Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners



Quotes of the Day:


“We can’t learn without pain.”
- Aristotle


“If you feel pain you’re alive.” If you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being.”
- Leo Tolstoy

“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.”
- Nelson Mandela




1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 21 (Putin's War)

2. SOCOM Nominee Sees China Fight As More Partner Building, Less Door Kicking

3. HIMARS: The new U.S. rocket launchers in Ukraine are making the Russians furious. But can they win the war?

4. How Inequality Hobbles Military Power

5. Why the Human Rights Movement Is Losing

6. The Future of China's Cognitive Warfare: Lessons from the War in Ukraine

7. Has Russia Reached Its ‘Culminating Point’ in Ukraine?

8. Russia declares expanded war goals beyond Ukraine's Donbas

9. The bottom lines for peace in UkraineThe bottom lines for peace in Ukraine

10. Two kinds of détenteTwo kinds of détente



1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 21 (Putin's War)



RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 21

Jul 21, 2022 - Press ISW


understandingwar.org

Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Layne Philipson, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

July 21, 5:00 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 conducted a few limited and highly localized ground attacks on July 21. The current Russian operational tempo is not markedly different from what it was during the officially declared operational pause between July 7 and July 16. Russian forces continued to conduct minor attacks throughout that period to the northwest of Slovyansk and around the Siversk and Bakhmut areas without capturing any decisive ground.[1] Since July 16, Russian troops have continued local attacks to the east of Siversk as well as east and south of Bakhmut; they have not made any major territorial gains in these areas as of July 21. The Russian grouping northwest of Slovyansk has in fact conducted fewer ground attacks along the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border than it did during the official operational pause. The lack of successful ground attacks beyond the Slovyansk, Siversk, and Bakhmut areas is consistent with ISW’s assessment that the Russian offensive is likely to culminate without capturing Slovyansk or Bakhmut.[2]

Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on July 21 that Russian troops have used up to 55-60% of Russia’s pre-war reserve of high-precision missiles.[3] GUR spokesperson Vadym Skibitksy specified that these high-precision missiles include Kh-101, Kh-555, Iskander, and Kalibr systems, which he stated Russian forces have been using less frequently, partially due to the effect of Western sanctions on the availability of needed components for high-precision systems.[4] On the other hand, Ukrainian forces have recently acquired an influx of Western-provided high-precision systems such as high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS), which they are using to a more decisive effect than the Russians have been achieving with their precision systems. Russian forces will likely continue to employ their reserves of lower-precision Soviet weapons systems, but the decisiveness of these strikes, compared to the impact of Ukrainian HIMARS strikes, is likely to remain limited.[5]

Key Takeaways

  • The current Russian operational tempo is not markedly different from the pace of Russian offensive operations during the official Russian operational pause, and Russian forces are unlikely to be able to take significant ground in the coming weeks.
  • Russia has likely used as much as 55-60% of its high-precision weaponry reserve.
  • Russian forces continued limited ground attacks to the east of Siversk and south of Bakhmut.
  • Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful ground attack north of Kharkiv City.
  • Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack in Kherson Oblast.
  • Russian forces may be storing equipment in Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant facilities to protect it against Ukrainian strikes.
  • Russia’s Murmansk Oblast is reportedly forming a volunteer battalion.


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 two 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 conducted artillery strikes to the southeast of Izyum toward Slovyansk and to the southwest of Izyum toward Barvinkove but did not make any confirmed ground attacks in the direction of Slovyansk on July 21.[6] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces shelled Dolyna, Bohorodychne, and Adamivka, northwest of Slovyansk, as well as various settlements in the vicinity of Barvinkove.[7] Russian Telegram channel Readovka noted that Russian efforts to advance toward Slovyansk are likely continually stymied by the challenging hilly and forested terrain surrounding the city and claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain control of the dominant heights around Slovyansk, especially to the south near Kramatorsk and to the east in Raihorodok.[8] Readovka’s assessment of Russian positions relative to terrain in this area is consistent with ISW’s control of terrain assessment.

Russian forces continued limited and unsuccessful ground attacks east of Siversk on July 21. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces failed to advance from the Lysychansk Oil Refinery in Verkhnokamyanka in the direction of Ivano-Darivka, about 5 km southeast of Siversk.[9] Russian troops also conducted air and artillery strikes on Siversk and Ukrainian positions in the surrounding settlements of Serebryanka, Spirne, and Hryhorivka.[10] Russian Telegram channel Readovka noted that—similar to the situation in Slovyansk—Russian forces around Siversk have not yet captured the dominant heights surrounding the city, which leaves them vulnerable to continued Ukrainian artillery fire from fortified positions.[11]

Russian forces continued limited ground attacks south of Bakhmut on July 21. The Ukrainian General Staff reported unsuccessful Russian assaults along the Klynove-Vershyna line, about 10 km southeast of Bakhmut.[12] Russian troops also continued to fight further south of Bakhmut in Novoluhanske and near the Vuhledar Power Plant.[13] Russian forces will likely attempt to push west on Bakhmut from positions on the eastern parts of Pokrovske and continued to shell Bakhmut and surrounding settlements.[14]

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line of contact on July 21. Russian milblogger Yuri Kotyenok claimed that Russian forces are fighting near Novoselivka Druha, Kamyanka, and Novobakhmutivka in order to push toward Avdiivka.[15] The Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian strikes around the Donetsk City area and toward the Zaporizhia Oblast border.[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 conducted a limited and unsuccessful ground attack north of Kharkiv City on July 21.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to advance in the Velyki Prokhody-Pytomnyk direction.[18] Russian forces also intensified artillery strikes on Kharkiv City on July 21, striking exclusively civilian infrastructure in an unspecified district of the city.[19] Russian forces continued launching tube and rocket artillery at Kharkiv City and settlements to the north, northeast, and southeast and launched airstrikes on Verkhnii Saltiv and Rtyshchivka.[20]


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

Russian forces conducted a limited ground offensive in Kherson Oblast but otherwise focused on maintaining defensive positions on the Southern Axis on July 21. Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces attempted a failed platoon-sized ground assault near Andriivka and toward Lozove, Kherson Oblast, indicating that Ukrainian forces retain a bridgehead on the Inhulets River.[21] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces struck industrial areas, energy infrastructure, and humanitarian trucks in Mykolaiv City with seven S-300 anti-air missiles.[22] Russian forces shelled the Nikopol area of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with Grad multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), likely from positions in Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast.[23] Ukrainian forces destroyed six Russian ammunition depots and a command post in the Kherson, Beryslav, and Kakhova areas of Kherson Oblast.[24] Russian forces continued shelling along the entire line of contact.[25]

Russian forces may be storing heavy military equipment in the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Enerhodar to protect it from Ukrainian strikes. Ukrainian state energy enterprise Energoatom reported that Russian forces demanded access to the engine rooms of reactors 1, 2, and 3 on July 20 and transferred 14 pieces of heavy military equipment and ammunition to the engine room of reactor 2 on July 21.[26] Energoatom reported that the Russian equipment is placed closed to highly combustible materials and makes the engine room inaccessible to emergency services in case of a fire. Energoatom warned that the detonation of the Russian ammunition at the Zaporizhzhia NPP would cause a disaster on the same scale as the Chernobyl disaster.[27] Odesa Military Administration Spokesman Serhiy Bratchuk stated that Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian military position in occupied Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast, on July 21.[28]


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

Murmansk Oblast authorities reported on July 20 that they are recruiting for a new volunteer battalion to participate in the war in Ukraine.[29] GUR reported on July 21 that Russian forces are forming hybrid battalion tactical groups (BTGs) from elements of different units as they lack sufficient manpower to form BTGs from a single military base.[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)

Nothing significant to report.

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Elc2-KjA48&ab_channel=UkrinformTVhttps://gur.gov dot ua/content/rosiia-iz-pochatku-povnomasshtabnoho-vtorhnennia-v-ukrainu-vykorystala-do-60-usikh-svoikh-raket.html

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Elc2-KjA48&ab_channel=UkrinformTVhttps://gur.gov dot ua/content/rosiia-iz-pochatku-povnomasshtabnoho-vtorhnennia-v-ukrainu-vykorystala-do-60-usikh-svoikh-raket.html

[24] https://khoda dot gov.ua/383932

understandingwar.org




2. SOCOM Nominee Sees China Fight As More Partner Building, Less Door Kicking


General Fenton is the right man at the right time to lead USSOCOM.


SOCOM Nominee Sees China Fight As More Partner Building, Less Door Kicking

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

Special operations forces are already prepared for possible action against China in defense in Taiwan, but the role of special operators in the Indo-Pacific, in competition with China, would differ substantially from the fast-paced, kinetic counter-terrorism performed in the Middle East and Afghanistan, Army Lt. Gen. Bryan Fenton, the nominee to lead Special Operations Command, testified Thursday.

Responding to a question from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Fenton declined to speculate on when China might make a military play for Taiwan, but acknowledged that Indo-PACOM leaders have said the window is within this decade, and could be within the next five years. Regardless of when, Fenton said, special operations forces are ready, “will remain ready, competing, contesting, and developing a range of options if needed for the joint force in high-end conflict.”

But ready to do what?

Much of the counterterrorism fight of the last two decades in the Middle East and Afghanistan had special operations forces—like the famous SEAL Team 6 that killed Osama bin Laden compound and the Army “horse soldiers” advanced teams who launched operations against the Taliban—engaged in combat.

Responding to a different question from Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Tenn., Fenton acknowledged that the role of special operators in the context of the Pacific is different, with a greater emphasis on building partnerships and developing unconventional, or “asymmetric” warfare capabilities—the sort that can give a small, outgunned force a fighting chance against a much larger, better-armed adversary.

“I would start with the role in concert with the [combatant commands], developing asymmetric, scalable options for the Co-Coms via our special operators’ placement, access, and influence.”

That looks much more like what special operations teams were doing with the Ukrainian military prior to this February, conducting advanced training and helping them to develop tactics and techniques with drones, satellite intelligence, and other emerging technologies to better compete against massive columns of Russian armor.

In the Indo-Pacific, he said, the challenge is much less about hunting down specific high-value targets (as it was in other recent wars) and much more about “presenting multiple dilemmas to the Chinese…and also developing and strengthening the partner and ally piece that's a comparative and competitive advantage for this nation.”

While Washington is moving its focus toward China and Russia, today’s nomination hearing, which also featured Lt. Gen. Michael Langley, the nominee to head U.S. Africa Command, showcased how China and Russia are challenging the United States in Africa and how violent extremist organizations on the continent continue to gain power, even if the world and Washington are paying less attention to them.

Several senators asked about Russian influence efforts in Africa, and particularly the recent push to blame Western sanctions for recent grain shortages that have hit African populations hard—rather than blaming Russia for launching a war on one of the world's top grain producing countries. Langley testified that diplomatic outreach to counter both Russian and Chinese narratives would be “a top priority” as the head of the combatant command.

