Quotes of the Day:

“I asked my mother why we couldn’t have books and she said, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.'

I thought to myself, 'Too late for what?”

― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“As it drew nearer, excitement grew intense. Swarms of adventurers expecting the overthrow of the Government crowded into Washington.”

― Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

“I spent thousands of hours studying a subject that is, somehow, too confusing for an academic but easily understood by a five-year-old—socialism is oppression. Even if it weren’t, it still wouldn’t work because you can’t entrust the same State that ruined capitalism to preserve socialism.”

― Seth Daniel Parker, The Greater Good: A Dystopian Novel of Divided America

​1. Special Warfare Magazine - January 2024 (PSYWAR School and Irregular Warfare Academy)

2. Defense Primer: What Is Irregular Warfare?

3. ‘Women are the best snipers’: the elite soldier hunting naive Russians

4. Investigation Reveals Tragic Details of Hamas’s Sexual Violence

5. How social media platforms shaped our initial understanding of the Israel-Hamas conflict

6. Denied Care, Deaths in Japan Result from Lack of Emergency Medical Services for American Personnel

7. Don’t Bring a Patriot to a Drone Fight—Bring Fighter UAVs Instead

8. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, January 4, 2024

9. The World’s Biggest Risks for 2024 Are More Than Trump

10. Xi’s latest purge targets the military. Why did powerful generals fall out of favor?

11. Overstretched and undersupplied: Can the US afford its global security blanket?

12.  5 Myths About the U.S. Military That Need to Go Away

13. Preventive Priorities Survey 2024

14. Attrition: Medical Care in the Combat Zone (Russia v. Ukraine)

​15. The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil

​1. Special Warfare Magazine - January 2024 (PSYWAR School and Irregular Warfare Academy)

The January 2024 issue of Special Warfare Magazine is available in PDF here: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/05/2003369571/-1/-1/1/SWM_JAN%2024_VOL%2036%20ISSUE%202.PDF

The Commanding General's message and table of conte​nts are below. The issue focuses on the transformation of  the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. 

I especially call attention to two articles: the establishment of the PSYWAR School (psychological warfare) and the Irregular Warfare Academy. 

The current and all past issues are available at this link below.

Special Warfare

The Official Professional Bulletin of U.S. Army Special Operations Forces

https://www.swcs.mil/Special-Warfare/Special-Warfare-Archive/

From the

COMMANDING GENERAL

Special Warfare exists to strengthen the Army special operations profession. My intent for this publication is to offer a forum for special operations forces warfighting ideas and concepts. It provides a canvas for serious discourse about the challenges of the contemporary operational environment and how Special Operations Forces should transform to meet future requirements. I encourage all of you reading this today to contribute to the professional dialogue and inform warfighting concepts, doctrine and training for the future of ARSOF.

The Chief of Staff of the Army will tell you that we are now in a period of continuous transformation, adapting to the realities of the modern battlefield while having to maintain readiness to respond to crisis and, if called upon, fight and win our nation’s war. That call could come at any time.

Over the past couple of months, we initiated movement on our SWCS 2030 Strategy to drive continuous institutional transformation. This transformation at the Special Warfare Center and School is strategically driven, threat informed, and operationally focused. It is necessary to maintain relevance in an ever-changing world, but we also will not fail in our priority mission to deliver world-class Special Forces, Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations professionals to the Army and the joint force. Through a series of jury-reviewed articles, this issue of Special Warfare informs our community of interest on our transformation and modernization efforts. We encourage you to discuss these changes within your organizations and to give us candid and constructive feedback through this professional forum.

GUILLAUME “WILL” BEAURPERE   

BRIGADIER GENERAL, U.S. ARMY COMMANDING GENERAL

CONTENTS

ARTICLES

05 | Commander’s Corner

06 | Letter from the Editor

07 | Useful Fiction: Operation Black Ditch

13 | USAJFKSWCS Continuous Transformation

and Modernization: Visualizing SWCS 2030

with Voices of ARSOF

20 | RUSIC: Empowering the Army’s Special

Operations Soldier with Unmanned

Systems

24 | PSYWAR School: For the Range of

Military Operations

28 | Improving the “U” in ARSOF

32 | FM 3-53: Transforming Army

Influence Activities

34 | Master Sgt. David K. Thuma

Noncommissioned Officer Academy:

Professional Military Education for our Next

Enlisted Leaders

36 | The Special Forces Warrant Officer Institute:

Army Excellence Personified

39 | Irregular Warfare Academy: Origins

2. Defense Primer: What Is Irregular Warfare?

Read the entire report here:

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12565

​Frankly, I am disappointed in this CRS report. It is at least 6 months out of date because it does not reference a key document. The newly released JP 1 Warfighting in which warfare, (conventional, nuclear, and irregular) is comprehensively defined and described. This report does not include the definition of IW from that joint publication and it should. This would not have happened if the late great Warlord, COL John Collins was still at CRS.

On the other hand I do think the CRS author is making an important point by emphasizing the importance of influence in irregular warfare. She is helping us get to what I think is the ideal in IW, e.g., learning to lead with influence. We must learn to lead with influence in political warfare and strategic competition in the gray zone short of traditional armed conflict (and we must also lead with influence in war as well).

I have pasted the entire section on Warfare from the new Joint Pub 1 below. I think it is important that this be studied and discussed and debated. It must be the common frame of reference for the entire joint force.

As an aside this is the final IW paragraph from Joint Pub 1.  

Joint Force Conduct of IW. IW is a joint force activity not limited to special operations forces activity. Most joint capabilities can be employed in an irregular context. All IW operations and activities require conventional force lead, facilitation, or participation.

​I spoke to one of the authors last month (who coincidentally was a student of mine in my course at Georgetown, Unconventional Warfare and Special Operations for Policymakers and Strategist) to learn about the intent. Does this mean conventional forces lead all IW operations and activities. She said no and that the important word in the sentence is "or" as in "or participation."  The intent is to ensure that the conventional force understands they have a role in IW but it does not mean they have the exclusive or lead role in IW. They may in certain instances have the lead and may not in other instances. This is important to understand especially as we conduct irregular warfare in support of political warfare and strategic competition in the gray zone short of traditional and conventional armed conflict.  

She must have recalled the anecdote of the NDAA section 1099 and the requirement for DOD to develop a counter-unconventional warfare strategy. When we reviewed the legislation the stafferes were using an old definition of UW (the one that said that UW is broad spectrum of military and paramilitary activities...). We recommended they use the new J0int Definition from 2009 which is "activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, or guerrilla force in a denied area​." 

We recommended they change the word "and" guerrilla force to "or" guerrilla force. This is how the 2009 UW working group wanted to define modern UW in that a guerrilla force is not required for the conduct of all UW operations. But the "traditionalists" want to emphasize that UW is based on the traditional employment of a guerrilla force (we believed underground activities were most relevant in modern UW and wanted to emphasize that. So we recommended the change in the NDAA. Unfortunately this did not influence the Joint Staff in any way. 

2016 NDAA Sec 1099: (d) Unconventional Warfare Defined.—In this section, the term “unconventional warfare” means activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, or guerrilla force in a denied area.

(Note the DOD definition uses AND guerrilla force while the NDAA uses OR. The use of OR make​s UW more flexible and with potentially more broad application because it does not require a guerrilla force.)

Defense Primer: What Is Irregular Warfare?

January 5, 2024

Introduction

United States military doctrine distinguishes between two types of warfare: traditional warfare and irregular warfare. In Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Publication (JP) 1 Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States, traditional warfare is characterized as “a violent struggle for domination between nation-states or coalitions and alliances of nation-states.” The publication further states that​ “traditional warfare typically involves force-on-force military operations in which adversaries employ a variety of conventional forces and special operations forces (SOF) against each other in all physical domains as well as the information environment (IE).” According to JP 3-04 Information in Joint Operations, the IE is “the aggregate of social, cultural, linguistic, psychological, technical, and physical factors that affect how humans and automated systems derive meaning from, act upon, and are impacted by information, including the individuals, organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or use information.”

In DOD Directive 3000.07 and in other DOD doctrine, irregular warfare (IW) is characterized as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s).” These actors may use nontraditional methods such as guerrilla warfare, terrorism, sabotage, subversion, criminal activities, and insurgency in their efforts to control the target population. In IW, a less powerful adversary seeks to disrupt or negate the military capabilities and advantages of a more powerful military force, which usually serves that nation’s established government. Because of its emphasis on influencing populations, actions to control the IE, to include actions in cyberspace, play a prominent role in IW.

Missions of Irregular Warfare

IW includes, among other activities, the specific missions of unconventional warfare (UW), stabilization, foreign internal defense (FID), counterterrorism (CT), and counterinsurgency (COIN).

​Continue reading the report at this link: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12565

​

Warfare from Joint Pub 1, Warfighting 27 August 2023 (pages II-5 through II-8)

1.  Warfare

a.  Introduction

(1)  Warfare is “the how”—or the ways—of waging armed conflict against an enemy. The character of warfare varies, influenced by evolving methods, technologies, and capabilities; the instruments of national power; and other social, infrastructural, physical, and temporal factors.

(2)  Understanding the changing character of war helps planners frame the context of warfighting. In a world where fragile critical infrastructure connects widely through cyberspace, and sabotage and terrorism have profound effects, adversaries can easily escalate a conflict. Inevitably, the dimensions of any particular security challenge may not align precisely with existing boundaries or command structures. Likewise, the conventions and conduct of war are continually changing. Although specified in the Geneva Conventions, exactly who is a combatant and what constitutes a battlefield shifting beyond previous norms. Adversaries, even though signatories to the Geneva Conventions, may not abide by them (e.g., targeting of civilians). Then again, warfare may become a more traditional contest between nations when it develops into a conventional force-on-force conflict. When considered in its totality, warfare may significantly affect operations throughout the entirety of an AOR and extend into others. Context helps leaders make informed choices about command and control (C2), force structure, force preparation, the conduct of joint campaigns and operations, and rules of engagement.

(3)  Translating operational success into strategic outcomes is the ultimate purpose of war. Tactical and operational military successes do not necessarily or naturally lead to strategic success. Therefore, while near-term success in tactical engagements and battles is essential to successful operations and campaigns that consolidate military gains and secure military victories, JFCs continue campaigning to establish the conditions and influence the behaviors necessary to achieve strategic objectives.

b.  Forms of Warfare. The US military recognizes two general forms of warfare— conventional and irregular—which may escalate to include the employment of nuclear weapons. JFCs choose to conduct warfare not in terms of an either/or choice but in various combinations that suit the strategic and operational objectives and that are tailored to a specific OE. In some cases, adversary actions force the JFC to select specific ways and means. Warfare does not always fit neatly into one of these subjective categories but incorporates all aspects of conventional warfare and irregular warfare (IW) when in tandem or parallel. Military activity (or inactivity) may be communicative if observed and perceived by actors as affecting them. A nation-state’s purpose for waging war is to impose its will on an enemy and avoid imposition of the enemy’s will. Winning a war requires creative, dynamic, and synergistic combinations of all US capabilities. Achieving strategic objectives often depends on the population indigenous to the OA accepting the imposed, arbitrated, or negotiated result.

(1)  Conventional Warfare. This form of warfare is a violent struggle between nation-states or coalitions, and alliances of nation-states, fought with conventional forces.

(a)  In conventional warfare, nation-states fight each other to protect or advance their strategic interests. Campaigning as a part of conventional warfare normally focuses on an enemy’s armed forces, their capabilities, and seizing key terrain to influence their government. In conventional warfare, enemies engage in combat against each other and employ a variety of similar functions and capabilities throughout the OE. In today’s OE, enemies are challenging traditional views of warfare that blur warfare lines in their rhetoric and their doctrine, including operations that may integrate IW, conventional warfare, and nuclear operations.

(b)  Nuclear war is an existential threat, and strategic nuclear deterrence requires a no-fail approach. Strategic deterrence is foundational to the success of all other missions and is the joint force’s priority mission for which it maintains the highest state of readiness. Therefore, the United States manages the risk of an escalation to nuclear war. This type of deterrence requires close coordination across all CCMDs to control escalation.

Additionally, the joint force supports counterproliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials of concern.

For more information on nuclear operations, see JP 3-72, Joint Nuclear Operations.

(a)  Military victory typically results from defeating an enemy’s will, destroying or defeating an enemy’s warfighting capability, destroying the enemy’s war- sustaining capacity (e.g., defense industrial base), removing a hostile regime, or the seizure and holding of territory. Both conventional warfare and IW may consist of a tailored mix of capabilities, including cyberspace and space capabilities.

(b)  Conventional warfare may also encompass state-like entities that adopt conventional military capabilities and methods to achieve military victory.

(c)  The near-term outcomes of conventional warfare are often obvious, with the conflict ending in military victory for one side and military defeat for the other or resulting in stalemate. When considering forcible action, policymakers and senior military leaders must consider the operational continuity of effort, like preparedness for initiating offensive operations, consolidation, and the return to competition. These actions can ultimately determine whether military victory translates into enduring strategic objectives.

(2)  IW. IW is a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare. The term “irregular” highlights the character of this form of warfare, which seeks to create dilemmas and increase risk and costs to adversaries to achieve a position of advantage. IW may employ the threat or use of organized armed violence for purposes other than physical domination over an adversary. States and non-state actors may conduct IW when they cannot achieve their strategic objectives by nonmilitary activities or conventional warfare.

(a)  States and Non-State Actors. IW occurs between nations, states, or other groups. Other groups include organizations with no state involvement but that have capacity to threaten or use violence. States or other groups conduct IW to impose their will, with complementary methods contributing to the military defeat of an adversary.

(b)  Campaign. JFCs plan, conduct, and assess IW within military campaigns as part of a broader, long-term USG effort across relevant instruments of national power to protect and advance US national interests.

1.  Integrating military and nonmilitary means is essential to plan and conduct IW, as the military alone is often insufficient to achieve desired strategic objectives. The joint force plans and conducts IW in collaboration with relevant instruments of national power and with allies and partners.

2.  The intent of IW is to erode an adversary’s legitimacy and influence over a population and to exhaust its political will—not necessarily to defeat its armed forces—while supporting the legitimacy, influence, and will of friendly political authorities engaged in the struggle against the adversary.

3.  JFCs may conduct IW proactively to deny access or create dilemmas for an opponent’s government, economy, or civil society.

4.  In armed conflict, JFCs can conduct activities to support IW as an inherent aspect of joint operations.

5.  JFCs may conduct IW proactively to undermine an emerging threat and prevent them from becoming an enemy.

(c)  Assure or Coerce. IW can assure or coerce within the paradigm of strategic uses of military force. JFCs can assure allies and partners by demonstrating US commitment to their strategic interests. JFCs can employ IW in attempting to coerce opponents, such as deterring their future behavior and compelling them to modify their current behavior. IW operations and activities may have the following effects:

1.  Affecting the legitimacy and influence of the principal actors and their partners and opponents.

2.  Deterring, delaying, disrupting, or degrading opponents.

3.  Countering the coercive and subversive activities of opponents.

4.  Diverting, coercing, attriting, or exhausting opponents.

(d)  IW Variables. IW employs either indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric military activities to achieve strategic objectives. Not all IW is indirect, non- attributable, and asymmetric, but IW includes one of these essential characteristics.

1.  Indirect activities target an adversary or support an ally or partner through one or more intermediaries (e.g., allies, partners, proxies, surrogates).

2.  Non-attributable activities target an opponent or support an ally or partner in ways that conceal the source of the activities or their sponsorship.

3.  Asymmetric activities target an opponent or support an ally or partner when a gross disparity in relative comprehensive power causes the weaker party to resort to irregular methodologies (e.g., disinformation, terrorism, insurgency, resistance to occupation) to erode or exhaust their opponent’s power, influence, and will. However, a stronger party may target opponents asymmetrically when the risks and cost associated with a direct, symmetric approach are unacceptable.

Joint Force Conduct of IW. IW is a joint force activity not limited to special operations forces activity. Most joint capabilities can be employed in an irregular context. All IW operations and activities require conventional force lead, facilitation, or participation.

3. ‘Women are the best snipers’: the elite soldier hunting naive Russians

‘Women are the best snipers’: the elite soldier hunting naive Russians

‘Cuckoo’ comes from a proud tradition of Ukrainian snipers — and Putin is sending poorly trained men into her crosshairs

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/women-are-the-best-snipers-the-elite-soldier-hunting-naive-russians-n53xd0vtd

“Cuckoo”, a photographer from Kyiv, has developed a deadly skillset to match the best

GEORGE GRYLLS FOR THE TIMES

George Grylls

, Donbas

Tuesday January 02 2024, 9.30pm GMT, The Times

F

rom her stakeout a kilometre away, the Ukrainian sniper trained her rifle on the gap blasted through the colliery’s concrete perimeter, waiting for the Russians to reappear.

The 47th Brigade markswoman had fired ten .338 calibre bullets at the wall behind which five men were sheltering. One had collapsed, apparently injured, before rousing himself and limping ­towards cover, minus his gun. The Russian raiding party, part of a wider assault on Avdiivka, was in disarray.

In spring the foliage disrupted the sniper’s line of sight; in summer the ­variations in temperature deceived her heat-seeking scope; in autumn the wind blew too briskly.

But the advent of the colder months — when the trees offered little protection bar the occasional clump of mistletoe, and human bodies flashed a telltale orange in her crosshairs — meant that conditions were now in her favour, ­especially since the Russians seemed intent on sending poorly trained men out into no man’s land.

Known as Cuckoo because of her habit of perching high above the battlefield, the sniper knew the four remaining infantrymen would have to try to run across the gap to reach the safety of a nearby copse. All she had to do was wait.

The Ukrainian team of three, comprising Cuckoo, Jackson, her commander and spotter, and a second sniper with whom she alternated night shifts, had been waiting 48 hours.

Now the appearance of a helmet and a torso, a presentable target, required a moment of calm. It was a breezy day. Unfortunately for the Russian soldier, Cuckoo, 32, a photographer in Kyiv before the war, had her calculations just right.

A bullet travelling 300 metres can ­require as much as 60cm of adjustment. “When I am taking a picture, I’m waiting for the moment when a subject expresses an emotion. When I’m working as a sniper, I’m just waiting for the right moment to shoot,” she said.

She pulled the trigger on her customised calibre rifle, its barrel spray-painted matte grey. “It’s not like the movies. There was no fountain of blood,” she said. “I saw him fall down. Then he stopped moving.”

The others, having seen their comrade killed, seemed paralysed by fear. Ukrainian infantrymen were dispatched, accompanied by a Bradley fighting vehicle, and easily killed them — another example of the value added by a sniper in the battlefield through the terror they inspire.

The battle for Avdiivka

Avdiivka is being attacked by Russia from three sides. Civilians that remain are living underground

PIERRE CROM

According to US intelligence, Russia has sacrificed 13,000 men in an attempt to pincer Avdiivka, the coal-mining town outside Donetsk at the centre of recent fighting. Cuckoo has been tasked with defending Stepove, one of the ­villages to the north that is resisting the town’s encirclement.

Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive failed to shift the front lines of the war towards the Sea of Azov, as was hoped, and President Putin is eager to present another victory to the Russian public before the rubber-stamp elections in March. He is not lacking in manpower.

Ukrainian troops have dug in around Avdiivka and are using the defenders’ advantage to inflict as many casualties as they can on the waves of enemy ­soldiers.

Valerii Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top general, has suggested withdrawal from Avdiivka if the casualties become too heavy. But until then he is determined to inflict maximum pain.

• Russian missiles hit Kyiv and key cities

Cuckoo finds the task of ­defending the village much easier than it was working with offensive troops around Robotyne in the summer. But the Russians keep coming, ­including unarmed men walking out on apparent suicide missions, carrying plastic bags to ferry water and food to their comrades.

These strange characters are given nicknames by the Ukrainians such as “Gandalf”, a bearded man with a staff whom they watched wander aimlessly towards the Ukrainian positions one day.

The bag-carriers are duly picked off, but others emerge to retrieve the cargo from the corpses and walk on.

Lady Death

Lyudmila Pavlichenko was the most successful Ukrainian female sniper of the Second World War, picking off 309 Nazis

GETTY IMAGES

Last month the US army welcomed the first active-duty female sniper into its ranks. Ukraine, by contrast, has a long history of female sharpshooters and Cuckoo is far from the only one ­deployed against Russia. She said that, after the medics, sniper was the position with the most equal representation between the sexes in the Ukrainian ­army.

The Soviet Union relied on female snipers to defend the motherland ­during the Second World War, the most famous of whom was Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Ukrainian known as “Lady Death”.

Given her nickname by the American press on a propaganda tour of the US where reporters asked whether she wore make-up to battle, Pavlichenko notched up 309 kills during the sieges of Odesa and Sevastopol, making her one of the most deadly snipers in ­history. “We mowed down Hitlerites like ripe grain,” she said.

Cuckoo, a diminutive figure whose movements are always crisp and deliberate, has a similar mindset. “To be a good sniper, you need to have stamina,” she said. “Women are more patient than men. We don’t feel the urge to get up and start running around shooting people. We wait for the enemy to come to us.”

Unlike during the urban battles such as Stalingrad, Ukrainian snipers rarely engage in duels with their opposite numbers, preferring to call in artillery strikes rather than challenge the ­Lobaev-wielding Russians to a gunfight. Two Ukrainian soldiers were killed in Avdiivka last week by Russian snipers when they went for a smoke.

Cuckoo is an admirer of Pavlichenko but is reluctant to have the same nickname bestowed upon her, and she scoffs at some of the taller tales she has heard of heroic snipers taking out the eye of a squirrel from two kilometres away.

She prefers the sober accounts of Chris Kyle, the American sniper whose tragic story was told in an Oscar-winning movie directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper. “There’s less bravado. It’s more about his life,” she said.

“You make a plan, you find a position. Then the hunting begins,” Cuckoo says

‘One-eye brigade’

Putin can draw on a seemingly in­exhaustible supply of ex-convicts and conscripts from Siberia in an attempt to capture Avdiivka, but Ukraine is running out of soldiers.

Cuckoo was recently ordered to serve in the regular infantry despite her skills as a sniper, honed over seven years in the Ukrainian army. The last time she was given leave to visit her family in Kyiv was in August.

Shortly before Christmas a tank shell exploded near Cuckoo’s position, leaving her severely concussed. Drone pilots and artillery gunners were among the other specialists acting as infantrymen who were also injured.

Zaluzhny has publicly called for a further mobilisation of troops, a source of tension with President Zelensky who claims the army is demanding 500,000 more personnel at a cost of $13 billion.

A draft law would lower the conscription age in Ukraine from 27 to 25. ­Rustem Umerov, the defence minister, has denied that Ukrainians overseas will be called up to fight.

There are also concerns that the Russians are outgunning the Ukrainians, who need western countries to increase the delivery of key ammunition.

Jackson, 44, said the Russians facing them had increased their firing rate from 100 mortar shells a day to 500. “We have plenty of shells, but the Russians always have more.”

A Ukrainian soldier fires on the front line outside Avdiivka last week

OZGE ELIF KIZIL/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES

Cuckoo, for her part, says she could improve on her kill rate if she had .375 CT bullets, increasing her range to 2km.

The squinting sharpshooters are ­affectionately known by the regular ­infantry as the “one-eye brigade”. Last year one of them, Vyacheslav Kovalskiy, 58, a former businessman, claimed to have killed a Russian soldier at a distance of 3.8km, a world record.

