Quotes of the Day:

“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.” 

- Heraclitus

“To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often.”

-Winston Churchill

"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions." 

- Claude Levi-Strauss

1. JUST IN: Special Operations Forces at ‘Inflection Point’ as Global Threats Evolve

2.  Special Operators Lack ‘Seat at the Table’ in Post-Counterterror Pentagon, SOF Leaders Say

3. U.S.-CHINA ECONOMIC AND SECURITY REVIEW COMMISSION 2022 Annual Report to Congress

4. China’s Cyber Capabilities ‘Pose a Serious Threat’ to US, Advisory Panel Warns

5. Seizing the memes of advantage in the Ukraine war and beyond

6. Opinion | In the global meme wars, it’s time to side with the elves against the trolls

7. Why America Loses Wars

8. There is a lot to like in the 2022 National Defense Strategy

9. Rapid Dragon: The Air Force Wants the C-130 to Launch Missiles

10. Managing the PLA’s Military Diplomacy: Key Institutions and Personnel

11. Ukraine war: Rishi Sunak visits President Zelensky in Kyiv

12. Shifting the Role of Leader and Led: Using Year Group Cohorts to Accelerate Marine Corps Force Design

13. Are We on the Road to Another Pearl Harbor?

14. Russian spy defects, calls Putin's Ukraine war "worst scenario" imaginable

15. High-profile attacks behind Russian lines hint at how Ukrainian special forces may be using their US training

16. Former Russian mercenary: the truth about the Wagner Group

17. Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy Can’t Be Undone

18. OPTAC-X Enters Deal to Provide U.S. Special Operations Medics With Battlefield Telehealth

1.  JUST IN: Special Operations Forces at ‘Inflection Point’ as Global Threats Evolve

What the....?  

This is also why we absolutely need the  ‘‘John S. McCain III Center for Security Studies in Irregular Warfare.’ with the mission to "support the institutionalization of irregular warfare as a core competency of the Department of Defense" as directed in Sec. 1205 of the draft NDAA 2023. SO/LIC should get behind this effort to ensure it preserves all irregular warfare institutional knowledge (and does not allow SOF to be a one trick pony)

Excerpts:

“There's not a lot of institutional knowledge that goes back, frankly, to the pre-2001 era,” Maier said. “So there's a significant amount of … education but also advocacy required in these conversations, in some cases just to get a seat at the table. And then being able to apply in those conversations … whether it's planning or policy discussions the role SOF can play and where there's key roles SOF can help to provide options for senior decision makers.”

I can support this conclusion.

“I don't have great concerns that given the opportunity, SOF won't achieve — and overachieve in some cases — what they're being asked to do,” he said. “I think it's making sure that the experience over the last 20 years with the counterterrorism fight that has rightfully given SOF so many accolades isn't overly interpreted by some as the one-trick pony.”

This is why we need to emphasize the two "SOF trinities:" (https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/two-special-operations-trinities)

The Two SOF Trinities:

(1) Missions:

Irregular Warfare,

Unconventional Warfare,

Support to Political Warfare

(2) The comparative advantage of SOF:

Influence,

Governance,

Support to Indigenous Forces and Populations 

(While maintaining the exquisite capabilities of CT and CP)

JUST IN: Special Operations Forces at ‘Inflection Point’ as Global Threats Evolve

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Josh Luckenbaugh

SPECIAL OPERATIONS

11/18/2022

By

Special Operations Command photo

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the threat environment continues to evolve, the U.S. Special Operations Forces must adapt their focus and capabilities to meet these new challenges, officials said.

For the better part of the last two decades, special operations forces have primarily focused on counterterrorism efforts. While that remains an important part of their responsibilities, emerging threats such as the pacing challenges posed by China and Russia have left the strategic role of special operations “much less defined,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Christopher P. Maier.

“I would characterize where we are right now as an environment of both continuity and change,” Maier said during a panel discussion at the National Defense Industrial Association Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict Symposium Nov. 18. “Where I think there is going to be tremendous transition and change — and I would say we're already along that path — is really applying the capabilities and the thinking — and in many respects the talent that is unique to SOF — to the rest of the National Defense Strategy challenges.”

Given the special operations forces’ concentration on countering terrorism and violent extremist organizations in recent times, there is a tendency within the Defense Department not to see how those forces can help in other areas of effort, he said.

“There's not a lot of institutional knowledge that goes back, frankly, to the pre-2001 era,” Maier said. “So there's a significant amount of … education but also advocacy required in these conversations, in some cases just to get a seat at the table. And then being able to apply in those conversations … whether it's planning or policy discussions the role SOF can play and where there's key roles SOF can help to provide options for senior decision makers.”

As great power competition with nations such as China and Russia garners more attention in the Defense Department overall, U.S. Special Operations Command is “rebalancing” where it allocates its resources to ensure it can respond to a variety of threats, said Air Force Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind, the Vice Commander of SOCOM.

“For [fiscal year 2023], we expect … half of our activities balanced between counter [violent extremist organizations] and crisis response, and the other half focused on great power competition,” Bauernfeind said. “But it's not just the operations that we have to put our money where our mouth is. It's what are those pieces of kit and equipment or software that we need to take our warfighters to make them even better?”

Over the last three budget cycles, SOCOM has pushed more than $8 billion towards modernization efforts, Bauernfeind added. Some areas of focus include next-generation mobility platforms, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and situational awareness capabilities, effects and biotechnology, he said.

Special operations forces have the ability to innovate and integrate new technology faster than other services, Maier said.

“We all know about the challenges … of acquisition, [research and development], that the big services [have],” he said. “Even if they create pilot efforts, the balance of going to productivity and being able to get things fielded takes much longer than anybody wants.” SOF with the Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Center and “some of the flexible authorities is really, I think, an incredible testbed to put some of these things in practice very quickly.”

That said, special operations forces must be given opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities beyond counterterrorism, Maier said.

“I think we're in an interesting inflection point now where when some of the strategic decisions are made, when the resources are allocated, I don't have a … sense that in every case SOF’s voice is at the table, that SOF capability [is] being incorporated into that,” he said.

“I don't have great concerns that given the opportunity, SOF won't achieve — and overachieve in some cases — what they're being asked to do,” he said. “I think it's making sure that the experience over the last 20 years with the counterterrorism fight that has rightfully given SOF so many accolades isn't overly interpreted by some as the one-trick pony.”

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Josh Luckenbaugh

2. Special Operators Lack ‘Seat at the Table’ in Post-Counterterror Pentagon, SOF Leaders Say

ASD SO/LIC was set up for failure from the very beginning in the Nunn-Cohen amendment.

Congress made a half hearted attempt to fix this by inserting ASD SO/LIC into the ADCON chain of command in Sec. 922 of the 2020 NDAA. The acting SECDEF, Chris Miller tried to implement Congressional intent but this was rebuffed.

This will never be corrected until Congress legislates that there be a SOF entity at DOD level with actual service responsibilities AND authorities versus "service-like" oversight and input to service activities (to include personnel management).

Special Operators Lack ‘Seat at the Table’ in Post-Counterterror Pentagon, SOF Leaders Say

Even as U.S.-trained Ukranians show their mettle, SOF is getting lost in the transition to great power competition, says the assistant defense secretary for special ops.

defenseone.com · by Elizabeth Howe

As the Pentagon continues to shift away from two decades of counterterrorism, special operation forces are getting left out of the conversation, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Christopher Maier said at National Defense Industrial Association’s SO/LIC Symposium Friday.

“Sometimes the outsized role of SOF in CT is a bit of a drag, in the sense that people associate the SOF enterprise with the CT mission and not much else,” Maier said.

But special ops forces have far more to offer. For example, it is part of the reason Ukraine is beating Russian forces back, said Kenneth Tovo, a retired three-star who led Army Special Operations Command until 2018. “Eight months of combat success of Ukrainian forces were built on eight years of partnership and training with the U.S.,” Tovo said at the symposium.

The current USASOC commander, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, said the same just weeks ago at Fort Bragg.

But Maier said special operators still largely don’t “have a voice at the table in the Pentagon.” He added that one of the community’s biggest obstacles to greater participation is “defining the value of SOF unique from some of the other aspects of the Defense Department.”

Opportunities will be missed, Maier said, if SOF isn’t considered as a valuable asset in operations other than counterterrorism.

“We’ll miss the opportunity to have the right capabilities, the right people at the right place,” he said. “We need to make sure that the experience over the last 20 years with the counterterrorism fight that has rightfully given SOF so many accolades isn’t overly interpreted by some as the one-trick pony.”

The solution, Maier says, is education.

“There's not a lot of institutional knowledge that goes back, frankly, to the pre-2001 era. No understanding that this is kind of what SOF has always done,” he said. “So there's a significant amount of, I'll say, education, but also advocacy required in these conversations, in some cases, just to get a seat at the table.”

And the pre-2001 era was all about SOF and great power competition, said Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind, vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.

“If you look at SOF’s upbringing, it started in great power competition. So the DNA is there,” Bauernfeind said.

The Pentagon has known since the 2018 National Defense Strategy that counterterrorism was not the way of the war of the future, he said. The 2018 NDS allotted 5 percent of operations towards great power competition. In the 2022 NDS, that percentage grew to 30 percent, and during the 2023 fiscal year, “half of our activities will be focused on great power competition,” Bauernfeind said.

And SOF will be left out of it all if it doesn’t demonstrate its value in that battlespace.

“After two decades of hard-fought combat relevance and being very successful in the counter-violent extremist organization fight, we need to return to our roots,” Bauernfeind said. “We have to put our money where our mouth is.”

defenseone.com · by Elizabeth Howe

3. U.S.-CHINA ECONOMIC AND SECURITY REVIEW COMMISSION 2022 Annual Report to Congress

U.S.-CHINA ECONOMIC AND SECURITY REVIEW COMMISSION

2022 Annual Report to Congress

https://www.uscc.gov/annual-report/2022-annual-report-congress

Unable to see this video? Click here.

Topics this year include CCP decision-making and Xi Jinping’s centralization of authority, challenging China’s trade practices, China’s energy plans and practices, U.S. supply chain vulnerabilities and resilience, China’s cyber warfare and espionage capabilities, China’s activities and influence in South and Central Asia, and a review of Taiwan, Hong Kong, economics, trade, security, political, and foreign affairs developments in 2022.

Opening Statement of Chairman Alex Wong

Opening Statement of Vice Chair Kim Glas

Report PDFs

Annual Report to Congress

Executive Summary

Recommendations to Congress

Chapter 1 - CCP Decision-Making and Xi Jinping’s Centralization of Authority

Chapter 1 - CCP Decision-Making and Xi Jinping’s Centralization of Authority

Chapter 2 - U.S.-China Economic and Trade Relations

Chapter 2, Section 1 - U.S.-China Economic and Trade Relations

Chapter 2, Section 2 - Challenging China’s Trade Practices

Chapter 2, Section 3 - China’s Energy Plans and Practices

Chapter 2, Section 4 - U.S. Supply Chain Vulnerabilities and Resilience

Chapter 3 - U.S.-China Security and Foreign Affairs

Chapter 3, Section 1 - Year in Review: Security and Foreign Affairs

Chapter 3, Section 2 - China’s Cyber Capabilities: Warfare, Espionage, and Implications for the United States

Chapter 3, Section 3 - China’s Activities and Influence in South and Central Asia

Chapter 4 - Taiwan

Chapter 4 - Taiwan

Chapter 5 - Hong Kong

Chapter 5 - Hong Kong

4. China’s Cyber Capabilities ‘Pose a Serious Threat’ to US, Advisory Panel Warns

Read Unrestricted Warfare.

China’s Cyber Capabilities ‘Pose a Serious Threat’ to US, Advisory Panel Warns

nextgov.com · 

By Edward Graham,

Staff Reporter, Nextgov

China’s focus on enhancing its cyber capabilities over the past decade “poses a formidable threat to the United States in cyberspace today,” according to a report released on Tuesday by a congressional advisory commission. That warning comes on top of the commission’s assessment that Beijing’s trade practices necessitate closer scrutiny from lawmakers and the Biden administration.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s 2022 Annual Report to Congress assessed a range of threats to the U.S. economy and national security, including Beijing’s cyber warfare and espionage capabilities. The commission—which was created by Congress in 2000 and includes 12 members appointed by Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate—must annually report on “the national security implications of the economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.”

The commission’s report noted that Beijing’s desire to become a “cyber superpower” gives China “an asymmetric advantage over the United States in cyberspace due to the [Chinese Communist Party’s] unwillingness to play by the same rules, reflecting a dynamic observable in other areas of U.S.-China relations.” And Beijing’s increasing reliance on cyber operations—to enable information warfare activities, conduct cyberespionage efforts and promote its national security interests by controlling cyberspace—“pose a serious threat to U.S. government, business and critical infrastructure networks in the new and highly competitive cyber domain.”

“The country has achieved this transformation by reorganizing its cyber policymaking institutions, developing sophisticated offensive cyber capabilities and perpetrating cyberespionage to steal foreign intellectual property at industrial scale,” the report said.

Beijing’s cyberespionage operations, in particular—which are “increasingly sophisticated and use advanced tactics,” according to the report—often rely on “vulnerability exploitation and third-party compromise to infiltrate victims’ networks.” And these efforts are further emboldened by the fact that China’s cyber-related legislation “weaponizes the country’s cybersecurity industry and research by requiring companies and researchers to submit all discovered software and hardware vulnerabilities to the government before providing them to the vendors that can patch them.”

To better combat China’s cyberspace operations, the commission recommended that Congress pass legislation to codify “systemically important critical infrastructure,” and also require designated “entities, defense contractors and recipients of federal funding for research and development of sensitive and emerging technologies to undertake enhanced hardening and mitigation efforts against cyberattacks.”

The report also recommended that Congress direct the Department of Homeland Security to “catalog Chinese-sourced surveillance equipment, first responder communication systems and smart cities systems used by state and local governments,” and implement plans to “remove and replace such equipment to protect U.S. interests.”

A report released by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology last month found that at least 1,681 state and local governments in 49 states purchased information and communications technology and services from five Chinese companies that were banned by the federal government between 2015 and 2021.

Additionally, the commission recommended that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative create an updateable list of Chinese companies in critical sectors “found to have benefited from coercive intellectual property transfer” that can be used to ban investments in the companies and to deny export licenses to the firms. The report also called for Congress to require the Treasury Department to prohibit investments in Chinese firms involved in “cyber-enabled intelligence collection or theft of intellectual property sponsored by the People’s Republic of China against U.S.-based persons.”

“Urgent questions remain concerning the United States’ readiness for the China cyber challenge, including the adequacy of resourcing for U.S. military cyber forces, the sufficiency of existing protections for U.S. critical infrastructure and the scope of public-private cybersecurity cooperation,” the report said.

Four of the report’s 39 recommendations for Congress addressed China’s cyber capabilities, while the others largely focused on concerns related to Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U.S. economy and national security. The commission’s top recommendation, however, was for Congress to direct the Biden administration to undertake a review of Beijing’s permanent normal trade relations—or PNTR—status approved by Congress in 2000, as China prepared to join the World Trade Organization.

Kimberly Glas, the president and CEO of the National Council of Textile Organization and the commission’s vice chair, said during a public briefing about the report on Tuesday that when China’s PNTR status was approved to normalize trade relations with Beijing, “there was acknowledgement that the conditions to which China agreed—if it complied with them—would address the systemic trade distortions experienced by U.S. companies and workers, and level the playing field.”

But forced technology transfers, the theft of U.S. intellectual property and market access restrictions have raised concerns about Beijing’s continued PNTR status. Glas said that China’s engagement in these activities has “harmed the U.S. economy, workers and our supply chains, creating significant vulnerabilities to the United States’ economic and national security.”

The report recommended that Congress direct the Biden administration to produce a report “within 90 days” on China’s compliance or non-compliance with the 1999 U.S.-China bilateral agreement on market access. If Beijing is found to be out of compliance with the agreement, the report said that Congress “should consider legislation to immediately suspend China’s permanent normal trade relations treatment.” Revoking Beijing’s PNTR status could lead to the U.S. imposing significantly higher tariffs on Chinese imports.

