Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"There should promptly be established, under the cover of the National Security Council Secretariat, a directorate of political warfare operations to be known as the Consultative (or Evaluation) Board of the National Security Council."

– George Kennan

"Be the kind of person that you want people to think you are."

– Socretes

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."

– Theodore Roosevelt

1. How the Lack of a “Two-War Strategy” Erodes Extended Deterrence and Assurance*

2. U.S. Foreign Policy Wanders Aimlessly

3. Army assumes support agent role for US Cyber Command

4. EXPERT ANALYSIS: Why is Crimea the one place where Ukraine is Winning? (Hodges, Stavridis, Breedlove)

5. Chinese and Philippine ship collision just the latest in a string of South China Sea confrontations

6. Let Slip the Robot Dogs of War

7. A record number of NATO allies are hitting their defense spending target during war in Ukraine

8. Robot craze in Russia-Ukraine war shines light on their drawbacks

9. The U.S. Marines: They’ve Got the Answer, but Not the Ships

10. Opinion: Chinese and Russian Influence Operations Threaten Safety of Jewish and Ukrainian Students

11. US reiterates mutual defense treaty terms after China rams, tows PH ships in Ayungin

12. Online rumours of Philippines civil war tied to China’s covert agenda

13. Putin Came To Power Because Russian Reformers Of 1990s Focused On Privatizing Economy Rather Than On Creating New Political System

14. US urged to join Asia-Pacific trade group, shift European forces to Indo-Pacific

15. The Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore is a capability, not just a pier

16. America’s New Nuclear Deterrence Era

17. Trump win could see mass purge of state department, US diplomats fear

18. The South China Sea Dog that Hasn’t Barked … Yet

19. How to Know When You’re in a Security Dilemma

20. Gig Work and the Joint Force: A Modern Solution to Leverage Reserve Component Talent

21. Chinese Unconventional Threats in the Era of Great Power Competition

1. How the Lack of a “Two-War Strategy” Erodes Extended Deterrence and Assurance*

Do we need to bite the bullet and publicly adopt a two war strategy? I expect that the foreign affairs specialists with influence in the Biden administration will lobby against such action because it will not comport with their worldview that they can bring peace and stability by reducing our military and military activities and appearing to be less of a threat. Their theories and world view do not align with the real word as it actually is.

David J. Trachtenberg, How the Lack of a “Two-War Strategy” Erodes Extended Deterrence and Assurance, Issue No. 590, June 17, 2024

https://nipp.org/information_series/david-j-trachtenberg-how-the-lack-of-a-two-war-strategy-erodes-extended-deterrence-and-assurance-issue-no-590-june-17-2024/

How the Lack of a “Two-War Strategy” Erodes Extended Deterrence and Assurance*

David J. Trachtenberg

David J. Trachtenberg is Vice President of the National Institute for Public Policy. Previously, he served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

Introduction

For years following the Cold War, the United States was considered the sole superpower and the U.S. military was the preeminent fighting force in the world. In the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, U.S. military strategy transitioned from a focus on deterring global conflict to one centered on regional contingencies. Accordingly, U.S. military planners designed a strategy that called on the United States to prepare to fight two major regional contingencies (MRCs) simultaneously.

This two-MRC construct was embedded in various unclassified U.S. military strategy documents and required U.S. forces to be sized and capable of successfully engaging adversaries in both Europe and Asia. It required a military that was sufficiently forward deployed and equipped with the most modern and sophisticated military technology that would ensure a U.S. advantage on the battlefield. This two-war standard became the benchmark against which the adequacy of U.S. forces was judged.[1]

Over time, the two-war standard was modified and scaled back to focus on irregular warfare and defeating one regional adversary while imposing severe costs on another. With the re-emergence of sharp great power conflicting interests as outlined in the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States of America and the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the United States shifted its conceptual focus from irregular warfare and lesser regional contingencies to threats posed by Russia and China. Subsequently, the 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance noted, “Both Beijing and Moscow have invested heavily in efforts meant to check U.S. strengths and prevent us from defending our interests and allies around the world.”[2] Yet U.S. military forces remained ill-prepared to prosecute a two-war scenario, especially one involving Sino-Russian collaboration.

The critical question is whether the U.S. armed forces today have adopted or are postured to adopt a revised force-planning construct that prepares for simultaneous regional conflicts against nuclear peer adversaries in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Failing to do so carries significant implications for both U.S. adversaries and U.S. allies: It likely encourages adversaries to challenge the United States militarily while simultaneously causing allies to question the credibility of U.S. security assurances.

A Dangerous Decline?

Any potential conflict with China is likely to rely heavily on U.S. air- and sea-based assets. In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration sought a 600-ship Navy. Today, the U.S. Navy has shrunk in size to fewer than 300 ships. While individual platforms possess greater capability today, the U.S. capacity to deploy forward as part of a deterrence strategy is much less than it was four decades ago. Likewise, the Air Force is cutting platforms, raising questions regarding the U.S. ability to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. As one Air Force official reportedly stated, “By any measure, we have departed the era of conventional overmatch” with respect to China. Beijing has “advanced so far and so fast in its air and space power that the Air Force’s ability to deter through conventional forces is at risk.”[3] This decline in U.S. military capabilities has resulted in what has been described as a “brittle force.”[4]

In addition to reducing U.S. conventional military power, Washington has repeatedly delayed essential nuclear modernization programs. In fact, the current U.S. nuclear modernization program is a legacy of the Obama Administration and was proposed at a time when the era of great power rivalry was considered a remnant of the past. Indeed, the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review declared that Russia was no longer an adversary of the United States and the risk of a direct U.S.-Russia military confrontation had diminished substantially, noting, “The threat of global nuclear war has become remote….”[5] Indeed, the 2010 NPR explicitly placed highest priority not on deterrence, but on nuclear non-proliferation and limitations on nuclear forces. In light of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the multitude of nuclear threats it has levied against the United States and the West in the past several years, such conclusions appear naïve at best, and the nuclear modernization program of record from the earlier optimistic era is now problematic.

A False Choice

The current conflict in Ukraine has exposed severe limitations in U.S. military readiness and capabilities, as the U.S. defense industrial base struggles with the demands of supporting Ukraine with sufficient equipment and materiel without negatively affecting U.S. warfighting readiness. Moreover, there are those who are calling for the United States to shift scarce defense resources away from supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia and toward confronting China in the Indo-Pacific.[6] Such calls reflect concern that the United States is ill-prepared to fight a two-front war with great powers. The situation is made even more precarious by the emergence of a hostile Sino-Russian entente that is threatening key U.S. allies in two different theaters. In addition, the United States now finds itself increasingly embroiled in a Middle East conflict that is likely to siphon additional military resources away from deterring great power rivals.

The current situation is a legacy of conscious decisions made by multiple U.S. administrations in the aftermath of the Cold War to reduce U.S. military capabilities in anticipation of a more benign strategic security environment. This was done without any apparent concern for the future assurance of allies in the event that the threat context dramatically worsened—which, unfortunately, has been the case. The expectation was that China would rise peacefully and that Russia would either be irrelevant to U.S. national security concerns or cooperative, i.e., a partner with the West rather than an adversary. As is now evident, those predictions did not materialize as expected. The international security environment today is arguably more dynamic, more uncertain, and more dangerous than ever before.

The view that the United States can only afford to prioritize defeating a single major adversary in one theater of operations carries significant ramifications for extended deterrence and assurance of allies. Indeed, it is increasingly unlikely that the United States can engage militarily in one regional contingency without eroding deterrence in another region. U.S. allies and strategic partners who rely on the United States as the ultimate guarantor of their own security surely recognize the increased risk that accompanies a U.S. military that is limited in its ability to respond to aggression in multiple theaters simultaneously.

Allied Queasiness Over U.S. Security Guarantees

In light of reduced U.S. military capabilities, concerns about an overextended U.S. presence abroad, and an apparent U.S. reluctance to commit military resources to ongoing conflicts in other theaters, even a focus on deterring China from attacking Taiwan has not been sufficient to quell Taiwanese anxiety over American willingness to come to Taiwan’s defense should China seek to move militarily against the island. As one Taiwanese academic noted, “there is substantial skepticism” over the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of overt Chinese aggression.[7] Indeed, public opinion polls have highlighted a lack of faith among allied publics in U.S. extended deterrence commitments and assurances. When it comes to U.S. security guarantees, a recent poll found that only 34 percent of Taiwanese believe the United States is a trustworthy country.[8] South Korean confidence in U.S. extended deterrence assurances is similarly low.[9]

Elsewhere in Asia, concerns over the credibility of U.S. security guarantees are growing, with both Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) openly questioning whether they should acquire their own nuclear deterrent. In the ROK, despite the U.S. reiteration of its “ironclad” commitment to South Korea’s defense in the 2023 Washington Declaration,[10] polling data indicates that more than 70 percent of South Koreans support the deployment of nuclear weapons on their territory—ether the re-introduction of American nuclear weapons or the acquisition of their own.[11] In Japan, public debate over acquiring nuclear weapons as a deterrent has reached unprecedented levels—a remarkable development for the only country to have suffered through two atomic bombings. This is a reflection of these allies’ growing threat perceptions and the simultaneous declining confidence in the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence.

In Europe as well, some of America’s traditional key allies are growing more concerned about the credibility of U.S. security guarantees. One survey of more than 15,000 respondents in 11 European countries found that a majority believe China is on the ascendancy and will overtake the United States in relative power over the next ten years. It concluded that Europe cannot depend on the United States to defend European security. The survey also exposed a belief that Europeans should invest more heavily in their own security and adopt a position of neutrality in any conflict involving the United States, China, or Russia.[12] As an analysis of the survey concluded, “The growing mistrust about Washington’s reliability and power is changing the nature of the transatlantic alliance.”[13] Moreover, one study conducted by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs concluded that the lack of a U.S. two-war strategy could lead to opportunistic aggression, noting: “If two major wars occur either simultaneously or sequentially, US military capability will be put under great stress. In the event of a second war, the US may find itself in a situation of conventional military inferiority, which it might have to compensate for with greater reliance on nuclear weapons.”[14]

One of the starkest expressions of concern over U.S. reliability was conveyed in a recent warning to European powers by two long-time scholars of transatlantic relations: “Recent events have shown that the United States will not vigorously and reliably defend you. The United States cannot credibly threaten escalation to defend our allies.” Their bottom-line summation: “Dear Allies: Do not look to the United States for your defense.”[15]

These changes in perceptions, in part, reflect concerns over official U.S. wariness to engage directly or indirectly in actions that could lead to escalatory outcomes. That wariness corresponds to the U.S. military retrenchment that began years ago with the movement away from a two-war strategy and the necessary procurement of military capabilities that could effectively execute that strategy.[16]

As U.S. military capabilities have declined, allies and strategic partners of the United States have become increasingly skeptical of U.S. security guarantees. Consequently, the Biden Administration has sought to publicly reassure partners in Europe and Asia of the “ironclad” nature of America’s commitment to their security.[17] The need for such reassurances suggests recognition of a growing uneasiness among allies over the credibility of such guarantees.

Addressing the Challenge

The force expansion necessary to implement a two-war strategy will require additional fiscal resources beyond those currently budgeted. The resources to implement such a course of action will no doubt be sizable. Some in Congress have shown a willingness to go beyond the levels of defense spending requested by the Biden Administration. For example, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee have approved levels of defense funding well in excess of the administration’s budget requests.[18] And the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, signed into law by President Biden on December 22, 2023, also increased the level of defense funding to more than $883 billion, well beyond that originally requested by the administration.[19]

Despite some positive signs, the results of recent budget negotiations are likely to constrain the procurement of the additional forces needed to implement adequately a two-war strategy. For example, anticipated reductions in the number of weapons platforms across all the Services, including F-35 fighters, nuclear submarines, and other military equipment as a result of defense budget caps signed into law by President Biden last year as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 will seriously impact any move toward restoring a two-war defense capability.[20] Indeed, the president’s proposed defense budget for fiscal year 2025 reflects only a one percent increase over the previous year—which translates to a real reduction in actual defense purchasing power given the rate of inflation.[21] As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated, the cuts will result in “targeted reductions to programs that will not deliver capability to the force until the 2030s….”[22] This actual reduction in U.S. defense spending purchasing power is likely to preclude implementation of the current strategy, much less a two-war strategy.[23]

The problems created by caps on U.S. defense spending and the corresponding lack of consideration of a two-war strategy are being exacerbated by increasingly aggressive adversary threats and closer collaboration between China and Russia. Indeed, the risks of opportunistic aggression by Moscow or Beijing, acting unilaterally or in concert, will likely grow without a concerted U.S. effort to adopt a more robust deterrence posture. This will also place increasing pressures on extended deterrence and assurance.[24]

Nevertheless, there is considerable resistance in Washington to reinstating a two-war standard. Such a posture would require greater resources and investments by the Services in additional military capabilities, a prospect which some find unappealing. As one recent assessment has noted, “The [Marine] Corps has consistently maintained that it is a one-war force and has no intention of growing to the size needed to fight two wars, and both its annual budget requests and its top-level planning documents reflect this position.”[25]

Today, the United States remains constrained by the choices it made decades ago. U.S. military prowess remains limited by a one-war standard (which, some argue, is really a one-half-war standard). With few exceptions, allies have not stepped up to take up the slack for their own defense.

Some have suggested that it is up to America’s allies to shoulder a greater burden of defense preparedness and that this should be a prerequisite for any increase in U.S. support to allies or strategic partners such as Ukraine that are engaged in their own efforts to counter military aggression.[26] While the issue of allied “burdensharing” has long been controversial, and greater allied defense investments should be encouraged, there is no substitute for American leadership. The U.S. inability to demonstrate both a willingness and capability to deter, and if necessary defeat, aggression in multiple theaters simultaneously—particularly in the face of a growing Sino-Russian entente—risks encouraging the very aggression U.S. defenses are intended to deter.

Eventually, U.S. allies will be compelled to make tough choices: either work with the United States to seriously rearm; rearm themselves independently; or conciliate to the Sino-Russian entente. Without a demonstrable American commitment to reenable a two-war strategy, the last option may be increasingly inevitable for some allies.

A policy of accommodation or appeasement is unlikely to forestall any aggressive acts by a Sino-Russian entente. Some European states have demonstrated the will to increase their own defense capabilities in the face of growing Russian assertiveness and aggression. Yet there is no substitute for U.S. leadership and power; it falls on the United States, as the leader of NATO and the ultimate guarantor of European security, to shoulder much of the burden. Doing so undoubtedly entails moving expeditiously toward re-adoption of a two-war strategy and to procure the conventional and nuclear capabilities needed to implement that strategy. Only in this way will allied confidence in the credibility of U.S. security guarantees increase and the efficacy of the U.S. extended deterrent be preserved.

The need to reconsider a more robust force sizing construct to strengthen deterrence in an era of two great power rivals has received strong bipartisan support. Recently, the congressionally mandated Strategic Posture Commission concluded that a one-war strategy is inadequate and inappropriate to the contemporary military challenges facing the United States. It declared that “U.S. and allied conventional military advantages in Asia are decreasing at the same time the potential for two simultaneous theater conflicts is increasing.”[27]

This structural challenge facing extended deterrence and assurance cannot be solved with robust rhetoric from Washington and NATO. The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) shows some recognition of the problem but eliminates “hedging” as a requirement despite the need for greater flexibility and adaptability in U.S. force preparedness. However, a renewed two-MRC standard would help provide a needed hedge against resurgent Russian revanchism, the rise of Chinese aggression, and a combination of both. Without such a hedging strategy, the risks of aggression, including opportunistic or coordinated aggression, will increase.[28]

Conclusion

Over the past decade, there have been several calls for a return to a two-war strategy in light of contemporary security developments. The prospect of a revanchist China and Russia working together or engaging in opportunistic aggression to challenge U.S. national security interests worldwide suggests that the time has come to restore the two-MRC force-sizing construct as a means of bolstering deterrence.

As the congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy of the United States concluded, “The United States now faces five credible challengers, including two major-state competitors, and three distinctly different geographic and operational environments. A two-war force sizing construct makes more strategic sense today than at any previous point in the post-Cold War era.”[29]

Restoring a two-MRC standard will require greater regional power projection capabilities, including an expanded U.S. force presence abroad, along with a greater number of more flexible, technologically sophisticated, and survivable offensive and defensive military assets both in theater and capable of rapid deployment to theater as needed.

The impact of a less than two-war strategy on extended deterrence and assurance is manifestly detrimental to the credibility of U.S. security guarantees to allies and their corresponding assurance. The credibility of America’s security guarantees corresponds to the capability and willingness of the United States to act on its commitments, and to be seen as willing to do so. A failure of U.S. resolve in one region cannot help but raise doubts about U.S. steadfastness and resolve among allies and strategic partners elsewhere. The end result is likely to be a weakening of trust in the United States and a greater movement by friends and allies toward accommodation and appeasement of U.S. adversaries. In the emerging threat environment, where the United States faces not one but two nuclear peer adversaries, the U.S. ability to project power and make good on its extended deterrence and assurance commitments is more critical than ever.[30]

* This Information Series is adapted from a forthcoming National Institute Occasional Paper.

[1] Department of Defense, Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review, May 1997, p. 12, available at https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/quadrennial/QD R1997.pdf?ver=qba2TZwCFGClTKIgPlPnvg%3d%3d.

[2] The White House, Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, March 2021, p. 8, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf.

[3] Mackenzie Eaglen, “The Bias for Capability Over Capacity Has Created a Brittle Force,” War on the Rocks, November 17, 2022, available at https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/the-bias-for-capability-over-capacity-has-created-a-brittle-force/.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review Report, April 2020, pp. iv, 3-4, available at https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/defenseReviews/NPR/2010_Nuclear_Posture_Review_Report.pdf.

[6] See, for example, Elbridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), pp. x, xvi.

[7] Damien Cave and Amy Chang Chien, “Taiwan’s Doubts About America Are Growing. That Could Be Dangerous.,” The New York Times, January 22, 2024, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/20/world/asia/taiwan-united-states-views.html.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Peter K. Lee and Kang Chungku, “Comparing Allied Public Confidence in U.S. Extended Nuclear Deterrence,” Issue Brief, The Asan Institute for Policy Studies, March 27, 2024, available at https://www.asaninst.org/contents/comparing-allied-public-confidence-in-u-s-extended-nuclear-deterrence/#:~:text=A%20December%202023%20survey%20by,6%20percentage%20points%20to%2039.3%25.&text=In%20short%2C%20South%20Korean%20confidence,extended%20deterrence%20commitment%20remains%20low.

[10] The White House, “Washington Declaration,” April 26, 2023, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/04/26/washington-declaration-2/.

[11] Toby Dalton, Karl Friedhoff, and Lami Kim, “Thinking Nuclear: South Korean Attitudes on Nuclear Weapons,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Lester Crown Center on U.S. Foreign Policy, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 2022, available at https://globalaffairs.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Korea%20Nuclear%20Report%20PDF.pdf. See also, “South Koreans want their own nukes. That could roil one of the world’s most dangerous regions,” The Associated Press, November 30, 2023, available at https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15070825.

[12] Jana Puglierin and Pawel Zerka, Keeping America Close, Russia Down, and China Far Away: How Europeans Navigate A Competitive World, European Council on Foreign Relations, Policy Brief, June 2023, available at https://ecfr.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Keeping-America-close-Russia-down-and-China-far-away-How-Europeans-navigate-a-competitive-world-published.pdf.