Cuckoo has notched two kills from a distance of 1.3km, two from 1km, and three from 600m. “Sometimes you see something in the bushes moving, you shoot and it stops moving. But we don’t count those ones,” she said.

Her heavy rifle is transported around the battlefield already assembled, meaning she only has to set up her ­bipod and attach the silencer.

“It’s much more interesting than being in the infantry because you need to use your brain,” she said. “You make a plan, you find a position. Then the hunting begins.”

Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir

4. Investigation Reveals Tragic Details of Hamas’s Sexual Violence

Apologies for another graphic article. However, we cannot allow the brutal acts of the Hamas' terrorists to be forgotten. We have to call attention to their atrocities and I will continue to do so.

Investigation Reveals Tragic Details of Hamas’s Sexual Violence

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/investigation-reveals-tragic-details-of-hamass-sexual-violence/

Soldiers walk near homes destroyed during the deadly October 7 attack by Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, southern Israel, November 2, 2023. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

By HALEY STRACK

·       

January 5, 2024 5:37 PM

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A New York Times investigation that was published last week describes in graphic detail verified accounts of Hamas’s systemic brutalization of Israeli women on October 7.

Read the story here. One police witness, a 24-year-old named Sapir, was at the music festival where Hamas slaughtered 360 Israelis. Sapir hid under a tree after being shot in the back and witnessed “about 100 men” passing between each other “assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women”:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Raz Cohen hid about a mile away from the festival on October 7 when Hamas began “combing the area and shooting anyone they found,” the Times reports:

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Multiple witnesses testified to seeing women whose vaginas appeared to have been cut open or mutilated. An Israeli who was looking for her missing friend filmed a video at the site of the music festival on October 8. The footage shows a woman lying face down near a car, her dress torn, “legs spread, vagina exposed.” The woman was mother-of-two Gal Abdush, whose family almost immediately identified her body from the video. Hamas killed both Abdush and her husband, who had been together since they were teenagers, at the rave. The couple’s children, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7, are now in their grandparents’ custody, the Times reports, and Refael said a couple of weeks ago:

“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Honey,” she said, “you can ask anything.”

“Grandma, how did mom die?”

Hamas member Basem Naim reportedly denied last week’s article and said there is “no conclusive evidence” that terrorists committed mass rape during what he called the “glorious” October 7 attack. Evidence is scarce, Israeli military says, because Jewish burial practices require bodies to be buried as soon as possible after death and because the military didn’t prioritize the collection of rape kits due to the overwhelming number of bodies collected on October 7. Israel has zero autopsies so far to prove Hamas’s sexual violence, which is why, until (and if) Israel exhumes bodies, the growing number of witness testimonies are so consequential.

The United Nations body tasked with investigating Hamas’s war crimes (the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel) has asked Israel to prove that Hamas committed rape and sexual violence. The commission claims it will investigate and prosecute accounts of gender-based violence. The commission has also called Israel’s counter-attack against Hamas “reciprocal wrongdoing,” implying that Israel’s pursuit of justice can in some way be equated to Hamas’s bloodthirsty onslaught.

5. How social media platforms shaped our initial understanding of the Israel-Hamas conflict

Please go to the link for formatting and to view the graphics and photos.

https://view.atlanticcouncil.org/social-media-gaza/p/1

Emerson T. Brooking, Layla Mashkoor, Jacqueline Malaret

How social media platforms shaped our initial understanding of the Israel-Hamas conflict

Platform design and content moderation decisions affect what people see, hear, and believe about the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the conflict in Gaza that has followed. Do X, Meta, Telegram, and TikTok recognize how their algorithms affect people, politics, and history? Do we?

The first declaration of war came via Telegram.

On October 7, at 7:14 a.m. local time, Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades used its Telegram channel to announce the beginning of a coordinated terror attack against Israel. Posts on Hamas’s press channel followed several minutes later. The press channel then posted a brief video clip of what appeared to be Israeli buildings in flames at 7:30 a.m. At 8:47 a.m., al-Qassam Brigades released a ten-minute propaganda video seeking to justify the terror attack, which was then shared via the press channel four minutes later. At 9:50 a.m., al-Qassam shared the first gruesome images of the actual attack; at 10:22 a.m., a grisly video collage. In both cases, the press channel followed suit.

Then came many more graphic posts, propelled to virality by both Hamas Telegram channels and a constellation of other Hamas-adjacent paramilitary groups. Within a few hours, the al-Qassam Brigades channel’s distribution grew by more than 50 percent, rising to 337,000 subscribers. Within a matter of days it would surpass 600,000 subscribers. Three other Palestinian militant groups rushed to release self-congratulatory statements about their own roles in the attack, not wanting Hamas to get all the credit. All told, Hamas and Hamas-adjacent groups would produce nearly 6,000 Telegram posts in the first seventy-two hours of the war.

Left: At 8:47 a.m. local time, a voice and silhouetted image alleged to be that of Mohammed Deif, commander of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, announced the start of “Operation al-Aqsa Storm.” The Arabic-language video was shared first via Telegram. Right: At 11:35 a.m. local time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded with a brief video that declared, “We are at war.” The Hebrew-language clip was shared simultaneously via X and Facebook.

This was an early glimpse of a conflict that would be largely mediated by the internet. In the aftermath of October 7, an audience of tens of millions would turn to social media to understand a terror attack that killed 1,139 people and resulted in the abduction of roughly 240 hostages by Hamas militants. Social media would remain the primary conduit through which audiences tracked and debated Israel’s ensuing siege of Gaza and military operation—one that would kill at least twenty thousand people in the first seventy days of fighting. Many users experienced the crisis not as a series of static news headlines but as a stream of viral events, often accompanied by unverified claims, decontextualized footage, and salacious imagery.

Almost as soon as the war began, it collided with the engineering and policy decisions of social media companies. Differences in their user interfaces, algorithms, monetization systems, and content restrictions meant that the reality of the war could appear wildly distorted within and across platforms. While a full reckoning of social media’s role in the conflict is not yet possible, we wanted to capture early apparent trends: the rapid and mostly uncontested spread of terrorist content on Telegram; the proliferation of false or unverifiable claims on X, formerly Twitter; the often one-sided content moderation decisions of Meta, which worked to the detriment of Palestinian political expression; and deep confusion around TikTok, due to both the insular nature of TikTok communities and a broad lack of understanding about how the TikTok algorithm works.

Evident across all platforms is the intertwined nature of content moderation and political expression—and the critical role that social media will play in preserving the historical record.

On Telegram, chaotic, unfiltered, and unverified battlefield footage

In Telegram, Hamas found many features it liked: a large distribution channel, relative security against the abrupt deletion of its accounts, and an incorporated encrypted messaging service. By contrast, Israel—with many more communications pathways open to it—did not seem to place the same emphasis on Telegram. As the October 7 terror attack began, the official English-language Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Telegram channel broadcast dozens of automated messages that appeared to be linked to Israel’s emergency alert network. The IDF sent what appeared to be its first non-automated message to its Telegram audience at 12:21 p.m., sharing video of a retaliatory airstrike. From then onward, the IDF used the channel to share raw video of recent operations, as well as other updates.

The IDF’s official Telegram account, programmed to automatically rebroadcast security alerts, offers a unique window into the confusion that prevailed during the first hours of Hamas’s October 7 attack. (Source: @idfofficial)

Other pro-Israel efforts were quicker to embrace Telegram as a means of rapid coordination and content dissemination. Among the most notable was South First Responders, created in the early morning of October 9 by individuals claiming to be affiliated with casualty recovery teams that had begun to clear the sites of massacres at the kibbutzim and Tribe of Nova music festival in southern Israel. They shared a stream of graphic images and videos (including recovered dashcam footage) that revealed the systematic way in which Hamas murdered Israeli civilians. The channel also became a clearinghouse for photographs of dead Hamas fighters and first-hand accounts of Israeli civilian resistance.

As the immediate confusion of October 7 passed, Israeli civil volunteers turned to Telegram to share accumulating evidence of the scale and horror of the Hamas attack. (Source: South First Responders)

As Israel began to respond to the attacks militarily, Telegram continued to host a large volume of primary source material, including the bloody aftermath of airstrikes and shelling in Gaza and clips of IDF soldiers encircling and neutralizing Hamas militants. In this way, Telegram assumed the same role that it has in Russia’s war against Ukraine, offering a chaotic, unfiltered, and unverified view of battlefield realities. This is in spite of the fact that Telegram appears to have been relatively unpopular in the region before the outbreak of the war, as compared with widespread Russian and Ukrainian Telegram use on the eve of that conflict.

Telegram continues to resist content moderation responsibilities

According to prior analysis by our Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) colleagues, Telegram remains the least restrictive large point-to-point messaging app in operation today. Although Telegram reportedly passed eight hundred million monthly active users in July 2023, its group structure and emphasis on user freedom and anonymity mean that it has relatively few enforceable content moderation policies. Despite its size and influence, Telegram has also avoided joining the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. Commonly known as GIFCT, the organization uses data-sharing arrangements and channels for industry coordination to help social media platforms limit the spread of terrorist content. Telegram took few steps to restrict the platform’s exploitation by combatants in the aftermath of the October 7 attack. Its first high-profile content moderation action did not come until October 23, when the company restricted some Hamas-aligned channels without banning them, likely in response to pressure by the Apple iOS and Google Play app stores.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov (who is famously outspoken about his resistance to government surveillance and content takedown requests) was selective in how he spoke about the conflict unfolding on his platform. “Hundreds of thousands are signing up for Telegram from Israel and the Palestinian Territories,” Durov noted on October 8, announcing Hebrew-language support in addition to Arabic. Only on October 13 did Durov directly address the violent imagery and calls to action being propelled by scores of Hamas-aligned channels. “Tackling war-related content is seldom obvious,” he wrote. Durov explained that Telegram held value for researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers and warned against “[destroying] this source of information.” Moreover, because users had to voluntarily choose which Telegram groups to join, he considered it unlikely that Telegram could “significantly amplify propaganda.”

On October 13, Telegram founder Pavel Durov posted a statement to his personal channel expressing his unwillingness to ban Hamas from the platform. (Source: @durov)

Although Durov was technically correct when it comes to how users choose to follow Telegram channels, this does not convey the whole story, as Telegram channels routinely exploit the platform for amplifying propaganda. Channel owners can choose to broadcast their messages to a wide audience unidirectionally, thus allowing them to tightly control what messages are amplified via the channel. This level of control makes Telegram an attractive first stop for actors to produce and disseminate content that quickly spreads to other platforms and audiences.

In the first weeks of the Israel-Hamas propaganda war, this meant that many of the most viral images and videos would begin life on Telegram.

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Photo: Reuters

THE BIG STORY

December 21, 2023

40 minute read

At X, recent policy changes drive a misinformation crisis

Despite the decline of Twitter’s audience base under Elon Musk’s stewardship, the platform, rebranded as “X” in July, has remained popular among journalists, policymakers, and other political elites. This means that many influential groups still turn first to X to understand—and shape the understanding of—fast-moving events. In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, unverified claims that went viral on X significantly affected public perception of the war, spreading across the information ecosystem and making their way into newspaper headlines, television broadcasts, and official government statements.

While it can be difficult to characterize the flow of public opinion across a large social media platform like X, especially during times of violent conflict, certain trends quickly emerged over the weekend of October 7—most notably, a chaotic information environment with users struggling to sort fact from fiction, and the proliferation of graphic content for both evidentiary and propaganda purposes. The volume of this conversation was unprecedented. A rudimentary scan of X via the Meltwater Explore social-listening tool finds that users made 342 million English-language war-related posts in the first month of the conflict. By contrast, the largest study of Twitter activity during Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was based on a dataset of 57.3 million tweets across all languages, assembled over the first thirty-nine days of fighting.

By rough estimate, there were approximately 342 million war-related English-language posts made on X in the first month of the Middle East crisis. Keyword results for “Israel,” “Israeli,” “IDF,” “Hamas,” “Palestinian,” including reposts. (Source: Meltwater Explore)

This confusion—manifesting first in uncertainty about the scale and basic facts of the October 7 attack—would become endemic to X users’ experience of the conflict on the platform. Although the chaotic nature of Twitter conversations contributed to the fog of war during other fast-moving conflict events, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there was no precedent for the volume of misinformation that spread on X during the first phase of the Middle East crisis. We repeatedly observed false claims that reached millions of impressions on the platform, far outpacing any attempt at correction or contextualization.

Much of the spread of this misinformation—and the real-world harm that sometimes resulted from it—was due to specific platform design policies instituted by X in the last year. These include the dismantling of its verification mechanisms and the repurposing of blue checkmarks as a premium accessory for the general public, the introduction of a “pay-per-view” monetization model for premium users, the elimination of headline previews for links shared on the platform, and significant restrictions to X’s application programming interface (API).

Paid verification fuels a misinformation crisis

In April 2023, X formally ended the user verification system that had appended a blue checkmark to “notable” accounts whose identity the platform had previously confirmed. Instead, X began offering all users the opportunity to purchase a blue checkmark for an eighty-four-dollar annual fee and present their accounts as “verified,” but without going through a vetting process. For users purchasing verification, Twitter offered algorithmic prominence in search results and elevation of their replies in discussion threads over non-premium users. X introduced an additional paid tier—“Verified Organizations”—that granted a gold checkmark for one thousand dollars per month and offered additional services, including dedicated support to avoid account impersonation.

This change severely undermined news media’s presence on X and media organizations’ prominence in conversations on the platform. In 2015, roughly a quarter of all verified users were journalists. As of March 2023, following the initial rollout of paid verification, only about 6,500 of X’s 420,000 legacy verified accounts had willingly made the transition to paid status. At the same time, roughly half of the 444,000 users who did pay for verification did so with fewer than 1,000 followers. The result was a sharp reduction in the visibility and discoverability of journalists, and previously unknown accounts expanding their audience reach through paid verification rather than through building trust over time. This impact on media users on X appears to have been by design; as Musk stated of journalists in December 2022, “They think they’re better than everyone else.”

Where verification had once helped amplify fact-based reporting on the platform, now it worked to obfuscate it. According to a Newsguard analysis of war-related misinformation on X during the first week of the conflict, of the 250 most-engaged false or unsubstantiated claims about the war, 74 percent originated and spread via paid verified accounts. This included claims that the Hamas terror attack had been a false flag operation, that Hamas fighters had taunted caged Israeli children, that Hamas acquired weapons from Ukraine, and that certain senior IDF leaders had been captured during the attack. It also included a widely circulated video in which someone inserted fake audio into a CNN clip to make it appear as if reporters were being coaxed into feigning fear during a Hamas rocket attack.

A separate study by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public found that between October 7 and 10, content spread by the seven most influential news aggregators (all of which had paid for verification) outperformed content shared by the most popular news media accounts by nearly a factor of twenty. User accounts that had purchased verification posted at a considerably higher volume than institutional media and commanded significantly more views per post, despite having a small fraction of the total follower count. In one instance, Musk personally promoted these accounts, overlooking their history of inaccurate reporting or explicit antisemitism and support for Hezbollah.

As these untrue claims spread in the first month of the war, only one prominent account is known to have been stripped of its organizational verification on X: that of the New York Times. The @nytimes account was the third-most followed institutional media account on the platform, with 55 million followers. No reason was given for X’s decision to remove the outlet’s gold checkmark, although it followed an October 17 incident in which the Times and other mainstream media organizations initially attributed a Gaza hospital explosion to an IDF airstrike, a claim that quickly spread worldwide, before updating their reporting to note that responsibility for the blast had not yet been confirmed. By then, though, it was too late, with violent riots taking place across the region, including in the West Bank, Morocco, Lebanon, and Jordan, where rioters attempted to storm the Israeli embassy. Later, multiple outlets concluded that the blast likely occurred when a rocket launched from Gaza crashed into the hospital, while the New York Times’ analysis did not draw a conclusion. In contrast, thousands of paid accounts that amplified false or misleading information during the same incident retain their verified status. At the time of publishing, the @nytimes account displayed a blue checkmark available for purchase by all platform users but had not been restored to its gold checkmark status.

Eight verified accounts on X, formerly Twitter, amplify the same false narrative that Ukraine has helped provide Hamas armaments. (Source: X)

Monetization upends the incentive structure for accounts covering the crisis

As part of X’s effort to encourage users to purchase blue verification checkmarks, the platform announced the launch of its Creator Ads Revenue Sharing program in July 2023. This program offered unspecified “ads revenue sharing” to accounts that purchased verification and met certain follower counts and popularity thresholds. The first tranche of payments for this program went to pre-selected accounts, which the Washington Post noted were disproportionately far-right influencers. Although X has since opened this monetization scheme to all users, basic elements of the program—who receives approval, how payments are calculated, or even how to tell if an account is participating—remain unknown.

It seems likely that some of the most popular aggregators for war-related content are participants in this monetization program. The operator of one such account, OSINTdefender, appeared to confirm as much on July 13, when they noted, “I never expected to ever make much money off of this App because I primarily do it as a Hobby but this could honestly change so much about what I do on here.”

An aggregator account appears to confirm participation in X’s revenue sharing program. (Source:@sentdefender)

Because of a common presumption that payments are calculated based on the total view count of posts originating from an account, creators have an incentive to produce as many posts as possible to maximize their reach.

Here, OSINTdefender’s posting behavior provides an instructive example. From October 7 to October 21, OSINTdefender posted 1,937 times—an average of more than 92 messages per day. Although this content included the expected surfacing of open-source intelligence material and cross-talk with other war-focused observers, it also included a very high volume of editorialization and unsupported suppositions intermingled with fact-based reporting.

Changes make X harder to understand, harder to leave

Other technical changes have also exacerbated the misinformation crisis on X. In August 2023, X instituted a five-second redirect delay for links to certain websites. As noted by the Washington Post at the time, these included some news media outlets that Musk had previously criticized, such as the New York Times and Reuters, but not others such as Fox News or the New York Post. The policy change also impacted rival social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack, but not YouTube.

Just prior to the Hamas attack, X also abruptly removed the display of headline metadata for most outbound web links, taking away important context about their content. Such friction was by design. “Traffic to legacy media websites keeps declining,” Musk stated on October 4, “while X rises.”

As X limited external link-sharing, it also significantly reduced visibility into its own internal processes. In February, X shut down the free API that had previously made Twitter the most widely studied social media platform in the world. A search for “Twitter” on arxiv.org, an archive of scholarly articles in computer science and related fields, produces 3,865 results, more than Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok combined. The shutdown effectively terminated hundreds of dependent apps and research dashboards in the process. Instead, X instituted a tiered structure in which the most expensive API access cost $210,000 per month. As the Coalition for Independent Technology Research observed in April, researchers get “an 80% [reduction of data availability] at about 400 times the price” as compared to what Twitter previously made available to researchers.

In February, X introduced a tiered API structure and severely handicapped free API access, leading to a sharp reduction in researcher use of the platform. The most expensive API access can cost up to $210,000 per month. (Source: X Developer Platform)

These API changes have had a chilling effect on the study of the platform. According to a September survey by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, more than one hundred research projects focused on X have been canceled, suspended, or significantly altered in the wake of technical changes to the service.

Content moderation policies fail to keep up with the conflict

The first notable communication by X about its content policies during the Middle East crisis came on October 10, when the X safety team announced that it was instituting the “highest level of response” in order to address the more than fifty million posts that had already been made in response to the October 7 attack.

On October 12, X CEO Linda Yaccarino provided further detail about X’s efforts to reduce the spread of violent or harmful content. Yaccarino’s letter came in response to European—not US—regulators, who hinted at actions they might take under the European Union’s recently passed Digital Services Act. In her letter, Yaccarino highlighted that X had “identified and removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts.”

Yet Yaccarino’s letter downplayed the torrent of viral misinformation that had already begun to imperil wartime reporting on the platform. Instead, Yaccarino pointed to the “Community Notes” that X users can add to posts to offer context, fact-checking, or further information. “More than 700 unique notes” had been produced in the first four days of the conflict, Yaccarino wrote, adding context that had been viewed “tens of millions of times.” While it had so far taken a median time of five hours for these notes to appear, Yaccarino expressed confidence that X could achieve “major acceleration” in this process.

It is unclear if X ever achieved the planned speed increase. In a late November investigation that examined four hundred pieces of war-related misinformation, Bloomberg News found that a “typical” Community Note took around seven hours to appear. In some cases, the waiting period could take ten times longer. Because of the brief half-life of material posted to X, this meant that false claims had received most of their shares and engagements well before the first Community Notes appeared.

Beyond the issue of timeliness, the crowdsourced nature of Community Notes made them dependent on the knowledge of individual contributors and susceptible to both human error and ideological disagreements. Not only could Community Notes carry wrong or inaccurate information, especially during fast-moving conflict events, but the content of the message itself could change based on the flow of downvotes and upvotes.

According to a study by the data scientist known as Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0), X users proposed 4,008 Community Notes to append to 2,037 unique war-related posts during the first five days of the conflict. Only 438 of these notes received a “HELPFUL” rating from X users; of these, roughly a quarter were produced in order to overwrite another note that had previously been judged “HELPFUL.” On multiple occasions, we observed that Community Notes elevated by the X community showed signs of editorialization and selective citation that made them little more useful than the posts they were intended to correct.

Community Notes are prone to editorialization, especially during fast-moving events. On October 14, the DFRLab observed that a video—purporting to show an explosion amid a Palestinian refugee column in Gaza that was initially attributed to an IDF airstrike—underwent multiple Community Note changes in real time. As of November 1, the Community Note had been removed from the video entirely. (Source: X)

X’s first comprehensive policy communication came on November 14. In a blog post, the X safety team shared the volume of content it had removed (more than 25,000 pieces of AI-generated content alone) and backed away from the monetization of wartime misinformation. X reiterated the usefulness of its Community Notes program, stating that “people are 30% less likely to agree with the substance of the original post after reading a note about it.” (X did not provide a source for this claim, although it may have been citing old studies that Twitter conducted prior to Musk’s acquisition and rebranding of the company.)

It is instructive to compare X’s response to the October 7 Hamas attack and subsequent fighting with Twitter’s response to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Within a few hours of Russia’s invasion, Twitter began to share Ukrainian-language information on how to delete accounts and stop location tracking in order for Ukrainian users to avoid possible reprisals by Russian military occupiers.

Several weeks later, Twitter published an English-, Ukrainian-, and Russian-language note outlining the range of platform and community-driven initiatives it had undertaken to limit the spread of false information, as well as extensive efforts to limit the propaganda harm of hostile state media. It also announced that it had taken immediate steps to pause monetization. “Content that discusses or focuses on the war, or that is considered false or misleading under the Twitter Rules, is not eligible for monetization,” the policy team wrote. “We’ve also demonetized Search terms related to the war, preventing ads from appearing on the Search results pages for certain words.”

It does not appear that most of the policies first implemented in February 2022 and later codified in Twitter’s May 2022 crisis misinformation policy were followed in the wake of the October 7 attack. Indeed, even if X had been in a position to consider such a response, most of the staff who could have stemmed X’s misinformation crisis in the first place had already departed the company through rounds of layoffs and firings.

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Meta has been here before

On October 7, as Hamas was on its deadly rampage through southern Israel, Meta didn’t play as central a role as Telegram or X did as primary sources of breaking news. The popularity of Meta in the region—with at least 200 million Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp users as of 2022—means that it likely did play some role in the spread of information on October 7. WhatsApp appears to have served as a vital line of communication, but it is difficult to quantify the spread of information over the private messaging app. The BBC reported that a WhatsApp group for mothers in Be'eri kibbutz offered minute-by-minute updates, with the group name changed to "Be'eri Mothers Emergency" as the attack unfolded.

