Quotes of the Day:
"There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen."
- Anonymous
"When we vote, we take back our power to choose, to speak up, and to stand with those who support us and each other."
- Loung Ung
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all."
- John W. Gardner, No Easy Victories
1. U.S. Intelligence Agencies Face Crucial Test in Deciphering Putin’s Motives
2. Russia says video shows tanks, military equipment leaving Crimea
3. Russian pullout meets NATO scepticism, Ukraine defence website still hacked
4. Ukraine hit by cyber attack as U.S. questions Russian troop pullback
5. Ukrainian Crisis - Predictive Analysis
6. Risk of a Ukraine war spreading in Europe rests on unknowns
7. Could Ukraine end up as a War of Words?
8. We spoke to 7 ex-CIA and Pentagon experts. Here's what they say Putin wants in Ukraine.
9. Biden warns Russia that war on Ukraine would be ‘bloody and destructive’
10. The U.S. has spent billions on equipment and training in Europe to deter Russia. Is it enough?
11. ‘Asia First’ Misses the Point
12. Summary Thoughts on the Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States
13. Indo-Pacific Strategy Quicklook
14. Ukraine Proves 'Asia vs. Europe' Is a False US Foreign Policy Choice
15. The Less Said About NATO and Ukraine, the Better
16. Biden Can Find Middle Ground in Heated Nuclear Debate
17. Coalition of the unwilling: Western elites prefer not to fight authoritarianism
18. US to reopen Solomon Islands embassy to foil China
19. How to Fix the Joint Combined Exchange Training Program
20. Politics and pressure are sabotaging women in special operations
21. Elite Risk: How Special Operations training can kill
22. No 'Fauda': Hamas TV series glorifies fight against Israel
23. US accuses financial website of spreading Russian propaganda
24. Who’s Watching the Winter Olympics?
25. Know the goal before committing troops — or lose the war
1. U.S. Intelligence Agencies Face Crucial Test in Deciphering Putin’s Motives
Judging intent is the most difficult intelligence problem.
But I see comments about the credibility of the IC if Putin does not attack Ukraine. Intelligence is NOT about simply making “successful predictions" or predictions that come true. It is about supporting policy and strategy. Exposing attack plans and false flag operations may deter an attack and inoculate the target audience to the deception being conducted. If the policies and strategies that are implemented and executed prevent war and Putin does not attack it does not mean the IC was wrong even if an attack does not occur. The IC may very well be “right” even if an attack does not occur. But pundits and armchair quarterbacks will still criticize it for what did not happen.
U.S. Intelligence Agencies Face Crucial Test in Deciphering Putin’s Motives
Feb. 15, 2022
Knowing the intentions of any autocratic leader is difficult, but President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who began his career as a K.G.B. officer, poses a particular challenge.
President Vladimir V. Putin’s calculus is likely shifting as he weighs the risks of an invasion against what he believes he could gain through negotiations, according to a U.S. official. Credit...Sputnik/Via Reuters
Feb. 15, 2022
WASHINGTON — At the height of the Russian effort in 2016 to manipulate the U.S. presidential election, the C.I.A. had a secret weapon: a mole with some access to the inner circle of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, who was able to inform Washington about how the master tactician was thinking about his next move.
That agent was extracted from Russia in 2017, leaving the United States largely blind, for a while, to Mr. Putin’s thinking. Now, after five years of slowly rebuilding access to the highest ranks of the Kremlin, America’s intelligence agencies face a crucial test: deciphering whether Mr. Putin will use the more than 150,000 troops he has amassed near the Ukrainian border to invade, or merely to give him leverage as he dangles the prospect of a diplomatic settlement.
In interviews with officials from the United States and its closest allies, it is clear the United States and Britain once again have windows into Mr. Putin’s thinking. Some intelligence conclusions are reached through electronic intercepts, others bolstered by his periodic conversations with President Biden, which officials say have proven helpful in understanding Mr. Putin’s worldview — and his transactional nature.
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Inside Ukraine’s Cybercommand Center, Hours Before Attack
A day before Ukraine announced its Defense Ministry and banking servers had been hacked, our video team toured the country’s Cybercommand Center, where officials have been preparing for this scenario for years.
Head of the NCSCC Support Service of the NSDC Staff Serhiy Prokopenko 00:12:38:05 00:12:44:06these are cyber attacks, as I said, on the essential facilities 00:12:44:12 00:12:47:04and the state authorities. 00:12:47:23 00:12:50:21The goal of the first ones is destabilisation. 00:12:55:06 00:13:02:13So if we understand, let’s say, that bank services are disabled,00:13:14:16 00:13:18:16and if you cannot pay for fuel, groceries, 00:13:19:07 00:13:24:06this immediately will lead to public reaction. 00:13:25:16 00:13:30:11And if it accompanied with attacking the state websites, 00:13:31:01 00:13:34:01then the citizens cannot receive the information. 00:14:00:02 00:14:03:01That’s why the cyber attack, the hybrid attack 00:14:05:21 00:14:09:13may cause that as the next step 00:14:09:21 00:14:16:21the society is shocked, the state allegedly does not control the situation 00:14:16:23 00:14:17:23inside Ukraine, 00:14:18:16 00:14:20:08the state authorities, 00:14:20:12 00:14:27:01and consequently, this is a reason to invade with forces.
A day before Ukraine announced its Defense Ministry and banking servers had been hacked, our video team toured the country’s Cybercommand Center, where officials have been preparing for this scenario for years.Credit...Michael Downey for The New York Times
Mr. Putin’s calculus, according to a U.S. official, is likely shifting as he weighs the changing costs of an invasion and he assesses what he could get from negotiations. Several officials note that Mr. Putin has a history of waiting until the last possible moment to make a decision, constantly re-evaluating his options.
Not surprisingly, American officials will not say how they know what Mr. Putin is thinking, anxious to preserve their current sources.
Knowing the intention of any autocratic leader is difficult, but Mr. Putin, who began his career as a K.G.B. officer, is a particular challenge. Because he avoids electronic devices, oftentimes bans note-takers, and tells his aides little, there is a limit to how much an intelligence agency can learn about his intentions and thinking.
“We do not understand fundamentally, none of us do, what is inside President Putin’s head, and so we cannot make any guess about where all of this is headed,” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told reporters on Tuesday.
One senior official who has met with Russian counterparts in an effort to defuse the current crisis said recently that the U.S. delegation came away with the sense that Mr. Putin’s representatives were taking a hard line because they did not know what their boss wanted to do.
American officials are poring over intelligence — both analytic reports and raw material — trying to answer a critical question: how Mr. Putin assesses his likelihood of success.
Both American and British officials say that a key element of their analyses is a shared conclusion that something has changed in Mr. Putin’s assessment of Russia’s relative status in the world. After spending heavily on his military, he now believes Russia is in the strongest position to coerce Ukraine — and the rest of Europe — since the fall of the Soviet Union. His financial reserves have greatly improved Moscow’s ability to withstand sanctions.
More recently, he has benefited from high gas and oil prices — and discovered that the more he threatens war, the higher those prices go.
And as Germany and other nations have looked at the wildly high cost of replacing Russian energy sources should they be cut off, it has made some European leaders more eager to negotiate a solution that would avoid needing to impose sanctions. It is extortion, one European negotiator said, while noting that Mr. Putin thinks like an extortionist.
Mr. Putin also has the benefit of time. He does not face voters for another two and a half years, potentially allowing him to recover from any domestic criticism that could arise from a punishing conflict — or the sanctions that might follow.
While there is broad agreement of that analysis in intelligence circles, former intelligence officials warn that those trying to predict the moves of a leader like Mr. Putin need to proceed with humility about how much they do not know.
“Analysts understand how Putin thinks, his grievances and his anger at the West and the United States,” said John Sipher, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Moscow. “Now, does that mean we know what he’s going to do and when he’s going to do it? No, because to do that you have to get in his head.”
The United States has clearly developed intelligence on the Russian military’s war planning, predicting the buildup of troops weeks before it happened, exposing what officials said were Russian sabotage plots and operations meant to create a pretext for invasion.
But the United States has long found itself caught by surprise by Mr. Putin, from his decision to annex Crimea to his deployment of forces to Syria.
Interestingly, one source of insight to Mr. Putin has been conversations with the Russian president himself.
Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
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The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s growing military presence on the Ukrainian border was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.
So, like a hostage negotiator, they are determined to keep him talking. Not long after William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, visited Moscow in November to warn against an invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden’s aides came up with a plan of constant engagement, setting up a series of negotiations — in Brussels and Geneva, at many different levels — on the theory that while Russia was talking with the West, airing its grievances and making its demands, it was unlikely to invade.
Paul Kolbe, who oversaw collection of Russian intelligence for the C.I.A. for many years, noted recently that “you keep them talking to try to figure out what they really want, to find another way out.” But Mr. Kolbe, now the director of Harvard’s intelligence project, added, “it made sense — unless what the gunman really wants is to shoot the hostages.”
Mr. Putin wields information as a weapon, keeping his own counsel and withholding details of his planning from close aides.
When Mr. Burns visited Moscow to warn against an invasion of Ukraine, he offered details of what the United States had learned about the military planning. The disclosures appeared to catch some Russian officials off guard, as if they were less privy to Mr. Putin’s planning, according to an American official briefed on the meeting.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, left, in a meeting with Mr. Putin on Monday. Mr. Putin is known to withhold details of his planning even from close aides.Credit...Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky
“I like to say, Putin’s not a good sharer, he didn’t pass that kindergarten class” said Beth Sanner, a former top intelligence official who regularly briefed President Donald J. Trump. “He was a spy. So he’s trained not to be a sharer, he’s trained to elicit and manipulate.”
But former intelligence officials said that the Russia bench within the C.I.A. remained strong, with numerous analysts and case officers who have devoted their careers to studying Mr. Putin. The long reign of an autocrat, said former officials, has certain advantages.
There are limits to what a government should ask its intelligence to do, said Marc E. Polymeropoulos, a former senior C.I.A. officer who oversaw operations in Europe and Russia. Intelligence agencies can provide warning, which is what they have done in recent months. Anything more can be fraught.
“Intelligence is not necessarily predictive of time and date. The intelligence community has done a pretty damn good job of providing policymakers with excellent situational awareness for them to develop policies if Russia goes one way or the other way,” he said. “That’s what intelligence does. Asking more of that is going to be very difficult.”
Even situational awareness may be harder to come by at a moment when the Russians claim to be de-escalating while military exercises are still underway. The basic jobs of tracking Russian moves in Ukraine have been disrupted. On Tuesday, the C.I.A. closed, at least temporarily, its station in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a day after U.S. diplomatic personnel relocated to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
2. Russia says video shows tanks, military equipment leaving Crimea
All warfare is based on deception or so said a dead Chinese general.
Russia says video shows tanks, military equipment leaving Crimea
MOSCOW, Feb 16 (Reuters) - Russia's defence ministry published video on Wednesday that it said showed a column of tanks and military vehicles leaving annexed Crimea across a railway bridge after drills, adding that some troops would also return to their permanent bases.
Moscow announced a partial pullback of forces from near Ukraine on Tuesday. The move was met with scepticism, however, and U.S. President Joe Biden said that more than 150,000 Russian troops were still amassed near Ukraine's borders. read more
World powers are engaged in one of the deepest crises in East-West relations for decades, jostling over post-Cold War influence and energy supplies as Moscow wants to stop the former Soviet neighbour ever joining the NATO military alliance.
On Wednesday morning, video footage showed what the defence ministry said were tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled artillery units leaving the Crimean peninsula that Moscow seized from Kyiv in 2014.
"Combat equipment and military personnel will be delivered by military trains to the units' permanent deployment points," the defence ministry said. "Upon arrival, the equipment will be serviced and prepared for carrying out the next phase of combat training."
The video, published by the RIA news agency, showed dozens of military vehicles crossing the bridge at night.
A separate convoy of service vehicles drove across a different bridge, the TASS news agency cited the military as saying.
Reporting by Alexander Marrow and Maxim Rodionov; Editing by Andrew Heavens
3. Russian pullout meets NATO scepticism, Ukraine defence website still hacked
Russian pullout meets NATO scepticism, Ukraine defence website still hacked
- Summary
- Russia says video shows tanks leaving Crimea
- Britain and U.S. say pullout has yet to be confirmed
- Cyber attack continues on Ukraine's defence ministry
- U.S. says more than 150,000 troops still threaten Ukraine
MOSCOW/KYIV, Feb 16 (Reuters) - Russia said more of its forces surrounding Ukraine were withdrawing on Wednesday but NATO urged Moscow to prove it was pulling back, saying there were signs that more troops were on the way.
In Ukraine, where people raised flags and played the national anthem to show unity against fears of an invasion, the defence ministry said a cyber attack was into its second day. Russia said it had nothing to do with that.
The Russian defence ministry said its forces were pulling back after completing exercises in the southern and western military districts near Ukraine.
It published video that it said showed tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled artillery units leaving the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said a pullout would be welcome but that moving troops about did not confirm it.
"It remains to be seen whether there is a Russian withdrawal ... What we see is that they have increased the number of troops, and more troops are on the way," he told reporters at the start of a two-day meeting of NATO defence ministers at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels.
The Kremlin said NATO's assessment was wrong. Moscow's ambassador to Ireland said forces in western Russia would be back to their normal positions within three to four weeks.
The deployment in the Crimean peninsula was part of a huge build-up of Russian forces to the north, east and south of Ukraine since November that had prompted London and Washington to warn in recent days that a Russian invasion looked imminent.
Russia mocked those warnings as hysterical war propaganda when it announced on Tuesday that some units were starting to return to base after completing exercises.
China, which has cultivated closer ties with Russia as both countries have come under increasing criticism from the West, accused the United States of "playing up the threat of warfare and creating tension". read more
Military analysts say a key indicator of a significant pullback will be whether field hospitals and fuel stores are dismantled and units from Russia's far east, which are taking part in huge exercises in Belarus this week, return to their bases thousands of miles away.
BIDEN STATEMENT
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that more than 150,000 Russian troops were still amassed near Ukraine's borders and an invasion remained "distinctly possible". He said Washington had not yet verified any pullout.
Biden has warned repeatedly of steep costs for Russia if it attacks Ukraine, including sanctions against Russian businesses and the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
But he also reaffirmed willingness to talk to Russia about arms control, transparency measures and strategic stability.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin was also keen to talk.
"We hope that this negotiation process will begin," he said, adding that it would be complex and require flexibility on both sides.
Russia has always denied planning to invade Ukraine but has been pressing for a set of security guarantees from the West including a promise that its neighbour Ukraine will never join NATO. The United States and its allies have rejected that.
DAY OF UNITY
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he did not see any sign of a Russian troop withdrawal. "When the troops do withdraw everyone will see that.. but for now, it’s just a statement," the BBC quoted him as saying during a visit to western Ukraine.
Zelenskiy designated Wednesday a patriotic holiday in response to Western media reports that Russia could invade on that day. "No one can love our home as we can. And only we, together, can protect our home," he said earlier read more
The defence ministry said hackers were still bombarding its website and had succeeded in finding vulnerabilities in the programming code. Traffic was being rerouted to servers in the United States while the issue was being fixed, it said.
Although Kyiv did not name who was behind the incident, a statement suggested it was pointing the finger at Russia.
"It is not ruled out that the aggressor used tactics of dirty little tricks because its aggressive plans are not working out on a large scale," said the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security.
The Kremlin denied that Russia was behind any cyber attacks but said it was not surprised that Ukraine would blame Moscow.
Kremlin spokesman Peskov said Putin had "taken note" of a request from Russia's parliament on Tuesday for him to recognise the "independence" of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian government forces since 2014.
But he said that would not be line with the 2014-15 Minsk agreements aimed at ending the conflict, in which Ukraine says some 15,000 people have been killed.
The comment appeared to indicate that Putin would not rush into recognising the separatist areas, which Ukraine and the West would see as a provocative step, but might keep such an option in reserve.
Reporting by Reuters bureaux; writing by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Philippa Fletcher
4. Ukraine hit by cyber attack as U.S. questions Russian troop pullback
Has the war already begun? Are these cyber attacks acts of war?
Ukraine hit by cyber attack as U.S. questions Russian troop pullback
- Summary
- Ukraine's defence ministry, banks knocked offline
- Russia says some forces rebasing after build-up near Ukraine
- U.S. says more than 150,000 troops still threaten Ukraine
- West responds with caution and scepticism
KYIV/MOSCOW/WASHINGTON, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Kyiv appeared to blame Russia for a cyber attack on Tuesday as U.S. President Joe Biden warned that more than 150,000 Russian troops were still amassed near Ukraine's borders after Moscow's announcement of a partial pullback was met with scepticism.
World powers are engaged in one of the deepest crises in East-West relations for decades, jostling over post-Cold War influence and energy supplies as Moscow wants to stop the former Soviet neighbour ever joining the NATO military alliance.
Western nations have suggested arms control and confidence-building steps to defuse the standoff, which has prompted them to urge their citizens to leave Ukraine because an attack could come at any time. Russia denies it has any plans to invade.
On Tuesday, the Russian defence ministry published footage to demonstrate it was returning some troops to base after exercises. Biden said the United States had not verified the move. "Our analysts indicate that they remain very much in a threatening position."
Hours after Moscow's announcement, Ukraine said the online networks of its defence ministry and two banks were overwhelmed in what is called a distributed denial-of-service. The manoeuvre works when hackers flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic to paralyse it. read more
Although Kyiv did not name who was behind the incident, a statement suggested it was pointing the finger at Russia.
"It is not ruled out that the aggressor used tactics of dirty little tricks because its aggressive plans are not working out on a large scale," said the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security, which is part of the culture ministry.
Ukrainian bank Privatbank users reported problems with payments and a banking app, while Oshadbank said its systems had slowed down.
Russia's Federal Security Service did not immediately reply to a request for comment from Reuters.
"If Russia attacks the United States or our allies through asymmetric means like disruptive cyber attacks against our companies or critical infrastructure, we're prepared to respond," Biden said in televised remarks from the White House.
One European diplomat said the hacking was concerning because a full military attack on Ukraine would likely be preceded by a cyber attack.
"It could mean a physical attack is imminent, or it could mean Russia is continuing to mess with Ukraine," the diplomat said, on condition of anonymity. While such attacks are difficult to attribute, the diplomat said there was no doubt that Russia was behind them.
'MEANINGFUL DE-ESCALATION'
The White House said energy prices could be hit if sanctions are imposed on Moscow following an invasion as diplomatic efforts continued on Tuesday to resolve the crisis.
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Russian servicemen drive tanks during military exercises in the Leningrad Region, Russia, in this handout picture released February 14, 2022. Russian Defence Ministry/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on a call that there needed to be "verifiable, credible, meaningful de-escalation" by Moscow.
Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron discussed their readiness to hit Russia with "severe consequences" over the crisis.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said there "are signs from Moscow that diplomacy should continue" but also that Russia often left military equipment behind after exercises, creating the potential for forces to regroup.
At a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Russian President Vladimir Putin referred only briefly to the troop moves.
Putin told reporters Russia would not be satisfied with talk that Ukraine was not ready to join NATO any time soon and was demanding that the issue be resolved now.
"As for war in Europe... about whether we want it or not? Of course not. That is why we put forward proposals for a negotiation process, the result of which should be an agreement on ensuring equal security for everyone, including our country," he said.
Russia has been pressing for a set of security guarantees from the West and says it can exercise troops on its own territory as it sees fit.
Russia's show of force near Ukraine's borders has prompted months of frantic Western diplomacy and drawn threats of severe sanctions if it invades.
The Kremlin sought to portray its moves as proof that Western talk of war had been both false and hysterical.
"February 15, 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
The defence ministry published footage showing tanks and other armoured vehicles being loaded onto railway flatcars. Western military analysts said they needed more information to judge the significance of the latest troop movements.
Commercial satellite images taken on Sunday and Monday showed a flurry of Russian military activity at several locations near Ukraine. read more
Russian shares, government bonds and the rouble rose sharply on hopes the situation was easing, and Ukrainian government bonds rallied. Major stock indices rose in the United States and Europe. read more
Oil tumbled over 3%, retreating from a seven-year high.
"The situation is very fluid, but today is definitely a calmer day," said Robert Yawger, executive director of energy futures at Mizuho. "It's going to be a minute-to-minute, day-to-day type of thing."
Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova, Andrea Shalal and Dmitry Antonov; additional reporting by Reuters bureaux; writing by Mark Trevelyan and Costas Pitas; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Rosalba O'Brien and Grant McCool
5. Ukrainian Crisis - Predictive Analysis
Will he or won't he? What is Putin up to?
Ukrainian Crisis - Predictive Analysis | SOF News
sof.news · by SOF News · February 16, 2022
By Marc Trepanier.
With US Troops being deployed, to NATO partner countries sending arms and support to the Ukraine, the following can be expected:
- Russian war rhetoric to increase
- Russian forces to receive a false flag attack or
- Russian forces to receive an order to invade
- NATO and US Conventional forces deployed into the Ukraine
- Ukrainian resistance forces taking up arms
- Russian forces slowed by environmental issues
Rhetoric Points to a Possible Invasion. Putin is very likely to order the invasion of the Ukraine. Ukraine was once part of the Soviet Union. Putin wants part or all of the country back. This invasion will be preceded by violent rhetoric and a possible false flag attack against Russian troops.
Russian war rhetoric will likely increase. In his 2007 speech in Munich Putin said “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” Placing NATO troops in Ukraine will be met with vitriol from the Kremlin.
Putin’s goal is to reestablish the USSR. You can see this goal in this Munich speech:
“[W]hat is a unipolar world? at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is [a] world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within. … this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world. … the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation.”
Putin sees a unipolar world as impossible. It sees global crises in the world and Russia as the logical cure. Putin believes it is his duty to project Russia as a foil to the West in general and America in particular.
