Quotes of the Day:

"Terrorism is resorted to for practical reasons because there is no other tool available. And those who use terrorism, and then subsequently become the targets of terrorism, understand its power and how difficult it is to counter it. Not just militarily. But especially in terms of international perception."

– Joe Sestak

"Unconventional warfare needs to remain the heart and soul of U.S. Special Operations Command and component commands."

– Brandon Webb, former US Navy SEAL

"If we were fighting an army, the work would be comparatively easy. We are fighting a secret revolutionary organization."

– Arthur MacArthur

1. Senator: JSOC to the rescue after State Dept rebuff

2. The Super Bowl of Deterrence: The Ultimate Showdown in Strategic Overmatch

3. A Ukrainian saboteur group’s desperate last stand

4. How Russia persecutes occupied Christians; Myroslava housing complex bombed

5. The Kremlin's Occupation Playbook: Coerced Russification and Ethnic Cleansing in Occupied Ukraine

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 9, 2024

7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 9, 2024

8. An Israeli Diplomatic Strategy to Undercut Hamas Propaganda

9. Our Restraint Destroys Your Deterrence

10. Stay Behind Operations (podcast)

11. Why Israel Is Winning in Gaza

12. Ukraine's Special Forces blew up Russian radar station in Black Sea

13. Young Blood: Zelensky Bets on New Generation, Battle-Tested Officers for Top Army Posts

14. We’re Not Eating Enough Bacon, and That’s a Problem for the Economy

15. U.S.-China Tensions Have a New Front: A Naval Base in Africa

16. How a liberal billionaire became America’s leading anti-DEI crusader

17. Terminating the FARA helo program was the right call by the Army chief

18. Philippines gunning for fast and massive military build-up

1. Senator: JSOC to the rescue after State Dept rebuff

Other interesting notes from the Global Special Operations Forum SOF Imperatives conference included discussions of irregular warfare and influence.

The Vice Commander of USSOCOM Lt Gen Fancis Donovan said the SOF priori of effort was 60% to integrate deterrence, 20% to counter VEO, and 20% to crisis response. There was no description of what the support for integrated deterrence consists of but my sense is that Bob Jones' concept of integrated deterrence (holding populations of totalitarian countries at risk to those regimes) would fit neatly in this category. The usual comments are that we have to shift from what we have been doing for the last 2 decades in the GOWT to strategic competition and with China as the pacing threat. These speakers fail to recall the other types of work that has been done in the last 20 (and more years) in places such as Colombia and the Philippines which are models for missions in strategic competition (there was one passing mention of the Southern Philippines).

Sean McFate, Mike Nagata, and Eric Robinson participated in a very good discussion on Irregular warfare and made the point that the US is lining the global influence competition and that there should be a shift to a more proactive approach to irregular warfare going from the defensive to the offensive. Sena McFate described a "dumpster fire strategy" which I would describe as creating a dilemma for the axis of totalitarians. Mike Nagata reminded us that when Special Forces was founded in 1952 at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) it was at the Psychological Warfare School which later became the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. He really emphasized the importance of information and influence and lamented how poor we are at this key element of strategic competition. But what Sean, Mike, and Eric really described in their excellent discussion about IW was a holistic interagency or whole of government approach to strategic competition. Without saying so, they were really describing Political Warfare which of course is a concept that most in government do not want to discuss but which we could really benefit from (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d269)

In addition to the main point of the story below Sentaro Ernst agreed that we need to be more proactive in conducting IW and she launched into a passionate description of the administration's reactive foreign which she described as a policy of appeasement and that appeasement is getting our military personnel killed She became very emotional when she mentioned the recent loss of our two SEALs in the Red Sea that she says is do to our ineffective foreign policy. During her remarks she also discussed the cuts to SOF, which she adamantly opposes, and described Psychological Forces as enabling capabilities. When questioned on PSYOP as enablers she agreed they are operational forces but manyon the Hill describe them as enablers and she said she will help dispel that misconception because she very much considers PSYOP personnel as operators.

Senator: JSOC to the rescue after State Dept rebuff

Officials: 4,500 U.S. SOF have “significant role” in support to Israel.

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/senator-jsoc-to-the-rescue-after?utm

SEAN D. NAYLOR

FEB 9, 2024

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Courtesy of www.ernst.senate.gov/about

The State Department pressured a bipartisan congressional delegation not to visit Israel shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack but quickly changed its position after Joint Special Operations Command offered to help, according to Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, who led the delegation.

Ernst told the SOF Imperatives Forum Feb. 8 that the delegation was in Bahrain Oct. 7 with plans to travel on to Israel, where she was scheduled to speak on Oct. 8, but had to divert to Jordan because the Hamas attack had closed the airport where the delegation’s plane was supposed to land.

As she was attempting to arrange travel into Israel from Jordan, the State Department tried to prevent the delegation from making the trip, Ernst said. “I caught holy hell from the State Department,” she said. “They kept telling me, ‘No, no, no, no, you’re not going in, we can’t support [you], you’re not going into Israel, it’s dangerous.’”

Ernst and her congressional colleagues “put the fight of our lives up,” she said. “I thought it was so important for us as members of a congressional delegation…to go into Israel and stand shoulder to shoulder with them.” But State “kept pushing back,” she said, adding that she responded by telling State, “You are the executive branch, but I am a member of Congress and I am a senator and you cannot tell me what I can and cannot do.”

The deadlock was broken by Vice Adm. Frank Bradley, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, according to Ernst. (JSOC runs the military’s most sensitive special operations missions.)

“I want to give a shout-out to our friends at JSOC,” Ernst said. “The good admiral, he called me while we were in Jordan and said, ‘Ma’am, whatever you need, we’re going to support.’”

It was only after Ernst had discussed with Bradley the support the delegation would need from JSOC that State relented, according to Ernst. “State Department changed their tune and said, ‘Oh, oh, we’ll support you, we’ll support you,’” she said. “They didn’t want to be the low man on the totem pole. So we were able to go in.” (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment by The High Side’s deadline.)

Once in Israel the delegation met with relatives of the hostages taken into Gaza by Hamas and other survivors of the Oct. 7 assault, according to Ernst.

Ernst’s delegation, which included Reps. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), had already visited Saudi Arabia. There, on the eve of the Hamas attack, they held a late-night meeting with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of the kingdom, who indicated that he planned to normalize relations with Israel, according to Ernst.

“We left really with a sense of joy…because we were getting affirmation from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia that we were on track for normalization with Israel,” she said. “It was really a great feeling.”

Numerous observers, including President Joe Biden, have suggested that Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack was an attempt to derail any such normalization. "One of the reasons Hamas moved on Israel ... they knew that I was about to sit down with the Saudis," Biden said in an Oct. 20 televised address. "Guess what? The Saudis wanted to recognize Israel."

Ernst, who said she made another visit to Israel in January, during which she met with Mossad director David Barnea, also confirmed that there are U.S. special operators in Israel assisting the Israeli Defence Forces in their fight against Hamas. “We do have a handful of SOF folks that are working with the Israelis and the IDF, so sharing between those organizations the intelligence necessary…[to] locate the hostages,” said Ernst, who.

That “handful” of operators are part of a large U.S. special operations contingent that deployed to the region in the wake of the Hamas attack, Marine Lt. Gen. Frank Donovan, vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told the forum. “After October 7, we launched about 4,500 SOF teammates and their equipment and their machines to the Eastern Mediterranean for a number of missions, which included a higher-end capability we bring and then two of our theater special operations [commands] working together with their geographic combatant commanders to solve a very hard problem,” he said.

While Donovan did not identify the specific organizations that deployed the 4,500 personnel, his reference to a “higher-end capability” appeared to be a reference to JSOC (pronounced “Jay-sock”). The High Side reported Nov. 7 that JSOC had deployed a task force to a British Royal Air Force base in Cyprus in response to the events in Israel and Gaza.

Donovan said the deployment to the Eastern Mediterranean was an example of a trend that has seen SOCOM deploying forces to crises at an increasing rate.

“We are finding ourselves responding to crises more now,” he said. “In the last two years we have launched a number of our crisis response forces at a scale … that we’ve never done before in the history of SOCOM.”

Christopher Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, echoed this point during his closing address to the forum. “We’re far busier in the crisis response space than we’ve been in past years and in past decades,” he said, adding that this was “in large part because we have fewer [conventional] forces out there, so it’s going to require our forces to be able to come in and mitigate some of the strategic concerns that we have.”

Maier also confirmed the degree to which U.S. special operators are assisting their IDF counterparts. The Hamas attack on Israel “has meant that we’re playing a pretty significant role in support to Israel in the Middle East,” he said.

2. The Super Bowl of Deterrence: The Ultimate Showdown in Strategic Overmatch

A "Go" board might be a better description than a chess board.

I actually think what is key is the demonstration of will and the belief by the intended "deterree" that the "deterrer" has the will to do what they say they will do.

This is a new website for me. I just came across it. https://globalsecurityreview.com/about/

Excerpt:

 In this contest, agility, information, and technological advantages are the keys to victory.

The Super Bowl of Deterrence: The Ultimate Showdown in Strategic Overmatch — Global Security Review

https://globalsecurityreview.com/the-super-bowl-of-deterrence-the-ultimate-showdown-in-strategic-overmatch/

globalsecurityreview.com · by Greg Sharpe · February 8, 2024

In the realm of global security, imagine a contest not on the grassy fields of a stadium but on the vast chessboard of international relations. This is the Super Bowl of deterrence, a high-stakes game where the competitors are not athletes but nations wielding military and technological might. In this epic showdown, the United States faces off against a formidable “friendship without limits” that includes China and Russia as the main players, but also includes Iran and North Korea. In this contest, agility, information, and technological advantages are the keys to victory.

As the teams take the field, their profiles are worth noting. After all, they each bring a different style of play to the field of competition.

The United States

The United States is a titan of technological innovation and military prowess. With a defense apparatus that leverages cutting-edge technology, including cyber capabilities, stealth technology, and unmanned systems, the Americans exemplify agility both in thought and action.

Its strength lies not just in its superior hardware but in its ability to integrate information warfare, space dominance, and artificial intelligence to outpace and outthink its adversaries. These strengths are also seen as weaknesses by the opponent, which they plan to exploit.

The Challengers

On the other side, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea form an axis of strategic adversaries. Each brings unique strengths to the table. What holds this team together is shared desire to defeat the United States.

China, with its rapid military modernization and significant advancements in areas like hypersonic weapons and space technology, poses a multidimensional threat. With the second largest economy in the world and a population only rivaled by India, is should come as no surprise that China finds itself in the Super Bowl of Deterrence.

Russia, seasoned in electronic warfare, unconventional strategies, and disinformation brings a wealth of experience in disrupting adversary operations. Although Russia’s performance shows a weakened player, the United States can never forget Russia’s trump card, which it has yet to play.

Iran, with its asymmetric warfare tactics, proxies, and extensive international network, excels in creating unpredictable challenges. In short, Iran is an agent of chaos on the field.

North Korea, as the smallest player on the field, adds a wildcard element with its nuclear capabilities and cyber warfare tactics. America’s advantage against North Korea is that the North Korean objective is a simple one: preserve the regime.

The Game Plan

The Super Bowl of Deterrence is not won by brute force alone but by the ability to disrupt the adversary’s decision cycle and achieve strategic overmatch. In many respects it is like a game of chess, where the objective is to force the other player into a position where the only option is defeat.

The US strategy hinges on its agility and technological edge, aiming to outmaneuver its opponents by disrupting their communications, blinding their sensors, and sowing confusion within their ranks. This game is about anticipation, where the US seeks to predict and counter its adversaries’ moves before they can execute, effectively scoring preemptive strikes in this lethal contest of wits and will.

The autocrats have a simple game plan: prevent the United States from moving forces into the region by making them blind, deaf, and dumb through cyberattacks on command-and-control systems and the American military’s logistics network. Attacks on American space assets is also a key element of the autocrat strategy.

Role of Allies and Partnerships

In this complex game, American allies and global partners play a crucial role, akin to the role played by special teams. The US leverages its network of alliances and partnerships to extend its reach, gather intelligence, and coordinate actions that pressure and isolate the opposing side. These relationships enhance the United States’ strategic positioning, providing logistical support and enabling joint operations that amplify its power-projection capabilities.

The autocrats do not have a similar set of alliances and partnerships. With their team built on a mutual desire to defeat the United States, the same level of trust and cooperation the United States has with its allies does not exist. Thus, team cohesion is tenuous.

Conditions for Victory

Victory in the Super Bowl of Deterrence is measured not in points on a scoreboard but in the ability to maintain global stability and prevent conflict. The ultimate goal for the United States is to deter aggression and ensure that its adversaries think twice before acting. This requires a delicate balance of showing strength without escalating tensions unnecessarily. This includes employing a mix of diplomacy, economic power, and military forces to maintain the status quo and protect national interests.

For the autocrats, victory is the toppling of the American-led international order. The asymmetry of interest in the contest means that the two teams will play a very different game for very different purposes. The dynamics of this contest are inherently unpredictable. Just as in football, where a single play can change the outcome of the game, the Super Bowl of Deterrence is fraught with uncertainties. Technological advancements, shifts in global politics, and unexpected moves by any player can alter the strategic landscape, requiring constant vigilance and adaptation by all involved.

Conclusion

The Super Bowl of Deterrence stands as a testament to the importance of strategy, technological supremacy, and the human element in the quest for global security. In this game, the stakes are immeasurably high, and the consequences of failure are real. Through agility, innovation, and strategic partnerships, the United States is positioned well and viewed by its opponent as a formidable contender that is ready to defend its title and ensure peace in an ever-changing world.

This epic contest is a vivid reminder that in the arena of global security, the game is always on, and victory favors the prepared, agile, and resilient. Like football, good intentions mean nothing. Preparation and capability mean everything.

Greg Sharpe is the Director of Communications and Marketing at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies

globalsecurityreview.com · by Greg Sharpe · February 8, 2024

3. A Ukrainian saboteur group’s desperate last stand

Here is another new website I have come across; The Counteroffensive. I met the head today, Tim Mak (former NPR journalist) (thank you Kim for the introduction).  

Tim conducts "narrative journalism" doing deep dives into issues.  He describes his work this way: "Human stories from the frontlines of the battle for democracy" and "Empathy and autocracy can't coexist." "The name of our publication is meant to signify a broader campaign: against apathy, cynicism and ignorance about world events in general and the emergence of a new Cold War in particular." See this: https://www.counteroffensive.news/about

I will be following this regularly and forwarding articles. I have subscribed and you should consider doing so as well.

A Ukrainian saboteur group’s desperate last stand

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/a-ukrainian-saboteur-groups-desperate

Exploring the true meaning of courage, inside the mind of a man who operated behind enemy lines. And in reporter’s notebook, Ross writes about why he became almost obsessed with this man’s story.

ROSS PELEKH AND TIM MAK

JAN 28, 2024

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Editor’s note: These are dark, cold days in Ukraine. We are persevering despite a substantial decrease in the number of paid subscribers over the past week. 93% of our readers don’t pay for our work. Will you help improve those numbers by supporting us?

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Right after Christmas 2022, Russian intelligence services posted a video showing the scene of a terrible battle. 

On the ground were the blurred-out bodies of Ukrainian saboteurs, who had made their way behind enemy lines. 

One tiny detail stood out to me, a detail I couldn’t get out of my head: on one of the weapons, I spotted a sticker that said simply, “bravery,” in Ukrainian. 

If the war goes on, as it now looks like it will, for years to come, sabotage groups and partisan action will become one of the main ways that Ukraine and Russia fight. Over the course of the last year, numerous Russian and Ukrainian teams have tried to infiltrate past the frontlines lines to wreak havoc on logistics and infrastructure.

This sabotage group, named ‘Svyatosha,’ or ‘Saint,’ was a group of close friends, a second family bound together not only because of war but with common ideas and values.

They were members of the Brotherhood of Korchynsky – a Christian organization that consists of absolutely devoted Ukraine patriots. Their strong ideology makes them perfect for conducting some of the most daring and skillful operations in enemy-held territory, often in cooperation with Ukrainian special operation forces. Despite the importance of this work, it often comes with a big price. 

The youngest of the saboteur group was a man codenamed ‘Apollo.’

He was only 19 years old.

It’s funny how a little detail can pull many other thoughts to the surface. I couldn’t stop thinking of it, and the questions that came after – thoughts about self-sacrifice, of life’s purpose, and the true meaning of bravery.

A couple of days later I saw a video showing all of the group smiling and joking that this may be their last video together. It was. At least, it was the last footage of them alive. 

In the background was a song, which spoke about ‘Kharcyz,’ which can be translated as ‘robber’ or ‘outlaw.’ The Kharcyz were originally a group of people in the 16th century, mostly villagers that ran away from serfdom and injustice, and settled between rivers Kalmius and Mius. They were free spirits and rebels, living outside society at the border of the ancient lands of Moskovia and Zaporozhian Sich. 

Doing a job like this you know death is going to happen one day, but the video shows there was no hesitation among these men. 

Free spirits, rebels of the society, daredevils in their nature but faithful Christians in their belief, they were without question willing to do anything for this country and they proved it by sacrificing their most valuable resource – their lives. 

I began wondering to myself: “where do we get these people from? Are they military? What was this Brotherhood that prepared them? And how can a 19 year old guy with no prior military experience get to this level of operations?”

I met with Marat Saifulin, an older member of the Brotherhood of Korchynsky. We discussed the nature of the brotherhood, its values and ideas. Marat has been with the brotherhood for almost 20 years, and participated in pro-Ukrainian demonstrations and campaigns in Moldova and Russia in the early 2000s. 

Marat told me that people in the brotherhood are not there by accident. All the people there are absolute patriots of Ukraine and faithful Christians. 

“We carry brotherhood traditions from ancient times,” he said. “We are a historical commune with historical roots. And we try to influence the religious and political sphere in society and, for the time being, also the military.” 

Dmytro Korchynsky, the leader of the brotherhood, set as his goal the revival of a traditional, independent, patriotic church in Ukraine – separate and apart from Russia. He had one condition: that this church would not be a “church of martyrs, but a church of warriors.”

Dmytro Korchynsky prays with his soldiers of the "Bratstvo" (Brotherhood) battalion of the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the hall of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University on April 17, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Photo by Andrii Kotliarchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images).

In the video was a particular group of brave and mostly long-serving men. Svyatosha, Nepuypyvo and Tarasiy were old members of the Brotherhood. They came at different periods. But they were with the Brotherhood for many years. The only exception was Apollo, who joined the Brotherhood at the beginning of the full scale invasion. 

               Clockwise from top left: Maxym ‘Nepiypyvo’ Mykhailov, Yurii ‘Svyatosha’ Horovets, Bohdan ‘Apollo’ Lyahov, Taras ‘Tarasii’ Karpyuk. Members of deceased ‘Svyatosha’ group. 

Marat describes them as more than just a group of soldiers. They were people with a common ideology and interests and beliefs and they always helped and supported each other. “They were like a family,” he explained to me.

The teenaged ‘Apollo’ was just one of them. His call sign was the God of the Sun, but his real name was Bohdan. 

“When the war comes, and it will come, I promise I will go to fight,” Bohdan told his father Oleksander in one of their talks.

And on the contrary to many others – older, tougher, stronger; many of those who declared themselves fighters, warriors and other important titles – this young man kept his word. 

Bohdan Lyahow was born in a small city of Zhovti Vody, with a population of just over 40,000. He showed some talent in drawing, and played multiple musical instruments. He was especially interested in history and philosophy. 

A drawing by Bohdan. It came with a caption: “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis”

Before his teenage years Bohdan was, according to his mother Marina, like “God’s blessing.” She was especially worried about him when, in keeping with his word, he began fighting for the Ukrainian cause after the full-scale Russian invasion. 

“It was really scary at that time, specifically when they were around Kharkiv, he was saying ‘Mom, I’m not sure if I can take it, I’m afraid that I may want to go back home,’” Marina recalled. “I have always asked him, when the moment comes, to give up and to try to survive. I always told him that he is artistic and he has a chance... But he was with the boys and he made his choice. And I respect this choice.”

I had a mixture of feelings as I listened to Marina’s words.

I was speaking to a mother who that not that long ago, had lost their only child, a child who was even younger than myself, yet resilient enough to make a decision and stick to it, no matter what else is happening. 

Marina showed me Bohdan’s room, and that it is covered in printed portraits of philosophers and great thinkers. I noticed Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, and Shakespeare there.

