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"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self."
- Ernest Hemingway
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- Aristotle
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- Aldous Huxley
1. Kyiv and Moscow Are Fighting Two Different Wars By Lawrence Freedman
2. How Ukraine war has shaped US planning for a China conflict
3. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 16, 2023
4. Ukraine war spurs European demand for U.S. arms, but not big-ticket items
5. Overnight protests rock Tehran, other Iranian cities, online videos show
6. Clandestine U.K. Program Developed 3D-Printed ‘Suicide’ Drone For Ukraine
7. Executive Compensation, Tech Transfer and National Security
8. The Drone War in Ukraine Is Cheap, Deadly, and Made in China
9. Why the Air Force’s best ‘secret weapon’ has nothing to do with airplanes
10. Do recruits need bonuses? No. 2 Marine expands on viral remark
11. PROFICIENCY (USMC)
12. Opinion | U.S. defense spending will have to go up. The Ukraine war shows why.
13. China’s Balloon Program Combines Commercial and Military Capabilities
14. Col Paris Davis: Black Vietnam veteran to finally receive Medal of Honor
15. Pentagon’s top China official to visit Taiwan amid rising bilateral tensions
16. China's balloons give Japan and Taiwan a reason to share intelligence, says lawmaker
17. Opinion | U.S.-China Relations Keep Getting Worse. Do They Have To?
18. War Books: Beginning Your Professional Development Journey through Reading
19. Naval Intelligence admiral: 'Naïve' American public has a 'China blindness' problem
20. How the West May Have Helped Build China’s Spy Balloons
21. Americans are Disturbingly ‘Ill-Informed and Naive’ on China, Navy’s Intel Chief Says
22. COL Joseph D. Celeski Obituary
23. Fentanyl deaths among troops more than doubled from 2017 to 2021
24. China set to eclipse US air superiority in Pacific
1. Kyiv and Moscow Are Fighting Two Different Wars By Lawrence Freedman
Excerpts:
Ukraine has been more innovative in its tactics and more disciplined in their execution. Aided by a growing supply of Western weapons and an agile command, it has managed to recover some of the areas occupied by Russian forces. But it also has been fighting on its own territory and unable to reach far into Russia. So while Ukraine has limited itself to targeting Russia’s military, Russia is targeting Ukraine as a whole: its armed forces, its infrastructure, and its people.
These contrasting approaches—the “classic warfare” pursued by Ukraine and the “total warfare” adopted by Russia—have deep roots in the wars of the twentieth century. As the war in Ukraine reaches its one-year mark, it has begun to offer significant insights into how these two forms of warfare can cope in contemporary conflicts—and how they are likely to shape the contest between Kyiv and Moscow in the coming months.
...
The basic problem with wars is that they are easier to start than to end. Once Russia’s initial thrusts were blunted, it found itself caught in a protracted conflict in which it dares not concede defeat even when a path to victory remains elusive. Such wars inevitably become attritional, as stocks of equipment and ammunition are depleted and troop losses mount. The temptation to find an alternative route to victory by attacking the enemy’s socioeconomic structure grows. Russia has not abandoned this alternative path even though so far it has only hardened Ukrainian resolve.
Russia has persevered with inefficient and costly strategies, perhaps in the belief that in the end its size and readiness to accept sacrifices will tell. By contrast, Ukraine’s route to victory depends on pushing Russian forces back enough to persuade Moscow that it has embarked on a futile war. Since it cannot target the Russian people, it must exploit the accuracy of its longer-range systems to target its military, rendering Russia’s supply lines, command networks, and troop concentrations vulnerable. Russia seeks to create circumstances in which the Ukrainian people have had enough. Ukraine seeks to make the position for the Russian military untenable. As the war enters its next, critical phase, these strategies, and the contrasting approaches to war they represent, will face their most severe tests.
Kyiv and Moscow Are Fighting Two Different Wars
What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Contemporary Conflict
February 17, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine · February 17, 2023
Over the course of the war in Ukraine, the strategies of Russia and Ukraine have increasingly diverged. At first, Russia sought to catch Ukraine by surprise using a modern army engaged in some fast-moving maneuvers that would yield a rapid and decisive victory. But over time, its army has been seriously degraded, and it has increasingly been relying on artillery barrages and mass infantry assaults to achieve battlefield breakthroughs while stepping up its attacks on Ukrainian cities. In the areas its forces are occupying, it is seeking to impose “Russification” and has dealt harshly with those suspected of spying and sabotage, or simple dissent.
Ukraine has been more innovative in its tactics and more disciplined in their execution. Aided by a growing supply of Western weapons and an agile command, it has managed to recover some of the areas occupied by Russian forces. But it also has been fighting on its own territory and unable to reach far into Russia. So while Ukraine has limited itself to targeting Russia’s military, Russia is targeting Ukraine as a whole: its armed forces, its infrastructure, and its people.
These contrasting approaches—the “classic warfare” pursued by Ukraine and the “total warfare” adopted by Russia—have deep roots in the wars of the twentieth century. As the war in Ukraine reaches its one-year mark, it has begun to offer significant insights into how these two forms of warfare can cope in contemporary conflicts—and how they are likely to shape the contest between Kyiv and Moscow in the coming months.
TWO KINDS OF WAR
The classic way of warfare, which dominated military thought prior to World War I, was all about battles. Strategy focused on getting an army in a position to fight; tactics concerned the fighting itself. Victory was decided by which army occupied the battlefield, the number of enemy soldiers killed or captured, and the amount of equipment destroyed. In this way, battles determined the outcome of wars. This approach was bolstered by laws of war that covered the treatment of prisoners and noncombatants and assumed that the defeated enemy would accept the verdict of battle.
Even before World War I, there were many reasons to doubt how closely this model of war captured reality, especially because of the way in which it insisted on keeping the civilian and military spheres separate. But the classic model continued to shape expectations in the run-up to World War I. That conflict, however, turned into a long war of attrition, during which underlying economic and industrial strength came to play a far more important role than mere battlefield outcomes. And the ability of aircraft to strike enemy cities called into question the concept of a distinct battlefield separate from civil society. People and property became natural targets.
To many strategists, bombing cities looked like a simpler route to victory than winning battles.
The rationale for targeting population centers was simple: armies drew on civilian infrastructure to fight. Munitions factories depended on a civilian workforce. When governments needed more troops, they drafted civilians. In other words, when an entire country was on a war footing, there were no innocents. Moreover, the governments that decided on war and peace depended on popular support. Vulnerable citizens, suffering under incessant bombardment, might be turned against the war, even to the point where they demanded their own side’s capitulation. To many strategists, bombing cities looked like a far simpler route to victory than winning battles. In this way, war became total, leading to the massive air raids of World War II and the U.S. decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. After that, civilians were spared only in wars that did not last long and were fought away from cities.
But three developments caused Western strategists to change their thinking about total war. First, the logic of total war led to nuclear catastrophe. If that was to be avoided, a way had to be found to keep wars limited. Second, there was a growing awareness that attacks on civilians were counterproductive. This was the conclusion of studies undertaken immediately after World War II on the impact of the Allied strategic bombing campaigns, and then the later experience of the Vietnam War, in which the efforts to seek out and eliminate the communist Viet Cong led to many civilian casualties.
The third development was the advent in the 1970s of precision-guided munitions. In principle, the dramatic improvements in accurate targeting afforded by such technology meant that there was no longer any excuse for collateral damage. Operations could be conducted in ways that would avoid civilians and strike only at military-related targets. With precision-guided weapons, there was an opportunity to revive classic warfare by concentrating on undermining an enemy’s military organization through deep strikes and rapid maneuvers. This was the lesson drawn from the United States’ decisive defeat of Iraqi forces in the first Gulf War.
Nevertheless, although this doctrinal shift has been evident in the planning of recent Western military interventions, classic warfare strategy has often fallen by the wayside once those wars turn into counterinsurgency campaigns, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both conflicts, the United States and its allies made efforts to avoid harming civilians in order to keep their support and avoid fueling the insurgency, but these efforts tended to be relaxed when their own forces were at risk. For Western forces, an additional source of tension was that local communities often regarded them as unwelcome, especially when they were supporting a government that—precisely because it relied on foreign support—lacked popular legitimacy.
RUSSIAN BRUTISHNESS, UKRAINIAN RESTRAINT
For its part, in the decades after the Cold War, Russia never quite abandoned the total-war model. This was the case even when it employed precision-guided munitions. In Syria, for example, Russian forces demonstrated that avoiding civilian targets was a matter of choice and not technology, as they deliberately attacked rebel hospitals. Even close to home, Russia has used unsparing tactics, especially in the Chechen Wars of the 1990s and in the first decade of this century, during which Moscow applied brute force directly to civilian areas and cities.
Now Russia is doing the same in Ukraine. But this time around, it faces an increasingly well-organized and professional army. As the Kremlin has become more frustrated in its campaign to occupy the country, it has resorted to regular attacks on Ukrainian civil society and economy. These have included aiming missiles at Kyiv and other cities, leveling apartment complexes and sometimes whole towns, attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and laying prolonged sieges, such as against Mariupol in the spring, Severodonetsk in the summer, and Bakhmut more recently. These are operations that involve artillery barrages that reduce cities to rubble and force their populations to flee.
Despite Russia’s maximal aims in Ukraine, it is possible to argue that it is not pursuing a total war. This is because Russia has refrained from using nuclear weapons—the ultimate symbols of contemporary total warfare. In fact, nuclear weapons have already played a critical role in setting the boundaries to the conflict. At the outset of the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked the nuclear threat to warn NATO countries against direct intervention. At the same time, his desire to avoid a war with the alliance has deterred him from using nuclear weapons on a smaller scale within Ukraine and from ordering attacks on neighboring NATO countries. Nonetheless, in most respects, Russia has followed the total-war approach that it has used in other conflicts since the end of the Cold War.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is following a classic-war approach. In defending their own cities, factories, and energy plants, Ukrainian forces have every reason to avoid unnecessary damage to civilian areas, and they have needed to conserve their scarce ammunition for high-priority Russian military targets. Moreover, Kyiv has also been constrained by the limitations placed on it by its Western suppliers. One area in which this has happened—and another example of the deterrent effect of the threat of total war—is Washington’s deliberate restriction of Ukraine’s ability to attack Russian territory, at least in ways that involve Western weapons. Ukrainian forces managed some attacks on targets within Russia using drones and sabotage, but these have been few. Notably, the United States has denied Ukraine the long-range artillery and aircraft that would allow it to strike deeper and more often, although the impact of such attacks against a country of Russia’s size would be more symbolic than material.
The result of these constraints is that Russia has been fighting a total war on Ukrainian territory without facing a serious risk of anything equivalent on its own. The contrast between the Russian and Ukrainian approaches has become even sharper as the war has progressed.
TOTAL RESISTANCE
Since Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union until 1991, their armed forces have a shared history as well as shared experience with Soviet-vintage equipment. Since 2014, however, Ukraine has come progressively under Western military influence. This process accelerated during the buildup to Russia’s 2022 invasion, and even more so once the war began. The United States and its allies have provided Ukraine with various forms of assistance, including training, intelligence, and advanced weapons systems. Although Ukraine has employed weapons that enable it to target Russian assets located far behind the frontline (such as command posts, ammunition dumps, and logistic hubs) and areas where Russian troops are concentrated, Russia has had few options other than to rely on its artillery and, following mobilization, infantry assaults designed to render Ukrainian towns and cities indefensible.
Reinforcing the contrast, Russian forces have attempted to “Russify” areas under their control—through restrictions and requirements on language, education, and currency—and have used torture and executions to inhibit Ukrainian resistance. This is in addition to the widespread war crimes they have committed, including torture and abductions, as well as looting and sexual abuse, which reflect their fear of sabotage and snooping, along with general indiscipline.
So far, the results of the Russian approach have confirmed the standard criticisms of total-war strategy. The onslaught against Ukraine’s civil society has made no dent on popular support for the Ukrainian government. Instead, accumulating evidence of egregious Russian behavior has made Ukraine all the more determined to ensure that these territories are liberated and that none is handed over to Russia indefinitely. The humanitarian consequences of Russia’s methods have also strengthened Western support for Ukraine. In addition, Russia’s total-war aims have reinforced the Ukrainian belief that there is no obvious “compromise peace” available. Nor have Russia’s total-war tactics impeded Ukrainian operations.
In recent months, Moscow has provided coercive rationales for its attacks on civilian infrastructure, connected to Ukraine’s refusal to accept Russia’s annexation of four provinces in eastern Ukraine in September. These attacks have made life extremely difficult for Ukrainians, with civilians regularly killed and injured by random strikes, and frequent blackouts during the winter months. But the Ukrainians have learned to adapt, taking out increasing numbers of missiles and drones with air defenses and finding ways of coping with the civilian hardship. After a year of war, there has been no evident effect on Ukraine’s will to fight.
RETURN OF THE TANKS
A year of war in Ukraine has further discredited the total-war approach. But what has it revealed about classic warfare? Here, experience warns that the battlefield victories essential to this approach can prove elusive when the defending forces appear to have inherent advantages over the offense. In such situations, armies can get stuck in long and grueling standoffs. It is possible to overwhelm an outgunned enemy by punching holes in its lines, but this usually requires maneuvering with armored vehicles, surprising the enemy with unexpected advances, achieving success through encirclements, and pushing the enemy into rapid retreats to the point where it is eventually unable to recover.
Such an outcome is not easy to achieve. In Ukraine, the most successful offensives by either side have come in situations where the defenses have been thin on the ground. Russian gains came during the first days of the war when its forces had the advantage of surprise and were able to move fast. In the south, they met little resistance, especially where defenses were poorly organized, notably in Kherson. Yet in the north, they took forward positions that could not be sustained, soon got into trouble against agile Ukrainian defenses, and were forced to withdraw. Then, in the next stage of the war, beginning with the battle for the Donbas, Russian gains were few, covering narrow areas, and they were achieved only at immense costs and over months.
For its part, Ukraine’s most impressive offensive came in Kharkiv in September, when its forces took advantage of a weak and poorly prepared defense while the Russian high command was focused on Donetsk and Kherson. Yet in areas where Russian defenses have been prepared, and then bolstered by the extra troops generated by mobilization, Ukraine’s progress has been slowed. Ukrainian forces were further limited by the onset of winter, as the ground became boggy. Ukraine’s counteroffensive to retake Kherson got off to a slow start in the late summer, and its forces were able to make progress only when they were able to cut of Russian supply lines, thus rendering Kherson City indefensible. It was evacuated in November.
If an army needs to move firepower over treacherous terrain, then what it needs looks very much like a tank.
In the coming months, the direction of the war may also be shaped by the changing balance of firepower. When it next gets a chance to go on the offensive, Ukraine will benefit from more armored vehicles, including Challenger, Leopard, and Abrams battle tanks furnished by Europe and the United States, following protracted discussions in January. As important, Kyiv will also be getting infantry vehicles, improved air defenses, and longer-range shells and missiles.
But it will take time for all these weapons to be delivered and to train Ukrainian forces to use them. Meanwhile, Ukraine will have to cope with a new Russian offensive that is essentially attritional in its methods, depending on Russia’s readiness to accept high casualties to make its gains. While the weight of numbers may allow them to advance in some areas, Russian forces have yet to demonstrate the ability to exploit any breakthroughs with rapid, forward thrusts. For now, Ukraine is obliged to cope as best it can with this pressure, concerned about the rate at which it is using up ammunition, hoping to hold its line well enough that when and if the new Russian offensive begins to fade, it will have its own opportunity to move onto the offensive.
Ukraine’s new capabilities will be geared to maneuver warfare. In the opening months of the war, many Western commentators pronounced tanks obsolete, on the basis of the substantial numbers the Russians lost to antitank guided weapons, drones, and artillery fire. In fact, there are explanations for the Russian tank losses, including a failure to follow their own combined-arms doctrine, which left them exposed. (Another reason for the weakness of the Russian offensives was the unexpectedly limited role played by the Russian air force. Instead, the demonstrable vulnerability of Russian aircraft to air defenses seemed to provide added confirmation to what has become a defining feature of contemporary warfare: the use of relatively cheap weapons to disable or even destroy very expensive systems.)
Now, it is tanks, along with more numerous infantry vehicles, that form the central piece of the recent equipment packages the West has agreed to send to Ukraine. If an army needs to move firepower with protective armor over treacherous terrain, then what it needs looks very much like a tank. It is rarely helpful to look at any systems without taking into account the strategic context in which they are being used and the other capabilities available to both sides. A new Ukrainian offensive, against entrenched Russian defenses, will represent a significant test of classic warfare in its purest form.
ELUSIVE ENDINGS
The basic problem with wars is that they are easier to start than to end. Once Russia’s initial thrusts were blunted, it found itself caught in a protracted conflict in which it dares not concede defeat even when a path to victory remains elusive. Such wars inevitably become attritional, as stocks of equipment and ammunition are depleted and troop losses mount. The temptation to find an alternative route to victory by attacking the enemy’s socioeconomic structure grows. Russia has not abandoned this alternative path even though so far it has only hardened Ukrainian resolve.
Russia has persevered with inefficient and costly strategies, perhaps in the belief that in the end its size and readiness to accept sacrifices will tell. By contrast, Ukraine’s route to victory depends on pushing Russian forces back enough to persuade Moscow that it has embarked on a futile war. Since it cannot target the Russian people, it must exploit the accuracy of its longer-range systems to target its military, rendering Russia’s supply lines, command networks, and troop concentrations vulnerable. Russia seeks to create circumstances in which the Ukrainian people have had enough. Ukraine seeks to make the position for the Russian military untenable. As the war enters its next, critical phase, these strategies, and the contrasting approaches to war they represent, will face their most severe tests.
Foreign Affairs · by Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine · February 17, 2023
2. How Ukraine war has shaped US planning for a China conflict
A lot of important lessons are outlined in this piece.
But why is civilian resistance not discussed? Yes there is a passing mention of civilians providing information through Starlink but there is no discussion of the contribution of the resistance operating concept and the development of a civilian resistance capability.
How Ukraine war has shaped US planning for a China conflict
AP · by TARA COPP · February 16, 2023
WASHINGTON (AP) — As the war rages on in Ukraine, the United States is doing more than supporting an ally. It’s learning lessons — with an eye toward a possible future clash with China.
No one knows what the next U.S. major military conflict will be or whether the U.S. will send troops — as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq — or provide vast amounts of aid and expertise, as it has done with Ukraine.
But China remains America’s biggest concern. U.S. military officials say Beijing wants to be ready to invade the self-governing island of Taiwan by 2027, and the U.S. is the island democracy’s chief ally and supplier of defense weapons.
While there are key differences in geography and in the U.S. commitment to come to Taiwan’s defense, “there are clear parallels between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan,” a Center for Strategic and International Studies report found last month.
A look at some of the lessons from the Ukraine war and how they could apply to a Taiwan conflict:
ARM IN ADVANCE
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Soon after Russian troops crossed into Ukraine last February, the U.S. and allies began sending massive amounts of weapons across the border from partner nations.
But Taiwan would need to be fully armed in advance, CSIS found in dozens of war scenarios it ran for its report.
“The ‘Ukraine model’ cannot be replicated in Taiwan because China can isolate the island for weeks or even months,” the bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization and think tank found. “Taiwan must start the war with everything it needs.”
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Ukraine “was more of a cold-start approach than the planned approach we have been working on for Taiwan, and we will apply those lessons.”
For China, Hicks told The Associated Press that an amphibious landing is the hardest military operation to undertake. But that same challenge would also make resupply difficult, particularly if China chokes off ocean access.
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STOCKPILE WOES
The Pentagon cannot pre-position equipment it doesn’t have. Ukraine is putting intense pressure on the U.S. and European defense stockpiles and exposing that neither was ready for a major conventional conflict.
For some items “we have weaknesses in both our inventory and our production capacity,” said CSIS International Security Program senior adviser Mark Cancian, an author of the Taiwan report. “In a couple of places, particularly artillery ammunition, it could become a crisis.”
Ukraine is shooting as many as 7,000 rounds a day to defend itself and has depended on announcements about every two weeks of new ammunition shipments from the U.S.
Since Russia invaded, the U.S. has sent Ukraine millions of rounds of munitions, including small arms and artillery rounds, 8,500 Javelin anti-armor systems, 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft systems and 100,000 rounds of 125 mm tank ammunition.
One of the biggest stockpile pressure points has been 155 mm howitzer ammunition. The U.S. has sent Ukraine 160 howitzers and more than 1 million howitzer rounds, which have been put to heavy use with as many as 3,000 rounds fired a day, according to the Pentagon.
Ukraine is waging a different type of war than the U.S. would likely face with China, said Doug Bush, assistant Army secretary for acquisition. A future U.S. campaign would likely involve much more air power and sea power, taking some of the pressure off land-based systems and ammunition.
But allies would still need to be supported with land-based systems and ammunition.
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REBUILDING TAKES TIME
The Pentagon’s defense strategy says the U.S. must be able to conduct one war while deterring another, but the supply chain has not reflected that.
Hicks said the surge of weapons to Ukraine “has not slowed down U.S. support to Taiwan,” but many of the military sales promised to Taiwan are facing the same pressures the Ukraine munitions face, such as limited parts or workforce issues.
In response, the U.S. has set up a presidential drawdown authority for Taiwan, Hicks said, that will allow the U.S. to send weapons from its own stockpiles instead of arranging new contracts.
The Army is working with Congress to get the authority to do multiyear contracts, so that companies will invest to meet longer-term needs, especially for the systems Bush called “the big four” — Javelin missiles, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System ( HIMARS ) launchers, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) munitions and 155 mm rounds.
“Without that urgency, we risk being behind at the wrong time later,” Bush said.
The Army is adding production lines for 155 mm artillery — including major components such as the outer metal shell, chargers, the fuse and the explosive material — while right now all production is at one facility in Iowa.
All of that will take time. CSIS reported it could take five years or more to replenish 155 mm, Javelin and Stinger stockpiles.
“The good news is that I think the Ukraine conflict has alerted people to these weaknesses. The bad news is that they’re going to take a long, long time to solve even if there is a lot of political will,” said Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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For European stockpiles, there’s not much excess left to send, and many of the partner nations are rushing to sign new contracts with industry to replenish inventories. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned this week in Brussels that particularly for larger caliber munitions, such as for ground artillery, it could be as long as 2 1/2 years before some new orders are delivered.
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SPACE AS A FRONT LINE
With its use of tanks and artillery, the Ukraine war often seems like a throwback to 20th century ground wars, but it has provided lessons in how valuable space technology has become for intelligence, communications and propaganda.
