Quotes of the Day:

“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage, and virtues mean everything. That power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this: that love, true love never dies. Doesn't matter if any of this is true or not. You see, a man should believe in these things because these are the things worth believing in.”

- actor Robert Duvall in the film “Second Hand Lions”

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate the truth,”

- Garry Kasparov - there would be no game of chess if pawns refused to play…

"If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."

- Charles Bukowski

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 27 (Putin's War)

2. The story of little Liza, killed in her stroller by a Russian missile

3. America’s Next War Will Be Urban

4. Taiwan: Two US warships sail through strait

5. Afghanistan withdrawal anniversary: Painful lessons from 20 years at war by Bing West

6. Rival Chechen fighters take war to battlefields of Ukraine

7. Stalin's Lessons for Putin

8. War Brings Ukraine’s Women New Roles and New Dangers

9. Arrests and Killings Drive Afghan Troops Once Allied With U.S. Into Hiding

10. For U.S. troops who survived Kabul airport disaster, guilt and grief endure

11. Foreign businesses want out of China. But breaking up may be tougher than ever

12. To prevent China ascendancy, U.S. needs to preserve its global system of rules, not rulers

13. No rules for USA. (China OpEd)

14. Clear analogy with South China Sea and Taiwan to India-China LAC tensions, says Kevin Rudd

15. Group of Dutch soldiers shot outside Indiana hotel

16. US colonel branded a MURDERER for turning away Americans during Kabul

17. Controlling the First Island Chain: How to Ensure China Can't Dominate the Pacific?

18. Stuart Scheller’s Tragic Truth-Telling About Military Hypocrisy

19. Russian force won't return from mission fearing Ukraine deployment: Report

20. Special Forces Troops of Indian Army & US Army Participated in Gruelling 48 Hours Long Validation Exercise

21. In New Hampshire, Republicans Weigh Another Hard Right Candidate

22. 10 Rules to Live by on Social Media for Those who Serve

23. The Man Who Won the War (WWII)

​1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 27 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-27

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 27

Aug 27, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 27, 7:30ET

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.

The volunteer battalions constituting Russia’s 3rd Army Corps will likely deploy to Ukraine in ad hoc combined arms units to renew offensive operations, possibly on the Donetsk City axis and the Southern Axis. The volunteer battalions Russia has been forming have been divided into two general groups, as ISW has previously reported. Some battalions are deploying to the front lines as soon as they have completed their abbreviated initial training. Others have been coalescing into a new 3rd Army Corps.[1] An analysis by Janes Intelligence Group of new images from combat training for elements of the 3rd Army Corps at the Mulino Training Ground in Nizhny Novogorod found 3rd Army Corps troops training with more modern Russian equipment such as BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, T-80BVM and T-90M tanks, and the latest AK-12 assault rifle variants.[2] The other Russian volunteer battalions that have fought in Ukraine, such as the North Ossetian “Alania” Battalion, have not entered combat with older equipment. The fact that the 3rd Army Corps units are training on better gear and apparently being held back to deploy in more coherent combined arms groups suggests that the Russian military intends to commit them to offensive operations and hopes to regain momentum somewhere along the front line. Elements of the 3rd Army Corps are reportedly already deploying from Nizhny Novgorod closer towards Russia’s border with Ukraine. The Georgia-based Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) observed T-80BV and T-90M tanks that were in Mulino likely of the 3rd Army Corps deploy to Rostov Oblast on August 27.[3] If this report is correct, it could suggest that the Russian military intends to commit the 3rd Army Corps to reinforce offensive operations near Donetsk City, where drives around Mariinka, Pisky, and Avdiivka have been stalling after making some gains. Elements of the 3rd Army Corps may also deploy to the Southern Axis. A Russian Local media outlet reported that the Khabarovsk Krai “Baron Korf” signals battalion will support the deployment of Russian field posts in Kherson Oblast and provide command and control to the new Russian 3rd Army Corps, indicating the Kremlin will likely deploy 3rd Army Corps elements to Kherson and Ukraine’s south.[4]3rd Army Corps elements are unlikely to generate effective combat power, however. Better equipment does not necessarily make more effective forces when the personnel are not well-trained or disciplined, as many members of the 3rd Army Corps’ volunteer units are not. Previous military experience is not required for many of 3rd Army Corps’ volunteer elements.[5] Images of the 3rd Army Corp elements have shown the volunteers to be physically unfit and old.[6] Analysts have also noted that Russia’s lack of experienced non-commissioned officers (NCOs) will hurt the 3rd Army Corps effectiveness.[7] ISW has previously commented on reports of indiscipline among the personnel of the 3rd Army Corps as well.[8]

Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that a 10-person Russian sabotage and reconnaissance group attempted assault operations in Kherson Oblast on August 27, suggesting that Russian offensive capabilities in Kherson Oblast have degraded even further. [9] A 10-person group amounts to a squad, which is too small to act effectively as a maneuver unit. If the Southern Operational Command correctly reported the size and mission of this unit, it would indicate that Russian ground forces in Ukraine have degraded to the point that they are attempting to conduct offensive operations and echelons too low to make meaningful gains. ISW has no independent confirmation of the current size of Russian assault echelons attempting ground attacks in Ukraine, but this report is consistent with the Ukrainian campaign to degrade Russian logistics capabilities in western Kherson Oblast and ISW’s prior assessments of diminished Russian military morale in Ukraine.[10]

Key Takeaways

• Volunteer battalions that comprise Russia’s 3rd Army Corps are likely being prepared to attempt offensive combined arms operations but will likely lack sufficient combat power to make a material difference on the battlefield.
• Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that a 10-person Russian sabotage and reconnaissance group attempted assault operations in Kherson Oblast, indicating that Russian offensive capabilities in Kherson Oblast have degraded further.
• Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack north of Kharkiv City.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks southwest of Izyum, northeast of Siversk, northeast and south of Bakhmut, and west and southwest of Donetsk City.
• Ukrainian forces targeted Russian airborne command-and-control elements in western Kherson Oblast.
• Russian and Ukrainian sources traded accusations of shelling the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
• Russian military leadership may be shifting to a new phase of mobilization in central Russia and have likely exhausted pools of potential recruits in more peripheral and disenfranchised regions.
• Russian authorities are intensifying law enforcement operations in occupied areas.

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.

• Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
• Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
• Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
• Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
• Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack southwest of Izyum on August 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attempted to advance in the direction of Brazhkivka, about 15km southwest of Izyum.[11] Russian forces additionally continued artillery strikes and aerial reconnaissance along the Izyum-Slovyansk line and conducted a rocket strike directly on Slovyansk. [12]

Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack northeast of Siversk on August 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attempted to launch an offensive towards Siversk from the area of Hryhorivka, about 10km northeast of Siversk.[13] The UK Ministry of Defense additionally noted that Russian forces have engaged in heavy fighting around Siversk in the past week as part of intensified offensive operations in Donetsk Oblast.[14] Russian troops continued air and artillery strikes on Siversk and its surrounding environs.[15]

Russian forces continued ground attacks northeast and south of Bakhmut on August 27. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian assaults in Soledar, 10km northeast of Bakhmut.[16] Russian troops also reportedly attempted to advance from Mayorske and Zaitseve on the outskirts of Horlivka, about 20km southwest of Bakhmut.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that “separate elements” (”Окремі підрозділи” - a term meaning elements at an echelon at or below a battalion) are active in the overall Bakhmut area, which suggests that Russian forces are operating in piecemeal sub-battalion formations around Bakhmut.[18] This report is consistent with previous reporting that advances towards Bakhmut are being led by elements of proxy and Wagner Group forces, as opposed to larger and more coherent battalion-level groups.[19]

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks near the western outskirts of Donetsk City on August 27. The Ukrainian General staff stated that Russian troops attempted to advance on Nevelske (10km northwest of the outskirts of Donetsk City) and towards Oleksandropil (15km northwest of the outskirts of Donetsk City).[20] Footage taken by a Russian military correspondent indicates that Russian troops have likely advanced into the outskirts of Krasnohorivka, 8km north of Avdiivka, which indicates that Russian forces are continuing efforts to flank Avdiivka from the north.[21] Russian forces continued firing on Ukrainian positions along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City frontline.[22]

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City on August 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops launched ground assaults towards Prechistivka and Pavlivka, about 40km southwest of Donetsk City in the Vuhledar area.[23] Russian troops continued air and artillery strikes between Donetsk City and the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border.[24]

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack north of Kharkiv City on August 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attempted an assault in the area of Dementiivka, about 20km north of Kharkiv City.[25] Russian forces conducted a missile strike against the center of Kharkiv City and shelled surrounding settlements in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast.[26]

Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)

Ukrainian forces targeted Russian military command-and-control (C2) elements in northwestern Kherson Oblast, likely as part of the campaign to degrade Russian military capabilities on the right bank of the Dnipro River. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian forces struck C2 points of Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) of the 11th and 83rd Separate Airborne Brigades in Novovoznesenske (just south of Vysokopillya) and Dudchany (on the right bank of the Dnipro River 27 kilometers southwest of Osokorovka).[27] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that damage to the Antonivsky and Darivka bridges into western Kherson Oblast have made them impassable for heavy equipment.[28] Satellite imagery and footage of the Antonivsky and Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam road bridges shows significant damage that will likely make repairing them difficult.[29]

Russian forces attempted a limited ground assault in Kherson Oblast on August 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian reconnaissance-in-force attempt near Potomkyne in northwestern Kherson Oblast.[30] The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian ground assault to cross the Inhulets bridgehead near Lozove, Kherson Oblast, but Ukrainian forces most likely control the bridgehead.[31] Russian forces struck Mykolaiv City with Smerch rockets and continued shelling throughout the line of contact.[32]

Russian and Ukrainian sources again traded accusations of shelling the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) on August 27. Ukraine state nuclear energy agency Energoatom stated that Russian forces have repeatedly shelled the ZNPP over August 26-27, resulting in numerous fire and radioactive safety risks.[33] The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces shelled the ZNPP grounds near nuclear storage facilities.[34] The Russian MoD still has not provided photographic or video evidence of damage at the ZNPP to support its claims that Ukrainian forces are striking the ZNPP. Russian authorities should be able to provide such evidence as Russian forces currently control the ZNPP’s territory.

Russian authorities at the ZNPP are reportedly intimidating Ukrainian ZNPP personnel into silence about current working conditions at the plant. Pro-Kremlin Russian news outlet RIA Novosti reported on August 24 that Rosgvardia forces have arrested ZNPP employees for allegedly collaborating with the Ukrainian military, and that Russian authorities have arrested 26 people for claimed access control violations since Russian forces took control of the plant on March 4.[35] The Telegraph reported on August 25 that undisclosed ZNPP personnel have told The Telegraph that Russian authorities are arresting and torturing ZNPP personnel to prevent them from disclosing safety violations to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and that Russian authorities want to reduce the presence of Ukrainian personnel at the ZNPP.[36] The Telegraph also reported that Russian forces are restricting Ukrainian workers from monitoring the conditions of the ZNPP by prohibiting movement and parking military equipment in turbine halls to prevent passage through them.[37] Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets stated that Ukrainian ZNPP personnel perform essential tasks in ensuring the safety of the ZNPP and that Russian detention of these personnel places the ZNPP at further risk of disaster.[38]

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground assaults in Zaporizhia Oblast on August 27. Ukrainian Zaporizhia Oblast Head Oleksandr Starukh stated that Russian forces struck Zaporizhzhia City overnight on August 26-27 with unspecified rounds, likely rocket artillery or missiles.[39] Russian forces conducted rocket strikes against Nikopol, Marhanets, and Chervonohryhorivka, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on the north bank of the Dnipro River, likely from positions around Enerhodar.[40] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Russian forces destroyed a Ukrainian HIMARS and M777 artillery ammunition depot near Preobrazhenka, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[41] Russian forces conducted tube artillery and airstrikes on settlements cross the line of contact.[42]

Russia continues to transit equipment to staging areas through Crimea. Recently geolocated footage shows Russian trains transporting heavy equipment into Crimea, including engineering and sapper equipment, tanks, and armored personnel carriers.[43]

Satellite imagery shows Russian forces transporting an S-300 air defense system from Maysaf, Syria to Novorossiysk, Russia.[44] Russia may deploy the S-300 elements to Crimea. Russian forces pulling military assets from Syria for use in Ukraine indicates that Russian forces are facing challenges sustaining or improving their air defense capabilities using equipment in Russia.

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

Russian military leadership may be shifting to a new phase of mobilization after having exhausted recruitment efforts and sources of combat power on Russia’s geographic and socioeconomic periphery. Spokesperson for the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Vadym Skibitsky stated on August 27 that the Moscow, Leningrad, and St. Petersburg areas are increasingly generating forces, whereas previously the onus for volunteer mobilization largely has fallen on more economically depressed and peripheral regions in eastern Russia.[45] The GUR similarly reported that the Kremlin has effectively exhausted mobilization potential in Tuva, Buryatia, republics of the Caucasus, and other ethnic minority enclaves that ISW has previously assessed were bearing the brunt of mobilization efforts.[46] The GUR noted that the Kremlin has directed the heads of Russian federal subjects (regions) in more western and well-off regions to lead regionally based recruitment campaigns and that the majority of recruits in Moscow Oblast are contracting into the 1st Guards Tank Army.[47] As the onus of partial mobilization shifts to more economically advantaged, densely populated, and better-educated regions of Russia, domestic opposition to recruitment efforts will likely grow. Recruitment drives in western Russia remain unlikely to generate significant increases in combat capability.

Russian federal subjects (regions) are continuing efforts to incentivize and train new recruits for service in Ukraine. Social media footage posted on August 27 indicates that the Bashkortostan's “Shaimuratov” volunteer battalion likely deployed to Ukraine between August 25-27.[48] The “Shaimuratov” Battalion announced it was ready to deploy to Ukraine on August 25 and received protective blessings from Russian clergy on August 26.[49] Norwegian outlet The Barents Observer reported that the northwestern Russian Republic of Karelia is now offering up to 250,000 rubles ($4,146) per month to recruits.[50] A Russian milblogger reposted a recruitment ad for the “Avanguard” OMON battalion and stated that the starting salary is 75,000 to 80,000 rubles ($1,243-$1,327) per month.[51] OMON is a system of specialized police units within Rosgvardia that typically requires more specialized recruitment, so the advertisement suggests that law enforcement bodies are also struggling to recruit and are broadening their mobilization aperture. Russian outlet News29RU reported on August 26 that veterans established a training center for future soldiers in Arkhangelsk Oblast, which indicates that Arkhangelsk likely lacks the formal infrastructure to facilitate the training of new recruits and relies on informal sources, such as veterans' organizations, to build out combat capacity.[52]

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)

Russian occupation authorities are continuing to intensify law enforcement efforts in occupied areas in the face of internal tensions and partisan threats. Russian outlet RIA Novosti posted pictures of Russian Spetznaz detachments, possibly from the Special Purpose Center of the Federal State Security Service (FSB), carrying out spot checks and other law enforcement tasks in occupied Kharkiv Oblast.[53] Russian Telegram channel Baza similarly claimed that police divisions of the Kherson and Zaporizhia occupation administrations are subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, which indicates that Russian authorities lack confidence in the ability of occupation administrations to provide adequate security to Russian government assets in occupied areas.[54] First Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration, Sergi Kiriyenko, stated that Russia has additionally allocated law enforcement funds so that every school in occupied areas of Donbas, Kherson, and Zaporizhia has two armed guards on its premises by the start of the school year on September 1.[55] Kiriyenko indicated that this initiative will be carried out in tandem with Rosgvardia, internal ministries of Russia and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) and selected private security companies.[56] Taken together, these individual data points suggest that Russian authorities are increasingly concerned with securing occupied areas.

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.

[4] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; http://amurpress dot info/strategy/34550/

[35] https://ria dot ru/20220824/zaderzhanie-1811857408.html

[45] https://suspilne dot media/275624-rosia-zadiala-u-vijni-proti-ukraini-160-tisac-vijskovih-ne-vrahovuuci-rosgvardiu-gur/

[46] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://gur.gov dot ua/content/v-moskovskii-ta-leninhradskii-oblastiakh-rf-posyliuietsia-prykhovana-mobilizatsiia.html

[47] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/v-moskovskii-ta-leninhradskii-oblastiakh-rf-posyliuietsia-prykhovana-mobilizatsiia.html

[50] https://thebarentsobserver dot com/en/security/2022/08/youth-center-arkhangelsk-takes-training-new-warriors

[52] https://www.news29 dot ru/m/obschestvo/V_Pomore_gotovit_severjan_k_kontraktnoj_sluzhbe_budut_v_specialno_sozdannom_centre/97759; https://thebarentsobserver dot com/en/security/2022/08/youth-center-arkhangelsk-takes-training-new-warriors

[55] https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/15578041

[56] https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/15578041

understandingwar.org

2. The story of little Liza, killed in her stroller by a Russian missile

We cannot forget the brutality of Putin's War.

Heartbreaking photos at the link. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/28/ukraine-vinnytsia-missile-attack-girl-stroller/

The story of little Liza, killed in her stroller by a Russian missile

The Washington Post · by Jennifer Hassan · August 28, 2022

By

August 28, 2022 at 4:33 a.m. EDT

Four-year-old Elizaveta Dmytrieva grinned as she pushed her stroller along the street in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. It was nearly five months into the war, but the city where her family had fled from Kyiv seemed safe enough. Her mother took an Instagram video as “Liza,” who was born with Down syndrome, led the way in a moment of delighted independence.

Barely an hour later, the little girl was dead, her mother severely injured. And the image of her black and pink stroller, flipped on its side and spattered with blood, would become symbolic of the gruesome toll Russia’s invasion has inflicted on even the youngest Ukrainians.

What Iryna Dmytrieva remembers, reliving the horror of that July morning in her first interview since leaving the hospital, is a deafening noise overhead that she thought was a plane. She looked up to see a “massive” missile and immediately crouched down to try to shield her child.

“There wasn’t time to do anything,” Iryna told The Washington Post. “It was over in a flash.”

As her injuries slowly heal, she keeps replaying those final moments with Liza. The two were going from one appointment to another, and Iryna is thankful she had securely strapped her daughter into the stroller at that point because they were rushing. Otherwise, she says, “who knows where she would have ended up?”

Her decision meant the family had an intact body they could grieve and bury — unlike the many other bodies blown apart that day.

“She was my life,” Iryna said of Liza. “What Russia took from me cannot be forgiven. All my plans are destroyed.”

Iryna was 14 weeks pregnant when doctors told her and her husband, Artem, that there were complications. Their child would be born with a heart defect and other problems; terminating the pregnancy would be best, the doctors advised. The couple said no.

Two months after Liza’s birth, a genetic test revealed she had Down syndrome — a chromosomal condition that commonly causes physical and intellectual disabilities. Five months later, she underwent heart surgery that lasted more than five hours. Her mother shared photos on social media throughout Liza’s hospitalization, and those images were how many others came to know the little girl.

Throughout Liza’s short life, Iryna used Instagram to shine a light on the struggles, hopes and fears of parenting a child with Down syndrome. The account became an online diary, which also documented her split from Artem. The couple separated when Liza was 2.

“It was the only kind of motherhood I knew,” Iryna said, describing the many medical appointments that became a regular part of life. Each night, before Liza fell asleep, she would remind her: “You’re my most clever, beautiful, ideal child.”

The photos tell a story of love through all seasons. There’s Liza dressed as a witch for Halloween. Liza wearing a sun hat at the beach. Liza lying on a bed of fresh white snow.

In one video, she runs through a field of lavender and spins around in a lilac dress. It was the beloved family dog, a chubby pug named Ben, who showed her how to twirl in circles.

“Is it possible to fall in love again and again?” her mother wrote under a photo just weeks before Liza was killed.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Я мама янгола (@l.i.z.i.love)

The July 14 strike on Vinnytsia claimed 23 lives in all, including those of two other young children. The Russian missiles that hit the central Ukrainian city, far from the front lines, also damaged a nine-story office block, restaurants and residential buildings.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called it “an open act of terrorism.”

Amid the dark, thick smoke, Iryna knew almost immediately that Liza was gone. She saw her still buckled in the stroller. Her daughter’s feet, clad in mint-green-and-white sneakers, were splayed at an unnatural angle. Next to the stroller was a severed human foot — someone else’s.

Iryna remembers screaming for help. No one responded.

The mother was taken in critical condition to Vinnytsia City Clinical Hospital, where she would spend a month. Doctors removed shrapnel from her stomach, including a piece lodged just centimeters from a vital artery. Her left leg was shattered. Surgery on her left arm removed a fragment from the projectile. She has yet to regain feeling in some of her fingers.

From her hospital bed, Iryna told her mother that she wanted Liza to be buried in a white dress — “like a princess,” she said. And three days after the attack, photos show the little girl lying with a flower crown on her head and some of her favorite toys crowded at her feet in the open casket. Among them was a treasured mouse that went everywhere with her.

Those images from the funeral, which Iryna could not attend because of the severity of her injuries, are ones she tries not to look at because she feels as though her daughter is still with her.

“The mental pain is worse than the physical pain,” she said.

She is 34 and, like other parents in Ukraine, struggling with wrenching, incalculable loss. Almost 1,000 children have been confirmed killed or injured since the war began, according to UNICEF, though the agency believes the true number to be much higher.

On social media, Iryna has been inundated with thousands of messages of love, prayers and support from around the world. Some people have shared paintings and poems with her.

The outpouring has brought comfort, though Iryna says she has nothing left.