“People who inspired him,” Marina explained, as she showed me pictures. 

Bohdan in 2022, still the face of a child, but the heart of a lion.

Bohdan was interested in the military, but didn’t want to participate in an old, Soviet-style army. That’s when he met members of the Brotherhood of Korchynsky.

“He called me and said, ‘Mom you can’t even imagine what people I’m surrounded [by] here,’” Marina recalled.

His father Oleksandr continued, “this is a place full of artists, philosophers, free thinkers.”

At the beginning of the invasion Bohdan was in Kyiv with his friend. His friend left the city when the Russians began to surround it, but he decided to stay to defend the capital.

Despite Ukraine having been on the brink during the first weeks of war, the flow of people that rushed to defend their country was well beyond the state’s capacity to arm and organize them all.

For three days he was waiting for a call back from territorial defense, and on the fourth day, Bohdan, unwilling to wait any further, joined the Brotherhood. 

“We tried everything parents would try to save their child. I told him to come back.. that he can join territorial defense here and protect the house,” his mother recalled.

“History is written here, in Kyiv/ I’m staying here and I will join some volunteer battalions. If they won’t take me, I will just steal some guns and go fight myself,” Bohdan replied.

His father Oleksandr told me that in his childhood, Bohdan came home one day all red, with some of his clothes ripped, and answered that they were “just playing with snowballs.”

Two days later Oleksandr discovered that Bohdan had beaten up some older guys from school, because they were bullying him and his friends, and this sense of injustice made him so wild, that the older guys had to stand back. 

“He had his own sense of bravery, and it resulted in him going with the guys. Because no one ever forced them to go. Who raised his hand – goes. And he was always telling his mother that he can’t simply stay back, others are going and he also has to go. Because they were like family,” Oleksandr said.

Ukrainian servicemen carry the coffin of one of the four members of the ‘Svyatosha’ sabotage team during a funeral on Kyiv’s Independence Square, on March 7, 2023. (Photo by Roman Pilipey/Getty Images)

We humans have short memories, particularly during a time of war when things can be so chaotic.

Shortly after the Ukrainian saboteur group was killed, Dmytro Korchynsky, leader of the Brotherhood, initiated a petition that demanded that the men be honored with the Hero of Ukraine award. 

Despite a petition gathering 25,000 signatures, no actions have been taken.

The circumstances of the group’s last fight and death are also uncertain.

The Russian intelligence services claimed that the group mistakenly walked onto a minefield. Yet the bodies from the video and later testimonies of the families include multiple bullet wounds, which indicates that they fought one last, heroic stand against the Russians. 

After the paywall: A press investigation shows how Chinese cameras widely used in Ukraine pose a security risk; and Ross explains why he became so focused on learning more about the saboteur group, as well as his view on what the future of the war holds.

NEWS OF THE DAY:  

Good morning to readers. Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands. 

UKRAINE UNCOVERS $40 MIL FRAUD: The country's SBU announced this weekend that it had discovered corruption in Ukraine's weapons acquisitions process. This particular scheme stole approximately $40 million, they allege, according to Reuters. The plan involved 100,000 mortar shells that were paid for but never delievered.

RUSSIA COUNTS ON NEW ALLIES: Putin is strategically building ties with China and the Global South in order to create a bloc that can challenge the West, The Washington Post reports. Russia’s goal is to undermine the American dollar as the world's reserve currency and undercut the post-WWII American-led world order.

CHINA CAMERA RISKS: Chinese-made surveillance cameras, now being used in Ukraine, have been used by Russian intelligence to guide strikes against Ukrainian targets, reports RFE/RL. Hundreds of thousands of cameras that transmit info back to their Chinese manufacturers are being used in Ukraine, and China cooperates closely with Russia. The cameras are banned in the U.S. due to concerns about security.

REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: 

Hi there, it’s Ross here. 

Throughout my travels in Ukraine I have noticed a section of the male population, people who were unable to accept the new reality of the war, people who still live with the idea that the good days will come back and they just need to hold out for them.

But in contrast to that there are those who immediately accepted the new reality around them, and despite all the injustice in this war, like in any war, stood their ground and jumped into battle, even when the odds were strongly against them. 

A Ukrainian man stands by the ruins of his house, destroyed by the war, in Sviatohirs'k, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on January 27, 2024. (Photo by Ignacio Marin/Anadolu via Getty Images)

When it comes to difficulties in life, unexpected troubles or challenges, we always want to believe that it is us who is going to save the day. 

Everyone wants to see himself as a hero, not a coward. 

It is really easy to speak about bravery and self-sacrifice and dedication when you are in an environment that keeps you safe from being forced to show these attributes, and it is absolutely another thing to be able to stand for your words when a country is literally falling apart in front of your eyes. 

Bohdan’s parents mourn over his coffin at his funeral on Kyiv’s Independence Square. (Photo by Roman Pilipey/Getty Images)

Bohdan stood out to me as a great example of what a man should be. Americans have a good proverb about this: “Talk the talk, and walk the walk.” 

It is a war for the hearts of people, with bad people gathering evil hearts, and good people trying to do the same with what remains of the good ones. This is how it has been since the beginning of the invasion. And this was the main reason we were able to save the country. 

It wasn’t the government who ‘didn’t run,’ as a lot of Western media claimed at the beginning of this war, giving politicians too much credit. No: it was all these thousands and thousands of good hearts. 

Firefighters in Kyiv help each other use a fire hose following a Russian shelling attack on February 26th, 2022, shortly after the Russian full-scale invasion began. (Photo by Mykhaylo Palinchak/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Those tens of thousands of people are the ones who we should be grateful to for the opportunity to still exist today. If not for them and their sacrifice, no government would be able to hold onto power. And as sad as it is, but as it often happens, the government forgets those who gave all when it was needed. 

Bohdan was one of them, and he struck me as an example of exceptional resilience and power of will. After speaking with the parents of Bohdan and discovering more about him I have no doubts that his choice was absolutely conscious. 

He understood that his sacrifice may never be properly valued and acknowledged. Yet his moral compass didn’t allow him to retreat or leave the country in such times. 

Time flew past quickly, and this war has changed its nature many times already. The mood has changed, and people have been put to their limits many times during these years. 

I personally changed my opinion on this war as well, but despite the loss of many lives, many other worthy and good people, as well as some friends, I always carried this story about these boys in the saboteur group. 

View of a church, destroyed by the war, in Bohorodychne, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on January 27, 2024. (Photo by Ignacio Marin/Anadolu via Getty Images)

As an example of human resilience and bravery, this ‘bravery’ sticker on the rifle never left my memory. No matter how much times have changed, and my mood with them, I knew it was important to remember their story – and more than that, to continue their story.

Good hearts that are willing to die for Ukraine are not infinite, and it is much more difficult to replace a good and motivated soldier than any piece of equipment.

Without technology, there probably will be no victory. But without people there will be no one to share victory with, and we have to remember this when fighting with an enemy as large as Russia. 

Ukraine has yet to prove its ability to play the long game.

And that’s what we’re in for.

Today’s Dog of War is Ruta, a small pup that Alessandra saw outside a bar called ‘Traven,’ in Lviv. 

Stay safe out there. 

Best,

Ross

4. How Russia persecutes occupied Christians; Myroslava housing complex bombed

I have not seen very much reporting on this.

Excerpt:

Since the beginning of the war with Russia in 2014, Russian occupiers have put pressure on Protestant communities, while favoring Orthodox churches that were subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate and, in turn, to Moscow.

Protestant Christians were the victims of 34 percent of persecution events tracked by the Institute for the Study of War, the D.C.-based think tank said last year. Church workers and pastors have been regularly summoned for interrogation in places like Donetsk, and there have been numerous cases of people disappearing.

How Russia persecutes occupied Christians; Myroslava housing complex bombed

counteroffensive.news · by Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova

Editor’s Note: A significant number of Republicans in the House and Senate have stalled Ukraine aid this week. Many of them are evangelical Christians. Know anyone who would be interested in reading about the persecution of Christians in occupied territories, or about human-centered stories in Ukraine more broadly?

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The thing that Tymur Kosymbekov remembers most vividly about his interrogations was the blood on the walls.

“I was told that they would find out everything. And if they found out that I was really a spy, they would shoot me here," he recalled with horror.

Kosymbekov, a Protestant Baptist pastor, lived in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which sits right on the shores of the Sea of Azov.

An aerial view taken on April 12, 2022, shows the city of Mariupol. (Photo by ANDREY BORODULIN/AFP via Getty Images)

He does not remember how long exactly he was held by the Russians. But Tymur said that while he was sitting in the basement, he heard regular gunfire: Ukrainian troops were trying to drive the Russians out.

At one point, he heard his Russian captors talking.

And what they said indicated that his life could soon be over.

He heard them mull over executing him, so as to not waste time questioning him.

"There were corpses of our Ukrainian soldiers lying at the entrance to this Russian base, and no one had cleaned them up,” Tymur said. “And I realized that it was no problem for them to shoot me."

Since the beginning of the war with Russia in 2014, Russian occupiers have put pressure on Protestant communities, while favoring Orthodox churches that were subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate and, in turn, to Moscow.

Protestant Christians were the victims of 34 percent of persecution events tracked by the Institute for the Study of War, the D.C.-based think tank said last year. Church workers and pastors have been regularly summoned for interrogation in places like Donetsk, and there have been numerous cases of people disappearing.

The Russians have also begun to audit the property of other faiths more frequently. They seem determined to suppress not only Protestant movements, but also the local Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and Muslim centers that are not under the control of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Russia.

Evangelical Christians, such as those of the Baptist denomination like Tymur, are frequently harassed by Russian authorities who consider them to be spies. Tymur ended up in captivity only because of a desire to help a friend. When the full-scale invasion broke out in 2022, he begged Russian troops to take a congregant with cancer to the hospital.

In the days prior, the Russians had repeatedly accused Tymur of being a spy. He knew he was taking a risk by seeking help. But rather than assist his friend, they detained him and began interrogating him.

The Russians threatened him, and even jabbed him in the back with a machine gun. After an entire day, they realized he was an ordinary citizen with no ties to espionage.

The defining moment came when they searched his phone.

"They saw my photos from [church] services, they probably realized that I was just an ordinary citizen,” he said. None of the photos would be useful for espionage purposes. “So the Russians just said ‘Run home.”’

Body of dead person in Mariupol, March 2022.

It was a long way back. Tymur had been taken out of town. During his travels through the city in those first months, he saw some terribly traumatic things: hundreds of dead bodies, many of them simply eaten by dogs.

Even worse, curfew was about to start. If you violated it, you could be shot – that's how the Russians searched for Ukrainian soldiers in the city. He ran as fast as he could, and ultimately made it back to his church, near Azovstal steel works in Mariupol.

"Everybody thought I was dead. And when I came back, everyone was very surprised," Tymur said with a smile on his face.

Tymur Kosymbekov during a church service

But one day their church was visited by more Russians.

"They stopped the whole service and started checking [our] documents. But at that moment a heavy firefight started right in our yard. Ukrainian snipers shot them. We had dead soldiers lying in our yard for several days after that, and we didn't know what to do with them," Tymur said. "When the Russian soldiers came, they did not see it as a church, but as a kind of cult.”

Another person who has experienced Russia’s disdainful attitude towards Protestants is Oleksandr Vaschinin. He has been a Protestant since childhood. And even then in Ukraine, during the Soviet era, he was disrespected for attending a non-Orthodox church.

As an adult, he became the pastor of an Adventist congregation in Donetsk. And when the city was occupied by the Russians in 2014, he stayed there for five years, until 2019.

Oleksandr Vaschinin with his wife.

Every Saturday the church held services as usual. However, almost every time they were visited by strangers, who weren’t just there to worship.

"You see that they were not ordinary people, they were soldiers. They were with you all the time… Every week or two there were searches. People would come with machine guns. Sometimes a tank would come. They would climb the stairs and enter the church. They were looking for everything, and you were standing there at gunpoint. And you have to tell them what, where, how..." Vaschinin said.

If they found a book in Ukrainian, they asked what it was doing here. They accused Ivanovych of collaborating with the Ukrainian authorities.

Another problem for the Adventist Church was that its founders were from the United States.

"There were times when they said, 'You are Americans, this is an American church, this is not [a Russian] church. We said we have been in Ukraine for almost a hundred years. But no one believed us," Oleksandr Vaschinin said.

And if someone disagreed with something, they could be taken to the basement, where they were tortured or abused, or imprisoned.

"We were treated like dogs. They beat us. Some were killed. Some disappeared. We had a pastor who was beaten very badly. One pastor from Horlivka [occupied Donetsk Region] was kept in prison for 21 days," Oleksandr Vaschinin recalls.

The pastor stayed in Donetsk until the so-called Russian authorities forced everyone to get Russian passports. Vaschinin and most of the other pastors refused and decided to leave their hometown.

Right now he has no plans to return to Donetsk. Neither does Tymur plan to return to Mariupol until Ukraine liberates it from Russian control.

"I don't even want to think about it. And all my friends who had to leave and scatter, we are all praying and waiting for Maruipol to return to Ukraine, to come home, to serve and rebuild, to help the people. We are waiting for this," Tymur said confidently.

After the paywall: Myroslava walks us through a terrifying event – a missile hitting her housing complex in Kyiv. She describes how it all unfolded from her point of view. In the news: An anti-war critic is prevented from running in the Russian election. Tucker leaves Moscow.

counteroffensive.news · by Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova

5. The Kremlin's Occupation Playbook: Coerced Russification and Ethnic Cleansing in Occupied Ukraine

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/kremlins-occupation-playbook-coerced-russification-and-ethnic-cleansing-occupied

THE KREMLIN'S OCCUPATION PLAYBOOK: COERCED RUSSIFICATION AND ETHNIC CLEANSING IN OCCUPIED UKRAINE

Feb 8, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

The Kremlin's Occupation Playbook: Coerced Russification and Ethnic Cleansing in Occupied Ukraine

By Karolina Hird

February 9, 2024

Click here to download the full report

The war in Ukraine is primarily a war for control of people, not land. Russian President Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine twice not mainly because he desires Ukraine’s land, but rather because he seeks to control its people. Putin’s project, explicitly articulated in the 2021 article he published justifying the 2022 full-scale invasion, is the destruction of Ukraine’s distinctive political, social, linguistic, and religious identity.[1] Putin seeks to make real his false ideological conviction that Ukrainians are simply confused Russians with an invented identity, language, and history that a small, Western-backed minority is seeking to impose on the majority of inhabitants. He sees language as one of the primary determinants of ethnicity—Russian speakers, he claims, must be Russians regardless of the state they live in.[2] The Russian Federation has claimed special rights to protect Russians in the former Soviet states since the 1990s, although the Kremlin did not act on those claims until Putin became president.[3] Putin’s aim to destroy Ukrainian identity, language, and culture is thus one of the primary objectives of his entire enterprise.

The stakes of this war thus transcend hectares of land. They include the lives, freedom, and identities of nearly five million Ukrainians currently living under Russian occupation, the nearly five million more whom the Kremlin has illegally deported to Russia and the additional millions who have fled their homeland to other parts of Ukraine or abroad.[4] Dry, abstract, “realist” discussions about pressuring Ukraine to make “concessions”—to “trade land for peace”—ignore the reality of the war. This war is about people as well as land, and Western leaders cannot dismiss the consequences of the policies they pursue and demand.

Russia first experimented with its occupation playbook in 2008 when it invaded Georgia and occupied the Georgian territories of the South Ossetia and Abkhazia “republics.”[5] Russia further developed means and methods of occupation in Ukraine after it invaded and seized Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014. The international community denounced the 2014 invasion, refused to recognize Russia’s claims to these areas, and heavily sanctioned involved Russian actors.[6] The international response, however, failed to discourage Russia from continuing its occupation of Ukraine and setting conditions for the 2022 full-scale invasion. Russia succeeded in forcing the international community to accept and internalize the 2014 occupation enough that many even in the West now view the 2014 territories as different from the rest of Ukraine.

Russia is now applying these means and methods of occupation on an expanded scale in the Ukrainian territories it occupied since the full-scale invasion that began on February 24, 2022. The Kremlin’s occupation design aims to eliminate Ukrainian identity by forcibly integrating occupied Ukraine into Russia socially, culturally, linguistically, politically, economically, religiously, and bureaucratically. Moscow ultimately seeks to persuade Kyiv and its supporters that the forced integration of Ukraine into Russia, and the resulting elimination of Ukrainian identity, are permanent and irreversible so that the Kremlin can fully subjugate these territories and people for its own gain.

Putin also seeks to use Ukraine as a source of mobilizable manpower in part to address Russia's demographic issues. Russia has been struggling since the beginning of the 1990s with a demographic crisis, caused by declining birthrates, an aging population, low life expectancy (particularly amongst males of working age), and high levels of emigration.[7] The war has somewhat exacerbated Russia’s demographic challenges because 800,000- 900,000 Russians fled the country after the start of the war, including up to 700,000 who ran after Putin ordered partial mobilization in September 2022.[8] Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) data shows that Russia’s labor shortage amounted to 4.8 million people in 2023, a problem that has reduced Russia’s economic output.[9] Rosstat also estimated in 2023 that Russia’s population will decline naturally at a rate of more than 600,000 people per year until 2032.[10]

Rosstat reported that the Russian population was 146 million as of January 1, 2023.[11] Five million Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied areas, plus the 4.8 million Ukrainians whom Russia has deported into the Russian Federation, thus comprise about 7 percent of the current Russian population. Russian efforts to control Ukrainian land and seize its people are therefore in part intended to offset Russia’s population decline and workforce shortages.

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6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-9-2024

Key Takeaways:

• The Russian online community noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not offer any new information in his interview with American media personality Tucker Carlson and simply repeated longstanding Kremlin talking points about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine for American audiences.
• Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev noted that Putin told the Western world in the most thorough and detailed way why Ukraine did not exist, does not exist, and will not exist.
• Delays in Western aid appear to be exacerbating Ukraine’s current artillery shortages and could impact Ukraine’s long-term war effort.
• Newly appointed Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi identified several of his goals as commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
• Ukrainian actors reportedly conducted a successful drone strike against two oil refineries in Krasnodar Krai on February 9.
• Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are increasing their use of illegal chemical weapons in Ukraine, in an apparent violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which Russia is a signatory.
• Bloomberg reported on February 9 that Ukraine is considering economic reforms in order to secure funding from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the event that the US Congress continues to block crucial aid.
• Russian forces advanced near Kreminna, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka amid continued positional engagements along the frontline.
• Russian paramilitary organization Novorossiya Aid Coordination Center (KCPN) is training drone operators in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near Krynky.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare for the upcoming Russian presidential elections by creating the appearance of popular support for Russian Vladimir Putin in occupied areas of Ukraine.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Feb 9, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 9, 2024

Angelica Evans, Riley Bailey, Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, and Fredrick W. Kagan

February 9, 2024, 6:40pm ET 

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report. 

Click here to see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 2pm ET on February 9. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the February 10 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

The Russian online community noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not offer any new information in his interview with American media personality Tucker Carlson and simply repeated longstanding Kremlin talking points about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine for American audiences. Prominent Russian milbloggers claimed that Putin did not say anything new and framed the interview as a Russian attempt to infiltrate Western mainstream media rather than to make any fundamentally new arguments or to address Russian audiences.[1] One milblogger claimed that Putin’s interview aimed to promote Russian foreign policy to Americans who are actively engaged on social media and explained Putin’s repetition of tired Kremlin talking points as a summary of Russia’s justifications for its invasion of Ukraine for American voters.[2] Sources close to the Russian Presidential Administration similarly told Russian opposition outlet Meduza that Putin’s interview was not designed for a Russian audience and that the Kremlin intended to generate informational effects and hysteria in the West.[3] One of Meduza’s interlocutors added that the interview’s secondary objective was to show Russian domestic audiences that Putin can still shape global discourse based on the popularity of the interview but did not offer an assessment of Putin’s success in this regard.

Kremlin sources focused on presenting the interview as a massively successful and popular Russian effort to shape the information environment in the West and claimed that the interview demonstrated that Putin is an influential world leader. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed that American interest in Putin’s interview was “undeniable” and that the Kremlin is interested in the reaction to the interview abroad as it continues to prioritize observing the domestic response to the interview.[4] Russian occupation officials celebrated a claim that the interview surpassed 60 million views and claimed that the world is increasingly interested in Putin’s opinion and his ”truths.”[5]

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev noted that Putin told the Western world in the most thorough and detailed way why Ukraine did not exist, does not exist, and will not exist.[6] Medvedev’s description of Putin’s interview further demonstrates that Russia has not abandoned its maximalist goals of eradicating Ukrainian statehood and that Putin does not intend to negotiate with Ukraine on any terms short of these goals.

