Quotes of the Day:
"Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood."
- Marie Curie
“A military situation at its worst can inspire fighting men to perform at their best.”
- Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent
"War's one of those things, don't you think, where everyone always thinks they're in the right have you noticed that? Nobody ever says we're the bad guys, we're going to beat shit out of the good guys."
- Caryl Churchill
1. Strategic Influence: Applying the Principles of Unconventional Warfare in Peace
2. Biden’s new China doctrine
3. Why Freedom Will Find A Way In Cuba
4. 1st female sailor completes Navy special warfare training
5. The Hearts-and-Minds Myth - How America Gets Counterinsurgency Wrong
6. Japan Is Indispensable Again
7. Gamifying Disinformation Mitigation
8. SecDef Teases New Deterrence Strategy, Vows Billions More for AI
9. So nice of China to put all of its network zero-day vulns in one giant database no one will think to break into
10. The China Challenge: How confident can Beijing be about its future?
11. U.S. military once trained Colombians implicated in Haiti assassination plot, Pentagon says
12. Xi’s squeeze taking the verve out of China Inc
13. Tanks are here to stay: What the Army’s future armored fleet will look like
14. Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House
15. Education Against Extremism: Suggestions for a Smarter Stand-Down
16. China snubs senior US official in worsening diplomatic stand-off
1. Strategic Influence: Applying the Principles of Unconventional Warfare in Peace
Strategic Influence: Applying the Principles of Unconventional Warfare in Peace
July 2021 No Comments
Author(s): Jones, R. (United States Special Operations Command)
Invited Perspective Preview
“The most important aspect of our containment strategy is that it serves to contain ourselves,” former President Dwight Eisenhower reportedly observed after he had left office. Perhaps the greatest problem facing the United States in the post-Cold War era is not our waning ability to deter the problematic peacetime activities of others; rather, it is that we have lost sight of the need to deter ourselves. Therefore, any serious look at updating US deterrence going forward must include a serious look at our own missteps. The world is changing rapidly, and we can neither wish nor force it into staying in some form we deem best for us. To truly lead a rules- based system, the US must first understand the world better for what it actually is and then shape changes in directions favorable to us. To lead, we must also pursue our interests in ways others deem appropriate and see as being in their own interests to follow.
2. Biden’s new China doctrine
I do agree that one of the most significant mistakes we made in the 21st Century was withdrawing from the TPP. I wish we could undo that decision and rejoin.
Unless my personal assessment here is wrong I don't think we are going to be able to have anything more than a very competitive relationship at best. That is because China's strategy conflicts with ours and the rest of the free world's: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.
I agree with this excerpt and that we have to defend the rules based internationally because China does not want to live within this system. It wants to rebuild the global order in its image.
Mr Biden’s plan is a missed opportunity. If America wants to stop China from rebuilding the global order in its image, it should defend the sort of globalisation that always served it well. At the centre of such an approach would be trade and the multilateral system, embodying the faith that openness and the free flow of ideas will create an edge in innovation.
If America really wanted to counter China in Asia, it would join the pan-Asian trade deal it walked away from in 2016. That is highly unlikely now, but it could seek fresh agreements on the environment and digital trade. It should also put money and clout behind new ideas that reinforce the Western order, such as a vaccine programme for future pandemics, digital payment systems, cyber-security and an infrastructure scheme to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Rather than copying China’s techno-nationalism, a more confident America should affirm what made the West strong.
Biden’s new China doctrine
Its protectionism and its us-or-them rhetoric will hurt America and put off allies
Jul 17th 2021
OPTIMISTS LONG hoped that welcoming China into the global economy would make it a “responsible stakeholder”, and bring about political reform. As president, Donald Trump blasted that as weak. Now Joe Biden is converting Trumpian bombast into a doctrine that pits America against China, a struggle between rival political systems which, he says, can have only one winner. Between them, Mr Trump and Mr Biden have engineered the most dramatic break in American foreign policy in the five decades since Richard Nixon went to China.
Mr Biden and his team base their doctrine on the belief that China is “less interested in coexistence and more interested in dominance”. The task of American policy is to blunt Chinese ambitions. America will work with China in areas of common interest, like climate change, but counter its ambitions elsewhere. That means building up the strength at home and working abroad with allies that can supplement its economic, technological, diplomatic, military and moral heft.
Much about Mr Biden’s new doctrine makes sense. The optimistic case for engagement has crumbled under the realities of Chinese power. Led by President Xi Jinping, China has garrisoned the South China Sea, imposed party rule on Hong Kong, threatened Taiwan, skirmished with India and has tried to subvert Western values in international bodies. Many countries are alarmed by China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy.
But the details of the Biden doctrine contain much to worry about—not least that it is unlikely to work. One problem is how Mr Biden defines the threat. Because politics in Washington is broken, he seems to feel that he needs the spirit of Pearl Harbour to help rekindle a sense of national purpose. That is a miscalculation.
It is true that Republicans jump on anything they can portray as soft on China (even though every time they say that the presidential election was stolen, they do the work of Chinese propagandists). However, Republicans are unlikely to start backing Mr Biden’s domestic agenda just because it has the word “China” stamped on the cover.
Worse, the more Mr Biden uses strident rhetoric to galvanise Americans, the harder he makes his task of galvanising allies and big emerging powers like India and Indonesia. By framing the relationship as a zero-sum contest, he is presenting them with a Manichean struggle between democracy and autocracy, rather than the search for co-existence. Alas, in this he is overestimating America’s influence and underestimating how much potential allies have to lose by turning their back on China.
By many economic measures China will become a dominant force, whatever America does. It will have the world’s biggest economy and it is already the largest trading goods partner of almost twice as many countries as America. Germany, Europe’s export powerhouse, aims to sustain commercial links with China even as political links buckle. In South-East Asia many countries look to America for their security and China for their prosperity. If forced to choose between the superpowers, some may pick China.
Rather than imposing a decision on other countries today, Mr Biden needs to win them around. And his best chance of that is for America to demonstrate that it can thrive at home and be the leader of a successful and open world economy.
Here, too, the details of Mr Biden’s scheme are troubling. Rather than build on America’s strengths as the champion of global rules, the administration is using the threat of China to further its domestic agenda. Its doctrine is full of industrial policy, government intervention, planning and controls. It is uncomfortably like the decoupling being pursued by China itself.
For a glimpse of what this could entail, look at the administration’s report on four crucial supply chains—for semiconductors, batteries, rare earths and vital pharmaceutical ingredients—published last month. The report does not just make the national-security case for government intervention in these industries. It also embraces union representation, social justice and pretty much everything else. More such reports will come later. If this one is a guide, Mr Biden will propose to use subsidies and regulation to ensure that jobs and production remain within America’s borders.
Inevitably, Mr Biden’s plans have trade-offs. Central to his attack on China is its abuse of human rights, especially of the Uyghurs, subject to internment and forced labour in Xinjiang. Central to his policy on climate change is to shift to renewables. Yet the two are entangled, at least in the short term, because Xinjiang is the origin of 45% of the silicon used in generating solar power.
A more fundamental problem is the China doctrine’s soft protectionism. This favours incumbents over competitors and is likely to weigh down the economy rather than supercharge it. The country’s new Moon programme is popular largely as a way to show that America has an edge over China. Yet it is vibrant precisely to the degree that it allows the sort of competition in which private firms such as SpaceX and Blue Origin can shine.
A third problem is that Mr Biden’s doctrine will make America’s allies even more wary. If the purpose of cutting ties with China is to create good union jobs in America, allies will ask themselves what is in it for them.
Mr Biden’s plan is a missed opportunity. If America wants to stop China from rebuilding the global order in its image, it should defend the sort of globalisation that always served it well. At the centre of such an approach would be trade and the multilateral system, embodying the faith that openness and the free flow of ideas will create an edge in innovation.
If America really wanted to counter China in Asia, it would join the pan-Asian trade deal it walked away from in 2016. That is highly unlikely now, but it could seek fresh agreements on the environment and digital trade. It should also put money and clout behind new ideas that reinforce the Western order, such as a vaccine programme for future pandemics, digital payment systems, cyber-security and an infrastructure scheme to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Rather than copying China’s techno-nationalism, a more confident America should affirm what made the West strong. ■
For more coverage of Joe Biden’s presidency, visit our dedicated hub
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Biden’s new China doctrine"
3. Why Freedom Will Find A Way In Cuba
A critique of the administration.
Conclusion:
Perhaps, the greatest lesson of the current cry for freedom in Cuban is that the U.S. has a government that is the least interested in listening. It remains an open question as to whether the Biden administration would have acknowledged the abuses and failures in Cuba were not for the importance of Florida’s electoral votes. Yet, since someday the president might have to court Cuban-American votes, he felt compelled to do more than nothing.
Why Freedom Will Find A Way In Cuba
“Life finds a way,” warned Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, a clear signal there would be rampaging carnivores before the end of the movie. The same might be said for freedom.
Despite decades of unrelenting suppression by a deeply repressive regime and its foreign enablers, the light of liberty refused to be snuffed out in Cuba. Triggered by appalling domestic conditions, thousands of Cubans rose in protest last Sunday, agitating for a change in government.
Predictably, their cry for freedom prompted a round of repression. The regime flooded the streets with security services, using physical violence to break up the protests. They restricted Internet access and began grabbing people out of their homes in the dark of night. Thus far, there is one known fatality among the protesters, with hundreds more arrested or “gone missing.”
No one knows how the battle between the Cuban people and their government will play out. The regime has a powerful and loyal security arsenal. But despite the uncertain outcome, we can learn important lessons from what’s already transpired.
Lesson # 1: Socialism stinks. A great number of activists in the United States embrace exactly the kinds of doctrines that are used to rule Cuba—rejecting capitalism, they seek to abolish customary democratic structures and erase the history and traditions of a free society. The recent assault on American holidays offers a clear example of a radical political agenda at play.
But while these activists spin utopian visions of equity and social justice, Cuba today offers an up-close and (for many Americans, very) personal exemplar of what these doctrines really bring: oppression, impoverishment, and despair.
This event should stir a national conversation about the American left’s present flirtation with socialism and communism. Unfortunately, the administration seems loathe to engage in a war of ideas unless it involves attacking their domestic political opponents.
Here at home, the Biden administration glibly labels laws designed to assure the integrity of the electoral process as “Jim Crow” and slanders dissenting voices as white supremacists. Globally, however, the administration speaks so softly in defense of American values it can barely be heard.
While the Biden team will occasionally call out Havana, Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran, they don’t make the case that the American system of free-market capitalism and constitutionally guaranteed liberties is superior to authoritarian regimes rooted in authoritarian doctrines. It is an opportunity missed.
Lesson #2: No lifeline for the regime. The argument has already been made that the best way to relieve the suffering of the Cuban people is to quickly lift sanctions and reengage with the regime. That would be a complete betrayal of the people marching in the streets.
The Cuban regime controls every aspect of the public and private sectors in Cuba. Anything that goes into the country is filtered through the fingers of the Communist overlords. They line their pockets and distribute the crumbs. “Opening up” merely empowers the regime further.
The Cuban government has the resources to alleviate the people’s suffering. Yet regime officials have chosen to squander those assets on elevating and pampering themselves and embarking on foreign adventures—such as propping up the Venezuelan dictatorship and financing guerilla movements undermining democracies throughout the region.
Sadly, the greatest danger the Cuban people face is that the Biden team will use the current crisis as an excuse to go back to Obama-era “engagement” policies. Those policies enriched the regime but did not bring the country one step closer to becoming a free and just society. If Biden does the same, the Cuban people will be doubly victimized.
Lesson #3. Hold the regime accountable. Rather than look for ways to prop-up the Cuban regime, the U.S. ought to pledge to hold them accountable for human rights abuses and criminal conduct in persecuting the people of Cuba. Washington should undertake a rigorous effort gather information and document these ongoing abuses.
There is scant hope, however, that the Biden administration will lead a serious effort. Last year, Cuba was reelected to the UN Human Rights Council. The Biden administration’s response to this outrageous act was to rejoin the council, effectively sanctioning the right of repressive governments to dictate UN policy on human rights. Indeed, the U.S. representative to the UN is best known not as a proponent of human rights, but for condemning American democracy. The odds of the Biden administration leading an international human rights campaign against Havana are next to nothing.
Perhaps, the greatest lesson of the current cry for freedom in Cuban is that the U.S. has a government that is the least interested in listening. It remains an open question as to whether the Biden administration would have acknowledged the abuses and failures in Cuba were not for the importance of Florida’s electoral votes. Yet, since someday the president might have to court Cuban-American votes, he felt compelled to do more than nothing.
A Heritage Foundation vice president and 1945 Contributing Editor, James Jay Carafano directs the think tank’s research on matters of national security and foreign relations.
4. 1st female sailor completes Navy special warfare training
Hooah. Congratulations to the newest SWCC.
1st female sailor completes Navy special warfare training
The Washington Post · by Lolita C. Baldor | APJuly 15, 2021|Updated today at 3:34 p.m. EDT · July 15, 2021
WASHINGTON — For the first time, a female sailor has successfully completed the grueling 37-week training course to become a Naval Special Warfare combatant-craft crewman — the boat operators who transport Navy SEALs and conduct their own classified missions at sea.
Navy officials said they would not identify the woman or provide more details on her — a routine military policy for special operations forces. She was one of 17 sailors to graduate and receive their pins on Thursday. She is also the first of 18 women who have tried out for a job as a SWCC or a SEAL to succeed.
The sailor’s graduation marks just the latest inroad that women have made into some of the military’s most difficult and competitive commando jobs — just five years after all combat posts were opened to them. She will now head to one of Naval Special Warfare’s three special boat teams.
“Becoming the first female to graduate from a Naval Special Warfare training pipeline is an extraordinary accomplishment and we are incredibly proud of our teammate,” said Rear Adm. H.W. Howard III, the commander of Naval Special Warfare. “Like her fellow operators, she demonstrated the character, cognitive and leadership attributes required to join our force.”
“She and her fellow graduates have the opportunity to become experts in clandestine special operations, as well as manned and unmanned platforms to deliver distinctive capabilities to our Navy, and the joint force in defense of the nation,” Howard added.
Of the 18 females who have sought a Navy special operations job, 14 did not complete the course. Three of them, however, are currently still in the training pipeline, one for SWCC and two attempting to become SEALs. Overall, according to the Navy, only about 35 percent of the men and women who begin the training for SWCC actually graduate.
A year ago, a female soldier became the first woman to complete the Army’s elite Special Forces course and join one of the all-male Green Beret teams. One other female soldier has finished training and will report to her assigned Special Forces group next month, and another will be attending the Military Freefall School next month, and then will report to her team.
