Quotes of the Day:

"U.S. appreciation [for special operations], defined narrowly in mainly military terms, is trendy and intermittent. Elite Ranger battalions, lionized for daring deeds during World War II, later left army rolls for 35 years, until admirers restored them. Green Berets, briefly popular when Kennedy was president, fell from favor a decade after the Vietnam War, before they began to revive. PSYOP, which should underpin or supplement most special operations, attracts scant attention. Tactics outshine strategies. Forces outrank employment concepts, which presently emphasize so-called ‘low-intensity” conflicts that U.S. leaders largely overlooked when nuclear deterrence and NATO defense were their only serious national security concerns."

- John M. Collins 1987

“Prime Minister Ardern is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them.”

- Julian Spencer-Churchill

 “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” 

- William James

1.  RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 1 (Putin's War)

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (01.11.22) CDS comments on key events

3. Ukrainian Commandoes Raid Airfield Deep Inside Russia, Destroy Frontline Helicopters

4. Ukraine war will make China think twice about invading Taiwan

5. Why Biden is sending US weapons experts into Ukraine

6. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: November

7. Ukraine Situation Report: Attacks Behind Russian Lines Crippling War Effort

8. Ukraine's Unprecedented Mass Drone Boat Attack Was A Wakeup Call

9. Russian Retreat in Ukraine Exposes Collaborators—and the Finger-Pointing Begins

10. The Nuclear Question America Never Answers

11. Iran may be preparing to arm Russia with short-range ballistic missiles

12. Relearning the ASEAN Way: On the Importance of Perspective in Multilateralism

13. Is Nepal Under China’s Thumb?

14. Preventing Wars is as Important as Winning Them: Lessons From Past Naval Strategies

15. Why Vladimir Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine

16. US Inspectors in Ukraine Won't Be Near the Front, Pentagon Says

17. The Real China Hands

18.  Ukraine grain export deal back on as Russia resumes participation

19. China and Russia prepare to turn Cold War II into a hot war

20. Rubio, Gallagher, Hagerty, and McCaul Express Concern Over Indo-Pacific Force Posture

21. Professionalizing Special Operations Forces

22. Advanced Drone Tech Poses Threat to Special Forces in Middle East

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 1 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-1

Key Takeaways

• Planned Iranian shipments of drones and ballistic missiles to Russia will likely further strengthen Russian reliance on Iran and Iranian-made weapons systems.
• The Russian MoD started its semi-annual fall conscription cycle despite reports of Russian authorities covertly continuing mobilization measures.
• Commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District (SMD), Lieutenant-General Andrey Mordvichev, reportedly replaced Colonel-General Alexander Lapin as commander of the Central Military District (CMD).
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin is likely attempting to address critiques against his parallel military structures following Lapin’s reported dismissal.
• Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued to conduct counteroffensive operations in the directions of Svatove and Kreminna.
• Russian forces continued defensive preparations while Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in Kherson Oblast.
• Russian forces continued to conduct offensive operations around Bakhmut and around Donetsk City.
• Russian forces continued to strengthen Russian control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
• Russian military structures are reportedly expanding training capabilities.
• Russian occupation officials continued to set conditions for the long-term and permanent relocation of residents from the east bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 1

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Madison Williams, Yekaterina Klepanchuk, and Frederick W. Kagan

November 1, 8:30 pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Iran plans to send more combat drones and new ballistic missile systems to Russia for use in Ukraine, likely further strengthening Russia’s reliance on Iranian-made weapon systems. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on November 1 that Iranian officials intend to send a shipment of more than 200 Shahed-136, Mohajer-6, and Arash-2 combat drones to Russia.[1] The GUR reported that Iran will send Russia the drones in a disassembled state and that Russian personnel will assemble them with Russian markings.[2] CNN reported on November 1 that unnamed officials from a western country that closely monitors Iranian weapons programs stated that Iran plans to send a thousand weapons to Russia by the end of the year, including surface-to-surface short-range ballistic missiles and combat drones.[3] This would be the first confirmed instance of Iran sending Russia advanced precision-guided missiles. Russia likely negotiated the additional Iranian shipment of weapons systems due to the depletion of its stockpile of cruise missile and drone systems over the course of the war in Ukraine, particularly during the Russian campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure. The GUR reported that Ukrainian air defenses have shot down more than 300 Shahed-136 drones since Russia starting using them in Ukraine on September 13.[4] Russia will likely continue to use drone attacks and missile strikes against critical infrastructure to try to offset the failures and limitations of its conventional forces on the frontline. Russian dependence on Iranian-made systems, and therefore on Iran, will likely increase.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) started its semi-annual fall conscription drive on November 1, amidst reports of continuing covert mobilization throughout the country. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that 2,700 draft committees across 85 federal subjects began the fall conscription call-up of 120,000 men.[5] Shoigu also stated that partial mobilization in Russia concluded. Head of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the Russian General Staff, Yevgeniy Burdinsky, reiterated that Russia is conscripting 7,500 fewer men than in previous years and noted that partial mobilization postponed the conscription cycle by one month.[6] Burdinsky claimed that conscripts will not serve in occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, or Zaporizhia oblasts this year and will not participate in combat. Head of the 4th Directorate of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the Russian General Staff Vladimir Tsimlyansky added that most recruits will deploy to training formations and military units where they will train for five months, while others will receive specializations based on their skills and education level.[7] The Russian MoD has conducted semi-annual conscription call-ups for decades and should be able to execute this process effectively and efficiently. Any problems with the execution of the fall call-up would likely indicate that partial mobilization and the war in Ukraine have complicated a standard procedure.

Numerous Russian sources reported that Russian enlistment officers are continuing to mobilize men despite Shoigu’s previous announcements of the conclusion of partial mobilization and transition into the conscription period on October 28. Local Russian outlets reported instances of men receiving mobilization notices in Tyumen and St. Petersburg as of October 31.[8] The Russian Central Military District (CMD) reportedly told journalists of a Russian outlet that mobilization processes will continue across Russia until Russian President Vladimir Putin signs a decree ending the mobilization period.[9] Ukrainian Melitopol and Mariupol authorities also reported that Russian occupation authorities are continuing to coerce Ukrainians into volunteer battalions and territorial defense units.[10]

Commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District (SMD) Lieutenant-General Andrey Mordvichev reportedly replaced Colonel-General Alexander Lapin as commander of the Central Military District (CMD). Several Russian milbloggers—including some who appear on Russian state television—noted that Mordichev has replaced Lapin in this position, but the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has not officially announced Mordichev’s appointment nor Lapin’s dismissal as of November 1.[11] A Russian local outlet citing an unnamed official within the Russian MoD claimed that Mordichev will only replace Lapin as the commander of the “center“ forces in Ukraine for the duration of Lapin’s supposed three-week medical leave.[12] A milblogger who frequently appears on Russian state media claimed that the Commander of the Russian Forces in Ukraine, Army General Sergey Surovikin, personally appointed Mordichev to replace Lapin due to his commitment to objective frontline reporting.[13] If reports of Mordichev’s appointment are true, then the Kremlin may be attempting to appease the pro-war milblogger community that has been demanding transparency and more honest reporting. The milblogger added that Mordichev reportedly has “warm working relations” with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and that Kadyrov called Mordichev “the best commander” during their meeting in mid-March.[14] Mordichev’s appointment may therefore indicate that the Kremlin is attempting to appease the siloviki faction—composed of Kadyrov and Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin—that has publicly criticized Lapin as well.[15] Lapin’s dismissal may have also been Surovikin’s recommendation as well, however, given that both commanders operated in the Luhansk Oblast area to seize Lysychansk and its surroundings in June.[16] ISW cannot independently verify milblogger or Russian local outlet reports at this time.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin is likely attempting to address critiques against his parallel military structures following Lapin’s reported dismissal. Prigozhin defended his mercenaries against unspecified “tens of thousands of critics,” stating that his Wagner mercenaries are dying while critics are refusing to go to the frontlines.[17] Prigozhin has been responding to numerous inquiries in recent days regarding Wagner units suffering losses or facing outbreaks of infectious diseases among prisoner recruits, but his attacks against Lapin have prompted some within the pro-war community to publicly question his authority.[18] Many Russian milbloggers who had defended Lapin heavily criticized Prigozhin’s comments about the Russian higher military command, with one milblogger stating that “shepherds and cooks,” sarcastically referring to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Prigozhin, could not assess Lapin’s performance.[19] ISW has also previously noted that Prigozhin’s units have not made significant gains around Bakhmut since June.[20]

Prigozhin is likely attempting to reduce the appearance that he might become too powerful, stating that he has no plans to hold political office and would refuse such a position if offered.[21] Prigozhin also added that he does not consider himself to be a leader of public opinion and does not engage in “showdowns” with Russian officials, despite continuing to publicly attack St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov and repeatedly calling for his resignation.[22] Prigozhin added that he is not competing with Beglov in the St-Petersburg business sphere.

Key Takeaways

• Planned Iranian shipments of drones and ballistic missiles to Russia will likely further strengthen Russian reliance on Iran and Iranian-made weapons systems.
• The Russian MoD started its semi-annual fall conscription cycle despite reports of Russian authorities covertly continuing mobilization measures.
• Commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District (SMD), Lieutenant-General Andrey Mordvichev, reportedly replaced Colonel-General Alexander Lapin as commander of the Central Military District (CMD).
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin is likely attempting to address critiques against his parallel military structures following Lapin’s reported dismissal.
• Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued to conduct counteroffensive operations in the directions of Svatove and Kreminna.
• Russian forces continued defensive preparations while Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in Kherson Oblast.
• Russian forces continued to conduct offensive operations around Bakhmut and around Donetsk City.
• Russian forces continued to strengthen Russian control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
• Russian military structures are reportedly expanding training capabilities.
• Russian occupation officials continued to set conditions for the long-term and permanent relocation of residents from the east bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Southern and Eastern Ukraine
• Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued to conduct counteroffensive operations in the direction of Svatove on November 1. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults northwest of Svatove in the directions of Mykolaivka and Kuzemivka (14km northwest of Svatove) in Luhansk Oblast and near Orlyanske, Kharkiv Oblast (30km northwest of Svatove).[23] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also launched a preemptive strike against Ukrainian forces preparing to resume a counteroffensive in the direction of Orlyanske and claimed that unsuccessful Ukrainian assaults from the direction of Kupyansk in the past weeks have cost Ukrainian forces significant equipment and manpower, which is forcing Ukrainian commanders to prepare for Russian counterattacks in the direction of Kupyansk.[24] Another Russian milblogger claimed that it would be highly unlikely that Russian forces would be able to launch an offensive in the Kupyansk direction until late November or December.[25] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces crossed the Zherebets River near Stelmakhivka (15km northwest of Svatove) and are preparing to resume an assault on Russian positions in the area.[26] Russian sources claimed that Russian BARS (Combat Reserve) 13 and 16 detachments are currently defending areas in the Svatove direction.[27] The BARS-13 commander reported that Ukrainian forces have increased their grouping in the Svatove direction and intend to take Svatove this week.[28]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued to conduct counteroffensive operations in the direction of Kreminna on November 1. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces continue to conduct offensive operations in the direction of the Kreminna-Svatove highway.[29] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are preparing to conduct offensive operations toward Chervonopopivka to access Kreminna from the north.[30] The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces near Ploshchanka (17km northwest of Kreminna) intend to launch offensives that will cut off the highway between Kreminna and Svatove.[31] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces periodically launch counterattacks west of Kreminna near Terny (17km northwest of Kreminna) and Torske (15km west of Kreminna) to constrain the actions of Ukrainian forces in the direction of the highway.[32] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully tried to assault Kreminna from the direction of Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna).[33] ISW cannot verify these Russian claims. The Luhansk Oblast Administration confirmed on November 1 that Ukrainian forces recaptured Nevske.[34]

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Russian forces continued defensive preparations in Kherson Oblast on November 1. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Russian troops are continuing active defensive actions, conducting aerial reconnaissance, and forming defensive lines on the east bank (left) of the Dnipro River.[35] Residents reported that Russian forces are digging trenches and settling in for the defense of the east bank, including along the Nova Kakhovka-Dnipryany-Korsunka line (on the east bank about 45km east of Kherson City), Hola Prystan (8km southwest of Kherson City) and as far south as Mykhailivka, which lies well into Russian-occupied territory about 45km south of Kherson City.[36] Such reports indicate that Russian troops are preparing for protracted defensive operations on the east bank.

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian troops continued counteroffensive operations in Kherson Oblast on November 1. Kherson occupation deputy Kirill Stremousov and other Russian sources claimed that Russian troops repelled an attempted Ukrainian attack in the direction of Beryslav.[37] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) similarly claimed that Ukrainian troops unsuccessfully attempted to advance towards Mylove (30km northeast of Beryslav), Sukhanove (32km north of Beryslav), the Bruskynske-Kostromka area (40km northwest of Beryslav), and Zeleny Hai (24km northwest of Kherson City).[38] ISW cannot independently verify these Russian claims.

Ukrainian forces continued their interdiction campaign against Russian concentration areas, logistics nodes, and military assets in Kherson Oblast on November 1. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported on October 31 that Ukrainian rocket and artillery units conducted 180 fire missions against Russian manpower and equipment concentrations in Kherson Oblast and that Ukrainian aviation struck a Russian stronghold in Snihurivka, Mykolaiv Oblast.[39] Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Head Yaroslav Yanushevich stated that Ukrainian forces also hit Russian ammunition warehouses in Beryslav Raion.[40] Social media users additionally reported explosions in Kozatske, near Nova Kakhovka, on November 1.[41]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on November 1. The Ukrainian General Staff notably did not mention specific Russian ground assaults around Bakhmut but noted that Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction on November 1.[42] Russian milbloggers claimed that intense fighting is ongoing near Opytne (about 3km southwest of Bakhmut) in the Kurdyumivka direction.[43] A Kremlin-affiliated Russian milblogger also reported that fierce battles continue in the outskirts of Soledar (13km northeast of Bakhmut) and Bakhmut as Wagner troops try to break through Ukrainian defenses.[44] Russian sources shared geolocated footage of close-quarters combat between Ukrainian forces and Wagner troops near Zaitseve (8km southeast of Bakhmut).[45] Ukrainian soldiers posted footage from settlements around Bakhmut and reported that Ukrainian forces continued to repel endless Russian attacks on Bakhmut and that Ukrainian troops are evacuating civilians in nearby Klyshchiivka (about 9km southwest of Bakhmut).[46] Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces continued to conduct routine indirect fire along the contact line in Donetsk Oblast.[47]

Russian forces continued offensive operations on the northern, northwestern, and southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City on November 1. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted offensive operations in the Avdiivka direction (15km northwest of Donetsk City) but did not further specify the location or nature of these operations.[48] The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) militia claimed that it stormed Ukrainian positions in Nevelske (about 25km northwest of Donetsk City) and took Ukrainian prisoners. A Russian milblogger reported that fighting continued in Pervomaiske and Vodyane and near Opytne (all about 15km northwest of Donetsk City) at the end of the day on October 31.[49] Another Russian milblogger additionally claimed that Russian troops managed to advance within Marinka (on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City) but that it is too early to evaluate Russian gains in Marinka.[50] Russian forces conducted routine artillery strikes in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.[51]

Russian forces continued offensive operations southwest of Donetsk City on November 1. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted offensive operations in the Novopavlivka direction (the operational direction used to refer to activity in western Donetsk Oblast) but did not offer further information on where offensive operations occurred.[52] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) First Deputy Minister of Information Daniil Bezsonov claimed that fighting intensified in the Vuhledar direction on November 1 and stated that Russian forces are attempting to take Pavlivka (45km southwest of Donetsk City) and Novomykhailivka (25km southwest of Donetsk City) as Ukrainian forces try to hold the left bank of the Kashlyhach River and regroup in the vicinity of Vuhledar.[53] Bezsonov indicated that this offensive is likely intended to encircle the Ukrainian grouping in Vuhledar but noted that seizing Vuhledar will likely be costly for Russian forces.[54] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian troops already control half of Pavlivka as of October 31 and that there was no significant progress by Russian forces operating around Novomykhailivka.[55] Another Russian miblogger refuted claims that DNR units are fighting in this area and claimed that elements of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade of the Eastern Military District are operating in the area instead.[56] Russian forces continued routine artillery fire in western Donetsk and southern Zaporizhia Oblasts.[57]

Ukrainian sources reported on November 1 that a Ukrainian strike destroyed the Akhtamar Hotel along the Mariupol-Donetsk City Road near Volnovakha.[58] Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko claimed that the hotel housed Chechen troops under the command of Ramzan Kadyrov.[59]

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

Russian forces continued routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on November 1. Russian forces conducted Shahed-136 drone and S-300 missile strikes against Dnipro City and Mykolaiv City overnight.[60] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces shelled Nikopol and Marhanets, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and Mykolaiv City, Bashtanka, Berenezhuvate, Pervomaisk, and Shyroke areas in Mykolaiv Oblast.[61] Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Deputy Interior Minister Vitaly Kiselyov claimed that recent Russian strikes against Ukrainian military infrastructure in Ochakiv, Mykolaiv Oblast sank two harbor tugs.[62] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces continued preparations for a Russian offensive west of Hulyaipole, Zaporizhia Oblast.[63]

Russian forces have likely increased their sabotage efforts in unoccupied southern Ukraine to further impede Ukrainian participation in the grain deal following the Russian pullout from the deal. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported on November 1 that Russian saboteurs are active in southern Ukraine.[64] Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian authorities arrested an Odesa City law enforcement officer associated with Russian intelligence services who collected data on Ukrainian military equipment transport and planned to blow up a railway.[65] Successful Russian interdiction of Ukrainian logistics lines in southern Ukraine could impede Ukraine’s ability to transport grain to neutral ports for international shipment.

Russian forces continue efforts to consolidate control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) amid deteriorating working conditions at the plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced on October 31 that a landmine near the ZNPP perimeter detonated on October 30, cutting power to reactor unit 4 and forcing it to rely on external power lines to power essential safety and security functions.[66] IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi expressed concern on October 31 for the working conditions of ZNPP personnel and stated that Russian occupation authorities continue to pressure ZNPP personnel into signing contracts with Russian nuclear energy agency Rosatom.[67] Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on November 1 that Russian occupation authorities established deadlines of November 1 and December 2 for ZNPP personnel to sign contracts with Rosatom and have limited Ukrainian personnel access to the ZNPP.[68] The GUR also reported that Chechen forces arrived at Enerhodar, likely to perform law enforcement duties, and that Russian forces installed equipment on the roof of reactor unit 5 to conduct aerial reconnaissance of the area.[69]

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

Russian military structures are reportedly expanding certain training capabilities. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported on November 1 that Russia is developing “tactical simulator” complexes using various unspecified training aids to reduce the cost of using expensive weapons systems.[70] The Belarusian MoD similarly reported that Belarus and Russia are planning to create joint training centers for the combined training of Russian and Belarusian military personnel.[71] Such measures are ostensibly intended to expand the training and development capabilities of the Russian military, potentially in response to widespread and systemic issues with training mobilized reservists under the partial mobilization order.

The Russian military leadership is likely continuing to struggle with the morale and discipline of mobilized soldiers. Russian sources reported on November 1 that the commander of a military base in Chita, Zabaykalsky Krai, expelled mobilized servicemen from the grounds of the base ahead of Zabaykalsky Krai Governor Alexander Osipov’s visit to the base.[72] Russian sources cited fears that the servicemen would ask Osipov “uncomfortable questions about supplies.”[73] Systemic issues with mobilization structures remain seemingly widespread despite the formal end of partial mobilization.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov implied that Chechnya will continue to send summonses to serve within Chechen units to men with previous combat experience.[74] Kadyrov highlighted that these men will not serve in the army, but will instead serve “among Chechens,” presumably in internal security forces in the Chechen Republic. Kadyrov may have again indirectly criticized the Russian Armed Forces by stating that the families of Chechen servicemen will know the locations and units of their loved ones’ deployments, which is not the case for soldiers in the Russian military. Russian outlets have reported that families complained that the Russian MoD did not properly inform them about the deployment of their relatives.[75]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian occupation officials in Kherson Oblast continued setting conditions for the long-term, if not permanent, forced relocation of Ukrainians from the east bank of the Dnipro River. Kherson occupation deputy Kirill Stremousov announced that “evacuations” (forced relocations) began from the 15km zone of the east bank of the Dnipro River.[76] Occupation Head of Kherson Oblast Vladimir Saldo announced that Russian officials will “evacuate” up to 70,000 residents from the east bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast and temporarily resettle them deep in occupied Kherson Oblast or in other occupied or Russian territories.[77] Saldo stated that Russian authorities in occupied Crimea, Krasnodar Krai, Rostov Oblast, and Voronezh Oblast issued housing vouchers and 100,000-ruble (roughly 1,620 USD) bonuses to “evacuees” from Kherson Oblast, indicating that Russian authorities do not intend to allow the original Ukrainian inhabitants to return to the evacuated zones of Kherson Oblast for a long time if at all.[78] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are intimidating Kherson Oblast residents into leaving and have deprived Kherson Oblast residents of the means to communicate.[79]

Russian forces are reportedly fortifying in civilian areas in occupied Kherson Oblast. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are constructing fortifications and explosive barriers around civilian housing in Kherson Oblast.[80] Saldo announced that the Kherson Oblast occupation administration is creating a territorial defense battalion with over 1,000 personnel and that Russian forces are fortifying on the east bank of the Dnipro River.[81] Kherson Oblast locals reported that Russian forces, including mobilized personnel, occupy civilian buildings and are building fortifications in the rear areas of Kherson Oblast.[82] If true, these fortifications suggest that Russian forces anticipate that Ukrainian forces may eventually advance deep into occupied Kherson Oblast east of the Dnipro River.

Ukraine’s Resistance Center reported on November 1 that an explosion seriously wounded a Russian occupation deputy mayor of Berdyansk on October 31.[83] A Pro-Ukrainian channel claimed that an improvised explosive device (IED) detonation, likely from Ukrainian partisans, filled with metal balls or nails injured the official.[84]

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[1] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/na-pochatku-lystopada-iran-planuie-vidpravyty-v-rf-partiiu-z-ponad-200-boiovykh-droniv.html

[2] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/na-pochatku-lystopada-iran-planuie-vidpravyty-v-rf-partiiu-z-ponad-200-boiovykh-droniv.html

[4] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/na-pochatku-lystopada-iran-planuie-vidpravyty-v-rf-partiiu-z-ponad-200-boiovykh-droniv.html

[6] https://ria dot ru/20221031/srochniki-1827979179.html

[8] https://72.ru/text/gorod/2022/10/31/71778872/?utm_source=telegram&utm_me...(dot)fontanka.ru/2022/10/31/71780855/

[9] https://72 dot ru/text/gorod/2022/10/31/71778872/?utm_source=telegram&utm_medium=messenger&utm_campaign=72

[11] https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/13698; https://t.me/mardanaka/11477; https:... ru/news/na-zlobu-dnya/v-minoborony-ne-podtverdili-otstranenie-ot-komandovaniya-tsvo-aleksandra-lapina; https://t.me/wargonzo/8988

[14] https://lenta dot ru/news/2022/03/28/mordv/

[58] https://t.me/andriyshTime/4083; https://t.me/andriyshTime/4085; https:... ; https://twitter.com/blinzka/status/1587395078095519749 ; https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1587463070233812995; https://t.me/donbassr/29655 ; https://tpyxa dot net/2022/11/01/in-volnovakha-the-akhtamar-hotel-on-the-mariupol-donetsk-highway-where-the-kadyrovs-were-based-was-hit/ ; https://t.me/stranaua/72976

[64] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/na-zaes-anuliuiut-perepustky-ukrainskoho-zrazku-dlia-personalu-na-dakhu-enerhobloku-vstanovyly-voienne-obladnannia.html

[65] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/na-zaes-anuliuiut-perepustky-ukrainskoho-zrazku-dlia-personalu-na-dakhu-enerhobloku-vstanovyly-voienne-obladnannia.html

[68] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/na-zaes-anuliuiut-perepustky-ukrainskoho-zrazku-dlia-personalu-na-dakhu-enerhobloku-vstanovyly-voienne-obladnannia.html

[69] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/na-zaes-anuliuiut-perepustky-ukrainskoho-zrazku-dlia-personalu-na-dakhu-enerhobloku-vstanovyly-voienne-obladnannia.html

[83] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/11/01/u-berdyansku-pidirvaly-chergovogo-kolaboranta/

understandingwar.org

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (01.11.22) CDS comments on key events

CDS Daily brief (01.11.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

Ukrainian refugees who have been issued temporary visas in the European Union and have returned to Ukraine can come back to the EU before winter, stated the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Czech Republic, Vit Rakushan, after returning from Kyiv. Ukrainians who already received temporary protection status in the EU but returned to Ukraine now have the right to come to the EU under the conditions that do not allow them to stay in Ukraine during the winter. He assumes that these people will return, and the number of refugees in the European Union may increase to 5 million. According to him, the Czech Republic could receive a maximum of half a million people.

Consequences of enemy shelling on the morning of November 1:

•       On October 31, the Russian occupiers shelled Zaporizhzhia, Polohy and Vasyliv districts of Zaporizhzhia Oblast. 29 reports were received about the destruction of houses (apartments) and infrastructure facilities.

•       At night, the Russians hit Mykolaiv with four rockets; 1 person was killed. A 2-story building was destroyed, an educational institution and private houses were damaged, and a 5-story building was on fire. In the Mykolaiv district, the enemy hit an industrial infrastructure facility.

•       Around midnight, 8 mines hit the Znob-Novgorod community of Sumy Oblast. Preliminary, no victims and destruction were reported.

•       After 21.00, the Russian occupiers attacked Kupyansk in Kharkiv Oblast; an apartment building was destroyed. There are no reported victims or injured. Also, during the day, the enemy shelled the Kupyansk (1 wounded) and Chuguyivskyi districts of the Oblast. In Kharkiv, due to the Russian attack on energy facilities on October 31, the boiler house and several heating stations are still not working.

•       On October 31, enemy shelling killed 2 civilians in Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast, and 1 in Kurakhovo. 3 more were wounded. As a result of the impact, a private house and a high- rise building were damaged in the city. Four houses were destroyed in the Toretsk community, and shellings were recorded near Yakovlivka, Bakhmutsky and Razdolivka in the Soledar community, Pavlo Kirilenko, head of the Donetsk Oblast Military Administration, said. The enemy fired fourteen missiles at the industrial zone in Kramatorsk. In Kurakhovo, one private house was completely destroyed. In Avdiivka, one shelling was recorded at night and two massive shelling in the morning. Due to the shelling of the Ocheretyanska community, the power supply line was damaged.

•       At night, 40 enemy shells landed in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. 14 high-rise and private buildings, a kindergarten, a pharmacy, a hairdresser salon, shops and bank premises were damaged. In the Marganetsk community, the shelling damaged the power line and cut off the power to the water utility's pumping station.

•       Russians attacked Poltava Oblast at night. According to the head of the OMA, Dmytro Lunin, at night, Poltava Oblast was attacked by 10 Shahed-136 drones. Air defense forces shot down six of them, and four hit civilian infrastructure. The Russians released Iranian-

made UAVs from the territory of the temporarily occupied Huliaipole in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Water and energy supply in Kyiv is fully restored, Kyiv mayor Klitschko said. However, according to the mayor of Kyiv, power cuts are still applied because the deficit in the energy system, after the barbaric attacks of the Russian aggressor, is significant. All trolleybuses in Kyiv are being replaced by buses to save electricity.

In the Kyiv Oblast, about 20 thousand households remain without electricity. Power engineers are working around the clock to eliminate the consequences of enemy shelling. To stabilize the network at 6:15 a.m., scheduled power outages began in the region, said the head of the Kyiv OMA, Oleksiy Kuleba. "When you have electricity at home, please charge your phones and power banks," he said. During the day, there was an emergency power outage in four districts of Kyiv, Obolon, Vynogradar, Minsk and Kurenivka neighborhoods.

In the case of a worst-case scenario, Kyiv is preparing for a hard winter. According to the mayor Vitali Klitschko, over 1,000 heating points have already been prepared in the capital. Electric generators and water supplies were established. The Kyiv City State Administration appealed to the Kyiv residents to organize the necessary supplies at home. Among other things, they need water, essential food supplies, warm clothes, etc.

In case of a nuclear attack, there are 425 special underground facilities with two entrances and exits and ventilation in the Kyiv Oblast. "The last 8 months have taught us that anything can happen. As an official, I am preparing for the worst scenario, but I hope everything will be fine," said Oleksiy Kuleba, head of the regional military administration. In total, there are about a thousand shelters in the [Kyiv] Oblast. Kuleba says there will most likely be no communication in case of a nuclear strike. "The only thing that will work is the radio. Therefore, portable radios with batteries should be equipped everywhere to receive the signal. Because information will be the most important thing."

In the Kyiv Oblast, the bodies of 200 victims of the Russian military are currently unrecognizable, stated the head of the Kyiv region police, Andrii Nebytov, during a briefing at the "Ukraine- Ukrinform" Media Center. He noted that with the results of examinations, the number of unrecognizable corpses is decreasing. Relatives are informed where the body is buried, and a decision is made to rebury at the request of relatives. As previously reported, as of October 28, 1,367 bodies of dead Ukrainians were exhumed in Kyiv Oblast.

Occupied territories:

Due to the explosion of a land mine near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the fourth power unit was shut down. The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency stated that the situation at the ZNPP is unstable. Russian invaders at the Zaporizhzhia NPP canceled Ukrainian passes for personnel, and military equipment was installed on the roof of one of the power units, reported the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. The Russians set a condition for the licensed shift workers of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power

Plant that by November 2, they have to sign or reject the contract with Rosatom. Other ZNPP employees have been given a deadline of December 1. It has been reported that Ukrainian passes to the station will be canceled shortly. Currently, engineering and technical workers of the station are not allowed to work. Only operatives (change of management) have access. According to intelligence data, the so-called "Kadyrov combatants" have arrived in Enerhodar, patrolling in groups of 15-20 people. On the roof of the fifth power unit, the Russian invaders installed EW equipment to combat aerial reconnaissance. The [Russian] command staff is scattered around the city and lives in the apartments of people who have left the city.

Russian invaders took 300 children from the temporarily occupied Enerhodar, and Kamianka to the regions of the Russian Federation,

[legally elected Ukrainian Mayor] of Melitopol Ivan Fedorov said during the national telethon. The mayor also reminded of the military censorship [Russian occupies] introduced in the city. If earlier the use of Ukrainian mobile communications and the Internet was restricted, now it is forbidden to use Ukrainian public and messenger channels.

Operational situation

(please note that this part of the report is mainly on the previous day's (October 31) developments)

It is the 251st day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to defend Donbas"). The enemy tries to maintain control over the temporarily captured territories, concentrates its efforts on disrupting the counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian troops, and does not give up attempts to conduct the offensive in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions.

