Quotes of the Day:

"If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall galdy change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance." 

- Marcus Aurelius

"Knowledge increases in proportion to its use; that is, the more we teach the more we learn." 

- Helena Blavatsky

Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.

- Aristotle

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 30 (Putin's War)

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (30.10.22) CDS comments on key events

3. Russia rains missiles on Ukraine after pulling out of crucial grain deal

4. US curbs on microchips could throttle China's ambitions and escalate the tech war

5. US Air Force to deploy nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to Australia as tensions with China grow

6. US Navy hunting for info warfare experts, Aeschbach tells Old Crows

7. They Make You Take an Oath to the Constitution: They Don't Make You Read

8. US and EU: Supporting Iranians demanding freedom is not a luxury

9. Blind spots in Washington’s Indo-Pacific Strategy

10. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is coming

11. How Foreign Policy Amateurs Endanger the World

12. If China declares war, these ham radio enthusiasts could be crucial

13. White House rejects promoting general involved in Capitol riot response

14. The attack targeting Nancy Pelosi illustrates rising political threats

15. A former employee’s complaint prompts Republican calls to investigate The China Project, an American news company

16. Iran’s Women on the Frontlines

17. Global Impact: Now the dust has settled after the 20th party congress, where is China heading under Xi Jinping?

18. 'Complex threat environment' ahead of midterm elections, top cybersecurity official says

19. Options for Ukraine to Defend Civilian Centers from Russian Strikes

20. Meet the Vets Running for Congress, the Largest Group of Candidates Who Served in a Decade

21. One War at a Time

22. The Ukraine War Will End With Negotiations

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 30 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics:  https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-30

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on October 30:

• Unconfirmed Russian reports claimed that Russian Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvichev (Commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District) replaced
• Colonel General Alexander Lapin as Central Military District (CMD) commander as of October 30.[13] Russian sources continue to make contradictory reports about whether Lapin was fully relieved of command of the CMD or just relieved of command of the Russian operational “Central Group of Forces” operating in Ukraine.[14]
• The Russian Ministry of Defense and Russian sources claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults on Pershotravneve, Tabaivka, and Berestove in Kharkiv Oblast.[15]
• Ukrainian sources and geolocated reports indicate that Russian forces destroyed a bridge over the Krasna River in Krasnorichenske, Luhansk Oblast.[16] Russian milbloggers accused Ukrainian forces of destroying the bridge.[17]
• A Russian occupation official stated that Russian force are preparing to defend Kherson City by engineering defenses in Bilozerka and Chornobaivka.[18] Ukrainian military official also noted that Russian officials continued to prepare defenses around Kherson City.[19]
• Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are preparing to withdraw artillery units from unspecified areas on the western bank of the Dnipro River to possibly reinforce other directions.[20] Ukrainian military officials also reported that several hundred Rosgvardia servicemen deployed from the Republic of Chechnya to Kalanchak in southwestern Kherson Oblast.[21]
• Russian forces continued to shell Ukrainian positions in Beryslav Raion, Kherson Oblast, and both Ukrainian and Russian sources provided limited information regarding the situation on the Kherson Oblast frontline.[22]
• Russian sources claimed that Russian forces captured Vodyane, Donetsk Oblast, (4km northwest of Donetsk International Airport) on October 30.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff’s evening report did not report repelling Russian attacks in this area as it usually does, potentially indicating that the Russian claims are accurate.
• Russian sources reported that Russian forces captured Pavlivka, Donetsk Oblast, (2km southwest of Vuhledar) on October 30.[24] Some Russian sources claim that Russian forces control only half of Pavlivka as of October 30.[25] The Ukrainian General Staff’s evening report did not report repelling Russian attacks in this area as it usually does, potentially indicating that the Russian claims are accurate.
• Russian forces launched Kh-59 cruise missiles at Ochakiv, Mykolaiv Oblast.[26] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces targeted and destroyed military infrastructure in Ochakiv.[27]
• Mobilized men from Republic of Komi appealed to Russian authorities with complaints of insufficient military equipment and body armor.[28]
• Russia announced its intention to supply 500,000 tons of grain to the “poorest countries” following its withdrawal from the deal that allowed Ukraine to export its grain.[29] Ukraine announced that it intends to export agricultural products to maintain global food security.[30]
• Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces continued to create conditions in Nova Kakhovka to drive local inhabitants to evacuate.[31]
• Occupation authorities in Kherson Oblast announced a dual currency system that allows the use of both rubles and hryvnya, unwinding a months-long effort to enforce rubleization in the oblast.[32]

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 30

Oct 30, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 30

Frederick W. Kagan

October 30, 5:00 pm 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.

ISW is publishing an abbreviated campaign update today, October 30. This report forecasts that Russia will continue to conduct conventional military operations well into 2023 rather than escalating to the use of tactical nuclear weapons or scaling back its objectives in pursuit of some off-ramp. It considers the timelines of Russian force generation and deployment, of weather effects, and of Moscow’s efforts to freeze Europe into surrender. It includes a summary of battlefield activities that will be described in more detail in tomorrow’s update.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will most likely try to continue conventional military operations in Ukraine to hold currently occupied territories, gain new ground, and set conditions for the collapse of Western support for Ukraine that he likely expects to occur this winter. Putin has likely not abandoned hopes of achieving his maximalist aims in Ukraine through conventional military means, which he is pursuing in parallel with efforts to break Ukraine’s will to fight and the West’s will to continue supporting Kyiv.[1] Putin is unlikely to escalate to the use of tactical nuclear weapons barring the sudden collapse of the Russian military permitting Ukrainian forces to make uncontrolled advances throughout the theater.[2] Such a situation is possible but unlikely. Putin is extraordinarily unlikely to seek direct military conflict with NATO. Putin is very likely to continue to hint at the possibility of Russian tactical nuclear use and attacks on NATO, however, as parts of his effort to break Western will to continue supporting Ukraine.

This forecast rests on two assessments. First, that Putin is setting conditions to continue throwing poorly prepared Russian troops directly into the fighting in Ukraine for the foreseeable future rather than pausing operations to reconstitute effective military forces. Second, that Putin’s theory of victory relies on using the harsh winter to break Europe’s will. These assessments offer a series of timelines that support the forecast.

Russian force-generation efforts will occur over the course of several predictable time periods. Putin has declared that the “partial mobilization” of reservists is complete.[3] That declaration means that, in principle, the Russian military will stop calling up reservists and instead focus on completing their brief training periods before sending them to fight in Ukraine. ISW previously assessed that most of the remaining called-up reservists will arrive in the theater of war over the next few weeks.[4]

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that continued reserve mobilization efforts will take the form of renewed efforts to recruit “volunteers,” likely into volunteer battalions—efforts that were largely shelved during the “partial mobilization.”[5] Russia will likely struggle to fill out new “volunteer” units rapidly following the reserve call-ups and the flight of hundreds of thousands of Russians who feared those call-ups. Continued attempts to create “volunteer” units will thus likely generate little meaningful combat power and will be spread over an extended period of time.

The Russian military will begin its semi-annual conscription call-up a month later than usual on November 1, 2022. Russia’s conscription cycle offers a set of predictable timelines. Normal Russian conscript training involves a period of roughly six months of individual basic and advanced training followed by the assignment of conscripts to combat units in which they complete their remaining six months of mandatory service.[6] Russian law bans sending conscripts to combat operations abroad with fewer than four months of training, although it specifies that conditions of war or martial law allow the Russian military to deploy conscripts to fight earlier than that. Putin has declared martial law states of varying degrees of urgency throughout the Russian Federation and could use that declaration to trigger the exemption from the mandatory training period.[7] The annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts offers another possible basis for exemption, because Russian law does not preclude the use of conscripts in Russian territory regardless of how much training they have received.[8]

Raw conscripts with no military experience and fewer than four months of training are likely to be nearly useless on the battlefield in any case. Putin may rush limited numbers of such conscripts to combat before their four-month training period is complete, but most will likely be held back until March 2023 at the earliest.

The Russian military will likely find it necessary to send these conscripts to units in Ukraine at the end of their six-month period of initial training in any case, however, as there are unlikely to be enough functional combat units at home stations in Russia to receive them. The Russian military has fully committed its available ground forces units to Ukraine in a series of force-generation efforts, as ISW has previously reported.[9] The partial mobilization and volunteer battalion recruitment efforts are further evidence that the Russian military has no remaining uncommitted ground forces to send. The Russian military likely will be unable to keep called-up conscripts in training areas for more than six months, however, because the next semi-annual conscription call-up would normally begin around April 1, 2023. Conscripts called up beginning on November 1, 2022, will thus likely be assigned to combat and support units in Ukraine and begin to arrive on the battlefield around May 2023.

The Russian Defense Ministry will not likely be able to conduct additional reserve call-ups as long as it is engaged in providing conscripts with initial training. The next window for a large-scale reserve mobilization would thus likely be not earlier than March 1.

The combination of the just-completed partial reserve mobilization and the annual conscription cycle thus creates two likely waves of Russian troops flowing into Ukraine—one moving in over the next few weeks, and the other starting to flow in spring 2023.

Weather offers another likely periodization of Russian efforts that coincides well with the force-generation timelines discussed above. Fall in Ukraine is generally wet and muddy but not usually so bad as to make mechanized offensives impossible. Winter, on the other hand, is usually the best season for mechanized warfare in Ukraine. Ukrainian land is among the most fertile on earth in part because of the dense network of rivers and streams that irrigate it. That network also breaks up the land and can inhibit mechanized advances by canalizing them along roads (although both Russian and Ukrainian troops are, in principle, trained and equipped to operate on this terrain in any season, Ukrainian troops have been far more successful, in general, in doing so.) When the ground freezes hard, however, most of the streams and some of the rivers also freeze, greatly facilitating cross-country mechanized advances. Spring is the nightmare season for fighting in Ukraine. The thaw swells rivers and streams and turns fields into seas of mud. Mechanized warfare in the spring muddy season is extremely difficult (although, again, not impossible for forces like Ukraine’s and, theoretically, Russia’s, that are properly equipped and trained for it).

The Russian partial mobilization is thus flowing forces into Ukraine now in a way that is likely meant to stiffen Russian defenses and allow Russian forces to hold their positions against expected Ukrainian counter-offensive operations through the rest of the fall and into the dangerous winter period. If Putin intends to deploy Russian boys about to be conscripted after four or six months of training, he could be setting conditions for Russian forces to resume offensive operations after the end of the spring thaw.

The Russian partial mobilization of reservists just completed strongly suggests that Putin intends to keep fighting into 2023 rather than expecting to secure some sort of ceasefire or to escalate in a way that could end the war on his terms. He has paid a very high domestic price for this mobilization effort in the flight of hundreds of thousands of Russians to other countries, unprecedented protests, and equally unprecedented criticisms of the performance of the Russian military and the Russian government.[10] This price makes sense if Putin intends to keep fighting and recognizes the need to get reinforcements to Ukraine right now in order to hold his positions long enough for fresh conscripts to arrive and turn the tide in his favor, as he might think. It makes far less sense if he intends to escalate to the use of tactical nuclear weapons either in an effort to win the war or in hopes of securing a ceasefire or some other off-ramp on favorable terms. It could make sense as part of a non-escalatory effort to pursue negotiations for some off-ramp had Putin not accompanied his announcement of the end of partial mobilization with repetitions of his maximalist claims regarding the illegitimacy of the Ukrainian state and the artificiality of the Ukrainian ethnos that are incompatible with serious negotiations.

Putin’s efforts to break Europe’s will by withholding Russian energy supplies over the winter offers yet another timeline that coheres well with the others. The theory underlying this Russian effort would be that freezing European populations will put such pressure on their governments that European states will begin to accept Putin’s demands to stop providing weapons and other forms of support to Ukraine, at least, and possibly to lift various sanctions on Russia as well. This theory will not really be falsifiable until well into 2023, however. European governments have ostentatiously prepared their populations for a difficult winter, stocked up as best they can on energy supplies, and set conditions to reduce energy usage even at significant economic cost. These actions signal that European leaders are ready for the kinds of pressures they are likely to encounter early in the cold season. Putin can hope that they will not be able to withstand those pressures all through the winter, but the validity of that hope will not be clear until the coldest weather has had a chance to build them. This timeline thus also coincides with the likely availability of the next wave of Russian forces in spring 2023—Putin will have been able to observe the effect of winter on European will and choose whether to commit his conscripts or pursue some other course of action.

These timelines are likely more significant in shaping Putin’s thoughts and decisions than in shaping effects on the ground. Roughly one-third of the mobilized reservists have already arrived in Ukraine, according to Putin, and they have made relatively little difference on the battlefield.[11] The UK Ministry of Defense noted that they are reinforcing combat units that were in some cases effectively destroyed—reduced to 10 percent of their normal complements.[12] The arrival of hastily mobilized and untrained reservists into such units will not render them combat effective. The deployment of raw conscripts after four or six months of training in 2023 will likely have similarly nugatory effects on the battlefield. But Putin does not appear to recognize these facts and seems rather to expect the reserves called up at such surprising cost to make a real difference.

Putin is thus setting conditions to continue waging conventional war for the foreseeable future rather than preparing to try to end the war by escalation or by making for some “off-ramp.” He could always change his mind, to be sure. But Ukraine and the West should be operating on the assumption that Ukraine will continue to have many months in which to regain control of strategically vital terrain, for which it will also continue to require continued large-scale Western support.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces conducted further offensive operations in northeastern Ukraine, and Russian forces continued to set conditions for a withdrawal from Kherson. Those developments are summarized briefly and will be covered in more detail tomorrow.

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on October 30:

• Unconfirmed Russian reports claimed that Russian Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvichev (Commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District) replaced
• Colonel General Alexander Lapin as Central Military District (CMD) commander as of October 30.[13] Russian sources continue to make contradictory reports about whether Lapin was fully relieved of command of the CMD or just relieved of command of the Russian operational “Central Group of Forces” operating in Ukraine.[14]
• The Russian Ministry of Defense and Russian sources claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults on Pershotravneve, Tabaivka, and Berestove in Kharkiv Oblast.[15]
• Ukrainian sources and geolocated reports indicate that Russian forces destroyed a bridge over the Krasna River in Krasnorichenske, Luhansk Oblast.[16] Russian milbloggers accused Ukrainian forces of destroying the bridge.[17]
• A Russian occupation official stated that Russian force are preparing to defend Kherson City by engineering defenses in Bilozerka and Chornobaivka.[18] Ukrainian military official also noted that Russian officials continued to prepare defenses around Kherson City.[19]
• Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are preparing to withdraw artillery units from unspecified areas on the western bank of the Dnipro River to possibly reinforce other directions.[20] Ukrainian military officials also reported that several hundred Rosgvardia servicemen deployed from the Republic of Chechnya to Kalanchak in southwestern Kherson Oblast.[21]
• Russian forces continued to shell Ukrainian positions in Beryslav Raion, Kherson Oblast, and both Ukrainian and Russian sources provided limited information regarding the situation on the Kherson Oblast frontline.[22]
• Russian sources claimed that Russian forces captured Vodyane, Donetsk Oblast, (4km northwest of Donetsk International Airport) on October 30.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff’s evening report did not report repelling Russian attacks in this area as it usually does, potentially indicating that the Russian claims are accurate.
• Russian sources reported that Russian forces captured Pavlivka, Donetsk Oblast, (2km southwest of Vuhledar) on October 30.[24] Some Russian sources claim that Russian forces control only half of Pavlivka as of October 30.[25] The Ukrainian General Staff’s evening report did not report repelling Russian attacks in this area as it usually does, potentially indicating that the Russian claims are accurate.
• Russian forces launched Kh-59 cruise missiles at Ochakiv, Mykolaiv Oblast.[26] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces targeted and destroyed military infrastructure in Ochakiv.[27]
• Mobilized men from Republic of Komi appealed to Russian authorities with complaints of insufficient military equipment and body armor.[28]
• Russia announced its intention to supply 500,000 tons of grain to the “poorest countries” following its withdrawal from the deal that allowed Ukraine to export its grain.[29] Ukraine announced that it intends to export agricultural products to maintain global food security.[30]
• Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces continued to create conditions in Nova Kakhovka to drive local inhabitants to evacuate.[31]
• Occupation authorities in Kherson Oblast announced a dual currency system that allows the use of both rubles and hryvnya, unwinding a months-long effort to enforce rubleization in the oblast.[32]

[12] Russian Units Severely Undermanned as They Prepare for Kherson Defense—U.K. (newsweek.com)

[13] https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/13698; https://t.me/mardanaka/11477; https://vologda-poisk dot ru/news/na-zlobu-dnya/v-minoborony-ne-podtverdili-otstranenie-ot-komandovaniya-tsvo-aleksandra-lapina

understandingwar.org

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (30.10.22) CDS comments on key events

CDS Daily brief (30.10.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

As of the morning of October 30, 2022, more than 1,253 Ukrainian children are victims of full- scale armed aggression by the Russian Federation, Prosecutor General's Office reports. The official number of children who died and were wounded during the Russian aggression is 430, and more than 823 children, respectively. However, the data is not conclusive since data collection continues in the areas of active hostilities, temporarily occupied areas, and liberated territories.

In Ukraine, 248 children are currently considered missing since the beginning of the full-scale war with the Russian Federation, and 7,049 have been found, according to the "Children of War" state portal. In addition, 9,441 considered [illegally] deported and 96 - returned.

According to Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko, 483 kindergartens of various types and forms of ownership are currently operating in the capital. This is approximately 60% of the total number of establishments.

Russia continued shelling Ukrainian residential areas and civilian infrastructure. Oblast Military Administrations reported shelling in 7 Oblasts of Ukraine over the past day, including the following:

•       At night and in the morning, the Russian forces shelled the Nikopol district of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Ten high-rise and private residential buildings, utility buildings, a gas pipeline, and a household waste removal company were damaged in Nikopol. One injured civilian was reported in the Marganets community.

•       Last day, the occupiers shelled Zaporizhzhia and Zaporizhzhia Oblast. 43 reports were received about the destruction of houses (apartments) and infrastructure facilities.

•       On October 29, the enemy attacked the Mykolaiv Oblast. Agricultural enterprises, houses and garages were damaged. In Bashtan district, 1 residential building was destroyed, 2 houses were damaged.

•       On October 29, 5 civilians were killed in Donetsk Oblast by enemy shelling: in Antonivka, Pervomaisky, Druzhba, Klishchiivka, and Elizavetivka. 8 more were injured. In addition, law enforcement officers found the bodies of five civilians who died during the occupation

- two in Koroviy Yar, two in Svyatogorsk, and one more in Lyman.

•       During the past day, the enemy shelled Kupyansk (1 wounded), Chuguyiv and Kharkiv districts of the Kharkiv Oblast. In Kupyansk, a civilian industrial facility was damaged, and a large-scale fire broke out. The police reported 1 death because of the Russian shelling. A 39-year-old female resident of Volchanski Khutora did not have time to run home from the guests when the shelling began.

A school in the Kherson Oblast was destroyed due to a direct hit by a Russian missile, reported the head of Kherson Oblast Military Administration, Yaroslav Yanushevich. According to him, before the full-scale invasion of Russia and the occupation of the village of Osokorivka, 360

students attended this local school. Under the "New Ukrainian School" program, the educational institution received new equipment, laptops, projectors, printers, and furniture.

Occupied territories:

In Severodonetsk, which was almost completely destroyed, the Russian invaders accepted applications for compensation for destroyed housing from only 38 people, said the head of the Luhansk Regional Military Administration, Serhii Gaidai. According to Gaidai, up to 10,000 residents remain in Severodonetsk today. In the city, the housing stock has been destroyed by 80%, "not to mention the lack of infrastructure. However, during the four months of occupation, no one [of occupation authorities] even thought of restoring anything, even for propaganda purposes. Before the pseudo-referendum, they announced they would pay compensation for the destroyed housing, but the people never got the money," he stressed.

During the so-called "evacuation" activities, the Russian invaders took prisoners from the Kherson colony (No. 90) and set up a base there. According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the enemy is using the territory of the mentioned correctional institution for the placement of personnel and military equipment.

According to Dmitry Orlov, Ukrainian mayor of Enerhodar, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Russian occupiers fired at the industrial zone of Energodar. Most of the city was left without electricity. Preliminary, one of the substations was hit.

Operational situation

(please note that this part of the report is mainly on the previous day's (October 29) developments)

It is the 249th 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 and concentrates its efforts on disrupting the counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian troops. At the same time, it does not give up attempts to conduct the offensive in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions.

During the past day, units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled the enemy attacks in the areas of Yakovlivka, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Oleksandropil, Kamianka, Avdiivka, Pervomaiske, Krasnohorivka, Maryinka, and Novomykhailivka of the Donetsk Oblast.

The enemy continues shelling units of the Defense Forces along the contact line, fortifying its frontiers in certain directions and conducting aerial reconnaissance. The enemy strikes critical infrastructure, violating the norms of International Humanitarian Law, laws and customs of war. During the past 24 hours, the enemy launched 5 missile strikes and 23 air strikes, and carried out more than 100 rounds of anti-aircraft fire. This criminal activity affected more than 45 Ukrainian towns and villages, including Slovyansk and Siversk in the Donetsk Oblast, Zaporizhzhia, and Novooleksandrivka in the Kherson Oblast. Near the state border, Rozhkovichi, Budky, Mezenivka,

Fotovyzh and Myropyllya of Sumy Oblast, Ternova, Vovchansk, Veterynarne, Vilkhuvatka, Gatyshche, Hryhorivka, Kamianka, Figolivka, Dvorichna, Starytsia, Ohirtseve, Strilecha and Chuhunivka of Kharkiv Oblast were shelled.

The Republic of Belarus continues to support the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukrainians. The Russian Federation continues to transfer individual units to the territory of Belarus. Thus, on October 26, the arrival of an echelon of military equipment from the Russian Federation at the Brest railway station was observed. Together with the servicemen of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the so-called "Kadyrov combatants" arrived. In addition, Russian soldiers were spotted in settlements between the cities of Brest and Malorita. The threat of missile strikes and the use of attack UAVs from the territory of the Republic of Belarus continues to persist.

The Defense Forces aircraft during the day struck the enemy 32 times. Of them, 23 were at areas of concentration of enemy weapons and military equipment, 3 at platoon strongholds, and 6 at enemy air defense positions. In addition, Ukrainian air defense shot down an Iskander-K missile and two Orlan-10 UAVs.

Units of AFU missile troops and artillery hit 6 areas of concentration of weapons and military equipment, 3 ammunition warehouses, 2 air defense facilities and 9 other important military targets.

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

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

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

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

Ukrainian troops consolidated successes and continued counteroffensive actions at the Svatove- Kreminna frontier and established full fire control over the main sections of the P66 road, which ultimately disrupts Russian logistics and supplies along this route.

Fighting continues on the Svatove-Kreminna line; Ukrainian troops are trying to break through to Kreminna and are accumulating forces for an attack. They attacked in the direction of

Chervonopopivka, where they killed 20 Russian soldiers and wounded another 30 with a precise strike.

Enemy troops conducted offensive operations east of the Kharkiv Oblast, inflicting damage on the accumulation of Ukrainian equipment in Tymkivka, Ivanivka, Tabaivka, and Khrokmalne. The enemy still holds positions east of the Oskil River up to the state border.

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 enemy fired from tanks, mortars, barrel and jet artillery at the positions of the Defense Forces in the areas of Kyslivka, Krokhmalne, Grekivka, Zarichne, Novoyehorivka, Berestove, Nevske, Olhivka, Terny, Torske and Yampolivka.

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 enemy shelled from tanks and artillery the areas of Andriivka, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Bilohorivka, Vesele, Zvanivka, Siversk, Zelenopillia, Soledar, Odradivka, New York, Vasyukivka, Serebryanka, Yakovlivka, Avdiivka, Nevelske, Vodyane, Maryinka, Novomykhailivka, Pervomaiske and Opytne.

Russian troops slowed down the pace of the offensive near Bakhmut, having recovered from the Ukrainian strike on October 28. Ukrainian Joint Forces launched a precision strike against Russian forces preparing for another attack south of Bakhmut near Mayorsk, killing approximately 300 Russian servicemen and wounding another 60 (evacuated to a medical facility in Horlivka). In general, Russian losses near Bakhmut since the beginning of the assaults in October are estimated at 8,000 KIA.

On October 28-29, Russian troops began an offensive on Vuhledar; they attacked in the direction of Pavlivka from positions to the south (near Yehorivka) and from the east (near Mykilske), broke through the first line of Ukrainian defense and reached the southeastern outskirts of Pavlivka.

On October 29, the Russian occupiers continued to increase the territory under their control near the city of Donetsk, entered the southeastern outskirts of Vodyane, captured a section of the M04 road and advanced near Nevelske and Pervomaiske.

Ukrainian Joint Forces repelled enemy attacks northeast of Avdiyivka near Kamianka, north of Donetsk near Vodyane, and northwest of Donetsk near Nevelske.

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 enemy shelled the positions of the Defense Forces and civil infrastructure in the areas of Vremivka, Vuhledar, Yehorivka, Mykilske, Novoukrainka, Pavlivka, Prechystivka, Hulyaipole, Nove, Dorozhnyanka, Zaliznychne, Zeleny Hai, Temyrivka, Olgivske, and Chervone.

In Velyka Znamyanka, the enemy continues to place personnel in the homes of local residents. International law considers "simulation of civilian status" to be an act of treachery, which is a violation of the laws of armed conflict.

Tavriysk direction

-    Vasylivka – Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line – 296 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 39, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 7,5 km;

-   Deployed BTGs of: the 8th and 49th Combined Arms Armies; 11th, 103rd, 109th, and 127th rifle regiments of the mobilization reserve of the 1st Army Corps of the Southern Military District; 35th and 36th Combined Arms Armies of the Eastern Military District; 3rd Army Corps of the Western Military District; 90th tank division of the Central Military District; the 22nd Army Corps of the Coastal Forces; the 810th separate marines brigade of the Black Sea Fleet; the 7th and 76th Air

assault divisions, the 98th airborne division, and the 11th separate airborne assault brigade of the Airborne Forces.

Areas of about 20 towns and villages along the contact line were damaged by fire. Nikopol and Vyshchetarasivka in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Havrylivka in the Kherson Oblast were hit by enemy shelling from rocket and barrel artillery.

During the so-called "evacuation" activities, the occupiers removed the prisoners from the correctional colony No. 90 in Kherson. The enemy is using the correctional institution's territory to place personnel and military equipment. In the Kherson area towns and villages, the enemy is taking measures to prepare for defense. The arrival of a company of Russian Guards from Grozny to Kalanchak was noted. On the territory of Nova Kakhovka, Russian special services are actively listening to the telephone conversations of the civilian population.

