Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“The strongest warriors are armed with something to believe in.”

- Dokeshi no michi

“It takes two years to learn to speak and sixty to learn to keep quiet.”

- Ernest Hemingway

“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society/“

- Theodore Roosvelt

1. Opinion | Joe Biden: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas

2. Opinion | The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In

3. David Petraeus on how the US should manage a world of overlapping crises

4. China changes its tune

5. For Postwar Gaza, Differences Grow Over Palestinian Leadership Role

6. Proxy Wars From Sparta to Ukraine and Gaza

7. US to deploy new land-based missiles, Army’s Pacific commander says

8. Ukraine’s artillery supply declines as shells go to Israel

9. Electronic Warfare System Hunting Drones Wanted By SOCOM

10. Information missteps have led to questions about Israel’s credibility

11. The world's attention is on Gaza, and Ukrainians worry war fatigue will hurt their cause

12. Australia says its navy divers were likely injured by the Chinese navy's 'unsafe' use of sonar

13. Dissent over US policy in the Israel-Hamas war stirs unusual public protests from federal employees

14. Opinion: Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer, not a TikTok influencer

15. The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear

16. Is Our Trade Policy Undermining National Security?

17. The Invisible War in Ukraine Being Fought Over Radio Waves

18. The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming

19. Irregular Influence: Combating Malign Chinese Communist Party Actions in Southeast Asia

1. Opinion | Joe Biden: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas

From the Commander in Chief.

Excerpts:

We can’t stand by when hate rears its head. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate and bias. We must renounce violence and vitriol and see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.

In a moment of so much violence and suffering — in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and so many other places — it can be difficult to imagine that something different is possible. But we must never forget the lesson learned time and again throughout our history: Out of great tragedy and upheaval, enormous progress can come. More hope. More freedom. Less rage. Less grievance. Less war. We must not lose our resolve to pursue those goals, because now is when clear vision, big ideas and political courage are needed most. That is the strategy that my administration will continue to lead — in the Middle East, Europe and around the globe. Every step we take toward that future is progress that makes the world safer and the United States of America more secure.

Opinion | Joe Biden: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas

The Washington Post · by Joe Biden · November 18, 2023

November 18, 2023 at 2:01 p.m. EST

(Brian Stauffer for The Washington Post)

Joe Biden, a Democrat, is president of the United States.

Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come.

What will our world look like on the other side of these conflicts?

Will we deny Hamas the ability to carry out pure, unadulterated evil? Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace, with two states for two peoples?

Will we hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his aggression, so the people of Ukraine can live free and Europe remains an anchor for global peace and security?

And the overarching question: Will we relentlessly pursue our positive vision for the future, or will we allow those who do not share our values to drag the world to a more dangerous and divided place?

Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.

The United States is the essential nation. We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead. For if we walk away from the challenges of today, the risk of conflict could spread, and the costs to address them will only rise. We will not let that happen.

That conviction is at the root of my approach to supporting the people of Ukraine as they continue to defend their freedom against Putin’s brutal war.

We know from two world wars in the past century that when aggression in Europe goes unanswered, the crisis does not burn itself out. It draws America in directly. That’s why our commitment to Ukraine today is an investment in our own security. It prevents a broader conflict tomorrow.

We are keeping American troops out of this war by supporting the brave Ukrainians defending their freedom and homeland. We are providing them with weapons and economic assistance to stop Putin’s drive for conquest, before the conflict spreads farther.

The United States is not doing this alone. More than 50 nations have joined us to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to defend itself. Our partners are shouldering much of the economic responsibility for supporting Ukraine. We have also built a stronger and more united NATO, which enhances our security through the strength of our allies, while making clear that we will defend every inch of NATO territory to deter further Russian aggression. Our allies in Asia are standing with us as well to support Ukraine and hold Putin accountable, because they understand that stability in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific are inherently connected.

We have also seen throughout history how conflicts in the Middle East can unleash consequences around the globe.

We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas. On Oct. 7, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people, including 35 American citizens, in the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust. Infants and toddlers, mothers and fathers, grandparents, people with disabilities, even Holocaust survivors were maimed and murdered. Entire families were massacred in their homes. Young people were gunned down at a music festival. Bodies riddled with bullets and burned beyond recognition. And for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released.

And while Israelis are still in shock and suffering the trauma of this attack, Hamas has promised that it will relentlessly try to repeat Oct. 7. It has said very clearly that it will not stop.

The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources. Every innocent Palestinian life lost is a tragedy that rips apart families and communities.

Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of unceasing violence, and build something stronger in Gaza and across the Middle East so that history does not keep repeating itself.

Just weeks before Oct. 7, I met in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The main subject of that conversation was a set of substantial commitments that would help both Israel and the Palestinian territories better integrate into the broader Middle East. That is also the idea behind the innovative economic corridor that will connect India to Europe through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, which I announced together with partners at the Group of 20 summit in India in early September. Stronger integration between countries creates predictable markets and draws greater investment. Better regional connection — including physical and economic infrastructure — supports higher employment and more opportunities for young people. That’s what we have been working to realize in the Middle East. It is a future that has no place for Hamas’s violence and hate, and I believe that attempting to destroy the hope for that future is one reason that Hamas instigated this crisis.

This much is clear: A two-state solution is the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people. Though right now it may seem like that future has never been further away, this crisis has made it more imperative than ever.

A two-state solution — two peoples living side by side with equal measures of freedom, opportunity and dignity — is where the road to peace must lead. Reaching it will take commitments from Israelis and Palestinians, as well as from the United States and our allies and partners. That work must start now.

To that end, the United States has proposed basic principles for how to move forward from this crisis, to give the world a foundation on which to build.

To start, Gaza must never again be used as a platform for terrorism. There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory. And after this war is over, the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza.

As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution. I have been emphatic with Israel’s leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop and that those committing the violence must be held accountable. The United States is prepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bans against extremists attacking civilians in the West Bank.

The international community must commit resources to support the people of Gaza in the immediate aftermath of this crisis, including interim security measures, and establish a reconstruction mechanism to sustainably meet Gaza’s long-term needs. And it is imperative that no terrorist threats ever again emanate from Gaza or the West Bank.

If we can agree on these first steps, and take them together, we can begin to imagine a different future. In the months ahead, the United States will redouble our efforts to establish a more peaceful, integrated and prosperous Middle East — a region where a day like Oct. 7 is unthinkable.

In the meantime, we will continue working to prevent this conflict from spreading and escalating further. I ordered two U.S. carrier groups to the region to enhance deterrence. We are going after Hamas and those who finance and facilitate its terrorism, levying multiple rounds of sanctions to degrade Hamas’s financial structure, cutting it off from outside funding and blocking access to new funding channels, including via social media. I have also been clear that the United States will do what is necessary to defend U.S. troops and personnel stationed across the Middle East — and we have responded multiple times to the strikes against us.

I also immediately traveled to Israel — the first American president to do so during wartime — to show solidarity with the Israeli people and reaffirm to the world that the United States has Israel’s back. Israel must defend itself. That is its right. And while in Tel Aviv, I also counseled Israelis against letting their hurt and rage mislead them into making mistakes we ourselves have made in the past.

From the very beginning, my administration has called for respecting international humanitarian law, minimizing the loss of innocent lives and prioritizing the protection of civilians. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel, aid to Gaza was cut off, and food, water and medicine reserves dwindled rapidly. As part of my travel to Israel, I worked closely with the leaders of Israel and Egypt to reach an agreement to restart the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance to Gazans. Within days, trucks with supplies again began to cross the border. Today, nearly 100 aid trucks enter Gaza from Egypt each day, and we continue working to increase the flow of assistance manyfold. I’ve also advocated for humanitarian pauses in the conflict to permit civilians to depart areas of active fighting and to help ensure that aid reaches those in need. Israel took the additional step to create two humanitarian corridors and implement daily four-hour pauses in the fighting in northern Gaza to allow Palestinian civilians to flee to safer areas in the south.

This stands in stark opposition to Hamas’s terrorist strategy: hide among Palestinian civilians. Use children and innocents as human shields. Position terrorist tunnels beneath hospitals, schools, mosques and residential buildings. Maximize the death and suffering of innocent people — Israeli and Palestinian. If Hamas cared at all for Palestinian lives, it would release all the hostages, give up arms, and surrender the leaders and those responsible for Oct. 7.

As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace. To Hamas’s members, every cease-fire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would once more perpetuate its hate and deny Palestinian civilians the chance to build something better for themselves.

And here at home, in moments when fear and suspicion, anger and rage run hard, we have to work even harder to hold on to the values that make us who we are. We’re a nation of religious freedom and freedom of expression. We all have a right to debate and disagree and peacefully protest, but without fear of being targeted at schools or workplaces or elsewhere in our communities.

In recent years, too much hate has been given too much oxygen, fueling racism and an alarming rise in antisemitism in America. That has intensified in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. Jewish families worry about being targeted in school, while wearing symbols of their faith on the street or otherwise going about their daily lives. At the same time, too many Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans, and so many other communities, are outraged and hurting, fearing the resurgence of the Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9/11.

We can’t stand by when hate rears its head. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate and bias. We must renounce violence and vitriol and see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.

In a moment of so much violence and suffering — in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and so many other places — it can be difficult to imagine that something different is possible. But we must never forget the lesson learned time and again throughout our history: Out of great tragedy and upheaval, enormous progress can come. More hope. More freedom. Less rage. Less grievance. Less war. We must not lose our resolve to pursue those goals, because now is when clear vision, big ideas and political courage are needed most. That is the strategy that my administration will continue to lead — in the Middle East, Europe and around the globe. Every step we take toward that future is progress that makes the world safer and the United States of America more secure.

The Washington Post · by Joe Biden · November 18, 2023

2. Opinion | The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In

This is a national security issue. What can we do and what is the biggest obstacle or challenge or resource shortfall? As in any strategy or campaign: Time.

Excerpts:

While tutoring is a step in the right direction, other measures to increase the time that students spend in school — such as after-school programs and summer school — will be required to help the students who have fallen furthest behind. In some communities, children have fallen behind by more than a year and a half in math. “It is magical thinking to expect they will make this happen without a major increase in instructional time,” as the researchers Tom Kane and Sean Reardon recently argued.

A study of data from 16 states by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University shows that the most effective way to reverse learning loss is to increase the pace at which students learn. One way is by exposing them to teachers who have had an extraordinary impact on their students. The center proposes offering these excellent teachers extra compensation in exchange for taking extra students into their classes. Highly trained, dedicated teachers have long been known to be the most reliable path to better educational outcomes, but finding them at any scale has always been difficult. If creative solutions can be found, it will help reverse learning gaps from the pandemic and improve American education overall.

The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.

Opinion | The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In

The New York Times · by The Editorial Board · November 18, 2023

The Editorial Board

The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In

Nov. 18, 2023, 7:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Leah Nash for The New York Times

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

In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sent $190 billion in aid to schools, stipulating that 20 percent of the funds had to be used for reversing learning setbacks. At the time, educators knew that the impact on how children learn would be significant, but the extent was not yet known.

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.

These learning losses will remain unaddressed when the federal money runs out in 2024. Economists are predicting that this generation, with such a significant educational gap, will experience diminished lifetime earnings and become a significant drag on the economy. But education administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country against this threat are not.

It will take a multidisciplinary approach, and at this point, all the solutions that will be needed long term can’t be known; the work of getting kids back on solid ground is just beginning. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be immediate action.

As a first step, elected officials at every level — federal, state and local — will need to devote substantial resources to replace the federal aid that is set to expire and must begin making up lost ground. This is a bipartisan issue, and parents, teachers and leaders in education have a role to play as well, in making sure that addressing learning loss and other persistent challenges facing children receives urgent attention.

The challenges have been compounded by an epidemic of absenteeism, as students who grew accustomed to missing school during the pandemic continue to do so after the resumption of in-person classes. Millions of young people have joined the ranks of the chronically absent — those who miss 10 percent or more of the days in the school year — and for whom absenteeism will translate into gaps in learning.

In the early grades, these missing children are at greater risk of never mastering the comprehension skills that make education possible. The more absences these students accumulate, the more they miss out on the process of socialization through which young people learn to live and work with others. The more they lag academically, the more likely they are to drop out.

This fall, The Associated Press illustrated how school attendance has cratered across the United States, using data compiled in partnership with the Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee. More than a quarter of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic. That means an additional 6.5 million students joined the ranks of the chronically absent.

The problem is pronounced in poorer districts like Oakland, Calif., where the chronic absenteeism rate exceeded 61 percent. But as the policy analyst Tim Daly wrote recently, absenteeism is rampant in wealthy schools, too. Consider New Trier Township High School in Illinois, a revered and highly competitive school that serves some of the country’s most affluent communities. Last spring, The Chicago Tribune reported that New Trier’s rate of chronic absenteeism got worse by class, reaching nearly 38 percent among its seniors.

The Times reported on Friday that preliminary data for 2022-23 showed a slight improvement in attendance. However, in some states, like California and New Mexico, “the rate of chronic absenteeism was still double what it was before the pandemic.” The solutions are not simple. There is extensive evidence that punitive measures don’t work, so educators may need a combination of incentives and measures to address the economic and family issues that can keep children away from school.

Researchers have long known that American students grow more alienated from school the longer they attend — and that they often fall off the school engagement cliff, at which point they no longer care. This sense of disconnection stems from a feeling among high school students in particular that no one at school cares about them and that the courses they study bear no relationship to the challenges they face in the real world.

These young people are also vulnerable to mental health difficulties that worsened during the pandemic. Based on survey data collected in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this year that more than 40 percent of high school students had persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness; 22 percent had seriously considered suicide; 10 percent reported that they had attempted suicide.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many parents and educators have been raising the alarm about the effects of grief, isolation and other disruptions on the mental health of their children. In addition to reconnecting these young people to school, states and localities need to create a more supportive school environment and provide the counseling services these students need to succeed.

The State of Virginia took a big swing at the problem of learning loss when it announced what is being described as a statewide tutoring program. But high-impact tutoring is labor intensive and depends on high-quality instruction. It is most likely to succeed when sessions are held at least three times a week — during school hours — with well-trained, well-managed tutors working with four or fewer students at a time. Such an effort would require a massive recruitment effort, at a time when many schools are still struggling to find enough teachers.

While tutoring is a step in the right direction, other measures to increase the time that students spend in school — such as after-school programs and summer school — will be required to help the students who have fallen furthest behind. In some communities, children have fallen behind by more than a year and a half in math. “It is magical thinking to expect they will make this happen without a major increase in instructional time,” as the researchers Tom Kane and Sean Reardon recently argued.

A study of data from 16 states by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University shows that the most effective way to reverse learning loss is to increase the pace at which students learn. One way is by exposing them to teachers who have had an extraordinary impact on their students. The center proposes offering these excellent teachers extra compensation in exchange for taking extra students into their classes. Highly trained, dedicated teachers have long been known to be the most reliable path to better educational outcomes, but finding them at any scale has always been difficult. If creative solutions can be found, it will help reverse learning gaps from the pandemic and improve American education overall.

The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.

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

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

A version of this article appears in print on , Section SR, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: The Startling Evidence On Learning Loss Is In

The New York Times · by The Editorial Board · November 18, 2023

3. David Petraeus on how the US should manage a world of overlapping crises

David Petraeus on how the US should manage a world of overlapping crises

atlanticcouncil.org · by dhojnacki · November 17, 2023

Watch the full event

Online Event Fri, November 17, 2023 • 10:00 am ET

David Petraeus on Israel, Ukraine, and the evolution of warfare

AN #ACFRONTPAGE EVENT — A conversation with former CIA director and retired US Army General David Petraeus on Israel, Ukraine, and the evolution of warfare.

Europe & Eurasia Israel Middle East Security & Defense

With so many global challenges emerging, the United States seems like a circus performer keeping a bunch of plates spinning, former Central Intelligence Agency director and US Army General David Petraeus said Friday. And some of those plates are the most “challenging” that the country has seen “since the end of World War II,” he added.

At an Atlantic Council Front Page event, Petraeus discussed the threats facing the United States in the modern-day security environment, drawing from Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, his new book co-authored with historian Andrew Roberts.

Of the plates Washington is spinning, the West’s relationship with China is the biggest—or, even, “bigger than all the others in the [circus] tent put together,” according to Petraeus, a member of the Atlantic Council board of directors. Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific is “the most important mission not just for the US,” he explained, “but really for the US and all of our allies and partners around the world. . . Were deterrence to break down into conflict there, the results would be catastrophic.”

