Quotes of the Day:

“Make no mistake: Satan’s specialty is psychological warfare. If he can turn us on God (‘It’s not fair!’), or turn us on others (‘It’s their fault!’), or turn us on ourselves (‘I’m so stupid!’), we won’t turn on him.” 

– Beth Moore

“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” - John Adams

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives"

– James Madison

1. SOCOM chief sees 'renaissance' for special forces amid great power competition, evolving warfare

2. How Shannon Kent Became a Trailblazer Among US Special Operations Forces

3. Military technology on display at Tampa trade show

4. SNC: Engineering the Future of Special Operations

5. 'Power of Partnerships' Is Focus of Special Operations Forces Convention

6. US paused bomb shipment to Israel to signal concerns over Rafah invasion, official says

7. TikTok Sues to Block U.S. Ban

8. US military finishes Gaza pier, but plans to move it into place paused

9. Chinese warplane fired flares, put Australian Navy helicopter in danger, Canberra says

10. Rifle-Armed Robot Dogs Now Being Tested By Marine Special Operators

11. Explainer: how 'AI killer robots' are threatening global security

12. The US Has Never Pivoted to the Indo-Pacific

13. Israeli and Hamas Negotiators Are in Cairo Under Pressure for Cease Fire

14. Israel hasn't crossed "red line" with current Rafah operation, U.S. officials say

15. Decline of Senior Officer Integrity and Civilian Control of the Military

16. Ukraine’s Strained Military Tries a New Style of Recruitment

17. The Original Sin of Biden’s Foreign Policy

18. No, This Is Not a Cold War—Yet

19. East Asia’s Coming Population Collapse

20. Why Ukraine Should Keep Striking Russian Oil Refineries

1. SOCOM chief sees 'renaissance' for special forces amid great power competition, evolving warfare

This is very important – the recognition of the "convergence of adversaries."

I am concerned that by making China our pacing threat we are neglecting this convergence. Just as we know we are stronger with our allies, thes axis of totalitarianism gains strength by their convergence of actions and activities and mutual support. Although they are not alliances in the same form as ours, I think our adversaries have recognized our strengths and see the value in convergence. Rather than local geographic threats the convergence creates global dilemmas across the boundaries of the geographic combatant commands.

Excerpts:

Fenton emphasized that special forces will also be in greater need as the character of warfare evolves. One leading reason, he said, is the “convergence of adversaries.” The general didn’t name who he had in mind, though US officials have raised alarm of closer ties between several countries. For example, Iran and North Korea are supplying Russia with weapons to sustain its invasion of Ukraine, while Moscow and Beijing have been seen as deepening their relationship to curtail western influence.

...

“We haven’t seen … the arrival of that many different, I would call ecosystems or capabilities, going that fast together in quite some time,” he said.

​Very important observations from CSM Shorter. The idea that the Global War on Terrorism is over so SOF has been able to take a rest is false. 

According to Command Sgt. Maj. Shane Shorter, SOCOM’s senior enlisted leader, the tempo for missions among SOCOM troops is actually rising. Sharing statistics with a mix of industry and government attendees, Shorter said that top officials informed SOCOM its missions “will be needed three times more in this decisive decade.

“In fact, the demand for SOF to support strategic competition has increased year-over-year by over 30 percent,” he continued. Additionally, crisis response events have increased over 150 percent, he said. Shorter didn’t specify quantities or timelines.

SOCOM chief sees 'renaissance' for special forces amid great power competition, evolving warfare - Breaking Defense

“We haven’t seen … the arrival of that many different, I would call ecosystems or capabilities, going that fast together in quite some time,” SOCOM Commander Gen. Bryan Fenton said of new technologies changing the nature of warfare.

breakingdefense.com · by Michael Marrow · May 7, 2024

Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, commander for the U.S. Special Operations Command, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee in Washington, D.C. March 20, 2024. (DoD photo by EJ Hersom)

SOF WEEK 2024 — The drawdown of US forces from the Middle East and pivot to great power competition could leave one with the impression that demand for special operations forces (SOF) is falling. But top officials from US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) argued today that troops under their command play an essential role in the US’s bid to outpace Russia and China, which they described as a harbinger for something of a revival.

“Strategic competition has been and absolutely is in SOF’s DNA. We’d offer that this era is a bit of a special ops renaissance,” SOCOM chief Gen. Bryan Fenton said at a keynote address at the SOF Week conference here in Tampa.

According to Command Sgt. Maj. Shane Shorter, SOCOM’s senior enlisted leader, the tempo for missions among SOCOM troops is actually rising. Sharing statistics with a mix of industry and government attendees, Shorter said that top officials informed SOCOM its missions “will be needed three times more in this decisive decade.

“In fact, the demand for SOF to support strategic competition has increased year-over-year by over 30 percent,” he continued. Additionally, crisis response events have increased over 150 percent, he said. Shorter didn’t specify quantities or timelines.

Fenton emphasized that special forces will also be in greater need as the character of warfare evolves. One leading reason, he said, is the “convergence of adversaries.” The general didn’t name who he had in mind, though US officials have raised alarm of closer ties between several countries. For example, Iran and North Korea are supplying Russia with weapons to sustain its invasion of Ukraine, while Moscow and Beijing have been seen as deepening their relationship to curtail western influence.

“That certainly has all of us very focused in special operations in the US military, on how we go forward,” he said.

Fenton further pointed to the proliferation of new technologies, like AI, which he said can help operators sift through “the mammoth mountains and glaciers of data that we have.” In a similar vein, autonomy can help operators do much more than they could previously, like network together huge swarms of drones and guide them with a single controller.

“We haven’t seen … the arrival of that many different, I would call ecosystems or capabilities, going that fast together in quite some time,” he said.

And in the backdrop, the demand for contemporary SOF missions, particularly counterterrorism, continues. Many of those operations are concentrated in Central and West Africa, where US troops operate from bases in places like Niger and Chad. But ruling military juntas have now moved to evict US troops from both countries. The US has withdrawn troops from Chad, and negotiations are underway to remove personnel from Niger, CNN previously reported.

Breaking Defense attempted to ask Fenton about the impact of the withdrawals on special operations and counterterrorism campaigns following his remarks, but Fenton’s aides said he would not be taking questions from the press.

breakingdefense.com · by Michael Marrow · May 7, 2024

2. How Shannon Kent Became a Trailblazer Among US Special Operations Forces

I look forward to reading this book about this great American.

How Shannon Kent Became a Trailblazer Among US Special Operations Forces

military.com · by Military.com | By Marty Skovlund Jr. and Joe Kent Published May 07, 2024 · May 7, 2024

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from "SEND ME: The True Story of a Mother at War" by Marty Skovlund Jr. & Joe Kent.

It was an overcast October day at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, perfect for weapons familiarization training. Shannon was the only woman in this Naval Special Warfare Direct Support Course class, and the only woman on the range that day. But that's not what she was thinking about; she just wanted to get to the part where she was sending rounds and burning brass.

"Point the weapon in a safe direction. That means not at your buddy, nerds!" The SEAL providing this block of instruction had no shortage of sarcasm, or disdain for support personnel for that matter.

"Verify that it's clear and safe, then return your Mk 48 to condition four. Then open the cover and feeding mechanism and place your dummy rounds on the feed tray. Then pull the charging handle back using an overhand grip, not underhand."

The SEAL paused for dramatic effect before repeating himself, "OVERHAND, not UNDERHAND!"

Yup, got it bud, Shannon thought. She was excited to be here, excited to be earning her spot in the special warfare community, but could barely stifle her own sarcastic inner monologue. She had worked with enough SEALs to spot when one was taking himself too seriously or carrying too much ego in his ruck. She figured it was the latter with this guy.

"Place the safety on safe, squeeze the trigger, and verify that the bolt does not go forward," the SEAL continued with his well-rehearsed monologue. "Push the charging handle forward and verify ..."

‘SEND ME: The True Story of a Mother at War’ was written by Marty Skovlund Jr. and Joe Kent. (Photo courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers)

Shannon crashed onto the special operations scene headfirst and didn't slow down once getting in. After Shannon returned from her first deployment, she made a quick pit stop in Garmisch, Germany, for language training -- and a little snowboarding in the Austrian Alps -- before volunteering for the new Naval Special Warfare Direct Support Course, which would allow her to serve in combat alongside Navy SEALs. She was the first female to attend, but she wouldn't be the last.

The course was a month long and involved timed, graded ruck marches, runs, swims, marksmanship, advanced training in close-quarters combat, and other activities required to serve alongside Navy SEALs in combat. Women on the SEAL teams were a new concept at that point, but Shannon set the standard and high expectations for other women coming into the program, finishing third overall in her class.

She was permanently assigned to Naval Special Warfare Support Activity 2 in Norfolk, Virginia, where she worked side by side with East Coast--based Navy SEALs. The SEALs were initially hesitant, not because she was a female but because non-SEAL support, in general, was a new concept at that time.

Because she was the first female to go through the direct support course and make it, some didn't believe she belonged there; they'd never heard of that happening before. The comments ranged from snarky to pure disbelief at times.

She's been through direct support?

Oh, no, she hasn't. There's no way.

But Shannon had the paperwork to prove it, and her performance at work always validated that piece of paper. It took a long time to get the course entered into her official records because people didn't want to deal with the ramifications of her having that qualification.

Every day after work, Shannon stepped off in a faded New York Yankees hat, brown T-shirt, black shorts, and earbuds to go for a run. She stayed quiet and humble, knowing actions speak louder than words and that she needed to earn her spot in Naval Special Warfare every day.

Shannon had been running her whole life and regularly used it as a way to show her physical prowess. Although contemporary special operators do a much better job at balancing cardiovascular endurance with weight training, the training philosophy was still very run-oriented in the late aughts. Anyone in SOF, from operators to support, was judged on their ability to keep up; dropping out of a run was akin to quitting. If you couldn't be counted on to keep up, how could anyone trust you to make it to target without falling out and potentially jeopardizing the success or failure of a mission?

A typical training day might start with the East Coast SEAL teams Shannon was assigned to running on a sandy beach in combat boots before swapping those out for fins to conduct a half-mile swim in the Atlantic Ocean. After returning, those same boots would be put back on (now soaked from the ocean) for the return leg of the trip. Everyone, SEAL or not, was expected to hang for what many called the "Friday Funny" or "Monster Mash" -- or simply the run-swim-run. Another typical run route took them from the Hot Tuna, a Virginia Beach restaurant popular with Navy SEALs stationed in the area, to the beachfront.

Shannon Kent was a Navy senior chief petty officer who was killed in the 2019 Manbij bombing in Syria. (Photo courtesy of Marty Skovlund Jr./Coffee or Die Magazine)

But the First Landing State Park route was particularly difficult, where the strong were separated from the weak. The first time Shannon did this route, she rode standard military Blue Bird school buses out to the unofficial trailhead, which led into First Landing State Park. From there Shannon stepped off on hiking trails that criss-crossed throughout the park, taking runners up and down hills and stairs and crossing bridges over the marshes and through the forest. Andrew was a fellow special warfare sailor. (Editor's note: Andrew's unit name is being omitted at the request of the Defense Department.) When Shannon first showed up to the unit, he expected she could keep up just enough not to embarrass herself, thinking she looked like the type that was more worried about breaking a nail, never mind a sweat. The First Landing State Park trails were where Andrew first saw her in action. He ran alongside Shannon, trying to make conversation as they climbed the tree roots that formed the steps up the hills in the park. "The weather's great today, isn't it?" Andrew said. "Nice to get out into nature, right?"

"Yeah, nice weather today for sure," Shannon said, polite but unenthused.

"How do you like SA-2 so far?" Andrew said, using the short-hand for their unit. He was breathing hard and a bit surprised that Shannon didn't seem particularly fazed by the difficult terrain. He wasn't the fastest in the unit, but he typically finished unit runs in the top quarter.

"So far, so good," Shannon said. Her replies didn't leave much room for a conversation to bloom. They continued with the small talk for a while longer. Shannon was trying to be polite but grew anxious that she would be perceived as more interested in talking than running.

"I'm sorry," Shannon said. "But I'm going to go ahead and start running now because I'm trying to set a pace for the next time I run this trail."

Andrew was stunned. She wasn't even breathing hard. The next time he saw her, she had already finished her cool-down and was casually stretched as the other runners rolled in.

Slowly, Shannon gained the respect and trust of the SEALs in her new unit. She was a true professional who wasn't afraid to step into any challenge. Her type-A personality and knowledge of trade-craft got her noticed in a positive way. It was an uphill battle, but she was making progress. Eventually she was selected to attend a special operations training course in Louisiana with a few others from her new unit.

Their class coincided with Mardi Gras, but they weren't allowed to go into New Orleans until after the festivities had already wound down -- which also happened to be a week before they were scheduled to graduate. At that point, they were ready to blow off steam and have a few drinks.

They each started off with two Long Island iced teas at about 11 a.m. They proceeded to barhop from one location to the next, hitting everything from seedy hole-in-the-wall joints to swanky gay bars, doing their best to cure themselves of sobriety in the process.

Joe Kent co-authored a book about his late wife Shannon, who was killed in 2019 in Syria, titled 'SEND ME: The True Story of a Mother at War.' (Photo courtesy of Joe Kent)

The bayou barhopping continued well into the evening, and they eventually ended up at Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo on Bourbon Street, drunk as the sailors they were. Inside, there were shrines of every variety adorned with skulls, beads, and more than a few voodoo dolls. Signs of varying sizes were posted everywhere, stating the obvious "nothing on the voodoo altar is for sale" or the more threatening "do not touch the voodoo altar or cops will be called." It was very clear the establishment did not want visitors to touch the voodoo altar -- especially the drunk ones.

But Shannon considered the signs more like a suggestion than a hard rule. She picked up a small figure sitting on the altar, and before she could ask how much it cost, the staff started hysterically yelling at her. Shannon was startled and knocked over the entire altar, breaking several of the delicate voodoo figurines.

"Oh shit," Shannon said.

"You will all be cursed for nine generations!" one furious museum staffer yelled.

"Last bar!" Shannon's friend Birddog yelled, giving the signal that it was time to get out of there before police were called. The small group of drunk special operations sailors immediately executed their E&E -- "escape and evasion" -- plan. They quickly melted into the New Orleans crowds, never to be seen again by the mystics who allegedly cursed them.

Shannon and her teammates laughed the whole way back to base and made it through their last week of training without incident.

"Wouldn't it be crazy if this plane goes Final Destination-style and crashes and we all die?" Birddog said on their flight back to Virginia Beach. In this way, Shannon's voodoo curse had followed her.

"If we start to crash, the last thing I'm going to do is punch you in the face," another said, looking at Shannon.

"Yeah, seems fair," Shannon replied, blushing ever so slightly. Fortunately, they made it home safely.

With the training course in Louisiana behind her, Shannon and her unit were about to leave for their next deployment to Iraq. As was customary, she and a few friends from work went out to a local bar in Virginia Beach frequented by frogmen for a few last drinks. AJ was a SEAL team leader out with his wife, and they were sitting at a table near Shannon's. His wife is Latina, and she overheard another woman in the bar, who was clearly not Latina, speaking Spanish perfectly.

"Who is that?" his wife asked.

"That's Shannon. She's new," AJ said, clearly impressed that she had caught his wife's attention. Shannon had successfully assimilated into her new unit and made a positive impression, even among the SEALs. Now it was time to go back to war.

Excerpted from "SEND ME: The True Story of a Mother at War" by Marty Skovlund Jr. & Joe Kent, published May 7 by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by Joe Kent and Marty Skovlund Jr. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

military.com · by Military.com | By Marty Skovlund Jr. and Joe Kent Published May 07, 2024 · May 7, 2024

3. Military technology on display at Tampa trade show

I think more important than the technology and hardware are the excellent national security panels that are taking place. USSOOCM and the Global SOF Foundation have really remade SOF week into more than a mod demo and a display of equipment. There are many important national security discussions taking place. I think this is in keeping with the first SOF truth that humans are more important than hardware and is illustrated in the idea that we must not only out build, "out logistics," and out fight our enemies, but we must outthink them as well. As T.E. Lawrence said, "irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge." USSOCOM is putting emphasis on intellectual capital in addition to hardware. But intellectual capital does not make the news.

Military technology on display at Tampa trade show

fox13news.com · by Lloyd Sowers

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It's Special Operations Forces Week in Tampa

FOX 13's Lloyd Sowers shows us the event in Tampa showcasing emerging technology in use on the battlefield.

TAMPA - At the Tampa Convention Center, the trade show floor is set up for an international event like no other.

"If you look around this show, there are all these different sensors, things that fly, things that shoot," says Tampa native and former Army Green Beret Paul Greaves.

The trade show is part of SOF Week. SOF stands for Special Operations Forces. They are small units of highly trained military forces from all branches that range from Delta Force to Navy SEALs.

