Quotes of the Day:

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing the evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go into your library and read every book.” 

- Dwight D. Eisenhower 

“Those who speak in the language of truth, in fact, or attacked as liars, traders, and purveyors of fake news.” 

- Chris Hedges.

The mind's true work lies in the power to choose, reject, desire, repel, prepare, intend, and affirm. A corrupted mind is a barrier to the fulfillment of its own potential." 

- Epictetus

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 7, 2023

2. Colonel Larry Ruggley was retired from the U.S. Army

3. LSE IDEAS announces the passing of Director, Professor Christopher Coker

4. Musk shut off Starlink to prevent Ukraine attack on Russian ships, report says

5. What next for Russia’s Wagner mercenaries?

6. Scoop: China hawk Kurt Campbell is leading candidate for deputy at State

7. Tip of the Spear - August 2023 (USSOCOM) | SOF News

8. NATO has no indication of intentional Russian attack on Romania

9. What $50 Million Can Buy: Inside the Sleek New White House Situation Room

10. Digital threats from East Asia increase in breadth and effectiveness

11. Marines draw inspiration from drug runners for unmanned resupply boat

12. Drone Strikes Rock Russian City That Is Home to Key Military Base

13. Pentagon expects to release its annual China report in mid-October

14. 5 Things to Watch as Biden Heads for G20 Summit

15. Apple Becomes the Biggest U.S.-China Pawn Yet

16. The inside story of how the Navy spent billions on the 'Little Crappy Ship'

17. EXPLAINED: The US Intelligence Counteroffensive Assessment That Has Everyone Talking

18. US raises alarm as Chinese platform corners market on global shipping logistics

19. The new Marine infantry battalion is slimmer, saltier and more techy

20. After Criticism from Its Top Commander, Space Force Adopts New Mission Statement

21. US, Australia should use civil aid, not military, to woo Pacific Island states from China: Wargame

22. Why Our Generals Don't Win By Gary Anderson

23. CNN Exclusive: ‘How am I in this war?’: New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma

24. The China Model Is Dead

25. Tuberville Military Blockade Muddles New Nuclear Oversight (1)

26. China Prefers Guns to Butter

27. Xi Prepares to Eat Economic Bitterness

28. I was Ukraine’s defence minister. Here’s my message for our allies: we must not lose sight of victory

29. Towards a Policy Framework for Addressing Violent Conspiracy Theory Movements

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 7, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-7-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 7 and made further gains on both sectors of the front.
• US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director of Analysis Trent Maul stated that there is a “realistic possibility” that Ukrainian forces will break through the entire Russian defense in southern Ukraine by the end of 2023, while a Ukrainian source suggested that upcoming Russian defensive positions are weaker than those Ukrainian forces have previously breached.
• Ukrainian forces are making tactical gains and successfully attriting defending Russian forces and ISW continues to assess Ukraine’s counteroffensive may achieve operational successes in 2023, but subsequent series of Russian defensive positions still pose significant challenges for Ukrainian forces and may in sections be strongly held.
• Russian forces conducted another large-scale Shahed-136/131 drone attack against Sumy and Odesa oblasts overnight on September 6-7.
• Moscow Oblast authorities detained the commander of the 1st Special Purpose Air and Missile Defense Army on bribery and corruption charges amidst continued and escalating drone attacks on Moscow.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, in the Bakhmut direction, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area but did not make any confirmed advances on September 7.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

Sep 7, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 7, 2023

Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Angelica Evans, and Mason Clark

September 7, 2023, 5:15pm 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.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1pm ET on September 6. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the September 7 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 7 and made further gains on both sectors of the front. Geolocated footage published on September 7 indicates that Ukrainian forces have made further advances northwest of Verbove (18km southwest of Orikhiv) in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[1] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces made further advances in the area and other milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces temporarily advanced to the northwestern outskirts of Verbove on September 6, likely indicating further recent Ukrainian advances northwest of the settlement.[2] Satellite imagery collected on September 6 shows burning foliage in a tree line roughly a kilometer northwest of Verbove, suggesting that Russian forces are firing on advancing Ukrainian forces in the area.[3] Geolocated footage published on September 7 indicates that Ukrainian forces have made marginal gains northwest of Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[4] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified successes south of Bakhmut and near Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and Verbove in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[5]

US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director of Analysis Trent Maul stated that there is a “realistic possibility” that Ukrainian forces will break through the entire Russian defense in southern Ukraine by the end of 2023, while a Ukrainian source suggested that upcoming Russian defensive positions are weaker than those Ukrainian forces have previously breached.  Maul stated on September 6 in an interview with the Economist that the recent Ukrainian breach of the “first” of three Russian defensive layers in southern Ukraine gives Ukrainian forces a “realistic possibility” to break through the remaining series of Russian defensive positions by the end of 2023.[6] Maul stated that Ukrainian forces have also advanced into the “second” Russian defensive layer, likely referring to recent advances by light Ukrainian infantry past the series of Russian defensive positions that run northwest of Verbove to north of Solodka Balka (20km south of Orikhiv) in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[7] Former Ukrainian Aidar Battalion Commander Yevhen Dykyi stated on September 4 that battles are already ongoing at these Russian defensive positions but that Ukrainian forces have not yet broken through them.[8] Dykyi stated that the minefields ahead of the upcoming Russian defensive layer are not continuous, consistent with previous Ukrainian statements suggesting that Ukrainian forces have already advanced through the densest minefields.[9] Dykyi stated that Russia’s “third” defensive layer in southern Ukraine is primarily comprised of command posts, communication points, and warehouses and mainly acts as a support line for the Russian defensive positions further north.[10] Dykyi argued that Russian forces will not be able to hold back Ukrainian advances at this “third“ series of Russian defensive positions, implying that a definitive Ukrainian breach of the current Russian defensive layer would be operationally decisive. However, Maul notably stated that the bulk of Russian reinforcements are deployed to the “third” Russian defensive layer, contradicting Dykyi’s suggestion that these positions are merely supportive in nature.[11] The subsequent series of Russian defensive positions may be weaker, less mined, and less manned than the defensive layer that Ukrainian forces have breached. Russian defenses are not uniform across the front in southern Ukraine, however, and assessments of the strength of subsequent Russian defensive positions may be extrapolations based on limited information from small sectors of the front. Ukrainian forces are making tactical gains and successfully attriting defending Russian forces and ISW continues to assess Ukraine’s counteroffensive may achieve operational successes in 2023, but subsequent series of Russian defensive positions still pose significant challenges for Ukrainian forces and may in sections be strongly held.

Russian forces conducted another large-scale Shahed-136/131 drone attack against Sumy and Odesa oblasts overnight on September 6-7. Ukrainian Air Force Command stated that Russia launched 33 Shaheds in several groups from the northern, southeastern, and southern directions, predominantly aimed at grain infrastructure in Odesa Oblast, and that Ukrainian forces destroyed 25 of the drones.[12] Geolocated footage posted on September 7 shows the aftermath of the Shahed strike on port infrastructure in Kiliya, Odesa Oblast.[13] Ukrainian Southern Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk noted that Russia is increasingly using such loitering munitions because they are cheaper to manufacture than missiles and are available in larger quantities.[14]

Moscow Oblast authorities detained the commander of the 1st Special Purpose Air and Missile Defense Army on bribery and corruption charges amidst continued and escalating drone attacks on Moscow. Russian media reported on September 7 that the Moscow Garrison Military Court detained Major General Konstantin Ogienko for bribery and noted that 4th Air Defense Division Commander Major General Dmitry Belatsky organized the allocation of state defense property to an unnamed civilian organization in collusion with Ogienko.[15] The 1st Special Purpose Air and Missile Defense Army, including its 4th Air Defense Division, is notably responsible for the air defense of Moscow City and the surrounding oblast. Drone strikes on Moscow Oblast have recently become more prevalent, and it is likely that command changes resulting from a bribery case against top commanders of one of the most elite elements of Russia’s domestic air defense could further complicate Moscow’s ability to defend against such attacks. While ISW has not observed evidence to suggest that Ogienko was detained for reasons other than bribery charges, Russian sources have recently complained that Russian air defense elements are responsible for failing to curb increased drone attacks on Moscow, and Ogienko’s removal could be a response to such allegations.[16]

Russian President Vladimir Putin promoted three Russian generals, including Central Military District (CMD) and Russian Central Grouping of Forces in Ukraine Commander Colonel General Andrey Mordvichev, on September 6. Putin promoted Mordvichev and 8th Combined Arms Army (Southern Military District) Commander Gennady Alashkin to the rank of colonel general, and Ministry of Defense (MoD) Main Armored Directorate Head Alexander Shestakov to the rank of lieutenant general.[17] The Central Grouping of Forces is primarily committed in Ukraine on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, and the 8th CAA is currently deployed near Bakhmut and on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line. [18]These promotions award each general with a rank that corresponds with his current command and are not necessarily unusual. Putin likely awarded these promotions now to reward loyalty and obedience to the senior Russian military command, rather than to recognize battlefield performance or particular responsibilities. Putin has previously publicly lauded Mordvichev, indicating that Mordvichev may hold more of Putin’s favor than other military district commanders, as ISW has previously assessed.[19]

Russian sources accused Armenian authorities of detaining a pro-Russian blogger in Goris, Armenia, on September 6. Head of Rossotrudnichestvo (Russian Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation) Yevgeny Primakov claimed that “unknown masked men” abducted pro-Russian blogger Mikayel Badalyan in Goris on the night of September 6.[20] Primakov noted he had interviewed Badalyan on a Radio Sputnik segment the day before and that Badalyan criticized the Armenian government for its “anti-Russian policy.”[21] Sputnik Armenia also noted that Armenian authorities also detained columnist Ashot Gevorgyan in Goris.[22] Badalyan’s and Gevorgyan’s alleged arrests occurred against the backdrop of increasing tensions between Armenia and Russia, with Armenia beginning to deliver humanitarian aid to Ukraine for the first time, preparing for joint military exercises with the US, and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan publicly questioning Armenia’s historical reliance on Russia for security guarantees.[23] Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova responded to the incident and called it a “provocation” aimed at further spoiling the relationship between Russia and Armenia.[24]

The Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) cancelled regional elections in some areas in Russia near the Ukrainian border for the first time. Russian CEC Head Ella Pamfilova announced on September 7 the cancellation of local elections in Shebekino Raion and the village of Zhigailovsky in Belgorod Oblast due to the “high alert” regime in the area.[25]  Russian authorities previously passed a law in May 2023 authorizing the CEC to cancel elections in certain areas under martial law.[26] The CEC likely cancelled these elections due to prior criticism of evacuations from Shebekino and the possibility that there may not be enough civilians remaining in Shebekino to portray these elections as legitimate.[27]

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 7 and made further gains on both sectors of the front.
• US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director of Analysis Trent Maul stated that there is a “realistic possibility” that Ukrainian forces will break through the entire Russian defense in southern Ukraine by the end of 2023, while a Ukrainian source suggested that upcoming Russian defensive positions are weaker than those Ukrainian forces have previously breached.
• Ukrainian forces are making tactical gains and successfully attriting defending Russian forces and ISW continues to assess Ukraine’s counteroffensive may achieve operational successes in 2023, but subsequent series of Russian defensive positions still pose significant challenges for Ukrainian forces and may in sections be strongly held.
• Russian forces conducted another large-scale Shahed-136/131 drone attack against Sumy and Odesa oblasts overnight on September 6-7.
• Moscow Oblast authorities detained the commander of the 1st Special Purpose Air and Missile Defense Army on bribery and corruption charges amidst continued and escalating drone attacks on Moscow.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, in the Bakhmut direction, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area but did not make any confirmed advances on September 7.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these 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 the Ukrainian 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 push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued limited offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line and did not make any claimed or confirmed advances on September 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Synkivka (9km northeast of Kupyansk) and Novoyehorivka (15km southwest of Svatove).[28] A Russian milblogger also reported Russian attacks near Novoyehorivka and Novoselivske (16km northwest of Svatove).[29] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated on September 6 that Russian forces are conducting an operational pause after experiencing failure near Novoyehorivka and are forming new combat-ready units from previously defeated units for further attacks.[30]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line and reportedly advanced on September 7. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces recaptured unspecified positions in the Serebryanske forest area near Shyplivka (about 10km south of Kreminna).[31] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Kyslivka (20km southeast of Kupyansk) and Dibrova (7km southwest of Kreminna).[32]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction on September 7 and advanced south of Bakhmut. Geolocated footage posted on September 7 of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) 4th Motorized Rifle Brigade striking Ukrainian positions shows that Ukrainian forces have marginally advanced northwest of Klishchiivka (about 5km southwest of Bakhmut).[33] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces advanced on Bakhmut’s southern flank, and Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash noted on September 6 that Ukrainian forces advanced near Klishchiivka.[34] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Klishchiivka and Andriivka (9km southwest of Bakhmut).[35]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction and did not make any claimed or confirmed advances on September 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces attacked near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (13km northwest of Bakhmut) and Klishchiivka.[36] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces counterattacked near Klishchiivka, Kurdyumivka (12km southwest of Bakhmut), and Zalizyanske (10km northwest of Bakhmut) but did not specify the outcome of these attacks.[37]

Ukrainian forces did not conduct any claimed or confirmed offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on September 7.

Russian forces conducted ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on September 7 and did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks north of Donetsk City near Avdiivka and Novokalynove (12km northwest of Avdiivka) and on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Marinka and Krasnohorivka.[38] A Russian milblogger advertised an equipment crowdfunding campaign for soldiers of the 103rd Motorized Rifle Regiment (150th Motorized Rifle Division, 8th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District), who are reportedly fighting in the Marinka area.[39]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations along the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts on September 7 but did not advance. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Novomayorske (18km southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[40] Russian sources claimed that elements of the Russian 40th Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet) and the 37th Motorized Rifle Brigade (36th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) repelled Ukrainian assaults along the Novodonetske-Novomayorske (12km to 18km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) line.[41] The Russian “Vostok” Battalion and its commander Alexander Khodakovsky, who are defending in the area, claimed that Russian forces periodically retreat to tactical rear areas before restoring their original positions and that Ukrainian and Russian forces periodically exchange control over advance positions along the Novodonetske-Novomayorske line.[42] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces also attacked Russian positions near Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) and amplified footage purporting to show elements of the Russian 336th Naval Infantry Brigade (Baltic Fleet) operating near Pryyutne (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[43]

Russian forces conducted limited unsuccessful ground attacks in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Prechystivka (18km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[44]

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 7 and advanced. Geolocated footage published on September 7 indicates that Ukrainian forces have made further advances northwest of Verbove (18km southwest of Orikhiv).[45] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces made further advances in the area and other milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces temporarily advanced to the northwestern outskirts of Verbove on September 6, likely indicating further recent Ukrainian advances northwest of the settlement.[46] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces pushed Ukrainian forces back from the northwestern outskirts of Verbove, but ISW has not observed that Ukrainian forces hold positions close enough to the northwestern outskirts of Verbove for Russian forces to have repelled them from the outskirts to begin with.[47] Satellite imagery collected on September 6 shows burning foliage in a tree line roughly a kilometer northwest of Verbove, suggesting that Russian forces are firing on advancing Ukrainian forces in the area.[48] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun stated that Ukrainian forces advanced south of Robotyne and west of Verbove on September 6.[49] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attempted to break through Russian defenses east of Novoprokopivka (13km south of Orikhiv) and made unspecified gains in the area.[50] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces continued to repel mechanized Ukrainian assaults along the Robotyne-Verbove line.[51]

A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces resumed offensive operations west of Orikhiv in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced on September 7, but ISW cannot confirm these initial reports at this time. The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces resumed offensive operations near Kamianske (31km southwest of Orikhiv) and made unspecified gains in the direction of Luhove (30km southwest of Orikhiv).[52] The milblogger also claimed that Ukrainian forces expanded their control along an unspecified part of the left (southern) bank of the Yanchokrak River.[53] The Russian milblogger has made previous accurate claims about Ukrainian offensive activity in western Zaporizhia Oblast in advance of other milbloggers, although he has also promoted intentionally false information in the past as well.

A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces continued limited activity on islands in the Dnipro River delta. The milblogger claimed that two Ukrainian landing groups with about three dozen personnel in total advanced from the northern part of Perevalsky Island (west of Nova Kakhovka) but that Russian artillery and tank units on the left bank of the Dnipro River pushed Ukrainian forces back to the northern part of the island.[54]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian independent media outlet Cherta reported on September 6 that the increased demand for Russian defense industrial base (DIB) workers since the beginning of the war in Ukraine has not led to increased salaries.[55] Cherta interviewed several Russian DIB workers and discovered that increased working hours, instead of higher wages, are responsible for the claimed increase in Russian DIB salaries to up to 200 thousand rubles ($2,030) per month.[56] Russian authorities have repeatedly lauded the Russian DIB for its claimed successes and Russian President Vladimir Putin even signed a decree on August 9 creating the title of “Honored Worker of the Defense Industry Complex of the Russian Federation.”[57]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) reportedly coordinated the attempted assassinations of five Russian military and security personnel in occupied Oleshky, Kherson Oblast. Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported on September 7 that SBU officials coordinated an improvised explosive device (IED) attack against a car carrying two Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers and three Russian military personnel, killing one FSB officer and wounding the remaining four passengers.[58] Ukrainska Pravda included footage of the car exploding.[59] Ukrainska Pravda reported that the FSB officers were visiting Oleshky from Skadovsk to assist occupation officials with the filtration and torture of Ukrainian locals.[60]

Ukrainian sources reported on Russian efforts to create a guise of legitimacy around sham elections in occupied regions of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on September 7 that Russian authorities are allowing early voting days in the occupied territories in order to excuse empty polling stations on official voting days (September 8-10) by claiming that locals voted early.[61] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported that Russian authorities are planning to distribute food and gather students from “volunteer movements,” public servants, and tourists from Russia at polling stations to make the stations appear busier on official voting days.[62] Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo declared September 8 a holiday in an attempt to increase voter turnout in Kherson Oblast.[63] Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Administration Advisor Serhiy Khlan stated on September 6 that Kherson Oblast occupation authorities are bringing in people from Crimea and Russia to vote in Kherson Oblast because locals refuse to participate in the rigged elections.[64]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

Nothing significant to report.

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

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.

2. Colonel Larry Ruggley was retired from the U.S. Army

Rest in peace, Colonel.

Colonel Larry Ruggley was retired from the U.S. Army

https://www.blufftonicon.com/news/2023/09/06/colonel-larry-ruggley-was-retired-us-army

Posted by Staff on September 6, 2023 - 1:08pm

Larry Dean Ruggley

Colonel Larry Dean Ruggley, United States Army (Retired), age 71 of Butler, KY passed away unexpectedly on September 3, 2023. COL Ruggley retired from the United States Army after 34 years of service where he was a Special Forces Green Beret.  

He will always be remembered as a loving husband and devoted family man, enjoying his final years in his favorite role of Grandpa. He loved the life that him and his wife built, driving his tractor around the farm, and could be seen at his grandchildrens’ sporting events.  

COL Ruggley was born in Bluffton, Ohio and preceded in death by his parents Harold and Mildred (Grismore) Ruggley. He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Marie Ruggley; his children, Monica Ruggley, Sabrina (Christian Hutchinson) Hazen, Brian (Erica) Ruggley and Annina Ruggley; his sister Peggy Ruggley; his nephew Ray (Sue) Ruggley Jr.; and grandchildren, Nicholas, Cameron, and Madison Mandel, Ava Ruggley, Nathaniel Hazen, Ella Ruggley, Kaylin Parsons and Grace Hutchinson.

COL Ruggley began his military career in 1971 when he enlisted in the Army and served in the Army Security Agency, being Honorably Discharged in 1973, after which he attended Lima Technical College and Ohio University.

He enrolled in ROTC and graduated from the Army Ranger School during the summer of 1977 and was selected as the Distinguished Military Graduate from Ohio University receiving a Regular Army commission in the Infantry in 1978. He later completed his Masters Degree in Administration from Central Michigan University and received a Masters Degree in Military Studies while attending the US Army War College. 

As an Infantry Officer and later Special Forces Officer he served in numerous leadership positions from Platoon Leader, Company Commander, Battalion Commander, and finally Garrison Commander. His first assignment was with the Berlin Brigade, West Berlin as a Rifle Platoon Leader, Scout Platoon Leader, Company Executive Officer, and Battalion Assistant Operations Officer with the 4th Battalion, 6th Infantry. 

He then volunteered to attend the Special Forces Qualification Course (Honor Graduate), and went on to complete numerous other leadership assignments: Detachment Commander, High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) Detachment Commander and Battalion Operations Officer (S3) 2nd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Ft Bragg, NC. 

He was then assigned to Ft Ord, Ca as the B Company Commander, 3rd Battalion, 17th Infantry and Company Commander HHC, 4th Battalion, 21st Infantry, 7th Infantry Division (Light). It was during this time he transferred from the Infantry to Special Forces (Green Beret). 

After completion of the Command and General Staff College and promotion to Major he was assigned as D Company Commander, 1st Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Training Group (Airborne), Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 

Upon promotion to Lieutenant Colonel he served as the J1 Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR). During this time, he also served as the J1 for SOC IFOR supporting operations in Bosnia. 

He was then selected to command the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne). His unit participated in the African Crisis Response Initiative in Malawi and Uganda and numerous other missions in Africa. 

After command, he became the Deputy Director of Training and Doctrine and then Chief of Staff of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School until 2000. After completing the Army War College and promotion to Colonel he was assigned to the Army Special Operations Command as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel from 2001–2003. 

He was then selected to be the Garrison Commander at Fort Campbell, Ky home of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), 5th Special Forces Group, and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. During his 3-year tenure he oversaw superb support during a tumultuous time for the 101st Airborne Division as they redeployed from war, transformed and redeployed to Iraq the following year. 

COL Ruggley’s many awards and decorations include the Legion of Merit, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal w/4OLC, Joint Service Commendation Medal w/ 1OLC, Army Commendation Medal w/1OLC, Joint Service Achievement Medal, Army Achievement Medal 3/OLC, Joint Meritorious Unit Award, Army Superior Unit Award, Army Good Conduct Medal, Army Occupation Medal, National Defense Service Medal 1/ OLC, Army Service Ribbon, Overseas Service Ribbon, and NATO Medal. He also has been awarded the Ranger Tab and Special Forces Tab, is a Master Parachutist, HALO Parachutist, and holds the Expert Infantryman Badge. 

In lieu of flowers the Ruggley family ask that individuals make a donation to the Tunnel for Towers Foundation (T2T.org) in COL Ruggley’s name. 

Visitation will be held on Saturday, September 9, 2023 at Cooper Funeral Home from 1:00-4:00 p.m.  A second visitation will be held on Monday, September 11, 2023 at St. Mary’s of the Assumption, 8246 E Main St, Alexandria, KY  41001 from 9:30-11:00 a.m. Mass of Christian burial will promptly start at 11:00 a.m. 

COL Larry Dean Ruggley will be laid to rest at a future date in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC. 

Cooper Funeral Home is serving the family. 

3. LSE IDEAS announces the passing of Director, Professor Christopher Coker

Another intellectual icon passes.

LSE IDEAS announces the passing of Director, Professor Christopher Coker

It is with the greatest sadness and heavy hearts that we announce the death of our Director, Professor Christopher Coker.

https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/media/news/LSE-IDEAS-announces-the-passing-of-Director-Professor-Christopher-Coker

As a Professor of International Relations at LSE for over 40 years Christopher taught and mentored countless students who remember his unique humour and individuality. Following his retirement in 2019 he continued to serve as the co-director of LSE IDEAS supporting the foundation of the LSE IDEAS Ratiu Forum and establishing many other long-standing partnerships.

Professor Coker was a world-renowned academic who dedicated his life to writing extensively on all aspects of war. He was a twice serving member of the Council of the Royal United Services Institute, a former NATO Fellow and a regular lecturer at Defence Colleges in the UK, US. Rome, Singapore, and Tokyo. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute for Defence Studies in Tokyo, the Rajaratnam School for International Studies Singapore, the Political Science Dept in Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and the Norwegian and Swedish Defence Colleges. His publications include Rebooting Clausewitz (Hurst, 2015), Future War (Polity, 2016), and The Rise of the Civilizational State (Polity, 2019). His most recent book was, Why War? (2020).

Co-Director, Professor Chris Alden, commented in memory of Professor Coker, ‘’Christopher's originality of thought and sparkling intellect shaped a generation of scholars, policy makers and students studying war in our times. All of us at LSE IDEAS were privileged to know and work with him over the years. His presence will be sorely missed.’’

Centre Manager, Dr Emilia Knight, said, ‘’We will miss Professor Christopher Coker immensely. He was a superb colleague and leader at IDEAS, and the kindest person.’’

We would also encourage you to share memories and messages on our dedicated space here. At this time, we do not have any further information regarding memorial celebrations but as and when these are organised they will be shared via our social media channels and website.

4. Musk shut off Starlink to prevent Ukraine attack on Russian ships, report says

This is a real dilemma that we must sort out. Should a business man have this kind of "power?" Should the capability he developed (and kudos to him for doing so) belong in the private sector? Should there be controls and restrictions placed on these types of capabilities? If so, what are those restrictions and how are they enforced? If this is such a necessary capability why didn't the government develop it? (the government developed the GPS system afterall). The bottom line is what takes precedence over the free exercise of commerce (the right of business to develop and sell goods and services) versus what the government considers necessary for a nationa;s national security.

My emotional response to this is that Musk is despicable. He took away a capability that was necessary for effective military operations by Ukraine and he put people at risk based on his "fear" that Ukrainian actions could cause Putin to escalate to nuclear use - that was his calculation. More to the point, did he make this decision after conferring with Putin's officials or Putin himself? But regardless of how or anyone else feels, it does not seem that he violated any law that I can see.

Musk shut off Starlink to prevent Ukraine attack on Russian ships, report says

Ars Technica · by Jon Brodkin · September 7, 2023

Enlarge / Starlink satellite dish seen on September 25, 2022, in Izyum, Kharkiv region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Getty Images | Yasuyoshi Chiba

Elon Musk ordered SpaceX engineers to temporarily disable Starlink in order to thwart a Ukrainian submarine drone attack on the Russian naval fleet last year, according to a report based on a new biography of Musk. The book provides more details on a previously reported incident.

A CNN exclusive report today said, "Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company's Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson's new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled 'Elon Musk.'"

"As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they 'lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,' Isaacson writes," the CNN report said. Ukrainian officials reportedly begged Musk to turn satellite service in the area back on.

It's said that Musk spoke with senior Russian officials and feared that Russia would respond with a nuclear attack. "Musk's decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk's conversations with senior Russian officials, according to Isaacson," CNN wrote. Musk reportedly said he was worried about the situation becoming a "mini-Pearl Harbor."

