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Quotes of the Day:
“What limits individuals as well as nations is the inability to confront reality, to see things for what they are. As we grow older, we become more rooted in the past. Habit takes over. Something that has worked for us before becomes a doctrine, a shell to protect us from reality. Repetition replaces creativity.”
- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
- Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid."
- Leo Tolstoy
“Because one believes in oneself, one doesn't try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn't need others' approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.”
- Lao Tzu
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 7, 2023
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4. Opinion | Time is not on Ukraine’s side By Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates
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7. Japan Matters if China Invades Taiwan
8. Ukraine War Proves the U.S. Government Needs Tech Giants Like Google As Allies
9. What three years of China’s covid travel restrictions cost the world
10. Philippine military chief replaced by retiring general
11. We are offered the Korean option, but Koreans regret it Secretary of Ukraines Security Council
12. The Age of Digital, Transparent Warfare Is Here
13. Facial recognition's rapid adoption exposes alarming pitfalls
14. Former high-ranking US official who spied for Cuba released after 20 years
15. U.S. $3 Billion Military Package to Ukraine Looks to Change Battlefield Dynamics
16. Tests on travelers from China offer rare snapshot of covid chaos
17. America Is Lost in a Dark Forest, But There's a Path Out by James Stavridis
18. Who cares who wins - The mythology of the SAS
19. V-22 Osprey: The U.S. Military's Biggest Mistake?
20. EDITORIAL: Taiwan must tackle military spy issue
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 7, 2023
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-7-2023
Key Takeaways
- Recent Russian gains in Soledar do not portend an imminent Russian encirclement of Bakhmut.
- Russia continues to weaponize religion to perpetuate long-standing information operations and discredit Ukraine.
- Russian forces reportedly continue to deplete their missile arsenal and stock of Iranian-made drones but will likely continue to threaten Ukrainian infrastructure at scale in the near term.
- Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Svatove and Kreminna.
- Russian forces made marginal confirmed advances in Soledar amid continuing Russian offensive operations around Bakhmut and along the western outskirts of Donetsk City.
- Russian forces continue efforts to establish further control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
- Ukrainian and European officials continue to warn that Russia is preparing for an imminent second wave of mobilization.
- Russian occupation authorities continue to transport Ukrainian children to Russian territory under the guise of medical rehabilitation schemes.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 7, 2023
understandingwar.org
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 7, 2023
Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Layne Philipson, Madison Williams, and Frederick W. Kagan
January 7, 5:45pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Recent Russian gains in Soledar do not portend an imminent encirclement of Bakhmut, contrary to claims made by Russian sources. Even at the most generous interpretation of Russian milblogger narratives, which claim that Russian forces are fighting on the outskirts of Razdolivka (about 6km northwest of Soledar), Russian forces are still far from being within striking distance of an operational encirclement of Bakhmut.[1] In order to effectively cut Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) into Bakhmut, Russian forces would have to establish control of the T0513 Siversk-Bakhmut highway (currently 7km west of the furthest point of confirmed Russian advances in the Soledar area) and reach the E40 Slovyansk-Bakhmut highway (13km from the furthest point of confirmed Russian advance in the Soledar area) at least. Considering that the recent rate of gains in this area has been on the order of a few hundred meters a day, at most, it is highly unlikely that Russian forces will be successful in cohering a mechanized push towards these GLOCs and move towards encircling Bakhmut.[2] Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut would still have GLOCs available even if the Russians cut the E40, moreover, making the entire discussion of an encirclement at this point bizarre.
Russia continues to weaponize religion to perpetuate long-standing information operations and discredit Ukraine. Russian milbloggers responded to footage posted on January 7 of uniformed Ukrainian servicemen attending Orthodox Christmas services at the Kyiv-Perchesk Lavra and decried it as a reprisal and open war on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP).[3] Several milbloggers referred to the footage as evidence that the Lavra has been “captured” by “heretics and schismatics.”[4] The milblogger vitriol at the footage of Christmas services at the Lavra follows the decision by the Ukrainian government to take back control of the main cathedral of the Kyiv-Perchesk Lavra from the UOC MP and allow the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) to hold Orthodox Christmas services at the Lavra on January 7.[5] The Russian response to the Ukrainian government’s decision to transfer control of the Lavra to the OCU exemplifies Moscow’s continued weaponization of religion in order to frame Ukraine as evil and position Russia as the protector of Orthodox Christian values, as ISW has previously reported.[6]
The Ukrainian government has not disrupted the ability of observers to celebrate Orthodox Christmas in Ukraine. Russian milbloggers falsely presented the legal transfer of the Kyiv-Perchesk Lavra from the UOC MP, which the Ukrainian government maintains has explicit links to the Kremlin and has provided material and spiritual support to the Russian war in Ukraine, to the OCU as an attack on the ability of observers of Orthodox tradition to celebrate Christmas. Orthodox services continued through Ukraine, including in the Kyiv-Perchesk Lavra, throughout the course of the day on January 7.[7] The Ukrainian government position that elements of the UOC MP, from which Kyiv removed control of the Lavra, is supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued association with the Russian Orthodox Church. In his speech on Orthodox Christmas, Putin thanked the ROC for its continued support for Russian troops in Ukraine.[8] Ukraine is not suppressing the religious liberties of Orthodox Christians, contrary to the Russian information operation, and is instead taking the steps it deems necessary to distance Ukrainian cultural heritage from religious elements it asserts are linked to the Kremlin and its conduct of the war.
Russian forces reportedly continue to deplete their missile arsenal but will likely continue to be able to threaten Ukrainian critical infrastructure and civilians at scale in the near term. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov published an infographic on January 6 detailing that Russian forces have expended roughly 81 percent of their strategic missile stocks and 19 percent of their tactical missile stocks.[9] Reznikov reported that Russian forces reportedly have remaining of their pre-war and post-invasion production stocks:
92 Iskander 9M723 missiles (11 percent),
52 Iskander 9M728/9M729 missiles (44 percent),
118 Kh-101 and Kh-555/55SM missiles (16 percent),
162 Kh-22/32 missiles (44 percent),
53 Kh-47M2 Kinzhal missiles (84 percent), and
59 sea-based Kalibr missiles (9 percent).[10]
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated that it would never run out of sea-based Kalibr missiles while conducting a massive series of missile strikes on December 29, 2022.[11] Russian forces last used sea-based Kalibr missiles in Ukraine during their ninth large-scale series of missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure on December 16.[12] Although the Russian military’s tactical missile stock is less expended, S-300 and 3M-55 Onyx missiles are less precise systems than Russian strategic missiles, which is likely why Russian forces have not used these systems extensively in large-scale missile strikes against Ukrainian critical infrastructure.
Reznikov reported that Russia has managed to produce since the February 2022 invasion:
290 Kh-101 and Kh-555/55SM missiles (65 percent of the pre-war stock),
150 Kalibr missiles (30 percent of the pre-war stock),
36 Iskander 9M723 missiles (5 percent of the pre-war stock),
20 Iskander 9M728/9M729 missiles (20 percent of the pre-war stock),
and 20 Kh-47M2 Kinzhal missiles (47 percent of the pre-war stock).[13]
The Russian production of strategic missiles since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in comparison to the Russian military's pre-war stock highlights that Russia has not mobilized its military industry to support Russian military operations in Ukraine. A country would normally increase the production of missile, rocket, and other weapons systems and munitions before embarking on a major war and would normally put its military industry on a war footing once the war began. Russia has done neither. Putin’s failure to mobilize Russian industry to support the Russian war effort in Ukraine may result from fears that further economic disruptions could produce further domestic discontent in Russia because Western sanctions regimes have placed significant constraints on Russian military industry, or because of inherent limitations of Russian industry and military industry—or some combination of these factors. The current level of the Russian military’s depletion of strategic missile systems may constrain how often and at what scale Russian forces conduct future massive series of missile strikes in Ukraine, but Russian forces will be able to continue their campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure at scale in the near term and threaten the lives of Ukrainian civilians.
Russian forces have also reportedly depleted their arsenal of Iranian-made drones following an increased pace of drone attacks in Ukraine in the past month. Russian forces have reportedly expended 88 percent of their stock of the Shahed-131 and –136 drones that they have so far received from Iran, with only 90 Iranian-made drones remaining according to Reznikov.[14] ISW previously assessed that Russian forces increased their use of Shahed drones in attacks on Ukraine over the past month in order to maintain the pace of their campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure without further depleting their more valuable missile stocks.[15] Russia’s contract with Iran reportedly stipulates that Iran will send an additional 1,000 Shahed drones to Russia.[16] Russian forces will likely be able to conduct only a handful of massive drone attacks in Ukraine in the near term until Russia receives from Iran another delivery of drones, which reportedly come in batches of 200 to 300.[17]
Key Takeaways
- Recent Russian gains in Soledar do not portend an imminent Russian encirclement of Bakhmut.
- Russia continues to weaponize religion to perpetuate long-standing information operations and discredit Ukraine.
- Russian forces reportedly continue to deplete their missile arsenal and stock of Iranian-made drones but will likely continue to threaten Ukrainian infrastructure at scale in the near term.
- Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Svatove and Kreminna.
- Russian forces made marginal confirmed advances in Soledar amid continuing Russian offensive operations around Bakhmut and along the western outskirts of Donetsk City.
- Russian forces continue efforts to establish further control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
- Ukrainian and European officials continue to warn that Russia is preparing for an imminent second wave of mobilization.
- Russian occupation authorities continue to transport Ukrainian children to Russian territory under the guise of medical rehabilitation schemes.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
- Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)
Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)
Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Svatove on January 7. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops northwest of Svatove in the Kupyansk direction are trying to improve their tactical positions and that Ukrainian troops repelled an attack near Stelmakhivka (15km northwest of Svatove).[18] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian troops attempted to counterattack towards Synkivka (45km northwest of Svatove).[19] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian troops attempted to advance on Stelmakhkivka and Novoselivske (13km northwest of Svatove).[20] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that a Russian engineering and sapper unit arrived in Svatove to examine options for potentially blowing the dam of a nearby reservoir in order to slow Ukrainian advances in the Svatove area.[21] Footage posted by Russian media outlet RIA Novosti shows a BMPT armored fighting vehicle in the Svatove area manned by personnel who appear to be wearing patches of the 3rd Army Corps.[22]
Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Kreminna on January 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attempted to attack near Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna), Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna), and Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna).[23] A Russian milblogger noted that Russian forces are attacking towards Makiivka and that Makiivka and the surrounding area are a “grey zone.”[24] The Russian MoD reported Ukrainian assault groups are operating in the Serebrianka forest area southwest of Kreminna.[25]
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces made marginal confirmed advances in Soledar, but Ukrainian forces maintain control of the settlement as of January 7. Geolocated footage shows a Wagner Group fighter at the Artyomsol Plant in central Soledar.[26] Russian milbloggers also broadly claimed that Wagner Group forces are fighting around Soledar on the streets in Pidhorodne, Krasna Hora, Krasnopillia, Blahodatne, Razdolivka, and Vesele and that Wagner Group fighters have taken complete control of Pidhorodne.[27] ISW has not observed visual confirmation to corroborate these extensive claims, beyond footage of the aftermath of urban combat and fighting in residential buildings in Soledar over the course of January 6 and 7.[28] A Ukrainian military correspondent posted a geolocated picture of himself in front of the Soledar Salt Mine in northwestern Soledar, indicating that Ukrainian troops hold the northwestern part of the settlement and repelled reported Russian attacks on this part of the mine.[29] Spokesperson for the Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces, Serhiy Cherevaty, denied Russian claims that Ukrainian troops are withdrawing from Soledar, and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops continue to repel Russian attacks on the settlement.[30]
Russian forces additionally continued ground attacks south of Bakhmut on January 7. Geolocated footage confirms that Wagner Group forces advanced into Klishchiivka (6km southwest of Bakhmut).[31] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks south of Bakhmut near Ozerianivka and Klishchiivka.[32] Russian milbloggers additionally discussed fighting south of Bakhmut near Opytne.[33] Graphic drone footage posted on January 7 shows the corpses of Wagner Group forces scattered near Bakhmut, indicating that combat in this area continues to be highly attritional.[34]
Russian forces continued ground attacks along the western outskirts of Donetsk City on January 7. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks near Pervomaiske on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City, and near Marinka and Pobieda on the southwestern outskirts.[35] A Russian milblogger reported that Russian troops are attempting to bypass Avdiivka (north of Donetsk City) from positions to the north, and that the next decisive offensive action in this sector will be on Pervomaiske.[36] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian troops conducted unsuccessful assaults northwest of Donetsk City towards Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka.[37] Social media footage shows Russian offensive operations within Marinka, where a milblogger claimed that Russian troops are trying to bypass Ukrainian fortifications from the south.[38] Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast and continued routine fire along the line of contact in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[39]
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian forces continued routine indirect fire west of Hulyaipole and along the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River in Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson oblasts on January 7 despite the declared Russian ceasefire.[40] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Kherson City and Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[41] Ukrainian Mayor of Kamianske, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Andriy Bilousov, reported that Ukrainian air defense shot down a Russian drone near the settlement.[42] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) likely tried to preempt criticism that Russian indirect fire continued during the period of the Russian ceasefire by claiming that Russian forces returned fire in Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kherson oblasts to suppress Ukrainian artillery strikes against Russian positions in southern Ukraine.[43]
Russian forces continue efforts to establish further control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) as of January 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian occupation troops have forced about 3,000 employees at the ZNPP to obtain Russian passports.[44] Russian authorities likely forced many Ukrainian employees at the ZNPP to obtain Russian passports in order to support ongoing efforts to force the employees to sign employment contracts with Russian state nuclear power company Rosatom.[45] Energoatom reported that only 100 out of the 6700 remaining Ukrainian workers at the plant have signed contracts with Rosatom as of October 28, 2022.[46]
Russian sources claimed that Russian air defenses shot down a Ukrainian drone in the vicinity of Russian-occupied Sevastopol, Crimea on the night of January 6 to 7.[47]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Ukrainian and European officials continue to warn that Russia is preparing for an imminent second wave of mobilization. Head of the Estonian Defense Forces intelligence center Colonel Margo Grosberg stated that Russian authorities are preparing for an imminent second wave of mobilization while continuing covert mobilization and noted that details regarding this new wave will likely become clear following Orthodox Christmas.[48] Grosberg noted that a printer in Krasnodar Krai has already received an order for 5,000 mobilization call-up slips.[49] Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) representative Andriy Chernak reported on January 7 that Russian officials plan to mobilize up to 500,000 Russians, including residents of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, which arguably have faced lighter mobilization pushes in the past.[50] Ukrainian and Russian sources continue to detail ongoing Russian mobilization efforts in Russia and occupied parts of Ukraine and refusals of Russian officials to release soldiers with expired contracts.[51] One Russian source accused “provocateurs” of spreading false reports of mobilization to push a false narrative of the existence of a second wave.[52] However, as Ukrainian and other officials have noted, and as ISW has previously reported, discussion of a “second” wave of mobilization is somewhat misleading because mobilization efforts never truly ceased after the purported “end” of partial mobilization.[53] Even the initial partial mobilization efforts in Russia were not truly the first mobilization wave; moreover, they were the first mobilization efforts aimed at the reserve on the tail end of regionally-based volunteer recruitment drives throughout the summer of 2022. The volunteer recruitment drives, finally, followed the call-up of Russian reservists in advance of the invasion of February 24, 2022. Each successive reserve call-up reaches deeper into the pool of men who have been out of service longer, are older, in worse health, or were exempted in previous waves.
