Quotes of the Day:
"Psychological Warfare has always rested as an uneasy activity in democracies, even in wartime. It is partly to do with the suspicion that using the mind to influence the mind is somehow unacceptable. But is it more unacceptable to shoot someone's brains out rather than to persuade that brain to drop down their weapon and live?"
- Dr. Phillip M. Taylor, Author of "Munitions of the Mind", Manchester University Press, 1995
"I do believe that political arrangements which are based upon violence, intimidation and theft will eventually break down - and will deserve to do so."
- Margaret Thatcher
"Where there is power, there is resistance."
- Michel Foucault
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Early July
2. A dozen of Biden’s national security nominees are on hold in the Senate
3. Warren Extracts Agreement for Nominees to Refuse Defense Industry Work for 4 Years
4. Ending Chaos in Haiti Is Not a Job for U.S. Troops by James Stavridis
5. JSOC’s former top enlisted soldier is one of 60 ‘Black Hawk Down’ award upgrades
6. Information Warfare Looms Larger in Russia’s New Security Strategy
7. Japan’s new defense whitepaper issues warnings over Taiwan’s security, climate change
8. Kristi Noem’s National Guard Deployment Is America’s Future
9. On the Eve of Destruction
10. Give combatant commanders the tools to innovate
11. Interpreting Sun Tzu: The Art of Failure?
12. China’s Belt and Road won’t readily reach Afghanistan
13. Cuba Doesn’t Know How to Handle the New Protests
14. Opinion | The War That Made Our World
15. Israeli tech sets yet another record, raising $11.9 billion in H1 of 2021
16. Iranian intelligence agents plotted brazen abduction of Brooklyn dissident journalist, U.S. prosecutors say
17. A new US-Europe rare earths supply chain is using a “very Chinese model” to counter China
18. FDD | Matthew Pottinger Named Chairman Of China Program At Foundation For Defense Of Democracies
19. National security and cybercrime: This is not your grandpa's battleground
20. Is the internet the most potent radicalization tool ever invented?
21. Xinhua Commentary: U.S. poses gravest threat to peace in South China Sea
22. Why has Cuba exploded in protests? It goes beyond the U.S. embargo and the pandemic
23. ‘The White House is finally paying attention’: Cuba’s protests force Biden’s hand
24. ‘There’s No Turning Back:’ Cuban Dissidents Feel Emboldened Despite Crackdown
25. An Uprising of Despair in Cuba
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Early July
July 14, 2021 | FDD Tracker: July 1 – 14, 2021
Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Early July
Trend Overview
Edited by David Adesnik
Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker, where FDD’s experts and scholars assess the administration’s foreign policy every two weeks. As always, they provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they study. Russian cybercriminals launched a ransomware attack of unprecedented size in early July, just weeks after President Joe Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin that “responsible countries need to take action against criminals who conduct ransomware activities on their territory.” Moreover, if Russia fails to act, the United States may step in. Meanwhile, Chinese leader Xi Jinping marked the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party by warning that any attempt to subjugate his country would result in “heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel.” In Iraq and Syria, Iran-backed militias attacked U.S. bases to show they were not intimidated by recent U.S. airstrikes. In Afghanistan, the Taliban continued to expand their control rapidly following the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Check back in two weeks to see how the White House dealt with these challenges across the globe.
Trending Positive
Trending Neutral
Trending Negative
Trending Very Negative
2. A dozen of Biden’s national security nominees are on hold in the Senate
Note this statistic: Sixty-one key civilian jobs at the Department of Defense require Senate confirmation. Of Biden’s defense nominees so far, the Senate has confirmed six (but none since May 28), 10 are awaiting Senate floor action, five are awaiting a SASC vote, and four are awaiting SASC confirmation hearings.
Excerpts:
The Senate “hold” is an informal practice through which senators convey their objections over a nominee to Senate leaders and deny unanimous consent to proceed to confirmation. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., can call a cloture vote to override such objections, which requires a simple majority of 51 votes ― though he hasn’t done so with the nominees in limbo.
Those people include: Kendall and Shyu; DoD assistant defense secretary picks Deborah Rosenblum, Christopher Maier, Ely Ratner and Shawn Skelly; DoD general counsel nominee Caroline Krass; Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation director nominee Susanna Blume; Air Force undersecretary nominee Gina Ortiz-Jones, and assistant Navy secretary nominee Meredith Berger.
Two picks for defense-related jobs at the Energy Department are also stalled: Jill Hruby and Frank Rose, who were tapped to hold the top two positions at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the national nuclear warhead stockpile.
A dozen of Biden’s national security nominees are on hold in the Senate
WASHINGTON — A dozen of President Joe Biden’s senior national security nominees — including his pick to lead the Air Force — are stalled in the Senate because multiple senators have placed procedural holds on their confirmations, Defense News has learned. The delay slows the administration’s efforts to introduce new military leaders and policies early in its tenure.
Since early June, the Senate Armed Services Committee has recommended a dozen nominees to the full chamber, but at least three lawmakers from both parties are using those positions to bargain with the administration over various concerns, such as basing and acquisition decisions. It’s unclear whether any of the nominees will receive a Senate floor vote before Congress breaks for August recess or whether other national security leaders could face similar delays.
“It’s important to get the Department of Defense staffed promptly, and we’re working to do that,” SASC Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., told Defense News on Tuesday. “I’m not going to comment on my discussions [with fellow senators], but my goal and my responsibility is to get people confirmed.”
On Congress’ agenda when members return from the July 4 recess: late-arriving defense spending and policy bills as well as President Joe Biden’s pick for Navy secretary, among other Pentagon nominees.
By: Joe Gould
On Tuesday morning, the process of approving Biden’s Pentagon leaders appeared to be moving forward after news Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., lifted her holds on Air Force secretary nominee Frank Kendall and Heidi Shyu, tapped to lead Pentagon acquisitions. But hours later, Michigan Democratic Sens. Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow told Defense News they are delaying a vote on Kendall as well as an undisclosed number of other Pentagon nominees.
“I have ‘holds’ on some folks,” Peters said ahead of a meeting with Air Force officials Tuesday. “I don’t need to get into the details, but obviously we need to ... get more information, and we’re going to press hard to get that information.”
The Senate “hold” is an informal practice through which senators convey their objections over a nominee to Senate leaders and deny unanimous consent to proceed to confirmation. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., can call a cloture vote to override such objections, which requires a simple majority of 51 votes ― though he hasn’t done so with the nominees in limbo.
Those people include: Kendall and Shyu; DoD assistant defense secretary picks Deborah Rosenblum, Christopher Maier, Ely Ratner and Shawn Skelly; DoD general counsel nominee Caroline Krass; Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation director nominee Susanna Blume; Air Force undersecretary nominee Gina Ortiz-Jones, and assistant Navy secretary nominee Meredith Berger.
Two picks for defense-related jobs at the Energy Department are also stalled: Jill Hruby and Frank Rose, who were tapped to hold the top two positions at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the national nuclear warhead stockpile.
The last nominations for senate-confirmable roles were announced on Dec. 30.
By: Aaron Mehta
Sixty-one key civilian jobs at the Department of Defense require Senate confirmation. Of Biden’s defense nominees so far, the Senate has confirmed six (but none since May 28), 10 are awaiting Senate floor action, five are awaiting a SASC vote, and four are awaiting SASC confirmation hearings.
The Michiganders’ resistance to Kendall is rooted in objections to the military’s decision in June to house an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter international training center at Arkansas’s Ebbing Air National Guard Base instead of Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard Base.
“We’re still getting information right now,” Peters said. “We’re meeting with the Air Force to get a better understanding of how that decision was made because, based on the facts as I review them, Selfridge was clearly the best place to locate that mission, and I need more clarification from the Air Force as to how they arrived at what I think was an erroneous decision.”
Stabenow said she and Peters were “discussing how far” to take their concerns, adding after their meeting with Air Force officials that there had been “no resolution” but “a lot of tough questions.”
Air National Guard spokesperson Lt. Col. Devin Robinson said the Guard is “certainly aware” of the situation with the Michigan senators. Air Force spokesperson Sarah Fiocco said that the service “uses its strategic basing process to select mission locations, evaluating installations based on factors related to mission requirements, infrastructure capacity, community support and cost.”
Air Force secretary nominee Frank Kendall pledged to work on bridging the pilot shortage and other issues at his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday.
By: Rachel Cohen
In addition, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee had a hold on Kendall as well, Inside Defense reported last month. Lee’s office has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
Another Republican, Sen. Roger Wicker, confirmed Tuesday that he is stalling Blume’s nomination to lead CAPE. The hold, first reported by Politico, was not about Blume per se, but to pressure the Navy to commit to buying four amphibious ships in a single “block buy.” Proponents say it would be cheaper than acquiring the ships individually.
“I have not gotten my concerns met,” Wicker, of Mississippi, told Defense News. “We need a bigger Navy and we need to save money, and there’s a real easy way to do that, by doing a block buy.”
Sometimes the tactic of delaying confirmation votes by placing holds works. Warren relented on Kendall and Shyu on Tuesday after they agreed to four-year ethics pledges and defense industry job recusals, according to a congressional aide familiar with the talks.
The separation between industry and the Pentagon has been an important issue for Warren, who pressed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to make a similar pledge during his own confirmation process earlier this year.
“I’ll be mindful not only of the legal requirements that govern my conduct, but also of the appearances to ensure that the public has no reason to question my impartiality,” Austin said in January.
“Going above and beyond what federal law requires, as you are doing here, sends a powerful message that you are working on behalf of the American people and no one else,” Warren replied.
A group on Pentagon nominees have experience dealing with the Pentagon’s acquisition system and extensive knowledge from industry, but they also have the scars from programs gone wrong and occasionally tense relationships with lawmakers.
By: Defense News staff
Kendall and Shyu, who have each worked in the defense industry, also agreed not to seek waivers for those ethics pacts. The agreements block Pentagon officials from working on procurement deals and other matters involving companies to which they have prior ties, including Raytheon, where both nominees held senior leadership positions.
Kendall served as the Pentagon’s top acquisition official from May 2012 to January 2017 and has spent nearly 50 years in the defense and national security sectors. Shyu held the Army’s top acquisition job from September 2012 to January 2016 as well, among other positions in industry.
Warren introduced legislation in 2019 that would have banned large defense contractors from hiring senior Pentagon officials and officers for four years after they leave office. She hasn’t ruled out placing holds on future Pentagon nominees to extract similar ethics pledges.
“This is definitely something that she will continue to push,” a congressional aide said.
Valerie Insinna of Defense News contributed to this story.
3. Warren Extracts Agreement for Nominees to Refuse Defense Industry Work for 4 Years
Is this enforceable? And do we think this will help attract the best qualified national security professionals? And what problems will the 4 year agreement really prevent?
Warren Extracts Agreement for Nominees to Refuse Defense Industry Work for 4 Years
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has lifted two nomination holds on prospective Defense Department officials after they agreed to stay out of the defense industry for at least four years following their work at the Pentagon, an aide familiar with the agreement confirmed to Military.com.
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts halted the nominations of Frank Kendall, President Joe Biden's pick to be the next Air Force secretary, and Heidi Shyu, put forward to be the Pentagon's research and development chief, pending their personal commitments to break the so-called ubiquitous military-defense revolving door in Washington. Inside Defense was first to report the news.
Kendall and Shyu have agreed to avoid working for defense firms for four years after their turns in the administration, up from the two years mandated by law, and won't seek a waiver to amend their ethics agreements, the aide said Tuesday. The two also agreed to recuse themselves from any decisions that involve their former employers during their government service.
The initiative is just one step of Warren's broader work to stop defense contractors from hiring former senior government officials for four years after they leave government.
In 2019, she introduced the Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act to limit the practice, although the bill never received a vote. In January, Warren received a similar pledge from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to recuse himself from any work related to Raytheon Technologies, where he was a member of the board of directors.
"This is precisely the kind of thing that senators should be doing to ensure that we shore up our system to make sure that there's integrity, and that there isn't even the perception that people are going to be using their public service to advance their own personal financial interests," said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight.
Smithberger said Warren's efforts are reminiscent of the late Sen. John McCain, who also kept a close eye on defense contractors filling top posts at the Pentagon.
"We don't even want the appearance that decisions are being made because of who someone's prior employers were," Smithberger said in an interview. "[Any] kinds of appearances of conflicts of interest can be extremely costly to the department, and can delay programs -- so they need to get their house in order."
Besides Warren, Sens. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, have reportedly also put holds on Kendall's nomination for various reasons. Air Force Magazine reported Peters held up Kendall's nomination over the future of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter international training center, which was awarded to Arkansas' Ebbing Air National Guard Base over Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan.
In a statement, an aide from Lee's office would not comment on the matter, and a representative from Peters' office did not reply to a message before publication.
Kendall spent 10 years on active duty and retired as a lieutenant colonel from the Army Reserve. Under the Obama administration, he served as the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics at the Pentagon between 2012 and 2017. He was previously the vice president of engineering for Raytheon.
Shyu was formerly the U.S. Army's top acquisition official between 2012 and 2016. Like Kendall, she previously also worked with Raytheon.
4. Ending Chaos in Haiti Is Not a Job for U.S. Troops by James Stavridis
Excerpts:
While the U.S. probably had the most at risk from a devolution of order in Haiti (notably from a potential wave of refugees, as occurred in the 1990s), it had no troops assigned to the UN mission. Given U.S. commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington needed to rely on those other nations to stabilize Haiti.
Each time I flew into the capital, Port-au-Prince, I was struck by the warmth of the Haitian people, the smiles of small children in their brightly colored clothes and the elegant French spoken by the national leaders in the crumbling palaces at the center of the city.
I would meet with the Brazilian general who commanded the UN mission to get his assessment, which was always more or less the same: “Admiral, the situation is stable, barely. But the economic picture is terrible, the gangs and narcotics are just below the surface, and sooner or later, the situation will collapse.”
Ending Chaos in Haiti Is Not a Job for U.S. Troops
Washington can assist on civil aid, but any military intervention should be left to other Western Hemisphere nations.
Bloomberg · by James Stavridis · July 13, 2021
The assassination of Haiti’s beleaguered president, Jovenal Moise, allegedly by a posse of Colombians and Haitian-Americans, leaves that ill-starred country in turmoil yet again.
Two different prime ministers are claiming power; the first lady is recovering from gunshot wounds in a Miami hospital; and Moise’s security detail is under investigation for allegedly failing to lift a finger to defend him. Armed gangs are roaming the streets as civil order — never strong in Haiti — is breaking down at an accelerating pace.
What is the outlook for the hemisphere’s poorest country, and what is the role for the U.S. in helping it calm the chaos?
When I was commander of U.S. Southern Command in the late 2000s, I visited Haiti often. While conditions were never promising, there was at least a veneer of civilization, mostly created by a United Nations peacekeeping force led by Brazil with troops from a number of nations, mostly from the Americas. The mission dragged on for more than a decade before wrapping up in 2017.
While the U.S. probably had the most at risk from a devolution of order in Haiti (notably from a potential wave of refugees, as occurred in the 1990s), it had no troops assigned to the UN mission. Given U.S. commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington needed to rely on those other nations to stabilize Haiti.
Each time I flew into the capital, Port-au-Prince, I was struck by the warmth of the Haitian people, the smiles of small children in their brightly colored clothes and the elegant French spoken by the national leaders in the crumbling palaces at the center of the city.
I would meet with the Brazilian general who commanded the UN mission to get his assessment, which was always more or less the same: “Admiral, the situation is stable, barely. But the economic picture is terrible, the gangs and narcotics are just below the surface, and sooner or later, the situation will collapse.”
I would return to my headquarters in Miami and have the operations team review and tighten the extensive contingency plans we maintained to deal with a wave of refugees — which included interdicting rafts at sea and returning them to Haiti or, worst case, offloading them in a refugee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was a constant worry, and as I left the command to head to Europe in 2009, I was pessimistic about the future.
But somehow Haiti has held together, weathering outbreaks of various pathogens (particularly cholera, tied to a lack of safe, fresh water and possibly mismanagement by the peacekeeping forces), earthquakes including the 2010 disaster that flattened much of the capital, vicious seasonal hurricanes and rising levels of drug trafficking.
The question is whether Haiti can remain calm as conspiracy theories and a power struggle magnify the effect of the presidential assassination. For the first time in a tortuous decade, Haitian leaders are asking for a U.S. intervention, an extraordinary request given the negative history of the U.S. military’s various incursions into the country over the past two centuries. (A good portion of the Haitian people are more leery of turning to Washington for help.)
The U.S. has sent a small team of investigators to help look into the assassination, but it should not step into the breech on a larger scale unilaterally, despite the dangers of a complete meltdown and an attendant refugee crisis.
The potential costs of a mission are high. It would set off the usual alarm bells across Latin America and the Caribbean, justified given America’s track record of military interventions. It would require a costly deployment of troops overseas just as President Joe Biden’s administration tries to end the so-called forever wars in the Middle East. And it would be a difficult and risky mission with uncertain metrics and outcomes — as was Afghanistan.
The best approach is clearly civil and multilateral. On the civil side, Washington can send an interagency operational team with significant representation from the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, the Coast Guard, and other agencies that can draw on the lessons of previous engagement in Haiti and in Colombia at the height of its insurgency and narco-trafficking challenges.
But the military portion of such a mission should come from the UN, with an emphasis on the larger nations in the region that were part of the earlier peacekeeping effort: Brazil, Argentina and Chile. It would ideally be under the umbrella of the Organization of American States, which would bring in other actors. Canada also has significant expertise in peacekeeping operations.
Obviously, it will be a heavy lift to get a mission together given the international effects of Covid-19, especially the spreading delta variant. Haiti, which was spared early in the pandemic, has seen cases skyrocket and is the only nation in the Americas yet to launch a vaccination program. Both Brazil and Chile are in some level of domestic challenge — Brazil with the worst Covid crisis in the hemisphere and Chile with a constitutional rewrite looming.
The U.S. could offer financial support to such a mission and logistical support from the U.S. Southern Command and its supporting component, U.S. Army South. The U.S. could potentially lead the maritime side of such a mission, with the land component headed by a regional general, probably from Brazil.
As always in Haiti, the combination of bad leadership and bad luck conspire to create seemingly unwinnable conditions. Poverty, disease and natural disasters continue to plague a nation that deserves a break. It will require a combined effort by the entire hemisphere to help hold Haiti together and prevent a surge of refugees.
The U.S. will need to exert leadership, but it must call on others to act collectively in terms of on-the-ground execution. America doesn’t need another forever war, this time in the Caribbean.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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Bloomberg · by James Stavridis · July 13, 2021
5. JSOC’s former top enlisted soldier is one of 60 ‘Black Hawk Down’ award upgrades
JSOC’s former top enlisted soldier is one of 60 ‘Black Hawk Down’ award upgrades
Rangers and Delta Force operators faced an onslaught of gunfire as they approached the crashed Black Hawk helicopter on the afternoon of Oct. 3, 1993.
The soldiers dashed for cover along the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, where they would spend the night securing the crash site.
In need of medicine and ammunition, another Black Hawk arrived, hovering low as aircrew kicked out cases of supplies. Helicopter door gunners opened up with 7.62mm miniguns, and were met with return fire from below.
“It was the first time I had ever heard miniguns being drowned out because there was so much ground fire from AKs up to that helicopter,” retired Command Sgt. Maj. Chris Faris, a Delta Force veteran, told Army Times. “That was the first time we realized how many people were actually around us.”
Faris, who went on to serve as the top enlisted soldier for the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, is among the 60 soldiers receiving new awards for the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. The awards came after former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy ordered a review of battlefield actions last fall.
Fifty-eight medals are being upgraded to Silver Stars and two will be upgraded to the Distinguished Flying Cross. Faris is expected to receive a Silver Star in an October ceremony at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
U.S. special operations forces were sent on the fateful 1993 mission to snatch lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid at a residence in central Mogadishu.