Delays in Western aid appear to be exacerbating Ukraine’s current artillery shortages and could impact Ukraine’s long-term war effort. The Financial Times (FT) reported on February 9 that Ukraine is struggling with artillery shortages amid delayed US aid and Europe’s anticipated failure to meet its March 2024 deadline of providing one million artillery shells to Ukraine.[7] An unnamed senior US military official told FT that delayed US aid risks creating an “air bubble” or a “gap in the hose” of Western aid to Ukraine and leaving Ukraine without Western aid for an unspecified period of time.[8] The official stated that the Pentagon is particularly concerned about Ukraine’s ability to maintain its air defense systems and ammunition supplies, and a senior European diplomat warned that it will be difficult for Ukraine to even maintain its current positions without Western materiel.[9] ISW continues to assess that the collapse of Western aid to Ukraine would likely lead to the eventual collapse of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and hold off the Russian military and could allow Russian forces to push all the way to western Ukraine closer to the borders of NATO member states.[10] Another European official expressed concern over Europe’s ability to substitute the volume of assistance that the US previously provided to Ukraine.[11] Ukrainian Ambassador to the US Oksana Markarova told Bloomberg on February 8 that Ukraine is facing a ”critical shortage” in military equipment, particularly missiles and interceptors.[12] Ukrainian military officials recently warned that Ukraine is rationing air defense equipment and ammunition while attempting to adapt and respond to large-scale Russian drone and missile strikes.[13]

Newly appointed Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi identified several of his goals as commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Syrskyi stated that his primary agenda is to set clear and detailed plans for the Ukrainian command as well as to facilitate the quick distribution and delivery of necessary materiel to combat units deployed throughout the theater.[14] Syrskyi stated that he intends to balance between having Ukrainian forces conduct combat missions and building Ukraine’s combat power by restoring and training Ukrainian units.[15] Syrskyi added that the introduction of new technical solutions and the implementation of lessons learned from successful modern combat experience, specifically with drones and electronic warfare (EW) systems, is a path towards Ukrainian victory, echoing themes from former Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s recent focus on using technological innovation and adaptation to offset Russian forces‘ numerical advantages.[16] Syrskyi further discussed these goals at a meeting with Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov on February 9 in which the two discussed plans for improving logistics and the quality of training for Ukrainian forces in 2024.[17]

Ukrainian actors reportedly conducted a successful drone strike against two oil refineries in Krasnodar Krai on February 9. Ukrainian outlet Suspilne, citing its internal sources in the Ukrainian security service (SBU), reported that SBU drones struck the Ilsky and Afipsky oil refineries in Krasnodar Krai on February 9.[18] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukraine launched two drones at Krasnodar Krai, but claimed that Russian air defense intercepted the drones, despite footage showing a fire at the Ilsky oil refinery following apparent drone impacts.[19] SBU sources additionally reported that the SBU conducted a drone strike against the Lukoil refinery in Volgograd Oblast on February 3.[20] Russian outlet Kommersant reported on February 6 that Russian refineries had to marginally reduce their output due to damage caused by Ukrainian drone strikes, and the Kommersant investigation found that Russian refinery output reduced by 4 percent in January 2024 compared to January 2023 and by 1.4 percent in January 2024 compared to December 2023.[21] While the reduction in refinery percentage is not large, it is noteworthy that Ukraine is able to achieve such asymmetrical effects against infrastructure that supports the Russian war effort using a few drones per strike on such high-value targets.

Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are increasing their use of illegal chemical weapons in Ukraine, in an apparent violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which Russia is a signatory.[22] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Ukrainian military has recorded 815 Russian attacks with ammunition equipped with toxic chemicals since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, 229 of which occurred in January 2024 alone.[23] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group Commander Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi noted that Russian forces are increasingly conducting chemical attacks in the Tavriisk operational direction (from Avdiivka through western Zaporizhia Oblast).[24] Ukrainian military officials stated that Russian forces most often use K-51 grenades, RGR 60mm irritant hand grenades, and RGO Soviet-era defensive fragmentation hand grenades, likely filled with either chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile (CS) gas or chloropicrin (PS).[25] Both CS gas and PS are considered riot control agents (RCAs), or irritant chemical compounds that are not necessarily lethal but have extremely irritating and harmful effects, especially when inhaled.[26] The CWC - which Russia ratified in 1997 - bans the use of RCAs in warfare.[27] The Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade recently acknowledged in a now-deleted post that elements of the brigade deliberately used K-51 grenades with CS gas on Ukrainian positions near Krynky in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.[28]

Bloomberg reported on February 9 that Ukraine is considering economic reforms in order to secure funding from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the event that the US Congress continues to block crucial aid.[29] Bloomberg reported that Ukrainian officials will propose a plan to IMF officials in Kyiv next week to expand Ukraine’s domestic bond sales, raise taxes, and cut federal spending. Ukrainian officials hope to assure the IMF that Ukraine can pay back its $15.6 billion IMF loan without additional Western aid.

Key Takeaways:

• The Russian online community noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not offer any new information in his interview with American media personality Tucker Carlson and simply repeated longstanding Kremlin talking points about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine for American audiences.
• Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev noted that Putin told the Western world in the most thorough and detailed way why Ukraine did not exist, does not exist, and will not exist.
• Delays in Western aid appear to be exacerbating Ukraine’s current artillery shortages and could impact Ukraine’s long-term war effort.
• Newly appointed Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi identified several of his goals as commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
• Ukrainian actors reportedly conducted a successful drone strike against two oil refineries in Krasnodar Krai on February 9.
• Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are increasing their use of illegal chemical weapons in Ukraine, in an apparent violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which Russia is a signatory.
• Bloomberg reported on February 9 that Ukraine is considering economic reforms in order to secure funding from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the event that the US Congress continues to block crucial aid.
• Russian forces advanced near Kreminna, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka amid continued positional engagements along the frontline.
• Russian paramilitary organization Novorossiya Aid Coordination Center (KCPN) is training drone operators in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near Krynky.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare for the upcoming Russian presidential elections by creating the appearance of popular support for Russian Vladimir Putin in occupied areas of Ukraine.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Activities in Russian-Occupied Areas
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Positional fighting continued along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on February 9. Geolocated footage published on February 9 indicates that Russian forces marginally advanced east of Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).[30] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces made further advances near Bilohorivka and captured the industrial zone and chalk plant east of the settlement, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[31] Russian milbloggers claimed on February 8 and 9 that Russian forces advanced near Synkivka (northeast of Kupyansk) and in the direction of Pishchane (southeast of Kupyansk) but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims either.[32] Ukrainian and Russian sources stated that there were positional engagements northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka; southeast of Kupyansk near Ivanivka; west of Kreminna near Terny, Yampolivka, and Dibrova; southwest of Kreminna near Hryhorivka; and south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka.[33]

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited a Russian Western Grouping of Forces command post, likely in the Kupyansk or Lyman direction, and received reports from Russian commanders on the situation on the frontline.[34] Shoigu visited an Eastern Grouping of Forces command post in the south Donetsk direction (Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area) in October 2023 shortly after Russian forces launched a localized offensive operation around Avdiivka.[35] Shoigu’s visit could indicate that the Western Grouping of Forces is reassessing aspects of its ongoing offensive operation along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line after intensified Russian assaults in January resulted in only marginal tactical gains in the area. Shoigu’s visit could also indicate that the Russian military command is prioritizing offensive operations on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Limited positional fighting continued northeast of Bakhmut on February 9. Russian milbloggers claimed that elements of the Russian 106th Airborne (VDV) Division captured several unspecified positions near Vesele (northeast of Bakhmut), although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[36]

Russian forces recently made marginal gains west of Bakhmut, and Ukrainian forces recently advanced southwest of Bakhmut. Geolocated footage published on February 9 shows elements of the Russian 98th VDV Division recently advancing in fields west of Bakhmut.[37] Additional geolocated footage published on February 9 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced west of Horlivka (southwest of Bakhmut).[38] Russian sources claimed that elements of the 98th VDV Division captured several other unspecified positions west of Bakhmut and continued advancing along the O0506 (Khromove-Chasiv Yar) highway, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of further Russian gains in the area.[39] Positional fighting continued northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka, west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske, and southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka.[40]

Russian forces recently advanced in northern Avdiivka and continued positional engagements with Ukrainian forces in the area on February 9. Geolocated footage published on February 9 indicates that Russian forces advanced close to the railway bridge along Chystiakova Street in northern Avdiivka.[41] Russian milbloggers claimed on February 8 and 9 that Russian forces continued to advance in residential areas in northern and northeastern Avdiivka as well as near the Avdiivka Coke Plant in northwestern Avdiivka, although ISW has yet to observe confirmation of further Russian gains within the settlement.[42] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy acknowledged on February 8 that combat clashes are occurring in residential areas in northern Avdiivka and stated that Russian forces are focusing assaults on northern Avdiivka.[43] Lykhoviy and Avdiivka City Military Administration Head Vitaliy Barabash stated that Russian forces aim to cut off Ukrainian forces in the Avdiivka Coke Plant and cut the Ukrainian main ground line of communication (GLOC) leading into Avdiivka in order to encircle the settlement.[44] Positional fighting continued northwest of Avdiivka near Novobakhmutivka, on Avdiivka’s southeastern outskirts, south of Avdiivka near Opytne, and southwest of Avdiivka near Nevelske and Pervomaiske.[45] Elements of the Russian 1st ”Slavic” Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk Peoples Republic [DNR] Army Corps [AC]) are operating on Avdiivka’s outskirts.[46]

Russian forces reportedly advanced further in Novomykhailivka amid continued positional fighting west and southwest of Donetsk City on February 9. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced up to Tsentralna Street in eastern Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City), although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[47] Positional fighting continued west of Donetsk City near Heorhiivka and Krasnohorivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Pobieda and Novomykhailivka.[48] Elements of the Russian 255th Motorized Rifle Regiment (20th Motorized Rifle Division, 8th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) are reportedly operating near Marinka (west of Donetsk City), and elements of the “Russkiye Yastreby” (Russian Hawks) detachment (33rd Motorized Rifle Regiment, 1st DNR AC) are reportedly operating near Novomykhailivka.[49] Geolocated footage published on February 8 shows Ukrainian forces striking a Russian tank with a first-person view (FPV) drone near Staromykhailivka at least six kilometers from the current frontline, suggesting that some Ukrainian FPV drones have an effective range beyond five kilometers.[50]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks south of Zolota Nyva (southeast of Velyka Novosilka) and north of Pryyutne (southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[51] Elements of the Russian 29th and 35th Combined Arms Armies (both of the Eastern Military District [EMD]) are operating in western Donetsk Oblast and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.[52]

Positional engagements continued in western Zaporizhia Oblast on February 9, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Ukrainian and Russian sources reported positional fighting near Robotyne, west of Verbove (east of Robotyne), west of Novopokrovka (northeast of Robotyne), and near Novoprokopivka (south of Robotyne).[53] Several Russian milbloggers complained that Ukrainian forces in the area are intensifying drone use and that Russian forces lack the counterbattery and electronic warfare (EW) capabilities to respond, which is complicating Russian abilities to rotate and evacuate troops on this sector of the front.[54] Elements of the Russian 291st and 70th motorized rifle regiments (both of the 42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) are reportedly operating in this area.[55]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted HIMARS strikes against Russian rear areas in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast on February 9.[56] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky claimed that Ukrainian forces targeted Vasylivka, Tokmak, and Bohdanivka—all settlements along the P37 Tomak-Berdyansk highway.[57]

Geolocated footage published on February 8 shows that Ukrainian forces recently made a marginal confirmed gain in Krynky in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.[58] Positional engagements reportedly continued in east bank Kherson Oblast on February 9.[59] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces have decreased the intensity of assaults against Ukrainian positions in east bank Kherson Oblast and are increasingly conducting assaults without armored vehicle support due to significant armored vehicle losses.[60]

Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign (Russian Objective: Target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure in the rear and on the frontline)

The Ukrainian Air Force reported on February 9 that Russian forces launched 16 Shahed-136/131 drones from occupied Cape Chauda, Crimea, and Kursk Oblast on the night of February 8 to 9 and that Ukrainian air defenses downed 10 Shahed drones over Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Kharkiv oblasts.[61] Ukrainian Kharkiv Oblast Administration Head Oleh Synehubov reported that at least five Russian Shaheds struck civilian infrastructure in Zmiiv, Kharkiv Oblast.[62]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian paramilitary organization Novorossiya Aid Coordination Center (KCPN) is training drone operators in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near Krynky.[63] A Russian volunteer and prominent milblogger claimed that the KCPN trained a small group of military personnel near the frontline in Krynky, challenging the drone operators to learn to operate drones in areas within range of Ukrainian electronic warfare (EW) without GPS navigation or drone stabilization.[64] The KCPN is linked to the Russian Imperial Legion (RIL) paramilitary organization, which has been instrumental in supporting Russian forces in Donbas since 2014.[65]

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine)

Nothing significant to report.

Ukrainian Defense Industrial Efforts (Ukrainian objective: Develop its defense industrial base to become more self-sufficient in cooperation with US, European, and international partners)

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal stated on February 9 that Ukraine has officially created an Industrial and Defense Committee to coordinate the work of the Ukrainian Ministry of Strategic Industries, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Innovation, Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).[66] Shmyhal emphasized that the Committee aims to further expand the Ukrainian defense industrial base (DIB), form a unique support system for manufacturers, and strengthen interactions among Ukrainian and international defense enterprises.

Ukraine’s partners continue efforts to provide Ukraine with military and humanitarian aid. The Finnish Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on February 9 that it will provide its 22nd tranche of defense materiel to Ukraine in a €190 million ($205 million) aid package.[67] The Finnish MoD also noted that Finland has joined the artillery and demining coalitions as part of the Ukraine Defense Contract Group.[68] Armenia and Lithuania also announced additional humanitarian and medical aid packages for Ukraine on February 9.[69] The Norwegian government announced that it has proposed an additional order of NASAMS rocket launchers for Ukraine valued at 3.45 billion Norwegian kroner (about $327 million).[70]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare for the upcoming Russian presidential elections by creating the appearance of popular support for Russian Vladimir Putin in occupied Ukrainian territories. The Kherson Oblast occupation election commission claimed that over 468,000 people have registered as Russian voters in occupied Kherson Oblast.[71] Russian occupation authorities frequently intimidate and coerce residents of occupied areas into registering to vote, however, as ISW and Ukrainian sources have previously reported.[72] The Kherson Oblast occupation election commission also reported that the ”InformUIK” Program is training volunteers (likely local collaborators or imported Russian officials) on how to prepare residents for elections through door-to-door canvassing.[73] 

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

The Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA) continued to threaten Finland and accuse its leadership of pursuing “unfriendly” and “anti-Russian” policies. Russian Ambassador to Finland Pavel Kuznetsov told Russian state news agency Ria Novosti that the entirety of Finnish foreign policy is based on opposition to Russia accompanied by anti-Russian rhetoric.[74] Kuznetsov claimed that foreign actors are now determining Finland’s foreign policy, implying that the US began to dictate Finland’s foreign policy trajectory after Finland became a NATO member in 2023. Kuznetsov added that Russia ”will firmly and decisively respond to all [Finland’s] unfriendly steps” and claimed that Finland’s ”anti-Russian psychosis” in the information space has a ”painful effect on [Russian] compatriots, of whom there are almost 100,000.”

A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger continued to promote Kremlin narratives that Moldova’s efforts to distance itself from Russia are antithetical to Moldova’s national interests and that Chisinau is pursuing an “aggressive” campaign to bring Transnistria back into Moldova’s legal system. The milblogger claimed that unidentified perpetrators threw a Molotov Cocktail at the NATO Informational Center in Chisinau and that Moldovan President Maia Sandu’s efforts to promote Moldova’s EU and NATO integration are bound to spark radical opposition.[75] The milblogger similarly accused Sandu of staging information conditions to integrate Transnistria into the Moldovan legal system, imposing additional taxes on Transnistrian entrepreneurs, and refusing to recognize illegitimate Transnistrian passports.[76] The milblogger claimed that the social situation in Moldova is ”deteriorating.”[77] Kremlin officials and mouthpieces have recently engaged in efforts to sow political instability and division in Moldova and set informational conditions to justify future Russian aggression against Moldova.[78]

Significant Activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

Nothing significant to report.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-february-9-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Northern Gaza Strip: Palestinian fighters continued to infiltrate Gaza City on February 9, where they are attacking Israeli forces.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the IDF to draft plans to evacuate civilians from Rafah and to “dismantle Hamas’ battalions in the Rafah area” on February 9.
• Iraq: The Central Bank of Iraq revoked the license that allows Iran’s largest bank to operate in Iraq on January 31, according to a Central Bank of Iraq document obtained by Reuters.
• Iran: Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian is engaging in political coordination with senior leaders in the Axis of Resistance during his visits to Lebanon, Syria, and Qatar.
• Two Western intelligence officials told Politico on February 8 that Iran used German financial institutions to funnel money to its regional proxy groups.
• Syria: Israel likely conducted missile strikes targeting Iran-affiliated targets in southwestern Damascus, Syria, on February 9.
• Yemen: The United States conducted preemptive strikes targeting Houthi missile sites and naval attack drones in Yemen on February 8.

IRAN UPDATE, FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Feb 9, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, February 9, 2024

Johanna Moore, Kathryn Tyson, Amin Soltani, Kitaneh Fitzpatrick, Talia Tayoun, and Brian Carter

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm EST

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. For more on developments in Iran and the region, see our interactive map of Iran and the Middle East.

Note: CTP and ISW have refocused the update to cover the Israel-Hamas war. The new sections address developments in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as noteworthy activity from Iran’s Axis of Resistance. We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Key Takeaways:

• Northern Gaza Strip: Palestinian fighters continued to infiltrate Gaza City on February 9, where they are attacking Israeli forces.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the IDF to draft plans to evacuate civilians from Rafah and to “dismantle Hamas’ battalions in the Rafah area” on February 9.
• Iraq: The Central Bank of Iraq revoked the license that allows Iran’s largest bank to operate in Iraq on January 31, according to a Central Bank of Iraq document obtained by Reuters.
• Iran: Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian is engaging in political coordination with senior leaders in the Axis of Resistance during his visits to Lebanon, Syria, and Qatar.
• Two Western intelligence officials told Politico on February 8 that Iran used German financial institutions to funnel money to its regional proxy groups.
• Syria: Israel likely conducted missile strikes targeting Iran-affiliated targets in southwestern Damascus, Syria, on February 9.
• Yemen: The United States conducted preemptive strikes targeting Houthi missile sites and naval attack drones in Yemen on February 8.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to launch and sustain a major ground operation into the Gaza Strip
• Degrade IDF material and morale around the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian fighters continued to infiltrate Gaza City on February 9, where they are attacking Israeli forces. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Mujahideen Brigades fighters conducted a combined attack that targeted a group of Israeli soldiers and vehicles near Eastern Cemetary, between eastern Jabalia and the Israel-Gaza Strip border.[1] Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—a leftist group aligned with Hamas in the current war—fired rockets and mortars targeting Israeli forces operating in Gaza City.[2] Israeli forces also directed an airstrike targeting Palestinian fighters near a Hamas military position during clearing operations in the northern Gaza Strip.[3]

Palestinian fighters continued attacks targeting Israeli forces in the central Gaza Strip. Al Quds Brigades fighters launched rockets targeting Israeli vehicles in the central Gaza Strip.[4] The Al Aqsa Martyrs‘ Brigades targeted an Israeli soldier with sniper fire east of al Maghazi refugee camp.[5] The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades are a self-identified military wing of Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist organization.