According to the Ukrainian Military Intelligence assessment, in this direction, the enemy has a grouping of up to 40,000 military personnel of well-trained military units of the Airborne Forces, marines, and SOF, supplemented by mobilized personnel.

The enemy continues to maintain defensive positions on the western bank of the Dnipro River and transfers the mobilized personnel to the western bank, despite the fact that they are showing signs of low morale and lack of prior training. Russian military forces civilians to build fortifications.

The Russian troops shelled Davidiv Brid, Mala Seydemynukha and Kobzartsi. They repelled five Ukrainian attacks in the directions of Mylove, Sukhanove, Pyatykhatky, Ishchenko, Bruskinske and Sadok along the front line in the north of the Kherson Oblast, where combat operations are conducted by enemy units of the 126th separate coastal defence brigade and 11th separate airborne assault brigade.

Units of AFU missile troops and artillery destroyed three ammunition warehouses in the Beryslav and Mykolaiv districts and struck the Antoniv bridge.

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.

The enemy retains 10 ships and boats at sea. They are located along the southwestern coast of Crimea. Among them are 3 Kalibr cruise missile carriers: a project 11356R frigate and two small project 21631 missile ships with a total of 24 missiles.

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

Enemy aviation continues to fly from Crimean airfields Belbek and Gvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 14 war aircraft from Belbek and Saky airfields were deployed.

The attack on the Russian Navy ships on October 29 was the largest military action since the Novorossiysk battleship was blown up in Sevastopol Bay on October 29, 1955. According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the attack on the Russian Navy ship near Sevastopol was probably carried out by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, this is only a restrained response to the bombing of Ukrainian cities. ISW reminds that attacks on warships in wartime are legitimate acts of war and not terrorist attacks. Ukraine's decision to strike Kalibr missile carriers at this time makes sense, given the intensification of Russia's campaign of strikes at Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

According to various data, 8-10 UAVs and 6-8 marine UAVs were involved in coordinated actions against the ships of the Russian Navy. During the attack, the frigate "Admiral Makarov", the minesweeper "Ivan Golubets", an amphibious ship and a missile corvette of the "Buyan-M" type were damaged. Various sources report 3-9 damaged ships. The fuel base of the Russian Air Force in Sevastopol was also damaged. It should be noted that even the Russian side recognized the penetration of three naval unmanned aerial vehicles into the internal raid of Sevastopol, which is very dangerous for a large number of the Russian Armed Forces forces based in Sevastopol.

"Grain Initiative": The Joint Coordination Center(JCC) in Istanbul, which coordinates the work of the "grain initiative", did not reach an agreement on the movement of ships through the "corridor" on October 30. According to the JCC, more than ten ships are waiting to enter the corridor. The coordination center is currently discussing further steps.

Due to Russia's withdrawal from the "grain agreement", the ship Ikaria Angel with 40,000 tons of grain for Ethiopia, could not leave the Ukrainian port today as planned, stated the Minister of Infrastructure Oleksandr Kubrakov. "These products were intended for the people of Ethiopia, who are on the verge of starvation. But due to the closure of the "grain corridor" by Russia, export is impossible," he wrote.

Russian operational losses from 24.02 to 30.10

Personnel - almost 71,200 people (+950);

Tanks - 2,672 (+13)

Armored combat vehicles – 5,453 (+52);

Artillery systems – 1,724 (+16);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 383 (+3); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 197 (+2); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 4,120 (+13); Aircraft - 274 (+1);

Helicopters – 252 (0);

UAV operational and tactical level – 1,412 (+6); Intercepted cruise missiles - 352 (+1);

Boats / ships - 16 (0).

International diplomatic aspect

"The grain deal was thwarted by Zelensky and his terrorists, who British specialists lead to add food to the nuclear blackmail," a chief propaganda mouthpiece of Russia's Foreign Ministry said. In the Russian world, waging a war of aggression and deliberately targeting civilians and critical infrastructure is a regular business. At the same time, Ukraine's self-defense and hitting warships launching cruise missiles on Ukrainian cities is called "terrorism."

"Russia began deliberately aggravating the food crisis back in September when it blocked the movement of bulk carriers with our food. From September to today, 176 vessels have already accumulated in the grain corridor, which could not follow their route. Some grain carriers have been waiting for more than three weeks. This is a completely deliberate blockade of Russia. This is an absolutely transparent intention of Russia to return the threat of large-scale famine to Africa and Asia", said Ukraine's President.

According to the monitoring group of the BlackSeaNews and Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, in the period of 1–18 September, the average waiting time for the "grain fleet" vessels for inspection by the Joint Coordination Centre in the Sea of Marmara was 54 hours/vessel. However, in the period of 19–30 September, the average waiting time skyrocketed to 272 hours/vessel (it has increased by five times or 11,3 days for a ship).

Russia's accusations that the UAF used the "grain corridor" to attack Russia's warships in the harbor of Sevastopol are ridiculous because there is more than 220 km between the sea route edge and Sevastopol. Moreover, in the period of August 8 (the start of the grain transit) – October 22, Russian warships conducted at least 75 launches of cruise missiles on Ukrainian cities, including thirty launches on a single day on October 10. At least twice, Ukrainian Navy assets engaged in securing the grain corridor have been attacked by Russian warships.

"There's no merit to what they're doing. The UN negotiated that deal, and that should be the end of it," Joe Biden said. "In suspending this arrangement, Russia is again weaponizing food in the war it started, directly impacting low- and middle-income countries and global food prices and exacerbating already dire humanitarian crises and food insecurity. We urge the Government of Russia to resume its participation in the Initiative, fully comply with the arrangement, and work to ensure that people around the world continue to be able to receive the benefits facilitated by the Initiative," Antony Blinken stated.

Lithuania's Foreign Minister called on the free world to enforce grain export with military escorts. "Negotiating with Russia doesn't work. Putin breaks agreements and blackmails all of us. If he continues to jeopardize Ukraine's grain exports, the free world must unite to safeguard shipping with military escorts. Let's bypass the blackmail", Gabrielius Landsbergis twitted. "President Putin must stop weaponizing food and end his illegal war on Ukraine," NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu said.

The "grain deal" has allowed to shipment of more than 9 million tons of grain by 397 bulker carriers. It helped to bring down global food prices, which have fallen about 15% from their peak in March. It's crucial to cope with the global food crisis and soften hunger in developing countries; that's why Russia is trying to use it as leverage.

"The readiness of Russia, including its president, for negotiations ("on Ukraine") remains unchanged," Sergey Lavrov said. He went on by saying that the talks are possible if Moscow is approached with "realistic proposals, based on the principles of equality and respect for each other's interests, and aimed at finding compromises and balancing the interests of all countries." Russia's Foreign Minister repeated his narrative that the situation is "similar" to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 because of growing "security threats right on our borders" while Ukraine is being pumped up with weapons. His message is aimed at blackmailing the West with nuclear weapons, though his boss [President Putin] recently turned to a less threatening tone. The Kremlin's spokesman said that negotiations "on Ukraine" should be conducted primarily with the US since Kyiv is acting "on orders from outside." It's just a typical Russian denial of Ukraine's sovereignty and propaganda narrative that Russia's war against Ukraine is the US "proxy" war against Russia. Russian propagandists are pushing the line that the US set up "a trap" and "made" Russia invade Ukraine.

"The only realistic proposal should be Russia's immediate cessation of the war against Ukraine and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory beyond the borders as of 1991," Ukraine's Foreign Ministry spokesman replied to the Moscow "statements."

Yevgeny Prigozhin, Vladimir Putin's fixer, has announced setting up the Wagner PMC Centre in Saint Petersburg. He is an owner of the so-called Wagner Private Military Company, which mercenaries are fighting in Ukraine, Syria, and several African countries. A former chief cook of Putin also runs Internet troll factories. Now he wants to set up a space for "ideas generation" to boost Russia's defense capabilities.

Yevgeny Prigozhin's company called on the [Russian] Prosecutor General to block Youtube in Russia because it "is flooded with fakes aimed at discrediting the Russian military, disseminates deliberately false information about the actions of the Russian Armed Forces, state authorities and administration, as well as patriotic forces." Since Yevgeny Prigozhin remains one of the closest confidants of Vladimir Putin, his increased public activities might signal his bid for Putin's favor in giving him more power and resources and, likely, choosing him as a successor. 

Centre for Defence Strategies (CDS) is a Ukrainian security think tank. We operate since 2020

We publish this brief daily. If you would like to subscribe, please send us an email at cds.dailybrief@gmail.com

Please note, that we subscribe only verified persons and can decline or cancel the subscription at our own discretion

We are an independent, non-government, non-partisan, and non-profit organisation. More at

www.defence.org.ua

Our Twitter (in English) - https://twitter.com/defence_centre

Our Facebook (in Ukrainian) - https://www.facebook.com/cds.UA

Our brief is for information only and we verify our information to the best possible extent

3. Russia rains missiles on Ukraine after pulling out of crucial grain deal

Russia rains missiles on Ukraine after pulling out of crucial grain deal

Fears were mounting Monday that the Kremlin's war would leave civilians in Ukraine and beyond facing a bleak winter.

NBC News · by Yuliya Talmazan and Reuters

A wave of Russian missile strikes hit critical infrastructure in Kyiv and across the country Monday, after Moscow blamed Ukraine for an attack on its Black Sea fleet and pulled out of a crucial grain deal.

From Kharkiv in the east to Cherkasy in central Ukraine and regions farther west, officials said sites that supply power and water were hit as the country was already reeling from weeks of sustained attacks on energy facilities.

Moscow’s targeting of those sites has forced Kyiv to enforce tough restrictions on energy use as temperatures drop. With the Kremlin announcing it was suspending its participation in a United Nations-brokered deal to allow shipments of grain to leave the country’s ports, fears were mounting that the war would leave civilians in Ukraine and beyond facing a bleak winter.

Russia halts grain exports out of Ukraine

Oct. 30, 202200:22

Residents of Kyiv woke up to the loud sounds of blasts across the capital, as air raid sirens blared and people ran into shelters.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko said some 350,000 homes in Kyiv lost power and 80% of the city was without water because of damage to infrastructure facilities caused by the strikes, as he urged residents to stock up on water "just in case."

Part of the Kyiv region also lost all electricity, authorities there said, as they warned residents it could be a while before the power came back on. Regional Gov. Oleksiy Kuleba said residential buildings were also hit, and there were injuries.

Ukraine’s army said more than 50 cruise missiles were fired by aircraft from within Russia Monday, and 44 were intercepted.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Russian missiles and drones hit 10 regions, damaging 18 infrastructure sites, most of them energy-related.

U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink said that like millions of Ukrainians, embassy staff in Kyiv were “once again taking shelter as Russia continues its callous and barbaric missile strikes on the people of Ukraine in an effort to leave the country cold and dark as we approach winter.”

Foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said missiles had hit energy infrastructure in Kyiv and other cities, causing electricity and water outages. “Russia is not interested in peace talks, nor in global food security. Putin’s only goal is death and destruction," Nikolenko said in a tweet.

There was no immediate response from Moscow, which has accused Kyiv of attacking its Black Sea Fleet in a Crimean port with 16 drones on Saturday. Ukraine has not taken responsibility for the incident.

Earlier this month, Russia launched the biggest airstrikes since the start of the war on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, in what it said was a response to an attack on its bridge to Crimea.

“Another batch of Russian missiles hits Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. Instead of fighting on the battlefield, Russia fights civilians,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a tweet Monday.

“Don’t justify these attacks by calling them a ‘response.’ Russia does this because it still has the missiles and the will to kill Ukrainians.”

Russia and Ukraine are both among the world’s biggest food exporters, and a Russian blockade of Ukrainian grain shipments caused a global food crisis earlier this year.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of "blackmailing the world with hunger" in his daily video address Sunday by pulling out of the food export deal negotiated by the U.N. and Turkey in July. Moscow was, once again, "putting the world on the brink of a severe food crisis," Zelenskyy said.

Among the vessels held up was one carrying tens of thousands of tons of wheat, chartered by the U.N. World Food Programme for an emergency response in Ethiopia, Zelenskyy added.

Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry said a total of 218 vessels were “effectively blocked.”

The grain deal required Russia and Ukraine to coordinate inspections and transit of ships through the Black Sea with the U.N. and Turkey acting as mediators.

This was a rare example of a negotiated settlement involving both Kyiv and Moscow, with peace talks long since halted as Ukraine seeks to press forward with counteroffensives that have dealt damaging setbacks to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.N. said the deal had indirectly prevented 100 million people from falling into extreme poverty, and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed "deep concern" about Russia’s decision.

The U.N. said it had agreed with Turkey and Ukraine on a transit plan for Monday for 16 ships to move Black Sea grain — 12 outbound and four inbound. There was no immediate response from Russia, but the country's state media covered the development without detailing Moscow's reaction.

The U.N. said Russian officials had been told about the plan, along with the intention to inspect 40 outbound vessels on Monday, and noted that “all participants coordinate with their respective military and other relevant authorities to ensure the safe passage of commercial vessels” under the deal.

President Joe Biden on Saturday called Russia’s move “purely outrageous” and said it would increase starvation. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Moscow of weaponizing food.

On Sunday, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, snapped back, saying the U.S. response was "outrageous," adding that Moscow has not seen "any condemnation of the reckless actions of the Kyiv regime," state news agency Tass reported.

NBC News · by Yuliya Talmazan and Reuters

4. US curbs on microchips could throttle China's ambitions and escalate the tech war

​1930s Japan and oil?

US curbs on microchips could throttle China's ambitions and escalate the tech war | CNN Business

CNN · by Laura He · October 31, 2022

Video Ad Feedback

How new legislation would help US semiconductor maker

02:32 - Source: CNNBusiness

Hong Kong CNN Business —

Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s push to “win the battle” in core technologies and bolster China’s position as a tech superpower could be severely undermined by Washington’s unprecedented steps to limit the sale of advanced chips and chip-making equipment to the country, analysts say.

On October 7, the Biden administration unveiled a sweeping set of export controls that ban Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. The rule also restricts the ability of “US persons” — including American citizens or green card holders — to provide support for the “development or production” of chips at certain manufacturing facilities in China.

“The US moves are a major threat to China’s technological ambitions,” said Mark Williams and Zichun Huang, analysts at Capital Economics, in a recent research report. The analysts pointed out that the global semiconductor industry is “almost entirely” dependent on the United States and countries aligned with it for chip design, the tools that make them, and fabrication.

A robotic arm is seen on the assembly line of computer at a computer manufacturing enterprise set up by Tsinghua Tongfang Co., Ltd on February 22, 2022 in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province of China.

Hu Xiaofei/VCG/Getty Images/FILE

The next frontier in the tech battle between the US and China

“Without these,” the analysts said, “Chinese firms will lose access not only to advanced chips, but to technology and inputs that might over time have allowed domestic chipmakers to climb the ladder and compete at the cutting edge.” They added: “The US has chopped the rungs away.”

Chips are vital for everything from smartphones and self-driving cars to advanced computing and weapons manufacturing. US officials have talked about the move as a measure to protect national security interests. It also comes as the United States is looking to bolster its domestic chip manufacturing abilities with heavy investments, after chip shortages earlier in the pandemic highlighted the country’s dependance on imports from abroad.

Arthur Dong, a teaching professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, described the recent US sanctions as “unprecedented in modern times.”

Previously, the US government has banned sales of certain tech products to specific Chinese companies, such as Huawei. It has also required some major US chip-making firms to halt their shipments to China. But the latest move is much more expansive and significant. It not only bars the export to China of advanced chips made anywhere in the world using US technology, but also blocks the export of the tools used to make them.

US President Joe Biden meets with China's President Xi Jinping during a virtual summit from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, November 15, 2021.

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

With its Made in China 2025 road map, Beijing has set a target for China to become a global leader in a wide range of industries, including artificial intelligence (AI), 5G wireless, and quantum computing. At the Communist Party Congress earlier this month, where he secured a historic third term, Xi highlighted that the nation will prioritize tech and innovation and grow its talent pool to develop homegrown technologies.

“China will look to join the ranks of the world’s most innovative countries by 2035, with great self-reliance and strength in science and technology,” Xi said in the party congress report, released on October 16.

Dong said the latest US sanctions will make it harder for China to advance in AI as well as 5G, given the role advanced chips play in both industries.

“In any circumstances,” Williams from Capital Economics said, “China would find achieving global tech leadership hard to achieve.”

Mass resignation of US executives?

One dramatic, and potentially disruptive aspect of the rules is the ban on American citizens and legal residents working with Chinese chip firms.

Dane Chamorro, a partner at Control Risks, a global risk consultancy based in London, said such measures are usually “only enacted against ‘rogue regimes’” such as Iran and North Korea. The decision to use this against China is “unprecedented,” Chamorro said.

A Chinese flag hangs from a pole near the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. headquarters in Shanghai, China, on Saturday, Dec. 19, 2020.

Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty Images

US strikes at the heart of China's bid to become a tech superpower

Many executives working for Chinese firms may now have to choose between keeping their jobs or acting as lawful US residents. “You can’t do both,” Chamorro said.

The ban could lead to a mass resignation of top executives and core research staff working at Chinese chip firms, which will hit the industry hard, Dong from Georgetown University said.

So far it’s not clear exactly how many American workers there are in China’s domestic chip industry. But an examination of company filings indicates that more than a dozen chip firms have senior executives holding US citizenship or green cards. At Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment China (AMEC), one of the country’s largest semiconductor equipment manufacturers, at least seven executives, including founder and chairman Gerald Yin, hold US citizenship, the latest company documents show.

A woman inspects the quality of a chip at a manufacturer of IC encapsulation in Nantong in east China's Jiangsu province Friday, Sept. 16, 2022.

Xu Congjun/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Other examples include Shu Qingming and Cheng Taiyi, who currently serve as vice chairman and deputy general manager, respectively, at GigaDevice Semiconductor, an advanced memory chip firm. The Financial Times report said in a recent report that Yangtze Memory Technologies has already asked American employees in core tech positions to leave, citing anonymous sources. But it’s unclear how many.

AMEC, GigaDevice Semiconductor, and Yangtze Memory Technologies didn’t respond to requests for comments.

If these senior executives depart, “this will create a leadership and technological void within China’s chipmaking industry,” Dong said, as the country loses executives with years of chipmaking experience in an industry with “one of the most complex manufacturing processes known to mankind.”

Beginning of a tech war?

While much of the world’s chip manufacturing is centered in East Asia, China is reliant on foreign chips, especially for advanced processor and memory chips and related equipment.

It is the world’s largest importer of semiconductors, and has spent more money buying them than oil. In 2021, China bought a record $414 billion worth of chips, or more than 16% of the value of its total imports, according to government statistics.

But some Western suppliers have already started preparing to halt sales to China in response to the US export curbs.

ASM International (ASMIY), the Dutch semiconductor equipment supplier, said Wednesday that it expected the export restrictions will affect more than 40% of its sales in China. The country accounted for 16% of ASML’s equipment sales in the first nine months of this year.

Lam Researc (LRCX)h, which supplies semiconductor equipment and services, also flagged last week that it could lose between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in annual revenue in 2023 as a result of the US export curbs.

The party congress, which recently wrapped up, has slowed China’s response to latest US export controls, analysts said. But as Beijing starts assessing the significance of the measures, it might retaliate. Xi is “concerned” about US plans to bolster domestic chip production as his administration moves to restrict China’s ability to make them, said US President Joe Biden in a speech on Thursday.

“This conflict is just beginning,” said Chamorro.

--FILE--A wheel loader piles up rare earth on a quay at the Port of Lianyungang in Lianyungang city, east China's Jiangsu province, 22 May 2016. China's rare earth industry has to produce more high-end products by further reducing the number of producers in the next five years, according to the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) for the industry released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Tuesday (18 October 2016). According to the plan, rare earth with higher added value will account for 50 percent of the total output by 2020, up from 25 percent in 2015. The plan has stipulated that the total mining of rare earths in 2020 should be no more than 140,000 metric tons, compared with the 105,000 tons limit in 2016.

Wang chun/Imaginechina via AP

China wants even more control over rare earths

Chamorro said the most valuable “card” in China’s hand might be the supply of processed rare earth minerals, which Beijing could embargo. Rare earth minerals are important materials in electric vehicle production, battery making and renewable energy systems.

“These are not easily or quickly replaced and China dominates the processing and supply chain,” Chamorro said.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is also weighing further restrictions on other technology exports to China, a senior US Commerce Department official said Thursday, according to the New York Times.

If either country takes these steps, it could shift the tech arms race between the United States and China to a whole new level.

CNN · by Laura He · October 31, 2022

5. US Air Force to deploy nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to Australia as tensions with China grow

US Air Force to deploy nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to Australia as tensions with China grow

ABC.net.au · by Watch · October 30, 2022

阅读中文版

The United States is preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, a provocative move experts say is aimed squarely at China.

An investigation by Four Corners can reveal Washington is planning to build dedicated facilities for the giant aircraft at Tindal air base, south of Darwin.

The US has drawn up detailed plans for what it calls a "squadron operations facility" for use during the Northern Territory dry season, an adjoining maintenance centre and a parking area for "six B-52s".

Plans for the Tindal air base expansion include a parking area that can accommodate six B-52 bombers.(Supplied/Four Corners: Lindsay Dunbar)

Becca Wasser from the Centre for New American Security says putting B-52s in northern Australia is a warning to China, as fears grow Beijing is preparing for an assault on Taiwan.

"Having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further," she says.

The bombers are part of a much larger upgrade of defence assets across northern Australia, including a major expansion of the Pine Gap intelligence base, which would play a vital role in any conflict with Beijing.

The B-52s have been the backbone of the US Air Force for more than 60 years, with the capability to deliver long-range strikes of both nuclear and conventional weapons. The US documents say the facilities will be used for "deployed B-52 squadrons".

"The ability to deploy US Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power," the US Air Force told Four Corners.

Asked when the B-52s would begin their deployment at Tindal, Australia's Department of Defence declined to comment.

'The tip of the spear'

Some worry having B-52s rotating through Tindal each year locks Australia into joining the US in any conflict against China.

"It's a great expansion of Australian commitment to the United States' war plan with China," says Richard Tanter, a senior research associate at the Nautilus Institute and a long-time, anti-nuclear activist.

"It's a sign to the Chinese that we are willing to be the tip of the spear."

Mr Tanter sees the planned deployment of the bombers as more significant than the rotation of US Marines through Darwin each year.

US marines and Australian soldiers conduct annual exercises in the Top End.(ABC News)

"It's very hard to think of a more open commitment that we could make. A more open signal to the Chinese that we are going along with American planning for a war with China," Mr Tanter says.

Ms Wasser says the growing importance of northern Australia to the US makes Darwin and Tindal targets in any war with China.

Her work includes running war game exercises to examine how a potential conflict might unfold.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.

Military analyst Becca Wasser and her team explore the risks Australia could face by joining the US in a fight over Taiwan.

She says in the war game scenarios where Australia either joined the fight or allowed Washington to use bases in the Top End, "it did very much put a bullseye on Australia".

“Ultimately these attacks were not successful because of the long range required and because China had already expended its most capable long-range missiles earlier in the game, … but who's to say that in the future, China might have more advanced missile capability that would be better suited to potentially attacking Australia.”

China's growing confidence about Taiwan invasion

In recent months, US war planners and analysts have brought forward estimates of when Beijing may look to take Taiwan.

"The time frame for an assault on Taiwan, I would put it at 2025 to 2027," says defence academic Oriana Skylar Mastro from Stanford University.

"This is largely dependent on when I think the Chinese leadership and in particular [President] Xi Jinping can be confident that his military can do this."

A missile launch from a Chinese military propaganda video.

She says there is a growing confidence within the People's Liberation Army that it could successfully invade Taiwan.

"For 15 years I would ask the Chinese military if they could do this [invade Taiwan], and the answer was 'no'. So the fact that for the first time at the end of 2020 they're starting to say 'yes', I think that's a significant message we should pay attention to," she says.

US has big plans for Australia

These growing tensions with China have made northern Australia a crucial defence hub for the US, which has committed to spending more than $1 billion upgrading its military assets across the Top End.

The Tindal air base expansion includes a parking area that can accommodate six B-52 bombers and is forecast to cost up to $US100 million. The US Air Force says the parking area will be finished in late 2026.

"The RAAF's ability to host USAF bombers, as well as train alongside them, demonstrates how integrated our two air forces are," it says.

B-52s have been the backbone of the US Air Force for more than 60 years.(U.S. Air Force photo)

In April, the US Department of Defence budgeted $US14.4 million ($22.5 million) for the squadron operations and maintenance facilities at Tindal.

"The [squadron operations] facility is required to support strategic operations and to run multiple 15-day training exercises during the Northern Territory dry season for deployed B-52 squadrons," the US documents say.

The US also plans to build its own jet fuel storage tanks and an ammunition bunker at the site.

"The north of Australia in the new geopolitical environment, has suddenly become strategically much more important, if not crucial to the US," says Paul Dibb, a former senior official at the Department of Defence in Canberra.

A greater presence of US forces in Australia was hinted at during last year's annual ministerial meetings, known as AUSMIN.

Under so-called "enhanced air co-operation" it was agreed there would be "rotational deployment of US aircraft of all types in Australia".

"Today we endorse major force posture initiatives that will expand our access and presence in Australia," US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin said.

B-52s can deliver long-range strikes of both nuclear and conventional weapons.(U.S. Air Force photo)

There was no mention of rotating B-52s through Tindal, although there have been hints in recent years.

Equally important to the growing US presence in northern Australia is the construction of 11-giant jet fuel storage tanks in Darwin.

Some of this fuel reserve was previously located at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, but is now being dispersed across the region.

"Without that kind of assurance of jet fuel in this country, the US simply wouldn't be able to treat Australia as a location from which it can stage military exercises and operations with confidence," says Ashley Townshend from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mr Townshend says the B-52s at Tindal are just the start.

"We will see much greater numbers of US military personnel forward located in Australia. That will include personnel from all three services, navy, air force and army, as well as the marines in Darwin, which are likely to be expanded," he says.

In the AUSMIN communique, this was flagged as part of efforts to "advance … force posture co-operation" to "deter our adversaries".

Spy base expands

While both governments have signalled the growing US military presence in Australia, the expansion of one site is veiled in secrecy. There has been very little said about Pine Gap.

The joint US and Australian spy base near Alice Springs is undergoing a major upgrade, according to Richard Tanter.

