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Quotes of the Day:
"I am convinced an information program can contribute to our security just as can an army, a navy, and an air force; and that it can make its contribution in a manner that is vastly preferable to the threat or the use of force, and at infinitely less expense."
- Testimony of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes before the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, April 1946.
"The United States Information Service is truly the voice of America and the means of clarifying the opinion of the world concerning us. Its objective is fivefold. To be effective it must (1) explain United States motives; (2) bolster morale and extend hope; (3) give a true picture of American life, methods, and ideals; (4) combat misrepresentation and distortion, and (5) be a ready instrument of psychological warfare when required."
- Source: “Preliminary Staff Report of the Smith-Mundt Congressional Committees During September and October 1947 of Conditions in Europe, with Particular Emphasis on the United States Information Service,” November 1947.
"The truth is that a fact — an incontrovertible fact — is often the most powerful propaganda."
- Source: Elmer Davis, formerly the Office of War Information chief, speaking to the Chicago Rotary Club in February 1946.
1. China signals it could soften its zero-Covid policy, but there are more questions than answers
2. Let’s Put the Pentagon’s China Report in Context
3. Philippines will explore for oil in South China Sea even without a deal with Beijing: Marcos
4. Learn from Ukraine, DIA Chief Tells New China Mission Group
5. US Hints at Military Option to Prevent a 'Nuclear Iran'
6. Palestinian Terrorist Groups Continue to Build Tunnels Under UNRWA Schools
7. Iran Arrests Niece of Supreme Leader as Death Toll of Protesters Mounts
8. Chinese users play cat-and-mouse with censors amid protests
9. Pentagon report warns that China may wield AI to enhance ‘cognitive domain operations’
10. Why Isn't Joe Biden Supporting Protests in China and Iran?
11. The Kadena Conundrum: Developing a Resilient Indo-Pacific Posture
12. How Much Do Language Skills Matter for Security Force Assistance? Not as Much as We Think
13. Journalist Maria Ressa explains 'How to Stand Up to a Dictator'
14. Russia-Ukraine War Has Influenced How BAE Systems Designed Army Bradley Replacement
15. Review | Why do some Asian countries embrace democracy while others reject it?
16. #WTH is TikTok so dangerous?
17. Castration, gang-rape, forced nudity: How Russia’s soldiers terrorise Ukraine with sexual violence
18. Nato holds first dedicated talks on China threat to Taiwan
19. This Vietnam-Era Special Ops Unit Had a 100% Casualty Rate
1. China signals it could soften its zero-Covid policy, but there are more questions than answers
Can China make political accommodations to halt the protests? (doubtful). Will it use force? If so, when, where, how, and for how long?
China signals it could soften its zero-Covid policy, but there are more questions than answers | CNN
CNN · by Simone McCarthy · December 1, 2022
Covid-19 control workers guard a lockdown in Beijing on November 29, 2022.
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Hong Kong CNN —
China has given its most significant signal yet that the country may seek to adjust its stringent zero-Covid policy that has transformed daily life, roiled its economy and – in recent days – sparked a wave of protests across the country.
The top official in charge of China’s Covid response told health officials Wednesday that the country faced a “new stage and mission” in pandemic controls.
“With the decreasing toxicity of the Omicron variant, the increasing vaccination rate and the accumulating experience of outbreak control and prevention, China’s pandemic containment faces (a) new stage and mission,” Sun Chunlan, China’s vice premier, said Wednesday, according to state media Xinhua.
The remarks follow a surge in public frustration with China’s restrictive zero-Covid policy and its high human cost, which erupted into unprecedented demonstrations in at least 17 cities since last Friday.
Sun – who has been the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s enforcement of the policy – made no mention of “zero-Covid,” as reported by Xinhua. Her comments came a day after a separate body of top health officials pledged to rectify some approaches to Covid control and said local governments should “respond to and resolve the reasonable demands of the masses” in a timely manner.
The high-level statements – alongside minor adjustments of rules and some easing of lockdown measures in major Chinese cities in recent days – suggest that China is taking a hard look at its policy, which has become increasingly disruptive as it struggles to counter highly transmissible coronavirus variants and record case numbers.
But the shifting tone has not come with any road map to an end goal or mention of transitioning away from the zero-Covid policy, and it remains uncertain how it will impact realities on the ground or ease mounting public frustration.
Thousands of buildings and residential communities across 32 cities in China remain under lockdown restrictions due to their classification as “high risk” as of Thursday.
Local officials may be reticent to let cases rise for fear of retribution from a central government that has long prided itself on its zero-Covid stance. Meanwhile, experts say, the country continues to lag in key areas of preparedness for a widespread outbreak.
Priorities
Chinese health officials and experts have long argued that the costs of the zero-Covid policy are scientifically justified, citing uncertainties in how the virus will evolve in the future, unknowns about its long-term effects, as well as gaps in medical preparedness, including a lagging elderly vaccination rate and inadequate intensive care infrastructure – especially in rural areas.
These weaknesses, they have warned, could see the healthcare system overwhelmed if the virus spreads freely in the country of 1.4 billion – a situation which could exacerbate the deaths expected with an opening up.
Police form a cordon during a protest against China's strict zero-Covid measures on Nov. 27, 2022, in Beijing, China.
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
What's happening in China after zero-Covid protests? Here's what you need to know
This remains a key concern for the government, according to health security expert Nicholas Thomas at the City University of Hong Kong, who said: “There is still a substantial part of the population that is trusting in the government’s actions in dealing with the virus. An unmanaged engagement with the virus could not only erode that trust but it could also expose vulnerable populations (to risk).”
The recent comments around the policy are “not a sign that China is ready to transition to living with Covid, but a sign that the virus has slipped out of control and that the government is unable to return to a zero-Covid environment,” he said.
Case numbers in the last week have hovered around record highs, with more than 35,000 new cases reported on Wednesday – posing a steep challenge to efforts to return case numbers to a low level.
Instead of preparing for wide spread of the virus as a top priority, observers say that China has focused on the infrastructure and manpower needed to maintain zero-Covid, which relies on lockdowns, mass testing and forced quarantines of both cases and close contacts.
One reason for this has been the government’s own narrative about its success and the backing of the policy by leader Xi Jinping, according to Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
After bringing its initial outbreak in Wuhan under control in 2020, China’s border restrictions and swift method of detecting and suppressing the virus allowed the country to live relatively virus-free, while hospitals in much of the rest of the world were overrun with sick and dying patients. By China’s official count, it has seen only 5,233 Covid-19 deaths since early 2020, with fewer than 600 reported in 2022.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping visits a community in Wuhan in March 2020, following the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in the city.
Xie Huanchi/Xinhua/Getty Images
Xi has touted China’s measures and its relatively low number of Covid deaths as a triumph of Chinese governance. The country stuck to that system even as others transitioned to living with the virus following mass vaccinations and the spread of the milder, but highly transmissible Omicron variant. However, Omicron also made China’s controls more disruptive and less effective.
“The number one (reason) is propaganda – they want to claim that China is doing a much better job than the United States,” said Wu, adding that expanding state control over the population could be another motivation for maintaining the zero-Covid policy – as Xi has stressed state security as a key policy goal.
But while pursuing this strategy, China “lost so many golden opportunities,” to prepare to live with the virus, and to prepare the public for a larger scale of deaths from Covid-19, he said.
Prepared?
One concern is the low level of booster vaccination in the elderly population most vulnerable to Covid-19 – a weakness that health officials on Tuesday launched a new plan to address.
As of November 11, 40% of China’s over-80 population had received a booster shot, according to state media, while around two-thirds had received two doses – a result of both vaccine hesitancy and an initial vaccine roll-out that did not prioritize the elderly.
A World Health Organization advisory group last year recommended that elderly people taking China’s inactivated-virus vaccines receive three doses in their initial course to ensure sufficient protection. Vaccine protection is known to wane over time and decrease against the Omicron variant.
Meanwhile, China’s immunity rests almost entirely on vaccination as so few people have been exposed to the virus. Around 90% of the population is fully vaccinated. While China’s vaccines have been shown to protect against severe disease and death, studies show they offer lower antibody protection than the mRNA vaccines used widely elsewhere in the world. Beijing has yet to approve any mRNA vaccine.
Residents line up for Covid-19 testing at a residential complex in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China on December 1, 2022.
Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images
A stark warning of the risks for the mainland played out in Hong Kong, where low vaccination rates among that most at-risk group played a role in pushing the Chinese territory’s Covid-19 death rates to some of the highest in the world last spring.
While vaccination will not eliminate an increase in deaths when restrictions ease, shots and boosters, as well as other preparations to reduce risks, are critical for countries transitioning away from policies aimed at “zero-Covid,” according to infectious disease physician Peter Collignon of the Australian National University Medical School.
“The preparation isn’t just vaccines, it’s surge capacity, it’s making sure you have enough hospital staff, you have enough beds and particularly making sure the elderly (are protected),” he said.
What’s next?
China has signaled that it may make more concerted efforts to bolster its defenses against the virus. Officials on Tuesday released an action plan to boost elderly vaccination rates. This echoed a target mentioned in a 20-point plan to optimize zero-Covid measures, released last month, which also called for hospitals to increase intensive treatment facilities and to stockpile anti-viral drugs and medical equipment.
The same notice also relaxed certain measures around testing and quarantine, and cautioned against excesses in policy enforcement at the local level – all messages that have been echoed by top health officials in recent days.
After that guidance – and in the wake of the recent protests – state media has highlighted a number of cities making minor changes to their policies, largely around testing and quarantine rules.
Police officers stand guard as people protest coronavirus disease (COVID-19) restrictions and hold a vigil to commemorate the victims of a fire in Urumqi, as outbreaks of the coronavirus disease continue, in Beijing, China, November 27, 2022. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
Thomas Peter/Reuters
China's security apparatus swings into action to smother Covid protests
On Wednesday, officials in the southern hub of Guangzhou relaxed lockdowns in four districts and eased a quarantine requirement. In Xinjiang’s Urumqi on Saturday, local officials said they would gradually ease lockdown measures in neighborhoods categorized as “low risk,” and moved to reopen essential businesses and public transport the following day.
The protests across the nation were sparked by a deadly fire on November 24 in Urumqi, where at least 10 people died, and videos of the incident appeared to show lockdown measures had delayed firefighters from reaching the victims. They joined a list of deaths that have been widely linked in public conversation to Covid-19 controls.
On China’s heavily moderated social media, a topic discussing the comparative “decreased pathogenicity” of Omicron was trending on Thursday – a possible sign of authorities aiming to shift public perceptions about the virus, following years of focusing on its risks.
But some social media users remained skeptical, saying the changes to testing requirements were too minor to ease the impact of zero-Covid on daily life.
And at least one city, Jinzhou in northeast China pushed back against adjustments in other cities, saying in a notice on Thursday that it would not relax measures ahead of schedule and give up its progress containing an ongoing outbreak, saying that regardless of whether the coronavirus was less virulent “not having (the virus) is still better than having it.”
Experts say the real test of the country’s direction remains to be seen in the coming months.
If the vaccination push and other proposed measures bolstering medical readiness were “seriously implemented,” then China would have “a way forward for future opening,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “But so far they have not been prioritized in the implementation process.”
Another problem is the disconnect between Beijing’s policies and how they are implemented by local governments, who are under pressure to control case numbers for fear of being removed from their posts – a regular punishment in the past for officials who have allowed outbreaks to spread.
“If you open up and you mess up, then there will be trouble,” Huang said. “You have to change the incentive structure of the local governments before any meaningful changes can be introduced,” he added.
CNN’s Wayne Chang, Xiaofei Xu and Mengchen Zhang contributed reporting.
CNN · by Simone McCarthy · December 1, 2022
2. Let’s Put the Pentagon’s China Report in Context
Conclusion:
Those who would seize on the latest Pentagon report on Chinese military power to bolster a militarized approach to U.S.-Chinese relations are doing America no favors. A more balanced approach that looks at political, economic, and military relations and seeks areas of cooperation on vital issues like combating climate change would be far more likely to foster stability and security for both the U.S. and China.
Let’s Put the Pentagon’s China Report in Context
What do the relative sizes of the U.S. and Chinese nuclear arsenals really suggest?
defenseone.com · by William D. Hartung
The Pentagon released its annual report on Chinese military power this week, and hawks in Congress and the Pentagon will no doubt use it as evidence that China is on the march militarily, and that the U.S. should therefore continue its buildup in the Pacific and its development of a new generation of nuclear weapons. But a closer look at China’s military aspirations in the context of current U.S. capabilities tells a different story.
The report says that China likely possesses 400 nuclear warheads, and that if production stays on pace, the number could more than triple over the next decade. But the United States has over 5,400 warheads in its stockpile, including over 1,600 deployed on bombers, submarines, and long-range ballistic missiles. Even if the Pentagon’s assessment is correct, deterrence would hold; Beijing would be in no position to launch a nuclear strike on the United States or its allies without suffering a devastating attack in return.
Indeed, the disparity suggests that the Pentagon could forgo a significant portion of its three-decade, up-to-$2 trillion plan to build new nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles, along with new warheads to go with them. Instead of continuing a wasteful and destabilizing arms race, the United States could move towards a “deterrence-only” posture along the lines outlined by the organization Global Zero.
The greatest risk of a U.S.-China nuclear confrontation is escalation in a conventional conflict between the two countries. This suggests that preventing war, particularly over Taiwan, should be a top priority of U.S. policy. Earlier this week a Pentagon official told reporters that although China is building up its military, “I don’t see any kind of imminent indications of an invasion.”
This provides time and space to repair U.S.-Chinese political understandings and security perceptions concerning Taiwan. Recent statements by the Biden administration, coupled with visits to the island by high-ranking government officials such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have undermined the “one China” policy, in which the U.S. forgoes formal recognition of Taiwan in exchange for a pledge by China to seek a non-military solution to the question of the island’s status. My Quincy Institute colleague Michael Swaine has further summarized the policy as follows: “the original Sino-U.S. understanding reached at the time of normalization…traded a U.S. acknowledgement of the Chinese stance that Taiwan is a part of China and an assertion that Washington would accept any uncoerced, peaceful resolution of the issue, for a Chinese adherence to a peaceful path toward unification as a top priority, while retaining the possibility of a use of force as a last resort.”
This approach has kept the peace in the Taiwan straits for decades, and a return to that approach is the best way to head off a future military confrontation. This arrangement does not preclude sending U.S. weapons that Taiwan could use to deter a Chinese attack.
Then there is the question of China’s global military ambitions. The Pentagon report cites China’s military base in the African nation of Djibouti and its possible plans to establish logistics hubs—not full-fledged military bases—in a handful of other nations. China’s moves should be contrasted with the U.S. global military footprint, which includes more than 750 military bases, 200,000 troops deployed abroad, and counterterror operations in at least 85 nations. China is in no position to match U.S. military reach, and the impact of its plans should not be overstated.
The real source of China’s global influence is economic, not military, from the Belt and Road Initiative, to its creation of an Asian development bank, to its growing trade ties with key nations. The Belt and Road Initiative is far from perfect. The infrastructure effort has raised questions of economic sustainability for participant nations, harm to the environment, and labor practices. But it is a significant source of influence nonetheless, and the United States has no comparable initiative.
Those who would seize on the latest Pentagon report on Chinese military power to bolster a militarized approach to U.S.-Chinese relations are doing America no favors. A more balanced approach that looks at political, economic, and military relations and seeks areas of cooperation on vital issues like combating climate change would be far more likely to foster stability and security for both the U.S. and China.
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
defenseone.com · by William D. Hartung
3. Philippines will explore for oil in South China Sea even without a deal with Beijing: Marcos
Creating a dilemma. But for who? China or the US?
Philippines will explore for oil in South China Sea even without a deal with Beijing: Marcos | CNN
CNN · by Reuters · December 1, 2022
By Reuters
Published 1:38 AM EST, Thu December 1, 2022
Philippine President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. speaks during a change of command ceremony at Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City, on August 8, 2022.
Ezra Acayan/Reuters
The Philippines must find a way to explore for oil and gas in the South China Sea even without a deal with China, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said on Thursday, emphasizing his country’s right to exploit energy reserves in the contested waterway.
“That’s a big thing for us, that is why we need to fight (for what is ours) and take advantage if there really is oil there,” Marcos told reporters.
Talks over joint energy exploration between Manila and Beijing in the South China Sea had been terminated, the previous government said in June, citing constitutional constraints and issues of sovereignty.
“That’s the roadblock, it is hard to see how we can resolve that. I think there might be other ways so it does not have to be G-to-G (government-to-government),” Marcos said.
The Chinese embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Marcos’ remarks came after his foreign affairs secretary said in August Manila was open to new talks with China on oil and gas exploration and that a deal with China or any other country must comply with Philippine laws.
The Philippines relies heavily on imported fuel for its energy needs, making it vulnerable to supply shocks and rising oil prices, which have helped push up inflation to a near 14-year high.
During a three-day visit last week, US Vice President Kamala Harris affirmed American defense commitments to the Philippines and reiterated support for a 2016 arbitration ruling that invalidated Beijing’s expansive South China Sea claims.
