Quotes of the Day:

"The military institution is a mirror of its parent society, reflecting strengths and weaknesses....The highest service of the military to the state may well lie in the moral sphere."

– Sir John Hackett, to the cadet corps at the USAF Academy, circa. 1960

"As a nation, everything we say, everything we do, and everything we fail to say or do, will have its impact in other lands."

– President Eisenhower, 1952

"Fear of war is never helpful in preventing war. If we are firmly determined to brave any risks, we can fend off any emerging threats."

– South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak, Radio Address, 27 December 2010

1. A Return to Privateering - A Strategic Concept for Unconventional Warfare

2. To counter China, NATO and its Asian partners are moving closer under US leadership

3. NATO Summit Puts Biden’s Fitness Under a Microscope

4. Asia’s New ‘Game of Thrones

5. 12 people to keep an eye on at the NATO summit

6. AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream

7. Erik Prince is Wrong for Secretary of Defense

8. China hits back at NATO's 'smears and attacks' ahead of summit

9. Russia under fire at UN over Ukraine strikes

10. Why NATO Still Exists

11. New NATO Command Will Assist Ukraine with Training, Equipment Donations

12. 82nd Airborne joins 3rd, 10th SF Groups to airdrop test new weapon sights

13. Wounded Veterans, Wounded Economy: The Personnel Costs of Russia’s War

14. Article 5 with an Asterisk: How a Tailored Application of NATO’s Collective Defense Principle Could Lead to a Sustainable Russo-Ukrainian Armistice

15. Avoiding War in the South China Sea

16. The Right Way for America to Counter Russia in Africa

17. US to loan ‘stalwart ally’ Poland another $2 billion for push to modernize military

18. NATO’s in denial about deterrence by denial

19. The West’s biggest vulnerability is internal

20. NATO Allies Confront ‘Serious Gap’ in Arms Production to Counter Russia

1. A Return to Privateering - A Strategic Concept for Unconventional Warfare

Certainly a very thought provoking article.

Something for SOCPAC to think about.

Excerpts:

REIMAGINING OF UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

The U.S. military defines unconventional warfare as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.” [vii] It is worth noting that the Iranians most likely do not concern themselves with this distinction between conventional unconventional warfare. Regardless, as unconventional warfare is defined as the use of proxy forces to disrupt a hostile government, then privateering can arguably be considered a form of unconventional warfare exercised by a maritime insurgent force.

But what matters more than academic characterizations are the strategic effects thereof. Maritime interdiction of shipping, regardless of conventional or unconventional means, can be an extremely effective strategy, capable of bringing a superpower to its knees. The strategy of blockade, effectively the maritime version of siege warfare, can be effective but requires a large naval force. [viii] An interdiction strategy is best employed when supplies must transit chokepoints, and achieves a similar effect as a blockade but for significantly less cost, force size, and risk. As exemplified by the recent accomplishments of the Houthi raiders, leveraging a proxy force to do the dirty work of attacking and seizing merchant shipping can offer enormous strategic advantages.

THE CHINESE ACHILLES HEEL

$3.5 trillion of shipping travels through the Strait of Malacca annually aboard approximately 94,000 ships.[ix], [x] On these vessels travel 30% of all globally-traded goods and 23.7 million barrels of oil per day (in 2023). Two-thirds of China’s maritime trade volume must transit the Strait, along with 97% of its seaborne crude oil imports.[xi], [xii] Around 10% of that amount comes from Iran and another 7% from Russia. Dark Fleet[xiii] passage makes up an additional sizable but unknown portion of Chinese imports, driven by recent international sanctions on oil exports from these two countries. To say shipping through the Strait of Malacca presents a strategic vulnerability for China is an understatement of existential proportion.[xiv]

• 11 hours ago
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• 13 min read

A Return to Privateering - A Strategic Concept for Unconventional Warfare

By Jeremiah Monk

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/a-return-to-privateering-a-strategic-concept-for-unconventional-warfare

"[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; . . ."

U.S. Constitution, Article I § 8, clause 11[i]

INTRODUCTION

An often overlooked clause in Article I of the US Constitution grants Congress the War Power authority to issue “Letters of Marque,” official documents issued by a sovereign nation authorizing private citizens, often ship captains, to capture enemy vessels and goods. This was a practice particularly prevalent during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and at the time of the Founding Fathers of the United States was a fairly common instrument of national power.[ii]

The strategic application of privateering effectively ended in the mid-19th century. Treaties largely banned the practice, and the conduct and character of warfare from that point on rendered privateering unnecessary. But to this day, the US retains the right to issue Letters of Marque. This capability offers not only a potent strategic deterrent but also a significant strategic option for the nation to leverage in the event of a war with China.

PRIVATEERING AGAINST THE BRITISH

At the time of the founding of America, the small U.S. Navy faced a dilemma: how to combat an adversary with a much larger naval fleet, but who offered a strategic vulnerability in their reliance on maritime trade and resupply. The strategy employed was effectively outsourcing, granting private vessels with the authority to interdict British supply shipments.

Issuance of Letters of Marque was a common practice employed by European powers since the Middle Ages. So effective was the strategy that at the time of the Revolution, the Founding Fathers wove it into the Constitutional fabric of the United States as a means to bolster the fledgling nation’s small Naval force. Congress exercised this authority against British shipping during both the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. In the War of 1812, American privateers captured between 1,200 and 2,000 British vessels, making for a profound strategic impact on the conflict.[iii]

The capture of British merchant ships severely disrupted trade, straining British resources and diverting the Royal Navy’s attention from other military operations. England was forced to allocate more ships and resources to protect their merchant fleet, which could have otherwise been used in direct military engagements against the United States. The success of American privateers simultaneously boosted morale on the home front, demonstrated the effectiveness of privateering as a form of asymmetric warfare, and helped garner support for the war effort among American citizens.

Ultimately, the economic pressure exerted by privateering contributed to the British decision to negotiate peace, leading to the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. The disruption of trade and the financial losses incurred by British merchants created a constituency within Britain that pushed for an end to the war. The strategic impact of privateering during the War of 1812 extended beyond the immediate capture of ships. It played a crucial role in economic warfare, resource allocation, morale, and ultimately, the diplomatic resolution of the conflict.

AN END TO PRIVATEERING?

The 1856 Declaration of Paris was a significant international agreement aimed at regulating maritime warfare.[iv] It established key principles, including the abolition of privateering, the protection of neutral goods (except contraband) under an enemy's flag, and the requirement that blockades be effective to be legally binding.

The United States did not sign the Declaration of Paris, primarily to preserve the U.S. government's ability to leverage a practice that had been so valuable during the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The U.S. viewed privateering as a means to supplement its relatively small navy and exert economic pressure on adversaries.

Today the U.S. adheres in practice to the principles of the Declaration and champions the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a comprehensive international treaty signed in 1982 that establishes the legal framework for maritime activities.[v] The U.S. has also maintained and operated the most powerful Navy in the world since World War II, rendering the practice of privateering unnecessary.

However, the U.S. never signed on to the Declaration of Paris. Nor has the U.S. signed on to UNCLOS, partially due to concerns over accepting limits to its sovereignty, despite having played a significant role in helping to develop it. To this day, privateering remains a dormant but legal tool of U.S. national power.

THE STRATEGIC IMPACT OF INTERDICTION

The strategy of attacking civilian maritime shipping is alive and flourishing in the modern age. In the Gulf of Aden, Somali-based raiders and Iranian-backed Houthis from Yemen are effectively leveraging the practice as a potent unconventional warfare tool. The practice presents significant strategic implications for international shipping, affecting both regional security and global trade dynamics.

The difference between piracy and privateering is nuanced, effectively coming down to state sponsorship: Piracy is an illegal act of robbery by individuals while privateering is a tool of warfare used by the state. In the Gulf of Aden, Somali raiders operate in clear violation of international law as pirates.

The Houthis, however, attack merchant shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait with the backing of the Iranian state.[vi] That they use helicopters and missiles to attack and seize ships is irrelevant – they do so at the behest of a nation that sees itself at war and, like so many of the adversaries of the West, does bother with troublesome policy distinctions that artificially categorize war as being either “irregular” or “unconventional.” By every definition, Houthi seizures can be considered acts of privateering, and are having a dramatic effect:

1. Economic Costs:

• Increased Shipping Costs: Shipping companies incur higher insurance premiums and security costs to protect vessels from pirate attacks. These additional expenses are often passed on to consumers, raising the cost of goods.
• Rerouting: Some ships choose to avoid the Gulf of Aden altogether, opting for longer routes around the Cape of Good Hope, which increases fuel consumption and transit times.

1. Security Measures:

• Naval Patrols: The presence of international naval forces, including the Chinese PLAN's anti-piracy missions, underscores the strategic importance of securing this vital maritime corridor. These patrols aim to deter piracy and ensure the safe passage of commercial vessels.
• Private Security: Many shipping companies employ private security teams to safeguard their vessels, reflecting the persistent threat of piracy in the region.

1. International Cooperation:

• Multinational Task Forces: The threat of piracy has led to unprecedented levels of international cooperation, with countries forming coalitions to patrol the waters and share intelligence. This collaboration enhances maritime security and fosters diplomatic relations.

1. Impact on Regional Stability:

• Economic Disruption: Piracy disrupts local economies by threatening fishing and trade, which can exacerbate poverty and instability in coastal communities.
• Counterterrorism: The nexus between piracy and terrorism is a concern, as revenues from piracy can potentially fund terrorist activities, further destabilizing the region.

For the Iranians, these effects equate to a delightful return on a very small investment. By using a proxy force to hold all civilian shipping through a strategic chokepoint at risk, the Iranians are achieving global economic and security impacts, all the while maintaining a (thin) veil of deniability.

REIMAGINING OF UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

The U.S. military defines unconventional warfare as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.” [vii] It is worth noting that the Iranians most likely do not concern themselves with this distinction between conventional unconventional warfare. Regardless, as unconventional warfare is defined as the use of proxy forces to disrupt a hostile government, then privateering can arguably be considered a form of unconventional warfare exercised by a maritime insurgent force.

But what matters more than academic characterizations are the strategic effects thereof. Maritime interdiction of shipping, regardless of conventional or unconventional means, can be an extremely effective strategy, capable of bringing a superpower to its knees. The strategy of blockade, effectively the maritime version of siege warfare, can be effective but requires a large naval force. [viii] An interdiction strategy is best employed when supplies must transit chokepoints, and achieves a similar effect as a blockade but for significantly less cost, force size, and risk. As exemplified by the recent accomplishments of the Houthi raiders, leveraging a proxy force to do the dirty work of attacking and seizing merchant shipping can offer enormous strategic advantages.

THE CHINESE ACHILLES HEEL

$3.5 trillion of shipping travels through the Strait of Malacca annually aboard approximately 94,000 ships.[ix], [x] On these vessels travel 30% of all globally-traded goods and 23.7 million barrels of oil per day (in 2023). Two-thirds of China’s maritime trade volume must transit the Strait, along with 97% of its seaborne crude oil imports.[xi], [xii] Around 10% of that amount comes from Iran and another 7% from Russia. Dark Fleet[xiii] passage makes up an additional sizable but unknown portion of Chinese imports, driven by recent international sanctions on oil exports from these two countries. To say shipping through the Strait of Malacca presents a strategic vulnerability for China is an understatement of existential proportion.[xiv]

MAKE PRIVATEERING GREAT AGAIN

The opportunity here should be fairly obvious. If the United States requires a point of leverage over China, the Strait of Malacca presents a prime option. Should U.S.-China relations deteriorate so far as to result in open conflict, shipping destined for China will certainly be considered a vulnerable strategic center of gravity.

The question is the how. Interdicting merchant shipping through the Strait is not an optimal task to give to the U.S. Navy Pacific fleet, which numbers about 200 ships.[xv] In a shooting war with China, the majority of those ships will be deployed to support combat operations elsewhere, most likely either offensively against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and in defense of Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and the U.S. equities and installations in theater. The U.S. Navy would not be able to reallocate a sizable portion of its fleet to an interdiction mission, nor accept the risk to force of operating in such confined waters. This is especially true as of those 200 U.S. ships, there is a reasonable expectation a significant portion will be removed from action in the opening days of a shooting war with China. Nor would it be good politically for the U.S. Navy, champion of navigational freedom, to be seen openly seizing civilian ships with gray-hull destroyers.

Strategically, this presents the U.S. Navy with the same challenge the Founding Fathers faced – how to attack the enemy’s strategic vulnerability of maritime shipping with a constrained naval force. The answer at the time of America’s founding was for Congress to outsource privateers via Letters of Marque. The same holds true today. The strategy of privateering offers the U.S. significant leverage over the most critical chokepoint in China’s Belt and Road, which in turn would put the Chinese economy, energy supply, and war production capacity at risk, all while preserving and protecting the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s ability to maximize the application of its combat power.

PRIVATEERING IN TOTAL DETERRENCE

The privateering strategy offers an intriguing and inexpensive option to expand U.S. Naval power through asymmetric means to hold Chinese supply routes at risk in wartime. In addition to providing an additional strategic option in wartime, the act of building such a capability before the outbreak of hostilities serves as a potent deterrent as well. Effective deterrent strategies do not seek to apply force against points of enemy strength, but rather to points of vulnerability. It is not the fear of opposing strength that dissuades, it is the calculation of unacceptable repercussions. If an actor feels adequately defended against their adversary’s strength, the deterrent value of that strength is significantly diminished. Similarly, the more time an actor is given to prepare against a static deterrent capability, the less effective that deterrent will be as the actor finds ways to mitigate it.

This is where asymmetric deterrent strategies can prove so valuable. Asymmetric strategies offer a means to exploit an adversary's specific weaknesses and vulnerabilities in cost-effective and flexible ways. They leverage flexible, targeted impacts to create significant psychological uncertainty and deterrence through unpredictability, complicating the adversary's strategic calculations and stretching an adversary's resources and attention. By avoiding direct, large-scale confrontations, asymmetric approaches minimize the risk of escalation and enable controlled engagement, which is crucial in maintaining stability while also preserving the more symmetric force.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Concept for Competing advocates “expanding the competition into new areas will also deter adversaries, potentially forcing them to divert scarce resources away from more threatening areas.”[xvi] Therefore, the Joint Staff seems aligned with the benefits offered by a strategy that proposes to create such a strategic dilemma for the Chinese. Any campaign that seeks to interdict Chinese maritime trade through the Bay of Bengal, Andaman Sea, and the Strait of Malacca would force the PLAN to reallocate a large percentage of their available naval force to escort duty, effectively eliminating that force from supporting combat operations. This reallocation would have the additional benefit of decreasing the force strength that the U.S. Navy would have to contend with. As Sun Tzu said, a wise commander should “Appear at points which the enemy must hasten to defend; march swiftly to places where you are not expected."[xvii]

The Chinese are keenly aware of the vulnerability of the Strait of Malacca. They are taking steps to mitigate the risk by establishing naval bases in Cambodia and the South China Sea[xviii] and investing in a proposed 90km land bridge across the Thai peninsula.[xix] These measures will take decades to complete. In the meantime, a campaign to establish a low-cost maritime interdiction force to hold Chinese supply chains at risk could take only a few years.

HOW TO BUILD A PRIVATEER ARMADA

Unlike in the Age of Sail, the United States does not have an available source of experienced and capable mariners to whom Letters of Marque could be issued. Such a capability must be built preemptively and deliberately. Should war break out with China, it will be too late to develop a low-cost asymmetric capability to hold Chinese shipping through the Strait at risk – and such a lucrative and cost-effective strategic option will be forfeited.

Civilian and paramilitary mariners from the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Bangladesh are potential candidates for recruitment. Not all these nations will permit preemptive training of privateers on their shores. Should the time come, the US could consider leveraging a direct and localized communication campaign to advertise a willingness to pay maritime bounties. For those nations that would support hosting a privateer force, U.S. Special Operations Forces are ideally suited to lead the training.

By U.S. Code, U.S. Special Operations Command is tasked with conducting unconventional warfare activities, and the command was built in part for this specific purpose.[xx] U.S. Special Operations Forces also have well-established and extensive training relationships with many of these partner nations. However, the skills provided in these training programs are largely carried over from decades past that prioritized counter-terror and direct action tactics. In a war with China, these skill sets will prove to be of limited use for U.S. partner forces. U.S. Special Operations Command should modernize the training programs provided for U.S. allies and partners, particularly those in the Indo-Pacific region. The skills U.S. trainers provide to those nations should support and align with a larger unconventional warfighting strategy employable in both great power competition and great power warfighting.

One of the more pressing changes Special Operations Command should make to these programs should be to prioritize tactical maritime interdiction and seizure training. Special Operations trainers should help partner nations develop not only military capabilities but also help build reserve fleets of private paramilitary mariners. In a time of war, these reserve fleets could be leveraged by U.S. partners to augment host nation maritime logistics, transport, and enforcement capabilities. They can also serve as privateers in waiting, signaling to Chinese decision-makers the existence of a credible asymmetric threat that requires only a letter of authorization from the U.S. Congress to wreak havoc on the entire Chinese economic system.

CONCLUSION

Privateering is a dormant capability enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for a reason. It is a highly effective asymmetric strategy that can be leveraged to hold an adversary’s critical maritime trade routes at risk while simultaneously preserving and protecting U.S. naval power. The U.S. leveraged privateers to great effect in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and should consider doing so again in contingency planning for a war with China. Maritime shipping through the Strait of Malacca presents a lucrative strategic vulnerability to the Chinese economy, presenting a deterrent option that should not be ignored.

Training a regional private maritime interdiction capability requires relatively little investment, a mere fraction of the $120 billion cost to build and maintain a single aircraft carrier.[xxi] But building such a force does require time, strategic foresight, and a deliberate investment of training resources.

In this case, time is the critical factor. One tenant of Special Operations is that they cannot be created after emergencies occur. Without preemptive action, the U.S. will lose both this deterrent leverage and the asymmetric warfighting option. U.S. Special Operations Forces are well-suited and well-positioned to build this capability, as they already possess all necessary resources, authorities, relationships, and capabilities. But those available assets must be redirected to better use to build asymmetric, irregular, and unconventional capabilities that are useful for the road ahead, not the road behind.

A war with China would inevitably be global and cross-domain, spanning trade markets, space access, civilian infrastructure, and cyber systems. Just as the U.S. experienced in the Atlantic in the last total war, maritime shipping in a war with China would again present a lucrative target. The U.S. therefore has three strategic options with how to affect enemy maritime supply routes: ignore it, try to regular naval forces, or find ways to outsource. A privateering strategy may sound comical up front, but when analyzed, offers a very serious option that policymakers and planners should consider as the U.S. prepares to fight and deter as an underdog in a war with China.​

NOTES

 [i] United States Constitution, Article I § 8, clause 11. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/#I_S8_C3

[ii] James Madison, “No. 41: General view of the powers proposed to be vested in the union.” The Federalist, New York, January 19, 1788. https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-41-50 (accessed June 27, 2024).

[iii] Frederick C. Leiner, “Yes, Privateers Mattered.” U.S. Naval Institute, March 2014. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2014/march/yes-privateers-mattered (Accessed June 27, 2024).

[iv] “Declaration Respecting Maritime Law.” Paris, April 16, 1856. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/assets/treaties/105-IHL-1-EN.pdf (accessed June 27. 2024).

[v] United Nations, “United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” November 16, 1994. https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/closindx.htm (accessed June 27. 2024).

[vi] Courtney Bonnell and David McHugh, “How are Houthi seizures in the vital Red Sea shipping lane impacting global trade?” The Times of Israel, December 14, 2023. https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-are-houthi-seizures-in-the-vital-red-sea-shipping-lane-impacting-global-trade/ (accessed June 27, 2024).

[vii] Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Joint Publication 1-02: Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.” Washington D.C., November 8, 2010, as amended through February 15, 2016. https://irp.fas.org/doddir/dod/jp1_02.pdf. (accessed June 27. 2024).

[viii] For example, during the American Civil War, the Union implemented a comprehensive blockade of Confederate ports, known as the “Anaconda Plan.”

[ix] Thomas Dent, “The Strait of Malacca’s Global Supply Chain Implications.” Institute for Supply Management, November 21, 2023. https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/news-publications/inside-supply-management-magazine/blog/2023/2023-11/the-strait-of-malaccas-global-supply-chain-implications/#:~:text=The%20volume%20of%20trade%20that,third%20of%20all%20worldwide%20trade. (accessed June 27. 2024).

[x] World Economic Forum, “These are the world's most vital waterways for global trade.” February 15, 2024. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/worlds-busiest-ocean-shipping-routes-trade/#:~:text=Around%2094%2C000%20ships%20pass%20through,of%20all%20traded%20goods%20globally. (accessed June 27. 2024).