[13] Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The crisis of American power: How Europeans see Biden’s America,” Policy Brief, European Council on Foreign Relations, January 19, 2021, available at https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-crisis-of-american-power-how-europeans-see-bidens-america/.

[14] Jyri Lavikainen, “China as the Second Nuclear Peer of the United States,” FIIA Briefing Paper No. 383, Finnish Institute of International Affairs, February 2024, p. 2, available at https://www.fiia.fi/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/bp383_china-as-the-second-nuclear-peer-of-the-united-states.pdf.

[15] Michael Hochberg and Leonard Hochberg, “Our Restraint Destroys Your Deterrence,” RealClear Defense, February 10, 2024, available at https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/02/10/our_restraint_destroys_your_deterrence_1010986.html.

[16] While some attribute growing allied concerns over American security guarantees to domestic U.S. politics—in particular concerns over how U.S. policy might change in a second Trump Administration—the inability of the United States adequately to defend its global interests in an increasingly contested international security environment characterized by two peer nuclear adversaries has arguably contributed to the belief that the United States may not be a reliable security partner. It has also fueled the controversy over whether and how the United States must choose between deterring adversaries in multiple potential theaters of conflict.

[17] Over a one-day period, President Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner all publicly reasserted that U.S. security guarantees to Japan, the Philippines, Israel, and South Korea were “ironclad.” As a DoD press release noted, the United States “affirmed its ironclad commitment to extended deterrence….” See Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller, “Biden says US support for Philippines, Japan defense ‘ironclad’ amid growing China provocations,” Associated Press, April 11, 2024, available at https://apnews.com/article/japan-philippines-trilateral-kishida-marcos-biden-03e6288c5b5155af1bb693a464de875d; Tweet by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, April 11, 2024, available at https://twitter.com/SecDef/status/1778570526396424598; and Department of Defense, “Joint Press Statement for the 24th Korea-U.S. Integrated Defense Dialogue,” April 11, 2024, available at https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3739122/joint-press-statement-for-the-24th-korea-us-integrated-defense-dialogue/.

[18] The Senate Armed Services Committee approved a level of defense funding roughly $45 billion more than what the administration requested. See Senate Armed Services Committee Press Release, “Reed and Inhofe File Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act,” July 18, 2022, available at https://www.armedservices.senate.gov/press-releases/reed-and-inhofe-file-fiscal-year2023-national-defense-authorization-act. The Senate Appropriations Committee also added significantly to the administration’s defense request. See “Senate appropriators seek $850 billion for defense, largest total of 4 key committees,” Breaking Defense, July 28, 2022, available at https://www.google.com/amp/s/breakingdefense.com/2022/07/s enate-appropriators-seek-850-billion-for-defense-largest-total-of-4-keycommittees/amp/.

[19] Senate Armed Services Committee, “Summary of the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act,” available at https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy24_ndaa_conference_executive_summary1.pdf.

[20] Lara Seligman, Connor O’Brien, Lee Hudson, and Paul McLeary, “Pentagon slashes weapons programs to stay under debt deal,” Politico, February 21, 2024, available at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/21/pentagon-slashes-weapons-programs-debt-deal-00142465#:~:text=The%20Biden%20administration%20struck%20a,stay%20under%20the%20spending%20caps..

[21] See Tony Capaccio, “Biden to Seek 1% Increase in 2025 Defense Budget Under Cap,” Bloomberg, March 6, 2024, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-06/biden-to-request-1-increase-in-2025-defense-budget-under-cap?embedded-checkout=true. Also see Brad Dress and Ellen Mitchell, “Biden seeks modest bump for record $895B defense budget,” The Hill, March 11, 2024, available at https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4524735-biden-record-895b-defense-budget/. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board referred to this as “a military budget fit for 1991” and stated that “the U.S. military is in a state of managed decline.” See The Editorial Board, “Biden Shrinks the U.S. Military,” The Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2024, available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-defense-budget-pentagon-u-s-military-china-russia-israel-ukraine-ba7fd46b.

[22] Department of Defense, “Department of Defense Releases the President’s Fiscal Year 2025 Defense Budget: Statement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III on the President’s Fiscal Year 2025 Defense Budget,” March 11, 2024, available at https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3703410/department-of-defense-releases-the-presidents-fiscal-year-2025-defense-budget/.

[23] Some in Congress have reportedly argued that the defense budget is more than $400 billion below what is required to meet current commitments. For example, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) called for a defense budget of $1.3 trillion, or five percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. See Senator Roger Wicker, 21st Century Peace Through Strength: A Generational Investment in the U.S. Military, May 2024, p. 7, available at https://www.wicker.senate.gov/services/files/BC957888-0A93-432F-A49E-6202768A9CE0. Also see Bryant Harris, “A nearly $1 trillion defense budget faces headwinds at home and abroad,” DefenseNews, March 7, 2024, available at https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2024/03/07/a-nearly-1-trillion-defense-budget-faces-headwinds-at-home-and-abroad/?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d#:~:text=As%20the%20Pentagon%20seeks%20to,and%20where%20it’s%20falling%20short.; Stephen Groves, “Key Republican calls for ‘generational’ increase in defense spending to counter US adversaries,” Associated Press, May 29, 2024, available at https://apnews.com/article/us-military-spending-pentagon-china-russia-iran-1af566ecfca060ce3042b23d9feb2438; Bryant Harris and Leo Shane III, “How a Republican majority in the House will affect defense policy,” DefenseNews, December 8, 2022, available at https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/12/05/how-a-republican-majority-in-the-house-will-affect-defense-policy/.

[24] As one analyst noted, “the premise that the United States will only need to fight one adversary in one part of the world seems like a bad bet. The United States may not yet be confronting a true ‘axis of evil,’ but American adversaries are becoming more tightly aligned, leaving the United States with a one-war force for an increasingly multi-war world.” See Raphael S. Cohen, “Ukraine and the New Two War Construct,” War on the Rocks, January 5, 2023, available at https://warontherocks.com/2023/01/ukraine-and-the-new-two-war-construct/. Also see Greg Weaver, “Part I: US Deterrence Requirements In The Coming Two-Nuclear-Peer Threat Environment,” in Greg Weaver and Amy F. Woolf, Requirements for Nuclear Deterrence and Arms Control in a Two-Nuclear-Peer Environment, Atlantic Council and Los Alamos National Laboratory, February 2, 2024, p. 8, available at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Requirements-for-Nuclear-Deterrence-and-Arms-Control-in-a-Two-Nuclear-Peer-Environment-Weaver-and-Woolf.pdf.

[25] Dakota L. Wood, ed., 2024 Index of U.S. Military Strength, The Heritage Foundation, January 2024, p. 518, available at https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2024-01/2024_IndexOfUSMilitaryStrength.pdf.

[26] See, for example, Rep. Mike Waltz, “Europe must do more for Ukraine; U.S. has to protect its own border,” The Highland County Press, September 26, 2023, available at https://highlandcountypress.com/europe-must-do-more-ukraine-us-has-protect-its-own-border#gsc.tab=0.

[27] Madelyn R. Creedon, Jon L. Kyl, et al., America’s Strategic Posture: The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, October 2023, p. 90, available at https://ida.org/-/media/feature/publications/a/am/americas-strategic-posture/strategic-posture-commission-report.ashx.

[28] Gouré, op. cit., p. 4. Also see Mark Gunzinger and Lukas Autenried, Building A Force That Wins: Recommendations for the 2022 National Defense Strategy, The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Air Force Association, June 2021, pp. 5, 22, 45, available at https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Building-a-Force-that-Wins-FINAL.pdf.

[29] Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission, November 2018, pp. 35, 66, November 2018, available at https://www.usip.org/publications/2018/11/providing-common-defense.

[30] As two former senior U.S. officials have commented, “Credibility among allies and potential enemies alike depends on our perceived will to maintain our longstanding commitments to support and defend like-minded democratic states.” A failure to do so, such as in Ukraine, “will cause all of our other allies and friends (including Taiwan) to question whether we would at some point abandon them too.” They argue, “Because American security commitments are not severable, such a loss of confidence would cause longtime allies to drift away, to be more accommodating of our potential enemies to our detriment, all leading, therefore, to a weakening of our own ability to shape world events.” Indeed, they conclude that anything less than a two-theater defense planning construct “is no longer sufficient in the two nuclear peer world in which we now find ourselves,” and that “Any suggestion that the U.S. military is too weak to engage in two theaters simultaneously—and therefore to deter in two theaters simultaneously—fundamentally misunderstands the nature of potential wars in NATO and in the Pacific.” See Eric S. Edelman and Franklin C. Miller, “We Must Return to and Maintain the Two Theater Defense Planning Construct,” RealClear Defense, August 1, 2023, available at https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/08/17/we_must_return_to_and_maintain_the_two_theater_defense_planning_construct_973522.html.

The National Institute for Public Policy’s Information Series is a periodic publication focusing on contemporary strategic issues affecting U.S. foreign and defense policy. It is a forum for promoting critical thinking on the evolving international security environment and how the dynamic geostrategic landscape affects U.S. national security. Contributors are recognized experts in the field of national security. National Institute for Public Policy would like to thank the Sarah Scaife and Smith Richardson Foundations for the generous support that made this Information Series possible.

The views in this Information Series are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as official U.S. Government policy, the official policy of the National Institute for Public Policy or any of its sponsors. For additional information about this publication or other publications by the National Institute Press, contact: Editor, National Institute Press, 9302 Lee Highway, Suite 750 |Fairfax, VA 22031 | (703) 293- 9181 |www.nipp.org. For access to previous issues of the National Institute Press Information Series, please visit http://www.nipp.org/national-institutepress/informationseries/.

2. U.S. Foreign Policy Wanders Aimlessly

Adopting a two war strategy (HERE) might end the aimless wandering.

The headline editor did not think north Korea was important enough to add to the subtitle, deeming it a lesser power like Venezuela (based on Dr. Mead's analysis - with which I disagree. We minimize the north Korean threat to our peril, especially since it provides significant support to Russia and Iran).)

U.S. Foreign Policy Wanders Aimlessly

Washington assumes erroneously that China, Russia and Iran want ‘stability.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-wanders-aimlessly-through-the-world-biden-g7-china-russia-iran-07965c8f?utm_medium=social

By Walter Russell Mead

June 17, 2024 5:14 pm ET

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Stansstad, Switzerland, June 16. PHOTO: ALESSANDRO DELLA VALLE/REUTERS

Rome

Giorgia Meloni was the winner of last week’s Group of Seven meeting. Whether giving French President Emmanuel Macron the stink eye or stitching up a deal to increase Italy’s clout in the European Union, the Italian prime minister had a good summit. Once stigmatized as a neofascist from the fringes of Europe’s hard right, Ms. Meloni has firmly entrenched herself at the center of European politics. She has become a role model for figures like Marine Le Pen in France, and the European Union seems to be moving in Ms. Meloni’s direction on issues like migration and climate change.

Joe Biden, by contrast, is struggling. While administration supporters denounced what they called a cropped and misleading video of a befuddled-looking president wandering across the lawn, the image aptly depicted the state of an American foreign policy that has largely lost its way.

The problem isn’t lack of activity. If frequent-flyer miles could be redeemed for Nobel Peace Prizes, Team Biden would have a fistful of medals. But that isn’t where we are. In the Middle East, Europe and the Far East, the U.S. and its friends are less secure than they were in January 2021. Great-power conflict is closer today than at any time in decades.

The heart of the problem is conceptual. Team Biden was slow to grasp the connections between the challenges it faces, and slower still to draw the appropriate conclusions. For too long they ignored the steadily growing elements of common strategy and purpose among major revisionist powers like China, Russia and Iran and lesser powers like North Korea and Venezuela.

The merits of the American-led world system were so obvious to Team Biden that they assumed other countries mostly agreed with us about how the world should work. “Stability,” they believed, is an interest almost everybody shares. When a crisis erupts—in the shoals off the Philippines, in the Red Sea, on Israel’s northern border, on the ground in Ukraine—the Biden hands instinctively rushed to “stabilize the situation,” offering “off-ramps,” “de-escalating,” and generally trying to smooth things over.

Unfortunately, this approach is badly out of date. China, Russia and Iran don’t have a common set of positive goals or values, but they have a common interest in undermining the U.S.-led world system. Rather than seeing crises as common problems demanding common action to restore stability, they see crises as opportunities to weaken American power.

In former times, China might have wanted America to succeed in its efforts to stabilize the Middle East and keep the Red Sea open. After all, China likes low oil prices and doesn’t want shipping disrupted in sea lanes that matter for its trade. That is still true, but China’s interest in hastening the decline of American power trumps its interest in Middle East stability. Rather than helping Team Biden calm the Middle East, Beijing looks to exploit regional tensions to weaken Washington’s position.

Similarly, 15 years ago the U.S. could count on our common strategic interest with Russia in avoiding a nuclear breakout in Iran and a nuclear buildup in North Korea. No more. The Kremlin no doubt still views the Iranian leaders with deep suspicion and the North Koreans with contempt, but empowering North Korea and Iran is a price Russia is willing to pay if the result is to make life harder for the U.S.

What unites the revisionists is their sense that America, overstretched and internally divided, is ready to be rolled. They believe that the best way to degrade and ultimately break America’s power is to create more instability and crisis in more places so that our resources and our will are overtaxed, and we fumble and stumble as the tide of history turns against us.

Conventional crisis management won’t solve this problem. American foreign policy must shift out of the managerial, reactive mode and become more proactive. The revisionist powers need to spend less time planning how to discomfit America and more time worrying about what the U.S. has planned for them.

The Middle East offers one option to change the momentum. Iran, racing toward nuclear weapons but not yet in possession of them, is overextended and the weakest of the major revisionist powers. Teaching Iran that supporting the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah is poor strategy would do more to stabilize the Middle East than 100 painfully negotiated Security Council resolutions about Gaza. It would also instill some healthy caution into the calculations of Moscow and Beijing.

There are other options, but time is running short. Unless the administration changes its approach, the image of Mr. Biden wandering aimlessly, doctored or not, will define his presidency.

WSJ Opinion: Roger Wicker Sounds the Alarm on Fading U.S. Defenses

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Review and Outlook: Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is pushing much higher defense spending to meet the growing threats from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Image: Mc2 Evan Mueller/US Navy/Zuma Press

Appeared in the June 18, 2024, print edition as 'U.S. Foreign Policy Wanders Aimlessly'.

3. Army assumes support agent role for US Cyber Command

The Army takes on more burden of supporting the other services and agencies.

Army assumes support agent role for US Cyber Command

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · June 17, 2024

The Army subsumed around 350 civilians as it became the combatant command support agent for U.S. Cyber Command effective June 2, according to a release.

That role was previously undertaken by the Air Force, but under the congressionally mandated change, those 350 or so Air Force civilians will now be Army civilians working on behalf of Cybercom.

All combatant commands require a combatant command support agent since they are joint organizations that encompass rotating uniformed staff from all services. These entities are responsible for administrative and logistical support of the headquarters and any subordinate unified commands, which includes professional, technical, administrative, logistical and/or base operating support that is performed in or provided directly to the headquarters of a combatant command to perform the headquarters assigned mission effectively, according to Department of Defense Directive 5100.03.

For example, the Army is also the support agent for European Command.

Officials noted that the primary footprint for Cybercom is at Fort Meade, an Army installation, and not everything will change.

“Think of the transfer like this: It’s like your phone service switched from Verizon to AT&T, but your number stayed the same. At the end of the day, you still work for U.S. CYBERCOM, only now you’re affiliated with the best Army in the world,” Jeffrey Jones, deputy to the commanding general at Army Cyber Command, said in a statement.

A Cybercom spokesperson noted that the civilian employees changing services will maintain their current positions and pay grades, but the Army will now assume responsibility of their administration for Cybercom to include things such as time off, identification cards or polygraphs, to name a few.

In his posture statement to Congress in April, Cybercom commander Gen. Timothy Haugh said the Army’s “military and civilian leaders have been superb in managing this transition and making sure our civilians experience this as a seamless and transparent process.”

Written by Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare and cyberspace.

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · June 17, 2024

4. EXPERT ANALYSIS: Why is Crimea the one place where Ukraine is Winning? (Hodges, Stavridis, Breedlove)

EXPERT ANALYSIS: Why is Crimea the one place where Ukraine is Winning?

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/why-is-crimea-the-one-place-where-ukraine-is-winning

Detonation of ammunition caused by a fire at a military training field in the Kirovsky district of Russian-occupied Crimea on July 19, 2023. News of the blaze came two days after Ukraine used waterborne drones to attack the Kerch bridge, a key military supply artery from mainland Russia to Crimea. (Photo by VIKTOR KOROTAYEV/Kommersant Photo/AFP via Getty Images)

Posted: June 18th, 2024

By The Cipher Brief

CIPHER BRIEF SUBSCRIBER+ANALYSIS — Ukrainians are striking Russian targets in Crimea – barracks, munitions depots, air defense batteries, logistics hubs, even Russian warships thanks to newly arrived American weapons which are featuring regularly in the Ukrainian attacks. In one theater of the war at least, Ukraine appears to be winning.

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT

Crimea represents a critical prize for both sides; a supply route for Russian forces, proximity to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, a pathway to the Black Sea for grain shipments and other commerce, and – less important strategically – it’s also a well-known and well-trafficked destination for tourists.

Crimea also matters to both sides for historical reasons. Russian President Vladimir Putin has often put the region front and center in his arguments for Russian primacy in Ukraine; Ukrainians have emphasized the peninsula’s centuries-long connection to Ukraine as an extension of the mainland. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said often that the war “began with Crimea and must end with Crimea — with its liberation.”

The Ukrainian military recently hit Russian S-400 and S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems in Crimea along with strikes against the Belbek airbase in Crimea, which Ukrainian officials said had destroyed two MiG-31 fighter jets and a nearby S-400 system, and set a fuel depot ablaze. On May 30, Ukraine claimed to have hit a Russian ferry crossing in Crimea with U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles. The crossing was “actively used” as an alternative route for supplies to the peninsula.

The Cipher Brief tapped three of its prominent military experts for an assessment of the situation in Crimea: two former NATO commanders, Admiral James Stavridis (Ret.) and General Phillip Breedlove (Ret.) and Lt. General Ben Hodges (Ret.), who commanded US Army forces in Europe. “In military doctrine, we would call it the decisive terrain,” Hodges told The Cipher Brief. “Whoever controls Crimea is going to win this war.”

THE CONTEXT

Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and sent troops to the peninsula to enforce its illegal occupation there.
For Ukrainians, Crimea is the reason why Russia’s February 2022 assault against their country is referred to as the “second invasion,” or “full-scale invasion,” and why they are quick to remind foreigners that they have been at war with Russia for a decade.
Ukrainian drone and missile strikes have struck Russian vessels belonging to the Crimea-based Black Sea Fleet and its main base in Sevastopol. The attacks have forced much of the Black Sea Fleet to relocate further east, including to the Novorossiysk base.
Ukrainian sea drones have also hit Crimea’s Kerch Strait bridge, a key supply link for Russian military operations in the peninsula, in October 2022 and again in July 2023, and several reports suggest another strike on the bridge may come soon.
The most recent Ukrainian attacks on Crimea come after the Biden administration gave the green light for Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied weapons for strikes on targets inside Russia. The shift is focused on the northeastern Kharkiv region, where Russia launched a new offensive last month.
Putin has complained that the Western weapons used by Ukraine have been effective in destroying Russian air defenses and disrupting military supply lines, and warned of grave consequences should those attacks continue.

THE EXPERTS

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges (Ret.)