Before the war, satellite imagery showed Russian forces massing along the border, countering Russia’s claims that it was just staging a military exercise. As troops crossed the border, Ukrainian civilians fed real-time images and video from their smart phones to expose Russian military positions, record confessions from captured Russian forces and publicize Russian troop defeats and deaths.
When Ukraine’s cell towers and power were struck, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk provided a backup by sending hundreds of his Starlink terminals to Kyiv to keep Ukraine connected.
“Russia just got its clock cleaned in the information war from Day One, and they were never able to control the narrative coming out of Ukraine” of democracy under attack, Brands said. “We should assume that China won’t make the same mistake, that it will try very aggressively to control the information space.”
U.S. space experts are also looking at expanding satellite communications, building on Starlink’s successes. While Starlink is now the main orbiting commercial communications ring, others are coming online.
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Starlink has thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth at the same low altitude in a ring. In a potential conflict, if one satellite was attacked, it would be quickly backfilled by another orbiting into place behind it.
That type of proliferated satellite communications is “the way of the future,” John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told the AP. “This is the thing we need to adapt to.”
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BE READY FOR CYBERWAR
While the satellites and their transmissions must be protected, the ground stations to process and disseminate information are also vulnerable. As Russia invaded, a software attack against Ukraine’s Viasat satellite communications network disabled tens of thousand of modems. While Viasat has not said who was to blame, Ukraine blamed Russian hackers.
China would likely use cyberwarfare to prevent Taiwan from sending out similar messages showing that it was effectively resisting any assault, Brands said.
That issue has the attention of the U.S. Space Force.
“If we’re not thinking about cyber protection of our ground networks,” the networks will be left vulnerable, and the satellites won’t be able to distribute their information, said the chief of space operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman.
AP · by TARA COPP · February 16, 2023
3. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 16, 2023
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-16-2023
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces conducted another series of missile strikes on infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine on February 16.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Russian Federation Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova on February 16, confirming that the Kremlin is directly involved in facilitating the deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families.
- Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces aim to capture Bakhmut by the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, which would require a significantly higher rate of Russian advance than has been recently observed.
- Russian forces are reportedly increasing their use of airpower in Ukraine but are unlikely to attempt dramatically increased air operations over Ukrainian-controlled territory.
- Russia and Ukraine exchanged 202 prisoners-of-war (POWs) in a one-for-one exchange.
- Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continues to subtly attack the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) credibility.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut, along the western outskirts of Donetsk City, and in western Donetsk Oblast.
- Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued reconnaissance activities along the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
- The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly continuing its prison recruitment efforts.
- Russian occupation officials continued efforts to integrate occupied areas into the Russian legal system.
- Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko reiterated his longstanding boilerplate rhetoric that Belarusian forces will attack Ukraine if Ukraine or the West attacks Belarus.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 16, 2023
understandingwar.org
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 16, 2023
Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, George Barros, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick Kagan
February 16, 6:45pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian forces conducted another missile strike on infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine on February 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces fired 32 air- and sea-launched missiles at Ukraine, including 12 Kh-101/Kh-555 cruise missiles from Tu-95MS aircraft over the Caspian Sea, 8 Kalibr cruise missiles from a Black Sea frigate, 12 Kh-22 cruise missiles from Tu-22M3 long-range bombers over Kursk Oblast, and 2 Kh-59 cruise missiles from Su-35 aircraft over Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast.[1] Ukrainian air defense reportedly shot down 14 Kh-101/Kh-555 cruise missiles and 2 Kh-59 cruise missiles, 6 over Mykolaiv Oblast, 2 over Kherson Oblast, and the remainder over western regions of Ukraine.[2] Russian missiles struck infrastructure targets in Lviv, Poltava, Kirovohrad, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.[3] Ukrainian Air Force Command spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat noted that Russian forces have changed their tactics and are launching cruise missiles at night, instead of in the middle of day, in order to take Ukrainian air defense forces by surprise.[4]
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Russian Federation Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova on February 16, confirming that the Kremlin is directly involved in facilitating the deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families. During an in-person working meeting with Lvova-Belova, Putin stated that the number of applications submitted by Russian citizens for the adoption of children from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts is growing significantly.[5] Lvova-Belova noted that she herself adopted a child from Mariupol and stated that she has particularly been working with Russian families to facilitate the placement of Ukrainian children into Russian homes, highlighting the story of one Moscow Oblast family who took custody of nine children.[6] Lvova-Belova confirmed that Russian regional governors are facilitating adoption efforts and emphasized the role of Chechen Head Ramzan Kadyrov’s efforts to work with her on programs for “difficult teenagers.”[7] Lvova-Belova’s and Putin’s meeting is likely a result of Putin’s January 3 list of instructions to Lvova-Belova and the occupation heads of occupied oblasts directing them to take a number of measures ostensibly to support children in occupied areas of Ukraine.[8] This meeting is additionally noteworthy because it suggests that Putin himself is overseeing and directing efforts to facilitate deportation and adoption programs, which ISW continues to assess may constitute a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[9]
Putin also ostensibly made a limited concession to Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin during his meeting with Lvova-Belova. Lvova-Belova noted that some servicemembers are fighting for Russia in private military companies (PMCs) but that their families aren’t receiving the same social support as families of other servicemembers.[10] Putin responded that volunteers, contract servicemen, and everyone in the Russian Armed Forces are equal and that Russian officials are working on providing social benefits to all families, including those of PMC fighters. While Putin did not mention the Wagner Group explicitly, the allusion to PMCs suggests that Putin to some degree sees such irregular military formations as equal to conventional Russian forces. The provision of social guarantees to families of PMCs, especially Wagner, would mark an inflection from Putin’s recent attempts to disenfranchise Wagner and move closer to the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) establishment, on which ISW has previously reported.[11]
Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces aim to capture Bakhmut by the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, which would require a significantly higher rate of Russian advance than anything seen for many months. Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov stated on February 16 that Russian forces intend to capture Bakhmut by February 24 to mark the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine and plan to conduct a massive series of missile strikes to mark the date.[12] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin recently stated that he expects Wagner Group fighters to encircle Bakhmut by March or April, and Prigozhin‘s pragmatic assessments of Russian advances in the Bakhmut area have generally been closer to tactical realities than assessments forecasting rapid Russian advances.[13] Russian forces do not appear to be quickening their rate of advance around Bakhmut and are unlikely to meet this reported February 24 goal. Ukrainian forces could always decide that the costs associated with holding Bakhmut are too high and voluntarily withdraw from the city, although Ukrainian forces and leaders continue to indicate that they intend to hold the city. ISW previously assessed that the Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut would likely prevent Putin from claiming that Russian forces secured the city on the anniversary of the invasion in an attempt to renew hope in a Russian victory in Ukraine.[14] The Kremlin may launch another series of missile strikes on civilian targets throughout Ukraine to mark the symbolic anniversary as actual military success continues to evade the Russian military.
Russian forces are reportedly increasing their use of airpower in Ukraine but are unlikely to dedicate significant amounts of airpower to combat operations over Ukrainian-controlled territory. The Financial Times (FT), citing shared NATO-member intelligence, reported on February 14 that Russia is massing fixed-wing and rotary aircraft near the Russo-Ukrainian border and suggested that Russian fighter jets may support an offensive on the ground.[15] Russian opposition outlet Important Stories, citing an internal Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) source, reported on February 16 that the Russian military is changing tactics and has committed to using large amounts of airpower in Ukraine.[16] A senior NATO official reported that 80 percent of Russia’s airpower remains intact and that Russian forces have been attempting to disable Ukrainian air defenses in preparation for a large strike campaign.[17] The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on February 16 that Russian sortie rates have increased over the past week to levels last seen in summer 2022 but noted that Russian forces have not increased their air presence in Ukraine and assessed that Russian forces are not likely preparing for an extended air campaign.[18] US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated that current Ukrainian air defense capabilities are not sufficient to combat a renewed wave of air attacks but stated that there are no imminent signs of a massive Russian aerial attack.[19] Important Stories noted that Russian forces have not likely adequately trained enough personnel to fully crew their aircraft.[20] Russian forces would likely suffer unsustainable aircraft losses if they committed aircraft to extended combat operations like a strategic bombing campaign or close air support, especially if Western states provide Ukraine with adequate air defense capabilities.
Russia and Ukraine exchanged 202 prisoners-of-war (POWs) in a one-for-one exchange on February 16.[21] Head of the Ukrainian Presidential Office, Andriy Yermak, stated that of the 101 personnel Ukraine received, 94 were taken prisoner in Mariupol and that 63 of them were defenders of the Azovstal plant.[22] A Russian source expressed frustration that the Russian Ministry of Defense casually released Azovstal POWs while Russian authorities imposed a harsh sentence against Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko for claiming that Russian forces destroyed the Mariupol Drama Theater.[23] A court in Barnaul, Siberia sentenced Ponomarenko on February 15 under the law against the dissemination of fake information about the Russian military to six years in a strict regime penal colony.[24]
Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continues to subtly attack the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) credibility. Wagner Group artillerymen posted a video on social media on February 16 in which they claimed that Wagner Group artillery elements lack artillery ammunition and are “cut off” from ammunition supplies — implying that the Russian MoD is sabotaging Wagner Group’s ammunition supply despite Prigozhin’s claims that the Wagner Group is the main combat-ready force on the frontlines.[25] Prigozhin amplified this narrative when Russian media asked for his comment about the video, stating that these artillerymen are effective fighters simply asking for necessary supplies for success on the battlefield.[26] Prigozhin stated that he personally has had to appeal to “offices in Moscow” to secure resources before and that the fact that he has had to ask for ammunition does not undermine the Russian military's credibility.[27] Prigozhin’s statement nonetheless promotes the larger narrative that the Russian MoD’s incompetence is hamstringing Wagner Group’s frontline forces and supports his larger effort to portray the Russian MoD as ineffective and corrupt.[28]
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces conducted another series of missile strikes on infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine on February 16.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Russian Federation Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova on February 16, confirming that the Kremlin is directly involved in facilitating the deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families.
- Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces aim to capture Bakhmut by the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, which would require a significantly higher rate of Russian advance than has been recently observed.
- Russian forces are reportedly increasing their use of airpower in Ukraine but are unlikely to attempt dramatically increased air operations over Ukrainian-controlled territory.
- Russia and Ukraine exchanged 202 prisoners-of-war (POWs) in a one-for-one exchange.
- Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continues to subtly attack the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) credibility.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut, along the western outskirts of Donetsk City, and in western Donetsk Oblast.
- Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued reconnaissance activities along the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
- The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly continuing its prison recruitment efforts.
- Russian occupation officials continued efforts to integrate occupied areas into the Russian legal system.
- Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko reiterated his longstanding boilerplate rhetoric that Belarusian forces will attack Ukraine if Ukraine or the West attacks Belarus.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- 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 continue offensive operations into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)
ISW continues to assess the current Russian most likely course of action (MLCOA) is an imminent offensive effort in Luhansk Oblast and has therefore adjusted the structure of the daily campaign assessments. We will no longer include the Eastern Kharkiv and Western Luhansk Oblast area as part of Ukrainian counteroffensives and will assess this area as a subordinate part of the Russian main effort in Eastern Ukraine. The assessment of Luhansk Oblast as part of the Russian main effort does not preclude the possibility of continued Ukrainian counteroffensive actions here or anywhere else in theater in the future. ISW will report out on Ukrainian counteroffensive efforts as they occur.
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks near Svatove on February 16. Ukrainian think tank Center for Defense Strategies reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian 138th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (45th Guards Motorized Rifle Division, 6th Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) attack near Hryanykivka (53km northwest of Svatove).[29] The Center for Defense Strategies also reported that Russian forces entered Lyman Pershyi, advanced to the Synkivka area, and attacked Masyutivka, Kharkiv Oblast (all 50–54km northwest of Svatove).[30] ISW has no independent verification of these claims. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces continue to fight for control of Hryanykivka and near Synkivka.[31] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are testing a remote-controlled machine gun system equipped with a self-destruction system near Svatove.[32]
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks near Kreminna on February 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks near Bilohorivka and in the Serebrianska forest area, both south of Kreminna.[33] The Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies reported that the Russian 3rd Motorized Rifle Division (20thCombined Arms Army, Western Military District) pushed Ukrainian forces back 500–1,000 meters near Kreminna.[34]The Center for Defense Strategies reported that the Russian 3rd Motorized Rifle Division then entered a field east of Yampolivka (14km northeast of Kreminna), where Ukrainian forces fired at Russian positions. ISW has no independent verification of these claims. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Bilohorivka (32km southeast of Kreminna), Torske (13km east of Lyman), and Nevske (22km northeast of Lyman).[35]
Russian sources continued to claim on February 16 that Ukrainian forces are concentrating and fortifying in preparation for possible Russian offensives in the Kupyansk and Kreminna areas.[36]
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces continued ground attacks around Bakhmut on February 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks on Bakhmut itself and near Fedorivka (15km northeast of Bakhmut) and Dyliivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[37] Geolocated footage shows special forces elements of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) striking Russian positions in Paraskoviivka, indicating that Russian forces have made marginal advances just northeast of Bakhmut.[38] Russian milbloggers emphasized that heavy fighting is ongoing in Paraskoviivka and that Russian forces are trying to envelop the settlement from two sides.[39] A Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner Group fighters advanced west of Soledar (10km northeast of Bakhmut) and reached Zaliznianske. [40] Two milbloggers claimed to be in Bakhmut itself and remarked that they personally observed fierce fighting on the northeastern outskirts of Bakhmut as Wagner Group forces try to cut all remaining Ukrainian supply lines into the town.[41] One Russian source claimed that the Wagner Group resumed an offensive on Ivanivske, 5km west of Bakhmut.[42]
Russian forces continued ground attacks in the Avdiivka–Donetsk City area on February 16. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks near Avdiivka and along the western outskirts of Donetsk City near Vodiane and Pervomaiske (on the northwestern outskirts) and Marinka and Novomykhailivka (on the southwestern outskirts).[43] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces made unspecified advances towards Pervomaiske and changed their tactics in Marinka to focus on bypassing the settlement from the south via Pobieda and Novomykhailivka instead of continuing costly frontal assaults on fortified urban areas in western Marinka.[44] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) posted footage of the aftermath of a purported DNR 5th Brigade attack in Marinka.[45] A Russian milblogger confirmed that elements of the Southern Military District’s 150th Motorized Rifle Division are supporting DNR operations in the Marinka area.[46]
Russian forces conducted ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on February 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attacked near Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City), Prechystivka (35km southwest of Donetsk City), and Novosilka (65km southwest of Donetsk City).[47] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian troops attacked near Prechystivka and on the outskirts of Vuhledar.[48] Another Russian source posted footage of Russian forces firing a TOS-1A thermobaric artillery system reportedly at the dacha area near the outskirts of Vuhledar.[49]
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued reconnaissance activities along the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast on February 16. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian artillery units of the Southern Military District destroyed a Ukrainian naval vessel during an attempted landing of a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group in an unspecified area of the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.[50] The Russian MoD claimed that the Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group was attempting to land near positions of unspecified Airborne (VDV) and motorized rifle formations.[51]
Russian officials claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted drone attacks against Crimea amid reports of explosions in occupied Crimea on February 16. Sevastopol occupation head Mikhail Razvozhaev claimed that Ukrainian forces launched several drones at Sevastopol and other locations in Crimea on the night of February 15 to 16 and that Russian air defenses shot down two drones near Sevastopol and several others elsewhere in Crimea.[52] Social media sources and Russian milbloggers amplified footage purporting to show a large explosion north of Armyansk, Crimea, but Crimean occupation advisor Oleg Kryuchkov claimed that Russian forces were conducting combat coordination activities in the area.[53]
Russian forces continued routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson oblasts on February 16.[54] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Kherson City.[55] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces intentionally shelled Chaplynka, Kherson Oblast on February 14 to accuse Ukrainian forces of shelling the settlement.[56] A social media source amplified footage on February 16 claiming to show explosions near Chaplynka and Skadovsk in Kherson Oblast.[57]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly continuing its prison recruitment efforts. Head of the Russian human rights organization “Rus Sidyashchaya” Olga Romanova stated that the Russian MoD prepares lists of prisoners with military experience and forcibly recruits them without notification.[58] Romanova claimed that the Russian MoD has conducted recent recruitment campaigns in Tambov Oblast, Volgograd Oblast, and Siberia.[59] Romanova also contrasted the MoD’s forced recruitment effort with the Wagner Group’s prison recruitment campaign, claiming that 300 prisoners voluntarily joined the Wagner Group in October 2022 and 20 in January 2023 from an unspecified oblast.[60] The reported decline in the Wagner Group’s recruitment from this unspecified oblast may be indicative of an overall reported decline in the Wagner Group’s prison recruitment campaign, and Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin recently claimed that the Wagner Group has stopped its prison recruitment campaign.[61] The Russian MoD’s reported intensification of prison recruitment efforts and the Wagner Group’s avowed end to its own campaign suggests that the Russian MoD may have barred the Wagner Group from this effort in order to monopolize the recruitment of prisoners.
Russian authorities reportedly arrested Russian military personnel for discrediting the Russian military on February 16. A Russian source claimed that the Samara Oblast military prosecutor’s office arrested two mobilized personnel reportedly from the 1444th regiment for discrediting the Russian military in connection with a video they recorded on February 9 in which they complained about a lack of proper documentation, payments, and instructions.[62] The 1444th regiment reportedly suffered significant casualties in a Ukrainian strike on a Russian base in Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast on December 31, 2022, and the Russian military reportedly disbanded the unit following the strike.[63] Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta reported that Russian military officials assigned the thousands of mobilized personnel from the disbanded 1444th regiment to the 362nd Regiment of the 3rdMotorized Rifle Division of the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army.[64] The arrest of the two Russian servicemembers may indicate that the Russian military intends to more aggressively silence routine criticism from rank-and-file Russian personnel.
The Western Military District Financial Department head Marina Yarinka reportedly fell out of a window and died on February 16.[65] A prominent Russian milblogger amplified claims that Yarinka’s mysterious death could be related to an April 2022 report that supposedly alleged that unspecified actors stole 70 percent of the funds allocated for the modernization of air and missile defense near St. Petersburg.[66]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian occupation officials continued efforts to integrate occupied areas of Ukraine into the Russian legal system. Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo and Crimea occupation State Council Chair Vladimir Konstantinov discussed integrating occupied Kherson Oblast into the Russian legal system on February 16, and Saldo claimed that Kherson Oblast will be completely legally integrated by the end of 2023 with Crimea’s support.[67] Russian opposition news outlet Meduza reported that Kremlin-affiliated news outlet RIA Novosti reported that the Russian Federation Council and State Duma plan to meet on March 1 to reportedly discuss integrating the annexed regions of Ukraine into the Russian legal system, particularly in regard to two laws relating to the budget and taxes of annexed territories.[68] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky announced that the occupation administration will speed up the passportization process of Zaporizhia Oblast civilians following his meeting with Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) Head of the Main Directorate for Migration Valentina Kazakova.[69] Balitsky claimed that the Russian MVD will open four additional migration departments and claimed that over 130,000 residents of occupied Zaporizhia Oblast have received RU passports.[70] The Ukrainian Resistance Center relatedly reported that occupation officials in Zalizny Port, Kherson Oblast apply pressure on citizens to get Russian passports by threatening to withhold social benefits and business licenses.[71]
Russian occupation officials continued efforts to deepen social integration of occupied Ukrainian territories into the Russian social sphere. Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko posted reported curriculum documents that the Russian occupation administration in Mariupol intends to use in schools that present a fabricated history of Ukraine and Russia in line with the Kremlin’s revisionist history.[72] The excerpt claims that Crimea and Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts are historically tied to Russia with Polish and Austro-Hungarian influence sparking “Ukrainization” and that Russia invaded Ukraine as a preemptive strike against the West, which uses Ukraine to attack Russia.[73] Russian occupation officials’ attempts to rewrite and erase Ukrainian history in classrooms is an extension of wider government initiatives to erase Ukrainian identity among youth. Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Head Leonid Pasechnik, Head of Sorokyne (Krasnodon) LNR Administration Sergey Kozenko, and City Head of Krasnoyarsk Vladislav Loginov signed an agreement establishing the cities as twin cities.[74] Pasechnik claimed that this relationship will include youth exchanges, infrastructure restoration, urban development, and sports development.[75] The Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) released a report stating Russian officials have used youth camps to attempt to indoctrinate Ukrainian children with Russian political ideology, holding at least 300 children in Russia for several weeks to several months longer than the specified program timeframe, and the youth exchange program touted by Pasechnik may be part of this youth camp scheme.[76]
Russian occupation officials are increasingly using medical infrastructure to consolidate control of occupied areas. Kremlin-affiliated news outlet TASS reported that Putin supported Balitsky’s idea to create an interregional children’s medical center for Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts because Kherson Oblast does not have a children's hospital.[77] TASS also claimed that Putin promised to help arrange special medical transport by purchasing five off-road vehicles so that doctors can reach rural areas.[78] ISW has previously reported on Russian occupation officials using the improvement of medical infrastructure and patient care to import Russian medical personnel to occupied areas and transport Ukrainian children further into Russian-occupied areas or to Russia.[79]
Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.
ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.)
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko reiterated his longstanding boilerplate rhetoric that Belarusian forces will attack Ukraine only if Ukraine or the West attacks Belarus.[80] This statement is not extraordinary — Lukashenko has parroted this narrative since February 2022, and his decision to reiterate it today is likely part of long-running Russian information operations suggesting that Belarusian conventional ground forces might join Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[81] ISW has written at length about why Belarus is extraordinarily unlikely to invade Ukraine in the foreseeable future.[82] ISW continues to assess that Belarusian forces remain extremely unlikely to invade Ukraine with or without Russian forces. Lukashenko may have made this statement to set information conditions for his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin planned for February 17.
The Belarusian 465th Missile Brigade based in Yuzhny, Osipovichi, is likely operating the Iskander short-range ballistic missile systems that Russia gave Belarus in late 2022 or early 2023.[83] A Belarusian media interview with a Belarusian operator of the new Iskander systems shows the soldier’s uniform bearing a patch of the Belarusian 465th Missile Brigade.[84]
Belarusian forces continue conducting exercises in Belarus. Unspecified elements of the Belarusian 11th Artillery Brigade and 48thSeparate Electronic Warfare Battalion conducted tactical medicine training at the Brest Training Ground on February 16.[85]
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.
[3] https://suspilne dot media/387509-rosia-zminila-taktiku-raketnih-obstriliv-ukraini-povitrani-sili/; https://ua.news/ua/war-vs-rf/v-vsu-soobshhili-skolko-raket-vypustili-okk...