The enemy continues shelling the Defense Forces units along the contact line. It carries fortification of the frontiers in some directions and conducts aerial reconnaissance. The enemy strikes critical infrastructure [of Ukraine], violating the norms of International Humanitarian Law, laws and customs of war. During the past 24 hours, the enemy launched 60 missile and 15 air strikes, and carried out more than 45 shellings with anti-aircraft missiles. Areas of more than 50 Ukrainian towns and villages, including Soledar, Vuhledar, Yakovlivka, and Vesele of the Donetsk Oblast, were hit by the enemy. Near the state border, Vilkhuvatka, Vovchansk, Gatishche, Strelecha and Veterynarne in Kharkiv Oblast came under fire.

The Republic of Belarus supports the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. The Russian Federation continues the transfer of units to the territory of the Republic of Belarus. The threat of missile strikes and the use of attack UAVs from the territory of the Republic of Belarus remains.

During the past day, the Ukrainian Defense Forces aircraft struck the enemy 14 times. Areas of concentration of enemy weapons and military equipment, strongholds and positions of the air

defense systems were affected. Ukrainian air defense units shot down 4 enemy helicopters, 2 UAVs and 45 enemy cruise missiles.

Over the past day, Ukraine's missile troops and artillery hit 2 enemy command and control points, 3 areas of concentration of manpower, weapons and military equipment and other important enemy targets.

The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces remain low. The Russian command investigates the arbitrary abandonment of positions by personnel of the 2nd motorized rifle battalion of the 423rd motorized rifle regiment in the area of Kolomychyikha village. The personnel of the 5th and 6th motorized rifle companies suffered significant losses due to the powerful fire impact of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for several days. Russian "mobilization" personnel, having failed to obtain any clear and adequate leadership from the constantly drunk commanders, retreated on foot, independently, without any command from the higher authorities, for almost 15 km to the rear, where the Russian command discovered them at the gas station on the western outskirts of Svatove; the hungry personnel were trying to get something edible. It was also established that Russian units, at the positions behind them or on the flanks, opened fire on them at least twice.

Kharkiv direction

• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;

• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd, and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments, 11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.

The enemy shelled the Defence Forces' positions in Kucherivka, Stelmakhivka, Myasozharivka, and Petropavlivka.

The enemy's troops command is taking active measures to stabilize the situation in the Svatove area and deployed the consolidated BTG of the 12th and 13th tank regiments of the 4th tank division of the 1st Tank Army (up to 22 tanks, not all in combat condition) in the Kolomiyichykha village area. Fierce street fighting continues in the village.

Due to the loss of about 45-50% of personnel and combat equipment, the enemy BTG of the 15th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division of the 1st Tank Army was withdrawn to restore combat capability.

The 1st motorized rifle battalion of the 1st separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps was transferred from the Donetsk region to the operational subordination of the commander of the 3rd motorized rifle division of the 20th Army.

During the past two days, due to the advance of the advanced units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to the west of Svatove, the enemy command had to hastily organize and carry out a poorly prepared counterattack in the direction of Dzherelne - Andriivka by the remnants of BTG consisting of the 254th motorized rifle regiment of the 144th motorized rifle division of the 20th Army, which was previously forced to move to this area from the south-west of Svatove. The BTG was hastily supplemented by [Russian] citizens who were called for mobilization and thrown into battle. As a result, it lost several dozen soldiers killed and wounded, two BBM and rolled back to the starting line.

Kramatorsk direction

● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;

●  252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th, and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.

The enemy fired from tanks, mortars, barrel and jet artillery at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas of Nevske, Bilohorivka, Rozdolivka, Spirne, Hryhorivka and Berestove.

The enemy deployed two reinforced companies from the 201st military base of the Central Military District of Tajikistan (the rest of its forces are now deployed in the Lysychansk direction) to the Lyman direction battle in the area of Zhyylivka village.

Donetsk direction

● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th, and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet," 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The enemy shelled the areas of Zelenopillya, Klishchiivka, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Soledar, Maryinka, Vodyane, Krasnohorivka, Pervomaiske and Nevelske from tanks and artillery.

The enemy carried out several unsuccessful assault actions. Thus, the 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 2nd Army Corps (AC) attacked with the forces of two platoons in the direction of Striapivka and Soledar. The reinforced platoon of the 6th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd AC attacked Pokrovske and Bakhmutske. Two platoons of the 2nd separate motorized rifle brigade of the 2nd AC stormed Trypillya and Yakovlivka. A platoon of the 3rd separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st AC attacked Zaitseve (lower) and Mayorsk. Up to two platoons of the 131st rifle battalion of the mobilization reserve attacked Horlivka- Mayorsk in foot formation. With the forces of two assault detachments from the "Wagner" PMC, the enemy attacked in the directions of Mykolaivka, Kurdyumivka; Odradivka, Andriivka; Vesela Dolyna, Bakhmut; Shypylivka, Beiohorivka; Zolotarivka, Beiohorivka. Attacks were carried out by units ranging from an assault detachment to a reinforced platoon. The enemy units of the 11th separate motorized rifle regiment made an unsuccessful attempt to attack Vodiane village and suffered losses. At the same time, units from the 1st separate motorized rifle brigade (2nd motorized rifle battalion), separate reconnaissance battalion "Sparta", 185th special battalion of the so-called "people's militia of DPR", and the "Storm" detachment of the 102nd motorized rifle regiment of the 150th motorized rifle division tried to consolidate on the positions captured on

28.10 to further develop an offensive on Opytne - Vodyane. They conducted aerial reconnaissance and combat reconnaissance, and tried to inflict fire damage on the Ukrainian Joint Forces advanced units.

Zaporizhzhia direction

●  Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The enemy shelled the positions of the Defense Forces in the areas of Vremivka, Vuhledar, Poltavka, Olhivske, Malynivka, Pavlivka, and Novodanilivka.

Tavriysk direction

-    Vasylivka – Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line – 296 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 39, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 7,5 km;

-   Deployed BTGs of: the 8th and 49th Combined Arms Armies; 11th, 103rd, 109th, and 127th rifle regiments of the mobilization reserve of the 1st Army Corps of the Southern Military District; 35th

and 36th Combined Arms Armies of the Eastern Military District; 3rd Army Corps of the Western Military District; 90th tank division of the Central Military District; the 22nd Army Corps of the Coastal Forces; the 810th separate marines brigade of the Black Sea Fleet; the 7th and 76th Air assault divisions, the 98th airborne division, and the 11th separate airborne assault brigade of the Airborne Forces.

The [Russian] occupiers forcibly relocate the civilian population. Thus, in Kakhovka, citizens living in apartments along the banks of the Dnipro river are forcibly evicted from their homes. The Russian invaders are equipping engineering fortifications and mine-explosive barriers around civilian housing. In Novochornomorya, Skadovsky District, Russian servicemen psychologically and physically put pressure on civilians. They are kicked out of their own homes. The houses released in this way are planned for the occupiers' placement.

Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:

The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the Black Sea and to maintain control over the captured territories.

The enemy holds eight ships and boats at sea. They are located along the southwestern coast of Crimea. Among them are 2 Kalibr cruise missile carriers: two small project 21631 missile ships with a total of 16 missiles.

There are 6 enemy patrol ships and boats in the Sea of Azov waters on the approaches to the Mariupol and Berdyansk seaports to block the Azov coast.

Enemy aviation continues to fly from Crimean airfields Belbek and Gvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 16 aircraft from Belbek and Saka airfields were deployed.

In Sevastopol, around 3:40 on November 1, the sound of an explosion was heard. According to local media reports, the explosion sounds were similar to the activation of the anti-aircraft system. The Russian head of Sevastopol, Mykhailo Razvozhaev, wrote in a telegram that at night in the area of Lyubimivka, the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation shot down a drone.

Grain Initiative: The Joint Coordination Center for the Grain Initiative, under the auspices of the United Nations, reported that by noon on Tuesday, November 1, three more vessels had left Ukrainian ports after Russia suspended its participation in the initiative. The center's statement said the movement of the vessels had been agreed upon by the delegations of Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations at the Joint Coordination Center (JCC) in Istanbul, and the Russian delegation had been informed. It is also noted that Amir Abdullah, coordinator of the UN Black Sea Grain Initiative, "continues negotiations with all three member states, seeking to restore full participation in the SCC."

The United Nations does not believe that Russia's suspension of participation in the "grain agreement" means that it has lost its validity. UN inspectors will continue to inspect ships transporting grain from Ukrainian ports. Martin Griffiths, Deputy Secretary General of the Organization for Humanitarian Affairs, told journalists about this at a briefing after the meeting of the UN Security Council on October 31.

Turkey holds a similar opinion, actually demanding that Russia return to the agreement. During a telephone conversation with Shoigu, Turkey Defense Minister Khulusi Akar emphasized the need to restore the "grain corridor" functioning. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed his full commitment to continuing grain exports during a telephone conversation with UN Secretary-General António Guterres. In turn, Putin said that the reason for suspending Moscow's participation in the "grain agreement" was a threat from Ukraine. Only in the case of security guarantees in the Black Sea can he reconsider this decision.

Russian operational losses from 24.02 to 01.11

Personnel - almost 72,470 people (+650);

Tanks - 2,698(+12)

Armored combat vehicles – 5,501 (+16);

Artillery systems – 1,730 (+2);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 383 (0); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 197 (0); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 4,143 (+15); Aircraft - 276 (+1);

Helicopters – 257 (+4);

UAV operational and tactical level – 1,415 (+2); Intercepted cruise missiles - 397 (+45);

Boats / ships - 16 (0).

Ukraine, general news

The Russians damaged about 40% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure, Pesiden Zelensky said. He discussed with the European Union Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson the issue of restoring the Ukrainian energy infrastructure after the Russian strikes and stabilizing the operation of the Ukrainian energy grid. He added that Ukraine is preparing for winter and stocking up on additional equipment, and Ukrainians should also prepare for a difficult winter and have supplies of technical water, flashlights, power banks, warm clothes, batteries and other things.

Prime Minister Shmygal said that yesterday's Russian attack is part of a larger, pre-planned Russian strategy to destroy the Ukrainian energy system. He noted that the possibility of evacuating the population in the event of a critical energy situation is an emergency step that will be used as a last resort.

12 countries will assist Ukraine in the form of energy equipment to restore the energy system, said Kuleba, the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Israel, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Germany,

North Macedonia, Poland, the Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Slovenia, Finland and France will deliver 954 units of energy equipment to Ukraine.

The IAEA has begun inspecting two Ukrainian nuclear facilities at the request of Ukraine to officially refute Russian fakes about the development of a "dirty bomb". A month ago, the IAEA already inspected one of the facilities. No undeclared nuclear activity or materials were found there. According to the Director General of the Agency, Rafael Grossi, a preliminary report on the audit results will be made public before the end of this week.

Ukrainian rescuers received the fourth tranche of assistance from the French government, including:

•       7 fire trucks;

•       6 light specialized cars;

•       ambulance car;

•       mobile medical center with radiological equipment

•       7 trailers with boats;

•       fire, rescue and medical equipment.

International diplomatic aspect

Iran is preparing to provide Russia with about a thousand additional weapons items, including ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Air Force spokesman said that Ukraine does not have an effective means of defense against Iranian-made ballistic missiles Russia is about to acquire.

About a hundred Ukrainian military personnel are about to complete their NASAMS air defense system operation course in Norway. The US will provide two first NASAMS at the beginning of November and six more within a couple of years. "France is fully prepared to step up its military support for Ukraine forthwith, especially as concerns anti-air defense," Emmanuel Macron told Volodymyr Zelensky in a phone conversation.

Russia is trying to create a "foreign legion" and hire Afghan special forces soldiers who fled Afghanistan for Iran after the US's troublesome withdrawal. The Kremlin is ready to offer a generous $ 1,500-a-month salary and safe havens for families of would-be mercenaries. Given Russia's previous failed attempts to attract "soldiers of fortune" from Syria and other corners of the world, it's unclear how many Afghanis will end up in the trenches in Ukraine.

Dmitriy Medvedev threatened Ukraine with nuclear weapons because "the goal of Ukraine in the war is the return of all territories that previously belonged to it. This is a threat to the existence of our state and the collapse of today's Russia". Ukraine's National Security Council's Secretary replied, "Russia will definitely and irrevocably lose. The Kremlin regime voluntarily launched the disintegration process of the sub-empire and the fake federation. All territories occupied by Moscow will be returned, which applies not only to Ukraine but also to Georgia, Moldova, Japan, and other countries and peoples. Belarus will be a free country, including from the Russian invaders. The threat and use of nuclear weapons by the Russian Federation is an act of suicide.

Russia will finally turn into enemy number one for the whole world." "Complete denuclearization is the ultimate goal of dismantling the Russian Federation... It's the only [real] guarantee of security for the world and Ukraine," Oleksiy Danylov continued.

Boris Johnson has told Sky News that he does not think Vladimir Putin will use a tactical nuclear weapon in his war in Ukraine. "I don't think he will, he'd be crazy to do so," the ex-prime minister said. Boris Johnson believes it would be a "total disaster" for Russia and will put it into a "cryogenic economic freeze." At the same time, Putin would "lose a lot of the middle ground of global tacit acquiescence that he's had."

Meanwhile, the Kremlin's mouthpiece threatened the UK with "further steps" because "such actions cannot be put aside." Peskov is developing a new narrative about alleged UK involvement in blowing up Nord Stream pipelines. "There is evidence that Britain is involved in sabotage ... a terrorist act against vital energy infrastructure," he said.

The US military personnel is conducting onsite inspections of the US weapons provided to Ukraine. The US Defense Secretary said before that the US side knows every detail about the American weapons in Ukraine and is not worrying about them being misused. However, several Russian IPSOs have claimed that weapons had ended up in the "wrong hands," and a bunch of Republican congressmen insisted on setting up an oversight. Ukraine is interested in assuring its partners that their weapons are in good hands and being used for a good purpose – annihilating Russian invaders.

Ukraine has already introduced a NATO-based LOGFAS logistics accounting and control system. Its integration with the Ukrainian information and analytical system "SOTA," which tracks foreign weapons from their entrance into the country's territory to their use on the battlefield, provides complete control over every item.

Russia, relevant news

Russian Gazprom reduced production by 18.6% in 10 months of the current year. The company produced 344 billion cubic meters of gas in January-October of the current year, which is 78.8 billion cubic meters less than last year's figures. At the same time, in the domestic market, demand for Gazprom's resources during this period fell by 11.1 billion cubic meters, i.e. 5.6%. On the other hand, according to the company's data, gas exports amounted to 91.2 billion cubic meters, which is 67.6 billion less than in 2021. At the same time, the company claims that the export of energy resources to China through the "Power of Siberia" gas pipeline is growing.

International company 3M Co. decided to completely withdraw its business from Russia and Belarus and is considering the possibility of selling its Alabuga SEZ and Volokolamsk production facilities – the Russian Interfax news agency reported, citing the company.

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3. Ukrainian Commandoes Raid Airfield Deep Inside Russia, Destroy Frontline Helicopters

If an accurate report, this would seem to be a significant development.

Ukrainian Commandoes Raid Airfield Deep Inside Russia, Destroy Frontline Helicopters - Kyiv Post - Ukraine's Global Voice

kyivpost.com · by Alisa Orlova · November 1, 2022

Ukrainian commandoes blew up three helicopter gunships at a Russian military airfield close to the Latvian border, in one of the most spectacular behind-the-lines raids launched by either side since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, multiple sources confirmed on Tuesday, Nov. 1.

The Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine said in a Monday, Oct. 31 statement that the Oct. 30 attack took place at the Russian army’s Veretye air base in north-western Pskov Region. The facility is more than 500 km., as the missile flies, from Ukraine to the south, and some 110 km from NATO member Latvia to the east.

Two Kamaz-52 attack helicopters were destroyed completely and a third was badly damaged by det charges placed by Ukrainian operatives infiltrating in and out of the site without being detected, the GUR statement added. Russian security teams subsequently found a fourth helicopter rigged with explosives that had not gone off, some news reports said.

The Ka-52 “Alligator” helicopter is one of the Kremlin’s latest combat aircraft and has been widely profiled on state-controlled media as an example of growing Russian military might. In serial production since 2007, the $16 million aircraft is equipped with a multi-level digital computer-based system, a helmet-mounted sight display, advanced navigation, and hard points for anti-tank missiles, ground attack rockets, and aerial bombs.

Multiple Russian Telegram channels have confirmed that the attack took place. Some initially challenged Kyiv’s capability to pull off such an attack, but even pro-Kremlin information platforms conceded the Ukrainian success following the Oct. 31 appearance of video of the actual sabotage operation in progress.

Originally published on the Telegram channel Orestokratiya, an information platform run by the management of Ukraine’s Obozrevatel magazine, the video shows an unarmed man in military attire preparing and planting explosives in the fuselage of a Ka-52 helicopter parked on the concrete tarmac of what appears to be a Russian army airfield. Russian soldiers are nowhere to be seen.

The Starshie Eddy Telegram channel, a pro-Kremlin information platform focusing on military developments, wrote: “Let’s be frank, this is a gross failure on our side. Yes, we need, immediately, much more severe punishment for those who are tracking (derogative swear word for Ukrainians) inside Russia. If it’s possibly to calmly blow up a helicopter on the grounds of military unit, what can we say about our less protected sites?”

Yuriy Butusov, a leading Ukrainian military journalist, said in a Facebook comment that the strike was “One of the best sabotage operations of the GUR…the saboteurs entered the territory of a particularly important military base, went unnoticed to the helicopter parking lot, installed four explosive devices, that is, wasted some time, set a timer and also left the territory of the air base unnoticed.”

Russian independent journalists penetrated Veretye base in December 2019, exposing poor security at the airfield at the time with a video of them entering and leaving the airfield without interference, or even spotting a guard, the Ukrainian UNIAN news agency reported on Tuesday, Nov. 1.

News of the Veretye strike became public two days after a dramatic Armed Forces of Ukraine attack on Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) warships off shore from their base in Sevastopol, in the Russian Federation (RF)-occupied Crimea peninsula. RF military spokesmen said Ukrainian special forces used remoted-controlled motor boats loaded with explosives to attack three BSF warships, slightly damaging one.

Independent Ukrainian news platforms said the Oct. 29 naval raid damaged at least two Russian vessels, one a frigate armed with long-range cruise missiles used to hit Ukrainian civilian targets. Kyiv military spokesmen confirmed Ukrainian special forces were behind the attack.

A picked force with a listed strength of some 5,000 men and women, the Special Forces of Ukraine (SSO) began a shift to NATO-style training and tactics in 2014, following the Kremlin’s forced annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk Regions. SSO leadership and even rank-and-file have since then trained frequently with NATO counterpart units, particularly from the U.S., Great Britain, Poland and the Baltic States

kyivpost.com · by Alisa Orlova · November 1, 2022

4. Ukraine war will make China think twice about invading Taiwan

Will the "three uncertainties" restrain the PRC until they have better "foreknowledge?" (as Sun Tzu would say)

I hope the Admiral is right (and we keep the three uncertainties uncertain).

Excerpts:

Taken together, these three uncertainties will probably create a reluctance to conduct a full-on military intervention against Taiwan for at least the next three to five years. An exception would be if Taipei crossed the ultimate Chinese red line and declared independence, something that appears highly unlikely.

Over the longer term, China may become more confident in its military as its forces accrue more and better hardware, perhaps conduct more out-of-area military operations and build a sustainable network of overseas bases like the U.S. enjoys today. Beijing will harden its critical supply chains. And it is closely following events in Taiwan, seeking to find clues as to the willingness of the Taiwanese to fight.

All remain uncertainties today. So, for now, until leaders gain more knowledge in all three areas, the view from Beijing, given the level of uncertainty of the outcome, will be one of avoiding military intervention against Taiwan.

Ukraine war will make China think twice about invading Taiwan

Uncertainty about sanctions, resistance and combat capability weigh on Beijing

James StavridisGuest Writer

November 1, 2022 05:00 JST

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Ukraine-war-will-make-China-think-twice-about-invading-Taiwan

Retired U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis is vice chairman for global affairs and a managing director at private equity firm The Carlyle Group. He previously served as supreme allied commander of NATO and dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He is the author of "2034: A Novel of the Next World War."

As the dust settles from the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping's ascension to an unprecedented third term as general secretary, Beijing's view of the unfolding Russian invasion of Ukraine is taking on growing geopolitical significance.

What does Xi think about the debacle into which his friend President Vladimir Putin has stumbled? Are there, in fact, limits to the "partnership without limits" that the two leaders declared early this year just before the war began?

As a former supreme allied commander of NATO, I am often asked if the invasion of Ukraine will ultimately encourage the Chinese to make a military move on Taiwan. There is a certain symmetry in how both Ukraine and Taiwan are seen as breakaway regions of their respective, far larger neighbors.

But ultimately, a military incursion looks unlikely at this time because as China looks at the Ukraine conflict, three key questions must emerge.

The first is quite simple: How would the Chinese military perform in large-scale, challenging combat operations? Put another way, Xi must be asking himself if his generals and admirals -- trained in the old Soviet model like their Russian counterparts -- would fare any better in actual combat?

The Chinese are well aware that their military has not engaged in sustained combat since the Korean War, in the early 1950s. War is unpredictable, to say the least, and without the harsh experience of large-scale combat, which an invasion of Taiwan would certainly entail, how an attack on Taiwan might unfold is an uncertainty for China.

For better or worse, the U.S. has a highly bloodied military, having conducted major combat operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as many smaller operations. The answer to how the Chinese military would perform in actual combat is an unknown.

A second question involves the Taiwanese. Would they fight as hard and effectively as the Ukrainians have? Again, this is a hard question to answer with certainty, but having met President Tsai Ing-wen and her senior military leadership team, I believe they would fight hard and well.

While the question of full-blown U.S. intervention is still shrouded in "strategic ambiguity," despite several comments by President Joe Biden indicating Washington would provide direct military assistance, it is a near certainty that the U.S. and its allies would, at a minimum, offer material assistance to the Taiwanese in the form of advanced weapons, including anti-air defenses, smart sea mines, cyber tools and anti-ship cruise missiles.

Supported by the West in terms of military equipment and economic sanctions against Beijing, the Taiwanese would probably fight hard.

President Tsai Ing-wen onboard a navy ship during the annual Han Kuang exercises on July 26: The Taiwanese would probably fight hard. (Handout photo from Taiwan Presidential Office) © AP

Again, the level of their resistance is an unknown for China and a concerning one. Like the unknown Beijing faces about the ultimate combat quality of the People's Liberation Army, the level of fighting spirit of the Taiwanese will not be clear until a military confrontation actually unfolds.

Finally, Beijing has to wonder whether the West would impose as severe sanctions as they have against Russia. From the Chinese perspective, Beijing reasonably judges that its economy, at around 17% of global gross domestic product, is too big to sanction.

In military terms, trying to apply a carpet bombing economic approach to China with massive, broad sanctions is probably unmanageable, given how intertwined the world's economies are today. Unlike Russia, which has a much smaller GDP and is really only a factor in hydrocarbon markets, Beijing is deeply embedded in every element of the global economy.

But instead of trying to carpet bomb the Chinese economy, could the West choose to conduct precision-guided strikes on critical elements of Chinese supply chains?

Probably. The new U.S. CHIPS and Science Act is a small foretaste of what a cleverly structured package of sanctions could look like on high-tech electronic components, key raw materials, finely machined tools and other critical items. What shape such sanctions could take is a third and highly concerning unknown for Xi.

Taken together, these three uncertainties will probably create a reluctance to conduct a full-on military intervention against Taiwan for at least the next three to five years. An exception would be if Taipei crossed the ultimate Chinese red line and declared independence, something that appears highly unlikely.

Over the longer term, China may become more confident in its military as its forces accrue more and better hardware, perhaps conduct more out-of-area military operations and build a sustainable network of overseas bases like the U.S. enjoys today. Beijing will harden its critical supply chains. And it is closely following events in Taiwan, seeking to find clues as to the willingness of the Taiwanese to fight.

All remain uncertainties today. So, for now, until leaders gain more knowledge in all three areas, the view from Beijing, given the level of uncertainty of the outcome, will be one of avoiding military intervention against Taiwan.

5. Why Biden is sending US weapons experts into Ukraine

Excerpts:

The weapons inspections are part of a broader plan released by the State Department last week to counter the diversion of advanced weapons in Ukraine. It noted that Russian forces capturing the weapons was the main source of weapons loss so far in the war. 

“Wars can provide opportunities for weapons to fall into private hands via theft or illicit sales, sometimes creating black markets for arms that endure for decades,” said a fact sheet on the plan. 

To counter that risk, the U.S. will work with Ukraine’s military and other officials to better account for and safeguard weapons, identify and investigate suspected arms trafficking, and ramp up monitoring on Ukraine’s borders. 

...

Jeffrey Pryce, a former Defense Department special counsel now at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, said the weapons experts were part of a “normalizing” of U.S. assistance after the surge in support this year. 

“I think, in a way, the system is just catching up to some of the standard procedures for accountability,” he said.

“It doesn’t disincent accountability that there’s been some in Congress who are calling for accountability,” he added. 

Pryce said he has not seen any evidence that Ukraine is misusing or selling off U.S. weapons. 

Why Biden is sending US weapons experts into Ukraine

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3714285-why-biden-is-sending-us-weapons-experts-into-ukraine/

BY COLIN MEYN - 11/01/22 1:29 PM ET

The Pentagon announced this week that it is sending weapons experts into Ukraine to inspect American-supplied arms being used against Russia. 

The group will be among the first U.S. military members in the country, apart from those providing security at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. 

President Biden has pledged that U.S. troops will not be sent into the fight, but this week’s announcement comes amid rising concern — particularly among Republicans — about how effectively Ukraine is utilizing U.S. military support. 

A senior Defense Department official told reporters on Monday that it had not seen “credible evidence of the diversion of U.S.-provided weapons.”

“Nonetheless, we are keenly aware of the possible risk of illicit diversion and are proactively taking all available steps to prevent this from happening.”

The Pentagon has not said how many weapons experts are in Ukraine or where they will operate.

Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Tuesday the “embassy personnel” would be “far away from any type of frontline actions.”

Ryder said the inspections had been “in development for a while,” though he did not say when the weapons experts arrived in Ukraine. 

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) set off a firestorm last month when he said a Republican majority would not issue a “blank check” to Ukraine. 

McCarthy and other GOP leaders sought to clarify that the party would not seek to scale back support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia, but instead wanted to increase oversight of U.S. aid. 

“I think you’ll see if we get the majority, more oversight and accountability in terms of funding and where the money’s going, and I think the American taxpayer deserves that,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Bloomberg television last month.

Still, members of McCarthy’s own party have accused him of backing off Ukraine support as some on the right question the need to spend billions on the war. 

“Maybe in his mind, he actually did believe that all he was saying is, ‘Hey, we want to have some oversight in this,’” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told CNN. “But what he did … you’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy, intentionally or unintentionally.”

The U.S. has committed nearly $20 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since January 2021, including rocket and air defense systems that have helped counter Russia’s superior military might. 

The Biden administration has pledged to keep up its support until the war is won; however, NBC News reported this week that Biden lost his temper with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a call over the summer. 

The weapons inspections are part of a broader plan released by the State Department last week to counter the diversion of advanced weapons in Ukraine. It noted that Russian forces capturing the weapons was the main source of weapons loss so far in the war. 

“Wars can provide opportunities for weapons to fall into private hands via theft or illicit sales, sometimes creating black markets for arms that endure for decades,” said a fact sheet on the plan. 

To counter that risk, the U.S. will work with Ukraine’s military and other officials to better account for and safeguard weapons, identify and investigate suspected arms trafficking, and ramp up monitoring on Ukraine’s borders. 

The Defense Department official said the weapons experts now in Ukraine have already conducted several inspections as part of the U.S. Defense attache in Ukraine and the U.S. Office of Defense Cooperation. 

U.S. Marines have been stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv since it reopened in May, after closing at the start of the war in February. 

Jeffrey Pryce, a former Defense Department special counsel now at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, said the weapons experts were part of a “normalizing” of U.S. assistance after the surge in support this year. 

“I think, in a way, the system is just catching up to some of the standard procedures for accountability,” he said.

“It doesn’t disincent accountability that there’s been some in Congress who are calling for accountability,” he added. 

Pryce said he has not seen any evidence that Ukraine is misusing or selling off U.S. weapons. 

Defense & National Security — US weapons experts in Ukraine

Energy & Environment — Biden seeks to spotlight oil profits before midterms

“Ukrainians are fighting for their lives. They’re fighting for their country,” he said. “And I haven’t seen any evidence of significant diversion of the assistance that we’ve been providing.”

Updated: 2:51 p.m.

Ellen Mitchell contributed reporting

6.  Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: November

Access the tracker  HERE.

November 1, 2022 | FDD Tracker: October 3, 2022-November 1, 2022

Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: November

Trend Overview

Edited by David Adesnik

Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.

Xi Jinping secured his third term as head of the Chinese Communist Party on October 23, with all signs pointing toward the further suppression of political pluralism and market forces at home as well as greater confrontation with the United States abroad. The Biden administration released its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy in October, both of which affirm that China under CCP rule poses the foremost threat to the United States. Yet neither strategy explains clearly how the White House plans to address either shortfalls in U.S. military capability or the lack of sufficient military presence in the Indo-Pacific theater. Meanwhile, North Korea tested its 24th ballistic missile this year, the most since 2017. The White House has taken steps to improve the readiness of U.S. and allied troops on the Korean Peninsula but otherwise exerted little pressure on Pyongyang to disarm. In Iran, anti-regime protests continued to rage, passing the 40-day mark. The administration has expressed sympathy for the protesters and imposed sanctions on several Iranian targets, yet the White House remains wedded to its policy of offering hundreds of billions of dollars of sanctions relief in exchange for concessions on the nuclear front.

Please check back next month to see whether and how the president adjusts his foreign policy after mid-term elections that may cost his party control of one or both houses of Congress.

Trending Positive

CYBER

By RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery and Jiwon Ma

ISRAEL

By David May

RUSSIA

By John Hardie

Trending Neutral

CHINA

By Craig Singleton

DEFENSE

By Bradley Bowman

EUROPE

By John Hardie

GULF

By Hussain Abdul-Hussain

INDO-PACIFIC

By Craig Singleton

KOREA

By David Maxwell

LATIN AMERICA

By Carrie Filipetti and Emanuele Ottolenghi

TURKEY

By Sinan Ciddi

Trending Negative

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

By Richard Goldberg

IRAN

By Behnam Ben Taleblu and Richard Goldberg

NONPROLIFERATION AND BIODEFENSE

By Anthony Ruggiero and Andrea Stricker

SUNNI JIHADISM

By Bill Roggio

SYRIA

By David Adesnik

Trending Very Negative

LEBANON

By Tony Badran

China

By Craig Singleton

7.  Ukraine Situation Report: Attacks Behind Russian Lines Crippling War Effort

Ukraine Situation Report: Attacks Behind Russian Lines Crippling War Effort

Ukraine’s ‘partisan’ fighters are disrupting Russian military operations and attacking collaborators, hampering Moscow’s progress.