Powerful antennas eavesdropping on foreign satellites and detecting missile launches sit under Pine Gap's domes.(Four Corners)

He's spent months poring over satellite images of Pine Gap and estimates the number of giant antennas has grown by more than a third over the past seven years.

"This is at a time when the Australian Parliament has been informed of none of this, no statements by ministers no questions by politicians," he says.

Mr Tanter says Pine Gap's powerful "ears and eyes" are now heavily focused on China.

"The searching for Chinese missile sites, the searching for Chinese command sites, in a preparatory way, is absolutely on high priority at Pine Gap now," he says.

"This indicates the extraordinary importance and the increasing importance to the US at a time of potential war with China."

Mr Tanter has observed the expansion of the spy base over a number of years.(Google/Maxar Technologies)

If a conflict broke out between the US and China, Mr Tanter says Pine Gap would play a hugely significant role, particularly around missile defence systems.

"Pine Gap would be detecting the launch of the missile … it would be queuing US missile defence systems to find that missile in mid-flight and attack it with their own missiles," he says.

Pine Gap's geo-location technology would then be used to find and destroy the missile launch site.

Paul Dibb, who held a high-level security clearance at Pine Gap for 30 years, says "it is the most potent intelligence collection facility that America has" outside of the US.

Mr Dibb says this put Pine Gap on targeting lists for the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, and it would be on those same lists for China in any conflict with the US.

"If it looked as though that crisis was going nuclear, China may want to take out Pine Gap as being the ears and eyes of America's capability," he says.

Watch tonight on ABC TV or ABC iview as Four Corners explores what conflict with China would mean for Australia.

Read the story in Chinese: 阅读中文版

ABC.net.au · by Watch · October 30, 2022

6. US Navy hunting for info warfare experts, Aeschbach tells Old Crows

Note the focus on the technical aspects versus the influence aspects except almost as an "add on," e.g. "its persuasive powers."

Information warfare, or IW, is a fusion of offensive and defensive electronic capabilities and cyber operations. It combines data awareness and manipulation to gain an advantage, before, during and after battles. The proliferation of communications and other advanced technologies and their prevalence in militaries the world over has given recent rise to the concept and its persuasive powers.

US Navy hunting for info warfare experts, Aeschbach tells Old Crows

Defense News · by Colin Demarest · October 28, 2022

WASHINGTON — Personnel steeped in information warfare are increasingly in demand across the U.S. Navy, and the woman who ensures they are properly trained, equipped and available is feeling the pressure.

“The competition is so keen now that my warfighting peers are approaching me and, in a good way, want me to do my job,” Vice Adm. Kelly Aeschbach, the commander of Naval Information Forces, said at the annual Association of Old Crows symposium in Washington. “They want to invest in actually having information warfare experts as part of their team, because the environment is so complex now.”

Information warfare, or IW, is a fusion of offensive and defensive electronic capabilities and cyber operations. It combines data awareness and manipulation to gain an advantage, before, during and after battles. The proliferation of communications and other advanced technologies and their prevalence in militaries the world over has given recent rise to the concept and its persuasive powers.

“We do our job right day to day, we will stay in competition. We will not be in crisis, and we will not have to endure conflict,” said Aeschbach, who previously served as deputy director of intelligence for U.S. Forces–Afghanistan and the director of intelligence for U.S. Strategic Command. “But I would also tell you that if we end up in crisis or conflict, we will be essential to the Navy prevailing in whatever that conflict is.”

RELATED

Operation Cyber Dragon turning US Navy reservists into digital defenders

“The interesting thing in the IT world or the network world is what’s patched and 100% compliant today might not be patched tomorrow, because vulnerabilities ebb and flow.”

The Navy years ago installed information warfare commanders in carrier strike groups. The position, C4ISRNET previously reported, supplements air warfare and surface warfare commanders.

The service also established Fleet Information Warfare Command Pacific, an entity postured for a vast region the U.S. deems vital to international security and financial well-being. The Pentagon considers China its No. 1 threat. Russia is a close second.

“I tell folks that information warfare in and of itself is its own warfighting domain. We have our own non-kinetic and kinetic capabilities that we deliver,” Aeschbach said Oct. 26. “But, candidly, no other warfighting area can execute without us. You have to have us in order to be successful, if you want to put a weapon on target.”

Aeschbach earlier this year told Defense News her top priority was “to get information warfare fully into live, virtual and constructive training,” where a clearer picture of the IW community’s capabilities can emerge.

An inability to train with information warfare systems during live events — either due to the harm they may cause nearby in the electromagnetic spectrum or because they don’t want to reveal tools and tactics to faraway observers — has clouded a more in-depth understanding.

“Until we deliver that,” Aeschbach said at the time, “we’ll remain challenged in being objective about how well we’re executing.”

With reporting by Megan Eckstein.

About Colin Demarest

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

7. They Make You Take an Oath to the Constitution: They Don't Make You Read

​Worthy of reflection and discussion - Civilian control of the military and the chain of command.

They Make You Take an Oath to the Constitution: They Don't Make You Read It - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by James Joyner · October 31, 2022

Officers in the U.S. armed forces take an oath to the constitution upon commissioning and renew it each time they are promoted to a new rank. In doing so, they pledge their loyalty to the country and their subordination to its laws. This oath is central to maintaining healthy civil-military relations, but it is not enough. As repeated crises over the last several years have shown, the military’s fealty to the constitution cannot be expected to save American democracy from presidents who violate their own oath to it.

The recent open letter in these pages signed by every living former secretary of defense except Dick Cheney and every living former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff except retired Army Gen. Hugh Shelton demonstrates the strength of U.S. military’s commitment to civilian control. The signatories include those who served under six presidents of both parties, and all four of the longstanding military services. Especially noteworthy is their embrace of Peter Feaver’s dictum that “Elected (and appointed) civilians have the right to be wrong.” This pithy statement means, essentially, that perfection in decision-making is not required — only sobriety, steadfastness, competence, and integrity, supported by a constitutionally accountable political mandate.

These high-level principles, however, do not tell the full story about the complexity of civil-military relations on a month-to-month or year-to-year basis. Both Congress and the courts have significant roles in shaping defense policy through substantive statutes, appropriations acts, and judicial orders, but these are of little direct concern to the rank and file. Civilian control of the military is, as a practical matter, exercised through the chain of command, which runs to the president as commander-in-chief. Neither laws nor court decisions are self-executing. Until the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff turn Congress’s will or a court’s mandate into policy orders, they have little direct effect.

Become a Member

As a result, if Congress is worried about the risks posed by an erratic president, it is their responsibility to codify safeguards into law, rather than counting on the country’s generals to act as a last line of defense. Instead of expecting the military to ignore a lawful nuclear launch order, for example, elected representatives could act now to help reduce that risk. At the same time, in an increasingly partisan climate, the public still expects generals and admirals to understand the political environment and navigate it. This means that they will have to be more cautious than ever to avoid stepping on political landmines and appearing to be partisans for either side. In other words, at a particularly fraught moment, the military’s oath of loyalty is necessary but not sufficient to keep the constitutional order functioning.

Understanding the Chain of Command

As just one example of how complicated the chain of command can be, consider Public Law 115-68, the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017, which Donald Trump signed on Oct. 6 of that year. While its text had significant implications for the curriculums of professional military education institutions, it is only slowly making its way into policy. The Trump White House did not issue its U.S. Women Peace and Security Strategy until June 2019, almost two years after signing the act into law. The ensuing Department of Defense Women, Peace, and Security Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan was published a year later, in June 2020. As of March 2022, a Department of Defense Instruction was still in the works. Changes still have not made it to the Officer Professional Military Education Policy, which was last revised a month earlier. Nor has it been a Chairman’s Special Area of Emphasis. In other words, a law was enacted over five years ago, following the normal constitutional processes, but has had very little practical effect because the executive branch has not completed the steps that turn it into useful guidance for the relevant military departments.

To be sure, many if not all of the staff and war colleges are working to carry out congressional intent on this matter, piecing together a mosaic approach from the various clues that Congress and the Office of the Secretary of Defense have provided so far. But that’s as much a function of organic support from leaders and scholars at these institutions as it is a matter of Congress having made its wishes known. Indeed, the act was signed into law near the end of the 114th Congress. We’re now approaching the end of the 117th. The lag between the passage of the legislative requirement and the issuance of meaningful and specific Defense Department guidance demonstrates the primacy of the executive branch’s leadership for the rank and file on this and similar issues.

Moreover, the fact that the military answers to the Congress as well as the president works both ways. It gives the brass two bites at the apple, allowing them a second avenue for prevailing in policy fights that they have lost against the executive branch. As Alice Hunt Friend and Sharon Weiner note, Congress routinely allows the service chiefs to lobby for “unfunded requirements” that were not part of the president’s budget.

Perhaps the most famous case of this was the rearguard action by the Navy Department against President Harry Truman’s efforts to unify the armed forces into a single department, which would have stripped the Navy of its airplanes and shuttered the Marine Corps. Ultimately, Navy and Marine leaders persuaded Congress that Truman’s plan would consolidate too much power in the executive at the expense of the legislature. Instead of unifying two service departments into one, America ended up with an additional Department of the Air Force that, oddly, did not have a monopoly on fighter jets. And instead of the Marine Corps being rolled into the Army, Congress not only codified its preservation into law but also went so far as to pledge a minimum of three divisions in perpetuity.

This example is hardly unique. Military leaders have prevailed over the wishes of their commander-in-chief by lobbying Congress on everything from gays in the military to the roles of women and special operations forces. As Friend and Weiner note, civilian masters tend to defer to the brass “not because they believe military expertise to be substantively superior in every possible instance, but rather because it is politically challenging to oppose military advice and often politically beneficial to align with military opinion.”

Yet despite this, going to the Hill is a tightrope walk for generals and admirals, who in fact serve at the pleasure of the president. For example, Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley earned the ire of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for adhering to Trump’s insistence that he keep lawmakers out of the loop on the decision to kill Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, even going so far as to provide evasive answers in his testimony.

Here, again, the constitution is of little help. The framers’ intentional division of powers over military and foreign policy between the president and Congress has long been understood as an “invitation to struggle.” Further, as Friend rightly notes in a recent commentary here, while they are required by their professional ethic to refrain from being partisan, senior uniformed leaders are inherently political actors. Both service chiefs and combatant commanders are charged with fighting over “who gets what, when, and how,” the very definition of politics.

Enter the Courts

Similarly, while judicial review of policies, orders, and actions involving the military is a form of civilian control, the process is circuitous. While officers are trained from their earliest days as cadets and midshipmen that they must disobey illegal orders, legality and constitutionality are rarely so straightforward that these determinations are easy for the individual officer to make, even at the four-star level.

For example, the Supreme Court held in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (June 2004) that the president may not suspend the right of an alleged enemy combatant who was also a U.S. citizen to challenge his detention in the federal courts. The Defense Department quickly responded, creating Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a new mechanism designed to comply with the holding. Two years later, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (May 2006), the court held that these tribunals, too, were unconstitutional because only Congress, not the president and his executive branch delegates, had the power to create judicial bodies. Congress filled the breach by passing Public Law 109-366, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which President George W. Bush signed into law on Oct. 17. Finally, in Boumediene v. Bush (June 2008), the court ruled that the Military Commissions Act was an unconstitutional suspension of the right of habeas corpus. Pursuant to this ruling, a lower court judge ordered that Lakhdar Boumediene and four other foreign nationals detained at Guantanamo be released. Congress also passed the Military Commissions Act of 2009, remedying the cited defects in the 2006 version, as part of that year’s National Defense Authorization Act.

At every step of the way, then, the Defense Department and many of its officers were acting in ways that were, in retrospect, unconstitutional. Presumably, they were doing so in good faith. It took multiple Supreme Court cases, over a period of many years, to flesh out what procedures were necessary for constitutional compliance. These issues are hard and often novel, and the answers are not immediately apparent. In fact, even years later they remain somewhat difficult for trained professionals, including military lawyers, to understand. Indeed, updated implementation guidance was issued as recently as March.

To take a more recent example, in August 2021, the Defense Department ordered all of its employees, uniformed and civilian, to get vaccinated against COVID-19, pursuant to implementation guidelines issued by the services, military departments, and field agencies. The next month, President Joe Biden issued an executive order requiring all executive branch employees to get vaccinated. While precise numbers are hard to come by, the services have already discharged over 5,700 uniformed members who have refused to comply with these orders. Meanwhile, the department’s inspector general has expressed “concern” that requests for religious exemptions were dismissed too hastily rather than being given the individualized scrutiny required by law. Now, dozens of lawsuits are underway. More than one federal judge has expressed sympathy for those asserting that their religious objections should take precedence over mission-related concerns of the department. It would be no surprise if the current Supreme Court upheld this view, overturning generations of extraordinary deference to presidents and the military brass on matters of good order and discipline.

Ultimately, of course, the military will follow the law as determined by the courts — to the extent that a court’s order and mandate are clear and executable. In the meantime, though, the orders of the president and the secretary of defense are presumed lawful. It would be chaos, indeed, if every unit commander, much less every member of the armed forces, were to take it upon themselves to offer their interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause, or to make individual judgments about the fitness of female soldiers to serve in the infantry or for gay soldiers to serve at all.

Indeed, as Texas National Security Review executive editor Doyle Hodges has pointed out, while the Nuremberg trials famously rejected the “just following orders” defense, they prefaced that by noting, “it is certainly not incumbent upon a soldier in a subordinate position to screen the orders of superiors for questionable points of legality. Within certain limitations, he has the right to assume that the orders of his superiors and the State which he serves and which are issued to him are in conformity with International Law.” Unless they are “manifestly unlawful,” a very high bar, they are presumed legal.

Most officers can discern the easy cases, but these are not the ones that occasionally shake institutions to their cores. The lawfulness of kinetic targeting of U.S. citizens, Defense Department policy on transgender servicemembers, and the shifting landscape over the War Powers Act are three examples where ten different senior officers — indeed, ten different military lawyers — might have ten different views on lawfulness and constitutionality.

Presidential Prerogative

Under the Trump administration, there were numerous instances when the commander-in-chief issued policy directives that looked a whole lot like orders via tweet. Many of them were, in both our judgment and that of senior Defense Department officials at the time, unwise. They were irregular in form. But almost all of them could be presumed legal. Constitutionally, no matter how reckless, ugly, and irresponsible, they were presumptively lawful orders from the president, bound to be operationalized and tested for lawfulness over time.

For the first time in decades, the erratic nature of the sitting president caused members of Congress, national security scholars, and others to panic over the fact that the commander-in-chief has essentially untrammeled authority to launch nuclear strikes. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee even held hearings on the matter, questioning whether the policy should change. Many members asserted that “without congressional authority, a preventative or preemptive U.S. military strike would lack either a constitutional basis or legal authority.” That view, of course, was not universally held, and the constitution is predictably silent on this particular matter, written as it was more than a century and a half before the advent of the nuclear age. Given the exigent nature of such orders, however, there would be no time to resolve this matter via the courts. And the commanding general of U.S. Strategic Command is neither a judicial officer nor elected policymaker.

Further, it is the most senior officers who have the primarily responsibility for ensuring that orders are in accordance with the constitution and other applicable laws. It is problematic, indeed, to argue that it is the duty of all officers to make those judgments. Outside of narrow cases like the law of armed conflict, that is simply not realistic, particularly as international law is evolving and outcomes often turn on hard facts.

An illustrative case is that of former Army Lt. Col. Terrence Latham. A distinguished physician with multiple combat deployments, Latham refused in early 2010 to deploy to Afghanistan, asserting that President Barack Obama was not a native-born U.S. citizen and therefore not constitutionally eligible to be president or issue orders through the chain of command. A military court martial rightly convicted him, sent him to prison, and ousted him from the service. This was not just because Obama was unquestionably born in Hawaii and thus constitutionally eligible — a matter the judge refused to even allow to be litigated at Lakin’s trial — but because lieutenant colonels are not the constitutional officers charged with deciding such things. Now a small minority of servicemembers are vocally asserting that Biden is not the legitimate commander in chief — a position thankfully rejected by the Joint Chiefs.

The Devil in the Details

That officers should “act constitutionally” and “follow the constitution” is so uncontroversial as to be axiomatic. But the devil is in the details. Figuring out what acts are actually constitutional can require constant attention, balance, advice, and good-faith judgments. Acting constitutionally is often interpreted as following the orders of the president faithfully. But when a president himself acts irregularly, in ways that may be inconsistent with the constitution, officers have to balance between the executive, the legislature, and the courts. In these situations, repeating that an officer’s duty is to the constitution provides little guidance.

Just ask Milley, who many argue routinely overstepped his authority in his efforts to circumvent a president he viewed as dangerous. Milley is an educated man, with a political science degree from Princeton, a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia, a certificate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Seminar XXI National Security Studies Program, and another master’s degree from the Naval War College. One presumes he got substantial training in civil-military relations along the way. Nothing in his classroom experience or four decades of military service could have prepared him for Trump, who was sui generis in his disregard for the norms of the office of commander-in-chief. We tend to agree with Feaver that Milley should therefore be graded on a curve. No officer could have been prepared for the chaos of the Trump administration.

Even from afar, Milley’s concerns about a petulant and erratic president seemed reasonable. His stated goals of ensuring Trump didn’t start an unnecessary war overseas, use the military in the streets against the American people, or undermine the military’s integrity are ones we share. Still, we agree with Hodges that civilian policymakers, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, are the proper authorities for making those judgments. Generals don’t get to choose which wars the country fights. Nor do they have the right to refuse to follow legal orders that they find morally distasteful.

At the same time, Friend is correct that these discussions of the civil-military relationship tend to let the civilians off the hook. The entire national security apparatus of the United States is predicated on presidents who respect the constitution and follow longstanding norms. To the extent they don’t, the responsibility is on Congress to remove them from office via the impeachment process or for the vice president and cabinet to step in by invoking the 25th Amendment. Those mechanisms all failed because Trump’s co-partisans refused to hold him accountable — even after he incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol to steal an election. Under those circumstances, it is difficult to be too harsh in judging Milley for overstepping his bounds. Future senior military leaders will hopefully not face the challenges he did. But they should be better prepared than Milley if they do.

Become a Member

James Joyner is a professor of security studies and the security studies department head at Marine Corps University’s Command and Staff College. He’s a former Army field artillery officer and Desert Storm veteran. Follow him on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Butch Bracknell is a retired Marine officer, international lawyer, and occasional civil rights activist. Follow him on Twitter @ButchBracknell.

Image: Pentagon

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by James Joyner · October 31, 2022​

8. US and EU: Supporting Iranians demanding freedom is not a luxury

Excerpts:

This means the United States should be seeking all practical and peaceful means of helping the Iranian people. Together with allies, the United States should do more to enable broadcasting into Iran. We should try to ensure that information gets through — despite censorship and regime efforts to block access — working through Radio Farda (run by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), Voice of America and other nations’ broadcasters and with private radio and television stations. We should be sure that our own government-supported stations are adequately financed and staffed and send a clear message in support of the fundamental rights of the Iranian people.

We should seek ways to reach the population through smartphone satellite technology to ensure internet access, especially as the regime seeks to control it. Given the centrality of the internet as a provider of information, we should be seeking to advance this technology as rapidly as possible.

The Iranian people need to know we are unambiguously with them in their pursuit of freedom and against the stifling regime that has threatened them and the globe for more than four decades. Just as the Ukrainian people must know that we are behind them.

US and EU: Supporting Iranians demanding freedom is not a luxury

BY ELLIOTT ABRAMS AND DAVID J. KRAMER, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 10/30/22 1:30 PM ET

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

The Hill · · October 30, 2022

Iran and Russia — two repressive regimes with very few allies, both under major international sanctions — are now collaborating militarily. In response, the United States and Europe need to ramp up pressure against the Iranian regime and demonstrate clear support for the Iranian people.

Iran is providing Russia with armed “kamikaze” drones and personnel to train Russian soldiers to use them against Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure. This support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine makes Tehran willingly complicit in feeding Putin’s war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also heightens the danger the Iranian regime poses to Israel, the United States and the entire Persian Gulf region, its role as the leading state sponsor of terrorism, and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The United States and European Union, which already have severe sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, should impose tighter sanctions on Iran for both the delivery of drones to Russia and the regime’s ugly use of deadly force against Iranian protestors following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in September after being detained by morality police. The EU has more leeway to impose such measures than the United States does. It enacted additional sanctions on Iranian officials and the manufacturer of the Shahed-136 drones that Iran has sold to Russia for use in Ukraine on Oct. 20, but it needs to do much more.

The way regimes treat their own people is often indicative of how they will act beyond their borders — and the regime in Tehran has abused the fundamental human rights of Iranians since coming to power in 1979. It has repeatedly and brutally put down protests, including the Green Movement in 2009 and now the recent protests in memory of Amini, who was arrested and detained for violating the regime’s severe dress code by not fully covering her hair. Eyewitnesses claim she was brutally beaten in prison.

Iran’s security services have injured and killed several hundred Iranians, including dozens of children, following protests against the country’s leaders, led by women and girls. More nationwide protests occurred on the 40th day after her death and were again suppressed violently. Such an ugly crackdown is not unusual for the regime, but it has not deterred brave Iranians from turning out into the streets to voice their opposition and frustration.

Still the brutality of the Iranian authorities is a reminder of their readiness to do whatever is necessary to hang onto power. That includes efforts to crush any demonstrations or labor strikes as well as a willingness to sell deadly weapons to their friends in Moscow. It should not shock the international community when the Iranian regime sides with Russia against Ukraine.

Neither Washington nor Brussels should let faint hopes of a new nuclear agreement get in the way of a proper and needed response. While Iran is supplying deadly weapons to Putin to use against Ukrainian civilians and that nation’s infrastructure, a nuclear agreement that would enrich Iran’s leaders with tens of billions of dollars in new revenue would reward such behavior.

For the last few decades, human rights issues in Iran have taken a back seat to nuclear and other “realpolitik” arguments. Support for the Iranian people was often viewed as a marginal issue — one that might interfere with far more serious concerns. During the Green Movement protests of 2009, the United States remained passive, leading demonstrators to hold up signs, in English, asking which side we were on. Former President Obama recently called his reaction at the time “a mistake.”

Indeed, it was. Nothing about Iran can be more “serious” than the Iranian people’s desire to rid themselves of their repressive regime. Moreover, compromises with the regime cannot resolve the dangers from Iran’s nuclear program, its support for terrorism, and, most recently, its military support for Putin. That requires the rise of a popular democratic movement in Iran to replace the Islamic Republic — one with a duly elected government that protects human rights and seeks to restore Iran to its proper place as a member of the international community.

Accordingly, our support for human rights and clear backing of the demonstrations and protests must be at the center of any serious approach to the dangers Iran presents today.

We should not leave today’s protestors in any doubt that we stand with them against their brutal oppressors. What started as a movement in support of Amini — with many brave Iranian women and girls publicly cutting their hair in solidarity and burning their headscarves — has morphed into a far larger push against the regime. It now involves all sections of Iran, geographically and socially.

This means the United States should be seeking all practical and peaceful means of helping the Iranian people. Together with allies, the United States should do more to enable broadcasting into Iran. We should try to ensure that information gets through — despite censorship and regime efforts to block access — working through Radio Farda (run by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), Voice of America and other nations’ broadcasters and with private radio and television stations. We should be sure that our own government-supported stations are adequately financed and staffed and send a clear message in support of the fundamental rights of the Iranian people.

We should seek ways to reach the population through smartphone satellite technology to ensure internet access, especially as the regime seeks to control it. Given the centrality of the internet as a provider of information, we should be seeking to advance this technology as rapidly as possible.

The Iranian people need to know we are unambiguously with them in their pursuit of freedom and against the stifling regime that has threatened them and the globe for more than four decades. Just as the Ukrainian people must know that we are behind them.

Juan Williams: Democracy hangs in the balance in the midterms What the midterm elections will signal to the world

And we cannot forget the lesson of Iran: support for a people demanding freedom is not a luxury. The goals of U.S. foreign policy in Iran will only be achieved when that hated regime is replaced by a government that reflects the Iranian people’s desire for peace, freedom and prosperity.

Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at CFR and former special representative for Iran in the U.S. State Department (2020-21).

David J. Kramer is executive director of the George W. Bush Institute and a former assistant secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights & Labor in the George W. Bush administration.

The Hill · by Alexander Bolton · October 30, 2022

9.  Blind spots in Washington’s Indo-Pacific Strategy

Excerpts:

When China is addressed in the US Indo-Pacific Strategy and the National Security Strategy, it is framed in terms of the central threat it poses to openness, security and prosperity in the region. There appears to be little consideration of the possibility that Beijing might share some of its neighbours’ goals or other elements of Washington’s regional agenda. US strategy focuses almost exclusively on mobilising US allies and partners, implicitly against China. Even the list of ‘prospective members’ in the US-Pacific Partnership does not include Beijing.

The United States and China, as the two most powerful countries in the world, must find ways to cooperate on key global issues for the benefit of humanity. This should apply within the Indo-Pacific as well, with both countries playing key roles in regional multilateralism in a shared pursuit of stability, prosperity, mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence.

There is no doubt that cooperation would be complicated, given the inevitable rivalry and strategic mistrust between Beijing and Washington. But the alternative of a region divided between hostile camps would almost certainly be worse. Accordingly, the United States should consider an approach to Indo-Pacific regional security that works with China rather than exclusively against it.

Blind spots in Washington’s Indo-Pacific Strategy | East Asia Forum

eastasiaforum.org · by Paul Heer · October 30, 2022

Author: Paul Heer, CFTNI

The Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, released in February 2022, affirms that the United States will work through ‘a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions’ to foster ‘the collective capacity’ of the region to confront 21st century challenges. To that end, Washington has played a leading role in promoting multilateral institutions and shared interests in the region.

These efforts include the Quad — a dialogue process that combines Japan, Australia, India and the United States — and AUKUS — a security agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the economic realm, Washington has partnered with multiple countries in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), as a substitute for US membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. The Biden administration also includes the Indo-Pacific in the Build Back Better World (B3W) Partnership, an infrastructure investment program launched by the G7.

US-led initiatives also include the US–Pacific Partnership with multiple South Pacific Island countries and the complementary ‘Partners in the Blue Pacific’ initiative (PBP) launched in June 2022 with Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the United Kingdom. These groups overlap with the pre-existing network of formal US allies in the region and Washington’s longstanding participation in ASEAN-centered institutions like the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit.

Though this would appear to be an embarrassment of riches in terms of US multilateral engagement in the region, several underlying issues have tempered the impact of Washington’s efforts and pose challenges going forward.