[4] https://suspilne dot media/387509-rosia-zminila-taktiku-raketnih-obstriliv-ukraini-povitrani-sili/
[5] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70524
[6] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70524
[7] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70524
[10] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70524
[12] https://glavcom dot ua/country/incidents/danilov-povidomiv-jak-ukrajina-hotujetsja-do-jmovirnoji-masovanoji-ataki-rf-na-23-24-ljutoho-908840.html ; https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/news-64635206
[16] https://storage.googleapis dot com/istories/news/2023/02/16/istochnik-vazhnikh-istorii-rossiiskie-voennie-reshili-massovo-primenyat-aviatsiyu-v-ukraine/index.html
[24] https://meduza dot io/en/news/2023/02/15/siberian-journalist-maria-ponomarenko-sentenced-to-six-years-on-disinformation-charges-for-posts-about-russia-s-mariupol-theater-strike
[25] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/78247; https://t.me/orchestra_w/5053; https:... news/?q=node/1212930; https://www.ostro dot org/ru/news/naemnyky-vagnera-zhaluyutsya-na-otsutstvye-snaryadov-y-prosyat-mo-rf-obespechyt-yh-boeprypasamy-i406274
[29] https://defence dot org.ua/dailybrief/2023-02-16/
[30] https://defence dot org.ua/dailybrief/2023-02-16/
[34] https://defence dot org.ua/dailybrief/2023-02-16/
[38] https://twitter.com/auditor_ya/status/1626219937483169792; https://twit... ua/content/cpetspryznachentsi-hur-mo-ukrainy-provely-uspishnu-operatsiiu-na-bakhmutskomu-napriamku.html; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr7dJ4yXQeE&ab_channel=%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%B...
[64] https://novayagazeta dot eu/articles/2023/02/09/draftees-who-suffered-missile-attacks-in-makiivka-ask-putin-to-send-them-home-due-to-outrageous-treatment-from-commanders-en-news
[71] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/02/16/rosiyany-prodovzhuyut-prymusovu-pasportyzacziyu-meshkancziv-pivdnya/
[77] https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/17058719
[78] https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/17058719
[80] https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/vstrecha-s-predstavitelyami-zarubezhnyh-i-belorusskih-smi
understandingwar.org
4. Ukraine war spurs European demand for U.S. arms, but not big-ticket items
Ukraine war spurs European demand for U.S. arms, but not big-ticket items
Reuters · by Mike Stone
WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - European demand for U.S. weaponry is soaring, but instead of big-ticket items like jets and tanks, shopping lists are focused on cheaper, less-sophisticated items such as shoulder-fired missiles, artillery, and drones that have proven critical to Ukraine's war efforts.
Countries close to Russia like Poland, Finland and Germany are striking deals to build U.S. weapons in Europe, negotiating new deals to buy arms and looking to speed up existing contracts, according to interviews with military officials and industry executives, and a Reuters review of recent announcements by governments and defense manufacturers.
Demand is centered around basic weapons and munitions: 155-millimeter artillery rounds, air defenses, communications equipment, shoulder-fired Javelin missiles and drones, nearly a dozen European military attachés in Washington told Reuters in a series of recent interviews.
The focus on high-volume, less costly weapons underscores how the war in Ukraine has reshaped strategic thinking in European capitals about how future conflicts could be fought.
Visions of high-tech wars more reliant on computers and machines have been replaced by the reality of relentless artillery duels and soldiers dug into muddy trenches. The one-year-old war has seen both sides expend vast quantities of artillery shells and missiles.
Ukraine's high usage rates of "both precision and unguided munitions have shown NATO countries that any future war would require much higher stocks than anticipated," said Roman Schweizer, a defense policy analyst at investment bank Cowen & Co.
The attaches said their governments were particularly keen on buying Javelins after seeing the weapon's effectiveness in Ukraine. The missiles have proven deadly against Russian tanks.
Five European countries, meanwhile, have expressed interest in buying Raytheon Technologies' (RTX.N) precision-guided 155 millimeter artillery rounds, according to a company spokesperson, who declined to name them. The rounds are accurate to within 12 feet (4 meters) and have a range of 20 miles (32 km).
The interest from the five countries has not been previously reported. The company already sells to three other European nations.
Expressions of interest are the first step in a multi-step acquisition process that includes approval from the United States government and negotiations between the buyer and weapons contractor. It can be a year or more before a weapon is actually delivered.
Several of the military attachés, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media on behalf of their governments, said their countries have been making sure payments to defense contractors have been on schedule, hoping to forestall any delays. The weapons purchases are now a domestic policy priority in their countries, they said.
U.S. arms makers have in the past complained about late customer payments on calls with investors.
DRONES BIG AND SMALL
Small drones and bigger unmanned aircraft, which cost about $20 million each without sophisticated sensors, cameras and other "extras," have also appeared on shopping lists.
Finland and Denmark began talks with General Atomics after Russia invaded Ukraine last February, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters. They want to buy a small number of MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones that can be used for maritime and land surveillance.
A Finnish defense ministry spokesperson declined to comment. A Danish defense ministry spokesperson said they have begun the process to buy at least two "long range, long endurance Remotely Piloted Aircraft System(s)" to strengthen "military capacities in the Arctic," without naming any companies.
Poland, which has been eager to get its hands on the same model drones, just received two of the previous generation model on lease from General Atomics until they get U.S. approval to buy the new ones, according to two sources familiar with the situation.
Defense minister Mariusz Blaszczak confirmed the delivery, although not the number, in a Feb. 12 tweet that said they will be used to surveil the country's eastern border, which it shares with Ukraine and Russian ally Belarus.
Some European countries are also keen to begin producing U.S. weapons on their soil because it would reduce dependency on foreign imports and lower purchasing costs.
In Germany, arms maker Rheinmetall is ready to boost the output of tank and artillery munitions and may start producing High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) mobile rocket launchers, which have had great success targeting Russian positions, CEO Armin Papperger told Reuters. read more
The system is currently produced by Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) in Camden, Arkansas. It is not clear whether the system would be produced under license, a joint venture or some other arrangement.
A Lockheed Martin spokesperson declined to comment directly on the possibility of Rheinmetall beginning production of HIMARS. Lockheed Martin's Eastern European business development manager for several missile programs, Rita Flaherty, said the company was "exploring co-production and technology transfer with several international partners."
Latvia, too, is interested in co-producing U.S. munitions. "We recognize the benefits provided by local production of large caliber munitions," military affairs spokesperson Roberts Skraucs said in a statement to Reuters.
Expectations remain high that European fears of Russian aggression will still generate orders for the biggest, multibillion dollar U.S. weapons like fighter jets and expensive missile defense systems with sophisticated radar.
For more expensive arms, the first orders are expected to be used to backfill equipment sent to Ukraine by Poland. Slovakia, for example, has said it is ready to send its MiG-29 jets to Ukraine. A likely replacement would be Lockheed Martin's F-16, which cost about $65 million each.
Investors banking on soaring demand for U.S. weapons have boosted share prices of the biggest U.S. defense contractors – adding $35 billion in market value - since the invasion of Ukraine began.
ARTILLERY STILL KEY
Demand is particularly high for 155 millimeter artillery shells. The war in Ukraine has highlighted the continued importance of artillery in helping to overwhelm enemy positions or thwart troop advances. The U.S. last year shipped more than 1 million 155 millimeter shells to Ukraine, a standard round that costs the U.S. Army about $800 each.
The U.S. production goal for 155 millimeter rounds has tripled from 30,000 shells a month to 90,000 a month over the next two years, according to an Army official. The huge increase reflects the need to restock U.S. supplies as well as those of allies including Norway, Canada, Finland, France, Germany and Italy, who sent some of their stocks to Ukraine.
"It has really hit home that this is an industrial-style war," said Seth Jones with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, referring to a conflict that requires a high volume of weaponry in a short period of time.
Countries also realized early on in the Ukraine conflict the importance of having the Javelin anti-armor missile in their armories, which frequently appeared in news reports of Ukraine's destruction of Russian armored columns.
In April, Lithuania said it had set aside 1 billion euros for Javelins and other weapons. In May, Lockheed said it was doubling production and later in the month won, alongside its production partner Raytheon, a $309 million order for more than 1,300 Javelin missiles for Norway, Albania, Latvia as well as to restock U.S. supplies sent to Ukraine. In August, the United States approved a $300 million order for Britain.
Training for Javelins is relatively quick, compared to the learning required for more sophisticated platforms like tanks and planes, and the weapons themselves are relatively inexpensive. The medium-range missiles guide themselves after being launched, allowing the shooter to take cover. A single Javelin costs the U.S. Army about $263,000.
Reporting by Mike Stone in Washington, editing by Chris Sanders and Ross Colvin
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Mike Stone
5. Overnight protests rock Tehran, other Iranian cities, online videos show
Overnight protests rock Tehran, other Iranian cities, online videos show
Reuters · by Reuters
Feb 17 (Reuters) - Protests rocked Iran again overnight after a seeming slowdown in recent weeks, with marchers calling for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, online video posts purportedly showed on Friday.
The marches in numerous cities including Tehran that began on Thursday evening and went on into the night marked 40 days since the execution of two protesters last month.
Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini were hanged on Jan. 8. Two others were executed in December.
The protests that have swept across Iran began last September after the death in custody of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini for flouting the hijab policy, which requires women to entirely cover their hair and bodies.
Videos on Friday showed overnight demonstrations in several neighbourhoods in Tehran as well as in the cities of Karaj, Isfahan, Qazvin, Rasht, Arak, Mashhad, Sanandaj, Qorveh, and Izeh in Khuzestan province.
An online video purportedly from the holy Shi'ite city of Mashhad in the northeast showed protesters chanting: "My martyred brother, we shall avenge your blood.”
Reuters could not verify the videos.
The long wave of unrest has posed one of the strongest challenges to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution. Openly defying the hijab rules, women have waved and burned their scarves or cut their hair.
While the unrest appeared to have tapered off in recent weeks, likely because of the executions or the brutal crackdown, acts of civil disobedience have continued unabated.
Nightly anti-regime chants reverberate across Tehran and other cities. Youths spray graffiti at night denouncing the republic or burn pro-government billboards or signs on main highways. Unveiled women appear in the streets, malls, shops and restaurants despite dire warnings from officials.
Many of the women among the dozens of recently released prisoners have posed unveiled in front of cameras.
Authorities have not backed down on the compulsory hijab policy, a pillar of the Islamic Republic.
In recent weeks Iranian media have reported closures of several businesses, restaurants and cafes for failure to observe the hijab rules.
Earlier this month, a Tehran pharmacy was ordered to close because "its owner disrespected the person who warned her to observe the hijab", the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency reported on Wednesday.
Last week, Iranian officials called on trade unions for stricter enforcement of hijab regulations in Tehran’s stores and businesses.
"Improperly" veiled female students were warned last month they would be barred from entering Tehran University, while local media reported that about 50 students were prevented from entering Urmia University in the northwest for flouting the hijab rules.
Rights activists say more than 500 protesters have been killed since September, including 71 minors. Nearly 20,000 have been detained. At least four people have been hanged, according to the judiciary.
Karami, a 22-year-old karate champion, and Hosseini were convicted of killing a member of the Basij paramilitary force militia.
Amnesty International said the court that convicted Karami relied on forced confessions. Hosseini's lawyer said his client had been tortured.
Two others were executed on Dec. 8 and 12 respectively.
Five women activists released on Thursday said in a joint statement they owed their freedom to the solidarity of "the freedom-loving people and youths of Iran", according to social media posts.
"The day of freedom is near," they said.
<a href="mailto:dubai.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com" target="_blank">dubai.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com</a>; Editing by Hugh Lawson
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Reuters
6. Clandestine U.K. Program Developed 3D-Printed ‘Suicide’ Drone For Ukraine
Innovation.
Excerpts:
Some details of the rapid development program were recently revealed by QinetiQ, the U.K.-based defense technology company that works closely with the U.K. Ministry of Defense, especially on experimental projects and novel technologies. The drone program originated in the Future Capability Group — part of the defense ministry’s Defense Equipment and Support (DE&S) branch — which, in turn, engaged QinetiQ.
Another drone in the QinetiQ portfolio, the Banshee Whirlwind remotely piloted aerial target. QinetiQ
A statement from QinetiQ doesn’t confirm when the program actually took place, while an uncaptioned accompanying photo (also seen at the top of this story) shows a small drone with swept wing and tail fin, apparently powered by a pair of micro-turbine engines, and possibly 3D-printed. The suggestion is that this is one of the prototypes from the program, but that also remains unconfirmed for now. On both counts, we have approached the company to find out more.
The aim of the program was to “provide recommendations for uncrewed aircraft systems that could be deployed readily by the Ukrainian military” and was part of a wider U.K. government effort, known as KINDRED, that’s assessing what kinds of weapons and equipment could potentially be introduced to service by Ukraine in the space of just four months.
Clandestine U.K. Program Developed 3D-Printed ‘Suicide’ Drone For Ukraine
The delta-wing drone was just one result of a rapid U.K. development program intended to prove systems for potential use by Ukraine.
BY
THOMAS NEWDICK
|
PUBLISHED FEB 16, 2023 4:24 PM
thedrive.com · by Thomas Newdick · February 16, 2023
In an until-now secretive program, the United Kingdom has rapidly developed and flight-tested a number of “complex” drones that would be suitable for use by Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. While it’s unclear which of any of the unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in question were ultimately selected for supply to Ukraine, it’s obvious that a range of different capabilities was explored in the process, including surveillance drones and, most intriguingly, what is described as a “3D-printed delta-wing ‘suicide’ drone.”
Some details of the rapid development program were recently revealed by QinetiQ, the U.K.-based defense technology company that works closely with the U.K. Ministry of Defense, especially on experimental projects and novel technologies. The drone program originated in the Future Capability Group — part of the defense ministry’s Defense Equipment and Support (DE&S) branch — which, in turn, engaged QinetiQ.
Another drone in the QinetiQ portfolio, the Banshee Whirlwind remotely piloted aerial target. QinetiQ
A statement from QinetiQ doesn’t confirm when the program actually took place, while an uncaptioned accompanying photo (also seen at the top of this story) shows a small drone with swept wing and tail fin, apparently powered by a pair of micro-turbine engines, and possibly 3D-printed. The suggestion is that this is one of the prototypes from the program, but that also remains unconfirmed for now. On both counts, we have approached the company to find out more.
The aim of the program was to “provide recommendations for uncrewed aircraft systems that could be deployed readily by the Ukrainian military” and was part of a wider U.K. government effort, known as KINDRED, that’s assessing what kinds of weapons and equipment could potentially be introduced to service by Ukraine in the space of just four months.
Within “a few weeks,” according to QinetiQ, it was determined that the drone program would be run from the company’s sprawling MOD Boscombe Down test site, in southwest England. Here, efforts were made to set up a safe and effective “sandbox window” test environment on the airfield.
But while KINDRED explores potential new defense equipment for Ukraine that can be brought to the front line within four months, the drone program was run on a much more demanding timeline. Within just three weeks, the QinetiQ-led team was to demonstrate a series of new drones and related technology to senior U.K. Ministry of Defense officials, during a two-day event. This would include “flying experimental UAS and EW [electronic warfare] testing.”
The QinetiQ Obsidian radar, offered as a counter-drone solution:
Ultimately, the defense ministry officials observed equipment, systems, and technologies from five different companies that were demonstrated at Boscombe Down. According to QinetiQ, the test projects “included C2 [command and control] and sensor payload[s] as well as VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] UAS and a unique 3D-printed delta-wing ‘suicide’ drone.” No details of other projects were disclosed and the companies involved have not been named.
We do know, however, that there was close involvement from a range of U.K. defense organizations and units, including the Royal Air Force (RAF) Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), the Royal Navy, the RAF’s No. 56 Squadron, Royal Artillery, Defense Science and Technology Laboratories (DSTL), U.K. Strategic Command, and the British Army HQ, as well as the Future Capability Group and DE&S.
As well as flight tests of at least some of the rapidly developed drones, the trials also included experiments on the ground, and use was also made of Boscombe Down’s anechoic test facility, which can be used to assess how test specimens respond to radio-frequency energy, as well as providing a controlled environment to see how electronic systems and emissions interact with one another. The anechoic chamber was also used to expose the test specimens to command link jamming, an important consideration in Ukraine considering Russia’s widespread use of offensive electronic warfare.
A company-operated PC-21 turboprop trainer in QinetiQ’s anechoic test facility. QinetiQ
It is worth noting that QinetiQ has also been playing a central role in developing new UAS technologies for the U.K. Royal Navy, including producing the jet-powered Banshee Jet 80+ that has been launched from the deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales. The adapted target drone has been used to demonstrate the broader potential for flying future adversary missions as well as more capable operational UAS that could be used aboard the two Queen Elizabeth class carriers. A Banshee development would also appear to be suitable for adaptation as a ‘suicide’ drone, should that be desired. At the very least, it would seem likely that work with the Banshee could have informed the designs developed for Ukraine.
The development program in the United Kingdom seems to have some parallels with the U.S. effort to develop the still-mysterious Phoenix Ghost loitering munition for Ukraine. This all-new weapon was quickly developed by the U.S. Air Force specifically for Ukraine and, although announced as part of a U.S. security assistance package in April last year, the weapon is not thought to have been identified in use so far.
The big question is to what degree the results of the U.K. drone experiment led to technologies that were selected for Ukraine and whether these might have even been used on the battlefield already. QinetiQ has only said that the event “delivered invaluable UAS insight and assurances to support the provision of effective equipment for the Ukrainian military.”
At the same time, while the United Kingdom is known to have transferred a considerable number of drones to Ukraine — at least 2,000, including loitering munitions — as part of its aid effort to that country, there have been few details as to the particular types supplied. It is possible that at least some of the drones supplied already are of types or configurations that were specifically designed for Ukraine.
Some of the drones provided to Kyiv by the United Kingdom so far include “unmanned surveillance systems” of unknown type, cargo-carrying logistics drones, autonomous mine-hunting vehicles, as well as 850 hand-launched Black Hornet micro-drones, the latter as part of a deal in collaboration with the Norwegian Ministry of Defense.
A British Army Black Hornet micro-drone. Crown Copyright
To date, the United Kingdom is not known to have delivered any armed drones, although the fact that a delta-wing ‘suicide’ drone has at least been tested, with a view to supplying it to Ukraine, is significant.
In fact, Ukrainian efforts to field a ‘suicide’ drone in broadly the same class as the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 used by Russia may well be gaining momentum.
A Russian-operated Shahed-136 over Ukraine. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images
A brief video that emerged on social media within the last week shows what’s apparently a modified version of the RZ60, which was originally developed in Ukraine as a target drone. The new version uses a trailer-mounted rocket-assisted launch system, instead of the previous pneumatic catapult. There is speculation that the drone is intended for one-way attack missions, although that cannot be said for certain, and details such as range and payload remain unclear.
What we do know is that Ukraine has adapted other kinds of drones for ‘suicide’ missions, including off-the-shelf hobby-style drones that have been used to target objectives in Crimea and across the border in Russia.
If the Ukrainian military were to go forward with this U.K.-developed drone as a strike weapon, it would give them another method of hitting Russian forces at longer ranges, though not nearly as far as some of its strikes with the Soviet-era jet-powered Tu-141 Strizh reconnaissance drone that Ukraine has converted into a strike platform and that’s hit targets deep inside of Russia.
For the time being, there is no confirmation that the RZ60 is indeed being adapted as a ‘suicide’ drone, although a weapon in this class would almost certainly be of great interest to Ukraine and that would appear to be reflected in the testing of a delta-wing ‘suicide’ drone in the United Kingdom.
Depending on the performance of the 3D-printed delta-wing drone tested at Boscombe Down, it’s even possible that it could be the weapon referred to recently by U.K. officials when they said they plan to offer Ukraine “longer-range capabilities,” which led to some speculation that the Storm Shadow cruise missile could be headed to Ukraine.
The U.K. government said the weapons in question “will disrupt Russia’s ability to continually target Ukraine’s civilian and critical national infrastructure and help relieve pressure on Ukraine’s frontlines.” That could well make sense as a reference to a British-designed ‘suicide’ drone, but for now, we simply don’t know.
The cost factor could also be important for any kind of drone rapidly developed for Ukraine, especially one that makes use of 3D printing. While a low price point was not one of the criteria mentioned for the U.K. drone experiment, a UAS of this kind could potentially offer a much cheaper way of striking Russian targets at distance, or even overwhelming Russian air defenses if launched in considerable numbers. At the same time, the 3D printing method should allow the drone to be designed and developed in the United Kingdom, before production is launched in Ukraine, with only minimal preparation required.
Of course, longer-range weapons are one of the critical items of military aid that Ukraine is now vigorously campaigning for — alongside new fighter jets. To what degree there may be a connection between the U.K.’s drone experiments and potential new-long-range strike weapons for Ukraine remains speculative for now, but drones, more generally, are clearly something that the United Kingdom is putting a significant emphasis on as it seeks to put additional and more effective weapons in Kyiv’s hands. It will be fascinating to see whether any of these technologies appear on the battlefield any time soon.
Hat-tip to Gabriele Molinelli for alerting us to this story.
Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com
thedrive.com · by Thomas Newdick · February 16, 2023
7. Executive Compensation, Tech Transfer and National Security
Mon, 02/13/2023 - 9:13pm
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/executive-compensation-tech-transfer-and-national-security?mc_cid=ddd60f795c
Executive Compensation, Tech Transfer and National Security
By Sanjai Bhagat, Michael Brogan, and Kevin Benson
China’s impressive military capabilities and increasingly hostile posture towards the U.S. and its allies causes significant concern among the top policy-makers in the U.S. As recently as the turn of the century, China was reluctant to challenge the U.S. military even in its own backyard. During the past quarter-century, however, China added significantly to its military capabilities, and now indeed challenges the U.S. military.
How did the Chinese military get so powerful and in such a short period?
The Chinese Communist Party focused on developing and modernizing its military via any and all means – legal and extra-legal. The legal mechanisms include China’s laudable investments in its higher education institutions, many of them focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The extra-legal mechanisms include expropriation of dual use technology (useful for both civilian and military purposes) from cutting-edge U.S. (and allied) technology companies operating in China as well as outright theft of intellectual property. Why did U.S. technology companies that invested billions of their shareholder dollars (and trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollar investments in U.S. higher education institutions in STEM research) to develop their valuable dual-use technology allow China to expropriate this technology?