BY

HOWARD ALTMAN

|

PUBLISHED NOV 1, 2022 10:33 PM

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · November 2, 2022

Ukrainian partisans are wreaking havoc on Russian forces and those who have collaborated with them, the Institute for the Study of War says in its latest assessment of Vladimir Putin's 251-day-old full-on war.

“Effective Ukrainian partisan attacks are forcing the Kremlin to divert resources away from frontline operations to help secure rear areas, degrading Russia’s ability to defend against ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensives, let alone conduct their own offensive operations,” according to ISW. “Poor Russian operational security has enabled Ukrainian partisan attacks.”

In a cascading series of misfortunes, Russia’s “increasing manpower shortages are likely degrading” Moscow’s ability to “effectively secure Russian rear areas against partisan attacks and simultaneously defend against Ukrainian counteroffensives. The Kremlin still has not effectively countered Ukraine’s organized partisan movement and is unlikely to have the capabilities to do so.”

Ukrainian partisans “have conducted dozens of confirmed attacks across occupied Ukraine and have assassinated at least 11 Russian occupation officials and prominent collaborators as of Nov. 1,” according to ISW.

Those attacks began on March 1, when men in military fatigues - “most likely Ukrainian partisans” - kidnapped Kreminna's pro-Russian mayor, Volodymyr Struk, in Zhytlivka, Luhansk Oblast, according to ISW. His body was found the following day.

The most recent such attack took place Oct. 25, when “Ukrainian partisans conducted a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) attack on Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky’s media building in Melitopol, where a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) branch was reportedly deployed.”

The attack’s intended target is unclear, according to ISW, but it “reportedly injured five people, including pro-Russian propagandists working at the "Za-TV" media outlet stationed at the building.”

ISW said it created this list using “only events that ISW can verify with high confidence using visual evidence, remotely sensed data, or Russian and Ukrainian source corroboration. It “only includes events that official Ukrainian government entities have claimed or discussed.”

A big contributing factor in these attacks is that "Russian forces have not effectively concealed the identities of pro-Russian collaborators and have failed to provide basic security to Russian occupation officials at their homes and places of work," according to ISW. But that's only part of the problem.

"Russian forces have failed to protect vulnerable sections of critical Russian ground lines of communication, such as rail line junctures and bridges, particularly in rural areas," ISW states. "Ukrainian partisans freely collect targeting information on Russian military and occupation authority targets and pass this information to other partisans and the conventional Ukrainian military."

Early on, we repeatedly underscored how a high-energized and well-funded insurgency would eventually doom Russian plans to occupy the country regardless of physical progress on the battlefield.

Another problem for Russia is that its forces are spread too thin, according to ISW.

"Russian forces occupy approximately 85,300 square kilometers of mainland Ukrainian territory, excluding Crimea, as of Nov. 1, according to ISW. "Russian manpower shortages are inhibiting efforts to secure this area."

Last week, Ukrainian Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov told The War Zone that there were about 40,000 Russian troops in the Kherson Oblast, out of about 170,000 Russian troops now in Ukraine, not including mobilized reservists. You can read about that and much more in our interview here.

"The Russian military’s prioritization of Kherson Oblast," where it occupies about "23,000 square kilometers," has "likely degraded Russian security forces in Zaporizhzhia (a notable hotbed of partisan activity), Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts," ISW said. "Partisan attacks have persisted in Russian-occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts even following Russia’s annexation of those regions on Sept. 30, indicating Russian forces continued inability to secure occupied territory."

Before we head into more of the latest news from Ukraine, The War Zone readers can get caught up with our previous rolling coverage of the war here.

The Latest

️As Ukrainian forces press their offensive closer to Kherson City, the Russian occupation administration there has moved its operations to the Black Sea port city of Skadovsk, Ukraine’s General Staff said on its Telegram channel Tuesday.

Skadovsk is about 30 miles southeast of Kherson City.

The move comes as Russians “continue to forcibly relocate the civilian population in the temporarily captured territories of the Kherson region,” according to the Ukrainian General Staff. “The enemy is resorting to intimidation of civilian residents, spreading information about the possible undermining of the Kakhovskaya [Hydroelectric Power Plant] dam. At the same time, the local population is deprived of means of communication.”

In general, "the Russians are attempting to hold onto the temporarily occupied territories and focusing their efforts on containing Ukraine's defense forces on different fronts," Ukrainian Pravda reported Tuesday. "They are conducting offensive actions on the Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Novopavlivka fronts."

A day after another round of massive Russian strikes on Ukrainian civil infrastructure badly damaged electric and water supplies across the country, things are improving in Kyiv, where the mayor says power and water have been fully restored.

Still, waves of Russian missile and drone strikes are having a deleterious effect. Electricity supply restrictions were introduced Monday in Kyiv Oblast and Kyiv, Zhytomyr Oblast, Chernihiv Oblast, Cherkasy Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, and Sumy Oblast, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's office, announced on his Telegram channel.

"The blackout affects all categories of consumers," said Tymoshenko. "Such steps are necessary to reduce the load on the network, which enables energy companies to quickly restore damaged power facilities."

Fortunately for Ukraine, the European Union said it will supply Kyiv with power if needed.

The Russian attacks, meanwhile, continue. Kramatorsk, in Donetsk Oblast, was hit with 14 Russian rockets, an official there said.

It's too late for this Halloween, but the VAMPIREs are coming, the Pentagon says of L3Harris’ new Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment system (VAMPIRE). The highly mobile system is designed to sling laser-guided rockets for striking ground targets and to take out drones. You can read much more about what it can do here.

The VAMPIRE system fitted to the back of a pick-up truck. Credit: L3Harris

The Pentagon expects a contract award "within the next few months," Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, told reporters, including from The War Zone Tuesday afternoon. "Right now we're anticipating delivery to be mid-2023."

The provision of anti-aircraft rounds to Ukraine from Germany is a bit murkier however, thanks to a dispute between Germany, which has a stockpile, and Switzerland, which makes them and has veto power over their distribution.

German politicians have called for an end to arms deals with Switzerland as the dispute deepens, Financial Times reported Tuesday. The issue has become more urgent since Russia escalated an aerial campaign targeting Ukraine’s infrastructure and as Kyiv’s weapon stocks have dwindled, German officials said.

Germany wants to send 12,000 Swiss-made 35 mm rounds that were bought by Berlin decades ago to restock the 50 Gerard self-propelled anti-aircraft guns it has pledged to Ukraine, Financial Times reported, but Swiss officials are concerned such a move would violate their historic neutrality.

By the way, if you want to see what a Gepard looks like in the wild, check out this video.

A day after Russia announced it was suspending its participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative and saying that it could not guarantee the safety of ships making that trip, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that some ships carrying Ukrainian grain left their ports. You can read much more about that controversy in our coverage here.

Europe's biggest nuclear power plant continues to be the subject of bitter incriminations by both sides.

Ukrainian officials say Russian forces have installed military equipment on the rooftop of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant while Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in a speech Tuesday that "the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not stop shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, evacuation points and humanitarian aid distribution areas."

Russian forces have "almost certainly" parked two MiG-31 jets in Belarus with what's likely the Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, according to the U.K. Defense Ministry.

And more indications that the Russians are using phosphorous against Ukrainian positions, according to what the Ukrainian SBU security service says is an intercepted call from a Russian soldier.

Speaking of intercepted communications, a Russian hacker with the code name "Joker" claims to have hacked Ukraine's "Delta" command and control computer system, according to the Telegram channel of Russia's official RIA Novosti news agency. Joker said "absolutely all" plans of the Ukrainian command were disclosed, according to RIA Novosti.

Ukrainian intelligence officials did not respond to a request for comment. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, could not confirm the hack, but said that "from a U.S. military standpoint, cybersecurity is something that we take very seriously at every level. And while I don't have anything specific to provide, that's an area that will continue to pay close attention to and ensure that not only are we protecting our systems, but that our people are taking the appropriate training and taking appropriate precautions."

New video emerged from the aftermath of a Ukrainian attack on a Mi-8 Hip helicopter shot down yesterday in Donetsk.

And speaking of ruined Russian helicopters, an apparent sabotage attack against a Russian airbase in the Pskov region, in the far west of the country, was apparently filmed by the operatives before they detonated explosives placed on the attack helicopters. You can read much more about that here.

Kherson Oblast has rivers and other waterways that can often make transport difficult. That's why vehicles like this PTS tracked amphibious transport come in handy.

So too does captured Russian equipment, of which the Ukrainian National Guard apparently has plenty.

To slow down Ukrainian advances, Russia could be setting up cement cubicles along the front lines.

But inside Russia, they are setting up another form of protection - bomb shelters, including anti-radiation ones in case of a nuclear war, according to the Moscow Times.

Meanwhile, more convicts are apparently headed to fight with the Wagner Group mercenary army.

And when it comes to negotiations, Putin says he is in no hurry.

We will continue to update this story until we state otherwise.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · November 2, 2022

8. Ukraine's Unprecedented Mass Drone Boat Attack Was A Wakeup Call

​A number of videos at the link: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-unprecedented-mass-drone-boat-attack-was-a-wakeup-call

Ukraine's Unprecedented Mass Drone Boat Attack Was A Wakeup Call

The coordinated drone boat operation underscored a rapidly evolving capability that can be accessed by state and non-state actors alike.

BY

TYLER ROGOWAY

|

PUBLISHED NOV 1, 2022 8:40 PM

thedrive.com · by Tyler Rogoway · November 2, 2022

The multi-unmanned surface vessel assault on the home of the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea marked a new point in unmanned warfare. We have gotten quite of few of these kinds of seminal moments in recent years — the arrival of weaponized off-the-shelf and homemade drones in Mosul, the long-range mass drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure, and the assassination attempt via drone on Venezuela's Maduro, to name a few. But the attack on Sevastopol also marked a historic point in the history of naval warfare, although to what degree will surely be debated. While not revolutionary, the operation was certainly evolutionary, and that makes it quite important. Here's why.

The level of success of the attack, which you can read all about in our initial reporting here, is still to be determined, but it really doesn't change the optics of it and especially the precedent that it set.

That's not to say that we haven't seen 'suicide' drone boat attacks before. The basic concept is anything but new and in some cases dates back a century, with influences running even farther back into the annals of military history.

I will save the history lesson for later, but in more recent times, Iran and their proxy clients largely pioneered this capability operationally, converting small boats into explosive-packed radio-controlled weapons. Nearly six years ago, one struck a Saudi frigate in the Red Sea.

But Iran's early use of improvized explosive-laden drone boats — Tehran has since evolved its capabilities in this regard, too — was a far cry from what was used Saturday morning in and near the Russian-occupied port of Sevastopol. What were up until recently crude, jury-rigged devices have morphed into purpose-built, or at least semi-purpose-built, weapon systems.

Images of improvised suicide drone boats deployed by Iran and/or its Houthi proxies in Yemen. Government of Saudi Arabia

Government of Saudi Arabia

When Ukraine's unmanned suicide drone boat configuration first appeared on a rocky Crimean shoal in late September, it was clear that they would become a major threat to contend with. The jet-black, very low-slung, jet-drive propelled almost kayak-like boat sported multiple camera systems, bow-mounted impact detonation sensors, and what appeared to be a satellite communications antenna, and was in a very different class than what we have seen before for this type of weapon.

Ukraine's suicide drone boat that washed ashore nearly a month before the attack on Sevastopol.

This was a near if not purpose-built configuration meant to be fast, maneuverable, hard to detect and engage, and above all else, it appeared to allow for beyond line of sight control. While not an uncommon capability on unmanned surface vessels today, it is new for ones that are intended to be expendable anti-ship weapons in their own right. Here is what we wrote about these boats, their surprising control architecture, and the implications of their use as part of our original reporting on the attack:

1.) If launched from land, these had to travel 130 miles at least. Not incredibly far in general, but for a small unmanned surface vehicle running on a jetski-like drive, there would be a major tradeoff between fuel capacity and explosives/warhead weight. That is if they were not ship-launched, but that would be a dangerous affair... as Russia keeps a close eye on movements in that area.

2.) The exact control concept for this drone boat is unclear. It appears to be a beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) man-in-the-loop concept. If so, this has huge implications for something this small and relatively unsophisticated. It puts so many harbors at risk, over long ranges, even potentially by non-state actors. They do not have to have close proximity/line of sight control of the craft to execute dynamic, reactive, opportunistic, maneuvering attacks. Of course, striking static targets would be possible beyond-line-of-sight without any man in the loop, which is also scary, but not dynamic maneuvering attacks like these today.

If this system relies on a BLOS man-in-the-loop concept, this is a new development in terms of operational combat use in naval warfare.

3.) On the other hand, it's possible to get these into position autonomously using GPS navigation, then local 'pilots' picking them up within-line-of-sight to control them for their terminal targeting runs. Big advantages here in complexity and retaining the ability to dynamically maneuver and target when it actually matters. Also could be a fallback for loss of BLOS control setup.

4.) Bottomline, as we had mentioned repeatedly years ago as Iran began deploying improvised 'suicide' drone boats, including operationally, this would be a major threat to contend with in the future, especially when it migrates to better-resourced militaries. With that in mind, Ukraine is the perfect incubation chamber for drastically advancing these concepts and deploying them (in effect testing them and learning from those actions) operationally. These boats are akin to Ukraine's 'Alibaba' long-range aerial suicide drones of the sea. Expect rapid evolution and capability enhancements.

The beyond-line-of-sight control concept, which was likely demonstrated in the Sevastopol operation, helps make very long-range attacks possible, but also lowers the risk and complexity of such an operation. While the unmanned vessels that likely executed this attack are not necessarily cheap, they appear to leverage mainly commercially available off-the-shelf parts. As such, they could cost tens of thousands of dollars each, but not many hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars that many modern types of guided anti-ship missiles cost. Here too is where the existence and proven usage of these more advanced suicide drone boats change the game. Such a capability is within the reach of non-state actors and will be more so in the future as similar components use decrease in price and increase in capability. This is especially true with global on-the-move high-bandwidth satellite communications becoming increasingly democratized.

While anti-ship missiles, especially older or lower-end types, are in the hands of some non-state actors today, they do not have the ability to independently manufacture them or deploy them en masse. This is not likely to be the case for increasingly advanced suicide drone boats in the future. Even without man-in-the-loop capabilities, as noted earlier, they could be programmed just to follow a course to a static target while remaining electromagnetically silent. This is especially concerning for operations against vessels in port and other shoreline assets, and we've already seen instances of at least basic capabilities in these regards in use by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

A U.S. Department of Defense briefing slide from 2017 highlighting Iranian-supplied components of a captured Houthi suicide drone boat, referred to as the Shark-33, including a guidance system with GPS-assisted navigation and optical sensor capabilities. American authorities said at the time that it was capable of tracking and engaging moving targets, as well as stationary ones. DOD

Additional details about the captured Shark-33, including that its guidance computer held 90 separate sets of coordinates. DOD

It isn't just the hardware and control architecture potentially used here that's new, either. In fact, it isn't the main revelation. It's the fact that multiple suicide drone boats were deployed in a relatively coordinated attack and then managed to push inside a highly defended harbor area. This firstly is reminiscent of the equally unprecedented suicide multi-drone attack on Russia's Khmeimim Air Base in Syria in 2018. If reports are accurate, the unmanned boat operation against Russian naval interests in Sevastopol was also paired with long-range suicide drones of the aerial variety in a layered attack concept.

Force protection of naval assets, especially at anchor or docked has been a high priority since the tragic attack 22 years ago on the USS Cole as it sat in the port of Aden in Yemen during a refueling stop. The lessons learned that day were paid for in blood and the Navy drastically increased its vigilance when its ships were at their most vulnerable — while they are totally static or maneuvering through very congested or tight waterways.

Beyond new procedures and enhanced small arms posture on deck, new capabilities came with these changes, including Mk 38 25mm chain gun-armed weapon systems and upgrades to the Mk 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (CIWS), to better deal with close proximity surface threats.

A Mk 38 25mm chain gun-armed weapon system, which can be crew-served or operated remotely, in action. USN

After 9/11, when ships came into port, even at home, heavy encircling booms and barriers became the norm, and waterway escorts and patrols were drastically enhanced, especially when Navy vessels were transiting out of and coming into port. A new focus for intelligence and threat assessment personnel also became a reality. In many naval ports, there is also much protection we cannot see. These can include anti-diver defenses and underwater surveillance, and even trained marine mammals. However, no defensive posture is perfect, and often times they are focused on the previous threats, not the emerging ones.

Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia, as seen from the air in 2011. Note the heavy floating barriers that help secure the huge number of assets berthed there. (USN)

What started out largely as new tactics and procedures to defend against a small boat-borne suicide bomber quickly turned into also being able to defend against swarming small boats while underway. There were multiple factors that spurred this in the post-9/11 era, including one now notorious wargame.

Near constant operational experience and improving tactics and technologies helped harden U.S. Navy ships against such threats over the last two decades, although it is still a major concern. While all of this would certainly be critical in fending off an unmanned 'suicide' surface vessel attack, doing so against many boats, with no humans onboard, all at once, complicates the situation. The possibility that such an attack could in the future be launched from far over the horizon, potentially without even anyone nearby to control the vessels at all, is maybe most troublesome.

A swarm of suicide drone boats could be carried forward to regions in which their targets are located via an unassuming mothership. Then they can attack from afar with their low profile and small size making them very challenging to detect. Even their acoustic signature could be troublesome to isolate and identify in densely trafficked waterways.

A swarm of Iranian fast-boats harasses a U.S. Navy carrier strike group transiting the volatile Strait of Hormuz in 2020. PHOTO © 2019 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION

Major risks exists when U.S. Navy ships are traversing these types of congested channels, especially at relatively low speeds. A swarm of these boats, like what was deployed against Russia's naval capabilities in Sevastopol, would be tough to defend against, especially if they suddenly appear and attack from multiple vectors. Layer in a threat from drones above, and things get even more complex. The risk to non-military vessels, which are outright defenseless against such weapons, is astronomically higher.

During a time of peer-state conflict, one could imagine similar systems would be used for attacks on an adversary's port facilities, even those located far from the core conflict area. This is especially true for forward-deployed naval base locations or those in foreign countries. Going after non-militarized vessels would be a key part of this strategy, as well, in order to degrade and slow an enemy's logistics. Even using these systems to create massive diversions would likely be a core application.

If you give these vessels more autonomy and the ability to truly swarm — work together cooperatively — the need for even BLOS communications and command and control could be greater decreased or eliminated altogether while still maintaining dynamic navigation and attack capabilities. Sense and avoid capabilities, as well as image recognition, are now in use every day on consumer vehicles, for instance. One could imagine how big of a challenge confronting dozens of small autonomous suicide boats working together to best achieve their goal could be. And really, like so much else when it comes to low-end capabilities versus higher-end assets, it's very much a numbers game. How many would it take to overwhelm a ship's defenses during a particular defensive posture while in a particular location? This is not an incredibly challenging tactical question for an adversary to answer. We are seeing the same problem present itself on a grand scale when it comes to suicide drones of the aerial flavor, as well.

So here we are. Increasingly advanced unmanned boats packed with explosives will be yet another threat to contend with. Everyone is watching the conflict in Ukraine very closely, especially potentially nefarious actors including China, Iran, and North Korea. Take the latter for instance. They could unleash hundreds of similar boats — even ones that need no communications and go after static targets — onto targets in South Korea at the opening of the conflict, which already features a conventional war plan that works to achieve ultimate chaos above all else. The fact is that these are weapon systems that can relatively easily achieve considerable range and will have the command and control architecture to support them. As such, they are growing into the realm of regional capabilities.

And no, this doesn't mean the suicide drone boat is some sort of super weapon that puts everything at risk today. That's just not the case. Still, in a number of circumstances, they are a growing concern — especially as they evolve. And those concerns have become more dire after what happened in Crimea over the weekend. At the same time, they are also a major opportunity. Remember, potential enemies don't have a monopoly on this concept, of course. The U.S. and its allies could mass-produce suicide drone boats of various capability levels very quickly as they already have deep knowledge of swarming unmanned surface vessel technology, as does China.

With all this in mind, expect rapid evolution in this threat category, as well as in countermeasures to defend against it, not to mention work to better exploit this concept by small and big players alike, in the wake of this milestone attack.

Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Tyler Rogoway · November 2, 2022​

9. Russian Retreat in Ukraine Exposes Collaborators—and the Finger-Pointing Begins

​This could be very ugly and the retributions will compound the tragedies. Ukraine needs to handle this very carefully.

​

Russian Retreat in Ukraine Exposes Collaborators—and the Finger-Pointing Begins

Many citizens thought the occupiers were there to stay. Some fought back, others actively supported them, while the majority just tried to survive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/recaptured-ukraine-collaborators-resisters-russian-occupation-11667315408?mod=hp_lead_pos8&utm_source=pocket_mylist

​ By Yaroslav Trofimov

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 | Photographs by Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal

Nov. 1, 2022 11:52 am ET​

SHEVCHENKOVE, Ukraine—When Russian armored columns drove into this rural community of 20,000 people on the first day of the invasion, Mayor Valeriy Prykhodko tried to count the tanks, artillery pieces and fighting vehicles that rolled past his windows.

After the first few hundred, he gave up. “It was too big for counting,” Mr. Prykhodko said. “The horror.”

Located some 35 miles from the Russian border, Shevchenkove fell without a fight the afternoon of Feb. 24. In the six months of Russian rule that followed, many locals came to believe that Moscow, with its awe-inspiring military might, would stay here forever.

Unwilling to work under Russian authority, Mr. Prykhodko tried for a time to resist orders, then fled to Ukrainian-controlled territories. But the municipality’s second-in-command, Executive Secretary Nadiya Sheluh, stayed on the job even once the Russians raised their red-blue-white flag over the building.

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State media footage in September showed Russian President Vladimir Putin firing a rifle while visiting a training site for reservists. His decision to mobilize new recruits to fight in Ukraine spurred protests and drove thousands of men to flee the country. Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/AP

Mr. Prykhodko, who is now back in office, recalls being surprised and outraged. But he also acknowledged that many in Shevchenkove think his former colleague did the right thing by helping keep basic services functioning through the occupation. “Our people are split about her,” he said. “Old ladies here say they are thankful to her, that she helped them and fed them.”

Ukrainian forces came back to Shevchenkove in September, as part of their rapid offensive in the eastern Kharkiv region. Now, like other towns and villages in recently liberated parts of Ukraine, Shevchenkove is torn from within by tensions between those who escaped or opposed the Russians—and those who are viewed as having accommodated the enemy.

The delicate task of sorting out one from the other falls on investigators from the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, and the National Police, who are collecting evidence in recently retaken territories and in large parts of the country that remain under Moscow’s rule.

In Shevchenkove, a few citizens tried to resist the occupation, scribbling anti-Russian graffiti on walls and passing intelligence to Ukrainian troops. Some others enthusiastically embraced the invaders, taking government positions and joining the Russian-created security forces. The majority in Shevchenkove, as in other occupied areas, tried to survive. As time went by, they were increasingly forced to make compromises with the occupiers, accepting Russian humanitarian aid, pensions or jobs.

At the outset of the war, Ukraine sought to undermine Russia’s hold over occupied areas with strict anti-collaboration laws. Voluntarily joining Russia’s education system on occupied territories can be punished with up to three years’ imprisonment. Taking a managerial role in the Russian-created administrations can mean up to 10 years in prison. Participation in Russian-created law-enforcement and security structures can be punished with up to 15 years behind bars—life imprisonment if it caused the death of a Ukrainian citizen.

Nadiya Sheluh, the municipality's executive secretary during the Russian occupation, was questioned by investigators.

Dozens of presumed collaborators have been gunned down by unknown assailants in occupied areas in recent months, mostly in the south of the country. Now that many of the formerly Russian-occupied areas are back under Kyiv’s control here in the east, Ukrainian authorities say they are taking a measured approach.

“We don’t work like the Russians. We don’t keep people in torture chambers,” said Serhiy Bolvinov, head of the investigations department of Ukraine’s National Police in the Kharkiv region. “It’s not enough that someone comes to us and points a finger at someone else to say, ‘This is a collaborator.’ We need to investigate according to the law and to look for solid evidence that will stand up in court.”

In the first month since the Ukrainian offensive reclaimed occupied parts of Kharkiv, he said, law-enforcement agencies opened a total of 132 criminal investigations, with 21 people formally notified of suspicions against them and four others indicted and sent to court.

An SBU investigator in Kharkiv added that rounding up everyone who collaborated with the Russians one way or another would be impossible because of the sheer number of people who broke the Ukrainian law to survive. “In every village here, they tell us that everyone in their own village resisted, but that the next village over is full of collaborators,” the investigator said.

While the Russian-appointed mayor and a few other senior collaborators fled Shevchenkove alongside Russian forces, many others who worked in the occupation administration and education systems, such as Ms. Sheluh, remain here, free to roam the streets after their initial questioning by Ukrainian authorities.

Ms. Sheluh, a former radio broadcaster who speaks flawless literary Ukrainian in a town where most speak either Russian or a mixed dialect known as surzhyk, once unsuccessfully ran for the district legislature on a pro-Western list and showed no pro-Russian inclinations before the war, according to villagers.

Interviewed in her home, Ms. Sheluh said she never accepted pay from the occupiers and worked with the Russians only because she sought to help Shevchenkove’s people in their darkest hour. “I was defending the interests of our local citizens,” she said. “Mostly old people and children stayed here, and they needed the baby formula, the diapers,” she said.

Some in Shevchenkove defend her; others are furious, demanding swift punishment for Ms. Sheluh and anyone else who helped the Russian occupation machine. “Why are our boys dying out there? Why has my grandson not seen his father for seven months? So that we forgive all these people as if nothing had happened?” asked Olha Usyk, a director of one of Shevchenkove’s schools whose son-in-law serves in the Ukrainian military.

Ms. Usyk was especially angry that Ms. Sheluh ordered schools to reopen under Russian authority. Russia has sought to erase Ukrainian identity by teaching in Russian and implementing that country’s curriculum, part of Moscow’s plan to annex the conquered areas.

Speaking at an improvised gathering on Shevchenkove’s leafy main square, Ms. Usyk and other educators complained that the returning Ukrainian authorities were slow to weed out Russian collaborators. “What’s scary is that, on the front line, it’s clear who is the enemy. But here, it’s murky, a real swamp,” said Maria Danylova, a teacher. “Everyone who collaborated with the Russians here was making their own choices. Nobody put guns to their heads.”

In the first days of Russian occupation, Shevchenkove—named after Ukraine’s national poet who spent a decade in penal exile for his opposition to Russian imperial rule—was largely left alone.

Shevchenkove residents wait for humanitarian aid in the main square last month.

Still, residents faced wrenching decisions. Serhiy Kovshar, a former police lieutenant whose son was killed fighting Russian proxies in the Donbas region in 2015, quietly removed a commemorative plaque on the front of his house. By May, he had joined the new occupation police force, say local residents who saw him at checkpoints and on patrols.

At the community’s 73-bed hospital, Russian soldiers arrived with one of their men, with an inflamed appendix, and demanded at gunpoint that doctors operate on him, said Natalia Nesvoyeva, who served as acting director. The surgery was successful, she said.

Over the course of the occupation, more than 100 Russian soldiers ended up at the Shevchenkove hospital, usually for conditions that weren’t life-threatening, according to Ms. Nesvoyeva. “They had shot themselves in the foot, or had hypertension crises after an overdose of something, or frostbite,” she said.

Ukrainian officials say that providing urgent medical care to Russian soldiers is protected under international humanitarian law and thus isn’t considered collaboration.

Meanwhile, Mayor Prykhodko and other local officials worked on their own to try to secure supplies, bake bread, and keep basic services running.

On March 5, agitated Russian soldiers arrived at Mr. Prykhodko’s office in the two-story government headquarters on Shevchenkove’s main square, he said. As soldiers pointed guns at the mayor, their commander demanded that he hand over lists of locals who served in the military, particularly the Donbas, that he take down the Ukrainian flag that still flew over the municipality, and that he write a letter to Vladimir Putin welcoming the Russian takeover.

“I will throw a hand grenade if you don’t,” the Russian officer threatened. Mr. Prykhodko, surrounded by some 15 staff members, decided the threat was empty and stood his ground. The Russians ended up driving away and the Ukrainian flag kept flying.

Valeriy Prykhodko, mayor of Shevchenkove, refused orders from the Russians, then escaped.

Initially, Russia’s presence in Shevchenkove mostly consisted of ill-equipped troops from the Russian-controlled statelets of Donbas. They demanded that Mr. Prykhodko allocate them housing. When he refused, he said, they settled in vacant homes and started looting. “They said they have been ordered to operate in a self-reliant fashion,” Mr. Prykhodko said. “They were dirty and stinky. We knew they just drank all night, and didn’t do much else.”

By April 18, a new batch of disheveled, shellshocked Russian troops arrived here, redeployed after the Russian withdrawal from Kyiv. “If you had forgotten about Irpin and Bucha, we will remind you,” they shouted, referring to the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in those suburbs of Kyiv. There were no massacres in Shevchenkove, however.

Ms. Danylova, a teacher of Ukrainian and one of the most passionate pro-Ukrainian activists in Shevchenkove, had spent the previous four decades collecting artifacts for the museum of Ukrainian traditional culture that was housed in the local high school.

Having heard about how the Russians burned a museum containing the paintings of naïve-style folk artist Maria Prymachenko near Kyiv, she decided to rescue the century-old embroidered towels, shirts and wedding dresses and hid them in her cellar and in friends’ homes. To do so, Ms. Danylova and her son, Ruslan Shokirov, had to brave Russian checkpoints.

“There is no doubt that they would have destroyed these items if they had caught us—they were burning everything Ukrainian. The only question is what they would have done to us,” Mr. Shokirov said. All the artifacts survived.

Maria Danylova, a teacher of Ukrainian, shows one of the traditional embroideries she managed to hide from Russian occupiers.

On April 27, a different kind of Russian security force, well-equipped and in modern vehicles, arrived at the Shevchenkove municipality. “Run away, they are hunting for you,” Mr. Prykhodko said he was told by colleagues. He jumped on his bicycle and waited out the night in the dark behind the outhouse at his brother’s home. The Russians spread word they wanted him to start working under their authority.

“All they want is for you to open the doors of the municipality and distribute their humanitarian aid. What’s wrong with that? They won’t do anything to you,” Mr. Prykhodko said he was told by a local woman who spoke with the Russians. “Are you crazy? I am a Ukrainian village mayor, not a Russian one,” he said he retorted. Unwilling to collaborate, Mr. Prykhodko fled Shevchenkove the following day and made his way through the front lines to Ukrainian government-controlled territory.

In his place, the Russians installed a local horse breeder, Andrey Stryzhko, who never hid his sympathies for Moscow. Usually dressed in black and wearing the papakha woolen hat of Russian Cossacks, Mr. Stryzhko used to hang the red Soviet flag outside his home even before the war. One of his first steps was to have himself filmed stripping away the Ukrainian coat of arms on Shevchenkove’s main square. He also ordered the removal of a monument to Ukrainian veterans of the war in Donbas.

