Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called "wars of liberation," to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the U.S.

Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military Academy, June 06, 1962

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation."

– Coretta Scott King

"If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho' we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny."

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"What historical narrative are we willing to weave in order to remind people not only that we were here enduring the trials but that we stared the fang-toothed wolves of injustice in the face and said, 'No more.'"

– Travon Free

Coffee or Die Presents - History of the Green Berets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g3XVG3oD9s

Jun 18, 2024

We take an in depth look into the history of the Army's special forces as well as first hand accounts from former operators. Learn more about why Black Rifle Coffee Company is America's Coffee: http://brcc.coffee/2rgH6vu

1. Is It Time to Step Up Defense Spending?

2. The Art of Irregular Warfare Campaigning: A Job for Which Headquarters or Agency?

3. Biden Administration Delays Moving Forward With F-15 Sale to Israel

4. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 18, 2024

5. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 18, 2024

6. State Department subpoenaed over Global Disinformation Index funding

7. What Will Replace the Marine Corps?

8. Marines Corps’ landing ship taking longer, costing more than planned

9. A Critical And Devastating Gap In Our Leadership Traits, Principles, Evaluations, Ethos, And Culture: The Problem With Solutions

10. First Black Navy SEAL, William Goines, dies at 88

11. Drones in Ukraine Get Smarter to Dodge Russia’s Jamming Signals

12. West Point Officer Arraigned on Charges of Drinking with Cadets, Violating No-Contact Orders for Women's Tennis Team

13. What to Know About Suicides in the U.S. Army

14. The Soft Cyber Underbelly of the U.S. Military

15. The Return of Peace Through Strength

16. A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is

17. Quality Has a Quality All Its Own: The Virtual Attrition Value of Superior-Performance Weapons

18. Fremen Stillsuits and Heated Bubble Gyms: Preparing the Army to Fight and Win on a Rapidly Warming Battlefield

1. Is It Time to Step Up Defense Spending?

Interesting effort here by the Wall Street Journal. We need to engage the young voices from around the nation. Only one from flyover country though.

I notice a distinct difference between the Ivy League students and the two midwest and west coast students.

Anika Horowitz from the University of Wisconsin hits it out of the ball park here. She is wise beyond her years. The Ivy Leaguers could learn a thing or two from her. She is a future SECDEF or SECSTATE.

Increased military spending is dismissed from two directions. The left has adopted a postmodern, self-loathing pacifism characterized by moral relativism and failed appeasement. Meantime, right-wing isolationism has re-emerged, pandering to a populist base. Many progressives view war itself, rather than malign powers, as the enemy. This lack of moral clarity perpetuates the belief that conflict can be avoided through disarmament and diplomacy.

Is It Time to Step Up Defense Spending?

Students discuss the military budget and modern warfare.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-it-time-to-step-up-defense-spending-8e9d035f?mod=latest_headlines

June 18, 2024 5:38 pm ET

The Pentagon. PHOTO: DANIEL SLIM/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Editor’s note: In this Future View, students discuss defense spending. Next we’ll ask, “Who will—or should—be Donald Trump’s vice president? Will the pick help or hurt his campaign?” Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words by July 1. The best responses will be published Tuesday night.

Disarmament and Diplomacy Won’t Work

Increased military spending is dismissed from two directions. The left has adopted a postmodern, self-loathing pacifism characterized by moral relativism and failed appeasement. Meantime, right-wing isolationism has re-emerged, pandering to a populist base. Many progressives view war itself, rather than malign powers, as the enemy. This lack of moral clarity perpetuates the belief that conflict can be avoided through disarmament and diplomacy.

Yet history shows that adversaries take advantage of delusions and military unpreparedness. Germany began to rearm soon after World War I. The Allies responded by signing the Washington Naval Treaty, significantly limiting their naval power. Japan, which had also signed the treaty, invaded Manchuria in 1931. Soon after Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland, Hitler invaded Poland. By contrast, deterrence won the Cold War and has prevented World War III.

Today, the Biden administration’s attempts to revive the Iranian nuclear agreement have emboldened Iran and its proxies. Russia has invaded Ukraine, and China threatens Taiwan. Peace can be achieved only by making war so costly that enemies deem escalation unthinkable. The populist right argues that America can’t increase military spending while law and order collapse in metropolitan areas and migrants pour across the border. Increasing military spending to deter a larger war, however, is far cheaper than fighting one in the future. Unless Democrats and Republicans build up enough military power to deter adversaries while supporting allies that fight for themselves, war will persist and spread.

—Anika Horowitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison, economics

The New Warfare

Increasing U.S. defense spending is like dumping water into an overflowing swimming pool. The U.S. last year spent more on defense than the next nine countries combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Despite already having a more-than-formidable military, the U.S. has been unable to quell global terrorist groups such as Islamic State or dissuade countries such as Russia from encroaching on their neighbors’ sovereignty. The size and capabilities of the U.S. military aren’t the problem.

While a strong military presence is important, the means by which modern wars are being waged transcends military solutions. Cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns and economic competition are becoming increasingly popular tools of warfare. The U.S. must adapt to the modern battlefield by strengthening its diplomatic ties, investing in technological innovation, and promoting economic resilience through spending on healthcare, education and infrastructure. Future wars won’t be fought only by soldiers. They will be fought by engineers, researchers and scientists.

—Matt Kirschner, Yale University, economics

We’re Funding Atrocities

America shouldn’t increase its military budget, as the country has committed numerous atrocities with its existing military funds, such as funding the current genocide in Gaza. An increase in the country’s military budget would expand the U.S. as an imperial state that promotes settler colonialism and xenophobia, which hurt Americans and non-Americans. The policy would also remove funding from other sectors that deserve more funds, such as education and housing.

—William Diep, Columbia University, history and sociology

It Isn’t 1990 Anymore

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, American power dominated international politics and threats from strategic competitors all but disappeared. This is no longer the case. America’s moment as the undisputed superpower is over, and the U.S. defense budget lags behind our national-security needs. China’s rising defense budgets and nuclear buildup are stark examples of this reality. In particular, the Defense Department estimates that China will have 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030.

While adversaries modernize their military capabilities, the U.S. defense industrial base remains in a sorry state. The Office of Naval Intelligence reports that China has more than 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the U.S. In a Taiwan conflict, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the U.S. would likely run out of critical long-range antiship missiles in less than a week. The U.S. lacks the military capabilities to deter Chinese, Russian and Iranian aggression.

It’s no longer the 1990s. In an era of great-power competition, peace is possible only through strength. Restoring deterrence and protecting the rules-based international order will require a massive increase in defense outlays to revitalize the U.S. nuclear and defense industrial complex. It will also require investments in the development of cost-effective deterrence strategies.

—Alexander Richter, University of California, Berkeley, economics

Click here to submit a response to next week’s Future View.

2. The Art of Irregular Warfare Campaigning: A Job for Which Headquarters or Agency?

This should generate some discussion and debate.

Tue, 06/18/2024 - 9:54pm

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/art-irregular-warfare-campaigning-job-which-headquarters-or-agency

The Art of Irregular Warfare Campaigning: A Job for Which Headquarters or Agency?

By Paul Burton

Irregular Warfare (IW) Campaigning is the art of using available resources by the Department of Defense and other Agencies in a series of linked actions, over an extended period, to eventually gain a marked advantage over your adversary, who will also be referred to as peer competitors. This long-term strategy requires continuity of desired end states through both political administrations and military command rotations. This was done by and large during the Cold War, albeit with course adjustments; the key was that the majority of America never questioned that the Soviet Union was our number one enemy. This basic common focus during the Cold War helped facilitate a unity of purpose and effort from different organizations, if not a unity of command and priority of tasks. So, the question is what agency or headquarters should take the lead in IW campaigning in the present multi-polar complex world?

Campaigning for conventional warfare is complex, but campaigning for IW is rocket science. Presently, we are without a school to teach this type of rocket science, and an organization to launch the rocket. The complexities of IW campaigning require staffs and agencies that understand IW. It necessitates that the organizations conducting the campaign design to make a mental and cultural shift from the last 30 years from what they have done. For example, there are only a couple of individuals on active duty that served in junior positions during the Cold War and the concepts of IW are not taught in sufficient breadth and depth by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the other agencies to staff the organizations that will be conducting the campaigns. It also implies that the executing organizations will underwrite risk and failures. Additionally, there is the age-old problem of different guidance and doctrine from different organizations and time periods. The new JP 1-1 published August 2023, states “Campaigning is the persistent conduct and sequencing of military activities aligned with other instruments of national power to achieve prioritized objectives over time through global campaigns, combatant command (CCMD) campaigns, and associated families of contingency plans. Combatant commanders (CCDRs) campaign to deter attacks, assure allies and partners, compete below armed conflict, prepare for and respond to threats, protect internationally agreed-upon norms, and, when necessary, prevail.” This implies that the CCMD is responsible for the regional IW campaign drawing on interagency support across the instruments of national power to win the campaign. Ultimately, the CCMD has the responsibility for their theater, but which sub-unified commander should be the main effort and in what phase? Additionally, should the DOD be a supporting agency short of armed conflict? This necessitates an agency that both understands the roles and missions of DOD resources and can appropriately assign objectives to the DOD in support of broader IW objectives.

The first rule of campaigning is you start where you are not where you want to be. If your competitor has the operational initiative when the campaign starts, you must build capacity and capability to regain the initiative and enter their decision-making cycle. Easier said than done; however, the construct of time, space, scale, and sequencing provides a framework to accomplish this. In today’s environment, this construct must be synchronized in the following domains: air, land, sea, cyber, space, and human. Time is defined as the length of time for the campaign which drives the resources to achieve effects in the phases of the campaign. Two points of refinement. First, the new JP-5.0 says you don’t have to have phasing, but I beg to disagree. Phasing helps synchronizes your sequencing, provides intermediate objectives to accomplish to move to the next phase, helps define decisive points and decision points, and I never met a commander who did not want a phased operation. Secondly, phasing helps synchronize the transition of the designation of which HQ is the main effort. For example, if the Theater Special Operations Command (TSOC) a sub-unified command, was the supported command for the first three phases of a five-phase operation; preparation, build, and employ the TSOC would most likely try to transition the responsibility of being the supported command to a HQ with more and different resources during the stability and transition phase of a campaign.

Space is the operational geometry of the campaign and the first thing you should do is get out an old-fashioned map, so you can understand the tyranny of distance. During GWOT, the U.S. and allied forces dominated space, but in a peer competition, control of space will be contested, making it more important than ever. Projecting effects and scale in the area of operations, for the IW campaigns in each theater, will not have equal resources placed against the problem, forcing prioritization and sequencing at the national level. In peer competition is about the level of advantage achieved at the desired space at the appropriate and necessary time. Every theater in IW is a theater of operation, including USNORTHCOM, which complicates the ability to force project.

Scale is the term I use instead of troops, which is stated in the Joint Publication, because it is about the effect that can be achieved to gain a marked advantage or decisive point. Leveraging a cyber or space asset is not a troop. The Joint Doctrine is generally written for conventional campaigns and in IW campaigning the executor must apply art to the Joint Doctrine to effectively conduct the operation. Managing the scale is important not only because long term nature of IW campaigning and multi-theater requirements, but also because the goal is not to escalate into conventional combat operations. The scale applied is critical in maintaining the threshold of success to a level which does not induce a peer to launch conventional combat operations.

Sequencing is not in the Joint Publication; however, it is vital for the following reasons:

First, to achieve the desired effect at the appropriate time, you must flow or leverage resources into the area of operations to support the campaign intermediate objectives. Second, the HQ in charge of the campaign must weigh resources that can counter the peer competitor or adversarial capability while building our own capacity and capability. Thirdly, in an environment of limited resources, especially air and sea deployment assets, wargaming should partially drive sequencing to mitigate risks and exploit adversarial weakness. The days of building huge ISBs with unlimited resources are probably in the past. Finally, sequencing is a larger concept than just flowing resources into the area of operation. It is about imposing costs on the peer competitor or setting a condition to provide United States or Partner Nations interagency with the ability to politically and diplomatically exploit the action to erode, degrade and de-legitimize our peer competitors.

So, what agency or Headquarters should take the lead in IW campaigning? It is my opinion that the Theater Special Operations Commands should take the lead in the IW Line of Effort (LOE) in supporting the broader Theater Campaign Plan. The Theater Command should be the HQ that leverages the sub-unified commands to support IW activities that are not Special Operations Forces (SOF) missions. For example, disrupting a peer competitor’s fishing operations that is stealing fish protein from a partner nation’s waters is not a mission for SOF. It could be the job of the naval sub-unified command. Additionally, the Theater Commands are better resourced to coordinate with other US and Partner Nation agencies to accomplish broad military and political objectives; however, one of the resources they presently lack are IW thinkers and planners. Undoubtably, the question will be asked, what about global and transregional plans?

Clearly, the TSOCs can coordinate across theaters with each other, and USSOCOM should have a role in the inter-theater sequencing and distribution of resources through the Service components. In a perfect world, the State Departments Policy and Plans would outline flawless objectives for the next 50-year peer competitor challenge, but it did not happen during the 20-year GWOT, and it won’t happen now. This leaves only one agency with both capacity and capability available for the United States, the DOD, and within DOD it must be regional commands with Joint Staff oversight for prioritization and synchronization of resources.

Paul Burton is a retired SF Colonel who is still active in the community.

This is the fourth article in a series of articles on Irregular warfare.

The opinions expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not reflect any organizations viewpoint.

About the Author(s)

Paul Burton

Paul Burton is a retired Special Forces Colonel and is still active in the community.

3. Biden Administration Delays Moving Forward With F-15 Sale to Israel

Biden Administration Delays Moving Forward With F-15 Sale to Israel

A month after senior congressional Democrats lifted their hold on the fighters, the State Department hasn’t yet sent the formal notification to lawmakers

https://www.wsj.com/world/congressional-leaders-allow-major-arms-sale-to-israel-to-proceed-after-white-house-pressure-f2e48389?mod=latest_headlines

By Jared Malsin

Follow and Nancy A. Youssef

Updated June 18, 2024 6:43 pm ET

An Israeli Air Force F-15 jet fighter flying near the border with the Gaza Strip. PHOTO: ABIR SULTAN/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

The Biden administration hasn’t moved forward with the sale of a fleet of F-15 jet fighters to Israel, even after congressional leaders agreed to allow the major weapons deal to proceed last month, U.S. officials said.

Two top congressional Democratic leaders on May 22 removed a hold they had placed on the deal over concerns about civilian deaths in the war in Gaza. Releasing the hold would allow the State Department to formally notify lawmakers of the sale—a requirement for a major weapons deal to proceed—but the administration hasn’t yet taken that step, according to administration and congressional officials.

The $18 billion sale of 50 warplanes is one of the largest arms deals with Israel in recent years, and comes as President Biden is facing calls from leaders in his own party to withhold American weapons to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept an end to the Gaza war. The administration also is urging Israel to de-escalate tensions along its northern border with Lebanon.

“There is no policy guidance to slow down transfers to Israel,” a State Department official told The Wall Street Journal. However, some in the administration are concerned the deal could lead to broader congressional opposition, the official said.

“We are looking tactically at the timing. It is not a question of whether,” the State Department official said. “It is a question of when.”

The White House declined to comment.

The potential sale also comes during a prolonged U.S.-backed effort to secure a cease-fire that would stop the fighting in Gaza and free Israeli hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The effort has involved months of complex diplomacy by the U.S. along with Egypt and Qatar, who are mediating in the talks between Israel and Hamas.

Women mourning Palestinians killed in the war in Gaza. PHOTO: RAMADAN ABED/REUTERS

The delay illustrates a dilemma facing Biden, who is contending with pressure from his own party and criticism from Republicans. The war in Gaza has become one the most contentious foreign-policy issues in the November U.S. presidential election.

“That is highly unusual. The formal notification after Congress has cleared the case usually takes, at most, a week,” said Josh Paul, a State Department official who resigned in October in protest of the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war.

Netanyahu on Tuesday rebuked the administration over what he described as a holdup on supplies of U.S. weapons and ammunition. “It’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel,” he said in an English-language video.

In response to Netanyahu’s comments, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said only one shipment of weapons to Israel had been paused amid concerns about Israel’s offensive in Rafah.

“We continue to have these constructive discussions with Israelis for the release of that particular shipment,” she said in a press briefing.

Earlier this year, the administration informed key congressional committees about the F-15 sale as part of an informal process that allows leaders to voice objections. Two of the four congressional leaders who sign off on major arms deals, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D., N.Y.), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, initially blocked the sale.

Rep. Gregory Meeks has expressed concerns about civilian casualties in Gaza. PHOTO: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/ZUMA PRESS

“Any issues or concerns Chair Cardin had were addressed through our ongoing consultations with the Administration, and that is why he felt it appropriate to allow this case to move forward,” said Eric Harris, a spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The lifting of the congressional holds was earlier reported by the Washington Post.

The decision followed extensive White House pressure on congressional leaders to unblock the deal, according to officials familiar with the matter. If the sale is formally approved, the F-15s would likely be delivered in about five years, congressional officials said.

Meeks said he had been in talks with the White House about the sale and had “repeatedly urged the Administration to continue pushing Israel to make significant and concrete improvements on all fronts when it comes to humanitarian efforts and limiting civilian casualties.”

More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials say. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.) is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. PHOTO: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/ZUMA PRESS

The U.S. has sent Israel tens of thousands of bombs, tank and artillery ammunition, precision weapons and air-defense equipment since the war began, often drawing on $23 billion worth of weapons transfers that have been previously approved by Congress.

The Biden administration in May paused a shipment of weapons that included 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs as the White House was urging Israel to pull back from a full-scale assault on the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. More than a million Palestinian civilians were sheltering in the area at the time. Israel has since gone ahead with the operation, though U.S. officials said it has adjusted its tactics in response to White House concerns.

The administration separately took steps in May to proceed with the future transfer of more than $1 billion of armaments including tank ammunition, mortar rounds and vehicles for the Israeli military. Netanyahu is set to address Congress in July.

“I say it is enough of the indiscriminate bombing. I don’t want the kinds of weapons that Israel has to be utilized to have more death,” Meeks said in an interview with CNN in April.

Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

4. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 18, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 18, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-18-2024

Key Takeaways:

Russian President Vladimir Putin published an article in North Korean state-owned newspaper Rodong Sinmun praising Russian–North Korean cooperation on the eve of his visit to North Korea, likely to frame any future support that North Korea will lend to Russia as part of a common struggle against the West.
Ukrainian forces struck Russian oil depots in Rostov Oblast and Krasnodar Krai overnight on June 17 to 18, using domestically produced Neptune missiles against a ground target in Russia for the second time.
Ukrainian forces have now conducted two strikes with its own Neptune missiles against areas in Russian territory that are within range of US-provided ATACMS but that are also protected by US policy that has established a vast sanctuary in Russian territory.
The Russian government is charging Ukrainian servicemen and military officials with crimes in absentia as part of its efforts to enforce Russian federal law outside of its jurisdiction and insinuate that Ukraine should not exist as an independent state.
Founder of the Kremlin-linked Rybar Telegram Channel, Mikhail Zvinchuk, gave his second uncharacteristically public interview within a month in which he criticized the state of Russia's war effort in Ukraine and acknowledged that Western sanctions are negatively affecting Russia's industry and economy.
Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Vovchansk, Svatove, and Avdiivka
Russian President Vladimir Putin continues efforts to groom Russian military personnel for positions in the Russian government through the Kremlin's "Time of Heroes" program.
Russian occupation officials continue their efforts to militarize Ukrainian youth in occupied Ukraine.

5. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 18, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 18, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-june-18-2024

Key Takeaways:

Iran: Iranian presidential candidates discussed the economy in the first debate for the upcoming election.
Iran has begun running computer models that could support the research and development of nuclear weapons.
Gaza Strip: A senior Israeli negotiator told Agence France-Presse that Hamas still holds “dozens” of living hostages in the Gaza Strip.
An Israeli Army Radio correspondent reported on June 18 details from an IDF Southern Command discussion on Hamas’ military capabilities in the Gaza Strip.
West Bank: Israeli forces engaged Palestinian fighters in at least two locations in the West Bank.
Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted three attacks into northern Israel.
Iraq: The US State Department designated Harakat Ansar Allah al Awfiya (HAAA) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
Yemen: US CENTCOM said that it has destroyed four Houthi radars and one Houthi unmanned surface vessel in Yemen.