So far, no women have successfully completed Marine special operations training. Marine spokesman Maj. Hector Infante said that since August 2016, nine females have attempted to get through the assessment and selection process. He said two candidates made it through the second phase, but didn’t meet performance expectations and, along with a number of male counterparts, didn’t get selected to continue.
He said that only about 40 percent of the more than 1,200 Marines who went through the course since 2016 successfully completed it.
Air Force Lt. Col. Malinda Singleton said that at of this month, there are two enlisted females in the Air Force Special Warfare training pipeline for combat jobs that opened to women in 2015. One has completed the assessment and selection course and will be eligible for an assignment in a special operations job as soon as she finishes some final training. The other woman is in the preparatory course and hasn’t yet made it to the assessment phase.
While Navy SEALs often grab the headlines for high-risk missions, the crew that operate the boats and weapons systems during raids and classified operations also go through an extensive selection and training process.
The training to become a combatant craft crewman comes after the Navy’s initial recruit boot camp, and includes a two-month preparatory course, a three-week orientation at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, Calif., and seven weeks where they learn basic navigation and water skill, as well as physical conditioning and safety. At the end of those seven weeks is a 72-hour crucible called “The Tour.” That event — which tests their grit and physical toughness — is the most frequent point of failure for the candidates.
Those who pass move on to seven weeks of basic crewman training to learn combat, weapons and communications training, followed by a seven-week intermediate-level seamanship course, and finally survival, evasion, resistance and escape training and a cultural course.
According to Naval Special Warfare, about 300 sailors attempt the SWCC course every year and about 70 complete it. There are between 760 and 800 in the force at any one time.
The Washington Post · by Lolita C. Baldor | APJuly 15, 2021|Updated today at 3:34 p.m. EDT · July 15, 2021
5. The Hearts-and-Minds Myth - How America Gets Counterinsurgency Wrong
As Matt Armstrong says it should be minds and not hearts and minds.
My thoughts:
What is wrong is that we try to conduct COIN in other countries.
We should never conduct COIN in a foreign country. The government & its political apparatus & its military, intelligence, security services, & development agencies must conduct COIN. We can only advise & assist through foreign internal defense if assessments deem it feasible.
US government agencies and the military can only assist a host nation in its internal development and defense programs to defend itself against lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, and terrorism. We cannot do it for them. And we cannot create a government and society in our image.
Excerpts:
Bringing an idealized version of American governance to another country may be appealing in theory. In practice, however, intervening in and then continuing a war in the hope that the government will ultimately see the need for reforms is a dangerous chimera. Again and again, doing so has compounded human suffering, required shocking moral choices, and sparked violence across regions. Nonetheless, this belief in reforms persists. In fact, it explains why the United States stayed in Afghanistan and Iraq for so long. For nearly 20 years, the United States and other powers have been urging Afghan and Iraqi leaders to make reforms intended to weaken or defeat the insurgency. Military leaders have pleaded for more time, more resources, and more effort to achieve good governance. But these reforms have not come.
The United States’ tendency to fight so-called small wars in distant lands where its interests are limited is part and parcel of the grand strategy the country has pursued since World War II. But these adventures do not serve American interests or values; they scatter U.S. attention, incur massive costs, and require ghastly moral compromises. A wiser grand strategy would be one of restraint. Under this approach, the United States would focus on its interactions with other great powers, particularly nuclear-armed ones. Outside that realm, in countries where there is a pressing humanitarian need, the United States should offer nonmilitary support for groups suffering from government repression. When it comes to counterinsurgency campaigns waged or supported by outside powers hoping for reforms, history suggests that the game is not worth the candle.
The Hearts-and-Minds Myth
How America Gets Counterinsurgency Wrong
After two decades, the United States is finally leaving Afghanistan, and only 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Iraq. In both countries, the insurgencies continue. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. In both wars, Washington hoped that imposing democratic reforms could protect the population, win hearts and minds, and defeat the insurgency.
That, after all, was the narrative spelled out in the vaunted U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published in 2006, which was intended to guide both campaigns. Drawing from Western practitioners’ accounts of successful counterinsurgency campaigns over 60 years, the document argued that good governance—including democratic reforms—defeats insurgencies. “Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” two generals, David Petraeus and James Amos, wrote in the manual’s foreword. “They must be able to facilitate establishing local governance and the rule of law.” A 2005 article in the journal Military Review by another pair of officers—Peter Chiarelli and Patrick Michaelis—made the same case: “A gun on every street corner, although visually appealing, provides only a short-term solution and does not equate to long-term security grounded in a democratic process.” Governments must limit civilian casualties, they noted, because harming the population only bolsters support for the insurgency.
Civilian policymakers have made similar points. In 2009, the Center for a New American Security, the liberal-leaning U.S. think tank, recommended that a top priority for the United States should be to “promote democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in Afghanistan and the region.” In 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told lawmakers that in Afghanistan, “success requires a fully integrated civilian-military effort, one in which security gains are followed immediately by economic and political gains.” She was in line with the rest of the administration of President Barack Obama: the National Security Strategy published by the White House that same year concluded that in Afghanistan and Iraq, “building the capacity necessary for security, economic growth, and good governance is the only path to long term peace and security.”
In fact, successful counterinsurgency campaigns have rarely included democratic reforms, and there was little reason to believe that the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq would prove any different. Rather, when Western powers have intervened militarily to support a threatened government, they have often perpetuated the government’s human rights abuses, bolstered self-interested elites, and harmed civilians. Even when an external power has pushed for reforms, it has found that its influence over another state’s domestic political choices is limited, making democratic reforms exceedingly unlikely.
Sometime, somewhere, the United States and its partners will again be tempted to militarily support a government threatened by an insurgency, convinced that a good-governance counterinsurgency campaign can defeat the rebels through democratizing reforms. What they should recognize is the chief lesson of the history of counterinsurgency: that great powers cannot easily shape the domestic politics of smaller, weaker states.
MYTHMAKING
The belief that democracy is necessary for long-term stability and can flow from the barrel of a gun is rooted in misleading accounts of past counterinsurgency campaigns. Five campaigns in particular have been frequently invoked as success stories: those in El Salvador, Greece, Malaya, Oman, and the Philippines. Some of the most prominent proponents of good-governance counterinsurgency served in these campaigns. Sir Robert Thompson, a British counterinsurgency expert who advised the South Vietnamese government during the Vietnam War, served in Malaya. David Galula, a French military officer, served in Algeria and Greece.
In each of these five campaigns, the story goes, the United Kingdom or the United States recognized the costs of using too much military force against civilians and instead helped their threatened partners provide good governance. Growing popular support for the government cost the insurgency support, and the military went on to defeat what was left of it. In this view, there is a battle between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the allegiance, or at least cooperation, of the people, who ultimately determine the winner in the new democracy.
The problem is that the campaigns most often cited as examples of good-governance reforms did not in fact include such reforms. Rather, elites won these campaigns by paying off rival political and military leaders and imposing tight military control on civilian communities. In the process, they abused civilians and ignored human and civil rights. In the decades since, none of these five states—El Salvador, Greece, Malaysia, Oman, and the Philippines—have become full democracies. But in one important respect, the campaigns in these countries were indeed success stories: in the short run, the threatened governments survived, and in the long run, all have remained relatively politically stable and at least marginally aligned with the West. If those are the goals, then liberal free-market democracy is not necessary to achieve them.
What is necessary is something else: a costly and violent effort. The local government must accommodate the interests of powerful rivals in order to gain important information about other actors, including members of the insurgency. Information on elites’ personal, political, and financial interests and political alignments helps the government target rivals to win them over or otherwise manipulate them. The government also needs rival elites’ military power to augment its own ability to control civilians and attack insurgents. Militias are a way to strengthen the government’s efforts at a relatively low cost. It must control its population to prevent crucial resources such as food from flowing to the insurgency. And it must mount a war of attrition against the insurgents. In short, the threatened government stays in power by controlling civilians through brute force, cutting deals with strongmen and other self-interested elites, and showing insurgents that they cannot win.
This conclusion is not a pretty one, but it is historically accurate. Democratic reforms never entered the picture. In fact, if any of the threatened governments had enacted such reforms, they would have stripped themselves of the wealth and power they were fighting to hold. If Greece or El Salvador had held free and fair elections, for example, successive juntas would probably have been cast out of power. Good governance would have meant regime suicide.
MISREADING MALAYA
One of the most referenced successful counterinsurgency campaigns is the Malayan Emergency. Beginning in 1948, the British fought and won a war against a communist, nationalist insurgency in their colony of Malaya. Decades later, advocates of good governance would present the case as a model of how reforms can defeat an insurgency. John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army officer, cited the campaign in the 2005 edition of his book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, and Petraeus turned to it as a model in the 2006 field manual. But the Malayan Emergency actually tells a different story: how the British had to abandon the reforms they had hoped to make and succeeded nonetheless.
Practitioners and pundits often point out that the United Kingdom offered independence to the Malayans, thus introducing a major reform that weakened the insurgency. In 1972, for instance, Robert Komer, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s pacification czar in Vietnam, wrote that the campaign took place “within the context of a firm rule of law and steady progress toward self-government and independence, which robbed the insurgency of much political appeal.” But this gets the history wrong. For one thing, the British complained to the end that they never got the popular support they thought they needed to win. For another thing, it was widely known that the British had been planning for Malayan independence since 1942—well before the insurgency began—making it chronologically impossible for the offer of independence to have been a reform that weakened the insurgency.
What’s more, the case is hardly an example of the importance of building an inclusive liberal democracy. Originally, the British planned to make Malaysia a liberal, pluralistic state with a multiethnic military. But facing resistance from the dominant Malay elites, they abandoned these plans, agreeing to form a state where the Malays would remain more politically powerful than the slightly smaller ethnic Chinese community and the considerably smaller ethnic Indian community. Only after the insurgency was defeated did the British begin sparingly expanding some political rights for non-Malays. Even today, ethnic Malays remain favored by the government in areas from education to housing.
The popular view of the campaign falls short in another important way. Many believe the British quickly learned to avoid civilian harm, limit their use of force, and respect human and civil rights. In fact, the conflict was defined by military control of civilians—through collective punishment, mass arrests and imprisonment without trial, and property destruction. The British also rounded up civilians and forced them into concentration camps. By 1952, more than 500,000 people had been forced into these “New Villages.”
Great powers cannot easily shape the domestic politics of smaller, weaker states.
Around the same time, a similar story was playing out in the Philippines. In a campaign lasting from 1946 to 1954, the U.S.-backed government defeated the Hukbalahap, insurgents who wanted government protection against rapacious landlords, less U.S. influence in the Philippines’ policy decisions, and communist reforms. The Philippine military forcefully controlled civilians throughout the campaign. It conducted massive clearing operations against civilian communities, committed extrajudicial executions, created civilian prison camps, burned houses, destroyed livestock and food, and raped women. All of this flies in the face of the myth that good governance leads to a successful counterinsurgency campaign.
BOUND TO FAIL
At the root of the counterinsurgency myth is a failure to understand the decision-making calculus of local governments. These governments do not and will not implement the reforms demanded by their great-power backer unless those changes serve their interests—and that is a rare occurrence.
Any external power, even a great power, and even a superpower such as the United States, has limited influence over the domestic political choices of other governments. When a great power declares that a threatened government’s survival is an important security interest of its own, the great power considerably reduces its leverage; the smaller state knows it has the clout to resist the intervening country’s demands. Even after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the United States was the ruling power, it had limited freedom to act as it wished. Instead, it had to consider the interests of some influential Iraqi military and political actors because of the power, influence, and sometimes even military strength they wielded.
Bringing an idealized version of American governance to another country may be appealing in theory. In practice, however, intervening in and then continuing a war in the hope that the government will ultimately see the need for reforms is a dangerous chimera. Again and again, doing so has compounded human suffering, required shocking moral choices, and sparked violence across regions. Nonetheless, this belief in reforms persists. In fact, it explains why the United States stayed in Afghanistan and Iraq for so long. For nearly 20 years, the United States and other powers have been urging Afghan and Iraqi leaders to make reforms intended to weaken or defeat the insurgency. Military leaders have pleaded for more time, more resources, and more effort to achieve good governance. But these reforms have not come.
The United States’ tendency to fight so-called small wars in distant lands where its interests are limited is part and parcel of the grand strategy the country has pursued since World War II. But these adventures do not serve American interests or values; they scatter U.S. attention, incur massive costs, and require ghastly moral compromises. A wiser grand strategy would be one of restraint. Under this approach, the United States would focus on its interactions with other great powers, particularly nuclear-armed ones. Outside that realm, in countries where there is a pressing humanitarian need, the United States should offer nonmilitary support for groups suffering from government repression. When it comes to counterinsurgency campaigns waged or supported by outside powers hoping for reforms, history suggests that the game is not worth the candle.
6. Japan Is Indispensable Again
The Need for Economic Security Is Reviving Washington’s Alliance With Tokyo
Excerpts:
If many of these initiatives look familiar to Americans, that is by design. One of Tokyo’s main objectives is to more closely align its economic security policies with Washington’s and ensure that the two governments coordinate on critical and emerging technology policies. So far, Japan’s approach appears to be working; soon after it launched the new NSS economic security division, the two governments announced that they would start a dialogue on economic security issues. Japan’s mastery of new technologies, its networks and connections throughout the Indo-Pacific, and its prestige and soft power in the region all make it an invaluable economic security partner for the United States.
But there is still more that Japan and the United States can do to address the economic security challenges posed by China. In order to facilitate more regular discussions on economic security, they could create a designated U.S.-Japanese consultative committee for these issues and an economic security version of the Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s annual defense summit. They could also expand support for the Blue Dot Network, an infrastructure and development certification initiative launched by Australia, Japan, and the United States that is sometimes compared to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Japan and the United States should also pursue economic security cooperation with other democratic countries and, where appropriate, in multilateral settings, as they did at the recent G7 meeting in the United Kingdom and the G20 meeting in Italy. They should identify ways to reduce their economic dependence on China to blunt the effectiveness of Chinese economic statecraft while also identifying China’s economic dependencies on democratic countries to deter and counter Chinese economic coercion. There is still considerable work to be done, but Japan’s recent reforms have prepared it for the economic security challenges ahead—and ensured that it will be closely aligned with the United States.
Japan Is Indispensable Again
The Need for Economic Security Is Reviving Washington’s Alliance With Tokyo
Japan has been delighted with the first months of Joe Biden’s presidency. Unlike his predecessor, whose transactional view of diplomacy rankled many in Tokyo, Biden has been at pains to rekindle the U.S.-Japanese alliance and to emphasize that Japan remains the linchpin of U.S. security policy in Asia. In February, the two nations renewed the agreement under which Japan hosts U.S. troops, and in March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin both visited Japan on their first overseas trips. Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide as his first foreign guest as president.