False Flag Attack. Russia could very likely use SPETSNAZ forces in unmarked uniforms, as used in Crimea, to conduct “cross border” attacks against his troops. Russians dying in training is no concern to the Russian military, so losing a few in a staged attack is no issue. It would give the excuse needed for a military response. As of 3 February 2022, Biden released information received from British intelligence. Russia planned a false flag attack and prepared a video. The video contained scenes with corpses and destroyed military equipment, both Russian and NATO-styled. This video would have been used to justify a Russian attack.
Invasion Order? Russian forces may receive an order to invade Ukraine. The Kremlin may tell the world they are protecting the Russian lineage of the separatists in the Donbas region as they did in Crimea. Crimea was a well-planned operation that was in the works for a long time. However, repeating that success on the scale of a country-wide operation would be near impossible for the Russians.
NATO Deployment. NATO and US Conventional forces have deployed into the Ukraine. At least 3,000 US troops are being deployed in NATO countries in support of coming operations. Policy makers will continue with sanctions and other diplomatic means against Russia, its international businesses and businessmen, its political leaders, and so on.
The Resistance. The Ukrainian resistance forces are taking up arms. Resisting Russia will involve Hybrid Warfare, the combined use of military and non-military assets. Success in this relies on the foundation of a successful information operation prior to the invasion. Since Crimea, Ukraine has made tremendous efforts to invest heavily in its population as a resistance force. The Ukrainian government professionalized their resistance fighters under law 5557 called Fundamentals of National Resistance. This is to avoid overly violent and costly resistance groups.
The current population of the Ukraine is 43.6 million. Of that, 67% of the population is within the age range of 45 to 64 years old. Of this, currently 220,000 are in the military, leaving about 31 million potential resistance fighters.
A Stretched Russian Military. As of 28 January 2022, Canadian Imam Younus Kathrada called for Syrian Muslims to increase their attacks against Russian troops occupying Syria. This, along with ongoing activities in Georgia and Chechnya, would have the Russian military stretched on three active fronts. The Kremlin cannot bankroll these operations and a full scale invasion of the Ukraine followed with a contested occupation.
Environmental Considerations. Raputitsa is a Russian term for two seasons of the year. These two seasons are spring and autumn that are marked by melting snow and ice or persistent rains resulting in heavy mud. Tracked vehicles and heavy troop moving vehicles become largely restricted to hardball surfaces. By being restricted to developed roads, streets, and highways invading Russian forces will find themselves at numerous choke points and ambush points.
Summary. After the discovery of a video appearing to be made in support of a false flag attack it seems that a Russian attack on the Ukraine is inevitable at this point. It remains a matter of when. To avoid the pitfalls of the spring thaw the invasion has to come in early February. The pending incursion has been preceded by a heavy and years’ long propaganda campaign to the separatists in the Donbas region. But this is likely not as effective as Russia would like as support for living under Russian rule appears to have waned.
NATO forces are staging closer to Russian territory. The Ukrainian government has prepared and militarized their citizenry. This may be the turning point in preventing a full take over. The weather may be the deciding factor in how the invasion is conducted and whether it is a success or failure. Much of the Russian armor and heavy troop vehicles may well be useless in the mud and easy targets in columns on the roads for the Ukraine military and the Citizens Defense Forces.
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Author Bio: Marc Trepanier is a veteran of both active duty and reserves units. He served 21 years with time in both the Army and Navy in positions from Infantry to Theater level intelligence operations coordination. He has earned a Master’s in writing.
sof.news · by SOF News · February 16, 2022
6. Risk of a Ukraine war spreading in Europe rests on unknowns
Could cyber attacks be the main line of effort in this war? Or will it lead to escalation in other domains.
Excerpts:
James Stavridis, a former chief commander of NATO forces in Europe and a retired Navy admiral, says two wild cards in the Ukraine crisis are the prospect of an escalation to cyberwar and the possibility of an unintended escalation in the Black Sea, where Ukraine’s small fleet is caught between the bigger navies of Russia and NATO nations.
“A missile that goes astray and strikes a non-combatant, say a U.S. destroyer, could be explosive,” Stavridis said.
He believes cyber warfare would be a central feature of any Russian attack on Ukraine, with the United States and its allies attempting to protect the Ukrainian military’s ability to communicate with and command forces in the field, and to preserve the electric grid and other civilian infrastructure.
“That could easily lead to Russian retaliation in the cyber world, broadening the conflict quickly and dangerously,” Stavridis said.
Biden cited a similar unconventional danger. “If Russia attacks the United States or our allies through asymmetric means, like disruptive cyber attacks against our companies or critical infrastructure, we’re prepared to respond,” he said.
Jim Townsend, who was the Pentagon’s top Europe and NATO policy official throughout the Obama administration, said he sees little chance that Putin would deliberately extend an offensive beyond Ukraine unless he believed Biden would be unwilling to go to war to defend NATO allies. More likely, he said, is an unintended scenario such as a Western military aircraft getting shot down along the border.
“My great fear is that we go down a slippery slope that nobody wants,” he said.
Risk of a Ukraine war spreading in Europe rests on unknowns
AP · by ROBERT BURNS · February 16, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — A Russian invasion of Ukraine would be devastating, and a wider European war even worse. Whether a larger war happens would depend partly on President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, partly on the West’s military response, and partly on plain luck.
Although U.S. and European officials have said for days that a Russian invasion appeared imminent, Putin’s government on Tuesday publicly welcomed further security talks with the West. It also announced that some of its forces bracketing Ukraine will be returning to their regular bases, although U.S. and other Western officials said it was too early to tell whether the invasion threat had receded.
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War by its nature is unpredictable, and the stakes are enormous, not just for an overmatched Ukraine but for Europe and the United States. At risk, arguably, is the European security order established after World War II and then altered peacefully with the reunification of Germany, the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the expansion of NATO.
President Joe Biden has said he will not fight Russia in Ukraine, nor would America’s NATO allies. So a Russian invasion would not automatically trigger a wider war. But if Putin took his offensive beyond Ukraine’s borders onto NATO territory, the United States could get drawn into it. That’s because Washington is obliged by the North Atlantic Treaty to defend its allies, some of whom fear they are Russian targets.
“Make no mistake. The United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power,” Biden said Tuesday. “An attack against one NATO country is an attack against all of us.”
Biden also said that if any American in Ukraine is targeted by Russia, “We will respond forcefully.”
Beyond the seemingly unlikely scenario of Putin deliberately extending an invasion beyond Ukraine, there is a risk that even a limited war could spread as a result of an accident, a miscalculation or a misunderstanding. Once the fighting started, a bit of bad luck could lead to more conflict.
Even if Putin were to back off in coming days and pursue a negotiated path to his security goals, the enormous tension created by his buildup of forces on Ukraine’s borders could have a lasting impact elsewhere in Europe. U.S. allies on NATO’s eastern front, particularly the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which were once part of the Soviet Union, may press for a bigger and more permanent U.S. military presence.
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A full range of scenarios for ending the Ukraine crisis and managing relations with Russia will be on the table Wednesday when U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin joins a two-day meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. Austin is expected also to meet jointly with his counterparts from the three Baltic states.
Biden has ordered about 5,000 extra troops, including a senior Army general, to Europe to demonstrate U.S. commitment to eastern flank allies like Poland and Romania that share borders with Ukraine. Some of those extra soldiers include elements of an airborne infantry combat brigade in southern Poland, not far from the Ukrainian border, preparing for the possibility of being asked to temporarily house and assist civilians who would flee Ukraine in the event of a Russian invasion.
Aside from the risk of an unintended or unexpected incident along Ukraine’s western borders, the scope of Russia’s military buildup and its options for disrupting Ukrainian and Western communications offer possibilities for an escalation that could draw in the United States.
James Stavridis, a former chief commander of NATO forces in Europe and a retired Navy admiral, says two wild cards in the Ukraine crisis are the prospect of an escalation to cyberwar and the possibility of an unintended escalation in the Black Sea, where Ukraine’s small fleet is caught between the bigger navies of Russia and NATO nations.
“A missile that goes astray and strikes a non-combatant, say a U.S. destroyer, could be explosive,” Stavridis said.
He believes cyber warfare would be a central feature of any Russian attack on Ukraine, with the United States and its allies attempting to protect the Ukrainian military’s ability to communicate with and command forces in the field, and to preserve the electric grid and other civilian infrastructure.
“That could easily lead to Russian retaliation in the cyber world, broadening the conflict quickly and dangerously,” Stavridis said.
Biden cited a similar unconventional danger. “If Russia attacks the United States or our allies through asymmetric means, like disruptive cyber attacks against our companies or critical infrastructure, we’re prepared to respond,” he said.
Jim Townsend, who was the Pentagon’s top Europe and NATO policy official throughout the Obama administration, said he sees little chance that Putin would deliberately extend an offensive beyond Ukraine unless he believed Biden would be unwilling to go to war to defend NATO allies. More likely, he said, is an unintended scenario such as a Western military aircraft getting shot down along the border.
“My great fear is that we go down a slippery slope that nobody wants,” he said.
AP · by ROBERT BURNS · February 16, 2022
7. Could Ukraine end up as a War of Words?
The battlefield is cognitive, taking place on human terrain. Are the Russian's following their non-linear or new generation warfare concepts?
Thus, the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, in order to achieve superiority in troops and weapons control, morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population. The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country. It is interesting to note the notion of permanent war, since it denotes a permanent enemy. In the current geopolitical structure, the clear enemy is Western civilization, its values, culture, political system, and ideology.
Could Ukraine end up as a War of Words?
Fine Print
Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.
OPINION — The Biden administration has introduced a new tactic that I’ve called “Deterrence by Disclosure,” as the U.S. makes public its intelligence about Moscow’s military and covert planning as a way to head off what Washington claims to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of either keeping an independent Ukraine out of NATO or retaking control of Ukraine by military action.
Although a great deal of this new tactic involves disclosing what once would have been highly classified intelligence information, much of what is being done remains secret. I’m referring to the contents of direct personal exchanges, and not just the telephone conversations between the contesting Presidents, such as the one Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin had on Saturday.
I’m referring to what was said during Friday’s call between their top generals, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley and Chief of Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov, and what was said during Saturday’s discussion between U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoigu.
This may be the first attempt in modern times to have information warfare stave off initiation of kinetic warfare.
Has it worked? I’ll get to that later. First, let’s look at how we got to where we are.
We are approaching the eighth anniversary of Putin’s 2014 takeover of Crimea and the military assistance he provided to pro-Russian rebels who broke away from Kyiv to create independent regions in eastern Ukraine. Note that today’s Russian military activities are frighteningly similar to those back then, as are public statements by Putin and his top aides.
The current Biden approach appears to be based on what his team learned back in February and March 2014, when President Barack Obama’s administration was caught flat-footed by Putin’s moves.
Compare that to White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s aggressive Sunday statements on CBS’ Face the Nation: “We have seen over the course of the past 10 days, a dramatic acceleration in the buildup of Russian forces and the disposition of those forces in such a way that they could launch a military action, essentially at any time. They could do so this coming week. But of course, it still awaits the go order. And so therefore, we cannot predict the precise day or time that they may take action.”
Sullivan pointed back to all the intelligence about Russian troop movements the administration had put out and how it had turned out to be correct. “I would just say: If you look at the course of the past few months, as we have said, we predicted there will be a buildup of this kind. Our information is telling us that the Russians are likely to move in these ways. Thus far — in November, in December, in January — that has borne out.”
Another intelligence disclosure pattern has been to describe potential Russian covert propaganda activities.
Back on January 23, I wrote about a little-noticed U.S. Treasury Department press release, in which the Biden administration accused Russia of implementing a 2020 information warfare plan for, “destabilizing the political situation in Ukraine and laying the groundwork for creating a new, Russian-controlled government in Ukraine.”
The plan, according Treasury, included “identifying and co-opting pro-Russian individuals in Ukraine and undermining prominent Ukrainians viewed as pro-Western, who would stand in the way of Russian efforts to bring Ukraine within its control.”
That same day in London, the British government announced that same plan and included the name of a pro-Russian former member of the Ukrainian parliament as Putin’s preferred puppet.
More exposures have followed, such as publicizing information about a fake Russian video that was reportedly in the works that would have falsely depicted killings of Russian-speaking people in the breakaway regions. Such a video could have been used as rationale to justify Russian troop intervention to ‘protect’ Ukrainians who have dual citizenship and Russian passports.
Sullivan on Sunday offered yet another example. “We also are watching very carefully for the possibility that there is a pretext or a false flag operation to kick off the Russian action in which Russian intelligence services conduct some kind of attack on Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine or on Russian citizens, and then blame it on the Ukrainians.”
Of course the Russian side can play that game, too.
On Friday, the Russian news agency Tass reported that Ukraine may attack the Donbass republics [the pro-Russian breakaway regions of Ukraine] in the immediate future, according to Donetsk People’s Republic leader Denis Pushilin.
Pushilin was quoted saying, “I do not rule out that Ukraine may attack at any moment. Ukraine has everything ready for that: the concentration of forces and means [of Ukrainian Armed Forces in Donbass] makes it possible to do it at any moment, as soon as a political decision is made.”
What we are witnessing is the opening up of a new front in information warfare, made possible in part by cyber usage in the digital age. “Cyber…has magnified vulnerabilities as well as expanded the field of strategic contests and the variety of options available to participants,” say Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher in their new book, “
While it is obvious that satellite imagery has played a major role, intercepted Russian messages have also been key to the Biden administration’s deterrence plan. U.S. officials publicly releasing the substance of intercepted messages contrasts with long-standing intelligence community inhibition to expose the extraordinary electronic collection capabilities of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.
Up to now, discussion of cyber warfare has mostly involved talking about the attacking or defending of computer systems. Little publicity has been given to intelligence collection capabilities, much less describing the outlines of intercept successes for fear of losing access to sources or methods for gathering such information.
The Biden ‘deterrence-by-disclosure’ plan has caused Putin to join in the public dialogue by repeatedly having to deny any intention of invading Ukraine.
As an example of how the White House approach has affected Kremlin statements, Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy aide and former ambassador to the U.S., described Saturday’s conversation between Biden and Putin as coming “against the backdrop of an unprecedented push by U.S. officials to whip up hysteria over the allegedly imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Ushakov also referred to similar requests for urgent conversations by Biden officials, meaning perhaps Milley and Austin, as part of a “coordinated effort to pump out hysteria about the ‘invasion,’ which is now at its height.”
Ushakov is correct. The Biden team has pumped up concern about a Russian invasion, even suggesting last week, that it could come as early as tomorrow [Wednesday].
But yesterday, the Kremlin released two transcripts of meetings that indicate Putin wants to lower concerns that any aggressive military move into Ukraine by Russian forces is not that imminent, if it even happens at all.
First, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an afternoon meeting with Putin yesterday said that responses from the U.S., NATO and other European nations had so far not satisfied earlier Russian demands. Nonetheless, Lavrov said, “We are developing a dialogue on some aspects that are of practical importance today, with our Western, primarily American colleagues. We will simultaneously seek their answers to the legitimate questions that we have raised,” he said, according to the Kremlin transcript.
Lavrov also said, “We have already warned more than once that we will not allow endless negotiations on questions that demand a solution today.” But he added, “I must say there are always chances…It seems to me that our possibilities are far from exhausted… At this stage, I would suggest continuing and building them up.”
Thirty minutes later, according to the Kremlin posted transcripts, Putin met with Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to get a report on the ongoing, large-scale, Russian military exercises.
Shoigu described that “they are underway in the Western Military District” near the Ukraine borders, and involved “virtually all [Russian Navy] fleets” and “military units from virtually all military districts.”
More importantly, Shoigu added, “Some of these exercises are nearing completion, and others will end in the near future.”
Another sign that may indicate things might be cooling down: Ukraine Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said yesterday that talks with his Belarus counterpart had led to an agreement that the Ukraine military attaché in Belarus could observe theUnion Resolve 2022 Belarusian-Russian military exercises that are underway now.
There had been speculation by U.S. officials that the Belarus exercise would turn into an invasion attack on Kyiv, which is just 140 miles away.
While U.S. involvement in the Ukraine information war is far from over, a release yesterday from the Russian Foreign Ministry in effect admits to Washington’s impact. The release talks of “evidence of a well-coordinated information attack against Moscow, aimed at undermining and discrediting Russia’s rightful demands for security guarantees and at justifying Western geopolitical aspirations and its military development of the Ukrainian territory.”
As for Biden’s deterrence-by-disclosure plan to prevent actual warfare: So far, so good.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
8. We spoke to 7 ex-CIA and Pentagon experts. Here's what they say Putin wants in Ukraine.
Five former CIA officers and two defense officials, one being Chris Miller, former A/SECDEF.
We spoke to 7 ex-CIA and Pentagon experts. Here's what they say Putin wants in Ukraine.
Wed, February 16, 2022, 5:00 AM·13 min read
Citizens of Kyiv take part in an open military training for civilians in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sunday. (Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The looming threat of a new Russian military invasion of Ukraine has set the world on edge, with intense diplomatic maneuvering by the Biden administration and its European allies so far failing to bring Moscow off its war footing.
For months, Russia has been amassing troops and matériel near its borders with Ukraine, with some units arriving from as far away as Siberia. Russia also recently initiated large-scale military drills with its ally Belarus, which shares a border with Ukraine close to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Over 100,000 Russian troops now surround Ukraine.
Though Russia announced that it was pulling back some troops from the Ukraine border, President Biden said on Tuesday that the United States has not independently verified Moscow’s claims, and emphasized that a new Russian incursion is “still very much a possibility.”
This is not the first time Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, has threatened Ukraine’s sovereignty. In 2014, Russia invaded, and subsequently annexed, Ukraine’s strategically located Crimean Peninsula and fomented an insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region, which breakaway pro-Russian forces still retain partial control of to this day.
Given the high costs of a Russian invasion — experts believe it will be a bloody conflict that will isolate Moscow diplomatically and economically — many Americans are wondering why Putin would opt to launch a new incursion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Vladimir Smirnov/AFP via Getty Images)
Yahoo News talked to some leading experts who have worked in U.S. intelligence and national security to get their assessments of Putin’s motivation for potentially launching this new invasion, and the wider politics of Russia and the region.
These former officials offered a diverse set of explanations for Putin’s motivations in Ukraine. Some see his actions as a bald play for regional dominance or power; others view them as springing from a desire to recapture territory lost at the end of the Cold War or from a desire to reconstitute the Russian empire. Still others look at Putin’s actions as a response to his fears — rational or not — of NATO encroachment, or of being toppled in a popular revolution that could lead to a trip to the gallows.
Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Russian students undergoing military and sports training. (Alexander Ryumin/TASS via Getty Images)
‘A KGB man’
Greg Sims, former CIA chief of station with Europe experience
I can’t imagine Putin really wants to invade. He’s a KGB man who feels more comfortable with subterfuge than brute military force. It’s a sign of his frustration that it’s come to this. He’s tried electoral manipulation, corrupt entanglement, economic pressure, and finally, disguised military attacks.
Each step was more manipulative than the last. A truly independent Ukraine was never an option for him, and now he’s left with just three choices: Grab Ukraine outright, lop off big chunks — almost out of spite — or give it up. He has to blame himself for this dilemma, because the one thing he didn’t try was being a good neighbor.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at a military parade in Red Square marking the 75th anniversary of the victory in World War II on June 24, 2020, in Moscow. (Ramil Sitdikov/Host Photo Agency via Getty Images)
‘He wants to reassert Russia’
Ronald Marks, former CIA officer with experience on Russia issues
Putin is a throwback; the ten-dollar term is revanchist. But what he reminds me of, there was a Roman emperor called Justinian, after the Roman Empire fell in the west. And Justinian got in his head, this was about 100 years after, he was going to retake the Roman Empire. It was really costly; there was a plague. That’s sort of what Putin’s got in his head — he wants to reassert Russia, but he can only sort of afford so much.
And he will show his power internally. His constituency is inside, and he will have to start leaving a legacy at this point. And I think the legacy is part of it with him. He wants to be known as the guy who reconstituted and to some extent pushed Russia forward in the world.
I have seen him do nothing at this point that isn’t perfectly logical by what he would want to do. He is in a lot of ways the world’s meanest teenager. He really knows how to push buttons, and he also knows how far he can go. A teenager wouldn’t necessarily know that, but he does know how far to go.
Then-Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi at a military parade in 1999. (Georges Merillon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Fear of the ‘Gadhafi scenario’
Michael van Landingham, former CIA Russia analyst
I think that [Putin’s current actions] relate essentially to Libya and the Arab Spring — and the election of [Barack] Obama. So Obama is elected on an antiwar platform, he’s an antiwar candidate, he’s elected in part because he proposes a reset with Russia. That reset materializes in some part with Putin’s handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev. But when the Arab Spring happens, Putin and his more conspiratorial advisers who have taken greater prominence in the past decade — the people who are heads of the SVR [Russia’s main nonmilitary foreign intelligence agency], FSB [a Russian intelligence agency that is the primary successor to the Soviet KGB], the Russian Security Council — those guys are real hard-liners, and really believe that the U.S., if left unchecked, would try to dismantle Russia and take Siberia away, drive Russia back to Moscow.
So Putin saw what he thought was a return to the pattern of the U.S. taking advantage of Russia — which basically means forcing policy priorities that Russia has to accept. And nowhere was this more true than with Russia’s 2011 abstention on U.N. Security Council resolutions 1973 and 1975, the U.N. no-fly zone on Libya and sanctions on Libya, where Russia could have vetoed it. And that set a precedent not only for NATO operations in a state that wasn’t threatening them, but a state that had given up a weapons of mass destruction program, a state that had pretty significant ties to Europe at that time.
[Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi kind of was an avatar for Putin’s animalistic fears of being shot in a ditch, which happened to Gadhafi. And it came during the presidency of an ostensibly antiwar liberal, but whose policy inner circle was staffed by people who thought democracy promotion and preventing deaths in the name of human rights was worth humanitarian intervention, people like Samantha Power and Susan Rice.