The ruling, which China refused to recognize, states that the Philippines has sovereign rights to exploit energy reserves inside its 200-mile (321-kilometer) Exclusive Economic Zone.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff arrive at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, in Metro Manila, Philippines, November 20, 2022.
Eloisa Lopez/Reuters
Kamala Harris' visit to the Philippines sends China a message of US intent
Marcos said on Thursday “we will have something more concrete” to announce by early next year about US proposals to access Philippine military bases under the 2014 Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement. Washington has proposed adding more sites to the current five under EDCA, which allows for the rotation of US military ships and aircraft at mutually agreed bases.
Philippine firm PXP Energy Corp, which holds an exploration permit in the Reed Bank, a disputed area, has had talks with China National Offshore Oil Corp on a joint venture. But Manila and Beijing’s conflicting claims have prevented it from undertaking further drilling and reaching a deal with CNOOC.
CNN · by Reuters · December 1, 2022
4. Learn from Ukraine, DIA Chief Tells New China Mission Group
Ukraine is a laboratory.
Learn from Ukraine, DIA Chief Tells New China Mission Group
Defense Intelligence Agency unit takes aim at “warning problem of our lifetime.”
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
Lessons from Ukraine will inform a new China mission group intended to be “a single visible place” for the Defense Intelligence Agency’s leaders, partners, and other agencies to get information about the People’s Liberation Army, DIA’s chief of staff said Tuesday.
DIA director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier wants to “take the lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine crisis, particularly as it...relates to indications and warning, and apply that to China, China-Taiwan- type scenarios,” John Kirchhofer said at an INSA event. “This is a warning problem of our lifetime.”
The group, which includes members of the agency’s analysis and science and technology directorates, is already operating in a limited form today and will reach full operating capability in the spring, Kirchhofer said.
“This is us integrating to the maximum extent possible on an existential threat to the long-term success of the United States,” Kirchhofer said.
Ukraine offers a lot of lessons for the intelligence community. On the one hand, their willingness to declassify intel and warn the world about the impending invasion inspired a raft of sanctions on Moscow and a flood of aid to Kyiv. On the other hand, the Biden administration officials were so convinced that Russia would tear through Ukraine’s military that they tried to persuade Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to leave the country. What that suggests is that leaders operating with the best available intelligence drastically overestimated the strength of the Russian military and underestimated that of Ukraine.
“Those predictions, based on alluring but fundamentally flawed criteria, have now proved false,” University of St. Andrews professor Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in March. “Western analysts took basic metrics (such as numbers and types of tanks and aircraft), imagined those measured forces executing Russian military doctrine, then concluded that the Ukrainians had no chance. But counting tanks and planes and rhapsodizing over their technical specifications is not a useful way to analyze modern militaries.”
O’Brien called Ukraine’s resilience “embarrassing for a Western think-tank and military community that had confidently predicted that the Russians would conquer Ukraine in a matter of days.”
In May, Berrier acknowledged that he hadn’t factored in Ukraine’s resolve. “My view was that, based on a variety of factors, that the Ukrainians were not as ready as I thought they should be,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Therefore, I questioned their will to fight. That was a bad assessment on my part because they have fought bravely and honorably and are doing the right thing.”
Taiwan poses a similar murky challenge. It is moving to acquire anti-access capabilities—drones, long-range fires, naval mines—in accordance with their Overall Defense Concept. Those should be useful in deterring a Chinese invasion, However, assessing Taiwan’s resolve in the face of multiple scenarios, from naval blockade to full-scale military occupation of Taipei, is a matter of understanding not only capability but also–far more ephemerally–will.
Like other defense agencies, DIA is moving more personnel and tech to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility, Kirchhofer said.
“We're already working with partners for partners and U.S. partners to get our footprint pushed into that region,” he said.
Lauren Williams contributed to this post.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
5. US Hints at Military Option to Prevent a 'Nuclear Iran'
Excerpts:
“What’s happening in Iran is first and foremost about Iranians, about their future, about their country. And it’s not about us,” Blinken told CNN. “And one of the profound mistakes that the regime makes is to try to point the finger at others, at the United States, Europeans, claiming that we’re somehow responsible for instigating or otherwise fanning the flames of the protests. That is to profoundly, fundamentally misunderstand their own people.”
The US Secretary of State noted that the world “is rightly focused on what’s happening in the streets in Iran,” adding that the US has worked to ensure the Iranian people have “the communications technology that they need to continue to communicate with one another and stay connected to the outside world.”
“There are other steps that we’re taking diplomatically, across international organizations and with many other countries, to make clear how the world sees the repression that’s going on in Iran, to try to hold down those who are simply trying to peacefully express their views,” he told the channel.
US Hints at Military Option to Prevent a 'Nuclear Iran'
english.aawsat.com · by Washington - Ali Barada
US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley revealed on Wednesday that President Joe Biden was ready to resort to the military option to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon in case sanctions and diplomacy failed.
Speaking to Foreign Policy, Malley hinted at several measures.
“We will have the sanctions; we will have the pressure; [and] we will have the diplomacy… If none of that works, the President has said, as a last resort, he will agree to a military option, because if that’s what it takes to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, that’s what will happen. But we’re not there,” the US envoy said.
He added that the Biden administration was still hopeful Iran would change its current path.
Malley noted that the indirect negotiations between Washington and Tehran stopped after Iran made additional demands that had nothing to do with the essence of the nuclear agreement.
The US envoy for Iran has recently reiterated that Washington no longer saw Tehran’s nuclear program as separate from other issues.
“Our focus on the agreement is not moving forward”, in light of the widespread popular protests taking place in Iran and the “brutal repression of the regime against the protesters,” he remarked.
After pointing to Iran’s selling of armed drones to Russia, Malley stressed his country’s commitment to “liberating our hostages,” referring to the three American citizens held in Iran.
For his part, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday that the Iranian regime “profoundly” misunderstands its citizens by blaming external parties for the protests that have swept the country since mid-September.
“What’s happening in Iran is first and foremost about Iranians, about their future, about their country. And it’s not about us,” Blinken told CNN. “And one of the profound mistakes that the regime makes is to try to point the finger at others, at the United States, Europeans, claiming that we’re somehow responsible for instigating or otherwise fanning the flames of the protests. That is to profoundly, fundamentally misunderstand their own people.”
The US Secretary of State noted that the world “is rightly focused on what’s happening in the streets in Iran,” adding that the US has worked to ensure the Iranian people have “the communications technology that they need to continue to communicate with one another and stay connected to the outside world.”
“There are other steps that we’re taking diplomatically, across international organizations and with many other countries, to make clear how the world sees the repression that’s going on in Iran, to try to hold down those who are simply trying to peacefully express their views,” he told the channel.
english.aawsat.com · by Washington - Ali Barada
6. Palestinian Terrorist Groups Continue to Build Tunnels Under UNRWA Schools
I wonder if they are getting any help from Koreanas femur the north?
Palestinian Terrorist Groups Continue to Build Tunnels Under UNRWA Schools
fdd.org · November 30, 2022
Latest Developments
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) announced that it identified a “man-made cavity” beneath an UNRWA school in the Gaza Strip. UNRWA stopped short of blaming Hamas or other militant organizations, saying that it “protested strongly to the relevant authorities.” The discovery is likely the latest example of a Palestinian terrorist organization using UN facilities, including schools, as shields for its belligerent activities against Israel.
Expert Analysis
“The newly discovered tunnel under a UNRWA school is a fresh example of Gaza groups putting innocent children at risk by attempting to hide terrorists and their weapons behind them. Hamas has repeatedly encouraged children as young as eight to put themselves in harm’s way, promising them money if they are injured. During the May 2021 Gaza war, Hamas placed rocket launchpads in a schoolyard and located multiple military tunnels and their openings near UNRWA and other schools, including a kindergarten.” – Orde Kittrie, FDD Senior Fellow
Palestinian Use of Human Shields
On June 4, 2021, UNRWA declared it discovered a “cavity and a possible tunnel” 7.5 meters beneath a school it managed in the Gaza Strip. Unlike in yesterday’s statement, UNRWA suggested a Palestinian militant organization was responsible for building the tunnel, saying it condemned “the existence and potential use by Palestinian armed groups of such tunnels underneath its schools.” However, UNRWA did not specifically blame Hamas.
On May 19, 2021, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) published evidence that Hamas launched rockets from a site near civilian structures, including a UN building, schools, a mosque, and apartment buildings.
An Admission of Guilt
Hamas has admitted to using Palestinian civilians as human shields. In an interview conducted in December 2021, Abu Khalid, a Hamas fighter, acknowledged that the organization used tunnels built under civilian infrastructure to launch rockets against Israel. Abu Khalid justified the practice as the only way to “ensure a better future for our children.”
A Strategic Weapon for Future Conflicts
Hamas and other Palestinian militant organizations view tunnels as an important tool in conflicts with Israel. In an interview shortly after the May 2021 Gaza war, a Hamas fighter showed how the terrorist group used tunnels for communication, launching rockets, storing ammunition, and abducting IDF soldiers. Hamas also built a command-and-control center inside the tunnels to relay orders to militants during conflicts.
Related Analysis
“Hold Hamas Accountable for Human-Shields Use During the May 2021 Gaza War,” by Orde Kittrie
fdd.org · November 30, 2022
7. Iran Arrests Niece of Supreme Leader as Death Toll of Protesters Mounts
Iran Arrests Niece of Supreme Leader as Death Toll of Protesters Mounts
fdd.org · November 30, 2022
Latest Developments
The niece of Iran’s supreme leader called for the clerical regime’s downfall in a video statement that her brother posted online after Tehran’s security services arrested her last week. Comparing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler and Mussolini, Farideh Moradkhani said in the video that other countries should cut ties with the “murderous and child-killing regime” in Tehran. Her arrest reflects Khamenei’s growing fears of ongoing protests in Iran, which constitute one of the greatest threats to the regime’s survival since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Expert Analysis
“Iran’s arrest of Farideh Moradkhani shows that the regime will stop at nothing to retain power. Rather than merely voice support for human rights in Iran, the Biden administration should express explicit agreement with Moradkhani’s call for regime change.” – Tzvi Kahn, FDD Research Fellow and Senior Editor
A History of Defiance
Tehran has arrested Moradkhani before. In January 2022, the regime detained Khamenei’s niece after she praised the widow of the former shah, calling for her to return to Iran. Moradkhani has also campaigned against the death penalty, which Tehran employs more than any country in the world other than China. Her late father, married to Khamenei’s sister and a persistent critic of the Islamic Republic, spent years in an Iranian jail.
Iranian Repression Continues
Iranian security forces have killed at least 448 people, including 60 children and 29 women, since protests began in September, according to the Norway-based nonprofit Iran Human Rights. Hundreds of protesters have suffered eye injuries or lost their vision entirely as targets of rubber bullets and other weaponry. The regime has even used ambulances to penetrate demonstrations and arrest protesters. A CNN investigation found at least 11 incidents of sexual violence against male and female protesters in prison.
Growing International Condemnation
Last week, the UN Human Rights Council held a special session on the protests in Iran, passing a resolution that establishes an independent, international fact-finding mission to investigate human rights abuses related to the unrest. Iran faces a “full-fledged human rights crisis,” said Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights. Tehran responded that it will not cooperate with the fact-finding mission. The regime has refused to allow UN special rapporteurs on human rights in Iran to visit the country since 1992.
Related Analysis
“Mapping the Protests in Iran,” by Mark Dubowitz and FDD
“Maximum Support for the Iranian People: A New Strategy,” by Saeed Ghasseminejad, Richard Goldberg, Tzvi Kahn, and Behnam Ben Taleblu
fdd.org · November 30, 2022
8. Chinese users play cat-and-mouse with censors amid protests
We should be studying the actions of the Chinese people and how they are dealing with Chinese attempts to control information. We both need to learn from them and also develop techniques that can be exploited by them against the regime but also what might be useful against regimes in Russia, Iran, and north Korea.
Chinese users play cat-and-mouse with censors amid protests
AP · by ZEN SOO · December 1, 2022
HONG KONG (AP) — Videos of hundreds protesting in Shanghai started to appear on WeChat on Saturday night. Showing chants about removing COVID-19 restrictions and demanding freedom, they would stay up only a few minutes before being censored.
Elliot Wang, a 26-year-old in Beijing, was amazed.
“I started refreshing constantly, and saving videos, and taking screenshots of what I could before it got censored,” said Wang, who only agreed to be quoted using his English name, in fear of government retaliation. “A lot of my friends were sharing the videos of the protests in Shanghai. I shared them too, but they would get taken down quickly.”
That Wang was able to glimpse the extraordinary outpouring of grievances highlights the cat-and-mouse game that goes on between millions of Chinese internet users and the country’s gargantuan censorship machine.
Chinese authorities maintain a tight grip on the country’s internet via a complex, multi-layered censorship operation that blocks access to almost all foreign news and social media, and blocks topics and keywords considered politically sensitive or detrimental to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. Videos of or calls to protest are usually deleted immediately.
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But images of protests began to spread on WeChat, a ubiquitous Chinese social networking platform used by over 1 billion, in the wake of a deadly fire Nov. 24 in the northwestern city of Urumqi. Many suspected that lockdown measures prevented residents from escaping the flames, something the government denies.
The sheer number of unhappy Chinese users who took to the Chinese internet to express their frustration, together with the methods they used to evade censors, led to a brief period of time in which government censors were overwhelmed, according to Han Rongbin, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s International Affairs department.
“It takes censors some time to study what is happening and to add that to their portfolio in terms of censorship, so it’s a learning process for the government on how to conduct censorship effectively,” Han said.
In 2020, the death from COVID-19 of Li Wenliang, a doctor who was arrested for allegedly spreading rumors following an attempt to alert others about a “SARS-like” virus, sparked widespread outrage and an outpouring of anger against the Chinese censorship system. Users posted criticism for hours before censors moved to delete posts.
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As censors took down posts related to the fire, Chinese internet users often used humor and metaphor to spread critical messages.
“Chinese netizens have always been very creative because every idea used successfully once will be discovered by censors the next time,” said Liu Lipeng, a censor-turned-critic of China’s censorship practices.
Chinese users started posting images of blank sheets of white paper, said Liu, in a silent reminder of words they weren’t allowed to post.
Others posted sarcastic messages like “Good good good sure sure sure right right right yes yes yes,” or used Chinese homonyms to evoke calls for President Xi Jinping to resign, such as “shrimp moss,” which sounds like the words for “step down,” and “banana peel,” which has the same initials as Xi’s name.
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But within days, censors moved to contain images of white paper. They would have used a range of tools, said Chauncey Jung, a policy analyst who previously worked for several Chinese internet companies based in Beijing.
Most content censorship is not done by the state, Jung said, but outsourced to content moderation operations at private social media platforms, who use a mix of humans and AI. Some censored posts are not deleted, but may be made visible only to the author, or removed from search results. In some cases, posts with sensitive key phrases may be published after review.
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A search on Weibo on Thursday for the term “white paper” mostly turned up posts that were critical of the protests, with no images of a single sheet of blank paper, or of people holding white papers at protests.
It’s possible to access the global internet from China by using virtual private networks that disguise internet traffic, but these systems are illegal and many Chinese internet users access only the domestic internet. Wang does not use a VPN.
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“I think I can say for all the mainlanders in my generation that we are really excited,” said Wang. “But we’re also really disappointed because we can’t do anything. … They just keep censoring, keep deleting, and even releasing fake accounts to praise the cops.”
But the system works well enough to stop many users from ever seeing them. When protests broke out across China over the weekend, Carmen Ou, who lives in Beijing, initially didn’t notice.
Ou learned of the protests only later, after using a VPN service to access Instagram.
“I tried looking at my feed on WeChat, but there was no mention of any protests,” she said. “If not for a VPN and access to Instagram, I might not have found out that such a monumental event had taken place.”
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Han, the international affairs professor, said censorship “doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective.”
“Censorship might be functioning to prevent a big enough size of the population from accessing the critical information to be mobilized,” he said.
China’s opaque approach to tamping down the spread of online dissent also makes it difficult to distinguish government campaigns from ordinary spam.
Searching Twitter using the Chinese words for Shanghai or other Chinese cities reveals protest videos, but also a near-constant flood of new posts showing racy photos of young women. Some researchers proposed that a state-backed campaign could be seeking to drown out news of the protests with “not safe for work” content.
A preliminary analysis by the Stanford Internet Observatory found lots of spam but no “compelling evidence” that it was specifically intended to suppress information or dissent, said Stanford data architect David Thiel.
“I’d be skeptical of anyone claiming clear evidence of government attribution,” Thiel said in an email.
Twitter searches for more specific protest-related terms, such as “Urumqi Middle Road, Shanghai,” produced mainly posts related to the protests.
Israeli data analysis firm Cyabra and another research group that shared analysis with the AP said it was hard to distinguish between a deliberate attempt to drown out protest information sought by the Chinese diaspora and a run-of-the-mill commercial spam campaign.
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. It hasn’t answered media inquiries since billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform in late October and cut back much of its workforce, including many of those tasked with moderating spam and other content. Musk often tweets about how he’s enacting or enforcing new Twitter content rules but hasn’t commented on the recent protests in China.
