Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“The difficulties with irregular forms of warfare became apparent during the wars of national liberation against the colonial powers that began after the end of the Second World War. The problem for the colonial powers was that they had no obvious way of bringing these conflicts to a conclusion, because the enemy had a continuing source of recruits while the population at home could soon get impatient with futile campaigns. Occasional victories brought respite but not resolution. Even after the former colonies had achieved independence, whenever Western powers were drawn back in, perhaps to support a friendly government or to prevent a humanitarian disaster, there was a high risk of getting caught up in situations from which it was difficult to withdraw. A government that could only survive with external help early in a conflict rarely achieved self-sufficiency during its course, although, to avoid indefinite commitments, there were efforts to improve governance and the conditions of ordinary people, and to build up indigenous forces so they could cope without foreign armies.”

- Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine by Lawrence Freedman

The caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf who keeps the caribou strong.

- Inuit proverb

"One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first."

- Malala Yousafzai

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 20 (Putin's War)

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (20.09.22) CDS comments on key events

3. China Is Capable of Blockading Taiwan, U.S. Navy Commander Says

4. 4. We don't have an organizational problem, we have a leadership problem (influence operations)

5. US making progress on cyber defense, but up against some 'significant hurdles': Commission report

6. FDD | 2022 Annual Report on Implementation

7. The Kremlin Must Be in Crisis

8. Russia’s underperforming military (and ours) - Responsible Statecraft by Andrew J. Bacevich

9. How the Second Civil War Could Start

10. The Alternate History of China

11. Building Taiwan’s Own Area Denial Capabilities

12. Ex-Fort Benning commander’s retirement halted over tweets

13. Opinion | Biden is right on Taiwan. Now he needs a staff that won’t undercut him.

14. Putin's Partial Ukraine Mobilization Could Mean the End of Russia

15. The West is testing out a lot of shiny new military tech in Ukraine

16. Revealed: US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data

17. Why the US still must invest in homeland missile defense

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 20 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-20

Key Takeaways

Russian-appointed occupation officials in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts announced on September 20 that they will hold a “referendum” on acceding to Russia, with a vote taking place from September 23-27.
The Kremlin’s annexation plans are primarily targeting a domestic audience; Putin likely intends to improve Russian force generation capabilities by calling on the Russian people to volunteer for a war ostensibly to defend newly-claimed Russian territory.
Ukrainian forces continued disrupting ongoing Russian efforts to reestablish ground lines of communications (GLOCs) across the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
Russian forces are likely targeting Ukrainian hydrotechnical infrastructure in Kharkiv and Luhansk oblasts to threaten Ukrainian positions along the Siverskyi Donets River.
Russian forces conducted ground attacks in Donetsk Oblast on September 20.
Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks west of Hulyaipole on September 20 and continued routine artillery strikes throughout Zaporizhia Oblast.
Russian forces continue to degrade their force generation capabilities by cannibalizing training elements to fight in combat formations in Ukraine.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 20

Sep 20, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Katherine Lawlor, Karolina Hird, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

September 20, 8:45pm 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.

Russian-appointed occupation officials in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts announced on September 20 that they will hold a “referendum” on acceding to Russia, with a vote taking place from September 23-27.[1] The Kremlin will use the falsified results of these sham referenda to illegally annex all Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and is likely to declare unoccupied parts of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts to be part of Russia as well.

The Kremlin’s annexation plans are primarily targeting a domestic audience; Putin likely hopes to improve Russian force generation capabilities by calling on the Russian people to volunteer for a war to “defend” newly claimed Russian territory. Putin and his advisors have apparently realized that current Russian forces are insufficient to conquer Ukraine and that efforts to build large forces quickly through voluntary mobilization are culminating short of the Russian military’s force requirements. Putin is therefore likely setting legal and informational conditions to improve Russian force generation without resorting to expanded conscription by changing the balance of carrots and sticks the Kremlin has been using to spur voluntary recruitment.

Putin may believe that he can appeal to Russian ethnonationalism and the defense of purportedly “Russian peoples” and claimed Russian land to generate additional volunteer forces. He may seek to rely on enhanced rhetoric in part because the Kremlin cannot afford the service incentives, like bonuses and employment benefits, that it has already promised Russian recruits.[2] But Putin is also adding new and harsher punishments in an effort to contain the risk of the collapse of Russian military units fighting in Ukraine and draft-dodging within Russia. The Kremlin rushed the passage of a new law through the State Duma on September 20, circumventing normal parliamentary procedures.[3] This law codifies dramatically increased penalties for desertion, refusing conscription orders, and insubordination. It also criminalizes voluntary surrender and makes surrender a crime punishable by ten years in prison. The law notably does not order full-scale mobilization or broader conscription or make any preparations for such activities.

ISW has observed no evidence that the Kremlin is imminently intending to change its conscription practices. The Kremlin’s new law is about strengthening the Kremlin’s coercive volunteerism, or what Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov called “self-mobilization.”[4]

The Kremlin is taking steps to directly increase force generation through continued voluntary self-mobilization and an expansion of its legal authority to deploy Russian conscripts already with the force to fight in Ukraine.

Putin’s illegal annexation of occupied Ukrainian territory will broaden the domestic legal definition of “Russian” territory under Russian law, enabling the Russian military to legally and openly deploy conscripts already in the Russian military to fight in eastern and southern Ukraine. Russian leadership has already deployed undertrained conscripts to Ukraine in direct violation of Russian law and faced domestic backlash.[5] Russia’s semi-annual conscription cycle usually generates around 130,000 conscripts twice per year.[6] The next cycle runs from October 1 to December 31. Russian law generally requires that conscripts receive at least four months of training prior to deployment overseas, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied that conscripts will be deployed to Ukraine.[7] Annexation could provide him a legal loophole allowing for the overt deployment of conscripts to fight.
Russian-appointed occupation officials in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts announced the formation of “volunteer” units to fight with the Russian military against Ukraine.[8] Russian forces will likely coerce or physically force at least some Ukrainian men in occupied areas to fight in these units, as they have done in the territories of the Russian proxy Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR).
The Russian State Duma separately passed new incentives for foreign nationals to fight in Russia’s military to obtain Russian citizenship and will likely increase overseas recruitment accordingly.[9] That new law, which deputies also rushed through normal procedures on September 20, allows foreign nationals to gain Russian citizenship by signing a contract and serving in the Russian military for one year. Russian law previously required three years of service to apply for citizenship.
Putin’s appeals to nationalism may generate small increases in volunteer recruitment from within Russia and parts of occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. However, forces generated from such volunteers, if they manifest, will be small and poorly trained. Most eager and able-bodied Russian men and Ukrainian collaborators have likely already volunteered in one of the earlier recruitment phases.
Local Russian administrators will continue to attempt to form volunteer units, with decreasing effect, as ISW has previously reported and mapped.[10]
Russian forces and the Wagner Private Military Company are also directly recruiting from Russian prisons, as ISW has previously reported.[11] These troops will be undisciplined and unlikely to meaningfully increase Russian combat power.

Putin likely hopes that increasing self-mobilization, and cracking down on unwilling Russian forces, will enable him to take the rest of Donetsk and defend Russian-occupied parts of Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts. He is mistaken. Putin has neither the time nor the resources needed to generate effective combat power. But Putin will likely wait to see if these efforts are successful before either escalating further or blaming his loss on a scapegoat. His most likely scapegoat is Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Russian Ministry of Defense. Reports that Shoigu would accompany Putin while Putin gave a speech announced and then postponed on September 20 suggest that Putin intended to make Shoigu the face of the current effort.[12]

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely also intends to deter Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensives by annexing occupied Ukrainian territory and framing Ukrainian attempts to liberate occupied territory as attacks on Russia. Russian officials and propagandists such as Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev issued vague warnings on September 20 that “the infringement of Russian territory is a crime; committing this crime permits using all means of self-defense.”[13] Russian officials are demonstrably panicked over Ukrainian advances, as ISW assessed on September 19.[14] The Kremlin likely intends these vague warnings to exacerbate Ukrainian and global fears of nuclear escalation. However, Putin has already declined to enforce any territory-specific redlines in response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian-annexed Crimea, occupied territory he has controlled for eight years and declares to be Russian.

Ukrainian and Western leaders responded to reports of the impending referenda with renewed declarations of commitment to restoring Ukrainian sovereignty over occupied Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stated on September 20 that “sham ‘referendums’ will not change anything ... Ukraine has every right to liberate its territories and will keep liberating them whatever Russia has to say.”[15] NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on September 20 that “[sham referendums] will only further worsen the situation, and therefore we need to provide more support to Ukraine.”[16] US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on September 20 that the United States “will never recognize this territory as anything other than a part of Ukraine” and will continue to provide “historic support” to Ukraine.[17] German Chancellor Olaf Scholz emphasized on September 19 that “Ukraine has every right to defend the sovereignty and integrity of its own territory and its own democracy.”[18] French President Emmanuel Macron called the sham referenda a “parody” and a “provocation.”

Key Takeaways

Russian-appointed occupation officials in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts announced on September 20 that they will hold a “referendum” on acceding to Russia, with a vote taking place from September 23-27.
The Kremlin’s annexation plans are primarily targeting a domestic audience; Putin likely intends to improve Russian force generation capabilities by calling on the Russian people to volunteer for a war ostensibly to defend newly-claimed Russian territory.
Ukrainian forces continued disrupting ongoing Russian efforts to reestablish ground lines of communications (GLOCs) across the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
Russian forces are likely targeting Ukrainian hydrotechnical infrastructure in Kharkiv and Luhansk oblasts to threaten Ukrainian positions along the Siverskyi Donets River.
Russian forces conducted ground attacks in Donetsk Oblast on September 20.
Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks west of Hulyaipole on September 20 and continued routine artillery strikes throughout Zaporizhia Oblast.
Russian forces continue to degrade their force generation capabilities by cannibalizing training elements to fight in combat formations in Ukraine.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those 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 population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Southern and Eastern Ukraine
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)

Ukrainian forces likely continued offensive operations along the Lyman-Yampil-Bilohorivka line on September 20. An unnamed senior US defense official stated that Ukrainian and Russian forces are engaged in artillery duels near Lyman.[19] Several Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian troops are attacking Lyman from the northwest (around the Sviatohirsk-Yarova area) and south (along the Shchurove-Dibrova line).[20] A Russian milblogger stated that Ukrainian troops attempted to attack Drobysheve, about 5km northwest of Lyman.[21] Geolocated combat footage confirms Russian and Ukrainian claims that Ukrainian troops have taken control of Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast (about 30km southeast of Lyman).[22] Russian sources also continue to indicate that Ukrainian troops are likely conducting offensive operations across the Oskil River with the intention of penetrating Russian rear areas in occupied Luhansk Oblast.[23]

Russian forces are likely targeting Ukrainian hydrotechnical infrastructure in Kharkiv and Luhansk Oblasts to threaten Ukrainian positions along the Siverskyi Donets River. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to destroy a dam over the Pechenizske Reservoir (35km due east of Kharkiv City).[24] The Ukrainian General Staff statement is likely corroborated by social media footage that shows an explosion and a large smoke plume after impact following a reported Russian strike on a dam across the Siverskyi Donets River east of Kharkiv City.[25] The Pechenizske Reservoir is just upstream of the Siverskyi Donets River, along which Ukrainian troops have likely established pontoon bridges and other alternative river crossings on the Tetianivka-Pryshyb-Lyman-Yampil line.[26] Russian forces likely sought to target this dam to flood the Siverskyi Donets River and isolate Ukrainian troops who have crossed the river south of Lyman from established positions on the right bank as well as to prevent additional Ukrainian troops from crossing to attack Russian positions on the left bank.

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Ukrainian forces continued efforts to interdict Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) in Kherson Oblast on September 19 and 20 as Russian troops continue attempts to reconstitute their GLOCs. Ukrainian officials reported multiple Ukrainian air and artillery strikes against Russian manpower and equipment concentration in the Berislav, Henichesk, Kakhovsk, and Kherson districts among other areas, as well as on bridges and pontoon and barge crossings.[27] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian artillery strikes disrupted Russian attempts to establish alternative crossing sites across the Dnipro River around Nova Kakhovka and Kozatske (both 60km east of Kherson City) and that one of the strikes hit a Russian barge loaded with weapons, equipment, and personnel.[28] Social media imagery analysis confirms that the Russians have been trying to establish an alternative crossing point near the Kakhovka Dam from at least September 2 through September 18.[29]

Ukrainian official sources maintained operational silence regarding Ukrainian ground attacks in Kherson Oblast, and Russian sources offered unusually limited coverage of activities in this area on September 20. Pro-Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces went over to the defensive around Posad-Pokrovske (30km northwest of Kherson City) and on the Oleksandrivka front (35km west of Kherson City) after unsuccessful attempts to advance.[30] Russian sources also claimed that Ukrainian forces prepared to conduct offensive operations in the Olhyne-Myrolyubivka area (just south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border) around Arkhanhelske and Lyubymivka, but ISW has no independent confirmation of any of these reports.[31] Ukraine’s Operational Command South reported that Russian forces attempted a platoon-sized attack in the direction of Davydiv Brid—Bilohirka (along the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border near the Inhulets River) but were turned back by Ukrainian artillery.[32]

Pro-Russian sources continue to obsess about a possible Ukrainian operation against the Kinburn Spit in Kherson Oblast, although no evidence has been presented that any such operation was undertaken or planned.[33] Russian forces continue to attack Ochakiv, however, possibly in response to the supposed Ukrainian operation on the Kinburn Spit, and a pro-Russian outlet claimed that Russian forces have recently destroyed the Ukrainian headquarters responsible for “Kinburn Spit” operations.[34]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces conducted ground attacks throughout Donetsk Oblast on September 20. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled attempted Russian advances south of Bakhmut around Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut), Mykolaivka Druha (12km south of Bakhmut), Zaitseve (8km southeast of Bakhmut), and Mayorsk (20km southwest of Bakhmut).[35] A Russian milblogger claimed that the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Army Corps (troops of the Donetsk People’s Republic) took control of Zaitseve, although ISW cannot independently verify this claim.[36] Russian forces additionally conducted ground attacks northeast of Bakhmut near Vesele (18km northeast of Bakhmut) and in Soledar (10km northeast of Bakhmut).[37]

Russian troops continued ground attacks along the northwestern and southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City and attempted to advance around the Pervomaiske-Nevelske area and in Marinka.[38] The Ukrainian General Staff also noted that Russian troops attempted a limited ground attack near Novomykhailivka, 25km southwest of Donetsk City.[39] Russian forces continued routine air and artillery strikes along the line of contact around Bakhmut, the Adviivka-Donetsk City area, western Donetsk Oblast, and eastern Zaporizhia Oblast.[40]

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

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks west of Hulyaipole on September 20 and continued routine artillery strikes throughout Zaporizhia Oblast.[41] Russian sources continued to accuse Ukrainian forces of shelling the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and surrounding infrastructure in Enerhodar.[42] Russian forces continued missile and artillery strikes throughout Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts and targeted infrastructure in the port city of Ochakiv.[43]

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

Russian forces continue to degrade their force generation capabilities by cannibalizing training elements to fight in combat formations in Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian military is forming four new infantry battalions at the base of the Russian 36th Motorized Rifle Brigade (29th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) in Borzya in Zabaykalsky Krai and that the Russian military is pulling faculty from the Russian Far Eastern Higher Combined Arms Command School to serve as officers in these battalions.[44] The Russian military‘s continued stripping of Russian training units and service academies of personnel will further impede its ability to train new conscripts and replacements.[45]

Russia continues to drain its forces deployed on bases outside Russia since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian military-political leadership decided to withdraw unspecified elements of the Russian 217th Airborne Assault Regiment (98th Airborne Division) from the Syrian Arab Republic and prepare them for deployment to Ukraine.[46]

The Kremlin continues mobilizing Ukrainian citizens in occupied southern Ukraine. The Russian-appointed occupation head of occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast Evgeny Balitsky announced plans to form a Zaporizhzhia volunteer battalion of 240 personnel on September 20.[47] The formation of irregular, hastily-trained units adds little effective combat power to Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.[48]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

See the topline text.

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.

[1] https://ria dot ru/20220920/referendum-1818162506.html; https://ria dot ru/20220920/referendum-1818146271.html

[3] http://duma dot gov dot ru/news/55277/; https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/20/world/ukraine-russia-war/russian...

[7] http://pravo dot gov.ru/proxy/ips/?docbody=&nd=102053139#:~:text=%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%83%D1%81%20%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BB%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B0%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%85%20%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C%20%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BF%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C%20%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2,2.; https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-acknowledges-conscripts-were...

[8] https://t.me/SALDO_VGA/146; https://iz dot ru/1398408/2022-09-20/pervyi-dobrovolcheskii-batalon-v-zaporozhe-budet-sostoiat-iz-240-chelovek

[9] http://duma dot gov dot ru/news/55276/

[47] https://iz dot ru/1398408/2022-09-20/pervyi-dobrovolcheskii-batalon-v-zaporozhe-budet-sostoiat-iz-240-chelovek

understandingwar.org

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (20.09.22) CDS comments on key events

CDS Daily brief (20.09.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

On the evening of September 20, the Russian military fired S300 rockets at several villages in Zaporizhzhya Oblast, namely Hryhorivka, Yulyivka, Richne, and Komyshuvakha, head of Zaporizhzhya Oblast Military Administration Oleksandr Starukh said. Information about damages and victims is being clarified.

The head of the Donetsk Oblast Military Administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said that the Russian forces struck Bakhmut around 1 a.m, hitting a high-rise building. Three entrances to the building collapsed. There may be two people under the rubble.

Mykolayiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych said that the volume of humanitarian aid coming to the city has decreased about tenfold in the last three months. However, there are several humanitarian programs, and it is possible to purchase products in supermarket chains, so the local residents are not at risk of starvation. According to him, it is not pensioners who are affected the most, but the people of working age who lost their jobs due to the war.

Kharkiv Oblast police urged residents of Malynyvska, Chkalivska and Pechenezka amalgamated communities to refrain from returning home soon. The retreating Russian forces left mined areas behind, and there are cases of local residents getting blown up by mines.

The head of the Pechenihy amalgamated community in Kharkiv Oblast, Oleksandr Husarov, warned residents of the Pechenihy village about the possible flooding of their houses due to Russian strikes on the Pechenihy dam. He also informed the people about the evacuation plan prepared by the local authorities in such an emergency.