Lieutenant General (Retired) Ben Hodges, the former Commanding General of US Army Europe (2014-2017), currently serves as NATO Senior Mentor for Logistics and is a Distinguished Fellow with GLOBSEC. He consults for several companies on Europe, NATO, and the European Union, and he is co-author of the book, Future War and the Defence of Europe, published by Oxford University Press. He served as Commander, NATO Allied Land Command in İzmir, Turkey and as Commanding General, United States Army Europe.

Admiral James Stavridis (Ret.)

Admiral Stavridis (Ret.) was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and 12th Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he earned a PhD in international affairs. He is currently Vice Chair, Global Affairs and Managing Director at The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Gen Philip M. Breedlove

Gen. Philip M. Breedlove retired as the Commander, Supreme Allied Command, Europe, SHAPE, Belgium and Headquarters, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany. He served in several senior staff positions to include; Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force; and Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff.

THE ANALYSIS

The Cipher Brief: What’s changed in Crimea that is shaking up the status quo?

Hodges: One thing is the U.S. has allowed Ukraine to have the 300-kilometer range ATACMS (missiles). That’s significant because as the SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) General (Christopher) Cavoli said, you can defeat mass with precision if you have enough time. And you do that by targeting headquarters, logistics and artillery. Because without those three things, it doesn’t matter how many troops you have, they’re not going to accomplish anything. So by taking out artillery headquarters and logistics, you negate the only advantage the Russians have. So that’s why this 300-kilometer range is so important, and that’s why you’re seeing more trouble in Crimea for the Russians as they’re getting pounded there.

Stavridis: Russian strikes against Crimea are gradually increasing in severity, fueled by a combination of U.S. intelligence and longer-range, heavier-gauge weapons, notably ATACMS. While it’s too soon for these to have decisive impact, these strikes against what is clearly Vladimir Putin’s top-priority conquest will only increase as F-16 aircraft arrive on scene this summer.

Breedlove: It’s a very big deal. Crimea is the key terrain in how this fight begins to resolve itself. For nations and for companies looking to invest in Ukraine, they’re going to want to see security and rule of law, and as long as Russia holds Crimea, Russia can hold at risk the main routes in and out of Ukraine in the Northern Black Sea. So, that security aspect is important. What you see now, is that Ukraine has for some time now understood the importance of Crimea and they have begun a dedicated campaign to deny Crimea to Russia. Frankly, I believe it’s really beginning to work for them.

The Cipher Brief: Why is Crimea so important in the broader scope of the war?

Stavridis: Crimea is at the dark heart of Vladimir Putin’s false narrative of “Ukraine has always been Russian.” It is personally of immense importance to him and to the leadership clique in the Kremlin. The Russians remember well the presence of European troops there – from the UK, France, and Italy – 180 years ago, during the Crimean War, which ended in a humiliating defeat for the Russian empire. It also has the best naval facilities on the Black Sea, access to Black Sea oil and gas, and provides a repair facility for the Southern front in the war. For all these reasons, Russia will fight hard to maintain control of Crimea.

Hodges: Crimea is the key to this war. In military doctrine, we would call it the decisive terrain. Whoever controls Crimea is going to win this war. For the Russians, of course, it’s important to them because it allows them to dominate the entire Black Sea. Where, by the way, we have three NATO allies. And it’s a launching pad for them to attack all over Ukraine, which they have been doing.

For Ukraine, they have to be able to liberate Crimea, for economic purposes and to deny the Russians the use of that platform. The Ukrainian Navy used to be based there, so the Ukrainians know where everything is. The difference now is they can reach it with lots of ACTAMS. They are proving the concept that with precision, you can begin to make Crimea untenable. Every square meter of Crimea is now in range of some Ukrainian weapon. So it’s a matter of time. They can’t stay there.

The Cipher Brief: What specifically are the Ukrainians targeting in Crimea?

Breedlove: We first saw the Navy being attacked, then we saw some fixed munitions storage locations. Then we started seeing some military command and control, and now we’re starting to see attacks against the strategic radar capability. Once you take down those strategic radars in Crimea, then the drones and things that Ukraine launches will be far more effective. And so you see a very smart rollback campaign of these critical capabilities for their fight, but also their ability to protect themselves, which makes them more vulnerable.

Stavridis: The Ukrainians are focusing on two principal target sets: command and control centers – hoping to kill senior Russian commanders and planners – and Russian air defense systems. The latter strikes, against S-400 and S-300 air defense systems in Crimea, seem designed to open up the battle space for F-16 strikes.

The recent strikes against the Black Sea Fleet are incredibly important and under appreciated. If Russia had been able to use the more than 60 warships in their Black Sea Fleet to choke off Ukrainian exports of agrarian products, for example, the impact would have been devastating. Instead of Putin gaining control of the seas throughout the Ukrainian coastline of the Black Sea, his remaining functioning warships – and nearly 40% have been sunk or knocked out of action – are relegated to distant patrolling off the coast of Russian-occupied Georgia. In effect, out of the fight.

Hodges: Headquarters, logistics, artillery, and of course the port. They (the Ukrainians) know exactly where the maintenance facility is, the fuel facility, where the ammunition is stored, where the piers and docks are where Russian ships might be. They’ve already hit the dry dock. And even I as an infantry soldier know that if you destroy the dry dock, they can’t do maintenance on their ships, not significant maintenance, which is part of the reason they’re having to relocate. And they destroyed the Black Sea Fleet headquarters, which is also part of the reason they had to relocate. And when they destroyed the dry dock, there was a submarine and another ship in there. This is brilliant targeting.

If you think about how Ukraine wins in Crimea, you do three things: Number one, you make it untenable. And that’s what they’re doing now. They’re making it untenable, so that the Russians can’t stay there. There’s been special forces attacks that have destroyed radar and air defense. There’s been maritime drones, there’s been unmanned aerial systems, air drones, and now you’ve got precision weapons.

The second thing that has to be done is you isolate it, and the way you isolate it is you destroy the three ways that aid gets to or resupply or anything gets in and down. Number one is the big Kerch bridge. Number two is the railroad that runs from Rostov into Crimea. And then the third is you destroy the ships and ferries that can move stuff back and forth.

The Cipher Brief: What is the value of the Kerch Bridge, and how does that factor into how the Ukrainians are approaching Crimea?

Breedlove: The Kerch Bridge remains key, and Russia has built a rail line through the occupied portions of Ukraine in the Southeast, and those two quarters are coming under attack. And I expect to see Ukraine continue to focus on them. I expect to see Ukraine drop multiple spans of the Kerch Bridge, or at least damage them to the point where they’re unusable. And I expect to see Ukraine bring under fire this new rail line, because if you cut off Crimea, it will wither and Russia will withdraw just like they have withdrawn in a naval sense already. And I think that is a focused effort of Ukraine.

Hodges: I think the Ukrainians will drop that bridge when they’re ready. It’s obviously going to be a huge effort because the Russians know how vulnerable that thing is and its high density of air defense and all kinds of things. So the Ukrainians, I am confident, will have figured out a plan that will involve all sorts of different things in order to severely damage, if not destroy, or drop a span of that bridge. Then you’ve got Crimea isolated as well as unusable.

Stavridis: It’s a juicy and symbolic target, and over time it will be irresistible. But Crimea’s air defenses should come first.

The Cipher Brief: Have ATACMS helped turn the tide in ways the Ukrainians were hoping?

Hodges: The greatest thing that the Ukrainians have always needed from us was long-range precision strike capability. Whether that’s coming off the wings of an airplane or out of a rocket launcher or out of a HIMARS (rocket launcher), or however it gets there. It’s that long-range precision strike that makes a difference.

The Ukrainians probably have a pretty good plan for sequencing and for priorities. I can imagine what’s going on is exactly what would be happening in any U.S. unit, where everybody’s saying, Hey, I need you to hit my target. I need my target to hit. So the big commander has to prioritize, because you can’t hit everybody’s target.

Breedlove: Yes, they have them, but they have relatively few of them. The United States made a big press splash that they’re giving them the long-range ATACMS, but they gave them a very small number. We remain nearly completely deterred by Mr. Putin’s threats. And so the West and specifically the United States has been very, very stingy in what they supply. So we’ve given them more of the shorter-range ATACMS, some of the oldest, but we’ve given them very precious few of the long-range unitary warhead ATACMS that are so critical to this fight. And that’s something that we still need to address.

American policy is still deterred by Mr. Putin. His war of threat and intimidation is his most successful weapon right now. So we need to be thinking about giving them more of the long range-capability, to continue to strike very effectively into Crimea, but not only into Crimea. Remember that western policy, specifically American policy, have built sanctuaries for Russia inside Russia and Belarus and other places, and Russia uses that sanctuary to stage, organize and launch forces into Ukraine. And we need to give Ukraine the ability to strike those forces before they reach into Ukraine.

Stavridis: The key is that ATACMS and HIMARS can deliver far greater payloads than drones. When F-16s enter the fight, that strike capacity will jump again. All allies should be pushing the F-16 program to fruition as rapidly as possible. It is a shame we waited so long to get it in train, but it will be crucial for the Ukrainians.

Breedlove: I flew the F-16 off and on for 24 years. It is a magnificent weapons system and capability, but I have a note of concern in that there’s less than half a dozen pilots ready and a few airplanes ready and all of a sudden the world thinks this is going to be a major change to the war. It will not. The F-16 will have a big impact on this fight, but it will take time. As they build the number of pilots and as they bring on more aircraft and we get to maybe a squadron’s worth of capability, we’ll start to see some real impact in this war by the F-16 and we have to acknowledge a few things.

The Ukrainian Air Force did an amazing job with a very small, very old, very under-supplied air capability. They did wonderfully. We helped them a lot and we can’t really discuss all the things we did to help them, but they were smart and they husbanded their capability and used it in a very intelligent way. That is what we also have to do with the F-16. If we just charge out there with every F-16 and go willy-nilly, they’ll get shot down and then people will be discouraged by the overall effort. We need to husband the resources, use the resources and begin to mature the pilots. The pilots were fighter pilots already, most of them, and they’re very good at basic fighter skills. But imagine, if someone put you in an Formula One racer car and put you on the circuit in Monaco, how good would you be the first time you drove the car? So these pilots jumping into these F-16s, they’re going to make a difference, but it’s not going to be on day one. We’re going to have to mature, grow, experience this force and then it will have a long-term impact on what goes on in Ukraine.

The Cipher Brief: What indicators will you be looking for to assess whether the war is shifting in a meaningful way for Ukraine?

Hodges: How many ships are still left from the Black Sea Fleet? How fast and how much they actually move from there, that will be an indicator that they realize that they can’t use Crimea any longer.

And then of course, Ukrainian and I suspect U.S. intelligence, knows how much of the remaining airfields are still operational. What kind of air operations are they running out of there? And then the logistics — they’ll probably be watching how much is going in via the railroad, the bridge, or the ferries. When that starts really decreasing, then that will look like the Russians are realizing there’s no point in continuing to put fuel and ammunition in there, because they’re going to be going the other direction.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief.

5. Chinese and Philippine ship collision just the latest in a string of South China Sea confrontations

Keep in mind this alternate perspective:

“The West Philippine Sea, not Taiwan, is the real flashpoint for an armed conflict,”

– Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez February 28, 2024

Chinese and Philippine ship collision just the latest in a string of South China Sea confrontations

AP · June 17, 2024

BANGKOK (AP) —

China has been at odds with many other countries in the Asia-Pacific for years over its sweeping maritime claims, including almost all of the South China Sea, a strategic and resource-rich waterway around which Beijing has drawn a 10-dash-line on official maps to delineate what it says it its territory.

Beijing is in the midst of a massive military expansion and has become increasingly assertive in pursuing its claims, giving rise to more frequent direct confrontations, primarily with the Philippines, though it is also involved in longtime territorial disputes with Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei.

A 2016 arbitration ruling by a United Nations tribunal invalidated Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, but China did not participate in the proceedings and rejected the ruling.

At stake are fishing rights, access to undersea oil reserves and other natural resources, as well as the possibility of establishing military outposts.

The U.S., a treaty partner with the Philippines, has raised concerns about China’s actions and President Joe Biden has pledged “ironclad” support for Manila. That’s sparked fears that if an incident escalates, it could spark a wider conflict.

In the latest incident, a Chinese vessel and a Philippine supply ship collided near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea on Monday. China’s coast guard said a Philippine supply ship entered waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, a submerged reef in the Spratly Islands that’s part of territory claimed by several nations. The Philippine military called the Chinese coast guard’s report “deceptive and misleading.”

Here’s a look at some other incidents and developments in recent months:

June 4: Philippine officials say the Chinese coast guard seized food dropped for Filipino naval personnel on an outpost on Second Thomas Shoal. Philippine Gen. Romeo Brawner says the Chinese may have suspected the packages contained construction materials intended to reinforce the rusty Philippine navy ship deliberately run aground at Second Thomas Shoal to serve as a Philippine outpost.

May 16: About 100 Filipino activists on wooden boats change plans to distribute food to Filipinos based on the Second Thomas Shoal after being shadowed by Chinese coast guard ships through the night. Instead, they distribute food packs and fuel southeast of the disputed territory.

April 30: Chinese coast guard ships fire water cannons at two Philippine patrol vessels near the Scarborough Shoal, another hotly disputed area where tensions have flared on and off. Philippine officials say water cannons could damage their ships’ engines, or even capsize the smaller vessels. China called its move a “necessary measure,” accusing the Philippines of violating China’s sovereignty. China also re-installed a floating barrier across the entrance to the shoal’s vast fishing lagoon.

April 23: A Chinese coast guard ship blocks a Philippine patrol vessel near Second Thomas Shoal, causing a near-collision. Before the incident, a Chinese naval vessel had shadowed two Philippine patrol boats as they cruised near Subi, one of seven barren reefs in the Spratly Islands that China has transformed in the last decade into a missile-protected island military outpost. Subi is also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.

March 23: Chinese coast guard hits Philippine supply boat with water cannons near Second Thomas Shoal, injuring crew members and damaging the vessel, Philippine officials say. China says the Philippines intruded into its territorial waters despite repeated warnings.

March 5: Chinese and Philippine coast guard vessels are involved in a minor collision off the Second Thomas Shoal, and four Filipino crew members are injured when China blasts a supply boat with water cannons, shattering its windshield. China’s coast guard says the Philippine ships were illegally intruding in the area’s waters and accused one of them of ramming a Chinese vessel.

Jan. 12: Filipino fishing boat captain says Chinese coast guard drives him away from Scarborough Shoal, forces him to dump his catch into the sea.

Dec. 9, 2023: The Chinese coast guard surrounds a supply ship, blasts it with a water cannon in the area around Second Thomas Shoal. The head of the Philippine military, who was aboard the supply boat, says they were also “bumped” by a Chinese ship.

Nov. 10, 2023: China blasts Philippine supply ship with water cannon near Second Thomas Shoal; China says it acted appropriately under maritime law to defend its territory.

Oct. 22, 2023: A Chinese coast guard ship and accompanying vessel ram Philippine coast guard ship and a military-run supply boat near the Second Thomas Shoal. Chinese coast guard says the Philippine vessels “trespassed” into what it said were Chinese waters.

Sept. 26, 2023: The Philippine coast guard says it removed a floating barrier from blocking the entrance to the lagoon at the Scarborough Shoal, put in place by China to prevent Filipino fishing boats from entering. China would later replace the barrier.

DAVID RISING

Rising covers regional Asia-Pacific stories for The Associated Press. He has worked around the world, including covering the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, and was based for nearly 20 years in Berlin before moving to Bangkok.

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AP · June 17, 2024

6. Let Slip the Robot Dogs of War

Jared Keller

Security

Jun 16, 2024 5:00 AM

Let Slip the Robot Dogs of War

https://www.wired.com/story/let-slip-the-robot-dogs-of-war/

The United States and China appear locked in a race to weaponize four-legged robots for military applications.

A Ghost Robotics Vision 60 prototype at an Advanced Battle Management System exercise on Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, September 2020.Photograph: Tech. Sgt. Cory D. Payne/U.S. Air Force/DVIDS

The Chinese military recently unveiled a new kind of battle buddy for its soldiers: a “robot dog” with a machine gun strapped to its back.

In video distributed by the state-run news agency CCTV, People's Liberation Army personnel are shown operating on a testing range alongside a four-legged robot with what appears to be a variant of the standard-issue 5.8 x 42-mm QBZ-95 assault rifle mounted on it as part of China’s recent Golden Dragon 24 joint military exercises with Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand. In one scenario, Chinese soldiers stand on either side of a doorway while the robot dog enters the building ahead of them; in another, the robot fires off a burst of bullets as it advances on a target.

“It can serve as a new member in our urban combat operations, replacing our members to conduct reconnaissance and identify enemy [sic] and strike the target during our training,” one Chinese soldier shown operating the robot told CCTV.

This isn’t the first time the Chinese military-industrial complex has shown off an armed robot dog. In October 2022, Chinese defense company Kestrel Defense published a video showing an unmanned aerial vehicle air-dropping a quadrupedal ground vehicle affixed with a 5.8 x 42-mm QBB-97 light machine gun on a roof during an urban warfare experiment. The company had previously released footage of robot dogs outfitted with combat systems that included everything from smoke grenades to loitering munitions. And as recently as this March, Chinese researchers claimed that tests involving robot dogs outfitted with an unidentified 7.62-mm rifle (likely a variant of the Type 56 assault rifle that’s based on the ubiquitous Soviet-made AK-47) yielded marksmanship that rivaled trained Chinese sharpshooters, according to the South China Morning Post.

China’s demonstration clearly rankled international observers, prompting at least one American lawmaker to call on the US Defense Department for a report on “rifle-toting robot dogs” and their potential national security implications. But if the Chinese military is pioneering the weaponization of robot dogs, then the United States military isn’t far behind.

In the past year, the Pentagon has experimented with outfitting quadrupedal ground robots with its standard-issue 5.56 x 45-mm M4A1 carbine, the 6.8-mm XM7 rifle that the US Army is in the process of adopting under its Next Generation Squad Weapon program, and even the M72 Light Anti-Tank Weapon that’s been in service with American troops since the Vietnam War. Just weeks before CCTV published its footage of armed robot dogs in action, Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC) revealed that it was experimenting with adding mounted gun systems based on defense contractor Onyx’s artificial intelligence-enabled SENTRY remote weapons system to its own mechanized canines.

American defense officials have been quick to emphasize that the development of weaponized robot dogs is, at this stage, purely experimental, intended to help military planners “explore the realm of the possible” when it comes to the potential applications of revolutionary robotic systems in a future conflict, as one Army official put it last August. But with Army soldiers conducting urban assault drills alongside robot dogs and the Marine Corps increasingly eyeing mechanical quadrupeds to augment future formations with “intelligent robotics,” it may not be too long before the US military is forced to seriously consider adopting armed robot canines for combat before China does.

“Why are we acting surprised by this? It was so obviously coming,” Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based think tank New America and expert on advanced military technology, tells WIRED. “The first wheeled and tracked [explosive ordnance disposal] robots had cameras on them to inspect roadside bombs, then someone added guns to them; the same thing with the Predator drone, which started out unarmed until the military strapped missiles to it. Armed robotics has been a trendline for years.”

A human-machine integration test using the Ghost Robotic Dog and the US Army Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport at Fort Irwin, California, March 15, 2024.Photograph: Spc. Samarion Hicks/U.S. Army/DVIDS

Man’s Best Friend

Quadrupedal robots aren’t a new development in the annals of military technology. In 2005, robotics leader Boston Dynamics unveiled BigDog, a four-legged mechanical “pack mule” that was intended to haul weapons and supplies for US troops over terrain considered unwelcoming to traditional wheeled or tracked ground vehicles. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and adopted as the Legged Squad Support System by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, BigDog was eventually deemed too loud for practical use and discontinued after a decade and more than $40 million invested in the much-hyped project.