While most of the Indo-Pacific is eager for US engagement and commitment, fault lines persist on what to prioritise in the regional agenda. Many countries perceive the US focus on traditional security issues to be at the expense of economic concerns and climate change. Washington has ramped up its attention to the latter issues, but diverging views on what is most important will continue to hamper robust cooperation. So will limits on the resources that the United States can bring to bear.

Diverging priorities also reflect varying levels of readiness to sign on to what some perceive as an overly confrontational US approach to dealing with China. Many leaders and strategic thinkers in the region have expressed their countries’ unwillingness to choose sides between the United States and China. Washington has repeatedly insisted that it will impose no such choice on its partners, but some of its diplomacy and rhetoric suggest a desire for other countries to align with the United States.

Some US partners are also concerned about how the various US initiatives fit together. ASEAN countries have long welcomed Washington’s embrace of ‘ASEAN centrality’ in regional multilateralism. But ASEAN’s exclusion from the Quad and AUKUS has raised questions about whether US attention is being diverted away from Southeast Asia’s priorities in dealing with China and other regional issues.

The Quad appears to be gaining momentum, but its effectiveness will continue to be subject to a lagging consensus on what its focus should be — both in terms of traditional versus non-traditional security issues and on how confrontational the group should be towards China. The Quad may also be hindered by the varying levels of confidence its members have in each other.

Overall regional confidence in the United States itself is also a lingering issue. Washington’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017 undermined faith in its commitment to the region and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is viewed by many as a somewhat meagre alternative. Much of the Indo-Pacific anticipates that US domestic politics will constrain Washington’s reliability in the region for the foreseeable future.

The elephant in the room is China, which is excluded from the United States’ multilateral initiatives in the Indo-Pacific. Washington and its key partners routinely minimise any explicit mention of China in their multilateral diplomacy, but no one doubts that the Quad, AUKUS, IPEF, B3W and ‘Partners in the Blue Pacific’ have that aim.

Washington’s multilateral diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific frequently emphasises the importance of ‘inclusiveness’ in the pursuit of a region that is ‘free and open’, peaceful and prosperous. But the more the United States avoids including China in its regional initiatives, the more obvious it is that those efforts are aimed at excluding and targeting Beijing.

When China is addressed in the US Indo-Pacific Strategy and the National Security Strategy, it is framed in terms of the central threat it poses to openness, security and prosperity in the region. There appears to be little consideration of the possibility that Beijing might share some of its neighbours’ goals or other elements of Washington’s regional agenda. US strategy focuses almost exclusively on mobilising US allies and partners, implicitly against China. Even the list of ‘prospective members’ in the US-Pacific Partnership does not include Beijing.

The United States and China, as the two most powerful countries in the world, must find ways to cooperate on key global issues for the benefit of humanity. This should apply within the Indo-Pacific as well, with both countries playing key roles in regional multilateralism in a shared pursuit of stability, prosperity, mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence.

There is no doubt that cooperation would be complicated, given the inevitable rivalry and strategic mistrust between Beijing and Washington. But the alternative of a region divided between hostile camps would almost certainly be worse. Accordingly, the United States should consider an approach to Indo-Pacific regional security that works with China rather than exclusively against it.

Paul Heer is Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

eastasiaforum.org · by Paul Heer · October 30, 2022

10. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is coming

Excerpts:

The domino theory fell out of favour after the disastrous American war in Vietnam. But over the past few years it’s been making a comeback. Not explicitly, as far as I know. But people are seeing the world in a domino way again. The Uyghurs and Tibet are being crushed by China. Hong Kong is now under Beijing’s heel. Sri Lanka, Laos, Pakistan, Kenya, Gambia, the Solomon Islands: one by one the dominos are quivering. It seems plain, almost mathematical. Taiwan will be next. If perception is reality, then it appears that Taiwan is doomed. Xi will win the history wars by rewriting the past and the future to shape his present ambitions. Even the historical record will fall, another domino in the chain.

This may be the final irony of Taiwan. The pièce de résistance of China’s demolition of history-less globalism will likely come with the ransacking of an island so globalised that it has virtually no nation-state friends at all, a place where the faith of the globalists in ‘strategic ambiguity’ is about to be crushed by an ethno-nationalist dictator.

Xi Jinping has amassed continental power and sits on the old Chinese imperial throne. He has no serious rivals. He lacks but one thing: Taiwan. For the sake of the world communist revolution, he will surely take it – or send millions to die trying.

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is coming | The Spectator

The recent CCP congress and other signs show Xi is preparing for war

30 October 2022, 11:50am

The Spectator · by Jason Morgan

This month, at the 20th National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist party, Xi Jinping was elected to a third term as chairman. ‘The New Mao’ – so has rung the common refrain.

It’s an entirely accurate assessment. The very existence of the two-term-limit precedent that Xi has now broken was set by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, in 1982. The reasoning behind the term limit was to prevent the cult-of-personality chaos that Mao and his sycophants had whipped up during his untrammelled, ruler-for-life tenure at the helm of the Chinese state. Deng wanted to make China rich enough so its citizens wouldn’t care that they were not free. To do that, he needed law and order, not proto-woke Red Guards beating up middle school teachers.

And to have law and order, Deng knew he needed to keep the political turnover in Beijing moving along at a healthy clip. No more maniac geezers like Mao hanging on until the country turned into a giant communist revival tent. Two terms and you’re done.

It worked for a while – until the rise of Xi. Xi came to power in the usual fashion – murder both judicial and extra-judicial, by hook and by crook. But he has played for keeps, and double-crossed the strongest in ways few have ever dared. Like others in his situation, Xi the tyrant realises that to lose power, or even to appear to let it slip from his grasp momentarily, is to invite instant retaliatory assassination. He will hold the brass ring until rigor mortis sets in. Just like Mao did.

The romance of the Revolution

But Xi is like Mao in another way, too. Chinese politicians after Mao have been mainly Party Central types, interchangeable bureaucratic nobodies (with the exception of Jiang Zemin). The historic destiny of the Chinese Communist party? Ha. ‘The historic destiny of my Swiss bank account’ was the driving factor for China’s elite after Mao and Deng. Not Xi, though. Xi is a romantic. He believes in socialism with Chinese characteristics. Believes in it so much that he’s willing to risk world war to see it spread over the earth as a soothing balm.

Xi, like Mao, wants the Revolution to continue. He wants to roll the Hegelian dice with his own hand. Marx and Lenin, rise from your graves and conquer! And so, hewing to the old-school CCP version of ‘history’ – which claims that China is fated to undo all its past ‘humiliations’ and return to the centre of geopolitics – Xi all but lowered the green flag on the final grand battle that will make China great again: the invasion of Taiwan.

As if to signal that the days of business as usual, grift-grin-retire communism were over, during the Twentieth National Party Congress, Xi had former president Hu Jintao, now a distinguished-looking gentleman with silver streaks in his hair, escorted off the stage by CCP goons. Xi looked Hu straight in the eyes, half ruthless and half bemused, as the old man was yanked away, surely never to appear in public again.

So long, Hu. Copacetic communists are anathema. Xi is in charge now. And he is steering the Chinese ship of state headlong toward the Revolution’s apocalyptic ending.

The irony of Taiwan

The CCP’s showdown with ‘history,’ and the rest of the world’s showdown with the CCP appears to be materialising over a smallish island tucked in the grand archipelagic arc comprising also the Philippines and Japan. In a speech last year in Beijing on the occasion of the centennial of the founding of the CCP, President Xi warned that anyone who tried to oppose China – the implications that Xi meant ‘over Taiwan’ were unmistakable – would get their ‘heads bashed in bloody’. The man sounds deadly serious.

Yes, no doubt Xi wants to ‘retake’ Taiwan. The irony of Xi’s Ahab Quest is that Taiwan has never been a part of China. ‘China’ today is a recapitulation of the old Qing Empire (which, to add irony to irony, was not Chinese but Manchurian). Tibet, East Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchuria are in no historical sense remotely ‘Chinese’. Ditto for Taiwan, in which Qing officialdom evinced only desultory interest until 1854, when American Commodore Matthew C. Perry, fresh from his gunboat-treaty journey to Japan, showed interest of his own.

Not at all worth fighting a war with western barbarians over a barbarian island, the Qing officials concluded. ‘Taiwan?’ the Qing bureaucrats told Perry. ‘Wild tribes live there. We have no control over those people.’

The Qing disavowed Taiwan, and so Perry concluded a treaty with a Taiwanese aboriginal chief instead of with Beijing. But the remoulding of CCP-style ‘history’ has now reached a fever pitch, and so the documented history of Taiwan has been thrown by the wayside.

On 20 October, as the Congress was in full swing, I spoke to Seki Hei, a naturalised Japanese citizen who left China after the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Seki now analyses Chinese politics for the Japanese national daily Sankei Shimbun.

Seki made it clear that Taiwan was the crux of the deal struck to allow Xi a third term. ‘There are quite a few people inside the CCP who are against Xi Jinping,’ Seki said. ‘Xi won over those opposing voices and secured support for his third term by promising, among other things, to solve the Taiwan problem. Unification with Taiwan was the fundamental justification which Xi offered for the need to extend his rule for another term.

‘During his keynote address at the opening ceremony of the National Party Congress,’ Seki continued, ‘Xi drew enthusiastic applause as he vowed to unify Taiwan with the mainland. Xi made it clear that he would use force to take Taiwan if necessary.’ I asked Seki if Xi would follow through on his end of the bargain. ‘The possibility of a move to take Taiwan is now very high,’ he replied. ‘Even if that means war.’

The American factor

‘Xi Jinping wants to avoid war with the United States,’ Seki told me. ‘What he and the CCP are trying to do is to arrange things so that Washington does not send forces to Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. Beijing has nuclear weapons. China will threaten the American military and attempt to keep the American side from moving [in response to a move by China].’

The argument is sound. But I wonder how it will all play out when the shooting starts in earnest. In early August, I attended a simulation in Tokyo, put on by the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies (where I am a research associate), envisioning Japan’s response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The simulation felt very real, not least because, as the desktop exercise unfolded in a hotel ballroom, the People’s Republic of China was launching real missiles around Taiwan, a tantrum thrown in response to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei on 2 August.

Former Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzō said many times in recent years, before he was silenced by an assassin’s bullet in July, that ‘an incident involving Taiwan is an incident involving Japan’. Japan is an ally of the United States, of course, and the United States is treaty-bound to defend Japan in the event of war.

The last southwestern outpost of Japan, the Senkaku Islands, lies about 100 miles off the coast of Taiwan. The sparks that set off wars can easily fly that distance.

And the sparks have been flying for a while now. Nearly every day for the past several years, Chinese ‘coast guard vessels’ (warships painted coast guard white) have been entering Japanese waters around the Senkaku Islands, circling them like sharks going around a life raft. Japan has sent its own coast guard vessels to meet the Chinese invaders, day after day after day. It’s a recipe for regional, possibly world, war.

In 2010, a Chinese ‘fishing boat’ (also used as part of the country’s informal attack flotilla) rammed a Japanese coast guard patrol boat. It is only a matter of time before there is another incident on the high seas around the Senkakus. ‘China could not win in a direct confrontation with the United States,’ Seki said. ‘But Xi is betting that Washington will not countenance war over Taiwan.’

There is good reason for Xi to believe that, by upping the ante to full-blown war, the Americans will back down. ‘When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990,’ Seki told me, ‘there were United Nations resolutions condemning Iraq’s actions and authorising the use of force [to push Iraq out]. But Taiwan is not part of the United Nations’. Washington does not even recognise Taiwan as a nation. In 1979, then-president Jimmy Carter severed relations with Taiwan [in favour of China]. Washington has an obligation to defend allies, for example fellow Nato countries and the like. But it is under no obligation to defend Taiwan: it merely provides Taiwan with weapons. ‘This is where Xi is focusing his attention: will Washington go to war over an island with which it does not even have formal diplomatic relations?’

Taiwan or bust

Dr. Tsewang Gyalpo Arya, the representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Japan, said to me about the National Congress speech that ‘Xi said that “Resolving the Taiwan question is a matter for the Chinese, a matter that must be resolved by the Chinese.” If Xi is really sincere and true to what he says, he should let the Chinese people decide not the communist leadership. On the contrary, the communist leader has threatened to take over Taiwan by force and has created a warlike situation in the area around the South China Sea.’

CCP exile and dissident Jennifer Zeng, who underwent torture in China for practicing Falun Gong and who now analyses Chinese politics from the United States, agrees.

‘Militarily, Xi has made it very clear that he will “unify” Taiwan with the mainland “peacefully” or with force. It is just a matter of when.’

But when is the million dollar question. Earlier this year, Zeng reported on what appears to be an authentic recording of a CCP war mobilisation meeting on 14 May. The party seems to be making concrete preparations for all-out war over Taiwan.

‘While Russian President Vladimir Putin declared martial law in four occupied regions [of Ukraine], the Chinese Embassy in Ukraine issued a Notice on the Transfer and Evacuation Guide and Consular Service Arrangements for Chinese Citizens in Ukraine, reminding Chinese people in Ukraine to be ready for evacuation at any time,’ Zeng said. ‘These two incidents happened on the same day, either accidentally or by having been well coordinated.’

She added: ‘Another event to notice is that Chinese vice-president Wang Qishan, who often acts as Xi Jinping’s special envoy, went to Kazakhstan on 13 October. Under the current quarantine policy in Beijing, this trip would make him unable to attend the CCP’s 20th National Congress, the most important political event for the CCP. What kind of matter was more important and urgent? Could it be a secret meeting with Putin to urgently coordinate issues related to the Russia-Ukraine War?

‘Some people might think that the setbacks Putin encountered during the war against Ukraine would make Xi think twice about invading Taiwan,’ Zeng continued. ‘But, considering Xi’s personality, such information might instead cause him to speed up his invasion of Taiwan. The reason is that Xi might want to invade Taiwan while Russia is still able to hold the West in check. If Xi waits until Russia is completely defeated, then the West will have only the CCP to deal with. And that wouldn’t be too good for Xi Jinping.’

The return of the domino theory

Just after World War II and throughout most of the Cold War, western pundits and political leaders were wont to think of communist expansion as a parlour game. As one nation came under communist sway, the ‘domino theory’ went, other nations would be toppled in turn. To stop the cascade, democratic states were obliged to intervene in faraway conflicts, lest the problem of communist expansion, left unchecked, spread via chain reaction.

The domino theory fell out of favour after the disastrous American war in Vietnam. But over the past few years it’s been making a comeback. Not explicitly, as far as I know. But people are seeing the world in a domino way again. The Uyghurs and Tibet are being crushed by China. Hong Kong is now under Beijing’s heel. Sri Lanka, Laos, Pakistan, Kenya, Gambia, the Solomon Islands: one by one the dominos are quivering. It seems plain, almost mathematical. Taiwan will be next. If perception is reality, then it appears that Taiwan is doomed. Xi will win the history wars by rewriting the past and the future to shape his present ambitions. Even the historical record will fall, another domino in the chain.

This may be the final irony of Taiwan. The pièce de résistance of China’s demolition of history-less globalism will likely come with the ransacking of an island so globalised that it has virtually no nation-state friends at all, a place where the faith of the globalists in ‘strategic ambiguity’ is about to be crushed by an ethno-nationalist dictator.

Xi Jinping has amassed continental power and sits on the old Chinese imperial throne. He has no serious rivals. He lacks but one thing: Taiwan. For the sake of the world communist revolution, he will surely take it – or send millions to die trying.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s World edition

For the sake of the world communist revolution, he will surely take Taiwan – or send millions to die trying

The Spectator · by Jason Morgan

11. How Foreign Policy Amateurs Endanger the World

So who are, and how do we develop, foreign policy "professionals?" Some interesting history here going back to JFK and the evolution of the amateurs.

Excerpts:

The language of public debate is getting loud, and it’s unoriginal. “Vacuums of power,” “emboldened opponents,” “Munich!,” of course, and “a test of US resolve,” as well as “shaping” this or that vast entity. Excitable professors join Blinken’s new Foreign Affairs Policy Board who write, actually in italics, of “ruthlessly blocking an opponent’s way forward” and explicitly urge a new Cold War. Meanwhile, civilian control of the military, which depends on a keen sense of what can and cannot be accomplished by force, hasn’t improved in any way at all.

Victory has been called the ability to face greater problems without fear. The steadiness which makes that possible can be seen in the case-hardened, enduring qualities that the U.S. Navy brings to refueling its ships in a storm: “Not easy, just routine.” These are strengths of focus, of deadly seriousness about the country’s needs, and of seasoned professionals who work with few illusions. In contrast, to keep indulging White House patronage is like playing dice at the heights of foreign policy making.

At best, the political appointee-to-career personnel ratios might change, though in fact little will be done to improve the staffing problem. Foreign and defense policy has become a trellis on which the well-connected grow careers, and too many influential figures profit from revolving doors, as do the companies where they cash in. Yet knowing of these failings might induce a healthy skepticism toward what journalists label the “national security establishment,” and also toward our country’s commitment, as stated in the latest national strategy document, to “defend democracy around the world.”

Ultimately, America’s peculiar approach to selecting talent undercuts the ability to handle strategy, let alone grand strategy, which entails unifying long-term ends with the most broad-based means. For a lifetime, with the fewest of exceptions, what passes for considered policy has instead been a twisting sequence of ad hoc decisions, hammered out under the stresses of domestic politics. How could results be otherwise?

How Foreign Policy Amateurs Endanger the World

By DEREK LEEBAERT

10/26/2022 04:30 AM EDT

Derek Leebaert is a founding editor of the Harvard/MIT quarterly International Security, was in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and launched the Swiss management consultancy MAP AG. His last book, Grand Improvisation, won the biennial 2020 Truman Book Award.

Politico

Magazine

Political appointees have too little experience and too many delusions.

These hands-on operating roles of government are all open to political patronage, including key positions affecting war and peace. | POLITICO illustration by Jade Cuevas/Photos by Getty Images/AP Photo/iStock

By Derek Leebaert

10/26/2022 04:30 AM EDT

Derek Leebaert is a founding editor of the Harvard/MIT quarterly International Security, was in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and launched the Swiss management consultancy MAP AG. His last book, Grand Improvisation, won the biennial 2020 Truman Book Award.

The Biden administration recently unveiled a new national security strategy with grand aims for U.S. foreign policy: to win the global contest against autocracy, particularly an increasingly dangerous Russia and China. To succeed, according to policymakers, the U.S. will have to “shape what comes next.”

Shaping what comes next isn’t as sweeping a vision as, say, “realigning” the Middle East, which was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s goal 15 years ago. Nor is it as fanciful as the guidance pitched in 1962 by Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, when he said the U.S. could crush the Viet Cong in Indochina with U.S. casualties no greater than the annual traffic-related injuries in Washington, D.C. It is consistent, however, with the longstanding — and dangerous — notion that the U.S. has far-reaching abilities to mold the world to its desires.

America may have been temporarily chastened by failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, as it was after Vietnam. But there’s no reason that fresh, exuberant ill-judgements on the scale pushed by Rice and Bundy won’t again be made, and soon. After all, those deadly fiascos were just the worst blunders in decades of U.S. foreign policy miscalculation.

Why do such bad ideas get injected into the making of U.S. foreign policy, particularly with an ease rarely found in other advanced democracies?

Much is due to the political appointments system which the country uses to staff its government, including the national security apparatus. The White House has the responsibility to fill roughly 4,000 senior jobs throughout the federal departments and agencies. When it comes to roles concerning foreign policy and defense, such appointees from outside the executive branch often have more experience in academia, law firms or in business than on the front lines of world affairs. (The same method is applied to staffing at other departments, like Commerce and HUD — except bad ideas at Commerce or Labor are unlikely to cause international catastrophe.)

This freewheeling approach imposes inexperience, compels urgency, courts risk and foments illusions of being able to manage the ethnic, ideological and political concerns of other nations.

“I didn’t think it would be this tough,” Rice concluded on Iraq, echoing Bundy who came to admit of Vietnam that “this damn war is much tougher” than he had anticipated. The system — in which Rice and Bundy, among so many others, have flourished — creates all the wrong incentives when devising foreign policy even as it raises the risk of being gamed by rivals overseas. Of course, not all appointees have such flaws, just like not all career officials have real foresight. But it’s difficult to see why the outcomes of jousting with China, waging proxy war against Russia and courting a showdown with Iran would be any better than the results of past turmoil.

Furthermore, the problem with the system of political patronage goes deep: The influence of cabinet members and nearly all ambassadors can be secondary to that of their subordinates who structure and execute decisions day-to-day at State, the Pentagon and on the NSC staff. Unlike in any other serious country, these hands-on operating roles of government are all open to political patronage, including key positions affecting war and peace: undersecretary of defense for policy, counselor at the State Department, assistant secretary of defense for international security, ones at State for political-military affairs. Also in the mix are assistant and deputy assistant secretaries in both departments for all regions of the globe. Various office directors and senior staff add their weight.

Some slots require Senate confirmation; most not. Appointees from outside federal departments and agencies may be fewer in one administration, more so in another. But the result is always a kaleidoscope of new arrivals and random talents. Meanwhile, embers are drifting down on powder kegs.

The Rise of Foreign Policy Amateurism

America wasn’t always so reckless in the world. It took Kennedy’s thousand days in office to make incaution systemic.

Certainly, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had made plenty of mistakes before him, and Korea — with its disastrous counter-invasion to “liberate” the North — had already been the first of what by today adds up to four failed wars in a row. (1991’s one-hundred-hour Gulf War was a high-tech, tactical win over a ruinously self-exposed army of conscripts.) But under JFK’s presidency, insobriety reached a new level. Suddenly, assassination and nuclear brinkmanship were tools of policy while the number of strategic missiles and bombers on alert doubled. And he boasted of increasing special forces in Vietnam by 600 percent.

Why the sudden shift? During the Kennedy presidency, every form of U.S. military power was multiplied. Appointee positions expanded geometrically, and vigorous men of all backgrounds quickly filled them. Professors, previously for the most part advisers to the departments dealing with national defense, suddenly became line practitioners. Kennedy moved his national security adviser — Bundy, who appointed people of his own — into the West Wing and promised a “long twilight struggle year in and year out” against ruthless, godless tyranny. The youthful and energetic men who came to power in January 1961 saw few limits and acted accordingly.

Later administrations kept the illusions of what U.S. political-military clout could accomplish, along with the habit of deploying professors and think tankers in hands-on roles, with no better results. To be sure, great accomplishments have surrounded the many self-deceptions. America defeated the Soviet empire, created sound alliances and had a short, focused, effective intervention in Kosovo, as in Kuwait. Yet the record as a whole is chilling: not just the failed wars but all the befriending of murderous sheiks and shahs, an illusory détente in the 1970s that buttressed Soviet Russia, to be followed in the 80s by upholding Saddam Hussein, later capped by nation-building in places where nations barely existed. And worst of all, the country keeps repeating its follies on a colossal scale.

Today, the Office of Presidential Personnel fills about 635 jobs at State and Defense, and several hundred more at Homeland Security and elsewhere that address foreign policy. At the NSC, which has a staff over 300, roughly 20 percent of the most senior people are appointed, the rest being detailed from the military and a range of government agencies.

Stephen Hadley, who succeeded Rice in 2005 as national security adviser, defended this approach after a lecture I gave in Washington, in 2019, on foreign policy shortfalls. Much is due to the executive branch structure’s depending on one figure being in charge. Accordingly, a president most effectively exercises power by personalizing the instruments of state right down to the level of daily implementation — especially in foreign affairs where, constitutionally, the president has vast latitude.

Basically, in this view, spirited, clever and well-schooled individuals then get pulled into the system. They are people like current national security adviser Jake Sullivan, a lawyer who had entered government in 2009, becoming Vice President Joe Biden’s chief national security aide; he then spent four years teaching and policy consulting during the Trump years, until Biden became president. Or like Rice, who in 2001 returned to Washington for a second stint in government — having spent two years at the NSC during the George H. W. Bush presidency — after a decade at Stanford. And people like Bundy too, who was new to public life when coming to Washington at the start of the Kennedy administration, after a dozen years teaching at Harvard.

Hadley also rose in this system where “outsiders” turn into “insiders” with each election cycle. A Republican, he had worked as an analyst at the NSC from 1974-1977, then practiced law in Washington until, in 1989, he served as a Pentagon assistant secretary for three and a half years under the first President Bush. Another long stint of lawyering followed until the second President Bush appointed him deputy NSC adviser in 2001. Hadley proved instrumental to making the case for invading Iraq in 2003, and, so qualified, he succeeded Rice.

These representative careers are emulated by other men and women with establishment credentials, stellar political networks and ambitions to enter America’s civilian national security cohort, or to attain foreign policy roles in general. They arrive from law firms, universities, think tanks, congressional offices, business and journalism, and they include former career professionals who’ve left government, then to return with political backing. In all, the actual number of years they serve in the executive branch is low compared to Foreign Service officers and civil servants who’ve risen in the merit-based ranks.

Before her star turn in Congress, Liz Cheney personified the existing foreign policy approach in which the job description needn’t include experience. She graduated from law school in 1996 and, being politically connected, got appointed in 2002 as a deputy assistant secretary of State. Her remit was the Near East, and, knowing zero about the region, she landed in the middle of calamity.

It’s a unique approach. In Europe, Japan, Brazil, Russia and China, ministries are filled instead by permanent, though frequently rotating, career officials. Career diplomats and foreign policy professionals hold important roles sometimes effectively up to cabinet level.

Ideally, the Washington way assures a valuable tension between an administration’s more original, politically-savvy appointees — alert to the short term — and an ongoing, knowledgeable, inherited staff attuned to longer challenges. However, what ends up happening in practice is that the country’s civil service and Foreign Service are diminished: Political appointees from outside the federal departments, relatively untried on the frontlines, tend to hold the decisive, career-enhancing roles like deputy assistant secretary and above. Chances of serious misjudgment increase.

Part of the tragedy is that most anyone whose life included years of mediating between warlords in N’Djamena, or equally dismal tasks during decades of actual responsibility, could have told professors Rice or Bundy that war was going to be “tough,” and could have said so before the thousands of body bags started arriving home.

That sort of gritty, practical, career-long experience exemplifies the Foreign Service, among other parts of the federal merit-based hierarchy. It fosters an expertise that’s hard to acquire elsewhere, even if a lawyer or professor or think tank researcher has more than one or two forays into government.

The Price of Inexperience

Questions of relevant, practical experience among many political appointees is one of several problems with the patronage system.

During 2001, for example, the Bush administration’s new undersecretary of defense for policy — a huge job that involved managing the Defense department’s international relations — arrived from a six-man law firm. In his memoirs written after he left for a think tank in 2005, this recent enthusiast for invading Iraq and thereby transforming the Middle East derided the country’s diplomats for their inclination to “fret about the risk” of war.

