Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners



Quotes of the Day:


“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hist a target no else can see.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer


“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root”
- Henry David Thoreau


“Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.”
- Colin Powell


1. Biden’s New National Security Strategy: A Lot of Trump, Very Little Obama

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 17 (Putin's War)

3.  Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (17.10.22) CDS comments on key events

4. Elon Musk fears nuclear war, not Ukraine

5. Army 2030: Disperse or die, network and live 

6.  Senate to add $10 billion in Taiwan aid, scale back arms sale reform

7. The U.S . Is Losing Yet Another 'War on Terror' 

8. What Ukraine Is Teaching U.S. Army Generals About Future Combat

9. French company fined $777 million and pleads guilty to paying ISIS as terror group killed Westerners

10. Redefining Irregular Warfare: Legitimacy, Coercion, and Power

11. Data Incoming: How to Close the Cyber Data Gap

12. Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine

13. When China Pushes, Push Back, Admiral Says

14. Still the End of History

15. Marine Corps War Plans Are Too Sino-Centric. What About The Other 90% Of The World?

16. Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?

17. China Recruiting Former R.A.F. Pilots to Train Its Army Pilots, U.K. Says

18. The U.S. Military’s Growing Weakness







1.  Biden’s New National Security Strategy: A Lot of Trump, Very Little Obama


Conclusion:


It is perilous to read too much into any National Security Strategy. Their importance is that they set the tone for U.S. security policy and indicate its direction. Therefore, when a Democratic administration offers a diagnosis that aligns so fully with the views of its Republican predecessor—and is so different from that of the last Democratic White House, from which so much of the current administration hails—it indicates a sea change in U.S. thinking. But if you think there will now be less partisanship in U.S. foreign policy—where conflicts are often said to stop at the water’s edge—you’d be mistaken. As a quick glance back to the Cold War shows, the question of how to deal with a mutually acknowledged threat can be just as divisive.


Biden’s New National Security Strategy: A Lot of Trump, Very Little Obama

Foreign Policy · by David Adesnik · October 17, 2022

Argument

An expert's point of view on a current event.

A renewed focus on great-power rivalry ratifies a sea change in U.S. thinking.

By David Adesnik, a senior fellow and the director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the Summit on Fire Prevention and Control at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, on Oct. 11.

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the Summit on Fire Prevention and Control at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, on Oct. 11. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images


“The United States welcomes the rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China.” These words from the Obama administration’s 2015 National Security Strategy already belong to a bygone era. On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden, who was vice president when the earlier document was drafted, released his own National Security Strategy. And it couldn’t strike a more different tone. “We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over [China],” the document pledges, blasting China for trying “to become the world’s leading power.” Russia, too, is no longer described in rosy terms as a potential partner but as an “immediate and persistent threat” to global peace and stability. Put simply, the Biden strategy is a 180-degree turn from the last Democratic administration. Instead, the new document affirms what the Trump administration first concluded in its 2017 strategy: “[G]reat power competition [has] returned.”

The similarity of the diagnoses presented by the Trump and Biden administrations does not mean their prescriptions for U.S. policy are the same. Nonetheless, much like a medical diagnosis, a strategic one narrows the range of options available for treatment. In his first address to the U.N. General Assembly in 2009, then-President Barack Obama declared, “More than at any point in human history, the interests of nations and peoples are shared.” Obama’s first strategy, published in 2010, reported that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the “circle of peaceful democracies has expanded; the specter of nuclear war has lifted; major powers are at peace; the global economy has grown.” Against this backdrop, a strategy that emphasized engagement seemed practical. Thus, Obama’s blueprint explained, “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—includ­ing China, India, and Russia.”

It’s not that the world has fundamentally changed since then. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign, Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain, already offered a very different view of the strategic landscape. McCain, like many others, already saw Russian President Vladimir Putin then as most Americans see him now. After all, Moscow had invaded Georgia only a few months before the 2008 election. McCain’s view of China was similar, and he would never have placed a democracy like India in the same category of potential partners as a pair of revisionist dictatorships. The usual explanation for the divergence in views is that McCain was a foreign-policy hawk, in contrast to Obama’s more dovish approach. Yet the hawk-dove metaphor is misleading. It presumes the two camps differ in their readiness for confrontation. However, the more profound difference is in their perception of threats—the hawks sense hostility where the doves see potential partners.

In their perception of threats, the Trump and Biden strategies converge fully on the pivotal issue of great-power rivalry. But there are many ways to deal with the same threat, as illustrated by the wide range of Cold War-era strategies that all fell under the heading of containment. But even on the level of policy, Biden’s 48-page strategy provides surprisingly few indications of whether and how his approach will differ from former President Donald Trump’s. Nor did the Trump strategy, which ran across 68 pages, map the course of his policies clearly. The reasons for this ambiguity are structural: Every National Security Strategy of the post-Cold War era reads more like a list of aspirations than a disciplined exercise in matching courses of action to achievable objectives—and this is the most one should expect from a public strategy that will be read by critics at home and adversaries abroad. More specific decisions would give opponents a chance to mobilize before a policy is put into action. Building consensus within the administration for a detailed global plan of action would also require the adjudication of countless disagreements across departments and the various national security factions. These are incentives for ambiguity.

There are still plenty of markers indicating that this is the strategy of a Democratic president, not a Republican.

The three pillars of Biden’s strategy toward China therefore remain ambiguous. The first is “to invest in the foundations of our strength at home—our competitiveness, our innovation, our resilience, our democracy.” Who could disagree with this political version of motherhood and apple pie? The second pillar is “to align our efforts with our network of allies and partners.” This appears, at first, like a departure from Trump, who seemed to delight in antagonizing many U.S. friends and partners—until you remember that during 70-plus years of NATO history, squabbles have been the norm. Finally, the strategy says the United States will “compete responsibly with [China] to defend our interests and build our vision for the future.” This is like saying the strategy is to have a strategy.

Tension between presidents and their staff may also render written strategies an unreliable guide to actual policy. Trump’s public statements, especially the joint press conference with Putin in Finland in 2018 that shocked much of the Western world, stood in stark contrast to what Trump’s staff had written in the 2017 strategy, which asserted that Russia wants “to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” Meanwhile, Biden’s own staff has now corrected him four times following unscripted pledges to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, which is not official U.S. policy. The staff position on Taiwan prevails in the new National Security Strategy, but there is no reason to believe that has resolved the dispute.

While the Trump and Biden strategies may offer nearly identical diagnoses of the most serious threat facing the United States, there are still plenty of markers indicating that this is the strategy of a Democratic president, not a Republican. There is the traditional warmth, not skepticism, toward the United Nations and the full range of multilateral institutions. Similarly, Biden’s strategy includes 20 references to climate change and 11 more to the climate crisis, whereas Trump’s mentioned the business or investment climate more frequently than climate policy, which only got one mention. Biden has already shepherded $370 billion in climate spending through the U.S. Congress. Still, there is a sense of discouragement about the role of climate diplomacy in foreign relations. In the interim security strategy released shortly after Biden took office, the White House balanced tough language on China with a readiness to “welcome the Chinese government’s cooperation on issues such as climate change … where our national fates are intertwined.” The new document, in contrast, has sharp words for China’s “massive coal power use and build up”—which, as critics would note, was plainly apparent long before Biden took office.

It is perilous to read too much into any National Security Strategy. Their importance is that they set the tone for U.S. security policy and indicate its direction. Therefore, when a Democratic administration offers a diagnosis that aligns so fully with the views of its Republican predecessor—and is so different from that of the last Democratic White House, from which so much of the current administration hails—it indicates a sea change in U.S. thinking. But if you think there will now be less partisanship in U.S. foreign policy—where conflicts are often said to stop at the water’s edge—you’d be mistaken. As a quick glance back to the Cold War shows, the question of how to deal with a mutually acknowledged threat can be just as divisive.

David Adesnik is a senior fellow and the director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Twitter: @adesnik


2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 17 (Putin's War) 


Maps/graphicshttps://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-17


Key Takeaways

  • Russian forces conducted drone and missiles strikes against residential areas and critical infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine on October 17.
  • Russian drone strikes against residential areas in Kyiv on October 17 are indicative of Russian forces prioritizing psychological terror over tangible battlefield gains.
  • Yevgeny Prigozhin and affiliated Telegram channels are increasingly commenting on the ineffectiveness of traditional Russian military institutions, which may be undermining the Kremlin.
  • A fratricidal altercation between mobilized servicemen at a training ground in Belgorod Oblast on October 15 is likely a consequence of the Kremlin’s continual reliance on ethnic minority communities to bear the burden of mobilization in the Russian Federation.
  • Russia is continuing to leverage its relationship with Iran to obtain drones and missiles, likely to compensate for its increasingly attritted missile arsenal.
  • A Russian Su-34 crashed near a residential building in Yeysk, Krasnodar Krai on October 17.
  • Russian sources continued to discuss potential Ukrainian counteroffensive operations northwest of Svatove on October 16 and 17.
  • Russian sources continued to claim that Ukrainian Forces are conducting counteroffensive operations in Kherson Oblast on October 16 and 17.
  • Russian forces conducted ground assaults in Donetsk Oblast on October 16 and 17.
  • Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian concentrations of manpower and equipment in Zaporizhia Oblast on October 16 and 17.
  • Russian authorities continued measures to exert full control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
  • Moscow City officials announced the completion of partial mobilization in the city on October 17, likely in an effort to subdue criticism among Moscow residents of reports of illegal mobilization in the city.
  • Russian and occupation administration officials continue to promote “vacation” programs to residents of Russian-occupied territories likely as pretext for the deportation of Ukrainian citizens and the resettlement of Russian citizens.




RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 17

Oct 17, 2022 - Press ISW


understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 17

Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, and Frederick W. Kagan

October 17, 8:30pm ET

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

Russian forces conducted a series of drone and missile strikes against residential areas and critical infrastructure throughout Ukraine on October 17. Russian troops struck Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia City, and areas in Vinnytsia, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv Oblasts and launched nine missile strikes and 39 air strikes on October 17.[1] Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ignat noted that Russian forces launched 43 drones from southern Ukraine, 37 of which Ukrainian troops destroyed and the majority of which were Iranian Shahed-136 drones.[2] Five Shahed-136 drones struck infrastructure in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv, including the UkrEnergo (Ukrainian electricity transmission system operator) building.[3]

The October 17 drone attack on residential infrastructure in Kyiv is consistent with the broader pattern of Russian forces prioritizing creating psychological terror effects on Ukraine over achieving tangible battlefield effects. US military analyst Brett Friedman observed on October 17 that a Shahed-136's payload is 88 pounds of explosives, whereas a typical 155mm M795 artillery round carries 23.8 pounds of explosives, which means that one Shahed-136 drone carries about three shells worth of explosive material but without the consistent pattern of fragmentation.[4] Friedman suggested that the five Shahed-136s that struck Kyiv had the effect of 15 artillery shells fired at a very large area.[5] Such strikes can do great damage to civilian infrastructure and kill and wound many people without creating meaningful military effects. This analysis suggests that Russian forces are continuing to use Shahed-136 drones to generate the psychological effects associated with targeting civilian areas instead of attempting to generate asymmetric operational effects by striking legitimate military and frontline targets in a concentrated manner.[6]

A fratricidal altercation between mobilized servicemen at a training ground in Belgorod Oblast on October 15 is likely a consequence of the Kremlin’s continual reliance on ethnic minority communities to bear the burden of mobilization in the Russian Federation. Russian sources reported that the shooting took place after mobilized servicemen from Dagestan, Azerbaijan, and Adyghe complained to their commander that the war in Ukraine is not their war to fight, to which the commander responded that they are fighting a “holy war” and called Allah a “coward,” causing a fight to break out between Muslim and non-Muslim servicemen.[7] Russian sources then claimed that three mobilized Tajik servicemen opened fire at the training ground, killing the commander and both contract and mobilized soldiers.[8] Eyewitnesses claimed that the shooters told Muslim servicemen to stand aside as they opened fire.[9] The Russian information space immediately responded to the incident with racialized rhetoric against Central Asians and called for the introduction of a visa regime in Russia.[10]

Much of the Kremlin’s campaign to avoid general mobilization has fallen along distinct ethnic lines, and ethnic minority enclaves have largely borne the brunt of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s force generation efforts.[11] ISW previously reported on the prevalence of volunteer battalions formed in non-Russian ethnic minority communities, many of which suffered substantial losses upon deployment to Ukraine.[12] This trend continued following Putin’s announcement of partial mobilization, after which authorities continued to deliberately target minority communities to fulfill mobilization orders.[13] ISW also previously noted that the asymmetric distribution of mobilization responsibilities along ethnic lines led to the creation of localized and ethnically based resistance movements, which ISW forecasted could cause domestic ramifications as the war continues.[14] The Belgorod shooting is likely a manifestation of exactly such domestic ramifications. Ethnic minorities that have been targeted and forced into fighting a war defined by Russian imperial goals and shaped by Russian Orthodox nationalism will likely continue to feel alienation, which will create feed-back loops of discontent leading to resistance followed by crackdowns on minority enclaves.

Wagner Group financier Yevheny Prigozhin and Wagner-affiliated social media outlets are increasingly commenting on the ineffectiveness of traditional Russian military institutions and societal issues, which may indirectly undermine the Kremlin’s rule. Prigozhin reiterated that only Wagner troops are operating in the Bakhmut direction, seemingly denying the Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DNR) claims DNR forces are operating in the area.[15] Prigozhin also emphasized that he fully sponsors all of the equipment for his troops when responding to a question about whether the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) assists Wagner with supplies. Wagner-affiliated Telegram channels published footage in which elements of the 126th Separate Guards Coastal Defense Brigade of the Black Sea Fleet thanked Wagner for providing them with military equipment.[16] ISW had previously reported that the 126th Coastal Defense Brigade issued a video appeal regarding its lack of military equipment on the Kherson frontline.[17] Prigozhin additionally offered a realistic portrayal of the situation in Bakhmut, noting that Ukrainians are unwilling to surrender. Wagner-affiliated Telegram channels commented on the Belgorod training ground shooting incident, noting that a “quiet civil war” is currently ongoing in Russia due to the Russian government’s long-term inability to restrict migration presumably from Central Asian countries.[18]

Prigozhin’s narratives have the ingredients to appeal to the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nationalist constituency that has long called for oligarchs to finance supplies for the armed forces, demanded transparency about what is really going on at the front, and criticized Russian higher military institutions for their failures on the frontlines. While Prigozhin does not directly oppose or criticize Putin, his growing notoriety within the nationalist community may undermine Putin’s “strongman” appeal by comparison. The emerging discussions about a civil war in Russia may further disrupt the Kremlin’s narratives about the national, ethnic, and religious unity within Russia.

Russia is continuing to leverage its relationship with Iran to obtain drones and missiles, likely to compensate for its increasingly attritted missile arsenal. The Washington Post reported on October 16 that Iran will likely supply additional missiles, including the Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar short-range ballistic missiles, to Russia in addition to Shahed-136, Mohajer-6, and Arash-2 drones.[19] Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani, however, claimed on October 17 that Iran has not provided weapons to “either side,” despite ample reporting by Russian, Iranian, Ukrainian, and Western sources to the contrary.[20] A Russian Telegram channel noted that the recent Russian use of Iranian munitions, particularly the Shahed-136s, is likely reflective of the fact that Russia has nearly exhausted most of its domestic stock of operational-tactical weapons.[21] The channel claimed that Shahed-136s fulfil the role of cruise missiles but allow Russia to circumvent sanctions while maintaining its ability to conduct deep operational strikes.[22]

A Russian Su-34 crashed near an apartment building in Yeysk, Krasnodar Krai on October 17. Russian sources claimed that the Su-34 crashed due to an issue with one of its engines.[23] The Su-34 crashed carrying ammunition that detonated on impact causing a fire that engulfed the nearby apartment building.[24] A Russian source claimed that the crash killed one person and seriously injured three others.[25]

Key Takeaways

  • Russian forces conducted drone and missiles strikes against residential areas and critical infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine on October 17.
  • Russian drone strikes against residential areas in Kyiv on October 17 are indicative of Russian forces prioritizing psychological terror over tangible battlefield gains.
  • Yevgeny Prigozhin and affiliated Telegram channels are increasingly commenting on the ineffectiveness of traditional Russian military institutions, which may be undermining the Kremlin.
  • A fratricidal altercation between mobilized servicemen at a training ground in Belgorod Oblast on October 15 is likely a consequence of the Kremlin’s continual reliance on ethnic minority communities to bear the burden of mobilization in the Russian Federation.
  • Russia is continuing to leverage its relationship with Iran to obtain drones and missiles, likely to compensate for its increasingly attritted missile arsenal.
  • A Russian Su-34 crashed near a residential building in Yeysk, Krasnodar Krai on October 17.
  • Russian sources continued to discuss potential Ukrainian counteroffensive operations northwest of Svatove on October 16 and 17.
  • Russian sources continued to claim that Ukrainian Forces are conducting counteroffensive operations in Kherson Oblast on October 16 and 17.
  • Russian forces conducted ground assaults in Donetsk Oblast on October 16 and 17.
  • Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian concentrations of manpower and equipment in Zaporizhia Oblast on October 16 and 17.
  • Russian authorities continued measures to exert full control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
  • Moscow City officials announced the completion of partial mobilization in the city on October 17, likely in an effort to subdue criticism among Moscow residents of reports of illegal mobilization in the city.
  • Russian and occupation administration officials continue to promote “vacation” programs to residents of Russian-occupied territories likely as pretext for the deportation of Ukrainian citizens and the resettlement of Russian citizens.


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

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

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

Eastern Ukraine: (Oskil River-Kreminna Line)

Russian sources continued to discuss Ukrainian counteroffensive operations northwest of Svatove on October 16 and October 17. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian troops around the Kupyansk area in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast are preparing to push east towards Nyzhna Duvanka, about 14km north of Svatove.[26] Russian sources, including the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), also reported that Russian forces inflicted air and artillery strikes on the Ukrainian grouping in the Kupyansk area on October 16 and October 17.[27] Russian forces additionally continue to reinforce their positions along the Svatove-Kreminna-Lysychansk line and conducted limited ground attacks west of Kreminna in order to regain lost territory between Lyman and Kreminna.[28] The Ukrainian General Staff noted on October 17 that Russian troops attempted an unsuccessful attack on Torske, 15km west of Kreminna, which is consistent with claims made by Russian milbloggers that Russian troops are fighting for ground in this area.[29]


Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Russian sources continued to claim that Ukrainian forces are conducting counteroffensive operations in northern Kherson Oblast on October 16 and October 17. Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) released an intercepted phone call on October 17 wherein a Russian servicemen states that Ukrainian troops will conduct counteroffensive operations in Kherson Oblast in the coming days.[30] Several Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian troops attempted to push south from the Nova Kamianka-Dudchany line towards Mylove and Piatykhatky.[31] Russian sources additionally claimed that Ukrainian troops attempted to break through Russian lines in northwestern Kherson Oblast near Davydiv Brid and that Ukrainian troops northwest of Kherson City conducting artillery preparation of the battlefield.[32] These Russian claims remain unsubstantiated.

Ukrainian military officials maintained operational silence regarding Ukrainian ground maneuvers on October 16 and 17 but generally emphasized that Russian troops in this area are conducting active defense along the entire Kherson Oblast frontline.[33] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command noted that Ukrainian troops continue their interdiction campaign to target Russian military, transportation, and logistics assets and concentration areas throughout Kherson Oblast.[34] Social media footage provided visual evidence of Ukrainian strikes in the Nova Kakhovka-Beryslav area (about 60km east of Kherson City) on October 16 and 17. Footage posted on October 16 shows the aftermath of a claimed Ukrainian strike on a Russian personnel concentration in Kalynivka, 30km southeast of Nova Kakhovka.[35] Residents of Nova Kakhkova reported explosions near the city on October 16.[36] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that Ukrainian troops destroyed two Russian ammunition depots and an air-defense object near Beryslav on October 16.[37] Geolocated images posted on October 17 show a Russian-constructed barge-bridge across the Dnipro River near the Antonivskyi Bridge, suggesting that Russian troops are continuing to reconstitute river crossings near Kherson City following consistent Ukrainian strikes on the Antonviskyi Bridge.[38]


Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces conducted ground assaults in Donetsk Oblast on October 16 and 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks on Bakhmut itself; north of Bakhmut near Bakhmutske (11km northeast of Bakhmut ), Soledar (12km northeast of Bakhmut), Berestove (26km northeast of Bakhmut), and Spirne (30km northeast of Bakhmut); and south of Bakhmut near Mayorsk on October 16 and 17.[39] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also conducted assaults south of Bakhmut near Optyne (3km south of Bakhmut) on October 17.[40] The Russian MoD also claimed on October 17 that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian attack on Russian positions north of Bakhmut in the direction of Striapivka (14km northeast of Bakhmut).[41]

Russian sources claimed on October 17 that Ukrainian forces are experiencing heavy losses in the Bakhmut area and discussed the possibility of Ukrainian withdrawals from settlements surrounding Bakhmut.[42] However, Ukraine’s Eastern Group of Forces spokesperson Serhiy Cherevaty claimed on October 16 that Russian forces have been conducting information operations about Russian forces capturing settlements near Bakhmut and that such Russian claims are not true.[43] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin also reportedly stated that Russian speculations about Ukrainian withdrawals were just rumors and that Wagner units continue to fight Ukrainian forces in and around Bakhmut.[44]

Russian troops also continued ground attacks on the western outskirts of Donetsk City on October 16 and 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground assaults south of Avdiivka near Mariinka (28km southwest of Avdiivka), Krasnohorivka (23km southwest of Avdiivka), Pobieda (32km southwest of Avdiivka), Nevelske (16km southwest of Avdiivka), Vodiane (9km southwest of Avdiivka), and Novomykhailivka (36km southwest of Avdiivka) on October 17.[45] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued to conduct routine indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk Oblast and eastern Zaporizhia Oblast on October 16 and 17.[46]


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

Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian concentrations of manpower and equipment in Russian-occupied Zaporizhia Oblast on October 16 and 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces struck Russian manpower and military equipment concentrations near Marfopil, Tokmak, Polohy, Kam’yanka-Dniprov’ska, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Voskresenka, and Vasylivka in Zaporizhia Oblast on October 16 and 17.[47] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported on October 17 that Ukrainian forces struck Russian manpower and equipment concentrations near Molochansk, Enerhodar, Orikhiv, and Hulyaipole sometime in the past several days.[48] The mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, reported on October 15 that Russian forces have made Melitopol a logistics center for the transportation of military equipment in southern Ukraine.[49] Ukrainian efforts to strike Russian concentration areas are likely to increase and become more effective as Russian forces increase the transportation of personnel and military equipment through Russian-occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.

Russian forces continued routine artillery, air, and missile strikes west of Hulyaipole, and in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts on October 16 and 17.[50] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Zaporizhzhia City, Nikopol, Ochakiv, and Bereznehuvate on October 16 and 17.[51] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces struck an infrastructure facility in Odesa Oblast with a Kh-59 cruise missile on October 17.[52] Ukrainian sources also reported that Russian forces struck Mykolaiv City and Odesa with drones on October 17.[53] Ukrainian sources claimed that Ukrainian air defenses shot down more than a dozen Russian drones in Mykolaiv and Odesa Oblasts on October 16 and 17.[54]

Russian officials continued measures to exert full control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) while Russian forces continued to engage in military activities in and around the ZNPP. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on October 16 that Russian authorities are trying to connect the ZNPP to the Russian power grid as quickly as possible.[55] The Resistance Center also reported that Russian authorities are hastily carrying out measures to convert spent nuclear fuel storage systems to the standards used by Russian nuclear operator Rosatom.[56] The Resistance Center reported that elements of the Chechen Akhmat battalion have deployed equipment and weapons directly in two of the turbine halls at the ZNPP.[57] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported on October 15 that Russian forces continue to shell Nikopol from Enerhodar.[58] Ukrainian mayor of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlov, reported on October 17 that Russian shelling once again disconnected the ZNPP from the last electrical line connected to the Ukrainian power grid.[59] Russian authorities will likely continue to use the threat of a nuclear incident at the ZNPP to increase their bargaining power in future negotiations with Ukraine and multilateral organizations.

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

Moscow City officials announced the completion of partial mobilization in the city on October 17, likely in an effort to subdue criticism among Moscow residents amid reports of illegal mobilization in the city. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced that all mobilization centers closed on the afternoon of October 17, that all unprocessed summonses are no longer valid, and that men subject to unprocessed summonses are not required to undergo mobilization procedures.[60] Moscow officials are likely responding to the criticism from city residents who had complained about Moscow enlistment officers reportedly mobilizing men off the streets, apartments, and dormitories over the weekend.[61] The Russian government FAQ website also states that only Russian President Vladimir Putin may announce the end of the mobilization cycle, suggesting that Sobyanin’s statement has no legal force.[62]

Moscow City officials will likely continue covert mobilization despite Sobyanin’s announcement. A Russian human rights group activist stated that it is likely that Muscovites will continue to receive mobilization notices because Moscow City has not fulfilled its mobilization quota, but local authorities are unlikely to hunt down men on the streets.[63] Local Moscow Telegram channels reported that enlistment officials posted announcements in apartment buildings summoning men to military recruitment centers hours after Sobyanin’s announcement.[64] Russian milbloggers also claimed that Moscow City has formed three volunteer regiments even prior to the announcement, despite local officials previously denying the formation of any volunteer units in the city.[65] Moscow City officials may continue to coerce more men into service within the volunteer battalions against the backdrop of mobilization. Moscow officials may face greater criticism if their covert mobilization efforts become known within Moscow City.

