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Quotes of the Day:
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction."
- James A. Baldwin
"The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so."
- Mark Twain
"One could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs, and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs."
- Wilhelm Reich
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 9, 2023
2. Ukraine’s rocket campaign reliant on U.S. precision targeting, officials say
3. How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
4. Chinese Balloon Had Tools to Collect Electronic Communications, U.S. Says
5. Spy balloons and the next great game
6. NSA Woos Laid-Off Tech Workers
7. China’s Balloon Program Grew From a Humble Start
8. DOD Is Focused on China, Defense Official Says
9. Russian generals killed in war "unbelievably high": Japanese intelligence
10. Five outstanding questions about the Chinese spy balloon
11. Romney defends Biden’s handling of Chinese balloon
12. When Lippy Generals Challenge Civilian Control
13. Sidney Shachnow: The Holocaust Survivor Who Became a Green Beret
14. How The International Community Should Respond To The Trial Of The 47 In Hong Kong
15. The rise and fall of the Mozart Group - Responsible Statecraft
16. Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine
17. Biden’s Foreign Policy Is a Mess: The White House Has Failed to Match Means and Ends
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1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 9, 2023
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-9-2023
Key Takeaways
- Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that the Wagner Group has entirely stopped recruiting prisoners.
- The Kremlin continues to pursue measures to gradually prepare Russia’s defense industrial base for a protracted war in Ukraine.
- A prominent Wagner-linked Russian milblogger called for the dismissal of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu over a Russian military uniform procurement scandal.
- The Kremlin continues to illustrate that it is unwilling to curb divisive rhetoric from ultranationalist pro-war figures.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast and the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area and continued offensive operations around Bakhmut.
- Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack in Zaporizhia Oblast.
- Russian sources claimed that the Russian military integrated a Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) volunteer formation into the Russian Armed Forces.
- Russian sources claimed that Russian authorities detained a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group attempting to assassinate Russian occupation officials.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 9, 2023
understandingwar.org
Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, George Barros, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan
February 9, 7:30 pm 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.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on February 9 that the Wagner Group has entirely stopped recruiting prisoners. In a response to a press comment, Prigozhin claimed that Wagner’s recruitment of prisoners has "completely stopped" and that "all obligations are being fulfilled" for those currently under Wagner’s employ.[1] Prigozhin also absurdly claimed that over 10 million Americans have applied to join Wagner.[2] The Wagner Group will likely continue to recruit from prisons, albeit in a much more limited capacity. As ISW has previously noted, Wagner’s recruitment of prisoners has slowed over the last few months, an assessment confirmed by statistics by the Federal Penitentiary Service that show that decreases in the Russian prison population stabilized between November 2022 and January 2023.[3] This phenomenon is consistent with the overall trend of conventional Russian troops slowly replacing the Wagner Group around Bakhmut, indicating that Russian military command may be shifting away from its reliance on Wagner and therefore on using prisoners as cannon fodder.
The Kremlin continues to pursue measures to gradually prepare Russia’s defense-industrial base for a protracted war in Ukraine while avoiding wider economic mobilization. Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting with the Supervisory Board of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives on February 9 and instructed the agency to support federal subjects in developing the production of unmanned aircraft systems.[4] Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev previously stated that Russian military manufacturers intend to expand the supply of reconnaissance and attack drones to support operations in Ukraine, and Russian and Iranian officials are reportedly planning to build a factory in Russia to manufacture 6,000 drones "in the coming years."[5]
Medvedev visited a tank manufacturing plant in Omsk Oblast on February 9 and stated that Russia needs to increase the production of various armaments, including modern tanks, in response to Western military assistance to Ukraine.[6] Dutch open-source group Oryx reported that Russian forces have lost 1,012 destroyed tanks in Ukraine with an additional 546 tanks captured by Ukrainian forces.[7] Oryx reported that these combined losses represent roughly half the tanks that Russian forces committed to Ukraine at the start of the invasion.[8] Fifteen hundred tanks are enough to equip more than 15 tank regiments or brigades or about 150 battalion tactical groups.[9] The Russian military needs to quickly replenish these tank losses to maintain the ability to conduct large-scale mechanized maneuver warfare ahead of a likely increased pace of offensive operations in eastern Ukraine. Medvedev likely framed his calls for increased production as a response to Western military assistance to obscure the fact that substantial military equipment losses are driving the need for increased production. The Kremlin’s efforts to gradually prepare Russia’s defense industrial base for a protracted war while avoiding a wider mobilization of the Russian economy continue to be incompatible with the scale of the war that the Russian military is fighting in Ukraine and the scale of Russian military equipment losses.
A prominent Wagner-linked Russian milblogger called for the dismissal of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu over a Russian military uniform procurement scandal. Many prominent Russian military bloggers harshly criticized Shoigu and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) over news that the 22-year-old son of the Russian Deputy Head of the Federal Agency for State Property Management won a contract to supply the Russian military with new uniforms.[10] The milbloggers argued that the new uniforms are of inferior quality and overpriced (costing about 130,000-210,000 rubles or $1,780 - $2,875 per uniform) and are part of a petty corruption scheme to enrich the families of Russian defense officials. The Grey Zone Telegram channel—a prominent Wagner Group-affiliated milblogger – wrote an explicative-laden rant to its 426,000 subscribers that Shoigu has lost credibility in front of the Russian nation and that Russian President Vladimir Putin can amend the situation by firing Shoigu, Shoigu’s "entourage" in the Russian General Staff and banning Shoigu and his associates from all Russian military affairs.[11] This is the latest episode in a string of events that has prompted Russian military blogger communities to attack the Russian MoD and senior Kremlin officials for petty corruption and ineptitude resulting in battlefield failures and worse quality of life for average Russian soldiers.[12]
The Kremlin continues to show that it is unwilling to curb divisive rhetoric from ultranationalist pro-war figures. Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov publicly sparred with Duma Deputy General Viktor Sobolev following Sobolev’s criticism of Kadyrov’s statements on grooming standards in the Russian military being discriminatory against Muslims and calls for the Russian military to fight satanism in Poland.[13] Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on February 9 that the Kremlin is "not participating in this controversy and would not like to give any assessments" about it.[14] The Kremlin will continue to tolerate divisive rhetoric from ultranationalist figures as it seeks to appeal to the wider pro-war community.
Key Takeaways
- Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that the Wagner Group has entirely stopped recruiting prisoners.
- The Kremlin continues to pursue measures to gradually prepare Russia’s defense industrial base for a protracted war in Ukraine.
- A prominent Wagner-linked Russian milblogger called for the dismissal of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu over a Russian military uniform procurement scandal.
- The Kremlin continues to illustrate that it is unwilling to curb divisive rhetoric from ultranationalist pro-war figures.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast and the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area and continued offensive operations around Bakhmut.
- Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack in Zaporizhia Oblast.
- Russian sources claimed that the Russian military integrated a Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) volunteer formation into the Russian Armed Forces.
- Russian sources claimed that Russian authorities detained a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group attempting to assassinate Russian occupation officials.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1—Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1- Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and continue offensive operations into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)
ISW continues to assess that Russia's most likely course of action (MLCOA) is an imminent offensive effort in Luhansk Oblast and is therefore adjusting the structure of the daily campaign assessments. We will no longer include the Eastern Kharkiv and Western Luhansk Oblast area as part of Ukrainian counteroffensives and will assess this area as a subordinate part of the Russian main effort in Eastern Ukraine. The assessment of Luhansk Oblast as part of the Russian main effort does not preclude the possibility of continued Ukrainian counteroffensive actions here or anywhere else in theater in the future. ISW will report on Ukrainian counteroffensive efforts as they occur.
Russian forces continued offensive actions along the Svatove-Kreminna line on February 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled a Russian attack near Stelmakhivka, 15km west of Svatove.[15] Russian milbloggers circulated footage reportedly of elements of the 3rd Motor Rifle Division (20th Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) correcting artillery strikes in an unidentified sector of the Svatove-Kreminna line.[16] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Central Military District elements are operating in the Lyman direction (the area west of Kreminna) and using TOS-1 thermobaric multiple rocket launch systems.[17] The commitment of a military district-level asset such as the TOS-1 to the Kreminna area suggests that the Russian MoD is prioritizing this axis. Widely circulated social media footage posted on February 9 additionally shows a Ukrainian strike on a Russian BMPT Terminator armored fighting vehicle about 8km south of Kreminna, indicating that the Russian command is committing new equipment to this area of the front.[18] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Ukrainian troops repelled a Russian attack near Bilohorivka.[19] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian troops are conducting offensive operations north of Bilohorivka and attacked along the Shepilove-Dibrova line, about 5km south of Kreminna.[20]
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces continued ground attacks around Bakhmut on February 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks on Bakhmut itself; northeast of Bakhmut near Vyimka (22km northeast) and Fedorivka (15km northeast); north of Bakhmut near Krasna Hora (4km north) and Paraskoviivka (5km north); and west of Bakhmut near Ivanviske (5km west) and Chasiv Yar (10km west).[21] A Russian milblogger remarked that Russian troops have recently changed their tactics in the Bakhmut area and are focusing less on frontal assaults on small settlements and more on interdicting Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) into Bakhmut along the E40 Bakhmut-Slovyansk and T0504 Kostyantynivka-Chasiv Yar-Bakhmut highways.[22] This observation is consistent with the Ukrainian General Staff report of Russian attacks towards Chasiv Yar and Ivanivske, both critical settlements along the T0504. Other Russian milbloggers similarly claimed that Wagner Group forces are pushing towards Ivanivske and attacking along the E40 near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (10km northwest of Bakhmut) and Dubovo-Vasylivka (5km northwest of Bakhmut).[23] Russian sources claimed that Wagner Group forces are additionally attacking toward Krasna Hora from three sides and that Ukrainian troops are close to withdrawing from the settlement.[24]
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on February 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Avdiivka, north of Avdiivka near Novokalynove, and along the western outskirts of Donetsk City near Vodyane, Pervomaiske, Vesele, Krasnohorivka, and Marinka.[25] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City resumed offensives near Krasnohorivka, advanced near Vodyane and Opytne, failed to break through near Pervomaiske, and continued attacks in western Marinka.[26] Social media footage published on February 9 purportedly shows elements of the 5th Brigade of the 1st Army Corps (forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic) attacking Ukrainian positions near Marinka.[27]
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on February 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bohoyavlenka (25km southwest of Donetsk City) and Prechystivka (38km southwest of Donetsk City).[28] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces resumed assault operations on the outskirts of Vuhledar.[29] A Ukrainian reserve officer also reported that the majority ethnic Tatar volunteer battalion "Alga" of the 72nd Motorized Rifle Brigade (3rdArmy Corps) fought near Vuhledar on February 6.[30] The reserve officer suggested that the use of volunteer battalions in this area indicates that the 155th and 40th Naval Infantry Brigades, which were previously active in the area, sustained insurmountable losses and are being replaced by other formations.[31] Recently posted footage from the Vuhledar area shows a defeated Russian mechanized formation of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade that lost 13 main battle tanks and 12 BMP infantry fighting vehicles in a single engagement - about half a Russian tank battalion.[32] The footage shows the Russian formation driving in a column displaying poor tactics and a lack of learning from previous Russian tactical failures.[33] Separate drone footage published on February 8 shows Ukrainian forces striking Russian forces approaching Vuhledar.[34] Geolocated footage published February 7 also shows reported elements of the 36th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade (29th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) striking Ukrainian positions on the eastern outskirts of Vuhledar.[35]
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack in Zaporizhia Oblast on February 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault near Novoandriivka, Zaporizhia Oblast.[36] Russian forces additionally continued routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson oblasts on February 9.[37] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Kherson City and Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[38]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian sources claimed that the Russian military integrated a Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) volunteer formation into the Russian Armed Forces. A Russian milblogger claimed that the former DNR Vostok volunteer battalion is now formally the 11th Regiment of the Russian Armed Forces.[39] The DNR Vostok volunteer battalion commander, a notable Russian milblogger, has not addressed the reported integration. The Russian milblogger did not specify what higher formation the 11th regiment is subordinated to, but it is possible that it is subordinated to the Southern Military District which formally controls the DNR 1st Army Corps. This regiment may be assigned to a new unspecified Russian maneuver division. ISW previously assessed that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) appears to be rushing to integrate irregular conventional forces into more traditional structures and will likely struggle to correct these formations‘ poor effectiveness during integration efforts.[40]
A Russian military court reportedly ruled that Russian commanders can legally refuse to release servicemembers from service at the end of their contracts. A Russian media outlet reported on February 8 that a Perm Oblast military garrison court ruled in favor of Russian commanders in a lawsuit filed by a serviceman who claimed that the commanders refused to release him from service when his contract ended in September 2022.[41] The court reportedly argued that the partial mobilization decree established an exhaustive list of grounds for release that did not include the expiration of a contract, and therefore, concluded that there were no grounds for recognizing the actions of the commanders as illegal.[42] ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin will not formally rescind the partial mobilization decree to legally justify the continued service of mobilized personnel indefinitely.
A volunteer battalion affiliated with a Russian occupation official reportedly deployed to frontline positions in Ukraine. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation deputy Vladimir Rogov claimed on February 9 that elements of Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky’s Sudaplatov volunteer battalion have deployed to frontline positions in an unspecified area of Ukraine.[43] Russian sources have previously claimed that Turkish, Swedish, and Serbian volunteers are serving in the volunteer battalion.[44] ISW continues to assess that this volunteer battalion will likely face significant command and control challenges if these claims are true.
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)
The Kremlin continues to prioritize the development of occupied territories in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the Supervisory Board of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives on February 9 and instructed the agency to focus on the development and implementation of socio-economic development plans for occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts.[45] Putin stated that Russia needs to develop the occupied territories within the current decade to foster social commitment to Russia.[46] Donetsk People’s Republic head Denis Pushilin met with Russian Energy Minister Nikolai Shulginov on February 9 to discuss a new fuel and energy complex in Donetsk Oblast.[47] The Kremlin and Russian occupation officials likely believe that rapid economic development will promote widespread pro-Russian sentiments in occupied territories.
