Quotes of the Day:
“The happy man is one who is freed from both fear and desire because of the gift of reason.”
- Seneca
"In war the will is directed at an animate object that reacts."
- Carl von Clausewitz
“The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.”
- Joe Dixon
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Late July
2. National Security Memorandum on Improving Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure Control Systems
3. White House Asks CISA, NIST to Set Cybersecurity Performance Goals for Critical Infrastructure Operators
4. The Age of Zombie Democracies
5. China seeks Taliban promise to wage war on Uighur fighters in Afghanistan
6. The U.S. Is Making One Thing Clear: China Must Back Off on Taiwan
7. Exercise Tests DOD's Integrated Deterrence
8. Navigating Through Turbulence: Think tanks’ impact on policy in a rapidly changing world
9. Cryptocurrency should be added to the US-Japan trade deal
10. Can diplomacy get global cyberwarriors to sheathe their swords?
11. The US military couldn’t stop the heroin trade from funding the Taliban. But synthetic opioid producers might.
12. David and Goliath: Myanmar’s Armed Resistance at the Crossroads
13. Pentagon announces new commander for U.S. Army Special Operations Command
14. Soldier with 10th Special Forces Group drowns while training in Florida
15. Hidilyn Diaz says China team mad at her Chinese coach for not sharing extent of her strength
16. The predictable collapse of the Afghan Air Force is happening in real time
17. U.S. House bans funding for maps that depict Taiwan as part of China
18. China names Xi ally, 'wolf warrior' as new ambassador to US
19. Chinese Defense University Conceals Partnerships With U.S. Schools
20. China’s New Ambassador to U.S. Is ‘Willing to Ruffle Feathers’
21. Time for a New Approach to Defense Strategy
22. Fully Fund the Guam Defense System
23. Americans and the Dragon: Coalition Warfare from the Boxer Rebellion to the Future Battlefield
24. China’s Sputnik Moment? How Washington Boosted Beijing’s Quest for Tech Dominance
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Late July
July 28, 2021 | FDD Tracker: July 15 – 28, 2021
Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Late July
Trend Overview
Edited by Jonathan Schanzer
Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Two times per month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They do so with a smile, while providing trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch. As our experts note, this has not been a quiet summer. The United States continues to beat a rapid retreat from the Middle East. Tensions linger over a massive cyberattack by Russia-based cybercriminals. And Iran is now digging in its heels even after President Joe Biden’s White House offered up more concessions than most experts thought possible. Read below to see how FDD’s scholars assess these challenges. And do not forget to check back again in two weeks. The one thing you can count on these days is rapid change.
Trending Positive
Trending Neutral
Trending Negative
Trending Very Negative
2. National Security Memorandum on Improving Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure Control Systems
National Security Memorandum on Improving Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure Control Systems
JULY 28, 2021
•
Protection of our Nation’s critical infrastructure is a responsibility of the government at the Federal, State, local, Tribal, and territorial levels and of the owners and operators of that infrastructure. The cybersecurity threats posed to the systems that control and operate the critical infrastructure on which we all depend are among the most significant and growing issues confronting our Nation. The degradation, destruction, or malfunction of systems that control this infrastructure could cause significant harm to the national and economic security of the United States.
Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of my Administration to safeguard the critical infrastructure of the Nation, with a particular focus on the cybersecurity and resilience of systems supporting National Critical Functions, defined as the functions of Government and the private sector so vital to the United States that their disruption, corruption, or dysfunction would have a debilitating effect on national security, economic security, public health or safety, or any combination thereof.
Sec. 2. Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Initiative. Accordingly, I have established an Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Initiative (Initiative), a voluntary, collaborative effort between the Federal Government and the critical infrastructure community to significantly improve the cybersecurity of these critical systems. The primary objective of this Initiative is to defend the United States’ critical infrastructure by encouraging and facilitating deployment of technologies and systems that provide threat visibility, indications, detection, and warnings, and that facilitate response capabilities for cybersecurity in essential control system and operational technology networks. The goal of the Initiative is to greatly expand deployment of these technologies across priority critical infrastructure.
Sec. 3. Furthering the Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Initiative. The Initiative creates a path for Government and industry to collaborate to take immediate action, within their respective spheres of control, to address these serious threats. The Initiative builds on, expands, and accelerates ongoing cybersecurity efforts in critical infrastructure sectors and is an important step in addressing these threats. We cannot address threats we cannot see; therefore, deploying systems and technologies that can monitor control systems to detect malicious activity and facilitate response actions to cyber threats is central to ensuring the safe operations of these critical systems. The Federal Government will work with industry to share threat information for priority control system critical infrastructure throughout the country.
(a) The Initiative began with a pilot effort with the Electricity Subsector, and is now followed by a similar effort for natural gas pipelines. Efforts for the Water and Wastewater Sector Systems and Chemical Sector will follow later this year.
(b) Sector Risk Management Agencies, as defined in section 9002(a)(7) of Public Law 116-283, and other executive departments and agencies (agencies), as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, shall work with critical infrastructure stakeholders and owners and operators to implement the principles and policy outlined in this memorandum.
Sec. 4. Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Performance Goals. Cybersecurity needs vary among critical infrastructure sectors, as do cybersecurity practices. However, there is a need for baseline cybersecurity goals that are consistent across all critical infrastructure sectors, as well as a need for security controls for select critical infrastructure that is dependent on control systems.
(a) Pursuant to section 7(d) of Executive Order 13636 of February 12, 2013 (Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity), the Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Secretary of Commerce (through the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and other agencies, as appropriate, shall develop and issue cybersecurity performance goals for critical infrastructure to further a common understanding of the baseline security practices that critical infrastructure owners and operators should follow to protect national and economic security, as well as public health and safety.
(b) This effort shall begin with the Secretary of Homeland Security issuing preliminary goals for control systems across critical infrastructure sectors no later than September 22, 2021, followed by the issuance of final cross-sector control system goals within 1 year of the date of this memorandum. Additionally, following consultations with relevant agencies, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall issue sector-specific critical infrastructure cybersecurity performance goals within 1 year of the date of this memorandum. These performance goals should serve as clear guidance to owners and operators about cybersecurity practices and postures that the American people can trust and should expect for such essential services. That effort may also include an examination of whether additional legal authorities would be beneficial to enhancing the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure, which is vital to the American people and the security of our Nation.
Sec. 5. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This memorandum shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations, where funding assistance may be required to implement control system cybersecurity recommendations.
(c) This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.
3. White House Asks CISA, NIST to Set Cybersecurity Performance Goals for Critical Infrastructure Operators
Excerpts:
The official said the administration is committed to finding innovative ways of working with the private sector and wants its initial steps to be voluntary but also signaled plans to work with Congress to secure the authority that would allow it to issue broad cybersecurity mandates.
“Short of legislation, there isn't a comprehensive way to require deployment of security technologies and practices that address, really, the threat environment that we see,” the official said. “The absence of mandated cybersecurity requirements for critical infrastructure is what, in many ways, has brought us to the level of vulnerability we have today. We're committed to addressing it. We're starting with voluntary, as much as we can because we want to do this in full partnership, but we're also pursuing all options we have in order to make the rapid progress we need.”
White House Asks CISA, NIST to Set Cybersecurity Performance Goals for Critical Infrastructure Operators
The initiative will not result in mandatory measures for the private sector, but the administration hopes to signal its commitment to cybersecurity and maybe get a little help from Congress on that front.
The White House will issue a national security memo Wednesday instructing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish cybersecurity performance goals for private-sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure.
The goal is to set comprehensive expectations for cybersecurity across all sectors of critical infrastructure at a time when private companies might be more inclined to meet them, a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday.
The official said the administration expects the action will make a difference even though it’s not a requirement because of “the fact that it's being announced by the president in the context of the [Transportation Security Administration’s] recent mandate, in the context of us openly saying that we really are committed to addressing the limited and piecemeal regulation, in the context of the current environment where the threat is known and seen by critical infrastructure owners and private sectors.”
“You look at a Colonial Pipeline, you look at JBS foods, you look at Kaseya, there is now a different threat,” said the official, listing victims of recent ransomware attacks with reverberating effects. “The threats that many people talked about have become real. So we believe these goals will be viewed differently.”
In contrast with typical industry reactions to the prospect of government mandates, Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blunt told the Senate Homeland Security Committee having standards to follow would be welcome. Blunt was testifying during a June 8 hearing on a pending TSA directive, now in effect, requiring pipeline operators to implement certain cybersecurity best practices.