Unlike Mr. Prykhodko, Ms. Sheluh, the community’s second-in-command, remained on her job. She played down her contact with the Russians. “I was in my office downstairs and they and their authority was upstairs,” she said. “I just worked in my own place.”

Ms. Sheluh sat in on meetings with the new Russian authorities. Some were filmed for Russian propaganda channels. Mr. Prykhodko said he terminated Ms. Sheluh’s employment and stopped her Ukrainian salary payments once he learned about her work with the Russians.

This monument was vandalized during the Russian occupation.

While most Shevchenkove police withdrew to government-held areas in February, some officers joined the new Russian-run force that detained curfew breakers and put them to work sweeping streets and picking weeds. The villagers learned a new verb—“to kadyrov”—which meant beating inmates with a large wooden pole, a practice introduced by troops loyal to Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, a key Putin ally.

“It was a bad time. I was afraid to walk on the street alone,” said Yana Holoboyko, a high-school student. “The Russians were very aggressive, especially when they got drunk, driving around and picking up women.”

On Ukraine’s constitution day in late June, block-length graffiti appeared on one of Shevchenkove’s streets. “Shevchenkove is Ukraine. Death to occupiers. Stryzhko—you’ll kick the bucket,” it said. Nobody bothered to paint it over.

Around the same time, Aleksandr Sidyakin, head of the executive committee of Russia’s ruling party, came to nearby Kupyansk to announce that locals could now start receiving Russian passports. “Russia is here for eternity!” he proclaimed to applause.

In the Shevchenkove hospital, doctors and nurses did what they could, treating civilians and Russian soldiers alike. “The Russians always came here with guns. We were afraid of them, and they were afraid of us. You never knew what they could do,” said the head nurse, Olha Kokhan.

Unlike in Kupyansk, where most hospital staff quickly switched to a Russian contract with its significantly higher pay, the doctors and nurses in Shevchenkove continued to receive Ukrainian salaries in their bank accounts.

With no Ukrainian banks functioning in occupied areas, they could only withdraw cash, at a commission of as high as 35%, via entrepreneurial middlemen from the Donbas who arrived with an internet hot spot that allowed online bank transfers.

Gradually, pressure to work with the Russians became hard to resist. A few of the female staff started dating Russian soldiers and officers. Vitaliy Ganchev, head of the Russian-created interim administration of the Kharkiv region, and other officials came to Shevchenkove on Aug. 23 to meet with the hospital staff, telling them that there was no point in holding out.

“You still hope the Ukrainians will come back? No, they will never come back,” Ms. Kokhan, the nurse, said Mr. Ganchev told them.

Olha Kokhan, head nurse of the local hospital, says Russian officials told staffers that resistance was pointless.

Russia paid more attention to schools. The occupation administration’s building in Kupyansk is still packed to the brim with Russian textbooks, teaching aids and educational posters. Ukrainian books and materials were removed and destroyed.

In August, Ms. Sheluh, the Shevchenkove executive secretary, called schoolteachers and directors, as well as the staff of the local kindergarten, demanding they reopen their institutions on Sept. 1. While all the school directors refused, Oksana Simutina, the local kindergarten director, agreed.

The kindergarten staff spent two weeks cleaning up the facility that was closed since February, washing curtains and sheets, sweeping the floors, and culling waist-high weeds, she said. Some 20 children showed up on Sept. 1. “There can be no politics in a kindergarten. We never communicated with the Russians,” said Ms. Simutina.

Out of the community’s 288 schoolteachers, only about one-tenth showed up as classes started on Sept. 1, according to Mr. Prykhodko, the mayor.

Teacher Ludmyla Zdorovko said Russian-appointed officials in Shevchenkove told her, “Go to work or you will remain jobless forever.” She added, “The people who went to work for them, it was not because they believed in the Russian world. Not many people did here. They were greedy and just wanted money.”

Ms. Sheluh said no Ukrainian books were destroyed in the community’s schools, and no Russian symbols displayed. Her decision was driven by patriotism, she said. “I asked our teachers to go to work and teach the Ukrainian language because I didn’t want them to bring outsiders to schools,” she said. “This is our land, we all grew up here, and nobody can educate better than our own people.”

On Sept. 5, senior staff of the Shevchenkove hospital were summoned to Kupyansk for a meeting with the occupation administration. “They asked that we collaborate and told us that we have no other choice,” Ms. Kokhan said. “And we almost agreed. Six months had gone by. It’s a very long time.”

If they had signed on to the Russian health system, as they planned to do days later, they would have been considered collaborators under Ukrainian law. But the following day, the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv region began.

Russian soldiers disappeared from Shevchenkove’s hospital before dawn. Then, a few hours later, on Sept. 7, Ukrainian forces showed up on the street outside. “You can’t even imagine the joy, the euphoria we all felt when we walked out and suddenly saw that finally our boys are back here, with our flags, right outside,” said the acting hospital director, Ms. Nesvoyeva.

Unlike Kupyansk, severely damaged in fighting, Shevchenkove survived the occupation largely intact and with few casualties. Mr. Stryzhko, the Russian-appointed mayor, and a handful of other Russian-appointed officials escaped with the last Russian troops. Many other Russian sympathizers remain.

“There are still people here in town who wait for the Russians to return,” said Yulia Fedorova, a paramedic in the hospital. “I have one in my own building. I tell her—if you like them so much, why are you lining up for Ukrainian humanitarian aid on the square instead of running away to your Russia?”

Soon after the Russian retreat, Mr. Prykhodko returned to his duties in the municipality. Ukrainian security authorities set up an office, too, looking for collaborators.

Mr. Kovshar, the former policeman, was detained for a couple of hours, and then released. Interviewed in his home, he acknowledged that he briefly joined the Russian-led police but said he did it only to steal the list of local hunters who owned rifles, so that the Russians wouldn’t have it. He said he passed intelligence to Ukrainian forces all along. The plaque commemorating his son’s heroism in Donbas is now affixed again on his home, a Ukrainian flag flying above it.

Mr. Kovshar, who joined the police, removed a plaque on his house honoring his son, who fell fighting Russian proxies. He has since replaced it.

Queried about the case, Ukrainian law-enforcement officials declined to comment on individual investigations. Mr. Prykhodko, the mayor, said there was no legally admissible evidence of collaboration by Mr. Kovshar.

Ms. Sheluh, the municipality secretary, said she was repeatedly interrogated, her phone and her passport taken away. She remains in her home in Shevchenkove, waiting to see how the inquiry progresses. Ms. Simutina, the kindergarten director, is free after her three interviews with the SBU. “I don’t believe we were collaborators,” she said, speaking as she was running errands in central Shevchenkove. “We worked in our own village, for our own people and for our own children.”

In the Shevchenkove hospital, the staffers who dated Russian soldiers remain on their jobs, even though many colleagues no longer socialize with them. “They wanted to fix their personal lives, but chose the wrong men. Now, they are despised by the entire staff,” said Ms. Nesvoyeva. “They are good workers, and I cannot fire them. But they are crying all day that other people have a bad attitude to them. What else did they expect?”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

10. The Nuclear Question America Never Answers

Excerpts:

And now here we are with the fifth NPR. Biden’s report does make some changes. Trump, for example, proposed a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile. This was a bad idea, and as a result of deliberations over the NPR, Biden zeroed out the budget for it. Biden’s NPR also jettisons much of Trump’s language about responding to nonnuclear attacks.

But we’re keeping the same kinds of forces and the same strategies we used during our long struggle with the Soviet Union. The NPR says, yet again, that the triad is a good idea, that it should be modernized at great expense, and that nuclear deterrence is the ultimate guarantee of American national security.

And yet the big questions remain unanswered. Does the strategic arsenal exist only to deter the use of similar weapons against us? Or does it exist to fight and prevail in a nuclear war? Biden’s solution is the same compromise found in the four other posture reviews: America hopes for a world in which nuclear arms only deter nuclear arms, but that world isn’t here yet.

The Nuclear Question America Never Answers

What the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review means

By Tom Nichols

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · November 1, 2022

What is the purpose of the American nuclear arsenal? Every American president since the end of the Cold War has tried to answer this question in a formal report called the Nuclear Posture Review. And every American president has fudged their answer—now including President Joe Biden, who released his NPR last week even as Russia wages war in Europe and the Russian president makes barely veiled nuclear threats against Ukraine, NATO, and the United States itself.

The first NPR, in 1994, was the result of an initiative by President Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense Les Aspin to ask what we should do after the Cold War with a nuclear arsenal that was designed to defeat a Soviet adversary that no longer existed. The process, unfortunately, turned into a kind of bureaucratic free-for-all, in which the Pentagon—better organized, more powerful, and more committed to the status quo than other agencies—outflanked Aspin and his staff (including a talented young assistant secretary of defense named Ashton Carter, later to become secretary himself). Unsurprisingly, the document effectively said that our nuclear establishment, including the triad of bombers, land-based missiles, and submarines, was just fine. Its authors conceded that a new force could be smaller and cheaper, a kind of Mini-Me of the old one.

And that’s pretty much what subsequent NPRs have said ever since. Over the years, other administrations have differed in their emphasis but not their conclusions. The 2002 NPR, for example, reflected both the priorities of the George W. Bush administration and the trauma of 9/11. It was, apparently, a mess of a document. I say “apparently” because most of it was classified; the parts that were released—or leaked—to the public looked very much like the result of lazy outsourcing to defense contractors once everyone in the national-security establishment had stampeded over to counterterrorism and insurgency issues. It was soon buried and forgotten.

Tom Nichols: The president and the bomb

When Barack Obama released an NPR, his administration hired communications consultants to try to avoid his predecessor’s stumble, but this precaution didn’t matter. I was among many who hoped that the 2010 release would contain serious changes to U.S. nuclear doctrine, especially because a year earlier, Obama had committed the United States to a nuclear-free world. But again, interagency struggles produced a compromise document that kept previous policies and structures intact.

When Donald Trump became president, many in the national-security community held their breath to see what would come from a man so staggeringly ignorant about nuclear issues. But in the end, the 2018 review, while somewhat harder-edged in its rhetoric, didn’t make major changes to U.S. policy. One significant addition was the idea that the United States could respond to “non-nuclear strategic attacks” with nuclear weapons, but Washington has always implicitly reserved the right to such a response; the Trump administration just decided to say it a little louder.

And now here we are with the fifth NPR. Biden’s report does make some changes. Trump, for example, proposed a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile. This was a bad idea, and as a result of deliberations over the NPR, Biden zeroed out the budget for it. Biden’s NPR also jettisons much of Trump’s language about responding to nonnuclear attacks.

Read: Letting it be an arms race

But we’re keeping the same kinds of forces and the same strategies we used during our long struggle with the Soviet Union. The NPR says, yet again, that the triad is a good idea, that it should be modernized at great expense, and that nuclear deterrence is the ultimate guarantee of American national security.

And yet the big questions remain unanswered. Does the strategic arsenal exist only to deter the use of similar weapons against us? Or does it exist to fight and prevail in a nuclear war? Biden’s solution is the same compromise found in the four other posture reviews: America hopes for a world in which nuclear arms only deter nuclear arms, but that world isn’t here yet.

The Biden NPR is woven into something the administration calls “integrated deterrence,” and as a symbolic point, it was released not as a stand-alone report, but along with both the National Defense Strategy and the Missile Defense Review. “Integrated deterrence” sounds very sensible, but what is it, and what role do nuclear weapons play in it? Here’s the 2022 National Defense Strategy:

Integrated deterrence entails working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our network of Alliances and partnerships. Tailored to specific circumstances, it applies a coordinated, multifaceted approach to reducing competitors’ perceptions of the net benefits of aggression relative to restraint. Integrated deterrence is enabled by combat-credible forces prepared to fight and win, as needed, and backstopped by a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.

If you found all that verbiage hard to parse, so did I. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Posture Review adds this refinement—such that it is:

A key goal of integrated deterrence is to develop tailored options that shape adversary perceptions of benefits and costs. The role of nuclear weapons is well established and embedded in strategic deterrence policy and plans. Non-nuclear capabilities may be able to complement nuclear forces in strategic deterrence plans and operations in ways that are suited to their attributes and consistent with policy on how they are to be employed.

As the writer Fred Kaplan noted, this is just “a slog of cliches.” But what it all boils down to is that we’re going to keep doing what we’ve done for some 60 years or so: The United States will deter its enemies by having very good military forces capable of fighting in various environments, with the ultimate security of America and its allies guaranteed by many hundreds of strategic nuclear warheads deliverable in hours by manned bombers—or in a matter of minutes by sea- and land-based missiles.

There is one part of the NPR that minces no words. It says:

Any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its Allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime. There is no scenario in which the Kim regime could employ nuclear weapons and survive.

This is a remarkably stark warning to North Korea. Notice, however, that this passage does not guarantee nuclear retaliation, which is wise. Presidents as far back as Richard Nixon have sought nuclear options against North Korea, a difficult business that carries great risk of escalation as well as damage to other nations. Still, the clarity of this one line raises the question of what might be happening behind the scenes that Biden felt the need to say it.

The report, however, is overall a disappointment for arms-control advocates, especially because Biden, like Obama and Trump before him, remains committed to spending a huge amount of money—more than $600 billion over the next decade—on nuclear weapons. Kaplan, rightly, argued that the 2022 NPR is “a sign that another casualty of the war in Ukraine and various other messes in the world is the suspension of creative thinking about nuclear strategy.” Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda at the Federation of American Scientists said that “efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role that nuclear weapons play have been subdued by renewed strategic competition abroad and opposition from defense hawks at home.” And the arms-control expert Joe Cirincione believes that the whole review process itself is so flawed that Biden’s NPR should be the last ever issued, because it removes too much power from the White House and gives the nuclear establishment too much control over its own interests.

From the September 2010 issue: Living with a nuclear Iran

How could this NPR have been different? I am a reformed nuclear hawk—early in my career, I worked in a defense firm that assisted the Strategic Defense Initiative—but since the early 1990s, I have been advocating for reducing our nuclear inventory and decreasing our reliance on nuclear threats. And so I would have liked to have seen a declaration that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter the use of similar nuclear weapons, along with a “no first use” pledge, in which the United States vowed never to be the first to employ nuclear arms. Sole-purpose and no-first-use declarations cause anxiety among our allies, and understandably so, but it is not 1968 and we are not facing two dozen Soviet divisions along the NATO border.

The huge cost of nuclear modernization also shifts resources away from necessary conventional-force improvements, which are important to countering potential Chinese aggression at sea. Nuclear weapons are not a replacement for naval, air, and ground forces that can deter—and if need be, fight and win—a war in the first place. Look no farther than Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin is learning that painful lesson right now: The Kremlin’s mighty nuclear arsenal has not saved tens of thousands of Russian men from being killed or wounded in a losing battle against a nation one-third the size of Russia.

Realistically, the Biden NPR probably said all that could be said in the current circumstances. A drawn-out crisis with Russia is not the time to invite a debate over the role of the American nuclear deterrent; as former U.S. Ambassador Steven Pifer told me earlier this week: “I had hoped for more ambition in the NPR, but given Russia’s actions and nuclear threats, the final product is no surprise.” The military and the nuclear establishment are resistant to change, but if the current NPR looks a lot like a status quo Cold War document rather than a blueprint for reform, we largely have Putin—and the Chinese, who may be ramping up their threats against Taiwan—to thank for it.

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · November 1, 2022

11. Iran may be preparing to arm Russia with short-range ballistic missiles

Excerpts:

Iran’s preparations for a potential missile transfer come amid stalled U.S. efforts to resurrect a deal with Tehran and world powers to address Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with the U.S. saying talks are at an “impasse.”

The U.S. has long maintained sanctions on Iran separate from and in addition to nuclear-related sanctions that were eased under the 2015 nuclear deal, which collapsed after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact in 2018.

Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank that advocates a hard-line position on Iran, said the potential weapons shipment provided another reason for the U.S. to back away from efforts to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program.

“With reports that Iran plans to send short-range ballistic missiles to Russia to use against Ukraine — and as the people of Iran cry out in the streets for a change in regime — the U.S. and its European allies should withdraw all sanctions relief offers made to Tehran and complete the snapback of U.N. sanctions at the Security Council,” Goldberg said.

Iran may be preparing to arm Russia with short-range ballistic missiles

Such missiles, which have a range of hundreds of miles, could help Moscow replenish its dwindling stockpiles.

Nov. 1, 2022, 4:46 PM EDT / Updated Nov. 1, 2022, 5:47 PM EDT

By Josh Lederman and Courtney Kube

NBC News · by Josh Lederman and Courtney Kube

Iran may soon arm Russia with surface-to-surface short-range ballistic missiles, three U.S. and Western government officials said, in what would be significant escalation of Iranian support for President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

In recent weeks, the United States and at least one allied nation have observed indications that Iran is preparing to transfer the weapons, the officials said, although it’s unclear how close Iran is to sending them. As of now, the U.S. has no indications any missiles have been sent, a senior U.S. defense official said.

If delivered, they would be the first advanced, precision-guided missiles that Iran has provided Russia since the war started. Short-range ballistic missiles have a range of hundreds of miles, and could help Moscow replenish its dwindling stockpile, which have been depleted by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Two of the officials say the surface-to-surface missiles are expected to be part of a tranche of roughly 1,000 additional weapons — including more weaponized drones — that Iran could transfer to Russia by the end of this year.

“We remain concerned about the potential for Iran to provide Russia with surface-to-surface missiles,” White House National Security Council adviser John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday. “They are very actively involved in supporting Russia and its efforts to kill innocent Ukrainians and to damage Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.”

A man works among the rubble of his destroyed home on Sunday after Russia's invasion of Chernihiv, Ukraine.Ed Ram / Getty Images

The Washington Post and CNN reported earlier on indications that Iran may supply ballistic missiles to Russia.

Yuriy Ihnat, the spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force Command, told reporters that Ukrainian forces would do whatever it could to counter any Iranian missiles that Russia places across Ukraine’s northern border. Still, he said, Ukraine only has air defense systems, not missile defense, making that task extremely difficult.

Iran’s Mission to the United Nations didn’t respond to a request for comment. But previously, Iran has firmly denied selling armed drones to Russia for use on the battlefield in Ukraine, calling those allegations “unsubstantiated.”

“Such unfounded claims, which are solely based on false flags and fabricated assumptions, are nothing more than a propaganda apparatus launched by certain states to further their political agenda,” Iran’s government said in a statement on Oct. 14.

The Biden administration has also accused Iran of sending military trainers and technical advisers to Crimea to help Russia’s military use Iranian-made drones. Russian military bases in Crimea, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, have been a key staging ground for Russia’s attacks against Ukraine since the war started in February.

“A week or so ago, we had solid information that they did have personnel on the ground. It wasn’t a very large number,” Kirby said Tuesday. “But whether they’re still there, or in what number, I couldn’t say today.”

Iran’s preparations for a potential missile transfer come amid stalled U.S. efforts to resurrect a deal with Tehran and world powers to address Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with the U.S. saying talks are at an “impasse.”

The U.S. has long maintained sanctions on Iran separate from and in addition to nuclear-related sanctions that were eased under the 2015 nuclear deal, which collapsed after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact in 2018.

Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank that advocates a hard-line position on Iran, said the potential weapons shipment provided another reason for the U.S. to back away from efforts to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program.

“With reports that Iran plans to send short-range ballistic missiles to Russia to use against Ukraine — and as the people of Iran cry out in the streets for a change in regime — the U.S. and its European allies should withdraw all sanctions relief offers made to Tehran and complete the snapback of U.N. sanctions at the Security Council,” Goldberg said.

NBC News · by Josh Lederman and Courtney Kube

12. Relearning the ASEAN Way: On the Importance of Perspective in Multilateralism

An important perspective from Australia.

Excerpts:

The perspective that we have come to appreciate from ASEAN fellows is that security co-operation brings prosperity, confidence and trust among neighbours. There is opportunity for the region to collectively alleviate poverty and elevate living standards of millions of people, regardless of national borders. Further, one must view Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions as closely integrated and interconnected—politically, economically, social-culturally, and environmentally. There is potential for misunderstanding the complex interconnectedness of concerns if we hold ourselves to a narrowly-defined, reductionist mindset of security, warfare, and military power. ASEAN conceptions of security differ between the nations, but our U.S.-centred assessment of the region assumes cookie-cutter concerns and this essentially leads to inappropriately designed responses.[6]

A clear example is the illusive grey zone. An artefact of the western way of thinking, the broad term seems to have become a synonym for complex, ambiguous, or opaque—a category of situations that don’t fit neatly or are difficult to understand. Listening to our ASEAN Fellows’ perspective has made us consider whether grey is just the norm for the region. We are likely the ones complicating things by expecting the clear black-and-white that comes with a traditional western-focused understanding of ASEAN and a reductionist view of security, warfare, and military power. The reality of interconnected complex relationships is that it is mostly grey. Of course, where ambiguous relationships and ill-understood boundaries exist, adversaries can exploit a seam, exposing crucial partnerships that take decades to mature to increased risk of being undermined. This is what the west is at risk of.

Increasingly, Australian analysts note there are concerns from ASEAN states surrounding AUKUS developments—specifically the acquisition by Australia of nuclear-powered submarines.[7] While fellows agree that this capability development would alter the strategic balance of the Indo-Pacific, in our people-people engagement over many coffees, fellows are quick to underscore that ASEAN concern stems from the potential of nuclear-armed submarines, not necessarily the acquisition of submarines per se. This position is in line with ASEAN political stance on nuclear weapons: in that, nations seek to maintain a region of nuclear-free arms (and proliferation).

Relearning the ASEAN Way: On the Importance of Perspective in Multilateralism

thestrategybridge.org · November 2, 2022

Elizabeth Buchanan and Christopher Kourloufas

The enduring tendency to “center the United States” in foreign affairs analysis—both in the United States and, increasingly, in Australia—is limiting real understanding of Southeast Asian strategic perspectives at the staff officer level. The bulk of Defence strategy work is done by those who are not country or even region experts, and at the staff-officer level, there is very little awareness or understanding of non-U.S. perspectives. This misunderstanding might yet drive miscalculation in the region, particularly when considering the trajectory of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

ASEAN plays an important role in facilitating a peaceful, stable, and resilient neighbourhood favourable to Australian national interests. Australia-ASEAN ties date back to 1974, but an uptick in domestic commentary and analysis highlights an evident gap in Australian understanding of ASEAN.[1] Our collective understanding of ASEAN has been shaped by Australian and U.S-centric views, assumptions and ideals rather than political realities on the ground.

This has become particularly evident through our Defence research unit work across the Sea Power Centre and the Air and Space Power Centre.[2] Our centres host valuable insight into ASEAN military-strategic thinking via the ASEAN Visiting Fellowship initiative. Launched in 2014, the program serves to deepen people-people relations between Australia and ASEAN partners with a specific focus on strengthening military educational ties.

When it comes to ASEAN, Australian military professionals, analysts, and commentators are largely missing adequate insight into two central topics: ASEAN strategic concerns (the problem set) and ASEAN-led solutions (the response). In this essay we reflect on some key takeaways of the ASEAN Visiting Fellowship in an effort to shine a light (and centre) upon ASEAN strategic views of Australia’s backyard.

The Problem Set: Assuming ASEAN Strategic Concerns

“[T]he rise of material powers, i.e. economic and military, requires avoiding the deepening of mistrust, miscalculation, and patterns of behavior based on a zero-sum game.”[3]

ASEAN assessment of Indo-Pacific strategic competition is somewhat at odds with the western liberal-democratic conception of great power competition.[4] A view in which Chinese aggression and unavoidable great power competition between Beijing and Washington are headline acts. However, our visiting ASEAN fellows have tended to minimise the uniqueness of great power competition in terms of articulating security challenges facing their nation.[5] When it comes to ASEAN security concerns, most fellows cite transnational crime, terrorism, piracy, and, Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated (IUU) fishing, as the leading security challenges facing their nations. Indeed, ASEAN fellows are largely concerned with how these matters manifest as domestic security crises—e.g., arms trafficking increasing the level of armed citizens. This is a reality which Western countries with warfare-centric navies tend to miss.

A view in which Chinese aggression and unavoidable great power competition between Beijing and Washington are headline acts.

The perspective that we have come to appreciate from ASEAN fellows is that security co-operation brings prosperity, confidence and trust among neighbours. There is opportunity for the region to collectively alleviate poverty and elevate living standards of millions of people, regardless of national borders. Further, one must view Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions as closely integrated and interconnected—politically, economically, social-culturally, and environmentally. There is potential for misunderstanding the complex interconnectedness of concerns if we hold ourselves to a narrowly-defined, reductionist mindset of security, warfare, and military power. ASEAN conceptions of security differ between the nations, but our U.S.-centred assessment of the region assumes cookie-cutter concerns and this essentially leads to inappropriately designed responses.[6]

A clear example is the illusive grey zone. An artefact of the western way of thinking, the broad term seems to have become a synonym for complex, ambiguous, or opaque—a category of situations that don’t fit neatly or are difficult to understand. Listening to our ASEAN Fellows’ perspective has made us consider whether grey is just the norm for the region. We are likely the ones complicating things by expecting the clear black-and-white that comes with a traditional western-focused understanding of ASEAN and a reductionist view of security, warfare, and military power. The reality of interconnected complex relationships is that it is mostly grey. Of course, where ambiguous relationships and ill-understood boundaries exist, adversaries can exploit a seam, exposing crucial partnerships that take decades to mature to increased risk of being undermined. This is what the west is at risk of.

Increasingly, Australian analysts note there are concerns from ASEAN states surrounding AUKUS developments—specifically the acquisition by Australia of nuclear-powered submarines.[7] While fellows agree that this capability development would alter the strategic balance of the Indo-Pacific, in our people-people engagement over many coffees, fellows are quick to underscore that ASEAN concern stems from the potential of nuclear-armed submarines, not necessarily the acquisition of submarines per se. This position is in line with ASEAN political stance on nuclear weapons: in that, nations seek to maintain a region of nuclear-free arms (and proliferation).

A Potential Response: Avoiding Miscalculating ASEAN Solutions

“ASEAN also needs to continue being an honest broker within the strategic environment of competing interests.”[8]

Our person-to-person engagement via the ASEAN fellows program has also prevented the misinterpretation of the ASEAN Way, referring to a mode of cooperation between nations that places national interests and national sovereignty first. This is often used in conjunction with ASEAN centrality, the process through which national interests and sovereignty are protected by non-interference and upheld via decision-making, which is based on consensus and non-confrontation principles. Our Defence research centres work with counterparts at Defence’s International Policy Division and ASEAN policy officers throughout government to host research conferences to showcase the work (and thought) of our ASEAN military fellows.

Senator The Honourable Penny Wong, Australian Foreign Minister (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

The research led by our ASEAN Fellows has revealed a wealth of opportunity for ASEAN and Australia to co-operate and collectively respond to challenges in our region.[9] Importantly, the solutions proposed are nuanced and aim to strengthen existing multilateral agreements within the region. By doing so, local empowerment is emphasised, leadership remains within the ASEAN community and Australian offerings contribute to the broader response. In particular, Australia’s experience with integrating across services and government agencies is a significant capability that can be shared within the region.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently reminded ASEAN nations “ASEAN centrality means that we will always think about our security in the context of your security.”[10] Our experience in learning from ASEAN visiting fellows indicates that our own staff officers and strategy makers have not yet adequately grasped ASEAN’s own security context. Continued tendencies to frame ASEAN challenges and opportunities in terms of centering on Australian or U.S perspectives is a behaviour we must unlearn. It feeds miscalculation of ASEAN strategic concerns and potentially reinforces a more contested strategic environment, or at least the view that we are living in one.

Dr. Elizabeth Buchanan is Head of Navy Research at the Royal Australian Navy’s Sea Power Centre and Squadron Leader Christopher Kourloufas is a Research and Engagement Officer at the Royal Australian Air Force’s Air and Space Power Centre. The views expressed are the authors’ alone and do not reflect those of the Australian government or the Australian Department of Defence.

The Strategy Bridge is read, respected, and referenced across the worldwide national security community—in conversation, education, and professional and academic discourse.

Thank you for being a part of The Strategy Bridge community. Together, we can #BuildTheBridge.

Header Image: ASEAN Flag, 2022 (Wikimedia Commons).

Notes:

[1] Euan Graham, “Does Australia need an ASEAN special envoy?” The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 29 Jun 2022, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/does-australia-need-an-asean-special-envoy/; Abdul Rahman Yaacob, “Improving Australia–ASEAN defence engagement,” East Asia Forum, 15 Jun 2022, https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2022/06/15/improving-australia-asean-defence-engagement/.

[2] Sam Fraser, “Tac Talks: Now is the time for Australia to step up into a leadership role in Southeast Asia to maintain regional peace and prosperity,” https://www.navy.gov.au/media-room/publications/tac-talks-29.

[3] “ASEAN Outlook in the Indo-Pacific,” 22 Jun 2019, https://asean.org/asean2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ASEAN-Outlook-on-the-Indo-Pacific_FINAL_22062019.pdf .

[4] Ibid.

[5] Policy Papers on Maritime Strategy and Defence Issues, Edition One, Sea Power Centre–Australia, 2021, https://www.navy.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/VNF_Edition_One_B5_internal_pages_print.pdf.

[6] Rose A. Ibrahim Sukri, “Superpowers: Hero or Villain in the South and East China Seas?” Air/SPace Blog, Air and Space Power Centre, 29 Sep 2021, https://airpower.airforce.gov.au/blog/superchallenge.

[7] James Chin, “Why is southeast Asia so concerned about AUKUS and Australia’s plans for nuclear submarines?” The Conversation, 20 Sep 2021, https://theconversation.com/why-is-southeast-asia-so-concerned-about-aukus-and-australias-plans-for-nuclear-submarines-168260.

[8] “ASEAN Outlook in the Indo-Pacific,” 22 Jun 2019, https://asean.org/asean2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ASEAN-Outlook-on-the-Indo-Pacific_FINAL_22062019.pdf.

[9] Arnold Enriquez, “Soundings Papers: The Philippines-Indonesia Maritime Border Agreement: Strengthening Relations towards Regional Stability in Southeast Asia,” https://www.navy.gov.au/media-room/publications/soundings-43.

[10] Penny Wong, “Special lecture to the International Institute for Strategic Studies - A shared future: Australia, ASEAN and Southeast Asia,” Minister for Foreign Affairs, 6 Jul 2022, https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/penny-wong/speech/special-lecture-international-institute-strategic-studies-shared-future-australia-asean-and-southeast-asia.

thestrategybridge.org · November 2, 2022

13. Is Nepal Under China’s Thumb?

Excerpts:

Meanwhile, the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok could serve as another platform for soft power. In February, Nepal’s government ratified an agreement to accept a $500 million grant from the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation to spur investments, which could be seen as an alternative to Chinese financing. The project faced significant pushback from communist politicians and triggered nationwide protests that cast the package as an extension of U.S. imperialism. A similar narrative appeared on TikTok, where related videos accumulated nearly 50 million views. Although the CCP didn’t actively push the agenda, TikTok provided a platform for negative coverage. China did not censor the topic as it has done with videos that mention human rights abuses in Xinjiang, for example.