[xi]U.S. Energy Information Administration, “World Transit Chokepoints.” Updated June 24, 2024. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints (accessed June 27, 2024).

[xii] U.S. Energy Information Administration, “China Analysis.” Updated November 14, 2023. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/CHN (accessed June 27, 2024).

[xiii] Aaron Bazin, “The Dark Fleet: A Glimpse into the Shadowy World of Illicit Shipping.” Strategy Central, July 3, 2024. https://www.strategycentral.io/post/the-dark-fleet-a-brief-glimpse-into-the-shadowy-world-of-illicit-shipping?postId=5c5a4691-fe7a-4380-b396-b511646dc500 (accessed July 5, 2024).

[xiv] Maurice K. DuClos, “Duc’s Notes on U.S. Proxy Warfare over Taiwan,” unpublished manuscript, March 10, 2022.

[xv] U.S. Pacific Fleet, “About Us.” https://www.cpf.navy.mil/About-Us/ (accessed June 29, 2024).

[xvi] Joint Staff, “Joint Concept for Competing.” Washington D.C., February 10, 2023, p.v.; as published by Small Wars Journal on February 26, 2023, p. vi. https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/joint-concept-competing?utm_source=pocket_saves (accessed June 17, 2024).

[xvii] Sun Tzu, “The Art of War.” Chapter 6: Weak Points and Strong. https://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html (accessed June 30, 2024).

[xviii] Craig Singleton, “Mapping the Expansion of China’s Global Military Footprint.” Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2023. https://www.fdd.org/plaexpansion/

[xix] Pichayada Promchertchoo and Rhea Yasmine Alis Haizan, “Analysis: Thailand’s proposed land bridge project easier than Kra Canal idea, but steep challenges await.” Channel News Asia, October 20, 2023.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/thailand-srettha-thavisin-land-bridge-project-port-malacca-strait-canal-3860941 (accessed July 3, 2024).

[xx] US Code, Title 10 – Armed Forces, section 167 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title10/pdf/USCODE-2011-title10-subtitleA-partI-chap6-sec167.pdf

[xxi]Brandon J. Weichert, “U.S. Navy's New Ford-Class Carrier: How to Waste $120 Billion.” The National Interest, May 9, 2024. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-navys-new-ford-class-carrier-how-waste-120-billion-209857 (accessed July 5, 2024).

2. To counter China, NATO and its Asian partners are moving closer under US leadership

I am sure the propagandists with the axis of dictators will have a field day with the headline at least.

As an aside, this week in Mongolia I heard a Chinese scholar describe Northeast Asia as a Northern Triangle (China, Russia, and north Korea) and a Southern Triangle ( ROK, Japan, and US). And of course he went on to say that it is the Southern Triangle that is responsible for raising tensions in the region with all their exercises.

A question is what effect will the US election have on these alliances and security relationships?

Excerpts:

America’s top diplomat said the U.S. has been working to break down barriers between European alliances, Asian coalitions and other partners worldwide. “That’s part of the new landscape, the new geometry that we’ve put in place.”

Countries with shared security concerns are strengthening ties as competition escalates between the United States and China. Washington is trying to curb Beijing’s ambition to challenge the U.S.-led world order, which the Chinese government dismisses as a Cold War mentality aimed at containing China’s inevitable rise.

...

“The fact that the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific alliances are structured around a clear anchor — U.S. military power — makes them more cohesive and gives them a strategic edge as compared to the sort of interlocking partnerships that bind China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” Simon wrote in a commentary last week on War On the Rocks, a defense and foreign affairs website.

To counter China, NATO and its Asian partners are moving closer under US leadership

BY  DIDI TANG

Updated 12:07 PM GMT+8, July 9, 2024

AP · July 9, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the third year of the war in Ukraine, NATO is set to deepen relations with its four Indo-Pacific partners, which, although not part of the military alliance, are gaining prominence as Russia and China forge closer ties to counter the United States and the two Koreas support opposing sides of the conflict in Europe.

The leaders of New Zealand, Japan and South Korea for the third year in a row will attend the NATO summit, which starts Tuesday in Washington, D.C., while Australia will send its deputy prime minister. China will be following the summit closely, worried by the alliance’s growing interest beyond Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

“Increasingly, partners in Europe see challenges halfway around the world in Asia as being relevant to them, just as partners in Asia see challenges halfway around the world in Europe as being relevant to them,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week at the Brookings Institution.

America’s top diplomat said the U.S. has been working to break down barriers between European alliances, Asian coalitions and other partners worldwide. “That’s part of the new landscape, the new geometry that we’ve put in place.”

Countries with shared security concerns are strengthening ties as competition escalates between the United States and China. Washington is trying to curb Beijing’s ambition to challenge the U.S.-led world order, which the Chinese government dismisses as a Cold War mentality aimed at containing China’s inevitable rise.

On Monday, Beijing responded angrily to unconfirmed reports that NATO and its four Indo-Pacific partners are expected to release a document laying out their relationship and ability to respond jointly to threats from cyberattacks and disinformation.

Lin Jian, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, accused NATO of “breaching its boundary, expanding its mandate, reaching beyond its defense zone and stoking confrontation.”

The war in Ukraine, which has pitted the West against Russia and its friends, has bolstered the argument for closer cooperation between the U.S., Europe and their Asian allies. “Ukraine of today may be East Asia of tomorrow,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told the U.S. Congress in April.

The U.S. and South Korea accused Pyongyang of supplying Russia with ammunition, while Russian President Vladimir Putin visited North Korea last month and signed a pact with leader Kim Jong Un that envisions mutual military assistance.

South Korea and Japan, meanwhile, are sending military supplies and aid to Ukraine. The U.S. also says China is providing Russia with machine tools, microelectronics and other technology that allow it to make weapons to use against Ukraine.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will bring to Washington “a strong message regarding the military cooperation between Russia and North Korea and discuss ways to enhance cooperation among NATO allies and Indo-Pacific partners,” his principal deputy national security adviser, Kim Tae-hyo, told reporters Friday.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said discussions would “focus on our collective efforts to support the rules-based system.”

The partnership does not make NATO a direct player in the Indo-Pacific but allows it to coordinate with the four partners on issues of mutual concern, said Mirna Galic, senior policy analyst on China and East Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace. For example, she wrote in an analysis, they can share information and align on actions such as sanctions and aid delivery but do not intervene in military crises outside of their own regions.

The NATO summit will allow the United States and its European and Indo-Pacific allies to push back against China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, according to Luis Simon, director of the Centre for Security Diplomacy and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

“The fact that the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific alliances are structured around a clear anchor — U.S. military power — makes them more cohesive and gives them a strategic edge as compared to the sort of interlocking partnerships that bind China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” Simon wrote in a commentary last week on War On the Rocks, a defense and foreign affairs website.

Beijing is worried by NATO’s pivot to the east, said Zhu Feng, dean of the School of International Studies at Nanjing University in eastern China. Beijing has insisted that NATO not interfere in security affairs in the Indo-Pacific and that it should change its view of China as a strategic adversary.

“NATO should consider China as a positive force for the regional peace and stability and for global security,” Zhu said. “We also hope the Ukraine war can end as soon as possible ... and we have rejected a return to the triangular relation with Russia and North Korea.”

“In today’s volatile and fragile world, Europe, the U.S. and China should strengthen global and regional cooperation,” Zhu said.

NATO and China had little conflict until tensions grew between Beijing and Washington in 2019, the same year the NATO summit in London raised China as a “challenge” that “we need to address together as an alliance.” Two years later, NATO upgraded China to a “systemic challenge” and said Beijing was “cooperating militarily with Russia.”

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand attended a NATO summit for the first time, where statements noted the geopolitical challenges China poses. Beijing accused NATO of “cooperating with the U.S. government for an all-around suppression of China.”

Now, Beijing is worried that Washington is forming a NATO-like alliance in the Indo-Pacific.

Chinese Senior Col. Cao Yanzhong, a researcher at China’s Institute of War Studies, asked U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last month whether the U.S. was trying to create an Asian version of NATO by emphasizing partnerships and alliances. They include a U.S. grouping with Britain and Australia; another with Australia, India and Japan; and one with Japan and South Korea.

“What implications do you think the strengthening of the U.S. alliance system in the Asia-Pacific will have on this region’s security and stability?” Cao asked at the Shangri-la Dialogue security summit in Singapore.

Austin replied that the U.S. was simply working with “like-minded countries with similar values and a common vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Beijing has its own conclusion.

“The real intent of the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy is to integrate all small circles into a big circle as the Asian version of NATO in order to maintain the hegemony as led by the United States,” Chinese Lt. Gen. Jing Jianfeng said at the forum.

___

AP researcher Chen Wanqing in Beijing contributed to this report.

AP · July 9, 2024

3. NATO Summit Puts Biden’s Fitness Under a Microscope

NATO Summit Puts Biden’s Fitness Under a Microscope

President faces a pivotal test in three-day event that opens Tuesday

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/biden-nato-summit-age-fitness-8fa809ed?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Lara Seligman and Catherine Lucey

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Updated July 9, 2024 12:26 am ET

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg meeting with President Biden last month. PHOTO: SAUL LOEB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

WASHINGTON—The White House once hoped the NATO summit that opens Tuesday would showcase President Biden’s leadership of the trans-Atlantic alliance and his differences with Donald Trump. Instead it has become a pivotal test of his fitness for a second term.

A solid performance during the three-day gathering of North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders could help shore up his candidacy, reminding voters of his support for the 75-year-old military partnership that his predecessor regularly attacked. Another stumble like his debate against Trump last month could only intensify calls for the 81-year-old commander in chief to exit from the presidential race. 

“He has absolutely no room for any sort of mistakes, any sort of trip-ups,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The sort of gaffes that have become pretty common for Biden and just a factor of who he is as a person and as a president are now going to be seen by European leaders as a broader question of suitability.”

Biden will open the summit with remarks Tuesday, followed by a day of meetings and a dinner at the White House for NATO leaders on Wednesday and a press conference with reporters on Thursday. He’ll also hold bilateral meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. 

U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said Monday that she was confident of the president’s abilities, having briefed the president three weeks ago about the summit. “He ended up peppering me with loads of questions that were tough to answer,” she said. “I don’t have concerns.”

Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, briefed the president in advance of the summit. PHOTO: ROD LAMKEY/ZUMA PRESS

But the president’s words will be parsed for any slip-ups or mistakes, as will his stamina, after he struggled during the 90-minute debate to deliver coherent answers. A subsequent interview on ABC did little to ease anxieties. 

James Townsend, a senior adviser at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, said of Biden’s debate performance: “There are gonna be a couple of elephants in the room and that is one of them.”

Asked about Biden’s fitness for the job on Friday, a senior administration official touted the president’s record and longstanding trans-Atlantic relationships. 

“Foreign leaders have seen Joe Biden up close and personal for the last three years. They know who they are dealing with, and you know, they know how effective he has been,” the senior administration official told reporters during a Friday call, noting that the president has backed NATO and “stood up to [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin’s unprecedented aggression against Ukraine.”

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby argued that Biden didn’t need to reassure allies following the debate. “We’re not picking up any signs of that from our allies at all,” he said Monday. “Quite the contrary, the conversations that we’re having with them in advance, they are excited about this summit. They are excited about the possibilities.”

Kirby also said that there would be announcements this week on deterrence capabilities as it relates to Ukraine and the entire alliance. He also said there would be announcements on the defense industrial base and on Ukraine’s path to NATO in the future.

Despite a massive damage-control effort by the White House, including the rare TV interview, Biden is facing pressure to end his re-election bid. At least 10 House Democrats have issued public and private calls for the president to drop out, joining a chorus of donors and party officials expressing concerns. Those cries could get louder this week with lawmakers back in Washington for the first time since the debate. 

White House Says Biden is Not Being Treated for Parkinson’s

White House Says Biden is Not Being Treated for Parkinson’s

Play video: White House Says Biden is Not Being Treated for Parkinson’s

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden has seen a neurologist three times as part of three annual physicals—most recently in February—and that there has been no finding of Parkinson’s. PHOTO: ELIZABETH FRANTZ/REUTERS

So far, the president has been defiant in the face of criticism, issuing a letter Monday and calling in to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to argue that he had the support of voters and that he was committed to staying in the race. A recent Wall Street Journal survey found 80% of voters believe Biden is too old to run for a second term.

Biden cited his foreign policy record as a reason he should remain his party’s nominee. 

“I expanded NATO. I solidified it,” Biden said on MSNBC. “I made sure that we’re in a position where we have a coalition of people of nations around the world to deal with China, with Russia. With everything that is going on in the world. We’re making real progress.” 

Some NATO leaders aren’t convinced. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski issued a warning for Biden on the social-media platform X after the debate:

“Marcus Aurelius was a great emperor but he screwed up his succession by passing the baton to his feckless son Commodus (He, from the Gladiator). Whose disastrous rule started Rome’s decline,” Sikorski wrote. “It is important to manage one’s ride into the sunset.”

The NATO summit will run Tuesday through Thursday. PHOTO: JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg dodged repeated questions about Biden’s health and abilities during a July 5 press conference. 

“I have had and continue to have a very good working relationship with President Biden, and I welcome his very strong personal commitment to the alliance and the leadership on Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said. 

Biden’s debate performance has prompted America’s allies to question whether they now have to prepare for the ever more likely scenario of a second Trump presidency. Europeans are increasingly on edge about what a Trump return means for NATO, given the former president’s frequent criticism of the trans-Atlantic alliance.

At this week’s summit, NATO leaders are likely to reaffirm the long-term goal to bring Ukraine into the alliance. Trump, by contrast, blamed Western promises to bring Ukraine into the alliance for provoking Russia to invade the country in the first place. During his debate with Biden, Trump said that if he were elected in November he would have the war settled before he even took office on Jan. 20. He didn’t provide details.

The contrast between the views of Trump and Biden will be on sharp display.

“Everything the president does right now, every moment is make or break,” said Heather Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund. “For the country and for U.S. national security, the president needs to have a strong performance.” 

Dan Michaels contributed to this article.

Write to Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com and Catherine Lucey at catherine.lucey@wsj.com

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the July 9, 2024, print edition as 'Biden Has ‘No Room’ for Mistakes at NATO Summit'.

4. Asia’s New ‘Game of Thrones

Excerpts:

Armchair American strategists shouldn’t get too excited here. These emerging tensions don’t mean that the Sino-Russian partnership is breaking up. But the glue that holds Russia, China and their fellow revisionists together is their common fear of American power and liberal ideology. As America turns inward and democracy retreats, that glue weakens, and we are getting a preview of the rivalries that would erupt among these allies and partners if American power were to disappear.

It has happened before. Early in the 1950s China and the Soviet Union were close partners. But in the 1960s when America was bogged down in Vietnam and torn by civil and political dissent at home, the two countries parted ways. By 1969 China and the Soviet Union were fighting tank battles along their disputed boundary, and Mao Zedong would ultimately embrace a partnership with Richard Nixon to balance Moscow.

Today’s Sino-Russian spats aren’t as serious as the 1960s Sino-Soviet rift. But nothing is eternal in world politics, and there are unexpected opportunities as well as grave dangers in the new world disorder taking shape. In our age of geopolitical competition, Americans need to study the “Game of Thrones” afoot across Asia. Like it or not, we are part of the game.

Asia’s New ‘Game of Thrones’

As U.S. power recedes, Russia and China compete for regional advantage.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/asias-new-game-of-thrones-authoritarian-revisionists-strategy-f99e8eb4?page=1

By Walter Russell Mead

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July 8, 2024 4:58 pm ET

Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, June 28, 2019. PHOTO: SPUTNIK/REUTERS

North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders are flocking to Washington, but their summit isn’t the most important thing going on this summer. Neither is the Democratic Party crisis over President Biden’s debate performance. Events in Asia, where Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have all made high-profile trips, are driving world developments. The center of global politics has shifted to the Indo-Pacific. What happens in the Eurasian heartland matters more to world politics and American interests than anything in the Atlantic world.

That makes world politics harder for most Americans to read. Authoritarian states like China, Russia, Vietnam and North Korea conceal their domestic political struggles behind veils of secrecy and censorship. Democratic countries like India, Indonesia and Japan are so complex and so culturally different from the U.S., that even well-traveled and well-read Americans can struggle to follow developments there.

As we reprogram ourselves from Euro-obsessives to Indo-Pacific mavens, there’s a lot to be learned by studying Eurasian leaders. Because so much power is concentrated in them, their summits are often more consequential than Western diplomacy’s photo-op gabfests. The recent spate of Indo-Pacific summits has been no exception. Mr. Putin visited North Korea and Vietnam in June. Mr. Xi was in Central Asia last week, and, as NATO leaders gathered in Washington to celebrate the alliance’s 75th birthday, Mr. Modi was in Moscow for consultations with Mr. Putin.

Mr. Putin’s visit to East Asia and Mr. Xi’s travel to Central Asia point to emerging tensions in the China-Russia partnership that is reshaping the world. For Mr. Putin, his journey to the East was an international and a domestic success. Internationally, the agreement with North Korea assures a continuing flow of weapons and reportedly personnel for the war in Ukraine. Domestically, the sharpest criticism Mr. Putin faces from Russian nationalists is that his confrontation with the West transforms Russia into a client of China. By deliberately stepping on China’s toes in the Far East, Mr. Putin sent a message both to Beijing and to critics at home: Russia remains an independent great power and has no intention of becoming a Chinese vassal.

China wasn’t thrilled with Mr. Putin’s visits to its two neighbors. Beijing sees North Korea as a nuisance and wants to control it; Russia values North Korea’s potential as a regional disrupter and wants to enhance its independence from China. Beijing has territorial disputes with Vietnam in the South China Sea and wants Hanoi to accept Chinese hegemony. Russia sees a strong and independent Vietnam as a healthy check on Chinese power.

China doesn’t take slights lightly. Mr. Xi’s visit to Central Asia was, in part, tit for tat. Mr. Putin’s goal of recreating the Russian Empire means reabsorbing the Central Asian republics into a Moscow-led federation. That isn’t China’s plan. Chinese investments in infrastructure are reorienting the region toward trade with Beijing, and a statement by Mr. Xi and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev last week signaled another stage in the process. They will work jointly to increase the capacity of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, allowing goods from China to move westward on a route that sidelines Russia.

The Russo-Chinese alliance is a strategic nightmare for India, and Prime Minister Modi follows every twist and turn in the relationship with keen interest. He has no doubt had some interesting conversations during his time in Moscow.

Armchair American strategists shouldn’t get too excited here. These emerging tensions don’t mean that the Sino-Russian partnership is breaking up. But the glue that holds Russia, China and their fellow revisionists together is their common fear of American power and liberal ideology. As America turns inward and democracy retreats, that glue weakens, and we are getting a preview of the rivalries that would erupt among these allies and partners if American power were to disappear.

It has happened before. Early in the 1950s China and the Soviet Union were close partners. But in the 1960s when America was bogged down in Vietnam and torn by civil and political dissent at home, the two countries parted ways. By 1969 China and the Soviet Union were fighting tank battles along their disputed boundary, and Mao Zedong would ultimately embrace a partnership with Richard Nixon to balance Moscow.

Today’s Sino-Russian spats aren’t as serious as the 1960s Sino-Soviet rift. But nothing is eternal in world politics, and there are unexpected opportunities as well as grave dangers in the new world disorder taking shape. In our age of geopolitical competition, Americans need to study the “Game of Thrones” afoot across Asia. Like it or not, we are part of the game.

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Replicator’s goals of drone deployment and business development process change are both worthy objectives. But given the Pentagon's antiquated culture, is two years enough time to procure more hard power faster? PHOTO: DEPT. OF DEFENSEAppeared in the July 9, 2024, print edition as 'Asia’s New ‘Game of Thrones’'.

5. 12 people to keep an eye on at the NATO summit

12 people to keep an eye on at the NATO summit

Politico

A guide to some of the most interesting characters in Washington this week planning for the future of the alliance.

Illustration by Claudine Hellmuth/POLITICO (source images via AP and Getty)

By Paul McLeary, Philipp Fritz, Stefan Boscia, Kyle Duggan, Laura Kayali and Thorsten Jungholt

07/09/2024 05:00 AM EDT

This week, leaders and diplomats from NATO’s 32 member states are descending on muggy Washington, where the alliance’s founding treaty was signed 75 years ago. Expect long days filled with discussions about arming Ukraine, ramping up weapons production, deterring Russia and confronting China.

These leaders will also likely push their agendas outside the conference rooms — appearing on more than a few panels and mingling with journalists and politicians inside their well-defined security bubble — in hopes of reaching agreements that benefit both the alliance and their own constituents.