For hostage rescues and other dangerous Special Operations missions, they increasingly rely on the most advanced technology for a view of the battlefield and to control drones, remotely operated guns, and weapons and surveillance systems.

"If you look around, it’s pretty much this whole show is about technologically linked equipment," says Greaves, who now works for a company called Persistent Systems, which provides technology systems for the military.

Many drones are on display. They’re become preferred weapons on new battlefields in a kind of technological chess match.

"It’s constantly evolving back and forth. We just try to stay ahead of them with our capabilities," says Justin Litko, of Blue Halo.

That company provides electric powered water drones that can run 500 miles, either on the surface or underwater.

"A scenario would be if you’re trying to get a drone a far distance and there is only water between you and where you’re trying to take the drone."

The sea drone can carry an air drone and launch it with little fear of detection.

Tampa is a natural location for the event. MacDill Air Force Base houses U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which is in command of U.S. Special Operations units from all branches of the military around the world.

Wednesday is the annual special operations demonstration at the Convention Center that simulates a special operation with troops dropped in by helicopters and automatic weapons firing blanks. It’s sure to be loud.

But the modern warfighter really depends on silent technology in the battles we see even now. Battles where drone warfare -- and seeing the battle in real time -- is war in the 21st century.

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fox13news.com · by Lloyd Sowers

4. SNC: Engineering the Future of Special Operations

"Sponsored content" from Defense News. But there are some interesting points in this.

SNC: Engineering the Future of Special Operations

Defense News · by Sightline Media Group Sponsored Content · May 6, 2024

For over two decades, U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) have led the charge in the Global War on Terror. SOF’s focus on innovation, agility and enhancing key partnerships have made it the premiere counterterrorism force while also advancing U.S. interests around the world. Today, as conflict shifts toward peer and near-peer threats, SOF’s unique structure, capabilities and expertise ensure that it remains a critical force for the U.S. and joint operations to deter and respond to Russia and China’s growing influence.

To ensure they stay ahead of evolving threats, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) consistently turns to global industry leader SNC, known for its world-class engineering, integration and modernization expertise. SNC’s history of supporting SOF spans decades, providing cutting-edge solutions that create strategic, asymmetric advantages in integrated deterrence, crisis and conflict situations.

While SNC’s legacy of innovation is rooted in advanced electronic warfare (EW), radiofrequency (RF) jammers and other systems, much of its partnership with SOCOM started with aircraft modification. Today, SNC combines these two strengths to shift SOCOM and special operators into the future. By digitally transforming proven platforms for global SOF support, SNC is creating open architecture systems ranging from Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) enablers, like SNC’s Digital Grid, SNC TRAX® Software, RF countermeasure (RFCM) systems, open mission systems, such as the Airlift Tanker Open Mission System (ATOMS) and other essential, next-gen solutions that enhance SOF’s existing strengths, enabling success in the strategic competitive environment.

SNC’s aircraft modification and modernization work is centered on survivability and connectivity, ensuring the warfighter has the advantage wherever the mission takes them. For instance, SNC’s engineering and installation work on the RFCM system provides threat detection, precision geolocation and active countermeasure capabilities on the AC/MC-130J aircraft, significantly improving survivability in the modern threat landscape through advanced system processing and robust spectrum support.

With the need to further JADC2 in an array of conflict environments, SNC’s integration of an airborne networking capability provides MC-130J aircrew and mission personnel with a secure communications suite. The system aggregates and disseminates tactical data from disparate networks between aircraft, ground forces and command centers across the battlespace. The system works in close coordination with RFCM – the former providing consolidated situational awareness and the latter, aircraft detection and self-protection – working in conjunction to safeguard and enable SOF warriors in degraded and denied environments.

SNC is broadening JADC2 and resilient C2 capabilities across the services, providing solutions for all branches of the U.S. military to greatly increase SOCOM’s strategic advantage in the future fight. It’s groundbreaking integration of the ATOMS solution, demonstrated during Mobility Guardian 2023, delivers enhanced situational awareness through multidomain networking and datalink. SNC’s ATOMS demo showcased the system’s ability to create a Common Operating Picture, improving data interpretation and bolstering decision advantage all within a highly mobile, adaptable platform that is easily configurable for nearly any SOF operation. ATOMS was built to enable global C2 using SNC TRAX to accurately navigate and maneuver the Joint Force while under attack. SNC TRAX translates disparate communication and data platforms across aircraft, Operations Centers, mounted and dismounted warfighters in every phase of the operation, with mission relevant information in near-real time for faster decisions.

As the U.S. refocuses toward Russia and China’s destabilizing influences, SOCOM is focusing on how to adapt its highly specialized forces to compete against a near-peer threat. In this effort, secure, reliable connectivity across the Joint Forces and our allied partners is essential. SNC’s trusted, proven solutions are protecting the SOF warrior in the most critical moments and facilitating global operations for mission success.

Defense News · by Sightline Media Group Sponsored Content · May 6, 2024

5. 'Power of Partnerships' Is Focus of Special Operations Forces Convention

I think that one of the most important concepts of special operations and in particular Special Forces operations is partnered operations. The fundamental concept for Special Forces was first described by COL Mark Boyatt in 1995 as "through, with, and by." Like all good ideas these words have been adopted by the broader SOF community and shared with the rest of the US military.

Key excerpts:

As to the priority to win, Fenton said the global SOF team wins "today and tomorrow, through our people providing options for decision-makers and dilemmas to our adversaries."

He added that the SOF community's three missions of strategic competition, crisis response and counterterrorism are accomplished through the power of partnership.

Regarding the priority of transformation, Shorter credited Socom's partnerships with academia, industry and the entire international SOF team with keeping Socom "at the cutting edge."

"And, of course, there is tech," he added. "Seabed to space, cyber to fiber, your Socom team — fueled by the power of partnerships — is all about people."

While providing an overview of the current geopolitical landscape as viewed through the eyes of Socom, Fenton credited the international SOF community with helping form such an assessment.

"We see and sense more because of our partners," he said. "And what I outline is a shared-sight picture."

In laying out that picture, the two leaders made mention of global adversaries working to degrade the very partnerships that Fenton and Shorter spent much of their keynote remarks lauding.

"Our adversaries seek to divide and weaken the power of these partnerships, and to challenge us even more with their hardware and tactics," Fenton said.

'Power of Partnerships' Is Focus of Special Operations Forces Convention

defense.gov · by Matthew Olay

Senior leadership from U.S. Special Operations Command today emphasized the significant role that partnership plays in accomplishing the mission of special operations forces during keynote remarks at the start of Special Operations Forces Week 2024 in Tampa, Florida.

Special Operations Forces Week 2024

Army Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, commander of Special Operations Command, and Army Command Sgt. Maj. Shane W. Shorter deliver keynote remarks at Special Operations Forces Week 2024 in Tampa, Fla., May 7, 2024.

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VIRIN: 240507-F-SI788-1124Y

While delivering a joint speech to roughly 3,000 convention attendees, Army Gen. Bryan P. Fenton and Army Command Sgt. Maj. Shane W. Shorter ­— Socom's commander and senior enlisted leader, respectively — spoke about how global challenges require international SOF solutions.

"We often speak about the power of partnerships, and we want to double down on that today because this conference is the manifestation of the power of partnerships," Fenton said.

Framing SOF Week as "a collision of differing perspectives crucial to solving intractable problems that our [partner and ally] nations depend on special operations to solve," Fenton and Shorter spent the early part of their remarks recapping Socom's three priorities: people, win, and transform.

"People are our number one enterprise priority, and they are our comparative and competitive advantage," Fenton said.

"And that team includes our partners — whether in our many courses in Joint Special Operations University or the 28 nations right in our headquarters, as well as the numerous SOF relationships we have around the globe."

This year's convention has 20,000 registrants attending from 75 countries.

As to the priority to win, Fenton said the global SOF team wins "today and tomorrow, through our people providing options for decision-makers and dilemmas to our adversaries."

Emerald Night

Air Force Special Tactics operators observe the range before conducting close air support training during Emerald Warrior 23 at Eglin Range, Fla., April 24, 2023. Emerald Warrior is the largest joint special operations exercise involving U.S. Special Operations Command forces training to respond to various threats.

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He added that the SOF community's three missions of strategic competition, crisis response and counterterrorism are accomplished through the power of partnership.

Regarding the priority of transformation, Shorter credited Socom's partnerships with academia, industry and the entire international SOF team with keeping Socom "at the cutting edge."

"And, of course, there is tech," he added. "Seabed to space, cyber to fiber, your Socom team — fueled by the power of partnerships — is all about people."

While providing an overview of the current geopolitical landscape as viewed through the eyes of Socom, Fenton credited the international SOF community with helping form such an assessment.

"We see and sense more because of our partners," he said. "And what I outline is a shared-sight picture."

In laying out that picture, the two leaders made mention of global adversaries working to degrade the very partnerships that Fenton and Shorter spent much of their keynote remarks lauding.

"Our adversaries seek to divide and weaken the power of these partnerships, and to challenge us even more with their hardware and tactics," Fenton said.

Special Operations Forces Week 2024

Army Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, commander of Special Operations Command, and Army Command Sgt. Maj. Shane W. Shorter deliver keynote remarks at Special Operations Forces Week 2024 in Tampa, Fla., May 7, 2024.

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Additionally, Shorter said, the U.S. and its allies are seeing the character of war rapidly changing — with uncrewed robotics, ubiquitous surveillance tools, and artificial intelligence all working in concert to create a set of "wicked problems" that "defy simple solutions, require ongoing management, and have far-reaching global consequences."

Spotlight: Artificial Intelligence

Despite such challenges, Fenton said Socom is rising to the occasion by "delivering asymmetric and asynchronous advantage and opportunities for our nation, across the globe, alongside our allies and our partners [and] providing dilemmas and challenges for our adversaries."

Prior to segueing into a question-and-answer session, the two senior leaders rounded out their prepared remarks by reemphasizing Socom's commitment to robust partnerships.

"The foundation for Socom's missions is our partnerships — forged by generational relationships and grounded in trust," Fenton said.

Jointly sponsored by Socom and the Global SOF Foundation, SOF Week — which runs through May 10 — is "an annual conference for the international SOF community to learn, connect and honor its members," according to the event's official website.

The highlights of this year's event include several multiple keynote speakers, professional development seminars, industry engagements and a live capabilities demonstration.

defense.gov · by Matthew Olay

6. US paused bomb shipment to Israel to signal concerns over Rafah invasion, official says

Key point:

...the pausing of the aid shipment is the most striking manifestation of the growing daylight between Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the administration of President Joe Biden, which has called on Israel to do far more to protect the lives of innocent civilians in Gaza.

US paused bomb shipment to Israel to signal concerns over Rafah invasion, official says​

BY ZEKE MILLER AND AAMER MADHANI

Updated 12:35 AM EDT, May 8, 2024

AP · by ZEKE MILLER · May 8, 2024

ZEKE MILLER

Zeke is AP’s chief White House correspondent

twittermailto

AAMER MADHANI

Aamer Madhani is a White House reporter.

twittermailto

AP · by ZEKE MILLER · May 8, 2024

7. TikTok Sues to Block U.S. Ban

National security versus First Amendment. Of course TikTok and China will try to employ our values against us. What do we sacrifice? LEt's consider the long term. Surely China wants to continue to employ TikTok to subvert American society and create divisions and manipulate democracy while "hoovering up" as much data on Americans as americans will so willingly give away in reign for the endorphin rush of watching short videos (which further erode the attention span of Americans thus harming the US ion another way). But if TikTok is outlawed due to national security over the first amendment, this will also contribute to subverting American and our values. So for China either outcome will be win-win and it is only a question of short term gains versus long term effects that will both benefit China. We need to recognize China's strategy(ies), understand it, EXPOSE it, and attack it with a superior political warfare strategy that rests fundamental on protecting American values.

On a slightly separate note, I would like the US to pass a law that says no country can provide internet/cyber services to the US market if they prohibit those services in their own country.  

TikTok Sues to Block U.S. Ban

Chinese-controlled app claims new federal law violates First Amendment and unlawfully singles out company for punishment

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/tiktok-sues-to-block-u-s-ban-6ec6e17f?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

By Jacob Gershman

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 and Meghan Bobrowsky

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Updated May 7, 2024 5:15 pm ET

ByteDance is seeking a court order blocking a bipartisan law signed by President Biden last month. PHOTO: HOW HWEE YOUNG/SHUTTERSTOCK

TikTok filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of a new law that requires a sale or ban of the popular social-media app, setting up a court showdown over national security and free speech in the age of global information wars.

The suit, filed directly with a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., seeks a court order preventing the U.S. from enforcing the bipartisan law signed by President Biden last month. The measure bans Chinese-backed TikTok in the U.S. unless its parent company, ByteDance, divests itself of the platform by mid-January. 

Beijing-based ByteDance has said it can’t and won’t sell its U.S. operations by the deadline, leaving litigation as its best hope to maintain its U.S. market. The lawsuit accuses the government of trampling on TikTok’s First Amendment rights—as well as the free-speech rights of millions of Americans—under the banner of national security. 

“There is no question: the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025,” the lawsuit states, “silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”

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The U.S. isn’t the first country to attempt a ban on TikTok, the Chinese-owned app used by millions of Americans daily. WSJ breaks down TikTok bans and how they work in practice. Photo illustration: Annie Zhao

The suit also alleges the U.S. ban is an unconstitutional legislative punishment of TikTok, denies the company equal protection under the law and amounts to an unlawful taking of private property.

The short-form video platform, which has operated as TikTok in the U.S. since 2018, quickly gained mass appeal as an entertainment platform, news source, cultural tastemaker and activist hub.

More than half of all U.S. adults ages 18 to 29 use TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center. About four in 10 TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app—double the number of people who said they did in 2020.

National-security officials and federal lawmakers have watched TikTok’s growth with alarm. Supporters of the law say TikTok offers a foreign adversary a potent tool to spy on Americans and manipulate public opinion through its algorithms. Forcing TikTok to cut ties with China is the only effective way to deal with the security risks, they say.

TikTok says it has taken measures to safeguard user data and prevent Chinese government influence.

The U.S. has long restricted foreign ownership of radio and television broadcasting, but Congress has never taken such drastic actions against an internet platform used by millions of Americans.

For now, life on TikTok is operating as usual. High-profile users are continuing to post content, and TikTok is telling advertisers not to worry. At a conference in New York last week, one of TikTok’s business leaders told a room of 300 media executives that the company isn’t backing down in its fight to stay in the U.S.

TikTok doesn’t comment publicly on its financials, but going into 2024 it wasn’t yet profitable, according to people familiar with the matter. 

TikTok ad sales in the U.S. are expected to grow 31% this year to $8.7 billion, according to estimates from Emarketer, an outside firm. The platform is investing heavily to build out a shopping feature that could potentially rival Amazon one day, with users buying and selling items directly on the platform. 

If ByteDance were to try to sell off TikTok’s U.S. operations, it is unclear what price it could fetch. One potential suitor has suggested $20 billion as a starting price for its U.S. operations. 

But divestiture in any meaningful sense seems to be off the table, since the Chinese government has indicated it won’t allow a forced sale of the app. If TikTok loses the court battle and is forced to withdraw from the U.S. market, competitors such as Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube could look to exploit the gap to their advantage.

Courts previously ruled against some federal and state restrictions on TikTok, but have left the First Amendment issues unsettled.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled against Commerce Department efforts to ban TikTok during the Trump administration, deciding the agency exceeded its authority under a 1970s law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. 

In a separate Pennsylvania case, another U.S. district judge, citing similar legal grounds, sided with a group of TikTok stars that sued the Trump administration.

The current case is different, however, because it is Congress that took action—after classified briefings—rather than the White House trying to claim authority for a ban under a decades-old law.

The GOP-led House passed the bill overwhelmingly in March. The Senate then took a more cautious view of the legislation, but ultimately approved it after extending the time period for TikTok to find a buyer.

Lawmakers, mindful of the coming legal scrutiny, took steps aimed at shoring up the legislation, including by framing the measure as a forward-looking effort to stop potential spying on Americans rather than an attempt to punish TikTok.

“It’s not about shutting down speech,” Mike Gallagher, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin who helped draft the legislation, told reporters in March before he left office. “As long as the ownership structure is changed, TikTok can continue and Americans can say whatever the heck they want.”

TikTok is already restricted on federal government smartphones. Many states have also banned the platform on state government devices. 

Several Supreme Court precedents could be relevant in the legal fight, including a 1965 case in which the high court said citizens have a right to receive information even if it is foreign propaganda. In that case, justices invalidated a federal law that made it more difficult for Americans to receive foreign mailings of Communist political propaganda.

Renewed calls to ban TikTok began after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. Some users felt there was an increase in antisemitic content posted to the platform. 

