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Quotes of the Day:
"Humble because of knowledge; mighty by sacrifice."
- Rudyard Kipling
“War is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds.”
- John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value."
- Thomas Paine
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 11, 2023
2. Zelenskyy says Ukraine ‘counteroffensive, defensive actions’ underway
3. Ukraine says it recaptured fourth village in modest counteroffensive gains
4. Spend More on Defense? Let’s Focus on Spending Better
5. Draft House NDAA would create Space National Guard
6. Chinese military says it’s here for “benevolence”
7. Congress’ critical annual defense policy work kicks off this week
8. Low Earth orbit: disruptive military technologies
9. Mercenary group's feud with Russian military heats up as Ukraine offensive begins: Updates
10. Opinion 5 questions about Ukraine’s counteroffensive, answered
11. Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction
12. Stigmatization, not loneliness, is the true national security threat
13. Partisans blow up railway bridge near occupied Melitopol - Ukrainian Army officer
14. Readiness Redefined: Now What?
15. How Wars Don’t End
16. American Sea Power in the Asia-Pacific
17. Military service a major factor in extremist attacks, study finds
18. How hero sister, 13, kept brothers, including BABY, alive for 40 days in Amazon jungle
19. Reality wars: Deepfakes and national security
20. Kherson Flood Waters Begin to Recede, As Evidence of Russian Sabotage Mounts
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 11, 2023
Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-11-2023
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least three areas of the front and made territorial gains on June 10 and 11.
- Ukrainian forces made visually verified advances in western Donetsk Oblast and western Zaporizhia Oblast, which Russian sources confirmed but sought to downplay.
- Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Russian forces are transferring their most combat-capable units from the Kherson direction to the Bakhmut and Zaporizhia directions.
- Russian forces conducted a limited series of drone strikes targeting eastern Ukrainian border areas overnight on June 10 to 11.
- Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin characterized the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) plan to formalize volunteer formations by July 1 as an attack on him and his forces.
- Russia and Ukraine conducted a near one-for-one prisoner of war (POW) exchange.
- Russian forces continued limited ground attacks south of Kreminna.
- Ukrainian and Russian forces continued limited ground attacks around Bakhmut and on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
- Ukrainian forces made gains near the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts and in western Zaporizhia Oblast as of June 10.
- Russian milbloggers claimed that rain along the Zaporizhia Oblast front may slow Ukrainian operations in the coming days.
- The Republic of Chechnya reportedly formed two new regiments – Akhmat-Russia and Akhmat-Chechnya – equipped with commercially-available Chinese armored equipment.
- Saboteurs, reportedly including Ukrainian partisans, conducted two discrete improvised explosive device (IED) attacks against railways in occupied Kherson Oblast and Crimea.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 11, 2023
Jun 11, 2023 - Press ISW
Download the PDF
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 11, 2023
Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, and Mason Clark
June 11, 2023, 6:40pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.
Note: The data cutoff for this product was 1:30pm ET on June 11. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the June 12 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.
Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least three areas of the front and made territorial gains on June 10 and 11. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces are conducting offensive operations in the Bakhmut area, and Russian sources reported continued Ukrainian ground attacks on Bakhmut’s northern and southern flanks.[1] Geolocated footage and Russian sources indicated that Ukrainian forces liberated multiple settlements during continued ground attacks south, southwest, and southeast of Velyka Novosilka in western Donetsk Oblast.[2] Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces continued to attack southwest of Orikhiv in Zaporizhia Oblast, and Ukrainian forces made gains in this area.[3]
Ukrainian forces made visually verified advances in western Donetsk Oblast and western Zaporizhia Oblast, which Russian sources confirmed but sought to downplay. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces advanced 300 to 1,500 meters in southern Ukraine.[4] Malyar and other Ukrainian and Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces made gains south of Velyka Novosilka between June 10 and 11, including liberating Makarivka, Neskuchne, Blahodatne, Storozheve, and Novodarivka.[5] Some Russian sources reported that battles are ongoing in “grey zone” or contested areas or that Ukrainian forces are operating in areas that Russian forces did not fully occupy before Ukrainian attacks in southern Ukraine.[6] Russian sources are likely referring to Ukrainian territorial advances through Russian defenses as capturing ”grey zones” in order to downplay Ukrainian gains and omit reporting on Ukrainian forces breaking through defensive lines. Ukrainian forces liberated several towns, but claims of a Ukrainian “breakthrough” are premature at this time.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Russian forces are transferring their most combat-capable units from the Kherson direction to the Bakhmut and Zaporizhia directions. Malyar stated on June 11 that Russian forces are transferring elements of the 49th Combined Arms Army (Southern Military District) and unspecified naval infantry and airborne forces elements from the Kherson direction in connection with the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam.[7] Malyar noted that Russian forces likely blew the KHPP dam in order to shorten their defensive lines in Kherson Oblast as part of the response to the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Flooding downriver of the KHPP has drained the Kakhovka Reservoir, resulting in landmasses emerging from the water. It is unclear how these terrain changes will affect maneuver warfare in southern Ukraine at this time.[8] If the terrain changes from flooding in the Dnipro River do not foreclose any possible Ukrainian river crossings in coming weeks and months, Russian forces may struggle to defend Kherson Oblast with remaining or then-available units if and when Ukrainian forces choose to conduct offensive operations across the river, assuming they have the ability to do so.
Russian forces conducted a limited series of drone strikes targeting eastern Ukrainian border areas overnight on June 10 to 11. Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces shot down six Russian Shahed drones that targeted border areas in Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts overnight.[9] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat noted that Russian forces are working to produce more high-precision, long-range ballistic missiles and stated that Ukraine’s stock of Western air defense systems is currently insufficient to replace its stock of Soviet air defense systems.[10]
Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin characterized the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) plan to formalize volunteer formations by July 1 as an attack on him and his forces. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced on June 10 that all volunteer formations must sign military contracts with the Russian MoD by July 1.[11] Prigozhin defensively claimed that Wagner private military company’s (PMC) servicemen will not sign contracts with the Russian MoD in his media response to Shoigu’s announcement.[12] Prigozhin proceeded to criticize Shoigu and the structure of the Russian Armed Forces and specified that Wagner is entirely subordinate to the interests of Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin’s mention of Putin as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief closely mirrors the language Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov used in his accusation on June 9 that Prigozhin is being insubordinate to Putin.[13] Prigozhin also noted that Wagner approves its actions with the Russian military command via Wagner-affiliated Army General Sergei Surovikin.
Some members of Russia’s veteran community indicated Shoigu’s statement is not intended to target Wagner. A member of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee (and former commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army) Viktor Sobolev stated that Shoigu’s order excludes Wagner.[14] Sobolev is an avid critic of Wagner and claimed that Wagner personnel are mercenaries, not volunteers.[15] Former Russian officer and ardent ultranationalist Igor Girkin supported the order and stated that cohesive armies win wars rather than separate detachments or private military companies (PMCs).[16] A Wagner-affiliated milblogger contrarily (baselessly) claimed that Wagner is not a PMC and that a secret decree legalized Wagner’s existence in Russia.[17] The milblogger also claimed that Shoigu and the Russian MoD are Girkin’s patrons who are using Girkin to prevent Prigozhin from assuming more authority and reshuffling leadership in the Russian MoD.
Russia and Ukraine conducted a near one-for-one prisoner of war (POW) exchange on June 11. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukraine returned 94 Russian POWs of unspecified ranks to Russia.[18] Ukrainian Presidental Office Head Andriy Yermak reported that Russia returned two Ukrainian officers and 93 privates and sergeants to Ukraine.[19]
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least three areas of the front and made territorial gains on June 10 and 11.
- Ukrainian forces made visually verified advances in western Donetsk Oblast and western Zaporizhia Oblast, which Russian sources confirmed but sought to downplay.
- Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Russian forces are transferring their most combat-capable units from the Kherson direction to the Bakhmut and Zaporizhia directions.
- Russian forces conducted a limited series of drone strikes targeting eastern Ukrainian border areas overnight on June 10 to 11.
- Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin characterized the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) plan to formalize volunteer formations by July 1 as an attack on him and his forces.
- Russia and Ukraine conducted a near one-for-one prisoner of war (POW) exchange.
- Russian forces continued limited ground attacks south of Kreminna.
- Ukrainian and Russian forces continued limited ground attacks around Bakhmut and on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
- Ukrainian forces made gains near the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts and in western Zaporizhia Oblast as of June 10.
- Russian milbloggers claimed that rain along the Zaporizhia Oblast front may slow Ukrainian operations in the coming days.
- The Republic of Chechnya reportedly formed two new regiments – Akhmat-Russia and Akhmat-Chechnya – equipped with commercially-available Chinese armored equipment.
- Saboteurs, reportedly including Ukrainian partisans, conducted two discrete improvised explosive device (IED) attacks against railways in occupied Kherson Oblast and Crimea.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied areas
Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)
Russian forces continued limited ground attacks south of Kreminna on June 11. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian offensive operations near Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).[20] A Russian milblogger claimed that the Russian forces are engaged in heavy fighting near the settlement.[21] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Vesele (30km south of Kreminna).[22] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces fired on Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Movchanove, Kharkiv Oblast (11km northeast of Kupyansk) and Torske, Donetsk Oblast (14km west of Kreminna).[23]
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Click here to read ISW’s retrospective analysis on the Battle for Bakhmut.
Ukrainian and Russian forces continued limited ground attacks around Bakhmut on June 11. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut), and that Russian Spetsnaz units are trying to push Ukrainian forces from positions near Klishchiivka.[24] A milblogger claimed that Russian forces repelled two Ukrainian attacks in the Soledar-Bakhmut direction.[25] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted failed ground attacks near Bohdanivka (5km northwest of Bakhmut).[26] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian ground attack near Bila Hora (14km southwest of Bakhmut).[27]
Ukrainian forces made marginal gains near Avdiivka as Russian forces continued limited ground attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line as of June 11. Geolocated footage shows that Ukrainian forces made marginal advances south of Nevelske (13km southwest of Avdiivka) as of June 11.[28] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled eight Ukrainian ground attacks near Novobakhmutivka (13km northeast of Avdiivka), Krasnohorivka (8km north of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka (southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[29] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted counterattacks near Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka) and Opytne (3km southwest of Avdiivka) on June 10.[30] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted a failed ground attack near Sieverne on June 11.[31] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks near Avdiivka and Marinka.[32] Footage published on June 11 indicates that the Russian 10th Tank Regiment (3rd Army Corps, Western Military District) continues to operate near Avdiivka.[33]
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks near the administrative border of Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts and made gains as of June 11. Geolocated footage published on June 11 indicates that Ukrainian forces liberated Neskuchne (immediately south of Velyka Novosilka) and Blahodatne (5km south of Velyka Novosilka) on June 10.[34] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces liberated Neskuchne and Blahodatne without a fight and that personnel of the “Kaskad” Operational Combat Tactical Formation (a Donetsk People‘s Republic formation) retreated to avoid encirclement.[35] The Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported on June 11 that Ukrainian forces liberated Makarivka (7km south of Velyka Novosilka) - a settlement further south of Russian positions in Neskuchne and Blahodatne.[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces retreated from Storozheve (3km south of Velyka Novosilka) and that Ukrainian forces have advanced further to the northern outskirts of Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[37] Russian milbloggers also claimed that Ukrainian forces established positions in Levadne (18km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) and advanced near Novodarivka (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[38] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces destroyed a dam on the Mokri Yaly River near Klyuchove (18km south of Velyka Novosilka), however there is no visual confirmation of damage to the dam at this time.[39] The milblogger also claimed that elements of the 336thGuards Naval Infantry Brigade (Baltic Fleet) struck a Ukrainian equipment column near Klyuchove. Russian sources claimed that elements of the 127th Motorized Rifle Division (5th Combined Arms Army) and the 36th Combined Arms Army (both of the Eastern Military District) are operating in western Donetsk Oblast.[40]
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited ground attacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on June 11. A Russian milblogger posted footage purportedly showing Ukrainian forces capturing Lobkove (24km southwest of Orikhiv) and Pyatykhatky (23km southwest of Orikhiv).[41] Other Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting is ongoing in Lobkove, which is in the “gray zone.”[42] Geolocated footage published on June 11 shows elements of the 429th Separate Motorized Rifle Regiment (19th Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) operating near Lobkove.[43] Russian sources claimed that the volunteer “BARS-3” Battalion (part of the volunteer “Tsar’s Wolves” strike brigade) is operating in the Orikhiv direction.[44] North Ossetian volunteer battalions ”Storm Ossetia” and ”Alania” are operating alongside the 429th Motorized Rifle Regiment in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[45] Elements of the 71st Guards Motorized Regiment of the 42nd Motorized Rifle Division (58th Combined Arms Army) are also likely operating near Robotyne (13km south of Orkhiv).[46]
Russian milbloggers claimed that heavy rain along the Zaporizhia Oblast front may hinder Ukrainian operations. A Russian milblogger claimed that heavy Western tanks and armored vehicles and Soviet T-72 tanks will get caught in mud from rain, making it easier for Russian forces to target Ukrainian kits.[47] Another milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces would not likely advance after heavy rains which would provide time (one milblogger suggested about 48 hours) for Russian forces to transfer reserves to combat areas.[48]
Continued Russian endangerment of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) has forced Ukraine to transfer the ZNPP’s last reactor from hot to cold shutdown mode. The Ukrainian State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate ordered Ukrainian nuclear energy operator Energoatom to transfer reactor No. 5, the last ZNPP reactor in hot shutdown mode, into cold shutdown on June 9.[49] The Ukrainian State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate cited the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam, continued Russian shelling of the ZNPP, and the degradation of the ZNPP emergency response system as necessitating the shutdown of reactor No. 5. ISW has previously reported on ZNPP personnel transferring reactors from normal operations into hot, then later cold shutdowns in response to Russian forces endangering the ZNPP.[50]
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
The Republic of Chechnya reportedly formed two new regiments – Akhmat-Russia and Akhmat-Chechnya – equipped with commercially available Chinese armored infantry mobility vehicles.[51] Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that both regiments will deploy to Ukraine on an unspecified date and noted in a speech to servicemen that ”whether we want this or not, everyone will eventually need to die - whether you are in Ukraine or you are in Grozny [Chechnya].”[52] A Russian milblogger claimed that Chechen officials equipped new regiments with Chinese armored vehicles, and Russian Radio Liberty previously reported that Akhmat units have received eight Chinese-made ShaanXi Tiger 4x4 armored infantry mobility vehicles.[53] Chechen forces likely purchased these light vehicles from China, which is consistent with US official reports that China is selling non-lethal equipment to Russia.[54] A Russian independent human rights group focused on repressions in the Northern Caucasus previously reported that Chechen security forces are recruiting personnel via blackmail, coercion, and threats.[55] A Russian independent outlet also claimed that the region increased monthly salaries up to 700,000 rubles ($8,460) for anyone who signed military contracts with Chechen units.[56]
Pskov Oblast Governor Mikhail Vedernikov announced on June 11 that the region will form local territorial defense units to prevent incursions.[57] Vedernikov claimed that local militia will learn from the experience of border incursions made by all-Russian anti-government forces in Belgorod Oblast and claimed that recruitment into territorial units will begin in the near future. Vedernikov added that the territorial defense units will assist law enforcement agencies in case of a possible emergency.
Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces continue to struggle with the quality of Russia’s defense industrial output and low morale among personnel. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are unable to use large batches of newly produced 122mm and 152mm shells due to shells self-detonating.[58] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that the Chief of the Russian General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov, ordered commanders to form assault units from personnel who express low morale, desert, or sabotage Russian positions.[59] Russian personnel are reportedly suffering from low morale due to a lack of established deadlines for the completion of the mobilization period.
Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian sources claimed that unspecified saboteurs carried out an improvised explosive device (IED) attack on a railway bridge in occupied Crimea, and a Ukrainian officer claimed that Ukrainian partisans detonated a railway bridge in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast on June 11.[60] Crimean Occupation Head Sergey Aksyonov stated that the sabotage targeted a segment of the railroad in Kirovskyi Raion in southeastern Crimea, and Russian milbloggers claimed that unspecified individuals detonated an explosive device on the tracks in front of a freight train.[61] Aksyonov also noted that the explosion delayed railway transport for three to four hours.[62] A Ukrainian serviceman reported that Melitopol-based partisans planted an IED on a railway bridge in Yakymivka, Melitopol Raion.[63] Russian sources have not confirmed a Ukrainian partisan attack on the railway bridge in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast as of the time of this publication.
The North Ossetia-Alania Republic is participating in the deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast under the guise of summer vacations for children in Russia. Head of the North Ossetia-Alania Republic Sergey Menyaylo announced on June 11 that 25 Ukrainian children from occupied Chernihivka Raion arrived at “Tamisk” rehabilitation center in North Ossetia.[64] Menyaylo added that North Ossetia is the patron of Chernihivka Raion and will assist the district with providing summer vacations to Russia. Menyaylo added that 500 children from occupied Ukrainian territories will arrive in North Ossetia for summer vacations.
Russia continues to expand patronage networks in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast. Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Head Yevgeny Balitsky stated that he signed a cooperation framework with Nenets Autonomous Okrug Governor Yuri Bezdudny that will establish cooperation between occupied Zaporizhia Oblast and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug on culture, sports, and other unspecified areas.[65]
Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks).
ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.
The Belarusian Ministry of Defense’s television channel, Voen TV, released new footage on June 10 of the Russian S-400s given to Belarus, possibly deployed near the new S-400 site at the Luninets Air Base.[66] Independent analysis of the observed transporter erector launcher and munitions indicate that Belarus’ S-400 systems are using - at minimum - the baseline 48N6 surface-to-air missiles with an operational range of 150km.[67] It is unclear if Belarus also received missiles with greater operational ranges.[68]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
2. Zelenskyy says Ukraine ‘counteroffensive, defensive actions’ underway
Zelenskyy says Ukraine ‘counteroffensive, defensive actions’ underway
militarytimes.com · by Samya Kullab and Jamey Keaten, Associated Press · June 10, 2023
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that counteroffensive and defensive actions are underway against Russian forces, asserting that his top commanders are in a “positive” mindset as their troops engaged in intense fighting along the front line.
The Ukrainian leader, at a Kyiv news conference alongside Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, responded to a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comment a day earlier that Ukraine’s counteroffensive had started — and Ukrainian forces were taking “significant losses.”
Zelenskyy said that “counteroffensive, defensive actions are taking place in Ukraine. I will not speak about which stage or phase they are in.”
Top Ukrainian authorities have stopped short of announcing a full-blown counteroffensive was underway, though some Western analysts have said fiercer fighting and reported use of reserve troops suggests it was.
“I am in touch with our commanders of different directions every day,” he added, citing the names of five of Ukraine’s top military leaders. “Everyone is positive. Pass this on to Putin.”
Trudeau, the first foreign leader to visit Ukraine since devastating floods caused by a breach in a Dnieper River dam, offered up monetary, military and moral support. He pledged 500 million Canadian dollars ($375 million) in new military aid, on top of more than 8 billion Canadian dollars ($6 billion) that Canada has already provided since the war began in February 2022, and announced 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.5 million) for humanitarian assistance for the flood response.
Trudeau said the dam’s collapse was “a direct consequence of Russia’s war,” but he didn’t blame Moscow directly.
Ukraine’s General Staff said Saturday that “heavy battles” were ongoing, with 34 clashes over the previous day in the country’s industrial east. It gave no details but said Russian forces were “defending themselves” and launching air and artillery strikes in Ukraine’s southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Recent Western injections of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment — some of it high-tech and top-of-the-line — to Ukraine has raised expectations about when it would be used, and to what effect against dug-in Russian lines.
For months, Ukrainian commanders in the eastern city of Bakhmut — which was largely devastated in a months-long fight that has been one of the bloodiest battles of the war — have used the language of counteroffensive and defensive operations to describe the activity there.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Friday that the epicenter of the fighting has been in the east, particularly in the Donetsk region, and cited “heavy battles” in Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Marinka.
Valerii Shershen, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s armed forces in Zaporizhzhia, told Radio Liberty that they were searching for weaknesses in Russia’s defense in that region, to the west.
Ukraine’s nuclear energy agency Energoatom said the last operating reactor at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, had been placed in “cold shutdown” mode. That’s a process in which all control rods are inserted into the reactor core to stop the nuclear fission reaction and generation of heat and pressure.
The plant’s other five reactors already were in cold shutdown amid concerns about the plant’s exposure to the fighting.
Energoatom said in a statement late Friday that there was “no direct threat” to the Zaporizhzhia plant because of the breach of the Kakhovka dam further down the Dnieper River, which has forced thousands of people to flee flooding and also sharply reduced water levels in a reservoir used to help cool the facility.
Water levels in the Kakhovka reservoir, which feed the Zaporizhzhia plant, remained stable on Saturday, Energoatom said.
The site’s power units have not been operating since September last year. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is due to visit Ukraine in the coming days.
Ukrainian authorities reported Saturday that at least six civilians have died across the country as Russian forces launched Iranian-made Shahed drones, missiles, and artillery and mortar strikes.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported that three people were killed and more than two dozen wounded overnight in an attack targeting the Black Sea port of Odesa. A spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern operational command, Natalia Humeniuk, said two children and a pregnant woman were among those wounded.
Two people were killed in a Russian attack on the town of Orekhova in the Zaporizhzhia region, according to governor Yuriy Malashko.
In Ukraine’s northeast, a 29-year-old man was killed as more than 10 drones targeted the Kharkiv region, its governor, Oleh Syniehubov, reported Saturday. He added that at least three other civilians were wounded.