The release of the commission’s report came after President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a three-hour meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia on Monday to discuss a range of U.S.-China issues, including North Korean provocations and Beijing’s increasingly militaristic posture toward Taiwan.

nextgov.com · by $(function() { GEMG.HoverGroup.init({}); });

5. Seizing the memes of advantage in the Ukraine war and beyond

Excerpts:

With a swarm of members that include social media researchers, a former president of Estonia, US congressional representatives and military personnel, NAFO is living proof of the importance of memes in contemporary information warfare.

...

So, back to NAFO. To understand what’s significant about posting a compressed image of a Shiba Inu in reply to disinformation content on social media we need to have an understanding of its history. The Shiba Inu has a surprising history of use online as a meme symbolising irony, irreverence and wholesome clarity in the face of challenging circumstances. This includes the Doge meme, which appeared on Reddit and 4chan in 2010. That in turn influenced the development of a number of other Doge-like memes (usually in the form of edited iterations of the original). One of them, a compressed image of a Shiba referred to as Cheems, was shrunk further, applied to an edited image of the NATO logo, and proliferated widely on Twitter from June 2022 onwards.

On its own, the edited form of the NATO logo wouldn’t have spread. But, by applying a meme with wide awareness and a spirit of irreverence to it, the movement began to grow. It enables users to create their own. There is no central authority. Members of the swarm create their own NAFO ‘Fellas’ avatars or gift them to others. Fellas work together, coordinating responses to drown disinformation content and highlight instances of war crimes or Russian military failures.

Understanding this approach and reproducing it in a deliberate and targeted way in future conflicts can result in similar, highly effective memetic insurgencies in cyberspace.

Seizing the memes of advantage in the Ukraine war and beyond | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Callum Harvey · November 15, 2022

Of all the vagaries we label as ‘non-traditional security’, none is more amusing or indicative of the role of digital networks than that of a compressed, grainy image of a Shiba Inu—a Japanese dog breed that the North Atlantic Fellas Organization uses as its sign. With a swarm of members that include social media researchers, a former president of Estonia, US congressional representatives and military personnel, NAFO is living proof of the importance of memes in contemporary information warfare.

NAFO, and other distributed information campaigns, have become a hallmark of the highly mediatised Russian invasion of Ukraine. These informational insurgencies aim to counter propaganda initiatives with sarcasm and wit. Any post on Twitter or elsewhere advocating support for the Russian invasion, or the legitimacy of sham referenda to annex parts of Ukraine to Russia, is met with relentless mockery, sarcasm and memes from NAFO members, colloquially referred to regardless of age, gender or location as ‘Fellas’.

Contemporary information warfare is often rolled into wider issues involving cyberspace and cybersecurity. The link is usually made based on information warfare being most easily undertaken today through social media and other digital technologies, while requiring a significantly different skillset to propagate and analyse.

If we’re to understand contemporary information warfare, we must recognise that it is fundamentally and by default memetic. The approach taken by the US Department of Defense, which is now under review and that Twitter and Facebook have described as an instance of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, demonstrates a pressing need for this. Meme warfare favours not the frontal assault, but insurgency. Pumping content into the digital aether is unsubtle and ineffective in shaping the narrative to suit strategic ends. There is a better way.

Memetic warfare, more commonly known as meme warfare, has floated around the fringes of the information warfare discourse for quite some time. The ‘meme’—defined by Richard Dawkins as the smallest possible unit of human culture—is at the core of this subset of information warfare. By progressively injecting small cultural elements into discourse on a matter, such as an invasion or other military operation, the idea is that a message can be spread unwittingly—using infection, rather than broadcast, as a medium of transmission.

As far back as 2006, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization recognised that meme warfare should be central to its defence initiatives. Of particular note was a proposal to integrate information operations, psychological operations and strategic communications in the form of a ‘meme warfare centre’ that would advise NATO commanders ‘on meme generation, transmission, coupled with a detailed analysis on enemy, friendly and noncombatant populations’.

These ideas have influenced NATO’s and the European Union’s efforts to expand their involvement in this space. In 2017, NATO and the EU established the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, which has a general focus on hybrid warfare across a number of domains, including the information domain. There’s also the Latvia-based NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, established in 2014, which provides tailored advice on information warfare, with a focus on its conduct online.

But analysis since then has cropped up rarely, and has tended to integrate meme warfare into wider information warfare to the point of conflating the two. One significant exception is the excellent piece published on this forum by Tom Ascott of the Royal United Services Institute in 2020. Ascott provides a highly informative overview of the history and contemporary applications of memetic warfare, from its pedigree and relationship to Soviet dezinformatsiya campaigns to its deployment in the 2016 US election. Alas, content in the space is perilously thin on the ground relative to its deployment, including crowdsourced disinformation campaigns such as the #DraftOurDaughters initiative deployed by a group of 4chan users in a bid to dent the national security credentials of US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In a networked environment in which individuals are empowered with all the publishing force of the Gutenberg press in the palms of their hands, empowering users to generate a suitable narrative is critical. If Australia and its allies are to replicate the successes of contemporary information warfare operations in Ukraine, an understanding of memes is more critical than ever. The role of NAFO in Ukraine is proof of this. Meme warfare is distributed and participatory, and understanding its power requires an understanding of internet culture.

What much of this relies on—and indeed, how the US, Australia and other like-minded countries may be able to leverage memetic warfare to their advantage—is the ability to create participatory online insurgencies. The best digital marketing initiatives are participatory—Spotify Wrapped, for example, enables users not only to collate data about their music habits for the year, but to share that data with others, contributing to narratives and meta-narratives about popular music. In effect, meme warfare draws from the same playbook by providing a series of cultural objects for individuals to latch onto, remix and reproduce online.

So, back to NAFO. To understand what’s significant about posting a compressed image of a Shiba Inu in reply to disinformation content on social media we need to have an understanding of its history. The Shiba Inu has a surprising history of use online as a meme symbolising irony, irreverence and wholesome clarity in the face of challenging circumstances. This includes the Doge meme, which appeared on Reddit and 4chan in 2010. That in turn influenced the development of a number of other Doge-like memes (usually in the form of edited iterations of the original). One of them, a compressed image of a Shiba referred to as Cheems, was shrunk further, applied to an edited image of the NATO logo, and proliferated widely on Twitter from June 2022 onwards.

On its own, the edited form of the NATO logo wouldn’t have spread. But, by applying a meme with wide awareness and a spirit of irreverence to it, the movement began to grow. It enables users to create their own. There is no central authority. Members of the swarm create their own NAFO ‘Fellas’ avatars or gift them to others. Fellas work together, coordinating responses to drown disinformation content and highlight instances of war crimes or Russian military failures.

Understanding this approach and reproducing it in a deliberate and targeted way in future conflicts can result in similar, highly effective memetic insurgencies in cyberspace.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Callum Harvey · November 15, 2022

6. Opinion | In the global meme wars, it’s time to side with the elves against the trolls

Opinion | In the global meme wars, it’s time to side with the elves against the trolls

The Washington Post · by Thomas Kent · November 16, 2022

Global Opinions

November 16, 2022 at 3:31 p.m. EST

Thomas Kent teaches at Columbia University and is a consultant on combating disinformation. He is a senior fellow of the Jamestown Foundation and former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The Kremlin’s intensive use of lies and conspiracy theories to defend its invasion of Ukraine has once again dramatized the need for smart policies to counter disinformation.

The conflict has also brought some valuable lessons for those who wish to fight back. Perhaps the most notable successes have come from nongovernment activists — pro-democracy campaigners in threatened countries — who have been mounting their own response to Russian propaganda.

“Putin is a strategic genius”

“He only wants Crimea”

“Russia won’t launch a full scale invasion”

“Ukraine won’t resist”

“Well, Ukrainian resistance will be futile”

“Well, they can’t conduct a counteroffensive”

“They’d never be able to hit Crimea”

“Well, not the bridge anyway”

— Bad Baltic Takes (@BadBalticTakes) October 8, 2022

In recent years, the U.S. government’s efforts to confront disinformation have often fallen short. Some officials oppose “becoming ‘propagandists’ ourselves” — when in fact combating hostile messaging requires no disinformation of our own, just telling the truth in an assertive and coordinated way. The recent exposure of a covert social media campaign promoting U.S. interests abroad has demonstrated the shortcomings of government operations done with little skill.

Perhaps it’s time we learned something from Eastern Europe’s online armies of nongovernment activists — many of them volunteers. They possess authenticity and expertise that outside governments cannot match.

(A post on the Facebook account of Sebavedomé Slovensko — which translates to “Self-Confident Slovakia” — compares Adolf Hitler’s 1938 seizure of lands in Czechoslovakia with Vladimir Putin’s recent annexation of Ukrainian territory. “But there is one difference: Ukraine is successfully defending itself and the Russian occupiers are being driven back from where they came.”)

Volunteer activists fight it out with trolls online, penetrate and disrupt conspiracy chatrooms, campaign for companies to stop advertising on disinformation sites, and post memes ridiculing Russian propaganda — as in the case of this Lithuanian post, with its caption reading: “Is there anyone in your family with mental illness?” “My grandfather thinks that Russia will win the war.”

Lithuania’s “elves” are perhaps the best-known such group. Organized eight years ago, the elves now claim thousands of members. Similar bands operate in other Baltic countries, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. Here’s another post from Sebavedomé Slovensko:

Other citizen efforts have spontaneously sprung up, such as the North Atlantic Fellas Organization campaign that has taken off since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Elves often repost work from other activists and cartoonists, adding to the volume of pro-democracy messages. But in many countries, such efforts consist only of small numbers of volunteers, often in unconnected organizations. They might lack skills to produce compelling videos and memes, and detect disinformation campaigns in the critical early hours. Many activists come from urban elites and have limited credibility with rural and less educated citizens who are prime targets for disinformation.

In countries where democracy is at risk, campaigners can have difficulty raising money. Corrupt actors denounce them as the tools of foreign interests, making citizens and businesses reluctant to support them. Some activists make a point of refusing donations from abroad, but others accept support from foreign governments and foundations. Such aid can be helpful, and some donors run excellent assistance programs. But, too often, assistance comes in short-term grants for individual projects, not for the ongoing costs of staff and activity to keep an organization alive.

Some Eastern Europeans have told me their work has fallen off because they cannot afford even one full-time person to monitor disinformation and recruit and organize volunteers.

A grant as small as $50,000 or $100,000 that continues reliably year after year can make a big difference in keeping a team staffed and operating. Activists also need professional, always-available help to design information campaigns and target them to critical audiences.

Amid the debate over what kind of information activity the U.S. government should run directly, we should not lose sight of the potential of these committed activists.

The Washington Post · by Thomas Kent · November 16, 2022

7. Why America Loses Wars

Conclusion:

He was first and foremost an infantryman, a soldier. We have this misperception that he was just a staff officer. He was in at least 36 battles. There were weeks where they would fight every day. He was at the Battle of Borodino. He once took a bayonet to the side of the head. He experienced nearly everything about war, from being wounded to being a prisoner of war, to leading in combat. But he also sat in meetings with the Czar. He had vast experience and vast education on war—he built his theoretical approach on all these different things. Bad theory will get you killed, he believed. And so, I’ve taken up that last point by writing this book, an attempt to encourage better thinking about why and how we wage war. 

Why America Loses Wars

By John Waters

November 19, 2022

Clausewitz tells us to measure society’s strength by whether we achieve victory on the battlefield. Victory entails not just destroying the enemy’s fighting capability or claiming his territory, but achieving certain political objectives. American politicians have shown a willingness to end wars without achieving their objectives. In other words, they have shown a willingness to lose. 

Precedent was set with the 1953 ceasefire in Korea and upheld when America withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. It remains unclear whether politicians intended to lose those wars (and others) or merely accepted that the price of victory had become too high, that victory was no longer worth the time or effort required. 

Whatever the case, our troops care about winning. Desire for victory is one reason young Americans leave their homes and families to enlist. They join to gain a mission, to make a difference, and to win on the battlefield. Desire for victory was part of the reason our troops performed so well in the fight against terrorism. Ask anyone who served whether they believed their combat deployments were making a difference. Odds are they answer ‘yes’, but acknowledge the overarching policy was misguided if not destined to fail.  

No one blames the troops for our failures in Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan. Rather, it is “the political leaders who have forgotten that victory matters,” historian and Clausewitz scholar Donald Stoker told me recently over the phone. And since the politicians do not believe that victory matters, our troops have found themselves trapped in endless wars that lead to defeat or stalemate, a doom loop of poor planning-leads-to-poor results, where the pursuit of war itself becomes more important than defeat or victory. 

In his book Why America Loses Wars (Cambridge, 2019), Stoker argues that flawed thinking about war, especially limited war, has led to flawed war policy and poor results. And, Stoker anticipates more of the same unless our political leaders clearly define their political objectives and apply the necessary military strategies and resources to achieve those objectives. The following is our conversation on war and politics. 

Can you first define “war” for our readers?

War is the use of military force to achieve a political aim. The violence (force) element is pivotal. What you will see argued is that you can have war without violence. That’s wrong. You have rivalry and competition, but war must have politically directed violence, directed at an adversary for a political end. 

Your writing is concerned with winning on the battlefield. Define victory.

Achieving your political aim. That’s the one that shines through. When you get what you want, and have the strength or ability to convince the other side to agree to your terms. This is where the complexity of the book comes into play. The most difficult chapter to write was on how to end wars, particularly those wars fought for a limited aim where often you’re not able to impose your will on the enemy. In such situations, it’s difficult to force the other side to come to your point of view, as was the case in the Korean War and the Gulf War, to name a couple of examples. It was too difficult to get the agreements to end those wars on the terms we wanted.

I’ll add that we almost never plan for the ending of a war, which is one reason for our failure to achieve victory in some of our wars since 1945. This is not just a problem for the United States—most countries never plan for the end of a war. The Russo-Japanese War [1904-05] is one of those very few examples where a nation-state (Japan) contemplated in advance exactly how to end the war. Japan thought through the negotiation steps needed to end the conflict on favorable terms. In contrast, the H.W. Bush Administration had thought about the need for a plan to end the Gulf War but didn’t create one. Instead, it had General Schwarzkopf negotiate in a very ad hoc way, and he was criticized for the settlement even though everything he did was approved by the administration.

You are opposed to loose usage of “war” in academia, government, and journalism. The term “limited war” is particularly bothersome. “Hybrid war” as well. To borrow a line from the Smiths: What difference does it make?

I get criticisms sometimes that I’m worrying about nothing, but as you dig into the arguments, you discover that we don’t even agree on basic definitions for “war” and “peace.” 

For instance, there’s this constant drumbeat that we’re at war with Russia, that we’re at war with China. I think many terms we use confuse “subversion” and “crime” with actual war. Now, the “gray zone” is a big one used to denote actions occurring in this supposed realm between peace and war, but my point is that people are again misunderstanding “subversion” and elements of Great Power Competition. I think we’re creating new terminology and imaginary complexity that amounts to sloppy thinking. This affects our ability to plan and make war.

Let’s apply these terms. Was the Iraq War a failure?

That depends. You can look at the question several different ways. 

First, what were the political aims being sought in the Iraq War? The political aims were to (a) overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime; and (b) build a democratic Iraq. You can make a good argument that we achieved both aims, but that we did not understand that achieving these aims required different things. Building a democratic Iraq is a completely different political aim and, when the aims are different, usually the ways must be different. The Iraq War certainly killed more people and cost more than it was expected to, but you could argue that the war was a success. 

All that said, I don’t like the question. You could certainly argue that we helped create a situation in Iraq that allowed Iran to obtain a dominant position in the country, that this probably would not have happened without overthrowing Saddam Hussein. 

Okay. How about the War in Afghanistan. Was it a failure?

Obviously. 

We wanted to (a) overthrow the regime; and (b) build a democratic Afghanistan. Then, late last year [2021], we decided we didn’t want to support the regime we created. What we did in Afghanistan failed to achieve the aim. In Iraq, we got our aim but was it worth it? I’m iffy on that. In Afghanistan, we didn’t accomplish our political aim.

