Quotes of the Day:
“… disinformation works, and in unexpected ways. The fine line between fact and forgery may be clear in the moment an operator or an intelligence agency commits the act of falsification – for example, in the moment when a fake photograph is inserted into an otherwise genuine document, or when an unwitting influence agent is lured into casting a parliamentary vote under false pretenses, or when a bogus online account invites unwitting users to join a street demonstration, or shares extremist posts. But fronts, forgeries, and fakes don’t stop there. Active measures will shape what others think, decide, and do – and thus change reality itself. When victims read and react to forged secret documents, their reaction is real. When the cards of an influenced parliamentary vote are counted, the result is real. When social media users gather in the streets following a bogus event invitation, the demonstration is real. When readers state using racial epithets online, their views are real. These measures are active, in the sense that operations actively and immediately change views, decisions, and facts on the ground, in the now.” (p.427-428)
- Thomas Rid, Active Measures - The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
“Fight on tenaciously with uncompromising combative spirit, firm revolutionary principle, indomitable revolutionary spirit, and faith in certain victory against the enemy class."
- A principle of the Ten Great Principles of Monolithic Ideology from north Korea
"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. . .What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge."
- Justin Kruger and David Dunning, in “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”
1. FINESSING PRIMACY – Some military considerations before subversion does us in Part One
2. FINESSING PRIMACY – Some military considerations before subversion does us in Part Two
3. “Psychological” isn’t a dirty word
4. Japan’s Military Role in the Indo-Pacific
5. Sizing The Navy: Why It Takes More Warships To Prevent Conflicts Than To Win Them
6. The Militant Drone Playbook
7. Stunning Speed of Taliban Offensive Brings Afghan Government's Control Into Question
8. No rules and no borders: Inside a future cyberwar
9. General Officer Assignments
10. ‘Close to the danger zone’: Security experts warn about increasing possibility of war over Taiwan
11. Media And Western Governments Give Little Chance To Non-Violence As A Tool Of Political Change – OpEd
12. Biden Wants To Reengage With The World, But His Ambassadors Are Mostly Absent
13. China is banning karaoke songs that endanger national unity
14. What's Missing from US Missile Defense? Pentagon Aims to Find Out
15. Another ICBM test successful, Air Force says
16. Speed of Taliban Advance Surprises Biden Administration, Dismays U.S. Allies
17. US keeping distance as Afghan forces face Taliban rout
18. Opinion | With a closer look, certainty about the ‘existential’ climate threat melts away
19. America Still Needs to Rebalance to Asia
20. Why is the Taliban on such a winning streak, and can the tide be turned?
21. How Identity Propaganda Is Used to Undermine Political Power
22. CCP outsourcing propaganda campaigns to content farms in Taiwan and Australia: Think tank
23. Why Asian-Americans are embracing a common identity
1. FINESSING PRIMACY – Some military considerations before subversion does us in Part One
A long but important thought provoking read from Anna Simons in two parts:
Access Part One of the full essay HERE
FINESSING PRIMACY –
Some military considerations before subversion does us in
Part One
By Anna Simons
A political society is more than just a system for integrating unequal
organisms (though it is that); it is a system that allows organisms to
strive for inequality…
Lionel Tiger & Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal[1]
There is no end to history, no ultimate primacy, no necessary continued progress,
for the unintended consequences of human action constantly create new interstitial
problems, plural outcomes are always possible, and human beings have the capacity
to choose well or badly, for good or ill…
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power[2]
The aim of this article is to tackle how, and why, international competition as Washington currently conceives it is more likely to undermine than assist American primacy in the 21st century.
There are five overarching elements to my argument:
1) humans are competitive – this is not going to change
2) U.S. primacy will prove increasingly difficult to maintain through traditional military and economic means
3) subversion represents a clear and growing danger
4) to thwart subversion the U.S. will need to adopt more than just counter-measures
5) among other courses of action, the U.S. should consider shifting the terms of competition altogether – while it still can
The end of WWII ushered in an entirely new era, and not just thanks to the advent of nuclear weapons. For the first time since the invention of agriculture, wars of conquest were no longer allowed. The Allied victory in WWII killed what had been an age-old war aim: the overt subjugation of other populations. One effect has been to turn warfare inside out. If, for instance, it is no longer possible to subjugate or put others to use, then they might as well be considered of no use. Why not dispose of or destroy them instead?[3] We have seen just such actions time and again in the guise of ethnic and religious cleansing. But more germane to what should concern Washington is that the idea of destruction – not conquest – now lurks beneath the surface of Great Power contestation.
Washington needs to beware. Unprovoked, Americans are not animated by the desire to destroy; we tend to be optimists and believe we can get others to come around; we seldom consider opponents to be irredeemable.[4] But this is not how others see us, and a major motivator for some (if not all) adversaries will be to undo the U.S.[5]
Especially worrisome is the fact that because we Americans are constitutionally wired to mirror-image – and to look at others and see ourselves – we are also predisposed to believe that others are ambitious to acquire primacy in the same ways we acquired it, and thus they will more or less abide by the same rules. However, in making this assumption, we miss more sinister motives. We also fail to recognize how much more can be done through subversion and other dark arts today than at any time previously.
As I hope to make clear, competition under post-conquest circumstances creates a host of problems. Not only is it much easier to subvert, undermine, and ultimately destroy than it is to control, but the means by which adversaries can inflict crippling damage have never been more promising, widespread, or accessible – from bio- and cyber-hacking and cybotage, to the printing of 3-D weapons, to what can be done with misinformation and disinformation, to the ease with which social movements can be hijacked.[6]
One conclusion I reach is that given the plethora of methods that state and non-state actors have at their disposal, it is short-sighted (and even dangerous) for policy makers and national security intellectuals to openly declare Washington’s intent to outcompete and contain near peers. At a minimum, policy makers should talk much more softly if at all about how they intend for the U.S. to out-do others. At the same time, decision makers should talk far more loudly about – and should begin to devise – a far more complete array of counter-measures. And then, because countering anything cedes the initiative to others and is re-active rather than pro-active, Washington should also consider how the U.S. might adopt new approaches to deflect competition to new, safer arenas.
Because the gist of this article tilts at current conventional wisdom, let me begin with what makes It most different. My starting premise is that competition – not status – is the driver we should be most concerned about.[7] I accept as a given that some individuals have a greater urge to compete than do others, and that some countries or peoples, shaped by this, are wired for primacy as well: they would seek primacy by whatever means are available, and those who are most ambitious will often seek it across the board.
Without question, acquiring status, seeking recognition, reveling in homage, and enjoying deference matter to ambitious individuals and countries. But, for whatever psycho-socio-historical set of reasons, the act of competing matters more. The need to best others amounts to an addiction. For those seeking primacy, adulation, like fame, is an ancillary reward. Ambitious individuals might believe prominence is what motivates them. But this does not account for why they pursue primacy, which is prominence maximized.[8]
2. FINESSING PRIMACY – Some military considerations before subversion does us in Part Two
Part Two from Anna Simons.
Access the entire essay HERE
Wed, 08/11/2021 - 11:01am
FINESSING PRIMACY –
Some military considerations before subversion does us in
Part Two
By Anna Simons
II. REDRESS – WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Given the vulnerabilities just described, what might the U.S. do to protect itself, thwart subversion, and retain primacy?[1] What kinds of counter-subversion might we engage in? Are there more unconventional ways in which to put the military to use, especially since traditional military options like conquest and control remain off the table?
Subversion redux
In no particular order, classic subversion makes use of: material grievances; government dishonesty; the government’s inability to deliver services efficiently, effectively, or equitably; and/or the government’s inability to provide sufficient security. When authorities fail along any of these dimensions, their failures make it easy to sow dissension and exacerbate distrust.
While the U.S. military itself represents a target for subversion, adversaries need not target the military directly in order to undermine its effectiveness, cohesiveness, or integrity. Anything that undermines public support for the armed forces or a sense of common national purpose will impact servicemembers. But also, when servicemembers find reason to question the worth or purpose of their sacrifice; suspect that civilian and/or senior military leaders are in over their heads; see others profiting at their expense; or find themselves ricocheting between unwinnable foreverness abroad and material profligacy at home, the effects are cumulatively debilitating. Add to this political correctness and a zero defect mentality, and little is left to sustain morale in the face of un-accomplishable tasks.
This is not to suggest that we are there yet with a hollow-feeling force, but any clever adversary could push various buttons in order to get us there faster.
It is worth remembering, too, that a functioning democracy requires competent media and an independent judiciary. Both law and order and the media sit well outside the Pentagon’s purview. However, when adversaries target either or both, this constitutes an attack on the integrity of our system. As the system begins to unravel, or appears to unravel, the question then becomes: who is responsible for responding – and how? Being able to answer these questions in advance is critical. Not only is confidence in government the target for both new- and old-style subversion, but the only way to retain Americans’ – and servicemembers’ – trust is for government to become the authoritative, unimpeachable, credible source of all information about itself.
To counter subversion effectively, government agencies cannot leave it to journalists to try to piecemeal together or ferret out the ‘truth’ (or what they think the truth is) weeks or months after the fact. Instead, the chief mission of government spokespeople needs to be to report any untoward event, mistake, or wrongdoing before anyone else can. Or, to use a military metaphor, government has to get ahead of the adversary’s ability to get inside our OODA loop.[2]
It is especially critical that the Department of Defense stay ahead of the news cycle for myriad reasons. First, the Pentagon owes servicemembers the truth. Even if service chiefs and senior leaders do not think that subordinates deserve a full explanation, steeped as everyone is in a ‘need-to-know/hierarchy-knows-best’ culture, coming clean about incidents, accidents, decisions, etc. is of a piece with the military’s emphasis on after action reviews and hot washes. More significantly, this is what today’s rising generation of junior officers and younger enlisted members expect of leaders. As ever, whenever the rank and file are not told what they think they deserve to hear, they will put two and two together in whatever way they can, based on whatever facts they can glean. They will then disseminate their version of the truth among themselves and to whoever else might be interested. There is nothing new in this, though what is new is the speed and the immediacy with which information and misinformation travel – and what can be done with them.
Essentially, military leaders run four considerable risks when they are not forthcoming: 1) they lose control over the official narrative – or the prospect that there might ever be an official narrative that people will believe; 2) they lose control over what is done with whatever narratives others put together; 3) they forfeit their ability to control how subordinates view them; and 4) they forfeit trust.
The Pentagon already suffers from a trust deficit thanks to its decades-long habit of keeping unflattering and embarrassing information hidden behind the cloak of ‘national security.’[3] The same applies to Washington writ large. The only way to overcome this is for the Department of Defense (like the U.S. government overall) to break all hard, bad, embarrassing news about itself first. Then, no adversary – or media outlet – can exploit what is not being said. Nor can leaks from disaffected individuals be turned into the drip-drip-drip of death by a thousand doubts.
By being forthcoming as soon as possible after an event, DoD would also bank trust. The Department of Defense can never be transparent about everything the military does in advance; military forces need to retain the element of surprise. But to keep the faith with servicemembers and citizens requires that DoD radically re-assess the timing of when information is released. In the same vein, U.S. government efforts to thwart 21st century subversion cannot consist solely of disseminating correct information more quickly and in greater volume than adversaries or misinformed Americans can. Nor will it suffice to simply expose and counter falsehoods; while vital, all such efforts are too reactive; they cede too much initiative to those bent on subversion.
Counter-subversion
In the same ways that adversaries can stir up trouble for the U.S., the U.S. should be able to stir up trouble for others – at least in theory. All countries are riven by fears and fissures, to include fears of fissure. That makes them all vulnerable. Fissures run between rulers and ruled, haves and have nots, and members of different communities. If we were less kinetically oriented, we would no doubt already focus on where others’ buttons lie and we would be ready to aggravate, inflame, or rupture and take advantage of their fears.[4] Except, while the U.S. might be an open society with few firewalls, this is not true of those countries we are most worried about or non-state actors who are already plaguing us. To be able to effectively subvert them requires that we first study them, as in really, seriously study them. We would need to have units dedicated to getting inside – and staying inside – competitors’ heads. At the moment we do not have cadres of individuals who specialize in what makes potential adversaries tick, and it takes time and skill to build these capabilities. But unless we devote resources to this in advance of opponents hardening themselves, we will never be able to initiate strategically meaningful mayhem, let alone prevent blowback.
However, if Washington did assemble teams comprised of the right type of individuals (and we liaised with allies while doing so), we could take advantage of events, much as China and Russia already do, events being the thin end of the subversion wedge.[5] For instance, at present there is no more teachable example of how an event can be put to strategic use than COVID. Consider: even if Beijing did not intend to subvert public health or global well-being, it did a masterful job of facilitating this once COVID was ‘out.’ Or, Beijing did a seemingly masterful job. I italicize ‘seemingly’ because despite the incalculable harm COVID has done, China has clearly overreached. No country has yet used China’s duplicity against it. Perhaps none has because too many countries remain pharmaceutically, industrially, and/or financially dependent on China. But the fact that every country in the world has been negatively affected makes COVID the ideal reminder of Beijing’s perfidy, ruthlessness, deceptiveness, sloppiness, ineptitude, or what have you. At a minimum, Beijing can now be accused of widespread wreckage. Even better, the longer Chinese officials go without offering a credible explanation for COVID’s origins, the more legitimacy this lends theories about COVID’s deliberate release. At the same time, the fact that no high-ranking government official has issued a public apology and that Beijing has expressed no contrition more than a year and a half after COVID’s appearance should be eminently useful against China for years to come.[6]
3. “Psychological” isn’t a dirty word
Correct. We have to embrace psychological warfare and psychological operations.
What is the major difference in the views of conflict, strategy, and campaigning between China, Russia, Iran, nK, AQ, and ISIS and the US?
- The psychological takes precedence and may or may not be supported with the kinetic
- Politics is war by other means
- For the US kinetic is first and the psychological is second
- War is politics by other means
- Easier to permission to put a hellfire on the forehead of terrorist than to put an idea between his ears
- Napoleon: In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one
- In the 21st Century the psychological is to the kinetic as ten is to one
- The US has to learn to put the psychological first
- Can a federal democratic republic “do strategy” this way
- Or is it only autocratic, totalitarian dictatorships that can “do strategy” this way?
-
An American Way of Political Warfare: A Proposal https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE300/PE304/RAND_PE304.pdf
“Psychological” isn’t a dirty word
Really good thread on this the other day.
From WWII until the start of the 21st century, the military considered the elements of strategy and national power to be Diplomatic, Military, Economic, Psychological- not Informational. Further evidence of how "information" has swallowed "psychological" in our foreign/mil policy pic.twitter.com/e2ZsC7mhiO
— Cole Livieratos (@LiveCole1) August 10, 2021
As a society (especially in the West), we have elevated anything having to do with the human brain to an almost sacred position. It is often said that it is easier to put a “warhead on a forehead” than it is to put an idea between someone’s ears.
My sense is that this aversion comes from a fear that attempting to influence using any kind of “technique” is somehow morally or ethically repugnant or dishonorable.
This, of course, is silly. We use these “techniques” every day. If we can use non-lethal methods to gain advantage in competition, change the tide in battle, or ultimately lessen suffering in war, shouldn’t we?
I also think there is an underlying fear born of conspiracy theory and pseudoscience that any form of influence is an attempt at ‘mind-control’ or ‘brain-washing’ – terms that have no basis in reality.
To Cole’s point, the constant word-shifting – psychological to informational – isn’t helpful. It’s an attempt to sanitize the effort, but only works to strip it of its essence. Everything we do is inherently a human endeavor. As such, there are psychological aspects at play and we should take them into account.
The more we try to avoid that, the less effective we will be.
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4. Japan’s Military Role in the Indo-Pacific
Excerpts:
The top three geopolitical risks facing Japan all relate to China. Most immediately, Tokyo will be concerned about the recent intensity of Chinese probing of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, particularly given the new Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) Law, which allows the CCG to use weapons against foreign vessels even in waters only claimed by Beijing. Second, and related to the first, is Tokyo’s concern about a Taiwan contingency, both because of its regional geopolitical implications, but also because of the uncertainty of how Japan would respond given its constitutional and legal constraints.
Third is China’s attempt to change the status quo in the South China Sea (SCS). There are many examples of this, including Beijing’s refusal to accept international law, which does not recognize its large “nine-dash line” claim in the SCS, the fortification and expansion of its islands in the sea, and the grey zone and coercive activities of its vast fishing fleet in the region. Instability in the SCS is a direct threat to the viability of Japan’s sea lanes of communication as well as to Japan’s allies in the area.
Japan’s Military Role in the Indo-Pacific
Insights from Robert Ward.
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The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Robert Ward, Japan chair and director of Geo-economics and Strategy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is the 282nd in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Identify any significant shifts in Japan’s defense policy based on its 2021 annual white paper.
The Japanese Ministry of Defense (JMOD)’s 2021 annual white paper was notable for four main reasons. First was the mention of the importance of stability in the Taiwan Strait and the link with Japan’s own security. This was the first such mention in a JMOD white paper. Second was the focus on U.S.-China relations, a clear marker by JMOD that U.S.-China strategic competition is now a key framer for Japanese defense policy.