The Ukrainian air force said that during the night, it had shot down 20 out of 35 Shahed drones and two out of eight missiles “of various types” launched by Russian forces.
The fighting and civilian casualties took renewed attention as authorities in southern Ukraine said water levels have been declining in a vast area beneath the ruptured dam.
Nearly one-third of protected natural areas in the Kherson region could be obliterated by flooding following the breach of the Kakhovka dam, the Ukrainian environment minister warned Saturday.
The U.N.’s humanitarian aid chief, Martin Griffiths, said in an Associated Press interview Friday that an “extraordinary” 700,000 people were in need of drinking water.
In other developments:
On Saturday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says he wants to continue speaking with Putin — whose order for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been criticized by many Western leaders — and plans to do so again “soon.” Scholz has spoken several times by phone with Putin since the invasion.
The chancellor said the basis for a “fair peace” between Russia and Ukraine is the withdrawal of Russian troops. “That’s needs to be understood,” he said.
The U.K. government said it will give 16 million pounds ($20 million) in humanitarian aid to those affected by the flooding. Most of the money is being channelled through international organizations such as the Red Cross and the United Nations, and the U.K. is also sending boats, community water filters, water pumps and waders to Ukraine.
The U.K. has already given Ukraine 1.5 billion pounds in economic and humanitarian support since the war began, the government said, and has committed 4.6 billion pounds in military aid.
___
Jon Gambrell in Kyiv, Joanna Kozlowska and Jill Lawless in London, and Frank Jordans in Bonn, Germany, contributed to this story.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
3. Ukraine says it recaptured fourth village in modest counteroffensive gains
Ukraine says it recaptured fourth village in modest counteroffensive gains
Reuters · by Tom Balmforth
KYIV, June 12 (Reuters) - Ukraine said on Monday its troops had recaptured a fourth village in a cluster of settlements in the southeast, a day after reporting the first small gains of a counteroffensive against Russian forces.
Soldiers held up the Ukrainian flag in Storozheve in the Donetsk region in unverified video footage posted online and the defence minister thanked the 35th Separate Brigade of Marines for regaining control of the village.
Ukraine has enforced strict operational silence to avoid compromising an operation it hopes will retake swathes of land in the east and south, and threaten the land bridge Russia uses to supply the occupied Crimea peninsula.
Russia, which said last week the counteroffensive had begun, has depicted it as a failure so far, posting images of destroyed American and German-made fighting vehicles and tanks.
Reuters was unable to verify the situation on the battlefield.
Ukraine said on Sunday its forces had liberated three villages -- Blahodatne, Neskuchne and Makarivka -- that lie on the edge of Donetsk region next to Zaporizhzhia region. Storozheve is adjacent to Blahodatne.
[1/4] Ukrainian soldiers place a Ukrainian flag at a building, during an operation that claims to liberate the first village amid a counter-offensive, in a location given as Blahodatne, Donetsk Region, Ukraine, in this screengrab taken from a handout video released on June 11, 2023. 68th Separate... Read more
The reported advance, if confirmed, appears modest, with Makarivka about 5 km (3 miles) from what had been the front line. Makarivka is 90 km from the southern rim of the Russian land bridge on the Sea of Azov.
Some prominent Russian military bloggers said fighting for Makarivka was still raging but confirmed Ukrainian forces had taken Blahodatne and Neskuchne.
Russia has built sprawling fortifications to defend against an attack by Ukrainian troops trained and equipped by the West.
Ukraine's armed forces general staff said in its regular fighting update that 25 battles raged in the previous 24 hours near Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Maryinka in the Donetsk region, and near Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region.
Serhiy Cherevatyi, spokesperson for the eastern military command, said Ukrainian forces had continued to counterattack on the flanks of Bakhmut and had pushed Russian forces back by up to 700 metres there.
Russia said it captured the devastated city last month after some of the bloodiest fighting of its February 2022 full-scale invasion.
Both sides have said their forces have inflicted heavy losses on each other over the past week.
Reporting by Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv, Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; editing by Timothy Heriatge
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Tom Balmforth
4. Spend More on Defense? Let’s Focus on Spending Better
Excerpts:
We understand that fights over the top-line budget are often a shorthand for being strong on defense. And while spending more on defense doesn’t guarantee we will deter China and roll back Russian aggression, spending less will almost certainly fail.
But it is also true that buying incrementally more of the same mix of weapons and technology won’t produce a force necessary to meet the challenges posed by an increasingly aggressive China and Russia. More alone isn’t better; better is better.
Spend More on Defense? Let’s Focus on Spending Better
The leaders of Congress’ National Defense Strategy commission lay out their priorities.
By JANE HARMAN and ERIC EDELMAN
JUNE 11, 2023
defenseone.com · by Jane Harman
Included in the bill to extend our nation’s debt limit is a cap on defense spending at 3 percent above last year’s levels, matching President Biden’s budget request of $886 billion but still falling short of inflation. The bill further limits next year’s defense spending to 1 percent above that.
Like most of the provisions of the bill, the defense spending level has come under fire from both sides. But the debate over the top line misses one key point: how much we spend on defense is less critical than how well our investments address the challenges the country faces. And on this point, there should be universal agreement that our current budget does not provide the workforce, the equipment, the technology, or the infrastructure needed to secure our national security interests and keep our global leadership position.
As the Chair and Vice Chair of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, we are leading a review of the 2022 National Defense Strategy and making recommendations to the President and the Congress on what needs to be done. Included in that review is a mandate to evaluate “the resources necessary to support the strategy, including budget recommendations.” Our report is due next fall.
In 2018, the previous NDS Commission noted that “the security and wellbeing of the United States are at greater risk than at any time in decades. America’s military superiority—the hard-power backbone of its global influence and national security—has eroded to a dangerous degree.” The Commission recommended “that Congress increase the base defense budget at an average rate of three to five percent above inflation” in the coming years.
While spending has increased a bit since then, the strategic environment is no more promising now.
The Defense Department, as indicated in the NDS, has shifted focus from our 20-year wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and recognized that our potential adversaries are far more capable.
China, in particular, has studied American warfighting and built a military designed to negate our advantages. In order to deter China from taking actions we oppose—for example, the forceful reunification of Taiwan or blocking the freedom of navigation in the western Pacific— our military will require a new set of capabilities.
Similarly, our mechanism for purchasing equipment and the defense industrial base’s capacity to produce it, are ill-suited for the future of warfare. The experience in supplying Ukraine with a relatively limited set of weapons and munitions shows that we need larger stockpiles, but just as important, the ability to increase production in a crisis.
Less obvious, but equally important, is thinking through how cyber, space, and ubiquitous sensors will factor in future conflicts; indeed, these technologies are being used every day against our systems below the level of warfare. Contemplating the role of artificial intelligence is even more complicated.
Moreover, the technological superiority that the United States has enjoyed over every adversary since the latter days of the Cold War is no longer assured. The answer in some cases is buying more, but it is also being more strategic, more visionary, more nimble.
Our Commission will look more broadly, including on ways to spend smarter. Are there missions better suited to diplomacy or foreign assistance or an alliance rather than areas where DoD often takes the lead? Is our force structure and the mix of talent in our military and civilian workforce the right one? Can billions of dollars in research and development be better spent in harnessing the innovation of the private sector? Are we getting the bang for our buck in the military healthcare system? Should Congress provide the Pentagon with more flexibility to move faster, understanding that speed often comes with risk?
We understand that fights over the top-line budget are often a shorthand for being strong on defense. And while spending more on defense doesn’t guarantee we will deter China and roll back Russian aggression, spending less will almost certainly fail.
But it is also true that buying incrementally more of the same mix of weapons and technology won’t produce a force necessary to meet the challenges posed by an increasingly aggressive China and Russia. More alone isn’t better; better is better.
Former Congresswoman Jane Harman and former Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman are the Chair and Vice Chair of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy.
defenseone.com · by Jane Harman
5. Draft House NDAA would create Space National Guard
Draft House NDAA would create Space National Guard - Breaking Defense
In addition, the subcommittee's markup of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would add 800 Guardians to the Space Force's active duty end-strength, as requested by the service — including establishing a dedicated Space Force legislative liaison.
breakingdefense.com · by Theresa Hitchens · June 9, 2023
Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman (R), Space Force and Command Senior Enlisted Leader and CMSgt Roger Towberman (L), with Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett present US President Donald Trump with the official flag of the United States Space Force in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on May 15, 2020. ( Samuel Corum-Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The House Armed Services military personnel subcommittee draft of the fiscal 2024 defense policy bill, obtained by Breaking Defense, would establish a Space National Guard, as well as approve the Biden administration’s plan to create a “hybrid Space Component” comprising both full- and part-time Guardians in lieu of a separate Space Force Reserve.
In addition, the subcommittee’s markup of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would add 800 Guardians to the Space Force’s active duty end-strength, as requested by the service — including establishing a dedicated Space Force legislative liaison. The Space Force currently relies on the Air Force to run its relationships with Congress.
The question of a Space National Guard has been a hot potato since the establishment of the Space Force in 2019. After more than a year of dithering, the Biden administration in 2021 rejected the idea due largely to cost concerns, with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) finding that creation of a separate Guard branch for space would cost up to $500 million annually and provide no new capabilities.
However, OMB’s cost estimates have been fiercely rebutted by top National Guard brass from all 50 states, as well as the National Guard Association of the United States (NGAUS).
Further, key House and Senate Armed Services members representing states with a large number of Air National Guard space specialists have weighed in to support the creation of a separate Space National Guard. Sens. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., and Marco Rubio, R.-Fla, on Feb. 16 re-introduced legislation to create a Space Guard. On the House side, Colorado Democrat Rep. Jason Crow and Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn — who chairs the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee responsible for overseeing Pentagon space policy and programs — followed suit on May 2.
The administration’s plan to fold Air Force Reserve specialists into a new Space Component, under a legislative proposal entitled ““Space Force Personnel Management Act,” has been much less controversial. Senior Space Force officials have painted the concept as “transformational,” and argued it will help ensure recruiting of specialized talent that otherwise might be scooped up by the private sector.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R.-Ala., intends to hold a hearing June 21 on the NDAA; the Senate schedule remains unclear.
breakingdefense.com · by Theresa Hitchens · June 9, 2023
6. Chinese military says it’s here for “benevolence”
A 2 minute Chinese propaganda video. Quite slick.
One thing about it is that all the actions it is touting have been routinely conducted by the US military and allies for decades. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Even their hospital ship looks like Mercy or the Comfort.
As I have written before, the last thing I did in the Army was to accompany 15 National War College students to China for about 2 weeks, visiting Beijing, Chingao, Kunming, and then Hong Kong. While in Beijing we visited the 5th Armored Brigade (whose most proud accomplishment is being in nearly every Military Day PArade since its founded in 1964 - I did not ask if their tanks were at Tinnemann). When we visited their static display of weapons and vehicles it was near one of their rifle ranges. I snapped a couple fo photos of the signs that bracketed the range. The signs had Chinese words but underneath they had English statements – one said "for world peace" and the other said "for homeland stability."
Watch the video at this link:
https://www.militarytimes.com/video/2023/06/06/chinese-military-says-its-here-for-benevolence/?utm
Chinese military says it’s here for “benevolence”The Chinese military looks to rebrand itself as a global humanitarian and peacekeeping force in a new English-language ad. Can it make the image stick?
6 days ago
7. Congress’ critical annual defense policy work kicks off this week
Congress’ critical annual defense policy work kicks off this week
militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · June 12, 2023
Most of the major military policy changes to be passed by Congress this year will be unveiled over the next two weeks, as House and Senate lawmakers offer up their first drafts of the annual defense authorization bill.
The House Armed Services Committee will release their draft first, starting with seven subcommittee markups on Tuesday and Wednesday. Next week, the committee and its counterpart in the Senate are scheduled to finalize those proposals, sending them to the full chamber membership for votes later this summer.
The work typically takes place in May, but was delayed by a month because of the debt limit fight among lawmakers. The negotiated deal to raise the country’s borrowing powers included plans for $886 billion in defense spending next year, a figure that should serve as the baseline for the policy debates in the next few days.
The authorization bill is a massive defense policy measure, dictating outlines for military spending and service policy changes. This year’s versions are expected to focus heavily on recruiting and retention issues, given the struggles that military officials have reported in meeting personnel levels over the last two years.
The measure is one of the few pieces of legislation to pass annually, even amid the partisan strife on Capitol Hill. Congress has advanced the defense authorization bill to the president’s desk for 62 consecutive years, making it a reliable and attractive vehicle for a host of veteran and military policy changes over the years.
Along with the military annual pay raise and targets for service end strength, the legislation in recent years has also included mandates to drop the names of Confederate fighters from military bases, a repeal of military COVID-19 vaccine requirements, and numerous reforms to military and veterans benefits.
Tuesday, June 13
Senate Armed Services — 9:30 a.m. — G-50 Dirksen
Nominations
The committee will consider the nomination of Gen. Eric Smith to be commandant of the Marine Corps.
House Foreign Affairs — 10 a.m. — Capitol H210
State Department Diversity
Department officials will testify on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in their agency.
House Armed Services — 10 a.m. — 2118 Rayburn
NDAA Strategic Forces markup
The subcommittee on strategic forces issues will mark up its portion of the annual defense authorization bill.
House Armed Services — 11 a.m. — 2212 Rayburn
NDAA Cyber markup
The subcommittee on cyber issues will mark up its portion of the annual defense authorization bill.
House Armed Services — 12 p.m. — 2118 Rayburn
NDAA Seapower markup
The subcommittee on seapower issues will mark up its portion of the annual defense authorization bill.
House Armed Services — 1 p.m. — 2212 Rayburn
NDAA Personnel markup
The subcommittee on personnel issues will mark up its portion of the annual defense authorization bill.
House Veterans' Affairs — 1 p.m. — 360 Cannon
Veterans Care
Veterans Affairs officials will testify on efforts to better coordinate health care provided to veterans.
House Foreign Affairs — 2 p.m. — Capitol H210
Near Eastern Affairs
State Department officials will testify on U.S. strategy in the Middle East and North Africa.
Senate Foreign Relations — 2:15 p.m. — 419 Dirksen
Nominations
The committee will consider several pending nominations.
House Armed Services — 2:30 p.m. — 2118 Rayburn
NDAA Tactical Air markup
The subcommittee on tactical air issues will mark up its portion of the annual defense authorization bill.
House Armed Services — 3:30 p.m. — 2212 Rayburn
NDAA Intelligence markup
The subcommittee on intelligence issues will mark up its portion of the annual defense authorization bill.
Wednesday, June 14
House Armed Services — 10 a.m. — 2118 Rayburn
NDAA readiness markup
The subcommittee on readiness issues will mark up its portion of the annual defense authorization bill.
House Foreign Affairs — 10 a.m. — 2172 Rayburn
Indo-Pacific Priorities
State Department officials will testify on budget priorities in the Indo-Pacific region.
Senate Homeland Security — 10:30 a.m. — 562 Dirksen
Pending Legislation
The committee will consider a series of pending bills.
House Foreign Affairs — 2 p.m. — Capitol H210
China
State Department officials will testify on U.S. response to China’s international outreach efforts.
Senate Veterans' Affairs — 3 p.m. — 418 Russell
Rural Veterans
Veterans Affairs officials will testify on efforts to deal with substance abuse problems among rural veterans.
House Veterans' Affairs — 3 p.m. — 360 Cannon
Pending Legislation
The committee will consider several pending bills related to veterans financial issues.
About Leo Shane III
Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.
8. Low Earth orbit: disruptive military technologies
Space is the place for all your military needs (to borrow the jingle from Ace hardware store).
Excerpt:
Until recently, the majority of SATCOM has been the preserve of geo-synchronous (GEO) satellite in orbits of 36,000km from the Earth’s surface. The big advantage of GEO is that ground satellite terminal technology was relatively simple because it points at a narrow, almost stationary ‘box’ in the sky to maintain lock with the satellite.
...
In recent years medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites have entered the fray, and whilst they do have some similar constraints, they do also lessen the negative aspects of GEO and can deliver high-capacity beams to meet a range of emerging requirements. However, the real game-changer is the commercially viable production of LEO SATCOM at scale.
The advantages of LEO have been known for some time, but technology and scale constraints have made them cost-prohibitive to build. However, plummeting launch costs, state-of-the-art satellite production lines, inspired by car manufacturing and the convergence of advanced telecommunication technology, has created the condition for the rise of the LEO SATCOM constellations.
Low Earth orbit: disruptive military technologies - Airforce Technology
airforce-technology.com · by Richard Thomas · June 11, 2023
The ability to communicate has always shaped the way militaries fight, with the flow of information often dictating the pace, momentum and accuracy of action and distance, weather and terrain doing their best to constrain it. Chris Moore, vice president Defence & Security at OneWeb, explains how the rise of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites can disrupt how militaries fight.
Smoke signals, messengers on horseback, flags on ships and hills, telegraph lines and more recently radio and satellite communications have evolved over time to compress the time to deliver information in increasing volume and distance. This in turn has helped synchronise the mass, scale and diversity of force elements to deliver enhanced lethality.
The second half of the 20th Century saw the rise of satellite communications (SATCOM) which enabled higher-capacity communications beyond line-of-sight making it possible for deployed commanders to receive information thousands of miles away.
Until recently, the majority of SATCOM has been the preserve of geo-synchronous (GEO) satellite in orbits of 36,000km from the Earth’s surface. The big advantage of GEO is that ground satellite terminal technology was relatively simple because it points at a narrow, almost stationary ‘box’ in the sky to maintain lock with the satellite.
GEOs’ distance from Earth has also helped mitigate the threat from Direct Ascent weapons from the Earth, but that threat has evolved and just possessing a few hardened GEO satellites is not necessarily the assurance countries once needed.
The disadvantages with GEO include relatively higher latency communication paths, which induces lag into voice and data connectivity, particularly for real-time collaboration applications and time-sensitive machine-to-machine functions, the latter of which will become key ground for semi and autonomous platforms.
GEO satellites also have fixed views of the earth and tend to be in an equatorial plane which means they have limitations in their coverage, particularly for High North and South operations and at the edge of beams. The fixed positioning also means that satellite ground terminal look angles can also be challenging – not just at High North and South locations – but sometimes with obstructions blocking the line of sight with the satellite; for example a mountain, high-rise building or even ‘wooding’ on a ship. The lack of relative orbital velocity with the Earth also makes them relatively easy to target through jamming – although it should be noted that some military satellites do have counter-jamming technologies.
In recent years medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites have entered the fray, and whilst they do have some similar constraints, they do also lessen the negative aspects of GEO and can deliver high-capacity beams to meet a range of emerging requirements. However, the real game-changer is the commercially viable production of LEO SATCOM at scale.
The advantages of LEO have been known for some time, but technology and scale constraints have made them cost-prohibitive to build. However, plummeting launch costs, state-of-the-art satellite production lines, inspired by car manufacturing and the convergence of advanced telecommunication technology, has created the condition for the rise of the LEO SATCOM constellations.
Gaining tactical advantage
SATCOM technology has undeniably changed and enhanced the way conflicts are fought. LEO space-based SATCOM allows military forces to access and share information across the battlefield in real-time, giving them unprecedented levels of information advantage against their enemies.
Compared to traditional SATCOM solutions at higher altitude geostationary orbits, LEO-enabled SATCOM provides end users with truly global coverage, seamless mobility (no edge of beam transition issues), in addition to increased bandwidth capacity at lower latencies.
High capacity and low latency, direct to the tactical edge without the need to traverse a range of disparate bearers and conventional connectivity, means data sharing, cloud services, augmented reality and real-time video are instantly accessible, enabling armed forces to conduct operations with even greater precision and efficiency.
As witnessed in the ongoing war in Ukraine, pioneering pop-up connectivity solutions, via a LEO network capability, enabled critical communications to be passed more efficiently and with less risk, resulting, at least initially, in higher tempo operations driven by the increased mobility of the Ukrainian forces.
However, large-scale militaries traditionally favour centralised structures because they require co-ordination and control over numerous units, resources, and complex operations. This allows for standardisation, synchronisation, and effective execution of overarching strategies. The trade-off is that centralisation can impede agility and responsiveness, as decision-making processes can be slow and less adaptable in comparison to decentralised approaches, which are better suited to rapidly changing circumstances.
To address this challenge, modern militaries must strike the right balance between centralisation and decentralisation, optimising organisational structures to the problems they face. For example, a commander may choose to establish decentralised command structures at lower levels or deploy specialised units with greater autonomy for particular problem sets.
A hybrid approach may seek to combine the advantages of centralised control with the benefits of decentralised decision-making, enabling both efficiency and agility in military operations. This allows for highly manoeuvrable forces with compressed decision cycles – or OODA for the Colonel John Boyd purists. The advancements in communication technologies and network-centric warfare has increased the potential for adaptable organisational models for modern militaries to apply, which perhaps underpins some of the thinking emerging for “multi-domain operations”.
Resilient, ubiquitous communications have also helped populations to stay connected and gain advantage in the so-called ‘information warfare’; again this is evident in the current conflict in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian’s have waged a hugely successful counter-narrative against their Russian adversaries, once thought of as modern-day pioneers of this dimension of warfare. Communicating to the world via social media channels, television, radio and the press, the Ukrainian’s have highlighted the atrocities, brutality and sometimes incompetence of the Russian military, and used it to help build powerful, international support against Putin’s war machine. And for the civilian population in Ukraine having reinforced internet connectivity has meant they have been able to stay connected when traditional terrestrial connectivity has been taken down and importantly reassured by Zelenskyy’s stoicism.
Robust and resilient communications have changed the face of the contemporary conflict and have enabled the pen – or in this case keyboard – to become mightier than the sword.