During the past three decades, U.S. companies relentlessly pursued a strategy of building manufacturing facilities in China. The over-arching rationale given by U.S. corporate leaders and international economists was that “trade benefits all countries.” U.S. CEOs shifted manufacturing to China arguing that lower manufacturing costs in China compared to the U.S. enabled them to price their product at a much lower price, and benefit their U.S. shareholders and consumers. A key building block of this narrative turned out to be false. The benefits to U.S. long-term shareholders of shifting manufacturing to China were, at best, temporary, and in most cases never realized, because China expropriated the technology of U.S. manufacturers using both legitimate and illegitimate methods.
Another serious problem with the all-trade-is-good position is the impact on U.S. national security. Many credit the Reagan Administration with accelerating the end of the Cold War by pushing the Soviet Union into an arms race its economy could not support. From the age of the Roman empire, economically weak nations were never militarily strong. When U.S. firms set up plants in China, they provide jobs there and directly strengthen the Chinese economy. Also, the expropriation of technology of U.S. firms that set up plants in China benefits their Chinese counterparts today, and the Chinese economy in the future because of the learning-by-doing aspect of gaining and improving manufacturing know-how. As their economy strengthened, China became more aggressive towards the U.S. armed forces.
***
In a recent paper, researchers focused on the impact of incentive compensation of U.S. (and western) CEOs and transfer of technology to China. U.S. CEO incentive compensation is often based on corporate earnings, and stock and stock options that vest over one to three years. The authors document greater technology transfer to China by companies whose CEO incentive compensation made up a larger part of their total compensation. Furthermore, the study documents that when U.S. companies engage in China’s strategic emerging industries (that include biotechnology, advanced material and manufacturing, and energy related manufacturing), which are central to China’s industrial policy, the U.S. companies transfer even greater amounts of technology. This demonstrates that China’s policy of expropriating U.S. technology effectively furthers its industrial policy. These researchers also document that when U.S. companies move their tech manufacturing to other countries (not China), there is no relation between CEO incentive compensation and technology transfer; this provides further evidence that expropriation of technology when U.S. companies move manufacturing overseas is mostly a problem when the manufacturing is moved to China.
The above research highlights the critical role of misaligned executive incentive in transferring U.S. technology (especially, high-tech manufacturing technology) to China, contributing to the strengthening of China’s economy and military. We propose a simple and transparent executive compensation plan that would help U.S. companies to address this concern. We propose that the incentive compensation of senior corporate executives should consist primarily of restricted equity (i.e., restricted stock and restricted stock options). Restricted in the sense that the individual cannot sell the shares or exercise the options for six to twelve months after their last day in office.
Under this restricted equity compensation plan, total shareholder returns would drive most incentive compensation, instead of short-term accounting-based measures of performance such as return on capital, or earnings per share. The rationale for six to twelve months after the executive’s departure is to minimize the perverse incentives for executives to make self-interested decisions during the “end-game” immediately prior to retirement, i.e., an individual making decisions when he or she nears retirement. This delay would eliminate incentives for executives to engage in moving manufacturing to China just to sell their vested shares at an artificially inflated share price immediately after retirement.
Of course, our proposal imposes some costs on executives. To begin with, if executives must hold restricted shares and options, their investments may be under-diversified, with a resulting decrease in risk-adjusted expected return. In addition, if executives need to hold restricted shares and options post-retirement, they may be concerned with lack of liquidity.
To address these concerns, we recommend the amounts of equity awarded under our proposal increase slightly from current levels to bring up the risk-adjusted expected return. Additionally, boards may permit managers to liquidate annually a reasonable percentage of their awarded incentive restricted shares and options.
We recognize that one size does not fit all. Corporate boards need to use their understanding of the unique circumstances of their companies’ opportunities and challenges to amend their compensation plans and ensure that such plans focus on serving the interests of long-term shareholders and national security. In implementing the proposal, corporate board compensation committees should be the principal decision-makers regarding the mix and amount of restricted stock and restricted stock options awarded to a manager, the maximum percentage of holdings the manager can liquidate annually, and the number of months post retirement/resignation for the stock and options to vest. Directors must focus on these issues that impact not just their companies’ long-term value, but, more importantly, national security.
About the Author(s)
Kevin Benson
Kevin Benson is a retired Colonel, U.S. Army (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-c-m-benson-7745648/).
Michael Brogan
Michael Brogan is a retired Brigadier General, U.S. Marine Corps (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-brogan-4164142b/).
Sanjai Bhagat
Sanjai Bhagat serves on corporate boards, is a professor of finance and author of Financial Crisis, Corporate Governance, and Bank Capital (Cambridge University Press) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjaibhagat).
8. The Drone War in Ukraine Is Cheap, Deadly, and Made in China
Excerpt:
Now, as I write this in February 2023, I’ve collected, categorized, and contemplated nearly 900 examples of how both Ukrainians and Russians are using small drones in the war. Here are some of the lessons that have become clear.
Conclusion:
What does 2023 hold for the small drones buzzing over the war in Ukraine? Almost certainly, small consumer and DIY drones will continue to pour into the conflict zone in ever-increasing numbers, and combatants on both sides will continue to become more skilled at building them, modifying them, and teaching growing numbers of soldiers how to use them. While both sides are working tirelessly on developing better electronic-warfare techniques to take down drones, it seems unlikely (at least right now) that a tactic that changes the game so much that small, cheap drones will be rendered suddenly irrelevant will be introduced soon.
The skies over 21st-century battlefields are going to be filled with dirt-cheap and startlingly effective eyes in the sky for a very long time to come. However, both Ukraine’s and Russia’s drone armies face a threat that may be unique in the history of modern warfare: A private Chinese company, DJI, holds the power to make their aircraft much more difficult to use and could exercise it at any time. And while efforts to replace DJI are underway around the world, none are at a point where they could seamlessly take over in the unlikely—albeit real—event that the company does make a move. As Beijing and Washington tussle over the watchers in their own skies, soldiers and analysts in the Ukraine war will doubtlessly be watching relations between China and the West this year with very close interest indeed.
The Drone War in Ukraine Is Cheap, Deadly, and Made in China
Crowdsourced donations are fueling eyes in the sky.
FEBRUARY 16, 2023, 10:06 AM
By Faine Greenwood, an expert on unmanned aerial vehicles, technology in humanitarian aid, remote sensing, spatial data, and data policy and ethics.
Foreign Policy · by Faine Greenwood · February 16, 2023
By Faine Greenwood, an expert on unmanned aerial vehicles, technology in humanitarian aid, remote sensing, spatial data, and data policy and ethics.
Almost a year after Russian tanks first began rolling over the border into Ukraine, a war many expected would be over within a month continues to grind on. It’s grimly reminiscent of European conflicts of the 20th century—but it’s also the first war in history where both sides have made extensive use of cheap, startlingly effective small drones, the kind that can be bought at electronics stores or built with simple hobby kits.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, I knew two things for sure. First, that Ukraine was going to stun the world with what it could do with small do-it-yourself and consumer drones, a skillset that their drone hobbyists and tech experts had been tirelessly expanding ever since Russia’s earlier invasion in 2014 – efforts led by now-famous volunteer drone organizations like Aerorozvidka, whose members had become some of the world’s premier experts on building, modifying, and using small, cheap drones in warfare. Second, I knew that as an expert in both consumer and hobby drones, I was going to do my best to document what happened next.
As Russia’s ill-fated 40-mile mechanized convoy headed toward Kyiv in early March, a week into the invasion—a convoy that we now know was stopped in large part due to night attacks by Aerorozvidka’s DIY, crowdfunded drones—I created a publicly available Google Sheets database, a place where I could store and classify information related to small drones in the Ukraine war. My goal wasn’t to collect a scientific, or truly representative, sample of drone use in the war. Instead, it was to compile as much publicly available data as I could find, to assemble as many snippets in one place as I could of a large story.
A Ukrainian serviceman demonstrates a drone carrying a mock grenade in Bakhmut
A Ukrainian serviceman holds up a drone carrying a mock grenade in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Feb. 9. YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images
Almost a year after Russian tanks first began rolling over the border into Ukraine, a war many expected would be over within a month continues to grind on. It’s grimly reminiscent of European conflicts of the 20th century—but it’s also the first war in history where both sides have made extensive use of cheap, startlingly effective small drones, the kind that can be bought at electronics stores or built with simple hobby kits.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, I knew two things for sure. First, that Ukraine was going to stun the world with what it could do with small do-it-yourself and consumer drones, a skillset that their drone hobbyists and tech experts had been tirelessly expanding ever since Russia’s earlier invasion in 2014 – efforts led by now-famous volunteer drone organizations like Aerorozvidka, whose members had become some of the world’s premier experts on building, modifying, and using small, cheap drones in warfare. Second, I knew that as an expert in both consumer and hobby drones, I was going to do my best to document what happened next.
As Russia’s ill-fated 40-mile mechanized convoy headed toward Kyiv in early March, a week into the invasion—a convoy that we now know was stopped in large part due to night attacks by Aerorozvidka’s DIY, crowdfunded drones—I created a publicly available Google Sheets database, a place where I could store and classify information related to small drones in the Ukraine war. My goal wasn’t to collect a scientific, or truly representative, sample of drone use in the war. Instead, it was to compile as much publicly available data as I could find, to assemble as many snippets in one place as I could of a large story.
To hunt down these examples of drones in action, I began to monitor hundreds of Telegram channels, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, media websites, and a sea of Twitter open-source intelligence accounts for war updates, relying on Google Translate and assists from Russian and Ukrainian-speaking friends to verify what I was seeing. For each example of how small drones were being used in the war, I compiled link and source information, wrote up brief text descriptions of the materials, attempted to identify specific drone models and locations (when possible), and assigned keywords linked to how the drone was being used. I also began documenting as much raw material of drone use—including videos, photographs, and websites—as I could, in multiple storage locations. I’d then be able to share my data with other researchers, analysts, and investigators down the line.
Now, as I write this in February 2023, I’ve collected, categorized, and contemplated nearly 900 examples of how both Ukrainians and Russians are using small drones in the war. Here are some of the lessons that have become clear.
A military operator walks past DJI Matrice 300 reconnaissance drones set up for test flights in Ukraine.
A military operator walks past DJI Matrice 300 reconnaissance drones set up for test flights near Kyiv on Aug. 2, 2022. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images
One company dominates the market. In early 2013, Chinese drone hobby company DJI released the Phantom 1, one of the first out-of-the-box consumer drones that a total novice could use to take aerial photos. Today, DJI is the overwhelming global king of the consumer-drone market, selling extremely affordable, sophisticated, and easy-to-use products that are useful for everything from construction mapping to filmmaking—whose positive attributes tend to overshadow ongoing controversies about just how secure these Chinese-made drones really are. And much to DJI’s irritation, the affordability and accessibility that make their drones so appealing to civilians are also very attractive to soldiers.
Per my database, DJI drones are by far the most popular drones in the Ukraine war, used (and demanded) by fighters far more than any other drone type: Out of the 463 drone incident entries in which I could positively identify the drone being used, it was a DJI product 59 percent of the time. DJI’s foldable, lightweight, and widely available Mavic model has become so beloved that in August 2022, Yuri Baluyevsky, former chief of the general staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, went so far as to call it a “a true symbol of modern warfare,” prompting a fierce, fruitless pushback from both Chinese social media users and DJI itself.
Ukrainians and Russians certainly aren’t pleased about their reliance on a single product made by a Chinese company, as the controversy early in the war around DJI’s proprietary AeroScope drone-tracking system (a system intended for civilian security organizations, and which remains in use in the war by both sides), and persistent consumer drone shortages and price hikes in Russia, after DJI pulled out of the market there, have highlighted.
Combatants are also acutely aware that DJI does have the capacity to remotely geofence drones it produces so that they will become considerably harder to operate within both Ukraine and Russia—a power the company used in 2017 in Iraq and Syria but has so far declined to exercise in the current conflict. But there are few viable choices that match the easy availability, cheap price, and ease of use that DJI offers, and despite Russia’s claims to the contrary, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to develop a DJI-killer where the rest of the world has failed so far.
The non-DJI consumer and DIY drones used by fighters in the Ukraine war are a much more diverse bunch, including popular but hard-to-find quadcopters made by China’s Autel, inexpensive but widely scorned Chinese DJI knockoffs sold on platforms like AliExpress, and custom-built drones (ranging in size from tiny to hefty) produced in relatively small quantities by hobbyist-founded organizations such as Ukraine’s Aerorozvidka. And although a number of small U.S. and European drone companies made highly publicized donations of their own aircraft to Ukraine at the start of the war, I still have yet to come across any open-source evidence of their actual use on the battlefield.
Read More
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg addresses a press conference following British, French, and U.S. strikes against Syria's regime at the NATO headquarters in Brussels.
It’s all about artillery rounds and air defense, not just tanks and fighter jets.
Ukrainian servicemen train using commercial drones in a military capacity in Kharkiv.
Ukrainian servicemen train using commercial drones in a military capacity to spot and target enemies for artillery teams in Kharkiv oblast, Ukraine, on Aug. 13, 2022. Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
This is a volunteer drone war. In both Russia and Ukraine, people with prior drone industry (and drone hobby) experience have volunteered for the war effort, both to fly drones themselves and to provide training and technical support to others, Volunteers also work to obtain drones for fighters on the frontlines. While both Ukraine and Russia are working furiously to spin up their own in-country drone-manufacturing projects, they still need access to huge quantities of consumer, off-the-shelf drones, as well as hobby-grade drone components (which are almost all produced in China). But DJI says that it does not “market or sell our products for combat operations”, and as of April 2022, the company doesn’t officially sell its products in Ukraine or Russia, either.
But DJI does still sell drones to civilians just about everywhere else, which means that in an odd turn of events, the majority of small consumer and DIY drones flying over Ukraine are sourced and paid for not by governments, but by donors on the internet. Today, a small army of volunteers from both Ukraine and Russia raises funds from sympathetic people on social media (often using crypto), uses the cash to buy consumer drones second-hand from civilian sources, and then transports the aircraft through the border into the war zone. The fact that DJI drones are explicitly sold as consumer, non-military products also makes them much easier to transport across international borders than more heavily controlled, explicitly military technologies—a situation in which Ukraine enjoys a strategic advantage. While it’s been relatively simple for friendly countries to funnel DJI drones across the border in the direction of Kyiv (a process the Ukrainian government made even easier), Russia was already reporting punishing shortages of consumer drones by June 2022.
Ukraine’s drone procurement efforts continue to get more sophisticated. In July 2022, Ukrainian officials partnered with the United24 fundraising platform on the Army of Drones project, an effort to direct drone-focused cashflow to the Ukrainian military. Within three months, the project claimed that it had raised enough cash to purchase 1,400 drones, including numerous consumer-level products.
The picture looks similar in Russia, where a parallel universe of often Telegram-based fundraisers and donations, popped up as soon as it became apparent that the war wasn’t going to be over in a few short weeks – and now supply everything from clean underwear to drones to Russian soldiers on the frontline. However, these online fundraising efforts are not always well-regulated: in one memorable case, a Ukrainian group claimed to have tricked Russian donors into paying for a drone for their side, instead. Just like in Ukraine, these Russian volunteer groups continue to furiously fundraise and to send drones to the frontline today, adapting their requests as the war changes. Calls for parts for explosive FPV “kamikaze” drones, and money to train their pilots, are now very much in vogue, although some Russian commentators lament what they perceive as a lack of official support for kamikaze drone parity. While Russian officials came to embrace the role of small drones in modern warfare over the last year—including training centers, an officially-permitted conference for consumer combat drone pilots in late 2022, and an endorsement from President Vladimir Putin himself—the military’s use of DIY drones and consumer drones made by Chinese sources remains in something of an uncomfortable gray area, as the nation scrambles to create a viable Russian-made replacement.
An aerial image taken by a drone shows destroyed Russian military vehicles by the side of a road in Dmytrivka, Ukraine.
An aerial image taken by a drone shows destroyed Russian military vehicles by the side of a road in Dmytrivka, Ukraine, on April 21, 2022. Alexey Furman/Getty Images
So what are all these for? Drones are really just flying cameras with pretensions, and what they’re most useful for is looking at things, gaining a perspective you can’t get from the ground, with an intimacy and stealth that planes can’t match. The vast majority of the drone-use cases in my database revolve around documentation, surveillance: tools that fighters can use to figure out where they are, who’s in the area around them, and to project that information out to the rest of the world. Ukrainian fighters regularly stream data feeds from consumer drones back to centralized command centers, often relying upon tools as mundane as Google Meet.
In particular, drones are incredibly useful for targeting artillery strikes. Both Ukrainian and Russian fighters have reported using small drones to help them precisely identify targets, taking advantage of relatively cheap drones equipped with hybrid zoom cameras and the ability to send accurate latitude-longitude coordinates back to both centralized command centers and pilots on the ground. At night, drone pilots take advantage of small drones equipped with thermal sensors, devices that are widely used in the civilian world for tasks such as infrastructure inspection, farming, and search and rescue.
They’re also a PR tool. Hundreds of war-focused Telegram channels, YouTube accounts, and Facebook pages, maintained by people on both the Russian and Ukrainian side of the conflict, now post dozens and dozens of battlefield videos collected by drones every day—dramatic footage that is constantly replayed by the global news media, shaping narratives and opinions.
Not all of this drone video footage is posted by combatants. Drones have become a key part of the war correspondent toolbox, and international news crews have captured huge quantities of drone footage from the front lines. Western journalists used drones to depict massive damage to civilian structures in Kyiv during the early stages of the invasion, civilians’ torturous flight over the destroyed Irpin bridge, and vast numbers of newly dug graves in the same town after its recapture. Meanwhile, Russian Telegram-famous war correspondents regularly capture intense war footage, shot during their embeds with front-line fighters. The world is seeing the Ukraine war through the gimbal-mounted digital eye of a drone: the first war everyone can follow from the god’s-eye perspective of a flying, zoom-lens-equipped camera hovering hundreds of feet over the bloodshed.
Ukrainian servicemen train to operate commercial drones in Kharkiv.
Ukrainian servicemen train to operate commercial drones in Kharkiv oblast on Aug. 13, 2022. Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Ukrainian soldiers operate a drone from a house on the Donbass frontline.
Ukrainian soldiers operate a drone from a house on the Donbas front line, in Donetsk oblast, Ukraine, on Jan. 14. Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
While drones are best for looking at things, they’re also pretty good at dropping explosives. At the very start of the war, the vast majority of small-drone bombing videos on social media came from Ukraine’s Aerorozvidka unit, which used custom-built, thermal-sensor-equipped, eight-armed multirotor drones to precisely drop modified, often Soviet-era, grenades onto Russian equipment. By late April, Telegram channels began to fill up with more videos of daytime drone grenade attacks on Russian positions—and increasingly, those grenades were being dropped by DJI drones equipped with 3D-printed dropper devices, which can be ordered in bulk on AliExpress. By June 2022, Russian fighters, who have consistently had to struggle to catch up to Ukraine’s mastery of small-drone tactics (and who complain surprisingly often in public about the lack of official support for their small-drone efforts) had also begun to post their own regular drumbeat of videos of bombing runs on Ukrainian positions.
Innovation has marched on ever since, including a Ukrainian-produced quadcopter rig that can carry six 82 mm mortar bombs, and, as of early 2023, a profusion of new ultra-fast FPV (first-person view) kit-built drones originally intended for racing, which Ukrainian fighters have turned into suicide bombs. However, these tiny kamikaze drones are much harder to fly than standard consumer drones, have a battery life of approximately five minutes, and can only land by crashing into something, meaning that pilots must be well-trained to make use of them. Some Russian front-line fighters are currently attempting to catch up to Ukraine’s FPV drone tactics as well, albeit with relatively limited results thus far.
At the start of the war, quite a few pundits assumed Russia’s sophisticated electronic-warfare devices would swiftly render Ukraine’s consumer drones completely useless. While this hasn’t happened, electronic-warfare tactics remain a constant threat to combatants on both sides. Drone pilots must take part in a constant arms race to outsmart each other’s drone-catching tools and tricks, like one popular hack, used by both sides, that makes it much harder for DJI’s proprietary AeroScope drone-detection tool to spot a “” (IE, hacked) drone—and DJI, for its part, regularly updates its firmware in an attempt to shut these hacker solutions down.
While Russia’s electronic-warfare systems may not be as infallible as previously assumed, a Royal United Services Institute study published in November 2022 still estimated that the average life span of a Ukrainian quadcopter ran to about three flights, largely due to enemy tactics that either disrupted the drone’s communications or successfully struck the drone pilot on the ground. Ukrainians, too, have taken advantage of tools capable of interrupting consumer drone signals, such as the Lithuanian-made EDM4S anti-drone jammer.
In one example from August, Russian journalist Alexander Sladkov, embedded with Russian fighters near Maryinka, filmed as an increasingly unhappy-looking DJI Mavic pilot realized that his drone’s signals had been disrupted by Ukrainian weapons. The group was forced to swiftly flee the scene, as they suspected the Ukrainians would use the drone’s data to slam artillery right into where they were standing. Not all counter-drone methods are high tech: In one recent case, a Russian fighter who’d already lost DJI drones to Ukrainian hijacking tactics attempted to use an extremely long piece of string to leash his drone to him in the air. To his displeasure, he got the string caught in the drone’s motors instead.
Then there’s machine-assisted surrender. In late November 2022, a Russian Wagner fighter surrendered not to a human, but to a drone. As the aerial camera watched, he threw down his weapon and began walking in the direction of Ukrainian lines—and he lived to tell the tale for Telegram. Ukraine quickly capitalized on the video’s popularity and began posting detailed instructions on how to surrender to a drone for Russian fighters, part of the evocatively named “I Want to Live” project. Both Russians and Ukrainians have also used drones to shoot video of fighters surrendering to other humans, which they then post to social media. This aerial footage may violate the Geneva Convention’s rules against exposing prisoners of war to “public curiosity.”
Drones can even help rescue—and kidnap—other drones. Consider a video from January of this year, in which Ukrainian pilots embarked on a mission to “Save Private Mavic”: They managed to safely retrieve their drone in hostile territory by sending out two other drones, equipped with hooks, to grab the fallen soldier and fly it out again. Drones can even be used for rather direct acts of espionage. In January, Ukrainian fighters used a hook-carrying DJI drone to remotely grab a Russian walkie-talkie that had been abandoned on the battlefield. They claimed they were able to then listen in on Russian communications for nine days.
A homemade prototype drone is tested with a fake RPG-7 grenade in a field outside Kyiv, Ukraine.
A homemade prototype drone is tested with a fake RPG-7 grenade in a field outside Kyiv on Nov. 9, 2022. Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
One massively hyped possible job for small drones, though, is missing from my database: delivery. Despite breathless pundit speculation and splashy press releases from smaller drone companies announcing delivery-drone equipment donations to the Ukrainians, I have yet to see any evidence of drones being used to deliver objects other than explosives in any meaningful way. Well, unless you count that time a few weeks ago when a Ukrainian drone pilot repurposed a drone to drop off some sugar—which, while charming, is a long way off from the massive humanitarian aid drone lifts some people expected to see.