In a dream she had the day after the attack, she saw Liza in her white dress, surrounded by bright yellow smoke. She embraced her daughter who then moved away. She tried to reach for Liza’s hand, but she couldn’t quite grasp it.

“I ask Liza to take me with her,” Iryna said.

“It’s not your time,” Liza told her mother. “You have to live.”

Annabelle Chapman contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Jennifer Hassan · August 28, 2022

3. America’s Next War Will Be Urban

Excerpts:

In comparing recent urban battles with historical urban offensives, it confirms the trends predicted in the early 1990s: Cities have greater tactical significance and strategic vitality not only in intra- and inter-state conflicts but also in regional socio-political dynamics and international terror campaigns.

For NATO, it is not a challenge that fundamentally alters tactical, strategic/operational level decisionmaking in unconventional scenarios. Although not usually urban in nature, some lessons can be drawn from the NATO presence in Afghanistan, especially the importance of human intelligence, humanitarian aid/support, and constant engagement/dialogue with regional political actors. As witnessed in Afghanistan, political support to regional parties provided clarity in military decisionmaking—in urban cities, the relationship between political actors becomes more intertwined due to the presence of multiple stakeholders such as non-government institutions, civil society groups, and international aid agencies. This relationship becomes further complex with the simultaneous employment of combat and stabilization operations.

For NATO, these challenges may be interpreted by political leadership differently, however, for military leadership and planners, it is imperative to take the ongoing engagements seriously. The solution to challenges will not emerge from innovative technological mechanisms—simply because meagerly integrating them in training simulations is not sufficient on its own to prevent civilian/military casualties or save a city from destruction. Instead, military leaders must integrate infantry and special operation units with mechanized and armor forces while simulating urban battle and permitting the participation of civilian urban warfare experts, academics, and humanitarian aid-centric institutions for constant operational/tactical revisions. It is important to note that the idea is not to have a large pool of civilian/military advisers who can provide constant training to militaries with smaller armed forces. The idea is to ensure that lessons learned from successive urban offensives are internalized by NATO military planners before NATO forces are drawn into an intense urban battle. A form of this training is occurring with the U.S. Army National Guard’s 40th Infantry Division’s urban training center in California.

In the future, adversaries will seek to engage NATO in battles for cities.

by Anant Mishra Edward Salo

The National Interest · by Anant Mishra · August 27, 2022

Cities have remained a center of gravity for most conflicts and conventional wars, though they became a focal point in strategic planning only at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Russo-Ukrainian War has reignited the debate on the future of modern warfare and the trends that continue to point toward its urban nature. Battles raging in the major cities highlight the importance of strategic control. In the context of political optics, there is no better example than the intense battles which occurred in Mosul, Aleppo, and Raqqa between 2011 and 2018 to retain control as part of broader politico-military objectives.

Recently, American military leaders have predicted that the next urban battles will be fought in megacities. Gen. Charles Krulak contended that the foundations of future warfare were not laid by Operation Desert Storm but by U.S. combat missions in Somalia and Russian lessons from the First Chechnyan War. These predictions are based on two factors: the migration from rural to urban areas, and the rise of intra-state conflicts.

By 2050, the overall growth of the world’s population could rise to 2.5 billion people residing in urban areas. The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) recently highlighted the immediate need to identify alternative approaches to urban operations. History continues to remind us that urban warfare is no longer an instrument of war, as close-quarter battles and house-to-house sieges have elevated from tactical alternatives for small unit action to the main offensive as a part of broader strategic planning.

Urban operations are tactical maneuvers (part of an offensive or defensive action within the gambit of strategic planning) involving at least two actors and are carried out with an intent to lay siege to a city to gain access to its infrastructures. Three cases of urban operations conducted between 2016 and 2022—Kyiv, Marawi, and Mosul—are especially notable.

Kyiv Offensive (Russo-Ukrainian War, 2022)

The offensive to take Kyiv used standard Russian doctrine and started with the bombardment of the city following a sabotage attempt from special operations forces (dressed as Ukrainian soldiers). The Ukrainian authorities killed approximately sixty saboteurs in intense battles. After heavy artillery bombardment, Russian armored columns began approaching the city, with the intent to siege it. This advance met a Ukrainian counter-offensive which not only destroyed Russian armor but the resulted in severe Russian casualties, including the tank column commander, and forced them to retreat. The Ukrainian population and military quickly mobilized to defend the city from Russian forces, and the siege was broken.

Siege of Marawi (2017)

The siege of Marawi was a five-month-long urban battle that raged in the southern Philippines. The battle occurred between the Philippine armed forces and the Maute and the Salafi Abu Sayyaf groups (ISIS affiliates). The battle witnessed government troops trained in irregular warfare engaging in house-to-house combat, which decimated the main city. With a population of 200,000, the city of Marawi was divided geographically between majority Catholic neighborhoods and Muslim-dominated areas in the south. In Marawi, combat operations were strictly limited to the city center after the fighters retreated there and remained throughout the battle. The ISIS affiliate groups intended to use the conflict for propaganda that would enflame regional and global inter/intra-religious tensions.

Mosul Counter-Offensive (2016-2017)

The Battle of Mosul was the single largest military battle led by Iraqi Government forces in support of coalition troops to retake the city from the grip of ISIS fighters, who had captured it in June 2014. The battle is credited as the single largest military operation since the invasion of Iraq and the toughest urban battle since World War II.

The operation began with Iraqi and coalition troops retaking control of areas in Nineveh Governorate surrounding Mosul, and engaged ISIS on three main fronts outside Mosul, clearing one village after another. In addition to the significant loss of both military and civilian lives, Mosul was decimated during the nine-month-long offensive. ISIS never aimed to retain explicit control over the city but sought to inflict serious losses to the Iraqi army and create instability in Baghdad by prolonging the fight. It also tried to propagandize the fight and the harm committed against civilians to bolster recruitment.

Taking the aforementioned case studies into account, it is important to comprehend the true character of urban operations:

First, cities and towns have symbolic importance. This is reflected by the various governments’ decisions to accept infrastructure damages and loss of civilian lives if it meant controlling urban areas. The siege of Kyiv is one such example that highlights how capturing a capital city can strengthen one’s political motivation. However, if such a campaign fails, it provides many opportunities for propaganda, as witnessed during the offensives on Mosul and Marawi where the symbolism was effective for terrorist groups in attracting recruitment.

Second, civilian casualties are vital for propaganda. Civilian casualties were exploited by ISIS in Mosul and Marawi. Nonetheless, civilian populations were used as human shields, scouts, weapon carriers, and drivers, which allowed ISIS fighters to lay improvised explosive devices or reinforce their positions without being targeted by coalition fire.

Third, complex scenarios overruled commanders’ intent. For offensive actions, commanders had to weigh their losses and analyze the use of superior firepower against the expected loss of civilian lives. In Kyiv, Marawi, and Mosul, air strikes and artillery were directed primarily to minimize losses of coalition troops and overcome challenges arising from a lack of close-quarter battle training.

Fourth, urban warfare is unconventional and improvised. Tactical operations constantly evolved throughout the battle. In the case of Ukraine, territorial defense forces employed Molotov cocktails against infantry fighting vehicles and they mounted man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) on 4x4 vehicles to increase mobility. In the other instances, ISIS equipped vehicles with explosives and altered commercially available drones for kamikaze attacks by lacing them with explosives.

Are Modern Militaries Prepared?

The battles of Mosul, Marawi, and Kyiv have reignited the debate on troop deployments for urban campaigns/offensives. Though U.S.-led coalition forces contributed air and support assets to the campaign, close-quarter offenses were mainly undertaken by Iraqi troops in Mosul. Kyiv became another example where the burden of counter-offensives was undertaken solely by Ukrainian territorial defense forces.

By this, NATO member nations continue to actively revise their capabilities through training simulations dedicated to urban environments. One such initiative is integrating the use of drones with infantry. During urban combat, fire engagement is loosely disciplined and results in a greater expenditure of ordinances in comparison to rural regions. Drones can provide ammunition to a unit pinned under heavy fire. For example, the Ukrainians have used drones to supply ammunition to their units but also employed small hand-held quadcopters for reconnaissance. The U.S. Army is also looking to modernize its mechanized infantry by integrating unmanned small drones with infantry fighting vehicles for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) purposes.

Although modern militaries do seem to understand the need for effective, realistic training, not all militaries have the necessary mechanisms to support it. The Israeli army continues to train its units in simulated settings modeled on urban scenarios; the U.S. and the British Army are still in the process of formulating an urban ecosystem-based training platform. Training sites not only help develop tactical skills for urban offenses but aid in mastering the art of close combat without relying heavily on superior firepower.

Nonetheless, democracies will remain skeptical of participating in urban offensives, and the question of whether decisive firepower should be deployed will remain a point of contention between political leaders and military commanders since the latter share the burden of responsibility when casualties occur among either their troops or civilians. This makes urban offensives additionally unique as residents armed with smartphones may potentially record an engagement and live-stream the operation to the world. This changes such offensives from a battle of tactics to one of narratives, especially for political leaders who may face domestic and international opposition to actions that are perceived as disproportionate or excessive. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine offers numerous such one-sided illustrations.

Is NATO Prepared for Urban War?

Russian military operations in Ukraine have turned into a full-blown war, risking its spillover into Eastern Europe. When drawing lessons from the ongoing operations, the outcome of this long war will likely be decided in urban cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Chernihiv, or Mariupol—like in most wars fought since the early twentieth century.

NATO retains a focus on large-scale combat operations against conventional adversaries, but is it prepared to engage in combat operations in unconventional settings, especially if the area of operation is urban?

NATO cannot forfeit the concept of urban warfare when it considers combined operations. As population centers remain a form of gravity. Judging by our discussions with a senior instructor at the NATO Joint Warfare Centre and with a former instructor at the U.S. Army Infantry School, in Fort Benning, Georgia, it is evident that NATO has taken note of the above context and introduced dedicated training mechanisms for urban operations, including new tactical level training modules and revised techniques for breaching doors/windows and scaling walls. However, the training focuses on evolving tactics and is devoid of operational/strategic-level implications for large-scale urban operations.

NATO’s Allied Joint Doctrine for the Planning of Operations is largely based on U.S. Joint Operations Doctrine and focuses on standoff and enhanced precision strike capabilities with an intent to annihilate the adversary before it even makes initial contact with friendly forces. This is possible through air superiority and technical capabilities such as signal jammers or electromagnetic pulse devices.

With this in mind, adversaries will seek to engage NATO in battles for cities for three reasons: 1) cities are a symbolic representation of political power, economic strength, and population; 2) the urban settings deter NATO’s tactical and technological supremacy; and 3) urban engagements put a halt on numerical superiority, quantitively a major disadvantage to NATO.

Consequently, the deep battle concept which is fundamental to the NATO/U.S. doctrine loses its relevance in urban operations. NATO doctrine provides two solutions to resolve this predicament: military blockade or complete annihilation. Putting it simply: liberation through death and destruction. This form of liberation was tolerable in Raqqa and Mosul, where military commanders were overwhelmed by ISIS fighters mounting serious defenses in the occupied cities. Yet for a military alliance based on collective defense, none of the said options will be politically acceptable.

It is also important to highlight the political leadership’s reluctance to ponder the changing nature of warfare and the implications of future combat operations. This is evident from NATO’s 2019 Annual Report, which highlights the alliance’s investments in employing innovative technologies to enhance its operational military capability without exhibiting any details on future urban operations or technologies for urban combat. The document is devoid of any references pointing toward the likelihood of urban operations in the future. To our surprise, none of the military exercises cited in the report featured urban operations scenarios.

The Way Forward

In comparing recent urban battles with historical urban offensives, it confirms the trends predicted in the early 1990s: Cities have greater tactical significance and strategic vitality not only in intra- and inter-state conflicts but also in regional socio-political dynamics and international terror campaigns.

For NATO, it is not a challenge that fundamentally alters tactical, strategic/operational level decisionmaking in unconventional scenarios. Although not usually urban in nature, some lessons can be drawn from the NATO presence in Afghanistan, especially the importance of human intelligence, humanitarian aid/support, and constant engagement/dialogue with regional political actors. As witnessed in Afghanistan, political support to regional parties provided clarity in military decisionmaking—in urban cities, the relationship between political actors becomes more intertwined due to the presence of multiple stakeholders such as non-government institutions, civil society groups, and international aid agencies. This relationship becomes further complex with the simultaneous employment of combat and stabilization operations.

For NATO, these challenges may be interpreted by political leadership differently, however, for military leadership and planners, it is imperative to take the ongoing engagements seriously. The solution to challenges will not emerge from innovative technological mechanisms—simply because meagerly integrating them in training simulations is not sufficient on its own to prevent civilian/military casualties or save a city from destruction. Instead, military leaders must integrate infantry and special operation units with mechanized and armor forces while simulating urban battle and permitting the participation of civilian urban warfare experts, academics, and humanitarian aid-centric institutions for constant operational/tactical revisions. It is important to note that the idea is not to have a large pool of civilian/military advisers who can provide constant training to militaries with smaller armed forces. The idea is to ensure that lessons learned from successive urban offensives are internalized by NATO military planners before NATO forces are drawn into an intense urban battle. A form of this training is occurring with the U.S. Army National Guard’s 40th Infantry Division’s urban training center in California.

Anant Mishra is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS) Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS) where he undertakes his research on interoperability during complex operations. He is a Visiting Fellow at the International Centre for Policing & Security, University of South Wales, Pontypridd.

Edward Salo, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history, and the associate director of the heritage studies Ph.D. Program at Arkansas State University. Before coming to A-State, he served as a consulting historian for various projects across the globe.

Image: Flickr.

The National Interest · by Anant Mishra · August 27, 2022

4. Taiwan: Two US warships sail through strait

Taiwan: Two US warships sail through strait

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Image source, US 7th Fleet

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USS Chancellorsville is part of the operation

Two US warships are passing through the Taiwan Strait, the US Navy has announced.

It is the first such operation to take place since tensions between Taiwan and China increased following a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan earlier this month.

The US and other Western navies have routinely sailed through the strait in recent years.

China reacted to Ms Pelosi's visit by holding military drills in the area.

On Sunday, Taiwan's defence ministry says it detected 23 Chinese aircraft and eight Chinese ships operating around Taiwan.

Among the detected aircraft, seven crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait - an unofficial barrier between Taiwan and China.

Washington says its two guided-missile cruisers - the USS Antietam and the USS Chancellorsville - are demonstrating freedom of navigation through international waters.

Beijing views such actions as provocative and maintains that the island of Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory.

On Sunday, its military said it was monitoring the two vessels' progress, maintaining a high alert, and was ready to defeat any provocation, Reuters news agency reports.

• China and Taiwan: A really simple guide
• What's behind China-Taiwan tensions?

The US Navy said in a statement that the transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrated the "United States' commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific".

"These ships transited through a corridor in the strait that is beyond the territorial sea of any coastal state," the statement added.

Taiwan's defence ministry said the ships were sailing in a southerly direction and that its forces were observing, but that "the situation was as normal".

• Where Taiwan crisis leaves Biden's China policy
• Nancy Pelosi's long history of opposing Beijing

Taiwan is self-ruled, but China sees it as a breakaway province with which it will eventually unite, with force if necessary.

Taiwan has become yet another flashpoint between Washington and Beijing in recent years, with the US walking a diplomatic tightrope on the issue.

The US abides by the "One China" policy - a cornerstone of the two countries' diplomatic relationship which recognises only one Chinese government - and has formal ties with Beijing and not Taiwan.

But it also maintains a "robust unofficial" relationship with the island. That includes selling weapons for Taiwan to defend itself.

China and Taiwan: The basics

• Why do China and Taiwan have poor relations? China sees the self-ruled island as a part of its territory and insists it should be unified with the mainland, by force if necessary
• How is Taiwan governed? The island has its own constitution, democratically elected leaders, and about 300,000 active troops in its armed forces
• Who recognises Taiwan? Only a few countries recognise Taiwan. Most recognise the Chinese government in Beijing instead. The US has no official ties with Taiwan, but does have a law which requires it to provide the island with the means to defend itself

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5. Afghanistan withdrawal anniversary: Painful lessons from 20 years at war by Bing West

Afghanistan withdrawal anniversary: Painful lessons from 20 years at war

Has America reverted to the situation in 2001 in Afghanistan?

foxnews.com · by Bing West | Fox News

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Afghanistan is back to where it was in 2001: Afghan translator

Saboor Sakhizada and Fox News' Pete Hegseth discusses the 'troubling issues' that have emerged in Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrew all military presence in 2021

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Obeying President Biden’s order, a year ago U.S. troops fled from Afghanistan amid botched planning and chaotic execution. Tens of thousands of Afghans who had loyally served America were abandoned. Thirty million Afghans who had tasted freedom were again oppressed by the medieval Taliban.

Two decades ago, U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan to destroy the al Qaeda terrorist organization. A few weeks ago, a U.S. missile killed Ayman al-Zawahri, the al Qaeda leader living comfortably in Kabul. At a cost of a trillion dollars and the tragic loss of more than 7,000 American and allied servicemen and contractors, the Afghanistan war ended in abject failure that had two root causes.

A Taliban fighter sits on the back of a vehicle with a machine gun in front of the main gate leading to the Afghan presidential palace, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

First, the White House was responsible for the critical decisions. President Bush initiated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then later decided to stay to build two democratic nations. He enormously expanded the war objectives without regard for the time required and the costs.

With similar disregard of the costs for failure, Presidents Obama, Trump and Biden were determined to pull out. Due to a Congress where either party now abjectly supports any president from that same party, the White House unilaterally makes war-related decisions. This enables any president to overturn the decisions of his predecessor, undercutting global confidence in America’s steadfastness. President Biden ignored our military commanders who advised we could remain in small numbers with few casualties.

Afghan women wait to receive food distributed by a humanitarian aid group, in Kabul, Afghanistan in April 2022. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Second, the military embraced the mission of nation-building in Afghanistan without the rigor that would have revealed the impossibility of the task. A comparative handful of American troops could not persuade millions of illiterate tribesmen to support a corrupt government in faraway Kabul.

Nor could the American grunts defeat the Islamist insurgents provided sanctuary by treacherous Pakistan. Yet dozens of American generals persisted with operations that every grunt knew were futile. The Pentagon has avoided admitting its basic error and rectifying its decision-making process.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Kabul on July 31, 2022. (Maher Attar/Sygma via Getty Images)

Looking forward, has America reverted to the situation in 2001 in Afghanistan? Emphatically, no.

The U.S. has erected impressive internal anti-terrorist defenses. While al Qaeda is back in Afghanistan, its core has crumbled. Thousands of terrorists in gangs only loosely linked to al Qaeda create chaos in a half dozen other countries.

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But our CIA and special ops forces do a commendable job of striking to keep them from consolidating.

It is regrettable that a Taliban commander was not killed along with al-Zawahri as the cost for harboring al Qaeda. That said, the terrorist threat from Afghanistan is orders of magnitude less than 20 years ago.

The major threat to American security has shifted to the far Pacific. Having watched our arms-length aid to Ukraine and our shameful flight from Afghanistan, Chairman Xi Jinping is increasing his bellicosity against Taiwan, testing to see if the American president will commit our forces or will stand aside. 

A former assistant secretary of defense and a Marine grunt in Vietnam, military historian Bing West has written a dozen books about our wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. His latest is "The Last Platoon, A Novel of the Afghanistan War."

foxnews.com · by Bing West | Fox News

6. Rival Chechen fighters take war to battlefields of Ukraine

Rival Chechen fighters take war to battlefields of Ukraine

AP · by DEREK GATOPOULOS and ANDREW KRAVCHENKO · August 27, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Kneeling in a patch of yellow wildflowers, a Chechen soldier carefully attaches an explosive device to the bottom of a small drone. Seconds later, it is released. It explodes next to two old storefront mannequins set up 200 meters (yards) away, one with a Russian-style military hat on its head.

After this and other training outside the Ukrainian capital, the Chechen soldiers, in assorted camouflage footwear and protective gear, will be heading to the front lines in Ukraine, vowing to continue the fight against Russia that raged for years in their North Caucasus homeland.

Fighters from Chechnya, the war-scarred republic in southern Russia, are participating on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine.

Pro-Kyiv volunteers are loyal to Dzhokhar Dudayev, the late Chechen leader who headed the republic’s drive for independence from Russia. They form the “Dudayev Battalion” and are the sworn enemies of Chechen forces who back Russian President Vladimir Putin and joined Russia in the months-long siege of Ukraine’s key port of Mariupol and other flashpoints in eastern and southern Ukraine.

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One group of new Chechen arrivals, many of whom live in Western Europe, was being trained at a makeshift firing range outside Kyiv before heading east. At a training session Saturday, the new recruits ‒ all Muslim men ‒ shouted “Allahu akbar!” (“God is great!”), holding their rifles in the air before being handed military ID cards that are issued to volunteers.

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Ukrainian officials say the Chechen battalion currently numbers several hundred who fight alongside the country’s military but are not formally under the national command.

Instructors teach the new battalion members combat basics, including how to use a weapon, assume a firing position and how to work in teams. Trainers include veterans of wars in Chechnya that ended in 2009, some joining up in Ukraine after the fighting against Russia-backed separatists started in Ukraine in 2014.

Tor, a volunteer who asked only to be identified by his battlefield nickname, said he sees no difference between the two conflicts.

“People have to understand we don’t have a choice,” he said speaking in English and with his face covered. “If they (Russian forces) win this war, they will continue. They never stop. I don’t know. The Baltic countries will be next, or Georgia or Kazakhstan. Putin openly, absolutely, says he wants to rebuild the Soviet empire.”