6. State Department subpoenaed over Global Disinformation Index funding

State Department subpoenaed over Global Disinformation Index funding

https://unherd.com/newsroom/state-department-subpoenaed-over-global-disinformation-index-funding/?mc_cid=00571cf984&mc_eid=70bf478f36

BY LAUREL DUGGAN

JUNE 17, 2024 - 8:00PMHouse Republicans have subpoenaed the Global Engagement Center’s records following reports that the State Department-funded entity was funnelling government money into global censorship projects, the Washington Examiner reported.

The GEC helped fund the Global Disinformation Index, a British ratings agency which purports to fight disinformation by steering advertising revenue away from offending websites through an opaque ratings system. In reality, the GDI targets disfavoured media outlets, often conservative, and starves them of revenue by warning advertisers that the sites are toxic to brands. The GDI attributed UnHerd’s blacklisting to the publication of the work of Kathleen Stock, a “gender-critical feminist”.

The subpoena demands Secretary of State Antony Blinken turn over a list of the GEC’s grant recipients since 2019, along with communications related to GEC grants and agreements with a list of recipients including Newsguard and other censorship organisations.

The GDI also targeted conservative outlets in the US including the Daily Wire and the Federalist, which are currently suing the State Department for allegedly censoring their reporting in violation of the First Amendment. The lawsuit argues that the GEC is violating its government mandate to only address foreign propaganda and misinformation by funding organisations that throttle American reporting.

The subpoena is the latest in the GOP’s push to shut down the State Department’s censorship activities. Republicans are also attempting to block government funding for the GEC by refusing to reauthorise it in the federal budget, and a judge recently allowed the case to move forward in a written opinion emphasising the free speech implications of the case.

The anti-disinformation industry is now facing a funding problem, as several supporters of the GDI were removed from its website this spring following a wave of reports on their censorship of journalism. The US State Department-funded Disinformation Cloud was taken out of the GDI’s public-facing list of sponsors, as was the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and one non-governmental sponsor. The UK government recently confirmed it would no longer fund the GDI, and the push from the US to cut off funding for such projects is well underway.

is UnHerd’s US correspondent.

laureldugg

7. What Will Replace the Marine Corps?

Another provocative essay from Colonel Anderson.

What Will Replace the Marine Corps?

We still need amphibious forces conducting ground operations. The Marines aren’t prepared too anymore.

https://spectator.org/what-will-replace-the-marine-corps/?mc_cid=00571cf984&mc_eid=70bf478f36

by GARY ANDERSON

June 18, 2024, 1:11 AM

In his book on maritime power To Rule the Waves, author Bruce Jones points out that, if the United States is to wage war with anyone other than Canada or Mexico, we need to do it with naval power. Ever since the invasions of Normandy and Okinawa where the Army provided significant amphibious landing forces, the leading edge of the projection of combat power ashore has been the United States Marine Corps. That is no longer the case.

Since 2019, the Marine Corps has largely abandoned its amphibious capability in favor of a limited mission of deterring or fighting a war with China in the South China Sea, all to fulfill the vision of the former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger. The concept is called Stand-in Forces. To buy the anti-ship missiles required to carry out his vision, Berger divested the Marine Corps of all of its tanks, much of its artillery, all of its heavy engineering and assault bridging and breaching capabilities as well as significant aviation assets, But as Jones points out we still need some way of projecting naval power ashore. The question now is who will do it? There are several possibilities. (READ MORE: Biden Has Allowed the Marine Corps to Become Irrelevant)

One candidate would be our special operations forces. They certainly have the combat skills to attack a defended shore. But, there is a problem. If they are to obtain the tanks, engineers, and other heavy assets needed to assault a hostile beach, they will lose the agility that makes them “special” in the first place. Amphibious operations in today’s hostile littoral environment take constant skill and practice. The Marine Corps used to have this because it and the Navy kept amphibious forces deployed in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Western Pacific. These Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) practiced constantly for amphibious operations. If a crisis popped up, they could be brought together into a brigade-sized landing force and further reinforced quickly to the division or corps level if needed. For example, during Operation Desert Storm, the Marine Corps mustered two combined arms divisions for the ground assault and a brigade off the coast of Kuwait for an amphibious operation if needed.

Since then, Gen. Berger has released the Navy from its commitment to maintain the number of ships needed to keep up the constant overseas MEU rotation because he believed that the capability was no longer needed.

The army is a second option. Some army units could be targeted for amphibious assault missions, but the army considers itself the nation’s force for fighting big wars on land. It has traditionally left the “lesser contingency” missions such as embassy and civilian evacuations and pop-up humanitarian assistance to the forward-deployed MEUs. Retooling the army to take aboard amphibious operations is not impossible, but it would be painful for the organization and expensive for the country.

A third option is to outsource amphibious operations to allies — after all, the British have recently shown interest in expanding their capabilities — however, economy of scale becomes a problem if large operations are needed. The British Army and Royal Marines combined would be hard-pressed to fill a good-sized soccer stadium. The Japanese have shown some interest in expanding their overseas expeditionary capability, but they would have some constitutional problems in developing a serious amphibious capability. In any case, we would have to build a consensus on what wars we would jointly fight. (READ MORE: Elon Musk and OpenAI Are at War. Your Data Is at Stake.)

There is a fourth option. That is to rebuild the Marine Corps as a worldwide force constantly ready to take action. One of the mysteries of the Marine Corps’ decision to concentrate on an anti-ship mission in the South China Sea is whether or not the joint force combatant commander responsible for the region even wanted this Marine Corps contribution. The current Indo-Pacific commander has not yet weighed in on the subject. A recent war game conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found the Stand-in Force concept to be duplicative and less effective than capabilities already possessed by other services and unable to contribute “heavily” in most scenarios. (READ MORE: A War-Ravaged Sudan Teeters on the Edge of Crisis)

There might even be some unanticipated goodness here. The capabilities that Gen. Berger discarded were Reagan-era legacy systems. The Marine Corps could experiment with newer and more capable tanks, artillery, and engineering systems and pick the best. In any case, we will have a dangerous gap in our national power projection capability for a number of years. In the future, we will have to be more careful in the power that we give a single service chief.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who lectures on Alternative Analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2003-5.

8. Marines Corps’ landing ship taking longer, costing more than planned

Marines Corps’ landing ship taking longer, costing more than planned

marinecorpstimes.com · by Todd South · June 18, 2024

A key vessel Marines need to move around in a potential island shootout with China is two years behind schedule, could cost nearly triple its original estimate and the short-term fix isn’t cheap.

The Navy’s landing ship medium program expects to award its design and construction contract in fiscal year 2025, two years later than originally planned, according to the Government Accountability Office’s Annual Weapons Systems Assessment, released Monday.

The concept, formerly called the light amphibious warship, was launched in 2020 to procure 35 such stern landing vessels.

The ship would hew closely to commercial designs to lower its signature and provide the recently formed Marine littoral regiments with options for maneuvering in areas close to shore and within island chains, especially in the Pacific.

Marines expect ‘big year’ for drone, ship and logistics testing

Aerial and maritime drones coupled with a new shore-to-shore connector aim to overcome logistical hurdles.

The current ship being used for testing is the stern landing vessel, a modified commercial watercraft that allows users to offload and onload directly from the beach.

“It is a shore-to-shore logistics connect to get heavy things that we can’t put on airplanes or don’t want to have a big ship coming in to bring, get it from Point A to Point B to move; maneuver it from Point B to a more advantageous position at Point C; and then sustain that position,” Assistant Commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney said in March.

Original design features for the landing ship medium concept include:

A length of 200 to 400 feet.
A draft, or depth of the vessel beneath the waterline, of 12 feet.
A crew of about 70 sailors.
The capacity for carrying 50 Marines and 648 short tons of equipment.
8,000 square feet of deck cargo space
Transit speed of 14 knots and a cruising range of 3,500 nautical miles.
Roll-on/roll-off beaching capability for beaches with a 1:40 grade.
A helicopter landing pad.
Two 30 mm guns and six .50-caliber guns for self-defense.
A 20-year service life.

Source: Congressional Research Services

The first of three planned regiments became operational in 2023. The Navy is developing a bridging strategy, according to the report. Marine Corps Times has reported on ongoing experimentation with commercial vessels modified to meet the service’s landing needs throughout the past two years.

But those solutions require “significant modifications,” according to the report, costing upward of $115 million per modified vessel.

A 2020 report by Congressional Research Services that was updated in April noted that Congress could consider adapting the existing fleet of Army logistics support vessels for at least some of the Marines’ requirements.

The Army has more than 100 such vessels in its fleet, according to that report. Dozens of those vessels have similar capabilities to the landing ships the Corps is seeking.

At the time the Army had sought to divest some of its watercraft fleet. But since then, the service has shifted its logistics needs to the Pacific and now wants to expand the fleet, Defense News reported.

Army logistics support vessel USAV SP/4 James A. Loux prepares to conduct a stern gate transfer with amphibious dock landing ship Carter Hall. (Petty Officer 3rd Class Kristin L. Grover/Navy)

Under the current timeline, the Navy expects to award the construction contract for the ships in March 2025 and have the first ship delivered by January 2029. On that schedule, the Navy expects to conclude operational testing by July 2030 and hit initial capability by December 2034, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

Another report released in April shows a much higher overall cost for the program than officials originally planned.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the initial 18-ship program could cost between $6.2 billion and $7.8 billion in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars, Marine Corps Times’ sister publication Defense News reported in April.

That translates to $340 million to $430 million per hull.

That’s three times more than the original estimate of $2.6 billion for the program ― or $150 million per ship.

If the Navy gets the green light to buy the full fleet of 35 landing ships, as the Marine Corps has requested, the program will cost between $11.9 billion and $15 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office report.

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

9. A Critical And Devastating Gap In Our Leadership Traits, Principles, Evaluations, Ethos, And Culture: The Problem With Solutions

Graphics and charts at the link: https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/leadership-critical-and-devastating-gap/?mc_cid=00571cf984&mc_eid=70bf478f36

A Critical And Devastating Gap In Our Leadership Traits, Principles, Evaluations, Ethos, And Culture: The Problem With Solutions

Posted on June 15,2024

Article Date 01/07/2024

2023 Gen Robert E. Hogaboom Leadership Writing Contest: Honorable Mention

The title, Marine, is synonymous with leadership. Many outside entities study the Marine Corps to understand its leadership traits, principles, values, and ethos. Yet, “the reader should note that there is a difference between a philosophy and a culture. A philosophy is merely words, but a culture is what truly matters since the culture is the unwritten norms and rules of an organization.”1 While we have a good leadership ethos, we must remember that “good is the enemy of great.”2

Jim Collins states that many organizations fail to become great because becoming good is achievable and comfortable.3 Though the Marine Corps is considered by many as an organization in which outsiders should emulate our leadership philosophy, we are missing one critical leadership trait, in which we are limiting our ability to effectively and efficiently achieve mission success, impose our will, develop and empower our subordinates, and sustain the transformation of our Marines. We, the Marine Corps, must recognize that humility is needed: as one of our leadership traits; to be incorporated into our leadership principles; as a metric in our evaluations; in our ethos; and most importantly to be consistently demonstrated and applied in our culture. As stated by Hayes and Comer, “Humility is one of the most important attributes of leadership because it helps connect the leader to followers through their common bond of humanity. Leaders who have humility build trust, and trust is the essence of leadership.”4 Therefore, the purpose of this article is to clearly showcase the importance of humility, and then provide solutions to our Corps’ decision makers on how to incorporate humility officially in our ethos and culture.

“Leaders who have humility are able to build trust and inspire people to want to follow them.” -Merwyn Hayes and Michael Comer

What Is Humility?

According to Hayes and Comer, authors of the book Start with Humility, the word “humility” is derived from ancient Greek, meaning “not rising far from the ground,” and Latin, meaning “of the ground or earth.”5 This concept is essential for leaders within the Marine Corps because as we progress in rank and billet, we must “remember that you are above the Marines only in rank structure and nothing else.”6 A humble leader is close to the boots on the ground physically, interpersonally, and environmentally. As stated by Bill Burns, “You have to keep your feet on the ground when others want to put you on a pedestal.”7

Figure 1. Humility is needed for justice and judgment.

According to Kaissi, “Humility is about having a true understanding of your strengths and weaknesses.”8 For Kaissi, humility is about self-awareness and how you understand yourself, your relationships with others, and your place in the universe.9 Those who possess humility typically display increased: interpersonal interactions, gratitude, time management, agreeableness, approachability, empathy, altruism, and willingness to seek advice.10

What Humility Is Not

Humility “has incorrectly evolved to mean having a low estimate of one’s importance, worthiness, or merits.”11 Some unfortunately equate humility with being timid, weak, complacent, non-driven, and not outspoken. Figure 2 displays the incorrect definitions provided when searching the phrase, “humility definition,” on the Google search engine. However, this is an incorrect view of humility. Humility is specifically not: a weakness, a lack of confidence, low self-esteem, an absence of ego, nor a lack of assertiveness, ambition, or speaking out.12 As stated by Hayes and Comer, “Humility and confidence are not at opposite ends of the scale.”13

In Amer Kaissi’s book, Humbitious: The Power of Low-Ego, High Drive Leadership, he expertly describes how ambition and humility are not at opposite ends of the spectrum, with both needed for high-output leaders.14 Whereas non-humble leaders have ambition for themselves, humble leaders have ambition for the organization and the team.15 Being confident and possessing an ego are needed in a strong leader; however, without humility, leaders cannot assess their true capabilities, limitations, or the situation correctly. Furthermore, leaders who lack humility will exhibit flaws in all our Corps’ leadership traits (Figures 1, 3, 4, and 6).

Moreover, humility does not demonstrate weakness, rather it showcases moral strength. A leader needs to be competent—not omniscient or infallible. Admitting one’s mistakes accurately and publicly can drastically increase the trust of one’s subordinates, and we must remember there is a distinct difference between a subordinate and a follower. A subordinate is dictated by the task organization, but a follower is an intrinsic choice by a subordinate to follow their leader/ commander, and followers will put in more effort than subordinates. Thus, we must strive to make our subordinates our followers. As discovered by Hays and Comer, discretionary effort (effort put into one’s work that is above what is expected) is directly correlated to one’s trust in their immediate manager and the organizational leadership as a whole.16

“Humility as a leadership virtue does not mean lack of asserting one’s self. Rather, it relates to how one asserts oneself, and where one places one’s focus- whether it is on the leader’s accomplishment or on the team’s accomplishment.”- Merwyn Hayes and Michael Comer

What Is the Opposite of Humility?

The opposite of humility is entitlement, pride, and self-centeredness. Entitlement, pride, and self-centeredness have facilitated and directly caused the downfall of individuals, teams, and organizations. When an individual is not humble, they will elevate themselves at the expense of the mission and others. As stated by Kaissi, “one of the most common myths about leadership is that arrogant, overconfident, and even narcissistic individuals are better leaders … It’s very clear: self-centered leaders do not achieve success in the long term … It is humility that leads to higher performance.”17

Entitlement, pride, and self-centeredness can be assessed by the frequency of one’s use of “I, me, mine, myself, etc.” When an individual talks exclusively about themselves; about how great/ impressive they are; about how hard they have it/ had it; and even how they are not great/ worthy, is an indication of the lack of humility. The latter, talking about oneself constantly in a self-deprecating manner, is a sign of pride concealed by pretending to be humble. This is because when one constantly talks about how they are not worthy, they are still constantly talking about themselves and “pretending to be humble may be worse than outright arrogance.”18 Furthermore, according to Kaissi, when you have a skill or capability and do not acknowledge it, you are not only displaying false humility but also self-disparagement and ingratitude.19

Figure 2. Google search engine definition of humility.

Figure 3. Humility is needed for dependability, initiative, and decisiveness.

When an individual uses terms like “they, the team, we, us, our, etc.,” this is a sign of humility. Leaders who possess humility, “share credit, emphasize the team over self, and define success collectively rather than individually.”20 However, a leader’s talking about others more than themselves must be genuine; otherwise, it is not humility and will be detected by those in the organization. As is taught in the Basic Officer Course, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

Why Is Humility Needed?

The following section will concisely state eight facts on why humility needs to be fully integrated into our Marine Corps ethos and culture.

Fact 1: Leadership Begins with Humility.

Prior to action, there is thought; either on the conscious or subconscious level. Regarding leadership, correct thinking begins with humility. Without humility, thoughts, words, and actions will derive from selfish and self-serving motives. With leadership being described “as the ability to inspire and influence those around you to perform at a higher level and become better versions of themselves,”21 “perhaps there is no greater sign of humility than serving others.”22

Fact 2: A Servant Leader Requires Humility.

There is a difference between a manager and a leader. A manager cares about an efficient process with an effective end-state. A leader cares about those variables as well. However, a leader also cares about the development of the individuals they have the privilege to serve. In John Maxwell’s book, The 5 Levels of Leadership, the fifth and highest level of leadership (Pinnacle) is categorized as “people follow because of who you are and what you represent.”23 In the book, Good to Great, Jim Collins states that one of the six factors that enable organizations to become great is “Level 5 Leadership.” As stated by Collins, “Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.”24 Thus, a true leader is a servant leader, which demands humility. As credited to Andre Malraux “to command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.”

Fact 3: Our Leadership Traits Are Connected to Each Other and Governed by Humility.

Gen Mattis, when asked, “What in your opinion is the most important leadership trait and why,” replied, “There is no way to separate out the leadership traits because if you prioritize one over the others then you actually become a weaker leader. You got to look at all of them and how they come together … it is how you put them together in your own authentic way.”25

While this is very true, we must also recognize that our leadership traits are not only connected but are governed by humility. As seen in Figures 1, 3, 4, and 6, humility directly affects all 14 Leadership Traits. Kaissi concludes that “the idea that humility needs to be coupled with other positive traits in order to lead to high performance is well supported by evidence.”26 Lastly, humility allows one to accurately self-assess their capabilities and limitations, which aligns with our first leadership principle (know yourself and seek self-improvement).

Fact 4: Humility Decreases Blunders.

Zachary Shore states that a mistake “is simply an error arising from incorrect data,” whereas a blunder is “a solution to a problem that makes matters worse than before you began.”27 Zachary Shore, in his book Blunder, categorizes typical blunders into seven categories (Exposure Anxiety; Causefusion; Flatview; Cure-allism; Infomania; Mirror imaging; and Static Cling). Humility directly contributes to minimizing all seven types of blunders proposed by Shore because humility facilitates a leader’s ability to listen to others for input, have increased empathy, and assess the situation more clearly; whereas pride diminishes the ability of an individual to truly listen and be open-minded.

In the book, The Smartest Guy in the Room, Enron Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling is quoted as stating that Enron would be the greatest company of all time because he was the smartest person in the room, and in 2001 Enron filed for bankruptcy.28 This directly contradicts the concept proposed by Gregerman in his book, Surrounded by Genius, which talks about the need of leaders to surround themselves with individuals smarter than themselves.29 As stated by Kaissi, “You can’t know everything or do anything by yourself. You need to rely on others for help, ideas, and advice. And for that, you need to be humble.”30

“Humble leaders recognize that unless they extract important insights from people around them, they run the risk of being limited by the scope of their own knowledge and expertise.”-Merwyn Hayes and Michael Comer

Fact 5: Humility Increases Trust.

When a leader lacks humility, their subordinates will believe that their superior is more about themselves than the unit; will not value their opinions; and their ideas/ efforts will be used to advance the superior, which all decrease trust. Lencioni, in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, states that the lack of trust is a primary contributor to dysfunctional teams.31 In the book, The Speed of Trust, Covey expertly conveys the vast importance of trust in organizations. As stated by Covey, “Trust is one of the most powerful forms of motivation and inspiration. People want to be trusted. They want to trust. They thrive on trust.”32 Furthermore, Covey states, “In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.”33

Figure 4. Humility is needed for tact, integrity, and enthusiasm.