Forty years earlier, it was Bundy — with no more useful experience than this undersecretary — who mocked the professionals at State for lacking “energy” when harsh decisions of escalation and regime change had to be made on Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, in the run-ups to both Iraq and Vietnam, it tended to be those experienced, long-serving professionals — men and women required to know something of history, foreign cultures and languages — who doubted that America could recast entire cultures overnight.

A second limitation arises from the relatively short stints in government among these appointees. Institutional memory becomes spotty as they come and go. Those confirmed by the Senate stay in office for an average of 17 months. Below them, others may serve slightly longer, before returning to private life. It’s a form of unplanned obsolescence.

One Washington lawyer, who had been appointed a deputy assistant secretary at State during Bill Clinton’s presidency, before returning to practice in 2000, genially admitted he was years behind the cable traffic when President Barack Obama designated him Special Envoy for Libya.

A system which depends heavily on short-term officeholders imposes a sense of urgency on itself. And urgency is dangerous when, say, negotiating arms accords — or deciding just how to evacuate Kabul or Saigon. Appointees — often focused, clever and determined people — are able to push their priorities through bureaucracies that are less certain or obsessed. These officials may be comparative amateurs. Yet they must act right now before competing urgencies are tabled, or their administration is swept from office.

A third limitation of many appointees — shared by cabinet members — is the recurring belief that America can pretty much shape entire geostrategic environments, like the one around Beijing.

All that’s needed to succeed are enough resources and zeal, combined with the quintessential American science of management. Surely “every problem can be solved,” believed Robert McNamara, the Ford Motor Company president who served as secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, from 1961-1967. The problem wasn’t just McNamara’s conceit: He staffed the Pentagon with what the press called “whiz kids” from Harvard, Stanford, RAND who shared his conviction. Desperate to thwart the devouring incubus of China, the country then applied these certitudes to Vietnam.

Today, after a debacle with many similarities, retired General David Petraeus — always politically attuned, and sounding like a just-appointed assistant secretary — writes of what should have been done to “manage” Afghanistan on a “sustained, generational” scale. Words like that say a lot, and they parrot a half-century of high civilian officials. This isn’t merely shorthand for a robust foreign policy. It’s a small step to assuming that Asia or the Middle East can be smoothly administered, or fine-tuned, if the right tools are applied.

Here too a difference has long existed with professional diplomats who are skilled in non-coercive persuasion. Seldom are Foreign Service Officers, who are frequently marginalized anyway from the big decisions, to be found among the “global architects” of whom novelist John le Carré writes. Those are officials at the top who are busily crafting “a secret tuck here, and a secret pull there… and a destabilized economy or two” to save democracy everywhere.

The Danger of “Emergency Men”

Worst of all, the appointee system is a gateway to power for a certain type of political figure. These are people whom the opportunities offered by the modern state tempt into an eternal trifling with danger and extremity. And it’s to the excitements of war and peace that they are drawn. Nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt called them “emergency men,” and the genre has abounded in Washington.

During the discussion with Hadley, he asked me what I meant by “fine-tuning.” A successor of his, John Bolton, who served 18 months under President Donald Trump, offers an example. Bolton is a true amateur, and fits Burckhardt’s description. He’s spent only 14 divvied up years of a nearly five-decade career working on these matters in government. Law firms, politicking, early domestic duties at the Justice Department and think tanks consumed his time. (Nor do TV interviews and op-eds issued from research centers compare to owning a problem while in office, however briefly.) Yet he tells of staging coups during stints of public service — pointless acts if even true, really, because there’s little chance that Washington will be able to control what comes next, whether Saigon in 1963 or Cairo in 2013, or who-knows-what tomorrow.

To boast in 2022 of staging coups recalls another national security adviser who described himself in 1972 as “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into town.” Each man was daydreaming of uncanny abilities.

Henry Kissinger held that slot at the time. President Richard Nixon, who knew much about foreign affairs, observed that Kissinger was one of those people who foment crises “to earn attention for themselves,” adding that the Harvard professor — in his first government job — would have set one off over someplace like Ecuador had Vietnam not been in play. Many crises did erupt, and worse: bungling in Cambodia and in Pakistan that abetted genocide, and so too in East Timor which he believed to be Muslim, not Catholic, and “in the middle of Indonesia,” plus bolstering a disastrous right-wing coup in Chile, just to begin. Meanwhile, Kissinger imitated Kennedy’s own NSC adviser, McGeorge Bundy. “The defect of the State Department is low energy,” he advised Nixon.

As would Kissinger, Bundy embodied emergency: Any resolute action had to be superior to restraint. An early hawk on Vietnam, he saw bloodshed during his first visit to Asia in 1965. The U.S. commander in Vietnam recalled Bundy developing a “field marshal psychosis,” and America then intervened big.

Political appointees aren’t the only ones to blame. Generals, legislators, carefully sieved Foreign Service Officers and their counterparts in the civil service, as well as at CIA, can push foolish notions too. (CIA has few appointees, and its problems instead occur from a decades-long hermetic insularity.) It’s the brass, after all, which keeps assuring politicians that the silver bullets of airpower will deliver a decisive edge: drones in the Middle East, helicopters in Vietnam and B-29s in North Korea. Yet these aren’t the men and women who are driving decisions day-to-day.

For the moment, the Biden administration appears to be deftly countering Russia’s war on Ukraine: tightly choreographing allies, not empowering cowboys, and by all accounts regarding career professionals as essential to handling a complex response. Helpfully, the National Security Strategy document released earlier this month emphasizes international economic policy and the strengthening of America at home.

But there’s a thin line between hopes of “shaping” the world and trying to exert open, direct control over what other countries might or might not do. Watch old habits unfurl as dangers mount, whether from Russia, Iran or from China, forever “on the march.”

The language of public debate is getting loud, and it’s unoriginal. “Vacuums of power,” “emboldened opponents,” “Munich!,” of course, and “a test of US resolve,” as well as “shaping” this or that vast entity. Excitable professors join Blinken’s new Foreign Affairs Policy Board who write, actually in italics, of “ruthlessly blocking an opponent’s way forward” and explicitly urge a new Cold War. Meanwhile, civilian control of the military, which depends on a keen sense of what can and cannot be accomplished by force, hasn’t improved in any way at all.

Victory has been called the ability to face greater problems without fear. The steadiness which makes that possible can be seen in the case-hardened, enduring qualities that the U.S. Navy brings to refueling its ships in a storm: “Not easy, just routine.” These are strengths of focus, of deadly seriousness about the country’s needs, and of seasoned professionals who work with few illusions. In contrast, to keep indulging White House patronage is like playing dice at the heights of foreign policy making.

At best, the political appointee-to-career personnel ratios might change, though in fact little will be done to improve the staffing problem. Foreign and defense policy has become a trellis on which the well-connected grow careers, and too many influential figures profit from revolving doors, as do the companies where they cash in. Yet knowing of these failings might induce a healthy skepticism toward what journalists label the “national security establishment,” and also toward our country’s commitment, as stated in the latest national strategy document, to “defend democracy around the world.”

Ultimately, America’s peculiar approach to selecting talent undercuts the ability to handle strategy, let alone grand strategy, which entails unifying long-term ends with the most broad-based means. For a lifetime, with the fewest of exceptions, what passes for considered policy has instead been a twisting sequence of ad hoc decisions, hammered out under the stresses of domestic politics. How could results be otherwise?

POLITICO

Politico

12. If China declares war, these ham radio enthusiasts could be crucial

Maybe we should still be teaching morse code in the military to retain the capability for contingency communication.

HF comms is not an anachronism. 

If China declares war, these ham radio enthusiasts could be crucial

americanmilitarynews.com · by Stephanie Yang - Los Angeles Times · October 31, 2022

On Tuesday nights, BX2AN sits near the Xindian River, motionless but for his thumb and middle finger, rhythmically tapping against two small metal paddles. They emit a sound each time his hand makes contact — from the right, a dit, or dot; from the left, a dah, or dash, the building blocks of the Morse code alphabet.

“Is anyone there?” he taps.

The replies come back in fits and starts: from Japan, then Greece, then Bulgaria. Each time, BX2AN, as he is known on the radio waves, jots down a series of numbers and letters: call signs, names, dates, locations. Then he adjusts a black round knob on his transceiver box, its screens glowing yellow in the dark.

There can be no doubt that this is his setup. That unique call sign is stamped across the front of his black radio set, scrawled in faded Sharpie on his travel mug and engraved in a plaque on his car dashboard. On the edge of his notepad, he’s absent-mindedly doodled it again, BX2AN.

In the corporeal world he is Lee Jiann-shing, a 71-year-old retired bakery owner, husband, father of five, grandfather of eight and a ham radio enthusiast for 30 years. Every week, he is the first to arrive at this regular meeting for Taipei’s amateur radio hobbyists.

They gather on a small, grassy campground on the city’s southern border, where Lee hunches over his radio from the back of his van, listening to the airwaves as the sun goes down. He doesn’t talk much; he prefers the dits and dahs to communicate. By 8:30 p.m. he has corresponded with six other operators in various countries.

U-R-N-A-M-E, Lee asks a contact in Bulgaria. G-E-K, the operator replies, adding a location, S-O-F-I-A. Lee taps out L-E-E, and his city in response.

As more members of the Chinese Taipei Amateur Radio League, or CTARL, trickle in, two other operators are setting up stations several yards away. One of them, like Lee, starts tapping. The other prefers a handheld voice transmitter, tuning into some indistinct chatter across the Taiwan Strait.

In the age of smartphones and DMs, amateur radio has become a niche hobby in Taiwan. Participants like Lee, many of whom are older than 50, tinker with electronics, exchange postcards with new contacts and compete to see who connects with the most far-flung places.

But ham radio might turn out to be more than just a pleasant pastime.

The self-governing island, about 100 miles east of China, is weighing wartime scenarios in the face of growing military aggression from its vastly more powerful neighbor. If cell towers are down and internet cables have been cut, the ability of shortwave radio frequencies to transmit long-distance messages could become crucial for civilians and officials alike.

The recreational use of wireless radios, which transmit and receive messages via electromagnetic signals, became popular in the early 20th century, starting in the U.S. Since the federal government began issuing licenses in 1912, the number of noncommercial radio operators in the country has surpassed 846,000, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

Amateur radio operators (also known as “hams”) tend to use the high radio frequencies, a measure of the oscillation rate of electromagnetic waves. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, and the farther signals can travel. (Never heard of it? Ham radio still occasionally pops up in movies and TV — “A Quiet Place,” “The Walking Dead” — as a communication channel of last resort.)

The technology proved useful during World Wars I and II, when countries such as the U.S. and Britain limited civilian airwave activity but enlisted skilled hobbyists to help send and intercept covert messages. More recently, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the BBC used shortwave radio to broadcast its news service after communication towers were attacked. Ham radio operators were also able to listen in and interrupt communications among Russian soldiers.

Taiwan was not an early adopter. Under the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party — whose leaders fled to the island in 1949 after losing to Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in China’s civil war — civilian use of amateur radio was all but banned by a government that remained wary of mainland spies. The first licensing exams weren’t offered until 1984. But today, with the threat of cross-strait conflict making headlines, Taiwan has about 25,000 licensed amateur radio operators, according to the National Communications Commission.

For years, China has asserted that Taiwan is part of its territory, a position the U.S. has acknowledged but stopped short of endorsing. As Chinese President Xi Jinping has pushed his vision for unification — if not peacefully, then by force — President Biden has hardened his rhetoric on defending the island’s democracy, raising fears of an inevitable clash.

After U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited here in early August, the People’s Liberation Army in China launched missiles, planes and warships around Taiwan for several days. The growing military pressure has also highlighted the vulnerability of the island’s internet, which is heavily reliant on several major undersea data cables.

As Taiwan confronts the possibility of war, many civilians are making preparations of their own.

Shoichi Chou, 45, remembers using a wireless radio as a teenager to date and talk with his friends. But two years ago, watching Xi call more forcefully for unification, he decided to reacquaint himself with the technology in case war broke out and communication lines went down. Now a licensed operator, Chou, who lives in the city of Taoyuan, keeps a radio in his emergency bag, along with spare batteries, water and a hard hat.

“I feel like it’s incredibly important,” said Chou, the owner of a laptop customization studio. “If just a few bases don’t have electricity, you won’t have any way to use your phone.”

Kenny Huang, chief executive officer of the Taiwan Network Information Center, a nonprofit that serves local internet users, said several government ministries have begun working on contingency plans for any conflict-induced outages. “This year,” he said, “the government realized because the tension between Taiwan and China is getting worse, they have to prepare for the worst-case scenario.”

The use of ham radio is not yet officially part of that equation. But for T.H. Schee, a Taiwanese tech entrepreneur who hosts lectures on civil defense, the devices seem like a natural solution to his topmost concern: securing communication capabilities in the face of an attack.

“Ham radio has been proven to be [a] reliable communication channel in several world wars, and the Ukraine-Russia conflict as well,” Schee said. In Taiwan, amateur operators have helped train military personnel and assisted in emergency communications for events including deadly natural disasters and the annual New Year’s Eve festivities in downtown Taipei.

“Some people will think that with today’s technological advancements, this thing is being phased out,” said David Kao, secretary general of CTARL. “But … new things are not always reliable.”

Kao was 9 when he first encountered a basic broadcast radio in 1981. Intrigued, he scoured the library for literature on the novel devices and went from stall to stall at a local market seeking more information. At that time, obtaining an amateur license was illegal under martial law imposed by the Nationalists, also known as KMT. But restrictions started easing a few years before martial law was lifted in 1987. Four years later, CTARL was founded, and Kao finally got his license.

Some hobbyists found their own ways around the rules. In 1981, when Wayne Lai was 16, he was so eager to play with radios that he built his own contraband out of electronic refuse.

His self-selected call sign back then was U0, or youling in Chinese, a homonym for the word “ghost.” His friends similarly styled themselves Apple, Snoopy, Frog, Mazda, Bandit, Chicken Leg, Spare Rib. A few years before Taiwan began to loosen restrictions, Lai and his friends were raided by the authorities. Their radios were confiscated, and they had to sign pledges to not use them again.

Today, amateur radio is very accessible, but Lai, one of the Tuesday night regulars at the campgrounds, worries that it doesn’t hold the same allure for people who grew up in the internet era.

“Look. Old guy,” Lai says, pointing at one of the operators who set up on a concrete bench. “Old guy. Old guy. Old guy. Old guy,” he continued, gesturing around a table. “There aren’t many young people coming to play anymore.”

Luo Yi-cheng is quick to challenge that pronouncement. The 27-year-old accounting specialist, who learned about ham radio from a YouTube video last year, compared it to discovering Facebook — a different way to connect with people around the world.

The hardest part, he said, was picking up the receiver and uttering his first words — it was something akin to speaking in front of the entire class in grade school. But the sense of accomplishment from a successful connection was greater than anything Luo had experienced using his smartphone. “I was completely unaware that this existed,” he said. “I think younger people aren’t simply disinterested; they probably just don’t know about this.”

For the most part, ham radio is a solitary activity. Nonetheless, there’s a festive atmosphere by the river. Lights strung up in a nearby tree illuminate screens and dials in the dark. Someone digs out a stack of ring toss hoops, while others fuss over small cups of tea.

Amid the sound of crickets and radio static, it’s common to hear hams chat about the weather, their latest devices and how to best hide their gadget addictions from their wives. Some of them band together to purchase new electronics via a group chat called “Buy, Buy, Buy.”

“With so many electronics, there’s no way you can use them all,” one member reasons.

“But when I see it, I still want to buy it,” another insists, to the commiserating laughter of the group.

Meanwhile, at the back of Lee’s van, another message arrives in halting beeps. He writes down the corresponding characters — E71A — before tapping out a response.

He waits but gets nothing.

In the radio silence, a colleague uses his phone to look up the call sign. “What is this flag?” he asks Lee, who is also at a loss. Upon closer inspection, the icon, a blue-and-yellow rectangle, is labeled “Bosnia and Herzegovina” in tiny letters.

Others gather behind them, looking over Lee’s shoulder. “Where is that?” they ask eagerly. “Did you respond?” “Did you make contact?”

“Didn’t go through,” Lee answers, his voice telegraphing dejection. “Hearing them, but not being able to reach them, is really depressing,” he said, tapping his fingers over his heart.

But all is not lost; there’s always the possibility of another exciting connection in the days ahead. Plus, it’s a peaceful night, and the threat of war — for now — seems as distant as the operators the hams are hoping to reach.

The night’s attendees pack up their equipment and return supplies to their cars. A few of them help pull the lights down from the tree, stowing them in Lee’s van for the next Tuesday gathering. And the regulars know Lee will probably be back at the river by the weekend, unable to stay away for long.

___

© 2022 Los Angeles Times

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Share

Flip

americanmilitarynews.com · by Stephanie Yang - Los Angeles Times · October 31, 2022

13. White House rejects promoting general involved in Capitol riot response

White House rejects promoting general involved in Capitol riot response

The Pentagon backed Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, the director of the Army staff, to become a four-star general. But the Biden administration nixed his promotion.

By Dan Lamothe

October 29, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · October 29, 2022

The White House rejected a recommendation by senior Pentagon officials to promote an Army general who came under intense scrutiny after the Pentagon’s slow response to the riot at the Capitol, defense officials said, pushing the officer to a near-certain retirement.

Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, the director of the Army staff, was backed to become the four-star general at Army Futures Command by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Army Secretary Christine Wormuth — both of whom were appointed by President Biden — and Gen. James McConville, the Army’s top officer, said two defense officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. The White House declined to send a nomination for Piatt to the Senate for months, the officials said, effectively killing the possibility.

Piatt has agreed to stay in his present position for several more months at the request of McConville and Wormuth, and “has the full trust and confidence of Army senior leaders to execute the immense responsibility this position requires,” Army spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said. “With almost 40 years of active service, Lt. Gen. Piatt is eligible to retire this year but will remain as Director of the Army Staff until next summer.”

Piatt, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. The White House in September nominated another officer, Lt. Gen. James Rainey, to lead Futures Command and quickly gained confirmation for him. Rainey was promoted to four-star general and took over at Futures Command in Austin this month.

Defense News reported in September that Army officials feared Piatt’s candidacy for the position was in trouble, and Rainey took the job the following month after it sat open for nearly a year. But some senior Pentagon officials were sympathetic to Piatt and disappointed he was denied, defense officials said.

“He absolutely got jammed up by the politics,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “This administration is willing to take risk on a lot of issues, but you could tell this wasn’t going to be one of them.”

A White House spokeswoman, Adrienne Watson, and a Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, both declined to comment on the situation, characterizing it as a personnel matter. They also declined to comment on when Piatt was recommended by the Pentagon for the job.

The decision marks a rare instance of White House officials rejecting the Pentagon’s pick for top generals. A recommendation for a four-star position in the Army is considered by senior military officials in the service, approved by the Army secretary and then reviewed by the defense secretary before it is sent to the White House.

The situation marks the latest fallout stemming from the attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, in which thousands of people descended on the Capitol at the suggestion of former president Donald Trump to disrupt Congress as it moved to certify the election win of Joe Biden.

The decision also marks another minefield for Army leaders who have sought to avoid dragging the service into partisan politics. That has proved difficult on numerous occasions, as Pentagon officials fend off allegations from Republicans that they are forcing the military to be “woke” by requiring vaccination against the coronavirus and adopting new diversity programs.

Piatt found himself in political crosshairs within days of Jan. 6 after former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund, who resigned after the attack, accused the general of saying in a key meeting during the riot that he could not recommend to his boss at the time, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, that the D.C. National Guard be deployed to help police quell the violence. Piatt, Sund said, exasperated other senior U.S. officials on a conference call by expressing concerns about how it would look if military personnel responded.

Piatt initially denied Sund’s allegations in a statement but acknowledged in a call with reporters about two weeks later that he had conferred with others who were present that it was possible he made comments to that effect. In sworn congressional testimony, Piatt said in June 2021 that senior Army officials “all immediately understood the gravity of the situation” but still needed to develop a plan before dispatching armed personnel into the fray.

“I communicated this on the conference call, but those on the line were convinced that I was denying their request, despite [me] clearly stating three times that, ‘We are not denying your requests. We need to prepare a plan for when the secretary of the Army gains approval,’ ” Piatt testified.

The White House’s treatment of Piatt differs from the hands-off approach it had to the promotion of another senior officer involved in the response, then-Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn. Flynn was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training when the Capitol was assaulted, and is the brother of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a former Trump administration official who suggested before the Capitol attack that Trump should declare martial law and have the U.S. military run a new election.

There is no indication that Charles Flynn shares his brother’s extreme views, and senior defense officials have publicly and privately defended him as a bright leader who is loyal to the Constitution.

Flynn was promoted and allowed by the Biden administration to assume command of U.S. Army Pacific in early June 2021.

A key difference between the fate of the two generals’ careers was timing, defense officials said: While Piatt had not yet been nominated for a promotion when the assault on the Capitol happened, Flynn already had been confirmed by the Senate in December 2020, before the attack.

Army officials falsely denied for days that Flynn was not present at the meeting with Piatt, but Flynn ultimately said in a statement that he “entered the room after the call began and departed prior to the call ending” because he thought a decision to deploy the Guard was imminent.

Days after being promoted, Flynn testified alongside Piatt before the House Oversight Committee and said he was “shocked and angered” when he first learned of the attack on the Capitol a few minutes before Congress was breached. Piatt repeatedly assured others on the conference call that he was not denying their request and that he needed approval from more senior defense officials to help.

Dueling narratives about the Pentagon’s response to the assault still exist.

William Walker, who served as the two-star general of the D.C. National Guard during the attack, testified in March 2021 before the Senate’s Rules Committee and its Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that restrictions placed on him by the Pentagon in the run-up to the riot and lag time in decision-making at the Defense Department prevented him from more quickly sending forces to assist police at the Capitol.

Without those directives, Walker testified, he could have sent about 150 National Guard members within about 20 minutes.

“I believe that number could have made a difference,” Walker testified. “We could have helped extend the perimeter and helped push back the crowd.”

Within weeks, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) selected Walker to serve as House sergeant-at-arms, the top law enforcement officer in her chamber of Congress.

A Defense Department Inspector General report released in November 2021 cleared senior Army leaders of any wrongdoing during the assault and laid out the disagreement between Piatt and Walker in greater detail. Witnesses told investigators that Walker was asked by Piatt and Flynn for an operational plan, and told the generals that he wanted to get National Guard members onto buses to the Capitol and take direction from police officials.

Piatt wanted more specifics.

“It would be like me saying, ‘Go to Baghdad and just find somebody and see what they need,’ ” Piatt said in his interview with investigators, according to the report.

The report stated that Walker was directed twice by Pentagon leadership to send in troops before responding. McCarthy first informed him by phone at 4:35 p.m. that he had approval and then called Walker again about 30 minutes to “reissue the deployment order,” one anonymous Army witness told investigators. McCarthy declined to comment.

Walker demanded a retraction of the inspector general’s report after it was released, saying that it was inaccurate and that he was not given a chance by investigators to respond to the allegations. He first received approval at 5:08 p.m., he said, about three hours after Congress was breached.

After the release of the inspector general report, Walker’s former staff judge advocate, Col. Earl Matthews, sent a 36-page memo to the House that called Flynn and Piatt “absolute and unmitigated liars” in how they characterized the military’s response to the attack. The memo, first reported by Politico, accused the Army of creating “an alternate history” of events that was “a revisionist tract worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist.”

Walker, reached by email, said he did not have a reaction to the White House bypassing Piatt for promotion. His past testimony, as well as that of Sund and D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III, is “accurate and unambiguous,” he said.

Walker said that Matthews’s memo “speaks for itself” and that he concurs with it.

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · October 29, 2022

14. The attack targeting Nancy Pelosi illustrates rising political threats

Troubling data.

The attack targeting Nancy Pelosi illustrates rising political threats

The attack against Paul Pelosi comes amid an increase in acceptance of political violence — and an increase in threats, data shows.

Steve Reilly, Investigative Reporter, Maggie Severns, Domestic Policy Reporter, and Alex Leeds Matthews, Data Visualization ReporterOctober 28, 2022

grid.news

The attack targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home early Friday morning left her husband Paul Pelosi with serious injuries and sent shock waves of alarm resonating across the country.

But given the political environment — along with decades of many on the right vilifying the California Democrat — the attack fits into a larger trend, topping off two years of vitriolic partisan attacks between the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and the 2022 midterms.

There’s evidence that a steadily increasing number of people are willing to tolerate political violence even before 2020. Threats against members of Congress increased 855 percent from 2016 to 2020, a dramatic escalation that experts and observers say is tied to increasingly violent content in political rhetoric across platforms, but especially prominent on social media.

David Depape, 42, was arrested in connection with the attack, according to the San Francisco Police Department. Online posts attributed to Depape on a blog and website are rife with political conspiracy theories.

ADVERTISEMENT

“There have been many years of individuals calling for political violence, and a lot of that has been directed specifically at Speaker Pelosi, calling her dangerous or crazy or implying she’s not human,” said Heather Williams, a former intelligence officer and senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation. “I don’t find it surprising that someone acted on that.”

Williams attributed the trend, in large part, to violent online rhetoric on social media, especially far-right sites such as Gab that have a culture of extreme rhetoric among their users.

There were 902 threats against members of Congress in 2016, according to a February report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That figure more than quadrupled in 2017 to 3,939. In 2020, there were 8,613 threats against Congress members.

Friday’s attempted attack is not the first instance of threats materializing into real-world attacks against congressmembers.

In June 2017, six people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., were shot during a practice for the Congressional Baseball Game by a left-wing political activist from Illinois.

ADVERTISEMENT

On Jan. 6, members of Congress were just feet away from members of a violent mob that had broken into the Capitol building following a speech by then-President Donald Trump, who had falsely told them the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Some have tied the growth in threats to political rhetoric that is increasingly permissive of violence.

“There’s no room for violence anywhere,” Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in response to the attack on Paul Pelosi during a campaign event on Friday, “but we’re gonna send [Nancy Pelosi] back to be with [Paul Pelosi] in California.”

In November 2021, one threat against a member of Congress came from another member of Congress. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., posted a cartoon video that depicted him killing a cartoon figure bearing the face of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

Some House members brushed off the threat, saying it was a regular, expected occurrence. “Unfortunately, in the world we’re in right now, we all get death threats, no matter what the issue is,” said Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., at the time.

ADVERTISEMENT

In a speech on the House floor in November 2021 in support of a resolution to censor Gosar, Pelosi condemned the Arizona congressman and those who excused his behavior.