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AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan in London and AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this story.
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This story corrects that the Urumqi fire was on Thursday, Nov. 24, not Friday.
AP · by ZEN SOO · December 1, 2022
9. Pentagon report warns that China may wield AI to enhance ‘cognitive domain operations’
Why can't we admit there is a human domain?
Pentagon report warns that China may wield AI to enhance ‘cognitive domain operations’
defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · November 30, 2022
The People’s Liberation Army of China sees artificial intelligence as a key enabler of psychological warfare that could be employed against the U.S. and other nations during “cognitive domain operations,” the Defense Department noted in its latest report on China’s military power.
The PLA has been honing its cognitive domain operations (CDO) concept, which calls for upgrading psy-ops for the modern information environment with the help of AI and other emerging technologies, according to the study.
“The goal of CDO is to achieve what the PLA refers to as ‘mind dominance,’ defined as the use of propaganda as a weapon to influence public opinion to effect change in a nation’s social system — likely to create an environment favorable to China and reduce civilian and military resistance to PLA actions. PLA researchers have stated that the victory of the cognitive narrative may yield greater strategic benefits than firepower destruction, force control, and siege, and that effects of CDO can last long after the conflict has concluded,” the document said.
Cognitive domain operations would fall under the People’s Liberation Army’s concept of so-called “intelligentized warfare,” which seeks to incorporate AI and other advanced tech into every aspect of warfare, according to the Pentagon.
“PLA researchers have stated that emerging technology such as artificial intelligence and big data are key to creating profound advancements in CDO. Since at least 2019, PLA researchers have called on the PLA to improve their big data, natural language processing, and deep learning capabilities in order to improve its ability to create deep fakes, disseminate propaganda, and analyze internet users’ sentiments,” the report said.
“Another PLA researcher suggested that the PLA should use AI to run its bot network on social media, which would be able to create content, and coordinate the optimal time to post on social media. If the PLA is successful in incorporating these technologies into operations, it could increase obfuscation of activities, create more plausible content, and enable more accurate targeting of audiences,” it added
Subliminal messaging, deepfakes and public sentiment analysis may be part of this more aggressive, next generation of psychological warfare, the study noted.
The Chinese military aims to achieve “information dominance” on the battlefield and conduct influence operations using cyber capabilities or other means. CDO-related technology could be used to spread misinformation and manipulate foreign audiences to further Beijing’s objectives, according to the Pentagon.
“The PLA probably intends to use CDO as an asymmetric capability to deter U.S. or third-party entry into a future conflict or as an offensive capability to shape perceptions or polarize a society,” the report said. “Authoritative PLA documents describe one aspect of deterrence as the ability to bring about psychological pressure and fear on an opponent and force them to surrender. PLA articles on CDO state that seizing mind dominance in the cognitive domain and subduing the enemy without fighting is the highest realm of warfare.”
defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · November 30, 2022
10. Why Isn't Joe Biden Supporting Protests in China and Iran?
Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate. What might come next in China and Iran? What do we do now to prepare for it? Overt or covert support for current actions?
Why Isn't Joe Biden Supporting Protests in China and Iran?
19fortyfive.com · by Michael Rubin · November 30, 2022
Biden Should Speak Out Forcefully for Chinese and Iranian Protestors: China’s protests caught the White House by surprise. America’s “near-peer” competitor and top military threat hobbled, at least temporarily, by widespread protests was not something the State Department or the intelligence community’s top China hands expected.
The Biden administration’s response was weak. “We’ve long said everyone has the right to peacefully protest, in the United States and around the world. This includes in the PRC [the People’s Republic of China],” a National Security Council statement read.
Once again, political appointees and professional diplomats responded as if by a computer algorithm rather than with an appreciation of the ideological battle in which the United States finds itself, the outcome of which will shape the fate of the rules-based order over the remainder of the century. The tepidness of the statement undermines any meaning it might have.
The reason for the Biden administration’s weak response is no mystery. After all, many of the president’s top aides also occupied senior national security or diplomatic roles during the Obama administration when, in 2009, Iran also erupted into protest. At that time, protestors chanted “Obama, Obama, ya ba o na ya ba ma” [“Obama, Obama, you’re either with us or against us”] as the White House remained largely silent.
President Barack Obama wanted a restrained reaction for three reasons. First, he argued, there was little the United States could do. Many in his inner circle further believed that to speak out in favor of the protestors might delegitimize them by playing into Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s accusation that they were foreign agents. Finally, Obama had secretly reached out to Khamenei and did not want the Iranian supreme leader to use statements against his regime as an excuse not to negotiate.
In each case, Obama was wrong. Unfortunately, Obama alumni in the Biden administration today repeat the same mistakes.
First (and most important), the United States can speak on behalf of principle beyond the right of peaceful protest. The battle today is for the liberal order. The White House, for example, might speak about the virtues of democracy, government accountability, and freedom. The issue across China is not simply the people’s right to protest, but rather the abuses of power that lead the Chinese people down this path. It is about individual liberty. The Chinese Communist Party repeatedly argues that its system is superior to Western democracy. Over the years, they have found some journalists and academics—Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs—whose columns and statements seem to amplify such arguments.
Now is Biden’s time to show Western democracy to be superior. Whatever internecine disputes Democrats and Republicans might have had with regard to the response to COVID-19, pale in comparison to the competition between Western liberalism and Chinese Communist Party autocracy. The Chinese public senses, and Biden should speak about how both Democratic and Republican policy responses were superior to what President Xi Jinping now imposes. Democracies learn from mistakes rather than bend society to the ego of a single man. Even when threatened by the ego of a man like President Donald Trump, in America the rule of law prevails. Biden should further explain how China is a great civilization and has much about which to be proud, but the Chinese Communist Party does not represent its apex. Taiwan and, previously Hong Kong, both show that democracy and Chinese culture are not mutually exclusive. The same points are also true with regard to Iran versus the Islamic Republic. The two are not and have never been synonymous. Iranians deserve freedom. They are ready for it. They should understand that Americans cheer for their freedom.
This brings us to the idea that offering moral support to protestors delegitimizes them. This is simply wrong. Protestors around the globe carry signs in English because they want to communicate with and receive the acknowledgment of the outside world. At the same time, dictators try to tar them with the accusation of foreign support regardless about whether they receive it or not. To deny them support is to play into the dictatorships’ hands by helping Beijing and Tehran isolate the protests.
Obama’s outreach to Iran was always naïve. Jake Sullivan, who as an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was its initiator, was naïve to believe both the sincerity of so-called regime reformists and the idea that engagement could tip the internal balance in Iranian elections from hardliners to reformists. In reality, the Iranians played him like a fiddle in an elaborate game of good cop-bad cop. Today, Special Envoy Rob Malley and Climate Czar John Kerry repeat Obama’s past error by prioritizing diplomacy with autocrats over human rights and the aspiration of freedom of the Iranian and Chinese peoples.
The crisis no one saw coming during the campaign shapes the foreign policy legacy of almost every administration. For Ronald Reagan, it was the end of the Cold War. For George H.W. Bush, it was Kuwait. Bill Clinton had the Balkans, George W. Bush had 9/11, Barack Obama had Syria and Libya, and Donald Trump had COVID-19. Biden’s moment is now. He must choose: Will he advocate for the rules-based order against those who would dismantle it, or will he essentially forfeit his opportunity to defend and advance freedom and liberty worldwide.
Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics, including “Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?” (AEI Press, 2019); “Kurdistan Rising” (AEI Press, 2016); “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter Books, 2014); and “Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos” (Palgrave, 2005).
19fortyfive.com · by Michael Rubin · November 30, 2022
11. The Kadena Conundrum: Developing a Resilient Indo-Pacific Posture
Bases:. Do we need them? Do we want them? Can we operate without them? Can we begin operations with them and then lose them because they are targeted? Or can we adequately defend them to sustain use in conflict? The conundrum applies to more than Kadena but Kadena is a pretty critical base.
The Kadena Conundrum: Developing a Resilient Indo-Pacific Posture - War on the Rocks
STACIE L. PETTYJOHN, ANDREW METRICK, AND BECCA WASSER
warontherocks.com · by Stacie L. Pettyjohn · December 1, 2022
The long-standing debate over whether the United States is prioritizing China and the Indo-Pacific region has reignited once more. The debate centers on U.S. posture — the forces, bases, and agreements that constitute America’s overseas military presence and make up the backbone of the U.S. Department of Defense’s deterrence strategies — in the Indo-Pacific.
The U.S. Air Force decision in October 2022 to remove two squadrons of aging F-15C/D fighters at Kadena Air Force Base on the Japanese island of Okinawa and replace it with a temporary detachment to cover the Kadena fighter mission sparked a firestorm. The announcement was quickly followed by numerous criticisms leveled by members of the Congress as well as regional and defense experts, many of whom have called for augmented posture in the Indo-Pacific to deter Chinese aggression. Their arguments cite a misalignment between resources and strategic priorities. If China’s developing military power renders it the U.S. Department of Defense’s priority pacing challenge, then why is the Pentagon removing key air assets that could contribute to holding Beijing at bay rather than doubling down on strengthening regional posture?
The answer is not as simple as the critique, but it boils down to a core concept often overlooked in deterrence debates: resiliency. For forces to be combat credible and effectively contribute to deterrence, they need to be able to ride out an attack, survive, and then resume operations and generate combat power. This is why the force-planning construct in the 2022 National Defense Strategy emphasizes a survivable future force and why nearly every military service has developed new operational concepts predicated on dispersed posture.
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Kadena is uniquely ill-positioned for permanently basing large numbers of American aircraft, given the Chinese military’s large investment in long-range precision strike capabilities. The volume of fires that Chinese forces can direct against Kadena makes it more vulnerable to than other bases in the First Island Chain. While air bases are large targets that are difficult to permanently destroy, unprotected aircraft and ground support equipment are soft targets that can easily be destroyed. Submunitions can allow a single missile to damage multiple aircraft and key support equipment parked in the open.
The reduction in the forces based at Kadena is not a sign that the United States is abandoning Japan or the First Island Chain, but rather a prudent measure to reduce the vulnerability of forward based U.S. aircraft and increase their ability to conduct sustained combat operations. Moreover, it is an important step in changing U.S. military posture in the Indo-Pacific to be more resilient to meet the operational challenges posed by the growing Chinese military threat. The Pentagon should take this opportunity to provide the forces and resources required to evolve toward a distributed, survivable, and rotational posture in the Indo-Pacific that allows a rapid transition to a contingency footing. As it makes these changes, the United States needs to socialize these new posture concepts with both allies and adversaries to ensure American intent is well understood and allocate money to support a truly agile basing concept in the Indo-Pacific region.
Posture Problems
This change supports the Air Force’s move towards distributed operations as a part of its agile combat employment concept. But more must be done to develop a resilient and survivable posture in the Indo-Pacific and shift vulnerable legacy presence to a combat credible posture. To successfully implement distributed operations, resources are required to improve the infrastructure at other bases in Japan, Australia, and the Philippines, and detachments of fighter aircraft from outside of the Indo-Pacific must be routinely deployed to practice, hone, and demonstrate their ability to execute this scheme of maneuver. The president’s fiscal year 2023 budget request for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative is inadequate. The funding request underinvests in the infrastructure and facilities needed to support distributed operations. Of all the services, the Air Force is investing the least in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and is notably the only service not increasing its forces in the region.
There is a wide-spread push to make greater investments in U.S. force posture in the Indo-Pacific to counter the China challenge. But how to enhance U.S. force posture is less agreed upon, with debates over whether investments should be in forces or concrete, as well as over the location, type, and permanence of forces. Here, the arguments against the changes at Kadena are illustrative and largely fall into three categories: force structure, posture, and assuring allies and partners and deterring potential aggressors.
The force structure critique argues that the Air Force is too small for its missions and that more fifth-generation fighter squadrons are needed to meet global demands. This line of attack is less about posture and more about insufficient capacity. The posture argument is that Kadena is “strategic real estate” that enables American power projection in East Asia and the removal of 50 aging fighters represents a “tangible reduction” of U.S. “combat credible” posture. In this line of thought, more U.S. forces and bases are needed in the Indo-Pacific to deter China and any decrease in the American military presence anywhere in the theater is an unacceptable net reduction in U.S. military power. This claim is intrinsically linked with the final critique, that rotating fighter squadrons signal a lack of American commitment to defend its allies and partners against Chinese aggression. Others conclude this move will embolden Beijing by “lowering the bar for aggression and demonstrating a continued mismatch between the Biden Administration’s talking points on the Indo-Pacific and America’s actual commitments in the region.”
By extension, these arguments lend themselves to several solutions: increasing force size, augmenting legacy posture, and prioritizing reassurance over deterrence. For the most part, this would be doubling down on continued U.S. presence at bases that are now more vulnerable than ever to Chinese missile attack. These solutions are insufficient to meet the operational challenges posed by China to the United States and its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific. The threats to Kadena Air Base are the canary in the coal mine and illustrate why the concepts and posture of the past 70 years must change to meet the growing Chinese military challenge.
Kadena: The Canary in the Coal Mine
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military has operated from airbases almost totally secure from air and missile attacks. The sanctuary era is long over, especially in the Indo-Pacific due to China’s acquisition of a large number of accurate long-range missiles and increasingly modern air forces. Conventionally armed Chinese missiles can range most American bases in the region, including Guam, but the level of the threat varies considerably and is directly tied to the base’s distance from China.
A simple firepower and density analysis, conducted by one of this article’s authors, of potential People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force firepower against three U.S. fighter bases in Japan — Kadena, Iwakuni, and Misawa — further differentiates the level of threat and shows that not all airbases in the First Island Chain are created equal. Kadena is in a particularly vulnerable and unenvious position, as the thousands of short-range missiles that China has stockpiled to attack Taiwan can also reach Okinawa. Given China’s greater investment in short-range missiles over more expensive long- and medium-range missiles, short-range missiles present a threat with greater magazine depth.
To geolocate the Chinese rocket forces, we used CASI’s recently published analysis of Chinese missile bases with the DF-11, DF-16, DF-17, DF-21, CJ-10, and DF-100. We did not consider the DF-26 as it would likely be reserved for more distant targets. With the exception of the DF-100, missile ranges were taken from the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Missile Threat website.
In the largest single salvo that Beijing could fire at any one of the three bases, China has 252 short- and medium-range ballistic and cruise missile launchers that can reach Kadena, 126 that can strike Iwakuni, and 36 that can reach Misawa. The 2021 China Military Power Report indicates that Chinese rocket forces have approximately 4 short-range ballistic missile rounds per launcher and 2.4 medium-range ballistic missiles rounds per launcher. This means that that Kadena could face multiple salvos of this scale.
No location in the theater is completely safe, but being farther away from China is better for American forces. Kadena is the closest U.S. air base to the Chinese coastline and faces twice as many People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force missiles than the next closest U.S. fighter base Iwakuni. If forces are moved from Kadena to Misawa, the number of Chinese missiles is reduced by 86 percent.
Don’t Simply Replace, Reshape Posture
American combat aircraft have operated from Kadena since 1945, but the growing Chinese missile threat has made this position untenable. Permanently basing several squadrons of fifth-generation fighters at Kadena does not provide significant combat capability in the early stages of a war. They instead present an opportunity for China to take out a significant portion of America’s tactical aircraft fleet with its deep inventory of short-range missiles. As Dick Betts’s seminal work on surprise has shown, it is unlikely that a Chinese opening blow would be a bolt-from-the-blue attack with little to no warning. However, it could still be an operational surprise, whether it’s because American leaders doubt that China will attack, fail to take appropriate defensive measures, or misjudge the time or location of the strike.
During a crisis or conflict, aircraft based at Kadena would either retrograde or be neutralized. Neither of these are good signals for the United States to send to allies or adversaries during a crisis. Chinese missile attacks would likely damage or destroy fighters parked in the open or may temporarily ground all aircraft at the base by rendering the runways and taxiways inoperable and destroying fuel stores. Although aircraft at Kadena would serve as a tripwire that could bring the United States into the war if they were attacked, symbolic force deployments do not shift the balance of power and do not enhance deterrence.
The U.S. Air Force should not leave Kadena entirely. It remains a valuable location for routine peacetime reconnaissance and surveillance operations in the East and South China Seas, and it could potentially be a useful in the latter stages of a war once China’s missile inventory is depleted. It is also an important symbol of the American commitment to Japan’s defense. However, Japan and other allies need to understand that the Department of Defense will not prevail in a war against China if it loses too many forces in the first few days. Dispersing American forces beyond the heart of the Chinese missile threat increases their ability to absorb an opening blow and to continue to effectively operate, which should be reassuring to allies and worrying to adversaries.
The retirement of the F-15C/Ds enables American posture to evolve, permanently stationing fewer aircraft at a highly vulnerable base and reducing the concentration of U.S. forces in the region to improve U.S. posture in the First Island Chain. There is a large body of analysis that demonstrates the value of dispersion and the improvements it would produce for force survivability. To enable this, the Pentagon needs to make investments in passive defenses and a distributed network of near and far bases. Thus far, efforts have focused on building up distant bases by improving defenses at Guam; upgrading an airbase on Tinian: augmenting support facilities in Darwin; and expanding an airfield at Tindal. Such distant bases are essential for tanker and bomber operations.