It will surprise no one that a major focus of these early meetings has been China, whose economic and military rise has unnerved Washington and Tokyo and united them in competition with Beijing. Biden administration officials have repeatedly affirmed their readiness to defend Japan, including its claim to the disputed Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands). But in addition to military and diplomatic competition with China, which has long been central to the U.S.-Japanese relationship, both countries have placed a new and important emphasis on economic security. In their first meeting, Biden and Suga discussed ways to protect critical supply chains, intellectual property rights, and sensitive technology that should not pass into Beijing’s hands. At the March meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, an informal strategic forum that includes Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, both leaders took a similarly expansive view of the China challenge, leading to the creation of working groups on controlling critical and emerging technologies, among other economic security issues.
That heightened economic competition with China has helped Japan reinvigorate its alliance with the United States is not an accident. Over the last several years, the Japanese government—first under Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and then under Suga—has honed a new brand of economic statecraft designed to protect the country’s economic interests, limit China’s creeping influence in Asia, and bolster Japanese soft power. Through a combination of enhanced economic intelligence, tighter trade restrictions, and better stewardship of data and emerging technologies, Japan has become a force for economic security in Asia and reinforced its position as an indispensable U.S. ally.
ABE’S ECONOMIC STATECRAFT
Japan has long thought of security in more than military terms. In part because of the military constraints imposed by its pacifist constitution, Tokyo has historically tried to win the trust of other Asian powers through aid, trade, and diplomacy. And it has largely succeeded: public opinion surveys in Southeast Asia consistently show that Japan is the most trusted major power in the region and that it has considerable soft power.
But as China’s foreign policy has grown more aggressive, especially under President Xi Jinping, Japan has had to come up with new ways preserve its autonomy and regional influence. Beginning in 2013, Abe’s government gradually refurbished the country’s outmoded national security infrastructure, strengthened its defense capabilities, and embraced a more proactive role in maintaining regional security. Abe also launched a series of economic security initiatives that attracted less attention but were arguably as important.
The most consequential of these was a bureaucratic reorganization aimed at improving interagency cooperation and enhancing the government’s ability to respond to new economic security risks. Toward the end of his premiership, Abe restructured Japan’s National Security Secretariat, adding an economic division that officially began operations in April 2020. Already, this new division has grown into the largest of the seven NSS units, prompting other ministries to undertake similar reorganizations: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; and the Ministry of Defense have all established new divisions or positions focused on technology and economic security.
Abe’s government also strengthened Japan’s economic-security-related intelligence collection and assessment capabilities, giving domestic intelligence agencies funding and directives to focus on threats to sensitive Japanese technologies, among other economic security risks. Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency, for instance, has created a team focusing on economic security and has begun outreach programs to raise public awareness of risks and threats posed by illicit technological and data transfers. Other security agencies have also restructured, creating new and better-resourced teams focusing on China.
Japan has sharpened additional tools of economic statecraft through new legislation and policies. Last year, the country’s parliament revised the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act to expand government jurisdiction over potentially troubling investments—in particular, by decreasing the threshold for regulatory approval of foreign investments from more than ten percent of a company’s shares to more than one percent. Japan has also effectively banned government procurement of information technology equipment from Chinese state vendors such as Huawei and ZTE and has provided subsidies and tax breaks to Japanese companies developing secure 5G networks. Along with Australia and India, it has launched the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative, which encourages Japanese companies and their subsidiaries to reshore operations or diversify and move them out of China to Southeast Asia.
Other economic security initiatives are in the offing. The government plans to create a new think tank that will focus on using emerging technologies such as quantum and artificial intelligence for security purposes. It is also mulling a new security clearance system for the private sector that would facilitate the sharing of threat information between the government and businesses and a system that would conceal from the public patents related to technologies that can be adapted for military use. It will likely designate economic security as one of three thematic pillars in a new National Security Strategy. And it will continue to play a leading role in setting standards for trade and digital commerce, including through the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade agreement, which Japan revived and renamed after the United States backed out.
AN INVALUABLE PARTNER
If many of these initiatives look familiar to Americans, that is by design. One of Tokyo’s main objectives is to more closely align its economic security policies with Washington’s and ensure that the two governments coordinate on critical and emerging technology policies. So far, Japan’s approach appears to be working; soon after it launched the new NSS economic security division, the two governments announced that they would start a dialogue on economic security issues. Japan’s mastery of new technologies, its networks and connections throughout the Indo-Pacific, and its prestige and soft power in the region all make it an invaluable economic security partner for the United States.
But there is still more that Japan and the United States can do to address the economic security challenges posed by China. In order to facilitate more regular discussions on economic security, they could create a designated U.S.-Japanese consultative committee for these issues and an economic security version of the Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s annual defense summit. They could also expand support for the Blue Dot Network, an infrastructure and development certification initiative launched by Australia, Japan, and the United States that is sometimes compared to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Japan and the United States should also pursue economic security cooperation with other democratic countries and, where appropriate, in multilateral settings, as they did at the recent G7 meeting in the United Kingdom and the G20 meeting in Italy. They should identify ways to reduce their economic dependence on China to blunt the effectiveness of Chinese economic statecraft while also identifying China’s economic dependencies on democratic countries to deter and counter Chinese economic coercion. There is still considerable work to be done, but Japan’s recent reforms have prepared it for the economic security challenges ahead—and ensured that it will be closely aligned with the United States.
7. Gamifying Disinformation Mitigation
Doowan Lee is one of the nation's experts on the study of disinformation.
Gamifying Disinformation Mitigation
JULY 15, 2021 | DOOWAN LEE
Bottom Line Up Front: gamification can promote and scale disinformation mitigation by lowering the threshold of collaboration across different demographic groups.
The Cipher Brief’s Academic Incubator partners with national security-focused programs from colleges and Universities across the country to share the thinking of the next generation of national security leaders.
Yi-ting Lien is currently a graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also a former spokesperson for President Tsai Ing-wen’s re-election campaign office and a former staffer at the Presidential office and the National Security Council of Taiwan.
Elizabeth Lange is an MA student and Kerry Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where she studies the intersection between influence operations and cybersecurity in the context of U.S.-China relations. Libby previously worked as the lead English speechwriter and social media manager for Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
Doowan Lee is a senior advisor to the Institute for Security and Technology (IST) and adjunct professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. He leverages emerging AI technologies to empower open society and support national security.
ACADEMIC INCUBATOR — “Humor over Rumor”
“Stop hoarding tissues since the paper you see here is enough for you to wipe your butt for 300 years!(可以讓你七卡臣約300年)” This was a caption Taiwanese Economic Minister Shen Jong-chin wrote in a video of his visit to a tissue factory, in response to rumors that toilet paper supplies were running low because they were being used to make face masks, which sparked panic buying in Taiwan. His uncouth but true statement went viral on social media platforms. Being capable of making creative and rapid responses like this- a strategy called “humor over rumor” – is now a common practice among Taiwanese officials given the ubiquity of disinformation campaigns the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has launched to target the island nation.
This is just one example of how the Taiwanese government has harnessed gamification to fight disinformation. And its impacts are anything but trivial. A company spokesperson at Facebook previously revealed that the government’s clarifications often traveled more broadly than false news did on its platform. Such efficient and innovative tactics don’t have a long history in Taiwan. The prominence of gamification in dispelling misinformation grew only after a nationwide election in 2018 that showed evidence of extensive meddling by the CCP.
The CCP’s disinformation campaign in 2018 was not an isolated incident. Taiwan was ranked as the country most exposed to foreign disinformation in a 2019 study by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. As the CCP’s testing ground for global influence operations, Taiwan offers a notable example of how gamification has greatly facilitated disinformation mitigation and broader digital transparency.
Gamification and Disinformation Mitigation
Gamification is the integration of game mechanics into a non-game environment in order to give it a game-like feel, motivating users to accomplish tasks in a given context. The application of such an approach has been increasingly popular.
We define gamification in this discussion as a strategy that entails designing responses to disinformation in a way that creates similar experiences to those experienced when playing games. Gamifying disinformation mitigation could effectively accelerate solutions adoption as it motivates and engages the audience in the behavior change process that boosts authentic interactivity between disseminators and receivers of online messages. Such interactivities are crucial to increasing genuine engagement, and therefore, to further decentralizing joint efforts in combatting disinformation.
“Memes” are one medium that exemplify the idea of gamification. While there’s no single format that memes must follow, memes are often entertaining and playful -which help them to spark viral sensations online.
The virality of memes can be a double-edged sword. This was exemplified by the Russian trolls who allegedly waged meme warfare to “divide America” during the 2016 US elections. It’s true that memes sometimes fall prey to malicious purveyors and become major vehicles for disinformation. However, the designs of memes- lighthearted images embellished with short text- also point to a way out of the dilemma facing open societies across the world.
The notion of gamification essentially involves a sense of collaborativeness- which aims to decentralize the joint effort to overcome public indifference towards policy issues. Such indifference creates a fertile milieu for disinformation operations and therefore would be a root cause that needs to be addressed if we want to mitigate disinformation.
Taiwan’s “humor over rumor” strategy exemplifies how the government’s gamifying of policy announcements creates a sense of “active transparency”, incentivizing citizens to pay more attention to its governance and be part of the effort to spread correct information.
The Taiwanese Innovation
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the Taiwanese government has further incorporated a gamification strategy into daily policy announcements and updates on the latest developments in Taiwan. For example, daily notifications from the Ministry of Health’s Line channel (a popular messaging app in Taiwan) feature a Shiba inu, Zongchai (總柴,CEO-Shiba in English), as their “spokesperson” to share the latest news and statistics. The personified Zongchai introduces levity to a serious subject and has become something of a pandemic-fighting sidekick for Taiwanese citizens.
While there has been a significant increase in the dissemination of disinformation regarding the coronavirus outbreak in Taiwan since early 2020, its harm has been limited as people can debunk rumors such as “Corpses are now everywhere in Taiwan after thousands of people died because of the virus!” effectively with frequent updates from “Zongchai”. The channel, which now has more than 7.7 million subscribers, has served as the most relied upon source of information following a sudden escalation of cases in mid-May. While disinformation has surged in tandem with case numbers, its amplifying effects have been limited with constant reminders from the shiba spokesdog that people should “verify before forwarding messages”.
Some may argue that gamification is only effective within certain echo chambers, given that the majority of social media users are members of younger generations and gamified measures might not be enough to overcome generational communication barriers. Indeed, the promotion of content authenticity is only as effective as how far it can reach. However, such reach could be broadened as long as gamification successfully raises young people’s awareness to the point that they feel motivated to amplify the effects of the mitigation measures by sharing the truth offline with older members in their families. Gamification has the potential to bridge the demographic divides in the information environment by appealing to social media users of all ages. For instance, the government frequently shares “zhang bei“ images (長輩圖), a niche genre of kitschy graphics usually designed and shared profusely by boomer-age Taiwanese social media users. While frequently forwarded as a daily greeting by older users, “zhang bei” images are considered to be goofy and comical by the young social media generation. When government fanpages post “zhang bei” images, an action item is created at the same time for young users to share this with “zhang bei” (長輩, elders in English) in their lives. During the pandemic, some also voluntarily designed their own “zhang bei” images to disseminate government instructions on pandemic mitigation measures. Another way of overcoming communication barriers is to use language that transcends disciplines and age groups. For example, the Taiwanese Shiba spokesperson illustrated the practice of “social distancing” by saying “when you’re indoors, keep three shibas away from others; when outdoors, keep two of them away”. Such easy-to-understand comparisons make it both simple and entertaining to follow the Shiba’s instructions.
Popular song lyrics are also very common in the Taiwanese government’s policy announcements- for example, when the Center for Disease Control launched the name-based rationing system for purchases of masks, Premier Su Tseng-chang incorporated song lyrics of a popular Taiwanese singer, A-Mei, into the instructions, in order to draw more public attention to the policy. Such approaches have not only greatly increased public reactions and engagements in governance, but also attracted the attention of major traditional outlets including newspapers and television stations, enhancing the effectiveness of this strategy in heightening awareness about the policy among the public. Through making its citizens well-informed of important policy issues, the Taiwanese government builds resilience against disinformation from the ground up.
Conclusion
Those who seek to mitigate disinformation can engineer memes, integrating gamifying elements to reinforce some of the signature characteristics memes already have-intelligible, humorous, and attractive- so that those characteristics can be used to the advantage of disinformation mitigation, namely, drumming up public interest in fighting back against disinformation. Gamifying these measures means not only making the policy announcements widely engaging in the first place, but also continuously bringing citizens into a joint effort to scotch the rumor. In other words, disinformation mitigation could be bolstered by gamification both reactively and preemptively- a preemptive approach that makes the public well-informed of important policy announcements would build a natural shield against disinformation campaigns; and a high awareness of such problems would help citizens detect factually incorrect information as well as distinguish between credible and suspicious claims.
Adopting culturally resonant means of disseminating fact-checking in a gamified way is a policy option that more governments should consider. Disinformation has exploited pop culture to accelerate its reach and speed. Combating disinformation should also leverage similar efficient information pathways to counter malign content. In the end, gamification can engender the much-needed scale and parity of competitive information operations. While content authenticity matters in disinformation mitigation, so does the efficient delivery mechanism of gamification.
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Yi-ting Lien is currently a graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also a former spokesperson for President Tsai Ing-wen’s re-election campaign office and a former staffer at the Presidential office and the National Security Council of Taiwan. She has a master’s degree in political communications from the London School of Economics and focuses on issues related to Chinese influence operations and international relations.
Doowan Lee is a strategic advisor to the Institute for Security and Technology (IST) and adjunct professor of politics at the Univ. of San Francisco. Working at a Silicon Valley tech company, he leverages emerging AI technologies to empower open society & support national security. He is a national security expert specializing in disinformation analysis and great power competition in the information environment. Before joining IST, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School for more... Read More
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8. SecDef Teases New Deterrence Strategy, Vows Billions More for AI
I am pretty sure we are going to be seeing "integrated deterrence" as a foundational DOD concept. Colin Kahl (USD(P)) discussed this in recent statements this spring.