“If you are viewing this and thinking, ‘Well, when you run for Congress, you get threats and the rest’ — you don’t expect to get them from your colleagues,” Pelosi said. “The example set in this House is one that is viewed across the country. Women across the country particularly feel vulnerable if insults of the nature that exist in this House are allowed to stand.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

grid.news

15.  A former employee’s complaint prompts Republican calls to investigate The China Project, an American news company

A former employee’s complaint prompts Republican calls to investigate The China Project, an American news company | Semafor

Ben Smith

MEDIA

Updated Oct 30, 2022, 6:52pm EDT

Ben is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Semafor, coming over from the New York Times. Sign up for his media newsletter, out every Sunday night.

semafor.com

The News

Whistleblower Aid

Shannon Van Sant’s career neatly tracks the American media’s romance and disillusion with China. Her journey began in 2005 when, after five years working in news for ABC and NBC, she scrolled through the basic web page of the state-run China Central Television and called the number at the bottom.

Van Sant, then 29, made an unusual career choice: She moved to Beijing in 2006 to host a CCTV documentary program on Chinese government policy. She traveled with a team from end to end of the country, and learned that her colleagues “saw themselves as one with the government.” They gave interview subjects scripted questions, while she pushed for American-style authenticity.

She left Chinese state TV for the American public broadcaster, PBS, which produced documentaries including one on the detention of whistleblowers. Her view of China darkened, and she moved back to the United States in 2017. In 2020 took a job as business editor of a small, influential American publisher now called The China Project whose “Sinica” podcast is a hub of the American conversation about China.

“The excitement I felt during my first few years in Beijing about China, its complexity, and its rise gradually gave way to fear and concern,” she wrote.

AD

Van Sant’s story appears in an 11-page sworn declaration focused on The China Project, that’s at the heart of a formal complaint now circulating on Capitol Hill. Her lawyers at the non-profit firm Whistleblower Aid cite her experience and her research to claim that there is “a reasonable belief” that The China Project has been influenced by the Chinese government and is acting as an “agent of a foreign principal” under federal law.

On October 21, they sent the complaint to the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Congress. Semafor obtained it from a source on Capitol Hill, where Van Sant’s case has been taken up by two leading China hawks, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Chris Smith.

“Shannon Van Sant’s revelations underscore the extent to which Xi Jinping’s China seeks to shape narratives, corrupt the media and subvert truth-tellers,” the two legislators said in an emailed statement.

The incendiary charge directed at The China Project, which often represents the pro-engagement side of the U.S. debate, would group them with state-controlled media like the news service Xinhua and Russia’s RT. Foreign Agent registration isn’t a ban, but it’s a scarlet letter that brings with it cumbersome reporting requirements.

The China Project denies the allegations, which come at a moment when concerns about foreign influence in general and China’s rising power in particular have prompted an array of investigations and allegations under the long-dormant Foreign Agent Registration Act.

AD

Van Sant is a “disgruntled former employee” who is “exploiting the political atmosphere in Washington D.C. to seek revenge,” its editor-in-chief, Jeremy Goldkorn, said in an email.

The Complaint

Van Sant began work as the business editor of SupChina, as The China Project was then known, in April of 2020. The outlet was founded in 2015 by Anla Cheng, a Chinese-American who made a career investing in China. Van Sant wrote that she was looking forward to working with “fellow former Beijing expats.” But she quickly came to believe that her employer was pushing her to produce journalism that was favorable to China, according to her sworn declaration, which her lawyers said she made “in the interest of U.S. national security.”

Van Sant, who now lives in Europe and writes for Politico, said in the complaint that she clashed with her editors when she wanted to write more about Chinese human rights abuses. She also writes that Cheng instructed her to promote a book written by an American consultant who is a favorite of the Chinese state media, Peter Walker. On June 15, she writes, Cheng told staff that she had spoken to the China Association for Science and Technology in Beijing, and gotten a tip that a Chinese scientist was being wrongly investigated in the U.S., and then told her staff, “We have to protect him.” Van Sant was fired that day, after two months on the job.

Van Sant’s complaint also centers on an investor in The China Project, Clarence Kwan. Kwan is a longtime Deloitte executive whose LinkedIn biography names him as a director of the China Overseas Exchange Association, a nonprofit aimed at connecting with the Chinese diaspora that described itself on its website as being supervised by a government agency. The group has since been folded into an organization associated with China’s broad “United Front” propaganda efforts, according to a report from an Australian think tank.

The Response

The China Project, for its part, heatedly contests both some of the facts and the implications of Van Sant’s complaint. Goldkorn provided an email from Cheng acknowledging that Van Sant was uncomfortable writing about Walker, and suggesting that her pressure to write about Walker was less about ideology and more about fundraising: She aimed to help him “get some coverage so that he in turn he can help us – spread the word, get more donors and members and readers,” she wrote.

Goldkorn said Cheng’s discussion of the Chinese scientist was journalistically sound.

“We have since our inception covered the wrongful persecution of Chinese scientists in the U.S., which intensified under the now disbanded ‘China Initiative,’” he wrote of a set of FBI investigations, many of which fell apart after destroying the careers of their targets. “Where is the wrongdoing in being concerned about the unjust treatment of scientists?” he wrote.

Kwan, in an email sent through Goldkorn, said he did not believe at the time that the Chinese Overseas Exchange Association had ties to the United Front. His title, he said, was honorary, with “no salary or other payments, and no duties.” He noted that the group was subsumed into a United Front organization only after he ended his involvement.

“The closest thing we’ve ever had to a real Chinese Communist Party connection was when Ms. Van Sant herself worked for us: She was an employee of state-owned Party mouthpiece China Central TV (now CGTN) from 2006 to 2008,” Mr. Goldkorn said in an email.

Ben's view

Van Sant’s declaration does not contain strong evidence that the Chinese government has any role in The China Project, and doesn’t claim to, though her lawyers and the Republican lawmakers are calling for an investigation.

The core question she raises is about the motives of people who are seeking a softer line on China at a moment when Chinese nationalism and power are on the rise. Americans are increasingly alert to the pressure on American business, including publishers and movie studios, to back Chinese views in order to protect their own business interests — part of the broad spectrum of Chinese Communist Party efforts to shape China’s image abroad.

Cheng was “doing a very classic thing which is trying to buy your way into the system’s good graces,” said James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy who has criticized The China Project’s coverage of human rights and is familiar with Van Sant’s experience.

Palmer said he saw no evidence for the “foreign agent” charge. The China Project is “a legitimate part of the debate,” he said.

Cheng denied both direct and indirect Chinese influence.

“I have never felt pressure to steer away from any topics that are unwelcome in China, and neither has my team,” she wrote. “We consistently cover topics that are unwelcome in China, and that's why we're blocked / banned there.”

The China Project’s business, which leans heavily on revenue from events and a recent crowdfunding campaign as advertising has fallen, also don’t particularly suggest foreign support. In fact recent disclosures with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that the company is running out of money.

Room for Disagreement

The emerging Washington consensus on China is closer to the view of Van Sant’s lawyers, Andrew Bakaj and Kyle Gardiner, who wrote that there is “reasonable belief” that The China Project should legally be considered an agent of China.

“American citizens acting as agents of a hostile foreign government should not be allowed to operate in the shadows by exploiting our laws and freedoms,” Senator Rubio and Rep. Smith said. “At a minimum, these actors should be forced to register under FARA, disclosing who they are ultimately working for and allowing others to act on that information accordingly.”

The China Project’s Goldkorn responded that “the China Project site, like Marco Rubio, has been BANNED in China since July 2018 for criticizing the Chinese government.”

“Had Senator Rubio spent even one minute looking at our website, it would have been clear that The China Project is an independent news and business research platform, not an agent of the Chinese government,” he wrote, and added a longer response on The China Project site.

The View From Beijing

When The China Project launched a crowdfunding campaign earlier this year, it drew some rhetorical support from state media figures including Zichen Wang, then a reporter at Xinhua with an English-language Substack.

"Resourceful people with *imagination* and *creativity* should see it as a middle ground of some sort and contribute,” he tweeted.

But when an article about Chinese social media comments on Ukraine caught the attention of nationalists on social media, the fiery state-run Global Times denounced the China Project in a headline as a “West-backed anti-China organization.”

Notable

• Shannon Van Sant’s declaration can be read in full here.
• Jeremy Goldkorn's full response is available here.
• The Trump Administration’s China Initiative ruined professors’ lives but failed to find spies, a pattern that “lends credence to the idea that the China Initiative was merely a formal gloss on a racialized moral panic,” Gideon Lewis-Krauss wrote in The New Yorker. “In its attempt to protect our technological supremacy, the government attacked the very people who underwrote our advances.”
• The little-understood United Front is “a political model and a way for the party to control political representation,” Alex Joske wrote in a 2020 report for the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative,” warning that other governments should be alert to how “its overseas expansion is an exportation of the CCP’s political system.”

semafor.com

16.  Iran’s Women on the Frontlines

​Excerpts:

No one can predict whether the movement in Iran will succeed or whether the ruling regime will prevail. Some changes now seem inevitable. The sense of the regime’s invincibility, and women’s marginalization from politics, has been shattered. But the struggle against patriarchal policies and values will likely continue regardless of what happens. Even if the protests do not lead to the collapse of the regime, the current cries for “Woman, life, freedom!” may have already shifted the social and political landscape. And alliances between constituents as diverse as schoolgirls, oil workers, and Kurdish nationalists have emerged. Moreover, the demands of the movement have resonated around the world—including in the United States—where renewed restrictions on reproductive autonomy and violence against women in politics have generated a sense of common cause.

Going forward, the movement will have to weather organizational obstacles and transcend the information blackout imposed by the Iranian government. International actors could help protesters by providing alternative means of accessing the Internet, enabling them to circumvent government shutdowns to communicate with one another and with the rest of the world. But even without such assistance, the videos and photographs that have made it through Iran’s media blackout demonstrate how women can act as powerful agents of change even—perhaps, particularly—under patriarchal authoritarian politics.

​

Iran’s Women on the Frontlines

Why Female-Led Movements Succeed—but Also Risk a Backlash

By Zoe Marks, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, and Erica Chenoweth

October 31, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Zoe Marks, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, and Erica Chenoweth · October 31, 2022

There is no sign that the protest movement led by women in Iran is slowing down, despite violent crackdowns by Iranian security forces. Just last week, thousands of Iranians marched to the city of Saghez, the hometown of Mahsa “Zina” Amini, whose death in custody 40 days earlier had sparked an outpouring of public grief and outrage that has evolved into a mass movement. Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian, had been visiting family members in Tehran when she was arrested by the morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law. Witnesses claim that the police severely beat her; she died three days later in a hospital after slipping into a coma.

Her death has catalyzed one of the largest and most sustained uprisings in Iran in a generation, mobilizing thousands of Iranians and supporters globally. Protesters have adopted the Kurdish slogan “Woman, life, freedom!” as their rallying cry and have taken to the streets to demand political freedom in the face of internet blackouts, mass arrests, and live-fire attacks by security services. The remarkable size and resilience of these protests are directly tied to the central participation of women. When women are on the frontlines, mass movements have a higher chance of succeeding and are likelier to lead to more egalitarian democracy. This is one of the reasons today’s protests are so threatening to the Iranian regime. As two of us (Chenoweth and Marks) wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, “fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders—and so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist.”

Over the past year in Iran, the government’s control over women’s lives has tightened, especially regarding the hijab law. Viral videos of the morality police violently enforcing the law have generated a swell of anger and defiance. Amini’s death was arguably the tipping point.

From the start, women have set the tone of these protests and have found innovative ways to register their anger with the government. Although men have also participated in large numbers, they have done so in the name of Amini and by embracing more feminist rhetoric than ever before. In this way, women’s organizing and outrage have laid the groundwork for a much wider pro-democratic uprising.

This is a moment of great hope but also great worry. Although the extensive frontline participation of women in protest movements often makes them more effective, it also raises the stakes dramatically. Should the Iranian regime defeat today’s protesters, an even deeper patriarchal backlash could follow, potentially setting back Iranian women’s rights and political freedom by decades.

POLICING WOMEN’S BODIES

In the months before Amini was killed, pent-up anger was building in Iran. A woman named Sepideh Rashno was arrested, beaten, and forced to “confess” on state-run TV after an altercation with a female hijab-enforcer on a city bus that went viral in July. In another incident, a viral video showed a mother trying to stop a police van, crying: “Please release my daughter! She is sick!” The van proceeded, ignoring her pleas. In addition to the hijab-related attacks, the government recently implemented a natalist population policy that imposes social control over women and families and is poised to further marginalize women from the public sphere. The policy, denounced by the UN high commissioner on human rights, criminalizes abortion and restricts family planning and reproductive health care, such as fetal monitoring, access to contraceptives, and voluntary vasectomies.

Mona Tajali, a scholar of women’s political representation, has noted that during the past two decades, Iranian women working inside and outside the government have made some progress in opening up political space and increasing inclusion. For example, Tajali notes that there have been numerous nonviolent protests against mandatory hijab since its introduction in 1979. And in 2018, female members of Iran’s parliament arranged for the first official government survey on the state’s religious decrees on women’s dress, revealing that a solid majority of Iranians disapproved of such measures. But in 2020, a conservative crackdown began to reverse these hard-won gains, with fundamentalist leaders banning outspoken women from running for office, persecuting them with frivolous lawsuits, throwing their support behind hard-line candidates of both genders, and brutally enforcing Islamic dress code. Now, Iranian women – and men – are fighting back.

Women have long been agents of change in Iran. Women’s high turnout in the 1997 presidential election brought President Mohammad Khatami to office and helped usher in an era of reform. Women played highly visible roles in the 2009 Green Movement against state-sponsored election fraud, constituting a substantial proportion, if not a majority, of frontline activists. Women developed several initiatives to keep the movement on the streets, such as Mothers in Mourning and Mothers for Peace, groups for women who had either lost their children during the protests or seen them arrested, prompting their loved ones to demand justice and their release.

But the centrality of women’s rights in today’s uprising makes it different from those earlier instances of women’s political mobilization in Iran, and unique among recent mass movements in the broader Middle East. From the Arab Spring in 2010–11 through Sudan’s 2019 revolution, protests in the region have often erupted in the wake of the deaths of young men. This is the first time in the region’s recent history that a nationwide uprising has been ignited by the death of a young woman—and one from an ethnic minority group, no less. The wave of protests in Amini’s name signifies broad-based support for women’s political power and agency as central to political change in Iran while underscoring the gendered nature of repression by the regime. And her Kurdish identity has evoked multiethnic solidarity.

NOT JUST SURVIVE, BUT THRIVE

This uprising is also different from other recent campaigns because it is being led, visibly and persistently, by women. From protesting in traffic circles to spearheading massive demonstrations, women are not just symbolizing freedom but also taking tremendous risks—in some cases, losing their lives—to demand it. This has made it more difficult for the regime to put a stop to the uprising and has increased the movement’s chances of producing change. Movements in which women play a prominent role tend to attract much larger numbers of participants. On average, they are about seven times as large as movements that sideline women—and larger movements are more likely to succeed. Because of information blackouts, it is impossible to know just how many people have been active in the movement so far. As the sociologist Mohammad Ali Kadivar has noted, however, today’s movement has attracted far broader support than other recent protests, both in the streets and from key sectors of Iranian society. Beyond reformists, students, and intellectuals in major cities, the movement has engaged diverse bases of support from oil workers to prominent athletes and artists to merchants from Tehran’s bazaar.

Movements with large numbers of female participants also tend to be perceived as more legitimate in the eyes of observers, who often respond to the symbolic power of grandmothers and schoolgirls protesting bravely. In Iran, news of students being killed or detained—often during raids of all-girls schools suspected of defying the hijab law—has catalyzed the teachers union to go on strike and demand the resignation of the education minister. Women’s involvement in mass movements also allows activists to gain access to social levers of change that women influence within their families and communities, where they can draw on different networks and norms than those dominated by men. For instance, in families and communities, women are often able to make moral claims and wield social power in ways that shape the behavior and attitudes of those around them. As a result, gender-inclusive protest movements are often better at chipping away at the loyalties of regime elites, empowering reformers, and sidelining hard-liners as a conflict intensifies.

There is footage of an elderly mother taking her son away from a group of policemen preparing to crack down on protesters. And female celebrities have objected to being portrayed on state-sponsored billboards with the slogan “Women of my Land.” The award-winning actor Fatemeh Motamed-Arya was among the first to publicly protest, releasing a video in which she appeared without a hijab and said, “I am not considered a woman in a land where young children, little girls, and freedom-loving youths are killed in its fields.”

Worldwide, movements led by women also tend to be more innovative—particularly in tactics of noncooperation—than those that sideline women. In Iran, some protest tactics have been uniquely gendered. Women have taken off their hijabs, burning them or waving them while chanting slogans, as with the female students who were filmed shouting “Get out!” at a representative of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at their school. Women are cutting their hair publicly, invoking an ancient Persian motif of mourning and outrage over injustice and launching a new symbol of international protest. An 80-year-old mother whose son was killed in prison unveiled and cut her hair to support the movement after a lifetime of veiling publicly. From the streets of Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan Province, to neighboring Afghanistan and Turkey, to the EU and Belgian Parliaments, women worldwide are wielding scissors on hair of all colors and textures to symbolize violence against women’s bodies and the rejection of conservative standards for beauty and morals.

Finally, campaigns with women participating prominently are more resilient in the face of repression, in part because inclusive protests are more likely to remain nonviolent. State violence against female protesters can backfire; attacking women and children is often seen as illegitimate and a sign of government weakness. This was poignantly seen in Iran’s 2009 protests, when Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman, was shot and killed, becoming a martyr for the movement. During the current unrest, reports suggest that the Iranian regime has arrested over 8,000 people, including hundreds of children, and killed upward of 200 protesters. When young and old, women and children are treated this way, it poses a serious risk to the perceived legitimacy of the security forces’ use of force.

THE DANGER OF FAILURE

Historically, movements that feature women in large numbers are more likely than those that are male-dominated to lead to democratic breakthroughs. Examples include democracy campaigns in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Poland, and the Philippines in the 1980s. Where campaigns succeed, increased democratization also typically leads to greater respect for civil liberties and gender equality in the years that follow.

As a result, such movements raise the stakes for authoritarian regimes. And when they are defeated, an intense patriarchal backlash often follows, setting back women’s rights to levels lower than before the movement started.

Iran already restricts women’s freedom of expression and bodily autonomy in ways that have downstream effects on their freedom of movement, personal and professional opportunities, and self-determination. This is twinned with legal gender discrimination that has significant economic and political consequences: women in Iran make up more than 50 percent of university graduates but just 14 percent of the labor market. If the current movement falters, Iranian women are likely to face harsher enforcement of already-repressive patriarchal policies.

No one can predict whether the movement in Iran will succeed or whether the ruling regime will prevail. Some changes now seem inevitable. The sense of the regime’s invincibility, and women’s marginalization from politics, has been shattered. But the struggle against patriarchal policies and values will likely continue regardless of what happens. Even if the protests do not lead to the collapse of the regime, the current cries for “Woman, life, freedom!” may have already shifted the social and political landscape. And alliances between constituents as diverse as schoolgirls, oil workers, and Kurdish nationalists have emerged. Moreover, the demands of the movement have resonated around the world—including in the United States—where renewed restrictions on reproductive autonomy and violence against women in politics have generated a sense of common cause.

Going forward, the movement will have to weather organizational obstacles and transcend the information blackout imposed by the Iranian government. International actors could help protesters by providing alternative means of accessing the Internet, enabling them to circumvent government shutdowns to communicate with one another and with the rest of the world. But even without such assistance, the videos and photographs that have made it through Iran’s media blackout demonstrate how women can act as powerful agents of change even—perhaps, particularly—under patriarchal authoritarian politics.

• ZOE MARKS is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
• FATEMEH HAGHIGHATJOO is Co-Founder and CEO of the Nonviolent Initiative for Democracy. She served in the Iranian Parliament from 2000 to 2004.
• ERICA CHENOWETH is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Foreign Affairs · by Zoe Marks, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, and Erica Chenoweth · October 31, 2022

17. Global Impact: Now the dust has settled after the 20th party congress, where is China heading under Xi Jinping?

Global Impact: Now the dust has settled after the 20th party congress, where is China heading under Xi Jinping?

• Global Impact is a fortnightly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world
• In this edition, we look back at the 20th party congress in Beijing and ponder what it all means for the next five years (and maybe more) for China

Daniel Kwan

+ FOLLOW

Published: 2:00pm, 31 Oct, 2022

Updated: 2:00pm, 31 Oct, 2022

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3197836/global-impact-now-dust-has-settled-after-20th-party-congress-where-china-heading-under-xi-jinping?utm_source=rss_feed

Closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Photo: Kyodo

The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party ended last Saturday with the election of a new Central Committee and amendments of the party constitution.

Then, on the following day, President Xi Jinping further cemented his paramount leader status with a third term as the general secretary, while also confirming a new line-up for the Politburo and its powerful Standing Committee.

The results were largely as expected as some of the familiar faces like Premier Li Keqiang and parliamentary chief Li Zhanshu are set to retire.

At the same time, Xi has populated the leadership core with his trusted aides and some up-and-coming new faces. The absence of any heir apparent in the new line-up also indicates that Xi will continue to rule China for another five years and maybe beyond.

The new leadership is not just younger, but it also boasts a more professional make-up. Within the Politburo, at least half-a-dozen members share a background in science and technology. There is also a public health expert and a top industrialist with decades of management experience.

The retention of Foreign Minister Wang Yi and military strongman Zhang Youxia despite their advanced age, however, indicate that Xi also values continuity and keeping a steady-hand in these two critical areas. There was, however, for the first time in decades, no woman selected for the Politburo.

Meanwhile, the congress also sent plenty of signals and messages about where Xi is going to lead the party and the country. On different occasions, Xi has made it clear that the congress marked the beginning of a new era, which will eventually see China become a modernised and prosperous world power in around three decades.

To achieve that, Xi stated that upholding the Communist Party’s leadership is crucial – a message that he again drove home during a visit with the newly-minted Politburo Standing Committee members to the party’s mecca of Yanan on Thursday.

The congress was only marred by an unscripted event on its closing day when former president Hu Jintao was escorted out of the meeting soon after it began. While the episode has attracted much attention overseas, it was not reported in domestic media.

More personnel changes are expected to be announced between now and the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in March. Some of these changes are expected and others will be surprises. However, one thing can be certain – they are all the president’s men.

60 second catch-up

Shake-up at the top of China’s Communist Party as Xi Jinping starts new term

Chinese President Xi Jinping unveils new team for his record-breaking third term

No obvious successor to Xi Jinping in Chinese Communist Party’s new leadership team

Video: Chinese President Xi Jinping unveils new line-up of country’s top decision-making body

Infographic: The 20th Politburo•Infographic: The Central Military Commission

Chinese President Xi Jinping looks to fresh faces to confront new term of ‘unparalleled complexity’

Chinese President Xi Jinping takes core team on visit to Communist Party revolutionary base

Opinion: Communist Party’s moment of crisis turned Xi Jinping from the ‘weakest’ to its ‘most powerful’ leader in history

Deep Dives

Illustration: Brian Wang

On track or off? US analysts say 20th party congress suggests difficult bilateral relations ahead

• New military leadership looks solid, but appointees to domestic positions seem more experienced in party ideology than in economics, which could destabilise ties
• ‘Looking into the future, it is uncertainty as far as the eye can see,’ one analyst says

While there has been little official US comment on the 20th party congress that saw President Xi Jinping gain an unprecedented third term, former US officials and analysts say Beijing’s apparent lack of attention to mounting economic problems and its hardening political and military line do not bode well for US-China ties.

The twice-in-a-decade Communist Party meetings are generally reserved for handling succession issues and outlining broad vision. But China is facing a property crisis, consumer slump tied to its zero-Covid policy, weakening currency, capital outflow and historically low growth rates even as youth unemployment hit a record high of 19.3 per cent in June.

Read more

Photo: Kyodo

The Hong Kong connection: Xi Jinping, 4 other top Chinese leaders and an ideologue who studied city from afar

• New hierarchy of seven-member Politburo Standing Committee could lead to smoother implementation of key policies involving Hong Kong, analysts say
• Pro-Beijing heavyweight says new team gives Hong Kong ‘quite a lot opportunities to be involved in the overall development of China’

China’s new top decision-making body unveiled over the weekend comprises an unprecedented number of leaders with extensive links to Hong Kong in their previous roles and an ideologue who had long studied the city, making for a line-up analysts have suggested can lead to a smoother implementation of Beijing’s key policies related to Hong Kong.

Pro-Beijing heavyweight Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai also said the new team would be “an asset” for Hong Kong as it could guide the city through an increasingly tense geopolitical environment and help it to further integrate with the country’s overall development.

Read more

Photo: Reuters

China’s top legislature ‘deliberates’ on new nominations, as leadership reshuffle stokes market turmoil

• The National People’s Congress (NPC) standing committee, which convened a meeting from Wednesday to Sunday, may have begun political appointments
• The NPC’s early approval of vice premiers could include those responsible for the economy, pandemic control, science and technology as well as foreign trade

Following days of market turmoil, all eyes are on the appointment of China’s top economic aides, who will be responsible for guiding the country through coming economic storms and continuing Xi Jinping’s grand modernisation strategy.

While Li Qiang, now China’s No 2 in the party hierarchy, will take the premiership in March, the naming of senior government roles might have already begun, enabling appointees to get to grips with economic challenges, plan policy priorities and ensure a seamless transition.

Read more

Photo: Reuters

China’s Communist Party cements ‘common prosperity’ as core economic agenda

• Constitutional revisions also call for acceleration of the ‘dual circulation’ concept
• Decision comes as structural problems mount at home and headwinds gain strength abroad

China’s Communist Party has cemented “security” and “common prosperity” as high priorities on its economic agenda by adding the “dual circulation” strategy and pursuit of “high-quality development” to the party constitution.

The revisions came amid fierce debate about whether Beijing is leaning towards a more inward course and prepared to sacrifice some growth to counteract widening socioeconomic inequality as structural problems mount at home and headwinds gain strength abroad.

Read more

Photo: Xinhua

China’s Communist Party looks to science cadres to push back at US tech squeeze

• More scientists added to the top ranks of the party and military command
• Expertise ranges from rocket science to nuclear power and the environment

More leaders with a strong science and technology background have been promoted to the upper echelon of the Communist Party as President Xi Jinping seeks to counter pressure from the West.

The emphasis on science and technology was evident not only in the new line-up of the powerful Politburo announced on Sunday but also in the newly elected policymaking Central Committee.