Israeli forces continued clearing operations and targeted raids in Khan Younis on February 9. The Egoz Unit (assigned to the IDF 89th Commando Brigade) and the 35th Paratrooper Brigade (assigned to the 98th Division) seized several small arms clashes during raids on Palestinian militia “compounds” in western Khan Younis.[6] The IDF 646th Brigade (assigned to the 99th Division) captured tunnel shafts, explosives, and small arms.[7] The brigade also captured a rocket launch site near a kindergarten.[8]

Palestinian fighters continued attacks targeting Israeli forces in Khan Younis on February 9. PIJ and Hamas fighters fired rocket-propelled grenades and other unspecified munitions at Israeli armored vehicles advancing in an unspecified area of Khan Younis City.[9]

Palestinian fighters did not conduct any indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel on February 9.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the IDF to draft plans to evacuate civilians from Rafah and to “dismantle Hamas’ battalions in the Rafah area” on February 9.[10] Netanyahu said that the IDF must conduct clearing operations in Rafah to destroy Hamas. Destroying Hamas is one of Israel’s stated war aims.[11] He added that the civilian population must be evacuated from Gaza to achieve this objective. The US National Security Council spokesperson said that the White House is not aware of any "imminent“ plans for the IDF to conduct operations in Rafah. He added that “absent any full consideration of protecting civilians at [the scale of the number of people in Rafah]“ the United States would not support a Rafah operation.[12]

West Bank

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Draw IDF assets and resources toward the West Bank and fix them there

Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters in three locations across the West Bank on February 8 and 9.[13] Unspecified fighters conducted three attacks targeting Israeli forces in Beit Furik, Tulkarm, and Kafr Qaddum.

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and demonstrations in the West Bank.

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Draw IDF assets and resources toward northern Israel and fix them there
• Set conditions for successive campaigns into northern Israel

Iranian-backed militias, including Lebanese Hezbollah, conducted nine cross-border attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel on February 9.[14]

The commander of the IDF Northern Command said that the IDF is preparing for an “expansion of the war” in Lebanon during a meeting with northern Israeli town councils.[15] The councils represented Israeli towns that the IDF evacuated due to the threat of Lebanese Hezbollah attacks. The commander said that the IDF’s goal is to “change the security situation” to enable the return of northern Israeli residents.[16] The head of the Meta Asher town council said that he “told the commanding general that [he hopes] the political echelon will let the IDF act” against Hezbollah.[17] Israeli officials have said repeatedly that they are attempting to reach a diplomatic agreement wherein Hezbollah will withdraw north of the Litani River in Lebanon, but that Israel may need to resort to military action against Hezbollah in the absence of a diplomatic solution.[18] UNSC Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Lebanon War, stipulates that Hezbollah cannot maintain military positions south of the Litani.[19]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Demonstrate the capability and willingness of Iran and the Axis of Resistance to escalate against the United States and Israel on multiple fronts
• Set conditions to fight a regional war on multiple fronts

Iraqi politicians continued to call for the expulsion of US forces from Iraq in response to the February 7 US strike in Baghdad that killed a senior Kataib Hezbollah commander.[20] A Sadiqoun member of parliament called on Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad al Sudani on February 9 to take ”immediate action” to end the US presence in Iraq.[21] The Sadiqoun bloc is the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Asaib Ahl al Haq’s political arm in Iraq’s Parliament.[22] Iraqi Deputy Parliament Speaker Shawkhan Abdullah called on the UN to prevent ”military attacks” targeting Iraq during a February 9 UN session with other heads of parliament from around the world.[23] Abdullah said that the Iraqi government has the authority to take ”all legal and diplomatic measures to stop attacks and protect [Iraqi] national sovereignty.”[24] Abdullah is a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party from Sulaymaniyah, a province in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. Kurdistan Regional Prime Minister and top KDP leader Masrour Barzani said on February 9 that the Kurdistan Region required greater US support to counter ”threats,” referencing Iran’s January 15 drone and missile attack that targeted Erbil.[25]

The Central Bank of Iraq revoked the license that allows Iran’s largest bank to operate in Iraq on January 31, according to a Central Bank of Iraq document obtained by Reuters.[26] Reuters reported that the Central Bank of Iraq canceled the license due to international sanctions on the bank, the bank’s losses accrued in Iraq, and its limited activities in Iraq. The US Treasury Department sanctioned Bank Melli Iran in 2018 for transferring funds to Iranian-backed Iraqi militia groups via the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).[27] The Central Bank of Iraq dated this document January 31, two days after US Treasury Department Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson discussed US sanctions on Iraqi actors and companies with Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council President Faiq Zaidan on January 29.[28]

Two Western intelligence officials told Politico on February 8 that Iran used German financial institutions to funnel money to its regional proxy groups.[29] Politico reported Western intelligence officials notified German financial authorities that Iran used Varengold Bank AG in Hamburg, Germany, to transfer funds to Iranian proxy groups, including Lebanese Hezbollah and the Houthis, for an unspecified number of years. The unspecified Western intelligence officials also said that the IRGC Quds Force-linked front companies used the German bank. The IRGC Quds Force is responsible for providing financial and material support to Iranian proxy groups across the Middle East. Politico reported that the US Treasury Department had previously sanctioned the unspecified Iranian front companies for their connections to the IRGC Quds Force. The IRGC Quds Force routinely utilizes international money laundering and oil smuggling networks to financially support Iranian proxy groups.[30]

Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian is engaging in political coordination with senior leaders in the Axis of Resistance during his visits to Lebanon, Syria, and Qatar.[31] Abdollahian arrived in Beirut on February 9 to meet with unspecified “senior Lebanese officials" and ”resistance” leaders.[32] Abdollahian will travel to Damascus, Syria, and Doha, Qatar, in the coming days.[33] Abdollahian met with Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh during his last visit to Doha.[34] Abdollahian repeatedly engaged in political coordination with senior Axis of Resistance leaders during similar visits to Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Qatar between October 12 and November 3, 2023, as CTP-ISW reported.[35]

Israel likely conducted missile strikes targeting Iran-affiliated targets in southwestern Damascus, Syria, on February 9. Local Syrian sources reported that Israel targeted IRGC-affiliated positions near the Mezzeh Military Airport in southwestern Damascus.[36] Pro-Syrian Regime sources claimed that Syrian air defense systems shot down the drones.[37] A UK-based Syrian outlet claimed that the strikes targeted Lebanese Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militia positions and an Iranian cargo plane that landed at the airport several hours before the strike.[38] The IDF has conducted a series of airstrikes targeting Syrian airports and other facilities in Syria to degrade Iran’s ability to move weapons to Hezbollah.[39] Hezbollah uses these weapons to support attacks into northern Israel.

Lebanese Hezbollah said on February 8 that an Israeli airstrike killed three of its fighters in Homs City, Syria, on February 7.[40] Hezbollah claimed that Israel struck a residential building in which the three fighters were planning to hold a meeting.

The United States conducted preemptive strikes targeting Houthi missile sites and naval attack drones in Yemen on February 8.[41] The United States conducted seven strikes targeting four Houthi naval attack drones and seven Houthi mobile anti-ship cruise missiles that Houthi fighters had prepared to launch at ships in the Red Sea. Houthi and other regional sources reported that US forces targeted al Jabanah, al Durayhimi, and al Kathib in Hudaydah Governorate and al Qutaynat in Saada Governorate.[42] Houthi leader Abdulmalik al Houthi said on February 8 that the US strikes will not deter the Houthis.[43] The US previously conducted strikes against Houthi missile sites in Yemen on February 7.[44]

8. An Israeli Diplomatic Strategy to Undercut Hamas Propaganda

Excerpt:

A Better Approach

A gifted orator and political survivor, Netanyahu knows well the power of rhetoric, whether to muster the Israeli public, spar with friends and foes, or dispirit Palestinians.

Though Netanyahu sees himself as a modern Winston Churchill, he can only move Israel from the immediacy of “never, never, never give up” toward concessions that will provide longer-term security. The Jewish state will be safer with credible Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian voices willing to highlight Hamas’ perversion of Islam. Israel will be stronger by embracing technocratic Palestinians, whether from Gaza, the West Bank, or the diaspora, willing to disprove Hamas’ narrative that it alone can represent the Palestinian people. The Israeli government needs Palestinian partners with whom it can restart a meaningful peace process, and one that allies and moderate Arab countries are willing to support.

Rhetoric will remain an essential tool in Netanyahu’s arsenal, especially during ongoing Israeli military operations, efforts continue to rescue hostages, and the threat of new fronts in the war looms. But an Israeli leader concerned about the safety and welfare of the world’s only Jewish state would be wise to moderate his public comments about Israeli strategic objectives—and thereby avoid the trap set by Hamas and its allies—and start speaking of a path that doesn’t lead simply back to where this tragic saga began.

An Israeli Diplomatic Strategy to Undercut Hamas Propaganda - Foreign Policy Research Institute

fpri.org · by Ted Singer

Ted Singer

Ted Singer served in executive leadership positions at the CIA and as Chief of Station five times. Twenty-five of his thirty-five years in federal service were spent overseas, both in traditional and politically sensitive assignments across the Middle East and Europe. There, he put to good use proficiency in Arabic, French, and Turkish. He now leads Laplace Solutions.

Bottom Line

• Benjamin Netanyahu’s vocal opposition to any role for Palestinians in the post-war period serves to amplify Hamas’ misleading propaganda that it alone represents the interests of all Palestinians, embraces the tenets of Islam, and that its armed struggle can reverse Israeli occupation.
• Israel’s long-term security will benefit from credible Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voices to undercut Hamas’ powerful propaganda.
• Without some course correction in his rhetoric toward Palestinians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will ultimately lead Israel back to the political situation that existed before the October 7 attacks, and Hamas’ insidious trap will succeed.
• A staunch ally of Israel, the United States will increasingly find it difficult to ignore domestic and regional concerns about the humanitarian costs and implications of Israel’s military action. Unless Palestinians are offered political alternatives, Israel’s allies will face challenges in assisting post-war plans, any progress toward normalization between moderate Arab states and Israel will falter, friends of Israel will increasingly fret about a broadening of the conflict and terrorism, and Hamas and its “Axis of Resistance” allies will register a success.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of two articles that will be released this week regarding the War in Gaza for FPRI’s Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare. This article by an experienced, retired CIA Arabist, Ted Singer, discusses the vital role that propaganda plays in this war. In irregular warfare, words matter and can be as powerful as any weapon or even more powerful. The second article—to be released later this week—will discuss the Law of Armed Conflict and its application against forces who do not follow the Geneva Conventions while waging an irregular war in a dense, urban environment. We hope both are useful for a better understanding of this bitter and emotional struggle.

Hamas is an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement and means “zeal” in Arabic. This wordplay foreshadowed the October 7 disaster, in which 1,200 people were killed.

In response to the October 7 attack, Israel launched Operation Iron Sword, a large-scale military campaign in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has articulated the following “prerequisites for peace”: destroy Hamas, demilitarize Gaza, and deradicalize Palestinian society. These goals are impossible to achieve, counterproductive to Israel’s long-term security, and risks setting Israel into a trap set by Hamas. Instead, Netanyahu should undercut the appeal of Hamas among Palestinians by engaging credible Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voices to undercut Hamas’ powerful propaganda.

The Meaning of the “Islamic Resistance Movement”

Hamas founders in 1987 carefully curated their words to propagate an ideology that would endure beyond inevitable efforts to capture and kill individual adherents.

Islamic

Islamic, of course, means of or relating to Islam, which itself means peace or submission to God. Worldwide, there are some 1.8 billion Muslims. Among the estimated 14 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and diaspora, the vast majority are Sunni Muslim. Drawing on their Muslim Brotherhood roots and tapping into the ascendant, conservative Islam in Saudi Arabia and Iran, Hamas founders sought to broadly interlink the Palestinian cause to religion. Among Palestinians, Hamas aimed to starkly differentiate itself from its rival, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and other Palestinian militant groups, which has secular, if not Marxist, origins.

Resistance

Resistance is the refusal to accept or comply with something. Hamas’ political nemesis, the Palestine Liberation Organization, had its own acronym, Fatah, which read backwards stands for the “Palestinian National Liberation Movement” and alone means “conquering.” Hamas founders, mostly Gazans and denizens of Palestinian refugee camps, played on Palestinian and international perceptions that, despite its name, Fatah had achieved very little and its leaders appeared to be “limousine” liberators living comfortably abroad.

Movement

Movement stands for a group of people with the same beliefs, ideas, or aims. Adopting this word was also intentional for Hamas, as movements, unlike parties or organizations, ostensibly lack leadership and outside control. Again, Hamas founders sought to distinguish themselves from the hierarchical Palestine Liberation Organization, a rival that they considered corrupt and subject to foreign influence. Hamas founders also sought to convey that hostility to Israel would also be the duty of all Palestinian men, women, and children and their sympathizers, not just fighters.

Hamas founders’ word choice no doubt had an Israeli audience in mind, too. The Zealots, a Jewish resistance movement in the first century A.D., opposed any modus vivendi with occupying Romans and their Herodian collaborators in Judea. Their military wing, the Sicarii, waged guerrilla warfare, their army turned on fellow Jews who sought compromise, and the last of the Zealots famously held out at Masada for three years before committing mass suicide in the face of overwhelming Roman forces. “It’s better to die than be a slave to Rome,” the Zealots’ leader, Eleazar ben Ya’ir, said.

Netanyahu’s Rhetoric

Netanyahu’s military goals in the current war—destruction, demilitarization, and deradicalization—is aimed at many audiences, except Palestinians. The plan foretells a return to the cycle of reoccupation, deterrence, and retaliation in which zealots thrive. He spoke to Israel’s allies in the West: he will do what he must do. He assured his right-wing allies that his opposition to a two-state solution wouldn’t change as long as the conflict continued and he remained in power.

The prime minister gave a nod to Gulf Arab, Egyptian, and Jordanian leaders, who privately applaud the demise of Hamas but publicly decry the civilian death toll. Lastly, he warned “Axis of Resistance” allies of Hamas—Iran, Hizballah, Houthis, and terrorists in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere—that the Sword of Iron is not limited to Gaza.

In separate remarks, Netanyahu has stated that he expects Gulf Arab states “will support the rehabilitation of the [Gaza] Strip.” However, these states have linked potential assistance to progress on a two-state solution, which right-wing Israelis adamantly oppose. Additionally, Netanyahu has labeled Qatar as “problematic,” as it largely funded previous reconstruction efforts in Gaza. Netanyahu has articulated Israel’s opposition to a “Fatah-stan.” However, the United States and other allies have lobbied vocally for a revitalization of the Palestinian Authority and its return to Gaza. Netanyahu has indicated that Israel will maintain a security role “indefinitely” in Gaza, despite US and European Union diplomatic positions against reoccupation of Gaza by Israel.

Israel’s military operations will certainly succeed in physically destroying the current crop of Hamas and like-minded militants in Gaza and the West Bank. By extension, Israeli security forces are well on the way to demilitarizing Gaza for the moment. But, with each passing day, this operation and settler violence in the West Bank pushes the Palestinian people in the opposite direction of deradicalization, just as Hamas founders expected. Hopeless, civilian Gazans who survive the unprecedented bombardments will seek solace in their faith, Islam. Homeless, many will have no recourse but to resist reoccupation and right-wing Israeli calls for forced migration. Leaderless, many will be tempted to recreate or resuscitate an Islamic resistance movement to combat Israel and avenge their losses.

Netanyahu’s rhetoric will resonate divisively in the US election cycle and pose longer-term implications for US interests. Seventy-five years of US bipartisanship toward Israel may be challenged by Netanyahu’s disregard of the administration and allies’ counsel, budgetary realities, and a citizenry opposed to involvement in “yet another never-ending” conflict. The US intelligence community has no doubt already begun to focus on the prospects of a resurgence of terrorism inspired by the Gaza conflict, and the US defense community is once again navigating unpredictable shoals in the Middle East in lieu of competing in the great-powers arena.

A Better Approach

A gifted orator and political survivor, Netanyahu knows well the power of rhetoric, whether to muster the Israeli public, spar with friends and foes, or dispirit Palestinians.

Though Netanyahu sees himself as a modern Winston Churchill, he can only move Israel from the immediacy of “never, never, never give up” toward concessions that will provide longer-term security. The Jewish state will be safer with credible Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian voices willing to highlight Hamas’ perversion of Islam. Israel will be stronger by embracing technocratic Palestinians, whether from Gaza, the West Bank, or the diaspora, willing to disprove Hamas’ narrative that it alone can represent the Palestinian people. The Israeli government needs Palestinian partners with whom it can restart a meaningful peace process, and one that allies and moderate Arab countries are willing to support.

Rhetoric will remain an essential tool in Netanyahu’s arsenal, especially during ongoing Israeli military operations, efforts continue to rescue hostages, and the threat of new fronts in the war looms. But an Israeli leader concerned about the safety and welfare of the world’s only Jewish state would be wise to moderate his public comments about Israeli strategic objectives—and thereby avoid the trap set by Hamas and its allies—and start speaking of a path that doesn’t lead simply back to where this tragic saga began.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

Image: Reuters

fpri.org · by Ted Singer

9. Our Restraint Destroys Your Deterrence

Excerpts:

Remember the advice the great geopolitical thinker, Halford Mackinder, provided in 1906, “[N]one but a powerful nation is a desirable ally. Moreover, to accept an ally, and to depend upon his aid for needful power, is to give a hostage to fortune….”

Do not rely on the United States to march or sail to your relief. The less you need our help, the more likely we are to help you. When your adversaries attack, the United States, in service of ‘peace’ and in thrall to domestic politics, will prevent you from achieving victory. Far too many of our citizens either align with adversaries, or they believe that the peace of accommodation and weakness is superior to victory.

The autocracies of Eurasia – China, Russia, and Iran, with their proxies – have entered an alliance and are coordinating their actions, aimed at destroying the Pax Americana and the Westphalian order.

Eighty years of America’s wars have ended in stalemate or in ignominious withdrawal, thanks to the ineptitude, fecklessness, or pusillanimity of America’s political elite. Why would that elite support an unambiguous victory in Ukraine or Israel – or in Taiwan?

American unwillingness to sponsor the conventional defeat of nuclear powers, should it continue, will result in revanchist nuclear states each developing an empire within their near abroad. Your only bulwark is your willingness to make the sacrifices and investments needed in order to deter aggression. It is a question of spending time and money now, or blood later.

Hopefully where you lead, the United States will follow, once the public recognizes that this challenge from an alliance of the Eurasian autocrats is an existential threat to America’s allies and its position in the world.

Our Restraint Destroys Your Deterrence

By Michael Hochberg & Leonard Hochberg

February 10, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/02/10/our_restraint_destroys_your_deterrence_1010986.html

Dear Allies: Do not look to the United States for your defense.

The wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and the Red Sea, as well as the ongoing Chinese harassment of Taiwan, are not individual brush fires. They are hotspots in a world-wide forest fire.

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. Nuclear-armed, autocratic, Eurasian regimes have developed a formula for deterring the United States.

Consider Ukraine. A Western-oriented, prosperous Ukraine, integrated with NATO, would present severe challenges for a revanchist Russia. The United States and NATO had a long window, from 1989 to 2013, in which to enhance Ukraine’s defenses. Instead, the U.S. focused on removing Ukraine’s nuclear weapons and on avoiding ‘provocation’ of Russia. Ukraine was left devastatingly vulnerable.

After the 2014 invasion, the U.S. emphasized negotiation and peace. While peace is a laudable aspiration, accommodating a bellicose Russia rewarded aggression.

While there were quiet efforts to train Ukrainian forces, the measures that could have deterred an invasion were ignored: Western air defenses, artillery, tanks, long range fires, and aircraft were not provided. Bases were not established. Only after the invasion of 2022 did equipment arrive – slowly – after a surge of support from the American public. Every enhancement to U.S. support for Ukraine since has been telegraphed in advance to Russia.

The United States has provided Ukraine with the means to avoid losing and, hopefully, to survive, but it has not provided the support that would enable victory. Many distinguished foreign policy and strategic thinkers in the U.S. believe it is a foolish risk to surprise the Russians with a sharp conventional escalation.

Rather than supporting the Pax Americana, fiscal conservatives worry about the cost of supporting our allies, preferring to disengage and avoid the danger of nuclear escalation. The American progressive left advances an anti-war agenda that (at best) does not distinguish between the defense against genocidal aggression and the aggression itself.

Progressives believe that by being ‘nice’ to the enemies of the US, these enemies can be converted into friends – despite all evidence to the contrary. And the propaganda being delivered through social media to the American polity has generated intense internal division.

The social media blitz, coupled with Russian nuclear threats, have successfully deterred the U.S. from underwriting a Ukrainian victory.

In Gaza, a more extreme situation prevails: As of the writing of this memo, no nuclear power backs Hamas. While both Hamas’ and Russia’s war aims are genocidal, Hamas’ legitimacy rests on not only wiping out the state of Israel, but on their intent to kill all Jews, worldwide. And yet, despite the atrocities of October 7, and in the presence of repeated Iranian attacks on US military facilities, the leaders of the United States continue to restrain Israel.