Despite BigDog’s shortcomings, the underlying research behind the system eventually gave rise to Spot, a smaller and quieter “robot dog” that Boston Dynamics debuted in 2015. While too small to lug around gear and weapons, the system immediately had clear military applications for everything from base perimeter security to remote site inspection. In the years since its introduction, Spot has proven the platform-defining vision of quadrupedal ground robots, inspiring both collaborators like Asylon Robotics’ DroneDog and alleged imitators like Ghost Robotics’ Vision 60 to compete for a slice of the Defense Department’s growing robotics budget.

Based on publicly available media in Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), the Pentagon’s media distribution hub, the adoption of robot dogs across the US military didn’t start in earnest until 2020, when the Air Force integrated a handful of Ghost Robotics systems into what’s called an “agile combat employment” exercise at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, which saw airmen work with their new best friends to secure an airfield against a simulated attack. Just a few months later, officials at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida became the first US military installation in the world to incorporate the semiautonomous robot dogs into its base security regimen.

A record number of NATO allies are hitting their defense spending target during war in Ukraine

BY ELLEN KNICKMEYER AND SEUNG MIN KIM

Updated 11:22 PM EDT, June 17, 2024

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · June 17, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — A record 23 of NATO’s 32 member nations are hitting the Western military alliance’s defense spending target this year, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday, as Russia’s war in Ukraine has raised the threat of expanding conflict in Europe.

The estimated figure is a nearly fourfold increase from 2021, when only six nations were meeting the goal. That was before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Europeans are doing more for their collective security than just a few years ago,” Stoltenberg said in a speech at the Wilson Center research group.

After the speech, Stoltenberg met at the White House with President Joe Biden. The U.S. president said the alliance has become “larger, stronger and more united than it’s ever been” during Stoltenberg’s tenure.

Biden spoke affectionately of Stoltenberg, calling him “pal” and saying he wished that Stoltenberg, who has been NATO’s secretary general since 2014, could serve another term when the current one expires in October.

“Together, we’ve deterred further Russian aggression in Europe,” Biden said. “We’ve strengthened NATO’s eastern flank ,making it clear that we’ll defend every single inch of NATO territory.”

Stoltenberg noted that allies were buying more military equipment from the U.S. “So NATO is good for U.S. security, but NATO is also good for U.S. jobs.” he said.

NATO members agreed last year to spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense. The surge in spending reflects the worries about the war in Ukraine.

Poland, at more than 4%, and tiny Estonia both lead the United States this year in the percentage of their GDP they spend on defense. Both countries border Russia.

Defense spending across European allies and Canada was up nearly 18% this year alone, the biggest increase in decades, according to NATO’s estimated figures released Monday.

Some countries also are concerned about the possible reelection of former President Donald Trump, who has characterized many NATO allies as freeloading on U.S. military spending and said on the campaign trail that he would not defend NATO members that don’t meet defense spending targets.

“Shifting U.S. administrations have had the absolutely valid point to say that U.S. allies are spending too little,” Stoltenberg told reporters. “The good news is that’s changing.”

Stoltenberg’s visit is laying the groundwork for what’s expected to be a pivotal summit of NATO leaders in Washington next month. The mutual-defense alliance has grown in strength and size since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, with both Sweden and Finland joining.

Defense spending by many European countries fell after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to neutralize what was then the prime security threat to the West.

But after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, NATO members unanimously agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense within a decade. The full-scale invasion that Putin launched in 2022 spurred European countries newly on the front line of a war in the heart of Europe to put more resources into meeting that target.

Much of the focus of the summit is expected to address what NATO and NATO member governments can do for Ukraine as it faces unrelenting air and ground attacks from its more powerful neighbor. They so far have resisted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s appeals to take his country into the bloc as long as the war is still on.

Stoltenberg pointed to efforts to bolster Ukraine in the meantime. That includes NATO streamlining the eventual membership process for Ukraine, and individual NATO nations providing updated arms and training to Ukraine’s military, including the U.S. giving it F-16s and bringing Ukrainian pilots to the U.S. for training on the advanced aircraft.

“The idea is to move them so close to membership that when the time comes, when there is consensus, they can become a member straight away,” Stoltenberg said.

However Russia’s offensive concludes, only taking Ukraine into the alliance will dissuade Putin from trying again in the future to conquer Ukraine, the NATO chief said.

“When the fighting ends, NATO membership” for Ukraine “assures that the war really ends,” he said.

The prospect of Ukraine joining NATO has long been anathema to Putin, and it was one of his stated motivations for seizing Crimea. He offered last week to order an immediate cease-fire if Ukraine renounced plans to join the alliance, an offer that was dismissed by Ukraine.

A weekend conference held in Switzerland was billed as a first step toward peace and ended with pledges to work toward a resolution but had few concrete deliverables. It was attended largely by Western nations and Russia was not invited. China sat it out and then India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Mexico did not sign the meeting’s final document Sunday.

Kyiv’s outgunned and outnumbered forces are battling to hold back the bigger Russian army, which has taken over chunks of territory after pollical squabbles led to delays in delivering U.S. and European military aid. Ukraine has been short of troops, ammunition and air defenses in recent months as the Kremlin’s forces try to cripple the national power supply and punch through the front line in eastern parts of the country.

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · June 17, 2024

8. Robot craze in Russia-Ukraine war shines light on their drawbacks

Excerpts:

Another factor constraining the use of robots in combat is the absence of fully autonomous navigation in many platforms, hence the necessity for additional equipment dedicated to their protection.

“As there is no truly autonomous UGV yet that can navigate itself to [a] target, the vehicle’s remote control today is also aided by drones providing tactical overwatch, helping to guide it towards intended destinations in logistics, supply and evacuation operations,” Bendett said.

This makes sending out these vehicles “very manpower-intensive,” he added.

Despite these limitations, there are many examples of the effective use of such systems by Ukrainian forces. Experts agree Western countries are drawing lessons from these instances.

Robot craze in Russia-Ukraine war shines light on their drawbacks

Defense News · by Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo · June 17, 2024

MILAN — Despite the notable lineup and exploits of crude ground robots seen whizzing over the battlefield in Ukraine, experts say deploying them in combat remains a costly affair in terms of labor and their vulnerabilities.

Since the appearance of a Russian unmanned ground vehicle, or UGV, in Ukraine in April 2022, several new prototypes have popped up across the battlefield.

The robot craze has seemingly engulfed both Russia and Ukraine, as evidenced by the former’s plan to make them an integral part of its military and the latter’s intention to create an army of robots. But the popularity of such systems predates the war by several years.

“Prior to its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military was one of the global leaders in UGV research, development and evaluation. It developed multiple types and started trialing them, but did so in a very limited format,” according to Samuel Bendett, a Russia defense expert at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analyses think tank. “It likely did not have enough time to develop tactics and concepts for integrating larger UGV numbers and types into combined arms formations.”

For its part, Ukraine approved the use of ground robots in military operations in 2016, but some limitations regarding their deployment have persisted, according to Serhii Kuzan, a former adviser to the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.

The two main issues he identified relate to the lack of higher numbers of UGVs present in military units and their vulnerability to different Russian countermeasures.

“Currently, the main problem is the relatively low saturation of such unmanned systems in Ukrainian units, but it is worth noting here that no European army could at the moment fully meet the needs for these robotic platforms,” said Kuzan, who is now the chairman of the analytics organization Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center.

UGVs are as much of a target for enemy drones as are crewed armored vehicles, he added, except that the robots are also highly vulnerable to Russia’s electronic warfare tools.

Given the number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones flying above the battlefield, developing larger “pre-February 2022 UGV types is a costly affair,” Bendett said, referring to the month Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Another factor constraining the use of robots in combat is the absence of fully autonomous navigation in many platforms, hence the necessity for additional equipment dedicated to their protection.

“As there is no truly autonomous UGV yet that can navigate itself to [a] target, the vehicle’s remote control today is also aided by drones providing tactical overwatch, helping to guide it towards intended destinations in logistics, supply and evacuation operations,” Bendett said.

This makes sending out these vehicles “very manpower-intensive,” he added.

Despite these limitations, there are many examples of the effective use of such systems by Ukrainian forces. Experts agree Western countries are drawing lessons from these instances.

Kuzan noted that ground robots have predominantly proved successful in demining and cargo-transport missions, specifically citing the Ratel S UGV as a valuable system that can also be used as a ground-based munition.

These newer applications could signal a trend, as Russia is moving beyond using land robots in a primarily logistics role, with the development of its latest Buggy UGV designed to detonate upon reaching its target.

“What the Russian military is doing is emulating the concept of a loitering ammunition drone but basing it on an uncrewed ground system — same functionality, but driving to the target instead of flying into it,” said Alain Tremblay, the vice president of innovation and business development at Rheinmetall Canada.

Remotely operated or autonomous robots are the platforms of choice for this, as they can generally “embark a much larger explosive charge,” Tremblay added.

Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. She covers a wide range of topics related to military procurement and international security, and specializes in reporting on the aviation sector. She is based in Milan, Italy.

9. The U.S. Marines: They’ve Got the Answer, but Not the Ships

Excerpts:

The amphib component of the Navy’s fleet has to account for the realities of life in the littorals, through which most of the world’s commerce travels. How big of a problem does the Navy face? Its annual shipbuilding account needs to be increased by approximately 30 percent to achieve the fleet of 355 ships envisioned in the service’s most recent 30-year plan. Meanwhile, China’s navy has already surpassed 370 vessels, nearly all of which are kept close to home, while only 60 or so U.S. ships of the Navy’s 296 operate in the Pacific on any given day. Numbers really do matter.

Amphibious options are absolutely vital. The current budget preserves 31 amphibs, but as planners start on the next budget round, they must hold fast not only to that number, but also to new requirements driven by the changing landscape of war. If they do not, they face debilitating risks.

The U.S. Marines: They’ve Got the Answer, but Not the Ships

By Dakota Wood

June 18, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/06/18/the_us_marines_theyve_got_the_answer_but_not_the_ships_1038723.html?mc_cid=7dc3e77b78&mc_eid=70bf478f36

U.S. Marines with Battalion Landing Team 1/1, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, maneuver combat rubber raiding crafts during a boat raid exercise in the Philippine Sea, Feb 12. 2024. Marines with BLT 1/1 conducted the raid exercise to enhance proficiency when executing amphibious operations targeting strategic equipment or terrain. The 31st MEU is operating aboard ships of the America Amphibious Ready Group in the 7th Fleet area of operations, the U.S. Navy’s largest forward-deployed numbered fleet, and routinely interacts and operates with allies and partners in preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific Region. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Elijah Murphy)

The U.S. Marine Corps has been developing solutions to the China problem. Numbers will favor the PRC in any crisis that features extended naval warfare within a few hundred miles of China’s coast. Hence the importance of the Corps’ Force Design effort to field forces relevant to such conflict and the urgency with which the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding problem must be solved.

The Marine Corps is on the right track with FD. It is rapidly evolving its ability to operate within the range of enemy weapons and to sustain its capability to engage enemy forces at close and extended ranges.

Akin to the Corps’ efforts in the 1930s, when it developed amphibious operations capabilities it foresaw would be essential in a war with Japan, Force Design, initiated by former Commandant General David H. Berger, in 2020, and accelerated by his successor, General Eric M. Smith, will: reduce its signature (physical and electromagnetic), improve its situational awareness, increase the range at which it can effectively hit targets with precision, expand its ability to share combat relevant information, lessen its logistical dependencies, and enhance is mobility and maneuverability.

But regardless of the Corps’ success in fielding unmanned systems, new communications networks, anti-ship and anti-air missiles, and high-resolution battlespace awareness, if its forces cannot get to the fight and move around the battlespace, Force Design may have limited utility in the Indo-Pacific.

Success depends on holding fast to at least 31 amphibious ships. This fleet would consist of 10 large-deck LHA/LHD vessels and 21 LPDs (13 are currently in the fleet but more San Antonio-class ships will replace older Whidbey Island and Harpers Ferry-class LSDs being phased out of service).

Well into the 1990s, the Marine Corps had a requirement for 38 amphibious ships. As budget pressures mounted, the service accepted a “fiscally constrained” 34-ship objective for several years, after which the Corps and the Navy settled on 31 ships as the minimum acceptable number.

To this fleet of conventional amphibs, the Marine Corps wants to add up to 35 “landing ship medium (LSM)” vessels, the type of ship and its quantity arrived at by a host of studies, wargames, simulations, and exercises. The Navy is at odds with the Corps’ plans, suggesting only 18 in its most recent NAVPLAN, but the two services will resolve their differences.

During the 1990s, the Marines closely studied the implications of more contested and lethal littorals. They found that their set of amphibious warfare capabilities was becoming less relevant or even practical. Improved anti-ship missiles (and the systems to guide them with precision at increasing ranges) meant that large amphibious warships would have limited ability to get close enough to any shoreline to “land the landing force.” Yet these large ships remained essential to making transoceanic crossings and to provide an at-sea support capability. What was missing was a complementary ability to operate within archipelagic waters and the concepts and tools necessary to wage battle in such settings, whether from aboard ship or once placed ashore.

Concepts like “operational maneuver from the sea” and “ship to objective maneuver” that had Marine Corps units launching forces from ships operating beyond the horizon—presumably beyond the range of anti-ship missiles of that day—directly to objectives deeper inland led to platform solutions that included the LCAC, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (a flawed concept that was ultimately canned), and the MV-22 Osprey (that repeatedly proved its worth during two decades of operations in Afghanistan). Each was deemed essential to get the force to the fight from a supporting base of amphibious warships, an essential component of amphibious warfare and without which an amphibious force isn’t particularly “amphibious.”

The Corps has been criticized for retiring some equipment deemed less relevant to littoral warfare (like tanks), but the thing that differentiates it from the Army (beyond service culture and its approach to combat), has been the service’s primary mission, codified in law: to serve as an amphibious force able to conduct land operations in the prosecution of a naval campaign. Tools that aren’t critical to this mission sap limited resources and a limited ability to operate “from the sea” undermines much of the justification to maintain the Corps. Though the Marines have made extraordinary strides in improving the service’s ability to operate on land in the modern era, its ultimate efficacy as an amphibious force lies in the hands of the U.S. Navy.

Here is where both services have a significant challenge: maintaining funding for the amphibious fleet desperately needed by the United States to defend its interests not just in the Indo-Pacific, but globally.

The unexpected loss of ships (e.g., the USS Bonhomme Richard burning to its deck plates in 2020, and the early retirement of up to 14 littoral combat ships through 2027), maintenance challenges that accompany ships nearing the end of their service life (the 30-year-old USS Boxer and the 35-year old USS Wasp, both powered by steam plants), and the need to introduce new ships add to the costs buffeting the U.S. Navy. The Boxer was slated to deploy this past spring, only to be delayed by maintenance problems. It finally sortied for a few days, then returned to port for rudder problems. If it does make it out to sea this summer, it will do so only to reenter maintenance on its return for perhaps two years. These woes have dramatically affected the ability of the Corps to do what only it can do: amphibious operations. In 2023, amphib ship readiness was an appalling 32 percent, down from 45 percent just one year earlier. In testimony to Congress last year, General Berger noted the importance of amphibs to the Corps’ reason-for-being and the problems that result when ships aren’t available; there have been occasions when the Marines could not respond to a COCOM request for support for lack of shipping.

The amphib component of the Navy’s fleet has to account for the realities of life in the littorals, through which most of the world’s commerce travels. How big of a problem does the Navy face? Its annual shipbuilding account needs to be increased by approximately 30 percent to achieve the fleet of 355 ships envisioned in the service’s most recent 30-year plan. Meanwhile, China’s navy has already surpassed 370 vessels, nearly all of which are kept close to home, while only 60 or so U.S. ships of the Navy’s 296 operate in the Pacific on any given day. Numbers really do matter.

Amphibious options are absolutely vital. The current budget preserves 31 amphibs, but as planners start on the next budget round, they must hold fast not only to that number, but also to new requirements driven by the changing landscape of war. If they do not, they face debilitating risks.

Dakota L. Wood is a retired Marine and non-resident fellow with the Lexington Institute.

10. Opinion: Chinese and Russian Influence Operations Threaten Safety of Jewish and Ukrainian Students

Opinion: Chinese and Russian Influence Operations Threaten Safety of Jewish and Ukrainian Students

kyivpost.com · by Yurij Wowczuk, Ivana Stradner · June 17, 2024

Russia, China, and Iran are waging information wars against Western countries, particularly at universities, and it’s Ukrainian and Jewish students who are paying the price.

June 17, 2024, 8:52 am

Pro-Israeli students wave Israeli flags as pro-Palestinian graduates interrupt the graduation and walk out during the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 30, 2024. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP)

The 2024 spring semester on US college campuses was anything but typical for students across the country. Anti-Israel protests and unabashed acts of anti-Semitism have swept across campuses, disrupting final exams and even graduation ceremonies. Jewish students have been denied access to parts of campus and outrageously labeled as Nazis for their support of Israel.

Ukrainian students have faced similar challenges. At the University of Connecticut, the Ukrainian Student Association has been targeted for its support of Ukraine. Their ribbons and posters have been destroyed and replaced by pro-Russia propaganda. Like their Jewish peers, Ukrainians on campuses across the country have also been smeared with Nazi comparisons. Canadian students are also facing similar hostility.

Recent investigations reveal that these actions are far from organic demonstrations led by misinformed students. To the contrary, they are fueled by today’s Axis of Evil: Russia, China, and Iran, and the lies they propagate. From developing the false narratives to disseminating them widely, these rogue states are using our open information ecosystem against us.

The Washington Post revealed that Russia and Iran are behind the funding of Grayzone, an online news site that targets American audiences with a steady stream of anti-Israel, anti-Ukraine, and anti-US propaganda. Grayzone, which has hundreds of thousands of followers, has peddled disinformation denying Hamas’ use of sexual violence on Oct. 7 and claiming that Russia’s bombing of a Mariupol theater was a false flag attack and claiming that the Maidan Revolution was a US-led coup. Narratives that have been echoed on college campuses.

China Urges NATO to 'Stop Shifting Blame' Over Ukraine War

China presents itself as a neutral party in the war and says it is not sending lethal assistance to either side, unlike the United States and other Western nations.

Beyond creating these narratives, foreign actors have also been found responsible for broadly circulating them and funding campus unrest. A new investigation by the Network Contagion Research Institute reveals that the recent anti-Israel protest movement is linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), aiming to deepen divisions within American society and destabilize its institutions. Exploiting the American constitutional right to freedom of expression, which the CCP denies its own citizens, has fueled unrest on US college campuses.

Moscow has also targeted campus protests through the Kremlin-linked network Doppelganger, claiming that protests “are financed by the Rockefeller and Soros foundations” and using Telegram channels to promote narratives about US hypocrisy related to “freedom to protest.”

Students have become pawns in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran’s grand strategy, bearing the brunt of these information warfare operations that seek to distract the West from Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine and sow division in the US.

Educational institutions must provide robust support systems for students targeted by these campaigns. Jewish and Ukrainian students, and indeed all students, should feel safe and supported on their campuses. Unfortunately, many universities have failed their fundamental duty to ensure a safe learning environment for all students, instead capitulating to their demands. The concessions range from agreeing to not punish any of the protestors who engaged in unauthorized activity to advancing university-wide policies to divest from Israel. In short, these protestors have been awarded for violating university policies and intimidating Jewish students. These university leaders are only encouraging future atrocious behavior and emboldening our foreign adversaries who have fueled these campaigns.