Russian authorities continue to recruit for territorial defense forces and perpetuate the unrealistic threat of a Ukrainian ground assault on Russian border regions. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 7 that Russian police in Belgorod Oblast are implementing a recruitment campaign following the failure of the initial plan to generate volunteers.[54] Russian servicemen reportedly visit residential areas, survey the male population of military age, and engage in discussions aimed at popularizing service.[55]
A Russian news outlet reported on January 6 that Russian authorities want to conduct “revenue mobilization” and collect a one-time payment of an unspecified amount from large businesses in order to fund the war and address problems in the state budget.[56] The source also claimed that Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin provided Russian officials in mid-December with relevant instructions for “revenue mobilization” and a proposal to allocate 175 billion rubles (about $2.4 million) to fund the war and additionally to provide for the resettlement of residents of Kherson Oblast to unspecified locations.[57] Russia continues to seek methods to circumvent growing financial difficulties, as ISW has previously reported.[58]
Russian military leadership continues to experience challenges with maintaining the morale of mobilized servicemen. A Russian mobilization Telegram channel posted video footage on January 7 in which previously mobilized servicemen of Belgorod Oblast asked to go home after stating that Russian leadership sent them to the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) as cannon fodder.[59] A Russian source claimed on January 8 that mobilized servicemen of the 568th Howitzer Artillery Battalion, now subordinate to the DNR’s 1st Army corps, complained that their command is transferring them into an infantry role for which they were not trained.[60] Independent Georgia-based investigative organization Conflict Intelligence Team reported on January 6 that several mobilized Russian servicemen training in Belarus escaped from their unit and stated that the servicemen are on a wanted list in Minsk Oblast.[61]
Russian military leadership continues to face resistance in ethnic enclaves following past partial mobilization efforts. The “Free Yakutia Foundation,” established on August 24, operates similarly to the other ethnic advocacy groups in Russia with anti-war and anti-xenophobia sentiments and seeks independence from Russia.[62] The “Free Yakutia Foundation” states that Russia’s partial mobilization scheme is part of a larger effort to ethnically cleanse indigenous peoples from Russia and that Russian military leadership intentionally sends minority groups of Russia into Ukraine as cannon fodder.[63] A Russian source claimed on January 7 that the “Free Yakutia Foundation’s” emphasis on the Russian government as a totalitarian and oppressive institution is overstated and unpopular in Russia’s Yakutia (Sakha) Republic and that the West is fixated on dividing the Russian Federation along ethnic lines.[64] ISW has previously reported that ethnic minority enclaves largely face the brunt of force generation efforts, which may prove to be a source of domestic dissent for the Kremlin as the war continues.[65]
Some Russians continue to challenge Russian force-generation efforts. A Russian news outlet reported on January 6 that Russian authorities in Rostov-on-Don, Rostov Oblast detained three people, including two minors, on suspicion of intent to set fire to a military recruiting office using Molotov cocktails.[66]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian occupation authorities are continuing to transport Ukrainian children to Russian territory under the guise of medical rehabilitation schemes. Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai stated on January 7 that Russian occupation authorities transported 300 Ukrainian children to Moscow Oblast hospitals after Russian field doctors in Luhansk Oblast conducted medical exams to identify children with “serious injuries.”[67] Haidai also reported on January 7 that teachers in occupied Luhansk Oblast accept bribes from Russian occupation officials to provide authorities with lists of children for medical examinations.[68]
Russian forces and occupation authorities are continuing to take measures to control movement in occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on January 7 that Russian forces are collecting data on local residents after Russian occupation authorities introduced special permits allowing civilian movement between settlements in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[69] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported on January 7 that residents must specify the purpose of their movement and identify the person they are visiting, allowing Russian forces to gather data on connections between residents in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[70]
Russian forces and occupation authorities are continuing to use intimidation to consolidate economic and administrative control of occupied territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 7 that Russian occupation authorities fully eradicated the Ukrainian hryvnia from circulation in occupied Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast, by threatening local entrepreneurs with fines and confiscation of property.[71] The Ukrainian General Staff stated on January 7 that Russian forces have increased seizures of residential property in Enerhodar as the number of houses abandoned due to forced evacuation has increased.
Russian occupation authorities are continuing to intensify measures to consolidate social control of occupied territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 7 that Russian occupation authorities replaced all Ukrainian television channels with Russian programming in Melitopol and Pryazovske, Zaporizhia Oblast.[72]
Russian occupation authorities continued intensifying efforts to identify partisan activity in occupied territories on January 7. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on January 7 that Russian occupation authorities created a Telegram chatbot to encourage local residents to report on and identify Ukrainian partisans operating in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast.[73]
ISW will continue to report daily observed indicators consistent with the current assessed most dangerous course of action (MDCOA): a renewed invasion of northern Ukraine possibly aimed at Kyiv.
ISW’s December 15 MDCOA warning forecast about a potential Russian offensive against northern Ukraine in winter 2023 remains a worst-case scenario within the forecast cone. ISW currently assesses the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine from Belarus as low, but possible, and the risk of Belarusian direct involvement as very low. This new section in the daily update is not in itself a forecast or assessment. It lays out the daily observed indicators we are using to refine our assessments and forecasts, which we expect to update regularly. Our assessment that the MDCOA remains unlikely has not changed. We will update this header if the assessment changes.
Observed indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- Nothing significant to report.
Observed ambiguous indicators for MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- Nothing significant to report.
Observed counter-indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- Kyiv Oblast Military Administration Head Lieutenant-General Oleksandr Pavliuk stated on January 7 that there is currently no immediate threat of a Russian offensive on Kyiv from Belarusian territory.[74] Pavliuk claimed that Russian forces are deployed near the Ukrainian-Belarusian border to pin Ukrainian forces on the northern border so that Ukrainian command cannot transfer these forces to eastern Ukraine.[75] Pavliuk stated that Ukrainian forces are considering the possibility of a Russian offensive in northwestern Ukraine in the coming months but have not observed Russian forces transfer the appropriate number of forces and means to Belarus in preparation for such an offensive.[76]
- The Ukrainian General Staff reiterated that it has not observed Russian forces in Belarus forming a strike group as of January 7.[77]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
[4] https://t.me/miroshnik_r/10125; https; ://t.me/kornilov1968/14679; https://t.me/sashakots/37956;
[5] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-government-moscow-religion-ort... ua/news/8416.html
[8] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70334; https://t.me/news_kremlin/1344
[16] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/rosiiski-terorysty-vykorystaly-blyzko-660-iranskykh-shakhediv.htm ; https://mobile.twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1611449870040109058
[17] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/rosiiski-terorysty-vykorystaly-blyzko-660-iranskykh-shakhediv.html
[21] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/07/rosiyany-mozhut-pidirvaty-dambu-svativskogo-vodoshovyshha-aby-spovilnyty-nastup-zsu/
[30] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/01/07/soledar-ne-znahodytsya-pid-kontrolem-rf-sergij-cherevatyj/; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0V9meYLzwcc7Wo5cNQ6Y...
[45] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/12/14/bilshist-praczivnykiv-zaes-vidmovlyayutsya-ukladaty-dogovir-z-rosatomom/
[48] https://news.err dot ee/1608842200/intelligence-chief-second-russian-call-up-likely-after-orthodox-christmas; https://t.me/mobilizationnews/6788; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilizati...
[49] https://news.err dot ee/1608842200/intelligence-chief-second-russian-call-up-likely-after-orthodox-christmas
[50] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/rosiiska-vlada-15-sichnia-mozhe-oholosyty-pro-dodatkovu-mobilizatsiiu.html
[51] https://semnasem dot org/news/2023/01/06/zhitelnica-makeevki-rasskazala-ob-oblavah-voenkomata-na-sotrudnikov-shahty; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-jan-4-6; https://www dot kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/384658/; https://t.me/mobilizationnews/6740; https://twitter.com/brewerov/status...
[61] https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-jan-4-6; https://charter97%20dot%20org/ru/news/2023/1/6/531135/
[69] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/07/rosiyany-vykorystovuyut-speczperepustky-na-tot-dlya-zboru-informacziyi-shhodo-misczevyh-meshkancziv/
[70] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/07/rosiyany-vykorystovuyut-speczperepustky-na-tot-dlya-zboru-informacziyi-shhodo-misczevyh-meshkancziv/
[73] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/07/okupanty-zaklykaly-meshkancziv-melitopolya-pysaty-donosy/
[74] https://suspilne dot media/353624-navkolo-kieva-dekilka-rubeziv-oboroni-protaznistu-blizko-tisaci-kilometriv-general-lejtenant-oleksandr-pavluk/
[75] https://suspilne dot media/353624-navkolo-kieva-dekilka-rubeziv-oboroni-protaznistu-blizko-tisaci-kilometriv-general-lejtenant-oleksandr-pavluk/
[76] https://suspilne dot media/353624-navkolo-kieva-dekilka-rubeziv-oboroni-protaznistu-blizko-tisaci-kilometriv-general-lejtenant-oleksandr-pavluk/
understandingwar.org
2. Now Fighting for Ukraine: Volunteers Seeking Revenge Against Russia
Ukraine needs to be careful about this. Note really addressed in this article is that it is imperative that it maintain the moral high ground and follow the law of land warfare. It will be responsible for the actions of these "volunteers" if they seek revenge, retribution, and retaliation for how they have been wronged in the past.
And of course the Ukrainians are also wise to be on the lookout for infiltrators.
Then again some can be useful behind enemy lines as this article illustrates. Also not addressed is this potential for support to influence operations that these volunteers can provide.
Excerpts:
Many of the volunteers were already living in Ukraine, either for work or seeking refuge from political oppression back home. Some volunteers have struggled with visas and residency permits, while their eagerness to join the fight has aroused suspicions among some Ukrainian officials and commanders, who are on high alert for saboteurs.
...
Although he and his fellow volunteers had lived in Ukraine for several years, they were initially met with suspicion from Ukrainians on edge about Russian saboteurs. “We were held at gunpoint,” he said. “We had many funny, and not so funny, encounters, but I was determined to have this regiment.”
But they have also found support among Ukrainians.
A Ukrainian volunteer group, Bratstvo, eventually helped the Russian regiment find a role for itself not so dissimilar from the other ethnic battalions, operating behind Russian lines and carrying out reconnaissance and sabotage missions for the Ukrainian Army.
Minutes before setting out on a night mission recently, White Rex said his aim had always been to find a way to return home to Russia. But he said the war had taught him that the way to return to Russia was to overthrow Mr. Putin and his government.
“The Russian Volunteer Corps marches in and destroys the current government — that’s the only way,” he said. “You cannot persuade a tyrant to leave, and any other force would be seen as invaders.”
Now Fighting for Ukraine: Volunteers Seeking Revenge Against Russia
nytimes.com · by Carlotta Gall · January 8, 2023
A volunteer Chechen battalion training last month outside Kyiv, Ukraine.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
KYIV REGION, Ukraine — The sharp crack of sniper fire rang out across the snowbound valley. Soldiers in white camouflage crouched low, shooting at the hill opposite to provide cover as four men evacuated a casualty.
The action was part of a live-fire training exercise for new recruits on a recent morning outside the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. But there was an unusual element to the event. While a Ukrainian Army officer was giving the orders, the trainees were members of a volunteer Chechen battalion that also mixed in some Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians.
Ukraine’s military commanders have long said they do not lack soldiers for the war, but they have nonetheless welcomed to their ranks thousands of volunteers, including foreign citizens. Many of them, like the Chechens, are refugees from Russia itself. Others have come from surrounding nations, like Georgia, that have a history of opposition to Moscow and the leadership of President Vladimir V. Putin.
“We saw what was happening,” said Muslim Madiyev, a gray-bearded deputy commander of the Chechen battalion, wearing ear protectors to muffle the sound of gunfire as he watched the training exercises. “Ukraine has no shortage of men, but we have to join and be a part of this war.”
Many of the volunteers were already living in Ukraine, either for work or seeking refuge from political oppression back home. Some volunteers have struggled with visas and residency permits, while their eagerness to join the fight has aroused suspicions among some Ukrainian officials and commanders, who are on high alert for saboteurs.
A sniper in winter camouflage during a training exercise for the volunteer Chechen battalion, a mix of Chechens, Tatars and Ukrainians.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
But the volunteers seem to be finding their place. Mr. Madiyev, a veteran of two wars in Chechnya against Moscow, was an associate of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the former Soviet general who led Chechnya’s bid for independence from Russia in the 1990s. Exiled from Chechnya, Mr. Madiyev settled in Ukraine in 2016.
His battalion, named for the late Chechen leader, is one of several Chechen units that have joined Ukraine in its fight against Russia in recent years, following the 2014 uprising of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. Mr. Madiyev declined to reveal how many active fighters he had, saying simply, “We have enough.”
He spoke about the Russian invasion the way many Ukrainians do, saying that if Moscow is not stopped in Ukraine, it will threaten many more countries of Europe.
But the younger fighters in his battalion take things further..
“Our aim is the liberation of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” a Chechen fighter said, using the name of the erstwhile self-declared republic, “and to help all the nations who want it, to gain freedom.” In accordance with military protocol, he gave only his code name, Maga.
The Chechens are only one example of numerous ethnic-based battalions and regiments that have been forming in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion last February.
Fighters from Belarus have formed a regiment thousands strong. Other volunteers come from the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as from ethnic minorities that have large populations in Russia: Chechens, Tatars and Turkic-speaking groups.
There is also a smattering of Russian exiles, among them Russian nationalists and neo-Nazis who are opposed to Mr. Putin. A thousands-strong regiment of Belarusians includes many opponents of the country’s president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.
Their participation in the war may be useful for Ukraine, but it is also a potentially explosive issue for the Kyiv government because most of them harbor long-term political ambitions to return home and overthrow the Russian and Belarusian governments. Ukrainian military officials declined to comment on their use of the volunteer groups, while a spokesman for the Ukrainian security service, the S.B.U., said it was not responsible for managing them.
But the volunteers themselves say that they are acting with the full knowledge and under the orders of the Ukrainian Army and intelligence services. Many of their operations are covert, including dangerous reconnaissance or sabotage missions behind Russian lines.
In response to an appeal by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, early in the war, thousands of volunteers poured in from Western countries, including the United States and Britain. Most joined the International Legion, which has been recognized by the Ukrainian government and, to some extent, integrated into the Ukrainian Army.
At a news briefing last month, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said there were ideological and political benefits to having foreign soldiers fighting alongside Ukrainians in defense of European values.
Foreign soldiers were also gaining valuable experience, he added: “The experience of the modern war here, the war of technologies, drone war and electronic warfare. So I think it’s a win-win exchange.”
But the volunteers from former Soviet republics are, in many ways, even more useful.
They have a linguistic advantage because most speak Russian, which is widely spoken in Ukraine, and sometimes Ukrainian, making coordination with the Ukrainian military easier. And some, like a group of Georgians in the Kavkaz Legion, have battlefield experience, having served with the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.
Their knowledge of Russia and Russians, and their hatred of Moscow, has made the volunteers good undercover operators for Kyiv. Some Ukrainian officials and lawmakers have even expressed support for their causes. In October, for example, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a motion recognizing the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria as a territory occupied by Russia.
But they also face substantial risks, given the nature of their work behind enemy lines. Not just Russian nationals, but virtually any undercover soldiers captured by Russian forces would be dealt with harshly.
One of the more recently formed volunteer battalions, Turan, is composed of Turkic-speaking ethnic groups from the Caucasus, Central Asia and Russia. It is led by a refugee from Kyrgyzstan, Almaz Kudabek, who had worked as a barber on American bases in his home country and in the Afghan city of Kandahar.
He says he has recruited Azerbaijanis, Tatars and Chinese Uyghurs to the group, and he talks passionately about the marginalization and oppression of Turkic-speaking minorities in Russia. He said that Moscow had unfairly drawn conscripts for the war predominantly from remote and poorer regions of Russia, including those populated by Turkic-speaking ethnic minorities, who have been killed in far greater numbers than ethnic Russians.
But Mr. Kudabek said members of his unit could turn that injustice to their advantage, infiltrating Russian-occupied territory on sabotage missions and even passing themselves off as Russian soldiers.
“We just want to fight Russians,” he said. “We know what they are.”
Despite their evident value to the Ukrainian military, the commanders of ethnic battalions complained of a lack of support from Kyiv. The Chechen battalion leader, Mr. Madiyev, said that beyond weapons and ammunition, the units have to provide for their own food, fuel and equipment.
The leader of a Russian regiment, a far-right nationalist who uses the code name White Rex, said he ran into multiple obstacles when he formed the unit shortly after the Russians invaded.
Although he and his fellow volunteers had lived in Ukraine for several years, they were initially met with suspicion from Ukrainians on edge about Russian saboteurs. “We were held at gunpoint,” he said. “We had many funny, and not so funny, encounters, but I was determined to have this regiment.”
But they have also found support among Ukrainians.
A Ukrainian volunteer group, Bratstvo, eventually helped the Russian regiment find a role for itself not so dissimilar from the other ethnic battalions, operating behind Russian lines and carrying out reconnaissance and sabotage missions for the Ukrainian Army.
Minutes before setting out on a night mission recently, White Rex said his aim had always been to find a way to return home to Russia. But he said the war had taught him that the way to return to Russia was to overthrow Mr. Putin and his government.