But the United States cannot win a war by fighting only from long-range. The Air Force’s fleet is heavily weighted towards short-range fighter aircraft. Operating from distant bases would not allow the undersized bomber force and short-range fighter fleet, heavily dependent on vulnerable aerial refueling, to generate enough mass to defeat a large-scale attack. Therefore, the United States must also distribute its fighters across Japan and the Philippines, which requires making improvements to the near bases in these countries. Because aircraft are highly responsive and can deploy from the United States on relatively short notice, their presence does not need to be continuous, but adequate air base installations do need to be in place to support them. The United States has access to five airbases in the Philippines but has not built the infrastructure needed at these locations to support American air operations.
According to the Commander of U.S. Pacific Air Forces, agile combat employment is “just normal ops” at U.S. bases in Japan, but more needs to be done to practice this concept throughout the theater and at scale. The United States should regularly have one to two rotational fighter squadrons in the theater at different bases, demonstrating highly expeditionary operations. At times, the Air Force should surge in additional squadrons along to demonstrate agile combat employment at scale. This approach exercises the logistics and force flow activities needed in any contingency scenario. If the old adage is that you fight like you train, rotational activities will allow the Air Force to do just that. Rotations will also expose a greater percentage of the overall force to both this form of operation but also, crucially, Chinese operational patterns. During World War II, the U.S. Navy rotated its best aircrews back home to continue to train the next generation against adversary tactics. The current, static deployment model risks concentrating key operational knowledge in a smaller number of aircrews.
Ultimately, the Defense Department should embrace a joint vision of posture and deterrence. The current debate over Kadena is centered on aircraft from a single service, located at a particular base. In a theater the size of the Indo-Pacific, relatively short-ranged, manned tactical aviation assets are not sufficient to achieve U.S. aims. Unmanned aircraft can augment the manned U.S. fleet. Mobile Marine and Army ground-based missile units offer another way of generating responsive, early conflict firepower inside the First Island Chain with greater survivability. Small groups of missile launchers are able to blend in with other vehicles and move around frequently, making them difficult to find and destroy. Stealthy attack submarines are also a critical part of the inside force in the early phases of a conflict. These stand-in forces are complimented by bombers operating from distant bases to provide sustainable, massed fires. Meanwhile, surface naval forces provide air and missile defense capabilities at key locations across the theater to enhance the survivability of more distant bases.
Bringing Our Friends Along
This new model will only truly work if the United States socializes it with our allies and partners. These activities must be paired with thoughtful diplomatic efforts to explain their value to key U.S. allies and partners — including Japan — and get them on board with the new approach. Ultimately, it will take the United States and its allies and partners working together to deter China, the goal of integrated deterrence. That means Japanese Air Self-Defense forces may take primary role defending their airspace from threats, freeing up U.S. aircraft to conduct other missions. Temporary access to additional bases for dispersed operations is also needed in Japan as well as access for American ground-based missile units. Further afield, developments to infrastructure at bases in the Philippines and Australia must be made in order to provide additional bases for dispersal and add resiliency to U.S. distributed operations.
This new approach to posture is just as much of a change for American allies as it is for the United States itself. While it is a bit disingenuous to argue that the removal of less than 50 aircraft from Okinawa will lead Japan to conclude that U.S. commitment is “less solid” when Japan still hosts Seventh Fleet, III Marine Expeditionary Force, and Fifth Air Force, it is understandable why Japanese leadership would have questions about long term plans and intentions after these moves. The United States has socialized allies into thinking that more presence and larger forces equals more deterrence and assurance. This model is not viable in the mature precision strike era.
Change is often difficult but necessary. As counterintuitive as it seems, removing the F-15C/Ds from Kadena is an opportunity to positively change the balance of power in the First Island Chain by enhancing the resiliency of U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific. This requires additional improvements to bases, prepositioning equipment, and regular rotations of smaller detachments of U.S. military forces to practice distributed operations. All of these steps will require additional resources and disciplined execution. Upgrading additional bases is not that expensive but has been habitually shortchanged because the services prefer to invest in force structure and Congress does not like spending money overseas. But rotational forces can be more expensive than permanently based ones and the bill for the logistics to support distributed operations will be sizable. Finally, there will be opportunity costs as the Defense Department does not have enough forces to be everywhere. American leaders will need to prioritize the Indo-Pacific and resist the urge to reflexively deploy forces to the Middle East at each Iranian provocation. Building a combat credible force that can effectively resist Chinese aggression will not be cheap or easy. But if American forces are dispersed across bases in the First and Second Island Chains and fewer forces are at Kadena, they will be able to withstand attacks, recover, and undertake effective operations to defeat aggression.
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Stacie Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.
Andrew Metrick is a fellow in the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.
Becca Wasser is a senior fellow and lead of The Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Stacie L. Pettyjohn · December 1, 2022
12. How Much Do Language Skills Matter for Security Force Assistance? Not as Much as We Think
As an aside, I just attended a dinner tonight in the Clark Economic Development Zone at the Marriott Hotel in the Philippines with a number of scholars, former government officials, NGO leaders, and others from South Korea, Japan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, and India discussing security in Northeast Asia. I am embarrassed to say that there were a number of people there who could speak more than 3 languages. (two people spoke six). On the one hand I was embarrassed because I can speak little more than English (but can offer greetings and order beer in multiple languages). It got me thinking that all the other participants had to dumb down the discussions to account for the 3 Americans present.
Excerpts:
In many ways, the fundamental challenge remains trying to choose the languages that SF soldiers should learn. The US Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility alone gives insight into these challenges. As 1st SF Group’s focus, the region hosts over half the world’s population spread across thirty-six countries, sixteen time zones, and 52 percent of Earth’s surface. Over one thousand languages are spoken across that vastness, making it difficult, if not impossible, to match language skills with all the possible contingencies the group could face. While some other regions are less diverse, all face their own linguistic and cultural challenges in trying to pair advisors appropriately.
All things considered, language skills are still important, and this is absolutely not an argument against the value of language training and cultural awareness. There are considerable advantages that come from being able to speak a foreign language in advisory efforts, and those advantages grow as an individual’s ability to converse grows. Knowing another language increases advisors’ ability to empathize with the force they are advising, communicate, and build trust, regardless of whether it is the same language spoken by the host-nation forces.
The main conclusion of my research is simply this: knowing a foreign language and having experience working with other cultures is more fungible and transferrable than normally assumed. SF soldiers trained on a language from one region can be deployed to another region and pick up important vocabulary and cultural knowledge after a rotation or two. Such deployments, however, should not impede maintaining consistency between advisors and host-nation forces, as that factor appears to be much more important to producing combat-effective partners than language skills. Language is not the be-all and end-all and there are other factors that are more important to producing capable, combat-effective partners than knowing the language of the host nation.
How Much Do Language Skills Matter for Security Force Assistance? Not as Much as We Think - Modern War Institute
mwi.usma.edu · by Frank Sobchak · November 30, 2022
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Considering the monumental failures to build capable security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is perhaps no more relevant time to study the topic of security force assistance. In Iraq, the United States committed more than $25 billion to constructing an army of 250,000 soldiers and 600,000 other security forces. Fewer than 10,000 Islamic State fighters routed those troops, whose real numbers were much lower due to corruption and graft. Coalition forces spent an astounding $83 billion on training and equipping Afghan security forces, only to watch a near repeat of their experience in Iraq. In both cases, the victors held parades with scores of captured American equipment.
Yet despite those colossal military disasters, small pockets of host-nation forces performed admirably. The Iraqi Special Operations Forces, a force composed of two brigades known colloquially as the Golden Division or simply the ISOF, fought doggedly against the 2014 Islamic State offensive in Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, and the critical oil refinery at Baiji. At Baiji they conducted an airmobile assault seizing the key terrain ahead of Islamic State forces but were quickly surrounded. Unable to be resupplied or evacuate casualties, they continued fighting for a week, even after the Islamic State offered them free passage in exchange for withdrawing. Their retrograde operation across northern Iraq delayed Islamic State fighters enough to allow a motley coalition of American, Iraqi, and Iranian forces to block the militant group’s advance. When the Iraqis and coalition forces counterattacked, the ISOF was at the lead of every offensive. In Mosul the unit took 40 percent casualties, leaving it far beyond what is normally considered combat ineffective, but continued to attack enemy strongpoints. Simply put, without the ISOF, Iraq could have collapsed and might not be a unitary state today.
A similar situation played out in Afghanistan with the Afghan National Army’s commandos. During the 2015 summer offensive fewer than two thousand Taliban fighters routed nearly five thousand Afghan government forces, whose wholesale destruction was only prevented by the timely arrival of Afghan commandos and their US Army Special Forces (SF) advisors. In 2021 around Kandahar City, surrounded commandos battled the Taliban for more than a month until their ammunition ran out. As province after province fell, commando units kept fighting to the bitter end, with some holding the perimeter around Hamid Karzai International Airport as the United States and its allies conducted evacuations.
What was it that made those units so effective while the remainder of the effort to build allied armies was an abject failure? One of the central puzzles of why a handful of units performed better than nearly all the others was that it appeared that language training and cultural awareness of their advisors did not play as important a part as would be expected and as doctrine predicts. In the cases of the ISOF and the Afghan commandos, most of the advising forces did not speak the language of the soldiers with whom they partnered. Of those who did, nearly all spoke it at a rudimentary level. That truth exposes an important riddle that challenges a core orthodoxy within the advising community: Is language training as important as we consider it to be in producing combat effective partners?
Does Language Ability Matter? A Research Question
To answer this question, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, my research examined case studies focused on the construction of elite host-nation forces in El Salvador from 1981 to 1991, Colombia from 2002 to 2016, and the Philippines from 2001 to 2015. For each case, I traced the causal links between five factors related to the advising effort and the resulting combat effectiveness of the partner force: (1) language training and cultural awareness of the advising force, (2) the , (3) the advisors’ ability to organize host-nation forces, (4) whether advisors are permitted to advise in combat, and (5) the consistency in advisor/partner pairing. One thread of continuity for all cases was that the host-nation forces were trained by US Army Special Forces—ostensibly experts in cultural awareness and language skills as each Special Forces group is regionally aligned and more than $51 million is spent annually on their language training.
To determine the impact of those factors on host-nation combat effectiveness, I conducted 109 original interviews of American and host-nation participants that amounted to a total of 121 recorded hours. The interviews included military and civilian personnel and ranged in rank from master sergeant to four-star general. Of the interviews with US personnel, approximately two-thirds were of individuals who had served or were serving in Special Forces assignments, with the remainder serving in various capacities that were directly involved in the oversight of the advisory missions. In addition, many of those interviewees provided me with access to unclassified and declassified primary-source documents, little of which currently exists in the public record. My analysis also included archival research, reviews of historical literature and memoirs, and examinations of official government press releases.
Language Ability and Combat Effectiveness
While the importance of language training and cultural awareness was contentious, a firm majority of interviewees indicated that those skills were not essential in building combat-effective partners. This was especially true in three cases (the Philippines, Iraq, and Afghanistan), and was reported by those who spoke the host-nation language at functional levels and above (as reflected by a score of 2 or higher in the defense language proficiency test or oral proficiency interview) as well as by those who did not speak the host-nation language. Moreover, it was reflected by those whose Special Forces group matched the region it was deployed to (as in 1st Group in the Philippines and 5th Group in Iraq) as well as when it did not (as in 10th Group in Iraq or 7th Group in Afghanistan). Two cases (El Salvador and Colombia) provided contradictory results, with most indicating that it was important to speak the language of the country where they deployed.
While few argued that language skills and cultural awareness had no value whatsoever, most interviewees indicated that they should be considered more as mission-enhancing skills than mission-essential ones. Advisors of such a mindset provided a series of explanations to justify their perspectives. Some noted that even though they did not speak the host-nation language, over a few weeks of their first deployment they were able to learn enough vocabulary to function at basic levels. Across multiple rotations, those individuals picked up additional vocabulary and cultural awareness to be able to advise more effectively. Others explained that many host-nation soldiers spoke English or were learning it, often nullifying the need for language skills on the part of the advisor. Some advisors even commented that their partners asked them not to speak their language in order to practice English, a critical skill that can have positive career and economic consequences.
Other factors also affected the importance of language skills toward advising. In countries where multiple languages were widely spoken, such as the Philippines and Afghanistan, it was particularly difficult to have adequately skilled linguists on each team. Moreover, due to the enmity between different domestic groups, speaking one of the languages spoken by a rival ethno-sectarian group had a negative impact on rapport—a critical component of advisory missions. When an Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands program officer greeted an Afghan Tajik in Pashtu, he ignored the officer and later sarcastically commented to another advisor, “It is good to see you are training your men in the language of the enemy.”
Many of the interviewees opined that having the personality and temperament to serve as an advisor was more important than knowing the host-nation language, recalling incidents where poor linguists were able to establish an interpersonal connection and rapport more effectively than those who were native speakers. Empathy, patience, tolerance, and a willingness to connect on a personal level proved to be traits that were more important than linguistic skills. Language helped, but ultimately advisors had to be able to gain trust and provide value through training, advising, and delivering what they promised.
Another factor that impacted the importance of language training on building effective partners was the stark reality that the actual language capabilities of SF soldiers are often far from the hyped skills normally associated with the regiment. Currently the graduation standard for the qualification course is only 1+ on both the reading and listening portion of the defense language proficiency test (DLPT)—whose two-part scores reflect these two proficiencies, reading and listening (e.g., “1+/1+”)—or for the oral proficiency interview (OPI). That is below the skill level 2 standard which is generally recognized as limited working proficiency. At that level of reading, one “understands short texts and exchanges, but cannot sustain comprehension of long texts . . . [and] lacks command of the language to draw inferences.” According to data gathered by US Army Special Operations Command but not publicly published, as of April 2021, across all of 1st Special Forces Command, inclusive of the five active duty and two National Guard groups and the large headquarters, there were 244 Special Forces branch personnel who scored at the 2/2 level on the DLPT or OPI in Spanish and ninety-four who scored at the 3/3 level. In other languages, the weakness was much more acute. French had seventy-four at the 2/2 level and thirty-one at the 3/3 level, while Russian had 152 at the 2/2 level and thirty-one at the 3/3 level. For the more difficult languages, the situation was dire: Arabic had forty-five at the 2/2 level and just twelve at the 3/3 level, Farsi had four at 2/2 and none at 3/3, Mandarin had nine at 2/2 and five at 3/3, and Korean had five at 2/2 and ten at 3/3. Languages spoken in Afghanistan had similarly low numbers of fluent speakers. Despite such a dearth of truly capable linguists, SF advisors were still able to produce effective partners in the ISOF in Iraq and the commandos in Afghanistan. Apart from Spanish, training SF personnel to a level where their language skills really made a significant difference has proven to be extremely challenging.
Those who reported the value of language training indicated that language was the gateway to earning rapport and trust. Others noted that language skills were important in tactical scenarios, where in the heat of combat communication had to be precise and timely. In addition, advisors who were trained in the host-nation language of a particular region were likely to either remain in that regionally oriented SF group or return to it after other assignments. As a result, they often returned to the same set of countries on future deployments, increasing consistency in advisor/partner pairing while building a deep stable of interpersonal connections and better understanding of regional history and culture.
The case study that most proved an exception to the lack of importance in language for producing effective partners was Colombia, where speaking Spanish was a mandatory component of the advisory effort. One potential explanation for this is the larger number of SF advisors who had functional-level Spanish skills (more than double that of any other language, a fact likely linked to the heightened number of native speakers and the comparative ease of learning the language). In turn, some advisors hypothesized that the high number of proficient Spanish speakers created an organizational norm to speak Spanish without an interpreter, which became an expectation on the part of the advised. At the same time, other factors such as low ratios of host-nation soldiers to advisors and consistency in advisor/partner pairing contributed greatly to the success in Colombia.
The Fungibility of Language Training
Framed in these conditions, US Army Special Forces should not return to the pre-9/11 world, where it was sacrilegious for an SF group to deploy forces outside of its assigned region. Excepting 7th Special Forces Group, which focuses on Latin America, no group has strong enough language skills to add significant value in an advisory mission. Moreover, most interviewees noted that they were able to successfully perform their advisory duties even if they did not speak the host-nation language.
In many ways, the fundamental challenge remains trying to choose the languages that SF soldiers should learn. The US Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility alone gives insight into these challenges. As 1st SF Group’s focus, the region hosts over half the world’s population spread across thirty-six countries, sixteen time zones, and 52 percent of Earth’s surface. Over one thousand languages are spoken across that vastness, making it difficult, if not impossible, to match language skills with all the possible contingencies the group could face. While some other regions are less diverse, all face their own linguistic and cultural challenges in trying to pair advisors appropriately.
All things considered, language skills are still important, and this is absolutely not an argument against the value of language training and cultural awareness. There are considerable advantages that come from being able to speak a foreign language in advisory efforts, and those advantages grow as an individual’s ability to converse grows. Knowing another language increases advisors’ ability to empathize with the force they are advising, communicate, and build trust, regardless of whether it is the same language spoken by the host-nation forces.