Washington must also intensify efforts to expose and counter foreign information operations. Students, faculty, and the public need to be informed about the true origins of these protests and the broader geopolitical motives behind them. Only by understanding the full scope of the threat can we effectively counter it.

Fortunately, Congress has begun addressing this threat, launching an investigation into foreign funding of the organizations that have spearheaded the wanton hate displayed on campuses nationwide. The Biden administration must take similar steps to safeguard our campuses from foreign influence.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

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Yurij Wowczuk

Yurij Wowczuk is director of the Vovk Foundation.

Ivana Stradner

Dr. Ivana Stradner serves as a research fellow with the Barish Center for Media Integrity at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Her research focuses on Russia’s security strategies and military doctrines to understand how Russia uses information operations for strategic communication.

kyivpost.com · by Yurij Wowczuk, Ivana Stradner · June 17, 2024

11. US reiterates mutual defense treaty terms after China rams, tows PH ships in Ayungin

US reiterates mutual defense treaty terms after China rams, tows PH ships in Ayungin

rappler.com · by Bea Cupin · June 18, 2024

MANILA, Philippines – The United States State Department on Tuesday, June 18 (Monday, June 17 in Washington) reaffirmed that armed attacks on Philippine armed forces and public vessels could be basis to invoke the Mutual Defense Treaty between Washington and Manila, a day after a “ramming and towing” incident in the West Philippine Sea.

State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller reiterated the terms of the treaty both in a statement on “US Support for the Philippines in the South China Sea” and in a readout following a bilateral phone call between top American and Filipino diplomats.

“The United States stands with its ally the Philippines and condemns the escalatory and irresponsible actions by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to deny the Philippines from lawfully delivering humanitarian supplies to service members stationed at the BRP Sierra Madre on June 17,” said Miller in a statement.

“PRC vessels’ dangerous and deliberate use of water cannons, ramming, blocking maneuvers, and towing damaged Philippine vessels, endangered the lives of Philippine service members, is reckless, and threatens regional peace and stability,” he added.

Philippine Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Maria Theresa Lazaro and US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell also spoke about the incident, according to a release from the US.

“The Deputy Secretary and Undersecretary agreed that the PRC’s dangerous actions threatened regional peace and stability,” said Miller.

No details

Early morning on June 17, the China Coast Guard said Philippine and Chinese ships collided in waters off Ayungin Shoal or Second Thomas Shoal, during what resupply mission to the BRP Sierra Madre. China pinned the blame on the Philippines.

Over 12 hours later, the Philippines, through its National Security Council (NSC), denied China’s claims, saying China’s Navy, coast guard, and maritime militia “engaged in dangerous maneuvers, including ramming and towing” during a routine resupply mission to the commissioned vessel. Sources disclosed China towed two Philippine boats.

The NSC said Chinese actions “put at risk the lives of our personnel and damaged our boats,” but it has so not released further details on the aftermath of China’s harassment.

The BRP Sierra Madre is a World War II-era warship that was purposefully run aground in the shoal back in 1999, in response to Chinese construction in nearby Mischief Reef.

Miller’s statement came barely three months after he also affirmed that the US was “standing with our ally the Philippines” following China’s actions against a Philippine rotational and resupply mission to the BRP Sierra Madre on March 5.

At least once a month, the Philippines conducts resupply missions to the BRP Sierra Madre – through vessel or air – to bring provision to troops that are stationed there for months at a time.

On May 19, China tried to disrupt both an aerial resupply mission for and a medical evacuation of soldiers stationed at the BRP Sierra Madre. The May incidents, made public only by the Philippines two weeks later, is only the latest in Chinese actions to stop Philippine missions to Ayungin Shoal.

China Coast Guard vessels have routinely harassed Philippine missions to the shoal, and have resorted to using their strong water cannons in an attempt to block the Philippines.

“Beijing’s actions reflect consistent disregard for the safety of Filipinos and for international law in the South China Sea,” Miller said.

Ayungin Shoal is in the West Philippine Sea, an area that includes the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. But China has ignored the 2016 Arbitral Award and still claims almost the entire South China Sea, including the West Philippine Sea, as its own.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., quoting discussions with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, earlier said that the death of a Filipino serviceman would be reason to invoke the Mutual Defense Treaty.

In late May 2024, speaking to top defense officials from all over the world in Singapore, he expanded that “red line” to include the death of any Filipino at sea, including civilians.

The US, once its colonizer, is a treaty-ally of the Philippines. It’s been among the most vocal supporters of the country’s new policy in the West Philippine Sea under the Marcos administration.

Marcos has promised that Filipinos would not “yield” in the face of China’s harassment. Beijing, meanwhile, has accused the US of being behind the Philippines’ new position and has accused Manila of being the provocateur in those waters. – Rappler.com

rappler.com · by Bea Cupin · June 18, 2024

12. Online rumours of Philippines civil war tied to China’s covert agenda

"Active measures" from China or what some analysts are now calling "cognitive warfare."

Online rumours of Philippines civil war tied to China’s covert agenda

Analysts accuse Beijing of using cognitive warfare to destabilise the Philippines’ political landscape amid their South China Sea row
Sam Beltran
+ FOLLOWPublished: 7:00pm, 17 Jun 2024

South China Morning Post · June 17, 2024

Last week, The Philippine Star reported on coordinated efforts by anonymous Chinese social media accounts that shared a November statement by Pantaleon Alvarez, a representative from Davao del Norte, calling for the secession of Mindanao’s southern islands from the rest of the Philippines.

Alvarez, a known ally of former Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte, served as speaker of the House of Representatives under the ex-president.

Philippine House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez bangs the gavel to begin a session in 2018. Photo: AP

Within days, more than 60 social media accounts posted about Mindanao’s “independence campaign”, fuelling speculation of conflict and blaming President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s “pro-United States” policy for the rift, the Philippine Star reported.

Online personalities linked to the Duterte camp amplified the secession posts, claiming Marcos’ administration was escalating the issue. Pro-Duterte commentator Rigoberto Tiglao, for example, wrote that officials’ “knee-jerk reactions” signalled to the world “that there is already an ongoing armed secession movement” – after National Security Adviser Eduardo Año and Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro had said that any secession movement would be “met by the government with resolute force”.

Duterte, who is in the midst of a vitriolic public feud with Marcos, in February called for the independence of his home island of Mindanao.

The suspected disinformation campaign aligned with Beijing’s “grey-zone” strategy of using covert tactics like cognitive warfare to achieve strategic objectives without direct military action, Ona said.

“We can also see that disinformation is being pushed through traditional channels, such as state media, astroturfing techniques using pro-Beijing social media sites for amplification, and trolls,” he told This Week in Asia.

Ona claimed similar cognitive warfare tactics had been deployed in Taiwan and Hong Kong, citing disinformation spread ahead of Taiwan’s election in January, including unfounded claims of corruption and dictatorship against eventual winner William Lai Ching-te and fake news about tainted pork and eggs imported from the US.

A US State Department report last year accused China of spending billions of dollars to expand global disinformation campaigns that it said constrain free speech and undermine information reliability.

“The tactic is to generally push a cyber-enabled disinformation campaign combined with offensive cyber operations, such as hacking of public data and cyberespionage,” Ona said, noting that this strategy often works in tandem with other malign tactics, like sowing division, co-opting local leaders, and controlling critical infrastructure.

Members of the media take footage of a China Coast Guard vessel blocking a Philippine Coast Guard vessel on its way to a resupply mission at Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea on March 5. Photo: Reuters

He said these efforts aimed to advance Beijing’s strategic vision of national rejuvenation and hegemony over the Indo-Pacific by 2049, as part of its “Chinese dream”.

“Its excessive claims in the South China Sea, its Belt and Road Initiative, among others, are part of this goal. It also plays the victim card by saying that China has endured centuries of humiliation perpetrated by foreign powers,” Ona said, arguing that Beijing extended its victimhood narrative to territorial claims in the West Philippine Sea – Manila’s term for its exclusive economic zone within the larger disputed waterway.

“The narrative is usually the opposite of what they do in the West Philippine Sea. Normally, Beijing resorts to blame-shifting, such as blaming the [Philippines’ coastguard] for the water cannon and collision incidents,” he said.

Information warfare

In April, Marcos unveiled a six-year plan to strengthen the Philippines’ cybersecurity efforts following a spate of cyberattacks from suspected Chinese actors.

The month before, an anonymous hacker breached the Philippine coastguard’s Facebook page, flooding it with malicious content for a week before the government regained control.

Marcos’ website, the Department of Information and Communications Technology’s email server, and the National Coast Watch Centre also fell prey to hackers in January. The information department said the hackers were traced by investigators and were suspected of using the services of state-owned telecoms company China Unicom.

02:26

Philippines seeks expulsion of Beijing diplomats over South China Sea wiretapping controversy

Chinese embassy officials in April refuted Philippine military reports that Beijing had been recruiting Filipino military personnel as consultants and planting operatives in “sleeper cells” across the country.

Don McLain Gill, a geopolitical analyst and lecturer at De La Salle University’s Department of International Studies in Manlia, noted a rise in information operations targeting the Marcos administration’s policies to secure Philippine sovereignty, coinciding with Manila’s efforts to bolster security ties and economic cooperation with the US.

Sowing discord

Gill said Beijing wanted to undermine the Philippines-US alliance and reshape the political landscape ahead of elections by sowing societal discord.

While Marcos has two years left in post until the Philippines’ next presidential race, midterm polls are set take place in 2025 for Senate and local government seats.

Gill said Beijing’s disinformation campaign on social media platforms like YouTube aimed to catalyse domestic unrest in the Philippines by spreading fabricated videos and posts “with the general aim of catalysing domestic clamour” and convincing Filipinos that Manila was provoking conflict in the South China Sea.

Marcos at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last month. The Philippine president has taken steps to boost the his country’s cybersecurity capabilities recently. Photo: Bloomberg

“Such information manipulation also aims to harness Filipinos’ negative perceptions of the US and its alliance network in the Indo-Pacific. More importantly, Beijing’s media mouthpieces, like the Global Times and the China Daily, conveniently parrot such narratives. One can safely assume that there is a strong link with Beijing’s overarching interests,” Gill said.

He called information operations a common “sharp power” tactic, referring to a country’s ability to disrupt governance and social cohesion in a target state through disinformation and propaganda.

Gill said democracies were more vulnerable to sharp power due to their open information flows, unlike authoritarian states that regulate media, and urged Manila to proactively counter the spread of malicious online disinformation.

“This is no time to be complacent. Manila must continue to consolidate a whole-of-government and society approach to call out and push back such malicious information. This will require a robust public-private partnership,” he said.

“Constant effort is needed from Manila to sustain its ability to transparently communicate its people-centric and agency-driven approach in the West Philippine Sea.”

China is not the only country that has been accused of conducting disinformation campaigns that have impacted the Philippines.

Reuters recently reported that the Pentagon attempted to discredit the quality of the Sinovac vaccine, which was the first Covid-19 jab that was available in the Philippines.

Responding to a query about the report, the US Defence Department did not deny it but said in a statement on Sunday that it conducts “a wide range of operations, including operations in the information environment (OIE), to counter adversary malign influence”.

South China Morning Post · June 17, 2024

13. Putin Came To Power Because Russian Reformers Of 1990s Focused On Privatizing Economy Rather Than On Creating New Political System

Hevwe debunked the theory that economic liberalization will lead to political liberalization?

Putin Came To Power Because Russian Reformers Of 1990s Focused On Privatizing Economy Rather Than On Creating New Political System – OpEd

June 18, 2024 0 Comments

By Paul Goble

eurasiareview.com · June 17, 2024

Russian liberal reformers in the 1990s laid the groundwork for the rise of a ruler like Putin by using despotic means to achieve the liberal goal of privatizing the economy rather than seeking to create a new political system that would institutionalize conflicts, Elena Chernova says.

The St. Petersburg sociologist who specializes in the study of conflict says that by acting in this way, the reformers allowed those like Putin who favored a despotic approach to all things to rise to power because they set the precedent and failed to create countervailing institutions (reforum.io/blog/2024/06/11/kak-ne-predat-sleduyushhuyu-popytku-demokratizaczii/).

“The reformers have entered history as liberals because they freed the economy from the rule of the CPSU and proclaimed a free market,” she argues; “but on the political level, they acted in the typical despotic approach to the country as an economic system.” That subverted their own goals and made the return of authoritarianism inevitable.

The Russian economy “beyond doubt” needed to be restructured, “but the political system needed to be created from scratch.” Instead of focusing on that, the reformers argued that “democracy would have to be developed after the introduction of ‘elements’ of capitalism.” And as is not always appreciated, that departed from what Gorbachev was trying to do.

“Gorbachev’s reforms,” Chernova continues, “were directed above all at the development of ‘glasnost and pluralism,’ that is on the creation of a republic political milieu. But after 1991, Boris Yeltsin led a team of reformers for whom politics was equated with economics and pluralism was an afterthought.” The clash of October 1993 highlighted this change.

The Yeltsin government, “armed with the only true economic doctrine of the free market, sought to quickly get into a bright future” [stress supplied, just as the Soviet government had]. The conflict was acute and was fundamentally different than anything that had occurred in public in Soviet times.

But instead of viewing this as progress to a new Russia, “Yeltsin labelled it a destructive vicious cycle he had to break” to ensure that his position won and resistance was destroyed. As a result, “the liquidation of the ‘retrograde’ parliament was not the beginning of the end of democracy but the restoration of the traditional despotic type of government” Russia has had.

As a result, a Putin figure became almost inevitable.

Chernova does not say but very much could have that the approach of the Russian liberals in the 1990s was in fact supported by Western governments who were quite prepared to declare Russia a democracy even though it wasn’t as long as the regime dismantled the state-controlled economy and blocked the return of the communism.

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com .

eurasiareview.com · June 17, 2024

14. US urged to join Asia-Pacific trade group, shift European forces to Indo-Pacific

We should never have withdrawn from TPP – the second greatest US strategic mistake of the 21st Century after the flawed decision to invade Iraq.

US urged to join Asia-Pacific trade group, shift European forces to Indo-Pacific

In ‘Lost Decade’, two prominent Washington analysts say a US ‘pivot to Asia’, originally undertaken in 2011, has failed and that renewing it is critical to stability with China

Bochen Han

in Washington

+ FOLLOWPublished: 2:46am, 18 Jun 2024

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3266989/us-urged-join-asia-pacific-trade-group-and-shift-its-european-forces-indo-pacific

The United States should join the Asia-Pacific trade bloc which former president Donald Trump left as well as shift its naval and air forces from Europe to the Indo-Pacific, two prominent Washington analysts recommend in a new book that urges a renewed “pivot to Asia”.

Robert Blackwill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Richard Fontaine, the president of the Centre for a New American Security, contend that despite a strategic American reorientation to the region in 2011, during the Barack Obama administration, what followed was a decade of missed opportunities and miscalculations.

Chief among the problems, Blackwill and Fontaine argue, is that Obama’s “pivot” lacked a clear articulation, with officials involved having different understandings of its objectives and metrics for success.

But they also acknowledge that the “lost decade” can also be attributed to a range of external factors, like crises in the Middle East that diverted US attention, and the lack of truly threatening or dramatic events emanating from China.

Months before the crucial US presidential election, the book seeks to insert urgency and balance in the debate about how Washington should articulate and enact its strategy to deter war as it competes with China.

Among its proposals is a pitch for Washington to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), an 11-country bloc representing one of the biggest free-trade frameworks in the Asia-Pacific, which rose from the ashes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership alliance that Trump had the US leave in 2017.

03:29

RCEP: 15 Asia-Pacific countries sign world’s largest free-trade deal

Entering CPTPP would “increase US access to lucrative Asian markets and give Washington the ability to shape rules in the region and beyond”, Blackwill and Fontaine argue.

Fontaine and Blackwill, both of whom worked in the George W. Bush administration, make alliances a focal point of their recommendations – and support strengthening several initiatives President Joe Biden’s administration has pursued.

Since 2021, the administration has forged or solidified multiple “minilaterals”, including the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Australia, India and Japan, reflecting its desire to prioritise changing the environment in which China operates over direct confrontation.

But trying to counter Chinese influence everywhere, they say, is a recipe for failure. Rather than generic coalitions, Blackwill and Fontaine suggest Washington organise countries around resisting Beijing on specific issues like intellectual property theft and human rights abuses.

They also oppose requiring partners to sever ties with China, reflecting feedback from governments worldwide that do not want to have to choose between Washington and Beijing. The message, they say, should be that “Washington does not seek to suppress China’s rise, but rather to establish a US-China equilibrium in the long term”.

Beijing has in recent years responded to Washington’s targeting of its economic and technological advancement with counter-tariffs and sabre-rattling – even while pushing the narrative that it seeks to be a partner and friend of the US.

Robert Blackwill of the Council on Foreign Relations. Photo: Handout

In terms of alliances, the authors say the US should prioritise Europe and further encourage it to wield its international regulatory power, noting that the EU had until 2022 been reluctant to take a harder line on Beijing given its reliance on the Chinese market.

But at the same time, they argue the US should decrease military activity in the Middle East, and move air and naval forces from Europe to Asia.

“Russia will pose no serious conventional military threat to Nato allies in Europe for the foreseeable future,” they say, noting that Moscow’s military strength is “significantly less” than Washington believed before its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Redirection does not mean abandonment. To meet the Asia challenge while remaining prepared for acute crises elsewhere, Blackwill and Fontaine call for a substantial increase of the US defence budget. While it already surpasses US$840 billion, they argue that it matches 1999’s budget as “the lowest level since 1953” in percentage of GDP terms.

Echoing Biden’s national strategy on China, Blackwill and Fontaine say that dealing with Beijing, unlike Moscow, is a “far more differentiated and complex challenge”.

They are not optimistic about bilateral cooperation, asserting that China has weaponised collaboration on transnational issues, like when Beijing suspended a climate working group after then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022.

Washington, they say, must be willing to accept tension with Beijing in the “near and medium term” – arguing that this would improve chances of long-term equilibrium.

This includes supporting the growth of democratic institutions worldwide, and making US values clear to allies and partners.

Still, the authors believe in sustained US-China diplomacy, arguing, in a rebuke of prominent Republican voices, that it complements a competitive approach towards Beijing rather than undermining US toughness.

Richard Fontaine of the Centre for a New American Security. Photo: Abby Greenawalt

Since last year, the Biden administration restarted what it calls “intensive diplomacy” whereby high-level officials from both sides meet to manage differences. Here, they say more is better.

In line with long-standing US policy, Blackwill and Fontaine push for “rigorous” adherence to the one-China Policy – Washington’s acknowledgement that there is only one sovereign state called China – and public rejections of Taiwanese independence or regime change in China.

And, to avoid hampering coalition-building, they also criticise any attempts to draw rigid lines between democracies and autocracies, including Biden’s Summit for Democracy, which gathers a select group of countries annually.

While they applaud many Biden policies, the authors argue that overall they are “insufficient” to meet China’s challenge.

Blackwill and Fontaine leave on an optimistic note, saying the US has what it needs to mark a “decisive decade” in the competition with China.

“At a time of bitter domestic strife, many issues will push our political leaders apart … Renewing the pivot to Asia should help bring them together.”

South China Morning Post · June 18, 2024

15. The Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore is a capability, not just a pier

The Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore is a capability, not just a pier

Though the pier in Gaza has had its struggles in recent high seas, the JLOTS system is a key capability that combines skills from the Army, Navy and civilian world.