So Putin, who had had these concerns in the early 2000s, was essentially convinced by this. The U.S. couldn’t help itself. It didn’t matter if it was a Republican in power, a sort of neoconservative who wanted to advance the freedom agenda, or a Democrat who wanted to advance human rights. The United States would use military force to unseat autocratic governments if there was a popular uprising against them. And Libya was the template for Putin and for hard-liners.
We knew his goal was to make Ukraine ineligible for NATO membership by taking a part of it [because it would be impossible to admit a new member-state while it was already in an armed conflict with Russia]. But the really, really hard-liners — not the people quite in Putin’s inner circle but the people who influenced the people in his inner circle — were advocating for stuff like taking all of eastern Ukraine, going all the way to Odessa, all the way to Transnistria [a Russian-aligned breakaway republic in Moldova, west of Ukraine].
The only way you can get the policy objective that Russia wants — a defenseless Ukraine that Russia can have any veto over foreign policy over — is with Russian force. And in 2015 they got Minsk II [a diplomatic agreement that attempted to lay out a framework to end the war in the territories in eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatists], which they thought might be implemented. But in taking Crimea, which was the most Russian part of Ukraine, and eastern Ukraine, which were also the most pro-Russian parts, making war on a fraternal Slavic nation, they pushed Ukraine further into the Western camp, because Putin was killing Ukrainians.
Why not [invade Ukraine] now? Because everything will be harder in the future. He’s got a million people in his country who died from COVID, and he’s facing reelection in 2024. And this is his new election with the new constitution that allows him to run again for a six-year term, so his first unconstitutional term [according to the previous legal framework].
He cares about security. If your goal is to have your state not invaded by the West, and not have a nuclear war with the West, and not get shot in a ditch, you’re willing to do a lot more than the next person for your regime’s security. And that’s his goal: to not get shot in a ditch.
And a lot of people would be like, “How could anyone think that could happen to them?” It happened to Mussolini, it happened to Ceausescu. Sic semper tyrannis.
Russian military vehicles move through Red Square during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow in 2021. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
‘Burn down their house’
Dan Hoffman, former CIA Moscow chief of station
First of all, NATO membership is a fig leaf. It’s a red herring. Everyone knows Ukraine isn’t joining NATO anytime soon. It takes unanimous consent; France and Germany won’t give that. Putin uses that as a convenient way to frame the narrative for his disinformation propaganda. NATO is a defensive alliance but it represents everything that scares him.
What he’s trying to do to Ukraine isn’t deny them NATO membership; it’s more broad than that. He’s trying to break Ukraine’s links to the West.
He’s doing it in three ways: economically, going back to the NotPetya attack [a catastrophic 2015 cyberattack on Ukrainian businesses and infrastructure], which was designed to make Ukraine an inhospitable place for commerce, and right now you’ve got capital flight, the risk of war, all those things. Ukraine is not a great investment.
No. 2, he’s trying to destabilize Ukraine politically, internally. So [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky is struggling through the worst poll numbers of his term, and Putin wants to show that your elected leader isn’t up to the task of dealing with the threat from Russia.
The third thing he’s doing is trying to use Donbass to exercise a veto over Ukraine’s foreign policy. And that’s where we get to what he’s doing right now, which is extorting the United States and the West by putting out 130,000 troops, military exercises in Belarus, militarizing the Black Sea with 11 amphibious ships and submarines — all of that designed to drive up the tensions and induce us to make concessions.
He’s made zero concessions, by the way. Nothing. We’ve offered to restart arms control negotiations, we’ve offered to give him access to the Aegis air defense in Poland and Romania, the Ukrainian ambassador to London had to walk back on not joining NATO even though it’s in their constitution, we’re offering, offering, offering, and Russia says, “We need more from you.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin at a press conference at the Kremlin in September. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
‘Just a damn bully’
Chris Miller, former acting secretary of defense, 2020-2021
Putin’s motivation: It’s the big unknown, but I don’t think it’s that difficult. Putin’s just a damn bully, and everything you need to know about Putin, if you’ve spent any time at a junior high school playground, it’s familiar to you. I do think it’s deep-seated in his psyche; I don’t think it’s deep-seated in the Russian psyche. People want to make it out to be, “They need a land corridor to their warm water port.” [That is, that the Russians might seek to invade and occupy the portion of Ukraine that would connect Russia via land to Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014 and which contains a critical Russian naval base and port on the Black Sea.] That’s clichéd. Let’s be honest, there’s got to be a domestic political calculation as well.
And there’s that geostrategic element where he’s like, I’m pushing, and they’re not pushing back, they’re just talking a good game. I think he’s just going to keep pushing until someone stands up against him, just like the playground bully. It’s playground bully 101.
I’m sure he’s sitting there saying, ‘I can’t believe that they’re letting me get away with this s***.’ The U.S. leadership’s just been feckless. And he got to be saying, ‘Holy crap, I can’t believe this.’ He’s like, ‘I think I’m going to pull this off.’
Ukrainian civilians attend a military training amid the threat of a Russian invasion. (Sergei Chuzavkov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
‘A desperate attempt to win back the empire’
Paul Zalucky, a former senior CIA official who served in Kyiv and Warsaw
This is why he might go in: because without Kyiv being a Russian city (because they always insist it’s their history, though it’s not), Russia ceases to exist as a global power. It’s just another country, and when you look at their [gross domestic product], which is less than Italy’s, they have nothing except nuclear weapons. And they can eat those if they want them.
The one factor that argues for him going in full-scale like this is it’s a desperate attempt to win back the empire, not so much the Soviet Union, but the Russian Empire, what Peter the Great had. And I think the Baltics are also part of that mission, but not right away.
Soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces conduct drills in northeastern Ukraine. (Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
‘Putin has pushed twice with no real consequence’
Josh Manning, a former Russia military and foreign policy analyst with U.S. European Command
Back in 2008, a few of us saw the Russian incursion into Georgia coming. You had two bullies going at each other for many months beforehand and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was really pushing his luck. He thought the U.S. would be there to help his overreach, and we did not. Should we have? At the time I didn’t think so, though the consequences for the incursion should have been far more severe. But Iraq, and by then to a lesser degree Afghanistan, were the focus for the U.S. then.
Then in 2014 was a small incursion into Ukraine. Same goals as Georgia and same achieved result. Again, the focus was the Middle East [now Yemen and the Horn of Africa], so Russia-related problems weren’t a major focus or priority.
So Putin has pushed twice with no real consequence and he actually emerged stronger from both events.
9. Biden warns Russia that war on Ukraine would be ‘bloody and destructive’
Is Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty getting the President's message to the Russian people?
Biden warns Russia that war on Ukraine would be ‘bloody and destructive’
President Joe Biden on Tuesday said he believes the Russian public does not want “a bloody and destructive war against Ukraine” and said diplomatic solutions to the standoff in Eastern Europe are still available to Russian leaders.
“While I will not send American service members to fight in Ukraine, we have supplied the Ukrainian military with equipment to help them defend themselves,” Biden said in an address from the White House. “We’ve provided training and advice and intelligence for the same purpose.
“And make no mistake, the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power.”
In recent weeks, the White House has ordered about 3,000 American troops into the region in a show of force. Biden’s comments Tuesday came amid conflicting reports of Russian military moves along the border with Ukraine.
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The attack came after weeks of escalating fears that Russia might invade its neighboring country.
Russian officials announced earlier in the day that some units participating in military exercises in the area would begin returning to their bases.
“We have not yet verified the Russian military units are returning to their home bases,” Biden said. “Indeed, our analysts indicate that they remain very much in a threatening position. And the fact remains right now Russia has more than 150,000 troops circling Ukraine and Belarus and along Ukraine’s border and invasion remains distinctly possible.”
Also on Tuesday, a massive cyberattack targeted the web sites of numerous Ukrainian government agencies and banks, White House and Pentagon officials would not say if intelligence showed a link between those moves and Russian forces.
Biden said he welcomed the unverified reports of Russian troops being redeployed to other areas but warned that the Russian military “remains in a threatening position” in regards to Ukraine.
“Nations have a right to sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Biden said. “They have the freedom to set their own course and choose with whom they will associate, but that still leaves plenty of room for diplomacy and for de-escalation. That’s the best way forward for all parties in our view.
“We will continue our diplomatic efforts in close consultation with our allies and our partners. As long as there is hope of diplomatic resolution that prevents the use of force and avoids the incredible human suffering that would follow, we will pursue it.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly stated that he has no plans to invade Ukraine, explaining the military show of force as a counter to growing NATO threats in the region.
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The announcement pushed world markets and the ruble up, but U.S. and Ukraine officials expressed skepticism.
Biden dismissed those arguments, blaming tensions in the region not on western powers but Russia’s decision to invade and annex Crimea in 2014.
“If Russia does invade in the days and weeks ahead, the human costs for Ukraine will be immense, and the human costs for Russia will also be immense,” Biden warned. “It will be met with overwhelming international condemnation. The world will not forget that Russia chose needless death and destruction.”
White House officials again urged all U.S. citizens in Ukraine to leave the country as soon as possible, to avoid being caught in the crossfire should an invasion occur.
In recent days, State Department officials have moved the U.S. embassy there out of Kyiv and to Lviv, close to the country’s border with Poland.
Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.
10. The U.S. has spent billions on equipment and training in Europe to deter Russia. Is it enough?
I think one important criticism will be that we did not provide sufficient support in equipment, weapons, and training to Ukraine soon enough. The counterfactual will be if we had armed Ukraine earlier would it have made a greater contribution to deterrence?
The U.S. has spent billions on equipment and training in Europe to deter Russia. Is it enough?
WASHINGTON ― The U.S. military has nearly 80,000 troops on average on rotational or permanent orders in Europe.
Now, it’s sending thousands more to support those units. About 3,000 combat troops are on their way to Poland to join 1,700 already assembling there in a demonstration of American commitment to NATO allies. Their mission will be to train and provide deterrence — but not to engage in combat in Ukraine.
An Infantry Brigade Combat Team with the 82nd Airborne Division is in Poland, and a joint task force headquarters with the 18th Airborne Corps was sent to Germany. A Stryker squadron permanently stationed in Vilseck, Germany, will also move through the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to get to Romania, to join 900 troops already there.
Prior to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Army had been drawing troops and equipment out of Europe. In the 1980s, the Army had 200,000 personnel in theater, but by 2015, that had declined to 33,000. Over 100 U.S. Army sites had closed, with the service’s presence mostly concentrated in Germany and Italy ― nowhere near NATO’s eastern flank.
But the U.S. began to change course following 2014, rapidly pulling troops and equipment back into Europe and requesting additional funding.
The Obama administration made its first request for the European Reassurance Initiative, seeking $3.4 billion. Some $2 billion funded the first armored brigade’s rotation in Europe, beyond a Stryker brigade and infantry brigade already there, with another $1.8 billion for an entire armored brigade’s worth of equipment.
Later renamed the European Deterrence Initiative, the effort’s funding peaked at $6.5 billion in FY19. After a drop attributed to one-time expenses like infrastructure projects, the fund stood at $4.5 billion in FY21. That year, it also included $250 million for military aid to Ukraine.
“The European Deterrence Initiative had a major impact on the U.S. presence, particularly in Eastern Europe,” said Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The problem the United States and NATO faced was that U.S. forces were in Central Europe because that’s where they stopped after World War II, and they were not in the east where the threat now lies.”
Amid the prospect of Russia invading Ukraine, top experts say the unfolding crisis will test the U.S. military’s ability to seamlessly and rapidly move American troops and heavy armor across the borders of multiple countries and could also magnify potential gaps in both strategy and capability.
Indeed, one of the biggest questions is how nimbly those forces can move from positions in central Europe or from the Baltics to the Black Sea to change the alliance’s deterrence posture as needed; a conundrum that has long plagued planners on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Military mobility is still a challenge,” retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2014 to 2017, told Defense News.
The challenges of mobility
After the annexation of Crimea, the U.S. military moved to demonstrate it could quickly send equipment and troops across borders to Eastern Europe to respond to a Russian attack.
In 2017, the first rotational heavy brigade, the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division out of Fort Carson, Colo., was tapped to participate in a large-scale combined arms live-fire exercise, called Saber Guardian, and show off its ability to move an ABCT into position.
Driving to the Center for Joint National Training Center in Cincu, Romania, isn’t easy because the only arteries in and out of town are narrow, winding roads occasionally blocked by herds of sheep. Even with their M1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Paladin Howitzers, among other vehicles, the brigade made it to the facility.
But sheep are a lesser obstacle than the bureaucratic red tape involved with moving military equipment through Europe. Because in many European countries, the necessary permissions can take weeks, Hodges has been calling for a “military Schengen zone,” ― a reference to the visa-free system that allows people to transit the European Union.
European countries are working with the U.S. to streamline the border crossing process, but it remains a challenge. If France follows through on an expressed desire to deploy a battle group to Romania, the logistics are unclear.
“They haven’t practiced that,” Hodges said of the French. “This will be an interesting test to see are we, as an alliance ready to do that ― to be able to move quickly through multiple countries with heavy equipment to get to a place in pre-crisis conditions, meaning you don’t get special exemption from [the European Union] road regulation, you don’t get special access to rail.”
Where the U.S. Army is
The U.S. has long maintained a large footprint in Germany, its primary military operational staging ground and home to major installations that house and train troops.
Former President Donald Trump planned to cut by about 12,000 troops the U.S. military’s presence in Germany, but after entering office, President Joe Biden froze Trump’s directive.
“We’ve got a very good launching pad from which to project American power,” Hodges said. “All of this capability that’s in Europe, in Germany, it’s essential.”
The Army late last year declared operational V Corps with a forward headquarters in Poland, established to defend Eastern European allies. The forward element acts “as the controlling headquarters for specific operations, activities and initiatives,” U.S. Army Europe and Africa has said.
“The headquarters elements are really, really important,” Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, told Defense News. “It creates people who are focused on the problems full-time so that when emergencies arise like the one we have now, then you have the contingency plans in place.”
The U.S. Army has also established a Multidomain Task Force in Europe as well as a new Theater Fires Command. The task force consists of a headquarters element, an intelligence, cyberspace, electronic warfare and space detachment and a brigade support company.
The Army established the task force in mid-2021 and conducted its first exercise in Norway focused on targeting for long-range, precision fires using high-altitude balloons.
U.S. troops also make up part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence Battalions in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, which have contributed to deterrence in the region.
Though NATO has four battalions of multinational forces in the northeast those forces wouldn’t be capable on their own of stopping a large Russian invasion, Stacie Pettyjohn of the Center for New American Security said. More heavy forces would be needed to allow enough time for NATO to bring its air power to bear.
The U.S. force deploying to Europe in recent days is likewise a symbolic tripwire force, experts say. It’s meant to show rattled Eastern European allies ― some with long, sometimes violent histories with Russia ― the U.S. will be there for them, said Cancian, and to “send a signal to Putin’s brain, to convince him the United States is serious.”
“There’s some questions about how effective that will be because the numbers are small, and they’re 700 miles from where the combat will likely be and given they’ve said they’re not going to get involved in combat,” Cancian said. “I think it’s important to emphasize that these forces are there to reassure our allies. They are not there to fight a war, and any talk about that, I think, is just not appropriate.”
The role of equipment
The U.S. Army has sought to ensure it has the equipment it needs to deter or defeat Russia. The Stryker unit traveling to Romania has 30mm cannons, a direct response to an urgent operational need issued following the Crimea annexation. The Army rapidly integrated the capability onto Stryker combat vehicles.
Still, Hodges said he was never able to address a lack of air and missile defense capability. While allies do have some air and missile defense capability beyond the one Patriot battalion the U.S. Army has in Europe, he said he’s concerned that might not be enough.
The Army has also changed where it keeps its prepositioned stock and how it’s used. APS locations include Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, and the service has a site in Poland under construction. There is an additional staging center in Germany.
An APS now houses an ABCT’s worth of equipment and engineering, artillery, military police, sustainment and medical capabilities, far less than the six divisions of equipment held in Europe during the Cold War.
The Army is also moving to ensure the prepositioned equipment is more modern and responsive to troops’ needs. While prepositioned stocks were historically only there for a crisis, now the equipment is used regularly during exercises and other activities.
Army Materiel Command commander Gen. Edward Daly told reporters recently he is “satisfied” APS in Europe can provide what troops need in the region.
The southeastern flank
Experts say allies have made NATO’s northeastern flank their strategic focus, leaving the southeastern flank potentially vulnerable. There remain gaps on the Black Sea, according to Pettyjohn.
“You can see that there’s a significant lag, and it would take weeks to get [equipment and troops] from the prepositioned sites in the northeast to the south because, I think, the rail network is a little dicier to Romania and Bulgaria than in Northern Europe,” she said. “NATO could easily bring air power and maritime forces … but it’s much harder for the ground forces.”
If a Russian invasion of Ukraine spills over into a broader conflict, southeastern Europe is where “entanglement and inadvertent escalation could happen,” she said. It’s unlikely Russia intends to attack Romania, but what if it seizes Ukrainian territory adjacent to Crimea, which sits on the Black Sea with Romania?
“You could imagine Russia using some of its lower level gray zone tactics and coming into contact with Romania there,” Pettyjohn said. “I think they certainly feel insecure, especially if Russia completely controls the Black Sea and expands its controlled territory in Ukraine and potentially positions more offensive systems.”
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Since Saber Guardian in 2017, the Army has grown its exercises in scale and frequency, including kicking off a now annual exercise — dubbed Defender Europe — that practices moving a division from the U.S. to Europe and then spanning it across a large swath of territory in theater to include some operations in the Black Sea region.
While U.S. forces are now moving into position in strategic countries like Romania, the U.S. military still lacks a strategy to secure the Black Sea region to deter Russian aggression there, Hodges said.
The possibility that Russia could invade Ukraine, and potentially use the Black Sea to its advantage, has pushed the U.S. to start developing a strategy, Hodges said, but it has to also include security cooperation, diplomatic efforts and economic development of the whole Black Sea region.
The arrival of Russian amphibious ships in the Black Sea “is ominous,” Hodges said. “I’m not seeing ... a single sign of de-escalation or they’re even tapping the brakes. I think of what they’re doing is like a giant boa constrictor around Ukraine, that’s squeezing it, trying to wreck its economy, trying to get the Ukrainian government to blink, trying to get all of us to blink.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts from Kenyon College.
Joe Gould is senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry.
11. ‘Asia First’ Misses the Point
The critiques are coming out. To those who wrote the strategy I offer words my boss told me when my work was criticized in the staffing process: Using your inside voice you can ask the critics: "Where were you when the page was blank?" It is so easy to criticize.
‘Asia First’ Misses the Point
The U.S. needs a coherent strategy for both security and economic policy.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Feb. 14, 2022 6:18 pm ET
‘Alexander Hamilton’ by John Trumbull
Photo: National Portrait Gallery, Washington
It was a frustrating week for Asia-first proponents who hope the Biden administration can execute the “pivot to Asia” that President Obama so disappointingly muffed. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken met in Melbourne with his Quad counterparts from Australia, India and Japan, the attention of the world was riveted on . . . Ukraine. As Mr. Blinken flew from Australia to Fiji to reassure regional leaders of American focus and attention, the headlines announced an airlift of thousands of American troops to . . . Europe. And even as the Quad’s leaders issued their statement on a common vision for the Indo-Pacific region, the American foreign-policy community was obsessed with a debate about . . . the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
For Asia hands, this was the worst kind of déjà vu. After Pearl Harbor, much to a nervous Winston Churchill’s relief, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made “Germany first” the guiding principle for American war strategy. As the Cold War intensified, similar sentiments led Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and George Marshall to prioritize Europe over Asia as the arena in which the U.S. would work to block the expansion of communist power. The 9/11 attacks saw East Asia again sink into the background of American foreign policy as the Bush administration focused on the Middle East.
After a generation of watching Washington’s successive failures to come to grips with a rising and increasingly assertive China—even as Asia became the most important economic region on the planet—Asia experts understandably are concerned that, yet again, the reflexive Atlanticism of the foreign-policy and media establishments will prevent an essential pivot.
This is a legitimate concern. But the chief danger facing American foreign policy today is not that an excessively muscular response to Russian revisionism in Europe will absorb the resources and attention that the greater threat of Chinese revisionism in Asia requires. It is the fateful combination of inadequacies in American national strategy that date back to the end of the Cold War and the doubts on Wall Street and elsewhere about the economic consequences of decoupling from China that constrain America’s Asia policy today.
The central feature of successful American foreign policy for more than 200 years has been a synthesis of domestic and international economic policy. For most of that time, the model of statecraft developed by Alexander Hamilton and promoted by leaders like Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt combined protectionist policies to shelter American industry from foreign competitors with pro-business regulation at home and vigorous promotion of American exports abroad.
This stance depended on British world power. On the one hand, as Adam Smith’s free-trade ideas gained greater acceptance in British political circles, Britain remained committed to a free-trade agenda even in the face of foreign protectionism. On the other, British naval and economic power maintained a favorable security and legal environment that allowed Americans to trade globally with only limited military and political commitments.
With the effective collapse of British power after World War II, Americans retooled the old Hamiltonian policy for a new era of American power. The U.S. would take on Britain’s global role as the champion of free trade and the guardian of world order. During the Cold War, two things made this policy politically sustainable: Fear of the Soviet Union kept the U.S. committed to its expansive global security policy, while for many years the relative weakness of foreign competitors only slowly recovering from the devastation of World War II limited domestic opposition to free trade.
The end of the Cold War saw both pillars of the new strategy come increasingly under strain. Over the long term, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to declining American support for global military engagement, and while 9/11 led to a temporary reversal in the trend, American defense spending as a share of gross domestic product remained well below Cold War levels. And on the trade front, new competition not only from Europe and Japan but increasingly from developing countries and above all from China saw American political support for free trade decline.