But is it a problem of thinking or a problem of will? We knew the political objective of the war: to create security conditions for peace and the development of a new government and military. We also understood the problem: accomplishing the objective would take 100 years.

Both. Loose terminology is a problem of thinking. But it always boils down to will, too. 

Clausewitz would say it always comes down to one side’s ability to hold. People would argue that the North Vietnamese or the Afghans were just willing to do it longer.

What if it’s impossible to achieve the aim? I think it’s a fair question to put forward in the context of Afghanistan. I’ve seen it in a couple of books. When Mullah Omar and Karzai cut a deal in early 2002, the administration wouldn’t accept the deal because it was very much an Afghan deal. It was rejected by the administration. Just think if they had taken the deal – what would have happened? It’s a fascinating one to think about.

It’s really tough if you’re in the political decision-making role. You may have to make the decision that you’re willing to lose. That’s the criticism leveled by Peter Bergen at the Biden Administration in Afghanistan, that they decided to lose. But did they really think they were losing the war?

Harry Summers’ book on Vietnam says there was no clear political aim in Vietnam. But it’s very clear from the Kennedy and early Johnson administration documents that these administrations wanted a non-Communist Vietnam. The interesting thing from Summers’ argument is that there are all these flag officers he interviewed who did not know the political aim. It’s as if it was not pushed down the chain. There’s a broken link in the chain. 

When you look at the political aims for the Iraq War, it’s very clear that the administration wanted to overthrow the regime and establish a democratic Iraq. But then you have Rumsfeld writing in his correspondence that the goal was not to establish a democratic Iraq. Moreover, the political aim given to the war planners was to overthrow the regime, not to plan for creation of a democratic Iraq. The disconnect between the WH – DoD – ground commanders was huge in the Bush Administration. I think it was very different in the Obama Administration. As far as communicating the political aim, I think there was some improvement in the Obama administration but there was also a real tightening of control at the WH in the Obama administration. Consequently, there was a real loss of strategy in favor of tactical planning. In Ash Carter’s memoir, he writes that the Administration was slow to figure out a strategy to fight the Iraq War in 2014 and beyond. I think there was a lack of emphasis on winning during the Obama Administration.

I’ll add that it’s very weird to see flag officers say that the point of fighting a war is not to win. You’ll see evidence of that dating back to the Korean War. It’s very odd. The class I taught at the Naval War College was essentially on “how to win wars,” but now you’ll see from military officers and politicians and others that the point is not to win the war. If you’re not trying to win the war, how will you ever get to peace? Fighting the war becomes an end. There’s a phenomenon where the war becomes more tactical the longer it goes on, and planners and decision-makers lose sight of the strategic picture.

There is a divergence between the academic’s answer and the participant’s answer. Many veterans believe we won tactically but lost strategically. There is a sense that the people most out-of-touch with war—politicians, bureaucrats, other “experts” in war policy—are the people most responsible for our failure. Can people who never served in war fully understand war?

I think at some levels “yes” and some levels “no.” There’s a friend of mine who spent a year in Iraq and a year in Afghanistan. His father had been an infantryman in Vietnam. He said when he came back from Iraq, his father finally talked to him about Vietnam and the wounds he suffered. He never spoke about the Vietnam War beforehand, maybe because it was too personal and he feared he wouldn’t be understood. Another colleague had a similar experience with a student who had a grandfather who served in World War II. The reason why is because they had someone they knew—someone they knew would understand. 

So, yes, I think it’s difficult to really understand the violence and chaos of war unless you’ve experienced it. 

You mentioned Clausewitz. I’ve not given you any preparation, but can you apply his “ends,” “ways,” and “means” analysis to the engagement in Ukraine?

I’m probably wrong on this because I’m guessing, but here it goes, from the Ukrainian side:

ENDS – I don’t know. Ukraine wants to secure its independence. Do the Ukrainians also want to retake land they lost in 2014? Some would argue “yes” but we don’t know.

WAYS – depends how you want to slice it. Probably defensive. Attrite the Russians and give ground until Ukraine can mount an offensive. [Which has happened since the interview was conducted]

MEANS – an effort to mobilize the entire country. Zelensky tried to revive the levée on masse at the beginning of the war, from ages 16 to 60. I’m uncertain how well this has worked. 

That seems right. Thanks for doing the analysis on the fly. 

Sure. And one further note on Clausewitz, if I may.

Of course.

He was first and foremost an infantryman, a soldier. We have this misperception that he was just a staff officer. He was in at least 36 battles. There were weeks where they would fight every day. He was at the Battle of Borodino. He once took a bayonet to the side of the head. He experienced nearly everything about war, from being wounded to being a prisoner of war, to leading in combat. But he also sat in meetings with the Czar. He had vast experience and vast education on war—he built his theoretical approach on all these different things. Bad theory will get you killed, he believed. And so, I’ve taken up that last point by writing this book, an attempt to encourage better thinking about why and how we wage war. 

John Waters is a writer in Nebraska. 

* The opinions expressed here do not represent the views of the National Defense University, the Eisenhower School, or the U.S. government.

8.  There is a lot to like in the 2022 National Defense Strategy

I, too, find a lot to like about the NDS. Especially, as the author notes, "campaigning." Operations, activities, etc should be executed through campaigns to support strategy and not by "programs." Effective campaign development will result in identification of necessary resources, authorities, and permissions required for successful execution. ANd each campaign is unique because it must be based on assessment of the conditions and the proper application of strategy to serve and advance US interests. And I would add that we need to develop "irregular warfare proficient campaign headquarters" for conducting campaigns in the gray zone below the perceived threshold short of the war and the employment of conventional combat forces. We need less focus on tactical development of forces (we have outstanding and very capable tactical forces) and more on campaign quality headquarters, especially irregular warfare proficient campaign headquarters. 

Excerpts:

To a certain extent, the military already does campaign – the regular cadence of joint exercises with allies and partners in key regions, for example, conditions those environments by demonstrating U.S. presence, commitment, and combined capability. Freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) are another form of campaigning, insofar as the regular transit of U.S. vessels is a reminder that it will enforce the right of all states to sail, fly and operate wherever international law allows.

What is new is that campaigning will be more selective. The NDS states that “we will focus day-to-day force employment on a more narrow set of tasks than we do currently.” Campaigning will also be more intentionally aligned with long-term lines of strategic effort focused on “the most consequential competitor activities – those that, if left unaddressed, would endanger our military advantages and vital national interests now and in the future.” For this intent to be realized, the DoD will need to have clarity about what interests those are, and which competitors and competitor activities have the potential to compromise them. Still, there is more to be heartened by than to quibble with in the document’s reasonably well-developed presentation of campaigning.

Integrated deterrence and campaigning should be non-controversial, given that they are a return to concepts about the role of force in international politics that served the United States well during the Cold War. When put into practice with care and conviction, they enabled the United States to compete with the Soviet Union over foreign policy outcomes, often successfully, without precipitating war. Their centrality in the 2022 NDS thus is encouraging, suggestive of a Department that is finding its footing and gaining confidence in its role in competition.

There is a lot to like in the 2022 National Defense Strategy

The Brookings Institution · by Melanie W. Sisson · November 18, 2022

The two-page fact-sheet released by the Department of Defense (DoD) in March 2022 served as an appetizer for the fully-cooked 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) that arrived seven months later. Whether the initial fact-sheet prepared its readers for disappointment or for satisfaction, the full document delivered. Those hungering for prioritization and a detailed alignment of ends, ways, and means will find it unfulfilling. Those with an appetite for more than just a reaffirmation that the United States must prepare to fight and win a war against China will find it hearty.

It came as no surprise that integrated deterrence – an approach to dissuading others from behaving in particular ways at particular times by using diplomacy, economic statecraft, and military power together – was prominently featured. It was less obvious that campaigning – the design and execution of operations over time and space, all working in service of the same strategic objective – would receive as much treatment as it did. This is a decidedly positive development. There remains some ironing out to be done, and there are ongoing objections to integrated deterrence. The NDS’s core concepts indicate that U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s team is thinking critically about how the U.S. military can be used not only to deter and fight war, but also as an effective instrument of foreign policy.

The debate is over, the DoD does integrated deterrence

Two objections to integrated deterrence are common: that threatening non-military consequences such as diplomatic reprimand (expelling diplomats, or excluding a state from an international forum) and economic sanctions, for example, are insufficient to restrain a determined actor; and that these and other such tools of influence aren’t the purview of the Department of Defense. The former doubtless is true, sometimes – but so too is it true, sometimes, that even the threat of military force is insufficient to restrain a determined actor.

The assertion that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that integrated deterrence failed where military deterrence would have succeeded, for example, mistakenly emphasizes the strategy itself, instead of its details and quality. The more relevant considerations are how and why the coalition composed and communicated the package of punishments intended to deter Putin. What was the rationale behind selecting particular economic sanctions, and threatening and applying them incrementally rather than immediately upon invasion? How and why, in the period prior, did the DoD determine which forces to deploy to Europe, where to deploy them, and in what numbers? Did the coalition make clear to Putin the extent and durability of its willingness to supply Ukraine with funds and weapons? It is the analytical approach behind the selection, timing, and application of these tools of influence, in other words, that either increases or decreases the likelihood that a strategy of deterrence will succeed.

This is precisely why the argument that the DoD should not concern itself with non-military forms of influence over which it has no control is wrong. Nobody is laboring under the misconception that the DoD believes it is, will, or should be the strategy lead on diplomatic activity, trade policy, or economic sanctions. All the NDS is proposing is that the DoD and the interagency treat coercion holistically. Integrated deterrence, that is, acknowledges that military action intended to deter can work either with or against other elements of U.S. national power.

A study published in 2020 found that there have been many instances over the last 30 years in which poorly-integrated deterrence was used to ill effect. Analysis revealed, for example, that there are conditions under which the application of sanctions made military efforts to deter less effective. Similarly, the manner in which U.S. demands were conveyed to the target of deterrence could be counterproductive. When demands and threats were clear and specific, military deterrence was more likely to succeed. When the United States issued mixed messages, non-specific demands, and vague threats, by contrast, the likelihood of successful deterrence declined.

Given that the deployment of any portion of the U.S. military in an effort to deter always carries costs and risks, it seems only common sense that the DoD would seek to develop coordinated strategies that at most avoid and at least minimize these negative interactions. Really, it would be irresponsible not to, especially when considering the stakes involved in, say, seeking to deter a Chinese use of force against Taiwan. The question that remains in urgent need of an answer thus is whether the Department and the interagency have in place the mechanisms they need to develop good strategies of integrated deterrence with the skill and speed that events might require.

Good to see you, campaigning

The concept of campaigning – defined in the NDS as “the conduct and sequencing of logically-linked military activities to achieve strategy-aligned objectives over time” – is a welcome inclusion, not least because it is far from a novel construct for the armed forces. Campaigning is something the services know how to do, and how to do very well, in the conduct of war, and that the joint staff has been thinking about how to apply to other mission sets for decades. The NDS simply applies the logic to military activities short of war, or to stay with the favored term, to gray zone activities.

In this context, campaigning acknowledges that other actors have interests that run counter to those of the United States, and that they should be expected not only to pursue them, but also sometimes to do so in ways are either illegal under international law or legal but inconsistent with established norms. The island-building activities of the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and China are examples of this, or Iran’s new habit of snatching up uncrewed U.S. surface vessels operating in its near seas. Most importantly, campaigning recognizes that thwarting any one attempt cannot be expected to forestall others – competitors will not simply quit in the face of failure, but rather will keep trying, whether using the same means or new ones to pursue their goals. Campaigning maintains U.S. preparedness to parry these attempts consistently and persistently over time.

To a certain extent, the military already does campaign – the regular cadence of joint exercises with allies and partners in key regions, for example, conditions those environments by demonstrating U.S. presence, commitment, and combined capability. Freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) are another form of campaigning, insofar as the regular transit of U.S. vessels is a reminder that it will enforce the right of all states to sail, fly and operate wherever international law allows.

What is new is that campaigning will be more selective. The NDS states that “we will focus day-to-day force employment on a more narrow set of tasks than we do currently.” Campaigning will also be more intentionally aligned with long-term lines of strategic effort focused on “the most consequential competitor activities – those that, if left unaddressed, would endanger our military advantages and vital national interests now and in the future.” For this intent to be realized, the DoD will need to have clarity about what interests those are, and which competitors and competitor activities have the potential to compromise them. Still, there is more to be heartened by than to quibble with in the document’s reasonably well-developed presentation of campaigning.

Integrated deterrence and campaigning should be non-controversial, given that they are a return to concepts about the role of force in international politics that served the United States well during the Cold War. When put into practice with care and conviction, they enabled the United States to compete with the Soviet Union over foreign policy outcomes, often successfully, without precipitating war. Their centrality in the 2022 NDS thus is encouraging, suggestive of a Department that is finding its footing and gaining confidence in its role in competition.

The Brookings Institution · by Melanie W. Sisson · November 18, 2022

9. Rapid Dragon: The Air Force Wants the C-130 to Launch Missiles

A flying missile truck. - HIMARS in the sky?

But I am skeptical of its application in a fight with China.

Rapid Dragon: The Air Force Wants the C-130 to Launch Missiles

19fortyfive.com · by Brent M. Eastwood · November 18, 2022

I’ve ridden in my share of C-130s when I was in the Army. The cargo and transport airplane is loud and will shake your teeth out. One rough ride almost made me want to throw up (I was dipping tobacco at the time, and it made me queasy). I never imagined the C-130 could be used as a missile truck someday.

Of course, the AC-130 is a formidable gunship, I knew about that, but launching missiles from the airframe never occurred to me. But that’s what the Air Force wants to try with its Rapid Dragon program.

Fire a Missile Out of a C-130? Why Not?

The idea is to simply load the missiles on to a pallet and push them out the rear door. The pallets would use parachutes to drift down until launch. The Air Force has the ubiquitous C-130 in large numbers. Lockheed has built more than 2,500 C-130s of various configurations over the years. No modifications on the airplanes would be necessary if all goes well.

How About Use Against China?

Kyle Mizokami of Popular Mechanics believes this could be a game changer in the Indo-Pacific, especially if a conflict over Taiwan lights up like a brush fire. Mizokami thinks the Rapid Dragon missile launching concept could be used on other cargo planes such as the C-17 and Japanese C-2. This would give the allies hundreds of missiles to destroy high value enemy targets and ships. These could eliminate the Chinese carrier killing missiles enabling U.S. Navy strike groups to steam into range and start the real war against China.

Bomb Bay in a Box

It’s a scenario that sounds too good to be true. But U.S. Air Force special ops personnel successfully tested the concept off the coast of Norway on November 9. Rapid Dragon is also called “bomb bay in a box.” That’s the basic idea that was evaluated. An MC-130J Commando II from the 352nd Special Operations Wing shot a Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range cruise missile with the system in the Arctic Circle. Bomb bay in a box could also fire the Long-range Anti-Ship Missile. The C-130 could carry six missiles and a C-17 could launch nine.

Plenty of Extra Cargo Planes World-wide

Lt. General Jim Slife, head of the Air Force Special Operations Command, said bomb bay in a box can take advantage of all the cargo planes stationed with allies around the world. Many air forces would like to have the capability of large bombers that could fire stand-off missiles but cannot develop their own systems due to limitations of their own aerospace industries and cost. This is where bomb bay in a box steps in.

C-130 Missile Truck: The Concept Is Simple

This is an experimental program led by the Air Force Research Laboratory. It works like this. One main parachute guides the missile package downward then four other parachutes keep it steady. The box turns vertical then out pops a missile and its wings and tail open. The engine fires up and away the cruise missile goes. The cargo plane can fly home, load up more boxed missiles, and do it again. This is a simple step-by-step process that should yield something to behold. Roll on, roll off, repeat.

That’s not all. The Air Force is looking at dropping more diverse pallets containing not just munitions but inventions such as intelligence gathering modules. And the branch is looking at testing different missiles.