For the United States, contrasting political ideologies should not deter policymakers from trying to engage more effectively with the various communist parties in Nepal. The comprehensive partnership between Vietnam and the United States could serve as a model for the U.S.-Nepal relationship. The CCP’s efforts to unify pro-China political parties and shape public life as well as its more covert attempts to influence public opinion could undermine Nepal’s own interests, as shown by the preference for infrastructure projects funded by high-interest BRI loans over U.S.-funded grants.

These developments highlight the grave danger facing Nepal’s democracy ahead of this month’s elections. The CCP will undoubtedly seek to court whichever party or coalition emerges victorious. Another weak alliance could condemn Nepal to more political instability, inviting further intervention from the CCP. And even if a more China-skeptic government emerges, the CCP still wields enough influence over other political leaders, the press, and the police to ensure its interests remain in play.

Is Nepal Under China’s Thumb?

Ahead of this month’s elections, Nepal’s democracy faces a dual challenge: its own factionalism and the Chinese Communist Party’s growing influence.

By Marcus Andreopoulos, a senior research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation.

Foreign Policy · by Marcus Andreopoulos · November 1, 2022

On Nov. 20, Nepalis will head to the polls to elect their 11th government since the country became a democratic republic in 2008, after more than 200 years of monarchical rule. In that time, the continuous formation and breakdown of alliances have plagued Nepal’s politics, leaving voters disillusioned. Yet there is still a greater threat to the country’s young democracy: China has become increasingly more involved in Nepal’s domestic politics.

Geography makes engagement with China a necessity for Nepal, but during the country’s transition to democracy, this relationship quickly developed into what onlookers inside Nepal describe as foreign meddling in Kathmandu’s political affairs. Nepal features prominently in China’s growing assertiveness in South Asia, and the outcome of the vote could either blunt or enhance Beijing’s strategic agenda as Chinese President Xi Jinping begins his historic third term. China will be keeping a close eye on the country’s upcoming elections, which will see briefly united communist parties compete against each other once again.

Leftist and communist ideologies have formally existed in Nepali political discourse since the mid-20th century. In the late 1940s, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power, the Communist Party of Nepal was in its formative stage, seeking to offer an alternative to the monarchy’s autocratic rule. Sympathies for the communist movement continued into the late 1990s and early 2000s, manifesting in popular support for the Maoist insurgency that eventually oversaw the end of former King Gyanendra Shah’s rule. Today, all major Nepali political parties still see themselves as proponents of democratic socialism.

Since Nepal embraced democracy, the CCP seems to have taken advantage of the willingness of some communist factions in Nepal to deepen diplomatic ties. Seeking to mitigate political instability, China has pushed for a united leftist party in Nepal that would enjoy widespread support and govern in the favor of officials in Beijing. By attempting to shape a hegemonic party that could rule unopposed, erode the apolitical nature of Nepal’s police, and seek to undermine the free press, the CCP machine appears intent on making Nepal serve China’s interests.

Although Nepal’s dominant leftist ideology is inviting for the CCP, its diplomats appear baffled by divisions among seemingly aligned parties. In 2017, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) announced that they would contest that year’s general election as an alliance. Many analysts suspected the CCP played a role in the merger. The newly formed Nepal Communist Party took office in 2018, but by 2021, the coalition had fallen apart. The Maoists entered into yet another partnership with the center-left Nepali Congress party, suggesting opportunism rather than ideology still fueled the country’s political alliances.

To achieve its own ambitions in Nepal, China would prefer consistent and ideological leadership similar to the CCP. To start, a lack of consensus among the various leaders who have come through Kathmandu’s revolving doors has inhibited progress on infrastructure projects under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which Nepal signed on to in 2017. Since the initial agreement, Kathmandu has appeared reluctant to begin work on a single project. Concern about debt remains an obstacle for the ruling coalition led by the Nepali Congress. There is also growing skepticism toward Chinese-funded projects after repeated delays to the opening of the international airport in Pokhara, Nepal.

Such hesitancy prompted Xi to visit Nepal in 2019, but he failed to secure concrete assurances from the government. In March, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a trip, where he was also unable to convince his counterpart, Narayan Khadka, to agree to a BRI-funded project. In the CCP’s view, the conditions that facilitated the original BRI agreement could solve its problems in Nepal. Nepal’s Maoist, pro-China former prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, initially enlisted Nepal in the BRI before resigning in May 2017. Had the Maoists retained sole control of the government, Nepal might have agreed to more infrastructure projects by now.

Read More

Indian laborers work at the construction site of a bridge for the new railway in Janakpur on June 14, 2017.

Indian laborers work at the construction site of a bridge for the new railway in Janakpur on June 14, 2017.

China and India Are Fighting Over Nepal’s Railways

The mountain state has just 18 miles of track. Beijing and New Delhi are keen to change that.

For Beijing, continuity of leadership in Kathmandu could also benefit the CCP’s geopolitical standing. Deepening ties between Nepal and China have already led to a strong display of solidarity at the United Nations; in 2021, Nepal joined other South Asian countries in commending China’s approach in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, where it has faced criticism for human rights violations. And any hope of a free Tibet would be quashed if the CCP is able to sandwich the region between two like-minded governments in Beijing and Kathmandu.

Taking lessons from Russia’s recent isolation after its invasion of Ukraine, Xi is also acutely aware of the importance of securing support from allies before he makes any potential decision to invade Taiwan. In 2019, Nepal endorsed the CCP’s position on Taiwan—but that was under the leadership of pro-China former Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli. If Beijing manages to push for a united leftist party to take power in Kathmandu, it would both boost economic ties between the countries and consolidate China’s global reputation in the event of a war with Taiwan.

China’s increasing interest in Nepal’s politics has worrying implications for the future of democracy in Kathmandu. The fickle alliances that formed before and after the 2017 election seem to be a feature of Nepali politics. For as long as Nepal has held democratic elections, no party has completed a full five-year term in government, which has eroded public confidence. In this year’s local elections held in May, voter turnout declined compared to the local elections in 2017. Such weaknesses leave the door open for Chinese intervention. The CCP’s attempts to stabilize Nepal’s political landscape could come at the expense of the country’s already fragile democratic institutions.

The CCP’s involvement elsewhere in Nepali public life provides evidence of this. In September 2019, the temporarily unified Nepal Communist Party signed a memorandum with the CCP to increase cooperation between Nepal and China’s departments and agencies, including, most worryingly, the police. The decision invited China’s People’s Armed Police to provide training and support to its counterpart in Nepal. The People’s Armed Police is political by nature: It is required to act on behalf of the CCP’s interests. Any collaboration between China’s police and its Nepali counterpart, therefore, undermines political neutrality—threatening the notion of a free society in Nepal.

The consequences of this still-nascent alliance have already become clear: Nepal’s police has increasingly participated in the repression and deportation of Tibetan refugees and dissidents, aligning with the actions of the People’s Armed Police in China and, by extension, the desires of the CCP. Relatedly, Nepal has stiffened its position on Tibetan refugees and political activists in recent years, mirroring the closer relations among some politicians in Kathmandu and the CCP. The more China is able to dictate policy and policing in Nepal, the harsher life will become for the more than 20,000 Tibetan refugees living in Nepal.

Because of the division among Nepal’s current political parties, the CCP has pursued other means of exerting influence within Nepal’s borders beyond politics. Soft-power tools have proved invaluable in ensuring the CCP can control the narrative inside Nepal. Its forays into press manipulation can be seen in Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes in Nepal, which offer training for journalists. Nepali government officials have, in turn, discouraged journalists from reporting critically on China, particularly around Tibetan affairs.

The CCP’s exertions of soft power have raised suspicions among Nepalis, including regarding the unexplained death of a journalist. In 2020, Balaram Baniya, a journalist and outspoken critic of Chinese policy in Nepal, died mysteriously. He was suspended from the Kantipur Daily newspaper for breaking a story that China had encroached on Rui village in Nepal, near the border with Tibet. Although no one has been implicated in Baniya’s death, rumors abound about the timing and the pattern of Chinese anger toward Nepal’s free press. A few months earlier, the Chinese Embassy in Nepal publicly condemned the Kathmandu Post for a “regrettable” bias on China-related issues.

Meanwhile, the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok could serve as another platform for soft power. In February, Nepal’s government ratified an agreement to accept a $500 million grant from the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation to spur investments, which could be seen as an alternative to Chinese financing. The project faced significant pushback from communist politicians and triggered nationwide protests that cast the package as an extension of U.S. imperialism. A similar narrative appeared on TikTok, where related videos accumulated nearly 50 million views. Although the CCP didn’t actively push the agenda, TikTok provided a platform for negative coverage. China did not censor the topic as it has done with videos that mention human rights abuses in Xinjiang, for example.

For the United States, contrasting political ideologies should not deter policymakers from trying to engage more effectively with the various communist parties in Nepal. The comprehensive partnership between Vietnam and the United States could serve as a model for the U.S.-Nepal relationship. The CCP’s efforts to unify pro-China political parties and shape public life as well as its more covert attempts to influence public opinion could undermine Nepal’s own interests, as shown by the preference for infrastructure projects funded by high-interest BRI loans over U.S.-funded grants.

These developments highlight the grave danger facing Nepal’s democracy ahead of this month’s elections. The CCP will undoubtedly seek to court whichever party or coalition emerges victorious. Another weak alliance could condemn Nepal to more political instability, inviting further intervention from the CCP. And even if a more China-skeptic government emerges, the CCP still wields enough influence over other political leaders, the press, and the police to ensure its interests remain in play.

Foreign Policy · by Marcus Andreopoulos · November 1, 2022

14. Preventing Wars is as Important as Winning Them: Lessons From Past Naval Strategies

Excerpts:

Of course, while the 2020s are different from the 1980s, but they are also different from 2007. While the global order and the international system of trade, finance, communication, and diplomacy remain similar, China, Russia, and lesser adversaries like Iran and North Korea represent new challenges. A strategy focused entirely on the preparation for war is insufficient in our networked and politically, commercially, and militarily linked world. And a strategy focused entirely on the peacetime maintenance of that order may also be unwise.

Across two centuries, the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard have balanced the distinct missions of preparing for war while simultaneously managing the global responsibilities of peace. While some might wish away half of that historic pair of missions, the reality is that the nation needs sea services that can do both. This has been at the core of the Department of the Navy’s task since the time of Benjamin Stoddert. No less than in 2007 or 1798, preventing wars is as important as winning them.

Preventing Wars is as Important as Winning Them: Lessons From Past Naval Strategies - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by BJ Armstrong · November 2, 2022

The American sea services were busy on Oct. 18, 2022. The destroyer USS Roosevelt was in the Baltic Sea, visiting Poland as it concluded the Joint Warrior 22-2 exercise. The American aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush was in the Mediterranean operating with NATO allies. In the Pacific, the Sama Sama exercise organized by American, Philippine, and Australian naval forces was wrapping up, which had also brought together ships from the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and British Royal Navy. Marine Rotational Force-Darwin 22 was returning home to California after the 11th rotational force forward deployment to the north coast of Australia. And the USS Milwaukee set sail from its homeport in Mayport, Florida, for a deployment to South America and the Caribbean with helicopters from Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 28 and a law enforcement detachment from the Coast Guard aboard.

With challenges and responsibilities for the U.S. Navy across the seven seas, the 2020s have brought about new calls for a fresh look at American maritime and naval strategy. For the most part, these writings have turned toward an alleged golden age of naval strategic thinking in the 1980s when the Reagan administration developed The Maritime Strategy. Some have contended that American naval strategists need to mirror the 1980s efforts more explicitly, while others have asserted that today’s strategy has already done that. With the dominant and potentially existential threat of the Soviet Union providing the focus of those earlier naval strategic concepts, it seems logical that a rising China would call for a similarly focused effort. But a fixation on one era and the parallels of one former adversary are insufficient. While thinking about the historical model provided by The Maritime Strategy, today’s strategists, naval professionals, and national security policymakers should also balance their thinking by returning to the maritime strategy efforts that culminated 15 years ago in the launch of The Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Sea Power, or CS21.

CS21 was steeped in the classical strategic concepts of seapower but also included revolutionary new elements for the 21st century. Specifically, it included a discussion of maritime responsibilities during peacetime that has been lost over the last decade and a half. Instead, today’s strategic guidance zeroes in on the risks of and potential for a war between the United States and its global rivals, replacing concerns about maintaining peace, preventing conflict, and enhancing prosperity with the need to have a “warfighting advantage.” Rereading 2007 strategy offers an opportunity to return to some of the classical ideals of seapower and focus on the ways that naval power serves to integrate deterrence and broader foreign policy goals.

Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict

In 2005, when the Navy staff began to work on new strategic guidance, the challenges that American national security professionals focused on were different than they are today. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were only a few years old, and were not progressing as military leaders had planned or political leaders had expected. The insurgency in Iraq was growing and by 2007, when CS21 was launched, “the surge” was beginning. The rise of China and the tensions it might engender were barely on the radar of the American national security establishment, and rarely a part of intelligence briefs. Questions remained about Vladimir Putin’s leadership of a Russian Federation which was turning from a failed economy to a corrupt petro-state. None of these challenges appeared to have major maritime or naval elements. American naval dominance remained the often-overlooked foundation of what some international leaders were labeling as the United States’ “hyperpower” status.

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Co-signed by then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps General James Conway, and Commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, CS21 was cooperative on multiple levels. First, as the signatories indicate, this strategy brought the maritime elements of the U.S. defense establishment together to collaborate on a shared strategy which aimed to guide all three services as they sailed into the new century. It was the first time the sea services created a shared strategic guidance. Since the end of World War II, the Marine Corps had largely been drifting away from its naval history and the Navy as the service attempted to create its own identity and carve out a place as an independent service with independent missions and goals. Going back even further, since Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels failed in his attempt to absorb the U.S. Coast Guard into the Navy following World War I, and despite operating under naval command in World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and missions in the Arabian Gulf from 1991 to 2007, the Coast Guard had largely focused its policies and strategic thinking on its domestic and law enforcement roles. CS21 reversed decades of drifting apart, bringing the three services into direct collaboration with a shared vision of the importance of the maritime world and the United States’ role on the world’s oceans.

The strategy was also cooperative on a global level. Looking back on the text from 2022, it seems prescient. Recent foreign policy thinking and writing includes a good deal of discussion about the liberal world order. The introduction of CS21 leads with the assertion that American “interests are best served by fostering a peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people, and government.” The importance of international partnerships and alliances plays a central role in the document, just as discussion of “integrated deterrence” does today. The maritime foundations of the liberal world order, with the predominance of trade traveling by sea and the international reliance on digital infrastructure made possible by undersea cables, was also at the heart of the strategy. Challenges raised by threats to freedom of navigation, climate change, and mass migrations were all discussed with international cooperation and partnership seen as key to addressing such challenges. While at a programming and practical level CS21 aimed to bring the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard into closer cooperation, it also demonstrated the vital nature of international cooperation on the world’s oceans.

Preventing War

The fundamental thesis behind the maritime thinking in The Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Sea Power was also seen in some quarters as its most controversial aspect. Early in the introduction, the strategy clearly stated that “[w]e believe that preventing wars is as important as winning wars.” For the U.S. Navy, this was a sea change in thinking from the top, and one that was not entirely supported from the middle or below. Despite the long history of navies and their responsibilities in peacetime, American strategy in the era of American naval hegemony had focused on war. The Maritime Strategy of the 1980s revolved around a narrow focus on the possibility of a war with the Soviet Union and the U.S. Navy’s role in that shooting conflict. This ranged from the importance of ballistic missile submarines to the ability to create conventional threats to Soviet global interests. The strategic documents of the 1990s focused on warfare in the littorals of the world, assuming that American dominance of the blue water of the oceans was complete and the projection of power from the relative safety of the sea was the future of American naval conflict. The rising cultural predominance and competition of the Navy’s warfare community “tribes,” — naval aviators, surface warfare officers, and submariners — drove naval thinking to focus on the tactical and operational questions of naval combat, largely abandoning strategic thinking to the higher levels of government in a post-Goldwater-Nichols world.

Since 1798, the Navy’s two core responsibilities have been to defend the nation in times of war and to protect its interests and defuse crises in times of peace. To do this, CS21 suggested a two-pronged concept. First, the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard needed to deploy “regionally concentrated, credible combat power” to the parts of the world with rising challengers. This force would be designed to “give political leaders a range of options for deterrence, escalation, and de-escalation,” and be prepared to “win our nation’s wars.” It would require continuing to maintain “a powerful fleet.” Second, in addition to these war-ready forces, the strategy called for “globally distributed, mission-tailored maritime forces” which would help provide “persistent global presence” and integrate Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps efforts with “other agency partners.” These forces would aim to contain local disruptions to the global order and foster international collaboration. In other words, it advocated for integrated deterrence and peacetime campaigns around the world.

These two distinct operating concepts were not designed simply for an amorphous persistent presence mission. In the strategy, it became clear that presence was a factor that contributed to a number of key missions and was more than simply bobbing around on the world’s oceans waiting for something to happen. Presence itself was not the mission. Instead, presence was a condition that created the ability to pursue deterrence, maritime domain awareness, homeland defense in depth, crisis response, naval diplomacy, and alliance maintenance and exercising. The strategy pushed the sea services to work with foreign partners and “in coordination with other U.S. services and government departments.” It reminded national security leaders that “trust and cooperation cannot be surged” but instead requires integrated effort through well-planned peacetime campaigns of influence and security building.

To achieve these two maritime goals — preparing for regionally based wars and enhancing maritime security in the global commons of the world’s oceans — the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard realized that the national fleet would have to change. While there would still be the need to maintain a “powerful fleet,” the new strategy also called for improved integration and interoperability between the sea services in order to provide “mission-tailored” force packages that were newly designed and creatively deployed. These force packages would create “a dispersed force under decentralized authority in a world of rapid information exchange,” which could require new approaches to leadership and operational command. Because of this, in addition to rethinking the fleet architecture with an eye toward smaller and more easily dispersed units, CS21 called for a new look at the education and training of the force in order to prepare those at lower levels for the increased responsibility its concepts would call for.

15 Years Later

Now, 15 years after The Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Sea Power was launched into the world, the United States and its allies face different challenges in a global environment that the 2022 National Security Strategy describes as an era of “geopolitical competition between major powers.” And yet the description of the global environment offered in CS21 remains valid at its core. The international system of trade, communication, and finance, which make up the foundation of the liberal world order, remains rooted in the maritime world. The international challenges of climate change, mass migration, pandemics, maritime insecurity, and food security — which were all identified 15 years ago — make their appearance in the new 2022 National Security Strategy as well. The need to strengthen partnerships among those who have joined into this international system, and to resist the efforts of autocracies to change the rules, is at the core of the new national strategy, as it was in the naval strategy of 2007. New strategies and guidance name names and call out specific nations and actors as potential adversaries and competitors, which was not the case in 2007. However, the core concept — that the nation’s national security community needs to operate on dual tracks which work first to maintain the peace and overcome crises while also preparing for the possibility of outright war — remains the same.

Despite the apparent prescience of CS21 when thinking about the role of the maritime world in international affairs, and specifically the role of the American sea services, follow through on the concepts and changes outlined in the document was mixed. Over the past decade and a half, the U.S. Coast Guard has become an ever busier and more involved international player. Following through on CS21’s calls for integration and collaboration with the international community, Coast Guard cutters and training teams have increased their international deployments in the past two decades and efforts continue to construct and deploy mission-tailored and specialized forces. The Marine Corps’ recent efforts to create distributed forces that are mission-tailored and able to serve both in support of a “powerful fleet” and during the operations prior to the outbreak of war can also be seen as drawing its inspiration from CS21.

The Navy, however, has little to show for the deep maritime thinking that resulted from the 2007 strategic guidance. The Navy’s pendulum has largely swung back toward the tactical and operational questions of preparing for war. A growing fear of combat with China has largely resulted in the adoption of only half of the CS21 concept. Focused on regionally concentrated, credible combat power, the Navy’s fleet size has flatlined and there are calls to jettison the historic mission of maintaining the peace. Small ships have been cut from the fleet. Creative new units and force packages have withered on the vine.

Over the last 15 years, the Navy struggled to implement changes that would have been in line with the 2007 strategy. Efforts to do more with less failed. The new ship classes that were introduced to the fleet during the early 2000s were largely over budget and underperforming. The proposed size the fleet, and the explanations of that requirement, fluctuated over time but saw little change in the actual ship count. Leaders focused on land power took control of Navy force structure planning and, overly-intent on preparing for combat, let the fleet continue to stagnate while making unsupported claims of a future 500 ship navy. The Navy, Department of Defense, and Congressional oversight largely allowed the strategy to die on the shelf. In other words, the Navy’s strategic outlook raised debate inside the service while at the same time failing to gain much resonance with the decision-makers in the Department of Defense and above.

While the Navy’s fleet design and size was generally unaffected by the strategy, and the concept of distributed deployments to protect the global system with mission-tailored forces largely fell out of favor, CS21’s description of the maritime world remained accurate. As a result, partnership and cooperation continued to develop in the 15 years since the strategy’s release. The USS Roosevelt and USS George H.W. Bush are in the Baltic and Mediterranean today as elements of the NATO forces responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They are a part of the largest 6th Fleet deployments in decades and join with NATO ships to bring concentrated, credible combat power to European waters. The naval forces involved in the Sama Sama exercise in the Philippines and the Marine Rotational Force returning from Darwin reflect a similar response to Chinese threats with regard to both Taiwan and the safe functioning of the Pacific maritime order. American naval forces and their maritime partners continue to respond to the realities described in 2007, from the reinvigoration of NATO to the establishment of “the Quad,” and continue to view the future as a cooperative one on the world’s oceans.

Maritime Strategy in the 2020s

15 years after its publication, a fresh look at The Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Sea Power can help balance vital maritime concepts for today’s naval professionals and national policymakers. Leaders who emphasize the importance of 1980s naval strategy efforts often see a parallel in the existence of a world with a dominant adversary. Yet the world of the Cold War was a different place than the world of the 2020s and today’s broader “geopolitical competition between major powers.” The Soviet Union and its allies were largely disconnected from the global systems of trade, finance, and communications. Because of this, the character of the competition was different. Today, however, China and America’s other potential adversaries are deeply integrated into the international economic and diplomatic system. The extreme sanctions placed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine illustrate that today’s competitors are networked together in ways that are fundamentally unlike the Cold War. Looking back to The Maritime Strategy can offer naval policymakers and strategists some interesting food for thought, but recognizing the differences is just as important as embracing the parallels.

Of course, while the 2020s are different from the 1980s, but they are also different from 2007. While the global order and the international system of trade, finance, communication, and diplomacy remain similar, China, Russia, and lesser adversaries like Iran and North Korea represent new challenges. A strategy focused entirely on the preparation for war is insufficient in our networked and politically, commercially, and militarily linked world. And a strategy focused entirely on the peacetime maintenance of that order may also be unwise.

Across two centuries, the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard have balanced the distinct missions of preparing for war while simultaneously managing the global responsibilities of peace. While some might wish away half of that historic pair of missions, the reality is that the nation needs sea services that can do both. This has been at the core of the Department of the Navy’s task since the time of Benjamin Stoddert. No less than in 2007 or 1798, preventing wars is as important as winning them.

Become a Member

BJ Armstrong is a contributing editor with War on the Rocks and is the principal associate of the Forum on Integrated Naval History and Seapower Studies. His fourth book, Developing the Naval Mind, coauthored with John Freymann, is available from the Naval Institute Press. Opinions expressed in his article are offered in his personal and academic capacity and do not reflect the positions or policies of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or any other agency.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by BJ Armstrong · November 2, 2022

15. Why Vladimir Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine

Excerpts:

In the end, every “rational” case for why Putin won’t use nuclear weapons in Ukraine falls short. He is not afraid of losing support from his current allies, because he misapprehends Russia’s position in the world; he sees Russia as politically, economically, and militarily stronger than it is. Chinese and Indian leaders may express alarm at the use of extreme measures such as nuclear weapons, but to Putin this points to their lack of resolve—their weakness, not the Kremlin’s. And, if need be, he is prepared to make outlandish denials, no matter how implausible. Russian propagandists have argued that the Malaysian airliner shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2015 was packed with corpses by bad actors trying to frame Russia and that the scenes of war crimes in Bucha were “staged.” Indeed, Shoigu’s Sunday phone calls opened the possibility of Russia deflecting blame for a nuclear strike by claiming that it was a Ukrainian false-flag operation.

The arguments that Putin won’t use nuclear weapons because doing so would endanger Russians, including himself, are blind to the fact that Putin believes he has the right, possibly the moral obligation, to sacrifice hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The argument that a nuclear strike wouldn’t help Putin achieve his strategic goals mistakes Russia’s strategic goals as anything but inflicting terror on Ukrainians. The losses the Russian military is suffering now can only motivate Putin to create more terror, against more people.

The one credible argument remaining is that Putin may fear repercussions. He is not afraid of nuclear retaliation—because Ukraine doesn’t have its own nuclear weapons and NATO is unlikely to mount a nuclear response against the use of a nuclear weapon inside Ukraine. (And, if NATO did, Putin believes that he would have a totally mobilized, albeit diminished, nation.) What he may fear, however, is an extreme response from NATO using conventional weapons—a series of strikes, for example, that would devastate Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and destroy all its remaining military capability in Ukraine. This would be a blow so humiliating that nothing but a second, more powerful nuclear strike could avenge it. Is that a prospect that Putin is unwilling to contemplate? Possibly not, but it is as close as the West can get to deterrence these days. 

Why Vladimir Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine

The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not.

The New Yorker · by Masha Gessen · November 1, 2022

On October 23rd, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, made phone calls to the defense ministers of four NATO member countries to tell each of them that Ukraine was planning to detonate a “dirty bomb”—that is, a conventional weapon spiked with radioactive material—on its own territory. Three of the four recipients of this information—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—responded that day with an unusual joint statement denouncing the claim. (Shoigu’s fourth interlocutor was Turkey.) Russian leaders and propagandists, who covered the phone calls in some detail, don’t necessarily think that anyone, anywhere, will believe that Ukraine would use a radioactive weapon against its own people just so it can blame Russia for the attack. Shoigu’s phone calls were preëmptive, another example of Russia creating information noise, sowing doubt, asserting the fundamental unknowability of the facts of war. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin said that he had personally directed Shoigu to make the calls, and this claim underscored their true meaning: Russia is preparing for a nuclear, or nuclearish, strike in Ukraine.

This was not the first, second, or third time that Moscow had sent this message. Putin has been rattling the nuclear sabre since the start of the full-scale invasion in February, and, indeed, for many years before. In 2014, months after annexing Crimea and at the height of engineering a pro-Russian insurgency war in eastern Ukraine, Russia changed its military doctrine to open up the possibility of a nuclear first strike in response to a threat from NATO. In 2018, Putin first proffered his promise—since reprised, and replayed many times by Russian television—that, in a world-scale nuclear event, Russians will go to heaven while Americans “just croak.” The threat of a nuclear strike has become more apparent—more frequently repeated on Russian propaganda channels—since the Ukrainian counter-offensive began, at the end of the summer.

The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not. Earlier this month, the U.K.’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, reassured the audience at a Conservative Party conference that, although Putin’s actions could be “totally irrational,” he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons because he couldn’t risk losing the support of China and India—both of which, Wallace asserted, had put Putin on notice. President Biden has offered a different perspective: Putin, he said, is a “rational actor who has miscalculated significantly” in launching his offensive in Ukraine, and this was the reason he wouldn’t use nuclear arms. (On another occasion, Biden said that a Russian nuclear strike would unleash Armageddon.) Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, has consistently said that the White House takes Putin’s threats seriously and would respond decisively in the case of a nuclear attack. Still, in recent weeks, as Moscow has ramped up its warnings, it has become conventional wisdom, or perhaps just good form, to say that Putin isn’t really going to use nukes. “Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably not drop an atomic bomb on Ukraine,” a September Washington Post editorial began, axiomatically. Bloomberg’s European affairs columnist Andreas Kluth started a recent column by instructing the reader to “put aside, if you can, the growing anxiety about Russian President Vladimir Putin going nuclear in his barbaric war in Ukraine” because, Kluth asserted, the risk “remains small.”

These reassurances tend to rely on arguments that fall into three categories: Putin fears the consequences of a nuclear strike, Putin is unwilling to put Russian citizens at risk, and a nuclear strike will not help accomplish Putin’s strategic goals. Back in July, James Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, laid out most of these arguments in a Bloomberg column. He wrote that Putin understands he needs to work to maintain the political support China has reluctantly given him, and the economic coöperation of Latin American, African, and South Asian countries—especially India—that continue to buy Russian oil and gas. Putin also, according to Stavridis, “likes his life and loves his country”—and the use of a nuclear weapon would jeopardize both. Stavridis argued that the conceivable strategic objectives of using a nuclear weapon—to cut off military supply lines by destroying the western Ukrainian city of Lviv; to decapitate the state by annihilating the capital, Kyiv; to devastate Ukraine’s economy by pulverizing the Black Sea trade-port city of Odesa—could be achieved with less risk by using conventional weapons. Finally, Stavridis noted, if Russia used a nuclear weapon, it could not deny that it had, the way it was able to at least attempt to deny that it had used chemical weapons in Syria.

In an October 5th Substack newsletter, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, one of the most knowledgeable observers of the war in Ukraine, cautioned his audience against caving to Putin’s “nuclear blackmail” and advanced several new arguments for why Putin is not about to use nuclear weapons. With a military draft in effect since late September, Russia is putting hundreds of thousands of men on the ground in Ukraine, and Putin wouldn’t want to risk killing them by detonating a nuclear bomb, Snyder argued. Russia has unilaterally (and illegally) declared a chunk of Ukraine to be part of Russia—which makes it impossible for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb in eastern Ukraine, where it would presumably devastate lands and people Russia claims as its own. The country has had so much trouble holding on to its military equipment, and, conversely, Ukraine has proven so adept at shooting down and capturing Russian weapons, that Moscow would not risk bringing a nuclear weapon even close to Ukraine. Finally, Snyder argued, given that Russia has been losing to Ukraine for months, if Putin were going to detonate a nuclear bomb as a desperate response to military defeat, he would have done so already. What Putin really needs, Snyder argued, is to shore up his power at home, something he is more likely to accomplish by finding a way to end the war—a nuclear bomb, Snyder suggested, would almost certainly prolong it.

Snyder is making the case that a nuclear attack against Ukraine would risk too much collateral damage to Putin, his people, and his troops—and that Putin’s awareness of these risks has so far held him back. And, like Stavridis, he suggests that Putin doesn’t need to use nuclear weapons to end the war. But, as the nuclear-arms expert Ankit Panda told my colleague Isaac Chotiner, Putin has been consistently—and unproductively, from the point of view of Western war science—running down his conventional arsenal; soon, cannon fodder, Iranian drones, and nuclear arms may be all he has left. “He’s making tactical military decisions that really don’t make sense from the perspective of rational military planning,” Panda said.