He was later asked about violent extremist groups in the region, such as al-Shabab. Langley's outgoing predecessor Gen. Townsend has described them as “the largest and most kinetically active al Qaeda network in the world.”

They, too, would be “a top priority,” Langley said.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker






3. HIMARS: The new U.S. rocket launchers in Ukraine are making the Russians furious. But can they win the war?


No single system or capability can win a war.. Strategy and campaign plans win war.s. But HIMARS is an exquisite capability that will make an important contribution to winning the war.




HIMARS: The new U.S. rocket launchers in Ukraine are making the Russians furious. But can they win the war?

The High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System weapon has inspired Ukrainian soldiers and a catchy song. Can it live up to the hype?


Joshua Keating

Global Security Reporter

July 22, 2022

grid.news · by Joshua Keating

The Ukrainians have a new weapon to sing about. Taras Borovok, the Ukrainian soldier who previously penned a viral musical tribute to the Turkish-supplied Bayraktar drone, recently released a new song paying tribute to the American supplied High-Mobility Advanced Rocket System — better known by its now-famous acronym.

“HIMARS! Our trusted ally from America is here. Do you want to meet him?” goes the catchy jingle shared last week on the Facebook page of the Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff.

Even by the standards of this social-media saturated war, the HIMARS is getting a lot of hype. A month ago, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted, “HIMARS have arrived to Ukraine. Thank you to my colleague and friend @SecDef [Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III] for these powerful tools! Summer will be hot for the Russian occupiers. And the last one for some of them.”

So far, Reznikov’s excitement seems justified. Rockets fired from HIMARS have struck more than 30 Russian targets behind enemy lines in Ukraine, including ammunition depots and command and control posts. By all accounts, they’ve thrown Russian logistics into disarray and are slowing the Russian military’s advance in eastern Ukraine. The governor of war-torn Luhansk province has described the Russians as in “panic mode” over the HIMARS’ capabilities. One sign that the hype may be true: Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has ordered his forces to prioritize destroying them.

In recent days, Ukraine used HIMARS to strike a key bridge used by Russian forces to resupply the occupied city of Kherson in southern Ukraine. The strike was likely part of preparations for an upcoming offensive to retake the city, which was captured by the Russians in the early days of the war.

The U.S. has already sent 12 HIMARS to Ukraine, and Austin announced on Wednesday that four more are on the way. The U.K. has also sent three M270 artillery launchers — an older but compatible model — and Germany has committed several as well. The system has emerged as something of a litmus test for Western support for Ukraine. In a recent Washington Post column, defense columnist Max Boot argued that if the Biden administration were serious about shortening the war, it would “send 60 HIMARS to Ukraine.”

Part of the reason for all the HIMARS enthusiasm is that they’ve provided the first reasons for battlefield optimism for Ukraine and its allies in quite some time. Since early April, when Russian forces abandoned their ill-fated attempt to take Kyiv in order to focus on the eastern Donbas region, they’ve been making slow but steady progress, in large part because of their overwhelming advantage in heavy artillery. The arrival of the HIMARS is the first sign the balance in artillery may be shifting in Ukraine’s favor.

How much of a wonder weapon is the HIMARS? And might it really the turn the tide of the war?

What is a HIMARS?

The High Mobility Artillery Rocket System is more or less what it sounds like: A platform loaded with multiple rockets that can be fired in short succession. The HIMARS is a particularly sophisticated version, each carrying either one-half dozen guided rockets with a range of around 40 miles, or a single Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which has a range of almost 200 miles. By contrast, the M777 howitzer cannon, one of the most advanced U.S. artillery pieces on the battlefield in Ukraine, has a range of less than 20 miles.

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The HIMARS’ payload is powerful enough to inflict damage on par with aerial bombardment.

There’s some historical irony to the fact these weapons are now making the Russian military’s life miserable as it attempts to “denazify” Ukraine. The Soviets were pioneers in the use of multiple rocket launchers dating back to World War II, when Katyusha rocket launchers — also known as “Stalin’s Organs” were used with devastating effect against the actual Nazis. (Ukraine also has a number of Soviet-era multiple launch rocket systems in its arsenal, both from its prewar stocks and via donations from Poland and the Czech Republic.)

The U.S. caught up with the Soviets with the development in the 1980s of the M270, which was used during the 1991 Gulf War. The lighter and easier-to-maintain M142 HIMARS was developed in the 1990s and is produced today by Lockheed Martin. Essentially a rocket launcher mounted on the back of a truck, the M142 HIMARS is light enough to be transported by cargo plane and its mobility makes it hard for the enemy to take out.

HIMARS have been used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Iraq and even in Jordan, where they were used to fire on Islamic State targets over the border in Syria. But they’re ultimately better suited for the current war in Ukraine, where there is no shortage of large and immobile fixed infrastructure to target. “We have used them before but not in this kind of role, which is what they were really designed for,” Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel who is now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Grid.

Previous rocket launcher systems were known for being destructive but also crude and inaccurate. The biggest technical leap in recent years has been the development of the precision-guided rockets, which use GPS tracking to hit specific targets at great distances.

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HIMARS has also been tested in the past as a potential anti-ship system, which could offer some tantalizing options for Ukraine in the battle for control of the Black Sea.

What’s the catch?

HIMARS is not the first “game changer” to reach the battlefield in Ukraine. Those Bayraktar drones as well as the anti-tank missiles that became known as ”St. Javelin” have had their moment in the sun as well. Eventually, Russian tactics adapted and the weapons became less effective.

That could happen for HIMARS as well, even if it hasn’t quite happened yet. While Russia says it has destroyed HIMARS in Ukraine, the U.S. and Ukrainians have rejected those claims. “To date, those systems have not been eliminated by the Russians, and I knock on wood every time I say something like that,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a press briefing on Wednesday.

Nonetheless, HIMARS and other mobile rocket systems will now be a major priority for Russian artillery, airstrikes and drones. The Russian military does not yet appear able to use its electronic warfare capability to jam the HIMARS’ GPS systems, as they have with great effectiveness against Ukrainian drones, but that could change.

Maintenance is also likely to be an issue. The Ukrainian military has gotten its troops trained on using the HIMARS remarkably quickly; they were deployed on the battlefield within weeks of their arrival. But the bigger challenge will be the upkeep. Under normal conditions, training to maintain a system as advanced as the HIMARS can take months, and that’s not taking into account the difficulty of sourcing spare parts from the battlefield. And to state the obvious: These aren’t normal conditions.

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And while Ukraine asks for dozens more of the HIMARS themselves, there’s also the question of just how many individual rockets the U.S. will send Ukraine. The U.S. has thus far shipped “hundreds” of compatible rockets to the war zone, but this drawn-out artillery duel is likely to last a long time. At a certain point it may start to put a strain on U.S. stocks. This happened with supplies of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles in the early days of the war.

“The issue will become ammunition and the consumption rates,” Milley said on Wednesday. “We are looking at all of that very, very carefully on a day-to-day basis. … We think we’re OK right now.”

On a tactical level, the HIMARS munitions are very effective for hitting fixed targets at long range — say, a Russian ammunitions dump — but are less suited for broad strikes against infantry or artillery. That means they’ll be less effective as part of an eventual Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south or east of the country. “HIMARS will help produce a stalemate, but it’s not going to be decisive in reconquering the lost territory,” said Cancian.

Despite their precision, there’s also the higher potential for civilian casualties when longer-range weapons are used. The Russian media has reported a number of civilian casualties from HIMARS strikes, putting the blame on Ukraine’s American allies. While such claims cannot be verified — and they certainly are not comparable to the mass-casualty destruction of Ukrainian cities by the Russian military. Russia can be expected to take full propaganda advantage of any errant strikes.

Rocket politics

One might wonder, given their effectiveness, why it took the U.S. so long to start sending Ukraine HIMARS in the first place. One reason appears to have been concerns about the potential for these long-range rockets to be used to hit targets inside Russia. “We are not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that can strike into Russia,” President Joe Biden told reporters in May. The Ukrainians have attacked a number of targets within Russia but have been coy about it. Reznikov said the Ukrainians have committed not to use HIMARS against targets on Russian territory, though it’s not clear if that extends to Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

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Meanwhile, the Biden administration has softened its stance, but only to a degree: The U.S. is not providing the longer-range ATACMS rockets, which could hit deep within Russia, despite Ukrainian requests. As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl put it in a press briefing at the beginning of June, “We settled on the HIMARS with the GMLRS round as the appropriate round at this time. We don’t assess that they need systems that range out hundreds and hundreds of kilometers for the current fight.” A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment when asked by Grid whether ATACMS are currently being considered for Ukraine, referring to earlier public statements.

This caution does not appear to have mollified the Russian leadership. In comments this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia would be forced to take more territory in Ukraine if the West continued providing it with weapons, such as the HIMARS, that could strike Russian territory. “If the West continues to pump Ukraine full of weaponry out of impotent rage or a desire to exacerbate the situation … then that means our geographical tasks will move even further from the current line,” he said.

Lavrov’s comment should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s not clear that Russia ever abandoned the goals of taking as much Ukrainian territory as it possibly can. When asked about the comments, Austin quipped, “I’m sure that Ukrainian leadership will be pleased to hear Lavrov’s confirmation of the effectiveness” of the HIMARS.

The HIMARS is neither a miracle weapon nor the battlefield newcomer that will ultimately determine victory in this war. But for now, it’s fair to say that it’s shifting how both sides view what’s possible on the battlefield. And for many Ukrainians, that’s something to sing about.

Thanks to Alicia Benjamin for copy editing this article.

grid.news · by Joshua Keating





4. How Inequality Hobbles Military Power



Conclusion:


Tracking inequality within armies is not a silver bullet. Analysts still need to account for military capabilities. Friction, uncertainty, and the fortunes of war will continue to confound even the best prewar assessments. But adding military inequality to net assessment will improve accuracy at a fraction of the cost of big-ticket technology, such as new satellite capabilities or clandestine signals intelligence. The ways in which social divisions and identities shape battlefield performance cannot be ignored. Military models must include the human elements of war or risk unwelcome surprises on the battlefield.


How Inequality Hobbles Military Power

Divided Armies Struggle to Win

By Jason Lyall

July 22, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Jason Lyall · July 22, 2022

Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine, along with unexpectedly dogged Ukrainian resistance, has sparked a debate about whether the current ways of measuring military capabilities are flawed. Indeed, U.S. intelligence analysts have been shocked by the rapid disintegration of the Afghan military in 2021, the collapse of Iraqi units in the face of the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS) in 2014, and Ethiopia’s shambolic performance against Tigrayan rebels in the last two years. U.S. analysts correctly predicted that Russia would invade in February, but their assumption that Ukraine would fall in a matter of days has only fueled the perception that something is amiss in how the intelligence community thinks about and measures military power. Prodded by angry lawmakers, the U.S. intelligence community has launched a sweeping internal review of how it assesses foreign military power amid its missteps in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

These intelligence failures have a common taproot: they neglect the nonmaterial drivers of military power. Most important, they overlook how social inequalities within armies shape battlefield performance. Current models of net assessment, the framework used to measure the relative strength of a military, privilege quantifiable indicators, such as numbers of tanks and soldiers. These metrics have proved to be poor predictors of how armies fight and whether they win wars. Afghan forces outnumbered Taliban fighters but could not translate their material advantages into victory. Even the largest and best-equipped fighting forces can fail on the battlefield if they lack the cohesion and determination of their foes. Armies, after all, are not just the sum of their personnel and their equipment; they can be riven with ethnic, racial, class, and other social divisions that invariably shape their capacity to fight. The intelligence community ignores these dynamics at its peril.

FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS

States spend fortunes sizing one another up. Better insights can tip the scales, but net assessment is a fraught business. States practice elaborate deception, seeking to hide their true military strength from prying eyes. Some capabilities can be properly appraised only when combat begins. Context, too, can shape battlefield dynamics in unpredictable ways. Analysts and organizations alike are fallible, forced to make judgments with incomplete information. Cognitive biases and internal politics can distort assessments. In the face of these overlapping problems, many analysts choose to be cautious and err on the side of exaggerating enemy capabilities to avoid battlefield surprises.

This conservative bias leads analysts to privilege quantitative measures of military capabilities. They dwell on so-called objective factors, including the number of soldiers under arms, annual defense spending, per capita income, and the acquisition of new technologies, to create estimates of relative military power. Much effort is also devoted to divining the capabilities of adversaries from published doctrines. Analysts estimate quantitative indicators of military strength using a sprawling infrastructure of satellites, open-source data collection, spies, and electronic eavesdropping.

Such efforts have scored successes—Russia’s plan to invade Ukraine was published even before its tanks crossed the border. But analysts using objective measures rely on three assumptions that create dangerous blind spots.



Armies reflect their societies and are subject to the same social divisions.

First, analysts should not assume that material strength translates into battlefield victories. In his 2004 book, Military Power, the international relations scholar Stephen Biddle found that material factors such as GDP, population, and military spending have had, at best, a weak connection to victory in wars since 1900. In my own work examining 252 wars since 1800, I found virtually no statistical correlation between the size of opposing armies and battlefield outcomes, including relative casualties, the likelihood of desertion and defection, or who eventually won. Given these results, it is perhaps unsurprising that much of the current debate among scholars over the sources of military effectiveness focuses on nonmaterial factors such as regime type, ideology, and culture, not relative material strength. Yet public debates outside the academy, including ones on the outcome of the war in Ukraine, still privilege traditional indicators of relative material strength.

Second, today’s net assessment assumes that armies are efficient killing machines. This, too, is mistaken. Nearly all armies reflect the societal divisions—whether ethnic, racial, ideological, or class based—of the broader country. Left unmanaged, these divisions create friction that saps military strength. In some cases, armies draw heavily from marginalized groups to spare the regime’s supporters from the costs of war. Some armies maintain cohesion through intimidation, forcing their own soldiers to fight. These armies might appear formidable on paper but typically lurch into battle hobbled by discord. The alienation of the Sunnis in Iraq inflamed sectarian tensions within the Iraqi army. That led many Sunni soldiers to desert in 2014, allowing ISIS to take Mosul with ease despite being outnumbered and outgunned.

Third, analysts assume that material indicators are more objective, leading them to downplay intangible factors, such as soldier morale or unit cohesion. And when analysts do consider these intangibles, they tend to treat them as uniform across an entire army. Doing so, however, omits the human side of war. Soldiers are not homogenous. Some might rally to the colors. But others may be driven by more mercenary motives. Still others may be forced to fight on behalf of a government they despise. Stitching together a coherent narrative that inspires all soldiers to fight equally hard is beyond the power of many governments. Russia is trying to form volunteer battalions to fight in Ukraine from prisoners, non-Russian Muslim populations, pro-Russian Ukrainian soldiers, and draft dodgers. Motivating soldiers in this patchwork quilt, especially given their limited training time, will be difficult. Analysts must recognize that for many armies, maintaining order and discipline is as challenging as fighting enemy forces.

THE PERILS OF MILITARY INEQUALITY

Improving net assessment requires opening the black box of armies to explore the nature and severity of the inequality that lies within. The intuition here is simple: armies reflect their societies and are subject to the same social divisions. Analysts need to gather two pieces of information to estimate a military’s level of inequality. They first need to map the size and composition of the social groups that make up the army. Historically, ethnicity has been a powerful source of potential division. Since 1800, the average army has gone into battle with five different ethnic groups in its ranks. In 1812, Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched on Moscow with enlisted soldiers from at least nine different nationalities, with French soldiers in the minority. During World War II, the Soviet Union’s Red Army, often imagined as ethnically Russian, cobbled together rifle divisions with soldiers from 28 different ethnic groups. Analysts next need to know how the state treats each group within its military. Some groups may be granted full rights and opportunities. Others, however, could be considered second-class citizens or, worse, could be subject to violent political oppression. France and the United Kingdom routinely levied colonial armies from marginalized populations to fight wars at home and abroad. The more an army is drawn from marginalized groups, and the more harshly those groups are treated by the state, the more unequal the force becomes—and the worse it performs on the battlefield.

Diversity is not destiny. Battlefield performance is driven by how the state treats each social group, not by the total number of groups within an army. Inclusive armies, ones that recruit among groups that enjoy full citizenship, can rise above crippling social divisions. For these armies, patriotism can be a powerful motivator. So, too, can be the promise of greater inclusion. During both World War I and World War II, Black Americans fought a double war: one against external foes and one for equality when the war ended. Even authoritarian powers, including Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, dangled greater inclusion to repressed minorities in Central Asia to bolster recruitment. But history carries a weight. Wartime adjustments to increase inclusion can improve battlefield performance on the margins but cannot overcome the legacy of the state’s oppression before the war.


States cannot easily hide the structures of their societies or the fact of repression.


Unlike standard indicators of national power, military inequality offers a clear connection to how and whether armies will fight. The greater the share of soldiers from marginalized groups in a given army, the worse that army will perform on the battlefield. Prewar inequalities wend themselves through the military like a poison, corroding combat power before a shot is even fired. Soldiers who have faced discrimination at home can be less willing to fight on the field. Inequality also sows distrust between privileged and marginalized groups, eroding bonds between soldiers and, in many cases, between officers and the rank and file. Past injustices create common cause among targeted groups to resist military authorities. The army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire unraveled during World War I as repressed Magyar and Slavic soldiers chose desertion over duty, fleeing the battlefield.

Unequal armies tend to be coercive toward their troops. Fearing mass indiscipline, such armies will adopt rigid command structures. They threaten or use violence to manufacture cohesion. Left without convincing ideological appeals, highly unequal armies may encourage soldiers to pillage and rape as rewards for continued service. Inequality also forces commanders to simplify their tactics. Sophisticated combined arms operations are too complicated for halfhearted soldiers to execute. Commanders are left facing a war within the war as they scramble to impose discipline and muster sufficient combat power to fight. In many cases, they fail. Over the past 200 years, highly unequal armies have suffered higher casualty rates and more frequent outbreaks of mass desertion than their more inclusive counterparts. The Mahdist Army, fighting in Sudan, was bitterly divided along ethnic and tribal lines and suffered one of the most lopsided defeats in recorded history. At Omdurman in 1898, it lost over 12,000 soldiers while killing only 48 of the opposing Anglo-Egyptian forces.

DISCORD IN THE ARMY

Military inequality offers several advantages as a guide to battlefield performance. For one, it is more visible. States cannot easily hide the structures of their societies or the fact of repression. Analysts can use open-source data as well as historical research to determine just how unequal and fractious a given military might be. Social divisions are slow to change, creating stable baselines for comparison. Given the gradual and hard-to-conceal nature of social structures, estimates of inequality are more likely to be accurate than those assessing new military technologies or doctrines. Measures of inequality can also be tailored for context. In some settings, ethnic or racial identities might divide a military. Class, ideology, or gender might prove more salient in other armies. Perhaps most important, military inequality is a scalable indicator. It can predict the battlefield performance of entire armies, small formations, or even individual units.

Useful data on morale and cohesion abound. Soldiers air their grievances on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, and Twitter. Such griping can be used to assess overall morale, distrust within the ranks, and support for the government. Soldiers’ posts can be geotagged to specific bases. Surveys can also be effective tools for assessing client armies. Polling within the Afghan military provided early clues of ethnic tensions, dwindling support for the regime, and an unwillingness among many soldiers to die in defense of the government.


The intelligence community ignores these dynamics of inequality within military forces at its peril.

Inequality can warp how armies recruit and deploy their soldiers. Highly unequal armies will often recruit, forcibly or otherwise, from marginalized communities as a way of insulating the regime from domestic antiwar sentiment. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stumbled in part because it relied on soldiers from ambivalent non-Russian minority groups, opportunistic Kyrgyz contract soldiers, and duped Russian conscripts plucked from poor, distant regions. Frontal, often uncoordinated, assaults by these “cannon fodder” forces were a direct result of an army staffed largely by soldiers drawn from populations considered to be expendable. Russia tucked these poorly trained conscripts into the army’s logistical corps, leading to snarled supply lines and columns of abandoned tanks. Identifying where armies deploy their marginalized soldiers or where they miss recruitment quotas offers clues about potential vulnerabilities.

Military inequality can cause rancor between soldiers and their superiors. Unequal armies typically draw their officers from politically reliable groups, relegating less trustworthy ones to the enlisted ranks. Divided armies are plagued by hazing and abuse. Officers rule through intimidation and violence. And unfair military legal systems and extrajudicial punishment flourish. Corruption, too, is often a symptom of inequality, as officers abuse their power to steal from their own soldiers. It is easy, after all, to scrimp on maintenance and equipment or to steal wages if officers view their soldiers as beneath them. Such impropriety cripples military effectiveness and can be spotted before a war begins.

THE HUMAN FACE OF WAR

Tracking inequality within armies is not a silver bullet. Analysts still need to account for military capabilities. Friction, uncertainty, and the fortunes of war will continue to confound even the best prewar assessments. But adding military inequality to net assessment will improve accuracy at a fraction of the cost of big-ticket technology, such as new satellite capabilities or clandestine signals intelligence. The ways in which social divisions and identities shape battlefield performance cannot be ignored. Military models must include the human elements of war or risk unwelcome surprises on the battlefield.


Foreign Affairs · by Jason Lyall · July 22, 2022



5. Why the Human Rights Movement Is Losing


At least when it comes to north Korea, human rights is a national security issue in addition to being a moral imperative.. Kim must deny human rights in the north in order to remain in power. And our focus on the nuclear issue actually reinforces Kim's legitimacy. But when we focus on human rights it undermines his legitimacy. 