Concern about China and now Russia will likely renew support for defense spending over time, but the development of an effective economic agenda that can command support at home while attracting allies and partners overseas remains an elusive goal. The problem is bigger than trade. For Wall Street, Hollywood and other important American players, cutting the U.S. off from the world’s second-largest economy looks like an extreme act of self-harm. Meanwhile, the overuse of sanctions and erratic Trump- and Biden-era trade policy has reduced foreign confidence in America’s economic leadership.
In the short term, an underprepared America faces serious security challenges in both Asia and Europe. To succeed over the long run, Americans will need to address the national-strategy deficit that currently undermines our position around the world.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the February 15, 2022, print edition.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
12. Summary Thoughts on the Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States
From Bryan McGrath. As expected, there are those who demand more substance to the strategy. Some want a very prescriptive strategy. We should also keep in mind the National Defense Strategy is being staffed and that should provide more detail (especially in the hard power area/deterrence criticized below).
Summary Thoughts on the Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States
From lay observers to professionals in the national security arena, for the last year most have been waiting to see what our Indo-Pacific Strategy would be.
Words matter, especially in national strategy where those words drive funding, effort, and the attentions of industry and the national security apparatus.
For reasons best known to those who made the decision, it was delivered last Friday, buried in a general Friday news dump before the Super Bowl weekend and Russia on the brink of invading Ukraine.
You would be hard pressed to pick a worse time, but it is what it is.
The timing does not take away our responsibility to read and comment, and this week we are going to spend the next two days doing just that.
To start out we have returning guest poster, our friend Bryan McGrath. I'll follow with my thoughts tomorrow.
You can get your own copy of the strategy at this link if you don't have it yet.
As always, we are grateful to have Bryan guest posting. On this topic especially, he's the right guy to give it a once over.
Bryan, over to you.
Non-Specific/General Comments
These thoughts were rather quickly put down in reaction to an important document that could be lost amid other world events threatening to take center stage. As a Seapower advocate, attentive readers will note my obvious biases.
This is strategy at the “grand” level, in that it attempts to align and apply U.S. national power within itself, and with friends and allies. This needs to be remembered, even as I criticize it for its vagueness and generality. It is a stab at laying out a comprehensive strategy for competing with China, particularized to this region.
One can reasonably be expected to look at how this was framed and what it is considered to be important when anticipating what a Biden National Security Strategy will look like. And that worries me.
That “Bolster(ing) Indo-Pacific Security” is the fourth of five objectives of this strategy, is unfortunate, and it sends an unfortunate message of prioritization (or lack of, mainly) of building up our military power and encouraging our friends and allies likewise.
There is a great deal of this document upon which I do not comment. This is because whatever is not commented upon is unobjectionable or not important enough to bring up.
The document was released late on a Friday afternoon when there is war boiling on front burner in Europe. I realize it was timed to the Quad meeting, but I wonder if putting this aside for a bit might not have been a better move.
THE INDO-PACIFIC’S PROMISE
Note: Bold text references are direct quotations from the document, with page numbers noted.
(4) Since then, administrations of both political parties have shared a commitment to the region. The George W. Bush Administration understood Asia’s growing importance and engaged closely with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Japan, and India. The Obama Administration significantly accelerated American prioritization of Asia, investing new diplomatic, economic, and military resources there. And the Trump Administration also recognized the Indo-Pacific as the world’s center of gravity.
This is excellent. Pointing to continuity over time is worthwhile.
(5) The PRC’s coercion and aggression spans the globe, but it is most acute in the Indo-Pacific.
This is useful and important, as there is sometimes a tendency to look at the PLA-Navy buildup and think that it is all about Taiwan or Western Pacific hegemony. It isn’t. China is building a global Navy and will operate it as such. We will rub up against them across the seven seas in the years and decades to come.
(5) From the economic coercion of Australia to the conflict along the Line of Actual Control with India to the growing pressure on Taiwan and bullying of neighbors in the East and South China Seas, our allies and partners in the region bear much of the cost of the PRC’s harmful behavior. In the process, the PRC is also undermining human rights and international law, including freedom of navigation, as well as other principles that have brought stability and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific.
Excellent shorthand description of what this strategy is designed to contest.
(5) Our objective is not to change the PRC 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.
There is laudable humility in this statement, and it leverages our “killer app”—which is our network of friends and allies around the world.
OUR INDO-PACIFIC STRATEGY
(7) For centuries, the United States and much of the world have viewed Asia too narrowly—as an arena of geopolitical competition.
Too narrowly? As opposed to what? Geopolitical competition is the natural order of things, and we ought to recognize that fact, not lament it.
1. Advance a Free and Open Pacific
(8) through investments in democratic institutions, a free press, and a vibrant civil society. The United States will bolster freedom of information and expression and combat foreign interference by supporting investigative journalism, promoting media literacy and pluralistic and independent media, and increasing collaboration to address threats from information manipulation.
This is good stuff, and it gets at the heart of this being a strategy written on the “grand” level rather than something derivative. It also is a group of activities and functions that in our republic, are not terribly well-synchronized. We don’t have a place where the making of grand strategy fits nicely, or a competent process for birthing it.
(8) work closely with like-minded partners to ensure that the region remains open and accessible and that the region’s seas and skies are governed and used according to international law.
I realize that I am being a bit of a noodge and a pedant, but the overwhelming majority of the region’s (and the world’s) seas are not only ungoverned, but they are also ungovernable. By design, at least, seas are ungovernable if “free seas” are what you actually desire. I think I get what the authors are aiming at here, but the language is inartful.
2. Build Connections Within and Beyond the Region
(9) We will pursue this through a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions.
This is an interesting and strategically significant statement. It occurs to me that a single strong coalition would be the best approach to the reason but given several factors (fear of China, historical enmity, alignment preferences), that is unlikely to occur. So, this “latticework” of coalitions takes the world as it is and doubles down on our main strategic advantage (more and better friends).
(9) We will continue to strengthen Quad cooperation on global health, climate change, critical and emerging technology, infrastructure, cyber, education, and clean energy, as we work together and with other partners toward a free and open Indo-Pacific.
All very much the purview of grand strategy. Somewhat disheartening to have read several references already to climate change and not a single word about military power or capacity.
3. Drive Indo-Pacific Prosperity
(11) The prosperity of everyday Americans is linked to the Indo-Pacific.
Yes, and that prosperity is underwritten by forward deployed and stationed naval forces who work closely with friends and allies to maintain the freedom of the seas. Would have LOVED to see that tie made clear within this document. But it isn’t. We are either supposed to already know it, or it isn’t important.
(11) The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the need for a recovery that promotes broad-based economic growth. That requires investments to encourage innovation, strengthen economic competitiveness, produce good-paying jobs, rebuild supply chains, and expand economic opportunities for middle-class families: 1.5 billion people in the Indo-Pacific will join the global middle class in this decade.
As I read this, I thought “holy smokes, the Biden team is trying to shoehorn its domestic agenda into this”. And then I read:
(11) Through our Build Back Better World initiative with G7 partners
Silly me for not knowing that they’d already done so.
4. Bolster Indo-Pacific Security
(12) Integrated deterrence will be the cornerstone of our approach. We will more tightly integrate our efforts across warfighting domains and the spectrum of conflict to ensure that the United States, alongside our allies and partners, can dissuade or defeat aggression in any form or domain. We will drive initiatives that reinforce deterrence and counter coercion, such as opposing efforts to alter territorial boundaries or undermine the rights of sovereign nations at sea.
Integrated deterrence is posited here as if it is well-understood and a clear term that means something to the national security community. This is not the case. What is befuddling is that its use here, in a section that is very much (or should be) devoted to military matters, makes it sound as if “integrated deterrence” is a creature of the Department of Defense. And while it has generally been DoD types who use the phrase to explain why the rest of us should be happy with insufficient resources being applied to defense, the Department already had a lexicon to describe how “integrated deterrence” works within the department. That word is “Jointness”. Integrated deterrence—at least to the extent that I understand what it is—means applying national power in a more integrated manner to the question of deterrence. And because of this clever application of national power, the Biden Team believes that we could and should more efficiently apply the military instrument to conventional deterrence. By efficiently I mean “economically”. Because the defense portion of the discretionary budget is a fat target for Building Back Better funds, getting defense spending under control is and has been a fundamental tenet of the Biden Team’s approach. There is a whiff of smokescreen in the whole concept of integrated deterrence, in that it provides cover for diminishing the hard power contribution to deterrence while building up other elements of national power that are more popular with domestic political constituencies.
(13) build the defense capacity of partners in South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.
I am unable to find even a passing reference anywhere in this document to building our own defense capacity. This omission is the greatest weakness of this document.
(13) expanding U.S. Coast Guard presence,
I remain hostile to the Coast Guard performing naval functions forward, as it legitimizes Chinese blurring of lines in its own maritime power by playing the same game. I realize that this is a minority view, but it has implications in both how we approach Chinese maritime power and how we resource that approach.
INDO-PACIFIC ACTION PLAN
Drive New Resources to the Indo-Pacific
(15) Building shared capacity requires the United States to make new regional investments. We will open new embassies and consulates, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, and increase our strength in existing ones, intensifying our climate, health, security, and development work. We will expand U.S. Coast Guard presence and cooperation in Southeast and South Asia and the Pacific Islands, with a focus on advising, training, deployment, and capacity-building. We will refocus security assistance on the Indo-Pacific, including to build maritime capacity and maritime-domain awareness. We will also expand the role of people-to-people exchange, including the Peace Corps. Within the U.S. government, we will ensure we have the necessary capacity and expertise to meet the region’s challenges. Throughout, we will work with Congress to ensure that our policy and resourcing have the bipartisan backing necessary to support our strong and steady regional role.
The failure to mention properly resourcing hard power and strengthening our conventional deterrence posture is breath-taking.
Reinforce Deterrence
(15) developing new capabilities, concepts of operation, military activities, defense industrial initiatives, and a more resilient force posture.
But not capacity. Not lethality. Words matter.
Support India’s Continued Rise and Regional Leadership
(16) We will continue to build a strategic partnership in which the United States and India work together and through regional groupings to promote stability in South Asia; collaborate in new domains, such as health, space, and cyber space; deepen our economic and technology cooperation; and contribute to a free and open Indo-Pacific. We recognize that India is a like-minded partner and leader in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, active in and connected to Southeast Asia, a driving force of the Quad and other regional fora, and an engine for regional growth and development.
Absolutely. Bravo.
Deliver on the Quad
(16) We will strengthen the Quad as a premier regional grouping and ensure it delivers on issues that matter to the Indo-Pacific.
We need to do more to emphasize military cooperation and exercises as a part of the everyday business of “The Quad.”
Bryan McGrath is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group. These views are his and do not represent any client.
13. Indo-Pacific Strategy Quicklook
As Lincoln said you cannot please all of the people all of the time. This is quite a critique.
Again, I will state my view from a position of if I was going to use this to write and implement supporting campaign plans and mission strategic plans at the country teams. I could make use of this strategy but I think all the critics want everything addressed with every question answered. The broadness and vagueness are troubling to some and of course that allow board interpretation to take place and critics provide their negative interpretation.
Conclusion:
So, in the end, I kind of understand why this was dropped on Friday. We can now say we have a strategy, but there simply is nothing here we didn't already know.
In the end from 'ole Sal, there are five places we need to focus on to build our relationships in the Indo-Pacific. Don't worry about the details, they will reveal themselves.
- Security.
- Economic growth.
- Standard of living.
- Good governance and rule of law.
- Respect for local cultural norms.
Indo-Pacific Strategy Quicklook
from adults to Model UN kid...
I've decided to take a slightly different take on the reading. Though there are some good points made and to reference in follow-on documents, my primary thought is one of frustration. Yes, this is not a military strategy document, but - as is correct - an all of government strategy where rightfully the military is in a supporting role. I went in hoping and expecting such an approach ... but I should be careful what I asked for. Too many good idea fairies had a role in promoting their petty agenda vice the nation’s larger agenda.
There is my TL;DR summary, but if you're still with me, let's dive in.
On page two;
"The future of each of our nations - and indeed the world - depends on a free and open Indo-Pacific enduring and flourishing in the decades ahead."
- President Joe Biden, Quad Leaders Summit, September 24, 2021
Free and open. Yes. That begs the question based on this observation: the Indo-Pacific is defined by its name - the two great Pacific and Indian Oceans. Throughout human history there is only one way you can keep oceans "free and open" and that is through a large and capable navy that enforces this state on the global commons that is the high seas.
Words mean things.
The word "navy" is only mentioned once, and that was for the Royal Australian Navy. "Naval" not once. We do have a few different variations on "maritime" however; "maritime domain"(4); "maritime security"(3); "maritime space" (1); "maritime capacity" (1); and "maritime challenges" (1).
At least the U.S. Coast Guard got mentioned twice, which is good for them ... but this isn't the U.S. Coastal Waters strategy. Their inclusion does fit a pattern of the USCG being pulled away from its primary responsibilities. Additionally, it is more politically acceptable to some in the present administration. If everyone has not realized it quite yet, the US Navy is not in possession of many advocates in the Executive Branch, and it shows.
There are other priorities in play.
"Climate" was mentioned 16 times. The nations of the Pacific?
- India=12
- Japan=10
- Taiwan=8
- Australia=7
- China=5
- Korea (any)=4
- Philippines=3
- Vietnam, France, United Kingdom=1 each
- Russia, Canada, Mexico, any Central or South American nation or region=0 (NB: as an all-of-government document, this is a mistake. The Western Hemispheric nations are in NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM as you can see in the pic above ... but that only a military concern. The rest of the government should not be so constrained).
Besides "Climate" getting 16 mentions;
- Democratic/Democracy=8
- Human Rights=2
- Gender equity=1
If you were looking for any new thinking, you're going to be sadly disappointed. If you were hoping to see domestic politics kept out, you will be even more disappointed.
It does start out strong;
The United States is an Indo-Pacific power. The region, stretching from our Pacific coastline to the Indian Ocean, is home to more than half of the world’s people, nearly two-thirds of the world’s economy, and seven of the world’s largest militaries. More members of the U.S. military are based in the region than in any other outside the United States. It supports more than three million American jobs and is the source of nearly $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States. In the years ahead, as the region drives as much as two-thirds of global economic growth, its influence will only grow—as will its importance to the United States.
It outlines our allies and close friends;
...ironclad treaty alliances with Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), the Philippines, and Thailand, laying the foundation of security that allowed regional democracies to flourish. Those ties expanded as the United States supported the region’s premier organizations, particularly the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN);
Though the post-Cold War efforts of the Bush 41 and Clinton Administration get snubbed, they do make the point that in broad terms this is a national, bi-partisan effort...as is proper;
The George W. Bush Administration understood Asia’s growing importance and engaged closely with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Japan, and India. The Obama Administration significantly accelerated American prioritization of Asia, investing new diplomatic, economic, and military resources there. And the Trump Administration also recognized the Indo-Pacific as the world’s center of gravity.
Credit is due for clearly identifying the central player in this story;
This intensifying American focus is due in part to the fact that the Indo-Pacific faces mounting challenges, particularly from the PRC. The PRC is combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological might as it pursues a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and seeks to become the world’s most influential power. The PRC’s coercion and aggression spans the globe, but it is most acute in the Indo-Pacific. From the economic coercion of Australia to the conflict along the Line of Actual Control with India to the growing pressure on Taiwan and bullying of neighbors in the East and South China Seas, our allies and partners in the region bear much of the cost of the PRC’s harmful behavior. In the process, the PRC is also undermining human rights and international law, including freedom of navigation, as well as other principles that have brought stability and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific.
This opening was clearly where the adults were in charge. Things start to wobble a bit when the people from the cheap seats start to get a say.
This one paragraph is just strange, as was the almost spoof-worthy constant bringing in of the neo-pagan climate change agenda ... but really, DPRK deserves a bit more than being clumped in to the weather;
The Indo-Pacific faces other major challenges. Climate change is growing ever-more severe as South Asia’s glaciers melt and the Pacific Islands battle existential rises in sea levels. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to inflict a painful human and economic toll across the region. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) continues to expand its illicit nuclear weapons and missile programs. Indo-Pacific governments grapple with natural disasters, resource scarcity, internal conflict, and governance challenges. Left unchecked, these forces threaten to destabilize the region.
At this point, we discover - besides proper fealty to the Cult of Gaia - what appears to be a Biden Administration buzzword that needs to in the middle square of all our BINGO cards; "resilience." They mention is a whopping 14 times. Here's just a sample of the context;
Our strategy, therefore, begins with building resilience within countries, as we have done in the United States.
There's a whiff of "White Man's Burden" here (along with other neo-imperialist patronizing sprinkled throughout), but let's look at the definition of "resilience;"
re·sil·ience
/rəˈzilyəns/
noun
1. the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
"the often remarkable resilience of so many British institutions"
2. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
"nylon is excellent in wearability and resilience"
Huh. They keep using that word, but I don't think they know what it means. The United States cannot do that across a swath of the planet with multitudes more population than we have. We are overselling here. Sure, sounds all Kennedy School of Government and McKinsey Consultingesque to make The Smartest People in the Room™ nod their heads, but no. Stop. Not here.
Mixed in the growing clouds of chaff, there remain some good things. Nothing new, but that's OK. The fundamentals need repeating;
The United States will pursue five objectives in the Indo-Pacific—each in concert with our allies and partners, as well as with regional institutions. We will:
• ADVANCE A FREE AND OPEN INDO-PACIFIC
• BUILD CONNECTIONS WITHIN AND BEYOND THE REGION
• DRIVE REGIONAL PROSPERITY
• BOLSTER INDO-PACIFIC SECURITY
• BUILD REGIONAL RESILIENCE TO TRANSNATIONAL THREATS
This paragraph from the second bullet and all the "wills" to generate action and name dropping The Quad is solid. If we work on just this, everyone's security would strengthen;
Those efforts begin with our closest alliances and partnerships, which we are renewing in innovative ways. We are deepening our five regional treaty alliances—with Australia, Japan, the ROK, the Philippines, and Thailand—and strengthening relationships with leading regional partners, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Pacific Islands. We will also encourage our allies and partners to strengthen their ties with one another, particularly Japan and the ROK. We will support and empower allies and partners as they take on regional leadership roles themselves, and we will work in flexible groupings that pool our collective strength to face up to the defining issues of our time, particularly through the Quad. We will continue to strengthen Quad cooperation on global health, climate change, critical and emerging technology, infrastructure, cyber, education, and clean energy, as we work together and with other partners toward a free and open Indo-Pacific.
Whoever snuck Mongolia in, I owe you a beer. Well done and exactly correct.
As for the people responsible for this but;
...we will deepen long-standing cooperation with ASEAN while launching new high-level engagements on health, climate and environment, energy, transportation, and gender equity and equality.
I'm sorry, but whatever gaggle who clearly has zero experience in the world outside meetings at Davos, the lounge at a Sheraton somewhere, or musings in DC salons or Acela academic lounges - they need to be kept away from policy and go work at some Vermont liberal arts boarding school to teach Dadaism.
Domestic political fetishes exported to interfere with foreign policy and security requirements has brought more trouble to America abroad than any value it brought to people not holding an American passport. Feel good cultural imperialism - and that is what it is - that runs against the norms and deeply held beliefs of many nations we are trying to work on more fundamental issues with is a vanity that gets people killed. This is counter productive to the extreme.
Then we have another strange paragraph that seems wedged in.
Allies and partners outside of the region are increasingly committing new attention to the Indo-Pacific, particularly the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). We will harness this opportunity to align our approaches and will implement our initiatives in coordination to multiply our effectiveness. We will partner to build regional connectivity with an emphasis on the digital domain, as well as to uphold international law, particularly in the maritime space. Along the way, we will build bridges between the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic, and, increasingly, with other regions, by leading on shared agendas that drive collective action. We will also advance our common vision through close coordination at the United Nations.
Evidently someone has a pet theory of trying to spot-weld European security entities on to the Indo-Pacific. I'm sympathetic to that theory, but it is tertiary at the moment. I'm sorry, we can't get the Germans and French to focus on events a day's drive from Berlin. We can bring them in deeper in to Quad issues at a later date. Yes, France has a lot of waterspace in the area and it is nice for others to visit now and then, but let's not lose focus on ... oh, I don't know...Indonesia.
Focus people. Focus.
Speaking of trashy domestic vanity politics. I'm still giggling at this;
Through our Build Back Better World initiative with G7 partners,...
It's just embarrassing.
Of the five bullets, only #4 has a military focus. It dilutes that with the whole "integrated deterrence" that it says will be the "cornerstone of our approach."
Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, fleshed out the concept ... "In terms of integrated … we mean, integrated across domains, so conventional, nuclear, cyber, space, informational," he said. "[It is also] integrated across theaters of competition and potential conflict [and] integrated across the spectrum of conflict from high intensity warfare to the gray zone."
Feel free to do something with that. Mortals can't.
Don't expect anything new about Taiwan or the NORKs. Most of what is said is either legalistic hedging or the status quo;
We will also work with partners inside and outside of the region to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, including by supporting Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities, to ensure an environment in which Taiwan’s future is determined peacefully in accordance with the wishes and best interests of Taiwan’s people. As we do so, our approach remains consistent with our One China policy and our longstanding commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiqués, and the Six Assurances.
...
As the DPRK continues to develop destabilizing nuclear and missile programs, we will continue to seek serious and sustained dialogue, with the goal of complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and addressing its ongoing human-rights violations and improving the lives and livelihoods of the North Korean people. At the same time, we are strengthening extended deterrence and coordination with the ROK and Japan to respond to DPRK provocations, remaining prepared to deter—and, if necessary, defeat—any aggression to the United States and our allies, while bolstering counter-proliferation efforts throughout the region. While reinforcing extended deterrence against nuclear- and ballistic-missile systems and other emerging threats to strategic stability, the United States will seek to work with a wide set of actors, including our rivals, to prevent and manage crises.
If you thought bullet #5 about transnational threats would be terrorism, well, no. It appears that Gaia is mad and that makes her the transnational threat.