Delivering truly resilient connectivity
With the use of small, mobile and robust multi-domain user terminals, easily deployed as an integrated eco-system on the land, in the air and at sea, LEO SATCOM has effectively unlocked the military constraints on accessing and sharing huge quantities of information in real-time, wherever you are on the planet – the North Pole, the summit of Everest, a vast ocean or in an aircraft.
Using small and lightweight user terminals on the ground or vessel, military personnel can receive up-to-date information about the ground, enemy and friendly force movements by tapping into a secure military network when other means of connectivity are disabled or disrupted. This information can then be seamlessly relayed across the front line or back to headquarters thousands of miles away, allowing commanders to make informed decisions that can turn the tide of a conflict.
Reliable and always-on connectivity is also paramount to the welfare and retention of troops. Soldiers, sailors, and aviators who have grown up in a connected world, away from home and used to on-tap internet, must have the opportunity to connect anytime, anywhere unless there are compelling operational reasons not to.
This allows them to retain links to family, friends and society, even during the most difficult times – something that is essential to the retention of their services and overall mental and physical wellbeing.
However, the advancement of the LEO SATCOM does not make MEO and GEO redundant – far from it. Each orbit has its own strengths and weakness, the trick is to design a coherent, multi-orbit architecture that converges with terrestrial networks to deliver truly resilient connectivity that routes data in the smartest possible way.
The real gamechanger will come when militaries combine the right balance of edge/cloud computing, with mobility and the right balance of multi-orbit connectivity, which will create the conditions for the 21st Century version of Blitzkreig.
OneWeb is at the forefront of the LEO revolution, keeping populations connected, particularly in remote locations or when traditional communications networks are disrupted. Having successfully completed its Generation One satellite launches, OneWeb offers a live service today which will expand to global coverage by the end of 2023. Alongside our industry partners, the company will ultimately deliver a robust ecosystem of solutions optimised for multi-domain use-cases.
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airforce-technology.com · by Richard Thomas · June 11, 2023
9. Mercenary group's feud with Russian military heats up as Ukraine offensive begins: Updates
Will this complicate Russian operations? Is this something Ukraine and its supporters exploit?
Mercenary group's feud with Russian military heats up as Ukraine offensive begins: Updates
USA Today · by Jorge L. Ortiz
USA TODAY
Show Caption
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Ukraine Dam Collapse Brings Uncertain Future for Region
The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine is swiftly evolving into long-term environmental catastrophe. It affects drinking water, food supplies and ecosystems reaching into the Black Sea. Experts say the long-term consequences will be generational. (June 11)
AP
The leader of the mercenary outfit that spearheaded Russia’s capture of the eastern Ukraine city of Bakhmut said his soldiers will refuse to join Russia’s regular forces.
Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said Sunday his fighters will flatly reject a new order by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu requiring they sign contracts with the ministry by July 1 to integrate into the regular army, a decision believed to target Wagner.
"Wagner will not sign any contracts with Shoigu," Prigozhin said through his press service. "Shoigu cannot properly manage military formations."
Prigozhin’s remarks figure to further intensify his long-running feud with Russian military leaders, at a time when Moscow’s forces have begun to confront Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Shoigu’s decree was announced Saturday in a Defense Ministry statement that did not mention Wagner, rather saying the requirement was intended to "increase the effectiveness" of Russian forces battling Ukraine and would "give volunteer formations the necessary legal status."
Prigozhin wasn’t buying it. He has assailed the ministry’s war strategy and repeatedly accused it of failing to properly arm his soldiers. In response, the ministry banned him from recruiting imprisoned Russian convicts.
"Wagner Group coordinates its actions with generals and has the best experience and a highly effective structure. Unfortunately, most military units do not have such efficiency," Prigozhin said, blaming Shoigu for the failure.
Developments:
The Kakhovka dam's breach has most likely disrupted the usual supply of fresh water to Crimea, forcing Russian authorities to impose rationing, use reservoirs, drill new wells, and bring in bottled water to meet the needs of the population in the occupied peninsula, the British Defense Ministry said.
The Ukrainian military said the counteroffensive has yielded control of three villages − Blahodatne, Makarivka and, Neskuchne − in the partially occupied eastern province of Donetsk.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it foiled an attack on one of its ships in the Black Sea, destroying six unmanned speedboats and preventing any damage to the ship. The claim could not be independently verified.
The warring parties completed a prisoner exchange Sunday, as 95 Ukrainians were released and 94 Russians gained their freedom.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said about 4,000 people have been evacuated from the country's south following the collapse of the Kakhovka dam, which he blames on Russia.
Rescue efforts for the dozens of towns and villages still flooded have been hampered by Russian shelling and other attacks, including one Sunday that left three civilians dead and 23 wounded when Moscow's troops fired at a boat evacuating people from Russian-occupied areas to Ukrainian-held territory, Kherson province Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said.
"Even beasts are more moral than you, Russian state," Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, revealing that the International Criminal Court has opened an investigation on the dam disaster.
The Ukrainian military said Russian forces are also behind the breach of a dam on the Mokri Yaly River in the Donetsk province, which caused flooding on both banks, the Kyiv Independent reported. Spokesperson Valeriy Shershen said the Russians blew up the dam to curtail the Ukrainian offensive, but said the attempt would fail.
"They expect a breakthrough of our defense forces, therefore, in order to slow down our advance, they use this tactic,” Shershen said, according to the Independent.
Zelenskyy has confirmed the counteroffensive is underway, and the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said the Ukrainians carried out operations Saturday in at least four areas of the 600-mile front. It promises to be an arduous task, and Zelenskyy has already warned to expect extensive loss of life.
Russia has had months to set up defenses, and its strategy in southern Ukraine is based on three main elements, the institute said, citing an unidentified Russian military blogger: "Early detection and destruction of Ukrainian assault formations, massive use of anti-tank weapons, and mining of territories near Russian defensive positions."
That approach has already been evident in the Kremlin’s initial defense of territory it has claimed in the Zaporizhzhia province, where the Ukrainians were pushed back after initial breakthroughs, the institute said, adding that the early going figures to be extremely difficult for Kyiv’s forces.
"Ukrainian forces are currently attempting an extraordinarily difficult tactical operation – a frontal assault against prepared defensive positions, further complicated by a lack of air superiority – and these initial assaults should not be extrapolated to predict all Ukrainian operations," the institute’s assessment said.
Another American has been arrested on drug charges in Russia, potentially setting up a thorny situation at a time of extremely high tension between Washington and Moscow.
Musician and former paratrooper Michael Travis Leake, who goes by his middle name, was arrested Tuesday in Moscow and "charged with large-scale illegal production, sale or trafficking of narcotic drugs," the state-owned TASS news agency said. Leake, 51, faces up to 12 years in prison, TASS reported. He was the frontman of the Russian rock band Lovi Noch, which translates to "Seize the Night."
The State Department said in a statement the U.S. government knows of reports an American was arrested in Moscow.
"When a US citizen is detained overseas, the department pursues consular access as soon as possible and works to provide all appropriate consular assistance," the statement said.
The Biden administration is already contesting the late-March detainment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage allegations that he, the U.S., and his employer deny. Gershkovich’s pretrial detention has been extended until at least Aug. 30. The government is also trying to gain the release of American businessman Paul Whelan, who is serving a 16-year sentence on spying charges.
In December, WNBA star Brittney Griner was freed in a prisoner exchange after a nearly 10-month imprisonment in Russia on drug allegations that resulted in a conviction and sentence of more than nine years.
As the war with Ukraine approached in February 2022, the State Department advised Americans to leave Russia because of the risk of being targeted by authorities there, repeating that urging several times since.
Leake taught English when he first moved to Moscow in 2010 and translated songs for Russian bands, according to Reuters, which reported his rock group hadn’t played a concert since 2019.
Contributing: The Associated Press
USA Today · by Jorge L. Ortiz
10. Opinion 5 questions about Ukraine’s counteroffensive, answered
Maps and graphics are at the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/11/ukraine-counteroffensive-questions-answers/?utm
Opinion 5 questions about Ukraine’s counteroffensive, answered
By Damir Marusic
Assignment Editor
June 10, 2023 at 1:49 p.m. EDT
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The long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian invaders is underway, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed Saturday. It has been underway since at least last Monday, according to U.S. officials — marking a new phase of a conflict that in recent weeks has been increasingly difficult to follow.
Questions abound. What are Ukraine’s objectives? How long will the operation take? And what will count as a victory? In the run-up to the operation, Washington Post Opinions has published a range of analyses that suggest some tentative answers.
Russian-controlled area
BELARUS
Russian-built
fortifications
RUSSIA
POLAND
Kyiv
Kharkiv
Lviv
UKRAINE
Area held by
Russian-
backed
separatists
since 2014
Soledar
Intense clashes in
this area this week
SLOV.
Bakhmut
Luhansk
Zaporizhzhia
Donetsk
HUNG.
MOL.
Mariupol
Kherson
Melitopol
Odessa
ROMANIA
CRIMEA
Black Sea
Illegally annexed by Russia in 2014
WHAT TO KNOW
Why is so little known about battlefield progress?
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News about the battles has been difficult to come by. Ukraine has been disciplined about maintaining operational security in the run-up to its counterattack, and it has remained just as silent as the fight has begun to unfold.
This is by design. Ukraine’s top commander has run a tight ship because the element of surprise could be decisive, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling wrote for The Post: “As a professional soldier, Ukrainian Gen. Valery Zaluzhny knows he holds only two major advantages when going on the offensive: picking the time and the place of the attack. He knows that after launching tens of thousands of soldiers against the Russian army — a force that has been preparing defensive positions for months — it’s impossible to call them back.”
Mark Hertling: Why preparations for Ukraine’s counteroffensive have taken so long
How will the counteroffensive unfold?
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Given Ukraine’s reticence, it’s difficult to ascertain where the fighting is concentrated. U.S. officials told columnist David Ignatius that the initial push was to the “south along multiple axes.” Russian official statements, as well as Russian military bloggers and journalists writing on the social media platform Telegram, have suggested that the fiercest fighting has taken place in the Zaporizhzhia region in the south, near the city of Orikhiv, around 150 miles to the east of the recently breached Kakhovka reservoir dam near Kherson.
David Ignatius: D-Day dawns for Ukraine
Rescue efforts in Kherson on Wednesday after the Nova Kakhovka dam and was partially destroyed, unleashing flooding near the front lines. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
Ukraine has yet to achieve a breakthrough, and there are indications that its forces have lost several armored vehicles, including Western-provided tanks. But we have no reliable assessment of how much damage Ukraine’s attacks have done to Russia’s defenses.
Post columnist Max Boot found retired Army Gen. David Petraeus cautiously optimistic after a recent trip to Ukraine. Petraeus has no illusions about the enormity of Ukraine’s challenge, but he told Boot that he is confident Ukraine will eventually prevail. However, Petraeus warned, expect Ukraine to sustain losses in the early phases. “The fighting in the early period of the Ukrainian offensive is ‘going to get much harder before it gets easier.’”
Max Boot: The Ukrainian offensive is beginning. David Petraeus is optimistic.
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What does Ukraine hope to achieve?
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Ukraine’s official objective is to push Russian forces out of every inch of its territory. Its leaders have refused to specify what they want this counteroffensive to achieve and when.
As former U.S. ambassadors John E. Herbst and Daniel Fried wrote for The Post, however, the quickest way for Ukraine to end the war would be to cut Russia’s land bridge to occupied Crimea. “If successful, such a move could be decisive,” they wrote. “It would divide Russian forces arrayed across Ukraine’s south, and even potentially put Crimea itself in a vulnerable position.”
UKRAINE
Russian-built
fortifications
Donetsk
Intense clashes
in this area
this week
Zaporizhzhia
Kakhovka
reservoir
dam
Mariupol
M14
Kherson
Berdyansk
Melitopol
RUSSIA
E105
Russian control of this
road creates a land bridge
to Crimea.
50 MILES
Sea of Azov
CRIMEA
The current fighting in Zaporizhzhia might not constitute the main thrust of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Fighting continues all along the front, and Ukraine is sending at least some of its freshly trained and equipped forces to Bakhmut in hopes of pushing out battle-weary Russian occupiers.
Should a partial breakthrough in the south compel Russian commanders to move troops from other parts of the front as reinforcements, Ukraine might take the opportunity to blitz weakened Russian defenses and win back territory in the north.
Guest Opinion: The key to ending the war in Ukraine? Attacking Crimea.
How long will the counteroffensive last?
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It could go on for weeks, or months.
U.S. officials have cautioned against expecting a quick outcome, but war is inherently unpredictable. Napoleon wrote that “the strength of an army, like power in mechanics, is estimated by multiplying the mass by the velocity.” Ukraine’s best hope is to leverage the mass of its Western armaments and training to weaken Russian defensive lines — and send Russian troops on a chaotic retreat.
But a better way to think of the counteroffensive is on a longer timeline. As The Post’s Editorial Board argued, this is best seen as a crucial battle in a long struggle. “The fighting in Ukraine is unlikely to subside anytime soon,” the board wrote. “In Washington and Europe, officials are laying plans to add muscle to Kyiv’s defensive capabilities over the next decade, assuming Russia’s aggressive designs will persist.”
The Post's View: The key to victory in Ukraine? Taking the long view.
A man works to extinguish a fire in a house damaged after Russian shelling in Kherson, Ukraine, on Friday. (Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
What is at stake?
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Ukraine’s stated purpose is to reclaim occupied territories from Russian forces. But its other goal is to convince Western publics and policymakers that their investment in Ukraine’s defense is paying dividends on the battlefield.
Whatever the immediate outcome, if the war drags on, more and more Americans might ask whether it’s worth it to support Ukraine’s fight. The Post’s Marc A. Thiessen laid out a 10-point case for why support is in America’s national interest.
Marc A. Thiessen: This is the ‘America First’ case for supporting Ukraine
“If we help Ukraine prevail,” he wrote, “we can rewrite the narrative of U.S. weakness; restore deterrence with China; strike a blow against the Sino-Russian alliance; decimate the Russian threat to Europe; increase burden-sharing with our allies; improve our military preparedness for other adversaries; stop a global nuclear arms race; dissuade other nuclear states from launching wars of aggression; and make World War III less likely.”
11. Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction
Conclusion:
Even if Russia defeats Ukraine in battle, Putin has lost this war, arguably as a result of applied friction. International relations theorists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, further support the idea of applying friction before directly committing to war, which they refer to as “husbanding U.S. strength” by “offshore balancing.”[35] They recommend that the United States “encourage other countries to take the lead in checking rising powers, intervening itself only when necessary” while assuring that “Washington could provide assistance to allies and pledge to support them if they were in danger of being conquered.”[36] Bringing whole-of-government solutions to bear—from implementing diplomatic and economic tools, to supplying military training, intelligence, and equipment—there are a host of ways to intervene and shape the battlespace prior to setting an American foot in it. Therefore, as the U.S. looks to develop its future strategies for conflicts, greater deference should be shown to John Boyd’s strategy of applied friction, within the fight and externally, beyond the static deterrence phase, into and throughout the kinetic phase of war.
Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction
https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2023/6/12/putins-wars-testing-boyds-strategy-of-applied-friction
Alessandra Nischi June 12, 2023
Vladimir Putin’s own military blunders in Ukraine have proven the friction studied by the strategist, and soldier once in Russian service, Carl Von Clausewitz.[[1] However, Clausewitz’s discussion of friction as an ever-present attribute inseparable from the very nature of war has already been well established and is therefore only mildly interesting regarding what can be learned in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the U.S. has successfully, though perhaps somewhat unintentionally, been testing out the strategy proposed by American fighter pilot and strategist John Boyd. Boyd mused that Clausewitz’s friction could be operationalized against an adversary rather than just accounted for in one’s own planning process.[2] Putin’s war in Ukraine proves the validity of Boyd’s strategy of applied friction and recommends that the U.S. give greater credence to extending this strategy by externally applying friction in future conflicts.
Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 1, 2023. (Gavriil Grigorov/AFP)
Classic strategic wisdom, as well as recent experience with successful territorial incursions likely bolstered Putin’s confidence that his strategy in Ukraine would succeed.[3] Yet, Putin’s assumptions failed him once they encountered not only the concept of Clausewitz’s traditional friction of war, but also Boyd’s concept of applied friction. The two notions are fundamentally different and will be examined at length in the next section. For now, the combination of these two variants have made Putin’s eventual success in Ukraine highly unlikely.
As political scientist Richard Betts states, “Strategies can be judged looking backward, but they must be chosen looking forward.”[4] This article has the advantage of hindsight in a way that strategists never do. Using that advantage, I propose that Russia, and the former Soviet Union, present four comparable case studies demonstrating externally applied friction, à la Boyd, can be successful at thwarting aggressive international actors without committing to direct conflict. These cases are interwoven throughout the following analysis of Putin’s assumptions and considered as evidence that the U.S. should give thorough consideration to consciously choosing a strategy of externally applied friction in future conflicts.
DEFINING FRICTION
Clausewitz argues that friction exists as details gone awry that could derail a plan.[5] John Boyd takes this idea farther and asserts that when in conflict, forces should find ways to increase an adversary’s friction.[6] To implement applied friction, additional refinement of the concept may prove useful. In physics, friction is defined as “the resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another” and is further subdivided into two categories: static and kinetic.[7] As the name implies, static friction is the friction applied to something up to the point of motion, at which point it becomes kinetic.[8] In the context of this analysis, static friction is equated with deterrence. At the point deterrence fails to prevent conflict and hostile actions are in motion, the strategy of deterrence progresses to a strategy of applied friction.
External influence in a war may suggest a proxy war; but externally applied friction does not implicitly equate to a proxy war, such as is the case of Ukraine. In this instance, the U.S. did not instigate conflict with Russia, rather it has continued to support a friendly nation in the defense of its sovereignty against an invading aggressor.[9] These attempts have gone beyond deterrence by externally applying friction as opposed to expanding and directly entering the war, as it would have if Ukraine was a NATO ally.[10] The Ukrainians have impressively and steadfastly resisted Russian forces since the invasion.[11] However, Putin’s success has been predominantly hindered due to externally applied friction from the international community in support of the Ukrainians. If not for these forces of externally applied friction, such as the influx of advanced western weapons and intelligence support, expansive economic sanctions, and mounting diplomatic pressure—Putin’s assumptions should have prevailed.[12]
ASSUMPTION 1: THE STRONGER FORCE WOULD EASILY BEST THE WEAKER FORCE IN BATTLE
At the outset, Putin assumed he could quickly defeat Ukraine. Had Putin expected the war to be as long and complicated as it has become, it is likely that he would have brought the full weight of his military force to bear from the beginning. Instead, looking at how swiftly he managed to defeat Georgia in 2008 and annex Crimea in 2014, Putin launched the 2022 offensive into Ukraine largely unprepared for a protracted conflict—from his supply chain, to personnel and equipment readiness.[13] For instance, Putin began the conflict with his only aircraft carrier in an inoperable maintenance status, or “in the yards,” for six years.[14] Despite the emphasis on the land war, Ukraine is a coastal nation and the Russian Navy’s ability to encircle, blockade, and launch attacks from the sea has been limited by the absence of the carrier option.[15] This oversight, an example of Clausewitz’s friction, was apparent when he suffered an embarrassing blow to his Navy. Though unconfirmed, it was widely reported that Ukrainian ground forces received intelligence that enabled them to sink the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. If any intelligence sharing did contribute to the sinking, that would be an example of Boyd's applied friction having kinetic impacts in the battlespace. Regardless, Putin’s lack of military readiness for a fight he initiated can be explained by the flawed assumption that his victory would be swift and decisive.
RUSSIA’S MILITARY MIGHT, ESPECIALLY HAD IT BEEN APPROPRIATELY WELDED AND FULLY PREPARED, SEEMED CAPABLE OF A QUICK AND DECISIVE VICTORY.
In fact, it seemed as though most of the world held a similar assumption.[16] Russia’s military might, especially had it been appropriately welded and fully prepared, seemed capable of a quick and decisive victory. The Ukrainian armed forces were estimated at 22% strength of the Russian forces at the outset of the war and projected to be far less militarily capable.[17] However, when the Ukrainian leadership rallied the people and challenged that assumption through tenacious resistance, the world was inspired to support the underdog in contributing to battlefield friction by providing intelligence and weapons to Ukraine.[18]
ASSUMPTION 2: THE NORM OF TOUGH TALK AND LIMITED RESPONSE WOULD CONTINUE
Putin assumed that his aggressive act would invite the ire of the West, but that, ultimately, no significant cost would be levied against him for the war. Though the 2008 Russo-Georgian war had complicated underpinnings, Russian forces claimed lands from the former Soviet country, and the world moved on.[19] In February 2014, when Russia took Crimea by force, the annexation was complete within roughly a month.[20] While the west imposed a few sanctions and ejected Russia from the G8, Putin had easily achieved his objective with greater benefits gained than costs imposed.[21] With those two quick wins in recent memory, Putin was emboldened to believe that invading Ukraine again would be no different, but this is the costliest assumption he made.
