censored or canceled or maligned. Along with a group of collaborators — including another CAP fellow who remains gainfully employed — he’s been publishing his broadsides against alleged cultural radicalism and petrified progressive institutions on a substack called The Liberal Patriot. No one has slipped nasty notes under his door.

But, he says, the way projects work in think-tank world means that when an institution doesn’t embrace a scholar’s interests and ideas, life gets harder. He once tried to start something called the Bobby Kennedy Project, which would look at ways to appeal to the Black and White working-class together. It went nowhere.

“People sort of tolerated the idea at CAP but nobody wanted to push it,” he says. “We did have some conversations with people in and around the foundation world and nobody wanted to touch it. You could tell. People were leery of talking about the white working class, as if it was de facto racist … You’re supposed to do stuff that’s funded, and you can’t get stuff funded if the institution isn’t behind you.”

The generational and ideological dynamics may be classic 2022 stuff, but there’s still something particularly ironic about Teixeira, of all people, feeling driven to quit by identity politics. The Emerging Democratic Majority, his 2002 book with John Judis, is often cited as having predicted the coalition of college graduates and minority voters that brought Barack Obama to power. Whenever you hear someone on the left saying the path to victory involves expanding the electorate with young and diverse voters, they’re part of his lineage.

Teixeira, for the record, says that’s a massive misreading of the book, which predicted a governing majority based on the assumption that the Democrats could hold a healthy proportion of blue-collar white people, as happened in 2008. But Obama’s first win turned out to be a high-water mark, not a new epoch. Teixeira is in the camp that blames “cultural radicalism” for this failure, saying the noise around things like pronouns and police defunding have made many blue-collar voters think of the party as a bunch of annoying recent liberal-arts graduates.

That last bit of blame, by the way, is highly debatable: Teixeira’s critics say that obsessing over young wokes lets the current president — who no one will ever confuse with a hectoring undergrad — off the hook for political failures. (The question is also the subject of Teixeira and Judis’ next book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?)

Whether it’s Teixeira’s fault for being oversensitive to “this endless talk about equity, anti-racism, and so on” or CAP’s fault for so frustrating a quirky lefty that he flew the coop, it’s undoubtedly a sad thing for liberalism than a prominent institution no longer feels like home for the guy.

Over on the other side of the nerd kingdom’s ideological spectrum, meanwhile, Teixeira’s workplace unhappiness was music to the ears of Robert Doar, AEI’s president. The think tank, which wielded unprecedented influence during the George W. Bush years, became known as a safe space for anti-Trump conservatives, which presented something of a branding problem at a moment when lockstep support for the former president remains the dominant GOP mode.

One fix: Bring in a bunch of fellows who have fallen afoul of institutional shibboleths elsewhere, hires that enable AEI to make a virtue of its heterodoxy while also tweaking the (often liberal) institutions where the newcomers had previously worked — something likely to please donors.

Recent additions include former Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz, who was stripped of tenure and fired this year for a long-ago sexual relationship with an undergrad, something he contends is actually about him being a conservative who slammed anti-racist campus protests; Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News analyst who infuriated Trump by calling Arizona for Joe Biden and subsequently lost his job; Thomas Chatterton Williams, the cultural critic who drafted the controversial 2020 “Harper’s Letter” criticizing purported hostility to free speech on the left; and Klon Kitchen, a former Heritage Foundation fellow who published a sharp criticism of his former employer over its stance on Ukraine. They’ve also lured a couple veterans of the historically liberal Brookings Institution.


“I like taking chances,” Doar tells me. “I like people to have the resources to do it. I want interesting stuff produced by scholars. ... One difference between us and Heritage, and everybody knows this, is that our scholars come here and do their own work and are allowed to be free and completely independent of what I want, of what the institution wants, broadly speaking. We don’t have one voice. That makes us different.” (Doar hastens to note that the 32 recent additions include Trump veterans, too, like former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former FCC chair Ajit Pai.)

The island-of-misfit-toys schtick is also not an entirely new look. Going back to the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick, AEI has long had a constituency of academics who didn’t quite fit in on campuses; it also had fellows, like Norm Ornstein, who didn’t fit the conservative mold.

Will the hires affix a new identity on a place still often associated with the Reagan and Bush years? One veteran of conservative think tanks tells me he’s dubious: “AEI has already alienated the people who stand in the mainstream of the Republican Party by being the home of the Never Trumpers. This is doubling down.” While pulling together dissidents against ideological orthodoxy may be splashy, “it’ll work a lot less well if Republicans get the White House” and insiders want a team that has the administration on speed-dial. (For its part, AEI says its scholars have testified 45 times before the current Congress, more than any other think tank.)

But Yuval Levin, who runs the AEI Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies shop where Teixeira and many of the other unlikely newbies have landed, says thinking of think-tank work as simply a collection of policy papers ignores how profoundly unusual the current moment is in America.

“This is a time for basic questions to be on the table,” Levin says. “It’s not a time for intense confidence in the answers we’ve had. And so it’s a moment for AEI. This is a place that’s always been more open to internal debate and real scholarly independence. That’s not always a strength. There are times when it keeps you out of the arena some. But right now, it’s a great thing.”




POLITICO



Politico · by LIS SMITH


10. Ukraine Gets First M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems


Keep up the fire. (and the logistics required to do so).



Ukraine Gets First M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems

The M270 in Ukrainian hands is bad news for the Russians who are already suffering from HIMARS attacks.

BY

HOWARD ALTMAN

JUL 15, 2022 9:09 PM

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · July 15, 2022

Ukrainian officials said on Friday that the U.S.-provided M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, have destroyed more than 30 Russian military hubs. Now the Russians have a new U.S.-made rocket artillery system to contend with, the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), which fires the same suite of ammunition as HIMARS, but can be loaded with twice as many rockets at a time.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov on Friday announced his nation has received its first tranche of M270s.

The "first MLRS M270 have arrived!” he announced in a Tweet. “They will be good company for #HIMARS on the battlefield. Thank you to our partners. No mercy for the enemy.”

Reznikov did not say where it came from, but both the United Kingdom and Norway have promised to provide versions of the U.S.-made system to Ukraine. The German government has also pledged to supply the Ukrainian armed forces with a number of MARS II systems, a country-specific derivative of the M270.

Regardless, Reznikov is right about the M270 being good company for the HIMARS.

Both fire the same family of 227mm artillery rockets, as well as Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) short-range ballistic missiles, though Ukrainain forces are not currently expected to receive any of the latter munitions. All of these rounds come preloaded in canisterized ammunition "pods."

There are differences though between the two systems.

Ukraine has received its first M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System, an example of which is seen in this photo. (U.S. Army photo by Gertrud Zach)

The M270 features a launch system mounted on a tracked chassis derived from the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. A single M270 can be loaded with two of the standard ammunition pods at a time, allowing it to fire up to 12 rockets or two ATACMS missiles before needing to be reloaded.

Unlike the M270, the HIMARS is on a wheeled chassis and can only have one ammunition pod loaded onto it at a time, as opposed to two with the M270. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Tyler Harmon)

The HIMARS, on the other hand, features a smaller launch system, which can only hold one ammunition pod at a time. It is mounted on a 6x6 Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) truck chassis. For what the M142 gives up in firepower it makes up in transportability and on-road mobility. It can even be rapidly deployed via a C-130. You can read much more about the M142 and the M270 here.

The maximum range of either of these systems is dependent on what type of munition they're firing. The longest-range artillery rockets currently available for the system are the M30 (submunition warhead) and M31 (unitary warhead) precision-guided types, which are GPS/INS guided and can hit targets out to around 43 miles (70 kilometers). The far larger ATACMS missiles can engage threats out to 186 miles (300 kilometers) depending on the variant.

So far, the Biden administration has sent M30/M31 series rockets, but has declined to provide Ukraine with any ATACMS missiles.

But even with the current rockets, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on Friday said that “with HIMARS” its army is “cutting off the [R]ussian hydra’s head on a daily basis. We will continue to do so until we have succeeded in cutting off the last head.”


On Friday afternoon, a senior U.S. military official told reporters that it appears the HIMARS strikes on logistics nodes are helping Ukrainian troops keep Russia’s “limited to incremental - if any - gains around the northern Donbas” at bay.

“Striking targets like ammunition [storage sites]…and other logistical supplies, command and control [facilities], and all those things have a direct impact on the ability to conduct operations on the front line,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “So I would say yes, although they're not shooting the HIMARS on the front lines, they are having a very, very significant effect on that.”

Some data appears to show that Russian artillery fire in Donbas has tailed off in conjunction with the introduction of the HIMARS into Ukraine.

The senior U.S. defense official, however, could not provide specifics when asked about how badly Russia’s ammunition supply has been affected by Ukrainian long-range fires from HIMARS.

All 12 HIMARS promised by the U.S. have now been delivered to the Ukrainians, the official said. However, it was unknown whether any of the latest shipment of four are being used in combat yet.

Asked by The War Zone if Ukraine is using U.S. intelligence to help guide HIMARS targeting, the official offered a purposefully vague response.

“We're helping the Ukrainians,” the official said. “I'm not gonna provide particulars as to how that works. But we've been able to give them information and they've been able to use that information the way they choose to do so.”

The official said that while “it is probably too early to make a determination" about how drastically HIMARS is affecting the battlefield in terms of strangling Russian supplies, "I have to believe that the HIMARS have had an effect” on Russian morale.

“It'd be hard not to have morale issues at times when you're supposed to get supplies, but those supplies were destroyed 40 kilometers behind your line.”

It remains to be seen how much more impact the M270 MLRS will have on the Russian operations, but it looks like we will find out soon.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · July 15, 2022


11. Plan To Train Ukrainian Pilots On U.S. Jets Passed By House Of Representatives

Only in the House version of the NDAA. I do not think training will start any time soon. But a positive step forward and this is necessary to support what is apparently going to be a long war.


Excerpts:


However, should the amendment become law, that could open the way for Ukrainian Air Force pilots to start training on U.S.-owned jets, which would, in turn, be a prerequisite for Kyiv receiving American-made fighters, from whatever source. The War Zone, too, has in the past made the case for spinning up a training program for Ukrainian personnel as soon as possible, as you can read more about here and here. Bearing in mind the fact that it may very likely take a while longer to secure the aircraft themselves, it clearly makes sense to get a training pipeline set up in advance of potential future deliveries.


Plan To Train Ukrainian Pilots On U.S. Jets Passed By House Of Representatives

After months of campaigning for new equipment, Ukrainian Air Force pilots could be poised to start training on U.S.-made fighter jets.

BY

THOMAS NEWDICK

JUL 15, 2022 5:42 PM

thedrive.com · by Thomas Newdick · July 15, 2022

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed its version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which, most notably, calls for funding to start training Ukrainian pilots on American fighter jets. The amendment follows repeated calls from Ukrainian officials and pilots for new aircraft, such as F-16s, with which to continue their efforts to repulse the Russian invasion.

So far, the U.S. government has been reluctant to provide Ukraine with fighters, and plans to transfer examples of Soviet-era jets from other NATO allies have also failed to materialize, except for weapons and spares.