BY JOSHUA SKOVLUND | PUBLISHED JUN 17, 2024 7:42 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · June 17, 2024

Former Navy utility boat coxswain Jarod Palm has been watching the struggles of the Navy’s Gaza Trident Causeway with a knowing eye. In the Navy, Palm was assigned to a Navy Seabee command and trained some of those operating the Gaza Trident Causeway pier. He’s seen firsthand what contributes to some of the problems with the different boats, ships, and equipment used to carry out the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, capability.

“In my experience, the reason why it’s so sensitive is, number one, the equipment is old,” Palm said. “Number two, it’s all ‘Lego bricked’ together, and that platform is actually held together by line.”

The system deployed to Gaza has proved to be a struggle to keep open and was this week shut down for the third time since May 17 when it was relocated to the Port of Ashdod, Israel, to avoid incoming harsh weather.

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Still, the U.S. and its allies have delivered 7.7 million pounds of aid across it to date.

The third factor, said Palm, is how the equipment is stored when it’s not in use. A lot of the equipment is stored in dry storage aboard Navy ships pre-positioned around the world.

He said different elements of the system would often break down during training operations.

What is JLOTS

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Jonathon Daniell sent a prepared statement to Task & Purpose in response to several questions, with technical expertise from CW2 Jason Earl, Master, Army Watercraft Systems. According to them, JLOTS is the capability of delivering cargo from sea to shore in austere environments or when port facilities are unavailable.

JLOTS is a complex system used to either establish a port, upgrade a sub-optimal port, or provide intratheatre lift. Different capabilities of JLOTS include a physical pier to deliver different types of aid or combat sustainment, an offshore petroleum discharge system, an inshore petroleum distribution system, or specialized lines that can pump drinking water onto shore for distribution.

The structure of a JLOTS operation typically starts with a large Navy ship anchored off the coast with a roll-on, roll-off-discharge facility placed adjacent to the ship — military jargon for a large floating dock that is also anchored.

Trucks, containers, or equipment will be lifted or rolled onto the floating dock, where it’s loaded onto a ship or boat that transports its payload to the shore, where a causeway will enable delivery to land.

There are different types of causeways available. Palm saw the Trident Causeway pier used in Albania and Guam during his time in the Navy, the same causeway used in Gaza. The Trident Causeway pier is made up of multiple Modular Causeway Sections that can span up to 1,800 feet long, depending on mission needs and geography of the coastline.

Each section of the Modular Causeway System consists of six 20-x-8 feet pontoons and three box-end 40-x-8 foot pontoons. The pontoons have an “integral connection system” that enables each section to be modular. The pier is assembled at sea and escorted by tugboats and rammed into the beach, and then Army and Navy personnel anchor the distal end to the ocean floor.

But one of the three shutdowns on the Gaza pier was due to rough sea states that broke the pier. It was transported to Israel for repairs before it was re-anchored in Gaza.

Construction Mechanic Chief Liam Anderson has spent a significant amount of time training on a more long-term solution for JLOTS operations: a modular elevated causeway system. Once built, it can stay in place for up to two years before requiring disassembly or repairs.

“They have a big erector set, which consists of 4.5 x 8 x 40 foot long containers that snap together to form a pier,” Anderson said. “The Seabees maintain the capability of building it anywhere between 800 to 3,000 feet long, as long as the ground beneath can support it.”

The other option involves different boats that can land on the beach to deliver supplies by dropping a ramp that vehicles or personnel can offload directly onto the beach. Security concerns in a wartorn area, the topography of the coast, and many other factors play into how a JLOTS operation is conducted.

JLOTS and sea states

Sea states are a measurement of wave height and are rated on a sliding scale of 0 to 10. The Gaza coastline regularly experiences a sea state of 4 or higher. The maximum sea state that JLOTS can be executed in is a sea state of 3 or less; anything higher risks damage to the pier, equipment, and those carrying out the operation.

There are many different structures and equipment available for the JLOTS capability, and each one has different capabilities and sea conditions it can handle before breaking, though the cut for personnel on causeways is a sea state higher than 3.

“Typically, sea states must be at a three or less, but other weather conditions can have operational impact,” Daniell said. “Sea state 3 is from 1’8” to 4’1”, and the height of the Modular Causeway Section is 4.5’.”

Anything higher will have a strong effect on the structure and increase the likelihood of damage and structural integrity compromise.

JLOTS is an important capability of the U.S. Army, but it entails almost every branch under the Department of Defense. JLOTS can look different every time it’s implemented based on the current environemnt it’s used in. Palm described it as a unique capability of America’s armed forces, based on his experience during training implementation of JLOTS.

“We can put equipment anywhere we need, even if there’s no port and it’s a shitty beach,” Palm said. “[…] ‘Hey, look, we can drop 2,000 Marines and 1,000 vehicles on a shitty beach any day.’’”

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taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · June 17, 2024

16. America’s New Nuclear Deterrence Era

America’s New Nuclear Deterrence Era

Having two nuclear peer adversaries heightens the need for America to update its nuclear warheads and weapon systems.

thedispatch.com · by Rebeccah L. Heinrichs · June 18, 2024

In a speech earlier this month, senior National Security Council official Pranay Vaddi acknowledged a new, uncomfortable reality: For the first time ever, the United States must deter two nuclear peer adversaries.

“The president recently issued updated nuclear weapons employment guidance, which takes into account the realities of a new nuclear era,” Vaddi told the Arms Control Association in a speech on June 7. “It emphasizes the need to account for the growth and diversity of the PRC’s nuclear arsenal—and the need to deter Russia, the PRC, and North Korea simultaneously.” Considering President Biden has been cheerleading disarmament efforts for decades, this remarkable announcement speaks to the gravity of the nuclear threats.

The White House’s finding echoes the chief assessment of the bipartisan U.S. Strategic Posture Commission, on which I served as a commissioner.

After the Cold War, the United States sought to rely less on nuclear weapons in its national defense strategy and instead focused on pursuing arms control and disarmament goals. The Russians were the only peer nuclear power, and Republican and Democrat administrations alike made investments in the U.S. nuclear deterrent on the assumption that relations between the U.S. and Russia were in a more productive and less adversarial period. Around 2009, when the last Strategic Posture Commission released its recommendations and when the United States was initiating its nuclear deterrent requirements, China had only a relatively modest nuclear arsenal. Strategy documents from around that time expressed cautious optimism that China would choose to engage in dialogue to build strategic stability, as a responsible state would.

Prior to ratifying the 2011 New START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia—which reduced both nations’ strategic offensive weapons—the Senate, and especially Republican Senators, insisted that President Barack Obama provide full support for the modernization of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. The hope was that future arms control with the Russians would also include restrictions on its theater-range nuclear weapons, which remain outside of New START.

But since then, Russia violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, abused the Open Skies Treaty, disregarded calls for responsible behavior in outer space, launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and announced it would not follow the New START Treaty. Moscow has chosen to assume an explicitly hostile posture toward the United States (and the post–Cold War democratic alliance system) while investing in novel nuclear systems and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship.

With the rise of Xi Jinping, China also has chosen an explicitly aggressive posture toward the U.S. and its allies to destabilize the global commons. Beijing, too, is rapidly expanding its nuclear weapons stockpile. China’s nuclear buildup has outpaced U.S. intelligence estimates, and Beijing now has a triad of delivery systems: land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), airborne long-range bombers, and sea-based nuclear-armed submarines. It also has provocatively tested weapons such as the fractional orbiting bombardment system (FOBS). And it is refusing to engage in nuclear arms control talks or transparency measures.

The risk of a confrontation between the United States and one or both nuclear adversaries is increasing.

This was another finding of the bipartisan U.S. Strategic Posture Commission, which concluded in its October 2023 report that while the fundamentals of America’s deterrence strategy remain sound, the “application of that strategy must change to address the 2027-2035 threat environment.”

The report urges the United States to “fully execute” the nuclear modernization program underway—overhauling its arsenal with new ICBMs, ballistic missile submarines, and warheads—and also recommended additional changes to prepare to meet the threats that have emerged since 2010.

It is imperative that the United States complete the program underway because it is necessary even if insufficient to credibly deter both China and Russia.

The nonpartisan consensus report has thankfully served as a wake-up call to the nation, lawmakers, and the Pentagon.

However, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, recently described the debate surrounding U.S. nuclear weapon policy as “stagnant.” In a May 17 Newsweek op-ed, he argued that “momentum” is the main reason for the push to replace America’s 40-year-old land-based intercontinental ballistic missile program with a new and admittedly expensive one called Sentinel.

But momentum had nothing to do with the bipartisan decision, made under multiple presidential administrations, to invest in Sentinel, a vital aspect of the nuclear modernization program. There are decades of momentum resulting in the neglect of the nuclear force and the degradation of the nuclear enterprise. But study after study showed that the most cost-effective way to maintain a credible ICBM leg was through replacing it with Sentinel.

But Smith, in defending his desire to not pursue the replacement of the decades old ICBM fleet, wrote that the Strategic Posture Commission concluded that the Defense Department should “pursue the feasibility of fielding some portion of the future ICBM force in a road mobile configuration.” Surely Smith, one of the elected leaders who helped initiate the SPC and who entrusted it with fairness and rigorous analysis, knows that the SPC offered suggestions for future adaptations, but not as pretexts to interrupt or to derail the current modernization program.

Finally, the congressman asserted that the commission’s recommendation that the Department of Defense invest more in conventional munitions was at odds with nuclear modernization. He said, “If the Sentinel program continues to balloon, these reductions to conventional systems are likely to increase as the Pentagon’s top-line is unlikely to grow significantly.” He is right to be concerned about the cuts to conventional systems, but the answer is not to pay for these systems with one of the three legs of the nation’s nuclear triad. The overall defense budget is at historic lows as a percentage of the nation’s GDP—and that’s the uncomfortable reality. Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently introduced a plan to significantly increase the topline to the Pentagon’s budget due in part to the challenges Smith has detected. The Wicker plan, dubbed the 21st Century Peace Through Strength report, is wise, given the nature of the China-Russia challenge and the high stakes.

Deterring war—especially nuclear war against two nuclear peer adversaries—and preserving the American people and our way of life is and must remain the No. 1 priority of the U.S. government. We can afford to do this, but we cannot afford to fail.

thedispatch.com · by Rebeccah L. Heinrichs · June 18, 2024

17. Trump win could see mass purge of state department, US diplomats fear

Troubling. I stand with Ambassador Shannon who is a great American patriot.

Excerpts:

“It’s not that they’re just left wing, it is what they really believe is so radically different,” Skinner told the In the Room with Peter Bergen podcast this week. “They think they have a responsibility now to dig in and keep their point of view, or wait out the president by slowing the process down.”

When Bergen asked her if she could think of an instance in the Trump presidency when state department staff obstructed policy, she said she could not come up with a specific example.

“I think it was so multifaceted, so broad-based, it’s hard to point at one,” she said. “What I found is that there were a lot of junior staffers who were not there for the president’s agenda because no one ever told them it was their job to be.”

Dennis Jett, a former ambassador on the same podcast, said the plan sounded like “a hostile takeover”.

Thomas Shannon, who was undersecretary of state for political affairs under Trump, the third highest position at state, said the plan of mass replacement of state department staff with Trump loyalists was unlawful and unworkable.

“These people are smoking some pretty serious weed. I’d like to know where they get it,” he said. “Kiron Skinner might think that she is landing the stormtroopers to take over the state department, and to be ready to respond to the president’s orders, but actually what’s going to happen is chaos, as people resist,” said Shannon, who served as interim secretary of state in the first 12 days of the Trump presidency.

“First of all, Schedule F is almost certainly illegal and unconstitutional,” he said. “The authority to establish the structures for the civil service, and to reform that service, lies in the Congress.”

Trump win could see mass purge of state department, US diplomats fear

Project 2025 blueprint for second Trump term envisages replacing thousands of career staff with political loyalists

The Guardian · by Julian Borger · June 13, 2024

America’s career diplomats are braced for the threat of a mass purge if Donald Trump wins the November election and for the potential flooding of the state department with loyalty-tested political appointees.

Rather than leading to a seamless change of course in a rightward Trumpist direction, the diplomats’ union and former ambassadors argue, such an attempted takeover would be much more likely to end in legal challenges, gridlock and chaos.

If elected, Trump has threatened to reinstate a policy he unsuccessfully attempted in his first term with the creation of “Schedule F”, a new category of federal employees which would be applied to tens of thousands of civil servants in “policy-related” jobs, robbing them of legal protections and making them liable to be fired at will.

What is Project 2025 and what does it have to do with a second Trump term?

A rightwing Washington thinktank, the Heritage Foundation, has prepared a blueprint for a second Trump term called Project 2025, fleshing out the Schedule F approach with a chapter on plans for the state department, which puts an emphasis on a clean-out of career officials suspected of not being fully committed to the president’s agenda, from the first day of a new Trump presidency, his inauguration.

“The next administration must take swift and decisive steps to reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine that serves the president and thereby the American people,” the 2025 plan declares. “No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day.”

The plan also envisages getting around the requirements of Senate confirmation of nominees for senior positions by the president simply placing his people in state department posts in an acting capacity pending confirmation, and thereby “exert leverage on the Senate” to accelerate the confirmation process.

The author of the chapter, Kiron Skinner, ran the state department’s office of policy planning for about a year in the Trump administration. She depicted the department as a bastion of leftwing partisan resistance.

“It’s not that they’re just left wing, it is what they really believe is so radically different,” Skinner told the In the Room with Peter Bergen podcast this week. “They think they have a responsibility now to dig in and keep their point of view, or wait out the president by slowing the process down.”

When Bergen asked her if she could think of an instance in the Trump presidency when state department staff obstructed policy, she said she could not come up with a specific example.

“I think it was so multifaceted, so broad-based, it’s hard to point at one,” she said. “What I found is that there were a lot of junior staffers who were not there for the president’s agenda because no one ever told them it was their job to be.”

Dennis Jett, a former ambassador on the same podcast, said the plan sounded like “a hostile takeover”.

Thomas Shannon, who was undersecretary of state for political affairs under Trump, the third highest position at state, said the plan of mass replacement of state department staff with Trump loyalists was unlawful and unworkable.

“These people are smoking some pretty serious weed. I’d like to know where they get it,” he said. “Kiron Skinner might think that she is landing the stormtroopers to take over the state department, and to be ready to respond to the president’s orders, but actually what’s going to happen is chaos, as people resist,” said Shannon, who served as interim secretary of state in the first 12 days of the Trump presidency.

“First of all, Schedule F is almost certainly illegal and unconstitutional,” he said. “The authority to establish the structures for the civil service, and to reform that service, lies in the Congress.”

Shannon – who served six presidents in his career, four of them Republican – said that placing people in positions in large numbers in an acting capacity would enrage the Senate, making it much harder to work with Congress. He pointed out it would also take a substantial amount of time to security-vet the new arrivals, and meanwhile it would be illegal for junior staff to share sensitive material with them, putting the rank and file in an impossible situation.

The diplomats’ union, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), has made clear it would fight any attempt to impose Schedule F.

“It’s probably not lawful, because people do have protections,” AFSA’s president, Thomas Yazdgerdi, said. “Remember, these are professional career foreign service members, who have devoted their lives to protecting our interests and promoting our values – and who serve in some of the most inhospitable and dangerous places on earth.”

Yazdgerdi adamantly disputed Skinner’s depiction of the state department as a partisan stronghold.

Trump’s Project 2025 plot would take ‘wrecking ball’ to US institutions, key Democrat warns

“I just couldn’t buy her main contention, that there is this leftwing group of folks who will not carry out the foreign policy of a conservative president. It’s just not true,” he said. “No one is questioning that the foreign service needs to carry out the foreign policy of the president. We do that. We don’t ask our members what party they are when they join AFSA. It’s completely non-partisan.”

Daniel Fried, a former ambassador to Poland, said that all administrations come into office seeking to populate the state department with officials who share their political vision. The difference with Project 2025 and the Schedule F plan is the scale of the ambition. Some observers believe that up to 50,000 across the whole civil service could be axed after inauguration day, about 10 times the normal turnover. However, Fried suggested that some of Trump’s incoming team might not object to the resulting confusion.

“A lot of the people in the Trump movement don’t like the federal government anyway,” he said. “They would want to paralyze it for ideological reasons, and that could do a lot of damage. It could be a real problem.”

The Guardian · by Julian Borger · June 13, 2024

18. The South China Sea Dog that Hasn’t Barked … Yet

Excerpt:

In recent months, a number of American and Chinese experts have asserted that the escalation risks in the South China Sea are higher even than those in the Taiwan Strait. Indeed, if Beijing is preparing a military response to Hanoi’s land reclamation, then this could trigger a bloody conflict akin to that which occurred in the Paracel Islands 50 years ago. Conversely, if Chinese leaders are content to permit Vietnam’s massive land reclamation in the South China Sea, then perhaps they are bluffing at Second Thomas Shoal and Philippine leaders need only demonstrate clearly their willingness to escalate. These diametrically opposed conclusions can both be supported by current circumstances, since we do not know what has driven China’s muted response to Vietnam’s island building in the Spratlys. Deciphering Beijing’s logic should therefore be a top priority for both government officials and outside researchers, as it will provide valuable lessons about the likelihood of conflict in the months and years ahead.

The South China Sea Dog that Hasn’t Barked … Yet - War on the Rocks

ZACK COOPER AND GREG POLING

warontherocks.com · by Zack Cooper · June 18, 2024

Vietnam has been busy. In recent months, it has exponentially expanded the size of several features it controls in the Spratly Islands, including Barque Canada Reef, Namyit Island, Pearson Reef, and Discovery Great Reef. China appears to have allowed these expansion efforts to occur largely unmolested. And yet, elsewhere in the Spratlys at Second Thomas Shoal, Beijing is preventing the Philippines from supplying food, water, and limited building supplies to the handful of Filipino personnel on the Sierra Madre, a Philippine Navy ship grounded at the shoal in 1999. Why have Chinese leaders chosen to take such a hard line against resupply efforts by the Philippines while permitting Vietnam’s large-scale island building at multiple nearby features?

Vietnamese land reclamation at Barque Canada Reef (courtesy CSIS AMTI and Maxar 2024)

There are at least four plausible explanations for China’s behavior. First, Chinese authorities may feel that they are already engaged in a struggle with the Philippines in the South China Sea and want to avoid a second major standoff at the same time. There is precedent for this behavior. In the past, China sometimes avoided engaging in coercion against multiple neighbors at the same time. However, the opposite has also been true — for instance, with China pushing hard on South China Sea, East China Sea, and Himalayan disputes all at once in the early years of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s rule. Still, with considerable problems at home and abroad, perhaps Beijing wants to avoid the additional public criticism that it would provoke for simultaneously using force against multiple claimants. In this sense, Vietnam might have chosen the perfect time to move, when China was already busy around Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal and therefore hoping to avoid other entanglements elsewhere in the Spratlys. This explanation might be part of the puzzle, but it is most compelling if China also believes that coercion against Vietnam would be diplomatically damaging and unlikely to succeed.

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That brings up the second possibility: Leaders in Beijing may believe that Vietnam is much more likely than the Philippines to escalate if China contests its actions, creating a crisis its leaders do not want. Private conversations with Chinese officials and experts suggest that many are convinced the Philippines will buckle if Beijing applies enough pressure. They cite China’s escalation dominance and a history of Philippine acquiescence to Chinese pressure, especially during the previous administration of Rodrigo Duterte. Chinese talking points also consistently frame the Philippines as lacking agency in the disputes, painting it as a mere dupe of the United States maneuvered into confrontation with Beijing. The current government in Manila therefore has to prove that it will not fold to pressure and that it is the one calling the shots, not the Americans. Hanoi, on the other hand, has nothing to prove on that front given its history of accepting substantial risk to push back against Beijing.