The administration’s approach is exemplified by work the Department of Energy is doing to get companies in that sector to put specific technology in place to protect industrial control systems, the official said, noting the cooperation of 150 electric utilities in that effort and that “additional initiatives for other sectors will follow later this year.”
The official said the administration is committed to finding innovative ways of working with the private sector and wants its initial steps to be voluntary but also signaled plans to work with Congress to secure the authority that would allow it to issue broad cybersecurity mandates.
“Short of legislation, there isn't a comprehensive way to require deployment of security technologies and practices that address, really, the threat environment that we see,” the official said. “The absence of mandated cybersecurity requirements for critical infrastructure is what, in many ways, has brought us to the level of vulnerability we have today. We're committed to addressing it. We're starting with voluntary, as much as we can because we want to do this in full partnership, but we're also pursuing all options we have in order to make the rapid progress we need.”
4. The Age of Zombie Democracies
Excerpts:
Sadly, U.S. President Joe Biden missed the chance to hammer Putin for his corrupt self-dealing at the summit between the two leaders in Geneva in June. Biden later said that he spoke to Putin “about the violation of human rights,” but apart from a brief mention of Navalny, there is no public record of what he said. That means the Russian people didn’t get to hear Biden criticize Putin and his oligarch friends for getting rich by appropriating state resources and then gutting the country’s democracy so they don’t have to answer for their actions.
Biden did a better job of highlighting the corruption of the Cuban government, after nationwide pro-democracy protests erupted earlier this month. He publicly accused Cuba’s authoritarian leaders of “enriching themselves” instead of protecting people from “the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected.” That kind of pointed criticism resonates far more with the citizens of authoritarian countries than a perfunctory note about “human rights” being privately mentioned.
The best way to undermine zombie democracies is to demonstrate that their leaders are indifferent to the publics they pretend to serve. Yes, autocrats can resort to brutality to cling to power, but that is a dangerous game. Even the most committed dictators have a hard time hanging on when the public has completely turned on them. To hasten the arrival of such reckonings, Biden and other democratic leaders should stress how, in their quest to retain power, the leaders of zombie democracies have utterly forsaken their people.
The Age of Zombie Democracies
Why Autocrats Are Abandoning Even the Pretense of Democratic Rituals
Over the past decade, autocrats around the world have perfected the technique of “managed” or “guided” democracy. In Belarus, Egypt, Russia, Uganda, Venezuela, and elsewhere, authoritarian leaders have held periodic elections to enhance their legitimacy but monopolized the media, restricted civil society, and manipulated state institutions and resources to ensure that they remained in power.
Such methods are never foolproof, however, and their effectiveness has diminished as citizens have wised up and learned to operate within rigged systems. A growing number of autocrats have thus been forced to rely on ever starker forms of repression: they still hold periodic elections since their people have come to expect them, but they do not even pretend that these empty rituals are free or fair. The result has been the proliferation of what might be called “zombie democracies”—the living dead of electoral political systems, recognizable in form but devoid of any substance.
Just as autocrats have moved from managed to zombie democracy, so too must supporters of human rights evolve. Whereas they could once counter managed democracy by attacking particular autocratic techniques—restrictions on civil society, say, or arrests of journalists—they must now fight zombie democracy with a more frontal approach, one that deprives autocrats of the legitimacy they seek from electoral charades.
CREEPING ZOMBIES
Traditional dictatorships make no pretense of democracy. The Saudi and Emirati monarchies don’t even bother to hold direct national elections. Nor does the Chinese Communist Party; its kin in Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam; or the unapologetically authoritarian governments of post-Soviet Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Other authoritarian regimes, such as the military junta in Myanmar that has killed hundreds of protesters and imprisoned thousands more since it seized power in February, have overthrown elected governments and dispensed with democracy altogether.
But in a growing number of countries, governments have cloaked their autocratic rule in the garb of democracy—only to strip away this thin disguise to the point of risibility in recent years. A good example is Russia, which has hurtled toward zombie democracy status in large part due to opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s repeated end runs around the Kremlin’s managed democracy. The Kremlin had long kept the opposition in check by manipulating public opinion through its dominance of state-run television and other media. But Navalny evaded Moscow’s information controls by producing slick documentaries about the corrupt dealings of President Vladimir Putin that garnered tens of millions of views on YouTube.
After allowing Navalny to run for mayor of Moscow in 2013, when he secured 23 percent of the vote, the Kremlin barred his party as well as other genuinely independent opposition parties from participating in elections. In 2019, however, Navalny circumvented that restriction by encouraging Russians to vote for candidates from the tame pseudo-opposition parties that the Kremlin had allowed—a “smart voting” strategy aimed at undercutting the ruling United Russia party. Russian authorities responded by banishing Navalny to a penal colony, seeking to criminalize as an “extremist” any candidate who supported him, and tarring some of the country’s remaining independent media outlets as “foreign agents.” Russia will continue to hold elections, but without even the pretense of a genuine opposition or free public debate.
Putin’s ideological bedfellows in Belarus and Hungary have taken their countries down a similar path toward zombie democracy in Europe. In office since 1994, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has relied on restrictions on the media and civil society to maintain tight control of his country. When he sought a sixth term in office in 2020, he likely assumed he would coast to an easy victory after detaining the main opposition candidates. But the public rallied around Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of one of the jailed opposition politicians, forcing Lukashenko to resort to blatant electoral fraud and mass detention and torture of protesters. Later, his government prosecuted critical journalists and human rights defenders and liquidated dozens of civil society groups and independent media outlets. He even went as far as forcing down a commercial flight to arrest a leading opposition figure.
Governments have cloaked their autocratic rule in the garb of democracy.
Hungary has taken a different route to zombie democracy. After coming to power for a second time in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orban took control of much of the country’s media, replaced independent judges with handpicked ones, imposed restrictions on civil society groups, gerrymandered electoral districts, and deployed public funds to maintain a large majority in parliament. But Orban’s strategy began to fail in 2019, when his party lost local elections in many large cities. Now, faced with the possibility that his party could lose next year’s parliamentary election to a unified opposition, Orban is moving to ensure that his party will control the state regardless of who is in government. His party has quietly taken control of the boards that run many state institutions and is creating foundations run by cronies that will control many state resources and operate beyond the oversight of the legislature.
Zombie democracy has also taken root in Latin America, most notably in Venezuela and Nicaragua. After Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s ruling party lost parliamentary elections in 2015, he used his control over electoral and judicial authorities to ensure that future elections would be neither free nor fair. The Supreme Court allowed government supporters to take over opposition parties, and security forces detained opposition leaders and brutalized their supporters to eliminate the possibility of an opposition victory. In response to international pressure, Maduro’s government recently appointed two officials associated with the opposition to the country’s National Electoral Council, but it remains to be seen if this concession will meaningfully improve electoral conditions.
In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega has grown steadily more autocratic as well. When large-scale protests against his rule erupted in 2018, his government responded with murderous repression: the police and heavily armed pro-government groups carried out a brutal crackdown on demonstrators that left more than 300 people dead and 2,000 injured. The government detained hundreds more and has carried out another wave of arrests in the lead-up to presidential elections slated for November of this year. Seven presidential candidates and at least 20 critics have been arrested, leaving Ortega to run for his fourth consecutive term effectively unopposed.
The Middle East and Africa have not escaped the scourge of zombie democracy, either. After the coalition government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lost mayoral elections in 2019 to candidates fielded by an opposition alliance, Erdogan escalated his attacks on a pro-Kurdish party that had supported alliance candidates, removing and jailing its mayors, green-lighting a court case to shutter the party, and redoubling efforts to prevent its charismatic former co-chair, Selahattin Demirtas, from leaving the prison cell where he has spent the last four and a half years. In the face of declining public support, Erdogan has sought to eviscerate independent media and exerts control over the courts. His coalition also appears to be preparing to alter legislation on elections and political parties without consulting other parties, raising concerns that the 2023 election could be less than fair.
Leaders of zombie democracies have utterly forsaken their people.
In Egypt, General turned President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his military junta have sought to foreclose the possibility of victory by an independent party such as the Muslim Brotherhood (which won the last fair presidential election in 2012) by imposing the most repressive rule in the country’s modern history: shutting down independent media, harassing civil society groups, and detaining tens of thousands of people. In 2018, Sisi was reelected with an official—and laughable—97 percent of the vote. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, meanwhile, was reelected earlier this year with a less commanding 58.6 percent of the vote, but only after his security forces arrested his main opponent and brutalized and killed many of his supporters.