But smaller plates also contribute to this “period of the greatest number of challenges and the greatest complexity of challenges,” Petraeus added, pointing to Russia’s aggression, the Israel-Hamas war, Islamist extremist groups, Iran, cyber threats, and climate change, among others.

Below are highlights from the conversation, moderated by PBS NewsHour’s Ali Rogin, which touched upon how conflict and deterrence have changed—and what those changes mean for Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war.

The right—and the wrong—type of leadership

Petraeus, in reflecting on conflicts since 1945, said that the success of “strategic leadership” is of “critical importance.” That means top-level officials, such as presidents and prime ministers, but also senior battlefield commanders.
He said that between his tours in Iraq as a three- and four-star general, he mapped out four tasks that these leaders must “perform superbly” to prevail: get “the big ideas” right, communicate them effectively, oversee their implementation, and, later, have a process to refine them.
Petraeus said that Russia’s war in Ukraine is a study in leadership contrasts. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he argued, is a “truly brilliant strategic leader as a wartime leader,” who “got the big ideas right” by opting to stay and defend Kyiv “until the end”—and by employing his “Churchillian” communication skills.
In contrast, Petraeus said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the “exact opposite” because he “got the big ideas wrong. . . underestimated the Ukrainians, [and] overestimated his forces,” in addition to employing a “terrible campaign design”—although Petraeus warned that the Russian military “has been a learning organization” and that it has now established a “formidable” force in the south.

So, what is the big idea?

On Israel, Petraeus said that “the biggest of the big ideas” is clear “right now”: The destruction of Hamas. He said that, despite facing “a difficult context,” Israelis have “made impressive gains so far.” And, given that they have to “clear every building, every room,” he explained, “this really should be thought of as more of a counterinsurgency campaign than a conventional military campaign.”
“[Israel has] been able to get many. . . civilians out of the way,” Petraeus said, but he added that Israel should set its sights on securing hospitals in Gaza, supporting medical treatment there, and taking wounded Hamas fighters to secure medical facilities. He reflected on how, during the second battle of Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, US special forces secured Fallujah General Hospital early. “You need to be thinking at the outset about hearts and minds,” he cautioned. “Make it what ‘right’ looks like.”
But “there need to be additional big ideas,” he warned, explaining that those big ideas should include ensuring that “life for the Palestinian people. . . will be vastly improved after Hamas is no longer part of it,” “ensuring that Hamas cannot reconstitute,” and seeking a “return to the two-state solution.”

The challenges of deterrence

The last decade shows that “what happens in one part of the world reverberates in other parts,” Petraeus said. If senior officials say they have a red line, but don’t act when that red line is crossed, it impacts “deterrence and perceptions” in other regions. For example, the United States “had alternatives” to withdrawing from Afghanistan, Petraeus said, and “the decision. . . sent a message to Moscow; it also sent a message to Beijing.”
Petraeus argued that nonmilitary tools such as diplomacy and economic and trade measures are a “crucial” part of deterrence abroad. Military-to-military communications, he added, can help prevent tensions from erupting into conflict.
He pointed to the US-China relationship, saying there wasn’t enough communication between Washington and Beijing when a Chinese spy balloon floated over the United States in February. “We need to get. . . guardrails on this relationship,” he said. “Yes, it is a severe competition. . . but we have to make very sure that that does not erupt into conflict.”
“What we need there is a comprehensive, integrated whole of governments—with an ‘s’ on the end—approach to China, and by the ‘s’ on the end, [I mean] that it’s our allies and partners together,” Petraeus said.

Katherine Walla is an associate director of editorial at the Atlantic Council.

Watch the full event

atlanticcouncil.org · by dhojnacki · November 17, 2023

4. China changes its tune

Really? Do we believe that or do we just want to believe that so badly? As Sun Tzu said, all warfare is based on deception. And our adversaries, like China, believe politics is war by other means.

Nov 18, 2023 -World

China changes its tune

Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/18/china-xi-jinping-biden-rhetoric?utm

Chinese leader Xi Jinping adopted a more conciliatory tone this past week during his visit to San Francisco, the culmination of a year-long trend away from harsh rhetoric from top Chinese officials.

Why it matters: The meeting this week between President Biden and Xi may mark the beginning of a period of relative calm in the U.S.-China relationship, but fundamental divisions between the two countries means the detente may not last, analysts tell Axios.

What's happening: Xi's remarks at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, both in public and in his meeting with Biden, were less critical and nationalistic than at times in the past.

Chinese state media changed its tune as well, pumping out articles all week that praised U.S.-China people-to-people ties.
Xi's remarks at a dinner with American CEOs were particularly warm. He repeatedly highlighted the benefits of economic cooperation, and suggested China might send more pandas to the U.S. — a line which got a round of applause from the audience.
"China is pursuing high-quality development, and the United States is revitalizing its economy," Xi said, per the Wall Street Journal. "There is plenty of room for our cooperation."

What they're saying: Attendees of the dinner with Xi said it was the friendliest tone they'd heard from him in years.

"It did strike me that it was a speech that could be given seven or 10 years ago in the era of engagement," Michael Froman, a former U.S. trade representative who attended the dinner, told the New York Times.
"It was as if the era of 'wolf-warrior diplomacy' had never happened, and some of the events of the past few years had not occurred."

Flashback: Some of China's most prominent "wolf warrior" diplomats —former foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian and former foreign minister Qin Gang — were removed from their positions this year. At the same time rhetoric from Chinese diplomats has lost some of its sharp edge.

Between the lines: The softer tone comes as China is facing its most difficult economic conditions in decades, foreign direct investment in China is falling, and U.S. export restrictions have hobbled parts of China's tech sector.

Yes, but: Fundamental disagreements between the U.S. and China remain.

"I think this was a lot of nice talk — and talk is better than no talk — with some very modest deliverables, but in reality the meeting is going to change virtually nothing about the nature of the U.S.-China relationship, and its continued competitiveness," Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Axios.
"The achievement of the Summit lies in the stabilization of U.S.-China relationship, not its improvement," Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, told Axios.
"Nothing fundamentally has changed in both countries, including their defined national interests, leaders' preferences, the structural conflict between the two countries, as well their definition of each other. So moving forward, it will continue to be highly contentious," Sun added.

5. For Postwar Gaza, Differences Grow Over Palestinian Leadership Role

Yes.the real challenge comes after the completion of the military operation.

The question to ask is not General Petraues' famous one: "How does this end?" The question is "what comes next?" What is the acceptable durable political arrangement that will bring security, stability, and prosperity to the region?

For Postwar Gaza, Differences Grow Over Palestinian Leadership Role

The Palestinian Authority faces critics for problems in the West Bank amid war with Israel

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/for-postwar-gaza-differences-grow-over-palestinian-leadership-role-438a6b5f?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Benoit Faucon

Follow, William Mauldin

Follow and Summer Said

Updated Nov. 19, 2023 12:01 am ET

RAMALLAH, West Bank—As Western and Arab leaders look beyond Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, most agree they want some form of Palestinian government running the enclave, but they can’t agree on who it should include.

One emerging point of consensus is that the Palestinian Authority—as it now operates and oversees the West Bank—isn’t up to the job. But there is no easy alternative.

Discussions in Washington, Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East are focused on reforming the authority or pushing it aside for something better to govern roughly 2.2 million Gazans upended by a devastating war.

Israel has said it doesn’t want to govern the strip once its offensive ends, potentially months from now, but wants to maintain security to ensure Gaza isn’t used to attack Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also has said he opposes the Palestinian Authority in its current form governing there.

The authority’s 88-year-old leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has said he would return to Gaza only as part of broader Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations toward a two-state solution. Yet few envisage a quick peace agreement so soon after the Oct. 7 attacks by militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel, prompting Israel’s assault on Gaza in response.

Brett McGurk, the White House’s top Middle East official, and Barbara Leaf, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, visited Brussels and the Middle East in recent days, seeking a coordinated approach to the conflict. The U.S. and its allies are unsure whether they can transform the authority or find another solution before Israel finishes its military operation against Hamas.

White House top Middle East official Brett McGurk in discussion with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi. PHOTO: MAZEN MAHDI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

“Everyone sees the problems,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a former official in the Palestinian Authority now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “No one seems to have a good idea what to do about it.”

The U.S. and European countries agree on what they don’t want. They reject displacing Palestinians from Gaza in the long term, Israel reoccupying the area, or Hamas returning in a way that threatens Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said Gaza and the West Bank should be unified under the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian Authority officials told EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Friday that it can help govern Gaza, using thousands of its own civil servants.

Complicating the situation is a view from some Arab states, such as Egypt, which believe Hamas should play a role in Palestinian politics—a prospect Israel and many Western countries oppose. The Arab leaders argue that while Israel might be able to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities in Gaza, it won’t eliminate the group as a political movement, and Hamas leaders must be engaged to promote stability.

Israel also still faces the challenge of defeating Hamas’s military, which isn’t a foregone conclusion. The Israeli military has largely taken control of northern Gaza above ground, but Hamas militants remain fortified in a tunnel network and hold hostages, complicating the offensive’s next stage.

For now, Abbas is focused more on pushing for a cease-fire than what comes next. In a meeting with McGurk and Leaf this week, the Palestinian leader asked the U.S. to pressure Israel to halt the continuing war in Gaza, accelerate deliveries of humanitarian aid and halt assaults by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, according to Mahmoud Habbash, an adviser to Abbas.

Palestinian supporters of Hamas hold up a green flag during a protest. PHOTO: HAZEM BADER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Blinken on Friday asked Israel to take urgent steps to stop violence being carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.

As a compromise, U.S. officials have suggested publicly in recent weeks that an international force, with troops from neighboring Arab allies, could enter Gaza. Some Israelis also embrace the idea, arguing the Palestinian Authority hasn’t proven to be a good partner for promoting long-term peace with Israel.

Officials from Germany and some other European countries have also suggested a role for a United Nations peacekeeping force or a U.N.-mandated presence to help with governance and security.

Still, when Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi met with Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns on Nov. 7, he rejected a proposal for the North African country to manage security in the Gaza Strip until the Palestinian Authority can take over after Hamas’s defeat, according to senior Egyptian officials.

Palestinians in the West Bank survey the damage after an Israeli airstrike and raid. PHOTO: ALAA BADARNEH/SHUTTERSTOCK

The Egyptian president said his government wouldn’t play a role in eliminating Hamas, as Egypt needs the militant group to help maintain security at the country’s border with the Gaza Strip. No other Arab country has suggested it would be willing to help manage security in Gaza.

“There will be no Arab troops going to Gaza. None. We’re not going to be seen as the enemy,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said at a security conference in Bahrain on Saturday.

The Palestinian Authority, too, has said it would oppose an international force, and some Israeli security officials have warned that such an arrangement wouldn’t work, pointing to a United Nations peacekeeping mission on its border with Lebanon that has watched as Hezbollah and Palestinian militias have regularly exchanged fire with Israel.

An Israeli military official said the Palestinian Authority was also nowhere near the level of competence in maintaining security that Israel would require to prevent another attack out of Gaza. Even those who have served in the Palestinian Authority say it is ill-equipped to run the Palestinian enclave, and is unpopular.

“Even if the PA sought that role, it would be unable to perform it, especially given that its already-diminished legitimacy is fast vanishing under the pressure of the continuing war,” said Salam Fayyad, who was the authority’s prime minister for six years until 2013.

The Palestinian Authority under Abbas is based in a relatively quiet compound in Ramallah, in the West Bank, and guarded by security forces with red berets and rifles. It was formed in 1994 after the Palestine Liberation Organization, under longstanding leader Yasser Arafat, sealed a peace accord with Israel that gave Palestinians self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

The PLO at the time was dominated by a Palestinian political faction, Fatah, which helped set up the authority to govern on an interim basis. The PLO had to shift overnight from being a political movement based outside the Palestinian territories to a government providing education, healthcare and other services to millions.

The first years of its rule were marred by corruption and violence by Hamas, a rival faction that aimed to disrupt the peace process. At the same time, Israel expanded Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the army limited Palestinian freedom of movement.

Failed peace talks in 2000 helped spark a Palestinian uprising that made Israelis wary of a long-term peace agreement. Israel walled off the West Bank and, in 2005, dismantled Jewish settlements in Gaza.

Israeli soldiers enter the former Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim in the Gaza Strip in 2005. PHOTO: ODED BALILTY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Two years later, Hamas fought Fatah for the enclave, taking over control, but the authority continued to direct a large part of its budget for civil servants in Gaza.

Since then, Palestinian officials have accused Netanyahu—in power during most of the period since 2009—of boosting Hamas in Gaza at the expense of the authority to divide the Palestinian leadership, make a peace deal harder and appease Israel’s right wing, which doesn’t want to cede the West Bank in a future agreement.

Netanyahu has said the Palestinian Authority can’t be considered a partner for peace because, while it recognizes Israel, the Israeli government says it promotes incitement against its citizens and pays the families of prisoners detained for terrorism offenses.

Palestinian Authority officials said Israeli policies—including mounting restrictions on movements through checkpoints—are undermining its ability to secure the West Bank. This month, the authority was unable to pay its security forces after Israel blocked the transfer of close to $200 million in Palestinian tax payments, said General Talal Dweikat, a commander in the force.

“Netanyahu has made a deliberate effort to weaken the PA from a security perspective,” said Dweikat. “It is becoming very difficult to maintain law and order.”

The U.S. is now pressing Israel to unfreeze the money, according to Western officials. A State Department spokesperson said that “this is Palestinian money. The secretary made clear that those revenues, those funds, ought to be released to the Palestinian people.”

A security wall has Hebrew writing that reads ‘Path to Peace.’ PHOTO: LEO CORREA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The authority’s standing also has been tainted among Palestinians by its cooperation with Israel on security in the West Bank. Ahead of the war, Abbas’s approval rating among Palestinians was at about 20% and has likely fallen further, said Khalil Shikaki, head of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

He estimates the only way the Palestinian Authority can return to Gaza is to extract concessions from Israel, such as movement toward a Palestinian state, which Israelis are currently unwilling to accept.

“Israel will find essentially no one willing to step in to replace the Israeli army, including the Palestinian Authority,” Shikaki said. “In the short term…Israel will have no choice but to run the affairs of 2.2 million Palestinians living in Gaza. I can’t see any other alternative.”

Fatima Abdulkarim, Stephen Kalin, Laurence Norman, Rory Jones and Vivian Salama contributed to this article.

Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com, William Mauldin at william.mauldin@wsj.com and Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com

6. Proxy Wars From Sparta to Ukraine and Gaza

For Sunday reflection.

History matters and still holds lessons for us.

Excerpts:

Is President Biden a modern-day Gylippus in his defense of Ukraine? The question makes Mr. Rahe laugh out loud. “It’s hard to think of him in those terms,” he says. “If anything, it was [Volodymyr] Zelensky.” The Ukrainian president famously refused a U.S. offer to evacuate him from Kyiv, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” That “put Biden in an impossible position. After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he couldn’t be humiliated by a brave Ukrainian patriot wanting to defend his country and asking for help. Zelensky drove Biden.”

Mr. Rahe regrets that the West is fighting a “half-hearted” proxy war in Ukraine, but he says it’s better than not fighting at all. He also cautions against arguments by foreign-policy “realists” like John Mearsheimer that the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault and that aiding Ukraine has driven Russia into China’s arms. Russia “was already solidly aligned with China,” Mr. Rahe says. He contends that realists “ignore Russian political culture, and ignore the fact that it will never be ‘saturated’ ”—a term Otto von Bismarck coined to describe a country that feels it has enough territory and therefore enough swagger.

Is the war in Ukraine also a proxy war for Beijing? “Well, you could argue, if you looked at it from a Chinese perspective, that getting the Americans to expend resources in Ukraine strengthens China.” But Mr. Rahe thinks that would be counterproductive for the Chinese, inasmuch as it has galvanized Japan. “The Japanese response to the Ukraine war is to double its military budget,” he says. The Japanese have recognized “that wars have not been abolished and that we’ve gone through a 30-year period of delusion since the end of the Cold War.” Japan could acquire nuclear weapons and “will go nuclear if China moves on Taiwan.” The southernmost islands of Japan, he points out, are “closer to Taiwan than the Chinese ports are. Furthermore, the Japanese are also psychologically close to Taiwan.”

Mr. Rahe has a message to Republicans like Messrs. Trump and Ramaswamy: “Listen to the Europeans. Listen to the Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Czechs and Romanians. Listen to the Swedes and the Finns, who were neutral during the Cold War. They think this is highly significant.” If Russia isn’t stopped in Ukraine, it may advance farther, drawing the U.S. in through its obligations under the NATO treaty. And “all the talk about the money we’re sending over, that’s cheap rhetoric. We’re not sending very much at all, in terms of our overall budget.”