Meta received criticism early in the conflict over widely circulated reports of Hamas allegedly livestreaming its attack on Facebook. One early source for the claim, Mor Bayder, said of her grandmother’s death, “A terrorist broke into her home, murdered her, took her phone, photographed the horror and posted it on her Facebook wall. This is how we found out.” The New York Times later confirmed that Hamas used the social media accounts of victims to broadcast its attacks in at least four instances, including a livestream showing the aftermath of the murder of Bayder’s grandmother.

In subsequent weeks, Meta platforms have played an expanding role in the conflict’s information space. Instagram emerged as the platform of choice for journalists in Gaza, who used stories, posts, and reels to share updates from the ground at a time when Israel had barred international media from entering Gaza. As the bombardment of Gaza increased, so too did claims from Palestinian journalists and the pro-Palestinian community that their content was being restricted or removed on Meta platforms.

By Meta’s own admission, legitimate content is bound to be wrongfully removed in the course of efforts to control the spread of content that violates Meta’s community standards. Adding to the challenge of moderation is that users are sharing content in various languages, primarily Arabic, Hebrew, and English. According to internal documents accessed by the Wall Street Journal, Meta modified its threshold for hiding comments amid a surge in hateful comments. The company’s standard practice is to hide comments when it is 80 percent certain the content qualifies as “hostile speech.” In response to the war, Meta reduced that threshold by half for large parts of the Middle East, requiring 40 percent certainty to hide comments. In the case of content coming from the Palestinian Territories, the threshold was further reduced to 25 percent. The Journal noted that while Meta was deploying automated systems to monitor Arabic-language content, it did not do the same for Hebrew-language content until later in October due to a lack of data for its newly built Hebrew classifier, according to the company. Actions such as these have fueled the perception of an anti-Palestinian bias on Meta platforms.

As this conflict has exemplified, content moderation systems that are vulnerable to errors and opaque in their implementation can be harmful in times of war when clear communication is of paramount importance.

A history of engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Facebook has long played a prominent role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the 2014 Gaza war, Israelis and Palestinians used the platform to incite violence. In 2015, in a legal first, Israel convicted a Palestinian man over Facebook posts inciting “violent acts and acts of terrorism.” And during the so-called “knife intifada” of 2015-2016, lone-wolf militants were inspired to action by content posted to Facebook and other platforms. At the time, the Israel Security Agency assessed that social media was a key factor driving attacks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the convergence of social media and terror attacks, had harsh words for Facebook.

In 2015, Israel established a cyber unit within its Ministry of Justice that monitors Palestinian content it claims could be threatening and reports it to Facebook and other platforms. In September 2016, Meta sent a delegation to Israel to meet with government officials; after the meeting, one minister said the company had agreed to work with the Israeli government to address the incitements to violence. Two months later, Facebook invited Palestinian advocates to its California headquarters to discuss concerns over suppression of speech and Israeli tactics.

Another major test for the platform came with the resurgence of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in May 2021. At the time, Meta faced significant backlash from human rights organizations for removing posts and blocking hashtags during Israeli raids on the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Internal documents showed the content was wrongly flagged for removal because the mosque shares a name with an organization sanctioned by the US government. Twitter also faced criticism for suspending accounts posting about the mosque raids, which the company said were wrongly removed by the automated spam filter. The wrongful removals sparked significant conversation about moderation efforts surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Facebook’s failure to effectively moderate non-English content. On May 13, 2021, senior Facebook executives met virtually with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh—the first meeting between the platform and Palestinian leadership. In its 2022 report, the Palestinian digital rights organization 7amleh accused Meta of being “the most restricting company” in “its moderation of the Palestinian digital space.”

In the aftermath of those events and following a recommendation from its Oversight Board, Meta commissioned Business for Social Responsibility, a management consultancy, to conduct an independent due diligence assessment of the platform’s impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group’s report concluded that Meta’s policies had an “unintentional impact on Palestinian and Arab communities — primarily on their freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred.” It added, “The data reviewed indicated that Arabic content had greater over-enforcement (e.g., erroneously removing Palestinian voice) on a per user basis.” Business for Social Responsibility also found under-enforcement to be a concern: “Hebrew content experienced greater under-enforcement, largely due to the lack of a Hebrew classifier,” it noted.

Consequently, Meta said that it would take ten of the twenty-one recommendations made by Business for Social Responsibility into consideration. Weeks before the latest escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Meta released an update on its progress in implementing the recommendations, noting that many of the changes would be rolled out in 2024.

As a result of this history and these efforts, Meta was better prepared to navigate the complex information environment surrounding the current war. The company has, however, continued to face certain content moderation challenges, including the volume of incoming requests. A November 14, 2023 report from Forbes found that Israel’s state prosecutor’s office had sent content takedown requests to Meta, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Telegram, with the most requests—nearly 5,700—going to Meta. The prosecutor’s office said content takedown requests to all platforms had increased tenfold since October 7, 2023, and that 94 percent of the requested takedowns were successful.

A history of distrust

On October 13, Meta released a statement outlining its efforts to address content from the current conflict. It said 795,000 pieces of content were removed in the three days following the October 7 Hamas attack. Citing the high volume of content being reported, Meta acknowledged, “[W]e know content that doesn’t violate our policies may be removed in error.”

These erroneous removals have impacted Palestinian journalists and media organizations, whose work provides a necessary lens into the war in Gaza. On the same day that Meta released its statement, the popular Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza had his Instagram account temporarily suspended. Palestinians, still harboring distrust from the events of 2021 and anticipating that their accounts and content will be removed, have made significant efforts to keep their content online. One approach is to create back-up accounts, which Azaiza relied on to continue sharing news during his suspension. On October 23, Azaiza’s X account was also temporarily suspended. On October 24, Azaiza’s back-up Instagram account was temporarily suspended. In a notice shared by the journalist, Instagram cited what it referred to as its “Community Guidelines on account integrity” as the reason for the removal.

A message from Motaz Azaiza’s backup account, which was suspended on October 24. (Source: @motagaza, left; @motaz_azaiza, right)

On October 25, the Instagram account @eye.on.palestine, which had more than six million followers, and its backup account @eye.on.palestine2, were removed from the platform. Associated Facebook and Threads accounts were also removed. When we tried to access the removed Instagram pages, the platform wrongly displayed a “no internet connection” message, which disappeared when accessing other Instagram accounts. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said, “These accounts were initially locked for security reasons after signs of compromise, and we’re working to make contact with the account owners to ensure they have access. We did not disable these accounts because of any content they were sharing.” On October 27, the primary account was restored and verified. In a statement, @eye.on.palestine said the account was wrongly removed due to “continuous reports” and “technical problems.”

When accessing the Eye on Palestine Instagram accounts soon after they were removed, the DFRLab received an incorrect “No internet connection” error message. (Source: DFRLab via @eye.on.palestine/@eye.on.palestine2)

Numerous reports have emerged from Palestinian journalists and the pro-Palestinian community accusing Meta of shadow bans, post removals, and account restrictions. While it is difficult to ascertain the exact chronology of these reports, in the first days of the conflict the reports of wrongful content removals appeared minimal. But as the intensity of the bombardment against Gaza escalated, the reports of content or account restrictions proliferated.

Meta has offered its appeals process as a solution to erroneous content removals. Many Instagram users believe they have been subject to shadow bans, which are difficult to detect and cannot be appealed. As a result, Palestinian journalists and the pro-Palestinian community have employed a variety of tactics to avoid detection and content removals. Amid the posts documenting the siege and bombardment of Gaza, there are also posts sharing tips for how to keep content online. Pro-Palestinian users encourage each other not to use the share feature, but rather to screen-record content and post it directly from their own account. Language tricks known as “algo-speak” are also used to avoid auto-deletion by intentionally misspelling words (“att@ck/s” in lieu of “attacks,” for instance). Other tactics have focused on confusing the algorithm by posting content or phrases not related to the conflict in between posts on Gaza.

Examples of the tricks used to confuse the Instagram algorithm. (Sources: @belalkh, left; @mohammedelkurd, center; @hamed.sinno, right)

Meta has been among the most communicative platforms during this conflict—an effort to provide transparency amid mounting accusations that it is suppressing pro-Palestinian content. On October 18, the platform released another update, writing, “There is no truth to the suggestion that we are deliberately suppressing voice [sic]. However, content containing praise for Hamas, which is designated by Meta as a Dangerous Organization, or violent and graphic content, for example, is not allowed on our platforms.” Meta cited a number of “bugs” that it said affected users globally and prevented them from re-sharing content. It also noted new features specific to “the region,” without defining what territory is considered part of the region. The new features enable users to lock their profiles in one step and limit by default who can comment on a user’s public Facebook posts (although users can opt out of the limits).

Some examples of “algo-speak” used to prevent Meta’s algorithm from identifying the content as relating to the Middle East crisis. (Source: Najjart_1)

In another sign of apprehension toward Meta, Palestinians have been warning each other to not update the Instagram app as there is uncertainty about whether the update will result in account limitations or changes, as some have claimed. While we cannot verify the authenticity of this claim, that it is circulating highlights a larger problem: Without transparency and clarity about platform updates, rules, and limitations, people are left to fill in the gaps themselves. In another example, Meta issued a statement noting that certain hashtags were being restricted, but it did not list which ones. Meta’s statement also said that it had “established a special operations center staffed with experts,” but the company does not specify who the experts are or what their expertise is.

Social media is a vital space for speech, and explicit and precise guidelines delineating the boundaries of acceptable content are critical. At the moment, the system hinges upon users' adeptness at navigating a labyrinthine series of potential tripwires.

Journalists in Gaza share notices received from Instagram about removing posts or restricting accounts. (Source: @hamdaneldahdouh, left; @belalkh, center; @shehab._2001, right)

Fearing a platform crackdown, the pro-Palestinian community recommended adding hidden Israeli flag emojis to Instagram stories, thinking it will help them circumvent the algorithm. The prevailing sense of distrust was exacerbated when, as reported by 404 Media, user bios that included “Palestinian” and an Arabic phrase that means “praise be to God” were translated to “Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.” Instagram later apologized for the translation error. The Wall Street Journal reported that an internal investigation at Meta found the translation error was the result of a “hallucination” by its machine learning systems. This is evidence that automated systems are not objective and unbiased but rather reflect the data they are fed, which can reinforce inequalities and prejudices. In another example of a potential error that Meta has yet to address, several claims have emerged of Instagram wrongly citing its policy against nudity and sexual behavior in takedowns of graphic content.

Graphic content is uniquely hard to monitor during war

In times of war, platforms face a difficult balance between permitting graphic content that documents realities on the ground and protecting users from exposure to that content—especially unexpected exposures. The direct experience of multiple DFRLab researchers confirmed that Instagram has been flooded with graphic content, including gruesome depictions of dead children. But removing that content would eliminate vital documentation, particularly in instances of alleged war crimes.

Rather than eliminate such content, Meta offers buffers that attempt to protect users from accidental exposure while allowing those intentionally seeking the content to find it. One example of an existing buffer is the “sensitive content” filter, which allows users to decide what degree of sensitive content they would like to see. Pro-Palestinian accounts are circulating recommendations to adjust the setting to allow for “more” sensitive content for those seeking it. Despite these buffer efforts, DFRLab staff experienced multiple instances of accidental exposure due to the auto-forward function on Instagram Stories, which automatically plays the next story for users after they have viewed an initial one. During times when conflict and violence aren’t dominating public discourse, this feature allows users to experience content that might be of interest to them, but the same functionality can unwittingly expose users to graphic content.

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On TikTok, fewer graphic visuals but a similar volume of misinformation

In the early hours of October 7, TikTok saw a surge of content showing the initial attack alongside users expressing support for either side. Simply by selecting the platform’s “For You Feed” option, TikTok users in the United States could see first-person graphic imagery of the Hamas attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival followed automatically by unrelated video game footage that was wrongly labeled as being from the attacks. Like all social media platforms, TikTok struggled to manage the volume of content related to the ongoing conflict, and the platform is rife with mis- and disinformation. Unlike other platforms, TikTok took early and direct interventions to eliminate this graphic content from its service. This came at the expense of speech, expression, and documentary content from both sides of the conflict, as well as TikTok’s global user base.

TikTok is registered in the Cayman Islands, and headquartered in both Singapore and Los Angeles, while its parent company, ByteDance Ltd, is based in Beijing. Following a contentious congressional hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, the company attempted to distance itself from allegations of Chinese government control over the company, authoring an April 2023 blog post detailing its structure and ownership. Some details of the relationship between ByteDance and TikTok, and ByteDance and the Chinese government, remain unclear.

Content on TikTok is not amplified via a central “trending topics” list, but instead by the algorithmic “For You Feed” feature. Whereas Meta’s, X’s, and Instagram's algorithmic network effects are based on amplifying content to platform-wide virality, TikTok’s For You Feed sorts videos into niches, allowing them to go viral within disparate communities but only achieve platform-wide virality by breaking through those predetermined communities. Similarly, TikTok does not have a central “trending” interface to aggregate trends across the app. These platform dynamics and a lack of transparency have made it difficult to quantify the amount of content circulating on the platform that is in violation of TikTok’s standards, and to compare it to other large social media platforms.

One of the core principles of TikTok’s community guidelines is to “ensure any content that may be promoted by our recommendation system is appropriate for a broad audience.” For this reason, certain forms of content are “also ineligible for the [For You Feed] if it contains graphic footage of events that are in the public interest to view.” In practice, TikTok is restricting or removing footage of “real-world torture [and] graphic violence.” TikTok reaffirmed its application of its community guidelines in an October 14 blog post, stating that in the first week of the current conflict in the Middle East it “removed over 500,000 videos and closed 8,000 livestreams in the impacted region.” In a subsequent blog post, TikTok stated that “between October 7 and October 31, 2023, [it] removed more than 925,000 videos in the conflict region for violating our policies around violence, hate speech, misinformation, and terrorism, including content promoting Hamas,” and that “globally, between October 7-31, 2023, we removed 730,000 videos for violating our rules on hateful behavior.”

While TikTok has a limited public-interest exception for what it refers to as “documentary” content, it is unclear how this policy is applied in the context of content removal and algorithmic amplification. At least one pro-Palestinian news organization, Mondoweiss, reported that it had been banned from the platform twice. At the time of writing, the account had been restored. TikTok, however, is much more aggressive with content takedowns than other social media platforms. And because of the way the user community is segmented into niches, it is harder to tell what is trending on TikTok. This makes conducting on-platform digital forensics difficult for researchers, journalists, and the general public.

TikTok’s moderation policies have changed in recent months. On October 7, users could search “Hamas,” but by November 20 they no longer could. TikTok added in its mobile app a notice for some searches of keywords related to the conflict, stating that “when events are unfolding rapidly, content may not always be accurate.” It is unclear if this notice shows up for all users worldwide. How TikTok determines which keywords should prompt this notice and when is also unclear. For a period of time, searches for “Gaza” and “Palestine” carried the notice but “Israel” did not; at the time of publishing, all three keywords generated the notice.

Many TikTokers, long aware of the platform’s contentious relationship with political speech, are practicing self-censorship while simultaneously employing “algo-speak,” like users on Meta, to skirt community guidelines and algorithmically boost their content. Accounts seeking to engage in cross-platform promotion choose to avoid words that may run afoul of TikTok’s moderation guidelines, using substitute words for “kill” such as “k*ll " or "unalive" and changing “sexual assault” to “SA,” while directing TikTokers off platform to X, where they are more likely to find graphic footage of the conflict.

An example of substituting words to evade detection on TikTok. (Source: @Berikas0)

TikTok has also been used to seed misinformation that later spreads to other platforms, such as old footage shared out of context and presented as current. One notorious example depicted children in a cage allegedly captured by Hamas, which fact-checking outlet FakeReporter noted had been uploaded prior to the October 7 outbreak of violence (where and when it was actually filmed remains unclear). In another instance, a film production company’s TikTok was presented on X as purported evidence that Israel was falsifying footage of victims.

Still, young Israeli and Palestinian creators are taking to the app to share their point of view, providing first-person accounts about living through the conflict. TikTok discourse is taking the form of commentary, with TikTok’s community of content creators providing explainers, updates, and punditry. On TikTok, the conflict is experienced primarily not through graphic footage, but rather through rhetoric focused on spreading messaging in support of each side. TikTok users have incorporated recent trends on the app, such as “boy math or girl math,” to align themselves with Palestinians, and are creating fancam-style videos identifying celebrities supporting one side or the other. Pro-Palestinian users are employing the song Dammi Falastini (My Blood is Palestinian) by Mohammed Assaf to organize. TikTok has also become an organizing hub for diaspora communities and young people to engage in forms of economic and civil protest around the globe.

As on X, monetization drives the sort of content that creators produce on the platform. TikTok users can earn money from their videos if they are enrolled in the TikTok creator fund. TikTok Live, in which users can earn financial compensation from “gifts,” has incentivized coverage of the conflict that includes “live matches,” which allow two users to co-stream in a five-minute long “match” with the goal of garnering more engagement for one side of the conflict or another.

Screenshot of a “Live Match” on TikTok Live, with users sending financial support. (Source: @dutapetridisi)

There have been multiple instances of harassment of Israeli and Palestinian creators. And as the conflict rages on, both Islamophobia and antisemitism have surged on the platform, despite these behaviors being ostensibly banned under TikTok’s community guidelines. For instance, some Israeli content creators have dressed as Palestinians, employing racial stereotypes, to make fun of civilians in Gaza, who are currently without water and electricity. Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League documented the spread of antisemitic TikTok memes that exploited gaps in the platform’s content moderation policies. In response to mounting complaints about Islamophobia and antisemitism on TikTok, spokespeople for the company stated that the company was actively working to combat hate speech on the platform.

The government of Israel is using its own official account to share combat footage and interviews with Israeli citizens and soldiers, and to defend Israel’s military actions. The IDF is also active on TikTok, similarly posting patriotic imagery and combat footage. Further, Israel’s prosecutor’s office has directly engaged with TikTok and asked for more aggressive content moderation measures, including the removal of several songs praising Hamas that “served as soundtracks for thousands of videos on TikTok.” In response to this request, TikTok removed the songs in question.

The backlash to the backlash: Distrust and misapprehension of TikTok creates unique policy pressures

Over the past three years, there has been a debate in the United States over whether to ban TikTok because of its potential vulnerability to Chinese government action. The surge of content related to the Middle East crisis is feeding into long-standing cultural and political discourse surrounding alleged Chinese government control over the platform, national security concerns created by the vulnerable US information environment, and a national TikTok ban.

Following the October 7 attack on Israel, a viral X thread alleged that pro-Palestinian user bias on TikTok was influencing young people in the United States to side with the Palestinian cause. The thread referenced the global volume of views of the hashtags “#standwithisrael” and “#standwithpalestine,” noting that the hashtag “#standwithpalestine” received more views than “#standwithisrael.” The Washington Post questioned this interpretation of hashtags, noting that an examination of US TikTok data from the start of the conflict suggested a very different trend, and did not account for instances in which pro-Palestinian hashtags were paired with TikTok videos that the Post described as “fiercely critical of Hamas.”

Nevertheless, some US politicians and officials have alleged that the Chinese Communist Party is utilizing TikTok to introduce anti-Israeli narratives to the American public. In a blog post for the Free Press, Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI) likened the app to “digital fentanyl” and called it “perhaps the largest scale malign influence operation ever conducted.” Additionally, CNN reported that White House aides “are also warily monitoring developments like how the Chinese government-controlled TikTok algorithm just happens to be prioritizing anti-Israel content on the social media platform preferred by many under 30.”

In response to this mounting political pressure, TikTok created a new account on X, @TikTokpolicy, to provide the platform’s perspective. It has taken the novel approach of directly engaging with US policymakers on X, with its official account quote-tweeting and arguing against those officials in what appears to be a first for a social media platform of its size and influence. TikTok also released a statement in an attempt to refute allegations that content on its app favors the Palestinian community in the context of the current crisis. Instead of solely focusing on the platform’s response to the war, the statement notably sought to address “misinformation and mischaracterization about how the TikTok platform actually operates.” It aimed to rebut hashtag analyses supporting the narrative that TikTok is biased toward Palestinians and highlighted the platform’s efforts to remove graphic content and hate speech. It also cited Gallup polling from March 2023, prior to the current conflict, to argue that young Americans are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinians. The statement noted that public data from Instagram and Facebook for the hashtags #standwithisrael and #freepalestine is comparable to TikTok’s data in order to maintain that TikTok’s content is on par with that of other large platforms. (A Washington Post analysis produced similar findings.)

It is not possible for us to measure with any confidence whether there is inherent platform-wide bias on TikTok regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—be it algorithmic or user-driven—or whether any such bias is influencing public and user perceptions of the conflict. Much of the evidence cited in viral threads on X, by public officials, and by TikTok has been selective and incomplete. Further, we lack evidence to conclude with any degree of certainty that perceived platform-wide bias regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been at the direction of China.

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Can the platforms thread this needle?

The flow of information surrounding this conflict is rapid and chaotic, rife with graphic footage, hate speech, incitements of violence, and disinformation. But caught up in all the content that may violate the policies of social media platforms is also legitimate speech and important documentation for the historical record. Platforms must carefully thread the needle on content moderation. How these technology companies define the difference between over-moderation, under-moderation, and effective moderation in times of war will have consequences for millions of people.

Differences in platform design and content moderation policies can lead to vastly divergent understandings of a particular event. The brutality of the Hamas terrorist attack, for example, became clear within a matter of hours as bloody footage emerged on Telegram before going viral on X, subsequently followed by graphic imagery depicting IDF airstrikes killing civilians in Gaza. By contrast, users of TikTok, which disincentivizes the spread of graphic content, had less ready access to this material as they sought to understand the events of October 7 and their aftermath—and were flooded instead with punditry.

In this image, the official X account of the state of Israel uses an AI-generated image of Voldemort, villain of the “Harry Potter” series, to direct users to an online repository of October 7 massacre videos. (Source: @Israel)

Moreover, user perceptions of platform design matter just as much as actual design decisions because of the way perception shapes user behavior. Because of the broadcast-like nature of Telegram channels, channel operators are free to share any content of their choosing, including propaganda, disinformation, and graphic footage. Influencers on X who directly monetize their content views have an incentive to publish attention-drawing information as often as possible. Because of their previous encounters with perceived algorithmic censorship or suppression by Meta, Palestinians have proven adept at navigating and circumventing limitations on Facebook and Instagram in order to express themselves and document harms. To discuss the war, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli voices have embraced the unique vernacular for talking about sensitive subjects that TikTok’s heavy-handed content moderation has inspired.

Beyond issues of platform engineering, it is clear that content moderation policy regarding graphic or violent material cannot be readily separated from basic questions of political expression. TikTok users who reckon with that platform’s zero-tolerance approach to graphic content must find ways to obliquely discuss the price and horrors of war without ever mentioning them directly—or showing them. Meanwhile, on X, Facebook, and Instagram, efforts to reduce the spread of “pro-Hamas” material have begun to collide awkwardly with peaceful expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people, as well as Israeli efforts to increase the spread of graphic material as part of its public diplomacy efforts to build support for its military operation. Even Telegram’s general avoidance of instituting basic content moderation is itself a question of political expression—one that may anger governments and lead to regulatory pressure whose effects would echo across the social media ecosystem for years to come.