A U.S. Air Force F-16C taxis past Ukrainian MiG-29s and Su-27s at Migorod Air Base, Ukraine, July 2011, during Exercise Safe Skies 2011. U.S. AIR FORCE

However, should the amendment become law, that could open the way for Ukrainian Air Force pilots to start training on U.S.-owned jets, which would, in turn, be a prerequisite for Kyiv receiving American-made fighters, from whatever source. The War Zone, too, has in the past made the case for spinning up a training program for Ukrainian personnel as soon as possible, as you can read more about here and here. Bearing in mind the fact that it may very likely take a while longer to secure the aircraft themselves, it clearly makes sense to get a training pipeline set up in advance of potential future deliveries.

The amendment, which authorizes $100 million to train Ukrainian pilots and ground crews to become familiarized with U.S. aircraft, was put forward by Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a Republican representative for Illinois and a former Air Force pilot himself. It was part of the House of Representatives version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act that was passed last night, July 14.

In a tweet today, Kinzinger said: “Last night the House passed my bipartisan Ukrainian Fighter Pilots Act, which authorizes the training of Ukrainian fighter pilots in the U.S. I urge the Senate to get this critical legislation to the President's desk. Slava Ukraini!”

Together with Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat representative for Illinois and also a former Air Force officer, Kinzinger introduced this legislation last month, to allow Ukrainian personnel to start training “on F-15s, F-16s, and other air platforms while the Administration continues to consider sending such equipment.”

There is no indication where that training might take place, but the U.S. already has bilateral training partnerships established with various different foreign F-15 and F-16 operators with relevant ‘schoolhouses’ that are resident at different American airbases. Another option could be to embed Ukrainian pilots within F-16 units of other NATO members, provided they have the capacity and sufficient instructors.

Lt. Col. Joost Luijsterburg, a Royal Netherlands Air Force detachment commander, buckles the chin strap of his helmet at Naval Air Station Key West, Florida, during a training detachment there. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Tech. Sgt. George Keck

In a joint statement, Houlahan and Kinzinger said: “The Representatives remain hopeful that there won’t be a need for further escalation [in Ukraine], but they both agree that it’s critical for the Ukrainian military to be trained and familiar with these air platforms should Russia continue their malign campaign against Ukraine’s sovereignty. Regardless of whether the United States and its allies deploy such equipment, this program will strengthen the Ukrainian military and ensure their long-term stability and security.”

Houlahan and Kinzinger also pointed to extensive accounts that suggest Russia is still yet to achieve air superiority, in the face of stiff opposition from the Ukrainian Air Force and Ukrainian ground-based air defenses. “The United States can help Ukraine change the situation in the air domain, giving Ukrainian forces a decisive advantage in the war,” the representatives added.

The latest development in the campaign to get U.S.-made fighter jets into Ukrainian hands comes only days after a visit to Washington, D.C., by Ukrainian Air Force pilots, callsigns “Juice” and “Moonfish.” The first of these previously gave an extensive interview to The War Zone about the air war in the ongoing conflict, which you can read here.

A video from the cockpit of a fully armed MiG-29, currently the primary air defense fighter in the Ukrainian Air Force:


Speaking on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon, the two Ukrainian MiG-29 Fulcrum pilots described the challenges they faced flying this Cold War-era equipment against far more modern Russian fighters. Again, they called upon the U.S. government to help them get F-16s and related training.

Meanwhile, another Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot, callsign “Nomad,” told Air Force Magazine that their sorties were essentially “suicide missions.” He added that the capability gap between Ukrainian and Russian jets included the enemy’s availability of advanced active radar beyond-visual-range missiles, with a range of “more than 80 miles,” a point that Ukrainian pilots have raised in the past.

Russian Aerospace Forces Su-35S fighters take part in the Ukrainian invasion:


Currently, Nomad is the only Ukrainian Air Force pilot training in the United States, as part of an Air Force leadership program at Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi. This began before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, but he’s now hopeful that he could be among the initial cadre to train to fly F-16s.

Other potential candidates for training on U.S. jets would likely come from a group of “at least 30 pilots” who are judged to already have sufficient English-language skills for the syllabus. That’s the opinion of Col. Yuri Ignat, chief spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force Command, who also spoke to Air Force Magazine.

Ignat added that it would likely take around six months for pilots to convert to new fighters, with the bulk of this being related to tactics and the use of new weapons. The official also spoke of his belief that two 12-aircraft squadrons of F-16s, plus reserves, would be sufficient to help turn the tables against the Russian Aerospace Forces.

This is a less ambitious timeline than some of those set out in the past. The Ukrainian Air Force has previously said its pilots could be trained to operate F-15s or F-16s within two to three weeks. Juice, meanwhile, told The War Zone that he and his colleagues could learn to fly F-16s within “a few days.” After that, tactical and weapons training might only take “a few weeks.”

As we have examined in the past, the U.S. Air Force normally allocates six-plus weeks for its transition course, which takes a fully trained and experienced Air Force fighter pilot and transitions them just to fly the F-16 from another type. A normal B Course student will take at least 37 weeks for training on the F-16. Usually transitioning a foreign air arm to the F-16 takes many months, if not years, to accomplish and that isn’t during a full-out war at home.

As well as defending against Russian aircraft, Ukraine has expressed its desire to also operate new fighters in the suppression of enemy air defenses, or SEAD, role. This is considered necessary to erode Russian ground-based air defenses but is a complex discipline that would require additional equipment and training to be executed properly. The call for the F-16’s specific SEAD capabilities was made by the two Ukrainian MiG-29 pilots on their U.S. visit.

An F-16CM Fighting Falcon assigned to the 77th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, which specializes in the suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses. U.S. Air Force

More recently, there have been unconfirmed reports that Ukraine may actually favor F-15s or F/A-18 Hornets over the often-mentioned F-16s. This is apparently due to concerns over the safety of a single-engine jet like the Viper, with a twin-engine platform being judged more suitable for rough-field operations and better able to absorb combat damage.

Once again, the new legislation could finally make it possible for Ukraine to obtain fighter jets, for air defense and possibly offensive duties, plus the required training for personnel. As recently as July 8, a senior defense official said that “there are no current plans to train Ukraine on any air platform other than those that they are using every day effectively in the battle right now.”

The effort to change that reality has been spearheaded by Houlahan and Kinzinger, who were among a dozen or so representatives and senators who met MiG-29 pilots Juice and Moonfish during their stateside visit. The Ukrainian pilots also reportedly had discussions with Nathaniel Adler, Principal Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Policy at the Pentagon, as well as representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

So far, efforts to provide the Ukrainian Air Force with replacement fighter jets of a similar vintage to its MiG-29s and Su-27s have failed, while the air arm and its pilots have repeatedly campaigned for the more capable U.S.-made fighters that they believe can tip the balance against Russian airpower. As the war continues, moreover, and the nature of the conflict changes, the possibility of a bifurcated Ukraine becomes more likely, with a significant area of occupied Russian territory in the east of the country. In this kind of scenario, advanced fighter jets would be invaluable to support efforts by troops to claw back Ukrainian territory.

The U.S. House of Representatives’ version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act could be the kickstart needed to realize these aims. First, however, the Senate must pass its version of the bill, ahead of a compromise bill from the two chambers proceeds to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. That’s a process that could take several months. We will continue to watch this amendment’s progress with interest.

Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Thomas Newdick · July 15, 2022


12. Opinion | What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East


Seems more along the lines of damning with faint praise.


Opinion | What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East

The New York Times · by The Editorial Board · July 15, 2022

The Editorial Board

What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East

July 15, 2022


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The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Joe Biden campaigned and won as the antithesis to Donald Trump. To deliver on that promise in foreign policy, in his first year as president, he tried to offer “something for everyone,” as Anne-Marie Slaughter has argued: tough talk on China for the realists; a recommitment to NATO, to the Paris Agreement on climate, and to the World Health Organization for the liberal internationalists; an end to the forever wars; and, for the idealists, a willingness to speak up for human rights.

The last item on this long list, his attempt to return to a values-based foreign policy after the often incoherent and destructive “America First” presidency of Mr. Trump, has proved to be the toughest for Mr. Biden to get right. Beginning with his inauguration speech, to last year’s “Summit for Democracy” and his statements in support of Ukraine, Mr. Biden has returned repeatedly to the idea of “democracy versus autocracy” as an organizing principle for American foreign policy.

This binary way of looking at the world doesn’t always serve American national interests or the interests of people around the world who are fighting for their democratic rights to live freely and in peace.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Mr. Biden’s trip this week to the Middle East. The Biden administration doesn’t have a doctrine, per se. Instead, it has tried to rally free nations in a world where democracy is under threat. Mr. Biden has succeeded in building a European bulwark to Russian aggression in Ukraine, at least for the moment, but in the Middle East, his options are limited.

In an essay in The Washington Post on Saturday, Mr. Biden portrayed the trip as a mission to shore up peace in the region through diplomacy. “A more secure and integrated Middle East benefits Americans in many ways,” he wrote. There are a few factors he didn’t mention: Inflation is soaring; gas prices are alarming; his popularity is plummeting; and midterm elections are looming. The people he has met on this trip know all this, and some of them, especially in Saudi Arabia and Israel, may be hoping for a Trump restoration.

Mr. Biden’s first stop was Israel, which is in the midst of another government meltdown and so has a caretaker prime minister, Yair Lapid, until elections are held on Nov. 1. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the long-serving hard-liner, is hoping to make a comeback. The visit was short on substance, but Mr. Biden largely delivered what Israel wanted: a public statement, in a taped interview on Israeli television, in which he reiterated the U.S. position that it was willing to use force against Iran, “as a last resort,” to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Given the situation in Israel, there is little Mr. Biden can do to breathe life into the moribund peace process, and the visit took place just a couple of months after the death of a popular journalist and American citizen, Shireen Abu Akleh. She was killed while covering an Israeli military operation in the West Bank, and Palestinians are convinced that she was deliberately shot. They do not buy the State Department’s conclusion that while the bullet was likely fired by an Israeli, there was “no reason to believe that this was intentional.” Palestinians are also frustrated that Mr. Biden has not reversed some vindictive actions taken by his predecessor, such as closing the United States consulate in East Jerusalem, although he did pledge $100 million in funding for hospitals there.

On Friday, Mr. Biden met with the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose kingdom Mr. Biden, as a candidate, suggested should be a “pariah” over the horrific murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Mr. Biden’s administration last year released an intelligence report that laid the killing at the feet of the crown prince. Now, Mr. Biden, with this visit, is trying to reset relations with the kingdom to shore up the alliance against Russia and, more important, to pump more oil.

In Saudi Arabia on Saturday, Mr. Biden is expected to meet with nine Arab leaders — those of the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) plus Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, whose major ask will be more military support against Iran. (Footage that surfaced this week from a 2021 incident in which Israel shot down Iranian drones with the help of Arab allies and the United States underlined the point.) At the same time, the U.S. administration hopes to leave the door open for the unlikely but worthy goal of reviving the nuclear deal with Iran that Mr. Trump ripped up — a revival that almost no one in the region seems to really want — while a shadow war of assassinations and covert actions between Israel and Iran continues.

This is not a pretty picture of diplomacy in action — an American president making nice with autocrats, with few opportunities to make meaningful progress on behalf of democracy.

America’s greatest strength in the world has always been its combination of high ideals and a readiness to engage with almost anyone when it served to advance peace and American national interests. This doesn’t mean the kind of amoral pandering to dictators practiced by Mr. Trump. Rather, it means building on areas of agreement, however small, that can be used to move toward a more peaceful, free and open world.

American presidents held regular summit meetings with Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War, achieving major arms-control agreements while remaining critical of Soviet human-rights violations. Richard Nixon’s visit to a totalitarian China in 1972 transformed America’s relationship with China and, eventually, China’s with the rest of the world.