As for Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Rahe thinks he’d “sober up in office.” He will see that “the first function of government is national defense, and that America’s longstanding policy is that if there’s going to be fighting, we don’t want it here. We want it over there. America’s defense perimeter? We want it way out there.” A proxy war in Eastern Europe is better than a war in North America. It’s time for us to think like spartans.

Proxy Wars From Sparta to Ukraine and Gaza

Paul Rahe, a scholar of ancient military history, finds contemporary parallels. But where’s our Gylippus?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/proxy-wars-from-sparta-to-ukraine-and-gaza-paul-rahe-7bffc1ca?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=1

By Tunku Varadarajan

Nov. 17, 2023 2:57 pm ET

ILLUSTRATION: KEN FALLIN

Hillsdale, Mich.

Paul Rahe is one of the world’s top scholars of ancient military history. When we meet, he wants to talk about war in the present tense: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas pogrom in Israel and China’s covetous eye on Taiwan.

Mr. Rahe, 74, is a professor of history and Western heritage at Hillsdale College, a private liberal-arts school 100 miles west of Detroit. He likens Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine to Athens’s attempt to conquer Sicily from 415-13 B.C. And he says it makes as much sense for the U.S. to back Ukraine as it did for the Spartans to help Sicily—which is to say, it’s a no-brainer.

For Mr. Rahe, antiquity isn’t merely academic. Embedded within it are maps that can help us sidestep present-day minefields and steer us toward common sense and smart strategy. These are qualities he finds in short supply on America’s “isolationist right,” in whose ranks he includes Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. (He admits of Mr. Trump that “I held my nose and voted for him in 2020.”)

Mr. Rahe believes that the Athenian and Russian invasions, 2,436 years apart, were both acts of “madness” and “greedy overreach” as well as expressions of “an erotic desire for grandeur.” The aggressors not only scorned the resolve of their targets—the Syracusans of Sicily and the Ukrainians, respectively—but also overestimated their own “capacities and chances of success.” For the Athenian leaders, the allure of Sicily was so great that they ignored “logistical difficulties of waging war on an island 800 nautical miles away.” Mr. Putin “didn’t ever ask himself what could go wrong.”

Mr. Rahe, whose Finnish name is pronounced RAY, has just published “Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War,” his fifth book on that Greek city-state. A sixth book on Sparta is already in press, he says almost apologetically. His preoccupation with Sparta began at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar in the early 1970s. He wants his latest book to be read not simply by an ever-shrinking tribe of Hellenists at anglophone universities but also by policy makers who shape world affairs. He would like them to learn to appreciate the strategic utility of proxy wars. “Why can’t they see that the United States is fighting just such a war against Russia in Ukraine?” he says. “And they’re fighting it on the cheap. It’s just like Sparta used the Sicilians as proxies to cripple the old enemy Athens by 413 B.C.”

Proxy wars are a great bargain because they can cost so little. Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, says Mr. Rahe, “was a proxy war, sure. Who trained them? Who planned it? Who funds Hamas? The Iranians. What does it cost the Iranians, a little bit of money?” How many Iranian soldiers died? “Probably next to none. They’re doing it cut-price, and they gain an enormous amount because they’ve got the entire Arab world up in arms over this.”

From an Iranian perspective, he says, “it’s brilliant. There was an alliance forming between Israel and the Sunni Arab states against Iran. That alliance is now in question, not because the Arab leaders have any sympathy for Hamas at all, but because of the Arab Street.”

History repeats itself: “There’s nothing known to grand strategists today that Thucydides hadn’t already worked out.” The first great historian, Thucydides would have grasped right away why the U.S. backs Ukraine with political support and military equipment. But Mr. Rahe thinks he’d have wondered why the support isn’t full-bore. When your rival “gets enmeshed in a war with another power, shouldn’t you provide that other power with all the means to bleed your rival?”

Proxy wars are the result of a politico-military impasse, Mr. Rahe says. History “is no stranger to enduring strategic rivalries in which neither power can deliver a knockout blow to the other.” Athens and Sparta are the first significant example. Rome and Carthage were exquisitely stalemated a short while later, as were England and France in the 18th century and the U.S. and the Soviet Union for nearly half a century after World War II.

That last conflict has resurfaced as the West grapples with Mr. Putin’s revanchist Russia. The competition with China for global supremacy guarantees a strategic stalemate for the ages, unless there’s a conflagration over Taiwan.

Stalemate doesn’t mean paralysis, Mr. Rahe makes clear. “So, what do you do in situations like that? You can bleed your opponent if they foolishly, or out of necessity, get into a war with a third power—even a small power—in circumstances where you can supply that power with what they need to fight.” That doesn’t have to be done covertly—as in Ukraine, “it’s usually apparent.”

Sparta’s intervention in Sicily was remarkable. It took the form of a single general, Gylippus, who was smuggled into Sicily on a Corinthian boat in 414 B.C. He was a mothax, meaning of mixed (and socially inferior) heritage: His father was Spartan and his mother a helot, or serf. “Within a week of arriving,” Mr. Rahe, says, Gylippus “stiffened Sicilian resolve with his generalship to such an extent that he turned the tide of the war decisively against Athens.” It didn’t help that Athens had a severe manpower shortage, having lost a large proportion of its population in a plague in 427 B.C. Rarely in history “has a power gained so much at so little cost through the efforts of a single man.”

Cut to Ukraine. The U.S. has stiffened Ukrainian resolve with a supply of advanced weaponry that has hit the Russian army hard. European countries have joined the effort, “some more enthusiastically than others, even as it should be acknowledged that our own supply of weapons has been unimpressive.”

Yet he thinks U.S. politicians, even those who support Ukraine, have been too risk-averse. “Are there dangers in a proxy war?” he says. “Yes, sure, you can get drawn into it and then your people begin to die.” Asked for an example, he says: “It’s called the American Revolution. It was a proxy war of the French, the Dutch and the Spanish. They wanted to knock the Brits down.” But the French “got drawn in. At the Battle of Yorktown there were more French than American troops.” The American Revolution “was a great victory for France. But there was a price to pay. It’s called the French Revolution,” which was brought on in part by the fiscal ruin that resulted from overreach in projecting power.

“Some people argue that we’ve got the same problem now in the U.S.,” Mr. Rahe says, “and that the price of our bleeding Russia may be a breakdown of our economic system. I don’t happen to agree with them.”

The Cold War was a series of proxy wars, starting with Korea and Vietnam, where “the Chinese began but the Russians had more resources. It was very effective, and did us enormous damage. The American army was a mess after Vietnam.” The U.S. was able to “return the favor in Afghanistan, and that, arguably, brought down the Soviet regime.” Losing Afghanistan “was particularly humiliating because of the ideological commitments of the Soviet Union. Communism can never fail. It can never withdraw. Once a country is socialist, it’s socialist forever.” Withdrawal from Afghanistan was “unthinkable,” but “they ended up having to do it.”

Is President Biden a modern-day Gylippus in his defense of Ukraine? The question makes Mr. Rahe laugh out loud. “It’s hard to think of him in those terms,” he says. “If anything, it was [Volodymyr] Zelensky.” The Ukrainian president famously refused a U.S. offer to evacuate him from Kyiv, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” That “put Biden in an impossible position. After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he couldn’t be humiliated by a brave Ukrainian patriot wanting to defend his country and asking for help. Zelensky drove Biden.”

Mr. Rahe regrets that the West is fighting a “half-hearted” proxy war in Ukraine, but he says it’s better than not fighting at all. He also cautions against arguments by foreign-policy “realists” like John Mearsheimer that the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault and that aiding Ukraine has driven Russia into China’s arms. Russia “was already solidly aligned with China,” Mr. Rahe says. He contends that realists “ignore Russian political culture, and ignore the fact that it will never be ‘saturated’ ”—a term Otto von Bismarck coined to describe a country that feels it has enough territory and therefore enough swagger.

Is the war in Ukraine also a proxy war for Beijing? “Well, you could argue, if you looked at it from a Chinese perspective, that getting the Americans to expend resources in Ukraine strengthens China.” But Mr. Rahe thinks that would be counterproductive for the Chinese, inasmuch as it has galvanized Japan. “The Japanese response to the Ukraine war is to double its military budget,” he says. The Japanese have recognized “that wars have not been abolished and that we’ve gone through a 30-year period of delusion since the end of the Cold War.” Japan could acquire nuclear weapons and “will go nuclear if China moves on Taiwan.” The southernmost islands of Japan, he points out, are “closer to Taiwan than the Chinese ports are. Furthermore, the Japanese are also psychologically close to Taiwan.”

Mr. Rahe has a message to Republicans like Messrs. Trump and Ramaswamy: “Listen to the Europeans. Listen to the Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Czechs and Romanians. Listen to the Swedes and the Finns, who were neutral during the Cold War. They think this is highly significant.” If Russia isn’t stopped in Ukraine, it may advance farther, drawing the U.S. in through its obligations under the NATO treaty. And “all the talk about the money we’re sending over, that’s cheap rhetoric. We’re not sending very much at all, in terms of our overall budget.”

As for Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Rahe thinks he’d “sober up in office.” He will see that “the first function of government is national defense, and that America’s longstanding policy is that if there’s going to be fighting, we don’t want it here. We want it over there. America’s defense perimeter? We want it way out there.” A proxy war in Eastern Europe is better than a war in North America. It’s time for us to think like spartans.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

US to deploy new land-based missiles, Army’s Pacific commander says

Gen. Flynn says China’s rapidly advancing military is on a dangerous trajectory.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

BY PATRICK TUCKER

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, DEFENSE ONE

NOVEMBER 19, 2023 08:34 AM ET

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia—Next year, U.S. Army Forces Pacific will deploy new intermediate-range missiles to the region as part of its efforts to deter China from invading Taiwan, its commander said Saturday.

These will include a limited number of land-based Tomahawks and SM-6s, Gen. Charles Flynn told reporters at the Halifax International Security Forum here.

“We have tested them and we have a battery or two of them today,” Flynn said. “In [20]24. We intend to deploy that system in your region. I'm not going to say where and when. But I will just say that we will deploy them.”

The deployment of land-based Tomahawks, whose variants can range up to 2,500 kilometers, was forbidden under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty until the U.S. withdrew in 2019, citing Russian non-compliance. The Marine Corps stood up its first Tomahawk battery in July at Camp Pendleton, California.

Flynn said these missiles might be followed by the Army’s Precision Strike Missile, which is set to reach initial operating capability this year.

The PrSM, designed to hit targets at “499+” kilometers—farther than than the 370-km SM-6— can be fired from the HIMARS platform.

“We shoot HIMARS in a number of these countries today,” he said. “This is just a different missile to put into it. So I don't necessarily think we need to have an agreement ahead of time,” with different countries.

In earlier public remarks, Flynn reiterated what other U.S. Indo-Pacific Command officials have said: that more regional militaries are looking to exercise with U.S. forces as a response to China’s increasingly aggressive behavior to some countries in the region.

He also said that China’s military capabilities are accelerating.

How its military is “able to perform is very different in 2023 than it was in 2014, 2015, 16, 17 or 18. So that trajectory that they're on is a dangerous one for the region, and, candidly, it's a dangerous moment for the world,” he said.

In 2021, then-INDOPACOM commander Adm. Philip Davidson told Congress that China might invade Taiwan “in the next six years.” On Saturday, Flynn wouldn’t say whether or when he thought that might happen. But he did lay out various factors that could be shaping Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s thoughts.

“The first is economic sanctions, particularly the economic sanctions that have been levied on Russia, you know…can they withstand that? The second thing is: they are doubling down on the region to fragment, fracture, disassemble the network of allies and partners that the U.S. enjoys, and they are working every day on that. They're doing that in the information space. They're doing it in the air. They're doing it at sea. They're doing it on the ground. And so, again, that's another area where he is assessing whether he can do this or not.”

Flynn said a third factor is China’s military readiness. Xi in August replaced several top generals from the Chinese rocket force. Said Flynn, “I believe that they are, you know, assessing. [Xi] is essentially assessing the military proficiency of his force to actually conduct a cross-strait invasion. That is a highly, highly complex operation, not to be taken lightly. It's going to require all of their forces and it's going to require a significant amount of expertise, precision, timing, sustainment—and I could go on and on.”

A final factor affecting the likelihood of a near-term invasion is the success of China’s influence and information operations, especially upon Taiwan’s upcoming January elections.

“They have to win the information war,” he said. “The U.S. has to be seen as a declining power and unreliable and they are seen as a reliable and ascending power and they have to win that war.”

Vincent Chao, a top Taiwanese official stationed in Washington, said these ongoing operations have three parts: “disinformation, disinformation, and disinformation.”

“They know that military actions, economic actions, ultimately backfire,” Chao, a member of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, said at Halifax. “So what we'll focus on right now is spreading disinformation within our societies that focus on one thing: undermining support for this current administration. Now they have a finger on the scale. I mean, they have one desired outcome in this election.”

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

8. Ukraine’s artillery supply declines as shells go to Israel

Hello South Korea and Hanwha.

Ukraine’s artillery supply declines as shells go to Israel

President Zelenskyy confirms that 155mm deliveries are drying up, even as Russia presses an assault in the east.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

Ukraine has seen a decline of deliveries of vital 155mm shells since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, even as Ukrainian parliamentarians warn of a dangerous shortage of ammunition across the front lines.

"Our supplies have decreased. It is life—and it is normal, as everyone is fighting for survival,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv on Thursday.

U.S. stocks of 155mm rounds that were originally meant for Ukraine are now being shipped to Israel, Axios has reported. The number of rounds were in the “tens of thousands,” according to the report, or close to U.S. monthly production rates.

The U.S. has delivered over two million 155mm rounds to Ukraine in the year and eight months since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. It has more than doubled production of the shells, going from 12,000 a month before Russia’s invasion to 28,000 now. EU members likewise emptied their stocks, and the EU as a whole launched a plan to supply one million 155mm rounds between March 2023 and March 2024.

Despite the effort, though, ammunition has frequently been tight. Ukraine uses 240,000 shells a month, a figure far higher than U.S. monthly production rates. Ukrainian troops regularly report ammo shortages across the front lines, even in hotspots like the country’s east.

The EU is also set to miss its March 2024 goal to supply one million rounds, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said this week.

Zelensky’s news of a reduction in U.S. deliveries, meanwhile, comes at a particularly challenging moment for Ukraine as Russia steps up its assaults near Avdiivka, a eastern-Ukrainian city where intense fighting resembles that seen in Bakhmut last winter.

“The situation is quite difficult,” said Ukrainian parliamentarian Yehor Cherniev. “The intensity of heavy shelling from our side is lower and lower because of the lack of ammunition,”

The war in Gaza is not the only thing slowing the delivery of arms to Ukraine. The funding pool approved by Congress for Ukraine aid is nearly empty.

The U.S. supports Ukraine primarily through supplemental funding appropriations. These funds are split into the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which pays to replace weapons sent from U.S. storehouses to Ukraine, and the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which buys brand-new weapons.

USAI exhausted its funds in mid-October, while PDA had just $1.6 billion in uncommitted funds remaining. Defense leaders have pressed Congress to approve more, but at least some lawmakers doubt much will be done amid the debate about what to do after the latest temporary federal-spending resolution expires early next year.

Meanwhile, Ukraine must bear up against Russian assaults.

“I go to the front lines often,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, who leads the Holos party faction in the Ukrainian parliment. “I’m afraid to even go there because people literally don’t have anything to shoot with.”

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

9. Electronic Warfare System Hunting Drones Wanted By SOCOM

Photos and video at the link: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/kamikaze-drones-that-hunt-electronic-warfare-systems-wanted-by-socom?utm

Electronic Warfare System Hunting Drones Wanted By SOCOM

Specialized seekers would help loitering munitions find and destroy electronic warfare systems, but could have other applications.

BYJOSEPH TREVITHICK|PUBLISHED NOV 17, 2023 6:17 PM EST

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · November 17, 2023

Small loitering munitions, also known as kamikaze drones, with new specialized seekers would be a valuable additional tool for finding and taking out enemy land-based electronic warfare systems, according to U.S. Special Operations Command. This underscores the threat posed by electronic warfare capabilities that potential adversaries, especially China and Russia, have already fielded and new systems they are continuing to develop. It also speaks to ongoing discussions about the roles of U.S. special operations in any future high-end conflict after decades of focusing on counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, and other lower-intensity operations.

A contracting notice posted online discusses the core requirements U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has for what it is currently calling the Counter-Electronic Countermeasure Seeker, or CECMS.