Excerpts:

This doesn’t mean liberal states and human rights activists shouldn’t be clear about principles. It means they must be careful and strategic about how they promote these values. That also includes avoiding toothless demands. Biden called Putin “a war criminal” who “cannot remain in power,” but he has no plausible way to deliver on this provocative statement. Although these kinds of empty condemnations may yield short-term feel-good effects, they ultimately look like hypocrisy, even if they are heartfelt. And as veteran human rights activist Priscilla Hayner notes in a recent book, there really are tradeoffs between peace and justice. Threatening military elites and other policymakers with jail time could, for example, foreclose offering them asylum or amnesty if they help end the warfare—and war, after all is the most severe cause of rights abuse. Exercising prosecutorial discretion “in the interests of justice,” as the statute of the International Criminal Court puts it, entails managing this tradeoff by undertaking tactically smart investigations while postponing untimely indictments.
Human rights, despite recent setbacks, are still the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of democracy. Wielding these weapons effectively requires understanding that the power of these rights lies in their appeal to self-interest and that they must be backed by a solidly constructed political coalition that delivers reliable results. Power leads; rights follow.

Why the Human Rights Movement Is Losing

And How It Can Start Winning Again

By Jack Snyder

July 21, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Jack Snyder · July 21, 2022

The modern human rights movement has long presented itself as an idealistic crusade. In a world rife with bare-knuckle power politics and predation on the weak, it likes to serve as a beacon of unstinting moral clarity grounded in universal principles. Human rights activists interpret their movement’s iconic victories as triumphs of unyielding rectitude that lay the groundwork for future progressive causes. In 2012, Aryeh Neier, the co-founder of Human Rights Watch, wrote that the antislavery movement was the first true human rights campaign because its adherents mobilized for the rights of others. The early abolitionists themselves claimed that their uncompromising pursuit of altruistic principles prevailed because the moral truth of their cause was self-evident. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., served as later paragons of the same resolute, exemplary model.

But the movement is flummoxed now that its style of one-way dialogue and high-dudgeon shaming is provoking sharp backlash from illiberal strongmen, right-wing populists, and the mass constituencies that support these strongmen around the globe. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin, former U.S. President Donald Trump, and many other leaders gained popularity by calling out the promotion of liberal human rights as a project of decadent, out-of-touch bullies who push alien agendas to replace popular national self-determination with elitist, imperialist cosmopolitanism. Xi shrugged off the charge of perpetrating a genocide against China’s Uyghur minority, taking a victory lap in Xinjiang Province (where most Uyghurs live) in July 2022, where he bragged about the “unification” of China’s peoples. U.S. President Joe Biden’s war crimes accusation did nothing to stop Putin from escalating attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Biden called Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a “pariah” but then visited him in Riyadh, where they exchanged a notorious fist bump. “Naming and shaming,” Neier acknowledges, “is increasingly ineffective.”

This backlash is largely self-inflicted. The problem is that advocates for human rights have misunderstood the sources of their own historical success. Democracy based on individual rights has been by far the most successful form of modern social organization not because of its selfless moralism but because it has usually been far better than the alternatives at serving people’s interests. Human rights activists do better when they work to strengthen people’s capacity to fight for their own rights, rather than browbeating oppressive leaders in ways that help them mobilize nationalist backlash.

HUMANLY POSSIBLE

Advances in human rights since the Reformation and the Enlightenment have depended not on foreign criticism of oppressive regimes but on the rising social power of those regimes’ own subjects, who directly benefited from an expansion of rights. Beginning in Protestant Northern Europe, such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, merchants and the urban middle classes pushed for democracy, due process, religious freedom, and efficient capitalism to protect their economic interests as well as their personal freedoms. In turn, the expansion of literacy and commerce gave educated, industrious subjects greater leverage against their rulers and underpinned the development of constitutional rule. Later, industrialization provided workers with an impetus to form trade unions and make demands for economic, social, and labor rights for the working class.

In many constitutional democracies, once a powerful core constituency for a rights-based system was established, social movements could use that system to extend rights to excluded groups. Human rights advocates may like to explain the victories of the antislavery movement, Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign for Indian independence, and King’s peaceful fight for civil rights as the result of their uncompromising idealism. But their successes depended above all on mobilizing and sustaining mass social movements based on broad moral principles that gained the sympathy of powerful majorities in their own societies. To win, principled activists, mass movements, and progressive political parties all coordinated, including by making expedient bargains to gain political power.


Consider the U.S. abolitionists. This wing of the antislavery movement was collapsing by the late 1830s as a result of internal divisions and the hostility of the northern white working class, which was wary of competition from Black labor in their states. But it was still strong enough in ultra-religious upstate New York to hold the decisive balance of power in the 1844 presidential election, which pitted the Whig Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, who was equivocal about slavery, against pro-slavery Democrat James K. Polk. The New York abolitionists abandoned the Whigs and cast their votes for an uncompromising antislavery third-party candidate, unintentionally electing Polk, which set the stage for the Mexican War and the westward expansion of slavery. The pragmatic Whig politician Abraham Lincoln learned from the abolitionists’ mistake. In his own campaign, he put together a successful antislavery Republican coalition by promising racist northern white workers that he would bar enslaved Black labor from the western territories, where white people hoped to settle. It was an unsavory compromise, yet necessary to empower slavery’s opponents. Lincoln won, and by 1865, slavery had been banned everywhere in the United States.

Although today’s human rights activists have learned some pragmatic techniques from their decades of grassroots work, they still prefer idealistic denunciations to expedient deal-making and shy away from building possibly unruly mass movements. Neier worried in a 2013 commentary that the power of “mass mobilization” might “be used abusively,” something that he said would not happen in an elite, professionalized organization. But as Kenneth Roth, the outgoing executive director of Human Rights Watch, acknowledged in a 2004 essay, his organization and its allies suffer from a “relative weakness at mobilizing large numbers of people at this stage of our evolution.”

JUSTICE AND PEACE

Democratic self-rule anchored by liberal civic rights has been by far the most popular, successful, and pragmatic form of modern social organization. Setting aside small oil states and Singapore, no country has advanced beyond the middle-income trap—or 25 percent of U.S. GDP per capita—without adopting the full panoply of liberal democratic civic and human rights. China remains stuck at 16 percent of the U.S. level based on 2020 World Bank data (using its metric for developed countries). And China’s rise was possible only because liberal powers allowed the country to plug into an open global market economy they had organized. Liberal democracies have also been on the winning side of every contest for global hegemony in the past two centuries because they are the best realists—better at making and keeping alliances, less threatening to fence sitters, and more prudent in avoiding the kind of self-destructive aggression that continues to plague authoritarian great powers.

Empirical research on the conditions that underpin successful human rights systems shows that these rights correlate most strongly with peace, since war inevitably brings a torrent of rights abuses. Democracy and a battery of factors that help promote stable democracy come in second. These factors include a reasonably high GDP per capita; rules-based, noncorrupt administrative and legal institutions; a diversified economy (especially one that’s not based solely on oil and gas); a consensus on which people will get to exercise their democratic right to national self-determination; and a supportive international neighborhood of liberal democratic states.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that historically, liberal democracy and liberal rights activism have been inseparable, each depending on the success of the other. But today, the counterproductive effect of strident human rights advocacy exacerbates the problem of democratic backsliding and complicates democracy’s geopolitical contest against increasingly assertive dictatorships. Roth’s introduction to the Human Rights Watch World Report 2022 is right to stress that solving the contemporary crisis of democracy is the key to improving global human rights.

But his prescription relies too heavily on what he calls the “denunciation” of autocracy. Moralistic shaming provides no shortcut to rights-based democracy when states lack the conditions for its creation. The Arab Spring failed to bring either democracy or human rights not because activists lacked high-minded rhetoric but because the social conditions for both were weak or absent in every state. Until at least some of the facilitating conditions are in place, the primary task of rights promoters is to find a pragmatic path to implementing them.

PERSUASIVE POWER

In today’s fraught political setting, it will be difficult to effectively combine principle and pragmatism. But politicians and activists who favor democracy and human rights can start by making sure that the central operating systems of the liberal democratic order are working as they should to provide collective benefits through the open global economy, through military alliance systems that protect liberalizing partners from authoritarian aggression, and through free speech and information.


This work won’t be easy. Rising economic inequality and the overwhelming flow of disinformation have tarnished the attractiveness of the rights-based system. A key reason for this—and a source of populist backlash against the liberal order—has been the ascendance of libertarianism, which has eclipsed the idea that the liberal state should regulate economic markets and that responsible journalists should exercise stewardship over the marketplace of ideas. To begin to revive the rights-based system, democratic countries and rights advocacy groups can work to impose far stricter rules on international money laundering, tax evasion, the hiding of stolen assets, and the global dissemination of hate speech, defamation, and false information.

Liberal states must also temper the way they expand their reach by conditionally opening the door for new countries to voluntarily join their ranks, rather than impatiently hard-selling liberal reforms. The European Union, for example, succeeded in bringing stable, democratic governance to much of post–Cold War Europe by correctly waiting for countries to petition for membership and then requiring a rigorous apprenticeship to achieve the club’s standards of governance, law, and rights. (Even then, the EU’s conditions have sometimes been slightly too lax, as democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland demonstrates.) But elsewhere, abrupt transitions to superficially Western-style systems, sometimes demanded by restive democratic donors, were forced on African and Middle Eastern states that lacked the institutional, demographic, and economic conditions for success. The results in places like Burundi, Iraq, and Rwanda were often short-lived and ultimately led to bloodshed.

Avoiding the hard sell will require that liberal states and activists tone down their legalism, moralism, and universalism. Instead, they should appeal to the self-interest of powerful national majorities by emphasizing popular issues such as anticorruption and broad economic prosperity. The former is particularly important. One-third of recent mass protests worldwide have been organized by local groups to denounce corruption. But major transnational rights organizations have joined these efforts only after the state has cracked down on the protests, and then only to oppose the suppression—not the corruption. More directly mobilizing against corruption would give the human rights movement a marquee issue, one that’s key to strengthening the rule of law. Rights groups were also keen on getting states to call China’s practice of placing its Uyghur minority in concentration camp systems a “genocide.” But such accusations lead to a disruptive exercise in semantic hair-splitting. In contrast, imposing strict limits on exports that rely on forced labor, such as that carried out by interned Uyghurs, highlights an issue on which foreign trading partners have clear standing in law and self-interest. Civil society groups can organize sustained boycotts to show that rights advocates mean business. This stakes out a position supporting the fair treatment of all Chinese workers and creates an incentive for China to improve its systems of accounting and labor standards.


Liberal states and activists must tone down their legalism, moralism, and universalism.

Indeed, at times, human rights promoters will want to avoid shaming altogether and instead approach their work in a manner more akin to management consulting—emphasizing sophisticated advice, an investment mindset, and positive inducements—rather than attacking a society’s cultural shortcomings. Research shows, for example, that deeply entrenched abuses of women’s rights such as child marriage and female genital cutting are reduced when residents have increased access to international media, when women have better job opportunities outside the home, and when communities are at least partially modernized—all positive reforms that broadly strengthen economies. Shaming states for “backwardness,” by contrast, can have the opposite of its intended effect by politicizing practices that are symbolic of a country’s cultural identity, in turn fueling backlash against women’s rights.