Russian officials continue to pursue the deportation of residents and children from occupied territories through various schemes. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky stated on February 9 that Russian medical services are taking women and newborns with diseases that cannot be treated in Zaporizhia Oblast to Russia for perinatal care.[48] Balitsky also stated that Russian doctors and the Russian Ministry of Health are providing obstetric services in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[49] Both these obstetric measures are likely meant to support ongoing Russian efforts to deport children and residents from occupied territories under the guise of medical relocation schemes.[50] Russian Agency for Strategic Initiatives member Svetlana Chupsheva stated in a meeting with Putin that the agency helped relocate dozens of residents from occupied territories to Russia under the medical relocation scheme.[51] Chupsheva also stated that the Agency for Strategic Initiatives plans to accept 5,000 children from Donetsk Oblast into a programming course that may set conditions for the relocation of these children to Russia.[52] ISW continues to assess that these schemes are likely part of a wider ethnic cleansing effort.
Russian sources claimed on February 9 that Russian authorities detained members of a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group attempting to assassinate the Berdyansk deputy occupation head, the Berdyansk occupation traffic police deputy head, and the Berdyansk occupation commandant.[53] Russian sources also claimed that the Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group was preparing an attack on a "We are Together with Russia" Center near Berdyansk.[54] ISW has previously assessed that the Kremlin likely founded, coordinates, and promotes the "We Are Together with Russia" organization to create a facade of public support for the annexation and integration of occupied Ukrainian oblasts into Russia.[55]
Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.
ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.)
Belarusian maneuver elements continue conducting exercises in Belarus. Unspecified elements of the Belarusian 6th Separate Guards Mechanized brigade conducted tactical live-fire exercises at the Gozhsky Training Ground in Grodno, Belarus, on February 9.[56] A tank battalion of the Belarusian 11th Separate Mechanized Brigade conducted live fire training with T-72 tanks at the Obuz-Lesnovsky Training Ground in Brest, Belarus, on February 9.[57]
Belarus reportedly began a month-long training for reserve recruits on February 9. The Grey Zone Telegram channel reported on February 9 that Belarus’ reserve recruits began a one-month-long training period.[58]
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] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70482
[5] https://www.wsj.com/articles/moscow-tehran-advance-plans-for-iranian-des... ; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/16872633 ;
[9] Captured Documents Say Elite Russian Unit Lost 130 Tanks in Kharkiv (businessinsider.com); Getting to Know the Russian Battalion Tactical Group | Royal United Services Institute (rusi.org)
[13] https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/3334; https://eng.kavkaz-uzel dot eu/articles/62013/; https://eng.kavkaz-uzel dot eu/articles/62012/
[14] https://ria dot ru/20230209/kadyrov-1850804605.html
[41] https://59 dot ru /text/gorod/2023/02/07/72040580/?utm_source=telegram&utm_medium=messenger&utm_campaign=59
[42] https://59 dot ru /text/gorod/2023/02/07/72040580/?utm_source=telegram&utm_medium=messenger&utm_campaign=59
[43] https://www.politnavigator dot net/my-vse-budem-udivleny-kogda-nachnjotsya-nastuplenie-rogov.html
[45] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70482
[46] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70482
[51] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70482
[52] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70482
understandingwar.org
2. Ukraine’s rocket campaign reliant on U.S. precision targeting, officials say
Are our Ukrainian partners revealing too much in terms of tactics, techniques, and procedures?
As an aside it would seem the US and NATO are refining tactics for this modern era of warfare.
Excerpts;
The GPS-guided strikes have driven back Moscow’s forces on the battlefield and been celebrated as a key factor in Kyiv’s underdog attempt to stave off the nearly year-old Russian assault. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House in December, he gave President Biden a military medal that had been approved for meritorious service by the commander of a Ukrainian HIMARS unit.
The issue is sensitive for the U.S. government, which has cast itself as a nonbelligerent friend to the government in Kyiv as it fights for its sovereignty and survival. The Kremlin has repeatedly accused the United States and its NATO allies of fighting a proxy war in Ukraine.
Senior Pentagon officials declined for days to answer questions about whether and how they provide coordinates for the strikes, citing concerns about operational security. They instead provided a statement highlighting the limitations of American involvement.
“We have long acknowledged that we share intelligence with Ukraine to assist them in defending their country against Russian aggression, and we have optimized over time how we share information to be able to support their requests and their targeting processes at improved speed and scale,” Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said in the statement. “The Ukrainians are responsible for finding targets, prioritizing them and then ultimately deciding which ones to engage. The U.S. does not approve targets, nor are we involved in the selection or engagement of targets.”
Ukraine’s rocket campaign reliant on U.S. precision targeting, officials say
Ukrainian officials say that they almost never launch HIMARS rounds without detailed coordinates provided by U.S. military personnel situated elsewhere in Europe
By Isabelle Khurshudyan, Dan Lamothe, Shane Harris and Paul Sonne
February 9, 2023 at 4:19 p.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · February 9, 2023
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian officials said they require coordinates provided or confirmed by the United States and its allies for the vast majority of strikes using its advanced U.S.-provided rocket systems, a previously undisclosed practice that reveals a deeper and more operationally active role for the Pentagon in the war.
The disclosure, confirmed by three senior Ukrainian officials and a senior U.S. official, comes after months of Kyiv’s forces pounding Russian targets — including headquarters, ammunition depots and barracks — on Ukrainian soil with the U.S.-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, and other similar precision-guided weapons such as the M270 multiple-launch rocket system.
One senior Ukrainian official said Ukrainian forces almost never launch the advanced weapons without specific coordinates provided by U.S. military personnel from a base elsewhere in Europe. Ukrainian officials say this process should give Washington confidence about providing Kyiv with longer-range weapons.
A senior U.S. official — who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue — acknowledged the key American role in the campaign and said the targeting assistance served to ensure accuracy and conserve limited stores of ammunition for maximum effectiveness. The official said Ukraine does not seek approval from the United States on what to strike and routinely targets Russian forces on their own with other weapons. The United States provides coordinates and precise targeting information solely in an advisory role, the official said.
The GPS-guided strikes have driven back Moscow’s forces on the battlefield and been celebrated as a key factor in Kyiv’s underdog attempt to stave off the nearly year-old Russian assault. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House in December, he gave President Biden a military medal that had been approved for meritorious service by the commander of a Ukrainian HIMARS unit.
The issue is sensitive for the U.S. government, which has cast itself as a nonbelligerent friend to the government in Kyiv as it fights for its sovereignty and survival. The Kremlin has repeatedly accused the United States and its NATO allies of fighting a proxy war in Ukraine.
Senior Pentagon officials declined for days to answer questions about whether and how they provide coordinates for the strikes, citing concerns about operational security. They instead provided a statement highlighting the limitations of American involvement.
“We have long acknowledged that we share intelligence with Ukraine to assist them in defending their country against Russian aggression, and we have optimized over time how we share information to be able to support their requests and their targeting processes at improved speed and scale,” Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said in the statement. “The Ukrainians are responsible for finding targets, prioritizing them and then ultimately deciding which ones to engage. The U.S. does not approve targets, nor are we involved in the selection or engagement of targets.”
The senior Ukrainian official described the targeting process, generally: Ukrainian military personnel identify targets they want to hit, and in which location, and that information is then sent up to senior commanders, who then relay the request to U.S. partners for more accurate coordinates. The Americans do not always provide the requested coordinates, the official said, in which case the Ukrainian troops do not fire.
Ukraine could carry out strikes without U.S. help, but because Kyiv doesn’t want to waste valuable ammunition and miss, it usually chooses not to strike without U.S. confirmation, the official said, adding that there are no complaints about the process.
For months now, the Ukrainian government has been lobbying Washington for longer-range precision weapons.
Kyiv possesses HIMARS launchers and a similar weapon, the M270 multiple-launch rocket system, each of which fire a U.S.-made rocket that can travel up to 50 miles.
Ukrainian officials also have sought the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a munition that can be fired from the same launcher and travel up to 185 miles. Biden administration officials have declined to provide that weapon, which is in limited supply and seen by senior U.S. officials as an escalation that could provoke Russia and drag the United States directly into the war.
Kyiv has pledged that it would not use the longer-range missile to strike across the border inside Russia.
The senior Ukrainian official contended that the Ukrainian military would face the same limitations it does now with conventional HIMARS rounds if it received ATACMS, with Ukraine still dependent on U.S. targeting coordinates.
“You’re controlling every shot anyway, so when you say, ‘We’re afraid that you’re going to use it for some other purposes,’ well, we can’t do it even if we want to,” the senior Ukrainian official said.
The senior U.S. official disputed the characterization. It is “not true,” the U.S. official said, that “Ukrainians run targets by us for approval.”
Ukrainian military officials have said that Russian forces have moved back their ammunition stocks out of HIMARS range, which has led to a steep decline in the daily bombardment of Ukrainian cities and soldiers but also reduced Kyiv’s ability to target Moscow’s arsenal. With ATACMS, the Ukrainians probably would target Russian military installations in Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed illegally in 2014.
The United States also recently approved the purchase and delivery of another GPS-guided munition, the ground-launched small-diameter bomb, or GLSDB, that can travel more than 90 miles and be launched from HIMARS and similar launchers. The round was initially designed to be fired from aircraft but has been repurposed.
The head of the Ukrainian military’s missile forces and artillery training, Maj. Gen. Andriy Malinovsky, told The Washington Post in an interview in October that Ukraine’s Western allies had confirmed coordinates for targets ahead of the Kharkiv counteroffensive.
The partners had worked out a process, he said, with Ukraine receiving precise coordinates to ensure they wouldn’t miss their mark with multiple-launch rocket artillery systems as the rapid counteroffensive caught Russian forces unprepared. The targeting information also provided a workaround for when Russian signal-jamming prevented aerial drone reconnaissance on the battlefield, Malinovsky said.
“According to our maps and software, a point will have one set of coordinates,” Malinovsky said. “But when we give this target to partners for analysis, the coordinates are different. Why? Because the Americans and NATO countries have access to military satellites.
“We’re all basically always online,” he added. “They immediately get us the coordinates and we then fire the MLRS right away.”
A third Ukrainian official confirmed that targeting all goes through an American installation on NATO soil and described the process as “very fast.” The Post is withholding the name of the base at the request of U.S. officials who cited security concerns.
The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · February 9, 2023
3. How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
Another Pulitzer for Hersch?
But this is published on his substack page. Why is no media outlet willing to pick this up? Is it because the facts cannot be verified?
Fact of fiction?
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream?utm_source=pocket_saves
Seymour Hersh
Feb 8
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The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
PLANNING
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
THE PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .”
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THE OPERATION
Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.
In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.
A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.
In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.
Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.
The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.
At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.
“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.
Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.
The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.
It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.
The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.
Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.
Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.
The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.
The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”
More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.
“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
4. Chinese Balloon Had Tools to Collect Electronic Communications, U.S. Says
Of course it did. It will be interesting to learn all the capabilities i t was carrying.
Chinese Balloon Had Tools to Collect Electronic Communications, U.S. Says
By Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes
Feb. 9, 2023
Updated 7:23 p.m. ET
The New York Times · by Julian E. Barnes · February 9, 2023
China’s surveillance balloons have flown over more than 40 countries and are directed by the Chinese military, the State Department said. The F.B.I. is studying debris.
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This picture provided by the U.S. Navy shows sailors recovering a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina.Credit...MCS1 Tyler Thompson/U.S. Navy
Feb. 9, 2023Updated 7:23 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration provided its most comprehensive description of the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States last week, saying on Thursday that the machine was part of a global surveillance fleet directed by China’s military and was capable of collecting electronic communications.
The conclusions were outlined in a State Department document, which said the U.S. military had dispatched Cold War-era U-2 spy planes to track and study the balloon before a fighter jet shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday.
China’s spy balloons have flown over more than 40 countries across five continents, the Biden administration said, and appear to be made by one or more companies that officially sell products to the Chinese military. That finding underscores questions among U.S. officials over the ties between some civilian-run enterprises in China and the country’s military, in what American officials call “military-civil fusion.”
The U.S. surveillance planes took images of the balloon while it was still in the air. Its visible equipment, which included antennas, “was clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment on board weather balloons,” the State Department said — a rebuttal to the Chinese government’s assertion that the balloon was a civilian meteorological machine that had strayed off course.
The balloon episode has led to a surge in U.S.-China tensions at a time when the relationship is already at one of its lowest points in decades. Although top American officials say they intend to keep channels of communication with China open, the clashing narratives over the balloon are sowing more conflict. And the Biden administration has begun a campaign to inform countries around the world of the extent of China’s spy balloon program and its violations of sovereignty, in the hope that other nations will push back against Chinese espionage activities.
Investigators from the Pentagon, F.B.I. and other agencies are examining the debris that the U.S. Navy has pulled from the shallow waters off the South Carolina coast. F.B.I. officials said Thursday that they were analyzing material from the balloon’s body, wiring and small amounts of electronics found floating on the water, all from debris that was handed over starting Monday.
Investigators believe that the bulk of the electronics is scattered on the bottom of the ocean, F.B.I. officials said. The balloon was 200 feet tall and had a payload the size of a regional jet, U.S. officials said earlier.
Some officials said learning exactly what kinds of communications information the balloon could collect is a top priority. Officials have said they have not found any evidence that suggests the balloon could carry weaponry.
Investigators are also looking to see whether any of the balloon’s equipment uses technology from American or other Western companies, U.S. officials said.
Any such discovery could spur the Biden administration to take harsher actions to ensure that companies do not export technology to China that could be used by the country’s military and security agencies.
The Chinese Spy Balloon Showdown
The discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon floating over the United States has added to the rising tensions between the two superpowers.
President Biden and his aides have already imposed broad limits on the sales of “foundational technologies” to China. Most notably, the U.S. government announced last October that it was barring American companies from selling advanced semiconductor chips and certain chip manufacturing technology to China. The new rules are also aimed at preventing foreign companies from doing the same.
The goal of the export controls is to cripple China’s development of advanced technologies, particularly tools used by the Chinese military. Mr. Biden has stressed the importance of maintaining independent supply chains in critical sectors, a point that he highlighted in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.
U.S. officials said they expect the recovered balloon parts will give them some insight into how Chinese engineers are putting together surveillance technology.