The UVision Hero-120 seen here is one of the loitering munitions SOCOM says could potentially make use of the new Counter-Electronic Countermeasure Seeker. UVision

Current conflicts have "shown the tactical and operational impact of enhance[d] ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and long‐range precision strike capabilities," one contracting notice released earlier this month explains. However, "the resulting requirement for dispersion complicates command, control, and logistics which are further degraded by electronic attack on communication and navigation systems."

"GPS and command link jamming degrades ISR and precision munition capabilities needed for attack in depth against command, control, and logistics centers," it continues. "While this effects [sic; affects] both sides it favors the side that can employ mass without regard for casualties. Under the cover of the jamming, he can prepare, and mass [forces] then turn it off to launch a wave of guided munitions and/or a major ground/air attack."

The notice also highlights that historically dedicated anti-radiation munitions, weapons that are specifically designed to home in on targets using their radiofrequency emissions, have been designed primarily to engage enemy air defense radars and to be launched by larger platforms. A prime example of this is the AGM-88 series of air-launched anti-radiation missiles that the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps employ from various fixed-wing aircraft.

What SOCOM wants now is a new seeker to enable a much smaller and potentially man-portable anti-radiation capability, with a particular focus on loitering munitions. The aforementioned contracting notice specifically mentions the Uvision Hero-120 loitering munition, which the U.S. special operations community is already acquiring, and the Altius 700, a highly modular drone that can be tube-launched from a variety of platforms, as potential recipients of the CECMS.

An Altius 700 drone. Area-I/Anduril

It's, of course, worth noting that loitering munitions, which Israeli companies pioneered and continue to be world leaders in, first emerged as a result of a desire for alternatives to traditional air-launched anti-radiation weapons. Many kamikaze drones in production today are still configured for this particular mission set. They are now steadily proliferating thanks in no small part to Iran, which has become a major source for uncrewed systems of this type, both to militant groups and the armed forces of nation-states, now including Russia.

The IAI Harpy, featured in the video below, is a prime example of an anti-radiation kamikaze drone.

SOCOM also lays out a notional concept of operations for employing the CECMS-equipped kamikaze drones wherein they would "penetrate [into] electronic countermeasure operational environments and loiter" and be able to "conduct a preplanned autonomous attack on active emitters." Though how the seeker might actually function looks to be left relatively open-ended at this state, the idea is that it would be capable of using various data, such as "location, type of signal and jam to signal ratio, etc., ... [to] determine threat identity to prevent fratricide."

SOCOM's contracting notice does point out that a CECMS that is small enough to fit into something like a Hero-120 or an Altius 700 could be readily adaptable to small, but more traditional munitions. The AGM-114 Hellfire missile and 70mm rockets are also specifically mentioned as potential weapons the seeker could be integrated onto in the future.

A US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone fires an AGM-114 Hellfire missile. DOD

If CECMS can be integrated onto small drones and munitions as a seeker, there is the possibility that could be added to the sensor suite on larger ISR platforms, too, according to SOCOM. This would help them be better able to hunt for enemy electronic warfare systems, which could then be engaged by other means, including by artillery fire, the contracting notice emphasizes.

There are still important questions that seem to still need to be answered about how CECMS would be intended to function and not be vulnerable itself to the kinds of electronic warfare systems it is designed to seek out. Getting it into a very small package could present challenges, as well.

It is interesting to point out here that the Air Force disclosed the existence of a radiofrequency seeker small enough to be integrated onto the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb (SDB), a relatively small air-dropped precision-guided munition, back in 2021. At that time, the seeker was described as offering "home-on-GPS-jam" capability, which sounds very much in line with what SOCOM is interested in, at least on a general functional level. Various kinds of home-on-jam capabilities are found on other existing air-launched munitions, as well.

GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bombs with seekers with "home-on-GPS-jam" capability seen during a test. USAF

SOCOM's interest in this kind of capability does underscore how very real a threat electronic warfare systems pose to U.S. forces now, something that is only expected to become more pronounced as time goes on.

Ground-based jammers, in addition to systems in other domains, could scramble friendly communications, disrupt GPS connectivity, and otherwise hamper the functioning of other key networks. GPS jamming, as well as spoofing, could be particularly problematic given that the system is used for both navigation and weapon guidance, meaning that this could prevent the use of certain key precision munitions or at least reduce their effectiveness.

Though this has all been increasingly apparent for years now, as The War Zone has highlighted on multiple occasions in the past, the current conflict in Ukraine has really hammered the point home.

“The agility being displayed by both parties, in the way that they’re executing operations in the [electromagnetic] spectrum, is awesome,” Air Force Col. Josh Koslov, head of that service's 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, told reporters at the Air & Space Forces Association's main annual conference in September, according to C4ISRNet. “Both sides are doing the cat-and-mouse game very, very well.”

Russia has long been making significant investments in electronic warfare systems, including a multiple of ground-based types, since the end of the Cold War, in no small part to help offset historic advances enjoyed by the U.S. military and other Western armed forces. Even before launching its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian military had been employing these capabilities against that country's armed forces.

Russia's Krasukha-4, which consists of both of the truck-mounted systems seen here, is one of the country's most advanced ground-based electronic warfare capabilities and has been used in Ukraine since 2022. It's stated purpose is to detect and jam large radars, such as those on airborne early warning and control aircraft, and satellites. Russian Ministry of Defense

China's People's Liberation Army has also put heavy emphasis on electronic warfare capabilities for the same kinds of reasons that Russia has, which has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. military.

In recent years, the U.S. special operations community has also been in the process of shifting its primary attention to preparing to support future high-end conflicts after decades of hunting terrorists and conducting other low-intensity missions around the world. This, in turn, has raised questions about how special operations forces might be best employed in a major fight, such as one against China in the Pacific.

The video below includes clips of U.S. Army Special Forces personnel, or Green Berets, destroying mock enemy air defenses during an exercise in 2021.

Finding and neutralizing high-value assets, including air defense systems, has long been a potential mission for special operations forces on the ground, and is something that has come back into vogue in the current context. It's not hard to see how this then extends to looking for and destroying electronic warfare systems. An anti-radiation munition able to zero in on electronic warfare systems could potentially be used directly against radars and other emitters, too.

In an environment with heavy electronic warfare jamming, special operations teams on the ground could offer advantages over other options for getting at these kinds of targets, including stand-off strikes from the air or sea, so long as those units can be effectively inserted to begin with. A man-portable loitering munition, especially one capable of autonomously searching for and engaging targets after launch, would also allow those units to still keep distance between them and the actual target area. This would help reduce their vulnerability or the possibility of the presence being detected at all.

An anti-radiation loitering munition based on something like the Altius 700 could also be employed from other platforms, such as crewed and uncrewed aircraft and watercraft. If the weapon with the CECMS is small enough to fit inside a standardized Common Launch Tube (CLT) it would open up an immense number of possibilities in this regard.

A rendering of an MQ-1C Gray Eagle launching Altius 600 drones. Variants of the Gray Eagle are service with the U.S. Army special operations units, among others. GA-ASI

Whatever their mode of employment Special operations forces could use unarmed drones with the CECMS equipped just as a sensor to help provide real-time intelligence about the location and activities of enemy electronic warfare systems, and conceivably other emitters, and otherwise improve situational awareness. U.S. special operations units on the ground already have access to backpack-mounted electronic support measure systems (ESM) that can detect and geolocate signal sources, which you can read more about here.

Marine special operators during an exercise. The individual seen at the left is carrying a backpack-mounted Joint Threat Warning System (JTWS) electronic support measures system (indicated further by the white arrow). USMC

ESM systems, in general, are becoming more commonplace at various levels within the U.S. military, as well as among adversaries, from space-based capabilities down to the backpack-based ones, which could help with targeting CECMS-equipped loitering munitions, as well. "Hunter" drones with an ESM package could operate cooperatively with "killer" ones with the anti-radiation seeker, too.

On top of all this, there has been a surge in interest in electronic warfare systems in recent years to defeat various kinds of drones, something that has increasingly become a factor in the conflict in Ukraine. This means that anti-radiation loitering munitions might become a key tool for clearing the way for other uncrewed systems, as well as other friendly forces, in the future. With SOCOM's stated concept of operations in mind, another option would be to send out these kamikaze drones proactively and have them loiter in a critical area where they could then immediately move to engage anything that then attempts to jam other incoming friendly drones, airstrikes or other assets.

All told, it remains to be seen how SOCOM's desired electronic warfare system-hunting seeker capability, integrated onto a loitering munition or anything else, might ultimately materialize. At the same time, there is a clear and understandable desire for more ways to neutralize threats in the electromagnetic spectrum, which are very real now.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · November 17, 2023

10. Information missteps have led to questions about Israel’s credibility

Here is a proposed research project for some aspiring scholar who has an internet in information and influence operations. Take the new DOD Strategy for operations in the information environment and compare it to the Hamas War in Gaza and see how effective the strategy might be if it was the US military conducting operations in Gaza rather than the IDF.

Excerpts:

This is not an evenhanded information war between Israel and Hamas, the latter being a terror group banned in the U.S. and Europe that carried out the Oct. 7 attack that killed some 1,200 people.

Among a host of spurious claims, Hamas claimed without evidence that Israel had bombed the al-Ahli Hospital on Oct. 17, killing 500 people. Israel denied this, saying that instead a misfired rocket by Palestinian militants had caused the explosion, a conclusion supported by evidence analyzed by NBC News.

And while some of Hamas’ propaganda has been able to sidestep Western efforts to limit its reach, Hellyer, whose career has included senior anti-radicalization roles in the U.K. government, said this information war should not be seen as one between two equal parties.

“We don’t take seriously what a terror group says, but we do take seriously what an army says, especially one that’s an ally of ours,” he said. “So we naturally hold it to a higher standard.”

Israel knows the international debate matters. While the White House backs Israel’s stated goal to destroy Hamas in response to its Oct. 7 attack that killed some 1,200 people, Biden administration officials have privately expressed concerns that the Israel Defense Forces are not doing enough to avoid civilian deaths, of which there have been more than 12,000, over half of whom were women and children, according to Palestinian health officials.

Pressure isn’t only coming from the United States. This week, the 15-member United Nations Security Council voted for a pause in the fighting. And streets across the world have been filled with hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding a cease-fire.

Information missteps have led to questions about Israel’s credibility

Israel has released several pieces of incorrect or disputed information, leading to weakened credibility and online ridicule.

NBC News · by Alexander Smith

Alongside its fight with Hamas, Israel is fighting another battle: to convince the world, and chiefly the United States, that this is a just war.

Israel’s public-relations machine has gone into overdrive in recent weeks to make the case that its pummeling of Gaza has been necessary and conducted in a way meant to minimize civilian deaths. It has allowed journalists, including those from NBC News, to embed with its soldiers in Gaza, maintained a steady drumbeat of social media posts, and made Israeli representatives available for TV appearances.

But in its recent outreach to global allies, Israel has released several pieces of inaccurate or disputed information including claiming that an Arabic calendar was a shift schedule for Hamas kidnappers, and using curtains as evidence that hostage videos had been filmed in a hospital.

The widespread reaction calling out these questionable pieces of evidence has weakened Israel’s credibility, according to some experts, and could lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf situation unless concrete evidence for a Hamas headquarters is found beneath Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital, one of Israel’s key contentions at this stage of the war.

“The irony is they might find something and nobody is going to believe them,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “At this point their credibility is shot.”

This is not an evenhanded information war between Israel and Hamas, the latter being a terror group banned in the U.S. and Europe that carried out the Oct. 7 attack that killed some 1,200 people.

Among a host of spurious claims, Hamas claimed without evidence that Israel had bombed the al-Ahli Hospital on Oct. 17, killing 500 people. Israel denied this, saying that instead a misfired rocket by Palestinian militants had caused the explosion, a conclusion supported by evidence analyzed by NBC News.

And while some of Hamas’ propaganda has been able to sidestep Western efforts to limit its reach, Hellyer, whose career has included senior anti-radicalization roles in the U.K. government, said this information war should not be seen as one between two equal parties.

“We don’t take seriously what a terror group says, but we do take seriously what an army says, especially one that’s an ally of ours,” he said. “So we naturally hold it to a higher standard.”

Israel knows the international debate matters. While the White House backs Israel’s stated goal to destroy Hamas in response to its Oct. 7 attack that killed some 1,200 people, Biden administration officials have privately expressed concerns that the Israel Defense Forces are not doing enough to avoid civilian deaths, of which there have been more than 12,000, over half of whom were women and children, according to Palestinian health officials.

Pressure isn’t only coming from the United States. This week, the 15-member United Nations Security Council voted for a pause in the fighting. And streets across the world have been filled with hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding a cease-fire.

A photo released Wednesday by the Israeli army shows soldiers carrying out operations inside Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.Israel Defense Forces via AFP - Getty Images

Polling suggests much of the outpouring of goodwill Israel received after the Oct. 7 attacks has now ebbed in the face of images showing mass casualties and destruction in Gaza.

Nimrod Goren, a Jerusalem-based senior fellow for Israeli affairs at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, the oldest think tank focusing on the region, said these shifts do not go unnoticed.

“The sense is that Israel is taking into account American and other Western concerns when conducting its military operation to ensure that support continues and the criticism doesn’t cross a certain bar,” Goren said.

A mistaken calendar and curtains lead to ridicule

Much of Israel’s PR effort has centered on hospitals, where IDF strikes have contributed to a soaring Palestinian death toll. Israel has maintained that Hamas uses the facilities as military bases, making them legitimate targets. Hamas has denied those claims.

The Israeli military says at Al-Shifa it has found one tunnel shaft, a vehicle containing weapons and other caches of guns and ammo. Nearby, Israel said its soldiers found the bodies of Yehudit Weiss, a civilian hostage, and Noa Marciano, a 19-year-old soldier, who were both taken by Hamas on Oct. 7.

But efforts to prove its case have at times hurt Israel’s cause.

Most notably, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari showed what he said was evidence that the Al-Rantisi hospital had been used by Hamas to detain hostages. He pointed to a piece of paper, saying that it showed a rota for guarding the captives. “Every terrorist has his own shift,” he said.

Written above the document in pen was “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’ name for its Oct. 7 assault. But Arabic speakers pointed out that the rest of the paper merely showed days of the week, with no trace of the Hamas captors’ names described by Hagari.

Elsewhere in the hospital, he pointed out curtains had been hung on a wall with no window. There was “no reason” to do this “unless you want to film hostages and deliver movies,” Hagari said.

Some people from the region pointed out that this is a common interior decor theme among Palestinian households.

In response, the IDF told NBC News that it had issued a “prompt correction” to Hagari’s calendar comment, and that any “suggestions that the IDF is manipulating the media are incorrect.”

“We are taking all necessary precautions to report as much information as we can,” it said in a statement, “whilst maintaining the safety of our troops and retaining our operational readiness.”

Nevertheless, ridicule soon followed. Videos on social media have lampooned increasingly ridiculous and mundane objects held up as “IDF evidence.”

Israel has been accused of spreading misinformation before. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson for Arab media, Ofir Gendelman, posted to X a video that he claimed showed Gazans faking their injuries with makeup. Despite countless people correcting him that the footage was in fact from a Lebanese film, it had not been deleted as of Friday.

Attacking a hospital is a war crime unless a military or militant group is using it for operations, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Even then, doctors and patients must be warned, with extra care taken not to harm those who stay.

Israel says it has warned doctors and patients at hospitals it says are being used by Hamas. But many doctors say they are unable to transfer critical patients and unwilling to leave them behind. Doctors at Al-Shifa have vehemently denied it is being used as a militant base.

NBC News · by Alexander Smith

11. The world's attention is on Gaza, and Ukrainians worry war fatigue will hurt their cause

Luck or of Putin's making? If I were a political and irregular warfare advisor to Putin, I would recommend that he call on his allies (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas) to create a diversion in the MIddle East to distract the international community's attention. Seems like comm sense (from a RUssian perspective and simple to do especially since the conditions in the MIddle East seem ripe for an"uprising" (a Hamas propaganda description) against Israel.

The world's attention is on Gaza, and Ukrainians worry war fatigue will hurt their cause

BY HANNA ARHIROVA

Updated 12:45 AM EST, November 18, 2023

AP · November 18, 2023

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — When Tymofii Postoiuk and his friends set up an online fundraising effort for Ukraine, donations poured in from around the globe, helping to purchase essential equipment for Ukrainian armed forces.

As the fighting with Russia wore on and war fatigue set in, the donations slowed down, but money continued to come in steadily. Then the Israel-Hamas war broke out on Oct. 7.

With the start of another major conflict, social media networks including X, formerly known as Twitter, were flooded with news from the Middle East. “Our fundraising posts and updates simply get lost in between those tweets,” Postoiuk said.