Finally, Hong Kong has also taken on some of the characteristics of a zombie democracy. An election process that allowed pro-Beijing constituencies to choose half of the members of the governing Legislative Council had long guaranteed a pro-mainland majority. But after a landslide victory in the 2019 local elections amid large-scale protests, pro-democracy candidates briefly threatened to prevail in the next Legislative Council election by using an informal primary system. Participants in that system are now being prosecuted, however, and all opposition activity has been shut down under a harsh national security law imposed by Beijing.
THE AUTOCRAT’S ACHILLES’ HEEL
The problem of zombie democracies has become so acute that governments committed to promoting genuine democracy need a strategy to address it. For decades, the standard response to managed democracies has been to attack their tools of electoral manipulation one by one—calling out censorship, opposing limits on civil society, or defending the rights of opposition candidates—to nudge these governments back toward allowing broader civic engagement, unfettered media, judicial independence, and free and fair elections.
But countering zombie democracies requires a more holistic approach. Their leaders have given up trying to manage popular opinion in favor of quashing it, but even the worst zombie democracies rely on some degree of popular consent, coerced as it may be. That gives those seeking to promote genuine democracy a point of leverage.
The United States and other like-minded democracies should continue to denounce the censorship and other abusive tactics that zombie democracies use to silence their critics, as well as the political and legal machinations they employ to empty democracy of its meaning. They should also stop providing sustenance to the leaders of zombie democracies, be it U.S. military aid and arms sales to Sisi or European Union subsidies for Orban.
But countries seeking to promote genuine democracy should go a step further and hit the leaders of zombie democracies where it hurts the most—exposing the corruption and self-dealing that sustain their regimes. Because zombie democrats no longer trust even a manipulated public to back them, they increasingly rely on cronies in the military and the private sector to prop up their rule. But generals and oligarchs are rarely true believers in zombie democracy. Their loyalty must be bought through the diversion of public funds, which is the autocrat’s Achilles’ heel.
Democratic governments should spotlight the ways in which the leaders of zombie democracies advance their private interests at the public’s expense. Sisi and Orban have both left public hospitals decrepit while paying off their cronies. The Kremlin has allowed friendly billionaire oligarchs to prosper while cutting pensions and letting wages stagnate. Maduro has paid off the army while the people of Venezuela suffer a humanitarian crisis. Similar critiques could be made of most leaders of zombie democracies.
Sadly, U.S. President Joe Biden missed the chance to hammer Putin for his corrupt self-dealing at the summit between the two leaders in Geneva in June. Biden later said that he spoke to Putin “about the violation of human rights,” but apart from a brief mention of Navalny, there is no public record of what he said. That means the Russian people didn’t get to hear Biden criticize Putin and his oligarch friends for getting rich by appropriating state resources and then gutting the country’s democracy so they don’t have to answer for their actions.
Biden did a better job of highlighting the corruption of the Cuban government, after nationwide pro-democracy protests erupted earlier this month. He publicly accused Cuba’s authoritarian leaders of “enriching themselves” instead of protecting people from “the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected.” That kind of pointed criticism resonates far more with the citizens of authoritarian countries than a perfunctory note about “human rights” being privately mentioned.
The best way to undermine zombie democracies is to demonstrate that their leaders are indifferent to the publics they pretend to serve. Yes, autocrats can resort to brutality to cling to power, but that is a dangerous game. Even the most committed dictators have a hard time hanging on when the public has completely turned on them. To hasten the arrival of such reckonings, Biden and other democratic leaders should stress how, in their quest to retain power, the leaders of zombie democracies have utterly forsaken their people.
5. China seeks Taliban promise to wage war on Uighur fighters in Afghanistan
Excerpts:
Reacting to the Taliban visit to China, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN he saw an alignment of the interests of regional countries on Afghanistan, where he argued "no one has an interest in Afghanistan falling into an enduring civil war" and "no one has an interest in a military takeover of the country by the Taliban, the restoration of an Islamic emirate."
"Everyone has an interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict and some kind of government that emerges that's truly representative and inclusive," Blinken said. "And so if China is acting on those interests, if other countries are acting on those interests, that's a positive thing."
Days before the Taliban traveled to Tianjin, Wang met U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman there to discuss a range of regional and international issues. Afghanistan was described as a topic in which Sherman "affirmed the importance of cooperation," according to the State Department.
But the dispute over Xinjiang and other areas in which the U.S. has accused China of human rights abuses loomed large over the meeting. After the issue was further pushed by the U.S. government's Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which called for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games over the Xinjiang issue, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian hit back forcefully against the U.S. on Wednesday.
"The so-called genocide in Xinjiang is a through-and-through lie of the century fabricated by a few anti-China forces," Zhao said.
China seeks Taliban promise to wage war on Uighur fighters in Afghanistan
Newsweek · by Tom O'Connor · July 28, 2021
China has sought assurance from the Taliban during a meeting in Tianjin that the resurgent movement will take on a murky Uighur Islamist separatist group in Afghanistan.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted a delegation of the Taliban led by Taliban political committee head Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar on Wednesday, marking the group's latest in a series of international trips as its fighters take territory nationwide in Afghanistan amid a U.S. military withdrawal from the country.
The top Chinese diplomat said his country "has always respected Afghanistan's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, adhered to non-interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs and pursued a friendly policy toward the entire Afghan people," according to a readout provided by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Wang was critical of the U.S. and allied NATO forces in how they handled both the conflict and their withdrawal from it.
"Afghanistan belongs to the Afghan people, and its future should be in the hands of its own people," Wang said. "The hasty withdrawal of the U.S .and NATO troops from Afghanistan actually marks the failure of the U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. The Afghan people have an important opportunity to achieve national stability and development."
But instability prevails at this pivotal time, and Wang called on the Taliban, officially known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, to "put the interests of the country and nation first, hold high the banner of peace talks, set the goal of peace, build a positive image and pursue an inclusive policy."
He called for a united Afghanistan.
"All factions and ethnic groups in Afghanistan should unite as one, truly implement the 'Afghan-led and Afghan-owned' principle, push for early substantive results in the peace and reconciliation process, and independently establish a broad and inclusive political structure that suits Afghanistan's national realities," Wang said.
There's one faction in particular, however, that Wang said was unwelcome in Afghanistan: the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), also called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
The group is predominantly comprised of Uighurs, a majority-Muslim ethnic group found across Central Asia, and especially in China. Beijing has taken heavy-handed and controversial steps toward curbing suspected ETIM activities in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan.
Speaking to the Taliban on Wednesday, Wang "stressed that the ETIM is an international terrorist organization designated by the UN Security Council that poses a direct threat to China's national security and territorial integrity."
"Combating it is a common responsibility for the international community," Wang said. "We hope the Afghan Taliban will make a clean break with all terrorist organizations including the ETIM and resolutely and effectively combat them to remove obstacles, play a positive role and create enabling conditions for security, stability, development and cooperation in the region."
Purported members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, known officially now as the Turkestan Islamic Party, train in this video entitled "Warriors of Truth" shared July 26 by the group's media office. The video featured a Uighur-language tag for "Khorasan" a term that refers to a historic region spanning parts of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Turkestan Islamic Party Voice of Islam Media Center
The remarks mirrored those uttered by Wang earlier this month during his visit to Tajikistan and shared with Newsweek by China's embassy in Washington.
Following the latest meeting in Tianjin, Taliban spokesperson Mohammed Naeem said that the group "assured China that Afghan territory would not be used against the security of any country," and "thanked China for its continued cooperation with the people of Afghanistan, especially its continued cooperation in the fight against coronavirus."
The two sides were also said to have discussed greater economic cooperation.
As Afghanistan's internationally recognized government in Kabul struggles to keep vast stretches of the countryside from falling into the hands of its foe, the Taliban's growing ties with regional countries including China, Russia and Iran are indications of the group's elevated status.
But these three nations have also called on the Taliban to rout any other militants with ambitions beyond Afghanistan's borders. In the eyes of China, ETIM embodies the most immediate threat.
The group has roots in Afghanistan dating back at least to the 1980s Soviet intervention, which saw Al-Qaeda and the Taliban ultimately emerge from a broad resistance of mujahideen fighters, some of whom were backed by the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
In the 1990s, ETIM would strike at China in protest of the ruling Chinese Communist Party's policies in Xinjiang, where the central government was accused of suppressing Uighur identity and culture.