The initial raid was successful, but the plan went awry when two Black Hawks were downed by rocket-propelled grenades.
“Many of us sent a laze back signaling not to shoot us," one soldier said. “As we continued to move, I began to hear the cracks of bullets."
Kyle Rempfer
August 3, 2020
The ensuing gun battle lasted through the night and cost the lives 18 U.S. troops, with dozens more wounded. Estimates of Somali casualties ranged from a few hundred to more than 1,000, including civilians caught within the urban sprawl.
The political fallout triggered the resignation of a defense secretary and cast a shadow over military planning throughout the 1990s and the war in Afghanistan.
“What I saw over the course of my career was the continued implications of ‘Black Hawk Down,’ to include all the way up until we did the mission for [Osama bin Laden],” said Faris, who was still with JSOC during the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
During debates over whether to approve the daring, and ultimately successful, cross-border operation in 2011, Faris recalled a cabinet official opposed to it saying, “We can’t afford another Black Hawk Down.”
No lucky shots
The RPGs that took those Black Hawks down during the deadly 1993 battle weren’t just lucky shots, Faris noted.
After a previous mission to capture Aidid’s financier, operators had warned against having the helicopters continue circling during raids.
Ostensibly, snipers aboard the aircraft provided over-watch. But in practice, the Black Hawks acted like a “big giant spotlight” drawing attention to U.S. activities, said Faris.
Members of C Squadron, 1st SFOD-D, gather for a picture near Mogadishu in 1993. (Courtesy of Chris Faris)
“They shot so many RPGs at the helicopter that day that, in fact, they’re lucky they didn’t get hit,” Faris said. “So we told our leaders to stop flying the freaking helicopters overhead. They’re going to get one shot down. And lo and behold, the next mission, that’s exactly what happened.”
Faris was on an MH-6 Little Bird helicopter that landed at the objective on the afternoon of Oct. 3, 1993.
The team quickly snagged Aidid’s lieutenants. Up to that point, they had taken some sporadic gunfire, but the only casualty was Ranger Pfc. Todd Blackburn, who fell from a helicopter’s fast-rope.
A ground convoy prepared to whisk away the targets, but things took a turn when the first Black Hawk was shot down. The Delta Force teams split up. One element returned to base with Aidid’s lieutenants and the other joined a Ranger platoon heading to secure the crash site.
“I would say the battle actually began as we got up to crash site one. That’s when all hell opened up,” Faris recalled. “It was a really good, concerted ambush. A lot of people went down right off the bat.”
“It was such intense and accurate fire that everybody just immediately, whether you were on the left side or right side of the road, began to clear the buildings that you were next to to take cover and regroup,” he added.
Delta Force operator then-Sgt. 1st Class Chris Faris, second from the right with no helmet, poses with teammates during training. (Courtesy of Chris Faris)
The Americans established a perimeter, with the forward edge at the crash site, and dug in for the night. The fighting was “on-again, off-again” as Somali militiamen probed the perimeter, Faris said.
Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division and Malaysian Army arrived in the pre-dawn hours to relieve the embattled force.
The team loaded their wounded into the armored vehicles and began what has become known as the “Mogadishu Mile,” the famed movement by foot that Rangers and Delta Force took out of the city.
Shadow over policymakers
At the tactical level, the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu didn’t change too much, Farris said.
Soldiers did learn some hard lessons, like planning for the worst. Expecting to complete the mission before sunset, troops had left their night vision goggles behind. Those devices would’ve been useful during the night fighting that followed.
But the mission’s ramifications were far greater within the halls of government.
“The impacts I saw were much more at the operational and strategic level, the government policy levels, over the next 25 years. It never went away in those discussions,” Faris said.
Graphic footage of slain U.S. troops on Mogadishu’s streets shocked the public and loomed large over President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy, as well as plans to commit ground forces elsewhere in the world, including in Bosnia and during the Rwandan genocide.
The echoes of the Mogadishu mission continued through to Afghanistan, too.
“When I was the command sergeant major of JSOC with Admiral [William] McRaven, we were trying to get permission to go across the border into Pakistan to get after both the Taliban and Haqqani Network sanctuaries, and we went up to speak with a gentleman from the State Department,” recalled Faris.
“At one point — of course he didn’t know who I was or what my experiences were — he made the comment, ‘I had to go in with the ambassador to clean up your mess in Mogadishu,’ which really got on my nerves because we don’t deploy without the commander in chief telling us to go,” Faris added.
Former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin ultimately resigned amid the fallout from the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. Aspin accepted blame for his role in denying requests by commanders in Somalia to send tanks and armored vehicles prior to the failed raid.
A Senate report also later faulted then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Colin Powell and his staff for rejecting a request to send AC-130 gunships.
“I think the one thing that it taught the policymakers was: When we sit here and we say, ‘Hey I want an AC-130 and here’s why,’ then don’t deny us the AC-130,” Faris said. “If you’re going to send us in to do something, then let us plan it. ... You either approve it or you don’t approve it and we’ll go from there.”
6. Information Warfare Looms Larger in Russia’s New Security Strategy
I am reminded that when Gerasimov developed his "doctrine" he said that the US was the one conducting deliberate operations to destabilize regions through the "color revolutions" and Arab Spring in order to justify US military intervention. He was arguing that Russia must defend against these activities and thus developed his new doctrine. It seems like this new Russian "strategy" is along the same lines. It describes what Russian adversaries are supposedly doing and that Russia must protect itself. But it is really describing the techniques and concepts of what Russia does and intends to do to its adversaries.
It decries foreign influence but it is aggressively conducting operations to conduct its own "foreign influence."
Some excerpts from a Latvian Defense report about the "Gerasimov doctrine" from a few years ago.
As a result, it follows that the main guidelines for developing Russian military capabilities by 2020 are:
i. From direct destruction to direct influence;
ii. from direct annihilation of the opponent to its inner decay;
iii. from a war with weapons and technology to a culture war;
iv. from a war with conventional forces to specially prepared forces and commercial irregular groupings;
v. from the traditional (3D) battleground to information/psychological warfare and war of perceptions;
vi. from direct clash to contactless war;
vii. from a superficial and compartmented war to a total war, including the enemy’s internal side and base;
viii. from war in the physical environment to a war in the human consciousness and in cyberspace;
ix. from symmetric to asymmetric warfare by a combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns;
x. From war in a defined period of time to a state of permanent war as the natural condition in national life.
Thus, the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, in order to achieve superiority in troops and weapons control, morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population. The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country. It is interesting to note the notion of permanent war, since it denotes a permanent enemy. In the current geopolitical structure, the clear enemy is Western civilization, its values, culture, political system, and ideology.
http://www.naa.mil.lv/~/media/NAA/AZPC/Publikacijas/PP%2002-2014.ashx
Information Warfare Looms Larger in Russia’s New Security Strategy
Kremlin’s first update in six years decries foreign influence, calls for more Russian info ops.
The Russian government sees itself as increasingly vulnerable to foreign and domestic subversion, according to a July 3 update to the Kremlin’s 2015 national security strategy, and is moving to shield Russian citizens from outside voices and improve its influence-warfare capabilities.
“A notable change from 2015 is the greatly expanded definition of subversion, including a long list of behavior by non-state actors that are said to be undermining Russian values and the stability of the state,” Dartmouth professor William Wohlforth said in an interview.
These include also humanitarian organizations like Human Rights Watch and Western tech companies like Twitter and Facebook.
The new document expresses concern over Western governments’ manipulation of Russian affairs. “The declaration of a ‘safe information space’ as a core national interest underscores the importance of information war to the Russian government,” said Ivana Stradner, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute specializing in law, Eastern Europe and hybrid warfare. “This is a continuation of the Russian government’s pathological self-victimhood. These claims, like Russia’s threats to ban Twitter this past spring, are aimed at bolstering Russian claims of ‘digital sovereignty’ through which President Vladimir Putin believes he can stave off the types of ‘color revolutions’ that have toppled other dictators in post-Soviet nations.”
That’s not necessarily new, even if it is new to this document, said Samuel Bendett, a CNA adviser who is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
“Russia sees itself as a target of persistent and ongoing information operations by the West against Russian Federation targets like the military and security organizations, along with critical infrastructure. This new national security strategy officially elevates these information and cyber threats to the level of an existential challenge to Russia’s long-term survival,” Bendett said.
The strategy isn’t just bad news for non-governmental organizations. It also pushes for Russia to engage other countries to partner with Russia on “cybersecurity” issues according to Russia’s definition of cyber security.
“This is significant because Russia has already been using UN subcommittees to frustrate U.S. efforts to develop a cybercrime treaty,” Stradner said. “Russia even managed to beat out the U.S. for the UN’s approval to draft a global cybercrime treaty.” She called it “part of Russia’s broader revanchist strategy to use international organizations to regain its Soviet-era prestige and power.”
Russia scholar Mark Galeotti described the strategy as “paranoid,” particularly in the way it describes Russian “traditional values” as under constant threat from the West.
“Let’s put aside just what ‘traditional Russian values’ may be—would they include serfdom, the knout and the terem (the social exclusion of women)?” Galeotti wrote in the Moscow Times. “Let’s put aside the slight of pen that manages to lump the State Department, al Qaeda, Human Rights Watch, and Facebook in the same array of hostile forces. This in effect reclassifies the modern world and all the social and economic revolutions that are reshaping it as a threat.”
The strategy document suggests a growing role for Russian intelligence services like the FSB and the SVR in addition to the information arms of the GRU, all entities that have carried out advanced information warfare operations against Western targets. In essence the document serves as a mandate to expand their activities (Russia has denied evidence-based allegations about its role in cyber operations.)
“We can expect this [new strategy] to manifest in the foreign development of intelligence missions similar to the Internet Research Agency, which has been linked to multiple meddling operations across the West,” Stradner said.
The strategy release was delayed, likely due to the U.S. presidential election, since the outcome of the election would directly affect Russian strategy, according to a brief by intel firm Intelligence Online. The Biden administration has been pressing the Kremlin to curb Russian ransomware hackers who have struck Western targets from within Russian borders or nearby friendly states.
“You could say some of the sections [of the strategy] are setting up a rhetorical trap for Moscow,” Wohlforth said. “After all, if all these actions by multinational corporations, NGOs and the like are seen as subversive threats to Russia, what are we to say about ransomware hackers operating on Russian territory?”
7. Japan’s new defense whitepaper issues warnings over Taiwan’s security, climate change
And a buried lede:
The full whitepaper, which was only released in Japanese with the full document in English expected to follow the July 13 summary in the next few weeks, also noted that neighboring South Korea’s defense budget is higher than Japan’s in absolute terms and on current trends will be 50 percent higher than Japan’s in 25 years.
This is despite nine straight years of increases in Japan’s defense budget as it seeks to counter China’s growing might and North Korea’s ballistic missile program, which Japan traditionally sees as its most critical security concerns.
Japan’s new defense whitepaper issues warnings over Taiwan’s security, climate change
MELBOURNE, Australia — In a first, Japan’s annual defense whitepaper has explicitly cited Taiwan’s stability as “important for Japan’s security” and that of the international community, warning officials to “pay close attention to the situation with a sense of crisis.”
The language in the July 13 document differs from previous versions, which would carefully choose their use of words on the matter.
The English-language summary of the whitepaper also said the “overall military balance between China and Taiwan is tilting in China’s favour, and the gap appears to be growing year by year.” China considers the self-ruled island of Taiwan a rogue province and has vowed to return it under the control of the mainland.
The whitepaper added that Japan must pay attention to the strengthening of Chinese and Taiwanese forces, the sale of arms to the latter by the United States, and Taiwan’s indigenous weapons developments.
The whitepaper comes in the wake of recent remarks by Japanese defense officials, including Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, linking Taiwan’s security situation directly to that of Japan, and amid reports Japan has asked the U.S. to share details of its plans to defend Taiwan. U.S. officials “demurred,” according to London’s Financial Times, although it also reported that the U.S. preferred to improve coordination with Japan over Taiwan “in phases.”
Meanwhile, U.S.-Japan military exercises are becoming increasingly complex, with the eventual goal being an integrated plan to defend Taiwan should a military force invade the island.
Taiwan has welcomed Japan’s unusually blunt assessment, but Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian described the whitepaper’s wording as “extremely wrong and irresponsible.”
The English-language summary also positioned climate change as a security issue for Japan for the first time, noting that the effects of climate change may induce or exacerbate conflicts over land and resources, along with social tensions and conflicts due to large-scale migration.
It also warned of climate change directly impacting militaries, including the increased need to deploy forces for rescue operations, an increased burden on equipment and bases, and growing demands to implement environmental measures.
The full whitepaper, which was only released in Japanese with the full document in English expected to follow the July 13 summary in the next few weeks, also noted that neighboring South Korea’s defense budget is higher than Japan’s in absolute terms and on current trends will be 50 percent higher than Japan’s in 25 years.
This is despite nine straight years of increases in Japan’s defense budget as it seeks to counter China’s growing might and North Korea’s ballistic missile program, which Japan traditionally sees as its most critical security concerns.
8. Kristi Noem’s National Guard Deployment Is America’s Future
Is this going to change national security and domestic homeland defense operations in a significant way?
Excerpts:
This is not to say that Governor Noem’s scheme is unproblematic. Not only is this specific instance problematic, but so is everything about the larger shift in governance functions that it both portends and reflects, which is perhaps why it is unusually unsettling.
What Noem and others are doing is undermining the nature of national authority, and with it the nature of government generally, because they don’t like the direction in which the majority of the country is going. This is potentially destructive to numerous values—including democratic legitimacy, the supremacy of federal (over local) authority, and how we define and police our borders—that have made our world, and this country, what it is today.
But all of this is a symptom, not the cause. Those values are under assault because of changes in technology (such as the advent of the internet, social media, and virtual reality), which then drive changes in society and the economy, which are, in turn, forcing changes in virtually every industry, service, and business on Earth. Though people generally don’t think of it this way, government is simply one of those industries undergoing such changes.
In many ways, the digital age has ushered in a world where the borders between places—and between every long-standing binary of thought—matter less. And there is much more like Noem’s National Guard deployment coming.
Kristi Noem’s National Guard Deployment Is America’s Future
The private sector has long been absorbing duties that belong to the government—and that pattern is intensifying.
It is all of those things. And it may be one other thing too: the future.
What Noem and Johnson are doing destroys modern boundaries between public and private, political and personal, and governmental and commercial. Taking a longer view, though, this public-private arrangement isn’t all that novel: Everything that has been criticized about it has been standard practice in the past. More significantly, it represents the direction in which things are headed.
In fact, for a long time now, the private sector (and other nongovernmental entities) has assumed functions that Americans have traditionally thought of as governmental. Large parts of the financial-regulatory system—the creation of money, the rating of the financial instruments on which the entire market depends (sometimes catastrophically, as with the Great Recession)—have been jobbed out to private entities since at least the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many other regulatory functions, such as annual car inspections, are outsourced to private providers, and have been for a long time. For centuries, mail delivery, one of the most common public functions, has gone through periods of privatization, renationalization, and back again repeatedly. And large swaths of the social safety net are in the hands of nongovernmental entities, some of which are for-profit.
But national security itself can’t be privatized or outsourced, can it? As a practical matter, it in fact can be and it has been. Mercenaries are frequently referred to as the world’s second-oldest profession, and significant portions of the national-security apparatus, including those that collect and analyze intelligence as well as those that imprison and interrogate foreigners, have been outsourced under recent administrations. Some countries have even outsourced the conduct of their foreign policy and national defense to other countries. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the British and Dutch outsourced governing much of the globe to private corporations, such as the famous East India, West India, and Hudson’s Bay Companies (the latter still exists as a department store). In medieval times, many central national authorities, usually kings, were unable to draw on a standing army, and had to count on individual nobles to fund and donate men-at-arms to send across borders to fight wars—donors not all that different in effect from Willis Johnson.
Despite these deep historical precedents, Americans—going back to the Framers—have never much liked the idea of individuals being able to dictate, via subsidy, the government’s priorities, especially the country’s defense. As a result, Noem’s move has been heavily criticized for literally selling government functions and policies.
But the fact is that, even today, many government priorities and policies are chosen by those willing to pay for them, and though this was more common in premodern times, it’s becoming common again now. Numerous U.S. governments have set up or worked with private foundations for the purpose of receiving donations, usually from other charitable foundations but also from individuals, for specific public initiatives. Various special-purpose districts in this country are funded by those interested in or affected by their purposes. Many governments allow for tax “check off” provisions in which individuals decide for themselves whether and to what extent certain public programs—particularly, at the federal level, campaign finance—get funded. “Voting” for public policies through money rather than votes, in short, is a common practice.
Most important today, neither the outsourcing of government functions to private entities, nor private individuals paying to channel public endeavors in a direction they favor, can be dismissed as a predilection of only conservatives and the right. Many public-policy innovations popular on the left involve similar phenomena.
For example, progressives have been pushing “social-impact bonds” for years as a way to increase the funding for social services such as job-training programs, offender-reentry efforts, and child care. What this funding strategy involves is, in policy-speak, shifting “policy risk” away from governments and taxpayers—an anodyne way of saying that governments get out of bearing the responsibility for having bad ideas or spending money on programs that don’t pan out. Instead, some private backer—usually a foundation, but sometimes a wealthy individual—decides to take a gamble as to whether a particular approach to social services will produce some desired result (lower unemployment, better school performance, fewer homeless people). If the policy turns out to be a dud, costing money but not generating results, the investor takes the hit, not the taxpayers. But, conversely, if the policy works, the public still receives the diffuse benefits of, say, reduced unemployment and its social implications—but the investors, not the government, reap the direct financial gain.
Similarly, the rash of municipal experiments across the country right now involving a basic or guaranteed income is also being funded by private foundations, not by governments and taxpayers. Private companies are now being founded to finance such efforts through not just charities but also high-wealth (and even average-wealth) individual investors.
Progressives like this shift of financial risk to, and the infusion of cash from, nongovernmental actors, which they hope will fuel expansion of such public priorities. But it is hard to distinguish this from what Noem and Williams are doing in putting the choice and funding of state programs at the discretion of private funders, except that one involves funding guns and the other butter.
This is not to say that Governor Noem’s scheme is unproblematic. Not only is this specific instance problematic, but so is everything about the larger shift in governance functions that it both portends and reflects, which is perhaps why it is unusually unsettling.
What Noem and others are doing is undermining the nature of national authority, and with it the nature of government generally, because they don’t like the direction in which the majority of the country is going. This is potentially destructive to numerous values—including democratic legitimacy, the supremacy of federal (over local) authority, and how we define and police our borders—that have made our world, and this country, what it is today.
But all of this is a symptom, not the cause. Those values are under assault because of changes in technology (such as the advent of the internet, social media, and virtual reality), which then drive changes in society and the economy, which are, in turn, forcing changes in virtually every industry, service, and business on Earth. Though people generally don’t think of it this way, government is simply one of those industries undergoing such changes.
In many ways, the digital age has ushered in a world where the borders between places—and between every long-standing binary of thought—matter less. And there is much more like Noem’s National Guard deployment coming.
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
9. On the Eve of Destruction
When I saw this title I was reminded of Barry McGuire's song - Eve of Destruction. The lyrics of his song should still resonate today:
The Eastern world, it is explodin'
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'
You're old enough to kill but not for votin'
You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?
And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin'
But you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction
Don't you understand what I'm trying to say?
Can't you feel the fear that I'm feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there's no running away
There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave
Take a look around you boy, it's bound to scare you, boy
But you tell me over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction
Yeah, my blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'
I'm sittin' here just contemplatin'
I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation
Handful of Senators don't pass legislation
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin'
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin'
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction
Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama
Ah, you may leave here for four days in space
But when you return, it's the same old place
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead but don't leave a trace
Hate your next door neighbor but don't forget to say grace
And you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend
You don't believe we're on the eve of destruction
You don't believe we're on the eve of destruction
Conclusion:
In the end, under loads of new burdens, with a smaller fleet and fewer sailors, the surface fleet was asked to do more with less, until it no longer could. The report makes it readily apparent that, under these circumstances, crews gave up their ships and presently are not prepared to go into harm’s way, and that these conditions persist on the eve of a great-power competition with a rising China that will be largely carried out at sea. It is a sobering realization.