One analysis—looking at the number of times users watched videos with certain hashtags—found videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags were getting far more views than those with pro-Israel hashtags. In some cases, the ratio was as high as 69 to 1, according to the analysis done by San Francisco-based data scientist Anthony Goldbloom.

TikTok, whose U.S. operations are based in Los Angeles, said its app doesn’t promote one side of an issue over another and that it hasn’t been asked by the Chinese government to turn over U.S. user data.

In the coming litigation, the Justice Department will need to show that Congress had compelling reasons that justify the burdens on free speech that come with shutting down a popular communications platform. It will also have to rebut arguments by TikTok that lawmakers’ concerns could have been addressed through restrictions that were more narrowly tailored than a ban or forced sale of the app.

The concerns have to be more than speculative, said David Greene, a lawyer with digital civil liberties nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes the ban.

“They’re going to have to show this is a real and actual security concern, not a hypothetical,” he said.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the lawsuit.

It is possible that the U.S. government could disclose to the courts classified information about TikTok’s alleged security threat.

“It’s going to turn on whether the national security argument put forward by the government is strong enough,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a University of Minnesota constitutional law professor. “At the end of the day, that’s what this comes down to.”

Write to Jacob Gershman at jacob.gershman@wsj.com and Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com

8. US military finishes Gaza pier, but plans to move it into place paused

US military finishes Gaza pier, but plans to move it into place paused

militarytimes.com · by The Associated Press · May 7, 2024

The U.S. military has finished construction of a temporary pier and causeway that will be used to deliver aid to Gaza through a maritime system, but plans to move it into place on the shore are on hold due to weather and other logistics.

Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters on Tuesday that U.S. military ships and the assembled pier are at Israel’s Ashdod port. High winds and sea swells are making it too dangerous for the U.S. military to install the pier at the Gaza beach.

Singh says the U.S. hopes to install the pier and causeway later this week, if the weather permits.

Meanwhile, humanitarian aid is being loaded onto a large container ship, the Sagamore, in Cyprus, for eventual delivery to Gaza, Singh said.

The U.S. hopes the pier can be used to bring more humanitarian aid into Gaza, where the U.N. says there is a full-blown famine in the north.

9. Chinese warplane fired flares, put Australian Navy helicopter in danger, Canberra says

Here is the buried lede.  

Excerpts:

The Australian MH-60R Seahawk helicopter was on patrol enforcing United Nations sanctions on North Korea at the time of the incident, the Defense Ministry in Canberra said, adding the move put the lives of the helicopter crew in danger.

...

“They’re in international waters, international airspace, and they’re doing work to ensure that the sanctions that the world has imposed through the United Nations on North Korea, due to their intransient and reckless behavior, are enforced,” the prime minister told CNN affiliate Nine News.

First, we rarely hear news about military forces actually trying to enforce north Korean sanctions. But what was the Chinese intent: Just asserting its regional dominance or active operations to "protect" north Korean sanctions evasion activities?

Chinese warplane fired flares, put Australian Navy helicopter in danger, Canberra says

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/06/asia/china-australia-helicopter-flares-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

By Brad Lendon, CNN

 5 minute read 

Updated 5:29 AM EDT, Tue May 7, 2024

An Australian Navy helicopter in flight. Ken Griffiths/iStockphoto/Getty Images

Seoul, South KoreaCNN — 

Australia has accused a Chinese fighter jet of firing flares into the path of a naval helicopter last weekend over international waters of the Yellow Sea, an action that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese blasted as “completely unacceptable.”

The Australian MH-60R Seahawk helicopter was on patrol enforcing United Nations sanctions on North Korea at the time of the incident, the Defense Ministry in Canberra said, adding the move put the lives of the helicopter crew in danger.

“This was an unsafe maneuver which posed a risk to the aircraft and personnel,” the statement from Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said.

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The Chinese jet “dropped flares about 300 meters (984 feet) in front of the Seahawk helicopter and about 60 meters (197 feet) above it,” Marles said in an interview with CNN affiliate Nine News on Monday.

No damage or injuries were reported, but flares can lead to the downing of a helicopter if they strike and damage its rotor blades, or if they are ingested into its engines.

The incident is the latest in a growing list of confrontations in international waters between China’s military and other nations, and it comes as Canberra and Beijing are pursuing a rapprochement following a bruising few years of trade disputes and strained relations.

China defended the action by its military and rejected Australia’s claim that the interception was unsafe.

“Under the guise of implementing United Nations Security Council resolutions, Australian warships and aircraft deliberately approached China’s airspace to cause trouble and provocation, endangering China’s maritime and air security,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian told reporters at a regular briefing.

“As a warning, the Chinese military took necessary measures at the scene. Relevant operations are legal, compliant, professional and safe.”

In a separate statement, China’s Ministry of Defense said the Australian helicopters were conducting “close reconnaissance” during China’s “normal training activities” and called its actions warning them to leave “legitimate.” It also accused Australia of “spreading false narratives.”

The MH-60 Seahawk is a twin-engine helicopter and carries a crew of three, according to the Australian Navy.

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What it’s like on board an outnumbered Philippine ship facing down China’s push to dominate the South China Sea

The Australian helicopter was operating from the destroyer HMAS Hobart in international waters of the Yellow Sea as part of Operation Argos, Canberra’s contribution to a multinational effort to enforce UN sanctions against North Korea, according to a statement from the Australian Defense Ministry.

Albanese called the Chinese actions “completely unacceptable” in a television interview Tuesday.

“They’re in international waters, international airspace, and they’re doing work to ensure that the sanctions that the world has imposed through the United Nations on North Korea, due to their intransient and reckless behavior, are enforced,” the prime minister told CNN affiliate Nine News.

“They shouldn’t have been at any risk while they engaged in that behavior,” Albanese said of the Australian crew.

Albanese said “appropriate diplomatic representations” have been made with Beijing.

“We’ve just made it very clear to China that this is unprofessional and that it’s unacceptable,” he said.

The incident was similar to an encounter between a Chinese fighter jet and a Canadian military helicopter over the South China Sea in late October when flares were also fired in the path of the helicopter.

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CNN took an 11-day cruise through some of the most-contested waters on Earth. Here’s what we learned

“The risk to a helicopter in that instance is the flares moving into the rotor blades or the engines so this was categorized as both unsafe and non-standard, unprofessional,” Maj. Rob Millen, air officer aboard the Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Ottawa, told CNN after the October incident.

After that incident China defended its actions and accused Canadian forces of conducting unspecified “malicious and provocative act with ulterior motives.”

Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton urged Albanese to call Chinese leader Xi Jinping to express Canberra’s concerns over the latest incident, but also over a long list of Chinese encounters with Australian and allied aircraft and ships.

“At some stage, there’s going to be a miscalculation and an Australian Defense Force member is going to lose their life. That is a tragic circumstance that has to be avoided at all costs,” Dutton said in an interview with Nine News.

“There will be a miscalculation by somebody who’s flying that jet or somebody who’s on the deck of a Chinese naval ship. Something will happen and that’s what, not just Australia is worried about, the Philippines, Japan, obviously the United States, many other countries in the region, who are very worried about these acts that continue to be provocative, and completely and utterly unnecessary.”

RELATED ARTICLE

Chinese water cannon damages ship in new South China Sea flare-up, Philippines says

Previous contentious and potentially dangerous incidents between Australia and China include an encounter in waters near Japan last November when Australia said a Chinese warship used sonar waves to harass Australian Navy divers in the water trying to untangle fishing nets from the propellers of the frigate HMAS Toowoomba, resulting in minor injuries to the divers.

According to Australian public broadcaster ABC, Australian Navy Vice Adm. Mark Hammond raised the Toowoomba incident in a meeting with Chinese navy Adm. Hu Zhongming at an international naval symposium in Qingdao.

“I sought his concurrence to prioritize the safety of our respective navy personnel and to prevent a reoccurrence of this incident,” ABC quoted Hammond as saying.

In June 2022, a Chinese fighter jet released flares and chaff that entered at least one of the two engines on an Australian P-8A flying in international waters over the South China Sea, Australia said.

Earlier in 2022, Australia said a Chinese warship used a laser to “illuminate” an Australian P-8A aircraft in waters north of Australia.

Pilots targeted by laser attacks have reported disorienting flashes, pain, spasms and spots in their vision and even temporary blindness.

China has denied wrongdoing in all incidents, saying its forces act in accordance with international law while protecting Chinese interests.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Hassan Tayir contributed to this report.

10. Rifle-Armed Robot Dogs Now Being Tested By Marine Special Operators

People are more important than hardware. Which is more important: dogs or robot dogs? (Okay that was a poor attempt at humor).

But I commend this kind of innovation - this will make people more important than hardware if this hardware can help protect the lives of people.

Rifle-Armed Robot Dogs Now Being Tested By Marine Special Operators

MARSOC is using robotic dogs equipped with remote weapon stations to detect targets automatically before being given approval to fire.

BY

HOWARD ALTMAN, OLIVER PARKEN

|

PUBLISHED MAY 7, 2024 10:32 PM EDT

twz.com · by Howard Altman, Oliver Parken · May 7, 2024

The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) looks to be the first organization within the U.S. military to be using rifle-wielding "robot dogs." Other armed robotic K-9s have been explored by the U.S. military and shown off by foreign countries, in the recent past.

Eric Shell, head of business development at Onyx Industries which supplied the gun system for the dogs, confirmed to TWZ on the floor of SOF Week that they are in use with MARSOC. Shell noted that MARSOC has two robot dogs fitted with gun systems based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS) — one in 7.62x39mm caliber, and another in 6.5mm Creedmoor caliber. It's unclear precisely how many other robotic dogs MARSOC may have at present, however, it appears likely that the two equipped with SENTRY are being tested by the command.

Video footage released by Onyx Industries showing one of MARSOC's robot dogs can be seen here.

MARSOC seen in Onyx Industries' video linked above. Onyx Industries

According to Shell, MARSOC's four-legged friends are "doing tunnel work, as well as perimeter security," but he could not specify where precisely.

The underlying robot dog doing this tunnel work for MARSOC is Ghost Robotics' Vision 60 quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle, or Q-UGV, Shell said.

Ghost Robotics describes its Q-UGV as a "mid-sized high-endurance, agile and durable all-weather ground drone for use in a broad range of unstructured urban and natural environments for defense, homeland and enterprise applications." Vision 60 is designed for tasks such as remote inspection, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) missions, mapping, distributed communications, and persistent security. The company has worked with various entities to explore different defense and security applications for Q-UGV in the past, which you can read more about in this past War Zone feature.

Ghost Robotics' Q-UGV. Ghost Robotic

In 2021, for example, we saw Ghost Robotics team up with SWORD International to create what the companies call the Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle, or SPUR. That system saw SWORD's 6.5mm Creedmoor gun fixed atop Ghost Robotics' Q-UGV. Since then, other types of robot dogs have also emerged armed with guns, as well as examples sporting rocket launchers, one of which has been tested by the Marines.

The Q-UGVs currently being tested by MARSOC, on the other hand, are configured with Onyx's SENTRY RWS. The integrated system combines Onyx's X360 Pan/Tilt Gimbal stack (providing full electro-optical/infrared capability), an AI-enabled Digital Imaging System (DIS), and what the company terms RAW (Remote Actuated Weapon). According to Onyx, the Remote Actuated Weapon in its various calibers accepts standard-size magazines and drums.

As Shell explained, the autonomous weapon system will "scan and detect targets... [locking] on [to] drones, people, [and] vehicles." As it features man-in-the-loop fire control, it will alert the operator once a target has been identified, letting the human decide whether to engage or not.

SENTRY can be operated over "any comms network... you can really operate this from anywhere in the world, keeping the operator kind of out of danger," Shell said.

A non-kinetic, sensor-only configuration featuring the Gimbal stack is also available, he pointed out.

For MARSOC, there's a lot that translates from their use of real-life dogs as part of highly dangerous operations to those of the robotic kind; particularly of the autonomous sort offered by Ghost Robotics and Onyx Industries. Both, for example, are able to fit into tight spaces where humans cannot, expanding the intelligence and information-gathering possibilities in the field.

MARSOC dog handlers and their dogs rappel from a US Navy helicopter during training. USMC

Their use also removes the risk posed by certain types of work for human operators, particularly with regard to scouring tightly confined tunnels and trenches where close-quarters combat is extremely dangerous. Blazing a trail through mined or booby-trapped areas will also be highly valuable applications for these mechanized K-9s. That MARSOC robot dogs coupled with Onyx's SENTRY RWS means they can autonomously select potential targets in those environments, prior to a human-in-the-loop safely engaging them from afar.

Moreover, their usefulness in providing persistent perimeter security has already been explored by other branches of the U.S. military. Unarmed Q-UGVs have notably been used by the U.S. Air Force for scouting purposes at bases like Tyndall and Nellis Air Force Bases. Moreover, Shell indicated on the floor of SOF Week that an unspecified number of Q-UGVs teamed with the SENTRY system are being experimented with at Dyess Air Force Base for perimeter security.

Ghost Robotics dog being put to the test at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. USAF

In line with the broader trend towards small, uncrewed platforms on the ground and in the air, armed robotic dogs have also emerged in other countries, too, including China and Russia.

While further details on MARSOC's use of the gun-armed robot dogs remain limited, the fielding of this type of capability is likely inevitable at this point. As AI-enabled drone autonomy becomes increasingly weaponized, just how long a human will stay in the loop, even for kinetic acts, is increasingly debatable, regardless of assurances from some in the military and industry.

Just last week, at the Modern Day Marine symposium, the head of the USMC's advanced robotics initiative laid out the vision for what the future of robotics-heavy warfighting will look like — including the use of robot dogs. It's becoming very clear that what was once fodder for science fiction tales is now quickly becoming a battlefield reality, and highly agile robot dogs, capable of going into extremely risky or inaccessible areas, and even dealing out deadly force in the process, are now on the horizon.

Contact the authors: oliver@thewarzone.com, howard@thewarzone.com

twz.com · by Howard Altman, Oliver Parken · May 7, 2024

11. Explainer: how 'AI killer robots' are threatening global security

How can we put the genie back in the bottle? Can treaties protect the world from AI robots? (only if all countries are parties to the treaties and then honor them.)

Explainer: how 'AI killer robots' are threatening global security - Army Technology

army-technology.com · by Kris Cooper · May 7, 2024

AI use in weapons systems has profound humanitarian consequences. Credit: metamorworks/Shutterstock.

The threat from artificial intelligence (AI) autonomous weapons and the need for international cooperation to mitigate the potentiality of “AI killer robots” was re-emphasised at the recent Humanity at the Crossroads: Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Challenge of Regulation conference in Vienna, Austria.

Allowing AI control over weapons systems could mean targets being identified, struck and killed without human intervention. This raises serious legal and ethical questions.

Current use of AI killer robots

Indeed, to what extent the genie is already out of the bottle is a question in itself. Drones and AI are already widely used by militaries around the world.

GlobalData defence analyst Wilson Jones tells Army Technology: “The use of drones in modern conflict by Russia and Ukraine, by the US in targeted strike campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan and, as recently revealed last month, as part of Israel’s Lavender programme, shows that AI’s ability to process information is already being used by world militaries to increase striking power.”

Investigations from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism into drone warfare of US brought to light the repeated airstrikes by the US military killing civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen. More recently, the IDF’s Lavender AI system has been used to identify tens of thousands of targets, with civilians killed as a result of the strikes.

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Sources quoted in a report by +972 said that, at the start of the IDF’s assault on Gaza, it permitted the deaths of 15 or 20 civilians as collateral for strikes aimed at low-ranking militants, with up to 100 allowed for higher-ranking officials. The system has been said to have a 90% accuracy rate in identifying individuals affiliated with Hamas, meaning that 10% are not. Moreover, deliberate targeting of militants in homes has reportedly occurred, resulting in entire families being killed at once due to the AI’s identification and decisions.

A threat to global security

The use of AI in this way emphasises the need for regulation of the technology in weapons systems.

Dr Alexander Blanchard, senior researcher for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an independent think tank focussing on global security, explains to Army Technology: “The use of AI in weapon systems, especially when used for targeting, raises fundamental questions about us – humans – and our relationship to warfare, and, more particularly our presumptions of how we may exercise violence in armed conflicts.”

“AI changes the way militaries select targets and apply force to them. These changes raise in turn a series of legal, ethical and operational questions. The biggest concern is humanitarian.”

“There are big fears amongst many that depending on how autonomous systems are designed and used they could expose civilians and other persons protected under international law to risk of greater harm. This is because AI systems, particularly when used in cluttered environments may behave unpredictably, and may fail to accurately recognize a target and attack a civilian, or fail to recognize combatants who are hors de combat.”

Elaborating on this, Jones notes that the issue of how culpability is determined could be called into question.

“Under existing laws of war there is the concept of command responsibility,” he says. “This means that an officer, general, or other leader is legally responsible for the actions of troops under their command. If troops commit war crimes, the officer bears a responsibility even if they did not give orders, the burden of proof falls on them proving they did everything possible to prevent war crimes.”