While China has attributed other incidents of unrest in Xinjiang to ETIM activities, a crackdown toward the end of the decade drove much of the group into then-Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It became one of many Islamist factions targeted by a U.S.-led campaign after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Washington and Beijing initially agreed on the threat posed by ETIM in Afghanistan, and the U.S. conducted airstrikes against it there as recently as 2018.
But as relations between the world's two leading powers worsened in the following years, the U.S. has taken aim at China's treatment of its Uighur minority, going as far as to accuse Beijing of conducting "genocide" in Xinjiang through the use of vocational education and training centers that U.S. officials have likened to concentration camps.
Chinese officials have vehemently denied any wrongdoing in what they view as an attempt to foster unity amid tensions in Xinjiang, and they have accused the U.S. of intentionally seeking to stir up unrest in an attempt to destabilize China.
Last November, the State Department removed ETIM from its "Terrorist Exclusion List," sparking furor from China and concern from others, including Pakistan, which has also raised the alarm about ETIM.
In comments sent to Newsweek last month, a State Department spokesperson defended the move.
"ETIM was removed from the list because, for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that ETIM continues to exist," the spokesperson said.
The State Department traced the change in American policy to changes in China's own counterterrorism position.
"We assess that ETIM is now a broad label China uses to inaccurately paint a variety of Uighur actors, including non-violent activists and advocates for human rights, as terrorist threats," the spokesperson said. "China often labels individuals and groups as terrorists on the basis of their political and religious beliefs, even if they do not advocate violence."
ETIM is currently designated a terrorist organization by a number of countries and international organizations, including China, the European Union, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United Nations.
Afghan Taliban political committee head Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (Center L) and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (Center R) pose alongside other officials from both sides during a meeting in Tianjin, July 28. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
While relatively little has been heard from ETIM in comparison to other transnational militant groups in Afghanistan such as the Islamic State militant group's Khorasan branch (ISIS-K) and Al-Qaeda, the group has been known to operate in Syria's rebel-held northwestern Idlib province.
A new United Nations report found that ETIM was still active in Afghanistan as well, where it "consists of several hundred members, located primarily in Badakhshan and neighbouring Afghan provinces," according to U.N. member states.
"Many Member States assess that it seeks to establish a Uighur state in Xinjiang, China, and towards that goal, facilitates the movement of fighters from Afghanistan to China," the report found. "Another Member State reported that the group has also established corridors for moving fighters between the Syrian Arab Republic, where the group exists in far larger numbers, and Afghanistan, to reinforce its combat strength."
Specific examples of ETIM activity included last year's insurgent siege on Kuran wa Munjan District in Badakhshan, the Afghan province that borders China's Xinjiang.
"Several Member States note that the group carries out terrorist training, maintains an active social media presence and regularly releases audio and video messages promoting terrorist attacks," the U.N. report found. "The group raises funds through extortion and kidnap for ransom, among other means."
ETIM's social media presence affirms that the group has China in its sights, including a February 2019 magazine cover that showed a depiction of the group's blue-and-white flag superimposed on Xinjiang province and wielding an AK-47-style rifle over the rest of China and the national five-starred red flag. More recent videos depict scenes of alleged abuse against Uighurs in Xinjiang.
While the group's actual capabilities in Afghanistan are still uncertain, it remains to be seen if the U.S. and China can once again find common ground in the country despite a myriad of differences.
Reacting to the Taliban visit to China, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN he saw an alignment of the interests of regional countries on Afghanistan, where he argued "no one has an interest in Afghanistan falling into an enduring civil war" and "no one has an interest in a military takeover of the country by the Taliban, the restoration of an Islamic emirate."
"Everyone has an interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict and some kind of government that emerges that's truly representative and inclusive," Blinken said. "And so if China is acting on those interests, if other countries are acting on those interests, that's a positive thing."
Days before the Taliban traveled to Tianjin, Wang met U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman there to discuss a range of regional and international issues. Afghanistan was described as a topic in which Sherman "affirmed the importance of cooperation," according to the State Department.
But the dispute over Xinjiang and other areas in which the U.S. has accused China of human rights abuses loomed large over the meeting. After the issue was further pushed by the U.S. government's Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which called for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games over the Xinjiang issue, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian hit back forcefully against the U.S. on Wednesday.
"The so-called genocide in Xinjiang is a through-and-through lie of the century fabricated by a few anti-China forces," Zhao said.
Newsweek · by Tom O'Connor · July 28, 2021
6. The U.S. Is Making One Thing Clear: China Must Back Off on Taiwan
Excerpts:
“Unfortunately, Beijing’s unwillingness to resolve disputes peacefully and respect the rule of law isn’t just occurring on the water,” he said. “We have also seen aggression against India … destabilizing military activity and other forms of coercion against the people of Taiwan … and genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.”
Unlike under the Trump administration, President Joe Biden has set a policy to rally allies and partners to help counter China’s increasingly coercive economic and foreign policies, CNBC.com reported. Later this week, Austin is set to visit Vietnam and the Philippines as part of an effort to emphasize the importance of alliances.
However, at the same time, Austin made it clear that this isn’t about creating an anti-China Coalition.
“We are not asking countries in the region to choose between the United States and China,” said Austin. “In fact, many of our partnerships in the region are older than the People’s Republic of China itself.”
The U.S. Is Making One Thing Clear: China Must Back Off on Taiwan
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a stern warning to China regarding its aggression in the Pacific.
Speaking at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore on Tuesday, Austin said the United States would not flinch when America’s interests are threatened, but added that the U.S. is not seeking a confrontation.
Austin, who is the first African American to serve as the secretary of defense and previously served as the twelfth commander of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), also reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a breakaway province.
The U.S. will “stay focused on helping Taiwan to defend itself or having the capabilities to defend itself going forward,” the former general noted.
Protecting U.S. Interests
In recent weeks, China has protested the presence of U.S. warships that have conducted freedom of navigation operations (FONOP) in the South China Sea, a region Beijing also claims solely as its own.
“We will not flinch when our interests are threatened,” Austin said. “Yet we do not seek confrontation. So let me be clear: As secretary, I am committed to pursuing a constructive, stable relationship with China, including stronger crisis communications with the People’s Liberation Army.”
Relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated in recent years over the issues of Taiwan and the South China Sea. At the same time, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has become the world’s largest naval force, and has undertaken a significant modernization and building program. The PLAN now operates two aircraft carriers, with a third under construction and a fourth in the development and design stages.
That fourth carrier will likely be nuclear-powered, putting China in a very exclusive club on the world stage.
Beyond Maritime Concerns
As the Washington Examiner noted, China’s increased military initiatives aren’t solely focused on the South China Sea or even in the Indo-Pacific. Beijing has taken a hard line against its own minority populations, while it has continued to confront India in the Kashmir region.
While speaking in Singapore, Austin was quick to address those issues.
“Unfortunately, Beijing’s unwillingness to resolve disputes peacefully and respect the rule of law isn’t just occurring on the water,” he said. “We have also seen aggression against India … destabilizing military activity and other forms of coercion against the people of Taiwan … and genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.”
Building Bridges
Unlike under the Trump administration, President Joe Biden has set a policy to rally allies and partners to help counter China’s increasingly coercive economic and foreign policies, CNBC.com reported. Later this week, Austin is set to visit Vietnam and the Philippines as part of an effort to emphasize the importance of alliances.
However, at the same time, Austin made it clear that this isn’t about creating an anti-China Coalition.
“We are not asking countries in the region to choose between the United States and China,” said Austin. “In fact, many of our partnerships in the region are older than the People’s Republic of China itself.”
Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.
7. Exercise Tests DOD's Integrated Deterrence
Excerpts:
GIDE 3 tested the Defense Department's domain awareness, integrated deterrence, information dominance and decision-making superiority, he said.
...
"Integrated deterrence is about using the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities, all woven together in a networked way so that it is credible, flexible and formidable, [and that it] will give any adversary pause, especially to think about attacking our homeland," VanHerck said.
...
"We're shifting our focus away from pure defeat mechanisms for homeland defense toward earlier 'deter and deny' actions," he said. VanHerck also added that the experiment spurred the department to find ways to enable faster decisions and provide more options by making new technologies more accessible.
Exercise Tests DOD's Integrated Deterrence
Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, today briefed the news media on Global Information Dominance Experiment 3, which took place July 8-15.
Pentagon Briefing
Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, briefs the news media on the recently completed Global Information Dominance Experiment 3 at the Pentagon, July 28, 2021.
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Photo By: Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase, DOD
VIRIN: 210728-D-D0439-002
The experiment focused on a peer competitor and centered a lot on contested logistics in scenarios where lines of communication — such as the Panama Canal — were challenged, he said without going into specifics since much of the experiment is classified.