There were few opportunities for Mr. Biden to show that kind of statesmanship on this visit, but that does not make incremental progress through diplomacy less valuable. Mr. Biden was right to release the intelligence report implicating Prince Mohammed in the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi; he is also right to recognize that the prince has made some headway on modernizing his kingdom, and that the alliance with Saudi Arabia is key to containing Iran, ending the conflict in Yemen, ensuring the security of Israel and restoring a modicum of stability to the oil market. Saudi Arabia’s work to restore unity among the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council and to maintain a truce in Yemen showed the value of this relationship.

Mr. Biden is also right in not rejecting out of hand the Abraham Accords, which the Trump administration helped achieve. The accords marked a normalization of relations between Israel and two Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, as well as Morocco and Sudan. Although they were criticized for, in effect, sidelining the Palestinians, the agreements formed a basis for other Arab states to consider forging relations with Israel. And he is right to talk to Saudi Arabia about an increase in oil production. Such a move is unlikely to have a significant impact on prices at American gas pumps in the short term, but it is essential — for the American economy and for the coalition supporting Ukraine — that Mr. Biden do whatever he can to ease the pressure on global oil markets.

While there is a natural impulse to look for grand gestures on every presidential visit abroad, there are other places and other issues where this administration needs to advance a broader and more ambitious agenda — especially climate change, Ukraine and China. This is not the moment for bold new Middle East policies. Mr. Biden is doing the right thing by treating the region’s issues as part of a bigger picture.

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The New York Times · by The Editorial Board · July 15, 2022



13. Beijing’s Propaganda Support for Russian Biological Warfare Disinformation, Part 1: Accusations Concerning the War in Ukraine



Worthy of study. May be of use to researchers.


Beijing’s Propaganda Support for Russian Biological Warfare Disinformation, Part 1: Accusations Concerning the War in Ukraine

jamestown.org · by John Dotson · June 17, 2022

Introduction

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, People’s Republic of China (PRC) officials and state media have promoted and amplified key elements of Moscow’s narrative that the war has been provoked by the United States and its NATO allies in Europe. At several PRC foreign ministry press conferences this spring, spokespeople lent credence to Russian disinformation that U.S.-sponsored biological laboratories had been “discovered” in Ukraine, and implied that the U.S. is in contravention of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention (PRC Foreign Ministry [FMPRC]), March 16April 14April 19). These same themes have also been actively promoted in state-controlled media. This article examines the origins of this Russian disinformation effort concerning alleged U.S. biological facilities in Ukraine, and analyzes some of the means by which Beijing has helped to amplify this narrative.

Russian Allegations Regarding Biological Warfare Labs in Ukraine

Amidst the extensive propaganda and disinformation spread by the government of the Russian Federation in relation to its war of aggression in Ukraine, one of the most prominent narratives invoked to justify the invasion—aside from the bizarre assertion that the invasion is intended to liberate Ukraine from “drug addicts and neo-Nazis”—is the conspiracy theory that the U.S. has been funding and sponsoring biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine (TASS, February 25March 9). One of the most prominent spokesmen for this disinformation campaign has been the commander of the “Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces of Russia” Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who has actively pushed the allegation in a series of public statements since mid-March.

On March 17, Kirillov gave a media briefing in Moscow in which he asserted that “components of biological weapons were being made on the territory of Ukraine,” involving the “direct participation of the Pentagon in the financing of military biological projects.” Kirillov insinuated that these biological weapons programs were connected to the appearance of an unnamed “mosquito-borne parasitic disease” in the vicinity of Kherson in 2018; to “drug-resistant tuberculosis… among the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics,” also in 2018; and to outbreaks of avian flu in Russia and the European Union in 2021. He asserted that such outbreaks “may indicate a deliberate infection, or an accidental leakage of the pathogen from one of the biological laboratories located on the territory of Ukraine,” and vowed that “we will continue to examine the evidence and inform the global community about the illegal activities of the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies in Ukraine” (Russia Today, March 17).

A graphic from a presentation delivered on March 17 by Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, alleging that the U.S. has been collaborating with Ukrainian officials to operate secret biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine. (Image source: Russia Today, March 17)


Kirillov spoke again in mid-May, promoting a spin-off conspiracy theory that Ukrainian officials, with American backing, had intentionally spread a “highly pathogenic strain of tuberculosis” (TB) in 2020 in Luhansk (an eastern Ukrainian region under the partial control of a Russian-sponsored separatist client state). According to Kirillov, “leaflets made in the form of counterfeit banknotes were infected with the causative agent of tuberculosis and distributed among minors in the village of Stepovoe,” with the intention of fostering an outbreak of drug-resistant TB in the region (Russia Today, May 11).

Such Russian accusations are evocative of the “active measures” undertaken by the KGB and allied Soviet Bloc intelligence services during Cold War era—such as “Operation Denver,” a highly successful disinformation campaign in the 1980s to spread the false narrative that the AIDS virus was produced by a U.S. military biological weapons program based out of Ft. Detrick, Maryland. [2] These time-tested, made-to-order conspiracy theories have been dusted off in the service of Russian information operations connected to the war in Ukraine—and this time around, the diplomatic and propaganda systems of the PRC have consistently acted as a megaphone for repeating and amplifying this Russian state disinformation.

PRC Support for Russian Biological Warfare Disinformation

The diplomatic messaging and propaganda systems of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have refrained from explicitly endorsing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but have consistently offered informational support on two levels: first, by repeating and amplifying Russian state messages; and second, by promoting a steady stream of anti-Western propaganda that identifies America and NATO as the real causes of the war (U.S. State Department, May 2). One of the clearest themes within this process has been the PRC effort to hype Moscow’s active disinformation related to alleged U.S.-Ukrainian collaborative biological warfare programs. In this, the PRC has generally followed a two-track approach: one directed to international audiences, in which the PRC publicizes Russian narratives in a sympathetic fashion, while avoiding an explicit endorsement of the claims; and another directed to Chinese-speaking audiences both domestically and abroad, in which the Russian claims are presented uncritically as fact.

Amplifying Russian Claims for International Audiences

An example of the former, internationally-focused approach could be observed in official channels as early as March 16, when PRC Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian (赵立坚) engaged in a scripted exchange with state broadcaster CCTV, which referenced accusations from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the U.S. was maintaining “hundreds of such [military biological] laboratories, including almost 30 just in Ukraine alone.” In response, Zhao replied that “We have noted [Lavrov’s] remarks. Biological security bears on the common interest of all humanity… the international community has long-held severe concerns about the biological military activities conducted by the U.S. at home and overseas” (FMPRC, March 16).

Similar exchanges have followed on subsequent dates, with an additional theme being the accusation that the U.S. is in violation of its responsibilities as a signatory to the U.N. Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). [3] In one such example from April 14, Zhao conducted another scripted exchange with a reporter from the state-run China Daily, who asked about Russian accusations that the U.S. was attempting to “divert the international community’s attention from the biological laboratories discovered in Ukraine.” In response, Zhao stated that “the U.S. has not yet given any convincing explanation for its bio-military activities. Undertaking consultation and cooperation to address concerns is a requirement of the [BWC]… How many biological samples did the U.S. ship out of Ukraine [and] for what purpose?… Did the U.S. conduct dangerous research overseas that is prohibited in the U.S.?” (FMPRC, April 14).

A still image from PRC state media, showing Vladimir Putin’s May 16 speech before representatives of the CSTO in Moscow. The captions read: “America Is Concealed in the Biological Laboratories,” and “Putin: American Laboratories in Ukraine Are Fundamentally for Researching Biological Weapons” (source: Peng Pai News, May 19).

Such statements have not been limited to diplomatic channels, but have also been promoted in state media—once again, normally amplifying Russian claims in a sympathetic fashion, rather than making novel accusations. For example, the state broadcaster CGTN—with coverage copied in the CCP’s official mouthpiece, People’s Daily—echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s May 16 speech in Moscow before representatives of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), writing that “President Putin pointed out that the Pentagon has established a number of biological laboratories in Ukraine… Documentary evidence obtained suggests that these laboratories were engaged in producing components that could be used to create biological weapons” (People’s Daily, May 18).

Assertions of Russian Claims as Fact for Chinese-Speaking Audiences

A more full-throated endorsement of Russian claims has appeared in Chinese-language media intended for a domestic audience—in which accusations against the U.S. are presented as fact, without the legerdemain of re-publicizing Russian state sources. In one such example from March 17—the same day that Kirillov presented his press briefing, in an apparent display of coordinated propaganda between the two governments—a state-produced news video announced that “Russia has discovered 30 biological labs subordinate to America inside Ukraine.” The video further insinuated that American-sponsored bio labs were responsible for producing the SARS CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, opining that:

America’s biological laboratories in Ukraine have attracted high-level international attention, many countries in succession have expressed apprehensions; previously there have been many people who have linked America’s biological laboratories with the novel coronavirus, but America has refused to give a direct response, and has even sought to ‘shake the pot at’ [i.e., blame] other countries (Jisu Guancha Shipin, March 17).

This same pattern is maintained in Chinese-language media directed towards the global ethnic Chinese diaspora. The CCP has invested a large-scale effort in recent years to establish control over the content of diaspora media, in order to ensure that it will “transmit well China’s voice” (传播好中国声音, chuanbo hao Zhonggu shengyin)—that is, to mirror the content of the PRC’s state-controlled domestic media. [4] In such outlets, the conspiracy theory about biological weapons labs in Ukraine is similarly reported as established, objective fact (see accompanying map image).

“Russia Has Found American Biological Weapons Labs in Ukraine!” A March 11 headline in Washington Chinese Daily News (華府新聞日報, Huafu Xinwen Ribao), a Chinese-language newspaper in the Washington, DC area (author’s photograph).

Conclusion

The effort to legitimate the invasion of Ukraine by invoking a national security threat from alleged U.S.-sponsored biological warfare laboratories is consistent with a long pattern of Russian state disinformation, one that extends from the present day through the past decade, and all the way back to the Soviet era. In fact, as will be discussed in the second article in this series, there are echoes of such biological warfare conspiracy theories going as far back as the Korean War. However, in contrast with Cold War “active measures” such as “Operation Denver,” in the present Ukrainian conflict these Russian disinformation efforts are being reinforced and trumpeted by the diplomatic and media messaging apparatus of the PRC—a state with far greater informational clout than the Russian Federation, especially in terms of influence in the developing world. The historical legacy of past Soviet-PRC disinformation campaigns concerning biological weapons, and Beijing’s latter-day motivations for involving itself with the disinformation efforts pertaining to Ukraine, will be discussed in the follow-up article in this series.

John Dotson is the deputy director of the Global Taiwan Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank focused on Taiwan-related economic and security issues, and US-Taiwan relations. He is a former editor of Jamestown’s China Brief.

Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a two-part series that addresses a prominent Russian Federation disinformation campaign related to the war in Ukraine—namely, the assertion that the Russian invasion was justified due to the alleged presence of U.S.-sponsored biological warfare research facilities in Ukraine—as well as the ways in which this conspiracy theory has been supported and amplified by the state-controlled media system of the People’s Republic of China. This first article provides details of this Russian disinformation effort, as well as examples of the ways in which Beijing has backed up Russian narratives. Part 2 of this article series will seek to place this coordinated disinformation campaign in broader context—both by providing historical parallels for these contemporary biological warfare allegations, as well as analyzing Beijing’s motivations for providing informational support for Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine.