AC-130 Gunship. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

This force-multiplier means that the Air Force could free up its other attack aircraft for additional missions. Rapid Dragon would enable massive strikes on the pivotal first day of warfare. And think of all the allies with C-130s that could attack Russia or China someday if needed. The Air Force hasn’t revealed how much bomb bay in a box costs, but the pallets should not be that expensive, not counting the price of each missile. This kind of innovative thinking is a way to outsmart U.S. adversaries and continue to iterate good ideas and bring them to fruition. Bomb bay in a box, if it continues to show promise, has the potential to enlarge capabilities for airplanes that wouldn’t normally have attack capacity. This brings more players to the fight.

Expert Biography: Serving as 1945’s Defense and National Security Editor, Dr. Brent M. Eastwood is the author of Humans, Machines, and Data: Future Trends in Warfare. He is an Emerging Threats expert and former U.S. Army Infantry officer. You can follow him on Twitter @BMEastwood. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and Foreign Policy/ International Relations.

19fortyfive.com · by Brent M. Eastwood · November 18, 2022

10. Managing the PLA’s Military Diplomacy: Key Institutions and Personnel

A very useful primer for dealing with the PLA.

Conclusion:

Despite the challenges facing China’s military diplomacy, the maturation of the OIMC’s role and further codification of China’s international military cooperation may generate renewed capacities to manage diplomatic activities in order to stabilize key relationships and better avoid grave risk.

The early prospects for China’s military to make this shift are promising in concept but entirely inadequate in practice. It will not be enough to improve internal processes to better align international cooperation, particularly because China can no longer rely on foreign diplomatic counterparts to design and sponsor mechanisms for stable military diplomacy, particularly in terms of crisis management. PLA military diplomacy management will have to accept responsibility and acknowledge it is in China’s interest to sustain stable relations and prioritize escalation avoidance even when friction arises.

Managing the PLA’s Military Diplomacy: Key Institutions and Personnel - Jamestown

Publication: China Brief Volume: 22 Issue: 21

By: Chad Sbragia, Kenneth Allen

November 18, 2022 05:05 PM Age: 17 hours

jamestown.org · by Chad Sbragia · November 18, 2022

Introduction

The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) status as the armed forces of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is particularly manifest in its handling of military diplomacy. This article examines the background and evolution of the Office of International Military Cooperation (OIMC)—the main Central Military Commission (CMC) organization responsible for managing and coordinating PLA relationships with foreign militaries. In addition, the piece examines and contextualizes the roles of the Joint Staff Department and the Minister of National Defense in military diplomacy. In examining the main PLA military diplomacy actors, this article builds on Kenneth Allen’s recent China Brief series, “The PLA’s Military Diplomacy in Advance of the 20th Party Congress,” which overviewed recent senior-level engagements as well as specific areas of cooperation between the PLA and foreign forces (China Brief, September 9; October 4).

A Brief History

The PLA’s Foreign Affairs Office originated in 1951 when the CCP’s CMC created a subordinate Foreign Liaison Division. [1] After the Ministry of National Defense (MND) was formed in 1954, the PLA used this office as a base to establish a subordinate Foreign Affairs Office (FAO; 外事办公室, waishi banggongshi) in 1955 that received dual guidance from the General Staff Department (GSD) Intelligence (Second) Department and the MND General Office (办公厅, bangongting). In 1959, the FAO was placed solely under the MND’s General Office. In January 1964, the office expanded to become the Foreign Affairs Bureau (FAB; 外事局, waishi ju) under the General Office. The bureau created a subordinate General Office (办公室) and three numbered divisions: 1st Division (一处, yi chu) : Military Attachés (武官, wuguan); 2nd Division: Military Assistance (军援, junyuan); and 3rd Division: Research (调研, diaoyan). In 1965, the bureau was re-subordinated under the GSD, where it underwent unidentified organizational adjustments. From then on, the GSD Foreign Affairs Bureau and MND Foreign Affairs Bureau were dual hatted with MND’s FAB providing a veneer for GSD activities.

In December 1998, both the GSD and MND changed the name of the Foreign Affairs Bureau to the Foreign Affairs Office. [2] Besides the name change, the new office was also upgraded to a corps leader-grade organization, which allowed it to deal with the GSD’s Second Department and the GSD Foreign Affairs Office’s counterpart in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an equal. The GSD / MND Foreign Affairs Office included the following subordinate organizations: Political Department (政治部; zhengzhi bu), Comprehensive Bureau (综合局, zonghe ju), Arms Control and Military Assistance Bureau (军控军援局, junkong junyuan ju), Asia Bureau (亚洲局, yazhou ju), Eurasian Bureau (欧亚局, Ouya ju), Americas and Oceania Bureau (美洲大洋洲局, meizhou dayangzhou ju), and West Asia and Africa Bureau (西亚非洲局, xiya feizhou ju), as well as some other unidentified bureaus (Tsinghua University, Center for International Security and Strategy; People.cn, June 25, 2013).

Impact of 2016 Reforms

On January 11, 2016, the CMC underwent a reorganization from a General Headquarters System (总部制) to a Multi-Department System (多部门制) in which four General Departments were transformed into 15 organizations (State Council Information Office [SCIO], July 24, 2019). This systemic reorganization, under which the new departments, commissions and offices are to operate as the staff, executive, and service organs of the CMC, aimed to foster centralized and unified leadership; strengthen the top military leadership body’s coordination functions; improve its capacity for strategic planning and overall management; and, strengthen restraint and supervision. As a result of these reforms, the Foreign Affairs Office was not only renamed to the Office for International Military Coordination (OIMC; 国际军事合作办公室, guoji junshi hezuo bangongshi), but was also elevated into the CMC’s new Multi-Department Organization System to become the 13th ranked department in protocol order, which is the equivalent grade to a corps leader (Huanqiu, January 11, 2016; Guancha, February 1, 2016). Concurrently, these reforms also abolished the former GSD Foreign Affairs Office (Takungpao, January 12, 2016). According to the official MND website: “the office is mainly responsible for foreign military exchanges and cooperation, and for managing and coordinating the foreign affairs work of the whole military” (MND). The arm patch for the office is shown below.

Despite the CMC OIMC’s recent origins, the exact link between it and the State Council MND office of the same name is unclear. However, it appears, these are the same organization with two different names. Specifically, various articles in 2016 noted that there was a CMC OIMC (中央军委国际军事合作办公室, Zhongyang junwei guoji junshì hezuo bangongshì) and an MND OIMC (国防部国际军事合作办公室, guofang bu junwei guoji junshì hezuo bangongshì), which were considered “one department with two brands” (一个部门两个牌子, yige bumen liangge paizi) (Huanqiu, January 11, 2016; Shangguan News, April 16, 2016). A reference to the MND OIMC was found as late as last December (PLA NDU International College of Defence Studies, December 24, 2021).

This is consistent with the November 2012 adoption of the “Working Rules of the Central Military Commission,” which stipulated a “CMC Chairman Responsibility System” that was later included in the revisions to the CCP constitution that were adopted at the 19th Party Congress in 2017 (PLA Daily, March 16, 2021). A seemingly new feature of the updated responsibility system is charging the Minster of National Defense with providing oversight of OIMC activities to the CMC. Based on the 2018 “deepening the reform plan of party and state institutions,” the Minister of Defense now sits on the CCP Foreign Affairs Work Commission as the sole uniformed PLA representative and coordinates with other state organs on foreign affairs through MND and the dual-hatted OIMC.

2021 Regulations on International Military Cooperation Work

The adoption of the “Military Strategic Guidelines for a New Era” conveyed in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) 2019 white paper on “China’s National Defense in the New Era,” not only expanded defense aims to include safeguarding overseas interests, but also affirmed the need to “actively develop constructive relationships with foreign militaries” that would require “a new configuration of foreign military relations which is all-dimensional, wide-ranging and multi-tiered is taking shape” (SCIO, July 24, 2019). Demands for greater participation in global and regional security governance, expansion of bilateral defense partnerships, efforts to settle disputes over territory and maritime demarcation through negotiation and consultation, and increased security cooperation activities combine to levy twofold requirements on the international military cooperation activities of the PLA. First, the PLA must refine relevant mechanisms for protecting China’s overseas interests and foreign affairs. Second, the PLA must establish and improve “system coordination” (体系统筹) functions of the OIMC consistent with the overarching “Socialist Military Policy System (system of systems) with Chinese Characteristics” (中国特色社会主义军事政策制度体系, zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi junshi zhengce zhidu tixi) that orchestrates all PLA systems as well as with other foreign affairs systems of China’s governance. [3]

After years in development, Xi signed an order as CMC Chairman issuing the “Regulations on International Military Cooperation” (国际军事合作工作条例, guoji junshi hezuo gongzuo tiaoli), which came into force on March 1, 2021 (PLA Daily, March 16, 2021). The regulations not only provide fundamental guidelines for international military cooperation consistent with Xi Jinping’s “Thinking on Strengthening the Armed Forces,” which are part of the broader effort to build a world-class military, they also seek to apply to Xi’s “Holistic National Security Concept” and expedite his strategic foreign policy aim to create a “community with a shared future for mankind.” The regulations also steer OIMC adaptation of the 2019 strategic guidelines for the “new era” and seek to implement specific steps for the reform and deployment of national defense and the military. A core feature of the regulations, which is consistent with the deepening reforms of the PRC’s national defense and the military systems since 2016, is the direction for OIMC to further “improve the working system and mechanism of international military cooperation in accordance with the leadership and management system established by the reform of national defense and the military, strengthen strategic management and work guidance, improve the work system, and clarify the responsibility interface of each unit in the work of international military cooperation” (PLA Daily, March 16, 2021).

In concert with the other PLA and foreign policy reforms undertaken since 2016, the regulations establish the importance that international military cooperation and the OIMC must function within the PLA, the Party and China’s overall foreign affairs, national defense and military construction, which all contribute to enhancing the PRC’s overall international influence. The regulations specify the main tasks and preliminarily establish a framework, which covers all aspects of CMC-led international military cooperation. Moreover, the regulations establish an “International Military Cooperation Leadership and Management System,” which is internal to China’s armed forces (both the PLA and the PAP), in order to regulate horizontal coordination and to vertically divide the OIMC’s responsibilities and implementation processes to foster overall synergy of effort. The regulations also established a “Military Cooperation Work Inspection and Evaluation System” to conduct assessments, inspections, and evaluations, which aim to improve the overall efficiency and level of international military cooperation.

OIMC Organizational Structure

So far, only a few organizations have been identified as being subordinate to the OIMC, including the Eurasian Bureau (欧亚局, Ouya ju), the Security Center or Security Cooperation Center (安全合作中心, anquan hezuo zhongxin), which is linked to China’s peacekeeping activities and is usually identified as belonging to the MND OIMC, and the Arms Control and Compliance Affairs Office (军控和履约事务办公室,jun kong he luyue shiwu bangongshi), which has a subordinate Compliance Affairs Bureau (履约事务局, luyue shiwu ju) responsible for overseeing China’s Chemical Warfare treaty participation requirements (71.cn, October 19, 2017; PRC Embassy in the Netherlands, September 19; People’s Daily, January 27, 2017). The OIMC also has a Comprehensive Bureau, Asia Bureau and Americas and Oceanian Affairs Bureau. It most likely has several other regional bureaus that correlate to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ regional departments for Asian Affairs; West Asian and North African Affairs; African Affairs; European-Central Asian Affairs; European Affairs; North American and Oceanian Affairs; and Latin American and Caribbean Affairs (FMPRC).

OIMC Leadership

The following personnel have been identified as the directors (主任,zhuren) for the OIMC starting in 2016, each of whom spent most of their career involved in military diplomacy. Each head of OIMC had held the grade of corps leader.

• 2016–2017: Navy Rear Admiral Guan Youfei (关友飞), who worked in various billets in the GSD and MND Foreign Affairs Office starting in the early 2000s (The Paper, January 15, 2016).
• 2017–2018: Army Major General Hu Changming (胡昌明), who served most of his career in the GSD foreign affairs structure to include working as the first attaché in the PRC Embassy in Tanzania in the early 2010s and as a Deputy Director of the OIMC from 2016 – 2017 (cn, November 22, 2017).
• 2018–2022: Army Major General Ci Guowei (慈国巍). He previously served as the PRC Military Attaché in Kyrgyz Republic and then the Director of the GSD Foreign Affairs Office’s Eurasian Bureau. He then served as a Deputy Director of the MND Foreign Affairs Office and then as a Deputy Director of the OIMC before becoming the Director in 2018 (Huanqiu, December 27, 2018).

It appears that there have been at least four deputy directors (副主任,fuzhuren) of OIMC since 2016 as well, each of whom were a major general or rear admiral with the grade of corps deputy leader (Baike). There are normally at least two to three deputy directors at the same time. It is not clear who, besides Huang Xueping, is currently serving as a deputy.

• 2016-December 2018: Major General Ci Guowei
• 2016-2017: Major General Hu Changming
• 2016-November 2017: Rear Admiral Li Ji (李际)
• November 2017-2022: Major General Huang Xueping (黄雪平) (CCTV News Weibo, September 18).

CMC OIMC Military Diplomacy Activities

The MND’s English-language website catalogues 13 events involving the CMC OIMC from 2018 to 2022, which are listed below. An unexplained phenomenon, however, is what conditions spur publicization of meetings and other events since some routine official OIMC talks are published in one period but not on other occasions. [4] Of note, none of the articles identified the participants as from the MND OIMC, nor did they mention any participation by JSD representatives.

• On April 18, 2018, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation hosted a welcome reception for a delegation of colonel-level PLA officers (China Military Online [CMO], April 18, 2018). The visit was part of the defense exchange jointly hosted by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, the Sasakawa Japan-China Friendship Fund and the China Institution for International Strategic Studies. As of the time of this reception, the two sides had facilitated exchanges involving about 130 Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) officers and more than 200 PLA officers since the program was launched in 2001. However, mutual visits were suspended in February, 2012. Major General Ci Guowei, who was a deputy director of the CMC OIMC in 2018, led the 25-member delegation to Japan.
• On November 21, 2018, the CMC OIMC invited foreign military attaches from nearly 60 countries to visit the MND’s peacekeeping center near Beijing (Xinhuanet, November 22, 2018). At that time, China had joined 24 peacekeeping operations, dispatching more than 36,000 personnel since the country first began participation in UN peacekeeping missions in 1990.
• MND hosted the 2019 New Year Reception in Beijing on the evening of January 25 to celebrate the approaching Spring Festival, the traditional Chinese New Year (CMO, January 25, 2019). Over 240 foreign military attachés and their spouses, from more than 80 countries, attended the reception. State Councilor and Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe, and fellow CMC members General Li Zuocheng, Admiral Miao Hua and General Zhang Shengmin all attended the reception. The leader of the CMC OIMC delivered a speech on behalf of General Wei.
• In July 2019, China’s MND hosted the first China-Africa Peace and Security Forum in Beijing (CMO, July 17, 2019). Representatives of the Chinese military and nearly 100 senior representatives from the defense departments of 50 African countries and the African Union, including 15 defense ministers and chiefs of general staff, attended the forum. CMC OIMC deputy director Major General Song Yanchao addressed the conference stating that: “In the face of new situations, the common languages, aspirations and interests of China and Africa in peace and security field have been increasing. Closer cooperation between the two sides is embracing new and precious historical opportunities.”
• On October 20, 2020, a top officer of the CMC OIMC had a telephone conversation with a senior U.S. Department of Defense official (CMO, November 1, 2020). They exchanged in-depth views on the relationship between the two militaries and discussed issues of mutual concern. The two sides agreed to strengthen communication between the two militaries, properly manage differences and conduct cooperation in areas of common interest. From October 28 to 29, the two militaries virtually convened the first Crisis Communications Working Group to discuss concepts of crisis communications, crisis prevention and crisis management. In addition, the two sides decided to hold the 2020 Disaster Management Exchange via video conference in mid-November. Finally the two militaries agreed to hold a video conference for the Maritime Military Consultative Agreement dialogue before the end of 2020.
• The 11th China-EU defense and security policy dialogue was held via video link on December 10, 2020 (CMO, December 11, 2020). The dialogue was co-chaired by the heads of the CMC OIMC and the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy and Crisis Response at the European External Action Service (EEAS), which marked the 45th anniversary of the establishment of China-EU diplomatic ties.
• The 18th ASEAN Regional Forum Security Policy Conference (ASPC) was held virtually on May 27, 2021. The participants exchanged views on international and regional issues, threats and challenges of emerging technologies to defense security, the buildup of mutual trust and development cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region, etc. (MND, May 31, 2021). The head of the CMC OIMC talked about China’s views on current international and regional landscapes. 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the establishment of China-ASEAN dialogue relations.
• On August 19, 2021, a leader of the CMC OIMC and U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense (DASD) had a video conference (MND, October 9, 2021). On September 28 and 29, 2021, a leader of the CMC OIMC and a U.S. DASD held another video conference to co-chair the 16th China-U.S. Defense Policy Coordination Talks. During the two interactions, the two sides exchanged in-depth views on the relations between the two countries and two militaries, and on issues of common interest.
• To mark the CCP’s 100th anniversary, the CMC OIMC organized a visit by military attachés from nearly 70 countries to the Museum of the CCP in Beijing (CMO, December 23, 2021). Interviews were also held with military attachés and international military students from 14 countries.
• On February 25, 2022, the 12th China-EU dialogue on defense and security policy was held via videoconference (CMO, February 25). Leaders from the CMC OIMC and the Common Security and Defence Policy and Crisis Response department under the EEAS co-chaired the dialogue.
• On March 16, 2022, the Security and Defense Sub-Committee of the China-Nigeria Inter-Governmental Committee convened its first meeting via video link (CMO, March 16). The meeting was co-chaired by leading CMC OIMC officials of and the Permanent Secretary of Nigeria’s Ministry of National Defense.
• On April 29, 2022, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) Defense Officials’ Dialogue video conference was held. China and Cambodia, the rotating chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for 2022, co-hosted the conference (CMO, May 1). Leaders from the CMC OIMC and the General Department of Policy and Foreign Affairs under Cambodia’s Ministry of National Defense both delivered speeches.
• On June 3, 2022, the CMC OIMC Director participated via video link in the 19th ASEAN Regional Forum Security Policy Conference (ASPC) in which the participants exchanged views on the regional and international issues (CMO, June 3).