According to the director of the Kharkiv Oblast health care department Maksym Haustov, many medical facilities have been destroyed during the occupation, and it's necessary to find different inpatient and outpatient care locations. He added that the Russian troops also broke a lot of equipment or took it away. "The losses in technical terms are actually 95%," Haustov said.

An operation to transfer the bodies of the fallen soldiers was held today. Ukraine returned the bodies of another 25 of its defenders, the Ministry of Reintegration said.

Two more bodies of men killed and tortured by the Russian forces were found at the former Russian army positions near the village of Myrotske, Bucha district, Kyiv Oblast, the head of Kyiv Oblast Police Andriy Nebytov reported. One of them was a civilian, and his hands were tied behind his back. The other wore a sweatshirt with SBU academy chevrons.

Occupied territories

Russian-installed authorities of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson Oblasts announced that they would hold a vote on joining Russia between 23 and 27 of September. An unrecognized

Russian "senator" from Crimea, Olha Kovitidi, said that after the vote is held, Ukraine's strikes on the occupied Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts will be considered strikes on the Russian territory. Kovitidi's words help explain why Russia decided to go ahead with the sham referenda knowing that their results would be legally void and would not be recognized internationally.

The occupying authorities in Zaporizhzhya Oblast announced that to hold the vote, a group of "election commission" members accompanied by policemen would go from door to door so that residents could vote. Polling stations will be organized for those who cannot vote during such visits.

Volodymyr Rogov, a Russian-installed collaborator from Zaporizhzhya Oblast, said on "Solovyov Live", a Russian state TV propaganda show, that the entire Zaporizhzhya Oblast, including the parts currently controlled by the Ukrainian government, will declare independence based on the results of the referendum. Vladimir Putin did the same with the Ukrainian Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts when recognizing their "independence" on February 21.

Operational situation

It is the 209th day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to protect Donbas"). The enemy continues to concentrate its efforts on establishing full control over the territory of Donetsk Oblast, organizing defense and maintaining control over the captured territories, and disrupting intensive actions of the Ukrainian troops in certain directions.

The enemy fired at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces along the contact line. Russian military takes measures to regroup troops in different directions, deploys reserves and conducts aerial reconnaissance.

Over the past 24 hours, in violation of the norms of international humanitarian law, laws and customs of war, the Russian forces have launched 10 missiles and 15 airstrikes and fired more than 56 MLRS rounds at targets on the territory of Ukraine. Over the past day, the infrastructure of more than 33 Ukrainian towns and villages has been damaged due to the Russian shelling. In particular, Slavhorod, Kramatorsk, Bakhmut, Mayorsk, Vodyane, Dorozhne, Soledar, Novopil, Zaporizhzhya, Mykolaiv, Oleksandrivka, Snihurivka, Nova Odesa, Shyroke, Bilohirsk, Myrolyubivka, and Bila Krynytsia have been affected.

The Russian military fired tanks, mortars, and various types of artillery at Mykolaivka, Chernihiv Oblast, and Novovasylivka, Slavhorod, and Ryasne, in Sumy Oblast. The threat of Russian air and missile strikes throughout the territory of Ukraine persists.

The so-called "mobilization" is continuing in the territories temporarily occupied by Russia. As of September 14, the previously issued documents postponing mobilization for about five hundred workers of the Yenakiyeve Metallurgical Plant are canceled. In addition, a ban was introduced for male residents to depart the territory of the temporarily occupied Crimea without the permission of the military commissariats.

The Russian military continues to replenish losses and form reserve units. According to available information, four rifle battalions are being formed at the base of the 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th combined arms army of the Eastern Military District (Borzya of the Zabaykalsky Krai). The officer positions in the aforementioned battalions are staffed with Far Eastern Higher Military Command School teachers. In addition, the formation of a naval rifle regiment at the base of the Black Sea Higher Naval School in temporarily occupied Sevastopol is underway.

During the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian Defence Forces Air Force hit 24 Russian manpower and military equipment concentration areas, 4 anti-aircraft missile systems positions, and one ammunition depot.

Ukrainian air defense units destroyed a Su-25 plane, a cruise missile, and three enemy UAVs.

Over the past day, Ukrainian missile forces and artillery have hit 16 enemy targets, including 6 areas of Russian personnel, weapons and military equipment concentration, 7 artillery firing positions, and 3 ammunition depots.

The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces remain low. Kharkiv direction

• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the

RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;

• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments, 11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.

The Russian forces shelled the positions of the Ukrainian troops with tanks, mortars, barrel and rocket artillery in the areas of Kozacha Lopan, Shevchenkive, Dergachi, Kamianka, Strelecha, Hlyboke and Dvorichna.

Units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine liberated Krymka, Yarova and Oleksandrivka.

Kramatorsk direction

● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;

● 252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.

The Russian forces shelled the Ukrainian Defense Forces with tanks, mortars, barrel and jet artillery in the areas of Oleksandrivka, Donetske, Raihorodok, Shchurove, Kryva Luka, Ozerne, Bilohorivka, Pryshyb, Hryhorivka and Siversk.

On September 18, a successful attack on the area of the Russian weapons and military equipment concentration was confirmed around Novoaidar, Luhansk Oblast. About 50 units of enemy military equipment were destroyed and put out of order; ammunition was also destroyed.

In the area around Svatove, units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces inflicted damage on the Russian manpower concentration area. 70% of the personnel was destroyed.

Donetsk direction

● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet", 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian military fired at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces near Mayorsk, Mykolaivka, Verkhnokamyanske, Soledar, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Vesela Dolyna, Odradivka, Vesele, Vyimka, Mykolaivka Druha, New York, Bilohorivka, Yuryivka, Spirne, Zaitseve, Yakovlivka, Krasnohorivka, Maryinka, Novomykhailivka and Pervomaiske.

Units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled Russian attacks in the areas of Mayorsk, Vesele, Kurdyumivka and Novomykhailivka.

Zaporizhzhya direction

● Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined

Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian forces did not take active actions.

Vuhledar, Velyka Novosilka, Mykilske, Mali Shcherbaky, Novomayorske, Mala Tokmachka, Chervone, Pavlivka, Hulyaipole, Novopil and Vremivka were affected by enemy artillery shelling.

Kherson direction

● Vasylivka–Nova Zburyivka and Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line - 252 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 27, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.3 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 114th, 143rd and 394th motorized rifle regiments, 218th tank regiment of the 127th motorized rifle division of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 57th and 60th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division, 51st and 137th parachute airborne regiments of the 106th parachute airborne division, 7th military base of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 16th and 346th separate SOF brigades.

There is no change in the operational situation.

Kherson-Berislav bridgehead

● Velyka Lepetikha – Oleksandrivka section: approximate length of the battle line – 250 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces – 22, the average width of the combat area of one BTG –

11.8 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 108th Air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault brigade of the 7th Air assault division, 4th military base of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 239th Air assault regiments of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331 Air assault regiments of the 98th Air assault division, 126th separate coastal defense brigade, 127th separate ranger brigade, 11th separate airborne assault brigade, 10th separate SOF brigade, PMC.

The Russian forces shelled more than 28 towns and villages, including Oleksandrivka, Novohryhorivka, Zorya, Shevchenkove, Myrne, Shyroke, Bilohirka, Bezimenne, Myrolyubivka, Vysokopillya and Olhyne.

Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:

The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the sea and connect unrecognized Transnistria with the Russian Federation by land through the coast of the Black and Azov seas.

After the storm in the Black Sea ended, the number of enemy ships at sea significantly increased. Currently, there are 11 warships at sea providing reconnaissance and blocking shipping in the Azov-Black Sea waters. Among them are three cruise missile carriers. Up to 24 Kalibr missiles can be ready for a salvo.

Russian missile and artillery attacks on Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Ochakiv have resumed. The Russian military uses cruise missiles, S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, MLRS, and artillery. On the night of September 20, the port of Ochakiv was attacked by two Iranian-made kamikaze drones for the first time. The mine hazard on the Black Sea coast of southern Ukraine remains relevant.

Russian aviation continues to fly from the Crimean airfields of Belbek and Hvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 12 Su-27, Su-30, and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved. In addition, a large concentration of helicopters is observed at Crimean airfields, namely more than 70 in Dzhankoy and 7 in Kirovske.

Amphibious ships are in the ports of Novorossiysk and Sevastopol for replenishment and scheduled maintenance. There are no indications of preparation for an amphibious assault on the southern coast of Ukraine.

All 4 submarines of project 636.3 are at their main base in Novorossiysk.

The movement of military equipment by road and rail transport through the temporarily occupied Crimea in the direction of Kherson Oblast remains intensive. It is confirmed that the Russian Federation is moving its troops, equipment and ammunition to the right bank of the Dnipro by the river fleet vessels they have captured. The movement continues between Kherson, Oleshki, Hola Prystan and Nova Kakhovka (instead of using the damaged bridges).

On September 20, the Armed Forces of Ukraine sank a barge with Russian personnel and equipment near Nova Kakhovka. It should be noted that this is not the first Russian barge sunk by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Before that, the Ukrainian Armed Forces sunk barges with the occupying forces on September 17 and 7. It is known that on September 7, the barge was sunk near Hola Prystan.

On September 20, bulk carriers PGE RAIN, SSI PRIDE, RIDER, TINA S left the quays of Odesa port, and APHRODITE M, NYMPHI, PAULINE, NORAN left the port of Chornomorsk. Also, today, the bulk carrier BC VANESSA, the fourth vessel chartered by the World Food Program (WFP) of the United Nations, was moored at the port of Odesa. The bulk carrier will be loaded with 30,000

tons of wheat to be delivered to Afghanistan. Since the departure of the first ship with Ukrainian food, 4.1 million tons of agricultural products have been exported (including 3.1 million tons in the first 20 days of September).

Russian operational losses from 24.02 to 20.09

Personnel - almost 54,810 people (+160);

Tanks – 2,216 (+4);

Armored combat vehicles – 4,724 (+4);

Artillery systems – 1,323 (+10);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 318 (+6); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 168 (0); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,587 (+6); Aircraft - 252 (+1);

Helicopters – 217 (0);

UAV operational and tactical level - 925 (+5); Intercepted cruise missiles - 239 (+1);

Boats / ships - 15 (0).

Ukraine, general news

85% of respondents expect Ukraine to join the EU by 2030, and 79% of Ukrainians would like Ukraine to join NATO by 2030, compared to 73% in May. The survey was conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology and the National Democratic Institute in Ukraine on August 2-9. It should be noted that in December 2021, 58% of Ukrainians wanted Ukraine's membership in the EU, and 48% of respondents were in favor of NATO, Ukrainska Pravda emphasized.

International diplomatic aspect

"He [Putin] is actually showing me that he's willing to end this as soon as possible," said Turkey's President. It was Erdogan's impression "because the way things are going right now is quite problematic." However, Vladimir Putin's political entourage is talking about referenda in Russia's occupied territories of Ukraine. "From the very beginning ... we've been saying that the peoples of the respective territories should decide their fate," said Sergey Lavrov. "They [referenda] completely change the vector of Russia's development for decades. Encroachment on the territory of Russia is a crime, the commission of which allows you to use all the forces of self- defense," wrote Dmitriy Medvedev, once "a liberal" President of Russia, in his telegram channel.

It's symptomatic that Russia is so obsessed with sham referenda and elections, as it finds itself among the twenty least free countries according to the Freedom House and forty least free in the Human Freedom Index. Besides murdering and jailing political opponents and journalists, denying a slim chance of any opposition to get to the Parliament or regional legislatures, Putin held a referendum wiping off limits on his inevitable re-elections. On top of that, Russia is one of the most experienced countries in holding referenda at gunpoint in the occupied territories of Ukraine (Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk), Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), and Moldova (Transnistria).

"The Russians can do whatever they want. It will not change anything," replied Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's Foreign Minister. "[The referenda] are worth nothing - the truth is that the result is decided in the Kremlin and not by voting," Andrzej Duda told reporters during his attendance at the UN General Assembly.

The Russian Duma amended the Criminal Code and enriched it with "mobilization," "wartime," and "martial law" clauses. A voluntary surrender will lead to imprisonment for three to ten years, while looting will be punished with up to fifteen years behind bars. Reservists declining to attend military training are equivalent to deserting contract soldiers and conscripts. The anti-war "Vesna" movement called on Russian servicemen to refuse to participate in the war or to surrender before it became a criminal offence.

After heavy losses on the battlefield and waves of Russian soldiers' surrender, the Russian military leadership turned to covert mobilization, employment of Russian and foreign mercenaries, and even prisoners. "Our information indicates that Wagner [the Russian private military company, though illegal under Russian law] has been suffering high losses in Ukraine, especially and unsurprisingly among young and inexperienced fighters," said a Pentagon official. The Wagner Group is trying to recruit over 1,500 convicted felons to participate in the war, but many refuse to join. It is reported that the criminals are promised to be pardoned if they would serve half of a year in Ukraine. However, Russian legislation doesn't provide legal grounds for such pardon schemes. Meanwhile, Moscow's Mayor said he would establish a recruitment facility for military service at the Sakharovo migration center.

Russian dictator is coping with the inability to escalate the war, given the degraded capabilities of the invasion forces and restrains of replenishing arms and munition, along with combat- capable troops. Orchestrating sham referenda and tightening the mobilization legislation, Vladimir Putin is trying to impress his subjects and the target audiences in Ukraine and the West. His options don't include stopping war and withdrawing troops from the Ukrainian territory. Instead, he might declare an all-out war and call the general mobilization that won't change much in real terms. However, such a decision might accelerate the collapse of the shaky economy and break up a silent consensus among Russians who either formally support or are ignorant about the war but aren't eager to take arms.

Putin's "urgent" address to the nation, announced at 8 pm on September 20, was postponed first for an hour and then till tomorrow. It was leaked that he would comment on numerous referenda in Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine and announce total mobilization in Russia. Meanwhile, Russian Google searches queries "Delay from the army" and "How to leave Russia" have sharply increased on Google.

The EU Council formally adopted the decision to provide € 5 billion of additional macro-financial assistance to Ukraine. This decision should be followed swiftly by adopting the third stage of the planned macro-financial assistance for a further amount of up to €3 billion.

The UK will meet or exceed the amount of military aid spent on Ukraine in 2022 next year, which is £2.3 billion. "The precise nature of UK military support in 2023 will be determined based on the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, it is expected to include equipment like the Multiple Launch Rocket System," stated in the Downing 10 press release.

Ukraine will donate 30,000 metric tons of wheat to Ethiopia and Somalia, worth $11.4 million. The bulker with the grain will depart from the Odesa port via the UN-backed grain corridor.

Russia, relevant news

In response to today's announcement about the planned fake referenda in the occupied Ukrainian territories, the Russian stock market fell by 8.84% during the main session on Tuesday. It's the maximum fall since February 24, according to the Moscow Exchange.

The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) published its decision regarding the 2024 European Football Championship stating that Russia is not allowed to compete.

Centre for Defence Strategies (CDS) is a Ukrainian security think tank. We operate since 2020 and are involved in security studies, defence policy research and advocacy. Currently all our activity is focused on stopping the ongoing war.

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3. China Is Capable of Blockading Taiwan, U.S. Navy Commander Says

Excerpts:

“They’ve completely militarized those islands,” he said. “They already have all the bunkers they need, they already have all the fuel storage capacity they need, the ability to house troops, they have the missiles, the radars, the sensors.”

China has the world’s largest navy by size, though the U.S. has more-advanced warships, including a larger aircraft-carrier fleet, giving it a qualitative edge. Adm. Thomas said China is turning out navy ships at an impressive rate, while the U.S. doesn’t have as many shipyards producing navy ships as it needs. China, for instance, is producing its Type 055 destroyers—a large and heavily armed surface ship, also known as the Renhai-class cruiser, that has become a symbol of China’s naval modernization—at a much greater rate than the U.S. is producing guided-missile destroyers, he said.

“Capacity has a quality all of its own,” he said.

Difficulties China might have coordinating across different branches of its armed services, which is how modern militaries operate, has long been seen as a potential weakness for the country’s military. But China has made progress on that front, Adm. Thomas said. Aircraft from China’s air force are flying across water, whereas only its navy undertook such flights four years ago, he said.

“They are more joint than they were a year ago, three years ago, five years ago,” he said.

China Is Capable of Blockading Taiwan, U.S. Navy Commander Says

‘If they want to bully and put ships around Taiwan, they very much can do that,’ said Vice Adm. Karl Thomas

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-capable-of-blockading-taiwan-u-s-navy-commander-says-11663585457

China’s armed forces are capable of blockading Taiwan, a senior U.S. Navy official said, pointing to the size of the country’s navy, which is the world’s largest and growing at a rapid pace.

“They have a very large navy, and if they want to bully and put ships around Taiwan, they very much can do that,” Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

China conducted military drills last month that sought to demonstrate its ability to blockade Taiwan, a democratic, self-governing island it sees as part of its territory. The drills came in response to a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island in August and occurred in six zones that effectively encircled Taiwan. By using a blockade, military analysts say, Beijing could try to force submission by Taiwan’s government without an invasion.

For decades, Washington has maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity, not saying whether it would directly intervene in a conflict. Though the White House says that policy hasn’t changed, President Biden has said that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China tried to invade. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” he reiterated his position, saying the U.S. military would get involved if there was an unprecedented attack.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which included a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, was the highest-level U.S. trip to the island in 25 years.

PHOTO: HANDOUT/TAIWAN PRESIDENTIAL OFFI/SHUTTERSTOCK

Speaking with the Journal before President Biden’s interview aired, Adm. Thomas said he didn’t know if China would carry out an invasion or a blockade, but it was his job to be ready for whatever they do. He said he hoped China would resolve differences over the island peacefully. If China were to mount a blockade, Adm. Thomas said the international community could step in.

“Clearly if they do something that’s non-kinetic, which, you know, a blockade is less kinetic,” he said, meaning it isn’t an all-out attack involving lethal force, “then that allows the international community to weigh in and to work together on how we’re going to solve that challenge.”