Vietnamese land reclamation at South Reef (courtesy CSIS AMTI and Maxar 2024)

For instance, Vietnam kept pressure on China during a months-long standoff over a Chinese oil rig in 2014 — including after a Vietnamese fishing boat sank. Long before that, Vietnam confronted China’s first moves into the Spratlys in 1988 by occupying more than a dozen rocks and reefs to keep them out of Beijing’s hands. That ultimately led to the brief — and for Vietnam, bloody — Battle of Johnson Reef. And beyond the South China Sea, there was the Sino-Vietnam border war of 1979, in which the unexpected doggedness of Vietnamese resistance, and high casualties, forced China’s military into an early withdrawal. Cross-border hostilities continued for the better part of the next decade. The few generals serving today in China’s military with any combat experience, like Central Military Commission members Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, earned it fighting Vietnamese troops. So Beijing likely knows that if Hanoi has decided this construction is a military necessity, it will not back down to gray zone coercion and will accept considerable risk of escalation. That may be successfully deterring China today.

Third, and relatedly, China may be treating Vietnam differently than the Philippines due to the latter’s formal treaty alliance with the United States. The logic of allying with a stronger country is that doing so should better deter challenges from adversaries. But in this case, Vietnam may counterintuitively be benefitting by not being a U.S. treaty ally. In short, Chinese leaders may feel that Vietnam’s land reclamation poses less of a threat than even much smaller actions by the Philippines because it is unlikely that American forces would benefit from them directly. Although it is unlikely that the small Philippine outpost at Second Thomas Shoal would be militarily useful for U.S. forces, Chinese leaders may worry more about Manila’s actions due to the alliance. If this is true, then Hanoi’s nonalignment could be an attractive model for other countries seeking to protect their interests amid heightened U.S.-Chinese competition.

Vietnamese land reclamation at Central Reef (courtesy CSIS AMTI and Maxar 2024)

Fourth, Chinese leaders may be treating Vietnamese counterparts differently given the longstanding cooperative relationship between Beijing and Hanoi. The party-to-party links between the two communist states remain robust, albeit more distrustful than outsiders sometimes assume (see the history of conflict above). Still, Chinese officials may be less comfortable instigating a crisis with Vietnam at a time when it faces so much pressure from the world’s liberal democracies. The Vietnamese Communist Party is also historically uncomfortable pursuing the kind of public naming and shaming campaign in which the Philippines is engaged. Hanoi prefers to communicate more quietly with Beijing while leaving it to outsiders (often with quiet Vietnamese encouragement) to impose public pressure. This has led to speculation that China is reacting more harshly to Philippine activities than to those of Vietnam because of anger over Manila’s efforts to publicize Chinese bad behavior. That may be true, but it seems more a contributing factor than a full explanation of Beijing’s behavior.

There are many other questions surrounding Vietnam’s actions. What prompted Vietnam to significantly expand its island building at this moment? Did Hanoi expect that Beijing would be so restrained in response? And how will U.S. and regional officials respond to Vietnam’s actions? To date, most have demurred, with the spokesperson of the Philippine Coast Guard saying Manila does not object to Vietnam’s island expansion because, unlike China, it has not been used to coerce other states. These are all important questions, but understanding the logic behind China’s (lack of) response is especially critical because it might help decipher Beijing’s response to future activities.

Vietnamese land reclamation at Namyit Island (courtesy CSIS AMTI and Maxar 2024)

In recent months, a number of American and Chinese experts have asserted that the escalation risks in the South China Sea are higher even than those in the Taiwan Strait. Indeed, if Beijing is preparing a military response to Hanoi’s land reclamation, then this could trigger a bloody conflict akin to that which occurred in the Paracel Islands 50 years ago. Conversely, if Chinese leaders are content to permit Vietnam’s massive land reclamation in the South China Sea, then perhaps they are bluffing at Second Thomas Shoal and Philippine leaders need only demonstrate clearly their willingness to escalate. These diametrically opposed conclusions can both be supported by current circumstances, since we do not know what has driven China’s muted response to Vietnam’s island building in the Spratlys. Deciphering Beijing’s logic should therefore be a top priority for both government officials and outside researchers, as it will provide valuable lessons about the likelihood of conflict in the months and years ahead.

Become a Member

Zack Cooper is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-host of the Net Assessment podcast for War on the Rocks.

Greg Poling directs the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is the author of On Dangerous Ground: America’s Century in the South China Sea.

Image: Vietnamese Government

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Zack Cooper · June 18, 2024

19. Fear Factor: How to Know When You’re in a Security Dilemma

Excerpts:

The dynamics of a security dilemma nevertheless intensify the competition over Taiwan. Even purely defensive capabilities deployed by Taiwan and the United States would appear threatening to China because they could increase Taiwan’s willingness to declare independence and reduce China’s ability to coerce or invade the island. Consequently, even if the conditions that would usually blunt a security dilemma were available—such as highly effective defense capabilities that do not double as offensive capacities—they would do little to reduce competition and China’s insecurity. Instead, China would see the United States as a threat and respond in ways that then threaten Taiwan. As China’s power and military potential increase, so will military competition and political tensions.

The United States is therefore left with only bad options. It can toughen Taiwanese defenses and its own commitment to safeguarding the island but will thereby continue to threaten China’s security and risk a major war. It can implement that policy in a variety of ways, but not in one that solves the fundamental problem: that China sees Taiwan as a vital interest. Alternatively, the United States can end its commitment to using force to defend Taiwan, potentially inviting a Chinese invasion and the forcible unification of the island with the mainland. There are no options in between.

Although it is not applicable in every situation, the security dilemma helps explain much of great-power competition. But as these cases show, even the strongest theory cannot be easily applied in all situations. Categorizing states as greedy or insecure may help conceptual models function, but it flattens the drivers of state behavior in the real world. As ever, some of the hardest problems for policymakers and analysts lie in the gray areas that resist easy solutions.

Fear Factor

How to Know When You’re in a Security Dilemma

By Charles L. Glaser

July/August 2024

Published on June 18, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Charles L. Glaser · June 18, 2024

Great-power competition is back. With the post–Cold War unipolar moment over, the United States and China now jostle over trade and technology, compete in a conventional and nuclear arms race, and seek to counter the other in various hot spots. So far, China’s aggressive posture has yet to trigger a full-blown war, but the same cannot be said of Russia. Its invasion of Ukraine has confounded policymakers in the West and raised the specter of an increasingly dangerous, conflict-prone world.

What explains this turn for the worse? Political scientists tend to understand the behavior of challengers such as China and Russia in two ways. One camp views them as revisionist, expansionist, or “greedy” states: China and Russia want to revise the geopolitical status quo in pursuit of nationalist aims, great-power status, ideological dominance, or the ambitions of their authoritarian leaders. The second sees China and Russia as fundamentally insecure. To protect themselves against an external threat, insecure states may build up their military forces, seize territory that could form a buffer zone, or conquer a threatening adversary. In this view, competition is driven not by greed on the part of specific states but by the international system itself—and the insecurity it can create.

The debate is more than academic; each description leads to a very different policy. When a country faces a greedy state, the standard policy prescription is to deter it. In the case of China and Russia, then, the United States should strengthen its military advantages, communicate its resolve, and pursue economic and political policies to weaken these adversaries. When a country faces an insecure state, by contrast, the solution is not so simple. In that case, policymakers must reckon with a key concept in international relations theory: the security dilemma.

A security dilemma arises when an insecure state that seeks to protect itself acts in a way that unintentionally makes another state feel threatened and insecure. Tensions can escalate and lead to war, even though both sides merely want to live in peace. When it faces a security dilemma, the United States will be inclined to improve its deterrent capabilities. But it has to do so in a way that does not make its adversaries feel less secure, while convincing them that it desires only security. That can be a difficult needle to thread: after all, when a state builds stronger deterrent capabilities, an adversary can feel threatened. In grappling with the security dilemma, a state may be left with only bad options.

Finding the right option becomes even tougher when analysts think too rigidly about the nature of states, assuming countries belong to one of the two categories: either greedy expansionists or security seekers. Policymakers must aim to deter the former while waltzing through the security dilemma with the latter. But that binary distinction overlooks the fact that many states are mixed; they can be greedy and insecure at the same time and, therefore, especially hard to manage. Indeed, that is likely the case with the United States’ principal rivals today.

CRUEL INTENTIONS

The security dilemma has long been a fixture of international relations theory. The term was coined in 1950 by John Herz, who argued that states pursuing security in an anarchic international system “are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others.” He went on: “This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst.” Anarchy in international relations does not refer to chaos but instead describes the lack of an authority that can protect states from one another and enforce international agreements.

In the 1970s, Robert Jervis advanced the field’s understanding of the security dilemma by explaining that it became more or less acute depending on the relative might of offensive and defensive military capabilities, what scholars termed the “offense-defense balance.” In a 1978 essay, he explored the implications of changes in this balance. When states can build offensive forces more easily than they can build the requisite defenses to stave off attack, they will all seek to bolster their offensive capacities. As a result, they will feel more insecure, and competition will invariably intensify. By contrast, when defensive capabilities have the edge, states tend to be more secure and compete less.

Misjudging this balance can lead to catastrophe. In 1984, Stephen Van Evera argued that World War I resulted from the mistaken belief in the strength of offensive forces over defensive ones. Many European governments assumed that conquests would be easy, a belief that encouraged them to go to war. That conviction came apart in the bloody years that followed, as machine-gun and trench warfare made mincemeat of visions of easy conquest.

In grappling with the security dilemma, a state may be left with only bad options.

Studying the security dilemma helped scholars in the following decades transform realist understandings of international relations that saw competition and conflict as inevitable. Theorists such as Kenneth Waltz argued that in an anarchic world, states tend not to cooperate because they fear that others will take advantage of them—by cheating on agreements, for example. But in “Realists as Optimists,” an essay published in 1995, I showed how melding Waltz’s view of the international system with insights from studies of the security dilemma might point the way toward escaping the insecurity that the system generated. Cooperation and unilateral restraint, rather than competition and aggression, could in fact be the best options for a state in an insecure world. Take the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972. The treaty essentially banned missile defense systems that would have threatened the adversary’s ability to retaliate for a nuclear strike—in other words, its capacity for deterrence. The treaty aimed to spare the superpowers an intensifying nuclear arms race that could have strained their relations and encouraged either of them to attack in a moment of crisis. Under the theory that scholars called “defensive realism,” states can be very secure when the security dilemma is mild—that is, when they find defense easier than offense and when a defensive strategy does not simultaneously provide a state with a more potent capacity to attack.

Other research of mine and by Andrew Kydd explored how competition driven by the security dilemma could lead states to see their adversaries as motivated by greed when they actually sought only security. A country could, for example, build up its army to provide itself with an extra margin of protection. But a rival might perceive that move as excessive and a sign of greed. The United States’ so-called pivot to Asia generated this type of dynamic. With China’s conventional military capabilities growing, the United States under President Barack Obama decided to give greater priority to East Asia, including by shifting more U.S. forces to the region. China believed that U.S. capabilities in the region were already extensive and sufficient for their stated purposes, however, so it perceived the change in U.S. policy as an act of hostility and aggression.

Scholars have explored the security dilemma’s reach in other arenas. Glenn Snyder explained that security-dilemma logic applies to alliance formation, as well as to military buildups. Much like the development of weapons that are good for both offense and defense, a new alliance can unsettle a rival, making that adversary wonder whether the pact is defensive or a precursor to future aggression. Barry Posen extended the security dilemma to ethnic conflicts that can erupt when imperial orders dissolve. In new conditions of anarchy, groups can see other groups as threatening even as each only seeks to defend itself. William Wohlforth applied the logic of the security dilemma to competition for status. A state’s anxiety about whether a peer recognizes its status can generate unnecessary competition. Scholars today apply this model even more widely—using it, for example, to examine how a conventional war might spiral into nuclear war.

As studies of the security dilemma demonstrate, governments have to worry about implementing policies that make other states feel less safe, because the heightened insecurity of others can be dangerous. During the second half of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union chose to deploy multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, missiles loaded with several nuclear warheads. Both countries were ostensibly searching for greater security. But as a result of the deployment, the U.S. land-based ballistic missile force became more vulnerable and the United States worried intensely about the adequacy of its strategic nuclear forces. The arms competition also strained the superpowers’ diplomatic relationship, which made the new vulnerability of their nuclear forces seem all the more perilous. Both Washington and Moscow would have been more secure if neither country had deployed MIRVs.

The thorny dynamics of the security dilemma offer governments a variety of policy insights. Recognizing how its actions might make an adversary feel less safe, a state should lean toward defensive strategies, unilateral restraint, and negotiated agreements that limit the size and offensive attributes of its forces. Such policies can moderate the negative signals that military buildups can send to adversaries. An arms control agreement in the 1970s to ban MIRVs would have made the United States safer and eased Cold War tensions. States can sometimes become more secure by doing less.

BEYOND THE BINARY

Analysts have used the security dilemma framework to look at relations between states that seek security in an anarchic system. By contrast, they have recommended deterrence as the best policy option for dealing with expansionist states that are driven by greed. This binary framing neglects the fact that some states are mixed, both insecure and greedy.

These mixed states will never be satisfied with the status quo. Even if they are certain that their adversary merely seeks security, they will still be prone to behaving aggressively. Yet they are also likely to act aggressively if they feel insecure. Russia today may be a prime example of a country with mixed motives: it pursues aggressive policies in Ukraine both because it believes Ukraine should be part of Russia and because it feels threatened by NATO expansion.

Dealing with such an adversary is doubly difficult. A state would need to maintain a strong deterrent to ward off its adversary’s expansionist impulses. But maintaining a stronger deterrent makes it harder to forgo policies that decrease the adversary’s security, which could be self-defeating: feeling threatened, the adversary could become harder to deter. The difficult tradeoff created by the security dilemma would then intensify. Simply exercising restraint—with the hope of demonstrating one’s own peaceful motives—would likely be too risky. Any sign of weakness would tempt the adversary, now less deterred, to take aggressive actions.

The mixed motives of states increase the chances of confusion and misperception, greatly exacerbating the effects of the security dilemma. If a state fails to appreciate that its adversary faces such a dilemma, it will reach unduly negative conclusions. All threatening actions will be interpreted incorrectly as reflecting greedy motives—and confrontation and conflict will become more likely.

STARVED FOR CHOICE

The security dilemma can help analysts understand the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the military competition in East Asia between China and the United States. Neither case, however, reflects a pure security dilemma. And some interpretations depend on contested assessments of events on the ground.

At the risk of oversimplification, the debate over the causes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be divided between those who emphasize the Kremlin’s greed and those who dwell on its sense of insecurity. The first perspective holds that the sources of the war are internal to Russia, including Putin’s particular beliefs about Ukraine’s history and a strain of imperial nationalism that has infected much of the Russian public. For analysts in this camp, Russia’s claims that it is threatened by the expansion of NATO are clearly disingenuous. This assessment of Russia—that it is greedy and secure—suggests that the best option for dealing with the Kremlin is deterrence and competitive policies; the United States should push for the expansion of NATO and strengthen its ability to attack or coerce Russia.

The other perspective holds that NATO’s eastward expansion—along with the promise officials made in 2008 that Ukraine would eventually become a member and the growing political and military relationship between the treaty organization and Ukraine since then—created genuine Russian insecurity. To prevent NATO from encroaching farther into the former Soviet Union, the argument runs, Russia invaded Ukraine. These analysts see the security dilemma in action, with NATO’s search for security making Moscow feel threatened and insecure. Alternatively, it could be argued that NATO was a greedy actor with expansionist goals that had nothing to do with its own security: it wanted to spread democracy, expand the liberal international order, and enlarge the reach of the West. In this view, the alliance did not face a security dilemma but instead adopted greedy policies that made Russia insecure and provoked it to invade.

Japanese forces in waters close to Okinawa, Japan, November 2023

Issei Kato / Reuters

This polarized debate largely overlooks the possibility that instead of being either greedy or insecure, Russia is both. In this reading, Russia had designs on Ukraine well before NATO moved toward including Ukraine in the alliance. Then, NATO’s looming expansion made Russia feel insecure, which in turn made the Kremlin more likely to act in expansionist ways. An invasion of Ukraine became Russia’s best option.

If Russia is indeed a mixed state, then the West probably never had good options to prevent the invasion. Giving up on NATO expansion might have delayed it but would not have stopped it. As Russia became more powerful, the Kremlin might have invaded just to satisfy its greedy motives no matter what NATO did. And because Ukraine was not in the alliance, NATO could not pursue a purely defensive strategy in deterring a Russian attack. Had NATO been more aggressive and decided to accept Ukraine as a member, it would have unavoidably decreased Russian security. But the slow process of the alliance’s expansion—raising the possibility of Ukraine’s inclusion but still excluding it—appears to have been the worst of both worlds. It may have made Russia feel insecure without sufficiently deterring a Russian invasion.

The security dilemma also looms large over the rivalry between the United States and China. In some respects, there should be little cause for military tension. The vastness of the Pacific Ocean makes invasion of each other’s homeland virtually impossible. That both countries are large and of roughly equal power also makes invasion less likely. In addition, both can deploy nuclear forces that can endure nuclear strikes, providing highly effective deterrents. Distance, the ocean, and nuclear weapons strongly favor defense. As a result, the security dilemma here is so mild that China and the United States should have little difficulty avoiding security competition.

The dynamics of a security dilemma intensify the competition over Taiwan.

But zoom in on East Asia, and the dynamic changes entirely. The security dilemma in this region and specifically over Taiwan is complex and dangerous. China considers Taiwan part of its homeland and wants to achieve unification with the island. It sees its efforts to prevent Taiwan from declaring formal independence as geared toward preserving its own territorial integrity and thus its national security. Chinese officials consider the possibility of using force to achieve unification a matter of security, not greedy expansion.

The United States does not take an official position on the outcome of Taiwan’s status, but it rejects the use of force as a legitimate means for resolving the dispute and is committed to maintaining the United States’ ability to defend the island. The situation is therefore not, strictly speaking, a security dilemma but a dispute over the political status quo and the acceptable means for that dispute’s resolution.

The dynamics of a security dilemma nevertheless intensify the competition over Taiwan. Even purely defensive capabilities deployed by Taiwan and the United States would appear threatening to China because they could increase Taiwan’s willingness to declare independence and reduce China’s ability to coerce or invade the island. Consequently, even if the conditions that would usually blunt a security dilemma were available—such as highly effective defense capabilities that do not double as offensive capacities—they would do little to reduce competition and China’s insecurity. Instead, China would see the United States as a threat and respond in ways that then threaten Taiwan. As China’s power and military potential increase, so will military competition and political tensions.

The United States is therefore left with only bad options. It can toughen Taiwanese defenses and its own commitment to safeguarding the island but will thereby continue to threaten China’s security and risk a major war. It can implement that policy in a variety of ways, but not in one that solves the fundamental problem: that China sees Taiwan as a vital interest. Alternatively, the United States can end its commitment to using force to defend Taiwan, potentially inviting a Chinese invasion and the forcible unification of the island with the mainland. There are no options in between.