When we say that someone isn’t acting rationally, what we mean is that we do not understand the world in which the person’s actions are rational. The problem is not so much that Putin is irrational; the problem is that there is a world in which it is rational for him to move ever closer to a nuclear strike, and most Western analysts cannot comprehend the logic of that world. Robert Jay Lifton, the pioneering psychiatrist and historian who has written about nuclear arms for half a century, is fond of quoting the philosopher Martin Buber’s phrase “imagine the real.” That is what we fail to do when we talk about Putin and his nuclear threat: we can’t imagine the very real possibility that he will follow through.

We have three sources for understanding what the world looks like to Putin: Putin’s own statements, Russian propaganda, and the voices of Russian defectors. During the Soviet period, memoirs by men who fled to the West—such as the former Party functionary Abdurahman Avturkhanov and the former spy Anatoli Granovsky—served as manuals to the thinking of the Soviet leadership for generations of researchers. These days, it’s much easier to leave Russia than during the Soviet Union, when citizens were rarely allowed to travel abroad and, if they were, had to endure constant surveillance. And yet few highly placed Russians have left recently, and so far only Boris Bondarev, a diplomat who defected following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has written in detail about his experience. Bondarev’s article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is a fascinating account of a conspiracy of distortion. “Even some of my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their televisions all day,” Bondarev, who had been stationed in Geneva, wrote. “It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves.”

After Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, the U.S., members of the European Union, and some other Western nations imposed economic sanctions on the country. Putin responded with counter-sanctions, effectively isolating the Russian economy even further. The Kremlin spun the entire affair as a victory, a boon for domestic manufacturing—and in some sectors this was true. But, Bondarev writes, some essential components used in defense production—sensors for aircraft, for example—came from Western manufacturers, and sanctions cut off the supply. “Although it was clear to my team how these losses undermined Russia’s strength, the foreign ministry’s propaganda helped keep the Kremlin from finding out,” Bondarev writes. “The consequences of this ignorance are now on full display in Ukraine: the sanctions are one reason Russia has had so much trouble with its invasion.”

Similarly, diplomats covered up losses on the international-relations front. In 2018, when Russia stood accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in Salisbury, the Kremlin attempted to derail the investigation by introducing a resolution before the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It was easily defeated, but Bondarev writes that cables to Moscow reduced the loss to a single sentence, surrounded by paragraphs “about how they had defeated the numerous ‘anti-Russian,’ ‘nonsensical,’ and ‘groundless’ moves made by Western states.”

Such is the feedback loop of propaganda, ambition, and fear that shapes Putin’s perceptions of the world. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Bondarev writes, many of his colleagues “took pride in our increasingly bellicose behavior.” When questioned, “they gestured at our nuclear force.” This was during the very early days of the full-scale war, when Russians and much of the world believed that Ukraine would quickly lose. As the Russian offensive faltered, the deployment of the nuclear threat went from triumphant to menacing. “One official, a respected expert on ballistic missiles, told me that Russia needed to ‘send a nuclear warhead to a suburb of Washington,’ ” Bondarev writes. “He added, ‘Americans will shit their pants and rush to beg us for peace.’ He appeared to be partially joking. But Russians tend to think that Americans are too pampered to risk their lives for anything, so when I pointed out that a nuclear attack would invite catastrophic retaliation, he scoffed: ‘No, it wouldn’t.’ ”

Although it may be evident to a non-Russian military strategist that the use of a nuclear weapon would be strategically disastrous for Russia, Putin sees his mission in grander and less pragmatic terms. He believes that, on the one hand, he is facing down an existential threat to Russia and, on the other, that Western nations don’t have the strength of their convictions to retaliate if it comes to nukes. Any small sign of a crack in the Western consensus—be it French President Emmanuel Macron pressuring Ukraine to enter peace negotiations, or the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy criticizing what he sees as unconditional aid to Ukraine—bolsters Putin’s certainty. An army of yes-men and the propaganda machine amplify both the threat Russia ostensibly faces and the support it supposedly enjoys.

Last week, Putin hosted his annual Valdai policy conference, an invitation-only junket that has traditionally served as a way for him to broadcast his message to the world. In the past, the audience has consisted largely of Western journalists and Russia scholars. But the crowd at this year’s event was different. The topic was “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for All.” Putin delivered a nearly hour-long talk on the need to liberate the non-Western world from the choke hold of “cancel culture” and “the ten different genders” that the West inflicts on countries in place of “traditional values.” For a couple of hours afterward, he fielded questions from representatives of Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and others; most speakers began by expressing respect bordering on adulation. “Many countries are tired of living under the rule of external powers,” Putin remarked at one point. “The more they see us pushing back against that pressure, the more they support us. That support will only grow.”

Putin’s world view—in which he, a once-lowly K.G.B. bureaucrat, wields a mighty sword that will save the world from decadence and decay—is the product of his specific background and historical moment, but it also belongs to a recognizable type of thought. Charles Strozier, who founded the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, has written extensively on what he calls the “fundamentalist mindset,” the kind of thinking that can fuel genocidal violence. And he has recently written about the evidence that suggests Putin, like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, has it. Strozier told me, “The thing that psychologically infuses the leadership style of someone like Putin, or Hitler, is the certainty that comes with paranoia.”

That Putin is paranoid is an observable fact: he is obsessed with the idea that Russia is surrounded by enemies; he is terrified of all protest and dissent, even though he has long since disabled any levers by which either could influence his regime; his fear of the coronavirus and, possibly, assassination, has driven him into near-total isolation and compels him to hold in-person conversations across giant tables. “The certainty that comes with paranoia is a strength of their leadership style, but, because they are inflexible, they make huge mistakes,” Strozier said.

The fundamentalist mind-set is apocalyptic and millenarian. Hitler had the idea of the “thousand-year Reich,” which positioned him as a successor to Roman and German emperors. Putin’s excursions into history have been similarly grandiose: he views himself as the last of a lineage of Russian emperors, and he explicitly dismisses historical facts—such as the existence of the Ukrainian state—that interfere with this narrative. Snyder, the Yale historian, has written extensively about the apparent influence on Putin of Ivan Ilyin, a twentieth-century Russian émigré philosopher who believed that the world, corrupted by Western-style liberalism and individualism, was ripe for radical renewal at the turn of the new millennium. I think that Snyder may overestimate the primacy of Ilyin’s teachings in Putin’s thinking: Putin uses ideas instrumentally, picking up and wielding them when he needs to say something that affirms his intuition. He has, similarly, used the ideas of the contemporary philosopher Alexander Dugin, another mystical thinker who believes that Russia’s mission is to restore traditional order to a world endangered by chaos coming from the West. The specific words and concepts are less important than Putin’s sense of his own vast historic mission.

In a 1990 book called “The Genocidal Mentality,” Lifton, the psychohistorian, discussed the term “nuclearism,” which he viewed as an ideology akin to Nazism. The politics of deterrence, he argued—the entire school of thought that saw the survival of the world as contingent on a balance between powers capable of annihilating it—activated “a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, deploy, and, according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons known to destroy entire human populations.” Both nuclearism and Nazism offered themselves as cures for historical disasters: Nazism for the humiliation Germany supposedly suffered in the aftermath of the First World War and nuclearism for the catastrophe wrought by the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both Nazism and nuclearism positioned themselves as preventive, as hedges against a greater threat—to the Aryan race by Jews and others, or to all of human life by nuclear holocaust. Both ideologies are peculiarly modern in that they “include near worship of science and technology.” And both feature “vast societal involvement in a genocidal project, creating dangerous forms of bureaucratic momentum that can carry one across the threshold into genocide.”

In May, I wrote about the way Russian television was broadcasting Putin’s nuclear threat on repeat. Since then, the threat has morphed into a sense of inevitability. “We are not calling for nuclear war,” Margarita Simonyan, the chief of the RT propaganda consortium, said, shortly after Putin ordered the draft in September. “We are telling you that we have no other choice.”

The threat against which Russia must wield its nuclear shield is the encroachment of the West, framed variously as the expansion of NATO, an assault on traditional values, the advancement of “gender ideology,” and a spreading decadence. All of it adds up to an existential threat to Russia, which in Putin’s view is a besieged island of heterosexuality, whiteness, and truth. Strozier has written that the fundamentalist mind-set involves an overarching mission that justifies all means. “The salvational notion is always present in genocide,” he told me, citing Hitler’s belief that inferior forms of life had to be exterminated to enable the thousand-year Reich. “Large-scale violence, genocide is embarked upon for a moral purpose.”

Putin and his propaganda machine have also framed the war in Ukraine as a struggle that flows directly out of the battles of the Second World War. Over the years, Putin has reminded Russians that they sacrificed the most in the fight against the Nazis—at least twenty six and a half million killed, according to post-Soviet historians. (A disproportionate number of those lost lives were Ukrainian, but Russia lays claim to their legacy, too.) He has also asserted that Russia was “alone” in fighting the Nazi menace and therefore Russia has the right to determine who is a Nazi now. But Russia is not just cosplaying the Second World War—the country is still prosecuting it, fighting to regain the superpower status once achieved by beating back Nazi Germany. This narrative bolsters Putin’s belief that he has the moral right to use nuclear arms. The Americans did it, so the Russians can, too.

Lifton won the National Book Award in 1969 for a book about survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, in which he described the predicament of the city’s residents as a “lifelong immersion in death.” The phrase can just as well be used to describe the experience of Russians who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. Putin was born in the first postwar decade, and raised in Leningrad, a city that lost a still uncounted number of civilians—the official toll was six hundred and thirty-two thousand, but estimates range upward of a million—during a nearly nine-hundred-day siege. The siege of Leningrad was, by contemporary standards, a war crime, one that Russian troops have repeated this year in Mariupol and elsewhere in Ukraine. The devastation of the city and the degradation of its residents were total: people died of hunger, but not before they had eaten, pawned, or used as fuel whatever remained of their lives.

After the war, Soviet propaganda glossed over the ugly brutality of the siege while it valorized its victims and survivors. Polina Barskova, a Russian poet, literary scholar, and historian at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “What distinguished books about the siege that could be published from those that couldn’t was that the former claimed the sacrifice had a purpose. It was Victory with a capital “V” over Enemy with a capital “E” and Evil with a capital “E.” It’s the kind of goal for which you can sacrifice any number of human lives.” For Leningrad natives, this myth is a birthright. For Putin, it is further proof that he has the moral right to kill, or condemn, entire human populations.

Putin’s older brother died, as a toddler, during the siege. His parents survived—barely, miraculously. “No one could survive by living solely off the ration cards issued by the government,” Barskova, whose book of short stories and essays about the siege, “Living Pictures,” was recently published in an English translation, said. “That is just a fact. Every survivor was a miracle, and most acts of surviving were transgressive, criminal.” Survivors had access to state power—nomenklatura rations—or committed crimes to pull through, or both. Putin is now the head of the criminal state that is Russia. He believes that he is exceptional and will survive the nuclear disaster he unleashes. It also helps that he has built a series of bunkers, underground palaces where, he imagines, he can survive the nuclear holocaust in luxury.

In the end, every “rational” case for why Putin won’t use nuclear weapons in Ukraine falls short. He is not afraid of losing support from his current allies, because he misapprehends Russia’s position in the world; he sees Russia as politically, economically, and militarily stronger than it is. Chinese and Indian leaders may express alarm at the use of extreme measures such as nuclear weapons, but to Putin this points to their lack of resolve—their weakness, not the Kremlin’s. And, if need be, he is prepared to make outlandish denials, no matter how implausible. Russian propagandists have argued that the Malaysian airliner shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2015 was packed with corpses by bad actors trying to frame Russia and that the scenes of war crimes in Bucha were “staged.” Indeed, Shoigu’s Sunday phone calls opened the possibility of Russia deflecting blame for a nuclear strike by claiming that it was a Ukrainian false-flag operation.

The arguments that Putin won’t use nuclear weapons because doing so would endanger Russians, including himself, are blind to the fact that Putin believes he has the right, possibly the moral obligation, to sacrifice hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The argument that a nuclear strike wouldn’t help Putin achieve his strategic goals mistakes Russia’s strategic goals as anything but inflicting terror on Ukrainians. The losses the Russian military is suffering now can only motivate Putin to create more terror, against more people.

The one credible argument remaining is that Putin may fear repercussions. He is not afraid of nuclear retaliation—because Ukraine doesn’t have its own nuclear weapons and NATO is unlikely to mount a nuclear response against the use of a nuclear weapon inside Ukraine. (And, if NATO did, Putin believes that he would have a totally mobilized, albeit diminished, nation.) What he may fear, however, is an extreme response from NATO using conventional weapons—a series of strikes, for example, that would devastate Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and destroy all its remaining military capability in Ukraine. This would be a blow so humiliating that nothing but a second, more powerful nuclear strike could avenge it. Is that a prospect that Putin is unwilling to contemplate? Possibly not, but it is as close as the West can get to deterrence these days. 

The New Yorker · by Masha Gessen · November 1, 2022

16. US Inspectors in Ukraine Won't Be Near the Front, Pentagon Says

US Inspectors in Ukraine Won't Be Near the Front, Pentagon Says

military.com · by Travis Tritten · November 1, 2022

U.S. defense personnel inspecting foreign weapons shipments inside Ukraine won't be close to the front-line fighting, Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Tuesday when questioned over the risk of engaging with Russian forces in the war.

The Pentagon has not provided the number of personnel or number and location of site visits in the country, which are aimed at ensuring the immense flow of American and other allied military aid is not trafficked. But Ryder asserted the new mission is not an escalation of U.S. involvement in the eight-month-old conflict.

"No, no, this is responsible management of the capabilities that we're providing to the Ukrainians," Ryder said during a public briefing with reporters. "And as I mentioned, the Ukrainians are working very closely with us to provide insight and tracking of those capabilities in places where it's not safe for U.S. personnel to go."

The inspection teams are working under the defense attache and the Office of Defense Cooperation at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. Such monitoring of aid shipments to foreign allies is not unusual, but it is the first time the Pentagon has acknowledged U.S. personnel working outside of the embassy since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

"My understanding is they would be well, well far away from any type of front-line actions," Ryder said. "We're relying on the Ukrainians to do that; we're relying on other partners to do that. So essentially, that would not be the case for U.S. personnel."

Uniformed military personnel are assigned to the Kyiv embassy, as well as a Marine Corps security detail.

On Friday, the Pentagon announced a $275 million package of weapons aid to Ukraine -- the 24th time it has tapped its inventories to aid Kyiv through presidential drawdown authority since August 2021. The latest shipment includes High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, precision guided artillery rounds, remote anti-armor mine systems, Humvees and small arms, among other items.

The U.S. has sent $17.6 billion in security assistance since the start of the war, according to a Pentagon update on Oct. 14. The inspections are designed to ensure none of that aid is being skimmed or transferred out of the war zone to other parts of Eastern Europe or the world.

Russia has claimed without evidence that weapons supplied to Ukraine have found their way onto the black market in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, according to Reuters. Russia's foreign minister, Maria Zakharova, said in October that a "considerable part" of the missile and artillery systems and ammunition has or will be resold elsewhere in what would appear to be a bid to slow the flow of weapons flowing into the country to aid Ukrainian forces.

A senior defense official said Monday that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been speaking with Ukraine about accounting for the weapons, and that Kyiv is tracking the assistance from the time it enters the country to the front lines of the war. But an effort is underway to improve the monitoring.

"DoD is conducting hands-on training with the Ukrainian Armed Forces on U.S. best practices so they can provide better data, for example, from sites close to the front lines that U.S. personnel cannot visit," the official said on condition of anonymity to brief reporters.

The U.S. personnel in the field will still be operating around weapons caches in a country that is under assault.

Russia has continued missile strikes on infrastructure in Ukraine such as its power grid -- a ruthless tactic that has also included bombing train stations, apartment buildings and other non-military targets.

The strikes have left Ukrainians without power and utilities as winter approaches and Russia continues to fight pitched battles with Ukrainian forces over territory in the east.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has also threatened to use nuclear weapons and pressed claims that Kyiv is preparing to detonate a so-called "dirty bomb" that could spread nuclear radiation. The U.S. and western allies have shot down the claims as baseless.

-- Travis Tritten can be reached at travis.tritten@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Tritten.

military.com · by Travis Tritten · November 1, 2022

17. The Real China Hands

Yes we should listen closely and pay attention to our Asia-Pacific allies.

Excerpts:

The United States has one advantage in the unfolding geopolitical contest with China that Beijing cannot replicate: a network of security alliances with democracies spanning the Pacific Ocean. Although China can claim growing influence in parts of the global South, Beijing’s closest security partnerships are limited to a flailing Russia, an isolated Iran, and a provocative North Korea. The United States, in contrast, has well-established treaties with the region’s most advanced economies and militaries.

In 1991, James Baker, then the U.S. secretary of state, wrote in these pages that Asian security was underpinned by the “hub and spokes” of America’s bilateral alliances in the region. Today, that structure is shifting more and more toward the hubs. Australia and Japan are establishing deeper security cooperation with each other and building partnerships and capacity in other countries in the region, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Greater U.S. investment in its closest alliances will pay dividends not only in the integration and readiness of those bilateral relationships but also in the ability of U.S. allies to bolster cooperation and resilience across the region.

The strengthening of these broader alliance networks will also help reset China’s expectations about American staying power and the durability of regional security networks. The economic interdependence of all U.S. allies with China makes a NATO-style collective security arrangement a nonstarter in the absence of major military moves by Beijing. But the Quad, AUKUS, and the burgeoning security ties among Asian democracies serve as useful reminders to Beijing that its coercion has consequences and that collective security arrangements that constrain China’s choices are indeed possible.

At the same time, some in Beijing may also find that the U.S. emphasis on allies helps stabilize U.S.-Chinese relations. Abe’s strategy for competition with China helped define U.S. strategy under both Trump and Biden. Abe’s search for a sustainable equilibrium with China should also shape thinking in Washington. After all, from Canberra to Tokyo, there is a deep consensus: that beyond the immediate task of defending against China’s coercion, the long game is achieving a productive relationship with Beijing.

The Real China Hands

What Washington Can Learn From Its Asian Allies

By Michael J. Green

November/December 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Michael J. Green · November 1, 2022

For four years, as an increasingly belligerent China breathed down their necks, the United States’ allies in Asia quietly endured a torrent of abuse from President Donald Trump. Under President Joe Biden, they again have a winning hand in Washington. By the time he took office, Biden, a leading optimist about cooperation with China when he was vice president, had transformed into a hardened skeptic. He has promoted key alliance builders to the top Asia posts at the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Pentagon and ensured that his first in-person summit was with Yoshihide Suga, then Japan’s prime minister. His administration has elevated the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), the group linking the United States with Australia, India, and Japan, to a regular summit and agreed to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact with that country and the United Kingdom. The White House’s Indo-Pacific strategy, issued in February 2022, mentioned allies or alliances more than 30 times in a 19-page document. China merited only two references.

Despite this welcome attention, the United States still fundamentally gets the relationship with its Asian allies backward. These countries are not reluctant partners that need to be shaken out of their complacency; they live with the threat of China every day, are eager to blunt it, and in fact originated many of the Biden administration’s initiatives to counter the country’s influence. Nor are they reckless novices that fail to understand the dangers of competition with China; they often have a far more subtle understanding of coexistence than the one that prevails in Washington. As it refines its China strategy, the United States should increasingly take its cues from Australia, Japan, and South Korea.

Indeed, as the United States becomes more dependent on allies to maintain a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, those countries will naturally expect a larger voice in formulating strategy on China. But the United States remains out of sync with its allies on two of the biggest strategic questions: the role that regional free-trade agreements should play in competition with China and the ultimate goal of allied policy toward China. And there are dangerous deficiencies in technology sharing and command and control that need to be addressed. These misalignments are not merely harmless differences between friends. The longer they last, the more China will be able to take advantage of them.

EARLY WARNING

As U.S. policymakers revamp their country’s China policy, a good place to start would be to recognize that it was not the United States that moved first to respond to the China challenge but its allies. A decade ago, the Obama administration was flirting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s proposal for a “new model of great-power relations,” which, in Beijing’s version, would have relegated Japan and South Korea to second-tier status in a new bipolar U.S.-Chinese condominium. Tokyo and other capitals quietly protested, as they had in 2009, when President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao signed a joint statement promising to respect U.S.-Chinese “core interests” and when Obama administration officials proposed “strategic reassurance” to Beijing. It was not that U.S. allies sought confrontation, but they had legitimate concerns about losing U.S. support at a time of growing Chinese coercion in their region.

U.S. officials shifted their stance near the end of the Obama administration, when the revisionist dimensions of China’s strategy became more apparent. The mood of the broader public was changing, too. In 2012, a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 40 percent of Americans favored placing a higher priority on building good relations with China than with U.S. allies; by 2018, that number had fallen to 26 percent. The sentiment was mirrored on the other side of the Pacific, with polls in Australia, Japan, and South Korea showing overwhelming support in each country for their alliances with the United States.

In waking up to the threat of China, Washington was far behind its most important allies in Asia, especially Japan. Back in 2013, as Washington anticipated a closer partnership with Xi, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government released a strategy for longer-term competition that was based on assumptions about Chinese behavior that are now widely accepted in U.S. policy circles. Abe’s controversial views on Japan’s own history—he had argued that Japan was often unfairly criticized for its conduct during World War II—made him look to many in Washington like an unwelcome spoiler in U.S.-Chinese relations. Beijing sought to exploit those doubts by targeting him with a global media campaign. (In one of the more histrionic episodes of Beijing’s relentless campaign, the Chinese ambassador in London went so far as to write an article for The Telegraph comparing Abe to the evil Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter books.) But Abe persisted with his strategy. He had been returned to power by a ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) looking to reset relations with Beijing after years of embarrassing Chinese incursions around the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands). Abe understood full well what Washington was only beginning to realize: that China’s leaders judged both the United States and Japan as being in precipitous decline. He intended to change that perception.

Biden and Abe in Tokyo, December 2013

Toru Hanai / Reuters

Faced with a deteriorating balance of power in relation to China, a nation such as Japan has three basic choices. The first is to get on the bandwagon of the rising power. But that was never an option that Abe or any other Japanese leader would consider. As he told an American audience in 2013, “Japan is not now and will never be a tier-two power.” The second option is internal balancing: enhancing one’s own power to meet the threat. In Japan’s case, the fastest way to accomplish that would have been to acquire nuclear weapons, which the country could develop in less than two years, but the Japanese public remains overwhelmingly opposed, as do its allies. Instead, Abe invested in more targeted defense capabilities and new sources of economic growth. He proposed the acquisition of long-range missiles that would go beyond the strictly defensive mission of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, ended a two-decade decline in defense budgets, and centralized national security decision-making in the prime minister’s office. On the economy, Abe did not undertake the full-throated reforms that most experts have called for, but he did spur growth by deregulating a handful of sectors and by pushing for more women in the workforce.

It was the third way to redress a power imbalance that formed the centerpiece of Abe’s overall strategy: external balancing, or strengthening one’s alliances. A decade ago, Washington may have still been debating the relative importance of cooperating with allies versus cooperating with China, but for Tokyo there was no question which was more important. For most of Japan’s postwar history, governments had interpreted the country’s pacifist constitution as forbidding Japan from coming to the aid of friendly nations under attack. Because the Japanese public feared getting trapped in the United States’ Cold War adventures more than it feared being abandoned, this interpretation provided a convenient alibi for sitting out conflicts from the Vietnam War through the Gulf War. But Abe was now more worried about abandonment than entrapment. The growing chorus of dovish voices in Washington, along with China’s expanded military footprint around Japan, led him to throw out the alibi.

In 2014, Abe introduced legislation recognizing that Japan would exercise the right of collective self-defense and could fight alongside the United States if the need arose. Although Abe was motivated in part by ideological opposition to Japan’s constitutional constraints, he fundamentally sought to ensure that the United States could depend more on Japan in a crisis so that Japan would still be able to depend on the United States. After a grueling 100-plus hours of debate in Japan’s parliament, the country backed him. Abe’s motivation was not a nostalgic attachment to U.S. leadership so much as a realistic assessment of what it would take to shore up U.S. power and commitments in the region for Japan’s own security. That was why he, more than any other world leader, was willing to absorb Trump’s barbs and ensure that he kept the mercurial U.S. president on his side.

As Abe said in 2013: “Japan is not now and will never be a tier-two power.”

Abe’s external balancing strategy also involved reinforcing countries’ resilience against undue Chinese influence and coercion. His “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy not only matched China’s Belt and Road funding but also promised high-quality infrastructure investments that would protect the environment and spare the recipients dangerous debt traps. This focus on helping the region paid off: today, Japan enjoys favorability ratings in South and Southeast Asia that far exceed those of China or any other country in the world. Abe gradually won over skeptical partners on his proposal for reestablishing the Quad after China’s incursions into the South China Sea and the contested Himalayan border with India. Free-trade agreements aimed at reinforcing open economic rules for the region also expanded under Abe. When he began his second stint as prime minister in 2012, less than 20 percent of Japan’s trade was covered by such agreements, but by the time he left office in 2020, the share had reached 80 percent. When the Trump administration withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017, Abe stepped in with his counterparts from Australia, Canada, and Singapore to ensure that the agreement went forward, leaving a place at the table should the United States regain its bearings on trade policy.

No other world leader did more in the face of Chinese revisionism to align the major powers and invest in countries’ durability against it, and that ultimately shaped U.S. strategy. The Trump and Biden administrations’ free and open Indo-Pacific strategies and their embrace of the Quad all flow from Abe’s original framework, often verbatim. Governments across Europe and Asia have begun modeling their approach to the region on the Indo-Pacific concept rather than on Xi’s fading China-centric alternative of a “community of common destiny.”

When Abe was assassinated in July 2022, the world acknowledged his impact. Scholars and diplomats also noted the shortcomings of his approach: challenged relations with South Korea, fruitless diplomatic efforts with Russia, and incomplete efforts at spurring economic growth and sustaining the economic empowerment of women to address Japan’s tough demographic picture. But to move forward, Washington’s own approach to allies must include an understanding of how persistently and effectively Abe introduced the framework that defines competition with China—and where U.S. strategy falls short by comparison.

THE STALWARTS

Japan has emerged as the most important net exporter of security in the Indo-Pacific, but Australia and South Korea remain critical bookends, 96 given their capable militaries and their development and diplomacy toolkits. Largely for reasons of geography, Canberra and Seoul were not as quick to organize in response to the China challenge as Japan—Australia because it is so far from China and South Korea because it is so close. U.S. allies all have closer trade relations with China than the United States does, particularly Australia and South Korea: 35 percent of Australian exports and 25 percent of South Korean exports go to China, compared with 22 percent of Japanese exports and nine percent of U.S. exports. But both Australia and South Korea are increasingly finding ways to adopt the same Indo-Pacific framework that Japan championed and Washington embraced.

Two decades ago, Australia began making a fortune exporting natural resources to China and importing students and tourists. Without the kind of manufacturing base that alerted the Japanese public early on to Chinese misbehavior in the global market—stealing intellectual property, dumping exports at below-market prices, and restricting foreign investment—Australians mostly saw upsides to their economic relationship with China. The Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, found in 2013 that 76 percent of Australians thought their economic future lay with China rather than with the United States, an outlook that mirrored the United States’ growing optimism about China at the time. Whereas successive U.S. administrations spurred Beijing’s request for a “strategic partnership,” Canberra formed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Beijing in 2014.

Beijing’s expansion into the South China Sea in 2014 and 2015 alarmed members of the Australian national security community just as it did their U.S. counterparts. But for most Australians, the wake-up call came in 2018, when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that China was trying to build a submarine base in the Pacific Island of Vanuatu—a development that would have put potentially hostile forces in Australia’s neighborhood for the first time since World War II. Then, in 2019, an influential Australian news program exposed vivid details about the Chinese Communist Party’s extensive operations to influence Australian politics and society, prompting Parliament to draft tough laws against foreign interference.

When the Australian government called for an international inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 in 2020, the Chinese ambassador in Canberra threatened a massive consumer boycott of Australian goods. Chinese imports of coal, copper, barley, and wine from Australia soon fell to a trickle as Beijing tried to use economic interdependence as a tool for coercion. Australian journalists were detained inside China, and Chinese propagandists launched a disinformation campaign in the region with provocative charges of Australian racism and war crimes. Beijing escalated tensions further by delivering a list of 14 demands that Canberra had to meet before relations could improve, including silence on Chinese human rights abuses and an end to funding for think tanks critical of Chinese military activities.

The Chinese gambit failed spectacularly. This year’s Lowy poll found a stunning reversal in views of China, with 75 percent of Australians saying that China will become a military threat to Australia in the future. Australia became the first country to ban the Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from its telecommunications markets, and a new foreign investment review board is limiting Chinese acquisitions of strategic assets in Australia. The government of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who took office in August 2018, defied China’s demands by agreeing to build nuclear-powered submarines and develop other advanced capabilities with the United States and the United Kingdom under the AUKUS pact. Australia has also expanded defense cooperation with Japan, signing an agreement this year that provides reciprocal access to military facilities in the two countries and inviting increasing numbers of Japanese forces to participate in military exercises in Australia. The country has also signed new defense agreements with India. Like Japan, Australia has moved faster than the United States to manage competition with China.

Canberra and Seoul were not as quick to organize in response to the China challenge as Japan.

South Korea is the latest U.S. ally in Asia to join the dance. In its case, China’s proximity left it with much less flexibility than Australia and Japan. Japan has thwarted one Chinese invasion, in the thirteenth century, and Australia has faced none, but South Korea’s history is scarred with dozens of invasions from its giant neighbor to the north. Moreover, China’s influence on North Korea—the most important security challenge for South Korea—is only increasing as Pyongyang has come to rely on China for 90 percent of its trade.

At times, Seoul’s efforts to manage relations with the great powers around the Korean Peninsula have only incited greater suspicion, jealousy, and pressure. The governments of the previous two presidents, Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in, both fell into that trap. Park solicited Beijing’s support despite her pro-alliance bona fides with Washington, and her government implicitly endorsed a U.S.-Chinese structure to Asian geopolitics by proposing a trilateral dialogue for the United States, China, and South Korea, much to the chagrin of Tokyo. In response to a multibillion-dollar Chinese boycott of South Korean companies to punish Seoul for accepting U.S. Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) batteries in 2016, the Moon government promised Beijing that it would limit future military cooperation on missile defense with the United States. This unparalleled accommodation of China with respect to the U.S.–South Korean alliance invited suspicion in Washington and raised ambitions in Beijing.

The South Korean public, however, was souring on China even faster than Australia had. The THAAD boycott, sympathy with Hong Kong’s citizens after Beijing’s crackdown, and mounting troubles for South Korean companies operating in China all cratered that country’s approval ratings. By 2021, 77 percent of South Koreans said they did not trust China. When the conservative politician Yoon Suk-yeul became president in May 2022, he realigned South Korean diplomacy with the United States and even Japan despite lingering tensions with Tokyo over painful historical issues. Yoon will still be constrained by geography and the North Korea problem. When Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited Tokyo after her contentious visit to Taiwan in August, for example, she met with Japan’s prime minister, but when she stopped in Seoul, Yoon was conveniently on vacation. Nevertheless, Seoul’s growing alignment with the United States is now tracking that of Australia and Japan.