“The Russian Volunteer Corps marches in and destroys the current government — that’s the only way,” he said. “You cannot persuade a tyrant to leave, and any other force would be seen as invaders.”
nytimes.com · by Carlotta Gall · January 8, 2023
3. New variant XBB.1.5 is ‘most transmissible’ yet, could fuel covid wave
Time for another vaccination. We will get another this week just in case and when they get one for this variant we will get that one too.
New variant XBB.1.5 is ‘most transmissible’ yet, could fuel covid wave
The Washington Post · by Fenit Nirappil · January 8, 2023
Three years after the novel coronavirus emerged, a new variant, XBB.1.5, is quickly becoming the dominant strain in parts of the United States because of a potent mix of mutations that makes it easier to spread broadly, including among those who have been previously infected or vaccinated.
XBB.1.5, pegged by the World Health Organization as “the most transmissible” descendant yet of the omicron variant, rose from barely 2 percent of U.S. cases at the start of December to more than 27 percent the first week of January, according to new estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 70 percent of cases in the Northeast are believed to be XBB.1.5.
While there is no evidence so far that XBB.1.5 is more virulent than its predecessors, a recent swirl of misinformation linking the rise of new variants to vaccination has cast a spotlight on this latest strain and raised concern among some health experts that it could further limit booster uptake.
“XBB did not evolve because people were vaccinated,” said Vaughn Cooper, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The way it evolved, let’s be straight, is because people were infected by multiple viruses at the same time.”
Since the omicron variant ignited an explosion of cases last winter, it spawned a host of descendants that are even more adept at slipping past antibodies and caused most infections in the United States. The XBB line emerged as a result of two other omicron subvariants swapping parts.
Virologists who studied XBB.1.5 say it does not appear better at escaping antibodies than other immune-evading predecessors, but it is better at binding to the cell and replicating. That means it can more easily become the dominant strain in a community than its relatives, but it doesn’t necessarily worsen an individual’s covid symptoms.
Health officials are urging Americans to get a booster dose of the new coronavirus vaccine formulated for omicron subvariants to protect against an expected winter surge in cases from holiday gatherings and as people continue to congregate indoors.
The nation is averaging nearly 48,000 people hospitalized with covid-19 over a seven-day period, the highest since late February but far below the 150,000 peak set about a year ago. The average daily count of hospitalized patients is up by about 20,000 since Thanksgiving.
But only 15 percent of those eligible — and 38 percent of senior citizens, who are most at risk — have received the updated shots.
“For folks without a very recent infection or a bivalent vaccine, you likely have very little protection against infection. And for older folks, diminishing protection against serious illness,” Ashish Jha, coordinator of the White House’s covid-19 response, tweeted Jan. 4. “So am I concerned about XBB.1.5? Yes. Am I worried this represents some huge set back? No.”
Good morning
Over the holidays, you may have heard about Omicron XBB.1.5
It went from 4% of sequences to 40% in just a few weeks
That’s a stunning increase
So what does it mean? Will it cause a wave of serious illness and death?
Here's what we know, don't know
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@AshishKJha46) January 4, 2023
XBB prompted some concerns because of lab studies showing antibodies generated by vaccines struggle to block that variant. But that doesn’t mean the vaccines don’t work: For much of the last year, waves of infections from immune-evading variants have not caused surges of severe illness at hospitals, and experts believe that widespread immunity from shots and prior infections are making people more resilient to the virus.
While antibodies do not provide foolproof shields against reinfections, they still reduce the odds of contracting the virus and greatly reduce the likelihood of severe illness and hospitalization.
“Things like boosters are always beneficial,” said Kristian Andersen, a professor in the department of immunology and microbiology who tracks coronavirus variants at the Scripps Research Institute. “Even if you get infected, you are expected to have less viral load, and you are expected to be able to transmit the virus less.”
But the focus on boosters is also drawing criticism. An opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal by a member of its editorial board suggested that repeated vaccination made Americans more susceptible to new variants.
Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the risk of mild breakthrough infection has been consistent throughout the pandemic despite the virus’s evolution, so there is no reason to blame shots for the variants. But he said it’s difficult to justify regular booster shots for the general population when the protection against mild illness is brief and immunity from earlier shots or infections still provides robust protection against severe outcomes.
“At some level, we are going to have to get used to mild illness unless you want to take three doses a year and stay in your house most of the time,” said Offit, who also advises the Food and Drug Administration on vaccines.
FDA commissioner Robert Califf, in a series of tweets he said he wrote to address prevalent “misinformation/disinformation,” noted that there was no clear evidence to support the thesis of the Wall Street Journal piece.
“Raising doubts about the value of vaccines will continue to lead well-intended people to delay getting an updated vaccine, leading to a clearly documented risk of death or severe illness,” Califf tweeted, after Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.); Richard Urso, an ophthalmologist and member of America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that spreads covid misinformation; and many others cited the Wall Street Journal piece as they questioned the use of coronavirus vaccines.
It’s a new year, but misinformation/disinformation is still prevalent. After reading this editorial, I think we should talk about XBB and the COVID-19 vaccines.
Thread… https://t.co/m91rTleSsM
— Dr. Robert M. Califf (@DrCaliff_FDA) January 4, 2023
Several studies have tried to examine whether SARS-CoV-2 variants spread faster in locations with higher vaccination rates and found no evidence to support it, said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.
“XBB.1.5 is just sort of the latest variant in what is going to be a continual process of the virus evolving,” Bloom said. “There’s a lot of space for the virus to get mutations.”
While XBB.1.5’s mutations have sparked scientific intrigue, experts caution it doesn’t substantially change circumstances for ordinary people navigating pandemic life with omicron’s descendants as the dominant strains since last spring. In addition to staying up to date on boosters, don’t assume you can’t get sick again if your last shot or bout with covid was more than several months ago. Wear high-quality masks and avoid crowds to avoid infections that can still cause mild illness, disrupt plans and lead to long-term health complications.
The World Health Organization is monitoring XBB.1.5 because of how quickly it has supplanted other subvariants — and each wave of mass infection brings opportunities for the virus to morph into something more dangerous.
“The more this virus circulates, the more opportunities it will have to change,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on covid-19 at a Wednesday news conference. “We do expect further waves of infection around the world but that doesn’t have to translate into further waves of death because our countermeasures continue to work.”
XBB.1.5 surged first in the Northeast, where it now makes up nearly three quarters of cases. But hospitals there have not raised alarms about people coming in sicker because of the new subvariant.
Official case counts are no longer considered reliable because at-home test results are not reported, but wastewater tracking and other measures suggest cases are rising across the country.
At Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital chain, the ranks of patients testing positive rapidly increased after Thanksgiving, along with the share of viruses confirmed to be the XBB.1.5 strain in lab testing. The “vast majority” of patients with coronavirus are admitted for other causes or coronavirus is a complicating factor, Northwell’s chief of infectious diseases Bruce Farber said. The share of those patients who received intensive care or were placed on ventilators remained stable after the rise of XBB.1.5 in early December. “In terms of very sick people with covid, it’s almost exclusively elderly and people with a lot of morbidities or who are immunosuppressed,” he said.
Experts hope hospitals in other parts of the country can share Northwell’s experience: weathering a rise of cases without covid wards packed with people fighting for their lives.
“Even though this thing is continuing to evolve, if you take a step back and look at the big peaks, they are not as ferocious as let’s say delta in the last half of 2021 or the early BA.1 omicron wave,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “Robust population immunity helps communities withstand new variants.”
Carolyn Y. Johnson contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Fenit Nirappil · January 8, 2023
4. Opinion | Time is not on Ukraine’s side By Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates
Conclusion:
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech before Congress last month reminded us of Winston Churchill’s plea in February 1941: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” We agree with the Biden administration’s determination to avoid direct confrontation with Russia. However, an emboldened Putin might not give us that choice. The way to avoid confrontation with Russia in the future is to help Ukraine push back the invader now. That is the lesson of history that should guide us, and it lends urgency to the actions that must be taken — before it is too late.
Opinion | Time is not on Ukraine’s side
By Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates
January 7, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Condoleezza Rice · January 7, 2023
Condoleezza Rice was secretary of state from 2005 to 2009. Robert M. Gates was secretary of defense from 2006 to 2011.
When it comes to the war in Ukraine, about the only thing that’s certain right now is that the fighting and destruction will continue.
Vladimir Putin remains fully committed to bringing all of Ukraine back under Russian control or — failing that — destroying it as a viable country. He believes it is his historical destiny — his messianic mission — to reestablish the Russian Empire and, as Zbigniew Brzezinski observed years ago, there can be no Russian Empire without Ukraine.
Both of us have dealt with Putin on a number of occasions, and we are convinced he believes time is on his side: that he can wear down the Ukrainians and that U.S. and European unity and support for Ukraine will eventually erode and fracture. To be sure, the Russian economy and people will suffer as the war continues, but Russians have endured far worse.
For Putin, defeat is not an option. He cannot cede to Ukraine the four eastern provinces he has declared part of Russia. If he cannot be militarily successful this year, he must retain control of positions in eastern and southern Ukraine that provide future jumping-off points for renewed offensives to take the rest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, control the entire Donbas region and then move west. Eight years separated Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its invasion nearly a year ago. Count on Putin to be patient to achieve his destiny.
Meanwhile, although Ukraine’s response to the invasion has been heroic and its military has performed brilliantly, the country’s economy is in a shambles, millions of its people have fled, its infrastructure is being destroyed, and much of its mineral wealth, industrial capacity and considerable agricultural land are under Russian control. Ukraine’s military capability and economy are now dependent almost entirely on lifelines from the West — primarily, the United States. Absent another major Ukrainian breakthrough and success against Russian forces, Western pressures on Ukraine to negotiate a cease-fire will grow as months of military stalemate pass. Under current circumstances, any negotiated cease-fire would leave Russian forces in a strong position to resume their invasion whenever they are ready. That is unacceptable.
Opinion writers on the war in Ukraine
Post Opinions provides commentary on the war in Ukraine from columnists with expertise in foreign policy, voices on the ground in Ukraine and more.
Columnist David Ignatius covers foreign affairs. His columns have broken news on new developments around the war. He also answers questions from readers. Sign up to follow him.
Iuliia Mendel, a former press secretary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, writes guest opinions from inside Ukraine. She has written about trauma, Ukraine’s “women warriors” and what it’s like for her fiance to go off to war.
Columnist Fareed Zakaria covers foreign affairs. His columns have reviewed the West’s strategy in Ukraine. Sign up to follow him.
Columnist Josh Rogin covers foreign policy and national security. His columns have explored the geopolitical ramifications of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. Sign up to follow him.
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The only way to avoid such a scenario is for the United States and its allies to urgently provide Ukraine with a dramatic increase in military supplies and capability — sufficient to deter a renewed Russian offensive and to enable Ukraine to push back Russian forces in the east and south. Congress has provided enough money to pay for such reinforcement; what is needed now are decisions by the United States and its allies to provide the Ukrainians the additional military equipment they need — above all, mobile armor. The U.S. agreement Thursday to provide Bradley Fighting Vehicles is commendable, if overdue. Because there are serious logistical challenges associated with sending American Abrams heavy tanks, Germany and other allies should fill this need. NATO members also should provide the Ukrainians with longer-range missiles, advanced drones, significant ammunition stocks (including artillery shells), more reconnaissance and surveillance capability, and other equipment. These capabilities are needed in weeks, not months.
Increasingly, members of Congress and others in our public discourse ask, “Why should we care? This is not our fight.” But the United States has learned the hard way — in 1914, 1941 and 2001 — that unprovoked aggression and attacks on the rule of law and the international order cannot be ignored. Eventually, our security was threatened and we were pulled into conflict. This time, the economies of the world — ours included — are already seeing the inflationary impact and the drag on growth caused by Putin’s single-minded aggression. It is better to stop him now, before more is demanded of the United States and NATO as a whole. We have a determined partner in Ukraine that is willing to bear the consequences of war so that we do not have to do so ourselves in the future.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech before Congress last month reminded us of Winston Churchill’s plea in February 1941: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” We agree with the Biden administration’s determination to avoid direct confrontation with Russia. However, an emboldened Putin might not give us that choice. The way to avoid confrontation with Russia in the future is to help Ukraine push back the invader now. That is the lesson of history that should guide us, and it lends urgency to the actions that must be taken — before it is too late.
The Washington Post · by Condoleezza Rice · January 7, 2023
5. Opinion | Diversity among diplomats will strengthen U.S. foreign policy
Excerpts:
Most important, Black and Brown personal stories reflect America’s story. When I served as an American diplomat in China, I gave presentations to Chinese citizens about my own family history — how my grandparents migrated from Panama to the United States — and the challenges of being an Afro-Latino.
The State Department does work to recruit and retain people of color to represent the United States overseas — via the Pickering and Rangel programs. USAID similarly offers the Payne Fellowship, and several departments actively recruit at historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic institutions, and other minority-serving schools.
To redouble these efforts, agencies should reach out to young people of color even earlier in the career pipeline. Many high school and college students aren’t aware that international careers are an option. Organizations such as the Fulbright Association, World Affairs Council of America and Diversity Abroad seek to expose young people to the idea of studying abroad.
Agencies and even political campaigns should also work closely with diverse professional groups to recruit and retain talent — including Black Professionals in International Affairs, the American Mandarin Society, the National Association for Black Engagement with Asia, the Black China Caucus and the Latinx China Network.
The United States can take advantage of its own diversity — by recognizing it as one of the greatest soft-power tools it can deploy in the global competition of ideas.
Opinion | Diversity among diplomats will strengthen U.S. foreign policy
The Washington Post · by Leland Lazarus · January 7, 2023
Leland Lazarus, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, is the associate director for national security at the Florida International University Jack D. Gordon Institute of Public Policy.
Last year, during the same week that President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in Bali, a group of 10 Black foreign-policy professionals who specialize in understanding China gathered in Washington, D.C., as part of the African-American China Leadership Fellows Program. I was lucky to be among them. Each day, we met with leaders from Congress, the Departments of State and Defense, private companies, and think tanks. Our discussions included U.S. strategy toward China, controls on microchip exports, Taiwan scenarios and standing up the State Department’s new China House.
In a field long dominated by White males, we were the majority in the room discussing United States-China relations and recommending how policy should be carried out. In the process, I realized that Black and Brown foreign policy professionals provide unique perspectives. Washington needs such fresh views at this crucial moment of diplomacy between the two superpowers.
As the United States and China compete for global leadership, each government tells a story about itself that’s meant to win hearts and minds around the globe. In the U.S. narrative, race relations have always threatened to overshadow its image as a shining “city on a hill.”
Since the nation’s founding, adversaries ranging from the British in the Revolutionary War to the Nazis in World War II to the Soviet Union during the Cold War have exploited U.S. racial tensions at home to weaken its credibility abroad. During the Vietnam War, “Hanoi Hannah” tried to persuade Black G.I.s to defect by pointing out U.S. economic and racial inequalities.
For decades China has sought to build solidarity with the Global South by comparing the West’s colonialism, imperialism and racial discrimination with its own suffering during the “century of humiliation.” Mao Zedong hosted Black leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and even some members of the Black Panthers.
Year after year, China releases its own report documenting U.S. racial discrimination, even as the United States continues to call out China’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs and political dissidents. In 2020, China seized on the George Floyd protests to highlight what it considered U.S. hypocrisy: condemning China for suppressing the 2019 Hong Kong protests yet, months later, dealing harshly with nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
I was a Foreign Service officer in Barbados when Floyd’s killing sparked global protests for justice. During that time, Black and Brown diplomats were called upon to openly and honestly share the nation’s long struggle with racism and admit that we are a country of contradictions, a home of hypocrisies. We also explained that Americans have always possessed the capacity to change, to right our wrongs, to bend with every ounce of our strength that moral arc of the universe toward justice.
To persuade the broader world of U.S. greatness, however, it is essential to make sure our representatives abroad look like people in the United States.
Black and Brown Americans are uniquely qualified to represent our country. Many of them grew up in bilingual households, which means the government may spend less time and resources training them in regional studies or language lessons. Many are engaged with diaspora communities, whose deep connections abroad serve as a foreign policy force multiplier. Biden acknowledged this during last year’s U.S.-Africa Summit, announcing the creation of the Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement.
Most important, Black and Brown personal stories reflect America’s story. When I served as an American diplomat in China, I gave presentations to Chinese citizens about my own family history — how my grandparents migrated from Panama to the United States — and the challenges of being an Afro-Latino.
The State Department does work to recruit and retain people of color to represent the United States overseas — via the Pickering and Rangel programs. USAID similarly offers the Payne Fellowship, and several departments actively recruit at historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic institutions, and other minority-serving schools.