We don't have an organizational problem, we have a leadership problem

Pointing fingers, turf fights, & dumb ops are products of absent leadership

mountainrunner.substack.com · by Matt Armstrong

Saying we have a leadership problem in the field of international information activities – whether you call this public diplomacy, strategic communication, countering disinformation, correcting misinformation, or something else – is an old refrain. Too many, however, intentionally avoid the leadership issue, instead, they pretend that a certain organizational structure will magically unlock the leadership, cohesiveness, and efficiency that currently eludes the US. Leaving aside logic and ~~common~~ sense, time and time again, examples are served up showing that it is leadership and not organizational structures that matter.

The latest example is a recent article by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times, “State Department watchdog gives failing grade to new counter-disinformation center.” Gertz writes:

The State Department unit devoted to countering disinformation and propaganda is failing to take the lead on government-wide efforts to expose foreign lies and deception, according to a new survey by the department’s internal inspector general.

The Global Engagement Center (GEC) still lacks the authority to carry out its mission and has not been led by presidentially-appointed officials for nearly half its existence, the IG stated following an eight-month probe that ended in March — despite having a staff of 167 people, mostly non-government contractors, and an annual budget of over $74 million. …

The IG found that the center’s response was hampered by problems with contracting, communicating and operating efficiently in dealing with foreign propaganda. Additionally, the center’s mission must deal with competing counter-disinformation programs at multiple government agencies, including the Homeland Security Department, Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

There are several issues to unpack here, but I’ll just discuss three below. These two aren’t in order of priority. In fact, #2 is more important as its more impactful, but since I keep reading about the need for a legislative “fix” imposed on the executive, which is what GEC kind of was (if you really think about it, GEC was Congress’s attempt to recreate USIA, though I don’t think anyone thought of it like that), that’s where I’ll start.

First, is the lack of action by Congress. Establishing GEC was a half-hearted organizational fire-and-forget “fix.” I know Members of Congress are proud they backed establishing GEC through legislation more than five years ago, but the lack of serious follow-up indicates the underlying hope it would work. Hope is (still) not a strategy, however. We can leave aside that GEC existed before the 2016 amendment, which was introduced six years ago, to the National Defense Authorization Act. We should not ignore, though, that the GEC authorization was in the NDAA and not a State authorization bill, which is indicative of Congress’s abrogation of its oversight role in non-military foreign affairs operations, including the State Department. It is sad to say, but the lack of oversight and accountability is essentially a feature and not a bug at this point.

In my “Gray Zone” testimony before Congress in July, I implored the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee to do their job – in the politest way I could – instead of looking at the sexy shiny baubles in DOD, the IC, and elsewhere. The incurious oversight in Congress and in the executive enables and even encourages the problems we complain about publicly and privately. While the legislative can’t make the executive execute, something I remind the Hill whenever I’m asked if this or that proposed bill they send me will “fix” whatever problem, they can call hearings to bring discomfort for the lack of action and poor action, but they fail to do any such thing. Fire-and-forget plus hope.

The second issue is the lack of leadership by the executive branch. Gertz writes GEC “has not been led by presidentially-appointed officials for nearly half its existence.” Funny enough, GEC’s notional boss, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and (Global?) Public Affairs has also not been filled by a presidentially-appointed official for nearly half its existence. In the case of this under secretary, the vacancy rate is 44% of the days since the first incumbent in October 1999.

The absence of leadership means an absence of strategy, oversight, cohesiveness, coherency in and across operations, invites operational competition, turf fights, reduces coordination, and unintentionally fosters ignorance of the government’s own capabilities that can be leveraged rather than recreated. We see this in the recent reporting about the social media debacle from (apparently) US Central Command, including the biting comments from State and elsewhere. (Back on 1 September, when news of the shuttered accounts first broke, I shared with a public diplomacy scholar that I figured these activities were CENTCOM contractors working a theater security contract with minimal direction and less oversight. The activities were too dumb to have been conducted by active PSYOP personnel.)

Leadership begins with the President and the Secretary of State, full stop. Chris Paul and I closed with this point in our July 2022 article “The Irony Of Misinformation: USIA Myths Block Enduring Solutions.” Further, leadership is not just about appointing someone but supporting and holding that person and other leadership accountable. In other words, the failure to appoint leaders is a symptom of an endemic problem and not the problem itself.

The third issue is with authorities. Gertz wrote GEC “still lacks the authority to carry out its mission.” What authority or authorities does it lack? I’d certainly like to know. There are basically two kinds of authorities that could be at issue here. First, there is statutory authority. Conversations I’ve had with folks near to GEC and broader around public diplomacy in State and Congress and elsewhere generally pointed to the Smith-Mundt Act as inhibiting this or that. More precisely, they were told Smith-Mundt prevented this or that, and when they went back, sometimes with information I provided, specifics were unavailable. In other words, “show me where it says I can’t do x” was followed by the equivalent of hemming and hawing and shifting. It seems, from my cheap seat, that the issue is with some lawyer’s interpretation of the authorities rather than the specific authorities, and this interpretation is often wrong, in my direct experience over the past decade. (Here, I’m reminded of the DOD’s August 2006 legal guidance that since DOD seemed to be doing things similar to State’s public diplomacy activities, DOD must then be constrained by the same Title 22 restrictions but applied to DOD’s Title 10 activities until Congress says otherwise. I helped raise this point with Congress, which resulted in the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012.)

If the lacked authority is within the State Department, this is strictly a leadership issue. The absence of leadership makes it an issue as fiefdoms are defended, coordination is inhibited, reticence to change course is effectively rewarded (or not punished, take your pick), lack of accountability reduces perceived value, and so on.

It is also possible, of course, that both are true: there is required statutory authority for GEC to be more effective and there is authority (or are authorities) within the department GEC requires. That’s fair, but on the statutory authority, has there been a definitive declaration on what is needed and why? I’ve had conversations with the Hill about statutory authorities around this and, of course, specifically around the Smith-Mundt Act, and I’ve not heard anything about this, but that’s just me, a random guy living in Europe. You’d think that GEC would go to its proud founding champions on the Hill and ask for the necessary authorities. Now, what if State has prevented this? Or, what if the authority problem isn’t statutory but departmental? We don’t know, and in the many years GEC has been around, there’s been no public airing of such issues. Why? Because leadership doesn’t care. It is just a sideshow.

mountainrunner.substack.com · by Matt Armstrong

5. US making progress on cyber defense, but up against some 'significant hurdles': Commission report

Excerpts:

Following another recommendation, White House’s national cyber director Chris Inglis is slated to finalize a national cyber strategy within the next few weeks.

“In addition to having a pen on the national cyber strategy, which is absolutely essential… two other areas where [Inglis has] already had an impact is kind of tackling the cyber workforce issue head on,” Sen. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., said at the FDD event. “He’s done a variety of things to practically do outreach on that. Obviously it’s not something that can be solved with a silver bullet solution coming out of the White House or Congress, but also my understanding is he actually has productively worked with the [Office of Management and Budget] in order to kind of really establish guidelines for various funding goals among all the agencies that play on cyber.”

US making progress on cyber defense, but up against some 'significant hurdles': Commission report - Breaking Defense

In discussing the new Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0 report, Sen. Angus King speculated some cyber deterrence against Russia is already paying off, with Putin "afraid" of the NSA.

breakingdefense.com · by Jaspreet Gill · September 21, 2022

U.S. Sen. Angus King (I-ME) speaks to reporters about a corporate minimum tax plan at the U.S. Capitol October 26, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — More than two years after the Cyberspace Solarium Commission made recommendations on how the US can bolster its cyber defenses, nearly 85 percent have been implemented or are in progress — but others still face a few “significant hurdles,” according to the commission’s new report. Overall, it’s work lawmakers said have already shown benefits when it comes to pushing back against Russian cyber activity.

The report, published today by Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0, paints a picture of some of the significant improvements over the past two years in US cybersecurity: Congress passed the Cyber Incident Reporting Act requiring companies to report cyberattacks and ransomware incidents, lawmakers increased funding for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the White House appointed a national cyber director.

“Collectively, these changes will help deter malign actors in cyberspace and shore up U.S. defenses at home,” according to the report. “They will also make digital interactions safer for stakeholders across industry and around the world… However, this progress cannot be the culmination of the U.S. government’s focus on cybersecurity; it must be the prelude to even further changes.”

As far as malign actors go, the report specifically pointed to a few successes under some of the recommendations that are on track to being implemented, like streamlining the attribution of cyberattacks through the “Cyber Incident Data and Analysis Working Group” and the “Cyber Incident Attribution and Analysis Decision Rubric.” These tools have already sped up attribution in recent years, the report said, including as recently as this February when Russia launched several cyberattacks against Ukraine at the onset of the invasion.

“Within just three days of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger accused Russia of perpetrating the attack,” according to the report. “The British government concurred. Subsequently, CISA released an advisory noting the indicators of compromise of the associated attack. The speedy attribution capabilities between the United States and its allies show the potential of this approach.”

Such cyber attacks were to be expected from Russia’s aggressive cyber operators, but Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, co-chair of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0, said today during an event held by The Foundation of Defense of Democracies (FDD) that he was a little surprised they weren’t more widespread, especially against the US and its allies. One reason, he speculated, was that Putin may be intimidated by the work of the National Security Agency. (The CMC 2.0 is housed within the FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.)

“I believe that we would have seen more of a cyber intrusion into the West, but for Putin is afraid of [Director of US Cyber Command Gen. Paul] Nakasone,” King said. “I think Putin is deterred, frankly, by the capabilities that we have and by what Nakasone and what NSA demonstrated in 2018 in the midterm elections… Now, again, I can’t prove that because they didn’t attack. My belief is that an attack might have been more likely but for the concern of the Russians that they were at risk. And in that case I think deterrence has made a real contribution.”

Overall the report shows that nearly 60 percent of the initial 82 recommendations made by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission in March 2020 have been fully or nearly implemented while more than 25 percent are on track to being implemented. Since the initial recommendations were made, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0, which was formed when the initial commission reached the planned end of its mandate, has added to the list, bringing the total number up to 116 recommendations.

The report also categories some recommendations made by the commission as having “significant barriers to implementation. Those recommendations “are not expected to move in the in the immediate future but are ready to be taken up if future crises spur action,” according to the report.

“National cyber resiliency requires long-term investment,” the report says. “Thwarting and punishing malicious cyber actors require persistence. Layered cyber deterrence demands sustained attention.”

King bemoaned how one recommendation in particular — setting up powerful congressional committees on cybersecurity similar to the current intelligence committees — has been so difficult to implement.

“In [1976] they realized that intelligence was spread all over the Congress and they set up committees on intelligence in the Senate and House to consolidate that jurisdiction. I don’t know how they did it, because trying to do that with cyber we have found is virtually impossible,” King said. “Nobody wants to give up their little piece of the jurisdiction.”

However, according to the report, legislative language has been drafted pertaining to that recommendation “and stands ready should a future emergency create the political impetus needed to overcome existing barriers.”

Following another recommendation, White House’s national cyber director Chris Inglis is slated to finalize a national cyber strategy within the next few weeks.

“In addition to having a pen on the national cyber strategy, which is absolutely essential… two other areas where [Inglis has] already had an impact is kind of tackling the cyber workforce issue head on,” Sen. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., said at the FDD event. “He’s done a variety of things to practically do outreach on that. Obviously it’s not something that can be solved with a silver bullet solution coming out of the White House or Congress, but also my understanding is he actually has productively worked with the [Office of Management and Budget] in order to kind of really establish guidelines for various funding goals among all the agencies that play on cyber.”

6. FDD | 2022 Annual Report on Implementation

The 56 page report can be downloaded here: https://www.fdd.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/fdd-csc2.0-2022-annual-report.pdf

Table of contents and Exceutive Summary are below.

Cyberspace Solarium Commission Recommendations Tracker

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2022/09/21/cyberspace-solarium-commission-recommendations-tracker/

Table of Contents

Executive Summary......................................................................................................... 2

Commission Background................................................................................................ 3

Transition to CSC 2.0 and Future Plans................................................................................ 3

Evaluating Progress......................................................................................................... 4

Recommendations From the March 2020 CSC Report................................................. 6

Pillar 1: Reform the U.S. Government’s Structure and Organization for Cyberspace......6

Pillar 2: Strengthen Norms and Non-military Tools........................................................... 9

Pillar 3: Promote National Resilience..................................................................................12

Pillar 4: Reshape the Cyber Ecosystem Toward Greater Security................................15

Pillar 5: Operationalize Cybersecurity Collaboration With the Private Sector..........21

Pillar 6: Preserve and Employ the Military Instrument of Power..................................24

CSC White Papers.......................................................................................................... 27

White Paper #1: Cybersecurity Lessons From the Pandemic.......................................27

White Paper #2: National Cyber Director..........................................................................28

White Paper #3: Growing a Stronger Federal Cyber Workforce..................................29

White Paper #4: Building a Trusted ICT Supply Chain....................................................31

White Paper #6: Countering Disinformation in the United States...............................34

Further Work by CSC 2.0............................................................................................... 35

Conclusion...................................................................................................................... 36

FDD | 2022 Annual Report on Implementation

fdd.org · by Jiwon Ma Program Analyst · September 21, 2022

September 21, 2022 | Monograph

2022 Annual Report on Implementation

RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery

CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow

Download Monograph

September 21, 2022 | Monograph

2022 Annual Report on Implementation

Jiwon Ma

Program Analyst

RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery

CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow

Download Monograph

Executive Summary

The past two years have been witness to significant improvements in U.S. cybersecurity. Critical legislation has broken loose from long-standing jurisdictional conflicts to become law. Congress passed the Cyber Incident Reporting Act, which requires critical infrastructure companies to report cyberattacks and ransomware incidents. Lawmakers have increased funding for government cybersecurity efforts, particularly at the country’s primary cybersecurity agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security, whose budget has grown by more than 25 percent, from $2 billion for FY20 appropriation to $2.59 billion for FY22 appropriation. Even more funding is expected in FY23. The White House now has a national cyber director (NCD) to lead the coordination of cybersecurity strategy and policy implementation across the government. The State Department has a bureau and a nominated ambassador charged with leading America’s international engagement on cyberspace challenges. And the executive branch has taken other important actions (based on new legislation), such as the establishment of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative at CISA.

Progress Toward Implementation of the March 2020 Recommendations

Collectively, these changes will help deter malign actors in cyberspace and shore up U.S. defenses at home. They will also make digital interactions safer for stakeholders across industry and around the world. Most importantly, these changes will help to protect every American who uses the internet for work, study, or staying connected with loved ones. However, this progress cannot be the culmination of the U.S. government’s focus on cybersecurity; it must be the prelude to even further changes.

Congress created the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC) to identify a strategic approach to securing cyberspace. Over the course of three years, the Commission developed 116 recommendations, many of which are accompanied by model legislative language. The Commission’s original report in March 2020 had 82 recommendations. Of these, nearly 60 percent are fully implemented or nearing implementation, and more than 25 percent are on track to implementation.

However, implementation is not the same as success. Lasting improvements in national cyber resilience will take sustained attention, investment, and agility to address the ever-shifting threat landscape. Accordingly, this assessment details both the progress of the Commission’s original work as well as the work of the non-profit CSC 2.0 project that has accepted the baton in the long race to secure cyberspace. Even as we issue this progress report, we know that assessing implementation is not enough. We urge readers to consider this report as a mid-course check, laying a path for the many stakeholders in government and industry charged with a task that we cannot afford to fail — protecting our national cybersecurity.

Senator Angus King (I-ME)

Co-Chair

CSC 2.0

Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI)

Co-Chair

CSC 2.0

Download Report

Download

2022 Annual Report on Implementation

Download

Executive Summary

U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, “Summary of H.R. 1158 FY2020 Consolidated National Security Appropriations Package,” December 2019, page 15. (https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/121619%20–%20HR1158%20Natl%20Security%20Package%20Summary.pdf)
Mark Montgomery, “Congress Invests in National Cyber Resilience but Misses Important Opportunities in the Consolidated Appropriations Act,” Lawfare, April 1, 2022. (https://www.lawfareblog.com/congress-invests-national-cyber-resilience-misses-important-opportunities-consolidated)
House Committee on Appropriations, “Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, 2023,” June 24, 2022, page 52. (https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20220624/114951/HMKP-117-AP00-20220624-SD003.pdf)

fdd.org · by Jiwon Ma Program Analyst · September 21, 2022

7. The Kremlin Must Be in Crisis

Conclusion:

Over the next few days, the bogus referenda will gather headlines, and the nuclear threats will create fear, as they were designed to do. But we should understand these attempts at blackmail and intimidation as a part of the deeper story told by this delayed speech: Support for Putin is eroding—abroad, at home, and in the army. Everything else he says and does right now is nothing more than an attempt to halt that decline.

The Kremlin Must Be in Crisis

Putin’s erratic actions are not those of a secure leader.

By Anne Applebaum

The Atlantic · by Anne Applebaum · September 21, 2022

If an American president announced a major speech, booked the networks for 8 p.m., and then disappeared until the following morning, the analysis would be immediate and damning: chaos, disarray, indecision. The White House must be in crisis.

In the past 24 hours, this is exactly what happened in Moscow. The Russian president really did announce a major speech, alert state television, warn journalists, and then disappear without explanation. Although Vladimir Putin finally gave his speech to the nation this morning, the same conclusions have to apply: chaos, disarray, indecision. The Kremlin must be in crisis.

In fact, no elements of the delayed speech were completely new or unexpected. Russian authorities have long intended to hold sham referenda in the Ukrainian territories they occupy. Putin and his television propagandists have been making subtle and unsubtle nuclear threats since February. Quietly, a creeping mobilization has been going on for many weeks too, as the Russian army has sought to recruit more men to replace the soldiers whom it still does not admit have been killed, wounded, or exhausted by the war. But now that Ukraine has successfully recaptured thousands of square miles of Russian-held territory, the sham referenda are being rushed, the nuclear language is being repeated, and the mobilization expanded. These are not the actions of a secure leader assured of his legitimacy and of the outcome of this war.

In part, the crisis stems from Putin’s fears that he will lose whatever counts as his international support. No ideology holds together the global autocrats’ club, and no sentiment does either. As long as they believed Russia really had the second largest army in the world, as long as Putin seemed destined to stay in power indefinitely, then the leaders of China, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, along with the strongmen running India and Turkey, were happy to tolerate his company.