War crimes investigators, too, are using drones as data-collection tools. Early in the war, drones piloted by Ukrainians captured video of the alleged murder of a civilian driver outside Kyiv and footage of bodies lying in the streets of Bucha. This information may very well play a part in criminal investigations to come (although figuring out how drone data and other open-source information may be used as evidence in war crimes trials remains a work in progress). French investigators reportedly used drones to capture images of parts of Bucha soon after the Russians departed and appear to have been using the same techniques in Chernihiv. However, civilians who use drones in war zones need to be careful: As I’ve written for the International Committee of the Red Cross, small drones continue to exist in an uncertain space in international humanitarian law, and we still lack real mechanisms for telling friend-drone from foe-drone way up in the air.
What does 2023 hold for the small drones buzzing over the war in Ukraine? Almost certainly, small consumer and DIY drones will continue to pour into the conflict zone in ever-increasing numbers, and combatants on both sides will continue to become more skilled at building them, modifying them, and teaching growing numbers of soldiers how to use them. While both sides are working tirelessly on developing better electronic-warfare techniques to take down drones, it seems unlikely (at least right now) that a tactic that changes the game so much that small, cheap drones will be rendered suddenly irrelevant will be introduced soon.
The skies over 21st-century battlefields are going to be filled with dirt-cheap and startlingly effective eyes in the sky for a very long time to come. However, both Ukraine’s and Russia’s drone armies face a threat that may be unique in the history of modern warfare: A private Chinese company, DJI, holds the power to make their aircraft much more difficult to use and could exercise it at any time. And while efforts to replace DJI are underway around the world, none are at a point where they could seamlessly take over in the unlikely—albeit real—event that the company does make a move. As Beijing and Washington tussle over the watchers in their own skies, soldiers and analysts in the Ukraine war will doubtlessly be watching relations between China and the West this year with very close interest indeed.
Foreign Policy · by Faine Greenwood · February 16, 2023
9. Why the Air Force’s best ‘secret weapon’ has nothing to do with airplanes
I think the paradox of globalization is the proliferation of English which means there is little incentive for native English speakers to learn a second language. And then there's the immigration issue. We need a modern Lodge Act (and not another MAVNI debacle). And we need to take those with the aptitude and desire and provide them with the deep immersion necessary to develop and sustain their language skills. The requirements vary widely across the services and organizations but in terms of Special Forces, Psychological Operations, and Civil Affairs there should be long term forward stationing (not TDY deployments) for operators in key locations around the world.
Why the Air Force’s best ‘secret weapon’ has nothing to do with airplanes
The little-known program may be one of America’s best tools for winning the next war.
BY DAVID ROZA | PUBLISHED FEB 16, 2023 11:56 AM EST
taskandpurpose.com · by David Roza · February 16, 2023
At the start of the classic World War II novel A Bell For Adano, the narrator argues that one of America’s greatest strengths is its “fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade, who understand the ways and have listened to their parents sing the folk songs and have tasted the wine of the land on the palate of their memories.”
“[E]verywhere our Army goes in Europe,” the narrator continues, “a man can turn to the private beside him and say: ‘Hey Mac, what’s this furriner saying? How much does he want for that bunch of grapes?’ And Mac will be able to translate.”
About 80 years after the fictitious events of the novel, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Charlynne McGinnis found herself serving as the allegorical ‘Mac’ while teaching an airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance program to local special forces troops in her native country of the Philippines.
“The first day I said, ‘welcome to the class,’ I spoke with them in Tagalog and immediately, right after that introduction, students were like ‘oh here ma’am, here are the problems we are having right now with the program,’” McGinnis recalled. Knowing the language “just opens up a floodgate, like ‘now that I know you understand the culture and language, I’m going to tell you what’s really going on. I’m going to tell you the inside baseball.’”
McGinnis is one of 3,600 service members speaking more than 90 languages who have participated in the Language Enabled Airman Program (LEAP), which is part of the Air Force Culture and Language Center. The LEAP program takes airmen and Space Force guardians who have some proficiency in a foreign language – whether from growing up in a household speaking it or from learning it in a classroom – and sharpens that skill level and cultural knowledge so that the LEAP scholar can serve as a cultural and linguistic expert for their fellow service members.
To use the example from A Bell for Adano, it would be as if a few of the Macs who grew up speaking or learning Italian applied to a special program in the Army. If they were accepted into the program, the Army would use mentor sessions or send the soldier into an “immersion” experience with fluent speakers to make sure their Italian language skills and cultural knowledge were up-to-date. After that, the Army would enter all those Macs into a database so they could be called upon whenever Italian language and cultural skills were needed.
U.S. Marine Corps 1st Sgt. Kimberly Barton, company first sergeant with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Ramchand Francisco, vehicle management superintendent with the 87th Logistics Readiness Squadron and a Tagalog LEAP Scholar attached to the 11th MEU, speak during a leadership symposium as part of KAMANDAG 6 at Camp Rodolfo Punsalang, Palawan, Philippines, Oct. 5, 2022. (Sgt. Dana Beesley/U.S. Marine Corps)
The hypothetical database actually exists with LEAP. The tool is particularly useful when the Air Force needs service members who not only speak a foreign language, but who are also experts in technical subjects under discussion. For example, when Filipino special operations forces told McGinnis about the specific technical problems they were experiencing with the ScanEagle ISR drone, she used the LEAP database to find Master Sgt. Timothy Tanbonliong, a fellow LEAP scholar who had the technical knowledge to address those problems.
Being enlisted also helped the Filipino troops open up to Tanbonliong.
“The majority of these folks are enlisted, so I needed an enlisted person who knew the language and culture and who knew the processes involved with getting this aircraft flown,” McGinnis said. Tanbonliong “answered the call and said that was the best [temporary duty] of his career.”
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LEAP scholars have also used their skills to open doors for service members in other branches.
“The Marines would look to us to provide the ground truth without stepping on toes and providing cultural considerations to scenarios,” said Air Force Capt. Timothy Nolan, one of three airmen who embedded with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit as a Tagalog interpreter during an exercise in the Philippines last year, in a press release in October.
“Seeing our countrymen’s eyes light up and see that we are one of them, even though we wear a U.S. Air Force uniform … they want to open up and ask questions,” said another of the three airmen, Master Sgt. Ramchand Francisco. “They feel safe.”
The language of war
LEAP is not a weapons platform: it cannot break the speed of sound, infiltrate hostile airspace or jam enemy communications. But the bonds that the program is meant to build with America’s partners overseas may be just as important as any fifth-generation fighter jet in a possible conflict with China.
Allies and partners “are our backbone across the Indo-Pacific,” as Brendan Mulvaney, the director of the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute, put it in a 2021 video. Countries like Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, “represent something the U.S. has many of, and China has none of: allies.”
Tech Sgt Kanako Fromm, a U.S. Air Force Language Enabled Airman assigned to the 374th Wing, helps interpret material with members of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force during the Pacific Unity Multi-Lateral Civil Engineer Key Leader Engagement, June 22, 2022 at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. (Airman 1st Class Emily Saxton/U.S. Air Force)
But like any other relationship, military partnerships require mutual trust and understanding, which is not always easy to build over a language barrier or culture shock. The Air Force Culture and Language Center, which oversees LEAP, was founded in 2006 in part as a response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. service members sought to understand local languages and cultures in order to fight a more effective counterinsurgency.
The U.S. military already has the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center for teaching service members foreign languages, but that institute specializes to teach service members new languages from the ground up. Meanwhile the LEAP program works with airmen or guardians who already have significant experience with a foreign language.
Once accepted into the program, LEAP scholars work with mentors online or participate in an immersion program, such as living with a family abroad, to bring their skills up to date.
“We develop you while you do your primary job so that when the Air Force needs you, you’re ready to come off the bench, what we like to refer to as ‘the bench of the willing and able,’” said Walter Ward, the director of LEAP.
A retired Air Force colonel with thousands of hours of experience as a navigator aboard aircraft such as the KC-135 and the C-130, Ward himself witnessed the importance of foreign language skills while flying through stormy weather over France many years ago.
The French air traffic controller “was clearly exasperated” as aircraft asked him to divert from their course to get around the storms, Ward recalled. Luckily, the copilot on Ward’s aircraft spoke French, which gave his crew a crucial advantage. English is the international language of aviation, but when the co-pilot asked for divert instructions in French, the crew got what they needed “just like that,” Ward said, snapping his fingers.
“When the controller’s having a really bad day, there was some familiarity from an aircraft that he could not see except as a blip on the scope,” Ward said. “There was someone to connect with, a person.”
Ward referenced a quote that has been attributed to Nelson Mandela: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
‘How can I understand you?’
A prime example of that phrase came during Operation Allies Welcome, the effort to resettle tens of thousands of refugees who were evacuated from Afghanistan during the last weeks of the U.S. war there in 2021. With little time to prepare, U.S. bases around the country stood up “safe havens”: temporary housing areas where evacuees were screened and supported before being resettled elsewhere. The challenge was: how do you help all those newcomers adapt to a new country, a new culture and a new language in a short amount of time?
Space Force Lt. Col. Adam Howland and Capt. Ron Miller were at the center of the solution. Howland and Miller speak fluent Dari and Pashto, respectively, so between the two of them they could speak directly to many of the Afghans temporarily housed at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, sometimes to the surprise of the Afghans. At one point, Miller startled a group of four boys by walking up to them and joining in their conversation.
“One drops his ball and he goes ‘Are you speaking English? How can I understand you? Can I speak English?’” Miller recalled. “He was flabbergasted that he could understand this white guy in a uniform.”
U.S. Space Force Captain Ronald Miller, a Cultural Advisor and Assessment Team Lead with Task Force Liberty, speaks with the Afghan guests at Task Force Liberty Village on Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, December 15, 2021. Being fluent in Pashto allows for smooth communication between Miller and the guests. (Airman 1st Class Darius Frazier/U.S. Air Force)
Miller said he talked 12 hours every day for three months during OAW, answering Afghans’ questions, helping them solve problems, teaching Afghans crash courses in English and American culture, teaching Americans crash courses in Afghan language and culture, and generally supporting the refugees. Some of the refugees had never been on a plane before OAW, and many of them still had family members back home now living under the Taliban.
“I’ve seen it firsthand that when you don’t have barriers: language barriers, cultural barriers, and you’re able to actually understand the other side, you can really begin to help,” he said.
Miller and Howland described several occasions where having cultural awareness helped defuse high-stress situations during OAW. For example, many Afghans have much smaller bubbles of personal space than most Americans. In fact, “it’s a sign of endearment when an Afghan stands incredibly close to you,” Miller said.
The processing facility at JBMDL, where many evacuees sought help in the resettlement process, was not set up to handle that cultural difference. The American workers answered evacuees’ questions from behind a roll-down cage, which, when combined with the cultural barrier, created an invisible brick wall between the two parties.
“In Afghan culture, that physical separation also demonstrates a degree of ‘give-a-care’ factor,” explained Howland. “That physical separation, that roll-down cage, increased or amped up the anxiety and the level of contention.”
Many of the Afghans already had enough stress to deal with, whether it was from missing children, difficult living arrangements with fellow evacuees, or the fact that their family members were still in Afghanistan. To mitigate the situation, Howland advised his airmen and guardians to come out from behind the roll-down cage and sit down next to evacuees who were particularly distressed.
“It would almost immediately defuse a portion of that stress,” he said. “That enabled our culture and linguistic team to help intercede and defuse some pretty bad situations.”
U.S. Space Force Lt. Col. Adam Howland, Task Force Liberty Lead Culture Advisor, shows his patches to an Afghan boy at Liberty Village, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, Sept. 7, 2021. (Spc. James Liker/U.S. Army)
It also helped that Howland had a network of contacts from previous visits to Afghanistan who served as vital relays between the Americans and the Afghans during OAW. In some instances, they were “the catalyst for communication and growth and coordination and defusing of tricky situations,” Howland said. “We had that preexisting relationship – they knew that we understood the culture and the language, and so it made the transition for so many of those Afghans much easier.”
Some of the newcomers showed their gratitude in unexpected ways. Miller was surprised to receive thank you letters, texts of ‘thanks’ in Pashto, Dari and English, and even artistic renderings of his face in paint, pencil and stone. One Afghan sent him a photo of a block of marble that the man’s cousin, still in Afghanistan, had carved Miller’s face into.
The cousin “looked me up on LinkedIn, took my profile picture, put it in marble as a ‘thank you’ and it’s sitting on a chair in the middle of a desert in Afghanistan right now,” Miller said. “I felt flattered.”
Pocket guides
Afghans were not the only ones who benefited from LEAP scholars during OAW. Howland and his team put together a guide meant to help military, State Department and other government employees better understand what the new arrivals were going through. Previous guides to Afghan culture were written from the perspective of Americans going to Afghanistan, but there was nothing to help Americans understand the perspective of an Afghan going to the United States.
Howland’s team developed a training suite based on what the refugees were experiencing based on JBMDL. The training was broken down into 12 domains of culture, which is also how AFCLC’s Culture Guide app is organized.
The app, which anyone with a smartphone can download, contains field guides for more than 70 countries. Users can click on a country and find concise, informative summaries of that country’s history, politics, religion, social norms, traditions of family and kinship, as well as more abstract concepts like how time, space, sex, gender and health are generally perceived in those countries. The app is meant to help bring service members up to speed on whatever country they are deploying to.
“If I am aircrew on a C-130 and I am getting tagged for deployment to Angola and I know that a tool like the field guide app exists, then I can go to that app and get some instant knowledge that is useful,” Howland explained.
Bite-sized guides are a tight format for explaining entire countries, and Howland acknowledged the difficulty. For example, in Afghanistan, there are at least five principal ethnicities, so “to try to talk about all of the cultural nuances of those various ethnicities in one guide is a real challenge,” Howland said.
“My experience, at least with the Afghanistan field guide, is that they did a decent job of identifying those broad things that apply generally across the country,” he added.
When greater cultural and linguistic expertise is needed, the LEAP program is designed to help. Though LEAP scholars are not always high in rank, their language and culture skills often mean they become the face of the U.S. Air Force or Space Force when they work closely with foreign troops overseas.
“I don’t want to make it seem bigger of a deal than it is, but in the RJAF, I am the American face,” said Maj. Wayne ‘Astro’ Mowery, a LEAP scholar who is fluent in Arabic. Mowery currently serves as an F-16 instructor pilot embedded with the Royal Jordanian Air Force.
“Everyone knows my name,” he said. “That sounds bad when you say it like that, but it’s like, when they think of America, the first person they probably think of is ‘Astro the exchange pilot,’ because I work with them every single day.”
Mowery is a unique case among LEAP scholars. English is the international language of aviation, so technically he does not need to know Arabic to teach F-16 flying to Jordanian pilots. But Mowery’s main mission as an exchange pilot is not simply to teach F-16 skills: it is to build connections with allies.
“You can’t simply show up and expect to be respected because you’re a major or because you’re an American or because you’re an instructor pilot,” he said. “You have to build the relationship first, and language is the only way to do that. Language and cultural understanding.”
U.S. Air Force then-Capt. Wayne Mowery briefed U.S. Ambassador to Jordan, Mr. Henry T. Wooster, during a 2020 visit by the Ambassador to Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. Mowery is serving as an exchange pilot with the Royal Jordanian Air Force. (U.S. Air Force photo)
Knowing another person’s language and being humble about it “shows that you care about who they are culturally,” Mowery explained, and it can also break down barriers. For example, Mowery may be able to teach his colleagues in the RJAF about the F-16, but his colleagues can help Mowery learn more about Arabic, a language he has been passionate about since he first began studying it in college. Humility can also help navigate awkward moments, like when your name, “Wayne” means “where” in Arabic.
“Once translated, it sounds like I’m saying ‘oh hello, my name is ‘where,’” Mowery said. “It sounds like I’ve lost my name. That’s why the callsign helps. But the language piece enables me to understand why these guys are so confused that my name is Wayne.”
‘A military imperative’
Whether it helps to understand a name, to learn how to fly a fighter jet, or to appreciate the benefits of a scout drone, LREC (language, regional expertise and culture) is the “secret weapon that builds the relationships that allow the partnerships to be built which the National Security Strategy depends upon,” Mowery explained.
“I used to think LREC was just nice to have, but really I’ve come to understand it as a military imperative,” he added. “Underneath all the coalition and partnerships is strong LREC competencies and you just cannot assume that. You have to work at that, and that’s where the AFCLC really thrives.”
U.S. Space Force Captain Ronald Miller, a Cultural Advisor and Assessment Team Lead with Task Force Liberty, speaks with the Afghan guests at Task Force Liberty Village on Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, December 15, 2021. (Airman 1st Class Darius Frazier/U.S. Air Force)
National security is not all that benefits from LEAP scholarship: the airmen and guardians themselves do too. With its long hours and technical jargon, military life can often distance service members from their civilian friends and family members. But McGinnis found LEAP to have the opposite effect, since it helped her reconnect with the place where she was born.
“Being a Filipino-American, an Asian-American and using my language and my culture to connect with my Filipino counterparts … not only brings joy to myself but also to the rest of my family,” said the airman, who grew up in the Philippines but who did not often speak Filipino after moving to the U.S. “The key takeaway was that despite being away from the culture and the language, I’m still connected.”
McGinnis’ experience points out a unique aspect of LEAP scholarship. Though much of basic military training and technical school is meant to break down former civilians and remold them into service members, LEAP taps into the diversity of culture and language that airmen and guardians bring with them into the military. Howland pointed out the core values of the Space Force’s Guardian Ideal: character, connection, commitment and courage.
“At least in part, what character means to me as an ideal to strive toward is that diversity of thought that we come into the service with,” Howland said. “That strength of character, that diversity will enable us to defeat our near-peer adversaries, and I’m convinced of that. That is my opinion, but I very much tie that thread between the diversity [airmen and guardians] bring and the strength of their character, because they should never be afraid to embrace who they are.”
David Roza
David covers the Air Force, Space Force and anything Star Wars-related. He joined Task & Purpose in 2019, after covering local news in Maine and FDA policy in Washington D.C. David loves hearing the stories of individual airmen and their families and sharing the human side of America’s most tech-heavy military branch. Contact the author here.
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taskandpurpose.com · by David Roza · February 16, 2023
10. Do recruits need bonuses? No. 2 Marine expands on viral remark
From an influence perspective, how long will these negative viral remarks persist? I am sure this will be over and done with in another news cycle or two. They will probably be dredged up a time or two in the future during future recruiting crises. But will anyone be able to track what will be the actual effect on recruiting? The General's remarks might be exactly right for the target audience he was speaking to - those who already want to be Marines and who will enlist out of pride, duty, and patriotism. That is where we really need to assess the effect: will Marine enlistment rates rise, fall, or remain the same? In my estimation it will have a negligible impact. And while this has generated a lot of negative response, it may actually have a positive outcome in the long run as more people look critically at the recruiting issues as well. In the end there will be a short regative uproar, some embarrassment, but in the long term it might make a positive contribution.
But in the end this will be another anecdote that hinders our attempts to conduct influence operations more broadly. People will only criticize the immediate perceived negative effects (public "uproar') and not take the time to consider the potential for positive long term effects.
Do recruits need bonuses? No. 2 Marine expands on viral remark
militarytimes.com · by Irene Loewenson · February 16, 2023
Many Marines have angrily responded on social media to the assistant commandant’s remarks at a conference Tuesday in San Diego on who deserves bonuses, but the general stressed on Wednesday that he wasn’t directing his comments to those in uniform.
When the Corps’ second-in-command said at the West conference Tuesday that the only enlistment bonus Marines need is the title of Marine, the response within the room was supportive.
“Your bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine,” Assistant Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said, in the context of the Corps’ recruiting challenges. “That’s your bonus. … There’s no dollar amount that goes with that.”
The crowd applauded and whooped.
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Being a Marine is enough of a bonus, No. 2 Marine Corps general says
"Your bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine."
But as news of the remark spread across social media, reactions were less positive.
“I’m not gonna lie to you, not a whole lot of us get paid enough to do 7 mile flak-and-kevlar log runs every week,” wrote Reddit user Thermock in the r/USMC group, known as a subreddit, in one representative comment. “Or working 15 hours a day over some unimportant bullshit 1stSgt wants done. Or dealing with the God-forsaken medical facilities we have.”
Smith told Marine Corps Times on Wednesday there’s an important distinction between enlistment bonuses for recruits and retention bonuses for those who are already Marines.
“The Marines who have earned that eagle, globe and anchor, you’re not who I was talking to,” he said. “You, I want to give a bonus to. You, I want to make sure you have incentive pays and promotions. But please don’t confuse those who wish to earn the title and those who have already done so.”
Although the general public considers the Marine Corps to be the most prestigious branch (at least per a 2014 Gallup poll), the most common reason young people would consider joining the military is pay, a fall 2021 Pentagon study found.
The Corps offers thousands of dollars in bonuses for those who enlist for a few in-demand roles, a fact Smith briefly mentioned in his speech Tuesday and reiterated to Marine Corps Times Wednesday.
For instance, recruits can get bonuses of $8,000 for signing up for an electronics maintenance contract, $5,000 for a six-year infantry contract and $3,000 for a supply, accounting, and legal contract, according to a Marine administrative message from October 2022.
And the Corps offers many other kinds of bonuses, including retention bonuses. In January, it announced bonuses of up to $750 a month for recruiters who extend their tours, on top of preexisting bonus pay for Marines on recruiting duty. Aircraft maintenance Marines can qualify for bonuses (and kickers) totaling tens of thousands of dollars over the term of their reenlistment.
Counterintelligence Marines who agree to a lateral move and reenlist for 72 months can get a $55,000 job-specific bonus and a $40,000 kicker for a total of $95,000.
But the Marine Corps does not offer recruitment incentives on par with the Navy, which offers maximum enlistment bonuses of $50,000 and has lowered its entrance exam requirements in an effort to gain more recruits.
Smith said that’s because the Marine Corps, as a particularly elite branch, needs recruits who really want to become Marines.
“I don’t want them thinking that we’re going to buy your loyalty,” he said of those considering joining the Corps.
All of the military services had a hard time filling their ranks last year, with the Army, Navy and Air Force falling short in at least some of their recruitment goals. The Marine Corps barely eked past its fiscal 2022 goals, but only because it had previously lowered them because of higher-than-expected retention.
Navy Times reporter Geoff Ziezulewicz contributed reporting.