The main conclusion of my research is simply this: knowing a foreign language and having experience working with other cultures is more fungible and transferrable than normally assumed. SF soldiers trained on a language from one region can be deployed to another region and pick up important vocabulary and cultural knowledge after a rotation or two. Such deployments, however, should not impede maintaining consistency between advisors and host-nation forces, as that factor appears to be much more important to producing combat-effective partners than language skills. Language is not the be-all and end-all and there are other factors that are more important to producing capable, combat-effective partners than knowing the language of the host nation.
Frank Sobchak, PhD, is an adjunct professor at Joint Special Operations University and a retired Special Forces officer. His final assignment was leading the Army effort to write the official operational-level history of the Iraq War, which culminated in the publication of the 1,500-page, two-volume set, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War. He is a contributor (Fellow) at the MirYam Institute and has been published in Newsweek, Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Jerusalem Post, Defense One, The Hill, Small Wars Journal, and the Jewish News Syndicate. His twitter handle is @abujeshua.
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: Petty Officer 3rd Class Thomas Rosprim, US Navy
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mwi.usma.edu · by Frank Sobchak · November 30, 2022
13. Journalist Maria Ressa explains 'How to Stand Up to a Dictator'
I wonder if Maria's book will be the modern follow-up to Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy." It just arrived on my iPad from Amazon in Kindle format and the hard copy was delivered to my house. I will begin reading it on the flight back to the States on Sunday.
Journalist Maria Ressa explains 'How to Stand Up to a Dictator'
NPR · November 30, 2022
DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I am Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Our guest today, Maria Ressa, is an international journalist who's widely celebrated around the world. She was Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2018 and last year won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov. But in her home country, the Philippines, Ressa faces multiple criminal charges and regulatory actions, which could shut down Rappler, the online news organization she heads, and land her in jail for decades. Rappler drew the anger of President Rodrigo Duterte, known for his violent campaign against alleged drug users, because the news site did stories about corruption and cronyism and exposed a web of online disinformation networks with ties to Duterte.
Before co-founding Rappler in 2011, Ressa spent many years covering Southeast Asia for CNN, breaking important stories about Islamic terrorist networks. Ressa's story isn't just that of a crusading journalist exposing corruption, though it is that; she's also focused on the role of social media networks, who, she says, are weakening democracy by enabling the rise of online disinformation and hate mobs in the service of authoritarian rulers around the world. Her new memoir is "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future."
Maria Ressa, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
MARIA RESSA: I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me again, Dave.
DAVIES: As I said, you are well-known internationally and celebrated in many ways. But in the Philippines, you face serious legal jeopardy. This is a long and painful story. But if you can kind of summarize for us, what have you been charged with and so far convicted of?
RESSA: I don't even know where to begin. You know, the beginning of it, I suppose, was first these charges coming out on social media, the weaponization of social media. And then, a year later, President Duterte came and said the same thing, top down. And then, a week later, we got our first subpoena. And then, shortly after that - that would have been 2017. By 2018, there were 14 investigations. There are three broad buckets - tax evasion, cyber libel, and the other one is securities fraud. When the government tried to shut us down in January, within four months, we dropped 49% of our advertising revenue. So this should have been - we were supposed to have been dead by now. But we're still here, you know? So we keep going.
I guess the part that is very personal to me is that in 2019, the Philippine government issued 10 arrest warrants against me in less than two years. So I am out on bail. And in order to travel, I have to ask the courts that hold what was, at one point, 10, then nine, and now, there are seven criminal charges - for permission to travel.
DAVIES: You know, I have to say that when - and this is not exactly new. But when we read about these charges that followed reporting by your organization, which offended the then-President Duterte and his supporters, it's hard not to conclude that these were politically motivated. I'm not putting those words in your mouth. It's just kind of hard not to see it that way. And I must note, you know, the Philippines does have a constitution modeled more or less on that of the United States. When you were arrested, you were read your rights, right? You had the right to remain silent and get an attorney.
RESSA: Yes.
DAVIES: To what extent do the courts there really give you due process in a consideration of the evidence?
RESSA: That's a fantastic question, and it depends on the moment in time that you ask me. And I continue to appeal to the wisdom of the judges and the justices who hold these charges. But let me put it this way. There were three ways that President Duterte showed his power. The first, which is (non-English language spoken) - (non-English language spoken) means make an example of. And he did that with a business person, someone in politics, and someone in media.
The company, he named shortly after he took office, and the company dropped 50% of its market cap. The senator who was actually investigating him has been in jail since - well, she would be coming up on her seventh year by February - seventh year in prison. She spent her entire term as senator in jail. And then, I have the cautionary tale for journalists. So it is what it is. And the fact that this has happened also shows you where we are. In my case now, this is the first time where I can't pinpoint - like, I can't shoot, like, a straight arrow 'cause it's unclear to me what my restrictions are. I just need to be respectful of the court - also, because if I'm not, the penalty is six years in prison. (Laughter) And so...
DAVIES: I'm wondering how much public anger was generated by the verdicts and the charges against you and whether the international recognition you've received, like the Nobel Peace Prize, have helped your cause among - in the Philippines?
RESSA: I don't think you can see this without the context of social media because social media is really like the fertilizer that set in place that shifted public opinion. You know, when you have information operations on social media the way the Philippines has - we were called the petri dish for information operations by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, right? Like, if I was attacked online - Rappler was attacked online with information operations a year before President Duterte himself attacked us. And that metanarrative was seeded. So by the time I was actually arrested, while it was shocking, it was seeded as a metanarrative a year earlier.
This is what is so bizarre. And it sounds like a conspiracy theory except that I lived through it. You know, I - when all the attacks online and then these narratives of journalist-equals-criminal, journalist-equals-criminal - and then, when it was attaching to me, I thought, people know my track record. I've been doing this for a long time. But our memories are really short, and social media changed our reality. So it set the stage for the filing of legal charges against us. And by the time that happened, which was about a year later - and now Filipinos doubt it. That's really what needed to happen, you know? That's what information operations do - seed chaos and doubt. And if you don't know what the facts are, then you don't act.
DAVIES: So in effect, there was almost an immunity to getting real information from a lot of the public who were prepared to believe the worst about you.
RESSA: It's - I can't quantify, but I will say that many people believed, for example, that I'm an Indonesian. It was seeded as a metanarrative - she's not Filipino. So, you know, the other part is, she's CIA and a communist. I - it's really shocking all of the things that I supposedly am. And when you're the target of attacks, you can't respond. I did, at the beginning, try to respond, but I was getting an average of 90 hate messages per hour. And it's impossible to respond. There aren't - there are more attacks than hours in the day. And this is what I pointed out to Facebook and to Twitter. You can't expect us to report these attacks. It's exponential lies. So a journalist under attack has no defense.
DAVIES: You know, one of the things that you note is that Cambridge Analytica, the firm that was involved in the big scandal about using data to influence voters in the United States, actually was active in the Philippines, kind of using it as sort of a laboratory. You want to explain this?
RESSA: Think about it like this. Since a hundred percent of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook, we became what Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, called the petri dish. So Cambridge Analytica tested these tactics of vast manipulation in the Philippines. If it worked, they - and this is Wylie's words, they ported it over to you. We were essentially the guinea pigs.
DAVIES: You in the United States, you mean. Yeah.
RESSA: You in the United States. Yes. And then I think, you know, I don't - it's very common knowledge for us in the Philippines. But America, the country that had the most number of compromised accounts during the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the U.S. But the country with the second most number of compromised accounts was the Philippines. We were the guinea pigs. America was the target.
DAVIES: Apart from the attacks on your credibility, what other kinds of, well, threats and denunciations did you get on this online campaign, you and others at, you know, Rappler, the news organization that you had?
RESSA: Yeah. So this was as early as August of 2016. We were doxxed. There was a group of Duterte supporters who came to the office, scared our team. They called for others to come protest. There were threats to bomb, you know, these threats of physical violence. And at that point, by September or October, 2016, I increased security because online violence leads to real-world violence. And this is when I began to see, OK, so if they called for protests outside and they got as far as our office - inside our office, will the police come and stop it? And at one point we weren't sure.
So there - but, you know, I guess UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists did a big data case study of the attacks against me. They took almost half a million social media attacks. And they quantified that 60% were meant to tear down my credibility. But 40% was meant to tear down my spirit. Neither of those happened, I hope. (Laughter) I'm knocking on wood, right? But it did change the way I lived.
DAVIES: How did it change the way you lived?
RESSA: Increased security. It took more effort to believe in the good, which I do. It took more effort to do the stories. And I'd say - here's the positive aspect of it, right? I wasn't the only one under attack in Rappler. And Rappler is about a hundred people. We're - we just became - we hit 10 years. We're 10 years old January this year. So my gosh, we're going to be 11 by January next year. But it's 63% women. And our median age is 23 years old. So when our younger reporters came under attack, I became far more protective of our team.
And within a short period of time, we increased our security six times, seven times, because at some point it became very clear that online violence is real-world violence. And, you know, in your introduction, you talked about the attacks of President Duterte and Facebook. I think, by 2016, I was calling for an end to impunity, impunity of Rodrigo Duterte and this brutal drug war and impunity of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. They go hand in hand. One could not have happened without the other.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Maria Ressa. She is CEO of the Philippine news site Rappler and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Her new book is "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOACIR SANTOS' "EXCERPT NO. 1")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Maria Ressa. She is the co-founder and CEO of the Philippines investigative news site Rappler and winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize. Her new memoir is called "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future."
I want to just take a moment and talk about Rodrigo Duterte. I mean, a lot of people have heard about his very violent campaign against alleged drug users and dealers. You actually have - you dealt with him many years ago when he was the mayor of Davao, if I'm pronouncing the name right. And you spoke to him when he was running for president. Give us a sense of his style, the kind of rhetoric he would employ, how he spoke to you.
RESSA: This was October, 2015, right before the May, 2016, elections. He hadn't yet declared he would run. But it was really clear that he was very top line. He focused on crime. He focused on drugs. He said that he would get rid of corruption. He made a lot of promises. He also said that he governs through fear. He's now under investigation by the International Criminal Court. And...
DAVIES: For what?
RESSA: Well, the brutal drug war. You know, what you would - what you called alleged drug dealers, you know, the first casualty in the Philippines' battle for truth is exactly how many people were killed in this drug war, because from the time he took office in July of 2016 to January, 2017, the Philippine police itself rolled out that they had killed 7,000 people. And then, I think, over those succeeding months, they began to realize that that was working against them. So in plain view, they began to roll back the numbers. Part of the reason Rappler was targeted is we kept track of all the numbers.
And so at one point after January, 2017, which is when Amnesty International said at least 7,000 people killed, the Philippine police rolled it back to 2,500 - and then down to, like, 2021, where there were only 5,000 killed, when in December of 2018, our commission on human rights said there were at least 27,000 killed. Did you just get dizzy when I was reeling out these numbers? That is the first casualty in our battle for facts, battle for truth. And that was done in plain sight.
DAVIES: Rappler, you know, the news organization that you co-founded did a lot of reporting on this and questioned whether, you know, those who had died in these encounters with police had resisted, or exactly what the circumstances were, and Duterte, in some cases, said some sort of ominous things about the vulnerability of reporters, that they - well, the possibility of assassination. What was the context of this remark, and what was it he exactly said?
RESSA: He said a lot of things. In that case, he - in what you mentioned, he said, just because you're a reporter does not mean you can't be assassinated - something along those lines. But this is Rodrigo Duterte. You know, this is also - in many ways, he was the perfect leader for the age of social media, when threats, when violence, when lies spread faster than facts. President Duterte's words are viral on social media. Social media helped elect President Duterte. And he continued. He and his government continued to use social media up until the end. But you can replace Rodrigo Duterte with, say, Donald Trump or Viktor Orban or any of the digital authoritarians who've used social media for greater popularity.
DAVIES: You know, if people want to get a sense of you and a lot of these events, there's a documentary. I think it's called "A Thousand Cuts." Do I have the title right?
RESSA: That's correct.
DAVIES: ...Referring to a thousand cuts of - against democracy. And you can see Duterte, and you can see the midterm election campaigns at which a lot of these contending forces went at one another. And one of the things that you hear in that documentary that I'm sure that you have heard a lot is from some people in poor communities saying, well, the fact is that our neighborhoods are safer. Our kids can play outside. Is there any independent evidence that all of the violence did actually make communities safer?
RESSA: That's a great question. And you can see, again, even in the numbers - right? - the numbers have been shifting. So it's unclear exactly. Perception is in some communities that that has happened. But whether it mimicked reality or not - that's also unclear to us. What I can tell you is reporting during that time period - you know, right after President Duterte was sworn into office, within hours, the first killing happened - just a short distance away from the palace. And then every night we had one reporter and one camera team that was out at night, and they would come home with at least eight dead bodies - videos of at least eight dead bodies. And, you know, the bodies would be bound, gagged, and there would be a cardboard on top. It's like Gotham City but worse 'cause it's reality. And that's when we began to realize that our world was changing.
DAVIES: Rodrigo Duterte is no longer the president. The president in the Philippines is limited to one six-year term. The new president is Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who is the son of, you know, the legendary dictator of the Philippines for so long. Did things change with the administration, either in terms of overall policy or the cases against you?
RESSA: Ah. That's a tough question. So let me first say, in February 2018, President Duterte banned our palace reporter - and me, even though I don't go to the palace - from the palace. So we went and filed a case at the Supreme Court, which is still at the Supreme Court. And we weren't able to cover President Duterte anywhere. At a certain point, it went beyond the palace to anywhere in the Philippines to anywhere around the world. With President Marcos, even saying that is like a "Back To The Future" moment, right?
So 36 years after the People Power revolt sparked these movements for democracy in all other parts of the world and Ferdinand Marcos, the father, was the kleptocrat who stole $10 billion in 1986 dollars; his family goes into exile in Hawaii; his son - only son and namesake - is voted overwhelmingly for president. And have things changed? In many ways, this president has shown he cares about what the world thinks. In his first hundred days, he has traveled more than any president in the history of the Philippines. And he went to the U.N. General Assembly. And during that time, a big change for Rappler is that he took our reporter with him.
So despite that, though - that's a good, positive thing, I think, for us - but the other part is our cases also began to move. So every day, the case for the shutdown of Rappler, the case for cyber libel all moved and moved to the negative. So each day, I wake up, and, you know, we could face shutdown. Yet we just keep doing our jobs.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Maria Ressa. She is CEO of the Philippine news service Rappler and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Her new book is "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future." She'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE FRESH CUT ORCHESTRA'S "THE MOTHERS' SUITE, MOVEMENT III - RITUAL OF TAKE")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Our guest is Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of the Philippines' investigative news site Rappler and winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize. Ressa faces criminal charges from the Philippine government, which were filed after Rappler published stories about public corruption and online disinformation campaigns connected to the government's supporters. The Nobel committee called Ressa a fearless defender of freedom of expression. She has a new memoir called "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future."
This book is also about your life. And I want to - it's an interesting story. You were born in the Philippines and your dad died at age 1, and then your mom left to go work in the United States. And until age 9, if I have this right, you lived in Manila with your paternal grandmother. What do you remember of those early years?
RESSA: Until I was 10 years old. Yeah. I went to an all-girls Catholic school. I remembered the kind of - its typical rote learning. I was I was a kid who tried to do well. I wasn't - my parents weren't there. So we kind of - we were different. But then when I turned 10, my mother came back, and she had just gotten married to my Italian American stepfather. Now I call him my dad. They came back and got us.
And in the book I talked about how it was like a kidnapping, because one day it was an ordinary day in class, and the next day it changed our lives - my sister and I, my sister who's two years younger. So I remembered looking at - hearing about America and thinking that America's streets were paved with gold. You know, you - when you're 10 years old, you believe a lot of things. And then one day we get on a plane, and I see snow for the first time. And we land in JFK Airport.
DAVIES: Right. And you end up living in Toms River, New Jersey. Did it seem like a surreptitious departure? I mean, you didn't say goodbye to your grandmother, I guess. I mean, you describe it as a kidnapping. What did it feel like when you were 10 to be suddenly spirited away to New Jersey?
RESSA: Like one life ended and another began. And I remembered asking my mom, you know, can we go back? I remembered in the car when she took us out of school thinking that night, maybe I should run away. It was a very confusing time. And when I landed, when my family landed in the United States, English wasn't my first language. So my parents, who were then, I guess, just turning 30, they decided that it was important we go to good public schools. And so even though they worked in New York City, they chose Toms River, New Jersey, which is at best...
DAVIES: Yeah, that's a long way.
RESSA: ...An hour-and-45-minute ride. Oh, my God. Like, Dave, would you do that? Like, to give your kids - my dad said he didn't want us to grow up in inner city schools. And in order to make that happen and to get us in good public schools, they drove four hours a day. I - this is why I love my parents. You know, it's like they sacrificed for us to get good educations.
DAVIES: I want to begin by just talking a bit about you forming Rappler, the news site that you have. I guess you started this in 2011, maybe went live 2012, with three other women. Was it hard to get financing and get taken seriously when it was a bunch of women putting this together?