Notes

[1] See: Henry Kamens, “Lugar Bio Laboratory in Tbilisi Latest: It’s Getting Worse by the Day,” New Eastern Outlook, January 31, 2016, https://journal-neo.org/2016/01/31/lugar-bio-laboratory-in-tbilisi-latest-it-s-getting-worse-by-the-day/. This publication, which has published a steady stream of material supporting this conspiracy theory, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in March 2022 as a disinformation outlet controlled by Russia’s leading civilian foreign intelligence agency, the SVR. See: U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Sanctions Russians Bankrolling Putin and Russia-Backed Influence Actors,” March 3, 2022, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0628.

[2] For more on “Operation Denver” and other Cold War era KGB “active measures,” see: Mark Kramer, “Lessons From Operation ‘Denver,’ the KGB’s Massive AIDS Disinformation Campaign,” MIT Press Reader, May 2020, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/operation-denver-kgb-aids-disinformation-campaign/; and Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986-87 (U.S. Department of State, August 1987), https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/1987/soviet-influence-activities-1987.pdf.

[3] The formal name of the agreement is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction. The U.S. signed the agreement in April 1972, and it was fully ratified and entered into force in March 1975. Full text available at: https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/isn/bw/c48738.htm.

[4] For a discussion of the efforts made by the CCP to pursue control over the Chinese diaspora, see: Anne-Marie Brady, submission to the New Zealand Parliament’s Justice Select Committee Inquiry into Foreign Interference (May 2019), https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2019/05/08/575479/anne-marie-bradys-full-submission. For an example of CCP discussion on the need to “speed up assimilation and transformation” (加快融合与变革, jiakuai ronghe yu biange) of overseas Chinese media in order to make it “tell China’s story well and transmit well China’s voice” (讲述好中国故事,传播好中国声音 / jiangshu hao Zhongguo gushi, chuanbo hao Zhonggu shengyin), see: “Make Overseas Chinese New Media Great and Strong” (把海外华文新媒体做大做强, Ba Haiwai Huawen Xin Meiti Zuo Da Zuo Qiang), People’s Daily, July 10, 2019, https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1638616254700785697&wfr=spider&for=pc.

jamestown.org · by John Dotson · June 17, 2022



14. Beijing’s Propaganda Support for Russian Biological Warfare Disinformation, Part 2: Historical Context and Contemporary Motivations


Again worthy of study and may be of use to researchers. Note historical analysis to include mention of the Korean War.


Beijing’s Propaganda Support for Russian Biological Warfare Disinformation, Part 2: Historical Context and Contemporary Motivations

jamestown.org · July 15, 2022

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part article series that addresses both a prominent Russian Federation state disinformation campaign related to the war in Ukraine—namely, that the Russian invasion was justified due to the alleged presence of U.S.-sponsored biological warfare research facilities in Ukraine—as well as the ways in which this conspiracy theory has been supported and amplified by the state-controlled media system of the People’s Republic of China. The first article in this series (Part 1: Accusations Concerning the War in Ukraine), which appeared in the June 17 issue, provided details of this disinformation campaign, as well as examples of how Beijing’s diplomatic and media systems have backed up Russian narratives. This second article seeks to place this coordinated disinformation campaign in broader context—both by providing a historical case study of similar biological warfare disinformation dating back to the Korean War, as well as analyzing Beijing’s contemporary motivations for providing informational support for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Historical Context for Beijing’s Biological Warfare Accusations Against the United States

The Russian government’s current disinformation campaign to assert the use of covert biological warfare by the U.S. and Ukrainian governments is not a new innovation. Rather, this effort accords with a long history of Soviet-era “active measures” in the field of political warfare, which have been continued by the Russian Federation through the successor agencies to the former Soviet KGB. [1] As detailed in the first part of this series, these efforts have been amplified by the propaganda resources of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the context of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. This ongoing cooperative disinformation campaign between the two governments is bringing the relationship between Moscow and Beijing full-circle, back to the early days of the Cold War—when another biological warfare disinformation effort played a prominent role in Communist propaganda in the latter stages of the Korean War.

The “World Peace Council” and Accusations of U.S. Biological Warfare in the Korean War

In 1952, the World Peace Council (WPC), a Soviet-controlled front organization created under the auspices of the Cominform in the late 1940s, became the vehicle for a combined Soviet-Chinese disinformation campaign intended to spread the narrative that U.S. forces had employed biological warfare in the Korean War against civilian populations in both North Korea and northeastern China. [2] This propaganda campaign was exemplified by the speech made by Guo Moruo (郭沫若), a prominent Chinese poet and the vice-president of the WPC, before a meeting of the organization in Oslo in March 1952. Guo charged that U.S. forces were indiscriminately spreading infectious agents throughout vast areas of Manchuria, and that the primary means used for this was the aerial bombardment of insects and other vermin:

[T]he American aggressors have begun a constant dissemination of large quantities of germ-laden insects and other poisonous objects over key cities and important communication lines both at the front and in the rear in Korea [and] Northeast China… Of the more than 35 types of objects dropped by the American aggressors, the main types are flies, fleas, mosquitoes, lice, sandflies, crickets, springtails, locusts, rats, contaminated meat, [and] dead fish…. Results of scientific tests by bacteriologists and entomologists show that many of the insects carry lethal germs of highly infectious diseases: bubonic plague, cholera and typhoid. The enemy on occasion has spread germs at the front by firing specially designed shells. But generally the enemy has used aircraft to drop bacteriological bombs… and other objects carrying germs or infected with virus[es].” [3]

Chinese Communist propaganda posters from the Korean War era (circa 1952), which accused U.S. forces of employing biological warfare against civilians in Korea and northern China. Left Image: “Resolutely Cut Off the Bloody Criminal Hand of the American Aggressor Spreading Germs!” / Right Image: “Everyone Must Prevent Epidemics, Smash the Germ Warfare of American Imperialism!” (Images source: Chineseposters.net)

This effort was bolstered by other communist front organizations including the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), which issued a report in March 1952 stating that “[we] must reach the conclusion that insects infected with epidemic diseases have been dropped over Korea by American airplanes.” [4] The WPC-led disinformation campaign succeeded in drawing support from a limited number of international political figures, as well as sympathetic leftist intellectual fellow-travelers. Dr. John Burton, former Australian foreign minister, returned from a CCP-sponsored “peace conference” held in Beijing in spring 1952 claiming to possess “telling documents” pertaining to U.S. bacteriological warfare. [5] A second WPC-organized commission later that year, which was led by Dr. Joseph Needham—a renowned British biochemist and historian of science in China—concluded after a fact-finding trip to China hosted by CCP officials that “The peoples of Korea and China have indeed been the objective of bacteriological weapons. These have been employed by units of the U.S.A. armed forces, using a great variety of different methods for the purpose.” [6]

These claims have been extensively debunked by historians in subsequent decades—to include research in the 1990s, using documentation from then-opened former Soviet archives, that revealed the evidence of biological warfare in Korea and China to have been fabricated by the Chinese Communists. [7] Despite the fraudulent nature of the claims, they achieved wide currency at the time—and have had a lingering influence since, primarily online among smaller, left-leaning publications. [8] This long-discredited story also resurfaces from time to time in more mainstream media: one prime example is a 2010 article in the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper that sympathetically cited accounts from North Korean villagers about disease-carrying insects dropped from American airplanes (The Telegraph, June 10, 2010). The persistence of this geopolitical urban legend, long after it has been debunked, illustrates the lasting psychological impact that can be achieved by disinformation when these narratives encounter a receptive target audience eager to believe them.

The Contemporary Significance of the Korean War Biological Warfare Accusations

This historical case study is more than simply academic: over the past year, the PRC state-controlled press—in both English and Chinese—has engaged in an ongoing and active effort to promulgate materials alleging U.S. germ warfare during the Korean War (China Daily, May 12; Shang Guan Xinwen, May 18). This revived propaganda campaign appears to date back to at least late summer 2021 (Xinhua, August 27, 2021; see also accompanying photo). The promotion of such material to both domestic and international audiences represents a likely effort to “seed” the information environment—and raises the possibility that the ongoing Russian-Chinese disinformation campaign regarding biological warfare labs in Ukraine was planned well in advance of the actual invasion.

The Russian and Chinese governments have even expanded this story beyond Ukraine. In mid-April, PRC press outlets began to echo and amplify Russian state media claims that at least some of the alleged U.S.-sponsored weapon labs in Ukraine were being relocated to South Korea and Mongolia, and that “the specifics of the research being performed are unknown, but thinking about it makes one shiver” (想想都让人后背发凉, xiangxiang dou rangren houbei fajing) (Hai-Lu-Kongtian Guanxing Shijie, April 17; China Economic Net, June 26). In reporting on the story, the nationalist Global Times sympathetically cited former Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ordzhonikidze to indicate that the alleged labs were likely working on gene weapons targeting ethnic Chinese; and further cited unnamed “experts” who indicated that “America’s primary research domain could be researching the effect of dangerous viruses on Asians” (美方的主要研究领域可能是研究危险病毒对亚洲人种的影响, Meifang de zhuyao yanjiu lingyu keneng shi yanjiu weixian bingdu dui Yazhouren de yingxiang) (Global Times, April 12). [9]

Beijing’s Motivations for Supporting Moscow’s Propaganda

All of this raises the question as to why the CCP leadership is reviving these stories again, in the context of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The leaders of the CCP have many motivations for supporting this disinformation campaign, but a few stand out above the others. The first is the need to justify sustaining the PRC’s close cooperative relationship with Russia, which was upgraded to a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era” in June 2019 during Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia (Xinhuanet, June 6, 2019). The Sino-Russian partnership, which in many ways is a de facto alliance, was further codified this year with a joint statement issued during Vladimir Putin’s early February visit to Beijing to attend the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics—very likely not coincidentally, just prior to the invasion of Ukraine (Xinhuanet, February 4). The joint statements made by the two governments on the occasion of these visits should not be viewed as throwaway diplomatic rhetoric: rather, the declaration of a “partnership without limits,” and the accompanying bitter denunciations of American “hegemony” (霸權, baquan) and U.S.-led military alliances, should be taken at face value (FMPRC, June 5, 2019; Guangming Ribao, February 4).

The bio-weapons disinformation story is only one component of a broader Sino-Russian propaganda campaign that blames the United States and the NATO alliance for starting the Ukraine War in the first place, with much of this taking the form of “expert” commentaries that blame NATO expansion for bringing about the crisis (Guangming Ribao, March 12; Xinhua, April 24). Much of this material identifies the United States as the sinister motivating force lurking behind the Ukraine crisis, in ways that are never explained in any cogent fashion; rather, emotive imagery and language are employed to depict the United States as a rapacious power bent on pursuing dominance and sowing chaos around the globe (see images below). In this narrative, the people and government of Ukraine are offered no agency, being mere pawns manipulated by the hegemonic U.S. puppet master. The PRC leadership has not wished to explicitly endorse the Russian invasion, but it has embraced propaganda support as a low-cost means of signaling continuing support for Moscow, while further indoctrinating Chinese-speaking audiences with anti-American sentiment.