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Russia launched two wars to prevent Chechnya, a mostly Muslim province, from gaining independence after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. The first conflict erupted in 1994.

The second Chechen war began in 1999 and culminated in a siege by Russian troops of Grozny, the Chechen capital, which was devastated by heavy Russian bombardment. After years of battling an insurgency, Russian officials declared the conflict in Chechnya over in 2017.

Muslim Madiev, a veteran fighter of the Chechen conflicts, identified himself as an adviser to the volunteer battalion in Ukraine. He joined the soldiers Saturday in shooting practice, taking aim at a plastic bottle held up on a stick. Bullet casings flew from his automatic rifle onto a field already littered with bullets, shotgun cartridges and cardboard target sheets.

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“We’re going to win this war. The whole world is already standing up for us,” he says, speaking in Russian.

“We were the only ones who fought for ourselves (in Chechnya). No one stood with us. But now the whole world is behind Ukraine. We must win, we must win,” he declared. ___ Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · by DEREK GATOPOULOS and ANDREW KRAVCHENKO · August 27, 2022

7. Stalin's Lessons for Putin

Excerpts:

In the spirit of Stalin, Putin wants Russia to be feared and respected rather than belittled and derided. Increasingly, however, his propagandists are struggling to provide compelling images of Russian power, caught between their desire to avoid talking up Ukraine’s capabilities and their reluctance to admit to their own mistakes. They have spent months using the most lurid language to describe the great Russian victories to come, not only against Ukraine but all of NATO, and are now perplexed at the turn of events.

Take the example of Vladimir Solovyov, a vigorous supporter of Putin and his war, and the potential victim of the April assassination attempt as fabricated by the FSB. Just before this event, with reports of more Western weapons being sent to Ukraine he explained to his audience: ‘”De facto we’re starting to wage war against NATO countries. We’ll be grinding up NATO’s war machine as well as citizens of NATO countries.’ When this came, he added ‘There will be no mercy.’ More recently Solovyov has b been more downbeat. He shared his dismay at the attacks in Crimea and in Belgorod as ‘some kind of surrealism.’ He asked: ‘Are we fighting or what are we doing? Tough, cardinal measures must be taken, every day we pay for half-measures with human lives.’

Now, in the aftermath of the assassination of Dariya Dugina he has continued with his theme of a coming ‘direct military confrontation’ with NATO. Yet he no longer sounds so confident, speaking of ‘dereliction’ and ‘complicity,’ while insisting that the ‘time of being relaxed is over – it is over!’ He reported that people involved in producing military equipment threw up their hands and told him there was no money. ‘Everyone is shifting responsibility to somebody else. What’s with shifting the blame? Do what you are told and if you can’t shoot yourself!’

Stalin's Lessons for Putin - KyivPost - Ukraine's Global Voice

By Lawrence Freedman. Published Aug. 28 at 2:39 pm

kyivpost.com

On 23 February 1942 Joseph Stalin, as People’s Commissar of Defence and Chairman of the State Defence Committee of the U.S.S.R., issued his ‘order of the day’. This was almost exactly 80 years before Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine. Stalin’s order was addressed to ‘comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, commanders and political workers, guerrillas-men and women’. Eight months earlier, he noted, ‘fascist Germany treacherously attacked our country, crudely violating a treaty of non-aggression.’

The enemy, he recalled, had ‘expected that at the very first blow the Red Army would be routed and would lose the ability to resist. But the enemy badly miscalculated.’ Because of the suddenness of the attack, the ‘Red Army was forced to retreat and evacuate part of our territory’, but even as it did so ‘it wore down the enemy forces and dealt them heavy blows.’ Then, as the war progressed, it was able to refresh and gain in strength. In particular it ‘defeated the German fascist troops which threatened to encircle the Soviet capital.’ With the initial German assaults blunted a significant moment had arrived.

‘Now the Germans no longer possess the military advantage which they had in the first months of the war by virtue of their treacherous and sudden attack. The momentum of unexpectedness and suddenness which constituted the reserve strength of the German fascist troops has been fully spent.’

This led to what Soviet propagandists soon claimed to be Stalin’s great contribution to strategic thought:

Thus, the inequality in the conditions under which the war is conducted, created by the suddenness of the German fascist attack, has been eliminated. Henceforward the issue of the war will not be decided by such a secondary factor as suddenness, but by such constantly operating factors as the strength of the rear, the morale of the army, the quantity and quality of the divisions, the armament of the army, the organizational abilities of the army commanders.

As a Marxist-Leninist Stalin sought to present war as a contest between competing socio-economic systems, which meant that their underlying strengths and weaknesses would eventually tell. This is why his list was topped by the ‘strength of the rear’ and then the ‘morale of the army’ before getting onto more basic military capabilities. Because these constantly operating factors would eventually determine the outcome of the war, other factors such as surprise could be dismissed as being of only temporary relevance. This had the additional advantage of letting him off the hook for failing to heed the many warnings he had been sent about an imminent German invasion.

The eventual Soviet triumph allowed Stalin’s insight to be turned into a genius application of scientific thought that no general dare contradict. Only after his death in 1953 did Soviet military theorists at first tentatively and then more confidently point out that in the nuclear age it might be unwise to dismiss the significance of surprise, while also noting the formulaic nature of these permanent factors and the apparent lack of regard for the military art.

Zelensky, Putin and the Limits of Surprise

Yet update the language of Stalin’s order of the day and remove some of the bombast and it starts to resemble Ukrainian President Zelensky’s description of Ukraine’s strategic situation. Six months ago they were caught out by a treacherous surprise attack and at first had to concede territory even as they struck the enemy with heavy blows. Zelensky also played down early warnings from the US and others of an imminent Russian attack. Fortunately, in 2022 as in 1941, the aggressor was unable to take full advantage of surprise. This was confirmed by Russia’s failure to take Ukraine’s capital Kyiv as the Germans failed to take Moscow. As Russia’s offensive is now petering out, the initiative is steadily shifting to Ukraine, allowing its underlying strengths, and the superiority of its social system, to reshape the course of the war. Russian morale is poor. Many of its material advantages have been lost in frustrated offensives. It has problems with ‘the strength of the rear’.

Putin constantly invokes the Great Patriotic War as a source of inspiration and guidance, and has presided over the partial rehabilitation of Stalin as a formidable leader, despite the terrors he unleashed, regretting that he was ‘excessively demonised’. One might therefore have expected Putin to be aware of the possibility that a surprise attack would not be as decisive as he hoped and that once this war became a competition between two social systems, especially with his enemy backed by the West, his ‘special military operation’ might not turn out so well. Putin’s initial optimism about the fragility of the Ukrainian society, was reinforced by his spy agencies who were anxious to please even though their own furtive polling showed how few Ukrainians would see a Russian invasion as liberation. As a result he repeated the folly of Hitler’s confident boast of 1941: ‘We have only to kick in the front door and the whole rotten Russian edifice will come tumbling down.’

Putin might also now ponder his predecessor’s preoccupation with the ‘strength of the rear’. Prior to the war, and with a paranoid ruthlessness, Stalin employed relentless propaganda and political commissars to ensure ideological conformity, while denunciations, mock trials, forced confessions, and extensive purges prevented any opposition forming. His agents could act on the merest hint of treachery. The associated cull of senior military commanders was one reason for Hitler’s optimism about a likely Russian collapse. When the war came Stalin knew enough about popular feeling to make this a war about the defence of the homeland and not communism (hence Great Patriotic War). In this he was helped by the Nazi contempt for and brutality towards all Slavs, so Germany missed opportunities to divide and rule. Ukraine began this war united, but Russian brutality has confirmed its determination to defeat the aggression. Zelensky has no need to worry about popular support for the war effort.

It is Moscow that must worry about the ‘strength of the rear’, as doubts grow at home about the war and its consequences. As with so much else in Putin’s Russia, any impulse to emulate Stalin is compromised by the state’s own incompetence, corruption, internal rivalries, and uncertainty about what the public really thinks. He has dealt forcefully for now with any potential opposition from technocrats and moderates, all silenced, imprisoned, or exiled. One of the last prominent opposition figures, former Yekaterinburg Mayor Evgeny Roizman, has been arrested for ‘discrediting the Armed Forces.’ Putin’s problem is more with ultra-nationalists, who lament that their leader has had the right ideas but not the necessary ruthlessness to implement them. His reluctance to mobilise the whole society and economy for a cataclysmic war with not only Ukraine but its NATO backers has meant that they now see a wonderful opportunity to restore Russia’s greatness slipping away.

The assassination of Darya Dugina

One of these ultranationalists is Aleksandr Dugin, a prolific promoter of, to quote Mark Galeotti, ‘splenetic and mystical nationalism’, known for his madcap geopolitical theories. Last Saturday his daughter Dariya, no mean propagandist in her own right, was blown up by a car bomb, triggering a surge of speculation about who was responsible and whether her father was really the target. The FSB came up in no time at all with a suitable culprit, Natalia Vovk, complete with the necessary connections to Estonia and Ukraine’s Azov Battalion (always signifier for the FSB of a Nazi), but also a 12 year old child, no actual connection to the killing, no theory about how the crime was perpetrated, and no apparent awareness of how incompetent it made the organisation look if a person they were apparently tracking so closely got away with a bold and complex murder and escaped back home. The more that is known about Vovk the less the story adds up and the more suspicious the whole event becomes. Why would she travel with number plates from occupied Donetsk, which provided good cover, but also have Ukrainian and Kazakh plates, which would have excited suspicion? (It was as if the FSB couldn’t decide who they wanted to blame). If Vovk had been in Dugina’s apartment block why not kill her there rather than rely on a car bomb?

One is reminded of the so-called plot claimed to have been uncovered by the FSB last April by Ukrainian neo-Nazis to kill Russian TV host Vladimir Solovyov in Moscow. As evidence they reported an improvised explosive device and a large variety of weapons, as well as Ukrainian passports and nationalist literature. Because there must never be any doubt about the sympathies of the would-be assassins, who clearly had no interest in covert operations, there was a picture of Hitler and red t-shirt with a swastika. Most bizarre of all was the presence of three copies of the SIMS video game, presumably because the officer staging this scene misunderstood his orders to supply three SIM cards, which might have some role in a car bomb. Lest there be any doubt about the authenticity of this plot another video showed an inscription in an unidentified book that had been found, signed in Russian with the words ‘signature illegible.’

There was no particular reason why Kyiv would target Dugin or Dugina, both marginal figures, but once blame was assigned to Ukraine there was a frenzy of demands for instant retribution. But these frenzies are now becoming routine. Russian TV has daily shows in which experts, including Solovyov, describe the terrible things that must be done – will be done – to Ukraine. The rhetoric is continually vicious and violent, as one NATO plot after another is described. One curiosity is that when Russia does do something vicious and violent there are always indignant denials. Dugina was memorialised by her media friends by showing her report on how the atrocities committed by Russian troops at Bucha were in fact another ‘false flag’ operation.

It is possible that Dugina’s murder was another false flag, a device in which the Russians have a persistent belief. Last Tuesday the HQ of the pro-Russian Donetsk leadership was struck, without doing much harm, in what some see as an attempt to justify an attack on decision centres in Kyiv. There is a mind-set in Moscow that believes that pretexts are important and if one does not exist then it must be manufactured. Yet, during this first six months of war, Russia, has not appeared to need any excuses to attack residential areas and infrastructure. Ukraine was already bracing for more missile strikes as this was the only way left for Russia to mark six months of war, Ukraine’s independence day, and its own general frustration with the state of the war. Even the Kremlin, however, might find it a bit excessive to escalate to a general war with NATO because of yet another politically-motivated death in a country where such deaths are not uncommon.

Alternative suggestions for motive include Dugina being sacrificed to justify yet more repression at home. (The use made of the assassination of Stalin’s Politburo colleague Sergei Kirov in 1934 in triggering the purges has been mentioned). It is possible that Dugin has fallen out with other powerful, shady figures in Moscow. It may even be that there is a dissident group adopting terror tactics. One claim, to be taken with a large pinch of salt, came from a hitherto unknown group, the National Republican Army, whose existence and activities was announced by a former Russian MP, Ilya Ponomarev, now living in Kyiv. The NRA’s manifesto declared Putin to be ‘a usurper of power and a war criminal who amended the Constitution, unleashed a fratricidal war between the Slavic peoples and sent Russian soldiers to certain and senseless death.’ They claimed that they had mounted other partisan actions in the past and promised more for the future.

Instability at Home

There have been unexplained acts of sabotage within Russia and Crimea that might have been executed by anti-Putin Russians, including up to a dozen attacks on military recruitment centres during the first months of the war. In addition, the Russians have been blaming traitors and saboteurs for embarrassing explosions in ammunition dumps and airfields inside Crimea and also Belgorod Oblast bordering Ukraine. In the face of these attacks, Russian propaganda is caught. Poor maintenance or local treachery is bad enough but even worse is acknowledging the ease with which Ukraine can now strike targets well behind the front lines with Russian air defences apparently unable to stop them.

How this is being done has led to much speculation. Some believe that the damage might have been done by special forces using drones, which is what the Ukrainian military has suggested; others are convinced that Ukraine now has access to long-range missiles, possibly even the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) that can be fired from the HIMARS platform, although this has not been confirmed and it was thought that the Americans had denied them to Ukraine because they don’t want strikes deep into Russian territory.

But the Americans have also made clear that they are not bothered about strikes against Russian assets in Crimea because this is illegally occupied territory. And for Moscow all these strikes are bad news, not only because of the impact on their ability to defend the Black Sea area and their positions in southern Ukraine but also because of the deeper political meaning of the attacks, and in particular the demonstration that there can be no sanctuary in Crimea.

Go back to how this war started. The threat that Putin claimed to justify the war was to the Donbas enclaves of Luhansk and Donetsk, but also to Crimea, especially if Ukraine, by being admitted to NATO, got the whole alliance to back an offensive to take the peninsula back. Now look at what has happened. The Donbas has been devastated, largely by Russian artillery, while the military formations recruited from the Russian occupied areas for the war, and which have done a disproportionate amount of the fighting, have been ill-prepared and ill-equipped and so suffered disproportionate casualties.

In late June UK intelligence suggested that over half of the Donetsk militia had been killed. There have been recent reports of units from Luhansk in a state of virtual mutiny, as they now can claim to have all of their Oblast controlled and do not want to go and fight for Donetsk. Unsurprisingly there is a shortage of new volunteers from these regions, so men in all occupied territories are starting to be press ganged into service.

Moscow’s claims of imminent Ukrainian assaults against Crimea were fanciful prior to 24 February but are less so now. Recall the warnings about how any attempt by Kyiv to move against Crimea might be exactly the sort of move to trigger Russian escalation, even nuclear use. Yet the moves have taken place, not as a land offensive but still against strategic targets. Because they have happened incrementally, with no red line abruptly crossed in a dramatic fashion, and Russians anxious to demonstrate that no serious damage has been done, they have yet to result in any escalation from the Russian side.

The potential vulnerability of the road and rail Kerch bridges, built at great expense to provide a link between Russia and Crimea, is becoming a Russian concern, especially given the evident limitations of its air defence systems. Russians who have been encouraged to see Crimea as a pleasant holiday destination, were getting home as quickly as possible across this bridge. Couple this with increased partisan activity behind the lines in Kherson and it soon becomes apparent that the ‘strength of the rear’, along with the ‘morale of the army’, Stalin’s two top priorities, cannot be guaranteed.

In the spirit of Stalin, Putin wants Russia to be feared and respected rather than belittled and derided. Increasingly, however, his propagandists are struggling to provide compelling images of Russian power, caught between their desire to avoid talking up Ukraine’s capabilities and their reluctance to admit to their own mistakes. They have spent months using the most lurid language to describe the great Russian victories to come, not only against Ukraine but all of NATO, and are now perplexed at the turn of events.

Take the example of Vladimir Solovyov, a vigorous supporter of Putin and his war, and the potential victim of the April assassination attempt as fabricated by the FSB. Just before this event, with reports of more Western weapons being sent to Ukraine he explained to his audience: ‘”De facto we’re starting to wage war against NATO countries. We’ll be grinding up NATO’s war machine as well as citizens of NATO countries.’ When this came, he added ‘There will be no mercy.’ More recently Solovyov has b been more downbeat. He shared his dismay at the attacks in Crimea and in Belgorod as ‘some kind of surrealism.’ He asked: ‘Are we fighting or what are we doing? Tough, cardinal measures must be taken, every day we pay for half-measures with human lives.’

Now, in the aftermath of the assassination of Dariya Dugina he has continued with his theme of a coming ‘direct military confrontation’ with NATO. Yet he no longer sounds so confident, speaking of ‘dereliction’ and ‘complicity,’ while insisting that the ‘time of being relaxed is over – it is over!’ He reported that people involved in producing military equipment threw up their hands and told him there was no money. ‘Everyone is shifting responsibility to somebody else. What’s with shifting the blame? Do what you are told and if you can’t shoot yourself!’

Lawrence Freedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London.

This article is reprinted from Comment is Freed. See the original here.

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

kyivpost.com

8. War Brings Ukraine’s Women New Roles and New Dangers

Excerpts:

Women have become an omnipresent force in Ukraine’s war six months in as they confront long-held stereotypes about their role in the country’s post-Soviet society.

They are increasingly joining the military, including in combat positions, and spearheading volunteer and fund-raising efforts. And with men still making up a majority of combatants, women are taking on extra roles in civilian life, running businesses in addition to looking after their families.

War Brings Ukraine’s Women New Roles and New Dangers

Women have become an all-important force in the fight. But even as they mobilize, they are increasingly bearing the worst of the conflict.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/world/europe/ukraine-war-women.html

nytimes.com · August 27, 2022

Residents of Chernihiv, Ukraine, listening to Hanna discuss the risks of landmines. She is among a growing number of Ukrainian women who have been trained in demining, a job they were unable to have until recently.

CHERNIHIV, Ukraine — The road to the training site was lined with crumbling homes and damaged buildings, a reminder of how war had consumed the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv just months ago.

At the head of the class was a woman named Hanna, along with a board showing images of unexploded munitions and landmines. She explained to the class the risks of minefields and how they are marked. One woman attending the day’s training asked if it was safe to take her 3-year-old son to a local park.

“Don’t walk in the woodland — it’s best not to walk there,” said Hanna, 34, advising her to stay on undisturbed paved areas.

Hanna, who asked that her surname not be used because of fears for her safety, is among a growing number of Ukrainian women who have been trained in demining, which until just a few years ago was on a list of hundreds of jobs women in the country were barred from holding.

Originally from Mariupol, Hanna had joined a Swiss demining foundation there two years ago, and after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, she fled that southern port city and headed north.

Hanna, 34, is working in cities like Chernihiv, where Russian occupiers have since retreated, to make war-ravaged cities and towns safe from land mines.

Now, she is working in cities like Chernihiv, from which the Russian occupiers have since retreated, to make war-ravaged cities and towns safe from landmines.

Women have become an omnipresent force in Ukraine’s war six months in as they confront long-held stereotypes about their role in the country’s post-Soviet society.

They are increasingly joining the military, including in combat positions, and spearheading volunteer and fund-raising efforts. And with men still making up a majority of combatants, women are taking on extra roles in civilian life, running businesses in addition to looking after their families.

The State of the War

• What Is Next?: After six months of fighting, the war seems to have settled into an impasse on the battlefield. Here is how the next stage of the war might shape up.
• Russia’s Military Expansion: President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, a sign Russia expects a prolonged war in Ukraine.
• Defiant Under Attack: Amid the blare of air raid sirens and deadly missile strikes, Ukrainians celebrated their Independence Day on Aug. 24 with a show of defiance against Russia’s invasion.
• Nuclear Plant Standoff: Russian and Ukrainian militaries are continuing to accuse each other of launching missiles and preparing to stage attacks on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. The United Nations issued warnings about the risk of a nuclear disaster and called for a demilitarized zone around the plant.

“The perception of women, in general, has been very paternalistic,” said Anna Kvit, a Ukrainian sociologist who specializes in gender studies. “With this war that escalated in 2022, the agency of women not only increased, but it also became more visible.”

That shift has been underway for some time, Ms. Kvit said, with women increasingly taking on new roles after the 2014 conflict in eastern Ukraine, accelerating changes in the defense and security sectors that filtered out broadly across society. Women had been barred from combat roles, but they were still taking part in the fighting, although without the same status, benefits or recognition as men.

“In Ukrainian society, the resistance was, and probably still is, that the army and war are not a place for women,” Ms. Kvit said.

The new laws ended bans on women holding any of 450 occupations in Ukraine, a holdover from the Soviet era, when certain work was considered damaging to reproductive health. In addition to demining roles, that list had included long-haul trucking, welding, firefighting and many security and defense jobs.

Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, said that more than 50,000 women were now in the country’s armed forces, and that the number had risen significantly since the war began.

Despite this, the key decision makers and a majority of the combatants are men, often obscuring the increasingly vital role of women in the conflict, said Jenny Mathers, an expert in security, Russia and gender and conflict at Aberystwyth University in Britain.

“One of the many persistent truths is that women do an awful lot of the unacknowledged but really crucial work,” Dr. Mathers said. “War wouldn’t happen without them, and all the things that are going to sustain societies that are in conflict — many of them are done by women.”

Ukrainian women have become the backbone of wide-scale logistics efforts, Dr. Mathers noted, and are organizing to make camouflage netting for troops, cooking for the millions of internally displaced people and raising money to support soldiers.