The Indo-Pacific is the epicenter of the climate crisis, but it is also essential to climate solutions. Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement will require the major economies in the region to align their targets with the Agreement’s temperature goals. This includes urging the PRC to commit to and implement actions in line with the level of ambition required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Our shared responses to the climate crisis are both a political imperative and an economic opportunity in the Indo-Pacific, home to 70% of the world’s natural disasters. The United States will work with partners to develop 2030 and 2050 targets, strategies, plans, and policies consistent with limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and will seek to serve as the preferred partner as the region transitions to a net-zero future. Through initiatives like Clean EDGE, we will incentivize clean-energy technology investment and deployment, seek to drive energy-sector decarbonization, and foster climate-aligned infrastructure investment. The United States will work with partners to reduce their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation and will support critical-infrastructure resilience and address energy security. We will also work to safeguard the health and sustainable use of the region’s vast oceans, including through the legal use of their resources, enhanced research cooperation, and the promotion of beneficial commerce and transportation.
We will partner with the region to help end the COVID-19 pandemic and build resilience against common threats. We will work closely with partners to strengthen their health systems to withstand future shocks, drive investments in global health security, and expand regional platforms to prevent, detect, and respond to emergencies, including biological threats. We will also work through the World Health Organization (WHO), the G7, the G20, and other multilateral fora to strengthen preparedness and response. We will advance our resilience efforts in close coordination with ASEAN, APEC, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and other organizations.
It appears that the adults were allowed to kick off the action plan. Some solid stuff here;
LEAD AN INDO-PACIFIC FRAMEWORK
We will launch, in early 2022, a new partnership that will promote and facilitate high-standards trade, govern the digital economy, improve supply-chain resiliency and security, catalyze investment in transparent, high-standards infrastructure, and build digital connectivity—doubling down on our economic ties to the region while contributing to broadly shared Indo-Pacific opportunity.
REINFORCE DETERRENCE
The United States will defend our interests, deter military aggression against our own country and our allies and partners—including across the Taiwan Strait—and promote regional security by developing new capabilities, concepts of operation, military activities, defense industrial initiatives, and a more resilient force posture. We will work with Congress to fund the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and the Maritime Security Initiative. Through the AUKUS partnership, we will identify the optimal pathway to deliver nuclear powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy at the earliest achievable date; in addition, we will deepen cooperation and enhance interoperability through a concrete program of work on advanced capabilities, including cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and undersea capabilities.
I'm all about giving interns a chance to contribute, but who let the Model UN kid go unsupervised?
The Quad Fellowship will formally launch in 2022, recruiting its first class of 100 students from all four countries to pursue graduate degrees in STEM fields in the United States beginning in 2023.
- 167,582 Indians are studying in the USA already.
- 11,785 Japanese.
100 students won't make a ripple unless they all become CIA assets.
So, in the end, I kind of understand why this was dropped on Friday. We can now say we have a strategy, but there simply is nothing here we didn't already know.
In the end from 'ole Sal, there are five places we need to focus on to build our relationships in the Indo-Pacific. Don't worry about the details, they will reveal themselves.
- Security.
- Economic growth.
- Standard of living.
- Good governance and rule of law.
- Respect for local cultural norms.
14. Ukraine Proves 'Asia vs. Europe' Is a False US Foreign Policy Choice
Exactly. We are a global power with global responsibilities. Even with my Korea/Asia focus bias I understand and acknowledge this. We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Excerpts:
For the United States to regain its strategic footing it must commit sufficient resources to realign the Joint Force so as to give it the capacity to fight two major theater wars simultaneously. It also must not just ask but demand that our allies in Europe field real exercise military capabilities or forfeit Washington’s protection. Only then will America reclaim sufficient strategic latitude to secure the homeland and project power globally as needed. The challenge the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia face today is not one of power deficit, but rather of the wasteful expenditure of resources drained by a reactive post-9/11 strategy that for two decades sidetracked the country into secondary theaters on a spurious belief that the scourge of terrorism could be extirpated by various “regime change” and “democracy and nation-building” projects. Our strategy going forward should not be predicated on a false choice of “Asia vs. Europe,” but should rest on the simultaneous effort to strengthen our position at home through re-shoring of our manufacturing base, cutting China’s access to our research labs and universities, and most of all by reinvesting in our alliances in those two critical theaters.
Ukraine Proves 'Asia vs. Europe' Is a False US Foreign Policy Choice
Ever since the Obama administration announced America’s impending “pivot to Asia” in early 2012 there has been a palpable sense of anxiety among Europe’s political class that Washington was gearing up to end NATO’s free riding and demand the allies start acting responsibly when it comes to rebuilding their militaries. Since then, U.S. foreign policy elites have periodically revisited various formulas of “strategic rebalancing” away from the Atlantic to the Pacific to better position the country to face the rising Chinese threat. Today this view constitutes the dominant consensus in Washington. The Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy and its 2018 National Defense Strategy prioritized China as the principal national security threat. The Biden administration has carried on in the same strategic direction.
Over the last ten years, op-eds, articles, policy papers, and books have worked essentially the same two-point problem set: (1) Asia, centered on the surging China, is tracking to replace the transatlantic community of democracies as the hub of the new international system, and (2) the United States needs to come to terms with the reality of its resource constraints that compel it to shift its attention increasingly to the Indo-Pacific and commit to great power competition with China at the expense of its historical ties with Europe. This binary imperative has morphed into a bipartisan point of departure for framing US foreign and security policy. By 2022 “China first” has acquired an air of inevitability. And yet, the Washington foreign policy conversation has been thrown into disarray by Russia’s military pressure on Ukraine and the attendant threat it poses to NATO, shifting U.S. attention to Europe once more. When it comes to even the best-crafted strategy, the adversary still gets a vote.
If history teaches us anything about state-on-state conflict it is that great imperial nations do not “pivot,” for the intricate network of relationships, commitments, and co-dependencies that undergirds their hegemonic position cannot be disentangled through a political fiat or by simply writing a new strategy. Rather, great powers persist in supporting the security architecture they have put in place so long as they have enough power to do so. In the end, the system can only be dismantled by an outright defeat. What has been missing from our conversation about American strategy going forward is the recognition that the United States still has sufficient resources to sustain its interests and system of alliances.
The current inflection point is largely due to the lack of clear purpose over the past three decades, and insufficient pressure within the extant alliance structure, especially NATO, to meet requisite capabilities targets. Today, rather than de-prioritizing the alliance that for the duration of the Cold War allowed it to prevent one hostile power from dominating Europe and the Eurasian landmass, and at the end brought about a resounding U.S. victory over the Soviet Union, Washington needs to refocus on forging a consensus in Europe on the nature of the threat that the Russo-Chinese alliance poses to democracies worldwide. No other strategy, including “rebalancing to Asia,” offers a pathway to victory, for it will inevitably divide the economic and military resources of the West confronted today by the hostile Sino-Russian alliance.
The ongoing theorizing over the past decade about a new strategic framework anchored predominantly in the Indo-Pacific rests on a skewed understanding of what constitutes America’s power and how it has evolved. The United States is a quintessentially naval power, an island on a continental scale blessed with an exceptionally secure neighborhood in our hemisphere, and through the vast coastal liminal unfettered access to the world ocean. Geography mandates that it continue to project power both West and East, regardless of how new technologies and new-in-principle weapons might yet again redefine warfare. American superpower status during the Cold War and its brief three post-Cold War decades of de facto global hegemony has rested on its dual anchors across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Today America cannot abandon the Atlantic vector anymore than it could disregard the Pacific region during the Cold War, for, in either case, the inevitable result would be to reverse two centuries of the country’s outward rise across the two oceans into Europe and Asia. This bidirectional national security framework remains the sine qua non of American power and prosperity. Just as much as Europe is America’s gateway to Eurasia, so are the Pacific islands of Japan and Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and the Australian continent the unsinkable aircraft carriers positioned off the coast of China and Russia.
Proponents of an “Asia first” American national security strategy often cite economic growth projections, population trends, interdependent manufacturing, and supply chain networks in order to lend the new strategy an air of eminent rationality, even inevitability. They argue that China must become America’s principal focus because of the size of its GDP, because of the very size of the Asian market, because in the future (near or more distant depending on who makes this assertion) Asia will constitute 50% plus of the global economy, because the People’s Liberation Army will soon eclipse the U.S. Army in terms of both size and capabilities, while the People’s Liberation Army Navy will put to sea an all-new submarine and surface fleet, to include a cutting edge aircraft carrier fleet to eclipse America’s. Perhaps. But today 75% of trade coming to Europe still flows across the Atlantic, and all the sea lanes of communication across the world ocean are protected by the U.S. Navy. Likewise, the combined economic and technological resources of Europe and America dwarf what China and Russia can bring to the table.
Last but not least, although China is rapidly modernizing its forces, they – especially the People’s Liberation Army Navy – are no match for the U.S. fleet, and are unlikely to catch up anytime soon. In short, now that the United States has finally abandoned its preoccupation with counterterrorism operations that tied down the Joint Force for two decades, it is well-positioned to restore its military for state-on-state high-intensity conflict, with each year bound to shift the balance of power in America’s favor. Our adversaries are keenly aware of that, hence the urgency with which Putin and Xi seek to exploit what they see as their current moment of strategic opportunity.
Image: Creative Commons.
Some “Asia first” proponents have gone so far as to recommend that rather than competing to restore our military capabilities, Washington should seek to do a “Nixon/Kissinger in reverse,” whereby we somehow entice the Russian Federation to break its alliance with China and side with the United States and the West in our quest to contain and eventually defeat the PRC. Considering Putin’s priorities near-term, which are to restore the Russian imperial state, for now, this strategy is a purely theoretical exercise. Statecraft and practical foreign and security policy-making are not a puzzle set where we can arrange pieces on the board to fit an eminently rational design if it lacks the necessary tools to implement it. Today the United States cannot offer Russia what it wants, i.e., the deconstruction of the transatlantic security system. Furthermore, Putin sees his alliance with Xi as an essential element of his strategy, for by creating a two-front crisis, one in Eastern Europe the other in the Indo-Pacific, he can fight for concessions in Europe.
America’s relatively weakened position is less a function of our depleted resources than it is a result of the emergence of the Sino-Russian alliance against the U.S.-led global order. Most of all, it is a result of the flawed American strategy of the past three decades that diverted the nation’s resources and reformatted its military for counter-terrorist operations in secondary theaters, while neglecting the fundamentals of great power statecraft and allowing the misguided globalist ideology to shift our technological and manufacturing base to China to the detriment of America’s national security. Although the various strategies for “pivoting to Asia” may appear on paper an attractive solution to America’s current security dilemmas, the truth is that in the great game of geopolitics there are precious few shortcuts.
Russian T-90 Tank Firing. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Today the United States’ security dilemma rests on the hard realities of shifting power balances worldwide. America must decide whether it wants to compete to sustain the system of alliances it put in place post-1945, or if it will indeed pull back and ultimately out of Europe, and eventually also out of the Western Pacific. Withdrawing either from Europe or Asia would mark the beginning of the waning of American power. Withdrawing from both theaters would be synonymous with America’s defeat and its return to being a regional player in the Western Hemisphere. The resources of the United States and its allies both in Europe and Asia are nowhere near so depleted today as to consider either of those outcomes.
For the United States to regain its strategic footing it must commit sufficient resources to realign the Joint Force so as to give it the capacity to fight two major theater wars simultaneously. It also must not just ask but demand that our allies in Europe field real exercise military capabilities or forfeit Washington’s protection. Only then will America reclaim sufficient strategic latitude to secure the homeland and project power globally as needed. The challenge the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia face today is not one of power deficit, but rather of the wasteful expenditure of resources drained by a reactive post-9/11 strategy that for two decades sidetracked the country into secondary theaters on a spurious belief that the scourge of terrorism could be extirpated by various “regime change” and “democracy and nation-building” projects. Our strategy going forward should not be predicated on a false choice of “Asia vs. Europe,” but should rest on the simultaneous effort to strengthen our position at home through re-shoring of our manufacturing base, cutting China’s access to our research labs and universities, and most of all by reinvesting in our alliances in those two critical theaters.
Andrew A. Michta is Dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany. He is also former a Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College and a former Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, DC.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
15. The Less Said About NATO and Ukraine, the Better
Excerpts:
Greater honesty about Ukraine and NATO can also help Western governments speak more constructively to Putin. A refusal to permanently settle the issue of alliance membership will frustrate him. Ever ready to take offense, he may even dislike hearing that one reason for a neither-in-nor-out stance on Ukraine’s membership is to limit Russian meddling and malevolence. But Putin can, if he chooses, also find some reassurance in a Western understanding of Ukraine’s divisions that, at least in part, overlaps his own. Putin would continue to deny that this divided country deserves respect; Western governments should continue to insist that it needs support. But they would at last be talking about the same thing. Let Moscow and Washington argue about whose ideas can best achieve security and stability.
Finally, honest talk about NATO membership can put discussions with Ukraine’s leaders on a better footing. They also know—and should hear from their friends—that the country’s divisions are its greatest vulnerability. To integrate into Western institutions, Ukraine has to better integrate itself. Western governments should offer to help Ukraine achieve that goal through increased economic, political, and even military support. But real national unity—probably a generational enterprise—has to be Ukraine’s own project. Nothing else can bring the country’s other goals within reach.
The Less Said About NATO and Ukraine, the Better
Neither Membership nor Neutrality Is the Answer
February 16, 2022
With Russia massing troops on Ukraine’s border and demanding an end to NATO enlargement, a heated international debate has broken out over whether limits on future membership in the alliance might resolve the crisis and avert war. Some have argued that it is time to close the door to new members, while others argue it would be a grave mistake to let Russian President Vladimir Putin dictate the terms of European security. Yet one all-important question has been missing from the debate: what being welcomed into NATO—or kept out—would mean for Ukraine itself.
Instead of looking at what is at stake for Ukraine, much commentary has centered on the alliance’s founding rules and principles, especially the open-door policy. The countries that created NATO at the start of the Cold War expected to admit new members over time, and doing so has served the alliance well. The addition of Germany, Greece, and Turkey in the 1950s and Spain in the 1980s made NATO stronger. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the prospect of EU and NATO membership offered eastern European governments an extra incentive to create Western-style institutions.
Even so, the case for keeping the door to membership open to everyone for all time—just because that approach worked well in the past—is unlikely to persuade those who believe peace now hangs in the balance. The alliance, after all, made a famous exception to the policy once before, because it believed that doing so would strengthen European security. In 1955, the victorious powers of World War II—France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—signed a treaty guaranteeing Austria’s permanent neutrality. Today, those who want to keep Ukraine out of NATO are asking, Why, if this agreement showed creative Cold War statesmanship in 1955, is something like it out of bounds in 2022?
Whether Ukraine qualifies for membership is another divisive part of the debate, even though no one claims the country does. U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders routinely declare that in failing to overcome systemic corruption, Kyiv has not met the criteria that would make it a credible candidate. Some alliance members doubt Ukraine will ever qualify to join—and hint that they will never vote to admit it. This way of talking about the issue only adds to the determination of those who favor an explicit and permanent ban to keep Ukraine out. If war can be averted simply by agreeing not to do something that no one really wants or expects to do anyway, they ask, then why not agree?
In the debate over Ukraine’s possible membership in NATO, neither side takes the other seriously anymore. Those who stand by the open-door policy sound to their critics like defenders of a meaningless principle, not serious diplomatic problem-solvers. Meanwhile, those who favor a permanent ban sound like enablers of Russian imperialism. Each side claims the other threatens the peace and security of Europe.
Both sides may actually be right. Understanding why, however, requires a different debate—one that looks at what being admitted to NATO or kept out permanently would mean for Ukraine. A definitive resolution of its status—one way or the other—would in fact do the country far more harm than good. It would deepen Ukraine’s internal divisions, undermine its stability, and keep the region as a whole in crisis. A serious effort to promote European security needs to focus not only on how to satisfy the great powers but also on how to hold together the country they are so vehemently arguing about. Proposals that ignore Ukraine itself cannot strengthen European security.
DIVIDED LAND
Consider what bringing Ukraine into NATO would mean for the country’s domestic politics. Putin’s famous remark to U.S. President George W. Bush in 2008 that Ukraine is “not a real country” was a ridiculous exaggeration of the country’s linguistic, ethnic, and religious cleavages. Even divided countries can have national identities, loyal citizens, free elections, and strong institutions. Still, good policy should unite rather than divide, and there is little doubt that in Ukraine’s east—where Russian faith, language, and culture are the strongest—many people do not want to feel cut off from Russia or in a state of permanent hostility, much less war, with it. If they feel pushed into confrontation with their eastern neighbor, they will be more receptive to extremist political appeals, more willing to excuse violent opposition to the government in Kyiv, and more tolerant of Russian meddling. More likely, in other words, to feel they are not part of a real country and owe it nothing.
For many Ukrainians, NATO membership has unfortunately become a civilizational marker of sorts. Polls now put support for joining the alliance at 60 percent or more—a significant increase from a decade ago, when sentiment was evenly divided. By seizing Crimea in early 2014 and launching a separatist war in eastern Ukraine, Russia made itself the main external threat to Ukrainian unity, sovereignty, and security. Those who say Putin has unified Ukraine and pushed it westward are right.
For many Ukrainians, NATO membership has unfortunately become a civilizational marker.
Yet the country’s pre-2014 divisions have hardly disappeared. Attitudes toward NATO still vary widely from region to region, and the intensity with which they are held has inevitably increased. Eight years into the separatist standoff in eastern Ukraine, some people there have clearly turned against Russia for bringing them so much grief. Others, meanwhile, denounce the government in Kyiv for its inability—unwillingness, they say—to end the conflict. In this setting, the United States and its allies should aim to keep the latter group as small as possible. Ukraine’s future depends on how many of its citizens want to be part of it.
These realities—not Biden’s list of qualifications for NATO membership and certainly not Putin’s claim that he feels threatened by a handful of U.S. advisers helping train and equip Ukraine’s army—are the true reason that bringing the country into NATO any time soon would be a bad idea. But here is where those who favor the Austrian neutrality model need to take a deep breath. Permanently barring Ukraine from NATO membership could destabilize the country just as much as bringing it into the alliance would, and for largely the same reasons.
CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE
Just as many Ukrainians in the east fear that joining Western institutions will make them enemies of Russia, many in the rest of the country are fiercely determined to continue integrating with the West. A permanent roadblock on the path to NATO membership would dash their hopes. Worse, it would seem to consign them to a Russian sphere of influence in which all important national decisions would be subject to Moscow’s veto.
In their fury at this outcome, some Ukrainians might blame spineless, unsupportive Western politicians. But many more would direct their anger at those of their fellow citizens who they felt had betrayed their country and opened it up to Russian manipulation. Ukraine would become harder to govern. Partisan politics would become more ethnically driven and consumed by the search for an enemy within. And radical militias, which Kyiv has sought in recent years to bring under its control, would once more proliferate.
To integrate into Western institutions, Ukraine has to better integrate itself.
Previous efforts to cut Ukraine’s ties to the West have triggered precisely this type of instability. The Maidan uprising that brought down President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 began when he broke his promise to seek closer relations with the European Union and chose alignment with Moscow instead. Although Ukraine has made progress toward national unity since then—all three of the major presidential candidates in 2019, for instance, were from Russian-speaking areas—other signs of polarization have increased. Politicians and officials considered too ready to deal with Moscow are regularly accused of treason. (That is the astonishing new charge against former President Petro Poroshenko, who stands accused of overseeing coal purchases from separatist areas to keep the lights on in the rest of the country.)
Most Western discussion of permanently postponing NATO membership for Ukraine seems to assume that its citizens would swallow their disappointment and carry on. This is almost surely wrong. They are far more likely to take their disappointment out on each other. Just ten years before Austria accepted neutrality in 1955, it had been part of the Third Reich. Its citizens were not divided by rival affinities for Moscow and Washington. Being kept out of the Cold War did not destabilize their country. In Ukraine, no one should take such a result for granted.
STRAIGHT TALK
If neither permanent exclusion from NATO nor early inclusion are good options, some Western policymakers may conclude the best path is continuing—or even increased—strategic ambiguity about how open the door to membership really is. In diplomacy, double talk is often a good choice. But the better way to avoid the drawbacks of leaning too far in either direction is to give the issue as little attention as possible. NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit declaration, which said Ukraine would someday become a member, showed how easily policy sleight of hand can backfire. The statement added to Moscow’s grievances without deepening Kyiv’s unity. Far better to have said nothing at all.
At this moment of national emergency, moreover, Ukraine hardly needs more equivocal talk. It needs unequivocal help. To survive and become more unified over the long term, it has to survive in the short term. It needs weapons and training, trade and investment, and solidarity. It needs international recognition as a real country that is trying to hold itself together. It needs advocates who push back against Putin’s threats and his absurd claims that Western help threatens Russian security.
Yet neither verbal ambiguity nor single-minded support will by themselves produce an effective, sustainable policy toward Ukraine. That requires more open, honest, and straightforward talk about why the country is not a good candidate either for NATO membership or Austrian-style imposed neutrality. Such an approach would have three important and clarifying results.
The first involves the way the United States and its allies think about European security. A peaceful Europe—“whole and free” as President George H. W. Bush described it in 1989—depends just as much on the stability of smaller states as on the agreement of great powers. A deal that exacerbates division within Ukraine—with its more than 40 million people, not a small state at all—undermines the security of all Europe. The most powerful case against a Russian sphere of influence that covers Ukraine is not that it would be immoral but that it would be destabilizing.
Greater honesty about Ukraine and NATO can also help Western governments speak more constructively to Putin. A refusal to permanently settle the issue of alliance membership will frustrate him. Ever ready to take offense, he may even dislike hearing that one reason for a neither-in-nor-out stance on Ukraine’s membership is to limit Russian meddling and malevolence. But Putin can, if he chooses, also find some reassurance in a Western understanding of Ukraine’s divisions that, at least in part, overlaps his own. Putin would continue to deny that this divided country deserves respect; Western governments should continue to insist that it needs support. But they would at last be talking about the same thing. Let Moscow and Washington argue about whose ideas can best achieve security and stability.