These elected officials have performed a public good by highlighting the shortcomings of the previous generation of naval leaders who have failed to adequately understand the requirements of the surface force and to provide sufficient money, time, and materials to meet them. We can only hope that the current generation of naval leaders — both uniformed and civilian — will leverage this report to gain support for increases in the Navy’s budget and ultimately for the surface fleet. If what naval leaders such as retired Admiral Phil Davidson, who warned that China could initiate a war in less than six years, or the current intel chief of the Indo-Pacific Command, Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, who said that the U.S. may already be “too late” to confront the Chinese threat, are correct, then the United States will need a healthy surface force soon that is backed by professionalism and filled with a confidence that it can carry out the nation’s wartime tasks at sea. The surface fleet is the heart of the United States Navy, and the nation needs that heart to beat regularly and strongly in the years that lie ahead.
On the Eve of Destruction
Ships of the U.S. Navy’s Destroyer Squadron 23 — led by the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Russell (front) — transit the Pacific Ocean, January 22, 2020. (Mass Communication Specialist Third Class Erick A. Parsons/US Navy)
Why a troubling new report on the Navy’s surface-warfare capabilities and culture matters.
With their report on “The Fighting Culture of the United States Surface Fleet,” Senator Tom Cotton and Representatives Jim Banks, Dan Crenshaw, and Mike Gallagher have provided an excellent example of congressional oversight in action and a surprisingly nonpartisan, objective analytical product. This report — and the analytical methodology behind it — was triggered by the collisions and near sinking of two destroyers in the Pacific, the outright surrender without resistance of two Navy riverine boats in the Arabian Gulf to elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the total loss of the billion-dollar light amphibious carrier Bonhomme Richard to a fire while she lay tied to a pier in San Diego.
The investigation was based upon standardized oral-history interviews across a broad base of current and former Navy officers and enlisted sailors stretching from the present day back to the late 1960s. In their research, Cotton, Banks, Crenshaw, and Gallagher — all four veterans of the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan; Cotton with the Army, Banks and Crenshaw as naval officers ashore, and Gallagher as a Marine — discovered a range of consequences that have emerged since the end of the Cold War that have combined to degrade the combat effectiveness and overall fighting culture of the Navy’s surface-warfare community.
This community — the surface-warfare officers (“SWOs”) or “ship-drivers” — lay at the very heart of the United States Navy. While the submarine- and naval-aviation communities of the Navy have emerged over the past century to claim their fair share of the service’s historic glory, the U.S. Navy itself finds its cultural roots in John Paul Jones’s Revolutionary War statement, “I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way” and Oliver Hazard Perry’s hoisting of the famous, “Don’t Give Up The Ship” flag at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. This ship-handling, fighting ethos extended through World War II where Arleigh Burke famously led the “Little Beavers” of Destroyer Squadron-23 at 31-knots in the Battle of Cape St. George and Jesse Oldendorf and his task force of battleships and cruisers “crossed the T” of a heavy Japanese surface fleet at the Battle of Surigao Strait, defeating it with superior ship-handling and fighting zeal.
Even in the long peaceful lee following the last great global conflagration, leaders within the surface-warfare community such as Vice Admiral David Robinson, who led “brown water” and later destroyer surface operations in Vietnam, and Admiral James Stavridis, who led surface actions ranging across Operations Ernest Will, Desert Storm, and the modern counter-terrorism campaigns, were recognized throughout the fleet during their careers for both their ship-handling skills and demonstrated warrior leadership. Disturbingly, the report concludes that such skills and ethos have been seriously degraded over recent decades.
Broadly, the investigators associated with this oversight process asked a large number of former and current Navy personnel whether the ship collisions, the surrender of the small boats, and the burning of the Bonhomme Richard were part of a broader problem within the Navy. An overwhelming 94 percent of respondents said “yes.” When asked more specifically if the four incidents themselves were directly connected, 55 percent responded affirmatively, but only 16 percent said “no.” The remaining 29 percent simply were not sure. In the end, the vast preponderance of the respondents simply knew that something was wrong with their Navy and their reasons behind this dangerous change fell along several broad categories. First and foremost, they believed that the Navy has placed an insufficient focus on warfighting even as it has increased administrative burdens throughout the Navy over the past 30 years. Second, the report highlights the trend toward finding “efficiencies” within the surface community specifically. This in turn contributed to the report’s next finding: a decline in investments in training across the surface force in particular, as well as an overall decline in attention to ship maintenance, both in terms of schedule discipline and overall investment. The report also raises the specter of micro-management of individual Navy ships, an issue that is at odds with the Navy’s long historical tradition of independence of command, which eroded the confidence of individual ship commanding officers and sapped their individual freedom of action. Lastly, the report cites concerns with the Navy’s rising oversensitivity to media reporting of Navy incidents.
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Both as a historian and as an officer who served actively across the three decades of surface-warfare decline highlighted in the report, I must say that none of the conclusions come as a surprise. Following the end of the Cold War, the Navy experienced a massive downsizing both in terms of ships and manpower, shrinking from 592 ships and 605,802 men in the fall of 1989 to 336 ships and 373,044 men just ten years later. These declines transformed the force, evolving the surface fleet’s focus from operating older, simpler destroyer and frigate in massed formations at sea toward fewer, yet more complex Aegis air-defense designs used largely to protect the aircraft carrier or project power ashore via Tomahawk land-attack missiles. Leadership of sailors at the deck-plate level was de-emphasized in order to make room for management of more-advanced technological systems. Among both officers and enlisted ranks, decisions about how to cull the force were difficult to make, but they were made. Both officer and enlisted fitness reports and evaluations were changed so as to discern any shortcomings or weaknesses. Anyone who did not reach the highest marks failed to select for promotion or was not allowed to re-enlist. A zero-defect mentality crept into the daily life of ships and aviation squadrons.
Moreover, the service force sought out areas for savings and efficiencies as budgets got tighter. Leaders became managers as the teachings of Dr. Edward Deming made the leap from the business community to the military — despite the fact that the military’s “bottom line” was best expressed in wins and losses in battle rather than spreadsheets. Lastly, the Navy experienced a series of public embarrassments and scandals during the 1990s; the botched investigation of the explosion of a turret on the battleship Iowa that killed 47 officers and sailors, the 1991 Tailhook Convention debacle that ultimately forced the resignation of a chief of naval operations and one of naval aviation’s greatest leaders in VADM Stan Arthur, and the suicide death of another CNO, Admiral Jeremy Boorda, when his previous valor was questioned. This string of incidents began the trend toward a fear of scandal and a wariness of the media within the Navy.
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As the Navy entered the 21st century, the core of one of its supporting pillars in the surface-warfare community had already begun to crumble. Cuts in military spending began that process, but even after the spending cuts were reversed after 9/11, the surface Navy did not benefit, and it continued to lose both ships and men in the following years. Unlike naval aviation and the nuclear-powered submarine community, the surface-warfare community lacked a “requirements written in blood” rule book that it could fall back on to defend its men and platforms. Aviators had data that showed that if money was not spent on training and maintenance, planes fell out of the sky and aircrew died. The submarine community had Hyman Rickover’s bible on nuclear safety that showed that if money wasn’t spent and procedures were not followed, reactor incidents would prevent acceptance of submarines and aircraft carriers in homeports or submarines would sink to the bottom of the ocean with their crews and weapons (as happened twice during the 1960s). The surface-warfare community had nothing but their can-do spirit and their willingness to do more with less, and so they were often tasked to do just that.
The report from Cotton et al. reveals that in 2003, in a slavish move toward Deming “efficiency”, the six-month surface-warfare-officer’s school in Newport, R.I., was cut. Officers were then ordered directly from their commissioning sources to their ships with nothing more than 23 compact discs to learn their trade, while they went about “on-the-job-training” onboard their first ship. Naval aviators take 18–24 months to earn their wings and complete their training before reporting to their first squadrons. Nuclear-trained submarine officers take 15–18 months to complete their prototype-reactor training and additional qualifications prior to reporting to their first boat. Surface-warfare officers simply reported to their first ships, fired up a computer, and started to stand watches on bridges and in machinery spaces that they had never seen before, saddling their commanding officers (and senior enlisted leaders) with un-prepared junior officers even as administrative burdens on those same ship captains were mounting. The ever-shrinking fleet was expected to do the same amount of work, which resulted in compressed training cycles with shortened underway periods wherein training simply became a planned sequence of events. In effect, they became rote and lacking in real learning or experience.
Ship maintenance also suffered. The new report reveals that planned ship-maintenance schedules simply could not hold up under the strain of continuous, lengthening, and often unplanned extending deployment schedules and that once ships did make it into drydocks, the issues revealed were too large to be addressed within the planned schedule or budgets, causing overruns and delays that had downstream effects upon the entire surface force. The surface force began to age, and its material condition began to degrade. It entered a death spiral.
Simultaneously, the surface fleet’s ethos began to suffer under all the added strain. Division officers, department heads, and even ship executive and commanding officers failed to push back against the added burdens, not wishing to collect a black mark in their records and thus fail to promote to their next desired rank or assignment. At sea, the ships found themselves patrolling in the Arabian Gulf or in the Mediterranean — not in preparation for combat against another nation’s navy but rather awaiting orders to launch their Tomahawk missiles against targets ashore in Iraq or some other nest of terrorists. Respondents within this new report highlight the perception that during the past two decades, the surface Navy stopped being a surface-warfare Navy and instead became a land-attack-from-the-sea Navy. As that happened, the force began to lose its sense of professionalism and fighting spirit.
In the end, under loads of new burdens, with a smaller fleet and fewer sailors, the surface fleet was asked to do more with less, until it no longer could. The report makes it readily apparent that, under these circumstances, crews gave up their ships and presently are not prepared to go into harm’s way, and that these conditions persist on the eve of a great-power competition with a rising China that will be largely carried out at sea. It is a sobering realization.
These elected officials have performed a public good by highlighting the shortcomings of the previous generation of naval leaders who have failed to adequately understand the requirements of the surface force and to provide sufficient money, time, and materials to meet them. We can only hope that the current generation of naval leaders — both uniformed and civilian — will leverage this report to gain support for increases in the Navy’s budget and ultimately for the surface fleet. If what naval leaders such as retired Admiral Phil Davidson, who warned that China could initiate a war in less than six years, or the current intel chief of the Indo-Pacific Command, Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, who said that the U.S. may already be “too late” to confront the Chinese threat, are correct, then the United States will need a healthy surface force soon that is backed by professionalism and filled with a confidence that it can carry out the nation’s wartime tasks at sea. The surface fleet is the heart of the United States Navy, and the nation needs that heart to beat regularly and strongly in the years that lie ahead.
Mr. Hendrix is a vice president of the Telemus Group and a retired U.S. Navy captain.
10. Give combatant commanders the tools to innovate
What if other Combatant Commands had similar authorities to USSOCOM for R&D and procurement? Is it a model worth expanding? Of course the argument against it would be that it would create inefficiencies and too many diverse programs and Congress would not allow it (Congress would have to initially approve the authorities but might later regret such a decision).
Give combatant commanders the tools to innovate
Smaller Department of Defense budgets will require shrinking the force and America’s commitments to allies. But more money will not restore the U.S. military’s edge against other major powers — and may simply reinforce the futurism that let U.S. forces fall behind in the first place.
Outgoing U.S. Indo-Pacific Command leader Adm. Phil Davidson noted earlier this year that China will be in a position to credibly threaten Taiwan, Japan or other U.S. allies before the end of this decade. Pouring additional billions of dollars into cutting-edge ships, aircraft and weapons will not yield results until the 2030s and probably later if current DoD programs are any indication.
Deterring Beijing will therefore require combatant commanders to innovate and do more with the platforms and systems they can field today rather than waiting for a theoretical future force.
The DoD largely missed its window to gain durable advantages against China or Russia during the last 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military now exits those conflicts with only modestly improved technologies compared to what was being fielded in 2000, requiring U.S. forces to implement concepts that rely less on overmatch and more on adaptability to gain temporary advantages over peer adversaries.
The building blocks of a more adaptable force are available. During the last two decades, government and industry researchers developed a wide range of new sensors, countermeasures, autonomous aircraft and vessels, and command-and-control systems. However, most of these innovations are not distributed throughout the military: They sit in labs or warfare centers to be rolled out for demonstrations or visiting dignitaries but are doing nothing to make Chinese or Russian leaders think twice about their next foreign adventure. And even when new technologies transition, they are shackled to multiyear-long operational cycles. For example, the Navy’s newest networks and electromagnetic warfare systems are only being introduced on fewer than a dozen of its 300 ships each year.
To get the most value from a small number of new platforms or systems, the DoD should ensure they are deployed to the priority theater for that system and remain there.
For instance, unmanned surface vessels would be more useful in the Indo-Pacific region than Europe, whereas mobile short-range air defense vehicles may be best used in Europe or the Middle East. Combatant commanders will therefore need organizations, processes and authorities to integrate these new technologies with the platforms and troop formations already in or deploying to their theater.
Congress and the DoD already identified the need for combatant commanders to assemble forces beyond the generic one-size-fits-all force packages provided by the military services. The European and Indo-Pacific deterrence initiatives show that combatant commanders and their domain-centered component commanders should be equipped to reconfigure and integrate new force compositions that respond to changing adversary tactics and systems, or create new challenges for an opponent.
Without the assured overmatch U.S. forces enjoyed during their post-Cold War conflicts, combatant commanders will need to rely on improvisation and unpredictability to gain a decision-making advantage and deter potential aggressors like China.
When re-composition alone does not provide an advantage, combatant commanders should be empowered to work with service and agency capability developers to adapt current weapons, mission systems, ships and aircraft. Evolutionary development, led by combatant commanders, would enable new technologies sitting on the shelf to reach the force and make a difference in deterring aggression, rather than gradually being dispersed to the entire military.
Congress could help combatant commanders gain a greater role in force composition and mission integration. The rapid capability-development organizations and software factories that could help combatant commanders augment or adapt fielded forces are already in place but require advocates in the Pentagon to implement capability adaptation using funding organized around missions instead of programs.
On Congress’ agenda when members return from the July 4 recess: late-arriving defense spending and policy bills as well as President Joe Biden’s pick for Navy secretary, among other Pentagon nominees.
By: Joe Gould
The combatant commanders will also need the in-theater operational infrastructure of communications, logistics, training and protection capabilities — as requested in the European and Pacific deterrence initiatives — to support mission integration.
The Pentagon should not give up on future weapons and platforms, but innovations delivering in the 2030s or 2040s will be irrelevant if U.S. forces fail to prevent Chinese or Russian aggression during the next decade. With the window of potential Chinese adventurism now opening, Pentagon leaders must accept they missed their opportunity to maintain a persistent military advantage and focus on doing the most with the force they have. Enabling theater commanders to compose and integrate forces is the best approach to create the adaptability and complexity that could deter aggression.
Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where Dan Patt is an adjunct fellow.
11. Interpreting Sun Tzu: The Art of Failure?
I recommend the late Michael Handel's excellent book Masters of War in which he compared Clausewitz and Sun tzu (and in a subsequent addition he added Jomini). The comparison of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz helps provide a deeper understanding of each and Handel emphasizes the many similarities between the two.
My thoughts on Clausewitz and Sun Tzu are in Timeless Theories of War in the 21st Century https://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/swjvol3.pdf. I argue that any complex political-military problem can be found by reading Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. You will not find the answers in their books but by engaging with them you will discern solutions to problems.
And I am reminded of this quote from the late Colin Gray: “If Thucydides, Sun-tzu, and Clausewitz Did Not Say It, It Probably Is Not Worth Saying.”
I concur with the author that we need to more deeply read Sun Tzu and (my words) not just his bumper sticker quotes.
Conclusion:
Similarly, The Art of War is much more than “winning without fighting,” and we do a disservice by promoting the view that it eschews violence or exists as a convenient strategic antipode to bellicose Western military thinking. As Robin McNeal notes in Conquer and Govern, the idea that military treatises of the aptly labelled Warring States era rejected the efficacy of force does not reflect the thoughts found in the texts themselves, but instead “grows out of a vision of early Chinese intellectual history that has been overdetermined by the late imperial ideology and a particular strain of Confucianism.”[26] We have long projected our own hopes and prejudices onto this enigmatic text. None of this means that we cannot or should not teach The Art of War in our professional military education institutions, but it would be helpful to periodically remind ourselves which side of the tapestry we are truly observing it from.
Interpreting Sun Tzu: The Art of Failure?
If you now wish to inquire into the Way of [the ancient sages], may I suggest that one can hardly be certain of it? To be certain of it without evidence is foolishness, to appeal to it though unable to be certain of it is fraud.
—Hanfeizi (3rd century BCE)[1]
“Translation,” an American poet and translator of Dante’s Inferno opined, “is the art of failure.”[2] In Don Quixote, the eponymous character notes that distortion is often a natural byproduct of the effort: “translation from one language into another…is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and brightness of the right side.”[3] The reverse tapestry is an apt metaphor for reading any ancient Chinese text, particularly The Art of War. While the use of logographs to express complex thoughts has been a constant feature throughout China’s recorded history, the written language of thousands of years ago differs significantly from its modern variant. While the original Art of War consists of approximately 6,ooo characters, a modern Chinese version requires more than double that number to convey the same approximate meaning.[4] Even most native Chinese speakers, therefore, read a translation of the original.
A copy of The Art of War by Sun Tzu. (Wikimedia)
While The Art of War is surprisingly short and compact, much remains ambiguous in its received message. As a result, our contemporary interpretations require constant skepticism, debate, and revision. While Sun Tzu’s text is arguably the oldest within the core strategic canon, it has been studied for the least amount of time by Western military theorists, in comparison with Thucydides and Clausewitz, for example. First translated into English only in the early twentieth century, strategists largely ignored The Art of War until the Vietnam War renewed interest in Asian military thinking.
Despite the limited scholarly focus on the text, in his foreword to the 1963 Griffith translation B.H. Liddell Hart confidently proclaimed that The Art of War “has never been surpassed in comprehensiveness and depth of understanding…Sun Tzu has clearer vision, more profound insight, and eternal freshness.” The certitude, though, with which we purport to understand The Art of War’s “clear vision” and “eternal freshness” remains inversely proportional to the collective effort we have put into researching its historical context or subjecting it to harsh philological analysis and extended debate.[5] Unlike Thucydides’ work, which has been well-served by the commentarial traditions of A.W. Gomme and Simon Hornblower, nothing remotely similar exists in English for contextualizing this Chinese classic. While translations of Sun Tzu vastly outnumber those of Clausewitz, reliable secondary-source references on the latter theorist and his milieu abound, while those on the former remain conspicuously absent.
Given the scarcity of authoritative writings or clarifying analyses on Sun Tzu’s text, how confident should we be that we have correctly grasped “the Way” of this ancient sage? Of particular importance, one of the core ideas we almost universally believe serves as a bedrock to Sun Tzu’s overall military philosophy—that his ideal strategic objective is “to take the enemy whole and intact”—rests on a problematic and potentially untenable textual foundation.[6] Instead, a stronger case favors an interpretation of Sun Tzu prioritizing self-preservation. Whether or not one’s adversary is destroyed or taken non-violently remains a distant secondary concern.
Given the scarcity of authoritative writings or clarifying analyses on Sun Tzu’s text, how confident should we be that we have correctly grasped “the Way” of this ancient sage?
Translation or Interpretation: Which State Must One Preserve?