A final issue that platforms must address is the extent to which they are duty-bound to preserve content documenting a war and facilitate the archive of that material. Efforts to moderate the online space during a conflict should acknowledge the paramount need to safeguard vital documentation.

Ultimately, platform design and content moderation policy will shape the history of the conflict itself. Many firsthand perspectives on the war have been captured in intimate and unlisted Telegram groups, ephemeral Instagram Stories, or winding X threads that may be deleted at any moment. Should this digital content simply be allowed to disappear, it could one day disappear from human memory as well.

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Emerson T. Brooking is a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and coauthor of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. From 2022 to 2023, he served as cyber policy adviser in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Layla Mashkoor is an associate editor at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. She has previously reported on disinformation, content moderation, and digital repression and has contributed investigative reporting to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Jacqueline Malaret is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Note: Meta has been a funder of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. This article, which did not involve Meta, reflects the authors’ views.

5.

6. Denied Care, Deaths in Japan Result from Lack of Emergency Medical Services for American Personnel

A good friend who flagged this for me and who is tracking the health status (as well as the many who have died) of all members of 1st Special Forces Group (and their family members) provided these comments to me:

This issue was exacerbated by the overall reduction in military medical personnel in places like Okinawa. Direct effect has been reduced and or delayed access to care - guys like SFC _______ died in part because of delayed access and in his case incorrect diagnosis (hemorrhoids versus rectal cancer) - this is a tough article to read.

This pains me to read as well since I see such excellent medical services at Fort Belvoir - the Alexander T. Augusta Military Medical Center (ATAMMC), formerly Fort Belvoir Community Hospital (FBCH).

Denied Care, Deaths in Japan Result from Lack of Emergency Medical Services for American Personnel

military.com · by Patricia Kime · January 5, 2024

At least 24 American service members, civilian Defense Department employees or military dependents have been turned away for emergency medical care from Japanese hospitals in the past two years, and four have died, according to Navy and Marine Corps leadership responsible for personnel in Japan.

In one case, a 7-year-old child who suffered a traumatic brain injury last January died from the oxygen deprivation she experienced as ambulance techs spent 35 minutes searching for a facility that would take her.

Several U.S. military facilities in Japan have emergency rooms, but none are designated as trauma centers, nor are they equipped to handle severe emergencies. According to a command investigation into the 7-year-old's death obtained by Military.com, military treatment facilities at Yokosuka and Okinawa since 2021 have not been able to handle severe injuries to troops or family members, including a gunshot wound, a rappelling accident, a severe car crash or a fall from a bunk bed that resulted in a liver laceration.

Adm. John Aquilino, commander of Indo-Pacific Command, directed U.S. Forces Japan in October to increase emergency medical care after a service member's spouse "died of an intracranial hemorrhage" when several hospitals in Tokyo denied her admittance, according to a portion of the military order obtained by Military.com.

An investigation into the death "indicated that latency in getting to an operating room was a likely contributor," noted the order.

Aquilino directed Army, Navy and Air Force commanders in Japan to "assess and provide planning estimates" to improve emergency care access for American patients covered by the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, with the island nation.

"Upon completion of the planning assessments, follow-on orders will direct necessary actions to realize increased access to care," the order stated.

Patients who were turned away from Japanese hospitals and died also included a civilian Defense Department employee who suffered a heart attack and was denied care at 10 hospitals. He succumbed shortly before an 11th facility agreed to accept him, according to the command investigation into the girl's death by the III Marine Expeditionary Force.

"Denial of U.S. military and SOFA status personnel for emergency hospitalization in Japan is not new. SOFA members in Japan have been routinely denied access to emergency care, sometimes to fatal results," stated the investigation, published Feb. 23, 2023, by Lt. Gen. James Bierman, commander of Marine Forces Japan.

Emergency care in Japan differs significantly from the American approach, which includes dialing 911 and having an expectation that an ambulance will transport a patient to the nearest hospital or best-equipped facility for the situation.

In Japan, the emergency medicine specialty was not developed until 2010, and the country does not have enough emergency medicine physicians to cover ERs around the clock. If an emergency specialist is not on duty, the emergency treatment may involve a physician trained in another specialty who is not obligated to treat patients whose condition is outside their capabilities.

As a result, patients can be denied care or diverted. The situation not only affects U.S. and civilian personnel; it also applies to Japanese citizens. In December 2022, more than 8,000 patients were denied emergency services in Japan and another 16,000 were turned away in January 2023, according to the command investigation.

The approach proved tragic for the family of a Marine assigned to 3rd Marine Logistics Group at Camp Kinser on Okinawa. While on a shopping trip at a mall in Urasoe City, the Marine's 7-year-old daughter lost her balance on an escalator and fell more than 50 feet to a floor several levels down.

Suffering a severe head injury, the girl was conscious after her fall -- able to sit up and acknowledge her mother's presence by saying "Mommy" -- but began experiencing respiratory issues and low blood oxygen levels. She also received inadequate and even harmful treatment by a physician who had been dispatched to the scene from a nearby hospital.

Ambulance technicians then spent 35 minutes trying to find a facility that would treat the girl, including one with a pediatric intensive care unit that recommended that U.S. military physicians, with whom they were communicating, consider end-of-life care.

Doctors at that hospital did not want to accept the little girl, because they felt that "heroic measures should not be attempted and withdrawing care would be 'difficult for American people to do in Japanese hospitals due to cultural differences,'" according to the investigation.

The girl eventually was transported to U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa, just nine minutes from where she fell. She was placed in the intensive care unit and monitored by an adult intensive care physician who told investigators they phoned a friend who specializes in pediatric intensive care to help provide critical care via telehealth from San Diego.

The girl was evacuated to Naval Medical Center San Diego, where she died on Feb. 15, 2023, after being removed from life support.

Concerns have been raised in the past several years over the availability of medical care for military personnel, families and civilian Department of Defense employees in Japan. In December 2022, the Defense Health Agency announced that it would treat civilian U.S. employees only on a space-available basis, and it notified longtime patients that they should plan to receive medical treatment from local providers if American military hospitals can't accommodate them.

Following a backlash from affected personnel, DHA clarified the policy in March 2023, announcing that civilians could continue to receive treatment for chronic conditions at military hospitals, but appointments for acute care would remain on a space-available basis.

In June, U.S. military medical staff at Kadena Air Base began informing pregnant service members, spouses and dependents that they should plan to deliver their babies at a facility other than Naval Hospital Okinawa -- a diversion caused by severe staffing shortages at the hospital.

The Defense Health Agency responded to the announcement from the 18th Medical Group at Kadena, saying the hospital had no plans to divert and deliveries would continue. DHA said the shortages were related to personnel moves and authorized a private health services contractor to offer signing bonuses and relocation assistance to attract labor and delivery nurses to Okinawa.

Shortages in the hospital and its affiliated clinics have become more pronounced since the changeover of hospital administration from the military services to the Defense Health Agency, according to Randi Wilson, a civilian Defense Department employee who advocates for military families and Defense Department civilians in Japan.

The move was related to health-care reforms that began nearly a decade ago to align the military medical commands to care for service personnel, while the DHA became responsible for the care of military family members and retirees.

But the recent deaths and lack of access to care has affected U.S. service members as well.

U.S. Forces Japan did not respond to a request from Military.com on Nov. 21 for a copy of Aquilino's order or to questions about the deaths of military patients in Japan. On Wednesday, after a second request for comment, the command sent an unattributed response, saying that it continues to "advocate along multiple lines of effort to address the ongoing medical concerns of the 110,000 personnel and family members in Japan."

According to the statement, commanders have conducted private meetings and working groups with decision-makers and participants in and outside of Japan.

"Advocacy for our personnel and families will not stop as long as there are access-to-care concerns to address and improvements to be made. Bottom line, service members and their families deserve the best medical care possible while serving so far from home," the statement read.

Officials added that they are working with the Defense Health Agency regarding the situation and referred additional questions to DHA.

DHA spokesman Peter Graves said Thursday that Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. Lester Martinez-Lopez, DHA and the military services are "keenly focused on primary, specialty and emergency care" in Japan and that assessments are ongoing.

"This comprehensive review will be provided to the under secretary for personnel and readiness once completed later this quarter," Graves wrote in an email.

The issues of staffing shortages at military medical facilities have garnered the attention of members of Congress, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., who sent letters last year to the Defense Department demanding fixes.

"Providing the best possible services to support service members and civilians deployed overseas enhances readiness, retention, and morale," Warren wrote in a letter in January 2023.

Any fixes, however, will come too late for a Marine family, who may have lost a daughter to traumatic injury even if the accident had happened in the U.S. As the mother sat by her little girl in the stationary ambulance for 35 minutes, she begged the technicians to take them to Naval Hospital Okinawa, according to the investigation.

In an interview with investigators, the mother shared the last words she had with her conscious daughter.

"I said, it's OK. [Mommy's] here with you. You're so beautiful. I love you so much, and it's OK if you need to go and be with Jesus, OK?" she said.

military.com · by Patricia Kime · January 5, 2024

7. Don’t Bring a Patriot to a Drone Fight—Bring Fighter UAVs Instead

(no relation to the author by the way - if there were he would be the smart one in the family).

Excerpts:

The last challenge for the development of small UAV fighters (and other UAVs) is integration into the battlefield environment. These systems should not be owned by the traditional air superiority services, but possessed by any ground unit that requires UAV defenses. Given the presence of other aerial platforms, airspace management will become more challenging especially as new aircraft owners will exist who aren’t part of existing airspace planning efforts. To achieve the density and effectiveness of the fighter UAV while maintaining the safety of other aircraft, rules on airspace use will need to be developed. Whether it’s deconfliction by altitude, time, or location, new rules will need to provide some organization to the skies. These rules will protect by design the other airspace users as the air superiority UAVs are expendable. Additionally, fighter UAVs should be incorporated into the overall air defense common operational picture. Air defenders should know where systems are located and what their capabilities are to synchronize defenses to their best potential. This will help to protect friendly ground forces from this evolving threat.

UAVs from small to large have altered the modern battlefield and the airspace above it. What was once the domain of air combat services is now an open melee of aircraft. Air defenses have not evolved quickly enough to defeat this new threat and where they have grown, they are proving insufficient. The time has come for air-to-air combat UAVs to be developed and fielded. For the US military to be prepared, it must combat UAV threats not with Cold War technology but instead with modern UAV technology.

Don’t Bring a Patriot to a Drone Fight—Bring Fighter UAVs Instead - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Paul Maxwell · January 5, 2024

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Recent conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh demonstrate the growing importance of unmanned aerial vehicles. UAVs are a constant threat on the modern battlefield. These platforms conduct reconnaissance, attack ground targets, and perform as loitering munitions. They range from low-cost commercial, off-the-shelf devices to defense industry products such as the Iranian Shahed-131. By some estimates, UAVs are so prolific that the Ukrainian military alone loses over ten thousand platforms per month. Some Ukrainian forces report that it is not unusual to have twenty or more overflights per day by hostile drones. The availability and capabilities of these platforms make the battlefield dangerous in an entirely new way.

Naturally, there have been attempts to defeat this new threat. Some resort to traditional antiaircraft systems, such as ZU-23-2 antiaircraft guns, small arms, or surface-to-air missiles. These approaches are sometimes effective but are not ideal. Hitting a very small, fast target with relatively larger-caliber rounds is challenging. Alternatively, expending many thousands (if not millions) of dollars on each missile to eliminate an inexpensive UAV is an economically losing affair. Other means to defeat this growing threat include devices that use the electromagnetic spectrum. This can vary from jamming systems (GPS denial, communications link denial) to directed-energy weapons such as lasers and microwaves. Though effective at times, these devices come with trade-offs such as interference with friendly systems and the loud invitation to opposing artillery once the signals are detected. No matter the defense mechanism chosen, there just are not enough systems to provide sufficient protection against swarms of UAVs. Air defenses are typically fielded in just enough quantities to defend high-value targets and not much else. The average grunt on the battlefield is left victim to the terror in the skies. The solution for this dilemma is to take the next step in UAV evolution: air superiority drones.

A Page from History

To clearly see why air superiority UAVs (or fighter UAVs) are the natural next step, one only needs to examine the relatively recent history of powered flight in combat. Shortly after the Wright brothers succeeded in demonstrating that powered flight was feasible, the militaries of the world began research into the use of this new technology in combat. Developing aircraft, pilots, and supply chains to make systems at scale became priorities for many nations.

The first step in the combat application of powered flight was for reconnaissance. This was an obvious mission for aircraft as balloons had already demonstrated their value as signaling and targeting platforms in previous conflicts, including the American Civil War. In the prewar years of 1911–1914, developing aircraft to conduct reconnaissance was important. As World War I began, the value of the airplane to detect enemy movements, guide artillery fire, and perform other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions became clear. The traditional scout (cavalry) had lost its value as trench warfare became prevalent. Other means of reconnaissance were needed.

It wasn’t very long into the war before ambitious pilots began to extend their mission sets into ground attack roles. Despite the lack of specifically developed bombers, pilots began to use aircraft to attack ground targets using items ranging from hand-dropped flechettes to grenades to small-caliber shells. This soon led to ground attack roles being deliberately incorporated into military air operations. Due to the exposure of ground forces to aerial reconnaissance platforms and burgeoning ground-attack systems, air defense mechanisms became an important developmental area. Of course, ground-based systems (antiaircraft weapons) were a component of this new defensive technology. In parallel, development of fighter aircraft whose purpose was to defeat enemy aircraft occurred. This began initially with crew members simply carrying small arms and then evolved to integrated automatic weapons. Instead of relying solely on ground defenses, militaries realized the value of air-based defenses against aerial threats. From those days forward, a key component of powered air combat systems were the air superiority fighters whose mission was to defeat enemy aircraft while in flight.

UAVs in modern combat have followed a similar trajectory as manned, powered aircraft. First were the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones. Then came the ground-attack systems. Given this path and the inability of ground-based systems to defend the skies against the swarms of UAVs, the next logical step is the fighter UAV. This need was demonstrated by the first recorded air-to-air engagement by a Ukrainian drone and Ukrainian research into fighter drone development.

Developing the UAV Fighter Squadron

Research into autonomous fighter aircraft is not new. Systems are already being experimented on, such as autonomous wingmen and the Air Combat Evolution AI for autonomous fighter aircraft. However, all of these efforts are focused on large, expensive platforms that attack and defend against traditional jet aircraft found in modern air forces. Certainly, these systems will be useful in future conflicts and they have an important role against traditional and future air war threats. However, they will not solve the issues found at the lowest levels on the modern battlefield.

What militaries need quickly are small, cheap (a.k.a. disposable) platforms that can defend against the numerous commercial, off-the-shelf UAVs that cloud the battlefield. Ahead of the military in this area is the Aerial Sports League’s Drone Combat Games, which pits two small UAVs against each other in a fight to the death. Small companies are also emerging in this field to fill the gap with products such as the DroneHunter F700. Whatever the development path is, there are important features required for these systems to be successful.

The first and probably most important aspect of air superiority drones is that they must be inexpensive and practically disposable. Militaries cannot afford in quantity traditionally priced aircraft when the threat is cheap and effective. Defense in this manner may be temporarily feasible but will not be successful over the course of long conflicts as resources will limit availability. Low cost will also help ensure that the lowest-level units can receive defensive capability that was previously only available to protect more valuable assets.

Next, these fighter systems will require significant autonomy. At a minimum, they should be able to fly patrol patterns without user intervention, detect threat aircraft, calculate intercept courses, and communicate intelligence data to relevant systems all at the speed of modern technology. Ideally, these aircraft would also be able to cooperate with other fighter UAVs to deconflict targets, identify priority targets, and engage threats automatically. Given that the threat is similarly unmanned, the ethics and challenges associated with autonomous targeting should be less difficult to overcome. Mistakes made in the destruction of unmanned drones should not be a major ethical or legal concern. Overall, these aircraft should be as simple to use as commercial UAVs that automate many flight tasks. Common user interfaces (e.g., smartphone, tablet) for these UAVs should prevail and point-and-click route setting utilized. Soldiers should not require days and weeks of training to use these systems.

The last challenge for the development of small UAV fighters (and other UAVs) is integration into the battlefield environment. These systems should not be owned by the traditional air superiority services, but possessed by any ground unit that requires UAV defenses. Given the presence of other aerial platforms, airspace management will become more challenging especially as new aircraft owners will exist who aren’t part of existing airspace planning efforts. To achieve the density and effectiveness of the fighter UAV while maintaining the safety of other aircraft, rules on airspace use will need to be developed. Whether it’s deconfliction by altitude, time, or location, new rules will need to provide some organization to the skies. These rules will protect by design the other airspace users as the air superiority UAVs are expendable. Additionally, fighter UAVs should be incorporated into the overall air defense common operational picture. Air defenders should know where systems are located and what their capabilities are to synchronize defenses to their best potential. This will help to protect friendly ground forces from this evolving threat.

UAVs from small to large have altered the modern battlefield and the airspace above it. What was once the domain of air combat services is now an open melee of aircraft. Air defenses have not evolved quickly enough to defeat this new threat and where they have grown, they are proving insufficient. The time has come for air-to-air combat UAVs to be developed and fielded. For the US military to be prepared, it must combat UAV threats not with Cold War technology but instead with modern UAV technology.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Paul Maxwell is the deputy director of the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy. He was a cyber and armor branch officer during his twenty-four years of service. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Colorado State University.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Senior Airman Caleb Pavao, US Air Force

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Paul Maxwell · January 5, 2024

8. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, January 4, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update-january-4-2024

Key Takeaways

1. Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Lai Ching-te continues to lead in the polls.
2. Taiwan’s three presidential candidates participated in a televised debate on December 30.
3. The PRC is continuing its intimidation tactics toward Taiwan before the election.
4. The PRC’s removal of top military and defense industry officials from political bodies reflects Xi Jinping’s continuing efforts to purge corruption and strengthen the loyalty of the military.
5. Xi Jinping appointed Admiral Dong Jun as the new Minister of National Defense on December 29.
6. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping reiterated his vision to forge a Sino-centric international order in statements around the new year.
7. A loss of Compacts of Free Association (COFA) funding for Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands would enable the CCP to expand its leverage points over these countries.
8. PRC Consul General in Jeddah Wang Qiming authored an article on the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” in the Saudi media outlet Okaz that supports a CCP line of effort to supplant US influence in Arab states.

CHINA-TAIWAN WEEKLY UPDATE, JANUARY 4, 2024

Jan 5, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

China-Taiwan Weekly Update, January 4, 2024 

Authors: Nils Peterson, Matthew Sperzel, and Daniel Shats of the Institute for the Study of War 

Editors: Dan Blumenthal and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute 

Data Cutoff: January 2 at 5pm ET 

The China–Taiwan Weekly Update focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s paths to controlling Taiwan and relevant cross–Taiwan Strait developments. 

Key Takeaways

1. Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Lai Ching-te continues to lead in the polls.
2. Taiwan’s three presidential candidates participated in a televised debate on December 30.
3. The PRC is continuing its intimidation tactics toward Taiwan before the election.
4. The PRC’s removal of top military and defense industry officials from political bodies reflects Xi Jinping’s continuing efforts to purge corruption and strengthen the loyalty of the military.
5. Xi Jinping appointed Admiral Dong Jun as the new Minister of National Defense on December 29.
6. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping reiterated his vision to forge a Sino-centric international order in statements around the new year.
7. A loss of Compacts of Free Association (COFA) funding for Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands would enable the CCP to expand its leverage points over these countries.
8. PRC Consul General in Jeddah Wang Qiming authored an article on the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” in the Saudi media outlet Okaz that supports a CCP line of effort to supplant US influence in Arab states.

Taiwan

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Lai Ching-te continues to lead in the polls. Polls from all major organizations in Taiwan show that Lai maintains a lead of at least three percentage points over Kuomintang (KMT) candidate Hou Yu-ih. Lai’s lead is greater than the margin of error. Some polls, such as Formosa and Mirror News, show that Lai holds more than a ten-point lead over Hou. The Poll of Polls, which is a weighted average of public election polls over the past 15 days that Taiwan News publishes, shows slight changes in candidate support levels since last week. Lai’s support has remained mostly steady at 35.3%, while support for Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) candidate Ko Wen-je grew by three percentage points to 24%. Hou fell nearly two points to 28.7%, however.[1] The slight shift in voter support comes after three televised policy presentations from the presidential candidates on December 20, 22, and 26. These are the last polls in the run-up to the presidential election, as Taiwan entered a ten-day poll “blackout” period on January 3 ahead of the election on January 13.[2][3]

Taiwan’s three presidential candidates participated in a televised debate on December 30. This is the first time the candidates have directly faced off against each other in the election. Cross-strait issues dominated the debate and were a main source of criticism from all three candidates. The candidates also sparred over individual real estate controversies and attacked each other’s integrity for alleged improprieties. KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih and TPP candidate Ko Wen-je took an especially offensive position against DPP candidate Lai Ching-te, sharply criticizing the latter’s cross-strait policy and alleging illegal construction practices on his home in New Taipei City. The candidates did not raise any new issues or make major announcements. They mostly reiterated previously stated policy positions.

DPP candidate Lai Ching-te maintained his emphasis on cross-strait issues, consistent with his presidential platform. Lai signaled continuity with President Tsai Ing-wen in foreign and domestic policy, touting the DPP’s diplomacy as the reason for Taiwan’s deepening integration into the international community.[4] Lai advocated for giving priority to the protection of human rights, democracy, and freedom in Taiwan, and promised not to allow the Republic of China (ROC) constitution’s surviving claims to mainland China to steer cross-strait relations.[5] Lai labeled the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the greatest threat to Taiwan’s existence, while the other two candidates refrained from doing so when prompted.[6] Lai addressed criticisms of support for Taiwan’s independence, stating that the PRC and ROC’s existence are not at odds with each other and are completely unrelated, which is the definition of independence.[7] The PRC Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) condemned Lai’s statements during the debate. TAO spokesperson Chen Binhua threatened Lai that Taiwanese independence is incompatible with cross-strait peace.[8]

KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih called out the perceived failures of the incumbent DPP administration, ranging from the deterioration of cross-strait relations to domestic governance issues. Hou criticized President Tsai’s diplomatic strategy, pointing to Taiwan’s loss of nine diplomatic partners during her presidency.[9] Hou highlighted the lack of cross-strait communication, dialogue, and exchange under Tsai. Hou expressed disapproval at the high rate of prosecution under Taiwan’s Anti-Infiltration Act during the election process and stated the judiciary should not be used as a tool for political gain.[10] The Anti-Infiltration Act is a law passed in 2019 that aims to prevent foreign influence from undermining Taiwan’s national interests.[11] Taipei authorities launched an investigation of 41 municipal borough wardens for suspected violation of the Anti-Infiltration Act after the wardens made a series of trips to the PRC at the invitation of the Taiwan Affairs Office.[12] Hou and his running mate Jaw Shaw-kong previously downplayed wrongdoing and accused the DPP of selectively prosecuting during the election process.[13]

TPP candidate Ko Wen-je appealed to voters to seize the chance to break the cycle of DPP and KMT governments. Ko championed a new Taiwan that rejects societal division and the entrenched ideology of former administrations. He characterized the DPP government as one of shortage and waste, advocating for a government that favors rationality, pragmatism, and science. Ko sought to distance himself from the other candidates’ polarizing positions on cross-strait relations. He urged Taiwan to find balance in an international structure increasingly defined by US-China competition. Ko asserted that Taiwan should be a bridge between the US and China, not a pawn in their confrontation.[14] He distanced himself from the concept that “two sides of the strait are one family,” calling the statement a symbol of goodwill while noting the differences in values and way of life between the PRC and Taiwan.[15] “Two sides of the Strait are one family” is a political platitude pushed by the CCP to lend credence to its One-China principle and warm Taiwan to the idea of unification.[16] Ko previously expressed support for the concept in 2017 during his tenure as mayor of Taipei.[17]

The PRC is continuing its intimidation tactics toward Taiwan before the election. Revelations of numerous possible PRC gray zone activities and influence operations against Taiwan circulated throughout Taiwanese media since last week.