The summit comes amid particularly volatile changes: the power-shifting French elections; a new government — and leaders — in Britain; the potential return of a President Trump; and now, questions about the political future of President Joe Biden. Joining the crowd will be several well-known figures, many of whom represent the changing tides of power across the globe right now. Some are newer to the world stage, while a few will be looking for their next challenge. Read more about key figures to keep an eye on below:

North America’s defense chiefs

Pushing their priorities — while their bosses are still in office

Lloyd Austin — Even if Joe Biden wins in November, tradition suggests Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would likely step down soon after the election, following four years of dealing with international crises in Afghanistan, Ukraine and the Middle East, and with tensions with China remaining high. This will likely be one of the last major international events he attends before the November presidential election.

Austin has led on maintaining the international coalition that has been arming and supplying Ukraine, and his steady hand has buttressed the often chaotic international scene, with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that grind on with no end in sight. While Austin has chaired the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, he has been somewhat open to NATO playing a larger role in coordinating Ukraine military aid, a nod to the Pentagon chief’s other pressing issues in the Indo-Pacific, where China is conducting its own military buildup.

Bill Blair — Bill Blair, Canada’s defense minister, has only been in the job for a year, but he’s turned heads with his frankness about the dire state of Canada’s military, publicly fretting about aging vehicle fleets, waning capabilities and what he’s called a recruitment “death spiral.” He’s also recounted his uphill battle trying to convince the Cabinet and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office to increase Canada’s defense spending.

Blair, a former Toronto police chief, is heading into the summit with a delegation facing pressure over Canada failing to meet its NATO spending commitments through 2030. Ottawa has poured its diplomatic efforts into bolstering support for Ukraine, but political success at this summit would also mean leaving without being singled out and raked over the coals for being a NATO free rider.

Great Britain’s delegation

New to their roles, but ready to dive in

Keir Starmer — Keir Starmer’s whirlwind journey from being one of the U.K.’s top lawyers to prime minister took him less than a decade. He entered parliament in 2015, after an esteemed career as a human rights lawyer and then director of public prosecutions, and became leader of Britain’s Labour Party in April 2020.

He has dramatically revived Labour’s electoral fortunes in the July 4 election, after the party suffered its worst defeat in nearly 100 years in 2019. Starmer has been elected with a large majority in parliament after bringing the party back to the center ground of politics and promising change from a chaotic and unstable period of government under the Conservatives. Unlike Labour’s last election winner, Tony Blair, Starmer is more of a buttoned-down technocrat in the Olaf Scholz mold. He certainly does not hit the soaring rhetorical heights of Blair or Boris Johnson, and has often been chided in Westminster for being “boring.”

Starmer has promised broad continuity from his predecessors on foreign and defense policy. He is committed to supporting Ukraine in the same vein as Johnson and Rishi Sunak, while also pledging to increase defense spending to 2.5 percent of GDP “when [fiscal] conditions allow.”

David Lammy — David Lammy was just 27 when he was elected to parliament in 2000 and is one of the country’s most well-known Labour politicians. He was chiefly known in Britain for being a vehement anti-Brexit campaigner from 2016 to 2019 and a vocal opponent of Donald Trump. He has since been reincarnated as Keir Starmer’s diplomat-in-chief, who often talks about injecting Britain’s foreign policy with “progressive realism.”

Lammy used his time as shadow foreign secretary to make deep contacts within key foreign governments, which has included multiple meetings with U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan. He has also secured meetings with a number of figures close to Trump — like J.D. Vance and Mike Pompeo — and has reportedly made a very good impression with the GOP nominee’s team. He recently said Trump was “misunderstood” on foreign policy, after branding him in 2017 a “racist, Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizer.”

The French delegation

Pushing global goals with little domestic support

France’s President Emmanuel Macron will be looking for strong commitments for Ukraine at the NATO summit. But he has found himself in an awkward position: After calling a snap election in France, he and his centrist coalition lost ground to far-right and far-left parties, which made significant gains in the National Assembly on Sunday. It’s still unclear how Macron can form a governing coalition among the center, left and far right, none of which have a majority in the assembly.

The left-leaning alliance New Popular Front, which came first, is divided on defense issues. Left-wing France Unbowed, which won the most seats among the New Popular Front, shares EU-skeptic, NATO-skeptic views with the far-right National Rally and opposes the French president’s positions on Kyiv, such as sending troops if needed, threatening to dull the impact of his voice at the summit.

Many questions also remain about the rest of the French delegation, as the summit starts less than 48 hours after the elections. Macron’s prime minister has offered to resign, but it’s unclear who will take his place — meanwhile the defense minister is also likely to be replaced, too — putting Macron in a significantly weakened position both at home and on the world stage.

NATO leadership

Preparing for a new world

Benedetta Berti — After more than 15 years in academia, think tanks and NGOs, Benedetta Berti joined NATO in 2017 to lead the policy planning team for the secretary-general. Over the past six years, she has provided the secretary-general with strategic advice and new ideas for the alliance, including on climate change, security and partnerships. She led the design of the NATO 2030 policy agenda — which set the priorities for NATO’s adaptation to the future of war and introduced new initiatives on issues like resilience, defense innovation and engagement with the Indo-Pacific.

She also managed the drafting of the 2022 Strategic Concept, NATO’s key strategic document, resetting the alliance for a more volatile and contested world, including by addressing, for the first time in the alliance’s history, the challenge posed by China.

The Ukrainians

Not technically in the club, but waiting on an invite

Dmytro Kuleba — Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has been front and center in Ukraine’s incredibly effective outreach to partners in the West. But his biggest challenge lies ahead: getting Ukraine into the NATO alliance.

That invitation won’t be offered at the Washington summit, but there is a movement to stitch together some of the bilateral security agreements between individual nations and Kyiv that leaders hope to announce at the meeting. Meanwhile, Kuleba and top Volodymyr Zelenskyy adviser Andriy Yermak will have their hands full at the NATO summit to keep up the momentum for an eventual formal invitation for Kyiv to join, and they are insistent on getting more concrete promises this year than at the NATO summit in Lithuania last summer.

Kuleba has also been at the forefront of successfully pushing the European Union to use the interest gained from frozen Russian assets to fund Ukrainian reconstruction and weapons purchases — which would be a major coup.

Rustem Umerov — Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov has kept a lower profile than his predecessor, who was relieved of duty after a series of corruption scandals last September. Despite shying away from big public statements, Umerov has proven to be an effective operator in overseeing an increasingly organized buildup of Ukraine’s defense industry while coordinating Western military aid.

A major push by the Ukrainians has been to try to set up co-production deals for munitions and defense equipment with U.S. and European defense firms, an effort that has been slow but is beginning to pay dividends. Kyiv has been focused on producing desperately needed artillery ammunition for its war, but it is also looking toward the future by pitching itself as a potential exporter of small drones to allied countries.

There have been some bumps in the road, as Umerov had previously clashed with Ukrainian military leadership over who controls battlefield decision-making and arms production. But the disagreements have generally been resolved without too much public drama — with Umerov ceding some duties to Oleksandr Kamyshin, the minister of strategic industries of Ukraine who now handles some key military modernization programs, while Umerov stays focused on meeting with his foreign counterparts and coordinating between the military and civilian sides of the government.

Central and Eastern Europe

Experts behind the scenes (and some looking for new challenges)

Géza Andreas von Geyer — As German ambassador to NATO, Géza Andreas von Geyr is primarily responsible for carrying out the plans of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. And as former German ambassador to Russia from 2019 to 2023, the 62-year-old is better suited for the task than many other diplomats in the Foreign Office corps, whose Russia policy over the past two decades has often been guided by wishful thinking about the motivations of Vladimir Putin. Von Geyr has also worked in the Federal Intelligence Service and the Defense Ministry, so even before his time as ambassador in Moscow he harbored no illusions about the authoritarian nature of the Putin regime.

He also clearly understands the United States’ demands for Europe: more responsibility for its own defense. According to the diplomat, if the Europeans fulfill their defense spending obligations, that could send a clear message even to a potential second-term President Donald Trump: “The way the security environment is likely to develop, no one can do it alone — and I don’t see any more stable partners for the U.S. than us Europeans.”

Cezary Tomczyk — At 39, Cezary Tomczyk is undoubtedly young for his role as Poland’s deputy defense minister. But he’s been politically active since the age of 25, when he was elected to parliament and served on the defense and EU committees. He also served briefly in the prime minister’s office and as government spokesman.

Tomczyk is a member of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party — the Civic Platform — unlike Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who leads the Polish People’s Party. And also unlike his boss, who is currently serving his first defense role, Tomczyk is considered an expert in the field. While the defense minister has experience in government and is considered a good strategist, Polish security experts have doubts about his competence in the role – making Tomczyk a trusted man for Tusk in the Ministry of Defense.

Klaus Iohannis — When Klaus Iohannis became Romania’s president in 2014 (and again in 2019), the nation hoped he’d deliver on his promise of progress against corruption. That progress never materialized. Neither did his ambitions to become NATO’s next secretary-general. He stirred up things in Brussels quite a bit by submitting his name, apparently without consulting within the alliance beforehand, and he eventually pulled out to clear the way for Rutte.

Iohannis co-founded the Bucharest Nine, a NATO group of Eastern European states formed after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. But that alliance is fracturing. Hungary and Slovakia skipped its June summit, and Bulgaria blocked a unified stance on defense aid to Ukraine, leaving the group without a joint declaration for the first time.

With his term ending this year, Iohannis is still on the hunt for a top international role. Whether he’ll settle for a spot as an EU commissioner — he’s eyeing defense chief — remains unclear.

Tomáš Pojar — Tomáš Pojar, the Czech government’s national security adviser, is widely considered one of the most influential security experts in Prague, with a reputation as a shrewd negotiator and gifted networker. While Pojar has only been in office since 2022, the year his role was created, he has years of previous experience that include serving in the Czech Foreign Ministry and as ambassador to Israel. His political affinity runs in the family: His father, the author and historian Miloš Pojar, was the Czechoslovak ambassador to Israel from 1990 to 1994.

Prime Minister Petr Fiala trusts Pojar so much that he has also made him the lead negotiator for the EU. Pojar’s greatest achievement, however, is probably his influence on Czech foreign policy. He is regarded as the architect of the Czech Republic’s uncompromising support for Ukraine and its close relations with Israel.

Politico

6. AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream

A deep dive into what USSOCOM appears to be doing with AI.

Excerpts:

First introduced to the public in 2019 in an essay by officials from SOCOM’s Joint Acquisition Task Force (JATF) for Small Wars Journal, the hyper-enabled operator (HEO) concept is the successor program to the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) effort that, initiated in 2013, sought to outfit US special operations forces with a so-called “Iron Man” suit. Inspired by the 2012 death of a Navy SEAL during a hostage rescue operation in Afghanistan, TALOS was intended to improve operators’ survivability in combat by making them virtually resistant to small-arms fire through additional layers of sophisticated armor, the latest installment of the Pentagon’s decades-long effort to build a powered exoskeleton for infantry troops. While the TALOS effort was declared dead in 2019 due to challenges integrating its disparate systems into one cohesive unit, the lessons learned from the program gave rise to the HEO as a natural successor.

The core objective of the HEO concept is straightforward: to give warfighters “cognitive overmatch” on the battlefield, or “the ability to dominate the situation by making informed decisions faster than the opponent,” as SOCOM officials put it. Rather than bestowing US special operations forces with physical advantages through next-generation body armor and exotic weaponry, the future operator will head into battle with technologies designed to boost their situational awareness and relevant decisionmaking to superior levels compared to the adversary. Former fighter pilot and Air Force colonel John Boyd proposed the “OODA loop” (observe, orient, decide, act) as the core military decisionmaking model of the 21st century; the HEO concept seeks to use technology to “tighten” that loop so far that operators are quite literally making smarter and faster decisions than the enemy.

“The goal of HEO,” as SOCOM officials put it in 2019, “is to get the right information to the right person at the right time.”

AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream

The US military has abandoned its half-century dream of a suit of powered armor in favor of a “hyper enabled operator,” a tactical AI assistant for special operations forces.

Wired · by Jared Keller · July 8, 2024

The day is slowly turning into night, and the American special operators are growing concerned. They are deployed to a densely populated urban center in a politically volatile region, and local activity has grown increasingly frenetic in recent days, the roads and markets overflowing with more than the normal bustle of city life. Intelligence suggests the threat level in the city is high, but the specifics are vague, and the team needs to maintain a low profile—a firefight could bring known hostile elements down upon them. To assess potential threats, the Americans decide to take a more cautious approach. Eschewing conspicuous tactical gear in favor of blending in with potential crowds, an operator steps out into the neighborhood's main thoroughfare to see what he can see.

With a click of a button, the operator sees … everything. A complex suite of sensors affixed to his head-up display start vacuuming up information from the world around him. Body language, heart rates, facial expressions, and even ambient snatches of conversation in local dialects are rapidly collected and routed through his backpack supercomputers for processing with the help of an onboard artificial intelligence engine. The information is instantly analyzed, streamlined, and regurgitated back into the head-up display. The assessment from the operators’ tactical AI sidekick comes back clear: There are a series of seasonal events coming into town, and most passersby are excited and exuberant, presenting a minimal threat to the team. Crisis averted—for now.

This is one of many potential scenarios repeatedly presented by Defense Department officials in recent years when discussing the future of US special operations forces, those elite troops tasked with facing the world’s most complex threats head-on as the “tip of the spear” of the US military. Both defense officials and science-fiction scribes may have envisioned a future of warfare shaped by brain implants and performing enhancing drugs, or a suit of powered armor straight out of Starship Troopers, but according to US Special Operations Command, the next generation of armed conflict will be fought (and, hopefully, won) with a relatively simple concept: the “hyper enabled operator.”

More Brains, Less Brawn

First introduced to the public in 2019 in an essay by officials from SOCOM’s Joint Acquisition Task Force (JATF) for Small Wars Journal, the hyper-enabled operator (HEO) concept is the successor program to the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) effort that, initiated in 2013, sought to outfit US special operations forces with a so-called “Iron Man” suit. Inspired by the 2012 death of a Navy SEAL during a hostage rescue operation in Afghanistan, TALOS was intended to improve operators’ survivability in combat by making them virtually resistant to small-arms fire through additional layers of sophisticated armor, the latest installment of the Pentagon’s decades-long effort to build a powered exoskeleton for infantry troops. While the TALOS effort was declared dead in 2019 due to challenges integrating its disparate systems into one cohesive unit, the lessons learned from the program gave rise to the HEO as a natural successor.

The core objective of the HEO concept is straightforward: to give warfighters “cognitive overmatch” on the battlefield, or “the ability to dominate the situation by making informed decisions faster than the opponent,” as SOCOM officials put it. Rather than bestowing US special operations forces with physical advantages through next-generation body armor and exotic weaponry, the future operator will head into battle with technologies designed to boost their situational awareness and relevant decisionmaking to superior levels compared to the adversary. Former fighter pilot and Air Force colonel John Boyd proposed the “OODA loop” (observe, orient, decide, act) as the core military decisionmaking model of the 21st century; the HEO concept seeks to use technology to “tighten” that loop so far that operators are quite literally making smarter and faster decisions than the enemy.

“The goal of HEO,” as SOCOM officials put it in 2019, “is to get the right information to the right person at the right time.”

To achieve this goal, the HEO concept calls for swapping the powered armor at the heart of the TALOS effort for sophisticated communications equipment and a robust sensor suite built on advanced computing architecture, allowing the operator to vacuum up relevant data and distill it into actionable information through a simple interface like a head-up display—and do so “at the edge,” in places where traditional communications networks may not be available. If TALOS was envisioned as an “Iron Man'' suit, as I previously observed, then HEO is essentially Jarvis, Tony Stark’s built-in AI assistant that’s constantly feeding him information through his helmet’s head-up display.

“[JATF] is targeting technologies to deliver cognitive overmatch to SOF operators working at the edge in austere and contested environments in coordination with and working through partners and allies,” SOCOM spokesperson James O. Gregory tells WIRED, invoking a general description of the program from the command’s website. “Such technologies will enable tactical teams of SOF operators to intuitively use information made available by next-generation sensors, networks, computing, and communication systems to rapidly build situation awareness. It will also help make timely, well-informed decisions, and take actions inside an adversary's ability to react.”

Enter the Gray Zone

So what does the HEO actually look like today, five years after its introduction into the US military’s tactical lexicon? Given the sensitive (and somewhat notional) nature of the effort, details remain scarce, and SOCOM officials have remained relatively tight-lipped about its progress. But according to SOCOM’s Gregory, the scenario and concept the HEO seeks to address has “evolved” from what officials previously described to reporters at the program’s inception. Indeed, rather than augmenting warfighters deployed to active combat zones, SOCOM officials envision something more like a casually dressed operator vacuuming up information on a busy urban avenue through a Google Glass-like eyepiece and sizing up the situation—in other words, more James Bond than Tony Stark.

“The operational environment for the JATF’s current efforts is in the competition phase of warfare, in permissive or semi-permissive locations,” Gregory says. (A permissive environment is generally defined as an operational environment where US forces have the backing of a host country’s security apparatus, according to the US Army, while a “semi-permissive” environment is potentially hostile and local support is often not reliable.) No longer just another tool for a kinetic assault, the HEO will help elite troops operating in the “gray zone” between peace and conflict.

A SOCOM broad agency announcement—a general request for research and development proposals from the defense industry—published in 2020 and updated as recently as November 2023 details the JATF’s push for advanced technologies designed to boost situational awareness. Those technologies include: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities “without substantial manning or networking resources” (the aforementioned “at the edge”); sophisticated sensors capable of “iris, facial, anatomical measures, gestures, gait, heartbeat, electromagnetic signals, deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA], and microbiome recognition”; low-visibility communications systems; and “data visualizations” that “permit [operators] to receive and intuitively understand networked information from communication, computing, and sensor systems,” among others. In short, the HEO envisions systems that enable the constant, real-time collection and distillation of data into actionable intel that could potentially mean the difference between life and death in an uncertain situation.

Edge Case

Envisioning a suite of aspirational capabilities is one thing; actually building them is another thing entirely. In terms of developing new products, Gregory says that the HEO effort has remained focused on three major experimental technology areas for the last several years: sensing and edge computing, architecture and analysis, and language translation.

“Sensing and edge computing” generally refers to the collection and processing of data from a variety of sources, but it also refers to the specialized computing power that operators need not only to function “at the edge,” but to actually run the AI-enabled software that will form the foundation of the HEO.

“Emerging technologies and solutions in artificial intelligence/machine learning require specialized ‘compute’ hardware, as traditional CPU-based devices are insufficient,” Gregory says. “We aim to feature a manpack device with a graphics processing unit, neural processing engine, and/or tensor processing unit capabilities. This will provide the necessary platform to leverage advanced technologies like language translation and other solutions at the edge, even when disconnected from the cloud.”

That computing power forms the basis for the “architecture and analysis” element focused on the rapid assessment and presentation of data to operators in the field. Gregory tells WIRED that, to support this element, the command has developed “a flexible [system] architecture that fuses data from various sources and media types” into an easily digestible format for operators to assess and act upon.

As for language translation, that’s self-explanatory. SOCOM believes that “prior to any hostilities ever occurring, clear communication can greatly enhance development of our long-term relationships,” Gregory says. “Voice-to-voice translation enables operators to communicate more effectively than relying on often scarce interpreters in the field. Even though many SOF personnel are multilingual, they are frequently deployed to regions with different languages or dialects.”

In line with these experimental technology areas, SOCOM has reportedly concentrated on six immediate lines of product development, per C4ISRNet: the “operator-worn kit” that includes both sensors and onboard computer processing power; application development resources; a unique, mission-agnostic system architecture; the “human-machine interface” that’s generally envisioned as a digital head-up display; a product called “information realization” that likely involves the clear presentation of data; and beyond-line-of-sight (BLoS) communications designed to keep troops in contact with their commanders (and each other) in satellite-denied environments.

According to Gregory, the command has gradually rolled out a handful of fresh capabilities from the HEO effort in recent years. In 2021, SOCOM announced that two products—a BLoS communications system and an unspecified “integrated situational awareness tool”—were transitioning into official programs of record, as Janes reported at the time. Gregory confirmed to WIRED that the BLoS system consists of “a steerable gimble antenna system that enhances the functionality” of the command’s SOF deployable nodes, a family of advanced satellite communications systems. The spokesperson also confirmed that the situational awareness tool, known as SEEKER, is an app that “enables advisers to build advanced situational awareness, thereby allowing them to select actions with an eye toward the broader situation rather than just the immediately apparent problem.” It’s unclear if the latter is related to the “automate the analyst” effort the command kicked off in 2020 to provide operators with an autonomous AI assistant.