Still images from a PRC state media animated music video titled “Look, There Is an Eagle Flying to Ukraine!” (有只老鹰盯着乌克兰, You Zhi Laoying Dingzhe Wukelan). The video, which was disseminated on social media, blames America for starting the war in Ukraine. (Image source: China Daily/Youtube, April 22)

Finally, for CCP officialdom, the biological warfare disinformation campaign may represent a further extension of efforts to engage in deflection regarding the origins of COVID-19. Since the outset of the pandemic, Beijing has displayed extreme sensitivity on this subject, and has reacted with particularly histrionic outrage to hitherto unverified foreign media speculation that the virus may have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In spring 2020, both PRC state media and diplomatic spokespeople commenced a spaghetti-against-the-wall disinformation effort to insinuate that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had originated at the U.S. Army disease research center in Fort Detrick, Maryland (thereby echoing Soviet-era disinformation about the origins of the AIDS virus), and that it had been brought to Wuhan in October 2019 by U.S. military athletes competing in the Military World Games (Global Times, March 25, 2020; Twitter, May 8, 2020; CGTN, June 24). In this light, the Ukraine bio labs story may represent in part a further propaganda smokescreen, as well as payback for the CCP’s self-perceived victimization regarding speculative accounts of COVID-19’s origins.

Conclusion: How Effective Is This Disinformation?

To most observers from open societies, who possess basic media literacy, the Russian accusations of U.S.-sponsored biological warfare in Ukraine—accusations actively buttressed and amplified by the PRC state media apparatus—will likely seem patently absurd. This may lead many observers to discount the impact of such disinformation. However, such disinformation is deployed for a reason: because it works, at least among certain targeted audiences for certain specific purposes, and generates resulting political impacts.

For the Russian and Chinese governments, such propaganda is primarily directed at domestic audiences in order to shore up popular opinion in support of state policy, and to reinforce the demonization of the United States (and by further extension, Western countries and the NATO alliance). Even for persons inclined to be skeptical of such state-sponsored conspiracy theories, the strident and pervasive flooding of the information space serves the purpose of encouraging silence, and hence, fostering tacit concurrence. The reach of this material is pervasive: social media analysis by a Voice of America journalist indicated that, as of mid-March, the Ukraine bio labs story had received over 260 million views in hosting by the official People’s Daily, and that at one point, variations of the story held both the number one and number seven trending spots on Weibo (Twitter, March 10).

Even among developed democracies, such disinformation will find a certain purchase in the more sensationalist and conspiracy-minded corners of the media and internet. In past decades such Communist-generated, anti-American propaganda might have found greatest purchase on the political left, but in recent years audiences on the political right have also become increasingly receptive to such disinformation. This spring, Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson highlighted the Ukraine biological warfare labs conspiracy theory, introducing the story to his millions of prime-time viewers (Fox News, March 9). Whether done so wittingly or not, such coverage serves to amplify Russian and Chinese state propaganda, and facilitate one of its goals, which is to erode political will and foster divisions within and among rival states in the West.

Although difficult to quantify, the greatest international impact of such disinformation will likely be found in the developing world, where the PRC has invested vast resources in establishing both a presence for its own media outlets and influence over native media organizations (IFJ, June 27, 2020; Deutsche Welle, January 29, 2021). In many countries of the Global South, both the receptivity to sinister conspiracy theories about former colonial powers, as well as the influence of PRC state agencies—to include the widespread direct insertion of Xinhua material into indigenous publications—ensures a loud megaphone for Chinese state-supported disinformation.

Those who have not been exposed to PRC state propaganda material on a regular basis might be taken aback to see how systematically and virulently anti-American (and by wider extension, anti-Western) it truly is. Now working in cooperation with the propaganda apparatus of the Russian Federation, it has become even more so. Expect to see more such conspiracy theories jointly promoted in the future—and expect as well to see the Ukrainian biological warfare labs story reappearing in circulation for many years to come.

John Dotson is the deputy director of the Global Taiwan Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank focused on Taiwan-related economic and security issues. He is a former editor of Jamestown’s China Brief.

Notes

[1] For a fuller discussion of the historical legacy of Communist Bloc “active measures,” see: Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986-87 (U.S. Department of State, August 1987). https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/1987/soviet-influence-activities-1987.pdf.

[2] For background on the WPC, see: The World Peace Council: A Soviet-Sponsored International Front (Central Intelligence Agency, Dec. 1971) (declassified Aug. 1999). https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600220001-7.pdf.

[3] Speech by Guo Moruo before the executive bureau meeting of the World Peace Council in Oslo, Norway, March 29, 1952. http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/KUO-1952.htm.

[4] International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea (March 31, 1952), p. 28-10. For background on the IADL as a Soviet front organization, see: Under False Colours: A Report on the Character of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (International Commission of Jurists, 1955).

[5] “Burton to Gov’t, ‘Investigate Germ Warfare Claim’,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 2, 1952, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/18267211?searchTerm=john%20burton%20germ%20warfare%20korea.

[6] Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China, supplement to People’s China (Sep. 17, 1952). https://massline.org/PeoplesChina/PC1952/PC1952-18-Sup.pdf.

[7] Extensive research on this subject was performed in the late 1990s by scholars at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project, employing original documents from Soviet archives. See: Kathryn Weathersby, “Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in Korea;” and Milton Leitenberg, “New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis;” both in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 11, 1998 (pp. 176-199). https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/bulletin-no-11-winter-1998.

[8] For two examples, see: Peter Schwartz, “German Documentary Charges US Used Biological Weapons in Korean War,” World Socialist Web Site (website of the International Committee of the Fourth International), Nov. 13, 2002, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/nov2002/arti-n13.shtml; and Jeffrey Kaye, “New Revelations on Germ Warfare: It’s Time for a Reckoning with Our History from the Korean War,” Counterpunch (April 9, 2021), https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/09/new-revelations-on-germ-warfare-its-time-for-a-reckoning-with-our-history-from-the-korean-war/.

[9] The Mongolian government, for its part, has firmly denied that any such laboratories exist in the country (Montsame, April 18).

jamestown.org · July 15, 2022


15. Opinion | What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East​ (NY Times Editorial Board)​


Seems more along the lines of damning with faint praise.


Opinion | What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East

The New York Times · by The Editorial Board · July 15, 2022

The Editorial Board

What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East

July 15, 2022


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The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Joe Biden campaigned and won as the antithesis to Donald Trump. To deliver on that promise in foreign policy, in his first year as president, he tried to offer “something for everyone,” as Anne-Marie Slaughter has argued: tough talk on China for the realists; a recommitment to NATO, to the Paris Agreement on climate, and to the World Health Organization for the liberal internationalists; an end to the forever wars; and, for the idealists, a willingness to speak up for human rights.

The last item on this long list, his attempt to return to a values-based foreign policy after the often incoherent and destructive “America First” presidency of Mr. Trump, has proved to be the toughest for Mr. Biden to get right. Beginning with his inauguration speech, to last year’s “Summit for Democracy” and his statements in support of Ukraine, Mr. Biden has returned repeatedly to the idea of “democracy versus autocracy” as an organizing principle for American foreign policy.

This binary way of looking at the world doesn’t always serve American national interests or the interests of people around the world who are fighting for their democratic rights to live freely and in peace.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Mr. Biden’s trip this week to the Middle East. The Biden administration doesn’t have a doctrine, per se. Instead, it has tried to rally free nations in a world where democracy is under threat. Mr. Biden has succeeded in building a European bulwark to Russian aggression in Ukraine, at least for the moment, but in the Middle East, his options are limited.

In an essay in The Washington Post on Saturday, Mr. Biden portrayed the trip as a mission to shore up peace in the region through diplomacy. “A more secure and integrated Middle East benefits Americans in many ways,” he wrote. There are a few factors he didn’t mention: Inflation is soaring; gas prices are alarming; his popularity is plummeting; and midterm elections are looming. The people he has met on this trip know all this, and some of them, especially in Saudi Arabia and Israel, may be hoping for a Trump restoration.

Mr. Biden’s first stop was Israel, which is in the midst of another government meltdown and so has a caretaker prime minister, Yair Lapid, until elections are held on Nov. 1. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the long-serving hard-liner, is hoping to make a comeback. The visit was short on substance, but Mr. Biden largely delivered what Israel wanted: a public statement, in a taped interview on Israeli television, in which he reiterated the U.S. position that it was willing to use force against Iran, “as a last resort,” to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Given the situation in Israel, there is little Mr. Biden can do to breathe life into the moribund peace process, and the visit took place just a couple of months after the death of a popular journalist and American citizen, Shireen Abu Akleh. She was killed while covering an Israeli military operation in the West Bank, and Palestinians are convinced that she was deliberately shot. They do not buy the State Department’s conclusion that while the bullet was likely fired by an Israeli, there was “no reason to believe that this was intentional.” Palestinians are also frustrated that Mr. Biden has not reversed some vindictive actions taken by his predecessor, such as closing the United States consulate in East Jerusalem, although he did pledge $100 million in funding for hospitals there.

On Friday, Mr. Biden met with the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose kingdom Mr. Biden, as a candidate, suggested should be a “pariah” over the horrific murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Mr. Biden’s administration last year released an intelligence report that laid the killing at the feet of the crown prince. Now, Mr. Biden, with this visit, is trying to reset relations with the kingdom to shore up the alliance against Russia and, more important, to pump more oil.

In Saudi Arabia on Saturday, Mr. Biden is expected to meet with nine Arab leaders — those of the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) plus Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, whose major ask will be more military support against Iran. (Footage that surfaced this week from a 2021 incident in which Israel shot down Iranian drones with the help of Arab allies and the United States underlined the point.) At the same time, the U.S. administration hopes to leave the door open for the unlikely but worthy goal of reviving the nuclear deal with Iran that Mr. Trump ripped up — a revival that almost no one in the region seems to really want — while a shadow war of assassinations and covert actions between Israel and Iran continues.

This is not a pretty picture of diplomacy in action — an American president making nice with autocrats, with few opportunities to make meaningful progress on behalf of democracy.

America’s greatest strength in the world has always been its combination of high ideals and a readiness to engage with almost anyone when it served to advance peace and American national interests. This doesn’t mean the kind of amoral pandering to dictators practiced by Mr. Trump. Rather, it means building on areas of agreement, however small, that can be used to move toward a more peaceful, free and open world.

American presidents held regular summit meetings with Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War, achieving major arms-control agreements while remaining critical of Soviet human-rights violations. Richard Nixon’s visit to a totalitarian China in 1972 transformed America’s relationship with China and, eventually, China’s with the rest of the world.

There were few opportunities for Mr. Biden to show that kind of statesmanship on this visit, but that does not make incremental progress through diplomacy less valuable. Mr. Biden was right to release the intelligence report implicating Prince Mohammed in the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi; he is also right to recognize that the prince has made some headway on modernizing his kingdom, and that the alliance with Saudi Arabia is key to containing Iran, ending the conflict in Yemen, ensuring the security of Israel and restoring a modicum of stability to the oil market. Saudi Arabia’s work to restore unity among the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council and to maintain a truce in Yemen showed the value of this relationship.

Mr. Biden is also right in not rejecting out of hand the Abraham Accords, which the Trump administration helped achieve. The accords marked a normalization of relations between Israel and two Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, as well as Morocco and Sudan. Although they were criticized for, in effect, sidelining the Palestinians, the agreements formed a basis for other Arab states to consider forging relations with Israel. And he is right to talk to Saudi Arabia about an increase in oil production. Such a move is unlikely to have a significant impact on prices at American gas pumps in the short term, but it is essential — for the American economy and for the coalition supporting Ukraine — that Mr. Biden do whatever he can to ease the pressure on global oil markets.