Ukraine government official Mykhailo Fedorov reportedly "plead[ed] with Musk to restore connectivity for the submarine drones by telling Musk about their capabilities in a text message." Musk "replied that he was impressed with the design of the submarine drones but that he wouldn't turn satellite coverage back on for Crimea because Ukraine 'is now going too far and inviting strategic defeat,'" the report said.

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As the dispute unfolded, "Musk was soon on the phone with President Joe Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, and the Russian ambassador to the US to address anxieties from Washington, DC, to Moscow, writes Isaacson," according to CNN.

“How am I in this war?” Musk asks

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell confirmed in February that the company took steps to prevent Ukraine's military from using Starlink satellite Internet with drones.

"We were really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom. It was never intended to be weaponized. However, Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement," Shotwell said at the time. Shotwell didn't provide details on how SpaceX disrupted Ukraine's use of Starlink but said, "there are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that... there are things that we can do and have done."

Musk wrote in a January 2023 tweet that "we are not allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes."

SpaceX came to Ukraine's aid when Russia invaded the country in February 2022. After the Russian invasion disrupted broadband service, Fedorov asked Musk to send Starlink terminals, and Musk quickly did so.

Within weeks, there were reports that Starlink connections helped the Ukraine military's elite drone unit target and destroy Russian tanks and other "priority targets." Starlink's terms of service say it is "not designed or intended for use with or in offensive or defensive weaponry or other comparable end-uses."

"How am I in this war?" Musk reportedly said to Isaacson during an interview for the book to be published on September 12. "Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes."

In October 2022, Musk proposed a peace plan that would formally make Crimea part of Russia. The USSR transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, but Russia has occupied the peninsula since 2014. Ukraine has stood firm in its demand that Russia withdraw from Crimea, while the Kremlin demands that Crimea be recognized as Russian territory.

Musk fought with Pentagon over Starlink funding

Musk had a dispute with the Pentagon late last year over who should fund Ukraine's use of Starlink. Musk initially said that SpaceX "cannot fund the existing system indefinitely" and continue to send additional terminals but later wrote, "The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we'll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free."

Shotwell was angry about Musk's decision to pull the request for funding. "The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally," Isaacson's book quotes Shotwell as saying. "Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story."

SpaceX and the US ended up working out a deal anyway. The US Defense Department recently confirmed that it is paying for Starlink satellite broadband service in Ukraine. Deals with the US and European governments struck in early 2023 would result in Ukraine getting another 100,000 Starlink dishes, according to the CNN report on Isaacson's book.

With SpaceX's Starlink, Musk controls the world's biggest network of low-Earth orbit broadband satellites. "Yet faced with little regulation and oversight, his erratic and personality-driven style has increasingly worried militaries and political leaders around the world, with the tech billionaire sometimes wielding his authority in unpredictable ways," a New York Times article on July 28 said.

"Musk's near total control of satellite Internet has raised alarms... he alone can decide to shut down Starlink Internet access for a customer or country, and he has the ability to leverage sensitive information that the service gathers. Such concerns have been heightened because no companies or governments have come close to matching what he has built," the article said.

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The NYT report, citing people familiar with the situation, said that Musk "has restricted Starlink access multiple times during the war."

US gains more control over Starlink use in Ukraine

The NYT report provides a slightly different description of the incident near Crimea than the one in the CNN report based on Isaacson's book. While the book reportedly says Musk ordered SpaceX engineers to preemptively disable Starlink's network in the area, the NYT report said that Musk "refused Ukraine's request last year to provide Starlink access near Crimea, the Russian-controlled peninsula, so it could send an explosive-filled maritime drone into Russian ships docked in the Black Sea."

Assuming both reports are accurate, Musk presumably denied the request after turning Starlink service off in the area. That would square with the new report that "Musk's decision... left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on."

The Pentagon's new deal with SpaceX involves 400 to 500 Starlink terminals and gives the US more control over how they are used, the July 28 NYT report said:

The deal gives the Pentagon control of setting where Starlink's Internet signal works inside Ukraine for those new devices to carry out "key capabilities and certain missions," two people familiar with the deal said. This appeared intended to provide Ukraine with dedicated terminals and services to conduct sensitive functions without fear of interruption.

Unlike traditional defense contractors, whose weapon sales to foreign countries are typically done through the federal government, Starlink is a commercial product. That allows Mr. Musk to act in ways that sometimes do not align with US interests, such as when SpaceX said it could not continue funding Starlink in Ukraine, said Gregory C. Allen, a former Defense Department official who worked at Blue Origin.

After Shotwell's comments in February, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote that companies are either on the side of Ukraine and "the right to freedom" or on the side of Russia "and its 'right' to kill and seize territories. SpaceX (Starlink) and Mrs. Shotwell should choose a specific option."

Ars Technica · by Jon Brodkin · September 7, 2023

5. What next for Russia’s Wagner mercenaries?

Conclusion:

Prigozhin’s death has highlighted Putin’s political vulnerability as he strives to regain control and enforce consequences for what he labels Prigozhin’s ‘serious mistakes’. Having seen the danger of consolidating power under a single private military leader, Putin won’t permit another to command 50,000 troops, as Prigozhin did during the Battle of Bakhmut. Instead, Russia will favour multiple smaller companies overseen by Putin-aligned oligarchs. These companies will align with the military, acting as grey-zone tools to expand Russian control and influence, especially in Africa.

What next for Russia’s Wagner mercenaries? | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Adam Rajic · September 7, 2023

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner private military company, joined the long list of Russian oligarchs who’ve died since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. From ‘tripped while smoking’ to ‘falling from a window’, challenging Russian President Vladimir Putin has proved fatal. Prigozhin’s death came just two months after his 23 June march on Moscow. In the aftermath we’ll see a struggle for Wagner’s resources and authority, and the rise of small private military companies that will align with the Russian military, primarily engaging in grey-zone warfare to serve Russian interests.

The former restaurateur and entrepreneur founded the Wagner Group in 2014 and soon became involved in the war in the Donbas. Officially, private military companies are illegal in Russia but Wagner was well funded by the Kremlin and Prigozhin was a long-term Putin ally. Wagner was an irregular warfare tool to exploit instability, providing plausible deniability for Putin while pursuing the Kremlin’s foreign policy objectives and extending Russian influence in Ukraine, Syria and Africa.

Prigozhin had a fierce rivalry with Russian military commanders and posted extensively on Telegram criticising figures including General Valery Gerasimov and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. The use of Telegram enabled Prigozhin to circumvent government censorship. He declared his mutiny in response to what he said was a Russian missile strike on a Wagner camp.

The rebellion was short-lived, but Prigozhin captured the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov and advanced to within 200 kilometres of Moscow. It ended with a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko under which Prigozhin and his troops were exiled to Belarus. Prigozhin was soon seen travelling to and from Moscow and meeting Putin in July. In August he uploaded a Telegram video, ostensibly filmed in an unnamed African country, in which he spoke of freedoms Wagner troops were bringing to the region.

On 23 August Prigozhin was travelling on his private Embraer-135 jet, an aircraft with a good safety record, when it tumbled out of the sky. Witnesses reported hearing explosions. On board with him was Valeriy Chekalov, one of Prigozhin’s closest friends who had been with Wagner since the early 2000s. Chekalov provided logistics and ran subsidiary companies for Prigozhin. Also killed was Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian intelligence officer described as Prigozhin’s right-hand man. US intelligence assessments point to a deliberate killing to decapitate the Wagner Group.

Prigozhin’s attempted rebellion exposed his many supporters in the Russian military and the civilian population. The Kremlin has rounded up those close to him, including General Sergei Surovikin, who previously led Russia’s invasion forces and disappeared after the attempted rebellion. The day before the crash, Russian media said that Surovikin had been moved to a new position and was on vacation. While the Wagner Group has been greatly reduced since the attempted rebellion, thousands of its members remain in two bases in southern Belarus. Prigozhin’s supporters present a significant risk to Putin but his crackdown has been brutal and effective and these loyalists will find it hard to present the threat they did two months ago.

The more than 5,000 Wagner troops in Belarus are much needed by the Russian military. The Kremlin has imposed conscription and voluntary enlistment campaigns to boost Russian force numbers and the military is struggling to fill officer and NCO roles with experienced and capable soldiers. Most of the instructors in training establishments have been deployed to Ukraine. The Wagner troops are unlikely to be amalgamated happily into a system they blame for killing many of their number, and Prigozhin. Reports indicate that the demolition of the Wagner cemetery in Nikolayevka coincided with Putin’s directive for all Wagner troops to pledge loyalty to Russia. Putin is actively dismantling the loyalties Prigozhin established to neutralise the Wagner threat.

A significant rival for Wagner’s resources is the Redut private military company established in 2008 by Putin-linked oligarch and former KGB agent Gennady Timchenko to safeguard his gas empire. It enjoys complete backing from the Russian Defence Ministry and has been active mainly in Syria. Redut played a major role in the Ukrainian invasion, suffering substantial losses. Leveraging Prigozhin’s unsuccessful rebellion, the company has recruited former Wagner members. Redut is now the Russian military’s preferred private army, emblematic of the evolving complexity of its grey-zone operations. It highlights the growing ties between the oil and gas sector, conflict and Russian foreign policy. The company will use grey-zone tactics to extend the influence of Russia.

So, who now will lead the Wagner Group, managing its significant resources and global influence? Putin has previously redistributed resources from deceased or incarcerated oligarchs to strengthen other allegiances. But given Wagner’s potency and power, its controller could potentially challenge Putin, so he’s likely to allocate most of its resources to other entities. The individual assuming control of what remains must be loyal and skilled at maintaining intricate connections, particularly within Russia’s intelligence community. This community has strongly supported Putin and remains a pivotal force in post-Soviet society, with former intelligence personnel assuming influential roles in various spheres.

Whoever takes over the group will require large financial backing to maintain it and fund its operations. Wagner’s activities in Africa have allowed it to secure mining contracts, generating an estimated US$250 million since the beginning of 2022. Putin admitted to financing the group to the tune of US$1 billion since May 2022. Prigozhin’s wealth allowed him to pay his troops above the average Russian military salary, which helped thwart the army’s attempts to convert Wagner soldiers’ contracts into Russian military contracts this year. Wagner personnel offered these significant pay cuts have refused and chosen exile.

Prigozhin’s death has highlighted Putin’s political vulnerability as he strives to regain control and enforce consequences for what he labels Prigozhin’s ‘serious mistakes’. Having seen the danger of consolidating power under a single private military leader, Putin won’t permit another to command 50,000 troops, as Prigozhin did during the Battle of Bakhmut. Instead, Russia will favour multiple smaller companies overseen by Putin-aligned oligarchs. These companies will align with the military, acting as grey-zone tools to expand Russian control and influence, especially in Africa.

Adam Rajic is the lead coordinator of professional development at ASPI. Image: AFP via Getty Images.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Adam Rajic · September 7, 2023

6. Scoop: China hawk Kurt Campbell is leading candidate for deputy at State

​I have not seen any other reporting on this "scoop." Seems like a very logical choice.

Sep 6, 2023 - Politics & Policy

Scoop: China hawk Kurt Campbell is leading candidate for deputy at State

• Barak Ravid
• Hans Nichols

​

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/06/biden-kurt-campbell-state-department-china?utm

Kurt Campbell speaks during a news conference at the South Korean Presidential Office in Seoul on July 18. Photo: Kim Hong-Ji/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Kurt Campbell, the coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the National Security Council, has emerged as a leading candidate to serve as President Biden's deputy secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter.

Why it matters: During Biden's first two-and-half years in office, Campbell, a seasoned diplomat, has been a forceful advocate for a more confrontational approach to China.

• As a veteran of President Obama's state department, and the founding CEO of the Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm, Campbell is a known quantity in the D.C. embassy circuit, as well as foreign ministries across Asia.
• If chosen, Campbell would enter an increasingly complex relationship with China as Washington tries to walk a tightrope of limiting China's expansion and influence in the Indo-Pacific region while continuing to partner with Beijing on trade, basic science and other areas.
• A final decision has not been made and the position requires Senate confirmation. The White House declined to comment.

Driving the news: Wendy Sherman, a Democratic operative and diplomat, retired this summer, opening up the No. 2 position at the State Department.

• Jon Finer, Biden's deputy national security adviser, had been the frontrunner for the deputy spot in the department, but Biden asked him to stay in his current role earlier this summer, Politico reported.
• Campbell is married to Lael Brainard, Biden's current director of the National Economic Council, who has also held crucial deputy positions at the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department.

Between the lines: Victoria Nuland, who joined the State Department as a career foreign service officer, has been serving in an acting capacity. According to two sources familiar with the issue, Nuland is also a candidate for the job.

• Nuland and Campbell have had a difficult relationship in the past and his nomination could potentially result in her departure, two sources familiar with the issue said.
• If that happened, it would leave the State Department without a woman in its top four positions.

The big picture: At the outset of his presidency, Biden put the ruling Chinese Communist Party on notice that the U.S. would challenge any efforts by China to expand its influence in the region.

• On the sidelines of the G20 summit in November of 2022, Biden and President Xi Jinping used their first official meeting to lower the temperature, with pledges to work more closely on climate change, pandemic preparation and the global economy.
• But those plans were delayed after China sent a spy balloon across America's heartland and Biden then ordered its downing off the coast of South Carolina in February.
• A Chinese official called the U.S. response "a clear overreaction" and "unacceptable and irresponsible."

Flashback: Seven years ago, Campbell was instrumental in moving the Obama administration towards reorienting its foreign policy towards Asia.

• He titled his 2016 book on those efforts "The Pivot."

Background: Campbell, like many foreign policy experts in both parties, has reevaluated his assumptions about China's ambitions and the best way to respond to them.

• In June, Campbell summarized the Biden administration's current approach to China: "We are in competition with China, but we do not seek conflict, confrontation, or a new Cold War," he said. "We are for managing the competition responsibly."

7. Tip of the Spear - August 2023 (USSOCOM) | SOF News

Information you usually do not get from the mainstream media. A useful snapshot of where and what SOF is doing in lesser known operations, events, and activities. And some history as well.

Tip of the Spear - August 2023 (USSOCOM) | SOF News

sof.news · by DVIDS · September 8, 2023

The United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has posted online its August 2023 issue of Tip of the Spear. The publication has a number of interesting articles about U.S. special operations events and training exercises from around the world. Article topics are listed below.

• SOCAFRICA Change of Command Ceremony
• Civil Affairs in Benin
• SF Conducts Free-Fall Operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• RoK and SOCKOR Decades-Long Alliance
• SOF in Exercise Arctic Edge 23
• SEALs and Australian Special Forces in Talisman Sabre 2023
• Indonesian Navy’s KOPASKA Train with SEALs
• Southern Star 23 and JTACs from US, Chile, and Spain
• Navy SEALs in Colombia
• Korea – ARSOF and the “Forgotten War”
• SEAL Team Three Celebrates 40 years
• NSW Legend Honored at SEAL Graduation
• Marine Raider Regiment Language Program Wins SOCOM Award
• Remembering General James J. Lindsay – 1st USSOCOM Commander

Tip of the Spear, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), August 2023, PDF, 40 pages.

https://www.dvidshub.net/publication/issues/67485

Photo: From August 2023 issue of Tip of the Spear. SOF operators train in unforgiving terrain at Pituffick Space Base, Greenland to demonstrate operational capabilities that are critical for integrated deterrence and layered defense during Arctic Edge 23. Courtesy photo USSOCOM.

sof.news · by DVIDS · September 8, 2023

8. NATO has no indication of intentional Russian attack on Romania

Was this a "probe" to gauge NATO reaction? Will this response from NATO lead to more "adventurous" actions by Russia? What else might think it could get a pass on?

NATO has no indication of intentional Russian attack on Romania

Reuters

BRUSSELS, Sept 7 (Reuters) - NATO has no indication that drone debris found on Romanian territory was caused by a deliberate Russian attack on Romania, its chief said on Thursday.

Ukraine had said on Monday that drones detonated in Romania during an overnight Russian air strike on a Ukrainian port across the Danube River. Attacks have increased on the site since July when Moscow abandoned a deal that lifted a de facto Russian blockade of Ukraine's Black Sea ports.

Romanian officials initially denied the Ukrainian allegations but changed course on Wednesday, with Defence Minister Angel Tilvar saying that parts of what could be a Russian drone fell on Romanian soil.

"We don't have any information indicating an intentional attack by Russia, and we are awaiting the outcome of the ongoing investigation," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told EU lawmakers.

Stoltenberg stressed the risks Russian air strikes in such close vicinity to the alliance's territory posed.

"It demonstrates the risks of incidents and accidents", he said. "Regardless of that outcome (of the investigation), what we have seen of course is a lot of fighting and also air attacks close to NATO borders."

Romania's defence ministry said on Thursday that the country did not face any direct threat to its territory or territorial waters from Russian strikes on Ukraine on Wednesday night.

Russia has carried out long-range air strikes on targets in Ukraine since it invaded its neighbour last year, and Kyiv has reported suspected Russian weapons flying over or crashing into neighbouring countries several times.

In the most serious incident, two people were killed in Poland by a missile that fell near the frontier last November. Poland and NATO allies later said it was a misfired Ukrainian air defence missile.

Reporting by Sabine Siebold and Marine Strauss, additional reporting by Alan Charlish in Warsaw; Editing by Alison Williams and Angus MacSwan

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Acquire Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Reuters

9. What $50 Million Can Buy: Inside the Sleek New White House Situation Room

But can the outstations that connect to the situation room keep up with the advanced technology? :-) 

Excerpts:

It was the intelligence arms race that led the president to approve the upgrade. Computer monitors and servers that seemed modern in 2006 — the year before the iPhone was announced — had become old and creaky. The signal-blocking technology was in need of modernizing in the era of high-tech sparring with China and Russia. Even the furniture had become worn from seven-day-a-week use.

(When President Barack Obama wanted to monitor the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, Mr. Gustafson said, the main conference room did not have the technology to stream the Defense Department feed, forcing the president and his top aides to watch in a cramped room next door. That has been fixed, he said.)

Movies and spy novels describe the Situation Room as a single place where presidents meet with their aides to make top-secret decisions in a crisis. In fact, it is a warren of rooms that represents what White House officials describe as the most technologically secure spaces in the country.

As a historical aside:

The OSS Society

@osssociety

·

25m

OSS’ Visual Presentation Branch designed the first situation room.

What $50 Million Can Buy: Inside the Sleek New White House Situation Room

The New York Times · by Michael D. Shear · September 8, 2023

The ultrasecure facility, which was last upgraded in 2006, is returning to use after officials closed it for a year to modernize it in an era of high-tech sparring with China and Russia.

The Situation Room is actually a warren of rooms in the windowless basement of the White House.Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

By

Reporting from the Situation Room

Sept. 8, 2023, 5:03 a.m. ET

The White House Situation Room, the ultrasecure facility known to West Wing insiders simply as “the whizzer,” has undergone a $50 million renovation, with sophisticated communications equipment and technology to prevent American adversaries from listening in.

To walk into the heart of the refurbished Situation Room, which got its nickname from the acronym WHSR, feels a bit like entering the set of a Hollywood thriller. In the windowless basement, one floor down from the Oval Office, the president’s oversize swivel chair faces three huge screens that he can consult while overseeing covert operations around the world.

“This was enhanced to the highest standard,” said Marc Gustafson, the senior director for the White House Situation Room, who oversaw the renovation. “You constantly enhance to keep up with foreign adversaries.”

During a tour for several journalists on Thursday, a panel built into one wall glowed bright green, with the word “UNCLASSIFIED” and the phrase “MICS OFF,” indicating that the room was not being monitored at that moment. A world clock listed the current times for cities including Tehran and Kyiv. It also listed POTUS, so aides can always know the time wherever the president may be.

The walls, built from sustainably harvested wood, hide what officials say are the most sophisticated technologies in the American arsenal for keeping the room secure. Last upgraded in 2006, the room and the surrounding offices have been closed for a year while contractors gutted the old facility and carried out a complete overhaul.

It was the intelligence arms race that led the president to approve the upgrade. Computer monitors and servers that seemed modern in 2006 — the year before the iPhone was announced — had become old and creaky. The signal-blocking technology was in need of modernizing in the era of high-tech sparring with China and Russia. Even the furniture had become worn from seven-day-a-week use.

(When President Barack Obama wanted to monitor the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, Mr. Gustafson said, the main conference room did not have the technology to stream the Defense Department feed, forcing the president and his top aides to watch in a cramped room next door. That has been fixed, he said.)

Movies and spy novels describe the Situation Room as a single place where presidents meet with their aides to make top-secret decisions in a crisis. In fact, it is a warren of rooms that represents what White House officials describe as the most technologically secure spaces in the country.

What had become over the years a slightly grungy workplace now gleams — and smells a bit like a new car, with leather chairs in every room. The reception room feels like entering the lobby of a luxury hotel, with the White House seal etched into a marble slab sourced from a Virginia quarry. Down the hall from the staff entrance is the V.I.P. door, used only by the president and vice president.

“It’s a marriage of the traditional and the modern,” Mr. Gustafson said proudly.

An image provided by the Biden administration showing the completed renovations in the White House Situation Room.Credit...Carlos Fyfe/White House

The main conference room is known as the J.F.K. room, in honor of the former president. It was President John F. Kennedy’s staff who decided to build a secure facility under the West Wing after the Cuban missile crisis. Until then, the president did not have a central, secure location for reviewing and discussing classified information.

The small conference room where Mr. Obama watched the bin Laden raid has been torn down. The walls, furniture, lighting and other equipment were saved and will be sent to the Obama Presidential Center. In its place are two small, secure “breakout” rooms for people like the secretary of state, attorney general or secretary of defense to work privately when they come for meetings with the president.

Two other small conference rooms are outfitted much like the J.F.K. room, with similar screens, bug-busting technology and a panel showing those in attendance the classification level of whatever is being discussed. All the rooms have LEDs in the ceiling that can change colors; on Thursday, one of the small conference rooms was bathed in blue light.

Around the corner is a closet just for the official seals, which have magnets so they can be swapped out. There’s one for the president, another for the vice president, and several generic “Office of the President” seals for use when someone like the national security adviser presides in the room.

Down another hall is the nerve center of the Situation Room: the Watch Floor. The largest of rooms, it is outfitted with three rows of desks facing a massive wall of flat screens. During the tour, the screens on the wall and the monitors at the desks were all blank or only showing the seal of the Executive Office of the President.

In normal times, Mr. Gustafson said, the screens would be filled with data, classified and not — video streams, social media, maps of the world and intelligence reports from the C.I.A., the Defense Department and elsewhere in the government. Usually, one TV rotates between major news networks.

At the desks sit 17 officials from agencies around the government; every military branch and spy agency is represented, along with State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and a few others. Day shifts begin at 5 a.m. and end at 5 p.m., when the night crew rotates in.

Those are the people responsible for alerting the president and his top aides to any possible crisis. If North Korea fires a rocket in the middle of the night, it is the Watch Floor that wakes someone up — usually the president’s national security adviser. Mr. Gustafson, who also is wakened, said his sleep got interrupted frequently.

The Watch Floor is also the place that manages the secure calls that flow into and out of the White House. When the president wants to call a world leader, often with little notice, a crew of up to a dozen people from the Watch Floor springs into action, setting up the secure video connections and making sure that both sides of the conversation are in sync.

Mr. Gustafson and his deputy have two offices with glass walls at the back of the Watch Floor, overseeing the operation. In true Hollywood style, though, the glass turns opaque at the flip of a switch — the better to have a discussion without peeping eyes.

During the past year, Mr. Biden and his top aides have been forced into using other secure rooms in the West Wing and facilities in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Mr. Biden held his first meeting in the new space on Tuesday, two days before leaving for a foreign trip to India and Vietnam.

Much of the senior staff weighed in on the design of the facility, which retains the dark paneling of the previous one but with sleeker lines and high-tech lighting that make it feel more modern. It was a consensus design, Mr. Gustafson said, without confirming whether Mr. Biden was consulted directly.

In the future, Mr. Gustafson said, a complete, yearlong renovation should not be necessary. The new walls, ceilings and floors are modular and designed to be taken out to allow access to the technology underneath.

“We should not have to do another gut renovation,” he said.

Michael D. Shear is a veteran White House correspondent and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who was a member of the team that won the Public Service Medal for Covid coverage in 2020. He is the co-author of “Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration.” More about Michael D. Shear

The New York Times · by Michael D. Shear · September 8, 2023

10. Digital threats from East Asia increase in breadth and effectiveness

Access the 19 page report here: https://justsecurity.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=96b766fb1c8a55bbe9b0cdc21&id=581aa354ef&e=21d70b8314

Will some political factions brand this as "fake news?"

China-backed disinformation and influence campaigns are mimicking U.S. voters and targeting political candidates with improved sophistication

​September 2023

Microsoft Threat Intelligence

Sophistication, scope, and scale:

Digital threats from East

Asia increase in breadth and

effectiveness

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11. Marines draw inspiration from drug runners for unmanned resupply boat

Learn from any source - friends and adversaries.

Marines draw inspiration from drug runners for unmanned resupply boat

Defense News · by Megan Eckstein · September 7, 2023

ARLINGTON, Va. — As the U.S. Marine Corps considers how to move weapons around contested waters to resupply forces ashore, it’s copying an unusual source: drug traffickers.

Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, said at the Defense News Conference on Wednesday that logistics remains one of the toughest aspects of the service’s new way of fighting, which calls for distributed, small units across a wide area.

Whereas Marines can often pre-position food, water and spare parts with allies and partners, doing so for missiles and munitions often isn’t an option. And with an enemy looking to cripple the American force by choking off its supply lines, resupplying small units with crewed ships is a risky proposition.

So the Corps is testing a prototype called the Autonomous Low-Profile Vessel.

“We just copied the drug lords down in [Joint Interagency Task Force] South running drugs. They’re hard for us to find, so now we figured, yeah, it works,” Heckl said.

The prototype the Marines have today can carry two Naval Strike Missiles into about 4 feet of water, where Marines would then pull the missiles onto the beach and to the nearest missile battery in need of resupply, Heckl explained. The Naval Strike Missile is the anti-ship missile used in the NMESIS weapon, or Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System.

Heckl, who is the Marine Corps’ requirements officer, told reporters after his on-stage remarks that he wasn’t sure how many of these Autonomous Low-Profile Vessels the service may buy. But because of their low cost, he said, “they’re almost expendable” — something that will be important in contested waters where, if spotted, they’d likely be the targets of enemy weapons.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, which falls under his command, is experimenting with a prototype. Heckl said he hopes the service starts buying these unmanned vessels within a couple years. He added that it could become a family of systems, depending on whether a two-missile resupply drone proves valuable during experimentation or if Marines find they need something larger or smaller.

The Corps plans to bring the Autonomous Low-Profile Vessel to the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 4 event in the spring to test the resupply tool in a major exercise with joint and coalition partners.

More broadly, Heckl said the Corps is considering a range of autonomous options to solve contested logistics problems. “You should try to go after everything autonomous. If you take the air-breather out of it, things get simpler; they typically get more efficient and they get less expensive.”