The idea of “taking the enemy whole and intact” comes from the first verse of the third chapter. Lionel Giles’ 1910 English translation proposed the following rendition:
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.[7]
Since Giles, almost every subsequent translator of the text produced a similar interpretation. Before comparing with the original Chinese, though, it is helpful to also consider Ralph Sawyer’s version, since his work is more consistent and literal than either the Giles or the Griffith translations:
Preserving the [enemy's] state capital is best, destroying their state capital is second-best.
Preserving their army is best, destroying their army is second-best.
Preserving their battalions is best, destroying their battalions is second-best.
Preserving their companies is best, destroying their companies is second-best.
Preserving their squads is best, destroying their squads is second-best.[8]
Now looking at its original written form, even without any knowledge of Chinese characters, it is clear that the verse in question is structured as a nearly identical repeating pattern. The only variation in each line is the specific organizational unit being referenced, arranged from largest to smallest entity:
This means we only need to translate a single line to unlock the key for how all remaining lines in the verse should best be interpreted. Below is a rough direct translation of each individual character in the first line:
To further simplify our analysis, we can limit ourselves to only the first two characters within each individual line:
Unlike in English, where a declarative statement generally requires an explicit grammatical subject, in classical Chinese the subject is often left unexpressed, as it is here.[9] What Sun Tzu presents the reader with is simply a predicate, composed of a verb (全) and a noun (國), with the noun serving as the direct object of the verb. It is from these two characters alone that Giles derived his initial translation of: “to take the enemy's country whole and intact.” But one will notice in its original form there is no additional character or any other indicator clarifying which state is being directed to be preserved—the enemy’s state or one’s own? This is common in classical Chinese, a notoriously terse system of writing, that relies on the overall context to flesh out specific meanings.[10]
Giles’ decision to interpret the noun as clearly referencing the enemy state is a choice, not an unambiguous direct translation. Sawyer’s version elucidates this by placing the term “enemy” in brackets, indicating that although this is not derived directly from the original wording of the text, his own interpretation suggests adding the modifier is a logical conclusion. But from a translation standpoint, arguing that Sun Tzu is singling out one’s own state for preservation is an equally valid option. Why did Giles—and his subsequent imitators—decide the entity directed to be preserved could only be the enemy’s?
In fact, later in his own translation, Giles reconsidered his initial choice. In the final verse of the twelfth chapter, Giles identified a second juxtaposition of the characters “preserve” (全) and “army” (軍): “Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution. This is the way to keep a country at peace and an army intact [全軍].”[11] But here Giles recognized the verse had an unambiguous meaning conveying the need to preserve one’s own army, not the enemy’s. In a footnote to this verse, Giles expressed doubt of his initial interpretation’s correctness:
It is odd that 全軍 [preserve army] should not have the same meaning here as in [the first verse in chapter three]. This has led me to consider whether it might not be possible to take the earlier passage thus: “to preserve your own army (country, regiment, etc.) intact is better than to destroy the enemy’s.”[12]
Giles, though, never modified his earlier passage, and when Samuel Griffith completed the next major translation of the text half a century later, he followed Giles’ lead: “the best policy is to take a state intact.”[13] In response to Griffith’s translation, the renowned sinologist D.C. Lau, a native Chinese speaker and prolific translator of other ancient Chinese texts, including Sun Bin’s Art of War, critiqued Griffith’s effort. In his 1965 article, “Some Notes on the Sun Tzu,” Lau took aim at Griffith’s rendering of the first verse of the third chapter, noting that the received wisdom that it was the enemy’s entire state and military forces directed to be “taken intact” was based on an incompatible rendering of the ancient Chinese verb “to preserve” (quan 全):
In taking the term quan as referring to the capture of the enemy intact, Griffith is following the Chinese commentators who, practically without exception, all take the term that way.[14] But the word quan normally means “to preserve intact,” and to make it mean “to capture the enemy intact” is to stretch its meaning…there seems, thus, to be a case for arguing that quan refers to “preserving oneself intact.”[15] (emphasis added)
The conventional interpretation, therefore, pushes a reading of “preserve” (全) well beyond its definitional limits by implying that even the enemy’s five-man squads—his lowest level tactical formations—are ultimately meant to be spared from any adverse effects during conflict.[16] Had Sun Tzu meant to convey a meaning of “capturing the enemy’s state and forces intact,” he could have used the much clearer verbs “to take/to annex” (取) or “to capture” (擒).[17] In other places within the text, Sun Tzu uses these same alternate characters to convey these specific meanings when referencing the enemy’s territory and military units.[18]
Moreover, other portions of the text appear to contradict the conventional view that one should prioritize the enemy state’s preservation. Just several verses later, Sun Tzu emphasizes that “one who excels at employing the military…destroys other people's states without prolonged fighting.”[19] In the eleventh chapter he notes that “if you pursue your own program, and bring your prestige and influence to bear on the enemy, you can take his walled cities and lay waste to his state.”[20] Expunged, it would seem, are any sacrosanct appeals to preserve the enemy state intact. While the text certainly preaches moderation, prudence, and caution in warfare, it never places the adversary’s preservation above one’s own desire to achieve military victory.
A Revised Interpretation: Preservation for Me, Not Necessarily for Thee
These arguments suggest that sufficient textual evidence exists to approach the conventional interpretation skeptically. A better reading is as follows:
Preserving one’s own state (army/battalions/companies/squads) is a commander’s highest duty; destroying the enemy’s state (army/battalions/companies/squads) is a secondary objective.[21]
Through this revision, Sun Tzu may be reminding his adherents that the continued preservation of one’s own state and potential combat power should always be their foremost priority, superseding even a ruler’s unquenchable desire to annihilate his rivals. As the Syracusan general Hermocrates cautioned in a speech documented by Thucydides, “I am not inclined to ruin myself for the sake of hurting my enemies.”[22]
Conversely, under the conventional wisdom, the commander should always prioritize the least violent means available, even if this means limiting one’s own strategic objectives, since the ultimate goal is to preserve the enemy state and its forces after victory as much as possible. Viewed through the revised reading, violent methods always remain a viable, and potentially even preferable option, so long as the commander first feels secure enough in his own strategic position.
A movie poster depicting the Battle of Changping at the end of the Warring States period (Heritage Auctions)
This updated interpretation, though, would not preclude the use of less direct or even non-violent means to achieve strategic objectives, provided these methods do not unduly imperil one’s own security. Thus, China might decide open military conflict with the United States incurs too much uncertainty and risk, preferring diplomatic, economic, informational, and psychological efforts to achieve its aims. Simultaneously, it might order a violently executed, full-scale military invasion of Taiwan if it determines that seizing the island is vital to the regime’s survival and the relative balance of forces skews in its favor. The key point is that one’s own preservation is the unerring guiding principle, not ephemeral commitments to “preserve” one’s hypothetically subdued adversary.
A revised interpretation of this passage will also assist in making the overall text more logically consistent. Take the contradiction inherent in the dual insubordinations authorized by Sun Tzu in the tenth chapter:
If the situation is one of victory but the sovereign has issued orders not to engage, the general may decide to fight. If the situation is such that he cannot win, but the sovereign has issued orders to engage, he need not do so.[23]
If the highest priority is to take the enemy whole and intact, the latter insubordination is understandable, since purposefully fighting a lost battle will preserve neither the enemy nor oneself. But, by using this same logic, Sun Tzu would have no good justification for advocating the first insubordination. Here, the sovereign simply rejects a method at odds with the supposedly preferred ideal of non-violent submission. There is no rational basis, then, for Sun Tzu’s unwillingness to find a more suitable method to subdue the enemy short of fighting. But if we recognize that Sun Tzu’s highest objective is to safeguard his own state and forces, not the enemy’s, both insubordinations now appear logically consistent. In many other cases throughout the text, these similar logical inconsistencies instantly vanish once one accepts that “preserving oneself” is the highest priority.[24]
Conclusion
We have long projected our own hopes and prejudices onto this enigmatic text.
In a review of multiple problematic English translations of another popular ancient text, Chinese philosophy professor Paul Goldin notes that we are prone to seek incompatible modern interpretations, and too often discount the controversial and uncomfortable ideas these ancient texts espouse:
The Daode jing is old; it is alien; it is Chinese; and it is difficult. These are the recalcitrant facts that too many readers seem disinclined to accept...Not much research is necessary to discover that there is more to Daoism than “letting events take their course” and that the scary political overtones cannot be disregarded as the detritus of imaginary interlopers. Like any profound work of philosophy, the Daode jing is dangerous. We do it no justice by pretending that it is easy to swallow.[25]
Similarly, The Art of War is much more than “winning without fighting,” and we do a disservice by promoting the view that it eschews violence or exists as a convenient strategic antipode to bellicose Western military thinking. As Robin McNeal notes in Conquer and Govern, the idea that military treatises of the aptly labelled Warring States era rejected the efficacy of force does not reflect the thoughts found in the texts themselves, but instead “grows out of a vision of early Chinese intellectual history that has been overdetermined by the late imperial ideology and a particular strain of Confucianism.”[26] We have long projected our own hopes and prejudices onto this enigmatic text. None of this means that we cannot or should not teach The Art of War in our professional military education institutions, but it would be helpful to periodically remind ourselves which side of the tapestry we are truly observing it from.
John F. Sullivan is a former U.S. Army China Foreign Area Officer. He is currently a J.D. candidate at the University of Hawaii’s William S. Richardson School of Law. This article is the final in a series seeking to revise the conventional interpretation of the first three verses of the third chapter in Sun Tzu’s Art of War. The second verse was analyzed in “Sun Tzu’s Fighting Words.” The third verse was considered in “Who Was Sun Tzu’s Napoleon?”
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Header Image: One of the terra cotta warriors of Emperor Qin Shi Huang (History.com)
Notes:
[1] Hanfei, Hanfeizi, trans. W.K. Liao, vol.2 (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1959), 299. (Chapter 50).
[3] Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. John Ormsby (Woodstock, Ontario: Devoted Publishing, 2016), 448.
[4] For instance, in a modern Chinese language edition produced by Cui Guozheng (崔国政), he needs to use 12,413 characters to express the same meaning of the 6,000 character original.
[5] B.H. Liddell Hart, “Foreword” in Sun Tzu: The Art of War, trans. Samuel Griffith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), vi.
[6] Sun Tzu, The Art of War: The Oldest Military Treatise in the World, trans. Lionel Giles (London: Luzac & Co., 1910), 17.
[7] Ibid. Giles’ version is not technically the first English translation. In 1905, a British army officer stationed in Japan, E.F. Calthrop, published a version of the text in English, followed by an updated edition in 1908. However, Calthrop based his translation on a Japanese language version of the text, so as a translation of a translation, it is unsuitable for textual comparison with the original Chinese version.
[8] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Ralph D. Sawyer (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 177. Note also that Sawyer is one of the only translators to render the character 國 as the “state capital” rather than as a “state” or “country.” Sawyer is probably correct that at the time it was composed, this character more accurately referred to a territory’s main walled city, from which its power and authority flowed to outlying regions, rather than any defined boundaries that represented the territorial limits of a larger political unit.
[9] Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995), 13.
[10] As a textbook on classical Chinese notes: “Literary Chinese texts are often over-determined; that is, there may be several perfectly grammatical ways to explain the syntax of a sentence. Skill in reading, then, lies in deciding which alternative is most likely rather than simply whether the alternatives are grammatically possible.” Michael A. Fuller, An Introduction to Literary Chinese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 2. (emphasis in original).
[11] Giles, 159
[12] Ibid. (Footnote to verse 12.2).
[13] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 77.
[14] Although it is true that several of the historical commentators interpret Sun Tzu’s advice as applying to the enemy’s state and forces, their notion of “preservation” might conflict with a modern understanding of this concept. For example, Cao Cao believes this advice means that one should first invade the enemy state and push one’s army deep into its interior, cutting off lines of communication and supply and thereby hope that the enemy submits without resistance (the superior option). If this aspirational goal is not achieved, though, one will then be forced to attack the enemy’s army while still deep inside their home territory (the inferior option). Several of the commentators see parallels between Sun Tzu’s advice and the historical example of the Han dynasty general Han Xin’s conquest of the states of Zhao and Yan in 204 BCE. In this case, Han Xin invaded and brutally exterminated the state of Zhao, but then sent an emissary to Yan requesting immediate submission, which was granted. Thus Yan was “taken whole and intact.” It is clear from this historical analogy, though, that but for the example of the violent annihilation of Zhao, Yan most likely would have resisted Han Xin’s demand for immediate submission.
[15] D.C. Lau, “Some Notes on the Sun Tzu,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1965), 335. Edited to reflect the more modern pinyin transliteration of the Chinese character 全 (quan). Lau shows no awareness in his article that Lionel Giles had also previously considered the same conclusion in a footnote to his earlier translation.
[16] This logic holds even if we consider all of the uses of the character 全 found in the other works of the Seven Military Classics of ancient China. For example, in the Wei Liaozi, the text describes the “third military teaching” as “preserving the army” (全軍), in which the meaning is clearly referring to one’s own army, not the enemy’s. The original Chinese reads: 三曰全軍，謂甲首相附，三五相同，以結其聯也
[17] For example, in the Zuozhuan, China’s oldest historical narrative, an exegetical passage notes that when the ancient Chinese texts use the verb “to take” (取) it refers to militarily annexing an opposing state with little to no resistance: “In summer, Shi fell into disorder and was partitioned into three sections. Our troops went to Shi’s aid and went on to take it [取]. In all cases when the text has ‘took’ [取], it is to say that it was easy; when a great army was employed, it says ‘extinguished’; when territories were not retained, it says ‘entered.’” Zuo Tradition: Zuozhuan, trans. Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 999. (Lord Xiang, Year 13).
[18] “When one’s opponents are in chaos, seize them [取].” Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Victor H. Mair (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 79. “Therefore, he who stubbornly persists though his forces are fewer will be captured [擒] by an enemy whose forces are more numerous.” Ibid, 86.
[19] Sun Tzu, trans. Sawyer, 177 (emphasis added).
[20] Sun Tzu, The Art of Warfare, trans. Roger Ames (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 161 (emphasis added).
[21] Note that Roger Ames is the only other translator who follows D.C. Lau’s suggestion: “It is best to keep one’s own state intact; to crush the enemy’s state is only a second best. It is best to keep one’s own army, battalion, company, or five-man squad intact; to crush the enemy’s army, battalion, company, or five-man squad is only a second best.” Sun Tzu, trans. Ames, 111. It is not surprising that Ames takes this view, given that D.C. Lau was previously his graduate school advisor.
[22] Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 257. (Book IV.64).
[23] Sun Tzu, trans. Griffith, 128.
[24] For instance, even before the reader leaves the third chapter, Sun Tzu discusses force ratios in which he advises that one attack the enemy if one holds a 5:1 numerical advantage. If one truly holds a fivefold numerical advantage and the overall goal is to preserve the enemy intact, why would one need to resort to an attack at all? Conversely, if one is focused on preserving oneself but not necessarily the enemy, a 5:1 advantage would certainly make an armed attack appear as a less risky path to certain victory—even if one’s ruler gives an order not to initiate a fight. As I discussed in a previous article, even Sun Tzu’s admonition against conducting sieges does not derive from a concern about the enemy’s welfare, but instead derives from a desire to protect one’s own forces and combat power. See John F. Sullivan, “Reconsidering Sun Tzu” Parameters, 49 (1–2) Spring–Summer 2019, 72-74.
[25] Paul R. Goldin, “Those Who Don’t Know Speak: Translations of Laozi by People Who Do Not Know Chinese” in After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 133. Although it should be acknowledged that Professor Goldin himself advocates for the conventional interpretation of the first verse of the third chapter in The Art of War. See Goldin, The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 155.
[26] Robin McNeal, Conquer and Govern: Early Chinese Military Texts from the Yi Zhou shu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), 1.
12.China’s Belt and Road won’t readily reach Afghanistan
This will be interesting to watch.
And will "B3W" effectively compete with OBOR (BRI)?
Excerpts:
Other analysts note China’s CPEC could soon face competition from the Group of Seven (G7) announcement of its “Build Back a Better World (B3W)” infrastructure program, ostensibly a rival to China’s BRI.
Soon after the G7’s announcement on the B3W, Islamabad and Beijing started to evaluate ways to speed up CPEC activities. But that may be more rhetoric than reality as Islamabad is now clearly weighing its geo-economic options.
Significantly, Pakistan’s new federal budget announced in June allocated a mere $510 million for CPEC-related projects, an outlay that will limit the amount of foreign funding that the scheme may receive.
China’s Belt and Road won’t readily reach Afghanistan
Beijing's hope to connect a Taliban-led Afghanistan with neighboring Pakistan overlooks rising and lethal resistance to the scheme
When suspected militants killed nine Chinese nationals in a blast that sent a bus plunging into a high mountain ravine in northern Pakistan, it marked the latest in a rising string of attacks on Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the country.
The bus was carrying over 30 Chinese engineers to the site of the Dasu dam, a hydroelectric project being built as part of the BRI’s associated US$60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
As China seeks to lure Afghanistan’s Taliban into its BRI, rising security concerns and stalled progress on the CPEC in neighboring Pakistan raises doubts about Beijing’s grand plan for Central Asian connectivity.
China has recently dangled big-ticket infrastructure projects in recent meetings with representatives of the Taliban, coincident with the militant group’s seizure of ever-greater swathes of territory as US troops withdrawal from the war-torn country.
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen recently referred to China as a “friend” of Afghanistan and expressed his hope China would invest in reconstruction work “as soon as possible.”
Beijing’s offer is contingent on the Taliban reining in Islamic militants groups who view China as an enemy, including ethnic Uighur groups bent on stirring instability in China’s Xinjiang region. It was unclear which militant group was behind the July 14 bus attack.
China’s offer would effectively seek to physically extend the CPEC to landlocked Afghanistan through trade-promoting roads and power supplies.
But Beijing’s overture to the Taliban overlooks the hard fact that the CPEC is increasingly dead in the water in Pakistan, with rising indications before today’s blast that both sides have cooled significantly on the ambitious scheme.
Soldiers move from an army helicopter an injured Chinese national after a bus fell into a ravine following a blast killing 13 people, at a military hospital in Gilgit, on July 14, 2021. Photo: AFP
That’s in part due to rising concerns that Islamabad may default on certain CPEC-related debts, namely for power station developments, as well as Beijing’s rising security concerns as militant groups target Chinese engineers and their projects in restive Balochistan.
Both Islamabad and Beijing have recently proposed different measures to revive the stalled scheme. Pakistan recently announced the formation of a new 15-member Steering Committee packed with military, intelligence and other security agency officials to eliminate threats and obstacles to the CPEC’s execution.
The new committee, formally endorsed by the Prime Minister’s Office, arguably adds to the CPEC’s already bureaucratic tangle of existing related bodies, including the CPEC Authority, the Cabinet Committee on CPEC and the CPEC Joint Consultative Mechanism.
Moreover, Pakistan for the first time extended an olive branch to Baloch insurgents who have lately intensified their anti-China, anti-Pakistan offensives in Pakistan’s southwest province of Balochistan. Some suggest the intensified activity is a byproduct of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s Cabinet later approved the proposal to engage ethnic Baloch rebels, with Prime Minister Imran Khan appointing Shahzain Bugti, a special assistant on reconciliation and harmony in Balochistan, to lead the talks.
It wasn’t immediately clear how the July 14 bus attack, which also killed two Pakistani military officials, will impact the initiative. No group took immediate credit for the lethal blast.
For its part, China has proposed that Pakistan’s political leadership become more directly involved in steering the CPEC, which is currently mostly managed by the military via senior retired officers. But analysts note greater political party involvement won’t necessarily push the stalled project forward.
Mushahid Hussain Syed, a Pakistani politician, chairperson of Senate Defense Committee and head of the Pakistan China Institute (PCI) think tank, notes that political parties and relevant local officials have been party to the CPEC’s Joint Consultative Mechanism (JCM) since it was first launched by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing in March 2019.