While there is a natural impulse to look for grand gestures on every presidential visit abroad, there are other places and other issues where this administration needs to advance a broader and more ambitious agenda — especially climate change, Ukraine and China. This is not the moment for bold new Middle East policies. Mr. Biden is doing the right thing by treating the region’s issues as part of a bigger picture.

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

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The New York Times · by The Editorial Board · July 15, 2022





16. Western ‘dictator envy’ ignores the far greater strengths of democracy


Dictator envy is a new "discipline" in foreign affairs and national security. A broad spectrum of leaders guilty of this "crime." (note sarcasm)



Video at the link: https://nypost.com/2022/07/15/western-dictator-envy-ignores-strengths-of-democracy/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=syndicated&utm_campaign=partnerfeed


Western ‘dictator envy’ ignores the far greater strengths of democracy

New York Post · by John Stossel · July 16, 2022

More On: dictators

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Some Western leaders envy dictators’ powers.

President Donald Trump said, when North Korea’s Kim Jong-un speaks, “his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

President Barack Obama told reporters it would be so much easier to be the president of China.

Canada’s foolish Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said he admires the Chinese because “their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.”

These are stupid and dangerous fantasies.

Some people have a “utopian dream that if only someone at the top could just point us in a certain direction, everything would go well,” says historian Johan Norberg in my new video.

“People like a strong leader,” I point out.

“A strong leader of their own imagination,” Norberg responds.

One example he gives: “Thomas Friedman of The New York Times famously said that he wanted to be China for a day to solve global warming.”

Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau said in an interview that he admired China.

SELIM CHTAYTI/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

If Friedman were dictator, he could solve global warming? I doubt it.

Yes, China has built lots of wind turbines. “But those wind turbines don’t produce more power!” Norberg points out. “Around 30% of them are not even connected to the grid. And why is that? Because they didn’t build them to make money. They built them because they wanted to meet a political goal.”

see also


Why mighty Xi Jinping is afraid of tiny Hong Kong

So China has useless wind turbines and, for power, builds more coal plants.

Another example: American media said we should look to China to contain COVID-19. NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, “How uncomfortable is it that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this?”

Fauci replied that China “prevented a broader spread.”

But China’s ” ‘Zero COVID’ policy turned into a nightmare,” says Norberg. China locked people into homes. One city even killed COVID patients’ pets. China is still the one country that will not acknowledge that we may have to learn to live with COVID.

“That’s what you get with dictators,” says Norberg. “If government is big enough to give you anything, it’s big enough to take everything away from you.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to members of the State Duma and the Federal Assembly of The Russian Federation on July 7.

Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin Pool/AP

At the beginning of the pandemic, America imitated China’s lockdowns. The mayor of Los Angeles threatened to shut off power to people who did not follow his orders.

see also


Putin being lied to by own advisers: US defense official

There was lots of political bickering about what our COVID rules should be. People don’t like the bickering, but Norberg calls it one of democracy’s strengths.

“Because it means that we see different things and we bring different ideas to the table.” By contrast, “when we have one guy at the top, they begin to fall for their own propaganda.”

That’s probably what led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Putin thought that his own military was in excellent shape,” says Norberg. “Ukraine was seen as a joke of a country, a place of latte-drinking comedians.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comedian before becoming president.

Putin assumed Ukrainians “would just run away the moment they saw muscular Russian paratroopers,” says Norberg. “But it’s been a disaster for them.” In freer countries, he points out, “journalists [and] people online would’ve seen those problems and brought them forth.”

Former President Obama meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS

But Putin’s advisers fear telling him the truth. It’s fun to watch one of his flunkies groveling.

I understand why his adviser stammers. Pointing out a problem might get him jailed, if not killed. It’s why dictators get bad information. They make bad decisions because there’s no open dissent.

“That’s what happens when you centralize,” says Norberg. “You lose individual initiative . . . local knowledge. If you can mobilize everybody in one direction, sometimes they mobilize us all over the cliff.”

I’m glad America has a government with limited powers.

“Democracy cannot guarantee the best governance, but it can prevent the worst from happening,” concludes Norberg. “That is enough. That’s really what freedom and democracy is about. It doesn’t guarantee us heaven, but at least it makes us sure that we won’t end up in hell.”

New York Post · by John Stossel · July 16, 2022




17.  'Bang, bang': Children live and play near Ukraine front line



​We must keep the human element in mind in this conflict and the tragedy that is happening for men, women, and children.


'Bang, bang': Children live and play near Ukraine front line

AP · by CARA ANNA · July 16, 2022

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (AP) — The children flicker like ghosts on the empty playgrounds in weedy courtyards deep in a city whose residents have been told to get out now.

Six-year-old Tania has no more playmates left on her street in the eastern Ukraine city of Kramatorsk. She sits on a bench only steps away from the city’s train station that was attacked by Russia in April, killing more than 50 people who had gathered there to evacuate. The remnants of a rocket from that attack bore the inscription in Russian: “For the children.”

Tania and her parents aren’t afraid to stay. In the shade near the now-closed station, they enjoy whatever quiet remains between the booms of outgoing artillery trying to keep out Russian forces.

“The bombs land all over the country. It’s doesn’t make sense to escape,” said Tania’s father, Oleksandr Rokytianskyi.

Chatting to herself while settling in with a lavish box of colored markers, Tania added, “Bang, bang!”

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It’s not unusual for older residents of eastern Ukraine to refuse to heed calls to evacuate to safer places elsewhere in the country. What’s jarring, however, is to see children — even a baby stroller — near the front line. It is unknown how many remain as the Russians press their offensive in the region.

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Children cannot escape the war, even in cities considered safe. Tania’s parents spoke on the day a Russian missile struck Vinnytsia, far from the front in central Ukraine, killing 23 people including three children — a 4-year-old girl named Liza Dmytrieva and two boys aged 7 and 8.

Children who remain close to the fighting have their fates tied to that of their parents, and the dangers can be unexpected.

Outside a hospital, 18-year-old Sasha sits smoking with a 15-year-old friend. Sasha’s right arm is bandaged, and he peers at the world from blackened eyes. He has scrapes all over after being struck while crossing the street by one of the military vehicles rumbling through the region.

The Ukrainian soldiers helped find him an ambulance, he said, his speech impaired by his injuries.

Sasha doesn’t know why he’s still living here. His mother decided the family wouldn’t leave. Like some in eastern Ukraine, he didn’t share his last name out of concern for his security.

“I’d rather stay because I have friends here,” he said, but if he had small children, he would take them out.

In the four-bed hospital room that Sasha shares with other patients, an older man named Volodymyr has his right hand thickly bandaged. He said he was in his garden in a village near Bakhmut when cluster bombs exploded.

His family, including his 15-year-old child, plans to stay.

But “the small ones need to be evacuated,” Volodymyr said. “The small ones, they haven’t seen much in life.”

Maksym, a wounded soldier recuperating from a concussion suffered during shelling, agreed.

For the first time since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, he has left the forest trenches and is able to speak by phone with his teenage daughter, who is safe in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, several hours’ drive away.

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This is also Maksym’s first chance to see what passes for normal life in Ukraine in almost six months, and he is surprised to see children still so close to the fighting.

“They’re kids,” he said, with the same gruffness he uses to call the entire war “nonsense.”

Dr. Vitalii Malanchuk said a “quite high” number of children are patients at the hospital. He finds it uncomfortable that some people who should be evacuating see his presence as a reassuring reason to stay.

As the latest air raid siren wails at a Kramatorsk playground and artillery booms, a girl in pigtails squeals and runs from the determined chase of a little boy. A small merry-go-round spins.

Dmytro and Karyna Ponomarenko wait for their daughter, nearly 5-year-old Anhelina, along with her pink bike with training wheels.

There are no safe places, they said, and Kramatorsk is home. They feel it’s hard to leave and expensive to start anew elsewhere. Some residents who left are now returning, they said, preferring to take their chances.

They will stay as long as they can, even as the Russians inch closer.

“She is used to the sirens, but the explosions still bother her,” Dmtryo said of Anhelina. They tell her it’s thunder, but somehow she has learned to fear the planes, even Ukrainian ones.

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There are fewer children to play with day by day, but Anhelina entertains herself, her father said.

“Hyperactive,” he added with a weary fondness.

With evening coming, the family leaves, walking by the statue of a tank that’s now outnumbered by real ones on the streets.

Shadows edge across the cracked concrete square. The air raid siren is still going.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · by CARA ANNA · July 16, 2022


​18. Worst Is Yet To Come: When The Center Does Not Hold – OpEd



Those of the center, unite and hold!



Worst Is Yet To Come: When The Center Does Not Hold – OpEd

eurasiareview.com · by Richard Falk · July 15, 2022

No lines of poetry are more resonant with our time than the celebrated lines of William Butler Yeats’ famous poem ‘The Second Coming’:

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“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

This is especially true here in the United States, as it was in post-World War I Germany’s nurturing the rise of Naziism and its demonic voice, Adolph Hitler, the consummate outsider who managed to crawl up the mountain to ascend its peak. The core disabling affliction of the United States in the 21st Century is an energized and armed extreme right-wing and a listless, passive center, a development lamented by liberals who would sell their souls long before parting with their stocks and bonds, all for a non-voting seat at various illiberal tables of power. This lack of humane passion at the political center serves as a reinforcing complement to the violent forces of alienation waiting around the country for their marching orders, as the January 6th insurrectionary foray foretells. Together these contrasting modes of ‘citizenship’ signal the death of constitutional democracy as it has functioned, with ups and downs, flawed by slavery, genocide, and patriarchy at birth, indeed ever since the republic was established in 1787 as ‘a more perfect union.’ In 2022 a fascist alternative is assuming institutional, ideological, and populist prominence with active support of many American oligarchs who fund by night what they disavow when the sun shines (again recalling the behavior of German industrialists who thought of Hitler as their vehicle, whereas it turned out the other war around).

This contemporary political ordeal is systemic, and not only the sad tale of American moral, economic, and political decline, temporarily hidden from public awareness by an orgy of excess military spending that has lasted for decades, a corporatized, compliant media, diversionary exploits abroad, and a greedy private sector that grows bloated by arms sales and a regressive tax structure, Pentagon plunder, and its profit-driven regimen. What may be most negatively revealing is the failure to take account of geopolitical failure or sanctified domestic outrages (mass shootings in schools and elsewhere with legally acquired weapons suitable only for organized military combat). It is time to link the inability to mount any serious challenge to the tyranny of the Second Amendment as interpreted by the IRA in cahoots with Congress and the Supreme Court, cowing much of the public to sullen sense of silent hopelessness. Even before these hallowed institutions acquired their Trumpist edge, they shied away from constructing rights as if they were aware of the violent societal and ecological fissures tearing up the roots of bipartisan civility. The moral rot is less the work of the sociopaths among us than it the outcome of a two-party plutocratic dynamic that is controlled by infidels and their bureaucratic minions who either actually like the way things are working out or feel impotent to mount a challenge with any chance of enacting benevolent change.