In both of these instances, little to no friction was applied in the conflicts—consequences were only imposed after Putin had achieved his primary objectives. However, in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, economic sanctions were immediately imposed against Putin and continually increased the squeeze as the war continued. Where Putin was counting on Europe’s dependence on Russian oil, the continent quickly sought other sources of energy, to their own economic sacrifice, that will result in the long-term loss of Russia’s majority export market.[22] Though this economically applied friction did not have an immediate effect either on the battlefield or to change Putin’s aggressive intentions, it has and will continue to have an impact over time that will at minimum affect the costs of the war and reduce Putin’s ability to sustain the fight.[23]
ASSUMPTION 3: A RUSSIAN VICTORY IN UKRAINE WOULD DETER NATO EXPANSION
Putin assumed his show of force would dissuade a NATO expansionist agenda. Conquering Ukraine, a former Soviet bloc country and second largest European nation, seemed the thing to do to accomplish his goal, especially as the fledgling democracy at his doorstep hedged further to the west.[24] He likely also believed that NATO would not aid Ukraine to the extent that it has since Ukraine is not a NATO nation. To the contrary, NATO allies and many other nations globally have united in support of Ukraine, determined to treat Russia as an outcast. Foreign forces seem to be all that is missing from the military support flowing to Ukraine from NATO nations.[25] Further, Finland and Sweden, two nations that were previously proud of their neutral status, have applied for full NATO membership in response to Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine.[26]
PUTIN’S PREMISE OF EXHIBITING HIS MILITARY PROWESS TO HALT NATO EXPANSION HAS FAILED DUE TO HIS OWN DISREGARD OF THE BASIC SECURITY DILEMMA PRINCIPLES THAT HAD CONCERNED HIM IN THE FIRST PLACE.
In 2008, Putin invaded Georgia four months after attending the Bucharest Summit, where NATO extended the opportunity to join the alliance to Georgia and Ukraine through the Membership Action Plan.[27] The invasion in Georgia and subsequent 2014 invasion of Ukraine affirmed France and Germany’s concerns that offering membership to the former Soviet nations would threaten Russia.[28] However, due to Russia’s iteratively aggressive behavior, they are now ready to apply the friction they avoided applying in the previous two invasions.[29]
CLAUSEWITZ POSITS THAT FRICTION IS EVER-PRESENT IN ALL WARS, AS IS THE NATURE OF WAR; BUT FRICTION HAS NOT BEEN OPERATIONALIZED IN ALL WARS AS BOYD RECOMMENDS.
Additionally, there is support for Ukraine to become part of NATO—perhaps not in the midst of hostilities, but eventually.[30] Therefore, Putin’s premise of exhibiting his military prowess to halt NATO expansion has failed due to his own disregard of the basic security dilemma principles that had concerned him in the first place. This diplomatic friction applied to Putin directly resulted in the loss of a primary objective of the war.[31]
JUDGING BACKWARD, CHOOSING FORWARD
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John Boyd (HistoryNet)
Clausewitz posits that friction is ever-present in all wars, as is the nature of war; but friction has not been operationalized in all wars as Boyd recommends.[32] In Georgia and Crimea, Putin was met with little externally applied friction, resulting in quick victories for Russia.[33] In the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, by arming the Mujaheddin, the U.S. externally applied friction to the Soviets, who were not successful in their Afghan endeavors.[34] Due to externally applied friction in Ukraine, each of Putin’s assumptions—that the invasion of Ukraine would be quick and easily accomplished, that the world would denounce but not stop it, and that it would sufficiently deter NATO expansion—have been invalidated.
THERE ARE A HOST OF WAYS TO INTERVENE AND SHAPE THE BATTLESPACE PRIOR TO SETTING AN AMERICAN FOOT IN IT.
Even if Russia defeats Ukraine in battle, Putin has lost this war, arguably as a result of applied friction. International relations theorists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, further support the idea of applying friction before directly committing to war, which they refer to as “husbanding U.S. strength” by “offshore balancing.”[35] They recommend that the United States “encourage other countries to take the lead in checking rising powers, intervening itself only when necessary” while assuring that “Washington could provide assistance to allies and pledge to support them if they were in danger of being conquered.”[36] Bringing whole-of-government solutions to bear—from implementing diplomatic and economic tools, to supplying military training, intelligence, and equipment—there are a host of ways to intervene and shape the battlespace prior to setting an American foot in it. Therefore, as the U.S. looks to develop its future strategies for conflicts, greater deference should be shown to John Boyd’s strategy of applied friction, within the fight and externally, beyond the static deterrence phase, into and throughout the kinetic phase of war.
Alessandra Nisch is a United States Naval Officer and currently a graduate student of Security Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Project 1164 Moskva, 2009 (George Chernilevsky).
NOTES:
[1] Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Carl Von Clausewitz On War, Indexed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
[2]John Boyd, A Discourse on Winning and Losing (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2018).
[3] The quotes from classic war strategists are in reference to and support each of the assumptions Putin made. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Carl Von Clausewitz On War, Indexed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).; Sun Tzu and Michael Nylan, The Art of War (New York, NY: W. W. Norton et Company, Inc, 2020).; Antoine Henri Jomini and J. D. Hittle, Jomini and His Summary of the Art of War: A Condensed Version (Cranbury, NJ: Scholar's Bookshelf, 2006).
[4] Richard Betts, “Is Strategy an Illusion?” International Security 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 5-50.
[5] Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Carl Von Clausewitz On War, Indexed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
[6] Jason M. Brown, “Uploading John Boyd,” The Strategy Bridge (The Strategy Bridge, January 22, 2021),
[7] CK-12 Foundation, “Normal Force and Friction Force,” CK-12 (CK-12 Foundation, September 1, 2016).
[8] Ibid.
[9] NATO, “NATO's Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine,” NATO (NATO, February 24, 2023).
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ukrainian resistance
[12] NATO, “NATO's Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine,” NATO (NATO, February 24, 2023).
[13] Michael Kofman, “The August War, Ten Years on: A Retrospective on the Russo-Georgian War,” War on the Rocks, August 17, 2018; Kurt Volker, “Where's NATO's Strong Response to Russia's Invasion of Crimea?” Foreign Policy, March 18, 2014; Kelly A. Grieco, “Testing Assumptions about the War in Ukraine, One Year Later ,” Stimson Center, February 15, 2023.
[14] Tomasz Grotnik, “Russian Carrier Kuznetsov Leaves Dry Dock... at Last,” Naval News, February 24, 2023.
[15] Basil Germond, “Ukraine: Russia's Inability to Dominate the Sea Has Changed the Course of the War,” The Conversation, February 24, 2023.
[16] Kelly A. Grieco, “Testing Assumptions about the War in Ukraine, One Year Later,” Stimson Center, February 15, 2023.
[17] Angela Dewan, “Ukraine and Russia's Militaries Are David and Goliath. Here's How They Compare,” CNN (Cable News Network, February 25, 2022).
[18] Gerry Doyle, Anurag Rao, and Vijdan Mohammad Kawoosa, “How Weapons from Western Allies Are Strengthening Ukraine's Defence,” Reuters (Thomson Reuters, March 10, 2023).
[19] Michael Kofman, “The August War, Ten Years on: A Retrospective on the Russo-Georgian War,” War on the Rocks, August 17, 2018.
[20] Kurt Volker, “Where's NATO's Strong Response to Russia's Invasion of Crimea?” Foreign Policy, March 18, 2014.
[21] Alison Smale and Micheal D. Shear, “Russia Is Ousted from Group of 8 by U.S. and Allies,” The New York Times (The New York Times, March 24, 2014).
[22] Reuters Person, “Factbox: How the EU Ban on Russian Oil Imports Affects Oil Flows,” Reuters (Thomson Reuters, March 15, 2023).
[23] Maxim Trudolyubov, “War as Putin's New Normal,” Wilson Center (Kennan Institute, February 24, 2023).
[24] Jonathan Masters, “Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia,” Council on Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations, February 14, 2023).
[25] Unknown NATO, “NATO's Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine,” NATO (NATO, February 24, 2023).
[26] Roger Cohen, “War in Ukraine Has Changed Europe Forever,” The New York Times (The New York Times, February 26, 2023).
[27] “NATO,” NATO (NATO, April 3, 2008).
[28] Roger Cohen, “War in Ukraine Has Changed Europe Forever,” The New York Times (The New York Times, February 26, 2023).
[29] Ibid.
[30] “NATO,” NATO (NATO, April 3, 2008).
[31] Jonathan Masters, “Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia,” Council on Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations, February 14, 2023).
[32] Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Carl Von Clausewitz On War, Indexed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).; John Boyd, A Discourse on Winning and Losing (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2018).
[33] Michael Kofman, “The August War, Ten Years on: A Retrospective on the Russo-Georgian War,” War on the Rocks, August 17, 2018; Kurt Volker, “Where's NATO's Strong Response to Russia's Invasion of Crimea?,” Foreign Policy, March 18, 2014.
[34] Bruce Riedel, “Could Ukraine Be Putin's Afghanistan?” Brookings (Brookings, February 24, 2022).
[35] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing - A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 4 (2016): 70–83.
[36] Ibid.
Tagged: 2Q23, Boyd, Putin, Russia, Ukraine, Strategic Thinking, Strategy
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12. Stigmatization, not loneliness, is the true national security threat
Conclusion:
I am all for protecting national security secrets, for ensuring that only the loyal, trustworthy, reliable possess access to our closely guarded secrets. But this proposal does not advance that end; rather, it increases stigma, forcing service members living with mental illness to retreat even further into the shadows, and denying them life-saving treatment and a means for improved mental health.
And that is the true threat to national security.
Stigmatization, not loneliness, is the true national security threat
militarytimes.com · by E.M. Liddick · June 11, 2023
On the morning of May 31, only a few hours before the Army Times revealed delays to the Army’s over-promised, under-delivered suicide prevention regulation, the Military Times published an opinion that asked the provocative question, “Has loneliness become a national security issue?” In it, retired Brig. Gen. Jack Hammond, using Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified documents, as his poster child, argued for “a comprehensive review” of the security clearance process. He went further, suggesting the government develop new screening criteria to identify “people who exhibit loneliness, poor self-esteem and grandiose narcissism,” and then, for those so identified, suspend or revoke access to classified information.
This is the sort of opinion that sounds nice, logical — national security-conscious even. And the author isn’t wrong in noting that “poor judgment or unreliable, untrustworthy, or dysfunctional behavior” can be symptomatic of some mental illnesses; they can. It’s just that by calling out “loneliness, low self-esteem, and narcissism” as things that should disqualify one from holding a security clearance, his suggestion may well increase the stigma surrounding mental health, making it less likely that troops seek help, and thereby — setting aside the primary harm to our most important assets — further masking eligibility concerns in a way that weakens national security.
The author begins by focusing on the recent pronouncement by the surgeon general of the United States of an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” before deploying statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health about the rising rates of mental health illnesses among the 18-25 year-old demographic, a sentence that reads almost like an accusation without apparent relevance. (For what it’s worth, these statistics may have resulted more from a shrinking stigma among younger generations coupled with the problem of underreporting among older ones.)
From the example of airman Teixeira, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s “plan to mend the social fabric of our nation,” and these statistics, the author draws the following conclusion: “loneliness, low self-esteem, and narcissism,” along with all other “mental health issues,” represent “red flags” in any security clearance adjudication.
Yet nowhere does the author define “loneliness.” Worse, he conflates emotion with illness, trait with symptom. Loneliness and low self-esteem can arise from adversity — a move, job change, divorce, or, yes, a pandemic — and bring about a diagnosable mental illness, like depression or anxiety. Or they can present as symptoms of an existing mental illness, such as post-traumatic stress, aka PTS. To the second, with the Department of Veterans Affairs estimating that anywhere from 10–30% of veterans experience PTS, there’s potentially a significant number of active duty service members presenting so-called “red flags.” Loneliness and low self-esteem, then, aren’t even on the same plane as narcissism, its own distinct illness that goes by the name “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and may look to outsiders like confidence, but can be much harder to treat.
And at what point does one cross the threshold between the loneliness most humans experience and the sort of loneliness that threatens national security? When does one cross from being “self-confident” which describes most military leaders, to “grandiose narcissist,” which describes a few? And who makes this determination? A security clearance adjudicator untrained in behavioral health?
A U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division soldier provides cover for advancing troops during movement March 20, 2003 across the southern Iraqi border. (Photo by Scott Nelson/Getty Images)
Yet in all of this, by singling out the lonely, the diffident, the self-centered, the author is actually increasing risk to national security.
Why? Because the author reignites the stigma the military services have labored — albeit unsuccessfully — to quash over the past two decades. Though likely unintentional, the author’s proposed solution communicates in hushed tones that, if you experience loneliness, if you hold yourself in low esteem, if you border on narcissism, then you should eschew seeking treatment because, to do so otherwise, will place you at increased risk of losing your security clearance. May God help you if you’re an introvert.
Nor is this speculative. In 2015, a paper published in Epidemiological Reviews revealed that upwards of 60% of military members “who could benefit from professional treatment do not access help or services.” Stigma was identified as one of the “barriers to help-seeking.” This belief that mental health treatment will impact — disparately and negatively — one’s security clearance is so pervasive that, as late as 2022, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command had to release a statement dispelling the stigma surrounding mental health treatment, stating, “Security clearances are not denied for seeking help.”
There was a time when the Questionnaire for National Security Positions asked applicants to disclose whether, in the last 7 years, he or she had “consulted with a mental health professional (psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor, etc.)” or “consulted with another health care provider about a mental health related question.” Fortunately, our understanding of mental health issues, and the stigma this question reinforced, has advanced in the last two decades. The author’s proposal, though, would have us return to that foregone era — one where stigma was king, and service members, its subject.
I am all for protecting national security secrets, for ensuring that only the loyal, trustworthy, reliable possess access to our closely guarded secrets. But this proposal does not advance that end; rather, it increases stigma, forcing service members living with mental illness to retreat even further into the shadows, and denying them life-saving treatment and a means for improved mental health.
And that is the true threat to national security.
Eric Michael (E.M.) Liddick is the author of the memoir All the Memories That Remain: War, Alzheimer’s, and the Search for a Way Home. His work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, The War Horse, War on the Rocks, The Moving Force Journal, and Thought Catalog. A native of central Pennsylvania, E.M. graduated from Penn State University and Tulane University Law School. He served in the 75th Ranger Regiment and 82nd Airborne Division, with multiple deployments overseas. He currently lives in Northern Virginia.
13. Partisans blow up railway bridge near occupied Melitopol - Ukrainian Army officer
Partisans blow up railway bridge near occupied Melitopol - Ukrainian Army officer
ukrinform.net
This was announced on Telegram by Anatoliy Shtefan, an officer with Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Ukrinform reports.
"A railway bridge was blown up in the town of Yakymivka in the temporarily occupied area of Zaporizhzhia region by partisans from the city of Melitopol," the report says.
It is noted that the bridge served as part of the enemy arms supply artery from the temporarily occupied Crimea to the temporarily occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region.
As reported earlier, explosions rang out in the temporarily occupied city of Berdiansk, near the local seaport.
ukrinform.net
14. Readiness Redefined: Now What?
Excerpts:
The work is far from easy. Changing culture never is, particularly in an organization so large and so culturally rooted as the Department of Defense. This is why, despite widespread agreement that these changes must happen, they never have. The department has accomplished much over the past two years in shifting to a strategic readiness approach — and we see more progress on the horizon. As our policies are formalized and our assessments are tested, we move closer to implementing a holistic, analytic, and rigorous means to address the ensuing impacts of decisions on our near- and long-term readiness and across our strategic objectives. By achieving decision advantage over our adversaries, we plan to outpace their ability to act now and in the future.
However, decision advantage is not decision certainty. Our tools should provide us clarity, improving what we know and challenging things that we think we know, but we can’t rely on them entirely. We still must develop the analysis and judgment that are central tenets of the department’s military and civilian talent management models. Decision-making is an art, not a science. We rely on the science to inform the art. We can only find balance through the risk-informed and clear-eyed decisions of our senior leaders. We must arm our senior leaders with a better understanding of the risk incurred tomorrow by decisions made today so our next steps can be more precise, deliberate, and ultimately successful in posturing ourselves to win.
The development of a strategic readiness framework is not the sole answer to striking the balance between readiness today and the ability to modernize the joint force. The next step will be creating the long-needed demand signal by which we design the joint force of the future. Without that marker, we cannot fully understand how close — or how far — we are from being strategically ready.
Readiness Redefined: Now What? - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Kimberly Jackson · June 12, 2023
In 2021, in a widely read article in these virtual pages, two service chiefs argued that the Department of Defense’s traditional approach to military readiness has left it woefully underprepared for the immense challenges it faces. As a way forward, the authors (one of whom has co-authored this article) called for a rigorous, analytical readiness framework that could better balance near-term demands with future modernization goals. It was a bold proposal, requiring a massive shift in the department’s culture. It asked senior leaders to take risk — on our watch — to give our successors more decision space to meet the challenges posed by the People’s Republic of China and Russia.
In the time since Redefine Readiness or Lose was published, the Department of Defense landscape has changed significantly. As a department, we emerged from a global pandemic that disrupted supply chains and fundamentally challenged our nation as well as those of our allies, partners, and competitors. After 20 years of war, our last troops left Afghanistan in August 2021. And less than six months later, Russia initiated the most brutal phase of its war in Ukraine since its initial invasion in 2014.
Redefine Readiness or Lose publicly captured deep concern that previously existed as whispered anecdotes throughout the department: if the Department of Defense continues to do business as usual and prioritize near-term requirements over long-term priorities, we risk being unprepared to compete with, deter, or defeat China and Russia. While this problem is not new, the argument was timely. After the United States withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, the country faced the imperative to find a better balance between near-term requirements and our long-term strategic goals and modernization priorities. The department began to formally and fully shift to a “data-centric organization,” creating opportunities to leverage the power of the department’s data to drive decision-making. We are now undertaking an arduous, but fundamentally necessary, effort across civilian and military organizations to redefine readiness in a meaningful, measurable and lasting way.
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The 2022 National Defense Strategy supported our effort by establishing the need for “a new framework for strategic readiness, enabling a more comprehensive, data-driven assessment and reporting of readiness to ensure greater alignment with [National Defense Strategy] priorities.” We responded to this call by working to define strategic readiness as the ability to build, maintain and balance warfighting capabilities and competitive advantages to achieve strategic objectives across threat and time horizons. This definition is designed to at once broaden the concept of readiness beyond near-term availability of forces but also constrain the term so that it has a specific meaning. It deliberately focuses on the principle of balance. The department must ensure that the ultimate goal is not balance alone, but rather to seek balance among inevitably competing priorities and requirements so that we can achieve and sustain strategic advantage.
It is not enough to simply be ready for readiness’ sake. Readiness alone is not enough to guarantee that the United States can compete with China and Russia, support contingencies and execute strategic deterrence, as is called for in our defense strategy. We must be clear-eyed at every juncture about the cascading impacts of our choices so that we can cultivate decision advantage at all levels and in turn harness those gains into lasting strategic advantages. In Redefine Readiness or Lose, we rightfully reiterated Richard Betts’ fundamental readiness questions: Ready for what? Ready for when? And what needs to be ready? While we will likely never have simple answers to those questions, what we can and must do is establish — and perhaps, most importantly, adhere to — a strategic readiness framework that assists leaders at all levels to weigh requirements against risk in a fully informed way.
Our success to date has depended on significant collaboration with our partners across the office of the secretary of defense, the military departments and services, and the joint staff. While these efforts are welcomed by many, others still resist new ideas and change. After all, seeing ourselves and our ability to be ready — or not — requires a level of effort and introspection that makes many uncomfortable. Further, while the department can build the most insightful measurement tools, develop perfectly predictive models, and write superlatively eloquent policies and strategic guidance on readiness, without a cultural shift that challenges the bureaucratic “way it’s always been,” Department of Defense leaders will continue to make decisions without understanding the true consequences.
Executing the Mission While Changing Our Culture
The department has made tremendous strides over the past two years to develop the policies, tools, and assessments that form the strategic readiness framework. These efforts will allow us to start looking across our disparate processes, understanding the cumulative impacts of a wide range of decisions on readiness, and identifying potential actions we can take now to mitigate such impacts in the future. And while dozens of offices across the department have already invested significant time and effort in building this new framework, we are still just at the start. Any changes to the way we create, utilize and measure readiness must address two key challenges: executing our mission and changing our culture.
We cannot fail to provide ready forces to give the president and the secretary of defense options in the face of crises and an ever-evolving geopolitical landscape. As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, recently testified, the military “must balance current operations’ readiness with future modernization and must not allow ourselves to create the false trap that we can either modernize or focus only on today: We must do both.” We agree. The challenge is ensuring that the tradeoffs inherent in balancing those imperatives are clear and comprehensive. Only by taking a holistic view of strategic readiness across the entire department can we understand the true impact of our decisions on future readiness and propose necessary actions and mitigations accordingly.
Seeking such a balance in an organization that is so strongly incentivized to prioritize near-term crises to protect U.S. interests over longer-term investments will certainly require culture change. But complicating such a shift is the fact that at our core, the military faces a paradox: That very thing that is our greatest strength is also our greatest vulnerability. The U.S. military is in the business of answering our nation’s call; a natural bias toward near-term action is inherent in the department’s processes, culture, and decision-making. These are not design flaws or inherent weaknesses in our department but rather features of our culture that must be acknowledged, occasionally challenged and intentionally integrated to achieve our strategic objectives.
Due to the military’s culture, we are predisposed to taking immediate action with the understanding that any negative consequences incurred by a given policy, operation, or resourcing decision can be sustained or alleviated after the crisis at hand is addressed. The dark side of this otherwise positive cultural hallmark is that the department often turns to the next pressing issue without capturing the follow-on impacts and tradeoffs incurred from action taken. The result is an inadvertent mortgaging of the readiness we need to fight and win in the future. The reason that it is so easy for the military to collectively fall into that trap is simple: It’s easy to see the consequences of our actions (or lack thereof) in the near term. It’s much harder to capture and comprehend the cumulative effects of our decisions. It can be extremely difficult to fully understand the total impact of an action, such as reassigning forces from one combatant command to another or routinely extending the deployment of a highly stressed unit.