Reuters reported on December 28 that the PRC pressured the popular Taiwanese band Mayday to support the PRC’s claim that Taiwan is a part of China.[18] Reuters cited an anonymous source who provided access to an internal security note that details the PRC’s threats to fine the band for lip-syncing, a fraudulent offense in the PRC. A Taiwanese security official asserted that the PRC’s intimidation of Mayday was to influence Taiwan’s youth vote. Spokesperson for Lai’s campaign Chao Yi-hsiang stated the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) election interference is becoming increasingly obvious.[19] Ko Wen-je stated that he condemned the PRC’s actions if the story was true.[20] The KMT issued a press release calling on Reuters to release its source for verification.[21]

Two PRC tugboats entered within three nautical miles of Taiwan’s southern coast on December 31.[22] Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration (CGA) dispatched a vessel to expel the boats, which were towing a barge northward. The radio operator on one of the tugboats mocked the CGA’s warnings but left Taiwan’s waters without incident.

PRC high-altitude balloons passed directly over Taiwan for the first time on January 1, 2, and 3. At least five of the nine balloons that Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) detected within Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) since January 1 flew above the island. The MND detected two balloons on January 1, one of which flew over Taiwan.[23] The MND detected four balloons on January 2, with three flying over Taiwan.[24] The MND detected 3 balloons on January 3, with at least one flying over the island.[25]

The PRC sending the balloons over Taiwan is likely part of a broader effort to wear down Taiwan’s resources and response capabilities. The PRC has normalized daily air and naval activities around Taiwan, including near-daily aerial crossings of the median line in the Taiwan Strait, since 2020. The MND publicly stated that the balloons were weather balloons but has started including them among its daily reports of PRC ADIZ incursions since December 8.[26] The frequency and number of consecutive instances is increasing since the MND started reporting the balloons. MND’s unprecedented inclusion of balloon flights in its daily updates and maps of ADIZ violations in December shows that Taiwan is increasingly concerned about these balloons and may consider them part of the PRC’s broader coercion campaign.

China

The PRC’s removal of top military and defense industry officials from political bodies reflects Xi Jinping’s continuing efforts to purge corruption and strengthen the loyalty of the military. The PRC’s National People’s Congress (NPC) abruptly removed nine high-ranking military figures as representatives to the legislative body on December 29. It did not explain the decision. The purged members included five current or former commanders of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), two members from the Equipment Development Department (EDD), one from the PLA Air Force (PLAAF), and one from the PLA Navy (PLAN). This is the first time that top air force and naval officers were implicated in the recent purges.

• Former PLARF commander Li Yuchao, who was relieved of command in July 2023 due to a corruption investigation.
• Former PLARF commander Zhou Yaning, Li Yuchao’s predecessor.
• PLARF deputy commander Li Chuanguang.
• Former PLARF deputy commander Zhang Zhenzhong. Zhang was Li Yuchao’s deputy and was placed under corruption investigations at the same time as Li.
• PLARF head of equipment development Lu Hong.
• Former deputy director of the General Armament Department (now replaced by the EDD) Zhang Yulin.
• EDD deputy director Rao Wenmin.
• Former PLAAF commander Ding Laihang.
• PLAN Southern Theater Commander Ju Xinchun.[27]

The EDD opened a corruption investigation in the summer of 2023 into hardware procurement going back to 2017, which overlaps with the period that former defense minister Li Shangfu led the procurement department. Li Shangfu was removed from his post in October 2023 following a corruption investigation.[28] Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) said the purged Rocket Force members represented most of the PLARF’s top leadership since the service was established in the 2015 reorganization of the PLA. SCMP also reported that removal from the NPC may be a sign of future disciplinary action, as NPC members are immune from arrest or criminal charges. The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) also removed three defense industry executives as representatives on December 27. The executives were Wu Yansheng, chairman of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC); Liu Shiquan, chairman of the board of China North Industries Group Corporation (Norinco); and Wang Changqing, deputy manager of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). All three are top executives at major state-owned defense technology firms and do not appear to have lost their positions at their companies as of January 2.[29]

The purges from the NPC and CPPCC appear as part of a trend of intensifying anti-corruption efforts in the military in 2023, which primarily focused on the Rocket Force and equipment procurement department. They are also part of Xi Jinping’s broader Anti-Corruption Campaign that began in 2013, which has recently intensified its targeting of senior PRC officials. SCMP reported that the PRC’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) investigated a record-breaking 45 senior officials in 2023, a 40% jump from 32 senior officials in 2022. 27 of the 45 officials had already retired from their roles, showing that CCDI is breaking from precedent by investigating retired officials.[30] The purges indicate Xi’s perspective that the PLA is not sufficiently loyal to the party and his willingness to risk projecting instability within the CCP to establish loyalty within the party.

Xi Jinping appointed Admiral Dong Jun as the new Minister of National Defense on December 29.[31] He is replacing former Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu, who disappeared from public view in August and formally lost his position in October.[32] The PRC has not had a Minister of National Defense since then. Dong most recently served as commander of the PLAN from September 2021 to December 2023.[33] Xi promoted Hu Zhongming to the rank of admiral to replace Dong as the PLAN commander.[34] Dong is the first PLAN officer to become Minister of National Defense. He has experience commanding theater joint operations within the PLA since 2013 and extensive international engagement with navies ranging from Chile to Sweden, including joint exercises with Russia and Pakistan.[35] His background in joint operations aligns with ongoing efforts to enhance interoperability between service branches. Dong’s experience engaging with foreign interlocutors prepares him for the international representation and communication component inherent in the position of Minister of National Defense.

CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping reiterated his vision to forge a Sino-centric international order in statements around the new year. The Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs is a key foreign policy meeting that occurs approximately every five years. Xi’s December 28 speech at the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs conveyed his view that “the world has entered into a new period of turbulence and change,” but the general trend toward “a shared destiny for the international community will not change.”[36] He further stated that the PRC has “greater moral appeal” and needs to “hold the international moral high ground, and unite and rally the overwhelming majority of the world.”[37] His rhetoric on holding the international moral high ground includes taking policy positions opposing American geopolitical stances. One example of this is the PRC claiming to hold the moral high ground in the Israel-Hamas War by advocating for an immediate ceasefire in contrast to the allegedly “biased” United States.[38]

Xi framed the People’s Republic of China as pursuing a path of “peaceful development” and “win-win cooperation” while building “a community with a shared future for mankind” in his New Year’s speech.[39] Xi also reiterated the CCP’s view in his New Year’s speech that unifying with Taiwan was a “historical necessity.”[40] His rhetoric toward Taiwan in this speech is consistent with CCP policy that falsely views Taiwan as a province of the People’s Republic of China rather than the current sovereign state of the Republic of China. Xi’s rhetoric does not indicate that the CCP intends to manufacture an imminent crisis over Taiwan. Eventual unification with Taiwan is central to Xi’s objective of forging a Sino-centric international system.

Compacts of Free Association

A loss of Compacts of Free Association (COFA) funding for Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands would enable the CCP to expand its leverage points over these countries. These COFAs govern the United States’ relationship with Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands while also granting the United States extensive military access throughout their territories. The United States renewed COFAs with Palau and Micronesia in May.[41] It then did so with the Marshall Islands in October.[42] The signed agreements are now before Congress for funding consideration. Congress previously funded the COFAs for a twenty-year period in 2003.[43] The total cost for all three of the twenty-year agreements would be roughly $7 billion spread over the period 2024 to 2043, according to the Congressional Research Service.[44] Deputy Secretary of State nominee Kurt Campbell stated during his Senate confirmation hearing on December 7 that “if we don’t get it [COFA funding] you can expect that literally the next day Chinese diplomats — military and other folks — will be on the plane…trying to secure a better deal for China.”[45] The US House of Representatives Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party also called for renewing the COFAs in a mid-December report.[46] President Biden signed the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act into law on December 22, but it did not include COFA funding.[47] Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr expressed concern in a December 27 interview with ABC Australia over the lack of Congressional-approved funding for the COFA agreement, in part because the 2010 Palau Compact Review Agreement was not funded by the US Congress until 2018.[48]

These three island countries control key sea lanes that provide a secure route connecting American allies and partners, such as the Philippines and Taiwan, to the US territory of Guam and the state of Hawaii. Palau and the Marshall Islands are 2 of the 13 countries that maintain official diplomatic relations with Taiwan.[49]

The loss of COFA funding would present an opportunity for the CCP to expand its economic influence with these vital Pacific Island countries. For example, this funding loss would cause severe financial pressure in Palau because COFA funding accounts for $36.9 million of the national government’s annual $124.2 million revenue as of fiscal year 2023.[50] This is an economic vulnerability that the CCP could partially fill by encouraging PRC nationals to vacation in Palau. The CCP cut tourism to Palau over the last decade to nearly zero as punishment for maintaining full diplomatic relations with Taiwan.[51] The reversal of this CCP policy would provide the party with economic leverage to wield over Palau in the event of future policy disagreements. The expansion of the CCP’s economic influence in Palau would also provide the party a leverage point to coerce the countries into switching diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China (PRC). The PRC aims to coerce countries into switching diplomatic recognition to falsely argue that Taiwan is a province of the People’s Republic of China rather than a legitimate country named the Republic of China.

The loss of COFA funding would also exacerbate the CCP narrative put forth by the propaganda outlet Global Times that the United States only cares about Palau for security reasons rather than mutually beneficial cooperation. [52] The Palau Senate passed a resolution in November rejecting the permanent deployment of a US Patriot missile defense battery.[53] This was the first instance of lawmakers challenging President Surangel Whipps Jr’s request for the United States to construct an over-the-horizon radar system in Palau.[54] In a December 27 interview with ABC Australia, Whipps tied this Palau Senate resolution to a narrative among unspecified portions of Palau that the United States actions were not in the best interests of Palau, as seen by the repeated delay in COFA funding.[55] The associated fiscal challenges that Palau faces without COFA funding buttresses the CCP’s narrative, which in turn creates hurdles for deploying mutually beneficial United States defense resources to the country.

The loss of COFA funding would also provide the CCP an opportunity to expand influence efforts targeting Micronesian political elites. The CCP has completed infrastructure projects throughout the country, such as houses for the country’s president, vice president, speakers of congress, and chief justice.[56] Axios reported that former Micronesian officials confirmed receiving gifts from the PRC, such as money, while on official state visits to the country.[57] The lack of COFA funding would exacerbate the appeal of CCP monetary gifts or infrastructure projects that target the Micronesian political elite. Micronesian President Wesley Simina also stated in late November that his country would be at a “fiscal cliff” without US Congressional approval of COFA funding. This would mean that “we [Micronesia] will have to find different sources of funding… and that’s not out there available immediately.”[58] The loss of COFA funding would also provide opportunities for external powers such as the CCP to enhance their economic influence in the country by filling these funding gaps.

The COFA funding also makes up $35.2 million of the Marshall Islands national government's annual $173.9 million revenue as of fiscal year 2023.[59] The loss of COFA funding would expose the country to similar severe fiscal challenges as Palau and Micronesia.

Israel-Hamas War

PRC Consul General in Jeddah Wang Qiming authored an article on the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” in the Saudi media outlet Okaz that supports a CCP line of effort to supplant US influence in Arab states. He framed the PRC as standing “on the side of peace, justice, [and] international law” by making “efforts to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”[61] Wang emphasized that the PRC's efforts to push for an immediate ceasefire and two-state solution as evidence for this framing. He then touted the Global Security Initiative to show that the CCP is dedicated to achieving “security and stability in the Middle East.”[62] Wang’s article aligns with the PRC’s diplomatic and information lines of effort that aim to supplant US influence with Arab states by proposing what it claims to be a more inclusive and cooperative regional security framework.[63] This involves portraying Washington as a self-interested and destabilizing influence in the region while simultaneously positioning Beijing as an altruistic and unbiased actor.[64]

9. The World’s Biggest Risks for 2024 Are More Than Trump

Please go to the link to view the graphics. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/05/2024-risks-trump-polycrisis/

The World’s Biggest Risks for 2024 Are More Than Trump

A sober assessment is needed in a bleak time.

JANUARY 5, 2024, 7:00 AM

By Robert A. Manning, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center and its Reimagining Grand Strategy Program, and Mathew Burrows, the director of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub and a distinguished fellow in its Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program.

Foreign Policy · by Robert A. Manning, Mathew Burrows · January 12, 2024

2024

FP's look ahead

This is the seventh edition of our annual “Top 10 Global Risks,” an exercise in foresight drawn from our forecasting experience at the U.S. intelligence community’s National Intelligence Council. In our previous forecasts, we have focused on the proliferation of small wars, food insecurity, developing-country debt, and growing climate change impacts—an ongoing polycrisis that is emblematic of our times: The post-World War II global system that the United States engineered is unraveling. Amid this disorder and strife, even more signs of distress will surface in 2024.

This is the seventh edition of our annual “Top 10 Global Risks,” an exercise in foresight drawn from our forecasting experience at the U.S. intelligence community’s National Intelligence Council. In our previous forecasts, we have focused on the proliferation of small wars, food insecurity, developing-country debt, and growing climate change impacts—an ongoing polycrisis that is emblematic of our times: The post-World War II global system that the United States engineered is unraveling. Amid this disorder and strife, even more signs of distress will surface in 2024.

We have medium-to-high confidence in all the probabilities we have assigned to each of the risks below, given the credible to high-quality level of information that was available and used. As it is for intelligence estimates, a high- or medium-confidence judgment still carries the possibility of being wrong.

Africa’s second lost decade

Displaced people at a food distribution area in Ethiopia

Displaced people at a food distribution area at Berley Camp near Gode, Ethiopia, on January 10, 2023. Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images

Numerous disruptive global trends unfortunately merge in Africa. With an intractable debt crisis, the drying up of capital flows, the growing impacts of climate change, and major drought, conflict and political instability are now endemic across a large swath of the continent—from the Sahel and Niger to southern Sudan and Ethiopia.

By 2050, a quarter of the world’s population will be African, with a projected 1 billion in their prime working-age years of 25-59, a “doubling of its share of world population workforce from 12% to 23%,” according to the United Nations. Absent more economic growth and greater job opportunities, the risk of Africa’s demographic bounty becoming a liability for the region as well as the world will continue to grow.

Africa saw modest economic growth in the 1990s when it grew at 2.5 percent, growing to 5.1 percent in the following decade, but slowing even before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Debt ballooned with the pandemic’s increased health costs, becoming now a major impediment to Africa’s growth. That growth is now at risk. According to the World Bank, 21 African states are facing debt distress or the risk of it. The continent’s public debt has nearly tripled since 2010 to $656 billion, with annual servicing of the debt amounting to about 23 percent of Africa’s GDP.

For Africa to achieve a new development trajectory, OECD nations would need to qualitatively ramp up G-20 efforts in the Common Framework—working with China—to relieve debt stress. But the recent breakdown in a debt agreement for Zambia augurs badly for any quick relief. China, along with other official creditors, forced the mineral-rich nation to suspend a deal of almost $4 billion in dollar bonds that had received the International Monetary Fund’s approval.

As the world economy becomes increasingly fragmented, protectionist, and region-centric, Africa’s development will become more challenging—an emblem of the gap between industrialized and developing nations that is becoming more difficult to narrow. While members of the global community need to view Africa as an essential part of their future and invest and trade with African countries more, these countries have some levers to attract more economic help. Diversifying trade with Asia would provide new opportunities that do not necessarily compete with current trade patterns focused on Europe and the Americas. But conflict, climate change, and a less friendly global environment steepen the curve for economic recovery and development.

Probability of Africa experiencing development quandaries:

Trump 2.0

Donald Trump walks in front of his plane, flanked by American flags

Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives during a rally at the Waco Regional Airport on March 25, 2023 in Waco, Texas. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has a good prospect of winning the 2024 U.S. presidential election. His main theme would be revenge—and his reelection would most likely wreak havoc on U.S. democracy and further destabilize the world system. As Trump said to supporters last March, “I am your retribution.” Though polls are just snapshots in time, Trump is running neck and neck with President Joe Biden and is ahead in most key swing states, according to at least one survey from last November.

Domestically, Trump’s authoritarian ambitions have become even more ambitious. Internationally, Trump aims to pursue his “anti-globalist” agenda, more unilateralist than isolationist. He would probably revoke U.S. climate pledges, and his advisors say he would scrap the Inflation Reduction Act and boost fossil fuel production.

Under a Trump presidency, the United States would probably end aid to Ukraine, renew ties with Moscow, and seek a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine over Kyiv’s head. Meanwhile, Trump might try again to reach a deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on nuclear weapons.

Trump’s election could fuel a surge in populist nationalism in Europe. Already the recent electoral successes of far-right nativist parties in three nations (the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Italy) show an emerging popular drift in the direction of Hungary’s authoritarian regime and a change in the political landscape.

Should Trump come to power, the entire West might veer away from its long-standing internationalist path.

He has hinted that he wants the United States to leave or reduce its role in NATO (e.g., suspend the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty) if demands for much greater European spending are not met and similarly might try to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea and Japan if these countries do not agree to more burden-sharing of the costs associated with stationing U.S. forces in Asia. More broadly, Trump has suggested imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports; this step would foster a trade war and curb support for international institutions. Trump’s agenda could be mitigated if Democrats win back the House and/or keep the Senate. Alternatively, as unlikely as it seems, if former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis were to nab the Republican nomination and win, there would be more continuity and less radical change.

Probability of Trump disruption

Stalemate in Ukraine

A Ukrainian serviceman rests

A Ukrainian serviceman rests near the town of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region on Ukraine on April 28, 2023.Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

2023 saw a disappointing Ukraine counteroffensive turn into a war of attrition with few gains or losses. Ukraine has been more successful in breaking Russia’s Black Sea blockade and attacking targets in Crimea and on Russian soil, but Putin’s war economy has expanded military production since the war began. For Ukraine, the minor territorial gains have been coupled with waning support from the United States and the European Union, fueled partly by the absence of a Ukrainian breakthrough but also by growing Republican opposition to continued arms shipments.

War is unpredictable, and 2024 could see greater Ukrainian successes, triggering new questions about Russia’s military sustainability. Washington was disappointed that Ukrainian forces disregarded U.S. advice on massing troops in the south, a move that could have severed the Russian line, threatening Russia’s control on Crimea and delivering a psychological blow to Putin. Should 2024 be another disappointing year for the Ukrainians, Western pressure on Kyiv for cease-fire talks will most likely increase. Biden would reap a political benefit in his upcoming campaign by bringing an end to the fighting. Outside of a humiliating military defeat, however, it is unclear whether Putin would actually want cease-fire talks.

Putin probably wants to wait for the possibility of a Trump presidency, in which case he might come under strong U.S. pressure to stop the fighting but could expect more favorable treatment in a peace deal. In the interim, Putin’s strategy might be centered on greatly intensifying drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, infrastructure, and ports in an effort to destroy Ukraine as a functioning nation-state rather than taking more territory. It is unclear how the United States or NATO would respond to such an approach.

Probability of a stalemate and a war of attrition:

Ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict

People search through buildings, destroyed during Israeli air strikes in Gaza

People search through buildings, destroyed during Israeli air strikes in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip on Nov. 12, 2023. Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images

The Israel Defense Forces may have destroyed most of Hamas’s military capabilities, but the destruction of housing and infrastructure will leave most Palestinians homeless and Gaza a hotbed for recruitment under Hamas or a successor group. Although Arab publics may remain angry, surrounding states will be loath to help much beyond providing more humanitarian assistance, though they will be more reluctant to overtly partner with the United States.

Washington will struggle to find any takers for running Gaza, absent a demonstrated Israeli commitment to a two-state solution, which has proved elusive for 50 years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unlikely to survive postwar scrutiny: Polls show most Israelis blame him for the war, with only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis trusting him, and a November Israeli poll showed that 76 percent want him to resign. But a strengthened conservative Israeli movement does not need him and will be even more hard-line, making a two-state solution virtually unworkable. Outside pressure to restart serious negotiations that require concessions to Palestinians will fail. The anger, rage, and grief on both sides likely foreshadow that the region will remain a tinderbox, with settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, Hamas attacks from Gaza, or Hezbollah attacks in northern Israel or attacks by other Iranian proxies elsewhere, including against soft Western targets.

Probability of an ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Global gap on climate change

Climate protesters in the street.

Climate activists take part in the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice near Manila, Philippines, during the COP28 Climate Conference on Dec. 9, 2023. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

On the world’s current course, temperatures will rise to 2.9 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to the latest U.N. Emissions Gap Report. Temperatures have already risen 1.1 degrees, close to the desired limit of 1.5 degrees. There is only a 14 percent chance of keeping temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, even if states meet their goals.

Although G-7 leaders set new collective targets for renewables last April, the U.N. report nevertheless shows that inequalities remain high: The richest 10 percent of the world’s population accounted for nearly half of emissions in 2021, while the poorest 50 percent contributed only 12 percent of total emissions; historical emissions are even more unbalanced.

Rich countries first promised $100 billion a year for climate adaptation in poorer nations at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. At the time, rich countries promised to deliver that amount by 2020 but missed the deadline.

This historical fairness issue has become a rallying cause for the global south, prompting last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai to make a “loss and damage” fund as its first decision. The United Arab Emirates and Germany both pledged $100 million; the United Kingdom about $76 million; Japan $10 million; and the EU (including Germany) about $245 million. Washington was criticized for promising only $17.5 million by climate activists, but Republican legislators are likely to block any amount. McKinsey Sustainability estimates that the “world faces a $41 trillion mitigation investment gap to 2030, with emerging markets facing a higher gap as a share of their GDP. There is also an adaptation financing gap of $600 billion required annually to 2050, which is 10-18 times greater than current flows.”

COP28 made some headway in marshaling the needed capital for mitigation and adaptation, but there is still a long way to go. The sense of inequity felt by developing countries—many more of which are impacted by climate change than richer countries—is unlikely to dissipate. Most developing-country representatives did not leave COP28 feeling in any way assured that the West “had their back” on meeting the demands of climate change.

Probability of worsening climate change and a deepening West-global south rift:

Eurasian entente

BRICS leaders meet at a summit

From left to right: President of China Xi Jinping, President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attend the 2023 BRICS Summit in Johannesburg on Aug. 24, 2023. Gianluigi Guercia/AFP via Getty Images

Attempts to dub the current global transition as one of authoritarianism versus democracy, or even to imagine a multipolar world as a bipolar one, fail to capture the complexity in the transformation of the geopolitical landscape. Many pivotal middle powers are now multialigned in pursuit of their interests, as Saudi Arabia’s thickening ties to China, Vietnam’s comprehensive strategic partnerships with the United States and China, and India in the BRICS group illustrate.