The result has been a broad shift in the world’s attention away from Ukraine to the fighting in Gaza — a trend that worries many Ukrainians. They fear that a combination of global fatigue, competing political agendas and limited resources will result in less aid for their military, hurting the country’s ability to sustain its confrontation with Russia.

“The longer we talk about our war, the less interest it holds for people,” said 21-year-old Ivan Mahuriak, who lives in Lviv in western Ukraine. Like many other Ukrainians, he feels as if the world stopped paying attention to the war in Ukraine even before the Hamas attack on Israel.

The fatigue, he said, arises from the fact that dynamics on the ground are significantly less than in 2022, when Ukrainian armed forces managed to completely or partially push Russians out of several regions.

“In some places, the front line is still. But that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening,” he said. His brother, two cousins, several colleagues and friends are in the Ukrainian military and continue to fight Russian troops.

FILE - The sun sets over a destroyed building in Izyum, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen, File)

FILE - An officer of Ukraine's 59th Motorized Brigade controls a drone from a shelter in the suburbs of Donetsk, the site of fierce battles with the Russian forces, Ukraine, Friday, May 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

This year’s much-touted counteroffensive, which took off in June, has progressed at a much slower pace, with Ukrainian troops struggling to dislodge Russians who are entrenched in captured territory. Additional U.S. funding for Ukraine is jeopardized by political fights in Washington, where the new war consumes attention at the highest levels.

Divisions over Ukraine have also emerged in the European Union, which says it cannot provide all the munitions it promised. EU summits and other high-level global meetings now tend to focus on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

United States President Joe Biden has made a point of linking U.S. support for Israel and Ukraine, saying both are vital for national security. Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, paid an official visit to Ukraine on Nov. 8 to show that the U.S. commitment has not wavered.

“The fact that I am here is one way to demonstrate that, in addition to the great concern and attention that we have toward what is going on in the Middle East, we have as much attention, focus and commitment as we have ever had right here to Ukraine,” he said, standing outside of St. Michael’s Church in Kyiv.

But many Ukrainians are worried.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged the fatigue earlier in November. “Yes. A lot of people, of course, in the world are tired,” he said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The war in the Middle East also presents an opportunity to Russian President Vladimir Putin by taking the spotlight off Ukraine.

“Of course, Russia is very happy with this war,” Zelenskyy added.

Millions of Ukrainians are burdened by the realization that the war Russia initiated in their country won’t end any time soon.

“No matter how frightening it may sound, I am preparing myself for the fact that this war will last my entire life,” said Zoya Krasovska, a 34-year-old resident of Lviv, who says her greatest fear is that allies will divert resources to other conflicts.

“It’s akin to receiving a diagnosis of an incurable illness, where you don’t stop living because of it, but you live with the awareness that it is with you forever,” Krasovska said.

Unlike 2022, when morale was high despite power outages, disrupted water service and blackouts, this year Ukrainians face the frustration of the slow counteroffensive and shortages of sophisticated weapons. Domestic politics have become a greater focus.

Postoiuk, a Netherlands-based development manager for the Way to Ukraine fund, said the team expected a decline in donations, but not to this extent. Since the Israel-Hamas war broke out, it takes at least twice as long to raise enough money to buy a car for the army — usually $8,000 to $14,000.

Through their work, they have collected nearly $147,000 — money that supported 13 brigades and provided vehicles that included 15 pickups, three SUVs, an ambulance and a drone.

For the first time in the history of the fund, donations from within Ukraine have exceeded those from abroad, he said.

Ukraine’s “war for independence is simply not on the agenda anymore, at least for now,” he said.

Ivan Bezdudnyi, a 26-year-old from Kyiv, is consumed by the war in his country. For the past two years, he has been involved in documenting Russian war crimes. Little has changed for him personally since the outbreak of the war in the Middle East.

He does not worry that diminishing interest will affect Ukraine’s war for long.

“When the wave of interest in Israel and Hamas subsides, and I tend to think it won’t last long … the level of attention we had will remain,” he said. “Maybe not as high as in February or March of last year, but probably higher than it is now.”

___

Associated Press writers Lori Hinnant in Paris and Samya Kullab in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.

___

Follow AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

12. Australia says its navy divers were likely injured by the Chinese navy's 'unsafe' use of sonar

Chinese malign activities. Unrestricted Warfare?

Australia says its navy divers were likely injured by the Chinese navy's 'unsafe' use of sonar

AP · by Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · November 18, 2023

FILE - Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles, speaks during a news conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong on the outcome of this year’s ministerial meeting at the State Department, Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022, in Washington. Australia on Saturday, Nov. 18, 2023, accused the Chinese navy of likely causing minor injuries to Australian naval divers by operating its sonar while they were trying to clear fishing nets from their ship’s propellers. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

BEIJING (AP) — Australia on Saturday accused the Chinese navy of likely causing minor injuries to Australian naval divers by operating its sonar while they were trying to clear fishing nets from their ship’s propellers.

The Australian government has expressed its serious concerns to the Chinese government over what it called the unsafe and unprofessional conduct earlier this week, Defense Minister Richard Marles said in a statement on his official website.

There was no immediate comment from the Chinese side. The U.S., Canadian and Australian militaries have complained multiple times about what they say have been dangerous actions by the Chinese navy and air force in the western Pacific. Analysts fear a collision or other accident could spark an international incident and escalate into conflict.

The HMAS Toowoomba stopped in international waters on Tuesday in Japan’s exclusive economic zone after fishing nets became entangled in its propellers, the defense minister’s statement said. The naval frigate had been helping to enforce U.N. sanctions in the region.

As diving operations were underway, a Chinese destroyer moved toward the Australian ship and was detected operating its hull-mounted sonar in a way that posed a risk to the divers and forced them to get out of the water, the statement said.

“The divers ... sustained minor injuries likely due to being subjected to the sonar pulses from the Chinese destroyer,” it added.

Sonar uses sound waves to obtain an image in the water. At high levels, those can cause dizziness, hearing damage other organ damage.

Australian Sen. James Paterson, a member of the opposition Liberal Party, noted the incident came shortly after a visit by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to Beijing to improve his country’s ties with China.

“On one hand, China says it wants a better relationship with Australia and on the other hand it takes dangerous maneuvers that put the safety of Australian personnel at risk,” he told reporters.

AP · by Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · November 18, 2023

13. Dissent over US policy in the Israel-Hamas war stirs unusual public protests from federal employees

Can our professional civil service remain.....professional?

Dissent over US policy in the Israel-Hamas war stirs unusual public protests from federal employees

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · November 19, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal government workers from the State Department to NASA are circulating open letters demanding that President Joe Biden pursue a cease-fire in Israel’s war against Hamas. Congressional staffers are picking up microphones in front of the Capitol, speaking out to condemn what they say is the silence of lawmakers about the toll on Palestinian civilians.

As the deaths soar in Gaza, Biden and Congress are facing unusually public challenges from the inside over their support for Israel’s offensive. Hundreds of staffers in the administration and on Capitol Hill are signing on to open letters, speaking to reporters and holding vigils, all in an effort to shift U.S. policy toward more urgent action to stem Palestinian casualties.

“Most of our bosses on Capitol Hill are not listening to the people they represent,” one of the congressional staffers told the crowd at a protest this month. Wearing medical masks that obscured their faces, the roughly 100 congressional aides heaped flowers in front of Congress to honor the civilians killed in the conflict.

The objections coming from federal employees over the United States’ military and other backing for Israel’s Gaza campaign is partly an outgrowth of the changes happening more broadly across American society. As the United States becomes more diverse, so does the federal workforce, including more appointees of Muslim and Arab heritage. And surveys show public opinion shifting regarding U.S. ally Israel, with more people expressing unhappiness over the hard-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

After weeks of seeing images of bloodied children and fleeing families in Gaza, a significant number of Americans, including from Biden’s Democratic Party, disagree with his support of Israel’s military campaign. A poll by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in early November found 40% of the U.S. public believed Israel’s response in Gaza had gone too far. The war has roiled college campuses and set off nationwide protests.

As of late this past week, one open letter had been endorsed by 650 staffers of diverse religious backgrounds from more than 30 federal agencies, organizers said. The agencies range from the Executive Office of the President to the Census Bureau and include the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.

A Biden political appointee who helped organize the multiagency open letter said the president’s rejection of appeals to push Netanyahu for a long-term cease-fire had left some federal staffers feeling “dismissed, in a way.”

“That’s why people are using all sorts of dissent cables and open letters. Because we’ve already gone through the channels of trying to do it internally,” this person said.

The letter condemns both the Hamas killings of about 1,200 people in Israel in the militants’ Oct. 7 incursion and the Israeli military campaign, which has killed more than 11,500 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The letter calls for the U.S. to push for a cease-fire and a release of hostages held by Hamas and of Palestinians that the signers say are unjustly detained by Israel, as well as greater action overall on behalf of Gaza’s civilians.

The organizers of the executive branch and congressional protests all spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, citing fear of professional and other repercussions. The federal employees speaking up in opposition to the U.S. policy appear to be seeking a balance, raising their objections in a way that doesn’t deprive them of a seat at the table and risk their careers.

Some current and former officials and staffers said it’s the public nature of some of the challenges from federal employees that is unusual. It worries some, as a potential threat to government function and to cohesion within agencies.

The State Department has an honored tradition of allowing formal, structured statements of dissent to U.S. policy. It dates to 1970, when U.S. diplomats resisted President Richard Nixon’s demands to fire foreign service officers and other State Department employees who signed an internal letter protesting the U.S. carpet-bombing of Cambodia.

Ever since, foreign service officers and civil servants have used what is known as the dissent channel at moments of intense policy debate. That includes criticism of the George W. Bush administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq, the Obama administration’s policies in Syria, the Trump administration’s immigration restrictions on mainly Muslim countries and the Biden administration’s handling of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But dissent cables, which are signed, are classified and not for public release.

In State Department tradition, at least, if “for whatever reason a criticism or complaint were not taken into account or were not believed to be sufficient to change policy, well, then, it was time to move on. It was done,’' said Thomas Shannon, a retired career foreign service officer who served in senior positions at the State Department. “It was time to salute, and execute.”

Shannon was briefly interim secretary of state in the Trump administration. There, he fended off a recommendation from White House spokesman Sean Spicer that State Department staffers who signed a dissent cable against President Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim ban should quit.

Growing diversity of the State Department’s workforce is a positive, Shannon said. But “in the foreign service as in military service, discipline is real and it’s important,” he said, citing the need for consistent, cohesive foreign policy.

“I guess I’m just saying I’m not a fan of open letters,” Shannon said.

State Department officials say several expressions of dissent have made their way through the formal channels to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

One State Department official, 11-year veteran Josh Paul, quit late last month to protest the administration’s rush to provide arms to Israel.

Blinken addressed internal opposition to the administration’s handling of the Gaza crisis in a departmentwide email to staffers this past Monday. “We’re listening: what you share is informing our policy and our messages,” he wrote.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the dissent was welcome. “One of the strengths of this department is that we do have people with different opinions,” he said.

Unlike the dissent cables, the multiagency open letter and another endorsed by more than 1,000 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development have been made public. They also are anonymous, with no names of signers publicly attached to them.

The USAID letter with 1,000 staffers backing it, which was given to The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and others, calls for an immediate cease-fire. But one longtime USAID staffer said it distressed some of the agency’s staffers, including some who are Jewish, by not addressing the Hamas killings of civilians in Israel. The delivery of the letter to news organizations also seemed outside the agency’s tradition of handling matters internally in a consultative way, the staffer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

In comparison, an internal State Department memorial for all civilians killed since Oct. 7, organized by Muslim, Christian and Jewish employee organizations, brought more solace, and seemed to bring colleagues of diverse outlooks and backgrounds closer together, that USAID staffer said.

The organizers of the multiagency open letter said they acted out of frustration after other efforts, particularly a tense meeting between White House officials and Muslim and Arab political appointees, seemed to have no effect.

Staying silent, or resigning, would shirk their responsibility to the public, the staffer said. “If we just leave, there’s never going to be any change.”

___

Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva and AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · November 19, 2023

14. Opinion: Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer, not a TikTok influencer

Thank you Peter Bergen for writing this OpEd.

We need more voices amplifying this message.

Opinion: Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer, not a TikTok influencer | CNN

amp-cnn-com.cdn.ampproject.org · by Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

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Let’s be clear: Osama bin Laden was not a deep thinker but the leader of a group responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and other Westerners, along with tens of thousands of people in Muslim-majority countries.

So the fact that people on TikTok are extolling bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” al Qaeda’s rationale for the 9/11 attacks, in videos that have been watched at least 14 million times is simply baffling.

Most of the people praising bin Laden on TikTok appear to be in their 20s, so they were either not born or were young children when 9/11 happened, and they also seem to be entirely ignorant of the actual history of al Qaeda.

Bin Laden’s men not only carried out the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,997 people, but they also bombed two US embassies in Africa in 1998, killing more than 200 Kenyans and Tanzanians and a dozen Americans.

Octavio Jones/Reuters

Former President and Presidential Republican candidate Donald Trump speaks to his supporters during the Florida Freedom Summit held at the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Kissimmee, Florida, November 4. REUTERS/Octavio Jones

Opinion: Trump’s ridiculous terrorism claim

Bin Laden’s al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq helped to trigger the Iraqi civil war in 2006, during which tens of thousands of Iraqis died.

In Indonesia in 2002, an al Qaeda-affiliated group killed more than 200 people in Bali, and in London three years later, bin Laden’s followers carried out the most lethal terrorist attack in British history, killing 52 commuters. And this is only a partial list of the mayhem carried out by bin Laden and his followers.

The “Letter to America,” had been posted on The Guardian’s website in 2002 when it was first issued, and it was removed by the Guardian this week after it started going viral.

This text is a laundry list of rationales that runs to a dozen pages about why al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11. It begins with the issue of Palestine, which the letter says is occupied by Israel with “American support.” Some of the recent videos on TikTok seem to be making connections between bin Laden’s opposition to Israel and their own opposition to the US support for Israel in its war against Hamas.

The “Letter to America” also decries the United States’ role in global warming, American tolerance for homosexuality and the drug culture that exists in the United States.

I’ve read tens of thousands of words by bin Laden, have written several books about al Qaeda, and produced bin Laden’s first television interview, which aired on CNN in 1997, and it’s not clear to me that bin Laden even wrote this “Letter to America” because it differs in many respects from his usual writings. If he did write it, he did so with the help of others.

Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

AFGHANISTAN:An undated recent file picture of Saudi dissident Ossama Bin Ladin, in an undisclosed place inside Afghanistan. The Taliban said today 08 August, Saudi dissident-in-exile in Afghanistan Ossama Bin Ladin, has nothing to do with two bomb attacks against United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The billionaire Bin Ladin, member of a family of wealthy Saudi construction tycoon, is blamed for two bomb blasts in his home country in 1995-96 that killed 24 US servicemen. AFP PHOTO (Photo credit should read AFP via Getty Images)

Some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden

Bin Laden’s voluminous other statements invariably focused not on cultural or political critiques of the United States but on criticizing American policies in the Middle East, not only US support for Israel but also, for instance, its support of the Saudi royal family.

Certainly, bin Laden himself was very focused on the Palestinian issue. As a teenager, he would gather friends to chant religious songs about Palestine. His father, who ran a major construction company, renovated the three holiest sites in Islam, including the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which is in territory that was taken by the Israeli army during the 1967 War.

So, bin Laden not only had a personal connection to the Palestinian issue, but as a devout Muslim, he had strong religious convictions about it. When, on August 23, 1996, he declared war against the United States, he wrote, “I still feel the pain of (the loss) [of] Al-Quds [Jerusalem] in my internal organs; That loss is like a burning fire in my intestines.”

For bin Laden, the Palestinian issue was a key factor in his hatred of the US. The al Qaeda leader was killed in a US Navy SEAL Team Six raid in 2011 in Pakistan, and so his voice has been absent from the scene. But in recent years, that issue seemed to have waned in importance for other jihadist groups. In countries like Iraq and Syria, ISIS was far more focused on attacking Shias, whom the jihadist group’s members consider to be heretics.

Now, the Palestinian issue is back as a cause célèbre among jihadist groups from al Qaeda to ISIS.

For the podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” I interviewed Nelly Lahoud, a professor of security studies at the US Army War College and the author of “The Bin Laden Papers.” Lahoud examined all the files recovered at bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, nearly 6,000 pages of al Qaeda’s internal communications.

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Lahoud learned how much bin Laden miscalculated about how the US would respond to the 9/11 attacks, telling me, “Bin Laden was convinced that the American people would take to the streets and replicate the Vietnam anti-war protests and demand that their government withdraw their military forces from the Middle East.”