“We’re analyzing them to learn more about the surveillance program,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Wednesday. “We will pair that with what we learn from the balloon — what we learn from the balloon itself — with what we’ve gleaned based on our careful observation of the system when it was in our airspace, as the president directed his team to do.”
The State Department said in its document that the U.S. government was confident that the company that made the balloon had direct commercial ties with the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military, citing an official procurement portal for the army. The department did not name the company.
“The United States will also explore taking action against P.R.C. entities linked to the P.L.A. that supported the balloon’s incursion into U.S. airspace,” the State Department said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “We will also look at broader efforts to expose and address the P.R.C.’s larger surveillance activities that pose a threat to our national security, and to our allies and partners.”
Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder speaking on the Chinese surveillance balloon program and gave an update on the recovery of the balloon that was recently shot down in American airspace.
The department said the company advertises balloon products on its website and has posted videos from past flights that apparently went over U.S. airspace and that of other nations. The videos show balloons that have similar flight patterns as the surveillance balloons that the United States has been discussing this week, the agency said.
The State Department document said the downed balloon’s array of antennas was “likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications,” while its solar panels were large enough to produce power to operate “multiple active intelligence collection sensors.”
Intelligence agencies have concluded that the antennas were capable of locating communications devices, including mobile phones and radios, and collecting data from them, U.S. officials say. But they do not know exactly what kinds of devices were being targeted, two officials said.
Radio frequencies can be detected by orbital satellites. Mobile phone signals are harder to detect from space but reach as high as where the balloon was drifting, at 60,000 feet.
Intelligence agencies do not yet know, officials say, whether the balloon was supposed to fly over parts of the United States — including over nuclear weapons sites — or was blown off course or suffered mechanical failure.
Officials say they are confident that they prevented the balloon from collecting any sensitive data from U.S. nuclear sites and other military bases. The U.S. government also took steps to protect official communications, but officials said they were unsure what the balloon collected.
Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, told a Senate committee on Thursday that the spy balloon episode “put on full display what we’ve long recognized — the P.R.C. has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.”
The Pentagon has said that a second balloon drifting last week over Latin America was also conducting surveillance, though China asserts that was a civilian balloon used for test flights.
The presence of the balloon in the United States last week ignited a diplomatic crisis and prompted Mr. Blinken to cancel a weekend trip to Beijing, where he had been expected to meet President Xi Jinping of China. Mr. Blinken said the balloon had violated U.S. sovereignty and was “an irresponsible act” by China.
After a U.S. fighter jet shot down the balloon, the Chinese government said the United States had overreacted and violated international convention, and that China had “the right to respond further.”
The Chinese government also said the balloon belonged to China and should not be kept by the United States.
The U.S. government says it has discovered instances of at least five Chinese spy balloons in American territory — three during the Trump administration and two during the Biden administration. The spy balloons observed during the Trump administration were initially classified as unidentified aerial phenomena, U.S. officials said. It was not until after 2020 that officials closely examined the balloon incidents under a broader review of aerial phenomena and determined that they were part of the Chinese global balloon surveillance effort.
The New York Times reported Saturday that a classified intelligence report given to Congress last month highlighted at least two instances of a foreign power using advanced technology for aerial surveillance over American military bases, one inside the continental United States and the other overseas. The research suggested China was the foreign power, U.S. officials said. The report also discussed surveillance balloons.
U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that China’s spy balloon program is part of a global surveillance effort designed to collect information on the military capabilities of countries around the world. With the flights, Chinese officials are trying to hone their ability to gather data about American military bases — in which it is most interested — as well as those of other nations in the event of a conflict or rising tensions, U.S. officials say. The program has operated out of multiple locations in China, they say.
China’s National University of Defense Technology has a team of researchers studying advances in balloons. And as early as 2020, People’s Liberation Army Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese military, published an article describing how near space “has become a new battleground in modern warfare.”
Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
The New York Times · by Julian E. Barnes · February 9, 2023
5. Spy balloons and the next great game
Excerpts:
A key lesson of the original great game concerns flaws in British approaches to Central Asian cultures and social dynamics. London officials eventually deprioritized supposedly outdated human intelligence techniques in favor of new tools that exploited the statistical movement. Subtleties related to tribal disputes and social factions on the Indian subcontinent were replaced with economic metadata and sweeping generalities. The result included everything from the unexpected Indian rebellion of 1857 to the British Empire’s two disastrous incursions into Afghanistan between 1839 and 1880.
These flaws of cultural parochialism endure, which is why China’s leaders quell fears by describing their balloons as harmless civilian weather instruments. This is a far cry from the truth.
Although satellites are useful for surveillance, they are not a panacea, and balloons can carry and deliver things that satellites cannot. According to Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and NORAD, one reason the military did not destroy the airship sooner was because they suspected it may have had explosives on board.
In sum, the world should expect to see more of this, and not just with balloons but also with other tools operating under the auspices of civilian ownership in the spirit of the East India Company. Beijing is playing the game by relying on western mirror imaging to keep their dubious narratives afloat and pacify the world into apathy. An awareness campaign focused on military-civil fusion’s role in supporting China’s political objectives could let some air out of its red balloons and give Washington a stronger hand in this infinite game.
Spy balloons and the next great game
BY MICHAEL P. FERGUSON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 02/09/23 9:30 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3850900-spy-balloons-and-the-next-great-game/
Last week, millions of Americans watched a massive Chinese surveillance balloon float leisurely above their homes before a sidewinder missile from a U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor brought it down off the coast of South Carolina. This was the first time a foreign aircraft has been destroyed in U.S. airspace since World War II.
By Feb. 7, the Washington Post reported that U.S. officials had uncovered a vast, multi-year surveillance program run by the People’s Liberation Army in the skies above five continents. Despite the seriousness of these developments, the situation in the United States generated as much satire as sober commentary.
One former U.S. intelligence official laughed it off, telling CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that on a scale of significance, he gives the incident a two out of 10. Feeding into this dismissive attitude was one of the first justifications Beijing provided, which described the balloon as a “civilian” airship used for “scientific research” that blew off course unexpectedly.
Even after U.S. defense officials clarified that the device was a maneuverable surveillance tool, this narrative developed a life of its own on the internet, appearing prominently in widely-shared Global Times cartoons and countless online comment forums. Beijing has since used similar language to explain the presence of another of its airships identified above South America, implying that rogue winds managed to commandeer two of its balloons on separate continents in a 24-hour period.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) relies on western ignorance of its governing systems as a crutch to keep these justifications standing. It is important, then, to highlight China’s policy of military-civil fusion, or MCF. According to the U.S. Department of State, MCF seeks to eliminate “barriers between China’s civilian research and commercial sectors, and its military and defense industrial sectors.”
Unlike the United States and other free nations, lines drawn between public and private property – intellectual or otherwise – are less concrete in the People’s Republic of China. Private Chinese companies behind the technology used in these balloons are purportedly involved in the military-civil fusion effort.
Although some analysts have pointed out that MCF is not consummate in its implementation, the CCP is notorious for its military control of China’s airspace. This means the term “civilian surveillance balloon” is somewhat of an oxymoron. Even if these claims were true, when a private company collects foreign information of military value, that information is subject to various means of party acquisition. A transcontinental balloon weighted down with sensors the size of school buses and flown over at least half a dozen sensitive sites in the United States has significant military value.
Congressional testimony from leading China experts such as M. Taylor Fravel and Elizabeth Economy has helped inform policymakers of the threat posed by MCF as a policy. Indeed, last year Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations a bill entitled the “Preventing PLA Acquisition of United States Technology Act of 2022.” The purpose of the bill is “to counter the military-civil fusion strategy of the Chinese Communist Party and prevent United States contributions to the development of dual-use technology in China.”
The MCF concept might seem intrusive, but this melding of public and private interests is not a historical anomaly. Some have likened competition between the United States and China to the era Rudyard Kipling coined “the great game” in his 1901 novel, “Kim.” This period of dueling European empires in the 18th and 19th centuries is a useful framework for demonstrating the enduring relationship between the civilian and the authoritarian state.
In this game – chronicled most notably by Peter Hopkirk – Central Asia became a hub for imperial spies, intelligence collectors and cartographers hoping to discover the key to a higher form of knowledge they could use as leverage over competing imperial powers.
The British Empire’s East India Company, for instance, was a “private” organization with a vast intelligence network spread throughout Central Asia by the end of the 18th century. The company’s officers fed information to London from around the globe, and not simply that of a military nature. Much of the information the company gathered was cartographic, botanical, anthropological or economic. But it worked to strengthen the empire’s political and military standing, all while operating under the guise of a militarily benign trading company. Today, it is hard to overlook similarities in China’s global aspirations.
A key lesson of the original great game concerns flaws in British approaches to Central Asian cultures and social dynamics. London officials eventually deprioritized supposedly outdated human intelligence techniques in favor of new tools that exploited the statistical movement. Subtleties related to tribal disputes and social factions on the Indian subcontinent were replaced with economic metadata and sweeping generalities. The result included everything from the unexpected Indian rebellion of 1857 to the British Empire’s two disastrous incursions into Afghanistan between 1839 and 1880.
These flaws of cultural parochialism endure, which is why China’s leaders quell fears by describing their balloons as harmless civilian weather instruments. This is a far cry from the truth.
Although satellites are useful for surveillance, they are not a panacea, and balloons can carry and deliver things that satellites cannot. According to Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and NORAD, one reason the military did not destroy the airship sooner was because they suspected it may have had explosives on board.
In sum, the world should expect to see more of this, and not just with balloons but also with other tools operating under the auspices of civilian ownership in the spirit of the East India Company. Beijing is playing the game by relying on western mirror imaging to keep their dubious narratives afloat and pacify the world into apathy. An awareness campaign focused on military-civil fusion’s role in supporting China’s political objectives could let some air out of its red balloons and give Washington a stronger hand in this infinite game.
Capt. Michael P. Ferguson is a U.S. Army officer with 20 years of combat, staff and security cooperation experience on four continents. He is the author of dozens of publications and co-author of a forthcoming military history of Alexander the Great.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone, and do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Defense, or U.S. government.
6. NSA Woos Laid-Off Tech Workers
Is this a reversal of fortunes? In the past the conventional wisdom was that the military trained personnel in syber skills and then they would leave for lucrative jobs in the private sector. Now the military could hire tech workers who have been trained in the private center. Could that bring culture change to the military cyber workforce?
NSA Woos Laid-Off Tech Workers
The intelligence agency is advertising "one of its largest hiring surges in 30 years" amid other new recruiting efforts.
defenseone.com · by Edward Graham
With tens of thousands of workers let go over the past several months by tech behemoths such as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, the National Security Agency is joining other federal agencies positioning themselves to benefit.
Molly Moore, NSA’s deputy director of workforce support activities, told Nextgov that “we absolutely are trying to take advantage of these tech layoffs” to bolster the agency’s tech and cyber workforce. She said these efforts have included “augmenting [our] current recruitment strategy to reach these audiences through social media, participation at job fairs and expanding the locations of job postings.”
In a tweet last month responding to another users’ tweet about openings in the tech sector amid the wave of layoffs, NSA cybersecurity director Rob Joyce noted that NSA was hiring for cybersecurity, capability development and signals intelligence—or SIGINT—positions, and offered “an amazing stable opportunity if that is now a priority.”
Moore said that, when it comes to enticing talented tech workers to apply to the NSA through social media engagement, “tweets, like Rob’s, don’t hurt.”
“We are at an inflection point, where cybersecurity is a national imperative,” Joyce told Nextgov in a statement. “NSA is looking to bring in top-talent from early to mid-career/life stages across a variety of skill sets. Whether you’re new to NSA or the [intelligence community], or you’ve worked here before, there’s a path for you at NSA to be a part of this cutting-edge, fast-paced mission.”
In a January press release, NSA announced that it was “undertaking one of its largest hiring surges in 30 years with openings for over 3,000 new employees.” Moore said that over half of the positions NSA is hiring for are in cyber- and tech-related roles, including openings for “software engineers, systems engineers, capabilities development specialists, cybersecurity professionals, analysts, mathematicians and data scientists.”
To better recruit these talented workers, Moore added that the agency’s intent is “to dedicate resources to try to streamline some of the processes” around hiring—efforts that included an initial, more targeted recruitment drive which has evolved into a broader hiring campaign.
From October through December, NSA ran a LinkedIn recruitment initiative that contacted identified tech workers “who were affected by that first wave of layoffs” rippling through the tech sector, according to Moore.
Christine Parker, senior strategist for talent management at NSA, told Nextgov that this initial campaign—which she said resulted in “an influx of applications”—entailed “reaching out via LinkedIn to people who had those tech companies in their profiles,” as well as “putting some social media information out there, getting on job boards like CareerBuilder and Indeed and putting some notes on our intelligencecareers.gov site, where you can go and look up NSA’s open vacancies.”
NSA launched a second tech-focused hiring campaign on Jan. 9 to expand the scope of its initial recruitment drive, with an emphasis once more on using LinkedIn to contact laid off tech workers and leveraging social media to spread the word about the agency’s vacancies. This new effort—which the agency plans to run through mid-March—is designed, in part, to “keep up with the companies that are experiencing layoffs,” and to “put messages out there that NSA is a soft landing place for people,” according to Parker.
An NSA spokesperson told Nextgov that, to date, the agency’s recruitment efforts have resulted in the agency hiring approximately 1,000 new employees for tech, cyber, intelligence and business positions.
“We do have more specific activities that we're going to try to undertake, including really trying to apply additional resources to the hiring of these folks, and really trying to shepherd people through the process,” Moore added, citing the difficulties that workers from the private sector can face when trying to navigate the government’s hiring platforms.
Parker said the agency’s communications dashboard has helped to overcome some of these challenges by providing applicants with more direct information about the hiring process, such as updates on their applications and answers to any questions that they might have.
“A single recruiter isn't going to be able to send a personal message to every applicant in their portfolio,” Parker said. “The dashboard lets us do that at a larger volume with some targeted messaging—it might not be 100% personal, but it’s targeted. And it’s helping people know we're still here, that we’re tracking you and we know you're in our pipeline and we still want you to come on board at the end of this process.”