In this fragmenting world, a plethora of new alignments are being created that do not as yet rise to the level of alliances. The most ominous is what we are calling the Eurasian entente—a loose, transactional group encompassing two nuclear and veto-wielding U.N. Security Council members, Russia and China, along with one current and one soon-to-be nuclear power, North Korea and Iran. The alignment, held together by opposition to U.S. power, does not yet equate to an alliance—but is nevertheless worrying.

Beijing has dropped the “no limits” designation for its partnership with Moscow, but Russia and China increasingly collaborate on a strategy to counter the United States. North Korea and Iran, long pariahs, are using new transactional interactions to align more with Sino-Russian interests. Iranian drones have proved to be important for Russia’s war against Ukraine, and North Korea is providing more arms after Kim Jong Un’s visit to Russia. Moreover, Russian missile technology aided North Korea’s first successful military satellite launch in November. Beijing seeks to build a Sino-centric alternative global order and benefits in multiple ways from solid partnerships with its Eurasian neighbors.

A congressionally mandated commission is already calling for an increase in U.S. nuclear arms to counter the Sino-Russian alignment. Ties among all four countries vary, but for Washington, which has underestimated the strength of the Russia-China bond and often fantasized about a renewed split between Moscow and Beijing, the expansion of that alignment is not good news, ensuring even more strategic fragmentation and the potential for greater conflict.

Probability of a Eurasian entente:

Looming Taiwanese elections

Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Lai Ching-te

Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Lai Ching-te greets supporters while arriving at a campaign rally Yilan, Taiwan on Dec. 21, 2023. Annabelle Chih/Getty Images

Whether the opposition or the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) wins Taiwan’s wide-open Jan. 13 presidential election, the results are likely to impact the cross-strait predicament and U.S.-China relations writ large. The DPP candidate, Lai Ching-te, in contrast to Taiwan’s more cautious current president, Tsai Ing-wen, is an outspoken, more overtly pro-independence leader, though he has said he would continue Tsai’s cross-strait policies.

China, which has in recent months stepped up already menacing military activity toward Taiwan (which will probably persist through the January election), would most likely overreact to another DPP victory and raise its military, digital, and economic coercion to a new level. Since Taiwan began holding direct presidential elections in 1996, Beijing has pursued heavy-handed intimidation and coercive pressure during election seasons, though on each occasion this tactic has backfired, with Beijing’s favored candidates losing.

After tortured efforts, the opposition candidates failed to unite behind one ticket, making it a three-way race. Absent a unified opposition, Lai will be the probable victor, per current polling. Opposition candidates favor renewed cross-strait dialogue and would most likely pursue significant political, social, and economic interaction with Beijing.

Meanwhile, U.S.-China tensions have eased slightly following the November Biden-Xi summit, designed to put a floor under the relationship through 2024. Nevertheless, if implementation of Chinese commitments on stopping fentanyl precursors, artificial intelligence cooperation, and military-to-military talks falter, all bets are off. Beijing has not reduced its assertive maritime actions in the South China Sea or near Taiwan. Biden reaffirmed the United States’ “One China” policy based on three foundational communiqués and the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. Growing support for arming and defending Taiwan in Congress, high-level visits, stepped-up military aid, and pending legislation deepening U.S.-Taiwanese ties have raised fears in Beijing that Biden is pursuing a “One China, One Taiwan” policy.

A Lai presidency would most likely reinforce these trends; reignite U.S.-China confrontation, possibly sparking an elevated action-reaction cycle; and could undo the modest gains of the recent Biden-Xi summit. A Lai presidency could be constrained if opposition parties win the legislature. On the other hand, a victory by either opposition candidate would upend the Washington narrative, now focused on how to best prepare the United States and Taiwan for an impending conflict. In either outcome, China-bashing rhetoric will continue to escalate as the U.S. presidential election campaign unfolds. This could become a volatile blend, escalating a downward cycle of U.S.-China confrontation, even more so if Trump gets elected.

Probability of Taiwan’s elections impacting U.S.-China relations:

A third nuclear era

Collective memory of nuclear crises such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis has faded. The post-Cold War framework for strategic stability has unraveled in direct proportion to heightened U.S.-Russia tensions, and the Ukraine war has all but severed these ties, effectively nullifying the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties.

Moreover, on the first anniversary of its Ukraine invasion, Moscow declared that it was suspending participation in the New START accord that limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and expires in 2026. Putin also signed a law withdrawing Russia from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

North Korea is building a formidable second-strike capability and new missile capacity with Russia’s help, and there are prospective chains of proliferation in the greater Middle East if Iran attains a nuclear weapons capability and in Northeast Asia in response to North Korea’s capabilities.

The new nuclear action-reaction rivalry is particularly troubling: The United States, Russia, and China are all modernizing and expanding their nuclear weapons capabilities. For Washington, this is creating a “three-body problem”—a new challenge of how to deter Russia and new nuclear peer China simultaneously. The United States is replacing and modernizing all three legs of its nuclear triad, including new short-range sea-launched cruise missiles, in an effort that could cost $2 trillion over the next 30 years.

Putin’s threats to use short-range nuclear weapons in Ukraine underscore that the threshold for employing nuclear weapons could be lowered. Russia’s supposed doctrine of “escalate to de-escalate” suggests that limited nuclear wars might occur, leading some U.S. analysts to consider the possibility. Emerging technologies—such as AI, offensive cyber-, and anti-satellite weapons—are creating new vulnerabilities for nuclear powers, shrinking decision times and stoking fears of first strikes, even as arms control efforts seem far off. Talks with China on committing to having humans in control of nuclear weapons is a modestly encouraging step.

Probability of a perilous third nuclear era:

Out of control AI

Staff prepares to decorate a robot during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference

Staff prepares to decorate a robot during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 7, 2023. Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images

The fear that AI and its physical expression—robots—could soon be smarter than humans has divided Silicon Valley, with one of the godfathers of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, and dozens of other leading AI developers warning of the “risk of extinction,” and most dramatically at OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, now fully on the side of speeding up AI development and promoting the opportunities.

Large language models of generative AI are exponentially improving a wide range of capabilities as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, dozens of start-ups, and China race ahead. In 2024, OpenAI will release a more powerful language model, GPT-5; it could be a watershed year determining whether governments can surmount the governance deficit. Biden’s recent executive order imposing regulations for safe and secure development and use of AI, as well as the U.K.-led Bletchley Declaration, with its vague commitments to cooperate on AI safety, are modest but promising steps.

No U.S. congressional legislation exists on AI standards, safety, and accountability, nor on digital privacy and data protection. Leading AI nations have separate regulatory regimes reflecting growing global fragmentation: The EU has produced, though not yet adopted, the most comprehensive legal framework for AI on top of digital privacy legislation to protect the public from unwanted algorithms. It also has a Digital Markets Act aimed at Big Tech.

China has published generative AI services regulations, following earlier restrictive digital commerce and data protection laws. AI is increasing exponentially, yet global safety and accountability norms are still elusive. But regulation alone would not contain AI. As Mustafa Suleyman, an AI pioneer and a co-founder of DeepMind, argues in a new book, The Coming Wave, containing AI may be all but impossible. Suleyman writes that regulation must be paired with adequate systematic research on AI safety, of which there is relatively little: We need to know why and how mistakes are made by AI, whether governments can stress-test AI systems and access and correct flawed systems, and whether there is a solely human-controlled off switch.

Probability of AI running wild:

Moral absolutism

Supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump clash with an anti-Trump protester

Supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump clash with an anti-Trump protester outside of the Trump National Doral resort on June 12, 2023 in Miami, Florida. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

All the risks discussed above are, to use former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s term, “known unknowns”—discernable events or trends whose trajectories we can assess. But one intangible driver of many of these trends has not been adequately considered: certainty or moral absolutism.

This mindset views issues through a Manichean us-versus-them, good-versus-evil lens and tends toward intolerance and identity politics. This approach is marked by what psychologists call “cognitive bias,” a proclivity to filter all events through a rigid, religious-like belief or set of beliefs and animating behavior, to wit: Putinism, Xi Jinping Thought, Christian nationalism, “woke” progressivism, radical Islamism, far-left and far-right antisemitism, U.S. exceptionalism and its perpetual primacy, and the “civilizing mission” ethos.

This mindset also tends to cling to outmoded assumptions, leading to what social scientists call “path dependence”—relying on past decisions and actions to achieve goals rather than evaluating current conditions and trends. Such black-and-white idées fixe could result in tragic outcomes, if not World War III. This trend is fueling internal polarization in the United States as well as global fragmentation. A balance of interests can be negotiated; absolute faith, not so much.

Theologian and political philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr warned of the illusion of “managing history,” explaining that “modern man lacks the humility to accept the fact that the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management.” As former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger admonished, “History presents unambiguous alternatives only in the rarest of circumstances.”

Probability of moral absolutism undermining global cooperation:

Foreign Policy · by Robert A. Manning, Mathew Burrows · January 12, 2024

10. Xi’s latest purge targets the military. Why did powerful generals fall out of favor?

China hands, please assess.

Xi’s latest purge targets the military. Why did powerful generals fall out of favor? | CNN

Analysis by Nectar Gan, CNN

 8 minute read 

Updated 4:32 AM EST, Fri January 5, 2024

CNN · by Nectar Gan · January 5, 2024

New recruits for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force participate in a send-off ceremony at the Fuyang Institute of Technology on December 26, 2021 in Fuyang, Anhui Province of China.

Wang Biao/VCG/Getty Images/File

CNN —

For much of 2023, a storm has been quietly engulfing the world’s largest military – the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China.

Behind the walled government and military compounds of the Chinese capital, powerful generals have disappeared from public view one after another. Some were subsequently removed from their positions without explanation, even for roles as high-profile as the defense minister.

After months of intense public speculation and evasive non-answers from government spokespersons, the clearest sign of a sweeping purge inside China’s military came last Friday, when nine high-ranking PLA officers were ousted from the country’s top legislature.

While the National People’s Congress (NPC) itself is just a rubber-stamp parliament, its members enjoy a degree of immunity from arrest and criminal prosecution granted by the constitution. Previously, such sudden expulsions often served as a prelude to further disciplinary or legal action.

In keeping with the opacity that shrouds Chinese elite politics, no reason was given for the generals’ sudden ouster from the legislature.

But experts who have long studied China’s military point to a corruption purge as the likely cause – possibly over the procurement and development of advanced equipment that has been a key element in leader Xi Jinping’s efforts to “modernize” the PLA and transform it into a “world class” fighting force.

To some, the scale and depth of the latest purges recalls the graft probes in the early years of Xi’s tenure, which led to the downfall of multiple senior generals and their underlings.

Xi has made rooting out corruption and disloyalty a hallmark of his rule since coming to power in 2012, and the latest shake-ups suggest that campaign is far from over within the military.

At the center of the latest purge is the PLA’s Rocket Force, an elite branch Xi has built up to oversee China’s fast-expanding arsenal of nuclear and ballistic missiles.

The Chinese leader has described the force as a “core of strategic deterrence, a strategic buttress to the country’s position as a major power, and a cornerstone on which to build national security.”

“Right now, it’s obvious to Xi Jinping and the Chinese high command that the Rocket Force leadership has been compromised,” said James Char, a longtime PLA-watcher and research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

“If this were allowed to fester over the longer term it would definitely have repercussions on the PLA’s overall combat capabilities,” Char said.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping shakes hands with officers during his inspection of the PLA's Rocket Force in Beijing on September 26, 2016.

Li Gang/XinhuaGetty Images

Hotbed for corruption

Among the nine PLA officials expelled from the legislature, five are linked to the Rocket Force.

The most notable was Gen. Li Yuchao, who was abruptly replaced as commander in July along with his political commissar. Li’s predecessor and two former deputy commanders were also on the list, as well as an official in charge of the force’s equipment procurement.

Three more of the ousted were also involved in arms procurement – two hailed from the PLA’s Equipment Development Department, while the other oversaw equipment for the PLA Navy’s South Sea Fleet before becoming its commander.

The remaining general dismissed from the legislature was a former commander of the PLA Air Force.

“By the affiliation of these nine personnel … we can more or less presume that corruption is the main cause behind the investigations into their wrongdoing,” Char said.

The ouster of the nine came just two days after three aerospace executives from China’s military-industrial complex were stripped of their roles in the country’s top political advisory body.

The move against the three executives, who hailed from state-owned defense contractors that manufacture arms and missiles, is seen by some analysts as further indication of a corruption probe into military procurement for the Rocket Force – a highly secretive and lucrative field flushed with billions of dollars of funding that makes a fertile ground for graft.

“The PLA Rocket Force has been invested with a lot of expensive equipment since 2016,” Char said, referring to the time of Xi’s wide-ranging reforms of the military.

As part of that ambitious overhaul, the Rocket Force was upgraded into a full armed service from the former Second Artillery Corps. Since then, it has rolled out an unprecedented expansion, adding powerful new intercontinental and intermediate-range ballistic missiles to its arsenal and boosting the number of missile brigades from 29 to 40.

“Clearly, with this increase in the size of the PLA Rocket Force, the amount of equipment and investment that the PLA has poured into the service is immense,” Char said.

In the past few years, satellite photos have shown the construction of what appears to be hundreds of silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles in Chinese deserts, and the US Defense Department predicts China could have some 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035 if it continues to expand the stockpile at its current exponential pace.

In September, CNN also revealed how China, alongside Russia and the United States, have all built new facilities and dug new tunnels at their nuclear test sites in recent years.

“Xi has placed great importance on those developments and that attention may have exposed the level of corruption that generated a clean-up effort that had the added benefit of undermining patronage networks that may infringe on Xi’s plans and power,” said Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

“Xi wants qualified people whose loyalty and judgement he trusts.”

Military vehicles carrying DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missiles travel past Tiananmen Square during a military parade marking the 70th founding anniversary of People's Republic of China held in Beijing in 2019.

Jason Lee/Reuters/File

Implications on combat

The Rocket Force will play a key role in any conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea – two potential flashpoints between the US and China – by leading the first strikes on enemy forces and deterring US intervention, according to Schuster.

Given the strategic importance of the force, a key question is whether the far-reaching purge would gut its operations or combat readiness.

So far, Xi has left the operational-level commanders and staff untouched, Schuster noted.

“The senior leaders were involved in building the force but, at this point, not likely to have been involved in operations and planning,” he said.

While the wide-scale purge is sure to dent morale in the Rocket Force and bring it under tighter scrutiny, Char said overall “the PLA’s combat capabilities have unlikely been compromised to any substantial extent.”

As part of Xi’s military overhaul, “the Rocket force assets have in fact become more and more integrated into the PLA’s joint theater command system. So, that means the PLA’s ability to conduct missile strikes, as part of a larger joint campaign, will unlikely be compromised,” he added.

Amid flaring geopolitical tensions, experts say in the long run, it’s crucial for Xi to clean up the rot within the PLA, especially around its weapon systems.

If the purges result in a more disciplined, effective and personally loyal fighting force – it could prove a win for Xi.

The poor performance of Russia’s military in its war with Ukraine – from substandard equipment to expired ration packs and deadly tank weaknesses – has served as a stark lesson for Xi and his top generals about the perils of corruption.

“The cleaning up is important because going forward, he would want to ensure the PLA Rocket Force has functioning lethal equipment that works on a battlefield,” Char said.

Former Defense Minister Li Shangfu was removed from his post in October 2023, after disappearing for months from public view.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

‘Tip of the iceberg’

Signs of problems around arms procurement were already apparent in July.

Days before the Rocket Force’s surprise leadership shakeup, the Equipment Development Department ordered a fresh crackdown on corrupt procurement practices, calling on the public to report tips on questionable activities dating back to October 2017.

The probe overlapped with the period when the department was headed by Li Shangfu, the former defense minister who was removed from his post in October after vanishing from public view for months without explanation.

One of Li’s deputies in the equipment department, Zhang Yulin, was among the nine dismissed from the legislature last week.

“(Now) that they have been stripped of their NPC membership, their cases can move on to the next stage, which is the military indictment process,” Char said, adding that the purge is far from over.

“I’m sure there are more generals whose actions have been investigated. It seems to be just the tip of the iceberg.”

Some officers placed under investigation may not be senior enough to hold seats in the legislature, while others may have already retired.

High on analysts’ watchlist is former Defense Minister Wei Fenghe, who has not been heard from since last March, when he retired and handed the baton to Li Shangfu. Wei was the inaugural commander of the Rocket Force when it was revamped at the end of 2015.

When asked about Wei’s whereabouts in August, a spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry said the military has “zero tolerance for corruption” and vowed to “investigate every case and crack down on every corrupt official.”

Gen. Ju Qiansheng, the commander of the PLA’s Strategic Support Force responsible for space and cyber warfare, has also not been seen since the summer.

Ju raised eyebrows after missing a reception in late July to celebrate the 96th anniversary of the PLA’s founding and a reward ceremony for Chinese astronauts in September.

More than a decade since Xi assumed office, China’s most powerful and authoritarian leader in decades is still battling corrupt and disloyal generals and officers – some of them handpicked and promoted by him.

“I think he can remove anyone he wants. But the very fact that he is still removing people says a lot about his poor judgment previously with regards to these personnel appointments,” Char said.

“Everything that we’re seeing right now, all the purges, is really all down to China’s one-party centralized system and the fact that there’s no public scrutiny that the PLA is subjected to.”

Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, said the purges show that corruption cannot be completely eradicated from the system despite Xi’s relentless efforts.

“Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” she said. “Xi’s determined to fight corruption, but corruption is a product of the system he is defending. It is a Catch-22.”

CNN’s Simone McCarthy contributed reporting.

CNN · by Nectar Gan · January 5, 2024

11. Overstretched and undersupplied: Can the US afford its global security blanket?

Excerpts:

In short, the United States faces a strategic choice. Its means are insufficient to achieve its ends. To close the gap, it must move one or the other.

Bringing the ends closer to the current means can be done in part by reassessing US commitments abroad. US policymakers should conduct a thorough review of current US security commitments, evaluating their strategic importance and resource demands, and scaling back involvement in certain regions to prioritize critical threats where necessary. It will be difficult work, which will include building a widely shared US political consensus on prioritizing among the considerable dangers existing in disparate parts of the world.

Bringing the means closer to the current ends also presents a challenge, namely the US Congress appropriating more funding. And to keep this funding “appropriate” in the eyes of Americans, US political leaders need to foster great unity on the United States’ international role and strategic priorities. Transparency and enhanced visibility on the current limitations of US industrial capacity and the cost of maintaining the current security architecture is vital to sustain Western leadership.

As the White House and Congress begin work on a budget for 2025, a first step they could take is to prioritize a domestic resurgence of the US industrial base. The United States needs an additional three hundred billion dollars in the annual defense budget directed toward revitalizing the US defense industrial base, by expanding capacity and diversifying supply chains to eliminate dependence on volatile foreign sources. This requires a significant budget increase and commitment to long-term rebuilding.

Overstretched and undersupplied: Can the US afford its global security blanket?

By Kathryn Levantovscaia

atlanticcouncil.org · · January 5, 2024

In recent decades, US foreign policy has been beset by visions of the United States ensuring security throughout much of the world, but with little thought to the resources or resolve required or the second-order consequences. One would do well to remember the words of British writer Aldous Huxley: “good ends . . . can be achieved only by the employment of appropriate means.” This notion is specifically relevant when reflecting on the US defense ecosystem—one bearing an industrial base that had struggled to meet capacity long before conflict erupted in Ukraine and Israel in recent years. While maintaining regional stability across the globe is critical to US defense and national security objectives, simultaneously supplying major arms packages to Israel and Ukraine, at a time when the United States needs to prepare for the possibility of armed conflict with China, will stretch production lines and resources beyond sustainable limits, potentially jeopardizing all US-supported efforts.

Recently, the US response to conflict in the Middle East and to Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought to light growing concerns about US defense industrial capacity and about the spectrum of security cooperation the United States deploys. Limited resources within the Department of Defense are polarizing debates in Washington and beyond about which country needs help more: Israel or Ukraine? The real answer is less simple than one or the other. While maintaining Israel’s and Ukraine’s sovereignty are both critical to US national security objectives, the size of the United States’ involvement in helping each could, in turn, gamble with many of the same security objectives.

The hollowing out of the broader US manufacturing base has made defense companies dependent on supply chains originating in, of all places, China.

The capabilities needed in Ukraine, Israel, and a potential conflict with China vary, which prompts many US commentators to argue that the United States can sustain all three. However, that presumption undermines alarms raised across the federal government. Both the administration and the Department of Defense have highlighted their concerns about vulnerabilities resulting from a dependence on a shrinking number of sub-tier providers and the disruption on US defense supply chains caused by geopolitical instability.

US defense industries are wheezing in fundamental categories of weapons production. Several decades of inadequate defense budgets compounded with poor management of major Department of Defense acquisition programs has left the nation with a force whose inventory of vital weapons is smaller, older, and less ready for combat. The hollowing out of the broader US manufacturing base has made defense companies dependent on supply chains originating in, of all places, China. From electronic components to gallium, Chinese companies export unconscionable percentages of indispensable subcomponents and materials on which US production lines depend.

To put this into perspective, US stocks of precision-guided munitions are perilously low. If the United States were to engage in a Pacific conflict, the US military would run out of these munitions within three to ten days. Meanwhile, Israel is in an existential fight, running through its inadequate weapons reserves as Ukraine commands $44.2 billion to date in US military assistance just to stay afloat. Frankly put, the US defense industrial base is a fraction of what it was when the United States codified commitments to Israel. Despite the immense strain on domestic manufacturing capacity, Washington continues to put greater investment in mounting commitments abroad than in the health of the US industrial base. There are no plans in place for a major expansion nor the significant budget increases required.

Make no mistake, this does not call for the abandonment of Ukraine or Israel. Ukraine is a critical regional strategic partner whose territorial integrity is key to both US and international security. Further, allowing Ukraine to fight Russia is arguably a more favorable alternative than forcing NATO to do so. On a similar token, US support to Israel emerged not in a flash, but from decades of step-by-step US-Israel alliance building and consideration of the dilemma created by the United States selling weapons to Arab states. Israel has been the cornerstone of US strategy in the Middle East since the Cold War, and as the leading Western influence in the region, the United States relies heavily on Israel’s sustained and protected existence. Regardless, careful mind must be paid to the true cost of US security commitments and their impact on longstanding partnerships and alliances.

Moving into an election year in the United States, a rise in exports of US military assistance while the domestic defense ecosystem withers could reignite skepticism and scrutiny among key US decision makers toward NATO. Reverting back to the previous administration’s disdain for multilateralism risks bringing down the entire security edifice that US statesmen erected in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East during the twentieth century.

Prioritizing US strength helps US allies and partners

While US leadership is critical, mounting world crises require a division of labor among allies. The United States carries the overwhelming load, and the US warfighter is dangerously stretched—so much so that the military’s standards for new recruits dropped significantly last year in a desperate attempt to fill ranks. Retainment is at an all-time low. China and Iran know it; hence, their galling military provocations from Taiwan to the Red Sea. US armed forces may be the strongest in the world, yet they are too small to handle the country’s many commitments abroad. As European allies continue to step up their support to Ukraine, the United States should take this pivotal opportunity to reinvest and rebuild US manufacturing prowess.