Heckl pointed to the expeditionary fast transport ship Apalachicola, built at Austal USA’s production line to include autonomy features that allow it to operate for 30 days without a human crew’s intervention. He explained the ship has conducted 1,500 nautical miles of autonomous operations, with humans onboard as a backup but not driving or maintaining the vessel. This could be an attractive option for moving much larger quantities of supplies around, he added.

This intra-theater lift ship can travel at 45 knots —faster than most U.S. Navy ships — and has a massive payload bay inside that could be outfitted to support dispersed Marine units in several ways.

“I want unmanned, autonomous everything, if we can get there,” Heckl said.

About Megan Eckstein

Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.

12. Drone Strikes Rock Russian City That Is Home to Key Military Base

Drone Strikes Rock Russian City That Is Home to Key Military Base

By Marc Santora

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Sept. 7, 2023

The New York Times · by Marc Santora · September 8, 2023

Ukraine never acknowledges strikes on Russian soil, but the incursions are happening with increasing frequency.

Russian investigators and workers examine damage following a drone attack in downtown Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on Thursday.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Sept. 7, 2023

Explosions rocked the area around one of Russia’s largest military hubs before dawn on Thursday, and local officials later said that air defenses had shot down two drones.

At least one blast was heard in the city of Rostov-on-Don, which is home to Russia’s southern military headquarters and is a command center for its forces in Ukraine. In June, the city drew world attention when mercenary fighters from the Wagner military company faced off with regular Russian soldiers there in a short-lived uprising.

On Thursday, Russian news outlets posted a series of videos showing an explosion in the center of Rostov-on-Don. The Russian Defense Ministry said that drone attacks in other regions were thwarted.

Vasily Golubev, the regional governor of Rostov, said debris that fell after air defenses downed the drones had damaged cars and buildings, injuring one person. One drone fell in the city center, he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app, listing an address that is across the street from the military headquarters. Another was shot down outside the city in the western part of the region, he said.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made several official visits to Rostov-on-Don since the start of the war. His most recent visit was on Aug. 19, when he received reports from Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces, and various commanders and senior officers, according to the Kremlin.

As a matter of official policy, the Ukrainian government does not comment on whether it has had a hand in the growing number of strikes across the border in Russia. But officials in Kyiv have become increasingly vocal in defending such strikes as warranted. President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the strikes as a “fair and just” way to bring the war home to Russia.

Last week, a wave of exploding drones targeted six Russian regions, including an airfield near the border with Estonia, a NATO member, where military cargo planes were damaged. In recent days, the airports around Moscow have had to temporarily suspend flights nearly every morning because of drone activity.

The forays are a sign, analysts say, that even as Kyiv has begged Western allies to supply long-range weapons, its own arms makers have built a homegrown arsenal that is capable of hitting Russian territory at a great distance by land, air and sea.

The strikes in Russian territory have not caused remotely as much damage as Moscow’s deadly attacks on Ukrainian cities, which often target civilian areas.

A photograph released by the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Press Office showing a war crimes prosecutor inspecting the site of a Russian drone attack in Izmail on Thursday.Credit...Ukrainian Prosecutor Press Office, via Associated Press

On Thursday, for the fourth time in five days, Russia attacked Izmail, a port city on the Danube River, said Oleg Kiper, the head of the region’s military administration. Two people were injured, the local prosecutor’s office said.

On a visit to Ukraine on Thursday, the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, praised “the extraordinary resilience of the Ukrainian people” while touring a school in the northern Chernihiv region, where Russian forces kept Ukrainian civilians hostage, including children, early in the war last year.

Earlier, Mr. Blinken, who spent two days in Ukraine before leaving Thursday night, met with state border guards near Kyiv and also with a demining team working to clear roughly 11 acres of unexploded ordnance that were scattered by an explosion. A day earlier, he met with Mr. Zelensky and announced more than $1 billion in new military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken looks at weapons as he tours a State Border Guard of Ukraine Detached Commandant Office of Security and Resource Supply site in the Kyiv Oblast, on Thursday.Credit...Pool photo by Brendan Smialowski

As limited as the incursions onto Russian soil are, they may nevertheless be taking a toll.

Even before the latest strikes, Frederick B. Hodges, a former top U.S. Army commander in Europe, said that the attacks inside Russia were having a cumulative effect. They may be hurting the economy, he said, and heightening tensions in a Russian military command already unsettled by the Wagner mutiny and the setbacks in the war in Ukraine.

“You can be sure people are getting chewed out,” General Hodges said in an interview. “There is going to be a lot of turmoil in the command structure.”

Russia’s air defense systems, largely designed to counter NATO air power, have the ability to limit the effectiveness of the strikes, he said, but the Kremlin’s war planners may have to reposition aircraft and redeploy military assets to counter the growing Ukrainian threat.

“Those have to come from somewhere, so there is going to be a loss of protection somewhere,” General Hodges said.

Erin Mendell, Constant Méheut and Valeriya Safronova contributed reporting.

Marc Santora has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia. He was previously based in London as an international news editor focused on breaking news events and earlier the bureau chief for East and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa. More about Marc Santora

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Drone Strike Jolts Home Of Russian Military Base

The New York Times · by Marc Santora · September 8, 2023

13. Pentagon expects to release its annual China report in mid-October

Pentagon expects to release its annual China report in mid-October

Reuters

WASHINGTON, Sept 6 (Reuters) - The Pentagon expects to release its closely-watched annual report on China's military modernization and defense strategy in mid-October, although the timing could shift, a senior U.S. defense official said on Wednesday.

The annual report offers a snapshot of everything from China's nuclear forces to its pressure on Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing sees as its own, and which receives sharp criticism from Beijing.

"It will be, as always, an important document and we'll do whatever we can to make it accessible to audiences and really highlight what's new there. Because it is a pretty meaty document," said Ely Ratner, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs.

Last year, the Pentagon report predicted China would likely have a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035 if it continues with the current pace of its nuclear buildup.

China's defence ministry responded by saying the U.S. was "gesticulating and absurdly guessing about the modernisation of China's nuclear forces."

Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali Editing by Marguerita Choy

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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14. 5 Things to Watch as Biden Heads for G20 Summit

The five:

A new Middle East Railway?

On Biden’s G20 wish list: Bigger role for the World Bank

The Xi factor

The Ukraine question

Modi’s moment

5 Things to Watch as Biden Heads for G20 Summit

Ukraine divisions and Xi Jinping's absence will cast shadows as India rolls out the red carpet for world leaders

Published 09/08/23 05:00 AM ET

Nikhil Kumar

themessenger.com · September 8, 2023

The war in Ukraine and the absence of China's leader will cast shadows over the G20 summit this weekend, as leaders of the world’s largest economies come together in India for their annual meeting.

U.S. President Joe Biden and nearly two dozen other world leaders are headed to the Indian capital New Delhi for the two-day conference. The official agenda covers a range of global issues—from food security to bolstering financial resources devoted to fighting climate change. The meeting is also likely to see an expansion of G20 membership to include the African Union.

But progress on these and other topics may be limited by the absence of key players—in particular, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, whose decision to skip the meetings has already raised questions about the G20 and its ability to tackle major global issues without China at the head table.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin will also skip this year’s G20; Moscow will be represented by the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

Beyond the absentees, and amid pre-summit differences over what the G20 as a whole will say about the Ukraine war, the meetings will be an opportunity for India’s Narendra Modi to boost his country’s—and his own—profile on the world stage.

Here are a few people and issues worth watching as the G20 gets underway.

A new Middle East Railway?

Infrastructure and development are always on the table at the G20 gatherings, and President Biden and his counterparts from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and India are reportedly working on an infrastructure deal that would link Persian Gulf and other Arab countries in a new network of railways.

Axios reported Thursday that the countries involved hope to announce the deal during the Saturday G20 sessions, and that the network would include sea links from Gulf ports to India.

Axios cited Biden administration officials saying that the potential deal is part of an effort to match China's infrastructure projects in the Middle East. It also comes as the U.S. is pursuing a broad diplomatic effort in the region that may ultimately bring a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

On Biden’s G20 wish list: Bigger role for the World Bank

Another key G20 issue involving global finance and infrastructure: a U.S. push to reform the World Bank. The Biden administration wants the Washington-based body to play a bigger role in financing international development projects and climate change mitigation as a way of countering China’s overseas lending.

"That's one of our main focuses heading into the G20: delivering on an agenda fundamentally reshaping and scaling up the multilateral development banks, especially the World Bank," White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters this week.

The U.S., which nominated the former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga to lead the institution earlier this year, wants a World Bank that funds infrastructure and other projects in ways that limit China’s ability to expand its role as a lender to less developed nations.

But some G20 countries will need convincing, and there are worries in poorer nations that the World Bank is already too driven by the priorities of rich Western powers such as the U.S.

The Xi factor

While the U.S. works to counter China's global influence, Xi Jinping’s absence will hang over this year’s G20.

China, which will be represented by Xi’s deputy, Li Qiang, hasn’t said why Xi, who recently traveled to South Africa to attend a summit of the BRICS nations, won’t attend. That has led to a range of theories—from whispers about problems at home (one report suggested Xi had been reprimanded by Communist Party elders for China’s recent economic troubles) to tensions with India, which are long-standing but have spiked recently.

For some, Xi’s absence is also the latest evidence of a worrisome trend: China’s refusal to engage with other world powers, particularly Western countries and their allies.

Over the past year and a half, China has stood beside Russia as it prosecutes its invasion of Ukraine—despite repeated calls from Washington and Europe for Xi to rethink his strategy. Meanwhile, tensions have risen with the U.S. over Taiwan and a range of trade and other economic issues.

A recent Reuters series of interviews with more than 10 foreign envoys based in China highlighted how difficult it was becoming for diplomats to get access to Chinese officials. Several Western envoys told the news agency that access to Chinese officials, or even scholars from think tanks linked to the Chinese state, had declined sharply since the Covid pandemic.

All this matters--at the G20 and beyond--because of China’s clout on the global stage. As the world’s second-largest economy and a growing military power, China is central to dealing with global issues ranging from Ukraine to climate change to public health. Which is why Xi’s absence from the G20 negotiating table has many wondering whether the summit can be effective without him.

The Ukraine question

The war in Ukraine is in its 19th month, with no signs of an endgame on the horizon and many signs of divisions among the G20 nations.

For the West, the line on Ukraine has been clear from the start: Russian aggression must be punished, territorial gains reversed, and Moscow should be isolated on the world stage.

But those views aren’t shared by several of the G20 nations--China in particular, but also G20 host India, a U.S. ally that has resisted cutting ties with Moscow. Russia’s trade links with India, for example, have actually deepened since the outbreak of the war, with Russia shipping record amounts of oil to India. Even NATO ally Turkey, which has supplied weapons to Ukraine, has continued to do business with Russia.

These divisions have led to disagreements in the runup to the G20, as officials attempt to hammer out a joint statement on the war for the assembled leaders to sign this weekend.

“There is a push to make it happen, because we want a Delhi declaration, but there are important differences over the approach on the conflict,” said an Indian official involved in the preparations for the summit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the negotiations.

And beyond the differences that the various G20 countries may have, any joint statement will suffer from the fact that Russia itself is a G20 member.

“To get absolute consensus on a statement on Ukraine is challenging because you’ve got Russia seated at the table, albeit not at the leader level because Putin isn’t going to be there,” said Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor.

Modi’s moment

Whatever happens with the formal agenda, India’s Modi will be worth watching--as he tries to make the most of a showcase for his country’s clout on the world stage.

Over the past year, as India assumed the presidency of the G20, the Modi government has been holding events to promote the meeting across the country—using it to project an image of Modi as a global leader ahead of elections next year.

These domestic imperatives were clear in an interview Modi gave to a local outlet this week.

“When global leaders meet me, they are filled with a sense of optimism about India,” he said. “They are also convinced that India has a lot to offer and must play a larger role in shaping the global future. This has also been witnessed in their support for our work through the G20 platform.”

A global spotlight can also shine on uncomfortable areas, of course, and in advance of the New Delhi summit, critics have been pointing out the darker side: that on Modi’s watch, India’s democratic credentials have taken a beating. In Modi’s India, several writers and activists have faced arrest or other forms of intimidation for deviating from the government line. Modi’s BJP party has also been accused of fanning sectarian tensions, with several instances of members of India’s minority Muslim community facing violence at the hands of Hindus, who form the majority of India’s population.

As the Guardian newspaper put it in an editorial this week: “Mr. Modi’s dangerous majoritarianism is too easily overlooked by the West, as the G20 glad-handing will show.” The paper said that while the U.S. and its European allies may feel a need to soft-pedal criticism because it needs India as a counterweight to China, a key question is: “at what cost (does this come) to democracy and human rights?”

themessenger.com · September 8, 2023

15. Apple Becomes the Biggest U.S.-China Pawn Yet

Apple Becomes the Biggest U.S.-China Pawn Yet

Few companies are safe if Apple isn’t immune to China retaliation

https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-becomes-the-biggest-u-s-china-pawn-yet-ad093256

By Dan Gallagher

Follow

Updated Sept. 8, 2023 12:01 am ET

iPhone 14 Pro models being advertised outside Apple’s flagship store in Shanghai. PHOTO: CFOTO/ZUMA PRESS

Apple AAPL -2.92%decrease; red down pointing triangle might be the king of tech. But in the growing cold economic war between the world’s two biggest economies, it is becoming just another game piece—albeit a big one. Still the world’s largest public company by market value, Apple has seen that value take a notable hit this week on increasing signs that its business in China might be coming under threat.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the Chinese government is banning the iPhone and other foreign-branded devices from use by workers at central government agencies. Bloomberg reported Thursday that such a ban might also be extended to state-owned enterprises and other government-backed entities. That could amount to a significant swath of people in a state-led economy with a population totaling more than 1.4 billion.

According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, about 56.3 million urban workers were employed by “state-owned units” in 2021. Those jobs commanded an average wage about 8% above the national urban average—an attractive segment for a company specializing in premium devices. And because Apple now ships roughly 230 million iPhones globally every year, 56 million would be a notable chunk to take out of the pool of potential buyers—especially in a mature global smartphone market with low growth prospects. 

On top of that, Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has launched a new smartphone reportedly delivering 5G-like speed, despite a U.S. ban on the type of advanced chips typically necessary for such devices. The new device called the Mate 60 Pro sold out within hours and has already amassed back-orders. It also conveniently launched just ahead of Apple’s expected unveiling of this year’s iPhone lineup at an event scheduled for next week. 

Apple’s stock price has thus slumped nearly 7% over the past two days, costing the company about $194 billion in market value. That might seem excessive considering the many unknowns about the reported iPhone bans and how they could ultimately play out. Also, China has at least some interest in not overly harming a major local employer during a time of growing unemployment. One Chinese city alone reportedly has more than one million workers building Apple products or employed in related jobs. 

But Apple’s stock price has been on a strong run, rising 46% for the year ahead of this week’s news. That had put the shares near 30-times forward earnings, a historically high multiple for a cyclical, hardware-focused business. The shares were actually exceeding Wall Street’s median price target for the first time in 18 months just ahead of the company’s latest quarterly results in early August, according to FactSet. 

The recent developments are also just the latest challenge Apple has faced in the country that now serves as its third-largest geographical segment, accounting for 19% of the company’s total revenue in the 12-month period ending in June.

Apple’s sales in its Greater China segment also generated pretax operating margins that were 12 percentage points higher than the company’s total during its most recent fiscal year. Covid-19 restrictions and social unrest crimped production of iPhone Pro models in China last year, resulting in delayed shipments during a key sales period. Apple is trying to diversify its manufacturing footprint, with the company now building devices in countries such as India and Vietnam. 

But China is still the company’s largest manufacturing base by far. And the iPhone is still Apple’s largest business, accounting for 52% of revenue. That ironically makes Apple a relatively easy target in the economic war between the U.S. and China. The U.S. has enacted severe restrictions on shipments of advanced chips and related technology to China, which has in turn responded by imposing its own restrictions on U.S. businesses such as memory-chip maker Micron.

China has also deployed other creative punishments for U.S. firms, such as withholding approval on major mergers and acquisitions, throwing a wrench into growth plans for major U.S. semiconductor companies such as 

Qualcomm QCOM -7.22%decrease; red down pointing triangle, Intel INTC 3.24%increase; green up pointing triangle and Applied Materials AMAT -3.23%decrease; red down pointing triangle. Throwing a rock at Apple also creates major ripples across the tech pond. The company is one of the world’s largest buyers of chips for its devices, so the PHLX Semiconductor Index slipped 2% Thursday while companies such as 

Qorvo QRVO -7.08%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Skyworks SWKS -7.35%decrease; red down pointing triangle, which supply key radio-frequency chips used in the iPhone, slid more than 7% each. And companies such as HP HPQ -2.69%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Dell DELL -2.11%decrease; red down pointing triangle—U.S. personal-computer makers that also have major manufacturing facilities in China—each saw their shares fall more than 2%.If Apple can’t dodge the bullets between the U.S. and China, who really can?

Write to Dan Gallagher at dan.gallagher@wsj.com

16. The inside story of how the Navy spent billions on the 'Little Crappy Ship'

​A long read.

The inside story of how the Navy spent billions on the 'Little Crappy Ship'

Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future. Instead, they broke down across the globe. Now the service is getting rid of them.

BY JOAQUIN SAPIEN

REPORTER, PROPUBLICA

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023 03:23 PM ET

COMMENTARY

NAVY

ACQUISITION

CONGRESS

defenseone.com · by Joaquin Sapien

In July 2016, warships from more than two dozen nations gathered off the coasts of Hawaii and Southern California to join the United States in the world’s largest naval exercise. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and others sent hundreds of destroyers, aircraft carriers and warplanes. They streamed in long lines across the ocean, symbols of power and prestige.

The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and light, able to combat enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.

In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons. Two of the $500 million ships had suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months. The Freedom’s performance during the exercise, showing off its ability to destroy underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships’ record on the world stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the first LCS built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years earlier.

But like the LCS program’s reputation, the Freedom was in bad shape. Dozens of pieces of equipment on board were undergoing repairs. Training crews for the new class of ships had proven more difficult than anticipated. The sailors aboard the Freedom had not passed an exam demonstrating their ability to operate some of the ship’s most important systems.

As the day to launch approached, the pressure mounted. Top officers visited the ship repeatedly. The Freedom’s sailors understood that theirs was a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port,” according to Navy documents obtained by ProPublica.

The Freedom’s Capt. Michael Wohnhaas consulted with his officers. Despite crippling problems that had left one of the ship’s engines inoperable, he and his superiors decided the vessel could rely on its three others for the exercise.

The Freedom completed its mission, but the accomplishment proved hollow. Five days after the ship returned to port, a maintenance check revealed that the faltering engine had suffered “galloping corrosion” from saltwater during the exercise. A sailor described the engine room as “a horror show” with rust eating away at the machinery. One of the Navy’s newest ships would spend the next two years undergoing repairs at a cost of millions.

It took investigators months to unravel the mystery of the engine’s breakdown. But this much was clear at the outset: The Freedom’s collapse was another unmistakable sign that the Navy had spent billions of dollars and more than a decade on warships with rampant and crippling flaws.

The ongoing problems with the LCS have been well documented for years, in news articles, government reports and congressional hearings. Each ship ultimately cost more than twice the original estimate. Worse, they were hobbled by an array of mechanical failures and were never able to carry out the missions envisaged by their champions.

ProPublica set out to trace how ships with such obvious shortcomings received support from Navy leadership for nearly two decades. We reviewed thousands of pages of public records and tracked down naval and shipbuilding insiders involved at every stage of construction.

Our examination revealed new details on why the LCS never delivered on its promises. Top Navy leaders repeatedly dismissed or ignored warnings about the ships’ flaws. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. Staunch advocates in the Navy circumvented checks meant to ensure that ships that cost billions can do what they are supposed to do.

Contractors who stood to profit spent millions lobbying Congress, whose members, in turn, fought to build more ships in their home districts than the Navy wanted. Scores of frustrated sailors recall spending more time fixing the ships than sailing them.

Our findings echo the conclusions of a half-century of internal and external critiques of America’s process for building new weapons systems. The saga of the LCS is a vivid illustration of how Congress, the Pentagon and defense contractors can work in concert — and often against the good of the taxpayers and America’s security — to spawn what President Dwight D. Eisenhower described in his farewell address as the “military industrial complex.”

“There is a lot of money flowing through this vast ecosystem, and somehow the only thing all these people can agree on is more, more, more,” said Lyle Goldstein, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College who is now investigating the costs of war at Brown University. “Unfortunately, I just think it might be in the nature of our system.”

This year, the Defense Department asked Congress to approve a staggering $842 billion — nearly half of the federal government’s discretionary spending — to keep America safe in what the Pentagon says is an ever more perilous world. As House and Senate leaders negotiate the final number, it is unlikely they will spend much time discussing ways to prevent future debacles like the LCS.

Such a conversation would cover hundreds of billions of misspent taxpayer money on projects from nearly every branch of the military: The F-35 fighter jet, deployed by the Navy, Marines, and Air Force, is more than a decade late and $183 billion over budget. The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, cost $13 billion and has yet to prove it can reliably launch planes. And the Army’s Future Combat System was largely abandoned in 2009 after the military had dedicated more than $200 billion on a battlefield intelligence network meant to link troops, tanks and robots.

The LCS program offers another clear lesson, one seen in almost every infamous procurement disaster. Once a massive project gains momentum and defense contractors begin hiring, it is politically easier to throw good money after bad.

Stopping a weapons program in its tracks means people losing work and admitting publicly that enormous sums of taxpayer money have been wasted. In the case of the LCS, it took an array of naval leaders and two consecutive defense secretaries to finally stop the program. Yet even after the Navy said it only needed 32 littoral combat ships, far fewer than the more than 50 originally planned, members of Congress forced the Pentagon to buy three more.

Former Lt. Renaldo Rodgers remembered laboring in San Diego from sunrise to sunset for months to ready the Freedom for a 2012 trial mission to San Francisco, only to have the ship break down during pretrial tests. Rodgers initially thought the futuristic ship looked like something out of “Star Trek.” But he soon learned it was no Starship Enterprise. It became the laughingstock of the waterfront, with other sailors deriding it as “Dry Dock One,” because it so rarely left port.

“It sucks,” he said. The LCS was “a missed opportunity.”

The Navy has tried to retire many of the littoral combat ships years before they reach their expected lifespan. Ships designed to last 25 years are being mothballed after seeing less than a decade of service.

In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”

“The Navy needs a more ready, capable, and lethal fleet more than a bigger fleet that’s less ready, less capable, and less lethal,” the statement read, saying the money would be better spent on higher-priority alternatives.

The cost of the program has gnawed at John Pendleton, who for years was a top military analyst at the Government Accountability Office and has studied the rise and fall of the LCS as closely as anyone in Washington.

Now retired, but unable to shake what he views as one of the most wasteful projects he’d encountered in his nearly 35-year career, Pendleton reviewed budgetary documents and GAO reports for ProPublica going back decades. His conclusion: The lifetime cost of the LCS class may reach $100 billion or more.

“In the end,” he said, “the taxpayers get fewer than 30 limited-survivability, single-mission ships.”

Pendleton is hardly alone in his assessment. Many regard the tortured path of the LCS as evidence of a damaging strain of hubris that runs rampant in the world of military innovation.

“It’s this zombie program phenomenon where everybody knows deep down we are going in the wrong direction,” said Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain, who now works on Pentagon reform for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. “But because so much money is involved and so much political capital is invested, you can’t stop the train until the problems are so overwhelming that no one can feign support for it.”

The two narratives of the ship — unstoppable in Congress, imperiled at sea — intertwined alarmingly during one 10-month stretch beginning in December 2015. During that period, five of the vessels broke down across the globe, each illuminating a new set of problems and effectively proving the critics right.

The Freedom was the third ship to fail. Captured in a Navy investigation more than 600 pages long, the incident stands out as a particularly devastating and detailed example of the Navy’s plight.

An Admiral’s Vision

In 2002, Adm. Vernon Clark stared down from the deck of a Danish warship at a pier in Denmark and watched a demonstration that would shape the future of the U.S. Navy.

A large deck gun sat below. On the orders of a Danish navy official, a crane hoisted it off the pier and installed it on the ship. Within 40 minutes, sailors were rotating the weapon to prepare it for operation.

No American ship could swap weapons on and off deck like that. But the Danes made reconfiguring a vessel to carry out different missions look easy. Clark, the head of the U.S. Navy at the time, marveled at the technology.

“This is it. Of course, this is it,” Clark remembered telling himself. “I didn’t know that they could do that.”

For Clark, the Danish demonstration crystalized his idea for a new ship that would be different from anything the Navy had done before. It would be small, relatively lightly armed and operated by about 40 sailors — far less than the average warship crew size. The weapons systems would not be permanently installed.

Instead, he envisioned a sort of Swiss Army knife for the Navy. Armed with one set of weaponry, it could hunt and destroy submarines. But if the threat shifted, it could be quickly outfitted to detect and clear underwater mines or to fight other warships.

As Clark envisaged it, the new ships could be deployed in coastal, or littoral, waters, where the Navy needed to expand its presence around the world: in the Persian Gulf to participate in the war in Iraq, in the Caribbean to track down gunrunners and in Southeast Asia to help smaller allied navies. They would be one of the fastest warships in the world — able to fight near shore, outrun larger vessels or hunt down the small ones increasingly popular with foes like Iran. The ships would be built quickly, in large numbers and at low cost.

The first red flags emerged here, at the conception of the LCS. As Clark began sharing his vision, concerns began to brew among Navy shipbuilding experts, who feared it was overly ambitious and technologically infeasible. Clark was unbowed.

He was an unlikely candidate to begin a revolution in shipbuilding. With an undergraduate degree from Evangel College, a small Christian school in Missouri, and an MBA from the University of Arkansas, he hardly fit the mold of a prototypical chief of naval operations who was groomed for leadership from his earliest days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

A self-professed “radical,” at times irreverent and impassioned, he wanted to run the Navy like a business, streamlining training, rooting out misspent dollars, retaining sailors who shined and getting rid of those who did not.

He believed the Navy needed a more cost-effective and technologically advanced fleet. Many of the Navy’s ships had been built during the Cold War. Massive carriers, destroyers, battleships and cruisers were facing retirement, in part because updating them with modern technology was prohibitively expensive, Clark said.

In keeping with his business background, Clark wanted as few people on the new ships as possible. “What I really want is an unmanned ship that’s got R2-D2 in it,” he said, recalling his thinking at the time.

Doubt dogged Clark’s dream from the start. Congress agreed to begin developing the ship in 2003 — despite a House Appropriations Committee report that warned that there was “no ‘road map’ of how the Navy will achieve the system required.”

One former admiral who worked on plans for the ship said Clark’s insistence on speed — up to 45 knots, or about 50 miles per hour — created immediate problems. A ship cannot go that fast for very long without running out of gas, which meant it could never stray far from its fuel supply. Its small size — many in the Navy joked that LCS stood for Little Crappy Ship — limited the weapons it could carry.