Kremlin officials indirectly acknowledged problems with financing Putin’s partial mobilization order. A member of Putin’s Human Rights Council, Kirill Kabanov, stated that there are consistent reports from different regions regarding failures to make payments promised to mobilized personnel on time or, in some cases, at all.[66] Kabanov noted that volunteers serving in Ukraine are also facing problems receiving promised loan payment breaks. Kabanov blamed the “painful” financial problems on “officials’ stupidity” and poor bureaucratic procedures, such as banks denying loan repayment delays to volunteers because they are not covered under the Russian mobilization benefits law.[67] Kabanov also accused military recruitment officials of wrongfully advertising loan repayment delays to volunteers and blamed regional officials of “regional discrimination” in distributing payments to the mobilized.[68] The Kremlin’s unequal treatment of its forces — volunteers, mobilized servicemen, proxy soldiers, Russian Combat Army Reserve (BARS), private military companies’ forces, and Chechen units — may prompt further social tensions among these elements if not addressed. ISW has previously reported that Russian officials have denied BARS personnel the benefits offered to volunteers such as veterans’ payments, one-time enlistment bonuses, or medical treatment.[69] Moscow Oblast Governor Andrei Vorobyov also announced the launch of a charity program aimed at addressing the financial needs of the families of mobilized personnel.[70]

The Kremlin is likely setting conditions to expand the list of mobilizable professions and may be attempting to use mobilization to eliminate certain political figures. “A Just Russia” party submitted a bill to the Russian State Duma proposing to abolish mobilization deferrals for Russian parliamentarians. The bill would also allow the Kremlin to mobilize security forces working in law enforcement, Rosgvardia, the Russian federal security service (FSB), the military prosecutor’s office, and the Investigative Committee.[71] This bill suggests that the Kremlin continues to view all of its security personnel as forces that it can commit to the frontlines in Ukraine.

Some Russians continued to resist mobilization on October 16 and October 17. Social media footage reportedly showed police detaining a young man in the St. Petersburg metro for refusing to accept a mobilization notice, and another video shows a man running away from enlistment officers in St. Petersburg.[72] Russian outlets reported instances of arson against military recruitment centers in Moscow Oblast and the Republic of Buryatia, and an administration building in Volgograd Oblast.[73] Russians are also recording pleas to Putin, the Kremlin, and local officials to stop mobilization, address numerous mobilization issues, or end arrests of protesters. Residents of the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic published an appeal to the head of the republic demanding local officials suspend mobilization to preserve the “national gene pool” within the region.[74] Relatives of mobilized men from Bryansk Oblast recorded a video appeal to Putin demanding the return of their loved ones from the frontlines, noting that local officials have botched mobilization.[75] Lipetsk City officials allowed locals to protest mobilization errors for the first time in years, and protesters also reportedly demanded changes within the Lipetsk Oblast government.[76]


Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian occupation authorities continue to peddle “evacuation and vacation” schemes likely as a pretext for deporting Ukrainian citizens to Russian territory as they populate occupied areas with Russian citizens. A Russian news outlet posted footage on October 17 of residents of Kherson Oblast, including children, who arrived in Anapa, Krasnodar Krai to “rest” at the Black Sea resort while Russian troops conduct operations in Kherson Oblast.[77] Kherson Oblast occupation deputy Kirill Stremousov claimed on October 16 that residents of Kherson Oblast are going to Krasnodar Krai for “rest and recuperation.”[78] As ISW has previously reported, occupation authorities may be using the guise of vacation schemes as a method of deporting Ukrainian citizens to Russia. The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Chechen elements of the Russian Armed Forces are forcibly evicting Ukrainian residents from homes in Rubizhne, Russian-occupied Luhansk Oblast, which may represent a similar attempt to depopulate occupied areas of Ukrainian citizens and repopulate them with Russian occupation and military elements.[79] It is unclear what Russian authorities intend to do with those evicted from residences in Rubizhne. Forced eviction may represent a violation of various international legal standards on the right to adequate housing.[80]

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.

understandingwar.org



3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (17.10.22) CDS comments on key events




CDS Daily brief (17.10.22) CDS comments on key events

 

Humanitarian aspect:

According to the Head of the President's Office, Andriy Yermak, another large-scale exchange of prisoners took place today. One hundred eight women, including 37 evacuees from Azovstal, 11 officers, 85 privates, and sergeants, were freed from captivity. Victoria Obidina, a doctor who was evacuated from Azovstal, was separated from her 4 y.o. daughter by the Russian military at the time of the evacuation. The mother was left at the "filtration" camp, and the daughter was taken to Zaporizhzhia, from where relatives later picked her up.

 

Ukraine's capital Kyiv was attacked by four kamikaze drones this morning immediately after the end of the curfew. One of the drones hit a residential building in the city center not far from the central train station. At least four people were killed, including a young couple - husband and wife, both 34. The young woman was 6 months pregnant, Kyiv city mayor Vitaliy Klychko said. 19 people were rescued from under the rubble. The ruined building had architectural value. The drones most likely targeted the heat production plant located near the train station.

 

In Donetsk Oblast, the Russian forces shelled Slovyansk at night, hitting a ceramics plant. No one was hurt. The invaders also fired artillery along the entire front line. Over the past day, 4 people were killed and 10 injured in the Oblast.

 

Joint Command South stated that 3 Shahed-136 kamikaze drones hit industrial infrastructure facilities and a pharmaceutical warehouse in Mykolaiv. Later, Dmytro Pletenchuk, the press officer of Mykolayiv Oblast Military Administration (OMA), said that the drones hir a sunflower oil container owned by one of the leading exporters of sunflower oil in Ukraine. The oil spilled into the streets of the city. 17% of the global oil export passed through this terminal in the city of Mykolaiv.

 

According to the Ukrainian government-owned electric energy provider "Ukrenergo", energy infrastructure facilities in Ukraine's central and northern regions were damaged due to the Russian terrorist attacks. «Ukrenergo repair crews are working on eliminating the consequences. The situation in the power system is under control». The company emphasized that the Ukrenergo dispatcher center is considering introducing an emergency shutdown schedule.

 

Shortly after 5 a.m., the Russian forces launched a missile attack on critical infrastructure facilities in the Romny district of Sumy Oblast, Dmytro Zhivytskyi, the head of the Sumy OMA said. At least three people died, and nine were wounded. According to Zhyvytskyi, 1,625 customers are disconnected from the electricity supply in Sumy Oblast.

 

Although the Ukrainian military destroyed three Russian cruise missiles over Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, one still hit an energy infrastructure facility this night. There was an intense fire, the head of Dnipropetrovsk OMA, Valentyn Reznichenko, said. As a result, scheduled blackouts started in the city of Dnipropetrovsk and the Oblast to balance the grid, CEO of Yasno energy provider


Serhiy Kovalenko said. The shelling also cut off the Zaporizhzhia NPP's electricity supply, again turning on its autonomous power generation.

 

In Kharkiv, on the morning of October 17, the metro and ground electric transport were temporarily stopped, and power outages occurred in different districts of the city of Kharkiv and Kharkiv Oblast, Suspilne public TV reported.

 

An enemy missile hit a critical infrastructure facility in Vinnytsya Oblast in the west of Ukraine, Serhiy Borzov, head of Vinnytsia OMA, said. No victims were reported.

 

In Ukraine, 6,570 compact living spaces for IDPs have been arranged, the press service of the Ministry of Reintegration said. The Ministry explained that local and regional authorities are in charge of helping displaced persons but in close cooperation with the central government. Modular cities for the people who were forced to move were deployed in five regions; 25 of them were built by the Polish government.

 

Law enforcement officers have exhumed 187 bodies at the mass burial site in the liberated city of Lyman, Donetsk Oblast. Among them are 35 military personnel and 152 civilians. The police press officer emphasized that about 40 graves remain unexplored because access to them is difficult.

 

The Russian forces are using a new tactic of nuclear blackmail, targeting energy infrastructure that connects nuclear power plants to the power grid, National energy company Enerhoatom said in a statement.

 

Occupied territories:

A total of about 3 thousand residents of occupied Melitopol, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, have been mobilized into "some pseudo-volunteer battalions" by force, the legally elected Ukrainian mayor of the city Ivan Fedorov said. The occupying authorities can simply pick up people in the middle of the street and take them to the military commissariat or the commandant's office. Although they are released afterwards, they are immediately put on the record. There were also cases when they were immediately taken into the army.

 

One of the reasons there are long lines to cross the Kerch Strait is that the Russian authorities use the ferries to transport military equipment, Deputy Permanent Presidential Representative [of Ukraine] in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Denys Chystikov, said. Once a military equipment shipment arrives, all civilian cars are made to wait in line, which makes the drivers very angry. Residents of Crimea were offered to use the land route through the recently occupied Ukrainian territories; however, they are afraid because the line of contact is close, and nobody could guarantee their security. To popularize this route, the occupation authorities publicly announced that "70 trucks in an organized group set off from the Kerch port towards the newly occupied territories." It's not clear, though, how safe the passage will be if no security is provided to travelers.


A team of 11 staff members of the International Committee of the Red Cross is ready to visit the POWs in Olenivka, Donetsk Oblast. However, it does not have the minimum security guarantees on the ground and the "permission of the local authorities" [so-called DPR] to visit, ICRS said in a statement. In response to accusations from Ukrainian government officials of ICRS not fulfilling its obligations, ICRS replied that accusing the Committee because "it was denied full and immediate access" will not help either the prisoners of war or their families, and the only ones who can change the situation are the relevant states and the "authorities" in charge of the detention.


Operational situation

(please note that this part of the report is mainly on the previous day's (October 16) developments)

 

It is the 236th day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to defend Donbas"). The enemy tries to maintain control over the temporarily captured territories. It concentrates its efforts on disrupting the counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian troops, and continues the offensive in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions.

 

The Russian military shells the positions of the Ukrainian troops along the entire contact line, fortifies defensive positions and frontiers in certain directions, and conducts aerial reconnaissance. In violation of the norms of international humanitarian law, the laws and customs of war, it strikes Ukraine's critical infrastructure and residential quarters.

Over the past day, the Russian forces have launched 2 missile and 26 air strikes and fired over 70 MLRS rounds.

 

Areas of more than twenty towns and villages, including Bilopillia in Sumy Oblast, Sloviansk, Pavlivka and Novosilka in Donetsk Oblast, Marhanets in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Pravdyne and Bilohirka in Kherson Oblast were hit by the Russian forces. In the Kharkiv Oblast, the Russian military shelled the villages of Veterynarne, Vysoka Yaruga, Vovchansk, Vovchanski Khutory, Hatyshche, Dvorichne, Zelene, Kozacha Lopan, Krasne and Ohirtseve with mortars, barrel and jet artillery. The Russian forces attacked Mykolaiv with fifteen kamikaze drones; eleven of them were shot down by Ukrainian defenders. The threat of missile and airstrikes and the use of "Shahed-136" attack UAVs from the territory of the Republic of Belarus persists.

 

The Russian forces try to replenish their manpower losses and mobilize a large number of men in the temporarily occupied territories. Thus, according to the available information, in Stanytsia Luhanska, Luhansk Oblast, employees of municipal services enterprises were forcibly registered for military service under Russian legislation and underwent a so-called medical examination. According to its results, all were found capable of military service.

 

The aviation of the Ukrainian Defense Forces made over 30 strikes over the past day. Hits on 25 enemy weapons and military equipment concentration areas and on 6 anti-aircraft missile systems are confirmed. Ukrainian air defense units shot down 15 Russian UAVs.


Over the past day, Ukraine's missile forces and artillery hit 2 enemy command and control posts, 1 anti-aircraft battery position, and 1 ammunition depot.

 

Russia has acquired an undisclosed number of Iranian Arash-2 drones, which are said to be faster and more destructive than the Shahed-136.

 

The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces remain low. On October 15, citizens of one of the CIS countries (presumably from Tajikistan), who sought to obtain Russian citizenship through participation in the war against Ukraine, shot a group of mobilized citizens of the Russian Federation at a training ground in the Russian Belgorod Oblast, killing at least 11 people and wounding another 15.

 

Kharkiv direction

Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;

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

 

There is no change in the operational situation.

 

Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks in the area of Novosadove and Terny. Russian troops regained control over the village of Torske.

Kramatorsk direction

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

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

 

The Russian military fired tanks and artillery of various calibers along the entire line of contact, particularly in the areas of Berestove, Petropavlivka, Pershotravneve villages of Kharkiv Oblast;


Grekivka and Novoyehorivka in Luhansk Oblast and Zarichne, Terny, Torske and Yampolivka in Donetsk Oblast.

 

Units of Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled the Russian attacks in the area of Torske.

 

Donetsk direction

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

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

 

The Russian military fired from tanks and rocket artillery in the areas of Andriivka, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Bilohorivka, Vesele, Opytne, Soledar, Yakovlivka, Berdychi, Vodyane, Krasnohorivka, Maryinka, Nevelske, Novomykhailivka, and Pervomaiske.

 

Units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled the Russian attacks in the areas of Spirne, Soledar, Bakhmut, Mayorsk, Vodyane, Krasnohorivka, Maryinka and Novomykhailivka in Donetsk Oblast.

 

Zaporizhzhia direction

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

 Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

 

The Russian forces did not conduct offensive actions. They fired artillery of various types in the areas of Bohoyavlenka, Velyka Novosilka, Volodymyrivka, Vuhledar and Paraskoviivka in Donetsk Oblast.


The Ukrainian defense forces struck the concentration of Russian troops in the areas of Orikhiv (T0803, T0812, T0815 and T0408 crossroads), Kinsky Rozdory (T0803 and T0815 crossroads) and Tokmak (T0401 and P37 crossroads).

 

Ukrainian Defense Forces' strikes inflicted the following losses on the Russian troops around the following towns and villages of Zaporizhzhia Oblast:

-  Molochansk - up to 40 wounded,

-  Kamianka-Dniprovska - 5 pieces of weapons and military equipment and about 25 wounded,

-  Enerhodar - up to 20 wounded,

-    Orikhiv and Hulyaipole - up to 5 pieces of weapons and military equipment and up to 50 wounded,

-  Polohy - about 7 pieces of military equipment and up to 30 wounded.

 

Tavriysk direction

-   Vasylivka – Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line – 296 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 42, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 7 km;

-  Deployed BTGs: 114th, 143rd, and 394th motorized rifle regiments, 218th tank regiment of the 127th motorized rifle division, 57th and 60th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 37th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division, 10th, 16th, 346th separate SOF brigades, 239th air assault regiment of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331st parachute airborne regiments of the 98th airborne division, 108 air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault battalion of the 7th Air assault division, 11th and 83rd separate airborne assault brigade, 4th military base of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 7 military base 49 Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 126th separate coastal defence brigades, 127th separate ranger brigade, 1st and 3rd Army Corps, PMCs.

 

Areas of more than twenty-five towns and villages along the contact line suffered fire damage. In particular, Nikopol and Novokamyanka in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ternovi Pody, Partyzanske, Shyroke in Mykolaiv Oblast, and Myrne in Kherson Oblast.

 

Enemy units of the 126th separate coastal defence brigade, 810th separate marines brigade of the Black Sea Fleet, 205th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 49th Army, 140th anti-aircraft missile brigade of the 29th Army, 10th separate SOF brigade are fighting to hold their defense on the right bank of the Dnieper. The 126th separate coastal defence brigade suffered the greatest losses and was critically exhausted.

 

Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:

The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the Black Sea and to maintain control over the captured territories.


In the open sea, the Russian naval group has decreased even more. Four ships and boats are located along the southwestern coast of Crimea. Among them is one cruise missile carrier, a corvette of project 21631, carrying up to 8 missiles.

 

In the Sea of Azov waters, enemy patrol ships and boats are located on the approaches to the Mariupol and Berdyansk seaports to block the Azov coast.

 

Russian aviation continues to fly from the Crimean airfields of Belbek and Hvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 16 Su-27, Su-30, and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.

 

The Russian military continues shelling Ukrainian ports and coastal areas. On the night of October 17, the Russian forces again attacked Odesa, Mykolayiv and other cities in the south of Ukraine with Shahed 136 kamikaze drones. On the evening of October 16 and the morning of the 17th, the Russian military launched 43 Shahed-136 kamikaze drones over the territory of Ukraine. Air defense forces shot down 37 drones. All enemy of them came from the south.

 

Also, on the morning of October 17, the Russian forces attacked Odesa with a Kh-59 missile launched from a Su-35 aircraft from the sea. The rocket hit an infrastructure object.

 

Due to the repair of the Kerch Strait Bridge, there is a massive accumulation of cargo waiting to cross the Kerch Strait. The waiting time is 4-6 days, depending on the direction and weather conditions. Therefore, the enemy is studying alternative logistics ways for supplying its grouping of troops in Kherson Oblast through the occupied Azov region with the main hub in Melitopol.

 

"The Grain Initiative": 5 ships with 122.3 thousand tons of agricultural products left the ports of Greater Odesa for the countries of Africa, Asia and Europe. Among them is the NEW LIBERTY bulker, which will deliver 25,000 tons of wheat to Kenya. Bulk carrier CHOLA TREASURE will deliver 61.8 thousand tons of rapeseed to Pakistan. Since the "Grain Initiative" launch, 350 ships with 7.8 million tons of agricultural products have left the ports of Greater Odesa for the countries of Asia, Europe and Africa.

 

The dry cargo ship NEW HORIZON (Panama flag), which was on its way to Odesa Oblast to load food as part of the "grain initiative", collided with the dry cargo ship LADY NURGUL (also under the Panama flag) on the raid in Istanbul (Sea of Marmara) at around 13:45 on October 16.

 

Russian operational losses from 24.02 to 17.10

Personnel - almost 65,320 people (+320);

Tanks 2,537 (+8);

Armored combat vehicles – 5,205 (+12);

Artillery systems – 1,599 (+10);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 366 (+1); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 187 (+1); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,969 (+10);


Aircraft - 268 (0);

Helicopters – 242 (0);

UAV operational and tactical level – 1,241 (+17); Intercepted cruise missiles - 316 (0);

Boats / ships - 16 (0).


Ukraine, general news

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the President's Office, calls for Russia to be expelled from the international Group of Twenty: "He who gives orders to attack critical infrastructure in order to freeze civilians, and organizes a total mobilization to cover the front with corpses, categorically cannot sit at the same table with the leaders of the G20." Podolyak believes that world leaders should put an end to ru-hypocrisy.

 

In the eighth month of the full-scale war, 40% of Ukrainians are in a tense or very tense state. At the same time, citizens demonstrate a good level of resilience; on a scale of 1 to 5, they rate it at 3.9, according to the survey Rating group pollster conducted on October 8-9. A study of Ukrainians' emotional states from March to October 2022 showed little change. The peak of tension was observed at the beginning of April 2022 (3.5). In June, there was a gradual decrease in the level of stress (3.3). In October, the indicators remained at the same level (3.3). Currently, 24% of Ukrainians rate their state as calm or very calm. The sociological group emphasizes that the tension rate of 40% is relatively low for wartime.

 

International diplomatic aspect

NATO speaks the only language Russia understands. Steadfast Noon, the annual nuclear deterrence exercise, kicked off on Monday. The drill involves 14 nations with more than 60 aircraft, including the fifth-generation planes the Russian Airspace Forces don't possess. The event sends a much more convincing message to Russia not to escalate than numerous statements of heads of state that they don't want world war III to happen.

 

The European Council has agreed to set up a Military Assistance Mission in support of Ukraine (EUMAM Ukraine). The mission will contribute to enhancing the UAF's military capabilities in defending the country. The EUMAM will provide individual, collective and specialized training to the UAF, including their Territorial Defence Forces. The two-year-long mission will be chaired by Vice Admiral Hervé Bléjean, the Director of the Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC) within the EEAS.

 

The European Council has also adopted the additional €500 million tranche under the European Peace Facility to further enhance the UAF's defense capabilities. It brings the total EU contribution under the EPF for Ukraine to €3.1 billion.

 

"Providing weapons to wage a war of aggression in Ukraine and kill Ukrainian citizens makes Iran complicit in the crime of aggression, war crimes, and terrorist acts of Russia against Ukraine," stated the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. "For anybody in the world who is either selling material to Iran that could be used for [unmanned aerial vehicles] or ballistic missiles, or who is involved in


flights between Iran and Russia: Do your due diligence because we are absolutely going to sanction anybody who's helping Iranians help Russians kill Ukrainians," the US official announced plans to impose economic sanctions and possibly some export controls over the Iranian support for the Russian war effort. The EU imposed sanctions against Tehran over the human rights crackdown and voiced readiness to punish it for its involvement in Russia's war in Ukraine. "What we can see now: Iranian drones are used apparently to attack in the middle of Kyiv, this is an atrocity," Denmark's Foreign Minister said.

 

Russia, relevant news

As of August 2022, 41% of the 5,700 cinemas in Russia were closed, Aleksey Voronkov, head of the Association of Cinema Owners (AVK), told the Russian government-owned news agency TASS. Due to the departure of the largest international film companies from the Russian market, more than 150 cinemas were closed in the country - 7% of the total number of more than 2,100 venues. And in some large 12-screen cinemas in Russia, only half of the halls are working due to the lack of content, according to Voronkov.

 

The Su-34 military plane crashed into a residential building in the Russian city of Yeisk, Krasnodar Krai. The fall of the aircraft caused a large-scale fire in a high-rise building. Russian mass media report that the disaster was caused by igniting one of the plane's engines during takeoff.


 

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4. Elon Musk fears nuclear war, not Ukraine


Quote the "analysis" and accusations.


Excerpts:


To show you how uncompromised Musk is, not long after initially stating that SpaceX would no longer provide free Internet services via Starlink to Ukraine, Musk backtracked in a tweet this weekend.

Obviously, someone in the US government got to Musk and outlined for him how bad that would be both for his reputation and, more important, the future of SpaceX. As I’ve reported since February 2021, the Biden administration has been out for Musk because of his politics. He knows it, too.

To protect his business, it seems that Musk has allowed himself to be compromised … by the US government.

Anyway, if Ukraine were smart, it would take its significant tactical gains of late and convert them into a strategic victory by making a deal with Moscow and ending the whole conflict before Putin goes totally nuts and fulfills Musk’s worst nightmare: nuclear world war. We’re locked into a very nightmarish future unless some kind of offramp from this regional war is offered.


Elon Musk fears nuclear war, not Ukraine

Worried that his Starlink was paving the path to Armageddon, Musk threatened but flip-flopped on halting the Internet service

asiatimes.com · by More by Brandon J Weichert · October 18, 2022

Elon Musk has done it again. After initially wading into the Russo-Ukrainian war by giving the beleaguered Ukrainian defenders against the terrible Russian invasion free access to 20,000 Starlink terminals, Musk is reassessing his commitment.

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine this year, Musk was goaded into generously providing free Internet access to Ukraine via his visionary Starlink satellite communications network.

Starlink is SpaceX’s attempt to deliver affordable, reliable Internet service to parts of the world that otherwise lack access. This constellation of simple, small, easily replaceable satellites is already remaking the way that we communicate globally. Further, it’s remaking the way we wage war.


Thanks to Musk’s contribution of free Starlink service to Ukraine in its hour of need, the billionaire helped to ensure that the Ukrainians could defend their country from being consumed by the brutal Russians.

Yet as the war has dragged on – and with Ukrainian forces achieving victory after victory against the Russians – fears abound that rather than lose a war that everyone believed would be easily winnable by the Russians, President Vladimir Putin might decide to launch nuclear weapons.

For Elon Musk, this risk is a red line. So he declared his intention to stop providing free Starlink service to Ukraine, though he has since backtracked.

Of course, there is much more to this story.

Plea for a settlement

This month, Musk tweeted his support for a negotiated settlement between Kiev and Moscow that would cede the Russian-speaking eastern portions of Ukraine to Russia in exchange for ending the war.


For a variety of reasons, not least of which because it is their country that Musk is proposing they trade away with the Russians after the Russians initiated this brutal war, the Ukrainians dismissed Musk’s reasonable calls to avert nuclear world war.

In fact, a Ukrainian diplomat took the very undiplomatic act of telling Musk to “f*ck off” on Twitter.

Perhaps the diplomat didn’t get the message: Musk’s Starlink constellation is the only thing keeping Ukraine connected to the global telecommunications network. In fact, according to one estimate, if Starlink were removed from Ukraine’s arsenal, its fighting capabilities would decrease by a whopping 60%.

In modern combat, speed kills, after all.

A Ukrainian soldier with a Starlink receiving terminal. Photo: Wikipedia

The Russians have been outmaneuvered repeatedly throughout the war they were supposed to win easily. And part of the reason for that is that the Ukrainian defenders have managed to coordinate massive offensives far better and faster than their Russian foes can respond to or defend against.


Ukrainian communications, thanks to the survivable nature of Starlink, have yet to be severed by Russian forces. An electronically isolated Ukraine is what Russia has longed for and Musk has prevented from happening.

Musk compromised – but by whom?

Now, because the war risks going nuclear the longer it drags on – as well as how ungrateful Ukraine has been to Musk for losing US$20 million per day by providing free Starlink services – Musk said he was done. SpaceX would no longer foot the bill for Ukraine to use the Starlink service. Instead, he said, the US government would have to pay for Ukraine to use Starlink. Otherwise, the Ukrainians would lose this key advantage.

Musk’s statement evoked rage from across the political spectrum, both in Ukraine and throughout the West. Some have questioned whether Musk is compromised by Russia.

This charge is especially rich, given how generous Musk was to Ukraine throughout the war. SpaceX, after all, is a business and not a charity. Its Starlink satellite constellation is one of its most valuable assets.

Further, the charge about Musk being compromised is doubly ridiculous, because so many of those making these spurious claims are defenders of US President Joe Biden. The corrupt exploits of Biden’s controversial son Hunter in Ukraine (and elsewhere) have reached legendary status. If anyone is compromised, it’s President Biden.


Musk’s support for a proper peace plan in the Russo-Ukrainian war – and the fact that he is now using Starlink as a key leverage point to try to force about this outcome – is not the result of some nefarious scheme by Musk to empower Russia at the West’s expense. Instead, it is the result of decades of idealism that has defined Musk’s long, successful career.

This is the man who left the lap of luxury as a billionaire to found two companies that most experts believed would fail, Tesla and SpaceX. Musk created these companies less out of a need to make money (he was extremely wealthy when he created the two companies) but out of his sense that he needed to use his resources to try to save the world from destruction.

Tesla represents Musk’s attempt to avoid a man-made environmental catastrophe by driving the technology that might one day reduce or eliminate entirely humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels, which most environmental scientists believe to be the source of catastrophic man-made climate change. Regardless of our opinion on the matter, this is what Musk believes and he has acted in accordance with those beliefs.

Similarly, SpaceX exemplifies Musk’s commitment to making humanity a multi-planetary species. For the South African–born tech billionaire, colonizing Mars is the only way to ensure that humanity does not obliterate itself in a nuclear world war. And, wouldn’t you know it, the longer the Russo-Ukrainian war drags on, the greater the likelihood is that we will enter a nuclear world war.