Finally, honest talk about NATO membership can put discussions with Ukraine’s leaders on a better footing. They also know—and should hear from their friends—that the country’s divisions are its greatest vulnerability. To integrate into Western institutions, Ukraine has to better integrate itself. Western governments should offer to help Ukraine achieve that goal through increased economic, political, and even military support. But real national unity—probably a generational enterprise—has to be Ukraine’s own project. Nothing else can bring the country’s other goals within reach.
16. Biden Can Find Middle Ground in Heated Nuclear Debate
Conclusion:
A no-first-use/sole purpose pledge and force posture would pose more risks than benefits in today’s strategic environment. But it is still a long-term goal that the United States could strive for provided the right conditions or circumstances are in place. Until then, nuclear deterrence is effective—when adversaries know the United States would actually use its nuclear weapons.
Biden Can Find Middle Ground in Heated Nuclear Debate
A conditions-based policy can reassure allies while moving U.S. policy forward.
By Duyeon Kim, a Seoul-based adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security and a columnist with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
U.S. President Joe Biden is faced with competing pressures as his administration prepares to announce the results of the latest Nuclear Posture Review. The administration; the niche, but important, arms control community in Washington; and foreign allies have been hotly debating whether Washington should adopt a policy pledging that the United States will not be the first to use nuclear weapons in a crisis (a preemptive attack or first strike), referred to as a “no first use” policy, and that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack against America and its allies, referred to as a “sole purpose” policy. Both sides fiercely argue their viewpoint—but a middle way is possible.
In January 2017, then-Vice President Biden articulated his long-held belief that the United States does not need to use nuclear weapons first. It mirrored then-President Barack Obama’s convictions about reducing the role of nuclear weapons and America’s “moral responsibility … to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” It also reflected a reduction in Washington’s perceived need to retain the first-use option against non-nuclear attacks since the end of the Cold War. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden pledged to push for a no-first-use policy, with his website stating, “As president, he will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.”
Biden is being pressed to make good on his campaign commitment by Democratic leaders such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Adam Smith, who reintroduced the No First Use Bill in April 2021 and signed on to a letter delivered to the president on Jan. 26, and he is also facing pressure from some experts in the nongovernmental arms control community.
U.S. President Joe Biden is faced with competing pressures as his administration prepares to announce the results of the latest Nuclear Posture Review. The administration; the niche, but important, arms control community in Washington; and foreign allies have been hotly debating whether Washington should adopt a policy pledging that the United States will not be the first to use nuclear weapons in a crisis (a preemptive attack or first strike), referred to as a “no first use” policy, and that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack against America and its allies, referred to as a “sole purpose” policy. Both sides fiercely argue their viewpoint—but a middle way is possible.
In January 2017, then-Vice President Biden articulated his long-held belief that the United States does not need to use nuclear weapons first. It mirrored then-President Barack Obama’s convictions about reducing the role of nuclear weapons and America’s “moral responsibility … to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” It also reflected a reduction in Washington’s perceived need to retain the first-use option against non-nuclear attacks since the end of the Cold War. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden pledged to push for a no-first-use policy, with his website stating, “As president, he will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.”
Biden is being pressed to make good on his campaign commitment by Democratic leaders such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Adam Smith, who reintroduced the No First Use Bill in April 2021 and signed on to a letter delivered to the president on Jan. 26, and he is also facing pressure from some experts in the nongovernmental arms control community.
Declaring a no-first-use policy would inevitably be accompanied by making changes to U.S. force posture and structure, including increasing the time and steps it takes to launch a nuclear weapon.
American allies, however, have firmly objected to alterations in U.S. nuclear doctrine that could put their own security at risk. Many Asian and European officials and experts in allied countries have told me that changes would also exacerbate existing doubts about Washington’s security commitment to them. As former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Walter Slocombe said in 2014, “The real danger of a no-first-use pledge is that our enemies would pay no attention, but our allies would pay too much [attention], losing confidence in the alliances.”
Plus, the next American president could reverse Biden’s decision, further undermining U.S. credibility. Allies firmly resisted when the Obama administration was considering adopting a no-first-use pledge and most recently expressed similar concerns during the Biden administration’s consultations. That’s hard to ignore at a time when Biden is attempting to strengthen alliances damaged during his predecessor Donald Trump’s presidency.
Those who advocate for a no-first-use and/or sole purpose policy present many important arguments whose common denominator is enhancing crisis stability, reducing the chances of escalation to the nuclear level, and leading by example through unilateral nuclear restraint. The potential return of Trumpism (and a president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons) would add more weight to these claims, even though such policy could be reversed by a future president. Some experts also believe that no-first-use and sole purpose are different. The latter, they argue, avoids “eroding primary or extended deterrence” because such language leaves enough ambiguity about the circumstances in which the United States would use nuclear weapons.
However, U.S. allies do not want Washington to limit its nuclear use to only responding to a nuclear attack. For Asian allies in particular, the psychological effect of nuclear weapons is just as important as their physical destructive power. Even if high-tech conventional weapons could effectively respond to non-nuclear attacks from an operational standpoint, Asian officials say they still need something much stronger to scare and deter adversaries from waging any kind of attack.
Plus, decision-makers in both allied and adversarial countries will not spend time analyzing words and researching definitions and historical origins according to different formulations of the language presented in the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review. Several officials have told me that they will interpret no-first-use and sole purpose as the same concept, and either articulation will have the same effect on allies and rivals. A premature pledge would also bring back the ghosts of Trump’s “America first” nightmare, in which allies’ needs were abandoned in favor of a narrow concept of American security.
The United States can and should play a leadership role in reducing nuclear dangers worldwide. But the conditions or circumstances in the global security environment must support it. Not all nuclear-possessing countries have a no-first-use policy. Russia dropped it in 1993, and nuclear weapons play a key role in its military doctrine. This is important to remember amid increasing fears of another Russian invasion of Ukraine and the potential for Moscow to be further emboldened by an American no-first-use/sole purpose policy. China’s claimed no-first-use policy has been met with increasing skepticism. North Korea maintains a first-use policy. India’s conditional no-first-use policy reserves the right to use nuclear weapons against biological or chemical weapons attacks. Pakistan, France, and the United Kingdom have first-use policies.
What’s more, China and Russia have made strides in their conventional capabilities, continue to modernize their nuclear weapons capabilities, and are increasingly aggressive. North Korea’s nuclear weapons advancements and sophistication drive neighbors to want their own nuclear deterrent. Advanced weapons in both conventional and dual-capable systems risk blurring the distinction between an incoming conventional and nuclear attack. Emerging non-nuclear threats and new technologies have also increased uncertainties about their destructive power and impact on military strategies as well as possibilities for nuclear use. And there is no guarantee or evidence that other countries will follow America’s lead on no-first-use/sole purpose. The list goes on.
A decision on when and how to take tangible steps toward no-first-use/sole purpose, therefore, should be guided primarily by the circumstances in the security landscape and the security concerns of both the United States and its allies. They could be assessed according to four general conditions: threat assessments of concerned parties; adversaries’ nuclear doctrines, force postures, and military capabilities; allies’ confidence in U.S. security guarantees; and U.S. military and political capabilities to deter both nuclear-weapons use and non-nuclear threats that can cause mass destruction by adversaries.
The Biden administration could demonstrate it is serious about working toward no-first-use/sole purpose by taking a series of declaratory and actionable steps. First, it could reiterate that no-first-use/sole purpose is America’s ultimate goal and that it will proactively work toward that end. It could outline specific steps in the Nuclear Posture Review or in a separate format.
Such a statement would further advance Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, which articulated its commitment to work toward reducing the role of nuclear weapons without yet giving up its right to nuclear first use, while acknowledging the Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review’s assessment of a sharp deterioration of the security environment with growing threats from China, Russia, North Korea, and non-nuclear strategic sources.
The Biden administration could compile an illustrative list of circumstances under which it might consider employing a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear attack, as proposed by expert Robert Einhorn. Such a list, he argues, would indicate that those circumstances would be much more limited than the impression that was conveyed in Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. The Obama administration stated that Washington would consider the use of nuclear weapons only “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” It did not elaborate on “extreme circumstances.” The Trump administration used almost identical language, but it went further to articulate that “Extreme circumstances could include significant non-nuclear strategic attacks … [which] include, but are not limited to, attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities.”
Washington could also announce that it will take steps toward adopting no-first-use/sole purpose in close consultation with allies. Specifically, the administration could run threat assessments of both the United States and its allies respectively to gauge the specific circumstances under which all parties would feel comfortable with Washington renouncing nuclear first use, declaring sole purpose, and beginning to take steps to add credibility to its declaratory policy. Such measures would include moving nuclear weapons off high alert, or ready to launch instantly. These discussions could be held in newly created consultative mechanisms with allies or included in existing ones that deal with defense and extended deterrence issues. Congress could also stay informed about the administration’s progress by receiving regular briefings.
From an alliance perspective, if the United States renounced its right to nuclear first use in extreme circumstances and declared sole purpose today, it would contradict NATO’s policy and undermine the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. European allies object to no-first-use because of Russia’s revanchism and growing reliance on nuclear weapons. Washington would, therefore, need to manage any future no-first-use/sole purpose policy within NATO.
In Asia, allies have already been increasingly skeptical about the reliability of the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent, or nuclear umbrella, and would be tempted to seriously consider their own nuclear options because of threats from China and North Korea. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and even Australia have previously toyed with nuclear weapons programs. South Koreans tell me that progressives might use a no-first-use/sole purpose policy as rationale—arguing that the nuclear umbrella is gone or broken—to question the need for U.S. troop presence and the United Nations Command, while moderates and conservatives would likely use the same rationale to call for the country’s own nuclear weapons. Prospects of Japan’s nuclear armament would ignite a nuclear arms race in the region as well.
Washington could also announce that it plans to discuss with senior officials of nuclear states either eventually agreeing to global or reciprocal no-first-use postures or beginning conversations on how to reduce pressures for nuclear use. There are many advantages of the former, including preventing Washington from going first only to find no one else follows and reducing the likelihood of intentional, accidental, unauthorized, or miscalculated nuclear use. States would still retain their deterrent, but the threshold would be raised for nuclear use and nuclear war. Global no-first-use could be achieved from a cobweb of bilateral agreements or multilateral ones.
But it’s true that global or reciprocal no-first-use is ambitious and unrealistic for the foreseeable future. The more feasible option could then be for the administration to begin senior-level discussions with nuclear states on how to reduce pressures for nuclear use.
Either way, these measures would provide a more tangible way for nuclear weapons-possessing states to create a more reassuring security environment together.
A no-first-use/sole purpose pledge and force posture would pose more risks than benefits in today’s strategic environment. But it is still a long-term goal that the United States could strive for provided the right conditions or circumstances are in place. Until then, nuclear deterrence is effective—when adversaries know the United States would actually use its nuclear weapons.
17. Coalition of the unwilling: Western elites prefer not to fight authoritarianism
Excerpts:
Did you get that? The EIU is untroubled by the prospect of the Chinese Communist Party replacing the United States as “the dominant global power.” The EIU advises that if we “manage that process” well, a few democratic societies and Western values may survive.
It gets worse: The EIU is not sure whether the triumph of authoritarianism over democracy should be regarded as bad or good. “If China’s ascendancy were to result in the spread of authoritarian rule and a rollback of democracy globally, would this bring about an improvement or otherwise in the lives of millions of ordinary people?” the report wonders. “Equally, we may ask to what extent the world’s democracies are succeeding in meeting these aspirations for a better life for all.”
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With apparent pride, the EIU further notes that it seeks “to avoid the tendency to present China in adversarial terms, or to presume that the Western way is the natural order of things.”
Reagan famously said: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” What he’d say about the current generation’s defense of freedom we can only imagine.
Coalition of the unwilling: Western elites prefer not to fight authoritarianism
OPINION:
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan addressed the British Parliament, expressing optimism about the “global campaign for democracy now gathering force.” Less than a decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed. After that, it was widely believed that authoritarianism was in decline and that the community of free nations was bound to grow and prosper.
That belief was incorrect. These days we monitor what political scientist Larry Diamond dubbed the “democratic recession.”
For example, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the respected research and analysis division of The Economist, the respected international magazine, produces a respected annual Democracy Index. The latest, issued last week, reports that the state of global democracy fell to a record low in 2021, with only 6.4% of the world’s population living in a “full democracy” and more than 33% living under authoritarian rule. That includes, of course, the 1.4 billion people living in the People’s Republic of China.
Those figures don’t shock me. What does: the EIU’s contention that the “real challenge for the West may not be to prevent China from one day becoming the dominant global power, which seems to be, if not inevitable, at least highly likely — but to manage that process in such a way as to avoid war and preserve democracy and the best of the Western enlightenment legacy.”
Did you get that? The EIU is untroubled by the prospect of the Chinese Communist Party replacing the United States as “the dominant global power.” The EIU advises that if we “manage that process” well, a few democratic societies and Western values may survive.
It gets worse: The EIU is not sure whether the triumph of authoritarianism over democracy should be regarded as bad or good. “If China’s ascendancy were to result in the spread of authoritarian rule and a rollback of democracy globally, would this bring about an improvement or otherwise in the lives of millions of ordinary people?” the report wonders. “Equally, we may ask to what extent the world’s democracies are succeeding in meeting these aspirations for a better life for all.”
The EIU is no outlier. Au contraire, it reflects the views of a broad swath of British, European and even American elite opinion.
Members of this “coalition of the unwilling” do not intend to exert themselves to defend what Mr. Reagan termed “the infrastructure of democracy” — the institutions, values and habits that guarantee freedom of speech, the press and assembly, along with property rights, competitive politics, an independent judiciary and the rule of law.
Within this coalition are both left-wingers and right-wingers — a horseshoe bent to run along parallel lines. The leftists believe America is so fundamentally flawed, socially unjust and systemically racist that it has no business passing judgment on Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Cuban, Venezuelan and other despots. The rightists believe America can and should become a fortress, ignoring conflicts in far-off lands about which we know nothing (to coin a phrase).
Examples? George Soros, a leftist billionaire, joined forces with Charles Koch, a rightist billionaire, to found (and fund) the Quincy Institute, which champions neo-isolationism and therefore promotes appeasement of the regimes ruling China, Russia and Iran.
Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to denounce “warmongers on both sides in Washington” who want “Russia to invade Ukraine” to “lock in this new Cold War” to financially benefit the “military-industrial complex.” Mr. Carlson found that “a credible view.”
Last month, Xi Jinping, secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party, gave a virtual address to the Davos World Economic Forum whose globalist and plutocratic members are apparently unconcerned about the crushing of freedom in Hong Kong, the reeducation camps in Xinjiang, the destruction of Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, and the distinct possibility that a lethal virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Mr. Xi welcomed Russian strongman President Vladimir Putin as his guest of honor at the Beijing Olympics, which have been compared to the Berlin Olympics of 1936. One difference: Though the Nazi regime’s antisemitism was hardly a secret, the mass murders were still a few years off and, to many, still unimaginable. By contrast, Beijing’s genocide of Turkic Muslims is infamous and ongoing.
As I write this, I see on the website of Amnesty International a slightly out-of-date note that the Olympic games “promise to be a memorable sporting spectacle, but the watching world cannot willfully ignore what is happening elsewhere in China.” Tough talk! Much more prominently featured on the website: Amnesty’s allegation that Israel is guilty of apartheid, carrying the implication that the democratic Jewish-majority state has no right to exist.
The top dogs in many American and European corporations, Hollywood film studios and sports franchises also defend — and perhaps kowtow to — Mr. Xi and his CCP.
So, what policy does the EIU propose the Free World adopt in response to the rise of authoritarianism? It recommends that the “U.S. and its Western allies should focus their energies on rejuvenating their political systems so that they can provide a desirable alternative model to that of China. Far better that the U.S. and the world’s democracies demonstrate the advantages of their system of government by re-democratizing their politics, rather than by trying to isolate or contain China.”
With apparent pride, the EIU further notes that it seeks “to avoid the tendency to present China in adversarial terms, or to presume that the Western way is the natural order of things.”
Reagan famously said: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” What he’d say about the current generation’s defense of freedom we can only imagine.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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18. US to reopen Solomon Islands embassy to foil China
An action to implement the Indo-Pacific strategy?
US to reopen Solomon Islands embassy to foil China
The US aims to re-open its Solomon Islands embassy to re-establish its presence in a neglected strategic region
The US aims to re-open its Solomon Islands embassy to re-establish its presence in a neglected strategic region
In a bid to counter China’s growing presence in the Pacific, the United States has announced plans to reopen its embassy in the Solomon Islands, which was closed in 1993.
Since then, US diplomats from Papua New Guinea have been accredited to the Solomons, where the US has a consular agency.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the announcement while visiting Fiji, promising to devote more diplomatic and security resources to the region.
Speaking at a Pacific Islands Forum virtual summit, Blinken stated: “Fiji and all the Pacific Island nations are a vital part of the Indo-Pacific region.” He said he hoped his visit would usher in more direct relations between the US and Pacific nations.
However, he downplayed the security aspect of his Pacific tour, stating that his visit was not focused on security reasons, but rather building a shared future.
An unnamed US official stated that China was “aggressively seeking to engage” political and business leaders in the Solomons, with its actions “causing real concerns.”
This announcement was made months after the 2021 riots in Honiara, the Solomon Islands’ capital. Protesters from Malaita traveled to Guadalcanal to seek an audience with Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, demanding action over the unequal distribution of resources, the lack of economic support, poor government services, corruption and his controversial decision in 2019 to drop diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of China.
Riots erupted in November last year when Sogavare was accused of using money from a national development fund that comes from China. He also refused to meet the protesters, sparking violence that resulted in much of Honiara’s Chinatown being destroyed.
He then blamed foreign powers for orchestrating the protests because they did not want the Solomon Islands to have diplomatic relations with China.
In response to the protests and calls for help from the government, Australia sent troops and police to stabilize the situation. A total of 23 members of the Australian Federal Police’s (AFP) Specialist Response Group, 50 AFP officers, and 43 Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel were deployed to the Solomons.
This deployment was made under the auspices of a 2017 agreement signed between Australia and the Solomon Islands. Apart from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa and Papua New Guinea sent smaller military and police contingents to assist.
China also sent an ad-hoc police advisory team, non-lethal anti-riot equipment and offered to train Solomon Islands police under existing bilateral agreements.
The Solomon Islands has a critical strategic location in the South Pacific, straddling vital sea lanes of communication connecting Australia and the US to Asia. The Solomon Islands and other small Pacific states face significant development problems, such as their small size, remoteness, overcrowding, poverty and climate change.
While traditional partners of South Pacific states such as the US, Australia and New Zealand emphasize good governance practices, Pacific states are more inclined to accept tangible economic assistance, infrastructure and action against climate change.
People interact on a large open field outside a schoolhouse in the Solomon Islands. This field is used for many different activities and acts as a recreational area for villagers. Photo: WikiCommons
China’s main interests in the South Pacific include isolating Taiwan diplomatically, protecting the significant Chinese expatriate population there and safeguarding its fisheries and mining enterprises.
While China has denied any expansionist or overt military agenda, its practices of elite co-optation, with its growing economic and military might, have raised security concerns within South Pacific states and their traditional partners.
One concern is that China can use trade bribery, corruption and debt to establish a military base in the South Pacific. In 2019, the Solomon Islands government vetoed China Sam Group’s attempt to lease Tulagi Island, which has the type of deep-water harbor coveted by the military.
Such a base would drive a wedge between Australia and the US, isolating it from its main ally, forcing Australia to go it alone in defense of its maritime interests.
However, South Pacific states are fiercely protective of their sovereignty and regional powers such as Australia, the US and New Zealand are devoting more diplomatic and economic attention to these fragile states to stave off China’s growing influence in their backyard.
So the possibility of China establishing a South Pacific base is remote at present.
Another concern is that China’s predatory political and economic practices can further undermine the already fragile political institutions of South Pacific states, which brings up a host of other security challenges, such as corruption, illegal migration, drugs and crime.
Some analysts argue that it was the neglect of the US and its partners towards South Pacific states’ needs for infrastructure and development that gave China a window of opportunity in the region.
19. How to Fix the Joint Combined Exchange Training Program
The elephant in the room for SOF.
For special operations in irregular warfare in the gray zone in support of strategic competition we need to move beyond the legacy JCET program. We all know the history of "deployments for training" (DFT) and skirting the MTT/Title 22 process and the use of SOF to advise and assist, the rise of the "SOF exception" and the establishment of the JCET program where the training benefit had to accrue to the SF team conducting the training (the 51% rule). We have JCETs, and counternarcotics training, and other training programs as a patchwork quilt to try to support theater engagement plans. We need to approach the employ of SOF from a campaign plan perspective versus a programmatic training perspective. The deployment and employment of SOF must be in support of achievement of campaign plan objectives (that support the mission strategic plan objectives, the theater command objectives, and ultimately US national security objectives) and for training of special operations forces. And they need the authorities and resources to adapt to the conditions that arise . This should be done under campaign plan authorities and contingencies should be identified and planned for during pre-mission training. I think we need to completely rethink how we employ SOF in "operations other than war" (where have I heard that phrase before?) in the gray zone executing campaign plans to support strategic competition.
How to Fix the Joint Combined Exchange Training Program - Modern War Institute
At precisely 2:30 a.m., a combined team of hackers from the United States and one of its partner nations launched a denial-of-service attack against the adversary’s cellular provider. For more than fifteen minutes, cell signal was disabled in the center of the ruined city.
The radio in the basement crackled to life. “Two tanks come! Four trucks!” came an excited voice in broken English from the western security position. An American Special Forces soldier, crouched underneath the sill of a blown-out window checked his watch—2:32 a.m. “Perfect timing!” he thought, and he whispered as much to the guerrilla leader, who keyed his own radio three times in deliberate succession. Tongues of fire leapt from basement windows hundreds of meters down the street, as antitank missiles screamed toward their target, impacting the lead tank with dull thuds. Machine guns in darkened windows all along the block began to shoot at the trucks in short bursts.