The United States prioritizing its own strength is the only sustainable path to support Ukraine and uphold every other commitment made by the country to allies and partners. US leaders and policymakers should be unwavering in their commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty. But in order to provide security assistance responsibly, they must first ensure a robust and well-resourced US defense industrial base, guaranteeing the United States’ long-term ability to support allies and partners while deterring adversaries.

NATO allies collectively enjoy an economy in excess of forty trillion dollars, top-tier military technologies, and a surplus of F-16 fighter jets, which, if provided in number, could make a large difference in Ukraine’s objective of recapturing its territory. Europeans not only have the fighter-bombers, but also the complex logistical and training networks to get Ukrainian pilots in the air quickly and create conditions for breaking the current stalemate. Decisions like these, however, require alignment on both sides of the pond. The US administration only recently provided the green light for Europe to provide Ukraine’s pilots with F-16 aircraft and training, which Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall deemed a key capability for Ukraine’s long-term defense.

Pursuing regional stability in Europe and the Middle East simultaneously are critical and costly endeavors. Doing so at the current pace in light of capacity limitations could backfire and damage not only Ukraine but also NATO. At the same time, the United States lacks the requisite focus to take on a Chinese threat to Taiwan and to defend its Pacific position because the US military and defense industrial base are stretched thin. This problem must be addressed now—a time when the United States’ European allies’ continued support for Ukraine affords the opportunity to do so.

In short, the United States faces a strategic choice. Its means are insufficient to achieve its ends. To close the gap, it must move one or the other.

Bringing the ends closer to the current means can be done in part by reassessing US commitments abroad. US policymakers should conduct a thorough review of current US security commitments, evaluating their strategic importance and resource demands, and scaling back involvement in certain regions to prioritize critical threats where necessary. It will be difficult work, which will include building a widely shared US political consensus on prioritizing among the considerable dangers existing in disparate parts of the world.

Bringing the means closer to the current ends also presents a challenge, namely the US Congress appropriating more funding. And to keep this funding “appropriate” in the eyes of Americans, US political leaders need to foster great unity on the United States’ international role and strategic priorities. Transparency and enhanced visibility on the current limitations of US industrial capacity and the cost of maintaining the current security architecture is vital to sustain Western leadership.

As the White House and Congress begin work on a budget for 2025, a first step they could take is to prioritize a domestic resurgence of the US industrial base. The United States needs an additional three hundred billion dollars in the annual defense budget directed toward revitalizing the US defense industrial base, by expanding capacity and diversifying supply chains to eliminate dependence on volatile foreign sources. This requires a significant budget increase and commitment to long-term rebuilding.

Kathryn Levantovscaia is deputy director of the Forward Defense program in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Further reading

Wed, Dec 20, 2023

Expanding NATO’s competitive mindset: Deterring and defending across physical and virtual domains

Strategic Insights Memo By Delharty Manson

In October 2023, the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s Forward Defense program, in partnership with NATO ACT, convened current and former practitioners for a private workshop on expanding NATO’s approach to multi-domain operations (MDO), identifying key challenges and opportunities to operationalizing MDO across the Alliance. This memo summarizes the workshop’s key takeaways and conclusions.

Crisis Management Defense Policy

Wed, Apr 12, 2023

Atlantic Council Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption interim report

Report By Eric Lofgren*, Whitney M. McNamara, and Peter Modigliani

The DoD must accelerate defense innovation adoption from the leading edge of the private sector. This report has ten recommendations to do so.

China Defense Industry

Fri, Sep 29, 2023

Jets and rockets are important, but Ukraine also needs faster munitions deliveries

New Atlanticist By Thomas S. Warrick

Today’s battlefield chews up ammunition and equipment at extraordinary rates. The US “arsenal of democracy” needs to start working overtime.

Conflict Defense Industry

Defense Industry Defense Policy Security & Defense United States and Canada

Image: A US Army paratrooper assigned to 4th Battalion, 319th Field Artillery Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade holds a round prior to loading it into a field artillery weapon in Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, July 29, 2020 in preparation for Exercise Saber Junction 20, taking place next month. (US Army photo by Spc. Ryan Lucas)

atlanticcouncil.org · by jcookson · January 5, 2024

12. 5 Myths About the U.S. Military That Need to Go Away

Thanks to the authors for this. Especially on describing the basing issue (we do not have bases everywhere!)

5 Myths About the U.S. Military That Need to Go Away

Pop culture understandings of the American military dominate the minds of most people. Whether it’s Hollywood making a war movie like Pearl Harbor with numerous historical inaccuracies or an unrealistic depiction of wartime conditions in The Hurt Locker, numerous narratives emerge that misrepresent the U.S. military.

The National Interest · by Jahara Matisek · January 4, 2024

Pop culture understandings of the American military dominate the minds of most people. Whether it’s Hollywood making a war movie like Pearl Harbor with numerous historical inaccuracies or an unrealistic depiction of wartime conditions in The Hurt Locker, numerous narratives emerge that misrepresent the U.S. military. Overcoming some of these misperceptions means addressing five common myths that most assume about the U.S. Armed Forces.

The U.S. military is everywhere.

Numerous public intellectuals like to push the narrative that the U.S. has become some kind of neo-colonial empire with military bases everywhere to dominate countries for the exploitative gain of the American capitalists. However, these assertions do not match reality. For instance, a policy organization proclaimed in a 2021 study that the U.S. had about 750 military bases in eighty different countries and “colonies” (an odd term for the U.S. territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). Unfortunately, the report does not distinguish between actual military facilities for projecting American military power and facilities for civilians and contractors. For instance, the dataset identifies a War Dog Cemetery in Guam, six small research and development sites in the Bahamas, and an aircraft runway as “military” facilities.

The reality is that the U.S. military has a few dozen major military bases outside of the United States. These are primarily located in allied countries across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The Department of State negotiated these agreements, and the host governments paid billions of dollars for the presence of the U.S. Furthermore, about 85 percent of the active duty military is based in the United States. Of the 15 percent stationed and deployed overseas, these personnel represent force postures needed to capably respond to crises or conflicts that no other responsible country has shown the ability to do.

The U.S. military only does combat.

The American military is certainly most concerned with organizing, training, and equipping its forces for large-scale combat operations. But the U.S. military does more than fight wars. The lexicon changes, but the President deploys the military for a host of non-combat missions that used to be referred to as “military operations other than war” (or MOOTW). Whether it is providing humanitarian assistance to fight Ebola in Africa, resettling hostages taken by the Islamic State in Syria, responding to COVID-19, and engaging in domestic civil works engineering projects, the U.S. military provides a wide range of capabilities for the U.S. government, allies, and partners. Many activities benefit the global common good, such as helping countries fight illegal fishing.

A key tenant of U.S. foreign policy is sustaining the international rules-based order by helping countries address security deficits. Such activities include counterterrorism operations in Africa, security cooperation missions around the world, military exercises with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, security assistance to Ukraine and Israel, a host of anti-piracy and counterdrug operations around Africa, and numerous freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, Arctic, and the Red Sea. These activities ensure authoritarian countries and violent non-state actors do not harm globalization or undermine the international rules-based order.

The U.S. military can only fight a one-front war.

Some analysts suggest that the U.S. military can only deal with one crisis, while others maintain that the “U.S. military forces cannot fight on 2 fronts.” Even though the United States is not doing the fighting in Ukraine, this leads some pundits to argue for halting support in Europe to preserve resources for some future war with China. Such suggestions are misleading because they insinuate that U.S. political leadership is highly centralized. They ignore how the Defense Department relies on combatant commands to employ the force and integrate allies and partners in these operations. Fifty-four countries provide military and financial assistance for Ukraine’s defense, and European support is larger than U.S. support. In any China scenario, Taiwan will certainly defend itself first, and American diplomats will likely rally international support, repeating its success with Ukraine. The emergence of concepts such as integrated deterrence illustrates that the United States can strengthen allies and partners to do the bulk of the fighting and the first responders in a crisis as the U.S. military remains in a supportive role.

Defense spending is out of control.

The U.S. military had a 2023 budget of over $816 billion and is expected to be more than $842 billion in 2024. When adding in the cost of veteran’s benefits and nuclear modernization, the cost of national security easily exceeds $1 trillion. Individuals certainly have sticker shock since that number is hard to conceptualize, but relative to the $24 trillion economy, it is low. Further, there is much non-defense spending in the Defense Department budget, such as public health, supporting small businesses, and higher education.

The Long Peace has undoubtedly ended, and U.S. competitors drive defense spending. China is expected to spend around $700 billion on its military. China is also modernizing its military, has the largest Navy in the world, and hopes to triple its nuclear weapons. Russia suggests spending $391 billion on its armed forces in 2024 despite only spending about $102 billion in 2023. Russia is the largest nuclear weapon state in the world and has repeatedly made threats to use nuclear weapons in Europe. If it weren’t for Ukraine’s defense, Putin’s project to reconstitute the Russian empire would be further along, and entire countries could disappear again like it’s the nineteenth century.

An inclusive military is a weak military.

Recruiting across the U.S. military is becoming a challenge, but it is not difficult to solve and certainly not a crisis, as some may suggest. Some suggest this recruiting crisis and the perception of a “woke military” is what is causing American military weakness. However, historically, the U.S. Armed Forces has consistently been more progressive and inclusive than American civil society. President Truman desegregated the military in 1948, well before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Since then, military policies have trended toward equal treatment and equality for all. This pursuit of inclusiveness and diversity is a strategic strength that makes the U.S. military so effective. Every Service member is expected to treat everyone with the dignity and respect that ought to be afforded to all human beings.

The Truth about the U.S. Military

Like any other government institution, the U.S. military is just an organization with a bureaucracy, its own laws and rules, and a host of traditions for each military branch. It just happens to be that the U.S. Department of Defense is also the largest employer in the world, with 3.2 million employees on its payroll.

About the Authors

Lieutenant Colonel Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek, Ph.D. (@JaharaMatisek) is a military professor in the national security affairs department at the United States Naval War College, a 2023 Non-Resident Fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative (joint production of Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point), and United States Department of Defense Minerva co-principal investigator for improving United States security assistance. Lt. Col. Matisek has published over ninety articles and essays in peer-reviewed journals and policy-relevant outlets on strategy, warfare, and security assistance. He is a command pilot who previously served as a senior fellow for the Homeland Defense Institute and associate professor in the Military and Strategic Studies Department at the United States Air Force Academy.

Dr. Derek S. Reveron (@DerekSReveron) is a professor and Chair of the National Security Affairs Department and brings decades of experience in strategy development with work in dozens of countries. He served on the Rhode Island Cybersecurity Commission and has published widely on national security, defense policy, and foreign policy. He is a faculty affiliate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches strategic problem-solving. He served 33 years in the Navy Reserves, leading units supporting operations in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and was a special advisor in Afghanistan.

Images: Creative Commons.

The National Interest · by Jahara Matisek · January 4, 2024

13. Preventive Priorities Survey 2024

Read the 12 page report at this link: https://cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/CFR_CPA_PPS24.pdf

Preventive Priorities Survey 2024 

Paul B. Stares General John W. Vessey Senior Fellow for Conflict Prevention Director, Center for Preventive Action

About the Preventive Priorities Survey

When the Preventive Priorities Survey (PPS) was launched

in 2008, the United States was deeply engaged in the global

war on terror. With large numbers of U.S. armed forces deployed

in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world following

the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States could ill afford yet

more overseas military commitments. The PPS was primarily

created, therefore, to alert U.S. policymakers to potentially

threatening sources of instability and conflict overseas so

they could take timely preventive action and reduce the risk of

additional military interventions.

While the rationale for the PPS remains essentially the

same, the global security environment has dramatically

changed since 2008. The foreign terrorist threat to the U.S.

homeland has receded significantly, but other concerns have

emerged. Of those, by far the most worrisome is the growing

risk of armed conflict with Russia, especially since the war

in Ukraine began in 2022, as well as with China, as a result

of rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait and in the South

China Sea. The past twelve months have also seen violent

conflict erupt or grow worse in many regions, notably in Israel

and the Palestinian territories, as well as in Sudan, the Sahel,

the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Myanmar, and

between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

In short, the trend toward less armed conflict around the

world since the end of the Cold War is now moving in the

opposite direction​.

With so many ongoing crises, U.S. policymakers are understandably

consumed with managing daily events and have

limited bandwidth to think about future threats to peace and

security, much less devote a great deal of time and energy to

averting them. Where they choose to focus their attention has

to be carefully prioritized as a consequence. CFR’s annual

Preventive Priorities Survey is designed to help them do just

that. Each year, the PPS polls hundreds of American foreign

policy experts for their assessment of the likelihood and the

potential harm to U.S. interests of thirty conflict-related contingences

that have been judged to be plausible in the coming

twelve months (see methodology, page 4). The results are

then collated, and the contingencies are sorted into three tiers

of relative priority for preventive action.

​14. Attrition: Medical Care in the Combat Zone (Russia v. Ukraine)

Excerpts:

It's a different situation with Ukrainian troops, where the army has been quick to adopt western military practices. The traditional military feldsher (medic with practical but no formal medical training) have received more training and better equipment than their Russian counterparts. The results have been dramatic.

About 40 percent of Russian casualties die compared to only 20 percent of Ukrainian casualties because the Russians in this war often get no battlefield medical treatment whatsoever. The Ukrainians eagerly adopted western combat medical practices, which were above average during World War Two and continued to improve after that war. 

Attrition: Medical Care in the Combat Zone

https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htatrit/articles/20240105.aspx?fbclid=IwAR0T2Ez80Nn528NfB4LUIsSG0-Pp16ZcSCXLUf-WhxhkLCbpwWNsMCT-VVg

strategypage.com

January 5, 2024:

Some things never change in Russia and one item is medical care. Russia never was able to establish a nationwide healthcare system and military health system comparable to those found in the west. This was especially true in the military. Russian medical care in combat units, especially in combat, was never very effective or even available.In the combat zone there was poor or nonexistent medical treatment for the wounded. It was the same for diseases that of the breakout among troops in the combat zone. Russian troops in Ukraine are currently suffering from what is called mouse fever and receiving little treatment. This means a growing number of Russian troops are technically available for service but are in fact disabled by the mouse fever, which Russian military medical personnel have been slow to deal with. In part that’s because this is a new ailment, and the Russian medical community has not yet found a way to effectively deal with it.

It's a different situation with Ukrainian troops, where the army has been quick to adopt western military practices. The traditional military feldsher (medic with practical but no formal medical training) have received more training and better equipment than their Russian counterparts. The results have been dramatic.

About 40 percent of Russian casualties die compared to only 20 percent of Ukrainian casualties because the Russians in this war often get no battlefield medical treatment whatsoever. The Ukrainians eagerly adopted western combat medical practices, which were above average during World War Two and continued to improve after that war. Subsequently western forces have at least minimal battle treatment, largely by getting the wounded off the battlefield to be treated by medics and eventually sent to field hospitals where surgery and other emergency treatment was available. It has long been known that wounded soldiers in freezing conditions died of exposure or shock within about an hour unless they are carried to shelter, but that is not happening for Russian soldiers in this war at all even though it was done somewhat during World War Two. Soviet field medics then were generally women with no medical training whose major job was to crawl out into battlefields with groundsheets, roll wounded soldiers onto those, and then drag them back to an aid station. There are no such Russian female medics in this war so wounded who cannot themselves crawl to a rear aid station generally die. Prospective recruits know this and that’s another reason for avoiding military service.

One of the more amazing, and underreported, aspects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are the dramatically lower American casualties compared to Vietnam, and previous 20th century wars. The casualty rate in Iraq was a third of what it was in Vietnam. It was even lower in Afghanistan and all subsequent conflicts. Medical care has gotten much better, quicker, and faster. Not only are procedures more effective, but badly wounded soldiers get to the operating table more quickly. Field medics now have capabilities that, during Vietnam, only surgeons had. All this is one reason why the ratio of wounded to killed was 6 in Vietnam, compared to 7.3 for Iraq. In Ukraine, Ukrainian troops benefit from these changes, their Russian adversaries do not.

The fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has brought about a major change in how the United States deals with combat casualties. The result is that over 90 percent of the troops wounded survived their wounds. That's the highest rate in history. There are several reasons for this. The main one is that medics, and the troops themselves, are being trained to deliver more complex and effective first aid more quickly. Military doctors now talk of the platinum 10 minutes, meaning that if you can keep the wounded soldier, especially the ones who are badly hurt, alive for ten minutes, their chances of survival go way up. Medics have been equipped and trained to perform procedures previously done only by physicians, while troops are trained to do some procedures previously handled only by medics. This skill upgrade is made possible by a number of factors.

First, over the last few decades, there has been continuous development in methods and equipment for emergency medicine practiced by ambulance crews and staff in emergency rooms. These practices were initially slow to be adopted by the military. Two decades ago, because of the fighting in Iraq, it had nearly all been adopted by military medical personnel. This was often due to medics in reserve units often having full time jobs as emergency medical personnel.

As much as combat deaths have been reduced in the last decade, by more than half, there are still some types of wounds for which there is no battlefield treatment, meaning the victim will die before more extensive treatment can be obtained. Chief among these are abdominal wounds, where the abdominal aorta is opened. When that happens the victim bleeds to death in minutes. Now there is a solution for this in the form of a belt that is placed on the abdomen and activated. A bladder inflates which puts sufficient pressure on the abdominal aorta to stop the bleeding or reduce it enough to make it possible to get the casualty to a surgeon.

While tourniquets have been around for thousands of years, these devices only work on limbs. Preventing death from most other rapid blood loss situations was achieved in the last decade with the development and widespread use of powders and granules that could quickly stop the bleeding. First came special bandages like the Chitosan Hemostatic Dressing, more commonly called HemCon. This was basically a freeze dried substance that caused rapid clotting of blood and was incorporated into what otherwise looked like a typical battlefield bandage. It greatly reduced bleeding, which had become the most common cause of death among wounded American troops. This device was a major breakthrough in bandage technology. Over 95 percent of the time, the HemCon bandages stopped bleeding, especially in areas where a tourniquet could not be applied. This did not work when the abdominal aorta was involved. HemCon was followed by WoundStat powder to deal with some of the bleeding that HemCon could not handle. While medics and troops prefer the bandage type device, there are situations where WoundStat, a fine granular substance is a better solution, especially in the hands of a medic. Only the medics got packets, usually two of WoundStat powder. That's because this is only needed for deep wounds and has a theoretical risk of causing fatal clots if it gets into the bloodstream.

WoundStat was but one of many new medical tools for battlefield medicine that greatly increased the effectiveness of the immediate within minutes or seconds, after getting hit, by medical care for troops. This effort consisted of three programs. First, there was the development of new medical tools and treatments that troops could quickly and safely be taught to use. This included stuff like HemCon. Then came the equipping of medics, about one for every 30 or so combat troops with more powerful tools, so that troops were less likely to bleed to death or suffocate from certain types of wounds that are not fatal if treated quickly enough. Finally, there was the Combat Lifesaver program, which more than tripled the number of medics by putting selected soldiers through a 40 hour CLS or Combat Lifesaver course in the most common medical procedures soldiers can perform to deal with the most dangerous types of wounds usually encountered. These CLS trained soldiers are not medics, of course, but they do make available in combat crucial medical treatments. Thus, they are sort of medics lite, which is close enough if you are badly wounded and in need of some prompt medical treatment.

During the last two centuries major wars have tended to produce significant improvements in medical care. This is what has happened in the past decade but in a much accelerated fashion. For example, since September 11, 2001, over two million American troops went off to war and about two percent of them were killed or wounded. Only 12 percent of the 57,000 combat zone injuries were fatal, the lowest percentage in military history. This was largely due to major improvements in dealing with rapid blood loss (as when a major artery is severed) and the increased speed with which complex medical care could be delivered to wounded troops. New medical technologies also made it possible to detect injuries like brain trauma that, in the past, was very difficult to detect and treat.

The Combat Lifesaver course teaches the troops how to do things like inserting breathing tubes and other emergency surgical procedures to restore breathing. The CLS troops have skills most likely to be needed in life-saving situations when a medic is not available. The additional emergency medical training, and new emergency first aid gear, the CLS bag, has saved hundreds of lives and reduced the severity of even more wounds. Enough troops have taken CLS training so that there is one for every 10-15 combat troops and one for every 20 or so support troops on convoy or security duty.

These new developments were also popular with civilian emergency medical services, and many of the experienced combat medics coming out of the military went to work as EMTs or Emergency Medical Technicians, thus increasing the quality of care for civilian accident victims. This was similar to what happened to the EMT field after the Vietnam War, when ambulance crews rapidly evolved from simply transporting accident victims, after a little first aid, to EMTs who could administer procedures that previously only doctors could handle. This followed the experience in World War II, where war demands led to development of mass production of the newly created antibiotics and that led to a revolution in surgery techniques.

Second, there's the high intelligence and skill levels of the volunteer military. High enlistment standards have largely gone unnoticed by most people, but within the military it is well known that combat troops are much brighter than at any time in the past and can handle more complex equipment and techniques. Getting the combat troops to learn these techniques is no problem, because for them, it could be a matter of life and death.

Third, medical teams, capable of performing complex surgery, are closer to the combat zone. These teams, like the medics and troops, have more powerful tools and techniques. This includes things like telemedicine, where you do a video conference with more expert doctors back in the U.S., to help save a patient.

The speed at which wounded troops get treated was called the golden 10 minutes in the 20th century, now that has become the platinum 10 minutes because more effective care can be applied more quickly.

All this is part of a century old trend. During World War II, the golden hour standard of getting wounded troops to an operating table was developed. Antibiotics were also developed at about the same time, along with the helicopter, whose first combat mission, in 1945 Burma, was to recover injured troops. So, these new developments are not anything exotic.

Finally, the military medical community has a track record of success that the troops know about. So, everyone realizes that if they pitch in, chances of survival are good, and they are. In Ukraine the results are startling because Ukrainian troops who are wounded get better battlefield medical treatment and are quickly moved to where they can receive hospital level care. It’s another reason why Ukrainian troops have higher morale and combat capability than their Russian counterparts. The Russian troops often have no professional medical care from medics, or feldsher, while the Ukrainians do. Russian wounded troops who are captured are allowed to let their families know they are alive but injured. Eventually these Russian troops are able to let their families know that they received much better medical care from the Ukrainians that the Russian military could provide.

strategypage.com

15. The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil

One slight mention of Korea. But ther are some interesting predictions.

Excerpt from Ian Bremmer's section:

Biden supporters are worried about the end of democracy. Trump supporters are worried Democrats want to throw the former president in jail. And there are plenty of adversaries (I’m looking at you, Russia, Iran and North Korea) that would love nothing more than to see more chaos from the Americans.

The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil

By POLITICO MAGAZINE

01/05/2024 05:00 AM EST

Politico · by ZACK STANTON

A collection of futurists, political analysts and other prognosticators on the possible Black Swans of the presidential campaign.

“Signs of extraterrestrial intelligence”

“Hurricane meets Jan. 6”

“Russian mothers’ revolt over the high Russian casualty rate”

“A Digital Apocalypse”

“War with China breaks out”

“A violent assault on a candidate”

“1968-like riots at the major party conventions”

Photos by Alex Brandon/AP and Natacha Pisarenko/AP

By POLITICO MAGAZINE

01/05/2024 05:00 AM EST

A global pandemic. A siege at the Capitol. A reality TV star in the White House. In just the last few years, we’ve watched the unthinkable become real. We think we have a firm grasp on what’s to come, in politics and beyond, and then something gigantic and unexpected happens.