From the October 2022 issue: The man who chased history

But Putin’s supposedly inevitable military victory is in jeopardy. His army looks weak. Western sanctions make problems not just for him but his trading partners, and their tolerance is receding. At a summit in Uzbekistan last week, he was snubbed by a series of Central Asian leaders. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told him that “today’s era is not an era of war,” and Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his “concerns” as well. On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told PBS that he had urged Putin to end the war: “The lands which were invaded will be returned to Ukraine.” And those lands, he made clear, should include Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, following a sham referendum much like the ones it now plans to stage in other parts of occupied Ukraine.

But while losing support abroad is bad, losing support at home is worse, and there are some signs of that too. Putin might not care much about the Russian liberals and exiles who oppose the war, but he may worry (and should worry) about people who are supposed to be on his side—people such as Alla Pugacheva, a Soviet-era pop star who has millions of mainstream followers and has recently proclaimed both her patriotism and her opposition to the war. Putin may also worry about the disappointed, pro-war nationalist bloggers, active on social media, who have been criticizing the conduct of the war for some time. “Mobilization is, let’s put it bluntly, our only chance to avoid a crushing defeat,” one of them recently wrote. No one has stopped or arrested these critics, perhaps because they have protectors high up inside the security services, or perhaps because they are connected to the heavily armed mercenaries who are now doing much of the important fighting in Ukraine. If their loyalty isn’t assured, then Putin isn’t secure either.

At the same time, the Russian president has to balance the discontent of that heavily armed minority against the wishes of the mostly apathetic, mostly silent majority. For the past six months, Putin has been telling the latter that there is no war, just a special military operation; that Russia has suffered no losses, just some temporary setbacks. Given that the army is victorious and everything is fine, most people need not alter their lives in any way. Now events have forced Putin to change his language, but it seems there are limits. Thus he speaks not of a true mass mobilization—which would involve conscripting young men in enormous numbers—but of partial mobilization: no students, no general call-up, just the activation of reservists with past military experience. Supposedly Russia has 300,000 such people, though it’s not clear how many of them are actually fit to fight or whether there are enough weapons and gear for them either. Presumably if better equipment were available, it would already be on the battlefield.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the speech and a series of legal changes announced yesterday reflect a crisis inside the military. In truth, the Russian army faces not just a logistical emergency or some tactical problems but also a collapse in morale. That’s why Putin needs more soldiers, and that’s why, as in Stalin’s time, the Russian state has now defined “voluntary surrender” as a crime: Under a law approved by the Russian Parliament yesterday, you can be sent to prison for up to 10 years. If you desert your guard post in Donetsk or Kherson (or change into civilian clothes and run away, as some Russian soldiers have done in the past few weeks). The state has also decreed new penalties for mutiny—“using violence against a superior”—and stealing while in uniform. If the Russian army were a reliable, enthusiastic, dedicated fighting force, then the state would not need to declare harsh punishments for deserters, looters and mutineers. But it is not.

Anne Applebaum: It’s time to prepare for a Ukrainian victory

Over the next few days, the bogus referenda will gather headlines, and the nuclear threats will create fear, as they were designed to do. But we should understand these attempts at blackmail and intimidation as a part of the deeper story told by this delayed speech: Support for Putin is eroding—abroad, at home, and in the army. Everything else he says and does right now is nothing more than an attempt to halt that decline.

The Atlantic · by Anne Applebaum · September 21, 2022

8. Russia’s underperforming military (and ours) - Responsible Statecraft by Andrew J. Bacevich

Excerpts:

I apologize: I know that I have blasphemed. But the times suggest that we weigh the pros and cons of blasphemy. With serious people publicly warning about the possible approach of civil war and many of our far-too-well armed fellow citizens welcoming the prospect, perhaps the moment has come to reconsider the taken-for-granted premises that have sustained U.S. national security policy since the immediate aftermath of World War II.

More blasphemy! Did I just advocate a policy of isolationism?

Heaven forfend! What I would settle for instead is a modicum of modesty and prudence, along with a lively respect for (rather than infatuation with) war.

Here is the unacknowledged bind in which the Pentagon has placed itself — and the rest of us: by gearing up to fight (however ineffectively) anywhere against any foe in any kind of conflict, it finds itself prepared to fight nowhere in particular. Hence, the urge to extemporize on the fly, as has been the pattern in every conflict of ours since the Vietnam War. On occasion, things work out, as in the long-forgotten, essentially meaningless 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. More often than not, however, they don’t, no matter how vigorously our generals and our troops apply the principles of jointness, combined arms, leadership, and logistics.

Americans spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out what makes Vladimir Putin tick. I don’t pretend to know, nor do I really much care. I would say this, however: Putin’s plunge into Ukraine confirms that he learned nothing from the folly of post-9/11 U.S. military policy.

Russia’s underperforming military (and ours) - Responsible Statecraft

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Andrew J. Bacevich · September 17, 2022

In Washington, wide agreement exists that the Russian army’s performance in the Kremlin’s ongoing Ukraine “special military operation” ranks somewhere between lousy and truly abysmal. The question is: Why? The answer in American policy circles, both civilian and military, appears all but self-evident. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has stubbornly insisted on ignoring the principles, practices, and methods identified as necessary for success in war and perfected in this century by the armed forces of the United States. Put simply, by refusing to do things the American way, the Russians are failing badly against a far weaker foe.

Granted, American analysts — especially the retired military officers who opine on national news shows — concede that other factors have contributed to Russia’s sorry predicament. Yes, heroic Ukrainian resistance, reminiscent of the Winter War of 1939-1940 when Finland tenaciously defended itself against the Soviet Union’s more powerful military, caught the Russians by surprise. Expectations that Ukrainians would stand by while the invaders swept across their country proved wildly misplaced. In addition, comprehensive economic sanctions imposed by the West in response to the invasion have complicated the Russian war effort. By no means least of all, the flood of modern weaponry provided by the United States and its allies — God bless the military-industrial-congressional complex — have appreciably enhanced Ukrainian fighting power.

Still, in the view of American military figures, all of those factors take a backseat to Russia’s manifest inability (or refusal) to grasp the basic prerequisites of modern warfare. The fact that Western observers possess a limited understanding of how that country’s military leadership functions makes it all the easier to render such definitive judgments. It’s like speculating about Donald Trump’s innermost convictions. Since nobody really knows, any forcefully expressed opinion acquires at least passing credibility.

The prevailing self-referential American explanation for Russian military ineptitude emphasizes at least four key points:

— First, the Russians don’t understand jointness, the military doctrine that provides for the seamless integration of ground, air, and maritime operations, not only on Planet Earth but in cyberspace and outer space;

— Second, Russia’s land forces haven’t adhered to the principles of combined arms warfare, first perfected by the Germans in World War II, that emphasizes the close tactical collaboration of tanks, infantry, and artillery;

— Third, Russia’s longstanding tradition of top-down leadership inhibits flexibility at the front, leaving junior officers and noncommissioned officers to relay orders from on high without demonstrating any capacity to, or instinct for, exercising initiative on their own;

— Finally, the Russians appear to lack even the most rudimentary understanding of battlefield logistics — the mechanisms that provide a steady and reliable supply of the fuel, food, munitions, medical support, and spare parts needed to sustain a campaign.

Implicit in this critique, voiced by self-proclaimed American experts, is the suggestion that, if the Russian army had paid more attention to how U.S. forces deal with such matters, they would have fared better in Ukraine. That they don’t — and perhaps can’t — comes as good news for Russia’s enemies, of course. By implication, Russian military ineptitude obliquely affirms the military mastery of the United States. We define the standard of excellence to which others can only aspire.

Reducing War to a Formula

All of which begs a larger question the national security establishment remains steadfastly oblivious to: If jointness, combined arms tactics, flexible leadership, and responsive logistics hold the keys to victory, why haven’t American forces — supposedly possessing such qualities in abundance — been able to win their own equivalents of the Ukraine War? After all, Russia has only been stuck in Ukraine for six months, while the U.S. was stuck in Afghanistan for 20 years and still has troops in Iraq almost two decades after its disastrous invasion of that country.

To rephrase the question: Why does explaining the Russian underperformance in Ukraine attract so much smug commentary here, while American military underperformance gets written off?

Perhaps written off is too harsh. After all, when the U.S. military fails to meet expectations, there are always some who will hasten to point the finger at civilian leaders for screwing up. Certainly, this was the case with the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Critics were quick to pin the blame on President Biden for that debacle, while the commanders who had presided over the war there for those 20 years escaped largely unscathed. Indeed, some of those former commanders like retired general and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, aka “King David,” were eagerly sought after by the media as Kabul fell.

So, if the U.S. military performance since the Global War on Terror was launched more than two decades ago rates as, to put it politely, a disappointment — and that would be my view — it might be tempting to lay responsibility at the feet of the four presidents, eight secretaries of defense (including two former four-star generals), and the various deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, and ambassadors who designed and implemented American policy in those years. In essence, this becomes an argument for sustained generational incompetence.

There’s a flipside to that argument, however. It would tag the parade of generals who presided over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and lesser conflicts like those in Libya, Somalia, and Syria) as uniformly not up to the job — another argument for generational incompetence. Members of the once-dominant Petraeus fan club might cite him as a notable exception. Yet, with the passage of time, King David’s achievements as general-in-chief first in Baghdad and then in Kabul have lost much of their luster. The late “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf and General Tommy Franks, their own “victories” diminished by subsequent events, might sympathize.

Allow me to suggest another explanation, however, for the performance gap that afflicts the twenty-first-century U.S. military establishment. The real problem hasn’t been arrogant, ill-informed civilians or generals who lack the right stuff or suffer from bad luck. It’s the way Americans, especially those wielding influence in national security circles, including journalists, think tankers, lobbyists, corporate officials in the military-industrial complex, and members of Congress, have come to think of war as an attractive, affordable means of solving problems.

Military theorists have long emphasized that by its very nature, war is fluid, elusive, capricious, and permeated with chance and uncertainty. Practitioners tend to respond by suggesting that, though true, such descriptions are not helpful. They prefer to conceive of war as essentially knowable, predictable, and eminently useful — the Swiss Army knife of international politics.

Hence, the tendency, among both civilian and military officials in Washington, not to mention journalists and policy intellectuals, to reduce war to a phrase or formula (or better yet to a set of acronyms), so that the entire subject can be summarized in a slick 30-minute slide presentation. That urge to simplify — to boil things down to their essence — is anything but incidental. In Washington, the avoidance of complexity and ambiguity facilitates marketing (that is, shaking down Congress for money).

To cite one small example of this, consider a recent military document entitled “Army Readiness and Modernization in 2022,” produced by propagandists at the Association of the United States Army, purports to describe where the U.S. Army is headed. It identifies “eight cross-functional teams” meant to focus on “six priorities.” If properly resourced and vigorously pursued, these teams and priorities will ensure, it claims, that “the army maintains all-domain overmatch against all adversaries in future fights.”

Set aside the uncomfortable fact that, when it counted last year in Kabul, American forces demonstrated anything but all-domain overmatch. Still, what the Army’s leadership aims to do between now and 2035 is create “a transformed multi-domain army” by fielding a plethora of new systems, described in a blizzard of acronyms: ERCA, PrSM, LRHW, OMVF, MPF, RCV, AMPV, FVL, FLRAA, FARA, BLADE, CROWS, MMHEL, and so on, more or less ad infinitum.

Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Army’s plan, or rather vision, for its future avoids the slightest mention of costs. Nor does it consider potential complications — adversaries equipped with nuclear weapons, for example — that might interfere with its aspirations to all-domain overmatch.

Yet the document deserves our attention as an exquisite example of Pentagon-think. It provides the Army’s preferred answer to a question of nearly existential importance — not “How can the Army help keep Americans safe?” but “How can the Army maintain, and ideally increase, its budget?”

Hidden inside that question is an implicit assumption that sustaining even the pretense of keeping Americans safe requires a military of global reach that maintains a massive global presence. Given the spectacular findings of the James Webb Telescope, perhaps galactic will one day replace global in the Pentagon’s lexicon. In the meantime, while maintaining perhaps 750 military bases on every continent except Antarctica, that military rejects out of hand the proposition that defending Americans where they live — that is, within the boundaries of the 50 states comprising the United States — can suffice to define its overarching purpose.

And here we arrive at the crux of the matter: militarized globalism, the Pentagon’s preferred paradigm for basic policy, has become increasingly unaffordable. With the passage of time, it’s also become beside the point. Americans simply don’t have the wallet to satisfy budgetary claims concocted in the Pentagon, especially those that ignore the most elemental concerns we face, including disease, drought, fire, floods, and sea-level rise, not to mention averting the potential collapse of our constitutional order. All-domain overmatch is of doubtful relevance to such threats.

To provide for the safety and well-being of our republic, we don’t need further enhancements to jointness, combined arms tactics, flexible leadership, and responsive logistics. Instead, we need an entirely different approach to national security.

Come Home, America, Before It’s Too Late

Given the precarious state of American democracy, aptly described by President Biden in his recent address in Philadelphia, our most pressing priority is repairing the damage to our domestic political fabric, not engaging in another round of “great power competition” dreamed up by fevered minds in Washington. Put simply, the Constitution is more important than the fate of Taiwan.

I apologize: I know that I have blasphemed. But the times suggest that we weigh the pros and cons of blasphemy. With serious people publicly warning about the possible approach of civil war and many of our far-too-well armed fellow citizens welcoming the prospect, perhaps the moment has come to reconsider the taken-for-granted premises that have sustained U.S. national security policy since the immediate aftermath of World War II.

More blasphemy! Did I just advocate a policy of isolationism?

Heaven forfend! What I would settle for instead is a modicum of modesty and prudence, along with a lively respect for (rather than infatuation with) war.

Here is the unacknowledged bind in which the Pentagon has placed itself — and the rest of us: by gearing up to fight (however ineffectively) anywhere against any foe in any kind of conflict, it finds itself prepared to fight nowhere in particular. Hence, the urge to extemporize on the fly, as has been the pattern in every conflict of ours since the Vietnam War. On occasion, things work out, as in the long-forgotten, essentially meaningless 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. More often than not, however, they don’t, no matter how vigorously our generals and our troops apply the principles of jointness, combined arms, leadership, and logistics.

Americans spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out what makes Vladimir Putin tick. I don’t pretend to know, nor do I really much care. I would say this, however: Putin’s plunge into Ukraine confirms that he learned nothing from the folly of post-9/11 U.S. military policy.

Will we, in our turn, learn anything from Putin’s folly? Don’t count on it.

This piece has been republished with permission from TomDispatch.

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Andrew J. Bacevich · September 17, 2022

9. How the Second Civil War Could Start

I do not offer this as a partisan perspective but as a national security one. We cannot avoid these discussions.

How the Second Civil War Could Start

The potential U.S. descent into violence, mutual suspicion, and even dissolution.

thebulwark.com · by Major Garrett and David Becker · September 20, 2022

[Editor’s Note: In the following excerpt from The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of “The Big Lie”, on sale today, authors Major Garrett and David Becker imagine a grim scenario for the next two years of U.S. politics.]

America’s second civil war could start with a bang or with a whimper. It could begin with a skirmish or sneak up on us through a series of small compromises and acts of political cowardice. Civil war could announce itself loudly and bloodily, leaving no doubt as to its awful entrance. Or it could creep in through the back door, only to be recognized in hindsight as a series of seemingly disconnected events that could have and should have been stopped. We may be midstream in such a flow of events already. We now examine this possible future as if we have just emerged from its aftermath.

During the 2022 campaign, national Democrats were bracing for a tidal wave that might eject them from control of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, crippling President Joe Biden’s agenda and possibly accelerating former president Trump’s formal announcement (he toyed with it throughout 2021 and 2022) as a candidate for the presidency in 2024. Democrats had long since lost patience with Republican accusations about the “stolen” 2020 election, which they came to believe led to a flurry of unnecessary and regressive laws in states dominated by Republican legislators. In Texas, a law passed that set new restrictions on mail-in ballot access, limited the use of drop boxes for early votes, and then went further by weaponizing and empowering hyperpartisan poll watchers to interfere with the voting process. This in a state where it was already harder to vote in than most other states. In states like Florida, Iowa, and Texas, professional election administrators found their efforts criminalized. In states like Arizona and Georgia, it appeared legislators were seizing control of elections by limiting the authority of election administrators at the state and county level, thereby creating the real possibility of partisan politicians rejecting the will of the voters. In several states—Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada—there were candidates running for secretary of state on a platform of denying elections and delivering outcomes for their preferred candidates. All of this was very much on the minds of national Democrats. Many were seething.

In such an environment, many were worried about armed poll watchers, inflamed passions, and even possible violence. In Texas, voters saw unusually long lines in voting precincts in urban areas like Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas, where recent legislation had resulted in concentrating more voting into a single day. The lines were longest in communities of color, thus confirming fears about the consequences of the new election law. Before the March 1, 2022, primary, voters in predominantly Democratic counties like Harris, Travis, and Bexar were seeing requests for mail-in ballots rejected at historically high rates, fifteen times higher than Texas had previously experienced in their most populous counties.

About this time, Democrats in Washington began wondering aloud if midterm election results could or should be believed. “I think there’s a real possibility that we will see in the next two elections, get some results sent to us for ratification . . . that’s not consistent or that we’re gonna have to question,” Texas Democratic representative Colin Allred said. “That’s the reality of the situation. We can no longer pretend like these elections are just going to continue to proceed the way they have in the past.” At a press conference marking his administration’s one-year anniversary, President Biden amplified this sentiment. When asked if the midterm elections would be legitimate, Biden said: “Well, it all depends on whether we are able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of this election.” Biden’s statement wasn’t as toxic as Trump’s, but it deepened confusion and consternation—setting the country up for months of midterm election fear-mongering.

Imagine a polling station in Texas on Election Day 2022. The location doesn’t matter. Neither does the underlying dispute. What matters is a person came to the polls, purportedly on the hunt for voter fraud. States like Texas had given poll watchers more latitude to move around polling places, question procedures, and exercise authority. This person, in accordance with Texas law, was armed with a semiautomatic pistol. A discussion escalated into a confrontation, perhaps about the proper place to stand inside the polling precinct in relation to others, or about how to properly mark the ballot and use the ballot scanning machine.

Tragically, things spun out of control. The person feared fraud was afoot, and meant to stop it, by any means necessary. It first came through a raised voice, then physical intervention, and ultimately through the brandished weapon. Tension and shouts ensued, followed by a scuffle. One shot rang out and a poll worker lay bleeding on the floor of the gymnasium—the polling place was a high school. As the blood pooled, the victim passed away. Simultaneously, a friend of the victim hit send on a video taken of the conflict and its horrible aftermath. The video, as these things do, flew faster than news coverage and became a national sensation. Raw emotions frayed further.