About Irene Loewenson
Irene Loewenson is a staff reporter for Marine Corps Times. She joined Military Times as an editorial fellow in August 2022. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.
11. PROFICIENCY (USMC)
Now this "influence operation" could have benefited from a slight bit of editing.
I do not think the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps meant this statement as literally as most of us might take it.
"Likewise, those who prefer to excel in personal endeavors like hobbies, higher education or personal fitness over their MOS typically perform substandard as a Marine."
I do not think he is denigrating hobbies, higher education, or personal fitness and I think he understands the value of higher education and personal fitness to doing one's job and accomplishing the mission. I think his nuance might be missed. He is not saying do not have hobbies, or seek higher education, or maintain personal fitness outside of the required physical training on duty. I think he is saying that a Marine should not put these activities ahead of being a Marine or being a proficient Marine. I am sure he believes that higher education and physical fitness contribute to proficiency but that their pursuit should not come at the expense of proficiency.
PROFICIENCY
smmc.marines.mil
WASHINGTON, D.C. --memorandum
SMMC MEMO 01-23
There has been a generations-long debate on how to determine what a proficient Marine is.
Is it the field Marine or the garrison Marine? Is it MOS-related or what we learn in PME? Is it the squared-away Marine or the slightly out-of-standards Marine that is great at a skill? In each case there is only one answer. The best Marine, who is best at being a Marine, is the best Marine.
This discussion is better described by understanding what proficiency means in terms of what is expected of a Marine.
For clarity, the title Marine includes both officer and enlisted. More specifically, anyone who has earned the title Marine has certain expectations. In Officers Candidate School, Ductus Exemplo “Set the Example,” is the overarching theme. In recruit training, the Senior Drill Instructor speech details the expectations, in particular, “you must strive constantly to be the best at everything you do.” Both of these key elements in our initial MAKING of a Marine are essential to proficiency.
Setting the example means to do what is right, the right way at the right time, always. A Marine cannot wear a service uniform without exacting precision and adherence to the most stringent standards, and then expect those they lead to follow a preflight checklist with a different level of precision as they themselves wear their uniform. In both cases, to be proficient in one develops a standing expectation of the other. Likewise, those who prefer to excel in personal endeavors like hobbies, higher education or personal fitness over their MOS typically perform substandard as a Marine.
Proficiency is truly about the whole Marine concept.
“Everything we teach you is important and must be remembered.” Beginning day one of the transformation starts a journey of learning. It is important how a Marine makes a rack, squares away their uniform, and learns the illustrious history of the Marine Corps. Starting day one, proficiency in marksmanship, drill, and swimming form a portion of the basis of our warfighting ethos.
These elements, amongst many others, are a lifelong endeavor to strive to be the best in everything a Marine does. In the same fashion, with every bit as much enthusiasm and vigor, mastery in a Marine’s MOS, advanced skills, higher education, PME, or qualifications are EQUALLY as important but no more so than anything Marines are taught.
Arguably, to truly be proficient means to set the example and maintain the exacting nature and expectation associated with remembering everything Marines are taught. Such an expectation is the bedrock that has, for more than 247 years, resulted in success in combat.
Proficiency is more than skill and more than adherence to orders and regulations. It is the combination of both. It’s striving for perfection knowing no mortal has ever achieved it. This means in all things we do. To be a Marine means being even more than just proficient, it means to strive for perfection.
Semper Fidelis,
TROY E. BLACK
Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps
smmc.marines.mil
12. Opinion | U.S. defense spending will have to go up. The Ukraine war shows why.
Excerpts:
As Congress debates how to manage spending amid debt ceiling negotiations, it should be mindful that cutting defense to 2022 spending levels — which amounts to about a 10 percent cut to the top line — would render the defense strategy envisioned by either Donald Trump or President Biden completely unachievable. We would fund our capability to lead in only one region, certainly not three. The lack of funds would reduce the U.S. military to nothing more than a regional power.
Instead, we should be focused on preserving American peace and prosperity by building and sustaining a U.S. military that maintains, what Reagan called, our “margin of safety” — the minimum force required to accomplish our strategic objectives.
It is hardly the most ambitious strategy: it does not seek military dominance everywhere at once, nor does it call for a force capable of winning two conflicts simultaneously. Rather, it is a strategy tailored to address the security needs of the dangerous world we are facing. That is the prudent approach after learning the difficult lessons of the past year.
Opinion | U.S. defense spending will have to go up. The Ukraine war shows why.
The Washington Post · by Roger Zakheim · February 16, 2023
Roger Zakheim, a former House Armed Services Committee deputy staff director, is a director of the Reagan Institute and a commissioner on the National Defense Strategy Commission.
Last February, the world witnessed a massive Russian military convoy driving down the road toward Kyiv. One year later, that convoy of armor and steel is no more. The Russian military failed to seize Kyiv, and Ukrainians are valiantly fighting to preserve their freedom and sovereignty, inspiring the United States and its allies to rally to their side. As the war enters its second year, and as Congress debates military funding, the United States must take care to heed the lessons that this war has — or should have — taught us.
First, it has shown that providing a country with military capabilities necessary to defend its territory will not necessarily lead to escalation or spillover. Quite the opposite. Western support for Ukraine has helped transform the battlefield. This support helped badly damage Russia’s military capabilities and force Russian President Vladimir Putin to pare back his military objectives (for now).
Second, while the war in Ukraine has revealed how technology is leveling the playing field between great powers and smaller countries, it has also shown the limits of those tools. Conventional forces still matter. Indeed, we are entering a new stage in the war, in which Ukraine will need tanks and other conventional offensive platforms to dislodge entrenched Russian forces and reclaim its sovereign territory.
This second lesson is crucial, and has implications beyond Ukraine’s borders. This lesson matters for the United States’ own defenses: investments in submarines, tanks, fighters, bombers, missiles and munitions cannot be sacrificed in favor of a future capabilities that do not yet exist. We need to sustain our conventional capabilities to prevail in today’s conflicts — and tomorrow’s.
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That brings us to a more alarming third lesson: Industrial capacity might be the United States’ Achilles’ heel as it implements its national defense strategy. Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing, in which products are made to meet only existing, immediate demand, might make business sense for big-box stores and their suppliers. But the war in Ukraine makes clear that using JIT manufacturing is a recipe for disaster on the battlefield. Whether it is building more Virginia-class submarines, increasing munitions production or scaling up missile and rocket inventory, “just in time” would mean “just out of time.” Equipment must be ready well before the threat is imminent.
With those lessons in mind, it is clear that realizing the objectives of our National Defense Strategy requires a builder’s mind-set. Now is the time to build a force capable of winning both today and tomorrow. There is remarkable continuity across the National Security Strategies released by the Trump and Biden administrations. They both called for greater U.S. leadership in three primary regions of the world: the Indo-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. They sought to win the competition with China and Russia. They also sought to deter Iran, North Korea and terrorist groups.
The primary test for any modern defense strategy is whether it can deter an aggressor state. Will China be deterred from seizing control of Taiwan in its pursuit of hegemony in the Indo-Pacific? It is far from clear. China’s aggressive and provocative actions in the Taiwan Strait, and most recently over U.S. airspace, combined with its robust military modernization program, suggest Beijing might be considering such a move sooner rather than later.
Successfully implementing a strategy that is up to this test requires today’s defense spending levels to increase. Those levels are currently at just over 3 percent of gross domestic product, and according to my analysis, they would need to rise to around 5 percent of GDP. That is because we have to play catch up. Of the six administrations that followed President Ronald Reagan, all have been seduced by the temptation of claiming the post-Cold War peace dividend. While some have deployed forces abroad and funded those endeavors, none have committed to funding the military’s modernization.
The Biden administration has in the past parried concerns about being able to sustain support for Ukraine while steeling for a standoff in the Indo-Pacific by saying that we can “walk and chew gum at the same time.” To counter one cliche with another: “It’s time to put our money where our mouth is.” Increasing the defense budget is necessary not only to meet our existing commitments. It will also provide the capital necessary to upgrade and expand industrial capacity for unpredictable military contingencies.
As Congress debates how to manage spending amid debt ceiling negotiations, it should be mindful that cutting defense to 2022 spending levels — which amounts to about a 10 percent cut to the top line — would render the defense strategy envisioned by either Donald Trump or President Biden completely unachievable. We would fund our capability to lead in only one region, certainly not three. The lack of funds would reduce the U.S. military to nothing more than a regional power.
Instead, we should be focused on preserving American peace and prosperity by building and sustaining a U.S. military that maintains, what Reagan called, our “margin of safety” — the minimum force required to accomplish our strategic objectives.
It is hardly the most ambitious strategy: it does not seek military dominance everywhere at once, nor does it call for a force capable of winning two conflicts simultaneously. Rather, it is a strategy tailored to address the security needs of the dangerous world we are facing. That is the prudent approach after learning the difficult lessons of the past year.
The Washington Post · by Roger Zakheim · February 16, 2023
13. China’s Balloon Program Combines Commercial and Military Capabilities
Civil-military fusion.
Excerpt:
“Civil-military fusion,” as China’s government calls it, isn’t wholly new, but it has come into sharper focus for the U.S. during the decadelong leadership of Xi Jinping.
China’s Balloon Program Combines Commercial and Military Capabilities
Work of a single balloon expert underscores Beijing’s objectives
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-balloon-program-combines-commercial-and-military-capabilities-b4dfe2aa?mod=world_lead_story
By James T. AreddyFollow
and Brian SpegeleFollow
Feb. 16, 2023 6:30 pm ET
BEIJING—The recent appearance over the U.S. of a Chinese high-altitude balloon is shedding light on the interplay between China’s entrepreneurs, universities and the People’s Liberation Army, a fusion of strengths that Washington said is the basis of a spy-balloon program.
The U.S. government alleged this month that a fleet of Chinese surveillance balloons has flown over dozens of countries and several continents. On Feb. 4, a U.S. military jet shot down a Chinese balloon off the South Carolina coast, and Navy divers in the Atlantic have salvaged some of the apparatus that had been sailing over America’s midsection.
The incident has complicated efforts by the U.S. and China to reset poor relations.
Last week the U.S. Commerce Department appeared to point to China’s bid to more closely bind civilian business activities with the military by blacklisting six companies it accused of contributing to a balloon and airship spying program managed by the People’s Liberation Army, which would prevent them from buying certain American technology.
Xi Jinping stressed the fusing of civilian and military endeavors when he described party policy last October.
PHOTO: ANDY WONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
China’s surveillance of U.S. interests takes many forms, including the pilfering of corporate data over the internet and relying on people sympathetic to Beijing in business and academia to use their access in the U.S. to glean intelligence it seeks, according to U.S. authorities and convictions in federal courts of people involved in such activities.
Now attention has shifted to Chinese high-altitude balloons in the midst of U.S. allegations that they have been developed to conduct surveillance from the edge of space. Like other such programs, including the development of a homegrown airliner and its version of a GPS-like satellite-based navigation system, China’s balloon endeavors blur the lines between civilian research, profit-oriented businesses and Beijing’s military objectives.
“Civil-military fusion,” as China’s government calls it, isn’t wholly new, but it has come into sharper focus for the U.S. during the decadelong leadership of Xi Jinping.
Previously, China relied mostly on often-lumbering state-owned enterprises to supply and equip its military. But under Mr. Xi, the government has increasingly sought to break down barriers between private businesses and the military’s needs. It has provided fresh incentives for more-nimble companies to align themselves with political priorities and to cash in on fat state handouts for businesses focused on national-security priorities.
How China’s civilian and military endeavors have fused over balloons is evident in the work of a Beijing academic named Wu Zhe. The 66-year old Communist Party member has held a senior role at an aeronautical institute, founded several private companies to develop balloons and military-grade apparatuses and is listed as an inventor on a range of patents for balloon-related technologies, including some with dual civilian and military applications.
Watch: China Says U.S. Overreacted After Shooting Down Balloon
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Watch: China Says U.S. Overreacted After Shooting Down Balloon
Play video: Watch: China Says U.S. Overreacted After Shooting Down Balloon
China accused the U.S. of indiscriminate use of force after it shot down a suspected spy balloon in early February. The Pentagon said the balloon flew over sensitive sites. Beijing said it was a civilian aircraft that blew off course. Photo: Mark R Cristino/EPA/Shutterstock
At least four of the six Chinese companies blacklisted by the Commerce Department on Feb. 10 trace management or financial ties to Mr. Wu, according to publicly available business records. Beihang University, an aerospace institute where Mr. Wu has taught and held a senior role, has been sanctioned by the U.S. for more than two decades because of its close ties to the People’s Liberation Army.
To limit chances that American technology could aid the People’s Liberation Army, U.S. sanctions effectively bar American companies from selling certain advanced software and components to China.
In announcing its latest measures, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security alleged that each of the six entities supports the modernization of the PLA’s aerospace programs, including airships and balloons and related materials and components. None of the companies has been publicly accused by the U.S. of participating in the production of the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.
All but one are private companies, based on publicly available corporate records. None of the companies has made a comment about the sanctions or responded to efforts to reach them. Mr. Wu didn’t respond to requests for comment submitted through one of the newly blacklisted firms, Eagles Men Aviation Science & Technology Group Co., which he founded.
China’s Foreign Ministry said the U.S. has overreacted to what it has described as a meteorological research craft blown off course, and that it “used the incident as an excuse to impose illegal sanctions over Chinese companies and institutions,” as Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin put it Wednesday. The ministry has claimed that debris from the downed balloon is Chinese property, but its officials haven’t responded to questions about the craft’s owner or mission. The ministry didn’t respond to questions about Mr. Wu, nor did China’s Defense Ministry.
Overlap between military and industrial pursuits is prevalent across the world, including in the U.S., where commercial weapon-systems makers supply the Pentagon. The U.S. government’s military budget gives it influence over American institutions and companies that participate in military-related business, but Washington isn’t generally thought to direct them to the extent that is possible in China’s top-down governance system.
Beihang University has been sanctioned by the U.S. on its ties to the People’s Liberation Army.
PHOTO: REN CHAO/ XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS
A characteristic of the great-power competition emerging between the U.S. and China is the deployment by each of commercial know-how, but a difference is how Beijing also uses enterprises “as a gray-zone cover for a lot of their military activity,” said Greg Levesque, chief executive of the Salt Lake City-based risk-analysis firm Strider Technologies Inc. It counts during Mr. Xi’s term the formation of thousands of what Mr. Levesque calls PLA front companies.
U.S. security officials said that it can be hard to know whether Beijing holds sway over a company even when it is privately held, in turn making it more difficult to enforce sanctions and export controls that are aimed at the Chinese state.
Eagles Men Aviation Science & Technology, or Emast, has described Mr. Wu on its website as the company’s founder as well as a former member of a science-and-technology committee for the General Armaments Department of the PLA.
Emast claims a specialty in producing stealth aircraft equipment and inflatable hangars to conceal jet fighters. While its website has been inaccessible in recent days, archived web pages shed some light on its activities.
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Mr. Wu’s work on balloons extends back years. At Beihang University in 2015, Mr. Wu celebrated the successful launch of a “new type of near-space airship,” referring to the territory above the flight corridors of airliners.
“This is the world’s first successful test flight of a near-space airship with continuous power, controllable flight and reusable capabilities,” read an account of the project by the official People’s Daily newspaper.
Mr. Wu led an even more ambitious effort in 2019. In an interview with Chinese media that year, Mr. Wu described the development and test of a multiton airship, known as Cloud Chaser, which measured 100 meters, the equivalent of 328 feet, and had cruised through the stratosphere over North America, Africa and Asia.
“This is the first time an aerodynamically controlled stratospheric airship has flown around the world at an altitude of 20,000 meters,” or more than 60,000 feet, Mr. Wu was quoted as saying.
Mr. Wu’s name also surfaces in business filings relating to Beijing Nanjiang Aerospace Technology Co., another of the U.S.-blacklisted companies. The records show how shortly after he set up Nanjiang in 2015, with financial backing from a Shanghai-listed real-estate company, the company pursued and flew at least one test flight for a “near-space vehicle,” the designation for balloons and airships that ply the stratosphere.
Later in 2019, Nanjiang announced it was discontinuing the near-space vehicle-development efforts.
Some of Mr. Wu’s activities were reported earlier by the New York Times and an online publication, the Wire China.
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In setting out party policy for the next five years in October, Mr. Xi stressed his fusion goals: “We will better coordinate strategies and plans, align policies and systems, and share resources and production factors between the military and civilian sectors,” he told fellow party leaders.
Repeated notices from the State Department in recent years have highlighted civilian-military fusion in China, including one from 2020 that said Mr. Xi personally oversees a party strategy that “is systematically reorganizing the Chinese science and technology enterprise to ensure that new innovations simultaneously advance economic and military development.” It said target sectors include dual-use technology in quantum and big-data computing, semiconductors, 5G telecommunications and artificial intelligence, plus nuclear and aerospace technologies.
Money backs up China’s strategy, including “civil-military-fusion” investment funds that publicly available corporate records show have flowed into some of the companies recently sanctioned by the Commerce Department. Several such funds have taken stakes in Emast, for example, investing alongside Mr. Wu and others, the corporate records show.
Write to James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com and Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com
14. Col Paris Davis: Black Vietnam veteran to finally receive Medal of Honor
Righting another wrong. America is great because we correct our mistakes.
Excerpts:
"I am so very grateful for my family and friends within the military and elsewhere who kept alive the story of A-team, A-321 at Camp Bong Son," the statement continued.
"I think often of those fateful 19 hours on June 18, 1965 and what our team did to make sure we left no man behind on that battlefield."
The then Army captain disobeyed his commands to leave a battle, but later said he could not leave men behind.
Though he was hit by gunfire and a grenade, Col Davis went back to a rice paddy for two seriously injured men - Billy Waugh and Robert Brown.
Col Paris Davis: Black Vietnam veteran to finally receive Medal of Honor
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Paris Davis was one of the first black officers in the US Army's Special Forces, known as the Green Berets
By Chloe Kim
BBC News, Washington
One of the first black officers in the US Army's Special Forces will receive recognition for his service in the Vietnam War with the Medal of Honor - after almost 60 years.
Col Paris Davis, who is now retired, disobeyed orders and rescued his troops who were wounded in an attack in 1965.
His nomination for the highest combat award was lost by the military during the height of the civil rights era.
President Joe Biden phoned the 83-year-old to deliver the good news.
"The call today from President Biden prompted a wave of memories of the men and women I served with in Vietnam - from the members of 5th Special Forces Group and other U.S. military units to the doctors and nurses who cared for our wounded," Col Davis said in a statement released by him and his family.
"I am so very grateful for my family and friends within the military and elsewhere who kept alive the story of A-team, A-321 at Camp Bong Son," the statement continued.
"I think often of those fateful 19 hours on June 18, 1965 and what our team did to make sure we left no man behind on that battlefield."
The then Army captain disobeyed his commands to leave a battle, but later said he could not leave men behind.
Though he was hit by gunfire and a grenade, Col Davis went back to a rice paddy for two seriously injured men - Billy Waugh and Robert Brown.
CBS News, the BBC's US partner, reported that Col Davis recalled telling his commanding officer: "Sir, I'm just not going to leave. I still have an American out there."
Mr Waugh went on to recommend Col Davis for the medal, as did his commander, Billy Cole.
But then the paperwork mysteriously vanished - twice.
Military historian Doug Sterner said it was extremely odd and rare for nomination paperwork of this kind to be lost.
Over the years, comrades and volunteers advocated on Col Davis' behalf to receive the honour.
"I thought that maybe this was just one of those racist things that shouldn't have happened, but did happen and when [the paperwork] got lost a second time I was convinced," Col Davis told CBS News in an interview.
He said racism was something he had experienced during his 23 years in the Army.
In January 2021, former acting US defence secretary Christopher Miller ordered a review of Col Davis' case.
In an opinion piece in USA Today, Mr Miller said "bureaucracy has a way of perpetuating injustice".
"Awarding Davis the Medal of Honor now might not untangle much military bureaucracy," he wrote. "But it would address an injustice."
More than 58,000 US military personnel are known to have died during the Vietnam War, according to the US National Archives.
The White House has not yet confirmed a date for Col Davis' medal ceremony.
BBC · by Menu
15. Pentagon’s top China official to visit Taiwan amid rising bilateral tensions
Pentagon’s top China official to visit Taiwan amid rising bilateral tensions
Rare trip to island is only second in four decades by high-level US defence official
Financial Times · by Demetri Sevastopulo · February 16, 2023
The Pentagon’s top China official is to visit Taiwan in the coming days, a rare trip to the island by a senior US defence policymaker that comes as relations between Washington and Beijing are mired in crisis over a suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down two weeks ago.
Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defence for China, will go to Taiwan in the coming days, according to four people familiar with his trip. He is currently in Mongolia for discussions with the country’s military.
Chase would be the first senior defence official to visit Taiwan since Heino Klinck, deputy assistant secretary for east Asia, went in 2019. At the time, he was the most senior Pentagon official to visit the island in four decades.
The visit comes as US-China relations have sunk to a new low after the Chinese military flew a large balloon over North America for eight days until an F-22 shot it down off the coast of South Carolina.
China says the balloon was a civilian craft doing meteorological research, but the US insists it was being used to conduct surveillance over sensitive military sites, including nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile silos in Montana.
President Joe Biden on Thursday said he planned to talk to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to “get to the bottom” of the balloon incident, which has sparked calls in Congress for the US to take an even tougher line on Beijing.
The Pentagon declined to comment on the trip to Taiwan. But it stressed that US “support for, and defence relationship with, Taiwan remains aligned against the current threat posed by the People’s Republic of China”.
“Our commitment to Taiwan is rock-solid and contributes to the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and within the region,” added the Pentagon spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Martin Meiners.
The planned visit comes at a sensitive moment in relations between Washington and Beijing. US secretary of state Antony Blinken is trying to meet Wang Yi, the top Chinese foreign policy official, at the Munich security conference this weekend. But two people familiar with the talks said Wang had not yet agreed to such a meeting.
Three weeks ago, Blinken cancelled a planned trip to China at short notice because of the balloon incident. He had been scheduled to meet Xi. The state department did not respond to a request for comment.
Tensions between Washington and Beijing also remain high over Taiwan. A top American Air Force general recently said he believed the US and China would likely go to war over Taiwan in 2025. The Pentagon moved quickly to say that his comments did not reflect the official view.
Beijing opposes visits to Taipei by US officials or lawmakers. Last August, the Chinese military held large-scale military exercises, including flying ballistic missiles over Taiwan, after Nancy Pelosi became the first Speaker of the US House of Representatives to visit the island in 25 years.