The former admiral said he raised concerns with his superiors but wished he had been more vocal. “As a subordinate naval officer, when your boss tells you, ‘Here’s a shovel, go dig the hole,’ you go dig the hole.”

The Navy pushed ahead. In May 2004, it awarded contracts to two teams of defense contractors to build up to two prototypes, each of their own design.

Both teams had lobbied heavily to win the contracts. Lockheed Martin, which partnered with the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin, plastered the Washington, D.C., Metro system with advertisements extolling the ability of its proposed ship.

The other team, a joint venture between General Dynamics and Australian shipbuilder Austal, planned to build its version at a shipyard in Alabama.

In response to the Navy’s goals, the contractors both based their original ship designs partly on high-speed ferries for cars or passengers, an unusual choice for a vessel meant for war not transportation.

With an emphasis on speed and dexterity, the ships were not designed to withstand much damage. Clark saw them fighting under the protection of larger, more lethal ships. To him, investing too much in protecting the ship with extensive armor would make it too heavy to operate near shore.

“Show me a ship that can take a direct hit with today’s modern weaponry and survive,” he said. “Why spend all this money pretending?”

This argument disquieted lawmakers. Toward the end of Clark’s tenure, members of Congress began to ask whether this meant the Navy had deemed LCS sailors expendable.

After Clark left the Navy in July 2005, the Navy responded to the concerns, redrawing the blueprints for the ships as they were being built to better protect sailors.

Costs began to rise dramatically. The ships were originally supposed to cost no more than $220 million each, which had helped sell them to Congress in the first place. But the final price tag rose to about $500 million each.

Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary who became a key proponent of the ship, said many in the Navy thought the initial estimate was unrealistic. “The Navy never believed it, at least the people who had to build the ship,” he said.

Despite the rising costs, the LCS soon gained a new champion so devoted to its construction that he led a yearslong campaign to resist efforts by two secretaries of defense to scale back the program.

A 'Foreseeable' Disaster

On the morning of Nov. 23, 2015, the USS Milwaukee set out across the frigid waters of the Great Lakes for its maiden voyage. The cost overruns had made headlines, but with the fifth ship in the water, Navy officials were hoping the vessel’s performance would lessen the growing doubts about the project.

The Navy planned to sail the Milwaukee from the shipyard on the shores of Lake Michigan in Marinette, Wisconsin, to its new home port of San Diego. From there, it would eventually join its sister ship, the USS Fort Worth, in helping to counter the Chinese navy’s expanding presence in the Western Pacific.

In a press tour days before the launch, Cmdr. Kendall Bridgewater evinced confidence, proclaiming that the enemy “would be hard pressed to find a vessel that could come up against us.”

But the ship wouldn’t need a fight to suffer its first defeat. Its worst enemy would be its own engine.

On Dec. 11, about three weeks into the two-month journey, a software failure severely damaged the Milwaukee’s combining gear — a complex mechanism that connects the ship’s diesel engines and its gas turbines to the propulsion shafts, producing the power necessary for it to reach top speeds.

A Navy salvage ship had to tow it some 40 miles for repairs at a base near Norfolk, Virginia. The ship hadn’t made it halfway down the East Coast — let alone to the South China Sea — before breaking down. If the Milwaukee were a brand new car, this would be the equivalent of stalling on its way out of the dealership.

Some former officers look back on the breakdown and those that followed as a clear violation of a cardinal principle in Navy shipbuilding: to “buy a few and test a lot.” But with the LCS, the Navy was doing the opposite. Commanders were learning about the flaws of the ships as they were being deployed.“This is a totally foreseeable outcome,” said Jay Bynum, a former rear admiral who served as an assistant to the vice chief of naval operations as the ships were entering the fleet. “Just think about it, Toyota checks out all of this before the car hits the showroom floor. What if the engineering guys there said, ‘Well, we think this is how the engine will work, but let’s just start selling them.’”

'Do We Want This Ship to Survive?'

On a breezy Friday in March 2011, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus addressed a crowd of sharp-dressed politicians and begrimed workers gathered at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama.

Mabus, tall and dapper, announced the names for two of the Navy’s newest littoral combat ships. One would be called the USS Jackson — a reference to the capital of his home state, Mississippi.

As he looked out at the waters of Mobile Bay, Mabus lauded the new class of ships that had emerged from Clark’s vision a decade before.

“It’s a drug runner’s worst nightmare, it’s a submarine’s worst nightmare,” he declared, speaking in his soft Southern drawl. “It’s anybody who wants to do harm to the United States of America or the United States Navy, it’s their worst nightmare.”

In fact, the LCS was on its way to becoming one of the Navy’s worst nightmares — and Mabus was its biggest cheerleader.

Better known for his political acumen than his military experience, Mabus served three years in the Navy in the early ’70s, including time at sea as a lieutenant junior grade on board the USS Little Rock.

Afterward, he rose through Democratic ranks to become governor of Mississippi, an ambassador to Saudi Arabia and eventually the longest-serving Navy secretary since World War I.

During his tenure as the Navy’s civilian leader, he put his stamp on the service by pursuing a range of progressive policies including gender integration and the use of renewable fuels. He also took advantage of a unique perk: tossing out the ceremonial first pitch at major league stadiums across the country.

His most transformative view on U.S. military strategy was his belief in the need for more ships.

The fleet had shrunk to less than half the 600 it wielded toward the end of the Cold War. China was rapidly expanding its navy and Russia was investing heavily in new submarines.

Mabus, who became secretary in 2009, pursued a plan that would make him one of the Navy’s most prodigious shipbuilders.

In an interview with ProPublica, he reiterated the “sheer importance of numbers” for the fleet. He backed the LCS, he said, because it would help meet an array of the Navy’s needs as fast as possible.

Even as a growing number of senior officers began to criticize the ships, Mabus expanded the program, drawing on his political connections and savvy dealmaking to defend the LCS against powerful opponents on the Hill and in the Pentagon.

Mabus acknowledged that his support of the LCS project put him at odds with some of the Navy’s top officers and the nation’s civilian military leadership. He recalled resistance from what he dubbed the “Alumni Association,” powerful former Navy officers who he said reflexively and unfairly disliked the ship because it was so different from anything else the Navy had built. For Mabus, his key role as civilian leader of a tradition-bound military service was overcoming its hostility to change and innovation.

Chief among the old-school critics, he said, was Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and decorated Navy veteran whose father and paternal grandfather had both been Navy admirals. He, along with Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, had emerged as skeptics of the LCS as leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both were alarmed by the costs, which had soared to more than $750 million apiece for the initial ships.

In response to such concerns, the Navy lowered the price by pitting the two teams of contractors against each other in a bidding war. Austal and Lockheed Martin turned in two different ship designs with similar price tags. Navy leaders dithered over which to select.

In the fall of 2010, Work, the Navy undersecretary at the time, said Mabus gathered senior naval leaders together to ask a blunt question: “Do we want this ship to survive?”

When the group answered yes, Mabus proposed a politically adroit solution: The Navy would select both companies to build the new ships in two shipyards, one in Alabama and one in Wisconsin.

Mabus calculated that he would win the support of congressional delegations from both places by delivering thousands of jobs and millions in spending to each, Work recalled. Spreading the wealth would increase the ships’ chances of survival. But it would also make the program harder to kill when problems arose.

“He was looking at the problem in a different way than we were looking at it because he was a professional politician,” Work said.

Mabus’ plan concerned some Navy leaders. The Austal ship, which was the basis for the Independence class, would be an aluminum trimaran — a ship with three hulls. The Lockheed Martin ship, which formed the basis for the Freedom class, would be a more conventional monohull forged of steel. The radically different designs meant that the ships could not trade parts or sailors, making them more expensive to maintain and crew. In addition, the contracts called for the contractors to build a total of 20 vessels, a large commitment for a relatively unproven warship.

But Mabus and his team argued that those additional costs would be dwarfed by the savings the Navy would enjoy in the long run — one top official found that the Navy would save $2.9 billion by awarding long-term contracts to both companies.

To Mabus, it was a win-win for all involved: each ship had its own benefits, taxpayers would get a better price, the Navy would get more ships faster and the shipyards would get more jobs.

He told ProPublica that keeping the shipyards active was always a “consideration, but it wasn’t the main driver” behind the decision. The real incentive, he said, was price, not politics.

But the political payoff soon became evident.

McCain held a hearing, where he excoriated the Navy. “The story of this ship is one that makes me ashamed and embarrassed as a former Navy person and as a person who’s responsible to the taxpayers of my state,” he said. (McCain died in 2018.)

But in a last-minute budget bill to keep the government open in late December, Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican, inserted language to buy ships from both shipyards.

“He made sure it happened,” a Shelby spokesman said at the time.

And Levin, the Michigan Democrat once critical of the ships, now supported them. The Marinette shipyard is just over the Michigan border in Wisconsin. Levin called the plan to build 10 ships there “a major boost for the region’s economy” and applauded the Navy in its efforts to bring costs down. (Levin died in 2021).As one former vice admiral put it, “politics is king in the shipbuilding business.”

'We Ask for Help, but There Isn’t Enough'

Just a month after the USS Milwaukee stalled in Virginia, the ship it was supposed to join in the South China Sea suffered its own embarrassing breakdown.

The USS Fort Worth was nearing the end of an otherwise successful deployment. It had helped with a search-and-rescue operation following an Indonesian commercial plane crash and participated in joint exercises with several allied navies.

But the Navy had decided to frequently rotate the small LCS crews in order to reduce burnout and, in November 2015, a new, inexperienced crew took over.

Even the commanding officer, Michael Atwell, had “few opportunities to gain valuable at sea experience” before his deployment, according to a later Navy investigation.

On Jan. 5, hundreds of gallons of fuel spilled into the ship’s main machinery room. The sailors had to spray chemical foam on the fuel to prevent it from catching fire. Then, in grueling, filthy shifts, they took turns crawling into the tight compartment to clean it up with rags and pumps.

The day after the spill, the Fort Worth pulled into a port in Singapore for a week of scheduled maintenance.

There it became clear that the ship had been “ridden hard,” according to officers interviewed in the Navy investigation. Leaks had sprung out of various parts, the engines were in bad shape, the electric generators needed work and the crew was exhausted. There was “no break, no reprieve, just increasing daily tasking,” one sailor said of their time on board.

The ship’s executive officer, the second in command, complained of a lack of support from superiors.

“We ask for help, but there isn’t enough,” he said, adding that he was told “they don’t have the bodies.”

The ship was originally supposed to leave by Jan. 12 for a “high visibility” port visit in Hong Kong. Atwell and his executive officer described a “tremendous amount of pressure” to make it happen, according to the Navy investigation.

The crew took shortcuts as it scrambled to test the engine. One of the sailors in charge of starting it skipped a routine step, failing to properly lubricate the combining gears.

“I messed up everything because I was going too fast,” the sailor later explained.

The mistake damaged the ship’s combining gear, forcing it to sit for seven months while waiting on replacement parts.

Navy leaders deemed Atwell unfit for command and removed him from his position.

Reached by phone, Atwell declined to comment.

The breakdowns on the Milwaukee and Fort Worth formed the beginning of a pattern that came to punctuate the life of the LCS program:

Ships were rushed to sea with faltering equipment. Shorthanded crews and captains without sufficient training or support tried to make them work. Breakdowns ensued. Then, the pressure to perform and restore the reputation of the program intensified anew and the cycle repeated itself.

Soon it would be the USS Freedom’s turn.

“We Were Essentially Telling a Lie”

In early 2012, sitting beneath the fluorescent glow of a Pentagon briefing room, Rear Adm. Sam Perez received a stern warning.

Weeks earlier, Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert had asked Perez to produce a report that would help him figure out how best to use the dozens of littoral combat ships that would be delivered to the Navy in the coming years.

The results were grim.

Discussing the details around a conference table, one fellow officer raised a finger to his own temple and mimicked a gun going off: Perez, he signaled, was about to risk career suicide.

It was a pattern with the LCS. Officers who criticized the ships faced consequences. An assignment to an undesirable post. Even dismissal.

Perez had found that the crews were too small. Some were stretched so thin that commanding officers had to spend time sweeping the decks, when they could have been studying intelligence reports and focusing on navigating the ship.

Contrary to what Clark observed in Denmark, the various weapons systems would not be easy to swap out. The Navy hadn’t factored in the weeks it could take for all the contractors, sailors and others who were needed to fly in from around the world to help outfit the vessels for different missions.

The two versions of the LCS complicated the problems. The designs were vastly different: They could exchange neither parts nor sailors. Perez and his staff worried that the ships would wind up sidelined because they lacked either equipment or trained crew members.

Comparing the LCS to the fleets of potential adversaries, Perez concluded that the vessels were only capable of fighting against lightly armed small, fast attack boats.

A fellow officer warned him that painting this kind of damning portrait for the highest ranking officer in the Navy, the chief naval officer, could hurt his career. At that point, the Navy had already committed to buying at least 20 more ships worth billions of dollars.

Perez had already shared some of his findings with Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mark Ferguson, the second highest ranking official in the Navy.

According to a former senior officer familiar with the events, Ferguson told Perez that he was looking at the vessels the wrong way. The small ship’s performance should be compared to a patrol boat.

Perez objected. Patrol boats aren’t supposed to clear mines, fight submarines or attack surface warships. They are far smaller, designed primarily for surveillance and interdiction.

The staffers worked on the comparison for about two weeks before they began “tearing each other up because we were essentially telling a lie,” according to the former officer who worked on the project. After a vote, they decided to stop comparing the LCS to a patrol boat.

Immediately after Perez delivered the report, he received a call from Bynum, a former rear admiral who at the time worked for Ferguson. Bynum told Perez to classify the report secret.

“That was absolutely my recommendation,” Bynum said in an interview with ProPublica. The report, he said, included a “host of vulnerabilities that didn’t need to be shared in the open press.”

At a PowerPoint presentation of his findings, Ferguson was curt. The former officer said Ferguson only allowed Perez about two words per slide, instructing him to flip to the next image before he could finish the last one.

In an interview with ProPublica, Ferguson did not recall asking Perez to compare the LCS to a patrol boat, but he acknowledged he was disappointed by key aspects of the report. Known to have a brusque style, he said he may well have sped through his presentation.

“I didn’t dispute any of the critique,” Ferguson said. “LCS had serious issues. But I wanted more in the way of recommendations on how to go forward; how to integrate them into the fleet.”

Soon after, Perez was assigned to the international relations department of the Navy. About a year after that, he became liaison to the State Department. Neither are regarded as ideal assignments for an admiral who had spent a career carrying out missions at sea.

Perez declined to comment.

For his part, Greenert said the idea that Perez was punished for speaking up was “nonsense.” On the contrary, he said it helped prompt him to increase the staffing and budget for LCS.

Around the same time, Greenert asked another senior officer, three-star Adm. Tom Copeman, to evaluate the LCS as part of a larger report on the surface fleet.

Copeman, then in charge of the fitness of the Navy’s vessels for combat, echoed concerns about the ship’s combat abilities. He thought the LCS was not lethal enough. The Navy’s contract called for 24 ships, with plans to build more than 50. Copeman recommended that the Navy halt building the ships after fulfilling the contract.

In March 2013, the memo was leaked to the trade press. Copeman immediately received calls from one of Mabus’ top staffers. He told Copeman that Mabus was extremely disappointed that Copeman had publicly disagreed with him. Copeman told him that the memo was never intended for public consumption and that he didn’t know how it got out.

, Greenert asked Copeman to retire early in mid-2013 after he had publicly expressed concerns over the fitness of the Navy’s ships for combat.

Greenert said Copeman was not asked to retire early. He said Copeman helped to convince him to ask for more weapons on the LCS.

Copeman declined to comment.

The Navy needed a lot more ships, and the LCS program was going to help provide them.

Freedom’s Troubles

About six months after two of its sister ships were docked for repairs, it was the Freedom’s turn in the spotlight.

But on July 7, 2016, the day before the ship was supposed to begin its part in the global Navy exercise, a string of equipment failures forced its captain into a bad spot: Wohnhaas had to submit a “fail to sail” message to his superiors — an embarrassing signal that the ship was not ready to go.

Working through the night, engineers on the Freedom eventually realized a part called a cannon plug used in the ship’s complicated propulsion system needed to be replaced. Without it, the ship couldn’t go anywhere.

They discovered one in Port Hueneme, about an hour north of Los Angeles. The engineer battled through five hours of Southern California traffic to pick it up and bring it back. The ship departed its port in San Diego a day late, then suffered another setback.

Three miles outside Mexican territorial waters, a loud metallic noise clanged out, startling the crew. Wohnhaas slowed the ship down but it began to drift. The crew dropped anchor to stop the ship and then steamed back to port.

He was sent back out to sea and senior officers later criticized him for holding up the mission.

Then on the evening of July 11, a leak erupted inside the main machinery room, the mechanical heart of the ship, spraying the electrical system with seawater. An inch or two pooled on the floor. If the leak wasn’t stopped immediately, it could cause short-circuiting or even a fire.

One sailor searched for the source of the leak by hand, burning his arm on a hot pipe before finding a hole seeping water. The sailors plugged the hole, but the repair backfired. It forced water to burst through a rubber seal that kept seawater out of the ship’s lubrication oil system. The water mixed with the oil, pumping a kind of emulsified goo through one of the ship’s four engines.

Two days later, the crew, again, had to return the ship to dock in San Diego. The engineer responsible for the ship while in port determined that a full repair of the engine could take as long as two weeks. Wohnhaas’ superiors rejected the idea. Time was running out for the ship to participate in the Rim of the Pacific exercise, or RIMPAC.

A Navy diesel engine expert proposed a procedure to block further corrosion of the engine with a special rinse.

A Navy expert in Philadelphia, referred to as “the guru” in the Navy investigation, approved that approach, which would allow the ship to get back to sea more quickly and complete the mission by using the ship’s three remaining engines.

Throughout the exercise, a parade of high-ranking Navy officials — including two rear admirals, a Marine Corps general, and a commodore — visited the vessel to turn up the heat on the crew and its captain.

They made clear that the Freedom’s participation in RIMPAC was “crucially important” to the entire LCS program and that there was “no appetite” for the Freedom to delay its departure. Freedom’s performance, they believed, would “perhaps modulate some of the program’s critics,” the investigation said.

Given what happened on the Fort Worth and the Milwaukee months earlier, top Navy leaders “felt pressure to deliver a ‘win’ for the program,” according to the investigation, which called the pressure on Wohnhaas “severe.”

One senior officer invoked the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Scott Swift, as wanting to use the region as a “testing grounds” for the Navy.

Reached by phone, Swift said he was a “believer in the LCS” and acknowledged that he had encouraged the Navy to test new weapons systems in the Pacific. But he emphasized that it was not an order to deploy ships at any cost.

“We made it clear if you want to take them off line, take them off line, but I am not surprised that people further down the chain didn’t feel they had that option,” he said. “The offer could have been perceived as an order, or taken advantage of by those that wanted to push harder to get a win out of LCS.”

“As a four star, if you ask for something too often people think of it as a requirement,” he said.

On the morning of July 17, 2016, the ship finally seemed ready to go.

The contractors completed the rinse and were packing up to leave. But when the chief engineer looked at samples taken from inside the engine, he was deeply worried.

“Holy shit,” he thought, according to an interview in a Navy investigation. “There’s still water in the engine.”

He sent a message to Wohnhaas that he later acknowledged was misleading because it suggested the ship was ready to go. He blamed the mistake on “not proof-reading” the text prior to sending it.

“Sir, the flush is done,” he wrote at 9:50 a.m. “I [assess] that we are still on track for tomorrow.”

Wohnhaas took this as good news and passed it on to his superiors:

“Everything is tracking toward an on-time departure,” he said in an email sent to his commodore, Warren Buller, at 11:36 a.m.

In fact, the procedure approved by the Philadelphia guru hadn’t solved the problem. Investigators would later determine the procedure could not have worked — it was meant to remove grit, not seawater, from engine oil.

The following morning, as the Freedom was preparing to depart, a senior enlisted engineer ran into a contractor he knew as Joe.

Joe told him that the engine was still contaminated.

Alarmed, the engineer discussed the situation with his supervisor, the chief engineer, who was smoking a cigarette on the front deck of the ship.

If they went to sea, the engine would rust, the engineer said. The chief engineer told him he knew it and he was on his way to tell Wohnhaas.

In an interview with investigators, the chief engineer said he told Wohnhaas something to the effect of “we can’t get underway like this, we gotta do something.”

Wohnhaas declined to comment for this story. In his interview with investigators, he said that when he learned of the contaminated samples from the chief engineer, he understood the engine was inoperable. But he was confident he could avoid further damage and complete the mission by relying on the ship’s other engines.

“There was a strong sense that we couldn’t have another LCS not meet mission,” Wohnhaas said. He did not tell his superior officers the uncomfortable fact that the engine was still contaminated because of the pressure to get underway, the investigation said.

The Freedom sailed out and detected mines in the water. The mission was a success — at least so everyone thought.

But on Aug. 3, five days after Wohnhaas returned the ship, a routine inspection revealed major damage to the engine, corrosion so extensive that the ship was docked in repairs for two years. The engine needed to be replaced.

The Navy investigation found that one failure led to another on the Freedom: The inexperienced crew used the wrong procedure to stop the leak; the Navy’s “technical community” then recommended another incorrect procedure to flush the engine; contractors executed it, providing “false hope” that it would prevent the corrosion.

Wohnhaas’ key error, according to the investigation: He failed to tell his superiors that the engine was still contaminated by seawater.

Wohnhaas was removed from command over the incident. Others, whose names and titles are redacted from the Navy report, were also recommended for discipline.

“It Just Felt Like a Big Joke”

By early 2017, Lt. Jett Watson was beginning to wonder whether he had signed up to squander his naval career.

He was in the middle of training to serve as an LCS officer, spending hours inside virtual reality simulators set up in San Diego to make participants feel as if they were driving the ship.

The digital experience was impressive, but getting a real LCS out to sea was more complicated.

“I’m sure it was funny to watch us get underway just to have a big cloud of smoke go out because an engine went down and then have the tugboats pull us right back into the pier, which happened very often,” he said in an interview with ProPublica. “I mean, it was almost a game just to watch.”

Becoming a full-fledged surface warfare officer in the Navy requires hundreds of hours at sea. In interviews with current and former officers, the LCS program was described as a place where careers go to die. The ships broke down so frequently that officers spent key years in which they were supposed to gain experience at sea sitting around waiting for repairs to be completed.

Watson felt deceived.

A couple of years earlier, he had come under the spell of the LCS as a student at the Naval Academy.

There, recruiters for the program spread the gospel of its small crew size and purportedly aggressive deployment schedule, convincing him that the ship suited only the most elite sailors and officers.

Watson was so taken by the promise of the ship that he became a kind of “LCS evangelist,” convincing his friends at the academy to join the program with him.

He remembered sweltering beneath the Maryland sun during his graduation ceremony, where Mabus delivered a kind of a final exhortation to the newly sworn in officers.

“We are America’s away team,” Mabus said. “You didn’t come to Annapolis to sit at home when you leave here, and you won’t be sitting at home. Sailors and Marines, equally in times of peace and at war, are deployed around the world.”

Hailing from Lubbock, Texas, Watson thought the LCS would be his ticket to a meaningful and exciting career in the Navy.

He went on to serve on three littoral combat ships, each belonging to the less problematic Independence class.

“I would hesitate to say we ever did a mission,” he said.

Instead, he and others had to stomach what one current senior noncommissioned officer described as “a big shit sandwich” when they first came on board.

General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin considered much of the data and equipment on the LCS proprietary — a problem that throughout the military. As a result, only their employees were allowed to do certain repairs, former officers said. This sometimes meant that contractors would go overseas to help, adding millions in travel costs and often delaying missions. The Navy recently purchased some of the data. A Navy spokesperson would not disclose the price “due to proprietary reasons.”

Watson and others spent much of their time escorting contractors while on board because so many areas on the ship were considered classified, reducing their ability to do their own jobs, according to interviews with multiple officers who had served on the LCS.

Cumbersome negotiations meant it could sometimes take weeks to get contractors on board. The delays were especially frustrating when trying to fix the computer network that connected everything from the radars, to the weapons systems, to the ship’s canteen. That system, another former lieutenant said, frequently shut down because of software glitches.

“You can’t ask for help from your superior commands” on shore, said the former lieutenant, who worked as a communications officer on Independence-class ships. “And you can’t even go buy yourself a soda.”

The ships needed constant repairs. But technical manuals were sometimes written only in the native language of the contractor that built the equipment. One former officer said that a manual for a davit, a type of crane used to lower a search-and-rescue boat, was written in Norwegian. He said the Navy had to spend thousands of dollars to fly in a contractor from Norway to change two fuses.

The Navy has recently increased the amount of maintenance performed by sailors.

“It just felt like a big joke,” said Watson, who left the Navy in 2021. He said many of the highly qualified sailors he worked with sought mental health assistance because they felt that their time on an LCS was a waste, affording them little opportunity to apply their skills or learn new ones.

“An average week would consist of 90 to 100 hours in port doing, honestly, nothing,” Watson said. “It felt ridiculous. Many times we were there just because we had to be there.”

At one point, a senior Navy official addressed a group of more than 50 LCS sailors assembled in an auditorium and asked how many would volunteer to come back. Two former officers familiar with the presentation said only a handful said yes.

A Fight Over the Future

The ships’ mounting problems drew attention from the highest reaches of the Pentagon, eventually prompting two successive defense secretaries to try to halt their construction.

The first, in 2014, was Chuck Hagel, a former Army infantry squad leader and U.S. senator. The military was fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it also needed to save money. Hagel’s advisers told him he could do that by keeping the LCS fleet to 32 ships, abandoning plans to build 52 of them.

He’d be cutting what was already understood to be a deeply troubled vessel. Studies showed that the ship couldn’t continue to fight after a missile strike and that the interchangeable warfighting packages — an idea originally at the heart of the LCS — were failing to perform.

“Do we want one-fifth of the future Navy fleet to be a ship that can’t take a hit and continue its mission?” one adviser recalled thinking at the time.

In February 2014, Hagel pledged to make the cut to 32 and asked the Navy to come up with a design for a new frigate — a larger, tougher type of warship. But Mabus pushed back. A Navy task force suggested that the LCS could be transformed into a frigate. The Pentagon’s top weapons tester told Hagel that was infeasible. But Hagel agreed with the task force, because the Navy was “going to have to live with it, and justify it. And count on it,” he said in an interview with ProPublica.

In December 2014, in one of his final acts as secretary of defense, Hagel agreed to allow the Navy : a mix of the littoral combat ships and the new frigates, which would be based on the LCS design, but with more weapons.

In response to critics who said he had capitulated, Hagel characterized his decision as a “compromise” based on the advice of the government’s top experts.