As Election Day played out in Texas, Democrats believed they were seeing some of their worst fears realized. The perception of long lines and disproportionate damage done to minority voters sparked genuine anguish and rage. Now a death—video confirmation of what Democrats came to see as senseless violence marring and jeopardizing democracy.

As for the polling place death, the causes and motives behind it were opaque. It might have been an unintentional escalation—not exactly an accident because there was a weapon and a confrontation, but certainly not premeditated. Every frame of the cell phone video was analyzed and then hyper-analyzed. It yielded no definitive answers to the discerning and just enough to those quick to judge and blame. What the video did capture quite clearly was the grisly, harrowing aftermath—a life taken by a single bullet fired in a single precinct in a single county within a vast country now unified by hatred, suspicion, and contempt. It seemed to be the only true unity this once great but now wayward nation appeared able to summon.

The death video, as they say, went viral, but not benignly so. Quite fortunately, it did not lead to more violence. But in the hours after it appeared, more people began taking weapons to polling places. There were standoffs. There were fistfights. Police and sheriff’s departments nationwide were deployed in almost SWAT-like fashion to protect poll workers, repel weekend vigilantes, and generally keep the peace. It was scary as hell up close, on cable, on cell phones, on Facebook, and myriad other apps. But it worked. An uneasy peace was erected and brittlely maintained, though an atmosphere of foreboding and crisis pervaded.

Or perhaps no such incident occurred. Maybe none was necessary to push the nation to the edge. In the months leading up to the November election, Trump and the circle of grifters that surrounded him continued to push, and profit from, The Big Lie (Trump’s multifaceted yet groundless vilification of the 2020 election). Con artists continued to successfully push for incompetent investigations of the last election. Legislation based on the false pretext of election integrity—but which actually reduced it—was passed and voter confidence suffered. Election deniers running for governor, or secretary of state, or Congress, won their primaries and amplified their platforms, or almost as dangerously, lost their primaries and doubled down on their divisive and destructive disinformation. Leading up to the November 2022 election, concerns about voter suppression and voter fraud were so amped up that whether either actually existed didn’t matter anymore. When reports of long lines at polling places in Texas, or Arizona, or wherever came up, that alone was enough to light the fire.

It could be a gunshot. It could be accumulated grievances. The combustibles are before us—voting, immigration, racism, abortion, crime. Things could move in dreadful directions, even if key players initially resist predictable grassroots pressure to lash out. We now describe events that could plausibly play out if either of the situations described above came to be.

Whether it’s nationally broadcast election bloodshed or a slowboil confrontation over voter suppression in a state like Texas, it is not hard to imagine House Speaker Nancy Pelosi facing hard questions from her leadership team about Texas’s entire delegation and other close House races. Texas could trigger a startling conversation about countermeasures. Democrats had already sued there over redistricting, alleging Republicans diluted minority voters by dispersing them in ways assuring more House seats in 2022. These gains were coming to be and were also emblematic of noxious trends. Republicans were on pace to win at least twenty-five Texas seats—many tainted, in the view of national Democrats, by violence, suppression, or both. With Texas at the center of these midterm aggravations, Democrats could feel it necessary, maybe even imperative, to use Texas as a pretext to prevent certification and recognition of the entire thirty-eight-member state delegation. This wouldn’t be easy. Each term of the House is limited to two years. A new House majority would swear in members and Republicans would hold sway. To cover their bets, House Democrats might also litigate all other close House races—generating lengthy delays and, possibly, widespread protests.

Texas, as it turned out, was the fulcrum in the House of Representatives. Republicans, when all voters were counted, won nearly twice as many seats there as Democrats. That advantage would loom large in control of the House. But so would other races that turned out to be surprisingly close in states with new and more restrictive voting laws and in districts where suburban voter attitudes shifted over abortion and privacy-related politics. These close races gave Democrats ground to challenge results, slowing certification and sowing confusion while generating new partisan hostility.

Under the Constitution, Congress is the judge of its own membership. There are limits, but Congress can, in theory and practice, refuse to seat or expel a member. As law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos of Harvard University points out, the “choice to seat or oust is a nonjusticiable political question. No court can second-guess a chamber’s judgment as to whether an election was free and fair or which candidate won a race.” Congress has delayed or refused to seat a member whose victory has been certified. A dispute in 1984 over a House seat in Indiana initially won by a Republican but awarded to a Democrat convulsed the chamber for months. Slowing certification would gum up the process of creating a new House, even with an incoming GOP majority. An idea took hold: Refuse to seat the full Texas delegation and hold off recognition of disputed races in other states.

This was not a novel idea, having been floated the previous year. Marc Elias, the prominent Democratic lawyer, had written in 2021 that as “Republican legislatures enact new voter suppression laws, Congress should reaffirm the House’s promise in 1965 to refuse to seat, or to unseat, members who benefit from discriminatory voting laws. If there ever was a need for it to do so, it is now.” Professor Stephanopoulos of Harvard similarly noted:

Given the history and law of the Judging Elections Clause, the most familiar way for a congressional chamber to enforce the provision would be by refusing to seat candidates-elect whose elections the chamber deems defective. . . . Imagine that, in the wake of the 2020 election, states under unified Republican control enact stringent new voting restrictions: photo-ID requirements, cutbacks to early and mail-in voting, voter roll purges, and so on. Also imagine that, in these states, several Republican candidates receive slightly more votes than their Democratic opponents in the 2022 election. Then, after that election, it would be a conventional application of the Judging Elections Clause for a chamber to decline to seat these Republican candidates-elect (and even to seat their rivals) because they owed their victories to voter suppression. This is exactly what the House and Senate have done many times before, especially in the decades after the Civil War.

Texas would be the symbol and the explanation—a rejection of Democratic and Republican members of Congress to contest deeper issues of access, suppression, and violence. Refusing to seat an entire state delegation would be novel, volatile, and unprecedented. It would not be undertaken lightly. But in pressurized times, lines can be crossed, especially when rivals are seen as enemies and choices no longer incremental but existential. Or perhaps a Democratic House could simply choose not to seat the Republican members elected, thus solidifying an even greater majority.

Democratic concern about GOP tactics in Texas and obstructionism of favored voting reforms put unrelenting pressure on Pelosi. Even if institutionalists initially resisted refusing to seat the Texas delegation, vociferous lobbying from the party’s progressive Democratic base proved too much to resist, particularly if it meant holding on to the House, preserving the House January 6th Committee, and shielding Biden from impeachment. Pelosi, though reluctant, could consider refusing to seat the Texas delegation, knowing her party would support her. Such an action, whether successful or not, would be another descent into norm-breaking oblivion. Pelosi could justify her actions by claiming she was preserving democracy. Republicans, some of whom backed the Big Lie, would then accuse Pelosi of destroying democracy. Whether the Texas delegation was seated or not could ultimately be irrelevant.

That process of vanishing could begin, and look something like this.

Provoked by the denial, successful or not, of congressional representation, Texas, which had just reelected Republican governor Greg Abbott by a fairly wide margin, announced it was prepared to take unprecedented action to halt this usurpation of power. Republican-led states, where some certifications were being held up, vowed to join Texas in whatever protest it deemed necessary. Republicans resurrected the words of Texas GOP chair Allen West after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Texas’s lawsuit to invalidate election results in six states, thereby overturning the 2020 election: “Perhaps law-abiding states should band together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.”

After a brief debate, Republicans worked with Abbott to enact a resolution of refusal. The terms were simple. The Republic of Texas (as it still calls itself) would no longer compel individuals or businesses within Texas to pay federal tax revenue and, further, would block any efforts by federal officials to collect said revenue. Texas said the grant of immunity from paying federal taxes would last until Pelosi seated the full Texas delegation, halted all election litigation, and delivered unto Republicans majority control in the House of Representatives.

There were some knotty details to sort out. Texas provisionally allowed the federal government to continue operating fifteen military bases and twenty-nine ports of entry. It informed Washington it was preparing to take possession of military facilities and ports. Travel restrictions, Texas menacingly warned, would accompany these repossessions.

Sympathetic states (possibly states like Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming) followed suit. Each state wrote its own resolution of refusal differently, but the march away from Washington was clear.

America being a diverse place, there were states with other sympathies and they sided with the Democrats. California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, and Delaware banded together as a compact against doing business with or recognizing the rights of visitors from Texas or any other state that joined its revenue-withholding gambit. This was a toothier form of boycotts that arose in earlier disputes over abortion and voting laws. States were merely intensifying the sense of separation, pressing up against the Interstate Commerce Clause along the way. Every step in the escalation raised arcane legal questions, but the impetus to pull apart and strike poses, fueled by grassroots political energy, overrode them. Banding together against Texas, the rival states said, was protection against secession, fascism, vigilantism, intimidation, voter suppression, and redistricting “violence.” Democrats believed it as surely as Republicans believed their equally florid rhetoric about patriotism, treason, subversives, socialist radicals, and BLM mobs.

Whether from a single galvanizing incident—a gunshot and death—or the culmination of less-violent but no-less-shocking incidents over time, a “national divorce” began. The approach was economical, but the effect was spiritual. A great, slow-moving cleaving came over America. The federal government tried to be patient. It changed nothing, of course, for the states that did not adopt resolutions refusing to pay tax revenue. Initially, the federal government took no action against those that did. Washington had plenty of practice dealing with non-cooperative states or resistance to federal requirements to receive revenue transfers in lieu of policy changes. It had far less practice with states flatly denying revenue and seeking to block collection thereof. The Civil War was an armed rebellion, an opposing force against the Union. This was less stark and more procedural. It was a rebellion, if you will, of accounting and shared resources. Uncle Sam was stunned and struggled for recourse.

As was discovered, it takes a great deal of energy and personnel to erect barriers within a once-unified nation. The matters to which states now turned their attention were related to protection and isolation. Travel wasn’t exactly halted because the attitude of boycott began to be translated into procedures of suspicion. States started to monitor themselves in relation to one another and therefore wanted to more closely inspect the movement of people, goods, and services. Definitions of contraband expanded exponentially and something akin to paranoia regarding motives about “other” states began to seep into laws and habits. This naturally led to unraveling of intertwined limbs of commerce that once profitably joined all fifty states. This meant increasing the security state—state by aligned state—at the expense of almost all else. All those fears about things getting militarized during COVID finally came to be—long after the pandemic had subsided. It was not the virus that cut down American democracy. It was a bastardized vision of protecting democracy that dealt the mortal blow.

Armed borders kept things in and kept things out, as armed borders almost always do. States for a time appeared satisfied, especially because Washington seemed stupefied. Federal courts, as it turned out, could not force states to do much of anything. There was no national military force large enough or motivated enough to storm Texas or any other state for revenue earmarked for Washington. National Guard forces became true militarized arms of the state—each state.

With legal disputes now separating one state from the other, America began to slowly disappear. Stock prices fell. More worrisome, America’s bond rating suffered, and interest rates rose—destabilizing the Federal Reserve. Texas said it might create its own currency. Simple transactions became complicated and confusing. Naturally, there were, for a time, regional winners, but the overall trajectory, reflected in bond markets and declines in foreign investment, was of an increasingly sluggish national economy. America was no longer a sure bet, the dollar less reliable as the safest global currency. States acted as small nations and transacted business for their nation and against other nations—places that used to exist as white stars on the same field of blue but now flew their own reimagined economic and cultural flags.

States that didn’t join either compact struggled for identity and good relations with both state compacts. Much energy and time was wasted in all directions. Other things began to slowly crumble too. Federal subsidies for infrastructure, scientific research, agricultural innovation, flood control, and weather forecasting atrophied. Decay took a noticeable, pitiable turn toward rot, leaving mid-twenty-first-century children to wonder what this thing was their grandparents remembered with such mourning . . . what was it called, again . . . the United States of America?

Perhaps most disturbingly, into the void left by a unified American nation—the world’s formerly oldest and longest-enduring democracy—stepped the opportunistic nations steeped in autocracy. Russia, North Korea, Iran, and most notably China, already transfixed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its aftermath, began to wonder if America could still lead the free world or if it had become only a collaborative partner with Europe. The great question of authoritarianism vs. democracy, to which America had always acted as if it knew the answer, seemed up for grabs in Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran, and Moscow. The lessons of Ukraine were far from settled but America looked not only distracted but on the verge of some form of disintegration. Autocrats began to wonder how best to pounce. Our allies, and the free people of the globe, were even more shaken than they were after the Capitol riot. Would America recede? Would they become more vulnerable? Was America devouring itself at the expense of all it had fought since the end of World War II to protect and preserve?

We have just tried to paint a narrative picture. It is not of a world blown up, not literally anyway. We are not describing an invasion where civilians are slaughtered as they were in Ukraine and vestiges of civilization and order fray. Ours is not a story of bunkers, stockpiles, and gaunt survivalism. It is not a story of militias in cabins or vigilantes in convoys. It is a potential story of national suicide committed gradually and with self-justifying intent, on paper—no bullets or bayonets required. It is a story about the death of America as a place, an ideal, and a home for liberty, prosperity, and law. It is a story the component parts of which are with us now. It is a story that intentionally leaves out widespread bloodshed—because our darkest fears are already bad enough. It is a story that fills in blanks we ourselves have created, blanks that will be filled one way or the other—through cooperation or confrontation. We must confront and extinguish election-denying cynicism. We must commit ourselves to casting and counting votes without fear or favor. We must do as generations did before—believe in democracy as we believe in ourselves.

The great cleaving could be closer than we think. Our next civil war is stalking us. We can stop it. We must stop it. Or we, as an ideal and as a spirit will, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, surely perish from this earth.

Excerpted from The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of “The Big Lie” by Major Garrett and David Becker, available now wherever books are sold. Copyright © 2022 Major Garrett and David Becker. Printed with permission of the publisher, Diversion Books. All rights reserved.

thebulwark.com · by Major Garrett and David Becker · September 20, 2022

10. The Alternate History of China

Excerpts:

Despite his use of this term, Zhao did not have a multiparty democracy in mind. Describing his thinking in the late 1980s, he told Zong: “At this time my guiding ideas were, first, that the leading position of the CCP could not change, but the party’s form of leadership must change; second, that a socialist state should be a rule of law state.” As Gewirtz writes, Zhao’s priorities were “to increase transparency, strengthen the ability of other political parties and social groups, from labor unions to women’s organizations, to represent their members, raise the number of appointments made through elections, protect citizens’ rights, and entrench the separation of party and state.”

If these were Zhao’s ideas, the possible future for China that was lost when Zhao was purged would not have been as democratic as Gewirtz seems to imagine. Had Zhao defeated Deng and realized his own political vision, China would still be a one-party state, facing the impossible task of reconciling popular political freedom with a monopoly on political power. This is not the kind of system that can square that circle. Zhao’s downfall was inevitable—the act of a regime so dedicated to concentrating power and so convinced of its own righteousness that it cannot allow independent political activity and survive.

Although Zhao and his open-mindedness are gone, the system under current Chinese President Xi Jinping has a great deal of continuity with the one Zhao envisioned. Zhao’s 863 technology project, which used top-down controls to promote rapid development in science and technology, has become Xi’s “Made in China 2025.” Xi’s idea of “civilian-military integration,” under which civil enterprises should develop advanced technology for the military, is an inversion of Zhao’s idea that military institutions should share economically promising technology with the state’s civilian enterprises. Today, as an official slogan puts it, “the state guides the market,” as it did under Zhao. Zhao’s vision of managing society like a machine has evolved into Xi’s surveillance state. Zhao wasn’t all that radical, but he was still too radical for the Chinese Communist Party.

The Alternate History of China

Could Beijing Have Taken a Different Path?

By Andrew J. Nathan

September/October 2022

Foreign Affairs · by China’s Search for Security · September 20, 2022

On a visit to China in the summer of 1988, I encountered a widespread sense of drift and despair. The official inflation rate at 18.5 percent, and the actual rate was probably higher. State statistics said that 21 percent of urban workers had suffered a decline in living standards. In big cities, residents needed to routinely pay bribes if they wanted phone lines, electricity service, mail deliveries, or medical attention. Intellectuals were criticizing China’s political leaders, its political system, and even its national culture and national character. “Nineteen-eighty-eight ushered in a season of discontent that is perhaps unique in China’s post-revolutionary history,” I wrote in an article published later that year.

Such a dark mood was surprising at the end of a decade of what the official propaganda apparatus called “reform and opening”—Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s ambitious campaign to restructure China’s economic system and open the country to global markets after the stagnation and autarky of the Mao Zedong years. Not an expert in economics, Deng relied on China’s premier, Zhao Ziyang, to figure out how to reform the economy. Zhao contracted agricultural land to farming families to manage as they saw best; authorized villages and townships to set up small-scale, effectively private enterprises; and opened special economic zones such as Shenzhen and other production bases where investors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other market economies could set up factories to import raw materials and export products free of tariffs. These and other reforms achieved remarkable success. From 1978 to 1988, China’s GDP more than doubled.

Then, in 1988, Zhao persuaded Deng to authorize another step forward: reforming China’s price system. Under Zhao’s proposed new regime, enterprises would receive a quota of inputs and would be required to sell a quota of outputs at state-set prices. After fulfilling their quotas, they could buy inputs and sell products at market prices. This “dual-track price reform” was supposed to eliminate incentives for corruption, spur production enthusiasm, and promote even faster growth by giving managers and workers a financial reason to improve their products and productivity, since they could now sell their goods for higher profits. But before the plan was even put into effect, enterprises started bribing suppliers for more inputs at plan costs in anticipation of the shift, and consumers flooded stores to buy everything they could find before prices went up. Corruption worsened, inflation surged, and Zhao canceled the reform. China seemed stuck with a dysfunctional hybrid economy: half planned and half market, with the worst features of both.

John Lee

The sense of paralysis helped drive popular dissatisfaction. In 1989, students in Beijing launched pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Thousands of workers and low- and mid-level government and party officials joined them, and soon, the unrest spread to hundreds of cities around the country. By that time, Zhao had been promoted to acting general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, officially the highest position in the Chinese party-state, although in reality, he remained overshadowed by Deng and a handful of other retired CCP elders.