Third was the highlighting of Japan’s widening security partnerships beyond its immediate region and beyond the U.S., including Canada, France, and the U.K. Fourth was JMOD’s increased focus on the need to bolster Japan’s research and development (R&D) in advanced technologies. In the 2021 English digest of the white paper “research” was mentioned 17 times, compared with just twice in 2020.
It is also worth highlighting the unusual cover of the 2021 JMOD white paper. In a marked departure from the more abstract covers of previous years, this year’s featured a high-energy ink drawing of a Samurai warrior on a charging horse. This was in part JMOD’s attempt to pique the interest of a younger audience to boost recruitment into the military but also to solicit their support for JMOD’s policy initiatives.
How is Tokyo enhancing Japan’s military role in the Indo-Pacific and security leadership in the Quad?
Japan’s regional military role is circumscribed by its “peace constitution” and domestic political constraints. That said, Tokyo has been highly active on multiple fronts trying to balance China’s rise on the one hand and play a greater role in the U.S. alliance on the other. Tokyo has, for example, expanded the range of countries with which it conducts military exercises: witness the joint drill with France in May this year, the first such on Japanese soil. It has also been vocal in its support for the U.K. Carrier Strike Group journey to the region. The number of joint exercises with the U.S. has also risen.
Japan has also focused on capacity building in Southeast Asia, with a view to helping the littoral states boost their law enforcement capabilities: for example, Tokyo’s provision of patrol vessels to the Philippines’ and Vietnam’s coast guards. The sale, announced in 2020, of Japanese radar equipment to the Philippines was also significant as it was Tokyo’s first sale of defense equipment overseas since Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s 2014 relaxation of the Japan’s self-imposed ban on finished defense exports.
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The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad, which includes the U.S., Japan, India, and Australia) has gained momentum, reflecting the increased focus on the grouping of the Biden administration, but also renewed interest from India following the straining of its relations with Beijing. This momentum was, for example, seen in the 2020 Malabar exercise, which included Australia for the first time, along with Japan, the U.S., and India. It has also driven the expansion of the Quad’s activities beyond joint military exercises into areas of economic security, such as supply chains, climate change, and vaccine distribution. For Japan, the Quad is a critical amplifier for its desire to support the rules-based order under its “free and open Indo-Pacific” framework.
Explain the stakes for Tokyo in strengthening Japan-Taiwan relations.
Japan’s tone regarding Taiwan has changed significantly. This reflects Japan’s concerns about China’s attempts to change the status quo in the broader region, as well as Beijing’s territorial needling around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which Japan controls and China claims. The Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands lie just over 100 kilometers from Taiwan, hence Tokyo’s alarm at Beijing’s increasingly hard line on absorbing Taiwan and the rising risk of a contingency in the area.
In an interview in May with Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, Defense Minister Kishi Nobuo was explicit in linking Japan’s security to that of Taiwan. As we have seen, this was echoed in the 2021 JMOD white paper. In the interview Kishi also indicated his willingness to break the convention of Japan spending only 1 percent of its GDP on defense. Japan is also seeking to “internationalize” the Taiwan issue, to lock multinational support for stability in the area into its broader support for the rules-based order. China, meanwhile, seeks to treat this as a domestic issue.
Assess the Biden administration’s strategic priorities in U.S.-Japan relations.
The Biden administration sees Japan as a key interlocutor in the Indo-Pacific. Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide was the first foreign leader to visit Biden after his inauguration. Aside from the U.S.’s perennial push for Japan to “do more” in the bilateral security alliance, the Biden administration has two main strategic priorities in U.S.-Japan relations.
The first is to secure Tokyo’s contribution to the U.S.’s push to bolster economic security. The high-technology component of this is particularly important, given the U.S.’s concerns about the influence of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in global 5G systems and Beijing’s desire to be a technology rule setter.
The second is enhancing cooperation among Quad countries. Notwithstanding the strategic advantages of doing so, the Biden administration is unlikely to take the U.S. into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) mega-trade deal. The Quad is thus a strategically critical tool for U.S. engagement in the Indo-Pacific.
Identify the top three geopolitical risks facing Japan as U.S.-China rivalry escalates.
The top three geopolitical risks facing Japan all relate to China. Most immediately, Tokyo will be concerned about the recent intensity of Chinese probing of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, particularly given the new Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) Law, which allows the CCG to use weapons against foreign vessels even in waters only claimed by Beijing. Second, and related to the first, is Tokyo’s concern about a Taiwan contingency, both because of its regional geopolitical implications, but also because of the uncertainty of how Japan would respond given its constitutional and legal constraints.
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Third is China’s attempt to change the status quo in the South China Sea (SCS). There are many examples of this, including Beijing’s refusal to accept international law, which does not recognize its large “nine-dash line” claim in the SCS, the fortification and expansion of its islands in the sea, and the grey zone and coercive activities of its vast fishing fleet in the region. Instability in the SCS is a direct threat to the viability of Japan’s sea lanes of communication as well as to Japan’s allies in the area.
5. Sizing The Navy: Why It Takes More Warships To Prevent Conflicts Than To Win Them
Excerpts:
This same logic applies to all of the military services, but in the current moment when a rising China drives U.S. military strategy, the naval aspects of the presence versus warfighting debate are of greatest urgency.
If the Pacific Fleet cannot sustain sufficient forward-deployed forces to deter Beijing from regional aggression, the consequences for America and its allies could be quite imposing.
After all, China is a nuclear power; it has options in wartime that countries like Iran lack.
So, it has to be a matter of concern that the head of the Indo-Pacific Command warned Congress earlier this year conventional deterrence is eroding in the Western Pacific.
The Pacific Deterrence Initiative advanced last year by leading Senators is a constructive effort to bolster U.S. credibility in the region, but the most basic need is for a bigger U.S. naval presence.
As of today, China has 360 warships to shape events in nearby seas, and America has fewer than 300 to shape events around the world.
Without a larger fleet, deterrence of armed conflict in all the areas where it is likely to occur is not feasible, and Washington may soon find itself fighting another war—maybe against a nuclear-armed adversary.
Sizing The Navy: Why It Takes More Warships To Prevent Conflicts Than To Win Them
Forbes · by Loren Thompson · August 10, 2021
The Biden administration is embarked on yet another exercise to determine how big and how capable the U.S. naval fleet needs to be.
Whatever conclusions the defense secretary’s Global Force Posture Review arrives at, it’s a safe bet that the Biden posture won’t be as ambitious as the 500+ warships in 2045 embraced by the Trump administration last year.
It is also a safe bet that the Biden number will require a higher rate of ship construction than that proposed in the Navy’s fiscal 2022 budget request—eight ships, only four of which are combat vessels.
At that level of effort, the U.S. Navy would never grow beyond its current count of 296 warships.
... [+]Wikipedia
Rather than talking endlessly about what the numbers should be at some point in the distant future, it would make more sense for policymakers to focus on what metric should drive force-sizing decisions.
The most fundamental question is simply this: should the fleet be sized to deter conflicts, or should it be sized to fight and win them?
This is often described in the professional literature as a choice between presence and warfighting.
Presence means being there, in hot zones before wars break out.
As Naval War College authority James Holmes recently observed in the outlet 1945, “If you want to control something you have to be there to control it. Showing up intermittently and going away will not cut it if your opponent is there, in force, all the time, to impose its will.”
Warfighting, on the other hand, means being able to respond effectively to a remote crisis by defeating the aggressor.
The posture of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific illustrates the difference.
If war broke out, say, on the Korean Peninsula, the Seventh Fleet assisted by the Third Fleet would be able to deploy sufficient forces within weeks to support the rest of the joint force in defeating North Korean invaders.
It might take some time, but the U.S. naval contribution would be adequate.
However, there would be losses—potentially massive, horrendous losses for America’s South Korean ally.
It would be far better to convince Pyongyang in advance of any aggression that its chances of prevailing are very low.
That presumably would prevent the conflict from occurring, sparing South Korea from massive carnage.
But here’s the rub: it isn’t enough to be continuously present in one place in order to deter conflict.
You need to be in several places, such as the North Atlantic and the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea so that all potential aggressors are deterred.
This implies that if the goal is to prevent war, the Navy will need to be bigger than if the goal is simply to fight and win.
Having eight deployable aircraft carriers should be more than sufficient to fight and win a major regional conflict, given all the other naval and joint assets available.
But eight carriers won’t cut it if the goal is to prevent conflict by being present in all theaters where major conflict is plausible.
That requires eleven or twelve carriers, because only about a third can be forward deployed at any given time, and there are at least four potential theaters of operation where continuous presence is needed to keep the peace.
Obviously, planners can play around with these numbers by occasionally substituting other warships such as amphibious assault vessels for nuclear-powered, large-deck carriers in regions that seem to be at peace.
But there has to be a sizable, visible presence anywhere that major aggression is possible, otherwise the requirements of the presence concept are not met.
Successive administrations have been oscillating between the requirements of presence and warfighting since the Cold War ended, with Republican presidents usually leaning toward presence (“peace through strength”) and Democratic presidents looking for some less demanding metric.
The goal in the latter case is to save money by providing the rationale for a smaller Navy, but this arguably is short-sighted, because if all you have is a warfighting force rather than a deterrent posture, you are probably more likely to end up using that warfighting force.
Once you’re in a war, the potential costs far outstrip whatever savings policymakers thought they might realize in peacetime by not embracing the presence mission as their main force-sizing metric.
This same logic applies to all of the military services, but in the current moment when a rising China drives U.S. military strategy, the naval aspects of the presence versus warfighting debate are of greatest urgency.
If the Pacific Fleet cannot sustain sufficient forward-deployed forces to deter Beijing from regional aggression, the consequences for America and its allies could be quite imposing.
After all, China is a nuclear power; it has options in wartime that countries like Iran lack.
So, it has to be a matter of concern that the head of the Indo-Pacific Command warned Congress earlier this year conventional deterrence is eroding in the Western Pacific.
The Pacific Deterrence Initiative advanced last year by leading Senators is a constructive effort to bolster U.S. credibility in the region, but the most basic need is for a bigger U.S. naval presence.
As of today, China has 360 warships to shape events in nearby seas, and America has fewer than 300 to shape events around the world.
Without a larger fleet, deterrence of armed conflict in all the areas where it is likely to occur is not feasible, and Washington may soon find itself fighting another war—maybe against a nuclear-armed adversary.
Forbes · by Loren Thompson · August 10, 2021
6. The Militant Drone Playbook
Excerpts:
Targeting the enemy’s center of military and political gravity is a challenge for militant groups. Doing so effectively would mean sustaining strikes over time and against multiple targets. This would require fixed-wing systems with greater flight range and payload capacity. It would also necessitate the establishment and defense of drone bases, which would be vulnerable to attack since they could be easily located and targeted. This would require a substantial investment of militant troops, and might prove infeasible unless militants could also invest in air defense systems. A drone fleet would require a reliable logistical supply chain, which would be susceptible to disruption. This highlights how even the most capable militant organizations remain fundamentally different from their state opponents, who have the links to the outside world, reliable sources of income, and territorial depth to sustain strategic strikes.
More surprising, perhaps, is that, with a handful of exceptions, militants have not used drones for terror attacks either. This is true even for groups that have shown a willingness to systematically target noncombatants, such as the Taliban or Boko Haram. Drones would seem particularly well-suited to such a task, since smaller drones could attack many targets and their novelty as a terrorist weapon would amplify their psychological effects. Militants’ calculations about using drones for terrorism appear more political than logistical. Militants engage in terrorism to convince their opponent and civilians that they are ruthless and highly resolved. Terrorist attacks via drone, which lower the risks to perpetrators of being caught or killed, do not signal strong resolve, and instead suggest that the militants are unwilling to put much skin in the game.
The Militant Drone Playbook - War on the Rocks
Since January, militants in Iraq and Syria have attempted or executed nearly a dozen weaponized drone attacks against American targets. Most of these involved midsize fixed-wing craft crashing into their targets and detonating, while some involved smaller quadcopter-style drones dropping lightweight munitions, often a 40 mm grenade. None of these attacks have resulted in fatalities or critical damage, but they did prompt the Biden administration to order retaliatory airstrikes against the militant groups behind them.
For years, defense and security leaders have called attention to militants’ increasingly adept use of drones. Earlier this year, U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie referred to the proliferation of small drones as the “most concerning tactical development” in Iraq since the emergence of improvised explosive devices. But while it is clear that militant drone operations pose a threat, there has been less consensus on the nature and scope of that threat.
Our research leads us to conclude that, while drones give militant groups a new and effective means of tactical disruption, insurgents have been unable or unwilling to use drones for strategic bombing. In coming years weaponized militant drone operations will likely increase, but there is reason to believe that the logic shaping the use of these systems will remain the same. In other words, militants are unlikely to use drone technology to target their opponents’ military centers of gravity or to engage in widespread attacks on civilian targets. As a result, policymakers, soldiers, and security officials should prepare for militant drone operations to expand in degree but not in form. This means developing better counter-drone technologies while still relying on traditional elements of counter-militant strategy.
Pages from the Playbook
The first recorded successful armed drone attack by militants occurred in 2006, when Hizballah struck an Israeli warship with a fixed-wing drone rigged with explosives. Since then, weaponized drone activity has increased significantly — 99 percent of observed attacks have occurred after 2015 — and been dominated by a handful of militant actors in the Middle East. Recent research records 440 drone attacks conducted by militants through 2020. Over 98 percent of recorded attacks have occurred in the Middle East, with two groups, the Islamic State and Houthi rebels in Yemen, responsible for over 80 percent of these.
Our research identifies two prominent patterns in militants’ tactical application of weaponized drones. Together, these indicate that militant groups find drones especially useful for disrupting opponent command and logistics and delaying the movement of military personnel and materiel.
First, militants often use drones for theater air attacks. In some cases, drones are used to support ground operations, providing militants with a combined arms capability. The best-known example of this is the Islamic State’s modifying commercial drones — or engineering its own — to deploy small munitions in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State routinely and effectively used its makeshift drone arsenal to disrupt enemy fighting positions and troop movements in a number of campaigns, including the Battle of Mosul. In other cases, militants with access to fixed-wing drones have used these as the leading component in a one-two punch of indirect fire — flying below radar to damage enemy air defense systems or military positions in order to open the field for more destructive strikes from missile or rocket systems.
Second, it is common for militants to use armed drones to damage logistic hubs, arms depots, critical infrastructure, and command headquarters behind front lines. Strikes against civilian airports, air bases, factories, and other forms of critical infrastructure disrupt the movement and command of opposing forces. The Houthis, one of the only militant groups possessing military-grade drones, have used this tactic to great effect. From April 2018 to October 2019, the Houthis executed 115 drone attacks. Of these, 62 were conducted against civilian airports or critical infrastructure. Only 27 were conducted against military bases or enemy troops. (The remaining attacks were reported as intercepted or as striking unknown targets.)
A number of militant groups also use unarmed drones strictly for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations. While it rarely grabs the headlines, drone-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance offers significant value to militants for relatively little cost or risk. For example, the Islamic State’s affiliate in West Africa has reportedly used drones to surveil the locations and movement of counter-insurgent forces in northeast Nigeria. Similarly, the Taliban have used drones extensively for years to monitor U.S. and Afghan troop movements.
However, militant groups have rarely used drones for more strategic aims, such as targeting opponents’ civilian populations or undermining their capacity to govern or raise military forces. Even the Houthi forces, who have an unmatched capacity to use long-range drones to strike major cities such as Riyadh, do so only sparingly. And the Islamic State, which regularly commissioned suicide and terrorist attacks in cities that remained under government control, only occasionally used drones to target civilians.
Why is this the case? Sustained strikes that do widespread structural damage would be logistically difficult for militant groups, while terrorist attacks, though logistically feasible, have political drawbacks.
Targeting the enemy’s center of military and political gravity is a challenge for militant groups. Doing so effectively would mean sustaining strikes over time and against multiple targets. This would require fixed-wing systems with greater flight range and payload capacity. It would also necessitate the establishment and defense of drone bases, which would be vulnerable to attack since they could be easily located and targeted. This would require a substantial investment of militant troops, and might prove infeasible unless militants could also invest in air defense systems. A drone fleet would require a reliable logistical supply chain, which would be susceptible to disruption. This highlights how even the most capable militant organizations remain fundamentally different from their state opponents, who have the links to the outside world, reliable sources of income, and territorial depth to sustain strategic strikes.
More surprising, perhaps, is that, with a handful of exceptions, militants have not used drones for terror attacks either. This is true even for groups that have shown a willingness to systematically target noncombatants, such as the Taliban or Boko Haram. Drones would seem particularly well-suited to such a task, since smaller drones could attack many targets and their novelty as a terrorist weapon would amplify their psychological effects. Militants’ calculations about using drones for terrorism appear more political than logistical. Militants engage in terrorism to convince their opponent and civilians that they are ruthless and highly resolved. Terrorist attacks via drone, which lower the risks to perpetrators of being caught or killed, do not signal strong resolve, and instead suggest that the militants are unwilling to put much skin in the game.
Looking Ahead
Thinking about the future of militant drone use requires understanding both the strengths and limitations of drone technology as well as militants’ political goals and military capabilities. As drone systems become more common in civilian and military environments, militants’ ability to acquire or develop drones will increase. Indeed, more armed groups will likely adopt these systems in coming years. While militant drone use has been highly concentrated in the Middle East, militant groups in other regions of the world (e.g., East and West Africa and Central Asia) will likely soon incorporate weaponized drones into their tactical operations. This is especially likely for groups with operational connections to transnational movements such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Other factors may create greater opportunity for their use as well. The anticipated increase of urban warfare is particularly worrisome, as urban terrain is especially well suited to small drone use.