Then there’s the “visual environment translation” system that’s designed to convert foreign language inputs into clear English in real time. Known overarchingly as the Versatile Intelligent Translation Assistant (VITA), the system encompasses both a visual environment translation effort and voice-to-voice translation capabilities and is “the most mature” of the JATF’s experimental technology areas, according to SOCOM. VITA is essentially “a voice-to-voice translation engine that functions offline on GPU-enabled devices,” Gregory says, small enough to be carried in the field on a laptop-tethered smartphone or wearable device and “engage in effective conversations where it was previously impossible.” And not only has VITA successfully demonstrated Russian, Chinese Mandarin, and Ukrainian language translation capabilities during testing, but the system has even been deployed to two undisclosed theaters of operations already.

“The visual translation component enhances situational awareness by translating video images, such as street signs, graffiti, and other written texts, in real time,” Gregory says. “Operators can use their phone cameras to scan their surroundings and understand foreign languages instantly.”

VITA provides US special operations forces with “a high-quality translation capability that is not reliant on the cloud or local interpreters, thus significantly reducing risk and logistical costs while increasing operational range and effectiveness for USSOF and our partners,” Gregory says. “The JATF is currently working with industry partners to reduce the size of the hardware and transition it into a SOF Program Executive Office for eventual fielding.” (And that language translation may not be restricted to a mobile device for long: According to SOCOM’s fiscal year 2025 budget request published in March, the command is still plowing ahead with head-mounted sensors and an augmented-reality HUD to present these functions right before operators’ eyes.)

Field Work

To US military planners, the HEO concept is promising: According to one Army assessment, the successful adoption of the system could potentially increase operator survivability far beyond that provided by the additional body armor of the TALOS program. But like other potentially revolutionary technology ventures, there’s certainly the possibility that HEO could end up a science fiction dream that collapses under the weight of its own technical complexity. And there’s no guarantee that operators will embrace the new technology seamlessly in the first place: Although VITA has shown operational promise, it’s unclear if other HEO products will prove intuitive enough to actually augment operators in the field rather than burden them with some complicated newfangled system. As Heinlein put it so aptly in Starship Troopers: “If you load a mud foot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped—say with a stone ax—will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier.”

Perhaps, like TALOS, the promise of a tactical AI assistant like Tony Stark’s Jarvis sidekick may prove simply too ambitious for military engineers to realize in a fully formed product. But even if the HEO effort ends up only fielding, say, the VITA language translation tool, it will still represent a major boost in capabilities for US special operators deployed abroad. The day is slowly turning into night, but American commandos own the night and, with the help of the HEO, will do so well into the next conflict.

Wired · by Jared Keller · July 8, 2024

7. Erik Prince is Wrong for Secretary of Defense

Erik Prince is Wrong for Secretary of Defense

By Morgan Lerette

July 09, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/09/erik_prince_is_wrong_for_secretary_of_defense_1043179.html?mc_cid=5562743452&mc_eid=70bf478f36

“If you want peace, prepare for war” was written by General Vegetius 1,600 years ago as he watched the Roman military deteriorate in a time of peace. This phrase should set the priorities of the next Secretary of Defense (SecDef). They must prepare to wage war while working to avoid it.

In his recent article, Stuart Scheller states the person for the job is the founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince. As a former Blackwater employee, I vehemently disagree. First, privatizing war may be more efficient, but I doubt it is more effective. Second, we need a SecDef who views war as a last resort, not one who pounds the drums of war like a heavy metal drummer.

Mr. Scheller makes the case that the military must be run like a corporation to gain efficiency and lethality. The problem is we have tried this before. On September 10^th, 2001, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a former successful CEO, made a speech promoting the privatization of the military to save money, gain efficiencies, and reduce bureaucracy. He had a mandate to transform the military. Twenty-four hours later he could be seen looking at a map of Iraq, salivating at the prospect of invasion. The mandate to transform the military was tossed away when its leadership decided to wage war. 

Mr. Rumsfeld chose efficiency over efficacy when invading Iraq. 130,000 troops, the same number used on D-Day to take a beach, stormed Iraq to take the entire country. The mission was to get to Baghdad and “cut the head off the snake” instead of taking and holding land. In doing so, a vast number of Iraqi soldiers and weapons were left unchallenged. These were later used by the Sunni insurgency in Fallujah and Ramadi. Had the U.S. military slowed the invasion and fought the Iraqi Army, the insurgency would have had fewer men and materiel which could have mitigated the need for the Marines to fight later on in these cities.

Erik Prince is the next Donald Rumsfeld. In recent comments, Prince has suggested that the United States could have used Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in Afghanistan to win the war and has proposed colonizing Africa. He yearns for conflict and has a readymade answer for it: use private contractors. Any conflict under his watch would use PMCs in the name of efficiency. This would include everything from cooks, vehicle maintenance, and hired guns (like me) because companies can allegedly do these jobs cheaper. There are two problems with this. First, we tried it in Iraq and Afghanistan—it did not work. Second, it outsources the morality which comes with combat operations.

The military is governed by lawful orders and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). PMCs are governed by neither. You would be hard-pressed to figure out which laws apply to civilians in combat roles in foreign lands. As an example, when I worked for Blackwater, we were told we had “diplomatic immunity” with the black Department of State passport to prove it. We were not governed by the UCMJ or the laws of Iraq. Until the former Blackwater employees of Raven 23 were prosecuted under U.S. federal law, which ignored due process and the chain of custody of evidence, no one knew which laws applied to PMCs. This is the legal ambiguity Erik Prince and politicians need to address when using PMCs in combat. 

Finally, the costs of war cannot be measured in lives and dollars. The effects of war last much longer, which is why we have the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Private Military Contractors do not receive long-term benefits. Their benefits are frontloaded in the form of pay, and the longer effects of being in combat operations are ignored. The VA, for all its faults, is still a place for veterans to turn. PMCs do not qualify for benefits in the form of medical care, education, or disability compensation like military members. Yet many bear the same external and internal scars of war. I have found no data on the number of PMCs who have committed suicide; I doubt any exists. What I do know is the suicide rate of former Blackwater employees I worked with is much higher than that of the soldiers I served with.

The next SecDef must meet these criteria in this order: first, avoid war; second, prepare the military for the next war; third, do not use PMCs in conflict zones where we are not willing to put soldiers; fourth, if PMCs are hired, define how they will be used and which laws apply, and set up long-term benefits for those who participate.

Erik Prince is not the man for this job.

Morgan Lerette is the author of Guns, Girls, and Greed: I was a Blackwater Mercenary in Iraq. He served in the US Air Force Security Forces, US Army as an Intelligence Officer, and worked for Blackwater in Iraq for 18 months in 2004-2005.

8. China hits back at NATO's 'smears and attacks' ahead of summit

It could also be said that China's "so-called security is at the expense of other countries' security and its actions have brought extremely high security risks to the world and the region."

I heard this talking point more than a few times from our Chinese participants this week.

Excerpts: 

"NATO's so-called security is at the expense of other countries' security and its actions have brought extremely high security risks to the world and the region," foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian told a regular news conference in Beijing.

"China is firmly opposed to NATO's smears and attacks on China, to its willingness to shift the blame onto others, as well as NATO's use of China as an excuse to move eastward into the Asia-Pacific and stir up regional tensions," he said.

China hits back at NATO's 'smears and attacks' ahead of summit

channelnewsasia.com

BEIJING: China lashed out at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) "smears and attacks" on Tuesday (Jul 9) after the defence alliance's chief accused it of supporting Russia's war in Ukraine on the eve of a summit in Washington.

United States President Joe Biden is hosting leaders of the 32-nation transatlantic alliance for three days from Tuesday, as well as the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference ahead of the 75th anniversary summit that their inclusion "demonstrates that our security is not regional, our security is global".

"And that's clearly demonstrated in the war in Ukraine where Iran, North Korea, China are supporting and enabling Russia's illegal war of aggression against Ukraine," Stoltenberg said on Monday, according to a NATO transcript.

China's foreign ministry took aim at the defence group, which was founded in 1949 to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.

"NATO's so-called security is at the expense of other countries' security and its actions have brought extremely high security risks to the world and the region," foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian told a regular news conference in Beijing.

"China is firmly opposed to NATO's smears and attacks on China, to its willingness to shift the blame onto others, as well as NATO's use of China as an excuse to move eastward into the Asia-Pacific and stir up regional tensions," he said.

NATO's leaders are gathering in Washington in the shadow of setbacks in Ukraine and electoral headwinds on both sides of the Atlantic.

Biden is fighting for his political life after a disastrous debate against his Republican presidential rival, NATO sceptic Donald Trump.

The star of the summit is set to be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is looking for firm signs of support even though NATO will not be extending his country an invitation to join the bloc.

Source: AFP/rk

channelnewsasia.com

9. Russia under fire at UN over Ukraine strikes

As it should be for its brutality.

Russia under fire at UN over Ukraine strikes

channelnewsasia.com

UNITED NATIONS: Russia came under fire at the UN Security Council on Tuesday (Jul 9) after Kyiv's allies called for an emergency meeting in the wake of deadly strikes by Moscow.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 38 people across Ukraine were killed - including four children - and 190 wounded in the wave of nearly 40 missiles that targeted several towns and cities, damaging medical facilities, on Monday.

"Intentionally directing attacks against a protected hospital is a war crime and perpetrators must be held to account," Joyce Msuya, acting under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, told the emergency meeting.

"These incidents are part of a deeply concerning pattern of systemic attacks harming healthcare and other civilian infrastructure across Ukraine," Msuya added.

Kyiv said a children's hospital was struck by a Russian cruise missile with components produced in NATO member countries, and announced a day of mourning in the capital.

"First Responders attending the scene immediately after the attack found children receiving treatment for cancer in hospital beds, set up in parks and on the street, where medical workers had quickly established triage areas," Msuya said.

Ukrainian ally France's envoy Nicolas de Riviere said "Russia has deliberately targeted residential neighbourhoods and healthcare infrastructure."

"France condemns these flagrant violations of international law, which are yet another entry and note list of war crimes for which Russia will be held accountable," he said.

"ABOMINABLE" ATTACKS

Russia previously claimed the extensive missile damage in Kyiv was caused by Ukrainian air defence systems.

"We continue to insist that we do not strike civilian targets," spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a daily briefing Tuesday.

However, the United Nations said there was a "high likelihood" that the children's hospital in Kyiv suffered "a direct hit" from a missile "launched by the Russian Federation".

Russia currently holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council and its envoy to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, indicated earlier this month he will take a firm line with Ukraine and its Western allies.

As a permanent member of the UN's top security body, Moscow wields a veto which it has used on several occasions to thwart efforts to censure its war in Ukraine.

It initially appeared that Russia would seek to block Ukraine from participating in Tuesday's meeting after Nebenzya said Kyiv had not correctly formatted its letter requesting to participate.

Ukraine could participate "only on condition it was requested by the United States ... we regret that Ukraine cannot act independently ... (and) it has to be led by its sponsor," said Nebenzya.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the deadly Russian strikes in Ukraine as "particularly shocking," his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Monday.

Dujarric said "directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects is prohibited by international humanitarian law and any such attacks are unacceptable. And must cease immediately."

UN rights chief Volker Turk echoed Guterres, calling the attacks "abominable," and saying that "the strikes severely damaged the intensive care, surgical and oncology wards of Okhmatdyt, which is Ukraine's largest children's referral hospital."

Zelenskyy has been urging allies to bolster Ukrainian air defence systems and was expected to renew those calls as a NATO summit kicked off later Tuesday in Washington.

channelnewsasia.com

10.

And do not forget to read the P.S. at the very bottom for some Cold War culture comments.

Excerpts.:

I am older and grayer now. The optimism I felt 30 years ago has dwindled. As NATO’s delegations were arriving in Washington this week, Putin’s forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Russia’s defense ministry issued a typically hazy denial in which it claimed that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. But the Russians have been obliterating civilian targets since the beginning of the conflict—a campaign of atrocities and war crimes—as a way of warning the Ukrainians that if they do not kneel to Moscow, Putin will murder every last one of them, including their children.

NATO at 75 should resolve not only to continue sharing its arsenal with Ukraine but also to rekindle the spirit that led to victory against the Soviet Union. NATO’s ministers should remind the world’s democracies that Moscow’s barbaric expansionism is a threat to civilized human beings everywhere.

Why NATO Still Exists

The democracies must continue their long fight against Moscow’s barbarism.

By Tom Nichols

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · July 9, 2024

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

America is hosting the NATO summit this week. Russia’s bombing of a children’s hospital should remind every member that the Atlantic Alliance must do more for Ukraine.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The problem with coronating Kamala Harris
• The new age of endless parenting
• Good on Paper: Not everyone needs to go to therapy.

The World’s Fight

NATO turned 75 this year, and remains the most powerful and most successful alliance in the history of mankind: It has deterred cataclysmic war, allowed almost 1 billion people to thrive under a shield of peace, and more than doubled its initial size because of the eagerness of so many nations to join it. When the first NATO nations, led by the United States, banded together in 1949, they were trying to stop a group of evil men bunkered in Moscow from threatening the peace of the world. The mission today is the same, as NATO’s 32 members now consider how to deal with another group of evil men in the same city.

NATO’s longevity is cause for celebration; the continued need for its existence is a tragedy.

Once upon a time, it seemed as if NATO might simply dissolve because it was no longer needed (and because no one seemed to care that much about it anymore). “NATO,” the author Jack Beatty wrote in this magazine in 1989, “is a subject that drives the dagger of boredom deep, deep into the heart.” He meant that, during the Cold War, the alliance was mostly a wonky policy area dominated by bureaucrats and military planners. By the time Beatty made his observation, the West’s main worry—how I miss the days when peace seemed to be breaking out everywhere—was no longer that the mighty Reds would conquer Europe, but that the U.S.S.R. would collapse into chaos and war.

Only five months after Beatty wrote those words, ordinary Germans took hammers to the Berlin Wall. Two years after that, the Soviet Union was gone.

I was a young scholar at the start of my career back then. I was teaching my first course in Soviet politics at Dartmouth College when the Wall came down—so much for that syllabus—and the following year, I moved to Washington and took a position working in the Senate for the late John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I expected to be advising him mostly on Soviet arms-treaty issues, but as the world changed, it was a joy to write his 1990 floor statement welcoming German unification.

By 1990, with the Soviet Union about to collapse in defeat, I felt as though I were living in the bright alternate reality of a science-fiction novel. Even when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait that year, I felt as though America and the West were more than up to the task of dealing with new dangers now that the Soviet threat had been defeated.

The idea that NATO would ever need to expand was faintly ridiculous to me after 1991. I was a Reaganite Cold Warrior in my youth, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, I was as eager as any American for an era of peace and reduced defense spending. (I recommended, for example, that Heinz vote against continuing to fund the B-2 Stealth Bomber. Heinz told me as he came off the Senate floor: “I voted to do the conservative thing: save money.” Such Republicans, men and women of consistency and principle, once existed.)

After I left Washington to return to teaching, I wondered if Russia and NATO would end up finding common cause on any number of issues. The entire world was facing growing threats from terrorism, rogue states, and nuclear proliferation. And for a time, Russia and some NATO nations did manage to cooperate and share information. (Even this year, the Americans took the dramatic step of warning Russian authorities of a possible terror attack that turned out to be the dreadful massacre at the Crocus City Hall near Moscow.)

I left Dartmouth for the Naval War College, where I taught military officers from the United States and around the world—including, for a time, a few Russians. I believed that NATO had helped the Western democracies win the Cold War, but I was reluctant to see a return to Cold War thinking about European security. I favored the immediate admission into NATO of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland as a way of stabilizing post-Soviet Eastern Europe and rectifying, as best we could, the pain inflicted on those nations by Moscow in 1956, 1968, and 1980. But other nations, I thought, should join at a much slower pace. America and Russia were, if not friends, at least not enemies, and for years I argued for a closer Russia-NATO-America relationship, an effort that could be undermined by a stampede of new Alliance members.

NATO, slightly more than a decade older than me, marched on toward middle age, as did I. In 1999, the alliance turned 50. I attended an academic conference in Germany devoted to this golden anniversary, and while listening to the discussions, even I started to feel the sharp point of Beatty’s dagger of boredom. NATO, I came to believe, should leave aside its roots as an anti-Soviet alliance and consider adopting the model of a collective-security organization, a group that reacts to aggression from anywhere and has no specific enemies. In this new role, the Atlantic Alliance would try to dampen or prevent wars and genocides where it could, and aid other parties to do so where it couldn’t.

I was finally talked out of all this optimism by the best advocate NATO has ever had in its later years for a larger, more aggressive, and better armed alliance specifically aimed at deterring Russia: a former KGB stooge named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Putin didn’t sway me back to my Cold War roots immediately. When Putin first came to power, I hoped he would be a bureaucrat and workhorse. But he turned out to be a murderous, grubby dictator, a Mafia don at the apex of the gang of thugs who now infest the Russian government.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I admired the Biden administration’s thoughtful restraint. Putin had blundered badly; despite his reputation as a sly, cool Russian spymaster, he is in reality quite emotional and not a particularly adept strategist. (Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer has put it more concisely: “Putin overreaches, and he miscalculates.”) The key for the West in those early months of the war was to help Ukraine survive—something I admit that in the first week or so I thought might be impossible—without accidentally sparking a wider regional or even global war.

Two years later, Ukraine is holding on, and it needs not only more of our weapons but also our permission to use them more effectively. The intelligent American strategy of 2020 has now become vapor-locked, stuck mostly where it was more than a year ago. The United States is sending weapons and better systems—finally—but the U.S. defense, diplomacy, and security establishments need to be jolted back into coordination and toward a more aggressive strategy, especially by lifting now-senseless restrictions on the use of American weaponry. (“Washington,” Pifer wrote to me today, “should allow Ukraine to use US-provided weapons to strike military targets in Russia without restriction.”) Biden’s people can do this, but they need direction from the president; they need to focus on increasing the lethal effect of our aid instead of being paralyzed by abstract theories about controlling escalation.

I am older and grayer now. The optimism I felt 30 years ago has dwindled. As NATO’s delegations were arriving in Washington this week, Putin’s forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Russia’s defense ministry issued a typically hazy denial in which it claimed that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. But the Russians have been obliterating civilian targets since the beginning of the conflict—a campaign of atrocities and war crimes—as a way of warning the Ukrainians that if they do not kneel to Moscow, Putin will murder every last one of them, including their children.

NATO at 75 should resolve not only to continue sharing its arsenal with Ukraine but also to rekindle the spirit that led to victory against the Soviet Union. NATO’s ministers should remind the world’s democracies that Moscow’s barbaric expansionism is a threat to civilized human beings everywhere.

Related:

• The war in Ukraine is the end of a world.
• U.S. allies are already worried about another round of Trump.

Today’s News

1. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “dear friend” during his first visit to Russia since 2022. The meeting appeared to strengthen the strategic alliance between the two countries.
2. Russia issued an arrest warrant for Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. She is charged with participating in an “extremist organization.”
3. Bloomberg Philanthropies, a charitable organization founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, donated $1 billion to Johns Hopkins University to pay tuition and living expenses for the majority of its medical-school students.

Dispatches

• Work in Progress: White-collar work is just meetings now, Derek Thompson writes. It may not be the most efficient way to get things done.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic*

The Particular Ways That Being Rich Screws You Up

By Adelle Waldman

When a certain type of person reaches middle age without having achieved the level of professional recognition or personal happiness they feel they deserve, they’re apt to take a page from sociologists who study poverty and start searching for root causes, the source of what went wrong … All options are on the table—except, perhaps, those that locate the blame within.

For the three unhappy adult siblings at the center of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s exuberant and absorbing new novel, Long Island Compromise, the go-to explanation for the various failures and disappointments that underlie their seemingly successful—successful-ish—lives is an event that is both lurid and tragic.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Conor Friedersdorf: The worst argument in favor of keeping Joe Biden
• The awkward truth about extinction
• Living and breathing in Southern California’s pollution corridor

Culture Break

Vincent West / Reuters

Celebrate. These photos show the annual, nine-day Fiesta de San Fermín, which includes the famous running of the bulls, in Pamplona, Spain.

Watch. Season 3 of The Bear (streaming on Hulu) is more committed to its trauma plot than ever. Sophie Gilbert breaks down how the show is both better and worse for it.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I won’t say the Cold War was fun. (Like many children of my generation, I had nightmares about nuclear war.) But I will say, after years of teaching a course on the popular culture of the era, that it produced some truly unusual moments when light entertainment collided with the most serious things in the world. I do not mean novels such as Fail-Safe and Alas, Babylon, both of which you should read if you’re interested in the Cold War. I mean the nuttiness of a classic movie such as The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, with the magnificent (and young) Alan Arkin in an early starring role, and especially the James Bond series, which were supposed to be popcorn movies but often relied on Cold War devices.