In fact, bin Laden’s attacks on 9/11 spectacularly backfired, and instead of withdrawing from the Middle East after the attacks, the United States got more deeply involved in the region than at any other time in its history.

It might behoove those posting on TikTok to understand some of this history before praising bin Laden’s purported brilliance.

amp-cnn-com.cdn.ampproject.org · by Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN

15. The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear

Key points:

1. A Ukrainian victory will dramatically diminish the threat from Russia.

2. The war’s outcome has clear implications for U.S. security interests in Asia.

3. The war’s outcome will affect global U.S. interests.

4. The outcome of the war will have major implications for the contest between democracies and autocracies.

The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear

Note to Congress: Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests.

By Michael McFaul, the director of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Foreign Policy · by Michael McFaul · November 16, 2023

Last year, the Ukrainians defeated Russia’s invading army on the battlefield, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin all of his core objectives for the war. He failed to de-militarize Ukraine, install a puppet government in Kyiv, bring Ukraine back into Russia’s fold, and stop NATO expansion. Today, Ukrainians are more committed to their nationhood than ever, and their democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, remains in power. Ukraine now has a stronger military and closer ties to NATO than ever before; Finland has joined the alliance, and Sweden is set to follow. In 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces won the Battle of Kyiv, the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Battle of Kherson, liberating more than 50 percent of the territory that Russia had occupied since launching its full-scale invasion.

Now, some of these successes could be reversed because of waning U.S. support. The false claim of a battlefield stalemate has brought about a new narrative that Americans should stop helping Ukraine because it cannot win. Alarmingly, the U.S. House of Representatives has delayed voting on the Biden administration’s request for supplemental military aid. Without new assistance from the United States, Ukraine will soon run out of arms, ammunition, and funds to fight effectively against the occupying Russian forces. Most urgently, the Ukrainian government needs air defense systems to protect its people and civilian infrastructure against Russian missiles and Iranian drones this winter. And Ukraine also needs additional weapons to defend and extend last year’s gains.

Putin clearly understands Ukraine’s precarious position in the U.S. Congress. Recently, he boasted that Ukraine would last only a week if the United States stopped providing military assistance. Putin is wrong: The Ukrainians have made it abundantly clear that they will continue to fight. Recall how, in February 2022, thousands of Ukrainians across the country prepared Molotov cocktails to defend against the Russian invaders. Putin’s statement, however, once again proves that he is not seeking to negotiate. Instead, he is waiting for the United States to quit on its Ukrainian partners so he can launch a new offensive to seize more of Ukraine and destroy its democracy. Without U.S. assistance, more Ukrainians will certainly die, and Ukraine may well lose more territory.

By delaying further assistance to Ukraine, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his supporters are acting against the United States’ own interests. Congress should approve new aid to Ukraine as fast as possible—not as a gesture of charity for Ukraine but as a hard-nosed and clear-headed investment in U.S. security objectives.

The moral argument for supporting Ukraine is clear. Despite the United States’ numerous past mistakes and current flaws, I still believe that it should be a force for good in the world. Russia’s war of colonial conquest is immoral and wrong. We cannot allow the world to return to a state of anarchy, where powerful countries can change borders at will. We cannot stand by as civilians are slaughtered, prisoners tortured, people raped, and children kidnapped. Withdrawing military assistance to Kyiv will not end the war but rather prolong it, leading to more deaths on both sides. The war in Ukraine is a democracy defending itself against a dictatorship. It is simply wrong to let an autocrat invade, occupy, annex, and destroy a country with a political system that Americans and so many others around the world deeply believe in. Global public opinion polls show that a majority of the world’s people prefer democracy to other forms of government. Unlike some other wars, there can be no confusion about right and wrong in this conflict. Those in Congress who cherish international law, human rights, and democratic values should not find it hard to pick a side.

But if moral arguments are not enough to sway members of Congress and their constituents, there are also some compelling realpolitik arguments for providing more aid to Ukraine. U.S. military assistance to Ukraine directly serves U.S. national security far beyond Ukraine. There are four ways a Ukrainian victory advances core U.S. interests.

1. A Ukrainian victory will dramatically diminish the threat from Russia. Even this year, which some observers have wrongly described as a military stalemate, Ukrainian forces have been systematically degrading the Russian army, destroying military infrastructure, and pushing the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea and the western Black Sea. The U.S. government now estimates more than 350,000 Russian military casualties—enormous losses for a fighting force once thought to be the world’s third-most powerful. The Ukrainians have destroyed massive amounts of Russian weaponry, including main battle tanks, fighter aircraft, submarines, and landing ships.

Without any direct U.S. involvement in fighting Russia, U.S. assistance has helped substantially degrade a major military threat to U.S. allies and potentially the United States itself—a strategy called “offshore balancing.” A defeated or vastly depleted Russian army will allow the United States to spend less on European defense, send fewer soldiers to NATO bases in the Baltics and Poland, worry less about being drawn into a future European war, and shift its money and attention toward other problems at home and abroad. Ukrainians are fighting the Russians today so that Poles, Estonians, and perhaps Americans do not have to fight them tomorrow. Russia’s imperial appetites will be neutralized only after a clear, humiliating defeat. A Russia that finally stays within its own borders is clearly in the U.S. national interest.

It is also premature to give up on Ukraine winning back its territory. This year, Ukrainian forces had to launch a counteroffensive without the weapons they needed to do so effectively. If the United States and Ukraine’s many other supporters stay the course, that will not be the case in future counteroffensives. Senior Ukrainian officials I met in Kyiv in September believe, as many outside experts do, that time is on Ukraine’s side in a drawn-out fight, especially when their warriors are better protected by fighter jets and air defenses, better armed with longer-range missiles, and better equipped with more sophisticated, domestically developed drones.

After the war ends, Ukraine will emerge as a powerful U.S. and NATO ally. Ukraine’s military will be one of Europe’s largest and best-armed, a defensive bulwark to deter future renewed Russian aggression and keep the peace. Already, Ukraine is moving away from its Soviet-era systems and adopting U.S.- and NATO-made weapons. After the war, Ukraine should quickly be invited to join NATO as it will become a serious provider of security for all of Europe. Ukraine could also become a reliable weapons supplier to NATO—who is building better sea drones than Ukraine today? It will also emerge as a major customer of U.S. weapons. More generally, a democratic, market-oriented, reconstructed Ukraine embedded in the European Union and NATO will be a significant economic partner for both Europe and the United States.

For Russia, defeat in Ukraine will speed up the demise of Putin’s domestic system of autocratic rule, just as the Soviet Union’s bloody and humiliating defeat in Afghanistan hastened the end of the Communist dictatorship. The end of Putinism will not happen overnight; it will most likely gain momentum only after Putin’s death or incapacitation. The United States and its European allies have a profound interest in weakening autocratic rule in Russia. A Russian defeat on the battlefield accelerates that outcome.

The opposite in equally true. If the United States abandons Ukraine now, the Russian threat to U.S. allies in Europe will only grow. Putin’s regime will become even stronger and threaten the United States’ democratic European allies even longer into the future.

2. The war’s outcome has clear implications for U.S. security interests in Asia. A Ukrainian victory, bolstered by strong U.S. and allied support, will make Chinese President Xi Jinping think harder about invading Taiwan, an assessment I heard repeatedly from top officials in Taiwan during a trip there last summer. If the United States continues to help Ukraine, Xi will be more likely to believe that the U.S. commitment to help Taiwan is credible. A U.S.-supported Ukrainian victory will also undermine Xi’s hypothesis that the United States is a declining, overextended power and that the democratic world can no longer act in unity for any sustained period.

Again, the opposite is equally true: If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, Xi will feel emboldened. If the United States stopped supporting Ukraine, Xi might assess that U.S. support for Taiwan would be temporary and feckless. Just as Putin is trying to do today in Ukraine, Chinese leaders will wait for politicians in Washington to doubt the wisdom of military and financial assistance to an embattled Taiwan and then call on Taipei to negotiate. To all those Republican members of Congress who argue that the focus should be on countering the China threat: Defeating Putin is a critical component of that grand strategy. Cutting military aid to Kyiv is precisely the wrong message to send to Beijing.

3. The war’s outcome will affect global U.S. interests. A Ukrainian victory would be a win for all those wanting to preserve the rules-based international order established and maintained by the United States since the end of World War II. Among that order’s amazing achievements have been the end of European overseas imperialism, establishing the taboo of annexation, and setting the global rules that brought an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity to the world. Wars of outright conquest and annexation, so frequent before 1945, rarely occurred, even during intense superpower competition during the Cold War. These outcomes served U.S. interests and made the world safer for Americans. A return to a Hobbesian world of annexation and imperialism would not serve U.S. interests. Americans would be dragged into these conflicts and potentially be at war with other major powers. The United States has no interest in returning to that kind of world.

4. The outcome of the war will have major implications for the contest between democracies and autocracies. Throughout its history, the United States’ enemies and rivals have been dictatorships, not other democracies. Think of imperial Japan, imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. When autocracies become democracies, it makes the United States safer. Think of post-1945 Japan, Germany, and Italy and then post-communist Europe, including Russia during its brief democratic phase in the early 1990s. Similarly, powerful autocracies make Americans less secure. Think of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. A Ukrainian victory will chalk up a win in the democracy column, perhaps even helping to reverse a nearly two-decade global trend of democratic erosion. In the great-power contest with China over the next several decades, democratic and liberal ideas constitute some of the greatest advantages of the United States and its democratic allies; this makes defending democracy a national interest. This is not just idealism: As former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued, “Promoting democracy … is not just the right thing to do. For America it is the smart thing to do.” Nowhere is this struggle of ideas more acute than in Ukraine. If Ukraine wins, the momentum for democrats around the world will grow, including those in neighboring Russia and Belarus. If Ukraine loses, the momentum for dictators will grow. The stakes are that high.

It is time for Congress to vote on a new assistance package for Ukraine. A yea vote is not only good for Ukraine but also a prudent investment in the national security of the United States.

Michael McFaul is the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, a professor of political science, and a Hoover Institution senior fellow, all at Stanford University. In the Obama administration, he was a U.S. ambassador to Russia, a senior director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council, and a special assistant to the president. Twitter: @McFaul

Foreign Policy · by Michael McFaul · November 16, 2023

16. Is Our Trade Policy Undermining National Security?

Excerpts:

The U.S. Steel request also mentions that the potential settlement “contravenes” and risks harm to our national security by allowing “duty free” imports of products such as steel slabs that are readily available from American manufacturers.

That’s why the presiding CIT judge should allow the filing of amicus briefs, so that the voices of concerned stakeholders can also be heard and considered.

Should the Biden Commerce Department move forward with a settlement, it risks setting a dangerous legal and regulatory precedent that will only further expose an increasingly fragile American economy to foreign companies. The White House should reconsider—and reassure the American People— that our collective security remains a supreme concern.

Is Our Trade Policy Undermining National Security?

By J.D. Hayworth

November 18, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/11/18/is_our_trade_policy_undermining_national_security_993673.html

While Americans have heard plenty about the war in Ukraine, one trade policy issue with Russia which also has troubling national security implications is mostly flying under the radar.

Though China has a history of “dumping steel” on U.S. markets, selling it for less than it’s worth to crush the competition, it turns out a major Russian steel company is also apparently attempting to hurt us through alleged evasion of tariffs.

Steel trade policy is inextricably linked to national security and it has been in the news lately.

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court “decided not to decide,” declining to hear the bid of an American steel importer to invalidate tariffs on certain steel products. Texas-based PrimeSource Building Products sought to appeal a lower court decision to uphold a 25 percent tariff on some steel derivatives, arguing that former President Trump exceeded his authority by imposing them.

By turning away the appeal, the “Supremes” let stand a February ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Interestingly, the Biden Administration had urged the Supreme Court not to consider the appeal—agreeing in essence with President Trump’s tariff imposition.

But the White House and a Cabinet-level agency seem to have “pulled a 180” in a similar case with the Russians. The Department of Commerce has decided to negotiate a settlement with the Russian-owned company NLMK, despite the clear contradiction with its earlier position in the PrimeSource appeal.

By pursuing this contradictory course of action, the Administration has insured that vigorous counteractions will be taken by stakeholders in the steel industry.

Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act could not be clearer: steel imports constitute a national security threat that lead to trade sanctions. It only allows three exemptions—Canada, Mexico and the EU.

While NLMK is the largest steel company in Russia, it also owns U.S.-based subsidiaries NLMK Indiana and NLMK Pennsylvania, therefore company lawyers maintain that the Russian exporter should be exempt from the 25 percent tariff.

Their dubious reasoning rests on the claim that since NLMK’s Indiana and Pennsylvania operations are wholly U.S. owned entities that hire American workers, a tariff exemption should be granted. This ignores the simple fact that NLMK imports its own products, made in Russia.

Even more difficult to ignore is the economic windfall NLMK would reap, should Commerce move forward with a settlement. Cash refunds from the 232 tariffs paid for Russian steel imports since 2020, with interest, would flow back into NLMK’s coffers.

This is troubling given its unfairness to other law-abiding U.S. steel importers who have been paying the required tariffs. Even more galling is that the entire process would be “turned on its head” by apparently giving preferential treatment to Russia.

In late 2021, NLMK Pennsylvania filed suit against the Commerce Department, challenging the agency’s denial of its request to exempt 4 million megatons worth of Russian steel imports from due tariffs. That litigation currently resides in the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT).

That initial NLMK legal maneuver of two years ago prompted American companies such as Nucor Corporation, U.S. Steel, and Cleveland-Cliffs to submit their own legal objections. Now, with NLMK apparently close to settling with Commerce, those aforementioned American businesses are again standing up for themselves.

Specifically, U.S. Steel hopes to submit an amicus curiae brief to CIT, explaining why the federal government should not settle with NLMK, nor refund its paid tariffs. In its request to submit the brief, U.S. Steel explains that NLMK is a prime example of foreign companies using stateside subsidiaries to exploit tariff exclusion processes like those found in Section 232.

The U.S. Steel request also mentions that the potential settlement “contravenes” and risks harm to our national security by allowing “duty free” imports of products such as steel slabs that are readily available from American manufacturers.

That’s why the presiding CIT judge should allow the filing of amicus briefs, so that the voices of concerned stakeholders can also be heard and considered.

Should the Biden Commerce Department move forward with a settlement, it risks setting a dangerous legal and regulatory precedent that will only further expose an increasingly fragile American economy to foreign companies. The White House should reconsider—and reassure the American People— that our collective security remains a supreme concern.

J.D. Hayworth represented Arizona in the U.S. House from 1995-2007, and was the first Arizonan ever named to the Committee on Ways and Means. His decade of service on that panel included membership of the Subcommittee on Trade.

17. The Invisible War in Ukraine Being Fought Over Radio Waves

The Invisible War in Ukraine Being Fought Over Radio Waves

Using electromagnetic waves to flummox and follow smarter weapons has become a critical part of the cat-and-mouse game between Ukraine and Russia. The United States, China and others have taken note.

The New York Times · by Aaron Krolik · November 19, 2023

A visualization of the rapidly-changing frequencies of the Himera military radio, which features signal-hopping technology that makes it difficult to jam.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Using electromagnetic waves to flummox and follow smarter weapons has become a critical part of the cat-and-mouse game between Ukraine and Russia. The United States, China and others have taken note.

By Paul Mozur and

Paul Mozur reported from Kyiv, Dnipro, and Odesa, Ukraine. Aaron Krolik reported from New York.

Nov. 19, 2023

The drones began crashing on Ukraine’s front lines, with little explanation.

For months, the aerial vehicles supplied by Quantum Systems, a German technology firm, had worked smoothly for Ukraine’s military, swooping through the air to spot enemy tanks and troops in the country’s war against Russia. Then late last year, the machines abruptly started falling from the sky as they returned from missions.

“It was this mystery,” said Sven Kruck, a Quantum executive who received a stern letter from Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense demanding a fix.

Quantum’s engineers soon homed in on the issue: Russians were jamming the wireless signals that connected the drones to the satellites they relied on for navigation, leading the machines to lose their way and plummet to earth. To adjust, Quantum developed artificial intelligence-powered software to act as a kind of secondary pilot and added a manual option so the drones could be landed with an Xbox controller. The company also built a service center to monitor Russia’s electronic attacks.

“All we could do is get information from the operators, try to find out what wasn’t working, test and try again,” Mr. Kruck said.