Joint Staff Department Military Diplomacy Involvement

It is still not exactly clear how the current CMC Joint Staff Department (JSD), which replaced the GSD in 2016, is actively involved in managing military diplomacy. For example, as noted in “The PLA’s Military Diplomacy in Advance of the 20th Party Congress (Part 1)”, the PLA has always assigned the military diplomacy portfolio to one of the Deputy Chiefs of the former General Staff Department or current Joint Staff Department (China Brief, September 9). The current Deputy Chief of Staff with this portfolio since August 2017 is Lieutenant General Shao Yuanming, who has the grade of Theater Command deputy leader.[5] The meetings he has chaired are listed below:

• January 2018: China and Myanmar Diplomacy and Defense Consultations in Naypyidaw, Myanmar (Xinhuanet, January 17, 2018).
• May 2018: China and Russia 20th round of strategic consultation in Beijing (CMO, May 30, 2018).
• September 2018: China and Russia “Vostok-2018” strategic joint military exercise at the Tsugol training range in Russia’s Trans-Baikal, where Shao was the PLA exercise director (CMO, September 14, 2018).
• April 2021: China and Vietnam 10th Defense and Security Consultation in Dongxing, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (CMO, April 23, 2021).
• September 2021: China and Singapore 8th Defense Policy Dialogue via video link (MND, September 15, 2021).
• January 2022: China and France 16th China-France Defense Strategy Consultation via video link (MND, January 13).
• January 2022: China and United Kingdom 8th Defense Strategy Consultation via video link (CMO, January 12).

A New Defense Minister in 2023

Although the Central Military Commission (CMC) had several different names from 1925-1954, it served the same basic functions.[6] The official name of the Central Military Commission (CMC) today is the Military Commission of the Central Committee ( 中央军事委员会, Zhongyang junshi weiyuanhui or 中央军委, zhongyang junwei) of the CCP. Although the Chinese term for the CMC has remained consistent since its creation, the English translation has changed over the years. In the 1960s and 1970s, the commission was commonly referred to as the Military Affairs Commission (MAC).

Under the CCP’s 1982 constitution, a state CMC was appointed by the National People’s Congress (NPC), which is institutionally co-equal to the PRC’s executive branch, the State Council. However, since its establishment, the State CMC and the CCP CMC have consisted of the same personnel, except for during the present, twice-a-decade period between a Party Congress and the next year’s National People’s Congress (NPC). During such transitions, the personnel who departed the CCP CMC following a Congress remain on the State CMC until their replacement at the NPC the following year.

Following the 20th Party Congress, the new Central Committee selected a new Party CMC, including two Vice Chairmen and four Members (People’s Daily, October 24). As noted, the State CMC will remain in place until the 14th NPC is seated in early 2023. As such, Wei Fenghe will remain as the Defense Minister and State Councilor until the NPC approves the Party CMC Vice Chairmen and Members to replace the current State CMC. The person who will replace Wei as the Defense Minister and State Councilor is General Li Shangfu (李尚福), a career Army officer with a focus on satellites, space, and weapons development (Ifeng, September 18). He received a bachelor’s degree in 1982 from the PLA’s National University of Science and Technology (NUDT) and a master’s degree from the Chongqing University School of Automation. There are no indications that he has any military diplomacy experience.

Conclusion

In concert with sweeping organizational, systemic, and functional reforms of the PLA since 2015, renaming the GSD / MND Foreign Affairs Office as the Office of International Military Cooperation (OIMC) signifies a more transformational change in its role within the CMC. The OIMC plays this role in two ways. First, the OIMC serves as a center to coordinate the institutional alignment of the military diplomacy activity of the PLA/PAP with the PRC’s broader foreign policy actions. Second, the OIMC seeks to manage the projection of external influence as an important manifestation of military soft power and to set favorable conditions for crisis and, if necessary, conflict.

As specified in the 2019 white paper “China’s National Defense in the New Era” and the 2021 “Regulations on International Military Cooperation,” OIMC will improve its leadership and management system for international military cooperation to “regulate the responsibilities of various tasks horizontally and divide the responsibilities of the organization and implementation process vertically” to achieve an “overall synergy” for the CMC (PLA Daily, March 16, 2021). Externally, OIMC will seek to “deepen bilateral and multilateral security cooperation, promote a coordinated, inclusive and complementary cooperation among security mechanisms, and contribute to a security architecture featuring equality, mutual trust, fairness, justice, joint contribution and shared benefits” that will both complement and compete with existing international defense mechanisms and dialogues (SCIO, July 24, 2019).

As U.S.-China systemic rivalry intensifies and as competition within the relationship increases, OIMC will serve as a fundamental vehicle to adapt to the developing international situation and promote China’s foreign and defense policy initiatives. The record show increases in China’s international defense cooperation activity, new forums and mechanisms for dialogues, and a concerted effort to reshape international military discourse advantageous to China. Construction of new China-led defense mechanisms and strengthening military discourse capacities serves to enhance military soft power and the “discourse dilemma” characterized as a critical gap in China’s defense diplomacy (81.cn, May 26, 2021). The aim to build China’s so-called “military discourse power” (军事话语权, junshi huayuquan) in order to contend with the “Western-dominated discourse system” and strengthen the military discourse capabilities necessary for effectively shaping the situation to manage and control crises, contain wars, and win wars (Study Times, September 20, 2017).

Yet, PLA military diplomacy management is likely to face prolonged challenges as tensions with the U.S. and other nations will remain an enduring feature of the international environment for the foreseeable future. The shift from the simple defense engagement of the past to a more active diplomatic posture faces new challenges amidst intensifying strategic competition. Combined with expanding PLA military deployments, overseas interests and basing, and concerns with PLA modernization, OIMC will find it difficult to navigate the need to promote defense interests while sustaining stable relations, especially when the latter is often sacrificed by Beijing as a symbol of strategic dissatisfaction, rather than viewed as a vital source of crisis prevention or conflict avoidance. Recent examples include the diplomatic instability leading to the U.S. cancellation of agreed-to defense contacts and exchanges at the beginning of the Biden Administration; and Beijing canceling phone calls, the Defense Policy Coordination Talks, and an operational safety meeting under the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (South China Morning Post, October 28; Guancha, August 8).

One issue exacerbating already strained U.S.-China defense relations is that General Li Shangfu, who is expected to be the next Defense Minister, was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018 under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which adds yet another obstacle to routine diplomatic contacts and exchanges with the PLA’s senior uniformed diplomat (U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, September 20, 2018).

Despite the challenges facing China’s military diplomacy, the maturation of the OIMC’s role and further codification of China’s international military cooperation may generate renewed capacities to manage diplomatic activities in order to stabilize key relationships and better avoid grave risk.

The early prospects for China’s military to make this shift are promising in concept but entirely inadequate in practice. It will not be enough to improve internal processes to better align international cooperation, particularly because China can no longer rely on foreign diplomatic counterparts to design and sponsor mechanisms for stable military diplomacy, particularly in terms of crisis management. PLA military diplomacy management will have to accept responsibility and acknowledge it is in China’s interest to sustain stable relations and prioritize escalation avoidance even when friction arises.

Kenneth W. Allen is a retired U.S. Air Force officer, whose extensive service abroad includes a tour in China as the Assistant Air Attaché. He was the former research director of U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) from 2017 through 2019.

Chad Sbragia is a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. He was the inaugural Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China and previously served as the Director of the China Research Group for the U.S. Marine Corps. He also served the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command as the Acting Director of the China Strategic Focus Group and as the Country Director for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mongolia. Mr. Sbragia served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1985-2012, including an assignment as the U.S. Marine Attaché within the U.S. Embassy Beijing.

Editor’s Note: This piece exceeds the standard length for China Brief articles, but is being published due to reader interest.

Notes

[1] See Kenneth W. Allen, Christopher Clarke, John Corbett, and Lonnie Henley. “China’s Defense Minister and Ministry of National Defense,” in Kevin Pollpeter and Kenneth W. Allen, eds., The PLA as Organization v2.0.(Vienna, VA: Defense Group Inc., 2015).

[2] See Alice Miller, “The Central Military Commission,” in Kevin Pollpeter and Kenneth W. Allen, eds., The PLA as Organization v2.0., (Vienna, VA: Defense Group Inc., 2015).

[3] The Military Policy System was the most prominent change unveiled in the 2019 Defense White Paper (see SCIO, July 24, 2019). At the CMC’s Work Conference on Policy and System Reform held in Beijing on July 13-14, Xi stressed “the military policy system regulates military relations, standardizes military practice, and guarantees military development; and the reform of military policies and systems is of great significance to realizing the party’s goal of strengthening the military in the new era and building the people’s army into a world-class military in an all-round way, and to realizing the goal of the “two hundred years” struggle and realizing the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The application of systems design as a structural form is not new but has clearly accelerated during Xi’s tenure as reflected in the 19th Central Committee’s fourth Plenary Session, which includes extensive development of systems architecture within the PLA (Xinhuanet, October 31, 2019)

[4] For example, U.S. and PRC defense officials met in Beijing on January 14, 2020, for the 15th U.S.-China Defense Policy Coordination Talks, which the PLA chose not to list on the MND website or address during the MND’s regular monthly press conference (U.S. Department of Defense, January 16, 2020).

[5] Of note, prior to 2018, all deputy chiefs of the General/Joint Staff had the grade of Military Region/Theater Command leader; however, they were all downgraded in 2018 as part of the PLA’s reorganization.

[6] See Miller, “The Central Military Commission.”

jamestown.org · by Chad Sbragia · November 18, 2022

11. Ukraine war: Rishi Sunak visits President Zelensky in Kyiv

Ukraine war: Rishi Sunak visits President Zelensky in Kyiv

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The meeting between the leaders marks Mr Sunak's first visit to Kyiv as prime minister

Rishi Sunak has met Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in his first visit to Kyiv since becoming prime minister.

The meeting was held to "confirm continued UK support" for Ukraine, a No 10 spokesperson said.

"We discussed the most important issues both for our countries and for global security," Mr Zelensky wrote on Telegram following the meeting.

"We are stronger and we will achieve the desired results," he added.

Mr Sunak - who took office last month - said it was "deeply humbling" to be in Kyiv and pledged that the UK would continue to stand by Ukrainians in their fight.

During the meeting with Mr Zelensky, he said the UK would provide a major new package of air defence to help protect Ukrainian civilians and the country's national infrastructure from Russian strikes.

Ukraine has been requesting assistance from Western nations in recent months amid intense Russian aerial attacks on Kyiv and across the country.

The £50 million package of defence aid comprises 125 anti-aircraft guns and technology to counter deadly Iranian-supplied drones, including dozens of radars and anti-drone electronic warfare capability.

It follows more than 1,000 new anti-air missiles announced by the UK's Defence Secretary Ben Wallace earlier this month.

Earlier in the week Russia hit Ukraine with one of its biggest barrages of missiles yet, days after its troops were forced to withdraw from Kherson.

Kyiv was hit and there were strikes across the country, from Lviv in the west to Chernihiv in the north.

That attack coincided with the G20 summit in Bali where, in a virtual speech, Mr Zelensky said he was "convinced now is the time when the Russian destructive war must and can be stopped".

Mr Sunak announced the UK will also increase the training offer to Ukraine's armed forces, sending expert army medics and engineers to the region to offer specialised support.

While in Kyiv, the UK prime minister laid flowers at a memorial for the war dead and lit a candle at a memorial for victims of the Holodomor famine, before meeting emergency workers at a fire station. Mr Sunak also saw captured Iranian-made drones which have been used to target and bomb Ukrainian civilians in recent months.

"I am proud of how the UK stood with Ukraine from the very beginning. And I am here today to say the UK and our allies will continue to stand with Ukraine, as it fights to end this barbarous war and deliver a just peace," Mr Sunak said.

"While Ukraine's armed forces succeed in pushing back Russian forces on the ground, civilians are being brutally bombarded from the air. We are today providing new air defence, including anti-aircraft guns, radar and anti-drone equipment, and stepping up humanitarian support for the cold, hard winter ahead," he added.

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• Volodymyr Zelensky
• Rishi Sunak
• Ukraine

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12. Shifting the Role of Leader and Led: Using Year Group Cohorts to Accelerate Marine Corps Force Design

What a fascinating and excellent concept. I think this could be very useful for USSOCOM and all the services. I can see so many benefits to this (mentoring, empowering, retention, morale, infusion of new ideas - innovation, future senior leader preparation)

I know LTG Cleveland implemented a similar program with his Young Lions concept when he was the USASOC CG.

The Commander’s Initiatives Group was complemented by a junior executive development program—which I called the Young Lions—that would bring one branch-qualified major from each of the nine tribes to USASOC headquarters for one five-day workweek. They were briefed on issues, went through leadership and team-building exercises, socialized, and then were given a relevant problem and told to come up with a solution that they would brief to the Commander’s Initiatives Group. Their names were engraved on a plaque to permanently stay in the headquarters, and they were given access to the Commander’s Initiatives Group portal that they would forever be able to use. They were subject to tasking after returning to home station and had to provide opinions on work being done in the group. They were the “classic” directed telescopes into our units. (footnote 17, page 178, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA300/PEA301-1/RAND_PEA301-1.pdf)

Shifting the Role of Leader and Led: Using Year Group Cohorts to Accelerate Marine Corps Force Design

cimsec.org · by Guest Author

Human Factors Week

By Travis Reese

“The United States has a perfect record in modern times of predicting when and where future outbreaks of war will occur—it always gets it wrong.”–Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

During the first three years of the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 effort, there has been a lively discussion over the intended goal of the transformation coupled with intense criticism over how the debate for change has been conducted. Critics have decried a lack of openness and transparency including a debate over the degree to which individuals feel empowered to contribute to the creation of the next iteration of the force. Force Design 2030 has been unique compared to prior design efforts in another regard; not only has there been the debate among serving Marines at every stratum of rank and experience, but there has been an intergenerational challenge from retired Marines who shaped the legacy organization of the Corps upon which these changes are being measured.