Musk’s idealism is determining his next course of action. He is trying to distance himself from the situation in Ukraine because he fears what will happen if he continues providing a capability that Ukraine will use to carry on the war and risk total Armageddon. Since his Starlink contribution is allowing the war to drag on, and in light of how boorishly the Ukrainians have behaved toward him lately, Musk simply wants out.

Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system has kept the internet up and running in Ukraine. Image: Twitter

Besides, SpaceX remains a business. Not only is Starlink meant as a profit-seeking enterprise, but by assisting Ukraine, Musk’s properties and business interests globally are threatened, as now other regimes, such as China, Russia, Iran and others, view SpaceX as nothing more than an appendage of American military power.

Hate him all you want but Musk has done more than any other billionaire to aid the cause of Ukraine. He’s just not willing to ride a nuke all the way down to Russian targets like Major Kong did at the end of Dr Strangelove.

Under pressure

Stop saying that he’s compromised. He’s not. Musk just wants to let his technology mature to allow for him to get humans to Mars, so we all have a chance of seeing our species survive whatever fresh calamity we cook up on this world.

To show you how uncompromised Musk is, not long after initially stating that SpaceX would no longer provide free Internet services via Starlink to Ukraine, Musk backtracked in a tweet this weekend.

Obviously, someone in the US government got to Musk and outlined for him how bad that would be both for his reputation and, more important, the future of SpaceX. As I’ve reported since February 2021, the Biden administration has been out for Musk because of his politics. He knows it, too.

To protect his business, it seems that Musk has allowed himself to be compromised … by the US government.

Anyway, if Ukraine were smart, it would take its significant tactical gains of late and convert them into a strategic victory by making a deal with Moscow and ending the whole conflict before Putin goes totally nuts and fulfills Musk’s worst nightmare: nuclear world war. We’re locked into a very nightmarish future unless some kind of offramp from this regional war is offered.

asiatimes.com · by More by Brandon J Weichert · October 18, 2022




5. Army 2030: Disperse or die, network and live 




Brigadier Simpkin, "Race to the Swift." He wrote in the 1980s the most important person on the battlefield will be the soldier who can operate behind enemy lines with a radio who can control "long range precision fires" (not his specific words but the words of today). This is the natural maturation of his vision.



“I don’t think there’s a single thing, but the network would be close,” said Rainey, speaking alongside Lt. Gen. Beagle at AUSA. “We believe everything you do is driven by the intel, [so] we’ve got to have a joint network, at speed and scale, that’s compatible with our partners across the joint force.


“It kind of makes it really hard to do any of the other things we visualize if we don’t bring that to bear,” he said.


The Army’s greatest asset here? Not tech, but people. “One of the advantages we have is actually our experience over the last 20 years,” said James Greer, a retired Army colonel and former director of the School of Advanced Military Studies.


“Our leaders, both non-commissioned and commissioned, have grown up on dispersed battlespace [in Afghanistan and Iraq],” Greer told the AUSA panel. “They have, through their experience, the ability to command and control when they are in fact separated, and they have the ability to bring in joint capabilities in support.” The challenge, he said, is “to scale that up.”


In the meantime, the Army, as usual, has a backup plan.


“But even… if nobody can talk, in the American Army at least, we’re not going to quit,” Rainey said. “Somebody will walk until they make contact and close with and destroy the enemy.”




Army 2030: Disperse or die, network and live - Breaking Defense

Long-range precision strikes are now so deadly that even rear-area support units must spread out and take cover to survive — which puts unprecedented strain on command & control networks.

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · October 17, 2022

Army soldiers take cover during a patrol in Iraq (Army photo)

AUSA 2022 — In an age of drones, commercial satellite imagery and informants wielding smartphones, you have to assume the enemy is always watching, even thousands of miles from the front line.

That surveillance can pinpoint targets for long-range precision weapons, which means rear-echelon command posts, support troops and supply dumps are under threat of attack like never before, a threat that changes how they have to operate. But how do units spread out, take cover, and keep moving — to avoid being spotted, targeted, and struck — while still coordinating any kind of effective action?

That’s the tactical dilemma the Army attempts to tackle with its new multi-domain operations doctrine – and the critical technical challenge for its still-in-development battle network.

RELATED: How we fight: Army issues all-new handbook for multi-domain war

“We must account for being under constant enemy observation,” said Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle, chief of the Fort Leavenworth Combined Arms Center, which put together the all-new edition of Field Manual FM 3-0, Operations. “The battlefield is transparent, and so we have to be dispersed, we have to be more agile.”

Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle (Army photo)

“Dispersion is critical,” Beagle told the annual Association of the United States Army conference, during a panel on the future Army of 2030. “[But] then how do we go from dispersed locations to bring those forces back together to achieve decisive effects?”

“[Especially] if you’re in a theater like INDOPACOM,” he said, “you’re going to be largely non-contiguous” – with different subunits potentially scattered over multiple small islands, rather than forming a contiguous battle line – “but still, at some point, you’re going to have to converge all those capabilities, concentrate all those capabilities, on multiple decisive points.”

Thrashing out the tactical and technical complexities is the purpose of the Army-led, multi-service Project Convergence wargames, which this fall include British and Australian troops in both European- and Pacific-inspired scenarios.

RELATED: Army accelerating Project Convergence tech with industry ‘gateway’

Lt. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman (Army photo)

“It’s not just the Army,’” said Lt. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, the deputy chief of Army Futures Command. “This is our joint force, our Five Eyes partners that are there with us…. We will always fight together, and we’ve got to get our communications, our long-range fires [coordinated].”

“We want to better understand how coalition and joint forces can fight together… so we can either create a new technological solution or use an existing solution,” Coffman told a separate AUSA event. “How [do] we map out both message traffic sent from sensors and received by shooters across the joint force?”

Dealing With Dispersion

“Everything is very simple in war,” Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “but the simplest thing is difficult.” In the two centuries since his time, a new factor has added to the difficulty of the simplest things in war: the imperative to disperse in the face of withering firepower. And as weapons have become more lethal, dispersion has become necessary, not just for frontline fighters, but throughout continent-sized theaters of war.

In the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, Clausewitz fought on battlefields where men stood shoulder-to-shoulder under fire, accepting a greater risk of being hit in order to concentrate their own firepower. In the era of inaccurate, slow-loading muskets, which fired three times a minute and could barely hit a barn beyond a hundred yards, that was a reasonable trade-off. Against the rifled muskets of Solferino and the US Civil War just four decades later, it was a riskier and bloodier approach. Against the machine guns and massed artillery of the First World War, it was suicide.

American soldiers leaving a trench during World War I. (Keystone View Co. via Library of Congress)

So, soldiers spread out, took cover and dug in. When it became clear that a long-enough bombardment could slaughter even troops in trenches, armies largely pulled back out of artillery range, leaving a screening force in the frontline trench while holding most of their men in reserve. In the offense, the German Stosstruppen – translated into English as “stormtroopers” – learned to advance while dispersed, moving forward in small groups to take advantage of every scrap of cover.

But dispersion did not stop there, because weapons — and the systems that found targets for them — became ever longer-ranged and more precise. In World War II, airstrikes ravaged supply columns, reinforcements and infrastructure far beyond the front. In Ukraine and Russia today, kamikaze drones and precision-guided rockets destroy ammo dumps, airfields and civilian infrastructure. In a future war between two high-tech powers – say, the US and China – immense arsenals of long-range precision weapons could strike targets hundreds or thousands of miles away. Space-based surveillance can detect, and cyber warfare can disrupt, operations anywhere in the world.

Mario Diaz (via LinkedIn)

“Any force that has to fight in 2030 or beyond, we need to be prepared for a very active campaign against the homeland,” said Mario Diaz, deputy under secretary of the Army, speaking at AUSA alongside Beagle. “It can contribute to our inability to get what we need from our forts and our ports to the battlefields.”

The new operations manual warns, “Planners should anticipate adversary forces using all available means to contest the deployment of forces, beginning from home station. […] Leaders must assume they are under constant observation from one or more domains and continuously ensure they are not providing lucrative targets for the enemy to attack.”

“Forces that are concentrated and static are easy for enemy forces to detect and destroy,” the manual emphasizes. “One way Army forces preserve combat power is by maintaining dispersion to the greatest degree possible.” Long before they reach the front, it says, units arriving in theater must “disperse elements into company-sized tactical formations while they are performing maintenance checks, loading munitions, ensuring crew readiness, and preparing to move to forward positions.”

But spreading out makes it harder to work together. “Although dispersion disrupts enemy targeting efforts, it increases the difficulty of both C2 [command & control] and sustainment for friendly forces,” FM 3-0 acknowledges. “Leaders [must] balance the survivability benefits of dispersion with the negative impacts dispersion has on mission effectiveness.”

An Army soldier tries out a prototype network device during a 2018 test. (Army photo)

The Network Must Work

This balancing act — the ability to coordinate action despite physical separation — depends on communications. But in the face of sophisticated adversaries, communicating isn’t as simple as grabbing a radio, logging into email or picking up a smartphone. Russia routinely jams GPS and communications satellitesRussian troops using cellphones in Ukraine given away their position to Ukrainian artillery, contributing to the deaths of a dozen generals. And even if an adversary can’t decrypt a coded radio transmission, they can triangulate its origin to locate the transmitting unit for attack.

“Continuous communication allows enemy forces to detect and target commanders, subordinates, and command posts,” FM 3-0 warns. “It should be avoided whenever possible.”

Doug Bush (Army photo)

So, the military’s next-generation network not only has to transmit masses of data swiftly and securely: It also has to send it in short bursts, without prolonged transmissions that an enemy can trace. That is a tremendous technical challenge the Army will have to solve before it can execute its bold new tactics.

In that context, of the Army’s 35 top-priority modernization programs, from hypersonic missiles to augmented-reality goggles, Army officials said one was particularly key:

“I’d mention one and that’s the network,” said Doug Bush, the Army’s civilian chief of acquisition, speaking alongside Coffman at AUSA. “Not everything is dependent on our new network technology, but a lot of it is, and that’s a lot of the work that we’re doing at Project Convergence — to figure out how to do that network.”

“All of those things require people to communicate in a situation when an enemy is trying to take the network down,” he added, “so this is graduate-level networking.”

Coffman agreed. So did his boss, the four-star chief of Army Future Command, Gen. James Rainey.

“I don’t think there’s a single thing, but the network would be close,” said Rainey, speaking alongside Lt. Gen. Beagle at AUSA. “We believe everything you do is driven by the intel, [so] we’ve got to have a joint network, at speed and scale, that’s compatible with our partners across the joint force.

Gen. James Rainey (Jose Rodriguez/US Army)

“It kind of makes it really hard to do any of the other things we visualize if we don’t bring that to bear,” he said.

The Army’s greatest asset here? Not tech, but people. “One of the advantages we have is actually our experience over the last 20 years,” said James Greer, a retired Army colonel and former director of the School of Advanced Military Studies.

“Our leaders, both non-commissioned and commissioned, have grown up on dispersed battlespace [in Afghanistan and Iraq],” Greer told the AUSA panel. “They have, through their experience, the ability to command and control when they are in fact separated, and they have the ability to bring in joint capabilities in support.” The challenge, he said, is “to scale that up.”

In the meantime, the Army, as usual, has a backup plan.

“But even… if nobody can talk, in the American Army at least, we’re not going to quit,” Rainey said. “Somebody will walk until they make contact and close with and destroy the enemy.”

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · October 17, 2022


6. Senate to add $10 billion in Taiwan aid, scale back arms sale reform


IMET is not enough.  More training is required.


Excerpts:

A Senate aide told Defense News that the provision was dropped in the NDAA because, under contract law, there’s no legal way to force U.S. defense manufacturers to bump up certain customers ahead of other countries in the queue. Saudi Arabia, for instance, remains ahead of Taiwan in the queue for certain backlogged items. But Riyadh would have to consent to letting Taipei’s weapons orders jump ahead of its own — an unlikely proposition given tension between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. over the OPEC+ oil production cuts and the former’s human rights record.
Still, the proposed NDAA text retains Taiwan Policy Act provisions intended to speed up the contracting process for arms sales to the island nation. It directs the Defense and State departments to “prioritize and expedite” foreign military sales for Taipei and prohibits both departments from delaying the sales through a bundling route, whereby a defense manufacturer would simultaneously produce weapons systems from multiple contracts.
Additionally, it allows the president to establish an Asia-Pacific “regional contingency stockpile” at an unspecified location, allocating $500 million per year in funding for those stocks through 2025.
...
While the proposed NDAA text also drops the Taiwan Policy Act provision that would have required the U.S. to establish a comprehensive training program with the Taiwanese military, it does authorize the State Department to conduct International Military Education and Training programs for Taiwan.

Senate to add $10 billion in Taiwan aid, scale back arms sale reform

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · October 17, 2022

WASHINGTON — The Senate’s annual defense authorization bill will now include $10 billion in military aid for Taiwan — more than double the initial amount proposed — even as it scales back language intended to help address the $14 billion backlog of arms sales the Asian nation already made from the U.S.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., included a modified Taiwan defense package as part of a massive bipartisan amendment he filed last week to the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. The full Senate is expected to vote on the NDAA, including the Taiwan defense provisions, when lawmakers return to Washington after the November midterm elections.

Reed told reporters last week that the NDAA’s defense package for Taipei remains “consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act.” The bill’s defense provisions for Taipei come from the sprawling Taiwan Policy Act, which the Senate Foreign Relations Committee advanced 17-5 last month.

The White House had expressed concerns regarding the initial version of the Taiwan Policy Act, introduced by Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, D-N.J. He worked with the White House to address many of those concerns, but the NDAA only contains the defense components of Menendez’s bill while removing provisions that would upgrade diplomatic ties with Taipei, give Taiwan the same treatment as major non-NATO allies and sanction China. China considers Taiwan a rogue province and has threatened to return it under the mainland’s control, by force if necessary.

Still, the $10 billion in Foreign Military Financing — a program that allows other countries to purchase U.S. military equipment with grants and loans — marks another significant increase from the $4.5 billion proposed in Menendez’s initial version of the bill.

The Foreign Relations Committee boosted the FMF amount to $6.5 billion when it advanced the bill, and the proposed NDAA plusses that up again to $10 billion — allocating $2 billion per year through the FMF program for Taiwan through fiscal 2027.

Taiwan would be able to use $300 million of that aid per year for onshore procurement, which allows a customer to purchase weapons systems and components from its own defense-industrial base instead of the United States. Israel is the only other country that has standing permission from Congress for onshore procurement; all other recipients require a State Department waiver for that authority.


Sen. Bob Menendez, D-.N.J., makes his way to the Senate chambers at the Capitol on Aug. 3, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

It’s unclear how quickly Taiwan can procure the U.S. weapons it purchases with that money because of the unwieldy Foreign Military Sales process, which has resulted in the $14 billion backlog dating back to 2019.

The NDAA retains some measures intended to ameliorate the backlog to Taiwan, but drops a key requirement that would have required U.S. defense manufacturers to “expedite and prioritize” the production of weapons that Taiwan purchased ahead of other countries in the queue.

A Senate aide told Defense News that the provision was dropped in the NDAA because, under contract law, there’s no legal way to force U.S. defense manufacturers to bump up certain customers ahead of other countries in the queue. Saudi Arabia, for instance, remains ahead of Taiwan in the queue for certain backlogged items. But Riyadh would have to consent to letting Taipei’s weapons orders jump ahead of its own — an unlikely proposition given tension between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. over the OPEC+ oil production cuts and the former’s human rights record.

Still, the proposed NDAA text retains Taiwan Policy Act provisions intended to speed up the contracting process for arms sales to the island nation. It directs the Defense and State departments to “prioritize and expedite” foreign military sales for Taipei and prohibits both departments from delaying the sales through a bundling route, whereby a defense manufacturer would simultaneously produce weapons systems from multiple contracts.

Another provision would require both departments to develop a list of weapons systems that are “pre-cleared and prioritized for sale and release to Taiwan through the Foreign Military Sales program.”

It would also require the departments to produce a joint report on foreign military sales worth $25 million or more to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, dating back to 2017. The report must detail the reasons for any delays as well as solutions for interim capabilities to fill the gap caused by any backlog.

The proposed bill also prioritizes the transfer of excess U.S. defense articles to Taiwan. It would also authorize $1 billion a year in presidential drawdown authority from existing U.S. stockpiles to transfer defense articles to Taiwan in the event of an emergency — the same authorization President Joe Biden used to send billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s invasion.

Additionally, it allows the president to establish an Asia-Pacific “regional contingency stockpile” at an unspecified location, allocating $500 million per year in funding for those stocks through 2025.

While the proposed NDAA text also drops the Taiwan Policy Act provision that would have required the U.S. to establish a comprehensive training program with the Taiwanese military, it does authorize the State Department to conduct International Military Education and Training programs for Taiwan.

About Bryant Harris and Joe Gould

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

Joe Gould is the senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry. He served previously as Congress reporter.



7. The U.S. Is Losing Yet Another 'War on Terror'


But we should be able to have. chance to observe the indicators and warnings of coups if we are present and have the relationships and if we are constantly assessing the situation and observating for the conditions of political instability and resistance.


Excerpts:

Rear Adm. Sands, the Special Operations Command Africa chief, maintained that U.S. training was not linked to coups and instead suggested that a key reason for them was that the U.S. was partnered with repressive regimes or, as he put it, “governance that is not necessarily aligned with the rights and will of their people.” Despite the rebellions by U.S. trainees and the partnerships with oppressive governments, Sands insisted, there “is no other option” but to continue U.S. support but no way to halt the coups.
“I would tell you that there’s no one more surprised or disappointed when partners that we’re working with or have been working with for a while in some cases decide to overthrow their government,” Sands tells Rolling Stone during a conference call with members of the press. “We have not found ourselves able to prevent it.”

Every SOF operator should have PIR along these lines, regardless of type from mission from liaison to JCET to MTT. These types of questions should be ingreained into every SOF operator.


UW Standing “PIR” For Resistance
Assessments – Special Forces Area Study/Area Assessment, PSYOP Target Audience Analysis, and Civil Affairs Civil Reconnaissance/Civil Information Management
Who is the resistance?
Leaders, groups, former military, in or out of government, etc.
What are the objectives of the resistance?
Do they align with the US and friends, partners, and allies?
Where is it operating?
From where is it getting support?
When did it begin?
When will it/did it commence operations?
Why is there a resistance or the potential for resistance?
What are the underlying causes/drivers?
How will it turn out?
E.g., what is the assessment of success or failure of the resistance?
Most important - An expert recommendation: Should the US support or counter the resistance and if so how?


The U.S. Is Losing Yet Another 'War on Terror'

The Pentagon last month quietly released a report revealing that — despite sending forces to at least 22 countries in Africa — the U.S. isn't reaching its objectives

BY NICK TURSE


OCTOBER 17, 2022

Rolling Stone · by Nick Turse · October 17, 2022

The security situation in the African Sahel — where U.S. commandos have trained, fought, and died in a “shadow war” for the past 20 years — is a nightmare, according to a Pentagon report quietly released late last month. It’s just the latest evidence of systemic American military failures across the continent, including two decades of deployments, drone strikes, and commando raids in Somalia that have resulted in a wheel-spinning stalemate and an ongoing spate of coups by U.S.-trained officers across West Africa that the chief of U.S. commandos on the continent said was due to U.S. alliances with repressive regimes.

“The western Sahel has seen a quadrupling in the number of militant Islamist group events since 2019,” reads the new analysis by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the Pentagon’s foremost research institution devoted to the continent. “The 2,800 violent events projected for 2022 represent a doubling in the past year. This violence has expanded in intensity and geographic reach.”


The worsening security situation reflects most poorly on Special Operations Command Africa or SOCAFRICA — which oversees elite U.S. troops on the continent and has played an outsized role in U.S. military efforts to counter terrorist groups or, in military parlance, violent extremist organizations (VEOs), from Jama’at Nurat al Islam wal Muslimin in Burkina Faso to Ahlu Sunnah wa Jama’a in Mozambique.

“SOCAFRICA, by, with, and through African partners must degrade and disrupt VEOs in order to advance U.S. security interests,” according to formerly secret plans, covering the years from 2019 to 2023, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by Rolling Stone. “To achieve the greatest gains, SOCAFRICA focuses its efforts on four major areas: East Africa, the Lake Chad Basin, the Sahel, and the Maghreb.”

As a result, the U.S. has consistently sent its most elite troops — Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marines — to such African hotspots. According to a list provided by U.S. Special Operations Command to Rolling Stone, America’s commandos deployed to 17 African nations — Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Tunisia — in 2021.

But that isn’t the whole story.

An investigation by Rolling Stone found U.S. special operators were sent to at least five additional African countries — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, and Somalia — last year. And this is in addition to myriad engagements by conventional U.S. troops across the continent — from Naval maneuvers alongside forces from Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Seychelles to National Guard deployments to MoroccoKenya, and Somalia.

“The U.S. government consistently lacks transparency in disclosing the scope and locations of its military operations across Africa. The Department of Defense does not acknowledge the full extent of its ‘training’ and ‘cooperation’ activities — oftentimes euphemisms for operations that look very much like combat,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, tells Rolling Stone.

The deployments to these 22 African nations account for a significant proportion of U.S. Special Operations forces’ global activity. Approximately 14 percent of U.S. commandos dispatched overseas in 2021 were sent to Africa, the largest percentage of any region in the world except for the Greater Middle East.



Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, president of Burkina Faso, arrives to his inauguration ceremony as president of transition, in Ouagadougou, on March 2, 2022. Olympia de Miasmont/AFP/Getty Images

Since the early 2000s, U.S. special operators have deployed on missions that run the gamut from training efforts like SOCAFRICA’s annual Flintlock exercise — which is “designed to strengthen the ability of key partner nations in the region to counter violent extremist organizations” — to “advise, assist, and accompany” missions alongside local troops that can involve U.S. Special Operations forces in combat. The latter are conducted in secret, far from the prying eyes of the press. The former, Flintlock, has become an annual PR camo-wash that affords the U.S. a patina of transparency and a plethora of publicity as cherry-picked reporters provide mostly favorablesometimes breathless cookie-cutter coverage of tough-talking American commandos barking orders at “raw,” African troops or “muscle-bound twentysomethings nervously watching their African protégés” or “regional forces learning from grizzled Western commandos”; all of it “under the pewter sun” in the “suffocating heat” of a “dusty training ground” of “fine Saharan sand” in the “harsh desert terrain” and “vast choking dustlands” of the Sahel.

Despite substantial engagement by American commandos, terrorism trends across the continent are dismal, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center. “Militant Islamist group violence in Africa has risen inexorably over the past decade, expanding by 300 percent during this time,” reads an August assessment of the entire continent. “Violent events linked to militant Islamist groups have doubled since 2019.”

Earlier this year, Rolling Stone’s Kevin Maurer accompanied Green Berets on a training mission in the Sahelian nation of Niger, where four U.S. troops were killed in an Islamic-state ambush in 2017. “It is hard to see how a dozen Special Forces soldiers and roughly 120 Nigérien commandos covering 200,000 square miles make a difference against an estimated 2,500 fighters aligned with either ISIS or Al Qaeda,” he wrote. The numbers bear out his skepticism.


Militant Islamist violence in the Sahel has quadrupled since 2019. The 2,612 attacks by terrorist groups in the region over the past year outpaced even Somalia. And the 7,052 resulting fatalities account for almost half of all such deaths reported on the continent, according to the Africa Center. A quarter of those fatalities resulted from attacks on civilians — a 67 percent jump from 2021.

At the same time, West African officers trained and advised by U.S. special operators keep overthrowing the governments the United States is trying to prop up — including four coups by Flintlock attendees since 2020. SOCAFRICA’s chief, Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands, tells Rolling Stone that the United States was not responsible for the rebellions, was powerless to prevent them, and suggested a major reason for the coups was popular dissatisfaction with U.S. partners on the continent who suppress the will of their own peoples.

“The lack of security and the numbers of internally displaced personnel, combined with, in some regions, a perception of disadvantagement that takes place between the government and the population, really form to create an environment where the population loses faith in the government and either decides deliberately to overthrow the government through a coup or, as we saw in … Burkina Faso … a mutiny that turned into a coup,” says Sands, referring to Damiba’s January putsch.

After 9/11, the Pentagon ramped up military engagement in Africa, building a sprawling network of outposts across the northern tier of the African continent — from Senegal to Kenya, Tunisia to Gabon — conducting hundreds of drones strikes from Libya to Somalia, as well as commando raids and training missions from one side of Africa to the other.


In Somalia, for example, there were 37 declared airstrikes over eight years under the Obama administration, while the number of U.S. attacks jumped to 205 during Trump’s single term, according to data compiled by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. has carried out at least 11 attacks there. Most of the strikes have been aimed at al Shabaab militants who now control about 70 percent of south and central Somalia, a country almost as large as Texas.

“Over the next several weeks and months, United States Armed Forces will reposition from locations within Africa to return to Somalia,” President Joe Biden informed Congress in June, eventually sending about 450 troops there and reversing a withdrawal from the country ordered by Trump in the last days of his presidency. “United States military personnel conduct periodic engagements in Somalia to train, advise, and assist regional forces, including Somali and African Union Mission in Somalia forces, during counterterrorism operations.”

Such “engagements” can, however, be indistinguishable from combat. In May 2017, for example, Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed by al Shabaab militants while conducting an “advise, assist, and accompany mission” with Somali forces. The next year, special operations soldier Alex Conrad was killed in a firefight in Somalia. And earlier this year, a soldier assigned to the 20th Special Forces Group was injured in a mortar attack in Mali.

During the past decade, U.S. Special Operations forces have seen combat in at least 13 African nations, according to retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who served at U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) from 2013 to 2015 and then headed Special Operations Command Africa until 2017. America’s most elite troops continued to be active in nine of those countries — Burkina Faso, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Somalia, and Tunisia — in 2021.

This year, the United States cut support to the first of those countries, Burkina Faso, after Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba overthrew his nation’s democratically elected president in January. Damiba, it turns out, was well known to AFRICOM, having participated in at least a half dozen U.S. training events. In 2010 and 2020, for example, he took part in SOCAFRICA’s Flintlock exercise.