To redouble these efforts, agencies should reach out to young people of color even earlier in the career pipeline. Many high school and college students aren’t aware that international careers are an option. Organizations such as the Fulbright Association, World Affairs Council of America and Diversity Abroad seek to expose young people to the idea of studying abroad.
Agencies and even political campaigns should also work closely with diverse professional groups to recruit and retain talent — including Black Professionals in International Affairs, the American Mandarin Society, the National Association for Black Engagement with Asia, the Black China Caucus and the Latinx China Network.
The United States can take advantage of its own diversity — by recognizing it as one of the greatest soft-power tools it can deploy in the global competition of ideas.
The Washington Post · by Leland Lazarus · January 7, 2023
6. Opinion | 2023 could be the year that exposes populism for the sham that it is
This will not change the mind's of populists and only harden their resolve.
Opinion | 2023 could be the year that exposes populism for the sham that it is
The Washington Post · by Fareed Zakaria · January 5, 2023
It’s hard not to be fixated on the drama unfolding in the House of Representatives, where the Republican Party is having a nervous breakdown in full public view. This crisis is entirely of the party’s own making. For decades it has whipped its base into a righteous fury by promising radical policies that offer emotional satisfaction to their hardline constituents — from rolling back Medicare and Social Security to defaulting on the national debt to eliminating whole government agencies. But because these policies are totally unworkable, they never happen.
The lesson that the base has internalized is that cowardly moderates were constantly betraying it. The solution now is to maintain a permanent vise grip on the House speaker, ensuring that he or she will always do what the hardliners want. This is, as many have noted, a recipe for permanent blackmail and constant chaos.
The Republican Party’s troubles are severe. Newt Gingrich told Axios that the party is in its worse shape in almost six decades. But it is not alone. In many countries around the world, populists are flailing.
Look at Britain, where Brexit — perhaps the ultimate 21st-century populist cause — has caused havoc within the Conservative Party, which used to be described as the world’s oldest and most successful political party. Britain has had five prime ministers in the six years since 2016; the prior five prime ministers spanned more than 30 years. The self-defeating decision to exit its largest market, the European Union, continues to depress the country’s economic prospects, and it remains the weakest of the Group of Seven economies. In the G-20, only Russia is projected to do worse than Britain in the near future.
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The story is similar in South America. Even though that continent has been swept up in populism from both the right and left, neither version is doing very well. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection, but the winner, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will also find it hard to implement some of his most radical promises. In Chile, left-wing populists coalesced around a plan to completely redo the country’s constitution, putting forward a new one that even many left-of-center politicians regarded as extreme and unworkable. In the ensuing referendum, 86 percent of Chileans turned out, rejecting the new constitution by a whopping 62 percent.
On the other side of the globe, in Australia, right-wing politicians had embraced Trump-style policies and rhetoric. Under Prime Minister Scott Morrison, they spoke a language that mirrored the grievance politics of older, White voters and scared the country about the dangers of immigration, crime and “African gangs” who were supposedly marauding through Victoria. But Morrison bungled the covid-19 pandemic and had little success with the economy. In the recent elections, Australia’s conservatives suffered their worst loss ever, and the even more extreme United Australia and One Nation Parties did poorly as well. The new Labor prime minister enjoys an extraordinarily high approval rating.
Why is this happening? Populism thrives as an opposition movement. It denounces the establishment, encourages fears and conspiracy theories about nefarious ruling elites, and promises emotional responses rather than actual programs (build a wall, ban immigration, stop trade). But once in government, the shallowness of its policy proposals is exposed, and its leaders can’t blame others as easily. Meanwhile, if non-populist forces are sensible and actually get things done, they defang some of the populist right.
Look at the United States, where President Biden’s moderate style, serious demeanor and practical policymaking have given him large legislative accomplishments without triggering a massive electoral backlash. Now, he does benefit by being an old, White man. Had Barack Obama enacted the same policies, I have a feeling we would be hearing much more talk of Obama’s dangerous socialism and un-American policies, complete with racial innuendos.
The poster child for populism has always been Argentina. Juan Peron and his even more charismatic wife, Eva, built a powerful mass movement that attacked the elites and promised to become the voice of the people. In fact, they destroyed Argentina’s economy. What had once been one of the world’s wealthiest countries in the 1910s was, only a few decades later, an economic basket case. Ever since, Argentine populists have promised voters the moon, run up staggering debts, and then routinely defaulted. But now things have soured for them — prompting the Economist to observe that Argentina’s populist movement “is at its lowest ebb.” “Peronism is obviously the main culprit for the situation of Argentina,” former president Eduardo Duhalde told the magazine. “Today we’re in our worst moment.”
These trends are not permanent. The world’s complicated problems will always allow for someone who proposes answers that are simple, seductive and wrong. But let us hope that 2023 will see populism exposed for the sham that it is.
The Washington Post · by Fareed Zakaria · January 5, 2023
7. Japan Matters if China Invades Taiwan
Yes it does. It will also not only be affected but threatened as well.
Japan Matters if China Invades Taiwan
19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · January 7, 2023
Nikkei Asia recently interviewed retired marine general and assistant secretary of defense Wallace “Chip” Gregson (also a 19FortyFive contributor) on the subject of how Japan can best contribute during a cross-strait war between China and Taiwan. Chip held forth about the need for the Japan Self-Defense Forces to fight jointly, to buttress their ability to move among Japan’s nearly 7,000 islands to repel invaders, and to acquire counterstrike arms. Tokyo, in other words, should shrug off its post-1945, passive approach to national defense and assume a posture befitting Japan’s standing as a beneficent great power.
The money quote from the interview, though, was this:
“The biggest contribution Japan can make to a Taiwan contingency is the rock solid protection of Japanese territory, while the U.S. does some of the other things.”
Indeed.
If Japan possessed armaments and warriors adequate to protect itself, the U.S. armed forces wouldn’t need to. They could provide goods Japan can’t—such as extended nuclear deterrence, or sea-lane security far from Japanese shores—while concentrating on other endeavors that advance allied interests, such as safeguarding Taiwan. In fact, you could go further and make this a general rule. The Pentagon’s slogan governing outreach to allies and coalition partners would go something like this: to help the alliance, help yourself.
Corollary: the United States should do its utmost to make its allies self-sufficient in national defense. By empowering them, it helps both its interests and the common cause—setting in motion a virtuous cycle.
Think about it. Allies and partners able to defend themselves without relying overmuch on U.S. military muscle would liberate U.S. forces for expeditionary duty. Unencumbered by the need to guard the host nation’s territory, U.S. forces could apply themselves to beating back denizens of the wretched hive of scum and villainy—the Chinas and Russias of the world. So rather than content itself with fellowships it can dominate, Washington should emancipate allies from subservience to the United States. In so doing it would transmute the post-1945 system of hegemonic alliances into alliances of equals.
Strategic debates among mutually deferential peers are healthier and more fruitful than one-sided debates between a hegemon and lesser allies. Furthermore, equal partnerships in which host nations were chiefly responsible for defending themselves would engage self-interest—the most elemental force in international relations. It’s easy to have skin in the game of self-preservation.
Back to Japan. If Gen. Gregson gets his way—if Japan shoulders most of the burden of its defense while America provides the alliance’s striking arm—then U.S. forces will enjoy a sanctuary from which to prosecute combat operations in Taiwan’s vicinity. Sanctuary is oftentimes a pivotal ingredient of victory in a hard-run conflict. You try to create it for yourself while denying it to antagonists.
Sanctuary means having secure bases from which to operate, or to fall back upon to repair battle damage or to replenish stores, fuel, and ammunition. Expeditionary forces bereft of such refuges find it hard to prevail in wartime. Which is why China has sluiced such resources into its anti-access and area-denial defenses—shore-based cruise, ballistic, and now hypersonic missiles backed up by air, surface, and subsurface forces—over the past quarter century. Fortress China now overshadows all potential U.S. military sanctuaries in the Western Pacific.
Even the American redoubt of Guam would probably come under fire from People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ballistic missiles or missile-armed combat aircraft. Lest anyone miss the point, Chinese weaponeers, displaying their customary subtlety and guile, have dubbed the PLA Rocket Force’s DF-26 ballistic missile a “Guam killer.” The logic behind such weaponry is irrefutable. Deny U.S. forces sanctuary and you deny them logistical support. Deny them logistical support and they soon go away or find themselves idled. China wins either way.
So Gregson has it right. More musclebound Japan Self-Defense Forces capable of defending the homeland on their own can restore some semblance of sanctuary in the Western Pacific, bolstering the alliance’s ability to vanquish cross-strait aggression. Japan guards the base while U.S. forces go abroad—sounds like an excellent division of labor.
In recent weeks Tokyo has vowed to double defense spending in the coming years, acquiring the wherewithal to assert itself on behalf of regional peace and security. It can’t happen fast enough.
Dr. James R. Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · January 7, 2023
8. Ukraine War Proves the U.S. Government Needs Tech Giants Like Google As Allies
As I previously mentioned, perhaps we need a "CRAF-like" program for some industries (CRAF = Civil Reserve Air Fleet) - We may need to mobilize certain capabilities in support for contingencies and war.
Ukraine War Proves the U.S. Government Needs Tech Giants Like Google As Allies
19fortyfive.com · by Daniel Goure · January 7, 2023
Ukraine War Shows Why Digital Giants Will Play A Growing Role In Global Security – The Russo-Ukrainian War is the world’s first digital conflict with profound implications for U.S. national security and the future of conflict. While Russia’s cyber offensive at the outset of hostilities was expected, what came as a surprise was Ukraine’s ability to blunt Moscow’s attacks. This was the result to a significant degree of early support provided to Ukraine by U.S. digital giants such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.
U.S. IT companies are exploiting their dominance in digital communications to mine Russian cell phone communications and publicly available apps for intelligence and targeting purposes. The extensive use of drones by both sides is enabled by sophisticated, often commercial, information systems for navigation, targeting, and intelligence collection. Private space-based communications are critical to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. If there is a single lesson to be gleaned from almost a year of war it is that U.S. commercial IT firms will play a growing role in global security.
Russia began its so-called special operation with a massive cyberattack on Ukraine’s civil, military, and commercial infrastructure. This came as no surprise to most defense experts and cyber specialists. The Russian cyber campaign against Ukraine had been ongoing since at least the seizure of Crimea in 2014.
The big surprise was the relative lack of effectiveness of Russia’s cyber offensive. Russian cyber operations appear to have had modest (if that) impacts on Ukraine’s ability to communicate, conduct government and military operations, or operate critical infrastructure. Instead, the Ukrainian government, economy, infrastructure, and military have seemed to operate relatively unimpeded by Russian cyber operations, forcing Moscow to rely more on kinetic attacks.
An important reason why Ukraine was able to blunt the impacts of Russian cyberattacks was the support provided by U.S. private digital companies such as AWS and Microsoft. Almost from the first day of the Russian invasion, AWS stepped in to help secure the Ukrainian government’s critical information. Essential data and programs, including tax information, property and bank records, and government personnel information, were downloaded onto suitcase-sized, solid-state computer storage units, using a capability called Snowball Edge, that were removed from the reach of Russian weapons. Then the data was transferred into Amazon’s cloud computing system. Snowball Edge is a mobile, flexible storage/compute capability that will be of interest to the U.S. military as it seeks to extend the reach of the Joint All-Domain Command and Control system down to the tactical edge.
The critical role played by AWS was recently acknowledged by Ukraine’s government. Kyiv awarded AWS the Ukraine peace prize for its support of Ukraine in the current conflict. According to Ukraine’s vice prime minister and digital transformation minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, “Amazon AWS literally saved our digital infrastructure.”
AWS continues to support Ukraine, expanding the range of government and private economic records it is securing. The company has pledged an additional $75 million dollars to Ukraine’s defense.
Microsoft, too, is providing critical cyber defense capabilities to Ukraine. Like AWS, Microsoft has offered to provide secure storage for Ukraine’s data on its clouds. It also is providing ongoing threat detection and analysis that helps deny Russian hackers critical information on Ukrainian defenses, supply lines, and military plans. The company has already given free technical support valued at $400 million. Another $100 million will be spent in 2023.
Google is another tech giant that has come to Ukraine’s defense. Since the war began, the company has sought to neutralize Russian influence operations and has provided continuous cyber incident response and threat tracking.
Taken as a whole, Ukraine has demonstrated a remarkable resilience to Russian cyberattacks, digital intelligence collection, and influence operations. As one Western analyst observed:
“Ukraine has shown formidable defensive strength and resilience on the physical battlefield, and the same is true in cyberspace. Kyiv’s ability to harness the experience of years of Russian cyberattacks, combined with strong support from Western governments and—crucially—technology companies has allowed Ukraine to deploy cyber defenses at a scale and depth never seen before.”
Western cyber skills have also been employed to support Ukraine’s offensive operations. There have been widespread reports that Ukraine’s military has exploited Russian soldiers’ extensive cell phone use both for intelligence purposes and targeting. The recent Ukrainian strike on a Russian military staging area that reportedly caused significant casualties was facilitated by localized emissions from multiple private cell phones. A number of Russian generals are also said to have been killed when their positions were pinpointed as the result of their use of unsecured commercial cell phones. Ukraine did not shut down its cell phone networks or destroy cell phone repeaters precisely in the hope that Russian forces would use their personal communication devices, thereby creating an exploitable vulnerability.
When Russian commanders and soldiers employed commercial communications devices, applications, and networks they created an unprecedented intelligence collection opportunity. A key to Ukraine’s ability to exploit this opportunity has been the help from U.S. companies that specialize in mining such information.
SpaceX is a fourth U.S. tech giant that is helping to defend Ukraine. Russian hackers have sought to bring down the commercial satellite networks on which Ukraine relies. SpaceX has continued to provide access to its Starlink system despite Russian threats. The company provided tens of thousands of Starlink antennas to enable Ukraine to maintain a domestic and international communications system.
The Ukraine conflict has demonstrated that it is possible to defend against even a potent cyber adversary. The key is to rely on the ever-increasing capabilities of the private sector. In future high-end conflicts, private IT companies such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google will play a key role. The U.S. national security establishment needs to do a better job nurturing and protecting the digital titans that have been so central to creating the modern global economy and which will be major players in global security.
Dr. Daniel Goure is Senior Vice President of the Lexington Institute, a nonprofit public-policy research organization headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. He is involved in a wide range of issues as part of the institute’s national security program.
19fortyfive.com · by Daniel Goure · January 7, 2023
9. What three years of China’s covid travel restrictions cost the world
Excerpts:
In the months leading up to the lifting of the quarantine requirements, China has also started to make it slightly easier to get a visa. Together, these changes have fueled optimism among those who were shut out of China for nearly three years.
Turner says she is restarting conversations with partners in China to plan in-person projects again. Allen, of the U.S.-China Business Council, says that companies are welcoming the change as a key step toward resuming normal business travel. And the Penn State Ph.D. student is hoping to introduce her new fiancé to her Beijing family this summer.
But many barriers remain in place. The government still isn’t allowing tourists in. In its recent announcement, the government only promised to “optimize” visa processing for foreign citizens looking to visit relatives, and travel for business and study without providing any further detail.
And of course, there is the inconvenient fact that the pandemic is still there. Having reversed its “zero-covid” policy, China is once again the world’s covid hotspot. That alone may slow any rush to return to China, at least in the short term.
As Ross said, “The outlook right now for the covid situation is so bad that nobody is hopping on a plane.”
What three years of China’s covid travel restrictions cost the world
Students, scientists and businesspeople are among those who have paid a price for China’s closed borders.
Lili Pike
China Reporter
January 8, 2023
grid.news · by Lili Pike
For more than a thousand days, China has kept its borders largely closed to the outside world, in an effort to guard against the spread of covid. Today, China is taking a giant step out of its isolation, scrapping its quarantine requirement for inbound travelers.
In March 2020, to prevent a wave of “imported” infections, China locked down its borders to foreigners. Millions of international tourists who visit the Great Wall, Forbidden City and dozens of other sights every year were barred from entry. They weren’t the only ones shut out – so were visiting students, scholars, artists and members of delegations and exchange programs that have been a staple of travel to China for decades. Nearly all existing visas to China were suspended, upending countless lives on both sides of the border overnight.
In the nearly three years that followed, Chinese consulates approved only a limited number of business and family-visit visas; tourist visas remained off-limits. And the travelers who were permitted entry faced other obstacles. In tandem with the border restrictions, the Civil Aviation Administration of China strictly limited international flights, sending the cost of tickets soaring. People flying from the U.S. have had to pay $5,000, and sometimes more, for an economy-class ticket to China – several times the average pre-pandemic price. And once travelers arrived in China, they faced at least 14 days of quarantine in a hotel; some were subjected to far longer periods of isolation – up to two months in some cases.