While we expect the use of armed drones by militant groups to increase and expand, the pattern of militant drone use is unlikely to change soon. Even with larger drones, targeting an adversary’s center of gravity will still require militants to control and defend territory and access global supply chains, areas where state opponents tend to have large advantages. And militants may find that alternative airborne weapons systems — rockets and missiles, for instance — remain better suited to the task of producing destructive effects against strategic targets. Therefore, we believe that militants will continue to view drones as a useful adjunct to their existing military repertoires, using them to assist in targeting forces on the battlefield, to harass command and logistic hubs, and to disrupt the supply and movement of adversaries’ soldiers and materiel.
What can state actors do to counter this threat? On the one hand, our analysis offers good news — in the near future, most militants are unlikely to be capable or willing to develop fleets of drones to pursue strategic objectives. The bad news, at least for state militaries, is primarily on or near the battlefield. It has proved difficult to develop military systems that can reliably intercept smaller drones. The development of counter-drone technology is and should remain a priority. But even improved counter-drone technology will only help mitigate the threat, and militants will be quick to adapt. This means that, even in an era of drone warfare, traditional elements of counter-militant strategy will remain essential: rooting out the deeper militant drone threat means disrupting supply chains, targeting sources of revenue, finding and engaging combat and support units, and cutting militant forces off from any territorial safe havens.
Austin C. Doctor is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a member of the executive committee of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Georgia. He writes on militant organizations, terrorism, armed conflict, and political instability. You can find him on Twitter @austincdoctor.
James Igoe Walsh is professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He holds a Ph.D. in international relations from American University. His research interests include technology and conflict, human rights violations, and forced displacement and return. His book, Combat Drones and Support for the Use of Force, is available from the University of Michigan Press. His work has been supported by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Minerva Research Initiative and Army Research Office. You can find him on Twitter @jamesigoewalsh.
7. Stunning Speed of Taliban Offensive Brings Afghan Government's Control Into Question
Is this a surprise? Many analysts have predicted this or a similar outcome.
Excerpts:
The success of the Taliban offensive also calls into question whether they would ever rejoin long-stalled peace talks in Qatar aimed at moving Afghanistan toward an inclusive interim administration as the West hoped. Instead, the Taliban could come to power by force — or the country could splinter into factional fighting like it did after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
In Doha, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has met with diplomats from China, Pakistan and Russia in an effort to as a group warn the Taliban they could again be considered international pariahs if they continue their offensive, State Department spokesman Ned Price said. Khalizad also plans to meet with Afghan government and Taliban officials as the fighting goes on without a sign of it abating.
The multiple battle fronts have stretched the government’s special operations forces — while regular troops have often fled the battlefield — and the violence has pushed thousands of civilians to seek safety in the capital.
The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment is that Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a couple of months.
Stunning Speed of Taliban Offensive Brings Afghan Government's Control Into Question
TIME · by letters@time.com
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban captured a police headquarters Thursday in a provincial capital in southern Afghanistan teetering toward being lost to the insurgents as suspected U.S. airstrikes pounded the area, an official said.
Afghan security forces and the government have not responded to repeated requests for comment over the days of fighting. However, President Ashraf Ghani is trying to rally a counteroffensive relying on his country’s special forces, the militias of warlords and American airpower ahead of the U.S. and NATO withdrawal at the end of the month.
The fighting around Lashkar Gah has raged for weeks. On Wednesday, a suicide car bombing marked the latest wave to target the capital’s regional police headquarters. By Thursday, the Taliban had taken the building, with some police officers surrendering to the militants and others retreating to the nearby governor’s office that’s still held by government forces, said Nasima Niazi, a lawmaker from Helmand.
Niazi said she believed the Taliban attack killed and wounded security force members, but she had no casualty breakdown. Another suicide car bombing targeted the provincial prison, but the government still held it, she said. The Taliban’s other advances have seen the militants free hundreds of its members over the last week, bolstering their ranks while seizing American-supplied weapons and vehicles.
Niazi criticized ongoing airstrikes targeting the area, saying civilians likely had been wounded and killed.
“The Taliban used civilian houses to protect themselves, and the government, without paying any attention to civilians, carried out airstrikes,” she said.
Map shows areas controlled by Taliban
AP
With the Afghan air power limited and in disarray, the U.S. Air Force is believed to be carrying out some series of strikes to support Afghan forces. Aviation tracking data suggested U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers, F-15 fighter jets, drones and other aircraft were involved in the fighting overnight across the country, according to Australia-based security firm The Cavell Group.
It’s unclear what casualties the U.S. bombing campaign has caused. The U.S. Air Force’s Central Command, based in Qatar, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Meanwhile, the Taliban appeared to be pressing into the capital of Ghazni province, some 130 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of Kabul. Wahidullah Jumazada, a spokesman for the provincial governor in Ghazni, acknowledged the insurgents had launched attacks from several directions on the capital, but insisted the government remained in control.
The Taliban posted videos and photos online purporting to show they had made it inside the provincial capital. Some matched known features of Ghazni.
Ghazni provincial council chief Nesar Ahmad Faqiri said government forces still held an intelligence headquarters in the city. Another provincial council member still in Ghazni, Amanullah Kamrani, said the government also held the governor’s guesthouse.
The success of the Taliban offensive also calls into question whether they would ever rejoin long-stalled peace talks in Qatar aimed at moving Afghanistan toward an inclusive interim administration as the West hoped. Instead, the Taliban could come to power by force — or the country could splinter into factional fighting like it did after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
In Doha, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has met with diplomats from China, Pakistan and Russia in an effort to as a group warn the Taliban they could again be considered international pariahs if they continue their offensive, State Department spokesman Ned Price said. Khalizad also plans to meet with Afghan government and Taliban officials as the fighting goes on without a sign of it abating.
The multiple battle fronts have stretched the government’s special operations forces — while regular troops have often fled the battlefield — and the violence has pushed thousands of civilians to seek safety in the capital.
The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment is that Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a couple of months.
___
Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Faiez from Istanbul.
TIME · by letters@time.com
8. No rules and no borders: Inside a future cyberwar
Excerpts:
Cyberattacks may happen online but their consequences don’t stay online. They pose real-world threats. As cyberattacks intensify, the world is pushed closer and closer toward cyber warfare — a newish type of warfare for which global society remains unprepared.
The landscape of conflict has changed.
...
In conventional physical warfare, international parties have agreed on the rules of a fair fight, the lines too cruel to cross and the tactics too inhumane to use.
That’s not the case for cyberwarfare. In the cyberworld, there are no ground rules. There are no traditional borders. And there is no clarity.
“What is cyberwar? What is legal cyberwarfare? What is a war crime in cyberwarfare? There is no clear definition and that’s part of the issue,” said Steinberg. “All the rules of warfare — you don’t target civilians and things like that — in the cyberworld, it’s not clear where these things stand.”
And cyberwar may not target just the military. Cyberattacks could strike “water distribution systems, financial systems, gas pipelines, hospitals — perhaps even combined with a mass-casualty physical attack,” said Wired.
...
And when it comes to cyberwar, we are all vulnerable because there are no ground rules in the cyberworld. That’s why many cybersecurity experts have begun pushing for a Digital Geneva Convention or some other global treaty to establish the go and no-go zones of cyberwarfare, reported Wired.
“Because this is a real threat and it’s not the future,” said Steinberg. “This is not a theory. This is not paranoia. It’s the world we live in.”
No rules and no borders: Inside a future cyberwar
From the Cold War to the Code War — here’s the science nonfiction of a future cyberwar
The page takes a second to load. Or doesn’t load at all. Instead, an error message pops up onscreen: the connection timed out. Page after page, none load.
Bank website? Down. Online retailer? Down. News site? Down. Government webpage? Down. Vaccine appointment system? Down. A while later, all the sites load properly.
The lights flicker and the power goes off. The heat shuts off too. It’s December and cold. Around the city, the electricity grid goes down.
The blackout lasts an hour, maybe six hours. The power comes back on.
The backup safety system for monitoring chemicals at a manufacturing plant runs unnoticed in the background. The system gives no security warnings and sends no alerts. A routine maintenance check finds that the backup system was not actually functioning.
At another manufacturing plant, a machine with a spinning centrifuge has this repeated glitch. The centrifuge will spin so fast that it spins out of control, torn apart by the force. The IT team finally identifies the issue and the machine stops spinning out of control.
So what?
Technological issues like these seem, well, unsurprising. Technology fails. Chalk the issues up to the finicky nature of the internet, to some glitch somewhere along the line.
But all of these incidents have happened before, reported Wired. And none of them were run-of-the-mill technological issues.
Targeted and intentional, cyberattacks are becoming increasingly frequent, increasingly dangerous and increasingly hybrid, reported Wired.
Cyberattacks may happen online but their consequences don’t stay online. They pose real-world threats. As cyberattacks intensify, the world is pushed closer and closer toward cyber warfare — a newish type of warfare for which global society remains unprepared.
The landscape of conflict has changed.
Cyberattacks and cyberwar: The dystopian future that happened yesterday
“Let’s start from the most important beginning point: This isn’t a conversation about the future,” Joseph Steinberg, a cybersecurity expert, told to Deseret News. “These are things that are already happening on a regular basis whether people realize it or not.”
“Cyberwarfare is something that involves a computer-based attack against another computer that causes some sort of real-world repercussion,” said Steinberg.
The example of websites not loading en masse? That’s the result of a common cyberattack called a distributed delay of service, or DDoS. Hackers overload website servers with fake requests so that real requests to load the page cannot be processed. The result? The site goes down completely.
A DDoS cyberattack like this in the Eastern European country of Estonia marked the start of “Web War 1” back in 2007, reported Wired.
THE INTERNET IS DOWN! THE WORLD IS ON FIRE!
— Thuggly (@Tangwes) July 15, 2021
The centrifuge spinning out of control? The U.S. and Israel led that cyberattack against Iranian nuclear facilities beginning in 2009 but the attack wasn’t identified until 2010, per Wired. The attack, later known as Stuxnet, became the first cyberattack designed to cause physical damage. The cyberattack delayed Iran’s development of nuclear technology.
The cyberattack that caused an electricity blackout? That’s happened twice so far.
The first time, in December 2015, Russian hackers disrupted the electricity of 225,000 Ukrainian civilians for about six hours. Similarly, in 2016, Russian hackers disrupted the power grid of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv for about one hour, per Wired.
Taking out backup safety systems? That cyberattack happened in a Saudi Arabia oil refinery in 2017. The malicious code aimed to silently disable the last-ditch safety systems that warn about dangerous conditions like a temperature build-up or a gas leak, reported Wired.
The company found the hack before an explosion or gas leak occurred, but the alternative could have been deadly.
“The cyberattacks we saw earlier this year? That’s not even the tip of the iceberg — that’s the cold air coming off the tip of the iceberg,” said Steinberg, the cybersecurity expert. “The cyberattack that directly causes people to die — it’s going to happen — that’s when we hit the tip of the iceberg.”
“We’ve slipped into permanent warfare,” said Jason Healey, a Columbia researcher and cybersecurity expert, per the New York Magazine. “There is no winning this war.”
“Some people think cyberwar won’t be violent — that’s not true,” said Steinberg. “There are real-world repercussions to cyberattacks and it’s only going to get worse.”
Inside a future cyberwar
In conventional physical warfare, international parties have agreed on the rules of a fair fight, the lines too cruel to cross and the tactics too inhumane to use.
That’s not the case for cyberwarfare. In the cyberworld, there are no ground rules. There are no traditional borders. And there is no clarity.
“What is cyberwar? What is legal cyberwarfare? What is a war crime in cyberwarfare? There is no clear definition and that’s part of the issue,” said Steinberg. “All the rules of warfare — you don’t target civilians and things like that — in the cyberworld, it’s not clear where these things stand.”
And cyberwar may not target just the military. Cyberattacks could strike “water distribution systems, financial systems, gas pipelines, hospitals — perhaps even combined with a mass-casualty physical attack,” said Wired.
These civilian sectors remain particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks because their systems tend to be “out of date, poorly maintained, ill-understood, and often unpatchable, “ reported Foreign Policy.
And worse still, not all cyberattacks will even have a physical target like these critical service sectors. That’s where cyberespionage comes in.
“Cyberespionage is going on all the time,” said Steinberg. Like cyberattacks, cyberespionage could have military or civilian targets. It could look like stolen military equipment plans or close monitoring of foreign citizens of interest.
“The person who’s going to be president in 30 years or 50 years, they’re posting all sorts of information in online media that may or may not be useful to an adversary,” said Steinberg.
Cyberespionage could inform cyberattacks targeting such individuals.
But the target could also be the entire public. Cyberattacks could manipulate public opinion before elections through online campaigns, targeted advertising and realistic “deep fake” videos of candidates or world leaders, reported Foreign Policy.
After all, there are no ground rules in the cyberworld — and even just one cyberattack could be too much.
“Even if we’re the superpower from offensive and defensive positions, other entities could get one or two or 10 or a small percentage of attacks and we’re not capable of stopping 100% of it,” explained Steinberg. “If someone is weaker but can get one attack through, then they can cause massive damage.”
What will a scorched earth policy look like in a cyber warfare context?
Imagine the impact on our modern civilisation of a full blown cyber war between state actors.
Since most businesses and government services are technology driven nowadays, the impacts could be disastrous.
— Ayush Kanaujia (@_ayushkanaujia) March 5, 2021
Behind the scenes of a future cyberwar
Say all of these cyberattacks happen. Does that mean we’re in a cyberwar? Well, maybe, but maybe not. Once again, there’s no clear line.
Assigning responsibility for cyberattacks gets incredibly complicated incredibly quickly. In the recent case of vaccination systems going down — was the attack led by a group of teenagers opposed to vaccines? Or was the attack led by professional state-sponsored actors that wanted to interrupt Italy’s health care system?
Because of proxy servers and other methods of erasing the assailant’s digital footprint, it’s hard to know for sure, reported Foreign Policy.
“There’s also plausible deniability,” explains Steinberg. “No one admits to doing it.”
But this lack of certainty around the party responsible for a cyberattack does not stop entities from cyberattacking back and creating a cycle of escalation, per Foreign Policy.
“We could stumble into a war that neither side wants because of the feeling that you have to retaliate,” said Amy Zegart, a cyberwarfare expert at the Hoover Institution and Stanford professor, per The New Yorker.
“We don’t understand escalation in cyberspace,” said Zegart.
Physical lockdown is one thing, Cyber-lockdown will be the next thing.
— Mikael (@mikael_jibril) February 26, 2021
Preventing a future cyberwar
This is science fiction turned science nonfiction. And cyberattacks we’ve seen so far?
“You want to call it the tip of the iceberg or the cold air coming off? This is nothing compared with what could happen if we don’t address these issues,” said Steinberg. “People are going to have to be more careful online because your computer could be used for an attack.”
To protect yourself and those you’re digitally connected to from cyberattacks, Steinberg recommends not using public Wi-Fi for sensitive tasks, avoiding risky downloads in emails or on websites, backing up your data often, following proper password guidelines, and using some sort of security software.
And when it comes to cyberwar, we are all vulnerable because there are no ground rules in the cyberworld. That’s why many cybersecurity experts have begun pushing for a Digital Geneva Convention or some other global treaty to establish the go and no-go zones of cyberwarfare, reported Wired.
“Because this is a real threat and it’s not the future,” said Steinberg. “This is not a theory. This is not paranoia. It’s the world we live in.”
9.General Officer Assignments
General Officer Assignments
The chief of staff of the Army announces the following general officer assignments:
Lt. Gen. (Promotable) Laura J. Richardson, commanding general, U.S. Army North, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, to commander, U.S. Southern Command, Doral, Florida.
Lt. Gen. Paul T. Calvert, commander, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, Operation Inherent Resolve, Iraq, to deputy commanding general/chief of staff, U.S. Army Forces Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Maj. Gen. (Promotable) John R. Evans Jr. to commanding general, U.S. Army North, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas. He most recently served as commanding general, U.S. Army Cadet Command and Fort Knox, Fort Knox, Kentucky.
Maj. Gen. (Promotable) Michael R. Fenzel, vice director for strategy, plans, and policy, J-5, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C., to U.S. Security Coordinator, Israel-Palestinian Authority, Israel.
Maj. Gen. (Promotable) Antonio M. Fletcher, deputy director, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to commander, NATO Special Operations Headquarters, Belgium.
Maj. Gen. (Promotable) Donna W. Martin, provost marshal general/commanding general, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, Washington, D.C., to inspector general, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.
Maj. Gen. Lonnie G. Hibbard, commanding general, U.S. Army Center for Initial Military Training, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, to director of operations, United Nations Command/Combined Forces Command/U.S. Forces Korea, Republic of Korea.
Maj. Gen. David C. Hill, deputy chief of engineers/deputy commanding general, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Washington, D.C., to commandant, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.
Maj. Gen. Stephen J. Maranian, commandant, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, to commanding general, 56th Artillery Command, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany.