Late last month, Damiba was overthrown by another military officer, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré. Was he also mentored by the United States? AFRICOM doesn’t know.


“This is something we will have to research and get back to you,” Africa Command spokesperson Kelly Cahalan tells Rolling Stone. “Military seizures of power are inconsistent with U.S. military training and education,” said Cahalan. But that would be news to trainees, like Damiba.


An arm patch for the Exercise Flintlock 2018 is seen on the shirt of an Austrian army instructor training soldiers from Burkina Faso in 2018. Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images

In 2014, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida, who attended a counterterrorism training course at Florida’s MacDill Air Force Base that was sponsored by Joint Special Operations University, seized power in Burkina Faso. The next year, Gen. Gilbert Diendéré — who headed the Burkina Faso Flintlock 2010 Committee — led the junta that overthrew that country’s government. In 2020, Col. Assimi Goïta, who also worked with U.S. Special Operations forces, participating in Flintlock training exercises and attending a Joint Special Operations University seminar at MacDill, overthrew Mali’s government. Goïta then stepped down and took the job of vice president in a transitional government charged with returning Mali to civilian rule, but soon seized power again, conducting his second coup in 2021. That same year, members of a Guinean special forces unit led by Col. Mamady Doumbouya took a break from training with U.S. Green Berets to storm the presidential palace and depose the country’s 83-year-old president, Alpha Condé. Doumbouya was soon installed as Guinea’s new leader.

SOCAFRICA’s Flintlock exercise may not be an incubator of insurrection, but recent putschists have been some of its highest profile participants. Officers who attended just two Flintlock exercises, alone, have conducted five coups since 2015. Burkina Faso’s Diendéré and Damiba were both involved in Flintlock 2010, while AFRICOM told Rolling Stone that Guinea’s Doumbouya and Mali’s Goita both attended Flintlock 2019. “Providing this kind of tactical training in fragile democracies comes with costs, and so far we haven’t been able to have honest public conversations about those costs,” said Savell, “nor do we have enough public information about every kind of training we’re engaging in and how to avoid abetting human-rights violations.”


AFRICOM says it does not keep tabs of which or how many American mentees overthrow their own governments, but U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries — Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three times), Mauritania, and the Gambia — since 2008.

Rear Adm. Sands, the Special Operations Command Africa chief, maintained that U.S. training was not linked to coups and instead suggested that a key reason for them was that the U.S. was partnered with repressive regimes or, as he put it, “governance that is not necessarily aligned with the rights and will of their people.” Despite the rebellions by U.S. trainees and the partnerships with oppressive governments, Sands insisted, there “is no other option” but to continue U.S. support but no way to halt the coups.

“I would tell you that there’s no one more surprised or disappointed when partners that we’re working with or have been working with for a while in some cases decide to overthrow their government,” Sands tells Rolling Stone during a conference call with members of the press. “We have not found ourselves able to prevent it.”

Rolling Stone · by Nick Turse · October 17, 2022



8. What Ukraine Is Teaching U.S. Army Generals About Future Combat


A brave new world (battlefield) out there.


Didn't we learn a lot from observing the war in Crimea in the 19th Century? Didn't it foreshadow some future wars?


What Ukraine Is Teaching U.S. Army Generals About Future Combat

U.S. soldiers can expect to be under constant enemy surveillance and threatened by long-range precision artillery in the next war.

BY

DAN PARSONS

|

PUBLISHED OCT 14, 2022 5:25 PM

thedrive.com · by Dan Parsons · October 14, 2022

Russia’s war in Ukraine is teaching U.S. Army generals that modern ground-launched missile technology, loitering munitions, and low-cost unmanned aircraft will force the service to unlearn most of what it remembers from its largely static counter-insurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In future combat, Army units will have to be constantly on the move and prepared for all manner of top-down attacks while assuming they are under persistent enemy surveillance, as troops have been since Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine began in February.

At this year's Association of the U.S. Army's annual convention in Washington, D.C. (AUSA), U.S. Army leaders laid out those lessons as examples of what they are learning while observing Ukraine's remarkable battlefield successes, and Russia's comparative failures.

For the past two decades, the Army has been fighting largely static wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, defined by massive, nearly permanent bases surrounded by a network of smaller tactical operations centers (TOCs) and forward operating bases (FOBs). Patrols would operate from those bases and return when their missions were complete.

U.S. soldiers disassemble a TOC during exercise Allied Spirit at Drawsko Pomorskie Training Area, Poland, June 13, 2020. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Julian Padua

In a future major conflict, fighting from established sites is a recipe for being hounded and pounded by enemy long-range missiles and drones, as the Russians have been in Ukraine, said Gen. James Rainey, head of Army Futures Command.

In his current position, Rainey is in charge of overseeing all of the Army’s modernization priorities, from soldier equipment to an optionally manned fighting vehicle and a fleet of revolutionary fast and maneuverable helicopters.

“We have got to get our hands around fighting under continuous observation,” Rainey said at the convention on October 12. “You're going to have to figure out how to fight when the enemy can see you. You're not going to be able to pile up things; you're not going to be able to build TOCs.”

Russia has so far largely failed at efforts to perform combined arms maneuver, in which infantry, armor, artillery, and aviation operate together to advance against an enemy, Rainey said. This has made their forces even more vulnerable to Ukraine’s long-range precision artillery capabilities.

Ukrainian artillery unit fires with a 2S7-Pion, a self-propelled gun, in the Kharkiv region on August 26, 2022. AFP via Getty Images

Pairing infantry with armor and air support should, for instance, make U.S. tanks less vulnerable to enemy anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs). Rainey said he does not think U.S. armored units would fall prey as quickly as Russian forces have to Ukrainian missile attacks, but “it's something we have to figure out and pay attention to and continue to emphasize in our training.”

“So, how are we going to take all the high-tech stuff that we know we need and deliver it in a way that doesn't require you to stop, hold still and pile up?” Rainey added.

The war in Ukraine has shown that units, or established positions that stay in one place for too long, are likely to be found. Once found, it is likely they will be engaged by enemy artillery, drones, or something else. Russian ammunition dumps far behind the frontlines came under systematic Ukrainian fire for weeks ahead of currnetly ongoing offensives, highlighting the effectiveness of weapons like the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. The war has already validated the Army's quest for precision long-range fires with ever-increasing ranges, as we previously covered in this piece.

Army units have defenses against some of the weapons Ukrainian forces have used to brutally punish invading Russian armored units. Rainey said a well-trained and equipped U.S. armored force would likely not suffer the same fate as Russian tanks in Ukraine.

Rainey did not specify what U.S. equipment would make that difference, but there are a number of things the Army is pursuing to protect its vehicles and personnel from guided missiles, drones and other modern threats. One is installing active protection systems, or APS, on its Bradley Fighting Vehicles, M1 Abrams tanks, and Armored Multipurpose Vehicles. Those systems can detect, track and deploy explosive countermeasures against incoming anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and other projectiles. But APSs are not designed to protect against long-range guided artillery like the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, or GMLRS, Ukraine has used to such devastating effect with HIMARS and M270 tracked launchers.

A modernized M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams tank at Fort Stewart, Georgia, in September. U.S. Army photo by 1st Lt. Jacob Swinson

“We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to survive on a battlefield against everything,” Rainey said. “How much of what happened to the Russians was because of the threat of ground-launched missiles, and how much of our ability to actually do combined arms maneuver could prevent that?”

Ukrainian weapons have picked off Russian tanks at a rate that has some questioning the vehicle’s future utility. Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. James McConville put that notion to rest, saying tanks and armored vehicles are essential to offensive operations if properly supported.

In the early stages of the war, defending cities against an invading mechanized army, the Ukrainians needed ATGMs like the Javelin to destroy Russian tanks, at which they excelled. Later, Ukraine needed long-range fire capability to hold the Russians back and prepare the battlespace for an offensive. Now Kyiv is showing the modern utility of tanks as its forces retake huge swathes of occupied territory, McConville said.

A destroyed Russian tank is seen outside of Izyum district of Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine, on October 13, 2022. Photo by Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

“You don’t need armor if you don’t want to win,” he told reporters at AUSA. “What I mean by that is, you go on the offensive – if you look at those great lessons being learned in Ukraine – that was the initial part of the war. And that was when they were in complex terrain and trying to defend cities, and they did that very, very well. But you don't win by being on the defense. You have to go on the offense … as the Ukrainians go more on the offensive, what they’re looking for is armored vehicles and tanks.”

The U.S. military’s experience with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in Iraq and Afghanistan led it to harden its vehicles against such weapons. That armor weighed down its tactical vehicles and sacrificed speed and range, precisely the mobility attributes commanders now want to reintroduce. The Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower, or MPF, light tank and Future Vertical Lift family of next-generation rotorcraft are just two examples where speed is required to promote survivability.

“Because of 20 years of tough combat … we have a lot of protection against bottom-up stuff, and that comes with a lot of weight,” Rainey said. “Unless we figure out how to port some of this stuff over, we might find ourselves in a situation where there is not as much of a bottom-up threat, but there is very clearly a top-down, 360 [degree] threat.”

Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, chief of Future Vertical Lift at Army Futures Command, said the war in Ukraine underscores the need for speedier rotorcraft to avoid enemy air defenses during air assault and attack missions. Army aviation has kept a close official watch on helicopter operations on both sides of the war, and much of what they’ve seen has reaffirmed the assumptions made in designing requirements for the Future Attack Recon Aircraft (FARA) that will replace some AH-64 Apaches and the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) that will replace the UH-60 Black Hawk.

Bell's V-280 Valor, seen here in attack configuration supporting Abrams tanks, are in the running for FLRAA. Bell image

“The fact that rotorcraft operating in the lower-tier air domain has been decisive in a number of engagements – we're watching that very closely,” Rugen told reporters at the AUSA conference. “But also, some flaws in the tactics that have been well played out – flying high during the day – those things don't work in large-scale combat ops. And so, the kind of technology we're bringing forward is going to allow our crews in the future to not be put in flight profiles that would give them difficulty getting through tough neighborhoods.”

The use of helicopters in Ukraine has reinforced “the need for speed, the need for standoff,” Rugen said. Both the Russians and Ukrainians have been flying their helicopters very low and employ standoff tactics like lobbing rockets into the air to increase their weapons range while reducing the aircraft's vulnerability to attack from air defenses.

Future air assault forces will have to launch missions from beyond the reach of enemy reconnaissance and artillery capabilities, then fly farther to their targets than existing helicopters can safely reach and still return to base. The faster and lower they fly, the less vulnerable they are to enemy man-portable air defenses.

The SB>1 Defiant is in the running to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk. Lockheed Martin Image

“Having the ability to stand outside of certain fires, just all this artillery and rocket capability that the Russians have, again, you want to be outside that and then close in quickly and strike, and that's where really the validation is coming from,” Rugen said. “And then stay low. Outside of these things that are hunting us.”

So far, the Army has engaged in distance learning while Ukraine and Russia duke it out. Army commanders have been able to study how their weapons are used without directly engaging an enemy. Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov, even offered Ukraine as a real-world, live-fire testing ground for Western weaponry.

Studying the conflict is undoubtedly valuable for the U.S. and its allies that are pouring weaponry into the country. Gen. Edward Daly, chief of Army Materiel Command, said the NATO effort to both arm Ukraine and retain enough equipment for member states’ militaries shows the value of foreign military sales.

“I think we're finding that foreign military sales are hugely powerful and enabling to numerous countries other than ours, and we're seeing that,” Daly said.

However, the U.S. Army and its sister services are more focused on a regional showdown with China than they are becoming directly involved with Ukraine’s struggle against Russia. Rugen and Rainey warned against leaning on lessons from Ukraine to confirm assumptions about all future conflicts.

“We also need to be very careful of confirmation bias, where we look at what's going on in Ukraine and say ‘yeah, see, I was right,’” Rainey said. “There are some things that are very new and interesting, and some of them are affirming some really problematic things.”

The ongoing aforementioned debate over tanks is an excellent example of running that risk. Ukraine has reinvigorated the debate about whether tanks are now obsolete given the proliferation of ATGMs, loitering munitions and other tank-killing weapons. The Russian's early experience in this war would seem to confirm that heavy armor is obsolete. The Marine Corps’ Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration came to that conclusion in May when the war was only three months old, saying Russian armor losses validated his service's decision to divest its Abrams tanks.

Now that the Ukrainians are on the move, they are clamoring for NATO to provide more tanks.

Rugen echoed that sentiment, saying, “we have significant observations, and we want to be humble about that to make sure that we don't gravitate towards the wrong lessons.”

Contact the author: dan@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Dan Parsons · October 14, 2022


9. French company fined $777 million and pleads guilty to paying ISIS as terror group killed Westerners




French company fined $777 million and pleads guilty to paying ISIS as terror group killed Westerners

KEY POINTS

  • Lafarge Cement is pleading guilty and has agreed to pay a fine of $777.8 million to resolve a criminal charge related to the French company’s payments to the terror organization ISIS to keep a plant operating in Syria.
  • The nearly $17 million payments to ISIS were made from 2012 through 2014, and occurred even as the terror group was kidnapping and killing Westerners.
  • The investigation that led to Lafarge being indicted in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, is ongoing. No individuals have been charged.
  • Lafarge was purchased by Switzerland-based Holcim in 2015.

CNBC · by Eamon Javers,Dan Mangan · October 18, 2022

In this article

A view of a Lafarge Cement plant is seen in Paris, France on September 8, 2021.

Julien Mattia | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Lafarge SA pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $777.8 million Tuesday to resolve a U.S. federal criminal charge related to the French company's payments to ISIS another terror group to keep a cement plant operating in Syria.

The nearly $17 million payments to ISIS and the al-Nusrah Front were made from August 2013 through October 2014, and occurred even as the terror group was kidnapping and killing Westerners.

"Lafarge has admitted and taken responsibility for its staggering crime," said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace in a statement. "Never before has a corporation been charged with providing material support and resources to foreign terrorist organizations."

Peace's office said Lafarge Cement Syria executives bought materials needed for their cement plant in the Jalabiyeh region of northern Syrian from ISIS-controlled suppliers, and paid monthly "donations" to ISIS and ANF, so that employees, customers and suppliers could cross checkpoints around the plant.

Lafarge Cement Syria "eventually agreed to make payments to ISIS based on the volume of cement that LCS sold to its customers, which Lafarge and LCS executives likened to paying 'taxes,' " Peace's office said.

An indictment against Lafarge and its defunct Syrian subsidiary was unsealed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, charging them with one count of conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, Lafarge pleaded guilty and was sentenced at a hearing there.

No individuals have been charged in the case, but authorities said their investigation is ongoing.

"In the midst of a civil war, Lafarge made the unthinkable choice to put money into the hands of ISIS, one of the world's most barbaric terrorist organizations, so that it could continue selling cement," said Peace.

"Lafarge did this not merely in exchange for permission to operate its cement plant – which would have been bad enough – but also to leverage its relationship with ISIS for economic advantage, seeking ISIS's assistance to hurt Lafarge's competition in exchange for a cut of Lafarge's sales," Peace said.

ISIS Vehicle Pass

Lafarge was purchased by Switzerland-based Holcim in 2015.

In a statement, Lafarge said, "Lafarge SA and [Lafarge Cement Syria] have accepted responsibility for the actions of the individual executives involved, whose behavior was in flagrant violation of Lafarge's Code of Conduct.

"We deeply regret that this conduct occurred and have worked with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve this matter," Lafarge said.

Holcim in a statement to CNBC said it supports the plea agreement that Lafarge reached with DOJ.

"None of the conduct involved Holcim, which has never operated in Syria, or any Lafarge operations or employees in the United States, and it is in stark contrast with everything that Holcim stands for," Holcim said in that statement.

"The DOJ noted that former Lafarge SA and [Lafarge Cement Syria] executives involved in the conduct concealed it from Holcim before and after Holcim acquired Lafarge SA, as well as from external auditors," Holcim said.

"When Holcim learned of the allegations from media reports in 2016, Holcim proactively and voluntarily conducted an extensive investigation, led by a major U.S. law firm and overseen by the Board of Directors. It publicly disclosed the principal investigative findings in 2017 and separated from former Lafarge SA and LCS executives who were involved in these events."

Lafarge was indicted by French authorities in 2018 in connection with the ISIS payments on charges of being complicit in crimes against humanity.

In its statement Tuesday, Lafarge said it "continues to cooperate fully with the French authorities in their investigation of the conduct and will defend itself against any judicial actions that it regards as unjustified in the French proceedings."

Holcim said in its statement that the DOJ has determined that it is not necessary to appoint an independent compliance monitor for Lafarge because Holcim has effective compliance and risk management controls to detect potential similar conduct.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

CNBC · by Eamon Javers,Dan Mangan · October 18, 2022



10. Redefining Irregular Warfare: Legitimacy, Coercion, and Power


The fundamental problem is that Irregular Warfare is an intellectual orphan in the department of defense.


Conclusion:

Left to resolve, then, is this striking contradiction raised by irregular warfare in practice, namely the great difficulty of authorizing, resourcing, and mobilizing the instruments of statecraft necessary for its prosecution. At present, there is no civilian operational system into which to emplace irregular warfare as defined: with exceedingly few exceptions, there is no civilian replica for the military’s doctrine, organization, institutionalized intellectual efforts, and operational templates to prosecute this mission. Indeed, there is also no culture, outside of the military, to do organized, troops-to-task thinking about security, however broadly defined. Until this reality is addressed, irregular warfare—intellectually as well as in practice—will fall to the same community within the Department of Defense, with scant impact on the broader system responsible both for assessment and response. Might the redefinition of irregular warfare, if properly handled, spur the necessary change?

A few thoughts:


"Political warfare includes all measures short of war... for hostile intent through discrete, subversive, or overt means short of open combat... Whereas gray zone tells us where along a spectrum between war and peace activities take place, political warfare tells us why."
- Matt Armstrong
 
IW is the dominant form of war for the military in the emergent human domain. (Maxwell)
 
“Political Warfare is the dominant form of warfare in the gray zone between peace and war and Irregular Warfare is the military contribution to Political Warfare.” (Maxwell)


Look back at the history of the evolution of IW in the GWOT era. Go back to 2006 as well as the NDS IW annexin 2018


DODI 3000.7 Definition and NDS 2018 IW Annex Definition:

 

      The 2007 DODI 3000.7 definition: a “ [violent] struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.” It said that IW consisted of UW, foreign internal defense (FID), CT, counterinsurgency, and stability operations (SO).

     2018 IW Annex: reaffirms above, less “violent”

     2018 IW Annex: IW is integral part of strategic competition - not separate or lesser included case

     2018 IW Annex: All services have to be able to conduct IW not just SOF

 

Draft input to the 3000.7 (2006)

 

“a form of warfare that has as its objective the credibility and/or the legitimacy of the relevant political authority with the goal of undermining or supporting that authority. Irregular warfare favors indirect approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities to seek asymmetric advantages, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.”

                                                                       -Working definition approved by Deputy Secretary of Defense, 17 April 2006

 

 

“ a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population”

                                                                       -Proposed OSD/Joint Staff                                                                       definition as of 25 Oct 06

 

IW JOC Version 0.7 as of December 2006:

 

     that the definition takes on different meaning at each level of war

     What makes IW different is the focus of its operations—a relevant population—and its strategic purpose—to gain or maintain control or influence over, and support of that population through political, psychological, and economic methods

     Logical lines of operation for a campaign could include Information, Intelligence, Developing Capability, and Combat operations

JP 1 FC states:

     Marked by a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population

     Goes to characteristics of the adversary and is not, per se, a new or independent type of warfare

     Indirect approach to erode power, influence, and will

 

 

Operations and Activities that Comprise IW (2006)

 

  1. Insurgency
  2. Counterinsurgency (COIN)
  3. Unconventional Warfare (UW)
  4. Terrorism
  5. Counterterrorism (CT)
  6. Foreign Internal Defense (FID)
  7. Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations
  8. Strategic Communications
  9. Psychological Operations
  10. Civil-Military Operations (CMO)
  11. Information Operations (IO)
  12. Intelligence and Counterintelligence Activities
  13. Transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms dealing, and illegal financial transactions that support or sustain irregular warfare and the law enforcement activities to counter them

                                              -Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept version 0.7

 

While we struggle to define IW Congress actually attempted to define IW but did not provide a doctrinally acceptable definition. Instead they really provide a way to describe an IW concept of operations to the US. A how to conduct IW by US forces.


Congress in the 2017 NDAA: Irregular Warfare is conducted “in support of predetermined United States policy and military objectives conducted by, with, and through regular forces, irregular forces, groups, and individuals participating in competition between state and non-state actors short of traditional armed conflict.”
 
I would change this to say “US” IW is conducted “in support of predetermined United States policy and military objectives conducted by, with, and through regular forces, irregular forces, groups, and individuals participating in competition between state and non-state actors short of traditional armed conflict.”


The above requires strategy and campaign planning for IW short of LSCO.


Lastly here is the Army's new definition of IW:


Army IW Definition JP 3-0 – Operations (2022)
 
1-40. Irregular warfare is the overt, clandestine, and covert employment of military and non-military capabilities across multiple domains by state and non-state actors through methods other than military domination of an adversary, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare. 


My final thought. While we debate the definition. I want to infuse IW (and political warfare) "thinking" into our military and the entire interagency.


”IW Thinking:” (Not a proposed definition of IW)
 
Because IW is the dominant form of war in the emergent human domain:

 

We need to infuse “irregular warfare thinking”* into DOD and “political warfare thinking” into the US government.
 
*What is “Irregular warfare thinking?” It is thinking about the human element in the full spectrum of competition and conflict up to and including conventional and nuclear war. It includes, but is not limited to, all aspects of lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, terrorism, political resistance, non-violent resistance, political violence, urban operations, stability operations, post-conflict operations, cyber operations, operations in the information environment (e.g., strategic influence through information advantage, information and influence activities, public diplomacy, psychological operations, military information support operations, public affairs), working through, with, and by indigenous forces and populations, in irregular warfare, political warfare, economic warfare, alliances, diplomacy, and competitive statecraft in all regions of the world. 
 
Irregular warfare is the military contribution to political warfare. Political warfare is the action of the whole of government in strategic competition.

 

We should also keep in mind that perfect is the enemy of good enough. Can we get a defintion that will be good enough to help us do strategy and campaign effectively in the IW environment?

Redefining Irregular Warfare: Legitimacy, Coercion, and Power - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by David H. Ucko · October 18, 2022

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The Department of Defense is working on a new definition of irregular warfare, and the stakes are surprisingly high. The danger lies not just in forgetting whatever was learned from twenty years of engagement with substate actors through counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Rather, in seeking to apply the term to state-based actors, the better to capture the subversive approach being used by America’s principal adversaries, there is a risk that irregular warfare will lose all its meaning. The issue is certainly not that irregular warfare is irrelevant to the strategic competition at hand—quite the contrary—but rather that the US military system is proving too traumatized by its counterinsurgency past, and too mired in its own orthodoxies, to grasp the contribution of the term. Before the value that irregular warfare provides is lost, an interrogation of its meaning is necessary. On this basis, this article sets out a reworked definition of irregular warfare, one that retains its crucial focus of on legitimacy, coercion, and political power but that is also applicable to interstate competition.

Why Redefine?

The Department of Defense officially defines irregular warfare as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s).” The term emerged from the challenges posed by nonstate armed groups, which necessarily engage in subversion and guile to outmaneuver militarily stronger states. In these efforts, mobilization, legitimacy, and credibility produce societal power, allowing adversaries weaker at the offset to paralyze stronger foes and, at times, prevail against seemingly impossible odds. Reflecting the approach, the official definition of irregular warfare specifies that it “favors indirect warfare and asymmetric warfare approaches” to direct military confrontation and seeks “to erode the adversary’s power, influence, and will” until a final military push, if necessary, can seal the deal.

Irregular warfare has always been a contested term, but it has served a valuable purpose to a military institution too often seduced by its own raw strength. Whatever the problems with the term, the effort to redefine it must therefore be taken on cautiously, lest its contribution is lost. Why, then, is this project officially being attempted? Four reasons come to mind.

First, there is concern that the definition of irregular warfare is too closely associated with insurgency and counterinsurgency, or with the types of major expeditionary efforts conducted in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Already, there is an effort to move from a “violent struggle . . . for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations” to a “struggle . . . to influence populations and affect legitimacy”—a broader remit—because the former was seen as too centered on counterinsurgency. The question is whether this attempt to distance irregular warfare from the legacy of unpopular counterinsurgency operations is being undertaken for the sake of conceptual precision and utility or, more likely, because that legacy is now so toxic.

Second, there is a related concern that irregular warfare is too narrowly focused on struggles between state and nonstate actors and must therefore be tweaked to account for state-based adversaries that adopt similar approaches, those that lean on asymmetrical methods and indirect attack. The current definition does specify that irregular warfare occurs “among state and non-state actors,” and so there is technically sufficient space therein to fit state-on-state confrontation. On that basis, this reservation about the nature of the actors involved appears minor, but it does raise a bigger issue. Specifically, irregular warfare has always been concerned with struggles relating to intrastate schisms, which would appear insufficient if the intent now is to apply the term also to interstate competitions.

Third, there is an official feeling that the definition of irregular warfare is too closely tied to the question of violence, which may work within counterinsurgency contexts but fits badly to the subversive and illicit activities of states seeking to outdo rival governments. As a result, the Pentagon has in recent reworkings of the term elided the mention of violence as a definitional marker, a seemingly minor change but one that significantly extends what irregular warfare may describe. Going further, others take issue with the language of “warfare” and have mooted “irregular competition” as a way to prevent the militarization of threats that are not uniformly violent in nature. Such a move, it is hoped, might also bring in the interagency and international partners that all irregular warfare practitioners are desperate to involve but who see any type of warfare as beyond their remit.

Fourth, in the post-counterinsurgency era, there is a growing weariness with the focus within irregular warfare on legitimacy and the business of affecting popular perceptions. As irregular warfare comes to describe an ever-growing range of activity, more and more observers are questioning whether it must always, by definition, have legitimacy as its root—as its center of gravity. On the one hand, the critique is driven by the conceptual stretching that irregular warfare has undergone, but on the other hand it is steeped also in the aversion to any apparent hearts-and-minds philosophy following the collapse of a counterinsurgency doctrine predicated on similar ideals. In the wake of its perceived failure, some view a focus on legitimacy as unnecessarily idealistic and even as inappropriate within a context of hard-nosed power politics.