Worse, the Biden administration calls for a Palestinian state, which would be a magnificent reward for the atrocities of October 7. The rhetoric deployed revolves around a desire to avoid escalation into a regional war – a war that is already being fought. U.S. unwillingness to retaliate against Hamas’ sponsors has ensured escalation by Iran and their proxies. Instead of using U.S. military power to engage in reprisals against Iran, US-driven restraint has telegraphed weakness. By denying Israel the support needed to achieve victory, the U.S. handed Hamas – which is still abusing both Israeli and American hostages – a victory. 

And what about Taiwan? The United States has many options to strengthen Taiwan. American troops could be quietly shipped in, and a basing arrangement announced (or kept ambiguous) once they are in place. The U.S. could be denying China access to U.S. markets, cutting off their access to key tools in high-value supply chains, and imposing sharp tariffs on imported goods. The U.S. could be providing Taiwan with a surge in weapons shipments. At the very least, the U.S. could ban TikTok (for instance by adding ByteDance to the Entity List), which delivers a stream of adversaries’ propaganda directly to our citizenry and to our children. None of these things are being done.

To all our allies under threat from autocratic regimes – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Taiwan, Israel, Japan, and others: Look to your own defense.

Make economic and political sacrifices now to construct your own deterrence. Invest in long-range weapons systems for reprisals and deep strikes. Develop special forces and grey-zone capabilities. Mine your bridges and dams. Stand up manufacture of munitions. Buy and distribute small arms to make every household into a defensive position and train your people for a Swiss defense. Demand that the United States back security guarantees with actual troops on the ground and offer to pay the costs and provide bases. Engage with other liberal-democratic countries to buy weapons and to share expertise. Develop nuclear weapons if that’s your best option.

Remember the advice the great geopolitical thinker, Halford Mackinder, provided in 1906, “[N]one but a powerful nation is a desirable ally. Moreover, to accept an ally, and to depend upon his aid for needful power, is to give a hostage to fortune….” 

Do not rely on the United States to march or sail to your relief. The less you need our help, the more likely we are to help you. When your adversaries attack, the United States, in service of ‘peace’ and in thrall to domestic politics, will prevent you from achieving victory. Far too many of our citizens either align with adversaries, or they believe that the peace of accommodation and weakness is superior to victory.

The autocracies of Eurasia – China, Russia, and Iran, with their proxies – have entered an alliance and are coordinating their actions, aimed at destroying the Pax Americana and the Westphalian order.

Eighty years of America’s wars have ended in stalemate or in ignominious withdrawal, thanks to the ineptitude, fecklessness, or pusillanimity of America’s political elite. Why would that elite support an unambiguous victory in Ukraine or Israel – or in Taiwan?

American unwillingness to sponsor the conventional defeat of nuclear powers, should it continue, will result in revanchist nuclear states each developing an empire within their near abroad. Your only bulwark is your willingness to make the sacrifices and investments needed in order to deter aggression. It is a question of spending time and money now, or blood later.

Hopefully where you lead, the United States will follow, once the public recognizes that this challenge from an alliance of the Eurasian autocrats is an existential threat to America’s allies and its position in the world.

Michael Hochberg earned his PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech and is currently a visiting scholar at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University. He is the President of Periplous LLC, which provides advisory services on strategy, technology, and organization design. He co-founded four companies, representing an exit value over a billion dollars in aggregate, spent some time as a tenured professor, and started the world’s first silicon photonics foundry service. He co-authored a widely used textbook on silicon photonics and has published work in Science, Nature, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, Naval War College Review, etc. His writing can be found at longwalls.substack.com

Leonard Hochberg taught at Stanford University (among other institutions), was appointed a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-founded Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (i.e., STRATFOR). He has published work in Social Science History, Historical Methods, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Orbis, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Cartographica, Naval War College Review, etc. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and serves as the Coordinator of the Mackinder Forum-U.S. (www.mackinderforum.org). Len earned his PhD in political theory and European history from the Department of Government, Cornell University.

10. Stay Behind Operations (podcast)

Two good friends, Brian from SF and Marte from Georgetown. They know what they are talking about. Worth 45 minutes of your time.

https://irregularwarfare.org/podcasts/stay-behind-operations/

Stay Behind Operations - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Ben Jebb, Adam Darnley-Stuart · February 9, 2024

Episode 98 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast delves into resistance warfare—with a specific focus on stay behind operations.

Our guests begin by contrasting conventional conflict with resistance warfare. They then discuss the utility of stay behind operations by examining how small states can impose outsized costs on occupying powers. More specifically, they address how distributed resistance elements can frustrate aggressive powers by operating behind enemy lines. Finally, they end by providing policymakers with a framework for crafting indigenous, stay behind forces in the digital age.

Brian Petit is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel, with more than a half-decade’s experience serving abroad in combat and conflict zones. Brian currently teaches and consults on leadership, strategy, planning, resistance, and special operations. In November of 2023, he authored an article on stay behind operations in War on the Rocks, which serves as the anchor for Episode 98.

Marta Kepe is a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. Her research interests include national resilience, unconventional warfare, and European security cooperation. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Prior to joining the RAND Corporation, she worked for the Latvian Ministry of Defence, the NATO Advisory Team in Kosovo, and the National War College.

Ben Jebb and Adam Darnley-Stuart are the hosts for this episode. Please reach out to Ben and Adam with any questions about this episode or the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a production of the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI). We are a team of volunteers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners in the field of irregular warfare. IWI generates written and audio content, coordinates events for the IW community, and hosts critical thinkers in the field of irregular warfare as IWI fellows. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn.

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter for access to our written content, upcoming community events, and other resources.

11. Why Israel Is Winning in Gaza

Variations on a theme. Luttwak has published a number of articles in the past couple of weeks on this subject.

Excerpts;

Even when Israel’s infantrymen in Gaza must dismount, or advance on foot from the start, they are guided by the warnings and directions of their commanders, who monitor their movement and those of any enemies close by with the cameras of their minidrones that can see them from above, while other flying cameras look for snipers and for mortar crews in the next street over. While these days even Iran manufactures drones, Israel was the first country to produce remotely piloted vehicles as they were originally known some 60 years ago, and still today leads the way, producing both the smallest—mechanical flying insects—and some of the largest. They are especially useful in Gaza because it takes many eyes to surveil the very complicated urban landscape.

None of the above would matter if the troops fighting in Gaza were not determined to ensure that they will not have to come back, by fighting as hard and as long as necessary to grind down Hamas until nothing is left of its fighting strength. Of that the best evidence is provided by a misunderstanding: The soldiers of a reserve battalion of several hundred, rotated out after much hard fighting to bring in a fresh battalion, mistakenly thought that Israel was starting to retreat altogether, and staged a protest until they were reassured—and also reprimanded—for protesting while still in uniform.

It is now evident that the tactical victory that Hamas achieved on Oct. 7 with all its scenes of unimaginable horror has become a leading driver of its strategic defeat, by compelling the Israeli government to persist in spite of the atrocious plight of the hostages, by motivating IDF troops to fight until its destruction, and by forfeiting much potential support even from within the Arab world, allowing all Arab governments that had them to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. That feckless American college students sing its praises will not avert the well-deserved fate that awaits Hamas, and without the heavy casualties that some feared while others gleefully anticipated.

Why Israel Is Winning in Gaza

The tactical victory that Hamas achieved on October 7, with all its scenes of unimaginable horror, has become a leading driver of its strategic defeat

BY​ EDWARD N. LUTTWAK

FEBRUARY 08, 2024

Tablet · by Edward N. Luttwak · February 9, 2024

Anyone who has ever been in combat knows that the enemy is almost always invisible, because to remain alive one must remain behind good cover: The one and only time I saw live enemies walking toward me, I was so astonished that I hesitated before opening fire (ill-trained, they were walking into a blinding sun).

It is the same in urban combat, but much worse because the invisible enemy can be a sniper behind a window—and any one of the countless apartment houses in Gaza has dozens of windows—or he can wait with an RPG at ground level to pop out and launch his rocket, whose short range makes it of little use in open country but is amply sufficient across the width of a street. Mortars, which launch their bombs parabolically in an inverted U, are exceptionally valuable in urban combat because they can attack forces moving up one street from three streets away, beyond the reach of immediate counterfire.

Finally, there are mega-mines: not the standard land mines with five to 10 kilos of explosives placed on the ground or just under, but wired demolition charges with 10 times as much explosive covered over with asphalt, to be exploded when a tank, troop carrier, or truckload of soldiers is above them.

That is why, from the start of Israel’s counteroffensive into Gaza, almost all the media military experts, including colonels and generals festooned with campaign ribbons (though few if any had ever seen actual combat) immediately warned that Israel’s invasion of Gaza could not possibly defeat Hamas, but would certainly result in a horrifying number of Israeli casualties, before resulting in a bloody and strategically pointless stalemate.

Israel has effected massive cost savings while reducing its reliance on U.S. resupply—and taking the steam out of propaganda claims about bombing and artillery massacres.

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And that was before it was realized that there were hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath Gaza, from which fighters could emerge from invisibility to attack advancing soldiers from the rear, or to set up instant ambushes in apparently cleared terrain, and through which encircled fighters under attack could safely escape. In the special case of Gaza, moreover, the crowded urban battlefield offers endless opportunities for the easiest of tactics, because contrary to accusations that only expensively educated U.S. college students could possibly believe, Israeli soldiers do not deliberately kill innocent civilians going about their business. Therefore Hamas fighters can be perfect civilians walking alongside women and children right up until the moment they duck into the right doorway to take up prepared weapons and come out shooting

Yet as of now, after 124 days of fighting in both Gaza and in the north against Hezbollah, a total of 562 Israeli soldiers have died—a total that includes 373 soldiers and local security officers, who died on Oct. 7 itself, when any and all immediately available soldiers—only some of them as organized units—rushed in to fight Hamas infiltrators wherever they could find them. Even a single death is immensely tragic for an entire family, and quite a few are entrepreneurs with employees who depend on them, so that every single death gravely affects many in many ways.

That must be said and emphasized before adding that the actual number of Israeli soldiers killed in the counteroffensive until now is not in the thousands suggested by the beribboned skeptics who were gleefully echoed by the malevolent, but under 300 as of this writing. In other words, only a very, very small number, given the magnitude of the forces involved on both sides, and the exceptional complexity of the battlefield. By way of comparison, 95 U.S. Marines and four British soldiers were killed in the six-week-long, 2004 battle of Fallujah, the famous Pumbedita of the Talmudists but a small town, fighting some 4,000 Sunni fighters. In Gaza, estimates are that Israel faced approximately 30,000 trained Hamas fighters at the start of the war.

Regardless of what happens from now on, the Gaza fighting to date has been an exceptional feat of arms. A conservative estimate—the lowest I have seen—is that approximately 10,000 Hamas fighters have been killed or terminally disabled, along with an equal number of wounded who may or may not fight again in the future.

The sensational 1 to 50, or near enough, kill ratio achieved by the IDF in fighting Hamas in Gaza is all the more exceptional for reasons that neither official Americans nor official Israelis care to mention, albeit for different reasons.

The first is tactical and technical. Without saying more, it is fair to conclude from news accounts that Israel’s very innovative methods to surveil, penetrate, and destroy Hamas tunnels have been markedly and unexpectedly successful.

But the constraints placed on Israel’s combat operations have been very severe, and a major impediment to its fight.

Israel has a fair amount of field artillery in the form of the common 155 mm caliber gun-howitzers, just like the U.S. and other Western armies. But it also has much smaller, much cheaper Israeli-made 160 mm heavy mortars that deliver 30 kilos of high explosives at shorter ranges. The Israelis should have used them abundantly in the Gaza fighting, because parabolic fire is just the thing in urban warfare, but did not because of their own avoidance of collateral casualties … and because of continued alarms and warnings from the U.S.

That was most certainly the case with the exceedingly restrained, indeed inadequate use of Israel’s air power in Gaza. In the 1991 “Desert Storm” attack on Iraq, for which I received a letter of commendation from U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak for target selection before and during the bombing, I never deliberately selected a civilian target. But I do not recall anyone ever telling me that a valuable military target must not be attacked because there may be civilian casualties. But in Gaza, the Israeli air force was hardly allowed to contribute more than a fraction of its strength to the fighting, in deference to the insistent requests coming from the White House.

Israeli soldiers patrolling an area in Gaza’s main southern city of Khan Yunis during a media tour organized by the Israeli military on Jan. 27, 2024, amid continuing battles between Israel and HamasNicolas Garcis/AFP via Getty Images

All this makes the Israeli success in the fighting to date all the more remarkable.

One reason is known to all: The Israeli army remains wedded to the British method of intensive and prolonged individual instruction for its soldiers before their in-unit training, so that nobody enters Gaza without at least a full year’s worth of combat instruction, much more than their American counterparts had in Vietnam when the U.S. last used conscripts.

Another reason is that the IDF did not fall into the illusion that normal infantry soldiers, howsoever well-trained, could venture into invariably booby-trapped and deviously interlinked Hamas tunnels and fight successfully. More than 25 years ago, the IDF established its Yahalom (an acronym that means “diamond” in Hebrew) combat engineer unit that specializes in tunnel warfare to learn all its many tricks and perils, so that when a new tunnel entrance is discovered in Gaza by advancing troops there is no rushing in Israeli-style, until Yahalom soldiers arrive to lead the way, very carefully. By substituting low-frequency sensors, heavy earth-moving equipment, minidrones, and bullets for jet fighters, heavy artillery, and smart bombs, Israel has effected massive cost savings while reducing its reliance on U.S. resupply—and taking the steam out of propaganda claims about bombing and artillery massacres.

Finally, there is the equipment much of it unique to the IDF, and already in high demand by foreign armies. Israeli Merkava tanks, unlike the seemingly formidable German Leopard tanks that failed to spearhead Ukraine’s big offensive, were not penetrated and cooked by the remarkable Russian Kornet missiles that Hamas also has. That’s because, in addition to its thick armor, each 60-ton Merkava went into Gaza with its own Trophy counterweapon that intercepts incoming missiles and rockets at close range.

Also unique to Israel is the turretless Namer infantry carrier, a battle taxi in effect, that allows Israeli troops to move about in the perilous urban space protected by more armor than any combat vehicle in history. When armored vehicles enter defended urban areas they must do so almost blindly, because their commanders cannot stand in their turrets to look all around, as they do in open ground, without fatally exposing themselves to close-in artillery and mortars, and also snipers. Yes, there have always been observation slits, periscopes and protected sights but they only offer narrow views, of little use when a hundred windows and balconies overlook the fight.

In the Namer by contrast, nobody has to stand in an open hatch to view all 360 degrees of the outside world, because the locked-down crew can see everything on large screens whose images come from microcameras safely embedded in the armor.

Even when Israel’s infantrymen in Gaza must dismount, or advance on foot from the start, they are guided by the warnings and directions of their commanders, who monitor their movement and those of any enemies close by with the cameras of their minidrones that can see them from above, while other flying cameras look for snipers and for mortar crews in the next street over. While these days even Iran manufactures drones, Israel was the first country to produce remotely piloted vehicles as they were originally known some 60 years ago, and still today leads the way, producing both the smallest—mechanical flying insects—and some of the largest. They are especially useful in Gaza because it takes many eyes to surveil the very complicated urban landscape.

None of the above would matter if the troops fighting in Gaza were not determined to ensure that they will not have to come back, by fighting as hard and as long as necessary to grind down Hamas until nothing is left of its fighting strength. Of that the best evidence is provided by a misunderstanding: The soldiers of a reserve battalion of several hundred, rotated out after much hard fighting to bring in a fresh battalion, mistakenly thought that Israel was starting to retreat altogether, and staged a protest until they were reassured—and also reprimanded—for protesting while still in uniform.

It is now evident that the tactical victory that Hamas achieved on Oct. 7 with all its scenes of unimaginable horror has become a leading driver of its strategic defeat, by compelling the Israeli government to persist in spite of the atrocious plight of the hostages, by motivating IDF troops to fight until its destruction, and by forfeiting much potential support even from within the Arab world, allowing all Arab governments that had them to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. That feckless American college students sing its praises will not avert the well-deserved fate that awaits Hamas, and without the heavy casualties that some feared while others gleefully anticipated.

Tablet · by Edward N. Luttwak · February 9, 2024

12. Ukraine's Special Forces blew up Russian radar station in Black Sea

Ukraine's Special Forces blew up Russian radar station in Black Sea

VALENTYNA ROMANENKO — TUESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2024, 14:16

UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS. STOCK PHOTO: 73RD NAVAL CENTRE OF THE SOF

As a result of a successful operation on one of the extraction platforms in the Black Sea, the Special Operations Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have destroyed a Russian radar station and equipment that assisted the Russians in attacking southern Ukraine with kamikaze drones.

Source: Special Operations Forces (SOF); Ukrainska Pravda

Quote from SOF: "Operators of the 73rd Naval Centre of the SOF conducted a highly complex and effective operation in the Black Sea near the coast of temporarily occupied Crimea, swiftly responding in the potential enemy's strike zone."

Details: Intelligence reports indicate that one of the illegally seized extraction platforms (UP sources say that it was one of the so-called Boyko towers, strategically important gas and oil platforms in the Black Sea between Crimea and the city of Odesa) was used by the Russians to enhance the operation of the Mohajer-6 UAV. Specifically, they installed equipment that increases its range and operational radius. It is noted that the Russians used such a drone for reconnaissance and subsequent strikes with Shahed kamikaze drones on critical infrastructure facilities in southern Ukraine.

Additionally, the Russians installed a Neva-B overwater object detection radar station on the platform. Using this radar, the Russians monitored the situation in the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The recent special operation was carried out in the area of constant patrolling by the Russian aviation and fleet, the SOF say.

At night, boats of the 73rd Naval Centre of the SOF approached the extraction platform. After taking special actions and clearing the area, the facility was mined. The combat group moved to a safe distance and detonated the Russian target.

The SOF reports that, as a result, important Russian equipment was captured, and the structure holding the antenna was destroyed.

Quote: "The successfully conducted special operation ensured safer movement of ships and limited the enemy's capabilities in the northwestern part of the Black Sea."

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/02/6/7440622/

13. Young Blood: Zelensky Bets on New Generation, Battle-Tested Officers for Top Army Posts

Young Blood: Zelensky Bets on New Generation, Battle-Tested Officers for Top Army Posts

All five used innovative tactics to win critical battles and led some of the AFU’s most-respected units to victory. Zelensky’s idea is to promote charismatic field commanders to top army jobs.

by Stefan Korshak | February 10, 2024, 9:06 am | Comments (3)

kyivpost.com · by Stefan Korshak · February 10, 2024

If President Volodymyr Zelensky gets his way, his Thursday decision to sack veteran General Valery Zaluzhny from command of Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) won’t just switch out the man in charge, but unleash generational change across the army’s top leadership.

In a nationally televised address, Zelensky told viewers Zaluzhny served loyally for two years and in that time a massively outgunned AFU fought the Russian army to a stand-still, for which the nation was grateful.

The next Ukrainian army commander will carry on that work with a fresh outlook and renewed energy, Zelensky said.

The man picked by Zelensky to replace Zaluzhny – Oleksandr Syrsky – is well known in Ukraine for leading successful operations in defensive fighting around Kyiv in Feb.-Mar. 2022, and for near blitzkrieg offensive catching the Russian army flat-footed east of Kharkiv in Sep. 2022.

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Syrsky’s reputation among front line troops and officers – whom he visits regularly – is that he is a demanding, regular army man firmly believing in troop discipline, deep fortifications, detailed planning, using surprise in attacks, and massed artillery whenever possible.

Srysky is as much a skilled technician and boss, laser-focused on results and accountability, as he is a reformer with the on-the-ground small unit experience to understand what works best on the modern battlefield and then implement it across an entire army, military analysts and professionals say.

Other Topics of Interest

Ukraine’s New Military Chief Makes First Statement, Says Armed Forces Must Evolve to Succeed

Syrsky makes first statement as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Major Maksym Zhorin, a seasoned field officer severely wounded in the 2022 Siege of Mariupol and currently serving as vice commander in the Kyiv-recruited 3rd Assault Brigade, in a Wednesday interview spoke for many in the AFU when asked by journalist Natalia Moseychuk his view of Zaluzhny and his replacement by Syrsky.