Fact 6: Humble Leaders Create Humble Leaders.

Throughout James Kerr’s book, Legacy, the reader can see the utmost importance and value that New Zealand’s premier rugby team, the All Blacks, place on humility.34 In Legacy, Kerr states that in the All Blacks culture, “leaders create leaders.”35 In regards to humility, “most humble leaders see their mission as a leader to serve—particularly the younger generation.”36 Hayes and Comer state that “humility is the soil that grows effective leaders.”37 “One of the most overlooked characteristics in authentic leadership is humility, the overarching virtue that enforces all the other virtues common to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, wisdom, confidence, compassion, and courage.”38 Lastly and notably, it has been found that the level of humility of employees in an organization can directly impact the failure or success of a leader.39

“The level of humility of employees in an organization can directly impact the failure or success of a leader.”-Amer Kaissi

Fact 7: Vulnerability Is Needed for Growth.

The Marine Corps is at a time of transition, evolution, and transformation guided by several critical documents.40 For our growth to occur in the Marine Corps, we must be vulnerable. The same is true for the individual or small unit; vulnerability is needed for growth. If a subordinate does not feel they can be vulnerable with their superior, such as with ideas, loyal dissent, or ownership, there will be no growth of the person or the organization. Non-humble leaders do not promote vulnerability in their subordinates, eliciting yes-men, thus closing avenues for growth. As seen in Figure 5, “The Growth- Vulnerability Curve,” there is an asymptotic curve related to the growth of an individual/ organization with the level of vulnerability associated with the leader-led relationship.

Growth (depicted by the Y-axis) does not immediately occur in an individual or unit when new relationships occur; rather a level of trust, thus vulnerability, must be cultivated. Once a level of vulnerability via trust is established between the leader and led, growth can occur. Vulnerability is needed for the growth of our subordinates/followers, which demands humble leadership. Michael Useem, in his book, Leading Up, talks about the vast importance of subordinates to be able to lead up the chain of command; however, this is only possible if a leader possesses genuine humility.41 Furthermore, humble leaders “realize the concern that others have during times of change and the importance of getting their involvement in the implementation of change.”42 Of note, Dr. Thad Green, who developed the concept of “The Belief System,” has concluded that regarding a person’s motivation, their perception of the situation is more important than the reality.43

Fact 8: You Cannot Have Semper Fidelis without Humility.

Semper Fidelis, Always Faithful, requires humility. One cannot be faithful to anything but themselves without humility. A non-humble Marine cannot put their fellow Marines, the mission, or the Corps above their desires, pride, and ambitions. According to Lencioni, the ideal team player possesses humility, hunger (i.e., drive), and smarts (i.e., emotional intelligence), with humility being “the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.”44

Figure 5. Growth-vulnerability curve.

Solution 1: JJ-DID-TIE-BUCKLE-H

I cannot take credit for the concept of including humility in our leadership traits via JJ-DID-TIE-BUCKLE-H. This concept was introduced during the Basic Officer Course and heard throughout my time in the Marine Corps. However, I am calling for the Marine Corps to officially incorporate humility into our leadership traits to elicit more effective, lethal, and resilient Marines. The Marine Corps leadership traits, JJ-DID-TIE-BUCKLE, are taught to each recruit and candidate, and humility must be integrated into our Corps from a Marine’s earliest training. The following is a proposed definition of humility as a leadership trait: “the ability to genuinely assess one’s capabilities, limitations, and the situation, listen to those around them, and place the mission, the Marines, and others above themselves.”

Solution 2: Leadership Principles

Our current leadership principles do not explicitly mention humility. However, humility will affect all eleven of our leadership principles, most notably in the first (know yourself and seek self-improvement), third (seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions), fifth (set the example), and sixth (know your men and look out for their welfare). The Marine Corps needs to develop a leadership principle that explicitly states the importance of humility in the leader. The following is a proposed example of a twelfth leadership principle regarding humility: Humbly lead, listen, and learn, ensuring the growth, development, and trust of your subordinates, while not seeking recognition.

“Humility allows us to ask a simple question: how can we do this better?”-James Kerr

Solution 3: Junior Enlisted Performance Evaluation System

Our privates’ through corporals’ performance is measured via the Junior Enlisted Performance Evaluation System (JEPES) with, “JEPES will be the means by which Marines in the ranks of Private through Corporal are evaluated and recommended for promotion to the next higher grade.”45 This replaced the legacy system of the private through corporal being evaluated via the proficiency-conduct system. Ironically, both the proficiency-conduct system and JEPES did not and do not use humility as a metric by which we should evaluate our junior enlisted Marines.

The JEPES “score is comprised of four equally weighted pillars each worth 25 percent of the Marine’s score as depicted.”46 The four pillars are warfighting, physical toughness, mental agility, and command input, with the pillar of command input being the only ability for the Marine’s direct leadership to influence the Marine’s score. Within the command input section, there are three equally divided variables (i.e., individual character, military occupational specialty and/or mission accomplishment, and Leadership). The Marine Corps needs to incorporate humility into the leadership subsection of the command input pillar into JEPES via incorporation of humility into the definition of a leader, as well as into the six brackets of performance; specifically in the last two brackets of performance (exceeds expectations and exceptional).

Figure 6. Humility is needed for bearing, unselfishness, courage, knowledge, loyalty, and endurance.

Solution 4: Fitness Reports

As stated in the Commandant’s guidance for the fitness report, “the completed fitness report is the most important information component in manpower management. It is the primary means of evaluating Marine’s performance and is the Commandant’s primary tool for the selection of personnel for promotion, augmentation, resident schooling, command, and duty assignments.”47 However, humility is not assessed in our fitness reports. Furthermore, shockingly, the word humility is not even written in sections D (mission accomplishment), E (individual character), F (leadership), or G (intellect and wisdom). This is a critical gap in our “Commandant’s primary tool for the selection of personnel for promotion, augmentation, resident schooling, command, and duty assignments.”48 Figure 7 is an example of how humility can be incorporated into either sections D, E, F, or G (since humility is needed and can be easily applied in each section).

Figure 7. Humility incorporated into the fitness report.

Conclusion

Steven Pressfield states “No one is born with the Warrior Ethos … The Warrior Ethos is taught.”49 The Marine Corps fully embraces this concept with our basic training and Officer Candidate Course training curriculums and culture; specifically of having to earn the title of Marine. At entry-level training, our future Marines are taught how to be Marines and how to be leaders, yet we have a critical gap in our curriculums and culture at these schools because we are not emphasizing, measuring, or acknowledging the importance of humility. This gap of not emphasizing, measuring, or acknowledging humility is only increased as one gains rank within the Marine Corps because humility is not used in our evaluation systems.

“Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”-C.S. Lewis

As we approach our 249th year of existence, let us holistically incorporate humility into our ethos and culture. Our ability to create small-unit leaders is a competitive advantage we possess and must fully exploit. Our ability to create competent, morally strong, and tactically proficient leaders allows us to impose our will against our adversaries. Our ability to empower our Marines is a strength that we must cultivate and unleash. All of this is enhanced by humble leaders and a humble culture. “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.”50 Never forget that we must emphasize, measure, acknowledge, and correct the culture we pursue.

>Capt Carter, prior to becoming a Special Operations Officer, was an Infantry Officer, serving as a Platoon Commander, Company Executive Officer, and Company Commander. Before commissioning in the Marine Corps, he was a strength and conditioning coach, a researcher in sports science, and a graduate teaching assistant. He is still currently active in the strength and conditioning community with his research centering on holistic training approaches for human performance.

Notes

1. Jeremy Carter and Thomas Ochoa, “The Relationship Between Enlisted and Officers- Part 2: Developing the T-Shape Culture,” Marine Corps Gazette 107, No. 12 (2023).

2. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001).

3. Ibid.

4. Merwyn A. Hayes, Michael D. Comer, Start With Humility: Lessons from America’s Quiet CEOs on how to Build Trust and Inspire Followers (Merwyn A. Hayes and Michael D. Comer, 2010).

5. Ibid.

6. “The Relationship Between Enlisted and Officers-Part 2.”

7. Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, “Managing Authenticity: The Paradox of Great Leadership,” Havard Business Review 83, No. 12 (2005).

8. Amer Kaissi, Humbitious: The Power of Low-Ego, High Drive Leadership (Canada: Page Two, 2021).

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Start With Humility.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Humbitious.

15. Start With Humility.

16. Ibid.

17. Humbitious.

18. Start With Humility.

19. Humbitious.

20. Patrick Lencioni, The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues-A Leadership Fable (Hoboken, New Jersey: Jossey-Bass, 2016).

21. Jeremy Carter and Thomas Ochoa, “The Relationship Between Enlisted and Officers- Part 1: The T-Shape Philosophy,” Marine Corps Gazette 107, No. 7 (2023).

22. Start With Humility.

23. John C. Maxwell, The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (New York: Center Street, 1995).

24. Good to Great.

25. Marines, “Leadership Lessons from Gen. James Mattis (Ret.),” YouTube video, 16:36, October 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EYU3VTI3IU.

26. Humbitious

27. Zachary Shore, Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).

28. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing and Scandalous Fall of Enron (New York: Portfolio Trade, 2004).

29. Alan S. Gregerman, Surrounded by Genius: Unlocking the Brilliance in Yourself, Your Colleagues, and Your Organization (Naperville: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2007).

30. Humbitious.

31. Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002).

32. Stephen M. R. Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything (New York: Free Press, 2018).

33. The Speed of Trust.

34. James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks can Teach us about the Business of Life (London: Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2015).

35. Legacy.

36. Start with Humility.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Humbitious.

40. Gen David H. Berger, 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, (Washington, DC: July 2019); Gen David H. Berger, Force Design 2030, (Washington, DC: March 2020); Headquarters Marine Corps, Tentative Manual for Expeditionary Advanced Based Operations 2d Edition, (Washington, DC: May 2023); Gen David H. Berger, Training and Education 2030, (Washington, DC: 2023); Gen David H. Berger, Talent Management 2030, (Washington, DC: 2021); and Gen David H. Berger, A Concept for Stand-in Forces, (Washington, DC:2021).

46. Michael Useem, Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss so You Both Win (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001).

47. Start with Humility.

48. Ibid.

49. The Ideal Team Player.

50. Headquarters Marine Corps, MARADMIN 505/20, Junior Enlisted Performance, Evaluation Systems (Washington, DC: 2020). https://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/Messages-Display/Article/2334563/junior-enlisted-performance-evaluation-implementation/

51. Headquarters Marine Corps, Marine Corps Order 1616.1, Junior Enlisted Performance Evaluation System (JEPES), (Washington, DC: 2020).

52. Headquarters Marine Corps, NAVMC 10835A, USMC Fitness Reports, (Washington, DC: n.d.).

53. Ibid.

54. Steven Pressfield, The Warrior Ethos (New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2011).

55. Good to Great.

10. First Black Navy SEAL, William Goines, dies at 88

Another great American passes.

First Black Navy SEAL, William Goines, dies at 88

militarytimes.com · by Claire Barrett · June 19, 2024

William Goines, the man credited with being the first Black Navy SEAL in the modern SEAL team era, passed away Monday, June 10, the U.S. Naval Institute confirmed. He was 88 years old.

Born in 1936, Goines’ childhood in Lockland, Ohio, was spent in a segregated community where the town’s lone public pool may as well have been a myth, Goines told the Cincinnati-based Enquirer in 2016.

“We were never allowed to swim in that pool,” he said. “When integration came to the area, the way I understand it, they filled the pool in with rocks and gravel so nobody could swim in it.”

Yet the Ohio native was drawn to the water. Inspired to join the Navy after watching the film “The Frogmen” — about underwater demolition operations during World War II — Goines enlisted in 1955 at the age of 19.

“My fate was sealed right there,” Goines recalled of the movie. “That’s exactly what I wanted to do.”

Yet race once again almost kept Goines from his calling.

“They tracked all African Americans to go into the steward rating, which was waiting on officers, cooking for officers,” he told the Enquirer. “They tried to track me into that, but I had a guy in my hometown in Lockland who said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t accept a school for stewards because all you’re going to be is a servant for officers.’”

He took his friend’s advice and, after an 11-month tour in Malta, Goines was among the first group chosen to serve on the newly established SEAL teams. Of the 80 men selected upon the official 1962 inception of the teams, Goines was the only Black man.

(Screenshot/X/U.S. Naval Institute)

Although Fred “Tiz” Morrison is often credited with being the nation’s first Black Navy SEAL — Morrison served in the Navy’s underwater demolition teams during WWII and Korea — Goines has the distinction of being the first Black Navy SEAL as the SEAL teams are known today.

Albeit forever tight-lipped on the specifics of his missions, Goines was selected to be one of the first to land in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, recalling, “We were on ships just sailing around the Cuban country waiting to make a landing there.”

Goines went on to serve three tours in Vietnam with SEAL teams before serving five years with the Chuting Stars, a Navy Parachute Demonstration Team.

“We jumped out of everything,” he told the Enquirer. “We even jumped out of balloons in France and Belgium, just experimenting.”

After 32 years of service, Goines retired in 1987 as a master chief petty officer. His many commendations include the Bronze Star, the Navy Commendation Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal, a Combat Action Ribbon, and the Presidential Unit Citation.

Following his retirement, Goines remained devoted to his nation and community, first working as the police chief in the Portsmouth, Virginia, school system for more than a decade, and later volunteering to help recruit minorities into the SEALs, according to the Virginian-Pilot.

Reflecting on his life in 2016, Goines stated that despite myriad challenges — including prostate cancer possibly linked to Agent Orange — “I’ve enjoyed my life immensely. Of all the things that I’ve been through, I don’t regret anything.”

Goines will be laid to rest on June 21 at Bank Street Memorial Baptist Church in Norfolk, Virginia.

About Claire Barrett

Claire Barrett is the Strategic Operations Editor for Sightline Media and a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.

11. Drones in Ukraine Get Smarter to Dodge Russia’s Jamming Signals

More photos and graphics at the link: https://www.wsj.com/world/drones-in-ukraine-get-smarter-to-dodge-russias-jamming-signals-9ebe3c07?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru

Drones in Ukraine Get Smarter to Dodge Russia’s Jamming Signals

Electronic warfare is rapidly evolving, pushing drone makers to swap out parts and make craft more autonomous; Western companies are watching closely

By Alistair MacDonaldFollow

and Heather SomervilleFollow

| Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The Wall Street Journal

Updated June 19, 2024 12:02 am ET

KYIV, Ukraine—The drones now leaving ISR Defence’s factory in Ukraine look exactly like those made there before Russia’s invasion but the components inside have completely changed. It is an exercise the company has gone through repeatedly to keep its drones aloft.

As drones play an increasingly prominent role in the war, both sides are pitched in a constantly evolving battle to down enemy craft and keep their own in the sky. Russia and Ukraine’s ability to wage electronic warfare—disrupting the signals guiding drones and render them mostly useless—has rapidly advanced. And so too have their efforts to stay ahead of that threat.

ISR has updated its exploding drone’s navigation equipment, antenna and video feed in a bid to avoid frequencies that Russia is targeting. Other drone manufacturers are focusing on making their equipment more autonomous, limiting the information they receive from satellites or operators that can be disrupted.

“Russian jamming is a crucial factor when making drones,” said Vadym Yunyk, ISR’s co-founder. A manufacturer now has to be able to make changes to drones without the usual level of research and development, he added.

Vadym Yunyk is the co-founder of Ukrainian drone manufacturer ISR Defence.

Western companies are eager to learn from Ukraine’s experience, with some setting up R&D centers in the country and others looking to invest in or partner with local businesses.

Unmanned aerial vehicles have come into their own in the Ukraine war. Surveillance and strikes by drones at the front line mean that almost any movement can be seen and targeted within minutes.

With drones now crossing the front line thousands of times a day, maintaining—and disrupting—that capability is a priority for both sides, and could provide an edge as the war grinds on.

Electronic warfare targets drones by essentially drowning out the signals being sent to a UAV along radio frequencies, blocking commands from its operator and the data required to navigate.

It is like tuning into a show on an old radio and not being able to hear it because it is overwhelmed by static, said Dmytro Shymkiv, co-founder of AeroDrone, a Ukrainian drone manufacturer.

Russia and Ukraine are trying to flood each other’s drones with static. Russia happens to be very good at it, Shymkiv said.

ISR Defence has updated its exploding drones in a bid to avoid frequencies that Russia is targeting.

By the spring of last year, Ukraine was losing some 10,000 drones a month due to Russian electronic warfare, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a U.K. think tank.

Electronic warfare is decades old and was used extensively in World War II to jam radar signals. During the Ukraine war, both sides have increased their use of jamming systems and worked to improve their effectiveness by increasing their range and ability to cover more frequencies, among other measures.

One way to escape jamming is to move a drone’s communications onto a different frequency. But the enemy soon finds that frequency, ensuring a constant race across the spectrum.

“But you go on one frequency and tomorrow they adjust their frequency,” said Oleksiy Semenov, an infantry-fighting vehicle operator, near Avdiivka, in east Ukraine.

Drone makers are increasingly looking to equipment and software that filters out the useful signals their UAV needs from the noise being sent to disrupt it.

AeroDrone’s Shymkiv says he is constantly testing circuit boards, antennas and other new equipment to filter these noises out. If they are able to pick up a clearer signal, he can swap them into his drones.

An R-18 drone mounted with three orange practice bombs made by ISR Defence in central Ukraine.

The camera view from an R-18 drone as it drops a practice bomb during a training session in central Ukraine.

Drones from Quantum Systems have a frequency hopping system that can automatically jump between radio frequencies as jamming occurs. The German company is building drones in Kyiv with a Ukrainian staff of about 40, and brings in parts from Europe to update its UAVs against more aggressive jamming tactics, said Chief Executive Florian Seibel.

“There is more electronic warfare the longer the war is raging,” said Seibel.

New rules in Ukraine this month require any drone vendor that wants to sell directly to Ukraine to prove they can withstand jamming and fly without satellite communication, Seibel said.

One method to reduce drones’ reliance on satellite signals used in Ukraine is visual navigation, where a drone navigates by comparing the terrain it sees through its camera with a map it has already stored in its systems.

The U.S. Defense Department has contracts with American companies for visual navigation and is also doing its own development work on the technology.

Another way for drones to avoid jamming is using a so-called pixel lock, where the drone locks onto a target and follows it without needing to be remotely guided by an operator.

“The drone will continue without the pilot and if it gets jammed it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t use GPS,” said Lorenz Meier, CEO of Auterion, which writes software for drones.

Auterion, based in Arlington, Va., opened a research and development office in Ukraine in September last year with 20 staff.

Meier says that outside of China, Kyiv is the drone capital of the world, with a large parts supply chain and fewer restrictions on testing than in the West.

By contrast, building a drone in the U.S. can be onerous. Policies aimed at keeping drones secure from hacking and durable for the battlefield limit what parts can be used, where they are bought from and when software can be updated.

Such policies, combined with some U.S. companies’ desire to keep total control over the hardware and software, mean American drones are often very difficult to make changes to, in the way Ukrainians are accustomed to, say drone entrepreneurs.

There are also only a few places where drones can be tested at distance because of the chances of bumping into aircraft. In Ukraine, only military planes are allowed to fly so the skies are much clearer.

Ukrainian drone makers’ reputation for innovation is prompting some Western companies—whose craft have largely struggled to cope with Russia’s electronic-warfare systems—to seek closer ties.

Ukrainian soldiers, who use jamming devices on their Bradley vehicle, in East Ukraine in early June.

SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

AeroVironment has explored potential acquisitions and partnerships in Ukraine, and elsewhere, though hasn’t yet done a deal, said Trace Stevenson, the company’s general manager of uncrewed systems.

“Ukraine is an interesting market, there is a lot of tech being developed rapidly there and based on real-world experience,” he said.

The U.S. company’s Switchblade drones have been deployed in Ukraine since the first year of the war. In response to electronic warfare, AeroVironment is using a technology whereby a drone goes back to where it last had a connection when its communications are cut, rather than falling to earth. It has also started frequency hopping, though Stevenson says Russia will likely catch up.