Further, risks incurred by potential courses of action are sometimes inadvertently lost as information flows up the chain of command. Given the intensity and punishing pace of the department’s work, there is a cultural tendency to focus on our particular areas of responsibility. This often precludes sharing key information across decision-making processes that could illuminate opportunities, redundancies, and threats to readiness. Inevitably, this means that sometimes senior leaders are unaware of the full complement of impacts — whether positive, negative, or neutral — that result from the decisions they face until it’s too late to reconsider or develop mitigation options. Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks has directed a number of changes to address the specific challenge of data sharing within the department. This is a foundational step to shifting our culture to think of sharing information as essential to, not detracting from, task accomplishment. But this, too, is a cultural shift that will take time and substantial effort to fully implement.
Historically, the department has defined readiness by measuring personnel, training, equipment, and maintenance at the unit level to ensure each is ready for its assigned missions. This definition is useful but not entirely sufficient to fully understanding the military’s preparedness to execute its missions. We must expand our concept of what it means to be ready to capture broader measures that directly and indirectly contribute to mission preparedness. Of course, incorporating assessments of those types necessarily means that we have to become more comfortable not only with sharing data more widely, but also with collecting difficult-to-measure data such as opportunity costs and finding ways to prove that our actions prevented negative consequences.
This mindset does not suggest that we need to maintain the highest levels of readiness across every unit in the military at all times. Not only is that unaffordable and unsustainable, but it would also be counterproductive to the department’s modernization goals. For example, by definition, a unit cannot be fully ready if it is in the process of training on a new platform. Moreover, readiness is intended to be built and then deliberately and thoughtfully expended as the nation requires. Balancing that expenditure with the slow build of recapitalization and modernization is where true strategic readiness lies.
A Strategic Readiness Framework
To achieve that crucial balance, we have made significant strides to develop and implement the strategic readiness framework: a flexible and mutually reinforcing set of tools, policies and assessments that allow us to understand how close or far we are from achieving our objectives. The ultimate goal of this framework is to ensure the decisions our leaders make are data- and risk-informed so they understand the tradeoffs necessary to choose one course of action over another.
At the center of the framework is an effort to define and expand the way the department measures and assesses strategic readiness. We measure readiness today based on how the joint force is organized at the unit level. Yet there is more to warfighting than the unit. Does the department have the basing, the equipment, and the talent pipeline to shape the force of the future? Strategic readiness is not the totality of the joint force’s unit readiness; it is a holistic view of the factors — including operational readiness — that influence our ability to fight across time and threats.
The department’s efforts to create a strategic readiness framework and formalize a standardized, repeatable process to better assess a variety of yet unmeasured readiness metrics are incredibly important to properly shape and posture the joint force. Our goal is neither semantic changes nor short-lived reforms. We are striving for a common understanding of the impacts of all our readiness-related decisions. The strategic readiness framework is a dynamic, resilient approach that forces the department to integrate across our decision-making processes to clearly articulate our goals, take account of the risks we’re incurring in our decisions and understand how close or far we are from achieving those goals. This approach will not completely eliminate problems or provide total certainty about the future. However, when applied, the strategic readiness framework will help to reduce blind spots and ensure that — even if there is disagreement — the military is basing assessments on a common, consistent set of data sources and analytic methods.
By linking the department’s many major processes, such as those that govern force management, budget formulation and review and the provision of security assistance to Ukraine, we intend to illuminate the details of problems with better clarity. This approach will inevitably provide a better understanding of the long-term impact of senior leader decisions for military readiness. Later this summer, the department, led by the undersecretary for personnel and readiness, will conduct its inaugural strategic readiness assessment. This assessment is designed to engender transparency across the Department of Defense and aid senior leader decision-making. But organizations across the Department of Defense already produce hundreds of analytical products every year to address our most pressing problems.
The Value of Another Assessment
Even our most insightful assessments are generally limited to specific audiences or focus on particular processes and, due to differing timelines, governance structures and organizational equities, are not meaningfully linked to one another. Further, fewer still inform the department’s larger task of providing resource-informed guidance to the military services to develop a joint force capable of meeting the National Defense Strategy‘s objectives or measure whether the actions taken in response to that guidance yielded strategic fruit. The annual strategic readiness assessment will integrate existing analytical efforts through the prism of the ten dimensions of strategic readiness: sustainment, modernization, allies and partners, business systems and organizational effectiveness, human capital, global posture, force structure, resilience, operational readiness and mobilization. The assessment will then not only identify the progress made toward the department’s objectives in each of those dimensions and across the processes that govern them but also recommend levers the secretary of defense can use to bring us closer to our strategic readiness goals.
Such integration of assessments and processes also directly supports our ability to provide effective oversight of readiness-related decisions. Caitlin Lee argued in these pages for the need for transparency and oversight to help instill strategic discipline in the department’s Global Force Management process. We agree that disciplined decision-making is paramount to more efficiently using our forces in the present while modernizing for the future and Global Force Management is only one of many processes that influence the readiness of the department. The department therefore must be able to broaden the context of a single decision and consider it among other related decisions made in a range of processes to determine strategic readiness impacts.
For example, a combatant commander submits a request for additional fighter aircraft support in their area of responsibility for the next six months in response to an emerging crisis. The secretary of defense is presented with courses of action to meet this request for forces. He then decides to extend the deployment of a Marine Corps F/A-18 squadron already deployed to that combatant command. Currently, the department can provide the secretary of defense with an analysis of the impacts to future fighter squadron availability. And for the first time, we can also capture the enterprise-wide impacts around sustainment, recruiting and retention, and fighter recapitalization writ large.
For this type of analysis, our two teams are developing the Readiness Decision Impact Model. This predictive analytics framework brings together and analyzes many extant, but previously disparate, readiness data streams. In the F/A-18 example, the model will allow the department to look deeper into the consequences of the extension, such as the impact on future readiness or the Marine Corps’ plan to recapitalize fourth-generation fighters (F/A-18s) with F-35s or whether the extension would cause pilots or maintainers to delay previously planned F-35 conversion training. Our analysis might also find that this decision will lead to a decrease in fighter squadron availability for global taskings two years into the future. The model also predicts the unit will incur a delay in its planned conversion to F-35s, which would cause the Marine Corps to significantly adjust its F-35 training and basing plan. As the model evolves, these kinds of data will lead to a broader picture of our readiness in the form of being able to see the resulting effects on joint force fighter readiness for several years into the future.
In the same way that we must train in the way we fight, we must model in the way we make decisions. By incorporating each military service’s planned supply of ready forces into one coherent model-of-models, the Readiness Decision Impact Model will enable defense leaders at all levels to visualize and compare the impacts of deviating from those plans. In this scenario, we might be able to see that deploying a Navy fighter squadron incurs fewer detrimental impacts to readiness than other comparable units from another service. This modeling effort can also aid us in uncovering previously hidden readiness impacts, such as the consequences of pulling personnel or equipment from less-ready units to make other units deployable faster. This information might not change the decision, but we will be armed with full knowledge of potential consequences and clarity on what can be done to start mitigating these impacts going forward.
Of course, none of these tools is a panacea for our readiness challenges. We must have the discipline to look across all aspects and dimensions of strategic readiness and acknowledge impacts our decisions have across the department. While the Readiness Decision Impact Model offers a powerful predictive capability, we also know that human-centered judgment and analysis of past and current readiness-related decisions and initiatives are necessary to ensure we are shaping and posturing the force to meet the challenges of the future. Further, central to every aspect of the strategic readiness framework is agility. We know that our first strategic readiness assessment won’t be perfect — but we didn’t design it to be. Almost as important as the assessment of our ability to meet our strategic objectives is the identification of gaps in our assessments that highlight where additional exploration and understanding are required. Similarly, full operating capability of the Readiness Decision Impact Model is not mission accomplished. We will continue to refine the scope of predictive analysis that the Readiness Decision Impact Model can provide as we develop new models and ingest additional metrics. The department cannot wait for a gold-plated solution and, as such, we’ve designed the strategic readiness framework so that it can adapt and evolve as we learn more and as the environment changes.
Call to Action
The work is far from easy. Changing culture never is, particularly in an organization so large and so culturally rooted as the Department of Defense. This is why, despite widespread agreement that these changes must happen, they never have. The department has accomplished much over the past two years in shifting to a strategic readiness approach — and we see more progress on the horizon. As our policies are formalized and our assessments are tested, we move closer to implementing a holistic, analytic, and rigorous means to address the ensuing impacts of decisions on our near- and long-term readiness and across our strategic objectives. By achieving decision advantage over our adversaries, we plan to outpace their ability to act now and in the future.
However, decision advantage is not decision certainty. Our tools should provide us clarity, improving what we know and challenging things that we think we know, but we can’t rely on them entirely. We still must develop the analysis and judgment that are central tenets of the department’s military and civilian talent management models. Decision-making is an art, not a science. We rely on the science to inform the art. We can only find balance through the risk-informed and clear-eyed decisions of our senior leaders. We must arm our senior leaders with a better understanding of the risk incurred tomorrow by decisions made today so our next steps can be more precise, deliberate, and ultimately successful in posturing ourselves to win.
The development of a strategic readiness framework is not the sole answer to striking the balance between readiness today and the ability to modernize the joint force. The next step will be creating the long-needed demand signal by which we design the joint force of the future. Without that marker, we cannot fully understand how close — or how far — we are from being strategically ready.
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Kimberly Jackson is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Readiness.
Gen. David Berger is the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Kimberly Jackson · June 12, 2023
15. How Wars Don’t End
Excerpts:
Losers do not easily accept defeat.
In 1914, few expected the stalemate, the scale of the destruction, the spread of the fighting from Europe to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, or the damage to Europe’s societies. When the guns finally fell silent, they did so in a very different Europe. Three empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia—were in chaos, and the Ottoman Empire was about to break apart. The balance of power had shifted with a weakened British Empire and a rising United States and Japan. Will the war in Ukraine bring similarly large shifts, with a damaged Russia and an increasingly powerful and assertive China?
Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister in 1919, once said that making peace is harder than waging war. We may well be about to rediscover the truth of his words. Even if the war in Ukraine can reach something like an ending, building peace in its wake will be a formidable challenge. Losers do not easily accept defeat, and victors find it hard to be magnanimous. The Treaty of Versailles was never as punitive as Germany claimed, and many of the treaty’s clauses were never enforced. But the Europe of the 1920s would have been a happier place if the Allies had not tried to extract high reparations from Germany and had welcomed it back into the community of nations sooner.
History can offer more encouraging examples. In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. Marshall Plan helped rebuild the countries of western Europe into flourishing economies and, equally important, stable democracies. In what would have seemed extraordinary in 1945, West Germany and Italy, admittedly under the threat of the Cold War, were allowed to join NATO and became core members of the transatlantic alliance. Even former enemies can be transformed into close partners.
The fate of the Axis powers after World War II offers at least hope that the Russia of today may one day be as distant a memory as is the Germany of 1945. For Ukraine, there is the promise of better days if the war can be wound down favorably for it, with the country recovering much of its lost eastern territories and its Black Sea coast, as well as being admitted to the EU. But if that does not happen and the West does not make a sustained effort to help Ukraine rebuild—and if Western leaders are determined to treat Russia as a permanent pariah—then the future for both countries will be one of misery, political instability, and revanchism.
How Wars Don’t End
Ukraine, Russia, and the Lessons of World War I
June 12, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by War: How Conflict Shaped Us · June 12, 2023
On February 24, 2022, the great Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov and his wife were awakened in their home in Kyiv by the sound of Russian missiles. At first, he could not believe what was happening. “You have to get used psychologically to the idea that war has begun,” he wrote. Many observers of the invasion felt and continue to feel that sense of disbelief. They were confounded by Russia’s open and massive assault and amazed at Ukraine’s dogged and successful resistance. Who, in those first days of the war, as the Russian columns advanced, would have predicted that the two sides would still be fighting well over a year later? With so many more weapons and resources and so much more manpower to draw on, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Russia would crush Ukraine and seize its main cities in a matter of days.
Yet well into its second year, the war goes on, and in a very different way than expected. An invasion of Ukraine, many assumed, would involve rapid advances and decisive battles. There has been some of that, including Ukraine’s dramatic counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in the late summer of 2022. But by early May, despite talk of a major Ukrainian offensive, the war had long since become a grinding conflict along increasingly fortified battle lines. Indeed, the scenes coming from eastern Ukraine—soldiers knee-deep in mud, the two sides facing each other from trenches and ruined buildings across a wasteland churned up by shells—could be from the western front in 1916 or Stalingrad in 1942.
Before the Russian invasion, many assumed that wars among major twenty-first-century powers, if they happened at all, would not be like earlier ones. They would be fought using a new generation of advanced technologies, including autonomous weapons systems. They would play out in space and cyberspace; boots on the ground would probably not matter much. Instead, the West has had to come to terms with another state-to-state war on European soil, fought by large armies over many square miles of territory. And that is only one of many ways that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine harks back to the two world wars. Like those earlier wars, it was fueled by nationalism and unrealistic assumptions about how easy it would be to overwhelm the enemy. The fighting has taken place in civilian areas as much as on the battlefield, laying waste to towns and villages and sending populations fleeing. It has consumed vast resources, and the governments involved have been forced to use conscripts and, in the case of Russia, mercenaries. The conflict has led to a search for new and more deadly weapons and carries the potential for dangerous escalation. It is also drawing in many other countries.
The experience of an earlier great war in Europe—we know it as World War I—should remind us of the dreadful costs of a prolonged and bitter armed conflict. And like today, that war was widely expected to be short and decisive. Yet the world, and Ukraine, now face disquieting questions. How long will Russia persist with its campaign, even though its hopes of celebrating victory continue to recede? What greater damage and horrors will be inflicted on Ukraine and its people? And when can those countries most affected by the conflict, from Ukraine’s neighbors to the wider membership of NATO, stop worrying that the war will spill outside Ukraine’s borders? But the past also offers an even darker warning—this time, for the future, when the war in Ukraine finally comes to an end, as all wars do. Ukraine and its supporters may well hope for an overwhelming victory and the fall of the Putin regime. Yet if Russia is left in turmoil, bitter and isolated, with many of its leaders and people blaming others for its failures, as so many Germans did in those interwar decades, then the end of one war could simply lay the groundwork for another.
SARAJEVO SYNDROME
In the spring of 1914, few thought that a land war between major European powers was possible. European states, so their inhabitants complacently assumed, were too advanced, too economically integrated—too “civilized,” in the language of the time—to resort to armed conflict with each other. Wars still took place on the periphery of Europe, in the Balkans notably or in colonial territories, where Europeans fought against less powerful peoples—but not, it was thought, on the continent itself.
Much the same held true in the early weeks of 2022. Leaders and policymakers and their publics in the West tended to view warfare as something that happened elsewhere, whether in the form of insurrections against unpopular governments or in the seemingly endless conflicts in failed states. True, there were concerns about major-power conflict when, say, China and India clashed along their common border or when China and the United States traded barbs over the fate of Taiwan. But to those in the more fortunate parts of the world—the Americas, Europe, much of Asia and the Pacific—wars were a thing of the past or far away.
In 1914 and 2022 alike, those who assumed war wasn’t possible were wrong. In 1914, there were dangerous and unresolved tensions among the European powers, as well as a new arms race and regional crises, which had led to talk of war. Similarly, in the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow had made clear its grievances with the West, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had given many indications of his intentions. Rather than rely on assumptions about the unlikelihood of a full-scale war, Western leaders who doubted the prospect of a Russian invasion should have paid more attention to his rhetoric about Ukraine. The title of the lengthy essay Putin published in 2021 said it all: “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Not only was Ukraine the birthplace of Russia itself, he argued, but its peoples have always been Russian. In his view, malign outside forces—Austria-Hungary before World War I and the European Union today—had tried to divide Russia from its rightful patrimony.
Putin also echoed early-twentieth-century leaders in concluding that war was a reasonable option. Following a Serbian nationalist’s assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, the rulers of Austria-Hungary quickly convinced themselves that they had to destroy Serbia, even if it meant a war with Serbia’s protector, Russia. Tsar Nicholas II was still smarting from the humiliation he had been dealt when Austria-Hungry annexed Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire in 1908, and he vowed he would never back down again. German Kaiser Wilhelm II, commanding the world’s most powerful army, was afraid of appearing cowardly. Each of these leaders, in different ways, felt that a quick and decisive war offered the best way to reinvigorate their countries. Similarly, Putin resented Moscow’s loss of power after the Cold War and was convinced he would quickly overwhelm Ukraine. And he confronted leaders in Europe and the United States who had their minds on other things, just as a century earlier, when the crisis erupted on the continent, the British government was preoccupied with trouble in Ireland.
A Ukrainian soldier in a trench in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, May 2023
Serhii Nuzhnenko / Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty / Reuters
Equally dangerous was the aggressors’ assumption that a war would be short and decisive. In 1914, the major powers had only offensive war plans, predicated on quick victories. Germany’s notorious Schlieffen Plan imagined a two-front war against France and its ally Russia. The German army would fight a holding action in the east, where Germany and Russia then shared a common border. And Germany would launch a massive attack in the West, swooping down through Belgium and northern France to encircle Paris—all within six weeks, at which point, the Germans assumed, France would surrender, and Russia would sue for peace. In 2022, Putin made much the same mistake. So convinced was he of Russia’s ability to rapidly conquer Ukraine that he had a puppet government in waiting and ordered his soldiers to bring along their dress uniforms for a victory parade. And like imperial Germany a century earlier, Russia paid little heed to the potentially catastrophic costs if things did not go as planned.
Leaders with the power to take their countries into war—or hold them back—can rarely be considered mere machines tabulating costs and benefits. If Putin had made the proper calculations at the beginning, he would probably not have invaded Ukraine, or at least he would have tried to extricate Russian forces as soon as it became clear that he would not get the rapid, cheap conquest he expected. Emotions—resentment, pride, fear—can influence decisions great and small, and as 1914 showed, so can the experiences of those making the decisions. Like Nicholas, Putin remembered a humiliation. As a young KGB officer, he had witnessed firsthand the Soviet empire’s retreat from East Germany and then the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, and he saw the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU—both of which had started under his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—as an indignity and a threat. The West downplayed Russia’s fears and largely ignored the blows to its national pride.
In 1914, Europe’s elites shared a common culture, often spoke the same languages, and were connected by ties of friendship and marriage. Yet they failed to grasp the strength of nationalism, the growing antipathies between often neighboring peoples, and the way their ruling classes and intellectuals were abusing history to claim that, for example, the Germans and the French were hereditary enemies. Today, for Putin and the many Russians who see things the way he does, the West, however defined, is the enemy and always has been. Ukraine was being seduced by Western materialism and decadence and needed to be saved and restored to its proper family. And another motive was in play: if liberalism and democracy took root in Ukraine, as appeared to be happening, those dangerous forces might start to infect Russian society, too. Before the invasion, few in the West understood the extent to which Putin saw Ukraine as central to Russia’s destiny.
One of the lessons of Russia’s war in Ukraine is that Western strategists need to pay more attention to how leaders elsewhere see their own countries and histories. For example, invading Taiwan would carry all sorts of risks for China. But the Chinese may be prepared to take them. Their leader, Xi Jinping, has made it clear that he views the island and its people as part of the Chinese nation and wants “reunification” to be part of his legacy. That view and that desire must factor heavily into Xi’s decision-making.
THE FAST-WAR FALLACY
As World War I indelibly demonstrated, wars rarely go as planned. Military strategists were aware of the growing importance of trench warfare and rapid-firing artillery, yet they failed to see the consequences. They were unprepared for what quickly became static frontlines, in which the opposing sides carried out massive exchanges of artillery and machine-gun fire from fortified trenches—tactics that led to very high casualty rates with minimal advances. A war that was meant to be over in months ground on for more than four years and cost far more in human lives and economic resources than anyone had imagined at the outset.
Although the war in Ukraine is only in its second year, it, too, has unfolded, for months-long stretches, in a situation of hardening frontlines with very high human costs. Such a reality does not preclude the possibility of significant new operations by either side and consequent shifts in momentum. Well over a year into the war, advances are likely to come at a much higher price. Ground that has been fought over, as the generals learned in World War I, is more difficult to move across. And both sides have used the winter months to prepare their defenses. Although such figures must be treated with caution, Western intelligence agencies have estimated that during some of the worst fighting, Russia has suffered an average of more than 800 killed and wounded per day, and Ukrainian officials have acknowledged peaks of between 200 and 500 Ukrainian casualties per day. Russia has already lost more soldiers in this war than in its ten years of fighting in Afghanistan.
The right kind of military preparations can matter more than overall firepower. In the early twentieth century, the British and German navies devoted enormous resources to building fleets of Dreadnought battleships, just as their counterparts today have sought aircraft carriers. But new and sometimes cheap technologies, such as mines a century ago and drones today, can render these huge war machines obsolete. In World War I, British and German battleships often remained in port because mines and submarines posed too great a hazard. In the current war, Ukraine has sunk the heavily armed flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with two relatively low-tech antiship missiles, blown apart hundreds of Russian tanks by drones and artillery shells, and hamstrung Russia’s supposedly superior air force with its air defenses.
Leaders are rarely mere machines tabulating the costs and benefits of war.