“We brought in a lot of different people on both sides of it,” he said. “That’s the only responsible way you can evaluate these big projects as secretary of defense, because you can’t know everything about this. It’s just, no one person is that smart.”

The Navy later awarded a contract to the shipbuilder Fincantieri Marine Group to build a new line of frigates based on a different design.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who followed Hagel, also took aim at the LCS.

In a to Mabus, Carter said the Navy was guilty of “prioritizing quantity over lethality.” He told the Navy to limit future purchases to 40 ships, including littoral combat ships and frigates.

Mabus told ProPublica that he was blindsided by the change of course and that it led to “heated discussions” with Carter in private.

In public, too: first at a naval symposium, then before Congress, then where he assured LCS builders they were working on the best ship in the world. In March 2016, under questioning from Rep. Bradley Byrne, an Alabama Republican who called the LCS his “favorite topic,” Mabus told the House Armed Services Committee that the Navy had a “” for the 52 ships.

Even as Mabus testified, the ships were breaking down at sea with increasing frequency.

Mabus downplayed the severity of the incidents.

“We took it seriously,” he said. “But it did not seem, from what we were looking at, that it was a systemic problem.”

The contractors who built the ships defended their performance.

Eric Dent, a spokesperson for the Italian-based shipbuilder Fincantieri, which also built the Freedom ships in Marinette, said it did so to a design from Lockheed Martin and the Navy, referring questions to both.

Lockheed Martin spokesperson Patrick McNally said the company is proud of its work with the Navy and is focused on delivering “affordable improvements to the platform.”

Australian-based shipbuilder Austal, which constructs the Independence class of ships, and General Dynamics, which built the , both declined to comment for this story.

The weapons systems were failing as badly as the ship’s engines.

Without them, the LCS was “only a box floating in the ocean,” said former Lt. Cmdr. Mark West, who helped lead the Navy’s development of the warfighting packages for years in uniform and as a civilian.

To help the LCS find mines, an important mission in 21st-century warfare, the Navy built a remotely operated designed to detect underwater explosives. West and others said it turned out to be too difficult to operate. The Navy is now dependent on an that often cannot deploy.

“Imagine a 25-year-old sailor trying to remotely control a [minisubmarine] in the water that weighs 20,000 pounds as the ship is going 4 or 5 knots,” one current senior enlisted sailor said. “Then trying to bring it to the surface as a crane lowers a saddle on top of it to get it out of the water. It was damn near impossible.”

After 15 years of development and more than $700 million invested in the remote minehunting system, the Navy canceled it in March 2016.

To , the defense contractors created a sonar device the ship dragged through the water on a long cable from the stern. When the device detected a submarine, it was supposed to send a signal to the ship, which then dispatched a helicopter to hover over the ocean and plunge another sonar device into the water. The helicopter then dropped a torpedo to destroy the sub.

None of these components effectively communicated with one another. And the wake of the LCS made it extremely difficult to launch and recover the sonar, according to one former commodore with direct knowledge of the program.

After pouring hundreds of millions into the module, the Navy shifted the function to its new frigate.

In an interview, West said the Navy never gave the modules the same priority as the ships. They always played “second fiddle,” West said. Those working on them had to “fight and claw” to get the time and money necessary to “ensure their success.”

Coronado and Montgomery

About a month after the Freedom’s engine failed, a fourth LCS, the USS Coronado, broke down on its way to Singapore and had to limp back to Hawaii.

The breakdowns had become routine by this point. First came the fanfare over a newly christened ship, with all the requisite flag waving, handshaking, speechmaking and celebratory Champagne bottle breaking. Later, a perilous journey: a few days or weeks at sea, followed by another busted part and another tow back to port.

This time, on the Coronado, a part called a coupling would be the culprit. The device, which helped connect the water jets to the engine, had failed, hindering the ship’s complicated propulsion system. The Navy discovered it was a problem on several other littoral combat ships, too.

The GAO, which has produced dozens of reports criticizing the ships, later learned that the Coronado between 2016 and 2017 because “it did not not have correct parts on board to fix simple problems.”

Important items like “circuit card assemblies, washers, bolts, gaskets, and diaphragms for air conditioning units were not on board,” the report found. “The LCS may not have adequate space onboard to stock these items.”

In August 2016, the Navy ordered a of all littoral combat ships to retrain the engineering crews and improve the fleet’s performance.

A month later, a fifth ship, the USS Montgomery, suffered a series of mishaps. Over a two-month stretch, its engine malfunctioned, it collided with a tugboat and it then cracked its hull after striking a lock in the Panama Canal.

"The Navy doesn’t want them"

On May 4, 2017, about three months into the administration of President Donald Trump, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget at the time, Mick Mulvaney, sat for an interview with conservative talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt.

They talked about “Game of Thrones,” the repeal of Obamacare and a new hire at the OMB before turning to Trump’s promise to increase the Navy’s fleet to 350 ships. How, Hewitt wanted to know, was the president going to achieve that?

Mulvaney said that the day before he had missed a meeting on the Paris Agreement — the international treaty to avert the catastrophic consequences of climate change — in order to discuss whether to buy more littoral combat ships.

“,” Mulvaney said.

With the Navy on its way toward building the more powerful frigate, it appeared that the LCS program was on its last legs. The Navy LCS that year.

But once again, politics intervened.

, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin, fought for more. She on May 12, casting the LCS as a rare opportunity for her and the president to work together. Both support American workers making American products, she said, but too few of the vessels in the budget would cause her state’s shipyard to lay off hundreds of workers.

On May 24, in a move that shocked the defense community, the Trump administration into the budget after it had already been sent to Congress.

The Trump administration had suddenly placed a $500 million order for a new ship that the Navy didn’t ask for.

In an email to ProPublica, Baldwin said she takes “great pride in representing Wisconsin’s shipbuilding industry,” adding that she supported the LCS because it “provided new capabilities and capacity to the Navy.”

Over the next year, Congress funded yet more ships, leaving the force with 35, three more than the Navy said it needed. The additions cost taxpayers more than $1.5 billion.

In the years since, both variants of the LCS have continued to grapple with major problems. The Independence version has shown of nearly half the class. The Navy determined that a flaw in the combining gear affected the entire Freedom class. The Navy came up with a fix at — an expense split with Lockheed Martin.

Naval experts worry that the failures of the LCS have put the Navy at a greater disadvantage against China, which boasts the largest Navy in the world with , according to the Pentagon’s most recent report to Congress on the state of the Chinese military. By comparison, the Navy has .

The Navy has begun to mothball littoral combat ships far before the end of their expected lifespans.

In March 2022, the Navy announced plans to retire nine Freedom-class vessels early because of their inability to hunt submarines.

In a predictable pattern, lawmakers representing states where the ships are based . They allowed the Navy to decommission only four. The first of those, retired last month, is less than five years old. Three other LCS had already been mothballed.

The Navy is now trying to retire two more, including the USS Jackson, the ship named for the capital of Mabus’ home state. Meant to have a 25-year lifespan, the ship would last only nine.

Joaquin Sapien is a reporter at ProPublica covering criminal justice and social services.

This story was produced by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation in an Instagram Live conversation on September 12. Follow @propublica for updates.

defenseone.com · by Joaquin Sapien

17. EXPLAINED: The US Intelligence Counteroffensive Assessment That Has Everyone Talking

EXPLAINED: The US Intelligence Counteroffensive Assessment That Has Everyone Talking

A top official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency has said there’s a “realistic possibility” of a full breakthrough by 2024, but there are a few caveats.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/21396

by Kyiv Post | September 8, 2023, 10:17 am | Comments (2)

A top US intelligence official has said there is a “realistic possibility” that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) could break through Russian lines in the south of the country by the end of this year.

Who’s the official?

A man named Trent Maul, who is director of analysis for America’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), so he knows his stuff.

What exactly has he said?

In an interview with The Economist, Maul said recent counteroffensive developments on the battlefield in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine around the recently liberated village of Robotyne have dramatically shifted the DIA’s prognosis.

“Had we had this conversation two weeks ago, I would have been slightly more pessimistic,” he told the outlet, adding: “Their breakthrough on that second defensive belt… is actually pretty considerable.”

What breakthrough is that?

Geolocated footage like that below, commentary from both pro–Russian sources and Western analysts, as well as statements from Ukrainian commanders, all show Kyiv’s forces are advancing in the south.

The AFU has breached the first line of Russian defense in some areas and is advancing through the second in others.

Maul described these successes as “significant” and said it means the AFU has a “realistic possibility” of making a full breakthrough of all three lines of Russian defense in some areas by the end of the year.

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Zelensky introduced Umerov as the new Minister of Defense, outlining his expectations, which include digitalization, safeguarding military personnel, and fostering trust in the ministry's decisions.

That sounds very positive

It does, and news organizations as well as social media pundits and commentators grabbed the headline and ran with it.

But Maul was a little more cautious in the interview and The Economist made clear that “realistic possibility” means a 40-50% probability.

Maul also warned that the bulk of Russia’s reinforcements remain at the third and that limited ammunition and worsening weather will make this “very difficult.”

This was also supported in the latest assessment from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which wrote: “Russian defenses are not uniform across the front in southern Ukraine, however, and assessments of the strength of subsequent Russian defensive positions may be extrapolations based on limited information from small sectors of the front.

“Ukrainian forces are making tactical gains and successfully attriting defending Russian forces and ISW continues to assess Ukraine’s counteroffensive may achieve operational successes in 2023, but subsequent series of Russian defensive positions still pose significant challenges for Ukrainian forces and may in sections be strongly held.”

Even so, The Economist reported that even without a breakthrough this year, “the DIA is moderately confident that if Ukraine can widen the salient around Robotyne, hold its positions and keep ammo flowing in, it will be well placed for a fresh push in 2024.”

Did Maul say anything else?

He did. In a quite remarkable moment of candor for a US intelligence official, he caveated his assessment with the fact that he’s been wrong before.

“We thought the Afghans would fight until the end of the calendar year and try to have a heroic defense of Kabul,” he said. Instead, “they basically folded pretty quickly.”

18. US raises alarm as Chinese platform corners market on global shipping logistics

Do we need to enlist privateers and issue letters of marque? Perhaps "cyber privateers" to extract the information that China will hoover up?

US raises alarm as Chinese platform corners market on global shipping logistics

• Warnings that Beijing could ‘gain access to and control massive amounts of sensitive’ data, including the commercial transport of US military cargo
• Logink, overseen by China’s transport ministry, collects information on shipping and cargo movement worldwide and provides free tracking and data management

Khushboo Razdan

in New York

+ FOLLOWPublished: 10:30pm, 7 Sep, 2023

By Khushboo Razdan South China Morning Post7 min

September 7, 2023

View Original

US lawmakers and experts in the field are raising alarms about China’s dominance in accessing and managing global shipping logistics and data, describing such control as a security risk and “a recipe for disaster”.

The latest in a series of warnings is a report published in July by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. The research highlights the Chinese commercial logistics platform Logink, which collects information on shipping and cargo movement worldwide and provides tracking, data management and other services free of charge.

Logink, which describes itself as a “one-stop logistics information service platform”, began as a provincial programme in China in 2007. It became part of a regional network in northeast Asia in 2010 and a global platform after 2014.

Overseen by China’s transport ministry, it partners with over 20 ports globally, including in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Portugal, Spain and in countries across the Belt and Road Initiative – China’s global infrastructure project – as well as many Chinese and international firms.

The network continues to expand as more ports worldwide use Logink to provide “greater global visibility that China can potentially access”, according to the research.

“The pervasiveness of China’s state-supported commercial logistics platform provides the constant monitoring of port capabilities and throughput of US cargo and our allies and partners during peacetime,” it said, adding that multiple freight movements globally contain US military consignments, and logistics data could predict current or future operations.

Though the issue is often missing from discussions about securing supply chains, a group of bipartisan US lawmakers has been calling attention to it.

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In March, Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, and Representative Michelle Steel, a Republican from California, introduced the Securing Maritime Data from Communist China Act in both congressional chambers, calling Logink “a recipe for disaster”.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, US President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attend the IPEF launch event in Tokyo in May 2022. Photo: Reuters

The bill, which is co-sponsored by Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, not only prevents the US Defence Department from entering contracts with any entity that uses Logink but also requires the US president to ensure that any major international agreement, such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), will stop the platform’s expansion through US industries as well as those of American allies.

Steel said awareness had only recently dawned that China was “using the data and logistics platform Logink for years to spy on our supply chains and gather data about any potential weaknesses”.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comments.

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Though the bill has yet to make any progress in the US Congress, the issue has also been addressed in the Republican-controlled House’s version of the annual defence spending bill, which calls for “securing maritime data from China”.

Representative Dusty Johnson, a Republican from South Dakota, introduced the provision as an amendment to the National Defence Authorisation Act that would prohibit “US ports that take federal grant money from using China’s state-supported” Logink.

US Representative Michelle Steel says China uses Logink “to spy on our supply chains and gather data about any potential weaknesses”. Photo: AP

“Logink provides massive amounts of monitoring, data and logistics infrastructure to the [Chinese Communist Party] – it’s imperative we keep Logink out of American ports,” Johnson said in June. “China already competes unfairly in the global shipping arena. Blocking their access to American port data is one small step to keep this advantage to a minimum.”

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The defence spending bill, which passed along party lines in the House, faces a difficult path in the Democratic-controlled Senate as it was larded with amendments regarding abortion rights for service members, healthcare for transgender troops and the defunding of diversity and inclusion initiatives.

The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission raised concerns about Logink in September 2022. It said the Chinese government could potentially “gain access to and control massive amounts of sensitive” data, including commercial transport of US military cargo, insight into supply chain vulnerabilities and critical market information.

The panel cautioned that global shipping data gained through Logink “could enable the interdiction or disruption of US operations or actions, including foreign military arms and munitions sales (such as to Ukraine or Taiwan), movement of US military forces, or the sustainment of US overseas strategic, military, intelligence or other operations”.

US seeks to ‘de-risk’ relationship with China, national security adviser says

Experts agree that information on what’s going where and at what price could provide both commercial and strategic advantage, while also frustrating US-led efforts to de-risk critical supply chains.

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Gabriel Collins of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston said that Beijing having an “informational advantage” complicated efforts to de-risk supply chains, and possibly undermined them.

“Even if you’re pulling physical production to some extent out of China and rehousing it to other places, whether that be Vietnam, Malaysia, India, United States or Mexico, you still have the issue of PRC in positional advantage that could potentially be turned against you in a whole number of ways,” said Collins, who co-authored a research paper titled “China’s Logink platform and its strategic potential for economic, political and military power projection” in April.

The report described Logink’s ability to help Beijing “contest allied logistical support from the factory floor to the frontline” as “a challenge the United States has never faced before”.

As of June 2022, China’s state-owned Cosco Shipping Corp Ltd owned 50 container terminals worldwide. Photo: AP

Citing an example of how Logink might enable China to block or disrupt trade flows, Collins noted that in 2016 Hong Kong authorities seized a shipment carrying Singaporean armoured vehicles and equipment that was headed back to Singapore after a drill on Taiwan.

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“I think that right there just affirms that, one, the PRC government is watching what goes through the shipping channels, and, two, if they see it as it being in their interests, they’re willing to act on it,” he said.

Collins added that facilitation tools have become more advanced over the last seven years, and that “by fusing all these data sets, you have a really good picture of the world and what’s going on your system”.

Andy Mok, a senior research fellow at the Centre for China and Globalisation, a think tank based in Beijing, described Logink as “not only a service provider, but also a strategic asset for China’s development and security” and said it was “a reflection of China’s legitimate interests and aspirations”.

Let us do our thing: US firms give China another shot – but there’s a new hurdle

“Logink can also contribute to the global common good by facilitating trade, cooperation and innovation,” he said, emphasising that the key is to ensure that it operates in a “transparent, accountable and responsible manner that respects the interests and rights of all stakeholders”.

The Brookings report said that despite this growing awareness, the Defence Department still uses multiple systems and unclassified networks for its logistical data, which creates challenges in protecting it from cyber threats and “ensuring the integrity of supply chains”.

Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on China, recently called the Pentagon “a massive emitter of data”.

“But the Pentagon doesn’t treat data like it treats ammo,” he said, and called its supply chain planning “bloated, ossified, antiquated”.

The Brookings report said Chinese companies had “taken control of physical logistics infrastructure worldwide and important terminals in the US”, contending that “adversaries could cause a key delay in support or disruption of critical logistics during a crisis, endangering operations and costing lives”.

US Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, leads the House Select Committee on China. Photo: AP

The state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company (Cosco) currently holds ownership stakes in terminals at five US ports, including joint ventures in Seattle, Los Angeles and Long Beach, California.

Cosco Shipping Group said that they “do not possess controlling stakes” in these joint ventures, and that it was “a common practice for major global shipping companies to enhance their services by leasing terminals through joint venture arrangements”.

“As a prominent global shipping enterprise, Cosco Shipping Group is committed to promoting worldwide economic development and smooth trade by maintaining a strong legal and compliance culture in all our global operations,” a PR official at the company said in an emailed statement.

However, the Brookings report asserted that “this real-time visibility generate considerable vulnerabilities for US operations and logistics”.

According to Statisca, a German data platform, as of June 2022, China Cosco Shipping Corp Ltd owned 50 container terminals worldwide. Cosco Shipping Ports Ltd, a subsidiary, operates 37 ports globally. In October 2022, Germany allowed Cosco Shipping Ports Ltd to acquire 24.9 per cent of the shares of the container terminal Tollerort in Hamburg.

“For US mariners, being tracked by a foreign country brings visions of the first and second world wars when German U-boats indiscriminately sunk our vessels,” said David Heindel, president of the Seafarers International Union, the largest North American union representing merchant mariners.

Calling on US Congress to act “appropriately and swiftly”, Heindel said: “These threats aren’t part of some science fiction plot. They are real.”

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19. The new Marine infantry battalion is slimmer, saltier and more techy

The new Marine infantry battalion is slimmer, saltier and more techy

marinecorpstimes.com · by Todd South · September 8, 2023

A slimmer, more senior and technology-driven Marine infantry battalion structure now unfolding across the service will shape the deployments, careers and lives of future riflemen, the most essential element of the service’s combat power.

The new infantry battalion reduces the former standard manning of the battalion from 965 Marines down to 811 Marines while also adding a host of new technologies to vastly increase the strike, sensing, communication and firepower of the unit.

But that was only phase one of a two-phase experimentation plan.

The next phase will refine how the battalion ― the Corps’ lowest echelon unit capable of independent, extended combat employment and the foundation of a variety of formations that have earned the service it’s “force-in-readiness” calling card ― moves, shoots, communicates and cares for its wounded. Planners expect the next fight will be a vast battlefield dotted with dispersed units facing firepower not seen since heavy combat of the mid-20th century.

Phase two kicks off later in 2023 with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, out of Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California. Leading that effort are battalion commander Lt. Col. Bryceson Tenold and Sgt. Maj. Trevor L. Goff.

This is far from the first time that the Corps has altered the structure of its basic combat units. New adversaries, technologies and global conditions demand such changes. And Marine leadership has stressed these changes and others are making the Corps relevant for today and tomorrow while preserving and improving its core missions and capabilities.

“This is what Marines do better than anybody, we’re small enough that we can be agile and quick and make changes quickly and efficiently,” said Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, deputy commandant of Combat Development and Integration during a June 2 call with media unveiling the phase one changes. “And that’s exactly what’s happening here.”

But some critics caution that the current effort is narrowly focusing on a singular threat ― the Chinese military. And while that may be the foe of the future, they say overspecializing could bleed the Corps’ hallmark flexibility. And the potential rigidity may sideline Leathernecks in the next fight.

John Schmitt, 64, former Marine major and author of Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication-1 “Warfighting,” the bible for modern Marine thinking on combat, admits he’s not privy to inside information any longer but from what he can see in new Corps doctrine, there could be gaps.

“I’m not believing that the future’s becoming any more certain and that we’re not going to require this global response capability that we’ve had for decades and that we’re not going to pay a price when we lose it,” Schmitt said. “It’s a big gamble and I don’t think it’s a smart bet, personally.”

The new infantry battalion reduces the former standard manning of the battalion from 965 Marines down to 811 Marines while also adding a host of new technologies. (Cpl. Jonathan Willcox/Marine Corps)

Recent changes

Leaders such as Heckl and others provided the first big-picture public view of the results of nearly two years of conceptual work and experimentation for phase I of the infantry battalion experiments in June.

Those experiments looked various configurations among three different battalions: 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, with a 735-Marine battalion; 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, at Camp Pendleton, California, with an estimated 930 Marines and 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, at Marine Corps Base Hawaii with a mixed version in the middle.

Before these experiments began, the infantry battalion manning stood at approximately 965 Marines, which emerged from an early 1980s study and reconfiguration that reduced the post-Vietnam War sized battalion of more than 1,000 Marines.

The new Marine manning now sits at 811 Marines and 69 Navy support personnel in the infantry battalion after phase one concluded.

Over that same period, during Berger’s tenure, the Corps has reduced its conventional artillery while increasing rocket-launched artillery such as the high mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS. The service removed tanks from its entire inventory and reduced the number of infantry battalions overall.

There are 21 active-duty infantry battalions and eight Marine Reserve battalions. The service cut three active-duty infantry battalions since 2020 as part of Force Design 2030.

This summer two battalions already had transitioned to 811 Marines, according to data provided by Manpower & Reserve Affairs.

The remaining battalions will transition on this schedule: two in fiscal year 2024; three each in fiscal years 2025 and 2026; four each in fiscal years 2027 and 2028 and the final three in fiscal year 2029.

As of June, the Marine Corps had 2,148 officers and 22,805 enlisted Marines with infantry as their primary job in the active duty ranks, according to manpower data. Another 353 officers and 4,721 enlisted Marines held infantry primary jobs in the Marine Reserve as of late May.

Phase I experimentation:

• Removing snipers from the battalion and instead creating a “scout platoon” to conduct some of the past functions of snipers in the headquarters & service company.
• Increased headquarters & service company capacity, such as added radio operators, a motor transport officer and chief, administrative clerks, warehouse clerks and food service specialists.
• Reorganized rifle company elements into a weapons platoon manned with machine gunners, mortarmen and antitank missile gunners.
• Added medical training and personnel for improved casualty care in austere locations where immediate medical evacuation may not be available.
• Increased 81 mm mortar platoon with two additional, for a total of four fire direction centers and organic precision fire section personnel in each rifle company.
• Added signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities at the company level.
• Enhanced command and control, sensing, lethality and sustainment experimentation.
• Experiments to reduce cognitive load on leaders at all levels, including a new course for company noncommissioned officers on running 21st-century combat operations.
• Removal of the assistant squad leader and one rifleman from each squad. The squad now contains 13 Marines instead of the previously configured 15 Marines.

Source: Marine Corps

Each of the three rifle companies within the battalion contains individual operations, signal, logistics, electronic warfare and medical sections. Plans now involve having a corpsman available for every squad.

The headquarters & service company holds its standard “S” shops ― S-1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ― battalion medical and a fires platoon with 81 mm mortar platoon and operations fires section. The scout platoon falls under S-2.

Combat Development and Integration released a 13-minue video online in mid-August outlining some of the phase I changes.

In the video, Experiment Division Director Col. Christopher Bronzi emphasized that the changes were driven by modern battlefield threats and the increased need for lower echelon precision strike, counter-drone and electronic warfare.

The new formation, he said, would provide enhanced sensing, command and control, lethality and sustainment for the battalion, an “increased capacity to sense, make sense and strike the enemy.”

The colonel noted “more maturity” at every echelon.

That means sergeants leading fire teams, staff sergeants leading squads, gunnery sergeants co-leading platoons with second lieutenants, master sergeants and captains running companies, sergeants major alongside lieutenant colonels at the battalion level and colonels at the regiment.

Except for the sergeants major, that is a rank up or more for every position within the formation.

Studies looking at staff sergeant squad leaders date back at least for the past five years. However, in high-demand rotations and depleted manpower, corporals and sometimes even lance corporals have served as squad leaders in combat over the recent war on terrorism.

Each of the three rifle companies within the battalion contains individual operations, signal, logistics, electronic warfare and medical sections. Plans now involve having a corpsman available for every squad. (Cpl. Scott Aubuchon/Marine Corps)

Sgt. Kristopher J. Hassemer, Marine Corps Warfighting Lab fellow in the experiment division said in the video that they’re focused on organic power generation at the battalion and company level and optimized power management at the platoon and squad level. Each part of the battalion will carry more electronic equipment than ever before.

The experiments have added water purification capabilities, increased tactical unmanned aerial and ground systems with a focus on tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems.

In the video, Capt. Michael J. Hogan, assistant team leader on the infantry battalion experiment concept development team, noted increased drone capabilities and the incorporation of signals intelligence and electronic warfare teams. The scout platoons will “generate multidomain effects.”

Hogan answered a controversial decision to replace scout snipers with scouts by noting that “removing precision rifle employment” allows scouts to focus on recon, surveillance and target acquisition.

Maj. Daniel C. Phillips, team leader for the concept development team, said in the video that the “hallmark” of new command and control focus was to have a shared common operating picture from squad to battalion. That will include MESH network radios, which allow users to share voice, data and video through the best pathways across a communication network, network-on-the-move company vehicles and beyond-line-of-sight communication at the squad level.

The result, Phillips said, would be reducing deconfliction time and location reporting, rapid kill change closing and secure communications on the move to companies as well as giving users multiple waveforms to communicate in cluttered electronic environments.

First Lt. Michael Meier, a Marine Corps Warfighting Lab fellow working with the battalion experiment development team and former company executive officer for 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, the on deck phase two experimentation unit, updated lethality changes.

In the video, Meier pointed to both Javelin and multipurpose anti-armor anti-personnel weapons systems in the company, precision rifles in the company arms room and integration of aerial loitering munitions.

This combination gives the company a 50 km reach for organic fires. Previously that range stood at 3.4 km with the 60 mm mortar. And the 60 mm mortars remain in the company, spokesman Maj. Eric Flanagan told Marine Corps Times.

Brig. Gen. Kyle B. Ellison, commanding general of Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and 30-year infantryman, summarized much of the explanation by highlighting the changes will increase lethality and maneuverability while enhancing combined arms across all domains and improving and increasing casualty care.

He took an extra beat to emphasize what the experiments are not doing, which is creating an infantry battalion unable to adapt to changing mission essential tasks, operate on the offense and defense.

“This is not about major course corrections…about one to two degree rudder steers,” Ellison said. “It’s about a journey, not a destination.”

The ‘threat of the ‘80s’

In the late 1970s, then-Marine Corps commandants Gen. Louis H. Wilson Jr. and his successor Gen. Robert H. Barrow, conducted outside studies and internal work on reducing and rearming the infantry battalion and preparing it for the “threat of the eighties.”

The Corps had left the Vietnam War only a few years before having seen its infantry conduct mostly dismounted patrols in jungle, hilly and sometimes urban terrain. But the likely foe on the horizon would be the Soviet Union, an armor and artillery-centric force.