“We anticipate they are good for six months,” Stevenson said of the changes. “It’s a constant cat-and-mouse game.”

Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, has an agreement to work with Kyiv-based Terminal Autonomy, which makes lightweight and low-cost strike drones.

The two companies are cooperating on a potential bid to participate in Replicator, a Defense Department initiative to field thousands of small autonomous drones, said Terminal Autonomy CEO Francisco Serra-Martins.

A Lockheed Martin spokesman said the company “is leveraging emerging technologies to meet the evolving challenges of a more complex battlespace.”

In an effort to advance drone development in the U.S., the Defense Innovation Unit, an arm of the Defense Department set up to adopt startup technology, has loosened some of its requirements for drones it certifies as battlefield-ready. It expanded the number of approved components UAV makers can use in their designs from five to 36, making it easier to swap out parts, and is reducing the time required to approve software updates from three months to less than four days.

Inside the Ukrainian Lab Exposing U.S. Chips in Russia’s Weapons

Play video: Inside the Ukrainian Lab Exposing U.S. Chips in Russia’s Weapons

Despite Western sanctions, Russia still gets foreign-made components for arms used against Ukraine. WSJ’s Ian Lovett reports from inside the forensic lab exposing Moscow’s access to vital microchips. Photo: Oleksii Samsonov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

Outside of the DIU program, drone companies selling to the Defense Department often wait more than a year to get approval for their software updates.

These improvements alone won’t solve America’s problem that it can’t build drones fast and cheap enough, or with better defenses against electronic warfare, said Trent Emeneker, a project manager and contractor at the DIU.

“Are we anywhere close to where we should be? The answer is no,” said Emeneker. “Even though we’ve made progress, we are further behind today than we were 2½ years ago.”

Ievgeniia Sivorka and Karolina Jeznach contributed to this article.

Write to Alistair MacDonald at Alistair.Macdonald@wsj.com and Heather Somerville at heather.somerville@wsj.com

12. West Point Officer Arraigned on Charges of Drinking with Cadets, Violating No-Contact Orders for Women's Tennis Team

Sigh...

What was this Colonel (and others in the story) thinking? (rhetorical question, I think we all know the answer)

West Point Officer Arraigned on Charges of Drinking with Cadets, Violating No-Contact Orders for Women's Tennis Team

military.com · by Steve Beynon · June 18, 2024

A top West Point officer is facing a series of charges related to sexual misconduct, providing and drinking alcohol with cadets, violating no-contact orders with an entire women's sports team at the academy, and soliciting cadets and another officer to lie on his behalf amid an investigation into his conduct.

Col. William Wright, the director of the U.S. Military Academy's geospatial information science program, was arraigned on nine allegations Tuesday, according to court records reviewed by Military.com. He was also reassigned to a role at the academy where he does not have contact with cadets, according to an academy spokesperson.

"West Point holds our staff and faculty to high standards," Col. Terence Kelley, an academy spokesperson, said in a statement to Military.com. "Upon allegations that our cadre have not upheld our standards, we promptly investigate to determine the facts, protect, and assist potential victims, and hold alleged violators accountable."

Wright could not be reached for comment ahead of publication. It was unclear if he had hired an attorney.

Wright, an armor officer, faces one charge of conduct unbecoming an officer for allegedly on "one or more occasions" making sexual remarks referring to the "G-spot or words to that effect" with at least three cadets in January.

He faces three charges of disobeying a direct order when he allegedly provided alcohol to at least one cadet and drank with them. He allegedly provided or consumed alcohol with a cadet in June last year. It's unclear if it was the same cadet.

Wright was ordered to stay away from and not contact cadets on the West Point women's tennis team, but allegedly violated that order in January when he contacted a cadet. It's unclear what the nature of that contact was or when the no-contact order was put into place.

Finally, Wright faces five charges related to lying and soliciting others to do so on his behalf during an investigation into the allegations he was drinking with cadets or providing them alcohol.

In January, Wright allegedly solicited a cadet to "wrongfully interfere with an adverse administrative proceeding," instructing her to "kill this," directing her to talk with an official whose name is redacted from court documents. He also instructed a cadet to "testify falsely" concerning her alcohol consumption to an investigating officer.

It's unclear if the incidents involve one or several cadets. The names of cadets were redacted.

Wright is at least the third high-profile West Point official in less than a year to be fired or face misconduct allegations.

Col. Anthony Bianchi, at the time the garrison commander, was fired in August for "loss of trust and confidence in his ability to command," a spokesperson said at the time -- a blanket and nonspecific statement that can cover a wide variety of issues, including major lapses in judgment, drug abuse, incompetence, criminal action, sexual harassment or abuse of subordinates.

In November, a West Point civilian staffer, William Gentry, the school's deputy brigade tactical officer, was arraigned on a felony criminal sexual conduct charge.

Gentry pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of "accosting a child for immoral purposes," which involves soliciting a minor for sexual purposes, court documents show. He was sentenced in May to five years on probation and being a registered sex offender for 25 years.

Wright's arraignment comes immediately off the heels of the former top officer of Ohio State University's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, Lt. Col. Michael Kelvington, being fired amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving at least three cadets. However, Kelvington faces no criminal charges.

military.com · by Steve Beynon · June 18, 2024

13. What to Know About Suicides in the U.S. Army

What to Know About Suicides in the U.S. Army

The New York Times · by Janet Reitman · June 19, 2024

A Times investigation reveals a crisis

of the military’s own making.

Valley at the U.S. Army National Training Center in California, in a photo found on his phone.Credit...From the Valley family

June 19, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

Soldiers are more likely than their civilian peers to die by suicide. Many people wrongly believe this is because of combat trauma, but in fact the most vulnerable group are soldiers who have never deployed. The Army’s suicide rate has risen steadily even in peacetime, and the numbers now exceed total combat deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A Times investigation into the death of Specialist Austin Valley, stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas, found that mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.

Here’s what you need to know about the Army’s suicide crisis:

The size and psychological strength of the Army has declined.

After the Vietnam War, the Army went through a period of recalibration, a slowing-down that allowed leaders to take stock of their troops and assess their strategies. That hasn’t happened since the military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021. For some units, in fact, the “operational tempo,” or amount of time soldiers spend away from home, is as high as it was during the peak of the war on terror, though the size of the force is smaller: The Army lowered its recruiting target in 2023, after falling thousands of people short of their goal in recent years.

The Army’s strategy is to deter nuclear rivals like China or Russia by placing troops all over the world on peacetime missions. This requires that the Army be able to deploy anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Maintaining constant “readiness” often comes at the cost of the health and well-being of soldiers, who describe feeling purposeless as they are worked as hard or harder than ever with no clear goal. “Everyone in the Army is depressed,” one soldier says.

The Army’s mental-health care system is broken.

Soldiers struggling with their mental health are sent to the Army’s Behavioral Health department, referred to colloquially as B.H., which experts and providers call severely dysfunctional and understaffed. At Fort Riley, for example, there are only about 20 mental-health counselors tasked with caring for more than 12,000 soldiers. As a result, soldiers seeking help can wait weeks or months to get an appointment. Providers can keep spotty medical records and fail to thoroughly assess patients before prescribing medications, including antidepressants that carry black-box warnings that they might worsen suicidality in some young people.

Army leaders routinely undermine privacy and safety protocols.

Though the Army says it is trying to remove the stigma around mental-health care, it can be careless with patient confidentiality. Some unit leaders publicly display a list of their soldiers’ mental-health appointments or openly discuss their health statuses. They can also put pressure on providers to make decisions that go against the best interests of their patients.

In recent years, to exert more control over soldier care, Army leaders have integrated mental-health providers directly into their units, writing their annual evaluations and determining their promotions. Providers say they can feel pressured to change a course of treatment or allow soldiers to deploy overseas to help the Army make its personnel quotas. “You have to make a choice,” one B.H. officer says. “Your career or the lives of your soldiers.”

Easy access to guns is an ongoing problem.

Firearms are used in a majority of suicides among active duty troops. Unrestrictive gun laws in the United States make it harder for the Army to protect soldiers who have reported suicidal ideation. Federal law bars people who have been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward or institution from buying a gun, but not those who have sought help voluntarily. Even if the Army marks soldiers as “high risk” and prohibits them from handling military-issued weapons, the policy cannot apply to personally owned firearms and has no power outside the base.

The Army fails to take the advice of its own experts.

The Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars on suicide-prevention research over the past two decades, but the findings of those studies are routinely ignored. In February 2023, the most recent of the department’s independent suicide-prevention committees released a report that cited high operational tempo, lax rules around guns and poor quality of life on bases as major problems. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of an institute that studies military suicides at the University of Memphis, says that the committee’s report echoes many others that have been produced since 2008; he has no confidence that this time, the recommendations will be taken seriously. “My expectation is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented,” he says.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.

The New York Times · by Janet Reitman · June 19, 2024

14. The Soft Cyber Underbelly of the U.S. Military

The Soft Cyber Underbelly of the U.S. Military

Information Warfare Essay Contest—Third Prize, Sponsored by Booz Allen.

Lessons from the Israel-Hamas conflict reveal you are more vulnerable to cyber than you know.

By Major W. Stone Holden, U.S. Marine Corps

June 2024 Proceedings Vol. 150/6/1,456

usni.org · June 1, 2024

Footage beamed live around the world on social media showed paragliders armed with automatic weapons swooping from the sky, terrorists on motorcycles flooding through gaps in a vaunted defensive line, and civilians massacred and dragged from their homes to serve as hostages. A hail of rockets threatened to overwhelm the defensive systems that protect millions of Israelis.1

Not visible were the hackers who eroded the ability of the country’s security organizations to provide warning and took advantage of civilian safety apps to install malware, not to mention the years of reconnaissance they conducted through the personal devices of Israelis. The 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel were notable for many reasons, one of which was their integrated employment of the information environment before, during, and after.2

Hamas’s attacks demonstrate the kinds of asymmetric and nontraditional cyber threats in the information environment that must be addressed to keep U.S. forces secure. While until recently nonstate actors were not generally associated with cyber capabilities, such actors can affect advanced militaries with increasing effectiveness as they gain access to better tools and skills. Furthermore, the integrated attacks illustrate the effects of attacks on individuals within a force unprotected in cyberspace. They demonstrate that the capabilities are a real and growing threat to Marines and sailors operating around the world.

Navy recruits spend a few minutes with their mobile phones. The Department of Defense must better educate service members and protect them from the operational risks social engineering and malware create. U.S. Navy (Stuart Posada)

This deserves close examination, given the information warfare–related strategies from the Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of the Navy released in fall 2023.3 The documents speak to the importance the United States places on the information environment and the tools needed to fight and win there. The 2023 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community highlights the growing cyber threat major strategic competitors pose. While a strategic focus on countering state capabilities is reasonable, the recent events in Israel and Gaza offer a reminder of the need to look more deeply at strategy through the lens of asymmetric and transnational actors such as terrorist groups.

Recognizing the threat is an excellent first step, but concrete actions must follow to improve the cyber resiliency of U.S. forces. These steps should include improved cybersecurity training, the proliferation of DoD-approved tools that service members can safely access and employ to keep themselves safe, and expanded use of antivirus (AV) protection. Marines and sailors carry devices in their pockets on a near-constant basis that are connected to the rest of the world. In this way, they also create a direct access line for adversary cyber operations. Failing to address the vulnerabilities these devices and connections create would be negligent and leave military systems at risk.

Catphishing and Jailbreaks

Hamas used cyber capabilities to complement air and ground actions during its attacks. Approximately 12 minutes after Hamas launched the initial rocket salvo, cybersecurity firms detected distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at shutting down websites that provide rocket alerts to Israeli civilians.4

On the day of the attacks, hackers hijacked billboards to push terrorizing messages and bombarded phones in Israel with threats via text messages.5 In the days that followed, other groups began attacking sites and services connected to the conflict. Some cyberattacks exploited code issues in apps to send fake rocket alerts, intercept requests, and expose servers. Counterfeit versions of those apps allowed hackers to collect sensitive data from users.6 One pro-Palestinian hacker group, Ghosts of Palestine, claimed to have attacked Israeli organizations including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ben Gurion Airport.7

While it is unclear how much direct control Hamas had over the hacking groups behind these attacks—possibly they were merely hacktivists joining in a larger conflict—the level of coordination at least suggests a close working relationship. Regardless, Hamas used advanced cyber capabilities in an impressively coordinated fashion. This capability did not emerge overnight. Over the past decade, Hamas developed a sophisticated cyber capability that racked up some impressive wins. Hamas began its cyber operations in 2013, using phishing tactics that included pornographic videos, relying on people’s reluctance to report threats given the nature of the videos.8 Since at least 2017, Hamas has been using fake dating profiles to lure Israeli Defense Force (IDF) personnel into downloading images containing malware and allowing Hamas operatives to snoop through phones to gain information on IDF weapons, units, and facilities.9

During the 2018 FIFA World Cup tournament, Hamas created an app to exploit fan interest in the games. It was supposed to let users track results, but it also contained malware targeting IDF personnel.10 This allowed Hamas to control the cameras and microphones of phones remotely, gaining information on IDF troops, bases, equipment, and operations. Hamas-associated hackers have proven adept at using social engineering on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp to elicit information.11 Hacked IDF devices appear to have provided much of the strikingly detailed intelligence on weapon platforms and facilities that made the 7 October attacks so successful.12

The IDF has not taken Hamas’s cyber activities lightly. It correctly sees them as a serious component of the threat picture. In May 2019, the IDF bombed the headquarters of Hamas cyber operations in response to an attempted widespread cyberattack.13 It followed this up in 2021 by striking Hamas cyber facilities in Gaza, such as storage facilities and hideouts for cyber operators, and targeting operators themselves.14

Nothing New Under the Microprocessor

Advanced cyber tools and “zero-day” exploits are being sold to the highest bidders.15 Tools once the sole domain of organizations such as the National Security Agency now find their way into the hands of rogue states, criminal groups, and terrorist organizations through a thriving gray market. Cartels in Mexico employ powerful Pegasus spyware from Israeli company NSO and other cyber tools to intimidate the cartels’ own personnel as well as journalists and activists.16

Terrorist groups have employed cyber tactics to conduct or support operations for many years. In 2009, Iranian-backed Shiite militants in Iraq hacked U.S. MQ-1 Predator feeds, gaining the same access U.S. operators had.17 Starting in 2012, hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army group hacked accounts associated with media companies, using the platforms to promote their preferred narratives of the Syrian civil war and spread disinformation.18

Perhaps the most consequential hack happened in 2013 when Syrian operatives gained access to the Associated Press Twitter account, from which they tweeted there had been an explosion at the White House. Although quickly debunked, it caused the U.S. stock market to tumble briefly—a real albeit temporary economic effect. In January 2015, ISIS-affiliated hackers briefly took over the U.S. Central Command Twitter account.19 Although embarrassing, the action’s military value was limited because control was quickly restored, and it did not appear to support the group’s actions in any other domain.

Alongside his costar Tina, Cyber Awareness Jeff is a well-known (and much mocked) character from the DoD Cyber Awareness Challenge. Despite recent improvements, the challenge has a long way to go. It should build on itself, annually bringing new skills and awareness. Presenting service members with real adversary threats and tactics would result in much better engagement. U.S. Navy on X

Integrating cyber action as part of a more extensive military campaign is difficult. Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many experts pointed to Russia’s seeming inability to sequence cyber effects to support or complement actions on the ground or in the air despite supposedly possessing some of the world’s most sophisticated cyber capabilities—and years of practice with them in Ukraine after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.20

While the scope and scale of Hamas’s cyber integration during its attacks were not as impressive as what an actor such as the U.S. military potentially could achieve, they still bear watching. Notably, Hamas did not need to penetrate secure IDF networks to gather the intelligence required; it went after the larger and softer attack surface of IDF personnel, targeting them in their pockets, where the Israeli cybersecurity establishment was not protecting them. This should serve as a warning: Other groups will increase their cyber capabilities to target militaries’ large, soft cyber underbellies for future operations.

All kinds of actors across the globe do not distinguish between those actively engaged in conflict and those at home scrolling. Bad actors will target Marines, sailors, and their families as service members deploy abroad, conducting espionage and degrading unit capabilities wherever they are able.

Enhancing Personal Capacity

Line of effort no. 1 in the Department of the Navy’s cyber strategy recognizes that cybersecurity training must be improved.21 Human error is the number one vector for cyberattacks on an organization, and the Marine Corps and Navy workforces are as big, diverse, and juicy a target (if not more so) as any other organization’s.

While improvements in the annual DoD Cybersecurity Awareness Challenge over the past several years are welcome, the program still falls short.22 First, the training needs to build on itself, bringing new skills and awareness each year. Instead, the training is viewed as, at best, a rote chore, or, more commonly, as a nuisance to be clicked through as quickly as possible. It can be hard for many to engage with abstract “What if?” scenarios, even if users are deeply aware of how critical brilliance in the cyber basics ought to be. However, presenting service members with real threats and tactics being used against them would likely result in a much higher level of engagement: “What techniques are Russian groups using against Ukrainians? How did Israeli soldiers get compromised by Hamas-affiliated cyber groups?” It is human nature to be more interested in something that has an obvious potential effect on your life. Making clear the linkage between the concepts currently taught—spearfishing links, VPNs, and so forth—and how adversaries are using them to target U.S. users would improve the connections service members make.

In conjunction with improved training, the Department of the Navy should work closely with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and commercial providers to generate lists of effective cybersecurity tools available to service members to use on their personal devices and incorporate those tools into training.23 It is not enough to tell Marines and sailors that images downloaded from dating apps might contain malware if there is no readily available tool they can reach for to protect themselves. These should include VPN services that allow safer connections as they travel abroad for missions and shore leave. The tools come in numerous varieties; however, a poor understanding of their capabilities and limitations can leave service members vulnerable. A simple toolkit and a basic knowledge of when and how to apply it can go a long way toward hardening the cyber security of the force.

Another prospective easy win would be providing antivirus protection. If you were to brief any commanding officer that the majority of his or her troops lacked personal protective equipment (PPE) for their jobs, he or she would be profoundly concerned. Government-furnished devices all come with commercial antivirus software because of their perceived criticality to setting a defensive baseline. A simple but effective improvement would be to have everyone use antivirus on all their devices, personal ones included. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that service members’ personal computers and mobile devices do not possess sufficient “cyber PPE.”

The Defense Information Systems Agency offers a “home-use program” in which service members get one free year of McAfee antivirus protection on one device.24 This is a good start, but many people have multiple devices, and a majority will go without coverage after the first year. Many Marines and sailors know how important this software is, but they may be unwilling or unable to pay the annual fees to maintain the service across personal devices. Antivirus protection should be provided to all service members for free as an element of their issued protective equipment. This would set a new baseline of protection at home and deployed, decreasing the cyber attack surface. It undoubtedly would be costly, taking into account the scale of the Department of the Navy, but leaving such a large vulnerability almost certainly would prove far more costly in the future.

As the Adversary Moves, So Must We

It is impossible to make cyberspace 100 percent safe or expect 100 percent compliance with best practices. Even if every Marine and sailor were to become a fully certified cybersecurity expert, they are still human and will make human mistakes. But mitigating the size and depth of the present security vulnerability is worth substantial investment. Believe the adversaries who are more than happy to exploit the connections in a service member’s pocket for military gain: It is worth the time and resources to improve cybersecurity for the masses. Given the crucial role cyber plays in the information environment, it is critical to protect that space by improving the training given to all service members, providing real tools for them to use to protect themselves, and furnishing some basic cyber PPE.

1. Daniel Byman, Emily Harding, and Michael Leiter, “Hamas’ October 7 Attack: The Tactics, Targets, and Strategy of Terrorists,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 7 November 2023.

2. MWI Podcast, “Understanding Hamas—From Tactics to Strategy,” West Point Modern War Institute, 14 November 2023.

3. Summary of the 2023 Cyber Strategy of the Department of Defense (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, September 2023); Department of Defense, “DOD Announces Release of 2023 Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment,” 17 November 2023; and Department of the Navy, “The Department of the Navy Releases Inaugural Cyber Strategy,” 21 November 2023.

4. Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco, “Cyber Attacks in the Israel-Hamas War,” The Cloudflare Blog, 23 October 2023.

5. Colin Demarest and Tzally Greenberg, “‘Hacktivists’ Join the Front Lines in Israel-Hamas War,” C4ISRNet, 31 October 2023.

6. Blake Darche, Amen Boursalian, and Javier Castro, “Malicious ‘RedAlert—Rocket Alerts Application’ Targets Israeli Phone Calls, SMS, and User Information,” The Cloudflare Blog, 13 October 2023.

7. Sam Sabin, “Hackers Make Their Mark in Israel-Hamas Conflict,” Axios, 10 October 2023.

8. Simon P. Handler, The Cyber Strategy and Operations of Hamas: Green Flags and Green Hats (Washington, DC: Atlantic Council, November 2022), 12–13.

9. MWI Podcast, “What Was Hamas Thinking?” West Point Modern War Institute, 23 October 2023.

10. Handler, The Cyber Strategy and Operations of Hamas.

11. “Hamas Using WhatsApp to Hack Israel Soldiers,” Middle East Monitor, July 2019.

12. Michele Groppi and Vasco da Cruz Amador, “Technology and Its Pivotal Role in Hamas’s Successful Attacks on Israel,” Global Network on Extremism and Technology, 20 October 2023.

13. Judah Ari Gross, “IDF Says It Thwarted a Hamas Cyber Attack during Weekend Battle,” Times of Israel, 5 May 2019; and Israel Defence Force, twitter.com/IDF/status/1125066395010699264, 5 May 2019.

14. Eviatar Matania and Lior Yoffe, “Some Things the Giant Could Learn from the Small: Unlearned Cyber Lessons for the U.S. from Israel,” Cyber Defense Review, Winter 2022.

15. A “zero-day” exploit is a computer vulnerability that is unknown to security researchers or computer companies, meaning they have had zero days of notification to fix the issue.

16. Cecile Schilis-Gallego and Nina Lakhani, “‘It’s a Free-for-All’: How Hi-Tech Spyware Ends Up in the Hands of Mexico’s Cartels,” The Guardian, 7 December 2020; and Alan Feuer and Emily Palmer, “An I.T. Guy’s Testimony Leads to a Week of Cyber Spy Intrigue in El Chapo Trial,” The New York Times, 13 January 2019.

17. Mike Mount and Elaine Quijano, “Iraqi Insurgents Hacked Predator Drone Feeds, U.S. Official Indicates,” CNN, 17 December 2009.

18. J. Dana Stuster, “Syrian Electronic Army Takes Credit for Hacking AP Twitter Account,” Foreign Policy, 23 April 2013.

19. David C. Gompert and Martin C. Libicki, “Decoding the Breach: The Truth About the CentCom Hack,” RAND Corporation, 3 February 2015.

20. Gavin Wilde, “Cyber Operations in Ukraine: Russia’s Unmet Expectations,” Cyber Conflict in the Russian-Ukraine War (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 2022).

21. 2023 Cyber Strategy (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, November 2023), 5-6.

22. Department of Defense, “Cyber Awareness Challenge 2024.”

23. CISA has a list of free cybersecurity tools online, ranging from basic to advanced. However, these tools are not well advertised and training on how to employ them is lacking. See www.cisa.gov.

24. Defense Information Systems Agency, “Antivirus Home Use Program (AV HUP).”

usni.org · June 1, 2024

15. The Return of Peace Through Strength

A preview of the NSS for a possible next administration?

Excerpts:

Trump, for his part, preferred to focus more on Americans unjustly detained abroad than on dissidents, in an effort to build relationships with foreign leaders and give dictators such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un a chance to come in from the cold. But he did pay attention to opposition forces in authoritarian states that are U.S. rivals. In January 2020, after I publicly expressed hope that the people of Iran would someday be able to choose their own leaders, Trump followed up on social media: “Don’t kill your protestors,” he admonished the theocrats in Tehran. A second Trump term would see stepped-up presidential-level attention to dissidents and political forces that can challenge U.S. adversaries. This effort would build on past actions, such as when Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and other senior officials met with activists seeking freedom in China and when Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger addressed the Chinese people in Mandarin from the White House and gave voice to many of their concerns about the repressive rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

Some might say that it is hypocritical for the United States to condemn some repressive governments, such as those in China and Iran, while partnering with others, such as Arab nondemocracies. But it is important to consider countries’ capacities to change. Most Arab monarchies today are more open and liberal than they were ten or 20 years ago—partly because of engagement with the United States. The same cannot be said of the Chinese or Iranian governments, which have become more repressive and aggressive toward their neighbors.

The United States is not perfect, and its security does not require every nation on earth to resemble it politically. Throughout much of U.S. history, most Americans believed it was sufficient to stand as a model to others rather than to attempt to impose a political system on others. But Americans should not underestimate what their country has achieved or downplay the success of the American experiment in lifting people at home and abroad out of repression, poverty, and insecurity.

Can an American revival occur today in a divided nation, when polls indicate that a vast majority of citizens believe their country is on the wrong track? As Reagan’s election in 1980 demonstrated, the United States can always turn things around. In November, the American people will have the opportunity to return to office a president who restored peace through strength—and who can do it again. If they do, the country has the resources, the ingenuity, and the courage to rebuild its national power, securing its freedom and once again becoming the last best hope for humankind.

The Return of Peace Through Strength

Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy

By Robert C. O’Brien

July/August 2024

Published on June 18, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Robert C. O’Brien · June 18, 2024

Si vis pacem, para bellum is a Latin phrase that emerged in the fourth century that means “If you want peace, prepare for war.” The concept’s origin dates back even further, to the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian, to whom is attributed the axiom, “Peace through strength—or, failing that, peace through threat.”

U.S. President George Washington understood this well. “If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for war,” he told Congress in 1793. The idea was echoed in President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” And as a candidate for president, Ronald Reagan borrowed directly from Hadrian when he promised to achieve “peace through strength”—and later delivered on that promise.

In 2017, President Donald Trump brought this ethos back to the White House after the Obama era, during which the United States had a president who felt it necessary to apologize for the alleged sins of American foreign policy and sapped the strength of the U.S. military. That ended when Trump took office. As he proclaimed to the UN General Assembly in September 2020, the United States was “fulfilling its destiny as peacemaker, but it is peace through strength.”

And Trump was a peacemaker—a fact obscured by false portrayals of him but perfectly clear when one looks at the record. Just in the final 16 months of his administration, the United States facilitated the Abraham Accords, bringing peace to Israel and three of its neighbors in the Middle East plus Sudan; Serbia and Kosovo agreed to U.S.-brokered economic normalization; Washington successfully pushed Egypt and key Gulf states to settle their rift with Qatar and end their blockade of the emirate; and the United States entered into an agreement with the Taliban that prevented any American combat deaths in Afghanistan for nearly the entire final year of the Trump administration.

Trump was determined to avoid new wars and endless counterinsurgency operations, and his presidency was the first since that of Jimmy Carter in which the United States did not enter a new war or expand an existing conflict. Trump also ended one war with a rare U.S. victory, wiping out the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) as an organized military force and eliminating its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

But unlike during Carter’s term, under Trump, U.S. adversaries did not exploit Americans’ preference for peace. In the Trump years, Russia did not press further forward after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Iran did not dare to directly attack Israel, and North Korea stopped testing nuclear weapons after a combination of diplomatic outreach and a U.S. military show of force. And although China maintained an aggressive posture during Trump’s time in office, its leadership surely noted Trump’s determination to enforce redlines when, for example, he ordered a limited but effective air attack on Syria in 2017, after Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons against its own people.

A second Trump term would see the return of realism with a Jacksonian flavor.

Trump has never aspired to promulgate a “Trump Doctrine” for the benefit of the Washington foreign policy establishment. He adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts and to traditional American principles that run deeper than the globalist orthodoxies of recent decades. “America first is not America alone” is a mantra often repeated by Trump administration officials, and for good reason: Trump recognizes that a successful foreign policy requires joining forces with friendly governments and people elsewhere. The fact that Trump took a new look at which countries and groups were most pertinent does not make him purely transactional or an isolationist hostile to alliances, as his critics claim. NATO and U.S. cooperation with Japan, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states were all militarily strengthened when Trump was president.

Trump’s foreign policy and trade policy can be accurately understood as a reaction to the shortcomings of neoliberal internationalism, or globalism, as practiced from the early 1990s until 2017. Like many American voters, Trump grasped that “free trade” has been nothing of the sort in practice and in many instances involved foreign governments using high tariffs, barriers to trade, and the theft of intellectual property to harm U.S. economic and security interests. And despite hefty military spending, Washington’s national security apparatus enjoyed few victories after the 1991 Gulf War while suffering a number of notable failures in places such as Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Trump thinks highly of his predecessor Andrew Jackson and Jackson’s approach to foreign policy: be focused and forceful when compelled to action but wary of overreach. A second Trump term would see the return of realism with a Jacksonian flavor. Washington’s friends would be more secure and more self-reliant, and its foes would once again fear American power. The United States would be strong, and there would be peace.

WHAT HAPPENED?

In the early 1990s, the world seemed to be on the cusp of a second “American century.” The Iron Curtain had fallen, and the countries of Eastern Europe had cashiered communism and abandoned the Warsaw Pact, lining up to join Western Europe and the rest of the free world. The Soviet Union passed into history in 1991. Holdouts to the tide of freedom, such as China, seemed set to liberalize, at least economically, and posed no imminent threat to the United States. The Gulf War vindicated the previous decade’s U.S. military buildup and helped confirm that the world had just one superpower.

Contrast that situation to today. China has become a formidable military and economic adversary. It routinely threatens democratic Taiwan. Its coast guard and de facto maritime militia are in a prolonged state of low-intensity conflict with the Philippines, a treaty ally of the United States, which could spark a wider war in the South China Sea. Beijing is now Washington’s foremost foe in cyberspace, regularly attacking U.S. business and government networks. China’s unfair trade and business practices have harmed the American economy and made the United States dependent on China for manufactured goods and even some essential pharmaceuticals. And although China’s model has nothing like the ideological appeal to Third World revolutionaries and Western radicals that Soviet communism held in the mid-twentieth century, China’s political leadership under Xi Jinping nonetheless has had enough confidence to reverse economic reforms, crush freedom in Hong Kong, and pick fights with Washington and many of its partners. Xi is China’s most dangerous leader since the murderous Mao Zedong. And China has yet to be held to account for the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in Wuhan.

China now has a committed and useful junior partner in Moscow, as well. In 2018, a year after leaving office as vice president, Joe Biden co-authored an article in these pages titled “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin.” But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 demonstrated that Moscow was hardly deterred by his tough talk. The war has also exposed the shameful truth that NATO’s European members are unprepared for a new combat environment that combines innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence with low-tech but lethal drones and century-old artillery.

Joining China and Russia in an emerging axis of anti-American autocracies is Iran. Like the regimes in Beijing and Moscow, the theocracy in Tehran has grown bolder. With seeming impunity, its leaders frequently threaten the United States and its allies. Iran has now amassed enough enriched uranium to build a basic nuclear weapon in less than two weeks, if it chose to do so, according to the most authoritative estimates. Iran’s proxies, including Hamas, kidnap and kill Americans. And in April, for the first time, Iran attacked Washington’s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, directly from Iranian territory, firing hundreds of drones and missiles.

The picture closer to home is hardly any better. In Mexico, drug cartels form a parallel government in some areas and traffic people and illegal drugs into the United States. Venezuela is a belligerent basket case. And the Biden administration’s inability to secure the southern U.S. border is perhaps its biggest and most embarrassing failure.

CLARITY ON CHINA

This morass of American weakness and failure cries out for a Trumpian restoration of peace through strength. Nowhere is that need more urgent than in the contest with China.

From the beginning of his presidential term, Biden has sent mixed messages about the threat posed by Beijing. Although Biden has retained tariffs and export controls enacted by Trump, he has also sent cabinet-level officials on a series of visits to Beijing, where they have delivered firm warnings about trade and security but also extended an olive branch, promising to restore some forms of the cooperation with China that existed before the Trump administration. This is a policy of pageantry over substance. Meetings and summits are activities, not achievements.

Meanwhile, Beijing pays close attention to what the president and his top advisers say in public. Biden has referred to China’s economy as a “ticking time bomb” but also stated plainly, “I don’t want to contain China” and “We’re not looking to hurt China—sincerely. We’re all better off if China does well.” To believe such pablum is to believe that China is not truly an adversary.

The Chinese Communist Party seeks to expand its power and security by supplanting the United States as the global leader in technological development and innovation in critical areas such as electric vehicles, solar power, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. To do so, Beijing relies on enormous subsidies, intellectual property theft, and unfair trade practices. In the automotive industry, for example, Beijing has backed national champions such as BYD, which it has showered with subsidies and encouraged to dump millions of cheap electric vehicles into markets in the United States and allied countries, with the goal of bankrupting automakers from Seoul to Tokyo to Detroit to Bavaria.

Trump and other G-20 leaders in Hamburg, Germany, July 2017

Carlos Barria / Reuters

To maintain its competitive edge in the face of this onslaught, the United States must remain the best place in the world to invest, innovate, and do business. But the increasing authority of the U.S. regulatory state, including overaggressive antitrust enforcement, threatens to destroy the American system of free enterprise. Even as Chinese companies receive unfair support from Beijing to put American companies out of business, the governments of the United States and its European allies are making it harder for those same American companies to compete. This is a recipe for national decline; Western governments should abandon these unnecessary regulations.

As China seeks to undermine American economic and military strength, Washington should return the favor—just as it did during the Cold War, when it worked to weaken the Soviet economy. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that a “full economic separation [from China] is neither practical nor desirable” and that the United States “reject[s] the idea that we should decouple our economy from China.” But Washington should, in fact, seek to decouple its economy from China’s. Without describing it as such, Trump began a de facto policy of decoupling by enacting higher tariffs on about half of Chinese exports to America, leaving Beijing the option to resume normal trade if it changed its conduct—an opportunity it did not take. Now is the time to press even further, with a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods, as Trump has advocated, and tougher export controls on any technology that might be of use to China.

Of course, Washington should keep open lines of communication with Beijing, but the United States should focus its Pacific diplomacy on allies such as Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, traditional partners such as Singapore, and emerging ones such as Indonesia and Vietnam. Critics suggest that Trump’s calls for U.S. allies in Asia to contribute more to their own defense might worry them. On the contrary: my discussions with officials in the region have revealed that they would welcome more of Trump’s plain talk about the need for alliances to be two-way relationships and that they believe his approach would enhance security.

The true source of tumult in the Middle East is Iran’s theocratic regime.

Joint military exercises with such countries are essential. Trump disinvited China from the annual Rim of the Pacific war games in 2018: a good defensive team does not invite its most likely opponent to witness planning and practice. (China, naturally, sent spy ships to observe.) Congress indicated in 2022 that the United States should invite Taiwan to join the exercises. But Biden has refused to do so—a mistake that must be remedied.

Taiwan spends around $19 billion annually on its defense, which amounts to just under three percent of its annual economic output. Although that is better than most U.S. allies and partners, it is still too little. Other countries in this increasingly dangerous region also need to spend more. And Taiwan’s shortcoming is not solely its own fault: past U.S. administrations have sent mixed signals about Washington’s willingness to supply Taiwan with arms and help defend it. The next administration should make clear that along with a continued U.S. commitment comes an expectation that Taiwan spend more on defense and take other steps, as well, such as expanding military conscription.

Meanwhile, Congress should help build up the armed forces of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam by extending to them the kinds of grants, loans, and weapons transfers that the United States has long offered Israel. The Philippines, in particular, needs rapid support in its standoff with Chinese forces in the South China Sea. The navy should undertake a crash program to refurbish decommissioned ships and then donate them to the Philippines, including frigates and amphibious assault ships sitting in reserve in Philadelphia and Hawaii.

The navy should also move one of its aircraft carriers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, andthe Pentagon should consider deploying the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific, relieving it in particular of missions in the Middle East and North Africa. U.S. bases in the Pacific often lack adequate missile defenses and fighter jet protection—a scandalous deficiency that the Defense Department should fix by quickly shifting resources from elsewhere.

THE RETURN OF MAXIMUM PRESSURE

Another region where the Biden administration has demonstrated little strength and thus brought little peace is the Middle East. Biden entered office determined to ostracize Saudi Arabia for human rights violations—but also to resume the Obama-era policy of negotiating with Iran, a far worse violator of human rights. This approach alienated Saudi Arabia, an important partner and energy exporter, and did nothing to tame Iran, which has become demonstrably more violent in the past four years. Allies in the Middle East and beyond saw these actions as evidence of American weakness and unreliability and have pursued foreign policies more independent of Washington. Iran itself has felt free to attack Israel, U.S. forces, and American partners through proxies and directly.

In contrast, the Trump administration carried out a campaign of maximum pressure on Iran, including by insisting that European countries comply with U.S. and UN sanctions on the Islamic Republic. This show of resolve rallied important U.S. partners such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and paved the way for the Abraham Accords. When U.S. allies see renewed American determination to contain the Islamist regime in Tehran, they will join with Washington and help bring peace to a region that is crucial to energy markets and global capital markets.

Unfortunately, the opposite has occurred during the Biden administration, which has failed to enforce existing sanctions on Iranian oil exports. In recent months, those exports reached a six-year high, exceeding 1.5 million barrels per day. The easing of sanctions enforcement has been a bonanza for Iran’s government and its military, netting them tens of billions of dollars a year. Restoring the Trump crackdown will curtail Iran’s ability to fund terrorist proxy forces in the Middle East and beyond.

Trump and Xi in Beijing, November 2017

Damir Sagolj / Reuters

Biden’s problems began in the Middle East when he tried to reenter the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal that Trump pulled out of in 2018, having recognized it as a failure. Far from eliminating or even freezing Iran’s nuclear program, the deal had sanctified it, allowing Iran to retain centrifuges that it has used to amass nearly enough uranium for a bomb. A return to Trump’s policy of maximum pressure would include the full enforcement of U.S. sanctions on Iran’s energy sector, applying them not only to Iran but also to governments and organizations that buy Iranian oil and gas. Maximum pressure would also mean deploying more maritime and aviation assets to the Middle East, making it clear not only to Tehran but also to American allies that the U.S. military’s focus in the region was on deterring Iran, finally moving past the counterinsurgency orientation of the past two decades.

A stronger policy to counter Iran would also lead to a more productive approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is once again roiling the region. For decades, the conventional wisdom held that resolving that dispute was the key to improving security in the Middle East. But the conflict has become more of a symptom than a cause of tumult in the region, the true source of which is Iran’s revolutionary, theocratic regime. Tehran provides critical funding, arms, intelligence, and strategic guidance to an array of groups that threaten Israel’s security—not just Hamas, which sparked the current war in Gaza with its barbaric October 7 attack on Israel, but also the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah and the Houthi militia in Yemen. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved until Iran is contained—and until Palestinian extremists stop trying to eliminate the Jewish state.

In the meantime, the United States should continue to back Israel as it seeks to eliminate Hamas in Gaza. The long-term governance and status of the territory are not for Washington to dictate; the United States should support Israel, Egypt, and U.S. allies in the Gulf as they grapple with that problem. But Washington should not pressure Israel to return to negotiations over a long-term solution to the broader conflict with the Palestinians. The focus of U.S. policy in the Middle East should remain the malevolent actor that is ultimately most responsible for the turmoil and killing: the Iranian regime.

FROM KABUL TO KYIV

Biden also drastically weakened American statecraft through his catastrophic mismanagement of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Trump administration negotiated the deal that brought an end to U.S. involvement in the war, but Trump would never have allowed for such a chaotic and embarrassing retreat. One can draw a direct line from the fecklessness of the pullout in the summer of 2021 to the decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack Ukraine six months later. After Russia brushed off Biden’s warnings about the consequences of invading Ukraine and attacked anyway, Biden offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the means to leave Kyiv, which would have repeated Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s ignominious flight from Kabul the summer before. Fortunately, Zelensky declined the offer.