This intergenerational tension in force design, even within the active-duty force, can be improved by re-arranging the relationship between senior and subordinate and creating a process that receives input from multiple generations of Marines. This can be done by passing earlier responsibility for designing the next iteration of the Marine Corps on to successive generations of the Corps from early in a Marine’s career. The Marine Corps can achieve this change in force design methodology by establishing generational cohorts organized in 10-year increments, that are tasked with forecasting force design requirements 30 years out from the present.

These cohorts can interact and transition ideas via a process of inter-generational and cross-functional dialogue captured through an electronic learning platform and knowledge exchange portal. The concepts developed on the platform can be augmented by live conferences and standing committees led by senior Marine Corps leaders actively listening to, and coordinating with cohort members to manage recommendations for force design for further development among responsible Marine Corps agencies and commands. The role of seniors will be to guide, mentor, and resource the testing of ideas generated by successor generations in continuous campaigns of learning (plural not singular) and not simply initiate or direct change through specialized efforts in ad-hoc cycles that have an uneven track record of capability adoption and meeting timely demand. This cross-generational knowledge management will also serve as a means for talent management. A Marine’s involvement in the force design process could lead to future assignments based on demonstrated interest and relevant contributions to the force design process.

Most importantly, passing some of the responsibility for force design onto younger cohorts of Marines is a way for the Marine Corps to harvest the reservoir of ideas already in the service and turn them into actionable designs for concepts and testing solutions. This will enable the service to stay ahead of adversaries and prepare generations to lead fully resourced forces for each era with a knowledge of what will come next. These cohorts would be the basis for, and creators of, force development and design solutions impacting their generation via a “crowd sourced” but “leader-managed” methodology that would inform institutional choices and force design focus.

This methodology would overcome institutional capacity limits that force the Marine Corps to plan in a sequential era-by-era fashion that potentially misses innovative opportunities that would benefit from earlier investment under a clear conception of their potential. There is ample evidence that talented futurists reside within the ranks who can contribute to force design beyond the current effort.

The Case for an Internal Forum

The Corps prides itself on the inherited legacy of those who came before, but history shows that the challenges the Marine Corps has faced are decidedly generational. Each generation of the Marine Corps needs to develop tactics, techniques, and means that fit the circumstances of their time. How soon should that start in a generation of Marines? Marines are rarely afforded an officially sanctioned opportunity during their career to formally influence the design of the force they will eventually lead. Without a well-managed forum to harvest ideas on force design, the Marine Corps is missing out on the ability to gain and maintain momentum on future concepts and develop means conceived by steady study, debate, analysis, and investment. Thus, the service is effectively decelerating its preparation for future conflict by limiting the number of Marines who can contribute to address future problems and by not having a common platform to proactively consider timely solutions.

No forum within the service exists to place those ideas where they can be received, tracked, harvested, and tested for application at the time-horizon in which they will be likely suitable or useful. Instead, Marines have relied on participation in ad-hoc dialogue through informal professional societies to contribute ideas and in professional writing. As for professional writing, there is little correlation between contributing to a public discourse and impact on the direction of the service. Marines interested in force design but kept outside of the formal combat development process are forced to play a waiting game until they are senior enough to introduce their ideas as commanders or are otherwise touched by a campaign of learning effort to support experimentation. Simply put, young Marines do not have a way to contribute their ideas into the force design process. Rather their ideas merely float in the ether of abstract conversation and vigorous, but indifferent, debate. Additionally, the Marine Corps’ force design process is not optimized to incubate ideas over multiple time frames and for extended periods.

Unfortunately, future force planning in Department of Defense frequently falls into two habits that create static logic: first, fixation on the current security challenge which becomes an anchor to perceptions of the future. This results in the military using the current state of global affairs as the model for all future conditions or second, establishing a single point in the future and then using that point alone to design a future force with more or less a constant interpretation of the threat. The latter occurs due to the institutional inertia that builds up around an adversary model as agencies work to align their programs and efforts to an accepted framework. Each change in the model often generates a halting effect on force development or design as organizations take years or better to adjust to a new conception of the future or threat. Yet, knowing this pattern of thought and activity, the Marine Corps and Department of Defense have never really considered a method to make transitions between force design efforts more fluid. Rather, every new era of challenge is “jump started” by some national security directive with large institutional transitions surrounding the effort. The Marine Corps is currently caught in this trap as it has adopted the departmental focus on 2030 as a target date and has not begun to consider the next, but inevitable, planning horizon. This is despite the fact that a new Marine today may serve until the year 2055 and could possibly face the next design effort having to change a force conceived in 2019, realized in 2030, and sustained until 2045 or 2050.

Marine Corps lore is rife with stories of determined innovators or mavericks who forced their way in the system to “save the day” with the just in time solution that, by luck, gained the attention of a senior sponsor. Trying to cross the valley of ex-officio debate and gain the notice of senior leaders to influence change may involve uncertain, and possibly unnecessary, career-risking approaches. Personal favor, institutional connections and chance notice by a senior leader are not the ways to harvest ideas for the future of the Corps. The refrain of “send us your ideas” from senior leaders is insufficient if no one is sure who is listening and there is no place to “post the letter” for a willing leader to receive and consider.

What To Do About It? Setting Up Year Group Cohorts

The Marine Corps needs to improve the relationship between leadership and successor generations to proactively shape the inevitable transition from current to future. This can be done by dividing the force into 10-year cohorts that participate in a managed service-wide mass participation learning framework incremented into 10, 20, and 30-year horizons. Why 30 years? First, it often takes 30 years to conceive and design capabilities and doctrine and put them into practice. Most of that time is focused on building an institutionally agreed-upon problem frame and discovering potential solutions. Secondly, if one assumes that the career of most senior leaders (officer and enlisted) may be sustained out to 35 years it makes sense that cohorts should cover that outcome. Third, a 10-year cohort would include groups with diversity in rank and experience to prevent myopia in terms of outlook and experience but remain close enough that near-contemporary relationships facilitate ease of dialogue and frankness of critique. Lastly, taking a longer-range look provides institutional freedom of action to explore options and alternatives free from the constraints of contemporary pressures (although informed by them) and in a more risk accepting posture.

How would this work? At the beginning of his or her career an officer or SNCO (who is now on a career-focused path) is assigned to a cohort focused on a specific time frame. Each cohort will consider how their generation will be defined in terms of security challenges and solutions. A cohort will remain in its assigned year and transition to become the 20- or 10-year group as a new cohort is created behind them to deal with the next 30-year horizon. The oldest cohort becomes the “current” year and/or begins to retire and transition from service. Groupings would be developed based on recommendations from Manpower and Reserve Affairs (DC M&RA). Cohorts would be organized as a large learning entity under a supervised management collaboration with Training and Education Command (TECOM) and Capabilities Development and Integration (DC CD&I). TECOM would be responsible to furnish access to qualified educational mentors. Professionally qualified mentors will be hired to manage the inputs, encourage research, and stimulate dialogue among the respondents. Combat developers from CD&I would be able to observe and harvest the ideas produced by the cohorts. Management of cohort contributions would be enabled via a web-based platform residing on unclassified and classified networks developed by Deputy Commandant for Information (DC I). The platform will facilitate discovery, search, and visualization of the various ideas produced by the cohorts. Problems or issues for a specific year group would be sponsored by the Deputy Commandants.

Annually, a Force Design conference would be led, structured as an activity for a regular three or four-star executive offsite. Cohort managers and mentors would provide a report back to the Commandant and deputy commandant sponsors on a cohort’s responses to a design question or specific challenge. Further, cohort managers could introduce new initiatives or concepts spawned by the cohort for consideration by the senior leaders. Select cohort members could be called in to brief their recommendations or future operating environment insights to the senior leaders. From these recommendations, debate would ensue on proposed investments, experiments, research, manpower adjustments, or concept development activities to conduct in support of each time-frame’s force development or design requirements. Nothing about this effort would disrupt standing institutional processes of capability development, acquisition, or budget planning. If anything, it would generate a faster-paced, iterative, institutionally understood, and data-informed pedigree to many force design initiatives under a participant-led and leader-managed effort.

The overall benefits of an institutionally integrated knowledge and professional exchange framework would be vast. Rather than random discoverability of talent or ideas spread across informal learning societies, intra- and intergenerational dialogue would exist across the Marine Corps with the express purpose of developing actionable ideas on future concepts directly. Participants, without disruption to necessary career progression, can engage in early strategic thinking about the future. This would have an impact on the quality of professional military education since instruction on strategy and strategic thinking would be amplifying to an embedded institutional activity. The knowledge portal would enable the service to discovery solutions to current and future challenges on a persistent basis rather than by exception through the ad-hoc use of events like challenge days or military “shark tanks” whose outcomes on capability development are uncertain and still require interest for adoption. Iterative doctrine development and deliberation would begin sooner rather than constrained to small writing venues or billet-specific offices. Force design as a process would shift to participant-driven and leader-managed generating large-scale buy-in and removing the variable of personality-focused initiatives. Lastly, every participant would have common appreciation of each 10-year framework guiding force development and design activities which they can articulate to external stakeholders in positions to support USMC discovery or resource solutions.

The Role of Mentors

Effective mentorship is essential to this proposal and would necessarily vary from cohort to cohort. Younger Marines focused on the 30-year horizon likely need very little encouragement to conceive of the next innovations that can be applied in the future. At this phase in their careers, they would likely need more guidance on how to research appropriately, create a sound argument, understand the implications of history and where to harvest those lessons. They need mentorship in the tools that make it possible to form a testable hypothesis for their intuitive vision. The 20-year horizon group is a mid-tier professional who needs insights regarding the institutional processes that will govern force design and development. They need mentors who will advise on institutional memory and help them navigate the gates of the system that will make it possible to shift from ideation to action.

The 10-year horizon group is in the nexus of decision between realizing their concepts that have been matured and challenged over 15-20 years and managing the acquisition risk of replacing the current force. They need executive-level mentorship in decision making and risk management at this stage of force design. The same mentors should not remain with a cohort as they are specialists in certain skills with biases and conceptions that should be minimized by exposure to other schools of thought.

Overall, it is important for the Marine Corps to not select mentors based on perceived authority bias or reputational history alone. Rather, cohorts may consist of iconoclasts and relative unknowns whose talents and skills are familiar to a small group but whose history of institutional challenge and change far exceeds their reputation.

Preventing Silos and Creating Institution-wide Cross-functional Dialogue

A risk of cohorts is that they can become silos of competition and become protective or adversarial against their counterpart cohorts. This can be prevented by incentivizing cross-functional exchange among the cohorts. A simple example: the 20-year cohort is depending on a particular technology to realize their proposed capabilities. It is discovered that the technology is viable, yet unachievable in that timeframe. Rather than abandon the investment, a decision is made for the 30-year cohort to inherit consideration of this option. Likewise, the 30-year group was considering a particular advancement and it is realized that the technology will be available in 10 years.

A decision could be made to transfer development to the 10-year cohort accelerating outcomes for them, potentially generating an unexpected overmatch for a range of adversaries, but also forcing a change to manpower requirements and doctrine development. To sustain this exchange, it would be necessary to conduct an annual conference, likely geared around the budget cycle, led by the Commandant. Cross-functional discussion of cohort discoveries sponsored by the Deputy Commandant for CD&I or a cohort manager can be led and investments in various force design options can be considered under unique scenarios for each year group. This process would help shape the transition of force design efforts to a participant-led and senior-leader managed process and enable the capacity to manage investments over a longer horizon with a better transition between current and future forces.

Conclusion

Members of the military live and work in two timeframes: present and future. The present is all about competency with current tools and techniques to be ready for today’s challenges. It is achieved through training, practiced in exercises, and measured in inspections and evaluations. The future is about preparedness for tomorrow’s challenges and requires the planning, preparation and imagination necessary to avoid strategic surprise. It is achieved through considering future scenarios, practiced in wargames, realized through investment in doctrine and technology, and measured in live and virtual experimentation.

If anything, the efforts of FD2030 should make the Marine Corps realize that current and future live in a symbiotic relationship and although everyone is required to master the threats of today, it is equally important to think about and prepare for tomorrow. Adversaries are always preparing to develop countermeasures to our well-developed structures and means.

Rather than simply leveraging industry or academia as sources of alternatives and solutions, the same level of alternative thinking (coupled with a greater sense of the implications) can occur inside of the Marine Corps. Modern technology and information exchange has made it possible to overcome the limits of happenstance discovery and the need for patronage of reformers and thinkers that formally infused the system.

Every Marine can become a force designer. The Marine Corps can harvest those ideas into action vice merely be observers/encouragers of the dialogue. Marines can level their interest in the future training, design, and development of the force into career-making choices supported by an institution that not only cares about what they think but acts on it.

The institutional conflict around FD2030 shows that the Marine Corps must improve how it leverages each generation of the Corps in preparing for future challenges. Those decisions must be informed by relevant institutional experience, but not be mired in the preferences and predilections of prior generations. The role of responsible generations to solve the problems they will face in the future must be given a commensurate opportunity and appropriate authority earlier if force design is to become a fluid, timely, inclusive, and less disruptive in the future.

Travis Reese retired from the Marine Corps as Lieutenant Colonel after nearly 21 years of service While on active duty he served as an artillery office and in a variety of billets inclusive of tours in capabilities development, future scenario design, and institutional strategy. Since his retirement in 2016 he was one of the co-developers of the Joint Force Operating Scenario process. Mr. Reese is now the Director of Wargaming and Net Assessment for Troika Solutions in Reston, VA.

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cimsec.org · by Guest Author

13. Are We on the Road to Another Pearl Harbor?

We need more than forces for a pivot to Asia. We need to pivot with all elements of national power.

Conclusion:

For more than a decade, America’s political leaders have talked about a strategic “pivot” to Asia without providing the necessary forces in the region to match the rhetoric. Meanwhile, the current administration in Washington promotes “engagement” with China even as war clouds gather in the western Pacific. Just as in the 1930s, the road to another Pearl Harbor could be paved with good intentions.

Are We on the Road to Another Pearl Harbor? - 

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · November 19, 2022

Are We on the Road to Another Pearl Harbor?

China is “is predisposed to delivering a decisive first blow against U.S.”

November 19, 2022, 12:04 AM

Three stricken U.S. battleships on Dec. 7, 1941 (Everett Collection/Shutterstock)

The Naval Institute Press has just published a small book titled The Road to Pearl Harbor: Great Power War in Asia and the Pacific, which is part history and part a warning that history may be about to repeat itself with another great power war in Asia and the Pacific. The book, which is edited by John Maurer of the Naval War College and Erik Goldstein of Boston University, brings together historians and strategists who provide provocative insights into the origins, evolution, and outcome of World War II in Asia and the Pacific and aspects of that war that, in the editors’ view, “illuminate the dangers that currently confront American leaders.”

History, of course, never exactly repeats itself, but it remains the greatest teacher of human behavior. Erik Goldstein and Peter Mauch write about the failed effort in the 1920s and early 1930s to construct a liberal international order centered on the League of Nations and multinational arms control agreements, especially the Washington Naval Conference and its treaties, that affected the balance of power in Asia between Britain, the United States, and Japan. John Maurer assesses Winston Churchill’s reaction to the “gathering storm” in Asia in the 1930s, while Walter McDougall shows FDR’s evolution from isolationist to semi-belligerent in the 1930s. Historian Richard Frank and China expert Grant Rhode highlight the importance to the eventual Allied victory of China’s stubborn and bloody resistance to Japan’s aggression in the 1930s and throughout the war. And they go a long way toward rehabilitating the reputation of China’s wartime Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, whose army crucially tied down many Japanese divisions as the Allies contracted Japan’s imperial realm.