“There should be growth. Constant movement from the lower ranks towards higher… I think that, more or less, they are from the same school. Zaluzhny and Syrsky. I think what they will do is win time for others to rise up in the ranks. For instance, those officers he [President Zelensky] named,” Zhorin said.

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Zelensky singled out by name five officers, all at least 20 years junior to Col.-Gen. Syrsky, as new generation leaders the top of the AFU needs: Brigadier Generals Andriy Hnatov, Myhailo Drapaty, Ihor Skybiuk; and Colonels Pavlo Palesa and Vadym Sukhevsky.

The Ukrainian leader said they will work directly for Syrsky – without making their actual future jobs clear.

“They will serve under the command of the most experienced Ukrainian commander [Syrsky],” Zelensky said.

Effectively unknown outside Ukraine, the five officers at home are known fairly well as successful battle commanders fighting in a hot war against Russia for most of their professional lives.

All cut their teeth in combat, in front-line fighting, as junior officers during Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. All have appeared in Ukrainian media, some frequently.

All but one officer commanded a combat brigade containing 2,000-3,000 men and women, and the unit succeeded on the battlefield.

The fifth leads a multi-brigade parent formation. Almost all were innovators and either the first or among the first to employ new battle tactics used across the AFU today.

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Said Zhorin of the five: “These are people, really, of a new generation. These people are in their 40s. They are still growing, they are still developing.

“But what’s really important is that they have real experience, which they gained on the battlefield. That’s extremely important.

“You can’t replace that with anything, not any kind of school, institute, in any country in the world.”

• Brigadier General Andriy Hnatov served as a senior staff officer and then commander of 36th Marine Brigade, one of the AFU’s best-known combat units for bitter fighting in the 2022 Siege of Mariupol, the 2023 Battle of Bakhmut and as a lead formation in a 2023 amphibious crossing of the Dnipro River.

Hnatov’s and his staff’s planning for the operation and its logistical support, using instead of conventional barges or bridging dozens of small boats, across one of Europe’s most sizable waterways. Thus far elements of four Marine brigades have rotated in and out of the bridgehead.

Photo:Ukrainian President Voldomyr Zelensky shakes hands with Andriy Hnatov, March. 20 2023 image published by NikVesti. At the time Hnatov commanded 36th Marine Brigade in fierce urban battles in the Donbass city Bakhmut.

Few officers within the AFU have more experience in urban warfare than Hnatov. For practical purposes, none have more experience in cross-water infantry assaults and using drones to support a bridgehead.

• Brigadier General Myhailo Drapaty has commanded of Joint Forces Kherson since the start of the war. His first job was constructing ad hoc defensive lines in the early days of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, following a Kremlin break-through from Crimea and initially weak Ukrainian forces around the cities Kherson and Mykolaiv.

Under his command Ukrainian troops in November 2022 recaptured Kherson, the most sizable Russian-occupied city liberated in the war thus far. In 2023 Kherson became a prime target for Russian missile bombardments, and Drapaty’s command became a bulwark of Ukraine’s strengthening air defense network.

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Photo: Myhailo Drapaty, currently commander of Joint Forces Kherson. Drapaty was a key planner of Ukraine’s amphibious crossing of the Dnipro River in Oct. 2023. Publicity photograph from 58th Brigade.

In October 2023 his regional command oversaw the launch of an amphibious assault over the Dnipro River. During Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, Drapaty fought extensively as a company, battalion and brigade commander. He was one of the first AFU commanders to lead troops against regular Russian army units in pitched battles.

• Brigadier General Ihor Skibyuk has commanded 80th Air Assault Brigade, one of the AFU’s standout formations, since the beginning of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. A paratrooper, Skibyuk joined the Lviv-headquartered unit in 1998 and served in every command position from platoon leader to brigade commander.

The 80th traces its history to an elite Soviet-era airborne unit. One of Skibyuk’s first battles, as a junior officer, ironically took place in 2014 fighting against Russian army paratroopers in battles in Luhansk region. In May 2022, during Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, the 80th Brigade fought a series of battles against elements of Russia’s 5th Guards Tank army, which were attempting to cross the Siviersky Donets River and envelop the Donbas cities Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.

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Ukrinform photograph of Ihor Skybiuk, commander of 80th Separate Air Assault Brigade. He was likely the first Ukrainian brigade commander to fight a battle with massed NATO artillery in support; it was a success.

The attacks were cut to pieces thanks to NATO-standard 155mm howitzers supporting 80th Brigade defenses. It was the first major use, in the Russo-Ukrainian war, of massed Western artillery fires against a Russian army attack. Skibyuk and the 80th have gone on to fight in practically all sectors of the front. In September 2022 the 80th spearheaded a counteroffensive liberating most of Kharkiv region. By reputation the brigade is an elite formation and one of the AFU’s hardest-fighting units.

• Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky - An alumnus of the 80th Air Assault, Sukharevsky was a staff officer in a Marine unit in the southern sector at the outset of the war, and in March was appointed to command the 59th Motorized Brigade, a formation badly shaken up by massed Russian tank and artillery assault heading north from Crimea.

According to media accounts from the time, some later confirmed by Kyiv Post on the ground, Sukharevsky pulled the 59th together by forcing sometimes-panicked troops to dig in and making junior commanders enforce the rule. In an account to Forbes magazine, Sukharevsky recalled anger and resistance by soldiers, before they learned Russian attacks would break up if they hit organized defenses.

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Photo: Screen grab from 2023 Forbes Ukraine profile of 59th Brigade commander Vadym Sukharevsky. Originally a paratrooper, once the war started he pulled a shattered brigade back together, and then became one of the first brigade commanders anywhere, ever, to really mass FPV drones in support of his formation.

In 2023 the 59th was one of the first formations in the AFU to organize an ad hoc strike drone unit, and probably the first brigade, in history, ever, to turn to strike drones as a real alternative to conventional artillery.

By late 2023 and early 2024 drone teams subordinate to the 59th were dominating skies in the Kherson sector, on some days hitting Russian positions and troops with hundreds of drone-delivered explosives a day.

• Colonel Pavlo “Hunter” Palisa - His father a career Soviet officer, and at 39 the youngest of the five officers singled out by Zelensky. At the outset of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine Palisa was an exchange foreign officer student studying at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth. He broke off his studies and returned to lead an assault regiment fighting in the Donbas sector.

The unit, 5th Kyiv Assault Regiment, was very first formation formed in the AFU tailored to assault and capture Russian fortifications and entrenchments. In 2023 he took command of 93rd Mechanized Brigade, a seasoned formation that for months was the lynchpin of fierce Ukrainian defenses holding the city Bakhmut.

Photo: Pavlo “Hunter” Palisa, commander of 93rd Mechanized Infantry Brigade. Under his command the 93rd held the city Bakhmut for some two months against Russia’s Wagner mercenary group.

In a recent video interview, he said the key to success for infantry in close-in fighting is clear instructions, proper equipment, and thorough training.

kyivpost.com · by Stefan Korshak · February 10, 2024

14. We’re Not Eating Enough Bacon, and That’s a Problem for the Economy

Seems like an easy fix. Eat more bacon.

As an aside, didn't a Chinese company buy Smithfield? 

(Yes: Then known as Shuanghui Group, WH Group purchased Smithfield Foods in 2013 for $4.72 billion.It was the largest Chinese acquisition of an American company to date)

We’re Not Eating Enough Bacon, and That’s a Problem for the Economy

The American pork industry has become so efficient that demand can’t keep up with supply. In search of solutions, farmers and processors are looking at everything from new overseas markets to fattier, tastier pigs.

https://www.wsj.com/business/bacon-pork-hog-farming-farmers-pigs-cf9d6f22?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Patrick ThomasFollow

Feb. 9, 2024 9:00 pm ET

The American pork industry has a problem: It makes more tenderloin, ham, sausage and bacon than anybody wants to eat. 

From giant processors to the farmers who supply them, they are in a predicament largely of their own making. They made production so efficient that demand can’t keep up with supply. Their long-running advertising campaign touting pork as “the other white meat” was remarkably effective at reaching consumers—but wasn’t actually the best way to market the product, some in the industry now argue, because it drew a direct comparison with chicken, which is typically more affordable. 

And much of the American public thinks pork needs to be cooked to high temperatures that leave the meat tough and unappetizing, thanks to food-safety messaging that was highly successful but no longer relevant or necessary, the industry now says. Younger Americans are still gobbling up chicken sandwiches and burgers, but they don’t buy as much pork as older consumers do, a bad sign for the future. 

People can’t agree on how to fix this. 

Some think cultivating new overseas markets is the ticket. Others are trying to repackage pork as an affordable, easy-to-prepare alternative to beef. Yet another camp thinks the solution is to encourage people not to overcook pork and to breed some fat back into the meat. 

At Carnico Foods, a small pork-processing plant in Litchfield, Mich., Scott Ferry is a fan of the more-fat approach. Ferry buys a hog-farming neighbor’s livestock and sells meat from fattier breeds, called Berkshire pigs, to upscale restaurants. 

His neighbor is also crossbreeding Berkshires with leaner Duroc swine to create what they call “Buroc” pigs. Ferry uses the Burocs, which need less feed than Berkshires but still yield perfectly marbled pork, for fattier, more flavorful bacon products.

U.S. demand for pork is 9% less than what it was 20 years ago, according to estimates from Kansas State University. U.S. farmers produce 25% more pork than they did two decades ago. 

The resulting glut has shrunk U.S. pork producers’ profit margins to their lowest levels since 1998, according to the American Bankers Association. Players big and small in the more than $50 billion pork industry are feeling the pain. Major processors like 

Tyson Foods TSN -2.58%decrease; red down pointing triangle lost millions of dollars on their pork operations last year. Farmers lost roughly $30 on every hog, according to Iowa State University estimates.If pork producers can’t attract more young consumers, annual consumption will decline by 2.2 pounds per capita over the next 10 years, according to the Pork Board’s research, from 50.2 pounds last year. 

“We are losing consumption, that’s a fact,” said David Newman, senior vice president for market growth for the National Pork Board, an industry-funded group charged with boosting pork’s position in the American diet. “We need to make pork relevant with the future consumer.”

Andrew Rasmussen, a 27-year-old health inspector in Chicago, is the kind of person pork producers hope to win over. During a recent trip to the supermarket, Rasmussen said he eats steak and burgers when they fit his budget and picks chicken when trying to save on his grocery bill.

“Pork is kind of a third thought,” he said.

From Hog Island to Porkopolis

European settlers and explorers are believed to have brought the first swine as a source of food to American shores in the early 1500s. By the 1600s, the North American pig population had grown enough that Roosevelt Island in New York City was known as “Hog Island.” The expanding North American pork industry became entwined with capitalism—and this very news organization: Herds of roving pigs complicated construction of a wooden wall Dutch colonists built in the mid-1600s to protect their Manhattan Island settlement. The same structure would eventually become the namesake for modern-day Wall Street.

An 1870 engraving showing pigs in Cincinnati, known for a time as ‘Porkopolis.’ PHOTO: PHOTO12/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

After the Revolutionary War, farmers pointed their hogs west, and packing plants followed in cities such as Cincinnati—for a time nicknamed “Porkopolis.” Much of the pork industry later shifted to the corn-growing states in the upper Midwest where producers had access to cheaper livestock feed. Carl Sandburg’s famous 1914 poem “Chicago” proclaimed the city “Hog Butcher for the World.” 

The rise of industrial-scale hog farms, steadily increasing crop yields and growing overseas demand helped supercharge the U.S. pork industry in the late 20th century, and since the 1980s, pork production in the U.S. has roughly doubled. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects the industry will produce nearly 28 billion pounds of pork this year, cleaved from roughly 125 million hogs. 

The industry estimates it contributes roughly $57 billion to the U.S. economy and employs 610,000 people. In Iowa, the top pork-producing state, hogs outnumber people nearly eight to one. 

That zeal for efficiency and expansion are a factor in the current troubles. Todd Thurman, a swine-industry consultant based in Texas who offers insights and training to farmers, governments and investors, said that production now is outpacing stalled demand, and slow population growth. 

Big processors are looking for ways to make pork quicker to prepare, and pitching it as an affordable alternative to beef. PHOTO: TIMOTHY MULCARE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“We’re a victim of our own success in a lot of ways,” said Thurman, who spends much of his time poring over numbers with hog farmers to figure out ways to save money on feed. 

Practically everything that goes into raising hogs is now significantly more expensive: machinery, services, equipment, repairs, building materials, livestock-feed supplements and labor. Lower grain prices this year could help a bit and push down the cost of livestock feed. 

Easier prep

In gleaming test kitchens in the southern Virginia town of Smithfield, professional meat cutters, chefs and marketing experts are betting on what they think could be the answer to pork’s troubles: bacon.

Aiming for a product that caters to our ever-tighter schedules, Smithfield Foods is introducing a quick-cook bacon under its Farmer John brand. The bacon will be roasted before it’s packaged, which the company says will cut cooking time in half. Crisp bacon usually takes about 20 minutes in the oven; Smithfield’s new version is done in 10 minutes, or just one minute in the microwave. It will be prepackaged on parchment paper, to make it easy for consumers to place in a microwave, oven or air fryer. 

Products with faster prep times can help get more pork onto the plates of consumers who have less time to cook than they did during the pandemic, said Stephanie Kensicki, senior marketing director at Smithfield. 

Tyson Foods is deboning more hams at its plants to produce more lunch meat and items like ham steaks, Chief Executive Donnie King said. The company is adding new cuts and offering more pre-seasoned pork loins among other cuts. 

And Tyson opened a $355 million plant last month in Bowling Green, Ky., aimed at producing more bacon products for its Wright and Jimmy Dean brands.

“We’re trying to make meal prep easier,” King said.

People may start to see digital ads, targeted by location and demographics, sponsored by the Pork Board, the industry group in Iowa. Shoppers in Houston, for instance, may run across instructions for making Mexican pozole while scrolling their Instagram feeds, compliments of the digital-marketing department in Iowa.

“We’re doing a targeted approach, identifying markets and targeting individuals with recipes,” said the Pork Board’s Newman. “We need to remind them there is pork beyond bacon.” 

If only pork could be a strong supporting player, on the side of a dish, instead of a main, Newman says. That way, it wouldn’t have to compete head-on with sirloin steak and chicken. He wants to push ground pork as an ingredient for meatballs or stir fry. 

A polarizing animal

If younger Americans don’t start buying more pork, annual consumption will drop by 2.2 pounds per capita over the next 10 years. PHOTO: TAYLOR GLASCOCK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the 1960s and early ’70s, beef was king among American consumers and pork held second place, but chicken overtook pork in 1986 as poultry production skyrocketed, making it the cheapest of the big three meats. By 1993, chicken became the most-eaten meat in America.

Religious prohibitions in Islam and Judaism may limit pork’s popularity, along with a sense among some that pigs are too smart to slaughter.

On the other hand, some consumers are more passionate about their love for bacon than any other meat, observed Helen Zoe Veit, a food historian at Michigan State University.

“The pig is a polarizing animal,” she said.

Producers like Brady Reicks, a sixth-generation hog farmer from northern Iowa with 60,000 sows, hope the Pork Board’s efforts, among others, will make the industry less reliant on exports.

The huge scale of Reicks’s operation, an ample supply of grain and a long-term arrangement to supply Tyson Foods’ Waterloo, Iowa, pork plant has helped him weather some of the industry’s turbulent cycles. Reicks says he’d be open to changing some of his operations, such as switching to an antibiotic-free program, if it meant making a few extra dollars on each animal. 

Smaller farmers don’t have Reicks’s advantages and some, especially older farmers with no clear successor, could leave the business, he said. The industry needs U.S. consumers to help stabilize profits, he said, and keep hog farming viable for younger generations.

“We’ve got some work to do,” Reicks said.

Maybe it’s us

Some say pork is misunderstood. Alexis Fenstermacher, a 25-year-old nurse in Philadelphia, says it’s her favorite meat, despite it not getting as many points for health or taste compared with chicken and beef. “When cooked right it can be better than a steak,” she says. 

That’s exactly what Tyson Foods, the biggest U.S. meat company by sales, has in mind. Tyson recently launched a new product called a “pork griller steak,” a cut that’s sliced differently than a traditional pork chop. It’s seasoned and marinated with either a steakhouse or herb and olive-oil flavor, said Ty Baublits, whose team spent the past 18 months perfecting the cut in Tyson’s Springdale, Ark., test kitchens. 

The precise difference of the cut is a company secret, but Baublits said it resembles a flatiron steak—a shoulder cut developed by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in 1998. That helped ranchers and meatpackers generate more value from each carcass.

Tyson’s pork steak began hitting supermarket meat cases about nine months ago, and Baublits said the company hopes to entice shoppers turned off by pricey sirloins and T-bones.

A 2003 ad from the long-running ’other white meat’ campaign., which some now think backfired by comparing pork to chicken, which typically costs less. PHOTO: THE PORK BOARD

For years consumers have cooked pork to internal temperatures of 165 or 170 degrees to protect against the disease trichinosis—and likely have overcooked the meat in the process, said Glynn Tonsor, a livestock economist at Kansas State University. 

The USDA lowered the recommended safe cooking temperature for whole cuts of pork to 145 degrees in 2011, decades after improvements in pig-raising practices reduced the risk of trichinosis, but some consumers still follow the old rules, Tonsor said. The industry is now pushing 145 degrees as the recommended temperature.

The hog industry has spent years breeding some of the fat out of pork by making the animals leaner, which makes the meat easier to overcook, said Tonsor. A 2006 USDA study said some cuts of pork were on average 16% lower in total fat.

Thurman, the hog-industry consultant, said the most ubiquitous pork tagline—“the other white meat”—has sent consumers the wrong message since its launch in the late 1980s, by comparing pork too much to chicken. 

“ ‘It’s like beef but cheaper’ would have made more sense,” Thurman said. Newman at the Pork Board said that while the campaign was widely recognizable, the group dropped the slogan in 2011 in favor of different marketing techniques, including “Real pork makes a real difference.”

Looking overseas

A worker at Smithfield Foods, which like other big processors has been seeking new ways to present pork as an affordable, easy-to-prepare alternative to beef. PHOTO: DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

American pork producers have increasingly banked on consumers in other countries. The industry typically exports about 25% to 30% of product, industry officials say. Sales to China, the world’s top pork-eating nation, surged following a hog-disease outbreak in the country in 2018. Producers in the U.S. responded by expanding capacity even further, with new processing plants in northern Iowa and southern Michigan.

Chinese pork producers rebuilt their herds, however, and exports to the country have plummeted over the past two years, contributing to U.S. oversupply and pressuring meatpackers’ profits. 

WH Group, the China-based owner of Smithfield Foods, said last fall that high costs of hog production and low sales value of pork products hurt its bottom line. Arkansas-based Tyson lost $139 million in pork operating income for its 2023 fiscal year. Exports to Mexico have been increasing. In January through November of 2023 pork exports to Mexico totaled over 995,000 metric tons, up 13% from the previous year. That helps offset the decline in exports to China, and trade groups have been trying to cultivate other markets in Asia, like Vietnam.

Profits for processors are expected to improve this year. Tyson said its pork business should break even or make $100 million in 2024.

In the U.S., retail ground-beef prices were up 9% in December versus the prior year and sirloin steak prices were up 15%, according to federal data. But retailers say that consumers aren’t picking up pork chops and sausage instead. 

“There should be greater demand for pork with beef prices where they are, but it’s not happening,” said Ferry.

Pigs today are leaner on average than they used to be. Some in the industry believe breeding some fat back into the animals will yield more flavorful meat that’s also less likely to become overcooked. PHOTO: SYLVIA JARRUS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Write to Patrick Thomas at patrick.thomas@wsj.com

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the February 10, 2024, print edition as 'We’re not eating enough bacon'.

15. U.S.-China Tensions Have a New Front: A Naval Base in Africa

The black and white stones are being placed on the "Go board."

U.S.-China Tensions Have a New Front: A Naval Base in Africa

American officials urge leaders in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea to reject Beijing’s overtures for a military presence on their Atlantic coastline

https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/u-s-china-tensions-have-a-new-front-a-naval-base-in-africa-616e9e77?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1

By Michael M. Phillips

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Updated Feb. 10, 2024 12:01 am ET

U.S. diplomats regrouped after a military coup in Libreville, Gabon, last summer to persuade new authorities there to rebuff Chinese overtures. PHOTO: HAN XU/ZUMA PRESS

In August, Ali Bongo, then-president of the Central African nation of Gabon, made a startling revelation to a top White House aide: During a meeting at his presidential palace, Bongo admitted he had secretly promised Chinese leader Xi Jinping that Beijing could station military forces on Gabon’s Atlantic Ocean coast.