My question is will the concept include a line of effort for "unconventional deterrence." As developed by Robert Jones at USSOCOM it is "the notion that the credible threat of UW can be employed to create a deterrent effect. This is a new form of “unconventional deterrence” designed to supplement current approaches as part of an integrated scheme. Similarly, one can help immunize an at-risk population of a partner or ally (or one’s own domestic population) to the UW efforts of others by working to identify and mitigate this energy to manageable levels. This is a form of “unconventional resilience.” While derived from a form of warfare central to the identity of US Special Forces, both concepts are increasingly important to competing successfully across the elements of national power in peace." https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/SMA-Invited-Perspective_Strategic-Influence_Jones_FINAL.pdf
Look to the Resistance Operating Concept (https://jsou.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=54216464) employed in Europe. I would argue a similar concept, adapted appropriately for the conditions, can be employed in many countries where China is conducting wolf diplomacy and debt trap diplomacy to help countries develop a kind of resistance potential and resilience perhaps even while exploiting the resources offered by One Belt One Road.
SecDef Teases New Deterrence Strategy, Vows Billions More for AI
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin delivers remarks at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Global Emerging Technology Summit on July 13, 2021 in Washington, DC. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
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In pursuit of "integrated deterrence," Lloyd Austin committed $1.5 billion over five years to the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence hub.
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July 15, 2021 08:00 AM ET
July 15, 2021 08:00 AM ET
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin teased a new vision for deterring adversaries and announced a $1.5 billion commitment to the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence hub over the next five years.
At a summit event Tuesday hosted by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which released its final report last March that found the U.S. is unprepared for AI competition with China, Austin said preventing conflict requires a new vision. That vision, he said, is called integrated deterrence.
“I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come, but basically, integrated deterrence is about using the right mix of technology, operational concepts, and capabilities—all woven together in a networked way that is so credible, and flexible, and formidable that it will give any adversary pause,” Austin said.
Austin also announced the Pentagon wants to inject the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, or JAIC, with nearly $1.5 billion over the next five years. DOD hyped the investments it’s requesting for AI projects during the recent rollout of President Joe Biden’s budget request—the 2022 proposal calls for $874 million in AI investments. However, at the end of the day it’s the legislators who decide how much money the JAIC will get.
During his remarks Tuesday, Austin said the department is currently working on more than 600 AI projects, or “significantly more” than the year prior. The JAIC itself has been elevated in stature: Fulfilling a recommendation from NSCAI, the JAIC now reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
In a recent memo, Hicks reaffirmed DOD’s commitment to ethical AI principles originally drawn up during the previous administration and gave the JAIC a list of assignments including coordinating a council that will establish a responsible AI strategy and implementation plan. Hicks also recently unveiled a new AI effort called the DOD AI and Data Acceleration initiative, or ADA, which will see operational data teams sent out to combatant commands.
9. So nice of China to put all of its network zero-day vulns in one giant database no one will think to break into
Huh? What does this mean? It is over my head. but this is an interesting conclusion:
Who could forget Uncle Sam's Office of Personnel Management, which was ransacked in 2015 by Chinese cyber-spies who made off with sensitive records on more than 20 million US govt staff. Former NSA boss Michael Hayden said the United States, given the opportunity, would have done the same to a foreign power.
"If I as director of CIA or NSA would have had the opportunity to grab the equivalent from the Chinese system, I would not have thought twice, I would not have asked permission, I'd have launched the Star Fleet and we'd have brought those suckers home at the speed of light," Hayden said.
There's also the question of what the Chinese government will do with its haul of vulnerability reports. With some in the West hurrying to remove Chinese vendors' kit from networks, this edict may intensify such efforts for fear a zero-day in such equipment will be exploited by Beijing.
So nice of China to put all of its network zero-day vulns in one giant database no one will think to break into
theregister.com · by Iain Thomson in San Francisco Thu 15 Jul 2021 // 01:07 UTC 21
We sum up Middle Kingdom's massive crackdown on bug reports
Chinese makers of network software and hardware must alert Beijing within two days of learning of a security vulnerability in their products under rules coming into force in China this year.
Details of holes cannot be publicized until the bugs are fixed. Malicious or weaponized exploit code cannot be released. There are restrictions on disclosing details of flaws to foreign organizations. And vendors will be under pressure to address these vulnerabilities as soon as they can and set up bounty programs to reward researchers.
The regulations are intended to tighten up the nation's cyber-security defenses, crack down on the handling and dissemination of bugs, and keep China's elite up to speed on exploitable flaws present in Chinese-made communications systems, wherever in the world that technology may be deployed.
It appears these rules ensure Beijing will be among the first to know of security weaknesses in equipment and software potentially present in foreign infrastructure and networks as well as domestic deployments. The rules were issued on Tuesday, come into effect on September 1, and apply to people and organizations operating within China. The following articles stuck out to us:
- Article 3 puts China's National Internet Information Office, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and Ministry of Public Security in charge of coordinating and managing network security vulnerabilities.
- Article 4 forbids the exploitation or use of bugs "in activities that endanger network security."
- Article 5 orders "network product providers, network operators, and network product security vulnerability collection platforms" to make it painless to report flaws, and keep a log of these bugs.
- Article 7 tells product makers to ensure patches are developed "in a timely manner and reasonably released," and that customers are kept in the loop with regards to mitigations, updates and repairs, and support. Crucially, vendors are told that all "relevant vulnerability information should be reported to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's cyber security threat and vulnerability information sharing platform within two days" of them learning of security holes in their products.
- Article 8 leans on network operators to shore up their systems as soon as they learn of a vulnerability in their equipment or software.
- Article 9 is another crucial one. This strives to keep details of security flaws under wraps until patches are available or special permission is granted by the government to go public. Folks are not allowed to "deliberately exaggerate the hazards and risks" of a bug. They are also "not allowed to publish or provide programs and tools specially used to exploit network product security vulnerabilities to engage in activities that endanger network security."
And "it is prohibited to provide undisclosed network product security vulnerability information to overseas organizations or individuals other than network product providers."
- Article 11 implores organizations to keep a lid on non-public bugs so that details don't leak before patches are available.
- Articles 12 to 15 make it clear that anyone who breaks these rules and related legislation will feel the full force of the Chinese government.
Though the rules are a little ambiguous in places, judging from the spirit of them, they throw a spanner in the works for Chinese researchers who work with, or hope to work with, zero-day vulnerability brokers. These sorts of regulations matter a lot: infosec experts in the Middle Kingdom earlier pulled out of exploit contests like Pwn2Own due to changes to the law within China.
“Chinese teams stopped participating in Pwn2Own after 2017 when there were regulatory changes that no longer allowed for participation in global exploit contests,” Brian Gorenc, head of ZDI and Pwn2Own at Trend Micro, told The Register on Wednesday.
It will also complicate matters for those hoping to engage with foreign bug bounty programs, which may or may not follow China's strict rules – particularly articles 7 and 9 – creating legal uncertainty for those participating.
"The law looks rather unclear," Katie Moussouris, founder of Luta Security and a pioneer in designing bug bounties, told The Register. "There are Chinese bug bounty programs but whether or not Western based companies would comply is a question that needs answering. We'll need to see a case emerge where the Chinese authorities attempt to exert the directive to see."
Another part of the order that worries Moussouris is the central Chinese vulnerability database that will be created to house all of these reported bugs: it's an obvious target for espionage. Then there's the fact that two days is not long enough to triage a bug report.
"Two days isn't enough for a thorough investigation for a flaw and certainly not enough time to make a fix that works," she said.
"It's also a dangerous place to be for an unpatched-vulnerabilities database, which would be an incredibly attractive target for adversaries – our people will be targeting it, I'm sure."
Who could forget Uncle Sam's Office of Personnel Management, which was ransacked in 2015 by Chinese cyber-spies who made off with sensitive records on more than 20 million US govt staff. Former NSA boss Michael Hayden said the United States, given the opportunity, would have done the same to a foreign power.
"If I as director of CIA or NSA would have had the opportunity to grab the equivalent from the Chinese system, I would not have thought twice, I would not have asked permission, I'd have launched the Star Fleet and we'd have brought those suckers home at the speed of light," Hayden said.
There's also the question of what the Chinese government will do with its haul of vulnerability reports. With some in the West hurrying to remove Chinese vendors' kit from networks, this edict may intensify such efforts for fear a zero-day in such equipment will be exploited by Beijing. ®
10. The China Challenge: How confident can Beijing be about its future?
A view from New Zealand.
Excerpts:
President Xi’s action in tearing up the timetable for the reunion with Hong Kong has cut the ground from beneath those in Taiwan who wanted the same. At present there seems only a tiny minority who wish to rejoin the motherland, or who even see it any longer as the motherland.
The president’s response has been to fall back on force, saying that Taiwan must be brought back by 2049. His military buildup, with increasing flights into Taiwan’s airspace, underlines this.
Suddenly war seems possible in the North Pacific, and democratic governments have to puzzle over what they would do about it. In 1938 the West thought it best to abandon Czechoslovakia. Will we decide that it is safest to do the same with Taiwan?
The China Challenge: How confident can Beijing be about its future?
OPINION: China’s rise now dominates our view of the future. Freed of its Marxist doctrines, its economy has grown with startling speed. It is now the second largest in the world and numerous experts tell us that it will surpass the United States in a few years.
Straight-line projections are of course risky. A few decades ago Japan’s hopes of the top position were hailed in books with titles like Japan as Number One. It is now number three.
But China’s expectation of reaching the top seems better founded. If it does, there seems no reason why we should fear such economic success, which after all benefits us all. But we wriggle uneasily at the thought because this rising economic power is fuelling a sour and aggressive nationalism.
Chinatopix Via AP
The Yangshan container port in Shanghai. ‘’Freed of its Marxist doctrines, its economy has grown with startling speed,’’ says Gerald Hensley.
Totalitarianism is back and history reminds us that this is not good for us. Totalitarian governments, we know, are prone to the expansion of national power and China, crushing ethnic groups, tearing up an international treaty and militarising the South China Sea, brings dismaying reminders of the 1930s.
And, as with Germany’s glittering economic success then, China’s boldness is leading some to wonder whether the messy, argumentative ways of democracy are best.
There is a lot in China’s ambitions to be a serious worry, but no reason to lose confidence in ourselves.
The front windows of totalitarian governments, which dazzle the passer-by, conceal some very shabby back rooms. Because of this, such systems do not have long lives. At the start of the last century communism and fascism were seen by many as the answer to the faults of democracy, but at the end of the century only the messy, argumentative democracies still existed. The analogy with China suggests that its present form of government will not outlast this century.
For there are some grave weaknesses in the totalitarian system which are not conducive to a long life.
Stuff
‘’Government by decree has no repair kit to deal with the accumulating errors of life,’’ says Gerald Hensley.
The first, more clearly evident in China than its 1930s predecessors, is that it is frightened of its own people. Its claims of enthusiastic and unwavering backing are belied by its jittery attitude to even minor risks.
In 2008, to stand at the roadside to watch the Olympic torch pass required a ticket from the authorities. During the last Party Congress in Beijing rear-window handles were reported to have disappeared from taxis, presumably to prevent the disaffected from shouting or throwing out subversive literature while passing Tiananmen Square.
Those are trifles, but they reveal an important difference from elected governments. Unlike democracies, totalitarian governments must at all times project a gleaming unmarked surface of success. Even the tiniest scratch on their immaculate paintwork is evidence of weakness, of vulnerability.
China’s rulers are well aware of the underlying fragility of their system. That is why this “people’s government” spends US$216 billion every year on domestic security, three times more than it spent a decade ago and more than it spends on the Chinese armed forces. That is not the spending of a government confident of its popular support.
Another weakness is even graver. It has brought down all of the preceding totalitarian experiments. Government by decree has no repair kit to deal with the accumulating errors of life.
The democracies can and sometimes do make a series of mistakes but they can apply a patch or two, perhaps change the government, and drive on.
AP
A screen shows Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking during a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The fearless leader of an absolutist regime cannot admit mistakes because by definition he cannot make them. If he is able as well as fearless, he can deal with short-term problems briskly and if necessary ruthlessly, which is why some see Chinese President Xi Jinping’s way as more effective than the argumentative democracies with a noisy media.
Over time, though, a dictator’s judgments will sometimes be wrong and possibly disastrous and there is no-one to dare argue with him, to tell him to take another path. Xi’s aggressive foreign policy is beginning to form a Western coalition against him.
It could over time prove a fatal flaw but if not, some other fault will in time bring him down because he does not have to consider the range of alternatives that in a messy democracy enables corrective action to be taken in good time.
The working of these facts in history tells us that totalitarian governments like China’s are not built for the long haul. They are designed for a sprint rather than a marathon. It helps to keep this in mind but, even so, a lot of damage can be done in a sprint, as the Nazis showed in the 1930s. In another of the eerie echoes of that time, Taiwan is looming like another Czechoslovakia.
Supplied
Gerald Hensley was a foreign service officer who served as head of the Prime Minister's Department and Secretary of Defence.
Taiwan has been generally regarded as a part of China, but the understanding reached with Beijing when Western diplomatic relations were renewed was that any reunion would be peaceful. That worked well for decades and Taiwan’s deepening economic relationship with the mainland suggested that a voluntary amalgamation was increasingly likely.
President Xi’s action in tearing up the timetable for the reunion with Hong Kong has cut the ground from beneath those in Taiwan who wanted the same. At present there seems only a tiny minority who wish to rejoin the motherland, or who even see it any longer as the motherland.
The president’s response has been to fall back on force, saying that Taiwan must be brought back by 2049. His military buildup, with increasing flights into Taiwan’s airspace, underlines this.
Suddenly war seems possible in the North Pacific, and democratic governments have to puzzle over what they would do about it. In 1938 the West thought it best to abandon Czechoslovakia. Will we decide that it is safest to do the same with Taiwan?
Gerald Hensley was a foreign service officer who served as head of the Prime Minister's Department and Secretary of Defence.
11. U.S. military once trained Colombians implicated in Haiti assassination plot, Pentagon says
Yes we will take a beating for this from the critics of foeng military training. But objectively, how can we prevent something like this from happening after we conduct training? And if we had not provided the training (which was probably only one small part of these soldiers overall training) would it have prevented this operation? I think not. But again we will "take a beating" for this. I wish we could quantify all the positive outcomes and key useful relationships established and sustained over the years because of our training and education programs. But as my command Sergeant Major used to say, "one aw sh*t wipes out a thousand "attaboys."
U.S. military once trained Colombians implicated in Haiti assassination plot, Pentagon says
The Washington Post · by Alex HortonJuly 15, 2021|Updated today at 10:54 a.m. EDT · July 15, 2021
Some of the former Colombian servicemen arrested after last week’s assassination of Haiti’s president previously received U.S. military training, according to the Pentagon, raising fresh questions about the United States’ ties to Jovenel Moïse’s death.