“With AI systems, this complicates everything. Is an IT technician culpable? A system designer? It’s unclear. If it’s unclear, then that creates a moral hazard if actors think their actions are not covered by existing statutes.”

Historical arms control conventions

Several major international agreements limit and regulate certain uses of weapons. There are bans on the use of chemical weapons, nuclear non-proliferation treaties and the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which bans or restricts the use of specific types of weapons that are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately.

“Nuclear arms control required decades of international cooperation and treaties after that to be enforceable,” explains Jones. “Even then, we continued to have atmospheric tests until the 1990s.”

“A major reason anti-proliferation worked was because of US-USSR cooperation in a bipolar world order. That doesn’t exist anymore, and the technology to make AI is already accessible by many more nations than atomic power ever was.”

“A binding treaty would have to sit everyone involved down at a table to agree to not use a tool that increases their military power. That isn’t likely to work because AI can improve military effectiveness at minimal financial and material costs.”

Current geopolitical stances

While the need for the responsible use of AI by militaries has been recognised by states at the UN, there is still some way to go.

Laura Petrone, principal analyst at GlobalData, tells Army Technology: “In the absence of a clear regulatory framework, these declarations remain largely aspirational. It doesn’t come as a surprise that some states want to retain their own sovereignty when it comes to deciding on matters of domestic defence and national security, especially in the context of the current geopolitical tensions.”

Petrone adds that, while the EU AI Act does lay out some requirements for AI systems, it does not address AI systems for military purposes.

“I think that despite this exclusion, the AI Act is an important attempt to establish a long overdue framework for AI applications, which could lead to a certain level of alignment of relevant standards in the future,” she comments. “This alignment will be critical to AI in the military domain as well.”

army-technology.com · by Kris Cooper · May 7, 2024

12. The US Has Never Pivoted to the Indo-Pacific

It could not. But more importantly it should not. We have global interests and we must be able to operate globally to protect those interests. And if we telegraph our priorities and announce where we accept risk, we can be sure our adversaries will try to exploit that.

The US Has Never Pivoted to the Indo-Pacific - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · May 7, 2024

The US Has Never Pivoted to the Indo-Pacific

Now, China is trying to achieve hegemony.

May 6, 2024, 11:26 PM

President Joe Biden greets Chinese President Xi Jinping, Woodside, California, Nov. 15, 2023 (Carlos Fyfe/The White House)

Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany in 1932. His rhetoric and actions between 1932 and 1939 made it clear to anyone willing to see and hear and read that he sought German hegemony in Europe and beyond. He ignored and violated international norms, grew Germany’s military, and used political pressure to intimidate smaller powers. Step by step, Hitler upset the European balance of power, while the other major powers looked on, hoping to appease the dictator and avoid a repeat of the slaughter of the Great War. Some courageous British bureaucrats fed Winston Churchill facts and figures that revealed the dangerous trends that were manifested in Germany’s bold moves on the European chessboard. Britain under the appeasers and the United States under Franklin Roosevelt’s “leadership” eventually rearmed, but not in time to avoid the global war that all dreaded. We are facing a similar situation today in China’s moves to achieve hegemony in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The 2024 Election Echoes That of 1968

America’s war planners in the 1930s rhetorically argued for a “Europe First” strategy in the event of war, the Roosevelt administration, however, did not “pivot to Europe” but instead cut the defense budget in a way that alarmed then–Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur who nearly resigned after confronting the president with facts about America’s unpreparedness. And while Roosevelt gradually began to provide aid to Britain in the late 1930s, as late as 1940 he publicly promised that no American boys would be fighting in another European war. FDR did nothing effectively to deter war, and he left the United States woefully unprepared for war when it came.

President Xi Jinping gained power in 2012. Since then, his rhetoric and actions have made it clear to anyone willing to see, hear, and read that he seeks Indo-Pacific hegemony as a first step in replacing the United States as the world’s leading power. Xi has expanded China’s economic and geopolitical reach via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), grown China’s military with an emphasis on naval power and nuclear arms to offset America’s extended deterrent in the western Pacific, asserted China’s hegemony in the South China Sea, pressured Hong Kong into political submission, and waged political/psychological warfare against Taiwan.

The Obama administration announced to much fanfare a “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia, but it turns out that the “pivot” was mostly rhetoric. Barack Obama, however reluctantly, kept America’s focus on the Middle East (Iraq, Iran, the Arab Spring, and Afghanistan). He permitted our naval power to atrophy while China’s navy overtook us in numbers of ships in the western Pacific. He failed to modernize our nuclear deterrent under the mistaken belief that arms control led to stability. Simon Tisdall in the Guardian pronounced Obama’s Asia pivot a failure that left the United States looking impotent in the region.

The Trump administration came into office staffed with what the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin characterized as China “superhawks,” “hawks,” and those who sought to continue Obama’s policy of engagement. At the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, the “superhawks” were ascendant, as advisers like Peter Navarro, Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, and Elbridge Colby steered the administration in the direction of confrontation with China. The 2018 National Defense Strategy shifted the focus of U.S. national security efforts from the small wars of the Middle East to great power competition. Trump called for strengthening U.S. naval power, including building up to a 500-ship navy, but the Biden administration’s defense budget put an end to that.

American Navy Lt. Commander Jonathan Wachtel, writing in the National Interest, claims that the United States is in the process of once again being unprepared for a potential war against a great power opponent — this time in the Indo-Pacific. Instead of funding a “pivot” to Asia, a whopping 86 percent of our Foreign Military Financing (FMF) continues to go to the Middle East. “All told,” Wachtel explains, “under 2 percent of yearly FMF funding goes towards America’s priority theater — the Indo-Pacific.” More money, he argues, should be going to our allies in the First and Second Island Chains in the western Pacific because no conflict elsewhere “existentially threatens the United States itself.”

It is time, in other words, to back up our rhetoric about a “pivot to Asia” with the funding necessary to achieve that strategic pivot. If we don’t, it may become too late. And as Douglas MacArthur once reminded us: “The history of failure in war can almost always be summed up in two words: ‘Too late.’ Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy. Too late in realizing the mortal danger. Too late in preparedness. Too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance.”

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · May 7, 2024

13. Israeli and Hamas Negotiators Are in Cairo Under Pressure for Cease Fire

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/08/world/israel-gaza-war-hamas-rafah?smid=url-share#major-gaps-with-hamas-remain-israeli-officials-say

LIVEUpdated 

May 8, 2024, 7:37 a.m. ET37 minutes ago

37 minutes ago

Middle East Crisis

Israeli and Hamas Negotiators Are in Cairo Under Pressure for CeaseFire

1. People standing near an impact crater in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
2. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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5. Fleeing Rafah on a donkey-drawn cart.
6. Hatem Khaled/Reuters
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8. An Israeli soldier preparing to launch a drone in southern Israel, near the border fence with the Gaza Strip.
9. Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock
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11. Displaced Palestinians arrive in Deir al Balah in central Gaza after leaving Rafah.
12. Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
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14. Women mourning those killed in Rafah.
15. Mohammed Salem/Reuters
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17. Israeli army soldiers and their vehicles in southern Israel, near the border with the Gaza Strip.
18. Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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20. Receiving food at a charity kitchen in Rafah.
21. Hatem Khaled/Reuters
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Here’s what we know:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to meet the director of the C.I.A. in Israel, as concern rises about a broader attack on Rafah.

• Major gaps with Hamas remain, Israeli officials say.
• Israel reopens a Gaza crossing that is an important aid route.
• Netanyahu dismisses Hamas’s latest proposal on a cease-fire as insincere.
• ‘People are going to continue to die’: Israel’s operation in Rafah has left doctors scrambling.

Major gaps with Hamas remain, Israeli officials say.

Image

Palestinians inspecting the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Rafah in southern Gaza on Tuesday.Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters

Negotiators from Israel and Hamas were in Cairo on Wednesday amid a renewed international push on a proposed deal for a cease-fire, though Israeli officials said that major gaps remained between the sides.

In a sign of the growing urgency, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to meet William J. Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, on Wednesday afternoon in Israel, according to an Israeli official who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks. Another person briefed on hostage negotiations confirmed that Mr. Burns was traveling to Israel.

Mr. Burns has been shuttling across the region in recent days in an attempt to clinch a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that would see the release of hostages held in Gaza and Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

The Israeli delegations arrived on Tuesday, hours after Israeli tanks and troops went into the southern Gaza city of Rafah and seized control of the border crossing with Egypt, disrupting the flow of humanitarian aid into the enclave.

The most substantive sticking point in the talks centers on a phrase that appears in both the Israeli- and Hamas-approved proposals: a path to a “sustainable calm.”

In Hamas’s revision, that phrase is clearly defined as a permanent end to the war and a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip. Mr. Netanyahu has consistently opposed any deal that explicitly calls for a permanent cease-fire, saying Israeli forces would not stop fighting in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed and the hostages are released.

Hamas’s revised proposal, Mr. Netanyahu said on Tuesday, was “very far from Israel’s core demands.” In his statement, he added that “military pressure on Hamas is an essential condition to secure the release of our hostages.”

Mr. Netanyahu, who is under pressure from the United States and other allies to agree to a cease-fire, said that while he had sent a midlevel delegation back to the talks, “in tandem, we continue waging the war on Hamas.”

A White House spokesman, John F. Kirby, said on Tuesday that the negotiations were at a “sensitive stage” and that “there should be no reason why they can’t overcome those remaining gaps.” Analysts said Israel’s incursion into Rafah might either ratchet up the pressure on Hamas to make a deal or sabotage the talks.

The Israeli military said it had gone into the city to destroy Hamas infrastructure used in an attack that killed four Israeli soldiers over the weekend near another border crossing, this one from Israel into Gaza.

The move did not appear to be the full ground invasion of Rafah that Israel has long been threatening and its allies working to avert. The Israeli military called it “a very precise” counterterrorism operation.

Last week, President Biden paused an arms shipment to prevent U.S.-made weapons from being used in a long-threatened assault on Rafah, administration officials said on Tuesday night Washington time, an indication of the growing rift with Israel over the conduct of the war. The decision to delay the delivery of 3,500 bombs was the first time that Mr. Biden has used his power to curtail arms to influence Israel’s approach to the war since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack.

Peter Baker and Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting from Washington.

— Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem

14. Israel hasn't crossed "red line" with current Rafah operation, U.S. officials say

17 hours ago -World

Israel hasn't crossed "red line" with current Rafah operation, U.S. officials say

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/07/us-israel-rafah-red-line

• Barak Ravid

Displaced Palestinians who left with their belongings from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip following an evacuation order by the Israeli army arrive to Khan Yunis on May 6, 2024. Photo: /AFP via Getty Images

The White House thinks the Israeli operation to capture the Rafah crossing doesn't cross President Biden's "red line" that could lead to a shift in U.S. policy towards the Gaza war, two U.S. officials told Axios.

Why it matters: The Biden administration has expressed deep concern about the possibility of a major Israeli military invasion in the southern Gaza city where more than one million displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

• Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week that "a major operation" in Rafah will harm U.S.-Israeli relations.
• White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Financial Times conference in Washington on Saturday that the Biden administration made clear to Israel that the way it conducts an operation in Rafah will influence U.S. policy towards the Gaza war.

The Biden administration has been considering suspending weapons shipments to Israel or conditioning the use of specific U.S. weapons systems if it goes on a major operation in Rafah, U.S. officials said.

• The Biden administration last week put a hold on a shipment of U.S.-made ammunition to Israel, Axios first reported.
• It was the first time since the Oct. 7 attack that the U.S. stopped a weapons shipment intended for the Israeli military and Israeli officials saw it as a warning signal from the White House.

Driving the news: On Monday, the IDF started a limited operation in eastern Rafah and captured the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza.

• Ahead of the operation, the IDF started evacuating Palestinian civilians from four neighborhoods in eastern Rafah that are close to the crossing.

Behind the scenes: Israeli and U.S. officials said the operation at the Rafah crossing came up during a phone call between Biden and Netanyahu on Monday.

• "Biden didn't pull the hand break on the capture of the Rafah crossing during the call", a senior Israeli official said.
• White House spokesman John Kirby said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday that Biden's message to Netanyahu during the call was focused on his opposition to a major ground operation in Rafah that would put many civilian lives at risk.
• He said Israel told the U.S. the operation in the Rafah crossing is limited in scope and time and is aimed at preventing Hamas from smuggling weapons through the border with Egypt.
• "They didn't describe it as a major ground operation," Kirby said.

• Biden stressed in his call with Netanyahu that the U.S. will follow the operation to see that this is the case, he added.
• Kirby said the administration's main focus is on Israel reopening the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza and the Rafah crossing as soon as possible so that desperately needed aid can flow into Gaza.

Between the lines: Two senior U.S. officials said the Israelis also made clear they wanted to capture the Rafah crossing in order to put pressure on Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the hostage talks.

• Israel says the Rafah crossing is a strategic site for Hamas because it can control aid trucks coming from Egypt, collect taxes and signal it is still the ruler of Gaza.

What to watch: The two U.S. officials said Biden doesn't see the current Israeli operation as "a breaking point" in relations with Israel.

• But they warned that if it broadens or gets out of control and Israeli forces go into the city of Rafah itself, it will be a breaking point.
• One U.S. official said Biden is approaching this the same way he approached the Israeli retaliation against the Iran attack — pressing Israel not to do it, then accepting something limited.
• "If this is all they are going to do we can absorb that, but there is a lot of nervousness about what's next," the official said.

15. Decline of Senior Officer Integrity and Civilian Control of the Military

Quite an indictment of our senior officers.

Excerpts:

The decline of senior officer integrity increasingly impacts civilian decision makers. Not long ago, overbooked national leaders could confidently “repose special trust and confidence” in the senior officers providing assessments and recommendations to them. The disciplined and honorable behaviors of past generations of generals and admirals certainly validated this special trust and confidence. But, with a rise in manipulative narratives, civilian leaders and their staffs are more likely to feel compelled to dig into the details of complex military matters to gain the full and complete picture they need to discharge their responsibilities.

In short, it is past time for senior officers to forego their increasing addiction to the power opiate of clever narratives and work to present full and balanced representations of the issues at hand.

Absent immediate internal reform by the Department of Defense, civilian leaders will increasingly have to turn, just as they have with other federal agencies, to independent investigations to gain a more complete understanding of national security issues.

Decline of Senior Officer Integrity and Civilian Control of the Military

By Keith T. Holcomb

May 08, 2024

​https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/05/08/decline_of_senior_officer_integrity_and_civilian_control_of_the_military_1030230.html?mc_cid=9ddaa69d54&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Public confidence in the military has slipped. One major reason is the politicization of senior military officers, who show an increasing propensity to compromise their integrity to gain influence and achieve both budgetary and policy goals. Their willingness to spin carefully parsed and knowingly misleading testimony and advice compromises civilian control of the military. Simply stated, these generals and admirals are not providing full and complete representations of plans, concepts, and assessments to senior civilians in the executive and legislative branches, thereby depriving them of the unbiased information they require to make decisions required by the Constitution.

In an era of increasing complexity, cleverly constructed narratives that present simplified, politicized positions to the general population have taken on out-sized importance. Senior officers increasingly are attempting to manipulate policy making by intentionally reducing complex reality to simple narratives designed to appeal to partisan audiences. 

Integrity has two meanings pertinent to this issue: the common understanding of integrity as honesty and the less common and more formal understanding of integrity as the quality of being whole and complete. 

Preparation for and experience in combat develops strong wills. Senior officers motivated by the desire to get the biggest possible piece of the pie for their services are tempted to dissemble to win the internecine budget and policy fights that are the lifeblood of official Washington. When these wills are not properly constrained by higher commitments to integrity and respect for the decision-making province of civilian authorities, generals and admirals can succumb to the temptation to deceive. 

These deceptions can take many forms. A senior officer can choose to highlight some information. Conversely, they can obfuscate, discredit, or ignore other information. They can allude to expert knowledge or classified information to undercut or deflect questions that challenge their assertions. They can use the age-old technique of making strawmen of opposing views. Worse, they can engage in or encourage subordinates or cultivated commentators to engage in ad hominem attacks on the messengers of alternate views. 

While the hyper-political environment sees daily evidence of such behaviors, some senior officers have exercised considerable self-discipline and have not let advocacy for a position override respect for the prerogatives of senior civilians. In short, just because they have the leadership persona, verbal skills, and communication staffs to construct one-sided positions and perhaps even succeed in the manipulation of some people, they have worked to develop full and balanced representations of the issues at hand. Theirs has been a triumph of professional ethics over the abuse of information to achieve their ends.