These same patterns of stasis are evident among the centrist elites who have been educated at the most esteemed universities. Perhaps the brightest, but surely not the best. Refusing to learn from Vietnam where military dominance, widespread devastation of a distant country, much bloodshed, resulted in a political defeat that should have induced some learning about the limits of military agency in the face pf colonial collapse. Instead of learning from the failure brought about by a changing post-colonial political balance in the countries of the Global South, anointed foreign policy experts whined about the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ that allegedly hampered a pragmatic recourse to military instruments to advance U.S. national and strategic interests because of a feared repetition of Vietnam. It was George H.W. Bush who reveled in the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the desert war fought against Iraq in 1991, not primarily because it restored Kuwaiti sovereignty but because of a restored confidence that the U.S. could win wars of its choice at acceptable costs. In his words, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” (March 1991)

In plainer language, that American military power had efficiently vanquished its Iraqi enemy without enduring many casualties, and thereby could feel free again to rely on its threats and weapons as a decisive geopolitical policy tool to get its way throughout the world. But had it? Better understood, this First Iraq War in 1991 was a strictly battlefield encounter between asymmetric military forces, and as earlier, the stronger side won this time quickly and without body bags alerting Americans to the sacrificial costs of warfare unrelated to the security of the homeland. The lessons of Vietnam for the foreign policy establishment were to the extent possible substitute machines for troops, and adopt tactics that shortened the military phase of political undertakings designed to nullify forms of self-determination that seemed to go against American post-Cold War resolve to run the world to serve the interests of its upper 1%..

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These lessons decidedly were not what should have been learned from a decade expensive failed efforts in Vietnam. The principal lesson of the Vietnam War was that the political mobilization of a people in the Global South behind a struggle for national self-determination can usually neutralize, and often eventually overcome, large margins of military superiority bv an outside power, especially if it hails from the West. The stubborn refusal by politicians and the most trusted advisors by their side to heed this lesson led to regime-change and state-building disasters in the Iraq War of 2003, Afghanistan (2001-2021), Libya (2011), and others less pronounced failures. No matter how many drones search and destroy mission or how much ‘shock and awe’ is staged for its spectacular traumatizing effects, the end result resembles Vietnam more than Iraq after the 1991 war. There is still no relevant learning evident, which would be meaningfully signaled by massive downsizings of the military budget and more prudently and productively using public monies at home and abroad. The bipartisan foreign policy, again evident in response to the Ukraine War, is locking the country into an expensive and lengthy dynamic of failure and frustration, somewhat disguised by dangerous deceptions about the true nature of the strategic mission. Instead of intervention and regime change, the dominant insider Ukraine rationale for heightening tensions, prolonging warfare devastating a distant country and bringing tragic losses of life, limb, and home to many of its people, is scoring a geopolitical victory, namely, inflicting defeat and heavy costs on Russia while sternly warning China that if it dares challenge the status quo in its own region it can expect to be confronted by the same sort of destructive response that Russia is facing. Long ago patriots of humanity should have been worried about the ‘Militarist Syndrome’ and paid thankful heed to the ‘Vietnam Syndrome,’ which could have led to a war prevention strategy rather than insisting on worldwide capabilities enabling a reactive military response to unwanted actions of others. Pre-2022 Ukraine diplomacy by the U.S. led NATO alliance rather than seeking a war prevention outcome seemed determined to induce a war dangerously overlapping an unstable unipolar geopolitical order disliked by most of the Global South as well as China and Russia.

Here at home with its embedded gun culture, homelessness, and cruelty to asylum seekers at the Mexican border, it is the underlying systemic malady that remains largely undiagnosed, and totally untreated—namely, a lame and unimaginative leadership that is alternatively passively toxic and overtly fascist in the domestic sphere, and geopolitically irresponsible and transactional when it ventures abroad for the sake of Special Relationships or insists that global security anywhere on the planet is of proper concerns only for Washington think tanks, lobbyists, and upper echelon foreign policy bureaucrats. It is not surprising that in such a quandary, those with energy, passion, and excitement on their side seem destined to control the future unless a surge of progressive energy erupts mysteriously, and enables a new social movement animated by strivings toward bio-ethical-ecological-political sanity.

This drift toward fascism is not the only plausible scenario for a highly uncertain American future. There is also Yeats’ assessment made long before the current world crisis emerged, but we should not be surprised that poets see further ahead than foreign policy gurus and politicians who remain fixated on electoral or other performance cycles even in autocracies:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

And then there is to be considered Barbara F. Walter’s carefully researched assessment that the United States is drifting toward a second civil war, and not a fascist sequel to republican democracy. [See Walter, How Civil Wars Start and how to stop them, 2022] It is relatively more optimistic although it fails to contextualize the political challenge in relation to the global systemic damage done by neoliberal economic globalization, an unsettling lingering COVID pandemic, and a general planetary condition of ecological entropy.

I find this prospect of civil wars less disheartening than the related drift toward fascism or the torments of anarchy. Civil wars end and can often be prevented, and the winners have a stake in restoring normalcy, that is, assuming the more humane side prevails, which under current conditions may seem utopian. At present, only respect for international law, responsible geopolitics, a UN more empowered to realize its Principles and Purposes (Articles 1 & 2), and ethically/spiritually engaged transnational activism can hope turn the tides now engulfing humanity toward peace, justice, species survival, and a more harmonious ecological coexistence. Miracles do happen! Now more than ever before struggle rather than resignation it is the only imperative worth heeding.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

eurasiareview.com · by Richard Falk · July 15, 2022


19.  Jordan Peterson Is Wrong About Russia, and the West


Excellent excerpts here:


I’ve long been a participant in the American culture war. I was a pro-life and religious-liberty litigator for more than 20 years before I became a journalist. I also know that it’s easy to lose perspective when you spend too much time immersed in domestic disputes. Most of us, however, get jolted back to reality when we see the true face of aggressive, authoritarian evil. A clash over whether to use the word woman or a person with the capacity for pregnancy is a moral and philosophical dispute that can be mediated through the instruments of liberal democracy.


A Russian cruise missile launched into an apartment building, by contrast, represents a truly different order of depravity. A nation or culture does not have to be perfect to be right, and make no mistake—in the clash between the war criminal in the Kremlin and Ukraine and its NATO allies, the true moral high ground could not be more clear.



Jordan Peterson Is Wrong About Russia, and the West

On the intellectual bankruptcy of moral equivalence

By David French

JULY 15, 2022

newsletters.theatlantic.com · July 15, 2022

There’s a pattern emerging in parts of the right. It goes something like this. “Yes, Russia is wrong to invade Ukraine, but …” And what follows the “but” is invariably an avalanche of excuse-making and false moral equivalence. NATO provoked Russia, Ukraine provoked Russia, or—and this is my favorite—Western wokeism provoked Russia.

Earlier this week the extraordinarily popular Canadian professor Jordan Peterson released a lengthy (and immediately viral) video that represented the virtual platonic form of the argument that “Russia is wrong, but …” If you have a spare hour, I’d urge you to watch his entire lecture, if only to understand a view you may not hear much in your daily life.

I want to focus on a specific claim by Peterson—that Russia has not only gone to war to protect itself from what he describes as Western degeneracy, but that our alleged degeneracy robs the West of the moral high ground in the conflict. Here’s a key quote:

And are we degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner? I think the answer to that may well be yes. The idea that we are ensconced in a culture war has become a rhetorical commonplace. How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia, say, will be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine merely to keep the pathological West out of that country, which is a key part of the historically Russian sphere of influence?

And what is this degeneracy? Peterson talks about radical gender ideology, the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson (yes, really), and her reluctance to define a “woman” during her confirmation hearings. Here’s more Peterson:

The culture war in the West is real, and culture is losing. And Russia is part of the West. And the culture war is now truly part of why we have a war, and it’s a real war. And it is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground, for some part of the reasons that [political scientist John] Mearsheimer details, and for these reasons of insanity. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.

Peterson’s moral equivalence does not (yet) hold majority Republican support. While Republicans are less likely to support Ukraine in the conflict than Democrats—and less likely to support strict economic sanctions against Russia and sending military support to Ukraine—strong majorities still oppose Vladimir Putin.

Peterson’s beliefs, however, are still worth addressing, and not just because they undermine American support for an ally that is directly confronting one of our nation’s chief geopolitical foes. His beliefs also lead to a sense of unjustified existential despair about the state of our own civilization and culture.

In short, while the West has problems, it is not “degenerate” by any reasonable historical measure, and there is no reasonable comparison between the virtue of NATO and Russia. To argue otherwise is to be ignorant or to engage in gravely deficient moral reasoning.

The right’s disproportionate commitment to moral equivalence in the Russia-Ukraine war is explained partly by pure contrarianism (opposing anything the “elite” supports) and partly by a profoundly negative view of modern Western cultural life, and a prewar view of Putin as a muscular representative of specifically anti-woke Christian nationalism.

There’s no question that Putin has forged a close relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, but that is an indictment of the Russian church, not an endorsement of Putin. He’s a brutal war criminal who employed his military in indiscriminate attacks against civilians in the wars in Chechnya and Syria well before the wholesale slaughter in Ukraine.

Moreover, it’s hardly the case that Russia itself is a hotbed of religious fervor. It’s far more secular than the United States (53 percent of Americans say religion is very important in their lives, versus only 16 percent of Russians). Russia has a substantially higher murder rate than every member of NATO, including the United States. It suppresses religious freedom, and it has one of the highest measured abortion rates in the world.

Is Russia defending itself against Western degeneracy and protecting the Christian faith? No, it’s distorting and appropriating Christianity to inflict its own “pathological” criminality on a peaceful nation and its innocent people.

Peterson’s critique of the West as degenerate or “insane” rests largely on the existence of radical gender ideology and illiberal “wokeness” that does have profound influence in a number of key Western cultural institutions, including the academy, large corporations, and much of the mainstream press.

Yet the Western-protected regime of individual liberty and the rule of law not only protects its citizens from the worst excesses of authoritarians on the left and the right; it protects the mechanisms of internal critique that can and do lead to reform. Moreover, even with wokeness abroad in the land, NATO countries remain among the best places in the history of the world to build a life and raise a family.

Neither America nor its Western allies have ever been perfect. We’ve always been profoundly flawed. Indeed, the United States that fought World War II was far more “degenerate” or “pathological” than it is today. We liberated Europe from Nazi tyranny and Asia from Japanese despotism at the same time that we maintained an apartheid-like Jim Crow regime in the South.

But that did not render the “moral high ground” in the Second World War up for the “most serious debate.”

I’ve long been a participant in the American culture war. I was a pro-life and religious-liberty litigator for more than 20 years before I became a journalist. I also know that it’s easy to lose perspective when you spend too much time immersed in domestic disputes. Most of us, however, get jolted back to reality when we see the true face of aggressive, authoritarian evil. A clash over whether to use the word woman or a person with the capacity for pregnancy is a moral and philosophical dispute that can be mediated through the instruments of liberal democracy.

A Russian cruise missile launched into an apartment building, by contrast, represents a truly different order of depravity. A nation or culture does not have to be perfect to be right, and make no mistake—in the clash between the war criminal in the Kremlin and Ukraine and its NATO allies, the true moral high ground could not be more clear.

newsletters.theatlantic.com · July 15, 2022



20. West Point alumni accuse academy of 'anti-American woke political indoctrination' in letter


Speaking of culture wars.



West Point alumni accuse academy of 'anti-American woke political indoctrination' in letter

americanmilitarynews.com · by Liz George · July 15, 2022

Three retired U.S. military officers and alumni of the United States Military Academy at West Point signed a scathing letter in May slamming the school’s “anti-American, anti-Constitution agenda” being pushed by “woke” leaders through “political indoctrination” driven by mandatory vaccinations that violate religious freedom, Critical Race Theory, and socialist ideology.