The war in Ukraine has also resurfaced the age-old problem of insufficient or misdirected defense spending. Before 1914, the British kept their army small and underfunded and were slow to introduce new technologies such as the machine gun. In the run-up to World War II, the United Kingdom and France were late to rearm, creating a disadvantage that helped convince their leaders to try to appease Hitler. Thus, the two countries did little to resist Germany’s takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia, giving the Nazis an even stronger position in the heart of Europe. Similarly unprepared, European leaders did little to respond to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his undeclared war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. That and the fact that the Ukrainian armed forces, then still modeled on the old hierarchical Soviet model and underequipped and poorly trained, had performed badly in 2014, were key parts of the context in which Russia decided to invade in 2022.
No less than in the past, the ability to keep society functioning and the war machine going can make the difference between victory and defeat. At the outbreak of World War I, armies on both sides found that in a matter of weeks, they were exhausting stocks of ammunition meant to last for months or more. The belligerents had to mobilize their societies to an extraordinary degree to ensure that they could keep fighting. So great was the strain on Russia that it brought about the collapse of the old regime in 1917, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, and a brutal and destructive civil war. In today’s war, Ukrainian society has met the extraordinary challenges and hardships imposed on it and, by many indications, is more united than ever. But it is unclear how long the country can hold together as its infrastructure is steadily destroyed and more of its people flee abroad. More immediately, Ukraine may struggle to secure enough ammunition and other equipment, such as armored vehicles, to carry on, especially as both sides step up their fighting during the warmer months.
By the spring of 2023, Russia had already upped its defense production and was obtaining weapons from a number of other countries, including Iran and North Korea. Yet according to multiple reports and leaked intelligence documents, the Western powers—led by the United States, on which Ukraine depends—have been painfully slow to ramp up their delivery of weapons and materiel, leaving Kyiv with critical shortages. Much will depend on whether the West will continue to increase its support. Putin’s Russia faces severe strains of its own, with cracks beginning to appear among the Russian elite and as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians, especially men of military age, leave the country. Will Russia hang together as the Soviet Union did in World War II? Or will the years to come produce a repeat of 1917?
PUTIN’S VERDUN
The longer a conflict lasts, the more important allies and resources become. In both world wars, Germany and its allies had some early successes, yet as the fight wore on, the opposing coalition won the economic war as well as the one on the battlefield. In each case, the United Kingdom could rely on its overseas empire for wealth and raw materials, and later on, the United States became, as President Franklin Roosevelt put it in World War II, the “arsenal of democracy” and ultimately a full military partner. That preponderance of resources and manpower was critical in bringing about Allied victories.
At the time of Putin’s 2022 invasion, Russia appeared to have a significant advantage over Ukraine, including a far more powerful military and more of everything that could be counted, from tanks to troops. But as the war has continued, Ukraine’s allies have proved more important than Russia’s might. Indeed, for all the bravery and skill of Ukraine’s armed forces, Kyiv could not have endured as long as it has without the extraordinary flow of arms and money from NATO countries. Wars are won or lost as much by access to resources or by attrition of the enemy’s resources as by the skill of each side’s commanders and the bravery of their combatants. And the publics of each belligerent nation must be sustained in their hopes of winning, and such persuasion can come at great cost.
One of the hallmarks of the two world wars was the enormous symbolic importance given to particular towns or regions—even if the costs of defending or capturing them seem to defy reason. Hitler wasted some of his best forces and equipment at Stalingrad because he refused to retreat. Not all the Pacific islands that American forces struggled to capture from Japan had great strategic significance. Consider Iwo Jima, in which the United States suffered more than 26,000 casualties in just 36 days, incurring some of the highest single-battle losses in Marine Corps history: the victory gave the Americans little more than a landing strip of debatable strategic value. And then there was Verdun in World War I. That fortress near France’s border with Germany had some strategic significance, but its historical symbolism is what made it important to Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German general staff. If the French could be defeated at a place so intertwined with French history, he felt, it would weaken their will to keep fighting. And even if they chose to defend it, they would take such losses that, as Falkenhayn put it, he would “bleed France white.” It was a challenge the French understood and accepted.
The offensive started with a massive German attack in February 1916. When Falkenhayn’s initial plan to seize all the hills around Verdun failed, however, the Germans found themselves committed to a devastating battle they were unable to win. At the same time, they could not withdraw from locations they had already taken, including the outlying French fortress of Douaumont: the gains had cost too many German lives, and German leaders had told the public that Douaumont was the key to the larger campaign. The battle of Verdun came to a close ten months later with around 143,000 German and 162,000 French dead and some 750,000 total casualties. In the end, the French had recaptured a large part of the territory the Germans had managed to seize, though the war itself would continue for nearly two more years.
Destroyed buildings in Chasiv Yar, Ukraine, April 2023
Violeta Santos Moura / Reuters
The war in Ukraine has produced its own senseless battles of this kind. Consider the Russian siege of Bakhmut, a largely ruined town in the east with little apparent strategic significance. After more than eight months of fighting, both sides had expended more human and military resources than in any other battle of the war. According to U.S. intelligence estimates, between December and the beginning of May alone, Russia suffered 100,000 casualties at Bakhmut, including more than 20,000 killed. Yet for Moscow, the battle for Bakhmut was a chance for a much-needed victory. For Kyiv, the town’s defense had become a symbol of Ukrainians’ determination to defend their land at any cost. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, has himself made the comparison to Verdun.
But the prospect of more Verduns is not the only threat posed by a prolonged war in Ukraine. Of even greater concern is the possibility that it could draw in other powers and become ever more widespread and destructive. It is worth recalling that World War I started as a local confrontation in the Balkans between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Within five weeks, it had become a general European war because the other great powers chose to intervene, acting, so they believed, in their own interests. Then, at each successive stage, other powers steadily followed: Japan in the late summer of 1914, Bulgaria and Italy in 1915, Romania in 1916, and China, Greece, and the United States in 1917. Although Ukraine’s many friends have not yet crossed the line of becoming actual combatants, they are more and more closely involved, supplying, for example, intelligence and logistical support, in addition to more and more potent and sophisticated weapons. And as they increase the quality and quantity of their support, that in turn increases the risk that Russia will choose to escalate, possibly attacking neighboring countries such as Poland or the Baltic states. A further risk is that China could begin backing Russia more actively, sending lethal assistance and thereby raising the chances of a confrontation between Beijing and Washington.
As wars continue, ways of fighting and types of weapons that had been unthinkable at the start often become acceptable. Poison gas was outlawed in the 1899 Hague Convention, but that did not stop Germany from using it starting in 1915, with the Allies following suit by the final year of the war. In 1939, the United Kingdom held back from bombing German military targets, partly from fear of retaliation but also for ethical and legal considerations. A year later, it adopted a policy on unrestricted air war, even if that meant civilian casualties. And finally, with the Royal Air Force raids over German cities in the later stages of the war, civilians themselves became primary targets in what had become an effort to break enemy morale.
Russia has already violated international laws and norms on numerous occasions in Ukraine, and the small town of Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv has become synonymous with war crimes. Worryingly, Russia has also threatened to break the taboo on the first use of nuclear weapons and has the capability to carry out chemical and biological warfare. It is difficult to speculate how Ukraine or its friends might react if Russia uses these weapons. But if Putin does use them and gets away with it, other countries ruled by authoritarian leaders would be tempted to follow his example.
THE WAR AFTER THE WAR
Even prolonged wars eventually end, sometimes when one belligerent can no longer fight, and sometimes through negotiation. The latter outcome, however, is only possible when both sides are prepared to talk and compromise. Some historians of World War II have argued that the Allies, with their insistence on an unconditional German surrender, gave Nazi Germany no choice but to fight to the bitter end. Yet there is no evidence that Hitler was ever prepared to negotiate seriously. In 1945, he killed himself rather than admit defeat, even though his cities lay in ruins, his armed forces were finished, and the Allied armies were rapidly advancing on Berlin. Preparing the Japanese public to fight to the death in the event of an American invasion, the militarists controlling Japan were so short of weapons that they began issuing sharpened bamboo sticks. It was only after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Japan offered an unconditional surrender.
It is possible that Ukraine and Russia, perhaps under pressure from China and the United States, might one day agree to talk about ending the war. Timing can be critical. In World War I, although various peace initiatives were floated—for example, by the pope and by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson—both sides continued to cling to the hope of military victory. Only in the summer of 1918, when the German high command recognized it was losing, did Germany ask for an armistice. But it is hard to imagine what such a settlement in Ukraine would look like, and as the fighting and losses on both sides mount and more reports of Russia’s atrocities come to light, the accumulated hatred and bitterness will pose enormous obstacles to any concessions from either side.
Inevitably, in a long war, the objectives of both sides evolve. In World War I, Germany’s war aims expanded to include a compliant—and perhaps annexed—Belgium in the West and an empire, economic or more formal, that would include the Baltic states and Ukraine. France, which had started the war wanting to reclaim its lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, by 1918 was contemplating annexing all German territory west of the Rhine River. And France and the United Kingdom quarreled over who would scoop up the largest parts of the defeated Ottoman Empire.
In the current struggle, Russia seems to have given up on taking Kyiv for now but appears set on absorbing as much of Ukraine as it can and reducing what is left to an impoverished, landlocked state. Ironically, Russia, which began the war proclaiming that its goal was the liberation of the innocent Ukrainians from the allegedly drug-addled, fascist government of Zelensky, now talks about ordinary Ukrainians as traitors. In turn, the Ukrainian government, which at first aimed simply to withstand the Russian assault and defend its land, has declared its intent to push Russia out of all of Ukraine, including Crimea, as well as the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk occupied by Russia since 2014. As long as both sides continue to hope for something they can call victory, getting them to the negotiating table will be difficult, and the growing gap between their war aims will make reaching a settlement even harder.
Losers do not easily accept defeat.
In 1914, few expected the stalemate, the scale of the destruction, the spread of the fighting from Europe to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, or the damage to Europe’s societies. When the guns finally fell silent, they did so in a very different Europe. Three empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia—were in chaos, and the Ottoman Empire was about to break apart. The balance of power had shifted with a weakened British Empire and a rising United States and Japan. Will the war in Ukraine bring similarly large shifts, with a damaged Russia and an increasingly powerful and assertive China?
Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister in 1919, once said that making peace is harder than waging war. We may well be about to rediscover the truth of his words. Even if the war in Ukraine can reach something like an ending, building peace in its wake will be a formidable challenge. Losers do not easily accept defeat, and victors find it hard to be magnanimous. The Treaty of Versailles was never as punitive as Germany claimed, and many of the treaty’s clauses were never enforced. But the Europe of the 1920s would have been a happier place if the Allies had not tried to extract high reparations from Germany and had welcomed it back into the community of nations sooner.
History can offer more encouraging examples. In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. Marshall Plan helped rebuild the countries of western Europe into flourishing economies and, equally important, stable democracies. In what would have seemed extraordinary in 1945, West Germany and Italy, admittedly under the threat of the Cold War, were allowed to join NATO and became core members of the transatlantic alliance. Even former enemies can be transformed into close partners.
The fate of the Axis powers after World War II offers at least hope that the Russia of today may one day be as distant a memory as is the Germany of 1945. For Ukraine, there is the promise of better days if the war can be wound down favorably for it, with the country recovering much of its lost eastern territories and its Black Sea coast, as well as being admitted to the EU. But if that does not happen and the West does not make a sustained effort to help Ukraine rebuild—and if Western leaders are determined to treat Russia as a permanent pariah—then the future for both countries will be one of misery, political instability, and revanchism.
Foreign Affairs · by War: How Conflict Shaped Us · June 12, 2023
16. American Sea Power in the Asia-Pacific
Excerpts:
In the conclusion of his book, Lehman warned that the post-Cold War naval decline invited today’s challenges by China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The Biden administration appears oblivious to this fact as evidenced by its proposed 2024 naval budget which seeks to “enact sharp cuts to the U.S. Navy,” forcing it to prematurely retire nearly a dozen ships and “take offline critical missile systems that serve as a primary deterrent to Chinese aggression,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. The proposed budget also contains no new amphibious ships for the Marines, which requested 31 new ships. Perhaps this has something to do with our current Navy Secretary who has stated that climate change is the top priority for the U.S. Navy.
Lehman wrote in 2018 that we have forgotten the lessons of history. “States that wish to wield global influence maintain global navies, whereas states that abandon their focus in the seas . . . see their power decline and their hopes fade.” He also quoted Churchill from 1935: “Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong--these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.” Sadly, they are being repeated today.
American Sea Power in the Asia-Pacific
Francis Sempa
June 10, 2023
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/06/10/american_sea_power_in_the_asia-pacific_939895.html
By
War between the United States and China in the western Pacific is a real possibility in the next several years. Although both sides have conducted military exercises and “war games” in the region, predicting the course and outcome of such a war is problematic. Military strategists and war planners, even armed as they are with the latest information technologies and precision weapons, have yet to overcome Clausewitzian “friction” and the Luttwakian “paradoxical logic” of strategy. Strategies and plans often fail to survive contact with the enemy. What Bismarck said about statesmen is also true of generals and admirals: They “cannot control the current of events [but] can only float with them and steer.”
In any future U.S. war with China, sea power will play a major role in the fighting. In the Asia-Pacific, China has the obvious advantages of geographical proximity to the arena of conflict and has been assiduously expanding its naval power to achieve regional naval superiority--at least in numbers of warships. As Sam Tangredi of the U.S. Naval War College has noted, numbers matter, and by the end of the decade if current trends continue China’s PLA Navy (PLAN) may reach a total of 460 warships, while the U.S. fleet may decrease to 260 warships. Tangredi contends that those who claim America’s technological advantages will tip the balance in war against China are ignoring history which shows that “[i]n a naval struggle between near-peers, mass (numbers), and the ability to replace losses bests technological advantage.” “At a certain point of imbalance in mass,” Tangredi continues, “the larger naval force cannot be defeated.” Tangredi’s conclusion: “If the United States wants to retain global influence, maintain deterrence in multiple regions, and conduct combat operations against a near peer that is expanding its global military footprint, it needs a large number of naval platforms.”
Tangredi’s conclusion is based on history, which is the best teacher. He studied the outcomes of 28 wars that involved significant naval clashes, including the Peloponnesian Wars, the Punic Wars, Rome’s civil wars, Anglo-Spanish and Anglo-Dutch-French wars, the Seven Years’ War, the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, the Opium Wars, the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War. In all but three of the 28 naval clashes, the nation with superior numbers won.
Tangredi’s observations reaffirmed the broader study by the great British geopolitical writer Colin S. Gray in his book The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War. Gray studied 10 major conflicts from ancient times to the Cold War and concluded that “Great sea powers or maritime coalitions have either won or, occasionally, drawn every major war in modern history.” Gray urged Western policymakers to recognize that “[t]here is a historical pattern to the repeated success of great sea powers over great land powers that defies dismissal as mere chance.” His thesis was that “superior sea power generates a strategic leverage which enables wars to be won.”
The leverage of sea power has economic/logistical, geopolitical, and military elements. Throughout history, insular powers with superior navies and command of the sea—most recently Great Britain and the United States—have provided economic and logistical support to continental coalitions to defeat Eurasian-based powers (Louis XIV and Napoleonic France, Imperial and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union). Both Great Britain and the United States understood that, to be effective, superior sea power needed to translate into land power, and, later, air power. None of that leverage was possible without what Alfred Thayer Mahan called “command of the sea,” which can only be achieved by superior naval power.
Winston Churchill understood this when he served as First Lord of the Admiralty in both world wars of the 20th century. In The World Crisis and The Gathering Storm, Churchill wrote about the value of superior sea power to achieve victory over continental powers who sought Eurasian and global hegemony. Churchill looked to British history and saw that it was British sea power that enabled Marlborough’s armies and Britain’s continental allies to defeat Louis XIV’s forces; that enabled Wellington to bleed Napoleon’s forces in Spain and defeat Napoleon at Waterloo; and that enabled Britain to neutralize the German High Seas Fleet while sending British and imperial troops to France, the Balkans, and the Near East in the First World War. In the Second World War, Anglo-American sea power (and air power) enabled the Allies to transport troops and supplies to every theater of global war, while winning the Battle of the Atlantic and the island campaigns of the Central and Southwest Pacific.
War in the western Pacific, of course, may also involve other powers. Japan, Australia, and England might add their considerable naval forces to the U.S. side of the conflict, but Russia might also side with China. That would likely mean a Third World War whose consequences, including possible nuclear escalation, would be dire and unpredictable.
War with China is not inevitable. Hopefully, the new Cold War between the U.S. and China remains cold. But who wins that Cold War will likely be determined by sea power in its broadest sense. Geopolitically, the United States is an insular maritime power, with friendly and comparatively weak powers to its north and south on the North American continent. China is both a sea power and a land power in a part of Eurasia that contains hostile sea powers (Japan, Australia), potentially hostile land powers (India, Vietnam, South Korea), and another great power (Russia) that currently is aligned with China.
During the 1980s, U.S. Navy Secretary John Lehman translated sea power theory into policy by formulating and implementing a “Maritime Strategy” that played an essential role in America’s Cold War victory, which Lehman explained in his 2018 book Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea. Lehman served as President Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary from 1981 to 1986. He was a former Navy flier and an aid to Richard Allen and later Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration. Lehman read Thucydides and Gibbon, Mahan and Spykman, and studied geopolitics under the legendary Robert Strausz-Hupe, the author of Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power, The Balance of Tomorrow, and the founder of the foreign Policy Research Institute.
Lehman writes that he witnessed the decline of U.S. naval power ironically under the presidency of Naval Academy graduate Jimmy Carter. Lehman and like-minded national security strategists and political leaders (including Ronald Reagan) formed the Committee on the Present Danger that proposed a dramatic increase in military, and especially naval, power to meet the Soviet geopolitical challenge. As Navy Secretary, Lehman oversaw the building of a 600-ship navy and the formulation of the Maritime Strategy that was designed to place at risk important Soviet military assets. This was part of Reagan’s overall strategy of “rollback” or “liberation” that Reagan once explained simply as “We win, they lose.”
Lehman credits then Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Hayward with establishing a Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College which kept the Maritime Strategy “constantly evolving and incorporat[ed] the latest technology, lessons learned, and intelligence for the remainder of the Reagan administration.” U.S. and allied naval forces engaged in massive, offense-oriented naval exercises that provided operational training for the growing fleet and sent a message to Soviet leaders that U.S. naval capabilities and strategy could directly threaten their key military installations. According to Lehman, after a few of these annual exercises and the growth of the U.S. Navy, the Soviet General Staff warned Kremlin leaders that Soviet air and naval budgets would have to be trebled to adequately defend against U.S. and allied naval power. The Soviet economy, as Mikhail Gorbachev recognized, was not up to this task.
In the conclusion of his book, Lehman warned that the post-Cold War naval decline invited today’s challenges by China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The Biden administration appears oblivious to this fact as evidenced by its proposed 2024 naval budget which seeks to “enact sharp cuts to the U.S. Navy,” forcing it to prematurely retire nearly a dozen ships and “take offline critical missile systems that serve as a primary deterrent to Chinese aggression,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. The proposed budget also contains no new amphibious ships for the Marines, which requested 31 new ships. Perhaps this has something to do with our current Navy Secretary who has stated that climate change is the top priority for the U.S. Navy.
Lehman wrote in 2018 that we have forgotten the lessons of history. “States that wish to wield global influence maintain global navies, whereas states that abandon their focus in the seas . . . see their power decline and their hopes fade.” He also quoted Churchill from 1935: “Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong--these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.” Sadly, they are being repeated today.
Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.
17. Military service a major factor in extremist attacks, study finds
Excerpt:
The START study comes with recommendations for officials on how to address the issue. That includes better data collection by the Department of Defense on extremism, teaching civic education to recruits as part of military training and investing in programs to counter extremism in veterans. Researchers also called on the Department of Veterans Affairs and veterans networks to invest in programs to help veterans boost their socio-economic well being and build healthy social communities.
Military service a major factor in extremist attacks, study finds
A detailed look at three decades of extremist violence comes as the Department of Defense struggles to combat extremism in the ranks.
BY NICHOLAS SLAYTON | PUBLISHED JUN 11, 2023 7:39 PM EDT
taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · June 11, 2023
Military service “is the single strongest individual-level predictor” if someone will carry out or plan to carry out a mass casualty event, researchers have found.
That’s according to the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START. Researchers with START looked at cases of extremist violence from 1990-2022, examining ideologies, success rates and motivating factors. They found that extremists with military backgrounds were 2.41 times more likely to plan or carry out a mass casualty event — defined as killing or injuring four or more people — than anyone without military experience.
Service is the largest indicator, more so than mental health issues, previous criminal experience or age. Researchers found that 170 of the 451 people in the database who had military backgrounds and carried out or attempted to carry out extremist violence were listed as mass casualty perpetrators. The majority of cases, 73.5%, were linked to right-wing ideologies. Roughly 40% were linked to white supremacist or nativist views, which includes extremists with ties to groups like the Ku Klux Klan or Neo-Nazis. Only 15% was tied to Islamist extremism.
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START researchers also found that extremists with military backgrounds were more successful at carrying out mass casualty events, coming in at 9% of the overall plots; non-military extremists were only 5.2% successful. 78.2% of extremists who carried out these attacks did so six or more years after leaving the armed forces. It also found that 44.7% of mass casualty offenders had backgrounds in the U.S. Army, the highest plurality for a service branch.
“As our previous research on the link between extremism and the U.S. military shows, service members and veterans are not more likely to radicalize to the point of violence than members of the general population,” researchers wrote in the brief. “However, this research brief illustrates that when service members and veterans do radicalize, they are more likely to plan for, or commit, mass casualty crimes, thus having an outsized impact on public safety.”
The Department of Defense has previously said that many extremists groups encourage already radicalized members to enlist in the military in order to gain skills that could help their causes. Identifying and weeding out extremist recruits has been a challenge for the military, according to both the Pentagon and outside groups. Extremist groups also look to recruit veterans for their skills, specifically combat training.