NSA is also factoring longer-term national security priorities into its recruitment efforts. Moore cited comments that Gen. Paul Nakasone—NSA director and the commander of U.S. Cyber Command—and Defense Department officials previously made about China being America’s “pacing challenge” to underscore some of the intelligence issues that NSA is looking to address with its new hires.
“How do we posture ourselves to be ready to really take on that challenge?” Moore asked. “That will require language analysts, it will require intelligence analysts. So it really covers the whole scope of job roles and fields that we have here.”
Other federal agencies are also working to pivot their hiring and recruiting efforts to take advantage of the tech sector’s wide-reaching layoffs. The Department of Veterans Affairs launched a hiring initiative in late 2022 to help fill roughly 1,000 tech-related vacancies across the department. VA’s chief people officer told Nextgov last month that the recruitment drive has helped the department fill more than 25% of its tech-focused vacancies, with hundreds of candidates waiting in the pre-selection stage.
When it comes to enticing laid off tech workers to join NSA, Moore said that potential applicants should consider the invaluable contributions that their skills could have on NSA’s intelligence and security operations moving forward.
“NSA is here, we're hiring stable and we work on really hard problems,” Moore said. “And so we really are looking for some of the best and brightest to help us with those problems.”
defenseone.com · by Edward Graham
7. China’s Balloon Program Grew From a Humble Start
China’s Balloon Program Grew From a Humble Start
Effort that now alarms U.S. military developed in a blurry zone between science and national defense
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-balloon-program-grew-from-a-humble-start-11675974996?mod=hp_lead_pos9
By James T. AreddyFollow and Brian SpegeleFollow
Updated Feb. 9, 2023 6:10 pm ET
Humble beginnings for Chinese high-altitude ballooning have given way to a modern program of towering, lighter-than-air data-vacuums that are now rattling the U.S. military establishment.
Parsing German and Japanese texts 40 years ago, Chinese scientists scratched calculations in notebooks and glued together scraps of newspaper to design a research balloon they hoped might fly to the edge of space.
Once a prototype was ready, the Chinese Academy of Sciences team chose to test it during the Mid-Autumn festival, when it is tradition to float lanterns skyward. Their craft, about the size of a small tourist hot-air balloon and equipped to detect a kind of cosmic high-energy particle, successfully disappeared into the stratosphere, according to a Xinhua News Agency article republished by the academy. The team dubbed it the “HAPI” to reflect the mood.
China-led researchers prepared to launch a weather balloon in May along the China-Nepal border.
PHOTO: SUN FEI/ZUMA PRESS
Beijing says its endeavors remain scientific. Washington and others saw broader ambitions in last week’s appearance of a big, white Chinese balloon toting equipment the size of three buses loitering in the Montana sky far above the cruising altitude of jetliners.
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What the U.S. has described as one craft in a fleet of spy balloons with links to the People’s Liberation Army, China called an unmanned civilian airship used for “research, mainly meteorological, purposes” that had blown off course. It offered the same explanation when a similar balloon was then spotted over Latin America.
Beijing, which criticized as an overreaction the U.S. destruction of the balloon on Saturday, has pledged to safeguard the interests of a “company concerned” but has otherwise declined to answer questions about the provenance or missions of its balloons.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, who earlier this week said China has provided information about the balloon on several occasions, on Thursday accused the U.S. of information “warfare.”
High-altitude balloons float without identification beacons through near-space corridors of the sky, well above aircraft lanes that top out about 40,000 feet and far below low-orbit satellites which travel above 600,000 feet.
In a similar way, China’s high-altitude balloon program, like its space and polar research, appears to exist in a blurry zone between advanced science and national defense.
Video: U.S. Shoots Down Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon
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Video: U.S. Shoots Down Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon
Play video: Video: U.S. Shoots Down Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon
U.S. jet fighters downed the balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, U.S. officials said. President Biden signaled earlier Saturday that the U.S. would address the balloon that had drifted above the country. Photo: Randall Hill/Reuters
The U.S. expressed confidence Thursday that the maker of the balloon seen last week has a direct relationship with the PLA as an approved vendor, noting it advertises balloon products on its website along with videos of past flights.
China has credited a clutch of state-backed institutes and enterprises, including the government-run science academy in Beijing, for lifting the country’s capabilities in high-altitude ballooning, according to documents published to the entities’ websites, government reports and foreign industry analysts. The Wall Street Journal found one company that described the PLA as a customer on its website, while other entities cited military applications in their work.
A grassland region of Inner Mongolia known for China's space program is believed to be a launch site for balloons, according to a photo from Planet Labs PBC and identified by Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
RUSSIA
Ulaanbaatar
MONGOLIA
Beijing
INNER
MONGOLIA
Suspected
balloon
launch site
Shanghai
CHINA
Source: Middlebury Institute of International Studies
The publicly available records show how various state enterprises have roles in ballooning, including a government research institute focused on satellites and optical imaging. And in the desolate grasslands of Inner Mongolia, an octagon-shaped slab of concrete marks what is thought to be a launch site for Chinese balloons, according to San Francisco-based satellite-imaging firm Planet Labs PBC, which provided The Wall Street Journal with the photo, and identified by Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif.
The science academy in China that did the early tests is now a leading balloon development center and in 2017 announced plans for a balloon flight base at Siziwang Banner, the area in the Planet Labs image. China’s space capsules return to Earth nearby, while Inner Mongolia is also associated with the nation’s satellite program, though rocket and spaceflight control stations are spread around the nation, from Hainan in the south to western Gansu.
The documentation on China’s balloon program points to a big motivation: American prowess in sophisticated ballooning.
The Chinese organizations routinely express envy at U.S. ballooning achievements, including by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas. From above, the Inner Mongolia launch site resembles NASA’s, according to Planet Labs.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says its balloons launched from a facility in Texas help with research that isn’t connected with the military.
PHOTO: EMILY HUDSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Chinese Academy of Sciences announced a balloon-flight base in Inner Mongolia, near where Chinese space capsules return to Earth.
PHOTO: LIAN ZHEN/ZUMA PRESS
NASA says its helium-filled, polyethylene balloons do high-altitude scientific and technological investigations that aren’t connected with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has declined to compare U.S. and Chinese capabilities.
NASA’s balloons are commonly 40 million cubic feet in size, or the equivalent of more than 195 Goodyear blimps—more than 20 times the estimated size of the Chinese craft spotted above the U.S.
How much China is spending on its balloon program isn’t known. Its rising attention to the industry has coincided with advances in surveillance capabilities and expansion of a nuclear arsenal that reflect leader Xi Jinping‘s stated determination to be a world power in technological and military strength.
The program is shrouded in secrecy. “China is very closed with the information they share of the balloon program,” says Luis E. Pacheco, editor of StratoCat, an Argentina-based database that tracks the sector. Before the recent hubbub in the U.S., StratoCat’s enthusiast users had filed photos of similar balloons in 2022 above the Indian Ocean, the Philippines and near Hawaii, Mr. Pacheco says.
It remains unknown who made China’s big white balloon.
A Hunan province company, Zhuzhou Rubber Research & Design Institute Co., describes itself as China’s largest manufacturer of meteorological balloons and says it specializes in producing the voluminous “envelopes” that, once filled with helium, give balloons their lift. Zhuzhou Rubber is ultimately controlled by state-owned Sinochem Group through a Shanghai-listed company, Haohua Chemical Science & Technology Co.
A Chinese government fund designed to ensure that new technologies benefit its armed forces has invested in Haohua, according to its stock-market filings. Zhuzhou Rubber has sometimes described itself as a supplier to the Joint Staff Department of the PLA, the arm responsible for strategy and combat readiness.
Haohua and Sinochem didn’t respond to questions about their balloon operations.
Balloons are also produced by aerospace behemoth Aviation Industry Corp. of China, or AVIC, which the U.S. officially calls a military end-user company, as well as China Electronics Technology Group Corp. 38th Research Institute, another entity targeted by U.S. sanctions.
Neither responded to questions.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which did the early high-altitude tests, remains involved in the sector through various branches, including its Aerospace Information Research Institute. The academy has shown on its website how a type of balloon secured to the ground, called an aerostat, could create “aerial wiring” for secure laser-based communication between China’s GPS-like Beidou satellite-navigation system, military drones and troop carriers. It last year claimed a height record for an aerostat that was equipped with a 16,404-foot-long tether attached to a 90-metric-ton base.
Chinese scientists have detailed breakthroughs with balloons that remain tethered to the ground like this one in Tibet.
PHOTO: XINHUA NEWS AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
Aviation Industry Corp. of China, a maker of Chinese balloons, had a display at an aerospace and aviation fair in November in Zhuhai, China.
PHOTO: DENG HUA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The academy also runs a balloon-vehicle research center as part of its satellite division, the Academy of Opto-Electronics. Optoelectronics focuses on light, including X-rays and fiber-optics for commercial use, and extends into military applications such as lasers, infrared sensors and imaging. A notice on the academy’s website says its balloon center, launched in 2005, cooperates with a subbranch of AVIC known as 605th Institute.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.
The China Aerospace Studies Institute, a U.S. Air Force think tank, says China’s military has used high-altitude balloons in drop tests of long-range missiles to simulate re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. Separately, papers by Chinese scientists mentioning high-altitude balloons suggest military applications, including one this year that concluded laser communications have “broad development prospects in the fields of emergency communications and military operations.”
China’s foreign and defense ministries didn’t respond to questions about commercial-military fusion of ballooning by the government.
Military use of balloons has a long history.
Both sides in the American Civil War signaled strategy to soldiers from balloons. The F-22 Raptor that destroyed China’s balloon near the South Carolina coast used the code name Frank to honor a pilot who excelled in picking off German observation balloons in World War I. And during the Cold War, the Air Force installed cameras on balloons for a Soviet spy program called Project Genetrix.
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Balloon research in China fell behind during its decadelong Cultural Revolution that lasted until 1976. The revival, which included the successful “HAPI” flight in 1983, is credited to a no-nonsense female nuclear expert named He Zehui who wanted more advanced ways of detecting cosmic particles than mountaintop treks that caused some researchers to vomit blood, according to a science academy tribute to Ms. He.
Mr. Pacheco estimates the Chinese balloon that traversed the U.S. was around 1.8 million cubic feet in size, making it around 16 times as large as a tourist balloon, while a fraction the size of NASA craft. Unusually, it appeared to have a smooth shape rather than the pumpkin contours of most modern balloons, according to enthusiasts.
“We certainly came into office aware that the Chinese were continuing this program of spy balloons and they were trying to improve this military capability,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week. “We continue to try to improve our own understanding of that capability and Chinese intentions.”
Write to James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com and Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
The U.S. expressed confidence Thursday that the maker of the balloon seen last week has a direct relationship with the PLA as an approved vendor. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the U.S. expressed its confidence on Friday. (Corrected on Feb. 9)
Appeared in the February 10, 2023, print edition as 'China’s Lofty Ambitions Started Many Decades Ago
8. DOD Is Focused on China, Defense Official Says
DOD Is Focused on China, Defense Official Says
defense.gov · by Jim Garamone
A Defense Department official today stressed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China remains the pacing challenge for the U.S. government.
Pentagon Meeting
A Defense Department official testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that DOD aims to counterbalance Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region. Last month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III met with Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada at the Pentagon, Jan 12, 2023.
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Photo By: Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jack Sanders, DOD
VIRIN: 230112-D-XI929-2006
This is embedded in the National Defense Strategy, and DOD officials are constantly working to ensure the strategic competition with China does not veer into conflict, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, said.
Spotlight: National Defense Strategy
China is actively seeking to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of World War II. "The [Peoples' Republic of China] is combining its economic, diplomatic, military and technological might as it pursues a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and seeks to become the world's most influential power," Ratner said.
China's army is central to the aims of President Xi Jinping and "in recent years, the PRC has increasingly turned to the PLA [Peoples' Liberation Army] as an instrument of coercive statecraft in support of its global ambitions, including by conducting more dangerous coercive and aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific region," he said.
The U.S. government is working to counter these aims, and Ratner detailed what DOD is doing with allies and partners to advance a "free and open Indo-Pacific vision that is widely shared throughout the region in the world."
Spotlight: Focus on Indo-Pacific
DOD is specifically working to strengthen alliances and capabilities in the Indo-Pacific, he said. The department is also developing a more distributed and resilient force posture and building stronger networks of like-minded allies and partners, Ratner said.
"These efforts will play an essential role in sustaining and further strengthening deterrence in the years and decades ahead," the assistant secretary said.
He noted that 2023 has already been a groundbreaking year for U.S. alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific.
In the U.S.-Japan alliance, U.S. officials support the Japanese decision to acquire new capabilities to strengthen regional deterrence, especially counterstrike capabilities.
As part of the Australia, United Kingdom, United States agreement, "we remain encouraged by the significant progress we've made on developing the optimal pathway for Australia to acquire a conventionally armed nuclear powered submarine capability," he said.
The United States is making significant investments in defense ties with India "to uphold a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific," he said.
Ratner told the senators that the United States will fulfill commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act. This includes "providing Taiwan with self-defense capabilities, and maintaining our own capacity to resist any use of force that jeopardizes the security of the people of Taiwan," he said.
On force posture, the department recently announced major upgrades throughout the region that will make U.S. forces more mobile, more distributed, more resilient and lethal, he said. This includes moves made with Australia and Japan.
Press Conference
A Defense Department official testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that DOD aims to counterbalance Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region. Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Philippine Secretary of Defense Carlito Galvez Jr. announced the addition of four Philippine bases to the enhanced defense cooperation agreement between the U.S. and the Philippines in Manila, Philippines, Feb. 2, 2023.
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Photo By: Chad McNeeley, DOD
VIRIN: 230202-D-TT977-0098M
"Just days ago, Secretary [of Defense Lloyd J.] Austin [III] was in Manila where the United States in the Philippines announced four new [Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement] sites at strategic locations across the country," Ratner said.
DOD is also looking to develop partners in the region. "Despite [China's] efforts to divide the United States from our allies and partners, DOD is focused on developing a constellation of coalitions to address emerging threats," he said.
This means enhanced cooperation with Japan and Australia, and with Japan and South Korea. It also includes outreach to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; "the Quad" partnership among India, Australia, Japan and the United States; and European allies that are increasingly worried about China's actions.
defense.gov · by Jim Garamone
9. Russian generals killed in war "unbelievably high": Japanese intelligence
I do not think I have ever read a report citing Japanese intelligence.