Regrettably, that admirable conduct is in decline and that decline is a contributing factor for decreasing public trust in the military. The American public may not know the specific capabilities of various weapons or the operational implications of various policies. But constant exposure to spun narratives has trained them to recognize manipulation when they see and hear it. Many resent being manipulated, and their sense that such techniques are being used by the Nation’s most senior officers undermines their trust and confidence in the military. The military was once recognized as a profession culturally apart from the rest of society, but no longer. America’s military, and its senior officers especially, are increasingly viewed as no less cynically self-interested than the rest of the elite class.

The decline of senior officer integrity increasingly impacts civilian decision makers. Not long ago, overbooked national leaders could confidently “repose special trust and confidence” in the senior officers providing assessments and recommendations to them. The disciplined and honorable behaviors of past generations of generals and admirals certainly validated this special trust and confidence. But, with a rise in manipulative narratives, civilian leaders and their staffs are more likely to feel compelled to dig into the details of complex military matters to gain the full and complete picture they need to discharge their responsibilities.

In short, it is past time for senior officers to forego their increasing addiction to the power opiate of clever narratives and work to present full and balanced representations of the issues at hand.

Absent immediate internal reform by the Department of Defense, civilian leaders will increasingly have to turn, just as they have with other federal agencies, to independent investigations to gain a more complete understanding of national security issues.

Brigadier General Keith T. Holcomb, (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.), is a former USMC Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His last assignment was as Director of the Training and Education Division, U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

16. Ukraine’s Strained Military Tries a New Style of Recruitment

We are learning so much from Putin's War in Ukraine and Ukrainian innovation. Can we learn something about recruiting? (I say this with only some sarcasm)

Ukraine’s Strained Military Tries a New Style of Recruitment

As leaders in Kyiv resort to boosting ranks more forcefully, one volunteer unit of highly motivated recruits has had to turn down applicants

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraines-strained-military-tries-a-new-style-of-recruitment-af6c0b77?utm

Members of the Da Vinci Wolves battalion.

By James MarsonFollow

 | Photographs by Emanuele Satolli for The Wall Street Journal

Updated May 7, 2024 12:00 am ET

KYIV, Ukraine—Ukraine’s military is turning to towering billboards and Instagram posts that mix bravado with stark warnings in an effort to attract recruits and make up for shortfalls in personnel.

“Don’t wait for the enemy to come to your home,” urges an online poster for the Da Vinci Wolves battalion, a volunteer unit. “Destroy the enemy together with us,” proposes another showing soldiers firing a howitzer.

The recruitment drive is part of efforts to replenish forces worn down by more than two years of war against Russia, a much more populous country. Russian forces are grinding forward in the east of Ukraine as Kyiv’s outgunned military awaits a fresh batch of weaponry from the U.S.

Ukraine also needs more troops to hold the line. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that 31,000 soldiers had been killed in the war, an underestimate given that thousands more are missing. Front-line units report personnel deficits of half or more, and many are exhausted.

Lt. Serhiy Filimonov, commander of the Da Vinci Wolves, says there are lots of people who want to fight. PHOTO: JOSEPH SYWENKYJ FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The government is expanding the draft pool by tweaking laws and trying to compel Ukrainians to return from abroad. Military units, particularly volunteer ones, are vying to pull in those who are willing to join the fight but wary of having little training, unmotivated comrades and poor leadership.

“There are lots of people who want to fight but want to choose their unit, their commander,” said Lt. Serhiy Filimonov, commander of the Da Vinci Wolves.

The battalion is one of the country’s best known, with a reputation for effectiveness, organization and motivation. It took its name from its first leader, Dmytro “Da Vinci” Kotsyubailo, who quit art school and went to fight Russia’s covert invasion of Ukraine’s east in 2014 while still a teenager.

When Da Vinci was killed during fighting in Bakhmut in 2023, Ukraine’s president and top military commanders attended his funeral. Now, his portrait greets potential members at a recruiting office in central Kyiv, just off a lively street packed with cafes and restaurants.

The battalion, part of Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade, counts among its number actors, hard-core soccer fans and a company commander who used to be a pediatrician. Several have high profiles on social media, and the unit’s leaders have a record of making sure their troops are well provided for and displaying tactical skills that protect troops’ lives.

A portrait of Dmytro ‘Da Vinci’ Kotsyubailo, who was killed near Bakhmut, Ukraine, is displayed at a military recruitment center in Kyiv.

Ukrainian military personnel carried the coffin of Dmytro Kotsyubailo during his funeral service in Kyiv, Ukraine, last year. PHOTO: ROMAN PILIPEY/GETTY IMAGES

Da Vinci’s partner, Alina Mikhailova, heads the battalion’s medical service. A British Army veteran who joined them as a volunteer rates Filimonov as the best commander he has served under.

The battalion has 50,000 followers on Instagram, where it sells merchandise and posts motivational videos and photos with slogans such as: “Time to fight.” It has received 1,000 applications to join since it launched a recruitment drive in February, far more than it could accommodate.

The approach contrasts with state efforts to compel many into service, while the government has vacillated over measures to expand the draft pool, only recently reducing the age of those eligible for mobilization to 25 from 27.

Ukraine’s government said last month that men of conscription age living abroad would have to return to Ukraine to renew their passports, a step aimed at forcing the return of some of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men living in European Union countries. Recruiting officers have at times resorted to spot checks of men on the street to determine whether they are due for military service.

New members of the Da Vinci Wolves said they were drawn to the unit because they wanted to fight alongside others who had chosen to be there.

Plates used for target practice lie near a weapon used in a recent Da Vinci Wolves shooting exercise. All new members of the unit go through physical and weapons training.

“No one was brought here by force. Everybody here speaks as equals. They are people that want to fight for our country,” said 29-year-old Dmytro Zharchenko, a former marketing manager for a European company.

Zharchenko said he had been overweight and had health problems such as migraines that had prevented him from serving, but he fixed them by changing his diet, which earned him his call sign: Vegan.

Applicants fill out a form online before visiting a recruiting office in Kyiv or Lviv in the country’s west. Bohdan Herashchenko, a 33-year-old computer programmer from the eastern city of Kharkiv, went to the Kyiv office one recent day to apply to join. He said he had listened to interviews with members of the Wolves online and was impressed by their commitment, skills and leadership.

“They really care about their soldiers’ lives,” he said. “I have no military experience. But I want it. I’m ready.”

Those deemed suitable are sent on a five-day immersion course at the unit’s base in central Ukraine. It includes shooting and medical training as well as theory and lessons on Ukraine’s military history in a tent adorned with pictures of past Ukrainian military leaders who resisted Moscow during Soviet times. Almost all applicants then sign service papers and undergo formal training.

Yevhen Hryhoriev, a recruiter for the Da Vinci Wolves, interviews prospective recruit Bohdan Herashchenko.

Natalia Kozyr, center, a Da Vinci Wolves recruit, has a meal with other members.

New members go through basic physical and weapons training, but the unit is looking for smarts as well as fitness, said a 24-year-old instructor with the call sign Horynych, a dragon in Slavic folklore.

“We need everyone, and everyone can find their place and be effective,” he said. “It’s not necessarily an assault role, but it can be management or logistics.”

Recruits are usually more youthful than the average age of Ukrainian troops, which is around 40. Some are 18, joining as soon as they can.

Yuriy Kulchytskiy, 24, said he was long troubled by the fact that while other young men were on the front lines, he was working a well-paid job as a bar manager in Kyiv. Then, he decided to join the fight, “and my mind was set at ease at once.”

Recruits say they are impressed with the skills of instructors and other soldiers, as well as their attitude to each other and to newbies. Natalia Kozyr, a 25-year-old bank manager who joined after her fiancé went missing in action, recalled a commander picking up his own shell casings on the shooting range, and fetching a gas cylinder for a heater that wasn’t working.

“It’s respect, a human attitude,” she said. “There’s nothing Soviet, no bullying. We’re all one family; we’re together.”

Those taking part in the Da Vinci Wolves' training included Dmytro Zharchenko, 29, a former marketing manager.

Another recruit, a 30-year-old YouTuber with two large earrings, said he was motivated by the desire to stop the Russians advancing further. He gave only his call sign—Dovbush, after a Ukrainian outlaw—because his father is on occupied territory.

He said he had earned enough money to build a house, but didn’t know where that was possible.

“There are no safe places to build a house and at any point my hard work could be blown away in a second,” he said. “So we need to fight with the primary source of the problem.”

Yevhen Pliasov, a 28-year-old builder who joined recently and is training to be a sniper, said he wanted to be among other volunteers who were committed to fighting.

“I want to be with the best,” he said.

Pliasov said he had long thought about volunteering, and that the final push came when his best friend was killed recently. He said his family supports his decision to fight, although his children, ages 6 and 7, don’t fully understand what it means.

“I want to put an end to this for them,” he said.

Oksana Grytsenko contributed to this article.

Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com

The War in Ukraine

News and insights, selected by the editors

Appeared in the May 7, 2024, print edition as 'Ukraine Changes Military-Recruitment Tactics'.

17. The Original Sin of Biden’s Foreign Policy

Excerpts:

Nevertheless, it is useful to return to what went wrong in Afghanistan precisely from a policymaking perspective, and not just a moral one. Like many of the never-ceasing crises that have enveloped the world since, the Afghanistan withdrawal was a story of the good intentions and honest efforts of diplomats and military personnel doing what they could to protect as many people as they could. But it was also a story of fatal misjudgments on the ground and among political decisionmakers.

A new account by the British ambassador at the time (forthcoming in the United States, but already released in Britain), Laurie Bristow, provides important further insights into the disaster as it unfolded.

Even before Bristow arrived in Kabul on June 14, 2021, he knew his term would be short. The agreement for “bringing peace to Afghanistan” that the Trump administration had signed in Doha, Qatar, with the Taliban on Feb. 29, 2020, was one of the more disreputable deals of modern times. It was not only naïve in believing that the Taliban would stick to the agreed timetable and that, somehow, incredibly, they had reformed into something more modern, but it ostentatiously excluded other key participants—none other than the Afghan government itself and the Americans’ key allies throughout the campaign, not least the Brits.

Throughout the first half of 2021, as the United States kept to its side of the bargain by drawing down its troops, a sense of foreboding quickly led to panic. The Taliban faced almost no resistance as they swept across the country.

...

In the maelstrom of the many crises of 2024, Afghanistan already feels like a footnote in history. One of the many lessons of its failure, Bristow writes, is the nature of cooperation between the United States and its allies. “[T]he U.K. was a junior partner, and we did not have an equal voice in U.S. decision making. The fact that we thought the military withdrawal unwise and badly thought through did not change U.S. policy.” This was the first big test, in other words, of “America First,” Trump-style and Biden-style, and everyone else was left flailing in its wake. And there will doubtlessly be more of this to come in other theaters of conflict, whether Biden wins re-election or not.

The Original Sin of Biden’s Foreign Policy

All of the administration’s diplomatic weaknesses were already visible in the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

By John Kampfner, the author of Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country.

Foreign Policy · by John Kampfner

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• Afghanistan

May 5, 2024, 11:30 AM

In Toronto a few weeks ago I met a young Afghan woman in her mid-20s. She had worked for an international aid agency in Afghanistan helping women suffering mental health problems. As Taliban forces surged across the country in 2021, she tried desperately to flee, knowing that she would be punished for having worked with foreigners. She did eventually get out, together with her younger brother and sister, fleeing first via Iran to Brazil. Then she undertook a treacherous odyssey across South America, through the Panama jungle, across former U.S. President Donald Trump’s wall, through the United States, and eventually to Canada.

The book cover for Kabul: Final Call by Laurie Bristow

Kabul: Final Call: The Inside Story of the Withdrawal From Afghanistan, August 2021, Laurie Bristow, Whittles Publishing, 256 pp., $24.95, August 2024

Her story is extraordinary for its bravery, but it is by no means unique. Countless Afghans did whatever they could to escape murder, torture, rape, and forced marriages. A lucky few were airlifted to safety by Western forces as they evacuated Kabul’s airport. Many more were abandoned back home to their fates. Others undertook dangerous odysseys. The fortunate have begun new lives; many more are stranded in refugee camps. Countless numbers have died during their treacherous journeys.

They are all statistics and all victims of a bigger power game. They were let down by the United States and its allies who, from the moment of their invasion in 2001 to their calamitous exit 20 years later, claimed to know what was best for Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom, in which more than 3,500 international service personnel were also killed, provided no enduring freedom, only the fleeting hope for Afghans of a better life that was suddenly and brutally snuffed out.

Throughout, one man has been defiant. U.S. President Joe Biden followed through on the policy set in train by Trump, his predecessor. Long before he entered the White House, Biden had criticized the commitment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. forces for what had long seemed to be futile military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was one of several areas of U.S. foreign and security policy where Biden continued Trump’s work—though neither side saw it in their interests to trumpet that continuity. Even amid the terrible scenes that took place at Kabul International Airport in August 2021, reminiscent of the fall of Saigon half a century earlier, Biden stuck with his assessment: “I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit.”

Amid the recriminations, numerous congressional inquiries were undertaken, and reports were issued during the first few months that followed the debacle. Films have since been made and books have been written seeking to explain what happened and who is most culpable. By contrast, policymakers and military chiefs quickly moved on. Their attention turned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and then to the Israel-Hamas-Middle East imbroglio. All the while, China is seen as the biggest long-term strategic threat to Western interests. To be fair to them, it seems inconceivable that Washington or its allies would have the resources or the political support to maintain a presence in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, it is useful to return to what went wrong in Afghanistan precisely from a policymaking perspective, and not just a moral one. Like many of the never-ceasing crises that have enveloped the world since, the Afghanistan withdrawal was a story of the good intentions and honest efforts of diplomats and military personnel doing what they could to protect as many people as they could. But it was also a story of fatal misjudgments on the ground and among political decisionmakers.

A new account by the British ambassador at the time (forthcoming in the United States, but already released in Britain), Laurie Bristow, provides important further insights into the disaster as it unfolded.

Even before Bristow arrived in Kabul on June 14, 2021, he knew his term would be short. The agreement for “bringing peace to Afghanistan” that the Trump administration had signed in Doha, Qatar, with the Taliban on Feb. 29, 2020, was one of the more disreputable deals of modern times. It was not only naïve in believing that the Taliban would stick to the agreed timetable and that, somehow, incredibly, they had reformed into something more modern, but it ostentatiously excluded other key participants—none other than the Afghan government itself and the Americans’ key allies throughout the campaign, not least the Brits.

Throughout the first half of 2021, as the United States kept to its side of the bargain by drawing down its troops, a sense of foreboding quickly led to panic. The Taliban faced almost no resistance as they swept across the country.

For the British Embassy, one of the main tasks was identifying which Afghans were eligible for emigration under its Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP). In his account, written in diary format, Bristow describes fraught meetings with local employees and advisors, all of whom knew what would happen to them if they were abandoned to their fate.

“We sat in a circle in the embassy garden next to the war memorial, with one of the men translating for those who needed it. I invited each one of them to have their say, one at a time,” Bristow writes on Aug. 5. “The women spoke first, coherently and at length. One of them, an older woman, was confident and spoke with natural authority, not deferring at all to the men. There was fear and anger in the air, and some tears were wiped away, but tempered with the Afghans’ natural courtesy and dignity.” Bristow notes: “It was impossible for me to look them in the eye and tell them I thought the decisions to refuse their applications for resettlement were justified.”

Some were lucky; most were not. In any case, the situation was hurtling out of control, and it was impossible for the bureaucrats back home to keep up with the applications. Within days, the Brits and other international forces were preparing to evacuate their embassies for the airport. They disposed of anything that could offer the Taliban a propaganda victory. “Pictures of the Queen, flags, the official wine store. All had to be removed or destroyed.”

The chaotic scenes of those final days, between the Taliban declaring their takeover on Aug. 15 and the final evacuations of Aug. 21, are etched in the memory. Bristow recalls: “The airport was seizing up, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people. The Americans alone had some 14,500 people on the airfield, waiting to be airlifted out of Kabul. At the gates and around the north terminal, everywhere you went and everywhere you looked, there were people: under awnings, in the open, in doorways. With children, elderly parents, heart-breaking luggage—whole lives packed into a battered case or a plastic supermarket bag.”

Back home, in Whitehall, it was peak summer holiday time. The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, was with his family in Greece and angrily insistent that he should not be disturbed. While teams were working round-the-clock in Kabul and London to get as many people out as possible, the political operatives had other priorities. Bristow described it as “an ugly game of recrimination and buck-passing,” adding: “It looked to me that the priority of some in London was to spare ministers and their close advisers … personal and political embarrassment. … The advice, assessment and welfare of the people on the ground was of secondary importance.” One of the more hapless ministers of the Boris Johnson era—and there was much competition for that mantle—Raab saw his political career melt away soon after.