Overall, from 2019 to 2021, travel in and out of China dropped by 80 percent. It’s been an unprecedented cutoff for a country as large and important as China, and it’s had a sweeping impact, from the Chinese diaspora to cultural delegations to global corporations.
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As China neared the end of its quarantine era, Grid reached out to some of those people to help document what’s been lost in the intervening years.
A breakdown in US-China exchange
Even before the pandemic, “engagement” between the U.S. and China had suffered, as American politicians on both sides of the aisle pushed for a more confrontational approach to China. But for people who believed that face-to-face interaction and exchanges between citizens of the two superpowers remained critical -- perhaps even more so because of rising friction between Washington and Beijing – China’s pandemic restrictions struck a crushing blow.
Study abroad programs that send students to China have been hit hard. Madelyn Ross, president of the US-China Education Trust, formerly served as director of China initiatives at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In that role, she planned a SAIS student trip to Wuhan for March 2020 – a month when the city found itself in the throes of the first covid outbreak. The trip was scrapped, but that was just the beginning. Until this fall, when the Chinese government began reissuing student visas, hardly any foreign students were able to attend study abroad and higher education programs in China. It’s not clear exactly how many students were affected, but as of 2018, when the last data was posted, nearly 500,000 foreign students were studying in China.
Ross and her colleagues worked hard to get around the barriers, planning Zoom classes and online conferences. But they couldn’t replicate the feeling of in-person meetings, she said – not least because the time difference offered only narrow windows of a couple of hours each day that were conducive to classes, meetings and events linking participants in both countries.
“It had a really devastating impact on students,” Ross told Grid.
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At a time when U.S.-China tensions had already turned some Americans away from studying Chinese, the restrictions further dampened student appetite. In a 2021 op-ed in The Diplomat, three foreign students whose programs in China were affected wrote that “faced with the reality of virtual study abroad and China’s opaque visa process, many of our peers have walked away from their initial curiosity about China.” Academics have also felt the blow, particularly those who haven’t been able to travel to their research field sites in China.
Dozens of other sectors have felt the impact. For decades, U.S. environmental advocates have traveled to China to provide expertise and learn from Chinese partners. That exchange has broken down, leaving American environmentalists less aware of the on-the-ground reality for Chinese emissions and the latest nuances of climate policy in China. On the flip side, fewer Chinese environmentalists have been able to travel to critical international climate and biodiversity meetings.
Before the pandemic, Jennifer Turner, the director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, traveled regularly to China for meetings and events with Chinese environmental NGOs. The restrictions have “definitely had a bit of a chilling effect on our work,” she told Grid, leading the organization to pivot toward working more on environmental issues involving China’s overseas infrastructure projects. “I don’t have my hand on the pulse as well as I used to.”
The travel barriers haven’t just been frustrating for individuals like Turner and their organizations. Taken together, they have amounted to a significant setback in collaboration between the U.S. and China – the world’s largest carbon emitters – on the planet’s biggest problem.
Business Impact
The travel restrictions have also exacted a huge cost for Chinese companies and global firms that work in China. In a June 2022 survey, 61 percent of the American Chamber of Commerce’s China members – American companies with operations in China -- said that essential staff, including senior executives, were unable to travel to China. A survey from the same month by the U.S.-China Business Council found that travel restrictions were the third largest issue for its members, after covid lockdowns and U.S.-China relations writ large.
“For most of the past few years, covid-related travel restrictions made it impractical for U.S.-based executives to visit their operations in China,” said Craig Allen, president of the U.S.-China Business Council. “This not only created operational difficulties for companies but also narrowed the people-to-people exchanges that are so important for the business community.”
Many companies told the council that they canceled conferences and delayed major business decisions because their executives couldn’t visit China in person. The American Chamber of Commerce also reported that travel restrictions had been a major challenge for companies trying to recruit foreigners to work in China; fewer people were willing to stomach the move given the travel headaches.
There may be long-term impacts for companies, even after the relaxation of the rules. Combined with local lockdowns, the restrictions have led many businesses to rethink their future in China. By the end of 2021, more than one-third of AmCham’s China members said they were either unsure of their future level of investments in China or planned to decrease them if travel restrictions didn’t change.
Divided families
Then there is the personal loss. And here the group that has felt the impact most keenly are the millions of families that have been separated by the travel restrictions.
A Chinese Ph.D. student at Penn State University who asked to remain anonymous told Grid about her experience navigating the restrictions. She went to college in the U.S. and had grown accustomed to traveling home twice a year to see her family in Beijing. The pandemic put an end to that. She couldn’t return home until the summer of 2021.
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“At that time, just going home was just terrible,” she said. “It took me like a month from door to door.” She had to take a circuitous route and ended up in quarantine for 28 days in Xiamen before being able to enter Beijing. She was lucky, she said, because in the lottery-like system of quarantine hotels, she “won” with an ocean-side room. Nonetheless, the travel took a toll. Eventually, she decided that the flights were too costly and the trips too complicated to undertake.
For many others, the situation has proved heartbreaking. “I know a lot of my friends who have lost their grandparents, for various reasons,” the Ph.D. student said, “and they couldn’t go home because of the covid restrictions.”
Reopening won’t happen all at once
In the months leading up to the lifting of the quarantine requirements, China has also started to make it slightly easier to get a visa. Together, these changes have fueled optimism among those who were shut out of China for nearly three years.
Turner says she is restarting conversations with partners in China to plan in-person projects again. Allen, of the U.S.-China Business Council, says that companies are welcoming the change as a key step toward resuming normal business travel. And the Penn State Ph.D. student is hoping to introduce her new fiancé to her Beijing family this summer.
But many barriers remain in place. The government still isn’t allowing tourists in. In its recent announcement, the government only promised to “optimize” visa processing for foreign citizens looking to visit relatives, and travel for business and study without providing any further detail.
And of course, there is the inconvenient fact that the pandemic is still there. Having reversed its “zero-covid” policy, China is once again the world’s covid hotspot. That alone may slow any rush to return to China, at least in the short term.
As Ross said, “The outlook right now for the covid situation is so bad that nobody is hopping on a plane.”
Cleo Li-Schwartz contributed reporting. Thanks to Brett Zach for copy editing this article.
grid.news · by Lili Pike
10. Philippine military chief replaced by retiring general
Philippine military chief replaced by retiring general
ABCNews.com · by ABC News
MANILA, Philippines -- Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Saturday cut short the term of the military chief of staff he appointed five months ago and replaced him with a retiring general without explaining the surprise move.
Marcos’s office announced the replacement of Lt. Gen. Bartolome Bacarro, who had received the highest military award for combat bravery. A statement late Friday that did not specify any reason for the change in military leadership. Bacarro’s three-year term was supposed to end in August 2025.
The appointment of military chiefs is a sensitive issue. The military has a history of restiveness, failed coup attempts, corruption scandals and has faced accusations of human rights violations. Efforts have been made for years to instill professionalism in the military and insulate it from the country’s traditionally chaotic and corruption-tainted politics.
Lt. Gen. Andres Centino, the military chief of staff who Bacarro replaced in August last year, was installed by Marcos to the top post of the 144,000-strong armed forces. Centino, who was due to retire next month, was chosen over a dozen senior generals and will have a fresh three-year term.
Asked for reaction on his removal, Bacarro told reporters without elaborating Friday night in a text message that the military would support the new chief.
National police spokesperson Col. Jean Fajardo said police forces have been placed on “heightened alert” mainly to secure an annual religious gathering in Manila. He denied the move was linked to purported military restiveness that has been reported by social media.
A new law that took effect last year fixed the term of the military chief of staff to three years to allow a top general more time to initiate reforms and press a yearslong campaign to modernize an underfunded military confronting Muslim and communist insurgencies and increasingly aggressive actions by China in the disputed South China Sea, where the Philippines lays claim to contested islands, islets and reefs with other coastal states.
In a turnover ceremony at the main military camp in the capital on Saturday, Bacarro handed a saber symbolizing military leadership to Centino and thanked the military, his family and the president. Marcos did not attend but was represented by his close advisers, including Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin.
Bersamin stressed in a speech he was impressed by the smooth military leadership transition, which he said should be emulated by politicians to avoid disruptive post-election unrest like what has happened in America.
“Continue with this tradition, where you respect each other, where you give so much consideration to the qualifications of your fellow officers in order to enable your organization … to move forward instead of looking back,” Bersamin said.
Marcos, he said, had asked him and other key presidential advisers to show the “highest respect” to Bacarro for his battlefield exploits and hinted the general may be given another government post after the end of his military career.
In 1991, Bacarro received a medal of valor for thwarting an attack by about 150 communist guerrillas on a northern Philippine town despite his smaller force. Wounded in the thigh by rebel fire, he commandeered a dump truck and rammed a fence to allow government militiamen, who were pinned down, to escape.
His sudden removal follows a decision by the national police chief, Gen. Rodolfo Azurin Jr., to tender his resignation on Thursday after Marcos’s interior secretary appealed to nearly 1,000 police generals and colonels to quit and allow a committee to investigate and weed out top officials involved in illegal drugs.
Azurin asked top police officials to support Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos’s drastic move. But he added some generals opposed the call for them to resign within the month because they were not facing any criminal lawsuits and have not been linked to the drug trade.
ABCNews.com · by ABC News
11. We are offered the Korean option, but Koreans regret it Secretary of Ukraines Security Council
I hate to see the name "Korea" invoked in this way.
We are offered the Korean option, but Koreans regret it Secretary of Ukraines Security Council
news.yahoo.com · by Ukrainska PravdaJanuary 8, 2023, 6:56 AM·2 min read
Oleksii Danilov, Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, has stated that the Russians are going to propose the so-called Korean option of settling the war with Ukraine, which implies the division of the country.
Source: Danilov in an interview aired during the national 24/7 joint newscast
Quote: "We are being offered the Korean scenario now. The infamous ‘38th parallel’ [which separated North and South Korea – ed.]. Here there are some Ukrainians, and over there, there are some other Ukrainians. The Russians will come up with anything now. I know for sure that one of the options they may offer us is the ‘38th parallel’.
Nevertheless, I have noticed while talking to representatives of Korea recently… They believe it was a mistake to make concessions and agree that it was necessary back then… Now they have problems."
Details: Danilov has also reported that Dmitry Kozak, Deputy Head of the Administration of the Russian President, "goes to meetings with politicians from past eras in Europe and delivers messages through them that they [the Russians - ed.] are ready to make many concessions in order to preserve the status quo, as it is today, and force us to come to some kind of truce".
The Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council has stated once again that many indicators point to an escalation of combat operations in February.
Quote: "There are a lot of markers from which we can conclude that we are entering a certain phase of activation.
Now, there is a strong will to drag Belarus into an open confrontation. Russian secret services are carrying out certain provocations for this. All this gives us grounds to say that we may have such an escalation."
Background: Danilov recently said that Russia was getting ready for an escalation of the situation on the line of contact in February, while Dmitry Kozak, Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration, has had meetings with Europeans and tried to persuade them to sign "peace deals" akin to Minsk-3 [a series of international agreements that sought to end the conflict in Donbas].
Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
news.yahoo.com · by Ukrainska PravdaJanuary 8, 2023, 6:56 AM·2 min read
12. The Age of Digital, Transparent Warfare Is Here
Conclusion:
Despite this transformation, the nature of war will never change: It will be about killing people and breaking their stuff faster than they can do it to you. It will still be a contest of wills, an aspect of the human condition that is far from being eradicated for all its ferocity, irrationality, and despair. The outcome will remain an unscripted mix of reason, emotion, and chance. Technology only changes how we fight, not why.
The Age of Digital, Transparent Warfare Is Here
Precision weapons, satellites, and AI have changed how we fight—and who sees the consequences.
Wired · by Condé Nast · January 6, 2023
The war in Ukraine was a shock, not a surprise—it was a clear and present danger ever since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. It was also not a surprise because the world watched Russia assemble its forces on Ukraine’s border for months. In 2023, war will be comprehensively transparent, seen and understood by integrating information from satellites—commercial low-Earth-orbit cubesats and high-end geo-stationary military satellites and aircraft; all the digital traces left as people and equipment move through a highly connected world (from closed-circuit TV cameras and traffic data to bank cards and mobile phone locations); and the proliferation of user-generated content discoverable on social media.
READ MORE
This story is from the WIRED World in 2023, our annual trends briefing. Read more stories from the series here—or download or order a copy of the magazine.
In 2023, it will no longer be possible to sneak up on someone else's country with an army, navy, or air force, or to conceal the death and destruction that they inflict. Armed forces around the world will try to counter this by assembling, moving from home bases, and maneuvering on the front lines in more dispersed ways, hiding as much as possible in plain sight. They will mostly fail, but the fleet of commercial vans moving small numbers of heavy artillery rounds on well-varied routes from West to East in Ukraine shows what can be done.
The success of both shoulder-launched and heavier anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles against columns of armored vehicles and streams of aircraft—plus the undisputed vulnerability of the whole of Ukraine to Russia’s long-range cruise and ballistic missiles, and the sinking of the Russian warship Moskva—show that precision weapons are ending the primacy of the platforms and headquarters that have dominated battlefields since the early 20th century. One precision missile, even if it costs tens of thousands of dollars, can destroy a platform that costs many millions and put the lives of its crew in mortal jeopardy. This will transform how armies, navies, and air forces organize, equip, and operate. The restraining factor today is the cost and manufacturing complexity of these weapons, but as the world lives with the existential peril of a 21st century Great Power Conflict, the urgency to drive down costs and increase inventory will only grow.
In 2023, digital technologies will transform confrontation and conflict, as transparency and precision will merge with advances in robotics, autonomy, connectivity, data in secure cloud, and AI. This combination will lead to armed forces that are no longer just people operating equipment but rapidly evolving teams of inhabited, uninhabited, and autonomous capability. This is a process that starts out by augmenting how today’s armed forces organize, operate, and train, but as technology advances and experience grows, it will be as transformative as Airbnb has been to accommodation or Uber to transportation. The Digital Age will drive the most profound transformation in how states confront and conflict. This will be a decades-long competition where the winners are bold enough to move rapidly and the losers have succumbed to the comforts of gentle change.
Despite this transformation, the nature of war will never change: It will be about killing people and breaking their stuff faster than they can do it to you. It will still be a contest of wills, an aspect of the human condition that is far from being eradicated for all its ferocity, irrationality, and despair. The outcome will remain an unscripted mix of reason, emotion, and chance. Technology only changes how we fight, not why.
Wired · by Condé Nast · January 6, 2023
13. Facial recognition's rapid adoption exposes alarming pitfalls
Facial recognition's rapid adoption exposes alarming pitfalls
Axios · by Alex Fitzpatrick · January 7, 2023
The breakneck development and deployment of facial recognition technology are outstripping efforts to corral alarming pitfalls.
Why it matters: Police, retail stores, airports and sports arenas are rapidly increasing biometric surveillance. But critics say the results are too often blindly trusted, without enough double-checking of matches.
Catch up quick: The latest face-recognition surveillance technology is designed to identify people seen on security cameras in real-time, or close to it.
- It aims to match security camera footage of someone with images tied to that person's identity and kept in various databases or publicly available online, such as police mugshots or social media profiles.
- Facial recognition also lets you unlock smartphones and tablets without a password.
Driving the news: A Black man was recently jailed for almost a week in Georgia after a facial recognition system incorrectly matched his face with a suspect in a New Orleans robbery, his lawyer told The New Orleans Advocate.
- The man — who said he's never been to Louisiana — was released after detectives realized their mistake, The Advocate reports.
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Facial recognition technology has led to at least three prior false arrests— all involving Black men, Wired reported last year. The technology has long been faulted for failures to accurately identify Black faces.
In New York, a personal injury lawyer recently said she was kicked out of Radio City Music Hall, which is owned by Madison Square Garden Entertainment, after being identified by facial recognition tech installed there.
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The lawyer, Kelly Conlon, works for a firm involved in a personal injury suit against an MSG-operated restaurant.
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MSG has banned all lawyers at firms involved in lawsuits against the company from its properties, including the arena where the New York Knicks and Rangers play. It's using facial recognition software — which sports stadiums and other venues are increasingly using as a security tool — to enforce that ban.
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"While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment,” the company said in a statement to The New York Times.
Zoom out: Some cities and states that have restricted use of face recognition in the past are mulling whether to loosen those rules to fight upswings in crime. Others are holding fast.