Brig. Gen. (Promotable) Curtis A. Buzzard, deputy chief of staff, operations, Resolute Support Mission, NATO; deputy commanding general (operations), U.S. Forces-Afghanistan; and commander, U.S. National Support Element Command-Afghanistan, Operation Freedom's Sentinel, Afghanistan, to director, Defense Security Cooperation Management Office-Afghanistan, Qatar.
Brig. Gen. Robert A. Borcherding to legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as staff judge advocate general, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, Operation Inherent Resolve, Iraq.
Brig. Gen. John D. Kline, senior advisor to the Ministry of Defense, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, Operation Freedom's Sentinel, Qatar, to commanding general, U.S. Army Center for Initial Military Training, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia.
Brig. Gen. Constantin E. Nicolet to deputy commanding general for intelligence, Over-the-Horizon Counterterrorism Headquarters, Operation Freedom's Sentinel, Qatar. He most recently served as deputy director, intelligence, J-2, U.S. Cyber Command, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland.
Brig. Gen. John T. Reim Jr., deputy commander, Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, Operation Freedom's Sentinel, Afghanistan, to deputy director, Defense Security Cooperation Management Office-Afghanistan, Qatar.
10. ‘Close to the danger zone’: Security experts warn about increasing possibility of war over Taiwan
I hear Kenny Loggins in the background of Top Gun singing the "Danger Zone."
Of course we will need those top gun pilots for any contingency.
‘Close to the danger zone’: Security experts warn about increasing possibility of war over Taiwan
Cmdr. Chris Gahl watches as the flag is raised aboard the USS Barry while the guided-missile destroyer sails through the Taiwan Strait, Nov. 21, 2020. (Molly Crawford/U.S. Navy)
TOKYO — A panel of security experts, including a former Japanese government official, expressed concern this week about the increasing potential for war between China and the United States, but made clear they believe conflict can be avoided.
During a news conference Wednesday at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, three experts discussed the rising tensions over Taiwan between the U.S., Japan and China, as well as what could be done to avoid outright combat.
Kyoji Yanagisawa, a former assistant chief cabinet secretary for Japan who led the country’s national security and crisis management between 2004 and 2009, expressed serious concerns about stability in the Indo-Pacific region.
“Personally, I believe that this situation is already reaching close to the danger zone of war,” he said. “And there is a serious risk that China and the U.S. may go to war or enter into a conflict over Taiwan.”
Mounting tensions follow increasing reunification rhetoric from Beijing, which considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province that should be reunited, possibly by force. The island split from the mainland in 1949 and has its own democratic government.
As recently as two weeks ago, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, described Taiwan as “an inalienable part of China’s territory” and said the issue itself is part of the political foundation of China’s diplomatic relations with Japan and the United States.
“China's national reunification and rejuvenation are an unstoppable trend. No one should underestimate the strong resolution, determination and capability of the Chinese people to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he told reporters on July 29. “Any attempt to create ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’ will be like trying to hold back the tide with a broom and is doomed to fail.”
In Tokyo, Yanagisawa said that while tensions between the U.S. and China have been relatively consistent throughout recent history, several factors have changed the status quo. He said a shift in the balance of military power in favor of China, Taiwan’s increasingly independent economy and a change in the political consensus of not recognizing Taiwanese independence as key factors in the escalation of hostile rhetoric.
“Amid the increasing distrust and tensions between the two sides and the fact that they are also stationing military around Taiwan as well, means I believe there is a significant risk of an unexpected conflict arising,” he said.
The official U.S. stance, known as the “One China” policy, acknowledges Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan but considers the island democracy’s future as unsettled. However, China frequently criticizes the U.S. for actions it believes undermines this policy.
The Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from mainland China, is seen from space during the Gemini X mission in 2010. (NASA)
Earlier this month, the Biden administration approved its first arms sale to Taiwan, a potentially $750 million deal that would include 40 self-propelled howitzers.
The proposed sale “interferes in China's internal affairs and undermines China's sovereignty,” an unnamed spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry said in an Aug. 5 statement on the ministry website. China, the spokesman said, would “resolutely take legitimate and necessary counter-measures in light of the development of the situation.”
“We are here to continue to operate to ensure peace and prosperity through the region, and we have to be in a position to ensure that status quo remains as it applies to Taiwan,” he said.
Shigeru Handa, a journalist who frequently covers defense-related issues in the Indo-Pacific, said Japan should avoid leaning too heavily in favor of the U.S., and instead prioritize cooperation with China and other countries in the region to ease tensions.
Referencing Lockheed Martin’s development of the long-range, hypersonic weapon, a surface-to-surface missile expected to enter service with the U.S. Army in 2023, Handa said it’s vital that Japan refuse the weapon’s deployment in the region. Instead, he said Japan should pursue diplomatic channels to persuade China to adhere to international law.
Sayo Saruta, president of the New Diplomacy Initiative, a Tokyo-based think tank, warned against Japan focusing solely on tactical military deterrence policies.
“We don't negate the role of military, but deterrence-only policy cannot maintain stability and peace,” she said in the conference. “We must have strong diplomatic channels and strong ties with China in order to keep peace in the region.”
Alex Wilson
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11. Media And Western Governments Give Little Chance To Non-Violence As A Tool Of Political Change – OpEd
I think the US has provided a lot of support to non-violent political activity through the National Endowment for Democracy, the US Institute of Peace, USAID's Democracy Human RIghts and Governance, and State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. We have lots of programs to support non-violent political actions.
Of course the author wants much more than that.
Excerpts:
If the US and its NATO partners had consistently supported the non-violent protestors the outcome would have been very different. In the next election Yanukovych would doubtless have been defeated. Russia would not have taken Crimea nor given military support to the dissident provinces of the east and south. The Cold War would not be re-heating as it is.
It is a human tragedy that non-violence as a tool of political change, as taught and shown by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, is often given short thrift by both the media and Western governments. In all these recent conflicts, if applied and advised, it could have avoided so much upheaval and so many deaths.
Media And Western Governments Give Little Chance To Non-Violence As A Tool Of Political Change – OpEd
By Jonathan Power
By any reasonable measure violence should have had its day. Throughout our long history violence and war have solved little. In most cases, if not all, war could have been pre-empted by deft diplomacy and non-violent action.
Take Afghanistan where after America’s longest ever war the US and its allies are finally withdrawing their troops.
Like the British in the nineteenth century and the Soviet Union in the twentieth the invader has again been effectively defeated. The allied armies leave behind only a modest list of achievements. There is now a solid minority of educated girls and women. The infant mortality rate is down and the number of good roads up. But all this could have been achieved by well-thought-out development programs, bolstered with foreign aid, as it has been in a vast majority of Third World countries. It didn’t need an invasion to bring it about. Look at neighbouring Nepal, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Admittedly the Taliban, the militant Islamic fundamentalists are now taking over but even fundamentalists, judging by the most fundamentalist of all, Saudi Arabia, don’t inevitably resist the education of girls or programs to lower the rates of maternal mortality and infant mortality. There are more women than men in Saudi Arabia’s King Saud University with its 51,000 students, none of whom pay fees.
In Iraq, outsiders’ violence overthrew the malevolent dictator, Saddam Hussein. But, for all his many dangerous faults, he provided social stability, safety on the streets, electricity, water and food and good nutrition for all, together with a falling infant and maternal death rate.
What did the US, British and French invasion substitute besides neutering Saddam? Mainly mayhem. Tens of thousands of deaths of innocents, shortages of food, worsening nutrition and disease, a breakdown in electricity and water supply, sharply rising crime levels, upheavals in the schools and health services.
Ten years later the country is still semi-chaotic and still bothered about Al Qaeda and ISIS, the Islamic terrorist organisations that Saddam successfully resisted. Some reports say over 1 million Iraqis died because of war and violence. Going to war with Iraq was counterproductive.
In Libya, the mercurial dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, provided the same sort of social benefits as Saddam. Ten years after the British, French, Qataris and the US launched their air attack which killed him and destroyed the government the country remains carved up into armed factions. The people, cowering, remain afraid. Gaddafi was not a nice man but, as he grew older, he became diplomatic and wise enough to surrender his incipient nuclear weapons facilities to the UK and the US, and in his latter years he became open to economic reform. There was enough for outsiders to work with. Again, military intervention by the West was counterproductive.
In Syria, the al-Assad family used to have a good track record of social reform. According to the UN’s annual Human Development Report Syria used to be among the top 10 developing countries in lowering infant and maternal mortality. The murder and rape rates were low. Now as the civil war goes into its eleventh year many of the cities are reduced to rubble and there are millions of refugees. Health services in some parts of the country are close to zero.
In Syria the anti-regime protests were started by teenagers. The government cracked down on them in a heavy-handed way. This triggered a large non-violent protest movement that brought large crowds of marchers onto the streets every day. Western media egged them on. When the police got tougher and cracked heads a small minority of the demonstrators took to the gun. Not for them the tactics of Gandhi. In return the police and army were ruthless. The conflict quickly escalated. Much of western media continued to egg on the now violent anti-Assad movements. The destruction of Syria continues, although reduced mainly to Idlib. In its own way the government has “won”.
In Syria’s case it is not outsider armies intervening who can be blamed. It is the Assad family and its acolytes who, feeling their dominant position was threatened, tried to clamp down on a popular revolt in the harshest way possible.
Why didn’t Assad appeal to the protests non-violently? He could have responded by implementing reforms such as proposing to train the police not to use violence and by encouraging some forms of democracy at town and provincial level.
In Egypt the faults can be spread three ways—the army, Western media and the protestors themselves.
In the first round of “Arab Spring” protests that toppled the long incumbent President Mubarak the demonstrators were non-violent. (So were the protestors in neighbouring Tunisia—and have remained so.)
They got what they wanted—the first free elections in Egypt’s long history. Western media did much to win them support outside Egypt but also inside among the elite. The victors were the Muslim Brotherhood, a quasi-fundamentalist grouping. Unfortunately, the newly elected President Muhammed Morsi instead of trying to unify the country set about implementing the narrow conservative policies of his movement. He alienated the young supporters who had given the Brotherhood its chance. He alienated the media, both domestic and foreign. Counterproductively he alienated the army.
Short-sightedly, the young protestors returned to the street demanding Morsi step down and the army return to governing. For some foolish reason many of the demonstrators expected the army to give democracy a second chance, but the army moved quickly to implement a violent crackdown, followed by severe political repression. If only the protestors had waited until the next election Morsi could have been voted out of office and the army kept in its barracks. Now Egypt is again ruled by a no-nonsense military that is making sure democracy doesn’t get a second chance. Imprisonment, torture and political and media restrictions rule the day.
In Ukraine the protest movement was initiated by young people who wanted the government to hurry up and sign an economic treaty with the European Union that pushed Russia to one side. Seven months after the protests began the government of President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed. But it was not overthrown by these liberal-minded, non-violent, young people. The violent denouement in Kiev’s main square, the Maidan, was led by fascist groups whose pedigree reaches back to Hitler’s time. They fired on the young demonstrators. For their own geopolitical reasons the US and its larger NATO allies fudged and covered up the role of the fascist militias and pointed their accusing finger at Yanukovych’s police.
Much of Ukrainian-speaking public opinion took their cue from the West. Convinced the firing and killing had done by the police, the media, many parliamentarians and big businessmen pushed for the immediate exiling of Yanukovych, despite an agreement made only the day before by EU leaders and Russia to support Yanukovych if he agreed to call elections and implement serious political and economic reforms.
Again, Western media did a poor job of reporting the truth of what was going on. They relied too much on Western diplomatic sources who were set on their geopolitical purpose of encircling Russia. To my knowledge, only one BBC program (out of many) and one Italian TV documentary got it right.
Now in place in Ukraine is a government riddled with corruption and maladministration that keeps Ukraine firmly in the Western camp combined with a very anti-Russian posture, which extends to an unpleasant, even harsh, attitude towards its own Russian-speaking minority (30%).
Russia has made its own bad moves, compounding the problem, not least the method of its take-over of Crimea, formerly a Ukrainian province.
If the US and its NATO partners had consistently supported the non-violent protestors the outcome would have been very different. In the next election Yanukovych would doubtless have been defeated. Russia would not have taken Crimea nor given military support to the dissident provinces of the east and south. The Cold War would not be re-heating as it is.
It is a human tragedy that non-violence as a tool of political change, as taught and shown by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, is often given short thrift by both the media and Western governments. In all these recent conflicts, if applied and advised, it could have avoided so much upheaval and so many deaths.
*About the author: The writer was for 17 years a foreign affairs columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune, now the New York Times. He has also written many dozens of columns for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. He is the European who has appeared most on the opinion pages of these papers. Visit his website: www.jonathanpowerjournalist.com
12. Biden Wants To Reengage With The World, But His Ambassadors Are Mostly Absent
For an interesting debate - career ambassadors versus political appointees. There are tradeoffs. It is not clear cut or black and white.
Psaki says the president supports promoting career foreign service officers, but she added the president also feels there are qualified nominees in the private sector who will make "excellent representatives" overseas.
For some former U.S. diplomats like Brett Bruen, who served as director of global engagement in the Obama administration, that's not enough.
Only 1 woman has served as US ambassador in Buenos Aires during the 198 year history of diplomatic relations w/Argentina
Biden just nominated another man (& donor) to the post
— Brett Bruen (@BrettBruen) August 7, 2021
After four years of Trump's withdrawal from the world stage, Bruen argues that the percentage of political nominees should be much lower — at the most 10%.
"We're back in the same place," Bruen said. "Unfortunately, the world has gotten a heck of a lot worse and you don't see my former colleagues recognizing and rethinking how we approach diplomacy."
Biden Wants To Reengage With The World, But His Ambassadors Are Mostly Absent
NPR · by Franco Ordoñez · August 12, 2021
More than six months into his administration only one of President Biden's ambassadors to another country has been confirmed. Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Biden promised to put U.S. diplomacy back in the "hands of genuine professionals," but more than six months into his administration only one of his ambassadors to another country has been confirmed.
That's raising concerns about how effectively the administration is conducting foreign policy — and the message such a diplomatic vacuum sends to the global community.
"There's no other country in the world, I think, probably that has ever had 80 vacant ambassadorships at one time," said Ambassador Eric Rubin, president of the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomatic corps' union. "And while I'm quite sure it's not intended to be a signal of disrespect or lack of commitment to engagement with other countries, it can come across that way after a point."
On Wednesday, the Senate unanimously confirmed former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Linda Thomas-Greenfield was confirmed in February as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a position based in the United States.
In comparison, at the 200-day mark (which was Sunday for Biden) former President Barack Obama had 59 ambassadors confirmed, George W. Bush had 53 ambassadors confirmed and Donald Trump had 19, according to Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, who tracks presidential appointees for the Brookings Institution.
"The sluggish pace is simply striking, and the dearth of U.S. ambassadors that have been confirmed at this point in his administration is a historic low," said Tenpas, who is also a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.
"And there's no question that this has to be affecting our diplomatic relations across the globe," she added.
Why so few ambassadors are confirmed
There are a host of reasons. The administration has put forth dozens of nominations that the Senate has yet to confirm.
Tenpas points to the evenly split Senate and a hefty congressional agenda. But Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has also used a procedural tactic to stall many State Department nominees over differences he has with Biden's policy on a Russian gas pipeline.
The White House is not happy about it.
Press secretary Jen Psaki blamed the Senate on Wednesday, though not specifically Cruz.
"We are frustrated over the slow pace of confirmations, particularly for noncontroversial nominees," she said. "A number of these nominees who are sitting and waiting are highly qualified. A number of them have a lot of Republican support. So, what is the holdup?"
She defended the president, stating that he has sent over more nominees at this point than Obama or Bush did at the equivalent time.
Wendy Sherman, Biden's deputy secretary of state, urged senators last week to break the logjam during a Foreign Relations Committee hearing. Sherman argued a recent trip she took to China could have been more fruitful if she had the expertise of their nominees on board.
"We are currently hamstrung in our ability to advance America's interests around the world without confirmed ambassadors and senior leaders," she said.
Ivo Daalder, who served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013, called it a lost opportunity for an administration that pushed an ambitious diplomatic agenda.
But he also says Biden deserves credit for picking people with experience — including among the more controversial political picks, even campaign donors.
Then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar speaks at an 2013 chamber event in Miami. Salazar has been confirmed as President Biden's ambassador to Mexico. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Salazar served alongside Biden in both the Senate and the Obama administration. Tom Nides, Biden's pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel, served under the Obama administration as deputy secretary of state and was awarded the secretary of state's Distinguished Service Award.
Daalder also cited Mark Brzezinski, another Obama-era diplomat with deep ties to Poland, who has been nominated to serve in Warsaw, and Jane Hartley, a Democratic fundraiser who is widely expected to be heading to London after serving as ambassador in Paris for Obama.
"What Biden has done is look for people who are both close to him, but also have the expertise to reengage in a diplomatic effort that is sorely needed after many years of neglect," Daalder said.
That's not easy.
Biden picks bring experience, along with campaign donations
Of the roughly two dozen-plus political ambassador appointees announced, more than half are political bundlers, according to Dennis Jett, a retired ambassador and Penn State professor who wrote the book American Ambassadors.
He describes some of these postings as a national security threat.