A battle is raging in Ukraine in the invisible realm of electromagnetic waves, with radio signals being used to overwhelm communication links to drones and troops, locate targets and trick guided weapons. Known as electronic warfare, the tactics have turned into a cat-and-mouse game between Russia and Ukraine, quietly driving momentum swings in the 21-month old conflict and forcing engineers to adapt.

“Electronic warfare has impacted the fighting in Ukraine as much as weather and terrain,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington, adding that every operation in the conflict now has to take into account enemy moves in the electromagnetic spectrum.

The Vector fixed-wing reconnaissance drone from Quantum Systems. Remote pilots communicate with the drone using radio signals.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Electronic warfare has been a feature of wars for more than 100 years. During World War II, the British mimicked German radio signals to deceive targeting systems that bombers used, which Winston Churchill popularized as the “battle of the beams.” In the Cold War, the Soviet Union invested heavily in electronic weapons to gain an asymmetric advantage against the missiles and planes from the United States.

In recent decades, the use of electronic attack and defense has been more lopsided. In the Iraq war in the 2000s, the United States used gadgets called jammers to create so much radio noise that improvised explosive devices could not communicate with their remote detonators. More recently, Israel has jumbled GPS signals in its airspace with electronic warfare systems to confuse would-be attacks from drones or missiles.

The war in Ukraine is the first recent conflict between two large and relatively advanced armies to widely deploy electronic warfare abilities and evolve the techniques in real time. Once the purview of trained experts, the technologies have spread to frontline infantry troops. Ukrainian drone pilots said they constantly fine-tuned their methods to parry the invisible attacks. One day, a new radio frequency might work, some said. The next, a different antenna.

The tactics have become so critical that electronic warfare received its own section in a recent essay by Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top military commander. “Widespread use of information technology in military affairs” would be key to breaking what has become a stalemate in the conflict with Russia, he wrote.

The techniques have turned the war into a proxy laboratory that the United States, Europe and China have followed closely for what may sway a future conflict, experts said.

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, raised the topic of electronic warfare this year in prepared remarks for a Congressional hearing. NATO countries have expanded programs to buy and develop electronic weapons, said Thomas Withington, an electronic warfare expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a British security think tank.

“The war in Ukraine has been the performance enhancing drug for NATO’s electromagnetic thinking,” he said. “It has been the thing that concentrates minds.”

A Ukrainian drone destroys a jamming system that targets drones hidden atop a building in Kherson Oblast during the summer of 2023.Credit...Escadrone

Antennas and jammers

As Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv in February 2022, the Russian military initially made good on its reputation as one of the world’s best at electronic warfare. It used powerful jammers and decoy missiles to inundate Ukrainian air defenses, leaving Ukraine reliant on aircraft to fight off Russian planes.

The electronic weapons do not appear dangerous at first glance. They are typically satellite dishes or antennas that can be mounted on trucks or set up in fields or on buildings. But they then beam out electromagnetic waves to track, trick and block sensors and communication links that guide precision weapons and allow for radio communications. Just about every communications technology relies on electromagnetic signals, be it soldiers with radios, drones connecting to pilots or missiles linked to satellites.

One basic but effective tool is a jammer, which disrupts communications by sending out powerful signals at the same frequencies used by walkie-talkies or drones to cause so much disturbance that beaming a signal is impossible. Jamming is akin to blasting heavy metal in the middle of a college lecture.

A Ukrainian drone destroys a Russian truck in the Kupiansk area in October 2023. The camouflaged vehicle, which has an antenna extended, is part of an electronic attack system that blocks and manipulates cellular phone networks.Credit...Escadrone

Another key weapon sends a signal that pretends to be something it is not, like a satellite link. Called spoofing, the fake signal can convince a drone or missile it is miles off course by feeding it false coordinates. In other cases, spoofers ape the signals made by missiles or planes to trick air defense systems into detecting attacks that aren’t happening.

Other tools listen for beams of radiation and seek to locate their origin. These devices are often used to find and attack drone pilots.

After early success using these tools, the Russian military stumbled, analysts said. But as the war has stretched on, Russia has innovated by making smaller, mobile electronic weapons, like anti-drone guns and tiny jammers that form a radio-wave bubble around trenches.

“The Russians have been more nimble at responding than we would have expected from their ground behavior,” said James A. Lewis, a former U.S. official who writes on technology and security for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “That should be worrisome for NATO.”

The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment.

Yurii Momot, a founder of Piranha-Tech, with an anti-drone gun that can jam the communications signals used to control small commercial drones.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

The anti-drone gun can send a burst of radio signals to overwhelm a drone’s communication links. Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Soviet versus start-up

To combat Russia’s century of Soviet know-how in electronic attack and defense, Ukraine has turned to a start-up approach associated with Silicon Valley. The idea is to help the country’s tech workers quickly turn out electronic warfare products, test them and then send them to the battlefield.

This summer, Ukraine’s government hosted a hackathon for firms to work on ways to jam Iranian Shahed drones, which are long-range unmanned aerial vehicles that have been used to hit cities deep inside the country, said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister.

At testing ranges outside Kyiv, drone makers pit their craft against electronic attack weapons. In a field in central Ukraine in August, Yurii Momot, 53, a former Soviet Union special forces commander and a founder of the electronic warfare firm Piranha, showed a new anti-drone gun built for the conflict.

The guns have a checkered performance in the war, but Mr. Momot’s version worked. Pointing it at a DJI Mavic, a common cheap reconnaissance drone, he pulled the trigger. The drone hovered motionless. Its navigation system had been swamped by a burst of radio signals from the gun.

“The whole system is more structured in Russia,” Mr. Momot said of Russia’s electronic warfare program, which he knows from his time with the Soviet army. “We’re catching up, but it will take a while.”

Other Ukrainian companies, such as Kvertus and Himera, are building tiny jammers or $100 walkie-talkies that can withstand Russian jamming.

Recovered Russian military radios, standing upright, with a green radio made by Himera, a Ukrainian company that makes $100 walkie-talkies that can withstand Russian jamming.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Inside some of Himera’s radios.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

A worker at Himera assembles a radio, which are used by some parts of the Ukrainian military.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

At Infozahyst, one of Ukraine’s biggest electronic warfare contractors, engineers recently worked on a project to track and identify Russian air defense systems. Iaroslav Kalinin, the company’s chief executive, said Russia’s anti-aircraft radars were not as easy to replace as tanks. But if enough were eliminated, it could provide a turning point in the war.

“Once we control the sky, then Russia fails hard,” he said.

A call to action

This summer, Oleksandr Berezhny, a Quantum executive, traveled with one of Ukraine’s top drone pilots to share what they knew about electronic warfare with NATO. At a large round table in a base in Germany, they explained the problems they faced to a rapt audience of commanders.

“We told them probably 90 percent of the American and European systems coming to Ukraine were not prepared to meet the electronic warfare challenge,” Mr. Berezhny said. “There was total understanding that something needed to change.”

As Ukraine offers a glimpse of how future electronic battles may be waged, would-be combatants of those fights have taken note. The United States and Europe have paid close attention to how such weapons have fared against Russian systems, with some worrying they are not responding fast enough. Chinese experts have also exhaustively chronicled which Russian electronic attacks were most effective against NATO systems, and in turn, where Russia failed.

In one November 2022 report, a Chinese defense think tank detailed how a Russian electronic attack had tricked NATO’s detection equipment, leading Ukraine to reveal the location of its own electronic defenses.

“The Russian army’s anti-drone combat capabilities are superior to those of the U.S. military,” the report said.

Oleksandr Berezhny of Quantum assembled a reconnaissance drone at the company’s repair center in August. He has discussed electronic warfare with NATO military personnel.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

As Ukraine evolves its anti-jamming techniques, some of those tactics are flowing to the United States and its allies, said Mr. Clark of the Hudson Institute.

“Now you’re starting to see countries, including the United States, field these smaller systems, just like you’re seeing folks in Ukraine cobbling them together,” he said.

For many on Ukraine’s front, the improvements can’t come fast enough.

“Even if you make your drone invisible, your controller and your antenna give out a signal,” said one Ukrainian drone pilot, who gave only his first name, Vladislav. Russians can detect a window of about 200 square meters where a drone pilot might be, he added, noting that artillery had once come within “about 15 to 20 meters” of hitting him.

“It’s not possible to hide completely,” he said.

Olha Kotiuzhanska contributed reporting from Kyiv, Dnipro and Odesa, Ukraine. Arijeta Lajka contributed video production from New York.

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul. More about Paul Mozur

The New York Times · by Aaron Krolik · November 19, 2023

18. The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming

An important read. A lot to consider here. We should look hard at our gender biases.

The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming

Many of the CIA analysts who spotted the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise were female. They had trouble getting their warnings heard.

By Liza Mundy

The Atlantic · by Liza Mundy · November 18, 2023

One day toward the end of the 20th century, John Rizzo, a career lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency, found himself chatting with Jack Downing—a former Marine and stalwart Cold Warrior who had been brought out of retirement to oversee the clandestine service.

The two men were talking about an analyst named Michael Scheuer, the cerebral but polarizing leader of a team focused on a terrorist group called al-Qaeda. Skeptical that Scheuer was up to the job, Downing brought up a perceived weakness of his staff. “The only people who work for him are girls,” he scoffed.

It was a small moment, but one Rizzo never forgot. “I remember him saying girls,” Rizzo told me in an interview before his death in 2021. Ironically, Downing, who also died in 2021, was seen as relatively supportive of women at the CIA.

Back in 2018, I met with a group of CIA historians to talk about women’s roles and experiences at the agency. The historians pointed to the striking number of women engaged in several key missions, chief among them the tracking of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, both before and after the 9/11 attacks; Scheuer’s team of “girls” played a key part. Over three years of book research, I interviewed more than one hundred female officers at the agency, including at least a half dozen who were involved in the bin Laden effort—some of whom had not spoken previously about their work, or not extensively—as well as many of their male colleagues. What became clear in these conversations was that many of the women who charted al-Qaeda’s rise felt that their work was undervalued or ignored and that their gender was part of the equation.

This article has been adapted from Mundy’s new book.

For decades, the CIA, founded in 1947, had been a boys’ club. The agency made a practice of hiring women as clerks, record-keepers, and secretaries, but not placing them in top jobs, particularly those that involved spying. According to a series of reports conducted during the Cold War decades, the view among many officers at Langley was that women were more emotional than men, less likely to be taken seriously abroad, and unable to succeed at the vital spycraft of running agents—that is, recruiting foreign nationals to share state secrets. When the agency’s equal-opportunity office investigated a discrimination complaint brought by a female officer in the late 1970s, the resulting report found “unwitting, subliminal, unconscious discriminatory procedures which have become institutionalized by practice.” The agency settled with the complainant, but then, in the mid-1990s, found itself settling two major sex-discrimination lawsuits brought by women in the clandestine service.

From the June 2019 issue: Female spies and their secrets

Sexism also existed in the analytic directorate, the large cadre of officers who take what the spies collect and make conclusions and predictions. A 1992 “glass ceiling” study commissioned by the CIA found that women made up nearly 40 percent of the professional workforce but only 10 percent of the elite Senior Intelligence Service. Women often found the headquarters environment “uncomfortable and alienating,” the study said, while white men tended to be given “career-making assignments.”

This history helps explain the dismissiveness that the largely female group tracking al-Qaeda perceived. For more than a decade beginning in the mid-1980s, the emerging discipline of counterterrorism was a low-priority mission, which is one reason so many women were shunted into it. But although they were well positioned to spot the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise, they often had trouble getting their voices heard when they sounded warnings. That the male analyst they were most closely associated with—Scheuer—was contentious in the building didn’t help.

Not all the women were heroes; the team had flaws just as any team of men would. They did not always make themselves pleasant to colleagues or bosses. They did not always agree on the approach, methods, or level of aggression warranted toward terrorists and their leaders. After 9/11, some were as susceptible as men to the excesses of the War on Terror. But for years beforehand they endeavored to make known that a dispersed group of fighters—while lacking a formal military or high-tech weaponry—was capable of turning America’s own technology against itself, and fully intended to do so.

Countless investigations have examined why the United States didn’t see 9/11 coming, and the explanations are many. But one factor these assessments don’t fully capture is that some analysts did know that such an attack could happen, and that many of the earliest, most tenacious, and most perceptive of them were female, in an institution that had long underestimated women and their work.

One of the first officers to pay attention to al-Qaeda was a twentysomething analyst named Cindy Storer, sharp-eyed, good at math, a lover of puzzles. In 1989, Storer joined the desk responsible for looking at Afghanistan, which for 10 years had been occupied by Soviet invaders, with the CIA basically running the resistance. The year she arrived on that account, the Soviet Army was defeated; two years later, the Soviet Union fell. Afghanistan, for most officers, faded into unimportance. “We walked away from it,” William Webster, then the CIA director, later admitted.

Storer, however, stayed on the beat, watching as tribal factions fought for control of the country. She began noticing something else: Arab fighters who had traveled from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to help repel the Soviet occupiers were now fanning out across the world. In Afghanistan, they were known as “foreign fighters” or “Afghan Arabs.” They called themselves mujahideen: Islamic warriors pursuing jihad, or holy war, against infidel nations. They were violent, anti-Western, and growing in number.

Storer began teaching herself how to do terrorism analysis, a new skill that entailed making sense of fragments such as travel records and intercepted conversations among fighters using code names. Sifting through transcripts, cables, and Arab-language news articles, she set out to track which fighters were being influenced by which people and groups. As she talked to colleagues and bosses, however, it seemed to her that they minimized the threat at a time—the “peace dividend” era—when CIA resources were shrinking and desks were competitive and short-staffed. “Nobody wanted to hear about it,” she told me.

At least, not until she met with a more senior Near East and South Asia analyst, Barbara Sude. Sude was a perfect example of how women at the CIA had been funneled: She’d earned her PhD in the mid-1970s and applied to the agency on a whim. At the time, women were mostly being hired as secretaries, and the agency had a special test with a pink cover, which included questions like: Would you rather spend time putting on makeup or go without? Upon being hired, she was routed to an offshoot unit—the Foreign Broadcast Information Service—where she worked for a decade before making her way into an analyst job at CIA headquarters.

An expert in medieval Islamic thought, Sude turned her attention to political Islam and, at Storer’s suggestion, added Islamic extremists to her portfolio, including those with links to terrorism. The two analysts studied illicit financial transactions, looking at nongovernmental organizations to see which ones were diverting donations for nefarious purposes.

Julia C. Morse: The counterterror war that America is winning

Soon, a third woman, Gina Bennett, joined their efforts. After Bennett graduated from college in 1988, she applied to the CIA. She didn’t get an interview, so she took a job as a clerk-typist at the State Department. She was quickly promoted to the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR, where she worked as a junior analyst in the terrorism “watch office,” which fielded cables about explosions and threats. Months into her new job, on December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Nearly 300 people died in a terrorist bombing attributed to Libyan agents.

The killing of civilians—students, families, children—was horrific, and Bennett, like the other women, sensed a pivot: Terrorism was rising and changing form. From her desk in Foggy Bottom, she began to study the flow of foreign fighters leaving Afghanistan and going into Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines, surfacing in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Burma.

Bennett, pregnant with her first child, began working on a memo for the INR’s daily bulletin, a compendium of intelligence for diplomats and the national-security community. In early 1993, she was finishing a draft when her water broke. Twenty-four hours later, she underwent an emergency C-section. A few days later, the phone rang by her hospital bed; a car bomb had gone off in a parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. “Your people did this!” her supervisor exclaimed, meaning that she’d had her eye on the right target. Bennett was back to work within weeks of giving birth.

Her stunningly farsighted memo “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous” ran in the August 21–22, 1993, weekend edition of the INR’s bulletin. The same network of donors that had “funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin,” Bennett wrote, “is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide.” The fighters excelled at guerrilla warfare, could travel easily, and had technological know-how. “The perception that the U.S. has an anti-Islamic foreign policy agenda raises the likelihood that U.S. interests increasingly will become targets,” she warned.

At a time when the name Osama bin Laden had appeared almost nowhere in the Western press, Bennett named the man to beware of. “Among private donors to the new generation [of fighters], Usama Bin Ladin is particularly famous for his religious zeal and financial largesse,” she wrote.

Having crossed paths with Sude at the CIA, Bennett invited her to join an informal interagency group studying the fighters. Sude invited Storer, and the women teamed up with a handful of officers from State, the CIA, the FBI, and the FAA, who met in borrowed offices, sharing papers, insights, and research.