GIDE 3 enabled the department to rapidly collaborate with all 11 combatant commands and across the department to see pertinent data and information, using a variety of sensors, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
GIDE 3 tested the Defense Department's domain awareness, integrated deterrence, information dominance and decision-making superiority, he said.
Dominance Experiment
Representatives from all 11 U.S. combatant commands participate in the third series of Global Information Dominance Experiments at North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command Headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., July 13, 2021.
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Photo By: Air Force Tech. Sgt. Tommy Grimes
VIRIN: 210713-F-ZD999-001C
"Integrated deterrence is about using the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities, all woven together in a networked way so that it is credible, flexible and formidable, [and that it] will give any adversary pause, especially to think about attacking our homeland," VanHerck said.
The experiment also tested how the department uses information and data to increase decision space for leaders from the tactical level to the strategic level, he added.
Another goal of the experiment, he said, is creating global integration, shifting the department away from today's regionally focused plans and strategies.
The experiment also focuses on finding ways to change how the department executes force management and force design paradigms, as well as budgetary and acquisition processes, he added.
Panama Canal
Global Information Dominance Experiment 3, which took place July 8-15, 2021, focused on contested logistics in scenarios where lines of communication, such as the Panama Canal (shown here) were involved.
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Photo By: Coast Guard photo
VIRIN: 210727-O-D0439-001A
"We're shifting our focus away from pure defeat mechanisms for homeland defense toward earlier 'deter and deny' actions," he said. VanHerck also added that the experiment spurred the department to find ways to enable faster decisions and provide more options by making new technologies more accessible.
"Right now, the threats we face and the pace of change in the geostrategic environment continues to advance at really alarming rates. We've entered an era of new and renewed strategic competition, and this time we're facing two peer competitors — both nuclear armed — that are competing against us on a daily basis," he said.
"We must outpace our competitors by accelerating our own efforts to transform our culture, including factoring in homeland defense into every strategy, every plan, force management, force design decision, as well as aspects of acquisition and budget," he said.
8. Navigating Through Turbulence: Think tanks’ impact on policy in a rapidly changing world
Please go to the web site to view the entire report to include the graphics. It is in an interactive format that will not cut and paste to a message.
Navigating Through Turbulence
Think tanks’ impact on policy in a rapidly changing world
By FP Analytics, the independent research division of Foreign Policy magazine
The last few years have seen rises in authoritarianism, economic protectionism, poverty, and threats to human rights and civil liberties, trends that were all further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Efforts to combat such trends take many forms, but this report is particularly concerned with the role and impact of think tanks given their capacity to understand, explain, and shape these trends. Such organizations have proliferated globally since the 1990s, but there has been limited research and a lack of consensus regarding how successful they are in counteracting these negative trends. To explore this topic, FP Analytics conducted an in-depth survey and semi-structured interviews with think tank personnel to highlight the experiences and viewpoints of the think tank staff working on the ground to advance democracy, economic openness, human rights, and poverty reduction in their home countries.
Executive Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated several troubling global trends, including increasing authoritarianism, economic protectionism, and threats to human rights and civil liberties. It threatened to undo the significant gains in global economic and political development since the end of the Cold War. Today, 2.6 billion people—35 percent of the global population—live under regimes that are becoming more authoritarian. By contrast, just 8 percent of the world’s population live under regimes that are becoming more democratic.1 For the first time since 2001, democracies are not the majority regime type in the world.2 Accompanying these shifts in governance are troubling trends across key aspects of human development. For example, the World Bank estimates that the pandemic has pushed 115 million people into extreme poverty.3 Likewise, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has warned that disruptions to food supply chains, declines in economic activity, and diversions of resources toward emergency medical responses due to COVID-19 will delay progress toward meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that was already moving at a slower pace than necessary to meet the targets by their 2030 deadline.4
Local think tanks are among the organizations working at the forefront of these challenges. With their deep understanding of, and analytical perspectives on, the domestic power structures in their respective countries of operation, and through their research and role in informing policymakers, the media, and the public with their analyses, these organizations can play a vital role in addressing the root causes and counteracting the impacts of such concerning trends. However, to date, there have been limited research and a lack of consensus regarding how think tanks make and measure impact, how they operate, and the degrees to which they are effectively addressing these and other challenges within their countries. Understanding these challenges is key to understanding think tanks’ utility and to maximizing their effectiveness. Accordingly, FP Analytics (FPA) undertook an in-depth investigation of local think tanks, interviewing 51 senior think tank leaders from organizations around the world and surveying another 322. This analysis sheds light on the perspectives of think tank leaders and how they are working to tackle four major issues including poverty and standards of living, economic openness, governance, and declining liberal democratic norms. Several notable findings emerged:
COVID-19 Presents Challenges and New Opportunities for Local Think Tanks: Think tank leaders felt that the pandemic has had a substantial negative effect on these four key areas in addition to causing operational challenges. The pandemic has provided cover for illiberal reforms and retaliation against opposition activity by authoritarian regimes, putting think tank staff at risk. However, the pandemic has placed a renewed spotlight on the importance of civil liberties, human rights, and the organizations and individuals working to defend them.
Governance and Declining Liberal Democratic Norms Are Major Worries: While all of the four major issues were serious concerns for survey respondents, two stood out. Nearly three-quarters of respondents reported being seriously concerned about governance, and 56 percent reported serious concerns regarding declining liberal democratic norms.
Local Dynamics Require Local Expertise: Though these organizations often work globally, around two-thirds of think tank leaders surveyed perceived significant unique aspects to how the trends of democratic decline, poor governance, poverty, and economic protectionism are manifesting in their countries. These leaders contended that local organizations are among the best positioned to address these challenges, given their local knowledge of the political, social, and other dynamics influencing socio-political realities on the ground. This includes an advantage in defining and measuring impact within local contexts.
Local Think Tanks Are Seeing an Impact, Despite Challenges: The vast majority of survey respondents reported having an impact or a substantial impact addressing poverty, declining liberal democratic norms, governance, and economic openness in their countries. How think tank leaders define “impact” is varied, with some pointing to concrete policy change and others noting amplification of research and analysis across public media. In countries where governments are actively suppressing dissent, think tanks are minimizing direct engagement with policymakers and diversifying their work to include monitoring and evaluating government activities, offering skills training, building youth capacity, translating literature, and diversifying school curricula.
While local think tanks are under tremendous pressure in some locations, and face great challenges globally from the pandemic, think tank personnel report having positive impacts on governance, declining democratic norms and liberties, poverty, and economic openness. In part, this is because they have adapted to the changing political and economic climate. Some have shifted toward a focus on messaging, public relations, and training students and activists. Others have continued to produce strong research, meet with political leaders, and spread their work through mainstream media. Think tank leaders repeatedly emphasized the value of coalitions and partnerships, noting that they have learned important lessons and best practices through connecting with others with shared goals. Specific recommendations for think tanks, as well as donors and stakeholders, to build on this success include:
For Think Tanks
- Build and Join Networks of Think Tanks and Civil Society Actors with Shared Goals: Coalitions of local, regional, and global organizations can share resources and ideas, learn from each other’s successes and failures, and build a strong community working toward shared outcomes.
- Diversify Funding Sources: COVID-19 has demonstrated that think tanks cannot rely on funding from sources from which money may be diverted to emergency relief during crises. Diversifying funding sources, and finding creative fundraising methods such as subscription models, will be vital for think tanks to continue doing their work, as well as to mitigate concerns about foreign influence.
- Publicly Demonstrate Independence to Improve Credibility: Think tanks should strive for financial transparency wherever appropriate while protecting the safety of donors and staff, and they should consider additional methods for formalizing and communicating organizational practices for maintaining independence, for example, through establishing clear and transparent policies about editorial and programmatic independence from donors.
For Donors and Other Stakeholders
- Foster Relationships in Fragile States: Respondents from think tanks in fragile states were more likely to report having a greater impact than those from think tanks in more stable contexts, suggesting that stakeholders would do well to engage with think tanks in fragile states when seeking new partnerships and opportunities.
- Build Organizational Capacity: Think tanks that engaged in this study reported great need for increased organizational capacity, through improved training and education for staff, and better infrastructure, such as wireless internet.
- Tailor Work to Local Needs: Local think tanks are often well positioned to understand the needs of the local government and community and focus their work accordingly. Stakeholders and donors could benefit from acknowledging their expertise and deferring to their local knowledge when determining organizational priorities and action strategies.