Roadblocks

These urges are informing the effort to redefine irregular warfare, but their aggregate effect risks turning it into something very alien to its nature: a catchall for any state behavior that is subversive or manipulative but that does not amount to outright war.

The logic at hand is that states, much like insurgents, are behaving illicitly, ambiguously, or asymmetrically, but on a global scale, in order to offset their conventional military weakness versus the United States. This commonality of approach between insurgent and state adversaries has been central to the expansion of irregular warfare to define both, as the US military needed a lens through which to understand hostile and coercive state behavior that did not explicitly or transparently cross the threshold into war. Writing in Moscow in 1946, George Kennan famously cast the approach as “political warfare,” not a term he coined but which he rightly described as “the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace.” The issue, however, is that while states can certainly be as conniving, as deceptive, and as subversive as insurgents, the overlap with irregular warfare as we knew it is too thin to warrant its wholesale importation into this new world.

Three problems become immediately clear. First, if the concern is state manipulation, subversion, or interference, why not just speak plainly of such behavior using precisely those terms? What is the added value of “irregular warfare” in explaining traditional (if illicit) forms of statecraft, particularly when response falls to agencies and instruments of state that typically have little to do with warfare? The use of illicit activities is not the definitional marker of irregular warfare within societies, and so why should it define irregular warfare among states? There has to be something more specific and narrower to allow this concept to be meaningful.

Second, the implied definitional point that irregular warfare occurs below the threshold of actual war makes the invocation of the “w” word all-the-more puzzling. Excluding violence from irregular warfare’s remit also removes from this term the very political violence that it has always sought to explain, be it by nonstate armed groups using all forms of violence, from terrorism to civil war, or even state efforts to conquer one another within a context of winning legitimacy and quashing dissent. Meanwhile, taking violence out of the equation makes it very difficult to distinguish between sharp-elbowed competition and irregular warfare. Where does the one end and the other start? As one indication of the ensuing confusion, the Joint Staff’s Office of Irregular Warfare was recently renamed to include also, in its title, “and Competition.” The conflation makes sense, given the spectrum of ways in which irregular strategies operate—from the kinetic to the nonkinetic—but it does not follow that irregular warfare is inherently limited to the latter.

Third, and most gravely, the attempt to distance legitimacy and credibility from the definition of irregular warfare robs the term of its unique contribution to strategic thinking. The danger here lies in turning irregular warfare into a study of tactics, losing sight of precisely why the approach is deployed: as a contest of legitimacy, with all else feeding into that. The central message of irregular warfare is that legitimacy can be translated into irresistible power. Legitimacy is why thousands of Ukrainians, even those based in the EU, are flooding back into that country to fight, all while Russians are leaving their country to avoid the same. Legitimacy is the target of all disinformation, manipulation, active measures, and terrorism that we associate with irregular warfare, because these efforts seek to erode the cohesion and resolve of set adversaries. Legitimacy is also at the root of societal and political resilience and to resistance efforts against stronger foes. Indeed, the focus on legitimacy is the most important component of irregular warfare. If it is lost, so is irregular warfare.

Crucially, the struggle for legitimacy is no popularity contest. As Stathis Kalyvas explains with reference to “geographical loyalty,” raw power can readily override political and social preferences. Those who wield control—those who decide who lives or dies—can usually produce the compliance they seek. Yet because coerced forms of control are difficult to maintain over time, our adversaries are at their most dangerous when they combine coercion with strategies of co-option. In a similar vein, it should always have been realized that winning hearts and minds necessarily includes more than being liked, namely shaping the subject’s behavior and preferences through the application of all relevant sources of power. In contrast to the caricaturesque understanding of this term that was allowed to dominate most counterinsurgency discussion, the point was always to blend power with co-option in a way that appealed both to hearts (sentiments of support) and minds (calculation of interest). A similar duality applies to legitimacy.

A Way Forward

In one strong sense, irregular warfare is already irredeemable. The term is defined in contradistinction to “traditional warfare,” a flawed heuristic that betrays the ahistorical and narrow character of much official thinking within the military. And yet, ironically for this very reason, irregular warfare has significant utility in reminding us, especially the Department of Defense, of just how wars typically unfold and how power is decided. We might just be better off speaking of war as war and eschewing artificial delineations between conventional and irregular operations, but not so long as terminological asceticism implies the reductive understanding of war typical of military institutions. Despite its many flaws, then, irregular warfare seems likely to stay, and we therefore face the challenge of grasping its relevance to the strategic competition currently faced by the United States.

That irregular warfare is indeed relevant to understanding and countering the strategies imposed by Russia, China, and the like is beyond doubt. Russia has engaged in interstate irregular warfare since at least 1917 and will presumably revert to kind given the poor returns achieved through conventional warfare in Ukraine. China also boasts extensive experience with irregular warfare, which it now uses to upend the international system formed following World War II. On a smaller scale, Iran and North Korea have demonstrated their proficiency with irregular warfare, which has allowed them to sponsor state and nonstate proxies, amass regional power, and increase their influence. Cuba and Vietnam did likewise. That these states have adopted nonstate-like strategies should not surprise, in that their approaches are all rooted within each country’s foundation through successful insurgency. It is puzzling, and unfortunate, that despite being formed through similar circumstances, the United States has so resolutely forgotten the lessons of its past.

But what does it mean for a state to conduct irregular warfare? How can this term be helpful in unpacking what the United States is facing and in mounting a response? Drawing on our recent research, our argument is for a return to basics, so that irregular warfare can regain its intended meaning and be applied more expressly to this new strategic context. In narrowing the field of options that “irregular warfare” can helpfully describe, it is true that the utility of the term may seem diminished. Ironically, it is precisely through such conservativism that irregular warfare survives, because a concept that describes virtually everything is also good for virtually nothing.

On this basis, a few principles emerge. First, irregular warfare is inherently about intrasocietal schisms. Irregular warfare describes the mobilization of some against others, so as to allow a militarily weaker actor to gain power at the expense of a stronger adversary. Where direct approaches are deemed too hazardous, energy and verve are found by attacking the foundations of the status quo and creating a new world, and new norms, that the powers that be cannot resist. Much as any other type of warfare, irregular warfare is fundamentally about politics, as actors struggle over the right to lead.

Second, violence, or at least coercion, is inherent to irregular warfare, as it distinguishes this type of approach from sharp-elbowed competition, such as that one may find even in democratic party politics. Coercion can range from low-level violence or even threats thereof to outright combat in service of an irregular warfare strategy, as seen in the Vietnam War, in Colombia’s struggle against FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), or even in Russia’s ongoing conventional assault on Ukraine—given its broad targeting of the legitimacy of that state; Russia’s reliance, alongside force, on more indirect and asymmetric types of attack; and the strategic clash therein between contending worldviews and narratives. Logically, the presence or threat of coercion is a necessary ingredient, given the description of the whole as a form of warfare.

Third, the chief definitional criterion of irregular warfare is its strategic intent: to erode or build legitimacy and influence. Methods may vary over time—they may span the direct and the indirect, the kinetic and the nonviolent—but the totality of the project is irregular if it is grounded in a struggle for legitimacy. The issue must be engaged with at this strategic level, in terms of its objective, as it is the intent that informs the nature of subsidiary actions taken, be they seemingly unwarlike or clearly belligerent. When an insurgent group is distributing aid or providing medical services, it is for the same strategic reason that it engages in terrorism and violent attack—to contest legitimacy and forge a path to victory. When it quietly and nonviolently mobilizes societal support, it is to assist the eventual seizure of power. The broader project, and intent, is irregular warfare.

Fourth, given the above parameters, state use of irregular warfare becomes something far more precise than a general sense of competing. Specifically, states use irregular warfare when they seek to accentuate (or mitigate) the schisms in targeted societies, thereby to gain power and influence. Offensively, this type of approach might entail sponsoring terrorism and insurgency abroad, engaging in election interference to subvert democratic integrity or to stoke social conflict, or undermining the legitimacy of a state so that a rival actor can rise up. Defensively, the challenge lies in how to react and how to guard against such actions. On the whole, this view of state-based engagement takes us back to two key missions of irregular warfare—foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare, respectively about fostering resilience and empowering resistance. The overriding context for such activity, however, is the competition for legitimacy in which these actors are embroiled, with foreign actors stoking the fire in their own ways.

Fifth, one can, strictly by analogy, conceive of a broader interpretation of irregular warfare as a global competition of legitimacy, whereby a country seeks power by accentuating the schisms between different world orders. International society then becomes the equivalent of domestic society, with states and actors assuming the role of its population. Thus, much as thinkers like David Kilcullen and James A. Bates saw within al-Qaeda’s efforts a “global insurgency,” it is possible to view China as involved in a global campaign of irregular warfare—a multifaceted, international offensive that weaponizes all normal instruments of power, everything from diplomacy to economic levers, and integrates them with kinetic menace and direct application. From this vantage point, the Communist Chinese Party is on a global quest to reshape international society much as it did with Chinese society back in 1949, and via strikingly similar means.

Mercifully, outright violence has so far been absent from the Chinese approach, which instead features growing economic ties, investment and loans, along with generous servings of disinformation, subversion, and threats. Still, these efforts can helpfully be framed as irregular warfare on a global scale, with the foregoing nonviolent efforts cast as but the shaping phase for a later military face-off with the United States, a confrontation that might not even be needed if US resolve can be so sapped during peacetime that it refuses the fight even when its core interests are at stake. Certainly, a country such as Taiwan is already keenly aware of this playbook. China’s expansion into the South China Sea has been largely nonviolent, relying instead on civilian and economic efforts, although it is rooted in a common awareness of the military realities at hand. In securing territory along with trade and communications routes, China is also positioning itself for an eventual attack on Taiwan, either threatened or carried out when necessary. Even if violence is kept at bay, coercion can prove a formidable weapon.

If it is our perception that China is launching a similar effort against the United States, the strategic objective provides the necessary context to classify constituent actions as part of this irregular warfare campaign. One may then see components of the overall struggle in how China weaponizes dependence on its economic support, in its resulting lack of transparency in trade negotiations, in its unchecked engagement in illegal activities (ranging from illegal fishing to usage of corruption and organized crime), and in its deft control of what can be said and done internationally about its domestic politics. The point of these activities can then be viewed through the prism of a competition for legitimacy, but at a global level, with US credibility and appeal targeted to clear the way for the Chinese takeover. Crucially, this lens retains the focus on the strategic objective and theory of victory—and defines tactics accordingly. The alternative, to begin with the toolkit of tactics and see them as “irregular warfare,” misses the forest for the trees.

Conclusion: A New Definition

The principles laid out above provide the blueprint for a new definition: “Irregular warfare is a coercive struggle that erodes or builds legitimacy for the purpose of political power. It blends disparate lines of effort to create an integrated attack on societies and their political institutions. It weaponizes frames and narratives to affect credibility and resolve, and it exploits societal vulnerabilities to fuel political change. As such, states engaged in, or confronted with, irregular warfare must bring all elements of power to bear under their national political leadership.”

This proposed definition of irregular warfare respects the etiology of the term and, thus, the reasons for its coinage; but it also applies it to a new strategic environment. It retains the lessons of two decades of involvement in irregular warfare yet allows for the internationalization of irregular struggles within a global competition for power. In seeking to redeem irregular warfare, it does not demilitarize the term, but instead insists on coercion as a component of the whole, thereby justifying its martial connotations and giving the armed forces a natural role to play. In its crucial retention of legitimacy as the center of gravity, however, it also strongly implies that whatever the Department of Defense can do to help must be in support of civilian actors and political strategies.

Left to resolve, then, is this striking contradiction raised by irregular warfare in practice, namely the great difficulty of authorizing, resourcing, and mobilizing the instruments of statecraft necessary for its prosecution. At present, there is no civilian operational system into which to emplace irregular warfare as defined: with exceedingly few exceptions, there is no civilian replica for the military’s doctrine, organization, institutionalized intellectual efforts, and operational templates to prosecute this mission. Indeed, there is also no culture, outside of the military, to do organized, troops-to-task thinking about security, however broadly defined. Until this reality is addressed, irregular warfare—intellectually as well as in practice—will fall to the same community within the Department of Defense, with scant impact on the broader system responsible both for assessment and response. Might the redefinition of irregular warfare, if properly handled, spur the necessary change?

David H. Ucko (@daviducko) is professor and chair of the War & Conflict Studies Department at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University. He is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and a senior visiting fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Dr. Thomas A. Marks is a distinguished professor and serves as the Major General Edward G. Lansdale chair of irregular warfighting strategy at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University.

This article draws in part on the second edition of Crafting Strategy for Irregular Warfare: A Framework for Analysis and Action (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2022), which was published earlier this month.

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

Image credit: 1st Lt. Benjamin Haulenbeek, US Army

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mwi.usma.edu · by David H. Ucko · October 18, 2022




11. Data Incoming: How to Close the Cyber Data Gap


Conclusion:

The federal government is about to receive an influx of new cyber-incident data. To capitalize on this resource, agencies should invest in analysis, sharing, and public release of the data and synthesize it with all other available data about cyber security. If the government succeeds, it will develop the most comprehensive picture the United States has ever had regarding cyber security and cyber threats. A clearer view of this landscape, in turn, is a key step in improving cyber policy and reducing cyber attacks against U.S. infrastructure.


Data Incoming: How to Close the Cyber Data Gap - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Jennifer Shore · October 18, 2022

How many cyber attacks happen in the United States each year? How many Americans are affected? Right now, we have little idea about answers to basic questions such as these. That is about to change. With a flurry of new regulations over the last year, U.S. companies will now be subject to expanded cyber-incident reporting requirements mandating them to submit information to the federal government about cyber attacks, data breaches, and other occurrences that compromise information systems. As such, the government is about to gain a valuable resource that offers unprecedented insight into the state of cyber security in the United States. Agencies receiving these incident reports should scale up data analysis and expand private sector and international cooperation to take advantage of this data.

The Cyber Security Data Gap

The U.S. government provides little publicly available large-scale data or data analysis regarding cyber security. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Management and Budget issue annual reports on certain cyber incidents, and the Treasury Department has published analysis of cyber incidents targeting banking and financial institutions. The Department of Health and Human ServicesSecurities and Exchange CommissionDepartment of Energy, and some state governments also release varying amounts of cyber incident or breach data reported to them. While this data is useful, it represents only a portion of what the government collects now and will begin to collect under new requirements. There is more the government can do to make available and provide analysis of the data it receives.

Industry and academia have also been unable to fill the gap. Academic researchers generally study cyber incidents reported in the press, but much of cyber conflict remains covert or is never publicly reported. Companies providing cyber security services have a wealth of incident data, and insurance companies gather details from cyber-related claims. However, this data is proprietary, which has limited its use and access.

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The paucity of cyber data is a relative anomaly compared with data on safety risks, hazards, and incidents in other industries and professions. There are 13 statistical agencies and more than a hundred additional statistical programs spread across the federal government. These entities cover labor, justice, transportation, economics, and health, among other areas. The federal government also collects data about aircraft incidentshighway safetyhospital injuries and deaths, and workplace injuries. This information is meant to improve public and consumer safety. Collecting cyber data would have the same purpose, with the added urgency that such data could reveal national security threats. It is standard practice in other fields for the U.S. government to collect, analyze, and release safety-related information: Cyber security is the exception.

Cyber data is important for many reasons. A fuller data set would allow the U.S. government to prioritize threats, allocate resources to policy efforts, and measure the success of those efforts. It would also help organizations to understand the scale and scope of risks they face and invest in cyber resilience measures. Insurance companies could use cyber data to develop better risk models to set rates. Finally, the data could illuminate which cyber security practices are associated with greater resilience or faster recovery from attacks, providing organizations with best practices.

Policymakers and experts generally agree that there is a serious deficiency in cyber security metrics. The White House National Cyber Director Chris Inglis stated that without data collection “we are going to be uneven, and perhaps less-than-optimal in our response to any of these threats.” Two scholars of cyber conflict wrote in 2018 that without good cyber-incident reporting the United States is “operating in [a] known environment needlessly wearing a blindfold.” Things have improved since 2018, but there is still room for further progress.

To address this, in 2020 the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission proposed forming a Bureau of Cyber Statistics. Some legislation has been introduced that sought to advance this, including most recently a proposed amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act. However, until now, these legislative efforts have not succeeded.

In the meantime, there has been a flurry of laws and regulations about cyber-incident reporting. These are probably at least partly spurred by a series of major cyber incidents targeting U.S. infrastructure in 2021 as well as fears of a Russian cyber attack against the United States following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While such incident reporting requirements would not take the place of a longer-term effort to establish a cyber statistics entity, these requirements would be a good start to advancing the mission that this office would ultimately undertake.

Current Cyber Data Landscape

The most significant source of incident-reporting data that the federal government can use to fill the cyber data gap is the information that companies will submit under the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act, which was passed into law in March. The details of what companies and incidents the law covers are still being worked out, but the law will probably be the most comprehensive cyber-incident reporting scheme the country has.

However, it could take two or more years until the law goes into effect. Until then, the federal government should use the incident reports submitted under other federal and state requirements to generate useful statistics. At the federal level, there are over 20 regulations and laws requiring incident reporting. These requirements have increased in the last year: In addition to the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Credit Union Association are exploring increased incident-reporting requirements, and the Transportation Security Agency and banking regulators have already successfully expanded requirements. Additionally, four states recently enacted cyber-incident reporting requirements and two have imposed ransomware laws requiring state and local governments to report ransomware incidents.

Federal agencies should synthesize this government incident-reporting data with industry data to build a more holistic and detailed picture of the cyber-threat landscape. Several companies, such as Verizon and Advisen, maintain databases of tens of thousands of cyber incidents. In addition, the government should request anonymized data from insurance and cyber security companies.

Finally, think tanks and researchers have created datasets of publicly reported cyber incidents that the government could use to complement incident-reporting data. The Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the University of Maryland have maintained such databases dating back to 2005, 2006, and 2014, respectively. The CyberPeace Institute has likewise created more narrowly focused databases of cyber incidents regarding the Ukraine invasion and the healthcare sector.

U.S. cyber-incident data would be even more valuable if combined with similar data from other countries. Some countries, like New ZealandAustraliaJapanEstonia, and Singapore are already collecting and publishing cyber-incident data. The United KingdomIsrael, and Canada also survey businesses regarding cyber security issues and publish the results. Canada and the European Union are considering requiring broader cyber-incident reporting, and India recently passed such a law. The U.S. government should establish data-sharing agreements and coordinate with partners and allies to release and share consistent data across countries.

Finally, the U.S. government could also conduct a national survey of cyber security practitioners in private sector organizations. The survey could be modeled on those conducted by CanadaIsrael, and the United Kingdom, and ask practitioners about cyber threats they face or anticipate as well as cyber security practices they adopt.

Promoting Data Standards

To promote robust, consistent data, the U.S. government should establish voluntary standards for industry and international partners and allies regarding measuring and collecting information about cyber threats and cyber security. For instance, countries could agree on a common set of data fields in cyber-incident reporting forms and a shared definition of a “cyber incident.” There is precedent for international standards of measurement: International organizations have developed a System of National Accounts that lays out standards of data collection and measurement to inform countries’ calculation of GDP. Cyber should have a similar set of standards.

The U.S. government should also provide capacity-building support and technical expertise to other countries and U.S. state and local governments to help them collect and make use of cyber-incident data. The federal government should offer data science training and expertise to help analyze trends in and conduct studies about cyber data. The federal government should also provide advisory support for countries developing cyber-incident reporting laws and regulations.

How to Analyze Cyber Data

Federal agencies could use the totality of cyber data to answer important policy and research questions about cyber security. The most basic use of such cyber data would be to paint a holistic picture of the cyber-threat landscape. In other words, how many cyber attacks happen and what is their effect on U.S. infrastructure, people, and the economy?

While it may sound rudimentary, we have little idea about answers to these questions. Take ransomware as an example. In the last year, various private sector organizations simultaneously found that ransomware incidents were either increasingstaying the same, or decreasing. Different private sector reports also provide conflicting findings regarding the sectors most targeted by cyber attacks.

The U.S. government could act as an arbiter, compiling and synthesizing all available data sources to provide authoritative assessments of cyber threats. U.S. cyber data, when pooled with other countries’ data, could also provide an international view of cyber threats and capabilities, which would allow researchers to better compare and rank countries’ abilities. While neither the government nor industry can ever be sure of the total number of cyber incidents, the government can play a role in dramatically improving visibility.

Two recent reports on the number of ransomware attacks can serve as models. The E.U. Agency for Cybersecurity recently released a publication that combined ransomware incidents reported to governments with those reported by the press and private sector to develop analysis of overall ransomware trends. The Institute for Security and Technology published a similar report by synthesizing data from five private companies. The U.S. government could base its own analysis off these models by combining incident-reporting data with various other sources to develop an overall understanding of threats.

Researchers could also use cyber-incident data to address the cost of cyber attacks to the U.S. economy — and the money saved by investing in cyber security. Various organizations including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the International Business Machines Corporation, and the White House Council of Economic Advisors have attempted to quantify the losses stemming from cyber incidents. These estimates vary widely, partly because they rely on different methodologies and partly due to the lack of comprehensive data. Additionally, researchers have sought to determine the economic returns on firms’ cyber security investments. A better understanding of the economics of cyber security could help firms to invest appropriately in cyber-resilience measures.

Cyber-incident data could also enable research on the impacts of cyber attacks on specific types of organizations and sectors to help direct resources to the most pressing risks. For instance, cyber-incident data could help to uncover the types of organizations and infrastructure most at risk of compromise. In the past, researchers have used the Department of Health and Human Services’ data breach database to determine how hospital size and teaching status affect the likelihood of a breach occurring, and how the type of data and organization targeted in healthcare breaches have evolved over time.

There are likely many other ways in which cyber-incident data could be used in academic research — especially if combined with private sector and open-source data. It will be hard to anticipate and plan for all of these uses in advance, which is why the government should make the data as widely available as possible in accordance with confidentiality and privacy restrictions. Since not all data will be shareable with the public, the government should also hire researchers in a variety of fields to produce in-house analysis.

Conclusion

The federal government is about to receive an influx of new cyber-incident data. To capitalize on this resource, agencies should invest in analysis, sharing, and public release of the data and synthesize it with all other available data about cyber security. If the government succeeds, it will develop the most comprehensive picture the United States has ever had regarding cyber security and cyber threats. A clearer view of this landscape, in turn, is a key step in improving cyber policy and reducing cyber attacks against U.S. infrastructure.

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Jennifer Shore is a graduate student at Princeton Universitys School of Public and International Affairs. She was previously a fellow at the White House National Economic Council during the Obama administration.

Image: U.S. Army

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warontherocks.com · by Jennifer Shore · October 18, 2022



12.  Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine


For all my security assistance and DSCA professionals who are doing yeoman's work to provide weapons to Ukraine. We have been very critical but they have made a tremendous effort despite the political friction and rules, regulations, and restrictions.


Just consider what might have happened had early requests been approved sooner.


Excerpts:


In early October, Russia launched a series of missile strikes on Kyiv and a number of other cities, killing more than three dozen people and damaging civilian infrastructure across the country. The attacks, which came in response to a large blast that damaged the bridge connecting the Russian mainland to Crimea, offered renewed force to Ukraine’s calls for Western air defenses. According to the senior Defense official, the challenge in providing such weapons is more technical than political: “There aren’t that many spare air-defense systems to give.” The U.S. military is not going to pull its existing Patriot batteries or NASAMs—two ground-based air-defense systems Ukraine has been requesting—from, say, South Korea or the Middle East. They have to be manufactured and procured. However, the Defense official said, Ukraine should be receiving the first two NASAMS in late October or early November, with more to follow.
The Biden Administration has also announced a military-aid package worth more than a billion dollars, bringing the total amount the U.S. has spent on arming Ukraine over the past year to sixteen billion. Among the key items in this package were an additional eighteen HIMARS systems, more than doubling the number in Ukraine’s arsenal. Ukrainian officials are now eying a number of items that, they argue, would allow even more aggressive counter-offensives: modern NATO-standard battle tanks, fighter jets such as F-16s, and the long-range ATACMS for striking logistics and ammunition hubs in Crimea.
Reznikov is certain that such deliveries are inevitable. “When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible,” he said. “Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimetre guns, the answer was no. HIMARS, no. HARM, no. Now all of that is a yes.” He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and ATACMS and F-16s.”
With the help of the U.S. and NATO, he went on, Ukraine’s military has shown that Russia can be confronted. “We are not afraid of Russia,” he said. “And we are asking our partners in the West to also no longer be afraid.”




Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine

Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Biden Administration has provided valuable intelligence and increasingly powerful weaponry—a risky choice that has paid off in the battle against Putin.

By 

October 17, 2022

The New Yorker · by Joshua Yaffa · October 17, 2022

In early September, Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, travelled from the center of Kyiv to a U.S. airbase in Ramstein-Miesenbach, Germany, where NATO officials were gathering to discuss military support for Ukraine. The trip, a distance of about twelve hundred miles, roughly the equivalent of travelling from New York to Minneapolis, lasted the better part of a day. Because there are no flights out of Ukraine, Reznikov had to take a car to the border and a plane the rest of the way. As he set off from the capital, he couldn’t help but hope for good news. Ukrainian forces had opened a second flank in an ambitious counter-offensive, a surprise operation in the direction of Russian-occupied territory in the Kharkiv region. “I learned not to raise my expectations too high,” Reznikov said, “especially in wartime.”

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appointed Reznikov defense minister last November, just three months before the Russian invasion. Reznikov is a lawyer and a longtime fixture of Kyiv politics, a veteran of the Soviet Air Force and an avid skydiver. He now serves as a lead negotiator securing the Western arms his country needs to continue its fight. “I get a certain request from the generals,” he said.“Then I explain to our partners the need for it.”

At the time of Reznikov’s trip to Ramstein, the war was in what he called its third phase. “The first phase was simply to hold off the enemy in those places where they managed to break through,” he said. This was the battle for Kyiv and for Ukraine’s survival as a sovereign state, which Russia effectively lost. “The second was to stabilize the front and achieve something resembling an equal opposition of forces on the battlefield.” Russia, which had occupied a number of key cities in Ukraine’s south and east, retained a sizable advantage in terms of heavy weapons; its long-distance missiles could rain down terror and death across the battlefield and beyond, clearing the way for its troops to advance. But Ukraine received enough artillery systems and munitions from the U.S. and other NATO states to mount an adequate response. “This allowed the country’s military and political leadership to think seriously about the third phase,” Reznikov said. “That is, launching an offensive operation.”