This doesn’t mean liberal states and human rights activists shouldn’t be clear about principles. It means they must be careful and strategic about how they promote these values. That also includes avoiding toothless demands. Biden called Putin “a war criminal” who “cannot remain in power,” but he has no plausible way to deliver on this provocative statement. Although these kinds of empty condemnations may yield short-term feel-good effects, they ultimately look like hypocrisy, even if they are heartfelt. And as veteran human rights activist Priscilla Hayner notes in a recent book, there really are tradeoffs between peace and justice. Threatening military elites and other policymakers with jail time could, for example, foreclose offering them asylum or amnesty if they help end the warfare—and war, after all is the most severe cause of rights abuse. Exercising prosecutorial discretion “in the interests of justice,” as the statute of the International Criminal Court puts it, entails managing this tradeoff by undertaking tactically smart investigations while postponing untimely indictments.

Human rights, despite recent setbacks, are still the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of democracy. Wielding these weapons effectively requires understanding that the power of these rights lies in their appeal to self-interest and that they must be backed by a solidly constructed political coalition that delivers reliable results. Power leads; rights follow.







6. The Future of China's Cognitive Warfare: Lessons from the War in Ukraine



Excerpts:

Given these lessons, China, while focusing on cognitive warfare, will continue to invest in existing physical domains and enhance the coordination between them. In countering China, the United States and its allies need to analyze China’s concept of cognitive warfare while also studying the coordination of operations in the cognitive, informational, and physical domains.
The United States and its allies, as democratic countries, need to enhance their own theories of cognitive warfare. Influencing the cognitive domain in other countries requires understanding their culture, identifying targets, and creating strategic narratives tailored to those targets’ characteristics. In cognitive warfare, information is ammunition, and the right bullet must be fired at the right time and place. Since 2014, Russia has demonstrated the effectiveness of spreading disinformation through digital means. The war in Ukraine, however, has shown that the best weapons of a democratic society are accurate publicity and the rapid disclosure of information.
The war in Ukraine demonstrates the importance of domestic and international public opinion. Cognitive warfare, however, is just one way to gain a strategic advantage, and the feasibility of defeating the enemy without a fight is questionable. This does not make cognitive warfare useless: rather, it should be seen as one tool among many. Cyber warfare has also seldom achieved an overwhelming strategic advantage by itself. Still, it has been integrated into land, sea, and air operations and become an essential part of modern warfare.
In the same way, cognitive warfare needs to be effectively integrated into operations in the land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains. Coordination between cognitive warfare and other operations is essential because the means of influencing an opponent’s perception include not only the transmission and disclosure of information but also intimidation and deterrence through the actions of physical assets, as well as the digital dissemination of information. To incorporate cognitive warfare into existing operations, targeting procedures can be helpful and may allocate multiple means to affect the enemy’s cognition.


The Future of China's Cognitive Warfare: Lessons from the War in Ukraine - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Koichiro Takagi · July 22, 2022

With the development of AI, neuroscience, and digital applications like social media, senior officers and strategists in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) claim that, in the future, it will be possible to influence the enemy’s brain to affect human cognition directly. Doing so creates the possibility of subduing the enemy without a fight, either by technical or informational means. Will the lessons of the war in Ukraine change their thinking on this subject — and thus alter their plans for possible future invasions of Taiwan?

Russia’s war on Ukraine is not merely kinetic: It involves a fierce struggle over the leaders’ will and public opinion among the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the international community. In this cognitive battle, the dissemination of information through digital means has become a significant factor shaping the war’s likely outcome. However, the war in Ukraine shows the limits of cognitive warfare in providing an independent strategic advantage. If Chinese strategists believe the human brain to be the next battlefield — and there is some evidence they do — Russia’s experience in Ukraine suggests caution in investing too heavily in that theory. Cognitive warfare alone cannot win wars. Western analysts should similarly be careful not to assume China will rely on cognitive or other non-physical measures to subdue Taiwan. Though influencing enemy cognition has long been a prominent subject of discussion among Chinese military theorists, they may not be drawing the same lessons from Ukraine’s resistance that Western commentators think they are.

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What Is Cognitive Warfare?

A Chinese theorist describes cognitive warfare as using public opinion, psychological, and legal means to achieve victory. In line with Sun Tzu’s dictum that supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting, China has long considered that defeating the enemy without physical combat is ideal. The PLA Political Work Regulations, when revised in 2003, outlined the “three battles” to be conducted by the PLA. The three battles consist of public opinion warfare to influence domestic and international public opinion, psychological warfare to shock and demoralize enemy soldiers and civilians, and legal warfare to gain international support through international and domestic law. Thus, all three battles are closely related to cognitive warfare.

Several papers published by Chinese strategists in the early 2000s stated that future information warfare would co-occur in three domains: the physical, the informational, and the cognitive domains. These strategists predicted that over time the importance of the cognitive domain will increase, eventually becoming the pivotal point in warfare. Since then, much work published by Chinese strategists over the past two decades has been based on the idea that war takes place in the physical domains of land, sea, air, and space; the information domain of communication networks and information in it; and the domain of human cognition, which consists of both the leader’s will and public opinion.

Chinese strategists focused on information and communication technology in the 2000s. In recent years, they have focused on developments in artificial intelligence and what they refer to as “brain science,” in addition to digital technologies such as social media. For example, Guo Yunfei (郭云飞), President of the Information Engineering University of the PLA’s Strategic Support Forces, argued in 2020 that of the physical, information, and cognitive domains, it is the cognitive domain that will be the ultimate domain of military confrontation between major powers. Fighting in the cognitive environment directly affects the brain, influencing emotions, motives, judgments, and actions and even controlling the enemy’s brain. As the engine of cognition, the brain could become the main battlefield of future warfare. The ability to control the brain is the key to combat in the most critical cognitive domains of future warfare.

Guo Yunfei further stated that operations in the cognitive domain embody the idea of defeating the enemy without fighting, as opposed to operations in the physical and information domain. Qi Jianguo (戚建国), the former deputy chief of staff of the PLA, also stated that in future wars, those who control the cognitive domain of their opponents would be able to subdue them without fighting. Thus, senior officers of the PLA argue that operations in the cognitive domain embody Sun Tzu’s statement of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

This concept of cognitive warfare is further reinforced by its integration with “intelligentized” warfare, which is China’s new military strategy, referred to in 2019, in addition to its existing military strategy of “informationized” warfare. Intelligentized warfare focuses on using artificial intelligence and is characterized by four key features: increased information-processing capabilities, rapid decision-making, the use of swarms, and cognitive warfare.

Chinese strategists have stated that human cognition is the focus of intelligentized warfare, and that strategic objectives can be achieved through direct action on enemy cognition. Qi Jianguo, former deputy chief of staff of the PLA, has stated that those who gain the upper hand in developing new-generation artificial intelligence technologies will be able to control the lifeline of national security: human cognition. Chinese strategists also argue that directly interfering with or subconsciously controlling the enemy’s brain can induce mental damage, confusion, and hallucinations in the enemy, forcing them to lay down their arms and surrender.

It is not certain how China intends to use future technology to control an enemy’s brain. In the case of currently available technology, the PLA seems to be considering intimidation through military actions and the use of disinformation. Intimidation includes the maneuvering and deploying of troops to specific locations, the preparation for operations of strategic nuclear weapons units, and undertaking military exercises for intimidation purposes. Disinformation could be disseminated via the internet and television broadcasts. It also includes deception of enemy intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities by electromagnetic or cyber means to mislead the commander’s judgment.

In addition, Pang Hongliang (庞宏亮), an advocate of intelligentized warfare, has discussed a wide range of U.S. technological achievements such as the use of small unmanned systems for surveillance, and has also mentioned the importance of using the latest technology to influence human cognition. For example, he states that unmanned systems such as social media bots operating in cyberspace can manipulate public opinion, and that in the future ultra-compact unmanned systems resembling small animals could secretly enter the rooms of a president or other chief decision-maker to intimidate or kill them, thereby subduing the enemy’s will and control it.

Yet is it possible to use cognitive warfare to secure victory without physical combat, as many Chinese senior officers and strategists claim? How do the lessons of the war in Ukrainian change these theories? The second half of this article will examine the feasibility of this theory and the potential for future changes in this theory, based on the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.

The Limits of Cognitive Warfare: A Ukrainian Demonstration

The PLA’s senior officials and strategists have yet to discuss in public the lessons of the war in Ukraine. However, a number of studies in the United States have pointed to the possibility that the lessons of the war in Ukraine may change the course of China’s plans for a potential invasion of Taiwan. One article predicts that the cost of a direct military invasion of Taiwan would be high, and China will wait patiently for Taiwan’s eventual surrender. Another study predicts that, having seen the resistance to Russia’s invasion, China will seek to inflict a psychological blow on Taiwan and break its will to resist through the following means: obstruction of U.S. intervention through nuclear threats, physical isolation through the encirclement of Taiwan by naval forces, and assassination of Taiwan’s political and military leaders. Another paper points out that China could conduct a broader operation prior to the attack, including fomenting division in Taiwanese society, disseminating disinformation, and blocking communications between Taiwan and the outside world.

These predictions are all reasonable analyses, given that the PLA’s senior officials and strategists have stated that human cognition is the focus of warfare and have referred to the importance of subduing the enemy without fighting. Chinese theorists would focus on the human cognitive aspect of the war in Ukrainian. But will China rely more than ever on cognitive warfare in invading Taiwan, as many analyses state?

As described by Chinese strategists, cognitive warfare using artificial intelligence and “brain science” uses future technology that has not yet been developed. Although the cognitive fight in Ukraine does not feature the futuristic concepts of a direct effect on the brain using such new technologies, it is worth analyzing the impact of human cognition on the war’s outcome. In particular, the ongoing war illustrates essential lessons about traditional Chinese concepts related to human cognition: public opinion warfare, which influences domestic and international public opinion to gain support, and psychological warfare, which shocks and demoralizes the enemy’s military and civilian population.

In its 2014 takeover of the Crimean Peninsula, Russia waged a clever battle in the domain of human cognition. When military units without markers indicating their affiliation — the so-called “little green men” — suddenly occupied the Crimean Peninsula, President Vladimir Putin immediately made a statement denying Russian involvement. Within hours, his remarks were published in the Washington Post, BBC, and other Western media. The purpose of Putin’s statement was to manipulate international public opinion by misleading people’s cognition and preventing the international community from interfering during the critical period of the pseudo-referendum to annex the peninsula.

Russia also used public media and troll factories to disseminate a strategic narrative of “repression of the Russian population in Ukraine” in a sophisticated manner. This strategic narrative was intended to give the appearance of legitimacy to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and create a false perception in the international community that Ukraine was at fault. For example, Russia simultaneously released fake news stories about “Ukraine’s massacre of pro-Russian residents in Odesa” and “U.S. media cover-up of Odesa massacre.” These fake news stories overlapped to give the impression that the truth was being covered up, planting false perceptions in the international community.