But the jewel in this collection of fine essays is Toshi Yoshihara’s examination of China’s views of a future war in the western Pacific. Yoshihara, who taught strategy at the Naval War College and who currently works at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is perhaps the nation’s foremost expert on the Chinese navy. He has mined open sources for the views of Chinese military strategists, including Chinese naval officers, and warns that the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) views on future warfare in the western Pacific are consistent with a Pearl Harbor–like first-strike attack on U.S. naval ships and facilities in the region, especially our “logistical infrastructure” at the Yokosuka naval base in Japan, the home of the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

The PLA, Yoshihara writes, “is predisposed to delivering a decisive first blow against U.S. forward-deployed forces in the western Pacific, particularly those in Japan.” Chinese doctrinal writings, he notes, emphasize surprise attacks and offensive campaigns at the outset of war. Chinese strategists call this part of a “counterintervention strategy” designed to strike American targets that pose the greatest threat to China’s important coastal hubs along the “Beijing-Tianjin, Shanghai-Nanjing, and Guangzhou-Shenzhen corridors.” And the PLA has steadily acquired the precision-strike arsenals (long-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles), especially the DF-21C, a conventionally armed intermediate-range ballistic missile that, Yoshihara notes, is capable of hitting any target on the entire Japanese archipelago, and the DF-26 missile which can deliver both conventional and nuclear warheads up to 4000 kilometers.

Yoshihara explains that attacks on U.S. naval forces based in Japan would only be “one element of a larger campaign” of strikes that would likely include our airbases at Iwakuni, Yokota, and Misawa in Japan, and Kadena on Okinawa, as well as cyber warfare attacks designed to interrupt our military communications. But like Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor, even a successful initial Chinese attack on U.S. forces and facilities “could very well prove strategically counterproductive, if not disastrous, for Beijing,” Yoshihara suggests, by drawing in Japan, the world’s third-largest economy with a powerful navy, on the side of the United States, thereby awakening two “sleeping giants” that together could spell doom for the PLA and the communist regime.

For more than a decade, America’s political leaders have talked about a strategic “pivot” to Asia without providing the necessary forces in the region to match the rhetoric. Meanwhile, the current administration in Washington promotes “engagement” with China even as war clouds gather in the western Pacific. Just as in the 1930s, the road to another Pearl Harbor could be paved with good intentions.

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · November 19, 2022

14. Russian spy defects, calls Putin's Ukraine war "worst scenario" imaginable

Russian spy defects, calls Putin's Ukraine war "worst scenario" imaginable

Newsweek · by Zoe Strozewski · November 18, 2022

A Russian spy has reportedly defected to Estonia and is now seeking asylum in the NATO country over his opposition to Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine.

The spy, identified as Artem Zinchenko, spoke to Yahoo News in early October for an article published Thursday about the "awful situation" triggered by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine that started in late February.

"It is the worst scenario that could even be imagined in my mind, and it was not only because my relatives live there, but because of the huge number of innocent victims," Zinchenko said.

Zinchenko's defection to Estonia was actually a return for the Russian spy after he was arrested by the country in 2017 and traded back to Russia in a swap a year later, Yahoo News reported. Zinchenko said that when he arrived home in 2018, "everything had changed dramatically" and described Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime as having "all the aspects of totalitarianism."

Above, Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen in Moscow on November 10. The reported defection of a Russian spy could be the newest embarrassment for Putin as he faces numerous defeats on the ground in Ukraine and opposition from civilians and officials in his own country. Mikhail Metzel/AFP via Getty Images

"You know, before and during my process, I saw that the law works much better here than in Russia," Zinchenko told Yahoo News. "During my situation, the Estonians told me they were not out to destroy my life or my business. This was a competition between intelligence services, they explained, and I was caught up in the middle of it."

The loss of Zinchenko to Estonia could be the newest embarrassment for Putin as he faces numerous military defeats and opposition from civilians and officials in his own country. Recently leaked emails from a whistleblower at Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) that were shared with Newsweek detailed inner turmoil and conflict within the Kremlin and said Russia will soon "descend into the abyss of terror" while war fatigue grows.

On the ground in Ukraine, Putin recently saw what experts believed was a major political blow for the Russian president when the Kremlin announced its withdrawal from the city of Kherson. Kherson was the only regional capital Russia had managed to capture in the Ukraine war, and Putin's loss of the city is especially significant because it is located in one of four Ukrainian regions that Russia declared would be annexed in late September.

The Russian army's woes in the war are likely to only worsen during winter. Sean Spoonts, a U.S. Navy veteran and editor-in-chief of Special Operations Forces Report (SOFREP), told Newsweek that the issues Russian soldiers in Ukraine could experience include exposure-related deaths, keeping warm in the colder months and ensuring adequate supplies for troops who have already reportedly been facing equipment shortages.

"All the problems that Russia had in the beginning of this war in February–they're going to have those problems again. And they're not prepared for it," Spoonts said. "They weren't prepared to equip a summer army. A winter army is even harder."

Newsweek reached out to the Kremlin for comment.

Newsweek · by Zoe Strozewski · November 18, 2022

15. High-profile attacks behind Russian lines hint at how Ukrainian special forces may be using their US training

High-profile attacks behind Russian lines hint at how Ukrainian special forces may be using their US training

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

Smoke rises after explosions at a Russian air base near Novofedorivka in Crimea on August 9.

Reuters

• Recent explosions in Crimea have damaged Russian military hardware and other infrastructure.
• Russia hasn't blamed Ukraine specifically, but Ukrainian officials have said they are behind the blasts.
• The attacks may be the work of Ukrainians who have trained closely with US special operators since 2014.

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This month, the Ukrainian military has again showed Russia and the world its commitment to winning the war, carrying out attacks far behind Russia's frontlines.

On August 9, Ukrainian forces struck a military target in Crimea, the first Ukrainian attack there since Moscow invaded and illegally annexed the peninsula in 2014. At least six blasts rocked Russia's Saki air base, which is home to the 43rd Independent Naval Attack Aviation Regiment, but the source of the attack remains unclear.

On Tuesday, there more explosions at an ammunition dump in northern Crimea. Russia's Defense Ministry said a fire at "a temporary ammunition storage site" caused the blast, calling it "an act of sabotage."

In both cases, Ukrainian officials have said or suggested that their forces were involved, which hints at how Ukrainian forces might be using the training they've been getting from Western special-operations forces since 2014.

Special operators or ballistic missiles?

Saki air base in Crimea on August 10.

Planet Labs PBC/Handout via REUTERS

The explosions at Saki Air Base on August 9 destroyed at least eight aircraft — Ukraine has said nine — including Su-30SM fighter jets and Su-24M fighter-bomber, in addition to ammunition, fuel supplies, and aircraft storage facilities.

Russia has said the blasts were caused by accidental detonations of munitions and blamed the destruction on fire-safety violations.

US officials have not determined what caused the blasts but have said they weren't caused by a US-supplied weapon — ruling out the powerful M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. (The US-made MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System could reach the base if fired from Ukrainian-held territory but the US hasn't provided that weapon, despite requests from Kyiv.)

Some Ukrainian officials denied responsibility but others said their forces were involved in the explosions at the base. Ukraine could have used a domestically developed long-range missile but it's not clear if it has such a weapon in service, though Kyiv has been working on one.

One Ukrainian official told The Washington Post that the attack was a result of a special-operations raid. Whether that claim was made to hide the actual cause of the attack is still uncertain.

Smoke rises from an electrical substation that caught fire after a blast in northern Crimea on August 16.

Still image from video obtained by Reuters

The explosions on Tuesday also hit an electrical plant and power lines, rail lines, and residential buildings, Russia's Defense Ministry said. Another blast, reportedly caused by a drone, hit a military airfield in central Crimea.

Following those explosions, a former senior Ukrainian official told The Guardian that Ukraine had "intelligence assets" operating in Crimea. A current Ukrainian official told The New York Times that an "elite" military unit "behind enemy lines" was responsible for the blasts in northern Crimea.

Special-operations raids could be plausible considering the training that Ukrainian commandos have received from special operators with the US and other NATO militaries and the capabilities those commandos have already displayed during the war.

Since 2014, the US special-operations community — primarily Green Berets from the Army's 10th Special Forces Group — has led a multinational effort to train Ukrainians, which has had a pivotal role in moving them away from their Soviet-era mindset and tactics and into the 21st century.

Ukrainian, Romanian, and US Army Special Forces soldiers train together in May 2021.

Romanian army/Capt. Roxana Davidovits

Insider understands that during those years of training, US special operators placed particular emphasis on operational and contingency planning and on updating the tactics, techniques, and procedures of Ukrainian commandos.

Throughout the war, Ukrainian special operators — whose ranks also doubled during that period of Western training — have repeatedly struck behind Russian lines, taking out resupply convoys and other vulnerable targets.

The attack at the Saki Air Base, moreover, has the indications of a special-operations raid. The explosions started in the morning, when all the aircraft were on the ground prior to launching the day's sorties — the Russian air force's nighttime combat capability is questionable at best.

Special operators naturally train and fight in the darkness, allowing them to surprise and out-maneuver larger conventional forces, and Ukrainian operators may have used the cover of night to approach the base. Those operators may have then triggered the blasts in the daytime with time-delayed or remotely detonated explosives.

Small drones have also been used to attack Russian installations in Crimea, though that method would likely require the drone operators to remain closer to the target for longer.

The start of a counteroffensive?

A woman and child walks by a Russian soldier on an embankment by the Black Sea in Kherson on May 20.

AP Photo

The attacks come as the Ukrainian military appears to be gaining the strategic initiative, dictating major moves on the battlefield with Moscow scrambling to respond.

Ukrainian officials told Politico that the attack on the air base could be considered the start of a counteroffensive toward the southeastern city of Kherson, which is north of Crimea.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his military advisers gambled when they launched a counteroffensive toward the south just a few days after Russian forces launched a renewed offensive in the Donbas region in mid-May.

That gamble seems to be paying off, as Russian forces have failed to make meaningful advances in Donbas and are now urgently relocating to meet the Ukrainian threat to Kherson.

Ukrainian troops near the frontline in Kherson on July 15.

Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Ukraine now has "a unique chance and window of opportunity," as an advance on Kherson and across the Dnieper River could limit Russia's ability to maneuver and bring more of Crimea into range of Ukrainian weapons, Sergii Grabskyi, a Ukrainian army reserve colonel, said on a recent podcast.

A number of factors will influence events in the months ahead. Ukraine and Russia have both sustained heavy losses among experienced troops, and the onset of autumn may make operations more challenging.

Both sides struggle with combined-arms warfare — that was evident for Russia early in the war, and Ukraine may now face similar difficulties.

"Since 1992, in our field exercises, we did not study offensive actions. We always planned defensive actions," Grabskyi said. "After eight years of war, Ukrainian forces are brilliant in defensive actions, but they have a very limited or almost zero experience to conduct large-scale offensive actions."

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

16. Former Russian mercenary: the truth about the Wagner Group

Video at the link: https://unherd.com/thepost/former-russian-mercenary-the-truth-about-the-wagner-group/

Former Russian mercenary: the truth about the Wagner Group

unherd.com · by David Patrikarakos

by Flo Read

Friday, 18

November 2022

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Video

15:00

Marat Gabidullin speaks out about the dark inner workings of the military company

by Flo Read

In 2015, Marat Gabidullin, a Russian airborne forces veteran and former bodyguard, joined the Wagner Group. The private military company (PMC), infamous for their ruthless military tactics and elite soldiers, is funded by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. It first emerged in the Donbas region of Ukraine, stirring up separatist action after the Maidan Revolution of 2014.

Then it spread across the world, propping up military regimes in Africa and the Middle East. Marat was sent to fight in Syria alongside the Russian army supporting President Bashar al-Assad and soon rose to command one of Wagner’s five units there. After being seriously injured on the battlefield, Marat returned to Moscow where he worked for Prigozhin personally as a strategist and assistant.

With the war in Ukraine, the Wagner Group began to adapt. It now recruits from high-security prisons, offering commuted life sentences to murderers and rapists in exchange for enlisting. After Marat witnessed what he calls a ‘lack of honour’ at the highest levels of the group, he absconded to Europe and spoke out, the first and only member of the group to do so. The silence of former fighters comes as no surprise. Just this week, a video emerged of a Russian Wagner soldier being sledgehammered to death for desertion. Wagner PMC wears its brutality on its sleeve, the motto of the group is chilling: ‘Death is our business – and business is good.’

Marat himself is the picture of a mercenary. He is an imposing figure, unflinching, with a manner of remorseless efficiency. On his hand is a heavy gold ring in the shape of a skull, a token from his days as a Wagner soldier. He joined me from Paris, where he has claimed asylum, to talk about the war in Ukraine and the future of Russia.

He tells me that torture and extrajudicial killings (like the mass graves found in the town of Bucha) are committed by new recruits, not trained soldiers. Rather than laying these atrocities at the feet of the army, he blames individuals’ “sick psyche, a torn psyche”. War wreaks havoc on the minds of young men, he says, “untrained minds would not be able to withstand it”. These green recruits are being used as cannon fodder by Russia. Marat says that no senior official would waste their best in Ukraine “because the fighting is very active and literally devours human resources. Prigozhin will take advantage of every opportunity and option presented to him in order to replenish the ranks.”

During his days working in Prighozin’s office, Marat was privy to an internal document that laid out the manifesto of the Wagner Group. He says it revealed cult-like, Neo-Nazi philosophy, full of paranoia about an invisible ‘enemy’ and the threat of the West to the soul of Russia. He believes that the ethos is based around Rodnovery, a pagan ideology native to Slavic countries like Poland and Ukraine.

Prighozin’s own aspirations are less philosophical, more power-hungry. He aspires to be the ‘King of the Donbas’, and these ambitions have led him to exaggerate his power over the Wagner Group. From the inside, Marat says, it is clear that the Russian government and Vladimir Putin ultimately control the group — all claims of its independence are simply to maintain his deniability. Wagner functions “at the expense of state resources,” he says, “it is obvious that it has never been a private military company… the intermediary was always the Ministry of Defence.”

Prighozin’s hubris (or “rudeness” as Marat bluntly refers to it) will not be tolerated in the long term. He predicts that ‘Putin’s chef’ will either be assassinated by FSB or forcibly sidelined once the war ends. And the end might come sooner than expected. Marat hears from former colleagues on the frontline that Russian morale is very poor and their defences are getting weaker by the day. I am speaking to him in the aftermath of Russia’s retreat from Kherson, but he maintains that the Wagner Group, at least, will keep fighting to the bloody end: “They channel their despair into aggression, bitterness, and even more striving to move forward.”

Marat was working in Prighozin’s office in 2016 during the American election and Russiagate scandal. I asked him what he saw there. Prighozin did attempt to influence the US election in 2016, he says, and will try to influence 2024, but more for the sake of internal propaganda than political gain. Election interference is really about PR, to create an “exaggerated propaganda campaign aimed primarily at persuading the Russian population that we are so cool that we can even influence elections in the USA.” Prighozin’s troll farms, he asserts, won’t move the needle: “There will be an attempt, but it will not produce any useful results.”

19th November 2022

unherd.com · by David Patrikarakos

17. Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy Can’t Be Undone

Conclusion:

Regardless of what happens in Sweden, the feminist foreign-policy movement is far from over. The elevation of feminist issues to the country’s highest-profile international engagements means that attempts to roll back its policies on women’s rights will inevitably meet attention and scrutiny. Traditionally, governments hostile to gender equality issues have been able to shift their approaches under the cover of wider budgetary and strategic changes, but the feminist foreign-policy agenda has forced these decisions into public view. So-called anti-feminist policies are no longer the status quo but rather an exposed choice.

Although the feminist foreign-policy agenda in Sweden can be reversed on paper, its legacy at home and abroad cannot be fully erased.

Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy Can’t Be Undone

Despite domestic setbacks, the movement will continue to shape foreign policy around the world.

By Rachel A. George, a lecturing fellow at Duke University’s Center for International Development.

Foreign Policy · by Rachel A. George · November 18, 2022

Sweden, once a pioneer of feminist foreign policy, is now the first to revoke it. Shortly after the country’s newly elected prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, announced his cabinet on Oct.18, his new foreign minister, Tobias Billstrom, declared the policy’s reversal, saying, “Gender equality is a core value for Sweden and this government, but we will not conduct a feminist foreign policy.”