Read more

Photo: AFP

Was Beijing’s praise of ‘noble’ party and state leaders a nod to Li Keqiang?

• A state media report didn’t name names when it recognised leaders who ‘voluntarily’ asked to retire
• President Xi Jinping used similar accolades for previous high-level retirements

Chinese state media has praised “some party and state leaders” for voluntarily stepping down to make way for younger talent – a likely reference to the retirement of China’s premier, Li Keqiang, among others.

Without directly naming anyone, a report on Monday from state news agency Xinhua said the leaders voluntarily asked for retirement during the consultation period for the new Communist Party leadership ahead of the 20th party congress.

Read more

Understand China’s leadership reshuffle with Global Impact newsletter. View all 20th party congress issues here.

Global Impact is a fortnightly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world.

Sign up now!

CONVERSATIONS (1)

Daniel Kwan

+ FOLLOW

Daniel Kwan is the SCMP's China Editor.

18. 'Complex threat environment' ahead of midterm elections, top cybersecurity official says

Excerpts:

Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), in an appearance on CBS "Face the Nation" said the agency is concerned about a range of threats, including cyber, insider, physical and disinformation even as it sees no "specific or credible" threats.

​...

The Department of Homeland Security, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center and U.S. Capitol Police issued a bulletin on Friday warning that political candidates, election officials and the public faced a heighten risk of violence.

Last week the NYPD called for "elevated vigilance" ahead of the midterm elections in an internal bulletin. The department warned that extremists could target political events and polling sites, putting poll workers and political candidates at risk.

​

​

'Complex threat environment' ahead of midterm elections, top cybersecurity official says

Reuters · by Tyler Clifford

Oct 30 (Reuters) - Election officials in the United States have been alerted to safe-proof their voting systems and be vigilant about political violence amid a "very complex threat environment," top U.S. cybersecurity official Jen Easterly said on Sunday in the wake of an attack on the husband of a leading Democratic lawmaker last week.

Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), in an appearance on CBS "Face the Nation" said the agency is concerned about a range of threats, including cyber, insider, physical and disinformation even as it sees no "specific or credible" threats.

CISA is distributing information about disinformation campaigns and tactics that seek to undermine confidence in U.S. elections, she said

"We are putting out information ... to make sure that state and local election officials have the information that they need to protect their voting systems and their election infrastructure."

The warning is among a range of messages being distributed by federal agencies and law enforcement, including the New York Police Department, with the midterm election just nine days away.

Businessman Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked with a hammer by an intruder during a break-in at the couple's home in San Francisco early on Friday. The attack has ignited fears about political violence at a time when crime has become a leading issue this election season.

The Department of Homeland Security, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center and U.S. Capitol Police issued a bulletin on Friday warning that political candidates, election officials and the public faced a heighten risk of violence.

Last week the NYPD called for "elevated vigilance" ahead of the midterm elections in an internal bulletin. The department warned that extremists could target political events and polling sites, putting poll workers and political candidates at risk.

Reporting by Tyler Clifford; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Sandra Maler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Tyler Clifford

19. Options for Ukraine to Defend Civilian Centers from Russian Strikes

Options for Ukraine to Defend Civilian Centers from Russian Strikes

divergentoptions.org · by Divergent Options · October 31, 2022

Michael C. DiCianna is a consultant in the national security field, and a staff member of the Center for International Maritime Security. He can be found on Twitter @navy_tobacco. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.

National Security Situation: Ukraine requires additional capabilities to defend its civilian centers from Russian strikes.

Date Originally Written: October 25, 2022.

Date Originally Published: October 31, 2022.

Author and / or Article Point of View: The author believes that with Ukrainian civilian centers defended from Russian strikes, the Ukrainian armed forces will be better able to focus on locating, closing with, and destroying Russian forces occupying Ukraine.

Background: After the bombing of the Kerch Strait Bridge that links Russia to Ukraine’s Crimea —unclaimed but likely attributed to Ukrainian sabotage, Russia responded with missile strikes on civilian targets in Kyiv. As of the time of this writing, 19 people have been killed, and hundreds wounded. Some of these strikes used Kalibr cruise missiles, launched from ships in the Black and Caspian Seas[1]. Russia’s long-range missiles and artillery continue to threaten Ukrainian lives and allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to commit what amounts to war crimes[2][3]. Putin ordering his forces to shoot upwards of 100 missiles at civilian centers instead of the military targets reaffirms his commitment to use terror tactics to cover up for Russian military losses.

Significance: Ukraine’s autumn counteroffensive has continued to degrade the Russian military on the front line. Western allies supplying arms and training continue to assist the Ukrainian military in its liberation efforts, but the Ukrainian capital and other major civilian centers are still being struck by Russian attacks. Protecting civilian lives and enabling the Ukrainian Armed Forces to focus on the front line will be vital to repelling the invasion.

Option #1: Western allies increase Ukraine’s anti-ship capabilities.

Risk: Putin has made it clear that the Kremlin will view all Western support to Ukraine as an escalation. Russian officials have made nearly weekly overt or implied nuclear threats. Previously, Russia implied that it would strike Western arms shipments in Ukraine, regardless of the point of delivery or casualties to North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries. All increases to Ukrainian offensive and defensive capabilities risk Russian escalation, though this risk must be balanced against the importance of defending Ukrainian sovereignty. The addition of increased anti-ship and anti-submarine capabilities might see reciprocal Russian assaults on Ukraine’s maritime infrastructure, or further attacks on major civilian centers. If Ukraine uses these hypothetical armaments to destroy Black Sea Fleet ships or infrastructure, Russa may feel even more cornered. Attacks against Crimea especially could increase the Kremlin’s perception of being “cornered.” Control of the Crimean Peninsula, including Sevastopol and thus a year-long naval base in the Black Sea, has been a core strategic objective of Russia since 2014.

Gain: Destroying Russian long-range missile capabilities will be more effective at defending Ukraine’s population than relying on air defense systems. Even the best air defense systems can be penetrated or overwhelmed. Ukrainians using Western-provided anti-ship capabilities to destroy Russian ships in the Black Sea not only removes Russian offensive capabilities, but it also damages the Russian strategic mission. Much like the loss of the illegally annexed territory of Lyman is a deep wound to the Russian agenda, a sunken Black Sea Fleet makes the Russian occupation of Crimea more and more irrelevant.

Increasing Ukrainian capability to strike Russian targets continues to degrade the Russian threat to the rest of Europe. Ukraine is fighting this war against Russia, and hopefully winning it, so that a similar war with Russia does not happen in Finland, Poland, or the Baltic States. This situation does not devalue the heroism of the Ukrainian cause, but it is a reminder to other European capitals that there is also a hard calculus behind supporting Ukraine. The Russian Army is being annihilated, and the Russian Air Force has taken serious losses. Losses to the Black Sea Fleet—already in a subpar state of upkeep—would be another drastic hit to Putin’s regime.

Option #2: Western allies provide Ukraine limited air defense capabilities.

Risk: Air defense systems will never be a complete shield over a city or other broad target. Even extensive air defense grids will leave gaps, and saturation strikes will overwhelm them. Providing Ukraine limited air defense capabilities will force Ukrainian military and civilian leaders to prioritize protection. Russian attacks could be targeting based on outdated maps, making it harder for Ukraine to predict which areas will be targeted[4]. Air defenses are vital to protecting civilian lives and military infrastructure, but limited Western support might not be enough in the face of further Russian bombardment.

Gain: An arms package containing limited air defense systems and provides Ukraine with no advanced long-range strike or antiship capabilities is likely viewed from a Western lens as a less escalatory option. Russia views all U.S. and Western arms deals for Ukraine as escalation and interference with a war it views as within its own periphery, but the Kremlin will still need to somehow maintain its own redlines[5]. Air defense systems designed to destroy Russian cruise missiles and drones are not as much of a threat to the Russian military as missiles designed to destroy Russian warships.

Other Comments: None.

Recommendation: None.

Endnotes:

[1] The Economist Newspaper. (2022, October 10). Russia launches a wave of missiles across Ukraine. The Economist. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/10/10/russia-launches-a-wave-of-missiles-across-ukraine

[2] Specia, M., Kramer, A. E., & Maria Varenikova, M. (2022, October 17). Buzzing Drones Herald Fresh Attacks on Kyiv, Killing Four. The New York Times. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/17/world/russia-ukraine-war-news.

[3] Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article 8, paragraph 2.

[4] Knowles, D (Host). (2022, October 12). Private mercenaries, GCHQ’s nuclear response and on the ground in the Donbas. In Ukraine: The Lastest. The Telegraph. https://open.spotify.com/episode/14CJ4WAtCtuGP14e60S0q6?si=d86626ee3e334514

[5] Ellyatt, H. (2022, March 12). Western arms convoys to Ukraine are ‘legitimate targets,’ Russia warns. CNBC. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/11/ukraine-needs-more-weapons-the-west-fears-provoking-war-with-russia.html

divergentoptions.org · by Divergent Options · October 31, 2022

20.  Meet the Vets Running for Congress, the Largest Group of Candidates Who Served in a Decade

​ A handy table at the end of this article. If it does not format correctly please go to the link: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/10/28/meet-vets-running-congress-largest-group-of-candidates-who-served-decade.html?ESRC=eb_221031.nl&mc_cid=ecc0f45ef6​

Meet the Vets Running for Congress, the Largest Group of Candidates Who Served in a Decade

28 Oct 2022

Military.com | By Rebecca Kheel

There's a new crop of veteran candidates running in this year's midterm elections, and they are part of the largest number of political hopefuls with military experience to seek office in years.

In New York, a rising Democratic star's military resume and pro-abortion rights campaign are giving the party hopes of hanging onto control of Congress. A grieving Green Beret husband in Washington state launched into politics and the Republican right after his wife's death.

And a Black female Air Force veteran running as a Republican in Indiana has turned her bid for a seat her party hasn't won in nearly a century into one of the most competitive races in the country.

Read Next: Space Force on Notice as Russia Warns Commercial Satellites May Be a 'Legitimate Target'

Those are just a few of the 196 Republican and Democrat veterans competing for a seat in Congress on Nov. 8. This year's cohort of major party nominees is the highest number of veteran candidates since 2012 and 14 more than in 2020. Many are incumbents, but a majority would be fresh faces in the Capitol, according to data from the Veterans Campaign, a nonpartisan nonprofit that trains veterans to run for office.

Republicans are expected to win at least the House, and many of the veterans running this year are in races that could determine which party controls Congress next year. The number of veteran candidates exceeds 200 when factoring in independent, third-party and write-in candidates who have little shot of winning, according to data provided by With Honor, a political action committee that supports veterans running for office.

Democrats have been hoping to defy the odds with pro-abortion rights campaigns after a Supreme Court ruling that abortion was not a constitutional right, but Republicans, who have been focusing on inflation, have recently seen momentum shift back toward them.

"Hardworking Americans are hurting from Joe Biden's disastrous, failed economic policies," Jen Kiggans, a Navy veteran running for the House in Virginia, said at her debate against Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., this month.

Those who track veteran candidates say it's important to have people with military experience in public office because they have the potential to be more nonpartisan than their peers. Still, it has become difficult for even veterans in Congress to compromise as politics becomes increasingly polarized on even defense issues, such as whether the military's diversity efforts are too "woke."

"There is the opportunity to work across party lines with shared military service," said Seth Lynn, executive director of the Veterans Campaign. "It doesn't always happen. Maybe it rarely happens. But the opportunity is there, and it's because it's one of the only things that sort of still trumps partisanship in D.C. and across the country."

Indeed, many of the veterans running this year are on the far right of the political spectrum and have falsely denied President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, despite dozens of court cases and reviews in various states that have failed to provide any proof of fraud that could have affected the election outcome.

That's not necessarily because veterans are moving further to the right, but rather the Republican Party is and more of the veterans running this year are Republicans than Democrats, Lynn said.

"You're seeing more right-wing veteran nominees because you're seeing more right-wing nominees and Republicans are nominating a lot of veterans," he said.

Democratic veteran candidates are largely following the party line on issues such as promising to protect abortion access, accusing Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare, and casting the election as a fight to save democracy from extremist supporters of former President Donald Trump.

Political polarization has grown to the point that a recent NBC News poll found 80% of Republicans and Democrats believe the other party "poses a threat that if not stopped will destroy America as we know it."

Rye Barcott, CEO of With Honor, said he does not think veteran candidates are becoming more extreme, just that those who are more radical are louder. Still, Barcott said he does worry about the extreme voices drowning out the "principled" veterans his group is trying to elect.

The candidates whom With Honor supports, who come from both parties, have to take a pledge to serve with integrity, civility and courage, and are expected to join Congress' For Country Caucus, a bipartisan group of veterans who have the stated goal of making the legislature less polarized, if elected.

"The important piece from our perspective is getting principled veterans elected, who have a proven record not only of service but are committed to working across party lines and compromising and getting things done, because that's the only way that things get done," Barcott said.

Here's a sampling of some of the veterans hoping to be sent to Washington for the first time or, in one case, be given a chance to do more than keep the seat warm for a few months.

Pat Ryan, New York-18

Democratic Army veteran Pat Ryan unexpectedly won a special election in August to serve the remainder of a term for a House district in southern New York left open when Antonio Delgado became the state's lieutenant governor, and he's now hoping voters will give him a full term in November's general election.

A West Point graduate, Ryan served two combat tours in Iraq as an Army intelligence officer. His campaign materials prominently feature his military service, with his website vowing he will bring West Point's motto of "duty, honor, country" to Congress.

"I was willing to put it on the line for our country, to put myself at risk in service of something bigger than myself, and I think a lot of people feel and I agree we need more of that ethos in politics right now," Ryan said in a recent interview with Military.com.

Ryan's victory in the special election was seen as one of the first concrete signs of electoral backlash against the Supreme Court's decision overturning nationwide abortion rights, giving Democrats hope they can win on pro-abortion rights platforms in November. Ryan's general election race in the Hudson Valley district is rated "lean Democrat" by election forecaster Cook Political Report.

Ryan said he applauds Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's recent move to ease service members' access to abortion and would like to see it codified so a future administration can't reverse it. He also said the Department of Veterans Affairs should broaden its recent decision to provide abortions to veterans in cases of rape, incest or where the life or health of the mother is at risk.

In his short time in Congress, he has already gotten one bill passed by the House, and it was a veterans bill. Specifically, it would expand VA home loan eligibility to more Guardsmen and reservists. If elected to a full term, Ryan said he'd push to establish grants for a veterans peer-to-peer support program, as well as expand veterans' families' access to mental health care.

Ryan also said he thinks it's important to have veterans in Congress with combat experience making foreign policies decisions.

"We need people at the table making foreign policy decisions who've actually been on the receiving end, way out on the edge, as I was in Iraq on two deployments, understanding how grave and serious the decision is to send young men and women into combat," he said.

Ryan's opponent in the general election is Colin Schmitt, who is a sergeant and automated logistical specialist in the New York Army National Guard's 53rd Troop Command.

Schmitt, a New York assemblyman, joined the National Guard in 2015 after having a "really great experience" interacting with Guard leaders as a staffer for the New York State Senate's Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs Committee, he told Military.com in a recent interview. Schmitt was activated for the domestic response to COVID-19, when he helped transport supplies to the emergency field hospital set up in New York City's Javits Convention Center and to other community groups in need of masks, sanitizer or other items.

Schmitt said he thinks his experience in the Guard has made him a "more well-rounded leader" and taught him resiliency. Asked what policies he would advance in Congress to support service members and veterans, he pointed to his opposition to the VA's proposal to close a hospital in the district. The idea was part of a broader VA infrastructure realignment plan that has since been scuttled by sitting lawmakers. Schmitt also cited support for the same peer-to-peer veteran support program Ryan vowed to advance.

"There's a lot of things that can divide us, but doing the right thing for veterans and thanking people for their service, that's what I'm all about," Schmitt said.

Don Bolduc, New Hampshire

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc is hoping to unseat incumbent New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan in a race seen as vital for control of the Senate.

Bolduc served in the Army for 36 years, a career that included 10 tours in Afghanistan and earned him two Purple Hearts.

Since his retirement from the military in 2017, he has become a mainstay on Fox News and has made other media appearances, blasting the Biden's administration's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as the result of "wishful thinking," saying moves Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley took at the end of the Trump administration to ensure a smooth presidential transition "fall somewhere between treason and dereliction of duty," and calling Pentagon efforts on climate change "dangerous."

Bolduc also spent more than a year spreading the lie that Biden stole the 2020 election, though two days after winning his primary in September, he said he had "come to the conclusion" the election "was not stolen."

Still, in a recent interview with Military.com, Bolduc said he would be a "unifying voice" as a veteran in the Senate.

"We can see that we have a polarization of our parties, Republican and Democrat, not able to come together any longer for the things that matter for Americans that I think veterans and the service of veterans really focus on," he said.

Asked about the apparent contradiction of casting himself as unifying after denying the 2020 election results, Bolduc said he was "not dwelling in the past."

"I don't know how often or how many times I have to say that I am not focused on 2020. I am focused on 2022 and beyond. I am focused on the future," he said. His critics are "trying to drag us back. They're trying to use divisiveness. I'm not. I'm trying to use unity. I am moving forward."

In terms of supporting veterans and service members if elected, Bolduc said his priority would be to "fix the VA." Specifically, he proposed taking primary care out of the VA's purview and giving that responsibility to private doctors. He said he's been passed around to five primary care VA doctors in the five years since he retired.

"Every time you have a different primary care provider, it's a two-hour to two-and-a-half-hour process for them to interview," he said. "They don't even get to know you. They don't get to know you as the patient to be able to provide health care for you."

Hassan, who is campaigning on what she describes as a record of bipartisanship, as well as on Democratic stances such as abortion rights, sits on the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. Cook Political Report gives her the edge in the race, rating it as "lean Democrat."

Jen Kiggans, Virginia-02

It's Navy veteran vs. Navy veteran in this race for a toss-up district along Virginia's Eastern Shore that is seen as critical in the battle to control the House.

Republican Jen Kiggans is seeking to unseat Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer who served in the Navy for 20 years.

In her four years in office, Luria has earned a reputation for conducting fierce oversight of her former service, criticizing Navy shipbuilding plans as insufficient, and crossing party lines to support sizable increases in the defense budget. But she also risked backlash from Republicans in her district by serving on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

Kiggans, who serves in the Virginia state senate, was a Navy pilot for 10 years, flying H-46 and H-3 helicopters, and deployed twice to the Persian Gulf. After leaving the Navy, she used GI Bill benefits to attend nursing school, becoming an adult geriatric primary care nurse practitioner.

Kiggans has cited her military experience in trying to fend off attacks that she has extreme positions on issues such as abortion and the 2020 election, telling a voter in September that she's "a mom, a Navy veteran and a normal person," according to The Washington Post. Her campaign did not respond to an interview request. Kiggans has called a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy "common sense" but has not said whether she would vote for it. She has also repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether Biden was legitimately elected, but has not explicitly endorsed stolen election lies.

On her campaign website, Kiggans also points to her military experience in pledging that she will work toward "securing critical funding for military bases and installations, never voting for defense cuts, and always advocating for military families." The site also says she supports more job and career training for veterans and "long-overdue reforms to our broken VA so our veterans and their families can get the care they need, when they need it."

Jennifer-Ruth Green, Indiana-01

Black Republican Air Force veteran Jennifer-Ruth Green leans into her military experience prominently in her campaign materials, declaring on her website's homepage that she will bring "battle-proven leadership" to Congress and calling her campaign platform her "battle plan."

Green, who is hoping to flip the Indiana district for the first time since 1930, is looking to unseat freshman Democratic Rep. Frank Mrvan, who serves on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee as the chair of its technology modernization subcommittee.

Her background -- she is one of only two Republican female veterans of color running this cycle -- has helped propel the race to become one of the most competitive in the country, with Cook Political Report rating it as a toss-up with a slight edge toward Democrats.

Green graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2005, starting her career in aviation before becoming a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Her military career included a deployment to Iraq as a mission commander for counterintelligence activities. She has retired from active duty, but continues to serve in the Indiana Air National Guard.

She supports the "America first" foreign policy espoused by Trump and incorrectly states that the Biden administration's National Security Strategy labels domestic terrorism as the country's primary threat instead of China. She's also leaned into the GOP culture wars, saying on "Fox and Friends" in May that she "wholeheartedly" disagrees with critical race theory, which she described as a theory that all systems are inherently racist.

"If it were, I would not have the opportunity of becoming a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and the Indiana Air National Guard," she told the program.

Her military experience was the focus of a recent controversy in the campaign when news outlet Politico reported she received a poor performance review in 2010 that said she did not meet leadership, professionalism and judgment standards.

The review cited two incidents, one where she loaded her weapon inside a military facility and another where she walked away from the rest of her group while visiting a facility in Iraq, according to Politico. During the Iraq incident, she alleges she was sexually assaulted by an Iraqi serviceman grabbing her breast and exposing himself.

The evaluation stalled her career, and she was removed from active duty in 2012 as part of a larger force reduction, according to Politico. Green's campaign did not respond to a request for an interview.

Green has maintained the evaluation was retaliation for her reporting the assault after a superior told her not to, and accused Mrvan or his supporters of "illegally" obtaining and leaking her military records to smear her. Politico said in the article the records were obtained through a public records request and given to it by someone outside Mrvan's campaign.

J.R. Majewski, Ohio-09

Republican Air Force veteran J.R. Majewski was considered to be in a toss-up race against longtime incumbent Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur until an Associated Press investigation undercovered that he inflated his military record. The race is now rated "lean Democrat" by Cook Political Report.

Majewski had talked on the campaign trail about "tough" conditions while deployed to Afghanistan and also tweeted that he'd "gladly suit up and go back to Afghanistan" while criticizing the Biden administration's withdrawal. But military records obtained by AP show the closest he got to the war zone was a six-month deployment to Qatar to help load cargo planes.

Most of Majewski's time in the Air Force, which lasted from 1999 to 2003, was spent based in Japan, according to the records obtained by AP.

The news agency also reported that he misrepresented the circumstances that led to his demotion and prevented him from reenlisting. While he had said he got into a "brawl" at an Air Force dormitory in 2001, records published by AP show he was cited for drunk driving.

Majewski, who did not respond to an interview request, has offered shifting defenses for himself, including at one point claiming his deployment to Afghanistan was not in his records because it was "classified." He has since said he misunderstood the paperwork he cited to claim his deployment was classified. In a lengthy statement on his website earlier this month, he argued that he never intentionally misrepresented his service and accused political opponents of trying to "stoke confusion or diminish my service."

On his website, Majewski, who was outside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot but maintains he never entered the building and has not been charged in connection with the attack, vowed to "support our troops at all times, without question."

Joe Kent, Washington-03

Republican Army Green Beret veteran Joe Kent first entered the public eye after his wife Shannon, a Navy cryptologic technician, was killed in an ISIS suicide bombing in Syria in 2019.

He has since carved out a political path on the far right, winning his primary election by defeating an incumbent Republican congresswoman who voted in favor of Trump's impeachment over the Jan. 6 attack. Trump has endorsed Kent.

His Democratic opponent in the general election race, which Cook Political Report rates as "lean Republican," is Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who is running a pro-abortion rights campaign and is seeking to appeal to working-class voters.

Kent joined the Army at 18 and applied to join the Special Forces shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His Army career included 11 combat deployments. He joined the CIA after retiring from the Special Forces and left after his wife's death.

Kent has blamed his wife's death on "unelected bureaucrats" who opposed Trump's attempts to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, a goal the former president never accomplished in the face of fierce pushback from military officials and members of Congress in both parties.

Now, Kent, who did not respond to an interview request, is running on an "America first" platform and espousing many of the same falsehoods as Trump, including that the 2020 election was "rigged and stolen" and that those arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack are "political prisoners."

Kent, whose campaign website pledges to "end our endless wars," has vowed to impeach Biden in part over last year’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was marred by chaotic scenes of desperate Afghans scrambling to get onto U.S. military evacuation flights and the death of 13 service members in an Islamic State suicide bombing. He also said that after years of focus on counterterrorism, the military must make "a decisive pivot to fighting a modern nation," particularly China, "in every warfare domain, especially cyber and information warfare."