What they're saying: Some critics point to the Madison Square Garden encounter as an example of overreach on the part of private companies.
- "This is exactly why we need an outright ban on all use of facial recognition surveillance in places of public accommodation like bars, restaurants, retail stores, and music and sports venues," said Evan Greer, director of digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, in a statement.
What we're watching: Several federal lawmakers have introduced bills meant to curtail the use of facial recognition tech nationwide. The proposals have yet to advance.
What's next: On a technological level, facial recognition tech will only keep improving — University of Georgia researchers are working on a system that works based solely on the shape of people's ears.
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Expect surveillance-based facial recognition to proliferate despite efficacy and ethics concerns, especially in high-security areas. The Transportation Security Administration is testing the tech at major airports.
Axios · by Alex Fitzpatrick · January 7, 2023
14. Former high-ranking US official who spied for Cuba released after 20 years
Video at the link:https://www.foxnews.com/us/former-high-ranking-us-official-spied-cuba-released-20-years
Former high-ranking US official who spied for Cuba released after 20 years
Ana Belen Montes was believed to have been recruited by Cuba while she was working at the DOJ and later sought employment at DIA to continue to share secrets
foxnews.com · by Brie Stimson | Fox News
Video
American couple accused of Russian espionage arrested
Former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman provides professional analysis of the Hawaiian couple that was suspected to be Russian spies on ‘Fox & Friends Weekend.’
Ana Belen Montes, a former high-ranking Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was released from prison Friday after more than 20 years behind bars at a federal prison in Texas.
Montes, 65, was released early after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit espionage as part of a plea deal in 2002.
She admitted that she revealed the identities of four undercover U.S. agents in Cuba to Havana as well as other classified information, including U.S. surveillance of Cuban weapons.
Montes, an American, is believed to have been recruited by Havana while she was working at the Justice Department’s Freedom of Information Office where she started at in 1979 and sought a job at DIA so she’d be in a better position to share secrets.
Ana Belen Montes with former CIA Director George Tenet. (U.S. Department of Defense/Handout via REUTERS)
Havana would send Montes coded messages while she was working as a Cuba analyst starting in 1985 that she would translate on an encoder.
She was arrested in 2001 and could have been sentenced to death if found guilty at trial. The agents whose identities she revealed were not harmed, prosecutors said.
"I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it," Montes said in her defense at the time.
The judge said she had put the U.S. "as a whole" at risk.
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Upon release, Montes faces five years of supervision, including having her internet activity monitored. She is also barred from government work unless given special permission.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
foxnews.com · by Brie Stimson | Fox News
15. U.S. $3 Billion Military Package to Ukraine Looks to Change Battlefield Dynamics
U.S. $3 Billion Military Package to Ukraine Looks to Change Battlefield Dynamics
defense.gov · by Jim Garamone
DOD officials unveiled the more than $3 billion package of military capabilities to help Ukraine drive the Russian invaders from their soil.
Ukraine Update
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine & Eurasia Laura Cooper speaks to the media during a briefing at the Pentagon, Jan. 6, 2023.
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"The war in Ukraine is at a critical point right now, and we have to do everything we can to help the Ukrainians continue to resist Russian aggression," Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, said.
The presidential drawdown authority announced today is the largest the United States has committed to so far. The authorization of presidential drawdown of equipment from U.S. inventories is valued at up to $2.85 billion and there is an additional $225 million in foreign military financing to contribute to the long-term capacity and modernization of Ukraine's military, Cooper said.
The major announcement was the inclusion of 50 M2-A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles for the Ukrainian military. These armored vehicles — enough to outfit a mechanized infantry battalion — will come with 500 tube-launched, optically sighted, wire-guided, or TOW, anti-tank missiles and 250,000 rounds of 25 mm ammunition.
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U.S. soldiers of the 1st battalion, 163rd Infantry inspect Bradley M2A3 Fighting Vehicles at Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait, Jan. 27, 2022.
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The drawdown authority also includes 100 M-113 armored personnel carriers and 50 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles. The U.S. will also provide 138 Humvees.
Artillery remains a crucial capability for the Ukrainians and the PDA will provide 18 self-propelled 155 mm Paladin howitzers, 36 105 mm towed howitzers and thousands of rounds to supply both systems.
The United States will also provide anti-aircraft capabilities including RIM-7 missiles and 4,000 Zuni rockets.
Also included are night-vision devices, sniper rifles, machine guns, spare parts, clothing and more.
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"These capabilities will complement and work with the expanded U.S.- led training beginning this month that will build Ukraine's capacity to conduct joint maneuver and combined operations," Cooper said. "We will ensure Ukraine has both the equipment and the skill necessary to sustain its efforts to push back on Russian aggression."
U.S. officials are always looking at what Ukraine needs to fight the Russian invaders. "Their battlefield needs have evolved over time," Cooper said.
When Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022, the immediate need was anti-armor weapons and the United States and partner nations sent thousands of Javelin systems and other comparable systems to Ukraine. After Ukraine defeated the initial Russian push, artillery became the crucial need and the United States sent howitzers and ammunition to the nation. Recently, air defense has been the priority and the United States and allies have sent systems that Ukraine has cobbled together to form an integrated air-defense system.
Now Ukraine needs armored vehicles and Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United States are sending them to the besieged nation, Cooper said. "In the case of the Bradley, what you are seeing is a recognition that this is the right time for us to provide this armored capability," she said. "This is the right time for Ukraine to take advantage of its capabilities to change the dynamic on the battlefield."
Pentagon Briefing
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine & Eurasia Laura Cooper speaks to members media during a briefing with Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder at the Pentagon, Jan. 6, 2023.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin "has not given up his aims of dominating Ukraine and continuing to acquire Ukraine's territory," Cooper said. But … "the Russian armed forces weaknesses have collided with those aims."
The aid to Ukraine is still important, the deputy assistant secretary said. "From an overall strategic perspective, it is hard to emphasize enough the devastating consequences if Putin were to be successful in achieving his objective of taking over Ukraine," she said. "This would rewrite international boundaries in a way that we have not seen since World War II. And our ability to reverse these gains and to support and stand by the sovereignty of a nation, is something that resonates not just in Europe, but all around the world.
"No one wants to send a signal to another bully around the world that they can take over their neighboring country without paying a steep, steep price," she continued.
Spotlight: Support for Ukraine Spotlight: Support for Ukraine: https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/Support-for-Ukraine/
Publication: Ukraine Fact Sheet – Jan. 6
defense.gov · by Jim Garamone
16. Tests on travelers from China offer rare snapshot of covid chaos
Tests on travelers from China offer rare snapshot of covid chaos
The Washington Post · by Kelsey Ables · January 7, 2023
SEOUL — As more travelers from China begin visiting international destinations for the first time in three years, covid data from places with on-arrival testing is offering a glimpse into the pandemic situation within China, which the World Health Organization said has been obscured by insufficient data.
In late December, two flights from China to Italy brought in almost 100 coronavirus-infected passengers; about half of one flight and one-third of another tested positive.
Countries around the world soon implemented increased testing requirements for arrivals from China, which have gone into effect during the run-up to heightened travel during the Lunar New Year holiday in late January. The new rules come into effect amid reports of overflowing hospitals and medicine shortages in China after it reversed its “zero covid” policy.
Among the strictest are policies in Italy, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, which require on-arrival testing for passengers from China. The United States requires proof of a negative test before departure, while other countries are testing wastewater from aircraft on flights originating in China.
Official data showed infection rates of more than 20 percent among travelers from China to neighboring South Korea and Taiwan in the first week of January.
Data from the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency obtained by The Washington Post showed a 23.2 percent infection rate for short-term visitors from China to Korea (or 314 out of 1,352 tested at the airport) from Jan. 2 to Jan. 6. The KDCA expects to publish data on all travelers from China next week, an official told The Post.
According to the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control, from Jan. 1 to Jan. 5 about 1 in 5 travelers (21 percent) from mainland China tested positive for the coronavirus, or 1,111 out of 5,283 arrivals.
On Friday, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare reported that about 8 percent of visitors from China from Dec. 30 to Jan. 6 had tested positive, or 408 out of 4,895 arrivals. Data from Italy was not immediately available.
“These numbers are certainly [the] tip of the iceberg, highlighting the immense size of infections in China,” Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in an email, responding to early reports suggesting an infection rate of 20 to 50 percent among Chinese travelers.
The numbers are particularly high, “if we consider that people typically would not travel overseas unless they feel well and healthy, or do not show symptoms,” he said.
However, given the high levels of exposure to covid in many countries, “it is not reasonable to view [visitors from China] as diseased or dangerous,” he said.
Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, called the high early infection rates “completely consistent with forecasts that the majority of the population of major cities have already been infected.” He said in an email that people can remain positive on PCR tests for weeks.
“Since most infections have occurred in late December and early January, and more than half of the population in major cities have already been infected, it is quite plausible that high percentages of travelers have been testing positive,” he wrote. “Those testing positive will mostly have recently recovered from infection rather than still being sick and/or contagious.”
Last month, China partly lifted domestic restrictions in a move seen as a response to a rare public backlash directed at the country’s notoriously stringent zero-covid policy.
On Sunday, China will end extensive quarantine requirements for inbound passengers, a decision that will mostly benefit Chinese who want to leave or Chinese nationals abroad who want to return. Mainland China is still closed to foreign tourists.
The move comes just weeks before the Lunar New Year, which begins on Jan. 22. Before the pandemic, travel during China’s “Golden Week” national holiday was believed to be the world’s largest annual human migration.
The Chinese holiday “will ensure that the virus reaches every last corner of the country by the end of January,” Cowling said.
Huang said the holiday season will encourage “retaliation tourism” — travel making up for time lost during the pandemic — and is likely to cause a peak in outbound infections. But he also said it is unlikely that travelers leaving China will make the virus worse elsewhere.
“So far, there is no evidence of emerging new subvariants from China,” he said. “Given that most of these countries have learned to coexist with covid-19, the influx of Chinese visitors are not going to lead to a spike of cases in these countries.”
The changes also come amid wider scrutiny of Beijing, which has stopped counting asymptomatic coronavirus cases. The World Health Organization has questioned China’s data and requested more information from Beijing.
The testing requirements targeting arrivals from China have drawn ire from Chinese authorities. “Some of these measures are disproportionate and simply unacceptable,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said at a Jan. 3 news conference. “We firmly reject using covid measures for political purposes and will take corresponding measures in response to varying situations based on the principle of reciprocity.”
Julia Mio Inuma in Tokyo and Lily Kuo in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Kelsey Ables · January 7, 2023
17. America Is Lost in a Dark Forest, But There's a Path Out by James Stavridis
America Is Lost in a Dark Forest, But There's a Path Out
BY JAMES STAVRIDIS JANUARY 7, 2023 7:00 AM EST
Admiral Stavridis (Ret.) was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and is Vice Chair, Global Affairs at The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. He is the co-author of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. His new nonfiction book is To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision
TIME · by James Stavridis
Sadly, in these not-so-United States, we have found our way deep into a dark forest, and the question before us is how do we find the path out of this dangerous thicket into which we have wandered? Our dire internal divisions are quite extraordinary and worrisome. And here I’m talking to you wherever you are on the political spectrum from MSNBC to Fox News. If you get up in the morning watching Morning Joe and you wrap it up with Rachel Maddow at night; or you start on the white couch over at Fox and you finish up with Sean Hannity—wherever you are on that spectrum, you ought to be concerned about the plummeting nature of our discourse with each other.
That division is the dark forest into which we have wandered, and the real challenge is that the world is not going to wait for us while we figure out how to escape. The world does not see us standing coherently together and facing the challenges and turbulence that roil the globe. This weakens us dramatically.
Consider the challenges: an ongoing global pandemic, a broken withdrawal from Afghanistan, Vladimir Putin rattling the saber of nuclear weapons, failing cyber security, fierce competition with Beijing, Iran moving apace toward a nuclear weapon, Kim Jong-un taunting with ballistic missile launches, terrorism still smoldering in many places, a damaged environment, on and on. The dangers are real, and the world will not wait while we figure out how to face these challenges together as a nation.
We must find practical ways to think through these problems and challenges or face dire consequences both internationally and here at home.
If I’ve brought you this far, you’re probably asking, “Well what do you think, Admiral? What can we do to find a path out of this Dark Forest? What are the tools we need? What should we do?
Counterintuitively, we should start by taking stock of some good news, even as we appropriately wring our hands and worry about all these external challenges and above all about our internal divisions. It’s good from time to time to step back and think about the advantages the United States of America enjoys.
Look at our geography, guarded left and right by vast oceans. We have benign neighbors to the north and south. We have the most powerful agrarian complex in the world, abundant arable land, fresh water. We have vast energy resources, both oil and gas and we’re rapidly building renewables. We have the most powerful and capable military imaginable. And we have multiple engines of innovation in Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, Boston’s Route 128, many other places. All of that accrues to our advantage as we face these challenges.
Another advantage? Immigration. It helps us. Do we need to control our borders: yes, of course. But overall, immigration is a powerful engine for this country. I’ll give you one quick practical example—for 10 years as an Admiral, I visited over a hundred countries. In almost every country I would pay a courtesy call on the U.S ambassador. I saw two things that were identical at every U.S embassy: number one, each was guarded by U.S. Marines. Number two, every U.S embassy in every country has lines, around the block in some cases, of people who want to come to the U.S.
Think about that. Go to the Chinese Embassy, the Iranian Embassy, the Russian Embassy. Hundreds of thousands of Russians just left Russia to avoid being drafted into an unjust war. Yet we have millions who want to come and be part of who we are. That’s an extraordinary advantage and we should take advantage of all that potential productivity.
What else can we do? Above all, we must listen better. We need to listen to our allies in the world, and even to our opponents. But above all, we need to listen to each other. That’s our job as Americans. It doesn’t mean we’re always going to agree with allies, opponents, or each other, but we need to understand the positions of “the other.” This requires patience and an openness, a lack of arrogance and more humility. We could do worse than to reread George Washington’s “Rules of Civility.”
What else can we do? We can celebrate service.
Because I’m a veteran, people say to me all the time, “Thank you for your service.” I appreciate it deeply and so does every veteran. It is a kind and thoughtful comment. But there are so many ways to serve this country—certainly our military—but how about our diplomats, our CIA officers, our Peace Corps volunteers, our Department of Homeland Security and border patrol, our civil servants? How about our brave police and our intrepid firefighters? How about nurses on the front lines of COVID-19 for two years? How about our teachers? The starting salary of an American teacher in the Panhandle of my home state Florida is less than forty thousand dollars a year. Do you think she’s serving the country? I do.
So, here’s my point: the more we celebrate service, the more we incentivize it, through our tax system and through educational credits, for example, the more it will help us. Service is non-partisan. We don’t need a mandatory “national draft,” but we do need that idea of service to become inculcated in all that we do to help escape this dark forest
What else can we do? Education. When I finished 37 years in the military, I went to one of my life mentors, Bob Gates, and I said “Sir, what do you think I should do after the military?” He said: “Well, Stavridis, what kept you in the military for 37 years? Maybe that’ll give you a clue.” I realized that there were a lot of things I liked about the military and the Navy: I liked wearing a uniform, I liked serving my country, I liked deploying on operational missions, I like traveling the world. I liked all those things, but what I loved best was mentoring young sailors, helping guide the trajectory of their lives. I said that to Bob Gates, and he said, “You ought to be an educator, Jim.” So, I spent five years as Dean at Tufts University. I know that world. I have taught in classrooms. I’ve been a dean. Education can be a powerful part of the solution to the dark forest.
But where I think we ought to put more attention these days is on our community college systems. We are underweighting the use of this powerful resource. Community colleges, at very low cost, can give an education that can be scaled to a young person’s interest, and within two years they can graduate as a programmer, a maintenance supervisor, a nurse, an environmentalist: real skills that can be applied immediately and provide a good life financially and emotionally. It is a path out of the dark forest by addressing the kind of inequalities we see not just financially but educationally as well.
Another aspect of education is teaching all of us how to use the internet safely, particularly for the youngest among us.
That cell phone in your hand is a supercomputer: you can communicate point to point anywhere in the world, you can listen to any symphony ever recorded, you can watch any film ever made, you can access all the world’s knowledge. But you can also swim in a river of pornography and lies and bitter, false conspiracies. These smart phones are powerful and dangerous devices, and we often place one in the hand of a child in this country before they are twelve years old. Frequently, we do that with very little guidance and very few restraints. Education and computer internet literacy needs to be part of how we find our way out of this dark forest
What else can we do? We can innovate. We can develop and apply new technologies across the spectrum of our society. Innovation can help us address many of the ill-effects of the dark forest, from solving environmental challenges in ways that create new, fulfilling jobs to taking students out of traditional classrooms to developing equitable and accessible health care.