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Beijing argues that visits to Taiwan, over which it claims sovereignty, dilute Washington’s “one China” policy. Under the policy, which has been in place since the US and China established relations in 1979, the Washington recognises Beijing as the sole government of China and acknowledges, without endorsing, the Chinese view that Taiwan is part of China.
While the Biden administration has avoided overtly antagonising China with official visits, at least one senior military official has visited Taiwan.
Last year the Financial Times reported that Admiral Michael Studeman, then the top intelligence officer at Indo-Pacific command, visited Taipei. His trip came around the time Chinese and Russian strategic bombers flew a joint mission over the Sea of Japan while Biden was on a trip to Tokyo.
The Biden administration insists US policy towards Taiwan has not changed. But the president has on four occasions said the US military would intervene if China attacked Taiwan.
His remarks appeared to shift the longstanding US policy of “strategic ambiguity” under which Washington refuses to say if it would intervene in a conflict. It was designed to make Taiwan less likely to declare independence — which would almost certainly trigger a Chinese attack — while making Beijing think twice about any military action against the country.
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Financial Times · by Demetri Sevastopulo · February 16, 2023
16. China's balloons give Japan and Taiwan a reason to share intelligence, says lawmaker
China's balloons give Japan and Taiwan a reason to share intelligence, says lawmaker
Reuters · by Reuters
TOKYO, Feb 16 (Reuters) - The flight of suspected Chinese surveillance balloons has shown that Japan and Taiwan need to share "critical" intelligence about possible aerial threats, a senior defence policymaker for Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party said.
Although Japan does not have official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, it worries that China could imperil Japanese security if it gained control over the self-governing island.
"We don't have those bilateral relations with Taiwan, so we don't cooperate on that, but Japan's government will have to consider what it does next," Itsunori Onodera, a former defence minister and an influential lawmaker in the ruling party, said in an interview.
One way that Japan could share information with Taiwan could be through its close ally the United States, Onodera said, adding that he had visited Taiwan in January and was briefed about threats posed to the island by China.
Japan said on Tuesday it suspected Chinese spy balloons had flown over Japan at least three times, most recently in 2021.
Japan did not intercept any of them, but on Thursday defence ministry officials briefed Onodera and other Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers about a planned change in military engagement rules to allow Japan's air force to shoot down unmanned aircraft, including balloons that could endanger other air traffic or people on the ground.
"The rules now cover manned aircraft or military aircraft. The change will add unmanned aircraft to those," Minoru Kihara, one of the lawmakers, told reporters after the briefing.
Japan's Self Defence Force will begin training pilots to engage those targets, he said.
Japan on Wednesday said it had warned China that violations of its airspace by surveillance balloons were unacceptable.
The issue of spy balloons has drawn new attention in recent days after U.S. fighter jets shot down a Chinese balloon on Feb. 4, and subsequently three other objects.
China said the balloon was a civilian weather-monitoring aircraft and it accused the United States of sending its balloons into Chinese airspace.
Reporting by Tim Kelly, Kaori Kaneko and Nobuhiro Kubo. Editing by Gerry Doyle
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Reuters
17. Opinion | U.S.-China Relations Keep Getting Worse. Do They Have To?
Excerpts:
However the balloon affair blows over, it has highlighted how strained U.S.-China relations have become and how easily another dispute could curdle into conflict. “As we see with balloons — who predicted a balloon mini-crisis? — the possible permutations are endless,” Chris Buckley, who covers China for The Times, said this week.
It has also revealed how little the two powers now communicate: Shortly after the balloon was shot down, the Pentagon said that Secretary Austin reached out through a special crisis line to his Chinese counterpart, who declined to answer his call.
Should this frosty dynamic persist, “a new type of Cuban-missile-crisis moment, when the fate of the world hangs in the balance, is not inconceivable,” Michael Schuman writes in The Atlantic. “Then the two adversaries may find that the channels of communication they’d need to avert disaster aren’t working, and their inimical attitudes are too entrenched to find a solution.”
Opinion | U.S.-China Relations Keep Getting Worse. Do They Have To?
The New York Times · by Spencer Bokat-Lindell · February 15, 2023
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The detection and downing of a Chinese spy balloon in American airspace earlier this month, and the attendant decision by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone the first trip to China by America’s top diplomat since 2018, was just the latest episode in a longer story of deteriorating relations between the world’s two great powers.
That story began in earnest five years ago, when the Trump administration ignited a trade war that the Biden administration has continued to wage. It took another turn in May when President Biden pledged to defend Taiwan if China attacked it, a striking (if halting) departure from longstanding policy, which was underscored by the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island over the summer. And last month, a top Air Force general issued a memo predicting a war in 2025 and calling for preparations “to deter, and if required, defeat China.”
Why does Washington believe that China is the top threat to U.S. national security? Are those fears founded, and what should be done to avoid a potentially disastrous military conflict between two nuclear-armed countries? Here’s what people are saying.
How dangerous is China, really?
China’s authoritarian government affords its citizens few civil liberties and even fewer political rights, and exercises its control through sprawling one-party rule, widespread censorship, repression of civil society, systems of surveillance and propaganda that have grown increasingly sophisticated under President Xi Jinping, and the mass detention of religious and ethnic minorities, which the United States has deemed a genocide.
There are, of course, other authoritarian governments in the world; the United States is even allied with some of them. But to U.S. officials, what makes China a unique threat — beyond its size — is the modernization of its military and, in the words of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, its “increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to fit its authoritarian preferences”:
Since the 1970s, the United States has struck a delicate diplomatic balance through the “one China” policy, under which it does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation, and through “strategic ambiguity,” selling arms to Taiwan without making any security guarantees. Taiwan dominates the production of microchips, which are critical to the functioning of electronic devices. A Chinese invasion that constrained the supply of those chips would lead to “a deep and immediate recession” and “an inability to protect ourselves,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned last year.
As the world’s second-largest economy, China also exerts influence through trade, alleged theft of intellectual property and investment in developing countries that critics have called a new form of colonialism. And as China’s market power has grown, “U.S. institutions and businesses are increasingly silencing themselves to avoid angering the Chinese government,” German Lopez of The Times has written.
But for all these concerns, many reject the notion that China poses an existential threat to the United States. At the most basic level, “China has neither the destructive capability nor the geopolitical motivation to destroy the U.S.,” Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, argued in Bloomberg in 2021. Even with a recent expansion, China’s nuclear arsenal remains much smaller than America’s, he added, and its military still lags in technological sophistication and experience.
In the view of Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Beijing also has shown little interest in exporting its governance system. “Where it does, it is almost entirely directed at developing countries, not industrial democracies such as the United States,” he argued in Foreign Policy in 2021. Moreover, its economic development model “is almost certainly not sustainable in its present form, given China’s aging population, extensive corruption, very large levels of income inequality, inadequate social safety net, and the fact that free information flows are required to drive global innovation.”
To Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China and Asia-Pacific studies at Cornell University, the logic of zero-sum competition with China has become so pervasive in Washington among members of both parties that it risks undermining America’s own interests. “When individuals feel the need to out-hawk one another to protect themselves and advance professionally,” she wrote in Foreign Affairs last year, “the result is groupthink.”
And for detractors of such groupthink, the reaction to the balloon incident is yet another instance of threat inflation. “Americans use all kinds of technology to gather intelligence on China and other states: satellites, phone tapping, computer intrusions, and even good old-fashioned human sources,” writes Emma Ashford, a columnist at Foreign Policy. “It just seems as if Washington blew this whole thing way out of proportion.”
Can the United States and China compete without conflict?
Even those who hold countering China’s rise as a top national priority aren’t particularly keen to start a war, as it would almost certainly exact tremendous costs:
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In a conflict over an invasion of Taiwan, the United States and its allies would lose tens of thousands of service members and Taiwan’s economy would be devastated, according to recent simulations conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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In part because the U.S. and Chinese economies are deeply interdependent, a war lasting just one year would cause America’s G.D.P. to fall by 5 percent to 10 percent and China’s by 25 percent to 30 percent, with severe effects for the global economy, according to a RAND Corporation study.
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Conflict could also imperil cooperation on climate change between the United States and China, the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters, as Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan temporarily did.
Opinions differ on how war might be best avoided. Regarding Taiwan, there are some, like Yu-Jie Chen, a research professor in Taiwan, who contend that deterring China requires more demonstrations of support from like-minded democracies, “including signing bilateral economic agreements with Taiwan, allowing it to join regional trade organizations to diminish Taiwan’s economic overreliance on China, supporting Taiwan’s participation in international organizations and more gestures like Ms. Pelosi’s visit.” The Times columnist Bret Stephens has argued that Biden should also end the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity in a formal statement.
Yet others think that would be a counterproductive provocation, as Beijing already assumes that the United States would support Taiwan in a conflict. “It would erode assurance by implying our policy is to guarantee Taiwan independence,” Arthur Kroeber, a founding partner at the China-focused research firm GaveKal Dragonomics, told Foreign Affairs in November. “And it could incite Taiwan to make more aggressive moves toward independence, which would increase, not lower, the chances of armed conflict.”
On other matters, there is more consensus about how to ease tensions. There is relatively broad support, for example, for increasing military aid to democracies in the region. “An active denial strategy that focuses on supplying defensive weapons to U.S. allies and a lower-profile, more agile deployment of U.S. forces in the region would raise the costs of Chinese military action without exacerbating China’s own sense of insecurity,” write Jake Werner, a China historian, and William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.
Last year, Congress passed bipartisan legislation allocating $52 billion in subsidies and tax credits to encourage domestic chip production, an industrial policy that could help lower the national security stakes of the Taiwan dispute by hedging against supply chain vulnerabilities. As Steven Rattner, a counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, wrote in The Times last month, “even many free-market conservatives seem to recognize that unfettered capitalism can lead to imperfect results.”
Biden could also turn down the temperature of the U.S.-China rivalry by rolling back tariffs on Chinese imports, which the Times editorial board described last year as “the Trump administration’s failed gambit of bullying China into making economic concessions.” Instead of trying to change China, the board argued, the United States should focus on strengthening ties with China’s neighbors, as “recent history teaches that the United States is more effective in advancing and defending its interests when it does not act unilaterally.”
For now, an uneasy peace
However the balloon affair blows over, it has highlighted how strained U.S.-China relations have become and how easily another dispute could curdle into conflict. “As we see with balloons — who predicted a balloon mini-crisis? — the possible permutations are endless,” Chris Buckley, who covers China for The Times, said this week.
It has also revealed how little the two powers now communicate: Shortly after the balloon was shot down, the Pentagon said that Secretary Austin reached out through a special crisis line to his Chinese counterpart, who declined to answer his call.
Should this frosty dynamic persist, “a new type of Cuban-missile-crisis moment, when the fate of the world hangs in the balance, is not inconceivable,” Michael Schuman writes in The Atlantic. “Then the two adversaries may find that the channels of communication they’d need to avert disaster aren’t working, and their inimical attitudes are too entrenched to find a solution.”
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
READ MORE
“China’s Top Airship Scientist Promoted Program to Watch the World From Above” [The New York Times]
“Biden’s Taiwan Policy Is Truly, Deeply Reckless” [The New York Times]
“U.S. Pours Money Into Chips, but Even Soaring Spending Has Limits” [The New York Times]
“Washington’s China Hawks Take Flight” [Foreign Policy]
“Have China hawks flown the coop?” [Politico]
The New York Times · by Spencer Bokat-Lindell · February 15, 2023
18. War Books: Beginning Your Professional Development Journey through Reading
War Books: Beginning Your Professional Development Journey through Reading - Modern War Institute
mwi.usma.edu · by Tom Dull · February 17, 2023
The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience . . . the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final.
An assignment to West Point perhaps inevitably means spending considerable time thinking about professional development in the Army officer corps. After all, for cadets the United States Military Academy is the first stage of a career-long development process. When I recently discovered that my next assignment will be command of 2nd Battalion, 11th Infantry Regiment—the unit responsible for the Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course—I reflected on General Mattis’s comments about the importance of reading. I began putting together a reading list aimed at young leaders—soon-to-be lieutenants here at West Point and elsewhere and newly commissioned officers just beginning their journeys as Army leaders.
This list is a start point—a menu of books that have personally influenced me and shaped the way I think about the profession of arms. All of these books were either presented or recommended to me by other fellow officers who have fought and led faithfully for our nation over the past thirty years. They have often spurred thoughtful conversations between me and other members of our profession. They have absolutely aided me as I continue to learn to lead in and outside of the Army. And ultimately, they are books I hope will help and inspire junior leaders to pursue excellence and continue to learn and lead.
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, by Steven Ambrose
Cohesion, heroism, tactics, good and bad leadership—you will learn about all of these in Band of Brothers. Pay close attention to Dick Winters and not only how he leads but also how he uses his wits and instinct (with doctrine and battle drills as the foundation) to consider the enemy, the terrain, and friendly forces in his tactics.
I highly encourage that you spend time in chapter 5, “Follow Me,” as Winters displays exceptional instinctive military tactics; it is infantry leadership 101.
Brief, by Joseph McCormack
Communicating clearly and concisely in our profession matters. Whether to the unit you command, a higher commander, or an adjacent unit, how you communicate your thoughts will provide clarity to your focused audience. This book assists in communicating leanly. Whether verbally, by email, or written on paper you should simply get in, get to the point, and get out.
Additionally, any officer should, at a minimum, peruse Army Regulation 25-50, Preparing and Managing Correspondence, as it provides the standards for military correspondence in the Army.
Infantry Attacks, by Irwin Rommel
This is an excellent book when considering small-unit tactics in large-scale combat operations. What we know from World War I, World War II, and even the ongoing war in Ukraine is that artillery matters—and when on the receiving end of it, the small unit must be dug in. So, learn to dig in as a priority of work. For infantry forces, Rommel teaches us of several significant tactical fundamentals that we must master—good reconnaissance, exploiting the enemy, digging in, and quickly laying a base of fire on the enemy before the enemy can lay a base of fire on us. Tactics matter. Reading this book will allow you to practice one of the most important habits of successful leaders: reflecting on the past to prepare for future battle.
Dig in!
Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life, by James Kerr
As officers, we simply just do extra. Whether planning an operation, considering and mitigating risk, caring for a subordinate’s family, or doing a little more fitness, we help build the values in our small units, and for that matter, the Army as a whole. The current operating environment is uncertain and complex and you and your team will need to hold one another accountable to succeed. Legacy gets at the root of how leaders build teams to succeed. This book will cause you to consider your unit’s mindset, values, and purpose. Sweep the sheds!
One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick
This book was recommended to me by several other officers, and it is worthy of their recommendations. It conveys the pressure on the lieutenant in training, preparation, and combat; it depicts what it’s like to fight in battle. At times the junior officer may be the “strategic lieutenant” whose decisions will have immediate repercussions and might have national consequences. So, what do you do? Your ability to think critically and creatively will matter in battle and Fick demonstrates this with excellence. Not every situation will be simple, but you will still need to think and decide.
Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics, by Tim Marshall
This is an easy and interesting read. The author describes how the geographic and human terrain of the globe influences much of how the world works with respect to politics and war. Clear and concise, this book will help you understand the worldview of groups across the globe and at the same time explain natural obstacles that either assist in defending or expose in attacking certain land areas on earth. This book will assist you in expanding your geopolitical field of expertise and how you see the world.
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown
Trust. How do you extend it and how do you receive it? The boat consisted of eight rowers and one coxswain—similar in size to an infantry squad. They lived through the Great Depression and they all mostly came from extremely humble means. Most were simply looking for a better way of life. However, they found a common cause and they learned to work together in pursuit of that cause; they built trust in one another. Tough and gritty, most teams come together through shared misery and this book conveys exactly that. Misery enjoys company, so find good company!
Tom Dull is an infantry officer in the United States Army and currently the executive officer for the Character Integration Advisory Group at West Point. He currently instructs West Point cadets in the Character Growth Seminar.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Master Sgt. Mark Burrell, US Army
mwi.usma.edu · by Tom Dull · February 17, 2023
19. Naval Intelligence admiral: 'Naïve' American public has a 'China blindness' problem
Excerpts:
Some observers, most notably retired Navy Adm. Harry Harris Jr., have taken the position that the US should drop this position and make its intentions clear under such a situation.
“I think this issue of strategic clarity versus strategic ambiguity is critical, and we have been well served” by ambiguity, Harris told lawmakers last week, according to the Washington Examiner. “But I think the time for ambiguity is over. I think we have to be clear about our intent with regard to what would happen if the [People’s Republic of China] invades Taiwan as the PRC is clear in its intent that it’s ultimately going to seize Taiwan, if need be.”
Studeman today did not name Harris or any other individual when talking about his position that the US should continue its policy of “strategic ambiguity.” But he also did not mince words that it is “not the time for strategic clarity.”
“It makes no sense… It doesn’t buy you a deterrence. The Chinese already think that the US is going to intervene if they do a military operation against Taiwan because they’re building a military designed to handle US intervention,” Studeman said.
“What you may do, in fact, is actually tie the [US] president’s hands… You’re giving a blank check even though you don’t know the circumstances of how you may face a situation where you may want to commit US forces,” he continued.
The two-star admiral finished his remarks with a plea, ostensibly, although not explicitly, aimed at the lawmakers and other elected officials who have very much dominated the public discussion of the country’s policy decisions regarding the Chinese government.
“Can we please lower the amount of internal bickering within the United States and focus on the international challenges that actually affect every American?” he said.
Naval Intelligence admiral: 'Naïve' American public has a 'China blindness' problem - Breaking Defense
Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, the commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, also pushed back on the idea the US should discontinue its policy of "strategic ambiguity" regarding Taiwan.
breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · February 16, 2023
Chinese President Xi Jinping is applauded as he waves to senior members of the government upon arrival at the Opening Ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China at The Great Hall of People on October 16, 2022 in Beijing, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
WEST 2023 — Following a week where most of the country’s attention was transfixed on a high-altitude balloon deployed by the Chinese government, a top Navy intelligence officer said it is “unsettling” how blind most Americans have become to the threat China poses.
“I’ll be very honest with you. It’s very unsettling to see how much the US is not connecting the dots on our number one challenge,” Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, the commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, told attendees here at the West 2023 conference in San Diego.
“It’s disturbing how ill-informed and naïve the average American is on China. I chalk this up, if I could summarize, into a China blindness. We face a knowledge crisis and a China blindness problem,” he continued.
Studeman’s blunt comments come as the White House, the Pentagon and the country at-large deal with the fall-out of a Chinese high-altitude balloon that violated US airspace. The Chinese government claimed the first balloon, shot down over the Atlantic Ocean near South Carolina, was used for civilian scientific research and went severely off-course, while the Pentagon has said the balloon was an intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance asset.
Following an F-22’s takedown of the balloon with an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile earlier this month, the White House and the Canadian government has been much more aggressive in publicly announcing and promptly taking down other unknown objects detected in NORAD airspace. Three more objects have been destroyed since, although the government has avoided attributing those objects to China.
When asked to comment on the balloon saga, Studeman said the remarkable sight of a foreign nation’s asset flying freely above American territory has “woken up a few” people, but he was also disappointed by how “narrow” the discussion around the event had become.
“We should be connecting the Chinese view of how to use their capabilities to all the other areas where the Chinese have either ignored, or they intend to subvert, forms of international law,” he said. “I guarantee you if they’d been successful with operating all over the place, and they had been for quite some time, that they’d be talking about redefining what sovereign airspace really is.”
Studeman blamed part of the problem with “China blindness” on the Pentagon’s propensity to classify large swaths of information at higher levels than necessary, an issue with which lawmakers in recent months have become increasingly attuned.
“Frankly, I’ve been in a struggle for some time with the Intelligence Community to be able to actually downgrade some of the things that we see that are truly damning with regard to what the Chinese are doing and why they’re doing it, and get those out into the public domain,” he said.
Despite speaking mostly about China for roughly 40 minutes, Studeman for much of that time did not mention the one issue that has garnered significant public attention in recent years: The possibility of a military invasion of Taiwan.
When he did address Taiwan though, the career intelligence officer pushed back on recent statements that the US should take a position of “strategic clarity.” The US has long held a position of not clearly declaring what it might do if China attempted to forcibly reunify Taiwan through military force.
Some observers, most notably retired Navy Adm. Harry Harris Jr., have taken the position that the US should drop this position and make its intentions clear under such a situation.
“I think this issue of strategic clarity versus strategic ambiguity is critical, and we have been well served” by ambiguity, Harris told lawmakers last week, according to the Washington Examiner. “But I think the time for ambiguity is over. I think we have to be clear about our intent with regard to what would happen if the [People’s Republic of China] invades Taiwan as the PRC is clear in its intent that it’s ultimately going to seize Taiwan, if need be.”
Studeman today did not name Harris or any other individual when talking about his position that the US should continue its policy of “strategic ambiguity.” But he also did not mince words that it is “not the time for strategic clarity.”
“It makes no sense… It doesn’t buy you a deterrence. The Chinese already think that the US is going to intervene if they do a military operation against Taiwan because they’re building a military designed to handle US intervention,” Studeman said.
“What you may do, in fact, is actually tie the [US] president’s hands… You’re giving a blank check even though you don’t know the circumstances of how you may face a situation where you may want to commit US forces,” he continued.
The two-star admiral finished his remarks with a plea, ostensibly, although not explicitly, aimed at the lawmakers and other elected officials who have very much dominated the public discussion of the country’s policy decisions regarding the Chinese government.
“Can we please lower the amount of internal bickering within the United States and focus on the international challenges that actually affect every American?” he said.
breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · February 16, 2023
20. How the West May Have Helped Build China’s Spy Balloons
Excerpts:
This example of a Western aerostat company cooperating with PLA-linked organizations is, however, not unique. In 2018, the Texas-based company Nanoracks signed a partnership agreement with the China's Kuang-Chi Science company to produce the Traveler series of near-space balloons. In the words of Nanoracks, the Traveler balloon would have various uses “from ecological and terrestrial observation to satellite deployment and space research.”
Here too, the Chinese government’s military-civil fusion strategy connects such partners to Chinese military priorities (making it crucial for outside firms in China to better understand this strategy and these links). Although Kuang-Chi is technically a private company, it has reportedly received funding from the Chinese government’s military-civil fusion programs. And in 2015, Kuang-Chi signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the 7801 Research Institute, which is part of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation. Known as CASIC, the giant military aerospace conglomerate is China’s largest producer of missiles. Soon after, Kuang-Chi joined CASIC’s Aerostat Industrialization Project in Hunan to produce “self-controlled airships, tethered aerostats, and near-space aerostats.” In 2020, the U.S. sanctioned CASIC for its role in China’s military space and missile programs.