Bristow’s overall assessment is worth dwelling on: “The failure of the Afghanistan campaign was not for want of resources. In 2011, at the height of the ‘Obama Surge,’ NATO had more than 130,000 troops in Afghanistan. The U.K. spent over £30 billion on the military campaign and aid to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. US expenditure was on a truly biblical scale: between $1 trillion and $2 trillion over 20 years, more than the entire cumulative GDP of Afghanistan over that period. Yet these immense outlays, made over nearly two decades, had not brought peace or stability or good governance to Afghanistan.”

The Doha Agreement is, he adds, “a strong contender for the title of worst deal in history if it is understood as a serious attempt to achieve a negotiated settlement. But it was not. Trump’s deal was driven by something rather different: the U.S. electoral timetable.” Everybody he met who was familiar with Afghanistan was “aghast at Trump’s dismal deal with the Taliban and then at Biden’s botched execution of the withdrawal.”

In the maelstrom of the many crises of 2024, Afghanistan already feels like a footnote in history. One of the many lessons of its failure, Bristow writes, is the nature of cooperation between the United States and its allies. “[T]he U.K. was a junior partner, and we did not have an equal voice in U.S. decision making. The fact that we thought the military withdrawal unwise and badly thought through did not change U.S. policy.” This was the first big test, in other words, of “America First,” Trump-style and Biden-style, and everyone else was left flailing in its wake. And there will doubtlessly be more of this to come in other theaters of conflict, whether Biden wins re-election or not.

Foreign Policy · by John Kampfner

18. No, This Is Not a Cold War—Yet

Excerpts:

Just how dicey are things likely to get between Washington and Beijing? Sanger, a longtime New York Times correspondent with unusual access to senior Biden administration officials, does a masterful job of chronicling in his book how the Biden administration has gradually come to realize that Xi is no longer 10 feet tall. Like other observers, Sanger credits Biden with “building a credible game plan” for outcompeting Beijing, but he concludes that confusion over the stakes still reigns in Washington: “Biden’s own cabinet members do not share a common understanding of what ‘engagement’ with China means.” Under Biden, U.S.-China relations have followed an arc of high tension that started in Alaska in 2021 and ended with Xi’s hat-in-hand appearance in San Francisco at the Asia Pacific Cooperation Forum in late 2023, when the Chinese leader openly begged U.S. tech investors to come back. As Sanger writes:

Xi’s decision to drop the wolf-warrior show and cajole American investors into returning to China marked the first time in decades that a Chinese leader entered a summit meeting knowing that he was playing a weak hand. He seemed increasingly desperate for American help.

In the past year or so, Beijing has also begun to signal that it may not be so eager to invade Taiwan any time soon, given the risk of additional economic sanctions at a time when China’s economy is growing only at 2 percent to 3 percent a year rather than 8 percent. Xi “must be wondering if his generals were overestimating the skills of the People’s Liberation Army, just as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s generals had predicted a short war in Ukraine,” Sanger writes, and he quotes a Biden official as saying, “There may be more time on the clock than we think.”

No, This Is Not a Cold War—Yet

Why are China hawks exaggerating the threat from Beijing?

MAY 7, 2024, 11:42 AM

By Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by Michael Hirsh

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• United States
• China

Over the past few years, the Pundit Industrial Complex has gone into high gear on China. A new generation of scholarly, governmental, and journalistic reputations is being built on the idea that the United States has entered a new cold war, with China in the role of the Soviet Union and a reduced Russia as its eager helpmate. Scores of books and articles are being sold, weapons systems developed (including the United States’ first new nuclear warheads in decades), promotions and tenure awarded, and so forth.

Over the past few years, the Pundit Industrial Complex has gone into high gear on China. A new generation of scholarly, governmental, and journalistic reputations is being built on the idea that the United States has entered a new cold war, with China in the role of the Soviet Union and a reduced Russia as its eager helpmate. Scores of books and articles are being sold, weapons systems developed (including the United States’ first new nuclear warheads in decades), promotions and tenure awarded, and so forth.

And ironically enough, at a time of vicious political polarization in Washington, there is no greater agreement between Democrats and Republicans than there is on the idea that China is aggressively trying to displace the United States as global hegemon.

So it’s game on with Beijing, and it’s a fair bet that if former President Donald Trump is elected six months from now, the mood won’t moderate much. In an essay in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Trump’s former deputy national security advisor, Matt Pottinger—who would likely be appointed in a second Trump administration—faults the hawks of the Biden administration for not being hawkish enough. Writing with Mike Gallagher, the just-retired and influential former chairman of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Pottinger comes close to calling for regime change in Beijing, invoking former U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Cold War cri de coeur: “There is no substitute for victory.”

Key U.S. allies such as Britain are pretty much going along with the new wave of hawkishness. Among the would-be cold warriors is Robin Niblett, a fellow at London-based Chatham House. Can anything be done to avoid this descent into another cold war? Niblett asks in his new book, The New Cold War: How the Contest Between the US and China Will Shape Our Century. No, it can’t, he writes, because “the problem is that these two countries are on opposite sides of a profound and open-ended global competition between two political systems that are incompatible and mutually hostile.”

“The new Cold War is now well and truly underway,” Niblett announces. In some ways, this sounds like a crude replay of many of the stark pronouncements we heard during the first Cold War—though this time, more as farce than tragedy (consider that Washington and Beijing shut down relations at one point over an errant balloon). The problem with this view is that the most compelling evidence tells us it’s not true—at least, not yet—and that what exists between the United States and China still resembles far more of a “cold peace.”

The biggest mistake that the new cold warriors make is to argue—as most of them do—that naturally, there are significant differences from the previous Cold War, but that these differences shouldn’t prevent a new one. Niblett actually devotes most of his book to such differences—and he does an excellent job of detailing them—warning in the end not to let conflict with China “become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

But that warning may have come too late. The Cold War comparisons just keep coming. In a famous 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs, Jake Sullivan and Kurt Campbell—later to become President Joe Biden’s national security advisor and chief Asia advisor, respectively—even contended that “China may ultimately present a stronger ideological challenge than the Soviet Union did.” Their argument then was that “China’s fusion of authoritarian capitalism and digital surveillance” could somehow end up proving to be “more durable and attractive than Marxism.”

This is not turning out to be the case—for reasons we’ll get to in a moment. But the main point is this: The differences between the two eras are so profound that they still argue much more for a cold peace than a cold war. And there’s a world of difference between those two terms.

“Cold war” means openly vying for total dominance, military and otherwise. It means constant internal interference with a rival nation through covert action and living with the ever-present threat of annihilation in a hair-trigger, nuclear-imperiled world. “Cold peace,” on the other hand, means that rival powers generally avoid the use of military force and focus their relationship on nonlethal forms of geopolitical competition. The contest is defined by whoever exercises the most influence within a generally agreed-upon international system.

A cold war is always zero-sum; in a cold peace, there’s no winner and no finish line. It’s a lot less exciting, but a lot fewer people are likely to die.

The latter condition is still much closer to what we’ve got now, as I will explain. The former is what the China hawks in Washington—and one almost can’t turn a corner in the nation’s capital without running into a China hawk—seem to believe we’ve got.

US China Hawk in Washington

US China Hawk in Washington

Washington’s China Hawks Take Flight

The story of how decades of U.S. engagement with China gave way to estrangement.

Why is there so little debate on what should be, at the very least, a controversial issue? Part of what’s happening today is an overreaction by U.S. and Western officials to the discovery that Beijing had no intention of becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in world affairs, as Washington hoped after the Cold War. Instead, China has become, under its increasingly hard-line government, the impresario and chief sponsor of a new era of autocracy and suppression of human rights, and it has flagrantly violated international trade rules.

Senior U.S. officials and legislators on both sides of the aisle were embarrassed by their naivete—as were all those credulous pundits—and it seems that hell hath no fury like an engager scorned. After Biden entered the White House, Campbell—who had long been a China hawk—left no doubt that he was nobody’s fool, declaring in 2021 that “the period that was broadly described as engagement” with China “has come to an end.”

That is not quite how it’s playing out, however. As the journalist David Sanger writes in one of the more balanced and farsighted of the wave of new books, New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, after a hostile first meeting with a Chinese delegation in Alaska in 2021, Biden administration officials have slowly come to realize that China may not be quite as formidable as they thought—and Beijing seems more willing to negotiate a possible way out.

Two Chinese flags fly atop a submarine. Three soldiers in white dress uniforms and hats stand under the flags against a smoggy gray sky.

A Jin-class nuclear submarine from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy takes part in a naval parade near Qingdao, in eastern China’s eastern Shandong province, on April 23, 2019. Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images

To be sure, there are plenty of reasons to think that the United States and China are still sliding toward a cold war—or worse—whether anybody wants one or not. This is especially true of an accelerating arms race, most recently featuring new Chinese hypersonic missiles that threaten to become so-called aircraft killers in the South China Sea. In the past few years, satellite photos also stunned Washington’s national security community by revealing China’s dramatic—and highly secret—nuclear buildup, which may include as many as 300 new missile silos.

Biden, in response, is upgrading U.S. nuclear arsenal, including via developing the country’s first new nuclear warhead, the W93, in 40 years; a B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb; 400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles; a fleet of nuclear-armed strategic submarines; and a new strategic bomber (the B-21) and air-launched cruise missile.

Beyond that, Biden has come closer than any previous president to violating the long-standing U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” and openly pledging to defend Taiwan—even as China’s military has stepped up its own threats and military exercises. All of which could easily mean that the two countries may someday leap right over the “cold” part and go directly into a hot war.

At the same time, despite Biden’s demurrals that he doesn’t want a new cold war, U.S. and Western policy practically confirms to Beijing that one is underway—and that it’s coming with the reluctant assent of Pacific U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea. Nothing delivered this message more forthrightly than NATO’s decision in mid-2022 to expand its focus to the Asia-Pacific region. China’s sense that Washington is quietly imposing a Cold War-style policy of containment on it has been reinforced by groupings such as AUKUS—a trilateral security pact between Australia, Britain, and the United States—and the Quad arrangement between the United States, Japan, India, and Australia.

It’s also quite clear that China and Russia will remain somewhat aligned—if not quite yet fully allied in the military sense. Both countries will continue to work to counterbalance U.S. hegemony, and it’s probably as futile to try to wedge them apart as it would be to divide the European Union from the United States. Despite withholding deliveries of large-scale weapons systems to Russia in Ukraine, China has been supplying finance and, increasingly, equipment and parts—as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken charged after traveling to China in late April to meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, following more than five hours of talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

At a news conference, Blinken accused China of “powering Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine” by being “the top supplier of machine tools, microelectronics, nitrocellulose—which is critical to making munitions and rocket propellants—and other dual-use items that Moscow is using to ramp up its defense industrial base.” Trade between China and Russia reached a record $240.1 billion in 2023, which was a major increase over the previous year.

Given all these threats, then, why should we not think of this as an oncoming cold war?

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wears a black suit and tie walks ahead of a group of other men, all in suits, along a street in Beijing. Two of the other men wear medical face masks. Behind them is a large gray building flying the Chinese flag from a flagpole out front.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken walks ahead of a group after arriving in Beijing on June 18, 2023.Leah Millis/AFP via Getty Images

During the same visit to China, Blinken also praised Beijing’s “important” influence in “moving Russia away” from considering the use of nuclear weapons during the Ukraine conflict, and he also commended Beijing for urging Iran not to escalate against Israel.

Michael Doyle, an expert in international relations at Columbia University, argues that it is vitally important to distinguish between the goals of China and Russia in the current environment.

“Russia’s a rogue and China’s a rival. I think that encapsulates it pretty well,” said Doyle, who is also the author of Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War, in an interview with Foreign Policy. “We’re now basically engaged in the most extreme cold war-level conflict with Russia,” he added, one not unlike the proxy wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan during that earlier period.

“With China, it’s very different,” Doyle said. “China has benefited immensely from its integration into the world economy, and for the future, China wants to play a lead role in the world economy. So it can’t afford to wreck it, that’s pretty clear. That means a major push back against the militarists in China who want to assert China’s prestige and power over the Eastern Pacific.”

What about the idea that the U.S. and Chinese systems are “incompatible” and “mutually hostile,” in Niblett’s words? In terms of political ideology, this is true to a degree, although perhaps not nearly as much as Niblett and many experts believe. (We’ll get to that later.) But in other respects, when it comes to economics and especially finance and trade, the idea is far more arguable.

In the past few years, an unprecedented raft of export restrictions has been imposed by Washington and European governments to ensure that Western businesses do not share sensitive technologies with Beijing, and those businesses reduce their reliance on Chinese imports in critical sectors such as telecommunications, infrastructure, and raw materials. But all this so-called decoupling (the Biden team prefers to call it “de-risking”) is still only happening on the margins. In 2022, overall two-way trade between the United States and China set a new record of $690 billion, the U.S. Commerce Department reported.

As Sanger writes, even Apple’s iPhone, “a device millions of Americans depend on for everything from their financial lives to their medical histories to the apps that open their front doors,” is still mostly assembled in China—and the company isn’t rushing to change that.

Xi seems to be coming to a much greater understanding of this interdependence, especially as he’s watched his economy tank. That is no doubt one reason that Xi is traveling to Europe this week—perhaps to solicit investment, perhaps in the vain hope that he can drive a wedge between the European Union and United States. But Xi is confronting a vastly different environment than he did during his last visit to the region in 2019. Back then, Europe and Washington had serious differences over how tough to get with Beijing; today, most of that dissent has faded away while mistrust toward China has soared. In a measure of how reduced Beijing’s profile is, Xi is confining his visit to two small and somewhat sympathetic countries, Hungary and Serbia, as well as a third country, France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, has gingerly tried to prod the EU toward more independence from Washington.

Rows of workers wearing protective gear and masks work beneath artificial lights on a busy factory floor that is crowded with various production equipment, including small devices on desks and larger machines in the aisles.

Employees work at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, China, on Sept. 4, 2021. VCG via Getty Images

Indeed, given the degree of integration and the mutual benefits to each economy of participation in global markets, it’s clear that the strategic threat that China and the United States pose to each other is far less than the threat that each country faces from a failure of cooperation.

This is especially true when it comes to stopping climate change and future pandemics, as well as stabilizing the regions that each country is keen on exploiting commercially—particularly the global south. Outright conflict—as opposed to economic competition—is not going to help either side there. More to the point, both the U.S. and Chinese governments have come to realize this, which helps explain why the trade war started by Trump hasn’t gotten much worse.

And what about that supposed ideological challenge from China? In her cover essay in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs titled “Can China Remake the World?” Elizabeth Economy of the Hoover Institution goes even further than Sullivan, Campbell, and other pundits, in some respects, by suggesting that Xi is pursuing nothing less than a reconception of the entire postwar system. “Xi Jinping’s ambition to remake the world is undeniable,” she writes. But Economy, who is respected as a careful scholar, ends up undercutting her own argument by noting that Beijing’s various attempts at alternatives to U.S.-led postwar power structures—the Belt and Road, Global Development, Global Security, and Global Civilization initiatives—“appear to be failing or backfiring.”

Indeed, the evidence indicates that China, along with Russia, is failing to build up a significant counterbalance to long-entrenched Western institutions, among them NATO, the U.N., and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It is true that many nations, especially in the global south, have sought to remain nonaligned among the two great powers. India, in particular, is carefully navigating a complex middle course, joining Washington’s Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (albeit not as a defense ally) while continuing its robust economic relationship with Russia as a balance to China.

But Xi continues to stumble even in winning his fellow autocrats over. For years, he has been offering them up a sort of ideological dog’s breakfast: an unsavory blend of bribery, bluster, and bullying that few countries are buying. They will, of course, occasionally defer to China to remain in its good graces.

For example, at its annual summit in Johannesburg in 2023, the BRICS forum of five major emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—announced it would induct six new members, ostensibly to create a balance-of-power rival to the U.S.-led West. These were Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina (though Argentina later reversed course). On paper, this looked worrisome for the West, encompassing six of the world’s top 10 oil producers, nearly half the world’s population, and 37 percent of global gross domestic product (measured by purchasing power parity).

In fact, however, the expanded BRICS amounts to even less geopolitical heft than the Non-Aligned Movement did during the Cold War, according to Foreign Policy columnist C. Raja Mohan, a well-known Indian strategist. “Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are close U.S. security partners,” Mohan wrote. “Even if they have their differences with Washington, they are unlikely to abandon U.S. security guarantees for untested Chinese promises, let alone protection by the formless sack of potatoes that is BRICS.”

Thus, it is clear that despite its official rhetoric, China is doing little to displace the international system that the United States and other Western powers created. Instead, China seems mainly intent on beating the United States at its own game within that system. Beijing really has no other choice if it wants to sustain its economy, many experts say.