The Biden administration has since provided significant military aid to Ukraine but has often dragged its feet in sending Kyiv the kinds of weapons it needs to succeed. The $61 billion Congress recently appropriated for Ukraine—on top of the $113 billion already approved—is probably sufficient to prevent Ukraine from losing, but not enough to enable it to win. Meanwhile, Biden does not seem to have a plan to end the war.

Trump, for his part, has made clear that he would like to see a negotiated settlement to the war that ends the killing and preserves the security of Ukraine. Trump’s approach would be to continue to provide lethal aid to Ukraine, financed by European countries, while keeping the door open to diplomacy with Russia—and keeping Moscow off balance with a degree of unpredictability. He would also push NATO to rotate ground and air forces to Poland to augment its capabilities closer to Russia’s border and to make unmistakably clear that the alliance will defend all its territory from foreign aggression.

Washington should make sure that its European allies understand that the continued American defense of Europe is contingent on Europe doing its part—including in Ukraine. If Europe wants to show that it is serious about defending Ukraine, it should admit the country to the European Union immediately, waiving the usual bureaucratic accession protocol. Such a move would send a strong message to Putin that the West will not cede Ukraine to Moscow. It would also give hope to the Ukrainian people that better days lie ahead.

A MILITARY IN DECLINE

As China has risen, the Middle East has burned, and Russia has rampaged in Ukraine, the U.S. military has resumed a gradual decline that began during the Obama administration before pausing during Trump’s time in office. Last year, only the Marine Corps and the Space Force met their recruiting goals. The army fell an astounding 10,000 recruits short of its modest goal of adding 65,000 soldiers to maintain its current size. The deficiency is not just a personnel problem; it speaks to a lack of confidence that young Americans and their families have in the purpose and mission of the military.

Meanwhile, the military increasingly lacks the tools it needs to defend the United States and its interests. The navy now has fewer than 300 ships, compared with 592 at the end of the Reagan administration. That is not enough to maintain conventional deterrence through naval presence in the 18 maritime regions of the world that U.S. combatant commanders have identified as strategically important. Congress and the executive branch should recommit to the goal of having a 355-ship navy by 2032, which Trump set in 2017. This modestly larger navy must include more stealthy Virginia-class attack submarines. Also crucial are more Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, which form one part of the so-called nuclear triad—the equipment and systems that allow Washington to deploy nuclear weapons from the air, land, and sea.

Other parts of the triad need improvement, as well. For example, Congress must appropriate funds for all 100 planned units of the B-21 stealth bomber that is under development, to replace the aging B-2 bomber. In fact, some analysts have argued that the air force needs no fewer than 256 of these penetrating strike bombers to carry out a sustainable campaign against a peer competitor. To avoid the procurement problems experienced with the B-2, which left the air force with a fleet of just 21 aircraft instead of the 132 originally planned, both the air force and the appropriate congressional committees must work to ensure a stable production process.

The triad has become more important in recent years as China and Russia have modernized their nuclear arsenals. China has doubled the size of its arsenal since 2020: a massive, unexplained, and unwarranted expansion. The United States has to maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles. To do so, Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992—not just by using computer models. If China and Russia continue to refuse to engage in good-faith arms control talks, the United States should also resume production of uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the primary fissile isotopes of nuclear weapons.

Trump greeting U.S. military personnel in Yokosuka, Japan, May 2019

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

The U.S. conventional arsenal also needs to be transformed. The Trump administration revived the development of hypersonic missiles, funding for which President Barack Obama drastically reduced in 2011, leaving China and Russia far ahead of the United States in acquiring these important new weapons that travel at more than five times the speed of sound and can maneuver within the earth’s atmosphere. A second Trump term would see massive investments in this critical technology.

Restoring the military will take the energetic involvement of the president and congressional leadership because civilian and uniformed personnel are incapable of fixing the Pentagon themselves. (Trump often pushed for innovation in the face of bureaucratic inertia fostered by senior-level civilian officials at the Defense Department.) But fundamental change must account for the reality of limited budgets. Thanks to unsustainable levels of borrowing, the federal budget will have to decline, and large increases to defense expenditures are unlikely regardless of which party controls the White House and Congress. Spending smarter will have to substitute for spending more in a contemporary strategy of peace through strength.

Fixing the military requires major reforms to the armed forces’ acquisition processes, both for itself and for allied militaries. In recent decades, important projects such as the Zumwalt destroyer, the Littoral Combat Ship, the F-35 fighter, and the KC-46 tanker aircraft arrived years late and vastly over budget. In the 1950s, in contrast, Lockheed delivered the first U-2 spy aircraft less than a year and a half after getting the contract—and completed it under budget. Such an accomplishment would be inconceivable today because of status quo attitudes in most of the services, congressional dysfunction that makes budgeting and planning difficult, and a lack of vision on the part of the secretaries of the armed forces.

Another fundamental problem with military procurement is the Pentagon’s irrational system of developing requirements for new weapons. Requirements are easy to add and hard to remove. The result is highly sophisticated weapons, but ones that are expensive and take years to field. For example, in the early and mid-1990s, when the navy was designing its current class of aircraft carriers, it added a requirement for an electromagnetic aircraft launch system—a technology that did not exist at the time. The decision, which Trump criticized in 2017, added significant costs and delays. The senior civilian leadership in the Pentagon must reform the process by establishing a new rule that any significant alteration in design that may add cost or time to the development of essential systems must be authorized by them and them alone.

The United States should take inspiration from procurement systems in allies such as Australia, where a lean bureaucracy has developed the Ghost Bat unmanned aerial combat vehicle and the Ghost Shark unmanned underwater vehicle at low cost and without the massive delays that hold back U.S. procurement. Nimble newer defense suppliers such as Anduril and Palantir—companies rooted in the innovative tech sector—could also help the Pentagon develop procurement processes better suited to the twenty-first century.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY—AND YOUR FRIENDS

A more efficient military alone, however, will not be enough to thwart and deter the new Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis. Doing so will also require strong alliances among the free countries of the world. Building alliances will be just as important in a second Trump term as it was in the first one. Although critics often depicted Trump as hostile to traditional alliances, in reality, he enhanced most of them. Trump never canceled or postponed a single deployment to NATO. His pressure on NATO governments to spend more on defense made the alliance stronger.

Biden administration officials like to pay lip service to the importance of alliances, and Biden says that he believes the United States is engaged in a contest pitting allied democracies against rival autocracies. But the administration undermines its own putative mission when it questions the democratic bona fides of conservative elected leaders in countries allied with the United States, including the former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Polish President Andrzej Duda. In fact, these leaders are responsive to the desires of their people and seek to defend democracy, but through policies different from those espoused by the kind of people who like to hobnob in Davos. The Biden administration, however, seems less interested in fostering good relations with real-world democratic allies than in defending fictional abstractions such as “the rules-based international order.” Such rhetoric reflects a globalist, liberal elitism that masquerades as support for democratic ideals.

Criticism of those democratic leaders is all the more galling when compared with how little attention Biden officials pay to dissidents in authoritarian states. The president and his top aides seldom follow the approach of former presidents who spotlighted detained dissidents to illustrate authoritarian abuses and highlight the superiority of the free world’s model of inalienable individual rights and the rule of law. Carter personally wrote to the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Reagan met with the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky in the Oval Office and met with others in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. In contrast, Biden has rarely spoken publicly about individual dissidents—people such as Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong publisher and democracy advocate whom Chinese officials have imprisoned on sham charges. Although the State Department has issued protestations about China’s treatment of its citizens, they have come against a backdrop of high-level, unconditional engagement with China that features no serious human rights component.

Trump’s pressure on NATO governments to spend more on defense made the alliance stronger.

Trump, for his part, preferred to focus more on Americans unjustly detained abroad than on dissidents, in an effort to build relationships with foreign leaders and give dictators such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un a chance to come in from the cold. But he did pay attention to opposition forces in authoritarian states that are U.S. rivals. In January 2020, after I publicly expressed hope that the people of Iran would someday be able to choose their own leaders, Trump followed up on social media: “Don’t kill your protestors,” he admonished the theocrats in Tehran. A second Trump term would see stepped-up presidential-level attention to dissidents and political forces that can challenge U.S. adversaries. This effort would build on past actions, such as when Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and other senior officials met with activists seeking freedom in China and when Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger addressed the Chinese people in Mandarin from the White House and gave voice to many of their concerns about the repressive rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

Some might say that it is hypocritical for the United States to condemn some repressive governments, such as those in China and Iran, while partnering with others, such as Arab nondemocracies. But it is important to consider countries’ capacities to change. Most Arab monarchies today are more open and liberal than they were ten or 20 years ago—partly because of engagement with the United States. The same cannot be said of the Chinese or Iranian governments, which have become more repressive and aggressive toward their neighbors.

The United States is not perfect, and its security does not require every nation on earth to resemble it politically. Throughout much of U.S. history, most Americans believed it was sufficient to stand as a model to others rather than to attempt to impose a political system on others. But Americans should not underestimate what their country has achieved or downplay the success of the American experiment in lifting people at home and abroad out of repression, poverty, and insecurity.

Can an American revival occur today in a divided nation, when polls indicate that a vast majority of citizens believe their country is on the wrong track? As Reagan’s election in 1980 demonstrated, the United States can always turn things around. In November, the American people will have the opportunity to return to office a president who restored peace through strength—and who can do it again. If they do, the country has the resources, the ingenuity, and the courage to rebuild its national power, securing its freedom and once again becoming the last best hope for humankind.

ROBERT C. O’BRIEN served as U.S. National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021.

Foreign Affairs · by Robert C. O’Brien · June 18, 2024

16. A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is

Another potential preview of an NSS in a possible next administration. I wonder which cabinet position Ben Rhodes is auditioning for?

Excerpts:

A similar dynamic is required on clean energy. If there is a second Biden administration, most of its efforts to combat climate change will likely shift from domestic action to international cooperation, particularly if there is divided government in Washington. As the United States works to secure supply chains for critical minerals used for clean energy, it will need to avoid constantly working at cross-purposes with Beijing. At the same time, it has an opportunity—through “de-risking” supply chains, forging public-private partnerships, and starting multilateral initiatives—to invest more in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia that have not always been an attractive destination for American capital. In a sense, the Inflation Reduction Act has to be globalized.

Finally, the United States should focus its support for democracy on the health of existing open societies and offering lifelines to besieged civil society groups around the world. As someone who has made the case for putting support for democracy at the center of U.S. foreign policy, I must acknowledge that the calcification of the democratic recession in much of the world requires Washington to recalibrate. Instead of framing the battle between democracy and autocracy as a confrontation with a handful of geopolitical adversaries, policymakers in democracies must recognize that it is first and foremost a clash of values that must be won within their own societies. From that self-corrective vantage point, the United States should methodically invest in the building blocks of democratic ecosystems: anticorruption and accountability initiatives, independent journalism, civil society, digital literacy campaigns, and counter-disinformation efforts. The willingness to share sensitive information, on display in the run-up to war in Ukraine, should be applied to other cases where human rights can be defended through transparency. Outside government, democratic movements and political parties across the world should become more invested in one another’s success, mirroring what the far right has done over the last decade by sharing best practices, holding regular meetings, and forming transnational coalitions.

Ultimately, the most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own democracy, which is the main reason a Trump victory would be so dangerous. In the United States, as elsewhere, people are craving a renewed sense of belonging, meaning, and solidarity. These are not concepts that usually find their way into foreign policy discussions, but if officials do not take that longing seriously, they risk fueling the brand of nationalism that leads to autocracy and conflict. The simple and repeated affirmation that all human life matters equally, and that people everywhere are entitled to live with dignity, should be America’s basic proposition to the world—a story it must commit to in word and deed.

A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is

Biden and the Search for a New American Strategy

By Ben Rhodes

July/August 2024

Published on June 18, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made · June 18, 2024

“America is back.” In the early days of his presidency, Joe Biden repeated those words as a starting point for his foreign policy. The phrase offered a bumper-sticker slogan to pivot away from Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership. It also suggested that the United States could reclaim its self-conception as a virtuous hegemon, that it could make the rules-based international order great again. Yet even though a return to competent normalcy was in order, the Biden administration’s mindset of restoration has occasionally struggled against the currents of our disordered times. An updated conception of U.S. leadership—one tailored to a world that has moved on from American primacy and the eccentricities of American politics—is necessary to minimize enormous risks and pursue new opportunities.

To be sure, Biden’s initial pledge was a balm to many after Trump’s presidency ended in the dual catastrophes of COVID-19 and the January 6 insurrection. Yet two challenges largely beyond the Biden administration’s control shadowed the message of superpower restoration. First was the specter of Trump’s return. Allies watched nervously as the former president maintained his grip on the Republican Party and Washington remained mired in dysfunction. Autocratic adversaries, most notably Russian President Vladimir Putin, bet on Washington’s lack of staying power. New multilateral agreements akin to the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris agreement on climate change, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership were impossible, given the vertiginous swings in U.S. foreign policy.

Second, the old rules-based international order doesn’t really exist anymore. Sure, the laws, structures, and summits remain in place. But core institutions such as the UN Security Council and the World Trade Organization are tied in knots by disagreements among their members. Russia is committed to disrupting U.S.-fortified norms. China is committed to building its own alternative order. On trade and industrial policy, even Washington is moving away from core tenets of post–Cold War globalization. Regional powers such as Brazil, India, Turkey, and the Gulf states pick and choose which partner to plug into depending on the issue. Even the high-water mark for multilateral action in the Biden years—support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia—remains a largely Western initiative. As the old order unravels, these overlapping blocs are competing over what will replace it.

A Biden victory in this fall’s election would offer reassurance that the particular risk of another Trump presidency has passed, but that will not vanquish the forces of disorder. To date, Washington has failed to do the necessary audit of the ways its post–Cold War foreign policy discredited U.S. leadership. The “war on terror” emboldened autocrats, misallocated resources, fueled a global migration crisis, and contributed to an arc of instability from South Asia through North Africa. The free-market prescriptions of the so-called Washington consensus ended in a financial crisis that opened the door to populists railing against out-of-touch elites. The overuse of sanctions led to increased workarounds and global fatigue with Washington’s weaponization of the dollar’s dominance. Over the last two decades, American lectures on democracy have increasingly been tuned out.

Indeed, after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, American rhetoric about the rules-based international order has been seen around the world on a split screen of hypocrisy, as Washington has supplied the Israeli government with weapons used to bombard Palestinian civilians with impunity. The war has created a policy challenge for an administration that criticizes Russia for the same indiscriminate tactics that Israel has used in Gaza, a political challenge for a Democratic Party with core constituencies who don’t understand why the president has supported a far-right government that ignores the United States’ advice, and a moral crisis for a country whose foreign policy purports to be driven by universal values. Put simply: Gaza should shock Washington out of the muscle memory that guides too many of its actions.

If Biden does win a second term, he should use it to build on those of his policies that have accounted for shifting global realities, while pivoting away from the political considerations, maximalism, and Western-centric view that have caused his administration to make some of the same mistakes as its predecessors. The stakes are high. Whoever is president in the coming years will have to avoid global war, respond to the escalating climate crisis, and grapple with the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Meeting the moment requires abandoning a mindset of American primacy and recognizing that the world will be a turbulent place for years to come. Above all, it requires building a bridge to the future—not the past.

THE TRUMP THREAT

One of Biden’s mantras is “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” As the presidential campaign heats up, it is worth heeding this advice. But to properly outline the dangers of a second Trump term, it is necessary to take Trump’s arguments seriously, despite the unserious form they often take. Much of what Trump says resonates broadly. Americans are tired of wars; indeed, his takeover of the Republican Party would have been impossible without the Iraq war, which discredited the GOP establishment. Americans also no longer trust their elites. Although Trump’s rhetoric about a “deep state” moves quickly into baseless conspiracy theory, it strikes a chord with voters who wonder why so many of the politicians who promised victories in Afghanistan and Iraq were never held to account. And although Trump’s willingness to cut off assistance to Ukraine is abhorrent to many, there is a potent populism to it. How long will the United States spend tens of billions of dollars helping a country whose stated aim—the recapture of all Ukrainian territory—seems unachievable?

Trump has also harnessed a populist backlash to globalization from both the right and the left. Particularly since the 2008 financial crisis, large swaths of the public in democracies have simmered with discontent over widening inequality, deindustrialization, and a perceived loss of control and lack of meaning. It is no wonder that the exemplars of post–Cold War globalization—free trade agreements, the U.S.-Chinese relationship, and the instruments of international economic cooperation itself—have become ripe targets for Trump. When Trump’s more punitive approaches to rivals, such as his trade war with China, didn’t precipitate all the calamities that some had predicted, his taboo-breaking approach appeared to be validated. The United States, it turned out, did have leverage.

But offering a potent critique of problems should not be confused with having the right solutions to them. To begin with, Trump’s own presidency seeded much of the chaos that Biden has faced. Time and again, Trump pursued politically motivated shortcuts that made things worse. To end the war in Afghanistan, he cut a deal with the Taliban over the heads of the Afghan people, setting a timeline for withdrawal that was shorter than the one Biden eventually adopted. Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal despite Iranian compliance, unshackling the country’s nuclear program, escalating a proxy war across the Middle East, and sowing doubt across the world about whether the United States keeps its word. By moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights, and pursuing the Abraham Accords, he cut the Palestinians out of Arab-Israeli normalization and emboldened Israel’s far right, lighting a fuse that detonated in the current war.

Although Trump’s tougher line with China demonstrated the United States’ leverage, it was episodic and uncoordinated with allies. As a result, Beijing was able to cast itself as a more predictable partner to much of the world, while the supply chain disruptions caused by trade disputes and decoupling created new inefficiencies—and drove up costs—in the global economy. Trump’s lurch from confronting to embracing Kim Jong Un enabled the North Korean leader to advance his nuclear and missile programs under reduced pressure. Closer to home, Trump’s recognition of an alternative Venezuelan government under the opposition leader Juan Guaidó managed to strengthen the incumbent Nicolás Maduro’s hold on power. The “maximum pressure” policy toward Venezuela and Cuba, which sought to promote regime change through crippling sanctions and diplomatic isolation, fueled humanitarian crises that have sent hundreds of thousands of people to the United States’ southern border.

Biden in Washington, D.C., May 2024

Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters

A second Trump term would start amid a more volatile global environment than his first, and there would be fewer guardrails constraining a president who would be in command of his party, surrounded by loyalists, and freed from ever having to face voters again. Although there are many risks, three stand out. First, Trump’s blend of strongman nationalism and isolationism could create a permission structure for aggression. A withdrawal of U.S. support for Ukraine—and, perhaps, for NATO itself—would embolden Putin to push deeper into the country. Were Washington to abandon its European allies and promote right-wing nationalism, it could exacerbate political fissures within Europe, emboldening Russian-aligned nationalists in such places as Hungary and Serbia who have echoed Putin in seeking to reunite ethnic populations in neighboring states.

Despite U.S.-Chinese tensions, East Asia has avoided the outright conflict of Europe and the Middle East. But consider the opportunity that a Trump victory would present to North Korea. Fortified by increased Russian technological assistance, Kim could ratchet up military provocations on the Korean Peninsula, believing that he has a friend in the White House. Meanwhile, according to U.S. assessments, China’s military will be ready for an invasion of Taiwan by 2027. If Chinese leader Xi Jinping truly wishes to forcibly bring Taiwan under Beijing’s sovereignty, the twilight of a Trump presidency—by which point the United States would likely be alienated from its traditional allies—could present an opening.

Second, if given the chance, Trump has made it clear that he would almost certainly roll back American democracy, a move that would reverberate globally. If his first election represented a one-off disruption to the democratic world, his second would more definitively validate an international trend toward ethnonationalism and authoritarian populism. Momentum could swing further in the direction of far-right parties in Europe, performative populists in the Americas, and nepotistic and transactional corruption in Asia and Africa. Consider for a moment the aging roster of strongmen who will likely still be leading other powers—not just Xi and Putin but also Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Ali Khamenei in Iran, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. To say the least, this cast of characters is unlikely to promote respect for democratic norms within borders or conciliation beyond them.