In the larger tapestry of U.S. relationships in the Indo-Pacific, the Biden administration is rightly focused on expanded engagement with India through the Quad, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, longtime treaty allies such as the Philippines and Thailand, and, now, with the Pacific Island countries. Many of the nations the United States is courting have dynamic populations poised to play leading roles in the future of the region and the world. Some compete with China but in measured fashion, such as Vietnam and India. All are debating their future trajectories, including their longer-term relationships with the United States and China. That soul-searching makes deeper U.S. engagement all the more important.

At the same time, for the foreseeable future, Australia, Japan, and South Korea will be in a league of their own. These are the alliances that the United States will need most in any regional crisis, and the Biden administration has been right to prioritize them. But it will have to begin thinking of allies not just as instruments of U.S. policy but as strategic innovators who see clearly the gaps in Washington’s own approach.

TELL THEM HOW THIS ENDS

One subtle but crucial difference concerns the long-term vision for relations with China. Abe’s strategy was premised on resetting relations with China, not containing or decoupling entirely from the Chinese economy. In April 2022, when the LDP’s hawkish Research Commission on National Security prepared the ruling party’s framework for Japan’s next defense plan, its members called for a doubling of defense spending to two percent of GDP in five years and an expansion of Japan’s strike capability. Still, the document clarified that the country’s ultimate goal was a “constructive and stable relationship” with China. Even after Beijing’s economic boycott, the Morrison government in Australia expanded funding for exchanges with China through organizations such as the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations, and the new Labor foreign minister, Penny Wong, has spoken of her desire for relations to be “stabilized.” Although South Korean President Yoon promised to back Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy and to be less deferential toward China, his foreign minister, Park Jin, pledged in Beijing to support regional and global cooperation.

One could interpret these stances as duplicitous accommodation, but a more accurate reading would be that all three major allies seek to work with Beijing on issues of concern from a position of strength backed by closer alignment with the United States and other like-minded countries in the region. Put another way, U.S. allies in Asia still hope for some version of the strategy that U.S. presidents from Richard Nixon to Obama pursued in the region: a combination of balancing and engaging China, but with a longer-term aim of integrating the country under rules favorable to the advanced industrial democracies. The idea is to compete with China, but with a clear end state in mind.

There is broad consensus in Canberra, Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington that Xi will present geopolitical and economic challenges for the next decade and that U.S. allies need to cooperate to blunt his worst ambitions. But where the allies differ from Washington is on the need for a framework that does more than isolate Beijing. Although much of the United States’ post–Cold War strategy explicitly sought to shape China in the belief that a combination of engagement and counterbalancing could bend Beijing toward a more durable relationship for the long term, the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy clearly abandons that mission: “Our objective is not to change the [People’s Republic of China] but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners, and the interests and values we share,” the document states.

Xi’s China is a much tougher counterpart, and competition across all domains, from military to technology, will be intense. But the current U.S. approach has left allies and partners wondering what the American endgame is for relations with China. If they haven’t given up on shaping China, neither should the United States.

IT’S THE ECONOMIC STRATEGY, STUPID

Asian allies’ well-known frustration with the lack of a U.S. trade strategy since the Trump administration is rooted in this longer-term search for a workable equilibrium with China, the top trading partner to most of the region. The TPP appealed to the United States’ Indo-Pacific partners not only because it integrated them into the attractive U.S. market but also because it set the stage for more successful negotiations with Beijing over economic rules going forward. The original vision for the TPP was that the weight of so many open regional economies would propel talks on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe and put enormous pressure on Beijing while providing it with incentives to negotiate along similar lines with all the member states. 102 In Sydney in 2007, the United States and other leaders attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum agreed that the TPP would be one building block for a broader free-trade area in the Asia-Pacific that included China. (The U.S. delegation insisted on the term “area” rather than “agreement” to avoid triggering congressional notification before the table was set for taking on negotiations with Beijing.) When the momentum behind the TPP was at its height in 2015, Obama briefed Xi on the pact, and prominent Chinese officials pointed to it as external validation of economic reforms, just as Premier Zhu Rongzi used the agreement creating the World Trade Organization in the 1990s to restructure China’s state-owned enterprises.

Whether that original vision for TPP as a counterweight to Beijing could ever have been realized is now a moot question, since the Trump administration withdrew from the partnership, and the Biden administration is adamant that it will not return. This leaves U.S. allies, the U.S. business community, and even many Chinese businesses in a much weaker negotiating position vis-à-vis the Chinese state. More alarming to those depending on a U.S.-led order is the vacuum created by Washington’s retreat on trade policy. In 2022, an index of regional power maintained by the Lowy Institute upgraded the United States to the top regional diplomatic influence but noted that its economic sway had declined ever more since the Trump years. Xi underscored the point in 2021 when he announced China’s intention to join the successor to the TPP—an agreement Washington had once championed.

U.S. allies are making big moves and taking on new risks.

Understanding the geopolitical ramifications of its absent economic strategy, the Biden administration announced the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) in May 2022 in Tokyo. The IPEF brings the United States together with 13 other regional economies for dialogue on topics including digital trade, the environment, and corruption. Although the participation of countries that have previously avoided trade pacts with the United States, such as India and Indonesia, is a geopolitical plus, Biden administration officials insist that the IPEF is not a trade agreement and that there will be no market-access provisions characteristic of the TPP. India and Indonesia agreed to participate precisely because they were not being asked to open up their markets in any significant way. The IPEF certainly addresses important modern issues such as digital trade, and it is possible that the talks could gather momentum and yield meaningful agreements short of trade liberalization or market access. But it is a shell of what the TTP would have been.

Recognizing that the quarter loaf of the IPEF is better than no loaf at all, U.S. allies are publicly championing the framework as evidence that the United States is back in the economic rule-making game in Asia. Privately, however, there is still great concern that the framework is insufficient to blunt China’s growing economic clout. The obvious way to make the IPEF more substantive would be to negotiate a digital trade agreement based on existing provisions in the U.S. pacts with Canada, Japan, and Mexico that the Trump administration negotiated and in comparable deals that Australia and Singapore signed. This is not likely to happen soon, given the protectionists in the Biden administration and Congress who worry that the IPEF might be a gateway drug to the TPP, but the pressure from allies and business to deliver substantive agreements will continue to build.

BETTER TOGETHER

Just as close allies need the United States to lead constructive engagement with Beijing and meaningful economic initiatives for the region, they also require U.S. backing to strengthen deterrence capabilities in the face of a more menacing China. (That may sound contradictory, but allies in the region have to deal with both realities.) U.S. allies are making big moves and taking on new risks. Japan’s recognition of the right of collective defense and its introduction of strike capability put Tokyo directly in Beijing’s cross hairs. Beijing now regularly releases satellite images of testing ranges shaped like Japanese bases that have been destroyed by ballistic missile attacks. In addition to committing to AUKUS, Australia has pledged to expand weapons production with U.S. firms through the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise, a multibillion-dollar program. In response to growing Chinese military challenges, Australia is developing new initiatives to host more U.S. troops and give the U.S. military greater access to the north and west of the country. And in South Korea, despite threats from Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang, Yoon has sought to increase readiness by resuming regular defense exercises with the United States that Trump and Moon had paused.

These developments have all been embraced by the Biden administration and Congress. Yet even though U.S. allies are making major changes in their defense production and operations, the mechanics of alliance management in Washington are still based on antiquated designs. True, the United States has upgraded its security cooperation with Japan by creating new military-to-military working groups, but the U.S.-Japanese alliance lacks anything like the combined commands that characterize the U.S. alliances with South Korea or NATO—alliances on the frontline that were designed during the Cold War to “fight tonight,” a readiness level still maintained by the U.S. Command in South Korea. Nor was the U.S.-Australian alliance designed for joint warfighting in the Indo-Pacific, despite the close operational relationship that U.S. and Australian forces developed fighting together in the Middle East. Integrated command and control is critical for these alliances because North Korean missiles and Chinese naval deployments have put Japan and even Australia on the frontlines of a potential war for the first time. It also matters because Japan’s deployment of long-range strike capabilities could trigger escalation by China or North Korea if that deployment is not well integrated into U.S. military planning.

Australia, meanwhile, is counting on the Pentagon and the State Department to share military technology in ways that follow through on Biden’s commitment to help build nuclear-powered submarines and other advanced military capabilities. In 2017, Congress expanded the definition of “the national technology and industrial base,” a legal concept demarcating countries whose companies are given national security priority, adding the United Kingdom and Australia. But in parts of the Pentagon and the State Department, the rules governing export licensing and technology transfer continue to be implemented case by case, as if the addition of Australia and the United Kingdom had not occurred, and “buy American” provisions in U.S. legislation continue to obstruct efforts to transfer technologies and integrate production between trusted allies. Without reform, AUKUS and other Australian investments in deterrence will be difficult to realize. That would be a setback for Australia’s defense, its alliance with the United States, and the overall balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.

Allies have big decisions to make as well. For Japan to actually increase defense spending to two percent of GDP, the government would have to cut social welfare programs or issue much more debt than it has. And if it is to further integrate itself into U.S. military planning, it will have to improve its protection of information to the levels of Five Eyes intelligence partners such as Australia that can be trusted not to leak the most sensitive intelligence and technical information. Australia’s initiatives will require increased spending or hard choices about priorities. South Korea under Yoon has pledged to support the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy in Southeast Asia but is sticking to its excuses when it comes to Taiwan contingencies closer to home, preferring to remain neutral rather than upset Beijing. Without more proactive reform from Congress and the Biden administration, however, these choices may remain too hard for U.S. allies to make, which would put all the participants’ security at risk.

HUB, MEET SPOKE

The United States has one advantage in the unfolding geopolitical contest with China that Beijing cannot replicate: a network of security alliances with democracies spanning the Pacific Ocean. Although China can claim growing influence in parts of the global South, Beijing’s closest security partnerships are limited to a flailing Russia, an isolated Iran, and a provocative North Korea. The United States, in contrast, has well-established treaties with the region’s most advanced economies and militaries.

In 1991, James Baker, then the U.S. secretary of state, wrote in these pages that Asian security was underpinned by the “hub and spokes” of America’s bilateral alliances in the region. Today, that structure is shifting more and more toward the hubs. Australia and Japan are establishing deeper security cooperation with each other and building partnerships and capacity in other countries in the region, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Greater U.S. investment in its closest alliances will pay dividends not only in the integration and readiness of those bilateral relationships but also in the ability of U.S. allies to bolster cooperation and resilience across the region.

The strengthening of these broader alliance networks will also help reset China’s expectations about American staying power and the durability of regional security networks. The economic interdependence of all U.S. allies with China makes a NATO-style collective security arrangement a nonstarter in the absence of major military moves by Beijing. But the Quad, AUKUS, and the burgeoning security ties among Asian democracies serve as useful reminders to Beijing that its coercion has consequences and that collective security arrangements that constrain China’s choices are indeed possible.

At the same time, some in Beijing may also find that the U.S. emphasis on allies helps stabilize U.S.-Chinese relations. Abe’s strategy for competition with China helped define U.S. strategy under both Trump and Biden. Abe’s search for a sustainable equilibrium with China should also shape thinking in Washington. After all, from Canberra to Tokyo, there is a deep consensus: that beyond the immediate task of defending against China’s coercion, the long game is achieving a productive relationship with Beijing.

• MICHAEL J. GREEN is CEO of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney. He served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration.

Foreign Affairs · by Michael J. Green · November 1, 2022

18. Ukraine grain export deal back on as Russia resumes participation

Ukraine grain export deal back on as Russia resumes participation

Reuters · by Ali Kucukgocmen

• Summary
• Turkey says grain deal to resume midday on Wednesday
• Russia says it has received guarantees from Ukraine
• Announced guarantees go no further than original deal

ANKARA/KYIV, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it would resume its participation in a deal to free up vital grain exports from war-torn Ukraine after suspending it over the weekend in a move that had threatened to exacerbate hunger across the world.

The Russian defence ministry said it had received written guarantees from Kyiv not to use the Black Sea grain corridor for military operations against Russia.

"The Russian Federation considers that the guarantees received at the moment appear sufficient, and resumes the implementation of the agreement," the ministry statement said.

Russia suspended its involvement in the deal on Saturday, saying it could not guarantee safety for civilian ships crossing the Black Sea because of an attack on its fleet there, part of which it said had originated from within the grains export corridor. Ukraine has said that was a false pretext.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said earlier that Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had told his Turkish counterpart that the July 22 grain deal, brokered by Turkey and the United Nations, would continue to operate as of midday on Wednesday.

"The grain transports will continue as agreed before as of 12 (pm) today," Erdogan said.

The prices of wheat, soybeans, corn and rapeseed fell sharply on global markets following the announcement, which eased concerns about the growing unaffordability of food.

Ships have continued to carry Ukrainian grain on the route despite the suspension, but that had been unlikely to continue for long because insurance companies were not issuing new contracts due to Russia's move, industry sources told Reuters.

"This is quite an unexpected turnaround," Andrey Sizov, the head of Russia-focused Sovecon agriculture consultancy, said of Russia's decision.

"Still, the deal remains shaky, as it is now back in guessing mode as to whether there will be an extension or not. With two weeks to go before the extension, the discussion around this topic will apparently continue," Sizov added.

The deal runs out on Nov. 19 and a European diplomat briefed on the grain talks has told Reuters that Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely to use the possible extension as a way to gain leverage and dominate next month's G20 summit in Indonesia.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the resumption showed how much countries could achieve together.

"This is an expression of how important it is that those who believe in the international order...stand together in these difficult times and do not allow themselves to be blackmailed by Russia," she told broadcaster Welt.

[1/7] Commercial vessels including vessels which are part of Black Sea grain deal wait to pass the Bosphorus strait off the shores of Yenikapi during a misty morning in Istanbul, Turkey, October 31, 2022. REUTERS/Umit Bektas

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said earlier that the world should respond firmly to any Russian attempts to disrupt Ukraine's export corridor across the Black Sea, which was blocked after Moscow invaded Ukraine on February 24.

The Russian blockade has exacerbated food shortages and a cost of living crisis in many countries as Ukraine is one of the world's biggest suppliers of grain and oilseeds.

In a Tuesday night video address, Zelenskiy said ships were still moving out of Ukrainian ports with cargoes thanks to the work of Turkey and the United Nations.

"But a reliable and long-term defence is needed for the grain corridor," Zelenskiy said.

"Russia must clearly be made aware that it will receive a tough response from the world to any steps to disrupt our food exports," Zelenskiy said. "At issue here clearly are the lives of tens of millions of people."

The grains deal aimed to help avert famine in poorer countries by injecting more wheat, sunflower oil and fertilizer into world markets and to ease a steep rise in prices. It targeted the pre-war level of 5 million metric tonnes exported from Ukraine each month.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlu Cavusoglu earlier said Russia was concerned about its fertilizer and grain exports, echoing Russian officials in saying ships carrying them could not dock even though the exports were not included in Western sanctions.

There was no mention of any concessions on those issues in the Russian statement on the resumption.

Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said Moscow's decision to resume the agreement had nothing to do with any guarantees from Ukraine.

"The Kremlin itself simply fell into a trap from which it did not know how to get out," she said.

"It was necessary to retreat and put on a good face (not very successfully) when faced with a bad game. That is, Putin, no matter how preoccupied he is with Ukraine, his historical mission and his faith that he's right, remains a moderately rational politician who knows how to retreat if necessary."

The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told CNN she was "delighted" to hear about Russia's return to the agreement.

"They can't stand in the way of feeding the entire world," she said.

Additional reporting by Ezgi Erkoyun in Ankara and other Reuters bureaux; Writing by Philippa Fletcher; Editing by Angus MacSwan

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Ali Kucukgocmen

19. China and Russia prepare to turn Cold War II into a hot war

Excerpts:

The NDS states Washington’s intent to “ work seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our network of alliances and partnerships.” If there are simultaneous challenges in multiple theaters — which seems to be what China and Russia are planning, with the malevolent participation of North Korea and Iran — it raises again the U.S. commitment to a “two-theater” warfighting capability. 

Given the scope of the challenge and the limits on available resources, America’s “network of alliances and partnerships” had better be prepared to step up and do their share. Nothing less than the fate of Western civilization is at stake. 

China and Russia prepare to turn Cold War II into a hot war

BY JOSEPH BOSCO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 11/01/22 10:00 AM ET

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3713227-china-and-russia-prepare-to-turn-cold-war-ii-into-a-hot-war/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

In 2011, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that both Russia and China posed “the greatest mortal threat” to the United States because of their nuclear capabilities. 

Though he also said neither then evinced an intent to use those capabilities against the United States, several Democratic senators expressed alarm at Clapper’s threat characterization and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) said he should resign.  

Obama’s policies were closely aligned with the committee members’ more relaxed view of the two countries’ relations with the United States. The Trump and Biden foreign policy teams, on the other hand, have shared the increasingly dire assessment of both China and Russia.

Last week, the Biden administration’s Defense Department released its National Defense Strategy (NDS), delayed by the war in Ukraine, along with the companion Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and Missile Defense Review (MDR). Like the earlier National Security Strategy (NSS), the documents place China at the top of the list of security threats facing the United States, with Russia as a close second.

“The PRC presents the most consequential and systemic challenge, while Russia poses acute threats — both to vital U.S. national interests abroad and to the homeland,” the NDS says of the People’s Republic of China.

The document is deficient, however, in understating the extent to which China-Russia collaboration compounds the threat that either poses by itself. It is entirely silent on the emerging security alliance being forged by the two U.S. adversaries.

On the diplomatic and political levels, Russia and China have been the corrosive evil twins at the United Nations for decades. They have used their Security Council vetoes not only to protect themselves and each other from the consequences of their multiple violations of the UN Charter and international law, but also to block or weaken Western sanctions against other global outlaws such as North Korea and Iran. 

In recent years, their cooperation has moved to the security realm, with China participating in a number of Russian war games and joint military exercises simulating their respective defensive capabilities.

Then, last February, just weeks before Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin met at the opening of the Beijing Olympics and released a “Joint Statement on International Relations Entering a New Era.” 

In an apparent response to President Biden’s proclamation of a global competition between democracies and autocracies, they claimed the democratic mantle for themselves. “The sides share the understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of States.”

But the “no-limits strategic partnership” they announced amounted to the declaration of a new cold war between the two autocracies and the Western-led international order. They implicitly repudiated the United Nations documents that enshrined that universality, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which both countries signed.  

By their definition of “universal,” every government or regime gets to proclaim itself democratic by its own whims. Xi and Putin asserted, “It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one.”

Their shared motive in rejecting anything approaching an objective standard was made abundantly clear when the Chinese perpetrator of genocide in Xinjiang and the Russian war criminal in Ukraine jointly stated, “The sides … oppose the abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.”

The joint statement also got down to specifics on how the “democratic value” they envision is to be applied to the situations in their respective regions, where they expressed their reciprocal support. 

From Xi to Putin: “The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches … Russia and China oppose color revolutions.” (Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” occurred in 2004.)  

From Putin to Xi: “The Russian side reaffirms its support for the One-China principle, confirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposes any forms of independence of Taiwan.”

The statement further reads, “The sides stand against the formation of closed bloc structures and opposing camps in the Asia-Pacific region and remain highly vigilant about the negative impact of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region.”

In the months that followed the Xi-Putin meeting and joint statement, China-Russia security relations have deepened, even as Beijing managed to continue financing Russia’s war against Ukraine without running afoul of U.S. sanctions.

The sanctions loophole China found was the same one it has successfully exploited with North Korea’s coal exports — by expanding exponentially its purchases of Russian oil, which is not covered by the sanctions, from pre-war levels. (The sanctions regimes clearly need to be strengthened by establishing a baseline of third-party purchases of exports from sanctioned countries, say, at the average level for the five prior years.)

In September, Russia and China held their 17th meeting on strategic cooperation. Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, met China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Fujian and stated, “The development of a strategic partnership with China is an unconditional priority of Russian foreign policy. The sides agreed on further military cooperation with a focus on joint exercises and patrols, as well as on strengthening contacts between the General Staffs.”

While Yang studiously avoided mentioning Ukraine, Patrushev said, “The Russian side takes a firm stand on the one-China principle, and firmly supports the measures taken by the Chinese government to safeguard sovereignty and territorial integrity on the Taiwan question.”

Even in their September meeting in Uzbekistan, when Xi expressed some “questions and concerns” about how the war in Ukraine was proceeding, Xi pledged to “work with Russia to extend strong mutual support on issues concerning each other’s core interests,” i.e., Ukraine and Taiwan.   

Yale’s perplexing invitation to judicial bullies

Rishi Sunak’s anti-fracking gift to Vladimir Putin

The NDS states Washington’s intent to “ work seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our network of alliances and partnerships.” If there are simultaneous challenges in multiple theaters — which seems to be what China and Russia are planning, with the malevolent participation of North Korea and Iran — it raises again the U.S. commitment to a “two-theater” warfighting capability. 

Given the scope of the challenge and the limits on available resources, America’s “network of alliances and partnerships” had better be prepared to step up and do their share. Nothing less than the fate of Western civilization is at stake. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.

20. Rubio, Gallagher, Hagerty, and McCaul Express Concern Over Indo-Pacific Force Posture

Perhaps we need to resurrect the proposal for a Far Eas Combatant Command or a Northeast Asia Combatant Command in Korea. But we should also consider a "super" or regional ambassador in Japan and a Far East Asia Economic Cooperation center in Taiwan.  

From a paper I contributed to Patrick Cronin's report (Pathways to Peace: Achieving the Stable Transformation of the Korean Peninsula) pre-COVID.

One of the ways for the United States to look at its future in Northeast Asia is to revise its military, diplomatic, and economic structures in the region. In recent years, Washington has undertaken a pivot or rebalance to Asia, and under the current administration transformed the US Pacific Command into the US Indo-Pacific Command. The latter highlights the importance of the entire region, which has been codified in the Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy. However, the Asia-Pacific theater is large and complex. Perhaps it is time to reexamine the Unified Command Plan and consider reorganizing the structure and responsibilities in the theater. The United States should examine the feasibility of establishing a Northeast Asia Command as a new and separate combatant command. This is not a new idea, but it has never been sufficiently examined. Given the importance of the entire region and Northeast Asia within it, a separate combatant command with responsibility for Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan, China, and the Russian Far East would enhance US strategic capabilities. However, one argument against this idea will always come to the fore. Whenever a new set of boundaries is established, it will always create gaps and seams. This is especially true when competition with China is considered. But such a recommendation should not be discounted solely for that reason. The analysis may reveal other opportunities and, even if the proposal is not accepted, may reveal other ways to better support US strategic objectives. 

While new ideas tend to focus on how to organize the military, the other instruments of power should also be considered. Perhaps it is time to think about creating a diplomatic organization in the region to coordinate all diplomatic activities and all information and influence activities to support US strategic objectives. A US Northeast Asia ambassador with the requisite supporting staff organization would provide the diplomatic and information effort necessary to synchronize the elements of national power. A third organization to support the economic instrument of power could be a Northeast Asia Economic Engagement Center. These three organizations would not only bring the strength of the US instruments of power to the region in a new and dynamic way; they would also send a powerful message of commitment, especially if they were located in the right places. The Northeast Asia Command could be located in Korea, the Northeast Asia ambassador in Japan, and the Northeast Asia Economic Engagement Center in Taiwan. Of course, this would create political challenges. However, such a proposal could also enhance the strength and power of the US alliance structure in the region and provide allies with effective tools to compete with the revisionist powers and defend against the rogue powers as outlined in the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. These are merely proposals and may not be at all feasible. However, it is time to creatively reexamine employment of the instruments of power to see if the United States can be more effective in achieving its strategic objectives and maintaining and strengthening its alliances in Northeast Asia. 

https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.hudson.org/Cronin_Pathways%20to%20Peace%20-%20Achieving%20the%20Stable%20Transformation%20of%20the%20Korean%20Peninsula.pdf#page=61

Rubio, Gallagher, Hagerty, and McCaul Express Concern Over Indo-Pacific Force Posture

https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?id=7648A046-C275-4476-987A-89808FF4C99E

NOV 01 2022

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) reportedly plans to retire its entire fleet of F-15 fighter jets in Okinawa, Japan, without replacing them with a permanent U.S. military presence. 

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI) sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warning that this move undermines efforts to deter a potential attack on Taiwan by the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army and may be perceived by Beijing as a sign of weakness. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) also signed the letter.

• “We believe that DoD’s plans to replace permanently-based fighters with rotational forces will lead to a tangible reduction in American forward combat power in the Indo-Pacific, lowering the bar for aggression and demonstrating a continuing mismatch between the Biden Administration’s talking points on the Indo-Pacific and America’s actual commitments in the region.”

• “We are concerned that DoD’s decision sends the wrong signal, not only to the CCP, but also to our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific. We therefore request a Congressional briefing on DoD’s actions articulating specific steps to replace the deterrent value and combat capability of any assets removed from the Indo-Pacific region, as well as the administration’s plan to establish a force posture in the Indo-Pacific that would be resilient to a CCP attack and capable of deterring an invasion of Taiwan.” 

The full text of the letter is below. 

Dear Secretary Austin:

We write with concern over recent reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) will retire its entire fleet of F-15 fighter jets currently based in Okinawa, Japan, without replacing them with a permanent presence anywhere in Japan.

According to public reporting, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) plans to retire two squadrons of F-15 Eagles that were permanently based in Okinawa. This decision would involve half of the roughly 100 USAF fighters in Japan. While we agree with the need to modernize the Air Force’s fleet in order to counter the rising threat of the People’s Liberation Army, we are concerned with reporting that indicates that there will be no permanent presence to replace the Okinawa F-15s. Instead, USAF plans to send F-22 fighters from Alaska to Okinawa on only a rotational basis. 

As you know, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is expanding its aggression in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. In his 20th Party Congress report, CCP General Secretary of Xi Jinping stated, “[w]e have shown a fighting spirit and a firm determination to never yield to coercive power” and “the wheels of history are rolling on toward China's reunification… Complete reunification of our country must be realized, and it can, without doubt, be realized!” It is abundantly clear that General Secretary Xi intends to take over Taiwan and establish the CCP as the hegemon in the Indo-Pacific, which would have catastrophic strategic, geopolitical, military, and economic consequences for U.S. interests.  

In this context, we believe that DoD’s plans to replace permanently-based fighters with rotational forces will lead to a tangible reduction in American forward combat power in the Indo-Pacific, lowering the bar for aggression and demonstrating a continuing mismatch between the Biden Administration’s talking points on the Indo-Pacific and America’s actual commitments in the region.

This decision is especially puzzling in light of the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which explicitly prioritizes deterring aggression and makes clear that “[e]arly and continuous consideration, engagement, and where possible, collaboration with Allies and partners in planning is essential for advancing our shared interests.” We are concerned that DoD’s decision sends the wrong signal, not only to the CCP, but also to our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific. We therefore request a Congressional briefing on DoD’s actions articulating specific steps to replace the deterrent value and combat capability of any assets removed from the Indo-Pacific region, as well as the administration’s plan to establish a force posture in the Indo-Pacific that would be resilient to a CCP attack and capable of deterring an invasion of Taiwan. 

We look forward to your prompt response. 

Sincerely,

21. Professionalizing Special Operations Forces

You can download the PDF in the proper format at this link: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/10/

Professionalizing Special Operations Forces

C. Anthony Pfaff

©2022 C. Anthony Pfaff

ABSTRACT: The special operations community could best address the perceived ethical crisis it faces by professionalizing as an institution. While earlier assessments have attributed special operations forces’ ethical issues to a focus on mission accomplishment that led to a broken force generation process and a high operations tempo, such diagnoses obscure a more comprehensive solution. Using sociologist Andrew Abbott’s work on professions as a framework, this article explores the benefits of building the kinds of institutions that can claim a jurisdiction, develop and certify expert knowledge, and establish and apply a code of ethics that addresses special operations unique concerns so that it builds trust and better serves the American people.

Special operations forces (SOF) appear to be experiencing an ethical crisis. According to a report last year in Rolling Stone, special operators routinely abused and even smuggled drugs while conducting operations.

More concerning are the times special operators were involved in, and occasionally got away with, murder.1 Another report described special operators engaging in extremist, radicalized, and racist discussions, sometimes advocating violence against elected US officials in secret Facebook groups.2 Additionally, multiple high-profile war-crime cases have recently occurred, including those of Eddie Gallagher (who was accused of one count of murder and two counts of attempted murder but convicted for posing for a photo with the corpse of a detainee) and US Army Special Forces Major Matthew Golestyn, who was accused of murdering an Afghan man his unit had detained.3

This ethical crisis is not limited to US special operations forces. According to the 2020 Brereton Report by the Australian Department of Defence, Australian special forces have also been involved in killing civilians and other abuses in

1.    Seth Harp, “The Fort Bragg Murders,” Rolling Stone (website), April 18, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com

/culture/culture-features/fort-bragg-murders-1153405/.

2.    Carol E. Lee, “In Secret Facebook Groups, America’s Best Warriors Share Racist Jabs, Lies about 2020, Even QAnon Theories,” NBC News (website), April 16, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/secret

-facebook-groups-america-s-best-warriors-share-racist-jabs-n1263985.

3.    Stephen Losey, “Eddie Gallagher vs. the World: After War Crimes Trial, Notorious SEAL Is Out to Settle Scores,” Military.com (website), June 26, 2021, https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/06/26/eddie

-gallagher-vs-world-after-war-crimes-trial-notorious-seal-out-settle-scores.html;  and  Dave  Phillips, “Army Denies Request by Soldier Pardoned by Trump, Setting Up Showdown,” New York Times (website), January 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/us/mathew-golsteyn-army-war-crime.html.

Afghanistan.4 The report cites credible evidence Australian special operators wrongfully killed 39 Afghan civilians—news that has generated much of the same kind of soul-searching currently happening in the United States.5

Crises like these are as attributable to the institution as they are to the individual. Indeed, United States Special Operations Command issued the Comprehensive Review in January 2020 to address this point. The report attributed these ethical failures, in part, to a focus on force employment and mission accomplishment, leading to a broken force generation (FORGEN) process and a high operations tempo (OPTEMPO) that impeded the recruitment, assessment, and deployment of fully trained operators and leaders.6

This diagnosis obscures the solution. Fixing these problems may result in a highly skilled force, but that is not the same as a highly professional one. Whereas a highly skilled force is proficient at performing tasks, a professional force understands how these tasks collectively serve a greater social good. The point here is not to assess whether the SOF community has a crisis but to emphasize the opportunity the current situation provides to professionalize more fully by addressing institutional shortcomings that diminish the ability to construct an effective professional identity.

Special operators may be professionals of a sort. However, until special operations designates a jurisdiction over which it has the autonomy to exercise judgment, the organization is better characterized as a bureaucracy that manages a highly skilled force. Sociologist Andrew Abbott describes professional expertise as necessary to diagnose, treat, and make inferences about the problems professionals are called upon to solve.7 Employing Abbott’s framework, I suggest a better way to address these issues and enable the SOF community to examine its ethical and operational challenges.