With that in mind, perhaps we need to deploy a tad more imagination before assuming we know what’s going to happen in 2024. It certainly looks like we’re headed toward a rematch of Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden and a bitterly contested, close general election. But, if recent history is a guide, something unexpected could be right around the corner.

We asked an array of futurists and technologists, historians and political scientists, foreign policy analysts and other savvy prognosticators whose expertise is identifying future risk: What might be the “Black Swan” event that disrupts the seeming inevitability of the 2024 campaign?

We asked them to leave aside the possibility that one of the candidates in their 70s or 80s dies during the campaign — something well within the realm of actuarial possibility and which is already on many voters’ minds. Instead, we asked them: What is the unpredictable, unlikely but entirely plausible thing that could happen this year that voters aren’t even thinking about yet, but which could have a massive impact on the outcome?

Our experts suggested an array of disruptions and disasters created by Mother Nature, humankind and, yes, even aliens. These aren’t their predictions for what will surely be a wild year, but they’re all possible. Even the aliens.

Here’s what they imagined:

A disrupted U.S. election

By Ian Bremmer

Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media.

We all know the 2024 U.S. presidential election is going to be enormously divisive and dysfunctional, perceived by many if not most (on the losing side) to be illegitimate. But what if it isn’t just perception? What if the world’s most powerful country can’t hold a free and fair election?

Biden supporters are worried about the end of democracy. Trump supporters are worried Democrats want to throw the former president in jail. And there are plenty of adversaries (I’m looking at you, Russia, Iran and North Korea) that would love nothing more than to see more chaos from the Americans.

That means that efforts to subvert the election could be successful and could come from a variety of actors — from cyberattacks, deep fakes and disinformation, physical attacks on the election process and oversight, and/or mass unrest, violent intervention and even terrorism to disrupt voting on Nov. 5. There’s no more geopolitically significant target than the upcoming U.S. elections, which are vulnerable due to limited experience and resources focused on election security.

I wasn’t worried about a coup back on Jan. 6, and I don’t see any way to overturn this coming year’s election either. But disrupting the 2024 U.S. election strikes me as plausible and deeply concerning.

A China surprise

By Matthew Burrows

Mathew Burrows is the program lead of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub. He was formerly the director of Foresight at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and the co-director of the New American Engagement Initiative.

War with China breaks out several months after Democratic Progressive Party candidate Lai Ching-te has been elected in the Taiwan presidential election on Jan. 13 with a bigger margin than expected. This encourages him to declare Taiwan’s independence from China against the advice of the Biden administration but with the backing of a number of congressional Republicans. China mounts a quarantine cutting off trade to the island. This only increases Taiwan’s determination to be independent, and just as the U.S. presidential campaign heats up in October, China starts a military operation. The Biden administration feels it has no option but to mount a military defense of the island. Biden’s strong presidential leadership shifts the momentum away from Trump among independent voters. The reigning assumption is that such a war would be so ruinous economically for China that President Xi Jinping would avoid it. However, in this scenario, he fears that China will lose Taiwan forever and is counting on the Biden administration to be wary of intervening for fear of the possible negative electoral consequences.

An alternative scenario: Under the weight of enormous debt, slow growth and a depressed property market, China suffers a financial crash similar to the 2008 economic crisis in the United States. As happened then, China’s woes aren’t confined to itself or Asia but spread, triggering a global recession. In the U.S., inflation goes away, but with a growing lack of confidence, unemployment starts to creep up just as the electoral campaign gets underway. Biden isn’t responsible, but like other U.S. presidents facing reelection, a poor economy further drags down his popularity.

Death at a Trump rally

By Julia Azari

Julia Azari is a professor of political science at Marquette University.

Political violence can be very disruptive, and it’s usually not planned. Here’s one scenario.

On Oct. 19, a fight breaks out at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. A group of five white men in their early 50s looked like standard rally-goers. But as they catch the attention of one of the many TV cameras in the arena, the group pulls out protest signs reading: TRUMP LIES and SAVE DEMOCRACY NOW. They had done similar protest actions together for years — anti-war protests, national political conventions and a few Trump events. Part politics, part reunion for longtime friends who had met in college protesting the first Gulf War.

What happens next is disputed. A couple attending their seventh Trump rally say that the protesters started pushing when people around them chanted insults. Other accounts say the Trump supporters initiated the fighting. However it happened, one of the five protesters suffered a heart attack. He is rushed to a local hospital but dies a few hours later.

News media scramble to cover the event, and the public can’t look away. A clear narrative proves elusive. Was the protester’s demise simply a random tragedy? Or a sign of the dangers of an increasingly violent time in American politics?

Pundits’ debates over these questions, interspersed with interviews with the deceased man’s friends, grieving widow and eloquent, angry teenaged children dominate the remaining weeks of the campaign. These stories drown out much of Biden’s messages about declining unemployment and legislative victories and distract from Trump’s slogans about immigrants and making America great again. The poignancy of the story draws in some Americans who paid little attention to politics, but for close watchers of politics, it was irresistible. Some question why the matter gets so much press when violence against people of color draws a fraction of the coverage. Others call for the suspension of Trump’s campaign, which leads to a whole new set of arguments about whether this was just a pretext to push him out of politics once again. One cable network devotes an hourlong program to a panel discussion about whether the Biden administration has done enough to curb political violence.

And so it continues, until Election Day.

Mother Nature wreaks havoc on the election

By Alec Ross

Alec Ross is the author of The Raging 2020s and a former senior State Department official during the Obama administration.

The latest-breaking event that will shape the 2024 presidential election will be a spectacularly destructive Category 5 hurricane that tears through the country just weeks before the election creating a Climate v. Christ binary in the electorate.

The Biden campaign will cite the hurricane as evidence of the extreme weather events produced by climate change that affirm his strategy to invest in next generation solutions to mitigate climate change. Trump will cite the storm as God’s wrath against Joe Biden.

Biden will spend the last weeks of the campaign visiting with victims and working from the White House and FEMA headquarters directing a response demonstrating his credentials as a competent and empathetic president. This will drive a youth vote that was withholding support back into the Democratic camp. Trump will visit a different disaster site every day and give speeches with his arms frequently spread in a crucifix pose. Millions of his evangelical Christian supporters will build a movement rooted in the belief that Trump is the resurrection of Christ to whom all worldly, secular powers must be transferred. Trump will do nothing to dissuade them. The election outcome will not be known until more than a month afterward because of the difficulty of administering an election with millions of Americans dislocated from their homes and home states due to the storm.

A message from outer space

By Avi Loeb

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University.

At the Galileo Project Observatory at Harvard University, we spend every day searching the universe for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Our research suggests that it’s only a matter of time before we’ll find something that signals that we’re not alone in the universe. And that will change a lot of things. There is no way to make a specific prediction on this matter. Of course, the Galileo Project could discover a technological object that arrived from interstellar space, or the U.S. government could disclose a similar finding.

Finding a package from a neighbor among familiar rocks in our backyard is an exciting event. So is the discovery of a technological object near Earth that was sent from an exoplanet. As a follow-up on such a finding, we could search for signals coming from any potential senders, starting from the nearest houses on our cosmic street. The sudden knowledge that we weren’t alone in the universe would immediately upend how humans think about themselves and their civilization, and the effects on earth would be both momentous and unpredictable.

This isn’t as speculative a scenario as you might think. The opportunity for a two-way communication with another civilization during our lifetime is limited to a distance of about 30 light years. But already we know of a dozen habitable exoplanets within 30 light years from Earth, and we are only aware of a few percent of them. But even if we identified all the nearby candidate planets for a two-way conversation, they would constitute a tiny fraction of the tens of billions of habitable planets within the Milky Way galaxy.

Most likely, any visiting probe we encounter had originated tens of thousands of light years away. In that case we will not be able to converse with the senders during our lifetime. Instead, we will need to infer their qualities from their probes, similar to the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who attempt to infer the nature of objects behind them based on the shadows they cast on the cave walls.

A digital apocalypse, and so much more

By Charlie Sykes

Charlie Sykes is editor-at-large at the Bulwark and host of the Bulwark Podcast.

Let’s set aside the obvious Black Swan events that could upend 2024: assassination(s), heart attack(s) or stroke(s). Let’s also stipulate that the entire year will be a Black Swan of sorts — with a leading party nominee facing trials on 91 felony counts. America might elect a convicted felon to its highest office. The swans don’t get any blacker than that.

What else could go wrong? A hell of a lot, because we live in an era of chaos and fragility. The new year is a nesting doll of unknown unknowns.

We could see 1968-like riots at the major party conventions and perhaps a humanitarian disaster at the border.

Internationally, we could see the collapse of an abandoned Ukraine and the subsequent invasion of Taiwan by an emboldened China. We could find ourselves on the brink of a nuclear confrontation amidst a global economic meltdown that would overshadow every other issue.

In 2020, no one envisioned a global pandemic, but in 2024, we might be hit by a global digital virus. What if the computers and the satellites stopped working? For even a few days? What if the virus attacked the world’s banking system, vaporizing trillions of dollars of wealth?

And since we are contemplating a Digital Apocalypse, we probably should brace ourselves for AI-generated fakes that could drop days before the election itself.

Happy New Year.

Global warming-induced havoc

By Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and author, most recently, of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

Given that 2024 seems almost certain to break 2023’s global temperature record (and this year was already the hottest in 125,000 years), the physics of global warming indicate that we can expect … havoc.

The precise form it will take and spots it will strike can never be known in advance — some combination of fire, flood, storm, drought and sapping heat — but it would be a shock only if it didn’t happen. And perhaps when it does, it will be one more reminder of the folly of electing climate deniers to high office.

A coup against Putin

By Bill Scher

Bill Scher is a contributing writer to POLITICO Magazine, the politics editor for the Washington Monthly and co-host of “The DMZ,” an online show and podcast with conservative writer Matt Lewis.

Some Kremlin analysts have suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “coup-proofed” his regime, using methods such as dividing military power between several agencies and outside organizations, as well as embedding the armed forces with spies, to stymie collaboration. We cannot know if coup-proofing will continue to work. The opaque nature of the Kremlin makes it difficult to see if Putin’s position is eroding. But a sudden end to Putin’s regime would change a lot of political equations around the world.

At least one figure is openly agitating for a coup: Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian Duma who voted against annexing Crimea in 2014, leading to his impeachment and exile to Ukraine. He now is a leader of a shadow parliament based in Poland, an opposition television channel and a small army called the Freedom of Russia Legion, which has claimed credit for some military operations within Russia. Ponomarev often speaks confidently; in July he told the Christian Science Monitor of the end of Putin’s rule, “We are months away. Maybe it would be the end of this year, maybe it would be the beginning of next year, but I’m absolutely convinced that it would not be like 2025 or later.”

Or Putin’s demise could come from within the Kremlin. Jack Devine, who served in the CIA for 32 years, recently predicted to The Sun, “Putin could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn’t be surprised if some element in the government had decided they were going to take executive action. ... I don’t think it’ll be an uprising. I think it’ll be what we might call a palace coup.”

Putin’s sudden disappearance would likely validate Joe Biden’s decision to stand with Ukraine and repel Russia’s invasion — unless what follows Putin is even worse.

The abortion battle gets even hotter

By Robert L. Tsai

Robert L. Tsai is professor of law at Boston University and the author of Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation.

For the moment, access to mifepristone to terminate pregnancy is unchanged. But imagine that the GOP-dominated Supreme Court upholds the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, rolling back access to mifepristone that’s been available for years. Since 2016, the FDA has allowed online ordering, mail delivery and receipt, and pharmacists to dispense the drug. Medication abortion now apparently accounts for nearly half of all terminated pregnancies in the U.S. — mostly in the comfort and safety of a person’s home.

Additionally, what if there were five votes to go with Judge James Ho’s more strident concurring opinion where he insisted federal law already bans “mail-order abortion?” Ho asserted that shipping mifepristone across state lines violates the Comstock Act, an anti-vice law from 1873 once used to ban mail-order contraception nationwide as “obscene.” (His colleagues on the panel didn’t go that far, striking down the FDA’s actions as “arbitrary” and refusing to defer to the FDA’s views about drug safety.) Because there is no longer a federal right to terminate one’s pregnancy after Dobbs, such a ruling would seem to immediately revive that 19th century law and potentially bar federal action to protect abortion access in other ways.

Whatever rationale the Supreme Court ultimately goes with, if the justices decide to sharply restrict access to mifepristone, their decision could limit even a single state’s ability to protect access to the drug outside of in-person settings. In theory, Congress could clarify or change federal law, but in polarized times it’s extremely difficult to reach legislative consensus to undo damage wrought by the Supreme Court.

A clash between states and the federal government could follow. Governors and state lawmakers who back abortion rights would likely enact laws that disagree with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of federal law and try to protect this availability as much as possible through state law. Anti-abortion state officials would be tempted to aggressively invoke any plausible state authority to block people from receiving such drugs in the mail.

While federal authorities are responsible for enforcing federal law, an anti-abortion state attorney general or district attorney might call federal officials derelict and perhaps overreach by engaging in a high-profile arrest of a manufacturer, shipper or mail delivery person. If that happened, you could see frustrated citizens who favor abortion rights take to the streets and the issue catapulted to the top of voters’ concerns. There could be a crackdown on protests that become unruly. Politically things would be unpredictable, with law-and-order arguments going both ways. Voters would have to figure out whether access to medication abortion is worth creative, popular efforts that pit regular people against elected officials and a hostile or indifferent Supreme Court.

A violent attack on a candidate

By Jeff Greenfield

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

If the polls and pols are right, we already know who the presidential nominees will be. What kind of Black Swan event could render this assumption inoperative?

Illness or injury: The two likely nominees will have a combined age of 160 on Election Day. The actuarial tables by themselves suggest a greater possibility of a disabling health issue than ever before. And, grim as the notion is, a violent assault on a candidate not only took the life of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, but sidelined Alabama Governor George Wallace four years later.

A grievous self-inflicted wound: Every time Joe Biden steps on a stage or off a plane, his supporters hold their breath. With most voters (including Democrats) thinking he’s too old to be president, a highly public stumble (physical or verbal) could turn that belief into a serious demand for someone else to take his place. In the case of Donald Trump, it would mean something he says or does that raises doubts among his less zealous supporters to change their assumptions about him. (Nikki Haley may have joined the League of Self-Inflicted Warriors when she failed to note that slavery was a cause of the Civil War.)

A New Hampshire surprise: If history is any guide, this is the “likeliest” of unlikely events. Time and time again the state has turned campaigns on their heads, forcing prohibitive favorites into lengthy battles, and rewarding underdog candidates whose dogged campaigning won their votes. Sometimes those campaigns produced bigger than expected results (Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Bill Clinton in 1992). Sometimes they won totally unexpected landslides (Gary Hart in 1984, John McCain in 2000 and 2008). If Haley can pull off that kind of result this year, it would undermine Trump’s “invincibility” and open the possibility of an actual contest.

A hurricane meets Jan. 6

By Jacob Soll

Jacob Soll is a professor of philosophy, history and accounting at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books).

Not a day goes by without an unexpected climate event: fires in the Northwest, tornadoes in Tennessee and hurricanes in Los Angeles. But imagine, for a moment, that one of these events happens during the upcoming presidential election. Indeed, imagine a monster hurricane hits the Mid-Atlantic seaboard on Election Day, shutting down D.C. and moving into Pennsylvania. Such an event could, very possibly, upend our democracy.

Surviving a weather disaster depends on good management and communication from public authorities. But we live in an age where large swathes of the public not only distrust science, but also the very government agencies that work to protect them in such an emergency. If a monster storm smashed into the D.C. area and then thrashed eastern and central Pennsylvania, with life-threatening winds, tornadoes and floods, one can imagine a particular form of political chaos.

If the Biden administration had to call for a closure of voting places and for the public to take shelter, one can imagine Donald Trump immediately claiming it constitutes an attempted coup. He could simply deny the disaster was actually happening, and he could call for his heavily armed voters to intervene in the election. What would happen then is anyone’s guess as National Guard troops might have to face these voters, or rebel themselves. It’s not an outlandish scenario. It’s simply a hurricane meets Jan. 6, and given how crazy our political system has become, it’s worth considering.

Global conflict scrambles the campaign

By Joshua Zeitz

Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing writer, is the author of Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation.

“The world has never been more disorderly within memory of living man,” observed the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1968. It’s an apt observation for 2024, as well — a year in which democracy stands in a pitched global struggle against populist authoritarianism, wars are devastating parts of Europe and the Middle East, and Americans continue to absorb the economic aftershocks of the pandemic.

There was no single Black Swan event in 1968, but Vietnam dictated the terms of the political debate and largely programmed the outcome of the presidential election. In that same way, events in other parts of the world could influence the outcome of next year’s contest.

Will the conflict in the Middle East spread regionally and necessitate direct American involvement? Will Joe Biden’s Israel policy cause the Democratic Party to continue to bleed support on the left? What happens if China, emboldened by Russian and Iranian aggression, makes its long-awaited move against Taiwan? Will terrorist threats hit closer to home?

Global conflict is the most likely of Black Swans, but it’s folly to predict how such an event might reverberate at home. One could just as easily imagine Biden profiting from a “rally around the flag” effect as Donald Trump eviscerating him on the basis of saber rattling. Living in such a disorderly time, the game board can easily be scrambled, and foreign actors know it.

Look to the Middle East for “peace” — and tech

By Joel Garreau

Joel Garreau is a professional scenario planner originally with Global Business Network and is Professor of Culture, Values and Emerging Technologies Emeritus at Arizona State University and a long-time reporter and editor with The Washington Post.

Last year, my scenario-planning students in the Dubai Executive Council’s Future Experts Program came up with two well-thought-out and credible Black Swan scenarios for the near future that made even my jaw drop:

• Peace in the Middle East/North Africa of a useful sort
• Rescuing the Taiwan chip makers from the Chinese by lavishly incentivizing them to move themselves and their fabs to the United Arab Emirates

The idea behind their “peace” scenario is their strongly held evaluation that the first choice for no Arab leader is more war to eradicate Israel. The vast majority of the Arab world, in this view, is sick of that bottomless scenario. They want their people to be like the rest of the Western world — relatively prosperous and entrepreneurial and bloodshed-free. As demonstrated by the tentative prospect of relationships with Israel by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other would-be leaders of the Middle East. In this perspective, most of the funding and arming of this region’s guerrilla violence is coming from Iran. Thus, leadership change in Iran fueled by its current deep-seated internal uprising could produce dramatic results for the world. The tipping point in this scenario would come from those in the Middle East who have a motivation for accelerating this regime change. Does everyone come together for a round of kumbaya? Hell no. This is the Middle East. But it is a scenario for — note the quotation marks — “peace.”

Will the Israel-Hamas war change that scenario? Who knows? It’s worth noting however that none of the Arab nations have yet joined the fray — in my mind confirming that economics still is a more deeply rooted part of this Black Swan.

The idea behind the China/Taiwan scenario is that it is globally unusual for chip-makers, after half a century, still to be concentrated in small portions of Europe, coastal Asia and the United States. In this view, the time is more than ripe for global diversification. Therefore, with a strong enough push, that concentration could change. China’s saber-rattling is plenty of incentive. The tipping point could come from a future-obsessed leadership seeking to punch way above their weight, fueled by a decades-long history of achieving amazing feats they were told couldn’t be done — from the world’s tallest building to the world’s busiest international passenger airport. And lots of money. All of which Dubai has.

Note: These are not predictions. They are scenarios. But scenario thinking is where the idea of Black Swans came from. Nor will these Black Swans culminate in the coming year. But it is credible to imagine them seriously starting in 2024.

In a post-American world order, Africa becomes a power player

By Reynaldo Anderson

Reynaldo Anderson is an associate professor of Africology and African American studies at Temple University. A co-founder of The Black Speculative Arts Movement, he is currently working on “The Democracy Project” as a guest curator with Carnegie Hall’s “Dancing on the Precipice: Fall of The Weimar Republic.

A Black Swan event in geopolitics might arise from a new approach to governance, resource allocation or international cooperation that renders contemporary geopolitical models obsolete. For example, a state or a coalition of states could lead to a reshuffling of alliances and economic relationships — such as the recent alliance between the states of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso with Morocco for a seaport and the Russian announcement of the formation of an “Africa Corps.”

This marks the beginning of the end of France Afrique and their legacy of colonial empire. Such a shift would have a wide impact on global election outcomes in 2024 — a shift that Afrofuturists have long been predicting.

Afrofuturism is an emerging philosophy and practice whereby Africans and people of African descent locate themselves in time and space with agency. It is a framework for exploring the future of Africa and the African diaspora. In a world where traditional narratives have been dominated by Western perspectives, a Black Swan event within an Afrofuturist context could take the form of a shift in social organization, or movement that originates from Africa or the African diaspora and impacts global dynamics and challenges existing geopolitical assumptions around diverse issues like A.I., decolonization, reparations, food security, climate change and migration.

The notion of a post-American world order suggests a geopolitical landscape where the United States’ influence as the sole superpower has significantly diminished, and power is diffused among a variety of state and non-state actors. In such a world, traditional alliances, economic structures and political paradigms would be upended, creating a fluid and multipolar global stage. In this shifting world order, a Black Swan event could manifest as a sudden realignment of global power.

Revolt against Putin

By John McLaughlin

John McLaughlin was acting director and deputy director of CIA from 2000-2004 and now teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

My candidate flows from Russia. As best we can tell, Putin’s approval rating is solid and high. The most reliable opinion data also suggests that the Russian public is broadly apathetic or at least chooses to not think about the war in Ukraine (except for minorities at both ends of the spectrum who actively approve or disapprove of the war). And by all accounts, Putin is feeling more comfortable than heretofore because of the static lines in Ukraine, divisions appearing in the West and turbulence in Ukrainian politics.

So, a Black Swan event that would defy expectations about Russia would be a sustained Russian mothers’ revolt over the high Russian casualty rate in Ukraine (as occurred over Russia’s occupation of Afghanistan and the Chechnya war), gathering steam around the time of Russia’s presidential election (March 15-17) and cutting into Putin’s expected large majority. If this were to occur, it could limit Putin’s ability to prosecute the war as aggressively as in recent months because this has depended to a large degree on massing troops without much regard to casualties. This, in turn, could enhance Ukrainian ability to penetrate Russian defenses while also giving Kviv a propaganda advantage. Any weakening of Putin’s position as Russian president could trigger cascading effects that would impact events around the world in unpredictable ways — including our own election in 2024.

A Katrina-level catastrophe could change the political game

By Eric Easter

Eric Easter is a writer and producer in Washington. He is a veteran of the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, L Douglas Wilder and Howard Dean.

If I’m honest, I think we’re overthinking the whole election process. I think we underestimate the sense of responsibility most people feel when they step into the voting booth, and we’ve seen the evidence of that in recent elections and who’s won and lost across the country over the last four years or so. We’ll see some significant shifts in voting blocs, particularly in the 18-24 crowd, but not enough to change the outcome.

That said, I think this year might bring a major climate catastrophe to an American city — Katrina-level but much worse — that’s going to force us to see the need for having an adult in the Oval Office and a government that works and still exists. But it will have to be something naturally occurring and undeniable. I’m afraid we’re too far gone into our own silos for anything political to change the game.

POLITICO

Politico · by ZACK STANTON

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