Video at the link: https://www.newsweek.com/russian-generals-killed-war-ukraine-japanese-intelligence-1780131
Russian generals killed in war "unbelievably high": Japanese intelligence
Newsweek · by Brendan Cole · February 9, 2023
Vladimir Putin has lost more of his top commanders in the war in Ukraine than previously reported, according to Japanese and Western intelligence.
The estimate of Russian generals killed increased to 10 this week after former retired Major General Dmitry Ulyanov, 44, reportedly died in a firefight in the Donbas region. A top paratrooper and commander of the elite 98th Guards Airborne Division, Ulyanov's death was the first among Russian generals reported for several months.
Ukrainian sources claimed in July that 14 Russian generals had been killed although some claims have been rebutted. While there have not been reports of Putin losing generals for several months, the scale of losses of such high-ranking officers is rare.
However, Japan estimates that 20 of Putin's generals have been killed in the war, based on intelligence gathered by Tokyo in cooperation with the United States and Europe.
Above, Ukrainian soldiers work on a tank in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine on January 23, 2023. Japanese and Western intelligence have said that Ukrainian forces had killed 20 Russian generals since the start of the war, twice as many as previously believed. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Retired General Kiyofumi Iwata, the former chief of staff of Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force, described the tally as "unbelievably high," while speaking to Nikkei Asia, especially when compared with the U.S. which has seen almost no combat deaths of officers ranked that highly.
"The death of a general weakens troop morale," he said.
The news outlet reported that one theory for such high losses was that Ukraine located commanders by tracking signals from their cell phones, which were used due to communication shortcomings earlier in the war but have since been banned.
Iwata believed that the cyber warfare capabilities of Ukraine's forces enabled Kyiv to find the locations of the generals, who are typically sent into the field.
A Japanese intelligence official told Nikkei that another reason that the generals' whereabouts were known was due to "informants" in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, much of which are controlled by Russia.
Newsweek reached out to the Russian defense ministry for comment.
"What is interesting is not so much that they're losing quality, but what they will be losing is people who are confident because the generals have got that far because they're loyal and are used to bullying people," Glen Grant, a military analyst with the Baltic Security Foundation, told Newsweek.
"What you can't tell is that it might actually have a positive effect for Russia," he said. "You lose these people who've been selected not because of their ability, but because of their loyalty."
"Maybe some of the people who come in behind some of the officers are better and less on the greasy pole," he added.
Newsweek · by Brendan Cole · February 9, 2023
10. Five outstanding questions about the Chinese spy balloon
Excerpts:
Here are the questions we have about the Chinese spy balloon.
What equipment was attached to the balloon, and what was it being used for?
Why didn’t the Pentagon tell the public about the balloon for five days?
What, if any, sensitive information did the balloon collect?
Why didn’t the Pentagon know about previous balloon sightings?
How often has China deployed these balloons, and to which countries?
Five outstanding questions about the Chinese spy balloon
BY BRAD DRESS - 02/09/23 6:02 PM ET
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3851826-five-outstanding-questions-about-the-chinese-spy-balloon/
Navy sailors are still pulling up debris from the Chinese spy balloon an F-22 fighter jet shot down on Saturday, and more details about the surveillance device are likely to be revealed in the coming days.
But for now, there are more questions than answers.
Here are the questions we have about the Chinese spy balloon.
What equipment was attached to the balloon, and what was it being used for?
A State Department official revealed on Thursday the balloon hosted antennas with the capability of collecting communications intelligence.
It also came “equipped with solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors,” the official said.
There is little else known about the equipment attached to the spy balloon, which weighed about 2,000 pounds and is the size of three coach buses.
While satellites are commonly used by nations for surveillance, balloons are cheaper to deploy and can linger over certain areas for longer than a satellite, potentially snapping clearer pictures and picking up on more communications.
Tim Heath, a senior international defense researcher at RAND Corporation, said China is using these balloons to “augment satellite collections.”
“Satellites are highly capable, but they’re in high demand so they can’t be everywhere,” Heath said. “Balloons are cheap and pretty cost effective. … You can deploy them all over the place.”
Why didn’t the Pentagon tell the public about the balloon for five days?
The Pentagon first detected the balloon on Jan. 28 over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska but chose not to inform the public about it until Feb. 2, when it was spotted over Montana.
Military officials briefed President Biden on the balloon last Tuesday. The next day, Biden ordered it to be shot down when it was safe to do so. That was determined to be when it was over water in the Atlantic Ocean.
Last Thursday, the Biden administration was forced to publicly acknowledge the balloon as the massive white ball floated through the skies of Montana and attracted attention.
What, if any, sensitive information did the balloon collect?
A major point of contention is how long it took the Pentagon to shoot down the balloon, which traveled from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina.
Republican lawmakers have slammed the Biden administration for waiting to take it down, arguing they could have shot it out of the sky over the waters of the Aleutian Islands or over sparsely populated areas of America’s heartland.
A concern from the GOP is that the balloon traveled over much of the continental U.S. and potentially collected sensitive information.
We do know the balloon traveled over Montana, home to one of the nation’s three nuclear missile fields.
Defense officials have said they took steps to ensure the balloon was not collecting sensitive information.
Heath, from RAND Corporation, said the Pentagon could have jammed the technology by beaming static at the balloon’s frequency, which would then block it from electronically communicating any message to a satellite for collection by China.
Why didn’t the Pentagon know about previous balloon sightings?
One of the most pressing questions for investigators and intelligence officials is why at least four previous Chinese balloon flyovers were not detected by the Pentagon.
Three of those balloon sightings occurred during the Trump administration, and in addition to the one downed last week, there was one more during the Biden administration.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said there was a “domain awareness gap” in the Defense Department’s ability to detect these four balloons, which were discovered retroactively.
Retired Navy Adm. Harry Harris Jr., a former commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told a House congressional panel on Tuesday this detection gap is worrying.
“That ought to concern all of us,” he said, calling it a “disconnect in our ability to understand these balloons.”
Improved technology developed during the Biden administration helped detect the balloon last week, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Monday.
How often has China deployed these balloons, and to which countries?
China is deploying the spy balloons in a massive global surveillance campaign, according to the State Department.
A State Department official on Thursday said that China has deployed them in at least 40 countries across five continents.
Since the U.S. detection of the balloon last week, both Japan and Taiwan have come forward with information and pictures about what they now understand to be balloon sightings.
Previous balloons have been spotted in the Pacific, including one near Hawaii, according to the Pentagon. Last week, one was spotted in Latin America.
The State Department also said the manufacturer of these balloons has a direct relationship with China’s military.
The U.S. is exploring options to take action against the Chinese military and entities supporting the balloon incursions, along with efforts to expose and address the surveillance campaign.
11. Romney defends Biden’s handling of Chinese balloon
Romney defends Biden’s handling of Chinese balloon
BY ALEXANDER BOLTON - 02/09/23 1:34 PM ET
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3851414-romney-defends-bidens-handling-of-chinese-balloon/
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Thursday defended President Biden’s reaction to the flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon across the United States and said he agreed with the president’s decision to shoot it down off the coast of South Carolina.
Romney said he was satisfied with answers he received from senior administration officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, at an all-senators classified briefing on the incident.
“My questions were satisfactorily answered and I believe the administration, the president, our military and our intelligence agencies acted skillfully and with care. At the same time, their capabilities are extraordinarily impressive,” Romney told reporters after the briefing.
Romney said the administration could have done some things differently but noted it’s always easy to second-guess decisions in hindsight.
“Was everything done 100 percent correctly? I can’t imagine that would be the case of almost anything we do,” he said.
Asked if he agreed with the decision to shoot down the balloon, Romney answered: “Yes.”
Romney broke with fellow GOP senators who say the administration should have shot down the balloon as soon as it entered U.S. airspace over Alaska and should have briefed congressional leaders sooner on the potential threat.
“China sent a spy balloon to fly all across America. The Biden administration had a chance to shoot it down over Alaska and they chose to let it spy all across America,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told reporters after the briefing.
Cotton said the balloon could have been equipped with a weapon, which is why he believes the military should have intercepted it immediately.
“We all know it was a spy balloon trying to collect information across the United States. I will say that you don’t know that in advance though,” he said. “That’s why we shouldn’t let Chinese aircraft float on their merry way all across the United States.”
12. When Lippy Generals Challenge Civilian Control
Why not another operation: maybe it was the right thing for the troops in his command.
When Lippy Generals Challenge Civilian Control
Was Air Force Gen. Minihan’s memo dangerous or just dumb?
defenseone.com · by Gregory D. Foster
News outlets, major and minor, have been quick to jump on and report the controversial memorandum Gen. Michael Minihan, commander of U.S. Air Mobility Command, issued recently to the troops under his command.
The memo, “February 2023 Orders in Preparation for—The Next Fight,” was unclassified. On top of that, Minihan is a big boy, having served in various senior command and staff positions. So, he knew full well that his words would emerge in the public domain and grab headlines of both approbation and disapprobation. We can safely assume that’s exactly how he wanted it.
Minihan is just the latest flag officer to present national command authorities—the Defense Secretary and the President—with a recurring dilemma: whether and how to assert civilian control over the military when faced with outspoken generals and admirals. Relieve them (and thereby end their career)? Coddle them (and treat them as cutesy, attention-grabbing novelties)? Or ignore them (in the hope that they have created nothing more than a momentary tempest in a teapot)?
Whenever a flag officer succumbs to the seductive allure of celebrity, the vital question is whether the remarks in question pose a bona fide danger to the affairs of state, or whether they are simply a dumb reflection of ignorance, insensitivity, and political inconvenience.
It is the prospect of looming danger in Minihan’s remarks that has so quickly grabbed the media’s attention and fed a measure of qualified alarm. At the same time, perceptions of incipient danger have fed and fed off of one of two major tropes that more generally define today’s national security environment: that the world we now inhabit is characterized by the U.S. contest with revisionist powers, most notably China, that seek to unseat us from our position of global supremacy.
Minihan is a reasonably senior acolyte whose words reflect his embrace of the received truth of great power competition. He contends with deadly seriousness—“My gut tells me”—that we are headed for war with China by 2025 (less than two years out). All the stars of the firmament, he seems convinced, are aligning in that direction: Xi Jinping’s aspirations and entrenched power, presidential elections in the United States and Taiwan, a distracted America.
In judging their potential danger, we and others must ask whether such pronouncements represent actual U.S. policy, aims, and intentions. Is Minihan speaking on behalf of the Biden administration and the country as a whole, perhaps sending a trial balloon to test the waters of great-power conflict potential? Or is he a wild card, a rogue warmonger, a snake-oil salesman in uniform, a crackpot ideologue who can be written off as an aberration?
Let us recognize that, though Minihan is, shall we say, an upper mid-level bureaucratic actor, he is a relatively minor player in the grander scheme of things. He isn’t a combatant commander or a service chief who sits on the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he is simply the head of a supporting command that enables others to more directly wage war and employ force abroad.
His words inadvertently highlight a number of rhetorical and substantive contradictions worth noting. First, though the military obsessively extols the intrinsic importance of good order and discipline, Minihan exemplifies a lack of rhetorical discipline that could lead to unexpected and unwanted disorder, depending on how others—allies and adversaries, audiences domestic and international—choose to interpret what he says, through their perceptual lenses, for their own particular purposes.
Second, in today’s media-driven, postmodern environment, there is increasingly little to distinguish words from actions; words are actions. Clearly, Minihan’s words are a far cry from a physical act by U.S. forces such as penetrating China’s territorial waters or airspace; from statements that represent a middle ground between words and actions, such as openly advocating Taiwanese independence; or even more pointed and precise words, as when, for example, a U.S. official states that we are prepared to use nuclear weapons if China invades Taiwan.
Third, there is the enduring question of whether particular words are more likely to contribute to deterrence and reassurance in the minds of various audiences or to provocation and escalation. Is saying that we face the prospect of war within two years likely to be an inevitable, self-fulfilling prophecy or a self-motivating challenge to be sufficiently prepared so that war can’t help but be prevented?
Fourth, we must ask ourselves how others are likely to distinguish actual motive—that of Minihan and that of the United States—from the expectable consequences his words might precipitate. In the final analysis, objectively speaking, Minihan’s words can’t be said to represent a serious danger, though the ultimate determination of that will be made by others. This isn’t like President Truman’s relief of Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War for the general’s outspoken criticism of administration policy and his calls for taking the war to China and introducing nuclear weapons. It isn’t like the forced early retirement of Adm. William “Fox” Fallon for being out of step with the Bush administration’s bellicose posture toward Iran.
This is more like President Obama’s relief of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, not for substantive disagreement over troop strength in Afghanistan, but for a widely publicized Rolling Stone article that quoted McChrystal aides, emboldened by the locker-room climate he had established, making childish disparaging comments about Obama administration officials, including then-Vice President Biden (“Did you say Biden or ‘Bite Me’?”).
What really deserves our attention and concern, then, is the dumbness of Minihan’s inflated rhetoric: locker room talk unworthy of the elevated discourse one should expect of a strategically minded general officer in charge of a major command. His memo is replete with muscle-flexing, chest-thumping, manly-man hyperbole. He directs his troops to “fire a clip into a 7-meter target”—and “aim for the head”—“with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.” “When you can kill your enemy,” he asserts, “every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.”
This is where motive matters, and also where the second of the two major tropes that define today’s national security environment comes into play: that all who serve in uniform are, by definition, warfighters—be they trigger-pullers or desk jockeys, front-line combatants or rear-area paper pushers or bean counters. Given a choice of self-image between bombastic George C. Scott (as either Patton or Buck Turgidson) or silent, stoic Gary Cooper (as Marshal Will Kane in High Noon), Minihan seems to have opted for the former, though his real-world role model seems closest to former Defense Secretary and Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who sanctified lethality in the 2018 National Defense Strategy and sought to embellish his warfighter image with such rhetorical flourishes as “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet” and “It’s quite fun to shoot them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people.”