- Strengthen Impact Assessments: Think tanks could secure more funding and build credibility by clearly demonstrating their impact. Stakeholders can support think tanks by partnering with data scientists and successful think tanks to offer training and practical support to those interested in improving their impact-assessment models.
9. Cryptocurrency should be added to the US-Japan trade deal
Excerpts:
The respective trade representatives could simply make explicit their intent to agree to treat these aspects of cryptocurrency and smart contracts as falling under the Digital Trade Agreement.
Ultimately, whichever approach Washington and Tokyo decide to adopt, given the size and scale of the overall U.S.-Japan trade in goods and services, worth $252.2 billion in 2020, the two sides have substantial economic equities at stake. Moreover, given the continued growth in digital currency and e-commerce in both countries, it is likely that cryptocurrency and associated blockchain technologies will play an increasingly important role in trans-Pacific economic ties.
Finally, in addition to the foregoing considerations, a U.S.-Japan agreement on digital currency could help set norms and rules for new technologies that favor a liberal international trading order by establishing a clear and consistent regulatory framework to govern their role in trade. For these reasons, a clear, jointly negotiated U.S.-Japan agreement toward regulating the use of cryptocurrencies in international trade may be an idea whose time has come.
Cryptocurrency should be added to the US-Japan trade deal
Substantial economic equities are at stake for both sides
Sale Lilly and Scott W. Harold
July 28, 2021 05:00 JST | Japan
Representation of Ethereum cryptocurrency: blockchain systems are often deployed alongside networks that employ tokens and digital currency. © NurPhoto/Getty Images
Sale Lilly is a senior policy analyst and Scott W. Harold is a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
When the U.S. and Japan agreed on a Digital Trade Agreement in late 2019, they declined to include language governing cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. Given that some of the earliest cryptocurrency markets began in Japan, and that many of the largest companies originate in the United States, this decision was somewhat surprising.
Today, the overall supply of cryptocurrency, or digital representations of cash, and associated financial blockchain technologies such as smart contracts and non-fungible tokens stands at over a third the size of the total U.S. monetary base.
As the Biden administration begins to define its approach to international trade, and the Suga administration looks to further tighten cooperation with the U.S., it may be worth reconsidering the exclusion of cryptocurrency from the U.S.-Japan trade deal. If they do, the two sides could either negotiate a separate annex to the existing agreement, or redefine the interpretation of that agreement to include regulation of cryptocurrency.
The 2019 Digital Trade Agreement was a landmark document covering a range of topics not typically considered in previous discussions of international trade.
Trading an algorithm, the digital representation of a photo, movie or song, is now a component of bilateral trade covered by an agreement that prevents the creation of new tariffs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the digital economy represents one in 10 dollars of all American output, or $1.8 trillion in 2018.
While the agreement only covers the U.S.-Japanese relationship, it is also a pacesetter, establishing low or no tariffs in the digital space, and was written in advance of other major international digital trade agreements. The agreement seems especially prescient given the fact that the outbreak of COVID-19 has driven much of people's daily lives, a trend that seems likely to continue even if the pandemic is ultimately brought under control at some point in the future.
Then-President Donald Trump speaks during a signing ceremony of the Digital Trade Agreement in October 2019: the agreement seems prescient given the fact that the outbreak has driven much of people's daily lives. © The Washington Post/Getty Images
As the agreement stands, some aspects of blockchain, particularly those elements not related to tokens or financial instruments, may land within the bounds of the tariff-free structure, though technically the agreement merely says no new tariffs will be imposed in this field. The reality, however, is that blockchain systems are often deployed alongside better-established networks, like Ethereum or Cardano, that do employ tokens and digital currency.
Developers around the world get a boost by not having to build a new peer-to-peer network, instead simply designing on one already available. Because those systems use digital representations to establish memory and storage fees, associated blockchains and digital goods could be defined as a financial instrument, and thus be subjected to tariffs not waived by the Digital Trade Agreement. That would represent a policy trade-off since these open-source cryptocurrency systems are considered to have some of the most rigorous defenses to cyber intrusion and hacking, important security aspects also addressed in article 19 of the digital trade agreement.
Additionally, since blockchain technologies are increasingly being considered for escrow functions -- the temporary holding of money or a bond pending a contract resolution between two parties, a practice common not just in real estate but also in settlement practices for shippers and vendors awaiting payments to clear -- there may be a real case where tariffs could be backdoored onto businesses hoping to trade in digital and physical goods as long as digital currencies remain excluded from the agreement.
Japan and the U.S. have at least two potential pathways forward if they are interested in an agreement covering cryptocurrencies.
First, Washington and Tokyo could simply negotiate a separate agreement, or an annex to the existing Digital Trade Agreement, that would cover cryptocurrencies and digital representations of financial instruments. Alternatively, a second option could be to resolve some of these concerns by jointly reinterpreting the terms of the existing 2019 agreement, since, in some sense, the details of cryptocurrency and associated smart contracts, digital authentication, signatures and algorithmic code are already included in the language of the existing document.
The respective trade representatives could simply make explicit their intent to agree to treat these aspects of cryptocurrency and smart contracts as falling under the Digital Trade Agreement.
Ultimately, whichever approach Washington and Tokyo decide to adopt, given the size and scale of the overall U.S.-Japan trade in goods and services, worth $252.2 billion in 2020, the two sides have substantial economic equities at stake. Moreover, given the continued growth in digital currency and e-commerce in both countries, it is likely that cryptocurrency and associated blockchain technologies will play an increasingly important role in trans-Pacific economic ties.
Finally, in addition to the foregoing considerations, a U.S.-Japan agreement on digital currency could help set norms and rules for new technologies that favor a liberal international trading order by establishing a clear and consistent regulatory framework to govern their role in trade. For these reasons, a clear, jointly negotiated U.S.-Japan agreement toward regulating the use of cryptocurrencies in international trade may be an idea whose time has come.
10. Can diplomacy get global cyberwarriors to sheathe their swords?
Excerpts:
At the summit, Mr. Biden was explicit about what he saw as a necessary first step: a mutually accepted list of key infrastructure and security targets that should be deemed off-limits.
Echoing that approach, a White House statement last week urged China to recognize that its involvement in ransomware and other hacking attacks was “inconsistent with its stated objective of being seen as a responsible leader in the world.”
Russian and Chinese participation in Washington’s drive to establish international cyber-guardrails will be critical to its success. It is still not clear whether they are ready to join in.
Politically, the signs so far point to no. Russia and China have been drawing closer together diplomatically of late, and that’s already having some cyber-effects: Last month they agreed on a joint position on “management of the internet,” including a bid to secure international recognition of their right to “regulate the national segment” of the World Wide Web.
Still, the Pegasus disclosures may give them a powerful practical reason to join cyber-arms-control efforts: the sheer power of the increasingly advanced cyber tools available.
In other words, it’s not just about Facebook meddling or even ransomware attacks. Every electronic device on earth and every mobile phone could ultimately be vulnerable.
China’s and Russia’s, included.
Can diplomacy get global cyberwarriors to sheathe their swords?
LONDON
International arms control used to mean missiles and munitions. Today, it’s about a powerful 21st-century weapon – cybertechnology – that is fueling a new arms race.
The issue has come to the surface with last week’s revelation that governments around the world appear to have been using a state-of-the-art piece of spyware, called Pegasus, to hack into and take control of mobile phones belonging to journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, and businesspeople.
Why We Wrote This
Washington would like to see an international treaty limiting the use of cyberwarfare. Russia and China are not keen, but they are just as vulnerable as anyone else. Might that change their minds?
On the broader cyberfront, hackers based in Russia and China – some of them thought to be working for their governments – have attacked U.S. government and private business targets in recent months. And Washington has its own offensive cyber capabilities.
To try to get things under control, the Biden administration is proposing international “guardrails” to rein in this new arms race. Washington has proposed to Moscow that the two sides draw up a list of key infrastructure and security targets that would be off-limits.
Neither Russia nor China appears very interested yet in such a deal. But with software like Pegasus around, it seems everybody is potentially vulnerable in the absence of a cyberweapons agreement.
And that includes Moscow and Beijing.
London
A new arms race has erupted around the world, with implications not just for countries’ security, but their citizens’ fundamental rights too. Unlike the old competition – over missiles and munitions – this one revolves around a powerful, 21st-century weapon: cybertechnology.
And in what could lead to a diplomatic tug of war as well, the Biden administration has begun pressing both Russia and China to agree to practical limitations on this new threat: in effect, a new kind of arms control for a new kind of arms.