The reversal in Sweden is in some respects unsurprising. Gender politics often fluctuate with political transitions, and waves of progressive gender equality agendas have historically met barriers and reversals. What is surprising, however, is that the founding nation behind this movement is now at the helm of its attempted undoing.

Like the broader feminist movement, the feminist foreign-policy agenda is the subject of intense debate and cannot be prescriptive for every context; thus, there is no universal consensus as to what it entails. Despite this lack of cohesion, the agenda can broadly be understood as policies that focus a country’s international engagements on gender issues through rhetoric, diplomacy, and development aid, among other vehicles. Underlying this approach is the belief that issues of gender equality shape every dimension of global stability and prosperity, from ensuring that peace deals last to lifting up global economies to protecting global health and beyond.

Sweden’s 2014 implementation of a feminist foreign-policy agenda under then-Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom aimed to put the promotion of gender equality and women’s rights at the center of its global activities. The policy consisted of three R’s: rights, representation, and resources, which directed funding and support toward enhancing women’s position, participation, and wider inclusion in society.

In practice, the adoption of this policy in Sweden led to a notable boost for the country’s aid spending on gender equality efforts abroad, increasing from $2 billion in 2016 to almost $2.7 billion in 2019. This spending helped Sweden finance a large and growing number of gender-focused international development programs and deliver gender-responsive humanitarian assistance to populations in need.

Beyond aid, the feminist foreign-policy agenda has also shaped Sweden’s approach to high-profile diplomatic negations. For example, it was seen as having influenced Wallstrom’s bold criticisms of Saudi Arabia’s record on women’s rights in 2015, which ultimately contributed to the country’s decision to end a long-standing weapons deal with the Persian Gulf state. Under this framework, Sweden also led global initiatives on women’s rights—including when it introduced a resolution at the United Nations Security Council in 2017 to elevate sexual and gender-based violence as grounds for economic sanctions. The policy also led the Swedish government to increase the number of women serving as ambassadors to almost half of all positions.

Sweden’s experience has demonstrated that this approach is more than a rhetorical gesture, and it can meaningfully influence policy outcomes on the world stage. Yet even with its successes, the movement has faced continued criticism from supporters and skeptics alike, with some today calling for a “rethink.” Many have raised concerns about the agenda’s failure to match rhetoric to action and demand a precise vision as well as its lack of accountability to citizens and feminist groups. Others have criticized the movement for failing to incorporate adequately inclusive and intersectional approaches to feminism, suggesting the agenda is steeped in perceived cultural imperialism—although the introduction of Mexico’s feminist foreign policy has helped stunt critiques of the agenda as an export of the global north.

Still, others perceive the use of feminist terminology to be too radical, either because they do not agree with the term or more simply because they worry that the policy can inspire negative reactions or backlash in contexts where the term is not accepted, hampering the potential for programs and policies to take effect or harming intended beneficiaries.

Sweden’s reversal, however, is less a rebuke of the feminist foreign-policy movement’s goals or strategy than it is a reflection of the country’s current political dynamics, as right-wing politicians attempt to reclaim conservative authority on social and fiscal issues. In his recent announcement, Billstrom claimed the policy reversal was necessary “because labels on things have a tendency to cover up the content.” His point highlights clear schisms in Swedish politics whereby views of the feminist term have, at times, been perceived as too radical.

This shift is undoubtedly a blow to the movement, but it does not necessarily signal its undoing. Because Sweden’s new government has—at least in rhetoric—publicly claimed an interest in upholding policy supporting women’s rights, its hands may be tied when it comes to reversing many of its feminist policies in practice.

Take, for instance, foreign aid. Sweden has long been a leader not only in gender equality foreign assistance but also in foreign aid writ large, committing more than 1 percent of its gross national income (GNI) to these efforts since the mid-2000s. As a result of these commitments, Sweden was ranked the third most generous aid donor country among Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in 2021.

Billstrom’s rebuke of the feminist foreign-policy agenda is swept up in concurrent efforts by the political right to cut Sweden’s aid spending. The new government has announced it aims to freeze its aid spending, reducing its long-standing 1 percent of GNI contributions to a projected 0.8 percent in 2023, which will inevitably lead to cuts in funding for global gender equality programs.

Yet because it promised to remain a leader for global gender equality, the new government must be careful to avoid making specific cuts to gender equality commitments that are not proportional to other reductions. Any shifts in aid spending for these programs could heighten criticisms that the government is hostile to women’s rights, risking backlash from voters.

The legacy of Sweden’s feminist foreign policy may also prompt attention from the new government to the optics of its mostly male leadership. Almost a decade after launching the agenda, women’s representation in global politics still hovers low, with women comprising just 21 percent of government ministers worldwide and only 26 percent of national parliamentarians. Facing public pressure, Sweden, among many countries, has boosted its investments in support for women’s political representation. Activists have urged the government to expand the government’s bureaucratic expertise in issues of political inclusion and for male leaders in particular to bring in greater women’s representation in their own cabinets and parties.

Partly as a product of this investment, Sweden’s new cabinet consists of 24 ministers—13 men and 11 women. Thus, the image of Sweden’s current male foreign minister slashing the country’s heralded former female foreign minister’s feminist project could create problems for the current administration, especially as the world’s attention is locked on the crowds of women and girls defying male authorities in Iran. The perception of this legacy under attack will then likely pressure Billstrom to avoid damaging optics and make the country’s female leadership even more visible in its global engagements on gender equality.

From spending to diplomacy to cabinet composition, the feminist foreign-policy agenda will continue to shape the government’s decision-making at home and abroad—whether Sweden’s leaders like it or not.

But the agenda’s ripple effects won’t stop there.

Sweden’s commitment to a feminist foreign policy in 2014 was met with fanfare from global gender equality advocates and sparked a wave of national commitments to this framework in Canada (2017), France (2019), Mexico (2020), Spain (2021), Luxembourg (2021), Germany (2021), and Chile (2022). Although their impacts are difficult to measure, these endorsements have resulted in a more gender-sensitive approach to the global COVID-19 pandemic response and recovery effort and in enhanced commitments from government to collect sex-disaggregated data to inform policymaking, among other measures.

Given that Sweden was a pioneer of the movement, it’s tempting to look at Sweden’s reversal as a test case for feminist foreign policy elsewhere. But Sweden’s setbacks could counterintuitively strengthen feminist agendas in other contexts. A study my team at the Overseas Development Institute conducted on women’s rights movements and norm changes indicates that perceived threats to gender equality in other countries can provide an anchoring effect for national women’s movements, which are motivated to double down and hold fast to progress in response. For example, the high-profile gang rape of a young girl in New Delhi in 2012 contributed to an explosion of national anti-violence against women campaigns working to maintain and expand existing protections in other countries. It’s possible, however, that Sweden’s changes could also inspire and empower backlash, thus indicating that the full effects of the move could depend on the relative strength of other movements in their national contexts.

Even facing challenges in certain settings, gender equality advocates across the board are broadly benefitting from an improving global consensus on women’s rights. In my research, I have explored how feminist principles are generally expanding over time. In my team’s study of attitudinal change in the World Values Surveys since the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, we found that attitudes that men should hold power and not women have palpably dropped over recent decades. In the mid-1990s, 50 percent of people surveyed globally agreed that “men make better political leaders”—a share that has since fallen to 35 percent. Even in traditionally conservative societies, such as Kuwait, engagement with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has contributed to norm change as local discourse has gradually absorbed the language of preventing discrimination against women. Rising global solidarity on women’s issues—reflected, for example, in the Qatari foreign minister’s recent disappointment with the Taliban’s retrenchments of women’s rights in Afghanistan—also indicate growing rhetorical consensus on the importance of women’s rights.

Regardless of what happens in Sweden, the feminist foreign-policy movement is far from over. The elevation of feminist issues to the country’s highest-profile international engagements means that attempts to roll back its policies on women’s rights will inevitably meet attention and scrutiny. Traditionally, governments hostile to gender equality issues have been able to shift their approaches under the cover of wider budgetary and strategic changes, but the feminist foreign-policy agenda has forced these decisions into public view. So-called anti-feminist policies are no longer the status quo but rather an exposed choice.

Although the feminist foreign-policy agenda in Sweden can be reversed on paper, its legacy at home and abroad cannot be fully erased.

Foreign Policy · by Rachel A. George · November 18, 2022

18. OPTAC-X Enters Deal to Provide U.S. Special Operations Medics With Battlefield Telehealth

Fascinating.

I recall back in the 1980s or early 1990s a Special Forces medic from 1st Special Forces Group was supporting a tasking in Kwajalein Atoll to provide medical support. In the middle of a typhoon a woman was giving birth, had complication, could not be medivaced and the SF medic was the most competent medical professional in the area. She required a cesarean section. The medic performed the procedure and had a satellite call back to Tripler Army Hospital in Hawaii to consult with the doctor. He successfully performed the surgery and mother and child survived with no complications.

Imagine what kind of capability this will provide to our medics.

OPTAC-X Enters Deal to Provide U.S. Special Operations Medics With Battlefield Telehealth

optacx.com · November 14, 2022

OPTAC-X has entered a deal to provide U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) and the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (SWCS) with a global hybrid LTE and SATCOM enabled telehealth system. It advances the ability of special operations medics to provide remote, critical life-saving care and assistance in prolonged field care with expert physician oversight at the point-of-injury or time-of-need.

As part of OPTAC-X's telehealth system, RealWear Navigator 500 HUD connects via OPTAC-X's proprietary, cutting-edge cloud technology and globally monitored, secure network. Physicians utilize the network to send video assets, images, charts or other material in 1080p that deployed medics can reference through the hands-free HUD device while simultaneously treating an injured soldier. The OPTAC-X telehealth system leverages its exclusive LTE and SATCOM services partner, Kymeta, to deliver industry leading global LTE and SATCOM capability. Kymeta's software-enabled, metamaterials-based electronically steered antenna (ESA) -- the Kymeta Osprey u8 -- provides mobile satellite and cellular communications whether on the move (COTM) or on the pause (COTP).

USASOC's initial purchase will place the OPTAC-X telehealth system, including global hybrid LTE and SATCOM connectivity by Kymeta Corporation, at the training institution at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As part of the agreement, OPTAC-X will deliver sustained service and training on the use of its telehealth system.

As part of OPTAC-X's telehealth system, RealWear Navigator 500 HUD connects via OPTAC-X's proprietary, cutting-edge cloud technology and globally monitored, secure network. Physicians utilize the network to send video assets, images, charts or other material in 1080p that deployed medics can reference through the hands-free HUD device while simultaneously treating an injured soldier.

The OPTAC-X telehealth system, successfully field tested by special operators deployed to Africa earlier this year, gives deployed special operations medics the ability to perform telehealth examinations with its advanced Look & Listen technology using RealWear Navigator 500, a ruggedized, heads-up display device (HUD). Charged with performing advanced life-saving procedures and prolonged field care in austere conditions, special operations medics will use OPTAC-X's integrated telehealth technology to communicate with a network of U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) physicians and surgeons offering advanced healthcare services at the time of need though separated by thousands of miles. What the deployed medic sees and hears at the time of need, the physician will see and hear at his or her location, enabling immediate life-saving and prolonged field care feedback.

Retired Major General Kurt Sonntag was the commanding general of SWCS and deputy commander of USASOC for the U.S. Army during his military career and witnessed firsthand the need for advanced medical care in the field.

"This amazing technology interface significantly enhances the already phenomenal medical capabilities our special operations possess," Sonntag said. "The ability to instantly reach back to medical subject experts, particularly when operating in denied or remote spaces, provides a new risk mitigation tool for commanders and operators alike and redefines the golden hour for saving lives."

The OPTAC-X telehealth system leverages its exclusive LTE and SATCOM services partner, Kymeta, to deliver industry leading global LTE and SATCOM capability. Kymeta's software-enabled, metamaterials-based electronically steered antenna (ESA) provides mobile satellite and cellular communications. Backed by U.S. and international patents and licenses, the Kymeta Osprey u8 addresses the need for lightweight, low-profile, and high-throughput communication systems that do not require mechanical components to steer toward a satellite, whether it be communications on the move (COTM) or communications on the pause (COTP).

The OPTAC-X telehealth system leverages its exclusive LTE and SATCOM services partner, Kymeta, to deliver industry leading global LTE and SATCOM capability. Kymeta's software-enabled, metamaterials-based electronically steered antenna (ESA) -- the Kymeta Osprey u8 -- provides mobile satellite and cellular communications whether on the move (COTM) or on the pause (COTP).

As part of OPTAC-X's telehealth system, RealWear Navigator 500 HUD connects via OPTAC-X's proprietary, cutting-edge cloud technology and globally monitored, secure network. The use of RealWear through simple voice commands in loud environments up to 100 dBA, enables full hands-free device control and navigation. Physicians utilize the network to send video assets, images, charts or other material in 1080p that deployed medics can reference through the HUD device while simultaneously treating an injured soldier. OPTAC-X's telehealth system helps the modern Special Operation Forces (SOF) medic to perform tasks with increased safety, efficiency and precision which directly contributes to more lives saved.

"Today's announcement is a major milestone in the realization of OPTAC-X's overriding desire to help soldiers and others who work in dangerous and difficult circumstances -- remote from standard medical care facilities and services -- to receive the lifesaving help they need via telehealth and achieve improved outcomes in prolonged field care," said Dr. Patrick Fullerton, founder and chief executive officer of OPTAC-X. "We look forward to partnering with USASOC and possibly other DOD entities to use the OPTAC-X telehealth solution to bring life-saving medical care to places around the globe that many never thought possible."

"Partnering with OPTAC-X allows Kymeta to provide connectivity capabilities to the front line in telehealth and emergency medicine," said Bill Marks, executive vice president and chief development officer of Kymeta, "We are excited about the wide range of innovations this partnership opens for digitally enabled care."

"We're extremely honored to be selected as the exclusive wearable assisted reality device for OPTAC-X's innovative solution now being used by SOF medics," said Chris Parkinson, cofounder and chief technology officer of RealWear. "By freeing medics' hands to communicate with a remote consulting physician who can talk them through a life-saving procedure is elevating telemedicine to new heights. This approach could serve as a blueprint for the future."

The OPTAC-X telehealth solution was developed to close the gap identified by military leaders and medical personnel desiring to have the audio and visual capabilities now offered by OPTAC-X's Look & Listen technology at the point of injury and time of need. SOF medics have faced persistent challenges with latency in communications systems that impeded the transmission of clear images and or voice commands. Products tested were unable to perform in challenging environmental settings or at the point-of-injury and within the golden hour without the dedication of significant physician staffing. OPTAC-X solved the problem by developing a combination of technologies which allow a medical provider to treat a patient while stationary or in a moving vehicle and sending and receiving voice and 1080p real-time images over thousands of miles with almost no latency.

Prolonged field care improvements via telehealth solutions have been a stated priority of the U.S. Secretary of Defense for years. In March of 2017, Lt. Gen. Nadja Y. West, then U.S. Army Surgeon General, testified before a U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee on the topic.

As reported in a U.S. Department of Defense News article, West identified virtual health capabilities including remotely monitoring patient vitals, providing virtual consultations, and letting medics provide combat casualty care as being important. She saw virtual health as a way to revolutionize access in garrison facilities, at patients' homes or at points of injury.

Fullerton sees great potential for the application of the OPTAC-X telehealth solution beyond the military. He points to energy, maritime and mining industries, emergency management systems and natural disaster scenarios such as the recent Hurricane Ian in southwest Florida as spaces where OPTAC-X's technology and service could have played a vital role.

OPTAC-X telehealth and tele-expert solutions are designed to bring expertise to first responders in under-served locations or in places where services have been disrupted making the system ideal for federal and state emergency services and multiple government entities. OPTAC-X is currently developing solutions for states that have been impacted by recent natural disasters while continuing to grow relationships within the DOD.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/optac-x-enters-deal-to-provide-us-army-special-operations-medics-with-the-next-generation-lifesaving-tele-health-system-designed-for-the-battlefield-301664737.html

optacx.com · November 14, 2022

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com