With men ages 18 to 60 prohibited from leaving the country so they can fight Russia, women are volunteering to drive transport cars from other countries in Europe for use by Ukraine’s military.

During a brief stop at a cafe in Lviv, in western Ukraine, she described a two-day round-trip journey into Poland from her home in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to pick up a truck and then return to Ukraine.

“Everyone is doing what he or she can do,” she said.

The female drivers have been well received, said Maria Stetsiuk, 35, who was passing through Lviv last month while driving east, where she planned to drop a truck off with friends in the military. But occasionally there are skeptics, like the police officer who stopped her on the way into Dnipro recently and asked her why she was driving and why she did not have a husband.

“I never thought I’d be doing something like this,” Ms. Stetsiuk said. “But nowadays everyone is doing what he or she can.”

These informal networks will be essential if peace returns, and they could play a vital role in rebuilding Ukraine, said Andrea Ellner, an expert in gender and war at King’s College London.

As the war has upended their lives, some Ukrainian women said they were confronting their own stereotypes about gender roles.

Yulia Maleks, 36, bought a small farm outside Lviv with her husband four years ago and said she never imagined she would be trying to keep it afloat alone. Her husband had tried to spare her from doing the hard labor, she said, while she focused on building a small dairy business.

But then the war began, and he volunteered for a local defense unit, leaving Ms. Maleks to work the farm alone.

“I’ve learned to do many things myself,” she said, like stocking the wooden stove they use to heat the house and trimming the animals’ hooves. Each morning, she rises at dawn to feed her goats and sheep, lugging feed and water buckets across the farm.

“My husband used to not let me carry the heavy stuff,” Ms. Maleks explained.

While the war has challenged perceptions about gender and broadened some opportunities for women, it has also had a disproportionate, brutal effect on their lives. Though they tend not to die in combat, they are among those most affected by displacement, and an analysis by U.N. Women and CARE International said the war had increased their care burden significantly and worsened gender inequalities, something that worries experts.

Yuliia Serdiuk, 31, was severely injured in shelling weeks ago in her hometown, Orikhiv, in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, when the once sleepy town found itself on the front line as Ukrainian forces tried to push back Russian troops. On May 8, her son had asked her to hold his hand as he rode his skateboard down a hill.

“Suddenly, there was an explosion,” she said. “We started running.” She shielded her son with her body. Fragments hit her rib and liver, and severed much of her spinal column. She can no longer walk and was evacuated by train to a hospital in Lviv, where she is undergoing intensive rehabilitation.

There, on a recent afternoon, a doctor helped her into a wheelchair and took her to physical therapy. Bruises are still visible, peeking out from under her T-shirt.

Ms. Serdiuk wants to return home, even though her town has been devastated. Her son’s school is gone, the downtown demolished. She is hoping to be transferred outside Ukraine for more advanced care.

nytimes.com · August 27, 2022

9. Arrests and Killings Drive Afghan Troops Once Allied With U.S. Into Hiding

This is one of the terrible effects of our withdrawal. We have blood on our hands.

As I reflect on this I wonder how this will bode for the US in the future in particular for US Special Forces working with indigenous forces. On the one hand you have to wonder how anyone would want to work with Americans after they have been abandoned. Think about the guerillas in the Philippines in WWII, the partisans in Korea during the Korean War, Hmong and the Montagnards in Indochina and other indgenous forces that we left behind. But yet despite that indgenous forces still want to work with Americans.

And we should also heed Mark Boyatt's criticism of the unconventional warfare mission. He believes we create a moral hazard if we only use indgenous forces to serve our interests of coerce and disrupt a government or occupying power and not support a resistance or insurgency in the overthrow of a government or occupying power. We use the indigenous and they are vulnerable to retaliation after the US has accomplished its objectives. Yes we must always put US interests first. But we must also deliberately consider the second and third order and long term effects of our actions. Someday our leaving indgenous forces hangin out to dry is going to come back to haunt us.

Arrests and Killings Drive Afghan Troops Once Allied With U.S. Into Hiding

The Taliban appear to have launched a campaign to track down former Afghan forces, the troops and American veterans trying to help them say

By Jessica DonatiFollow

 | Photographs by Joël van Houdt for The Wall Street Journal

Aug. 26, 2022 11:47 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-taliban-national-resistance-front-11661523527

KABUL—The Taliban appear to have launched a campaign to track down former Afghan members of U.S.-backed military and intelligence units, according to colleagues, relatives and a network of American veterans trying to help them.

Former Afghan troops have increasingly been arrested, gone missing or been killed since the Taliban seized power last August. The goal, the people say, is to prevent troops from joining an opposition group that has taken root in the northeast.

The arrests and killings add to the risks faced by elite forces, who have been targeted in revenge attacks for their role in the war against the Taliban. Thousands have likely gone into hiding or fled across the border to neighboring countries. Among them is Ahmad, who said goodbye to his wife and children and sought refuge in a safe house in Kabul almost a year ago with the help of a retired U.S. Army Ranger.

Ahmad knows of five colleagues from his special-operations unit, which worked closely with the Rangers and the Central Intelligence Agency, who have disappeared in recent months. His former colleague Abdul was taken from his house a couple of months ago. Abdul had received a call from another former colleague, asking him to step outside to talk, according to his wife, Murwarid. He found a group of Taliban waiting to arrest him.

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The Wall Street Journal verified the identities of those who disappeared or are in hiding and agreed to withhold their full names.

The Taliban officers told Murwarid that Abdul was being investigated for links to the National Resistance Front, a new domestic opposition group. They searched the house for electronics and arrested their son as well. The teenager was released the next day, she said, but Abdul has disappeared. Local police departments and the Taliban’s spy agency told relatives inquiring about his whereabouts that they knew nothing about his arrest.

“I believe if he doesn’t come back, I cannot continue living,” Murwarid said.

Murwarid hasn’t seen her husband, Abdul, since he was arrested by the Taliban a few months ago.

The Taliban, who offered amnesty to former adversaries after regaining control of the country last year, have repeatedly denied any systematic effort to target former soldiers, intelligence-agency personnel and others. The group has said that any killings or disappearances are rooted in local conflicts and score-settling after two decades of bitter conflict.

Behzad Behnam, former commander of the Afghanistan Reconnaissance Unit, which worked with the U.S. Army Rangers in high-risk and covert operations, said he knows of nine of his former soldiers who have disappeared. He has since escaped to the U.K. and has received calls from soldiers asking him questions about the opposition group, which he said he has no connection with. He believes the Taliban forced the men to call him under duress.

“They are still thinking that operatives are all around Afghanistan working for the U.S. government,” he said.

The U.S. and its allies say they don’t support any opposition group in Afghanistan. Western and Middle Eastern governments have declined requests by Afghan opposition leaders to supply weapons or money, according to National Resistance Front members.

The United Nations and other entities have documented hundreds of extrajudicial killings of former Afghan forces and government workers in the past year.

Mirwais Naab, a senior Afghan foreign ministry official under the former government, collects data on targeted killings and disappearances with a team of about a dozen people, mostly in Afghanistan. The team said it has verified about 750 reports, including accounts that elite military units are being hunted down one by one. Mr. Naab said his team has gathered hundreds more reports that are impossible to verify because family members are unreachable or unwilling to talk.

A former member of an elite Afghan unit held prayer beads in a safe house in Kabul.

Afghans affiliated with the U.S. have been the subject of targeted killings for years. The attacks escalated as soon as the Taliban seized power. Many inside the country blame them for night raids and bombings that often killed civilians.

Soon after the last evacuation flights took off, Ahmad, whose team members were recruited from an Afghan special unit known as the Ktah Khas, began to fear for his life. A cousin called to warn that the local police chief had been killed. The cousin had recognized the man’s body dumped in the playground near his house.

As Ahmad began making arrangements to go into hiding, he learned that a colleague from the Ktah Khas had been shot and killed after being stopped at a checkpoint while trying to leave Kabul.

“I thought, if any of my neighbors know who I am, they can call the Taliban and let them know about my location,” he said in an interview at his safe house in Kabul earlier this summer.

Ahmad fled to a relative’s house and called Mike Edwards for help. Mr. Edwards is a retired U.S. Army Ranger who has 18 combat tours under his belt, most of them in Afghanistan. He had helped launch the reconnaissance unit that Ahmad was part of for over a decade.

Ahmad in an apartment in Kabul.

Mr. Edwards set up an organization called Project Exodus last year to help evacuate former forces and others at risk. He had tried to help Ahmad escape from Kabul during last year’s chaotic evacuations. Ahmad was unable to get to the gate at Kabul airport with his wife, who was then six months pregnant, and three children. The crowd was too large.

Mr. Edwards said he was in touch with another group of veterans that had space in their safe-house operation. He told Ahmad that hiding was his best option until there was a way to get him out of the country, and connected him with an Afghan ground team that would escort him to a safe place.

Ahmad made arrangements to depart, wiping the data from his phone and hugging his wife and children. He got into a car filled with armed men waiting to escort him to the secret location in Kabul. His escorts were disguised as Taliban and he feared they would arrest or kill him.

Mr. Edwards said Project Exodus now has its own network of safe houses and is sheltering some 700 people, the majority former special-operations and air force members and their families.

Female former special-operations members are especially vulnerable. Many were disowned by their own families for joining the army and have nowhere to hide on their own. One 24-year-old female former member of the Ktah Khas unit learned how to jump out of helicopters in her job searching women during raids by special operations troops. Now she’s in a safe house with her parents run by Mr. Edwards and, like Ahmad, hoping the U.S. will save her.

A 24-year-old former member of the Ktah Khas unit at a safe house in Kabul.

The situation has grown more dangerous with the rise of the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front, according to former soldiers, family members and human-rights groups. Daily attacks in Panjshir—the Tajik-dominated province that formed the base of Northern Alliance, a coalition of militias that fought the Taliban in the 1990s—have risen in recent months and are inflicting casualties on both sides.

The Taliban view former Afghan military and intelligence forces as top candidates for recruitment to the resistance movement, given their years of alliance with and training by the U.S. and allied forces. Some of those left behind in August fled to Panjshir, helping to establish the opposition group.

Analysts say the resistance group is years away from being a significant threat, but it has become a serious concern for the Taliban rulers, who have deployed thousands of troops to fight the group.

A State Department official said the U.S. has received a growing number of reports of arrests, killings and disappearances of former combatants in Afghanistan, although he said that it was unclear whether killings were directed from the top.

The official said the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan, Tom West, meets Taliban representatives roughly every six weeks and raises the issue in every meeting.

Ahmad said his fears eased after he reached the safe house, in a towering apartment block in a busy part of Kabul. He has gotten unusual-sounding text messages and calls from some former colleagues, asking for information on his whereabouts or the opposition group. He deletes the messages each time.

He has left the safe house only a handful of times since arriving. The first time was for the death of his father. Then he took his family to apply for passports in another province. His wife had given birth to a boy, and he held his son in the car all the way there.

The baby died soon afterward, following a night of vomiting and diarrhea. Ahmad left the safe house again to bury him. He blames himself for being unable to get the baby to a doctor in time. Most recently, he returned home for a gathering for his sister’s engagement.

“It’s like a prison, but it’s good to be safe. Even if it’s a prison, I am alive,” he said.

He has applied to the U.S. for a Special Immigrant Visa, designed to help Afghans who are at risk of reprisal, but hasn’t heard back. Most of the elite forces that worked for the Afghan army or spy agency don’t qualify for the visa, which requires applicants to have worked directly for the U.S. government.

A female former member of an Afghan elite unit with her newborn in a Kabul safe house.

Ahmad’s application is in a pipeline with a backlog of some 74,000 others left behind in Afghanistan. In all, there could be a quarter of a million people waiting to be evacuated, including family members, State Department officials say—a number that will take years to process.

Travis Peterson, an Afghan war veteran who is the founder of a network called the Moral Compass Federation, aims to coordinate the efforts of the many veteran and civilian groups that sprang up last summer to help evacuate Afghan allies. It maintains a list of some 33,000 vetted Afghans at risk, the majority of whom were in special operations, served as intelligence officials or are female former troops. Mr. Peterson is hoping to change some of the U.S. criteria for evacuating Afghan partners.

“The end goal is legislation,” he said. “We need to help the ones that we made a promise to.”

Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced a bill that would give certain Afghan special operations forces a path to a Special Immigrant Visa, and make the almost 80,000 Afghans who have been evacuated to the U.S. eligible for green cards.

In Kabul, Ahmad spends his days in the safe house keeping track of reports of colleagues and other Afghan forces who have been arrested or disappeared.

Recently, a former colleague was stopped in the Salang Pass on his way to Iran, was arrested by the Taliban and hasn’t been heard from since.

Last month, another former colleague called to ask for advice. The Taliban had visited his family, who are low-income farmers, and warned they would be taken hostage unless he delivered himself to the authorities. Ahmad advised him to stay put.

“I told him, there’s nothing to do. Why would you go to their prison?” he told his friend. “Do you want to disappear as well?”

Esmatullah Kohsar contributed to this article.

Write to Jessica Donati at jessica.donati@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 27, 2022, print edition as 'Afghan Troops Face More Arrests, Killings'.

10. For U.S. troops who survived Kabul airport disaster, guilt and grief endure

For U.S. troops who survived Kabul airport disaster, guilt and grief endure

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · August 24, 2022

The U.S. military’s treacherous evacuation of Afghanistan continues to haunt those who were there.

By

August 24, 2022 at 2:30 p.m. EDT

From a guard tower overlooking Kabul’s airport, two U.S. Marines spotted a man matching the description of a suspected suicide bomber. They radioed their commanders: “Do we have permission to engage?”

Request denied, one of the Marines, Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, recalled being told. Too many civilians nearby.

The man vanished from view among a crush of people clamoring outside the airport’s Abbey Gate, he said. It was Aug. 26, 2021. Hours later, an explosion ripped through the crowd, killing an estimated 170 Afghans along with 13 U.S. troops.

Vargas-Andrews contends that “unfortunately, a lot of people died” because he was directed to stand down. “That’s a hard thing to deal with,” he said. “You know, that’s something that, honestly, eats at me every single day.”

The 24-year-old, from Folsom, Calif., climbed down from the tower a short time before the explosion went off and suffered catastrophic wounds in the blast. He has undergone 43 surgeries since, losing his right arm, left leg, left kidney, and parts of his intestines and colon. At least 15 metal fragments remain embedded in his body, he said, silent reminders of the day he almost died.

It’s unclear if the bombing at Abbey Gate could have been averted. The event was a low point in the United States’ exit from Afghanistan and the treacherous operation that began when Taliban foot soldiers swept into the capital 11 days prior. For the American military personnel involved, much of their experience throughout those two weeks is still coming into focus now, a year later, as they process the suffering they witnessed, and cope with lasting feelings of anger, guilt and grief.

This account of the deployment and the attack, carried out by an Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, is based on interviews with 14 service members involved, including the top military commander who planned and directed the operation.

As part of this project, The Washington Post produced a companion episode of its podcast, “Post Reports,” where listeners will hear directly from the U.S. troops who shared their recollections of these events. In blunt, often visceral detail, those who survived the final days of America’s longest war made clear that what endures is an incalculable sense of loss.

The commander, Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, said that he, too, continues to process what occurred, and regrets both the Abbey Gate bombing and a drone strike U.S. forces carried out three days later near the airport, killing 10 civilians. U.S. troops involved mistakenly believed they were targeting another suicide bomber, the Pentagon later concluded.

“We all feel bitterly what happened at the end,” the general said.

Heart-pounding and heartbreaking

Nearly 6,000 U.S. service members were dispatched to Afghanistan as Kabul fell, in what would be the greatest test of the Pentagon’s emergency-evacuation planning since the Vietnam War’s devastating conclusion decades earlier. Nearly 125,000 people were rescued over 17 days. But tens of thousands more were stranded, many with no clear path to be reunited with family in the United States.

For many of the troops rushed to Hamid Karzai International Airport — named for Afghanistan’s first leader after U.S. forces ousted the Taliban from power as vengeance for quartering the terrorist group responsible for 9/11 — it was their first taste of a war that, after nearly 20 years, already was lost.

The sudden crisis undercut President Biden’s promise of a “safe and orderly” withdrawal, and prompted McKenzie to cut a deal with the Taliban in which coalition troops controlled Kabul’s airport while America’s longtime battlefield adversary pledged to maintain order outside.

U.S. personnel involved in the mission said the arrangement was exasperating, with militants beating and executing Afghans as they approached the airport. McKenzie described it as a strained but transactional relationship that provided U.S. troops with a measure of security from the Islamic State, which also is in conflict with the Taliban.

A Defense Department review of the operation, first detailed by The Post in February, exposed sharp disagreements within the U.S. government over how to carry out the withdrawal. State Department officials wanted to keep the U.S. Embassy in Kabul open as long as possible, frustrating the military brass who wanted to begin the evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies sooner.

Top commanders, including McKenzie, had advised Biden against withdrawing all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, preferring to keep a force of about 2,500 in place that would be reinforced by a similar number of coalition troops and backed by air power. But when the president announced in April 2021 that he wanted the military out by that September, the Pentagon began preparing for an evacuation.

A few hundred soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division were positioned at the airport in spring of 2021 to maintain security in Kabul. They were intended to be a safety net as the administration, leery of Taliban gains elsewhere, had hoped to retain a diplomatic presence after the military withdrawal was complete.

The Afghan government’s collapse on Aug. 15 triggered mass panic, leading tens of thousands of Afghans, many of them American allies who aided the war effort, to rush the airport. First Sgt. Andrew Kelly, of the 10th Mountain Division, said his unit tried but failed to prevent the chaos that unfolded as people, desperate to flee, swarmed the flight line and attempted to reach any aircraft they could find.

In the hysteria, Kelly and other U.S. soldiers responded to a report of gunshots at a traffic circle outside the airport’s commercial terminal. As civilians scrambled for cover, a firefight broke out when gunmen brandished weapons at the Americans. U.S. soldiers killed three of them and wounded a fourth.

The small contingent of U.S. troops, linked arm-in-arm at times, attempted to hold back the masses. But the determined civilians broke through, with some boarding parked C-17 cargo planes without permission, and others climbing onto the outside of aircraft before takeoff only to fall to their death moments later.

“That’s how desperate they were to get out of there,” said Army 1st Lt. Timothy Williams. “It was one of those defining moments, I think, for everybody where it was just like, ‘Wow, this is terrible.’ ”

As C-17s carrying American reinforcements touched down, Marines and soldiers were assigned to secure the airport’s gates, and to assess, search and admit evacuees. It was heart-pounding, often heartbreaking work.

Among the units instructed to reopen Abbey Gate was the 1st Platoon of Ghost Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines. Comprising less than 45 troops, it had been in Jordan serving as part of a crisis-response force when commanders ordered their departure for Kabul. The group was tightknit and had been training for months, said Gunnery Sgt. Jonathan Eby, the platoon sergeant.

Eby, a 17-year Marine with previous experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, said they formed a line and surged toward the crowd trying to move people backward. There was a writhing, anxious energy, he said, likening the crowd to a mosh pit.

“I would compare it to whatever Leonidas and his Spartans felt like trying to hold back all those people,” Eby said, referring to the ancient Greek king and his warriors, who were vastly outnumbered in a famous battle depicted in the movie “300.”

In the ensuing days, the Marines maintained a barricade at the gate, adjacent to a fetid drainage canal along the facility’s southeastern edge. Many Afghans figured out that wading through the filth was the easiest way to bypass the crowd. Those flashing the requisite paperwork were hoisted to safety. U.S. troops carried out similar work at other entry points.

Teams of U.S. service women, formed on the fly in preparation for the evacuation, supplemented the mission by searching women and assisting children, hundreds of whom had reached the airport without any parent or guardian, or wound up separated along the way.

Warrant Officer Sasha Savage, who led a team of eight women, said the effort never truly found a rhythm, but they assisted who they could. Photographs of her teammates caring for babies went viral online. It was clear that the evacuees were “going through the hardest time of their life,” arriving dehydrated, bloody or scared because their families had been separated in the mayhem, she said.

“It feels like you’re making impact at that point,” Savage said.

To get around the airport, U.S. troops hot-wired baggage carts, forklifts and other vehicles. They pilfered tools found in shipping containers, figuring they might prove useful. Vargas-Andrews grabbed a pair of 18-inch bolt cutters.

At Abbey Gate, he and his scout-sniper teammates took turns scanning the crowd from the guard tower. Several times, he said, Marines interfacing with those hoping to flee retreated into the base of the tower to cry. The Taliban were posted at checkpoints just yards away, and watching them act so ruthlessly made it difficult to maintain restraint.

Vargas-Andrews recalled that after a few days of observing Taliban abuses, he crept closer to their checkpoints to photograph corpses nearby — people the militants had killed, he surmised. He relayed the images to commanders, he said, but understood there would be no recourse.

“If we start firing at them, they’re going to start firing at us. Do we want to get in that scenario?” he said. “I get it. But it’s a hard thing.”

A flash and then ‘Boom’

Fire from the explosion swallowed the tightly packed corridor outside Abbey Gate, ejecting ball bearings that cut down those closest to the epicenter and left a gruesome path of carnage. U.S. personnel manning the gate had been warned that a suicide bomber was likely to be nearby, but they had not received orders to suspend operations.

Asked about Vargas-Andrews’s contention that the bomber could have been killed before the explosion, McKenzie said that no request to do so reached his level or surfaced during a military investigation of the incident that included testimony from more than 100 U.S. personnel. Vargas-Andrews said he was never interviewed as part of that inquiry as he underwent numerous surgeries.