Here’s a list of all the veterans running for Congress on the November ballot:

DistrictFirst NameLast NamePartyMilitary ServiceStatusCombat DeploymentAKChrisByeLibertarian*ArmyActiveOIF, OEFAL-2BarryMooreRepublican (i)ArmyGuardNoneAL-4RickNeighborsDemocraticArmyActiveVietnamAR-1MonteHodgesDemocraticArmyReserve, GuardNoneAR-1RickCrawfordRepublican (i)ArmyActiveNoneAR-3SteveWomackRepublican (i)ArmyGuardNoneAR-4JohnWhiteDemocraticAir ForceUnknownUnknownAZ-2EliCraneRepublicanNavyActiveOEFAZ-3RubenGallegoDemocratic (i)Marine CorpsActiveOIFAZ-4KellyCooperRepublicanMarine CorpsActiveNoneCA-1MaxSteinerDemocraticArmyActiveOIFCA-3KermitJonesDemocraticNavyActiveOIFCA-4MikeThompsonDemocratic (i)ArmyActiveVietnamCA-5MikeBarkleyDemocraticNavyActiveNoneCA-6TamikaHamiltonRepublicanAir ForceActive, ReserveOEFCA-8RudyRecileRepublicanArmyActiveNoneCA-10MichaelKerrGreenArmyActiveNoneCA-19JimmyPanettaDemocratic (i)NavyReserveOEFCA-21MichaelMaherRepublicanNavyActiveNoneCA-24SaludCarbajalDemocratic (i)Marine CorpsReserveNoneCA-27MikeGarciaRepublican (i)NavyActive, ReserveOIFCA-28WesHallmanRepublicanAir ForceActiveSouthern WatchCA-35MikeCargileRepublicanArmyIRRNoneCA-36TedLieuDemocratic (i)Air ForceActive, ReserveNoneCA-36JoeCollinsRepublicanNavyActiveOIFCA-39AjaSmithRepublicanAir ForceReserveOEFCA-44PaulJonesRepublicanMarine CorpsUnknownUnknownCA-45JayChenDemocraticNavyReserveOIRCA-46ChrisGonzalezRepublicanArmyActiveNoneCA-48DarrellIssaRepublican (i)ArmyActiveNoneCO-4IkeMcCorkleDemocraticMarine CorpsActiveOIFCO-5DavidTorresDemocraticAir ForceReserveNoneCO-6JasonCrowDemocratic (i)ArmyActiveOIF, OEFCO-6StevenMonahanRepublicanNavyActiveNoneCO-7ErikAadlandRepublicanArmyActiveOIF, OEFCT-2MikeFranceRepublicanNavyActiveGulf WarFL-2NealDunnRepublican (i)ArmyActiveNoneFL-6MikeWaltzRepublican (i)ArmyActiveOEFFL-7CoryMillsRepublicanArmyActiveBosniaFL-10CalvinWimbishRepublicanArmyActiveOIF, OEFFL-12KimWalkerDemocraticArmyActive, GuardNoneFL-13Anna PaulinaLunaRepublicanAir ForceActiveNoneFL-14JamesJudgeRepublicanCoast GuardActiveOIFFL-16VernBuchananRepublican (i)Air ForceGuardNoneFL-17GregSteubeRepublican (i)ArmyActiveOIFFL-18ScottFranklinRepublican (i)NavyActive, ReserveBosniaFL-21CorinnaBalderramos RobinsonDemocraticArmyActiveOIFFL-21BrianMastRepublican (i)ArmyActiveOEFFL-25CarlaSpaldingRepublicanNavyActiveNoneFL-28RobertAsencioDemocraticArmyReserveNoneGA-2SanfordBishop Jr.Democratic (i)ArmyActiveNoneGA-2ChrisWestRepublicanAir ForceGuardNoneGA-3ValAlmonordDemocraticArmyReserveNoneGA-4JonathanChavezRepublicanAir ForceActiveOIFGA-6BobChristianDemocraticArmyActiveOIFGA-6RichMcCormickRepublicanNavyActiveOEFGA-9MikeFordDemocraticArmyActiveVietnamGA-9AndrewClydeRepublican (i)NavyActive, ReserveOIFGA-11BarryLoudermilkRepublican (i)Air ForceActiveNoneGA-14MarcusFlowersDemocraticArmyActiveNoneHI-1ConradKressRepublicanNavyActiveNoneHI-2JoeAkanaRepublicanAir ForceActiveNoneIA-1MariannetteMiller-MeeksRepublican (i)ArmyActive, ReserveNoneIA-3ZachNunnRepublicanAir ForceActive, GuardOEFIL-1EricCarlsonRepublicanArmyActiveNoneIL-2ThomasLynchRepublicanArmyActiveOIFIL-6KeithPekauRepublicanAir ForceActiveGulf WarIL-8ChrisDargisRepublicanNavyActive, ReserveNoneIL-12Homer "Chip"MarkelDemocraticNavyActiveNoneIL-12MikeBostRepublican (i)Marine CorpsActiveNoneIL-17Esther JoyKingRepublicanArmyReserveNoneIN-1Jennifer-RuthGreenRepublicanAir ForceActive, GuardOIFIN-3GarySnyderDemocraticArmyActive, GuardNoneIN-3JimBanksRepublican (i)NavyReserveOIFIN-4JimBairdRepublican (i)ArmyActiveVietnamIN-6GregPenceRepublican (i)Marine CorpsActiveNoneIN-8LarryBucshonRepublican (i)NavyReserveNoneKS-2PatrickSchmidtDemocraticNavyActive, ReserveNoneKS-4BobHernandezDemocraticArmyActive, GuardOIFKY-2BrettGuthrieRepublican (i)ArmyActiveNoneKY-5HalRogersRepublican (i)ArmyGuardNoneMA-4JakeAuchinclossDemocratic (i)Marine CorpsActiveOIF, OEFMA-6SethMoultonDemocratic (i)Marine CorpsActiveOIFMA-7DonniePalmerRepublicanArmyActiveNoneMA-9JesseBrownRepublicanMarine CorpsActiveNoneMD-1AndyHarrisRepublican (i)NavyReserveGulf WarME-1EdThelanderRepublicanNavyActiveBosnia, OEFME-2JaredGoldenDemocratic (i)Marine CorpsActiveOIF, OEFMI-1JackBergmanRepublican (i)Marine CorpsActiveVietnamMI-4JosephAlfonsoDemocraticMarine CorpsActiveNoneMI-7TomBarrettRepublicanArmyActiveOIFMI-10JohnJamesRepublicanArmyActiveOIFMI-11MarkAmbroseRepublicanArmyActive, ReserveNoneMI-12StevenElliotRepublicanMarine CorpsActiveNoneMN-2TylerKistnerRepublicanMarine CorpsActive, ReserveNoneMN-3TomWeilerRepublicanNavyActiveNoneMO-4JackTrumanDemocraticArmyActiveNoneMO-5JacobTurkRepublicanMarine CorpsActiveNoneMO-6HenryMartinDemocraticArmyGuardGulf WarMS-1TrentKellyRepublican (i)ArmyGuardGulf War, OIFMS-2BrianFlowersRepublicanNavyActiveNoneMS-3ShuwaskiYoungDemocraticArmyGuardNoneMT-1RyanZinkeRepublicanNavyActiveOIFNC-1DonDavisDemocraticAir ForceActiveNoneNC-6ChristianCastelliRepublicanArmyActiveSomalia, OEFNC-8ScottHuffmanDemocraticNavyActiveNoneNC-9BenClarkDemocraticAir ForceActiveNoneNC-10PamGenantDemocraticArmyActiveNoneNC-14PatrickHarriganRepublicanArmyActiveOEFNC-14JeffJacksonDemocraticArmyGuardOEFNE-2DonBaconRepublican (i)Air ForceActiveOIFNJ-9BillPascrellDemocratic (i)ArmyActiveNoneNJ-9BillyPrempehRepublicanAir ForceActiveNoneNJ-11MikieSherrillDemocratic (i)NavyActiveNoneNV-1MarkRobertsonRepublicanArmyActiveOIF, OEFNV-2MarkAmodeiRepublican (i)ArmyActiveNoneNV-4SamPetersRepublicanAir ForceActiveOIF, OEFNY-1NickLaLotaRepublicanNavyActiveNoneNY-2JackieGordonDemocraticArmyReserveOIF, OEFNY-6TomZmichRepublicanArmyReserveGulf WarNY-11MaxRoseDemocraticArmyActive, GuardOEFNY-12MikeZumbluskasRepublicanArmyActiveNoneNY-18ColinSchmittRepublicanArmyGuardNoneNY-18PatRyanDemocraticArmyActiveOIFNY-22FrancisConoleDemocraticNavyActiveOIFNY-22BrandonWilliamsRepublicanNavyActiveNoneNY-23MaxDella PiaDemocraticAir ForceActiveNoneNY-24SteveHoldenDemocraticArmyActive, GuardOIF, OEFNY-26SteveSamsRepublicanArmyActiveOIF, OEFOH-2BradWenstrupRepublican (i)ArmyReserveOIFOH-6BillJohnsonRepublican (i)Air ForceActiveNoneOH-7MaxMillerRepublicanMarine CorpsReserveNoneOH-8WarrenDavidsonRepublican (i)ArmyActiveNoneOH-9J.R.MajewskiRepublicanAir ForceActiveDisputedOH-10DavidEsratiDemocraticArmyActiveNoneOH-11EricBrewerRepublicanAir ForceActiveVietnamOH-14MattKilboyDemocraticNavyActiveNoneOH-15MikeCareyRepublican (i)ArmyGuardNoneOK-3JeremiahRossDemocraticArmyGuardNoneOR-1ChrisMannRepublicanArmyActive, GuardOIFOR-2JoeYetterDemocraticArmyActiveNoneOR-4AlekSkarlatosRepublicanAir ForceGuardOEFPA-1AshleyEhaszDemocraticArmyActiveOIRPA-5DaveGalluchRepublicanNavyActiveNonePA-6ChrissyHoulahanDemocratic (i)Air ForceActiveNonePA-10ScottPerryRepublican (i)ArmyGuardOIFPA-14GuyReschenthalerRepublican (i)NavyActiveOIFPA-17ChrisDeluzioDemocraticNavyActiveOIFSC-2JoeWilsonRepublican (i)ArmyActiveNoneSC-4WilliamTimmonsRepublican (i)ArmyGuardNoneSC-7DarylScottDemocraticArmyActive, GuardOIFTN-7MarkGreenRepublican (i)ArmyActiveOIF, OEFTX-2DanCrenshawRepublican (i)NavyActiveOIF, OEFTX-3KeithSelfRepublicanArmyActiveNoneTX-4PatFallonRepublican (i)Air ForceActiveNoneTX-6JakeEllzeyRepublican (i)NavyActiveOIF, OEFTX-8MorganLuttrellRepublicanNavyActiveOIF, OEFTX-9JimmyLeonRepublicanArmyActiveNoneTX-11AugustPflugerRepublican (i)Air ForceActiveOIRTX-13RonnyJacksonRepublican (i)NavyActiveOIFTX-20KyleSinclairRepublicanArmyGuardNoneTX-22TroyNehlsRepublican (i)ArmyReserveOIF, OEFTX-23JohnLiraDemocraticMarine CorpsActive, GuardOIFTX-23TonyGonzalesRepublican (i)NavyActiveOIF, OEFTX-35DanMcQueenRepublicanNavyActiveNoneTX-36BrianBabinRepublican (i)Air ForceActive, GuardNoneTX-36WesleyHuntRepublicanArmyActiveOIFUT-2ChrisStewartRepublican (i)Air ForceActiveNoneUT-3GlennWrightDemocraticAir ForceActiveVietnamVA-1HerbJonesDemocraticArmyActive, GuardOIFVA-2ElaineLuriaDemocratic (i)NavyActiveNoneVA-2JenKiggansRepublicanNavyActiveNoneVA-3BobbyScottDemocratic (i)ArmyGuard, ReserveNoneVA-3TerryNamkungRepublicanAir ForceActiveNoneVA-4LeonBenjaminRepublicanNavyActiveNoneVA-10HungCaoRepublicanNavyActiveOIF, OEFVA-11JimMylesRepublicanAir ForceActiveNoneVTLiamMaddenRepublicanMarine CorpsActiveOIFWA-1VincentCavaleriRepublicanArmyReserveNoneWA-2DanMatthewsRepublicanAir ForceReserveVietnam, Gulf WarWA-3JoeKentRepublicanArmyActiveOIFWA-10KeithSwankRepublicanArmyActiveNoneWI-3DerrickVan OrdenRepublicanNavyActiveBosnia, OIF, OEFWI-5ScottFitzgeraldRepublican (i)ArmyReserveNoneWI-8MikeGallagherRepublican (i)Marine CorpsActiveOIFAZ-SenateMarkKellyDemocratic (i)NavyActiveNoneCT-SenateRichardBlumenthalDemocratic (i)Marine CorpsReserveNoneIL-SenateTammyDuckworthDemocratic (i)ArmyGuardOIFIN-SenateThomasMcDermott Jr.DemocraticNavyActiveNoneIN-SenateToddYoungRepublican (i)Marine CorpsActiveNoneNH-SenateDonBolducRepublicanArmyActiveOEFNV-SenateAdamLaxaltRepublicanNavyActiveOIFSD-SenateBrianBengsDemocraticAir ForceActiveNoneVT-SenateGeraldMalloyRepublicanArmyActiveGulf WarHI-SenateBobMcDermottRepublicanMarine CorpsActiveGulf WarIA-SenateMichaelFrankenDemocraticNavyActiveNoneOH-SenateJ.D.VanceRepublicanMarine CorpsActiveOIF

Credit: Compiled with information from the Veterans Campaign and With Honor

(i) Indicates a candidate is an incumbent.

* Chris Bye is included because of Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system. All other third-party candidates have been excluded.

** The list excludes candidates from Louisiana, which will hold its primary elections on Nov. 8, and if no candidates receive more than 50% of the vote, general elections Dec. 10.

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

Related: Republicans Vow to Put 'Woke' Military in Crosshairs if They Win in November

Related Topics: Military Headlines Elections Congress Veterans

© Copyright 2022 Military.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

21. One War at a Time

​But the cliche "the enemy has a vote" may apply here.

A rebuttal to Tom Mahnken's recent Foreign Affairs essay.

Conclusion:

Mahnken calls for a World War II-style mobilization effort to enable us to fight major wars in Europe and Asia simultaneously. But perhaps instead of fighting two wars simultaneously as we did in the Second World War, we should follow President Abraham Lincoln’s example during the American Civil War during the so-called Trent Crisis when some American policymakers were urging Lincoln to wage war against Great Britain while simultaneously fighting the Confederacy. Lincoln’s brief but profound response to such advice was: “One war at a time.”

One War at a Time - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · October 31, 2022

One War at a Time

There’s no need for America to fight major wars on two fronts.

October 30, 2022, 10:26 PM

People’s Liberation Army c. 2000 (U.S. government/Wikimedia Commons)

There are very serious people, like Thomas Mahnken of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who are suggesting that the United States may soon be engaged in a world war in Europe over Ukraine and the Far East over Taiwan. Mahnken in an article in Foreign Affairs suggests that American policymakers should start studying the Allied victory in the Second World War, especially the mobilization of industry, science, and technology, as well as the “sequencing” strategy that prioritized the war in Europe over the war in the Pacific.

Sometimes in international relations it is worth taking a decades-long perspective on the changing global balance of power. And if the war in Ukraine and the rising tensions in the western Pacific are viewed in that context, the balance of power in Europe still favors the West, but it is shifting against the West in the Asia-Pacific. Yet, the Biden administration is pouring money and resources into the Ukraine War while promoting détente in the Asia-Pacific. That approach — that “sequencing” — has it exactly backwards.

Russian dominance of the eastern provinces of Ukraine — even all of Ukraine — would not measurably shift the balance of power against the West, especially when compared to the situation in the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s. Back then Soviet Russia controlled all of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and East Germany. It also exercised predominant influence over Finland’s foreign policy. Today, all of those states, except Ukraine, are part of NATO, or in the case of Finland and Sweden, soon will be. All along its western border, Russia is confronted by the U.S.-led NATO alliance.

The West’s manpower and economic might dwarfs Russia’s. The notion that Putin’s armed forces — which are having difficulty holding on the Ukraine’s eastern provinces — threaten to overrun Central and Western Europe is a fantasy. To be sure, the United States has imprudently allowed Russia to take a slight lead over us in deployed nuclear warheads, and we need to strengthen and modernize our nuclear triad. But overall, compared to the late 1970s and the 1980s, what the Soviets used to call the “correlation of forces” still strongly favors the West in Europe.

The situation in the western Pacific and the Far East, however, is different. There, since 1980s, the balance of power has shifted dramatically toward China. In the 1980s, China was a de facto ally of the United States in the Cold War. It was at that time a very economically backward country whose military had huge manpower resources but lagged far behind the West in power projection and technology. Today, China is the world’s second largest economy and its military has made great strides in sophistication and modernization. It has a powerful regional navy and a growing nuclear force. Its only two allies in the region are North Korea and Pakistan, but its economic and political influence has spread to Central Asia and Africa via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The West, meanwhile, has allies in Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and has improved relations with India. But overall, the balance of power in the region has shifted in China’s direction.

Under these circumstances, America’s “sequencing” strategy should prioritize the Asia-western Pacific region over Europe — in World War II terms, we should have an “Asia-western Pacific First” strategy because China poses a much greater threat than Russia to our global interests and because the current balance of power in Europe is far more favorable to the United States than is the balance of power in the Asia-western Pacific region.

Mahnken calls for a World War II-style mobilization effort to enable us to fight major wars in Europe and Asia simultaneously. But perhaps instead of fighting two wars simultaneously as we did in the Second World War, we should follow President Abraham Lincoln’s example during the American Civil War during the so-called Trent Crisis when some American policymakers were urging Lincoln to wage war against Great Britain while simultaneously fighting the Confederacy. Lincoln’s brief but profound response to such advice was: “One war at a time.”

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · October 31, 2022

22. The Ukraine War Will End With Negotiations

Conclusion:

All wars end. By raising now the crucial questions that will need to be addressed in the case of Russia’s war in Ukraine, policymakers can guard against unwanted escalation and ensure a more robust and stable settlement when the time finally comes. Though a settlement may seem unpalatable now, only by astute and careful negotiation are Ukraine’s core interests—and the security of the region—likely to be protected for the long term.

The Ukraine War Will End With Negotiations

Now Is Not the Time for Talks, but America Must Lay the Groundwork

By Emma Ashford

October 31, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Emma Ashford · October 31, 2022

By late August 2022, the West’s focus on Russia’s war in Ukraine was diminishing. The two sides were bogged down in an extended stalemate, freeing Western leaders from making difficult choices or thinking too hard about the future of the conflict. Events since early September—dramatic Ukrainian gains, followed by Russian mobilization, annexations, missile attacks on civilian areas, and nuclear threats—have shattered that illusion, pushing the war into a new and more dangerous phase.

Since the start of the war, the Biden administration has effectively maintained a balanced realpolitik approach: arming and funding Ukraine yet continuing to make clear that the United States will not engage directly in the conflict. But the administration has avoided talking about one crucial area of war strategy altogether: how it might end. Experts and policymakers who have suggested that the United States should also support diplomatic efforts aimed at a negotiated settlement have been treated as naïve or borderline treasonous. Driving the administration’s skittishness about endgames, then, are questions of morality: many argue that it is immoral to push Ukraine toward a settlement.

But nearly all wars end in negotiations. Moscow’s escalation this fall raises the twin specters of a broader war with NATO and of the use of nuclear weapons. The global economic costs of the conflict are already enormous and will almost certainly increase with the onset of winter. Even if a negotiated end to the war seems impossible today, the Biden administration should begin to raise—both publicly and to its partners—the difficult questions that such an approach would entail. It must think through the right timing to push for negotiations and at what point the costs of continuing to fight will outweigh the benefits. In seeking a sustainable settlement, the administration must also figure out how to capitalize on Ukraine’s successes without setting the stage for further conflict. To prepare for the best deal, American policymakers must maintain a common front between the West and Ukraine, take account of Ukrainian and Russian domestic politics, and embrace flexibility, particularly in working out which sanctions against Russia can be lifted without strengthening Putin’s regime. If the administration does not prepare soon, it may find its carefully calibrated response to the war being overtaken by a dangerous fantasy of absolute victory.

NOT IF BUT HOW

In the eight months since the Russian invasion, the Biden administration’s support has allowed Ukraine to retake territory and inflict heavy damage on Russian forces while keeping the risk of large-scale escalation relatively low. The administration has also carefully avoided talking about what comes next, claiming that it is up to Ukrainians to decide what is in their best interest. But maintaining that position is becoming more difficult now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has doubled down on the war and made blatant nuclear threats against the West. Putin has chosen to take significant new risks rather than to back down, suggesting that this war will not end through simple Russian capitulation. Though these risks seem manageable for now, the time may come when negotiations are necessary to forestall catastrophe.

At the same time, the economic fallout of the war is rapidly growing. In Ukraine, public finances have been ravaged; the country is running out of cash. As the economic historian Adam Tooze put it in September, “Unless Ukraine’s allies step up their financial assistance, there is every reason to fear both a social and a political crisis on the home front.” Europe, meanwhile, is trapped in its own tightening noose, as surging energy prices exacerbate inflation and raise the prospect of a deep recession. All this makes the administration’s position—that Kyiv alone will decide when the war ends—increasingly untenable.

In reality, the question is not whether negotiations are needed to end the war but when and how they should unfold. Yet policymakers must contend with a catch-22: the better Ukrainian forces perform on the battlefield, the more difficult it is to discuss a negotiated settlement, even though it is to Ukraine’s advantage to negotiate from a position of strength. As the risk of Russian escalation grows, so does the prospect that any Western leader who talks about ending the war will be portrayed as unrealistic, immoral, or caving to “nuclear blackmail.” But internal discussions on acceptable settlement terms now would better position all parties when the opportunity for such a deal does arise.

DURABLE, NOT MAXIMAL

To lay the groundwork for a settlement, American policymakers must act to ensure that Ukrainian, American, and European interests do not diverge. Ukrainian interests are not necessarily identical to those of its Western partners. For Kyiv, the stakes are higher, and—with the Ukrainian economy already in shambles—it may determine that it has little to lose in risking escalation or continuing the war. But Ukraine’s efforts are made possible by Western arms, funding, and intelligence. European states are bearing substantial economic costs from the war. And any risk of escalation or nuclear exchange poses a direct threat to the West itself. Ukraine’s Western backers have a strong stake in the war; they should have a say in how it ends.

This does not mean that the West should push Ukraine to concede, as some have argued. But it does suggest that the United States and its partners should provide future aid with an eye to putting Ukraine in the best negotiating position, not simply continuing the war. For example, Ukraine and its allies must focus on core interests, such as preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty and protecting its population. These goals should be narrow by design: rather than trying to retake all of its pre-2014 territory or to punish Russian leaders, Ukraine should pursue objectives that are less likely to produce dramatic escalation and more likely to result in a durable peace. Washington should encourage pursuing those objectives, and should also make clear to Kyiv, at least in private, where the limits of American support lie and what the White House perceives as unacceptable escalation risks. Setting clear expectations now reduces the risk of misperception in Kyiv.

American policymakers must also consider Ukrainian and Russian domestic politics, since internal support in both countries will be vital to making any settlement last. History suggests that a power transition in Moscow is possible but by no means likely or inevitable. Thus, policymakers need to focus on Putin and the small group of elites around him and consider what settlement they might be willing to accept. Given Putin’s mobilization of several hundred thousand additional frontline troops, it seems increasingly clear that he will seek to avoid a complete, devastating loss at any cost. But like many other authoritarians before him, he can sell a poor result as a win. This means that it may be possible to find some face-saving deal in which de facto realities, such as Russian legal control of Crimea, could be recognized, and which the Kremlin could portray to the Russian public as genuine concessions by the West.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky faces a more open, contentious political environment, as the divisions of Ukrainian politics begin to reemerge. Nonetheless, he faces a similar dilemma. Ukraine’s population has become more unified since February, rallying around a national struggle against invasion. After asking so much of Ukrainians, the Ukrainian government will find it difficult to compromise in any way that seems to reward the enemy. If Zelensky accepts an unpopular settlement, it could lead to his defeat at the ballot box. In these circumstances, a deal in which Ukrainians feel that they have largely triumphed is more likely to succeed. This makes it all the more important to manage expectations now. Washington should encourage Kyiv to take a more moderate stance on issues, such as Crimea, that are likely to figure in a future settlement; to tone down triumphalist talk; and to emphasize the economic rewards that Ukraine stands to receive through international reconstruction aid and European economic integration under a settlement.

Ukraine’s Western backers should have a say in how the war ends.

Policymakers should set clear basic parameters for a settlement but have significant flexibility in many details. A few points are nonnegotiable. Paramount among them are Ukraine’s sovereignty and the protection of Ukrainian citizens, particularly those who wish to leave Russian occupied territory. But there are other issues on which flexibility is possible. Final territorial borders, for example, may be determined partly by military gains on the ground. Policymakers should not be irrevocably devoted to the pre-February 24, or even pre-2014, status quo. A more territorially compact Ukraine, shorn of Crimea and some of the Donbas—both of which retain some pro-Russian populations—might be more stable and defensible.

And in general, policymakers should seek to prioritize practical outcomes over abstract principles. An independent sovereign Ukraine that can defend itself and integrate economically with Europe, for example, would be far preferable to a Ukraine with permanent territorial disputes within its borders. The situation in Ukraine remains dynamic; U.S. policymakers should avoid tying their own hands now with declarations that may be hard to achieve in practice.

Meanwhile, sanctions relief is likely to be one of the most important but politically fraught parts of any negotiation for Western policymakers. Sanctions tend to turn into permanent features of international politics, even though their economic and political impact weakens over time. They are therefore often more useful as bargaining chips than as permanent punishment. Policymakers should think carefully now about how to use sanctions relief to obtain Russian concessions. Throughout the war, Western sanctions have served two goals: short-term punishment for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and long-term weakening of Russia’s military machine.

Some sanctions relief for Russia will likely be a prerequisite for a successful peace deal, but policymakers should think carefully about which sanctions are worth lifting. Allowing Russia to repatriate some of its foreign exchange reserves, for example, might be helpful as part of a deal because it is attractive to the Kremlin for short-term economic stabilization, and because keeping these reserves frozen does little to weaken Russia’s economy over the long term. In contrast, export controls imposed on Russia should serve to limit the country’s defense industrial base in the longer term; they should be maintained, if possible. Policymakers should also embrace thorough plans for phasing, in which Russia concretely concedes or withdraws in exchange for gradual sanctions relief—something that was notably absent from the failed Minsk agreements.

KNOW WHEN TO HOLD ’EM

There are three circumstances in which it may make sense for the United States to push for a settlement. The first is if Ukrainian forces continue to achieve significant success and leadership in Kyiv begins to talk about liberating Crimea. Given the importance of Crimea to Russian leaders, such a goal substantially raises the risk that Putin will resort to the use of nuclear weapons, damaging norms against nuclear use and directly endangering the United States or—more likely—its NATO allies. The second is if Russian forces regain the initiative and retake significant territory, particularly if they begin to advance out of the Donbas. This would suggest that Russian mobilization has worked and that a settlement may be necessary to maintain Ukraine’s sovereignty. The third is if the two sides become locked in another stalemate, with neither able to regain the advantage. In such a situation, the United States, Europe, and even Ukraine and Russia may conclude that it is no longer worth bearing the substantial costs of continuing the war.

At first glance, it may seem strange that U.S. policymakers should consider a settlement when Ukraine is winning, when it is losing, and when it is doing neither. And each of the situations outlined above would likely produce wildly different settlements. But what connects all three is that, in each, battlefield outcomes point to a relative consensus around which a settlement could be built. Today, the battlefield is still dynamic; both parties think they are going to triumph. A settlement will become possible only when the outcome on the battlefield becomes more apparent. Until then, robust Western support can help ensure that the first of these scenarios is the most likely.

Recent airstrikes against Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities suggest that Russia may be contemplating greater escalation. There are substantial risks and costs to a widening conflict; even if it is not yet the time to negotiate, policymakers need to explore now the circumstances under which the United States would push for an end to the war. They should think through how to effectively leverage sanctions and battlefield gains to put Ukraine in the best position at the negotiating table. And perhaps most important, policymakers in Washington should communicate the results of these discussions to Kyiv and to European capitals in order to avoid potentially dangerous divergences in national interest among Ukraine and its Western partners.

All wars end. By raising now the crucial questions that will need to be addressed in the case of Russia’s war in Ukraine, policymakers can guard against unwanted escalation and ensure a more robust and stable settlement when the time finally comes. Though a settlement may seem unpalatable now, only by astute and careful negotiation are Ukraine’s core interests—and the security of the region—likely to be protected for the long term.

• EMMA ASHFORD is a Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. She is the author of Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates.

Foreign Affairs · by Emma Ashford · October 31, 2022

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