Since 2020, there have been several attacks or foiled plots involving active-duty service members and veterans. Many have been linked to Neo-Nazi organizations as well as right-wing anti-government groups such as the Boogaloo movement.
The study comes only three weeks after the Department of Defense was failing to fulfill five out of six recommendations put forth by a Pentagon working group to combat extremism in the military. In the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, the department initiated a series of efforts to address extremism in the ranks, including a servicewide stand-down in March that year. A series of recommendations were released by the study group, but this May, CNN reported that the department had essentially given up on implementing them. Much of that failure to follow through on the recommendations came as a result of criticism from conservative pundits and lawmakers who said the military was “woke,” a claim leaders including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley have rejected.
The START study comes with recommendations for officials on how to address the issue. That includes better data collection by the Department of Defense on extremism, teaching civic education to recruits as part of military training and investing in programs to counter extremism in veterans. Researchers also called on the Department of Veterans Affairs and veterans networks to invest in programs to help veterans boost their socio-economic well being and build healthy social communities.
The latest on Task & Purpose
taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · June 11, 2023
18. How hero sister, 13, kept brothers, including BABY, alive for 40 days in Amazon jungle
Incredible and heartwarming. We need some good news.
How hero sister, 13, kept brothers, including BABY, alive for 40 days in Amazon jungle
Lesly, 13, used her "ancestral knowledge" and experience of looking after her young brothers, aged nine, four and 10 months old, to keep them alive in the Amazon rainforest, known to be one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet
ByRyan FaheyWorld News Reporter
- 09:14, 11 Jun 2023UPDATED09:15, 11 Jun 2023
Mirror · by Ryan Fahey · June 11, 2023
The heroic oldest sibling of four indigenous children who disappeared into the depths of the Amazon rainforest has shared the remarkable story of how she kept her three brothers alive for 40 days.
Lesly, who is just 13 herself, looked after the boys Soleiny, nine, Tien Noriel, four, and 10-month-old baby Cristin after their plane crashed into the Colombian jungle on May 1.
When the Cessna light aircraft plummeted on to the forest floor, their mum Magdalena Mucutui Valencia, the pilot and an indigenous leader were all killed, but the children miraculously survived.
On Friday, Colombia gave a sigh of relief as the anxiety that wracked the country for six weeks came to an end.
The Armed Forces confirmed they had found the kids and although they were starving, dehydrated and covered in insect bites, they were otherwise unharmed.
Lesly often took care of her brothers while her mum was out at work, so knew exactly how to look after them (
Image:
Colombian Presidency/AFP via Get)
The world was stunned at how a young group of children could have survived one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet for so long.
Their aunt has now given a clue as to what may have helped the youngsters survive in the jungle against the odds.
Speaking with the local Caracol news network, Damarys Mucutuy said that a "survival game" they used to play must have helped them live through the horror ordeal.
The daughter of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, speaks to hero girl Lesly, 13, who managed to keep her three young brothers alive for six weeks in the unforgiving Amazon rainforest (
Image:
Colombian Presidency/AFP via Get)
Damarys explained how that the two eldest children, Lesly and Soleiny, would play a game in which they would "set up like little camps".
And Lesly, 13, had knowledge of which "fruits she can't eat because there are many poisonous fruits in the forest".
"And she knew how to take care of a baby", added the aunt.
One of the boys unloaded from a plane. The kids were starving, dehydrated and covered in insect bites (
Image:
Mauricio Duenas Castaneda/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
When they found the children, the Colombian Army also surveyed the scene, finding hair ties strewn around on the jungle floor, suggesting that resourceful Lesly had used them to construct the shelters that kept them alive.
Fatima Valencia, the kid's grandma, said she was "very grateful" and thanked "mother earth" for "setting them free."
The BBC reported that Lesly often looked after the other three while their mum was at work, a key part of their survival.
One indigenous leader said Lesly relied on her "ancestral knowledge" to keep her family safe (
Image:
Mauricio Duenas Castaneda/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
"She gave them flour and cassava bread, any fruit in the bush, they know what they must consume," Ms Valencia said.
John Moreno, the leader of the Guanano indigenous group near where the family were from, said the youngsters were largely raised by their grandma.
Medics treat one of the youngsters as Colombian First Lady Veronica Alcocer visits their bedsides (
Image:
PRESIDENCY OF COLOMBIA/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
He added: 'They used what they learned in the community, relied on their ancestral knowledge in order to survive."
The children are being treated in the capital, Bogota, at a military hospital, where they have been visited by President Gustavo Petro.
Mirror · by Ryan Fahey · June 11, 2023
19. Reality wars: Deepfakes and national security
We have to get ready for this.
Reality wars: Deepfakes and national security
wbur.org · by Claire Donnelly
A prominent Kremlin critic says the Russian government invited him to a Zoom call that turned out to be a deepfake.
But what happens when governments start using deep fakes against each other?
"The U.S. government is cognizant that that senior leaders, political elected officials and the like, might have their images and likenesses manipulated," Jamil Jaffer, founder and executive director of the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, says.
"So, one would assume that we're looking into how to affect the views of foreign audiences. In fact, it would be stupid if we weren't doing it."
Today, On Point: 'The reality wars': Deepfakes and national security.
Guests
Hany Farid, professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s schools of information and electrical engineering and computer sciences. He specializes in digital forensics, generative AI and deepfakes.
founder and executive director of the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. Venture partner with Paladin Capital Group, which invests in dual-use national security technologies.
Also Featured
Bill Browder, head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign.
program manager for the Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which aims to develop technologies to detect and analyze deepfakes.
Transcript
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Bill Browder was in London watching helplessly. It was late 2008. His friend and lawyer, 37-year-old Sergei Magnitsky, had been arrested and thrown into Moscow's Butyrka prison.
BILL BROWDER: I mean, I can't even describe how upsetting it is to have somebody who works for you taken hostage because there's not a moment that you can feel happiness or relaxation or anything. Because you just know that while you're in your own bed, he's sleeping like a stone cot. While you're taking a shower, he's not allowed a shower, you know, while you're sitting in a warm room, he's sitting in a room nearly freezing to death.
CHAKRABARTI: This is Browder telling the story to the independent media company London Real. Up until 2005, Bill Browder had been a hedge fund manager who worked in Moscow and was among the largest private investors in all of Russia. But then his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky had found evidence implicating Russian officials in massive corruption, and also implicated them in having connections with the Russian mafia. Magnitsky was jailed, held for more than 350 days without trial and killed. Cause of death, blunt trauma to the head.
BROWDER: When he died, when they killed him. It was so far outside of my own expectations of the worst-case scenario. I couldn't even process that. It was just so horrible. Well, I processed it the only way I knew how. Which was to take responsibility, to go after the people that killed him.
CHAKRABARTI: Bill Browder pushed hard. He has constantly advocated for sanctions against Russia. And in 2012, he was instrumental in Congress's passing of the Magnitsky Act, which bars Russian human rights abusers from entering the United States. Browder is also one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's most forceful critics.
BROWDER: He is truly one of the most cynical, aggressive, evil dictators on the planet. He's a killer. And as a result of being his enemy and as a result of his homicidal tendencies, I've had to adjust my life very profoundly. I'm still here, which is a good thing.
CHAKRABARTI: As Bill Browder says, as a result of his constant criticism of Vladimir Putin, he has had to protect every aspect of his life, his physical safety, his financial safety, even his digital safety. Browder told us he's always on guard against any way in real life or online that Putin might get to him.
But he's also still criticizing the Russian regime, and most recently, he's been vocally supporting sanctions against Russia for its attack on Ukraine. So just a few weeks ago, Browder told us he wasn't surprised at all to get an email that seemed to come from former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, asking if Browder would schedule a call to talk about sanctions.
BROWDER: And so that seemed like a perfectly appropriate approach. The Ukrainians are very interested in sanctions against Russia. And so, I asked one of my team members to check it out, make sure it's legit, and then schedule it. I guess in the rush of things that were going on that week, this person didn't actually do anything other than call the number on the email. The person seemed very pleasant and reasonable. The call was scheduled, and I joined the call a little bit late.
I'm on like 10 minutes after it started because of some transportation issues, and apparently before I joined there was an individual who showed up on the screen saying, I'm the simultaneous translator. I'm going to be translating for former President Poroshenko. And there's an image of the Petro Poroshenko as I know him to look like. And he starts talking. It was odd because everybody else, as they were talking, you could see them talking.
And he was talking, and there was this weird delay, which I attributed to the simultaneous translation. It was as if you're watching some type of foreign film that was dubbed in. So, you know, the person's watching their lips move, it's not a correspondent with the words coming out of the mouth. Then it started getting a little odd. The Ukrainians, of course, are under fire, under attack by the Russians. And this fellow who portrayed himself as Petro Poroshenko started to ask the question, "Don't you think it would be better if we released some of the Russian oligarchs from sanctions if they were to give us a little bit of money?"
And it just seemed completely odd. And I gave the answer which I would give in any public setting. And I said, "No, I think the oligarchs should be punished to the full extent of the sanctions." And then he did something even stranger, which is he said, "Well, what do others think on this call?" And that's a very unusual thing. If it's sort of principal to principal, people don't usually ask the principal's aides what they think of the situation.
But my colleagues then chimed in and said various things, and I didn't think that it wasn't Poroshenko. I just thought, what an unimpressive guy. All these crazy and unhelpful ideas he's coming up with. No wonder he's no longer president. That was my first reaction. And then it got really weird. And as the call was coming to an end, he said, "I'd like to play the Ukrainian national anthem, and will you please put your hands on your heart?"
And again, we weren't convinced it wasn't Petro Poroshenko. And so, we all put our hands on our heart. Listening to the Ukrainian national anthem, I had some reaction that maybe this wasn't for real, but there he was this Petro Poroshenko guy. Then the final moment that I knew that this was a trick was when he put on some rap song, in Ukrainian, that I don't know what it said. And asked us to continue putting our hands on our hearts. And at that point, it was obvious that we had been tricked into some kind of deepfake.
Well, this was done by the Russians. Why would the Russians do this? Well, the Russians have been trying to discredit me for a long time, in every different possible way. And I think what they were hoping to do is to get me in some type of setting where I would say something differently than I had said publicly.
I've been under attack. Under death threat, under a kidnaping threat by the Russians since the Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012. And so the fact that they've actually penetrated my defenses is very worrying. The fact that we didn't pick it up is extremely worrying. And I think thankfully, I mean, in a certain way, this is a very cheap lesson. Because nobody was hurt, nobody was killed, nobody was kidnaped. You know, we all just looked a little stupid. And I'm glad they taught me this lesson because since then, we've dramatically heightened our vigilance and our security. Maybe we've just gotten too relaxed, but we aren't anymore.
CHAKRABARTI: Bill Browder, a prominent critic of the Russian government. Now, Browder also told us that he and his staff finally confirmed that the call was indeed a deepfake when they took a much closer look at the email that that message, supposedly from Poroshenko, where it came from. Turns out they traced the email back to a domain in Russia that had only recently been created.
So, Browder's experience raises the question once again about what happens when deepfakes move from the realm of saying a thing that a celebrity never said, and into the realm of governments using deepfakes against each other. Well, that's what we're talking about today. And joining us now is Hany Farid. He's a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information and Electrical Engineering. And he specializes in digital forensics, generative AI and deepfakes. Professor Farid, welcome to you.
HANY FARID: Good to be with you again, Meghna.
CHAKRABARTI: So how emblematic would you say Bill Browder's story is of the kinds of uses that we might see of deepfakes in the national security sphere?
FARID: First, that's a chilling story. I'm also not surprised to hear it. We have been seeing over the last five years the deepfake generative AI technology continue to improve in quality. And the democratization of the technology, that is, it's not just state sponsored actors, but it's anybody. And what's particularly chilling about this example is it's only fairly recently that we've seen live deepfakes. It's one thing to go to YouTube or TikTok and say, okay, somebody has offline created a deepfake.
But this is happening in real time now over a video call. And I think this is yet another problematic world we are entering where we can't believe what we read and see online. We can't believe the Zoom calls. We can't believe the phone calls. And the question you got to ask yourself is, "How do we get through the world? How do we get through the day?" And I think that is a really concerning aspect of deepfakes, is now everything is suspect. You got to know that on every call Bill Browder gets on, there's going to be this nagging suspicion of like, "Is this happening again?" And that's a tough world to enter into.
We have been seeing over the last five years the deepfake generated AI technology continue[s] to improve in quality.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Wow. So can you just tell me a little bit more about what's allowed in the past couple of years for the deepfakes to get so much better, so much more convincing?
FARID: Yeah, there's a couple of things going on with the deepfakes technology. So first of all, there's just a lot of people out there developing really powerful algorithms that are faster and create higher quality. So there's just a big body of literature that is both academic and in the private sector, we have more and more data. There's more and more images and videos of people that you want to create deepfakes of.
And of course, we have more and more computing power. Computing power is becoming more ubiquitous and easier to get a hold of. And so it's the natural evolution of almost every technology that we have seen over the last two or three decades. The technology gets better, it gets faster and it gets cheaper and it gets more ubiquitous. And the deepfakes are following that same basic trend.
CHAKRABARTI: And so, I mean, obviously, we've talked a lot about deepfakes in sort of the commercial and social media sphere, social media being the way that these things go viral, of course. But our focus today is on national security. So do we already have evidence beyond, you know, Browder's one experience that governments are perhaps using deepfakes as a means to undermine other countries in various ways?
FARID: This is not the first example that we have seen the Russians using deepfakes. We saw one in the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, where they had created a deepfake of President Zelenskyy saying, "We surrender, put down your weapons."
The mayor of Madrid, Vienna and Berlin, each separately, had a Zoom call, very much like Bill Browder's, where they thought they were talking to the mayor of Kyiv. And in fact, it was deepfakes. Our very own chairman of the Fed was on a phone call a few weeks ago with who he thought was President Zelenskyy. And it was not. It was a deepfake. So we are seeing this weaponization impacting global leaders around the world.
CHAKRABARTI: Today, we're talking about the use and threat of deepfakes when governments deploy them against each other, so the potential national security threats of deepfakes. And Professor Farid, just before the break, you had talked about an example of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his voice being deep faked. And I want to actually just walk folks more specifically through that example.
So this happened back in March of 2022, and it was apparently a video of Zelenskyy telling his soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender to Russia. The deepfake video in total is about a minute long, and it circulated on social media quite extensively. We're going to play the deepfake in just a second. But first, I wanted people to once again hear Vladimir Zelenskyy's real voice. Now we can confirm this is really him. ... Because you're about to hear Zelenskyy's speech, a moment from a speech when he stood before a joint session of the United States Congress in December of 2022. So here's what he sounds like, and this is Zelenskyy's real voice.
ZELENSKYY: Dear Americans, in all states, cities and communities, all those who value freedom and justice, who cherish it as strongly as we Ukrainians. In our cities, in each and every family, I hold my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart.
CHAKRABARTI: So once again, that's Vladimir Zelenskyy. In December of 2022, when he spoke before the United States Congress. So here's a really short clip of the deepfake video of Zelenskyy that appeared earlier in the year. It's in Ukrainian. So it's going to sound different from Zelenskyy speaking in English. But here's what that deepfake sounded like.
(CLIP OF ZELENSKYY DEEPFAKE)
CHAKRABARTI: So we just wanted to play only a few seconds of that. Professor Farid, does the technology exist right now to quickly be able to tell the difference?
FARID: Yeah, that's the right question to ask. First, let me mention that there are two ways of creating that fake. Three ways of creating fake audio. One, is you just have an impersonator, somebody who's just good in impersonating them. Two, is that you cloned the voice from just a few minutes of audio. So I can, for example, upload a few minutes of audio of you, Meghna. And I can clone your voice and then I can type, and then it will synthesize an audio of you saying what I want you to say. Let's consider that an offline process.
And there's also a real time voice cloning where, as I'm speaking with about a half a second delay, it will be converted into another person's voice. Your voice, president Zelenskyy's voice, whoever. And so those are the three threat vectors. And now the question you want to ask is, Can we detect it? And the answer is yes. But six months from now, who knows? This is very much an adversarial game. The technology is constantly changing. And so we build defenses. That's what we do here in my lab at UC Berkeley. And usually, we get 6 to 12 months of defense, and then a new technology comes out and we have to build another defense and then another defense.
And it's very much that cat and mouse game in an arms race. And it's very difficult because my starter gun goes off after my adversary has already released their offensive weapon. And so I'm always playing catch up by design. So it's a very hard task. But here's what's also hard. It's a big Internet. There are billions of uploads a day and we can't analyze every single piece of content. I can't be on a private call between Bill Browder and whomever he's speaking with. So even the defenses are not enough. They're necessary, but they're not enough to solve the problem in its entirety.
CHAKRABARTI: So, you know, a little bit later in the show, I'm going to return to this "What can we do?" question. Because as you noted, so much has changed in the past few years and so much will change even in the next six months that the cat and mouse game is almost infinite here. But I wanted to also take a moment to understand with greater clarity the kinds of uses for these deep fakes when it comes to national security. The wartime use is one of them, obviously. But we've seen other examples. For example, I believe there was an image or a video that was faked of the Pentagon recently that actually had an effect on the stock market. Can you tell us about that?
FARID: So this was just a couple of weeks ago. There was a not very good fake image purportedly showing the Pentagon being bombed. And it was absolutely AI generated. There was the telltale signs that we could see. That image was posted on Twitter on a verified account, so that blue checkmark. Thank you, Elon Musk. And went viral. It was retweeted by wait for it, RT, the Russian propaganda machine of the government. And the stock market dropped in a period of 2 minutes, half a trillion dollars. That's insane.
CHAKRABARTI: And we can directly link it back to that image?
FARID: Yeah. Yeah. The tick-tock, you can look at the timing of how the image went up, the reaction to the market. It plummeted. The image was debunked, the market rebounded. And the thing that's fascinating about it was it [was] not a particularly good deepfake. And it was a confluence of things. It was the fact that it was a verified account that looked like Bloomberg News, that it was retweeted by a number of different outlets and people move fast on social media. And so that's the other aspect of this, is before anybody thought about this problem, there was the sell off.
Now, look, everything rebounded. It was fine. But did somebody make billions of dollars in that dip? We don't know. But you know somebody's looking at that reaction. Thinking, well, if one image can drop the market, surely another one can. So if somebody's going to try to manipulate our markets using simple fake images, probably. And that's, I think, something that we need to start taking very seriously.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, so in this example, though, isn't part of the problem not just on the side of the proliferation of the deepfake. But also, I mean, if the markets respond so quickly, part of that must be because of all the automated trading that goes on. The system itself has some weaknesses.
FARID: This is a fascinating question because I don't think we've done the full postmortem. But there is a scenario here where an AI generative image caused predictive algorithms to respond to the market. And what a weird world we're living in now where AI's manipulating AI. But yes, I think that's almost certainly there was some role of automated trading here that panicked when they saw what they thought was breaking news on Twitter about a bombing at the Pentagon.
What a weird world we're living in now where AI's manipulating AI.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Well, the reason why I bring that up is because, again, in a few minutes, I want to explore deeply about how it's not just the deepfake itself. It's the environments that those deepfakes are deployed into, that also have to be strengthened when it comes to economic and national security.
So hang on here for just a second, Professor Farid, because I want to walk through a couple more examples of how other experts see the threat to national security when it comes to synthetic media or deepfakes. So we have a moment here from a June 2019 House Intelligence Committee hearing on national security challenges of deepfakes. And by the way, your research was actually quoted quite extensively at this hearing, but we're about to hear Clint Watts from the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. He described to the House committee some of the national security threats he sees presented by manipulated media.
CLINT WATTS: Deepfake proliferation presents two clear dangers. Over the long-term, deliberate development of false synthetic media will target U.S. officials, institutions and democratic processes with an enduring goal of subverting democracy and demoralizing the American constituency. U.S. diplomats and military personnel deployed overseas will be prime targets for deepfake disinformation conspiracies planted by adversaries. Three examples would be mobilization at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, the consulate in Benghazi, and rumors of protests at Incirlik Air Base. Had they been accompanied with fake audio or video content, could have been far more damaging in terms of that.
CHAKRABARTI: So Clint Watts there describing how deepfakes could have an impact politically on national security internally to the United States and also have an impact on U.S. interests abroad. Well, joining us now is Jamil Jaffer. He's founder and executive director of the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. And also a venture partner with Paladin Capital Group, which invests in dual use national security technologies. Jamil Jaffer, welcome to you.
JAMIL JAFFER: Thanks for having me, Meghna.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So just want to get a quick sort of temperature check from you. How concerned are you about the use of deepfakes or synthetic media, as they're more broadly called, as a potential threat to U.S. national security?
JAFFER: Well, look, I think we should all be concerned. And I think, you know, Professor Farid has laid out some great examples of where this can go wrong, how these tools can be utilized by nation states and by a broader audience of folks to generate, you know, concerns, generate economic change in the marketplace and generate a political response.
You know, we know about what happened in 2016 with the efforts by the Russians to manipulate our elections. And we now know that the nation states are aware of and capable of using these technologies as they get faster, and better and more efficient, to engage in things that could potentially affect U.S. and allied national security.
CHAKRABARTI: You know, it seems to me, though, that if we take sort of a 30,000-foot view of the situation, that deepfakes are just the latest means of what has always been with us, when it comes to nations battling each other, using information to undermine other countries. So what would you think makes synthetic media different from what nations used to do to each other before?