Eby, who also was at Abbey Gate when the bomb exploded, said that there was a “known threat” in the area, but he was unaware of any service member identifying the bomber. “All that was ever said was, ‘Look for a black bag,’ ” Eby said.

Shortly before the blast, Vargas-Andrews had climbed down from the tower to help people into the airport. He recalls seeing a flash. And then, “Boom — this massive wave of pressure just hit me,” he said.

“The next time I opened my eyes, I’m on the ground,” Vargas-Andrews recalled. To his left, a sea of people were down and lifeless.

The military investigation, released earlier this year, determined the loss of life from the bombing was from a single catastrophic explosion. Some dispute that, though. Multiple personnel posted at Abbey Gate said they heard gunfire as well — and that they shot back.

Vargas-Andrews and others with him at the time remain convinced the bombing was part of a complex attack. As he lay in the dirt, his arm and leg shredded, the sound of gunfire crackling overhead urged him to seek cover, he said. There was a hole in the fence line about 70 yards away, but his wounds made it impossible to drag himself there.

Investigators concluded that gunfire was sporadic, and that those believing otherwise may have been disorientated by the explosion.

Those unharmed — or not incapacitated — scrambled to save as many lives as possible.

Among them was Marine Sgt. Wyatt Wilson, who sustained grievous shrapnel wounds in the blast and was thrown off his feet by its force. Despite his injuries, he tried to drag another severely wounded Marine to safety, but he had lost too much blood. The woman Wilson tried to help, Cpl. Kelsee Lainhart, was left paralyzed by the explosion.

Teammates of Vargas-Andrews knew he was in trouble after the blast. Sgt. Charles Schilling, a close friend, raced to him, screaming Vargas-Andrews’s name repeatedly. Using the bolt cutters his friend had commandeered, Schilling ripped open a hole in the fence to shorten the distance they’d need to traverse for medical care. The injured were whisked away on any vehicle available.

“Patients kept coming in five, six at a time,” said Capt. Carlos Mendoza, an Air Force flight nurse who was working at the airport’s hospital a few miles from the blast site. “It just didn’t stop.”

The wounded were splayed out on the floor waiting for care as doctors triaged them. Mendoza recalled encountering one service member who had died and another who was mortally wounded. Chaplains arrived and administered last rites.

A doctor split open the chest of one Marine using a pair of scissors as they searched for interior bleeding and then rushed him to surgery, Mendoza said.

“I heard that he survived,” he added, though he is unsure.

Thirty-seven Marines were awarded Purple Hearts for injuries sustained in the attack, said Maj. Jordan Cochran, a spokesman. More than 300 received ribbons stipulating that they engaged in direct combat over the course of the evacuation.

In the Army, at least four soldiers have received Purple Hearts for injuries suffered in the evacuation, said Maj. Jackie Wren, a service spokeswoman. Nearly 330 soldiers were recognized for experiencing combat during those weeks.

About 45 U.S. troops were wounded in the bombing and survived, the Pentagon said. The Americans killed:

• Marine Lance Cpl. David Espinoza, 20.
• Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23.
• Marine Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, 31.
• Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, 23.
• Marine Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22.
• Marine Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola, 20.
• Marine Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20.
• Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, 20.
• Marine Cpl. Daegan Page, 23.
• Marine Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25.
• Marine Cpl. Humberto Sanchez, 22.
• Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, 20.
• Navy Hospitalman Maxton Soviak, 22.

The recovery

McKenzie, the commanding general, retired in April. He marvels at the courage and professionalism rank-and-file troops showed during the evacuation, and said his greatest fear was a bomber sneaking onto a plane and detonating in the air, killing hundreds of people.

Service members reflecting on the operation should “decouple their actions and their enormous courage on the ground” from decisions made by more senior U.S. officials that put them there, he said.

“If you’re going to bring people in, you have to search them,” he said. “You’ve got to be confident that you’re not going to let someone with an explosive device get on an airplane because that is the point of greatest vulnerability.”

Eby, the platoon sergeant, lost nine men in his unit, all 23 or younger. During an interview last month at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, he paused several times to regain composure while recounting stories about the fallen. He considers the surviving members of the platoon to be family.

“We are inseparable,” he said. “I still get called ‘Dad’ by most of them.”

Savage, who led a female search team, wears a black metal bracelet engraved with Gee’s name. The weightlifting enthusiast had been meritoriously promoted, and was among the Marines pictured caring for Afghan children.

“She had a certain light and happiness about her that would make things positive no matter the situation,” Savage said.

Vargas-Andrews said he hopes the military enhances its recognition of those who saved his life and the lives of others. He singled out Schilling, who tore open the fence, and Hospitalman 3rd Class Jorge Mayo, who raced among the blast victims and treated Vargas-Andrews.

A memory from a few days before the explosion sticks with the Marine, as he continues physical therapy at Walter Reed National Military Medical outside Washington. In the crowd at Abbey Gate, he spotted a sobbing girl in tattered clothes, maybe 8 years old. She held an infant in one arm and the hand of a boy about 4 years old in her other hand. The baby wasn’t breathing.

Vargas-Andrews said he hustled the infant, who was turning blue, to an Air Force medic, and they resuscitated the baby. But the girl continued to cry.

He scrambled to a higher perch on top of a vehicle, and spotted a man with his head in his hands. It was the children’s father. The man had paperwork needed to evacuate but had been separated from his children in the melee. Their family was reunited moments later.

Vargas-Andrews said the moment was “huge for me,” his voice thickening with emotion as he recalled it.

“I look at my injuries every day,” he said. “And that one family, they have a life now. And that’s something that won’t be taken away from them.”

He shifted his weight in his chair, a prosthetic leg beneath him.

“You know,” he said, “there were a lot of moments like that out there, and it makes it worth it. It makes all this worth it.”

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · August 24, 2022

11. Foreign businesses want out of China. But breaking up may be tougher than ever

Foreign businesses want out of China. But breaking up may be tougher than ever

Los Angeles Times · by Stephanie Yang · August 28, 2022

TAIPEI, Taiwan —

In 2018, Fabien Gaussorgues realized that what had once been an asset for his manufacturing firm — producing 100% of its electronics and consumer goods in China — was fast becoming a headache.

Then-President Trump had begun levying tariffs on Chinese products, kicking off further measures between the U.S. and Chinese counterparts as businesses scrambled to offset the financial impact. Though other options seemed plentiful on paper — Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines — Gaussorgues found that relocating production would not prove easy.

Four years later, his company, Agilian Technology, which designs, produces and distributes goods for overseas clients, remains wholly reliant on its factory in southern China. Yet the impetus for departing what has long been considered the bedrock of global manufacturing has only escalated.

Multinational companies are facing a slew of fresh challenges doing business in China because of the ever-deteriorating U.S.-China relationship, enduring pandemic restrictions and the specter of war with Taiwan.

“It was not necessarily a strong strategy before but more like, let’s see how it goes,” said Gaussorgues, 51, who founded Agilian, whose parent company is based in Hong Kong, five years ago. “Now it’s something like, we have to do it. That’s a big difference.”

President Xi Jinping’s tough zero-COVID policy has had a particularly strong effect, keeping foreign workers out of China for the last two years and locking down entire cities and industrial hubs for months at a time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile, has underscored the financial risks to war and sanctions, should China pursue its territorial claim over Taiwan with a similar attack on the democratically ruled island.

As more foreign companies eye the exits, China stands to lose an integral part of its domestic economy and booming export market. At the same time, the lessons of the last few years have made clear that there’s no silver bullet to curtailing the world’s dependency on China.

“Companies don’t want to do this,” said Michael Walsh, a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner and a former Commerce Department chief of staff. “It is truly challenging, and I think that the push may have fallen by the wayside if it were not for the Russian invasion.”

Given the obstacles against going cold turkey, many companies have sought to supplement Chinese production rather than leave the country altogether. Tech giants Samsung and Apple are among the firms that have shifted portions of their production out of China in recent years, seeking cost savings in places like Vietnam and India.

Though Gaussorgues doesn’t have plans to shut down his 200-employee operation in China, geopolitical jitters hastened his search for alternative manufacturing bases as customers have fretted over the potential effects of military conflict with Taiwan. “They are very, very worried,” he said.

In 2019, he began assessing the possibility of moving some manufacturing capabilities to Vietnam. The company hired freelancers, visited factories, initiated marketing and proceeded to staff a full-time team. But he abandoned the plan eight months later after price increases for about half of the company’s projects upset his customers. Product development also took longer — one prototype that would have been completed in three weeks in China required six months in Vietnam.

A review of other countries in Southeast Asia proved even less fruitful, he said. Though Thailand offered relocation incentives and a promising quality of life for foreigners, he worried about local corruption and the availability of components. The Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia were too close for comfort to the South China Sea, another geopolitical hot spot, he decided.

By late 2020, Gaussorgues turned farther afield — to India. The local electronics and automotive ecosystem offered lower manufacturing costs and easy access to parts. It shares a border with China but is not likely to be the center of any major conflict. In December, he started hiring personnel in Chennai and Hubbali. With five employees so far, he aims to start assembly work next year, and hopes to host the majority of manufacturing there after five years.

“For risk management, this is probably the safest,” he said. “It will take a lot of work to make it grow.”

Consultants and lawyers said the path out of China is rife with hurdles and can often take years, though companies are rarely willing to discuss it publicly because of political sensitivities. The task has become even trickier as alternatives such as Vietnam have struggled to keep up with demand and the war in Ukraine has ruled out possibilities in Eastern Europe.

“Every single one of our clients would like to stop manufacturing in China, and people say, ‘Why don’t they?’” said Dan Harris, a founder of the law firm Harris Bricken, which advises American companies on doing business overseas. “There’s a million reasons why it’s just not that easy.”

Though most crucial supplies are readily available in China, including semiconductors, zippers and shoelace rings, importing such materials to facilities outside China can drive up costs. Labor shortages and strained resources have also put upward pressure on prices, as the turn away from China has driven demand elsewhere. Even more worrisome than the bottom line for some companies is the possibility that supply-chain snarls in untested new facilities will keep them from delivering the final products.

Daniel Karlsson, founder of Asia Perspective, a consulting firm for European businesses in China, said a handful of clients had given up plans to diversify operations after running into complications.

“We have seen a lot of clients that have the business plan, and when they start the implementation they see the difficulties and cost increases, especially for consumer goods,” Karlsson said. “On the high level, people have made a decision. But on the low level, there’s a lot of chaos.”

For companies catering to Chinese consumers, there’s still no better option than to be based in the country. Those that rely on low-cost, high-volume manufacturing have also benefited greatly from China’s logistics and infrastructure and are loath to give that up even in the face of rising uncertainty.

Looking back, Gaussorgues reckons his arrival in China 12 years ago came during a “golden age,” the country emerging as the world’s second-largest economy with business opportunities too good to pass up. Foreigners received a warm welcome at the time, he said, and new hires were enthusiastic about China as well.

Now, the country’s economic growth has plateaued, faltering even more drastically this year under Xi’s zero-COVID policy. Many expatriates have departed, while in China fervent nationalism and suspicion over foreign influences have grown.

In a June survey, the American Chamber of Commerce in China reported that 44% of respondents said they decreased or delayed investment in China as a result of the COVID strictures. One in 10 said if the restrictions continued for another year, it would prompt them to move operations out of China. Another survey released that month by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China showed nearly 1 in 4 companies thinking of shifting current or planned investments elsewhere because of the lockdowns.

Though there’s little indication that Xi will abandon zero-COVID in the near term, officials are cognizant of the need to reinstill faith. In a conference call this month, Vice Premier Hu Chunhua emphasized the development of foreign investment and support of foreign businesses, according to a release from China’s Ministry of Commerce. Government bureaus are also courting foreign workers with added perks and tax exemptions.

“China will still be very interested in remaining the world’s factory floor because it is very competitive,” said Eric Zheng, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. “Many local governments are very proactively going after multinational companies to see what they can do to help.”

Even as Agilian has committed to investing more in India, Gaussorgues knows that it won’t be a perfect substitution. Hiring stable workers has been difficult, and delivery timelines from suppliers have been tougher to pin down. Though locally sourced products have the potential to be made cheaper than in China, the facilities will still need to import many electronic parts.

“We don’t know how to fix that yet,” Gaussorgues said. “I don’t know if that’s something where we don’t use any components from China, but some of that is impossible.”

Los Angeles Times · by Stephanie Yang · August 28, 2022

​12. To prevent China ascendancy, U.S. needs to preserve its global system of rules, not rulers

Excerpts;

This is the most challenging facet of this geopolitical contest between the United States and China. The Chinese hold closer proximity to the Indo-Pacific than its competitor, the United States, and it can observe and relate to vulnerable Indo-Pacific states more easily. China can more seamlessly provide services and investment — even in a hyper-connected world, it is still easier to trade with those closest and provide/receive vital investments.

That is alarming when considering the advantages regional proximity gives China in the global technology/cyber competition. China is in a position to gain a large footprint in the tech economies of the region’s states. From this growing footprint, the Chinese can ascertain and influence any cyber/tech advances of regional states, like 5G, quantum computing, and IoT (Internet of Things) systems. They can move forward on their goal of creating a state-controlled alternative cyberspace to the internet (Splinternet); and they can create a robust coalition to set new international standards for current and emerging technologies.

This is a challenging hurdle for the United States, since even the global hegemon cannot shift tectonic plates. That is why the United States’ regional partners (i.e., the quasi-alliance among the U.S., Australia, Japan, and India: The Quad) are critical to help contain Chinese ascendancy and help maintain a world based on rules, not rulers.

To prevent China ascendancy, U.S. needs to preserve its global system of rules, not rulers: Santana F. King

cleveland.com · by Guest Columnist, cleveland.com · August 28, 2022

NORTH ROYALTON, Ohio -- There is an intense contest brewing between liberal democratic nations and the illiberal, autocratic China. The future will be one of immense geopolitical conflict filled with increasingly complex alliance systems, front-end public diplomacy, and back-end technical arms races (conventional and cyber). Leaders will have to engage without miscalculation.

China seeks to achieve the same continental dominance in Asia that the early United States did in the Americas. To gain global pre-eminence, a state must first gain regional dominance; It cannot dictate world affairs if it has a dangerous neighbor in its periphery with the constant specter of conflict.

Since the Asian Indo-Pacific region hosts more than half of all international trade and production, China would only have to be the dominant actor in this region to achieve global pre-eminence. By achieving Asian dominance, China would only need to cut vital global supply chains to coerce other states into capitulation. As 2021-22 has highlighted, the world is hyper-connected, and even the smallest disruption in our global supply chains can cause enormous stress to national economies.

Furthermore, the Chinese Communist Party aims to eclipse the United States as the global power to transform the current international system and create one in its own image.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States and its allies formed a liberal world order predicated on rule of law, liberal economic intercourse, democratic governance, and individual rights and freedoms. This is a world order that doesn’t align with the Chinese Communist Party’s governing ideology. The CCP aims to create a world order that emulates the current Chinese state (i.e., one of restricted markets, repression and supervision, and a state-centered economic model) to preserve the power, legitimacy, and the longevity of the CCP.

A liberal Chinese political system is what the Chinese Communist Party fears most, and the party has aggressively endeavored to maintain and promulgate its national power and influence, to prevent just that. In the past decade, the CCP has become more aggressive in their military presence in the Indo-Pacific by rapidly growing their national navy, investing in military capabilities (e.g., hypersonic ballistic missiles and a GPS alternative, BeiDou) and contesting disputed territories. Moreover, they are also diplomatically maneuvering in the region by both building alliances and attempting to torpedo outstanding U.S. bilateral partnerships/alliances. They are attempting this by offering neighboring nations attractive economic trade and investment partnerships.

Santana F. King, a former GOP primary candiidate in Ohio's 13th Congressional District, is an international affairs consultant. (Photo by Christiana Anastasia McCarthy)

This is the most challenging facet of this geopolitical contest between the United States and China. The Chinese hold closer proximity to the Indo-Pacific than its competitor, the United States, and it can observe and relate to vulnerable Indo-Pacific states more easily. China can more seamlessly provide services and investment — even in a hyper-connected world, it is still easier to trade with those closest and provide/receive vital investments.

That is alarming when considering the advantages regional proximity gives China in the global technology/cyber competition. China is in a position to gain a large footprint in the tech economies of the region’s states. From this growing footprint, the Chinese can ascertain and influence any cyber/tech advances of regional states, like 5G, quantum computing, and IoT (Internet of Things) systems. They can move forward on their goal of creating a state-controlled alternative cyberspace to the internet (Splinternet); and they can create a robust coalition to set new international standards for current and emerging technologies.

This is a challenging hurdle for the United States, since even the global hegemon cannot shift tectonic plates. That is why the United States’ regional partners (i.e., the quasi-alliance among the U.S., Australia, Japan, and India: The Quad) are critical to help contain Chinese ascendancy and help maintain a world based on rules, not rulers.

Santana F. King, a former Republican primary candidate in the 13th Ohio Congressional District, is an international affairs consultant for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The views expressed in this column are his own.

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cleveland.com · by Guest Columnist, cleveland.com · August 28, 2022

13. No rules for USA. (China OpEd)

From one of the Chinese propaganda mouthpieces.

No rules for USA

Xinhua | Updated: 2022-08-28 08:52

chinadaily.com.cn · by 赵满丰

The Taipei 101 skyscraper commands the urban landscape in Taipei, China's Taiwan. [Photo/Xinhua]

Some US politicians keep preaching "upholding the rules-based international order." But in reality, the country proves to be the biggest destroyer of rules and order, and their repeated reference means nothing but their preference for US hegemony.

As a founding member of the United Nations and the world's only superpower, the United States constantly places its domestic law above international law and observes international rules only as it sees fit. This is the biggest damage being done to the international order.

While asking other countries to uphold the international order, the United States has been obstructing negotiations for a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention, and refusing to ratify multiple international conventions including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The United States has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and other organizations, even the Trans-Pacific Partnership it had advocated.

The United States' so-called "rules-based international order" is actually a bunch of rules made by a handful of countries to serve the selfish interests of the United States in seeking hegemony.

John Bolton, former White House national security adviser, said earlier in an interview unashamedly that he had helped plan coups in foreign countries. Bolton's admission is so revealing.

Leading US politicians trumpet the so-called "rules-based international order" for one purpose: to ensure that the United States can easily interfere in other countries' affairs and overthrow their governments at its own will. This is exactly the kind of "rules" and "order" that they want to defend.

For years, the United States has created political unrest in Latin America, played a part in the "Arab Spring", and instigated color revolutions in Europe and Asia. The United States has wantonly invaded and interfered militarily in other countries, killing over 800,000 people and turning more than 20 million into refugees in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. The United States says little, however, about how many innocent lives have been lost and how many families torn apart as a steep price for this order it championed.

The Taiwan question has always been the most important and the most sensitive issue at the heart of China-US relations. The China-US Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, published in December 1978, states: "The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China."

However, the United States has substantially eased restrictions on official relations with Taiwan and increased military contacts with the region, as evidenced by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan earlier this month. The United States' deviation from the one-China principle will surely take a huge toll on the mutual trust between the two countries.

The one-China principle, reaffirmed by United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 2758, is an integral part of the post-WWII international order, an established international consensus and a widely-accepted basic norm in international relations.

By breaching the one-China principle, the United States is also challenging the post-war international order, which will surely be met with wide opposition from the international community.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed in June that they've sought to build an imperfect but liberal order. But judging from the US deeds, it is neither liberal nor order; it is hegemony, highhandedness and bullying, and an attempt of the United States and a small number of other countries to make rules that suit themselves.

People across the world will not want the kind of "imperfect" but "liberal" order peddled by the United States. What they want is an equal and shared right to security, development and prosperity for all. It is high time that the United States reflects on itself and takes real responsibilities for world peace and development.

chinadaily.com.cn · by 赵满丰

14. Clear analogy with South China Sea and Taiwan to India-China LAC tensions, says Kevin Rudd

Excerpts:

Is there a way for India to counter China's influence in the neighborhood? In other words, is the opposite of China be more democratic, be more pluralistic, be more inclusive inside India’s region? Or is there a way of out competing China?

The Chinese deeply understand the balance of power and they also talk about their own comprehensive national power. They also calculate the aggregate state power of India, of Japan, of the United States, Australia, of the Europeans, and they put it together in an ultimate equation. Therefore, what we all do individually in terms of our aggregation of national power, wealth and power, including military power, and what we do collectively enters into this calculus, which underpins China's choice for strategic behavior. So I think adding a voice to the existing international rules based system is in many respects, as important as the fundamental as it were response to the reality of Chinese strategic power. And finally, all I'd say is that for India, there is the long term question. What does India do ultimately, if China does unilaterally resolve the border, as Gorbachev did, with the Russian Federation within the Soviet Union in 1989? I've often had a private theory, there's no evidence to back it up whatsoever. But that if Xi Jinping was being the ultimate diplomatic realist, and was to resolve the border along the lines of the original proposals between Chou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru, what would India then do in terms of China's rise if the border was resolved, and India and China and Russia folded into one enormous market of mutual opportunity? Because China would still seek to be the center of the pan regional and global system, even if the border was resolved.

Clear analogy with South China Sea and Taiwan to India-China LAC tensions, says Kevin Rudd

The Hindu · August 28, 2022

Former Australian PM says Chinese infrastructure consolidation at LAC indicates it will not turn back or withdraw completely

There are parallels between China’s actions at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and its tensions between China and the US over Taiwan, says former Australian Prime Minister and China watcher Kevin Rudd. Mr. Rudd, who is the author of a new book, “The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the U.S. and Xi Jinping’s China”, is also the President of the Asia Society, is in Delhi for the launch of a new policy institute, to be inaugurated by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in Delhi on Monday.