Another key is immigration reform. This is a big hard complicated problem. It begins with controlling our border—every sovereign state must control its border. But we must add to that fundamental key more thoughtful programs that can harness the power of immigrants who want to come here desperately and work and be among us.
Do we want them here? Think about the vast majority of those who make it to our borders. How much courage and true grit and determination does it take to grab your four-year-old’s hand put your two-year-old on your back and walk across six countries to get to our border? That’s the Hunger Games, and many of those people are the kind of folks I want on my team. We’ve got to figure out how to do that in a way that’s fair to those who have gone through every legal process, and much goes back to controlling the borders; but this could be an enormous engine for us that can help us as we come through the dark forest.
What else? Leadership matters. We need to search for and select leaders—across the political spectrum—who are willing to reach across the aisle and construct successful compromises. Think FDR or Reagan for the 21st century. Do we need a new political party, one that draws from both sides? Perhaps. As a nation we didn’t start with Republicans or Democrats, and my guess is we won’t end with them. But in the meantime, we need to find leaders from both parties with the willingness to bargain, compromise, and achieve constructive outcomes.
Final thoughts: all of this must be based on our values. If you haven’t stopped for a moment and thought about our values, it’s worth doing especially as I did, gazing at the sacred ground near Constitution Hall. Others have gone before us thinking about democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, gender equality, racial equality, about all our values. We have executed those values imperfectly, admittedly, but they are the right values. The values come to us from the ancient Greeks, from the East and the philosophy of the Buddha, and they arrived here in American via the European enlightenment. They come to us through our founding fathers, passing then through insurrections, a civil war, an emancipation, universal suffrage, and many other trials, challenges, failures and successes. Those values matter and we need to communicate those values to ourselves and to the world.
Sometimes when I say that people respond with “Oh Admiral, you’re right, you know it’s a war of ideas.” No, it’s not a war of ideas – it is a marketplace of ideas. Our ideas can compete in that marketplace, but we need to communicate them clearly, coherently, and boldly, without a shred of arrogance or self-righteousness, but with confidence as well.
How fast do we need to go to escape this dark forest? Very fast, but let me make a point using the physiognomy of the fastest thing on earth: the cheetah. It can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in three seconds, and it’s built for speed. The head is shaped like an ax so cuts through the air with almost no drag; it’s got powerful front legs; huge ribs to process all that oxygen; big back legs—built for speed. Except, instead of a tiny, decorative tail, the Cheetah has a huge tail. Why? The engineers among us will know: the cheetah needs that big tail so that when it accelerates and then tries to turn, the tail can counterbalance. Without that tail to stabilize, it would just go tumbling Into the dark forest. So, the point is yes we need to go fast; but we must keep the system in balance
I’m Greek American, of course, so I’m required to mention a Greek myth in everything I write. Think of Sisyphus and his boulder: we must be resilient. Our leaders must be resilient, and the boulder rolls down whoever you are, no matter if you are the most powerful person on Earth. The boulder rolled down on George W. Bush on 9/11; it rolled down and Barack Obama with the Great Recession; it rolled down on Donald Trump with the pandemic; it is rolling down on Joe Biden with inflation spiking and a war in Ukraine. The boulder rolls down. The measure of anybody is not whether the boulder never crushes you; the measure is do you get up put your shoulder behind it and continue the hard work. That resilience is what we need in our leaders and ourselves.
One of my great life mentors in addition to Bob Gates was General Colin Powell. If you look at his “Thirteen Rules,” four of them deal with hope and optimism. He said, “it will look better in the morning,” “optimism is a force multiplier,” and “it can be done.” Hope and optimism. So, if you remember nothing else from my words, I suggest you remember this quote: Napoleon, who knew a great deal about leadership, said “a leader is a dealer in hope.” Not in fear, not in chaos, not in anger.
Those are the kind of leaders we need. Whatever you do in life, be that kind of leader yourself, a dealer in hope. Seek others who lead in that way. Above all, be optimistic about this extraordinary country.
Adapted from a speech given by Admiral Stavridis in Philadelphia on October 7, 2022, within sight of Constitution Hall, the birthplace of American democracy. My remarks were entitled, “The Dark Forest,” an allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy, of which the first volume is “The Inferno.” Dante begins his masterpiece ominously with the words, “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
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TIME · by James Stavridis
18. Who cares who wins - The mythology of the SAS
You can also listen to the podcast at this link: https://thecritic.co.uk/who-cares-who-wins/?utm_source=pocket_reader
Excerpts:
Forty years ago, Major-General Sir Jeremy Moore had the moral courage and professional standing to openly question and challenge, albeit in an official context, the SAS legend. Moore’s ultimate aim was to ensure that the right lessons concerning the employment of Special Forces units in a medium-level, high-intensity war against a near peer adversary were properly identified, and more importantly, learned. Moore’s post-operational report also ventured to underscore the fact that conventional forces ultimately win campaigns and wars. In Moore’s view, by concentrating solely on counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations in the years preceding the Falklands, the SAS in 1982 was physically, conceptually and morally unfit to conduct maritime operations alongside conventional forces.
Tellingly, the SAS’s own report of proceedings for Corporate was heavily amended by Admiral Fieldhouse. It bore little relation to the truth and was merely another exercise in myth-making and legend building on the part of the Regiment. Moore’s myth-busting should therefore act as a sobering check to the recent media frenzy surrounding SAS: Rogue Heroes. Instead the SAS continues to be protected by an exquisite enabling wrap of official secrecy, media cheerleaders, tame historians and institutional echo-chambers. All ensure that daylight is not let in upon the magic — to paraphrase Walter Bagehot’s exhortation, made in his 1867 monograph The English Constitution, to perpetuate the mystique of monarchy. Such sycophancy, however, engenders an environment in which military organisations start to believe their own propaganda. This is ill-advised. As Colonel Ollie Lee, another morally courageous Royal Marines officer who was obliged to resign his commission in protest at the gross mishandling of the “Marine A” incident, once told the Afghanistan veteran and future Tory MP Johnny Mercer, “The precise moment you start to believe your own hype, is the precise moment it all starts to go badly wrong.”
Who cares who wins | Paul Winter | The Critic Magazine
The mythology of the SAS
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By
Paul Winter
15 December, 2022
thecritic.co.uk · by Podcast · December 15, 2022
Eighty years after rampaging behind enemy lines in the deserts of North Africa, and forty-two years since exploding into the public’s consciousness by dramatically ending the Iranian Embassy siege, Britain’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) is once again the centre of the nation’s attention. This renewed notoriety owes nothing to any stunning military success or dramatic action on the part of the Regiment, as it is referred to, but rather to the new BBC television series, SAS: Rogue Heroes. Based on the best-selling book by Ben Macintyre, who was granted privileged access to the SAS’s own classified regimental archives, SAS: Rogue Heroes depicts the wartime birth and first unsteady steps of the world’s most famous Special Forces unit.
Described by the media’s usual suspects of military commentators and cheerleaders as an adrenaline-fuelled, “gung-ho”, “rock-star history” of the SAS’s infancy, Rogue Heroes is not only a piece of televisual entertainment. It serves another, more profound purpose — namely the supercharging of the Regiment’s reputation, fighting-record and mythology. It also adds a further stratum to existing layers of legend, which throughout its operational history have afforded the SAS a distinct psychological advantage over its opponents.
Book shelves buckle under the sheer volume and weight of a growing corpus of work on the Regiment. The high-levels of embellishment, hyperbole and dissembling inherent in these literary outpourings, compounded by operational security, plausible deniability and a refusal on the part of the MoD to comment on the activities and very existence of UK Special Forces units, has meant, unsurprisingly, that academics and journalists alike have found it a challenge to penetrate the shroud of secrecy enveloping the activities of the SAS. It is difficult to differentiate, therefore, between what is fact and what is myth.
Ostracism and stigmatisation have answered their heresies
The late Professor Sir Michael Howard, eminent military historian and one-time Chichele Professor of military history at Oxford, addressed the role of myth in a highly-influential essay entitled, “The Uses and Abuses of Military History”. Howard wrote that “the ‘myth’, this selective and heroic view of the past, has its uses”. “The regimental historian”, in Howard’s opinion, had “consciously or unconsciously, to sustain the view that his regiment has usually been flawlessly brave and efficient, especially during its recent past”. “Without any sense of ill-doing,” contended Howard, “he will emphasize the glorious episodes in its history and pass with a light hand over its murkier passages, knowing full well that his work is to serve a practical purpose in sustaining regimental morale in the future”.
Professor Howard believed, however, that “myth” was not an “abuse of military history” if it sustained a soldier on the battlefield “even when he knows, with half his mind, that it is untrue”. Howard, himself a wartime Captain in the Coldstream Guards and recipient of the Military Cross, felt that myth was a form of “nursery history” which could assist in immunising military personnel against the “realities of war”. The only problem with this proposition, however, is that if a military organisation such as the SAS mythologizes its fighting record until it possesses only a passing acquaintance with the truth, then the realities of future combat will rapidly disabuse its personnel of such delusions.
Like the winged Sword of Damocles that features prominently on the Unit’s badge, the “myth” of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient fighting machine has been a proverbial double-edged sword. For the majority of those who have served in the Regiment over the years, it has sustained them in combat and in adversity. Yet for a select number of “badged” SAS personnel, who have been compelled to question “the myth”, ostracism and stigmatisation have answered their heresies. One of the most high-profile examples of this occurred during the Falklands war of 1982.
Following the sinking of HMS Sheffield in early May by an Argentine Exocet missile, it was directed that the SAS was to undertake a reconnaissance mission, Operation Plum Duff, of the Argentine airbase at Rio Grande, which was home to Exocet-carrying Super-Étendard jets. Plum Duff was a prelude to a much larger Direct Action operation, codenamed Mikado. This envisaged an Entebbe-style raid on Rio Grande involving the force-landing of two C-130 transport aircraft packed with men from B Squadron 22 SAS, whose objective was the destruction of the stationary jets and the death of pilots who flew them. This planned raid was very reminiscent of those conducted by David Stirling, Paddy Mayne and Jock Lewes, the founding fathers of the SAS, against Axis airfields in wartime North Africa — events dramatically depicted in the BBC’s SAS: Rogue Heroes.
Yet a combination of bad weather, poor planning, a paucity of reliable intelligence, navigational errors and the twin tyrannies of time and space forced SAS Captain Andy Legg, commanding the eight-man recce force, to abort the mission and exfiltrate his team across the Argentine border into neighbouring Chile. This was not before Legg had spoken to SAS HQ via satellite communications to deliver a situation report informing them of these insurmountable difficulties. Despite the low probability of completing this near-suicidal mission, Legg had been told to press on regardless.
As Ewen Southby-Tailyour subtly suggests in his book, Exocet Falklands, despite having taken the morally courageous decision to scrub this sub-optimal mission, undoubtedly saving the lives of his men, Legg appears thereafter to have been regarded by SAS high command, quite unjustly, as an individual who had “not maintained” or “perpetuated the myth”. Regrettably, Legg left the SAS shortly afterwards of his own volition, but it is telling that his own Squadron boss back in Hereford had viewed Operation Mikado, which thankfully was never launched, to have been not only “foolhardy” but ultimately “unachievable”.
Setting aside the controversies surrounding Plum Duff and Mikado, Operation Corporate, the British campaign to liberate the Falkland Islands, was not the SAS’s finest hour. In a rare example of official military censure, Major-General Sir Jeremy Moore, a senior Royal Marines officer and commander of UK land forces during the conflict, issued a stinging critique of the SAS in his post-conflict report of proceedings, a document recently declassified at the National Archives, Kew.
Writing to the Commander-in-Chief of the Task Force, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, Moore stated in his introduction that whilst he had “little criticism of the way in which Special Forces, both Special Air Service and Special Boat Squadron, conducted themselves during advance force operations” (i.e. during the shaping phase prior to the amphibious landings on 21 May), he did lament the inability of the SAS, post 21 May, to “integrate with the land force operations as a whole and to provide the accurate and timely reports that I required”. Sir Jeremy concluded by stating that “despite … [the] undoubted quality” of the SAS, there were “improvements which should be made”.
In an annex to his main report, Moore expanded upon these general criticisms, providing granular detail of the SAS’s military shortcomings. Whilst never questioning the individual courage and professionalism of SAS personnel, Moore was highly critical of the SAS as an organisation. Aside from upbraiding the Regiment for refusing to disseminate its own report of proceedings, thereby stymieing efforts to ascertain how the SAS had rated its own performance during the campaign, Moore deprecated it for having routinely “short-circuited” the formal chain of command in the Falklands by using its own satellite communications system. This had effectively shut out the land force commander and the other task group commanders from key SAS planning and decision-making.
The SAS’s “concentration on counter-terrorism and special operations” prior to the Falklands conflict, was also highlighted by Major-General Moore, who postulated that this “may have developed tendencies which are incompatible with the more conventional roles in support of ground forces that they were tasked with after the landing on 21 May”. As a consequence, the SAS had “found [it] difficult” to adjust to supporting “conventional operations”.
Another vexatious issue for Sir Jeremy and his divisional staff had been the fact that “more SF were deployed than were needed or could be supported in the field”. In the view of the commander land forces, the SAS was “expensive in terms of the support and planning effort needed to sustain their activities” and had become “less effective, in relation to results achieved, when deployed in greater numbers” than was “necessary to meet essential tasks”. Regarding this surplus of Special Forces Units, Major-General Moore concluded that one squadron from the SAS’s rivals, the Special Boat Squadron, SBS, could have “met most of our SF requirements”.
Overall, Moore was forced to admit that in the aftermath of Operation Sutton, the amphibious landings at San Carlos on 21 May, the SAS was “given tasks more out of a sense of obligation than from any valid need”. Evidently, Moore and his staff, in addition to those in HQ 3 Commando Brigade, regarded the SAS as a nuisance. Instead of being part of the solution to the Task Force’s challenges during Corporate, the SAS was in reality part of the problem.
This toxic culture has been perpetuated into the 21st century
Forty years of research into the South Atlantic conflict has unearthed a litany of unprofessional behaviour, elementary mistakes and failures on the part of the SAS. These ranged from a “blue-on-blue” incident where an SAS patrol shot dead a member of an SBS team, and the near cancellation of the raid on Pebble Island due to tardiness on the part of the SAS — to the poor skill-sets and discipline of SAS personnel manning a covert observation post overlooking the twin settlements of Darwin and Goose Green, whose sub-optimal report on Argentine force numbers helped convince the CO of 2 PARA that there were far fewer Argentine forces there than was the case; and the failure of the SAS to properly secure Mount Kent prior to the heliborne insertion of “K” Company 42 Commando Royal Marines onto this strategically important feature. Various other examples include non-SF units encountering individual SAS patrols in the field, sitting laughing and talking without posted sentries; and a compromised SAS raid on a fuel depot. Having incurred casualties during the raid, the SAS required the assistance of HQ 3 Commando Brigade, eliciting from one staff officer the comment, “Bloody Special Forces; the whole world has to stop for them, I suppose.”
Perhaps the most serious instance of SAS incompetence, however, focused on Operation Paraquet, the British mission to recapture the island of South Georgia. Instructed by Task Force HQ at Northwood to send only a Mountain Troop from D Squadron SAS, the Regiment took it upon itself to embark the entire squadron for this operation. Furthermore, by ignoring the advice of the mountain and arctic warfare-trained Royal Marines landing force commander to avoid the notorious Fortuna Glacier (hubris that was to lead to the destruction of two Wessex helicopters and near deaths of D Squadron’s entire Mountain Troop), the SAS jeopardised the success of the entire operation. The political timing of this near-disaster could not have been worse. In the words of a senior officer instrumental in recapturing the Falklands, “I believe that had there been a serious loss of life on the Glacier among SAS and aircrew … there would have been demands from many MPs … who were dubious about Operation Corporate, to wrap up the whole operation, including retaking the Falklands.”
Controversy has, to varying degrees, been a constant companion to the SAS since its inception in 1941. During the protracted “troubles” in Northern Ireland, the Regiment was repeatedly accused of pursuing a “shoot to kill” policy, whereby terrorist suspects were shot dead without any attempt to arrest them. This cause célèbre peaked in the aftermath of the ambush and killing of three members of an IRA active service unit in Gibraltar in March 1988. It is little surprise, then, that the SAS has been referred to as the “Hereford gun club” or the “Hereford hooligans” by conventional forces.