Vladimir Putin had effectively embraced the stalemate of the war’s second phase, wagering that, as the front lines held and the conflict increasingly disrupted global energy and food supplies, the Ukrainian public would tire of the war and the West’s commitment would wane. There was some basis for questioning the durability of U.S. and NATO support—it seemed to strengthen in proportion to Ukraine’s ability to repel Russian forces. “We have seen U.S. arms supplies contribute to real success on the battlefield, which has in turn consolidated support for providing more,” a Biden Administration official involved in Ukraine policy told me. “But one could imagine things reversed: if the former were not the case, then maybe the latter wouldn’t be, either.”

As spring turned to summer, Reznikov sensed a growing weariness in some Western capitals. The attitude, he said, was, “O.K., well, we helped Ukraine resist, we kept them from being destroyed.” Reznikov and other officials wanted to demonstrate to their partners in the West that the Ukrainian Army could reclaim large swaths of Russian-occupied territory. “The counter-offensive would show that it’s one thing to take part in helping the victim,” Reznikov said, “another to realize you can punish the aggressor.”

In July, military officials from Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom converged at a base in Europe to plot out possible scenarios. The Ukrainians’ starting point was a broad campaign across the southern front, a push to liberate not only the occupied city of Kherson but hundreds of square miles in the nearby Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. The military planners met in three rooms, divided by country, where experts ran the same tabletop exercises. They often worked twenty hours a day, with American and British military officials helping to hone the Ukrainians’ strategy. “We have algorithms and methodologies that are more sophisticated when it comes to things like mapping out logistics and calculating munitions rates,” a senior official at the Defense Department said. “The idea was not to tell them what to do but, rather, to give them different runs to test their plans.”

The initial tabletop exercises showed that a unified push across the southern front would come at a high cost to Ukrainian equipment and manpower. It looked ill advised. “They ran this version of the offensive many times and just couldn’t get the model to work,” the Defense official said.


In the south, Ukraine had been battering Russian positions with American-provided precision rocket systems. In response, Russia’s generals had moved a considerable number of units out of the Kharkiv region, in the northeast, to back up forces near Kherson. The assembled planners settled on an idea that would take advantage of this vulnerability: a two-front offensive. Shortly afterward, Reznikov was informed of the plans. “It wasn’t the first time I was struck by our military’s ability to come up with unexpected solutions,” he said. “I understood it was up to me to get them the necessary weapons.”

In late August, Ukrainian ground forces started their push toward Kherson. It was a slow, grinding operation, with both sides suffering heavy losses. A week later, troops dashed toward Russian lines in the Kharkiv region, a move that clearly caught Russian military leaders off guard. With so many units relocated to the south, a number of territories in the northeast were guarded by under-equipped Russian forces and riot police with little combat experience. Many of them simply abandoned their positions and ran off, leaving behind crates of ammunition, and even a few tanks. Ukrainian troops sped through one town after another, often on Western-supplied fighting vehicles, such as Humvees and Australian Bushmaster armored personnel carriers.

Reznikov was still en route to the Ramstein Air Base when he first received a text message about the breakthrough near Kharkiv. The Ukrainian armed forces had retaken Balakliya, a key gateway city in the region. Reznikov pictured the map in his head, counting the next towns likely to be liberated. He was travelling with a small delegation that included top officials from the general staff and military intelligence, who were also receiving updates from the front. They began comparing notes. Ukrainian units moved east, toward Kupyansk, an important logistics hub, then spread north and south, retaking key roads and rail junctions. By the time Reznikov landed in Germany, on September 8th, paratroopers had reached the Oskil River, thirty miles behind what had been the Russian front line just hours before. Within days, the Ukrainian military recaptured more than seven hundred square miles of territory.

The next morning, Reznikov met with Lloyd Austin, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They had been briefed on the counter-offensive, and joined Reznikov in tracking the military’s progress on a map. Both maintained their composure, Reznikov noted, but they were clearly excited. “Their faces were glowing,” he said. “They knew what was happening, and what this meant.”

In the afternoon, Reznikov addressed a group of thirty NATO defense ministers. “The success of Ukraine’s counterattack is thanks to you,” he said.

He later told me, “Of course, I meant the U.S. most of all.”

Prior to this year’s invasion, officials in Kyiv often felt as if the political establishment in Washington viewed their country as little more than a bit player in a geopolitical game. “Ukraine was not considered to have its own agency,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Zelensky, said, “but rather as just one of the many elements in managing the relationship with Russia.”

In 2014, Putin had ordered Russian troops with no insignia—the so-called little green men—to Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, and sparked a separatist conflict in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine retained a largely Soviet-style military, with a baroque bureaucracy and Cold War hardware. Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, appealed to Barack Obama for more and better weapons. Obama’s concern, according to the senior Defense official, was that, “if we escalated, the Russians would counter-escalate, and the conflict would spiral.” Joe Biden, then the Vice-President, was more inclined to provide arms. The Defense official said, “He had the position that if Putin had to explain to Russian mothers why caskets were coming back home, that could affect his calculus.”

Ukrainian officials were particularly adamant in their requests for one weapon: the shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile, which takes its name from the similarity of its flight path to that of a spear—the missile arcs nearly five hundred feet into the air, then back down, striking a tank or armored vehicle from above, where it’s most vulnerable. “The Javelin was the one thing the Ukrainians understood they really needed,” Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser in the Obama White House, said. “It was also a purely defensive weapon, which, they hoped, could make it relatively easier for us to supply.”

Obama declined to provide any lethal arms at all. Instead, the Administration focussed its efforts on training Ukrainian forces. At a base near Yavoriv, in western Ukraine, fifteen miles from the Polish border, instructors from the U.S. and other NATO countries taught the principles of small-unit tactics and trained a new branch of Ukrainian special forces. Still, Carol Northrup, who was then the U.S. defense attaché at the Embassy in Kyiv, said, the Ukrainians “were much more interested in our stuff than our advice. They would say, ‘We want stuff.’ And we’d answer, ‘We want to train you.’ ”

Donald Trump came into office promising improved relations with Russia, which alarmed officials in Kyiv. But his Administration approved the Javelins. The first shipment—about two hundred missiles and thirty-seven launchers—arrived in Ukraine in the spring of 2018. The following year, an anonymous whistle-blower revealed that, during an official phone call with Zelensky, Trump had implied that future Javelin sales could be linked to a “favor.” The President wanted Zelensky to look into an obscure conspiracy theory suggesting that the Ukrainian government, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, and to order the investigation of a case involving the work of Biden’s son Hunter on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. The exchange led to Trump’s first impeachment trial. It also unlocked U.S. military aid for Ukraine: Congress, with bipartisan support, insured that a package worth two hundred and fifty million dollars was released.

Zelensky saw Biden’s election as a chance to re-start relations with the U.S. In the spring of 2021, Russia began assembling troops and equipment on the Ukrainian border. That September, during a meeting with Zelensky at the White House, Biden announced an additional sixty million dollars in security assistance, including more Javelins. The two Presidents projected an air of mutual interest and bonhomie, but Zelensky left Washington without commitments on two key issues, both of which he had raised with Biden: creating a path for Ukraine’s admittance to NATO, and preventing the startup of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would allow Russia to circumvent Ukraine in supplying natural gas to Germany and the rest of Europe.


That fall, intelligence data showed that Russia had positioned more than a hundred thousand troops along the Ukrainian border. “At that point, we weren’t yet sure if Putin had made the ultimate decision to invade,” a person familiar with White House discussions on Ukraine said. “But it was without doubt that he was giving himself the capability to do so.”

In November, Biden dispatched the director of the C.I.A., William Burns, on a secret trip to Moscow. Burns had previously served as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia and had often dealt with Putin personally. In the course of two days, Burns met with Putin’s inner circle of advisers, including Alexander Bortnikov, the director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Kremlin’s Security Council. He also had an hour-long phone call with Putin, who, wary of COVID and increasingly isolated, was hunkered down in his Presidential residence in Sochi. Burns thought that Putin sounded cool and dispassionate, as if his mind was nearly made up. Upon returning to Washington, Burns relayed his findings to Biden. The message, according to Burns, was that “Putin thought Zelensky a weak leader, that the Ukrainians would cave, and that his military could achieve a decisive victory at minimal cost.”

In January, Burns made a trip to Kyiv to warn Zelensky. The Orthodox Christmas had just passed, and a festive atmosphere lingered in Ukraine’s capital, with decorations lining the streets. Zelensky understood the implications of the intelligence that Burns presented, but he still thought it was possible to avoid a large-scale invasion. For starters, he was reluctant to do anything that might set off a political and economic crisis inside Ukraine. He also worried that mobilizing the military could inadvertently provide Putin with a casus belli. Burns was sympathetic with the dilemma, but he emphasized that the looming danger was not hypothetical. Burns specifically told Zelensky that Russian forces planned to seize the Hostomel airport, twenty miles from the capital, and use it as a staging point for flying in troops and equipment.

At the White House, a “Tiger Team,” made up of experts from the State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs, and intelligence agencies, carried out exercises to anticipate the shape of a Russian attack. After Putin came to power, two decades ago, the Kremlin leadership had advertised a wide-scale effort to modernize its armed forces. The C.I.A. and other Western intelligence agencies concluded that Russia’s military would overwhelm Ukraine. Intelligence assessments at the time were that Putin expected Russian forces to seize Kyiv within seventy-two hours. “We thought it might take a few days longer than the Russians did,” the Defense Department official said, “but not much longer.”

Outwardly, Zelensky acted as if war were not inevitable. “The captains should not leave the ship,” he said near the end of January. “I don’t think we have a Titanic here.” But he did take the prospect of a Russian invasion seriously. “There’s a difference between what you articulate with the public and what you are actually doing,” Oleksiy Danilov, Zelensky’s national-security adviser, said. “We couldn’t allow for panic in society.”

Behind the scenes, Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials were asking the U.S. for a significant infusion of weapons. “At each phase, they just said give us everything under the sun,” an Administration official said. “We tailored what we provided to the actual situation they were facing.” In late January, the Administration announced that it was sending a two-hundred-million-dollar package of military aid, which included three hundred more Javelins and, for the first time, Stingers, the man-portable anti-aircraft systems, or MANPADs, that had played a key role in the mujahideen’s defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan. “You can’t take over a country with MANPADs,” the Defense Department official said. “But you can defend an airport from an airborne assault.”

U.S. Air Force transport planes, carrying crates of arms, began landing several times a week in Kyiv. The Biden Administration had also declassified summaries of its intelligence assessments, issuing public warnings that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. Many U.S. officials believed that Zelensky wasn’t ready to accept the urgency of the threat. In multiple conversations with Biden, Zelensky brought up the negative impact that the talk of war was having on Ukraine’s stock market and its investment climate. “It’s fair to say the fact that those issues remained a priority item as late as they did raised some eyebrows,” the person familiar with the White House’s Ukraine policy said.

Six months earlier, the Taliban had seized power in Afghanistan within days of the U.S. withdrawal. The Biden Administration had wagered that the U.S.-backed Afghan Army could fight the Taliban to a stalemate over the course of several months. When it came to the Russian threat in Ukraine, U.S. defense and security officials erred on the side of alarmism. “I think in some ways we transposed the Afghan experience onto the Ukrainians,” the senior Defense Department official said. Podolyak, Zelensky’s adviser, felt that the warnings coming from Washington and elsewhere were incomplete: “They would say, ‘The Russians will attack!’ O.K., then, what’s the next step? Are you with us? And it felt like there was no answer.”

Another underlying source of unease was that U.S. officials had little understanding of the Ukrainian plan to defend the country, or even if such a plan existed. General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was speaking several times a week with his counterpart in Kyiv, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces. Milley pressed Zaluzhnyi for information about how Ukraine would defend itself, including a request for detailed inventories of weapons stockpiles. Milley also offered his own strategic vision—an emphasis on dispersed mobile units, multiple lines of defense across the country, and a mixture of conventional forces and partisan warfare. “Our message was not, ‘You guys are about to get steamrolled, so you should just sue for peace,’ ” a U.S. military official said. “Rather, the message was that you are about to get steamrolled, so you have to get your defenses majorly shored up.”

Zaluzhnyi seemed hesitant to provide any details. Not only was he protective of his plans, he refused to share the placement of arms caches, which he was constantly moving and camouflaging to keep them from being destroyed or captured by the Russian Army. Some U.S. officials worried that Zaluzhnyi, like Zelensky, didn’t fully believe the U.S. intelligence. “Others were convinced he believed it, and had war plans on hand,” the military official said, “but wanted to keep them secret from Zelensky.”

Given Zelensky’s reluctance to put the country on a war footing, there was speculation that Zaluzhnyi may have been trying to avoid the possibility of being asked to scale down his preparations. If this was the case, the U.S. military official said, it’s possible that Zaluzhnyi didn’t want to share them with Milley because he was afraid that Milley would then brief the White House, which would in turn say something to Zelensky.

Finally, in February, Zaluzhnyi agreed to share his plan for defending Ukraine. A defense attaché from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, an Air Force colonel, was summoned to a meeting at the general-staff headquarters and shown a one-page sketch of Ukrainian positions and defensive schemes. She was not given a copy, and was permitted to take only handwritten notes. Even having stipulated these conditions, Zaluzhnyi was less than forthcoming. His subordinates showed the attaché a false version of the plan, masking the full scope of the defensive campaign.


Ultimately, Zaluzhnyi’s strategy was to prevent the capture of Kyiv at all costs, while, in other areas, letting Russian forces run ahead of their logistics and supply lines. The idea was to trade territory in the short term in order to pick off Russian units once they were overextended. “We trusted no one back then,” a senior Ukrainian military official said. “Our plan was our one tiny chance for success, and we did not want anyone at all to know it.”

In the war’s early days, Biden told national-security officials at the White House and the Defense Department that the U.S. had three main policy interests in Ukraine. “One, we are not going to allow this to suck us into a war with Russia,” a senior Biden Administration official recalled. “Two, we need to make sure we can meet our Article 5 commitments with NATO.” (Prior to the invasion, the Biden Administration had sent several thousand additional soldiers to NATO member states in Eastern Europe and the Baltic region, to show that the U.S. military was prepared to defend them.) “And, three, we will do what we can to help Ukraine succeed on the battlefield,” the official continued. “The President was clear: we do not want to see Ukraine defeated.”

From a bunker in Kyiv’s government quarter, Zelensky led a conference call with Ukrainian officials twice a day, at ten in the morning and ten at night, on the subject of arms supplies. The U.S., along with the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltic states, was sending anti-tank weapons, MANPADs, and small arms. But to the Ukrainians, who were suddenly in a fight for survival, these shipments seemed trivial. They wanted more powerful weaponry, including fighter jets, tanks, air defenses, and long-range artillery and rockets. “The deliveries were not so big, not like we would have liked to see,” Danilov said. “No one believed that we could hold out.”

Zelensky displayed tremendous courage by remaining in Kyiv. According to Reznikov, the country’s security services were tracking three Chechen hit squads sent to assassinate the Ukrainian President and other top politicians. Zelensky also proved an adept leader, projecting an air of defiance to promote cohesion at home and support internationally. Two days into the invasion, the Associated Press reported that Zelensky had rejected a U.S. offer to evacuate him from Kyiv, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” A senior U.S. official said, “To the best of my knowledge, that never happened.” The official added, “But hats off to Zelensky and the people around him. It was a great line.”

Ukrainian forces managed to keep Russian transport planes from landing at the Hostomel airport. In the countryside around Kyiv, Russian armored convoys were stranded beyond the reach of their supply lines and became easy targets for ambushes and drone strikes. Washington’s fears about the country’s armed forces now seemed misplaced. “Obviously, it turned out they had a plan,” the U.S. military official said. “Because you don’t whip the Russians like that and expertly execute a mobile defense in depth without one.”

The Ukrainians benefitted from another factor that the U.S. had not considered: Russian hubris and disorganization. Putin had planned the invasion with a small circle of trusted advisers, who settled on a lightning-fast raid to overthrow Zelensky and his cabinet. Ukrainians were finding dress uniforms inside the Russian military vehicles that they captured—the invading forces had thought that within a matter of days they would be marching victorious down the streets of central Kyiv. Instead, they found themselves deep in Ukrainian territory without access to basic necessities like food and water. As the Defense Department official put it, “We presumed they had their shit together, but it turns out they didn’t.”

Ukraine’s early success changed attitudes in Washington. “The Ukrainians were putting up a good fight, which helped open the floodgates for a lot more military assistance,” the Defense Department official said. Even so, the Biden Administration did not give Kyiv everything it wanted. One wish list circulating around Washington said that Ukraine needed five hundred Javelin missiles per day; at the start of the war, the production of Javelins was only around two thousand per year. Other proposals aired in public by Zelensky and top Ukrainian officials, such as a no-fly zone maintained by NATO aircraft and air defenses, were non-starters. “Our interests highly overlap, but they are not identical,” the Defense official said. “When we say things like ‘That is escalatory and could draw NATO into the fight,’ they are, like, ‘Yeah, good. How could it get any worse for us? It’s already existential.’ Frankly, if I were them, I’d have the same view.”

A moment of tension erupted between Milley and Zaluzhnyi. Ukraine wanted more MIG-29s, a Soviet-designed plane that Ukrainian pilots had flown since the eighties. Kyiv reached a tentative deal with Poland, in which Poland would deliver two dozen jets, and the U.S. would give American-made F-16s to Poland as a replacement. The Biden Administration worried that flying aircraft from NATO territory into Ukraine’s contested skies would be seen as a clear escalation. U.S. officials were also skeptical of the planes’ usefulness to Ukraine. The MIG-29 is primarily an air-to-air-combat interceptor—not a ground-attack plane that might, say, provide aerial support to infantry or attack a tank column—and Russia’s more advanced fighter, the Sukhoi Su-35, could easily outmaneuver it. Zaluzhnyi told Milley that Ukraine had almost no fighter jets left. Milley insisted that Ukraine still had plenty. The two did not speak for more than a week. “Early on, their conversations were formal and matter-of-fact,” the U.S. military official said. “One would say his long piece, and the other would say his. Now the tone is more familiar, warmer, friendlier. They talk about their families.”

No one knew for sure how Russia would respond to Western arms shipments. U.S. officials believed that Putin would escalate given one of three scenarios: if the Russian military faced utter collapse on the battlefield, if Putin felt an immediate threat to his own rule, or if the U.S. or NATO militaries directly intervened in Ukraine. As for Putin’s likely response, officials in Washington forecast a range of worrying possibilities, from carrying out a nuclear-bomb test in the Arctic to detonating a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. But the assessment was also that, in the end, Putin could be deterred. A senior U.S. intelligence official said, “It’s not like he wants World War Three, either.”

In early April, the Russian military announced a full pullout from the Kyiv region, essentially an admission that its initial combat aims had failed. Now it was shifting tactics to an artillery assault in the Donbas, using missile strikes to level cities and towns before sending in ground forces to seize the rubble. This meant that Ukraine required heavy artillery of its own. “There’s not much a unit with some Javelins can do if you have two hundred tanks coming at you,” the senior Ukrainian military official said.

At the time, according to Ukrainian generals, the Army had enough artillery ammunition to last for two weeks of intensive fighting. Ukraine used 152-millimetre shells, a family of ammunition that many former Warsaw Pact member states inherited from the Soviet Union. NATO forces use 155-millimetre shells, and the two systems are not interchangeable. The problem was not merely the depleting stocks of Soviet-calibre munitions inside Ukraine—they were becoming increasingly hard to find anywhere in the world. At the start of the war, Western governments and private arms dealers had negotiated transfers from places such as Bulgaria and Romania. Among the largest caches were those the U.S. and NATO had designated for Afghan security forces, which had been sitting unclaimed in warehouses in Eastern Europe since the Taliban takeover. Belarus, where Russian troops had amassed before the invasion, had sizable stores of artillery ammunition, but Russia’s ally certainly wasn’t going to give it to Ukraine. Rear Admiral R. Duke Heinz, the director of logistics for the U.S. Army’s European Command, said, “We were seeing fewer and fewer countries raise their hands to say they had munitions to donate.”

That left another option: Ukraine would have to switch to NATO-calibre weaponry. On April 26th, defense ministers from more than forty countries, including all the NATO member states, met at the U.S. airbase in Ramstein. Austin, the U.S. Defense Secretary, opened the proceedings. “Ukraine clearly believes that it can win, and so does everyone here,” he said. “I know we’re all determined to do everything that we can to meet Ukraine’s needs as the fight evolves.”


Prior to the summit, the U.S. had agreed to transfer ninety M777 howitzers to Ukraine, the first time it would be providing the country with heavy artillery. The M777, which was designed to support infantry operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, was more powerful and more accurate than Ukraine’s existing howitzer-style artillery. “Austin called and said the decision has been taken,” Reznikov said. “I understood we crossed a certain Rubicon.”

Within days, the first contingent of Ukrainian soldiers—two-man teams made up of a gunner and a section chief—arrived at a U.S. Army training facility in Grafenwöhr, in southern Germany. Over six days, U.S. instructors taught them how to set up and move the M777, how to manually line up a target, and how to maintain the gun’s levels of nitrogen and hydraulic fluid. As one U.S. trainer put it, “This isn’t a gun you can beat the crap out of and will keep humming along.”

The Ukrainian soldiers in Grafenwöhr struck their American counterparts as highly motivated. During one lunch break, a Ukrainian soldier reported that his village had just come under Russian shelling; the rest of the Ukrainian troops stood up without finishing their meal and returned to their training. “They’re not here for R. and R.,” Brigadier General Joseph Hilbert, who oversees the facility, said. “They want to get back and put these things to use.”

By the end of the month, eighteen M777s were flown to bases in Eastern Europe and brought to the border with Ukraine. Under the cover of night, the howitzers were transferred to small convoys of unmarked trucks driven by Ukrainian teams. As the war has progressed, U.S. defense officials have opened other routes, shipping equipment on rail lines across Europe and through ports on the North Sea, in Germany. Putin and other Russian officials have threatened to target these transfers. But, according to Heinz, not one has come under fire. “Russia is aware of how security assistance gets into Ukraine,” the senior Defense Department official said. “But, so far, they have refrained from attacking those hubs, because they don’t want a war with NATO.”

The M777s allowed Ukraine to mount a defense in the Donbas. “In any war, of course, it’s not only about quantity, but quality,” Roman Kachur, the commander of Ukraine’s 55th Artillery Brigade, said. “There’s a difference when you’re fighting with a modern weapons system or one that hasn’t been significantly updated since the days of the Second World War.” For weeks, his forces had faced heavy artillery fire from a fortified Russian position near Donetsk, a Russian-occupied city in the Donbas. “We couldn’t knock the enemy out of there, because we simply couldn’t reach him,” Kachur told me. Then the M777s arrived. “Within three or four days, the Russians had pulled all their artillery out of there,” he said. “It’s a new situation. We are dictating their behavior to a certain degree.”

The U.S. does not have the ability to monitor the howitzers’ locations and conditions from afar, or electronically limit where they could be used. “Once this equipment gets to them, it belongs to them,” the senior Biden Administration official said. “We don’t have a scorecard.” Occasionally, bad news arrived from the field. In one case, forces in eastern Ukraine moved a number of M777s from a firing position to a barn, and within minutes a Russian missile hit the location, destroying both the guns and the trucks used to transport them.

Even as another seventy-two systems arrived—along with dozens of NATO-compatible howitzers from France and Germany—Ukrainian generals estimated that Russian artillery pieces outnumbered Ukraine’s by seven to one; each day, Russian forces were shooting some twenty thousand shells, pummelling cities such as Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. Zelensky said that, in June, as many as a hundred Ukrainian soldiers were being killed every day. It was the most difficult moment in the war for Ukraine, with Russia—fitfully and at great cost to its own forces—blasting through Ukrainian defenses and capturing territory one metre at a time.

Washington encouraged Ukraine to rely on judicious planning and the efficiency of Western weaponry rather than try to outshoot the Russian military. NATO had chosen a similar strategy in the latter stages of the Cold War, when it found itself with far fewer tanks and artillery than the Soviet Union. “We told the Ukrainians if they try and fight like the Russians, they will lose,” the senior Defense Department official said. “Our mission was to help Ukraine compensate for quantitative inferiority with qualitative superiority.”

Ukraine has a fleet of reconnaissance drones and a loose network of human sources within areas controlled by the Russian military, but its ability to gather intelligence on the battlefield greatly diminishes about fifteen miles beyond the front line. U.S. spy satellites, meanwhile, can capture snapshots of troop positions anywhere on earth. Closer to the ground, U.S. military spy planes, flying along the borders, augment the picture, and intelligence intercepts can allow analysts to listen in on communications between Russian commanders. Since the invasion, the U.S. and other Western partners have shared a great deal of this information with Ukraine. Mykola Bielieskov, a defense expert at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, in Kyiv, said, “That’s a major field where the U.S. is helping us.”

One evening in April, at an intelligence-coördination center somewhere in Europe, Ukrainian military officers asked their American and NATO counterparts to confirm a set of coördinates. This had become a common practice. Ukrainian representatives might ask for verification of the location of a Russian command post or ammunition depot. “We do that, fair game,” the senior Biden Administration official said. In some cases, U.S. intelligence and military officers provide targeting information unsolicited: “We do let them know, say, there’s a battalion moving on Slovyansk from the northwest, and here’s roughly where they are.” But, the official emphasized, Ukrainian forces choose what to hit. “We are not approving, or disapproving, targets.”

The Biden Administration has also refused to provide specific intelligence on the location of high-value Russian individuals, such as generals or other senior figures. “There are lines we drew in order not to be perceived as being in a direct conflict with Russia,” the senior U.S. official said. The United States will pass on coördinates of a command post, for example, but not the presence of a particular commander. “We are not trying to kill generals,” the senior Biden Administration official said. “We are trying to help the Ukrainians undermine Russian command and control.”