How do you see U.S. and China tensions over Taiwan?

My analysis is that Xi Jinping’s China is different in two fundamental ways. The first is that the balance of power has changed between China and the United States: militarily, economically, and technologically. The second is the particular agency of Xi Jinping’s leadership. Xi Jinping is not a “status quo” politician, he is a “let's change the game” politician, [focused on] China's national ambitions to be the preeminent regional and global power by 2049 and to reincorporate Taiwan on the way through. Since 2017, United States has recognized this challenge, named this challenge, and defined this relationship as one of strategic competition. And the winner of this competitive race is who either remains or becomes the dominant regional global power.

Is there a timeline, according to you for when Xi Jinping hopes to “reincorporate” Taiwan?

Xi Jinping has said that China's great ‘national rejuvenation’ cannot be achieved in the absence of Taiwan, And that programme has a timetable of 2049. Xi Jinping has also brought forward the date for the completion of China's military reform and modernization program from 2035 to 2027. In my judgment, Xi will automatically be reappointed as General Secretary of the Communist Party for a third term this October/November at the 20th Party Congress and that he's looking towards at least another three terms, taking him through to 2037. So what I'm most concerned about is, that China's internal timetable [for Taiwan] is likely to be late 2020s, early 2030s. I'm more concerned about crisis escalation, conflict and war by accident, between now and then.

In your book, where you write about the 10 concentric circles of Xi Jinping interests. Where do you think India fits in into those?

This is a analytical framework I've invented, it has no resonance really in the Chinese tradition. But I thought it was important to try and make sense to an international audience as to how in fact, I think the standing committee of the Politburo headed by Xi Jinping looks at the world in a series of sets of priorities moving from the center out: some are more important than others. Obviously, within that 10 concentric circles of interest, the first four or five are largely domestic, and they're about the politics and economics and the security apparatus remaining in power. But when you start to move out from those concentric circles, it becomes of course, much more pronounced. There are two which particularly relate to India, and possibly three.

One is what I put as concentric circle number two, which is Xi Jinping said preoccupation with the politics and the military strategy of national unity. That's not just maintaining the unity of the nation, that’s securing unresolved territorial boundaries, whether it's with Taiwan, and the reincorporation of it, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, even a minor maritime border dispute with South Korea, and certainly with India. That's number one. I think if you look at what I describe as concentric circle eight, which is the use of the Belt ad Road initiative to extend China's overall economic and therefore political sphere of influence across the vast Eurasian continent, through Central Asia, through South Asia, into Eastern Europe, and eventually to Western Europe, in fact, through the Middle East into Africa, by simply becoming the indispensable economic power, or the indispensable infrastructure builder of Pan Eurasia. Under those circumstances, India obviously figures in this because India is not participant in it. But India's neighboring states, whether it's Bangladesh with Sri Lanka, we've seen most spectacularly with the Sri Lankan port, but also, of course, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor in Pakistan, Nepal and elsewhere.

If there's a final element of intersection with Indian interests, and India itself, it is of course, in the Chinese thinking about the reshaping of the international rules based system, and to do so in a manner which ultimately rolls back what China perceives to be an America centric international post world war two rules based system anchored in the UN anchored in the Bretton Woods institutions, but ultimately anchored in US Strategic power. And there there is a normative element to that, which is China's view of international law, and international rules, and the progressive stripping out by China of international human rights provisions based on the Universal Declaration of 1948, in which India proudly played a role.

Given this scenario, should India strengthen the quad Alliance quad arrangement with Australia, Japan and the United States, or keep the present balance as a member of the SCO and BRICS with Russia and China?

The two options available to India and other countries, given China’s assertiveness, is to bandwagon or to balance. I don't see it in India's nature to bandwagon with China, given the unresolved nature of the Sino-Indian border, therefore, the alternative strategic course, is balancing. The Quad obviously represents one fairly prominent example of balancing, by India, Japan, United States and Australia. AUKUS at a different level, reflects much the same dynamic. But also you see the hardening of the European Union and NATO in terms of strategic posture towards China as well.

Despite the LAC standoff since 2020, the Indian government has kept the door open for talks for military and Foreign Minister-level talks. Is this the way forward or do you see, like in Taiwan, a possible flashpoint?

After the border clashes of April-May of 2020, the Chinese, at least in one part of the border (at Ladakh), have chosen to double down, to build hard infrastructure behind those new positions, and rather than “tactically withdraw”, leave every evidence that China has consolidated. I think in terms of concrete, political and diplomatic messaging from the Chinese side, they are sending a clear message that China is not for turning back, and that it is in the process of prosecuting it's full territorial aspirations to the allowable strategic limit. And there, I see a clear analogy with South China Sea, Taiwan, East China Sea. As to India's response to that emerging new Chinese strategy which is more assertive, that of course, is a matter for the government in Delhi [to decide]. They've been dealing with this effectively since 1962, and effectively in a different way prior to 1962. And so it would not be appropriate for me to tell Delhi what to do.

Your book is called The avoidable war between U.S. and China. Do you think the conflict or the next conflict between India and China is avoidable as well?

I'm not sufficiently expert in the granularity of the border. But when you have multiple sub disputes along the border, an ongoing challenge in Kashmir, the unfolding dynamic of Pakistani politics, and Pakistan's “all weather” alliance with Beijing, I think [India and China] are in for a rocky period ahead. What I have seen though, however, is remarkable stability and maturity in Indian diplomacy to continue to find the off-ramps and there are a number within the Chinese system which are always looking for off ramps as well, even though the evidence on the ground so far, at least from Beijing's perspective is to push ahead.

There are now reports indicating a possible meeting between Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping at international conferences like the SCO or the G-20. How effective could summitry be in resolving the issues?

The Chinese strategic culture is to observe what states do, not what they say. Therefore, concrete strategic behaviors, and actions by India on the border, or in its relationship with the United states, or its Quadrilateral relationship... these are the things which China observes, takes note of, and then analyzes in terms of how it should respond. And China respects strength and is contemptuous of weakness. So, summitry can be enormously powerful when it rests on those underlying realistic assumptions. Frankly, it's Xi Jinping that counts within the system, the rest of the system doesn't count for much in the ultimate decision making processes of the Chinese system. Therefore, for important global political leaders like Prime Minister Modi, how they engage Xi Jinping directly matters, because the rest of the system is much weaker, then it was under Xi Jinping’s predecessors.

Is there a way for India to counter China's influence in the neighborhood? In other words, is the opposite of China be more democratic, be more pluralistic, be more inclusive inside India’s region? Or is there a way of out competing China?

The Chinese deeply understand the balance of power and they also talk about their own comprehensive national power. They also calculate the aggregate state power of India, of Japan, of the United States, Australia, of the Europeans, and they put it together in an ultimate equation. Therefore, what we all do individually in terms of our aggregation of national power, wealth and power, including military power, and what we do collectively enters into this calculus, which underpins China's choice for strategic behavior. So I think adding a voice to the existing international rules based system is in many respects, as important as the fundamental as it were response to the reality of Chinese strategic power. And finally, all I'd say is that for India, there is the long term question. What does India do ultimately, if China does unilaterally resolve the border, as Gorbachev did, with the Russian Federation within the Soviet Union in 1989? I've often had a private theory, there's no evidence to back it up whatsoever. But that if Xi Jinping was being the ultimate diplomatic realist, and was to resolve the border along the lines of the original proposals between Chou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru, what would India then do in terms of China's rise if the border was resolved, and India and China and Russia folded into one enormous market of mutual opportunity? Because China would still seek to be the center of the pan regional and global system, even if the border was resolved.

The Hindu · August 28, 2022

15. Group of Dutch soldiers shot outside Indiana hotel

Group of Dutch soldiers shot outside Indiana hotel​

By Adam Schrader​

upi.com

Aug. 27 (UPI) -- A group of Dutch special forces soldiers in Indiana for military exercises were shot outside an Indianapolis hotel early Saturday morning, officials said.

Indianapolis police responded to the Hampton Inn around 3:30 a.m. and found the three men with gunshot wounds, WXIN-TV reported.

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The men were taken to local hospitals and one of them is in critical condition, the Netherlands Ministry of Defense confirmed in a statement.

"The shooting took place in front of the hotel where the commandos are staying. They are in the state of Indiana on exercise. The incident happened during the military's free time," the Netherlands Defense Ministry said.

"The families of the victims have been informed. Local police are investigating the cause of the shooting. No one has been arrested yet."

The Indiana National Guard confirmed to WXIN-TV that the soldiers were training at Muscatatuck Urban Training Center.

"It is a premier training facility and used by DoD as well as other allies," Indiana National Guard said in a statement.

"The Dutch soldiers visited Indianapolis at the end of their duty day. Our thoughts and prayers are with the soldiers and families during this difficult time."

Police officials said in a press conference that preliminary evidence suggests that a disturbance had occurred between the soldiers and the possible suspect.

upi.com

16. US colonel branded a MURDERER for turning away Americans during Kabul

I wonder if DOD will act on these allegations and conduct an investigation. If they are proven true this Colonel needs to be held accountable. But with all the unauthorized people who were evacuated I find it at least counter to the narrative about what was happening at the airport. It seems like all the stories were about how the military and personnel tried to get as many out as quickly as possible. And I cannot imagine anyone saying no to a US passport holder but if the alleged Colonel did not even check and was using Tim Kenndy's reputation as the reason for denying aiding Americans and eligible Afghans then he needs to be held accountable.  

US colonel branded a MURDERER for turning away Americans during Kabul

Daily Mail · by Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com · August 28, 2022

A US Army colonel is being slammed as a murderer for turning away four bus-loads of Americans, friendly Afghans, and 300 orphans during the country's evacuation from Kabul Airport last year - likely condemning them to their deaths.

The order from the unnamed colonel was delivered on August 25, less than a week before the last troops were withdrawn from the country as the Taliban tightened their grip on the city.

Tim Kennedy, the former MMA fighter turned soldier, was among those who witnessed the incident.

He told a new Amazon Prime Video documentary called Send Me Tim Kennedy: ‘(We) asked if people holding up blue passports and SIVs could get through.

‘He answered: “No, I don’t care who they are, those people get back on those buses and they go back into Kabul. Get em off this base?”’

Kennedy said of the incident: ‘There’s not enough capacity in my soul to be able to mourn four busloads of people that are about to die because the time spend on anguish and mourning could have been spent saving other people.’

It happened after a team of exceptionally-experienced security level personnel were dispatched into Kabul to gather people approved to fly back to the US on chartered planes after President Biden announced plans to withdraw.

That sparked an almost-immediate capitulation to the Taliban by US-trained Afghan forces, as well as a sudden and chaotic scramble to fly refugees out from Kabul’s besieged airport.

Those collected by the buses included American citizens, green card holders, Afghans who’d helped the war effort and been granted Special Interest Visas, as well as Christians who faced persecution at the hands of the Taliban, and orphaned children.

Former MMA fighter turned soldier Tim Kennedy told of his disgust at a US Army colonel who kicked four bus loads of refugees out of Kabul Airport last August - even though they'd been approved for safe passage to the United States

The buses are pictured pulling into the airport on the fateful day - shortly before the unnamed colonel turned them back

Chad Robichaux, who was also part of the rescue effort, branded the colonel who sent the refugees back a 'murderer'

The incident in question transpired on August 25, members of the groups said in the recently released documentary, outside the Kabul Airport, where days later a suicide blast by ISIS-K agents would leave 13 servicemen and 170 Afghans dead.

Realizing the pressing nature of the situation, fellow SoA founder Nick Palmisciano - a former infantry officer in the US Army - said he, Kennedy, and their other colleagues enlisted the buses to help streamline the evacuation.

He said his team were particularly excited by this batch of refugees, who they felt were among the most deserving of being rescued.

‘We had orphans, 100 Christians, several high value individuals that were requested by govt entities. We also had the families of the crews that had been flying the charter airplanes.’

Despite being meticulously screened, the colonel refused to process them once they’d made it into the airport, and instead questioned whether the papers they’d presented guaranteeing their entry to the United States could have been faked.

Recalling the shocking moment the news was delivered, Kennedy said of the colonel's inexplicable order: 'He just makes the call – "Turn everybody around – put everybody back out, I don’t care who they are.’

The group - which included Kennedy, Palmisciano, Special Forces Officer Dave Johnson, and ex-recon Marine Chad Robichaux - had purchased the buses out of their own pockets, they said, and used them to pick up the various individuals across the war-torn country all through the night.

Robichaux said: 'Whoever just made the decision to turn this bus around essentially just killed – just murdered – these people. And by the way, some of those people are children.

'And some of these people were women. But some of these people are Americans, that we just sent back to the Taliban.'

A drawing taken from the documentary gives a rough idea as to how refugees were supposed to be processed once they'd been brought to a secure area inside Kabul Airport

A rocket-toting Taliban fighter is pictured outside the airport. Kennedy and others are convinced that the refugees turned away by the US colonel will have been easy prey for the terrorist group on being dumped back outside the safe and secure airport facility

Ferrying Christians, families of Afghan evacuation pilots, and American passport holders, the buses had been commandeered by the ex-UFC fighter - who is also a former veteran - to aid in the hectic operation.

Among them were Americans with documents proving their citizenship, as well as 100 Afghan Christians at risk of being persecuted by the Muslim Taliban in the wake of the takeover.

Also picked up were roughly 300 orphans found throughout the capital, and high value individuals (HVTs) that government entities the group had been working with ordered them to pick up.

'We had a location for 300 orphans,' Palmisciano - an infantry soldier-turned Hollywood producer - says in a segment of Send Me that recounts the disagreement with the colonel, who was not named by the filmmakers.

'We had a location for about 100 Christians. And then we had several high value individuals that were requested by government entities for us to pick up,' he recalled.

Also on the bus were the 'families of the crews that had been flying the charter airplanes' evacuating thousands of Americans and ally Afghans, Palmisciano further revealed.

Aided by 12 other friends and former servicemen who comprised the humanitarian group, retired MMA star Kennedy and other members would then fight for the innocents to be allowed through into a US military base - but were ultimately rebuffed.

The tense standoff likely saw hundreds of Afghan children, commandos and interpreters' lives snuffed out - and is detailed in full in the upcoming Send Me, which recount's the struggles of Kennedy's team during the evacuation.

Days after the buses were turned away, Joe Biden ordered the last of the 13,000 or so soldiers stationed in the war-torn country to withdraw - likely leaving thousands behind to suffer at the hands of the notorious terrorist group.

Send Me, which started streaming on Amazon Prime last week, details the buildup to this event and chronicles one of the largest civilian rescue operations in history - which in this case was foiled by the unidentified colonel.

Refugees are pictured waiting at Kabul Airport during last summer's' chaotic withdrawal

Kennedy, 42, recalled: 'We send out buses to multiple places throughout the city.

'The most elite intelligence agencies in the world have their people on these buses,' the ex-UFC middleweight went on. 'Afghan Special Forces commandos, interpreters, Christians, orphans – all of these on these buses.'

Palmisciano added: 'The guys worked all night and then filled those buses with those individuals.'

Once packed with the potential refugees, the convoy convened at a location outside the airport, called the Black Gate, which had been the agreed rallying point for the bus evacuation, made ahead of time with Marines who had been stationed at the airport.

Johnson, a former special forces officer and ex-Westpoint graduate, recalled of the frantic evacuation effort: 'In one last swoop we thought we could just get one big, big lump through. We had this great little gate that we had arranged ahead of time with the Marines. We have five of them lined up at this one gate - Black Gate.'

At the time, Palmisciano had been waiting at the airport with Sean Lee, the operations officer for Save Our Allies and a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Army, for the buses' arrival.

Eventually, around 3 am, the pair received a call from their colleagues notifying them of the buses' arrival - which they in turn could not help but celebrate.

'I got a SAT [satellite] call: ‘Hey – We got 300 orphans, 100 Christians, the HVTs, and the families of about half the crew through the gate.’

Kabul's airport is pictured. A secure US zone at the facility was besieged by people hoping to escape during the withdrawal. Many were turned away, despite having permission to enter the US

Palmisciano recalled: 'We danced a jig. Like, were like, you know, "F**k yeah."

The ex infantrymen called the occurrence one of the happiest moments that we had during the entire excursion, which lasted the better part of that month until the final day of the US evacuation on August 31.

Lee recalled how he and Nick high-fived and danced around the airport upon hearing the news, thinking their efforts had saved the lives of hundreds of Americans, children, and US allies.

But Kennedy, who retired from the UFC in 2016 following a 15-year MMA career, said the team quickly grew serious, as they knew they would have to still work with US Army officials to get the evacuees through.

'We’re doing as much as we can as fast as we can,' the former fighter recalled of his team's efforts - which saw thousands of others rescued during the unrest.

'We can’t make mistakes,' Kennedy said. 'We can’t let one person through that shouldn’t have gotten through. And so, we’re being thorough.'

At that point, the team members began conversing with a government rep at the airport, which triggered a series of calls up various chains of commands about the busses and its inhabitants.

That's when the colonel, who was not named but belonged to the 82nd Airborne, arrived on the scene, Kennedy said. Immediately, the serviceman began to assert his authority - as he was the most senior officer on the scene.

One of the SoA members, a serviceman who goes by the pseudonym of Seaspray, recalled of the encounter: 'There was colonel who came out and wanted to show that, essentially, he was the one that can decide whether or not somebody could get on a plane or not.'

'And he just makes the call,' Kennedy then added, recalling the colonel's words.

'"Turn everybody around; put everybody back out - I don’t care who they are,"' Kennedy recounted.

At that point, Kennedy and his team frantically began making calls and arguing with brass at the de facto base - noting to officials that the lists of occupants on the bus had been verified, their bags searched, and their travel documents perused.

Seaspray said: 'We had the appeal of, "These lists have been verified; they had been searched by US Marines; they weren’t carrying anything; their bags had already been gone through; they’ve been patted down; documents have been verified – we had all of that proof.'

US troops are pictured within a secure area of Kabul Airport last summer, while hopeful refugees await charter planes to leave

However, the colonel reportedly remained unconvinced - telling the team that he didn't know if the documents and other criteria were 'fake or not.’

Still, the group continued to attempt to talk sense into the serviceman, asking if they could at least go through the passengers and to pull out the American citizens and the green card holders.

'And he’s like,' Kennedy said: ‘"Nope – it’s my decision. It’s a command."’

The fighter, who served in the Army's Green Berets as a sniper during the early years of his storied MMA career, said that he at that point was growing increasing impatient with the colonel, and even accused him of making an unlawful order.

'Like, well, I’m not in the military,' Kennedy, who started Save Our Allies along with Palmisciano and Colonel Sarah Verardo, said. 'I’m not here for the military – and that’s not really a lawful order.'

The colonel, according to Kennedy, continued to push the theory that the documentation - which had been checked by Kennedy and his team as well as other US officials - have been fabricated.

But Kennedy's response this time was, ‘"Is it worth the risk of saying that it isn’t? If there’s a chance that these documents are real, are you willing to push Americans back off base?"’

'And they were,' Kennedy says in an excerpt of Send Me.'

Tim's colleagues theorized that the colonel's behavior stemmed from the fact that Kennedy is a pseudo celebrity - and no longer is part of the military. Palmiscianor said that because of this, he did not seem to take the group and their efforts seriously, looking at it as a publicity stunt by the ex-athlete.

'From his perspective,' Palmiscianor recalled, 'Tim was the only guy that he knew.'

'He thought, "This is some f***in guy that’s just showing up in Afghanistan, running seven buses in, you know – f**k this guy, I want to kick him out."’

Seaspray added that at one point during the face-off, he heard the colonel sarcastically remark, 'This isn’t the Tim Kennedy show.'

Kennedy, meanwhile, was irate over the treatment, chiefly due to the fact that their were people's - and children's - lives at stake. With that said, if the colonel's theory was wrong, the mistake would be a costly one.

'These were people that fought and had their relatives die for us,' Kennedy recalled of the bus passengers, who would eventually be turned away and never heard from again - despite several generals later overruling the colonel's inexplicable order.

'They lost their limbs for us,' Kennedy continued, referring to the Afghans onboard who had aided the US in the fight against the Taliban. 'They lost their adult lives and youth and their innocence for us.

He added: 'Yes, they’re fighting for Afghanistan. Yes, they’re fighting for their people – but they are fighting with us. That’s who – that’s who we’re trying to save here.'

Palmisciano added: 'From our perspective, this was possibly the most valuable load of people we had brought in thus far.'

The group would then begin to desperately plea with the officer, who refused to make any concessions to the group, including just accepting those with American passports or those related to American citizens - all while the passengers waited desperately outside the gate, off the bus.

But the colonel still would not budge.

‘Everybody goes back on these buses and I want them escorted back off the base,’ he told Kennedy and the rest of the group. ‘Kick them out.’

Seaspray said: : ‘And at gunpoint, they pushed Americans, orphans, visa holders, back into buses, and forced them ack off base knowing that we were already rebaring and cementing the main gates closed, knowing that we’re going to leave soon, knowing that if you push those people back of the base, it was a high probability that they would not ever get on a plane.

Daily Mail · by Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com · August 28, 2022

17. Controlling the First Island Chain: How to Ensure China Can't Dominate the Pacific?

Excerpts:

But there’s less reason to fret than it might seem when PLA Navy ships of war appear east of Japan or off Alaska.