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But even at this game, Xi has been scoring almost as many own goals as Washington in recent years. During the Chinese president’s 2019 visit to Europe, Italy signed on to his Belt and Road Initiative—Xi’s massive, China-led global infrastructure project designed to win friends (and encumber them with debt)—becoming the first G-7 member country to do so. But in late 2023, Rome withdrew, saying it saw no real benefits. Another major Chinese initiative with the European Union, the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, also quietly died after Beijing refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Today, the United States has more than 50 allies and strategic partners around the world, including several—such as the Philippines—that ring China’s perimeter and were once wary of Washington but have since re-upped security pacts out of fear of Beijing. Most of them, including the 32 wealthy NATO countries, comprise the richest nations in the world. By contrast, “China’s main allies are North Korea with an economy ranked 125th in the world by nominal GDP and Russia with an economy the size of Texas,” writes Randall Schweller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, in a forthcoming academic article titled “The Age of Unbalanced Polarity.”

As a result, “even a traditional Western sphere of influence appears out of Beijing’s reach,” Schweller concludes. “Ringed by major powers, its economy weighted down by inefficient capital markets, ruled by a leader who continues to reverse economic reforms and double down on statist economic policies, China looks ever more like it will remain a weak Number 2 in an unbalanced bipolar system.”

The issue, in other words, is nothing at all like the height of the Cold War, when—as John F. Kennedy said in October 1960 while running for president—the whole globe itself seemed to be up for grabs when it came to hearts and minds. As JFK said then, the concern for most of the world was “which system travels better, communism or freedom. Can our system help them solve their problems, or must they turn to the East?”

Not many are turning to the East these days. Nor should we worry much that they will anytime soon. So why are so many observers putting the worst possible face on the conflict? (Full disclosure: I myself used the term “cold war” in a 2022 essay after NATO’s turn to the Asia-Pacific, though I critiqued the move and suggested that simply accepting the idea of an inevitable cold war represented “a failure of imagination and political courage on the part of the U.S. president and major powers.”)

There is no question that hawks vastly outnumber the small minority of scholars and pundits who still insist that we face a cold peace and not a cold war (among them being CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who first used the term in 2021 and recently called Pottinger and Gallagher’s proposals “reckless, dangerous and utterly impractical.”) The biggest problem may be that the idea of a new cold war is just the new zeitgeist—and that long-entrenched policies on both sides, in Washington and Beijing, have made the term fairly meaningless.

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Schweller said that when he first entered the academic job market in 1993, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, international security (IS) studies were fizzling fast. Now, they’re hot again.

“Promoting the idea of Cold War 2.0 definitely promotes the careers of IS scholars,” Schweller wrote in an email.

And that’s true on the Chinese side as well, said political scientist Eun A Jo of Cornell University. “Hawks in competing states benefit from each other in their domestic battles,” she said in a phone interview. Like the Soviet and U.S. hard-liners of the Cold War, the militarists in China are eagerly promoting the idea that the United States seeks to contain China. “The deepening ideological tensions between the two countries today are more likely a product of this dynamic than China’s growing evangelism” about becoming a world power, Jo said.

China's President Xi Jinping, wearing a dark suit, bows his head as he walks onstage at a conference past a U.S. flag displayed behind him to the right.

Xi attends an event held by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the U.S.-China Business Council on the sidelines of APEC Leaders’ Week in San Francisco, California, on Nov. 15, 2023. Carlos Barria/AFP via Getty Images

Just how dicey are things likely to get between Washington and Beijing? Sanger, a longtime New York Times correspondent with unusual access to senior Biden administration officials, does a masterful job of chronicling in his book how the Biden administration has gradually come to realize that Xi is no longer 10 feet tall. Like other observers, Sanger credits Biden with “building a credible game plan” for outcompeting Beijing, but he concludes that confusion over the stakes still reigns in Washington: “Biden’s own cabinet members do not share a common understanding of what ‘engagement’ with China means.” Under Biden, U.S.-China relations have followed an arc of high tension that started in Alaska in 2021 and ended with Xi’s hat-in-hand appearance in San Francisco at the Asia Pacific Cooperation Forum in late 2023, when the Chinese leader openly begged U.S. tech investors to come back. As Sanger writes:

Xi’s decision to drop the wolf-warrior show and cajole American investors into returning to China marked the first time in decades that a Chinese leader entered a summit meeting knowing that he was playing a weak hand. He seemed increasingly desperate for American help.

In the past year or so, Beijing has also begun to signal that it may not be so eager to invade Taiwan any time soon, given the risk of additional economic sanctions at a time when China’s economy is growing only at 2 percent to 3 percent a year rather than 8 percent. Xi “must be wondering if his generals were overestimating the skills of the People’s Liberation Army, just as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s generals had predicted a short war in Ukraine,” Sanger writes, and he quotes a Biden official as saying, “There may be more time on the clock than we think.”

China under Xi also seems increasingly willing to negotiate arms control in the last year or so, Sanger writes: “Suddenly, the Chinese seemed, vaguely, to be interested in some kind of dialogue—perhaps because they didn’t want to get into an expensive arms race, perhaps because the tightened military alliance between Washington and Tokyo gave the United States new counterstrike capabilities.”

Another factor that opens the door to some necessary realpolitik with China is that Biden has all but dropped his other cold war-style narrative—the idea that we are in a two-bloc world of democracies versus autocracies. Especially with an autocrat-enamored Trump threatening to retake the U.S. presidency in November, it’s clear that we are living in far more of a spectrum of political ideology and practice that ranges from the liberal democracies of the West to Russian and Chinese autocracy—but with a lot of mixed regimes in between, such as India, Hungary, and Brazil.

Indeed, with the credibility of U.S. democracy itself in question, it’s reasonable to hope for a mutual recognition that neither system is perfectible. That could also make a modus vivendi easier. The Chinese despise democracy and Americans despise autocracy—but we are now enduring the pitfalls of democracy just as Xi and his underlings are contending with the shortcomings of autocracy.

Sanger’s book makes clear that China is still dabbling in cold war-style tactics, including dropping malware code into U.S. infrastructure, possibly to test how to slow down a U.S. response to a Taiwan invasion. And at least one analogy to the first Cold War should be drawn: Neither side can afford to miss an opportunity to ensure that we remain in a cold peace rather than simply stumbling into a new cold war.

“I see a similarity with late 1940s especially, when it was relatively unclear what kind of threat [Joseph] Stalin and the Soviet Union posed,” said Doyle, the Columbia University expert. “I think that’s sort of the world we’re in right now. There are legitimate warnings about the nature of the rivalry with Russia and China. But let’s relearn the lessons of detente at the same time as we learn the lessons of the Cold War.

“And detente is something we should do now rather than waiting 20 years.”

Foreign Policy · by Michael Hirsh

19. East Asia’s Coming Population Collapse

From one of the real experts on demographics in Asia.

Graphics at the link:  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/east-asias-coming-population-collapse

Excerpts:

It is not hard to imagine how such strains could lead Washington to curtail aid. U.S. officials already routinely complain about allied countries spending too little on defense, and none of their populations have yet to truly crater. But the United States must not fall prey to this temptation. If resentment and acrimony undermine collective security in East Asia, democracies on both sides of the Pacific stand to lose while Beijing stands to gain (even as it depopulates). U.S. officials must therefore pay attention to the demographic trends facing East Asia over the next several decades and work proactively with regional partners to address the defense burdens that lie ahead.

Provided such conversations succeed, these demographic trends should give Americans some hope—and not just because they will weaken China. The United States may be beset with domestic problems and divisions, but to the extent that demographics matter, its strategic future looks surprisingly bright. The country’s under-30 population is projected to be just slightly smaller in 2050 than today, and the overall working-age population will be larger. The country is set to gray, but much more modestly than any in East Asia. By 2050, the United States will have a higher potential support ratio than any major Western economy, with a projected 2.3 Americans of working age for every senior citizen.

The power of demography is bestowing on the United States a great strategic gift in the Asia-Pacific. U.S. policymakers and strategists would be wise to recognize the opportunity and seize it. They need to think through the ways in which this big demographic tilt should change their approach to China and the region overall—including to their friends. Doing so will help Washington best take advantage of what one might call American demographic exceptionalism.

East Asia’s Coming Population Collapse

And How It Will Reshape World Politics

By Nicholas Eberstadt

May 8, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Nicholas Eberstadt · May 8, 2024

In the decades immediately ahead, East Asia will experience perhaps the modern world’s most dramatic demographic shift. All of the region’s main states—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—are about to enter into an era of depopulation, in which they will age dramatically and lose millions of people. According to projections from the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic Social Affairs, China’s and Japan’s populations are set to fall by eight percent and 18 percent, respectively, between 2020 and 2050. South Korea’s population is poised to shrink by 12 percent. And Taiwan’s will go down by an estimated eight percent. The U.S. population, by contrast, is on track to increase by 12 percent.

People—human numbers and the potential they embody—are essential to state power. All else being equal, countries with more people have more workers, bigger economies, and a larger pool of potential soldiers. As a result, growing countries find it much easier to augment power and extend influence abroad. Shrinking ones, by contrast, struggle to maintain their sway.

East Asian countries will be no exception: the realm of the possible for its states will be radically constricted by the coming population drop. They will find it harder to generate economic growth, accumulate investments, and build wealth; to fund their social safety nets; and to mobilize their armed forces. They will face mounting pressure to cope with domestic or internal challenges. Accordingly, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will be prone to look inward. China, meanwhile, will face a growing—and likely unbridgeable—gap between its ambitions and capabilities.

Because of the effects on China, East Asia’s loss promises to be Washington’s geopolitical gain. But the drag on East Asia’s democracies will create problems for Washington. These states will become less attractive partners for the United States, just as their need for partnership with the United States grows. The U.S. government might then come under pressure to invest less in these countries’ security, generating friction that American officials will have to manage carefully to protect Washington’s alliances.

There is more to national power than head counts, of course. But depopulation will disadvantage East Asia’s states in ways that will become increasingly difficult to overcome. Demography is not destiny, but the power of demography means the long-heralded “Asian century” may never truly arrive.

INFLECTION POINT

In the decades after World War II, East Asia’s population boomed. Between 1950 and 1980, it increased by almost 80 percent. By 2020, the region had almost 2.5 times as many inhabitants as in 1950, growing from under 700 million to almost 1.7 billion. This population leap far exceeded the United States’ own total growth over those three generations, and it occurred much faster It was integral to East Asia’s extraordinary economic takeoff.

But even as East Asia’s population rose, the underlying trend lines presaged a coming decline. In Japan in the early 1970s, fertility fell below the replacement level, which is generally defined as 2.1 births per woman. In the 1980s, the same thing happened in South Korea and Taiwan. China—the giant that accounts for five-sixths of East Asia’s total population—followed suit in the early 1990s. Since then, the region’s fertility has fallen even farther below replacement. As of 2023, Japan is East Asia’s most fertile country, even though its childbearing levels are over 40 percent below the replacement rate. China’s childbearing levels are almost 50 percent below the replacement rate; if that trend continues, each rising Chinese generation will be barely half as large as the one before it. Much the same is true for Taiwan. South Korea’s 2023 birth level was an amazing 65 percent below the replacement rate—the lowest ever for a national population in peacetime. If it does not change, in two generations South Korea will have just 12 women of childbearing age for every 100 in the country today.

East Asia, in other words, is set on a course of decline that extends as far as the demographer’s eye can see. The region is set to shrink by two percent between 2020 and 2035. Between 2035 and 2050, it will contract by another six percent—and thereafter by another seven percent for each successive decade (if current trends hold). The depopulation extends beyond East Asia’s four main countries to their northern neighbor—Russia—where population is projected to decline by about nine percent between now and 2050. (Populations will change fractionally in Mongolia and North Korea, too, but those two countries today account for less than two percent of East Asia’s population.)

This is not the first time East Asia has lost inhabitants. According to historical records, China has undergone at least four long-term depopulations over the past two millennia. Some of these bouts lasted for centuries. After AD 1200, for example, China’s population shrank by more than half. It took the country almost 350 years to recover. Japan and Korea also endured long-term depopulations before they began modernizing.

But the impending depopulation is different from all the ones before it. In the past, East Asia’s (and every region’s) prolonged contractions were a consequence of dreadful calamity—such as war, famine, pestilence, or upheaval. Today, the decline is taking place under conditions of orderly progress, improvements in health conditions, and spreading prosperity. The coming depopulation, in other words, is voluntary. It is happening not because people are dying en masse but because they are choosing to have fewer children. China provides perhaps the starkest illustration of this fact. The country suspended its coercive one-child policy in 2015, yet in the years since, annual births have fallen by more than half.

Current East Asian fertility patterns could change; demographers have no reliable tools for predicting long-term fertility trends. But there has never yet been an instance of a country where birthrates fell 25 percent below replacement and then rebounded to replacement levels, even temporarily. It will, therefore, not resemble past depopulations, where high birthrates restored population once famine, war, or other disasters subsided. After decades of sub-replacement fertility, East Asia’s trajectory of population loss has been largely baked into the cake for decades to come.

East Asian demographic patterns stand in sharp contrast to those in the United States. Unlike that of East Asia, the U.S. population is still enjoying growth in both total numbers and its 15‒64 cohort. It is still tallying more births than deaths, despite high rates of illness compared with other rich Western societies. Death totals in the United States have been rising steadily over the postwar era, but death rates are not projected to outpace birthrates until the early to mid-2040s. The country’s birthrates are below replacement levels, but U.S. fertility is nonetheless over 40 percent higher than East Asia’s. The United States also attracts high numbers of immigrants, bolstering its population, whereas immigration is negligible in East Asia. It is impossible to forecast whether large-scale international migration into the United States will continue, but if it does, the country will continue to grow for decades.

GOING GRAY

Given that a very large share of East Asia’s 2050 population is already alive, demographers can speak about the outlook for the region’s countries with a high degree of confidence. What they have to say does not sound especially positive. By 2050, the population in every one of the region’s countries will be smaller and older than it is now. The China of 2050, for example, will have many fewer people under 60 than does today’s China. But it will have two and a half times as many septuagenarians, octogenarians, and nonagenarians as today—another 180 million of them—even though the country’s total population will decline. In other countries, the changes will be even more drastic. In 2050, Japan will likely have fewer people than it does today in every age cohort under 70. Taiwan will have more people over 75 than under 25. In South Korea, there will be more people over 80 than under 20.

This demographic shift will cost these countries more than just their youth. It also threatens to sap them of economic vitality. As a rule of thumb, societies with fewer people tend to have smaller economies, as do societies where the elderly make up a disproportionate share of the population. The elderly work less than the young and the middle-aged: there is a reason why demographers conventionally refer to people between 15 and 64 as the “working age” population. And although East Asia’s working-age cohort grew until 2015, the region’s labor pool is now shrinking. If projections hold, China’s working-age population will be more than 20 percent smaller in 2050 than in 2020. Japan’s and Taiwan’s will be about 30 percent smaller, and South Korea will be over 35 percent smaller.

In theory, East Asia could surmount this demographic disadvantage by jump-starting labor productivity. But there is no easy policy mechanism by which these states can accelerate worker efficiency, and East Asia’s depopulation will make it even harder for workers to increase national per capita output. The region’s “potential support ratios”—that is, the number of people who are between 20 and 64 relative to those who are 65 and older—are expected to plunge in the years ahead. In 2020, that ratio was 5.1 to 1 for China, 4.4 to 1 for Taiwan, 4.2 to 1 for South Korea, and 1.8 to 1 for Japan. In 2050, it will be 1.8 to 1 for China, 1.4 to 1 for Taiwan, and an almost unfathomable 1.2 to 1 in Japan and South Korea—meaning that, in Japan and South Korea, there will be almost as many people over 65 as between 20 and 64. This transformation will likely depress individual productivity, savings, and investments , as workers and their parents devote ever more time and money to elder care. It will also cost governments, which will have to figure out how to increase spending on social welfare—in particular, on pensions and health care—even as economic growth stalls.

The economic crunch from graying and shrinking can be mitigated through healthy aging, more and better training and education, higher workforce participation, and longer careers. But states have only so much leeway to squeeze out more from less. And like it or not, the fastest-growing age demographic in these countries is likely to be the one least able to work: people over 80. In China, this “oldest old” contingent will more than quadruple between 2020 and 2050. By midcentury, one in ten of the country’s people will be an octogenarian or above. In Japan and South Korea, nearly one in six will be over 80 years old. By 2050, all of East Asia will have more people over 80 than children under 15. (In South Korea, there could be twice as many.) The United States will be aging, too, but will have a lower share of super-elders in 2050 than any East Asian country. This contrasts with 1990, at the end of the Cold War, when the United States had a higher share than any of them.

Many of these super-elders will have few kin to care for them—or none at all. East Asia has the highest childlessness levels of any region on the planet today. Japanese demographers estimate that a Japanese woman born in 1990 stands an almost 40 percent chance of never having children—and slightly better-than-even odds of never having biological grandchildren. By 2050, over a sixth of Chinese men in their 60s will be so-called surplus boys from the days of the one-child policy who never married or had children.