Russia does not have a concept of cognitive warfare and uses instead a concept of information and psychological confrontation. However, this method of using digital means to influence people’s thoughts and values is similar to what China calls cognitive warfare. And Russia was successful in 2014 with respect to such warfare.

Russia, however, is falling short of achieving its aims in the current war, not only in the physical realm but also in the realm of human cognition. Claims of a special military operation to rescue the oppressed Russian population are like the strategic narrative they used in 2014, which may have been intended to assert legitimacy to the international community. However, while this strategic narrative has worked within Russia, it has not influenced international public opinion as it did in 2014.

In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky remained in his capital city of Kyiv, undaunted by Russian threats. Supported by the president’s courage, the Ukrainian government was able to disseminate accurate information, maintain the unity of the Ukrainian people, gain a high level of support from the international community, and secure physical assistance from numerous countries. The Ukrainian government has also used information from open sources and intelligence provided by the United States to combat the Russian military and to display Ukrainian courage and Russian military atrocities to the international community.

U.S. support has played a pivotal role in this cognitive warfare. The United States used a prebuttal strategy, rapidly disclosing classified information to publicize Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine before the war beganMany articles have praised this strategy: It reduced the credibility of the Russian strategic narrative in advance and fostered an environment of greater cohesion among democracies, which led to material support for Ukraine. In addition, the protection provided by U.S. cyber forces and the support of high-tech companies has played an essential role in maintaining Ukraine’s information and communications infrastructure, thus enabling Ukraine to disseminate information to the world quickly.

Thus, in the short term, Ukraine and the democracies led by the United States have a clear advantage in the public cognitive arena. This dominance brings material support from the international community that is essential for Ukraine to continue fighting. However, it was Ukraine’s physical forces, armed with drones and Javelins, that defended the capital city of Kyiv from the thrust of Russian armored units and recaptured parts of Russian-occupied territory, not cognitive warfare. Ukraine demands more physical assets, including artillery, tanks, fighter planes, and anti-aircraft weapons, to prepare for a more protracted battle.

In the long run, there is no guarantee that Ukraine will maintain its superiority in cognitive warfare. In this age of the internet and social media, international public opinion is volatile. If this war continues for years, Western support is likely to wane as domestic politics begin once again to dominate local narratives. If material support from democracies diminishes, Ukraine will find it difficult to continue the physical fighting. Meanwhile, Russia is strengthening its repressive regime, imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading information that differs from official government pronouncements. This repressive regime is a favorable factor in domestic cognitive warfare. It enables Russia to maintain the support of its own people, which is the minimum requirement for continuing the war.

In the war in Ukraine, Ukraine and Russia have made and will continue to make various efforts to win the support of the international community and their citizens — and, in the long run, it may get harder for Ukraine to win out in this regard. The war in Ukraine demonstrates the importance of strategically disseminating information to influence people’s perceptions and win the support of domestic and international public opinion in the digital age. However, Ukraine cannot regain its eastern and southern territories lost to Russia solely through cognitive warfare. Fighting in the physical domain will determine the outcome of the war.

Thus, the Russo-Ukrainian war shows that cognitive warfare alone cannot win wars. Claims by Chinese theorists that they will win a war using cognitive warfare without direct combat are simply not feasible with the current science and technology. In other words, against many analyses, China will not be able to bring Taiwan to its knees solely by indirect means, such as psychological blows through nuclear threats, blockade, decapitation, disinformation dissemination, and blocking of communications.

Do Emerging Technologies Alone Confer a Strategic Advantage?

This is reinforced by the experience of cyber warfare in Ukraine. In the past decade, many government officials and cyber experts have warned of devastating cyber attacks that could kill people and destroy critical infrastructure. Before this year’s Russian invasion, experts also predicted a cyber attack on Ukraine’s power grid that would have left millions of Ukrainians without heat in the bitter cold, and psychologically subdued.

With the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russia launched cyber attacks against the computer systems of the Ukrainian government, military, and critical infrastructure, causing some systems to malfunction. The KA-SAT used by Ukraine’s military and intelligence agencies also ceased to function due to cyberattacks. However, cyber warfare was not as decisive as anticipated before the war, and Russia did not gain a strategic advantage from cyber warfare alone. The war in Ukraine shows that cyber warfare does not achieve a strategic impact on its own but is best used as a tool to support land, sea, and air operations.

Thus, the war in Ukraine revealed that cognitive warfare and cyber warfare — which use digital means and are conducted in non-physical domains — do not alone provide strategic advantages. If the PLA’s senior officials and strategists come to the same realization, they will continue to emphasize operations in the existing physical domains as well as in the non-physical domains. Indeed, they recognize the coexistence of mechanized, informationized, and intelligentized warfare and will continue to do so.

Neither Sun Tzu, who idealized subduing the enemy without fighting nor British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart, who advocated the indirect approach strategygave specific advice on how to put it into practice. And in the long history of warfare, it has been physical battles that subdued the enemy’s will.

Recommendations for the United States and Its Allies

Given these lessons, China, while focusing on cognitive warfare, will continue to invest in existing physical domains and enhance the coordination between them. In countering China, the United States and its allies need to analyze China’s concept of cognitive warfare while also studying the coordination of operations in the cognitive, informational, and physical domains.

The United States and its allies, as democratic countries, need to enhance their own theories of cognitive warfare. Influencing the cognitive domain in other countries requires understanding their culture, identifying targets, and creating strategic narratives tailored to those targets’ characteristics. In cognitive warfare, information is ammunition, and the right bullet must be fired at the right time and place. Since 2014, Russia has demonstrated the effectiveness of spreading disinformation through digital means. The war in Ukraine, however, has shown that the best weapons of a democratic society are accurate publicity and the rapid disclosure of information.

The war in Ukraine demonstrates the importance of domestic and international public opinion. Cognitive warfare, however, is just one way to gain a strategic advantage, and the feasibility of defeating the enemy without a fight is questionable. This does not make cognitive warfare useless: rather, it should be seen as one tool among many. Cyber warfare has also seldom achieved an overwhelming strategic advantage by itself. Still, it has been integrated into land, sea, and air operations and become an essential part of modern warfare.

In the same way, cognitive warfare needs to be effectively integrated into operations in the land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains. Coordination between cognitive warfare and other operations is essential because the means of influencing an opponent’s perception include not only the transmission and disclosure of information but also intimidation and deterrence through the actions of physical assets, as well as the digital dissemination of information. To incorporate cognitive warfare into existing operations, targeting procedures can be helpful and may allocate multiple means to affect the enemy’s cognition.

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Colonel Koichiro Takagi is a visiting fellow of the Hudson Institute. All views in the article are his own. He is a former Deputy Chief, Defense Operation Section, 1st Operations Division, J-3, Joint Staff Japan, and has designed joint operation plans and orders in the severe security environment of East Asia.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Koichiro Takagi · July 22, 2022


7. Has Russia Reached Its ‘Culminating Point’ in Ukraine?


Excerpt:


However, the predictions continued even as Russian forces made advances in the east, most recently capturing nearly all of the Luhansk region that remained in Ukrainian hands.1 If nothing else, this timeline reaffirms the truism that making predictions can be an ungrateful business, particularly amid the fog of war.


Has Russia Reached Its ‘Culminating Point’ in Ukraine? | Russia Matters

russiamatters.org

This week’s reports that Russia’s invasion seems to be “entering a more aggressive phase” throw into stark relief one recurring theme in analysis of the Ukraine war: the prediction that Russian forces will soon exhaust their capabilities, reaching what the famous Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described as a Kulminationspunkt, or “culminating point,” of attack. In his book “On War,” Clausewitz defined this as a “point at which the forces remaining are just sufficient to maintain a defensive, and to wait for Peace.”

Below is a compilation of such predictions, beginning in March 2022. Some were made that month, and may have rested on a looser definition of culminating point than Clausewitz’s original, predicting that Russian forces would not be able to sustain their offensive on the many fronts of their initial invasion; indeed, by late March, Russia started moving troops away from Kyiv, marking Moscow’s new strategic focus on eastern Ukraine.

However, the predictions continued even as Russian forces made advances in the east, most recently capturing nearly all of the Luhansk region that remained in Ukrainian hands.1 If nothing else, this timeline reaffirms the truism that making predictions can be an ungrateful business, particularly amid the fog of war.

  • March 14: Former commander of U.S. Army Europe retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges: “The Russians, I think, are about 10 days away from what is called the culminating point, when they just no longer have the ammunition nor the manpower to keep up their assault. I think we keep pouring it on, and the Russians culminate.”
  • March 15: Institute of Statecraft senior fellow Julian Lindley-French and Lt. Gen. Hodges: “The race to the culminating point of Ukraine’s tragedy is on! Possible Chinese support notwithstanding the next 10 days or so will prove critical. The Russian war of conquest in Ukraine is now entering a critical phase, a race to reach the culminating point of Russia’s offensive capacity and Ukraine’s defensive capacity.”
  • March 17: CEPA's Steven Horrell: “There's a lot of thinking—you know, this is a question of 10 days to two weeks more now that Ukraine's held out so far that the Russian logistics, that they're reaching their culminating point, and they're going to no longer be able to maintain their offensive.”
  • March 21: Retired Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan: “Military doctrine defines culmination as ‘the point at which continuing the attack is no longer possible and the force must consider reverting to a defensive posture or attempting an operational pause.’ This is what appears to have happened in Ukraine.”
  • March 21: Retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former U.S. Army commanding general, Europe: “[A]ll indicators are that Russia has not kept up with their operations. If they don't keep up logistically, the operation stalls. That's where we've come to. It's called, in the military terms, a culminating point of the offense.”
  • March 22: American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Kagan: “Our assessment that the Russian campaign has culminated and that conditions of stalemate are emerging rests on our assessments, laid out carefully in many fully documented reports published on our website (not just maps) and increasingly validated by reports from various Western intelligence communities, that the Russians do not have the capability to bring a lot of fresh effective combat power to the fight in a short period of time.”
  • March 22: British Col. Richard Kemp: “The Russian campaign in Ukraine may have reached its culminating point. In short, Russian forces may no longer be able to achieve their strategic objective by offensive operations. If so, it would mark a turning point.”
  • March 23: Robert Johnson, director of the Changing Character of War Program at Oxford University: “In terms of cost-benefit analyses, Putin’s war is no longer worth the military success that might be achieved. It could prove to be a classic example of operational achievements failing to turn into strategic victory. Putin has failed to grasp that for Ukrainians this is now … an existential war and they will resist. Russia cannot now achieve its strategic ends and risks a culminating point of stalemate.”
  • March 30: Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy Michael Ryan: “Most military observers and very senior American army generals believe that the Russian army [has] reached a culminating point. A significant aspect of that is the losses that they've sustained.”
  • Late March: Hudson Institute’s Japan Chair Fellow Masashi Murano: “At first, Russia seemed to think it could bring down Kyiv in a short time through blitzkrieg-like operations or, to use [a] more familiar phrase in Asia, a ‘short, sharp war,’ but it seems to have failed to do so. And the Russian military campaign seems to have reached a stalemate or culminating point.”
  • April 19: British Col. Richard Kemp: “Putin’s goal is to achieve a major victory in the Donbas before Russia’s Victory Day parade on May 9th. Yet even this latest, last-ditch effort may ultimately come to a stalemate, with Russian forces reaching their culminating point of attack before achieving their objectives, as occurred around Kyiv.”
  • May 10: Retired U.S. Army Maj. John Spencer: “You have to look for the ‘culmination points’ when a military force takes so many losses that they will not be able to meet their goals. This is what we saw in Kyiv. … This conflict, in a larger sense, won't end for years. Russia will always contest the borders of Ukraine as a sovereign nation. But this war, the battle for Ukraine, will end within weeks or months. That is my opinion. We will see the Russian military in Ukraine reach its culmination point soon.”
  • May 28: Frederick Kagan, Kateryna Stepanenko and George Barros wrote for The Institute for the Study of War: “When the Battle of Severodonetsk ends, regardless of which side holds the city, the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will likely have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back.”
  • June 7: U.S. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, former commanding general of the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team in Iraq: “Indeed, there's a term, culminating point, whenever you attack. The Russians have apparently, if they have not run out of smart weapons, they don't have a whole lot left. So, what they're using is artillery stores that date back to the Cold War. And the U.S. sanctions are definitely having an impact as far as modernization of anything that they have. So, they will culminate. They don't have the logistics to support indefinitely, and they're going up against a very determined enemy.”
  • June 9: ISW’s George Barros: “[T]he Russians have made very few gains in the Donetsk Oblast, they've almost exclusively focused on the Luhansk front line, which has led to what's likely going to be a culminating point for the Russians in Severodonetsk.”
  • June 18: Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Newton in reference to the capture of American volunteers fighting for Ukraine by Russian forces: “It really does complicate our position there at a time when the conflict is at a really culminating point… Russia is really starting to hold its ground in the east and Ukraine is trying to figure out how it can take the Donbas area. So it’s just really bad timing.”