Still, Zhao was responsible for managing the crisis. He insisted that the students could be persuaded to leave the square peacefully. But Deng wanted to use force. He cashiered Zhao and ordered the People’s Liberation Army to enter Beijing, where they put down the uprising, ending years of openness. Zhao spent the last 15 years of his life under house arrest. China, meanwhile, steadily evolved into the high-tech totalitarian system that it is today.

Did it have to be this way? In Never Turn Back, Julian Gewirtz says no. Gewirtz, a historian who now works on China policy in the White House, provides a vivid and readable account of the period from Mao’s death until shortly after Tiananmen, with a focus on the role of Zhao. In Gewirtz’s view, a more liberal development path was possible, and Beijing might have pursued it were it not for the quirks of history. “It is possible to imagine a China, even one ruled by the CCP, that rehabilitates Zhao Ziyang, praises the debate and contestation of ideas that characterized the 1980s, and even apologizes publicly for the violence of June 1989,” he writes. “It is possible to imagine China once again experimenting with meaningful political reforms, increasing the independence of the judiciary and the media, and giving ordinary people a greater say over the country’s direction.”

But historical contingency is not the reason China has become what it is today. Zhao’s conservative archrival Li Peng articulated a hard truth during the 1989 crisis. The pro-democracy demonstrators, Li said, “want to negate the leadership of the CCP and negate the entire socialist system.” Their aims were fundamentally at odds with the structure and philosophy of the one-party system. A regime that claims to possess an infallible ideology and is constructed on what Gewirtz describes as a system of “entrenched hierarchies” cannot survive if it opens up. Other CCP leaders knew this, even if Zhao did not.

DIFFERENT AND THE SAME

In devising measures to implement Deng Xiaoping’s goal of modernizing the Chinese economy, Zhao was intellectually adventurous. He welcomed the advice of young think tank scholars and advisers. And as Gewirtz describes in his previous book, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China, Zhao invited prominent Western economists such as Milton Friedman and James Tobin and Eastern European experts including Janos Kornai and Ota Sik to discuss the pros and cons of market economics. He also became enamored of the ideas of the futurologists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, whom he entertained in Zhongnanhai. The Tofflers forecast a post-industrial society dominated by computers, the Internet, and digital media. Chinese translations of their books Future Shock and The Third Wave, along with John Naisbitt’s similarly themed Megatrends, were enthusiastically received.

These writings may have predicted radical change. But they still fit well with the belief inherent in Leninist systems that once class conflict is eliminated, government is essentially technical, and leaders equipped with the science of Marxism—updated with contemporary tools—can design and control society. Zhao was determined to use these insights to leapfrog Western states to the frontier of the “New Technological Revolution,” in which, as Naisbitt put it, “the strategic resource is information.” Zhao established the so-called 863 Program and other institutions to promote rapid development in seven key areas, including biotechnology, space technology, information technology, laser technology, automation, energy, and materials engineering. As Gewirtz acidly remarks, “At this point, the governments of the United States, Japan, and many other countries saw technology transfer to China as in their interests.”

Although they introduced some market incentives into the economy, the reforms were in no way designed to challenge the primacy of the party. The state owned all the land in the country, which it leased to peasants and urban factories for production. It ran all major utilities, allocated credit through state banks, controlled the exchange value of the currency, and eased or tightened the flow of imports and exports with regulations and licenses. The state indirectly set the price and allocation of labor through household registration and social welfare systems. And as the private sector grew, the state kept strategically important enterprises in its own hands. The propaganda system ransacked Marx’s writings to produce concepts such as “the initial stage of socialism,” “the socialist market economy,” and, most enduringly, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to explain that what Zhao was doing was consistent with the ruling party’s ideology.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

Deng understood that to successfully modernize the economy, the government would also have to make certain changes to the country’s political system. Under the Maoist regime he inherited, the government made all its decisions based on ideology—including which crops to plant, where and how close to plant them, where to locate a factory, and how to run it. Local cadres would apply ideological principles even to decide whether to authorize a marriage, allow a couple to have a child, or permit a couple to get divorced.

As Mao kept revising the party’s ideology, officials struggled to figure out how it applied to clearly unrelated technical and managerial decisions. This ad hoc micromanagement resulted in repeated disasters. In 1959, unsound agricultural requirements created a two-year famine that killed an estimated 30 to 45 million people. Mao’s subsequent Cultural Revolution caused more mass death and paralyzed the government. Even when politics were relatively calm, Mao’s politicized economic system fostered inefficiency and stifled innovation.

Deng sought to fix these problems by freeing up economic actors to pursue prosperity without undue interference from party officials. He first raised the subject of political reform in a 1980 intraparty speech that called for ending life tenure in political office, diffusing top-level power among a group of leaders, and stopping party officials in state-owned enterprises and government agencies from interfering in managerial and technical decisions. This last policy was particularly important, and it came to be called “separation of party and government.”

Historical contingency is not the reason China has become what it is today.

Deng had no intention of relinquishing the CCP’s leadership over China. But his speech did have the effect of removing the long-standing ban on the independent discussion of politics. Senior officials and establishment intellectuals began to promote what were, in China, radical ideas. Vice Premier Wan Li said the party should let people “really exercise their constitutional right of free expression.” Senior party researcher Liao Gailong called for an independent press, for a more independent judiciary, and for the National People’s Congress—the rubber-stamp legislature—to function as an independent voice for diverse social interests. (Even the idea that socialist society could contain groups with diverse interests was radical.) Party scholars and journalists argued for establishing checks and balances among the three branches of government, and some even promoted multicandidate elections. The state-owned Central China Television broadcast a six-part documentary called River Elegy that attributed the country’s “backwardness” to Chinese culture and called for Westernization. Chinese civilization, the documentary concluded, “needs a good scrubbing by a great flood.”

In 1987, amid this intellectual turmoil, Deng again turned to Zhao, in his capacity as acting general secretary, to prepare a set of political reform proposals for an upcoming party congress. Zhao convened a team that privately heard uncensored testimony about different political systems, including from experts on Western systems. They considered a host of liberalizing measures, such as eliminating party cells from some institutions; allowing provincial people’s congresses to consider more than one candidate for governor and vice governor; giving more power to minor, noncommunist political parties; and strengthening the ability of the party-run trade unions to promote the interests of workers instead of trying to suppress worker unrest. “A yearlong process at the highest levels of the Chinese leadership to develop proposals for remaking China’s political system—building on nearly a decade of ferment, exploration, and new thinking—was on the verge of being approved by the 13th Party Congress,” Gewirtz writes. “A transformation was in the offing.”

But as Zhao prepared his proposals, Deng warned him not to consider ideas that “imitate[ed] the West.” In the end, Zhao submitted only modest proposals, including creating a civil service to staff the government and giving more power to nonparty managers and experts. As Gewirtz writes, “These changes sought to strengthen the functioning of the CCP and the government so that both entities could more effectively lead the economic reforms.” They did not soften the party’s hold on power.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

A leading purpose of Gewirtz’s book is to correct exaggerations, by both Chinese and Western historians, of Deng Xiaoping’s role in reforming his country. This distortion was no accident: it was the product of a concerted effort by the regime to portray Deng as the “chief architect of reform and opening” in order to erase Zhao’s more liberal ideas from public memory. Given Zhao’s actual importance, it is easy to see why Gewirtz believes that had Zhao stayed in power, he would have fundamentally changed China.

There’s no doubt that Zhao had a reformist bent. In his early career, the premier pioneered change in Sichuan Province, contracting land to the peasants at great political risk before party leaders had endorsed the policy. He was remarkably open in consulting Western economists and in listening to wide-ranging political reform proposals from party and nonparty intellectuals. During the 1980s, he embraced an ambiguous idea called neo-authoritarianism, which argued that authoritarian rule was needed to push a recalcitrant system forward toward democracy. And in what might be the only source on Zhao that Gewirtz’s exceptionally well-researched book does not use—a series of interviews between Zhao and a loyal former subordinate named Zong Fengming conducted during Zhao’s house arrest—Zhao remarked that he had been interested in something called “parliamentary democracy.”

The Chinese Communist Party cannot tolerate independent political activity and survive.

Despite his use of this term, Zhao did not have a multiparty democracy in mind. Describing his thinking in the late 1980s, he told Zong: “At this time my guiding ideas were, first, that the leading position of the CCP could not change, but the party’s form of leadership must change; second, that a socialist state should be a rule of law state.” As Gewirtz writes, Zhao’s priorities were “to increase transparency, strengthen the ability of other political parties and social groups, from labor unions to women’s organizations, to represent their members, raise the number of appointments made through elections, protect citizens’ rights, and entrench the separation of party and state.”

If these were Zhao’s ideas, the possible future for China that was lost when Zhao was purged would not have been as democratic as Gewirtz seems to imagine. Had Zhao defeated Deng and realized his own political vision, China would still be a one-party state, facing the impossible task of reconciling popular political freedom with a monopoly on political power. This is not the kind of system that can square that circle. Zhao’s downfall was inevitable—the act of a regime so dedicated to concentrating power and so convinced of its own righteousness that it cannot allow independent political activity and survive.

Although Zhao and his open-mindedness are gone, the system under current Chinese President Xi Jinping has a great deal of continuity with the one Zhao envisioned. Zhao’s 863 technology project, which used top-down controls to promote rapid development in science and technology, has become Xi’s “Made in China 2025.” Xi’s idea of “civilian-military integration,” under which civil enterprises should develop advanced technology for the military, is an inversion of Zhao’s idea that military institutions should share economically promising technology with the state’s civilian enterprises. Today, as an official slogan puts it, “the state guides the market,” as it did under Zhao. Zhao’s vision of managing society like a machine has evolved into Xi’s surveillance state. Zhao wasn’t all that radical, but he was still too radical for the Chinese Communist Party.

ANDREW J. NATHAN is the Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He is a co-author, with Andrew Scobell, of China’s Search for Security.

Foreign Affairs · by China’s Search for Security · September 20, 2022

11. Building Taiwan’s Own Area Denial Capabilities

Excerpt:

Overall, the purpose of this article was not to propose the AGM-158C as the sole countermeasure Taiwan needs; nor do I underestimate the value of the legacy Harpoons and other anti-ship weapons. Rather, AGM-158C missiles together with other defense options can strengthen Taiwan’s deterrence posture by forming a multi-layered anti-ship system. Ukraine’s sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, has already demonstrated that with intelligence sharing of targeting information a disadvantaged military can cause devastating damage to a stronger enemy force. To repel the PLAN, Taiwan needs more than just its legacy short- and medium-range countermeasures. The AGM-158C missiles will force the PLAN to position its carrier strike groups farther away from Taiwan and thus increase the uncertainty and risks of China’s operation plans.

Building Taiwan’s Own Area Denial Capabilities

Taiwan can use long-range anti-ship missiles to create its own A2/AD strategy.

thediplomat.com · by Pei-Shiue Hsieh · September 21, 2022

The launch of China’s third aircraft carrier in June marked a new phase of military pressure on Taiwan. Chinese carrier strike groups, with full operational capability, strengthen Beijing’s blue-water power projection capabilities both to directly attack Taiwan and to prevent other countries from coming to the island’s aid. While some assert that Taiwan cannot counter a Chinese invasion on its own, the results of my analytical wargames show the opposite. The drills by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last month likely demonstrated Beijing’s intentions to impose a naval blockade on the island in the event of a military confrontation. Taiwan’s military needs to prevent Chinese fleets from moving into their tactical positions or, if unable to prevent the blockade’s establishment, to disrupt ongoing PLA Navy (PLAN) operations.

While Chinese expansion of the PLAN and its capabilities do put Taiwan at risk, Chinese carrier strike groups are not without their vulnerabilities. Attacks on supply and support to the Chinese carrier strike group can damage the PLAN’s operational effectiveness. Specifically, the Type 901 Hulunhu-class fast combat support ship, of which the PLAN has two, is prime for targeting. China’s conventional-powered carriers, despite the fast-growing combat fleets, are still quite limited in their range and endurance, requiring support and logistics ships. Sinking these support ships would disrupt a Chinese blockade or amphibious invasion.

To achieve the aforementioned goal, Taiwan must develop its own anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy, which incorporates guided weapons and reconnaissance systems. Currently, Taiwan’s military possesses two possible options for guided anti-ship weapons: the ground-launched Hsiung Feng II/III and the ground- or air-launched AGM-84 Harpoon. With the reconnaissance information gathered by naval surveillance radars and MQ-9B SeaGuardian unmanned aerial vehicles, these legacy anti-ship missiles remain potent defenders of the island. However, as the PLAN is rapidly growing, Taiwan needs more than short- and medium-range options to cope with the PLA threat.

While these legacy systems are effective, they have capability gaps that reduce the effectiveness of Taiwan’s A2/AD plans. One option to close those gaps is the stealthy AGM-158C long-range anti-ship missile (LRASM). The AGM-158C is capable of conducting autonomous targeting and precision strike at standoff distances. Employing the AGM-158C to sink combat support ships, the Achilles’ heel of Chinese carrier strike groups, would inflict catastrophic damage on Chinese invasion plans and force the PLAN to station its fleets farther away from the island.

Building the Scenarios

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I designed several scenarios to test and compare the effectiveness of these possible options, using Command: Modern Operations Professional Edition (CMO PE), a powerful commercial-off-the-shelf computer wargame software widely used by the U.S. armed services, NATO, allied militaries, and defense corporations. For example, Northrop Grumman Corporation selected CMO PE as the only wargame software being analyzed for the Gamebreaker program awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Moreover, CMO PE’s mechanisms for simulating and calculating fleet damage are more sophisticated than other options, including Synthetic Theater Operations Research Model (STORM) and Extended Air Defense Simulation (EADSIM). All weapons system specifications and data used in my simulations were from open-source intelligence (OSINT).

Scenario 1: Chinese Invasion

In the first scenario, the Chinese carrier strike group consisted of eight vessels: one aircraft carrier, one Type 901 fast combat support ship, one Type 055 missile destroyer, three Type 052D missile destroyers, one Type 052C missile destroyer, and one Type 054A missile frigate. The carrier and the combat support ship joined off the coast of Zhejiang province, which is around 220 nautical miles (nm) from northern Taiwan. The missile destroyers and frigate formed two air defense areas, which were 25 nm and 75 nm respectively ahead of the carrier. Carrier-based J-15s fighters and early warning aircraft conducted combat air patrol (CAP) missions out to a range of 175 nm ahead of the carrier.

The mission of Taiwan’s military was to impede a Chinese invasion by sinking the PLAN’s Type 901 combat support ship. In northern Taiwan, the Sky Bow II/III surface-to-air missiles were positioned to defend against air intrusions while E-2K Hawkeye early warning aircraft and MQ-9B provided airborne and maritime surveillance and reconnaissance. For this and the other scenarios, Taiwan received foreign intelligence and long-range targeting information akin to what Ukraine is receiving from the United States and other partners.

Three options tested were the AGM-84L Harpoon Block II, Hsiung Feng II/III, and AGM-158C LRASM. The F-16V, as Taiwan’s most advanced fighter, was selected for launching the air-to-surface guided missiles. Thanks to the capacity and scalability that CMO PE provides, I modified the simulation mechanism and mounted AGM-158Cs on the F-16Vs to test hypothetical scenarios. For each option, I executed at least 30 trials to reduce the possibility of biased results.

The simulation outcomes were clear. The limited range of the AGM-84L Harpoon (around 77 nm) makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for this option to sink the Type 901. In the simulations, F-16Vs had to fly at least 149 nm forward and penetrate the Chinese combat air patrol zone and naval outer air defense area in order to attack the Type 901 ship. This maneuver forced the air squadrons to expose themselves to heavy enemy fire without protection from the Sky Bow II/III surface-to-air missiles. By adding more F-16V sorties to carry out the missions, success rates did improve; nevertheless, the casualties would be too high to accept if we expect the mission success rates to reach approximately the same performance as the AGM-158C (more on this later).

In the second set of tests, the Hsiung Feng II/III missiles were unable to engage the Type 901 ship as a result of their limited range (80-135 nm) and ground-based launching platforms. After adjusting the scenario setting and sailing the Chinese fleets through the Miyako Strait, to the north of Taiwan, the Hsiung Feng II/III missiles were able to strike the designated target. However, that adjustment may raise a question about the reality of the scenario. A more realistic premise would be that the Chinese navy remains positioned outside the Hsiung Feng II/III bubble until it can be suppressed.

By adding the third, and for now hypothetical, option of using the AGM-158C, the Taiwanese started to turn the tables. The AGM-158C’s incredible 500 nm range allowed Taiwanese F-16Vs to launch strikes while protected by the Sky Bow II/III surface-to-air missile umbrella. Moreover, in the simulations, the AGM-158C missiles demonstrated the capability to consistently penetrate hostile air defense systems, sinking the Chinese Type 901 combat support ship. Obviously, the long-range anti-ship missile is a feasible and better option for sniping at Chinese vessels hiding behind their air defense shield.

Scenario 2: Naval Blockade

In the second scenario, the PLAN took the opportunity of military drills to transit through the Miyako Strait. A Chinese carrier strike group assembled in waters 220 nm away from eastern Taiwan, aiming to suppress Taiwan’s military bases and armed forces and to cut off the island’s connections to any possible foreign support. Taiwan’s goal was to sink the Type 901 ship and force the PLAN to retreat, eventually lifting the blockade.

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Unlike the first scenario, the Chinese naval fleets in the Philippine Sea were now facing air threats from all directions. China’s carrier strike group not only had to counter anti-ship missiles from its western flank, but also left its eastern flank open to maritime attacks. During a U.S. Senate committee hearing, former U.S. PACOM Commander Adm. Harry Harris urged the faster development of LRASMs to counter PLA threats. The Pentagon has worked out an operation plan in recent years wherein B-1B Lancer strategic bombers or even C-17A Globemaster III airlifters traveling from Guam or the continental United States could launch AGM-158Cs against the Chinese navy. My proposition is that Taiwan’s Air Force can actually be the executor of this operational plan.

For this scenario, I further designed a mission that had Taiwanese F-16Vs launched from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, carrying AGM-158Cs to sink the Chinese Type 901 combat support ship. The premise was that Taipei and Washington had a tacit agreement, allowing Taiwan to pre-position AGM-158Cs in Guam and to transit some F-16Vs with mounted conformal fuel tanks to the base once the PLAN’s drills turned hostile. With the assistance of aerial refueling and long-range targeting information from the United States, it took around two hours for Taiwan’s F-16Vs, taking off from Guam, to reach their attacking positions. The results were devastating for the Chinese Type 901 ships, as Taiwan was able to launch standoff attacks on the PLAN’s Achilles heel from both flanks. Regardless of the political barriers, my simulations demonstrated that this option is feasible at the tactical level.