The JCM’s second session was held in August 2020 with representation drawn from across Pakistan’s political spectrum, yet no substantive agreements to push the project into a higher gear were agreed, Syed noted.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative currently bypasses Afghanistan but could connect via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor running from Kashgar via Islamabd to Gwadar. Map: AFP
Earlier this year, the CPEC Authority informed Pakistan’s cabinet that China’s actual investment in 17 completed projects as of 2021 was a mere $13 billion. Another 21 projects worth an estimated $12 billion were still in the implementation process. Another $28 billion worth of projects is on the proverbial drawing board.
The CPEC was launched in 2015 with an initial investment target of about $46 billion, which gradually increased to $60 billion over time. It’s unclear why the CPEC Authority’s math arrives at only $53 billion of completed, ongoing and proposed CPEC projects.
Ahsan Iqbal Chaudhary, secretary-general of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and a former federal minister for planning, told Asia Times that government apathy is partly to blame for the slow progress.
“The Western route of the project had planned to be accomplished in the year, but it is still incomplete and may not be commissioned this year. Similarly, the framework agreement of Pakistan railways flagship project ML-1 was signed with Chinese authorities in 2017 and we were expecting its completion by the year 2021-22 but it was delayed inordinately,” he said.
That’s partly due to budgetary reasons, as Khan’s government recently exercised a 50% cut in so-called Public Sector Development Programs (PSDP). “Even the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) which should be up and working in 2020 are still devoid of infrastructure facilities. Not a single SEZ could start functioning anywhere in the country,” Ahsan said.
Other analysts note China’s CPEC could soon face competition from the Group of Seven (G7) announcement of its “Build Back a Better World (B3W)” infrastructure program, ostensibly a rival to China’s BRI.
Soon after the G7’s announcement on the B3W, Islamabad and Beijing started to evaluate ways to speed up CPEC activities. But that may be more rhetoric than reality as Islamabad is now clearly weighing its geo-economic options.
Significantly, Pakistan’s new federal budget announced in June allocated a mere $510 million for CPEC-related projects, an outlay that will limit the amount of foreign funding that the scheme may receive.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan (2nd R) attends talks with China’s President Xi Jinping (not pictured) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 2, 2018. Photo: AFP / Thomas Peter / Pool
The budget represented both Pakistan’s contribution and Chinese-related loans, which by any measure won’t be nearly enough to complete CPEC projects now underway, not to mention those on the drawing board or new potential spokes connecting to Afghanistan.
The scant allocation, observers say, underscores the Khan government’s rising if not unspoken indifference and frustration with the CPEC.
Significantly, the budgetary scale-back comes as Beijing refuses to reschedule debts due for CPEC-related power projects that require Pakistan to pay for electricity that hasn’t been delivered via so-called take-or-pay contracts.
Top Pakistani officials have gone hat-in-hand to Beijing on at least two occasions seeking debt relief, both times to no avail, according to sources familiar with the situation.
Before the lethal bus attack, Beijing was playing down the bubbling debt conflict and overall lack of progress. China’s Ambassador to Pakistan Nong Rong said that the Communist Party of China values the exchange of ideas and cooperation with Pakistani political parties during a recent webinar hosted by the Pakistan-China Institute (PCI).
“We are ready to work with Pakistan’s political parties to make good use of the CPEC JCM and promote and strengthen exchanges of ideas, policies and people-to-people contacts to create a good political and public environment for the high-quality development of the CPEC,” he said.
13. Cuba Doesn’t Know How to Handle the New Protests
If it cannot handle the protests then what comes next?
Excerpts:
What is clear is the ongoing protests are completely unprecedented. Even during the darkest days of the “special period,” nothing on this scale—spontaneous, mass grassroot uprisings spreading from Havana in the west to Santiago de Cuba in the east—occurred.
It is too early to characterize this weekend as Cuba’s 1989 moment. But Cuba’s communist rulers are rapidly approaching a similar juncture to the one leaders of their Eastern European sister parties faced three decades ago. The Cuban Communist Party can liberalize the system and risk their own displacement, or it can deploy the full force of the state against the population, albeit right on the doorstep of the United States.
It has arrived here because its preferred option—to continue with the status quo and exhort ordinary Cubans to make ever greater sacrifices—is suddenly no longer an option. As the older revolutionary generation shuffles off this mortal coil, with only a handful of Sierra Maestra veterans left in the Cuban government, younger Cubans have lost their fear.
Cuba Doesn’t Know How to Handle the New Protests
The island hasn’t seen anything like this for decades.
For seasoned Cuba watchers, it has been a remarkable couple of days. For the first time since the mid-1990s, mass protests have rocked the communist-run island. Now, like then, the main sources of discontent are food shortages, government repression, and a stagnant economy.
But 1994, the last time Cuba witnessed anything like this, Cuba was at the height of the so-called “special period.” The country was ravaged by shortages following the collapse of its benefactor, the Soviet Union. When the USSR fell, around a third of Cuba’s GDP disappeared almost overnight. Rolling blackouts became the norm, and food was hard to find. Protests back then were much smaller, however, and consisted of several hundred demonstrators in Havana.
For seasoned Cuba watchers, it has been a remarkable couple of days. For the first time since the mid-1990s, mass protests have rocked the communist-run island. Now, like then, the main sources of discontent are food shortages, government repression, and a stagnant economy.
But 1994, the last time Cuba witnessed anything like this, Cuba was at the height of the so-called “special period.” The country was ravaged by shortages following the collapse of its benefactor, the Soviet Union. When the USSR fell, around a third of Cuba’s GDP disappeared almost overnight. Rolling blackouts became the norm, and food was hard to find. Protests back then were much smaller, however, and consisted of several hundred demonstrators in Havana.
This time around, the economic crisis isn’t quite as catastrophic, but the protests are both bigger and more threatening to the communist government. In part, that’s because of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s death in 2016. In the aftermath of the 1994 riots, Castro, along with his entourage, traveled down to the Malecon, Havana’s iconic seawall. Castro declared that anyone who wanted to leave Cuba could do so. “We are not opposed to anything, to letting those who want to leave, leave,” he declared. Over the ensuing months, the wily Cuban leader opened Cuba’s maritime ports, allowing thousands of balseros (“rafters”) to depart for the United States, a regular safety valve the former Cuban leader deployed to get rid of malcontents.
Another key difference this time around is social media. Protests reportedly began on Sunday in San Antonio de los Baños, a town around 22 miles from Havana, where Cubans took to the streets to protest against electricity blackouts and to demand access to COVID-19 vaccinations amid a rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis. This week, Cuba had an estimated 5,000 new COVID-19 cases. As images of the protests spread via social media, further crowds of anti-government protesters appeared across the island, from Holguín, Santa Clara, Matanzas, and Camaguey to Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba. Videos of police—usually a source of fear—being pelted with rocks went viral.
These videos went viral on social media platforms outside of Cuba as well, where they were amplified by a digitally connected diaspora. #CubaSOS was trending on Twitter by Saturday evening, and there were large street protests in the Miami exile community throughout the night. The government has responded by taking much of the island offline.
Much of the discontent can be traced to a broken economy. State-run stores that sell goods priced in U.S. dollars—a source of resentment for Cubans, most of whom are unable to afford the items offered—were looted in Havana. Crowds gathered next to Havana’s capitol building and chanted “libertad” (“freedom”), “down with the dictatorship” and “patria y vida” (“homeland and life”). In the city of Cárdenas, footage emerged of the first secretary of the local communist party’s vehicle being overturned by a crowd of protesters.
It has long been acknowledged even inside the Cuban government that the island’s state-run economic model does not work. Castro said as much himself in an interview with American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in 2011. In 2008, following Fidel’s incapacitation, then-Cuban leader Raúl Castro attempted to reform the moribund command economy, liberalizing key sectors and seeking rapprochement with then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration.
However, following the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 and resistance to Raúl Castro’s reforms from hard-liners within the Cuban leadership, Cuba’s optimism during 2015 and 2016 dissipated. Economic reforms approved by the 6th Communist Party Congress back in 2009 stalled. Then, in 2018, then-86-year-old Raúl Castro passed power to a handpicked successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel, a long-time party functionary who had served as vice president for the previous five years. One of Díaz-Canel’s slogans since then has been “we are continuity,” an uninspiring and frustrating message for young Cubans who are tired of limits on free expression and basic food staple shortages.
The pandemic has exacerbated Cuba’s economic problems. Despite being praised internationally for its handling of the coronavirus in the first half of 2020 (Cuba reported just 2,726 cases and 88 deaths by August 2020), in recent weeks, coronavirus cases have risen sharply. In parts of the island, the hospital system appears to be close to collapse. Longstanding medicine shortages have taken on renewed significance as more Cubans turn up at hospitals with COVID-19 symptoms. Some of the country’s medical centers are reportedly without aspirin.
Cuba has been dependent on foreign visitors for much of its income in recent decades. With global tourism near dead for 18 months, the island’s economy has taken a severe hit. In 2020, the Cuban economy shrank by 11 percent, its most precipitous fall since the cut off of Soviet aid in the early 1990s. Díaz-Canel last year introduced his own package of emergency economic reforms while increasing wages, which triggered a spike in staple food prices. Prices could rise between 500 percent and 900 percent in the coming months.
Discontent went public at the end of 2020 when artists and intellectuals of the San Isidro movement gathered outside Cuba’s Ministry of Culture to protest limits on free expression. In a bold and rare act of defiance, 300 artists, intellectuals, and activists stunned the Cuban leadership by gathering outside the ministry to demand the freedom of rapper Denis Solís González, who was detained by Cuban authorities after sharing a video where he sang about repression in Cuba. Authorities responded to the San Isidro movement in a familiar fashion: by denouncing the protesters as U.S. agents.
The Cuban authorities have responded in much the same way this time around, even as the number of protesters grows. In the aftermath of yesterday’s protests, the authorities blocked access to online social networks. On Sunday at 3 p.m. local time, Díaz-Canel appeared on state television to denounce protesters as “counter-revolutionaries” and “mercenaries” paid by the United States. Díaz-Canel also appeared to call for civil war, ordering government supporters onto the streets in a “call to combat.” “The order to fight has been given—into the street, revolutionaries!” Díaz-Canel said in his television address.
Videos have since emerged showing the Cuban police firing shots at unarmed protesters. So far, the government has detained at least 100 people, and the country’s notorious special forces—known as the “black wasps” due to the color of their uniforms—have been recorded wearing plain clothes and attacking protesters with batons. The White House issued a statement on Sunday night calling on the Cuban government to “hear their people and serve their needs.”
What is clear is the ongoing protests are completely unprecedented. Even during the darkest days of the “special period,” nothing on this scale—spontaneous, mass grassroot uprisings spreading from Havana in the west to Santiago de Cuba in the east—occurred.
It is too early to characterize this weekend as Cuba’s 1989 moment. But Cuba’s communist rulers are rapidly approaching a similar juncture to the one leaders of their Eastern European sister parties faced three decades ago. The Cuban Communist Party can liberalize the system and risk their own displacement, or it can deploy the full force of the state against the population, albeit right on the doorstep of the United States.
It has arrived here because its preferred option—to continue with the status quo and exhort ordinary Cubans to make ever greater sacrifices—is suddenly no longer an option. As the older revolutionary generation shuffles off this mortal coil, with only a handful of Sierra Maestra veterans left in the Cuban government, younger Cubans have lost their fear.
14. Opinion | The War That Made Our World
Yes. This is the kind of history we should be discussing and analyzing in history classes in school.
Excerpt:
But returning to the 1750s as an adult reader of history — and as a columnist trying to offer constructive thoughts about the history wars in K-12 education — I think my childhood self was basically correct. The war that evicted the French from North America was not only incredibly fascinating but also one of history’s most important wars. Indeed, from a certain perspective, it was more important than the American War of Independence: The Revolution merely determined in what form Anglo-America would spread to embrace continental empire and global power, while the French and Indian War determined whether that continent-spanning America would come into being at all.
Opinion | The War That Made Our World
Ross Douthat
The War That Made Our World
July 13, 2021
British forces in 1755 outside Fort Duquesne, near present-day Pittsburgh, in a battle that was part of the French and Indian War, a conflict that shaped the political geography of North America.
By
Opinion Columnist
Two hundred and sixty-six years ago this month, a column of British regulars commanded by Gen. Edward Braddock was cut to pieces by French soldiers and their Native American allies in the woods just outside today’s Pittsburgh. The defeat turned into a rout when Braddock was shot off his horse, leaving the retreat to be managed by a young colonial officer named George Washington, whose own previous foray into the region had lit the tinder for the war.
This was the beginning of the French and Indian War (also known, much less poetically, as the Seven Years’ War), which I thought as a boy was the most interesting war in all of history.
I had encountered it originally through a public television version of “The Last of the Mohicans,” but I soon found that the real conflict exceeded even James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic imagination: the complexity of forest warfare and the diversity of the combatants on both sides, colonial, European and Native; the majesty of the geographic setting, especially the lakes, mountains and defiles of upstate New York; the ridiculous melodrama of the culminating battle at Quebec, with a wee-hours cliff-scaling that led to a decisive showdown in which both commanders were mortally wounded, James Wolfe in victory and Louis-Joseph de Montcalm in defeat.
In school the war faded into the background of my history classes. In world history it was folded into the larger categories of colonial warfare and endless Anglo-French conflict; in American history it was treated mostly as a prelude to the real business of the American Revolution. (Not only Washington but also Ben Franklin and a long list of future Revolutionary-era officers, from Daniel Morgan to Charles Lee, played roles in Braddock’s doomed campaign.)
But returning to the 1750s as an adult reader of history — and as a columnist trying to offer constructive thoughts about the history wars in K-12 education — I think my childhood self was basically correct. The war that evicted the French from North America was not only incredibly fascinating but also one of history’s most important wars. Indeed, from a certain perspective, it was more important than the American War of Independence: The Revolution merely determined in what form Anglo-America would spread to embrace continental empire and global power, while the French and Indian War determined whether that continent-spanning America would come into being at all.
As a kid, I — a good patriotic American and stalwart New Englander — naturally rooted for the British and the American colonists, from their early string of setbacks at the hands of Montcalm and other canny French commanders through their eventual triumphant invasion of New France. It was particularly easy to identify with the neurasthenic Wolfe, the victor at Quebec, whose self-dramatization and battlefield martyrdom fit with a 9-year-old’s idea of generalship.
For an adult, though, reading books like Fred Anderson’s “Crucible of War,” the best 21st-century history of the conflict, or Alan Taylor’s “American Colonies” for the bigger picture of North American empire, it’s easy enough to end up rooting for the French.
First, because they were obvious underdogs — New France had less than a fifteenth of the population of the 13 colonies, it was constantly being cut off from its motherland by the British Navy, and it’s something of a miracle that it lasted for as long and won as many victories as it did.
But also because the French empire in North America represented an unusual model of European colonization: The combination of the smaller, scattered population, the harsher climate and the distinctive vision of figures like Samuel de Champlain and the French Jesuits all contributed to a friendlier relationship with Native American populations than obtained in the English colonies. (For a Francophilic supplement to Anderson and Taylor, I recommend David Hackett Fischer’s “Champlain’s Dream” and Kevin Starr’s “Continental Ambitions.”)
So a world where the French somehow held on to their territories might have been more Catholic (obviously a good thing) while offering more possibilities for Indigenous influence, power and survival than the world where England simply won the continent.
There’s a terribly poignant moment at the end of Anderson’s “Crucible,” when tribes of the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley, under the Ottawa leader Pontiac and others, begin to rise against the British shortly after the French retreated from North America. The British imagine that French agents must still be around stirring up trouble, but the reality is that the Native Americans still understand themselves to be in a relationship with the French king and imagine that their war can help bring France back to their aid. But no: They’re alone now with Anglo-America, and foredoomed.
Imagining an alternative timeline, a history in which New France endures and a more, well, “French and Indian” civilization takes shape in the Great Lakes region, isn’t exactly the stuff of the patriotic American education that I wrote about last weekend.
But it also makes a poor fit with contemporary progressive pieties, in which organized Christianity is a perpetual scapegoat for the mistreatment of Native peoples — since it was arguably the power of the church and the Catholic ancien régime in New France, relative to the greater egalitarianism, democracy and secular ambition in the English colonies, that helped foster a more humane relationship between the French colonizers and the Native American population.
Once you recognize that kind of deep historical complexity, you can go in two directions. Along one path lies a kind of cynicism about almost every aspect of the past, where the reader of history is encouraged to basically root for nobody, and the emphasis is always on the self-interest lying underneath every expression of idealism. The French might have modeled what seemed like a kindlier form of colonization, but they were only following their own self-interest as greedy traders and proselytizing Catholic zealots. The New England colonies might have pioneered what seemed like an impressive form of egalitarian democracy, but they achieved their wide distribution of property by ruthlessly crushing the Pequot and the Wampanoag.
This is the mood that I sense, for instance, in Taylor’s “American Colonies” and its sequels, “American Revolutions” and “American Republics” — the last out just this year, and much praised for its disenchanted view of the early-1800s United States. These books are capacious histories, remarkable works of synthesis, in which you sometimes get the sense that apart from the occasional sympathetic victim, the author finds very little in hundreds of years of history to actually admire.
That mood has its place in historical analysis. But continuing my attempts to propose solutions to our current K-12 history wars, I want to suggest a different path, in which the kind of patriotic spirit that made me root for the British at Fort William Henry as a child and the kind of speculations about a Catholic-Huron imperium that I can entertain as an adult are both appropriate.
The first, the patriotism, is a form of gratitude for the particular goods that the American Republic ended up embodying — the initial goods of greater equality, liberty and prosperity for many ordinary people, and then the gradual extension of those goods to people once subjugated and excluded.
The second, the speculation, is a recognition of contingency and complexity — the reality that although the United States we have is good and great in many ways, along another timeline there might lie other goods, other civilizations, that would have been different from our democratic empire but also admirable, and whose real and imagined histories can be usefully contrasted with our own.
Both attitudes cultivate the appreciation of the past that seems essential to sustaining historical memory. On the one hand, you have an appreciation of what was best in the victors and founders, from Wolfe to Washington, who played crucial roles in establishing a continental civilization that we have inherited through no achievement of our own.
And then on the other, an appreciation of figures like Montcalm and Pontiac, and other embodiments of the two peoples, French and Native, who give one of history’s most decisive wars its name: peoples whose potential American futures were stillborn or defeated, but in a different world might have merited patriotism and gratitude as well.