This leads to the third danger. In the coming years, leaders will increasingly be confronted with global problems that can be managed or solved only through cooperation. As the climate crisis worsens, a Trump presidency would make a coordinated international response much harder and validate the backlash against environmental policies that has been building within advanced economies. At the same time, artificial intelligence is poised to take off, creating both valuable opportunities and enormous risks. At a moment when the United States should be turning to diplomacy to avoid wars, establish new norms, and promote greater international cooperation, the country would be led by an “America first” strongman.

A TIME TO HEAL

In any administration, national security policy is a peculiar mix of long-standing commitments, old political interests, new presidential initiatives, and improvised responses to sudden crises. Navigating the rough currents of the world, the Biden administration has often seemed to embody the contradictions of this dynamic, with one foot in the past, yearning nostalgically for American primacy, and one foot in the future, adjusting to the emerging world as it is.

Through its affirmative agenda, the administration has reacted well to changing realities. Biden linked domestic and foreign policy through his legislative agenda. The CHIPS Act made substantial investments in science and innovation, including the domestic manufacturing of semiconductors. The act worked in parallel with ramped-up export and investment controls on China’s high-tech sector, which have buttressed the United States’ lead in the development of new technologies such as AI and quantum computing. Although this story is more complicated to tell than one about a tariff-based trade war, Biden’s policy is in fact more coherent: revitalize U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing, disentangle critical supply chains from China, and maintain a lead for U.S. companies in developing new and potentially transformative technologies.

Gaza should shock Washington out of the muscle memory that guides too many of its actions.

Biden’s most significant piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, made enormous investments in clean energy technology. These investments will allow the United States to raise its ambition in meeting climate goals by pushing domestic industry and global markets to shift away from fossil fuels faster. Although this breakthrough enhanced U.S. credibility on climate change, it also created new challenges, as even allies have complained that Washington resorted to subsidies instead of pursuing coordinated cross-border approaches to reduce emissions. In this respect, however, the Biden administration was dealing with the world as it is. Congress cannot pass complex reforms such as putting a price on carbon; what it can do is pass large spending bills that invest in the United States.

Despite tensions over U.S. industrial policy, the Biden administration has effectively reinvested in alliances that frayed under Trump. That effort has tacitly acknowledged that the world now features competing blocs, which makes it harder for the United States to pursue major initiatives by working through large international institutions or with other members of the great-power club. Instead, Washington has prioritized groupings of like-minded countries that are, to use a catch phrase, “fit for purpose.” Collaboration with the United Kingdom and Australia on nuclear submarine technology. New infrastructure and AI initiatives through the G-7. Structured efforts to create more consultation among U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. This approach involves a dizzying number of parts; one can lose track of the number of regional consultative groups that now exist. But in the context of an unraveled international order, it makes sense to thread together cooperation where possible, while trying to turn new habits of cooperation into enduring arrangements.

Most notably, Biden’s reinvestment in European alliances paid off when Washington was able to swiftly mobilize support for Ukraine in 2022. This task was made easier by the administration’s innovative release of intelligence on Russia’s intentions to invade, an overdue reform of the way that Washington manages information. Although the war has reached a tenuous stalemate, the effort to fortify transatlantic institutions continues to advance. NATO has grown in size, relevance, and resourcing. European Union institutions have taken a more proactive role in foreign policy, most notably in coordinating support for Ukraine and accelerating its candidacy for EU membership. For all the understandable consternation about Washington’s struggle to pass a recent aid bill for Ukraine, Europe’s focus on its own institutions and capabilities was long overdue.

SLOW TO CHANGE

Yet there are three important ways in which the Biden administration has yet to recalibrate its approach to the world of post-American primacy. The first has to do with American politics. On several issues that engender controversy in Congress, the administration has constrained or distorted its options by preemptively deferring to outdated hard-liners. Even as Trump has demonstrated how the left-right axis has been scrambled on foreign policy, Biden at times feels trapped in the national security politics of the immediate post-9/11 era. Yet what once allowed a politician to appear tough to appease hawks in Washington was rarely good policy; now, it is no longer necessarily good politics.

In Latin America, the Biden administration was slow to pivot away from Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaigns on Venezuela and Cuba. Biden maintained, for example, the avalanche of sanctions that Trump imposed on Cuba, including the cynical return of that country to the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism just before leaving office, in January 2021. The result has been an acute humanitarian crisis in which U.S. sanctions exacerbated shortages of basic staples such as food and fuel, contributing to widespread suffering and migration. In the Middle East, the administration failed to move swiftly to reenter the politically contested Iran nuclear deal, opting instead to pursue what Biden called a “longer and stronger” agreement, even though Trump was the one who violated the deal’s terms. Instead, the administration embraced Trump’s Abraham Accords as central to its Middle East policy while reverting to confrontation with Iran. This effectively embraced Netanyahu’s preferred course: a shift away from pursuing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and toward an open-ended proxy war with Tehran.

Anyone who has worked at the nexus of U.S. politics and national security knows that avoiding friction with anti-Cuban and pro-Israeli hard-liners in Congress can feel like the path of least resistance. But that logic has turned into a trap. After October 7, Biden decided to pursue a strategy of fully embracing Netanyahu—insisting (for a time) that any criticism would be issued in private and that U.S. military assistance would not be conditioned on the actions of the Israeli government. This engendered immediate goodwill in Israel, but it preemptively eliminated U.S. leverage. It also overlooked the far-right nature of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which offered warning signs about the indiscriminate way in which it planned to prosecute its military campaign, as Israeli officials cut off food and water flowing into Gaza within days of Hamas’s attack. In the months that followed, the administration has been trying to catch up to a deteriorating situation, evolving from a strategy of embracing Netanyahu, to one of issuing rhetorical demands that were largely ignored, to one of partial restrictions on offensive military assistance. Ironically, by being mindful of the political risks of breaking with Netanyahu, Biden invited greater political risks from within the Democratic coalition and around the world.

The temptation to succumb to Washington’s outdated instincts has contributed to a second liability: the pursuit of maximalist objectives. The administration has shown some prudence in this area. Even as competition ramped up with China, Biden has worked over the last year to rebuild lines of communication with Beijing and has largely avoided provocative pronouncements on Taiwan. And even as he committed the United States to helping Ukraine defend itself, Biden set the objective of avoiding a direct war between the United States and Russia (although his rhetoric did drift into endorsing regime change in Moscow). The bigger challenge has at times come from outside the administration, as some supporters of Ukraine indulged in a premature triumphalism that raised impossible expectations for last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive. Paradoxically, this impulse ended up hurting Ukraine: when the campaign inevitably came up short, it made the broader U.S. policy toward Ukraine look like a failure. Sustaining support for Ukraine will require greater transparency about what is achievable in the near term and an openness to negotiations in the medium term.

Biden and U.S. officials meeting with a Chinese delegation in Woodside, California, November 2023

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Gaza also showcases the danger of maximalist aims. Israel’s stated objective of destroying Hamas has never been achievable. Since Hamas would never announce its own surrender, pursuing this goal would require a perpetual Israeli occupation of Gaza or the mass displacement of its people. That outcome may be what some Israeli officials really want, as evidenced by right-wing ministers’ own statements. It is certainly what many people around the world, horrified by the campaign in Gaza, believe the Israeli government really wants. These critics wonder why Washington would support such a campaign, even as its own rhetoric opposes it. Instead of seeking to moderate Israel’s unsustainable course, Washington needs to use its leverage to press for negotiated agreements, Palestinian state building, and a conception of Israeli security that is not beholden to expansionism or permanent occupation.

Indeed, too many prescriptions sound good in Washington but fail to account for simple realities. Even with the United States’ military advantage, China will develop advanced technologies and maintain its claim over Taiwan. Even with sustained U.S. support, Ukraine will have to live next to a large, nationalist, nuclear-armed Russia. Even with its military dominance, Israel cannot eliminate the Palestinian demand for self-determination. If Washington allows foreign policy to be driven by zero-sum maximalist demands, it risks a choice between open-ended conflict and embarrassment.

This leads to the third way in which Washington must change its approach. Too often, the United States has appeared unable or unwilling to see itself through the eyes of most of the world’s population, particularly people in the global South who feel that the international order is not designed for their benefit. The Biden administration has made laudable efforts to change this perception—for instance, delivering COVID-19 vaccines across the developing world, mediating conflicts from Ethiopia to Sudan, and sending food aid to places hit hard by shortages exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. Yet the overuse of sanctions, along with the prioritization of Ukraine and other U.S. geopolitical interests, misreads the room. To build better ties with developing countries, Washington needs to consistently prioritize the issues they care about: investment, technology, and clean energy.

Once again, Gaza interacts with this challenge. To be blunt: for much of the world, it appears that Washington doesn’t value the lives of Palestinian children as much as it values the lives of Israelis or Ukrainians. Unconditional military aid to Israel, questioning the Palestinian death toll, vetoing cease-fire resolutions at the UN Security Council, and criticizing investigations into alleged Israeli war crimes may all feel like autopilot in Washington—but that’s precisely the problem. Much of the world now hears U.S. rhetoric about human rights and the rule of law as cynical rather than aspirational, particularly when it fails to wrestle with double standards. Total consistency is unattainable in foreign policy. But by listening and responding to more diverse voices from around the world, Washington could begin to build a reservoir of goodwill.

A FAREWELL TO PRIMACY

In its more affirmative agenda, the Biden administration is repositioning the United States for a changing world by focusing on the resilience of its own democracy and economy while rebooting alliances in Europe and Asia. To extend that regeneration into something more global and lasting, it should abandon the pursuit of primacy while embracing an agenda that can resonate with more of the world’s governments and people.

As was the case in the Cold War, the most important foreign policy achievement will simply be avoiding World War III. Washington must recognize that all three fault lines of global conflict today—Russia-Ukraine, Iran-Israel, and China-Taiwan—run across territories just beyond the reach of U.S. treaty obligations. In other words, these are not areas where the American people have been prepared to go to war directly. With little public support and no legal obligation to do that, Washington should not count on bluffing or military buildups alone to resolve these issues; instead, it will have to focus relentlessly on diplomacy, buttressed by reassurance to frontline partners that there are alternative pathways to achieving security.

Avoiding friction with anti-Cuban and pro-Israeli hard-liners in Congress can feel like the path of least resistance.

In Ukraine, the United States and Europe should focus on protecting and investing in the territory controlled by the Ukrainian government—drawing Ukraine into European institutions, sustaining its economy, and fortifying it for lengthy negotiations with Moscow so that time works in Kyiv’s favor. In the Middle East, Washington should join with Arab and European partners to work directly with Palestinians on the development of new leadership and toward the recognition of a Palestinian state, while supporting Israel’s security. Regional de-escalation with Iran should, as it did during the Obama administration, begin with negotiated restrictions on its nuclear program. In Taiwan, the United States should try to preserve the status quo by investing in Taiwanese military capabilities while avoiding saber rattling, by structuring engagement with Beijing to avoid miscalculation, and by mobilizing international support for a negotiated, peaceful resolution to Taiwan’s status.

Hawks will inevitably attack diplomacy on each of these issues with tired charges of appeasement, but consider the alternative of seeking the total defeat of Russia, regime change in Iran, and Taiwanese independence. Can Washington, or the world, risk a drift into global conflagration? Moreover, the reality is that sanctions and military aid alone will not stop war from spreading or somehow cause the governments of Russia, Iran, and China to collapse. Better outcomes, including within those countries, will be more attainable if Washington takes a longer view. Ultimately, the health of the United States’ own political model and society is a more powerful force for change than purely punitive measures. Indeed, one lesson that is lost on today’s hawks is that the civil rights movement did far more to win the Cold War than the war in Vietnam did.

None of this will be easy, and success is not preordained, since unreliable adversaries also have agency. But given the stakes, it is worth exploring how a world of competing superpower blocs could be knitted into coexistence and negotiation on issues that cannot be dealt with in isolation. For instance, AI presents one area in which nascent dialogue between Washington and Beijing should evolve into the pursuit of shared international norms. Laudable U.S. efforts to pursue collaborative research on AI safety with like-minded countries will inevitably have to expand to further include China in higher-level and more consequential talks. These efforts should seek agreement on the mitigation of extreme harms, from the use of AI in developing nuclear and biological weapons to the arrival of artificial general intelligence, an advanced form of AI that risks surpassing human capacities and controls. At the same time, as AI moves out into the world, the United States can use its leadership to work with countries that are eager to harness the technology for positive ends, particularly in the developing world. The United States could offer incentives for countries to cooperate with Washington on both AI safety and affirmative uses of new technologies.

Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 2022

Mandel Ngan / Reuters

A similar dynamic is required on clean energy. If there is a second Biden administration, most of its efforts to combat climate change will likely shift from domestic action to international cooperation, particularly if there is divided government in Washington. As the United States works to secure supply chains for critical minerals used for clean energy, it will need to avoid constantly working at cross-purposes with Beijing. At the same time, it has an opportunity—through “de-risking” supply chains, forging public-private partnerships, and starting multilateral initiatives—to invest more in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia that have not always been an attractive destination for American capital. In a sense, the Inflation Reduction Act has to be globalized.

Finally, the United States should focus its support for democracy on the health of existing open societies and offering lifelines to besieged civil society groups around the world. As someone who has made the case for putting support for democracy at the center of U.S. foreign policy, I must acknowledge that the calcification of the democratic recession in much of the world requires Washington to recalibrate. Instead of framing the battle between democracy and autocracy as a confrontation with a handful of geopolitical adversaries, policymakers in democracies must recognize that it is first and foremost a clash of values that must be won within their own societies. From that self-corrective vantage point, the United States should methodically invest in the building blocks of democratic ecosystems: anticorruption and accountability initiatives, independent journalism, civil society, digital literacy campaigns, and counter-disinformation efforts. The willingness to share sensitive information, on display in the run-up to war in Ukraine, should be applied to other cases where human rights can be defended through transparency. Outside government, democratic movements and political parties across the world should become more invested in one another’s success, mirroring what the far right has done over the last decade by sharing best practices, holding regular meetings, and forming transnational coalitions.

Ultimately, the most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own democracy, which is the main reason a Trump victory would be so dangerous. In the United States, as elsewhere, people are craving a renewed sense of belonging, meaning, and solidarity. These are not concepts that usually find their way into foreign policy discussions, but if officials do not take that longing seriously, they risk fueling the brand of nationalism that leads to autocracy and conflict. The simple and repeated affirmation that all human life matters equally, and that people everywhere are entitled to live with dignity, should be America’s basic proposition to the world—a story it must commit to in word and deed.

BEN RHODES is a co-host of the podcast Pod Save the World and the author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made. From 2009 to 2017, he served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting in the Obama administration.
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Foreign Affairs · by After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made · June 18, 2024

17. Quality Has a Quality All Its Own: The Virtual Attrition Value of Superior-Performance Weapons

Quality Has a Quality All Its Own: The Virtual Attrition Value of Superior-Performance Weapons - War on the Rocks

EVAN MONTGOMERY, TRAVIS SHARP, AND TYLER HACKER

warontherocks.com · by Evan Montgomery · June 19, 2024

Can the United States stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by turning the island’s approaches into an “unmanned hellscape”? Can the “attritable” unmanned capabilities being acquired through the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative close an emerging gap in combat power with the People’s Liberation Army? Can the U.S. Air Force compensate for its shrinking force structure, maximize the effectiveness of its manned airframes, and achieve “affordable mass” with collaborative combat aircraft?

Each of these efforts represents a wager that smaller, less expensive, and more numerous systems are critical to deterring or defeating Chinese aggression. They also reflect one side of a long-standing defense policy debate over the utility of expensive and advanced capabilities versus cheaper and less sophisticated alternatives. This tradeoff between quality and quantity arises because, as Alfred Thayer Mahan observed regarding naval fleets, “Budgets not being illimitable in size, there results between numbers and individual cost of ship an opposition.” Advocates of the two approaches have sparred throughout history, including when Britain launched the Dreadnought battleship in 1906 and when the United States purchased the M1 tank, F-15 fighter aircraft, and other weapons in the 1980s. Today, the dueling approaches comprise a high-stakes debate in American defense strategy — with future fighting concepts and billion-dollar contracts hanging in the balance.

Become a Member

Right now, the affordable-but-plentiful school seems to be gaining ground. Although this approach helps to address constraints on the U.S. military’s size and posture, policymakers should not let enthusiasm for cheaper weapons mutate into prejudice against costlier ones, which has happened in the past. Sophisticated yet scarce capabilities offer unique advantages, particularly when it comes to degrading an opponent’s military effectiveness by inflicting virtual attrition.

From the Doolittle Raid in World War II (which convinced the Japanese to heighten defenses around their home islands) to the SCUD hunt during Operation Desert Storm (which compelled Iraqi units to remain hidden and reduced missile launches by 50 percent), history shows that attacks by highly capable, limited-inventory forces can exert a surprisingly large influence once their direct and indirect effects are taken into consideration. The latter can be difficult to measure, easy to miss, and even easier to dismiss, especially for observers focused on the clear-cut signs of physical attrition. But ignoring them could leave the United States without critical tools it can use to deter, fight, and win.

The Reality of Virtual Attrition

In most sports, when team A has a highly proficient offensive player, team B often devotes disproportionate attention and effort to stopping them. Doing so, however, can wear down the members of team B, reducing their ability to go on the offense themselves. And this might even create a cycle in which team A keeps getting more chances to put points on the board. In other words, the value of a player is not just measured in the number of points he scores, but in how his ability to score can put an opposing team in a difficult bind. That, in short, is virtual attrition.

When it comes to military affairs, virtual attrition entails the threat or use of violence to cause inefficient changes in enemy force generation or force employment. Put simply, a military inflicts virtual attrition when its attack, or the prospect of its attack, causes the adversary to adjust its behavior in ways that decrease the quality, amount, or rate of combat power brought to bear. Conversely, a military suffers virtual attrition when the physical attrition it fears causes it to deploy, maneuver, or sustain its forces in suboptimal ways.

For instance, the threat of airstrikes might drive ground forces to hide or disperse, reducing their volume of fire or rate of advance; rather than going on the attack, targeted ground forces need to focus more on simply staying alive. Likewise, air-to-ground strikes against infrastructure targets that had seemed invulnerable or out of bounds might trigger defensive countermeasures yielding similar inefficiencies; if states suddenly need to protect facilities they previously believed were not at risk, that could dilute their ability to conduct attacks of their own.

The concept itself is hardly novel. Virtual attrition lies at the heart of combined arms maneuver warfare and suppression of enemy air defenses. In those contexts, artillery units and electronic warfare platforms, respectively, endeavor to impede rather than destroy enemy forces. Virtual attrition has also been critical to the success of past military campaigns, including the battle of the Atlantic and the combined bomber offensive of World War II. Yet it remains understudied and underappreciated because it lacks the visibility and measurability of physical attrition. For example, although the 1999 NATO campaign against Serbian air defenses failed to destroy many mobile launchers, it still pushed the Serbs to keep their launchers hidden and radars turned off. Serbian air defenses survived the war, but NATO air forces achieved their objectives by striking targets while suffering minimal losses. These effects do not register neatly on battle damage trackers or add to “kill counts,” but they contribute greatly to military success.

Today, the easiest place to see virtual attrition in action is by looking at the U.S. response to China’s military rise. Facing a host of anti-access/area denial systems, the U.S. military can no longer operate as it did when its air and sea bases remained largely immune from enemy attack. Instead, it has to contemplate delaying the dispatch of reinforcements rather than rushing them into a crisis zone, hunkering down assets behind active and passive defenses instead of pushing them immediately into the fight, dispersing forces across many small locations as opposed to concentrating them in a few large installations, and positioning critical platforms where they remain most survivable but not necessarily most efficient.

Many of these effects, should they materialize, originate from the relatively modest (albeit growing) inventories of very advanced Chinese weapons. That raises an important question: How might the United States leverage superior-performance capabilities of its own to inflict virtual attrition on China?

Snipe, Block, Harass, Repeat

Although virtual attrition can appear in various guises, three general types of virtual attrition–inflicting activities stand out: sniping, blocking, and harassing. These activities all occur at the tactical level, but they could also achieve operational-level effects by leveraging superior-performance weapons, even those fielded in smaller numbers.