"If we were talking about selling the command of an aircraft carrier to a real estate developer, people would go absolutely ballistic because that would be a threat to national security," he said.
Presidents on both sides of the aisle have sought to strike the right balance between promoting career officials who have dedicated their lives to certain regions of the world, while saving some of the more luxurious postings for donors and political allies who helped them get elected.
According to the American Foreign Service Association, more than 43% of Trump's ambassadorial appointments were political appointees, while 30.5% were political for Obama and 31.8% for Bush.
The White House says Biden hopes to keep political appointments to about 30% of ambassador picks.
Psaki says the president supports promoting career foreign service officers, but she added the president also feels there are qualified nominees in the private sector who will make "excellent representatives" overseas.
For some former U.S. diplomats like Brett Bruen, who served as director of global engagement in the Obama administration, that's not enough.
Only 1 woman has served as US ambassador in Buenos Aires during the 198 year history of diplomatic relations w/Argentina
Biden just nominated another man (& donor) to the post
— Brett Bruen (@BrettBruen) August 7, 2021
After four years of Trump's withdrawal from the world stage, Bruen argues that the percentage of political nominees should be much lower — at the most 10%.
"We're back in the same place," Bruen said. "Unfortunately, the world has gotten a heck of a lot worse and you don't see my former colleagues recognizing and rethinking how we approach diplomacy."
NPR · by Franco Ordoñez · August 12, 2021
13. China is banning karaoke songs that endanger national unity
See the"blacklist" in the concluding paragraph.
I guess the CCP has not learned that taking away the music the people like causes resistance. They are going to create music rebels.
China is banning karaoke songs that endanger national unity
CNN · by Shawn Deng and Amy Woodyatt, CNN
Shawn Deng and Amy Woodyatt, CNN • Published 11th August 2021
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Beijing (CNN) — China will create a "blacklist" of karaoke songs, banning those that contain "harmful content" from entertainment venues.
According to interim rules outlined by the country's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, karaoke must not endanger national unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity, incite ethnic hatred or undermine ethnic unity, promote cults or superstition or violate the state's religious policies.
Songs must also not encourage obscenity, gambling, violence, drug-related activities or crime, nor should they insult or slander others, the ministry said.
The regulations will "promote socialist core values, and maintain national cultural security and ideological security," according to the ministry.
Content providers to karaoke venues will be responsible for monitoring the songs, the ministry said, adding that China has more than 50,000 "song and dance entertainment" venues across the country, and a catalog of more than 100,000 songs, which would be hard for venues to police.
The ban will come into effect on October 1.
Censorship -- online and otherwise -- is common in China, with an increasingly hard line taken on entertainment content deemed inappropriate.
In 2015, the country banned a catalog of 120 songs from the internet after deeming them "harmful" to society, including Chinese songs titled "No Money No Friend," "Don't Want To Go To School," "One Night Stand" and "Fart."
CNN · by Shawn Deng and Amy Woodyatt, CNN
14. What's Missing from US Missile Defense? Pentagon Aims to Find Out
What's Missing from US Missile Defense? Pentagon Aims to Find Out
As part of its efforts to integrate weapons across the services, the office of the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs will look anew at missile defense plans.
A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block 1B interceptor missile is launched from the guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG 70) during a Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Navy test in the mid-Pacific. The SM-3 Block 1B successfully intercepted a target missile that had been launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands in Kauai, Hawaii. U.S. Navy photo/Released
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As part of its efforts to integrate weapons across the services, the office of the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs will look anew at missile defense plans.
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August 11, 2021 05:26 PM ET
Technology Editor
August 11, 2021 05:26 PM ET
What’s missing from the U.S. military’s missile defense is a sense of how to build and integrate missile defense tools and capabilities across the services, Gen. John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Wednesday.
The military services are doing “the best they can” to make sure they are prepared to defend against all manner of incoming missiles and similar threats but, in the era of advanced hypersonics and new drones, that’ s not good enough. The Joint Requirements Oversight Council, or JROC, which is headed by Hyten and other service vice chiefs, has set the goal of integrating those efforts as its next major priority.
“Go out and read the current requirements from the Joint Requirements Oversight Council for integrated air and missile defense, and actually look at the portfolio of integrated air and missile defense and see where the JROC has identified gaps and capabilities from looking at integrated air and missile defense. You'll find out that we have not,” done any work to identify them, Hyten told the audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.
Because of that lack of joint planning and requirement writing, the services have basically been on their own, said Hyten. So they’ve each developed their own missile defense procedures and capabilities. But the Defense Department is now moving forward with a broad, multi-year vision to better integrate all of its weapons, vehicles, satellites, and troops in one massive network dubbed Joint All-Domain Command and Control.
The Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has recently completed its strategy document for JADC2. They’ll brief industry in the coming months, Hyten said. With the strategy document now complete, the JROC can assess gaps in the military’s overall missile defense capabilities.
“We never gave the overarching structure that we have to plug into. And we have to do that. So we're going to do that. And we're going to do this capability gap assessment of everything in that [missile defense] portfolio,” he said.
With all of the services on board with an integrated missile defense strategy, the military will be in a better position to plan how to conduct offensive operations. That, Hyten said, will hopefully convince adversaries not to attempt their own offensive action.
“From an adversary’s perspective, deterrence comes from the integration of all capabilities,” he said.
15. Another ICBM test successful, Air Force says
I am waiting for the photo of some Airmen painting "Destination Pyongyang "on the nose cone. Or "Kim Jong-un: This one's for you." But such a photo would likely be classified!
Another ICBM test successful, Air Force says
Airmen of Air Force Global Strike Command launched an unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with a test re-entry vehicle from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 12:53 Pacific Time Wenesday morning, the Air Force said in a release.
While stripped of its nuclear payload for the launch, the ICBM contained conventional explosives aboard a Hi-Fidelity Joint Test Assembly re-entry vehicle, which successfully detonated above the water’s surface near Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, some 4,200 miles from the launch site.
“Today’s test launch is just one example of how our nation’s ICBM fleet demonstrates operational readiness and reliability of the weapon system. It also allows us to showcase the amazing level of competence and capability of our Airmen,” Col. Omar Colbert, Commander of the 576th Flight Test Squadron, said.
Defense officials were careful to stress that the test was routine, taking months to plan rather than a response to tensions in the region or around the world. Overall, officials said the Air Force periodically tests the Minuteman 3 to demonstrate the weapons system’s capability and gather data. The Defense Department, Energy Department, and US Strategic Air Command use the data collected to further force development.
“Test launches are not a response or reaction to world events or regional tensions,” said Lt. Col. Aaron Boudreau, Task Force commander said. “The launch calendars are built five years in advance, and planning for each individual launch begins six months to a year prior to launch.”
Conducting the launch were airmen from the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom AFB, 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, and 91st Missile Wing at Minot. These airmen fall under Air Force Global Strike Command, headquartered at Barksdale Air Force Base, Shreveport, Louisiana. AFGSC is not only responsible for the nation’s ICBM fleet but also its strategic bomber fleet of B-52, B-1, and B-2 wings, effectively housing two of the three nuclear triad’s “legs.”
“The U.S. nuclear enterprise is the cornerstone of the security structure of the free world,” Colbert said in the release.
According to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, the first iteration of the Minuteman ICBM became operational in the early 1960s. Since then, it has gone through a series of improvements leading to the Minuteman 3 becoming active in the early 1970s.
Despite nearly 60 years of reliable service, the Minuteman series of ICBMs is slated for replacement beginning in 2029, when the Air Force expects an “initial capability” of its replacement, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, to be online.
Until then, the Air Force states it is committed to ensuring that the Minuteman 3 remains a viable deterrent, which is due primarily to the commitment and competence of the Airmen who operate and maintain the weapons platform.
“We’re honored to conduct this mission in conjunction with the 576th Flight Test Squadron and extremely proud to represent the numerous men and women that support the nuclear deterrence mission,” Boudreau said.
James R. Webb is a rapid response reporter for Military Times. He served as a US Marine infantryman in Iraq. Additionally, he has worked as a Legislative Assistant in the US Senate and as an embedded photographer in Afghanistan.
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In Other News
John Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said the Afghans still have time to save themselves from final defeat.
Relief societies are helping troops facing unexpected PCS costs, including thousands of dollars to transport their pets to and from overseas.
Space Force leaders are hashing out a plan to create a new group under U.S. Central Command to coordinate what military space assets to use in the region.
The former California congressman fills in a key Pentagon leadership role that has proved troublesome in recent years.
16. Speed of Taliban Advance Surprises Biden Administration, Dismays U.S. Allies
Sadly, I think there are a lot of people who are unsurprised.
Speed of Taliban Advance Surprises Biden Administration, Dismays U.S. Allies
Fears spread among countries that worked to prop up the Afghan government, from the fate of their embassy staff to the value of U.S. commitments
WSJ · by Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef and Gordon Lubold
The latest U.S. intelligence assessment said Kabul could fall to militants in as soon as a month, officials said. U.S. officials now worry that Afghan civilians, soldiers and others will flee the city ahead of a Taliban assault.
The rapid collapse of regular Afghan forces has dismayed allies, including those that have contributed troops to the U.S.-led coalition, and revived worries about the value of U.S. commitments overseas. India closed a consulate and sent a plane to retrieve its citizens this week. The U.S. military and State Department this week accelerated plans to evacuate the well-staffed American embassy if the situation in Kabul dictates it, U.S. officials said.
Afghan Foreign Minister Haneef Atmar said Tuesday the Taliban offensive violates an agreement it reached with the U.S. last year that set the stage for the American withdrawal. He urged the U.S. and others to respond with military force and sanctions.
U.S. soldiers and contractors loading vehicles in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Photo: jeffery j. harris/u.s. army/Reuters
Mr. Biden appears to be sticking with the plan to withdraw all forces by Sept. 1. “I do not regret my decision.” he told reporters Tuesday.
Some allies, foreign policy specialists and critics of the Biden policy fear that Afghanistan’s chaos will open the door for extremist groups to again flourish there and provide an opportunity for China and Russia to expand their influence.
Mr. Biden “knows from long experience that America’s actions abroad matter, but he is willingly ignoring the far-reaching consequences of America’s withdrawal in Afghanistan,” said Bradley Bowman, an Afghanistan veteran and senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Center on Military and Political Power, a hawkish think tank in Washington.
“We can expect Chinese and Russian diplomats to ramp up with new credibility a whisper campaign in capitals around the world that Washington is an unreliable partner who will abandon its friends sooner or later,” he said.
The U.S. flag lowered in May during a handover ceremony at Camp Anthonic in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
Photo: afghan ministry of defense/Associated Press
The Biden administration has said that after two decades in Afghanistan, the U.S. has expended enough money and lives there, and that U.S. priorities are shifting to rebuilding at home and dealing with China and Russia.
The administration said it aimed to prevent the emergence of new terrorist threats by maintaining warplanes and counterterrorism capabilities at bases in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere outside of Afghanistan. Mr. Biden has pledged diplomatic, financial and other assistance to the Afghan government.
“Afghan leaders have to come together,” Mr. Biden said Tuesday. “They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation.”
Others in the administration challenged the notion that a small U.S. force of several thousand could have stalled or stopped the Taliban advance.
The Taliban’s swift takeover of swaths of Afghanistan, plotted for years, hinged on staging forces around the country ready to move on provincial capitals as soon as the U.S.-led coalition announced its exit, according to Pentagon officials.
After May 1, when the U.S. withdrawal began, those Taliban forces that had been lying in wait began fighting Afghan forces and intimidating local leaders in an effort to control district centers, the nation’s basic administrative units. In April, the Taliban controlled 73 districts—out of 421 nationwide. By August, insurgents controlled 222 and were contesting another 114.
With the districts in their hands, the Taliban surrounded many provincial capitals and began tightening the noose, the U.S. officials said. Among the major centers that have fallen since Friday’s offensive is the northern city of Kunduz. Others appeared vulnerable to collapse.
A Taliban flag raised in the main city square Wednesday in Pul-e-Khumri, the capital city of the Baghlan province, north of Kabul.
Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Afghanistan moved some of its special forces to fend off attacks on Lashkar Gah, Herat and Kandahar last week, a diversion that allowed the Taliban to take control of other provincial capitals, U.S. defense officials said.
Each time a provincial capital falls, the Taliban gain a psychological victory, the defense officials said. They also pick up arms and equipment left behind or won from Afghan national security forces, and open prisons, freeing inmates to join their cause, the officials said.
“Every Afghan, they are really up to here with Americans,” said Ahmad Wali Massoud, a former Afghan ambassador to London and the brother of a legendary mujahedeen commander who fought Soviet troops. “You came to Afghanistan to root out terrorism. What happened?”
Divide, conquer
The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to drive out the al Qaeda operatives who plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The mission soon expanded to rebuilding the country and propping up a government and military aligned with U.S. security interests. That objective, however, foundered.
As the Taliban gained ground, Mr. Biden’s predecessors considered leaving. President Donald Trump reached an agreement with the Taliban on withdrawal early last year that stipulated the Afghan government release up to 5,000 of its prisoners. That included Taliban who rejoined the fight.
Afghan security forces relied heavily on firepower and support from the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as well as on thousands of U.S.-funded contractors to repair and maintain their fleet of aircraft, armored vehicles and other equipment.
With allied forces and contractors now gone, the meager pay to Afghan soldiers and police fighting the Taliban isn’t enough to sustain their loyalty in the face of a Taliban onslaught.
U.S. officials said divisions inside the Afghan government over how to counter the Taliban emerged after Mr. Biden’s announcement in April.
Chris Hondros/Getty Images
Some civilian national security leaders close to President Ashraf Ghani argued early on, against the advice of the American military, that government forces should cede no ground to the Taliban. The decision left troops and special forces stretched thin across the country, unable to defend more strategic cities and districts now under siege or already taken.
On Monday, a small group of senior national security and foreign policy officials met at the White House to discuss removing personnel from the embassy in Kabul, U.S. officials said.
State Department officials and others argued for as large a presence as possible, the officials said, but military officials warned that the more Americans who remained, the fewer options there would be to retrieve them.
A top U.S. envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, arrived in Doha on Monday for talks with Afghan government officials and Taliban representatives.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday said the talks were “the only process that will bring peace and stability to Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan policy specialists and former officials see them as futile.
“It should be very clear by now that the Taliban are not interested in negotiating a peaceful solution to Afghanistan,” said Lisa Curtis, who served as an Afghanistan policy adviser to Mr. Trump. “They are going toward a military solution and anyone who can’t see that is blind, deaf and dumb.”
Afghan security personnel inspected a building in Kabul following an attack last week.
Photo: Rahmat Gul/Associated Press
‘It’s done’
European allies in the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan are critical of the way the withdrawal is being handled but haven’t called on the U.S. to change course or offered to contribute their own troops. Some say they understand there is no desire within the Biden administration to reconsider the decision. “It’s done,” one European official said.
Instead, they are asking for U.S. help to evacuate their embassy personnel should the Taliban sweep through Kabul, one European official said.
U.S. allies worry about the consequences of the withdrawal, including the rise of terrorism, a blow to democracy and women’s rights and the erosion of Western influence around the world. For Middle East allies Saudi Arabia and Israel, shifting U.S. priorities compound concerns about how much they can rely on Washington’s support to counter the influence of Iran, China and Russia in the region.
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, other countries in the region may also be more vulnerable to China and Russia, said Yaacov Amidror, a former national security adviser in the Israeli government.
“We cannot be sure that when the Americans will be needed they’ll be here to help,” said Mr. Amidror, now a fellow for the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America
Members of Afghan families who fled Taliban insurgents in the provinces of Kunduz and Takhar collected food Monday in Kabul.
Photo: WAKIL KOHSAR/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
—James Marson, Rajesh Roy, Stephen Kalin, Dov Lieber and Mike Cherney contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef and Gordon Lubold
17. US keeping distance as Afghan forces face Taliban rout
I am sure this is painful for many (especially our Afghan allies).
I am going to be very worried about all remaining foreigners in the country, particularly our journalists. They are and become even more vulnerable.
US keeping distance as Afghan forces face Taliban rout
Biden has made clear he has no intention of reversing the decision he made last spring, even as the outcome seems to point toward a Taliban takeover. With most U.S. troops now gone and the Taliban accelerating their battlefield gains, American military leaders are not pressing him to change his mind. They know that the only significant option would be for the president to restart the war he already decided to end.
The Taliban, who ruled the country from 1996 until U.S. forces invaded after the 9/11 attacks, captured three more provincial capitals Wednesday, giving them effective control of about two-thirds of the country. The insurgents have no air force and are outnumbered by U.S.-trained Afghan defense forces, but they have captured territory with stunning speed.
John Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said the Afghans still have time to save themselves from final defeat.
“No potential outcome has to be inevitable, including the fall of Kabul,” Kirby told reporters. “It doesn’t have to be that way. It really depends on what kind of political and military leadership the Afghans can muster to turn this around.”
Biden made a similar point a day earlier, telling reporters that U.S. troops had done all they could over the past 20 years to assist the Afghans.
“They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” he said.
The United States continues to support the Afghan military with limited airstrikes, but those have not made a strategic difference thus far and are scheduled to end when the U.S. formally ends its role in the war on Aug. 31. Biden could continue airstrikes beyond that date, but given his firm stance on ending the war, that seems unlikely.