“A review of our training databases indicates that a small number of the Colombian individuals detained as part of this investigation had participated in past U.S. military training and education programs, while serving as active members of the Colombian Military Forces,” Lt. Col. Ken Hoffman, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement to The Washington Post.
The Pentagon’s review is ongoing, Hoffman said. He did not say how many of the men received training or precisely what it entailed.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), whose legislation provides oversight to foreign defense aid used in human rights abuses, said the episode was a grim reminder that U.S. assistance to other countries can take unexpected turns.
“This illustrates that while we want our training of foreign armies to build professionalism and respect for human rights, the training is only as good as the institution itself,” he said.
“The Colombian army, which we have supported for 20 years, has a long history of targeting civilians, violating the laws of war and not being accountable. There has been a cultural problem within that institution.”
Colombian officials have said 13 of the 15 Colombian suspects in the July 7 assassination plot once served in that country’s military, including the two killed by Haitian authorities after Moïse was fatally shot inside his home.
It is common for Colombian troops and other security personnel across Latin America to receive U.S. training and education. Colombia, in particular, has been a significant U.S. military partner for decades, receiving billions of U.S. dollars since 2000 in its effort to battle drug trafficking organizations, leftist guerrillas and far-right paramilitary groups.
That effort has included CIA-backed missions and a close relationship between Colombia military personnel and the Green Berets, who help train their elite counterparts in guerrilla warfare. A Colombian commando school is modeled on the Army’s grueling Ranger School, and the two militaries’ partnership dates at least to the 1950s.
Colombian military and police also use U.S.-provided weapons and equipment, an agreement that came under scrutiny earlier this year after police there killed multiple protesters during demonstrations against government tax proposals. A related analysis by The Post, published in May, found that Colombian authorities overstepped their own rules of engagement in some of the deadly encounters.
Fighting in Colombia’s decades-long war has been a springboard for military veterans to trade their U.S.-funded experience for hire in other global conflicts, such as in Yemen.
“The recruitment of Colombian soldiers to go to other parts of the world as mercenaries is an issue that has existed for a long time, because there is no law that prohibits it,” the commander of Colombia’s Armed Forces, Gen. Luis Fernando Navarro, told reporters last week.
Foreign military training provided by the United States is intended to promote “respect for human rights, compliance with the rule of law, and militaries subordinate to democratically elected civilian leadership,” Hoffman, the Pentagon spokesman, said in his statement. He did not immediately respond to questions seeking additional information.
The disclosure that some of the assassination suspects received U.S. training, which has not been previously reported, is certain to complicate the already murky understanding of how the plot to kill Moïse took shape, and who was involved.
Two U.S. citizens of Haitian descent are among those who’ve been arrested, and Haitian authorities have said a Florida-based security company was involved in purchasing plane tickets for the Colombian suspects to fly from Bogota to the Dominican Republic, according to a report published this week by the Associated Press, which noted authorities have offered scant evidence.
Christian Emmanuel Sanon, 63, an American doctor and pastor who frequently traveled between Haiti and Florida, was arrested in connection to the plot. Authorities have claimed he was positioning himself to run for president in the impoverished Caribbean nation and had a role in hiring the alleged assassins, but they have provided little evidence about his alleged involvement.
To date, Haitian authorities have arrested at least 20 people in connection with Moïse’s death, which has plunged the country into a leadership crisis. Late Wednesday officials confirmed they had detained the presidential palace’s head of security.
Authorities in Haiti are investigating Moïse’s killing with assistance from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security officials and personnel from Colombia’s government. President Biden has condemned the assassination and appealed for calm, but his administration has rebuffed requests from Haiti’s government for American military assistance to help shore up security.
Widlore Merancourt, Samantha Schmidt, Rachel Pannett and Anthony Faiola contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Alex HortonJuly 15, 2021|Updated today at 10:54 a.m. EDT · July 15, 2021
12. Xi’s squeeze taking the verve out of China Inc
Excerpts:
Xi’s tech crackdown could cost China roughly $45 trillion of capital flows by 2030, according to calculations by Rhodium Group and the Atlantic Council. That’s more than 3.2 times today’s gross domestic product (GDP) squandered as Team Xi arguably puts what’s best for the party over what’s best for economic dynamism.
The Didi controversy alone might have Western investors thinking twice before getting involved in Chinese tech IPOs. As Josh Rogin, a Washington Post foreign affairs columnist, puts it: “Wall Street must now acknowledge that the risk of investing in these companies can’t be known, much less disclosed. Therefore, US investors shouldn’t be trusting their futures to China Inc.”
The thing is, China’s scale and potential make it a must-invest place for punters everywhere. And look at the “Who’s Who” of Western finance behemoths racing to increases their China operations: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BlackRock Inc, Vanguard, Amundi, Credit Suisse, Schroders – and more.
None of the above players, nor any serious economists, doubt China’s vast potential. But Xi’s team must find a balance between their control instincts and leaving capitalism alone to work its magic. The events of the past 12 months suggest the former is thriving at the expense of the latter.
Xi’s squeeze taking the verve out of China Inc
President Xi’s team must strike a better balance between their control instincts and leaving capitalism alone to work its magic
China’s Sinovac vaccine is quickly changing from a hoped-for diplomatic triumph to a sign that China isn’t yet ready for the global cutting-edge prime time.
Initially hailed as the developing world’s trump card against Covid-19, the vaccine is suddenly facing an epidemiological crisis. Efficacy doubts have Singapore deciding people who received Sinovac should be characterized as unvaccinated. In Thailand, health officials claim more than 600 Sinovac-jabbed have tested positive for coronavirus.
It’s an embarrassing turn for Xi’s “vaccine diplomacy” scheme – one that initially caught the US flatfooted. And it’s bigger than that. The Sinovac stumble symbolizes both China’s growing number of policy mishaps as well as its broad tendency to put the quantity of growth ahead of its quality.
Count Cathie Wood of Ark Investment Management is among those growing skeptical of Xi’s economic management. In her case, it’s Chinese President Xi Jinping’s fast-widening tech crackdown that raises big questions about the new model he appears to be developing on the fly.
Wood, one of Wall Street’s biggest names of the moment, has been selling mainland tech stocks following Xi’s moves against fintech giant Ant Group, ride-sharing behemoth Didi Global and a fast-growing number of tech disrupters. The China weighting of her flagship Ark Innovation ETF fund plunged to less than 1% – way down from 8% in February.
This pivot away from a Chinese sector that seemed about to rejig the global pecking order raises questions about Xi’s endgame. The conventional wisdom is that this is about controlling consumer data and managing risk. Perhaps. But there’s also a “throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater” quality to the policy direction.
The just-ended Donald Trump era was far more of a blessing than a curse for Xi’s Communist Party.
The former US president’s taxes on US$500 billion of mainland goods surely did damage. Along with slamming global growth, the tariffs upended supply chains and contributed to today’s semiconductor shortages and inflation. And Trump’s bans on mainland companies destroyed .
Xi Jinping won Donald Trump’s trade war but its not clear he’ll win the wider competition with Joe Biden. Image: Facebook
But four years of Trumpian chaos was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Xi.
Xi amassed the most power of any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong and telegraphed an ambitious plan to raise Beijing’s global clout. The 2017-2020 Trump era, for all its turbulence, played right into the Xi zeitgeist of rising China offering the developing world a better model than a gridlocked Washington and a foundering West.
Even the Covid-19 crisis was a moment to spread China’s wings in the developing world. Critiques about what really happened in Wuhan aside, the Sinovac vaccine, coupled with a “V-shaped” economic recovery that would make Xi’s nation the key engine driving global growth, looked set to strengthen Brand China.
This Trumpian void, more broadly, seemed an ideal opportunity to markedly expand Beijing’s influence at America’s expense — and perhaps permanently. Instead, the last several months have seen Xi kick any number of balls into the back of Beijing’s own net.
Going global with Sinovac before its time could be its own reckoning for China Inc’s clout.
But so are Xi’s moves to suffocate and troll Taiwan. Beijing’s over-the-top response to Australia asking legitimate questions about why Beijing was slow to warn of a coming pandemic is another bad global look.
Ditto for scrapping dialogue with Europe – or retail giants like H&M – over concerns those parties raised about alleged forced labor in the Xinjiang region.
The unhinged “wolf warrior” bombast emanating from Xi’s diplomatic corps, meantime, smacked of Trumpism with Chinese characteristics. Eventually, even Xi realized his mean-tweeting diplomats had gone too far.
But more than any of the above, the biggest misstep may be having global investors wonder if Xi really does have a plan for China’s economic future.
A Chinese paramilitary police stands guard while a light show is seen from the Bund in Shanghai on June 30, 2021, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Photo: AFP / Hector Retamal
Two years ago, the trajectory was obvious. Xi’s ginormous “Made in China 2025” blueprint would lead the future of aerospace, chips, renewable energy, self-driving vehicles, software, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, green infrastructure, you name it.
Moves to internationalize the yuan and get Chinese stocks included in global benchmarks like MSCI and bond indexes – FTSE Russell, most recently – would give markets a “decisive” role in Beijing’s decision-making, just as Xi promised.
That was then. Now – who knows?
This question has haunted many a foreign investor since November, when a hotly-awaited initial public offering by Jack Ma’s Ant Group was suddenly and dramatically scrapped.
At the time, observers rationalized it as Xi’s team trying to reduce risk. Yet coming only days after Alibaba Group founder Ma chided state-owned banking giants as having a “pawn shop mentality,” and regulators not understanding the internet, it was hard not to sense the empire was .
One question grates on investors: Didn’t Xi’s team know on October 23, a day before Ma’s Shanghai speech, what Ant had been planning? Global investors sure did. The $37 billion IPO would’ve eclipsed Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing to become history’s biggest.
The Ant IPO would take place a world away from New York, where Alibaba listed in 2014. Listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong would raise the clout of Xi’s two most important financial centers.
That did not happen, and Ma himself – formerly, the shining example of the high-flying Chinese CEO on the global stage – has lost his voice and his visibility.
Xi’s actions made clear that international bragging rights take a back seat to letting outward-facing tech billionaires know who’s boss.
The more recent crackdown on Didi shows the Ant fiasco wasn’t an aberration. Details differ, of course (Chinese regulators claim they directed Didi to delay its June 30 IPO in New York).
But the chaos surrounding the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC, banning Didi from app stores over “seriously violating laws” about data collection and usage suggests Xi’s crackdown on Big Tech has only just begun.
DiDi logo displayed on a phone screen is seen with illustrative stock chart in the background. Photo: AFP / Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto
“Investors have to rethink the entire China structure,” warns David Kotok at Florida-based Cumberland Advisors. He says it means, at a minimum, that Ma’s Ant fiasco “is not a one-off” and that “everything China touches must be viewed with suspicion.”
Adds Wood of Ark Investment Management: “I do think there’s a valuation reset” concerning the prospects for large Chinese tech firms. “From a valuation point of view, these stocks have come down and again from a valuation point of view, probably will remain down.”
When analysts look at the decisions Xi has made over the last 12 months, they’re often framed relative to the US – ie, in terms of how this move, or that policy tweak, will advance Beijing in its rivalry with Washington.
More insights might come from asking whether Xi’s maneuvers will underline China’s native potential.
Getting Alibaba, Didi, Tencent, Baidu and others to toe the Communist Party line will surely increase Xi’s control over all facets of China Inc. And it will increase his already overwhelming odds of winning a third presidential term next year. Yet it might also hobble an industry vital to China’s journey upmarket.
The more Beijing views tech innovators as threats to the party rather than change agents creating new jobs, efficiencies and wealth, the more the Xi era risks deadening the animal spirits that are needed to rival .
There’s an argument, of course, that China heading off giant monopolies may rid Xi of the ongoing headaches Washington faces with Amazon, Facebook and Google.
As Nathan Attrill, a China expert at the Australian National University, notes, Beijing’s Didi drama “has spooked riders and drivers while energizing rivals who see a rare opportunity to chip away at a leader holding 90% of the market.”
And let’s not forget the real long-term question here, says Jeffrey Towson, a business professor at Shanghai-based China Europe International Business School, or CEIBS.
Didi “getting hammered in share price due to regulatory issues” is surely important, he says. “But that is short-term. The big question is, ‘When will they reach operating profitability?’”
Yet the CAC just put the bar for new tech startups searching for funding remarkably low. Last week, the CAC said mainland companies holding data on 1 million or more users must get cybersecurity approval before listing.
But in a nation of 1.4 billion people, which companies wouldn’t have that many users?
The lack of transparency in recent policy moves is causing gloom among some China watchers. Photo: AFP
The broader question is: How much will this plethora of issues discount China’s ?
Xi’s tech crackdown could cost China roughly $45 trillion of capital flows by 2030, according to calculations by Rhodium Group and the Atlantic Council. That’s more than 3.2 times today’s gross domestic product (GDP) squandered as Team Xi arguably puts what’s best for the party over what’s best for economic dynamism.
The Didi controversy alone might have Western investors thinking twice before getting involved in Chinese tech IPOs. As Josh Rogin, a Washington Post foreign affairs columnist, puts it: “Wall Street must now acknowledge that the risk of investing in these companies can’t be known, much less disclosed. Therefore, US investors shouldn’t be trusting their futures to China Inc.”
The thing is, China’s scale and potential make it a must-invest place for punters everywhere. And look at the “Who’s Who” of Western finance behemoths racing to increases their China operations: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BlackRock Inc, Vanguard, Amundi, Credit Suisse, Schroders – and more.
None of the above players, nor any serious economists, doubt China’s vast potential. But Xi’s team must find a balance between their control instincts and leaving capitalism alone to work its magic. The events of the past 12 months suggest the former is thriving at the expense of the latter.
13. Tanks are here to stay: What the Army’s future armored fleet will look like
"Gunner sabot, tank, identified, fire, on the way." I think I remember some of the fire commands from tank table VIII at Graf in 1985. I was the night range OIC for the 3dID tank gunnery qualification. I think some 250 tanks went down the range over a month and I observed every one firing at night. It was quite an experience for an infantry officer at the time. There is nothing more awesome than seeing the power of M1 tanks firing.
Tanks are here to stay: What the Army’s future armored fleet will look like
Whether one is looking at aggression on Europe’s eastern borders, strikes by China against allies in the Pacific or Iranian subterfuge in the Middle East, the current answer to those problems has revolved around ubiquitous sensors to know what’s going on and longer-range, faster-moving fires to hit where it hurts.
The Navy wants more ships with better protection, and a top Air Force general called Army long range fires plans “stupid,” saying his service has that covered. The Marines spent most of the past year ditching tanks to become more nimble in their naval efforts.