Footnotes:

  1. While Russia said in early July that it had taken control of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai, its Ukrainian governor, said July 17 that two villages are still under Ukrainian control.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the experts quoted. Photo by Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs shared under a Creative Commons license.

russiamatters.org



8. Russia declares expanded war goals beyond Ukraine's Donbas




Russia declares expanded war goals beyond Ukraine's Donbas

Reuters · by Mark Trevelyan

  • Summary
  • Foreign minister says geographical reality has changed
  • Russia may push deeper as West supplies long-range arms
  • Ukraine says comments show Russia aims to grab more land

LONDON, July 20 (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow's military "tasks" in Ukraine now went beyond the eastern Donbas region, in the clearest acknowledgment yet that it has expanded its war goals.

In an interview with state media nearly five months after Russia's invasion, the foreign minister also said peace talks made no sense at the moment because Western governments were leaning on Ukraine to fight rather than negotiate.

Ukraine's foreign minister retorted that Russia wanted "blood, not talks".

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When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, President Vladimir Putin explicitly denied any intention of occupying his neighbour. He said then that his aim was to demilitarise and "denazify" Ukraine - a statement dismissed by Kyiv and the West as a pretext for an imperial-style war of expansion.

But Lavrov said geographical realities had changed since Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held peace talks in Turkey in late March that failed to produce any breakthrough.

At that time, he said, the focus was on the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR), self-styled breakaway entities in eastern Ukraine from which Russia has said it aims to drive out Ukrainian government forces.

"Now the geography is different, it's far from being just the DPR and LPR, it's also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories," he said, referring to areas well beyond the Donbas that Russia has wholly or partly seized.

"This process is continuing logically and persistently."

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba responded: "By confessing dreams to grab more Ukrainian land, (the) Russian foreign minister proves that Russia rejects diplomacy and focuses on war and terror. Russians want blood, not talks."

Lavrov said Russia might need to push even deeper if the West, out of "impotent rage" or desire to aggravate the situation further, kept pumping Ukraine with long-range weapons such as the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

"That means the geographical tasks will extend still further from the current line," he said.

Russia could not allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy "or whoever replaces him" to threaten its territory or that of the DPR and LPR with the longer-range systems, he said - referring casually, and without any evidence, to the possibility that the Ukrainian leader might not remain in power.

After failing to take the Ukrainian capital Kyiv at the start of the war, Russia said in March it would focus on "achieving the main goal, the liberation of Donbas".

Nearly four months later, it has taken Luhansk, one of two provinces that comprise the Donbas, but remains far from capturing all of the other, Donetsk. In the past few weeks it has ramped up missile strikes on cities across Ukraine.

Lavrov spoke a day after the White House said Russia was starting to roll out a plan to annex large parts of southern Ukraine under the cover of "sham referendums".

Russian-imposed officials in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia have outlined plans to hold plebiscites in the coming months. The Kremlin says it is up to people living there to decide their own futures.

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Additional reporting by Max Hunder in Kyiv, Writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Catherine Evans/Mark Heinrich

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Mark Trevelyan



9. The bottom lines for peace in UkraineThe bottom lines for peace in Ukraine




The bottom lines for peace in Ukraine

Russia says peace in Ukraine will be ‘on our terms’ – but what can the West accept and at what cost?


asiatimes.com · by Alexander Gillespie · July 22, 2022

The recent assertion by Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s security council (and former president), that the invasion of Ukraine will “achieve all its goals” and that peace will be “on our terms” raises an obvious question: what are those terms?

History suggests the answer may be a hard one. Modern Russian wars have followed a pattern – victory is either total (Chechnya or Syria) or it involves the dismemberment of the other country (Georgia or Ukraine after the first Russian intervention in 2014).

Peace treaties are rare, and settlements – as Medvedev’s comments implied – have been Russia’s alone to approve. Opponents are expected to surrender, not negotiate.


And right now, Russian President Vladimir Putin may well believe he has the upper hand in Ukraine. Sanctions have hurt but not strangled the Russian economy. Western weapons and intelligence have slowed but not stopped the Russian advance, which grinds on with overwhelming and often indiscriminate use of force.

But with Russia now saying it will expand its war aims, and with the West continuing to pour arms into Ukraine, the risk of the invasion spilling into a larger conflict (by accident or design) slowly grows. Russian threats to European gas supplies during the coming winter suggest both sides are likely to escalate rather than accept defeat.

The only safe way out will be through negotiation. But given what we know about Russian strategies and expectations, how will that be achieved?

Russia’s terms: Vladimir Putin conferring with then-prime minister Dmitry Medvedev at a State Council meeting at the Kremlin in 2019. Image: Getty Images via The Conversation

What are the bottom lines?

Clearly, there is significant uncertainty about what terms Putin might agree to. Given he has denied the existence of Ukrainian statehood at all, he may believe Russia is entitled to it all. Or he may only demand international recognition of Russian claims to territory already conquered.

Beyond that, he may really be looking for the disarmament of all parts of Eastern Europe that were once part of the Soviet Union.


While Putin’s bottom lines remain unknown, the onus is now on Ukraine and its Western backers to set out their own terms for what is and isn’t negotiable. Although it may be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s country at war, ultimately peace will have to be settled by Putin and US President Joe Biden.

There appear to be four main questions that will determine what the bottom lines for peace would look like:

  1. Should Russia be economically liable for the restoration of the damage caused by its invasion?
  2. Should those accused of war crimes be brought to justice?
  3. Should Ukraine’s territorial integrity be retained, or should the country be divided and parts ceded to Russia (as former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has recommended)?
  4. What would ongoing security guarantees for the region look like?

What can the West live with?

The fourth question is particularly difficult, given the negligible respect currently shown for international law or treaty commitments.

Rulings by the International Court of Justice that Russia should desist from its invasion of Ukraine have been ignored.

Similarly, the treaties that had previously kept the peace in Europe by slowly building good faith and trust – governing the size of conventional military forces, the prohibition of missile defense shields, the illegality of certain classes of nuclear weapons – are now largely void.


And so we may need to add a final question to that list, perhaps the most significant of all: even if an agreement can be hammered out over Ukraine, will the precedents and perverse incentives it creates be tolerable?

Avoiding something worse

None of this is easy. Compromise, cooperation and peace are, in the end, much harder than war. And there are certainly still many with hawkish views on why Putin must be stopped and his veiled nuclear threats ignored.

But beyond Russia now being considered a significant and direct threat to the security, peace and stability of NATO countries, the wider global context cannot be ignored, either.

Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with US-made Javelin missiles during military exercises in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on December 23, 2021. Photo: Ukranian Defense Ministry Press Service

In 2021, world military expenditure surpassed $2 trillion for the first time – 12% more than in 2012. Nuclear arsenals are expanding and upgrading, as are emerging and largely unregulated military technologies in space, cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems.

Ongoing tensions between China and the WestAmerica, Israel and Iran, and webs of new military alliances (some visible, some opaque) on all sides, all contribute to a world that is becoming less peaceful according to the latest Global Peace Index.


Add to this the real threats to stability from climate change, a global food crisis, stretched supply chains and inflation, and the risk of Ukraine sparking or exacerbating something worse should be clear. Peace on the right terms must be the priority.

Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

asiatimes.com · by Alexander Gillespie · July 22, 2022




10. Two kinds of détenteTwo kinds of détente




Two kinds of détente

A strategy of détente with Russia and China would buy the United States time to rebuild its technological and military capabilities​.​


asiatimes.com · by David P. Goldman · July 21, 2022

Historian Niall Ferguson, the official biographer and occasional alter ego of Henry Kissinger, proposed to “dust off that dirty word détente and engage China” in a June 5 essay for Bloomberg News. Wrote Ferguson:

Back in the 1970s, that little French duosyllable was almost synonymous with “Kissinger.” Despite turning 99 last month, the former secretary of state has not lost his ability to infuriate people on both the right and the left—witness the reaction to his suggestion at the World Economic Forum that “the dividing line [between Russia and Ukraine] should return to the status quo ante” because “pursuing the war beyond that point could turn it into a war not about the freedom of Ukraine … but into a war against Russia itself.”

Ferguson distinguished himself earlier this year as a skeptic of Western policy towards Ukraine, writing for example on March 9:


Western media seem over-eager to cover news of Russian reverses, and insufficiently attentive to the harsh fact that the invaders continue to advance on more than one front. Nor is there sufficient recognition that the Russian generals quickly realized their Plan A had failed, switching to a Plan B of massive bombardment of key cities, a playbook familiar from earlier Russian wars in Chechnya and Syria.