“My suspicion, my strong suspicion, is that the 31st of August timeline’s going to hold,” said Carter Malkasian, who advised U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan and Washington.
Taliban fighters patrol inside the city of Farah, capital of Farah province, southwest Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021. Afghan officials say three more provincial capitals have fallen to the Taliban, putting nine out of the country’s 34 in the insurgents’ hands amid the U.S. withdrawal. The officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the capitals of Badakhshan, Baghlan and Farah provinces all fell. (AP Photo/Mohammad Asif Khan)
Senior U.S. military officials had cautioned Biden that a full U.S. withdrawal could lead to a Taliban takeover, but the president decided in April that continuing the war was a waste. He said Tuesday that his decision holds, even amid talk that the Taliban could soon be within reach of Kabul, threatening the security of U.S. and other foreign diplomats.
The most recent American military assessment, taking into account the Taliban’s latest gains, says Kabul could be under insurgent pressure by September and that the country could fall entirely to Taliban control within a couple of months, according to a defense official who discussed the internal analysis Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
Officials said that there has been no decision or order for an evacuation of American diplomatic personnel from Afghanistan. But one official said it is now time for serious conversations about whether the U.S. military should begin to move assets into the region to be ready in case the State Department calls for a sudden evacuation.
Kirby declined to discuss any evacuation planning, but one congressional official said a recent National Security Council meeting had discussed preliminary planning for a potential evacuation of the U.S. Embassy but came to no conclusions.
Any such plan would involve identifying U.S. troops, aircraft and other assets that may have to operate from within Afghanistan or nearby areas. The U.S. already has warships in the region, including the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and the USS Iwo Jima amphibious ready group with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard.
Military officials watching the deteriorating situation said that so far the Taliban hasn’t taken steps to threaten Kabul. But it isn’t clear if the Taliban will wait until it has gained control of the bulk of the country before attempting to seize the capital.
Military commanders have long warned that it would be a significant challenge for the Afghan military to hold off the Taliban through the end of the year. In early May, shortly after Biden announced his withdrawal decision, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he foresaw “some really dramatic, bad possible outcomes” in a worst-case scenario. He held out hope that the government would unify and hold off the Taliban, and said the outcome could clarify by the end of the summer.
The security of the U.S. diplomatic corps has been talked about for months, even before the Taliban’s battlefield blitz. The military has long had various planning options for evacuating personnel from Afghanistan. Those options would largely be determined by the White House and the State Department.
A key component of the options would be whether the U.S. military would have unfettered access to the Kabul international airport, allowing personnel to be flown systematically out of the capital. In a grimmer environment, American forces might have to fight their way in and out if the Taliban have infiltrated the city.
The U.S. also would have to determine who would be evacuated: just American embassy personnel and the U.S. military, or also other embassies, American citizens, and Afghans who worked with the U.S. In that last category are former interpreters and those who face retaliation from the Taliban. The U.S. has already started pulling out hundreds of those Afghans who assisted troops during the war.
Senior defense leaders have been talking and meeting daily, laying out their grim assessments of the security situation in Afghanistan. Officials pointed to the fall of Baghlan Province as a worrisome bellwether, because it provides the Taliban with a base and route to Kabul from the north.
AP writer Ellen Knickmeyer and AP Diplomatic writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.
18. Opinion | With a closer look, certainty about the ‘existential’ climate threat melts away
Excerpts:
New coal-fired power plants in China and India will double and triple those nations' emissions, respectively. There are, Koonin says, five times more people “developing” than “developed,” and in this century cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from developing nations will be larger than from developed nations. Every 10 percent reduction that the developed world makes (“a reduction it has barely managed in 15 years”) will offset less than four years of emissions from growth in the developing world.
Koonin notes (as instant media analyses of the 4,000 pages might not) that this week’s U.N. study expresses low confidence in most reported trends in hurricane properties over a century, is uncertain whether there is more than natural variability in Atlantic hurricanes and calls its extreme emissions scenarios unlikely. Some of its plausible emissions scenarios project 1.5 to 2.7 degrees Celsius warming by 2100.
By then, however, global gross domestic product, which grows by a larger multiple than population, will mean a much-increased per capita global wealth. A previous U.N. report said that a large global temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius might negatively impact the global economy as much as 3 percent by 2100. Koonin says: Assuming, conservatively, 2 percent annual growth, the world economy, today about $80 trillion, would grow to about $400 trillion in 2100; climate impacts would reduce that to $388 trillion. Not quite an “existential” threat.
Opinion | With a closer look, certainty about the ‘existential’ climate threat melts away
The Washington Post · by Opinion by George F. WillColumnist Today at 2:09 p.m. EDT · August 11, 2021
Journalism about climate change has a high ratio of certitude to certainty when reporting weather events or climate projections, such as this week’s U.N. report. There is a low ratio of evidence to passion in today’s exhortations to combat climate change with measures interestingly congruent with progressive agendas that pre-date climate anxieties.
Last year, CNN announced: “Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second.” True. However: “The earth absorbs sunlight (and radiates an equal amount of heat energy) equivalent to two thousand Hiroshima bombs per second.” That sentence is from “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters,” by physicist Steven E. Koonin, formerly of Caltech, now at New York University after serving as the senior scientist in President Barack Obama’s Energy Department and working on alternative energy for BP. His points are exclusively from the relevant scientific literature.
Because unusual weather events are routinely reported as consequences of climate change, Koonin warns: “Climate is not weather. Rather, it’s the average of weather over decades.” Of course the climate is changing (it never has not been in Earth’s 4.5 billion years), the carbon footprints of the planet’s 8 billion people affect the climate, and the effects should be mitigated by incentives for behavioral changes and by physical adaptations.
Human activities account for almost all of the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, but science has limited ability to disentangle human and natural influences on climate changes in, for example, the Little Ice Age (about 1450-1850) or the global cooling of 1940-1980. Although Koonin cites U.N. reports when saying “human influences currently amount to only 1 percent of the energy that flows through the climate system,” media “reports” say hurricanes are increasing in numbers and intensity. Koonin says “humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes during the past century.” Improved weather radar detects even weak tornadoes, hence the increase in reported ones. But, says Koonin, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show the number of significant ones has changed negligibly, and the strongest kind have become less frequent.
Sea levels, currently rising a few millimeters a year, have been rising for 20,000 years. Koonin cites recent research that the rate of rise ascribable to melting glaciers has “declined slightly since 1900 and is the same now as it was 50 years ago.” The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contributes no more to rising sea levels in recent decades than it did 70 years ago. The average warmest temperature across the United States has hardly changed since 1960 and is about what it was in 1900.
A scandalous 2019 Foreign Affairs article by the director-general of the World Health Organization asserted: “Climate Change Is Already Killing Us.” Says Koonin, “Astoundingly, the article conflates deaths due to ambient and household air pollution (which cause … about one-eighth of total deaths from all causes) with deaths due to human-induced climate change.” The WHO says indoor air pollution in poor countries, mostly the result of cooking with wood and animal and crop waste, is the world’s most serious environmental problem. This is, however, the result not of climate change but of poverty, which will become more intractable if climate-change policies make energy more expensive by making fossil fuels less accessible.
New coal-fired power plants in China and India will double and triple those nations' emissions, respectively. There are, Koonin says, five times more people “developing” than “developed,” and in this century cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from developing nations will be larger than from developed nations. Every 10 percent reduction that the developed world makes (“a reduction it has barely managed in 15 years”) will offset less than four years of emissions from growth in the developing world.
Koonin notes (as instant media analyses of the 4,000 pages might not) that this week’s U.N. study expresses low confidence in most reported trends in hurricane properties over a century, is uncertain whether there is more than natural variability in Atlantic hurricanes and calls its extreme emissions scenarios unlikely. Some of its plausible emissions scenarios project 1.5 to 2.7 degrees Celsius warming by 2100.
By then, however, global gross domestic product, which grows by a larger multiple than population, will mean a much-increased per capita global wealth. A previous U.N. report said that a large global temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius might negatively impact the global economy as much as 3 percent by 2100. Koonin says: Assuming, conservatively, 2 percent annual growth, the world economy, today about $80 trillion, would grow to about $400 trillion in 2100; climate impacts would reduce that to $388 trillion. Not quite an “existential” threat.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by George F. WillColumnist Today at 2:09 p.m. EDT · August 11, 2021
19. America Still Needs to Rebalance to Asia
I guess the time for talking is over. We must walk the walk.
Excerpt:
Since the United States first pledged it would rebalance to Asia, there has been a disturbing and recurrent gap between U.S. rhetoric and action. Responsibility lies with administrations of both parties and with Congress. The good news is that in stark contrast to his immediate predecessor, Biden appears committed to multilateralism and proactive leadership in Asia. Yet more than halfway into his administration’s first year, there are concerns that history may be repeating itself—or at least rhyming. In order to make good on its promise to U.S. allies and partners that “America is back,” the Biden administration must develop and execute a positive, comprehensive strategy for Asia with the hard lessons from the past decade in mind.
It makes little difference how many times U.S. officials or congressional leaders say the United States is competing with China or pivoting, rebalancing, or shifting its focus to Asia. What matters more is what they actually do.
America Still Needs to Rebalance to Asia
After Ten Years of Talk, Washington Must Act
This fall marks ten years since the Obama administration rolled out its famous “rebalance to Asia.” Standing before the Australian Parliament in 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama declared that the United States was “turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region.”
Even at the time, American officials were clearly mindful of the widespread concerns about U.S. commitment to the region and skepticism that they would fulfill their sweeping promises. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton penned a widely read article in which she made the case that in the coming decade, the United States needed to pivot away from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and instead bolster its investment in the Asia-Pacific region. “In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make—and keep—credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action,” she wrote. “The answer is: We can, and we will.”
Ten years and two administrations later, it is clear that the United States has fallen short. In speeches and statements, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all appropriately emphasized the singular importance of Asia to the United States’ future. Congressional leaders of both parties have similarly asserted the region’s importance and talked tough about competition with China. But such rhetoric has often been disconnected from actual U.S. policies, budgets, and diplomatic attention. As Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s undersecretary of defense for policy, recently lamented, “Washington has not delivered on its promised ‘pivot’ to Asia.”
Today, President Joe Biden asserts that “America is back” in its traditional leadership role, and his administration’s early approach to Asia has hit many of the right notes. But fulfilling Biden’s ambitions in Asia will require not just vision but also execution. Moving forward, the administration and Congress must resolve the recurring disconnect over the past decade between ambitious rhetoric and underwhelming action. Their three top priorities should be refocusing on a positive agenda and strategy for the region rather than framing U.S. engagement as a response to China, embracing a more proactive agenda on trade and economic integration, and increasing American diplomatic and military resources in the region. Such a strategy can help secure U.S. interests in regional peace, security, and prosperity—and the future of American leadership in Asia.
Taking Stock
In her seminal 2011 article, Clinton described six lines of action that would give substance to the rebalance to Asia. She committed the United States to strengthening its bilateral security alliances, deepening its working relationships with emerging powers, engaging with regional multilateral institutions, expanding trade and investment, forging a broad-based military presence, and advancing democracy and human rights. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now possible to assess progress in each of these areas.
Over the past decade, the United States’ bilateral treaty-based security alliances have faced serious and novel challenges, from without and within. China has grown more economically and militarily powerful and is increasingly resorting to coercive actions, such as maritime gray-zone operations and economic bullying to assert its sovereignty claims. These actions are difficult to deter because they often fall below the threshold of provoking a U.S. and allied military response. North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities continue to advance, presenting new challenges for the deterrence strategy on the Korean Peninsula.
As these external challenges have grown, U.S. alliances in Asia have also confronted internal pressures. The Trump administration levied tariffs on several U.S. allies on flimsy “national security” grounds and threatened to withdraw some U.S. forces from the region unless the allies that host them quadrupled their support payments. Today, U.S. alliances with Australia, Japan, and South Korea are back on more solid ground, but ties with the Philippines and Thailand are at risk owing to those countries’ democratic backsliding and tendencies to accommodate China. Public opinion polling in all five allied countries show that their citizens are concerned about whether Washington will remain a reliable ally.
U.S. relationships with emerging powers and developing countries in the region have also been tested. The U.S.-Chinese relationship may now have reached its worst point in half a century. Many who hoped that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” have been chastened by developments in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang. In these areas, Beijing’s behavior demonstrates a willingness to act coercively in pursuit of its sovereignty claims while more brazenly suppressing human rights closer to home.
Meanwhile, U.S. ties with India, Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the countries of the Pacific Islands have fared better, but there are risks on the horizon. Many decisionmakers in Southeast Asia have been disheartened by a perceived lack of U.S. commitment and declining influence: in one poll of Southeast Asian elites, 77 percent of respondents assessed that U.S. engagement in the region declined over the past four years.
The welcome mat in Asia is out, but Washington isn’t stepping up.
The region’s multilateral institutions have also seen their influence decline. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has struggled to respond effectively to the recent coup in Myanmar and Chinese pressure, particularly in the South China Sea. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States has flourished despite—or perhaps partially because of—ASEAN’s struggles. But this grouping omits Southeast Asia and its 650 million people, and any U.S. strategy in Asia that neglects this critical subregion has a gaping hole at its heart.
Perhaps the biggest U.S. failure has been on trade and investment. In 2016, both U.S. presidential candidates opposed the comprehensive, high-standard Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to the chagrin of Japan and ten other countries that subsequently adopted a renamed deal. Since then, economic integration has accelerated: in 2019, the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement entered into force, and last year the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership linked the economies of Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, ASEAN members, and other countries in a trade agreement that will cover 30 percent of global population and production. The United States remains a conspicuous bystander to these economic agreements.
Washington has also struggled to forge a broad-based military presence in the region. China’s military is far stronger today than it was when the rebalance was announced. In 2011, China’s military expenditure was roughly twice the size of Japan’s—but by 2020, it was more than five times as large. In 2011, the U.S. Navy had 12 more “battle force” ships than the Chinese navy, but today China fields roughly 40 more ships than the United States. And Beijing has surged investment into other maritime capabilities, such as its expanding Coast Guard and Maritime Militia, which play a front line role in asserting Beijing’s sovereignty claims. Quantitative comparisons only go so far, but the basic trend of a shifting balance of power is clear.
Unlike the U.S. military, which is active globally, China’s operations are concentrated in East Asia. U.S. officials regularly warn about renewed “great-power competition” and the “pacing challenge” that China represents in the region, but Washington has been slow to act. Rather than a broad-based presence, the United States now depends more than ever on its forces in Guam, Japan, and South Korea. This is of particular concern given the vulnerability of fixed bases to China’s numerous conventional missiles.
Finally, the state of democracy and human rights in Asia has worsened considerably over the last decade. Democracy has been in decline globally for 15 consecutive years, including recent backsliding in the world’s two largest democracies: India and the United States. Efforts to deepen U.S. alliances with Thailand and the Philippines have been frustrated by concerns about the human rights situations in both countries. Coups in Thailand and Myanmar have also undercut democratic reform efforts, while Beijing has significantly curtailed freedoms in Hong Kong and engaged in egregious acts of repression against the Uyghur population in its northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Less Talk, More Walk
It is hard to square this sobering reality with the assertion made by both the Obama and Trump administrations that Asia is “the single most consequential region for America’s future.” Washington’s challenges in Asia are often blamed on others, yet the past ten years show that they also stem from failures of U.S. vision, strategy, and execution. The Trump administration did its fair share of damage, but shortcomings were evident long before it began.
Today, the Biden administration appears determined to reassert U.S. regional and global leadership. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently made a successful trip to Southeast Asia and Vice President Kamala Harris is heading to the region soon. However, the administration’s success in Asia will require avoiding its predecessors’ mistakes and minimizing the recurring gap between U.S. rhetoric and action. The administration and Congress should draw several lessons from recent history to develop a revitalized U.S. Asia strategy.
First, U.S. discourse on Asia has become excessively China-centric and must be recalibrated to realize a positive vision for the broader region. Too often, U.S. leaders conflate tough talk on China with an effective regional strategy. But a fixation on Beijing diminishes the agency and importance of other countries in Asia, which will play a crucial role in determining the region’s future and in shaping China’s behavior. China strategy should flow from regional strategy, not the other way around. Although “great-power competition” became a defining phrase during the Trump administration, such slogans provide little concrete guidance for leaders in Washington and even less for foreign counterparts. Worse still, focusing narrowly on U.S.-Chinese competition deprives the United States of its greatest strategic advantage: a network of countries that share many of its interests and often its values.
The Biden administration has acknowledged the importance of getting Asia right, but it has yet to put forward a positive, comprehensive regional agenda that can attract an array of diverse countries. U.S. leaders should aim to broaden and deepen Washington’s partnerships on issues of security, economics, technology, and governance, each of which will require different coalitions that will shift in composition according to the specific issue and circumstances at hand. This will not only bolster cooperation with Asian countries in pursuit of shared goals, it will also place significant pressure on China to compete positively in the region. In short, the path toward a more peaceful and prosperous region goes through the rest of Asia first and China second.