But the Army looks on and its top leaders, one of them an aviator, point to an old adage: You don’t win a conflict until you control where people live — on land.
While the Army is putting a lot of its weight behind better fires, networks and sensors, it’s also doubling down on armored vehicles. That means armored troop transports, robotic battle buddies and the mainstay of the ground fight — the tank.
Modified Bradley Fighting Vehicles, known as Mission Enabling Technologies – Demonstrators, and Robotic Combat Vehicles, are used at Fort Carson, Colo., during training in summer 2020. (Jerome Aliotta/Army)
The Army faces a $3.7 billion funding cut. While the service is keeping money for the Next Generation Combat Vehicle program and continuing upgrades to existing tanks and other vehicles, they’re doing less than previously planned and slowing the rate of updating the fleet to save money for modernization elsewhere.
Those would include delays to M1 Abrams tank upgrades and a 10 percent reduction in research funding vital to creating new options for the future vehicle fleet.
Still, advances are coming in every direction, from on board drone swarms and new armor to electronic attack and defense, as well as a host of added formations to support and exploit armor’s role. Armored vehicles and formations may be unrecognizable in the next decade. But the mission remains the same — take and hold terrain.
Making the case
Maj. Gen. Ross Coffman is the director of the Army’s Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team for Army Futures Command. He made the case at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in March that while Russia remains an adversary, the true threat that extends beyond its own region is China.
“Any belief that China would self limit in conflict is shortsighted to me,” Coffman said. “You can trust that in conflict they will fight globally. They’re going to use every arrow in their quiver.”
While talk of hotspots like the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait grabs attention, Coffman noted those areas are only about 5 degrees of China’s periphery. They’ve had wars or clashes with India and Vietnam in their backyard.
“China has a long history of fighting on their periphery. They use armored vehicles every time,” he said.
But China is a growing worldwide player with budding interests in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
“It will go global fast, faster than wildfire. You’ll go from the South China Sea to the Arctic overnight, to Africa,” he added.
Coffman and his boss, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville, have repeatedly said that while the air, sea and space domains will all play a part, the land is the decisive factor in conflict.
McConville pointed to his own experience in an April interview with the Washington Post. Armored forces have real value in cities. And for years, Army leadership has talked about the increasing urbanization of warfare and the likelihood that the Army will find itself in a megacity, or at least an urban fight.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is displayed on a screen as Type 99A2 Chinese battle tanks take part in a parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of Japan's surrender during World War II held in front of Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, Sept. 3, 2015. (Ng Han Guan/AP)
McConville previously saw armored forces used in Sadr City while serving with the 1st Cavalry Division, and how Army tanks supported Marines in Fallujah.
At the center of that maneuver, Coffman noted, is the armored force, providing mobile, protected, accurate, lethal fires in high volume.
“If you want to take land, if you want to hold land, if you want to clear land, you need the ground element,” Coffman said. “Combined arms maneuver is how we will be decisive, how we will clear and hold land.”
And committing armor sends a message.
“When you’ve called the U.S. Army, particularly the armored force, you’ve made the decision,” Coffman said. “You’re all in.”
High demand, changes needed
While high operational tempo within special operations is often at the top of the headlines, air defense and armored units have also been frequently tapped across the globe in recent years.
In 2020, McConville said he worried about ops tempo in general, but he specifically pointed to air defense artillery and ABCTs as his top concerns.
Those ABCTs on rotations to Korea, Europe and the Middle East, are also in the midst of major modernization. That means more than adding new equipment, but also training and adjusting tactics.
In 2018, the Army announced it was converting a Stryker Brigade Combat Team to an ABCT. That followed the conversion of an Infantry BCT to an ABCT the previous year.
New Russian Armata tanks roll during the Victory Parade marking the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, in Red Square in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, May 9, 2015. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)
Recovering armor assets has taken years after conversions in the opposite direction during the early 2000s, when armored forces gave way to Stryker or infantry teams tailored for Iraq and Afghanistan. So, when even one BCT is converted, it’s significant.
When those conversions concluded, the Army had 11 ABCTs in the active forces and five ABCTs in the Army National Guard.
While more units gives the force added options, the technology in most of the ABCT platforms is decades, sometimes more than half-a-century, old.
To keep pace with new threats, from EW to drones and better anti-tank weapons, the Army is doing a years-long overhaul of nearly every part of the ABCT.
Adversaries and tactics
Russian officials have announced that they would field the T-14 Armata tank in 2022. They have described it as, “the best killing system on the planet.” It could arrive 25 tons lighter, faster and with as much advanced capabilities as what the Army has now.
Coffman noted that China has an estimated 7,000 tanks and 3,000 infantry fighting vehicles in its arsenal now, far outnumbering the U.S. inventory.
“In order to be decisive, we have to be there with armor to prevent the Chinese [from] getting into position of relative advantage,” Coffman said at the March CSIS event.
Retired Army Col. David Johnson now works as a principal researcher for the Rand Corporation and adjunct scholar for the Modern War Institute at West Point. He wrote two papers for Rand — one in 2011 and the other in 2016 — that struck upon many of the armor challenges the Army now faces.
Johnson told Army Times that simply looking at what China and Russia are fielding, like tanks and airborne-portable armored infantry carriers, should help U.S. planners understand what ground threats they may face.
There will be ABCTs a decade from now and they will look pretty similar to what they do now, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, director of the Center for National Defense at the Heritage Foundation. He sees the Abrams still in the formation for possibly 60 years or more, when paired with autonomy and robotic platforms — both air and ground.
U.S. soldiers move toward simulated opposing forces with a Multipurpose Unmanned Tactical Transport during training in Hawaii, July 22, 2016. (Staff Sgt. Christopher Hubenthal/DoD)
Current BCT commanders are only starting to incorporate new technologies. Future commanders will have to manage a host of tools, platforms and capabilities previously handled higher up the chain at the division or corps level, such as electronic warfare, cyber and space assets.
But while those brigades will remain, how many and where they’re located might matter more than ever. Spoehr sees two ABCTs in Poland at Russia’s flank as a key deterrent. The single ABCT in Korea isn’t bad, but another would help.
The key, though, will be recovering sea lift capability to get the tanks and other heavy assets ashore or move them around the theater, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.
Army veteran Paul Scharre helped establish policies on unmanned and autonomous systems in the Defense Department. He is now the vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security. He is also the author of “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War.”
He, too, said that the ABCT is a useful tool — if it’s available.
“The biggest concern I have is a bunch of tanks in Fort Hood isn’t going to help you in a conflict in Russia,” Scharre said.
He argues that the Army’s role in the Pacific is more supporting than leading, and it should continue to focus efforts on Eastern Europe, where the ground component should be present and ready.
That means an ABCT in Europe will likely look different than one on rotation in the Middle East, Africa or the Pacific.
The past two decades of counterinsurgency and counter terrorism has seen the Army focus warfighting at the company or platoon level, Scharre said. But optimizing for a fight against Russia or China raises that to a division or corps-level fight.
A soldier drives a tank simulator at Fort Benning, Ga., designed to replicate in real-time the look and feel of driving a tank in a combat. (Patrick A. Albright/Army)
Deploying armor brigades must look to where they’re headed, watch their likely adversary and study what equipment their unit needs organically, rather than rely on being sent equipment from higher up.
Johnson noted that much of the ground gear of China and Russia looks very similar. Being prepared to confront one can help with the other.
And for near-peer threats such as North Korea — with a seemingly endless stock of artillery pointed south — armor is vital.
“If you don’t have armor, you’re not even a speed bump, you’re an artillery sponge,” Johnson said.
Experts roundly agreed that what might be most likely is the United States ends up engaged with a proxy of one of its adversaries. There, a fully-equipped ABCT can still be useful.
“The next war is likely not in mainland China or with Russia,” Spoehr said. “It’s with a third party, maybe equipped by the Russians or supported by the Chinese.”
For lessons on what that might look like, some have been pointing to a very recent conflict.
Nagorno-Karabakh and armor
Recent fighting in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia has given armor supporters and detractors a lot of talking points since fighting concluded in late 2020.
Depending on the take, the destruction of tanks by precision drone strikes either spelled the end of armor as we know it or served as an example of what unprotected, poorly deployed armor would face.
Experts have pointed out that Armenia used Soviet Union-era tanks without solid overhead defenses.
Spoehr said that the Armenian forces presented the most vulnerable formations by lacking any real counter-drone capability.
Armenian tanks stand idled in the town of Beylagan on October 5stand idle. Azeri army officials said were seized during the ongoing fighting with Armenia over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region, in the town of Beylagan on October 5, 2020. (Tofik Babayev/AFP via Getty Images)
Most modern tanks being deployed by the United States, Russia and China carry advanced armor packages, sensors, active protection systems and work in concert with associated ground-to-air defense and air forces.
Retired Army Col. John Antal, who commanded tank and combined arms units from the platoon to regimental level, points to this conflict as a real-world example from which Army leaders, especially ground combat commanders, should draw lessons.
Writing on the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command-led “Mad Scientist” blog, Antal said the conflict hints at what challenges armor commanders and others will face — avoiding being sensed and protecting vehicles that don’t involve armor from drone swarms and more.
Improving and replacing
While the M-1 Abrams has been running since 1980, a series of upgrades has kept it at the center of the formation, where it will likely remain for the coming decades, though with improvements.
For instance, the Army is testing the Modular Active Protection System, which has sensors and countermeasures to find, track and destroy anti-tank guided missiles and rocket propelled grenades.
But rather than fleets of manned Abrams rolling alone, other vehicles will take on old and new tasks to ease their burden. Despite a nearly $4 billion overall cut, the Army still plans to spend $1.46 billion next year alone on Next Generation Combat Vehicles, a top modernization priority.
Tanks and Strykers will get upgrades, to the tune of 70 tanks at a cost of $981 million and 187 Strykers with a price tag of nearly $1 billion, according to the most recent budget proposal.
And an Optionally Manned Tank is likely to fight alongside the Abrams. The Army expects to have prototypes of the robot tank after selecting the builder by 2023.
Army Futures Command held demonstrations of technology and equipment on May 16, 2019 at the Texas A&M University System’s RELLIS Campus in Bryan, Texas. Six weapons and defense industry vendors showcased seven autonomous combat vehicles in an effort for Army officials to decide which machines fit their needs best and what needs to be improved on. (Luke J. Allen/Army)
The vehicle will act as a kind of sensor node, pulling in data from other surveillance platforms, such as drones or ground sensors and using artificial intelligence to not just detect but identify threats in its area.
Also, the Army has been working on its Robotic Combat Vehicle program, which is developing light, medium and heavy versions of what would serve as wingmen for manned ground vehicles and tanks. Light and medium versions are headed for assessments by soldiers at the company level next year.
The Army is also looking to return to early armor roots with a light tank, which will push tank capabilities out of the armored brigades and give IBCTs a new tool.
The program, dubbed Mobile Protected Firepower, essentially aims at giving a type of airborne-transportable light tank to its infantry and quick response forces.
The MPF isn’t built to go after enemy armor.
Instead, it’s expected to be a more robust firepower platform that can go places heavy tanks can’t. That’s because they want it to be air-dropped and its weight and dimensions allow it to cross weaker bridges and narrow passes that would stymie a big tank.
An instructor teaches a soldier from 4th Infantry Division how to operate robotic combat vehicle systems from inside the Mission Enabling Technologies – Demonstrator (MET-D) during testing at a Fort Carson, Colorado training area in early July 2020. (Sgt. Liane Hatch/Army)
Two companies had prototype vehicles in developmental tests at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, this past October.
The 82nd Airborne Division has soldiers kicking the treads on the two light tank prototypes from January to June 2021.
The OMFV program is the Army’s effort to replace the aging Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which has been in service since the 1980s.
By early 2023, Coffman said, the Army expects to pick three companies for testing prototypes. The winner and new fighting vehicle is scheduled for 2027, with a battalion’s worth of OMFVs fielded by 2029.
Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles are also a long-awaited replacement for the M1113 armored personnel carrier, which has been in service since 1960 and makes up nearly a third of the Armored Brigade Combat Team’s tracked fleet.
Soldiers from 1st Cavalry Division drive through a low-water crossing in the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) after completing field testing on Fort Hood, Texas. ( Maj. Carson Petry/Army)
The AMPV will field multiple variants, including a general-purpose vehicle for resupply and casualty evacuation; a mission command variant with communications and network systems; a medical treatment vehicle for a “mobile protected environment” for a surgeon and medical staff; and a medical evacuation or ambulance version.
Additionally, Capt. Chrisopher Telle posed the question as to whether the Army needs a medium tank in its ranks in the Winter edition of Armor magazine titled, “A Balanced Team: The Need for Options in Armored Warfare.”
The Abrams weighs in at more than 80 tons, while adversary tanks are considerably lighter, such as the Russian T-14 and T-90. The Chinese type 98 all fall between 50 and 55 tons. That lighter load makes them more maneuverable, Telle wrote.
The captain argued that a medium tank would restore the Army’s ability to fight a peer threat in a variety of terrain with less logistical constraints. Therefore, it would best fit into the Stryker Brigade Combat Team formations.
For now, this is simply the brainchild of Telle, but Army officials have kept open the idea of a range of vehicle types in their public discussions of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle program.
All-robot attack? Not quite yet
For at least the coming decades there will continue to be a role for humans on the actual battlefield, but a different one than today, Scharre said.
While aerial drones can be flown continents away by pilots in Nevada, that’s not the same as running ground vehicles.
Scharre sees a human-crewed tank moving farther back from the frontline fighting as disposable autonomous or controlled systems move into the close force-on-force role.
For that, a tank and other crewed armor assets will work more like control nodes, directing the nearby battle in a protected role.
He likens the advancing role of crewed armor to that of infantry forces in large-scale combat – a mopping up force.
And those changes won’t come all at once, but as technology, tactics and experience develops.
How these things change concepts of operations will be different in 2025 than in 2030 or 2035, Scharre said.
14. Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House
Given what we know about Russian doctrine, intentions and operations it does seem like this would be a logical course of action from Russia's perspective. Of course this will be denounced by some.
The fact that Russia wants to interfere in US democracy should unite all Americans. But the very idea that Russia seeks to do that has somehow become divisive. Why is that? (rhetorical yes, as I think I know the answer).
Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House
Exclusive: Documents suggest Russia launched secret multi-agency effort to interfere in US democracy
The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.
They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.
Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.
Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.
The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.
Vladimir Putin holds a meeting with permanent members of the security council on 22 January 2016 at the Kremlin. Photograph: Alexei Nikolsky/Russian presidential press service/TASS
The Kremlin responded dismissively. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the idea that Russian leaders had met and agreed to support Trump in at the meeting in early 2016 was “a great pulp fiction” when contacted by the Guardian on Thursday morning.