Prof. Ferguson’s skepticism was prescient. Far from halving Russia’s economy, US-led sanctions will cut Russia’s GDP by just 8% in the International Monetary Fund’s estimate, not nearly enough to cripple Russia’s war effort. According to a Finnish study, Russia’s energy export revenues reached a record 93 billion euros during the first 100 days of the war.

Russia has taken Mariupol and Severodonetsk, using massive artillery barrages that Ukraine cannot match. Russia is pursuing a war of attrition that has severely depleted both Ukraine’s manpower and ammunition stocks. Russia appears to be able to clear the sky of Ukrainian drones, possibly neutralizing the impact of American long-range rocket launchers. The outcome of the war is far from certain; at this writing, Russia appears to have the strategic initiative.

Kissinger’s controversial advice—to accept a negotiated solution with Putin’s Russia—is bitter medicine for the Biden administration, after the president’s declaration that Putin is a war criminal who cannot be allowed to remain in office. But the facts on the ground favor Putin.

Ukraine is not well-positioned to fight a war of attrition against an aggressor with four times its population. Ukraine’s stocks of ammunition, moreover, appear to be close to exhaustion, and the West does not have the means to replenish them. According to a British military think tank, a year’s worth of US production of artillery shells at the current levels would last Ukraine ten days’ worth of combat.

Whether (as Professor John Mearsheimer and Pope Francis have suggested) the West provoked Russia’s invasion by maneuvering towards NATO membership for Ukraine is an important question, but moot under present circumstances. However wicked we believe Putin to be, we may not be able to dislodge Russia from Ukraine by any means that would not risk a nuclear war, and therefore will have to negotiate and in some way accommodate Russian strategic interests.


That would be humiliating for the West in general and the Biden Administration in particular, and Prof. Ferguson deserves credit for the cold-bloodedness with which he called attention to this option.

In his June 5 essay, Ferguson warns of the dire consequences of a rush to confrontation with China. He cites Elbridge Colby’s book Strategy of Denial, which suggest ways by which the United States might interdict a hypothetical mainland Chinese invasion of Taiwan (which Colby thinks likely), and warns:

Yet it is far from clear, as retired Taiwanese Admiral Lee Hsi-Min has argued, that Taiwan would be capable of putting up as tenacious a fight as Ukraine has against Russia in the event of an invasion by the People’s Liberation Army. Moreover, in all recent Pentagon war games on Taiwan, the US team consistently loses to the Chinese team. To quote Graham Allison and Jonah Glick-Unterman, my colleagues at Harvard’s Belfer Center, “If in the near future there is a ‘limited war’ over Taiwan or along China’s periphery, the US would likely lose—or have to choose between losing and stepping up the escalation ladder to a wider war.”

Colby’s volume, “popular among the China hawks,” as Ferguson notes, has not a word to say about China’s overwhelming superiority in surface-to-ship missiles as well as long-range ballistic missiles. I pointed out this egregious omission in my January review, and have asked Colby via Twitter and other media to respond. Answer came there none. In the meantime, Prof. Oriana Skylar Mastro, an Air Force strategist, warned in the New York Times on May 28:

China’s missile force is also thought to be capable of targeting ships at sea to neutralize the main US tool of power projection, aircraft carriers. The United States has the most advanced fighter jets in the world but access to just two U.S. air bases within unrefueled combat radius of the Taiwan Strait, both in Japan, compared with China’s 39 air bases within 500 miles of Taipei.

Pentagon strategists have known this for years. The late Andrew Marshall, the long-time director of the Office of Net Assessment (for whom I consulted in the early 2010s) told me that Chinese missiles unquestionably can sink US carriers by swamping existing missile defenses. That was before the Chinese developed hypersonic glide vehicles against which there presently is no defense.

In the case of Russia and Ukraine, a simple count of manpower, artillery pieces, and ammunition stocks would have led to the obvious conclusion that Russia is not easy to defeat in its “near abroad.” A count of Chinese assets, including 1,300 medium- and long-range missiles, sixty submarines, and a thousand interceptor aircraft would lead to the obvious conclusion that “it’s far from certain that the United States could hold off China,” as Prof. Mastro wrote.


The sad fact is that after thirty years of military malpractice, the United States has an army designed to attack ragtag irregulars rather than fight a modern enemy. We wrote off Russia and ignored the awakening of the Chinese giant. We were intoxicated with our victory in the Cold War and convinced that the world was ready to adopt America’s political model.

We rely on weapons systems like aircraft carriers that are vulnerable to massed missile barrages which can overwhelm our very limited missile defense capacities. The trouble is that every flag officer now serving was promoted for doing the wrong sort of thing, and the entire complex of defense think tanks, journals, specialized schools, and consultant firms were funded to do the wrong things.

Elbridge Colby’s fantasy of a “strategy of denial” that ignores China’s ability to destroy whatever assets the US can field in the Western Pacific reflects the sociology of the broader defense community. To admit that the US cannot prevail over China is to confess to comprehensive incompetence over a generation of strategic planning. The defense establishment would rather spin fantasies about an easy victory over Russia or a “denial’ of Taiwan to China than admit its systemic pattern of mistakes.

In that respect, Prof. Ferguson is right. We need to dust off the dirty word “détente” because we are debilitated and lack the means to impose our will by force on Russia and China. But that is only half the story.

We need inspirational leadership to persuade American taxpayers to fund investment on this scale, like John F. Kennedy in 1962 when he told the nation that we would go to the moon, or Ronald Reagan in 1984 when he proposed to protect America against missile attack.
David P. Goldman

Ferguson is both very right and terribly wrong. Weakness forced a strategic accommodation with the Soviet Union upon the United States during the 1970s, but under the cover of détente, the United States invented the digital economy and a new generation of weapons that turned the tide in the Cold War. That had nothing to do with Kissinger, who believed that the Cold War should be managed but not won.


His ascendancy began with his 1957 attack on the US strategic doctrine of massive retaliation and his advocacy of limited nuclear war, a chimerical concept embraced by a large part of the US foreign policy establishment. Thomas Schwartz reviews the record in his 2020 volume Henry Kissinger and American Power (see also my notice in Claremont Review of Books).

Russia’s massive preponderance of conventional power in the European theater, including its superiority in surface-to-air missiles, made Kissinger the man of the hour. The whole array of foreign-policy initiatives that Kissinger advanced, including arms control, failed miserably, but that wasn’t why Nixon put him in the job. America needed to buy time.

Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work explained the circumstances in a 2016 speech:

Then in 1973, the Yom Kippur War provided dramatic evidence of advances in surface-to-air missiles, and Israel’s most advanced fighters, flown by the top pilots in the Middle East, if not among the world’s best, lost their superiority for at least three days due to a SAM belt. And Israeli armored forces were savaged by ATGMs, antitank guided munitions.
U.S. analysts cranked their little models and extrapolated that the balloon went up in Europe’s central front and we had suffered attrition rates comparable to the Israelis. U.S. tactical air power would be destroyed within 17 days, and NATO would literally run out of tanks.
…. Defense Secretary Harold Brown and his Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Bill Perry, set about devising a new offset strategy. Now the first thing was just to give all our tactical systems a competitive edge by embedding modern digital electronics.
… But the real advance occurred when they said, look, let’s take all of these technologies and apply them at the operational level of war — the campaign level, combining airborne, high-resolution synthetic aperture radar, and moving target indicator radars, facilities that could fuse all this information, and both airborne and ground-launched missiles carrying new, guided munitions, to strike at the second and third echelons before they reach the forward line of troops.

In less than two years, Soviet Marshall Ogarkov famously said that reconnaissance strike complexes, the Soviet and Russian term for battle networks, could achieve the same destructive effects as low-yield tactical nuclear weapons.

As one strategist said, the Soviets now, quote, “Believe that their American rivals were scientific magicians. What they said they could do, they could do,” unquote.

While Kissinger busied himself with arms control negotiations that ultimately proved counterproductive, Russia demonstrated the capability to destroy American planes and tanks in huge numbers. America responded with a massive commitment to defense R&D.

A proxy for this commitment is the size of the federal development budget (building and testing of prototypes) as a percentage of GDP, as reported by the National Science Foundation. This remained at around 0.8% of GDP during the Carter and Reagan years, compared to just 0.3% of GDP today.


In 1976, for example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency commissioned RCA labs to build fast and energy-efficient microchips, initially to enable weather forecasting in the cockpit of US fighter aircraft. By 1978, the CMOS chip manufacturing process made possible lockdown radar, which requires advanced computation to distinguish images below an aircraft from the background.

In the nine years between the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1982 Israeli-Syrian air battle over the Beqaa valley, the United States reestablished domination of the skies. Israel used a combination of lookdown radar, AWAC-based command and control, and suicide drones to destroy nearly 100 modern Soviet-built aircraft and 17 out of the 19 Syrian surface-to-air missile batteries, with the loss of just one Israeli fighter. The Beqaa valley engagement marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War, and the end of Soviet technological superiority in key military technologies.

Henry Kissinger’s arms-control flummery and musings on limited nuclear war did not motivate America’s pursuit of détente. We had no choice after 1973, because Russia had the upper hand. But we did not leave it at that. We mobilized our technical and scientific resources on an enormous scale and created the digital revolution.

That gave us war-winning technologies in conventional arms and opened the promise of an effective missile defense shield under Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It was a bipartisan commitment. Jimmy Carter’s Defense Department under the leadership of a prominent physicist, Dr. Harold Brown, developed most of the weapons systems that made America so formidable during the Reagan years.

A détente with Russia and China that accepts China’s dominance in global high-technology manufacturing and its corresponding rise as a dominant military power would be a surrender in slow-motion. It would mean the end of America’s aspirations, and a British-style decline into strategic irrelevance. But a détente that takes grim inventory of our own failings and buys us time to rebuild our technological edge is another matter.

The idea will not be popular among American politicians who find it easier to denounce Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping than to remedy our weakness at home. But it is the only path between two unacceptable alternatives: A confrontation with Russia and/or China that we might lose, and which might escalate into nuclear war, or descent into national mediocrity.

The scale of the problem is daunting. To return federal R&D funding to the levels of the late 1970s or 1980s relative to GDP, we would have to spend another $200 billion a year. The great corporate laboratories, starting with Bell Labs, no longer exist; they would have to be reconstituted. Only 7% of our college students major in engineering, against 33% in both Russia and China; Russia alone graduates as many engineers each year as the United States. These are labors of Hercules.

But we have the choice of accomplishing them or condemning future generations of Americans to mediocrity. We need inspirational leadership to persuade American taxpayers to fund investment on this scale, like John F. Kennedy in 1962 when he told the nation that we would go to the moon, or Ronald Reagan in 1984 when he proposed to protect America against missile attack.

David P. Goldman, president of Macrostrategy LLC, a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty, and a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. He writes the “Spengler” column for Asia Times Online and the “Spengler” blog at PJ Media, and is the author of You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World (Bombardier Books) and How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too)(Regnery)

The following article was originally published in the Law & Liberty magazine and is republished here with kind permission. Read the original article here.

asiatimes.com · by David P. Goldman · July 21, 2022






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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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