The adversary, with its cell phones ineffective and unable to use line-of-site radio because of the interference of locally positioned guerrilla jammers, launched a flare into the air that served as a distress signal. The adversary’s small unmanned aerial vehicles spotted the flare and signaled to two attack helicopters to cautiously approach. As the helicopters drew near, unable to see the trapped convoy without flying directly over it, teams operating shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles from rooftops several blocks away opened fire, destroying both helicopters—the real objective of the ambush. Immediately after firing, the antiaircraft and antitank teams disassembled their weapons and melted into the city.
This scene, entirely fictional, portrays American special operations forces (SOF) operating alongside indigenous forces in a complex, multidomain, urban ambush. With the right weapons systems and terrain on which to practice, any ground force could train to conduct a baited ambush of enemy aircraft. What differentiates SOF from a conventional force is the requirement that SOF be able to advise a partner force of foreign, irregular fighters to conduct the ambush itself.
But SOCOM’s approach to implementing the thirty-year-old program needs reform. At the moment, it affords participating SOF little flexibility to organize for training in a way that enhances their readiness to fight peer adversaries. SOCOM should avoid a narrow, overly conservative approach to the statute pertaining to JCETs, and instead should seek the maximum amount of flexibility within the law. Congressional stakeholders should direct a study of the JCET program to ensure that the law, as written, is suitable to contemporary US military and foreign policy requirements. And they should make sure the worldwide training program complements other efforts to engage with foreign partner forces. JCETs can play an important role in helping SOF prepare for a fight against a great power rival—but only if the program is reformed.
What is the JCET?
The modern JCET program dates back to 1991. That year, “Congress clarified the Department of Defense’s (DOD) authority to spend training funds in connection with SOF training overseas with friendly foreign forces, as long as the primary purpose was to train U.S. forces.” Thirty years later, the program remains generally unchanged. A small element of Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine special operators deploy to a partner nation where they train alongside a special operations unit from the host nation. The training is tactical in nature, usually around one month long, and typically focuses on an exchange—the US element provides training to the partner force in one area, while the host nation SOF reciprocates in another.
According to the governing statute, the primary purpose of a JCET is to train the participating US special operations force. For select US SOF, whose work entails advising foreign partner forces, this overseas exposure meets a critical training requirement. It is one thing to train unilaterally to perform a task; it is another thing to train and execute an operation in a foreign country, with and through a foreign force. Even an immersive exercise in the United States, using American military or civilian role players to simulate the foreign forces, fails to recreate the real linguistic, cultural, and logistical obstacles that SOF must negotiate.
Although the primary purpose of the JCET is to train US SOF, the engagements have ancillary benefits for the host nation SOF partner in terms of building proficiency. Improving their expertise and deepening US relationships with these elements generally support US objectives in a given country.
What is Wrong with JCETs Today?
JCETs are intended to provide realistic training to US special operations forces. But SOCOM’s strict interpretation of the law’s language prevents SOF from exercising the flexibility, in terms of organization, to train as they would fight. Units are unable to “task organize”—tailoring teams to meet the specific mission requirements and the overall training objective. Instead, they can only deploy with their organic teams—the members of the unit who are permanently assigned.
According to one of SOCOM’s SOF Truths, “Most special operations require non-SOF support.” This truth, first articulated in 1987, is as true today as it has ever been. SOCOM’s components envision embedding information, intelligence, and cyber-related capabilities, to name a few, within SOF units of action—creating, in the words of US Army Special Operations Command, a “special operations combined arms team.” To train to fight peer adversaries, SOF must maximize every opportunity to employ these “cross-functional,” “cohesive, task organized” sorts of teams. Returning to the earlier fictional example, a future battlefield could require a SOF team to integrate an air defense team, a cybersecurity expert, a civil engineer, and an electronic warfare team, for instance. Under SOCOM’s current practices, none of these people can participate in a JCET.
Within those teams, the SOF label extends only to those servicemembers who are specially selected and trained as special operators. (Under the relevant statute, the secretary of defense makes this designation.) This division is necessary because SOCOM exercises service-like responsibility for manning and professional development of these men and women, but not over the servicemembers with conventional military occupational specialties who are assigned to special operations units. Though they receive on the job training, the supporting cast within any given special operations unit—supply sergeants, personnel clerks, and intelligence analysts, for instance—are not special operators.
This delineation of who qualifies as a special operator, combined with a narrow reading of the law regarding JCETs, creates an inflexible approach toward tailoring organizations to encompass both organic and non-assigned servicemembers. While it is unlikely that the incorporation of supply or administrative personnel into a SOF detachment’s organization would be a critical requirement for a realistic exercise against a peer adversary, the inclusion of nonorganic teammates—including intelligence specialists, chemical experts, fire support planners, and electronic warfare specialists—might all be critical.
In addition to diminishing training realism, the inflexibility of JCET authorities deprives junior SOF leaders of key developmental opportunities. One of the many issues cited in a 2020 comprehensive review conducted by SOCOM was an absence of opportunities for officer and enlisted leaders at the unit-of-action level (principally leaders in the grades of O-3 and E-8) to integrate with the US joint force and develop the baseline knowledge to execute staff functions. Constraining JCET participation to organic units of action deprives these junior leaders of the opportunity to develop this sort of proficiency during a major training event.
Other Vehicles for Training and Engagement
To be sure, there are other mechanisms for engagement between US SOF and their foreign counterparts, some of them theater specific. Exercises under the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Exercise Program, commonly referred to as JCS exercises, allow the US military to train and engage with partner nation forces under different statutory authorities. JCS exercises range considerably in size and scope, and while there are no limitations on who can participate, JCS exercises can be less flexible than JCETs for the participating SOF unit: SOF units may be constrained by larger conventional force headquarters’ umbrella organizations and their intent for specific exercises.
European Deterrence Initiative funding, meanwhile, helps support US SOF training and engagement with regional partners. This includes participation in larger conventional force exercises, as well as efforts to build partner capacity. While the European Deterrence Initiative’s budgetary language is broad and gives US SOF multiple opportunities to train and engage with partner forces, its Asia-Pacific counterpart allows far less wiggle room. The Pacific Deterrence Initiative is extremely platform-focused, with more than 95 percent of the $5 billion budget funding research, development, and procurement of surface ships, aircrafts, and missiles for the Navy. There is no mention of SOF in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. The only explicit reference to engagement with partner forces comes in the form of a $500,000 allotment to the US Marine component using two JCS exercises and a service exercise to demonstrate rapid deployment.
The distinction between the opportunities that the European and Pacific Deterrence Initiatives afford to SOF may be indicative of an abundance of JCETs in Asia. SOCOM does not generally publish the annual number of JCETs conducted per region, but in 2018 US SOF conducted seventy-seven JCETs in the Indo-Pacific; it is highly likely that US SOF conduct more JCETs in the Indo-Pacific than in any other single region. As a result, US SOF working in the Indo-Pacific—the Department of Defense’s priority theater, given its focus on China as the pacing threat—have the greatest overall interest in SOCOM taking a more flexible approach to the JCET program.
Both JCS exercises and the European Deterrence Initiative provide SOF with opportunities to conduct overseas engagements with partner forces, but the existence of either program does not excuse SOCOM from the requirement to more flexibly implement the JCET program. JCETs are unique in the prioritization of training value for US SOF; if SOCOM is serious about preparing the force for contests against peer adversaries, the command should maximize every opportunity to train alongside partner forces.
Flexibility is Key
Given the diminished requirements for SOF in Iraq and Syria and the wholesale US withdrawal from Afghanistan, JCETs may begin to amount to a greater proportion of worldwide SOF deployments than at any other point in the last two decades. Leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities and the House’s Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations should exercise oversight over the JCET program by initiating another study, in the tradition of the 1999 report that remains the most comprehensive study of JCETs.
Such a report should ask three principal questions: First, does the JCET program continue to meet SOF training requirements? Second, is US SOF training the appropriate prioritization for these missions or should geographic combatant commands (the force employers) have more agency in determining the focus of participating SOF units? Third, how does the JCET program complement other forms of SOF engagement with foreign partners? This analysis, directed and sponsored by stakeholders in Congress, can guide the evolution of the JCET program—perhaps specifically articulating the potential for non-SOF participation in training.
In the interim, SOCOM should interpret the law to afford maximum flexibility to the elements and the theater special operations commands who coordinate and execute the JCETs themselves. According to the letter of the law, training must focus on participating US SOF’s mission-essential tasks. And the law stipulates that SOCOM can authorize payment for “expenses of training special operations forces assigned to that command in conjunction with training, and training with, armed forces and other security forces of a friendly foreign country,” as well as for the “expenses of deploying such special operations forces for that training.” Since integration of select non-SOF servicemembers can be critical to training mission-essential tasks, the expense of deploying these servicemembers would be in accordance with the statute. This may require SOCOM to expand its internal apportionment of operations and maintenance funds toward the JCET program, at least in select cases.
Lest this flexibility lead to a run on SOCOM’s bank, the inclusion of non-SOF servicemembers in JCETs should remain an exception—a requirement validated by Title 10 chain of command (the force provider), and with the concurrence of the theater special operations command (the force employer). The men and women in the staffing channels for these exceptions must be mindful that the training requirements for SOF to prepare for twenty-first-century war may warrant augmentation of non-SOF elements.
JCETs are not the only model of SOF training and engagement overseas. But the program affords SOF small-unit commanders the unique ability to tailor their training to meet real-world requirements, while building relationships with foreign partners. Until and unless congressional stakeholders, with SOCOM advice, craft a different model, JCETs present indispensable training opportunities. Working within the law, SOCOM should ensure that JCET guidance is as flexible as today’s units of action require.
Gordon Richmond is a US Army Special Forces officer assigned to the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) and the deputy director of fellows for the Irregular Warfare Initiative.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Osvaldo Equite, US Army
20. Politics and pressure are sabotaging women in special operations
Major Tucker is trying to drive SOF reform with her outspoken commentary.
Politics and pressure are sabotaging women in special operations
Heavy-handed policy has been applied like a hammer to a task for a scalpel.
In March 2020, Military.com announced that, for the first time ever, a female had been selected for Special Tactics, an elite Air Force organization that conducts challenging missions in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. However, outrage over women’s integration into elite special operations units has flared up once again.
In early January, Instagram user @bkactual posted a letter written by an anonymous combat controller accusing the Special Tactics schoolhouse — 352nd Special Warfare Training Squadron — of giving preferential treatment to the female trainee. The author accused the candidate of quitting repeatedly, and receiving an unprecedented number of opportunities to continue. The AFSOC commander responded with a Facebook post, stating that “the standards — which are tied to mission accomplishment — have not changed. However, there is a difference between standards and norms.”
According to a memo written by the student in question that was obtained by Air Force Times, a communication failure led to other students believing that physical fitness standards had been lowered for her.
As a service member, I’m puzzled that the idea of women in special operations remains a source of controversy, despite the 2016 Department of Defense policy that opened all military jobs and schools to women and the fact that women have been in Special Operations units for years. The current fiasco is reminiscent of a previous accusation that the Army had lowered standards for the first female Rangers, levied by then Rep. Steve Russell (R-Okla.) who famously demanded to see the women’s training documents.
Spc. Gage Branscome, a Cavalry Scout assigned to Bravo Troop, 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, fires the M17 9mm pistol at Fort Carson, Colorado, Jan. 20, 2021. (U.S. Army photo by Capt. Daniel Parker)
I am also familiar with the two main ideological camps that have emerged as the result of these controversies. One side is outraged by the perceived lowering of military standards — former Navy SEAL and Republican Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw is a sympathizer. In response to the release of the anonymous letter, he posted to his Twitter account that “We cannot sacrifice training standards. Ever. Full stop.” Though he added that “there are lots of females that contribute enormously to Special Operations missions,” his support of the letter only encourages those who oppose the integration of women into special operations. I am skeptical of the opinion of any politician who hasn’t witnessed the changes that have taken place in special operations training environments since they became fully integrated, or frankly, anyone who wasn’t at the Special Tactics schoolhouse to watch events unfold.
The opposing camp decries perceived tab-protecting, or the practice of elite military communities blocking otherwise viable candidates from attending or graduating from these crucible schools. This practice is not publicized for obvious reasons, but it still happens to both women and men attempting to undergo elite training. We all know it can happen. Of course, cadres in these schools are the true arbiters of what passes muster. Nonetheless, the degree to which personal biases impact a decision to keep or scrap a struggling candidate remains a valid concern.
Regardless of these polarized opinions, only those that were witness to the female trainee’s performance know the truth. It’s also reasonable to assume that across the military, some degree of both standard adjustment and tab-protecting might happen, just as there are schools and assessments that maintain long-standing requirements and treat all candidates equally. And we can all agree it’s just as bad to push an unprepared student through a brutally difficult training course as it is to create artificial barriers for those who deserve an opportunity to be there.
So what’s the bigger picture?
The problem is that we may be rushing the process. Assuming the accusations and the airman’s statements are both true as reported, both the student and the unit are probably victims of a politicized, heavy-handed policy that has been applied like a hammer to a task for a scalpel.
Rushing to Failure
U.S. Air Force Special Tactics operators spread out on a berm to provide security at the landing zone and observe their target during operability training with 14th Weapons Squadron air assets at Eglin Range, Florida, April 22, 2020. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Rose Gudex)
It is no secret that Congress exercises enormous influence over the military — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Department of Defense has struggled to eradicate sexual misconduct in the ranks for decades, and Congress recently intervened. The downside is that Congress is quick to tighten the purse strings when they’re unhappy with DoD practices or expenditures. Though no commanders I know ranked O-6 or above could ever openly say it without facing reprimand, special operations leaders are probably under immense congressional pressure to put more women in the most elite military jobs.
Why would this be the case? First of all, it’s been policy to allow women in top tier jobs for 6 years. Any shrewd governing body would expect its commanders to fall in line. Secondly, all branches of U.S. government are subject to the National Security Strategy, the interim version of which promises to protect “equal rights of […] women and girls” and expressly states “we will work to ensure that the Department of Defense is a place of truly equal opportunity.” It also mentions gender equality twice. The addition of a proposal to add women to the draft in the National Defense Authorization Act, though it was removed last December, is further evidence that the Biden administration is taking integration and equality seriously. Congress has more reason than ever to ask senior military leaders hard questions around integration. But instead of asking why more women aren’t in combat roles and elite Special Operations Forces units, they should be asking, “what can we do to help?”
It was likely this pressure that led to the first female Special Tactics student being publicly sacrificed. But there must be a first, right? Maybe the command felt pressure to push a female through to set the precedent. Perhaps it was willing to adjust norms so that she and subsequent females could snag a win for the unit.
Of course, the training unit has every right to change its practices. The question remains whether these new norms were already in place and well-understood, or if they were first implemented when the female candidate arrived at the school. The latter could easily create the perception that she was given special treatment, and subsequently destroy the instructors’ trust if they were ordered to push her through. Norms aside, units also reserve the right to change their standards within their command’s procedural requirements, regardless of public outcry. If the standards no longer make sense for how we fight today, they should be revisited to ensure recruitment of the best candidates for the job.
I can understand why the author wrote the anonymous letter; he or she likely felt there were no options left to bring attention to an issue which caused them major concern. While it may be factually correct, it has unfortunately ruined the opportunity for a closed investigation, which would yield the most nuanced and candid findings. Conversely, to maintain credibility in the public eye, the command may have to remain silent or boil findings down to a one-liner that fails to paint the full picture. The public always wants simple answers. It will not accept a nuanced explanation of changing norms, training adaptations, exceptions to policy, communication gaps or pressure from the chain of command or Congress.
Rushing the process of integration has set women and elite units up for failure. It also erodes trust and unit cohesion at all levels. When we rush it, otherwise admirable and capable women are dragged through the mud, and commands are forced to make important decisions under pressure. The fallout ruins the candidate’s credibility, causes the training cadre to question their leaders, and violently yanks elite units into the spotlight.
The Solution
Two U.S. Navy Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen assigned to Naval Special Warfare engage a target during a joint live-fire training exercise with Hellenic Navy operators from the Underwater Demolition Command (DYK) in the Aegean Sea near Greece on July 16, 2020. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Aven Santiago)
Real change takes time. Patience may have yielded a better result in this case. It was only a few short years ago that the first female Rangers received their tabs; now there are nearly a hundred. There are also now females currently serving as Army Green Berets. More women are serving in elite combat roles than ever before. Every few weeks, a story comes out of yet another woman earning entry into an elite unit.
We can’t deny that precedent matters; news outlets cover every milestone of women in American elite units because it’s exciting, and it shows other women that the door is open. With some patience, perhaps another viable female candidate will present herself in the next six months, or year, who would complete the training without the cloud of vitriolic publicity. (In spite of how events unfolded, and for what it’s worth, I deeply admire the anonymous female trainee who went through this whole ordeal for her fortitude and integrity.)
If integration were done right, we’d see an organic, gradual, and enduring increase of women in elite units. And if our lawmakers want lasting and meaningful female representation, they should allocate the necessary resources. Investing into programs that facilitate unit cohesion, team-building and productive cultural change would help. So would investment in programs such as the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness and the Special Operation Command THOR3 performance program to improve training that is specific to the individual, female or male, accounting for biology, physiology, and previous fitness experience. Female athletic and tactical performance is a woefully under-researched arena even in the civilian world. These efforts would be an investment in the future of American security.
At the unit level, commanders should encourage their fittest and most gritty females to assess and go to elite schools training the Army’s Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, or Air Force Special Tactics. Candidates should be connected with those who have completed these pipelines and given opportunities to train and compete. While commanders must prioritize the needs of the unit first, they are also the gatekeepers for their subordinates’ professional advancement. Commanders should be sending the signals up to Congress and the Biden administration for gradual and intuitive integration of women in America’s deadliest units: otherwise, institutional integrity and unit cohesion are under threat. To find the right people, we must be patient. Perhaps the politicians need to be reminded that “Special Operations Forces cannot be mass-produced.”
I look forward to the day when female firsts are no longer making headlines — when the trails have been blazed, gender no longer dictates fitness for service, and the door remains open for the next lethal American to walk through and take up the burden of serving as a special operations warrior.
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Maj. Meg Tucker has been in the Army for eleven years, serving as a Kiowa Warrior pilot and Army Special Operations as a Psychological Operations officer. She has deployed to Southern, Central and Indo-Pacific Commands and taught in the PSYOP school. She has been published in Special Warfare Magazine and Small Wars Journal. She owns and operates The Valkyrie Project and is currently pursuing a Master of Science degree in Information and Political Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
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21. Elite Risk: How Special Operations training can kill
We should keep in mind that at all these training institutions the trainers are committed to the safety of the trainees. We should not be misled by the films and photos of what appears to be extreme training with the trainers standing by or offering "words of encouragement." Every one of those trainers is looking to prevent something from going wrong and harm coming to the trainees. The amount of preparation that goes into all this training is hard for us to imagine because that is never reported on. Tragic events occur but I know from first hand experience that the trainers are committed to providing the best training in the safest manner possible. But we cannot forget that most all of the training is inherently dangerous on its own, as noted in the article, and no amount of preparation and commitment can prevent all tragedies. I know that the units are looking hard at these latest incidents and will learn from them.
Elite Risk: How Special Operations training can kill
As was reported in multiple news outlets on February 5th, 2022, a trainee in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training recently died shortly after completing the rigorous 5-day period of First Phase training known as Hell Week. Per news reports, the trainee was hospitalized a short time — possibly 2 hours — after Hell Week ended, along with a second trainee who was still being treated as of the writing of this article. The trainee who perished was identified as 24-year-old U.S. Navy Seaman Kyle Mullen, from New Jersey.
In addition, U.S. Army Special Forces training has also reportedly suffered two fatalities recently, although no details have yet been publicly released, and those fatalities, as well as their causes, cannot be confirmed by this author.
While all branches take safety precautions very seriously, the nature of special operations work, and therefore its training, is inherently dangerous (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Peter Reft)
The U.S. Navy has not yet released any details on the cause of Seaman Mullen’s death, and this article will not attempt to guess at what caused the tragic incident. However, we can point to some of the various causes of non-trauma death of Special Operations candidates and personnel that have occurred during training evolutions. While it is publicly unknown what led to the death of the most recent fatality at BUD/S, the statistics point to one of the below as the most likely medical cause.
Data on previous fatalities in Special Operations Forces (SOF) training are hard to come by, beyond press accounts, and for this article, the author spoke with a former U.S. Special Operations Command surgeon with first and second-hand knowledge of incidences of fatalities in SOF training.
1. Hypoxic Loss of Consciousness (HLOC)
HLOC occurs when a person performs some sort of breath-hold evolution, usually underwater, which then leads to a loss of consciousness and subsequent death by drowning. Obviously, Seaman Mullen was not performing any breath-holding evolution after Hell Week had ended. BUD/S trainees and instructors have succumbed to this in the past, during underwater knot-tying evolutions, dive tower ascent training, and when simply practicing breath-holding in a pool or in the open water.
Exercises conducted in potentially dangerous situations can go a long way to breeding confidence and competence in our special operators, but occasionally, the risk of pushing physical limits can have tragic consequences (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Ryan Conroy)
2. Swimming-induced pulmonary edema (SIPE)
SIPE is a respiratory condition that typically occurs during physical exertion — like swimming — while a person is submerged in water. Fluids from the blood leak from the small blood vessels of the lung and into the alveoli. There has been speculation that cold water exacerbates this problem, although that has not been scientifically proven. According to one former diving medical officer in the Naval Special Warfare (NSW) community, SIPE would not be considered a likely cause of death for a trainee several hours after Hell Week had secured, unless there was a significant length of immersion in the water just beforehand. Triathletes also sometimes suffer from SIPE, although incidences of death from SIPE appear to be rare.