Still, Ukraine has so far killed as many as eight generals, most of them at long range with artillery and rocket fire. The high death toll is partially a reflection of Russian military doctrine, which calls for top-down, hierarchical operations. In most cases, mid-ranking Russian officers and enlisted soldiers are not empowered to make decisions, creating a need for generals to be positioned closer to the front. “They were depending on them to control and direct troops,” the U.S. military official said. “It’s a huge operational catastrophe.”


The Ukrainian request in April concerned the suspected location of the Moskva, a Russian naval cruiser and the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. Could U.S. intelligence confirm that the ship was at a certain set of coördinates south of the Ukrainian port city of Odesa? The answer came back affirmative. Soon, officials in Washington began to see press reports that the ship had suffered some sort of explosion. On April 14th, the Moskva disappeared into the Black Sea.

Kyiv said that two Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship missiles, fired from onshore near Odesa, had hit the Moskva —a statement that was confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies. Russia never admitted that the strike took place, instead blaming an onboard fire and stormy seas for the loss of the ship. Some forty Russian sailors are reported to have died.

After the arrival of the M777s, the Ukrainian Army increasingly shared information with the U.S. about the condition of its weaponry on the battlefield, something it had not always been eager to do. Reznikov described it as a “mirror reaction” to Washington’s initial approach to the war. “You see they don’t trust you with serious weapons,” he said, “so why should you trust them?” But, as the U.S. and other Western powers increased their commitments, the relationship improved. According to Reznikov, “When we received one package of assistance after another, and we could see there was a real desire to help, it allowed us to come to an agreement and reach a genuine dialogue.” A Western diplomat in Kyiv told me, “It’s a common story here. You can be incredibly wary, until you’re not. Then you become trusting and open.”

When the U.S. military carries out operations with a partner force, such as a fellow NATO member state, it coördinates battle movements on a common operational picture, or COP, a single digitized display showing the location and composition of forces. “We don’t quite have that with Ukraine,” the military official said. “But it’s close.” Ukrainian commanders feed information to the U.S. military, which allows for an almost real-time picture of its weaponry in Ukraine. “These days we know similar information about what we have given to Ukraine as we know about equipment in our own military,” the official said. “How many artillery tubes are functioning, what’s down for maintenance, where the necessary part is.”

In May, Ukrainian artillery crews, using M777s along with some Soviet-era systems, fired on a large contingent of Russian forces that was trying to cross a pontoon bridge on the Siverskyi Donets River. Intelligence provided by the U.S. appeared to allow the Ukrainians to identify the moment of the Russian column’s crossing. It was one of the single biggest losses for the Russian Army since the war began. Dozens of tanks and armored vehicles were destroyed, left charred along the river’s swampy banks, and as many as four hundred Russian soldiers were killed.

For months, Ukraine had one U.S. weapons system at the top of its wish list: the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. Whereas the M777 can hit artillery pieces, troop formations, tanks, and armored vehicles at what is known as tactical depth, around fifteen miles, HIMARS can reach an entirely different target set: ammunition depots, logistics hubs, radar systems, and command-and-control nodes, which tend to be situated considerably farther behind enemy lines. The HIMARS system is mounted on a standard U.S. Army truck, making it able to “shoot and scoot,” in military parlance. Colin Kahl, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, has described HIMARS as the equivalent of a “precision-guided air strike,” delivered from the back of a truck.

The Ukrainian military could only take advantage of the HIMARS’ extended range if its soldiers had intelligence on where to strike. “Precision fires and intelligence are a marriage,” the U.S. military official said. “It’s difficult to have one without the other.” The dilemma for the Biden Administration was not whether to give HIMARS to Ukraine, but which munitions to send along with them. Each system can carry either a pod with six rockets, known as GMLRS, with a range of forty miles, or one surface-to-surface missile, or ATACMS, which can reach a hundred and eighty miles. “It’s not HIMARS that carries a risk,” the Defense Department official said. “But, rather, if it was equipped with long-range missiles that were used to strike deep in Russian territory.”

Putin is extremely paranoid about long-range conventional-missile systems. The Kremlin is convinced, for example, that U.S. ballistic-missile defense platforms in Romania and Poland are intended for firing on Russia. Even if Ukraine agreed not to use HIMARS to carry out strikes across the border, the mere technical capability of doing so might prove provocative. “We had reason to believe the ATACMS would be a bridge too far,” the Defense official said.

The battlefield realities inside Ukraine were another determining factor. “The imperative was ‘What does Ukraine need?’ ” the Defense official said. “Not what they are asking for—what they need. And we do our own assessment of that.” The Biden Administration asked for a list of targets that the Ukrainian military wanted to strike with HIMARS. “Every single grid point was reachable with GMLRS rather than ATACMS,” the Defense official said.

There was one exception: Ukraine expressed a more ambitious desire to launch missile strikes on Crimea, which Russia uses for replenishing its forces across the south and which is largely beyond the reach of GMLRS. During the war-game exercises held over the summer, when the possibility of ATACMS came up, it was clear that Ukraine wanted them to “lay waste to Crimea,” the Defense official said. “Putin sees Crimea as much a part of Russia as St. Petersburg. So, in terms of escalation management, we have to keep that in mind.”

In multiple conversations, U.S. officials were explicit that the HIMARS could not be used to hit targets across the border. “The Americans said there is a very serious request that you do not use these weapons to fire on Russian territory,” the Ukrainian military official said. “We said right away that’s absolutely no problem. We’ll use them only against the enemy on the territory of Ukraine.” As with other weapons platforms, there is no technical mechanism to insure compliance. Officially, the U.S. has signalled that all Ukrainian territory illegally occupied by Russia since 2014—not only that which it has taken since February—is fair game for HIMARS strikes. “We haven’t said specifically don’t strike Crimea,” the Defense official told me. “But then, we haven’t enabled them to do so, either.”


The first batch of HIMARS appeared on the battlefield late in June. Within days, videos circulated of Russian equipment and munitions depots outside Donetsk exploding in clouds of fire and smoke. Reznikov announced that the military had used HIMARS to destroy dozens of similar Russian facilities. In response, the senior Biden Administration official said, Russian forces “have had to adjust their tactics and maneuvers,” moving command posts and munitions depots out of range—which also diminishes their utility in battle. “They are very mindful of the presence of HIMARS,” the official said.

Each launcher costs roughly seven million dollars. According to some calculations, Ukraine could fire more than five thousand GMLRS missiles per month, whereas their manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, was only producing nine thousand a year. “We said straightaway, ‘You’re not going to get very many of these systems,’ ” the Defense Department official said. “ ‘Not because we don’t trust you but because there simply isn’t an unlimited quantity of these on planet Earth.’ ”

In July, Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, instructed commanders in Ukraine to “prioritize the targeting of the enemy’s long-range rocket artillery weapons with high-precision strikes.” Two weeks later, Russia claimed to have destroyed six HIMARS systems. At the time, the U.S. had provided a total of sixteen launchers; Germany and the United Kingdom had given nine similar systems. U.S. officials insist that all of them remain intact and functional.

In preparation for its counter-offensive this summer, Ukraine used HIMARS to repeatedly strike Russian command posts and ammunition depots in the Kherson region. Several missiles hit the Antonivskyi Bridge, which connects the city to the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. Russian units inside Kherson risked being cut off from resupply lines and logistics support. “The use of HIMARS in the south contributed to a high attrition rate of Russian troops and hardware,” Bielieskov, the defense analyst in Kyiv, said. “The whole Russian group on the right bank of the Dnipro is dependent on a very small number of crossings.”

The U.S. had also begun to supply Ukraine with AGM-88 HARM missiles, launched from military aircraft, which home in on electronic transmissions from surface-to-air radar systems. The missiles are designed to be carried by U.S. fighters, such as the F-16, but the Ukrainian Air Force figured out a way to mount them on their MIG jets. The senior Defense Department official said, “It was pretty MacGyvery, and opens up the possibility to think of what other munitions could be adapted to Ukrainian platforms.” The HARM missiles created a dilemma for Russian forces. They could either turn on their radar batteries and make themselves vulnerable to HARM strikes, or keep them turned off and lose the ability to detect Ukrainian aircraft and armed drones, namely the Turkish-made Bayraktar.

U.S. military and intelligence circles have debated the reason that Putin has not yet attempted an escalatory move to discourage further arms shipments on Ukraine’s western border. “As we have gotten deeper into the conflict, we realized we could provide more weapons of greater sophistication and at greater scale without provoking a Russian military response against NATO,” the Defense Department official said. “Was it that we were always too cautious, and we could have been more aggressive all along? Or, had we provided these systems right away, would they have indeed been very escalatory?” The official went on, “In that scenario, Russia was the frog, and we boiled the water slowly, and Russia got used to it.”

The embarrassment of the Kharkiv retreat revealed a fundamental weakness of the Russian forces: they had been degraded, in terms of both personnel and equipment, to the point at which they could no longer hold on to captured territory while trying to carry out major offensive operations. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military was receiving fresh waves of NATO-trained conscripts and Western arms. Throughout September and into October, Ukrainian forces pushed farther, reclaiming the entirety of the Kharkiv region and moving into towns and villages in the Donbas, the “protection” of which was Putin’s stated aim for the war. “We continue to see that Putin’s political objectives are not matched to what his military can achieve,” the senior U.S. intelligence official said.

This paradox is a potentially destabilizing factor. U.S. intelligence agencies had assumed that if Putin were to face what he regarded as an “existential” threat he would feel forced to escalate, possibly with chemical or nuclear weapons. “But seeing as how he understands his own legacy and place in history,” the senior U.S. official said, “a humiliating setback in Ukraine can also begin to look existential.”

After Kharkiv, with the momentum of the war shifting against Russia, Putin moved to double down on what increasingly appeared to be a losing hand. In a speech on September 21st, he announced a series of referendums to annex Russian-occupied territories in southern and eastern Ukraine and ordered a “partial” mobilization of conscripts in Russia. (It soon became clear that the draft could reach up to a million Russian men.) Putin said that Russia was not battling just the Ukrainian Army but “the entire war machine of the collective West.” In a final, ominous threat, he seemed to suggest a willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend the parts of Ukraine that he intended to annex. “If the territorial unity of our country is threatened, in order to protect Russia and our nation we will unquestionably use all the weapons we have,” he said. “This is no bluff.”

The annexation of these territories—which was finalized in Russia on October 5th and quickly refuted by the rest of the world—effectively announced a fourth phase of the war. Putin has now staked his rule on an ability to hold these lands, which he has declared, with great fanfare, to be inexorably a part of Russia. His wager is that the escalation will not deter Ukraine so much as its backers in the West. Will the U.S., for example, debate the use of its weapons in strikes on Russian targets in Kherson as it had about targets in Crimea? “We have not sorted all the way through that,” the U.S. military official said. “But it’s clear we’re not going to be bullied around by what Putin decides to call Russia.” The senior Biden Administration official said, “We monitor Russia’s nuclear forces as best as we can,” and “so far we haven’t seen any indication that Putin has made a serious move in that direction.”

In Kyiv, the prospect of a Russian nuclear attack is both horrifying and a nonfactor. “Ukraine has no choice but to liberate all its territories,” Podolyak, Zelensky’s adviser, said, “even if there exists the possibility of strikes with weapons of mass destruction.” Ukraine has no nuclear weapons of its own—it gave up its arsenal in 1994 in a treaty signed by the United States and Russia, among others—so any response would have to come from the West. “The question is not what we will do,” Podolyak said, “but what the world’s nuclear powers will do, and whether they are indeed ready to maintain the doctrine of deterrence.” He called on Western nuclear powers, particularly the U.S., to make their response clear up front: “Send a message to Putin now, not after he strikes—‘Look, any missile of yours will lead to six of ours flying in your direction.’ ”

In early October, Russia launched a series of missile strikes on Kyiv and a number of other cities, killing more than three dozen people and damaging civilian infrastructure across the country. The attacks, which came in response to a large blast that damaged the bridge connecting the Russian mainland to Crimea, offered renewed force to Ukraine’s calls for Western air defenses. According to the senior Defense official, the challenge in providing such weapons is more technical than political: “There aren’t that many spare air-defense systems to give.” The U.S. military is not going to pull its existing Patriot batteries or NASAMs—two ground-based air-defense systems Ukraine has been requesting—from, say, South Korea or the Middle East. They have to be manufactured and procured. However, the Defense official said, Ukraine should be receiving the first two NASAMS in late October or early November, with more to follow.

The Biden Administration has also announced a military-aid package worth more than a billion dollars, bringing the total amount the U.S. has spent on arming Ukraine over the past year to sixteen billion. Among the key items in this package were an additional eighteen HIMARS systems, more than doubling the number in Ukraine’s arsenal. Ukrainian officials are now eying a number of items that, they argue, would allow even more aggressive counter-offensives: modern NATO-standard battle tanks, fighter jets such as F-16s, and the long-range ATACMS for striking logistics and ammunition hubs in Crimea.

Reznikov is certain that such deliveries are inevitable. “When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible,” he said. “Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimetre guns, the answer was no. HIMARS, no. HARM, no. Now all of that is a yes.” He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and ATACMS and F-16s.”

With the help of the U.S. and NATO, he went on, Ukraine’s military has shown that Russia can be confronted. “We are not afraid of Russia,” he said. “And we are asking our partners in the West to also no longer be afraid.”

The New Yorker · by Joshua Yaffa · October 17, 2022




13. When China Pushes, Push Back, Admiral Says



As Lenin said: “You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw”


When China Pushes, Push Back, Admiral Says

Seventh Fleet commander says the U.S. needs to continue freedom of navigation patrols in the Pacific.

defenseone.com · by Jennifer Hlad

The U.S. Navy must keep sailing warships in international waters claimed by China, because “if you don’t push back, and if we don’t take a stand, they’ll just continue to move the ball down the field,” the commander of the Navy’s 7th Fleet said Friday.

The remarks on the importance of what the military calls freedom of navigation patrols—and which Beijing says undermine peace and stability—comes as China’s leader, Xi Jinping is poised to take a third term, and just days after the Biden administration imposed sanctions on China’s ability to purchase critical chip technology.

Though China stays “right below that level” of violating rules-based international order at sea, it has gotten closer over the years, said Karl Thomas, who oversees Navy assets in the Western Pacific from the fleet’s headquarters in Yokosuka, Japan.

When he was commander of the USS Ronald Reagan strike group, “We would have [China] join us if we're operating in the South China Sea. If we left the nine dash line, they would break off. Today they are a little more persistent. They'll stay with us a little farther. They patrol the Spratlys a little greater than they did back then. They do more coordinated exercises, but they do it often by themselves.”

By contrast, he said, “When we do an exercise, it’s with all of our friends.”

Speaking at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event at the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis, Maryland, Thomas outlined the variety of operations Navy assets are involved in today in the Western Pacific—from a trilateral anti-mine exercise in the Sea of Japan to Manila, where the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier just arrived for a multilateral maritime security exercise—and stressed the value of partnerships.

That value is on display now in Ukraine, he said, where dozens of countries have stepped up to provide support after Russia’s invasion.

“When you try to use force to go across borders, that causes the international community to respond as a team,” Thomas said. “Then, I think that you look at the challenges that Russia has had in this fight to be able to not only sustain themselves, but … it certainly didn’t play out the way that [Russian leader Vladimir Putin] thought.”

Meanwhile, Thomas called China’s military exercises around Taiwan after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit “irresponsible.”

The U.S. has the responsibility “to provide defensive capability to Taiwan, and to make sure that we’re ready, and we are. Our desire would be to have a peaceful resolution of cross-strait differences, and the PRC says that’s their desire,” he said. “But when you see them fire ballistic missiles over Taiwan and have them land in the maritime commons and the shipping lanes, and some of them actually landed in the Japanese economic exclusion zone. … I think that’s not the way that countries that want to be leaders within the world should behave.”

Xi on Sunday said China will “strive for peaceful reunification” with the contested island, but warned it will take “all measures necessary” for that reunification, directing his comments “solely at interference by outside forces and a few separatists seeking Taiwan independence,” The New York Times reported.

As for North Korea, which has recently stepped up its campaign of ballistic missiles and military flights close to the South Korean border, Thomas said it “certainly has ... our attention” and is a concern. However, he said, he would not prioritize it over his “bigger concern” in the area: namely, China.

defenseone.com · by Jennifer Hlad


14. Still the End of History



Doubling down?


I hope he is right (this time).


Still the End of History

Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states.

By Francis Fukuyama


The Atlantic · by Francis Fukuyama · October 17, 2022

Over the past decade, global politics has been heavily shaped by apparently strong states whose leaders are not constrained by law or constitutional checks and balances. Russia and China both have argued that liberal democracy is in long-term decline, and that their brand of muscular authoritarian government is able to act decisively and get things done while their democratic rivals debate, dither, and fail to deliver on their promises. These two countries were the vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave that turned back democratic gains across the globe, from Myanmar to Tunisia to Hungary to El Salvador. Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.

The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences. Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.

Supporters of liberal democracy must not give in to a fatalism that tacitly accepts the Russian-Chinese line that such democracies are in inevitable decline. The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or endpoint of historical progress. The millions of people voting with their feet—leaving poor, corrupt, or violent countries for life not in Russia, China, or Iran but in the liberal, democratic West—amply demonstrate this.

The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.

* * *

The weaknesses of strong states have been on glaring display in Russia. President Vladimir Putin is the sole decision maker; even the former Soviet Union had a Politburo where the party secretary had to vet policy ideas. We saw images of Putin sitting at the end of a long table with his defense and foreign ministers because of his fear of COVID; he was so isolated that he had no idea how strong Ukrainian national identity had become in recent years or how fierce a resistance his invasion would provoke. He similarly got no word of how deeply corruption and incompetence had taken root within his own military, how abysmally the modern weapons he had developed were working, or how poorly trained his own officer corps was.

The shallowness of his regime’s support was made evident by the rush to the borders of young Russian men when he announced his “partial” mobilization on September 21. Some 700,000 Russians have left for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, and any other country that would take them, a far greater number than has actually been mobilized. Those who have been caught up by the conscription are being thrown directly into battle without adequate training or equipment, and are already showing up on the front as POWs or casualties. Putin’s legitimacy was based on a social contract that promised citizens stability and a modicum of prosperity in return for political passivity, but the regime has broken that deal and is feeling the consequences.

Putin’s bad decision making and shallow support has produced one of the biggest strategic blunders in living memory. Far from demonstrating its greatness and recovering its empire, Russia has become a global object of ridicule, and will endure further humiliations at the hands of Ukraine in the coming weeks. The entire Russian military position in the south of Ukraine is likely to collapse, and the Ukrainians have a real chance of liberating the Crimean Peninsula for the first time since 2014. These reversals have triggered a huge amount of finger-pointing in Moscow; the Kremlin is cracking down even harder on dissent. Whether Putin himself will be able to survive a Russian military defeat is an open question.

Something similar, if a bit less dramatic, has been going on in China. One of the hallmarks of Chinese authoritarianism in the period between Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978 and Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2013 was the degree to which it was institutionalized. Institutions mean that rulers have to follow rules and cannot do whatever they please. The Chinese Communist Party imposed many rules on itself: mandatory retirement ages for party cadres, strict meritocratic standards for recruitment and promotion, and above all a 10-year term limit for the party’s most-senior leadership. Deng Xiaoping established a system of collective leadership precisely to avoid the dominance of a single obsessive leader like Mao Zedong.

Much of this has been dismantled under Xi Jinping, who will receive the blessing of his party to remain on as paramount leader for a third five-year term at the 20th Party Congress. In place of collective leadership, China has moved to a personalistic system in which no other senior official can come close to challenging Xi.

This concentration of authority in one man has in turn led to poor decision making. The party has intervened in the economy, hobbling the tech sector by going after stars such as Alibaba and Tencent; forced Chinese farmers to plant money-losing staples in pursuit of agricultural self-sufficiency; and insisted on a zero-COVID strategy that keeps important parts of China under continuing lockdowns that have shaved points off of the country’s economic growth. China cannot easily reverse zero-COVID, because it has failed to buy effective vaccines and finds a large part of its elderly population vulnerable to the disease. What looked two years ago like a triumphant success in controlling COVID has turned into a prolonged debacle.

All of this comes on top of the failure of China’s underlying growth model, which relied on heavy state investment in real estate to keep the economy humming. Basic economics suggests this would lead to massive misallocation of resources, as has in fact happened. Go online and search for Chinese buildings being blown up, and you will see many videos of massive housing complexes being dynamited because there is no one to buy apartments in them.

These authoritarian failures are not limited to China. Iran has been rocked by weeks of protests following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police. Iran is in terrible shape: It faces a banking crisis, is running out of water, has seen big declines in agriculture, and is grappling with crippling international sanctions and isolation. Despite its pariah status, it has a well-educated population, in which women constitute a majority of university graduates. And yet the regime is led by a small group of old men with social attitudes several generations out of date. It is no wonder that the regime is now facing its greatest test of legitimacy. The only country that qualifies as even more poorly managed is one with another dictatorship, Venezuela, which has produced the world’s largest outflux of refugees over the past decade.

Celebrations of the rise of strong states and the decline of liberal democracy are thus very premature. Liberal democracy, precisely because it distributes power and relies on consent of the governed, is in much better shape globally than many people think. Despite recent gains by populist parties in Sweden and Italy, most countries in Europe still enjoy a strong degree of social consensus.

The big question mark remains, unfortunately, the United States. Some 30 to 35 percent of its voters continue to believe the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and the Republican Party has been taken over by Donald Trump’s MAGA followers, who are doing their best to put election deniers in positions of power around the country. This group does not represent a majority of the country but is likely to regain control of at least the House of Representatives this November, and possibly the presidency in 2024. The party’s putative leader, Trump, has fallen deeper and deeper into a conspiracy-fueled madness in which he believes that he could be immediately reinstated as president and that the country should criminally indict his presidential predecessors, including one who is already dead.

There is an intimate connection between the success of strong states abroad and populist politics at home. Politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and of course Trump in the U.S. have all expressed sympathy for Putin. They see in him a model for the kind of strongman rule they would like to exercise in their own country. He, in turn, is hoping that their rise will weaken Western support for Ukraine and save his flailing “special military operation.”

Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted. Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights, whether that is the European Union or the administration in Washington. But reality has intervened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine constitutes a real dictatorship trying to crush a genuinely free society with rockets and tanks, and may serve to remind the current generation of what is at stake. By resisting Russian imperialism, the Ukrainians are demonstrating the grievous weaknesses that exist at the core of an apparently strong state. They understand the true value of freedom, and are fighting a larger battle on our behalf, a battle that all of us need to join.

The Atlantic · by Francis Fukuyama · October 17, 2022



15. Marine Corps War Plans Are Too Sino-Centric. What About The Other 90% Of The World?


Marine Corps War Plans Are Too Sino-Centric. What About The Other 90% Of The World?

Forbes · by Loren Thompson · October 18, 2022

China has long been known in standard Mandarin as Zongguo, the “middle country.” Judging from President Xi Jinping’s remarks to the Communist Party congress this weekend, the idea that China is the center of the world is just fine with him.

However, the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy may have gone too far in designating China as the central threat around which future U.S. military preparations must be organized.

The Chinese challenge to America is mainly economic in nature, and Taiwan looks to be the only place where Beijing might undertake a military campaign in the foreseeable future. For all its superpower pretensions, China remains an insular nation hemmed in by geography and its own internal challenges.

Nonetheless, U.S. military services have been striving since the release of the 2018 strategy to demonstrate their relevance to the Chinese threat. Nowhere is this more true than in the Marine Corps, where Commandant David H. Berger has undertaken a wholesale redesign of his service’s formations and plans.

... [+]Wikipedia

Among other things, General Berger has called for eliminating all of the Corps’ tanks and a sizable chunk of its rotorcraft; creating smaller combat units; fielding a new class of light amphibious vessels capable of eluding enemy detection; and increasing Marine support of the Navy’s sea-control mission.

All of these changes have been initiated to bolster Marine relevance in the Western Pacific. They are intended to facilitate “Expeditionary Advance Base Operations” and “Littoral Operations In Contested Environments”—doctrines generated to combat China within the confines of the first island chain along its eastern coast.

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And while the commandant states in his 2019 planning guidance that the 31 large amphibious warships the Navy currently operates to lift Marine units “will remain the benchmark of our forward operating crisis response forces,” he also raises doubts about the survivability of such vessels in what is now the most important theater of operations for U.S. military planners.

This has sown confusion in the Navy’s shipbuilding plans, which currently propose truncating a planned buy of 13 new LPD amphibious warships at three while commencing early retirement of the decrepit amphibs they were supposed to replace, and stretching out construction of larger LHA assault warships to twice the preferred interval—up to ten years.

If these proposals were actually implemented, they would leave the Marine Corps with a grossly inadequate lift capacity for dealing with crises in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf and elsewhere, while fielding dozens of “light amphibious warships” likely to prove useless in most contingencies.

Thanks to its amphibious-landing capabilities and training to operate under austere conditions ashore, the Marine Corps has long served as America’s first-responder force, able to insert ground forces into crisis situations before other U.S. services or allies arrive.

According to NASA, over a third of the global population lives within 60 miles of the sea. Most of the world’s megacities, from Jakarta to Karachi to Lagos to Shanghai, are located on or near the ocean. Every country likely to challenge U.S. interests in the years ahead is accessible from the sea.

So, the value of a sea-based quick reaction force such as the Marine Corps is not hard to grasp. Marines have been used to intervene in the Caribbean dozens of times, and may yet do so again in Cuba or Nicaragua or Venezuela. It is a rare year when Marines are not called on to perform critical missions in the Mediterranean.

The problem with redirecting Corps preparations to the Chinese littoral is that the service is called on to develop capabilities that aren’t much use elsewhere—and might not make much difference even there.

The basic idea Marine leaders have advanced is that platoon-size units transported on light amphibious warships and equipped with long-range munitions can hop among the islands off the Chinese coast, disrupting the movement of Beijing’s naval forces and aiding U.S. military efforts to control littoral seas.

Unfortunately, this requires the Marine units to operate within range of Chinese weapons, which is why they need to be highly mobile and generate minimal trackable signatures. Commandant Berger freely admits that current Marine air defenses and reconnaissance assets are not up to the job—which is why money needs to be freed up to buy new equipment such as the light amphibs.