Yes, Bond was mostly fighting crazed supervillains, but usually those Mao-jacketed loons had done something that could cause World War III. In 1967’s You Only Live Twice, Bond’s archenemy, Ernst Blofeld, was hijacking U.S. and Soviet spacecraft; in The Spy Who Loved Me a decade later, Karl Stromberg—an underwater-dwelling Blofeld with webbed fingers, basically—was stealing British, U.S., and Soviet nuclear submarines.

But to get a sense of how something scary could intrude on something fun, watch for the scene in the 1983 Bond flick Octopussy where Bond realizes that a mad Soviet general—Steven Berkoff in full scenery-chewing glory—has planted a nuclear weapon at a circus on a U.S. air base in Germany. (The plot was clearly drawn from the real-life debate in the mid-1980s over stationing U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.) Octopussy isn’t great, but that moment, in which Roger Moore is wearing clown makeup and pleading with an American general to evacuate the base, is a great example of how there was just no getting away from the Cold War, even at the movies.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · July 9, 2024

11. New NATO Command Will Assist Ukraine with Training, Equipment Donations

New NATO Command Will Assist Ukraine with Training, Equipment Donations - USNI News

news.usni.org · by John Grady · July 8, 2024

Ukrainian forces in formation during training in U.K. on Feb. 11, 2024. NATO Image

NATO’s leaders are set to approve a separate command at Wiesbaden, Germany, to coordinate training and equipment donations to Kyiv’s forces, a senior administration official told reporters last week.

The command will have about 700 personnel from NATO countries and partner nations assigned to the center, an alliance news release said. The administration officials, speaking to the press Friday, said the center would increase the interoperability among Ukrainian forces and NATO.

As an example of the drive to make Kyiv’s military more interoperable with NATO’s, the administration official said, “the U.S. for more than a year [have] been training Ukrainians on F-16 platforms,” as have other alliance members.

NATO will also facilitate equipment logistics and provide support through the center to the long-term development of Ukraine’s armed forces, the release added.

Last month, the alliance’s defense ministers approved the motion for consideration at the summit in Washington.

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said recently that creating the center does “not make NATO a party to the conflict, but they will enhance our support to Ukraine to uphold its right to self-defense.”

The administration official said, “the alliance stood up to President [Vladimir] Putin.” He added that 23 of the 32 nations in NATO are spending more than 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their own security, and some members are calling for a 3 percent threshold. Overall, the alliance has boosted its defense spending by more than $180 billion each year since 2020, he added.

At the defense ministers’ meeting last month, Stoltenberg said, “Over the next five years, NATO Allies across Europe and Canada plan to acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft – mostly 5th generation F-35s – and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.”

The center’s creation also could be seen as a means of “institutionalizing” the long-term commitment of Western and Indo-Pacific nations, such as Japan, Korea and Australia, to Ukraine. The support would continue despite changes in administrations as would occur in the United States if Donald Trump is elected and, and changes in governments, as happened in the United Kingdom with Keir Starmer becoming prime minister.

“The long-term effort is to provide a bridge to membership” for Ukraine, the administration official said. He added, “there is a political overlay” to decisions like creating an alliance and multinational center “to help to build Ukrainian future forces.”

The administration official insisted the alliance was stronger than ever with the admission of Sweden to be formally marked in Washington this week. He also cited the North Atlantic Council’s selection of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the next secretary general. He takes office in October.

The official dismissed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s meeting with Putin in Moscow as showing alliance weakness. “We’re convinced [the meeting] will not promote the course of peace.” Hungary now leads the Council of the European Union under its six-month presidential rotation policy. It is also a NATO member.

Orban has often broken with the E.U. and NATO on how the war should end. Orban also has repeatedly called for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to consider conceding territory to the Kremlin as the best way to stop the fighting. In addition, he has barred the shipment of donated weapons through Hungary to neighboring Ukraine. He joined with Turkey in delaying Sweden’s admission to the alliance for almost two years.

Also high on the summit’s agenda will be what steps NATO should take regarding China’s underpinning of Russia’s military-industrial base as the war continues. The official noted Beijing is supplying 90 percent of the microelectronics Moscow’s defense industry needs. It also is supplying other dual use high technologies and precision tools for advanced manufacturing.

“This is creating a strong challenge to our European allies,” the official said. He added that the E.U., Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand will be attending the summit as observers. The E.U. and the four Indo-Pacific U.S. allies will participate in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council to discuss mutual security threats from Russia and China that include building resilience in its armed forces and industrial base, cyber, disinformation campaign and technology transfer.

The official said those nations’ attendance, along with the E.U., show the “variable geography” of U.S. global alliances.

The official said a major announcement of defense industry revitalization and expansion would be forthcoming at the meeting, but did not provide details. Nor did he provide details on new arms, beyond saying air defense systems,” would be sent to Ukraine in the coming months.

Related

news.usni.org · by John Grady · July 8, 2024

12. 82nd Airborne joins 3rd, 10th SF Groups to airdrop test new weapon sights

82nd Airborne joins 3rd, 10th SF Groups to airdrop test new weapon sights

army.mil · July 8, 2024

FORT LIBERTY, North Carolina – Airborne and Special Forces Soldiers here are testing after nightfall, the latest small arms weapon sights.

A SOF Soldier with the 3rd Special Forces Group checks his altitude during the military free fall portion of the Family of Weapons Sights – Individual test. (Photo Credit: Maj. Joshua Cook, Deputy Chief of Tests at ABNSOTD) VIEW ORIGINAL

The 82nd Airborne Division, joined by the 3rd and 10th Special Forces Groups, are in the final stages of testing the Family of Weapons Sights – Individual (FWS-I) for static line and military free fall airborne infiltration.

The FWS-I program will provide Soldiers with thermal enablers (sights) for individual weapons.

“The FWS-I gives Soldiers the capability to see farther into the battlefield, increase surveillance and target acquisition range, and penetrate day or night obscurants,” said Lashon Wilson, a test coordinator for Project Manager Soldier Lethality.

A SOF Soldier with the 3rd Special Forces Group approaches Laurinburg Drop Zone during the military free fall portion of the Family of Weapons Sights – Individual test. (Photo Credit: Yves Saintiche, Contract Photographer, ABNSOTD) VIEW ORIGINAL

“American paratroopers and Special Operations Soldiers are renowned for attacking when and where least expected and almost exclusively at night,” said Staff Sgt. Derek Pattle a Test NCO with the Airborne and Special Operations Test Directorate.

“Conducting forced entry operations during daylight hours leaves paratroopers exposed to enemy ground fire and counterattack during airborne assault,” he added.

“That’s why mastering night vision devices and targeting systems is a critical skill for Army paratroopers and Special Operators and vital to mission accomplishment during forced entry parachute assault.”

A Soldier from 1/325 Airborne Infantry Regiment employs the Family of Weapons Sights – Individual as a standalone optic prior to night target identification testing Fort Liberty, North Carolina. (Photo Credit: Michael Zigmond, ABNSOTD photographer) VIEW ORIGINAL

According to Capt. Joseph Chabries, a Plans Officer at ABNSOTD, the core question for military equipment employed by Army paratroopers and Special Operations regarding is in its survivability.

“’Can the system survive airborne infiltration?’” said Chabries.

“Individual paratroopers as well as vehicles and cargo delivery systems are bristling with technology, which can at times be fragile,” he added.

“Ensuring these systems are both suitable and effective for issue to airborne forces often requires a more technical approach.”

SOF Soldiers with the 10th Special Forces Group prepare to exit an Air Force C-27 aircraft over Maxton, North Carolina during the military free fall portion of the Family of Weapons Sights – Individual test. (Photo Credit: Michael Zigmond, ABNSOTD photographer) VIEW ORIGINAL

Staff Sgt. Dalton Carter, a weapons squad leader with 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division said, “I feel as if this is a step in the right direction for army night vision and lauded the operational features the FWS-I can provide his squad.”

The FWS-I test also exposed many veteran paratroopers to operational testing for the first time.

Sgt. David Brown, a fire team leader in Bravo Company, 1/325 Airborne Infantry Regiment, serving as a test participant during static line testing, said, “I feel like the FWS-I can be a real force multiplier for key leaders during hours of limited visibility or when the battlefield might be obscured.”

During post-drop operations, jumpers assembled for accountability and to ensure all FWS-I’s were fully mission capable by performing a system functions check and collimation using the Mobile Boresight Collimation Station, which is used to evaluate the bore sight retention and repeatability of the FWS-I before and after static line and military free fall infiltration.

The data from the MBCS allows the test team to determine if and how much the boresight reticle on the FWS-I was moved or displaced due to any shock induced from exiting the aircraft, the opening of the parachute canopy, or landing on the ground.

“ABNSOTD is one of the few organizations in the Department of Defense that maintains a bore sight collimation capability and the only mobile system of its kind,” said Mr. Jacob Boll, ABNSOTD’s Operational Research Analyst.

The ABNSOTD instrumentation section is charged with maintaining and employing this unique capability and trained extensively to conduct post-drop weapons testing before beginning operational testing of FWS-I.

Maj. Joshua Cook, Deputy Chief of ABNSOTD’s Test Division described the importance of testing and how it plays into the future of technology in warfare.

“Operational Testing is about Soldiers and ensuring the systems developed are effective in a Soldier’s hands and suitable for the environments in which they train and fight,” Cook said.

~~

About the U.S. Army Operational Test Command:

Headquartered at West Fort Cavazos, Texas, the mission centers on ensuring systems developed deliver optimal performance in the hands of Soldiers and are suitable for the environments in which they train and fight. Through direct feedback from test units and their Soldiers, the command plays a crucial role in refining current and future systems for enhanced military readiness capability.

As part of the U.S. Army Operational Test Command, the Fort Liberty, North Carolina-based Airborne and Special Operations Test Directorate plans, executes, and reports on operational tests and field experiments of Airborne and Special Operations Forces equipment, procedures, aerial delivery, and air transportation systems to provide key operational data for the continued development and fielding of doctrine, systems or equipment to the Warfighter.

army.mil · July 8, 2024

13. Wounded Veterans, Wounded Economy: The Personnel Costs of Russia’s War

Wounded Veterans, Wounded Economy: The Personnel Costs of Russia’s War - War on the Rocks

THOMAS LATTANZIO AND HARRY STEVENS

warontherocks.com · by Thomas Lattanzio · July 9, 2024

Throughout its history, Russia has rarely cared for its soldiers, on or off the battlefield. The Kremlin’s current attempt to do right by its veterans looks to be simultaneously insufficient and unaffordable, destined to leave behind armies of broken men while draining state coffers. After nearly two and a half years of grinding warfare, both Ukraine and Russia have taken horrendous casualties and spent hundreds of billions of dollars. Despite such a price, the conflict is unlikely to end soon, with both sides believing they have more to gain. This price is not just paid on the battlefield. Even if the fighting were to end today, the economic and demographic impact felt by the Russians would be generation-shaping.

Through open source information on the costs of health care and the state of the Russian medical system, alongside historical scholarship and medical publications, we examine the crushing economic damage of the war on Russia from the lens of military personnel. We conclude that the state is logistically, fiscally, and culturally unprepared for the tremendous burden of supporting veterans and their families, presenting serious questions about state capacity going forward.

Above all else, the Russian state has to financially support the families of fallen soldiers in perpetuity. Many of the wounded (to say nothing of the dead) will permanently be out of the workforce, and even those who return to it will require lifelong mental and physical health care. And the numbers of dead or wounded servicemembers will only worsen the negative demographic trends in Russia. These challenges will grow larger as the war continues and the bodies pile up.

Become a Member

Holding aside the long-term implications of the personnel costs of the conflict, one has to appreciate how much the Russian state is currently spending to care for casualties. The one-time costs of compensating wounded and dead soldiers plus their families are very high, in no small part due to recent decrees that promise major payouts to incentivize volunteers. A law passed before the war entitles the family of a soldier who has been killed to 3.3 million rubles as an insurance payment from private insurers, and an additional 5 million rubles from the state. Wounded soldiers are entitled to 3 million rubles, as per a decree from the early days of the invasion of Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has announced a separate 5 million ruble payment to families (this combines the previously mentioned 3 million ruble payout for injury with an additional 2 million in case of death). Every Russian oblast or province provides a separate payment of at least 1 million rubles, with some paying up to 3 million. Combining all of the above, the cost of payouts to the family of a soldier killed in Ukraine would come to at least 14 million rubles at the time of writing, excluding several smaller, long-term payments.

Based on open source estimates from the governments of France and the United Kingdom as of May 2024, the Russians have likely taken around 400,000 casualties, with over 100,000 of those dead. Simple math shows that one-time payments would equate to 900 billion rubles for wounded personnel and at least 1.4 trillion for families of the dead, 2.3 trillion rubles total. This equates to 6 percent of the 2024 budget, a truly staggering amount that will continue to climb.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin, it will not get off the hook with one-time expenses, at least if it wants to provide an adequate level of medical care for veterans. If anything, caring for wounded troops will be more difficult now than in the past; after Afghanistan and Chechnya, care was cheaper than today as the scope of treatment was narrower and the cost of medical equipment, drugs, and labor was lower. Physically, Russia’s wounded are returning with complex, long-term injuries. Russia’s deputy minister of labor himself reported that the majority of disabled veterans have at least one amputation.

Mental wounds may be even more daunting to treat. A 2022 study carried out by researchers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that the total economic cost of post-traumatic stress disorder, society-wide, in the United States was $232 billion in 2018. Approximately 80 percent of those with post-traumatic stress were civilians, while 20 percent were servicemembers. The annual, per-person cost of post-traumatic stress disorder in military personnel and veterans was $25,700 per year, and the same figure was $18,640 per year for civilians. Adjusted for inflation, those same figures would be approximately $32,000 and $23,000 a year.

Applying this research to the Russian case, if we divide these costs by purchasing power parity, which compares different countries’ cost of living, we get an approximate estimate of the cost of post-traumatic stress disorder. The purchasing power parity modifier for Russia is roughly 2.2, meaning that goods and services worth $100 in the United States would cost roughly $45 in Russia. Using this, we estimate the yearly cost of treating a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder in Russia to be approximately $15,000. Assuming the dollar-to-ruble exchange rate remains constant at 90 rubles to the dollar, this would be 1.35 million rubles per year, per individual. If one million soldiers end up serving in the invasion of Ukraine, 500,000 of them could reasonably be expected to acquire some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder based on historical estimates. If so, the estimated yearly cost to the Russian economy of post-traumatic stress disorder among Ukraine veterans would be over 660 billion rubles a year, roughly 2 percent of the 2024 budget.

Holding aside the staggering costs of treating veterans in Russia, there are also significant capacity issues that the Russians are woefully ill equipped to deal with. The number of hospitals in Russia has declined roughly 20 percent since 2012, and there are only 10 veterans’ hospitals in the country. The only one that focuses on psychological rehabilitation has just 32 beds. There will need to be a massive expansion of the Russian military hospital system, or the state risks the collapse of the medical system, particularly in poorer and more sparsely populated areas. It’s unclear where the money and personnel for such an expansion would come from. Yet, if the state does not disburse the required resources, then either Russian veterans or the citizenry will not get adequate medical care. There is no middle ground. Further, Russian policymakers seem unwilling to assess if post-traumatic stress disorder is even an issue, since, according to grassroots veteran organizations and veterans themselves, “no one tests veterans for psychological trauma” and “there are no rehabilitation programs.” Instead of funding central treatment centers, the Russian government is supposed to provide grants to support groups or various programs set up by former soldiers, yet funding is sparse.

The Kremlin ordered the creation of the “Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation” in June 2023, and the organization has reportedly opened branches in several regions, including St. Petersburg. Government claims that the foundation has helped thousands of people seem dubious, as only 3 percent of its budget is dedicated to actually treating psychological ailments. The total first quarterly budget for the foundation was a mere 1.3 billion rubles ($15–$20 million under current exchange rates), for what is supposedly a national organization.

Even when volunteers overcome funding challenges to care for veterans, additional roadblocks have been encountered. For example, there are cases where volunteer medical staff are not allowed into St. Petersburg hospitals, and volunteers must fight the government tooth and nail to distribute aid. This may be part of an attempt to limit the exposure of civilians to the real effects of Putin’s war. Even with government-run organizations, access to aid is held up by rampant incompetence and bureaucracy. The wife of a veteran, seeking help from the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, was told that her amputee husband had to personally appear to file a claim to initiate the process of receiving treatment.

Whether due to a lack of resources or to a view of post-traumatic stress disorder as a personal weakness, it appears highly likely that huge numbers of traumatized veterans will not receive adequate mental health treatment upon their return. This will only be compounded by aspects of Russian society, such as the interrogation of veteran organization medical volunteers, who were summoned by security forces to an investigative committee for “undermining” the Russian Ministry of Defense.

A 2009 study examined those who had endured traumatic experiences during the Yugoslav wars and who had never accessed psychological treatment. The results reveal the drastic impact of untreated trauma on productivity. At the time of the study, respondents universally reported extremely high unemployment. Of the participants who lived in Croatia, 43 percent were unemployed, at a time when the Croatian unemployment rate was under 10 percent. Participants in Serbia reported a 55 percent unemployment rate, those living in the United Kingdom a 50 percent rate, and those in Germany, 85 percent. While it would not be appropriate to say this relationship will be exactly reproduced in Russia, it clearly demonstrates the disastrous impacts untreated post-traumatic stress disorder can have on an individual’s ability to function in society. Traumatized veterans who do not receive care can be expected to have vastly lower employment rates and lean much more heavily on government benefits, further weakening the Russian economy in the decades to come.

While we focused our discussion on the costs of post-traumatic stress disorder in terms of cost of care and lower productivity, there are plentiful cases of other negative effects. For example, up to 60 percent of Soviet veterans of the Afghan war suffered from alcoholism or drug addiction in November 1989. The Serbsky Center estimated in 2003 that 70 percent of veterans from the two Chechen Wars had some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. By the mid-2000s, about 100,000 veterans of “local wars” (primarily Chechnya) were in prison. Using budgetary data taken from Russian journalists, the state would be spending 10 billion rubles a year jailing local war veterans.

Given the precedents set in the Afghan and Chechen wars of ignoring or severely underfunding mental health care, there is a serious possibility that this will be repeated with the invasion of Ukraine. Old attitudes that see mental illness as moral and spiritual weakness likely remain strong among leadership. Such attitudes are very likely to have sway among Russian soldiers, making them less likely to seek out treatment. As we have also noted, the kind of frank and open discussions about the war that are a part of coping with trauma may be seen as undermining public confidence in the military. All this means that if and when money becomes scarcer in Russia (especially if oil prices drop), mental health programs might be early on the chopping block.

The figures here are not exhaustive, and the true costs of veteran care will likely be higher. Even still, they demonstrate the tremendous burden that the war in Ukraine will exact on Russia after the guns go quiet. Treating post-traumatic stress disorder, caring for physically wounded soldiers, and supporting their families will become either a major budget item for decades to come, or a political weakness for the government if it fails to satisfy the expectations of veterans and families. In the long term, heightened expenditures, coupled with unstable revenues, will force the Russian state to make difficult choices.

Become a Member

Thomas Lattanzio is a public service fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies with a concentration in security, strategy, and statecraft. He has served in the U.S. Navy as an enlisted sailor and as a civilian within the federal government.

Harry Stevens is a graduate of the University of Chicago who specializes in Russian affairs and economic history and conducts research with the Center for the National Interest. He has produced Barbarossa: Apocalypse in the East, a popular history podcast, and currently works in AI.

Image: Vadim Savitsky via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Thomas Lattanzio · July 9, 2024

​14. Article 5 with an Asterisk: How a Tailored Application of NATO’s Collective Defense Principle Could Lead to a Sustainable Russo-Ukrainian Armistice

Excerpts:

At first blush, the problem of Ukrainian accession appears to pose a Catch-22: there’s little chance that NATO members would welcome Ukraine to the club until there is a sustainable armistice, but little hope for a sustainable armistice until Ukraine is in NATO.

But this conclusion is unwarranted. NATO’s Article 5 need not present an intractable obstacle to admitting an ally at war. To see why, we must understand NATO’s founding Washington Treaty, how it can be amended to add a casus foederis qualification, and how the introduction of casus foederis qualifications can be balanced against the concomitant loss to NATO’s deterrent value.

...