Alarmed, U.S. principal deputy national security adviser Jon Finer urged Bongo to retract the offer, according to an American national security official. The U.S. considers the Atlantic its strategic front yard and sees a permanent Chinese military presence there—particularly a naval base, where Beijing could rearm and repair warships—as a serious threat to American security.

“Any time the Chinese start nosing around a coastal African country, we get anxious,” a senior U.S. official said.

The charged exchange between Bongo and Finer in Libreville, Gabon’s capital, was just one skirmish in the great-power maneuvering between the U.S. and China in Africa. China is conducting a backroom campaign to secure a naval base on the continent’s western shores, American officials say. And, for more than two years, the U.S. has been running a parallel effort to persuade African leaders to deny the People’s Liberation Army Navy a port in Atlantic waters.

Gabon President Ali Bongo with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing last year. Bongo told a U.S. official that he had promised Beijing a naval position on Gabon’s Atlantic coast. PHOTO: KEN ISHII/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Jon Finer, U.S. principal deputy national security adviser, urged Bongo to retract the offer in the weeks before he was overthrown. PHOTO: IVAN VALENCIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Chinese government didn’t reply to a written request for comment. The Foreign Ministry said it was unaware of the government’s military plans in Gabon or elsewhere on Africa’s Atlantic coast.

Within weeks of his meeting with Finer, Bongo was overthrown by his own presidential guard, and the U.S. was forced to start again, trying to persuade the new Gabonese junta leader to shun Chinese overtures.

It’s a battle American officials say they are winning. So far, no African country with an Atlantic coastline has signed a deal with China, U.S. officials say.

“We’re confident that Gabon is not going to permit a permanent P.L.A. presence or establish a Chinese military facility,” the U.S. national-security official said.

Next door, in Equatorial Guinea, where U.S. officials have previously flagged Chinese efforts to open a base, Washington has seen no signs of military construction at a Chinese-built, deep-water commercial port in the city of Bata, which would be the most likely spot for such a presence, the national security official said. 

Authorities in Equatorial Guinea, a repressive, family-run oil state, have “consistently assured us that they will not have the P.R.C. construct a base,” the official said.

Chinese navy ships freely transit international waters. And Chinese companies have built some 100 commercial ports in Africa since 2000, from Mauritania in the far west to Kenya on the Indian Ocean, according to the Chinese government.

A Chinese navy ship in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2019. U.S. officials say no African country with an Atlantic coastline has signed a deal with China so far. PHOTO: CHEN CHENG/XINHUA/ALAMY

Djibouti, the tiny nation overlooking the strategic Red Sea, has a permanent base for Chinese ships and trips. PHOTO: ELIAS MESSERET/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Only one African port, however, serves as a permanent base for Chinese ships and troops: The P.L.A.’s seven-year-old facility in Djibouti, which overlooks the strategic Red Sea where the U.S. and its allies are currently defending shipping routes against attacks from Iran-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen. The Chinese base, capable of docking an aircraft carrier or nuclear submarines, sits a short drive from the largest American base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, a hub for the U.S. campaign against al-Shabaab, the virulent al Qaeda affiliate operating in Somalia.

The August military coup in Gabon has triggered U.S. laws that restrict security assistance to military regimes, limiting American diplomats’ ability to supplement sticks with carrots.

The palace uprising took place just hours after election authorities announced that Bongo, whose family had run Gabon since 1967, had won a third term in office. Gen. Brice Oligui Nguema, head of the powerful Republican Guard, was named transitional president by rebellious officers who declared the election void. Bongo was put under house arrest.

American diplomats had to regroup to persuade the new Gabonese authorities to rebuff Chinese approaches. Finer met with Oligui on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September. The National Security Council’s top Africa hand, Judd Devermont, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Melanie Higgins visited Gabon the following month.

At that meeting, Oligui said he understood U.S. concerns about a Chinese military presence on the Atlantic. He said that Bongo had a handshake agreement with President Xi, but that there was no written deal.

“They talked about a package of stuff we could do to keep Gabon from engaging with China,” said a senior State Department official.

The president’s office in Libreville referred questions to Noël Nelson Messone, Gabon’s ambassador in Washington, who said he wasn’t privy to any discussions about a possible Chinese base. He said Oligui had yet to have high-level talks with Beijing. 

In Libreville, Devermont encouraged Oligui to set a timetable for a swift return to elected government.

“There’s this tension here between how we uniquely uphold our democratic values and how we pragmatically continue our bilateral relationship, which has a security component,” a senior U.S. defense official said.

American diplomats say Oligui has reached several milestones—such as restoring press freedoms, promising a national political dialogue and scheduling a two-year transition to civilian government—that the U.S. identified as necessary to allow resumption of some security assistance.

Gabon’s new rulers “are well aware of the pessimism that surrounds most transitions, particularly in Africa,” said Messone, the Gabonese ambassador. “That is why they are committed to a timely transition road map.”

U.S. and Gabonese officials are currently negotiating a defense-cooperation agreement and have discussed American training to help Gabon secure its borders. In November the White House decided to have Gabon host this year’s U.S.-led West and Central African maritime exercises, which bring together naval forces from dozens of countries. The exercises are designed to help coastal countries battle piracy and illegal fishing.

The U.S. could also boost support for Gabon’s efforts to preserve its rainforests, which cover almost 90% of the country.

Mvemba Dizolele, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent think tank in Washington, D.C., predicted the Biden administration would find a way to legally provide whatever inducements are needed to frustrate China’s military aspirations.

“This is a matter of tremendous national-security urgency,” said Dizolele. “We need to continue working with the Gabonese.”

The U.S. has also made a diplomatic pitch to Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled the former Spanish colony since 1979. Finer visited Malabo, the country’s capital city, in 2021 and met with Obiang’s son, Vice President Teodoro “Teodorin” Nguema Obiang Mangue, at the U.N. last year. The U.S. invited Equatorial Guinean military officials to observe American-led naval exercises and floated the idea of helping the country combat piracy.

Relations, however, have been overshadowed by U.S. concerns about extrajudicial killings and torture of regime opponents. In civil cases, U.S. government lawyers accused Obiang Mangue of amassing more than $300 million “through corruption and money laundering.” Obiang Mangue told the U.S. ambassador in Malabo in 2011 that he earned his wealth through legitimate government contracts, according to a State Department cable from the time.

Equatorial Guinea’s ambassador in Washington, Crisantos Obama Ondo, said China supplies the African nation with military hardware and training, as well as roads, ports, airports and other infrastructure. But, he added, “we’re surprised by the insistence of the U.S. government because we haven’t received a formal or informal request from the Chinese government to set up a naval base in Equatorial Guinea.”

The ambassador said that human-rights groups have unfairly criticized the Obiang government and that new laws are addressing torture, prison abuses, corruption, nepotism and other issues. Obiang Mangue, the president’s son, is leading the reform effort, the ambassador said.

U.S. officials, however, find the regime opaque, and, despite assurances, worry that Obiang might yet allow the Chinese to establish a permanent presence in the country, the senior U.S. official said.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials watch to see where the Chinese will turn next. “When one door closes, they’re looking for another opportunity,” the U.S. national-security official said.

A ferry enters the port of Bata, in Equatorial Guinea, where the U.S. has made a diplomatic pitch to keep China’s military out. PHOTO: DAVID DEGNER/GETTY IMAGES

Write to Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com

16. How a liberal billionaire became America’s leading anti-DEI crusader

How a liberal billionaire became America’s leading anti-DEI crusader

Bill Ackman used Wall Street tactics to oust Harvard’s first Black president. He’s part of a wave of business leaders attacking diversity initiatives spurred by George Floyd’s death.

By Elizabeth Dwoskin

Updated February 10, 2024 at 7:36 a.m. EST|Published February 10, 2024 at 12:01 a.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Elizabeth Dwoskin · February 10, 2024

Three years ago, Vivek Ramaswamy called up hedge fund manager Bill Ackman with an idea: an “anti-woke” asset management firm that would combat social justice and climate initiatives spreading through the business world.

Though the billionaire power broker had made a career forcing management changes in businesses including Wendy’s and JCPenny, Ackman seemed an unlikely backer for his tennis buddy’s project. A longtime Democratic donor, Ackman had helped propel the career of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and his philanthropic efforts included paying for thousands of undocumented immigrants to attend college. Moreover, Ackman had praised the movement Ramaswamy opposed — known as environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG — endorsing ESG practices in his 2021 shareholder letter.

But the tumultuous years of the pandemic had shifted the Wall Street billionaire’s worldview. Like others in his uber-wealthy circles, Ackman had come to believe that well-meaning ESG efforts had curdled into something pernicious, stifling debate, destroying careers and undermining the meritocratic values that made the free-market system “the most powerful potential force for good in addressing society’s long-term problems,” as he once put it.

Ackman invested $2.5 million in Ramaswamy’s Strive Asset Management — an early flash point in his personal transformation. By last month, when the hedge fund manager led a successful campaign to oust Harvard University’s first Black president, he had fully emerged as one of the most powerful — and unexpected — adversaries of a diversity movement that has swept society since the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a White police officer.

In hours of interviews with The Washington Post, Ackman, who is Jewish, argued that campus responses to the Oct. 7 attacks had been lackluster compared with the solidarity shown post-George Floyd. To Ackman, the contrast exposed the hypocrisy of the movement for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI — which includes race-based hiring goals and diversity trainings he called “unhealthy” and the “root cause of antisemitism.”

“Say whatever you want about me being a powerful person,” Ackman said. “I don’t want to advantage my own group at the expense of another. What I want is fairness.”

A master of making public companies bend to his vision, Ackman is translating his Wall Street tactics to attack the ideology of DEI, which generally asserts that including underrepresented groups benefits companies. Ackman says those efforts have in practice become discriminatory and claims even Martin Luther King Jr. would have opposed them.

He is creating a think tank, which he describes as a cross between a research center for his curiosities and an incubator of solutions, underpinned by a philosophy he defines as: “Look, I don’t like when people get screwed.” He says he will pursue his crusade against “discrimination in all forms ... to the ends of this earth,” echoing a line from his infamous six-year battle with the supplement company Herbalife. He communicates with his 1.2 million followers on X — a platform he rarely used before the pandemic — in thousand-plus-word screeds written from the elliptical, Ubers and his private jet. He wants everyone to know that his most popular recent X post has 36 million views. (“Pretty f-----g huge,” he says. “How many subscribers does the Washington Post have?”)

Despite his intention to end the DEI industry, he has yet to speak to someone who works in the field.

Ackman’s evolution mirrors many elites who, like the hedge fund manager, see themselves as moderates and not culture warriors.

The group includes Elon Musk, who says he voted for Democrats including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and President Biden, but now surrounds himself with a right-wing cohort online and recently declared “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” to be “propaganda words.” In a recent memo, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen named his “enemies” as “ESG,” “social responsibility,” “sustainability,” “socialism,” and “anti-greatness.” And Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, in an interview last month, said he didn’t care for the “whole diversity and inclusion thing,” arguing that ads showing models with various body types can send the wrong message. (“You’ve got to be clear that you don’t want certain customers coming in,” said Wilson.)

Ackman “has this weird resonance, because people are like — he is basically right — even if no one in a real position of power will say it out loud,” said Sam Lessin, a former Facebook executive who recently ran for a seat on Harvard’s alumni Board of Overseers with support from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and opposes DEI.

“If you have experienced and understand what excellence really looks like, then you know that for America’s future … we need excellence,” he added.

Investor Mark Cuban, a strong DEI supporter, argues that the investor class has become newly emboldened to attack the movement, in part because of X, formerly Twitter. They are “falling into the anti-woke echo chamber,” he said. “Twitter is the glue that unites them.”

Some DEI experts agree that certain diversity initiatives have had a chilling effect on public debate. There are many “institutions where it is impossible to say certain things, and the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed,” said Ralph Richard Banks, director of the Center for Racial Justice at Stanford Law School.

But Banks disagrees with critics like Ackman who “think the solution is to eliminate the entire industry,” arguing the outcome would be a grave setback to limited racial progress. “[Ackman] is well-intentioned, but … he can re-create the same us-vs.-them dynamics that are the root of so many of these problems.”

Ackman waves off critics who dismiss him and like-minded titans as wealthy White men clinging to power. And he rejects the idea that anyone should judge him by his new right-wing bedfellows. He says that robust debate, even with people with whom he vehemently disagrees, is exactly what society is currently lacking — the very point of his crusade.

If he has a megaphone, he argues, it’s only because people want to hear what he has to say.

A self-appointed ‘Mr. Fix It’

Ackman, whose high school yearbook tagline was “most verbose,” has never shied away from a fight. Close friends in his upscale Chappaqua, N.Y., hometown and later Harvard would tease him about his persistence and competitiveness.

“Whether it was a Scrabble match or a tennis game, if Bill lost, you were getting a rematch because Bill is not going to end the day on a loss,” said a good friend from Harvard, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid associating with Ackman’s fight against DEI. One time she purposefully threw a contest to be able to go home to sleep.

Ackman, who is worth about $4.2 billion according to Forbes, could be just as relentless for causes he cared about. He volunteered as a peer counselor for Room 13, Harvard’s mental health crisis line, taking calls in the 7 a.m.-7 p.m. shift. “Bill has always been Mr. Fix It,” said the friend, with a “streak of wanting to fix problems.”

Friends say Ackman gets his outspoken nature in part from his father, Larry, a real estate executive. Stephen Fraidin, a family friend and Yale Law professor, said Larry Ackman broke up the genteel tenor of PTA meetings with comments that were “about four times more aggressive” than the norm. Before Larry died in 2022, his last letter to his son was about the dangers of rising antisemitism.

Fraidin, who later drew up the paperwork for Ackman’s first hedge fund, remembers him as a precocious teen whose overflowing opinions animated hour-long car rides to NYC for weekend enrichment classes.

This self-appointed Mr. Fix It tendency became the hallmark of Ackman’s career. In the mid-1990s, he took a large stake in the troubled real estate company that owned Rockefeller Center. As a board member, Ackman grew frustrated with mismanagement. “I watched [the other board members] make mistake after mistake after mistake,” he said. Eventually he brought on partners to buy the company outright.

“That was probably the first moment that I realized that, as a shareholder, I could do this better than the guy running the company,” he said.

As an activist investor, Ackman would take a sizable position in companies, then force changes to make them more profitable. He founded Pershing Square Capital Management, deploying obsessive research, a nose for underperforming stocks and blitzkriegs of loud shareholder letters to push out leaders of more than a dozen companies. Hugely profitable turnarounds at food giant Wendy’s, mall operator General Growth Properties and rail operator Canadian Pacific have helped make him one of the most prominent hedge fund investors on Wall Street.

Still, his bold bets were wrong almost as often as they were right. He possessed “Golf Channel commentator” good looks and a near-blinding emotional attachment to his investments, sometimes getting weepy during shareholder presentations, according to Liz Hoffman’s “Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World’s Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink.”

His reputation for impulsivity extended to his support of Booker. Ackman teared up the first time he heard Booker, then the mayor of Newark, speak. He soon promised tens of millions of dollars to the struggling majority-Black city, which he’d visited only a few times. (Booker, who is still close friends with Ackman, declined to be interviewed.)

“Once he decides what’s right … he doesn’t back down,” said Keith Creel, whom Ackman recruited to lead Canadian Pacific Kansas City, a large railway operator. Though wary of corporate raiders, Creel grew to respect Ackman, who parachuted in from New York in 2012, unafraid to take on a lazy board that Creel said was “run like a country club.”

Even in the brash world of finance, these tactics have rubbed many the wrong way. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz once called Ackman “despicable,” accusing him of leaking company information to push out the CEO of JCPenny, a member of the Starbucks board. Longtime rival Carl Icahn, the activist hedge fund manager, called Ackman the most sanctimonious person he ever met. A rival investor said he’d “rather hang out with drug dealers and prostitutes” than Ackman.

But Creel and other friends insist Ackman’s campaign against DEI is free of cynicism or ulterior motive. “He’s a very principled person,” Creel said. “He’s a guy who thinks that if the right thing isn’t being done, he is going to do it whether it makes people uncomfortable or not.”

Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, attended Harvard with Ackman in the mid-1980s. While Ackman’s singular determination makes sense in the cutthroat world of Wall Street, Barrett said, it is inappropriate when the target is the first Black leader of the most prominent educational institution in America.

“When he is bullying a company that he has bought stock in, at least he owns a piece of that company,” Barrett said. “But when you go out into the broader world and start telling institutions that you don’t have an ownership stake in how to behave properly, when you take on complex multidimensional issues like race in higher education … all you’re really saying is: I’m a really rich guy, I’ve got access to communications technology and I’ve got no shame.”

In 2012, Ackman took on the biggest activist campaign of his career against the supplement maker Herbalife. He argued it was a massive pyramid scheme that preyed on working-class strivers. Herbalife disputed the claims.

The dramatic strategy was classic Ackman. In an hours-long, 342-slide presentation, he called Herbalife “a criminal enterprise” and its CEO “a predator.” He told shareholders that his $1 billion bet against the company’s stock price, known in investing circles as a “short,” would be a “death blow.” He funded Latino activists who had filed a class-action suit against the company and promised any profits would go to charity. With his signature odds-be-damned confidence, he announced that Herbalife would be shut down immediately, repeating the claim as if he could will it into happening.

It didn’t.

Though federal authorities charged the company with deceptive practices and bribery, Wall Street was never on Ackman’s side. Icahn, who, like Ackman, is Jewish, propped up the company’s stock, publicly scolding Ackman on CNBC for being a “little Jewish boy crying” in a schoolyard.

Ackman ended his short bet against Herbalife in 2018. Naturally, he still believes he is “100 percent right.”

In retrospect, he says it was a “mistake” to tie his campaign against the supplement maker to a short sale — a lesson he is taking to his current crusade against DEI. He said he promised himself that if he ever took on another campaign that ambitious, it wouldn’t be bound to money.

“Because a rich guy was going to make a profit … it made people question the credibility of our work,” he said.

The Herbalife fight made Ackman a star of CNBC and finance publications. But soon he would take his voice to a larger and very different stage: Twitter, now X.

Until 2020, Ackman had just 30,000 followers on the platform and had tweeted fewer than two dozen times.

But that February, he became increasingly anxious about reports of a mysterious virus emerging from China. He discovered that the platform was full of scientists and epidemiologists sharing their views. Messaging with experts on the platform, he became convinced that the virus was about to surge. Ackman panicked, moving his family and his elderly parents to his mansion in the Hamptons.

He also saw an opportunity for a hedge. The market was at an all-time high, ignoring the impending risk of a major global catastrophe. In an emergency meeting, Ackman instructed his investing team to buy large swaths of low-cost financial products — known as credit-default swaps — insurance against the market failing.

“We basically made 2.7 billion in two weeks, from Twitter. And I wasn’t even paying for my subscription,” Ackman said, winking.

Two years later, when Pershing invested $10 million in Musk’s bid to buy Twitter, Ackman joked it was a token to repay the billions he made on the prescient trade.

In the meantime, Ackman was hooked. Not only was the platform “a powerful research tool,” he said, it was in some ways a more potent form of communication than television and shareholder letters. He issued covid warnings. He criticized Biden and U.S. foreign policy. He supported Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who was acquitted after killing two protesters at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020. (Rittenhouse is “a civic-minded patriot” who acted in “self-defense,” Ackman concluded, after watching hours of testimony one night). He said vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy raised “important issues about vaccines.” He started to critique ESG.

Privately, friends worried that the Twitterverse, and its algorithmic boosting of right-leaning opinions that accelerated in the wake of Musk’s 2022 acquisition, was having a blinding effect.

Ackman says it has opened up a world of possibility.

“It just sort of leads you to different people over time,” Ackman says. “There’s a whole group of people who are kind of in deep on this stuff.”

By Oct. 7, when news broke that Hamas had attacked Israel, Ackman’s followers were ready to listen.

‘What has Harvard become?’

Ackman says he had never given much thought to diversity initiatives until this past fall. He’s long been interested in how racial groups scramble into elite clubs, writing his Harvard thesis about the experience of Asians and Jews trying to get into the Ivy League.

Though he credits much of the success of his eight-person investment team — which is majority non-White — to its diversity, he rejected a proposal for diversity training at his own company. (The team currently has no Black people and one woman.) He recognizes discrimination as a persistent problem, noting that his father was told as a recent graduate not to apply to Chase bank because he wouldn’t “make much progress” as a Jew. So when Claudine Gay was named Harvard’s first Black president over the summer, he was “happy” for someone other than a White man to lead the school.