While the Army’s mass centered in Europe to meet that threat, the Corps needed to find its way to fight on the edges or in key positions of any potential conflict. That was the vision of the service’s leaders, according to multiple accounts in historical documents Marine Corps Times reviewed recently at the service’s Quantico, Virginia, archives.

Marines operate the radio to establish communications with the surrounding squads during defensive tactics training, Aug. 6, at the Base Expedicionaria de Fuzileiros Navais in Formosa, Brazil, during the annual Infantry Training Exercise Formosa. (Gunnery Sgt. Daniel Wetzel/Marine Corps)

One study encapsulated the effort and would change the structure of the infantry battalion in some ways to present day ― the “Marine Infantry Battalion 1980–1990 Study.”

Initial work came out of an independent review of the battalion’s combat effectiveness and recoverability should it sustain casualties by Science Applications, Inc. completed in November 1979.

From the outset, the commandant and senior leaders looked to reduce the infantry battalion’s size to 900 Marines or fewer, down from more than 1,000 Marines in its previous war footing.

Retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, whose final posting was running Marine Corps Combat Development Command from 1995–1997, told Marine Corps Times that the initial focus first on manning then on capabilities in that study resulted in some positive and some “ludicrous” changes. But he maintains that the initial push to focus first on manning due to lower Corps end strength was “flawed from the start.”

“The Marine Corps didn’t arrive at a 1,000 Marine battalion with heavy weapons and a weapons company without a hell of a lot of combat experience,” Van Riper said.

The retired three-star first enlisted in 1956 and retired in 1997. At the time of the 1980 study and its later implementation Van Riper was a lieutenant colonel commanding 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment. He and a group of other retired senior Marine officers have been openly vocal critics of major changes that have happened in recent years under the previous Commandant Gen. David Berger.

The 1980 battalion study resulted introduced the M198 155 mm howitzer, increased other conventional artillery, added a 24 BGM-71 TOW anti-tank, guided missile launchers, the Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher, M2 .50 caliber machine gun, the Mk-153 shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon and the squad automatic weapon, a 5.56 mm light machine gun. The changes also increased the number of M47 Dragon anti-tank missile launchers from 24 to 32.

While the firepower was a welcome addition, both Van Riper and Schmitt, who served first as a rifle platoon commander then as the anti-armor platoon commander in 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, an experimental unit in the 1980s battalion study, had to make major adjustments on the ground.

Van Riper recalls a practice by which two Marines were expected to run a vehicle with both a Mk-19 and a .50 caliber machine gun. One Marine driving, the other firing, and only one weapon could be mounted at a time. That move proved not only cumbersome and demanding, but risky at best.

He noted that should one of those two Marine be wounded, that would essentially take two guns out of the fight. At the time the M60 machine gun, a 7.62 mm gun used routinely required a three-Marine contingent to operate, he said.

Schmitt recalls commanders repurposing some of the machine and grenade-launcher mounted vehicles, Jeeps at the time, to conduct nuclear and radiological reconnaissance because the battalion had no such capabilities but still faced that threat.

As the anti-armor platoon commander, Schmitt received his fill.

“The relevant thing is that it went from a (table of organization) of 56 (Marines) to a TO of 96 in response to the threat posed by Soviet armor,” he said.

But overriding any equipment employment questions and the blessings of more firepower, the biggest change that thwarted effective efforts was the introduction of the 11-Marine squad. Down from the decades-long, combat-proven 13-Marine squad.

The Corps has used a 13-Marine squad formation, the building block of its platoons, companies and battalions, since at least the 1950s. The squad centered around a single squad leader coordinating three, four-Marine fire teams.

Marines were being tasked with more weapons, more mobility and more communications, but losing two Marines in each squad.

And that figure flowed across the formation, Van Riper noted.

“Here’s the usual argument on manning ― ‘technology makes the individual Marine, fire team or squad more effective, therefore we cut,’” he said.

But by cutting the rifle squad from 13 to 11, he said. With 13-Marine squads, the organization remained three-quarters effective when it took a casualty. But with 11 Marines it’s now only two-thirds effective.

When leaders at the time cut for the sake of meeting manning numbers and adding tasks and tech, they were simply thinking about bringing fire upon the enemy but not about the resiliency of a squad, he said.

By 1984, 60% of the Corps’ battalions had shifted to the new formation. But the Corps had already switched back to a 13-Marine squad after reports from the field.

Recent squad changes

In 2016, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, conducted a series of experiments over a six-month period looking at how the Corps could increase the situational awareness and firepower of the squad and what the composition of the unit could be. The experiments looked at various manning structures.

While wrapping a tour with FAST Company, then-Capt. Joe Patterson got a call from the infantry career monitor who asked if he wanted to return to his old unit, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, in Camp Pendleton, California, and lead a company. The only other thing he remembered was the monitor asked how he felt about experimentation.

“I said, ‘Great, let’s go,’ I just wanted to go back to 3/5,″ Patterson said.

He thought the experiments might mean adding female infantry Marines to the unit, which had only begun a short time before.

Patterson served as Kilo Company commander during the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Integrated Experiment, which lasted until 2017.

Kilo Company and its two fellow companies each used various options at the platoon level but once the initial part of the test concluded, his company went with the 15-Marine model.

He reported to his unit on a Friday and found his executive officer filling rosters, pulling in Marines from across the Corps. Every billet was filled with a senior rank for that spot. Experienced sergeants were leading squads, all his fire team leaders were corporals, both a rarity in a stretched-thin, constant deploying Corps over the previous decade.

And it wasn’t only riflemen. He was getting engineers, mechanics, more communications Marines, generators, water purifiers, drones and radio equipment that few at his level normally had in their gear locker.

He went from 160 Marines in the company to 350 in about a week, he said.

The next four months whipped by at breakneck speed. Individual training on the new gear lasted one to two weeks, nearly every Marine learned how to purify water, talk on and troubleshoot radios then work as fire teams, squads, platoons then as a company in a couple of months.

The squad has now reverted to the 13-Marine structure, keeping the squad systems operator and cutting the assistant squad leader and one rifleman from the ranks. (Gunnery Sgt. Daniel Wetzel/Marine Corps)

“The idea was that we could all hop into an aircraft run an over-the-horizon mission, conduct long range operations and be completely self-sustained and live off the land without long logistics chain back to the (Marine Expeditionary Unit Amphibious Readiness Group),” he said.

Patterson described it as “old-school Vietnam” type of fighting with modern technology.

“By the end of the company phase of this, man I tell you I wouldn’t have wanted to be the bad guys on the other end of what we were delivering,” Patterson said.

Along the way, he said, they were told repeatedly that they were the tip of the Marine Corps spear and treated as such. That meant countless visits from distinguished guests, endless questions and feedback from experts and never-ending after action reviews for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.

“This was not the traditional company command experience,” he said. “I was under the microscope. Everything we did was evaluated and graded; we were tested constantly.”

What that led to for this captain was something now commonly called “task saturation.”

The bombardment of more information than perhaps any Marine company commander had ever seen sometimes stalled decision-making. And he worried it would do the same for a squad alone in a combat zone. The formation needed extra bodies simply to provide security while leaders looked at screens, ran comms or did the myriad of more complex tasks being asked of them.

Even he was overwhelmed. At one point stuck trying to figure out how to employ a machine-gun equipped robot in the firing and maneuvering. There were no manuals for this.

But a friend broke him out of his own fog.

“Hey dude, you know what it still is?” a friend asked. “A machine gun. Employ it like you would a machine gun.”

The companies in the experiment also got a batch of the then-new MRZR, the four-person off road vehicle that would later be fielded as the ultra-light tactical vehicle now providing most of the tactical wheeled mobility for the company. That one change helped his Marines zip around corners of the battlespace in ways they’d never had.

Looking back, Patterson sees how some automation could reduce the workload on his Marines in some ways but increase it in others. He’s happy the Corps went with the 15-Marine squad for exactly that reason. Though it has since reverted to the 13-Marine squad.

Patterson led a platoon on a combat tour in Sangin Valley, Afghanistan, in 2010, during some of the most intense fighting there during that phase of the war.

At one point the unit took three casualties at the same time. All research and reports indicate that any near peer conflict would see casualties that dwarf anything experienced during the war on terrorism, rivaling perhaps the figures seen during World War II.

Those three casualties took two squads to evacuate. One to carry them off the battlefield and the other to provide security while they did. A smaller squad would have been crippled by that incident.

Patterson recalls the final phase of the experimentation, a two-week, self-sustained field exercise culminating in a massive live fire event that featured robot battle buddies, scavenged power sources and a variety of new drone, communications and fires options, as one of the most rewarding of his more than two-decade career.

“I didn’t have anything to do as I’m leading this attack. I just ran behind my guys, shouted nice things at them and watched the beautiful destruction occur,” Patterson said.

About a year later, in May 2018, then-Commandant Gen. Robert B. Neller announced that the Corps would move to 12-Marine rifle squad.

The new squad lost a Marine but gained the following: the M27 infantry automatic rifle which replaced the M4, a common handheld tablet, multi-channel radios and a better grenade launcher, the M320 replacing the rifle mounted M203.

But by the end of the year, Neller had pivoted and wanted to see how a 15-Marine rifle squad would perform.

In 2019, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, deployed with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, with a complete 15-Marine rifle squad structure. The formation had kept the 13-Marine base and added an assistant squad leader and squad systems operator.

And, until mid-August, that was the publicly announced squad configuration. But in a mid-August online video explainer rollout of the new infantry battalion, the squad has now reverted to the 13-Marine structure, keeping the squad systems operator and cutting the assistant squad leader and one rifleman from the ranks.

Heading into phase two, the Corps has decided to use the 13-Marine rifle squad structure due in part to manning considerations, Flanagan said. As experimentation continues, planners will continue to evaluate the squad.

Both 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, battalion commander Lt. Col. Bryceson Tenold and battalion Sgt. Maj. Trevor L. Goff are set to lead the battalion through the next two years of experimentation. The pair are already receiving Marines, some of which were in units involved with phase one experiments.

Tenold and Goff told Marine Corps Times in a mid-August phone interview that they plan to set the tone for the right kind of culture in the battalion that aims to rapidly build up skill sets and teams through openness and sharing of lessons learned.

Between now and the end of the year many Marines in the unit or headed to it will attend a variety of training schools and continue that training on new equipment and methods of employment in the coming months.

An estimated 500 Marines of the 811-Marine battalion are already on station, Goff said. The remainder should arrive by November. Some internal shifting will occur as promotion boards for various ranks across the Corps release promotion data in the coming months.

That’s important because the aim is to have sergeants as fire team leaders, staff sergeants as squad leaders, gunnery sergeants as platoon sergeants, master sergeants as company sergeants and sergeants major as both battalion and regimental sergeants major. All of those with the last two exceptions were previously filled by ranks at least one, sometimes two ranks below.

The “Thundering Third” won’t get to operate in a vacuum, Goff emphasized they’ll be simultaneously experimenting with the new battalion structure while also readying for any crisis response, contingency or larger scale exercises and operations the division or Marine expeditionary force tasks them.

When the pair learned they’d be leading this battalion at the edge of new experimentation, each had their own reactions.

After a nearly three-decade career, Goff said he and his Marines have a lot of excitement about being part of this historic effort and that its shows the Corps is “willing to redefine and refine the infantry battalion and continue to refine it along the way.”

As of June, the Marine Corps had 2,148 officers and 22,805 enlisted Marines with infantry as their primary job in the active duty ranks. (Gunnery Sgt. Daniel Wetzel/Marine Corps)

He’s already stressing to his junior Marines that the input they’re able to give the institution will inform how the future battalion is designed and deployed.

Tenold sees this as a great opportunity, both to command an infantry battalion and to set in motion options for senior leaders to evaluate as they develop the way ahead for Marine Corps infantry.

Patterson retired as a major in 2022. And while he doesn’t closely follow every detail of Marine infantry any longer, his heart remains close to those ground-pounders with whom he served.

His has simple advice for the captains leading companies at 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines.

To re-read MDCP-1 “Warfighting” and apply its principles. And no matter what “Gucci gear” they get and to stick with infantry 101.

“Don’t get lost in the sexiness,” Patterson said.

“A Marine is still a Marine and nothing is more dangerous and lethal than a Marine with his rifle and all of this stuff you are going to experiment with is going to enhance that Marine and not replace. So don’t overthink it.”

The story before the story

Marine Corps Warfighting Lab commander Ellison specifically noted in the video explainer that the battalion will remain ready to accomplish its historic tasks along with its new missions.

But not everyone is yet convinced, Schmitt among them.

Schmitt, who wrote “Warfighting” under the supervision and inspiration of a maneuver warfare shift within the Corps driven largely by the much lauded 29th Commandant Gen. Al Gray, has concerns that Force Design 2030 and its focus on sea control and denial may be the war that the Corps wants to fight, rather than the one it will be forced to fight ― one that includes close combat.

“I think the thing that has generated a lot of the resistance is not just the dramatic change in infantry numbers, because the Marine Corps is always tweaking numbers, but it’s the fact that that change is taking place within the framework of a new concept for warfare that not everybody’s bought into.”

The combined arms, maneuver-inspired approach of even the smallest of Marine units set it apart from the hulking formations of the U.S. Army. That carved a unique niche that saw Marines employed and deployed for everything from embassy evacuations and battalion landing teams to fire missions and humanitarian aid over the past 40 or more years.

“We were that way precisely because we knew we couldn’t predict what was going to be needed. And that seems to be another thing that’s different today. There seems to be a belief that we know what we’re going to need, and we can start to tailor ourselves to this need.”

Should the Corps lose that flexibility, Schmitt said the move could change how others view the Corps’ purpose, which may sideline the Marines in the next fight.

But Schmitt admitted he doesn’t know all the details and could be wrong.

“Maybe the next fight is going to be a big fight in the South China Sea and Marines are going to distinguish themselves and everybody’s going to say, ‘Thank God for this new Marine Corps,’” Schmitt said. “I don’t know.”

Van Riper, a lifelong student and teacher of history, worries that current leadership has only looked at its most recent shadow as it prepares for the coming decades and not the long line of combat history that led to where the Corps’ formations have their origin.

Marine Corps Times requested documents, literature review or explanation and analysis of historical aspects as they relate to the infantry battalion. Those were not immediately available prior to publication of this article.

One day, back in the mid-1990s, while Van Riper headed Marine Corps Combat Development Command, he saw two majors with an appointment on his schedule.

They wanted to talk about the need to reorganize the Marine infantry Battalion.

“I said, gentlemen, let me tell you a story, when I came in the Marine Corps, we had a weapons company that went away. Now it’s back. When I came in, we had 60 mm mortars, they went away before Vietnam and then came back and then went away again. And I’ve seen this thing played over and over and over. We keep reinventing the wheel.”

Then he had a task for the two ambitious majors.

“I want you to tell me the history of the Marine Corps infantry battalion, so we don’t end up repeating things that are erroneous,” Van Riper said.

“They went away, and I never heard from them again.”

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

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marinecorpstimes.com · by Todd South · September 8, 2023

20. After Criticism from Its Top Commander, Space Force Adopts New Mission Statement

After Criticism from Its Top Commander, Space Force Adopts New Mission Statement

military.com · by Thomas Novelly · September 7, 2023

After the Space Force's top officer criticized the service's mission statement this past May, Guardians weighed in. Now, the service has a new one.

In a press release Wednesday, the Space Force said its new mission statement is: "secure our nation's interests in, from, and to space."

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, in a May memo, called the previous mission statement "long and cumbersome" and asked the service's Guardians to offer ideas. Within two weeks, 135 responses had been sent in, according to the release.

"We did not hire a corporate marketing team to develop a catchphrase. Nor did generals sit around a table in the Pentagon debating what the statement should be," Saltzman said in the press release. "Our mission statement was sourced from a Guardian-driven process."

In July, Guardians from four field commands and major commands participated in eight focus groups to discuss the phrase and provide feedback, according to the release.

In announcing the new mission statement, the Space Force said the phrase "In, from, and to space" is a reference to the three main functions of the service, which were described as:

• "In space, through space superiority activities that protect the joint force and nation from space and counterspace threats.
• From space, by delivering global mission operations like satellite communications, positioning, navigation and timing, and missile warning activities.
• To space, by assured space access through the service's launch, range and control network infrastructure."

The previous Space Force mission statement was: "The USSF is responsible for organizing, training, and equipping Guardians to conduct global space operations that enhance the way our joint and coalition forces fight, while also offering decision makers military options to achieve national objectives."

In the three years since the Space Force became a separate and distinct service branch under the Department of the Air Force, officials have worked tirelessly to build public recognition.

Military.com previously reported on the woes that Guardians had with the lack of public recognition for the Space Force, which led to late-night talk show monologues, a poorly reviewed Netflix series of the same name, and even internal slogans that mocked the service's slow pace of development.

While there has been a lot of progress -- namely from former Chief of Space Operations Gen. John Raymond and soon-to-be retired Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman -- Saltzman's reworking of the mission statement is the latest example of how the service's top leaders are making culture and identity a focus.

"Our mission statement is a call to action that concisely encapsulates our purpose and identity as Guardians and members of the profession of arms," Saltzman said in the press release.

Towberman, the service's top enlisted leader, is retiring from the service Sept. 15. In May, the Space Force selected Chief Master Sgt. John Bentivegna to serve as his replacement -- making him the next leader responsible for culture, policy and morale of the Space Force's enlisted Guardians.

-- Thomas Novelly can be reached at thomas.novelly@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomNovelly.

military.com · by Thomas Novelly · September 7, 2023

21. US, Australia should use civil aid, not military, to woo Pacific Island states from China: Wargame

US, Australia should use civil aid, not military, to woo Pacific Island states from China: Wargame - Breaking Defense

"One of China’s most salient advantages in the competition is its ability to identify and woo both public influencers and elites in [Pacific island] governments, whether via licit or illicit means," MITRE analysts conclude.

breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · September 7, 2023

“Nearly a century after the last world war brought conflict to the Pacific, Pacific Island Countries (PICs) are once again crucial terrain in a strategic competition,” says the wargame report, published today. “This time the competition is between the People’s Republic of China on one side and the United States and Australia on the other, with nations like Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and Kiribati finding themselves courted by all.”

The wargame, dubbed Sage Dragon and run last November, went beyond the usual military-on-military move and countermove to examine broader strategic, political, economic and even intelligence factors that would play key roles in the event of a fight in the Pacific. While the report notes that “Australia looks ever more appealing for operational access and future basing,” it also found that “the ability to move forces to and operate from locations in Australia — and to keep them sustained — depends in large part on secure sea lines of communication near island states such as Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu.”

Map additions by MITRE Corp. of INDO-PACOM official map.

Kiribati, the report notes, “straddles all four hemispheres and fills an expanse as large as the contiguous United States — [Chinese] forces could wedge between U.S. territories in the western Pacific and target Pearl Harbor with relative ease. Exposure of either set of targets to PLA offensives would undermine U.S. operational plans and threaten to upend its broader competitive.”

But it’s not just military operations that need to guide US and Australian policy in the region, the wargamers noted. Kiribati, for example, possesses enormous potential economic assets in the form of cobalt found on the seabed within its Exclusive Economic Zone. It is estimated to possess three times as much cobalt as can be found in what is called the “global terrestrial reserve base.” Cobalt is a key mineral for touchscreens, batteries and other electronic gear.

So, given how crucial these tiny states are to global military and economic strategy, what are the best ways to encourage them to side with Australia and United States instead of China, which has been pressing hard to win friends and influence people across these reefs, vast stretches of ocean and tiny human population? China has spent copious amounts of cash cultivating senior politicians, government officials and people of influence throughout the Pacific Islands. The US and Australia, when they’ve paid attention to the region, have taken a very different approach.

“One of China’s most salient advantages in the competition is its ability to identify and woo both public influencers and elites in PIC governments, whether via licit or illicit means. U.S. policymakers, in contrast, are more likely to emphasize direct dialogue with PIC civil societies through public diplomacy, including directly exposing Beijing’s corrupting influence whenever possible,” the MITRE report says. “U.S. and allied perspectives on good governance, anti-corruption, and democratic values are important drivers of this asymmetry.”

For fairly obvious reasons, local political and business leaders often perceive that Chinese economic and security assistance is a more palatable “no strings attached” choice, the report says.

But exposing such conduct to the bright light of a warm tropical day can mitigate China’s influence, report author Shane Bilsborough told Breaking Defense in an interview. He offered an example from the game where a natural disaster struck a country.

In this scenario, China had been collecting compromising information about local officials there for years. When disaster struck, Beijing tried to get officials in the affected country to reject US and Australian aid and only accept it from China.

“So the way that the United States countered this was, they had through intelligence means already begun to monitor these collection activities and collect evidence of China’s direct involvement in funding them,” Bilsborough said. During the game, players posing as senior US officials decided to reveal intelligence that China had been flying ministers to the gambling Mecca of Macau and filming their behavior.

The result? “The prime minister or president of the country decided to oust almost his entire cabinet that had been implicated in the corruption scandal,” he said. “It was a highly effective message, which is that look, China is, is trying to corrupt your governments, right? It’s trying to feed poison into your democracies in order to get them not to act in the best interests of the people, but in their own best interest.”

After the real-life debacle of the Solomon Islands government signing a still-secret security pact with China, Australia created its “Step Up” policy and the United States crafted its “Pacific Partnership Strategy” as part of the Pacific Island Partnership, which included an unprecedented White House dinner with President Joe Biden for leaders of 14 Pacific countries.

Bilsborough said the wargaming experts felt “definite optimism that that sort of renewed level of high-level attention in Washington to the region could only bode well.” But he cautioned that it was clear that “concrete, near-term accomplishments” that local politicians can point to during elections will be the key to long-term influence.

Those tangibles, the gamers found, need to be bolstered by “improved messaging from Western allies and the willingness and agility to rebut Chinese propaganda as soon as possible.”

breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · September 7, 2023

22. Why Our Generals Don't Win By Gary Anderson

Why Our Generals Don't Win

military.com · by 7 Sep 2023 Military.com | By Gary Anderson · September 7, 2023

The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.

Operation Desert Storm was the last major conflict that the United States clearly won. It is no coincidence that it was also the last war directed by general officers who were not products of the Goldwater-Nichols and Skelton Panel professional military reforms in military structure and education.

Those "reforms" have resulted in an Army that could not organize an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan, a Navy that has failed to build enough attack submarines to credibly deter or defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and a Marine Corps that willingly castrated itself in an idiotic new strategy called Force Design 2030.

These misbegotten reforms laid the groundwork for bloated joint staffs that cannot get out of their own way, and general officers who cannot coherently plan or lead major wars and campaigns. This piece will examine the baleful legacy of Goldwater-Nichols.

The American failure in Vietnam. closely followed by the debacle of Desert One -- the failed Iran hostage rescue mission, caused lawmakers to question the overall competence of the American military, but particularly our ability to have the services fight as joint forces. This coincided with the publication of "A Genius for War" by Army Col. Trevor Dupuy, who argued that the German General Staff system provided a model for institutionalizing military excellence that our American services had lacked when dealing with the Vietnamese and Iranians. The reformers argued that the quality of selection and education of joint staff organizations had to be improved.

It was true that the services were not sending their best and brightest to joint staff duty and that senior service schools were largely not rigorous, being viewed as a year off for competitive officers from rigorous duty in the field or at sea. Unfortunately, the cure our politicians and armchair academic strategists developed turned out to be worse than the disease itself.

First, the Goldwater-Nichols legislation dictated that all future general and flag officer aspirants would have to serve at least one tour on a joint staff. That created some unintended consequences that are now haunting us.

Every joint staff grew exponentially to accommodate all the midgrade officers competing for flag rank, and there is no empirical evidence serving in a role like the graves registration officer at Central Command will make someone fit to rise to high command.

Erwin Rommel's Panzer army that overran most of North Africa was a tiny fraction of the size of the staffs that infest major U.S. military commands, like those in Tampa and Honolulu today. Rommel himself was not a product of the German General Staff system. Rather, he was one of those largely self-taught savants that frequently pop up in military history.

The second problem that Goldwater-Nichols created was a generation of officers who are a mile wide and an inch deep in the experience of their craft. If a lieutenant colonel or Navy commander wants to achieve flag rank, he or she must have punched several service- and Goldwater-Nichols-mandated tickets in about seven years. These are battalion/ship command, war college, a joint staff tour, and colonel/naval captain-level major command. The resulting officers are largely jacks of all trades and masters of none.

At no point have most of them been required to be the chief of staff or operations officer of a major service command; that is where the real mastery of grand tactics and operational art is learned and practiced. Is it any wonder that our generals could not effectively choose between Kabul International Airport and Bagram Air Base as the port of embarkation for our "cut and run" operation from Afghanistan, a decision that resulted in a nearly indefensible position as troops were overwhelmed by a humanitarian crisis?

Over the course of two decades, I spent time in Afghanistan as a civilian adviser watching a revolving door of military mediocrities acting as NATO commanders ignore the real problems of the war. While spending their time aimlessly wandering about the country handing out challenge coins to their adoring -- if somewhat puzzled -- troops, they failed to realize that the rural population was not buying what we were selling.

A few such senior generals, such as Jim Mattis and David Petraeus, tried to change the strategy but were frustrated by the stubborn incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government and its military. Petraeus at least managed to prevent Iraq from becoming a complete fiasco.

Those of us who spoke out against the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in the 1980s have proved to be right. I argued against the concept in The Washington Post, as did then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman.

We need to modify Goldwater-Nichols now. There is nothing wrong with requiring officers to be familiar with the joint planning system; that is a mere process and can be easily taught at service and joint schools. If the services were required to send only the top 10% of field-grade officers to joint staffs annually, the size of these staffs could be slashed without sacrificing quality.

A military professional must be a master of his trade. Ulysses Grant, John Pershing, Dwight Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz never served as joint officers before leading great armies and fleets to victory. Each spent years in the trenches learning his craft. We do not need more ticket punchers; we have railroad conductors for that.

-- Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps officer who served as a special adviser to the deputy secretary of defense and did several tours as a civilian adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan.

military.com · by 7 Sep 2023 Military.com | By Gary Anderson · September 7, 2023

23. CNN Exclusive: ‘How am I in this war?’: New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma

CNN Exclusive: ‘How am I in this war?’: New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma

By Sean Lyngaas, CNN

Updated 1:35 PM EDT, Thu September 7, 2023

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/07/politics/elon-musk-biography-walter-isaacson-ukraine-starlink/index.html?utm

CNN — 

Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”

As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.

Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials, according to Isaacson, whose new book is set to be released by Simon & Schuster on September 12.

Musk’s concerns over a “mini-Pearl Harbor” as he put it, did not come to pass in Crimea. But the episode reveals the unique position Musk found himself in as the war in Ukraine unfolded. Whether intended or not, he had become a power broker US officials couldn’t ignore.

The new book from Isaacson, the author of acclaimed biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, provides fresh insights into Musk and how his existential dread of sparking a wider war drove him to spurn Ukrainian requests for Starlink systems they could use to attack the Russians.