China’s extensive work in aerostats, which led to the recent incidents in U.S. airspace, reveals two larger aspects of the larger competition that is reshaping global security. The first is the importance placed on long-term strategy and investments that bear fruit often decades later. The second is how fields that seem innocent enough can be developed to provide technologies for the Chinese military, and eventually used against the very same countries that nurtured China’s industry in the first place.
How the West May Have Helped Build China’s Spy Balloons
Beijing has long pursued aerostat technology, even enlisting French and American firms to help.
By THOMAS CORBETT and PETER W. SINGER
FEBRUARY 16, 2023 12:00 PM ET
defenseone.com · by Thomas Corbett
China’s high-altitude spy balloons took Western politicians and publics by surprise, but they really shouldn’t have. Chinese strategists and industry have worked for more than a decade on 21st-century applications of the 18th-century invention—with some assistance from the West.
Aerostats—the word encompasses powered airships (“blimps”) as well as unpowered balloons—have long been associated with military applications, particularly information-gathering activities. They hold numerous advantages in persistence and cost, and thus many of the Chinese organizations that produce them are directly funded by China’s military industry.
China’s interest in aerostats dates at least to the Mao era. Their modern applications have been noted as far back as 2010, when the National Air and Space Intelligence Center reported that China considered aerostats desirable for their large surveillance area between 1,000 and 2,000 km, low radar profile, ability to persistently loiter above desirable locations, and for their relatively inexpensive operating costs.
Two years later, a seminal conference further illuminated Beijing’s visions for aerostat development. The event was held at China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University, one of China’s “Seven Sons of National Defense” with extensive ties to the PLA and defense industry. It drew a wide range of participants, including Beihang University (another one of the Seven Sons, and the home of an aerostat company recently sanctioned by the Biden administration), the Chinese Aeronautical Society, and the PLA Air Force Equipment Research Institute.
The main theme of the conference was “innovation, development, exchange, and cooperation” with the clearly military goal of deploying aerostats for “early warning, command and communication, and anti-submarine activities.” The conference was particularly interested in topics such as how to increase aerostat payloads, improve energy efficiency, and aerodynamics. It also encouraged participants to track aerostat developments internationally.
In 2020, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission concluded that the PLA envisions an overlapping network of satellites and near-space aerostats to provide redundant and persistent intelligence and targeting capabilities. The value of that persistence is illustrated by not just the balloons crossing over U.S. and other nations’ skies, but by China’s own aerostat makers. For example, the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation claims that one of its model aerostat systems can stay aloft for two weeks, while the Aerospace Information Research Institute, claims its Jimu-1 can operate for months some 20 kilometers up in the air.
Well before last week’s incursions and shootdowns of balloons in North American airspace, China had deployed multiple aerostats to its South China Sea installations in disputed territories. One was reportedly spotted at a Chinese base in Mischief Reef in 2019, and another was seen near the Philippines last year. These aerostats, believed to be solar-powered, float between 7 and 20 km above the Earth. In Chinese airspace, aerostats have been observed in Shandong, Tibet, and Xinjiang, all regions close to sensitive borders or territorial claims.
China’s long work in this space underlines not just the tactical challenges posed by aerostats, but the strategic ones posed by a nation that is a massive market. Soon after the incursions went public, the Biden administration blacklisted six Chinese organizations involved in aerostat development. However, U.S. and European businesses have also played a role in advancing China’s aerostat industry going back for almost a decade.
In 2015, the French company Flying Whales, which makes heavy-lift airships, sent leaders to sign a strategic cooperation agreement with China’s Special Vehicle Research Institute. One of the first Chinese organizations to develop aerostats and stratospheric airships for intelligence collection, SVRI is among the Chinese military’s premier aerostat suppliers. It is also nestled several tiers down in the massive defense conglomerate Aviation Industry Corporation of China, where it is known as AVIC’s 605th Research Institute.
SVRI's PLA links are hardly a secret. In a 2018 work meeting, SVRI Director Zhang Mingwen emphasized SVRI’s mission was to “strengthen the military and enrich the people,” and said that SVRI would serve the needs of China’s “military construction.” The company also employs multiple people who participate in China’s “511 Talent Project” for national defense engineering and collection. But while AVIC is on the U.S. government entity list for export control, SVRI and its immediate parent company are not.
Flying Whale’s agreement called for jointly carrying out “research, development, and production” to “improve the development and production capabilities of the aerostats of both parties.” A follow-up report by SVRI in 2016 envisioned the joint development of an airship that could haul a 60-ton payload—far larger and heavier than the 1-ton payload of the spy balloon that is making recent news. In 2018, SVRI’s parent company sent a team to France to learn about such heavy-lift aerostats.
This example of a Western aerostat company cooperating with PLA-linked organizations is, however, not unique. In 2018, the Texas-based company Nanoracks signed a partnership agreement with the China's Kuang-Chi Science company to produce the Traveler series of near-space balloons. In the words of Nanoracks, the Traveler balloon would have various uses “from ecological and terrestrial observation to satellite deployment and space research.”
Here too, the Chinese government’s military-civil fusion strategy connects such partners to Chinese military priorities (making it crucial for outside firms in China to better understand this strategy and these links). Although Kuang-Chi is technically a private company, it has reportedly received funding from the Chinese government’s military-civil fusion programs. And in 2015, Kuang-Chi signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the 7801 Research Institute, which is part of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation. Known as CASIC, the giant military aerospace conglomerate is China’s largest producer of missiles. Soon after, Kuang-Chi joined CASIC’s Aerostat Industrialization Project in Hunan to produce “self-controlled airships, tethered aerostats, and near-space aerostats.” In 2020, the U.S. sanctioned CASIC for its role in China’s military space and missile programs.
China’s extensive work in aerostats, which led to the recent incidents in U.S. airspace, reveals two larger aspects of the larger competition that is reshaping global security. The first is the importance placed on long-term strategy and investments that bear fruit often decades later. The second is how fields that seem innocent enough can be developed to provide technologies for the Chinese military, and eventually used against the very same countries that nurtured China’s industry in the first place.
Thomas Corbett is a research analyst with BluePath Labs. His areas of focus include Chinese foreign relations, emerging technology, and international economics.
P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security.
defenseone.com · by Thomas Corbett
21. Americans are Disturbingly ‘Ill-Informed and Naive’ on China, Navy’s Intel Chief Says
The balloon incident could be a wake-up. But will it be one? Or will it just further feed the partisan divide (which is certainly an objective of the PRC/CCP).
Americans are Disturbingly ‘Ill-Informed and Naive’ on China, Navy’s Intel Chief Says
Recent balloon incident brought some attention to the possible threat, but not enough, says Rear Adm. Michael Studeman.
defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams
SAN DIEGO—The recent balloon shootdowns brought more attention to China’s potential threats to the U.S., but the American public is still disturbingly uninformed about those dangers, the commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence and director of the National Maritime Intelligence Integration Office, said Wednesday.
“It's disturbing how ill-informed and naive the average American is on China,” U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Michael Studeman said during a presentation at the WEST 2023 conference. But “China is pretty good about flying under the radar on things that are frankly, very alerting. It uses time and in a very adept way…creeping its way to its objectives,” he said. “This incrementalism that doesn't sort of alert you to something fast and red and blinking going across your sight line. It's the slow-moving other thing that doesn't get your attention.”
Additionally, China’s goal is to take on a “veneer of responsibility regarding all of their actions” by influencing the information domain.
The surveillance balloon the U.S. shot down earlier this month is a bit of a departure because it’s something the public could see, he said.
“It's surprising to anybody who's a China hand watching this thing—like the one of 10,000 ways that the Chinese actually do espionage or penetrate our society—they actually get to see it to believe it, to understand what the nature of the threat is.”
But while the media attention and public discourse of the balloon has helped “wake up people,” it’s been too narrow, when there should be a deliberate effort to connect the incident to a larger pattern, Studeman said.
“We should be connecting the Chinese view of how to use their capabilities to all the other areas where the Chinese have either ignored or they intend to subvert forms of international law,” he said. “So in this case, the Chinese aren't talking about it right now. But I guarantee you if they had been successful with operating all over the place, and they had been for quite some time, that they'd be talking about redefining what sovereign airspace really is.”
“They're going up into the 60,000, 80,000 feet and maybe beyond, right, because their intention is to go ahead and then use that access to do a variety of different functions to communicate, to sense, to have electronic warfare capability on those things, to have weapons systems on those things, right?” Studeman said. “Every place that they can get an advantage, they would, and it's tied to other areas where we see them essentially trying to bend or break, you know, international law.”
Studeman said to better educate and equip the public, the intelligence community should “downgrade some of the things that we see that are truly damning with regard to what the Chinese are doing and why they're doing it, and get those out into the public domain.”
But the admiral said getting the IC to do that has been a “struggle.”
“This is par for the intelligence community. It's not in our DNA to release things out in the public. We have to protect sources and methods—and there's a way to do that, while at the same time exposing what is really going on across so many different fronts.”
defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams
22. COL Joseph D. Celeski Obituary
The Special Forces Regiment has lost another brother too soon.
There is not much information about him. I have pasted his AUSA bio below.
Joe made tremendous contributions to the Regiment and our dation's defense in uniform and following retirement.
Here is a 57 minute C-SPAN interview about the book he wrote about Special Forces in Laos after years of painstaking research and first person interviews with those who advised and fought in Laos. I was honored to have Joe share with me his research periodically and the depth he went into with SF veterans makes his work the seminal work on the US involvement in Laos.
The Green Berets in the Land of a Million Elephants
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Joseph Celeski talked about his book, The Green Berets in the Land of a Million Elephants, on the Army’s secret war in Laos from 1959 to 1974.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?459009-1/the-green-berets-land-million-elephants
Joseph D. Celeski Obituary
https://www.echovita.com/us/obituaries/ga/buford/joseph-d-celeski-15984877
It is with deep sorrow that we announce the death of Joseph D. Celeski of Buford, Georgia, who passed away on February 13, 2023, at the age of 69, leaving to mourn family and friends. Leave a sympathy message to the family in the guestbook on this memorial page of Joseph D. Celeski to show support.
COL(R) JOSEPH D. CELESKI
https://www.ausa.org/people/colr-joseph-d-celeski
COL Joseph D. Celeski retired from a thirty-year career with the U.S. Army in September, 2004 after successful completion of commanding the 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He assumed command of the Group in May 2002 in Afghanistan where he also served as the commander of the Combined and Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF) for two tours in Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. His published works include articles on Special Forces in Somalia, the use of Special Forces in joint urban combat, and three monographs on Counterinsurgency in the 21st Century (JSOU Press).
Colonel Celeski enlisted in the Army in 1974 as an armor crewman and served in the 1st AD. Upon promotion to sergeant, he entered OCS and was commissioned in February 1978 as an armor officer. He attended the Armor Officer Basic Course at Fort Knox and served in the Federal Republic of Germany. As a member of 3/64th Armor, 3d Infantry Division, Colonel Celeski served as an M-60A1 tank platoon leader, battalion motor officer, and company commander of an M1 tank company.
During 1983, Colonel Celeski attended the Infantry Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, followed by attendance at Columbus College in the Degree Completion Program, where he obtained a BS in Political Science. After graduation, Colonel Celeski volunteered for Special Forces, attended the SFQC and was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) as an SFOD-A Commander and as the B500 Company Commander in El Paso, Texas. From 1988 to 1989, Colonel Celeski attended DLI for Modern Standard Arabic and was subsequently assigned as an advisor in the Royal Jordanian 1st Armor Battalion. Following that assignment, he attended CGSC at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Upon his graduation, he returned to the 5th SFG(A) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and served as the S3 of the 1st Battalion and then as the Group S3. Colonel Celeski attended the Armed Forces Staff College and served a tour with SOCCENT as the Ground Operations Officer in the J3 and as the Deputy J5 for Plans and also served in Somalia. He returned to the 5th SFG in June 1996 to serve as Commander of the 2nd Battalion. Upon completion of battalion command, Colonel Celeski was assigned to the USASFC(A), where he served as the G3 and then the Chief of Staff until attending the Army War College. Upon graduation, he served as the CJSOTF Commander in Sarajevo, Bosnia- Herzegovina, in support of NATO’s Operation JOINT FORGE. His last assignment, prior to assuming group command, was as Deputy Commanding Officer, U.S. Army Special Forces Command (Airborne). He became a fully qualified Joint Officer and was also trained in the Arabic Language.
Colonel Celeski is also a graduate of the Marine Amphibious Warfare Course, the U.S. Air Force Command and General Staff College, and the Army Force Management Course. Colonel Celeski was designated as a Joint Specialty Officer during his career. He holds a Masters Degree in Public Administration from Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania and a Master’s Degree in Strategic Studies from the Army War College, Carlisle, PA.
Colonel Celeski was among one of the first recipients of the St. Philip Neri awards (Bronze) for his active service in Special Forces. Colonel Celeski’s other awards and decorations include the Combat Infantrymen’s Badge, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star (w/1OLC), The GWOT Expeditionary Medal, The Afghan Campaign Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Ribbon, Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal (with two stars), United Nations Medal for Operations in Somalia, Kuwaiti Liberation Medal, NATO Medal (Bosnia service), Joint Service Commendation Medal, Armed Forces Reserve Medal, Southwest Asia Service Medal, NCO Professional Development Ribbon, Pathfinder Badge, Ranger Tab, Air Assault and Master Parachutist Badges, and Special Forces Tab.
23. Fentanyl deaths among troops more than doubled from 2017 to 2021
Subversion is part of Unrestricted Warfare. The Fentanyl crisis is subversion designed to weaken society (to include the military).
Fentanyl deaths among troops more than doubled from 2017 to 2021
militarytimes.com · by Meghann Myers · February 15, 2023
Fentanyl, a drug that has gained widespread national attention in recent years for its role in the U.S. opioid epidemic, was involved in 174 overdoses, or about 52% of overdose cases, in the military between 2017 and 2021, according to Defense Department data. Fatal fentanyl overdoses more than doubled during that span, from 36% of overdoses in 2017 to 88% in 2021.
The Pentagon compiled the data as part of a request from a bipartisan group of senators in September. The data also show that while the Air Force and Army saw small increases in overall overdose deaths during that time period, those same statistics among Marines and sailors doubled.
“Our military is not immune to the opioid epidemic. We have lost countless service members to overdose, and if we fail to take action to protect those in uniform, we will lose countless more,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in a release Wednesday. “The Department of Defense’s latest report underscores the urgency of this moment and our need to ensure access to quality care and treatment without stigma or shame.”
Thousands of service members on active duty suffered drug and alcohol overdoses between 2017 and 2021, the data show, with 332 of those cases resulting in death. Overdose deaths represented 7% of all military deaths during that period.
Broken down, fentanyl was present in 73 cases, while another 101 involved another drug taken along with fentanyl. There were 45 cases, or about 14%, involving heroin.
Non-opioid overdoses included 84 cases — or 25% of all fatal overdoses — of mixed drugs, including alcohol, cocaine, diphenhydramine (an antihistamine) and other over-the-counter, prescription or illicit drugs. There were also 29 fatal incidents involving alcohol overdose, just under 9% of the total number.
Of the non-fatal cases, 22 involved fentanyl, though the data noted that the drug only received its own category in 2020. Overall opioid-involved overdoses totaled 1,010 cases between 2017 and 2022. Another 1,800 or so cases involved benzodiazepines, amphetamines, cocaine, LSD, cannabis and other narcotics, according to the report.
Another 13,284 cases were included in general categories, such as poisonings of an assortment of drugs and medications ― cough medicine, antipsychotics, and antiepileptics, for example ― 2,638 of which involved antidepressants.
RELATED
Combat troops at higher risk for opioid, heroin addiction, study says
The National Bureau of Economic Research has released a study finding that combat exposure increases the risk of opioid, heroin addiction.
By Patricia Kime
Numbers by service
The Army, which is at least twice the size as any of the other services, reported the most fatalities, at 171, or an average of 34 per year.
“The Army annual rate of fatal OD deaths remained relatively unchanged from 6.5 per 100,000 service members (36 deaths) in 2017 to 6.1 per 100,000 Service members (35 deaths) in 2021,” according to the report.
Over the same period, the Air Force reported 45 deaths, while the Marine Corps counted 36. The Navy, meanwhile, reported 80.
“Air Force deaths have increased slightly over time from nine deaths in 2017 to 11 in 2021,” according to the report. “During the same period, USMC and Navy OD deaths have doubled from five and [11] deaths, respectively, in 2017 to 10 and 21 in 2021.”
Young, white, enlisted men were disproportionately affected by fatal overdoses, according to the data. More than 80% were under 33, 77% were white, 16% Black and about 4% unknown. Enlisted personnel accounted for 96% of fatal overdoses, while men comprised 92.5% of that total.
By comparison, about 65% of the military is under 30 years old, 70% of the force is white, 80% is enlisted and 80% is male.
In response, according to the report, DoD is working to beef up prevention and treatment programs, but officials acknowledge that there is still stigma around seeking treatment for substance abuse.
“Addressing drug abuse and preventing overdose deaths in our force is a high priority for the Department of Defense,” Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s personnel boss, wrote in letters to the senators. “Every drug overdose is a preventable loss of life and we must work to do better. The Department continues to evaluate, refine, and improve strategies for overdose prevention to ensure we are making every effort to prevent these tragic deaths.”
About Meghann Myers
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.
24. China set to eclipse US air superiority in Pacific
I will defer to the air power experts but I think that air superiority depends on more than one or two platforms.
China set to eclipse US air superiority in Pacific
China’s J-20 stealth fleet numbers will surpass US F-22 inventory within this year at current production delivery rates
asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · February 17, 2023
China is on pace to surpass the United States in 5th generation fighter production, a dynamic shift with significant implications for the balance of air power in the Pacific.
This month, Nikkei reported that China’s inventory of J-20A 5th generation fighters could soon overtake the US inventory of 187 F-22 Raptors, with China already having 150 airframes designed to match the F-22 in air-to-air combat.
Although the report notes that while the US has 360 F-35As, it notes that China’s J-20A production is gaining speed and that if current delivery rates are sustained China is on track to exceed the number of US F-22 airframes within this year.
The F-22, the world’s first 5th generation fighter, was designed in the 1990s and is still touted as the US’ most advanced air superiority jet. It is the first air superiority fighter designed around stealth to give it an advantage over previous fighters.
Entering service in 2005, the F-22 was meant to replace the 4th generation F-15 Eagle in frontline service, combining stealth, integrated avionics, and super maneuverability.
Sandboxx notes in an article this month that the F-22 can carry two AIM-9X Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles and six AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided ones in an internal weapons bay alongside an M61A2 20-mm cannon with 480 rounds for dogfights.
For close air support, the report says that the F-22 can carry two 450-kilogram GBU-32 JDAM smart bombs or eight 113-kilogram Small Diameter Bombs.
Developments in China’s manufacturing techniques and jet engine technology have recently accelerated production of the rival J-20. In that direction, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported in November 2022 that China is using world-class pulsating production lines to speed up its J-20 fighter deliveries.
SCMP notes that the new pulsating production techniques and improved domestic engines have pushed the number of J-20 airframes to equal or even exceed the numbers of the US F-22 Raptor, whose production was stopped in 2011 with only 187 airframes built.
China’s J-20 is gaining ground on the F-22. Image: Facebook
In contrast, SCMP mentions that China may already have up to 200 J-20s based on serial numbers on the aircraft displayed during the 2022 Zhuhai Air Show.
China may also be close to solving key problems with its jet engine technology, which to date has been a significant handicap for its jet fighters. SCMP reported in March 2022 that the J-20 has been tested with afterburning WS-15J engines in a bid to improve its maneuverability and combat capability.
The same report notes that China’s WS-15J will eventually replace Russian AL-31F engines currently installed in its J-20 fleet, an indication of China’s increased confidence in its jet engine manufacturing methods and metallurgy.
Asia Times noted in October 2022 that China’s incremental approach to jet fighter development through reverse-engineering and 5th generation fighter technology research.
The J-20’s upgrade potential makes the type a viable basis for China’s 6th generation fighter program, which would conceivably facilitate faster development timelines than similar UK and US projects, including the US Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) project, which is slated to be fielded in the 2030s.
But despite fast-growing aircraft numbers, the J-20 may have qualitative flaws. In a September 2021 article for National Defense Magazine, Jon Harper notes that the J-20 is the largest low-observability fighter in production, which may imply it is a heavier, less-agile aircraft.
Harper also states that China may still need to solve challenges in true sensor fusion and seamless passive sensor integration. However, future J-20 variants are widely expected to continue to narrow the technology gap between the US and China.
US military leaders are publicly downplaying that threat, however. US Air Force head of Pacific Forces General Kenneth Wilsbach noted that China’s fighter programs were “not anything to lose sleep over.”
Similarly, US Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown has pooh-poohed China’s J-20, noting that while China has impressive command and control over its J-20s in operations involving F-35s in the East China Sea, the type’s capabilities were nothing he would worry too much about.
However, the US decision to stop F-22 production may have significant consequences for US airpower in an era of renewed great power competition.
Defense channel Task and Purpose explains in a December 2022 episode the many factors that stopped F-22 production, which included the perceived irrelevance of the F-22 in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the view that China and Russia will not be able to field 5th generation fighters until after the 2020s, and that the F-22 was a competitor to the newer and more versatile US-made F-35.
That decision, Task and Purpose notes, has subsequently overstretched the US Air Force, as its current force structure needs to generate more sorties for a possible fight against China including over Taiwan.
An F-22 Raptor performs at the Thunder Over New Hampshire Air Show at Pease Air National Guard Base in Portsmouth, N.H., Sept. 11, 2021. Photo: US Air National Guard / Sgt. Steven Tucker
The report also notes that the US reconsidered restarting F-22 production in 2016, but its production lines had already been reallocated for F-35 production. It suggested it might be cheaper at this point to develop a new aircraft such as the NGA) 6th generation fighter.
Task and Purpose also mentions that since the US never exported the F-22 due to security concerns about its stealth technology falling into the hands of US adversaries, US allies may not have the air capabilities needed to operate effectively alongside US forces to defend themselves against increasingly advanced enemy fighters.
At a higher strategic level, this may mean that China has already reached parity or even surpassed US airpower in the Pacific, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The US now fields only 48 of 60 “multirole” fighter squadrons, with the fighter shortage most felt in the Pacific where it fields just 11 out of 13 needed. Moreover, the US fighter fleet’s readiness is steadily declining, with the average age of its fighters now 28.8 years old and pilots getting just 9.7 flight hours per month, compared with 22.3 hours before the 1991 Gulf War.
To maintain minimal fighter strength levels, the US must produce 72 fighters a year and keep its allies at a comparable level of readiness, a calculation, of course, that risks mistaking quantity for capability.
asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · February 17, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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