Storer created a slide deck that showed where the fighters were moving and used symbols to denote what they did: Establish an office. Set up a training camp. Make a bank deposit. Blow something up. Another member of the group, the State Department analyst Lyndsay Howard, invited Storer to share her insights with people higher up. Around late 1993 or early 1994, Howard went door to door to leading bureaus at State and begged colleagues to send somebody senior to Storer’s briefing. The group listened to the presentation, but when Howard followed them out, she heard two or three people walking down the corridor laughing, she told me. They seemed to think Storer was exaggerating, ginning up a new enemy to justify the CIA’s continued existence.

At Langley, Storer could barely get the threat acknowledged. In February 1993, her team sent an item about the foreign fighters, authored by two colleagues, to the editors of the President’s Daily Brief, the compendium of urgent items that is presented every morning to the “First Customer” in the White House—Bill Clinton, at the time. The editors declined to include the item, Storer told me. After the WTC bomb exploded, an editor called and asked what her office knew about “Afghan Arabs,” she recalled. She suggested he read the PDB item that had been sitting in the drawer for two weeks.

Eventually Storer and Sude both found their way to the CIA’s counterterrorist center, a niche unit created in the 1980s to respond to hijackings and attacks in the Middle East. By 1995, the agency was becoming more cognizant of the threat posed by bin Laden. A small “virtual station” was created within the center, initially to examine his financial dealings. Mike Scheuer headed the outfit—dubbed “Alec Station,” after his young son—and recruited a team of mostly women analysts. Scheuer, by his own description, was the second or third pick for that job, which was not ardently sought by ambitious colleagues who perceived that the bureaucracy, overall, still had not fully embraced the mission.

Garrett M. Graff: After 9/11, the U.S. got almost everything wrong

The hardworking Scheuer grasped early on the magnitude of bin Laden’s success in cajoling other extremist leaders to come together in a multiethnic effort to kill Americans and drive the United States out of the Middle East. But Scheuer was also aggrieved, contemptuous of the political establishment, prone to go after his critics, and incessantly at odds with the FBI, from whom Alec Station sometimes hoarded information (and the other way around). “He was always a little nuts,” as one officer put it, “but he was our nut.” Storer and Sude each did stints working alongside Scheuer’s team, though not as part of it.

“I had enormous respect for the women who worked for me,” Scheuer told me, describing them as “experts at minutiae, putting pieces of information together or thinking, ‘Hey, two months ago I read something about this,’ and they’d go back and find it. They didn’t spend much time at all around the water cooler telling war stories.”

Having a female staff made it harder for Scheuer to get buy-in within the larger organization, however. Operations officers scoffed at his team. “What’s his staff? It’s all female,” the ops officer Glenn Carle is quoted observing in the journalist Peter Bergen’s book Manhunt. “It was just widely discussed at the time that it’s a bunch of chicks,” Carle continued. “So, the perspective was frankly condescending and dismissive.”

Scheuer’s team was not given its own ops officers to collect information overseas, so he tapped his reports officers—a traditionally female job that entailed disseminating cables—to wheedle materials from colleagues on other desks. Another Alec Station team member, Jennifer Matthews, helped create a new field—targeting—that entailed finding terrorists where they hid. Working with her was Alfreda Bikowsky, known as Freda, who combined a steel-trap memory with a restless manner and an aggressive approach that some of the other women, including Storer, sometimes argued with. Darrell Blocker, a CIA officer who worked with Bikowsky years later and saluted her focus and competence, described her personality to me as “not warm and fuzzy.” When Bikowsky came to Alec Station in the late 1990s, as chief of operations, she set about expanding what “operations” could mean: no longer just recruiting foreign nationals to pass secrets but also “figuring out who it is that we should be looking for, who they’re connected to,” she told me. It was, she said, “manhunting.” (Bikowsky later drew controversy when she participated in the post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program, working as an analyst vetting detainee assertions, and served as an architect of the agency’s efforts to defend what was condemned by many as torture.)

Gina Bennett, at Scheuer’s urging, left the State Department and joined the CIA to work on the al-Qaeda mission. Over the next few years, Alec Station grew to about two dozen people, and remained 80 percent female. The women did not always get along. Those working for Scheuer, or some of them, exhibited ferocity and suspicion. Some, Storer felt, regarded outsiders, even Storer herself, as not necessarily entitled to know what they knew.

Nonetheless, diving into the “troves” of files that the Alec team collected, Storer had an epiphany moment: “I’m like, holy crap, it’s a terrorist organization.” Bin Laden’s fighters weren’t a loose federation but a bureaucracy, complete with a payroll and franchises. Yet even in the counterterrorist center, colleagues on other accounts remained doubtful that scattered fighters could pose an organized threat on the level of Hezbollah or Hamas. As Storer put it, many officers regarded the terrorists as “ragheads who lived in a cave,” when in fact the leaders were “doctors and lawyers and military officers who knew their shit.”

The agency’s bureaucracy presented another problem. Most of the classified reports the CIA produces are “corporate products,” which means that anyone with a stake in a memo or paper must sign onto it before it’s published. Consensus must be secured, desk by desk, and that’s especially hard when you are female, junior, and laboring in an obscure unit. Around 1997, Storer said, she set out to write a definitive paper with “everything you wanted to know about bin Laden and al-Qaeda.” The draft was 60 pages long. But she “couldn’t get other desks to agree,” she told me. A supervisor wanted her to break it into small parts, she recalled. Storer said the full version was never published.

By mid-1998, Storer had long been warning colleagues that bin Laden’s organization had the ability to stage simultaneous attacks. On Friday, August 7, she turned out to be right: Major explosions occurred at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. When the attacks were conclusively linked to al-Qaeda, this was, as one operations officer later wrote, a “profound” revelation, in that it showed that bin Laden could conduct “large-scale bombings of U.S. targets.”

Gradually, the truth was working its way to the agency’s seventh floor and to CIA Director George Tenet, who tried to convey to the White House the extent of the threat. A series of plans to capture bin Laden were formed but were rejected by top officials, who worried about how precise the targeting was and the danger of putting civilians at risk. After the 1998 embassy bombings, Tenet paid a visit to Alec Station. As he wrote in his 2007 memoir, a female member approached him and, “quivering with emotion,” confronted him about one plan to apprehend bin Laden that had gotten nixed. Many CIA women later noticed the phrase and resented its implication that the women had been emotional and weak.

As 2000 gave way to 2001, Storer found herself reading terrorist communications that used words like “Olympic-sized” and “Armageddon.” In October 2000, suicide bombers in Yemen blew a hole in the USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors, and analysts were shocked when the outgoing Clinton administration did not retaliate. In 2001, Tenet began begging the incoming administration of George W. Bush to let the CIA mount an operation that allowed for killing bin Laden rather than capturing him. Analysts expected that another major attack could happen in the summer, and Storer felt responsibility and dread: This is going to happen on your watch.

In July, Barbara Sude was tasked with writing a PDB that tackled the question everyone was wondering: Might the big attack occur on the U.S. mainland? She remembers her boss saying words to the effect of, “They are looking for a piece on bin Laden and the U.S.” From this loose instruction, Sude fashioned one of the most famous warnings in American history.

She and a few other analysts had written nearly 40 warning items that year alone. She had a pile of papers two feet high on her desk, including one by the FAA about hijackings. Crafting the memo with the input of colleagues, Sude noted that bin Laden had implied in TV interviews that he wanted to follow the example of the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef, and “bring the fighting to America.” The memo pointed out that the 1998 bombings of the embassies in East Africa, which bin Laden associates had scoped out as early as 1993, showed that al-Qaeda was patient and “not deterred by setbacks.” Al-Qaeda members “have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years,” she wrote. Threat reporting suggested that bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft, and the FBI had noted patterns of activity suggesting “preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.”

Ben Rhodes: The 9/11 era is over

She faxed a draft to the FBI, and sent it up to the PDB editors, who titled it “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” But the editors wanted more statistics from the FBI. Sude called the Bureau again and learned that it was conducting “approximately 70 full field investigations” looking into “bin Ladin–related” activity in the United States. Sude added that information to the draft. The item was put in the book on August 6, and the president was briefed.

Sude would always wonder: When President Bush was told of the existence of more than 70 FBI investigations into bin Laden activities in the American homeland, did the commander in chief worry? Did he ever call the FBI director and ask him what was going on? Bush later told congressional investigators that he felt heartened to learn of so many investigations. He took it to mean that things were under control. After the August 6 PDB ran, four weeks passed before the Bush administration had its first Cabinet-level meeting about the threat posed by al-Qaeda, on September 4, 2001.

The day of the attacks, the CIA staff evacuated headquarters, except for people in the counterterrorist center. The women there, who thought that a plane might be headed for Langley—and for them—felt a mixture of fear, anger, failure, resentment, and guilt. In the coming years, they worked to prevent more attacks and to track down the perpetrators, particularly bin Laden. One team member, Jennifer Matthews, died in that effort, killed alongside colleagues when a suicide bomber infiltrated the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. Some, like Cindy Storer and Barbara Sude, continued hunting terrorists for many years, until they retired. Gina Bennett was still at the CIA when bin Laden was found and killed on May 2, 2011, and stayed on for years after that. Freda Bikowsky, who went on to direct the “global jihad” unit, married Michael Scheuer in 2014 (she now goes by Alfreda Scheuer). Scheuer, meanwhile, was eased out of Alec Station in 1999 and left the agency in 2004, after growing more and more outspoken about the Iraq War and other issues. He went on to create a blog where he has expressed admiration for QAnon, claimed that the 2020 election was stolen, supported mob violence against Black Lives Matter protesters, and called for the killing of journalists and Democratic politicians, among other extremist views. (“He bears no resemblance to the man I knew,” Bennett told me.)

That these women’s warnings—and many other warnings—were not acted on owes to many factors. With any failure as big as 9/11 comes hindsight bias and I-told-you-sos. But there’s no question that early strategic warnings, and later tactical ones, were made by women who worked in an un-prestigious, discounted unit, and who had their ears to the ground.

After the attack, Tenet demanded that analysts, with their granular knowledge, be included in high-level briefings. When the hunt for bin Laden was reinvigorated nearly 10 years after 9/11, a team of targeters—strikingly female—proved key to the mission’s success. Whatever else it is, the CIA is a workplace, one with institutional biases, turf wars, bureaucracy, and, yes, sexism. When the stakes are so high, those dynamics can have history-making consequences.

This article has been adapted from The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Atlantic · by Liza Mundy · November 18, 2023

19. Irregular Influence: Combating Malign Chinese Communist Party Actions in Southeast Asia

Dead the entire 24 page essay in PDF at this link: https://media.defense.gov/2023/Nov/14/2003340186/-1/-1/1/FEATURE%20LEHMKUHL%20-%20JIPA.PDF/FEATURE%20LEHMKUHL%20-%20JIPA.PDF

Conclusion:

Critique

The current US strategy exhibits significant gaps and remains incomplete. It lacks a discernable end-state beyond the overarching goal of approaching China from a position of strength and surpassing it. Ambiguity in key policy areas, such as Taiwan, may be intentional to influence CCP decision making. However, this ambiguity also raises doubts among our regional allies and partners, many of whom have already adopted hedging strategies. To address this, deliberate efforts should be made to cultivate stronger relationships with our partners and align our interests more effectively. To date, our strategy has been predominantly regionally formulaic, overlooking nuanced opportunities that could be leveraged with existing partners and newcomers alike.

Moreover, the United States has lost its ability to craft a compelling narrative that contrasts with that of the CCP. Previously, Washington projected itself as “the leader of the free world.” However, America appears to have not only lost its footing on the global stage but also its voice. Nevertheless, the United States still possesses a value proposition that sharply contrasts with that of China. It is crucial to elevate strategic communications and narrative within our strategy moving forward. Rectifying misinformation and highlighting CCP contradictions can help bridge gaps in messaging and influence warfare that have not yet been addressed. Prioritizing truth in messaging aligns with our liberal democratic core values when operating in the information environment. Crafting a more holistic strategy that elevates various instruments of power alongside traditional military deterrence will present complex scenarios for Beijing to navigate.

Irregular Influence: Combating Malign Chinese Communist Party Actions in Southeast Asia

Published Nov. 15, 2023
By Lt Col Jeffrey S. Lehmkuhl, USAFR

Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs --

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/3588621/irregular-influence-combating-malign-chinese-communist-party-actions-in-southea/

View PDF version here.

Abstract

As the United States seeks to reorient its foreign policy to effectively compete with China, it must gain a profound understanding of China’s ambitions. Uncovering the historical roots and driving forces behind Chinese actions is crucial for comprehending the underlying motivations fueling these ambitions. This research scrutinizes the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and assesses the strategic means by which it seeks to realize them. It critically examines the CCP’s pursuit of global hegemony and outlines its strategy, with a particular focus on its regional ambitions in Southeast Asia. Emphasis is placed on the CCP’s utilization of malign influence as a tool to achieve its objectives while carefully avoiding actions that might provoke a military response from the United States. This research is relevant to foreign relations experts and the operational military force alike.[1]

***

China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), constitutes an amalgamation of Confucian and Marxist-Leninist authoritarian ideologies, drawing significantly from its more recent Maoist history in shaping its approach to “struggle.”[2] Chinese President Xi Jinping has revived the Maoist adage celebrating “the rise of the East and the decline of the West” as a reflection of shifting dynamics in the world order.[3]

The CCP actively employs unrestricted warfare tactics in Southeast Asia to achieve its regional objectives, thereby advancing its broader global ambitions with the aim of reorienting the prevailing world order to one centered on Beijing. The CCP adopts a nuanced strategy of irregular warfare (IW), skillfully exploiting the intersection of political warfare and influence to attain its goals while meticulously avoiding actions that could trigger a military response from the United States. This strategy subverts traditional forms of benign statecraft, such as diplomacy, by weaponizing them as instruments of IW.[4]

The CCP executes a sophisticated and deliberate plan that concurrently leverages all elements of power to operationalize the means required to achieve its desired end-state. In Southeast Asia, the constituent objectives converge on the reunification of Taiwan. The security of both the CCP and China itself is fundamental to and intertwined with this objective. Beijing is in the process of implementing a strategy aimed at creating conditions conducive to a forceful reunification of Taiwan, if necessary. This entails securing access to vital resources, establishing institutionalized supply lines, and exporting Chinese influence. Southeast Asia emerges as the pivotal region in ensuring the successful reunification, serving as the initial domino in a broader plan for regional and ultimately global hegemony.[5]

The desires of the CCP are in direct contrast to US regional objectives and impede its capacity to project military power to counter China’s ambitions. Without a revamped US strategy for confronting China, both the freedom of movement in the Pacific and US strategic interests will face significant ramifications.

Roots of the Conflict

China’s Historical Consciousness

The phrase wuwang guochi (勿忘国耻), translating to “never forget national humiliation,” holds a central place in CCP narratives and is deeply ingrained in the contemporary Chinese psyche.[6] This narrative is predicated on the framing of the “Century of Humiliation,” spanning the years from 1839 to 1949 when China’s government lost control over substantial portions of its traditional territory to foreign powers.[7]

This period commenced in 1839 when British gunboats ascended the Yangtze River, compelling China’s leadership to open its ports to the opium trade, thus instigating the First Opium War.[8] Subsequently, the Boxer Rebellion aimed to expel foreigners from China but ultimately failed, culminating in the Boxer Protocol. This accord effectively partitioned control of China among an eight-nation alliance comprising Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary.[9] This agreement subjected China to foreign influence and obligated it to pay substantial reparations. Japan also brutally invaded China, culminating in World War II. Additionally, China experienced intermittent internal strife, infighting, and rebellions, which further compounded its challenges.

The period ended when the CCP, led by Mao Zedong, emerged victorious in the Chinese civil war, establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.[10] The consolidation of power by the PRC forced the Kuomintang (KMT) to retreat to Taiwan, setting the stage for the ongoing power struggle known as the “Taiwan question.” The imperative of achieving the reunification of Taiwan remains a paramount objective for the CCP, as underscored in official speeches and engagements.[11] Deep-seated beliefs regarding the century of humiliation and the reunification of Taiwan serve to solidify the CCP’s legitimacy and signify the rectification of a lingering historical injustice. Taiwan’s reunification arguably stands as the sole nonnegotiable vestige of that era.[12]

An examination of this historical context is essential for comprehending the Chinese psyche and the narrative employed by the CCP to foster nationalism and solidify its legitimacy. The national trauma associated with the century of humiliation can be likened to the American sentiment following the events of 11 September 2001.[13] Although many Americans did not directly experience this event, subsequent generations are likely to connect with it through media and storytelling. In contemporary China, the four Chinese characters 勿忘国耻 have acquired symbolic significance and are enshrined in nationalistic pledges and educational materials for the youth. This is complemented by the CCP’s construction and renovation of more than 10,000 memorial sites since 1991, serving to amplify patriotism.[14]

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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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