That’s the message from a recent series of dramatic developments, culminating in last week’s revelations concerning a piece of Israeli software called Pegasus, which has given governments from Mexico to Morocco, and from Hungary to India, the capability to target, hack into, and take control of individual mobile phones.
Why We Wrote This
Washington would like to see an international treaty limiting the use of cyberwarfare. Russia and China are not keen, but they are just as vulnerable as anyone else. Might that change their minds?
The company behind the spyware, NSO, says it explicitly tells clients that it is to be used only against terrorists, drug dealers, and people-traffickers. But last week’s leaked list of more than 50,000 mobile phone numbers – apparently candidates for Pegasus penetration – left little doubt that some clients are ignoring that caveat.
Vetted by a consortium of major world news organizations, which managed to identify the owners of nearly 1,000 numbers, the list included 85 human-rights activists, nearly 200 journalists, and more than 600 politicians, diplomats, or other officials.
This aspect of the cyber arms race – heralding the prospect that Pegasus and similar software will become ever more commonplace – is only one part of a larger cyberwarfare struggle.
China, Russia, and the United States are the major players, though other would-be actors, including North Korea and Iran, have been building up their capabilities. Reports in the United Kingdom this week, citing a leaked Iranian security document, suggested the Iranians may be seeking the capacity to target civilian infrastructure with cyberattacks.
Until recently, Russia was the main focus of American and allied concerns.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Moscow used social media to attempt to influence the past two American elections. This year, U.S. government departments and private companies have suffered a number of cyberstrikes from Russian territory, one of which Washington blamed on Russian state actors.
In May, a Russia-based ransomware group forced the temporary shutdown of one of America’s main oil pipelines, the Colonial, causing fuel shortages in states from Texas to New Jersey.
But last week, the spotlight fell on China.
NATO and European Union allies joined Washington in an unprecedented rebuke for a series of China-based ransomware operations, as well as a major attack they said was sanctioned by China’s Ministry of State Security – hacking into Microsoft’s main email servers. Wendy Sherman, the second most senior figure in the U.S. State Department, reinforced that message in talks this week with Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Just how much cyberwarfare the United States wages itself is largely shrouded in official secrecy, but Washington is widely believed to have mounted a number of assaults against Iran. And it may have been an American operation that this month shut down the “dark web” sites of Russian ransomware group REvil, responsible for recent attacks on U.S. businesses.
Still, that could also have been the result of a stern phone call from President Joe Biden earlier this month telling Russian leader Vladimir Putin that he needed to clamp down on Russia-based hackers as a matter of “national security.” That call came only weeks after Mr. Biden’s summit meeting with President Putin, at which he also pushed for Russian cooperation.
The idea that some new form of arms control is needed to set “guardrails” around this new arms race has become a major foreign policy priority for the Biden administration.
At the summit, Mr. Biden was explicit about what he saw as a necessary first step: a mutually accepted list of key infrastructure and security targets that should be deemed off-limits.
Echoing that approach, a White House statement last week urged China to recognize that its involvement in ransomware and other hacking attacks was “inconsistent with its stated objective of being seen as a responsible leader in the world.”
Russian and Chinese participation in Washington’s drive to establish international cyber-guardrails will be critical to its success. It is still not clear whether they are ready to join in.
Politically, the signs so far point to no. Russia and China have been drawing closer together diplomatically of late, and that’s already having some cyber-effects: Last month they agreed on a joint position on “management of the internet,” including a bid to secure international recognition of their right to “regulate the national segment” of the World Wide Web.
Still, the Pegasus disclosures may give them a powerful practical reason to join cyber-arms-control efforts: the sheer power of the increasingly advanced cyber tools available.
In other words, it’s not just about Facebook meddling or even ransomware attacks. Every electronic device on earth and every mobile phone could ultimately be vulnerable.
China’s and Russia’s, included.
11. The US military couldn’t stop the heroin trade from funding the Taliban. But synthetic opioid producers might.
Excerpts:
Historically, the Taliban has been one of the big beneficiaries of the opioid trade, deriving up to $400 million a year in revenue connected to the business, Rand said.
If the opiate market were to collapse, filling the revenue gap could be “a heavy lift in just a few years,” the report said.
“Overall, the loss of opiate revenues for insurgent or other antigovernment groups could be beneficial to the central government if those groups lose strength in relation to the central government, but the government’s prospects are highly uncertain,” Rand said.
...
A rapid loss of the opioid market could also spur a humanitarian crisis in the rural south, where poppy cultivation is the main industry. Farmers might be forced into urban centers if alternatives sources of income weren’t found, the report said.
“The government would then be facing not just a rural crisis but also the challenges of accelerated urbanization, including attendant needs for crime control or expanded services,” Rand said. “The central government is highly unlikely to have adequate resources to meet such challenges on its own, even with additional tax revenues.”
The US military couldn’t stop the heroin trade from funding the Taliban. But synthetic opioid producers might.
A 2nd Infantry Regiment soldier walks through a poppy field during a patrol in Maiwand district, Kandahar province, Afghanistan in 2009. A growing preference among global drug producers for cheaper synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, could diminish the Afghan heroin industry, which helps fuel the country's insurgencies and corruption, according to a new Rand Corp. report. (Stars and Stripes)
The global drug trade could eventually accomplish what the U.S. military tried and failed to do in Afghanistan: bust up a heroin industry that fuels insurgencies and corruption.
A threat to the Afghan heroin market — which accounts for anywhere between 10%-30% of that country’s gross domestic product — looms because of a growing preference among drug producers for far cheaper synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, according to a new Rand Corp. study.
“All told, fentanyl represents an attractive alternative for drug producers and marketers who are looking to reduce their operating costs and risks. Therefore … when comparing the two drugs, it is hard to see how heroin can compete directly or indefinitely with this low-cost, high potency alternative,” Rand said in its report that examined the implications for Afghanistan.
Since the early days of the war in Afghanistan, U.S. forces sought to curtail the heroin trade in the country. The efforts ranged from attempts to get farmers to shift from poppy to pomegranate trees, to more extreme measures. For example, in 2009, then-NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. John Craddock issued a memo stating that troops should shoot on sight those affiliated with the drug industry. The plan caused a stir at NATO headquarters and was eventually rescinded because of a backlash among allies.
A soldier stands guard in a poppy field outside a house Saturday near Khaneh Gerdab, Afghanistan in 2009. A growing preference among global drug producers for cheaper synthetic opioids could bust up the Afghan heroin industry that fuels the country's insurgencies and corruption, according to a new Rand Corp. report. (Stars and Stripes)
But over time, market forces could prove to be more of a threat to Afghanistan’s opioid industry than NATO forces ever were.
Fentanyl is already displacing major heroin markets in the U.S. While fatal overdoses and drug seizures related to heroin have been on the decline, they’re rising in connection with synthetic opioid use, Rand said.
Fentanyl is similar to morphine, but is 50 to 100 times more potent, the U.S. National Institute for Drug Abuse said on its website. It’s used legally to treat severe pain and following some surgeries.
Fentanyl can be churned out in laboratories from cheap chemicals, providing quicker turnarounds than harvesting the poppies that are key to the Afghan trade.
So far, the Afghan heroin industry does not appear to have taken a serious hit, but that’s because most of the trade involves European and Asian markets rather than North America, Rand said. The future of the industry in Afghanistan will hinge on whether Europe and Asia-based illegal drug traders make the same shift as their U.S. counterparts.
Historically, the Taliban has been one of the big beneficiaries of the opioid trade, deriving up to $400 million a year in revenue connected to the business, Rand said.
If the opiate market were to collapse, filling the revenue gap could be “a heavy lift in just a few years,” the report said.
“Overall, the loss of opiate revenues for insurgent or other antigovernment groups could be beneficial to the central government if those groups lose strength in relation to the central government, but the government’s prospects are highly uncertain,” Rand said.
Opium poppies grow near a police station in Zhari district, Kandahar province in 2019. A growing preference among global drug producers for cheaper synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, could bust up the Afghan heroin industry that fuels the country's insurgencies and corruption, a Rand Corp. report said. (Phillip Walter Wellman/Stars and Stripes)
A rapid loss of the opioid market could also spur a humanitarian crisis in the rural south, where poppy cultivation is the main industry. Farmers might be forced into urban centers if alternatives sources of income weren’t found, the report said.
“The government would then be facing not just a rural crisis but also the challenges of accelerated urbanization, including attendant needs for crime control or expanded services,” Rand said. “The central government is highly unlikely to have adequate resources to meet such challenges on its own, even with additional tax revenues.”