RESSA: You know, the opposite. Part of it was because we came from the largest network in the Philippines. So I had done a lot of - I was testing these ideas in the - with the largest broadcaster. I ran the news organization - about a thousand journalists. And then I realized that the very things that made legacy news organizations successful were the very reasons why they could not succeed in the digital age. It was just, you know, you're too caught up in legacy systems.
So we decided, you know, we have to explore the internet. The internet, to me, was the future. And it was - if it worked, I figured then we can prove something. But if it didn't work, then we can go back to our old jobs. All four of us had long careers in journalism. We came from the trenches. And we raised the money for Rappler. And it wasn't - at that point, I raised $2 million. That was enough for a startup. That's how we began. And the elevator pitch was very simple. We build communities of action, and the food we feed our communities is journalism.
DAVIES: When you started Rappler, this news service, one of the things you note is that the population of the Philippines had already become remarkably attached to digital technology. Different from a lot of places in that way, wasn't it?
RESSA: Yeah. Look, we were the texting capital of the world before this, the SMS capital of the world. And then we became known as the social media capital of the world. And by January 2021, for six years in a row, Filipinos spent the most time online and on social media globally. A hundred percent of Filipinos on the internet today are on Facebook. Facebook literally is our internet.
DAVIES: So how did Rappler use technology in an innovative way in your reporting? You said people - you could tell Rappler reporters on a scene because of the equipment that they had, right?
RESSA: Yeah. I was such a fan of this. And I realize now, in retrospect, it makes a reporter's life that much harder to write. Look, what we did is we found instead of using the very expensive broadcast equipment tech, digital shrunk it so that it's affordable. We could fight against the top broadcasting groups and be first on the scene using mobile phones. And this is before you had Facebook Live. What we did was we actually created an OB van for IP satellites. Instead of using satellite - you know, the kind that you would need to pay for, we used IPs.
DAVIES: IPs, that's - what? - internet protocol.
RESSA: Internet protocol. Correct. So we actually - you know, so, like, an OB van would cost $1,000,000 to buy. We created an IP satellite van for $100,000 - like, literally built it on an Isuzu chassis. And then we built it like an OB van, except that the transmission out is IP. It was incredible. And we could go live anywhere in the Philippines. That innovation lasted maybe about three years until Facebook Live and YouTube Live made it all irrelevant. But we still have the van with us.
DAVIES: Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Maria Ressa. She is CEO of the Philippines news site Rappler and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Her new memoir is called "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future." We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Maria Ressa. She is co-founder and CEO of the Philippines investigative news site Rappler. She also was the winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize. Her new memoir is called "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future."
You know, you write that when you organized Rappler, this new site you had, which was a very high-tech operation, that you saw great positive potential for social media, for meaningful journalism and social change. And over time, a darker side to it emerged. And one of the things that you did was that you tracked - not you personally, but the organization - tracked how disinformation was spread in the Philippines particularly to support Rodrigo Duterte, who was running for president, and people in his camp.
I mean, it seems that what you were discovering was that social media platforms, like Facebook, have discovered that people respond to sharply emotional messages. And so the algorithms give them more of that - anger, hatred, resentment - which, in turn, brings more engagement, which is what their economic model is based on. And it - you observed that this was allowing people who were telling lies that were destructive and poisonous to democracy to spread faster than truth.
The interesting thing is that you actually had conversations with Facebook executives about this, right? You met with a bunch of them. Did they get it? What did they say?
RESSA: Rappler was essentially an alpha partner of Facebook. We knew Facebook in the Philippines better than Facebook did. And I went to them with the data, hoping that they would give me more data and fix it. I thought it would be an easy fix 'cause in 2016, it was alarming to see this kind of, you know, incitement of hate. In 2017, I was one of about a dozen startup founders that Mark Zuckerberg met with. And, you know, I was trying to get him to come to the Philippines to see how powerful Facebook was. And at that point, 97% of Filipinos were there. And that's what I told him. I said, you know, you really have to come 'cause 97% of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook. So he started frowning. And I thought, OK, I must have been a little too pushy. And then, he looked at me. And he said, Maria, where are the other 3%?
DAVIES: (Laughter).
RESSA: I think that was the problem, right? They were so focused on market share, their profits, their goal for the business, that they forgot to look at the social harms. I also don't think it's a coincidence that they do not tell the difference between fact and fiction. It doesn't have any business or economic benefits to doing that. So at this point, you don't even have facts. So what did they do? They outsourced it. They gave - it became a fact-checking network that was doing this. But it was never integral to the product by design. Social media divides and radicalizes, and this is what we're seeing in the world today.
DAVIES: You write that, at one point, Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to start to really focus on weeding out offensive content. And you said, you're missing the point. It's - the problem isn't content; it's distribution. What did you mean?
RESSA: Because so much of the debate centers on content when that isn't the problem. Doesn't matter if your crazy neighbor talks about a conspiracy theory. You'll still like your crazy neighbor, and you listen. But it becomes different when that's the front page of your town newspaper. Imagine, the crazy things now make it to the front page. That is what goes viral. And that's the world we live in. Doesn't matter if it's real or not as long as it captures your attention. So it is your amygdala that decides, right? If you get angry, you'll share it.
And this is the - I mean, look, there is a - E.O. Wilson, who studied emergent behavior in ants, said that our greatest crisis that we face is our Paleolithic emotions, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technology. That godlike technology manipulated us to the point that the very systems of democracy that gave rise to this is now at the verge of failure.
DAVIES: You know, at the end of the book, you kind of ask the big question, which is, what do we do about this? I mean, now that you've - it's apparent how harmful and poisonous this can be for democratic institutions. You know, in the United States, I mean, tens of millions of people believe made-up stories about a stolen election despite plenty of fact-checking that has been published debunking a lot of these stories. You think you have some strategies that might be effective? I mean, this is a little complicated, but share some of these ideas with us.
RESSA: In the short term, we decided, as we were walking into our presidential elections, that we would try to figure out what a whole-of-society approach to civic engagement could look like. And we created a four-layer, facts-first pyramid - four different layers. The bottom layer are 16 news organizations - the first time news groups worked together. You know, I've been trying since 2016, but we finally all work together. And that is the supply of fact checks.
But as you know, fact checks are really boring. They don't get wide distribution on social media. So that leads to the second layer. It's called the mesh - 115, 116 different civil society groups - NGOs, human rights organizations, climate change groups were there - business, the church. The Philippines is Asia's largest Roman Catholic nation. And the goal of the mesh layer is to share those boring fact checks, but to add emotion because emotion is what moves it through distribution. And what we found when we did that was that inspiration spreads as far as anger. The third layer are academic institutions. Eight of them total that took the data from the first two and every week told Filipinos how we were being manipulated, who was winning, who was losing, what were the media narratives being seeded? And then finally, the last layer, layer four, is rule of law. It's legal organizations from the left to the right in the Philippines, from the free legal group to the integrated bar of the Philippines to the Philippine Bar Association.
They filed, in less than three months, more than 21 cases, tactical and strategic, that helped protect the three layers. It worked. We were able to - it was the most successful attempt to try to take over the center of our information ecosystem. We mapped it. But more than that, within two weeks of launching this facts-first pyramid, the Philippine government - the office of the solicitor general filed a petition at the supreme court against Rappler and our commission on elections, because we were working with them at that point. They said that fact-checking is prior restraint. They tried to stop us from fact-checking. It almost made me laugh.
DAVIES: Heavens (laughter).
RESSA: Yeah. That's exactly the reaction I had.
DAVIES: To kind of summarize here, it sounds like what you're proposing is that news organizations need to overcome some of their competitive instincts and work together when there is important fact-checking to be done, connect them to other organizations in a way that puts energy and emotion into it and get that out there.
RESSA: Think about it like this. Like, if you don't have integrity of facts, you cannot have integrity of elections. And ultimately, what that means is that these elections will be swayed by information warfare. I mean, you know, it's funny. Americans actually look at the midterms. And they say, well, it wasn't as bad as it could be. Death by a thousand cuts - it's still bad. And if we follow, you know, what - the trend that we're seeing, if nothing significant changes in our information ecosystem, in the way we deliver the news, we will elect more illiberal leaders democratically in 2023, in 2024.
And what they do is they crumble institutions of democracy in their own countries, like you've seen in mine. But they do more than that. They ally together globally. And what they do is, at a certain point, the geopolitical power shift globally will change. Democracy will die. That point is 2024. We must figure out what civic engagement, what we do as citizens today, to reclaim, to make sure democracy survives.
DAVIES: I want to come back to where we started, talking about what you are facing. I mean, for many, many years now, I mean, you and your organization have faced criminal charges, regulatory actions, arrests, trials, appeals. How do you maintain your optimism?
RESSA: Because I know that whether I go to jail or not will depend on what I do today. And I have to have faith. But I guess part of it is, I don't think I have a choice, you know? It's like, the baton was handed to me in my nation as the head of a news organization at a difficult moment in time. And I could either drop it or hand it to the next generation. I am going to hand it to the next generation.
DAVIES: Maria Ressa, I wish you good fortune and good luck. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
RESSA: Thank you.
DAVIES: Maria Ressa is CEO of the Philippines news site Rappler and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Her new book is "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future." Coming up, our book critic Maureen Corrigan shares her list of the 10 best books of 2022. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE COUNT BASIE ORCHESTRA'S "GOOD 'SWING' WENCESLAS")
NPR · November 30, 2022
14. Russia-Ukraine War Has Influenced How BAE Systems Designed Army Bradley Replacement
Optional armor? I would hate to conduct the investigation into a Bradley destroyed because a leader decided not to use the "optional armor" and then was struck by a weapon that the optional armor might have defeated. My negative waves notwithstanding it looks like BAE is doing some innovative development so we will be ready to fight in Ukraine again sometime in the future (okay that was an uncalled for snarky comment - we are learning from Ukraine to prepare for the next conflict not to refight the last, I hope).
Russia-Ukraine War Has Influenced How BAE Systems Designed Army Bradley Replacement
The company is including optional armor and making it easy to add counter-drone technology.
defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber
Military tactics used in the Ukraine war—including the heavy use of kamikaze drones—are influencing the way BAE Systems is designing a new armored fighting vehicle for the Army.
The company, which is one of five competing to replace the four-decade-old Bradley Fighting Vehicle, shared details Wednesday about its proposal, which includes the option to add more armor to protect soldiers from attacks from above.
“For a long time, ... as we're trying to meet weight targets and great mobility for vehicles, we've taken the armor off the top of vehicles,” Jim Miller, vice president of business development at BAE Systems, said during a call with reporters.
Militaries around the world have scrapped heavy armor from the tops of armored vehicles, he said, “which has made those vehicles potentially at risk because of this new top attack thing we're seeing everywhere, and most recently in Ukraine.”
“We are looking at, and we're going to offer, the ability to do modular armor protection, so additional armor that would go on the top of the vehicle and allow for protection,” he said.
Anti-tank weapons like the American-made Javelin or the Ukrainian-made Stugna-P climb above the target and then drop down to strike from above where armor is the weakest. Russia says its Kornet anti-tank weapon has a similar capability.
BAE Systems has also designed its vehicle so that high-energy lasers and other types of counter-drone technology could be installed later if the Army wants it.
“What we're doing is making sure that the modular hooks are in place so that we can support that when it comes,” Miller said.
Bids to build prototypes to replace the Bradley for what the Army calls the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, or OMFV, were due on Nov. 1. The Army is expected to choose three winners next year and then evaluate the prototypes before selecting a single winner in 2027.
BAE, which built the Bradley, is offering a newly designed vehicle. The company announced Wednesday that its teammates include Elbit Systems of America, Curtiss-Wright, and QinetiQ. The team said the vehicle is being designed so that the Army can easily install new weapons or technology as needed in the future.
“Given the Army's requirements for growth, and for the future, you just can't constrain it with an old design,” Miller said.
Aside from having more technologically advanced weapons and sensors, all five bidders are proposing hybrid-electric vehicles, which will allow soldiers to drive or conduct reconnaissance using only batteries, making it more difficult for an enemy to spot since they will not be emitting heat or generating noise.
“We're offering mobility at the objective levels for this vehicle, and so beyond the base requirement,” Miller said. “We think [that] series hybrid electric drive gives you the drive, the mobility, the burst speed, the torque, to be able to operate anywhere that you choose to operate.”
The extra battery power will also allow the Army to install defensive lasers later.
“The onboard power that we have will be able to run lasers that are much bigger than the lasers we see being used for counter-UAS right now,” Miller said.
defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber
15. Review | Why do some Asian countries embrace democracy while others reject it?
And another book for the "too read pile." I will order this one later tonight.
Excerpts:
In “From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia,” Dan Slater and Joseph Wong seek to explain why democracy emerged in some countries, has been tried in others and is unlikely to take root in China. The authors argue persuasively that some regimes are capable of moving from authoritarian forms of government to democracy. In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, strong institutions were built to help ensure that neither national stability nor the interests of the political elite would be threatened by free and fair elections. At the apex of their power, leaders in these countries recognized signals of incipient decline and concluded that democratic reforms would allow them to keep, and perhaps even increase, their power.
...
Of most interest are the three “developmental socialist” states. Cambodia had a brief moment of democracy but it was suppressed by the current dictatorship, which is far too insecure to tolerate an organized opposition. Vietnam, which leans increasingly toward the United States to defend it from Chinese pressures, holds out a distant prospect of moving toward democracy. Slater and Wong suggest a long-shot possibility that a strong government in Hanoi might choose democratic reform to cement its ties to Washington.
And then, of course, there’s China. The authors argue convincingly that the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, the crushing of the movement for democracy, was undertaken at Deng Xiaoping’s urging because he recognized the unpopularity and weakness of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s leadership was divided, but those who prevailed feared openness and perceived Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika — economic and political reforms — as the cause of the demise of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union. A period of some reforms in China ultimately ended with the rise to power of Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party is certainly strong enough today to dominate in any free and fair election. Xi, however, seems obsessed with threats to stability and to the party. He perceives American democracy as the obstacle to China’s dominance of East Asia and Chinese influence elsewhere in the world. Democracy is the enemy. As long as he remains in power, there’s little chance China will choose democratic reform.
Review | Why do some Asian countries embrace democracy while others reject it?
The authors of ‘From Development to Democracy’ explain the political evolutions of different nations
Review by Warren I. Cohen
November 30, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Warren I. Cohen · November 30, 2022
The states of East Asia, other than North Korea and the Philippines, have experienced extraordinary economic growth since World War II. Japan led the way in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by a range of others, including even Cambodia and Myanmar. Most striking, obviously, has been the economic development of China after Deng Xiaoping opened the country to “socialism Chinese-style” in the late 1970s.
While standard theories of modernization contend that development gives rise to a middle class seeking political freedom and power and ultimately democracy, only three developed Asian countries — Japan, Taiwan and South Korea — have established stable democracies. China, the strongest country in Asia, apparently is determined to avoid democracy, as its recently concluded Communist Party congress indicated by anointing authoritarian Xi Jinping to another five years as the nation’s supreme leader. The leadership’s resistance to democracy has been on full display lately with China’s severe crackdown on protests against strict coronavirus lockdowns; in a rare show of defiance, demonstrators have called for Xi’s resignation and greater freedoms generally.
In “From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia,” Dan Slater and Joseph Wong seek to explain why democracy emerged in some countries, has been tried in others and is unlikely to take root in China. The authors argue persuasively that some regimes are capable of moving from authoritarian forms of government to democracy. In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, strong institutions were built to help ensure that neither national stability nor the interests of the political elite would be threatened by free and fair elections. At the apex of their power, leaders in these countries recognized signals of incipient decline and concluded that democratic reforms would allow them to keep, and perhaps even increase, their power.
The United States played an important role in the foundation of the three strongest democracies. After World War II, the Americans occupying Japan did their best to re-create Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in Tokyo, including providing the Japanese with a new constitution that stressed individual rights and democracy — and included the famous Article 9 renouncing the sovereign right to war. American civilians attached to the Supreme Command of Allied Powers carried out land reform; empowered workers and women; broke up the zaibatsu, the powerful industrial-banking combinations that had dominated the Japanese economy; and decentralized political power. They helped resurrect the movement toward democracy that had seemed so promising in Japan in the 1920s but was shattered by the military during the Depression. Regaining independence in 1952, the conservative elite that dominated the country concluded that its interests would be served best by strengthening democratic institutions and practices. Japan’s impressive economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s gave the regime what Slater and Wong call “performance legitimacy” — popularity with the people whose lives were improved by government policies.
The Taiwan case was very different. In 1949, when China fell to the communists under Mao Zedong, the defeated Nationalist, or Kuomintang, government under Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, where it ruled as a dictatorship. This relatively small number of displaced mainlanders dominated and repressed the native Taiwanese. With American assistance, Taiwan’s economy did quite well from the 1960s on. But in the 1970s the United States withdrew its recognition of Taipei as the government of China and recognized Beijing. Chiang Ching-kuo, who had succeeded his father as president of the Republic of China, saw signals of potential threats to the government among the restive Taiwanese population. He understood that American support would be more likely to continue if there was political reform — and he was confident that the Kuomintang’s power could be sustained even with free and fair elections. In 1987 he ended martial law and began the process of democratization. In 1996, in the first presidential election on Taiwan, the Kuomintang candidate won easily. In 2000, a candidate of the opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, was elected president, and a peaceful exchange of power ensued, ending Kuomintang rule. Taiwan today is a modern, prosperous democracy, unsurpassed in its production of the most advanced microchips.