However, in an August 26 report, respected congressional naval expert Ronald O’Rourke raises a series of searching questions about this concept of operations:

  1. Do Marine plans focus too much on China at the expense of other challenges and missions?
  2. Can the Marines successfully gain access to littoral islands and then survive there?
  3. Can the Navy resupply Marine units within range of Chinese weapons once deployed there?
  4. If the proposed force redesign is implemented, would it significantly aid U.S. sea control in the region?

The short answer to these questions is that nobody can say today, because it all depends on what reconnaissance assets Beijing deploys between now and when the Marines are ready to execute their operational concepts in the Chinese littoral. It is not hard to imagine how a combination of long-endurance drones and orbital assets might preclude even small units from hiding in wartime.

The more immediate issue, though, is how this problematic approach to the China challenge might deprive the Marine Corps of capabilities needed to respond elsewhere. We are already seeing evidence that the consensus supporting a fleet of large amphibs suitable for responding to crises in other places is being undermined by confusion over Marine plans.

Getting rid of all the tanks on the assumption the Army can supply heavy armor in a timely fashion seems unrealistic. And eliminating squadrons of heavy, medium, and light rotorcraft is doubly questionable, given the fact that Marines are already breaking up deployed readiness groups to cope with diverse regional challenges. Those rotorcraft may not be needed to fight China, but there are dozens of other places around the world where they could prove more useful than a light amphibious warship.

Various companies engaged in supplying the Marine Corps contribute to my think tank.

Forbes · by Loren Thompson · October 18, 2022


16. Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?



Why is not north Korea considered as part of the threat calculus? The only mention of Korea is of the Korean War in 1950.



Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?

America’s top rivals aren’t allies in the conventional sense, but acting in unison they could stretch a superpower well beyond its military capabilities.


https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-16/us-isn-t-ready-to-fight-china-iran-and-russia-all-at-once?srnd=opinion&leadSource=uverify%20wall&sref=hhjZtX76


ByHal Brands

October 16, 2022 at 2:00 AM HST


Imagine a scenario in which, a year or two or three from now, the world is convulsed by war from Europe to the Pacific. The idea isn’t as absurd as you may think. Not in decades has the US faced such prospects of near-term military confrontation in several separate theaters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ignited Europe’s largest conflict in generations and provoked a great-power proxy fight. In East Asia, the chances of war are growing, as the tensions precipitated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August demonstrated. In the Middle East, the US may have to choose between fighting Iran and accepting it as a nuclear threshold state.


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Put these crises together and you have the makings of a Eurasian conflagration. 

Nightmare scenarios usually don’t materialize, of course. It is possible that none of these situations will pull the US into war, and the most plausible timelines toward conflict vary by region. But the thought exercise demonstrates just how pervasive the danger of major war has become. It also reminds us that today’s crises are more deeply interrelated than they appear.

America’s antagonists may not be formally allied, but they are aligned in a critical area — the Eurasian heartland — and in critical ways. An overstretched US cannot react to one problem without considering the impact on its ability to deal with others. The demands on American statecraft will be severe, as Washington confronts an array of problems it can’t easily walk away from and certainly can’t afford to see escalate all at once.


In some ways, America’s predicament resembles the period before World War II. Leave aside that no US rival has committed aggression or atrocity on the scale of the Axis powers — although China’s repression of the Uyghurs and Putin’s murderous war in Ukraine are haunting echoes of that past. Leave aside, also, that Putin’s brutal bumbling in Ukraine presently looks more like an imitation of Benito Mussolini than of Adolf Hitler. The basic patterns of geopolitics look painfully familiar.

Then as now, the international system was being battered from many directions. Japan was seeking dominance in the Far East. Hitler’s Germany was bidding for primacy in Europe and beyond. Mussolini’s Italy was making a bloody push for empire in the Mediterranean and Africa. The Soviet Union would ultimately end up fighting Hitler — but only after helping him carve up Eastern Europe.

There was little intimacy among these revisionist states. The differing racist ideologies that motivated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were fundamentally incompatible. Although Berlin, Rome and Tokyo did sign their Tripartite Pact in 1940, omnidirectional mistrust ensured that this was little more than a loose agreement to blow up the existing order and build separate empires amid the rubble.

Yet if the Axis powers made cynical partners, there was a deep, destructive synergy among the programs of radical expansion they pursued.

The dictators supported each other at critical moments: Mussolini’s backing aided Hitler’s bloodless conquest of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Advances by one fascist power emboldened the others: Germany’s romp through Western Europe in 1940 helped persuade Japan to push into Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the expense of a defeated France, a desperate Britain and a distracted America.

Then as now, a democratic great-power facing trouble everywhere struggled to act decisively anywhere. During the late 1930s, Britain hesitated to draw a hard line against Germany while facing simultaneous threats from Italy and Japan. The US had similar problems amid worsening crises in Europe and Asia. “I simply have not got enough Navy to go round,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1941.

Even wartime mobilization didn’t fully solve this problem. From beginning to end, a fight against multiple antagonists forced the Allies to make agonizing trade-offs. It didn’t take a fully integrated alliance of totalitarian adversaries to throw the democracies off balance — and create the gravest, most generalized crisis of global security the world has seen.

In the 1930s, Western leaders struggled to foresee how quickly regional crises could cause a global meltdown. Similarly, most post-Cold War policymakers never thought America’s unipolar moment would end like this. It’s not news that autocratic powers have been building up their militaries and coercing their neighbors. What is new is that all these challenges are threatening to turn acute.


Eastern Europe is aflame thanks to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the culmination of a generation-long campaign to restore Russian primacy from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea. A successful blitzkrieg back in February might have given Russia a commanding position in Eastern Europe and invited new coercion of exposed North Atlantic Treaty Organization states. Russian blunders and Ukrainian resistance averted that scenario. But even a diminished Russia will have plenty of ability to make trouble, and the Ukraine conflict is far from over.

Both Ukraine and Russia have ambitious aims. Kyiv seeks the liberation of all occupied territory, including Crimea; Moscow aims to turn Ukraine into an impoverished, vivisected vassal state. The war has also unleashed a ferocious contest in great-power coercion. Washington and its allies are giving Ukraine guns, money and intelligence to bleed Putin’s army; they are battering the Russian economy through sanctions. Moscow has used energy coercion to make the war more painful for Europe; it has threatened nuclear escalation in hopes of limiting its losses on the battlefield by limiting Western support for Ukraine.

Putin seems to believe he can coerce his enemies into quitting before he suffers a major defeat, while the US is acting as though it can deter Putin from escalating long enough for Ukraine to prevail. The result of all this is a violent, unstable equilibrium, one that cannot hold forever as committed participants pursue irreconcilable goals.

Meanwhile, the countdown to conflict may have begun in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing used Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan as pretext for aggressive military exercises that presage a higher baseline of regional tension. Chinese officials surely prefer to achieve their goals — controlling Taiwan and pushing the US out of the Western Pacific — without a major war. It is possible that Putin’s bloody mess in Ukraine has made Chinese President Xi Jinping more cautious about using force. Yet a three-decade military buildup has undoubtedly given Xi a far better shot at subduing Taiwan if he chooses.

In fact, Xi may have to use force to get what he wants: The odds of Taipei peacefully submitting to a neo-totalitarian China decrease each year, while the US and its allies appear increasingly intent on blocking Beijing’s bid for regional dominance. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, recently said that the US is in “the early years of a decisive decade” in its competition with Beijing.

There is vigorous debate in Washington over when the threat of Chinese aggression will become most acute; even the most worried observers think a showdown is at least two to three years away. Yet the risk of war is rising as China’s determination to upend the East Asian balance smacks into its rivals’ determination to uphold it.

Then there is the perpetually flammable Middle East, a region Americans would love to ignore. The ongoing, intermittently violent contest between Washington and Tehran nearly exploded in 2019 and early 2020, after a sequence beginning with US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement and culminating with the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike.

Iran’s advances in uranium enrichment have reportedly given it the ability to make a nuclear weapon in short order. The US and Israel must therefore consider whether more coercive methods are needed to prevent Iran from crossing this red line. A crisis could come quickly — in months — if negotiations to revive the nuclear agreement conclusively fail. 


Or a crisis could build more slowly, if the negotiations drag on indefinitely. Even if some agreement is reached, the US might still face an Iran whose nuclear infrastructure is more advanced than it was in 2015; one with extra cash thanks to at least partial sanctions relief; and one that might push more aggressively for primacy from the Gulf to the Levant.

War between the US and its rivals is not inevitable in any of these theaters. It is a distinct possibility in all of them.

Healthy regional systems underpin healthy global systems. When multiple regions implode at once, they can bring the global order crashing down. Europe, the Persian Gulf and East Asia collectively form the strategic core of the larger theater — Eurasia — that has been the focal point of global politics in the modern era. By sowing upheaval within their regions, the revisionists are shaking several pillars of the system at once.

Simply by pursuing their own agendas, moreover, they create openings for the others to exploit. Feverish tensions with China and Russia force Washington to tread carefully with Iran. Biden’s administration must be wary of provoking Xi while it is tangling with Putin.

Putin, for his part, lost his gamble that America’s focus on China would ensure a weak response when he invaded Ukraine. Yet the danger that US-China competition could get very ugly, very soon, may still give Putin hope that he can prevail if he can simply hang on.

To be sure, America’s rivals are ambivalent friends. Xi hasn’t rescued Putin from his quagmire in Ukraine; if China, Russia and Iran did push the US out of Eurasia, they might fall out among themselves. But none can accomplish its aims without successfully confronting a superpower, which gives them an overriding incentive to align.

Americans may not see the China-Russia relationship as an alliance, but that’s mostly because it lacks the explicit mutual-defense guarantees that have characterized US alliances since World War II. Even so, the relationship has many attributes of an alliance: arms sales and military exercises; growing ties in defense technologies; cooperation to maintain autocratic stability in Central Asia. It also involves a tacit non-aggression pact that frees Beijing and Moscow to focus on the US rather than worrying about each other. A crucial reason the risk of war is growing on both sides of Eurasia is that America’s two great-power adversaries can now fight “back to back.”

Iran is not in the same weight class as Russia and China, but it is part of this loose revisionist axis. Russia and Iran fought together to save Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, while China helped run interference at the UN Security Council. China and Russia have periodically shielded Tehran from US pressure, delaying or diluting sanctions and selling Iran arms.


This cooperation is becoming more pointed. Tehran conducted trilateral naval exercises with Moscow and Beijing after its tensions with Washington spiked in 2019; signed a 25-year strategic partnership with China in 2021; and provided Russia with hundreds of military drones for use in Ukraine.

Tehran’s assistance to Russia underscores something vital: If any of the revisionists were decisively defeated, the others would face an emboldened superpower that could more aggressively target its remaining foes. China may not want to get involved in Ukraine. Yet if Xi feared that Russia was nearing a military collapse that could cause a political collapse in Moscow, he might feel pressure to provide economic aid and military supplies despite the threat of American wrath.

Don’t expect Russia, Iran and China to commit suicide for one another, but don’t think they will be indifferent to one another’s fate.

The US government often struggles to handle more than one crisis at a time, because the attention of top policymakers is finite. What’s more, America presently has less ability to deal with multiple military challenges than at any time since the Cold War. Significant real-dollar defense cuts in the early 2010s, combined with a worsening threat environment, forced the US to adopt a “one-war” defense strategy, rather than the two-war standard of the 1990s and 2000s.

That shift reflected an overdue realization that a major war with a mighty rival — especially China — would tax the US military to the utmost. Yet it means that the Pentagon lacks the wherewithal to deal with violent contingencies in two, let alone three, theaters if they happen in close succession.

Strategy textbooks typically say that a country with more commitments than capabilities should reduce the former or increase the latter. That’s sound long-term advice, but it isn’t as helpful right now.

So-called Asia Firsters argue that the US should de-escalate confrontations and even liquidate commitments in the Middle East and Europe to focus on China. They might get a boost from the bipartisan fury that the recent Saudi decision to cut oil production has provoked in Washington. 

But moving to such a China-centric foreign policy would be unwise. Immediately de-escalating in Ukraine might allow Putin to salvage a messy victory and send a message that conventional aggression, when backed by nuclear coercion, can pay. Pulling back significantly from the Middle East when Tehran is at the nuclear threshold is a recipe for either Iranian hegemony or regional anarchy. Retrenchment is hard to get right in ideal conditions, let alone when rivals are advancing.


Alas, the other traditional answer — spend more money — may not work, either. As the Ukraine war and a bevy of nonpartisan analyses have shown, the US desperately needs enhanced defense spending to field the capabilities, increase the munitions stockpiles, and strengthen the industrial base required to win one war, let alone two or three. Washington cannot allow the near-term problem — an insufficiency of means relative to ends — to become a chronic, geopolitically debilitating condition. But if a major military buildup is necessary, it would take years to bear fruit, too long to make a difference if trouble erupts sometime soon.

What remains is a strategy of sequencing — one that seeks to manage several volatile problems without either retreating dramatically or having them climax in quick succession. A sequencing strategy exploits the fact that Washington may have more time in one region than another: The decisive moment in Ukraine could come in weeks or months, while the moment of maximum danger with China might not begin for a few years.

Sequencing is designed to make the most of those gaps, by resolving certain matters quickly while delaying confrontation elsewhere. Yet because this strategy is the refuge of those who lack better options, there’s no guarantee it will work.

Sequencing first requires ending the war the US is already, if indirectly, in. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine arguably helped the US global posture, by leading to an expanded NATO and bleeding Moscow’s military. Yet a long struggle could end up hurting Washington by distracting it from the greater threat posed by China and consuming scarce dollars and weapons the Pentagon needs to deter — and, if necessary, fight — other conflicts.

How to end the war in Ukraine is hardly obvious. Putin has shown no incentive to negotiate on terms Ukraine would or should accept. Restraining Ukraine now, while it has the military advantage, would set a terrible precedent by effectively legitimizing Russian aggression, and might just give Moscow a chance to renew the fighting later.

Yet if all this argues for putting the pedal to the metal, there is some unquantifiable danger that trying to run Russia out of all of Ukraine — including Crimea — could cause Putin to make good on his nuclear threats. The Ukraine war could become one of those paradoxical conflicts, like Korea in 1950, where getting closer to victory actually brings one closer to disaster.

There is no easy escape from this dilemma, and those who assert there is — that Putin is all bluster and his nuclear bluff should be called — are showing a remarkable degree of analytical confidence. But the fact that Putin has so far stuck to rhetorical threats of nuclear escalation, rather than more menacing signals like visibly moving his nuclear forces around, indicates that he may be trying to get the benefits of nuclear intimidation without paying the costs of nuclear war. It may thus be worth running a slightly higher risk of an expanded conflict in the near-term to reduce the risk of a grinding, protracted war.

This would mean significantly increasing US arms supplies and other support for Kyiv over the next few months, in hopes of allowing Ukraine to liberate as much territory as possible before Russia can mobilize new forces — and perhaps jolting Putin or a successor to offer more serious negotiations.


But it may also mean pressuring Ukraine to go easy on some of its more ambitious, if justified, war aims (such as war crimes trials for Russian henchmen); to remain flexible on the disposition of Crimea; and to advance a serious diplomatic initiative when its current offensives culminate.

The latter of those polices may even work in the service of the former: European allies such as France and Germany might be willing to rush more money and weapons to Ukraine if they feel Kyiv is sensitive to their concerns about escalation.

This approach would require pairing assurance and deterrence — communicating clearly to Putin that the US seeks no wider war with Russia, but that Russia will get that wider war if it uses nuclear weapons. This threat is a necessary component of any strategy to enable Ukrainian victory, even if it is unclear whether an American president would, if put to a decision, actually carry it out.

Think of this as an American twist to Russia’s infamous “ escalate to de-escalate” strategy — it could help Ukraine achieve an advantageous peace without simply charging headlong into conflict with a nuclear power. But don’t kid yourself: This approach is still risky, and even if it succeeded, it would leave Ukraine with less than it deserved.

There is still time for an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy to work in Ukraine, assuming the Pentagon is correct that China will not assault Taiwan for at least two or three years. In East Asia, then, the right policy could be called “quiet urgency” — delaying confrontation while enhancing US defenses.

With minimal fanfare, the US should accelerate the arming of the Taiwanese military with what are known as anti-access/area-denial capabilities, and push Taipei to embrace the asymmetric, whole-of-society defense that has served Ukraine well.

Washington should enhance planning with Australia, Japan and Singapore to determine what military help it can expect in a crisis, and with a larger array of democratic countries to pre-plan comprehensive sanctions in case China uses force. Not least, the US should deploy additional ships and planes in the region, and expedite the mass production of capabilities that could stymie a Chinese invasion — including sea mines, unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, and anti-ship missiles and other long-range precision strike weapons. The key is to use the sense of alarm provided by one war, in Ukraine, to get serious about preparing for another.

Contrary to the current mood in Washington, though, this approach requires foregoing symbolic steps that don’t help Taiwan but give Beijing a pretext to lash out. Virtue-signaling visits by congressional leaders and provocative changes in the name of the unofficial Taiwanese mission in Washington are bad ideas. Recognizing Taiwan as an independent country, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has suggested, would be even worse. Until the US is ready to defend Taiwan, it should speak softly while building a bigger stick.


This leaves the Middle East, where — as always — the choices are lousy and just limiting the damage may be the best outcome. The US negotiating position is weak, due to an Iranian perception that Washington is desperate to avoid a major crisis. Yet most options for increasing US leverage, such as credibly threatening an assault on Iranian nuclear facilities, seem unreasonably risky amid tensions with two nuclear-armed great powers.

A sequencing strategy thus involves playing for time, by deferring the choice between confrontation and capitulation. Even a deeply imperfect diplomatic deal on Iran’s nuclear project would at least delay a political-military showdown, perhaps until after an Iranian regime that is facing increasingly intense domestic challenges to its rule has passed into history.

Realistically, however, Iranian intransigence, along with the political maelstrom in Washington that a weak deal would ignite, may make this option infeasible. In which case the US and Israel might resort to creative coercion: intensified covert action, cyberattacks, stronger economic sanctions, and perhaps selling Israel advanced bunker-buster bombs that would allow it to credibly threaten a unilateral attack.

“Success” in the Middle East would be an ongoing, tense relationship with an Iran that has substantial nuclear infrastructure. But failure could easily occur. Even if the US plays for time, Israel’s patience might not be equal to Washington’s. Coercion short of war could trigger an Iranian military response. Or Iran could perceive US overstretch and push harder for advantage.

America may simply not be able to control when and where crises arise in a progressively less stable system. US rivals don’t have to follow the American script. China could gamble that it is better to attack Taiwan before the Ukraine war is resolved. A badly bludgeoned Russia might refuse to settle, in hopes that Chinese aggression will take the target off Moscow’s back.

The US may come through the next few years without facing a single war, let alone two or three. Even determined autocrats won’t lightly hazard a conflict with a superpower. But getting there from here will require good strategy and, most likely, good luck.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Hal Brands at Hal.Brands@jhu.edu

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net




17. China Recruiting Former R.A.F. Pilots to Train Its Army Pilots, U.K. Says


China Recruiting Former R.A.F. Pilots to Train Its Army Pilots, U.K. Says

nytimes.com · by Mark Landler · October 17, 2022

A J-16 fighter jet at a training base for the People’s Liberation Army in Ningbo, China, last year. China has contracted with as many as 30 retired British military pilots to train its crews, an official said.Credit...Chinatopix, via Associated Press

LONDON — China has recruited as many as 30 retired British military pilots, including some who flew sophisticated fighter jets, to train pilots in the People’s Liberation Army, according to Britain’s Defense Ministry. A senior official said the ministry worried that the practice could threaten British national security.

Britain said it was working with allies to try to stop the practice, which the official said dated to before the coronavirus pandemic but had gained momentum in recent months. The recruited British pilots, the senior official said, included former members of the Royal Air Force and other branches of the armed forces.

None of the retired pilots are suspected of violating the Official Secrets Act, the British law that covers espionage, sabotage and other crimes. But the official said that Britain was determined to tighten the controls on retired service members to guard against training activities that could contravene espionage laws.

“We are taking decisive steps to stop Chinese recruitment schemes attempting to head hunt serving and former U.K. Armed Forces pilots to train People’s Liberation Army personnel in the People’s Republic of China,” said a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, who, under department rules, spoke on the condition that he not be named.

Britain, however, does not have obvious legal tools to stop retired pilots from accepting training contracts from the Chinese army. The contracts are lucrative — about $270,000 a year — and are particularly attractive to pilots who retired from active duty several years ago, the official said.

China, the official said, has contracted the recruiting to a third party, a private test flying academy in South Africa.

The British official declined to say which allies had been involved in investigating the practice, but he suggested that their pilots had also been targets for recruitment.

None of the pilots recruited by the Chinese operated the F-35, the most advanced and expensive fighter jet in the British fleet. But several have flown older-generation warplanes like the Typhoon, Harrier, Jaguar and Tornado, according to the official. Though the pilots train their Chinese counterparts on Chinese planes, he said, the Chinese were eager to learn about British and Western tactics and procedures.

Relations between Britain and China have deteriorated sharply in recent years, with the government in London denouncing Beijing’s crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, a former British colony. In July 2020, the government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson banned the purchase of equipment from Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, for its high-speed broadband network on national security grounds.

Under Mr. Johnson, China was designated as a “systemic competitor,” reflecting his government’s desire to balance criticism of Beijing’s human rights abuses with a continuation of trade relations. But the current prime minister, Liz Truss, has further hardened Britain’s stance. She is expected to designate China as a “threat” in an updated version of a defense and foreign policy review.

After a lull in recruitment during the months of pandemic-related travel bans, the official said, China’s efforts to lure pilots have since ramped up.

“All serving and former personnel are already subject to the Official Secrets Act,” the defense spokesman said, “and we are reviewing the use of confidentiality contracts and nondisclosure agreements across Defense, while the new national security bill will create additional tools to tackle contemporary security challenges — including this one.”

nytimes.com · by Mark Landler · October 17, 2022



18. The U.S. Military’s Growing Weakness


Graphs/charts at the link.

The U.S. Military’s Growing Weakness

A new Heritage Foundation report warns about declining U.S. naval and air power.

By The Editorial Board

Updated Oct. 17, 2022 5:51 pm ET


https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-growing-military-weakness-heritage-foundation-index-of-u-s-military-strength-navy-air-force-army-11666029967?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d



Americans like to think their military is unbeatable if politicians wouldn’t get in the way. The truth is that U.S. hard power isn’t what it used to be. That’s the message of the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength, which is reported here for the first time and describes a worrisome trend.

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Heritage rates the U.S. military as “weak” and “at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests.” The weak rating, down from “marginal” a year earlier, is the first in the index’s nine-year history.

***

The index measures the military’s ability to prevail in two major regional conflicts at once—say, a conflict in the Middle East and a fight on the Korean peninsula. Americans might wish “that the world be a simpler, less threatening place,” as the report notes. But these commitments are part of U.S. national-security strategy.

Heritage says the U.S. military risks being unable to handle even “a single major regional conflict” as it also tries to deter rogues elsewhere. The Trump Administration’s one-time cash infusion has dried up. Pentagon budgets aren’t keeping up with inflation, and the branches are having to make trade-offs about whether to be modern, large, or ready to fight tonight. The decline is especially acute in the Navy and Air Force.

The Navy has been saying for years it needs to grow to at least 350 ships, plus more unmanned platforms. Yet the Navy has shown a “persistent inability to arrest and reverse the continued diminution of its fleet,” the report says. By one analysis it has under-delivered on shipbuilding plans by 10 ships a year on average over the past five years.

From 2005 to 2020, the U.S. fleet grew to 296 warships from 291, while China’s navy grew to 360 from 216. War isn’t won on numbers alone, but China is also narrowing the U.S. technological advantage in every area from aircraft carrier catapults to long-range missiles.



The Navy wants to build three Virginia-class submarines a year, and the U.S. still has an edge over Beijing in these fast-attack boats. But the shipbuilding industry has shrunk amid waning demand, and the Navy’s maintenance yards are overwhelmed. Maintenance delays and backlogs are the result of running the fleet too hard: On a typical day in June, roughly one-third of the 298-ship fleet was deployed, double the average of the Cold War.

It’s worse in the Air Force, which gets a “very weak” rating. Aging “aircraft and very poor pilot training and retention” have produced an Air Force that “would struggle greatly against a peer competitor,” Heritage says.

The fighter and bomber forces are contracting to about 40% of what America had in the 1980s. The service has been slowing its F-35 buys even as it needs modern planes to compensate for the smaller fleet. Aircraft have low mission-capable rates, roughly 50% for the F-22. Heritage says the Air Force has “abandoned even the illusion” that it is working toward an 80% aircraft readiness goal. Munitions inventories “probably would not support a peer-level fight that lasted more than a few weeks,” and replacements can take 24 to 36 months to arrive.




A pilot shortage “continues to plague the service,” and the “current generation of fighter pilots, those who have been actively flying for the past seven years, has never experienced a healthy rate of operational flying.” Fighter pilots flew a meager 10 hours a month on average in 2021, up from 8.7 in 2020 but still far below the 200 hours a year minimum needed to be proficient against a formidable opponent.

The story isn’t much better for the Army, which has lost $59 billion in buying power since 2018 due to flat budgets and inflation. The Army is shrinking not as a choice about priorities but because it can’t recruit enough soldiers—nearly 20,000 short in fiscal 2022.

The Marines scored better in the index as the only branch articulating and executing a plan to change, reorganizing for a war in the Pacific in a concept known as Force Design 2030. But the Marines are slimming down to a bare-bones 21 infantry battalions, from 27 as recently as 2011. Mission success for the Marines depends on a new amphibious ship that the Navy may not be able to deliver.

***

Some will call all this alarmist and ask why the Pentagon can’t do better on an $800 billion budget. The latter is a fair question and the answer requires procurement and other changes. But the U.S. will also have to spend more on defense if it wants to protect its interests and the homeland. The U.S. is spending about 3% of GDP now compared to 5%-6% in the 1980s. The Heritage report is a warning that you can’t deter war, much less win one, on the cheap.

WSJ Opinion: Does the U.S. Still Retain Military Dominance Over China?

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China’s hypersonic missile test demonstrates the next major war will utilize cyber attacks and unmanned vehicles striking from afar. So far the Biden administration is ignoring the warning signs (10/21/21). Images: EPA/Shutterstock/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly

Appeared in the October 18, 2022, print edition as 'The U.S. Military’s Growing Weakness'.













De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com


V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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


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