The report – “No 32-04 \ vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.
There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.
There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.
The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.
“It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.
This extract from a secret Kremlin document gives details of the Russian operation to help an impulsive and ‘mentally unstable’ Donald Trump to become US president
This would help bring about Russia’s favoured “theoretical political scenario”. A Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system” and see hidden discontent burst into the open, it predicts.
The Kremlin summit
There is no doubt that the meeting in January 2016 took place – and that it was convened inside the Kremlin.
An official photo of the occasion shows Putin at the head of the table, seated beneath a Russian Federation flag and a two-headed golden eagle. Russia’s then prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, attended, together with the veteran foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Also present were Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister in charge of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency; Mikhail Fradkov, the then chief of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service; and Alexander Bortnikov, the boss of the FSB spy agency.Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB’s former director, attended too as security council secretary.
According to a press release, the discussion covered the economy and Moldova.
The document seen by the Guardian suggests the security council’s real, covert purpose was to discuss the confidential proposals drawn up by the president’s analytical service in response to US sanctions against Moscow.
Donald Trump after winning the Florida state primary in West Palm Beach, Florida, in March 2016. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use ‘all possible force’ to ensure a Trump presidential victory. Photograph: Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty Images
The author appears to be Vladimir Symonenko, the senior official in charge of the Kremlin’s expert department – which provides Putin with analytical material and reports, some of them based on foreign intelligence.
The papers indicate that on 14 January 2016 Symonenko circulated a three-page executive summary of his team’s conclusions and recommendations.
In a signed order two days later, Putin instructed the then chief of his foreign policy directorate, Alexander Manzhosin, to convene a closed briefing of the national security council.
Its purpose was to further study the document, the order says. Manzhosin was given a deadline of five days to make arrangements.
What was said inside the second-floor Kremlin senate building room is unknown. But the president and his intelligence officials appear to have signed off on a multi-agency plan to interfere in US democracy, framed in terms of justified self-defence.
Various measures are cited that the Kremlin might adopt in response to what it sees as hostile acts from Washington. The paper lays out several American weaknesses. These include a “deepening political gulf between left and right”, the US’s “media-information” space, and an anti-establishment mood under President Barack Obama.
The ‘special part’ of a secret Kremlin document setting out measures to cause turmoil and division in America
The paper does not name Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 rival. It does suggest employing media resources to undermine leading US political figures.
There are paragraphs on how Russia might insert “media viruses” into American public life, which could become self-sustaining and self-replicating. These would alter mass consciousness, especially in certain groups, it says.
After the meeting, according to a separate leaked document, Putin issued a decree setting up a new and secret interdepartmental commission. Its urgent task was to realise the goals set out in the “special part” of document No 32-04 \ vd.
Members of the new working body were stated to include Shoigu, Fradkov and Bortnikov. Shoigu was named commission chair. The decree – ukaz in Russian – said the group should take practical steps against the US as soon as possible. These were justified on national security grounds and in accordance with a 2010 federal law, 390-FZ, which allows the council to formulate state policy on security matters.
According to the document, each spy agency was given a role. The defence minister was instructed to coordinate the work of subdivisions and services. Shoigu was also responsible for collecting and systematising necessary information and for “preparing measures to act on the information environment of the object” – a command, it seems, to hack sensitive American cyber-targets identified by the SVR.
Vladimir Putin in 2016. The Russian president has repeatedly denied accusations of interfering in western democracy Photograph: Sputnik/Reuters
The SVR was told to gather additional information to support the commission’s activities. The FSB was assigned counter-intelligence. Putin approved the apparent document, dated 22 January 2016, which his chancellery stamped.
The measures were effective immediately on Putin’s signature, the decree says. The spy chiefs were given just over a week to come back with concrete ideas, to be submitted by 1 February.
Written in bureaucratic language, the papers appear to offer an unprecedented glimpse into the usually hidden world of Russian government decision-making.
Putin has repeatedly denied accusations of interfering in western democracy. The documents seem to contradict this claim. They suggest the president, his spy officers and senior ministers were all intimately involved in one of the most important and audacious espionage operations of the 21st century: a plot to help put the “mentally unstable” Trump in the White House.
The papers appear to set out a route map for what actually happened in 2016.
A matter of weeks after the security council meeting, GRU hackers raided the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and subsequently released thousands of private emails in an attempt to hurt Clinton’s election campaign.
Hillary Clinton at the Democratic party’s convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July 2016. GRU hackers released thousands of private emails in an attempt to hurt Clinton’s election campaign. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The report seen by the Guardian features details redolent of Russian intelligence work, diplomatic sources say. The thumbnail sketch of Trump’s personality is characteristic of Kremlin spy agency analysis, which places great emphasis on building up a profile of individuals using both real and cod psychology.
Moscow would gain most from a Republican victory, the paper states. This could lead to a “social explosion” that would in turn weaken the US president, it says. There were international benefits from a Trump win, it stresses. Putin would be able in clandestine fashion to dominate any US-Russia bilateral talks, to deconstruct the White House’s negotiating position, and to pursue bold foreign policy initiatives on Russia’s behalf, it says.
Other parts of the multi-page report deal with non-Trump themes. It says sanctions imposed by the US after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea have contributed to domestic tensions. The Kremlin should seek alternative ways of attracting liquidity into the Russian economy, it concludes.
The document recommends the reorientation of trade and hydrocarbon exports towards China. Moscow’s focus should be to influence the US and its satellite countries, it says, so they drop sanctions altogether or soften them.
‘Spell-binding’ documents
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s spy agencies and author of The Red Web, said the leaked material “reflects reality”. “It’s consistent with the procedures of the security services and the security council,” he said. “Decisions are always made like that, with advisers providing information to the president and a chain of command.”
He added: “The Kremlin micromanages most of these operations. Putin has made it clear to his spies since at least 2015 that nothing can be done independently from him. There is no room for independent action.” Putin decided to release stolen DNC emails following a security council meeting in April 2016, Soldatov said, citing his own sources.
Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s former ambassador in Moscow and an associate fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, described the documents as “spell-binding”. “They reflect the sort of discussion and recommendations you would expect. There is a complete misunderstanding of the US and China. They are written for a person [Putin] who can’t believe he got anything wrong.”
Wood added: “There is no sense Russia might have made a mistake by invading Ukraine. The report is fully in line with the sort of thing I would expect in 2016, and even more so now. There is a good deal of paranoia. They believe the US is responsible for everything. This view is deeply dug into the soul of Russia’s leaders.”
Trump did not initially respond to a request for comment.
Later, Liz Harrington, his spokesperson, issued a statement on his behalf.
“This is disgusting. It’s fake news, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA was fake news. It’s just the Radical Left crazies doing whatever they can to demean everybody on the right.
“It’s fiction, and nobody was tougher on Russia than me, including on the pipeline, and sanctions. At the same time we got along with Russia. Russia respected us, China respected us, Iran respected us, North Korea respected us.
“And the world was a much safer place than it is now with mentally unstable leadership.”
15. Education Against Extremism: Suggestions for a Smarter Stand-Down
Excerpts:
Finally, we should resist the temptation to sideline discussing these issues because they have been politicized by elected officials. The stand-down, and content associated with it, have led to a series of accusations by Congressional Republicans that the U.S. military is attempting to enforce “woke” policies, thereby bringing the “culture war” to the Department of Defense. Some have even gone so far as to encourage active-duty members to report on their fellow servicemembers, while others have targeted professors and courses at the U.S. Military Academy and across military education. This contentious debate culminated in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley tersely telling members of the House Armed Services Committee that he found their accusations “personally … offensive.” This, in turn, prompted some conservative commentators to mock and insult Milley himself.
We are at precarious moment in American history, one where the country is actively negotiating whether right-wing violent extremism is to be tolerated in mainstream politics. But the Department of Defense definition of extremism remains clear in its rejection of supremacist ideology and the use of violence to achieve domestic political objectives. The military should remain committed to upholding this definition and empowering its own leaders and servicemembers in to foster an environment of unity, teamwork, and cohesion. And this requires fostering a serious, comprehensive, and informed discussion about extremism.
Education Against Extremism: Suggestions for a Smarter Stand-Down - War on the Rocks
A large number of veterans, and even some active-duty officers, were among those who stormed the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection. In response, the military leadership held small-group stand-down sessions across the force last spring to discuss the presence of extremism in the ranks and how best to eradicate it.
Yet, recent remarks from some officers tasked with implementing these sessions have raised concerns about their effectiveness and the uniformity with which they were executed. Worse, some participants described the stand-down day as “insufficient” while others wrote an open letter claiming that the event actually “undermine[d] trust.” Indeed, rather than serve as a productive moment for reflection and problem-solving, the stand-down instead appeared to be mired in the malaise that has plagued other “awareness days” focused on persistent problems such as suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sexual assault.
Based on what we have observed in our capacity as a department chair and a director of a selective scholars’ program at the Army War College, part of the problem stems from the lack of seriousness and preparation surrounding these sessions. To give extremism in the ranks the attention that it deserves, it should be folded into the regular curriculum. At the Army War College, we have tried to address this by implementing several structural reforms that better equip our faculty members to lead discussions about sensitive personnel issues. While there remains a long way to go, we argue that by approaching these topics from a civil-military relations perspective, bolstered by expert panels and prepared readings, we will better prepare our students for their future as senior leaders.
Senior-leader education cannot treat these stand-down days as just another training and checkbox exercise. We should instead critically engage the wealth of knowledge that exists around right-wing extremism in the military and use this as an opportunity to brainstorm ways in which senior officers can change culture in the absence of regulation. We should develop a framework that can address personnel issues in a thoughtful and rigorous way whenever they come up — and devote the kind of resources and care toward these issues that we do with every other lesson in the curriculum.
A Problematic Approach
The problems surrounding this spring’s extremism stand-down are not unique. As faculty members in professional military education, we have witnessed years of events known as “stand-downs,” “wingman days,” “awareness days,” and other training events intended to address the personnel issues that are currently plaguing the force. Yet these all suffer from a similar neglect — not the fault of any particular instructor, commander, or leader, but rather the result of everyone being overtasked and under-resourced when trying to accomplish educational objectives.
Two issues in particular regularly emerge. The first is the lack of institutional care that accompanies these sessions. They are rarely announced to the student body ahead of time, and even more rarely accompanied by a preview of what is to be discussed. As a result, students enter discussions unprepared and without proper time to reflect and self-assess. Sessions are held ad hoc and often done offsite, away from classroom materials and other resources that would communicate importance and encourage thoughtful, rigorous discussion. The institution rarely if ever spends money to bring in outside expertise, preferring to task lectures to students and faculty even though they are rarely experts on the topic. And despite the prevalence of student surveys on almost every aspect of the curriculum from core courses to advising, no student or faculty survey is conducted to evaluate the institution’s performance on these days. No follow-up sessions are announced, and discussions about potential solutions are rarely actually passed up to higher leadership. All of this builds to a general sentiment that stand-downs are unappreciated “add-on” days, rather than important parts of the professional military education experience.
Second, we lack a common framework for addressing the problems that we are tasked to tackle. Faculty preparation, if done at all, is largely limited strictly to a single department or select group of uniformed personnel. While most lessons in the core curriculum are accompanied by a corresponding faculty workshop, where lesson planners run through their intent for the session and offer their expertise and experience of teaching, instructors are instead sent into these small-group sessions largely blind — resulting in an unstructured discussion informed by nothing but individual experience, speculation, and emotional response. This is particularly problematic when dealing with issues like race and extremism. If a white commander has never had personal experience of confronting cases of white-power extremism, it becomes nearly impossible to run a discussion that relies on personal experience to generate debate and discussion. The result is a series of meandering conversations based primarily around the experiences of one or two people, uninformed by history, data, or potential solutions.
This dismissive approach to stand-down days is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it is bad for civil-military relations. Stand-down days are unique because they are ordered from the top down: They are one of the few times a year when we are explicitly tasked to address a particular issue that is on the secretary of defense’s mind. When the institutional response, however, is to simply treat these days as a “checkbox” exercise, it sends a signal to students and faculty alike that the secretary’s guidance can be effectively ignored. Over the last two months, Secretary Lloyd Austin not only ordered the entire force, both civilian and uniformed, to dedicate an entire day to addressing extremism in the ranks — a combined total of over 22 million man-hours — but he himself made a video addressing the force and had the service chiefs do the same. When professional military education institutions approach this with less preparation and attention than they do a lesson on ideology in World War II, they are in fact engaging in a form of soft shirking that undermines civilian control.
Second, not taking these days more seriously alienates those who participate. By consistently under-valuing and under-preparing for stand-down days, we risk alienating those members of the force who are being asked to share difficult stories and contribute their experiences to discussion. “Difficult conversations” about race, sexual assault, and suicide are emotionally taxing on minority groups, who are often asked to perform diversity, equity, and inclusion work without additional benefits or pay. When they take the leap of faith to contribute, only to discover that the day has been put together in an ad hoc manner, it further signals that the institution does not care about their experience. Indeed, some sexual assault survivors report that sexual assault and harassment awareness events only end up re-traumatizing them because of the careless way in which the sessions are handled. Similarly, conversations about extremism and race can be counter-productive when minorities are asked to share their personal encounters with extremist behavior without the proper institutional support. We need people with these experiences to be vulnerable and trust leadership to be sensitive to their concerns — and the nature of trust means that we only get so many bites at the apple.
Finally, it is problematic for the education of our senior military officers. The students who we educate in professional military education go on to lead at the highest levels of the military. They are the ones who will be responsible for setting personnel policy in the future, and those responsible for designing and implementing future stand-down days. Combating issues like domestic extremism in the ranks will be just as much a part of their job description as planning the next global campaign — yet we devote precious little time or energy to preparing students for doing so. The result is a senior leadership corps that continues to be tone-deaf in its response to personnel problems. From the now well-publicized “escape room” theater to discuss Sexual Harassment Assault Response Prevention (more popularly known as SHARP) reporting requirements to teal pancakes for sexual assault awareness, leaders routinely fail to treat these issues as the opportunities that they are to check in on the force.
What Professional Military Education Can Do
Professional military education has a unique role to play in changing the military’s response to extremism. As the United States, and thus the military’s recruiting pool, diversifies, senior officers will find themselves leading a force that increasingly looks very different from them — at least until minority retention issues are solved within the officer corps as well. These officers will need to know how to build trust in politically divisive times without simply relying on hackneyed tropes like “we all bleed green.” They will continue having to address personnel issues involving extremism, sexual assault, suicide, and religion. Just in the last year, we have seen the force deal with the murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillen and the Fort Hood report, the death of George Floyd, and subsequent revelations about discrimination in the Air Force, not to mention the participation of multiple active-duty military members in the Jan. 6 insurrection. When professional military education denies its students the opportunity to thoroughly discuss and debate these problems in an informed way, we do a disservice to the force that reverberates for a generation.