A critical component of a positive regional agenda is developing and executing a clear economic strategy for Asia. In 2016, Kurt Campbell, now the White House’s top adviser on Asia, wrote that “economics and security are inextricably linked in Asia. . . . Economic statecraft should therefore be elevated to the core of U.S. foreign policy.” This assessment was correct then and has only been thrown into sharper relief by Beijing’s growing use of economic coercion to achieve its foreign policy goals. Three-quarters of experts in Southeast Asia welcome U.S. economic engagement, while nearly the same percentage worry about China’s growing regional economic influence. The welcome mat is out, but Washington isn’t stepping up.
U.S. engagement in the region needs to be more than a response to China.
Washington’s disengagement from accelerating Asian economic integration has harmed its own position and hampered its ability to shape and promote a stable regional order. Despite its imperfections, there is no realistic alternative to renegotiating entrance to the renamed TPP, now called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Predictably, the previous administration’s experience demonstrated that unilateral tariffs and bilateral trade deals will not rewrite the region’s economic rules or compel China to change its behavior.
When it comes to a comprehensive, order-defining trade deal in Asia, it is the CPTPP or bust. Starting negotiations on a separate multilateral trade deal is unrealistic and a digital trade deal will be insufficient, particularly for developing economies in Southeast Asia. Even the United Kingdom has expressed its intent to join the CPTPP as part of its own “tilt toward Asia.” Ten years ago, the Obama administration made the TPP the litmus test of U.S. economic engagement in the region. If the Biden administration cannot sell the American people and the Congress on the CPTPP, then for many in Asia—especially emerging economies increasingly interlinked with China’s economy—claims that the United States is “back” may ring hollow.
Another top priority should be a diplomatic surge across the region, and especially in Southeast Asia. Long overdue nominations for key diplomatic posts have started to trickle out, but nearly seven months into the Biden administration, it still has not nominated an ambassador for any of the five U.S. treaty allies in Asia or to ASEAN or China.
Biden should also travel to Asia himself this fall and give a high-profile speech setting out U.S. objectives and committing real resources to accomplish those ends. Ideally, such a speech would be delivered in Southeast Asia—in Jakarta, for example—and paired with a complementary speech in the United States to make the case to the American people for increased investment in the region and for joining the CPTPP.
Finally, the administration and Congress must work together to reverse the current shift of the military balance of power away from the United States and its allies. Reinforcing deterrence in Asia will likely require adjustments in presence elsewhere, which the Pentagon has signaled will mean drawing down forces in the Middle East. As this occurs, the Pentagon should work with its Asian allies and partners to develop a robust strategy of “deterrence by denial,” which would aim to convince Beijing that it cannot obtain its objectives in Asia through the use of force, especially against Taiwan. Such a strategy will require that the Department of Defense invest in long-range conventional missiles, submarines, and stealthy strike platforms, while also reinforcing the U.S. forward presence across East Asia.
Since the United States first pledged it would rebalance to Asia, there has been a disturbing and recurrent gap between U.S. rhetoric and action. Responsibility lies with administrations of both parties and with Congress. The good news is that in stark contrast to his immediate predecessor, Biden appears committed to multilateralism and proactive leadership in Asia. Yet more than halfway into his administration’s first year, there are concerns that history may be repeating itself—or at least rhyming. In order to make good on its promise to U.S. allies and partners that “America is back,” the Biden administration must develop and execute a positive, comprehensive strategy for Asia with the hard lessons from the past decade in mind.
It makes little difference how many times U.S. officials or congressional leaders say the United States is competing with China or pivoting, rebalancing, or shifting its focus to Asia. What matters more is what they actually do.
20. Why is the Taliban on such a winning streak, and can the tide be turned?
The key question:
Could the U.S. get involved again?
“We trained and equipped with modern equipment over 300,000 Afghan forces. … I’ll insist we continue to keep the commitments we made, providing close air support, making sure that their air force functions and is operable, resupplying their forces with food and equipment and paying all their salaries,” Biden said in a White House briefing Tuesday. “They’ve got to want to fight.”
As for withdrawing U.S. troops within the space of just a few months, “I do not regret my decision,” he said.
Why is the Taliban on such a winning streak, and can the tide be turned?
It’s been a punishing few days for Afghanistan’s U.S.-created and supported army.
Since Friday, the Taliban has overrun bastions of government control, snatching more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals on its way to controlling an estimated 65% of the country. On Wednesday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani raced to the north to rally a defense of besieged Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s fourth-largest city.
With U.S. forces set to complete their pullout in less than three weeks, the Taliban’s breakneck advance has many observers asking: After two decades and billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and its partners to create effective Afghan fighting forces, what happened? And can they stop the Taliban from taking over the entire country?
Here’s a look at the situation.
‘Ghost’ fighters
On paper, the Taliban should be no match for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, known as the ANDSF. According to the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, a U.S. government watchdog, the ANDSF comprises 300,699 security personnel, including army, police and air force members. Around one-fifth of them are highly trained special forces operatives, then there are undisclosed figures for CIA-trained paramilitary groups as well as militias associated with the country’s warlords.
The Taliban, the SIGAR report estimates, has around 75,000 fighters.
But those figures should be treated with skepticism. Corruption, which pervades the Afghan security forces just as much as it does the government, means there are “ghost” soldiers and police — personnel who either never show up or never existed but are on the books so that officials can pocket their salaries.
It’s difficult to gauge the scale of the problem, but in 2019, a new payroll system purged more than 10% from the rolls. A year later, another SIGAR report found a gap of 58,478 personnel between recorded and actual strength levels.
The problem is worse among the Afghan police, especially in the country’s south. SIGAR reported in 2020 that, in the southern provinces — areas with pro-Taliban sentiment — 50% to 70% of police positions were for personnel who didn’t exist. (That report also found that half of them use drugs.)
“For a long time, people in the U.S. and the NATO advisory mission have known that the Afghan police are notoriously corrupt ,” said Andrew Watkins, senior analyst for Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group. He added that although the new payroll system had gone some way toward improving the situation, commanders were now skimming off their subordinates’ salaries.
“Whatever solution there has been for corruption, corruption has found a way,” he said.
Uneven abilities
When asked last month whether he trusted the Taliban, President Biden brushed off the question, saying instead that he trusted “the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better-trained, better-equipped and … more competent in terms of conducting war.”
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, left, and President Biden meet in the Oval Office in June.
(Susan Walsh / Associated Press)
But only a portion of the military would meet that criteria, chief among them the special forces, which are estimated to include some 56,000 operatives. The performance of other sections of the military has been less encouraging, with many observers complaining of a lack of motivation to fight or of personnel acting as little more than placeholders.
“They’re meant to sit in checkpoints and act as a static representation of government presence,” Watkins said. “It’s understood that they don’t fight effectively — they’re certainly not advancing — and that they’re not an offensive force.”
That has led to an all-too-frequent routine on the battlefield: Special forces dislodge the Taliban from an area, only for it to be lost again a short time later when other security personnel — whether army, police or local militias — come in to secure those gains and flee before a Taliban counterattack.
Overreliance on air power
When these less-trained troops do fight, they’ve often looked to air support for cover. But much of that air power has come from the U.S. and its NATO allies, meaning that, as the U.S. draws down, local troops are having to rely more on the Afghan air force for close support, reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering.
Just like U.S. and NATO troops, Western contractors who are meant to service the aircraft and repair battle damage are also “going to zero,” meaning they are set to depart the country by Aug. 31, with still no concrete plans as to how the air force will be maintained. That’s especially detrimental to the UH-60 Black Hawks, helicopters that are used for missions including repulsing Taliban onslaught, evacuating casualties and resupplying Afghan forces.
Logistical hurdles
Perhaps the biggest problem facing the ANDSF isn’t training or equipment but logistics. With its takeover of rural areas, the Taliban also gains control over more than 80% of the country’s highways. That figure has only increased in recent days as the group has taken additional territory, such that any attempt to resupply the thousands of army and police bases and checkpoints must be done almost exclusively by air.
In other words, every bullet, every mortar shell, every gallon of fuel and often every carton of eggs has to be brought in by already overstretched air force crews. And the greater the distance from Kabul or primary bases in Kandahar and elsewhere, the more likely the outpost will fall.
That’s why, for several Afghan officials, including one former high-ranking security head who spoke on condition of anonymity, the recent losses have come as no surprise.
“The ANDSF is very scattered, and it can’t choose its own battlefield,” he said. “The Taliban chooses the battlefield. That meant the ANDSF had to shrink its presence.”
Can the government turn things around?
It depends. This month, Ghani, the president, presented a security plan that he vowed would bring the country back under government control within six months. The general outline of the plan has the army defending strategic targets while the Afghan police provide security in major urban areas.
But another, less-discussed aspect of the plan includes empowering former warlords, including figures with a dark record in Afghan’s conflict-filled history. Ghani’s visit to Mazar-i-Sharif on Wednesday was an effort to organize a defense of the city with warlord Atta Mohammad Noor and notorious militia leader Abdul Rashid Dostum. There have been reports that Ghani has promised the two leaders air support as well as assistance from the special forces corps to claw back northern territories.
Could the U.S. get involved again?
“We trained and equipped with modern equipment over 300,000 Afghan forces. … I’ll insist we continue to keep the commitments we made, providing close air support, making sure that their air force functions and is operable, resupplying their forces with food and equipment and paying all their salaries,” Biden said in a White House briefing Tuesday. “They’ve got to want to fight.”
As for withdrawing U.S. troops within the space of just a few months, “I do not regret my decision,” he said.
21. How Identity Propaganda Is Used to Undermine Political Power
Excerpts:
Since 2016, the study of mis- and disinformation has been a booming area of research at universities and think tanks. Legal and policy scholars, meanwhile, have translated this research into a set of policy recommendations for safeguarding the public sphere in the age of online platforms. To date, most of this research has focused on whether information is true and its intent (purposeful false information is considered “disinformation” as opposed to “misinformation,” which lacks this strategic intent). Propaganda more expansively concerns deliberate attempts to manipulate the public, including through appeals that mix truths and lies. Taken together, this research has offered important insights into strategic attempts to undermine the factual basis of democratic deliberation, and building from it scholars have offered several compelling proposals to inform everything from platform content moderation to state and federal legislation to regulate digital political advertising.
While the study of mis- and disinformation and propaganda offers an excellent starting point for contemporary challenges to democracy, the attacks on Harris do not quite fit any of these well-researched categories, which focus on revealing ill intent and truth. Raising whether Harris is really Black does not have so easily a fact-checked answer given that it is in the realm of social and political perception. Characterizations of Harris as “disrespectful” and innuendos about her sexual history, meanwhile, are not readily verifiable facts. While these things fall more readily into the category of propaganda in terms of strategic attempts to manipulate the public, researchers have generally focused on factual claims and untruths and very rarely have considered whether—and why—there are underlying patterns of propaganda, especially when race and gender are concerned.
...
Strategic racial appeals are only one aspect of identity propaganda—there are many different forms of identity that othering, essentializing and authenticating work upon, just as there are likely other patterns of identity narratives that can weaken the political standing of political figures from nondominant groups. By going beyond assessing claims about candidates as true or false, and focusing on racial and social hierarchies undergirding disinformation and propaganda, researchers and the public would become more aware of the patterns, and power, of attacks directed against nondominant groups. Even more, it would shed a light on how strategic attempts to undermine and weaponize people’s social identities and group memberships for political gain happen in the context of established narratives, tropes and meanings that are deeply embedded and ready-to-hand for people to wield politically.
How Identity Propaganda Is Used to Undermine Political Power
By Daniel Kreiss, Madhavi Reddi Wednesday, August 11, 2021, 8:01 AM
Soon after Joe Biden chose California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate in the summer of 2020, the rash of attacks began. There was the typical rhetoric of then-President Trump on display in his calling her “nasty,” “disrespectful” and “phony.” There were also conspiracy theories about Harris’s parents’ immigration status and her eligibility for higher office, disingenuous and strategic questions about her Black identity, and stereotyped expectations of her racial and gender identity.
These attacks attempted to undermine the legitimacy of Harris’s candidacy by exploiting her identities and leveraging racist and sexist sentiments. In a recently published article in New Media & Society, we (along with Rachel Kuo) argue that these attacks on Harris should be understood as forms of “identity propaganda”—strategic narratives that target and exploit identity to maintain social and political orders and the power of dominant social groups. While there are many different types of identity that can be strategically mobilized, questioned and undermined, we focus our analysis on the particularly well-established forms of anti-Black racism, misogyny and xenophobia that were on display during Harris’s vice presidential run. These factors have long shaped American political culture and helped whites maintain their dominant group status. We argue that the attacks on Harris in 2020 reveal long-established patterns of “othering” nondominant groups and individuals, “essentializing” (assuming fixed traits) racial, ethnic and gender differences, and calling on nondominant people to “authenticate,” or prove, their group memberships. These patterns are designed to undermine the political standing of political figures from nondominant groups.
Since 2016, the study of mis- and disinformation has been a booming area of research at universities and think tanks. Legal and policy scholars, meanwhile, have translated this research into a set of policy recommendations for safeguarding the public sphere in the age of online platforms. To date, most of this research has focused on whether information is true and its intent (purposeful false information is considered “disinformation” as opposed to “misinformation,” which lacks this strategic intent). Propaganda more expansively concerns deliberate attempts to manipulate the public, including through appeals that mix truths and lies. Taken together, this research has offered important insights into strategic attempts to undermine the factual basis of democratic deliberation, and building from it scholars have offered several compelling proposals to inform everything from platform content moderation to state and federal legislation to regulate digital political advertising.
While the study of mis- and disinformation and propaganda offers an excellent starting point for contemporary challenges to democracy, the attacks on Harris do not quite fit any of these well-researched categories, which focus on revealing ill intent and truth. Raising whether Harris is really Black does not have so easily a fact-checked answer given that it is in the realm of social and political perception. Characterizations of Harris as “disrespectful” and innuendos about her sexual history, meanwhile, are not readily verifiable facts. While these things fall more readily into the category of propaganda in terms of strategic attempts to manipulate the public, researchers have generally focused on factual claims and untruths and very rarely have considered whether—and why—there are underlying patterns of propaganda, especially when race and gender are concerned.
Our research was born of deep consideration of these attacks on Harris and especially their continuity with other attempts to keep nonwhite political figures and groups in subordinate political and social roles. To understand and analyze why attempts to undermine Harris took the form they did, we utilized critical race theory—a methodology and a branch of scholarship that interrogates the institutionalization of racism and its effects on the United States’ legal, political and social system. While currently deeply politicized and weaponized by the political right to elide a racial understanding of U.S. history and present-day inequality, critical race theory provides a powerful set of tools for understanding the relationship between identity, power and information. Naming these things as “identity propaganda” is important because the concept reveals how attacks on Harris are part and parcel of underlying ideas and ideologies that shape how we think about race in America and how strategic political actors can draw on these structures of thought to shore up the groups in power while undermining the claims of those who challenge them.
To provide an example of how identity propaganda works, consider the well-known and well-established “model minority” myth. This myth describes Asian Americans in idealized terms of academic and professional achievement, which elides the heterogeneity within the various groups said to comprise “Asian Americans” and disparities in socioeconomic outcomes within these groups and between these groups and whites. At the same time, it shores up the idea that socioeconomic success is the product of individual initiative and group culture, not determined or extensively shaped by historic patterns of racial discrimination. And, because it is ready-to-hand in American political culture, the model minority myth can be wielded strategically to drive a wedge between nonwhite groups fighting for racial justice and provide a politically convenient justification for inequality.
As this example shows, centering racial analyses through the concept of identity propaganda—including analyses of whiteness—enables researchers and the public to better see the goals and patterns behind these strategic appeals. This includes seeing racial frames in disinformation and propaganda that appeal to whites, or have whites as their primary audience, as racial—such as how the model minority myth can simultaneously have many purposes, including working to justify the social and political power of whites.
Three Types of Identity Propaganda
The concept of identity propaganda helps reveal the structure of the specific types of appeals used to delegitimize and undermine the support of minority politicians. We outline three types of identity propaganda and illustrate their application through Harris’s case. This highlights themes that linked the propaganda directed against Harris to claims made against other nonwhite political figures in the United States.
First, “othering” narratives, premised on structures of domination, divide people based on preexisting racial colonial hierarchies. They rely on the public’s internalization of Orientalist tropes that establish Western superiority. In the case of Harris, these othering narratives sought to portray her as foreign or “other” to the norm of white political leaders. There are numerous examples of this, perhaps clearest in the repeated claims of right-wing figures such as John Eastman, a Chapman University law professor, who erroneously argued that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment would require one or both of Harris’s immigrant parents to be U.S. citizens for her to be a natural-born citizen—and thus eligible to be vice president. (Harris is the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father.) Eastman’s false claim was, in turn, circulated on social media tens of thousands of times and referenced by then-President Trump.
This attempt at othering, via the erroneous citing of legal requirements for higher office, can take many different forms. But, at its heart, it is a tactic to undermine the legitimacy and status of nonwhite political figures. Dominant groups—in this case, whites in America—define themselves in relation to an “other” and can leverage perceptions of “otherness” to preserve group status. Indeed, citizenship has long been linked to whiteness in the United States, providing a readily culturally available line of attack on Harris. These claims around Harris are not unique. This attempt at othering a prominent Black woman mirrors the repeated questioning of President Obama’s birthplace and therefore citizenship, including by Trump, in the years before and after Obama emerged as a political figure.