Although it is not applicable in every situation, the security dilemma helps explain much of great-power competition. But as these cases show, even the strongest theory cannot be easily applied in all situations. Categorizing states as greedy or insecure may help conceptual models function, but it flattens the drivers of state behavior in the real world. As ever, some of the hardest problems for policymakers and analysts lie in the gray areas that resist easy solutions.

CHARLES L. GLASER is a Senior Fellow in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

Foreign Affairs · by Charles L. Glaser · June 18, 2024

20. Gig Work and the Joint Force: A Modern Solution to Leverage Reserve Component Talent

Gig Work and the Joint Force: A Modern Solution to Leverage Reserve Component Talent - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jim Perkins · June 18, 2024

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Roughly half of the US military is in the reserve component. Yet the US military in 2024 is organized and manned by a system designed largely in the 1970s and 1980s, with active duty forces as the central focus. In this way, both individuals and units across the armed services’ reserve forces and the National Guard are managed and measured against active component constructs of readiness and force management. Predictably, the level of frustration in the reserve forces is very high—the Army Reserve cannot even fill 100 percent of its battalion command vacancies. People want to serve, but they are tired of the unnecessary complications or unpaid overtime.

Due largely to the Total Force Policy of 1973, National Guard and reserve forces are viewed primarily as elements of strategic mass rather than the source of critical skills and other enablers that they are. This Industrial Age model is no longer adequate in today’s competition for talent (and time). It is time for a modern solution that more effectively empowers the Department of Defense to tap into the full talents of the part-time forces.

Imagine that the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps needs a unified deployment dashboard that provides real-time updates to force deployments around the world. To create it, the corps mobilizes a Navy Reservist whose day job is supply chain and logistics optimization at Walmart or Amazon to partner with a data scientist from the Air National Guard. Lending their unique expertise, they only need to be mobilized for four weeks to build the dashboard. This is all made possible by a tool that exists today, called GigEagle.

GigEagle.mil is a completely new approach to how DoD understands and leverages its citizen soldiers. Initially developed by the Defense Innovation Unit to address its needs for critical skills, it is a secure and compliant talent marketplace that allows units to access civilian skills from across the joint force for tours ranging from four hours to one year. Crucially, it introduces three unprecedented capabilities to DoD.

First, for the first time in the US military, GigEagle recognizes that each service member is more than just a rank, occupational specialty, and skill identifiers. It captures the full talent profile of an individual, including civilian skills and experience. Current systems and practices cannot account for the idea of a service member with a day job that is valuable to the military (such as software development or medicine)—let alone the idea that military and civilian careers would not be perfectly aligned. Yet it is very common.

The military will always trail industry because it takes years to create new occupation and skill codes. To the Army, I’m a 12A engineer officer, but my day job is software product management—one of the many civilian jobs with no military code. DoD is struggling to recruit and retain people with digital technology talent but we have individuals across the joint force working in these fields. Similarly, we have service members with skills in law, medicine, human resources, marketing, and many other critical areas scattered across our reserve components, especially in the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR).

Yes, the IRR—a force larger than the entire Marine Corps at 220,000 service members—is composed of those who are considered nearly out of the military altogether, with just one more signature needed to be fully separated. When we consider retaining talent, this is a key demographic. It is more challenging and time-consuming to recruit and train a civilian than to bring someone out of the IRR.

What if we could make service attractive to this pool of vetted talent? These service members could have left completely, but they chose not to. Many simply have a service obligation and cannot get out. Yet many others—like myself and many of my peers—still want to serve, but the demands of traditional drilling are too much to balance along with day jobs, education, families, and other commitments. Time is our most precious resource and we want to spend it directly impacting the mission, not on administrative nonsense (or sitting in a drill hall scrolling TikTok).

GigEagle provides a way to harness this largely overlooked part of the total force, and that’s the second innovation: short-term gigs. The “gig economy,” exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, creates a more efficient talent market. Right person, right time, and right place are no longer just empty phrases. Instead of viewing reserve component mobilizations through the usual 365- or 180-day lenses, units can be more precise and use their limited budgets much more effectively while being attractive to part-time service members. This is a win-win for the total force.

Yes, this is a new way of thinking about staffing. Units and leaders will need to spend time identifying the hard problems and key events they will face in the next 6–12 months and, to solve those problems and successfully complete those events, what each deliverable they need will look like. This is results-oriented leadership, which is more likely to achieve outcomes compared to simply asking for a certain branch and rank.

Service members are not simply interchangeable widgets. Consider the difference between a generic post in Tour of Duty—a system that enables Army Reserve soldiers to volunteer for mobilizations—seeking a generic Special Forces officer. Compare that with a targeted, detailed description: We need a leader with experience coordinating combat operations and intelligence who is fluent in Spanish for 8–12 weeks. Ideal candidates have past military experience in Latin America.

That’s the difference between current military tools built for the Industrial Age and what modern talent management is all about.

Lastly, a modern military realizes that it’s not in competition with itself. Is there a meaningful difference between being a Russian linguist in the Navy versus the Army? What about data science, medicine, or civil engineering? No, the skills we have are largely transferable across the joint force, yet each service maintains a talent silo creating excesses and shortages that can be smoothed by other services.

If Navy Supply Systems Command—NAVSUP—needs to update a dashboard in Microsoft Power BI, should it be restricted to seeking the necessary talent only among Navy Reservists? With GigEagle, NAVSUP can see talent from across the force and coordinate to attach the most qualified individuals for a tour and fund them. This is what a truly joint force looks like.

GigEagle is a visionary and transformational solution, but as anyone who works on government technology knows, technology is easy, but policy is hard. Although many units are already tapping into talent via GigEagle, DoD needs to update or clarify policies about how to mobilize and fund reserve component service members to fully leverage this new capability. A match on the marketplace is worthless without a clear route to making use of it.

The under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness must clarify policy to ensure that all units are authorized to convert funding aligned to an unfilled billet into funds that can be used for mobilizations. In addition, the guidance should clarify that service members should not need to transfer units (or move between the National Guard and services’ reserve forces) just to support a short-term project. Lastly, the services should issue guidance for exceptions to policy for mobilizing service members out of the IRR. If the service member is not deploying and the tour is less than thirty days long, requiring a physical, dental exam, and fitness tests should be waived. Service members mobilizing for longer than thirty days should be able to be on orders for up to thirty days while performing those tasks. Together, these changes will greatly reduce the friction—or perceived friction—about gig work in DoD.

If we step back for a moment, the worst scenario right now is that DoD squanders this opportunity. People want to serve, but the current system is simply incongruent with modern American society. The response from service members to GigEagle has been overwhelmingly positive and the only question is whether DoD will recognize this critical opportunity and seize it or continue with its traditional methods and lose these service members for good.

Major Jim Perkins is an Army Reservist currently supporting the launch of GigEagle. After eleven years on active duty, he is now a leader in cloud computing and software development for government and national security.

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

Image credit: Airman 1st Class Samuel Becker, US Space Force

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jim Perkins · June 18, 2024

21. Chinese Unconventional Threats in the Era of Great Power Competition

Please go to the lnk to view the maps: https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/chinese-unconventional-threats-in-the-era-of-great-power-competition/

Conclusion:

In examining these key geopolitical hotspots, it is clear that China acts based on its own self-interest. This analysis suggests that the PRC might go beyond traditional forms of international engagement, employing unconventional methods to further its strategic national objectives. Specifically, the PRC may work with VEOs as a novel approach to increase its regional influence. VEOs are appealing because they can disrupt, subvert, or distract. Therefore, China’s potential use of VEOs to project power indirectly requires a coordinated counterterrorism response. Understanding Beijing’s possible future tactics is crucial for developing effective countermeasures against these unconventional threats.

Chinese Unconventional Threats in the Era of Great Power Competition

June 18, 2024 by Leo Matthews, Kevin Hoerold Leave a Comment

Would China ever take a page from Iran’s playbook and cultivate relationships with violent extremist organizations (VEOs)?

Despite its seeming improbability, the increasingly assertive actions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Southeast Asia raise this compelling question. This article explores when, where, and how the PRC might use VEOs to further its political, military, and economic goals. An analysis of Southeast Asia identifies an intersection of the PRC’s goals with those of violent non-state groups in Myanmar, the Philippines, and the Indian border regions. In each case, the PRC could plausibly advance its national interests via a partnered or proxy relationship with select VEOs. The same method of analysis identifies when and where the PRC’s collaboration with VEOs would be unlikely due to competing financial and political interests.

Understanding China’s potential tactics and likely flashpoints for irregular warfare is vital for preparing effective countermeasures. Most importantly, the discussion of China’s unconventional levers of power serves as a warning against the complete separation of counterterrorism efforts from strategic competition with China.

Where Does the PRC Already Cooperate with Proxy Groups?

Description: Map depicts the gas and oil pipelines of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. Source: China’s New Approach to Myanmar – Geopolitical Futures

In perhaps the defining example of PRC engagement with armed non-state groups, Myanmar has been a testing ground for China’s emerging strategy. In the absence of a stable, effective central government in neighboring Myanmar, the PRC maintains mutually beneficial relationships with both the military government and a complex web of ethnic armed groups. PRC collaboration with the military government of Myanmar and numerous ethnic opposition groups demonstrates President Xi’s willingness to arm and fund non-state actors in the pursuit of economic and military interests.

The PRC’s interests in Myanmar are largely focused on the development of the 1,700-kilometer China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. First proposed as a standalone project by Beijing in 2017, the project includes oil and gas pipelines, road and rail links, and a deep-sea port located in the coastal city of Kyaukpyu. Upon completion of the corridor and Kyaukpyu Port, the PRC will obtain direct access to the Bay of Bengal and the wider Indian Ocean. This will secure an alternative energy and trade route through Myanmar, open up an easier passage to global markets for the PRC’s landlocked Yunnan-based industries, and help reduce Beijing’s vulnerable reliance on maritime energy imports through the Straits of Malacca. In addition to the economic dimensions of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Myanmar, there is a budding element of great power competition at play in Kyaukpyu. The port will grant the PRC another outpost in its “string of pearls” strategy to encircle India, intimidate neighbors, and challenge US naval hegemony in the Indian Ocean.

The PRC’s expansive BRI projects in Myanmar traverse a country embroiled in ethnic conflict and tenuously led by a military junta. Beijing’s strategic priority is the completion of the economic corridor and unimpeded flow of commerce, irrespective of the internal politics of Myanmar. Consequently, the PRC funds and arms multiple sides of the conflict to protect its investments, simultaneously engaging with violent non-state actors and the military government.

In lieu of an effective government partner in Myanmar to maintain order, particularly along the Chinese border states, Beijing works through various ethnic armed organizations (EAO), the local power brokers. The largest EAO, the twenty-thousand-strong United Wa State Army (UWSA), has enjoyed a close relationship with the PRC’s security services since its founding in 1989. The UWSA emerged in 1989 from the splintering of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), which the PRC had supported with weapons and military equipment since 1968 to combat the nationalist Kuomintang forces that fled into northeastern Myanmar after the Chinese civil war.

In recent years, PRC weapons shipments to the UWSA have included heavy machine guns, HN-5A Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS), artillery, armored fighting vehicles, and other sophisticated communications equipment. The UWSA further benefits from access to cross-border markets for Chinese currency, rubber and mining industries, construction technology, and communication networks. Although the PRC does not publicly endorse the political goals of the UWSA, Beijing employs the group as a proxy force to protect ongoing BRI projects, stem the flow of drugs into China, and crack down on cyber scam centers operating in remote areas near the Chinese border.

When necessary, the PRC leverages its relationship with the UWSA and other armed groups to exert pressure on the military government of Myanmar to concede contested territory near PRC investments. Meanwhile, the military government of Myanmar maintains diplomatic ties with Beijing and has purchased over $1 billion in arms and military equipment since 2021 for its war against the UWSA and other EAOs. In recent months, Beijing has pressured both sidesof the conflict into (short-lived) ceasefire agreements to reduce the violent interruptions of trade and construction.

The PRC is not picking sides in Myanmar but rather protecting its strategic interests and investments. Beijing’s demonstrated willingness to arm and fund ethnic armed organizations in Myanmar leads us to question what other regions present similar conditions for PRC collaboration with violent, non-state actors.

Where is China Most Likely to Leverage VEOs?

The Philippines and the India/Kashmir border present two such possibilities. The PRC’s interest in the Republic of the Philippines is two-fold. First, the PRC seeks to undermine the re-emergence of security ties between the Philippine government and the United States. Manila has recently undertaken strategic steps to deepen its relationship with the United States, marking a significant evolution in its foreign policy. This is underscored by the recent expansion of the US-Philippine Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. Second, the PRC has actively pursued territorial claims in the South China Sea (SCS), employing a strategy that combines economic leverage and the enhancement of its soft powerwithin the Philippines. This multifaceted approach aims to sway Manila into acknowledging the PRC’s territorial assertions, highlighting a sophisticated blend of diplomacy and economic influence to advance its geopolitical interests in the region. In a recent escalation of tensions, the PRC has intensified its assertive actions in disputed maritime territories by deploying both coast guard vessels and civilian fishing fleets. The PRC’s use of VEOs as a proxy force would allow for plausible deniability on the international stage while weakening the Philippine government’s maritime operations in the SCS and straining US-Philippine relations.

The two most likely VEOs for the PRC to leverage are the New People’s Army (NPA) and the Islamic State East Asia (ISEA). The New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), has a documented history of engaging in actions against US personnel and interests within the Philippines. Their violent history includes deadly attacks on US servicemembers, underscoring the significant threat the NPA poses to both national and international security interests in the region. The NPA’s stated aims are to overthrow the Philippine government and eliminate US influence in the Philippines, highlighting its ambitious objectives against both the central government and foreign presence. Formed in the image of Maoist revolutionaries, the NPA received direct funding and military suppliesfrom the Chinese Communist Party from 1969 until the 1976 normalization of Chinese-Philippine relations. This demonstrates the NPA’s predisposition to collaboration with the PRC as the Chinese Communist Party’s genesis serves as the inspiration behind the NPA’s movement.

ISEA also holds both the capability and intent to attack American and Philippine government interests. The ongoing conflict instigated by ISEA in the southern islands of the Philippines demands extensive efforts from the Philippine government in terms of time, manpower, and resources. This continuous engagement diverts Manila’s focus and resources from other national security priorities, potentially benefiting the PRC’s strategic position. However, the PRC’s longstanding campaign against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, under the pretext of combating Islamic extremism, might make the PRC cautious about associating with a violent Islamist group like ISEA. The PRC would go to great lengths to keep a proxy partnership with ISEA highly confidential.

When evaluating the potential for future PRC engagement with VEOs in the Philippines, several indicators could signal an escalation of involvement. A noticeable enhancement in the weaponry and capabilities of these groups could serve as an early warning of increased support. Additionally, a rise in both the frequency and intensity of their attacks, particularly if these occur in tandem or close succession with PRC assertive actions in the West Philippine Sea, could suggest a level of coordination between these organizations and the PRC.

Source: China Joins India and Pakistan in the Kashmir Battlespace – New Lines Institute

PRC support for certain VEOs in Kashmir, meanwhile, could provide strategic, economic, and security advantages to Beijing. The PRC’s primary regional interests are the protection of nearby BRI investments and the disruption of the Indian military presence along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Pursuant to these interests, the PRC supports Pakistan’s territorial ambitions and stands to benefit indirectly from the actions Pakistan takes to exert its power in Kashmir via conventional and unconventional means.

Periodic PRC military incursions into Indian Kashmir, including a 2020 clash in the Galwan Valley that resulted in 120 Indian casualties, underscore the PRC’s willingness to violently escalate tensions in the region. In addition to conventional military engagements along the LAC, Beijing provides financial support to Pakistan, whose military occupies a second front with India along the Line of Control (LOC). Should the PRC wish to employ unconventional methods in its simmering conflict with India, Beijing may consider working with or through Kashmir-based VEOs.

Within Indian Kashmir, Pakistan exercises varying levels of control over a network of Islamist VEOs opposed to Indian rule in the region. The jihadi organizations offer an alternative to conventional military force, operating within urban environments and conducting guerrilla warfare against the Indian government. Pakistan provides jihadists, via its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with funding, weapons, equipment, and a safe haven to train for their perennial struggle against Indian rule in Kashmir.

The primary organizations directly associated with Pakistan are Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT, renamed Jamaat-ud-Dawa in 2022), as well as Harakat-ul Jihad Islami (HUJI), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM). ISI does not enjoy the same relationship with ISIS or al-Qa‘ida-affiliated groups whose global vision for Kashmir as part of a worldwide Islamic caliphate are at odds with the secular Pakistani state.

Beijing is unlikely to engage directly with Islamist VEOs but could work through existing ISI channels to indirectly fund or arm groups such as JeM or LeT. Using Pakistan as an interlocutor builds upon decades-old relationships between the ISI and select VEOs while providing a level of deniability to the PRC, publicly committed to opposing radical Islamist movements. In fact, from September to December 2023, multiple Indian media outlets reported on alleged evidence of PRC support to Pakistan-backed militants in Kashmir. Although uncorroborated in Western reporting, the stories claim Chinese military technology, including drones, encrypted communications devices, and advanced weaponry, have been supplied to LeT and JeM via the ISI. While far from definitive proof of PRC engagement, the news stories reveal an existing Indian narrative of Chinese involvement with Pakistan’s network of jihadist groups in Kashmir.

Where China is Unlikely to Leverage VEOs

The conditions identified in South Asia, which may accommodate a relationship between the PRC and VEOs, are not replicated in South America or Africa. From the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC) in Colombia to the plethora of VEOs across Africa, both regions offer vectors for VEO engagement, but the PRC’s extensive economic and diplomatic investments suggest such a partnership would be highly unlikely.

The PRC will work with and through partner governments or institutions to pursue its economic and strategic interests whenever possible. The emphasis on infrastructure development, economic growth, and fostering long-term partnerships under the BRI framework (as opposed to geographic ambitions) suggests a strategic preference for stability and cooperative engagement over the contentious and unpredictable nature of VEOs. To this end, the PRC has fostered relationships with governments across Africa and South America and voiced support for local counterterrorism efforts.

Engagement with a VEO is an inherently high-risk endeavor, only likely to happen when the PRC lacks a cooperative, effective government partner and does not jeopardize its regional investments.

Conclusion

In examining these key geopolitical hotspots, it is clear that China acts based on its own self-interest. This analysis suggests that the PRC might go beyond traditional forms of international engagement, employing unconventional methods to further its strategic national objectives. Specifically, the PRC may work with VEOs as a novel approach to increase its regional influence. VEOs are appealing because they can disrupt, subvert, or distract. Therefore, China’s potential use of VEOs to project power indirectly requires a coordinated counterterrorism response. Understanding Beijing’s possible future tactics is crucial for developing effective countermeasures against these unconventional threats.

For more on how China uses nontraditional security forces, see IWI’s latest podcast.

Authors: Anish Beeram, Emmanuelle Brindamour, Valentina Raghib-Charry, Tommy Gannon, Datis Doustali, Anna Kaloustian, Jackson Parrott, Leo Matthews and Kevin Hoerold.

Kevin Hoerold is a General Wayne A. Downing Scholar of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He holds a MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University and BS in Management and Financial Economics from Norwich University.

Leo Matthews is an instructor at the United States Military Academy’s Social Sciences Department. He holds a MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University and BS in Civil Engineering from the United States Military Academy.

Main Photo: Then-US Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis meets with China’s Minister of Defense Gen. Wei Fenghe at the People’s Liberation Army’s Bayi Building in Beijing, China, on June 28, 2018. (Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith via DVIDS)

Views expressed in this article solely reflect those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

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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