The letter – signed by LTG Thomas McInerney, USAF; MG Paul Vallely, U.S. Army; and Colonel Andrew O’Meara Jr., U.S. Army – is entitled “Declaration of Betrayal of West Point And the Long Gray Line” by “Concerned Graduates of West Point.”

In the letter, the officers asserted that it is their “sacred duty” as members of The Long Gray Line – an assembly of West Point graduates – to “challenge dysfunctional conduct or rogue behavior, such as that which has come to dominate West Point.”

The officers stated that “it is not the purpose of the military to help advance the anti-American, anti-Constitution agenda of leftist ideologues. But the military is being forced by WOKE leaders in the White House, Congress, Department of Defense, and Pentagon, to do just that: advance a leftist agenda that seeks to tear down the Constitution, not protect it.”

The letter goes on to accuse the U.S. military of forcing officers and enlisted troops to “sit through leftist indoctrination sessions that portray America as an inherently racist nation, white troops as genetically bigoted, and minority troops as hopeless, lifelong victims.”

“The Biden Administration seeks to divorce military service from defense of the Constitution by replacing allegiance to the Constitution with Critical Race Theory. This prepares the military for their role in support of an overthrow of the government and the Constitutional order,” the letter continued. “By forcing the military to undergo liberal socialist indoctrination they sever the linkage between US military service and support for the Constitution. That action, which violates the Constitution, also violates the oath of office.”

“Civilian faculty members have introduced political indoctrination into academic instruction to include socialist ideology that runs counter to the noble principles of the Constitution,” the letter added. “The corruption of cadet instruction with socialist doctrine is further demonstrated by a pronounced bias in the selection of guest speakers, who have been almost exclusively liberal. We could not identify any conservative speakers in recent years.”

The officers also highlighted “very troubling” instances of “Academy Staff requiring cadets to violate their religious beliefs contrary to the religious freedom long observed by the Academy” by forcing Cadets to submit to “vaccinations with experimental drugs never approved by the FDA.”

Additionally, the officers called out the use of Critical Race Theory in classroom instruction, which they asserted “severs the ties of every cadet to defense of the Constitution, thereby nullifying the oath cadets have sworn to uphold.”

“Critical Race theory now replaces Duty, Honor, Country. The cumulative impact of these changes has so altered the Military Academy that USMA betrays the purpose for which it was founded in 1802 – defense of our Constitution, and maintenance of individual freedom,” the letter added. “This transformation betrays the purpose of the founders and the sacred principals of the Declaration of Independence.”

The officers ultimately declared that “times like these” are why “God made Patriots.”

“This is no time for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. Those who have stood in harm’s way are needed now to stand by our oath. It is time to speak truth to power,” the officers wrote. “We either serve Duty, Honor, Country, or we challenge the demands of a secular revolution to fundamentally alter America transforming the Republic into a socialist police state.”

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americanmilitarynews.com · by Liz George · July 15, 2022



21.  Biden administration warns of criminal drone threat to Americans



​Excerpts:


In written testimony to the committee, Mr. Wiegman said the FBI has conducted 70 drone detection and counter-drone operations at large events, such as the Super Bowl and the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square in New York.
The FBI attempted to stop 50 of the 974 drones it detected in those operations.
He said these operations represented “only 0.05% of the over 121,000 events” for which state, local, and federal officials sought assistance or an assessment regarding counter-drone support from the government.


Biden administration warns of criminal drone threat to Americans


​Officials ask for more government power to counter dangers.​


washingtontimes.com · by Ryan Lovelace


Biden administration officials warned Congress on Thursday that dangerous uses of drones are on the rise, and they want lawmakers to provide additional authority for the federal government to combat the drones.

Deputy assistant attorney general Brad Wiegman told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that lawmakers need to expand powers granted to the government in 2018 but lapsing later this year.

“We’re seeing an increase in the use of drones for a wide spectrum of criminal and other dangerous activities,” Mr. Wiegman told the panel Thursday. “They can be weaponized to conduct attacks using firearms, explosives or other materials. They can conduct cyberattacks against wireless devices or networks. And they can conduct espionage or traffic in narcotics and contraband.”

The Biden administration has made a “Domestic Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems National Action Plan,” under which it wants to reauthorize and expand counter-drone authorities provided to the Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State departments, plus some authorities for the CIA and NASA.

The plan aims to expand where government officials can fight the drones, which officials may do so, and how to do it lawfully.


Homeland Security acting assistant secretary Samantha Vinograd said her agency has watched the threat from drones grow in recent months.

“The threat landscape from drones is heightened and, candidly, escalating extremely fast,” Ms. Vinograd said. “Drones have been used to conduct dangerous kinetic attacks, have interfered with aircrafts and airports, have been used to survey, disrupt, and damage critical infrastructure and services, and more.”

Ms. Vinograd said U.S. Customs and Border Protection detected more than 8,000 illegal cross-border drone flights at the southern border since August 2021.

Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio Republican, pressed Ms. Vinograd on how many of those flights were stopped and she said she would check with the Border Patrol officials.

“We’ve been asking them for this since February, persistently, and we are not getting the information,” Mr. Portman said. “I think it’s important we have an authorization but we have to have information.”

Democrats shared fears of how drones could be weaponized in an attack on Americans too.

“If we do not act, it could only be a matter of time before someone who is recklessly operating this technology causes an accident that can have catastrophic effects,” said Sen. Gary Peters, Michigan Democrat, at the hearing.

“As we work to avoid unintentional disasters, we must also account for the escalating threat of weaponized drones from terrorists and criminal organizations who can launch domestic drone attacks on mass gatherings, high profile landmarks and buildings, or federal property,” he said.

In written testimony to the committee, Mr. Wiegman said the FBI has conducted 70 drone detection and counter-drone operations at large events, such as the Super Bowl and the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square in New York.

The FBI attempted to stop 50 of the 974 drones it detected in those operations.

He said these operations represented “only 0.05% of the over 121,000 events” for which state, local, and federal officials sought assistance or an assessment regarding counter-drone support from the government.

• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.

Copyright © 2022 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

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22. It's time to root out white supremacists in the military and law enforcement


Wow. This is probably the strongest critique of all uniformed services (military and law enforcement) I have read.




It's time to root out white supremacists in the military and law enforcement

thegrio.com · by David A. Love · July 15, 2022

It’s time to root out white supremacists in the military and law enforcement

OPINION: In a vote along party lines—meaning zero Republican support—the House passed an amendment requiring government agencies to produce a report on white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in federal law enforcement and the military. Addressing the problem is long overdue.

David A. Love |

Jul 15, 2022


(Getty Images)

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

White supremacists in the military and law enforcement are not a new phenomenon. But the crisis is growing like a cancer, and now, apparently, the government is finally taking this utmost threat seriously. In light of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, if America fails to root out the white domestic terrorists in our midst, then the country as a whole is in a heap of trouble. And those specifically who are not white supremacists are in deep trouble.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment to require government agencies to produce a report on white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in federal law enforcement and the military. This measure would include the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI.

With a 218-208 vote, the amendment was approved on purely party lines, with all Democrats voting for the amendment and all Republicans voting against it. This breakdown should not surprise those who have paid attention, given the Republican Party is a leading purveyor of white supremacy and party leadership has embraced an agenda of white nationalism; whatever passes as policy in that party these days reflects the racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement theory“—the idea that the white man is an endangered species, and Democrats, liberals and Jewish people are replacing him with Black and brown people.

It is likely the Republicans in the Senate will kill the legislation because white supremacists are the base of the Republican Party. A recent poll found that 7 in 10 Republicans believe in the great replacement theory.

Pentagon report last year sounded the alarm on the white supremacist threat in the armed services. The report focused on recruitment and called for changes in the screening process for military recruits, given that even a small number of domestic extremists pose a national security threat and undermine military cohesion. The number of white extremists in the military is unknown. In the past, white supremacist servicemembers have committed murderplanned acts of terrorism and have been involved in other disturbing activities.

Active-duty servicemembers are “highly prized” members of domestic terrorist groups who legitimize these groups and help increase recruitment, according to the Pentagon report. And all that helpful combat and weapons training translates into more successful terrorist attacks. Over the past two decades, right-wing extremists have killed more people in America than any other extremist group, according to a senior Department of Defense official.

Some active-duty soldiers have been discharged for their membership in white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. More importantly, white supremacist servicemembers with ties to militia groups such as the Oath Keepers participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and install Donald Trump as dictator.

As we have learned from the congressional hearings, the Oath Keepers—whose members are reportedly tens of thousands of current and former military and law enforcement officials—were key players in the deadly attack. An estimated 13 percent of insurrection-related arrests have been of veterans or active-duty soldiers, and one-fifth of applicants to the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front claim military ties. At least five Patriot Front members, including four veterans and a National Guard cadet, were arrested last month for planning to attack an Idaho Pride event.

Joining forces with groups such as the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, the Republican Party and others, the Oath Keepers harbor racist and antisemitic beliefs and call for a civil war—an “armed revolution,” which they tried to carry out at the Capitol insurrection.

Perhaps the most prominent military member involved in Jan. 6 was retired lieutenant general and Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. A QAnon conspiracist who has ties to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and has openly flashed the white power hand sign, Flynn claimed President Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump, and he called for violence. Flynn advised Trump to seize voting machines across the country and impose martial law. And Flynn pleaded the Fifth when investigators asked him if the violence of Jan. 6 was justified and whether he believed in a peaceful transfer of power.

If that was not enough, Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, then-deputy chief of staff of the Army and brother of Michael Flynn, was involved in key discussions with U.S. Capitol Police and District of Columbia officials on whether to send in National Guard troops to end the violent Capitol riot. The Pentagon at first denied Charles Flynn had been involved in any such calls that day.

Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a part of DHS, has fostered a culture of racism and violence against migrants, with dehumanizing verbal abuse against people from the Global South. The nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency, CBP has employed white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members since its inception nearly a century ago, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Border Patrol agents have killed 100 people in the last decade, abused Indigenous children and caused their deaths, posted racist and sexist material online, and have spread replacement theory without being held accountable. The blatant racism and brutality of the Border Patrol were on full display in September 2021, when CBP agents were photographed and video recorded riding on horseback and chasing, whipping and yelling at Haitian migrants on the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas.

A now-iconic photo shows a Border Patrol agent on horseback armed with a whip and grabbing Mirard Joseph, a Haitian migrant. The organization Haitian Bridge Alliance filed a federal lawsuit against the Biden administration and CBP on behalf of Joseph, alleging CBP agents used horse reins as whips against Haitian people. A CBP report called for discipline for four agents for violations such as using “denigrating and offensive language” and “force or the threat of force.” denied. However, the report denied allegations from the Haitian Bridge Alliance that agents used horse reins to strike Haitian migrants, even as the images of such behavior sparked international outrage.

White supremacists have infiltrated the military and the police for decades, if not forever. America, you have a problem on your hands, and it is coming from inside. You armed and trained this threat, and you gave it a uniform, so this is on you.


David A. Love is a journalist and commentator who writes investigative stories and op-eds on a variety of issues, including politics, social justice, human rights, race, criminal justice and inequality. Love is also an instructor at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, where he trains students in a social justice journalism lab. In addition to his journalism career, Love has worked as an advocate and leader in the nonprofit sector, served as a legislative aide, and as a law clerk to two federal judges. He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He also completed the Joint Programme in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. His portfolio website is davidalove.com.

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thegrio.com · by David A. Love · July 15, 2022





De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com


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

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

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

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