This toxic and dysfunctional culture appears to have been perpetuated well into the 21st century. In the last few years, a raft of negative news stories, questioning the culture, ethics and military professionalism of the SAS, have surfaced in the press. These have ranged from contracting sexually transmitted infections whilst on operations, and claims of domestic abuse against the partners and family of serving SAS personnel; to serious allegations, investigated and reported on by the BBC’s Panorama programme, of war crimes committed by particular “rogue” SAS Squadrons whilst on deployment to Afghanistan. The alleged planting of weapons on the dead bodies of unarmed “Taliban ‘suspects’”, and charges that UK SAS squadrons vied with their Australian counterparts to see who could kill the most Taliban on a tour of duty, have been of particular concern.
The timing of SAS: Rogue Heroes could not, therefore, have been more propitious for the SAS’s PR machine and senior leadership who, it has been revealed, permitted serving SAS personnel to assist in the production of the TV series. This glorification of its distant past could be perceived as a cynical attempt to contain and reverse recent reputational damage, to retrieve some of its tarnished glory.
For those “non-badged” personnel in wider UK Defence, who have had to endure the toxic effects of SAS mythology whilst on operations, the apparent “unaccountability” of the SAS has proved professionally upsetting. The SAS’s total disregard, at times, for the rules; and the indifference to the second, third or fourth order consequences of its “cowboy” actions have over the years led to the bastardisation of its famous motto “Who Dares Wins” into “Who Cares Who Wins”.
Other SF units have wearied of the SAS’s voracious appetite for publicity
Resentment towards a maverick and publicity hungry SAS is not the sole preserve of “non-badged” Service personnel. Contrary to the impression engendered by the media, the SAS is not the UK’s only SF unit. The Directorate of Special Forces’ Tier 1 and Tier 2 order of battle is a veritable alphabet soup of SF acronyms. Aside from 22 SAS and its reserve units, 21 and 23 SAS, the UKSF community comprises the Special Boat Service, SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, SRR and their support elements, namely the Special Forces Support Group, SFSG, the Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing and 18 (UKSF) Signals Regiment. Confusingly, The Parachute Regiment’s elite Pathfinder Platoon, the Royal Marines’ Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron, SRS and the British Army’s newly-formed Ranger Regiment operate under Brigade level HQs and are therefore not part of the UKSF community.
Historically, the aforementioned units have conducted their core business professionally and, above all, quietly. The SBS, whose motto is “By Strength and Guile”, hold a particular aversion to media exposure. In a recent review for The Critic of a new revisionist biography of David Stirling, authorised historian of the wartime SBS Saul David revealed the Service’s institutional philosophy toward public disclosure. In a thinly-disguised swipe at its brethren in the SAS, the SBS’s classified handbook affirms that, “Some units like to make a noise about their activities. We take a more discreet approach. Whilst some prefer the limelight, we prefer the twilight.”
14th Intelligence Company (“The Det”), predecessor of today’s SRR, shared a similar ethos and outlook to the SBS. Fierce rival of the Special Air Service, alongside whom it worked closely in Northern Ireland, “The Det” preferred operating clandestinely in the shadows, watching and listening. This was often in stark contrast to the SAS for whom surveillance was merely a prelude to Direct Action. The fact that “The Det” holds the distinction of achieving more “kills” in the Province than their Hereford counterparts, owes more to the incaution of Irish terrorists than any gung-ho, trigger-happy inclination on the part of its covert operatives, whose training espoused the avoidance of armed confrontation.
Understandably, these SF units have wearied of the SAS’s voracious appetite for publicity and credit, particularly if that recognition should have been attributed to its vital operational input. Units such as the SBS and SRR are significantly less obsessed with myth and legend-making, and they are not, institutionally-speaking, prone to the delusion that they alone can win conflicts. After all, UKSF units — despite their acknowledged ability to achieve effect out of all proportion to their size and strength — are but small cogs in a far bigger military machine, one that ultimately relies upon conventional forces to achieve a decision on the battlefield.
Since the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, an epoch judged to have been the “golden age of special operations”, British politicians and officials have increasingly come to trust in and rely upon UKSF units. A recent investigation into the UKSF community by the Oxford Research Group enumerated the reasons for this infatuation. Not only do UK Special Forces units operate covertly around the globe, under the cover of plausible deniability, making them a “low-risk” option, they are also cheaper than conventional forces whose logistical footprint and public profile are significant. This makes UKSF the ideal tool for policy-makers who wish to circumvent the British public’s increased “risk aversion” to foreign conflicts. Consequently, the UKSF community is increasingly taking on more of the UK Defence effort.
This marked increase in defence output by UKSF units has attracted adverse comment, however. Those monitoring its activities have levelled the charges of “unaccountability” and “lack of transparency” against the Directorate of Special Forces. Unlike UK Intelligence and Security Services, who are officially regulated by an oversight committee, no such forum exists for holding UK Special Forces to account. This is compounded by the MoD’s refusal to comment on UKSF operations, and the fact that Britain’s military elite do not come within the remit of the House of Commons Defence Committee or any other parliamentary body. Without public scrutiny, it is impossible to ascertain the extent to which politicians and senior officials can, or cannot, differentiate between myth and reality in the shadowy world of UK Special Forces.
The persistent conviction on the part of politicians and officials, that the UKSF community is a panacea for the nation’s defence challenges, has in turn granted HQ UKSF and the Director Special Forces unprecedented power and influence. This is out of all proportion to their relative size, but over the years it provided the SAS in particular with a powerful lobbying voice within the MoD. Until very recently, all Directors of UKSF have been officers drawn from the SAS, making them primus inter pares within the world of UK Special Forces. The recent formation of the British Army’s Ranger Regiment and Special Operations Brigade, together with the Royal Navy’s plans to convert the Royal Marines’ Future Commando Force, FCF, into a Special Operations Force, SOF, merely serve to confirm an emerging UKSF-SOF primacy in defence matters.
This new growth industry comes at a cost, however. Whilst the current direction of travel is the consolidation and expansion of Tier 1 and 2 UKSF and SOF-capable formations, this growing trend will be at the expense of the conventional “green” Army, in particular infantry, armoured and artillery units who are being substantially cut. By viewing the nation’s future defence requirements through the prism and focus of UKSF-SOF units, Special Forces devotees in Whitehall and Westminster are not only distorting the optics of UK Defence, but are unbalancing and pulling out of shape the UK’s conventional forces.
A foretaste of this step change occurred in April 2006 when 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment — traditionally a specialist light-infantry formation — was converted into a UKSFSG unit, and the Royal Marines were obliged to provide a company group from their existing order-of-battle. Whilst strengthening a growing Special Forces empire, it simultaneously weakened Britain’s frontline infantry strength. It therefore remains to be seen whether this evolving defence model will survive the exigencies of future conventional warfare, or prove to be a costly strategic mistake.
Forty years ago, Major-General Sir Jeremy Moore had the moral courage and professional standing to openly question and challenge, albeit in an official context, the SAS legend. Moore’s ultimate aim was to ensure that the right lessons concerning the employment of Special Forces units in a medium-level, high-intensity war against a near peer adversary were properly identified, and more importantly, learned. Moore’s post-operational report also ventured to underscore the fact that conventional forces ultimately win campaigns and wars. In Moore’s view, by concentrating solely on counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations in the years preceding the Falklands, the SAS in 1982 was physically, conceptually and morally unfit to conduct maritime operations alongside conventional forces.
Tellingly, the SAS’s own report of proceedings for Corporate was heavily amended by Admiral Fieldhouse. It bore little relation to the truth and was merely another exercise in myth-making and legend building on the part of the Regiment. Moore’s myth-busting should therefore act as a sobering check to the recent media frenzy surrounding SAS: Rogue Heroes. Instead the SAS continues to be protected by an exquisite enabling wrap of official secrecy, media cheerleaders, tame historians and institutional echo-chambers. All ensure that daylight is not let in upon the magic — to paraphrase Walter Bagehot’s exhortation, made in his 1867 monograph The English Constitution, to perpetuate the mystique of monarchy. Such sycophancy, however, engenders an environment in which military organisations start to believe their own propaganda. This is ill-advised. As Colonel Ollie Lee, another morally courageous Royal Marines officer who was obliged to resign his commission in protest at the gross mishandling of the “Marine A” incident, once told the Afghanistan veteran and future Tory MP Johnny Mercer, “The precise moment you start to believe your own hype, is the precise moment it all starts to go badly wrong.”
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thecritic.co.uk · by Podcast · December 15, 2022
19. V-22 Osprey: The U.S. Military's Biggest Mistake?
I waited a long time for the CV-22 while on active duty but I never had a chance to fly in one
V-22 Osprey: The U.S. Military's Biggest Mistake?
19fortyfive.com · by Harrison Kass · January 7, 2023
Of all the unique, advanced airframes in the US military’s expansive inventory, the V-22 Osprey may be the most easily identifiable. Using tilt-rotors – rotors that can pivot between about 90 degrees mid-flight – the V-22 is basically an amalgamation of a prop plane and a helicopter. Uniquely versatile, the V-22 can perform both vertical and conventional takeoff/landings. The result is a single airframe that combines the utility of a helicopter with the velocity and range of a turboprop.
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In most circumstances, the V-22 takes off and lands in “helicopter mode,” with its nacelles positioned vertically and its rotors moving horizontally. Then, once the V-22 is airborne, having achieved flight like a helicopter would, the nacelles are pushed forward 90 degrees until they are positioned like a traditional prop aircraft (the nacelle reconfiguration takes about 12 seconds).
The V-22’s origins lie in one of modern America’s most haunting political and military embarrassments: Operation Eagle Claw.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter greenlit Operation Eagle Claw to extract the US hostages being held captive at the US Embassy in Iran. Famously, the operation was aborted – because of helicopter malfunction. It wasn’t just one helicopter that malfunctioned – like in the raid to assassinate Osama bin Laden; during Eagle Claw, three of eight helicopters malfunctioned – indicating decisively that the US was operating with deficient technologies.
While only four helicopters were needed to complete Operation Eagle Claw, mission procedures held that the mission would be aborted if less than six helicopters were available. The mission procedures accommodated the failure of twenty-five percent of the mission’s fleet. Still, the buffer wasn’t enough. Three helicopters failed – for one reason or another – and the mission was aborted.
The scope of the failure was expansive. Not only were US hostages left in Iran, consigned to wait until 1981 for release, but the botched operation contributed to Jimmy Carter’s political ruin. During the 1980 campaign, Carter was hounded for the failure of Operation Eagle Claw; GOP nominee Ronald Reagan cited Eagle Claw as a primary source of evidence to demonstrate Carter’s general weakness and inability to lead. The message stuck and Carter was routed in the election. Carter, now an old man, well into his 90s, acknowledges that failing to send additional helicopters on Eagle Claw was one of the biggest mistakes of his presidency.
War planners regretted Eagle Claw, too. But lessons were learned. In the 1980s, the Department of Defense founded the JVX aircraft program. Essentially, the JVX program was meant to result in an aircraft that could have pulled Eagle Claw off.
Bell and Boeing teamed up to fulfill the new JVX program. Bell, a helicopter manufacturer, worked on the wing, nacelles, rotors, drive system, tail surfaces, and aft ramp. Boeing, who has some helicopter making credentials but is mostly known for their fixed-wing aircraft, took care of the fuselage, cockpit, avionics, and flight controls.
As you might imagine, designing the V-22 – a novel piece of technology – was not always a smooth process. Decades were spent finagling over the details and the funding and the responsibilities. One Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, spent years trying to kill the program – only to have it revived when the Clinton administration took office. Yet despite the turmoil, the V-22 program persisted, through the 80s and through the 90s – behind schedule but moving forward. As flight testing began other problems, mechanical rather than political, began to emerge.
A CV-22 Osprey assigned to Air Force Special Operations Command prepares to land during an aerial demonstration at Wittman Regional Airport, Wis., July 30, 2021. With the various Air Force Special Operations Command aircraft and personnel in attendance, AFSOC brings specialized airpower and competitive advantage to the future warfighting environment. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Miranda Mahoney)
The V-22 was dangerous to operate. And it was expensive to produce; after two decades of costly development, the V-22 finally went operational in the twenty-first century.
More concerningly, the tilt rotor craft kept crashing. In 2000, a total of 23 US Marines were killed when two V-22s went down in separate incidents.
Redesigns were incorporated but the reputation followed: The V-22 was an aircraft that pilots had to be especially careful in.
200718-N-GR168-1055 ATLANTIC OCEAN (July 18, 2020) An CMV-22B Osprey, attached to the Blackjacks of Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Two One (HX-21), lands on the flight deck aboard the amphibious transport dock ship USS New York (LPD 21), July 18, 2020. New York is operating in U.S. 2nd Fleet in support of naval operations to maintain maritime stability and security in order to ensure access, deter aggression and defend U.S., allied and partner interests. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Lyle Wilkie/Released)
The hassle and investment of designing the V-22 was probably not worth it; the Pentagon recently announced that V-22 production is coming to an end.
Harrison Kass is the Senior Defense Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. He lives in Oregon and listens to Dokken. Follow him on Twitter @harrison_kass.
19fortyfive.com · by Harrison Kass · January 7, 2023
20.EDITORIAL: Taiwan must tackle military spy issue
I will never forget being in Taiwan in 2017 for a conference and with about 100 Taiwan officers and about 20 Americans, the Taiwan Chief of Staff of the Army said in this room theatre are PLA spies. I do not think he was talking about the Americans.
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2023/01/07/2003792130?utm_source=pocket_reader
Sat, Jan 07, 2023 page8
EDITORIAL: Taiwan must tackle military spy issue
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- Former Taiwan Solidarity Union legislator Lo Chih-ming (羅志明) and retired navy major general Hsia Fu-hsiang (夏復翔) were on Thursday released on bail after they were questioned by prosecutors in relation to alleged spying for China. The case is concerning due to their high profile. Hsia previously commanded a destroyer and was deputy director of the Navy Command Headquarters’ Political Warfare Department. The two had access to sensitive information and have contacts in positions of influence.
- There have been several high-profile spy cases in the past few years, affecting public and military morale. The High Court on May 13 last year acquitted New Party member Wang Ping-chung (王炳忠) and others who were accused of receiving funding from entities controlled by the Chinese military for the purpose of spreading Beijing’s propaganda. Taipei prosecutor Lin Da (林達) and Taiwan Forever Society chairman Huang Di-ying (黃帝穎) at the time criticized the acquittal, saying that “judicial officials and legislation have not kept up” with China’s disinformation campaigns.
- In June, a retired major general surnamed Chien (錢) and a retired lieutenant colonel surnamed Wei (魏) were charged with helping Beijing create a spy network among active-duty service members. In November, the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office charged former army colonel Hsiang Te-en (向德恩) with corruption, accusing him of pledging allegiance to China and accepting money to work as a spy. The Ministry of National Defense at the time said it would “continue to bolster counterespionage education for officers, as well as rank-and-file soldiers, and would work closely with national security agencies to thwart Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts.”
- The prevalence of such cases shows not enough is being done to combat espionage, particularly in the military. Following Hsiang’s case, Institute of National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said military espionage poses a serious threat to national security and urged the government to reinstate military trials or to have military prosecutors participate in espionage investigations.
- This could be a good approach, as punishments for espionage are much harsher under the Criminal Code of the Armed Forces (陸海空軍刑法), but the government should also look at cutting off such activity before it can occur in the first place. For it to occur, two conditions must be met: Contact between Taiwanese officials and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents must be established, and an exchange of money and information must take place. Ensuring that no such contacts take place would require prohibiting active-duty and recently retired military and political officials from traveling to China, scrutinizing and monitoring their travel and boosting the National Security Bureau’s means to monitor the movements and exchanges of Chinese in Taiwan.
- Cutting off money and information exchanges would require that bank accounts of those with access to sensitive information be audited, and any large, atypical transfers or deposits be investigated. Information access should also be compartmentalized, with officials having access only to the information they need to perform their duties. Active-duty service members’ online and telephone communications with Chinese should also be monitored. Some people might say the measures would run against personal freedom, but anyone who chooses a career in politics or the military should know that positions in these fields, especially decisionmaking roles and positions with access to sensitive information, come with restrictions to protect national security.
- Taiwan is in the process of reforming its military. This involves longer conscription terms, investment in the domestic development of defense systems and measures to boost professionalism. These are all good measures, but they would be for nothing if spying is not addressed.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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