15. Israeli tech sets yet another record, raising $11.9 billion in H1 of 2021
Israeli tech sets yet another record, raising $11.9 billion in H1 of 2021
Israeli tech is showing no signs of slowing down, displaying a sharp upsurge in capital raising in the second quarter of 2021, according to data published on Wednesday by the IVC Research Center and the law firm Meitar.According to the Israeli IVC-Meitar Tech Review for the first half of 2021, an all-time record was set in the first half of 2021 with $11.9 billion being raised, more than the total amount raised in 2020 ($10.3 billion).The report shows that in the second quarter of 2021, 230 transactions were completed with a total record investment amount of $6.52 billion. As a result, the number of transactions completed in the first half of 2021 was equal to 66% of all transactions completed in 2020.Tel Aviv skyline. Photo: Shutterstock
Israeli high-tech fundraising records were registered in all rounds during the second quarter of 2021. Investments in early rounds (Seed and A round) continued to climb during the second quarter - both in terms of number of transactions and in dollar volume - reaching 126 transactions with $1.04 billion raised.Investments in more advanced rounds (B rounds and above) also continued to increase in the second quarter of 2021: $5.48 billion was raised, compared to $4.66 billion in the first quarter of 2021, an 18% increase. There has also been a significant increase in the number of quarterly transactions over the past two years, with the median figures indicating an actual increase in capital per transaction in medium and later rounds during the first half of 2021.In the first half of 2021, $50 million or more were invested in 79 deals, compared to 47 such transactions in 2020 and 39 such transactions in 2019. 38 transactions of over $100 million each, completed in the first half of the year, accounted for approximately 50% of all fundraising during that period.Investors' preferences remained largely unchanged in the first half of 2021, with the majority of capital flowing towards companies in the fintech and cybersecurity tech verticals: 57 transactions in fintech compared to 26 deals in the corresponding period last year. The companies active in the cybersecurity field raised $2.9 billion in the first six months of 2021, almost 25% of the total amount raised in this period, and more than the total capital raised in 2020.Israeli high-tech activity in U.S., Israel and other public capital markets increased significantly in the first half of 2021, which was reflected in the highest numbers of initial public offerings (IPOs), SPAC transactions and follow-on offerings. A record number of 48 Israeli high-tech companies completed their IPO in the first half of 2021, with seven deals being completed through a merger with SPAC companies in which a total amount of $2.41 billion was raised.The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) attracted the largest number of IPOs during this period (35 deals), which accounted for approximately 12% of the total amount raised through the 48 IPOs that were consummated during the first half of 2021.Mike Rimon, a partner at Meitar, said: "Since 2013-2014, we have not seen such a large number of Israeli high-tech companies go public in such a short period of time. In the first half of 2021, public offerings of 48 Israeli companies were completed - either by way of a "regular" offering or by way of a merger with a SPAC - of which 35 were completed in Tel Aviv, 12 in the U.S. and one in London."These companies, especially those that went public in the U.S., completed their IPO at very high valuations, and most raised their valuation following the IPO. We anticipate this trend to continue in the near future, albeit possibly more moderately than in the first half of 2021. Mergers with SPACs will be considered, among other things, in light of US and Israeli regulators' concerns regarding such transactions, as well as the performance of such companies following their de-SPACs, which were significantly lower than the "traditional" IPOs in the first quarter of 2021."The Israeli high-tech M&A deals in the first half of 2021 amounted to about $4 billion, a rate that was similar to 2020, in which we also experienced a decline.The three big acquisitions were: MyHeritage acquired by Francisco Partners for $600 million; Prospera acquired by Valmont and VDOO acquired by JFrog for $300 million per transaction.According to Mariana Shapira, Senior Analyst at IVC: "According to the findings observed during the first half of 2021, it seems that the Israeli high-tech industry continues to be a strategic target for foreign venture capital investors, with technology companies benefiting from generous investments at every stage, with serious investors participating in earlier stages, which is reflected in greater fundraising volumes, and leads to increased chances of survival."The fact that Israeli investors have expanded their activities, as well as high company valuations, indicate the availability of capital, and a positive trend in the flow of funds to the high-tech industry is expected to continue in the course of 2021."
16. Iranian intelligence agents plotted brazen abduction of Brooklyn dissident journalist, U.S. prosecutors say
Brazen is right (if accurate). The question is how do we respond to this?
Iranian intelligence agents plotted brazen abduction of Brooklyn dissident journalist, U.S. prosecutors say
The Washington Post · by Rachel PannettJuly 14, 2021|Updated today at 6:43 a.m. EDT · July 14, 2021
Iranian intelligence agents plotted to abduct an Iranian American journalist living in Brooklyn and spirit her away to the Middle Eastern country, possibly via a daring maritime evacuation, the Justice Department alleged in an indictment unsealed Tuesday.
Four Iranians were charged in federal court in Manhattan with conspiring to kidnap the exiled journalist and women’s rights activist, Masih Alinejad, who has long been critical of the regime in Tehran. Alinejad was not identified by prosecutors, but she confirmed on Twitter that she was the intended target.
“I am grateful to FBI for foiling the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry’s plot to kidnap me. This plot was orchestrated under Rouhani,” she wrote on Tuesday, referring to outgoing Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
Several exiled Iranian dissidents have recently disappeared in mysterious circumstances, though an abduction on U.S. soil would have been especially brazen. In her tweet, Alinejad referred to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist who lived in exile in France but was lured to Iraq in 2019; he was later executed. She also noted the case of Jamshid Sharmahd, a California-based member of an Iranian militant opposition group who was abducted last year while traveling abroad and is now in an Iranian prison.
One of the four defendants owned an electronic device that contained a composite graphic showing a picture of Alinejad alongside the two other dissidents, prosecutors wrote in their indictment. They said a Farsi caption on the graphic read: “gradually the gathering gets bigger … are you coming, or should we come for you?”
“This is not some far-fetched movie plot. We allege a group, backed by the Iranian government, conspired to kidnap a U.S. based journalist here on our soil and forcibly return her to Iran,” FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. said in a statement Tuesday, adding: “Not on our watch.”
Alinejad, a longtime critic of the theocratic government in Tehran, received a human rights award in Geneva in 2015 for creating a Facebook page inviting women in Iran, where hijabs are mandatory, to post pictures of themselves without their headscarves. She is a prominent figure on Farsi-language satellite channels abroad that critically view Iran, according to the Associated Press.
U.S. officials also allege that before the kidnapping plot, Tehran attempted to financially induce Alinejad’s relatives, who reside in Iran, to lure her to travel to a place where it might be easier to abduct her to Iran for imprisonment. Her relatives did not accept the offer.
Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If the plot had succeeded, Alinejad’s fate would have been “uncertain at best,” said Audrey Strauss, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
“Among this country’s most cherished freedoms is the right to speak one’s mind without fear of government reprisal,” added Strauss. “A U.S. citizen living in the United States must be able to advocate for human rights without being targeted by foreign intelligence operatives.”
The four defendants all live in Iran, prosecutors said, identifying one of them, Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, as an Iranian intelligence official and the three others as “Iranian intelligence assets.” A fifth defendant, Niloufar Bahadorifar, accused of supporting the alleged plot but not participating in the kidnapping conspiracy, was arrested in California.
It wasn’t clear whether the four Iranians accused of the kidnapping conspiracy had legal representation in the United States; an attorney for the fifth defendant did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The four defendants may never see the inside of a U.S. court. Washington has no diplomatic relations with Tehran, and the Justice Department could not immediately be reached for comment on any plans to extradite the accused Iranians.
Starting around the middle of last year, Farahani and his network used private investigators to surveil Alinejad’s home in Brooklyn and other members of her household, the indictment said. They allegedly misrepresented their identities to the investigators and used laundered money to pay them.
The accused also allegedly researched ways to get Alinejad secretly to Iran, including looking into travel routes from her apartment to a waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn. One agent researched a service offering “military-style speedboats for self-operated maritime evacuation out of Manhattan,” prosecutors said, and maritime travel from New York to Venezuela, a country that has friendly relations with the regime in Iran.
In a video that Alinejad posted Tuesday on Twitter, she is standing by an apartment window with a police car parked, lights flashing, on the street below.
“The police have been around my home for the past two weeks now … to protect me,” Alinejad says, according to the English subtitles scrolling with the video. Laughing nervously as she speaks, she adds: “I’m so not used to being protected by the police. Every time I see them, I assume it’s to arrest me.”
Read more:
The Washington Post · by Rachel PannettJuly 14, 2021|Updated today at 6:43 a.m. EDT · July 14, 2021
17. A new US-Europe rare earths supply chain is using a “very Chinese model” to counter China
A new US-Europe rare earths supply chain is using a “very Chinese model” to counter China
By Mary Hui
Reporter
Published July 12, 2021
Last week, the first container of mixed rare earth carbonates began making its way from the US for further processing in Estonia, marking a major step in the launch of US-Europe rare earth supply chain that’s aimed at reducing reliance on China for the critical minerals.
Still, segments of the US-Europe supply chain have significant exposure to China, illustrating just how intertwined global supply chains are. What’s more, the effort to curb dependence on Beijing is actually, to a certain degree, modeled off of China’s successful rare earth strategy.
How China made rare earths mining cheaper
The transatlantic supply chain was first announced in March, bringing together two North American companies in a joint initiative to diversify rare earth supplies. New York-listed Energy Fuels, a major American uranium miner, is processing monazite sands to produce rare earth carbonates, which are then sent to Estonia, where the Canada-headquartered Neo Performance Materials has a processing facility to separate the mixed rare earth carbonates into individual elements for use in manufacturing high-tech products like rare earth magnets.
Monazite is one of the world’s primary minerals that is mined for its rare earths, and is itself a byproduct of mining heavy mineral sands for titanium and zirconium. Monazite contains uranium, which Energy Fuels extracts for use in generating nuclear energy, while also recovering rare earths in the process. Rare earths are a group of 17 metals critical in the manufacturing of numerous electronic products that power the global economy, including electric vehicles and wind turbines, and demand for which is expected to soar as the world transitions to clean energy.
This approach of extracting rare earths from the byproducts of mining operations addresses one of the key challenges of setting up a rare earth mining and processing facility: high startup costs. It can cost millions of dollars to explore a potential mining site, and then to conduct feasibility and environmental studies to determine that there are sufficient rare earths in high enough concentrations to sell the final rare earth products at a profit margin that covers the initial investment and subsequent expenses. And that’s if global rare earth prices don’t suddenly crash, which could stall operations and bankrupt businesses if the metals become cheaper than what it costs to dig them out of the ground.
“Byproduct economics” 101
Speaking during a quarterly earnings call in March, Neo Performance Materials CEO Constantine Karayannopoulos described his company’s US-Europe supply chain project with Energy Fuels as being very capital efficient, very low cost, and very Chinese.
“[W]e followed…a very Chinese model of putting this project together,” said Karayannopoulos, in response to an analyst question about the new supply chain.
In explaining how the US-Europe supply chain is optimizing “byproduct economics” such that “mining costs are essentially paid for by…different operations,” Karayannopoulos referred to Baotou Steel, a Chinese state-owned iron and steel enterprise that mines iron ores that contain rare earths, then provides the critical metals to its rare earths subsidiary. (That rare earth subsidiary was regrouped in 2015 to form China Northern Rare Earth, one of China’s six major state-owned rare earth giants.)
In a similar way, Energy Fuels obtains monazite from US-based chemicals company Chemours, which has stockpiled monazite from its titanium mining operations.
More containers of mixed rare earth carbonates are expected to be shipped from the US to Estonia in the coming months, barring obstacles posed by shipping container shortages.
The new supply chain, said Karayannopoulos, “begins to unlock the extraordinary economic and environmental potential presented by utilizing low-cost rare earth feedstock from monazite ore that is a byproduct of existing mining.”
18. FDD | Matthew Pottinger Named Chairman Of China Program At Foundation For Defense Of Democracies
An important addition to FDD.
On a side note, funding for our Korea work has been cut. My brilliant colleague, Mathew Ha, and I are available for other full time employment. I will stay on at FDD as a nonresident senior fellow but Mathew and I will searching for other meaningful work.
FDD | Matthew Pottinger Named Chairman Of China Program At Foundation For Defense Of Democracies
Former Deputy National Security Adviser to lead FDD’s work on countering China’s global ambitions
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 13, 2021 – The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) today named former Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger as chairman of the organization’s China Program. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
FDD takes a whole-of-institution approach in studying and countering the threats from the Chinese Communist Party. FDD’s China program, comprised of leading experts on these threats, works closely with FDD’s centers on American power: the Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP) headed by General H.R. McMaster; the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) chaired by Dr. Samantha Ravich; and, the Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP) led by the Hon. Juan Zarate. FDD also studies China across our multiple regional areas spanning the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe, Africa, Canada, and Latin America.
“I’m thrilled to contribute to the work and mission of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has a spectacular team of action-oriented and independent thinkers,” Pottinger said. “The United States and her allies must marshal their political, economic, military, legal, technological and informational advantages into effective policies to counter Beijing’s global challenge to liberty.
“The creative minds Mark Dubowitz has assembled in the China program and the centers chaired by Juan Zarate, H.R. McMaster, and Sam Ravich are an ideal team for formulating such policies,” he continued.
“I can think of no better person than Matt Pottinger with his decades of experience in government, the military, and journalism, and his fluent Mandarin language skills, to help our team develop actionable policies for this critical strategic competition with America’s most formidable adversary,” said Mark Dubowitz, CEO of FDD. “Matt is a national treasure who has fundamentally changed the direction of U.S.-China policy and we are honored to have him join us as chair of our China program.”
Lt Gen. McMaster commented, “Matt Pottinger has served our nation with great distinction in and out of uniform. He is a man of impeccable character and extraordinary intellect. His deep understanding of the Indo-Pacific region and clear-eyed view of the challenge presented by the Chinese Communist Party will allow FDD to contribute further to the most important competition of the twenty-first century.”
“The preeminent challenge in the domain of financial and economic power is how to compete with and challenge the Chinese Communist Party and its state-driven authoritarian capitalist system,” said Juan C. Zarate, who was former deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism (2005 to 2009). “Given the size of the Chinese economy, the growth of its State-owned enterprises beyond its borders, China’s regional and global economic and financial ambitions, and Beijing’s growing willingness to leverage economic tools to coerce others, there is a striking need to develop creative strategies, tools, and alliances to defend and advance U.S. and allied interests. With the addition of Matt to lead FDD’s China program, there is no better leader or strategist to engage these issues and provide this kind of creative and cutting-edge thought leadership, for which FDD is well known. Matt’s work as Deputy National Security Advisor and deep expertise and focus on China while in the White House will help weave together the work of FDD’s three core centers to ensure policymakers, the private sector, and media are considering and addressing the myriad challenges China presents this century in all domains of power,” continued Zarate. “I am eager and very pleased to be able to learn from and collaborate with Matt.”
Pottinger served the White House for four years in senior roles on the National Security Council staff, including as deputy national security advisor from 2019 to 2021. In that role, he coordinated the full spectrum of national security policy, and is credited with raising awareness of Chinese Communist Party efforts to spread influence and interfere in various U.S. institutions, including academia, the tech sector and Wall Street.
Pottinger previously served as senior director for Asia, where he led the administration’s work on the Indo-Pacific region, in particular its shift on China policy.
Before his White House service, Pottinger spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. A former Marine intelligence officer, Pottinger served in Iraq and Afghanistan during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Following active duty, he founded and led an Asia-focused risk consultancy and ran Asia research at an investment fund in New York.
“How to preserve our values, our prosperity, and our security from an adversarial China that has both a technological base and an economy that rivals ours, is the greatest challenge we now face. Matt brings to FDD an expert understanding of China’s strategies, capabilities, and intentions as well as years of experience forcing the U.S. government to ready itself for this struggle,” said Samantha Ravich, chairman of CCTI, former commissioner on the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission and former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. “With Matt on our team, FDD is now positioned to lead this effort from the outside, overlaying his China expertise on our existing centers of technology, military, and financial power to help further the understanding and craft the policies needed to maintain America’s preeminence,” Ravich said.
The United States is engaged in a strategic competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The challenges posed by the CCP continue to mount: the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, massive human rights abuses, threats to American democratic allies like Taiwan and Hong Kong, dominance of vital supply chains and critical 21st century technologies, cyber intrusions, theft of U.S. intellectual property, strategic and weaponized CCP foreign investment in the United States and around the globe, North Korea and Iran nuclear, missile and military cooperation and sanctions-busting, and military provocations in the Indo-Pacific.
To address these threats, FDD’s China Program experts work as part of FDD’s three centers on American power to leverage the economic, financial, military, political, cyber and technology tools to expose and counter the full scope of the CCP challenge. They conduct detailed research, appear regularly in the media, and develop actionable policy options.
FDD’s China Program team includes fellows and analysts with a range of backgrounds, Chinese language skills, data-driven mining capabilities to examine Chinese-language sources, and experience in government, intelligence, military, and technology. FDD’s China Program examines a range of topics including: illicit finance; corrupt CCP global infrastructure; exploitation of the U.S. court system; methods for protecting vulnerable U.S. supply chains; proliferation activities; military developments; cyber threats; and human rights abuses in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere.
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About the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:
FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Connect with FDD on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
About FDD’s Centers on American Power:
19. National security and cybercrime: This is not your grandpa's battleground
Conclusion: We have an opportunity now to shape the future of our defense ecosystem. As the battlefield becomes increasingly complicated, sophisticated and digital, we must expand the weapons in our arsenal to include less-than-lethal options for the new age of warfare.
National security and cybercrime: This is not your grandpa's battleground
The Hill · by Robert H. Bishop, Ph.D., opinion contributor · July 13, 2021
The United States’ pending exit from its 20-year takeover in Afghanistan marks the end of a deadly chapter in our nation’s history. It also signals our shift into a new era of conflict, where bullets and bombs take a backseat to technology in the fight against our enemies.
Our nation faces a far different range of adversaries today than it has in generations past. Nation-states are no longer sole actors, as terrorist groups and criminal organizations extend their reach across borders via cyber channels. Earlier this month, Russia-linked cybercriminal group REvil breached Kaseya VSA’s IT management software in what Wired described as one of the “most significant ransomware attacks in history.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray has gone so far as to draw comparisons between the severity of these attacks and 9/11, prompting President Biden to warn Russia of possible action from the United States. And as Congress debates the bipartisan infrastructure bill, our government and corporate entities wait with bated breath for another hit. Given this state of the modern battlefield, it is time to provide policymakers with a portfolio of “less-than-lethal” military options as an additional arrow in the quiver to disrupt, disorient and disarm our enemies.
This is not a novel concept — in fact, the prioritization of “less-than-lethal” conflict has been argued, and pushed aside, for decades. A 1998 research report from the Air Force Center for Strategy and Technology wrote that militaries have historically sought to increase the lethality of weapons to “better achieve military success,” despite substantial evidence that pointed to the viability of non-lethal technologies. Meanwhile, a 2012 Slate essay recognized an “ongoing revolution in the nature of conflict,” but said that reduced lethality of conflict will require “far more serious attention than it has received to date.”
Our country maintains its long-standing reluctance to non-lethal conflict today, despite our adversaries’ use of these options. But in a world where the costs of kinetically engaging a target may be unacceptably high, we have few options but to overcome that reluctance. Of course, it remains vital that the U.S. military maintains its dominance in the arena of kinetic action, but when a policymaker asks for the menu of options to address a threat, less-than-lethal strategies should be listed as a main course.
President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan calls for $180 billion in new R&D spending on emerging technologies that can drive military innovation in the less-than-lethal space over the coming decades. This would be a game-changing investment. By tapping into the tools and talents from the realms of engineering, the hard sciences, the social sciences and the legal community, among others, we can build out new non-lethal technologies to address the increasingly blurred boundaries of conflict.
As a professor, I often discuss the future of conflict with college students. This generation naturally appreciates the potential of technology more deeply than my generation can. Young people today grew up in a time of iPhones and Facebook, of hackathons and cyber-espionage, of false missile alerts and 8chan. If the right steps are taken, we can position them as vital contributors to a new era of conflict —one that trades combat boots for coding.
We have an opportunity now to shape the future of our defense ecosystem. As the battlefield becomes increasingly complicated, sophisticated and digital, we must expand the weapons in our arsenal to include less-than-lethal options for the new age of warfare.
Robert H. Bishop, Ph.D., is dean of the College of Engineering and the president of the Institute of Applied Engineering at the University of South Florida.
The Hill · by Robert H. Bishop, Ph.D., opinion contributor · July 13, 2021
20. Is the internet the most potent radicalization tool ever invented?
Is the internet the most potent radicalization tool ever invented?
John Letzing
Digital Editor, Strategic Intelligence, World Economic Forum
Andrew Berkley
Lead, Immersive Technology and Content, World Economic Forum
- Researchers have now been studying the internet’s role in radicalization for decades.
- The World Economic Forum created a visualization of radicalization in the US over a 70-year period.
- The visualization illustrates the expanded role of internet use in fostering extremism.
By the time he arrived in Sarajevo to assassinate the heir to the throne in an empire of more than 51 million people and alter the course of modern history in 1914, he’d been radicalized via means available for millennia.
The internet is certainly far from the first medium used to foster extremism. But it seems to be uniquely effective.
Among the individuals profiled in PIRUS, a detailed database of people in the US who were radicalized, social media played a role in the process for 27% of them between 2005 and 2010. That increased to 73% between 2011 and 2016.