After Russia disrupted Ukraine’s communications systems just before its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Musk agreed to provide Ukraine with millions of dollars of SpaceX-made Starlink satellite terminals, which became crucial to Ukraine’s military operations. Even as cellular phone and internet networks had been destroyed, the Starlink terminals allowed Ukraine to fight and stay connected.

But once Ukraine began to use Starlink terminals for offensive attacks against Russia, Musk started to second-guess that decision.

“How am I in this war?” Musk asks Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

Musk was soon on the phone with President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, and the Russian ambassador to the US to address anxieties from Washington, DC, to Moscow, writes Isaacson.

Meanwhile, Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister of Ukraine, was pleading with Musk to restore connectivity for the submarine drones by telling Musk about their capabilities in a text message, according to Isaacson. “I just want you—the person who is changing the world through technology—to know this,” Fedorov told Musk.

Musk and SpaceX did not reply to CNN’s requests for comment.

A Ukrainian soldier disconnects their Starlink on the front line during a ceasefire announced by Russia over the Orthodox Christmas period, January 6, 2023.

Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

Musk, the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla and private space exploration firm SpaceX, replied that he was impressed with the design of the submarine drones but that he wouldn’t turn satellite coverage back on for Crimea because Ukraine “is now going too far and inviting strategic defeat,” according to Isaacson.

The unchartered territory that Ukrainian and US officials were in – relying on the charity of an unpredictable billionaire for battlefield communications – also led to a standoff over who would pay for the Starlink terminals last fall.

SpaceX had spent tens of millions of its own money sending the satellite equipment to Ukraine, according to Musk. And the company told the Pentagon that they wouldn’t continue to foot the bill for the satellite gear, as CNN first reported last October.

After CNN’s reporting, Musk reversed course, tweeting “the hell with it … we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”

Gwynne Shotwell, Musk’s president at SpaceX, was livid at Musk’s reversal, according to Isaacson.

“The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally,” Isaacson quotes Shotwell as saying. “Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story.”

But SpaceX was eventually able to work out a deal with the US and European governments to pay for another 100,000 new satellite dishes to Ukraine at the beginning of 2023, according to Isaacson.

Starlink’s importance in the war hasn’t waned.

Last week, the US and its “Five Eyes” allies accused Russian hackers of targeting Ukrainian commanders’ battlefield communications. The Russians’ malicious code was designed to intercept data sent to Starlink satellites, according to the Ukrainians.

24. The China Model Is Dead

China may want to invoke Mark Twain here. (“Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.”)

My "Chinese model:" China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.

The China Model Is Dead

The nation’s problems run so deep, and the necessary repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may already have passed.

By Michael Schuman

The Atlantic · by Michael Schuman · September 7, 2023

China’s jobless college graduates have become an embarrassment to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The unemployment rate among the country’s youth has reached an all-time high, putting the country’s severe economic troubles on display at home and abroad. In August, Xi’s administration decided to act: Its statistics bureau stopped releasing the data.

But Xi can’t hide China’s economic woes—or hide from them. The problems are not just a post-pandemic malaise, or some soon-to-be-forgotten detour in China’s march to superpower stature. The vaunted China model—the mix of liberalization and state control that generated the country’s hypersonic growth—has entered its death throes.

The news should not come as a surprise. Economists and even Chinese policy makers have warned for years that the China model was fundamentally flawed and would inevitably break down. But Xi was too consumed with shoring up his own power to undertake the necessary reforms to fix it. Now the problems run so deep, and the repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may have passed.

Contrary to the assumptions of many commentators in recent years, China may never overtake the United States as the world’s dominant economy if current trends continue. In fact, it’s already falling behind.

A downward trajectory in China does not necessarily ensure the future of American global power, however. China may turn out to be a less formidable competitor than once imagined and offer a less attractive model of development for the rest of the world. But economic failure could also heighten Xi’s determination to overcome American dominance—if not by becoming richer, then through other, possibly more destabilizing means.

The demise of the China model is in many ways a function of its tremendous success. When China’s free-market reforms were just getting under way in 1980, the country was poorer, per capita, than Ghana or Pakistan. Today, China has an $18 trillion economy capable of devising 5G telecom networks and electric vehicles.

The motor of the China model is investment, and lots of it—into factories, highways, airports, shopping malls, apartment towers, you name it. China was destitute at the outset of its reforms, and much of the new infrastructure was necessary. Better transport systems helped to boost economic efficiency; new housing sheltered families migrating from farms to cities in search of opportunity. The investments turned China into the world’s factory floor and produced eye-popping rates of growth.

Read: The end of optimism in China

Over time, China developed a more advanced economy, but the state and companies nevertheless kept on building. The growth rate stayed high, but now the economy was generating wasteful excess that undermined its health. Logan Wright, a partner at the research firm Rhodium Group, estimates that China has 23 million to 26 million unsold apartments. That’s enough to house the entire population of Italy. Many of these apartments will never be purchased, Wright conjectures, because they were constructed in towns with declining populations. China’s automobile industry, figures Bill Russo, the founder of the consulting firm Automobility in Shanghai, has enough unused factory capacity to make more than 10 million cars (sufficient to supply the entire Japanese car market—twice). Beijing boasts about its extensive network of high-speed railways, already the world’s largest—but the state-owned company that operates it has racked up more than $800 billion in debt and posts substantial losses. The Cato Institute once described China’s rail-building bonanza as a “high-speed debt trap.”

The Chinese “continue to invest beyond what they can actually absorb,” Alicia Garcia-Herrero, a senior fellow and specialist in Asian economies at the think tank Bruegel, told me. “This is why their model went wrong.”

As a result of all this unproductive investment—much of it financed by borrowing—China’s debt has expanded much faster than its economy. A decade ago, China’s total debt was about twice the size of the country’s economy; now it’s three times as large. Michael Pettis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes that China has “among the fastest growing debt burdens in history.”

Politics have exacerbated the debt problem. The Communist Party has trumpeted high growth rates as proof of its legitimacy and competence, so when growth rates have slipped below targets, authorities unleashed credit to pump them back up. The International Monetary Fund estimates that China’s local governments have amassed $9 trillion in debt in the name of financing infrastructure projects.

China’s leadership has long known that its investment strategy carried risks. Back in 2007, Wen Jiabao, then China’s premier, said, “There are structural problems in China’s economy which cause unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development.” And Chinese policy makers knew exactly how to repair these problems: China had to “rebalance,” as economists say, meaning that it needed to decrease its reliance on investment and foster new engines of growth, especially domestic consumption, which is abysmally low compared with that of other major economies. For that, economists agreed, China would need to liberalize its financial sector and relax the hand of the state on private enterprise.

Early in his tenure, Xi seemed to accept these imperatives. In 2013, he signed off on a Communist Party reform blueprint that pledged to give the market a “decisive” role in the economy. But the reforms never happened. Enacting them would have diminished the power of the state—and thus Xi’s own power. China’s leader was unwilling to trade political control for economic growth.

The more power Xi has commanded, the heavier the state’s hand in the economy has become. Xi has relied on state industrial policy to drive innovation, and he has imposed intrusive regulations on important sectors, such as technology and education. As a result, China’s private sector is in retreat. Two years ago, private companies accounted for 55 percent of the collective value of China’s 100 largest publicly traded firms, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics; in mid-2023, that share fell to 39 percent.

Now rebuilding the private sector’s confidence is perhaps the most urgent task facing China’s economic policy makers, the Cornell economist Eswar Prasad told me: “And on that score they don’t seem fully cognizant of what needs to be done, or maybe they’re just not willing to do it, and that I think has some fairly serious repercussions for China’s growth.” Prasad added that the chances of policy makers correcting course are “pretty slim” because they consider private enterprise a “necessary but not really ideal avenue of generating more growth.”

At a time when China sorely needed to juice domestic consumption, Xi’s draconian pandemic lockdowns delivered a devastating blow to incomes. The China model has cracked under the pressure: So little demand drives the economy that it has slipped into deflation, which, if it persists, could further discourage the investment and consumer spending that the economy needs to revive. The Peking University professor Zhang Dandan recently estimated that the unemployment rate among youth ages 16 to 24 could be close to 50 percent, more than twice the official figure. Real estate was once a major contributor to economic growth and a store of middle-class wealth. Now investment, sales, and prices in that sector are falling. The largest private developer, Country Garden, is teetering on the brink of default as its Hong Kong–listed shares have lost two-thirds of their value since the beginning of the year.

China’s economy isn’t beyond repair, but fixing it will be costly and painful. The government will have to write off bad debts, close up zombie companies, and introduce sweeping market reforms of a nature that policy makers have so far avoided. Taking these steps would reboot the economy for a new phase of growth—not at the lofty rates of the past, but at a pace that could sustain the country’s economic progress.

The Chinese government has shown no interest in adopting these reforms, however. Various authorities have issued multiple-point plans to support the economy that amount to little more than administrative tweaks and vague pronouncements. Xi’s confidence-inspiring message to the public is, essentially, “suck it up”: “We must maintain historic patience and insist on making steady, step-by-step progress,” he said in a speech recently published in the Communist Party’s top ideological journal.

Economists are not anticipating that China will soon collapse into a financial crisis akin to the 2008 Wall Street subprime meltdown. But their outlook on growth has turned somber. Daniel Rosen, a co-founder of Rhodium, says that if China were to make the proper reforms, it could endure very low growth during a period of adjustment, but then emerge with annual advances of 3 to 4 percent—not bad for an economy its size. But without those reforms, growth will likely slumber at 2 to 3 percent. Prasad expects that the Chinese economy will grow at 3 to 4 percent for the next several years, but that without more market-oriented policies, it will probably not sustain that pace.

None of these rates are alarmingly low, but they are probably not high enough to allow China to catch the United States from behind, or even to make it a close competitor in years to come. For China’s leaders, Prasad told me, “the question is whether that is going to be enough to accomplish what they want.”

Xi Jinping has spent the past decade amassing personal power. Now the yuan has to stop with him. In theory, the economy’s troubles should prod him into a rapprochement with the United States, to stop economic relations with the West from further deteriorating and keep foreign technology and capital flowing to aid the country’s development. But Xi is taking China in a different direction.

Read: China and the West are coming apart. Can China continue to rise?

At the latest summit of the BRICS group of developing countries last month, the forum’s members—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—agreed to add six more, including Iran and Saudi Arabia. Xi appears to envision the BRICS as a counterweight against the West. Global Times, a news outlet run by the Chinese Communist Party, opined that “as more like-minded developing countries join BRICS, a stronger collective force will form, emitting a more resounding ‘BRICS voice,’ driving the world toward good governance.”

The language suggests that Xi remains undaunted in his quest to remake the world order, despite—or even because of—the economic troubles confronting him at home. The only thing he has changed is the strategy. “I think this is the plan: ‘My economy might not be bigger’” than America’s, Bruegel’s Garcia-Herrero said, “‘but my bloc will be bigger.’”

In other words, if China can’t overtake the U.S. on its own, perhaps it can do so in aggregate. But that plan may not work: The economies of the six new BRICS members combined are only a bit bigger than the United Kingdom’s.

The determination to compete with the United States has long been a central component of Xi’s economic agenda. In recent years, he has doubled down on industrial policies, including state financial support, specifically devised to put Chinese companies ahead of American rivals in such sectors as artificial intelligence and semiconductors. With a focus on “self-sufficiency,” he has sought to reduce Chinese vulnerability to U.S. sanctions by substituting homemade alternatives for foreign imports. And his Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-building program, was designed to open avenues of trade and investment for Chinese business beyond the West. The BRICS are even talking about forming their own currency to decrease their dependence on the U.S. dollar.

China may not have the economic strength to attain all of these goals. The country remains relatively poor, with per capita income of $12,700—one-sixth that of the United States. It may not have the resources to support the continued expansion of its military capabilities, or to underwrite initiatives meant to bolster its influence abroad. State banks have already significantly scaled back development lending to low-income countries, for example.

The slowdown of China’s economy may undercut Xi’s ideological assault on the world order. By example, China has sought to demonstrate to the Global South that democracy and development are not inseparable, and that autocrats can have wealth, international respect, and political power. Those claims are harder to make with a faltering economy. If anything, China’s economic troubles suggest that authoritarian regimes cannot both tighten control and sustain economic progress—that, ultimately, political reform must accompany economic reform.

Read: China doesn’t want to compete. It wants to win.

Xi is unlikely to embrace this inconvenient truth. Rather, he will pursue his anti-West agenda with even greater urgency. If he can’t point to rapid growth, then he’ll have to find some other way to justify his repression to his own people, and a march for global primacy against American imperialists could do the job. Maybe Xi can’t (or won’t) make China rich—but at least he’ll make China great.

For this reason, economic weakness could make China’s leaders all the more dangerous—more prone to champion nationalist causes and stumble into foreign adventures, such as a military grab for Taiwan. One can only hope that Xi will look to history and realize that a nation’s power can be projected only as far as its economic strength allows.

The Atlantic · by Michael Schuman · September 7, 2023

25. Tuberville Military Blockade Muddles New Nuclear Oversight (1)

Uh oh.

Tuberville Military Blockade Muddles New Nuclear Oversight (1)

• Pentagon replacing aging ICBMs as Russia, China threats mount
• Senator’s abortion protest stalls hundreds of promotions

September 7, 2023 2:15 PM

By Roxana Tironand Tony Capaccio

https://about.bgov.com/news/tuberville-military-blockade-muddles-new-nuclear-oversight-1/?mc_cid=55f239b1b8

(Updates with further detail on the newly-created Pentagon position in fifth paragraph.)

Bloomberg Government subscribers get the stories like this first. Act now and gain unlimited access to everything you need to know. Learn more.

One senator’s blockade of military promotions is impeding oversight of a multi-billion dollar project to replace and overhaul the aging US intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal at a time when China is building up its own nuclear arsenal and Russia has threatened to use its own in Ukraine.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has blocked military promotions for more than six months, insisting the Defense Department under President Joe Biden end a policy that lets personnel take leave and travel for abortion care or other reproductive health matters if services are unavailable in the states where they are stationed. One of the affected positions is a new post intended to oversee the modernization of the country’s missiles.

His blockade has already stalled more than 300 US military promotions and could extend to as many as 650 promotions by year’s end if it continues, drawing warnings of damage to the nation’s military readiness by three civilian military leaders.

Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, shown speaking with reporters at the Capitol on Sept. 6, 2023, is blocking hundreds of military promotions over the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy.

Task Force Leader

The current defense authorization act (Public Law 117-263) created an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Site Activation Task Force at the Air Force Global Strike Command whose charge includes the nuclear missile wings and nuclear-capable bombers. Under law, the newly-established task force must be run by a general officer.

The Pentagon created a two-star billet — a Major General — and the choice would be Brig. Gen. Colin Connor to run the ICBM task force and receive a promotion as a two-star general, according to a Senate aide familiar with the project who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information that hasn’t been made public. Even if an existing two-star general is appointed to the position, the Senate would still have to confirm it because it’s a change in a high-level post, the aide said.

Connor is the deputy director for nuclear and homeland defense operations responsible for advising the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on nuclear, space, and homeland and missile defense operations.

As the head of the ICBM task force, Connor would oversee day-to-day details of one of the Defense Department’s largest construction projects: replacing the aging Minuteman III ICBMs, built in the 1960s, with the new Sentinel ICBM weapon system built by Northrop Grumman Corp., according the the Senate aide.

The now-$96 billion Sentinel program is a key part of the US drive to modernize its air, land and sea “nuclear triad” in the face of China’s rapidly expanding arsenal, Russia’s suspension of participation in the New Start nuclear treaty and North Korea’s nuclear development.

Delays

The project’s development phase is falling behind schedule by at least a year, according to the Government Accountability Office. The lag is “due to staffing shortfalls, delays with clearance processing, and classified information technology infrastructure challenges,” the GAO said in its annual assessment of major weapons programs.

The Senate Armed Services Committee outlined the need for oversight of the project in its version of the 2024 defense authorization measure. The Senate and House still have to negotiate the final version.

“Despite reaching Milestone B (Engineering and Manufacturing Development) in 2020, the Air Force has yet to produce a reliable master schedule for the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program,” the committee wrote in the bill report. “The program contractor is expecting substantial schedule delays and cost growth. This schedule and cost uncertainty has ripple effects on the transition from the Minuteman III (MMIII) to the Sentinel ICBM.”

Hundreds of Silos

The transition from the Minuteman III fleet, estimated to last almost 10 years, “will be a lengthy and complicated process involving, among other things, real estate purchases, construction, deconstruction, removal and installation of equipment, and nuclear certification,” the panel added. The construction phase alone is estimated at $8.7 billion, the Pentagon said in its latest Selected Acquisition Report.

The project would span five states and will involve placing the new Sentinel ICBMs in 400 silos and multiple ground launch centers across three missile wings: F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming; Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana; and Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. It would occur year round with thousands of construction workers laboring in summer and during the harsh northern winters, according to the Senate aide.

Pentagon officials had no immediate response to a request for comment.

To contact the reporters on this story: Roxana Tiron in Washington at rtiron@bgov.com; Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Robin Meszoly at rmeszoly@bgov.com; Angela Greiling Keane at agreilingkeane@bloombergindustry.com

Stay informed with more news like this – from the largest team of reporters on Capitol Hill – subscribe to Bloomberg Government today. Learn more.

26. China Prefers Guns to Butter

Excerpts:

Of course, the history of PLA entanglement in China’s domestic economy makes it difficult to discriminate between defense investment for military purposes and internally oriented stimulus spending (i.e., make-work). But the particular focus of PLA investment over the last decade has been on expeditionary capabilities rather than on traditional homeland defense. In the event that China continues to fail to transition to sustainable consumption-based growth, Beijing will be left with one of the biggest hammers in the world, and recalcitrant parties abroad may all look like nails.

This could even include the United States. In the face of an ascendant PLA, U.S. defense spending as a percent of GDP is historically low, just above the nadir preceding 9/11. The U.S. has been caught flat-footed, while the CCP is sprinting.

For its part, the CCP would claim that it is responding to threats, but the PLA buildup occurred over a 20-year period during which U.S. forces were almost exclusively focused on low-intensity conflicts outside of the Indo-Pacific region. Equally, while Japan and Taiwan have begun to rearm and prepare for war, respectively, this is only a belated reaction to the PLA’s ascent.

What’s left to discern is how the United States will react now. The good news is that Xi’s own guidance implies that the United States can counter Chinese coercion and avoid conflict if it is able and ready to fight. While China’s spending spree has been closing the gap, the U.S. military still boasts the most valuable arsenal in the world, and U.S. forces, thanks to the legacy of World War II, are globally positioned to operate alongside allies and partners. These residual strengths should form the basis of a strategy to contain or, if necessary, defeat Chinese adventurism. To paraphrase Xi again, Americans need only dare to “speak to enemies in a language they understand.”

China Prefers Guns to Butter

As the economy declines, the CCP leans heavily on the army.

By Jacqueline N. Deal, president and CEO of the Long Term Strategy Group, a Washington, D.C.-based defense consultancy, and Michael Mort, senior vice president at the Long Term Strategy Group.

Foreign Policy · by Jacqueline N. Deal, Michael Mort · September 7, 2023

China’s current economic slowdown has many observers concerned about spillover, including the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will try to substitute nationalism for prosperity as a basis of legitimacy. Some even worry that the party will strike out abroad to divert blame and shore up support at home. These concerns are well-founded, as new data suggests that the CCP years ago made the decision to use force—or the threat of it—to stay in power. From Beijing’s point of view, nationalism and military strength are the handmaidens of future prosperity, and if this comes as a surprise, that is by design.

China’s economic growth has been slowing for over a decade, so the CCP has had plenty of time to responsibly manage the deceleration and—as urged by many Western policymakers and economists—transition to more sustainable consumption-led growth. But the party has failed to implement this advice, perhaps because it would require structural changes that might weaken its grip on power. Instead, the CCP responded to slowing economic growth by pouring resources into its military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Beijing attempted to cover up the scale of this investment. While trumpeting the party’s commitment to a “peaceful rise,” Chinese officials released annual defense budget figures over the last decade indicating that they were keeping spending on the PLA roughly pegged to China’s gross domestic product (GDP)—i.e., that the PLA’s budget increases were proportional to broader economic gains.

Even though China’s GDP is widely thought to be lower than reported and the PLA budget higher, the global community largely accepted Beijing’s line that the two were coupled, enabling the party to explain away the biggest peacetime military buildup since the 1930s.

For instance, the Center for Strategic and International Studies characterizes Beijing’s “rising defense spending” as “closely linked to its burgeoning gross domestic product” such that “since 2000, China’s defense expenditure as a share of its GDP has hovered at or below 2 percent.” This soothing summary is consistent with Chinese public data, but not with common sense. Unfortunately, until now, every public estimate of Chinese defense spending—whether from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute or the International Institute for Strategic Studies—is based on statistics released from Beijing, with minor tweaks consisting of additions of non-defense spending line items from the official budget.

If you watched as China serially produced more new ships, airplanes, and missiles than you could count for most of the last decade and then wondered how the PLA budget could only be growing by single digits in real terms as claimed, you were right to be suspicious. Our group’s independent, bottom-up estimate of Chinese defense spending shows that investment in the PLA has significantly outpaced broader economic growth since at least 2015. This comes from a unique, open-source effort to recreate Chinese spending for every year back to 2000 using observable outputs from major categories including procurement, personnel, and operations and maintenance. For instance, we estimate the cost of each system or weapon the PLA has fielded in dollars, based on its capabilities compared to an analogue from a market economy, and then convert to renminbi using a tailored purchasing power parity exchange rate to account for differences in the price of goods and services in China relative to other countries. While our absolute number for any given year is likely to be an underestimate, as we cannot price what we do not see (i.e., secret programs or underground facilities), this approach conveys a longitudinal sense of the major cost centers and of trends in the PLA’s budget, independent of Beijing’s official statements. We estimate that from 2015 through 2019, China’s military spending grew nearly twice as fast as China’s official GDP in real terms.

PLA investment stalled during the height of COVID on the mainland in 2020 as Chinese shipyards switched from building PLA Navy vessels, a traditional cost center, to building commercial ships—potentially because constructing warships requires tighter working conditions than constructing bulk carriers, and health concerns were paramount. But the spending increases appear to have resumed by last year and to be outstripping GDP growth once more. Chinese drydocks are again buzzing with about 20 major warships under construction; the PLA Rocket Force has embarked on a radical nuclear expansion; the PLA Air Force is pouring ever more resources into the procurement of advanced aircraft; and China is orbiting record numbers of military satellites, even surpassing the United States. All of this is happening in the face of the economic crisis brought on by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy and its aftermath, which exacerbated China’s broader economic downturn.

Amid this crisis, Beijing’s decision to double down on defense spending—combined with the party’s shift from a “peaceful rise” to its increasingly bellicose “wolf warrior” diplomacy—is a deliberate strategy. Backstopped by credible threats, Beijing is in the process of wresting from the rest of the world the resources, market access, technology, and capital that it needs. In other words, the CCP is positioning to coerce—or, if necessary, fight—its way to riches.

Consider the South China Sea. Back in 2010, on the sidelines of a meeting in Hanoi, then-Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reacted angrily to the persistence of smaller regional countries defending their right to contested islands and the waters surrounding them. “China is a big country, and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact,” he explained.

Since then, China has tried to claim essentially the entire sea by building and militarizing new islands. South China Sea outposts are not only of symbolic and defense value but also convey influence over sea lanes that serve as an economic lifeline for East Asian countries dependent on both energy shipments from the Middle East and access to other foreign markets. The South China Sea takeover has additionally enabled Beijing to press its claim to local fish stocks and undersea gas and oil deposits.

As Xi intensifies this extractive campaign, he explains his logic—which he calls the “dialectic of war and peace”—to domestic audiences as follows: “Only those who are capable of fighting can deter war, and those who are ready to fight may not need to fight.” Building up the PLA, then, is designed to enable the party to assert its interests abroad without fear of resistance.

Of course, the history of PLA entanglement in China’s domestic economy makes it difficult to discriminate between defense investment for military purposes and internally oriented stimulus spending (i.e., make-work). But the particular focus of PLA investment over the last decade has been on expeditionary capabilities rather than on traditional homeland defense. In the event that China continues to fail to transition to sustainable consumption-based growth, Beijing will be left with one of the biggest hammers in the world, and recalcitrant parties abroad may all look like nails.

This could even include the United States. In the face of an ascendant PLA, U.S. defense spending as a percent of GDP is historically low, just above the nadir preceding 9/11. The U.S. has been caught flat-footed, while the CCP is sprinting.

For its part, the CCP would claim that it is responding to threats, but the PLA buildup occurred over a 20-year period during which U.S. forces were almost exclusively focused on low-intensity conflicts outside of the Indo-Pacific region. Equally, while Japan and Taiwan have begun to rearm and prepare for war, respectively, this is only a belated reaction to the PLA’s ascent.

What’s left to discern is how the United States will react now. The good news is that Xi’s own guidance implies that the United States can counter Chinese coercion and avoid conflict if it is able and ready to fight. While China’s spending spree has been closing the gap, the U.S. military still boasts the most valuable arsenal in the world, and U.S. forces, thanks to the legacy of World War II, are globally positioned to operate alongside allies and partners. These residual strengths should form the basis of a strategy to contain or, if necessary, defeat Chinese adventurism. To paraphrase Xi again, Americans need only dare to “speak to enemies in a language they understand.”

Foreign Policy · by Jacqueline N. Deal, Michael Mort · September 7, 2023

​27. Xi Prepares to Eat Economic Bitterness

Resistance. Think about it and its potential implications.

Excerpts:

As much as China remains a tightly controlled society, there are indicators—many of them nuanced or easily suppressed—that could signal Xi’s hold is starting to weaken. One such signal could be elite public dissent in the shape of criticism from high-ranking officials, retired party officials, or influential business figures. Shifting or intensifying propaganda could also provide clues. An increase in nationalist messaging, for instance, could represent an attempt to rally the public around a common cause to distract from domestic issues. Similarly, a surge in internet censorship might indicate growing concerns about public sentiment or the spread of information deemed threatening to the regime.

While large-scale protests in major cities could be significant, even small, localized protests or strikes could be telling. A heavy-handed approach to these incidents might suggest heightened regime anxiety. Other potential indicators could include significant boosts in internal security spending, signaling concerns about maintaining stability, as well as abrupt policy changes, leadership reshuffles, and unexpected delays in policy implementation, any of which could hint at dissent within the CCP’s ranks about China’s economic direction. Finally, domestic displays of military might could reflect underlying authoritarian insecurities and fears of threats to the regime.

From today’s vantage point, the notion that China will economically eclipse the United States seems implausible, even far-fetched. Yet Western policymakers would be wise to remember that Xi is charting a course for the long term and continues to believe that a China returning to its “socialist roots” can replace the United States as the world’s dominant power. Given the stakes, it’s not in Washington’s interests to make Xi’s journey any easier by suddenly easing up on the pressure.