American efforts to foster democracy in South Korea failed before and after the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. In 1961, the military staged a coup and dominated the country for a quarter of a century. It was also a period of rapid economic growth and industrialization. Dissent was suppressed brutally but continued to mount, and a declaration of martial law in 1980 led to protests demanding political reform. Student protesters were killed and raped by the military in the southern city of Gwangju in May 1980. As many as 100,000 citizens fought back, resulting in the massacre of between 500 and 2,000 people — and demands from the United States for reform. In 1987, Gen. Roh Tae-woo, who was about to become president, concluded that his party was strong enough amid a divided opposition to hold the Republic of Korea’s first free and fair presidential election. Roh won with slightly more than 30 percent of the votes when the opposition predictably split. The political shift in the Republic of Korea was more of a gamble than it was in Japan or Taiwan, but the nation has been a stable democracy ever since.
In all three regimes, conservative authoritarian elites were confident that democratic reforms were in their interest. They believed — correctly — that the economic performance under their rule and the bureaucratic institutions they had built gave them sufficient popular support to remain in power and the instruments to maintain stability.
The authors analyze three other “clusters”: developmental militarism (Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar), developmental Britannia (Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong) and developmental socialism (Cambodia, China, Vietnam). The three militarist states tried democracy when opposition to military rule threatened their interests, but Thailand and Myanmar reversed course, lacking confidence in their ability to maintain stability and dominate the opposition. Only Indonesia, where opposition is fragmented, has succeeded in maintaining democracy. Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong benefited from British-imposed legal systems. But only Singapore’s leadership is strong enough for democratic reform — though that is not yet its choice.
What’s clear is that economic development is not sufficient — leaders must choose democracy. Hong Kong, despite its extraordinary economic success, never had a chance. When the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997, its residents suffered first a gradual and in recent years a rapid and conclusive loss of freedom.
Of most interest are the three “developmental socialist” states. Cambodia had a brief moment of democracy but it was suppressed by the current dictatorship, which is far too insecure to tolerate an organized opposition. Vietnam, which leans increasingly toward the United States to defend it from Chinese pressures, holds out a distant prospect of moving toward democracy. Slater and Wong suggest a long-shot possibility that a strong government in Hanoi might choose democratic reform to cement its ties to Washington.
And then, of course, there’s China. The authors argue convincingly that the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, the crushing of the movement for democracy, was undertaken at Deng Xiaoping’s urging because he recognized the unpopularity and weakness of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s leadership was divided, but those who prevailed feared openness and perceived Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika — economic and political reforms — as the cause of the demise of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union. A period of some reforms in China ultimately ended with the rise to power of Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party is certainly strong enough today to dominate in any free and fair election. Xi, however, seems obsessed with threats to stability and to the party. He perceives American democracy as the obstacle to China’s dominance of East Asia and Chinese influence elsewhere in the world. Democracy is the enemy. As long as he remains in power, there’s little chance China will choose democratic reform.
Warren I. Cohen, a historian of American foreign relations, is distinguished university professor, emeritus, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A new edition of his book “East Asia at the Center” will appear in 2023.
From Development to Democracy
The Transformations of Modern Asia
By Dan Slater and Joseph Wong
Princeton. 348 pp. $35
A note to our readers
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
The Washington Post · by Warren I. Cohen · November 30, 2022
16. #WTH is TikTok so dangerous?
#WTH is TikTok so dangerous?
whatthehellisgoingon.substack.com · by What the Hell is Going On?
AEI’s Klon Kitchen joined us to talk TikTok this week. Three things from our pod:
- Delete the app.
- Make your kids delete it.
- More than one third of America is in the Chinese Community Party’s databases. Don’t care? You will.
Thanks for reading What the Hell is Going On?! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.
We all know the look: Doomscrolling for hours on end, laughing, sharing; it feels like every American under 30 is on TikTok, looking at all the digital catnip TikTok’s algorithms feed you. German Shepherds? Yes ma’am. French lessons? Bien sur. German Shepherd training videos in French? Mais oui. It’s brilliant. What won’t you find? Anything about anti-regime demonstrations in China. Anything about Uyghur concentration camps. Anything about Xi Jinping that isn’t flattering. Not your vibe? Well, it is someone’s vibe, but clips posted to TikTok on topics the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want you to see are filtered out. You think you posted it; you may even think it’s gone viral. But no one else will see it because the CCP has suppressed it.
But there’s more. It’s your every movement. Your shopping. Your keystrokes. Your bank passwords. Everything about you, filed away for a moment when the Chinese government wants to use it. Access to you at a time of the Chinese government’s choosing. Don’t care? You should. If you join the military, they’ve got leverage against you. Join a company, they may want proprietary information. Join the government, they know your every move.
We’ve all become reconciled to a certain loss of privacy in the online world. But even if you don’t care that Walmart or Google or Apple knows you feed your dog Alpo, or that you’re nervous about dandruff, or that you check your wife’s geolocation every five minutes, it’s one thing for them to know and another for the government of a hostile nation to know. And for that foreign government to use every detail of your life as a way to leverage public opinion, blackmail Americans, or other exert undue influence over more than one hundred million users.
Think they don’t do it? You’re wrong. Around the world, the Chinese Communist Party uses its own nationals, ethnic Chinese, and untold numbers of others to influence the direction of public opinion and government policy. Sometimes their agents are willing; sometimes they’re not. It’s time to stop giving them the access they use against us. It’s time to ban TikTok in the United States.
HIGHLIGHTS
So what’s the big deal?
KK: I understand TikTok as a social media app is very engaging. It is the fastest growing, number one downloaded social media app in the United States. There's currently 140 million monthly users, US users of TikTok …However, there are very real concerns associated with TikTok that most Americans aren't thinking about
TikTok is not unique in the fact that it collects a lot of information about its users. Other social media apps do the same thing. TikTok is peculiar in how much data it collects. I mean, it hoovers up a ton of data and it's been broken down by a number of different cybersecurity and other folks to show that not only does it hoover up data, but interestingly, if you look at the backend code, there are aspects of the way the app works that change if you try to enact greater security. So it's really peculiar. We're starting to learn more about that.
Why does Bytedance (TikTok’s owner) share its data with the Chinese government?
KK: What they've done is they have passed a series of cybersecurity and national security laws that require every bit and byte of data that is collected, that is stored, that transits, or that in any other way touches a Chinese network to at least be made available to the Chinese government. There's no getting out of that. There's no resisting that.
But what do I care?
KK: So from an individual standpoint, it's not just your dance videos, it's all of your contacts. It's your GPS location. It's your online viewing and shopping habits. It's even your keyboard swipes and your off app, online habits. So for example, TikTok knows what other websites you go to in your web browser, not just in TikTok but then it's also tracking the key swipes when you're on those other websites. So for example, if you log into, say, your bank website and it is able to track your keyboard swipes when you're on that website, what do they know? Well, they know your username and they know your password, and they know texting content. So they don't actually have to intercept the text. So even if the text itself is end to end encrypted, the fact that they are able to monitor keyboard swipes means that they can actually put together the content of a message.
There's also what we call pattern of life knowledge that comes from this. So, if I just know your GPS, just your GPS, it takes me about 24 hours to figure out where do you live, where do you work, where do you congregate, what's your favorite coffee shop, that kind of thing. Now, again, your daughter may say, "Well, okay, that's kind of creepy, but who cares?" All right. Well, one, you may care one day and that's a real challenge for you that you may not be thinking about anticipating in the future. Two, it helps them understand precisely how they want to target and influence you and everyone like you.
But what if I still don’t care?
KK: Then there's moving beyond the individual. There's what the Chinese government ultimately is able to learn about more than a third of the US population. So they're able to collect this volume, as I said, from approximately 140 million Americans and that gives them deep, deep insight into how a third of the country thinks, how they operate, what they're economically engaged in, and ultimately how to influence that group. Now, if you can move or shape in some form or fashion, a third of the US population, that is a tool that is incredibly attractive to a government that we know engages in strategic influence operations in the West
So what should we do?
KK: As much as I would like the normal American to think better about all this, and I think they can and should, at the end of the day, national security is fundamentally the US government's job. We cannot be relying on 140 million Americans all making the same right choice every single time. That's just never going to work. And that's why I think there's plenty of legitimate justification, national security justification for the US government to take action against TikTok. The underlying rationale that we have used for Huawei and ZTE and a host of other Chinese companies is the exact same rationale that we would use under TikTok. And so I think it's time.
Does Bytedance admit to all this?
KK: So they'll say things like, "The Chinese government has never asked us for access to US persons information." No. We're just required to build our networks in such a way as where the Chinese government has access. They don't have to ask us. And then also they'll say, "But if they ever did ask us, we would say no." Well, one by Chinese law, it's actually written to law, they actually have to deny cooperation with the Chinese government. But even so, assume that they don't want to lie, the way they massage that is they say, "Well, we would say no, but that doesn't actually mean that the government wouldn't get it. They would just say no, and then it would continue afoot."
Why hasn’t the US banned TikTok already?
KK: For a long time, Dany, to answer your question directly, one of the things that slowed us down was the undeniable economic intermingling between the United States and China. It's true. It's real. And if we were to address the problem that we've been discussing comprehensively, there's no avoiding very real disruption and pain, there just is. That is a problem. And you'll remember in the last administration, there was always these, we'll call them tensions between the national security folks and the treasury folks about how we were going to deal with China. Well, that's continued into this administration. But the idea that something has to be done is now largely settled. And now it's a conversation about, well, okay, how far how fast? I think that one of the best things that's helped that conversation has been Xi Jinping. His unrelenting aggressiveness, his inability, frankly, to manage the situation to what I would say would be his own advantage has actually allowed us to clarify the situation and has caused fence sitters to have to kind of move. And I think we're in the middle of that right now.
But aren’t US consumers savvy enough to resist TikTok?
KK: Well, the danger is being shaped by the Chinese Communist Party. Your understanding of the world, the issues that are at stake, how those issues play off of one another, and what you think is actually true or not is all being, in the case of TikTok, dictated to you by the Chinese Communist Party. That's the thing. And again, I mentioned I used to do influence [operations for the USG]. TikTok, and all of social media, they do not exist so that we can see cat videos. These are not social media companies in that sense.
Their purpose for existing is to capture and move audiences. That's why they make billions and billions and billions of dollars. Now, in one sense, I'm good with that, particularly in the American context. Okay. We're all making this choice and it does serve us a purpose. But when we talk about the Chinese government, we just have to understand that we're dealing with, unfortunately, an inherently hostile foreign government who seeks to move our population in directions that are inevitably against our own interests and toward theirs. That's it. That's the summation of the problem. And again, I know I mentioned in one sense, that's a rational choice by the CCP. Of course, I would use this capability. I want to amass and wield geopolitical influence. This is potentially the most powerful platform for geopolitical influence ever built, and it's mine. Yes, I'm going to use it. I'm going to leverage it. We have, as a society, and particularly policymakers, we have to understand that this is the world we live in; it's not going to change. This is where we are. And we either get sophisticated, or we're handing ourselves over to an enemy without even a fight
Draw a picture of the danger for individuals? Say you’re joining the intel community?
KK: They're going to know, not just about you, but they're going to know about every individual member of the IC, the intelligence community, which doesn't just give them insight into that community, but it then gives them insight into how to build the perfect spy. They understand, "Okay, what's the legend that has a 90% application success rate into the IC? Okay, now I know how to build that. Okay, what is the life that fits into the IC and gets elevated up into the senior ranks? I can build that, I can use that, I can manipulate that."
As a guy like me, I think about, I'm not going to burn this source. What I'm going to do is I'm going to keep building that portfolio. I'm going to help in every way that I can to make sure that person becomes the director of the China Center. And if I can move them with an invisible hand, I'll do that. But if it comes down to it and they become the National Security Advisor to the president one day, well then one day, when we're at some kind of a diplomatic meeting, I'm going to have a one-off conversation and just give them a peek at the portfolio, and let them know that they now work for me.
So what next?
KK: Now, I want to be careful. I don't want to build them up to be 10 feet tall and bulletproof. Some of your listeners, most of your listeners will rightly kind of throw up with their hands and say, "Look, I'm not on TikTok. I'm doing what I can. There's not much I can do more." Fine, but this is where my point about the US government really comes in, is that this is so clearly a concern. This is so completely within the government's constitutional duties to provide for the common defense that we're now on the line, in my view, of professional negligence, if we don't take this action.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Quotes
● Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA): "Well, I think Donald Trump was right. I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat. So, if you're a parent, and you've got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned. All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing."
● Secretary Mike Pompeo: “Here’s what I hope that the American people will come to recognize – these Chinese software companies doing business the United States, whether it’s TikTok or WeChat, there are countless more … are feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party, their national security apparatus – could be their facial recognition pattern, it could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they’re connected to”
● Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL): “The Biden Administration can no longer pretend that TikTok is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. Even before today, it was clear that TikTok represented a serious threat to personal privacy and U.S. national security. Beijing’s aggressiveness makes clear that the regime sees TikTok as an extension of the party-state, and the U.S. needs to treat it that way.”
● Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI): "Enough is enough. It has been clear to anyone paying attention that TikTok is not only destroying our children's brains, but also poses an unacceptable threat to our national security. It is long past time to ban its operation in the United States.”
TikTok and Chinese Influence
TikTok found spying on the location of specific Americans (Techstory, November 25, 2022)s
FCC Commissioner says government should bad TikTok (Axios, November 1, 2022)
As Washington wavers on TikTok, Beijing exerts control (Washington Post, October 30, 2022)
Inside Democrats’ elaborate attempt to woo TikTok influencers (Washington Post, October 27, 2022)
TikTok’s Beijing roots fuel censorship suspicion as it builds a huge U.S. audience (Washington Post, September 15, 2019)
Revealed: how TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing (The Guardian, September 25, 2019)
TikTok and Privacy
Incoming House Committee Chairs Accuse TikTok of Lying to Congress (National Review, November 22, 2022)
Troops’ use of TikTok may be national security threat, FCC commissioner says (Military Times, July 14, 2022
Leaked Audio From 80 Internal TikTok Meetings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China (Buzzfeed News, June 17, 2022)
The U.S. government fined the app now known as TikTok $5.7 million for illegally collecting children’s data (Washington Post, February 27, 2019)
TikTok and Scrolling Addiction
Douyin, Chinese version of TikTok, adds time limit for kids under 14 and bans nighttime use
Of relevance: Huawei
US bans imports of Chinese tech from Huawei, ZTE (CBS News, November 25, 2022)
Counterpoints: Opposition to banning TikTok
Nice Video Streaming Business You Got There… (Cato Institute, August 5, 2020)
The Lesson of TikTok (Cato Institute, August 7, 2020)
Don't Ban TikTok and WeChat (ACLU, August 14, 2020)
Klon Kitchen work:
Ban TikTok Now
Espionage with Chinese Characteristics
Game On
whatthehellisgoingon.substack.com · by What the Hell is Going On?
17. Castration, gang-rape, forced nudity: How Russia’s soldiers terrorise Ukraine with sexual violence
Such is the evil nature of the Putin regime.
Castration, gang-rape, forced nudity: How Russia’s soldiers terrorise Ukraine with sexual violence
The Kremlin has been accused of terrorising Ukrainians with sexual violence systematically – and known reports are the 'tip of the iceberg'
By
Harriet Barber,
GLOBAL HEALTH REPORTER
28 November 2022 • 9:55am
The Telegraph · by Harriet Barber,
Since Russia’s soldiers first stormed Ukraine, women have been gang-raped, men castrated, children sexually abused, and civilians forced to parade naked in the streets, according to the United Nations.
The Kremlin stands accused of terrorising the Ukrainian population with sexual violence in a systematic and unsparing manner. It is thought that the full-extent of this barbarism will not come to light until years after the war.
The allegations come ahead of a major international conference for preventing sexual violence in conflict, held in London on Monday, during which dozens of survivors from around the world will speak out about their abuse.
“In Ukraine, an alarming number of reports are coming in from areas illegally controlled by Russia. The UN has begun to document them, and they are chilling,” James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, wrote exclusively in the Telegraph ahead of hosting the conference. More than 50 ministers from around the world will join him.
Last month, a UN Commission documented what it described as “patterns” of rape and sexual violence inflicted on Ukrainians throughout the war. “Victims range from four to over 80 years old,” it said, detailing a series of appalling accusations in October’s report.
One Russian soldier forced a four-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him in the presence of her parents, according to the report. The 22-year-old mother was raped, her husband sexually violated, and the pair were also forced to have sexual intercourse in the presence of the armed forces.