Diagnoses

Whether reported cases of ethical failure in special operations forces rise to the level of crisis is difficult to say given the anecdotal nature of the evidence. In 2018 and 2019, however, the severity of these failures motivated Congress

4.    Ben Doherty, “How the ‘Good War’ Went Bad: Elite Soldiers from Australia, UK, and US Face a Reckoning,”

Guardian (website), June 1, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/02/how-the-good

-war-went-bad-elite-soldiers-from-australia-uk-and-us-face-a-reckoning.

5.    Christopher Knaus, “Key Findings of the Brereton Report into Allegations of Australian War Crimes in Afghanistan,” Guardian (website), November 18, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020

/nov/19/key-findings-of-the-brereton-report-into-allegations-of-australian-war-crimes-in-afghanistan.

6.    Inited States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), Comprehensive Review (MacDill Air Force Base, FL: USSOCOM, January 23, 2020), 5–7.

7.    Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 52.

to direct a review of special operations accountability, misconduct, ethics, and professionalism.8 In response, United States Special Operations Command issued a report in January 2020 that found no “systemic” ethical failures. The report acknowledged a high operational tempo and certain aspects of special operations culture had set conditions for ethical failures. Specifically, the high operational tempo disrupted the normal FORGEN process and caused a “cascading effect” impacting leader development and unit integrity.9

Additionally, the review found some services overemphasized physical training at the expense of professional development. Thus, special operators were highly skilled when they joined special operations organizations, but they lacked a fully developed professional identity and ethos. The report also found the lack of exposure to originating service cultures, and the specialized attention and amenities operators received further risked creating a sense of entitlement. Moreover, the level of quality control over assessment, selection, and training varied among services and special operations components, causing acculturation to be inconsistent.10

The report’s findings were met with a mixed response. Writing in the Washington Post, David Ignatius described the report as an “important step,” though the report may have been “careful . . . perhaps to a fault” in its language.11 Less receptive, Rolling Stone described the report as “mostly a whitewash, full of vague language about improving leadership and accountability.”12 Both responses likely hold truth. The report helpfully describes how ethical failures are attributable to the institution as much as the individual. By understating the role the institution (as a system) plays in setting the conditions for these failures, the report obscures the institutional remedies available to address the conditions for ethical failure.

As an institution, special operations has been hampered in its ability to control the recruitment, assessment, and professional development of its personnel because of its dependency on external organizations to manage those processes. Although the establishment of US Special Operations Command as a unified command solved many operational concerns at the time, the most important elements of what it means to be in a profession were left to the other services,

8.    Meghann Myers, “The Pentagon Is Reviewing the Special Operations Community after a Series of High-Profile Scandals,” ArmyTimes (website), December 5, 2018, https://www.armytimes.com/news/your

-army/2018/12/05/the-pentagon-is-reviewing-the-special-operations-community-after-a-series-of-high-profile

-scandals/.

9.    USSOCOM, Comprehensive Review, 25–32.

10.    USSOCOM, Comprehensive Review, 42.

11.    David Ignatius, “Special Operations Forces Are Stretched to the Danger Point,” Washington Post (website), January 28, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/special-operations-forces-are-stretched-to-the

-danger-point/2020/01/28/c6c3898a-421a-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html.

12.     Harp, “Fort Bragg Murders.”

which are effectively other professions.13 At this point, no single institution oversees the professional development and certification of special operators over one jurisdiction.

Compounding these institutional difficulties, the complexity of the operating environment also contributes to the current crisis. Writing on the Small Wars Journal website, one special operations officer argued the community’s ethical issues primarily arise from special operations soldiers being “selected for a willingness and aptitude to conduct traditionally immoral acts, trained to be proficient at the conduct of those acts, but then expected to refrain from those acts outside of approved operational circumstances.” In response, the author recommends a “bifurcated ethics system” that differentiates operational and nonoperational environments.14 Echoing this sentiment, another special operator serving a federal prison sentence told Rolling Stone special operators act in the “grey zone” where morality and ethics are “in the eye of the beholder,” “everything goes” as long as the mission is accomplished, and any indiscretions remain outside the public eye.15

Although anecdotal, both views reflect a misunderstanding of the roles professionals play in society. Where professions serve a social good (such as health, justice, or security), professionals have a prima facie ethical obligation to provide that service. For example, emergency rooms are required to ensure patients are stabilized and treated, regardless of their ability to pay.16 Thus, professionals are not asked to do unethical things; rather, professionals are asked to do things that would be unethical for nonprofessionals to do. Professional knowledge is highly specialized, and those without it will be unable to provide the profession’s service and, in some cases, could harm the client.17

Notably, Abbott rejects the idea professions must somehow serve society. Yet, Abbott acknowledges some professions, like the military, could qualify as a “special calling” because of the nature of the work and a sense of corporateness in members’ individual roles. Writing in 1988, Abbott observed such professionalism was generally in decline in the United States.18 This point is important because an occupation can count as a profession without needing to reconcile its professional ethics with personal ones. But where the provision of a

13.     Bryan D. Brown, United States Special Operations Command History: 1987–2007 (Tampa, FL: USSOCOM History and Research Office, 2007), 12.

14.    Dan Pace, “A House Divided: A Look at SOF Values,” Small Wars Journal (website), February 25, 2021, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/house-divided-look-sof-values.

15.     Harp, “Fort Bragg Murders.”

16.     “Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) Fact Sheet,” American College of Emergency Physicians (website), accessed on May 10, 2022, https://www.acep.org/life-as-a-physician/ethics

--legal/emtala/emtala-fact-sheet/.

17.    Eliot Freidson, Professionalism, Tte Third Logic: On the Practice of Knowldege (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 17.

18.     Andrew Abbott, “The Army and the Theory of Professions,” in The Future of the Army Profession, ed. Don M. Snider and Gayle L. Watkins (Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2002), 528–30.

good or service risks harm—whether to the client or others—professions must ensure they have effective institutions able to educate, train, certify, and, perhaps most importantly, govern professionals to ensure their acts serve the greater good and can stand up to ethical scrutiny.

This obligation points to another challenge for special operations forces. Although a subjective approach to ethics like the ones expressed above is wrong in any environment, the norms for operations below the threshold of war are not well established, well understood, or even normative. In this environment, weaker adversaries “punch above their weight” by employing technology, proxies, and other means to bypass stronger actors’ military forces and inflict substantial harm, often while avoiding accountability. Where actors evade accountability, their targets have little choice but to engage in reprisals to discourage and deter future aggressions. Reprisals, of course, set conditions for escalation, which risks a wider conflict for otherwise limited ends.19 These conditions, however, do not mean unethical acts are permitted or ethics does not apply. Rather, the under-governed environment in which special operators work requires professionals who can conduct themselves ethically within a profession that can tell them how.

Treatment

To remedy the situation, the Comprehensive Review recommends US Special Operations Command improve its validating requirements to ensure the FORGEN process can generate fully manned and trained organizations. The review also recommends better development of leaders who can provide increased accountability and oversight.20 These recommendations are good, but they miss the gap the review identifies in special operations recruitment, assessment, and professional development. As the review notes, individuals enter special operations before they have been fully acculturated into their service profession, and, after joining, their development focuses on skills rather than the profession.21 Consequently, a gap between professional identity and practice emerges that is unlikely to be remedied by more professional or ethics training or education. Rather, this gap suggests special operations as an enterprise must fully professionalize before it can expect its members to act as professionals.

Before examining what fully professionalizing special operations means, it is worth clarifying how a professional perspective can improve ethical reasoning and create conditions for more ethical behavior. Take for instance the approach articulated in A Special Operations Force Ethics Field Guide: 13 Ethical Battle Drills

19.    C. Anthony Pfaff, “Military Ethics below the Threshold of War,” Parameters 50, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 69–70, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss2/10/.

20.     USSOCOM, Comprehensive Review, 69.

21.    USSOCOM, Comprehensive Review, 41–43.

for SOF Leaders. Produced by the US Special Operations Command chaplain’s office, the field guide is based on a business ethics text developed by two Brigham Young University business professors.22 The guide characterizes moral dilemmas as a finite set of choices between “right versus right,” where actors understand their options as two “highly prized values,” such as keeping a promise to honor confidentiality versus loyalty to a friend.23

The problem with this “right versus right” framing is it oversimplifies the complexities of practical moral reasoning and downplays the importance of professional judgment and experience. For example, one “battle drill” poses a dilemma in which one special operator observes another stealing thermal scopes. The dilemma arises because the thief saved the life of the special operator, and turning the thief in would ruin his career, if not land him in prison. The situation appears to pit loyalty to a friend to whom one has a special obligation against the organization, which would suffer from the loss of thermal scopes.

Framing the situation in this way creates a false dilemma from a professional, ethical perspective. Loyalty alone is insufficient to generate ethical obligation; to whom or what one is loyal matters in the context of ethics. As legal scholar George Fletcher stated, “Blind adherence to any object of loyalty—whether friend, lover, or nation—converts loyalty into idolatry.”24 More to the point, constructing the dilemma in this way obscures the professional obligation special operators have as stewards of their profession to conserve and employ appropriately the resources the American people have provided. Upon more careful analysis, seeing the two rights here is difficult. The special operator should have turned in his friend, and his friend, if he had any professionalism left, should understand why the special operator had to do it.

Another more tragic dilemma illustrated in the battle drills is an operator’s choice whether to shoot an armed nine-year-old child who is about to shoot other soldiers maneuvering in a firefight.25 This case could easily be framed as a choice between two wrongs, which would better reflect its tragic nature. Under the laws of armed conflict, shooting the child may be permissible because the laws allow one to attack persons participating in

22.     Dan Rascon, “BYU Professors Create Ethics Field Guide to Help US Special Forces,” KSL TV (website), February  23,  2021,  https://ksltv.com/456124/byu-professors-create-ethics-field-guide-to-help-us-special

-forces/?.

23.     George T. Youstra, A Special Operations Force Ethics Field Guide: 13 Ethical Battle Drills for SOF Leaders

(MacDill Air Force Base, FL: USSOCOM, 2021), 7.

24.     George P. Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6.

25.     Youstra, Ethics Field Guide, 30.

hostilities. Seeing shooting the child as right, however, is difficult.26 A more professional frame would account for professionals incurring an additional burden of risk, requiring them to consider alternative responses such as finding ways to disrupt the child’s aim or warn the soldiers the child is about to engage.27

In tragic dilemmas, regardless of the choice made, moral residue and reasons for regret and remorse will always exist; that is what makes the situation tragic.28 Seeing either choice as “right,” in any sense of the word, downplays the complex emotional response a special operator might have. If these emotional responses are left unaddressed, they can contribute to psychological stresses that potentially create the conditions for future unethical behavior. A code of professional ethics can help individuals mediate these stresses by providing a framework for evaluating practical choices, even in the heat of the moment. Moreover, institutions are obligated to provide the tools for better ethical outcomes, resulting in better alternatives and preparing professionals practically, ethically, and psychologically to reduce the chance for and degree of stress.

US Special Operations Command has engaged in efforts, such as those associated with the Preservation of the Force and Family initiative, that address physical, psychological, cognitive, social, and spiritual conditions that can enable ethical violations.29 Such initiatives are an important part of any comprehensive solution, but they do not address the fundamental professional and ethical concerns necessary for effective reform.

The field guide is not a governing document for special operations; therefore, one must be careful about drawing too broad a conclusion about special operations ethics. Also, in fairness to the guide, the battle-drill examples are real-world cases, and the special operators may have perceived their situations as “right versus right” dilemmas. Well-trained and well-educated professionals should not see such situations in this way. While ethical dilemmas may be difficult and tragic, a well-conceived professional ethic resolves the tension by reconciling personal values to professional ones.

Inference

Based on the above analysis, special operations forces may not be having an ethical crisis so much as a professional one. Exacerbating the problem is special

26.     John Cherry and Michael Rizzotti, “Understanding Self-Defense and the Law of Armed Conflict,” Lieber Institute (website), March 9, 2021, https://lieber.westpoint.edu/understanding-self-defense-law-armed

-conflict/.

27.    Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 155.

28.     Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 71–75.

29.    “About USSOCOM Preservation of the Force and Family (POTFF),” USSOCOM (website), April 20, 2021, https://www.socom.mil/POTFF/Pages/About-POTFF.aspx.

operations is not really a profession. A profession entails specialized knowledge in service to society, allowing professionals to exercise autonomy over a specific jurisdiction.30 The medical profession, for instance, involves specialized knowledge about human health applied to sustain or improve the health of patients. Because these professional have autonomy over a specific jurisdiction, they can act in ways nonprofessionals cannot.31 For example, only medical professionals are certified and permitted to conduct surgery or prescribe drugs.

Moreover, membership in a profession is contingent upon completing a certification process created and assessed by other members of the profession. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals are certified by attending medical school. As they progress within their chosen specialties, the professionals undergo additional education and training. Professions also have a code of ethics to ensure their members continue to serve a greater good.32 Again, the medical example is instructive because the codes obligate members to practice competency, compassion, and the provision of care, among other qualities necessary for the medical profession to fulfill its role.33

Professional codes require an understanding of professional purpose and the knowledge required to fulfill this purpose. Samuel Huntington famously argued the essential function of the military is successful armed combat, and he characterized military expertise as the “management of violence.”34 Managing violence requires more than tactical skill; it also involves organizing, training, and equipping the force and planning and directing its operations and activities in and outside combat.35 Within the military, services carve out jurisdictions and build expert knowledge around them. For instance, the Army claims Landpower as its jurisdiction and “the ethical design, generation, support, and application of landpower, primarily in unified land operations, and all supporting capabilities essential to accomplish the mission in defense of the American people” as its expert knowledge.36 Other services have similar statements specifying their jurisdictions, roughly corresponding to the five domains of warfighting: land, air, maritime, space, and information (including cyberspace).37 Regardless of the jurisdiction

30.     Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957), 8–10.

31.    Abbott, System of Professions, 60.

32.     Huntington, Soldier and the State, 9–10.

33.     “Code of Medical Ethics Overview,” American Medical Association (website), accessed on July 8, 2021, https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/code-medical-ethics-overview.

34.     Huntington, Soldier and the State, 11.

35.    Huntington, Soldier and the State, 11.

36.     Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA), The Army Profession, Army Doctrine Reference Publication 1 (Washington, DC: HQDA, 2015), 5-1.

37.    Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Joint Operations, Joint Publication 3-0 (Washington, DC: JCS, October 22, 2018), IV-1.

a service claims, the burden is on the service to determine the knowledge the members need to claim the jurisdiction.

Military expert knowledge comprises four fields: military-technical, moral-ethical, political-cultural, and human development.

•       Technical expertise ensures the profession is effective.

•       Ethical expertise determines the norms governing the service the profession provides and ensures the trust of the client.

•       Political expertise includes cultural knowledge and covers how the profession interacts with external actors—which, in the case of the military, includes the US government, the American people, allies

and partners, and civilian populations where the military operates.

•       Human development involves inspiring people to serve and then providing them with the professional development necessary to become effective certified leaders.38

These different elements of professional expertise are necessary so professionals can fulfill client needs, maintain client trust, develop the talent necessary for sustaining and growing the profession, and manage relations with external actors who have a stake in the profession’s activities.

The trust of the client is critical to the health of a profession. Professionals must put the needs of their clients first.39 Without this trust, clients will look elsewhere for service, undermining the profession’s jurisdiction, or impose external regulation and oversight, thus eroding the profession’s autonomy. Unlike the professions of law and medicine (the clients of which are members of society, the military’s client is the state to whom it must provide expert advice on the application of force in defense of the society the state represents.40

No occupation is ever fully professionalized because humans are frequently neither fully competent nor fully ethical. This limitation is also built into the design of professional practice. Professions usually require extensive bureaucracies to sustain their practices and manage scarce resources, so they are used to maximum effect. Bureaucratic demands, however, are often at odds with professional ones. Where professionals create expert knowledge and apply it to new situations,

38.     Richard A. Lacquement Jr., “Mapping Army Professional Expertise and Clarifying Jurisdictions of Practice,” in The Future of the Army Profession, ed. Don M. Snider and Gayle L. Watkins (Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2002), 217.

39.    Anne C. Ozar, “The Plausibility of Client Trust of Professionals,” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 33, no. 1 (2014): 90.

40.     Huntington, Soldier and the State, 11–18.

bureaucrats emphasize efficiency and maintaining the status quo.41 The resulting tension is evident in the medical field where, for example, a doctor may wish to prescribe an expensive treatment, but the hospital administrator will not approve it because the treatment will result in fewer resources for other patients.

Favoring the professional ideal over the bureaucratic may encourage an innovative service, but one that is likely incapable of delivering on a large scale. If the bureaucratic is favored over the professional, service provision can get overwhelmed by process and regulation.42 For this reason, a profession’s status as a profession should never be taken for granted. Resolving the tension in either direction undermines the service provided, which, in turn, undermines the trust of the client. Such an effect occurred in the post–Vietnam War Army, wherein stifled innovation and diminished training and discipline were not overcome until the Army renewed its emphasis on defeating the Soviets and developed education, training, and capabilities to match.43 The Army’s professional status was questioned again in the 1990s, when the emphasis on large-scale combat operations displaced other security concerns related to failed states in the Balkans and elsewhere.44

The point here is not that clients set a profession’s jurisdiction. When confronted with a problem that falls outside the profession’s capabilities but within its jurisdiction, professionals are obligated to generate new capabilities—especially if no other profession would be a better fit for the problem. For instance, when the coronavirus pandemic broke out in early 2020, it was the role and obligation of medical professionals to develop a vaccine. The pandemic also required the medical profession to expand capacity—a feat it was not always able to accomplish. Because capacity was limited, the profession recommended restriction on movement and social contact to lower demand. Some of these restrictions drew objections from the public and brought into question—rational or not—how much the public trusted the medical profession. Therefore, in pursuit of the social good, the execution of professional responsibilities can require constant negotiation between the needs of the client and the particular social good the profession was created to provide.

This tension between the profession and the bureaucracy is enduring. Professional services are a finite resource rarely sufficient to meet demand. Bureaucratic hierarchy, process, and other requirements often displace notions of

41.    Don M. Snider, “The US Army as a Profession,” in The Future of the Army Profession, ed. Don M. Snider and Gayle L. Watkins (Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2002), 15.

42.     Snider, “Army as a Profession,” 15–16.

43.     Leonard Wong and Douglas V. Johnson II, “Serving the American People: A Historical View of the Army Profession,” in The Future of the Army Profession, ed. Don M. Snider and Gayle L. Watkins (Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2002), 102; and Suzanne C. Nielsen, An Army Transformed: The US Army’s Post-Vietnam Recovery and the Dynamics of Change in Military Organizations (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College Press, 2010), 36–39, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/343/.

44.     Snider, “Army as a Profession,” 14–20; and Wong and Johnson, “Serving the American People,” 103–4.

personal and social responsibility, especially when they conflict with bureaucratic efficiency. The choice for the professional is not “either/or”; the choice is “both/and.” Bureaucratic requirements are necessary for the large-scale provision of a professional service and critical for accountability and transparency. Professionals must “do the heavy lifting” to balance bureaucratic requirements in ways that maintain a level of efficiency that preserves clients’ trust and bolsters the jurisdiction and autonomy necessary to ensure professional effectiveness.

Thinking a particular professional practice consisted of one group of expert professionals and another group of skilled bureaucrats would be wrong. A healthy profession’s members must play both roles. They can, however, rely on nonprofessionals or professionals from other fields to improve operations. While human resource professionals working in a law firm are not members of the legal profession, this status does not make their contributions any less important. Professionals must know how to use nonprofessional contributions to apply expert knowledge successfully.

Bureaucracies are not the only things able to undermine a profession. Often, specific policies that seem effective can set conditions for ethical failure in practice. As Peter Olsthoorn observes, the military encourages social cohesion and physical courage by instilling a sense of shame should soldiers fail their comrades in combat.45 High social cohesion, however, can crowd out the conditions necessary for moral courage—understood here as overcoming the fear of humiliation, shame, or loss of status when confronting wrongdoing.46 When overcoming these fears and confronting wrongdoing negatively affects membership, members of highly cohesive groups often perceive the cost of confrontation to be too high.

Thus, the Rolling Stone article describing the special operations ethos as focusing almost exclusively on mission accomplishment and avoiding embarrassment is not surprising. However, a better-developed professional identity can address the negative conditions high social cohesion can create and preserve the positive conditions necessary for an effective fighting force. Professional obligations require the individual’s reputational cost to be subordinated to the reputational cost of the profession.

Professionalizing Special Operations Forces

Absent a professional framework, things can go wrong because they are also going right. The professional framework demands the professional maintain the

45.    Peter Olsthoorn, Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 2011), 54–55.

46.     Olsthoorn, Military Ethics, 49–50.

client’s trust and get the job done in ways that reflect the client’s values. As the foregoing analysis suggests, creating and integrating a professional framework requires establishing a jurisdiction, creating expert knowledge, certifying members in the knowledge, and developing a code of ethics governing the application of expert knowledge.

Establish a Jurisdiction

For Abbott, professions establish themselves by competing over jurisdictions.47 Without its own jurisdiction, the special operations community is not fully professionalized. James Burk describes a professional jurisdiction as the domain within which expert knowledge is applied. This domain is physical, such as a hospital, courtroom, or battlefield. The domain, however, is equally conceptual—for example, health, justice, or defense.48 Both physical and conceptual domains can be further divided, creating additional professional spaces. Given the four physical domains of warfighting have been claimed by other services, special operations will have to look below the threshold of war to find its place.49

Competition below the threshold of war is a natural fit for special operations. In the 1960s, US President John F. Kennedy reoriented US Army Special Forces to focus on unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency to combat the spread of communism while avoiding escalation with the Soviet Union.50 More recently, General Richard Clarke, commander of US Special Operations Command, stated the future of special operations entails working with critical allies and partners to ensure access, placement, and influence. The future of special operations also involves ensuring the success of relevant information operations intended to deny adversaries the ability to spread disinformation.51 These activities are critical to how the Department of Defense supports international competition.

To claim a jurisdiction is not to say other services do not play a role. Rather, in doing so a profession takes responsibility for success within that jurisdiction, allowing other contributions to have maximal positive impact. Currently, no single service or other entity owns the competitive space below the threshold

47.    Abbott, “Theory of Professions,” 534.

48.     James Burk, “Expertise, Jurisdiction, and Legitimacy of the Military Profession,” in The Future of the Army Profession, ed. Don M. Snider and Gail L. Watkins (Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2002), 49–50.

49.    JCS, Joint Operations, IV-1.

50.     Allan R. Millet, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012 (New York: Free Press, 2012), 624–25.

51.    Howard Altman, “The Future of SOF: Exclusive Interview with SOCOM Commander Richard Clarke,”

Military Times (website), May 20, 2021, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/05/20/the

-future-of-sof-exclusive-interview-with-socom-commander-richard-clarke/.

of war. Moreover, the other services have jurisdictions above the threshold that take priority.

Create Expert Knowledge and a Process to Certify Professionals

Professional knowledge goes beyond the development of skills. Abbott states professional knowledge is abstract in that it legitimizes professional work; establishes the research necessary to diagnose, treat, and make inferences about the problems professionals solve; and constructs the standards of instruction from which the profession certifies its members. Additionally, professional knowledge supports innovation because it reveals underlying regularities that relying on skill does not.52

A significant challenge for professionalizing special operations is the diversity of skills involved, including direct-action operations, foreign internal defense, security force assistance, information operations, and civil affairs.53 Given this range, seeing how these skills could be unified under one professional education umbrella might be difficult. A professional jurisdiction will inform how the profession educates and trains each member to apply each required skill.

Creating expert knowledge and its certification process means significant investment in professional military education that focuses on the demands of special operations. Special operations could still rely on the service components for recruitment, accession, and training but would need to have greater involvement in, if not oversight of, its programs (as the Comprehensive Review recommends). Additionally, special operations must create a career-long standard of education that produces professionals capable of stewarding the profession at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels.

Develop a Code of Ethics

With a jurisdiction and expert knowledge established, special operations will be in a position to establish and administer a professional ethic that accounts for what the special operator, as a highly skilled individual, does; who the special operator, as a moral agent, is; and what special operations, as an institution, should achieve. Properly constructed, a robust professional ethic describes the duties, outcomes, and character traits associated with good special operators. Moreover, a professional ethic is not passive. Avoiding

52.     Abbott, System of Professions, 56–57.

53.    “Core Activities,” USSOCOM (website), accessed on July 12, 2021, https://www.socom.mil/about/core

-activities.

ethical wrongdoing is not good enough; a professional must proactively seek to do good.54

Developing such an ethic will be complex given the relative paucity of norms below the threshold of war. Further complicating matters, no professional ethic involves the effective provision of a service. Society gives professionals the authority to engage in activities society does not grant nonprofessionals because these activities could lead to harm. Especially in the military context, professionals must further gain and sustain moral authority. In addition to the functional imperative of the profession, professionals must integrate social norms and relevant legislation, including international law and treaties, into practice and their personal values.55

Conclusion

Implementing any of these recommendations, much less all of them, would raise several concerns. The most obvious is designating a special operations jurisdiction would place the organization on the same level as the other services. This effect was almost achieved when then-Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller directed the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict to report directly to him, as other service secretaries do.56 Current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, however, partially reversed this decision when he moved the position back under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where the position focuses on the broad policies associated with its functional imperative. Nevertheless, Austin retained a direct line over administrative matters involving organization, training, and equipment.57 The reversal effectively provided additional oversight by the Department of Defense without the additional autonomy US Special Operations Command would have gained as a service equivalent.

Other concerns follow from the “chicken-and-egg” situation in which special operations finds itself. To professionalize fully, special operations must set itself apart from the other service professions. From a bureaucratic perspective, this distinction would place special operations in competition rather than collaboration with the other services. This competition could affect access

54.     C. Anthony Pfaff and Keith R. Beurskens, “Introduction,” in Maintaining the High Ground: The Profession and the Ethic in Large-Scale Combat Operations, ed. C. Anthony Pfaff and Keith R. Beurskens (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Army University Press, 2021), 2.

55.    Anthony Hartle, Moral Issues in Military Decision Making, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 74–75.

56.     Corey Dickstein, “Acting Defense Secretary Orders Top Special Operations Civilian to Report Directly to Him,” Stars and Stripes (website), November 18, 2020, https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/acting-defense

-secretary-orders-top-special-ops-civilian-to-report-directly-to-him-1.652557.

57.    Lara Seligman, “Austin Rolls Back Trump-Era Policy on Special Ops,” Politico (website), May 5, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/05/lloyd-austin-defense-special-ops-policy-485432.

to important resources service components currently provide, making full separation from the services difficult. The growing importance and complexity of competition below the threshold of war and the distraction created by the competition from the equally important task of warfighting suggest special operations’ evolution into a full profession is in the organization’s interests.

Multiple options exist to move special operations from its current state to one with the resources necessary to recruit, train, assess, and employ effective individuals and teams that can avoid the current ethical failures of the organization. Something like professionalization in the sense described here must happen. Additionally, nothing is wrong with developing an ethics curriculum to sensitize individuals to what is ethically relevant.

Without a professional framework, these measures will do little to set conditions for better ethical behavior. Fixing force generation and operational tempo will ensure a highly skilled force that may be blind to how functional imperatives (like high social cohesion) can encourage unethical behavior. While teaching individual ethics may better enable special operators to talk about ethics, it cannot make them care about ethics. Divorced from the calling a professional identity provides, individuals will have little reason to take the hard right and avoid the easy wrong—and little reason to hold themselves accountable for attaining the professional ideal.

C. Anthony Pfaff

Dr. C. Anthony Pfaff is the research professor for strategy, the military profession, and ethics at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is the author of numerous articles on ethics and professions, including, most recently, “Making the Case for a Joint Special Operations Profession” in Joint Forces Quarterly, which he coauthored.

Select Bibliography

Abbott, Andrew. “The Army and the Theory of Professions,” in The Future of the Army Profession. ed. Don M. Snider and Gayle L. Watkins. Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2002.

Abbott, Andrew. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Burk, James. “Expertise, Jurisdiction, and Legitimacy of the Military Profession,” in The Future of the Army Profession. ed. Don M. Snider and Gayle L. Watkins. Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2002.

Freidson, Eliot. Professionalism: The Third Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Hartle, Anthony. Moral Issues in Military Decision Making. 2nd ed. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Huntington, Samuel P. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957.

Lacquement, Richard. “Mapping Army Professional Expertise and Clarifying Jurisdictions of Practice,” in The Future of the Army Profession. ed. Don M. Snider and Gayle L. Watkins. Boston: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2002.

Pfaff, C. Anthony, and Keith R. Beurskens. “Introduction,” in Maintaining the High Ground: The Profession and the Ethic in Large-Scale Combat Operations. ed. C. Anthony Pfaff and Keith R. Beurskens. Fort Leavenworth, KS: Army University Press, 2021.

22. Advanced Drone Tech Poses Threat to Special Forces in Middle East

Advanced Drone Tech Poses Threat to Special Forces in Middle East

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Stew Magnuson

ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

10/31/2022

By

Gen. Bryan P. Fenton

Stew Magnuson photo

AQABA, Jordan — The leader of U.S. Special Operations Command on Oct. 31 joined several Middle East military officers in expressing his concern about terrorist groups using advanced drone technology to achieve their goals.

“Unmanned aerial systems, or drones, are reshaping today’s battlefield,” Army Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, SOCOM commander, said during the Middle East Special Operations Commanders Conference being held in Aqaba, Jordan, the day prior to SOFEX, the region’s largest Special Operations trade show.

“They’re flying farther and faster and becoming more lethal,” he said. “They are a problem not only for individual nations or regions, they are a problem for the globe,” he added.

Kamikaze drones — which can be used for surveillance or flown into targets setting off explosive charges — have proliferated during Ukraine’s war against Russia. Many of them are purpose-built for such missions by U.S. companies like AeroVironment, which manufactures the Switchblade.

Russia of late has employed the same tactics after receiving a large shipment of Iranian-built Shahed-136 drones, according to U.S. officials who have spoken to the media. Russia has used the drones to systematically destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, although both Iran and Russia have denied that Tehran has supplied the weapons.

Maj. Gen. Nick Perry, director of specialist military units for the United Kingdom’s armed forces, said prior to the Ukraine War, Iran was already proliferating drone technology to its proxies in the Middle East.

Maj. Gen. Adil Rehmani, commander of special operation services in the Pakistan army, said that his forces once had the technological edge over terrorist groups, but that is no longer a given.

“Ten or 13 years ago [a terrorist] was not able to do surveillance. Now, he can fly a drone, and a I fear someday soon, he will have an armed drone,” Rehmani said.

Just like the coalition that helped bring down the terrorist group ISIS, a partnership of international militaries and intelligence agencies should come together to help defeat the drone scourge “because they threaten all of us,” Fenton said.

The approach should also include industry, academia and non-military agencies, he added. “Combining all these tools and using almost three decades of experience, a very strong partnership can address this new threat.”

Special operators are well suited to help in the fight against drones because they are adept at experimenting with new technologies and forging partnerships. “We can address that in a very unique and different way,” Fenton added.

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Stew Magnuson

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com