Japanese mapmakers are not helping things. Like their Chinese counterparts, their handiwork sometimes conveys false impressions. The Japanese authorities track Chinese (and Russian) naval movements closely. When plotted on the map as solid lines, the courses traced by hostile aircraft and ships look like ramen noodles spilling into the Western Pacific. Or, less amusingly, they resemble cords encircling—and constricting—Japan. Such visuals could exacerbate anxieties among the Japanese political leadership, the military, and especially the populace at large.

That’s what Beijing is counting on when it essays such shows of force. But it’s important to keep them in perspective. These are not solid barriers. They merely indicate the track a ship or plane followed while transiting from point A to point B. Such maps denote a transitory presence in Japan’s environs, as compared to the relatively firm barrier manifest in a fortified first island chain. So Japanese should interpret imagery with a skeptical eye, and they should take heart. They retain the geographic advantage over China in a marine contest of arms. If they harness that advantage effectively, they still stand a good chance of deterring or quashing Chinese misadventures.

Revise your mental map of the region accordingly—and get ready.

Controlling the First Island Chain: How to Ensure China Can't Dominate the Pacific?

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · August 27, 2022

If you harbored any doubt that the first island chain represents the focal point of strategy, counterstrategy, and counter-counterstrategy in the Western Pacific, take a gander at recent developments out of Tokyo and Beijing. Exhibit A: the Japan Ministry of Defense released Defense of Japan 2022, an official statement wherein the ministry takes stock of Japan’s strategic surroundings and explains in general terms how it intends to manage them.

Its premier goal: deterrence.

Girding for battle along the Ryukyus chain constitutes a major part of deterrence for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi. Doing so, proclaims Defense of Japan 2022, will make “opponents realize that doing harm to Japan would be difficult and consequential.” If China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) lacks the military capability to seize islands along the Ryukyu Islands chain—or if it can’t seize them at a cost worth it to Beijing—then Chinese Communist Party magnates should desist from making the attempt.

That’s Deterrence 101. And it’s why, in the strategy document’s words, Tokyo is budgeting for “one integrated ‘Defense Strengthening Acceleration Package.’” In other words, the Kishida government is in a hurry to ready Japan’s defenses. And a good thing, too.

Defense of Japan 2022 sketches (scroll down to page 4) one of the better practical portrayals of how island-chain defense works that you’ll see. It involves stationing compact Japan Ground and Air Self-Defense Force units along the Ryukyus chain. Armed with anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, ground-force units will strive to deny attacking PLA forces access to seas and skies adjacent to the islands, and thus to the islands themselves. Air and ground forces will fight alongside Maritime Self-Defense Force units prowling nearby waters, ready to pummel hostile shipping and aircraft.

The product of their labors: a daunting joint defense able to deny the PLA access to Japanese territory. Access and area denial is not just a Chinese thing.

This defensive scheme draws on martial logic spelled out eloquently by German field marshal Helmuth von Moltke over a century ago. Channeling Carl von Clausewitz (and as interpreted by Julian Corbett), Moltke observed that holding something is easier than taking it. Tactical defense, that is, represents the strongest form of warfare. That being the case, the best strategy for a contender pursuing strategic defense is to seize an undefended or lightly defended parcel of land, or some other object it covets. It makes the opening move, waging tactical offense on the cheap. Once ensconced in that place, it defends it. It reverts to tactical defense in the service of strategically defensive ends.

In strategy as in legal affairs, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Japan is putting Moltke’s logic to work in peacetime. It can do so at low cost and risk since it already holds the contested ground. By fortifying the Ryukyu archipelago, the Self-Defense Forces have in effect dared their Chinese antagonists to cross hundreds of miles of water under fire before attempting an opposed amphibious assault—among the most arduous feats known to military folk. This proactive approach marks a welcome departure from previous Japanese strategic documents, which spoke of retaking islands after they had fallen to Chinese arms.

That more passive approach could have forfeited Japan’s Moltkean advantages in part or in whole.

While homeland defense is the chief benefit Tokyo espies from arraying forces along the southwestern islands, access denial bestows another major boon on Japan and its chief ally, the United States. Namely, it bottles up sizable segments of the PLA Navy within the China seas, not to mention China’s merchant fleet. Use naval and air power to close the Ryukyu straits, the Tsushima Strait, and the Taiwan Strait to sea and air traffic, and you can bring some military and economic hurt to China. This is not lost on PLA commanders or their political masters. It’s doubtless part of why they’re so consumed with conquering Taiwan. Control of the island would hand them control of both shores of the strait, bolstering their efforts to keep that passage open in time of war.

Without such control the PLA Navy fleet could find itself fragmented between north and south.

And the logic of island-chain containment could apply south of Taiwan as well, although the diplomatic dimension gets dicey along the first island chain’s southerly arc, made up chiefly of the Philippine Islands and Indonesia. Think about it. No Chinese harbor outflanks the first island chain, which ambles southward and westward all the way to the Strait of Malacca. Defenses emplaced along the island chain could cement an unbreakable barrier to Chinese maritime movement. But again, convincing Manila or Jakarta to unite behind such a scheme could prove nettlesome. They see value in good relations with China, mainly for economic reasons, and thus they blanch at the thought of affronting their giant neighbor.

Yet the military logic of island-chain defense holds. The visuals in Defense of Japan 2022 convey this logic vividly. A well-crafted picture speaks louder than a thousand words.

Exhibit B: meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated tabloid Global Times reported, with its customary bravado, that the PLA Navy leadership expects to declare two of its supersized Type 055 guided-missile destroyers fully battleworthy by year’s end. The destroyers, classified as cruisers in the West, will then undertake “island chain-breaking far sea operations like encircling Japan and patrolling near Alaska.”

Three points. One, it’s easy to lie to others or yourself with maps, just as with statistics. Mental maps commonly distort cartographic reality. As Defense of Japan 2022 notes, deployments along the Ryukyus constitute a deterrent in peacetime. By definition no one is battling anyone in peacetime. The Self-Defense Forces (and their U.S. allies, notably the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force) intend peacetime deployments to put the PLA on notice that the allies could deny access to the islands and close the straits in wartime.

So The Global Times scribes are engaging in puffery. There’s no chain to break in peacetime; no one will obstruct the PLA Navy’s access to the Pacific. There are merely maps with lines inscribed on them to depict a concept of wartime operations. Making those lines solid implies something false. To use a football analogy, on the gridiron it would be easy to break into an opposing team’s backfield if its hulking linemen made no effort to block you. Standing idle says little about how the competition would play out come gametime.

Two, if war erupted while Type 055s or other units were operating outside the first island chain, they wouldn’t be able to return home so long as the allied barricade held. For a time the ships could provide some combat value by operating east of the island chain, helping mount a 360-degree assault on the islands’ defenders. But dispatching warships beyond the island chain during times of tense peace would be an exceedingly risky practice for Beijing. Where would their logistical support come from should the allies close the straits with them outside? Without regular stocks of fuel, ammunition, and stores, Chinese task forces would wilt in short order.

Now, if the Type 055s could puncture a defended island chain, gaining access to the broad Pacific, then the Global Times would have something to crow about. But that’s doubtful. And the more doubtful Japan and America can make it, the better their prospects for deterrence.

So, three, there’s little cause for Japan, its allies, or its friends to quail at the sight of PLA Navy assets operating in the broad Pacific. Appearing off your adversary’s coasts was daily routine during the Cold War—as we sailors of increasingly grizzled years can attest. Forward deployments stretch out your adversary while sowing doubt about what you might do should cold competition go hot. Such demonstrations promise to resume being standard fare during whatever we’re calling the strategic competition we are now in.

But there’s less reason to fret than it might seem when PLA Navy ships of war appear east of Japan or off Alaska.

Japanese mapmakers are not helping things. Like their Chinese counterparts, their handiwork sometimes conveys false impressions. The Japanese authorities track Chinese (and Russian) naval movements closely. When plotted on the map as solid lines, the courses traced by hostile aircraft and ships look like ramen noodles spilling into the Western Pacific. Or, less amusingly, they resemble cords encircling—and constricting—Japan. Such visuals could exacerbate anxieties among the Japanese political leadership, the military, and especially the populace at large.

SOUTH CHINA SEA (Oct. 19, 2021) The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Milius (DDG 69), rear, and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) Akizuki-class destroyer JS Akizuki (DD 115) transit the South China Sea in formation. Milius is assigned to Commander, Task Force (CTF) 71/Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 15, the Navy’s largest forward-deployed DESRON and the U.S. 7th Fleet’s principal surface force. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Christine Montgomery) 211019-N-TC847-1020

That’s what Beijing is counting on when it essays such shows of force. But it’s important to keep them in perspective. These are not solid barriers. They merely indicate the track a ship or plane followed while transiting from point A to point B. Such maps denote a transitory presence in Japan’s environs, as compared to the relatively firm barrier manifest in a fortified first island chain. So Japanese should interpret imagery with a skeptical eye, and they should take heart. They retain the geographic advantage over China in a marine contest of arms. If they harness that advantage effectively, they still stand a good chance of deterring or quashing Chinese misadventures.

Revise your mental map of the region accordingly—and get ready.

Expert Biography: A 1945 Contributing Editor writing in his own capacity, Dr. James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010, and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.” The views voiced here are his alone. Holmes also blogs at the Naval Diplomat.

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · August 27, 2022

18.  Stuart Scheller’s Tragic Truth-Telling About Military Hypocrisy

B​ased on all his actions and public statements do not think this can be a very credible book.​

Stuart Scheller’s Tragic Truth-Telling About Military Hypocrisy -

spectator.org · by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos · August 26, 2022

Crisis of Command: How We Lost Trust and Confidence in America’s Generals and Politicians

By Stuart Scheller

(Knox Press, 272 pages, $28)

“He was following the orders he was given.” At this point, former Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller despises those words and carries special disdain for officers who use some configuration of the phrase to justify why they did something that ultimately hurt someone or harmed the mission.

In many ways, it was the persistent echo of these words that sparked his (some would say ill-fated) decision to post a YouTube video a year ago this week that eventually landed him in the brig with a special court martial and an abrupt end to a long, promising career in the Marines before his 20-year retirement. It also cost him his wife, separation from his young boys, and rebuke from colleagues and former officers indulging in seeming schadenfreude during the ensuing spectacle.

In his forthcoming book, Crisis of Command: How We Lost Trust and Confidence in America’s Generals and Politicians, Scheller recounts watching the news coverage of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan last August. A lieutenant colonel with 17 years in the Marine Corps, including combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, Scheller had just taken over his first command of the Advanced Infantry Training Battalion in North Carolina in June 2021. He writes:

I watched multiple units, including my first unit, First Battalion, Eighth Marines, rapidly respond to a situation poorly planned for months. I knew from experience junior service members on the ground would rise to the occasion despite failures at the general officer level, but I remained frustrated at the situation.

He recalls his confusion over the military’s decision to leave the massive Bagram Airfield to an overrunning Taliban in July. He said he became angry when messages from the commandant of the Marine Corps, and then from the Pentagon, given to service members not only suggested a complete lack of understanding of what the rank and file were feeling, but “victimized the service members by projecting mental health problems as a source of [their] frustration.”

After an Aug. 26, 2021, terror attack outside the Kabul airport left 11 of his fellow Marines, some of whom he knew, dead, Scheller said that he had a “deep rage in my belly” and that his battalion executive officer, who had come into his office upon seeing the news, felt it too.

Scheller writes:

Everyone was angry. Everyone was disappointed with our senior leaders. They continued to let us down. They continued placing career progression over warfighting capability. They continued redirecting blame in every direction but at themselves. They were all hypocrites. They didn’t represent anything about our core ethos.

He spent the evening writing his thoughts down. He dismissed the idea of sending it up the chain of command, saying: “I knew those processes would be blocked by the same bureaucratic red tape that got us into the mess in the first place. I was trapped in a midlevel position, with no real authority or recourse to address our systemic failures.” He guessed that any military publication, leashed to the influence of senior officers and retired poobahs, would reject it outright. So, he made his first YouTube video, in which he took particular aim at the institution:

This amalgamation of the economic/corporate/political/higher military ranks are not holding up their end of the bargain. I want to say this very strongly: I have been fighting for seventeen years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders, “I demand accountability.”

He then made second and third videos after he was relieved of duty, and the backlash was unleashed. The rest, as they say, is history.

Scheller’s court martial was a bit of a circus, and the judge for his case, Col. Glen Hines, knew it. He blasted the prosecution for Scheller’s treatment, scolding the prosecution during Scheller’s sentencing, and reducing his agreed-to fine from $30,000 to $5,000.

Scheller writes: “I was fortunate to have him look at all the facts of the case. It appeared to me that he didn’t want me to plead guilty. He stated that, in his over thirty years as a JAG officer, he ‘had never seen someone sent to pre-trial confinement for these types of charges.’” Hines called out the anonymous leak of Scheller’s Marine Corps charge sheet, including medical records, to the online magazine Task & Purpose. Like Scheller’s supporters, Hines said that Scheller’s words had been twisted and “taken out of context” to make him look mentally unstable and extremist.

Even his comments about the Capitol on Jan. 6 were reported to suggest radical intent. “It’s unfair. It’s illegal. And it needs to be investigated,” Hines told the court according to Scheller’s account, retold in several news stories from the time. “It creates the specter of unlawful command influence.”

In the end, Scheller pleaded guilty and was convicted of violating multiple Uniform Code of Military Justice articles. These include:

Article 88 (contempt toward officials), Article 89 (disrespect toward superior commissioned officers), Article 90 (willfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer), Article 92 (dereliction in the performance of duties), Article 92 (failure to obey an order or regulation) and 27 specifications of Article 133 (conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman)

He was given a general discharge under honorable conditions and the pension that a 20-year marker would have afforded him and his family was withheld.

Without the judge’s intercession, it would have been a lot worse, Scheller suspects. And, honestly, he should have known. Whether he began to write Crisis of Command in order to prove it or whether it came out in the telling, it is obvious by the end that his career, from a young man seeking purpose after 9/11 to a seasoned battlefield leader, is pockmarked by a series of relationships and incidents he was forced to manage on institutional terms and by rules he found arbitrary and counterproductive, sometimes illogical and unjust. Uphold the system and be rewarded. Question or disparage it and expect the leadership to close ranks like a vise. Scheller was obviously an exemplary Marine, with strengths that allowed him to navigate as far as he did. But he must know that his idealistic standards would never have allowed him to rise further beyond his rank. He writes:

Reflecting the status quo ideology of a boss is the easiest way to promotion. Currently, warfighting capability and winning wars are not priorities for promotion. A warfighting focus may factor into the boss’s impression of a military employee, but it is a small slice at most. I witnessed several talented officers wash out of the system because their warfighting focus detracted from the peripheral tasks prioritized by superiors.… Unfortunately, it is almost impossible for renegade warfighters to penetrate the barriers of the system.

Scheller’s thrust into the spotlight came because of his questioning of decisions that led to the botched withdrawal of Afghanistan. Crisis of Command illuminates a longstanding frustration within the military with how the 20-year wars were conducted, how strategy was subverted in favor of politics and process, and how generals, promoted for anything but battlefield skills and intellectual capabilities, are nothing but slaves to career progression.

Scheller’s story is instructive in that it covers what seem to be mundane but are really revelatory experiences with high-handed officers in Iraq, wound tight and overworked, who let toxic ego get in the way of clear-eyed combat decisions and put men and women at risk, all the way up to his time at the Command and General Staff College, where “too much importance was placed on academic PhDs with zero military experience.” He writes: “It was hard to take them seriously when they lectured me about my views. The PhDs also acted like tenured instructors only willing to put in the minimum effort.”

He also criticizes the idea that the U.S. is stronger because of its moral righteousness and its theory of the “just war.” He feels that both, combined with the culture of mindlessly following orders and the aforementioned promotional path, have allowed for a foreign policy that seeks conflict over diplomacy (but then does not unleash lethality in order to maintain some moral ideal) and a military institution that deviates from actual skill building necessary to win wars. He points early in his book to his time in Officer Candidate School (OCS), saying:

Resiliency is important for military leadership, but it always bothered me that critical thought wasn’t emphasized more. A candidate could be a deep-thinking, geopolitical analyst with a bountiful knowledge of science, but he wouldn’t make it through [OCS] if he couldn’t withstand beratement, yell programmed responses, and dance in a coordinated manner thirty inches behind another man.

Furthermore, Scheller excoriates the military-industrial complex for fostering an “oligopoly within the government contracting world reaping exorbitant amounts of money off the war industry.”

He points to the revolving door in which senior officers like retired Gens. James Mattis and Lloyd Austin go from industry boards to the Pentagon and back again, influencing expensive programs that ultimately fail and policies that do too. Meanwhile, “a young, enlisted infantryman cannot receive basic technology in a timely manner due to bureaucratic red tape in procurement.” Scheller continues, “Instead, the junior service member consistently and unknowingly assumes unnecessary risks because the procurement process cannot be navigated effectively by senior military leaders.”

It is clear that Scheller has long judged the military against his own sense of right and wrong and sees its inability to stand accountable to mistakes and the use of “just obeying orders” as not only the most egregious of transgressions but also the manifestation of corruption within the system. Certainly, there are a number of his fellow officers and infantrymen who agree, standing up for him during the trial, and many others who consider him a truth-teller, albeit a tragic one.

Whether he is seen as writing the book to justify his own illegal behavior and make a buck or to raise alarms about systematic degradation from the top will likely depend on one’s impression of Scheller from the beginning. But it is a compelling story, regardless, with Scheller as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. As he writes:

As you may have heard in the media, the military depicted me as the bad guy.

Yes, I did break the rules.

Yes, I should have been held accountable.

And so should every senior leader for their violations. However, they only acknowledge the failures of those below them and lack the courage, fortitude, and wherewithal to acknowledge the failures of their counterparts at the top. My story is a microcosm for the hypocrisy of the system.

spectator.org · by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos · August 26, 2022

19. Russian force won't return from mission fearing Ukraine deployment: Report

Russian force won't return from mission fearing Ukraine deployment: Report

Newsweek · by Xander Landen · August 27, 2022

Russian troops in Kazakhstan are refusing to return to Russia because they do not want to be deployed to the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian intelligence officials said Saturday.

There are roughly 1,000 Russian troops in Kazakhstan according to Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine's Ministry of Defense. The directorate says that the the military contingent stationed in the country "does not want to replenish the composition of the occupation contingent" in Ukraine, according to a translation of a post on Telegram.

However, it also said that the "formal reason for the refusal is the lack of special air transport, which is fully engaged in the war with Ukraine."

Ukrainska Pravda first reported on the claims from the intelligence officials on Saturday.

Above, Russian soldiers stand guard at the Luhansk power plant in Shchastya, Ukraine, on April 13. Russian troops in Kazakhstan are refusing to return to Russia because they do not want to be deployed to the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian intelligence officials said Saturday. Alexander Nemenov

In its Telegram post, the directorate said that Moscow does not want to completely withdraw troops from Kazakhstan. The troops were sent to the country in January following rallies against its government. The directorate added that Russia has almost completely withdrawn its troops from nearby Tajikistan and Armenia to support its war in Ukraine.

Newsweek has reached out to Russia's Ministry of Defense for comment.

The claims about Russia's troops in Kazakhstan come as Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for his military to add additional troops amid the ongoing war. Putin has ordered the military bring on 137,000 new troops, which would bring the total number to 1.15 million, by January 1.

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Mark Hertling said Saturday that he believes the development shows the Russian military is "in trouble."

"Are they going to just put these new soldiers that they recruit through the basic training that they have, which truthfully, is not very good and then send them right out to a unit to try to learn combined arms operations, which are very difficult, without any additional training? If that's the case, they're going to be in trouble," Hertling said in an interview on CNN.

In May, The Daily Beast reported that a Russian soldier said that his commander shot himself in the leg to escape the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian intelligence directorate released a phone call at the time, identifying the speaker as a Russian soldier speaking with his mother.

"This won't end anytime soon. What the hell do I need this for? At 20 years old...I'm not at all interested in Ukraine. I need to come back and resign," the soldier said during the call. "I had a commander...who shot himself in the leg just to get out of here. And that was in the very beginning!"

Newsweek · by Xander Landen · August 27, 2022

20. Special Forces Troops of Indian Army & US Army Participated in Gruelling 48 Hours Long Validation Exercise

​A short news story based on a tweet.

Special Forces Troops of Indian Army & US Army Participated in Gruelling 48 Hours Long ... - Latest Tweet by Prasar Bharati News Services |  LatestLY

latestly.com · August 26, 202

The latest Tweet by Prasar Bharati News Services states, 'Special Forces troops of Indian Army & US Army participated in gruelling 48 hours long Validation Exercise to validate Battle Drills to include Recce, Surveillance, Target Designation & Direct Action during ongoing Joint Exercise@SpokespersonMoD @adgpi#VajraPrahar'

Socially Aug 26, 2022 08:57 PM IST

Special Forces troops of Indian Army & US Army participated in gruelling 48 hours long Validation Exercise to validate Battle Drills to include Recce, Surveillance, Target Designation & Direct Action during ongoing Joint Exercise@SpokespersonMoD @adgpi#VajraPrahar pic.twitter.com/xEYyLUXRkm— Prasar Bharati News Services & Digital Platform (@PBNS_India) August 26, 2022

(SocialLY brings you all the latest breaking news, viral trends and information from social media world, including Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. The above post is embeded directly from the user's social media account and LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body. The views and facts appearing in the social media post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY, also LatestLY does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.)

21. In New Hampshire, Republicans Weigh Another Hard Right Candidate

Included because it is about a former US Army Brigadier General. It seems there are a large number of veterans, to include many from the SOF community running for election this year.