‘You’ll help us find others’: Ukrainian rape victim ordered to help Russian troops hunt for women
A 83-year-old woman described how, while her village was occupied by Vladimir Putin’s forces, she was raped by a Russian serviceman in front of her physically disabled husband.
In the summer, a video circulated showing a Russian soldier with blue surgical gloves castrating a Ukrainian prisoner.
The Telegraph could not independently verify these accusations, but these reports have been described as the tip of the iceberg by lawyers, aid workers and sexual assault experts we interviewed. Cases will be underreported for years to come, they say, because it can take years for survivors to speak about such violence.
“Even in Bosnia we still get women stepping into support services saying they were raped 30 years ago. It has taken 30 years to feel confident to disclose this. We anticipate a similar situation may happen in Ukraine,” said Jaime Nadal, the Ukraine representative for UNFPA, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency.
One Ukrainian victim told the UN Commission: “This experience is very shameful for me and I am extremely scared and intimidated”.
It has taken years for sexual assault survivors of Russia’s earlier invasion of eastern Ukraine, in 2014, to speak out.
Alisa Kovalenko, a Ukrainian film director aged 34, was interrogated, forced to strip naked and bathe in front of a Russian commander in 2014. The commander later tried to rape her.
Alisa Kovalenko, a Ukrainian film director aged 34, was interrogated, forced to strip naked and bathe in front of a Russian commander in 2014 Credit: Natalie Thomas/Reuters
“It took more than a year for me to say anyhing about the sexual violence,” she told the Telegraph. “I gave all the other details [about the captivity] except this. It was very painful. I didn’t want to traumatise my family.”
“I hid deep inside myself,” she added.
Iryna Dovgan, 61, was also captured and sexually assaulted in 2014 by Russian soldiers. She described how she was interrogated, denied food and water, and sexually abused twice. They soldiers threatened to rape her 14-year-old daughter.
“They tortured me and humiliated me,” she said. “I was taken to the town centre and tied to a pole. They put a sign on my breast. It said I killed kids and helped the Ukrainian army to kill civilians. People came and beat me. Everything that happened to me in those five days is beyond human understanding.”
Sexual assault on a systematic level
Sexual violence can be used against all members of a community as a tactic of war, torture, terrorism, reprisal, and political repression. Today, it is used in at least 18 conflicts around the world, including in Afghanistan, Syria and South Sudan.
It intends to humiliate and destroy families. It can propel forced displacement, punish and persecute targeted populations, and serve as an instrument of “ethnic cleansing” and social control. It also condemns survivors to a lifetime of trauma.
Sexual violence against men in war is hidden and ignored
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office said Moscow’s war on Ukraine “is aimed at exterminating the Ukrainian people” and that Russia’s use of sexual violence intends “to spread a state of terror, [and] cause suffering and fear”.
Dr Ingrid Elliott, MBE and one of the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict experts, said that the Russians have two methods of sexual violence – the first of which is staged during an attack on a village.
“People are dragged out to the streets and paraded, men and women,” Dr Elliott said. “There are circumstances where the man would be killed and the woman would face sexual violence afterwards. Sometimes the women are rounded up, and held in basements, where repeated sexual violence is inflicted upon them, for days of even weeks.”
The second pattern of abuse happens in detention centres in occupied territories. While it is hard to document this abuse, people who have fled or been liberated have come forward with information.
“What we see then is sexual torture against men,” Dr Elliott said. This can take the form of genital electrocution, castration or sodomy.
This week, Reuters news agency reported that some Russian commanders have encouraged and ordered sexual violence.
Russian soldiers have been accused of committing war crimes and lashinng out with drunken violence, including in Bucha Credit: AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd
British lawyer Wayne Jordash told Reuters that in around the capital of Kyiv some of the sexual violence reported involved a level of organisation by Russian armed forces that “speaks to planning on a more systematic level”.
The Kremlin has denied these allegations.
Increasing hate speech during attacks
There has been an increase in hate speech accompanying the sexual assault since February, according to Kateryna Busol, a Ukrainian lawyer who has been working on the documentation of crimes perpetrated in Russia since 2014.
“What we have seen since the full-scale invasion is the increase in the hate speech and potentially genocidal speech that accompanies these crimes,” said Ms Busol. “Cases of visibly pregnant women who have been beaten in detention, [being told] there was nothing bad about a small dirty Ukrainian dying.”
There have also been more attacks perpetrated in front of family members, she added, and sexual attacks on children. “This is the new sad phenomenon,” Ms Bustol said.
New survivor centres have now been built in Kyiv, Lviv, and Zaporizhzhia by the UNFPA, equipped with rape management kits. Most of the centres constructed throughout the last decade were destroyed by bombing or looted by the Russians, the agency said.
At the Zaporizhzhia centre, Mr Nadal said one man recently sought help along with his two sons, all of whom had been sexually assaulted.
The Nobel laureate imprisoned in his own hospital
“Sexual violence against men in conflict is much more prevalent than we think,” said Dr Elliott. However, she cautioned that such attacks often never come to light.
“Men will disclose torture but not necessarily describe it as sexual violence. It gets labelled or characterised as other forms of violence. There’s a lack of understanding, fear of stigma and fear of being seen as less maculine,” she said. “This is what drives it in the first place – the dishonouring.”
‘Impunity is the norm’
Sexual violence in conflict has long been used as a weapon of mass destruction, yet the first prosecution of rape as a war crime did not occur until 1998.
Despite that landmark ruling, by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, it can still take decades for perpetrators to be brought to justice, and in most cases they never are.
“Efforts to hold perpetrators accountable are few, and prone to failure. Impunity is the norm: the number of successful international prosecutions for sexual violence in conflict remains in the low single digits,” said Baroness Arminka Helic, a former Foreign Office special adviser.
Nonetheless, at the Hague last week, a representative for the Office of Prosecutor General in Ukraine said it is already working on 100 criminal proceedings relating to sexual violence during the conflict.
“I want justice for those who made those Russian soldiers come to my city, and tortured me, and killed other people,” Ms Dovgan said. Since February 2019, Iryna has been leading the Ukrainian sexual abuse survivor network, called SEMA Ukraine.
While efforts for justice are underway, psychological support is considered a more urgent task.
Lilia Sidun, a child psychologist in Zaporiththia, spoke to the Telegraph about young patients struggling to understand the sexual violence they have witnessed.
“It is very hard for them to open up,” she said. “It won't be until the end of the war that people will really talk about these times.”
Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security
The Telegraph · by Harriet Barber,
18. Nato holds first dedicated talks on China threat to Taiwan
This seems a fairly significant development. Based on informal discussions I had in Warsaw this week it does seem that NATO is taking China very seriously.
Nato holds first dedicated talks on China threat to Taiwan
Financial Times · by Henry Foy · November 30, 2022
Nato members held their first dedicated debate on Taiwan in September, as the US encourages other members of the transatlantic security alliance to pay more attention to the rising threat of China to the island.
The talks were held by the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s main political decision-making body, according to several people familiar with the matter. Nato members had discussed Taiwan in previous NAC meetings as China ratcheted up pressure on the country, over which it claims sovereignty, but the September session was the first dedicated debate.
The discussions came three months after Nato released a strategy that for the first time described China as a threat to the 30-member alliance and one month after Beijing launched large-scale military exercises in response to a visit by Nancy Pelosi to Taipei — the first by a US House Speaker in 25 years.
“It is notable and significant that, for the first time, the alliance is conducting discussions about the status of Taiwan, its democratic government and its critical role in the manufacture of microchips globally,” said James Stavridis, a retired US admiral and former Nato supreme allied commander.
One of the people familiar with the September debate said Nato ambassadors discussed the latest intelligence about the threat to Taiwan and the impact that any conflict there would have on the members.
“We did not talk about what Nato’s role would be in the event of any military action but discussed the variety of impacts that it could have on Euro-Atlantic security and wider implications for the alliance,” the person added.
They also discussed how Nato should make Beijing aware of the potential ramifications of any military action — a debate that has gained significance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amid questions about whether the west was tough enough in its warnings to Moscow.
The US has been urging allies, particularly in Europe, to focus more on the threat to Taiwan, as concerns mount that Chinese president Xi Jinping may order the use of force against the island.
Senior US military officers and officials have floated several possible timelines for military action, with some eager to increase the sense of urgency to ensure Washington and its allies are prepared.
As part of US efforts, the state department recently shared an economic analysis with allies that said a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would cost the global economy $2.5tn per year.
“If there is an issue that we are discussing inside out and upside down, it’s Taiwan and possible scenarios and essentially a sense of what would happen,” said a senior EU official.
Nato foreign ministers said they would discuss the “challenge” from China on Wednesday as part of meetings in Bucharest, Romania.
The US, citing its support for Ukraine and Europe this year, is pressing European allies to hew closer to its tougher stance on Beijing. While the Nato strategy document released in June mentioned China, it did not refer to Taiwan.
“People are moving at different paces on this, inevitably in an alliance of 30,” said one western official. “[But] we have made a lot of progress on China . . . We are moving from assessing the problems to addressing them.”
In a phone interview from Bucharest where she is attending the Nato meetings, Canadian foreign minister Mélanie Joly said there had been more discussion on Taiwan among G7 members, though China was watching closely how the Nato alliance was responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“I think the unity of the alliance is our strength, and we need to make sure that we reinforce it,” Joly said.
Canada last week unveiled its strategy for the Indo-Pacific, which described China as “an increasingly disruptive global power”.
One person familiar with discussions between the US and its Nato allies about Taiwan said it was important not to overestimate what Nato would do in a conflict.
“The most important implication for Nato of a potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait is the likely need for European militaries to backfill US military assets in the north Atlantic in the event that the US has to redeploy some assets to the Indo-Pacific. Nato is unlikely to get involved directly into a Taiwan crisis or war,” the person said.
While the US presses allies, it is pleased that Europe is starting to take the issue more seriously, even if some nations are reluctant to take a tougher stand given their trade with China or unwillingness to divert attention from Ukraine.
The “fundamental principle” that Nato had shown in relation to the Ukraine war and to the challenges posed by China was that “we are doing it together, we’re doing it united”, Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, said on Tuesday. “That is Nato’s greatest strength.”
Nato spokesperson Oana Lungescu said that the alliance did not comment on classified discussions, but added: “Nato allies regularly address a range of security issues, including the situation in and around east Asia.”
“The policy of Nato allies on Taiwan has not changed. The Nato secretary-general has made clear that there is no justification for China to use aggressive rhetoric or to make threats against Taiwan,” she said. “We are concerned by China’s coercion and intimidation in the region. A conflict in Taiwan is in nobody’s interest.”
The White House declined to comment.
Follow Henry Foy and Demetri Sevastopulo on Twitter
Financial Times · by Henry Foy · November 30, 2022
19. This Vietnam-Era Special Ops Unit Had a 100% Casualty Rate
One of the best special operations organizations ever created. We can learn a lot from studying this organization. I learned a lot from senior NCOs from this organization who were still serving on active duty when I was a young SF officer. And there is so much more than can be learned.
This Vietnam-Era Special Ops Unit Had a 100% Casualty Rate
warhistoryonline.com · by Rosemary Giles, Guest Author · November 28, 2022
You’ve heard of the elite Navy SEALs and Green Berets who conducted guerrilla and counter-guerrilla operations, trained local troops and quashed enemy uprising in Vietnam. However, you’ve likely never heard of MACV-SOG, comprised of members from both forces, as well as the CIA. Together, they made up a unit more covert than any other during the war.
MACV-SOG was tasked with undertaking various forms of unconventional warfare in Vietnam, including reconnaissance and rescue missions, psychological warfare and capturing enemy prisoners. They conducted a number of covert operations, which had a profound effect on the outcome of the conflict.
MACV-SOG’s top-secret beginnings
MACV-SOG, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group, was established on January 24, 1964. It was made up of members from the US military’s most elite forces: Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Air Force commandos, CIA operatives and those who’d served in the Marine Corps’ reconnaissance units.
MACV-SOG actions in Vietnam were controlled by the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities at the Department of Defense, as it gave them the ability to conduct missions outside of South Vietnam. Control of the group was eventually given to the US military.
Having never been assigned an official logo, the members of MACV-SOG created their own. (Photo Credit: MACV-SOG Soldier / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
Much of MACV-SOG’s work was conducted in North Vietnam, which had to remain top secret, as the official American position was that US forces weren’t fighting outside of the South. The group also spent time conducting operation in Laos and Cambodia, due to the importance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).
Given the extremely dangerous nature of the work they undertook, MACV-SOG was comprised entirely of volunteers. Their work was so dangerous, in fact, that the casualty rate for operatives was 100 percent – they knew they’d either receive a Purple Heart for their actions or come home in a body bag.
Unidentifiable Americans
Given the top-secret nature of their operations, MACV-SOG had very particular uniform requirements designed to make them unidentifiable as Americans. They donned the tiger stripe camouflage commonly associated with the South Vietnamese, and they didn’t carry any ID, including dog tags and patches. The Green Berets also didn’t wear their identifiable headgear.
MACV-SOG reconnaissance team, 1966. (Photo Credit: US Army / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
As for weapons, MACV-SOG generally carried either a CAR-15 or AK-47, as well as M79 grenade launchers, all of which had their serial numbers removed, so they couldn’t be identified. Each was carefully attached to the individual in a way that would render any noise from their movement non-existent. The guns were carried with a canvas strap, while the M79s were attached with a D-ring covered in tape.
Operators also carried additional weapons, including fragmentation and V40 mini grenades. For many, their weapons of choice were as unconventional as the missions they undertook. One particular MACV-SOG member, Staff Sgt. Robert Graham, decided to use a 55-pound bow with razor-edged arrows, which he pulled out when his ammo ran low.
Ho Chi Minh Trail
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the main area of operations for MACV-SOG, given its importance to the guerrillas they fought against. The group’s primarily role here was to be the boots on the ground, providing intelligence back to Saigon. They took photographs, stole enemy documents and bugged communication lines.
MACV-SOG photo showing North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops walking along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (Photo Credit: SOG / Joel D. Meyerson / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
These were extremely dangerous missions, and those tasked with running them were heavily aided by local forces, who made up the majority of a unit’s numbers – two to four Americans were typically paired with between four and nine South Vietnamese guerrillas. In an interview with History of MACV-SOG, Jim Bolen discussed the details of running missions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, saying every one he ran took place along the network’s arteries.
There would be extensive enemy encampments attached to the trail, which housed thousands of soldiers. Two examples of these terrible odds were the mission on Thanksgiving Day 1968, which saw a six-man team face an enemy force of 30,000, and Frank D. Miller’s solo encounter with 100 NVA troops.
MACV-SOG operations behind enemy lines
In his interview with History of MACV-SOG, Jim Bolen also revealed that he and other operatives were responsible for planting seismic sensors along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which were monitored by Lockheed C-130E Blackbirds and would inform them of significant enemy movement.
Through this and other forms of reconnaissance, it’s believed MACV-SOG provided 75 percent of American intelligence about the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Col. Donald Blackburn, commander of MACV-SOG, visiting a field location. (Photo Credit: US Army / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
MACV-SOG had another purpose for operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail: using it to get behind enemy lines to engage in prisoner snatching. This was considered one of the most dangerous missions. Prisoner snatching could be done as either the primary goal of a mission or a secondary one, should the opportunity present itself. Either way, it was heavily encouraged by superior officers.
Prisoner snatching behind enemy lines
MACV-SOG members were given $100 for capturing an enemy soldier, as well as R&R, while their local comrades were given new watches and other cash amounts. With this program in place, they captured 12 soldiers in Laos in 1966 and acquired important information from them, such as troop movements, sizes and base locations.
MACV-SOG operator Michael Stahl in a De Havilland U1-A Otter. (Photo Credit: IndianaJones1936 / Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)
In order to successfully snatch their prisoners, MACV-SOG had to get creative. Lynne Black, a MACV-SOG operator, figured out the precise amount of C-4 needed to knock out a man without killing him (you can imagine the test process). This required an operator to place the explosive along the trail and wait for an enemy combatant to walk near enough to remotely detonate the C-4, swoop in and leave with their unconscious target.
MACV-SOG was involved in many of the major engagements that took place over the course of the Vietnam War, including Operation Steel Tiger, the Tet Offensive, Operation Tiger Hound, Operation Commando Hunt and the Easter Offensive. Despite this, their involvement was largely kept a secret until the 1980s.
It took until 2001 for the group’s members to be formally recognized, with them being awarded the Presidential Unit Citation.
Rosemary Giles is a history content writer with Hive Media. She received both her bachelor of arts degree in history, and her master of arts degree in history from Western University. Her research focused on military, environmental, and Canadian history with a specific focus on the Second World War. As a student, she worked in a variety of research positions, including as an archivist. She also worked as a teaching assistant in the History Department.
Since completing her degrees, she has decided to take a step back from academia to focus her career on writing and sharing history in a more accessible way. With a passion for historical learning and historical education, her writing interests include social history, and war history, especially researching obscure facts about the Second World War. In her spare time, Rosemary enjoys spending time with her partner, her cats, and her horse, or sitting down to read a good book.
linkedin.com/in/rosemary-giles
warhistoryonline.com · by Rosemary Giles, Guest Author · November 28, 2022
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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