Incidences of SIPE are fairly common in BUD/S training, and a recent 2019 study found a 5% instance of SIPE in a study of 2,117 BUD/S trainees over 15 months. That is 106 cases in total amongst that studied group, none of which were fatal in that particular study. Data on death from SIPE in SOF training is difficult to come by, but at least one death in the 1990s at BUD/S is suspected of being due to the illness.
3. Hypothermia
Navy SEAL candidates train in the water for extended periods of time to be acclimated and accustomed to the strain it puts on the mind and body, which can lead to increased risk of hypothermia (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Abe McNatt)
A significant drop in body temperature, hypothermia can result in death if not recognized and treated adequately. BUD/S has suffered training deaths due to hypothermia (a Second Phase trainee died following the 5.5 nautical mile open water swim), as has Ranger training, and Special Forces training. Hypothermia is a persistent and constant threat in Special Operations training. Instructors in BUD/S, in particular, are trained to recognize its signs early, and to take the necessary precautions before a student gets progressively worse. BUD/S students spend a large portion of training in a state of mild hypothermia.
4. Heatstroke
A significant rise in body temperature, heatstroke (severe hyperthermia) is the most significant and dangerous phase of heat-related illness. It leads to multi-organ failure and death if not recognized and treated. It has also claimed the lives of multiple trainees across multiple services. In 2014, for example, four British Special Air Service (SAS) trainees died as a result of hyperthermia while in training.
5. Drowning
Drowning is a real and persistent danger in SOF training, especially BUD/S, as well as any Special Operations training that involves significantly hazardous evolutions in the water. Special Operations trainees and already-qualified personnel have drowned in both pools and open water, and even in inland waterways in a war zone. Drowning, in this case, is differentiated from an HLOC death, as in these cases, trainees were not attempting to hold their breath when they drowned.
Other non-trauma dangers
While the above medical causes of death in Special Operations training are the most common non-trauma deaths, other causes — such as trauma and viral or bacterial infection — can also explain some training fatalities. Parachuting, fast roping, boat insertion through the surf zone, live-fire exercises, and helicopter operations have all caused deaths in training operations in the past.
Dangers of special operations training like fast-roping might be more obvious, but medical personnel must be trained to recognize more subtle dangers and act quickly to prevent a training fatality (U.S. Marine Corps)
As far as infections, pneumonia is very common at BUD/S, though this author cannot find any verified cases of it causing a fatality. Necrotizing fasciitis has also occurred at BUD/S on multiple occasions, although it was again unclear if it had caused any fatalities in BUD/S trainees. A fast-spreading and potentially deadly bacterial infection, necrotizing fasciitis can be especially insidious in individuals with compromised immune systems, like BUD/S trainees.
Regardless of what caused Seaman Mullen to suffer his fatal medical emergency in the hours immediately following the end of Hell Week, it is heartbreaking that yet another trainee has died in the course of attempting to make it through the training. May he rest in peace.
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22. No 'Fauda': Hamas TV series glorifies fight against Israel
Hamas information and influence activities? Their battle with Israel in the entertainment domain.
No 'Fauda': Hamas TV series glorifies fight against Israel
AP · by WAFAA SHURAFA · February 16, 2022
BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Palestinian militants scrambled out of the tunnel and attacked an Israeli tank in broad daylight as gunfire and explosions echoed across the Gaza frontier.
This time it wasn’t the start of another war, but an action scene filmed for a TV series produced by the territory’s militant Hamas rulers.
The 30-episode series, titled “Fist of the Free,” presents the fighters as scrappy heroes outwitting a better-armed Israeli military. Unlike “Fauda,” the hit Israeli drama that deals with some of the same subject matter, it is unlikely to get picked up by Netflix.
It’s the latest such production by the media arm of Hamas, which has invested heavily in its offerings despite a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade on Gaza since the Islamic militant group seized power in 2007.
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The shows are aired on Hamas-run TV, and “Fist of the Free” will debut during the upcoming holy month of Ramadan, when viewership soars after the dawn-to-dusk fast and networks across the Muslim world debut big-budget offerings.
“The idea of our films and series centers on our struggle with the enemy,” says Sadi al-Attar, the assistant director. He says the latest show is a response to “Zionist aggression.”
The storyline centers on a real-life botched Israeli raid in Gaza in 2018. An undercover unit disguised as Palestinian aid workers aroused suspicions in a town near the border. When their cover was blown, a gun battle ensued in which seven Hamas fighters and an Israeli commander were killed.
In real life, the undercover unit was detected by local residents, the death toll was lopsided and Israel successfully evacuated 16 undercover agents. In the dramatization, Hamas brilliantly outwits the Israelis and scores a major victory.
Al-Attar rejects any comparisons to “Fauda,” which centers on an undercover Israeli unit that poses as Palestinians and conducts daring raids against militants. That series presents complex characters confronting moral tradeoffs, but has been criticized for its far-fetched plot twists and for reducing Palestinians to the bad guys in a cop drama-like shoot-’em-up.
“We are not responding to them in their Fauda program,” al-Attar said. He acknowledged having watched a few scenes of the Netflix thriller, calling it “lying and misleading.”
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Hamas and Israel have fought four wars and dozens of more limited skirmishes over the years. Israel and Western countries view Hamas as a terrorist group because of its long history of attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, portrays itself as the “resistance” to military occupation, a view reflected in its media productions.
The group has produced seven series and several movies centered on the conflict, most of them aired on its Al-Aqsa satellite TV network during Ramadan.
In 2017, it built an entire movie set based on Jerusalem’s Old City, including a replica of the Dome of the Rock — part of a holy site that is sacred to Jews and Muslims and has been a persistent flashpoint for Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Al-Attar declined to say how much was being spent on the latest series, which he said was funded by donations.
There were no cranes on set, so overhead shots were taken by drone or by a cameraman sitting on another man’s shoulders. Crew members used their camera batteries to detonate mock explosives. The filming took place at a Hamas military base near the frontier.
The cast is recruited locally, from a population that has had little contact with Israelis since the Hamas takeover and the tightening of the blockade.
Zohair al-Bebisi, a 64-year-old who has never set foot in Israel, was cast as David, an Israeli commando tasked with sneaking into Gaza to recover high-tech equipment captured by wily Hamas militants.
“It’s the first time I play the role of an Israeli intelligence officer,” al-Belbisi said as he rested between takes. He described his character as “very cunning,” with a knack for getting out of dangerous situations — until his luck runs out.
Spoiler alert: David is killed by friendly fire.
The propaganda goes largely unchecked inside Gaza, where Hamas does not tolerate dissent. Since taking power in 2007, Hamas has jailed journalists and activists, banned newspapers, shuttered rival TV stations and restricted movie screenings.
Its rivals in the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which is confined to parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, have also cracked down on dissent.
Hamas is hoping to gain a wider viewership of its latest production, offering the rights for free to channels in Syria, Lebanon, Algeria and Turkey. But it will struggle to break through the Ramadan lineup, when production houses across the region crank out top-quality dramas with marquee actors.
It is also likely to face barriers online, as Facebook, YouTube and streaming services censor content perceived as inciting violence.
But al-Attar says they wouldn’t take a meeting with Netflix even if it asked, because the streaming service “is biased toward the occupation.”
AP · by WAFAA SHURAFA · February 16, 2022
23. US accuses financial website of spreading Russian propaganda
Seems more than a useful idiot.
Excerpts:
A manifesto published on Zero Hedge’s site defends its use of anonymous authors and proclaims its goal is “to liberate oppressed knowledge.” Many articles are published under the name Tyler Durden, also a character in the movie “Fight Club.”
The website was an early amplifier of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. An Associated Press investigation determined the site played a pivotal role in advancing the unproven theory that China engineered the virus as a bioweapon. It’s also posted articles touting natural immunity to COVID-19 and unproven treatments.
Zero Hedge was also cited in a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that examined how far-right extremists are harnessing COVID-19 misinformation to expand their reach. Twitter briefly suspended Zero Hedge’s account in 2020 but reinstated it a few months later, saying it “made an error in our enforcement action in this case.”
The U.S. moving to name the website could inform some people who come across its content online, Schafer said.
“My guess is that most of the people who are loyal Zero Hedge followers naturally are inclined to mistrust the U.S. government anyway,” he said, “and so this announcement is probably not going to undermine most of Zero Hedge’s core support.”
US accuses financial website of spreading Russian propaganda
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · February 15, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday accused a conservative financial news website with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda and alleged five media outlets targeting Ukrainians have taken direction from Russian spies.
The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence. The officials did not say whether they thought Zero Hedge knew of any links to spy agencies and did not allege direct links between the website and Russia.
Zero Hedge denied the claims and said it tries to “publish a wide spectrum of views that cover both sides of a given story.”
The officials briefed The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence sources. It was the latest effort by President Joe Biden’s administration to release U.S. intelligence findings about Russian activity involving Ukraine as part of a concerted push to expose and influence the moves of Russian President Vladimir Putin. U.S. officials previously accused Putin of planning a “false-flag” operation to create a pretext for a new invasion of Ukraine and detailed what they believe are final-stage Russian preparations for an assault.
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It’s unclear whether U.S. efforts are changing Putin’s behavior. And without releasing more proof of its findings, Washington has been criticized and reminded of past intelligence failures such as the debunked allegations that pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Zero Hedge has been sharply critical of Biden and posted stories about allegations of wrongdoing by his son Hunter. While perhaps best known for its coverage of markets and finance, the website also covers politics with a conservative bent.
In recent months, Zero Hedge has published numerous articles that accused the U.S. of fomenting panic about Ukraine, which now faces the possibility of an invasion by more than 130,000 Russian troops massed on several sides of the country. Some of those articles are listed as being written by people affiliated with the Strategic Culture Foundation.
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The Biden administration sanctioned the foundation last year for allegedly taking part in Russia’s interference in the 2020 U.S. election. U.S. intelligence officials allege the foundation’s leaders ultimately take direction from the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service.
Recent articles listed as authored by the foundation and published by Zero Hedge include the headlines: “NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia In Ukraine,” “Americans Need A Conspiracy Theory They Can All Agree On” and “Theater Of Absurd... Pentagon Demands Russia Explain Troops On Russian Soil.”
In an email, the website said there “is no relationship between Strategic Cultural Foundation (or the SVR) and Zero Hedge, and furthermore this is the first time we hear someone allege that the Foundation is linked to Russian propaganda.”
“They are one of our hundreds of contributors — unlike Mainstream Media, we try to publish a wide spectrum of views that cover both sides of a given story,” the website said.
Disinformation has long been used by Putin against adversaries, including the United States, and as one tool in regional conflicts to accompany cyberattacks and the movement of military forces. Washington and Kyiv have for months highlighted the issue of Russian influence in Ukrainian media.
Intelligence officials on Monday named two websites they said were directed by the Strategic Culture Foundation. Three other websites are alleged to have ties to the FSB, Russia’s federal security service.
“These sites enable the Russian government to secure support among the Russian and Ukrainian populations,” one official said. “This is the primary vector for how the Russian government will bolster support domestically for an invasion into Ukraine.”
Officials described for the first time what they say are direct communications between Russian spies and the editors or directors of the media outlets. They did not release records of the communications.
FSB officers had directed Konstantin Knyrik, the head of NewsFront, to write stories specifically damaging to Ukraine’s image, U.S. officials alleged. They said Knyrik has been praised by senior FSB officers for his work and requested derogatory information that he could use against the Caucasian Knot, a website that covers news in the Caucasus, where Russia has also maintained conflicts with smaller neighbors.
The editor of PolitNavigator sent reports of published articles to the FSB, an official said. And the managing editor of Antifashist allegedly was directed at least once by the FSB to delete material from the site.
The Strategic Culture Foundation is accused of controlling the websites Odna Rodyna and Fondsk. The foundation’s director, Vladimir Maximenko, has met with SVR handlers multiple times since 2014, officials alleged.
Several of the sites have small social media followings and may not appear influential at first glance, noted Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. But falsehoods or propaganda narratives often start small before they’re amplified by larger actors, he said.
“You see the narrative enter the information space, and it’s very hard to see where it goes from there,” he said.
A manifesto published on Zero Hedge’s site defends its use of anonymous authors and proclaims its goal is “to liberate oppressed knowledge.” Many articles are published under the name Tyler Durden, also a character in the movie “Fight Club.”
The website was an early amplifier of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. An Associated Press investigation determined the site played a pivotal role in advancing the unproven theory that China engineered the virus as a bioweapon. It’s also posted articles touting natural immunity to COVID-19 and unproven treatments.
Zero Hedge was also cited in a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that examined how far-right extremists are harnessing COVID-19 misinformation to expand their reach. Twitter briefly suspended Zero Hedge’s account in 2020 but reinstated it a few months later, saying it “made an error in our enforcement action in this case.”
The U.S. moving to name the website could inform some people who come across its content online, Schafer said.
“My guess is that most of the people who are loyal Zero Hedge followers naturally are inclined to mistrust the U.S. government anyway,” he said, “and so this announcement is probably not going to undermine most of Zero Hedge’s core support.”
___
Associated Press journalists Angela Charlton in Paris and David Klepper in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · February 15, 2022
24. Who’s Watching the Winter Olympics?
Commentary from students.
I like going to YouTube and finding the highlights of the events and athletes I am interested in.
Who’s Watching the Winter Olympics?
Students discuss the low viewership of the 2022 Beijing games.
WSJ · by Feb. 15, 2022 6:54 pm ET
As an athlete with Uyghur heritage lit the Olympic torch at the opening ceremonies (and later disappeared from Olympic events), most international viewers knew that, on the other side of the country, China was engaging in genocidal activities against people like her. Viewers do not like to be taken for fools, and most people, especially Americans and other citizens of free countries, are able to see past the propaganda put out by the Chinese Communist Party.
We see this disdain for viewers throughout the competition. One image showed a ski slalom against a gray industrialized backdrop that included multiple nuclear reactors, one of which was decorated with a sad Olympic logo. The lack of effort at beautification is telling: Authoritarian states do not hold the same views as liberal democracies. The Chinese Communist Party cares only about maintaining its own power.
Viewers of China’s Olympics need only so many signals that they are not valued before they return the favor.
—Charles Hilu, University of Michigan, political science
Who Watches TV Anymore?
The real culprit behind the record-low Olympic viewership is probably not just Covid, the CCP’s oppression or even the politicization of sport. Viewership of the Olympics has been in decline since the London games of 2012. The actual cause seems to be something much more boring and less contentious: the continuing shift away from traditional television.
Why would busy individuals stop to watch an event when they can later access the highlights on any convenient media platform? Even when viewers actually exert the effort to watch something live, there are competing distractions. Should the event prove longer, duller, more political, less tasteful or less entertaining, some billions of hours of alternative content are the click of a remote or the tap of a screen away. The unbounded accessibility of instant entertainment has effectively eliminated the incentive to conform oneself to live television.
Whether one is boycotting or just waiting for the highlights makes little difference. It has simply never been easier not to watch the Olympics in real time.
—Jakob Haws, Pennsylvania State University, Dickinson Law (J.D.)
No Olympic Spirit
As NBC has acknowledged, U.S. viewership of the Winter Olympics has been remarkably low.
Perhaps Americans are becoming more apathetic about international sports, and the time difference and absence of a live audience don’t help. But the likeliest reason is the politicization of the games by Beijing. The Russian-Chinese summit on the sidelines, together with gross disregard for international law, human rights, gender equality and sexual harassment in sports (in the case of tennis star Peng Shuai ) hang heavily over the games.
In the U.S., unfavorable opinions of China are reaching historic highs. Beijing’s flexing of its strength, deplorable human-rights atrocities and other illiberal activities have eclipsed the projection of soft power that is ordinarily associated with hosting the Olympics. And while that is a grave disappointment, it is as disheartening to see the International Olympic Committee allowing China to project a narrative that is counter to the Olympic spirit.
—Eleanor Shiori Hughes, Georgetown University, Asian studies
Bad Coverage Means No Viewers
NBC would love to blame low viewership on a government or political party, but if the network wants to figure out what happened this year, it should look for a mirror. The coverage has been poor. NBC treats what is supposed to be a celebration of individual human achievement as a nationalistic horse race, or worse yet a “Today” show-style collage of trite human-interest stories.
Most events are not presented live, and they are intercut with so many ads that viewers miss half the performances. NBC could stimulate viewership by simply showing fewer ads. As much as the dwindling audience might care about a potential geopolitical issue or a social trend, the situation is simple. People don’t like watching bad television.
—Sam Walhout, Brown University, economics
Where Are Our Heros?
Viewership has always been lower for the Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics, and the attention paid to the Olympics, regardless of season, has been trending down for years. There has been a large dissociation from nation-states over the last few decades, but the drop-off in attention paid to the Olympics is not a direct result of this trend. The decline comes, instead, from a lack of grand narratives, whether historical or heroic.
We pay attention to sports when they give us a rallying cry in community with our fellow Americans, as in 1980, when the American ice-hockey team triumphed over our Cold War rivals, or when they inspire that part of the soul that craves excellence: watching Michael Phelps win eight gold medals in 2008 or Simone Biles win four in 2016.
Why are we not watching the Winter Olympics? Because we have no heroes to behold in these games.
—Jack Little, Hillsdale College, history
America’s Got Other Things on Its Mind
The pandemic’s onset caused Americans’ optimism to plummet, and morale hasn’t recovered. As rampant inflation persists, frustrations with remaining Covid restrictions mount, and a crisis in Ukraine threatens to spiral out of control, it’s no wonder that almost two-thirds of Americans think that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Simply put, our country is exhausted, and the national mood remains sour. People working extra shifts to feed their kids or moonlighting to pay their rent can’t afford to spend hours each day watching snowboard halfpipe runs or elaborate figure-skating routines, impressive as those things are. The Olympics’ abysmal viewership doesn’t seem attributable to a widespread popular indictment of China’s communist leaders; rather, the causes appear to be purely circumstantial, driven by worsening crises that have diverted the public’s attention.
Whether this year’s games were held in Beijing or Zurich wouldn’t have made much difference.
—Matthew Wilson, Princeton University, politics
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WSJ · by Feb. 15, 2022 6:54 pm ET
25. Know the goal before committing troops — or lose the war
Know the goal before committing troops — or lose the war | Column
On Ukraine, heed the lessons we should have learned in Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
It was a cold fall morning in 1993 at Pope Air Force Base, adjacent to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The sun would not rise for a few more hours. I chose to drive out to the Joint Special Operations Command Headquarters to wait for the arrival of those returning from Somalia, where 18 of our troops had recently died in combat during the incident made famous in the book and movie “Blackhawk Down.” For reasons I still do not fully understand, I felt compelled to be there — to welcome them home.
Robert Bruce Adolph is a former US Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel and United Nations Chief Security Advisor, who holds graduate degrees in both international affairs and national security studies and strategy. His previously published works have appeared in nearly every US military publication of note. Most recently, he penned the commentary series “Dispatch from Rome” for the Military Times. Adolph also recently published the book entitled “Surviving the United Nations: The Unexpected Challenge.” [ Courtesy of Robert Adolph ]
I heard the plane land at the nearby field. They arrived in a nondescript gray bus half an hour later. I removed my gloves and shook the hand of each man as he disembarked. There seemed to me far too few in the official homecoming party. The troops trundled off to find their personal vehicles in the parking lot, bleary-eyed, haggard and, I thought, heartsick.
Nobody expressed joy at being home, only a kind of dogged resignation. Soldiers had fought and died, but for what? Our commander-in-chief of that era failed to understand the potential costs of committing our soldiers to combat prior to their deployment. I am still angry about it. From my perspective, our soldiers died for little beyond presidential arrogance and ignorance, no matter his stated intentions.
Tragically, the butcher’s bill over the last two decades reached frightening heights. The numbers of U.S. and allied dead and wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan were terrible. However, it is critically important to note that the losses suffered by the Iraqi and Afghan people dwarf our nation’s casualties in these conflicts. Only a politician could try to make a case that the massive sacrifices in blood and treasure were worth the expenditure. I have that chill feeling of deja vu all over again.
Our military’s combat performance in both wars was superb. We won the ground battles. Yet, America lost the wars — more lives were sacrificed, more national treasure was wasted, and more political and diplomatic capitol was squandered because we selected unrealistic national goals. Our military’s warfighting strategy development tanked as a result. And, even now, there are no answers from our political and military leadership concerning why. The problem is clearly top-down, reflecting all too common human failings.
Commanders-in-chief from both political parties seem to make the same mistakes, leading to similar regrettable outcomes. This must stop. Our armed forces personnel recognize the dangers of service. All that they ask is that their sacrifices — life and limb — not be wasted. Tragically, lives were wasted on the Horn of Africa back in the autumn of 1993, later in the Middle East and now Southwest Asia too.
U.S. soldiers do not have the luxury of selecting their adversaries. That is the responsibility of our most senior elected leadership. Those leaders have done the country poor service with their choices. The decision to go-to-guns in Somalia was birthed in a Democratic White House. The decision to war in Iraq and Afghanistan originated in a Republican Oval Office. Defeats were the ultimate result. Somalia still wars with itself. The winner in Iraq is Iran. The victor in Afghanistan is the Taliban. Clearly, we learned nothing from the debacle in Mogadishu. And now, what of Ukraine?
American chief executives are not royalty. Presidential arrogance and ignorance, regardless of political party, must be brought into the light and examined. We must come to better understand these awful errors in judgment. The price of our refusal to examine-in-detail such wrong-headed and costly decisions, honestly and openly, is too high. More U.S.-involved conflicts are on their way. There is little time to get our house in order.
Robert Bruce Adolph is a retired senior Army Special Forces soldier and UN security chief. He formerly taught university classes in both U.S. Government and American History. He is a frequent guest columnist to the Tampa Bay Times, Atlantic Perspectives Magazine of the Netherlands and the Military Times. He is also author of his publisher’s number one best–selling book, “Surviving the United Nation: The Unexpected Challenge.”
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