A second form of identity propaganda is the “essentializing” narrative. Essentialism is broadly the “attribution of a fixed essence” to someone’s identity and that of their group. This essentialism is often linked to group stereotypes that are well established and can be exploited to undermine political support. Essentializing narratives are insidious in that they force nonwhite political figures to respond to stereotypes about their cultural and social traits, which in turn are used to delegitimize their claims on political power.
In the case of Harris, essentializing narratives are strategic attempts to exploit her racial and gender identities to undermine her support among the social groups that she identifies with and attempts to represent. To provide a few examples, racist identity propaganda cast Harris as sexually promiscuous, raising numerous unfounded claims of untoward professional and personal relationships. Right-wing figures such as Tomi Lahren stated that Harris slept her “way to the top,” and the “Joe and the Hoe” slogan for Biden and Harris was popularized by right-wing celebrities such as Rush Limbaugh and prominent NBA photographer Bill Baptist. Other prominent figures like Tucker Carlson traded off the “angry Black woman” trope. All of these comments relied on the cultural availability of racist tropes of Black women as hypersexualized and angry.
Finally, “authenticating” narratives question a political figure’s identities as a way to undermine that person’s claims to political representation. By portraying figures as “inauthentic” to the identities they hold, this narrative not only delegitimizes them to the general public but also may impact the support they receive from those with shared identity traits. Calling upon someone to “prove” their identity relies on reductive (and essentializing) understandings of identities themselves. In Harris’s case, throughout her career she has self-identified as Black, even writing that her mother raised her daughters to be strong Black women. Yet, to undermine this affiliation, purveyors of identity propaganda sought to challenge Harris’s representation of herself as Black, including through fabricating claims that she previously represented herself in different ways and by assertions that she was not, in fact, Black. For example, in August 2020 Black right-wing commentator Candace Owens shared a post on Twitter in which she stated, “I am SO EXCITED that we get to watch Kamala Harris, who swore into congress (sic) as an ‘Indian-American’, now play the ‘I’m a Black woman’ card all the way until November.” Similarly, author and failed-U.S. House candidate Angela Stanton King tweeted, “Black America, Is this your Queen? I’m no genius but I’ve been around Black folks all my life and this ain’t it. She has the Red Dot and everything.” Stanton King’s use of “red dot” refers to a bindi, a dot worn on the forehead that holds symbolism within Hindu culture.
Biracial individuals are particularly vulnerable to these identity propagandistic appeals given that they live at the juncture of different cultural and racial identities—which research has shown is socially troublesome given the emphasis on either-or distinctions. Biracial individuals can lay claim to many identities, but they are also vulnerable to attempts to undermine their authentic representation of multiple groups. This can result in the constant questioning of people’s identities for strategic political reasons, such as undermining their credibility to represent these groups. Authenticating narratives, then, question a person’s identity, or call on them to prove their identity, in ways that undermine their political standing with the groups in question or with other groups. In the example above, identity propaganda around Harris was designed to both undermine Harris’s standing with Black voters, a key part of the Democratic coalition, and appeal to whites that the vice presidential candidate was not a member of this group. Authenticating narratives claim that Harris cannot represent herself as Black and at the same time question her credibility in a broader sense.
Strategic racial appeals are only one aspect of identity propaganda—there are many different forms of identity that othering, essentializing and authenticating work upon, just as there are likely other patterns of identity narratives that can weaken the political standing of political figures from nondominant groups. By going beyond assessing claims about candidates as true or false, and focusing on racial and social hierarchies undergirding disinformation and propaganda, researchers and the public would become more aware of the patterns, and power, of attacks directed against nondominant groups. Even more, it would shed a light on how strategic attempts to undermine and weaponize people’s social identities and group memberships for political gain happen in the context of established narratives, tropes and meanings that are deeply embedded and ready-to-hand for people to wield politically.
22. CCP outsourcing propaganda campaigns to content farms in Taiwan and Australia: Think tank
Really?
Perhaps Stalin was right: “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope.”
CCP outsourcing propaganda campaigns to content farms in Taiwan and Australia: Think tank | Taiwan News | 2021-08-10 17:34:00
‘Influence-for-hire services’ pillar of Asia-Pacific’s online shadow economy
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A new report by Canberra-based think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) reveals how audiences in Australia and Taiwan have been targeted by a common strategy of online manipulation via Chinese news content farms.
The report, Influence for hire: the Asia–Pacific’s online shadow economy, looks at cases of online manipulation in the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Australia, and shows how a range of commercial firms “from content farms through to high-end PR agencies” are implementing influence operations for state actors.
Researchers from the security-focused Australian think tank teamed up with Taiwanese civic group DoubleThink Lab (台灣民主實驗室) to check two prominent Chinese-language content farms — Au123.com and Qiqis.org — for narrative alignment with Chinese state messaging surrounding the events of the Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6.
They found spikes in bias through a substantial increase in the phrases found in Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled sources around that time, repeating phrases commonly used by Chinese diplomats, such as “a beautiful sight to behold” (美丽的风景线) in reference to the riots.
“The language and tactics used reflect the CCP’s broader strategy to undermine the global standing of the US and spread the perception of democracy in decline,” the report states. The farms were also found to promote CCP-aligned disinformation on the origins of COVID-19 and party talking points on topics relating to Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The report suggests that content farms, which have obscure organizational structures and churn out low-quality content in pursuit of pay-per-click ad revenue, are ideal propaganda proxies, revealing financial affiliations between at least one of the sites and the CCP.
These “contractual arrangements to republish state-produced content” via third-party outlets allow Beijing “an indirect channel into the Chinese-language information ecosystem in Australia and Taiwan through which to shape perceptions about contemporary geopolitical events,” according to the report.
The report also sheds light on the content farms' strategy to leverage network effects and boost SEO in creating “a self-contained content-sharing ecosystem.”
Qiqi’s news, for example, has several Facebook fan pages with similar profile pictures and names, such as "Qiqi watches news" (琦琦看新聞), "Qiqi watches life" (琪琪看生活), "Qiqi reads history" (琪琪看歷史) and "Qiqi tells fortune" (琪琪看运势), which promote posts from within the network.
The think tank recommends the opening of multi-stakeholder approaches, including an “an Asia–Pacific centre of excellence in democratic resilience” that could enable public-private collaboration to keep the health of the region’s online sphere in check. It also encourages initiatives to reshape the business models behind content farms so that these publications make more “productive contributions to the region’s digital economy.”
23. Why Asian-Americans are embracing a common identity
I have noticed this with my daughter and how she described her college experience.
Why Asian-Americans are embracing a common identity
“Outcasted” is how Angelene Superable describes the subtle sense of alienation she felt growing up in Pearland, Texas, a town outside Houston.
While her best friend was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty — a sort of Texas ideal — Superable was the daughter of Filipino immigrants who had arrived in the US with just $200. She found herself wincing at the slights suffered by her parents, with their heavily-accented English, and the regular reminders that they were outsiders even as they were living a version of the American dream. They built careers in the medical industry and managed to eventually buy a home with a swimming pool. When she arrived at the University of California Berkeley, Superable longed to join a mostly white sorority. “I was like, ‘I want to be the token Asian!’” she says.
Angelene Superable this year helped found the New York Pan-Asian Democratic Club © Instagram/asuperable
But no longer. By the end of her studies, Superable had come to grips with her roots and her identity. After graduating, she joined an initiative sponsored by the office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to register disenfranchised voters, many of them Asian-American immigrants.
“Why don’t we have something like this?” Superable, 25, recalls asking herself. “Every other ethnic group does.”
Protesters demand an end to anti-Asian violence earlier this year in New York City © Spencer Platt/Getty Image
NY PAD is part of a wave of Asian-American activism rolling across the country, propelled by those like Superable seeking to forge a coherent political and social movement from citizens who trace their heritage to such disparate countries as China, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh, among many others. Their sense of purpose has been fortified by a pandemic that originated in China and which has led to a surge in hate crimes and violence that has sent tremors through Asian-American communities.
From New York to California, Asian-American groups say they are signing up new members who previously showed little interest in the cause. One fruit of their efforts was harvested in Illinois in July when the state legislature passed the country’s first law mandating that Asian-American history be taught in the state’s public schools. That could make common knowledge of events like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — the first and only law to prohibit a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating to the US — and other pieces of Asian-American history largely ignored by most Americans. Other states are now examining similar measures.
“What we’re seeing now is . . . a mass galvanising moment for Asian-Americans,” says Takeo Rivera, a professor and playwright at Boston University, likening its cultural importance to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man who was beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers at a time when rising Japanese imports were stirring anti-Asian sentiment.
“Before the Vincent Chin case there wasn’t a broad-based national sense of what it meant to be an Asian-American,” Rivera argues. Now there was, and he saw Asian-Americans again “uniting around a sense of shared vulnerability and a shared sense of precarity against racist violence”.
For Wayne Ho, president of the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social services organisation in New York, the burst of activism is the silver lining he had hoped for when he and his staff gathered in the early days of the pandemic to discuss its possible implications.
“We actually said a best-case scenario could be not just Asian-American activists and professionals but also that Asian-American community members who have not been as civically involved could actually feel more empowered and assert their voice and try to fight for their rights more because of what we were starting to see at the early stages of the pandemic,” Ho says.
Pandemic pressures
Asian-Americans total about 20m, or roughly 6 per cent of the population, according to data from the Pew Research Center. They are now the country’s fastest-growing racial or ethnic group.
Still, Asian-American identity is a recent concept and a fragile one. The term dates to 1968, when two graduate students at the University of California Berkeley coined it to try to create a pan-Asian activist group. It emerged from the same ferment as the civil rights and Third World liberation movements. Previously, Americans whose families immigrated from Asia identified by their country of origin — Chinese-American, Japanese-American, Indonesian-American, Nepalese-American and so on. Many still do.
The notion of cramming so many nationalities and ethnicities under a single umbrella is challenging, to say the least. There are dozens of languages and cultures to accommodate.
While Asian-Americans lean Democratic overall, there are plenty of exceptions. Many older Vietnamese, for example, harbour a deep fear of communism and tend to be more conservative. Any issues relating to China can be polarising for people who hail from other countries in the region.
There are also generational differences that stem from how and when people arrived in America.
One could, for example, be the descendants of Chinese labourers who came generations ago to build the railroads, and have since built their own community organisations; or be a highly-trained Indian doctor who arrived after US Immigration law was liberalised in 1965; or be a desperately-poor refugee fleeing violence or war.
“What it means to be Asian-American is constantly in flux,” says Rivera.
Grace Meng, the New York City congresswoman, speaks at a news conference with House Democrats and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus on the ‘Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act’ on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, in May this year © Andrew Caballero/AFP via Getty Images
Now Covid is shaping a new generation. Communities like Flushing, Queens, home to one of the world’s biggest Chinatowns, were among the first to see their businesses suffer as tourists stayed away and restaurants shuttered. Then came the violence.
The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University San Bernardino found that reported hate crimes against Asian-Americans in 16 major US cities increased 149 per cent last year — even as hate crimes overall fell by 7 per cent. In New York City, hate crimes rose 262 per cent during the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2020.
Behind such statistics are accounts of elderly Asian-Americans being spat at and told to “go home”, and videos that have circulated widely online, such as one showing an 84-year-old man being assaulted in San Francisco — he later died of his injuries — or the two Asian women being accosted by a hammer-wielding woman in New York.
“People are just really scared. They don’t want to leave the house at all,” Grace Meng, the New York City congresswoman, told a group of business leaders earlier this year. “I have people texting me left and right: ‘I have pepper spray. You want one? Where do you buy pepper spray?’”
Many blame former president Donald Trump for racialising a virus that emanated from China by repeatedly calling it the “China virus” or “kung flu.” In the process, they say, Trump has reinvigorated an enduring prejudice that Asian-Americans are, somehow, not truly American.
But such bigotry appears to be binding Asian-Americans together in a way that other initiatives have not. As with Vincent Chin’s murder, bigots are inclined to target all Asian-Americans for the perceived transgressions of any ethnicity.
Former president Donald Trump was accused of racialising a virus by calling it the ‘China virus’ © Drew Angerer/Getty Images
A man in Midland, Texas, for example, last year stabbed three members of a Burmese family, including two children, at a Sam’s Club discount store because, he told law enforcement, he “thought they were Chinese and spreading Covid”.
“Most Americans don’t make any distinction between national origins. That has a way of reminding those of us who are Asian-American that we’re all in this together,” says Janelle Wong, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Maryland.
Mobilising votes
While only a minority of Asian-Americans have embraced a common identity, according to Wong, the rates are higher among younger generations and those born in the US. There are plenty of peculiarities. Even though many Indian-Americans have adopted Asian-American identity, many of those whose origins are in east Asia do not accept them as such.
Those sorts of divisions help to explain why Asian-Americans have struggled to harness political power. Another problem is that many are also concentrated in non-swing states, such as Hawaii, New York and California, diluting their appeal to political parties.
Asian-Americans tend to receive the fewest flyers, door knocks and other forms of political outreach. In New York City, where Asians are 14 per cent of the population, Governor Andrew Cuomo has never attended an official event in Chinatown.
“Because of the way we’re situated in the political landscape, because we are a smaller group — a group that is predominantly immigrant, a group that is not all English dominant — it’s very hard to mobilise Asian-Americans,” Wong said. “And parties, at least until the very recent past, have not devoted a lot of resources to mobilising Asian-Americans.”
Asian-Americans attend a self-defence class organised by the Public Safety Patrol, a civil patrol team started in response to the spike in attacks against Asian-Americans since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, in Queens, New York © Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
That might be changing. Asian-American turnout jumped from 49 per cent in the 2016 presidential election to a record 60 per cent last year, according to AAPI Data. (Indian Americans led the way, at 71 per cent, while Filipino voters trailed at 54 per cent).
In Georgia, Asian-Americans helped deliver not only Biden’s victory but also the wafer-thin margin to deliver the state’s two Senate seats to Democrats in January’s special run-off election. Among the winners was Raphael Warnock, the first black Democratic senator from the south since the Reconstruction era.
Grace Pai, the executive director of Asian-American Midwest Progressives, went to Georgia for two months to lead a field campaign to knock on the doors of 100,000 Asian-American voters in and around Atlanta. She noticed that both the political parties hired staff for that contest to liaise with the Asian-American and Pacific Islands community, something they have not traditionally done.
“That is a step in the right direction, but there is so much more to do,” she says. “When we’re talking about Asian-American voters, there are a multitude of languages spoken in our community, and in order to reach those voters you have to both do multilingual work, but you also have to do long-term organising. You can’t just show up at someone’s door and ask them to vote for someone just because you have a translated flyer, you know?”
A Guardian Angel patrols New York City’s Chinatown © Alex Wong/Getty Images
Asian-American voters tended to focus more on issues — such as healthcare, education and now safety — than party affiliation, according to Pai, who estimates that the number of Asian-American political organisations had at least tripled over the past five years. Such groups are aiming to build long-term relationships within communities — not just during elections.
One is 18 Million Rising. It launched in 2012, during President Obama’s re-election campaign, and at a time when the murder of young black men, like Trayvon Martin, was intensifying debates about identity and politics. Its hope is to create an online hub where young, politically-conscious Asian-Americans might connect, particularly those outside diverse communities like Los Angeles and New York. It is the sort of political home that Laura Li, one of its campaign managers, wished she had in her formative years.
“I grew up slightly disconnected, which is the experience of a lot of Asian-Americans,” says Li, whose parents settled in Silver Spring, Maryland in the mid-1980s.
They ended up working in restaurants and hotels — an existence far removed from the “model minority” myth, which holds that East Asians have been universally successful in America. Growing up, Li described her place in her high school’s ethnic and racial hierarchy as “proximate to whiteness.”
“I think a lot of children of immigrants, we only gather the language to explain our experiences as we grow up, and we begin to understand how our experiences relate to the context in which we grew up,” Li said, echoing Superable’s description of her coming-of-age in Texas. “I would say that Asian-Americans are experiencing a political awakening right now.”
A poster in memory of Vicha Ratanapakdee on display as members of the Thai-American community held a rally against Asian hate crimes in Thai Town in Los Angeles in April © Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty
Checking stereotypes
That awakening can be complicated. Superable’s parents, for example, struggled to understand their daughter’s objection to positive stereotypes about hard-working and brainy Asians. “It was hard for them to take the nuance that any racialised stereotype can be harmful because it opens the door to other stereotypes,” she said.
In New York’s June Democratic primary, NY PAD saw some of its favoured candidates for city council prevail, including Julie Won, a Korean-American from Queens, and Shahana Hanif, a Bangladeshi-American from Brooklyn. They are likely to be among a record six Asian-Americans on the 51-seat council.
But NY PAD was strangely silent when it came time to endorse a candidate for mayor even though Andrew Yang, the upwardly mobile son of Taiwanese immigrants, was on the ballot. For months, opinion polls showed Yang leading the race, holding out the possibility he might become the first Asian-American mayor of America’s largest city. Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams won the party’s nomination for the November election.
Still, Superable and some of her progressive friends were not satisfied. In Yang’s moderate policy stances, they saw a politician they believed was still too eager to be the token Asian in a largely white fraternity. Mere representation was not enough for them.
“It’s probably been the most pivotal year of my life,” she explains. “It’s when I found my voice.”
Letter in response to this article:
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.