Sniping compels an adversary to operate less efficiently. Good snipers are highly lethal, but their value extends beyond killing enemy personnel. Though few in number, they shape enemy behavior by remaining hidden, differentiating high-value targets, and striking from long ranges. The real or imagined threat of sniping can fix enemy forces, disperse them, or delay their operations while they hunt for a concealed marksman.

In the Indo-Pacific theater, submarine– or ground-launched hypersonic missiles could operate as snipers imposing virtual attrition. With unit costs in the tens of millions, inventories of these weapons will remain relatively limited. But by remaining concealed, penetrating enemy defenses, and striking high-value assets, they could create operational dilemmas and opportunity costs for the People’s Liberation Army. If these weapons struck critical targets previously considered invulnerable, similar targets elsewhere might suddenly need to hide, shelter, disperse, stay on the move, or adopt stronger defenses (meaning those defenses could not deploy in other places). Moreover, by imposing an inefficiency tax, virtual attrition might reduce the demands on U.S. defensive operations and create windows of opportunity for U.S. offensive operations.

Blocking offers another way to inflict virtual attrition. Militaries have long used mines to inhibit an opponent’s movement on land and at sea. Minefields may damage units attempting to pass through them, but their purpose extends beyond physical attrition to fixing, canalizing, and delaying. Enemy forces encountering mines must risk the harm of traversing them, take time to clear them, or bypass them via an alternate route — all of which can cause operational inefficiency.

With today’s technology, blocking encompasses more than just static minefields. Ground-based anti-ship missiles can perform a similar function. A Marine littoral regiment armed with the right missiles or an Army multi-domain task force equipped with Tomahawks could hold at risk ships transiting key routes without seeding those areas with sea mines. Missiles positioned within range of the Luzon Strait, Bashi Channel, or Miyako Strait could block Chinese navy vessels’ transit to the greater Pacific, forcing them to follow longer routes or bunch near other chokepoints — two potentially advantageous outcomes emblematic of virtual attrition at sea.

Finally, harassing presents a third option for imposing virtual attrition. Although not particularly lethal, harassing fires have long been used by artillery and reconnaissance units to disrupt an enemy’s tempo. Andrew Jackson’s forces employed harassing fires to wear down British units at the Battle of New Orleans, and U.S. artillery units in Vietnam routinely conducted harassment missions against enemy supply routes.

Certain advanced weapons — especially those more affordable in higher quantities than the costliest systems — might harass the People’s Liberation Army and cause virtual attrition. For example, future air-launched hypersonic missiles may possess the speed and precision to strike mobile and elusive targets. With high survivability and a sufficiently large magazine, however, they could also strike softer targets, from airfields to troop emplacements. Although this might seem like overkill, it would demonstrate that nothing and no one is safe, even inside well-defended airspace. That, in turn, could cause the Chinese military to augment its defenses in ways that detracted from offensive operations. Harassment may also play out in space, where directed energy or other nonkinetic counter-space capabilities could harass satellites, forcing them to reposition, burn valuable fuel, and forego future maneuvering.

Sniping, blocking, and harassing can all cause physical attrition, but their effects increase when incorporating virtual attrition. This fact highlights the inadequacy of simplistic “cost per shot” comparisons between cheaper and costlier weapons, as such comparisons ignore the second-order effects that are the hallmark of virtual attrition.

Big Lessons from Small Weapons?

Of course, even if costlier, superior-performance weapons can inflict virtual attrition, so can cheaper, sufficient-performance weapons. Indeed, the war in Ukraine shows cheaper weapons compelling Russian forces to operate more cautiously in an environment teeming with drones. Although cheaper weapons can clearly accomplish virtual attrition, they have three limitations in doing so relative to costlier weapons.

First, part of what makes cheaper weapons less expensive is the fact that they lack performance characteristics — striking power, speed, range, stealth — that create the greatest uncertainty in an enemy’s mind and thus shape their behavior. For example, an advanced munition’s ability to penetrate defenses and hit high-value targets would cause opposing leaders to perceive a continuous risk requiring continuous countermeasures. Because low-cost drone swarms are more easily detected and defeated, as Israel showed during Iran’s massed drone attack in April, such swarms pose a defensive challenge but may not stimulate the pain-avoidance decisions triggered by incessant vulnerability. In sum, the superior performance of costlier weapons permits them to inflict virtual attrition in ways that cheaper weapons cannot.

Second, current operations in Ukraine do not reflect what would occur during a future conflict against China. Due to differences in geography and fighting strengths, drone swarms and other low-cost capabilities could likely impose only limited damage in many Indo-Pacific scenarios. Moreover, their effectiveness is dependent on the promise of reliable autonomy and swarming capabilities that may prove insufficiently mature or impractical at a price point that allows for mass procurement. As a result, their virtual attrition effects would prove minimal, particularly since they could not hold at risk well-defended or high-value targets, including targets deep in mainland China.

Third, despite drones dominating the news, Ukraine’s limited use of advanced Storm Shadow and SCALP missiles has generated virtual attrition by pushing Russia to move portions of the Black Sea Fleet east from Crimea to Novorossiysk and restrict naval operations in parts of the Black Sea. Most recently, Ukraine’s employment of small numbers of longer-range Army Tactical Missile Systems against Russian airfields inflicted virtual attrition by disrupting air operations. These examples indicate that higher-performance weapons, not lower-cost alternatives, have generated much of the noteworthy virtual attrition in Ukraine.

Minding the Mass Gap

There is little doubt that the United States faces a growing challenge when it comes to the amount of combat power it can generate compared to the rival it worries about most. That, in turn, has catalyzed a new version of an old debate over the merits of quantity and quality in defense procurement. Investing in less advanced systems that can be acquired in larger numbers might indeed help to close the “mass gap,” especially if the capabilities they produce are employed in practical ways — for instance, as the short-range tier of a layered stand-in force that can help to disrupt the frontline units of an invasion, rather than as aspirational silver bullets that can achieve more ambitious goals like destroying large portions of an invading force.

But these investments are unlikely to serve as a substitute for more advanced systems, particularly in a broader, lengthier war between the United States and China. Only high-performance weapons possess the attributes that will enable them to strike high-value targets and shape adversary behavior on the contested battlefields of future conflicts. At the same time, leveraging advanced systems that might only be available in small numbers requires rethinking how they are employed and to what ends. That means moving beyond a narrow focus on physical attrition and placing renewed emphasis on virtual attrition options and effects.

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Evan Braden Montgomery is the director of research and studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Travis Sharp is a senior fellow and director of the defense budget studies program at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Tyler Hacker is a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

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warontherocks.com · by Evan Montgomery · June 19, 2024

18. Fremen Stillsuits and Heated Bubble Gyms: Preparing the Army to Fight and Win on a Rapidly Warming Battlefield

Fremen Stillsuits and Heated Bubble Gyms: Preparing the Army to Fight and Win on a Rapidly Warming Battlefield - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Erik Patton, Antonio Salinas, Dagomar Degroot · June 19, 2024

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The world is getting hotter, and increasing heat could exacerbate global instability and conflict. The US military views this situation as a “threat multiplier,” one of the global changes threatening national security and potentially contributing to the ever-evolving character of warfare. In response, the Department of Defense is adapting equipment and installations. Hardening infrastructure that supports warfighters makes sense—and measures like micro–power grids also make installations more resilient against direct threats like cyberattacks. At the same time, the US military services also feel acute pressure to reduce carbon emissions; the US military is the world’s largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases, emitting more each year than entire industrialized countries like Sweden or Denmark and accounting for some 80 percent of federal energy consumption. Climate-related challenges are most immediately apparent for the Navy and Air Force, which rely on weapons platforms deployed from fixed installations to fight. Newport, Virginia, home of the largest naval base in the world, faces increasing flooding even during sunny days when sea level rise combines with high tides. To fly in hotter, less dense air, Air Force aircraft need to significantly reduce their operational load or flight range.

However, in one critical area, there have been limited efforts to address the threat of increasing temperatures: the soldier. Army installations don’t face chronic flood risk like Navy facilities, and Army equipment may be better able to operate in extreme temperatures and weather than Air Force stock. But soldiers have the fundamental constraint of being human, and the human body has physiological limits to operating in heat. Human physiology also adapts to changes at timescales driven by evolution, not technological innovation. Already, parts of the world are experiencing hot temperature extremes approaching the limits of what a healthy human can work in. Considering the impact of climate change on the soldier and developing adaptations to deploy, fight, and win in future conflicts is as important as ensuring equipment and installations are prepared for a climate-altered future.

Soldier Thermal Physiology 101

Heat stroke is characterized by central nervous system dysfunction, typically when a body’s core temperature exceeds 104ºF, although it can occur at lower temperatures. True heat stroke generally requires treatment within ten minutes to minimize organ damage and thirty minutes to prevent death. Protecting against heat stroke is already challenging in the current climate; 2,103 US service member heat strokes occurred between 2018 and 2022, with rates highest for soldiers and Marines.

Preventing soldier heat stroke in a hotter operational environment will be complicated by the limits of human physiology. Human core temperature can stray only slightly from normal levels before heat-related illness occurs. Just maintaining basic life functions generates body heat. Without the ability to shed metabolic heat, a resting soldier (or any human) would experience a core temperature rise of around 2ºF per hour. Fortunately, humans sweat to keep the core temperature stable in hot conditions. When ambient temperature exceeds skin temperature (above approximately 95ºF), sweating is the only effective method to shed body heat.

Although human physiology is generally good at preventing heat stroke, two additional factors require consideration. First, soldiers engaged in physically laborious activities generate huge amounts of metabolic heat—up to ten times more than when resting. Heat generated from work can result in heat stroke if not dissipated fast enough. Second, sweating only works if it evaporates from the skin; dripping sweat does nothing to cool body core temperature. In high humidity environments, sweat doesn’t evaporate freely; the higher the humidity, the less effective sweating becomes. For soldiers, uniforms and equipment also reduce sweat evaporation. Little sweat evaporates from under body armor, and (by design) chemical suits are virtually impermeable.

What Do a Few Degrees Matter?

The US National Security Strategy, the secretary of defense, intelligence assessments, and DoD reports all note climate change threatens US national security. But for militaries, weather has always been strategically, operationally, and even tactically relevant. Aside from installation and equipment resiliency, few sources describe how to prepare militaries to operate in expected climate-altered conditions. This is true even of the Army Climate Strategy. Despite making “training” one of its three lines of effort, the strategy gives little consideration to the impacts of rising temperatures on soldiers. By contrast, carbon emission reduction features prominently in its discussion of the training line of effort, as it does in all service climate strategies. So how much will a few degrees of global warming really matter to the Army?

Climate change as it is currently occurring is characterized by the rapid increase in Earth’s temperature, but impacts differ at regional and local scales. Rising global temperatures increase the frequency and intensity of extreme events like heat waves, creating future conditions that will drastically change the operational environment. A few degrees of rapid global warming will destabilize the climate system, reducing the occurrence of average temperatures and increasing the occurrence of hot temperatures, as shown in Figure 1. Not only does the distribution of temperatures shift warmer (i.e., rightward), the right “tail” (i.e., hot extremes) gets bigger. This significantly increases the frequency of extremely hot days—by 2050 DoD projection tools anticipate a 375 percent increase in the number of days above 95ºF at Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

Figure 1: Global temperature distribution changes. The y-axis is the frequency of temperature occurrences. Between 1962 and 2022, the distribution curve peaks—the most frequently observed temperature—shifted by about 2ºF warmer (rightward), while the number of occurrences at the hottest (right) end of the distribution (beyond 4.0ºC, or 7.2ºF, higher than the distribution peak) also increased significantly. (Data source: NASA)

Increasingly frequent and severe heat waves will significantly affect land operations. Heat waves in the United States are already twice as common as they were forty years ago, and record-breaking heat is occurring more commonly across the globe. A RAND report on the Middle East finds that in a pessimistic scenario, by 2050, Iran may experience 120 days of extreme heat (up from seventy-six historically) and thirty more days of “extreme danger” temperatures each year, defined according to the National Weather Service heat index. Already, temperature and humidity combinations in select regions are approaching the limit of tolerance even for humans resting in shade; such conditions will expand to more regions, occur more frequently, and be more intense as the climate warms.

Military Operations in the Heat: Vulnerabilities and Opportunities

Throughout history, climatic conditions have never been merely the “backdrop to human events,” especially in warfare. While shifting climatic conditions do not determine human decisions, they nonetheless limit or expand choices available to combatants. In the era of rapid climate change, military professionals must recognize the environment’s influence on warfare. Environmental conditions undoubtedly impact how, when, and where countries fight. Over the long history of states and interstate conflict, Earth’s average temperature changed only modestly. It was often only when empires dispatched armies to hot climates—Roman legionnaires around the border of present-day Syria, for example, or British redcoats in today’s Haiti—that extreme heat played a substantial role in military history. Local and regional variations in temperature did occasionally affect military campaigns, influencing the progress of Spanish forces in the seventeenth-century Low Countries, for instance, but there is no historical analogue for the magnitude of warming in the coming century or its probable impact on soldiers. Earth is likely to soon be hotter than it has been in millions of years, and armies will surely find it hard to cope, but emerging climatic conditions also provide opportunities for resilient and adaptive armies. As the climate changes at an increasingly rapid pace, the ability to adapt to changing conditions may influence who wins and who loses on future battlefields. While climatic threats are threats without passports that do not respect the sovereignty of nation-states, national decisions can influence where states end up in the race to harness the heat, with some countries already starting to adapt their armies to hotter conditions.

Singapore has a history of policies to prevent soldier heat stroke. Recruits are grouped by fitness levels and prescribed appropriate training programs; less fit recruits attend an eight-week physical training phase prior to the nine-week vocational training program. Thermoregulatory profiling is implemented to determine return-to-duty status and profile soldiers undertaking highly demanding (e.g., commando) training.
The British Army, with a history of expeditionary operations in hot locations, encourages heat casualty studies through the Royal Army Medical Corps. Recent examples include epidemiological reports drawn from operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Oman, Kenya, and Cyprus. In contrast, US military heat casualty reports are more generalized, occurrences are thought to be underreported, and detailed studies generally only exist for Training and Doctrine Command units.
The Indian Army, operating in the intense heat of the subcontinent, has incorporated research into educating its soldiers on the need for the gradual increase of rigorous training to acclimatize units to perform military functions in extreme heat.
China’s military, along with others, has tried to optimize its uniforms and lighten its troop equipment, although climate concerns are generally missing from national and strategic military documents, exposing a potential area of vulnerability if the People’s Liberation Army is slow to adapt to changing environmental conditions.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) take extreme thermal conditions seriously, going as far as canceling all ground forces training during heat waves and developing a thermal index more suitable for field use than the one used by the US military. The Heller Institute of Medical Research, affiliated with Tel Aviv University, includes the Institute of Military Physiology of the IDF and the Environmental Physiology Division; such direct partnership between academia and the military is less common in the United States.

Harnessing the Heat for Operational Advantages

Anyone who deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Kuwait during the summer months in the past twenty years will remember that feeling of exiting the plane in what feels like an oven. As the world heats up, armies may find themselves fighting in extreme temperatures more often. They must consider how to prepare soldiers to maintain lethality in the face of challenging climatic circumstances.

First, soldiers must embrace fitness in the heat. Unlike in past contingencies such as Operation Desert Storm, future crises will be unlikely to provide soldiers with time and safe areas to acclimate, necessitating options to do so at home stations. One solution would be establishing heated bubble gyms to train activities such as ruck marches, individual movement techniques, medical evacuations, battle drills, and functional fitness. Training in such an environment would be particularly beneficial in the two weeks prior to deployment by enabling physiological heat acclimatization processes to take place. There are additional benefits to training in hot environments, such as blood plasma volume increase enhancing cardiovascular fitness, a reduction of core temperature when exercising, and increased skeletal muscle force. Some studies also indicate heat training is superior to altitudinal training, providing enhanced aerobic power.

Second, the US Army should examine efforts to keep soldiers cool through personal equipment adaptation, especially by innovating uniforms and body armor and developing means to better assist with load bearing. The ideal improvement may be the development of a uniform similar to the “Fremen stillsuits” depicted in the film Dune to extend the range of environments humans can work in. A whole-body cooling suit may seem like the stuff of science fiction now, but we can generally imagine what it might look like. Progress in materiel sciences and energy storage may result in advances leading to such cooling suits and research along such lines should continue to be pursued. Such equipment could recycle body moisture or use a cooling agent to augment the body’s ability to shed metabolic heat. More immediately, modifications can be made to the current Army uniform by drawing inspiration from traditional indigenous practices such as Bedouin dress, which uses breathable fabrics to allow maximum airflow. Another example is innovative armor that stops bullets and assists with temperature regulation or incorporates biosensors to help prevent heat injuries. On this front, the US Army has made inroads in its work on an initial biomonitoring device. Further developing self-cooling systems compatible with body armor would optimize performance in extreme temperatures. Additional adaptations include reducing load-bearing requirements for soldiers by emphasizing lightweight weapons and radios and by incorporating robotics, such as robotic mules or exoskeletons, to aid soldiers in carrying supplies, thus reducing their physical burden.

Third, the US Army must consider climate impacts on partner nations, assessing their forces’ ability to operate alongside US personnel in future hotter environments. Many nations will increasingly rely on militaries—including US forces—to respond to humanitarian crises and instability exacerbated by climate change. Focused internally, partner militaries may train less for warfighting, degrading readiness for combined operations, especially with US forces. Partner nations must also have resilient infrastructure to host US forces. Climate-resilient barracks and buildings, or heat casualty treatment facilities, may be needed as US soldiers acclimatize to local extreme heat.

To facilitate partner nation adaptations, combined summer training should encourage experimentation. A subset of these training exercises must assess how partners operate in the heat, potentially adopting local techniques. Although partner militaries may be more accustomed to locally hotter temperatures, increasingly frequent record heat means even militaries in tropical regions will struggle to operate during extreme heat waves. Heat casualty transportation and treatment should be exercised and evaluated during combined training and extreme temperatures included in operational planning. Seemingly mundane considerations like generating and transporting potable water and ice will be critically important during heat waves no matter if they occur during training, a humanitarian response, or hot conflict.

While ensuring infrastructure and equipment are ready to face the challenges of climate change is crucial, the US military must not forget its most important asset: its people. Even in an age of drones, cyberattacks, and AI, humans are still required to fight in challenging environments that are becoming more inhospitable with increasing temperatures. Threats presented by climate change are not abstract; they are real, are increasing in severity and frequency, and can be no less lethal than enemy fire. The US Army especially must continue research and investment to provide the best training, policy, and individual equipment to counter this threat. The warriors on the front line against enemy combatants will increasingly also face a very hostile force of nature, but by incorporating adaptations that allow them to operate despite extreme heat, these soldiers will gain a distinct advantage over their adversary.

Erik Patton, PhD, RG, is an active duty Army major assigned to the Advanced Strategic Planning and Policy Program at Duke University with a research focus on the implications of climate change on military training. He has sixteen years of service, including assignments with the 1st Infantry Division, 1st Armored Division, 25th Infantry Division, and Army Corps of Engineers, and has led soldiers in Iraq. He has published on the impact of increasing extreme heat on Army training programs.

Antonio Salinas is an active duty Army lieutenant colonel and PhD student in the Department of History at Georgetown University, where he focuses on the history of climate and conflict. Following his coursework, he will teach at the National Intelligence University. Salinas has twenty-five years of military service in the Marine Corps and the US Army, where he led soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of Siren’s Song: The Allure of War and Boot Camp: The Making of a United States Marine.

Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University and the incoming Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 and named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best history books of that year. His forthcoming book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, is under contract with Harvard University Press and Viking, and he is editing several books on past climate change—including the Oxford Handbook of Resilience in Climate History. Degroot publishes equally in historical and scientific journals, including Nature and the American Historical Review, and writes for a popular audience in, for example, the Washington Post, Aeon magazine, and The Conversation. He maintains popular online resources on the history of climate change and has shared the unique perspectives of the past with policymakers, corporate leaders, and journalists in many cities, from Wuhan to Washington, DC.

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

Image credit: Spc. Steven Alger, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Erik Patton, Antonio Salinas, Dagomar Degroot · June 19, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

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