The Ukraine aid package Congress approved in April will likely enable Ukraine to survive the year. But Putin has powerful incentives to keep fighting beyond this year, including Americans’ declining appetite to fund a war of attrition, a fractious Congress torn between competing priorities, and the prospect of electorally driven and potentially abrupt shifts in policy toward Ukraine.

Zelenskyy will no doubt say all of this at this week’s NATO summit in Washington. While there are strategically defensible reasons for denying his pleas for Ukrainian accession, fear that Kyiv’s accession would necessarily convert Ukraine’s war into our war is not one of them. On the contrary, a carefully cabined accession may be the alliance’s final opportunity to draw red lines in Ukraine that restore peace to Eastern Europe and protect NATO’s eastern frontier for the next seventy-five years.

Article 5 with an Asterisk: How a Tailored Application of NATO’s Collective Defense Principle Could Lead to a Sustainable Russo-Ukrainian Armistice - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Luke J. Schumacher, Spencer Segal · July 8, 2024

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This week, leaders of NATO member states will convene in Washington for a summit commemorating the alliance’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will no doubt renew his plea for Ukraine’s immediate accession to NATO. And US leaders, purporting to speak for the club, will almost certainly rebuff his entreaties.

In an interview this May, President Joe Biden repeated his stance that that he is “not prepared to support the NATOization of Ukraine.” As if to remove any doubt, his ambassador to NATO more recently stated, “Ukraine will not be receiving an invitation to join the alliance this July” at the summit.

There are sound strategic arguments both for and against bringing Ukraine into the NATO fold while it remains at war with Russia, and we take no position here on the ultimate wisdom of doing so. But a major argument against extending the invitation to Ukraine—that the NATO charter’s Article 5 would effectively obligate member states to deploy troops to Ukraine—is misplaced.

Ukraine’s accession to NATO could be accompanied by a limitation on the application of Article 5 to Ukrainian territory. By cabining how NATO’s Article 5 would apply to Ukraine—confining it to a narrower scope than its typical interpretation—Kyiv’s accession may also provide it with the leverage required to broker a sustainable armistice without dragging the rest of NATO into war. NATO’s no-strings-attached commitment to assist attacked members makes it an anomaly among alliances. Its lack of conditions has been a boon to the alliance’s deterrence, but it may be a luxury NATO can no longer afford.

To protect its eastern flank and provide Ukraine with the negotiating leverage it needs to stabilize the region, NATO could do what alliances regularly do: admit Ukraine but carefully specify the casus foederis—that is, the conditions that would trigger its collective-defense obligations to Kyiv. A carefully cabined accession of Ukraine to NATO could achieve a durable settlement to the Russo-Ukrainian War without sacrificing the deterrent value of NATO on which its current members depend. As competition for US dollars, materiel, and attention among allies stiffens, such a settlement is within the US interest, and potentially within NATO’s grasp.

Alternatives to NATO are Unlikely to Achieve and Maintain a Russo-Ukrainian Armistice

At the NATO summit in Vilnius in July 2023, NATO decided not to decide when to invite Ukraine to join the club. The decision to kick the can down the road reflected, in part, members’ uneasiness about bringing in a country at war. If Ukraine joins NATO while the conflict persists, there’s every reason to believe Zelenskyy would immediately invoke Article 5 of NATO’s Washington Treaty, the clause that triggers NATO states to assist an aggressed member.

The United States was reportedly the lead holdout (alongside Germany) on Ukrainian accession in Vilnius. This marked an inversion of the parties’ historical positions. In past proposals for NATO enlargement, several European states opposed US efforts to extend invitations to Georgia and Ukraine. More recently, Turkey and Hungary threatened to spoil attempts to bring Finland and Sweden into the NATO fold before both Nordic countries became members by unanimous consent. In July 2023, however, Biden remained “immovable in his opposition” to inviting Ukraine to join NATO.

What the president did offer, according to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, was a “bridge to NATO” in the form of “the Israel model.” The Israel model refers to the arrangement between the United States and Israel dating back to the administration of President Ronald Reagan, whereby the former pledges its military support to the latter in memorandums of understanding updated every decade or so. Though designated by US law as a “major non-NATO ally,” Israel does not share a mutual defense treaty with the United States, meaning Washington has no obligation to defend Jerusalem when attacked. Because an arrangement along similar lines vis-à-vis Ukraine would ensure material support without risking the lives of US service members, it is attractive to the Biden administration. However, this approach is almost certainly inadequate to bring about an end to Ukraine’s war. This is so for three reasons.

First and most obviously, the “Israel model” is hardly an exemplar of deterrence. The events of October 7, Iran’s concerted airstrikes on Israel in April, and the nonstop barrage of Hezbollah rockets impacting northern Israel reminds us that, for all its merits, US support to Israel has not deterred Iran from waging war against Israel on multiple fronts. This may be because the principal objective of the Israel model is not deterrence. Indeed, the US State Department defines the Israel model’s goal as “helping Israel maintain its Qualitative Military Edge” over its “regional adversaries.”

Second, it is precisely the Israel model’s limited aim—helping Israel maintain its qualitative advantage over its Middle Eastern adversaries—that makes it a poor template for Ukraine. The less than $4 billion the United States provides annually to Israel is reasonably calculated to enable Israel to maintain its military-technological edge during relatively stable times. By contrast, US interests in Eastern Europe cannot be secured with so meager a commitment. Ukraine has no qualitative military edge to maintain, and gaining any such edge over Russia would prove exceedingly more difficult than maintaining Israel’s edge over, say, Hamas, Syria, or even Iran. This strategic difference makes the Israel model a poor guide for the US-Ukraine relationship.

Last, as much as the Israel model underdelivers what Ukraine needs, it also overpromises what Washington can deliver. Ironically, NATO membership may be the more modest and realistic promise. If the Israel model is “the bridge to NATO,” as Biden told Zelenskyy it was, Congress has made clear it is a treacherously creaky bridge. Sustaining the Israel model has depended on a decades-long bipartisan consensus that the United States should aid Israel. Even this previously unassailable consensus is beginning to show cracks, with Congress’s latest vote on aid to Israel dividing Democratic members of Congress.

If Israel cannot reliably depend on the Israel model to receive aid in time of need, how can Ukraine? Ukraine has never enjoyed the kind of bipartisan support that Israel once did. Though fairly robust at the outset of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Republicans’ support for Ukraine aid has waned steadily as the war has progressed. Biden thus cannot credibly promise that Washington will continue to provide the support Kyiv needs to maintain a negotiated settlement with Russia.

To be sure, Ukraine’s accession to Ukraine would also require congressional support. Article 11 of the Washington Treaty provides that its “provisions [shall be] carried out by the Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.” In the United States, this means that a two-thirds majority of the Senate must pass a resolution ratifying Ukraine’s accession. Still, the prospects that the Senate would do so are appreciably better than the chances that a much more fractious House of Representatives will continue to appropriate aid to Ukraine as the war drags on. The Senate, after all, voted 95-1 in favor of admitting Sweden and Finland into NATO in August 2022 and put its overwhelming support behind the April 2024 aid package for Ukraine.

Notwithstanding the Israel model’s inadequacy, the Biden administration proposed it for understandable reasons. Policymakers, professors, and pundits all seem to agree that “accession is not possible as long as war is raging.”

But it is unclear how a sustainable armistice—something Washington badly needs in order to focus resources elsewhere—is possible as long as accession is withheld. Clearly, Ukrainian military capability and America’s “unwavering” commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty proved insufficient to deter Putin’s bid on Kyiv in 2022. Why, then, should we expect Russia to now abide by the terms of a peace deal unless it’s underwritten by a more credible deterrent like NATO’s nuclear umbrella?

At first blush, the problem of Ukrainian accession appears to pose a Catch-22: there’s little chance that NATO members would welcome Ukraine to the club until there is a sustainable armistice, but little hope for a sustainable armistice until Ukraine is in NATO.

But this conclusion is unwarranted. NATO’s Article 5 need not present an intractable obstacle to admitting an ally at war. To see why, we must understand NATO’s founding Washington Treaty, how it can be amended to add a casus foederis qualification, and how the introduction of casus foederis qualifications can be balanced against the concomitant loss to NATO’s deterrent value.

Article 5 Obligations: Legal Terms vs. Strategic Expectations of Compliance

Fueling the tepid approach to Ukrainian membership exhibited at the 2023 Vilnius summit was worry that NATO’s Article 5 mechanism—the trigger that obligates members to assist one another—will make Ukraine’s war our war.

Strictly speaking, however, an invocation of Article 5 compels no such outcome. The rub is that NATO’s credible deterrence arguably does. Although Article 5 does not require that members commit combat forces to aid an attacked ally, the expectation that members will do so substantially raises the costs of attacking NATO territory.

A closer review of the Washington Treaty’s provisions and their historical applications suggests, however, that the Article 5 guarantee, as applied to Ukraine, can be cabined to accommodate Ukraine’s accession without subverting NATO’s deterrence value. Doing so, like all policy decisions, involves tradeoffs, and in this instance, concessions from Ukraine.

Article 5 of the Washington Treaty provides that

an armed attack against one or more [members] . . . shall be considered an attack against them all and . . . if such an armed attack occurs, each of them . . . will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking . . . such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

On the one hand, the plain language of Article 5 permits each country to decide for itself what action it “deems necessary” to effectuate the treaty’s object of restoring and maintaining security. Such action may “includ[e] the use of armed force,” but need not. A member may conclude that what is necessary to restore security today is that which NATO countries are already doing for Ukraine: providing materiel and sanctioning Russia.

On the other hand, a fair reading of the treaty in light of its historical use does suggest that if Ukraine were admitted into NATO without qualification, Kyiv’s Article 5 invocation under present circumstances would create, under international law, binding obligations for members to commit combat forces to Ukraine. On the sole occasion that Article 5 has been invoked—by the United States following the terrorists attacks on 9/11—each NATO member did ultimately contribute troops to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. A NATO member would be hard-pressed, especially after sending troops to assist the US war effort against nonstate extremists in Afghanistan, to argue that what it “deems necessary” to “restore and maintain” regional security is anything short of its “use of armed force.”

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties governs how treaties are interpreted. The convention holds that a treaty “shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning” of its words “and in the light of its object and purpose.” The ordinary meaning of the obligation to “assist the Party . . . so attacked,” both at the time the treaty was ratified by NATO’s founding members in 1949 and today, has usually meant (the threat of) sending combat forces to the victimized ally. This form of assistance was the intent of the parties when contemplating Article 5, and the intent they sought to communicate to adversaries. Indicative of this understanding is Biden’s oft-repeated vow that “we will defend literally every inch of NATO,” or NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg’s similar pledge that members will not merely assist one another, but will “protect and defend every inch of allied territory based on our Article 5 commitment.”

Whatever we may make of Article 5 in the abstract, if Kyiv were admitted to NATO today and invoked the collective-defense clause, both international law and NATO’s credibility would seemingly obligate members to deploy combat forces to Ukraine.

Cabining NATO’s Article 5 Guarantee as Applied to Ukraine

NATO need not accept this all-or-nothing proposition, though. The Washington Treaty contains the tools necessary to accommodate Ukraine’s situation. Article 5 obligations can be delimited geographically and substantively to better specify the casus foederis that would trigger them. Defense pacts, including US bilateral ones, often contain scope conditions. Indeed, NATO is exceptional for the lack of conditions that trigger its collective-defense obligations.

The Washington Treaty’s Article 12 provides a mechanism for amending the treaty. In practice, the only amendments thus far have stemmed from the several protocols announcing that, upon ratification, a new member will join the club. The very first such protocol—announcing the accession of Greece and Turkey—effectively amended Article 6 of the treaty, which defines NATO’s geographic area. The protocol enlarged NATO’s geographic orbit: in addition to “Europe [and] North America” (as well as, originally, “the Algerian Departments of France,” which are no longer within NATO, per an informal amendment), “the territory of Turkey” was now also under NATO’s umbrella. (Because the parties agreed that Greece was in Europe, no wording changes were necessary to effectuate Greece’s accession.)

Since the Treaty can and has been amended to extend NATO’s territorial scope, there is no reason it cannot be used to extend that scope over only part of Ukraine’s territory. In fact, NATO did just that when West Germany acceded to NATO while East Germany remained under Soviet occupation. NATO could likewise bring under its wing all of Ukraine except the areas presently occupied by Russia—the Donbas region and the Crimean Peninsula. The casus foederis that would then trigger NATO’s Article 5 obligations would be an attack against the Ukrainian territory currently under Kyiv’s control.

A geographically delimited Ukrainian accession is not entirely free of risk, of course. First, there is the danger of signaling a de facto concession of territory from Ukraine to Russia. Second, it risks introducing a scheme of tiered membership in NATO, where current members enjoy the full suite of protective benefits over all their sovereign territory while newly admitted states do not. The risks, however, may not only be worth assuming; they might even provide a template for future accessions.

Zelenskyy’s government has continued to define victory as the restoration of Ukraine’s international borders as they stood before Russia’s 2014 invasion. An accession of Ukraine that does not encompass the Russian-controlled areas of the Donbas and Crimea could be viewed by Moscow as NATO’s tacit acknowledgment of Russia’s territorial claims. For three reasons, NATO leaders should nonetheless consider a geographically delimited accession for Ukraine.

First, bringing the territory that Kyiv controls into NATO in no way limits the assistance individual NATO members can provide to help Ukraine prosecute its war in territory outside NATO. Just as those states have aided Kyiv since February 2022, they may continue to do so at their own discretion. The difference is that west of the Russian lines, Ukraine would enjoy the full suite of protections afforded to any NATO member.

Second, NATO as an entity could invest its resources as it deems necessary to protect its territory while individual members commit what they deem prudent to Ukraine’s fight in the contested regions. In hushed tones, leaders of NATO states have expressed concerns that Ukraine’s war aims are less than realistic, maybe even undesirable. Both the Donbas and Crimea have been under Russian occupation for nearly a decade now. Even if reclaimed, the Donbas is neither easily defendable nor all that profitable for Ukraine to retain. Mostly destroyed by Russian brutality and largely populated by Russian loyalists today, retaking the Donbas would require Kyiv to fund a massive reconstruction effort and probably prosecute a protracted counterinsurgency campaign. While Crimea remains key to Ukraine’s economic viability as a state, last summer’s counteroffensive came nowhere near seizing it. The best Kyiv may hope for in the foreseeable future is using long-range fires to deny Moscow’s productive use of it.

Last, trading this territory for a NATO guarantee may be the only way to sufficiently reduce the risk to NATO members to gain their unanimous support to admit Ukraine. A geographically delimited accession could be used by NATO to force an armistice that freezes the current position of Russia’s troops. Alternatively, the geographically limited accession could follow an armistice, freezing the line of Russian troops that Putin would almost certainly unfreeze but for the threat of a NATO reprisal. Either way, NATO would likely need to deploy a sufficiently sizeable tripwire force along Ukraine’s Donbas line of control to make credible its threat to honor Article 5 if Russia violates the armistice.

The second general risk of geographically cabining Article 5 is the precedent set by opening the door to admitting what might be perceived as second-class NATO members. The NATO model has served its members well for nearly eight decades. Change carries risk. But since its inception, NATO has adapted, in ways small and large, to accomplish its mission amid geopolitical change. A NATO policy against admitting militarily contested areas like the Donbas would retain NATO’s core character as a defensive alliance against charges that it intends to provoke aggression. This Ukraine model could be applied elsewhere, too. Among non-NATO European states, Ukraine and Georgia are the most obvious candidates for admission. The sticky point for current NATO members is that in Georgia, as in Ukraine, Russian troops occupy two territorial areas, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Should NATO decide that but for this fact Georgia would be a strategic asset to NATO, the alliance could, under the Ukraine model, admit Georgia, less the Russian-occupied territories. Again, this would reinforce the nature of NATO’s defensive alliance, signaling that it does not acquire new members to join fights, but to establish red lines against future encroachment.

Instead of, or in addition to, a geographic delimitation, NATO could also agree to cabin its Article 5 commitment substantively. That is, the parties could specify the particular adversarial actions that would entitle Ukraine to invoke Article 5. Here, not all incidences of Russian aggression would qualify for Article 5; only those that cross a threshold agreed upon by the members would. Such substantive qualifications would require Ukraine and current NATO members to draw conceptual distinctions between strategic threats, such as a tank column heading toward Kyiv, and nonexistential threats.

There is no precedent for substantive qualifications within NATO, though the Treaty’s Article 4 consultation mechanism has been used to discuss what constitutes an attack on a member. But several US defense pacts with non-NATO allies are explicitly or implicitly qualified in this way. For example, South Korea occasionally faces North Korean aggression along the Korean Demilitarized Zone and in the Han River estuary. Though the United States has almost thirty thousand tripwire troops stationed on the Korean Peninsula and a treaty obligation to defend Seoul from Pyeongyang’s attacks, Washington does not react to all such nuisances by declaring war on the North Korean regime.

Limiting Ukraine’s invocation of Article 5 would mean Kyiv receives different treatment than other NATO members. But whether NATO qualifies its Article 5 obligation to Ukraine geographically or substantively, such a decision need not be permanent. If, down the line, Ukraine successfully regains some or all of its territory, NATO members can decide whether to add that territory to that already covered by Article 5 by going through the same process that would govern the initial, limited accession. This process would allow NATO to assess the risks and benefits of throwing its full Article 5 weight behind defending that regained territory.

Some, including even alliance experts, worry that specifying the casus foederis that would trigger NATO’s Article 5 obligations would undermine NATO’s deterrence value. It is the assumption, the argument goes, that the alliance’s determination to “defend literally every inch of NATO” with all its conventional (and even nuclear) might that has deterred adversaries from violating allied territory. But deterrence has always been a function of the three Cs: an actor’s capability, its credibility, and importantly, its communication. Accordingly, by communicating exactly what NATO would defend in Ukraine (and by implication, what it would not), cabining NATO’s commitment to Ukraine need not diminish the alliance’s deterrence value.

In fact, research shows that not only is it “very common for treaties to specify limits to obligations,” but that those limits are often key to effective deterrence. Treaties are often limited to particular adversaries, to conflicts in particular theaters, or even to a specific ongoing conflict. In the history of alliances, NATO remains unique for its lack of obligatory limits. For nearly seventy-five years, NATO has been an all-weather, deterrence-driven, “open” alliance.

This has been a virtue. Few institutions have done more than NATO to provide regional stability and prosperity. But research also indicates that when an alliance specifies the casus foederis that would give rise to its activation, those “alliance contracts” successfully deter aggression precisely because they “are specific enough to provide information to a potential attacker about when assistance is likely to be forthcoming.” Being specific about when and where NATO would fight in Ukraine would communicate clear red lines to Russia and perhaps make those lines more credible.

A Closing Window of Opportunity

The Ukraine aid package Congress approved in April will likely enable Ukraine to survive the year. But Putin has powerful incentives to keep fighting beyond this year, including Americans’ declining appetite to fund a war of attrition, a fractious Congress torn between competing priorities, and the prospect of electorally driven and potentially abrupt shifts in policy toward Ukraine.

Zelenskyy will no doubt say all of this at this week’s NATO summit in Washington. While there are strategically defensible reasons for denying his pleas for Ukrainian accession, fear that Kyiv’s accession would necessarily convert Ukraine’s war into our war is not one of them. On the contrary, a carefully cabined accession may be the alliance’s final opportunity to draw red lines in Ukraine that restore peace to Eastern Europe and protect NATO’s eastern frontier for the next seventy-five years.

Luke J. Schumacher is a JD candidate at Stanford Law School, a PhD student in political science at the University of Virginia, and a combat veteran. Follow his work on his website.

Spencer A. Segal is a JD candidate at Stanford Law School. He holds an MA in public policy and a BA in economics, both from Stanford University. He previously was a missionary in the West African nations of Togo and Benin.

Image credit: President of Ukraine

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Luke J. Schumacher, Spencer Segal · July 8, 2024

15. Avoiding War in the South China Sea

Excerpts:

Washington also would be wise to use this crisis as an opportunity to expand its visible presence in the region. Its recent ramping up of combined maritime patrols with allies in the South China Sea has been a good start and should be built upon. Additional U.S. freedom of navigation operations in other areas of the South China Sea could redirect Beijing’s focus away from Second Thomas Shoal. Investing in the capabilities of Southeast Asian partners such as Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam to operate more effectively in the maritime domain could also serve as a timely signal of U.S. displeasure at Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea.

As fraught as the current moment feels, it is not the first time that China, the Philippines, and the United States have edged close to the precipice. There was a period of similarly elevated tensions in 2016 around Scarborough Shoal, a remote rock in the South China Sea roughly 120 miles off the coast of the Philippine island of Luzon. In that instance, leaders engaged directly and privately, and cooler heads prevailed.