A report submitted to lawmakers in Australia cautioned that the threat of right-wing terrorism is increasing during the pandemic due in part to social media, and the UN has warned that right-wing terror groups are using the health crisis to radicalize and recruit online – it noted a 750% increase in anti-Semitic tweets as the outbreak began, amid escalating hate crimes against people of Asian descent.
Authorities in the US have been arresting an average of three defendants per day on charges related to the insurrection at the Capitol in January. Many will plead that they were duped by baseless claims about election fraud amplified on social media.
The mother of one woman charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds said her daughter had taken a sudden interest in “far right message boards,” according to court documents. The woman allegedly used a group-chat app recently valued at $12 billion to boast that she’d stolen a computer from the Speaker of the House during the melee.
The Forum has used PIRUS data to create a visualization of radicalization in the US from 1948, when the first live nightly news broadcast appeared on TV, to 2018, well into the internet era. In the excerpt below, people radicalized over the years by far right (red dots), far left (blue dots), and Islamist groups (yellow dots) are represented by location.
Image: World Economic Forum
TV remains a potent means of manipulation. But the internet may be an algorithmic, personalized upgrade. Its role in radicalization has now been researched for more than two decades; one study published earlier this month found that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm regularly suggests videos with misinformation and hate speech that violate company policies.
In the visualization excerpt below, white dots represent the locations of people entered into the PIRUS database over the years who were radicalized through the internet.
Image: World Economic Forum
One study published earlier this year sought to delve deeper into anecdotal evidence of the internet’s role in radicalization; it found that “beheading” videos were the most sought-after jihadist material online among young people in Belgium, but also the material least predictive for radicalization. The conclusion: it might not be the internet that radicalizes people, as much as general moral disengagement.
Still, pressure has mounted on social media sites to crack down. Facebook recently provided a glimpse of a related effort that asks users if they’re concerned someone they know is becoming an extremist – and provides a link to “get support.”
In the visualization excerpt below, white dots represent the locations of people entered into the PIRUS database over the years who were radicalized through Facebook.
Image: World Economic Forum
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The rise of right-wing extremist groups that thrive online prompted a shift in the language used to identify terrorist threats in Australia, according to this analysis – though the bland nature of that new language raises concerns about bowing to the conservative side of politics. (Lowy Institute)
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Inmates detained at the same jail for their role in the US Capitol insurrection regularly sing the national anthem “loud and proud,” according to one who has bragged during a recorded Zoom call about being armed during the assault. (ProPublica)
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A Belgian soldier disappeared after being implicated in weapons theft and threats to kill the country’s top pandemic virologist, according to this analysis. It didn’t take long for a Facebook group supporting him to attract more than 50,000 members. (The Conversation)
- “It’s ironic, if you think about it.” This study suggests that in order to prompt people to make the right choices and resist extremist messages, it might actually be best to stress their autonomy by telling them they’re free to accept or reject them.
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Radicalization in America requires a new plan, and according to this analysis the current administration’s approach – based on two decades of studying radicalization in the internet era – is a welcome change. (Harvard Kennedy School)
21. Xinhua Commentary: U.S. poses gravest threat to peace in South China Sea
To be expected from PRC propaganda.
Xinhua Commentary: U.S. poses gravest threat to peace in South China Sea - Xinhua | English.news.cn
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This bird eye view shows the scenery of China's Xisha Islands, South China Sea, June 1, 2011. (Xinhua/Zha Chunming)
by Xinhua writer He Fei
Under the pretext of navigation freedom, the United States frequently sends its warships and aircraft carriers to the regional waters and has conducted a multitude of war games. Such a naked show of force is practically heightening tensions in Asia-Pacific, and undermining peace and stability there.
BEIJING, July 14 (Xinhua) -- Seeking to call the shots in Asia-Pacific, the United States has been trying to transform the South China Sea into a hunting ground for its geopolitical self-interests.
Being such a reckless superpower, the United States now poses the gravest threat to the region. In recent days, the U.S. administration has once again geared up to make new waves in the regional waters.
On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tapped the so-called ruling of an illegal arbitral tribunal on the South China Sea made five years ago and accused China of threatening the freedom of navigation and violating international law. The next day, a U.S. warship illegally entered Chinese waters near Xisha Islands in the region.
Washington, in order to hype up the so-called "China threat" and to pursue hegemony in Asia-Pacific, has quite a history of flexing its muscles in the region and pointing an accusing finger at Beijing with groundless charges.
Photo taken on Jan. 12, 2019 shows the White House and a stop sign in Washington D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
The threat to the freedom of navigation, for starters, has been a pure fiction. While some 100,000 merchant vessels now travel in this busy shipping route annually, not a single ship has ever reported its safety threatened in the South China Sea.
And under the pretext of navigation freedom, the United States frequently sends its warships and aircraft carriers to the regional waters and has conducted a multitude of war games. Such a naked show of force is practically heightening tensions in Asia-Pacific, and undermining peace and stability there.
Washington's move to rake over the old ashes this time is even more preposterous.
Both the illegal and invalid ruling and the arbitral tribunal itself are a political farce. The ruling violates the United Nations Charter and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). There is no way for Beijing to accept either the ruling or any claims and actions based on the award.
And the fact that the United States is calling on others to follow international law while it refuses to join the UNCLOS is such an irony and a vivid reflection of Washington's hypocrisy.
What China has done in the South China Sea is based on convincing historical and legal foundations.
Participants take part in a rescue drill on the sea in Xisha area of Sansha City, south China's Hainan province, June 10, 2017. (Xinhua/Yang Guanyu)
Meanwhile, Beijing believes that differences on the territorial maritime rights should be bridged by related countries in the region through consultation. And it has all along been doing just that.
In recent months, regional countries including China have made positive progress in consultations on the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea, showing their shared commitment to maintaining peace in their common home.
Once born, the Code of Conduct can effectively protect the legal rights of related parties in the region in accordance with international law.
The South China Sea is one of the world's busiest waters. A smooth flow of world trade and resilient global supply chains rely much on peace and stability there. The United States should play a constructive role in the region and join others to turn the South China Sea into a sea of peace, cooperation and friendship. ■
22. Why has Cuba exploded in protests? It goes beyond the U.S. embargo and the pandemic
Why has Cuba exploded in protests? It goes beyond the U.S. embargo and the pandemic
Although she did not take part in the historic protests that rocked the entire island of Cuba on Sunday, Caridad Montes, 50, says she understands why they took place.
“It’s very simple," said Montes, a Havana resident. "They are tired of the hardships and want changes for the better."
Cuba has been grappling with acute shortages of food and medicine throughout the pandemic. People make lines for blocks to buy whatever they can find at stores. Inflation and blackouts during the tropical summer heat have aggravated the situation.
Cuba’s government blames the economic crisis squarely on the decades-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, which was tightened by the Trump administration, as well as on the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. In a speech Monday, President Miguel Díaz-Canel said the U.S. “politics of economic asphyxiation” was having a “cumulative effect” on Cuba.
But the embargo is not solely to blame for Cuba’s woes. One of the most important factors that has led to years of economic stagnation is the country’s Soviet-style, centrally planned economy and its hesitation to adopt market-oriented reforms that other remaining communist countries have taken.
“Reforms in Cuba do not depend on the embargo, and the embargo should be eliminated unilaterally, independently from reforms in Cuba. Both cause problems,” said Pavel Vidal, a former Cuban central bank economist who teaches at Javeriana University in Colombia.
The 1980s were a period of little scarcity in Cuba, thanks to subsidies from the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, subsidies dried up, and Cuba struggled with extreme deprivation and massive food shortages, its economy contracting by over 35 percent. Many economists say Cuba never really recovered.
The U.S. embargo does have a negative impact on the economy, restricting imports and exports and making it riskier for investors to put money into Cuba, Vidal said.
But at the same time, Cuba has not heeded the advice of China and Vietnam in adopting economic reforms. During an official visit in 2018, the general secretary of Vietnam’s Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, urged Cuba to embrace a market economy, as Vietnam did in the 1980s. During its period of rapid economic growth, 30 million Vietnamese were lifted out of poverty.
“Since the 1990s, many opportunities have been lost to reform the economy,” Vidal said. Cuba's government owns and operates most industries, and most of the labor force is employed by the state.
Riot police walk the streets after a demonstration against the government of President Miguel Díaz-Canel in Arroyo Naranjo Municipality in Havana on Monday.Yamil Lage / AFP - Getty Images
Faced with severe shortages of food and medicine, Díaz-Canel recently picked up the pace of reforms, unifying the country’s dual currency and legalizing the status of private businesses that began operating decades ago, promising more movement in that direction. But for the average Cuban, the reforms were too modest and came much too late.
“There is a lack of credibility over the promised reforms. ... It’s not just the economic crisis. People don’t have hope in getting out of the crisis in a definitive way,” Vidal said. Former leader Raúl Castro had promised ambitious economic reforms in 2011 that were never fully implemented.
Amid the fragile economy, Covid-19 hit.
Odalys Campos, 55, a resident of Miami, has not visited her elderly parents in Cuba for two years. She used to make four to five trips a year to see them and her brothers, but she is afraid she could be forced to quarantine for two weeks if she tests positive for Covid-19 upon arrival and then get stuck in Cuba for an extended period of time, because limited flights are always full.
“I miss them so much, and I’m worried about them,” she said. “They are older, and they have health problems.”
The island is grappling with a spike in Covid-19 case numbers. It registered over 6,000 new cases Monday, and the province of Matanzas, where the beach resort of Varadero is located, is at the center.
In a statement to NBC News, the State Department said it expedites any request to export humanitarian or medical supplies to Cuba; the U.S. embargo allows the export of agricultural products and food, medicine and medical equipment, and humanitarian goods to the island.
In the first six months of 2021, for example, Cuba imported $123 million worth of chicken from the U.S., the State Department said.
Cuba entered the era of the pandemic with an already weakened economy. Former President Donald Trump’s travel restrictions had reduced tourism to the island, the second-most-lucrative source of revenue for the government after the export of medical professionals. The aid Cuba relied on from Venezuela had also declined dramatically after the economic and political crisis.
Cuba’s strict measures during the pandemic were praised for having greatly limited the number of Covid-19 infections last year. But the success came at the expense of the economy. Cuba shut its borders for eight months with absolutely no tourism. Cuban Americans desperately tried to send medicine to relatives through agencies, but it took months to arrive, adding to the frustration.
People push an overturned car in the street during a demonstration against Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel in Havana on Sunday. Yamil Lage / AFP - Getty Images
After Cuba reopened its airports, it restricted flights from the U.S. to avoid coronavirus infections. Flights from the U.S. had already been limited because of Trump-era sanctions. The measure has kept many Cuban Americans living in the U.S. from visiting relatives who usually make trips loaded with food and medicine. Strict quarantines make it impossible for weekend trips by Cuban Americans to unload goods and by “mulas,” couriers who would frequently hand-carry packages from Miami to Cuba.
Remittances to Cuba, the third-most-lucrative source of revenue for the government, along with tourism, are reported to have taken a hit. There are no data on the amount of remittances to Cuba; early in the pandemic, remittances declined all over Latin America when people found themselves out of work and unable to provide for loved ones.
In November, Trump’s sanctions forced Western Union to close its 407 locations across Cuba. While Cubans abroad have continued to send remittances through travel agencies and couriers and with traveling friends and family, it is estimated that the amount has declined.
All of that has greatly reduced the amount of hard currency, which Cuba needs to buy goods. The island depends on imports for most of its consumption, and it has struggled to import enough food and medicine. All of that, compounded with inflation and blackouts that last up to 12 hours in the sweltering summer heat have, led people to take to the streets in protests.
Cuba’s government does not have the charisma or the historic legitimacy of the revolutionary figures of Fidel and Raúl Castro, Vidal said.
As people protest, “it has to find legitimacy through its results,” he said.
23. ‘The White House is finally paying attention’: Cuba’s protests force Biden’s hand
Excerpts:
Still, former administration officials and experts on the region say Biden will have to be careful not to get too involved publicly. Díaz-Canel and Cuban leaders have already sought to spin the protests as a product of “Yankee imperialism,” despite protesters emphasizing that they took to the streets over desperation caused by Cuba’s own policies.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed allegations that the United States orchestrated the protests, saying the demonstrations were a “reflection” of the Cuban people’s exhaustion with government repression and mismanagement.
“It would be a grievous mistake for the Cuban regime to interpret what is happening in dozens of towns and cities across the island as a result or product of anything the United States has done,” Blinken said during a news briefing Monday. “It would show they simply are not hearing the voices and will of the Cuban people.”
“It is a balancing act for Biden in the end,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the think tank Council of the Americas and a former U.S. government official. “You have to come out in support of democracy, in support of respect for peaceful protestors and human rights … without creating difficulties for the protestors.”
“The Cuban regime is very good at painting protesters as stooges of the United States,” Farnsworth added. “They are not. And that is clearly not the case here.”
‘The White House is finally paying attention’: Cuba’s protests force Biden’s hand
07/12/2021 07:29 PM EDT
Biden promised to “reverse the failed Trump policies” on Cuba. He didn’t expect to have to figure out how so quickly.
Thousands of Cubans took to the streets on Sunday to protest food and medicine shortages amid a worsening economic crisis. | Eliana Aponte/AP Photo
07/12/2021 07:29 PM EDT
Asked in March whether President Joe Biden intended to lift his predecessor’s last-minute designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: “A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.”
Six months in, that refrain makes one thing clear: Amid burgeoning foreign crises from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, Biden’s team wasn’t ready to turn its attention to Cuba.
But over the weekend, the communist-run island nation became an unavoidable subject. Thousands of Cubans took to the streets on Sunday to protest food and medicine shortages amid a worsening economic crisis, while calling for an end to the 62-year-old dictatorship. And while Biden voiced support for the protesters, describing the protests as a “clarion call for freedom,” much of his policy toward Cuba remains a mystery.
Will Biden encourage more demonstrations? Does his team support adding new sanctions or keeping in place Trump-era sanctions? Is the idea of bolstering diplomatic and trade ties now out of the question? The White House’s painstaking review of Cuba policy now risks being overtaken by current events.
“The easy political thing to do is to issue demands for freedom from America while doing nothing,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as a senior aide to former President Barack Obama and helped craft the Obama administration’s diplomatic opening to Cuba. “I just don’t think that’s the approach that’s going to be constructive here.”
The protests in Cuba were another example of the Biden administration being forced by realities on the ground to grapple with an issue after trying to deprioritize it. Earlier this year, Biden and his aides found themselves scrambling to deal with clashes between Israel and Palestinian militants after signaling a desire to minimize U.S. engagement in that long-running conflict.
And they come as concerns within the White House about Cuba have grown in recent days, according to two people in touch with administration officials. Before the protests, U.S. officials were looking at what they could do to ease the Cuban people’s suffering, one of the people, a Cuba analyst, told POLITICO. That included possibly easing travel restrictions as well as limits on people’s ability to send money to relatives and others on the island — changes Biden himself discussed on the campaign trail.
“They are concerned about the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Cuba and the possibility that it could spill over into a migratory crisis,” said the analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations. “I know that the White House is finally paying attention.”
In recent months, the number of Cuban migrants coming by land and sea has grown significantly. More than 500 Cuban migrants have been intercepted and repatriated this fiscal year, up from 49 in 2020 and 313 in 2019, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Some Republicans, including Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio, have expressed concern that the Cuban government will begin to encourage mass migration to the United States, as it did in 1994 when Cuba last saw large-scale protests. However, U.S.-Cuba experts say that level of migration by sea is less likely to happen this time around, given that Washington no longer has an immigration policy in place that welcomes Cubans when they reach U.S. soil.
So far, some of Biden’s biggest allies on Capitol Hill have been supportive of his move to keep Trump-era sanctions and restrictions in place.
“The regime needs to understand that change [in Cuba] will bring about a change in sanctions” — not change in who occupies the U.S. presidency, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said, adding that it’s important that Biden has not weakened the sanctions.
Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, defended the administration for not making Cuba a foreign policy priority, saying it’s “understandable” given ongoing challenges with China, Russia and Iran.
“But now that the Cuban people have taken to the streets, I think the administration will have to look at options they can exercise in support of the Cuban people,” Menendez said, noting that he has been in touch with administration officials and they already have a list of his policy suggestions that are under consideration.
Others closely following the situation worry that the protests will only make it less likely that the Biden administration rolls back Trump-era restrictions. They say Biden’s ability to maneuver on Cuba policy will only get more restricted as the 2022 midterm elections get closer.
“They’re just not going to make themselves politically vulnerable by lifting the sanctions, rolling back the Trump policies, when the Republicans will immediately hammer away at it and say it is a gift to the Cuban regime,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue.
The domestic considerations for Biden were on display Sunday as hundreds of Cuban Americans took to the streets in Miami to protest in solidarity with the Cuban people. Meanwhile, Republican leaders like Rubio, who played a major role in the Trump administration's hardline Cuba policy, were already hammering Biden for not having an immediate response to the protests.
“President Biden’s lack of comment yesterday made clear that he has no interest in standing with the Cuban people as they rise up against the authoritarian regime,” Rubio said in a written statement to POLITICO. “The Biden Administration’s decision to remain silent during decisive hours harms the protesters bravely demonstrating for their God-given rights.”
Meanwhile in Havana, Cuban leaders sought to crack down on the widespread protests across the island. President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Sunday declared that “the order to combat is given.” Security forces were deployed, government supporters were called on to take back control of the streets and internet access was restricted in an apparent effort to prevent protestors from sharing information. There are numerous reports of beatings and arrests by security forces, including widely known dissidents like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the Movimiento San Isidro.
On Monday, Díaz-Canel, who only three months ago took over as head of Cuba’s Communist Party, a job he was being groomed for since becoming president in 2019, blamed U.S. policy toward Cuba as the reason for the unprecedented demonstrations, refusing to acknowledge Cubans’ frustration with his government.
The Cuba protests come amid a political crisis in nearby Haiti that is spurring U.S. concerns of a Haitian exodus as well.
“Neither was on the agenda. But they’ve been forced back on the front burner,” said Shifter. “Biden was caught off guard and [the administration has] to figure out the right narrative for this and get out in front of it.”
It remains to be seen whether the protests are a unique event that will be quashed by Cuba’s authoritarian regime or if they are the start of a meaningful movement. Cuba’s government exercises strict control over its population, but Cubans’ patience has been sorely tested by the coronavirus pandemic, which has added to their existing economic misery.
Biden administration officials did not immediately respond to questions about whether they were surprised by the demonstrations, had been warned they were coming, or what the administration’s Cuba-related plans are in the days ahead.
Speaking Monday, Psaki said she's not aware of any immediate U.S. policy shift toward Cuba. "We're assessing how we can be helpful to the people of Cuba," she said.
In their statements, Biden administration officials appeared to try to walk a fine line: voicing support for the protesters and asking the Cuban government to be responsive to the people’s demands, but stopping far short of encouraging regime change.
At times, it made for a confusing overall message.
On Twitter, for instance, Julie Chung, the acting assistant secretary in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the Department of State, repeatedly called on all sides to refrain from violence and for the Cuban government to “listen to their citizens’ demands.” But at one point, she seemed to channel a revolutionary spirit, writing: “The Cuban people have waited long enough for ¡Libertad!”
Republican lawmakers seized the moment to attack both the Cuban regime and Biden.
“President Biden, freedom in #Cuba needs you now! Don’t be AWOL,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
Chung, who was the first U.S. official to tweet about the situation in Cuba on Sunday, was at the center of Republican criticism over her initial tweet, in which she said the protests were to “express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages.”
Rep. Carlos Giménez, a Cuban American Republican representing South Florida, on Monday urged Biden, in a letter shared with POLITICO, to remove Chung from her position leading Western Hemisphere affairs at the State Department for what he called a “disjointed and foolish statement.”
Biden “should be sure we stay on the side of the Cuban people against this vicious regime,” said Elliott Abrams, a veteran Latin America watcher and former senior State Department official under President Donald Trump. “That means rhetorical support, support in international organizations, and an absolute refusal to weaken sanctions as the regime brutalizes the population.”