Thus far the Pentagon has tentatively sought to distance itself from Minihan’s statements. What seems most in order in the longer run is that Minihan be taken to the woodshed, scolded, and reminded of his proper place in the cosmos. He should be enjoined to stop pontificating on strategic matters that are beyond his ken, jettison the warfighter talk, hold his tongue, and simply do the job he is expected to do—silently, dutifully, and anonymously. And, because he has threatened to issue more memos—presumably with the continuing intent to prepare for “the fight”—we can only hope he is brought quickly to the realization that he isn’t the “tip of the spear.”
Gregory D. Foster is a professor at the National Defense University.
defenseone.com · by Gregory D. Foster
13. Sidney Shachnow: The Holocaust Survivor Who Became a Green Beret
What a great American. It was an honor to serve under him. And after he retired I was able to spend some time with him in Korea when he was the senior SOF mentor.
Sidney Shachnow: The Holocaust Survivor Who Became a Green Beret
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/msn/sidney-shachnow-who.html?utm_source=pocket_saves&chrome=1
warhistoryonline.com · by Jesse Beckett, Guest Author · February 9, 2023
Sidney Shachnow was a Lithuanian Jew who experienced – and survived – the Holocaust. Imprisoned in the Kovno Ghetto during World War II, he suffered the loss of his entire family before escaping and hiding from the Germans. He eventually became a US citizen and later went on to serve with the US Army’s Special Forces, retiring as a major general.
He kept the story of his incredible life largely under wraps until 2004, when he published a book detailing his experiences.
Sidney Shachnow’s early life
Sidney Shachnow. (Photo Credit: U.S. Army)
Sidney Shachnow was born Schaja Shachnowski on November 23, 1934 in Kaunas, Lithuania to a middle-class Jewish family. He lived in relative peace with his loved ones until Germany invaded Lithuania.
In July 1941, the Germans gave Shachnow’s family 30-days notice to move into the Kovno Ghetto, also known as Concentration Camp No. 4, Kovno. Like other European Jews, they were penalized for their religion and suffered harsh treatment at the hands of their invaders.
Surviving German imprisonment
Prisoners of the Kovno Ghetto making saddles, 1943. (Photo Credit: George Kadish / Zvi Kadushin / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
Sidney Shachnow’s camp differed from better-known concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau because it didn’t have the equipment necessary for large-scale mass-killings. However, that didn’t mean imprisonment wasn’t a death sentence for the majority of people sent there. Of the 40,000 who entered the camp, just 2,000 made it out alive.
Without these tools, the Kovno Ghetto used more traditional mass-murder methods. Mass graves were excavated by bulldozers, in front of which prisoners were lined up and shot. Once full, the graves were bulldozed over.
During his three-year imprisonment, Shachnow lost nearly every member of his extended family, and had to perform manual labor to survive. On a stroke of luck, he managed to avoid the ghetto’s “Children’s Action” on March 27 and 28, 1944, when the Germans gathered up the camp’s children and marched them to the Ninth Fort and Auschwitz for execution.
Nine-year-old Shachnow escaped with his uncle just a few days before the horrible event, hiding under his coat as he walked out of the camp. The two arrived at a pre-arranged dropoff point, where they were greeted by a woman wearing a red kerchief. She was just one of the many incredible heroes to risk their lives for those suffering under German persecution.
After living with a local family, Shachnow was eventually reunited with his mother and brother, both of whom had also escaped. The ghetto – and Lithuania as a whole – were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. His family made the tough decision to travel to Germany and board a US Navy ship to the United States.
After immigrating to Salem, Massachusetts, Shachnow received an education for the first time.
Enlistment in the US Army and entry into the Special Forces
Sidney Shachnow. (Photo Credit: U.S. Army)
Sidney Shachnow enlisted in the US Army in 1955 and earned a Master’s degree in public administration. In 1960, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant, and before long was in command of an infantry company in Germany. He volunteered to join the Special Forces – better known as the Green Berets – two years later.
Shachnow served in Vietnam along the Mekong River, where he was simultaneously shot in the leg and arm. Despite his injuries, he continued to fight, earning a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his actions. After recovering from his wounds, he was struck down by tuberculosis, typhoid fever and a number of other illnesses, but fortunately recovered.
He returned to Vietnam for a second tour, this time assigned to the 101st Airborne Division.
Shachnow’s next mission was with Detachment-A in Berlin, a highly top-secret unit the government didn’t publicly acknowledge until 2004. These troops wore civilian attire and were experienced (or well-educated) in local cultures and languages. They didn’t carry American identification. In the event of a Soviet invasion, members of Detachment-A would stay behind and fight from the inside, using unconventional warfare. They would also help those suffering.
During his time with the Special Forces, Shachnow reached the rank of major general.
Sidney Shachnow’s post-war life
Sidney Shachnow. (Photo Credit: U.S. Army)
Sidney Shachnow died on September 27, 2018 in Southern Pines, North Carolina and was interred at Arlington National Cemetery. Following his retirement from the Army, he served as a board member for various charities, a mentor and as a guest speaker. In 2010, he was elected as the Honorary Colonel of the Special Forces Regiment, just three years after being named a Distinguished Member of the regiment.
He lived an extraordinary – and sometimes ironic – life, facing persecution from the Germans, only to end up defending them. In his 2004 autobiography, Hope and Honor, he wrote:
“I have been involved or played a part in some of the most significant times in history from the beginning of the Special Forces, the Vietnam War, and the Tet Offensive, to the fall of the Berlin Wall while living in the former home of the Treasurer of the Third Reich as Commander of the US Forces.
“The irony of circumstance has always been exceptional in my life, from being enemies with the Germans, friends with the Soviets as they rescued me and my family from Kovno, and later enemies of the Russians during the Cold War and protecting West Germany.”
Jesse Beckett is one of the authors writing for WAR HISTORY ONLINE
warhistoryonline.com · by Jesse Beckett, Guest Author · February 9, 2023
14. How The International Community Should Respond To The Trial Of The 47 In Hong Kong
Excerpts:
As the trials move forward, the international community must carefully consider what can be done to alleviate the plight of those held hostage by the CCP and the Hong Kong government. That means stepping up efforts to free political prisoners.
In the U.S., members of Congress should adopt political prisoners through the Tom Lantos Commission’s Defending Freedoms Project, and advocate for their release at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Several imprisoned Hong Kongers, including Jimmy Lai, are dual nationals in the UK, so the British government ought to step up its advocacy to free its citizens. The U.S., the UK, and other nations should consider issuing targeted sanctions against individuals responsible for the miscarriage of justice the world is bearing witness to.
Not a day should go by that the international community does not express its solidarity with the wrongfully imprisoned in Hong Kong. It should act now to demonstrate its commitment to action in defense of the 47. Their future and the future of freedom in Hong Kong depends on it.
How The International Community Should Respond To The Trial Of The 47 In Hong Kong
Forbes · by Olivia Enos · February 9, 2023
Olivia EnosContributor
I write about international human rights and national security.
... [+]Getty Images
When people think of Hong Kong, they don’t usually think of political prisoners. For many years, Hong Kong was a flourishing capitalist society where residents enjoyed vast freedom. And then, in 2019, everything changed.
Beijing’s tightening grip on the city sparked pro-democracy protests that resulted in over 10,000 detentions. According to ChinaFile, 227 individuals have been arrested for allegedly violating the new National Security Law (NSL) – the CCP’s draconian response to the protests. Of those 227, 135 have been charged. That number is likely to increase as the city-state begins the trial of 47 Hong Kong politicians and civil society activists this week.
The 47 include well-known names like activist Joshua Wong, journalist-turned-politician, Gwyneth Ho, and many others who are a visible representation of how far Hong Kong has fallen from grace. Most of those facing trial are charged with “subversion,” which can carry a life sentence.
Subversion is but one of the many loosely defined political charges that can easily be lobbed against individuals who are problematic for CCP and their cronies in Hong Kong. Most of the 47 are being charged for their involvement in an unofficial primary election in which pro-democracy candidates sought to challenge the CCP’s creeping influence after the NSL was instituted.
There can be no doubt as to the nature of these trials. The world will witness at least four-month-long show trials, the outcomes of which are predetermined. The thin veneer of legitimacy that protects Hong Kong’s legal system will not be enough to hide the injustice. As Martin Lee predicted, just as there is no rule of law in China, and after Beijing solidified its grip on the city-state in 2019 and 2020, there is no longer a rule of law in Hong Kong either.
The trial of 47 is happening against the backdrop of the politically motivated targeting, imprisonment, and trials of other high-profile individuals, including businessman and publisher Jimmy Lai. Lai’s own NSL trial was postponed earlier this year after the Hong Kong courts denied Lai’s ability to be represented by his British lawyer, a right that has been acknowledged by the courts for decades.
As the trials move forward, the international community must carefully consider what can be done to alleviate the plight of those held hostage by the CCP and the Hong Kong government. That means stepping up efforts to free political prisoners.
In the U.S., members of Congress should adopt political prisoners through the Tom Lantos Commission’s Defending Freedoms Project, and advocate for their release at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Several imprisoned Hong Kongers, including Jimmy Lai, are dual nationals in the UK, so the British government ought to step up its advocacy to free its citizens. The U.S., the UK, and other nations should consider issuing targeted sanctions against individuals responsible for the miscarriage of justice the world is bearing witness to.
Not a day should go by that the international community does not express its solidarity with the wrongfully imprisoned in Hong Kong. It should act now to demonstrate its commitment to action in defense of the 47. Their future and the future of freedom in Hong Kong depends on it.
Forbes · by Olivia Enos · February 9, 2023
15. The rise and fall of the Mozart Group - Responsible Statecraft
The rise and fall of the Mozart Group - Responsible Statecraft
responsiblestatecraft.org · by David Isenberg · February 8, 2023
The war in Ukraine is confirming the truth of Ferengi (fictional species in the Star Trek universe) Rule of Acquisition No. 34: “War is good for business.” Specifically, an American-staffed training and evacuation business called The Mozart Group. That is, before it folded up shop last week after nearly a year of operating in Ukraine.
The visible partner in this venture was former U.S. Marine Andy Milburn, a high-profile supporter of the Ukrainian cause and a charismatic social media source for plenty of on-the-ground updates.
Mozart positioned itself as the reverse, good-guy version of the infamous Russian private military group (PMG) called the Wagner Group, which is conducting front-line combat operations in Ukraine today. According to its mission statement on the Mozart website, the group’s mission is “to build sustainable capacity in the Ukrainian military and territorial defense units so that Ukraine can defend itself from Russia’s invasion. A vital component of our mission is battlefield clearance — removing the tons of un-expended ordnance, mines and booby traps that litter the area previously occupied by Russian troops. We want to enable the people of Ukraine to return to their homes and begin rebuilding their lives, free from threat.”
Both Milburn and the brand had drawn nothing but praise since planting a flag in Ukraine. One New York Times article said that, for Milburn, “Ukraine represents the morally just war that eluded him his entire career.”
Mozart claimed to not carry weapons or traffic in weapons, but engage in training of troops, such as its Territorial Defence Brigades, along with other services, according to the website, including emergency extraction and humanitarian aid.
Their work had been effective enough that it caused Russia to mount disinformation campaigns against them.
But recent news reports indicate that perhaps more scrutiny should have been paid to The Mozart Group from the beginning. The core problem is that TMG was structured as a limited liability company registered in Wyoming. But Milburn and TMG had encouraged tax-exempt donations through its “alter ego” humanitarian organization, Task Force Sunflower [TFS].
The key difference between LLCs and nonprofits is what they do with the money they generate: LLCs can choose to distribute profits from their business operations, products, and services to their owners. Nonprofits must use revenue after operating expenses and employee salaries to carry out their mission. Nonprofits do not have to pay federal taxes, whereas LLCs do.
The Mozart Group was founded in March 2022 by Milburn and Andrew Bain, a businessman who has lived in Ukraine for over 30 years and who retired with the rank of colonel in 2014 from the Marine Corps Reserve.
Milburn retired from Marine Corps active duty as a colonel in 2019 after 31 years of service. By all accounts, he had a distinguished career. His last position in uniform was as deputy commander of Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT), and prior to that, commanding officer of the Marine Raider Regiment and Combined Special Operations Task Force–Iraq.
Milburn first arrived in Ukraine the month after the February invasion working as a correspondent for the U.S. military publication Task & Purpose. He and Bain started The Mozart Group shortly thereafter. On January 12, Bain wrote, “TMG has done great good for Ukraine, and is filled with idealistic and moral people who are trying to do their best for the country.”
According to Bain, Mozart “was established as a limited liability company (LLC), given some of its activities (military training and equipping) would not qualify as charity under US law, with my owning 51% and Milburn 49%.” The Mozart Group insisted it was not directly involved in combat and volunteers (typically ex-servicemen and locals) do not carry weapons, making the business compliant with the US Neutrality Acts which prohibit U.S. citizens from joining foreign militaries or launching wars against countries not at war with the U.S.
As of late last summer, the Mozart Group consisted of 20-30 volunteers hailing from the U.S., U.K., Ireland, and other Western countries. According to The Intercept, “By August, Mozart deployed three teams of former soldiers — two teams for military training, one for extracting civilians from the front lines — with each one costing up to $100,000 a month in expenses.”
Milburn was appointed CEO, and Bain worked behind the scenes. According to Wikipedia, they set up an office in Kyiv and began soliciting donations. The group subsequently relocated from Kyiv to the Donbas, according to The Guardian.
Milburn was also listed as a principal in its affiliated humanitarian NGO, Task Force Sunflower (TFS), which was established as a non-profit 501c3 in May 2022. By April 2022, Mozart quickly became a media favorite given its emphasis on conducting primarily humanitarian assistance and military training. The venture had a robust social media presence with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn sites.
But by mid-January all hell had broken loose, with Bain revealing he had sued Milburn to get him out of Mozart.
A complaint filed by Bain in the Third Judicial District Court of Wyoming on Jan. 10 accuses Milburn and ten other defendants whose true identities are unknown of taking actions that have and will continue to cause harm to the company.
First, Milburn may have been misrepresenting Mozart as a charity.
Second, despite Mozart saying that it funds its operations through donations and claiming that its main cause is helping Ukraine, Bain’s lawsuit accuses Milburn of going after paid military contracts in Armenia.