Much has changed since 2016, but one thing remains the same: for all concerned, there is far more to lose than gain from a spiraling conflict. The situation at Second Thomas Shoal is a struggle between China and the Philippines that has been managed for decades and will need to be managed for many years to come. The United States’ best option for limiting risk is to chart a middle path between succumbing to a military test of wills and putting pressure on the Philippines to give in to Chinese pressure. Conflict is possible, but far from preordained.

Avoiding War in the South China Sea

How America Can Support the Philippines Without Fighting China

By Ryan Hass

July 9, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Ryan Hass · July 9, 2024

Throughout this year, American officials have been privately and publicly signaling to their Chinese counterparts that the United States is firmly committed to upholding its alliance commitments to the Philippines. The message is intended as a warning not to test the limits of American tolerance for Chinese attempts to obstruct access to Second Thomas Shoal, a submerged reef in the South China Sea where a grounded Philippines vessel, the Sierra Madre, serves as an outpost for Filipino soldiers. In May, Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. delivered a keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, warning that if a Filipino citizen is killed by a willful act, it would be “very, very close to what we define as an act of war,” which could compel the Philippines to invoke the1951 mutual defense treaty with the United States.

Such rhetoric has not stopped Beijing from trying to prevent the Philippines from resupplying the Sierra Madre. The Philippines has successfully reinforced the outpost in recent months. But on June 17, the Chinese Coast Guard intentionally collided with a Philippine resupply boat. Chinese servicemen wielded axes, machetes, and improvised spears, and a Filipino sailor lost a finger in the ensuing skirmish. A video of the confrontation went viral. Chinese and Philippine vessels continue to operate close to one another. The risk remains high that an incident could result in the death of a Filipino soldier, potentially triggering the U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty and bringing American and Chinese forces to the brink of conflict.

To manage through this current moment, Washington will need to operate with clarity on its goals. For Washington, success is upholding the credibility of its alliance commitments, avoiding conflict with China, and preventing Chinese occupation of Second Thomas Shoal. Achieving these results will require Washington to weigh every policy decision against whether it does more to prevent or provoke a crisis. Second Thomas Shoal is a strategic challenge with a military dimension. It is not a military problem with a military solution. Washington must resist pressure to frame this issue as a test of wills between the United States and China and instead leverage Beijing’s bullying at Second Thomas Shoal to strengthen its relationships in the region.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS

Second Thomas Shoal carries tremendous symbolic weight for the United States, China, and the Philippines. At present, there is little hope of compromise. Washington views the struggle over Second Thomas Shoal as threatening the credibility of its security commitments, which underpin the United States’ standing in Asia and around the world. If Washington fails to stand firm in defense of the Philippines, the thinking goes, then other allies and security partners will question the United States’ reliability and begin to hedge.

For Manila, Second Thomas Shoal has become a national symbol of the country’s determination to stand up to Chinese bullying and uphold international law. In 2016, a tribunal established under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea ruled that China cannot claim sovereignty over Second Thomas Shoal and sovereign rights over it are vested in the Philippines. Second Thomas Shoal sits on the Philippine continental shelf and falls within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Manila is determined to prevent the Chinese from building an artificial island at Second Thomas Shoal, as Beijing previously did at Mischief Reef, a low-tide elevation with similar legal standing as Second Thomas Shoal.

Beijing believes it has exercised restraint by refraining from dislodging the Sierra Madre and from employing the Chinese navy to use force in obstructing Philippine resupply efforts. Beijing alleges that Manila has reneged on a gentlemen’s agreement with the administration of Rodrigo Duterte on limits to the resupply efforts, but the current government under Marcos has responded that no such agreement exists. Chinese officials further insist that the Philippines would not be so reckless in confronting China over Second Thomas Shoal were it not for the urging and military backing of the United States.

Given the conflicting imperatives of the three major participants, the United States will need to walk a tightrope. It cannot allow itself to be seen as passive in the face of Chinese pressure against its treaty ally. On the other hand, Washington must preserve its position as defender of the status quo, thereby sharpening the contrast with China’s revisionist attempts to alter the situation at Second Thomas Shoal.

THE MIDDLE WAY

U.S. policymakers must resist the urge to turn Second Thomas Shoal into a contest of wills between the United States and China and urge Beijing to do the same. The more the standoff becomes publicly framed as a showdown between major powers, the more likely that nuclear-armed rivals could find themselves in a nose-to-nose confrontation over a rusting boat.

Instead, Washington should use every available diplomatic channel with Beijing to clearly lay out its objective to uphold the status quo at Second Thomas Shoal and to insist that Beijing reciprocate in kind. Such mutual clarity of intentions will shrink space for miscalculation. At the same time, Washington should make clear that the more China pressures the Philippines, the more the United States will feel obliged to provide countervailing support for its ally. Washington’s immediate focus is on limiting risk that the current struggle could spiral into an armed conflict. Washington should press Beijing to reduce its public and physical pressure on Manila and instead engage directly with Philippine counterparts to manage tensions. A meeting held between Chinese and Philippine diplomats on July 2 was an encouraging step in this direction.

U.S. policymakers must also be publicly supportive and privately firm with their Philippine counterparts. Washington should privately counsel Manila against unilateral uncoordinated actions that could lead to escalation. It should make clear that it supports direct talks between Manila and Beijing to de-escalate tensions. Washington also should encourage Manila to refrain from publicizing every encounter between Philippine and Chinese forces near Second Thomas Shoal. China is not embarrassed by evidence of its heavy-handedness when it comes to its assertions of national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The more international media highlight every cat-and-mouse encounter between Chinese and Philippine forces, the more public pressure there will be on leaders in Beijing, Manila, and Washington to demonstrate resolve. This heightened public scrutiny and accompanying nationalist fervor will make diplomacy more difficult.

Charting a middle path between aggression and acquiescence holds the best hope of limiting the risk of a conflict in the South China Sea.

Washington should enlist as many concerned countries as possible to privately counsel Beijing against further escalation. Greater engagement by more actors, especially the Southeast Asian states that Beijing seeks to pull closer, will make the current dispute seem less like a binary clash between the United States and China. It could also compel China’s political leaders to take a more active role in managing Chinese actions around Second Thomas Shoal, rather than leave major decisions to military and paramilitary leaders, who may feel compelled to act in ways that heighten risk of dangerous escalation and be less inclined to explore off-ramps.

Additionally, successful negotiations among South China Sea claimants over their own maritime disputes will sharpen the contrast between responsible statesmanship and China’s bullying behavior. Washington should express support for efforts by Vietnam and the Philippines to negotiate their maritime boundaries and encourage other Southeast Asian claimants with disputes to follow suit.

Crucially, Washington policymakers will need to tune out U.S. security hawks who want to force a confrontation with China by using American military assets for resupply missions to Second Thomas Shoal. Proponents of this approach argue that because China is not yet prepared for direct conflict with the United States, Beijing surely would back down if it realizes that Washington is ready to use force to protect its ally. Washington would be unwise to test the theory that China is a paper tiger that would back down in the face of concerted American action. Such reckless logic underestimates Chinese President Xi Jinping’s own political imperatives; although Xi may wish to avoid direct conflict with the United States, he is even more determined to avoid being perceived as weak or soft at home.

But de-escalation need not mean capitulation. Washington must not push Manila to yield to Chinese demands at Second Thomas Shoal, as this would amount to doing Beijing’s bidding. If Washington were to suggest to Manila that it abandon or weaken its position at Second Thomas Shoal, such a message would likely leak to the media, resulting in a loss of confidence among the United States’ allies about its willingness to stand up to China, to say nothing of the lasting damage it would do to the U.S.-Philippine alliance.

COOLER HEADS

Charting a middle path between aggression and acquiescence will require subtlety and patience. It will not yield any moment of triumph. And yet, it holds the best hope of limiting the risk of a conflict involving the United States and China in the South China Sea.

To deter China, Washington must make clear to Beijing that it will respond to Chinese aggression by boosting its support for Manila. To that end, the United States must maintain a strong, persistent military presence in the region. Washington should also continue to invest in military facilities in the Philippines that Manila has allowed the United States to access under the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. It also could announce plans for additional high-level delegations to expand economic investment in the country, building on Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s trade delegation in March.

Washington also would be wise to use this crisis as an opportunity to expand its visible presence in the region. Its recent ramping up of combined maritime patrols with allies in the South China Sea has been a good start and should be built upon. Additional U.S. freedom of navigation operations in other areas of the South China Sea could redirect Beijing’s focus away from Second Thomas Shoal. Investing in the capabilities of Southeast Asian partners such as Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam to operate more effectively in the maritime domain could also serve as a timely signal of U.S. displeasure at Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea.

As fraught as the current moment feels, it is not the first time that China, the Philippines, and the United States have edged close to the precipice. There was a period of similarly elevated tensions in 2016 around Scarborough Shoal, a remote rock in the South China Sea roughly 120 miles off the coast of the Philippine island of Luzon. In that instance, leaders engaged directly and privately, and cooler heads prevailed.

Much has changed since 2016, but one thing remains the same: for all concerned, there is far more to lose than gain from a spiraling conflict. The situation at Second Thomas Shoal is a struggle between China and the Philippines that has been managed for decades and will need to be managed for many years to come. The United States’ best option for limiting risk is to chart a middle path between succumbing to a military test of wills and putting pressure on the Philippines to give in to Chinese pressure. Conflict is possible, but far from preordained.

• RYAN HASS is a Senior Fellow, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center, and Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the U.S. National Security Council.

Foreign Affairs · by Ryan Hass · July 9, 2024

16. The Right Way for America to Counter Russia in Africa

Excerpts:

In some cases, as when its vital interests are at stake, the United States should push back against Russia through sanctions, diplomacy, pressure campaigns, or intelligence operations. For the most part, however, Washington should take advantage of the fact that Moscow is often its own worst enemy. The bargain the Kremlin typically strikes with Africa’s autocrats is that it will protect their regimes, provide hired guns, and organize flashy disinformation campaigns in exchange for a lucrative stake in extractive industries.

Russian help often backfires. In Burkina Faso and Mali, for example, military-led governments have killed scores of civilians and engaged in horrific human rights abuses, sometimes with the help of Russian mercenaries. Such brutal tactics will only exacerbate the security problems that are engulfing parts of the Sahel. In Sudan, Russia is supporting both sides of a bloody civil war, thus inflaming the violence, in a bid to get permission to build a base on the Red Sea. In time, the most self-serving of African leaders will probably realize that Russian patronage leave them worse off in the long run.

Of course, it would be naive to expect that African countries exploited by Russia will simply fall back into the arms of the United States. Across the continent, citizens and governments alike are increasingly keen to chart their own course and diversify their external relations, and Washington must accept this reality. But by offering its partnership to countries that want it and leaving the door open to future cooperation with those that, for now, do not, the United States can craft more effective policies without pressuring leaders across the continent to take sides in a Cold War–style battle for influence.

The Right Way for America to Counter Russia in Africa

Help Democracies—and Let Moscow’s Appeal Fade in Autocracies

By Frederic Wehrey and Andrew S. Weiss

July 9, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya · July 9, 2024

The Kremlin is on a roll in large parts of Africa. In April, the Pentagon announced withdrawals of U.S. military forces from Chad and Niger, two key U.S. partners in counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel that are now turning to Russia for security assistance. In the case of Niger, a military junta that seized power in a coup last year ordered U.S. personnel to leave a $100 million drone base. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has been pouring mercenaries, proxies, and materiel into Libya for the past six months, adding to its already sizable presence in that country. Libya is now an important access point for Russia in the Mediterranean and a launching pad for operations elsewhere in Africa.

A string of coups across Africa since 2020 has allowed Moscow to strengthen its position on the continent, even as it funnels vast military and economic resources into the war in Ukraine. Russia’s increased military, political, and economic presence in a diverse array of countries that now includes Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Sudan also flies in the face of expectations expressed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who said in June 2023 that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine had “diminished Russian influence on every continent.” More than two years into that war, Russia clearly remains capable of seizing opportunities to expand its reach in Africa and other parts of the world.

With so many other crises calling for the Biden administration’s attention, rolling back Russia’s advances in Africa will not be easy, not least because the Kremlin has ingratiated itself with many unsavory regimes there. Moreover, Russia’s recent successes capitalize on a combination of worsening regional security dynamics and the continent’s postcolonial history. In the Sahel, for example, Russia touts its ability to help governments respond to rising violence and jihadist threats while scorning France, the former colonial power, for its long record of heavy-handedness and failed policies.

The key question for the United States is how to identify realistic policy goals that play to Washington’s strengths, align with U.S. values, and harness Africa’s enormous potential while recognizing that many countries want to hedge their bets when it comes to foreign partners. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have often treated countering Russia as an end in itself, citing the demands of great-power competition as justification for action in every country where Moscow gains a foothold. U.S. policymakers should take a more selective approach. Instead of simply trying to compete for the affections of African leaders who are sometimes more of a liability than an asset to the United States, Washington should continue helping its current partners deliver good governance, economic opportunities, and security for their citizens. Such aid can both improve the lives of ordinary Africans and diminish the likelihood that their governments will look to Russia in the future. As for those countries that have already turned to Russia for assistance, Washington needs to acknowledge that in many cases the most fruitful policy—difficult as inaction may be—is to step back and allow Russia’s appeal to fade on its own.

RIPE FOR RUSSIA

Russia is benefiting from a wave of democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation across the continent. Coups have ousted several Western-friendly governments in former French colonies such as Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, and Niger. These recent trends have deep roots. As European colonial rule ended, from the 1950s through the 1970s, many African countries, such as Senegal and Tanzania, embraced multiparty elections, but others, including Burundi and the Central African Republic, devolved into coup-prone dictatorships. Former French colonies were especially predisposed to authoritarianism, given the highly centralized political structures bequeathed by the colonialists and Paris’s support for strongmen rulers.

In the fight against violent extremists in the decades after 9/11, Washington and Paris trained military officers in the Sahel who often committed serious human rights abuses. Years later, some of these officers launched or supported military coups—including those in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The United States and France also frequently overlooked the fact that militant organizations in the Sahel drew strength from the domestic misgovernance that their own security and counterterrorism assistance had enabled. The Western response to the uprising in Libya in 2011 made matters worse. After NATO intervened in support of a revolution that toppled the longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi, the country plunged into chaos.

Russian patronage will leave African leaders worse off in the long run.

Libya’s fragmentation created an opening for Russian intervention and destabilized the countries to its south. Security conditions in Libya deteriorated after the United States disengaged in 2012 and when a civil war broke out in 2014, and Moscow took advantage of the resulting power vacuum. Russia began establishing in Libya a bridgehead for its activities in sub-Saharan Africa in 2018. The Kremlin dispatched thousands of fighters from the Wagner paramilitary group, an ostensibly private mercenary outfit controlled by the Russian government, along with regular Russian soldiers, advanced weaponry, and disinformation specialists to aid a warlord based in eastern Libya in his bid to defeat the internationally recognized government in the capital. Although that effort failed, Russian forces gained access over time to many of Libya’s airbases and, later, key ports, which they now use to ferry arms and fighters to Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, and Sudan. Russia’s presence in Libya also allows the Kremlin to profit from the smuggling of fuel, gold, drugs, and migrants.

Russia learned lessons in Libya that now inform its meddling across the continent. Limited, flexible, and nominally deniable interventions—often on behalf of distasteful partners that the West is unwilling to countenance—can establish Russian influence on the cheap and secure lucrative revenue streams, such as from gold mining. For relatively little effort, Russia has successfully marketed itself as a partner that can provide military assistance and regime protection without demanding concessions on human rights or democracy.

Moscow understands, of course, that it cannot outperform Western governments when it comes to providing economic prosperity or human security. But as many in the region remain resentful of Paris’s paternalism—and, to a lesser extent, skeptical about Washington’s intentions—Russian policymakers have discovered that their biggest advantage is that Russia is neither France nor the United States. Although the United States remains more popular than Russia throughout Africa, the gap in approval ratings between the two countries among Africans has narrowed over the past decade, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. Western officials should not assume that Russia’s reputation is as toxic in much of Africa as it is in Western countries.

LESS IS MORE

U.S. policymakers must learn that they cannot always outbid Moscow in places such as Mali or Niger. The United States has often failed in its efforts to bend ambivalent foreign governments to its will, and leaders in such places are adept at playing great powers off each other to get what they want. A better use of Washington’s attention and resources would be to support existing partners in Africa who share American values and are committed to helping their citizens, not just shoring up their regimes. Washington should strengthen ties with African countries while holding its partners to a high standard. It was a step in the right direction for the Biden administration to designate Kenya as a major non-NATO ally. Of course, the Kenyan government’s violent suppression of protesters just weeks after Kenyan President William Ruto visited Washington underscores the need for the United States to continually scrutinize its partners.

It should not give any government—even a democratically elected one—a free pass simply because it aligns with Washington instead of Moscow. The United States should continue to include policy conditions to its aid packages to help African leaders govern more effectively, reduce corruption, expand trade, improve competitiveness, and reduce high debt. It would be short-sighted to jettison these stipulations simply to win over countries that have been wooed by Russia. In parallel, the United States should continue to put a spotlight on Russian misdeeds, predatory behavior, human rights abuses, and support for large-scale corruption by publicizing damning information collected by activists, independent journalists, and Western governments.

In some cases, as when its vital interests are at stake, the United States should push back against Russia through sanctions, diplomacy, pressure campaigns, or intelligence operations. For the most part, however, Washington should take advantage of the fact that Moscow is often its own worst enemy. The bargain the Kremlin typically strikes with Africa’s autocrats is that it will protect their regimes, provide hired guns, and organize flashy disinformation campaigns in exchange for a lucrative stake in extractive industries.

Russian help often backfires. In Burkina Faso and Mali, for example, military-led governments have killed scores of civilians and engaged in horrific human rights abuses, sometimes with the help of Russian mercenaries. Such brutal tactics will only exacerbate the security problems that are engulfing parts of the Sahel. In Sudan, Russia is supporting both sides of a bloody civil war, thus inflaming the violence, in a bid to get permission to build a base on the Red Sea. In time, the most self-serving of African leaders will probably realize that Russian patronage leave them worse off in the long run.

Of course, it would be naive to expect that African countries exploited by Russia will simply fall back into the arms of the United States. Across the continent, citizens and governments alike are increasingly keen to chart their own course and diversify their external relations, and Washington must accept this reality. But by offering its partnership to countries that want it and leaving the door open to future cooperation with those that, for now, do not, the United States can craft more effective policies without pressuring leaders across the continent to take sides in a Cold War–style battle for influence.

• FREDERIC WEHREY is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya.
• ANDREW S. WEISS is Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the graphic novel Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin.

Foreign Affairs · by The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya · July 9, 2024

17. US to loan ‘stalwart ally’ Poland another $2 billion for push to modernize military

US to loan ‘stalwart ally’ Poland another $2 billion for push to modernize military

Stars and Stripes · by Phillip Walter Wellman · July 9, 2024

Soldiers from the U.S. and Polish armies walk to the site of Patriot missile system near Drawsko Pomorskie, Poland, in 2018. A second U.S. loan to Poland of $2 billion will be used to buy American air and missile defense systems, the Polish Defense Ministry said. (Aaron Good/U.S. Army)

The U.S. will give Poland another $2 billion loan to buy American weapons, the second time in less than a year that a State Department loan program has been used to aid the Polish armed forces’ modernization.

Foreign Military Financing direct loans are rare and reserved for the United States’ most important security cooperation partners, said a Monday statement from the State Department.

Before September 2023, when Poland’s first such $2 billion loan was approved, the last time the State Department had done so was in 2017, when it awarded a Foreign Military Financing loan to Iraq, according to reporting by Defense One.

Polish soldiers in M1 Abrams tanks salute officials during a parade in Warsaw, Poland, on Aug. 15, 2023. Poland was granted a second $2 billion loan from the U.S. for weapons acquisition. The previous loan went toward the purchase of Abrams tanks, F-35 Lightning II jets and other U.S. military hardware. (Joshua Zayas/U.S. Army)

The U.S. has agreed to provide up to $60 million in foreign military financing to subsidize the interest cost of the latest loan, which will help accelerate the procurement process, the State Department said.

The new loan will be used to buy American air and missile defense systems, Poland’s Defense Ministry said in a statement last week.

Some 10,000 American troops are serving in Poland, which has taken on growing significance as NATO counters Russian aggression in neighboring Ukraine. Last year, the U.S. Army established a garrison in Poznan, giving Poland its first permanent American military outpost.