On the left, however, there’s a belief that American sanctions on Cuba are no more likely to succeed now than they have over the past six decades.
The administration should “figure out ways to engage the Cuban people, which necessitate taking off some sanctions both to improve their lives and [deal with] things like Covid,” Rhodes said. “I think ultimately that engaging Cubans is more empowering than thinking you can keep them in this pressure cooker.”
Still, former administration officials and experts on the region say Biden will have to be careful not to get too involved publicly. Díaz-Canel and Cuban leaders have already sought to spin the protests as a product of “Yankee imperialism,” despite protesters emphasizing that they took to the streets over desperation caused by Cuba’s own policies.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed allegations that the United States orchestrated the protests, saying the demonstrations were a “reflection” of the Cuban people’s exhaustion with government repression and mismanagement.
“It would be a grievous mistake for the Cuban regime to interpret what is happening in dozens of towns and cities across the island as a result or product of anything the United States has done,” Blinken said during a news briefing Monday. “It would show they simply are not hearing the voices and will of the Cuban people.”
“It is a balancing act for Biden in the end,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the think tank Council of the Americas and a former U.S. government official. “You have to come out in support of democracy, in support of respect for peaceful protestors and human rights … without creating difficulties for the protestors.”
“The Cuban regime is very good at painting protesters as stooges of the United States,” Farnsworth added. “They are not. And that is clearly not the case here.”
24. Taliban fighters execute 22 Afghan commandos as they try to surrender
Certainly the Taliban must consider Afghan SOF as the biggest threat especailly if they live to fight another day.
Taliban fighters execute 22 Afghan commandos as they try to surrender
CNN · by Anna Coren, Sandi Sidhu and Tim Lister, CNN
Dawlat Abad, Afghanistan (CNN)Over clear but unsteady video, the words ring out: "Surrender, commandos, surrender." Several men emerge from a building; they are clearly unarmed.
Video shows 22 Afghan commandos executed by the Taliban 03:50
Gunfire erupts. At least a dozen men are seen shot to death amid cries of "Allahu Akhbar" -- God is Great.
The victims were members of an Afghan Special Forces unit: their executioners, the Taliban. The summary killings took place on June 16 in the town of Dawlat Abad in Faryab province, close to Afghanistan's border with Turkmenistan.
CNN has obtained and verified several videos of the incident and has spoken with witnesses.
Videos show the commandos' bodies strewn across an outdoor market. After a fierce battle to hold the town, the commandos had run out of ammunition and were surrounded by the Taliban fighters, witnesses said.
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In one video, about 45 seconds long, a bystander can be heard saying in Pashto, the local language: "Don't shoot them, don't shoot them, I beg you don't shoot them." The bystander then asks: "How are you Pashtun killing Afghans?" The Pashtuns are the main ethnic group in Afghanistan.
At the end of the video, another voice off-camera says: "Take everything off them."
In another video, a man can be heard saying: "Open his body armor." One fighter can be seen taking equipment off the body of one of the commandos.
The Red Cross confirmed the bodies of 22 commandos were retrieved.
The killing of the soldiers stands in stark contrast to the Taliban's efforts to show it is accepting the surrender of soldiers and, in some instances, paying them to go home as it makes territorial gains across Afghanistan.
The Taliban posted a video three days after the fighting in Dawlat Abad, showing the seizure of military trucks and weapons. The video claimed that "the Washington guards, a CIA specially trained special commando who had been pursuing the Taliban in Dawlat Abad, Faryab, were captured alive by the Taliban, disarmed and handcuffed."
See inside Afghanistan's 'deserted' Bagram Airfield after US withdrawal 01:40
The Taliban has denied the alleged executions, stating in a Twitter post on Wednesday that the accusation is "fictitious" and accusing CNN of fabricating video evidence.
"The report is from a fake scene combined with footage from another where 22 commandos were killed during clashes while carrying out an operation in Faryab province," a Taliban spokesperson wrote.
In a statement to CNN Wednesday, Afghan Ministry of Defence spokesperson Fawad Aman said the executions constitute a "war crime." "This is not the first time the Taliban have shot dead our soldiers. The Taliban have no mercy on anyone; From the military to innocent civilians are executed. The Taliban cannot deny this crime. The video clearly shows the Taliban executing our soldiers after surrender," Aman stated.
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International UK said that the killings amounted to a war crime.
"This deeply disturbing footage is horrific and gives insight into the increasingly desperate situation enveloping in Afghanistan. What we are witnessing is the cold-blooded murder of surrendering soldiers -- a war crime," the group said after CNN's reporting on the killings first aired Monday.
Samira Hamidi, Amnesty International's South Asia Campaigner, said: "This evidence suggests that the Taliban's persistent claims to have changed their ways are predicated on a lie and completely undermines their claims that they will respect human rights in the peace process."
She added that Afghan authorities should "launch an immediate investigation into this reprehensible act," and if they failed to bring perpetrators to justice, "the international community and the International Criminal Court must step in."
They 'shot them all'
According to several witnesses interviewed by CNN in Dawlat Abad, the commandos were shot in cold blood.
One man said the commandos arrived in the town with several tanks but ran out of ammunition after two hours of fighting and received no support from the air.
"The commandos were surrounded by the Taliban. Then they brought them into the middle of the street and shot them all," the witness said.
Anna Coren on covering the end of 'the longest war' 03:40
He also suggested some Taliban fighters were not from the region and may have been foreign because he could not understand what they were saying when they spoke between themselves.
A second witness -- a shopkeeper in the bazaar where the shooting took place -- agreed some of the Taliban sounded foreign. He said the commandos "were not fighting. They all put their hands up and surrendered, and (the Taliban) were just shooting."
Another shopkeeper corroborated this account: "I was so scared when the Taliban started shooting the commandos. On that day everyone was scared. I was hiding in my shop."
He said he watched the shooting unfold through a small hole in the wall.
Local officials have criticized the dispatch of elite commandos to the town with no reinforcement or air cover.
Abdul Ahad Ailbek, a member of Faryab's Provincial Council, said the force that arrived did not know the area, nor which districts the Taliban controlled.
Afghan security personnel stand guard as Afghan security forces fight the Taliban in Kandahar on July 9.
The Taliban claims defections
Across Afghanistan, tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced amid a surge in fighting that followed US President Joe Biden's announcement that all US troops will be withdrawn from the country by September 11.
Since then, the Taliban claims to have taken control of nearly 200 districts across Afghanistan -- mostly in the north and north-west. In many areas, they have met little resistance.
In a statement Monday, the Taliban said "thousands of soldiers" had "defected and embraced the open arms of the Islamic Emirate," which it claims is the true leadership of the Afghan people.
"Nearly two hundred districts were cleansed from their malicious presence," the statement added.
The US military left Afghanistan's Bagram Airfield on July 5, and didn't notify the new Afghan commander for more than two hours.
According to the Long War Journal, which tracks territorial control in Afghanistan, as of July 10, 212 districts were under Taliban control, with 76 under the control of the government and 119 still contested.
In its statement, the Taliban claimed "fake videos and footage of years-old video showing activities of Daesh [ISIS] militias are also passed off as recent actions committed by the Mujahideen of Islamic Emirate."
Afghan special forces -- who are US-trained and better equipped than regular units -- number some 11,000. But they are stretched thin as the Taliban steps up attacks across the country.
Now without US air support or intelligence gathering, their mission is even more challenging.
Afghan forces are sustaining heavy losses. CNN has obtained another video showing the bodies of commandos killed by the Taliban in another part of Faryab province last week.
The Red Cross confirmed they collected more than a dozen bodies from that location.
'There will be no takeover'
One of those killed in Dawlat Abad was a 32-year-old commando Sohrab Azimi, who spent two years at a military school in the US and was due to marry his American fiancée next month.
Sohrab Azimi trained in the US.
His father -- a retired general -- told CNN Azimi was responsible for calling in air support. He did -- but it never arrived.
"Anyone would be angry if that happened to their son. Why didn't they support the operation and why did someone tell the Taliban they were coming?" asked Gen. Hazir Azimi.
"Afghanistan lost someone who was educated, who was the future -- I am so sad for his loss."
Gen. Azimi had nothing but contempt for the Taliban. "They don't even respect dead bodies and soldiers who have surrendered," he said.
General Hazir Azimi said his son was responsible for calling for air support but none came.
Abdul Ahad Ailbek, the Provincial Council member, said the "Taliban are the previous Taliban. They have not changed. Unfortunately, they do not have the freedom for the people."
Afghanistan's National Security advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, has sought to reassure Afghans the country will not fall to the Taliban.
"There will be no takeover by the Taliban," Mohib said Monday. "The Afghan people are determined to defend our country, our people, and our values."
The Afghan people are determined to defend our country, our people, and our values.
Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan's National Security advisor
When asked about the Dawlat Abad attack, Mohib claimed that many of the Afghan National Security Forces's recent defeats stemmed from a lack of air support.
"The reality is that these were areas largely surrounded that couldn't be defended, they needed to be supplied by air, and those soldiers ran out of ammunition," Mohib said.
"There was a vacuum created as a result of the retrograde, but we're trying to fill that gap."
Mohib made the comments at a handover ceremony to formally pass command authority of Afghanistan from top US general in Afghanistan Gen. Austin Miller to Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the leader of US Central Command.
General Austin Miller, the top US commander in Afghanistan, passes the flag of US-led Resolute Support mission to General Kenneth McKenzie, the head of US Central Command, on July 12.
Miller has repeatedly expressed concern about the pace of the Taliban's territorial gains.
He says a political agreement cannot be achieved amid the escalating violence.
"I'm one of the US military officers who's had the opportunity to speak with the Taliban," Miller said. "And I've told them ... it's important that the military sides set the conditions for a peaceful and political settlement in Afghanistan.
However, the civilians in Dawlat Abad who spoke to CNN seemed wary of the Taliban and their intentions once foreigners leave.
Several told CNN the Taliban had quickly introduced new rules after taking over the area. Girls could no longer go to school and women could not go to the market unless accompanied by a man.
One witness to the commando shooting said: "The Taliban said that if foreigners left Afghanistan they would make peace. How long will they continue this killing of brothers in our country?"
Another witness to the attack said many people had left the town. He said he had one message for the Taliban.
"We are one Islam, we are one brother. Why are you killing your brothers? Come and sit with us and talk about this."
CNN · by Anna Coren, Sandi Sidhu and Tim Lister, CNN
24. ‘There’s No Turning Back:’ Cuban Dissidents Feel Emboldened Despite Crackdown
Will there be a tipping or breaking point?
‘There’s No Turning Back:’ Cuban Dissidents Feel Emboldened Despite Crackdown
Security forces took dozens of protesters into custody following a wave of protests on Sunday. But dissidents expressed hope the demonstrations would lead to lasting change.
Huge crowds of protesters denounced the state, the rising cost of living, and worsening shortages of food and medicine on Sunday in Havana.Credit...Reuters
July 13, 2021
Guillermo Fariñas, a veteran Cuban dissident known for long stints in prison and frequent hunger strikes, said he couldn’t believe his eyes as the police station he was briefly held in following mass protests on Sunday filled up with unfamiliar faces, many of them teenagers.
He didn’t recognize any of them from traditional opposition circles, he said.
“I told the state security guard who arrested me, ‘You’re going to have to change,'” Mr. Fariñas, 59, said. “‘This is the people, and not just the people, but the youth. Look at them: They’ve decided they are not just going to continue leaving the country — they want change here.’”
The Cuban dissident Guillermo Fariñas in 2013.Credit...Christian Lutz/Associated Press
In the aftermath of a remarkable wave of demonstrations across Cuba over the weekend, the government detained dozens of people in a crackdown that activists described as the largest in years, perhaps even decades.
One longtime human rights activist said that the nationwide sweep of arrests was comparable only to the crackdown that preceded the 1961 invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
Amnesty International said on Tuesday that it had compiled a list of 150 people detained in the wake of Sunday’s demonstrations. Another group, the Movimiento San Isidro, a Cuban dissident group led by artists and academics, tallied 171 reports of people who were detained or who vanished in the wake of the protests.
“The massive peaceful protests were historic,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, the Americas director at Amnesty International. “While the forms of repression are the same, we’re watching a substantial and dangerous mobilization of police and military security forces.”
Human rights groups said it may take several days to get a clear picture of the scale of the government response because spotty phone and internet connections have made it difficult to track how many people were taken into custody.
Sunday’s protests were the largest ones since the Cuban Revolution, and were nationwide.Credit...Reuters
But Cubans reported seeing a strong presence of security forces on the streets on Monday and Tuesday, and many families were desperately trying to track down loved ones who were detained or who vanished after the demonstrations. The Cuban government said that one person was killed during a disturbance in Havana on Monday.
Still, veteran dissidents said the repression was to be expected following what many called the biggest day of protest in the country since the Cuban Revolution, forcing Cuba’s leaders to acknowledge the severe economic crisis that had sent thousands into the streets. Many described it as a potential turning point in a country where the Communist Party has managed to stifle even small challenges to its authority for decades.
“The spark has been lit, ladies and gentlemen, there’s no turning back,” the independent journalist Yoani Sánchez said in a brief podcast she recorded on Tuesday. “People felt what it’s like to scream freedom in the streets of Cuba.”
The Cuban government often detains dissidents for a day or two after security forces break up demonstrations. It was unclear whether Sunday’s detentions would lead to a new generation of long term political prisoners.
Daniel Triana, a Cuban actor who was held at a Havana detention center for about 24 hours, described a flood of protesters being led into the cell where he was kept.
“A lot of people throughout the country are still detained, I would say hundreds,” he said in a phone interview. “In my wing, there were dozens of people and they were bringing in people when I got there, and they were bringing in people when I left.”
Camila Remón, a member of Movimiento San Isidro, said the recent protests were enabled by widespread internet connectivity on the Island, a relatively new phenomenon.
Cuban officials appeared shaken by the magnitude of Sunday’s protest, which unfolded in dozens of towns and cities across the island.
“It’s been a very effective means to speak out,” she said, noting the flurry of online videos, many of them broadcast live, that gave people around the world a real-time glimpse of what was happening inside Cuba as the protests unfolded. “We’ve managed to get out a lot of content showing what the regime does.”
But internet service was soon shut down across the country on Sunday, and many activists have reported trouble connecting this week. Dissidents said the government appeared to be restricting access to a tool that poses a dire threat to its hold on power.
“The only thing that gave us the bravery to hit the streets was seeing that other people were also doing it,” said Mr. Triana, the artist. “Cutting the internet will squash all the security we had.”
In Florida, local leaders on Tuesday discussed ways to empower opposition groups in Cuba. Gov. Ron DeSantis expressed interest in having local companies explore the possibility of vastly expanding access to the internet on the Island.
Senior Cuban officials appeared shaken by the magnitude of Sunday’s protest, which unfolded in dozens of towns and cities across the island. Large defiant crowds of protesters denounced the state, the rising cost of living and worsening shortages of food and medicine.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez called on government supporters to take back the streets and invoked the prospect of violence as the government seeks to assert control.
“We will not surrender our sovereignty, the people’s independence, nor the freedom of this nation,” he said Sunday after the protests. “There are many among us revolutionaries who are willing to put our lives on the line.”
The following day, Rogelio Polanco Fuentes, the head of the Communist Party’s ideological department, said the protests were part of a form of “nonconventional warfare” the United States was waging in the pursuit of regime change.
“It involves tactics of so-called nonviolent struggle that generate instability and chaos in countries, to provoke the security forces into acts of repression,” he said. “These, in turn, generate the perception of human rights violations.”
Security forces responding to the protests on Sunday.Credit...Reuters
But many leaders around the world, including President Biden, quickly embraced the protesters’ cause and condemned the wave of detentions.
“The place for these people is not in prison but in a public discourse,” Peter Stano, a spokesman for the European Union, told reporters on Tuesday. “We call on the Cuban authorities to release immediately all the people who have been detained based on their political conviction and based on their journalistic work.”
Activists on the island said that many people had been released, particularly well-known dissidents and people who had not committed any acts of vandalism.
Julie Chung, the top American diplomat for Latin America, said the detention and disappearance of protesters “remind us that Cubans pay dearly for freedom and dignity.”
With tensions running high on Tuesday, many independent journalists and activists reported being forbidden from leaving their homes. That was the case for Denis Solís, a musician who sings against the Cuban government, who had just been released from an 8-month prison term when Sunday’s protests broke out.
But thinking about what his fellow citizens had done, Mr. Solís was in a jubilant mood.
“I can’t believe what is happening,” he said. “It’s what we have been waiting for since 1959. Something that was impossible was made possible.”
Oscar Lopez contributed reporting.
25. An Uprising of Despair in Cuba
I wonder how afraid Kim Jong-is observing this?
He may decide to double down on his draconian population and resources control measures to prevent any resistance.
If I were advising VOA and RFA I would include extensive Cubn reporting to the three target audiences in north Korea: the elite, the 2d tier leadership, and the population.
An Uprising of Despair in Cuba
Biden sounds the right notes but there’s more the U.S. can do.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
Anti-government protesters march in Havana, July 11.
Photo: Ismael Francisco/Associated Press
The remarkable protests in Cuba this weekend show that the Cuban people still yearn for a life free of tyranny despite decades of repression. President Biden hit the right note on Monday by expressing American support for the protesters, and let’s hope he follows through by increasing pressure on the regime.
Protests aren’t uncommon in Cuba, where most people live in desperate poverty while a narrow governing elite benefit from a state-owned economy that depends on dollars and euros from abroad. But Sunday’s uprising was unusual it that it developed almost spontaneously and expanded across the island as the message spread on social media and apps like Telegram.
The protests weren’t planned or organized. Cubans massed in the streets to register their opposition to the economic fallout from Covid-19, which has been mismanaged on the island; widespread shortages of food and medicine; and the numerous daily blackouts from failing electric power.
Protesters picked up the cry of freedom and sang the popular “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and Life) as a way of repudiating Che Guevara’s revolutionary slogan “Homeland or Death.” Social media is dangerous to the dictatorship because it allows people to share their dissatisfaction and feel they aren’t alone.
This time is also different because Fidel Castro is dead, his brother Raúl no longer holds an official position, and successor Miguel Díaz-Canel has no claim to legitimacy beyond the military and intelligence services that back him. The public’s willingness to risk arrest by heading into the streets is a signal that their suffering is so great that most Cubans have nothing left to lose.
It isn’t clear if this outburst has staying power or can be crushed like all the others. The regime is taking no chances. Mr. Díaz-Canel has unleashed his military and Ministry of Interior agents to stop the protests with arrests and beatings.
On Sunday he called for “revolutionaries”—plain-clothes thugs—to take to the streets to attack protesters and warned that his opponents “will have to go over our dead body if they want to overturn the revolution.” This state use of violence is standard operating procedure in Cuba, and there are reports that Mr. Díaz-Canel has cut off all internet service that the regime controls. He won’t give up easily because he has much to lose.
The U.S. can’t dictate events in Cuba, but we were heartened to hear President Biden issue a statement on Monday that Sunday’s protests are a “clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering” dished out by Havana. He also called on “the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”
The Administration's challenge is to back up those words with real support for the liberation of this long-suffering nation. Step one is not to return to the failed appeasement of Barack Obama that expanded U.S. travel and commerce with the island but achieved nothing in political or economic reform. The regime is more vulnerable since Donald Trump restored some U.S. sanctions, and its allies in Venezuela can no longer provide much oil to keep the lights on and the military well-fed.
The U.S. can tighten the financial squeeze and impose Magnitsky sanctions on Cuba’s human-rights violators. Helping protesters foil Cuba’s internet shutdown would be invaluable, and a warning to Russia and China not to meddle by propping up the regime is warranted. The odds on a freedom revolution may be long, but the Cuban people need to hear loud and clear that America is on their side, and not on the Communist regime’s.
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WSJ · by The Editorial Board
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