Third, Mozart seems to be edging closer to taking on combat roles. A Daily Telegraph article noted that “Milburn has outlined a desire, in the future, to see Mozart members helping with command and control in the operational headquarters, or assisting in the ‘fires cel,’ where artillery and other indirect fire platforms, such as drones are brought to bear.”
Bain’s most serious charge is:
Taking various actions and carrying on various activities in the name of the Company which require prior approval and permits issued by the United States Department of State in compliance with International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)… Milburn failed to secure the necessary approvals prior to taking such actions and when notified by the United States Department of State of alleged violations of ITAT an attorney was retained to respond to the claims. Milburn unilaterally and without explanation terminated the services of the attorney responding to the allegations, failed to engage substitute counsel, and as a result failed to meet the required response deadlines set by the government. The matter is still open and remains unresolved creating significant potential liability for the Company.
Bain wrote on his LinkedIn page that “As time went on Milburn became increasingly problematic as a partner. Eventually, his disorganization and unreliability became liabilities, impacting operational effectiveness. For various reasons the focus he’d brought to the mission in those early days was diluted by substance abuse, petty and self-serving feuds, and personal aggrandizement.”
Examples of this type of behavior, according to the complaint, include:
—Outside the scope of the original business interest in Ukraine, seeking commercial contracts for military training in Armenia which would divert resources from Ukraine, having done so knowingly and deliberately without United States Department of State registration or approval in violation of ITAR.
—Promoting himself as a selfless volunteer helping Ukraine but misleading journalists to believe Mozart Group LLC is a charitable entity under 26 U.S.C. 501(c)(3) when it is not.
—Insisting on personal compensation payments exceeding $35,000 per month from company accounts which was not formally approved by the Members, and not accounting to the company for donated funds received which were received in personal or other accounts controlled by him. According to Milburn (as of December 2022), Mozart Group’s monthly expenses amounted to about $170,000, so his salary would be about 20 percent of that.
—Unilaterally hiring as his personal assistant a Ukrainian woman whom upon information and belief he met on the social media dating application and with whom he had a prior personal relationship, and paying her an annual salary of $90,00 which is at least four times more than the usual compensation rate for a Ukraine-based employee in such a position.
Also according to the complaint, “Subsequent to taking the position as Director of TFS Milburn caused the donation link on the website for Mozart Group LLC to forward to the donation page for Task Force Sunflower, thereby intentionally misrepresenting to Mozart Group LLC donors where their funds would be used and diverting funds to a different entity with which he was involved and upon information and belief has a financial interest in.”
Bain has not emerged unscathed from the ongoing controversy. According to Milburn, he was “fired by me in December for financial fraud and because he is under criminal investigation for a number of allegations from sexual assault to sanctions violation (Russian and Afghanistan).”
Neither side is commenting on the lawsuit. Bain wrote that “I need to run all questions by my lawyers.” Queries to Milburn and to The Mozart Group received no response. Nor did the State Department or Pentagon return calls for comment on the activities of the Mozart Group in Ukraine or the accusations against Milburn.
The bottom line is that the children suffer when the adults quarrel. It is doubtful donors want to put money into yet another unresolved conflict within a conflict. And perhaps ex-military providers aren’t the best suited for organizational harmony under stress.
Despite all the regulations and controls that have been devised and implemented in the past three decades to provide oversight and accountability of private businesses operating in war zones, it is still far too easy for them to be corrupted.
While the fundamental missions differ, Mozart shares similarities with past private security contractors like Blackwater.
When it operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater claimed its contractors operated strictly in a defensive role, protecting diplomats and other officials. Yet there were numerous occasions when its employees fired their weapons for non-defensive purposes. Mozart was focused on rescuing endangered civilians from the front lines, yet was also engaged in paramilitary activities by training Ukrainian military and security forces. Blackwater was an explicitly for-profit group, and Mozart seemed to be positioning itself to become one too.
On Jan. 31 Milburn tweeted the following: “Today was the last day for the Mozart Group The Mozart Group ended today. The name and entity -had become the subject of litigation and a distraction from our core mission: training Ukrainian soldiers and rescuing civilians But, the mission and the people continue.” The New York Times also reported that the group had literally run out of money.
The Mozart Group’s humanitarian mission was laudable, but esprit de corps is lacking, making it yet another PMC that appears destined to fall apart before the mission was completed. Perhaps they could learn from a quote by the real Mozart:
“All I insist on and nothing else is that you should show the whole world that you are not afraid. Be silent if you choose but when it is necessary speak—and speak in such a way that people will remember it.”
responsiblestatecraft.org · by David Isenberg · February 8, 2023
16. Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine
"Comandos?" Commandos don't do this type of work. This is the work of Special Forces. It is what they were organized, trasined, equipped, educated, and optimized for. There is no other force for this and again it is certainly not "commando" work.
Excerpts:
Congressional officials said it is difficult to predict the outcome, particularly with Republicans split over the vast sums being spent on Ukraine. Others argue that the programs’ relatively small expense — $15 million annually for such activities worldwide — is a bargain compared with the tens of billions of dollars being committed to train and arm Ukrainian forces, and replenish U.S. stockpiles.
Military officials are eager to restart these activities in Ukraine to ensure that hard-gained relationships are not lost as the war wears on, said Mark Schwartz, a retired three-star general who led U.S. Special Operations in Europe when the programs began in 2018. “When you suspend these things because the scale of the conflict changes, you lose access,” he said, “and it means you lose information and intelligence about what’s actually going on in the conflict.”
American commandos, using a similar funding authority, have for many years paid select foreign military and paramilitary units across the Middle East, Asia and Africa, employing them as “surrogates” in counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and their affiliates. Newer surrogate programs, such as those used in Ukraine, are considered a form of “irregular warfare.” They are intended for use against adversaries, such as Russia and China, with whom the United States is in competition, not open conflict.
...
The Pentagon’s response initially was to limit its irregular warfare surrogate programs to Europe, where U.S. Special Operations troops — and therefore their surrogates — lack authority to participate in direct combat, current and former officials said. “We were told to focus on Europe as a proof of concept for Congress,” said one, “because nothing kinetic was going on there and it seemed like counter-Russia was a bipartisan thing that no one would argue with.”
Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine
If approved, the move would authorize U.S. Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian movements and counter disinformation
By Wesley Morgan
February 10, 2023 at 2:00 a.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Wesley Morgan · February 10, 2023
The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials. If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.
A determination is unlikely before the fall. Defense officials are preparing a proposal for lawmakers’ consideration in the coming months, when work begins on next year’s Pentagon policy and funding bill. If successful, these programs could resume as soon as 2024, though it remains unclear if the Biden administration would allow U.S. commandos back into Ukraine to oversee them or if the military would seek to do that from a neighboring country. No American military personnel are known to have operated there since the war began, beyond a small number tasked to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.
Congressional officials said it is difficult to predict the outcome, particularly with Republicans split over the vast sums being spent on Ukraine. Others argue that the programs’ relatively small expense — $15 million annually for such activities worldwide — is a bargain compared with the tens of billions of dollars being committed to train and arm Ukrainian forces, and replenish U.S. stockpiles.
Military officials are eager to restart these activities in Ukraine to ensure that hard-gained relationships are not lost as the war wears on, said Mark Schwartz, a retired three-star general who led U.S. Special Operations in Europe when the programs began in 2018. “When you suspend these things because the scale of the conflict changes, you lose access,” he said, “and it means you lose information and intelligence about what’s actually going on in the conflict.”
American commandos, using a similar funding authority, have for many years paid select foreign military and paramilitary units across the Middle East, Asia and Africa, employing them as “surrogates” in counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and their affiliates. Newer surrogate programs, such as those used in Ukraine, are considered a form of “irregular warfare.” They are intended for use against adversaries, such as Russia and China, with whom the United States is in competition, not open conflict.
Critics, including some on Capitol Hill, say such activities risk drawing the United States into a more direct role in the Ukraine war. Defense officials maintain, though, that unlike the Pentagon’s larger and more overt effort to arm the Ukrainian military, the secretive surrogate programs would not contribute directly to Ukraine’s combat capability because the operatives involved and their U.S. handlers would be restricted to performing only the nonviolent tasks they had undertaken until their suspension last year.
The debate arises as Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine nears the start of a second year, and as the Biden administration dramatically accelerates and expands the scope of military assistance it is providing the government in Kyiv despite repeated Russian protests and threats of escalation. In recent weeks, President Biden has authorized the provision of ammunition and advanced weapons, including heavy battle tanks and other armored combat vehicles. Reinstating these irregular warfare programs would further deepen Washington’s involvement, granting American military personnel hands-on control over Ukrainian operatives in the war zone.
Typically, the deployment of a surrogate control team into the host country has been required as part of these programs, though U.S. Special Operations troops have become accustomed in recent years to advising surrogate and partner forces far from the front lines. Biden has promised he would not deploy any troops inside the country except in isolated cases, which include the military attache and security personnel who work at the embassy.
This account of the Pentagon’s lobbying effort on Capitol Hill is based on interviews with 15 current and former U.S. officials familiar with the surrogate programs and efforts to reactivate them in Ukraine. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified military operations.
Spokespersons for the Senate and House Armed Services committees declined to comment, citing the programs’ classified status. The White House also declined to comment. The Pentagon also declined to comment because of the programs’ classification.
Surrogate operations like those used in Ukraine are called “1202 programs,” named for Section 1202 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, the law that approved their use and funding. The provision specifies that such programs cannot be used during a “traditional armed conflict,” prompting their suspension last year when Russia’s own military efforts in Ukraine evolved from backing pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east to a full-scale invasion.
The Pentagon sought unsuccessfully to have that language in the law revised as Congress debated this year’s defense budget legislation. Military officials want it to say instead that such activities may continue if a host nation, not the United States itself, enters an open war. Beyond the near-term utility of resuming these two program in Ukraine, the Pentagon sees an opportunity to persuade legislators to broaden the authority so that such a stoppage won’t be necessary elsewhere in the future, said one government official.
Kenneth Tovo, a retired three-star general who led the Army’s Special Operations forces when the 1202 authority was proposed and passed, said the military’s concern is that these restrictions have severed a useful source of intelligence in Ukraine and risk doing so again in another conflict.
“We have a habit of doing this,” Tovo said, “where we turn things off, pull people out after years on investment as an immediate reaction to a change in a conflict, and then we’re surprised when we have less information and less understanding of what’s going on as a result.”
Opponents argue that Russia might construe the programs’ reactivation as a provocation and respond by broadening the scope of its war. One official familiar with the talks on Capitol Hill said that, for this reason, the Pentagon will struggle to win over skeptical lawmakers.
“What started as a reconnaissance mission can quickly turn into combat when the surrogates start getting shot at,” the official said. “I think that’s a real possibility in Ukraine, and I’m not sure how the department is going to change people in Congress’s minds about that.”
Proponents, including current and former defense officials and some congressional staffers, say the secrecy surrounding 1202 programs has made them appear more aggressive than they are, in large part because of Section 1202’s derivation from the authority — called Section 127e — that allows U.S. Special Operations to pay and equip foreign troops, and dispatch them on missions to kill or capture suspected terrorists. Irregular warfare surrogates, by contrast, have only conducted what the U.S. military calls “non-kinetic” — or nonviolent — missions.
Congress, said one defense official, is more familiar with the counterterrorism programs, having been briefed on such activities for many years. It’s “hard to explain” for lawmakers, this person said, that the newer program is being used “in a very different way.”
“We don’t want to start a third world war with bad decision-making surrounding surrogate units, but they aren’t out there finding, fixing and finishing like in Iraq or Afghanistan,” said Mick Mulroy, a Pentagon policy official during the Trump administration, using military lingo to describe how commandos in those countries prepared for and carried out counterterrorism raids.
The irregular warfare programs funded by Section 1202 and the more numerous counterterrorism ones allow teams of Green Berets, Marine Raiders and Navy SEALs, with agreement from the host government and relevant U.S. Embassy, to issue them missions and orders. “There’s an element of command and control” in the surrogate programs that doesn’t exist in other relationships between U.S. troops and foreign partners, Mulroy said. “… That’s what makes it effective. It allows us to move more quickly.”
The counterterrorism surrogate programs have drawn criticism for blurring the line between where the United States is engaged in armed military operations and where the local host countries are. The heavily classified 127e programs are also exempt from legislation that requires human rights vetting of other foreign military and paramilitary units before U.S. troops can work with them. The newer 1202 programs also are exempt from that requirement.
Before the invasion, U.S. Special Operations troops were running two irregular warfare surrogate programs in Ukraine. In one, “We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs,” said a person in the Special Operations community.
U.S. commandos used the second program to send Ukrainian operatives on surreptitious reconnaissance missions in Ukraine’s east. “We’d train surrogates to go collect signals intelligence off a Russian radar battery … stuff like that,” another government official said. “We weren’t training and paying Ukrainians to go kill Russians for us.”
Schwartz, the retired general, said that, when the programs began, Russia’s military spies were prevalent in eastern Ukraine. “There were all these indications of Russian influence, and we wanted to call it out,” he said, “but we didn’t necessarily want to be seen as the ones calling it out.”
U.S. commandos in Ukraine did not supply their surrogates with training or weapons that might cause problems later if misused, Schwartz said. “We weren’t going to equip Ukrainians with sophisticated means to employ demolitions, because if they wind up sneaking that across the border into Russia and using U.S. explosives for sabotage operations that we didn’t authorize, that would be escalatory,” he said.
If reauthorized, the programs would still be limited to noncombat operations. Section 1202 specifies that surrogate troops can’t undertake any missions U.S. Special Operations forces “are not otherwise legally authorized to conduct themselves.”
The defense committees in Congress inserted that restriction, a congressional official said, after U.S. commandos had used the counterterrorism surrogate programs to undertake combat missions that took lawmakers by surprise when they went wrong. In 2017, for instance, a planned raid by a Green Beret team and its surrogate unit in Niger led a second Green Beret team into an insurgent ambush that killed four U.S. soldiers. Lawmakers were furious, saying they hadn’t known that U.S. troops in the African country were involved in such dangerous missions.
“Niger was a seminal moment for a lot of members,” the congressional official said. “They were worried about authorities like 127e and 1202, and the possibility that they allow Special Operations forces who are ostensibly not authorized to engage in combat a chance to engage in activities that look and smell a lot like combat.”