U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Raymond Lemmert, right, briefs Polish air force Lt. Col. Pawal Muzyczuk, left, and Lt. Col. Rafal Zawadka on F-35 maintenance operations in 2022 at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz. Poland will receive its second $2 billion loan from the U.S. in less than a year to modernize its armed forces with American weaponry. (Dominic Tyler/U.S. Air Force)

Polish leaders have branded Russia an existential threat and in recent years have approved the spending of billions of dollars to boost the country’s military capabilities.

The modernization has included purchases of American F-35 airplanes, Patriot missile systems and Abrams main battle tanks.

“Poland is a stalwart U.S. ally, and this deal will further strengthen NATO’s eastern flank,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday.

The country currently spends 4% of its gross domestic product on defense, the highest percentage of any NATO member.

“The United States remains our main foreign partner in the modernization of the Polish armed forces,” the Defense Ministry statement said.

Phillip Walter Wellman

Phillip Walter Wellman

Phillip is a reporter and photographer for Stars and Stripes, based in Kaiserslautern, Germany. From 2016 to 2021, he covered the war in Afghanistan from Stripes’ Kabul bureau. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics.

previous coverage

• US agrees to sell over $3 billion worth of new missiles to Poland

Stars and Stripes · by Phillip Walter Wellman · July 9, 2024

18. NATO’s in denial about deterrence by denial

NATO’s in denial about deterrence by denial

Politico · by John R. Deni · July 8, 2024

1. News
2. Opinion

Taking the necessary steps to fully operationalize deterrence by denial is critical — especially before a possible change in America’s relationship with NATO.

At its Madrid summit in 2022, NATO committed to pursuing deterrence by denial. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Opinion

July 8, 2024 4:00 am CET

By

John R. Deni is a research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and an associate fellow at the NATO Defense College. He’s the author of “NATO and Article 5.” The views expressed are his own.

Recent revelations that the Chinese government has been substantially aiding Russia’s war effort in Ukraine — selling the country all it needs to build its own armaments, including microchips for drones and missiles, machine tools and explosives precursors — have renewed debate in the West over how quickly Moscow will be able to reconstitute its land power.

Not long ago, conventional wisdom held that the losses sustained by Russia’s ground forces through 2022 to 2023 were substantial enough to require several years of rebuilding. Casualties in the hundreds of thousands and the loss of two-thirds of its massive tank force led many to reason Russia was down and out — at least in the short run. The only disagreement seemed to be over how many years it would take to rebuild.

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Ironically, this discussion of timelines seems irrelevant to those closest to the threat. Government officials from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland view Russian President Vladimir Putin as utterly opportunistic, unwilling to wait for some subjective measure of readiness before launching his next attack. Hence, what matters more than the West’s prognostications are the Kremlin’s perceptions of Western resolve, capability and capacity.

So, with doubts now sown over America’s willingness to reinforce its NATO allies in case of a Russian attack, the organization’s best bet in the increasingly risky context of European security is to implement a “deterrence by denial” strategy — aiming to stop and repel an attempted attack on allied territory without giving much, if any, ground. And truth is, the alliance is already halfway there — at its Madrid summit in 2022, NATO committed to pursuing deterrence by denial. Unfortunately, the reality along the Eastern flank doesn’t yet match this rhetoric.

Despite widely known shortcomings in allied capacity, however, achieving this type of deterrence is actually possible. And by reversing its decisions on conscription, expanding and refining its force structure in Eastern Europe, and modifying its approach toward Russia’s aggression in the air and the electromagnetic spectrum, NATO could take the necessary steps during its Washington summit this summer.

Deterrence by denial is a strategy that sounds intuitively appealing — and something NATO should be capable of. However, over most of its history, the alliance has struggled to achieve it.

For example, during the Cold War, NATO occasionally came close to matching Warsaw Pact countries’ conventional military strength along the border between the then two halves of Germany, but it was usually undermatched. And this inability — or unwillingness — to achieve conventional force parity in part reflected the West’s pursuit of deterrence on the cheap in contrast to the Soviet Union.

Then, following the end of the Cold War, this conventional force imbalance vis-à-vis Russia became even more dramatic. But this was tolerable for two reasons: First, to many in the West, Russia simply wasn’t as aggressive — or, judging from its numerous failed military reform efforts, as effective — as it appeared in Soviet times. Hence, there was strong public support for a peace dividend, slashing conventional strength and dropping conscription. Second, the kinds of operations allies were increasingly conducting — like those in Kosovo and Afghanistan — demanded more highly trained, mobile professional forces.

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So, this inability to achieve deterrence by denial led the alliance to pursue deterrence by punishment — a form of deterrence aimed at convincing potential aggressors that NATO will strike back in devastating fashion if attacked. However, since deterrence by punishment can’t prevent an aggressor’s early gains, the clear — if often unstated — implication is that territory may be lost, at least initially.

And NATO has pursued this approach in defense of its most vulnerable members — the three Baltic states and Poland — since 2014. For example, since 2017, NATO has stationed one multinational Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP) battle group in each country. These units were initially relatively small — around 1,200 troops each — and they were comprised of forces from across the alliance, which meant that if Russia attacked, it would be taking on troops from nearly all of NATO.

Of course, the downsides of these small multinational units were that they lacked the heft necessary to blunt and repel an initial invasion, and they suffered serious interoperability challenges. However, given the lack of consensus among allies on Russia’s intent, and the unmistakably strong deterrent signal of allied solidarity, these and other operational shortcomings were deemed reasonable risks.

After Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the ensuing brutal war, though, NATO reexamined its approach and took several steps to strengthen its efforts. | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

After Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the ensuing brutal war, though, NATO reexamined its approach and took several steps to strengthen its efforts.

It completed new allied operations plans, which based allied defense planning, exercises and force sizing more closely on real-world threats. It revamped its force structure, embracing a new NATO Force Model designed to provide larger numbers of troops at higher readiness, and placed multinational battle groups in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. It also moved to integrate its new members — Finland and Sweden — remarkably quickly. And given these changes, the alliance has now begun modifying its command structure as well. It has also agreed to expand its small battle groups to brigade-size, when and where necessary.

But none of this adds up to deterrence by denial. Allied efforts to create tripwires on land, air, sea, cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum have been — and remain — inadequate. To be clear, the alliance deserves praise for what it’s done to date, but with an unpredictable leader in the Kremlin, none of it’s sufficient to achieve deterrence by denial.

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This won’t be an easy or quick fix either, but it is possible — and there are policy moves NATO should embrace, such as personnel expansion, force posture changes and modified rules of engagement, in order to do so.

Regarding personnel, NATO simply needs more. Nearly all major European allies — especially France, Italy, Germany and the U.K. — face military personnel shortages. Decisions made a decade ago to invest in capabilities at the expense of capacity mean that even as these allies have become increasingly capable of fighting side-by-side with their American counterparts, they’ve been fielding smaller militaries. And even those with plans to expand personnel, like Germany, don’t have plans to resource them.

So, how many more troops does NATO need? Deterrence by denial doesn’t necessarily mean matching Russian forces soldier-for-soldier everywhere — although NATO would be better off aiming for parity in the territory of its most vulnerable allies. Attacking is usually considered a “harder” military task than defending. It requires troops to leave the safety of fortifications and enter unfamiliar “foreign terrain,” so typically a three-to-one ratio is necessary for offensive success. To mitigate this, NATO should aim to prevent its forces in the east from falling below a two-to-one or 1.5-to-one ratio.

Overall, this means more European allies will likely need to reexamine their decisions to ditch conscription, as well as embrace more robust development and activation of reserve forces to help allies achieve the necessary mass. Larger European NATO countries, which have the populations to support bigger military formations, will be critical here. And with Germany at least beginning to discuss conscription, NATO should give its endorsement at the Washington summit.

Then, on posture, NATO needs to beef up its forces in the east — and not just “where and when required.” The alliance needs to build up its forces both qualitatively — especially to counter specific Russian offensive capabilities in indirect fires and electronic warfare — and quantitatively, to meet the scale of the Russian threat.

In terms of quality, this means endowing NATO’s forward military units with more full-spectrum capabilities, including electronic warfare, unmanned aerial vehicles, short range air defense and cyber. And in terms of quantity, it means that each forward military unit in the three Baltic states, Poland and Romania ought to be made into brigade-size units permanently. The German-led unit in Lithuania is headed in this direction, and the Canadian-led unit in Latvia may be as well — but the timelines for this are woefully long.

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As for reducing the interoperability frictions in some forward military units — the one in Latvia, for example, suffers from this the most, with 10 contributing allies — a country’s minimum contribution to each unit ought to be a battalion. Meanwhile, there’s no reason to have land-centric forward military units in Slovakia, Hungary or Bulgaria, as these allies face no significant ground threat. And given the threats facing Romania, NATO should convert the unit there into its first Multi-Domain Task Force, with an emphasis on intelligence, maritime domain awareness, air defense, and long-range artillery and rockets.

Finally, allies need to shift their approach when it comes to Russia’s aggression in the air and the electromagnetic spectrum.

In the air domain, some have framed this as a move from air policing to air defense but, in any case, the goal should be to forcibly end Russian aircraft and missile incursions into allied airspace. For instance, the NATO countries should announce they’ll no longer tolerate violations of allied airspace by piloted Russian aircraft, flyovers of any ally by Ukraine-bound Russian missiles and rockets, or Russian drone activity within a certain distance of the alliance’s eastern frontier.

To make good on this, NATO should then forward station-appropriate integrated air and missile defense assets along its eastern front, starting in southeastern Poland and northeastern Romania — something that may also have the unintended benefit of creating no-fly zones over portions of western and southwestern Ukraine.

As for the electromagnetic spectrum, it’s become increasingly clear that Russia’s aggressive, indiscriminate use of electronic jamming isn’t just threatening military operations by allied forces in NATO’s east but, more worryingly, civilian aviation and maritime activity. Will the allies wait until Russia’s electronic warfare downs a civilian airliner before they respond?

Taking the necessary steps to fully operationalize deterrence by denial now is critical — especially before a possible change in America’s relationship with NATO. And this upcoming Washington summit provides the ideal opportunity for NATO to finally embrace this strategy.

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Politico · by John R. Deni · July 8, 2024

19. The West’s biggest vulnerability is internal

Wartime leadership? But the foreign policy prime directive is to never escalate.

The West’s biggest vulnerability is internal

Politico · by Andrew A. Michta · July 9, 2024

It’s time for wartime leadership in America and its democratic allies.

"To preserve peace, the U.S. and its allies need to move onto a war footing." | iStock

Opinion

July 9, 2024 4:01 am CET

By

Andrew A. Michta is senior fellow and director of the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council of the United States. Views expressed here are his own.

In the unyielding realm of the Darwinian ecosystem we call international relations, there are rare moments when history abruptly accelerates and decisions set the world on a new course.

This happened when U.S. President Ronald Reagan uttered the famous “we win, they lose” guidance for his administration. Or when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev launched his perestroika reforms in a desperate effort to compete with the newly assertive U.S. — an ill-considered policy that ultimately collapsed the Soviet empire. Or more recently, when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the second time in 2022, and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared Beijing’s “no-limits friendship” with Moscow.

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Today, the U.S. and its allies face a similar moment where strategic choices will set the course of history for a generation. But to devise the right strategy, Washington’s political leadership needs to coldly and accurately diagnose what is sickening the world around them — and its allies must do the same. If not, we risk falling into an all-out global conflict.

Democracies are already in the early stages of a system-transforming war that’s been all but declared by the newly formed “axis of dictatorships.” Russia and China are setting a new global agenda, while Iran and North Korea work to dismantle what’s left of their regional power balances. But political leaders in the U.S. and Europe have been slow to recognize this new reality, with many still clinging to the post-Cold War narrative of a “rules-based international order,” instead of speaking directly to their publics about the storm that’s gathering over the horizon.

Our political establishments seem unable to overcome their disbelief that the good old days of globalization are a thing of the past.

Meanwhile, Russia and China have been arming at speed and scale, with Moscow fully mobilized to generate a force of 1.5 million, and Beijing already commanding a military of over 2 million. China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy is already numerically bigger than the U.S. Navy, its shipyards building new units faster than anything U.S. contractors can achieve. And the same goes for the slow rates of munitions production in the U.S., not to mention the subpar performance of Europe’s largest economies when it comes to rearmament. A case in point, this year Russia is expected to produce about three times more artillery munitions than the U.S. and Europe combined — and at much cheaper cost.

Truth is, as the axis of dictatorships continues to consolidate, both politically and militarily, the collective West — though declaring itself united— remains fractured. Democratic allies are often at cross-purposes when it comes to their economic interests, and they lack a shared threat assessment as well.

The post-Cold War decades have accustomed Western societies to life with limited risk — or preferably without risk altogether. In the minds of their citizens, globalization removed state-on-state violence from their national security equation. The “complex interdependence” fostered by the internationalization of manufacturing enmeshed state interests to such an extent, that for them, it became competition rather than war, and negotiation rather than confrontation that framed the world order.

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Meanwhile, Russia and China have been arming at speed and scale, with Moscow fully mobilized to generate a force of 1.5 million. | Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

Our naïveté and wishful thinking prevented us from realizing that when it comes to hard power, there’s only dependence — and there’s nothing complex about that, other than who depends on whom and for what.

But risk is still present. It has always been inherent in our international system — whether manifest in unraveling military balances, mass migration flows or Covid-19. And even though still deemed unacceptable, the only way forward is to relearn how to live with risk and prepare for it.

For the U.S. and its democratic allies to craft a winning strategy against the axis of dictatorships, our political leaders must speak plainly, truthfully and directly: The rules-based international order — if it ever truly existed — is dead. There’s no strategic sleight of hand, no “pivot” that can substitute the imperative to reshore manufacturing to the U.S., decouple from China and double U.S. defense spending, while dramatically reforming our weapons procurement system.

Western leaders must communicate to their people that if we want to preserve our prosperity going forward, we will have to fight for it. If we want to ensure our security — and the security of our children — we must stop clinging to escalation management as our idee fixe, and be ready to go to war if challenged by enemies. Only then will deterrence hold and regional power balances endure.

Citizens across the democratic world don’t need to hear bromides about international norms and values. These have been violated with impunity by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea over the past 20 years. What we need to hear is that there’s no substitute for hard power built on economic strength and national cohesion. After all, it is nations not armies that go to war.

In this context, the biggest challenge democracies face today is the imperative of adaptation. But there can be no adaptation if we don’t articulate what it is we need to adapt to. Simply put: If we want to preserve peace, the U.S. and its allies need to move onto a war footing, if for no other reason than the fact that our enemies have already done so. To mobilize for what’s coming, we need a culture change in how we organize our economic activity and how we relate to each other in society.

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We need to bring national security front and center into how we prepare for the future.

Fat times produce managers, hard times produce leaders. Those who mobilized to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, they were children of the Great Depression for whom a cot in Army barracks and three square meals a day awas a good deal. They were accustomed to working with their hands on farms and in factories. And most of all, they had a shared sense of obligation to each other, which comes from knowing one is a part of something larger than themselves: a nation.

Amid our fractured politics, can we say the same of the U.S. or its allies today? Can a country that has to rely on its adversary for critical supply chains hope to persevere and win against it?

And yet, the U.S. still commands unparalleled resources that, if mobilized, would ensure victory. But in order to mobilize, we need honesty. We need to listen to one another once more, and we need leadership that can prepare our societies for this new, unstable international environment.

We need leaders to replace managers — individuals who will have the courage to teach society to accept risk once more and to keep taking risks until we succeed. We need leaders that can articulate a national strategy, which speaks to our irreducible secondary and peripheral national interests, clearly conveying what we’re willing to fight and die for.

Our strategy for victory can’t simply be more reactive normative talk of “defending the rules-based order.” We need a vision of victory in this war, and to communicate it in common sense terms, so that every citizen clearly understands where we’re going and what’s expected of them.

Only then can one place a democracy on a war footing and — should deterrence fail — be able to win.

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Politico · by Andrew A. Michta · July 9, 2024

​21. NATO Allies Confront ‘Serious Gap’ in Arms Production to Counter Russia

​

NATO Allies Confront ‘Serious Gap’ in Arms Production to Counter Russia

U.S. and Europe build weapons too slowly to meet Ukraine’s needs, officials say at Washington summit

https://www.wsj.com/world/nato-allies-confront-serious-gap-in-arms-production-to-counter-russia-3b5b75f9?mod=latest_headlines

By Lara Seligman

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 and Doug Cameron

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Updated July 9, 2024 6:46 pm ET

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance will take steps to increase weapons production. PHOTO: ELIZABETH FRANTZ/REUTERS

Senior U.S. and European leaders opened this week’s NATO summit with a pledge to increase the alliance’s investment in military industrial production, while acknowledging that more than two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the allies are still struggling to produce enough weapons and equipment to help Kyiv win the war. 

Even as Russian President Vladimir Putin put his country on a war footing, cranking out tanks and ammunition rounds at an alarming rate, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has had limited success in accelerating the output of its own defense industry.

“The reality is that the war in Ukraine has demonstrated not only that the scopes have been too small, and that the production capacity has been delinquent, but it has also demonstrated serious gaps in our interoperability,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said during a Tuesday event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Stoltenberg said the allies will sign a new defense industrial pledge this week to increase defense spending, better coordinate production among the different countries, and do more to enforce those promises. But he acknowledged that the efforts so far haven’t been sufficient to match the demand from the battlefield in Ukraine. 

It remains uncertain whether the kinds of high-level political commitments expected to be announced at the summit in Washington this week will finally translate to signed contracts and increased factory production. 

The urgency of making up that shortfall was on display on Monday, when Russia launched an attack on Ukrainian cities, destroying a children’s hospital in Kyiv and killing and injuring dozens of civilians. Russia is expected to ramp up its air assault in the coming months, targeting Ukraine’s energy grid and crucial infrastructure heading into the winter. 

So far, the air-defense capabilities the U.S. and NATO allies have been able to pull together for Kyiv have failed to stop such attacks.

A Russian attack destroyed a children’s hospital in Kyiv on Monday. PHOTO: THOMAS PETER/REUTERS

While various countries have provided interceptors, those efforts haven’t kept up with the near-daily Russian barrage. The U.S. has given Ukraine one Patriot air-defense battery so far, while the Netherlands has supplied one and Germany two. 

President Biden announced Tuesday at the opening of the summit that the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Italy will provide Ukraine with the equipment for five additional air-defense systems, and in the coming months the U.S. and its partners will also send Kyiv “dozens” of other systems.

The U.S., Germany and Romania will each donate one Patriot battery; Italy will provide a European-made SAMP/T air-defense system; and Patriot components donated by the Netherlands and other countries will enable the operation of an additional Patriot battery, according to a U.S. official.

Biden also pledged to ensure that Ukraine goes to “the front of the line” for receiving new air-defense interceptors.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited a German military training area in June. PHOTO: JENS BUTTNER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

In the U.S., defense companies and the Pentagon now say they were overly optimistic about how quickly they could increase production of critical weapons. Supply-chain kinks and labor shortages meant it will take four years to double output of the U.S.-made Javelin antitank missiles that Ukraine uses widely, twice as long as initially expected.

“We need to do more and we need to do it faster,” said Chris Calio, the chief executive of RTX, which produces the Patriot missile-defense system.

Production is starting to accelerate. U.S. output of 155mm artillery shells has more than doubled to 30,000 a month since the start of the conflict and is expected to almost double again by the end of the summer. U.S. companies have also ramped up production of Patriot interceptors, Himars rocket launchers and the GMLR missiles they fire.

“We are seeing the results as we speak on the battlefield,” said Jake Sullivan, U.S. national-security adviser, during the Chamber of Commerce event. 

Stacks of 155mm artillery shells awaited shipping at a munitions plant in Scranton, Pa., last year. PHOTO: BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS

Rising NATO budgets are being directed at weapons purchases, with almost one-third spent on equipment, double the level a decade ago, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank. But global demand for some weapons systems is running three times available supply, defense executives said.

Even when the funding is available, bureaucratic barriers can hamper more production. Much of the $45 billion in supplemental funding approved in April by the U.S. for Ukraine has yet to go on contract.

“The primary reason for those orders not [to] be secured yet is the contracting capacity and time line of our customers,” said Wahid Nawabi, CEO of AeroVironment, whose Switchblade suicide drones have been deployed widely by Ukraine.

Senior NATO leaders in Washington for the summit acknowledged that it is difficult to increase production. Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said Lockheed executives told him they couldn’t fulfill an order for long-range ATACMS missiles before 2028 at the earliest. 

Putin can order a sausage factory turned into an arms plant but democracies have planning processes, which can take years, said Pevkur, speaking at the Chamber of Commerce. Executives are trying to adapt, he said. “They need contracts. Without contracts, we will not get production.”

Daniel Michaels contributed to this article.

Write to Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at Doug.Cameron@wsj.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com