JAFFER: No, I think you're exactly right, Meghna. We've had information operations, you know, going back thousands of years in wartime to affect adversary's perceptions of our capabilities or the other side of it. And so you're exactly right. What I think is important here about this new trend, which Professor Farid has also identified, is the rapidity, the speed, the efficiency, the ability to deliver messaging in real time as events are happening and to shape people's perception of what's going on. You know, we heard about what happened with that call that Bill Browder had. Where in the moment, as Professor Farid laid out, you can change what people are perceiving.
Is this in fact Petro Poroshenko on the other side of this conversation? Is President Zelenskyy saying put down our weapons? Is the President of the United States going to order an attack on another nation? You know, there was a video up that was generated by a research institution at Northwestern University of a terrorist, or actually a dead terrorist, Mohammad al-Adnani saying something that Bashar al-Assad said.
And so, you know, these are fairly early days of this technology. And so certainly being able to determine whether something is, in fact, a person. In fact, who they say they are. Whether, in fact, a video is what it purports to be. And how you can tell when things aren't that, are going to be critical going forward. Not just in the political arena, but in the business arena for markets and the like.
CHAKRABARTI: So, Professor Farid, let me go back to you for a moment. Pick up on what Jamil Jaffer is saying. And let's just focus for a second on how the deepfakes could potentially undermine not just national security vis-à-vis U.S. officials, but national security in terms of our belief, meaning Americans' belief in, you know, in their own democracy. So the demoralization question that Clint Watts, in that clip I had played earlier, had mentioned.
FARID: Yeah. What's amazing about Clint's comments back in 2019, four years ago is he was quite prescient. I think he got it just about right. And I think there's a number of things that we are starting to see. So one is, as Jamil was just saying, the technology is getting better and better, more ubiquitous. People are starting to use it. And what that means is that we've eroded trust, that when you see a video of President Biden saying something, there's this, is this real or is it not real? And the question you got to ask yourself is, how do we have a democracy? How do we have a society when people are fundamentally skeptical about everything they read, see and hear online?
We've eroded trust. ... When you see a video of President Biden saying something, there's this, is this real or is it not real?
What happens, for example, when there really is an audio recording of a politician saying something illegal or offensive, they have plausible deniability. They can deny reality at this point. Reality starts to become very weird just when things can be synthesized and manipulated. And suddenly it's getting very difficult to even reason about basic facts of what's going on in the world, from police violence, human rights violations, elections, everything that happens in the world is suddenly, well are we sure about that?
And I worry about our very democracy because, as you were saying, we've already seen the impact of misinformation, disinformation [led] to things like the Jan. 6th insurrection. Lead to spectacular conspiracy theories that have disrupted our response to COVID. And what happens when you inject deepfake videos and audio into that already existing ecosystem, that should be of real concern to us as a society.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I think I'm seeing some experts call it the liar's dividend, right? So Jamil Jaffer, picking it up from there. Let's look internationally. Could you imagine a scenario in which deepfakes are used to, let's say, mislead U.S. military personnel abroad? Because, of course, you know, our U.S. soldiers and airmen and Marines, they're all connected to the Internet as well in certain ways. Is that a potential threat?
JAFFER: Certainly, a possibility. As Hany lays out exactly right. You know, this all comes at a time when we were already seeing an erosion in not just in America, but around the world, in reliance on the rule of law, reliance on rule of law, institutions right here in the United States. People question our elections. We question whether law enforcement is doing the right thing, whether what we're seeing on television or what the president [is saying] is real news or fake news. Are they facts? Are they alternative facts?
So this is all coming at a time when our entire society is questioning these topics. And things that are in the public debate. And you add on to that, you know, what are our perceptions of us overseas? What are our military members thinking? Now, one would assume that we have ways of verifying that messages being passed through official channels are legitimate. You know, everyone knows the scene from a nuclear launch code being passed on, where you break over the package and you verify the numbers and there's multiple people verifying it.
So there are ways, you know, that we have, through encryption and the like, to verify whether messages are legitimate. The problem is that it's all taking place in the context of a political environment, where there's a bit of decay in truth and a decay in facts. And, you know, people are inclined to think that what they're seeing might not be that their own lives are lying to them. And that's what creates the possibility for this liar's dividend that Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron have come up with. This idea of people saying even something that's true isn't true, right? President Trump says, "I didn't say that." Or even though there's a video of him saying that "I didn't say that. That's a deepfake." Right?
CHAKRABARTI: So, Jamil, I mean, how much do we know about whether the United States is interested or even currently deploying these same tools that we're talking about, in terms of they're a threat to the U.S., but something that's potentially effective and hard to combat must be a powerful tool for the U.S. to use as well?
JAFFER: Well, you know, certainly the United States, like every other nation state, has engaged in information operations and psychological operations historically, as part of our military operations in war and in battle. And even, you know, in the lead up to a conflict, we might do it through covert action or the like. And so this is not an area that's unknown to the United States. In fact, you know, some would argue that the United States, Russia, China are the best at this type of information and psychological operations.
And so the question becomes, you know, has the U.S. looked at this capability? And there's no doubt that our special operations forces, our intelligence agencies are actively exploring these capabilities. They're also actively exploring defenses, these technologies. And we know that DARPA has programs on semantic forensics and the like to identify, you know, the kind of tools. And we've seen, you know, American companies partner with the government institutions to help identify how do we figure out what a deepfake is and the like.
The United States, Russia, China are the best at this type of information and psychological operations.
And the private sector is investing the space. You know, at Paladin Capital, we're spending time looking at how do you ensure that algorithms are strong and well and defensible? How do you identify these capabilities? And so, you know, both in the private and public marketplace, we're looking both at the offensive capability, but also how to defend against it. And by the way, it's worth noting, AI — and Hany can talk about this actively — AI can both create these capabilities and also help defend against it.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, you mentioned special operations, Jamil, and just to put a finer point on it, reporting from The Intercept a little earlier this year, back in March, found that U.S. Special Operations Command, in fact, is openly signaling its interest in developing synthetic media as a tool for the U.S. military. There's a document that The Intercept has taken a look at and actually published now, a SOCOM document that signals SOCOM's desire to use deepfakes.
Specifically, the document says that they're looking for next generation capability to do things like take over the Internet of things and to deal with the digital space, social media analysis, deceptive technologies. So, I mean, it's out there in terms of the U.S.'s desire to use these technologies. Hany, did you have a response to that?
FARID: Yeah, I can't speak to the offensive part, but I think Jamil is absolutely right that it would defy credibility that the U.S. is not at least looking at this. I can certainly speak to the defensive part, because it is absolutely true that now for many years the U.S. government, through DARPA and through other funding agencies, have been funding research, the kind of research we do here and many other places in the world, to try to build defenses.
And Jamil is right too, that it's fascinating to see essentially the same basic tools being used for offense and defense. And that's actually why this task is so hard, is because many times the defensive tool can be used against you. If you are in the business of playing offense, you want to be in the business of also playing defense, because that's the only way to know whether your techniques are going to work or not.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, that's an excellent point. So I just wanted to add the specific language from SOCOM's document about what they're trying to learn and gather and contract out. They want to quote, 'Improve means of carrying out influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.'
Now, to circle back to what both of you just said, about if the same tools are needed for offensive capabilities and defensive capabilities when it comes to synthetic media, we did actually reach out to folks at DARPA who are currently at work on this.
And the reason why we did it is because back in 2019, at that same congressional hearing that I had mentioned earlier, we remembered hearing the founder of the Media Forensics Research Project, or also known as MediFor, which is at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And the head of that program used to be a gentleman named David Dorman. And here's what he said to Congress in 2019.
DAVID DORMAN: When the MediFor program was conceived at DARPA, one thing that kept me up at night was the concern that someday our adversaries would be able to create entire events with minimal effort. These events might include images of scenes from different angles, video content that appears from different devices and text that is delivered through various mediums, providing an overwhelming amount of evidence that an event has occurred. And this could lead to social unrest or retaliation before it gets countered. If the past five years are any indication that someday is not very far in the future.
CHAKRABARTI: So that's David Dorman, almost exactly four years ago, speaking to Congress about DARPA's MediFor program. So we recently spoke to the current head of that program, Wil Corvey. DARPA has actually replaced MediFor with another project called Semantic Forensics, which both of you have mentioned. And Wil Corvey told us that a lot has changed since that 2019 congressional hearing, namely the explosion of generative AI.
WIL CORVEY: We've gone from a media landscape where it was a bit of an outlier, right, to find a piece of created or synthesized media, to now where we would expect, actually maybe very soon, the bulk of Internet media to at least have been retouched by one of these computational models. And so it really becomes much more of a characterization problem for us now, as opposed to merely a detection problem or primarily a detection problem.
CHAKRABARTI: Corvey also told us that means DARPA has to speed up how quickly deepfakes can be detected, to get to a place where the technology can pick apart a piece of synthetic media to see how it was created. And they say that because, of course, not all deepfakes are meant to be malicious.
CORVEY: You may have seen, like the image of a squirrel riding a skateboard in Central Park, but imagine then that I did some Photoshop editing on top of it, right? That might now be the state of the art for sort of computer aided art. So moving forward as a culture of makers online, that might be a signature or something, that we would want to set aside as a completely benign purpose of a couple of different computational techniques. Unfortunately, though, those very same computational techniques could be utilized for propaganda purposes, right? And so differentiating between those kinds of stacks of analytics is another part of the scaling.
CHAKRABARTI: Corvey also told us that the technologies SemaFor is working on could be used to flag potentially harmful deepfakes for moderators to review. Human moderators. But the actual policy implementation would be up to the social media companies or to government regulators. Good news, though, Corvey says. SemaFor has been able to use older, generative AI models to train AI to detect the things made by those same models.
CORVEY: So a lot of models that are the best performing models at this moment have a predecessor model that is related in the way that it was implemented. It has a similar model architecture, and so it turns out the computer systems that are tooled for the detection of these kinds of models can use those architectural similarities, in addition to human expertise in order to achieve really good detection accuracies, even on unseen models.
And so we had a particular collaboration within video, within the program, where we were able to show that for face generation models, for instance, it works if you train it on a predecessor model and then deploy it on sort of the current model. And in that case, we were able to release a detection model at the same time that Nvidia released their new face generation model. So basically, it would be much less likely that someone could use that particular model for a nefarious purpose.
CHAKRABARTI: Professor Farid, what I'm still curious about regarding the tools used to detect deepfakes in the national security realm, is that several years ago the concern was, yes, we can do it, but there was a speed and scaling problem in terms of could we analyze everything that could potentially be a deepfake. Now, earlier in the hour, I thought I heard you say that that scaling problem is still real.
FARID: Yeah, very much so. The way I think about these defenses that we've just been talking about, that Wil very nicely described, is that they are necessary but not sufficient. We need the tools to detect manipulated media, but we also need regulation to force companies like Twitter, like Facebook, like TikTok to do better on moderating content.
We need more education. We need people to understand what these threats are and how to reason about a very complex and fast-moving world. And we need people to slow down on the Internet. Part of the problem is that people are moving so fast on the internet, resharing, retweeting without really thinking about the implications of what they're doing. So I think there are many aspects of what we need to do to start to regain some trust.
And I'll make a little pitch, also. That there is some other technology that is being developed called the Content Authenticity Initiative, where synthetic media will be signed and watermarked at the point of creation. And so one way to think about this problem is if you wait until something is in the wild, it's very hard to rein it back in. But if you are at the point of creation, either a real image or a synthetic image, you can sign and watermark and fingerprint that content so that when it does go into the wild, it can be very quickly detected. And there's some very nice technology coming out that I think is going to help us regain some trust. But it is still part of a larger ecosystem that we need.
We also need regulation to force companies like Twitter, like Facebook, like TikTok to do better on moderating content.
CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, Jamil Jaffer, the other issue that seems to continue to dog folks who are worried about democratic and national security is the velocity part, right? Like the deepfakes wouldn't be as effective in changing many minds if they didn't get to as many minds as quickly as they did. So can they be slowed down by the social media companies?
I have to say I possess a great deal of pessimism about this. Because we've already seen unwillingness from the major social media companies in the recent past to even slow down the velocity of known misinformation and disinformation, let alone harder to detect deep fakes. So should we be putting more pressure on the platforms by which these synthetic media proliferate to try and cut the velocity of them?
JAFFER: Well, I think there's no doubt that we're going to see some amount of regulatory moves by the government. You've already heard discussion about it on Capitol Hill. You've got Europe trying to make some moves in this space. They've got the AI Act and the like. They've got other forms of regulation that they've been considering with respect to some of the larger social media companies. A lot of it, frankly, wrongheaded and not particularly sophisticated.
But there is some amount of activity going on in governments that we will see going forward. The question becomes, where's that balance? You definitely are going to need some amount of government action and regulation in this space. But you also want to disincentivize innovation. You want to ensure that people are moving forward and are using technology in the long run. In the longer scheme of things, artificial intelligence, the machine learning, the kind that Hany spends a lot of time looking at.
This is going to be transformative for our society and create huge benefits for society. There are certainly downsides and there is a need for the government to get engaged. The question is at what level, how often, where. When it comes to this issue of misinformation and disinformation, I think the best methodology is truthful content and clarity about what is and what is not true.
And things like this authenticity initiative that Hany's talking about, that's where the real opportunity is. Because remember, the platforms and creators benefit when they're able to say, This is my content. This is legitimate content. It's to the benefit of the platforms and the creators when you're able to generate authenticity and demonstrate authenticity.
CHAKRABARTI: You know, I want to come back, circle back around to something that Professor Farid, that you said a little earlier. And that is really we're moving towards a world in which it's not unreasonable to, in a sense, have a little bit of constant doubt about almost everything that we're absorbing, digitally. Honestly, I think that's going to mess with the human mind. Because we're not really evolved to the point of not being able to believe in our own realities.
And then contemporaneous with that, is kind of one of the neurological and emotional reasons deepfakes work. And what got me thinking about that is I went back and watched a 2019 conference that happened at the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center, and they were talking about deepfakes and national security. And at that conference, Boston University law professor Jessica Silbey said she thought the challenge in combating deepfakes wasn't exclusively technological.
JESSICA SILBEY: Deepfakes. Many of them, their purpose is to denigrate and to dominate ideologically or physically. So, what about our sociology feeds those stories more than others? I think we have to think hard about. It's a cultural problem as much as it is a technological problem.
CHAKRABARTI: Professor Farid, what do you think about that?
FARID: Yeah, I think Professor Silbey is right, by the way. There is very much a human component to this, which is that we respond to the most outrageous, salacious, hateful and conspiratorial content online. The reason why social media keeps recommending this content to us is because we keep clicking on it. And Professor Silbey is right.
We need to look hard inside of ourselves and ask, What is wrong with us? Why do we keep enabling this type of content? You can absolutely blame the social media companies. You can blame YouTube for this week saying, we will no longer take down content that denies the election. The last national election here in the U.S. We should criticize them for that. But we should also ask why is it that we keep migrating to this content, over trusted content, over truthful content? And I don't have an answer for that, but I think that has to be part of the solution.
We need to look hard inside of ourselves and ask, What is wrong with us? Why do we keep enabling this type of content?
CHAKRABARTI: Well, we've got about 30 seconds left. And Jamil, I'm going to give you the last word here. I mean, what would you recommend that the United States do to prepare itself for, again, in the national security realm, for the near continuous threat now of synthetic media?
JAFFER: Yeah. Look, I think we need a way of getting authorized and approved content. Content that's authentic, out more often, more regularly. We need to think about regulation. We need to think about in the context of innovation and ensuring that we promote that innovation. And at the end of the day, we have to recognize, and the American public has to recognize that our adversaries are using this technology. They're going to use it against us. We need to be skeptical of the content we see and ensure it's authentic when we rely upon it, and pass it on to others.
wbur.org · by Claire Donnelly
20. Kherson Flood Waters Begin to Recede, As Evidence of Russian Sabotage Mounts
Kherson Flood Waters Begin to Recede, As Evidence of Russian Sabotage Mounts
The UN has warned the ravages of flooding will almost inevitably lead to lower grain exports, higher food prices around the world, and less to eat for millions in need.
by Kyiv Post | June 11, 2023, 11:04 am | Comments (2)
kyivpost.com
Five days after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine’s Kherson region, the scale of the disaster is still difficult to comprehend – thousands forced to flee, disrupted water supplies and an unfolding environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
The latest on the ground
According to authorities, the flood waters are now beginning to recede. Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, said water levels had decreased on average by 27cm overnight.
"Compared to the morning [of June 10], the average level of flooding has decreased by 27 cm and is now 4.45 m. The area of the flooded territories has decreased by almost half.
“The water has receded from Mykolaivka, Lvove and Olhivka of Beryslav district. 32 settlements on the right bank are still flooded. 3,784 residential buildings are under flood water,” he said.
As of Saturday evening, 2,699 people, including 178 children and 67 people with reduced mobility, were evacuated from dangerous settlements in Ukrainian-held territories.
Prokudin's counterpart in the Mykolaiv region, Vitaly Kim, also said "the water level began to fall" there.
Ukraine has said five people are known to have died while Russian-installed authorities in occupied areas affected by the flooding have said eight people have died in areas they currently control.
The death toll is likely to rise with Ukrainian authorities saying on Saturday that 29 people were missing.
A local resident looks at a flooded street in the town of Kherson on June 10, 2023. Genya SAVILOV / AFP
The evidence against Russia
While Ukraine has not hesitated in blaming Russia for deliberately blowing up the dam, the international community has held back from making any concrete accusations so far, but according to the growing body of evidence, this may not be too far off.
Norway's seismological institute said on Friday it had detected “an explosion” at the site and time the dam was breached, heavily suggesting it did not burst as a result of damage incurred during months of heavy bombing.
"We are confident that there was an explosion," Ben Dando, a senior Norsar official, told AFP.
According to the institute, the blast occurred at 2:54 am local time, at a site whose coordinates correspond to the Kakhovka dam.
The magnitude of the blast was “between 1 and 2”, said Norsar, which had yet to calculate its equivalent in tonnes of TNT.
“It's not a weak explosion,” Dando added.
Any terrorist counts on only a few forms of results for himself: the suffering of people, the intimidation of people, and the ruins that terror leaves behind. This is exactly how Russia acts in this case.
We will do everything to guarantee people a basis for life even after this… pic.twitter.com/iIKLQRGlSm
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 11, 2023
In a separate announcement later on Friday afternoon, The New York Times reported that a U.S. official said American spy satellites equipped with infrared sensors also detected an explosion.
Also on Friday, Ukraine’s security services released a recording of an intercepted phone call between two Russian men in which one of them appears to admit that Moscow’s forces blew up the dam in a botched operation.
During the call, one of the men says: “[Ukraine] didn’t blow it up. Our sabotage team is there. They wanted to cause fear with this dam. It did not go according to the plan.”
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrel has come closest to a direct accusation so far, saying on Friday “everything indicates” Russia is behind the Kakhovka dam breach.
“The dam was not bombed. It was destroyed by explosives installed in the areas where the turbines are located. This area is under Russian control,” Borrell told Spanish public television.
“I wasn’t there to find out who did it. But everything seems to indicate that if it took place in an area under Russian control, it is difficult to believe it could have been someone else,” he added.
“In any case, the consequences for Ukraine are terrible, from the humanitarian point of view for the displaced people, and from the environmental point of view because the (dam’s) destruction will cause an ecological disaster.”
The Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks on dams unless "it is used for other than its normal function and in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support," an exemption that did not apply to the Nova Kakhovk dam.
A local resident sails on a sup board during an evacuation from a flooded area in Kherson on June 8, 2023. ALEKSEY FILIPPOV / AFP
Houses are flooded in the town of Kherson on June 8, 2023. Genya SAVILOV / AFP
The humanitarian situation
According to the UN, 700,000 people do not have proper access to drinking water on both the Ukrainian-controlled and Russian-controlled sides of the river.
The UN sent humanitarian convoys to the region on Friday, but the scale of the clean-up task and the range of consequences is on a massive scale.
Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths, told AP that one of the immediate threats is that posed by the flood waters digging up and moving land mines “and what we are bound to be seeing are those mines floating in places where people don’t expect them,” threatening adults and especially children.
“So it’s a cascade of problems, starting with allowing people to survive today, and then giving them some kind of prospects for tomorrow,” he said.
Ukrainian servicemen help residents unload a cow evacuation from the flooded village of Afanasiivka, Mykolaiv region on June 9, 2023. Genya SAVILOV / AFP
A volunteer carries a dog during an evacuation from a flooded area in Kherson on June 8, 2023. Genya SAVILOV / AFP
Ukrainian servicemen and volunteers sail on boats during an evacuation from a flooded area in Kherson on June 8, 2023. Genya SAVILOV / AFP
A rescuer of the State Emergency Service (R) helps local resident Tetyana (C), 75, during an evacuation of local residents from the flooded village of Afanasiivka, Mykolaiv region on June 9, 2023. Genya SAVILOV / AFP
The ecological situation
The full ecological impact of the destruction of the dam won’t be known for some time, but there is no doubt it will be immense.
Ukraine has already warned of a potential "ecocide" after 150 tonnes of engine oil spilled into the river, from the dam’s machinery, as a result of the attack.
One very visible consequence of the disaster is the current situation at the Kakhovka reservoir in place, which can hold 18 cubic kilometers of water – approximately the same capacity as Utah's Great Salt Lake.
Before-and-after video posted on social media shows how just how far the water levels have dropped in the reservoir.
Ukrainian ecologist, Maksym Soroka, said: “The water will not disappear. However, now this place will become a temporary swamp. And only then will nature figure out what to do with this territory.”
Griffiths warned the ravages of flooding will almost inevitably lead to lower grain exports, higher food prices around the world, and less to eat for millions in need.
kyivpost.com
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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