And Ackman was looking forward to new leadership for other reasons. Despite giving about $50 million to Harvard over the last 15 years, private tensions had ballooned between Ackman and the university. He says Harvard used a 2017 donation in a way that violated his specifications, something he did not speak about publicly at the time.

In the days following Hamas’s attack, before Israel’s invasion of Gaza, more than two dozen campus groups circulated a letter charging the Israeli “apartheid regime” with being “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The letter did not acknowledge the loss of life in the surprise attack that killed 1,200. “What has Harvard become?” Ackman asked himself, seething in disbelief.

As protests erupted on campus, Ackman, whose wife is Israeli, joined a group of outraged donors from Silicon Valley and Wall Street to complain.

“I called my friends on the board, and I’m like, I want to help,” Ackman said. “This thing is heading for a train wreck. I said, I’d love to sit down with Claudine. I’d love to sit down with the board. Let’s work on this together. You know I care about the institution.”

Ackman was put in touch with board chair Penny Pritzker, a phone call he describes as “one of the most disappointing conversations I’ve had in my life.”

Ackman says he told Pritzker that he had no choice but to share his concerns publicly.

“Then I literally hung up the phone, sat down on my computer, and typed Harvard Letter Number One,” Ackman says. (Pritzker declined to comment. A person close to her, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations, described Ackman’s phone call as “verbally abusive.” Ackman said the call was “polite and respectful.”)

“The letter,” a massive 3,138-word tweet he also sent to Harvard, was written in the style of his strident shareholder missives. He demanded that Harvard release the names of the students whose groups had signed the protest letter to block them from Wall Street jobs.

“One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists,” he declared.

Internet sleuths heeded Ackman’s call and published the students’ names. One group blasted them on the side of “doxing trucks” that drove around campus. Ackman says he mostly opposes doxing but that “students should be accountable for their public statements.”

A few weeks after the attacks, Ackman flew to Boston, meeting with professors, a law school and a business school class, and holding a listening session for more than 200 students. He says the students shared stories about antisemitic incidents that they’d experienced and described a lack of concern from the administration.

Ackman left the meetings disheartened and perplexed. “The problem was much worse than I thought,” he said. “So I called people on the faculty who I knew would confide in me. And that’s when I started learning about the whole DEI thing. Then I started doing a deeper dive.”

Ackman’s deep dive involved a lot of learning from X. He began to read posts by conservative activist Christopher Rufo and by Aaron Sibarium, an investigative reporter with the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon. Rufo, a senior fellow at the right-leaning think tank the Manhattan Institute, has led a high-profile charge against critical race theory, an academic concept that posits structural racism is built into American institutions. The idea underpins DEI programs and anti-racism seminars, which Rufo argues often label White people as oppressors, leading to reverse discrimination. Boosted by last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning affirmative action in college admissions, Rufo’s arguments have spurred GOP leaders to ban teaching critical race theory in nine states.

Ackman read Rufo’s book, “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything,” and messaged with him online. His first X post about DEI was a comment on a video clip of Amanda Seales, a Black comedian, who argued it was wrong to present Hamas “as this big bad wolf.”

“Is this incredible ignorance, conscious avoidance of the truth, or racism?” Ackman posted. He noted that “a large proportion of the Hamas supporters … are members of the black community and/or other people of color.”

“Some have argued,” Ackman continued, this is spurred by a DEI movement that “delineates the world into an oppressor/oppressed framework,” with Jews identified as White oppressors, an argument that parrots Rufo’s book. “Do you agree with this explanation?” he asked his followers.

Four days later, Gay sparked outrage alongside two other university presidents, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, during a widely criticized hearing on Capitol Hill. Asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s hate speech policy, Gay answered “it depends on the context.”

Ackman went ballistic. Since Oct. 7, his X feed had become a steady stream of Israeli hostage stories, videos of antisemitic incidents on campuses and criticism of Harvard. The day of the hearing, he tweeted 23 times.

“She has to go now,” he said of Gay. The university president got the same treatment Ackman had dealt so many corporate chiefs — a relentless public crusade — only this time, he marshaled a giant army on X.

A Wall Street man, he tracked his bets as if watching a stock ticker. “One down,” he said when news of Magill’s impending resignation broke on Dec. 7.

“I give this a 95% probability,” he posted eight minutes later.

“Oddsmakers are now at 99%” he wrote the following day.

Then he was on to MIT. “To the MIT governing boards,” he wrote on Dec. 10. “Let’s make a deal. If you promptly terminate President Kornbluth, I promise I won’t write you a letter.”

On Dec. 10, Rufo messaged Ackman about an investigation he was about to publish involving plagiarism allegations he had unearthed about Gay. Sibarium, a Yale graduate, wrote that Gay had “paraphrased or quoted almost 20 authors without proper attribution,” and Rufo had interviewed a scholar, Carol Swain, who accused Gay of plagiarizing her work. Ackman reposted Rufo, Sibarium and other conservative activists throughout December, sometimes six times a day.

By then, Ackman’s own posts were being boosted by a business leader with the biggest megaphone on the platform: Musk. “#DefundHarvard,” wrote Musk, who has more than 140 times Ackman’s following, in one of several replies to the businessman’s posts.

On Jan. 2, Gay resigned from Harvard. It was “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor,” she wrote in her resignation letter, noting she’d been subjected to “threats fueled by racial animus.”

Ackman posted his own more-than-5,000-word letter that day, too, so long it hit the character limit for paying users. In it, he reiterated a claim that he had insider information that the Harvard presidential search committee had purposefully excluded candidates who didn’t come from a marginalized group. “The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large,” he wrote.

Harvard spokesman Jason Newton told The Post that staff from the university’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging can serve on search committees but “have no authority” over hiring decisions. He had no further comment on Ackman’s crusade. Gay did not respond to a comment request. A person involved in the presidential search process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it, said that Ackman’s actions were “destructive, racist, and reprehensible” and that DEI-criteria had no influence on the hiring process.

Some of Ackman’s friends and former classmates have mixed feelings about his Harvard crusade. They worry his use of X has caused him to fall in with a group acting in bad faith. The seemingly self-satisfied and strident persona he displays on X, satirized recently by the writer Kurt Anderson as “dark-comedy hybrid of ‘Succession’ and a Nabokov novel,” doesn’t reflect the loyal friend who can laugh at himself and will consider different views, they say.

But others praise what they argue is a political conversion. “He’s a guy who has gone through something of an intellectual transformation: I don’t know if he quite recognizes it in himself,” said Ramaswamy, who recently dropped out of the Republican presidential campaign. “The thing about him is he is very receptive to the best arguments, even if it’s very different from what he used to believe — and that’s a good thing.”

Ackman, alongside Musk, recently debated investor Cuban, who chastised the men for pushing away diverse talent. (“The loss of DEI-phobic companies is my gain,” Cuban said). But Ackman later spoke privately to Cuban and concluded there is more common ground than difference between them. “Like me, he believes in diversity with a lowercase d,” Ackman said, noting he is opposed to “DEI” as a “political movement.”

Cuban said the conversation was “very respectful” but that X’s “echo chamber” was “far more intoxicating for someone like Bill than being on CNBC.”

Stanford’s Banks says the complaints over DEI reflect growing pains as American institutions try to become more equal. While researchers have found that diverse companies perform better financially, DEI consulting is a relatively new industry whose efficacy is still largely unproven. When conservatives come to Stanford and complain, “If we’re being honest, we’d say, you know, it’s even worse than you think,” Banks adds.

But he and other DEI experts say critics like Rufo and Ackman don’t represent the entirety of the industry. “There is good DEI and bad DEI. But what these people are doing is saying, let’s scrap the whole thing, and that’s clearly an overcorrection,” Banks said.

“It’s a false claim: that DEI is about flipping the power structures,” said DEI consultant Lily Zheng, noting the reverse racism is a “carbon [copy] of arguments against affirmative action from the ’70s.”

But Ackman isn’t stopping. For everyone who has called him a racist, he says, there are more people who have thanked him privately. He keeps a stack of thank you letters on his desk to prove it. (He reads from the letters randomly, including one from a doctor and another from a university president). He says he is aware of the weight of history in targeting the first Black Harvard president, but it doesn’t much matter to him. “I’m an equal-opportunity criticizer,” he says.

He plans to give more money to Jewish causes — in the past, he said he didn’t think Jews needed it.

Though he isn’t sure what his think tank will do, he says it will hire the very best people — Wall Street analysts, journalists, academics — to go deep on problems “where people have been taken advantage of,” including “vaccine safety” and “Why is DEI not working.” Once they understand the reason for the problems, they will propose solutions, such as a new company or a political campaign.

“Is there a policy fix? Is shining a spotlight on it going to fix it?” he asks, and smiles, half-serious. “Or is this something Bill can handle with a tweet or two?”

The Washington Post · by Elizabeth Dwoskin · February 10, 2024

​17. Terminating the FARA helo program was the right call by the Army chief

​Conclusion:

Some will want to criticize the Army for this decision. Some will decry the $2.4 billion spent as wasted. None of the criticism, however, will overcome the fact that the new Army Chief is proving that he can make difficult and independent decisions. That’s good for the Army, and it’s vital that his colleagues across the services take note — and start taking a critical eye at their own long-term plans.Some will want to criticize the Army for this decision. Some will decry the $2.4 billion spent as wasted. None of the criticism, however, will overcome the fact that the new Army Chief is proving that he can make difficult and independent decisions. That’s good for the Army, and it’s vital that his colleagues across the services take note — and start taking a critical eye at their own long-term plans.

Terminating the FARA helo program was the right call by the Army chief - Breaking Defense

breakingdefense.com · by John Ferrari · February 9, 2024

on February 09, 2024 at 10:33 AM

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George answers questions from members of the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., July 12, 2023. George was nominated to become the next Army Chief of Staff by President Joseph R. Biden. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. David Resnick)

The tremor Army aviators felt in their bones Thursday evening was the result of the Army’s surprise decision to scrap one of its marquee, high-dollar future rotorcraft programs in favor of investing in current platforms. In the op-ed below, former senior Army officer and acquisition expert John Ferrari says the move is a good start.

Last night, the Army announced that it is terminating one of its two major new-development aviation programs, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, as part of a broader aviation rethink. These cuts are the right calls, and should be taken as a sign that Gen. Randy George, the relatively new Army Chief of Staff, is willing to make hard choices.

That’s good, because he has many more he’s likely to have to make. The fiscal dysfunction in Washington, exploding costs associated with nuclear modernization, and lessons learned on the Ukraine battlefield should begin driving changes in long-held modernization plans, and previously sacred cows need to be on the table.

Make no mistake, this was a bold choice by George. The Army had spent almost $2.4 billion developing this helicopter, and had planned to spend many more billions to develop and field it far into the future. But in order to pay these developmental bills, the Army would have had to destroy the industrial base of its existing aircraft fleet at a time of increased global tensions.

The Army is under enormous fiscal pressure coming into the 2025 budget that is to be released (budget watchers hope) in the next few weeks. With a pay raise over 5 percent and a topline only increasing within DoD at 1 percent, procurement and development are likely to be the billpayers. The current strategy within the DoD is to “divest-to-invest,” in essence, kill production of today’s weapons in order to develop weapons for the next decade. That the Army is going against this mantra is significant, signaling the largest service is getting serious about the threat of warfare this decade rather than the next.

While we can expect that some portion of the funds that have been harvested from this decision will go to “pay other bills” such as the pay raise, much of the money is going towards continuing production of the Chinook, an enduring workhorse that many in the Army had wanted to cancel. Additionally, this now sets the tone and provides the money that the Army is going all in on unmanned aerial systems, something that it had over the past few years been avoiding, with its half-in/half-out manned/unmanned platform approach.

The path forward for the Army within armed attack and aviation now appears to be a mix of enduring aircraft — of which the Apache is the best in the world — space, and unmanned systems. So, what should be the next steps for Army aviation? There are two paths I would like to see.

First, on the Apache, Boeing and the Army should be investing heavily in artificial intelligence and gunner/pilot assisted technologies. The Apache is likely to be flying for the next two decades and with software upgrades, it can and will be an important part of the Army’s arsenal.

Second, as it looks at its future aviation drones, it needs to make sure that they can be produced by the thousands and that they can change systems every few years. The Army should not lock itself into a decades long program for unmanned aviation systems and instead should be buying from multiple vendors, rewarding those who innovate and enticing new entrants with procurement contracts ready to go.

And not all changes that the new chief pushes will be in the realm of technology. The Army is currently severely undermanned and without significant reductions in the number of units, it will quickly become a hollow force. The Army also has too many non-commissioned officer billets which will force it to relook if it can keep specialty units like the SFABs. Both these changes need to be on the table.

The emergency supplemental working its way through Congress has $5.3 billion for 155mm artillery, $1.5 billion for PAC-3 missiles, $550 million for Guided Rockets, $960 million for small and medium caliber ammo, and several hundred more for an assortment of other munitions. And yet, the Army needs to show industry in its long-term funding plan that procurement levels will remain high. To do this within its topline, it is going to have to cut, at some point, more of its research and development funds.

Some will want to criticize the Army for this decision. Some will decry the $2.4 billion spent as wasted. None of the criticism, however, will overcome the fact that the new Army Chief is proving that he can make difficult and independent decisions. That’s good for the Army, and it’s vital that his colleagues across the services take note — and start taking a critical eye at their own long-term plans.

Maj. Gen. John Ferrari, US Army (ret.), is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and is the former director of program analysis and evaluation for the US Army.

Read more at Breaking Defense →

breakingdefense.com · by John Ferrari · February 9, 2024

​18. Philippines gunning for fast and massive military build-up

Philippines gunning for fast and massive military build-up - Asia Times

Top brass angling for $36 billion defense spending package to include multiple submarines and other modern assets to point at China

asiatimes.com · by Richard Javad Heydarian · February 9, 2024

MANILA – “We are not satisfied with minimum [deterrence capability alone]…movement is life, stagnation is death,” Colonel Micheal Logico, a top strategist at the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), recently told this reporter when asked about the country’s evolving defense strategy. “We [need] to elevate ourselves into a world-class armed forces,” he added.

Confronting a mighty China, the Philippines is undergoing a once-in-a-century defense buildup that if all goes to plan could transform it into a formidable military “middle power.” This year, top Philippine defense officials have announced their decision to pursue the acquisition of multiple submarines as part of a massive US$36 billion defense spending package.

“We do not only [need] one submarine, we need two or three [at least],” Commodore Roy Vincent Trinidad, spokesperson of the Philippine Navy for the West Philippines, recently told media. Under “Horizon Three”, the third phase of a 15-year-old defense modernization plan that began in 2012, the Philippines is also set to acquire modern fighter jets, warships and missile systems.

Next month, the Philippines is also set to receive India’s much-vaunted Brahmos supersonic missile system, which is seen as a likely precursor to even more sophisticated acquisitions in the future.

“It is a real game-changer because it brings the Philippines to the supersonic age. For the first time in our history, the Philippines will have three batteries of supersonic cruise missiles that have a speed of (Mach 2.8) or almost 3x (times) the speed of sound,” said National Security Council spokesman Jonathan Malaya.

The Southeast Asian nation wants to develop its conventional and asymmetric military capabilities as it prepares for multiple contingencies in the region vis-à-vis China, including in both the hotly-contested South China Sea as well as over nearby Taiwan, which is only separated by the narrow Bashi Channel from northern Philippine provinces.

Now boasting Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economy, the Philippines finally has more financial resources to invest in its long-neglected armed forces, which half a century ago were the envy of the region with state-of-the-art American weapons and fighter jets.

Well into the 1970s, the Philippines intimidated its smaller neighbors and unilaterally built military facilities in the Spratly group of islands.

At one point, the Richard Nixon administration worried that it could get dragged into conflict with other claimant states due to its mutual defense treaty with a self-aggrandizing ally, thus Washington’s long-term policy of strategic ambiguity on the South China Sea disputes.

At the height of hubris, the Philippines even contemplated the invasion of Malaysia in order to wrest back control of Sabah, an oil-rich island that once belonged to the Sultanate of Sulu, now part of the Philippine Republic. But chronic corruption, political instability and decades-long insurgencies in the restive island of Mindanao steadily corroded and spent the Philippines’ military capabilities.

A Philippine Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAV) during a landing exercise in Subic Freeport in Subic town, north of Manila on September 21, 2019. Photo: Asia Times Files / AFP / Ted Aljibe

By the end of the 20th century, the Southeast Asian nation, among the world’s largest archipelagos, had among the smallest and most antiquated navies in the region. The Philippine Army, battling decades-long Muslim and communist insurgencies, gobbled up much of the AFP’s resources. For years, the Philippines didn’t even possess a single supersonic fighter jet.

Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the Philippines served as a “second front” for the George W Bush administration’s “Global War on Terror”, further reinforcing gaps in Philippine military capabilities. But things began to change under President Benigno Aquino III (2010-2016), who implemented the Revised AFP Modernization Act, which sought to rapidly modernize the Philippine Navy and Air Force.

Within a few years, the Philippines had acquired modern fighters from South Korea under a $415.7 million package. The Philippine Navy (PN), meanwhile, acquired increasingly modern warships, most notably the BRP Gregorio Del Pilar (PF15) and BRP Ramon Alcaraz (PF16), Hamilton and Hero-class cutters worth up to $400 million.

Defense spending increased by 36% between 2004 and 2013, with the year 2015 seeing close to a 30% year-on-year increase.

To boost its ally’s defense modernization, Washington increased its Foreign Military Financing to the Philippines over the years. Other key partners such as Japan, meanwhile, provided multi-role patrol vessels to the Philippine Coast Guard while South Korea donated a Pohang-class corvette to PN.

Beyond minimum deterrence

Initially, the Philippines was hoping to simply achieve a “minimum credible defense” capability vis-a-vis rivals such as China.

Despite many hurdles and delays, however, the Southeast Asian nation’s military modernization campaign now aims at building a 21st-century armed forces en route to becoming a full-fledged “middle power.”

Last year, the Philippines overtook Vietnam to become the swiftest-growing economy in Southeast Asia, a trend that some expect to continue well into the future.

This places the Philippines on a path to becoming among the biggest economies in the region, thus generating more economic resources for a defense build-up.

Accordingly, the Philippines has pressed ahead with a revised 10-year modernization plan worth 2 trillion pesos ($35.62 billion) to finance the acquisition of state-of-the-art weapons including submarines.

“[W]e are embarking into what we call the ‘ReHorizoned 3’ capability enhancement and modernization program where the President recently approved an array of capabilities,” Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr said.

Gilberto Teodoro Jr sees new horizons for Philippine defense spending. Image: X Screengrab

“The Armed Forces will transition initially to enable itself to guarantee, as much as possible, Philippine corporations and those authorized by the Philippine environment the unimpeded and peaceful exploration and exploitation of all natural resources within our exclusive economic zone and other areas where we have jurisdiction,” he added.

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With that signaling, several countries are jockeying to win multi-billion dollar defense contracts with the Philippines. The French, who are also exploring a visiting forces agreement-style deal with Manila, seem to be ahead in the line.

France’s Naval Group is offering two diesel-electric Scorpene-class submarines, similar to those operated by neighboring Malaysia.

Navantia, a Spanish government-affiliated company, Navantia, is also in the running and has offered two S80-class Isaac Peral submarines with an estimated value of $1.7 billion. The Spanish have also offered to build a submarine base and other necessary logistics for the boats.

South Korea, already a major defense supplier to Manila, is also jostling for the sub deal. Hanwha Ocean (formerly known as DSME) is offering its Jang Bogo-III submarines, which boast guided-missile systems, advanced propulsion and lithium-ion battery technology that makes them particularly stealthy.

South Korea has already supplied the Philippines’ with its most advanced warships and fighter jets, making it a trusted partner amid the rival big-ticket bidding.

“For so long, the Philippine military has also been considered the weakest in our region. With the acquisition of [submarines], we will no longer be called the weakest,” National Security Council spokesman Jonathan Malaya said in a mixture of English and Filipino when asked about the strategic implications of the submarine acquisition plans.

“We will now become a middle power in terms of our armed capabilities and that is a game-changer because that will increase our defense posture,” he added.

Follow Richard Javad Heydarian on X, formerly Twitter, at @Richeydarian

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asiatimes.com · by Richard Javad Heydarian · February 9, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com