In New Hampshire, Republicans Weigh Another Hard Right Candidate

nytimes.com · August 28, 2022

Don Bolduc, a retired Army general, has played to the Republican base and is leading in polls to take on Senator Maggie Hassan, who is viewed as vulnerable in November.

Don Bolduc, a retired Army general, hopes to take on Senator Maggie Hassan, the Democratic incumbent.Credit...Andrew Harnik/Associated Press, left. Adam Glanzman for The New York Times

MANCHESTER, N.H. — He has said the state’s popular Republican governor is “a Chinese Communist sympathizer,” called for the repeal of the 17th Amendment allowing direct popular election of senators and raised the possibility of abolishing the F.B.I.

The man behind these statements is Don Bolduc, a retired Army general who leads the Republican field in what should be a competitive race for the New Hampshire Senate seat held by Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat.

In one primary after another this year, Republican voters have chosen hard-right candidates who party officials had warned would have trouble winning in November, and Mr. Bolduc could be on course to be the next. Like him, many embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s election denial. “I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Donald Trump won the election and, damn it, I stand by” it, Mr. Bolduc said at a recent debate.

The suddenly fraught midterm landscape for Republicans caused Senator Mitch McConnell, the G.O.P. leader, to complain recently that poor “candidate quality” could cost his party a majority in the Senate that had long seemed the likely result.

In the final competitive primary of the year, scheduled for Sept. 13, Republican officials in New Hampshire are echoing Mr. McConnell. They warn that grass-roots voters are poised to elect another problematic nominee, Mr. Bolduc, and jeopardize a winnable race against a vulnerable Democrat.

This month, Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican moderate broadly popular in his purple state, said on New Hampshire talk radio that Mr. Bolduc was a “conspiracy theorist-type candidate.” He added: “If he were the nominee, I have no doubt we would have a much harder time trying to win that seat back.”

Mr. Bolduc, who served 10 tours in Afghanistan, held a formidable lead with Republican voters in a poll this month, in large part because he has barnstormed continuously for more than two years, while his rivals joined the race later. The contest was effectively frozen for a year until November, when Mr. Sununu, a top recruiting target of national Republicans, declined to run for Senate, deciding instead to seek a fourth term as governor.

Mr. Bolduc has built a following by offering red meat to the conservative base. But New Hampshire is a politically divided state where Republicans who win statewide traditionally appeal to independents and conservative Democrats. Its four-member congressional delegation is entirely Democratic; state government is firmly in the hands of Republicans.

“We’re not a red state, we’re not a blue state, we’re a weird state,” said Greg Moore, a Republican operative not involved in the Senate primary. He was skeptical that Mr. Bolduc, after targeting only his party’s base, would be able to attract a broader coalition in November.

In a debate on Wednesday outside Manchester, Mr. Bolduc denounced the provision in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act authorizing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, saying, “Anything the government’s involved in, it’s not good, it doesn’t work.”

• Biden on the Campaign Trail: Fresh off a series of legislative victories, President Biden is back campaigning. But his low approval ratings could complicate his efforts to help Democrats in the midterm elections.
• The Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s increasingly hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a special election in New York’s Hudson Valley is the latest example.
• New Women Voters: The number of women signing up to vote surged in some states after Roe was overturned, particularly in states where abortion rights are at risk.
• Sensing a Shift: Abortion rights, falling gas prices, legislative victories and Donald J. Trump’s re-emergence have Democrats dreaming again that they just might keep control of Congress. But the House map still favors Republicans.

A rival of Mr. Bolduc’s, Kevin Smith, told him at an earlier debate, “You know, Don, your M.O. seems to be ‘Fire, ready, aim.’”

Mr. Bolduc, 60, is a compact figure who still sports a military haircut close-cropped on the sides. In the minutes before the debate went live on Newsmax, while other candidates studied their notes, he spontaneously led the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance and in singing “God Bless America.”

A poll this month by the New Hampshire Institute of Politics showed Mr. Bolduc with support from 32 percent of registered Republican voters, well ahead of his closest rival, Chuck Morse, the State Senate president, who was at 16 percent. Others in the poll, including Mr. Smith, a former Londonderry town manger, were in the low single digits.

All of the candidates have struggled to raise money and draw voters’ attention — 39 percent of Republicans said in the poll they were still undecided.

Ms. Hassan has long been seen as vulnerable. Just 39 percent of voters in the Institute of Politics survey said she deserved to be re-elected.

At the debate outside Manchester, the candidates bashed Ms. Hassan, a former governor, linking her to rising gas prices and expected high prices for home heating oil this winter.

Ms. Hassan, in response, defended voting for Democrats’ climate and prescription drug law. “While I’m fighting to get results for New Hampshire, my opponents are out on the campaign trail defending Big Oil and Big Pharma and bragging about their records of opposing a woman’s fundamental freedom,” she said in a statement.

Mr. Trump has made no endorsement in New Hampshire, and he may not make one at all. He snubbed Mr. Bolduc in a 2020 Senate primary, endorsing a rival. Neither Mr. Bolduc nor Mr. Morse have spoken to Mr. Trump lately about the race, according to their campaigns.

Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s first 2016 campaign manager, who is a New Hampshire resident, has publicly urged his former boss not to back Mr. Bolduc, calling him “not a serious candidate.”

Mr. Bolduc declined to comment for this article. Rick Wiley, a senior adviser to Mr. Bolduc, said the criticisms of him — that he is unelectable, that independents won’t vote for him — were the same ones thrown at Mr. Trump in 2016.

“The electorate wants an outsider, that is resoundingly clear,” Mr. Wiley said. Shrugging off Mr. Sununu’s criticisms, he added: “I expect we’re probably going to be sharing a ballot with the governor. There will be unity on the ticket in November and Republicans up and down the ballot will be successful because of the policies Biden and Maggie Hassan have put in place.”

The biggest primary threat to Mr. Bolduc, and the preferred candidate of much of what remains of the G.O.P. establishment, is Mr. Morse, a low-key, self-made tree nursery owner with a strong Granite State accent, who appears in his TV ads riding a tractor at dawn at his operation in southern New Hampshire.

Despite his prominent role in state government, a poll in April found that 54 percent of Republican voters didn’t know enough about Mr. Morse to have an opinion. Just 2 percent named him as their choice for the nomination. His ascent to 16 percent in the latest public poll this month is seen by supporters as a sign of momentum.

Dave Carney, a strategist for Mr. Morse, agreed that Mr. Bolduc was the current race leader. But he said that Mr. Morse’s superior fund-raising, which allowed him to buy TV ads, was raising his profile, and predicted that he would continue to gain on Mr. Bolduc.

“Sixty-one percent of the voters are willing to replace Hassan,” Mr. Carney said, referring to the share of voters in the Institute of Politics survey who said that it was time to give someone new a chance to be senator or that they were undecided. “We need to nominate somebody who can do that.” He called Mr. Bolduc a “flawed candidate,” adding, “I don’t think there’s any way in hell he could get conservative Democrats or the vast majority of independents to go his way.”

Mr. Morse had $975,000 in his campaign account as of July, compared with Mr. Bolduc, who had just $65,000. Ms. Hassan’s $7.3 million on hand has allowed her to aggressively spend on TV ads all year, including one promoting her work for people with disabilities that features her son, who was born with cerebral palsy.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which this month slashed its planned spending in three battleground states — Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin — has kept a commitment to spend $6.5 million on the New Hampshire race after the primary, reflecting its belief in Ms. Hassan’s vulnerability.

With the Senate divided 50-50 between the parties and Democrats optimistic about flipping at least one seat, in Pennsylvania, Republicans need to take down two or more Democratic incumbents to win a majority. Their top targets are in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire.

At the recent debate, the audience was mostly committed supporters of each of the candidates, with few appearing undecided. Bolduc fans dismissed out of hand Mr. Sununu’s view that their candidate would have a hard time in November.

“Sununu is a globalist clown and is not a Republican,” said Kelley Potenza, a candidate for the state House of Representatives who is from Rochester. “He’s afraid because Don Bolduc is the only candidate that’s not going to be controlled.”

In the audience before the lights went down, Bill Bowen, a recent transplant from California and a Morse supporter, said Mr. Bolduc had reached his ceiling in the polls. He said supporters of Mr. Bolduc who ignored doubts about his electability in November were misguided.

“That’s all that matters,” he said, adding, “This is the 51st vote,” referring to a potential Republican majority in the Senate.

nytimes.com · August 28, 2022

​22.​ 10 Rules to Live by on Social Media for Those who Serve

​Good advice here.

10 Rules to Live by on Social Media for Those who Serve - From the Green Notebook

fromthegreennotebook.com · by From the Green Notebook · August 16, 2022

by Orlandon Howard

“When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable, but he who restrains his lips is wise.” – King Solomon (1010-931 BCE)

It’s easy to make mistakes when communicating regularly on social media. Humans are prone to it because of our emotional and psychological makeup. Nevertheless, errors on publicly accessible social platforms can cause a lot of pain that can be difficult to overcome, especially if you kick the wrong wasp nests.

Here are some general rules to reduce the risk of problems.

1. Maintain self-control. Good public communication requires self-control. Emotion and instinct have high horsepower that can drive us to do unwise and even hurtful things if unregulated. Self-control entails being led by reason (thinking), not emotions. Reason provides the internal checks and balances we need to conduct ourselves in the measured way appropriate for a service member.

The Webster Dictionary defines “reasonable” as having sound judgment and being fair and sensible. All our public communication should be reasonable, even in response to inflammatory situations. Restraint in words demonstrates greater strength and wisdom than the boldest and cleverest comments.

2. Avoid partisanship. This is a tricky one. We’re servants of the country, its designated authorities, and its citizens who have a countless diversity of views and perspectives. Service members have an obligation to remain objectively neutral and maintain a high-ground perspective over all positions. If forced to choose sides in public, we should align with the sitting administration’s standing policy.

It’s always safer to repeat senior leaders’ ideas and messages (in our own words). However, it’s safest to avoid wading into those discussions in public because it’s high risk, low reward. Don’t make statements you wouldn’t want to be pressed on by the media or anyone else in public. Similarly, avoid becoming a pawn in someone else’s political or activist agenda. Some people may try to exploit your military affiliation and a position you seem to be taking in public.

3. Stay in your lane. The best advice public affairs officers give service members engaging media is to stay in their lane. It means avoiding speaking publicly about topics outside your purview and expertise. It also suggests staying away from subjects you haven’t been prepared to discuss or don’t have permission, especially on U.S. or Army policy matters. The advice works for social media discussions as well.

The policy component is the stickiest and most consequential. The safest bet is to be silent, neutral, or positive about policy in public. We should be careful not to contradict or undermine leaders’ decisions on social media because it can have a corrosive effect on the policy and the force. There are usually more appropriate forums for discreet debate or contrary opinions. This advice doesn’t discourage (nor encourage) speaking out when there are legitimate questions about a policy’s morality, legality, or ethicality. But it should be thoroughly considered and consulted with other mature, informed persons before addressing publicly.

4. Don’t become an unintended or unwanted spokesperson. A service member speaking in public on social media can easily be construed as a service member speaking publicly on an issue. It’s definitely true if you are an officer or senior enlisted leader. Media and blog writers look for quotes from troops seen as a credible representation of a bloc within the military. Some writers report on opinions they identify as prevalent if multiple service members of any rank discuss them on social media.

Also, don’t try to speak for other people. It’s not safe to assume others share your position or that you’re speaking for anyone but yourself. Sometimes we wrongly think our position is an objective truth that most others share. American service members have a lot in common, but we also have a lot of different perspectives.

5. Acknowledge your ignorance. Be honest with yourself. How much do you really know about things outside your normal scope? Similarly, how much do you know about the situation someone is presenting as a WTF incident or controversial policy? There’s too much to keep up with in our lives, careers, and families to stay abreast of the countless things happening outside our normal sphere. That’s why we should avoid rash and hardened judgments before gathering enough information.

Most of us have little insight into situations governed by forces outside our scope and control. We need to accept we might be uninformed, underinformed, or even misinformed. One technique that’ll help remind you of your limitations is challenging yourself to thoroughly explain what’s happening when an issue arises. It can be humbling when you realize how little information or understanding you have when struggling to explain something.

6. Be diplomatic. Diplomatic means “dealing with people sensitively and effectively.” It implies communicating in a way that avoids igniting unproductive feelings and opposition. The best way to do that is to be civil and respectful by softening your language and trying not to offend. It maintains relationships and gets better results. Conversely, you can protect yourself from being offended and losing your cool by giving others the benefit of the doubt, treating their positions fairly, and never forgetting they’re human.

Likewise, service members should also give proper respect and courtesy to the people and situations that deserve it. With all due respect, we’re still a military force with a rank structure and certain expectations of our profession.

7. Don’t call people out in public. Correction in the military is essential to maintaining a high-quality organization with high standards and should happen often. However, it should rarely be done in public. Every platform has a direct message tool. We should use that to give feedback intended to correct or critique. If reprimanding a person in public seems warranted, it should be done empathetically by a “competent authority.”

Similarly, don’t call out your military service in public. Each service is made up of people, but individuals don’t make the service. It’s not fair to blast your service over issues with one person or one organization. The great thing about the military is every service member serves under a higher authority you can appeal to.

8. Remember recruiting. Guard your public persona and our collective public persona. It impacts recruiting. Outsiders are watching, some of whom we need to join the military or recommend joining. Active and former service members serve as the US military’s best recruiters.

Your attitude and opinion significantly influence the next generation of our all-volunteer force. A first principle should be: do NO harm to the military’s reputation and public image. We must be careful about what we say and how we say it. Similar to rule #7, there are ways to complain without casting shade on the whole organization.

9. Remember your current and future employer. Freedom isn’t free, and neither is all speech. It comes with social consequences that can cash out into more material consequences. It can impact whether you’re chosen for a job or if you’re able to retain it. From their perspective, an undisciplined social media user could be a careless team member and an unnecessary risk to the organization’s reputation.

10. Communicate for positive effects. Before communicating on social media, ask yourself what you are trying to achieve. If the outcomes you want are constructive (or neutral) and consistent with the rest of the advice shared here, you’re on message. But if you’re trying to vent negative vibes, stoke a fire to get other folks emotional, or ridicule, degrade or shame someone, you should consider taking a page from Abraham Lincoln’s playbook by keeping that diatribe as a draft. It’ll do more harm than good.

Final thoughts. Social media has given us significant power to be heard by people and communities in ways impossible before the internet and modulated before social media. It’s not too corny to remind us of Spiderman’s ethos that “with great power comes great responsibility.” A little judgment and restraint are accessible superpowers that can help uphold that responsibility and keep you out of a web of turmoil.

MAJ Orlandon Howard is a U.S. Army public affairs officer (PAO). He has served as a PAO observer-controller-trainer (OC/T), public affairs operations officer, brigade combat team PAO and marketing operations officer. He also served as an Field Artillery Officer, NCO and Soldier during the first half of his career.

The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DoD or the U.S. Army.

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fromthegreennotebook.com · by From the Green Notebook · August 16, 2022​

​23. The Man Who Won the War (WWII)

I came across this unexpected history.

Excerpts:

As Douhet predicted, no distinction was made between civilians and combatants.  LeMay understood that no such distinction was possible given the technology of the time.  He once remarked that if you kill enough people, they will stop fighting.  That is exactly what happened to end the Pacific War.  The two atomic bombs that obliterated most of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought Douhet’s vision to its ultimate reality.  The two super-bombs and LeMay’s relentless attacks effectively brought the war to an end.

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As we approach another anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender in World War II, we should remember one of the great military commanders who brought about the war’s end.  Both during and after the American Civil War, Gen. Ulysses Grant was called a “butcher” for the way he conducted warfare.  LeMay in 1945, like Grant, in the 1860s, understood the nature of warfare at the time and acted accordingly.  Grant is considered one of America’s greatest commanders.  LeMay should be, too.

August 26, 2022

The Man Who Won the War

By Francis P. Sempa

americanthinker.com

Air Force general Curtis LeMay rarely gets mentioned when military historians rank America’s greatest commanders, but he should.

Most Americans, if they have ever heard of LeMay, know him from the caricatures created by Hollywood in the fictional comedy movie Dr. Strangelove (the characters Gen. Jack Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, and Gen. Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, are based on Hollywood’s view of LeMay) or the more serious movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis Thirteen Days, which portrays LeMay as the dangerous military hawk tamed by the “brilliant” and “prudent” President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert — a theme promoted by Kennedy court historians after the crisis.

Curtis LeMay, unlike the Kennedy brothers, did not succeed because of his father’s money, political machinations, and a sycophantic media.  As James Scott explains in his new book about the firebombing of Tokyo and the end of World War II, Black Snow, LeMay had a “hardscrabble” childhood, with his father frequently switching jobs and his mother cleaning houses to support their six children, of which LeMay was the oldest.  LeMay at a young age worked delivering newspapers and store goods and earned extra money in high school as an ironworker.  LeMay put himself through college at Ohio State, where he studied civil engineering and joined ROTC.  As a young child, LeMay was fascinated by airplanes, and while in college, he decided to join the National Guard and was accepted at flight school.  The rest, as they say, is history.

LeMay’s star rose quickly at the outset of World War II as he earned a reputation as the best navigator in the Army Air Corps.  He wasn’t a self-promoter; his talents and work ethic led to his rise.  Ralph Nutter, who served with LeMay, called him “all substance and no form.”  LeMay flew B-17s from England over Germany as part of the Eighth Air Force and pioneered bomber formations that improved the accuracy of bombing while providing for increased protection for flight crews.  The airmen who flew under his command viewed him with a combination of fear and awe.  He was known for being tough but fair and as a leader who didn’t tolerate failure.  LeMay also learned quickly that daytime bombing of military targets was costly and imprecise.

LeMay was promoted to brigadier general in 1944 and assigned to the China-Burma-India theater to conduct bombing missions over Japan.  He was only 38 years old.  In early 1945, he replaced Gen. Haywood Hansell on Guam to head up the 21st Bomber Command and its mission to bomb military targets on Japan’s main islands.  Hansell was a member of the so-called “Bomber Mafia” that Malcom Gladwell has written about.

Hansell continued to insist on precision bombing of military targets instead of area bombing that would inevitably inflict “collateral damage” — i.e., civilian casualties — despite the fact that in 1945 there was no such thing as “precision bombing.”  LeMay was chosen to replace Hansell because he understood this and was willing to do what was necessary to bring Japan to its knees.

In 1921, Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet in his book Command of the Air envisioned air power as the decisive instrument of warfare.  Douhet promoted the relentless and systematic bombing of cities to force an enemy to surrender.  Air forces, he believed, should operate independently of other services.  Command of the air, he explained, “means to be in a position to wield offensive power so great it defies human imagination.”  Air forces, he wrote, must be “capable of crushing the material and moral resistance of the enemy.”  Douhet predicted that future warfare would make no distinction between civilians and combatants.  ”Future war,” he wrote, “will be total in character and scope.”

Douhet predicted that in the next war, the entire territory of the enemy, including commercial and industrial establishments, government facilities, and population centers, would become targets of air power.  The goal of air power, he explained, would be to “inflict the greatest damage in the shortest possible time” to bring about the “complete breakdown of the social structure” of the enemy.  He called this a “dark and bloody picture” — the reality of total war.

Curtis LeMay was an intellectual disciple of Douhet.  In the air war over Japan between March and August 1945, LeMay put into practice Douhet’s theories.  LeMay’s B-29s relentlessly, systematically dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo and 65 other Japanese cities, inflicting hundreds of thousands of deaths, rendering millions of people homeless, and burning and destroying over one hundred square miles of Japanese civilian population centers.  He brought total war to Japan’s leaders and its people.

Scott in Black Snow describes the nighttime firebombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, from the perspectives of U.S. airmen and Japanese civilians.  Military targets were hit, but more than 105,000 people lost their lives to a firestorm created by American incendiary bombs.  The destruction and suffering were unprecedented, Armageddon-like.  One survivor recalled that she thought the world was coming to an end.

As Douhet predicted, no distinction was made between civilians and combatants.  LeMay understood that no such distinction was possible given the technology of the time.  He once remarked that if you kill enough people, they will stop fighting.  That is exactly what happened to end the Pacific War.  The two atomic bombs that obliterated most of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought Douhet’s vision to its ultimate reality.  The two super-bombs and LeMay’s relentless attacks effectively brought the war to an end.

At the time, LeMay was featured on the cover of national magazines and lauded as a hero.  He went on to command the Strategic Air Command and serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  He was a staunch anti-communist who wanted to strike and invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, who ridiculed arms control, who criticized American presidents for failure to win the Vietnam War, and who served as George Wallace’s running mate in 1968.  LeMay’s biographer Warren Kozak called LeMay “America’s most innovative and … controversial military commander.” Kozak noted that LeMay ordered the deaths of nearly a half-million people, yet “by killing so many human beings, LeMay saved millions more by making an invasion of Japan unnecessary.”  Kosak wrote that LeMay accomplished this because he had a “ruthless sense of realism.”

As we approach another anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender in World War II, we should remember one of the great military commanders who brought about the war’s end.  Both during and after the American Civil War, Gen. Ulysses Grant was called a “butcher” for the way he conducted warfare.  LeMay in 1945, like Grant, in the 1860s, understood the nature of warfare at the time and acted accordingly.  Grant is considered one of America’s greatest commanders.  LeMay should be, too.

Image: Air Force Archive via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

americanthinker.com

​

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

VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com