Building Taiwan’s A2/AD Bubble

Overall, the purpose of this article was not to propose the AGM-158C as the sole countermeasure Taiwan needs; nor do I underestimate the value of the legacy Harpoons and other anti-ship weapons. Rather, AGM-158C missiles together with other defense options can strengthen Taiwan’s deterrence posture by forming a multi-layered anti-ship system. Ukraine’s sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, has already demonstrated that with intelligence sharing of targeting information a disadvantaged military can cause devastating damage to a stronger enemy force. To repel the PLAN, Taiwan needs more than just its legacy short- and medium-range countermeasures. The AGM-158C missiles will force the PLAN to position its carrier strike groups farther away from Taiwan and thus increase the uncertainty and risks of China’s operation plans.

Pei-Shiue Hsieh

Dr. Pei-Shiue Hsieh is an assistant research fellow at Institute for National Defense and Security Research, Taiwan (INDSR). His research areas focus on modeling and simulations, wargaming, geopolitics, and arms races.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, the Ministry of National Defense, or any part of the Taiwanese government.

thediplomat.com · by Pei-Shiue Hsieh · September 21, 2022

12. Ex-Fort Benning commander’s retirement halted over tweets

Ex-Fort Benning commander’s retirement halted over tweets

armytimes.com · by Davis Winkie · September 19, 2022

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 2 p.m. on Sept. 20, 2022, to clarify attribution regarding allegations made in the inspector general complaint.

The former commanding general of the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Georgia, has had his retirement put on pause while the service completes an investigation into alleged misconduct focused on his social media use.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe intended to retire after handing over command of the installation to Maj. Gen. Curtis Buzzard in July.

But according to an Army website, he’s no longer in the retirement process and has been reassigned as a “special assistant” to the commander of the service’s Training and Doctrine Command. The two-star general did not respond to an email or social media messages from Army Times requesting comment.

Army spokesperson Cynthia Smith told Army Times that Donahoe “has been temporarily assigned as a special assistant to the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command pending appropriate Department of the Army administrative reviews.”

Donahoe is likely to face discipline for his conduct on social media, a source familiar with the move confirmed, who was not authorized to speak on the record regarding internal personnel issues. It’s not clear what form such discipline will take, though.

Smith declined to comment on what’s preventing Donahoe’s retirement from going through, stating, “As the Army’s review process is ongoing, we cannot provide any additional information at this time.”

Social media snafu?

The two-star general has long had a significant Twitter following that won him acclaim in some corners of the service.

In 2019, Military Times rated him No. 1 among “the top service members” to follow on the site. It’s not clear what specific posts have come under scrutiny, but he was a party to a few prominent social media spats in recent months.

Donahoe and other senior leaders with prominent followings, such as Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, publicly clashed with conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson in March 2021.

Carlson made controversial remarks about women in the military, accusing the Biden administration of “feminizing” the DoD through uniform policy changes.

The former Fort Benning commander made headlines alongside other TRADOC general officers when he shared a female soldier’s reenlistment video and called Carlson out, saying the Fox host “couldn’t be more wrong.”

A few months later, in June 2021, Fox host Laura Ingraham targeted Donahoe after the general sparred with right wing trolls about installation COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

In addition to the allegations of inappropriate online conduct, Donahoe was also accused of retaliation against officers who had filed inspector general complaints against him, according to the official who spoke on background. The allegations were amplified by popular military-themed meme accounts, most notably TerminalCWO. But there is no indication that the retaliation allegations were founded by investigators.

This story contains reporting from the Associated Press.

About Davis Winkie

Davis Winkie is a senior reporter covering the Army, specializing in accountability reporting, personnel issues and military justice. He joined Military Times in 2020. Davis studied history at Vanderbilt University and UNC-Chapel Hill, writing a master's thesis about how the Cold War-era Defense Department influenced Hollywood's WWII movies.

13. Opinion | Biden is right on Taiwan. Now he needs a staff that won’t undercut him.

Ouch!

Opinion | Biden is right on Taiwan. Now he needs a staff that won’t undercut him.

The Washington Post · by Henry Olsen · September 19, 2022

President Biden, in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, once again committed the United States to Taiwan’s defense. And once again shortly after, White House staff attempted to walk back his clear statement.

This ritual is damaging the country’s standing overseas. Who is in charge? The elected president or his unelected staff? Biden should put an end to this game by decisively rejecting his staff’s mischaracterization of his policy.

The U.S. relationship to Taiwan’s defense has long been intentionally ambiguous. The two nations once had a mutual defense pact, but President Jimmy Carter canceled that treaty when he established diplomatic relations with Communist China in 1979. Since then, the United States has sold arms to Taiwan while officially proclaiming that there is one official China and that the eventual resolution of Chinese-Taiwanese relations should be done peacefully. As a result, it was purposefully unclear whether the United States would come to the island nation’s aid if China decided to invade.

Biden has now clearly stated multiple times that this ambiguity is over. He has given the same answer to multiple questions on whether the United States would defend Taiwan if the latter were invaded: Yes, it would.

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Some critics contend this is unwise — that it unnecessarily commits the United States to a conflict with a rising, powerful nation. But there’s method to Biden’s purported madness. Making the U.S. position clear gives Beijing something to think about. If it knows that any invasion of Taiwan would meet with a U.S. military response, it might be deterred from attacking the nation in the first place.

That’s why the staff’s repeated walk-backs are so harmful. The elected president clearly wants to change U.S. policy. Subsequently saying there is no change to that policy does not put the genie back in the bottle. Instead, it undermines Biden by implicitly suggesting he is not in charge of his own administration. That implication is more damaging than any change in policy could ever be.

Both friends and foes benefit from clarity about U.S. decision-making. Clarity helps friends know what they can and cannot expect from the Unites States. It also gives foes clear guidance over what they can and cannot do without triggering a military response. For example, successive presidents have indicated that Russia can exert influence in Central Asia without triggering military reprisal. Clarity both promises war in select cases and avoids war in others.

The staff’s walk-backs replace clarity with damaging opaqueness. No one seriously doubts that Biden wants to defend Taiwan sovereignty if it is attacked. But they now have reason to wonder whether Biden’s will alone determines U.S. policy.

China now has an incentive to find potential allies within the U.S. chain of command, which could easily lead to serious miscalculations. If Chinese officials believe that ambiguous words from, say, the secretary of state or the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff imply the United States might hold off on retaliatory measures, that could encourage them to do something they might otherwise refrain from doing. That increases the chance of war.

Biden is right to commit the United States to Taiwan’s defense. China’s growing military power is upsetting our web of alliances in the Pacific. Our allies know that any Chinese move would likely first come against Taiwan. Our allies also do not believe that China would stop at Taiwan if an invasion succeeded. Stopping an aggressor at the first point of conflict is the only sure way to stop subsequent violence. Biden’s statements show he understands this, and that reassures our allies.

Biden can stop his staff from undercutting him in one of two ways. One way is to hold a news conference in which he definitively states that U.S. policy has changed. If he chooses this route, he should do so with all the relevant decision-makers behind him, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. That would put an end to the walk-backs and instill clarity about U.S. intentions.

The other way is to deploy U.S. military units to Taiwan itself. The United States does not station any military units in Taiwanese territory, and has fewer than 40 military personnel unofficially within the country. Biden could negotiate an agreement with the Taiwanese government to place U.S. Air Force, Army or Marine units there on a permanent basis. Chinese officials would howl, but they would know that any invasion would automatically entail a U.S. response, both from the troops on the island and elsewhere.

China clearly is building its capability to invade Taiwan sometime in the near future. That effort will succeed unless the United States stands firmly behind the island’s rulers. Biden is right to put us in that position, and he should act firmly now to end the uncertainty his aides are sowing.

The Washington Post · by Henry Olsen · September 19, 2022

14. Putin's Partial Ukraine Mobilization Could Mean the End of Russia

Hyperbole?

Putin's Partial Ukraine Mobilization Could Mean the End of Russia

19fortyfive.com · by Alexander Motyl · September 21, 2022

Vladimir Putin’s speech announcing a partial mobilization of Russian reservists contains nothing we haven’t heard before. It’s an exercise in repetition. Thus, the West and its lackey, neo-Nazi Ukraine, forced the war on poor Russia, which had no choice but to defend itself. The West’s aggression continues as neo-Nazi Ukrainians engage in genocide and other atrocities. Naturally, the people support Russia unconditionally and call for Russian support.

“We cannot,” says Putin, the great moralist, “we have no moral right to let our kin and kith be torn to pieces by butchers; we cannot but respond to their sincere striving to decide their destiny on their own.”

Moreover, says Putin, the great strategist, “Today our armed forces, as I have mentioned, are fighting on the line of contact that is over 1,000 kilometres long, fighting not only against neo-Nazi units but actually the entire military machine of the collective West.”

Given Russia’s deep commitment to morality and the determination of the barbarian West to destroy Russia, Putin concludes that “In this situation, I consider it necessary to take the following decision, which is fully adequate to the threats we are facing. More precisely, I find it necessary to support the proposal of the Defence Ministry and the General Staff on partial mobilisation in the Russian Federation to defend our Motherland and its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to ensure the safety of our people and people in the liberated territories.”

Putin delivered pretty much the same speech back on February 24, when he announced the “special military operation” that quickly morphed into a disastrous war. He and his minions have been repeating the same tropes since then. Indeed, the terms and arguments haven’t changed since the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine and Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas.

The rhetoric reveals—yet again—that Putin and his cronies are either living in a parallel reality that contradicts ours in every respect or are consummate liars or both. According to the Kremlin’s playbook, democratic Ukrainians and their Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, are neo-Nazis. The degenerate West wants to destroy Russia and has always wanted to destroy Russia. In contrast, the Russian state cares only about the good of the people and had to defend itself against neo-Nazi predations.

Anybody with a minimal understanding of the Putin regime and contemporary Ukraine will quickly see through these bizarre assertions and recognize them for what they are: the delusionary ravings of a manipulative dictator who believes that he constructs reality.

The sad thing is that Putin probably knows that his audience—the average middle-aged Russian males who adore him—will believe such a claptrap. The good news is that there are important signs of growing disbelief among many, especially younger male, Russians, who know that they, and not their elders, will be called upon to fight and die in Ukraine in a war that makes no sense. They also know that the Russian army has been battered and that Russia is losing.

Will the reservists rally to the flag and lay their lives for a mad dictator, or will they succumb to common sense and do everything possible to avoid certain death?

The Kremlin appears to know that the latter option is increasingly likely. The Russian parliament just passed a bill increasing penalties for desertion, voluntary surrender, insubordination, and damage to military property. Clearly, as Ukrainian sources regularly confirm, such behaviors must be increasingly common for the Duma to adopt such harsh measures. Moderate oppositionists have begun calling for the people to take to the streets; radical oppositionists are calling for the firebombing of draft boards. Underground resistance movements are destroying rail tracks and other infrastructure. Scores of municipal officials throughout Russia have publicly called for Putin’s removal. The famous singer Alla Pugacheva has openly criticized the war and the regime.

Russian President Putin addressing the nation.

The writing is on the wall. The smart money should bet on the failure of Putin’s mobilization and the galvanization of opposition. Revolutions often start when regimes do something egregiously brutal or stupid. The mobilization decreed by Putin may be the spark that sets off a political and social conflagration and ends the regime—and, possibly, Russia.

Expert Biography: Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”

19fortyfive.com · by Alexander Motyl · September 21, 2022

15. The West is testing out a lot of shiny new military tech in Ukraine

The West is testing out a lot of shiny new military tech in Ukraine

How satellites, drones, and AI helped Ukraine’s counter-offensive.

By Jonathan Guyer @mideastXmidwest jonathan.guyer@vox.com Sep 21, 2022, 9:00am EDT

Vox · by Jonathan Guyer · September 21, 2022

A drone operator launches a quadcopter to monitor the operation of an evacuation robot during its field testing on September 9, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Mykhaylo Palinchak/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

As Ukraine turned a corner 10 days ago with a military offensive that retook territory from Russia, former Google CEO billionaire Eric Schmidt was meeting with senior Ukrainian officials. He was on a 36-hour visit to the country exploring technology’s role in the war.

“What I was interested in is what did the tech industry do to help?” he told a press conference organized by George Washington University, Zooming from a private jet flying back from an undisclosed European country.

Schmidt traveled to Ukraine not just as a former tech CEO, but as a billionaire investor in military technology startups who has served on influential federal boards advising the US government on adapting more artificial intelligence. He has prominently advocated for the US Department of Defense to integrate new tech, and his trip was a reminder of how integral advanced technologies and novel uses of existing technologies have been to Ukraine’s approach in this war.

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Satellites, drones, artificial intelligence, and cyber capabilities have been central to the war since the first days of Russia’s invasion. New technologies have been working in concert with traditional military hardware, empowering Ukraine’s pushback against Russia. Little wonder that NATO has launched a 1 billion euro investment fund for innovation. A senior Ukrainian minister had appealed to Elon Musk via Twitter early on, to route Starlink satellites that provide high-speed internet over the country to keep the country connected even if infrastructure on the ground was destroyed. “Elon Musk is genuinely a hero here,” Schmidt said.

Together with the Minister of Defense of Ukraine @oleksiireznikov held a meeting with the former executive director and chairman of the board of Google, ex-executive chairman and technical advisor of Alphabet @ericschmidt. pic.twitter.com/SP18jdoaiw

— Andriy Yermak (@AndriyYermak) September 11, 2022

The most important factors in Ukraine’s advance likely relate to the unprecedented military aid packages that the United States has provided. That assistance puts Ukraine on par with the top 20 countries worldwide by military spending. The US alone has sent over $14 billion worth of security aid since Moscow invaded, according to senior US defense official Sasha Baker, who last week emphasized that Ukraine has been “creative in integrating capabilities” from the US and other allies.

A spokesperson for the Defense Department said that the US wouldn’t get ahead of the Ukrainians in detailing what tech they have. We do know that the US, for example, has sent 700 Switchblade drones made by the Virginia-based AeroVironment, and the cyber company BlackHorse has been contracted to provide for the Ukraine mission, but it’s not clear yet how much of US assistance writ large is going to cyber and AI. Tracking all those contracts “is an entire project that, in a just world, a team of people would be summarizing in real time,” says Jack Poulson, founder of the nonprofit watchdog Tech Inquiry.

But experts and former military officials said that there are several firsts in this conflict, and one of those has to do with the outsize role of relatively cheap commercial technologies like Musk’s satellites and small drones. For American experts, Ukraine is a case study for understanding how these new technologies operate in a conventional land war alongside all the other weapons the West is sending.

“There’s always this silly and, frankly, faux either/or narrative on technology in war,” says futurist Peter Singer, co-author of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. “It’s very clear that technology, and in particular, new technologies matter, and have been incredibly important, but are they the only important thing? Of course, not.”

Tech at war: satellites, drones, AI, and cyber

Former US defense officials told me that much of the advanced technology that Ukraine is using is commercial and off-the-shelf — in other words, useful innovations that you don’t need to be a military leader to purchase.

That might not sound revolutionary, but it stands in contrast to the Pentagon’s attempts to integrate already-developed products or technologies, which have at times been thwarted by the institution’s complex bureaucracy and tech workers’ protests against enabling the military. “We’re actually seeing that relationship happening in Ukraine and seeing it in real time, and so you’ve got commercial companies that are running to help,” says Jim Mitre, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Program at the RAND Corporation.

Satellites are not new, but small, commercial ones are a major emerging space for venture capital and new startups. And they have contributed to Ukraine’s ability to understand Russian troop movements and track potential war crimes through intensive open-source data collection.

Small commercial drones have been an important part of the Ukraine story too, and they’re doing everything from finding Russian forces, providing target-quality data for artillery strikes, and conducting battle-damage assessments. Both Ukraine and Russia are deploying loitering munitions — small armed drones that can hover in the air for hours and then drop explosives on a target — and in some cases have been used in swarms. And much has been made of the Ukrainians’ success in using the lightweight, armed Bayraktar TB2 drone; the Turkish company that makes it refuses to sell the unmanned aerial vehicle to Russia.

The use of artificial intelligence in war is incredibly controversial, but undeniably advancing. When Reuters reported that the facial-recognition company Clearview AI had provided its technology to Ukraine, critics of the company pointed to its dangers and potential misuse.

Though facial recognition had been used in limited ways in Afghanistan, now Ukraine is using it at scale. “This is the first major conventional conflict where you’re seeing face recognition deployed,” Singer, who co-manages the firm Useful Fiction that has advised the US Air Force and major military contractors, told me. “Start thinking with your sci-fi hat on.”

Another example of AI playing a role has been in the context of new apps that can be used in information operations, such as a tool from the company Primer that can do voice recognition, transcription and translation services, and may be being used to analyze intercepted Russian communications.

Many analysts predicted that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine would spell hard-core cyber attacks. The fact that nothing major has gone down, however, may be in large part due to the work of cyber defenders behind the scenes, at commercial companies and in Western governments. “There’s been an incredible amount of cyber activity, incredible,” says Singer. The example he cited was of Ukrainian hackers infiltrating electric-vehicle charging stations in Moscow and putting on the screen an anti-Putin slur. That was cute, says Singer, “However, what actually mattered is besides defacing the screen, they shut down the operations of the charging stations. They hit the internet of things. They used digital means to cause physical change in the world.” Countries have used that capability covertly before (such as in Israel’s Stuxnet attack in the mid-2000s on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure), but here is the first time perhaps it’s happened in a conventional conflict.

Large-scale military hardware endures as Ukraine’s not-so-secret weapon, but even that operates within a larger technological context. Candace Rondeaux, a researcher at the Washington think tank New America, points out, “It’s the combining of these technologies in certain ways that has been unique.” She acknowledges the centrality of the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), the precision rocket-launcher made by Lockheed Martin that the US has sent to Ukraine to defend against Russia, but adds that in itself it’s insufficient. It’s a targeting system that requires good information and intelligence. “For that information to flow, you’ve got to have communications platforms, and the means by which to securely communicate where things are, when you want to strike them,” she said.