Yet it does not have to be this way. Indeed, professional military education already has a tried-and-true method for tackling controversial, important issues — through the education and lessons that it already offers to students. Rather than treat stand-down days as one-off exercises and “training sessions,” military educators should instead fold these topics into the broader curriculum and teach them as they would other elements of leadership and strategy. This includes assigning readings selected by in-house specialists, outlining learning objectives, and offering suggested discussion questions that can spark and shape conversation in productive ways. Professional military education should survey its students after the lesson to identify ways to improve and engage outside experts to help to supplement readings and discussions. In sum, stand-down days should be given the same kind of institutional attention and credit that the rest of the curriculum merits.
At the Army War College, we have recently made significant changes in our approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion and sexual assault awareness, though there remains a long way to go. Last year, we changed how Sexual Harassment Assault Response Prevention training was delivered to make it seminar-based, led by prepared faculty instructors supported by lesson materials and readings explicitly crafted for a senior-leader audience. We set aside three “skills days” for discussion and engagement with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the Army, and added a specific lesson on diversity in our Strategic Leadership course. An elective on “inclusive leadership” was added to the curriculum, which was met with high interest from our students and was subsequently well-subscribed.
For the stand-down, the Army War College convened a panel of experts to discuss the problems associated with extremism in the force and then broke into seminars facilitated by prepared faculty members. Next year, we will integrate personnel issues more fully into the curriculum, embedding discussion on the three harmful behaviors (sexual assault/harassment, extremism/racism, and suicide) into our core Strategic Leadership Course, and encouraging student research on combatting them that will filter up to the chief of staff of the Army.
Yet these changes, while welcome, are both recent and reversible. Without sessions that established buy-in from the entire faculty, seminar-based discussions last year varied considerably in their effectiveness. Using “skills days” to deliver content means that they are easily removed during an already busy year. And electives offer programming to students already interested in the topic — arguably those who need additional education the least — and can be cancelled. Institutionalizing these efforts will therefore require sustained commitment from curriculum developers and unqualified support from leadership, lest they turn into temporary anomalies. Yet they also provide a blueprint for how other professional military education institutions could approach integrating personnel issues into student education. All in all, we should leverage our expertise to create a lesson plan and curriculum for our students that adequately prepares them for the problems they will face in a rapidly changing organization.
Make the Content Compelling
Substance is also important. What follows are a series of suggestions for how we might best conduct discussions about extremism and other personnel issues going forward.
First, name the issue. The veterans who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were members of groups that advocated for the violent disruption of government processes, as well as for white power and other extremist ideologies. Department of Defense Instruction 1325.06 explicitly defines extremist organizations as those that “advocate supremacist, extremist, or criminal gang doctrine, ideology or causes; including those that attempt to create illegal discrimination based on race, creed, color, sex, religion, ethnicity, or national origin; advocate the use of force, violence, or criminal activity; or otherwise engage in efforts to deprive individuals of their civil rights.” This definition is important, but it only takes us so far. More specific guidance from leadership would be invaluable, but in its absence faculty can foster a productive conversation dedicated to defining the problem. Indeed, until we begin with a common understanding of what extremist behaviors we are concerned about, discussion will stagnate around unhelpful questions like “what does extremism mean to you?” Tackling it up front helps to move the discussion forward and gives everyone a common definition and language to use.
Second, discuss the historic scope of the problem. In a working paper they presented at the 2021 Air University Diversity and Military Effectiveness Workshop, Jacqueline Whitt and Amber Batura argued that the military often tells itself a series of myths around social issues that erase the degree to which the force continues to grapple with discrimination and extremism. These myths tend to be along the lines of “While the military was initially opposed to the integration of a minority group, once the decision was made we all saluted and incorporated them, and now we are color blind.” This misperception bleeds into all group discussions about diversity, inclusion, and extremism in professional military education, and it will continue to until we take a closer look at history.
The U.S. military has a well-documented record of tolerating and even fostering extremist behavior — Kathleen Belew traces it in Bringing the War Home, William Taylor outlines it in his social history of military service, and a series of authors including Nora Bensahel, David Barno, and Simone Askew have examined it in War on the Rocks. This history is important because solutions to problems change based on how institutionally entrenched they are. If we treat topics like extremism as exceptions — thus ignoring the long history of discriminatory and violent behavior that has plagued the force for decades — we set our students up to develop short-term solutions that will ultimately do little to address deeper cultural issues. Understanding the strategic context, therefore, is a critical first step to thinking about topics like extremism in the ranks.
Third, get buy-in from the small group — both during faculty development and in seminar. Discuss why it is important that the force and future senior leaders pay attention to extremism in the ranks. Senior leadership has acknowledged repeatedly that there is a need for these discussions to serve as starting points, rather than ends in themselves. But in order to promote continuing conversations, our students should themselves become stakeholders in the process. And while there is truth to the secretary’s statement that “we must retain the trust of the American people,” this concept is too nebulous for even the brightest students to hold onto through multiple rounds of uncomfortable and oftentimes raw discussions with their subordinates. We therefore have students walk through four concrete and distinct ways that extremism in the force can compromise military effectiveness and civil-military relations more generally. When this problem is tackled from a civil-military relations perspective, students do not have to be experts in extremism per se in order to directly relate to the consequences of these attitudes on their soldiers and across the force.
In order to get buy in, we start at the lowest level of effect: unit trust and cohesion. When one member of the force is suspected or known to be a believer in white supremacist ideology, it undermines trust across the unit. The military has been granted significant authority over individuals’ lives in the name of establishing trust inside the unit. Offenses that are considered personal problems in civilian society, like adultery, are instead criminalized by the Uniform Code of Military Justice because of the need for trust, cohesion, and faith in one’s unit members. What effect does a commander who regularly ignores extremist rhetoric have on trust inside a diverse unit? When leaders tolerate bad behavior, that affects culture. And when trust declines, so does the organization’s ability to cope and adapt in the face of adversity, thereby reducing resiliency.
We then move on to the strategic level. Extremist ideology, and particularly the white-power movement, advocates for the superiority of certain types of people. Such hubris is incompatible with perspective-taking, a practice necessary to understanding the politics, strategic dispositions, and military cultures of globally dispersed allies, adversaries, and competitors. Of course, the denigration — whether in extremist or milder forms — of others’ cultures, ethnicities, and sociopolitical belief systems is also ethically problematic for a country and a military that espouses the moral worth and dignity of every person. In his latest book, H. R. McMaster calls for “strategic empathy” — the ability to put oneself in the shoes of one’s enemy and understand the interests that they are pursuing. This necessarily requires a level of respect and awareness that is largely missing from those who espouse extremist ideologies and white power. Just as attitudes about racial superiority contributed to strategic blunders by Germany, Japan, and even the United States leading up to and during World War II, the United States risks underestimating the intelligence, interests, and strategic acumen of its adversaries when extremists are in positions of power. Today, the United States already struggles to incorporate cultural experts into intelligence assessments and planning due to security protocols — a problem that has long been identified as a barrier to good assessment. What’s more, research suggests that diverse groups are less prone to group think, and that women-led teams tend to be more collaborative by nature. When the U.S. military sits quietly by while extremists create hostile environments for women and minorities, we do significant damage to our capacity for strategic assessment and ultimately contribute to diminished battlefield performance.
Next, we look at the impact on the force as a whole, particularly with regard to recruiting and retention. It is well known that there is a leaky pipeline amongst women and minorities in the service. Some of that has to do with the concentration of women and minorities in non-combat specialties, both by explicit policy and by preference. But culture also plays a significant role in deterring women and minorities from joining certain communities and chasing many out when they do. The Fort Hood report released last year explicitly stated that the toxic climate that led to Guillen’s murder “is not attributable to any one commander or command staff. Nor did it spontaneously combust during the review period or as a direct consequence of recent events. It was a culture that … developed over time and out of neglect over a series of commands that predated 2018. A toxic culture was allowed to harden and set.” If the military is seen by its members to tolerate racial discrimination and extremist ideologies, minorities will continue to flee the military at higher rates than whites, negatively impacting retention and further separating the military from the rest of American society.
This then also affects recruiting. As the United States edges ever closer to becoming a minority-majority country, the military will necessarily have to increase its recruiting amongst minority groups. Already the composition of enlisted forces is seeing significant demographic change, with black Americans slightly overrepresented and Hispanic Americans now only slightly underrepresented as a share of society. Yet the officer corps, and especially senior ranks, remain overwhelmingly white — creating new challenges for officers tasked with leading a force that looks increasingly different from them. A military that is seen to be sympathetic to extremist ideology, particularly white-power ideologies, alienates the very people it depends on to maintain the health of the force.
Finally, we discuss the broader issue of how society interacts with the military. What are the implications of a military that does not look like the society it is tasked to protect? Research increasingly shows that the military sees itself as better than American society. This perception risks exacerbating what many have called a “soft praetorianism” amongst the force — damaging democratic health and civilian control.
Moving Forward
It is only after we have laid this groundwork that we can begin to have a conversation about how to combat extremism in the force. Future leaders should first appreciate the history behind, and importance of, the problem before brainstorming ways to combat it.
These discussions do not necessarily have to remain at the war college level, though senior-leader development is the natural place for strategic-level conversations about diversity in the force. Personnel issues that spark these mandated “awareness days” affect units of all kinds. Every professional military education institution has departments dedicated to the study of leadership and specialists on civil-military relations. These faculty members can help to produce thoughtful and engaging material that can generate informed discussion on personnel topics. And education at every level of the force should communicate why solving problems about extremism, sexual assault, and racism are important to the health of the military — giving these missions a sense of purpose and solidarity.
Finally, we should resist the temptation to sideline discussing these issues because they have been politicized by elected officials. The stand-down, and content associated with it, have led to a series of accusations by Congressional Republicans that the U.S. military is attempting to enforce “woke” policies, thereby bringing the “culture war” to the Department of Defense. Some have even gone so far as to encourage active-duty members to report on their fellow servicemembers, while others have targeted professors and courses at the U.S. Military Academy and across military education. This contentious debate culminated in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley tersely telling members of the House Armed Services Committee that he found their accusations “personally … offensive.” This, in turn, prompted some conservative commentators to mock and insult Milley himself.
We are at precarious moment in American history, one where the country is actively negotiating whether right-wing violent extremism is to be tolerated in mainstream politics. But the Department of Defense definition of extremism remains clear in its rejection of supremacist ideology and the use of violence to achieve domestic political objectives. The military should remain committed to upholding this definition and empowering its own leaders and servicemembers in to foster an environment of unity, teamwork, and cohesion. And this requires fostering a serious, comprehensive, and informed discussion about extremism.
Carrie A Lee is the chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College and fellow with the Truman National Security Project. You can follow her on Twitter at @CarrieALee1.
Celestino Perez is an associate professor in the Department of National Security and Strategy, director of the Carlisle Scholars Program, and Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research at the U.S. Army War College.
Opinions expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Army War College, U.S. Army, or Department of Defense.
16. China snubs senior US official in worsening diplomatic stand-off
China snubs senior US official in worsening diplomatic stand-off
amp.ft.com · by Demetri Sevastopulo · July 15, 2021
Beijing has snubbed the US by refusing to grant Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state, a meeting with her counterpart during a proposed visit to China that would have been the first top-level engagement since acrimonious talks in Alaska.
The US halted plans for Sherman to travel to Tianjin after China refused to agree to a meeting with Le Yucheng, her counterpart, according to four people familiar with the decision. China offered a meeting with Xie Feng, the number five foreign ministry official who is responsible for US affairs.
The Biden administration had been negotiating what would have been the first high-level engagement since their first meeting in Alaska, which erupted into a public spat between Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, and Yang Jiechi, the top Chinese foreign policy official.
While the state department had not said Sherman would travel to China, she had planned to visit after a trip to Japan, South Korea and Mongolia.
The Chinese snub follows a similar stand-off between the two countries’ militaries. China earlier this year rebuffed several requests for Lloyd Austin, US defence secretary, to meet General Xu Qiliang, China’s most senior military official. But China refused to engage, after previously offering a meeting with the defence minister, who is less senior in its system.
Perhaps they are trying to punish the US for insufficient respect in Anchorage
Bonnie Glaser, German Marshall Fund
Evan Medeiros, a China expert at Georgetown University, said China was “playing games” since the history of diplomatic meetings made clear Sherman should be meeting with Le, the number two foreign ministry official.
“China’s move is a dangerous one. It increases distrust, tension and the risk of miscalculation during an already fraught period,” Medeiros said.
China had originally suggested that Sherman could also hold a videocall with Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, during her visit to Tianjin.
Last month Kurt Campbell, the top White House Asia official, said the US was frustrated that China refused to arrange meetings with officials who are close to Xi Jinping. He said even Yang and Wang were “nowhere near within a hundred miles” of the Chinese president’s inner circle of trusted advisers.
The stand-off comes four months after the Alaska meeting, which also ended on an acrimonious note. At the end of the two-day meeting, Yang told Blinken in private that he would welcome a follow-on meeting in China, to which the secretary of state said “thank you”. When Yang asked if that meant he would visit, Blinken responded “thank you means thank you” in a clear indication that the US was not prepared to hold another meeting that angered China.
“Perhaps they are trying to punish the US for insufficient respect in Anchorage,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund. “Or maybe Beijing is simply testing the Biden administration, and will eventually propose a higher level ministry of foreign affairs official and the visit could be added to Sherman’s itinerary.”
Ryan Hass, a former state department China expert now at Brookings Institution, said it was “common” for the US and China to engage in haggling over protocol at the start of a new administration in Washington.
“Incoming US officials typically want to protect the protocol level at which their office historically has been received by Chinese authorities, and vice versa,” Hass said. “These types of protocol kerfuffles often — but not always — work themselves out by the time of arrival of the senior official.”
A senior state department official said the US would continue to “explore opportunities” to engage Chinese officials. “As in all travel abroad, we make announcements only once — and if — we determine that a visit has the potential to be substantive and constructive for our purposes.”
The US viewed the Sherman visit as a possible stepping stone to a China visit by Blinken that would set the stage for President Joe Biden to hold his first meeting with Xi at the G20 summit in Italy in October.
The Chinese embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
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amp.ft.com · by Demetri Sevastopulo · July 15, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