The Pentagon’s response initially was to limit its irregular warfare surrogate programs to Europe, where U.S. Special Operations troops — and therefore their surrogates — lack authority to participate in direct combat, current and former officials said. “We were told to focus on Europe as a proof of concept for Congress,” said one, “because nothing kinetic was going on there and it seemed like counter-Russia was a bipartisan thing that no one would argue with.”
The Washington Post · by Wesley Morgan · February 10, 2023
17. Biden’s Foreign Policy Is a Mess: The White House Has Failed to Match Means and Ends
Excerpts:
At the midpoint of Biden’s administration, the U.S. government has been unable to untangle the contradictory elements in its ambitious strategy, nor has it compensated for these misjudgments by boosting its military and diplomatic spending. The administration’s inability to fashion an international economic policy impedes its central objective of building an effective international coalition to counter China. In this way, it tips the balance of importance away from both economic policy and diplomacy toward the exercise of military power, something the administration explicitly sought not to do.
With two years remaining in the president’s term, the administration should capitalize on U.S. public support for trade—which, according to a 2021 Chicago Council on Global Affairs study, is at an all-time high—and provide the leadership that allies need to reduce their reliance on China. Instead of enrobing protectionist policies in the ermine of a “foreign policy for the middle class,” the president could make the case for advancing democracy by tightening economic cooperation with allies and partners, instructing the Commerce Department and Treasury Department to develop policies that shift manufacturing and the sourcing of materials to allied countries, encourage countries to adopt U.S. standards by giving them greater access to the U.S. market through the Indo-Pacific Economic Forum, and offer extensive exemptions from restrictions in the Inflation Reduction Act for businesses from allied countries. Washington should couple punitive measures that target China with incentives for friendly countries to adjust their economies in ways that increase their bargaining power in dealings with China.
Instead of forcing Congress to correct the administration’s inadequate defense budgets, the administration should develop a more realistic baseline budget for carrying out its strategy—one that accounts for the rate of inflation and the requirements of the possible defense of Taiwan right now and in the future. And since a president can make the solemn commitment of defending another country only with congressional consent to a diplomatic treaty, the secretary of state ought to commence such negotiations to move toward a formal alliance. The sticker price for the administration’s national security strategy is likely around $1 trillion, or a consistent year-on-year real increase of five percent above current defense spending. Trying to cut costs by urging reforms in the Defense Department and armed forces will not produce significant savings and only distract from the urgency of addressing what really matters: improving the military’s ability to fight and win wars, increasing stockpiles of essential weapons, and aiding allies in upgrading their armed forces. In its next two years, the Biden administration should find what was lacking in its first two, a seriousness of purpose that matches the ambitions of the White House’s strategy.
Biden’s Foreign Policy Is a Mess
The White House Has Failed to Match Means and Ends
February 10, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony · February 10, 2023
Many foreign policy analysts breathed a sigh of relief when Joe Biden replaced Donald Trump in the White House two years ago. With Biden’s hands on the wheel (and Trump’s erratic and at times reckless tenure in the rearview), the United States could return to being a stabilizing force in the world. The president himself embraced that perception. “America is back,” he pledged to allies in February 2021. After the tumult of the Trump years, an administration with a serious foreign policy agenda once again called the shots in Washington.
Yet the first two years of the Biden presidency have not vindicated this optimism or promise. Instead, confusion abounds, with a troubling disconnect between the administration’s stated priorities and its conduct. Biden’s desire to protect U.S. workers and boost U.S.-based industries has found itself at odds with the imperative of building an alliance to contain the threat of China.
The central deficiency of Biden’s national security strategy is the absence of an economic vision that will allow the United States and other countries to reduce their dependence on Chinese products and markets. With Washington unable to get allies on board on the economic front, other elements of U.S. strategy end up carrying more weight, notably the armed forces. But there, too, the administration’s recognition of the urgent military threat posed by China has not produced a sufficient change in actual policy, in terms of both the defense budget and how policymakers deploy U.S. forces. The State Department is not strong enough to make up for these deficiencies and often finds itself sidelined. Unbalanced, the administration’s strategy lacks credibility. Unless the administration puts into practice the strategy it extolls—by disciplining the president’s loose comments about Taiwan, giving friendly countries incentives to enact difficult economic transitions, enforcing export controls, significantly increasing defense spending, and boosting the capacity of the armed forces—its foreign policy will continue to be ineffective.
MUDDLED THINKING
The administration’s thinking about how economic policy relates to foreign policy has been muddled from the outset. On the one hand, the White House seeks to protect the United States from the supposed ravages of globalization and Chinese mercantilism. On the other, it preaches the virtues of alliances and the solidarity of the international community. These two goals have inevitably clashed.
The administration has ignored the pleas of allies in East Asia to help them reduce their economic reliance on China. China’s neighbors do not want paeans to democracy or military posturing that might increase the risk of war. Instead, they want a path to prosperity that weakens China’s economic grip on them. Australia, Japan, and South Korea, for example, have asked the United States to commit more seriously to free trade in the Indo-Pacific. More than simply trying to isolate Beijing, Washington needs to craft a positive economic policy that persuades its allies to develop markets and supply chains independent of China. But the economic plank of Biden’s foreign policy seems interested only in the vicissitudes of U.S. domestic politics, demanding that allies bring their economies into line with U.S. standards and offering few concessions.
The administration cannot bring itself to return to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Asian trade pact negotiated when Biden was vice president. It cannot bring itself to develop a “friendshoring” trade policy that increases resilience by relying on allied countries in supply chains. The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America legislation (CHIPS) does not preclude U.S. companies from using Chinese materials or penalize China for illicitly acquiring technology, and it could actually end up helping Chinese businesses since U.S. firms that receive subsidies could still rely on supply chains that lead to China. Biden’s Treasury and Commerce Departments also have a checkered record in enforcing export controls. Moreover, his administration allowed trade promotion authority (legislation that allows Congress to vote only yes or no on trade treaties) to lapse in 2021, ensuring that no trade deals can now get ratified without amendment by Congress. It has maintained most of the Trump administration tariffs, even those leveled against allied countries, such as restrictions on European Union steel. And it has embittered allies by delivering greater subsidies to U.S. firms through the Inflation Reduction Act.
Biden’s commitment to a “foreign policy for the middle class”—a nebulous slogan that in practice seems to mean trade protectionism and subsidies for U.S. companies—appears to take precedence over building a united front with allies. The Biden administration’s defense of its recent protectionist legislation, delivered in Davos by Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator from West Virginia, was to tell Europeans that they should simply welcome efforts to strengthen the U.S. economy, even if they come at the expense of European businesses. The current government in Washington may not believe in free trade, but the one in Beijing does. China created the world’s largest free trade area last year by launching the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with Southeast Asian countries, but the United States responded with only a vague initiative called the Indo-Pacific Economic Forum that no one seems able to explain.
BARKING, NOT BITING
The lack of a coherent economic policy that can support the National Security Strategy’s objective of successfully competing with China to shape international order places more stress on other areas of national power, in particular the military. The United States has had to talk tough about security in the region to reassure allies, since its economic policies have alienated them. And yet it has not backed up that talk with actions. The administration has made significant policy choices that necessitate increases in defense spending, notably the president’s departure from decades of American ambiguity on Taiwan, by repeatedly asserting that U.S. forces would defend the island in the event of a Chinese attack. Beijing could interpret Washington’s new rhetoric as a provocation and lunge against Taiwan.
But the administration has not adjusted U.S. defense spending, force structure, or the stationing and deployment of the military to account for that possibility. Nor do the admirably aggressive Department of Commerce restrictions that prevent Chinese entities from accessing U.S.-produced commodities and advanced technologies appear to have been coordinated with the Department of Defense, even though such commercial sanctions could make China more willing to go to war. A more considered, integrated approach to deterring China’s bad behavior would synchronize these sanctions both with demonstrations of American military readiness for a potential conflict (and the participation of U.S. allies in such exercises) and with diplomatic efforts to stabilize relations and reduce the potential for conflict. But the administration does not seem to have prepared for the increased military risks that come with the visits of U.S. congressional delegations to Taiwan. With the Chinese military now more active in and around the Taiwan Strait, the Pentagon has described the elevated threat to Taiwan as “the new normal.”
The administration’s foreign policy has been muddled from the outset.
Many officials in the government recognize this danger. In May 2021, the Indo-Pacific commander, Admiral Philip Davidson, testified before Congress that China is most likely to attack or attempt to blockade Taiwan between now and 2027. Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, called the likelihood of China attacking Taiwan between now and 2030 “acute.” Bill Burns, the CIA director, concurred in that judgment. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, delivered a National Security Strategy that called the next ten years “a decisive decade for shaping the terms of competition, especially with the PRC.”
Yet the activities and budget of the Department of Defense reflect none of that urgency. The 2022 defense budget includes $109 billion in spending on issues such as homelessness, climate change, and public health research that do not boost military power and that should be the responsibility of other government departments. The administration’s first budget in 2021 increased nondefense spending by 16 percent, but raised defense spending by only 1.6 percent, and that in nominal terms, rather than real terms that account for inflation. The International Institute for Strategic Studies assessed in 2021 that this increase was negligible and that it made “clear that the Biden administration is not attempting to make significant changes to the spending trajectory, at least in this budgetary round, at the U.S. Department of Defense.” In both 2021 and 2022, Congress found the Biden administration’s proposed defense budgets so deficient that on a bipartisan basis it insisted on more funding for the military, adding $28 billion in the first budget and $45 billion in the second.
The urgency of the Chinese threat to Taiwan also does not seem to have fully registered in the Defense Department. It conducted a force posture review early in the administration that resulted in no meaningful changes; what marginal changes it has subsequently proposed, such as rotational stationing and dispersed bases, are not occurring at a pace consistent with the threat. The Defense Department plan proposes to reduce the size of the army and take ships out of the fleet and squadrons out of the air force in the near term to free up funding for a future force to be fielded in 2035. In other words, the department plans to limit its ability to carry out its current strategy in order to be able to field a stronger force in the distant future, well after the timeframe in which U.S. officials think a Chinese attempt to take over Taiwan would most likely occur.
AFFAIRS OF STATE
The misalignment of Biden’s foreign policy goals and the administration’s conduct can also be seen at the State Department. The administration committed to “elevating diplomacy as our tool of first resort” and increased diplomatic spending by 14 percent in its first two years, expanding the ranks of the Foreign Service by around 500 people. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for Independent Development produced a solid joint strategic plan that established institutional priorities: mobilizing coalitions to address global challenges, promoting global prosperity, promoting good governance and human dignity, revitalizing its workforce, and improving consular support for Americans abroad. This agenda has the potential to reshape the institutional culture of the State Department for the better.
But there is little evidence the State Department has succeeded in its desire to “modernize alliances and revitalize international institutions.” The department has been marginal to the successes of the joint Australian, British, and U.S. security partnership, known as AUKUS, and has played only a minor role in galvanizing NATO support for an embattled Ukraine. The White House directly negotiated the AUKUS defense agreement, whereas the State Department struggled to handle the predictable French fury that resulted from the deal (owing to the cancellation of an Australian purchase of French submarines). CIA Director Bill Burns, not Secretary of State Antony Blinken, seems to be the White House’s emissary of choice in difficult diplomatic encounters, whether with Russia, Turkey, or Ukraine. Sullivan appears to be China’s main interlocutor, and also the diplomatic heavy recently called upon to deal with German truculence about providing tanks to Ukraine. Lloyd Austin, the secretary of defense, holds monthly meetings abroad with 50 counterparts to orchestrate the delivery of weapons to Ukraine. Blinken and his department have no diplomatic equivalent in motion for galvanizing international support for Kyiv.
The 2021 Summit for Democracy, organized by the State Department, was a bust, devolving into debates about which governments were invited and failing to craft a consequential agenda: the summit inaugurated a “year of action” to strengthen democracies that produced little action. The department’s bid to promote global prosperity appears to be mostly advancing the president’s domestic economic agenda or extolling things that the State Department has little ability to affect, such as U.S. technological leadership.
SALVAGE JOB
At the midpoint of Biden’s administration, the U.S. government has been unable to untangle the contradictory elements in its ambitious strategy, nor has it compensated for these misjudgments by boosting its military and diplomatic spending. The administration’s inability to fashion an international economic policy impedes its central objective of building an effective international coalition to counter China. In this way, it tips the balance of importance away from both economic policy and diplomacy toward the exercise of military power, something the administration explicitly sought not to do.
With two years remaining in the president’s term, the administration should capitalize on U.S. public support for trade—which, according to a 2021 Chicago Council on Global Affairs study, is at an all-time high—and provide the leadership that allies need to reduce their reliance on China. Instead of enrobing protectionist policies in the ermine of a “foreign policy for the middle class,” the president could make the case for advancing democracy by tightening economic cooperation with allies and partners, instructing the Commerce Department and Treasury Department to develop policies that shift manufacturing and the sourcing of materials to allied countries, encourage countries to adopt U.S. standards by giving them greater access to the U.S. market through the Indo-Pacific Economic Forum, and offer extensive exemptions from restrictions in the Inflation Reduction Act for businesses from allied countries. Washington should couple punitive measures that target China with incentives for friendly countries to adjust their economies in ways that increase their bargaining power in dealings with China.
Instead of forcing Congress to correct the administration’s inadequate defense budgets, the administration should develop a more realistic baseline budget for carrying out its strategy—one that accounts for the rate of inflation and the requirements of the possible defense of Taiwan right now and in the future. And since a president can make the solemn commitment of defending another country only with congressional consent to a diplomatic treaty, the secretary of state ought to commence such negotiations to move toward a formal alliance. The sticker price for the administration’s national security strategy is likely around $1 trillion, or a consistent year-on-year real increase of five percent above current defense spending. Trying to cut costs by urging reforms in the Defense Department and armed forces will not produce significant savings and only distract from the urgency of addressing what really matters: improving the military’s ability to fight and win wars, increasing stockpiles of essential weapons, and aiding allies in upgrading their armed forces. In its next two years, the Biden administration should find what was lacking in its first two, a seriousness of purpose that matches the ambitions of the White House’s strategy.
Foreign Affairs · by Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony · February 10, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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