“It’s not HIMARS that’s winning the war for the Ukraine, nor is it traditional artillery duels,” according to Mitre, who worked as a senior Defense official until earlier this year. “It’s their ability to process information at a faster clip than the Russians that is having a big impact here.”

The breadth of information operations has led Brendan McCord, a hedge-fund manager who previously authored the Department of Defense’s first AI strategy, to describe this conflict as the first broadband war. “We fought networked wars for some time, but always in the narrowband sense,” he told me. Rather than depending on small bandwidth, low-speed data transmissions, Starlink has given Ukraine “this incredible advantage,” especially in terms of transmitting high-quality video.

“Ukraine feels like it’s a half a generation ahead on integrating the technologies that it’s using into novel war-fighting concepts,” he added.

What it means for the US

All the newly forged connections are between the US private sector and Ukraine. And the rallying of US companies is obviously not entirely altruistic.

“If you’re a defense company, what you’re hoping is that Ukrainian generals are going to be asking the US military to provide your capabilities to them,” Gregory Allen, a researcher with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “And that’s just a degree of intimacy between the supplier and the warfighter across nations, that is kind of unprecedented.”

That intimacy was on display in June, when the first business executive to visit Ukraine since Russia invaded was Alex Karp, the CEO of the data analytics military and intelligence-agency contractor Palantir. “There has always been a relationship between the defense-industrial complex and private companies, but it is possible that the visibility of CEOs is notable,” says Margarita Konaev, a researcher at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Executives of major US defense contractors have bragged about how they’d profit from arming Ukraine. Silicon Valley companies are jumping into the mix. And, in an extraordinary move, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will keynote a US military contractor conference — speaking directly to US weapons makers.

Going forward, experts are watching how advanced technologies are being used in the battlefield to understand what lessons might apply to US policymakers. Lindsay Gorman, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund who recently served in the Biden administration on the National Security Council, says the focus of much of Washington is on how Russia’s invasion relates to China’s military power and potential scenarios for an attack on Taiwan. Others cited how quickly Ukraine has adapted new technologies and whether the US could follow suit.

For Schmidt, the lesson so far is the urgent need for government to make room for tech. The Ukrainian parliament, for instance, quickly changed a law at the onset of the war to put all of the Ukrainian government’s information in the cloud. “They should have done that before,” he said, “but the point is, the war gave everybody a political excuse to do the right thing.” Schmidt also emphasized the importance of engaging with the country’s crowd-sourced hackers.

But some experts were much more skeptical about tech’s prominence in the first major conventional war in Europe in more than a generation. “What is the role of tomorrow’s technology in today’s war?” asked Konaev. “To an extent it still remains quite limited.”

Vox · by Jonathan Guyer · September 21, 2022

16. Revealed: US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data

We will never become proficient at information warfare because Americans will not want us to because the press, pundits, and politicians will turn them against it.

Revealed: US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data

The “Augury” platform includes highly sensitive network data that Team Cymru, a private company, is selling to the military. “It’s everything. There’s nothing else to capture except the smell of electricity,” one cybersecurity expert said.

By Joseph Cox

Vice · by Joseph Cox · September 21, 2022

Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.

See More →

Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic, and which in some cases provides access to people’s email data, browsing history, and other information such as their sensitive internet cookies, according to contracting data and other documents reviewed by Motherboard.

Additionally, Sen. Ron Wyden says that a whistleblower has contacted his office concerning the alleged warrantless use and purchase of this data by NCIS, a civilian law enforcement agency that’s part of the Navy, after filing a complaint through the official reporting process with the Department of Defense, according to a copy of the letter shared by Wyden’s office with Motherboard.

The material reveals the sale and use of a previously little known monitoring capability that is powered by data purchases from the private sector. The tool, called Augury, is developed by cybersecurity firm Team Cymru and bundles a massive amount of data together and makes it available to government and corporate customers as a paid service. In the private industry, cybersecurity analysts use it for following hackers’ activity or attributing cyberattacks. In the government world, analysts can do the same, but agencies that deal with criminal investigations have also purchased the capability. The military agencies did not describe their use cases for the tool. However, the sale of the tool still highlights how Team Cymru obtains this controversial data and then sells it as a business, something that has alarmed multiple sources in the cybersecurity industry.

“The network data includes data from over 550 collection points worldwide, to include collection points in Europe, the Middle East, North/South America, Africa and Asia, and is updated with at least 100 billion new records each day,” a description of the Augury platform in a U.S. government procurement record reviewed by Motherboard reads. It adds that Augury provides access to “petabytes” of current and historical data.

Motherboard has found that the U.S. Navy, Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency have collectively paid at least $3.5 million to access Augury. This allows the military to track internet usage using an incredible amount of sensitive information. Motherboard has extensively covered how U.S. agencies gain access to data that in some cases would require a warrant or other legal mechanism by simply purchasing data that is available commercially from private companies. Most often, the sales center around location data harvested from smartphones. The Augury purchases show that this approach of buying access to data also extends to information more directly related to internet usage.

Team Cymru says on its website that its solution provides “access to a super majority of all activity on the internet.”

Do you work at a company that handles netflow data? Do you work at an ISP distributing that data? Or do you know anything else about the trade or use of netflow data? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

“Augury is the visibility into 93% of internet traffic,” another website describing the tool reads. Some clients have access to the platform under the different brand name Pure Signal RECON, according to Team Cymru’s website.

The Augury platform makes a wide array of different types of internet data available to its users, according to online procurement records. These types of data include packet capture data (PCAP) related to email, remote desktop, and file sharing protocols. PCAP generally refers to a full capture of data, and encompasses very detailed information about network activity. PCAP data includes the request sent from one server to another, and the response from that server too.

PCAP data is “everything,” Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who has closely followed the data trade, told Motherboard in an online chat. “It’s everything. There’s nothing else to capture except the smell of electricity.” (Team Cymru told Motherboard it does limit what data is returned to users but did not specify what data actually is provided to a user of the platform).

A source in the cybersecurity industry said “that’s insane” when shown that sensitive information like PCAP data was available in Augury. Some private industry users appear to have less access to certain data types in Augury than those listed in the government procurement records. Motherboard granted multiple sources in this piece anonymity because they weren’t authorized by their employers to speak on this issue.

Augury’s data can also include web browser activity, like URLs visited and cookie usage, according to the procurement records. Cookies are sensitive files that websites plant onto computers when people visit them. Given their uniqueness, cookies can be effective for tracking. Facebook and Google, for example, use cookies to follow a particular user from website to website and track their activity. The NSA has then piggybacked off of these cookies to identify targets for hacking. Screenshots of an apparent Augury panel obtained by Motherboard show results containing cookies, URLs visited, and email data. Motherboard showed a section of one of the screenshots to multiple sources familiar with the tool who said it does appear to be the Augury panel.

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Augury also contains so-called netflow data, which creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. That can include which server communicated with another, which is information that may ordinarily only be available to the server owner themselves or to the internet service provider that is carrying the traffic. That netflow data can be used for following traffic through virtual private networks, and show the server they are ultimately connecting from. Multiple sources in the cybersecurity industry told Motherboard that netflow data can be useful for identifying infrastructure that hackers are using.

Team Cymru obtains this netflow data from ISPs; in return, Team Cymru provides the ISPs with threat intelligence. That transfer of data is likely happening without the informed consent of the ISPs’ users. A source familiar with the netflow data previously told Motherboard that “the users almost certainly don’t [know]” their data is being provided to Team Cymru, who then sells access to it.

It is not clear where exactly Team Cymru obtains the PCAP and other more sensitive information, whether that's from ISPs or another method.

A screenshot of Augury obtained by Motherboard. Image: Motherboard.

Motherboard asked Team Cymru multiple times if Augury contains cookies, URLs visited, and PCAP data, as the procurement records show. Team Cymru did not answer the question directly, and instead wrote in an email that “The Augury platform is not designed to target specific users or user activity. The platform specifically does not possess subscriber information necessary to tie records back to any users.”

“Our platform does not provide user or subscriber information, and it doesn’t provide results that show any pattern of life, preventing its ability to be used to target individuals. Our platform only captures a limited sampling of the available data, and is further restricted by only allowing queries against restricted sampled and limited data, which all originates from malware, malicious activity, honeypots, scans, and third parties who provide feeds of the same. Results are then further limited in the scope and volume of what’s returned,” Team Cymru said in another email.

Some have used Team Cymru’s data as part of investigations that aimed to identify specific computers and then contact the person using it, though. In July 2021 researchers at Citizen Lab published a report about Israeli spyware vendor Candiru. As part of that, the researchers wrote that they used Team Cymru’s data to identify a computer they believed had been infected with Candiru’s malware, and in turn, contacted the owner of that computer. Citizen Lab did not respond to a request for comment.

The procurement record that says Augury has access to PCAP data, URLs visited, and cookies relates to the maintenance of a Department of the Navy purchase of the tool. Other procurement data viewed by Motherboard shows The Department of the Navy paid for a “Platinum” Augury license. Beyond that, it is not clear which of Team Cymru’s U.S. government clients have access to the more sensitive data such as cookies. Records for the Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency do not explicitly include the “platinum” marker, but in some cases the amount paid by the agencies is the same amount as what the Navy paid for a platinum license.

These sales to the U.S. government were made through a company called Argonne Ridge Group, which Motherboard found shares an address with Team Cymru. Team Cymru told Motherboard in an email that Argonne Ridge Group is an affiliate of Team Cymru which has historically handled contracts with public agencies.

Although they don’t explicitly mention Augury, Motherboard found multiple contracts between Argonne Ridge Group and the FBI and Secret Service. One of the FBI contracts says “it will secure funding approval to buy net flow from one commercial vendor and integrating it into existing sources of net flow available to cyber intelligence analysts to analyze as a proof of concept.” The Secret Service did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The FBI did not provide a response in time for publication.

The Army was unable to provide a statement on the Augury platform purchases in time for publication. After initially acknowledging Motherboard’s request for comment, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency later deferred to the Department of Defense.

Charles E. Spirtos from the Navy Office of Information told Motherboard in an email that NCIS specifically “conducts investigations and operations in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. The use of net flow data by NCIS does not require a warrant.” Spirtos added that NCIS has not used netflow during any criminal investigation, but that “NCIS uses net flow data for various counterintelligence purposes.”

Regarding the whistleblower that Senator Wyden says approached his office, their complaint relates specifically to use by NCIS, which Motherboard found does have a contract with Argonne Ridge Group.

“NCIS will defeat threats from across the foreign intelligence, terrorist and criminal spectrum by conducting operations and investigations ashore, afloat, and in cyberspace, in order to protect and preserve the superiority of the Navy and Marine Corps warfighters,” NCIS’ website reads.

In his letter addressed to the oversight departments of the DHS, DOJ, and DOD, Senator Wyden writes that “my office was recently contacted by a whistleblower who described a series of formal complaints they filed up and down their chain of command, as well as to the DOD Inspector General and the Defense Intelligence Agency, regarding the warrantless purchase and use of netflow data by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).”

The whistleblower alleges that NCIS is purchasing data from Team Cymru that includes both “netflow records and some communications content,” the letter continues. “The whistleblower has informed my office that their complaint was forwarded by the DOD Inspector General to the Navy Inspector General.” Pointing to the various U.S. government contracts for access to Augury, which his office also reviewed, in his letter Senator Wyden asks the oversight branches of the DHS, DOJ, and DOD to “investigate the warrantless purchase and use of Americans’ internet browsing records by the agencies under your jurisdictions. Your independent oversight must ensure that the government’s surveillance activities are consistent with the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision and safeguard Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.”

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, which the whistleblower alleges referred their complaint to the Navy, told Motherboard it had received Wyden’s letter and was reviewing it. The Office of the Naval Inspector General declined to comment and directed Motherboard back to its Department of Defense counterpart.

Beyond his day job as CEO of Team Cymru, Rabbi Rob Thomas also sits on the board of the Tor Project, a privacy focused non-profit that maintains the Tor software. That software is what underpins the Tor anonymity network, a collection of thousands of volunteer-run servers that allow anyone to anonymously browse the internet.

“Just like Tor users, the developers, researchers, and founders who've made Tor possible are a diverse group of people. But all of the people who have been involved in Tor are united by a common belief: internet users should have private access to an uncensored web,” the Tor Project’s website reads.

When asked by Motherboard in April about Thomas’ position on the Tor Project board while also being the CEO of a company that sells a capability for attributing activity on the internet, Isabela Bagueros, executive director for the Tor Project, said in an email that “Rabbi Rob's potential conflicts of interest have been vetted according to the standard conflicts disclosure process required of all board members. Based on the board's understanding of Rabbi Rob's work with Team Cymru, the board has not identified any conflicts of interest.”

Motherboard has previously revealed other data purchases by the U.S. military. In 2020, Motherboard found that a Muslim prayer app downloaded more than 98 million times sold its location data to a broker called X-Mode. X-Mode, in turn, included U.S. military contractors among its clients. As part of that investigation, Motherboard also found that U.S. Special Operations Command had purchased Locate X, a surveillance tool based on location data harvested from ordinary apps. Last March, Motherboard reported that a military unit that conducts drone strikes bought Locate X too.

After Motherboard published some of those findings, Senator Wyden asked the Department of Defense for more information about its data purchases. Some of the agency’s subsequent responses were given in a form that meant Wyden's office could not legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer in particular was classified. Instead, Wyden wrote in a second letter in May 2021 to the agency that “I write to urge you to release to the public information about the Department of Defense's (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans,” suggesting that the Pentagon is engaged in such surveillance. At the time Wyden's office declined to provide Motherboard with specifics about the classified answer. But a Wyden aide said that the question related to the Department of Defense buying internet metadata.

In August, the House of Representatives approved changes to next year’s military budget that would require the Department of Defense to start to disclose any purchases of web browsing or smartphone data that would ordinarily require a warrant, Gizmodo reported at the time. It has yet to be approved by the Senate.

Other cybersecurity companies also package controversial datasets. In 2020 Motherboard reported that HYAS, a threat intelligence firm, sourced location data in order to track people to their “doorstep.”

Update: This piece has been updated with a statement from the Navy.

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Vice · by Joseph Cox · September 21, 2022

17. Why the US still must invest in homeland missile defense

Why the US still must invest in homeland missile defense

Defense News · by Peppi DeBiaso · September 20, 2022

North Korea’s test of an unprecedented number of ballistic missiles in 2022, including several types of intercontinental ballistic missiles, is the latest reminder the United States faces an increasingly perilous security environment.

U.S. adversaries continue integrating offensive missiles into their strategies to support coercion, intimidation and aggressive military behavior. While it might be tempting for the United States to throw up its hands and allocate missile defense resources elsewhere in this increasingly unpredictable missile threat environment, the U.S. should instead continue to strengthen its capabilities for effective homeland defense.

Today, the nation is defended against a limited ICBM attack on the homeland posed by the missile arsenals of “rogue states” such as North Korea and Iran (who is also continuing its pursuit of longer-range missiles and a nuclear capability). In response to North Korean and Iranian efforts, the United States is considering how to improve its missile defenses to deter possibly larger and more sophisticated missile attacks and, if deterrence fails, to reliably protect the homeland against missile attacks.

At the same time, these developments have raised concerns an increase in the scale or complexity of the North Korean missile threat may eventually overwhelm the ability of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system to defend against most or all of these threats. This possibility calls into question the broader strategic value of improving, or even maintaining, the nation’s missile defenses.

An argument in favor of scaling back missile defense development too readily discounts the role defenses play in U.S. deterrence and defense policy — even in the context of an expanding missile threat. Moreover, it leads to an erroneous “all or nothing” approach to defending the United States against significant dangers.

At least four crucial considerations help make the case for sustaining and strengthening the homeland missile defense posture.

The first is uncertainty around how the threat will evolve over the next decade. While North Korea is committed to its ICBM program, the projected size of its arsenal and timing remain uncertain.

North Korea has encountered technical and developmental setbacks in its ICBM program that not only affect the pace of this threat, but also raise questions about the operational reliability of such complex weapon systems — at least for the foreseeable future.

Second, defenses do not have to be large or perfect to inject complexity and doubt into the adversary’s pre-war planning and execution of missile strikes. Even limited defenses are capable of weakening an opponent’s confidence in its ability to achieve its military objectives.

Third, even in the face of possible advances in rogue state long-range missiles, missile defenses provide significant value to blunt blackmail or coercion where the adversary seeks to test American political will — especially by threatening limited strikes. In these circumstances, defenses would confront the aggressor with the prospect its attack would be futile, while risking a devastating U.S. counterattack.

Fourth, it is dangerously imprudent to rule out the possibility deterrence might fail. Crises have unpredictable dynamics fraught with misperception and miscalculation. There will also be situations in which deterrence may be simply irrelevant, particularly in those instances where an adversary’s ruler believes he has nothing to lose in launching his ICBMs. Under these conditions, defenses remain vital to reducing the scale of destruction in the United States.

The Department of Defense’s 2023 budget request takes a number of steps to align the homeland missile defense posture with increasingly challenging missile threats. It maintains the bipartisan focus on sustaining and enhancing the current GMD system while funding modernization efforts to ensure it can effectively counter larger and more sophisticated rogue state ICBM threats.

This includes developing a new Next Generation Interceptor expected to add 20 defensive interceptors and potentially replace the 44 existing GBIs by the end of the decade. The budget also funds a network of space- and land-based sensors crucial to tracking and targeting more advanced ballistic and hypersonic missile threats.

Collectively, these efforts to build a second-generation homeland defense system begin laying a foundation to address more capable North Korean and Iranian missile threats. However, it is essential for the Biden administration and Congress to not only sustain current modernization efforts but also define a clear strategy for the next generation of missile defense concepts, technologies and capabilities.

Directed-energy weapons, like high-powered microwave systems and kinetic interceptors deployed on airborne platforms for boost phase engagement, hold considerable promise for more effective intercept capability at lower cost. Progress in the commercial satellite sector over the last decade has produced more capable, smaller and cheaper platforms and offers innovative opportunities for advanced military space-based sensors to defend against more complex missile threats.

While the United States may not be able to eliminate all rogue state ICBM risks over time, that does not mean it should turn away from missile defense. The United States can reduce these risks by investing in emerging and disruptive technologies to improve the capabilities of effective missile defenses while continuing to offer significant deterrence and, should deterrence fail, a way to limit damage.

Peppi DeBiaso is the former director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Missile Defense Policy and a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

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FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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