Exactly how old-age support will work in societies so bereft of descendants is a question that has typically been relegated to dystopian science fiction treatises. But now, those stories are looking a little less fantastical. In the 2022 Japanese film Plan 75, Tokyo has started paying seniors to euthanize themselves as a way to reduce their economic toll on society. When the director, Chie Hayakawa, was crafting its main character, she interviewed 15 elderly women—all of whom said they would welcome such a plan in real life. “It’s too real to be sci-fi,” Hayakawa said of the movie. “I specifically made this film to avoid a program like this becoming a reality.”

NO MAN’S LAND

East Asia’s population implosion is, foremost, a domestic socioeconomic challenge. But it also poses inescapable constraints on the region’s international clout. The East Asian population explosion helped produce large economies and strong militaries. In fact, it showed up in military-age men before it reached the rest of the adult population. The same will be true for the region’s fertility collapse. In every East Asian country, depopulation will hit the potential recruitment pool even faster—and even harder—than the general working-age population.

Geopolitically, this decline will benefit Washington by weakening its main rival. Between 1950 and 1990, China’s cohort of military-age men—that is, men between 18 and 23—shot up from 30 million to 80 million. Since then, it has dropped to about 50 million, and it is expected to return to roughly 30 million by 2050. When China celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s civil war victory in 2049, it will have scarcely more potential recruits than it did during the year of its triumph. The United States, by contrast, is projected to have more military-age men in 2050 than it did at the end of the Cold War. Back in 1990, China had almost seven times as large a recruiting pool as the United States; by 2050, it is projected to be just two-and-a-half times as large.

This extraordinary shift will limit options for China, which will have to make difficult strategic tradeoffs concerning its precious 18- to 23-year-old manpower. The country’s supply of young adults with the highest educational attainment, the best technical skills, and perhaps the most promising human potential will have a harder time improving the country’s general global position. They will, after all, account for a smaller and smaller share of the national population than they do today. Should they go into the military, removing them from a flagging national economy? If they remain civilians, should they try to go immediately to work at the cost of long-term training? These are not the sort of calculations a rising power wants to face.

In a real military crisis, there is usually no true substitute for manpower.

What’s more, China’s remaining numerical advantage over the United States in military-age manpower may be further qualified by other demographic stressors. Beijing will have less money to spend on the armed forces if it spends more on elder care. Likewise, if China has few young men relative to its population of elders, society and the state could possibly grow more sensitive to casualties and thus more militarily risk averse. This possibility is sharpened by the rise in the number of only children in the military’s recruitment pool.

To be sure, China will remain an enormous country with a huge economy and military force. It can hardly help but remain a formidable power—indeed, it will be difficult for China to drop out of second place. The Chinese government may also be able to compensate for some unfavorable military demography with technology, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons. But in a real military crisis, there is usually no true substitute for manpower. Fielding and funding a competitive military force is about to get much harder for Beijing relative to Washington, almost regardless of what the Chinese government decides.

East Asia’s population implosion, however, will not count as an across-the-board win for Washington. The region’s other countries, after all, are shrinking as well, including states traditionally of great help to Washington. As Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan lose people, they may no longer be able (or willing) to offer the same contributions to regional security. Back in the late 1950s, for example, there were almost as many 18-to 23-year-old men in Japan as there were in the United States, making Tokyo a valuable U.S. Pacific ally. But that is now ancient history. By 2020, Japan had less than a third as many military-age men as the United States. By 2050, it could have barely a fifth. The South Korean military-age population was never as large as Japan’s, but its recruitment pool—once 25 percent as large as the United States’—was big enough to help the United States both on the Korean Peninsula and in broader planning for Northeast Asia’s defense. But by 2050, South Korea’s recruitment pool will be less than 10 percent as big as the United States’. Taiwan’s corresponding balance in relation to the United States is also falling sharply, from ten percent in 1990 to a projected five percent in 2050.

These countries will still need Washington. In fact, the United States’ economic and military potential will be more important than ever for the safety of these shrinking countries. But thanks to population declines, it will be harder for Japan and South Korea to contribute to their formal security partnerships with Washington (and for Taiwan to pull its weight in any informal arrangement). Demographics will be constantly changing the terms of trade in these friendly partnerships, shifting more burden to the United States.

Demographic trends should give Americans some hope.

It is not hard to imagine how such strains could lead Washington to curtail aid. U.S. officials already routinely complain about allied countries spending too little on defense, and none of their populations have yet to truly crater. But the United States must not fall prey to this temptation. If resentment and acrimony undermine collective security in East Asia, democracies on both sides of the Pacific stand to lose while Beijing stands to gain (even as it depopulates). U.S. officials must therefore pay attention to the demographic trends facing East Asia over the next several decades and work proactively with regional partners to address the defense burdens that lie ahead.

Provided such conversations succeed, these demographic trends should give Americans some hope—and not just because they will weaken China. The United States may be beset with domestic problems and divisions, but to the extent that demographics matter, its strategic future looks surprisingly bright. The country’s under-30 population is projected to be just slightly smaller in 2050 than today, and the overall working-age population will be larger. The country is set to gray, but much more modestly than any in East Asia. By 2050, the United States will have a higher potential support ratio than any major Western economy, with a projected 2.3 Americans of working age for every senior citizen.

The power of demography is bestowing on the United States a great strategic gift in the Asia-Pacific. U.S. policymakers and strategists would be wise to recognize the opportunity and seize it. They need to think through the ways in which this big demographic tilt should change their approach to China and the region overall—including to their friends. Doing so will help Washington best take advantage of what one might call American demographic exceptionalism.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT is the Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

MORE BY NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Foreign Affairs · by Nicholas Eberstadt · May 8, 2024

​20. Why Ukraine Should Keep Striking Russian Oil Refineries

Excerpts:

The current strategy comes with limited risks. Ukrainian drones have generally been hitting their targets at night, causing few, if any, civilian casualties. As long as Ukraine continues to weigh potential harms to noncombatants every time it approves a strike, it should stay on the right side of international law. Targeting an industry that directly contributes to Russian military power is a reasonable wartime measure—one that past belligerents, such as the United States, have employed before, including in its recent operations against the Islamic State.

Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries also seem unlikely to widen the conflict. At the very least, Russia will struggle to escalate in kind, given its long-running and far broader campaign to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure: its forces destroyed Ukraine’s Kremenchuk oil refinery within weeks of the 2022 invasion, and the Ukrainian energy minister has said that Russian strikes earlier this year hit up to 80 percent of Ukraine’s conventional thermal power plants. Rather than threatening escalation in response to Ukraine’s strikes, the Kremlin has tended to play down their effects to avoid embarrassment.

To keep the risks low, the United States should neither help Ukraine proceed with these attacks nor even publicly encourage them. But nor should it try to dissuade Kyiv from this course of action. Despite the U.S. Congress’s recent approval of $61 billion in military aid, Ukraine is at its most fragile point in more than two years. Strikes on Russian refineries alone will not force Moscow to capitulate, but they do make the war more difficult and expensive for Russia—and so, if nothing else, when the time comes for negotiations, they may push the Kremlin to make concessions.

Why Ukraine Should Keep Striking Russian Oil Refineries

Washington’s Fears About Energy Markets Are Misplaced

By Michael Liebreich, Lauri Myllyvirta, and Sam Winter-Levy

May 8, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Michael Liebreich, Lauri Myllyvirta, and Sam Winter-Levy · May 8, 2024

On January 19, a Ukrainian drone struck an oil depot in the town of Klintsy, in Russia’s western Bryansk region, setting four gasoline tanks on fire and igniting some 1.6 million gallons of oil. Later that week, another strike lit a fire at Rosneft’s oil refinery in Tuapse, a Russian city some 600 miles from Ukrainian-held territory. In March, Ukrainian drones hit four Russian refineries in two days. April began with a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s third-largest refinery, located deep in the region of Tatarstan, around 800 miles away. The month ended with strikes on facilities in two more Russian cities, Smolensk and Ryazan.

In all, Ukraine has launched at least 20 strikes on Russian refineries since October. Ukrainian security officials have indicated that the attacks’ objectives are to cut off fuel supplies to the Russian military and slash the export revenues that the Kremlin uses to fund its war effort. By the end of March, Ukraine had destroyed around 14 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity and forced the Russian government to introduce a six-month ban on gasoline exports. One of the world’s largest oil producers is now importing petrol.

But the Biden administration has criticized the attacks. In February, Vice President Kamala Harris urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to refrain from targeting Russian oil refineries out of concern that the strikes would drive up global oil prices. Echoing that sentiment, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned the Senate Armed Services Committee in mid-April that the “attacks could have a knock-on effect in terms of the global energy situation.” Instead of striking oil infrastructure, Austin told the committee, “Ukraine is better served in going after tactical and operational targets that can directly influence the current fight.”

Washington’s criticism is misplaced: attacks on oil refineries will not have the effect on global energy markets that U.S. officials fear. These s​trikes reduce Russia’s ability to turn its oil into usable products; they do not affect the volume of oil it can extract or export. In fact, with less domestic refining capacity, Russia will be forced to export more of its crude oil, not less, pushing global prices down rather than up. Indeed, Russian firms have already started selling more unrefined oil overseas. As long as they remain restricted to Russian refineries, the attacks are unlikely to raise the price of oil for Western consumers.

Yet they can still inflict pain inside Russia, where the price of refined oil products, such as gasoline and diesel, has begun to surge. The strikes are achieving the very objectives that Ukraine’s Western partners set but largely failed to meet through sanctions and a price cap on Russian oil: to degrade Russia’s financial and logistic ability to wage war while limiting broader damage to the global economy. Kyiv must take wins where it can, and a campaign to destroy Russia’s oil-refining capacity brings benefits to Ukraine with limited risk.

TARGETED STRIKES

Ukraine has so far concentrated its attacks on Russian oil refineries, not oil fields or crude oil export infrastructure. The distinction is important. After oil is extracted from a well, it is transported through pipelines and other infrastructure to refineries, where it is converted into products to be distributed to end users. In 2023, Russia extracted an estimated 10.1 million barrels of oil per day. Of this, around 50 percent was exported to refineries abroad, and the remaining 50 percent was refined domestically, creating products such as gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel, and chemical feedstocks. Half of these refined products was consumed domestically, with a substantial proportion diverted to fuel the Russian war machine. Russia also sells refined oil products abroad—the country was responsible for around 10 percent of the world’s seaborne exports in 2023—but most Western countries have already stopped importing refined Russian fuel. The top destinations for Russia’s refined oil products are Turkey, China, and Brazil, though Russia has also been selling fuel to North Korea, in violation of UN sanctions, in exchange for munitions.

The Ukrainian strikes have dealt a significant blow to Russia’s refining capacity, knocking out up to 900,000 barrels per day. Repairs will be slow and expensive, in part because refinery stacks—where oil is distilled into its constituent parts—are huge and complex pieces of equipment that take years to design and build, and in part because Western sanctions are hampering Russian firms’ access to specialized components.

Russia’s oil storage capacity is limited. When a refinery is destroyed or damaged, therefore, extracted crude oil cannot simply be stocked for later use. This leaves Russian producers with just two options: increasing exports of crude oil or shutting wells and reducing production.

Both options are painful for Russia, but increasing exports is less so than scaling back extraction. Russia can sell its oil only to select countries, including China, India, and Turkey, whose facilities are equipped to use the specific oil grades produced in Russia. These countries thus have leverage over Russia to buy at lower-than-market prices. Once the oil is refined, however, the final products can be sold internationally—meaning that Russia must pay market price to meet its domestic and military fuel needs.

Attacks on Russian oil refineries will not have the effect on global energy markets that U.S. officials fear.

If Russia chooses to shut wells instead of increasing exports, the global oil price would indeed rise—the outcome the Biden administration seeks to avoid. But Russia would then face an even sharper increase in the cost of refined products, only with lower export revenues to cushion the blow. It was not surprising, then, when Russia’s First Deputy Minister of Energy Pavel Sorokin suggested in March that Moscow would choose the first option and divert more crude oil for export.

Data from recent months confirms that, as expected, Russia is exporting more crude oil at the same time that its refined fuel exports have hit near-historic lows. Moscow exported just over 712,000 tons of diesel and gasoil in the last week of April, a drop from more than 844,000 tons in the same week in 2023. Monthly exports of crude oil, however, increased by nine percent from February to March, reaching their highest level in nine months and third highest since Western sanctions on Russian crude oil took effect in December 2022. The strikes have had no discernible effect on international crude oil prices, which remained stable until the end of March, when Russia cut its output under a preexisting agreement with OPEC.

Western markets may not be hurting, but Russia is feeling the pinch. Since the Ukrainian strikes began, diesel production has fallen by 16 percent and gasoline production by 9 percent. The average weekly wholesale price of gasoline and diesel in western Russia rose by 23 percent and 47 percent, respectively, between the end of 2023 and mid-March. In April, the cost of gasoline hit a six-month high, up more than 20 percent from the start of the year. Russia imported 3,000 tons of fuel from Belarus in the first half of March—up from zero in January—and the Kremlin has been forced to ask Kazakhstan to ready 100,000 tons of gasoline for supply in case of shortages.

So far, Russian consumers have been largely shielded from these wholesale price increases. But in the last week of April, retail diesel prices jumped by ten percent. This lag suggests either that oil companies are earning slimmer margins, at the expense of their oligarch owners, or that the Kremlin has raised public fuel subsidies, diverting money it could have spent on the war in Ukraine. According to some reports, the Russian government may also consider lifting restrictions on low-quality gasoline usage to prevent a fuel shortage, a move that risks damaging engines, placing further strain on an already weak military vehicle maintenance capacity and rendering void the warranties of foreign-made vehicles. Altogether, the political, economic, and military costs are mounting for the Kremlin as the strikes on oil refineries continue.

GOOD STRATEGY

Ukraine’s campaign is working. It is inflicting pain on Russian energy markets, and it is putting exactly the kind of pressure on Moscow that the U.S.-led sanctions regime was designed for but has had limited success in delivering.

In the early months of the war, the Biden administration assembled a coalition of countries to impose economic penalties on Russia, including a price cap on Russian crude oil exports. The idea behind the price cap was to set it high enough that Russia would keep oil flowing, helping avoid a global recession, but low enough to depress Russia’s export earnings. In practice, inconsistent enforcement and monitoring have undermined the price cap’s effectiveness: Russia’s federal revenues hit a record $320 billion in 2023. The price cap may also have been set too high. A recent assessment by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finnish think tank, determined that a lower rate could have slashed Russia’s oil export revenues by 25 percent between December 2022 and March 2024 without pushing Russian companies to shut off the taps. The EU and G-7 shipping industry, meanwhile, is still deeply entwined with Russia’s exports. In March this year, 46 percent of Russian oil shipments were carried on ships owned or insured in G-7 and EU countries, and some Western tankers have continued to transport oil priced above the cap.

Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries are now doing what the sanctions regime has not. Without compromising global energy supply or driving up prices, the attacks are eating into Russian revenues and curtailing Russia’s ability to turn crude oil into the kinds of fuel that tanks and planes need to run. As long as Ukrainian forces avoid hitting crude oil pipelines or major crude oil export terminals, they can maintain this balance.

Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries are now doing what the sanctions regime has not.

The current strategy comes with limited risks. Ukrainian drones have generally been hitting their targets at night, causing few, if any, civilian casualties. As long as Ukraine continues to weigh potential harms to noncombatants every time it approves a strike, it should stay on the right side of international law. Targeting an industry that directly contributes to Russian military power is a reasonable wartime measure—one that past belligerents, such as the United States, have employed before, including in its recent operations against the Islamic State.

Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries also seem unlikely to widen the conflict. At the very least, Russia will struggle to escalate in kind, given its long-running and far broader campaign to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure: its forces destroyed Ukraine’s Kremenchuk oil refinery within weeks of the 2022 invasion, and the Ukrainian energy minister has said that Russian strikes earlier this year hit up to 80 percent of Ukraine’s conventional thermal power plants. Rather than threatening escalation in response to Ukraine’s strikes, the Kremlin has tended to play down their effects to avoid embarrassment.

To keep the risks low, the United States should neither help Ukraine proceed with these attacks nor even publicly encourage them. But nor should it try to dissuade Kyiv from this course of action. Despite the U.S. Congress’s recent approval of $61 billion in military aid, Ukraine is at its most fragile point in more than two years. Strikes on Russian refineries alone will not force Moscow to capitulate, but they do make the war more difficult and expensive for Russia—and so, if nothing else, when the time comes for negotiations, they may push the Kremlin to make concessions.

• MICHAEL LIEBREICH is Founder of and Senior Contributor to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. He is a former adviser to the United Kingdom Board of Trade and the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative.
• LAURI MYLLYVIRTA is Lead Analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
• SAM WINTER-LEVY is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University and a Director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative.

Foreign Affairs · by Michael Liebreich, Lauri Myllyvirta, and Sam Winter-Levy · May 8, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com