Xi Prepares to Eat Economic Bitterness

To withstand threats from China’s economic troubles, Xi stays focused on security.

By Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Foreign Policy · by Craig Singleton · September 7, 2023

Chinese President Xi Jinping always knew it was a matter of when, not if, China’s economic miracle would reach its zenith. Anticipating today’s economic storm, Xi spent many years battening down the hatches and laying the ideological groundwork for his boldest gambit yet: transforming China from an export-dependent, debt-saddled behemoth into a resilient, self-reliant powerhouse. Now, Xi’s moment to implement his vision has arrived—albeit more quickly than he likely expected.

In the West, where democracies demand leaders prioritize near-term economic results, Xi’s restrained response to China’s current crisis might seem perplexing. Yet Xi’s focus on what he has called “comprehensive national security” prioritizes the strategic autonomy of the Chinese state over economic growth, with the former increasingly viewed in Beijing as a precondition for the latter.

Xi’s strategy, rooted in the notion that a stringent focus on security can fend off any threats to his power stemming from economic troubles, may well navigate China through today’s headwinds. But the journey promises to be anything but smooth, even under the improbable assumption that everything goes Xi’s way.

Xi’s pursuit of comprehensive national security has redefined Chinese society, transforming security from a mere policy goal to a mode of governance. Beyond underpinning Beijing’s assertive foreign policy, Xi’s bid for all-encompassing national and regime security aims to reduce, if not eliminate, China’s economic and technological dependence on the West. Relatedly, his corporate crackdowns, as well as the party-state’s ever-deeper push into China’s private sector, seek to curb capitalism’s excesses and return China to its socialist roots. In attributing China’s current challenges to Western “encirclement” and “containment,” Xi also sees his sweeping security framework as a hedge against any risks to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) among the population as the country enters a period of significantly slower growth.

With this in mind, Chinese leaders likely view China’s current slowdown not solely as a near-term challenge but, more importantly, as an opportunity to correct economic imbalances in ways favorable to the party’s longer-term interests.

Thus far, Xi’s response has been limited to meager supply-side stimulus served with a heaping portion of “I told you so.”

Indeed, from his earliest days in power, Xi has philosophized about the “eventual demise of capitalism” and socialism’s “ultimate victory,” albeit one preceded by “hardship.” Xi has rarely held back in highlighting China’s myriad economic ills, attributing them to structural factors, not merely cyclical ones. Today’s spiraling debt, high youth unemployment, and real estate insolvencies are, in Xi’s mind, a symptom, rather than the cause, of China’s economic slowdown, which he views as an outgrowth of corrosive capitalist forces that have undermined China’s ideological cohesion. Xi’s diagnosis is debatable, but his concerns about China’s unbalanced economy are not. China’s inflated growth has been overly reliant on increasingly nonproductive investments in infrastructure, as well as its hyper-leveraged real estate sector, which accounts for one-third of China’s GDP. It now takes China an estimated $9 of investment to produce $1 of GDP growth, up from $3 of investment per dollar of growth in the 1990s. Beijing’s economic model is the very definition of unsustainable.

Tantalizing headlines about China’s rapid slowdown aside, the Chinese economy has actually been trending toward lower growth since 2011, the year the country’s population peaked. Now, China’s crisis of confidence has entered a new, self-reinforcing phase, in which Chinese consumers and businesses refuse to either spend or borrow because of uncertainty over the country’s trajectory. Meanwhile, direct investment by foreign companies has cratered, largely because of growing concerns about Xi’s maximalist national security orientation. That includes a sweeping recent revision to China’s counterespionage law that categorizes routine commercial engagements, such as performing basic due diligence, as acts of espionage punishable by imprisonment. Further compounding China’s crisis is weak global demand for Chinese goods, which has undercut any hopes Beijing may have harbored about manufacturing its way out of today’s problems.

Thus far, Xi’s response has been limited to meager supply-side stimulus served with a heaping portion of “I told you so.” Apart from marginal interest rate cuts and a few minor consumer subsidies, which have failed to spur growth, Chinese policymakers have signaled to businesses, consumers, and free-spending local governments that they should not expect any more help. Speaking to college graduates worried about landing jobs, let alone high-paying ones, Xi advised they instead “eat bitterness” and consider relocating to the countryside to perform menial labor. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators essentially shrugged this year when a major Chinese investment firm, Zhongrong Trust, missed several multimillion-dollar payments to corporate investors. That news sparked fears of a Lehman moment in China’s so-called shadow banking industry, which manages financing activities outside the formal banking system controlled by China’s party-state.

Xi has shown even less sympathy for Chinese households that plowed their life savings into China’s housing market, which is beset by dangerous price bubbles and inflated debt levels. Having railed for years that “houses are for living in, not for speculation,” Xi barely batted an eye when Chinese construction behemoth Evergrande declared bankruptcy and another housing conglomerate, Country Garden, announced that it was on the brink of default. Combined, both companies account for about 40 percent of China’s home sales. Now, Chinese investors may be left without their new property even after plunking down pre-sale deposits. Xi has pleaded for patience with housing investors concerned about real estate values—but not without expounding that the West’s pursuit of similar material wealth led to “spiritual poverty.”

But Xi’s frosty calculus is also predicated on simple economic truths encountered by nearly every country that has followed a high savings, high investment growth model, as China has. Chief among them is that decades of growth built on the back of misallocated, nonproductive, debt-financed investment are, in the long run, unsustainable. For context, the International Monetary Fund estimates that debt held by China’s local governments alone has nearly doubled over the last five years to about $9.3 trillion, roughly equivalent to half of China’s annual economic output. China’s commercial banks hold trillions more in debt, with many borrowers now struggling to repay their loans. If China maintains its current policies, the country’s debt burden will surge to ever-higher levels in ways that Xi realizes, as most economists do, could lead to financial collapse.

Xi’s non-response response suggests he understands China must change course by taming its balance sheet and adjusting its economic model away from unsustainable investment—two objectives easier said than done. Previous efforts to shift China’s investments from unproductive to productive sectors, such as high tech, have struggled due to the limited size of these industries and their inability to absorb significant investments. Pursuing this type of radical restructuring also poses social and political risks with distinct winners and losers, potentially pitting powerful, entrenched bureaucracies against the country’s upstarts as power and wealth are redistributed from the former to the latter.

Besides stimulus spending and redirecting investments, Xi’s other option to stabilize the economy is boosting consumption, essentially encouraging Chinese consumers to spend more. But this strategy faces hurdles. Consumers, tackling wage cuts, rampant job insecurity, and falling home values, remain wary of spending, choosing instead to save for what they fear will be many more rainy days ahead. No doubt, Xi exerts tremendous influence over the lives of China’s citizens, but even he can scarcely compel consumers to part with their cash. Moreover, the structural shifts required to boost the role of consumers in driving growth—for example, by strong-arming local governments and businesses to allow workers to retain more of their earnings—would similarly disrupt Chinese society by shifting power from the state and state-controlled enterprises to the people.

Which is why Xi has chosen to do next to nothing or, at a minimum, to not repeat his predecessors’ mistakes of resorting to massive stimulus to nonproductive investment to temporarily juice the economy. Nor, for ideological reasons, will Xi pull back from his anti-capitalist purge, even as China faces business failures, banking sector stress, and capital flight. Instead, Xi will likely adopt piecemeal or sector-specific measures to alleviate some of today’s pressures, with the goal of orchestrating a controlled economic contraction. Still unclear is whether China’s slowdown will be a short, sharp affair or a long, drawn-out period of stagnation like Japan’s. Regardless, Xi’s desired end state remains the same: a reformed, more balanced, party-first economy free from what he perceives as today’s capitalist burdens.

All told, Xi’s evolving response will likely be a blend of risk aversion when confronting challenges to party authority, social stability, and security and risk acceptance in the economic and ideological realms if he believes his actions align with the CCP’s long-term vision for China. For Xi, managing an economic contraction requires increasing censorship and surveillance to tighten control over information and quell any unrest or criticism. Already, China has ceased publishing youth unemployment data. On the foreign front, Xi will likely adopt a more conciliatory posture with alternative trading partners, especially among developing nations or those less aligned with Western interests. At the same time, he may double down on more assertive messaging against the United States to divert attention from China’s woes and rally nationalist sentiment.

The problem, of course, is that Xi’s emphasis on security over the economy may serve as a buffer in the short run. Sustained economic malaise, however, could have widespread consequences that security measures alone might not be able to contain.

As much as China remains a tightly controlled society, there are indicators—many of them nuanced or easily suppressed—that could signal Xi’s hold is starting to weaken. One such signal could be elite public dissent in the shape of criticism from high-ranking officials, retired party officials, or influential business figures. Shifting or intensifying propaganda could also provide clues. An increase in nationalist messaging, for instance, could represent an attempt to rally the public around a common cause to distract from domestic issues. Similarly, a surge in internet censorship might indicate growing concerns about public sentiment or the spread of information deemed threatening to the regime.

While large-scale protests in major cities could be significant, even small, localized protests or strikes could be telling. A heavy-handed approach to these incidents might suggest heightened regime anxiety. Other potential indicators could include significant boosts in internal security spending, signaling concerns about maintaining stability, as well as abrupt policy changes, leadership reshuffles, and unexpected delays in policy implementation, any of which could hint at dissent within the CCP’s ranks about China’s economic direction. Finally, domestic displays of military might could reflect underlying authoritarian insecurities and fears of threats to the regime.

From today’s vantage point, the notion that China will economically eclipse the United States seems implausible, even far-fetched. Yet Western policymakers would be wise to remember that Xi is charting a course for the long term and continues to believe that a China returning to its “socialist roots” can replace the United States as the world’s dominant power. Given the stakes, it’s not in Washington’s interests to make Xi’s journey any easier by suddenly easing up on the pressure.

Foreign Policy · by Craig Singleton · September 7, 2023

28. I was Ukraine’s defence minister. Here’s my message for our allies: we must not lose sight of victory

I was Ukraine’s defence minister. Here’s my message for our allies: we must not lose sight of victory | Oleksii Reznikov

To my defence ministers friends around the world, I say: thank you for the military support, but heed this advice

The Guardian · by Oleksii Reznikov · September 8, 2023

How long is 671 days? In the context of modern history, it is perhaps the equivalent of a few seconds. But for me, it accounts for a period of time during which morehas happened to Ukraine than many countries go through in a century. It is also the number of days that I served as my country’s minister of defence.

I took up the position on 4 November 2021, when Ukraine had been facing Russian hybrid warfare for eight years. Within 112 days, the Kremlin had begun full-scale warfare – unknown to Europe since the second world war. Ukraine became the first state in the world forced to wage war against an aggressor in five domains at once: land, air, water, and the informational and cyber environments.

As defence minister, I was always thinking about what Ukraine’s armed forces would need tomorrow, not today. This led to the vital acquisition of Javelins, NLAWs and Stingers; later on we acquired the M777 howitzer, the Patriot missile system and are now preparing to deploy F-16 fighter jets.

This would not have happened without the will, determination and compassion of my fellow defence ministers from more than 50 countries across the world. We have been united under the Ukraine Defense Contact Group – also known as the Ramstein format, due to the monthly meeting’s location at the Ramstein airbase in Germany – and the leadership of the US secretary of defence Lloyd Austin. The Ramstein format is a platform capable of changing the world’s security architecture for the better.

I would like to thank my fellow ministers of defence: you are the people writing a new page of the world’s history. It is thanks to you that Ukrainians are able to face Russian aggression with dignity. We will never forget those who lent a hand in the most terrible time of our history.

But I would also like to make several important points for my defence colleagues.

The objective of the civilised world must be to stop Russia

Impunity for Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 brought about its occupation of Crimea in 2014; impunity for the occupation of Crimea led to the occupation of Donbas; impunity for the occupation of Donbas allowed for Russia’s aggressive intervention in Syria; impunity for Syria and inattention to events in Crimea and Donbas resulted in the full-scale war in Ukraine – with hundreds of thousands killed, millions of refugees and humanitarian and ecological disasters.

Do we want this list of suffering to be extended?

You have to realise that you are responsible for the entire future of humanity; that is why it is vital that you act decisively. Russia and its partners have challenged not just the independence and sovereignty of one European country, but the entire world order – including international law and humanitarian and security institutions. Whether the civilised world will be able to avert a third world war will depend on its response to Russia’s actions and how the war in Ukraine ends.

Russia won’t be stopped by “freezing” the conflict, an armistice or concessions

In 1938, striving to prevent what would become the second world war, an infamous agreement was signed in Munich, transferring the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich. We know from history that this did not stop Hitler. Soon the Third Reich had complete control over what was left of Czechoslovakia, including its considerable military arsenal, which later played an important role in the invasion of Poland and France.

Putin’s actions follow a similar pattern. Russia demands the recognition of the occupied territories of Ukraine as its territory in exchange for the end of the war. However, this is obviously for the sake of one thing only – to buy some time, regroup and “finally solve the Ukrainian issue” using new resources. Russia does not recognise the existence of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people; its goal is the destruction of Ukrainian statehood and the assimilation of Ukrainians.

Its ambitions will not stop at Ukraine. I believe that letting Russian obtain Ukraine’s resources, including a large recruiting fund, will only increase the Kremlin’s ambitions and lead to a big new war in eastern Europe, which will inevitably involve Nato – with all the resulting risks.

Russia’s nuclear threat may be solved by your decisiveness

Russia has consistently withdrawn from most of the key international agreements on nuclear weapons, such as Start 2 (it left the treaty on 14 June 2002), New Start (Russia suspended participation on 21 Feburary 2023) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty (it withdrew on 3 July 2019).

Moreover, on 25 May 2023 Russia and Belarus signed a document on the deployment of nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory. Given this trend, it is currently impossible to claim with certainty which countries Russian nuclear missiles and nuclear weapons’ technologies can still reach and what the consequences might be.

While the war continues, an international strategy for minimising the risks of engagement of Russian nuclear weapons and the proliferation of Russian nuclear weapons’ technologies to other countries should be developed and approved as soon as possible. This should contain components of military strategy and sanctions as pressure mechanisms, as well as the future architecture of international treaties regarding Russian nuclear weapons.

Russian war criminals must face justice

Evil must be punished to prevent more people becoming victims in future. The sooner an international tribunal for Russia’s crimes in Ukraine is established, the sooner this war will end. The tribunal should assess all facts of Russia’s alleged war crimes, including genocide, cultural genocide, ethnocide, ecocide, forced deportations, child abduction, terror against energy production, mass executions of civilians and prisoners of war and missile and artillery attacks against objects of civilian infrastructure.

Victory for Ukraine is not a dream, but a reality

The recipe for this victory is clear: it is restoration of the territorial integrity of Ukraine, the withdrawal of the remnants of Russian troops, the punishment of war criminals, reparations, the introduction of the amendments to international law that will prevent similar aggressions in the future, and participation of Ukraine in the architecture of international security.

The victory of Ukraine will be the triumph of international law over the arbitrariness of the strong. It will demonstrate that it is unacceptable to change internationally recognised borders through military aggression. It will be the unity of the free world against the tyranny of unfreedom.

Dear colleagues, ministers of defence, I trust in your virtues and desire to make this world better. Therefore I urge unity, bravery and consolidated action – that is the only way for us to save this world from the catastrophe of a third world war.

Finally I would like to ask you to be even more responsive and supportive to my successor. Rustem Umerov is a competent and professional person capable of continuing the initiatives we have launched. Together, you will accelerate the moment of Ukraine’s victory.

It was my honour to serve my country and work with you. Glory to Ukraine!

The Guardian · by Oleksii Reznikov · September 8, 2023

29. Towards a Policy Framework for Addressing Violent Conspiracy Theory Movements

Conclusion​:

Common across the approaches of both social media platforms and governments is a lack of synergy between the various policy areas in which conspiracy theories sit. Given the complicated relationship between conspiracy theories and ideological motivations, traditional CVE frameworks and securitised approaches which centre ideology in radicalisation processes may be insufficient in comprehending the motivations and pipelines of violent conspiracy actors. It is equally vital for policymakers to avoid securitising non-violent communities, calling for a careful equilibrium in understanding where conspiracy networks cross the line of inciting hatred or violence.

To systematise and bridge the gaps in policies addressing conspiracy theories online, both cross-platform and intra/inter-governmental communication is imperative. Furthermore, with the forthcoming of the UK’s Online Safety Bill and the implementation of the European Digital Regulation Framework in 2024, collaboration between governments, regulators and social media platforms to ensure legal consistency across the online and offline spaces is paramount. As the threat posed by radicalised online communities continues to morph and innovate, policies must be suitably flexible and agile to adjust to evolving landscapes of violence.

Towards a Policy Framework for Addressing Violent Conspiracy Theory Movements - GNET

gnet-research.org · by Hannah Rose

7th September 2023 In Insights

In this GNET Insights miniseries, ISD experts explore the complex intersection of conspiracy theories, violence and extremism. In the fourth article in the series, ISD Analyst Hannah Rose outlines the shifting platform and government responses to these issues, and the complex policy landscape around this emergent harm area.

You can also read the other articles in the series, on the complex conceptual relationship between these phenomena, the varied manifestations of violence associated with conspiracy movements, and the key conspiratorial narratives accompanying violent radicalisation.

Introduction

With the emergence of the anti-lockdown movement and its capacity for mass mobilisation, the potential for real-world impacts of conspiracy theory movements boomed both in the public and policymakers’ consciousness. While the January 6 Capitol insurrection demonstrated the propensity of conspiracy theory movements to catalyse violence, Instagram’s introduction of labels for COVID-related content showed for the first time that mainstream social media platforms recognised the offline harms which could originate within their ecosystems.

Violent conspiracy theories pose a threat by targeting marginalised communities, serving as conduits to more extreme ideologies and propagating diverse forms of violence. As such, they represent a meshing of often disparate harm types and constitute a new phenomenon which platforms and governments alike have struggled to situate within their existing policy frameworks.

Although conspiracy theories can motivate their proponents towards violence, believing in a conspiracy theory is not inherently illegal, nor is it against a platform’s terms of service, even if it carries the potential for real-world harm. Policies are further complicated by the nebulous structure of conspiracy movements, which lack clear group affiliations, and the frequent use of coded language or ‘dog whistles’, which hinders detection. Additionally, conspiracy theories tend to revolve around an anonymous or undefined villain, whose identity is heavily inferred but is never explicitly revealed, sitting in a grey area when it comes to policies against incitement. For example, conspiracy theories may refer to shadowy figures such as ‘globalists’ or ‘cultural Marxists’ – terms that may seem innocuous to the unseasoned reader but are often deployed to propagate myths about Jewish people’s relationship with power, money and control.

A combination of these various issues has led to an unsystematised approach to defining the problem and its solutions. This Insight will consider some of the commonalities and gaps in policy approaches to combatting violent conspiracy theory networks, first on social media platforms and subsequently in governments.

Platform Responses

Conspiracy theories provide three core challenges for platforms’ Trust and Safety policies, which often centre around the removal of content produced by proscribed terrorist groups and other overtly illegal behaviour. Firstly, conspiracy theories gain momentum through a loosely connected, decentralised and often anonymous online landscape, with no clear leader or formal structure, and therefore no obvious page to take down. A second issue is the ambiguous nature of the content, wherein platforms are accustomed to removing material that has been designated as illegal by a state but lack the same impetus when it comes to removing non-proscribed conspiracy theory content. The final challenge is the heterogeneous nature of conspiracy theories, marked by different interpretations of events and narratives accompanied by diverging attitudes towards violence across conspiratorial networks. Combined, these challenges fall outside the scope of the clear-cut, mass content removal on which platforms’ Trust and Safety systems were initially designed.

Trust and Safety systems across mainstream social media platforms typically exhibit fractured policies towards conspiracy theories. For example, policies which may be used to address conspiratorial content on TikTok are dispersed across the policy areas of harassment and bullying; violent and hateful organisations and individuals; hate speech and hateful behaviours, and violent behaviours and criminal activities. YouTube specifically identifies conspiracy theory content under its hate speech policy; however, it defines such content in a manner that only considers it a violation when it specifically targets an individual or group with protected characteristics.

In May 2022, X (formerly known as Twitter) published a crisis misinformation policy which included the advancement of demonstrably false information with the potential to “cause serious harm”. Combined with their abuse and harassment policy and violent speech policy, this could cover the nexus of conspiracy theories and violence. However, with moves to reinstate actors who have promoted conspiracy theories such as Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) since Elon Musk took over the company, the future of the comprehensive enforcement of such policies is unclear.

Meta is the only company to demonstrate a dedicated policy area focused on the intersection of conspiracy theories and violence, as part of its ‘dangerous organisations and individuals’ community standards. Placed in the third part of Facebook and Instagram’s three-tier content removal policy, “violence-inducing conspiracy networks” (VICNs) “may not have a presence, or coordinate” on their platforms. Meta defines VICNs as non-state actors who 1) organise under a name, sign, mission statement or symbol, 2) promote theories that deliberately and falsely attribute violent or dehumanising behaviours to people or organisations and 3) have inspired real-world violence. Such a definition specifically distinguishes conspiracy theories promoting violence against individuals from those that may have little hateful impact such as flat earth theories.

The policy raises questions around the definition of ‘violence-inducing’ and decisions by platforms to only address content specifically related to violence. For example, a 9/11 ‘truther’ who believes that Jewish people orchestrated the terrorist attack may not specifically advocate for antisemitic violence and therefore not qualify under Meta’s definition of a VICN. However, by spreading falsehoods about Jewish people, they would nevertheless contribute to a hostile and hateful online environment. Similarly, survivors of terror attacks or family members of victims targeted by ‘disaster trolls’, as identified by researchers at King’s College London, may experience other adverse impacts beyond merely the ‘real-world violence’ defined in Meta’s policy. In practice, the enforcement of VICN policy is narrowly focused on QAnon to the extent that Meta’s policy updates on this area refer in shorthand to “our policy against QAnon”.

A thin line exists between ensuring freedom of speech and protecting communities from harassment or abuse, and different parts of conspiracy movements may sit on different sides of this line. In these scenarios, catch-all content removal or approval may fail to understand the heterogeneity of these movements. For example, the anti-COVID lockdown movement features significant diversity in its attitude towards violence, meaning that blanket content removal policies designed to reduce violence may inadvertently take down more than the policy intends.

Even when the threat is well-defined, platforms may still encounter challenges when identifying conspiratorial content and assessing coded or covert language against their policies. Defining what violence looks like in the context of intersecting harm types and subsequently recognising the associated actors and linguistic cues will necessitate the adaptation of content moderation software and ongoing refinement of human moderator expertise. Platforms must also consider the different policy levers available to them beyond content removal, including content warning notices, redirection strategies, counter-narratives and targeted interventions

Government Responses

Government policies addressing the proliferation of conspiracy theories are similarly fractured, with no clear international consistency regarding its policy domain, ranging from digital governance to counter-extremism to matters of security. Across governments, the effort to tackle violent conspiracy networks currently sits in three overarching portfolios; counter-terrorism, threats to democracy and incitement to violence.

The UK Government’s recent update to its counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, recognises that “conspiracy theories can act as gateways to radicalised thinking and sometimes violence”, and therefore pose a threat both in themselves and through their linkage into other harm types. In the UK, violent conspiracy theories may be considered under the catch-all category of ‘mixed, unstable or unclear’ terrorist threats, which include ideologically motivated violence beyond the traditional far right/Islamist dichotomy.

In a similar recognition of the changing framework of violent threats, the Canadian government moved towards defining conspiratorial actors under ‘ideologically motivated violent extremism’ (IMVE), distinct from religiously or politically motivated violent extremism (RMVE and PMVE). In both cases, violent conspiracy networks are understood as a terrorist threat, using counter-terrorism tactics. Given the complex relationship between violent conspiracy theories and ideology, as well as their decentralised and grassroots structures, post-9/11 countering violent extremism frameworks are often focused on ideological deradicalisation and group disengagement and therefore may struggle to adequately grapple with and counter violent conspiracy networks.

Conspiracy theories are often united by anti-establishment and anti-government threads, leading some governments to define conspiracy theories as threats to democracy or the constitution. In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution monitors conspiracy networks such as the anti-lockdown Querdenken movement. This movement which organised a protest to storm the Bundestag in 2020, and the Reichsbürger movement, whose adherents were involved in a recent intended coup, fall under its scrutiny.

David Icke, who has long spread conspiracy theories that the world is ruled by reptiles, was banned entry into the Netherlands and the Schengen Zone in November 2022 for posing a “threat to public order and peace”. The letter to him by the Dutch government identifies that conspiracy theories “can harm the democratic rule of law” by undermining the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Due to differing national contexts, not all governments have the same offices or legal instruments to define violent conspiracy theories as threats to democracy.

Icke’s ban was secondly linked to the illegality of incitement to hatred in relation to targeted antisemitism in his live shows and writings. When conspiracy theories lead to incitement to violence or hatred against a protected minority, relevant legislation can be used regardless of the perpetrator’s motivation. One such example is Piers Corbyn’s 2021 video calling for the public to engage in violent acts against MP’s offices for their role in implementing lockdown measures. This led to his arrest on suspicion of encouragement to commit arson. Such outcome-focused measures can prevent violence, yet overlook the conspiratorial motives of the alleged perpetrator or the other harms that extend beyond targeted violence including the spread of propaganda, or abuse and harassment of targeted communities.

Given the diversity of conspiracy theories and their violent manifestations, the current approach pulls together disparate policies and legal instruments, attempting to shoehorn this unique threat into existing counter-terrorism (CT) or countering violent extremism (CVE) frameworks. As concerns regarding the nexus of violence and conspiracy theories deepen, a comprehensive cross-government policy program may become necessary to coordinate the various areas in which the threat sits. Establishing consistency in policy programs across governments will be crucial, working towards a uniform framework to facilitate a fluid international response to a transnational threat.

Conclusion

Common across the approaches of both social media platforms and governments is a lack of synergy between the various policy areas in which conspiracy theories sit. Given the complicated relationship between conspiracy theories and ideological motivations, traditional CVE frameworks and securitised approaches which centre ideology in radicalisation processes may be insufficient in comprehending the motivations and pipelines of violent conspiracy actors. It is equally vital for policymakers to avoid securitising non-violent communities, calling for a careful equilibrium in understanding where conspiracy networks cross the line of inciting hatred or violence.

To systematise and bridge the gaps in policies addressing conspiracy theories online, both cross-platform and intra/inter-governmental communication is imperative. Furthermore, with the forthcoming of the UK’s Online Safety Bill and the implementation of the European Digital Regulation Framework in 2024, collaboration between governments, regulators and social media platforms to ensure legal consistency across the online and offline spaces is paramount. As the threat posed by radicalised online communities continues to morph and innovate, policies must be suitably flexible and agile to adjust to evolving landscapes of violence.

Hannah Rose

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Tags: Conspiracy, Policy

gnet-research.org · by Hannah Rose

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com