John Vandiver
12. David and Goliath: Myanmar’s Armed Resistance at the Crossroads
PDF - People's Defense Forces.
Excerpts:
The PDF also takes actions against the military-appointed administrators of villages and townships, who are believed to spy on the junta-opposing residents. Several have been killed in what we can call an extrajudicial process, prompting many to question the PDF’s code of conduct.
Some believe that the violent actions of the resistance movement are not the main means of overthrowing the regime, but are important nonetheless. “I gave up my pacifist views with the onset of the coup,” declares Mya Oo, a 24-year-old teacher. “The Tatmadaw is breaking wartime standards like no one.”
“The world is watching while terror is shaking Myanmar,” says Gum Tun, an ethnic Kachin man living in Yangon. “Aung San Suu Kyi would never support violence, but we can’t just wait to get help until we die.”
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Last month, the U.N. adopted a non-binding resolution calling for an arms embargo, which was a rare show of relative unity among its members. Yet not everyone is willing to work toward restoring democracy in Myanmar. The head of Rosoboronexport, the state-owned spearhead of the Russian arms industry, admitted they continue to supply the junta with military hardware, including aircraft.
“If the U.N. would have responded more quickly, there would be no PDF,” Gum Tun claims. “The military can do whatever they want; the law is in their hands.”
David and Goliath: Myanmar’s Armed Resistance at the Crossroads
“We can’t just wait to get help until we die”: More and more protesters see no hope for a return to democracy outside of taking up arms.
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Mahatma Gandhi once said that nonviolence is a weapon of the strong. Although deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi is known to have embraced his philosophy, many Myanmar people are turning to armed struggle, hoping to overthrow the junta that seized control on February 1.
What has the Myanmar armed resistance brought, besides increasing the number of casualties?
Since the coup was launched on February 1, the country has been witnessing attacks on civilians by the military on an unprecedented scale. Tatmadaw soldiers are resorting to burning whole villages to terrorize the population, raping and torturing wherever they go. In response to that, People’s Defense Forces (PDF) were formed in many areas to counter the junta forces.
According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of mostly young people have been receiving underground training in secret locations in the borderlands. It cannot be verified how many are really being trained. Also, some report that joining the PDF is very hard as the groups are fearful of spies.
The PDF has its successes but pays a high price for it. In a clash against raiding military forces, a couple of military officers were recently gunned down in Mandalay before soldiers captured around 10 PDF members.
The PDF also takes actions against the military-appointed administrators of villages and townships, who are believed to spy on the junta-opposing residents. Several have been killed in what we can call an extrajudicial process, prompting many to question the PDF’s code of conduct.
Some believe that the violent actions of the resistance movement are not the main means of overthrowing the regime, but are important nonetheless. “I gave up my pacifist views with the onset of the coup,” declares Mya Oo, a 24-year-old teacher. “The Tatmadaw is breaking wartime standards like no one.”
“The world is watching while terror is shaking Myanmar,” says Gum Tun, an ethnic Kachin man living in Yangon. “Aung San Suu Kyi would never support violence, but we can’t just wait to get help until we die.”
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Last month, the U.N. adopted a non-binding resolution calling for an arms embargo, which was a rare show of relative unity among its members. Yet not everyone is willing to work toward restoring democracy in Myanmar. The head of Rosoboronexport, the state-owned spearhead of the Russian arms industry, admitted they continue to supply the junta with military hardware, including aircraft.
“If the U.N. would have responded more quickly, there would be no PDF,” Gum Tun claims. “The military can do whatever they want; the law is in their hands.”
Gum Tun is originally from Hpakant, the jade town, and he is terrified about the reports of renewed fighting in his homeland. “Although the fighting didn’t bring anything positive for us, at least we feel happy when we hear that someone from the junta got killed,” he comments.
The Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Karen National Union (KNU) have trained the PDF and shared some arms with them. Unfortunately, this remains a David-versus-Goliath war, with deplorable consequences for the civilians. Recently around 200 locals were forced to flee their homes following the shelling by the Tatmadaw. The military was itself responding to the KIA’s attack on a police vehicle and an ambush on a junta-allied militia.
The Rakhine-based Arakan Army (AA) clashed with the Tatmadaw in June, but then released the captured soldiers.
Fresh fighting has also broken out in southern Chin State. The Mindat Resistance Movement was among the first to oppose the junta. Having only traditional hunting guns at their disposal, they were able to knock down the opponent for many days, until the army deployed much heavier equipped forces.
After that, 20,000 civilians went into hiding in the forests, and only pigs are reported to be roaming free in this hillside town controlled by the junta.
Gum Tun is sure that “the only choice is to respond in a violent way, although I can’t even express how it impacts me emotionally.”
But not every ethnic armed group has been able to easily get over the divide and rule policy of the Tatmadaw, which has shaped the landscape in the past decades.
In Shan State, two competing armed groups have waged battles over territory, using thousands of troops and ignoring appeals for peace. The recent call for unity and a truce under a newly formed Shan State Front for Federal (SSFF) and other partners, including monks and intellectuals, has yet to bear fruit.
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One of the parties to the conflict, the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), has shown interest in a peaceful resolution to the conflict, while pointing to their current efforts in undermining the presence of the Tatmadaw in the region.
The other armed group, the Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP), is suspected to be backed by the United Wa State Army (UWSA), a group aligned with China. Importantly, the area of their dispute runs through the Myanmar-China Cross Border Economic Cooperation Zones, and China is believed to consider the SSPP an important ally.
However, as the number of casualties and displaced people skyrockets, the regime is facing a a new opponent, one that has lurking behind the headlines for a long time.
COVID-19 is striking Myanmar’s armed forces, spreading to regional command headquarters, battalions, and units in the country’s major cities.
With soldiers, generals, and commanders being infected, chaos is spreading within an institution responsible for crimes against humanity. Lacking oxygen and medical equipment, the generals can only resort to releasing a number of prisoners charged with offenses committed before the coup as a measure to prevent the spread of the virus.
Some hope that COVID-19 might deal a serious blow to the stability of the regime, perhaps even help to change the course of history. It’s a bitter hope, considering the death toll is not limited to the military alone. There can be no hope when there is no vision for the future, and yet the Myanmar people cling to the desire to live in a democratic country.
13. Pentagon announces new commander for U.S. Army Special Operations Command
We are going to have USASOC CG and a 1st Special Forces Command CG with Asia experience. MG Braga has done some excellent work vis a vis China as the SOCPAC CG and I imagine he built on that experience as the Deputy CG of USARPAC. MG Angle commanded 1-1 SFG in Okinawa. And both have extensive SMU experience as well.
Pentagon announces new commander for U.S. Army Special Operations Command
| The Fayetteville Observer
Maj. Gen. Jonathan Braga, who is scheduled for a promotion, will become the new commander in mid-August, a spokesman said.
Plans have not yet been announced concerning the next assignment for Lt. Gen. Francis Beaudette, who has led the command since June 8, 2018.
Braga is currently the deputy commanding general for the U.S. Army Pacific Command at Fort Shafter, Hawaii.
He is no stranger to Fort Bragg.
According to his biography, Braga was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and commissioned as an infantry officer in 1991.
His biography states that after graduating from the Special Forces Qualification Course, he served in multiple command spots to include that 7th Special Forces Group when the unit was located at Fort Bragg and in Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, from 1995 to 2001.
After deployments and humanitarian relief operations to the Caribbean, Central America and South America, he returned to Fort Bragg to serve in a U.S. Army Special Operations Command special mission unit.
He completed multiple deployments as a task force commander to Afghanistan and Iraq for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom and Operation Willing Spirit in Columbia from 2002 to 2005, according to his biography.
After receiving his master’s degree from the Naval War College, he served as the operations officer for the Joint Reconnaissance Task Force as part of Joint Special Operations Command in Washington, D.C. and led a special operations task force across three geographical commands from 2006 to 2008, Braga returned back to Fort Bragg.
His biography states that he served in several command and staff positions in the same USASOC special mission unit between 2008 and 2012, completing multiple deployments in Iraq as a task force commander.
In other Fort Bragg and Special Forces changes, Pentagon and Army officials announced the next assignment for Maj. Gen. John Brennan Jr.
His next assignment will be as commander for the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, Iraq, according to therelease.
Maj. Gen. Richard Angle, deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, will be the new commander of the 1st Special Forces Command.
In other Fort Bragg changes, Maj. Gen. Brian Mennes will become deputy commanding general for the 18th Airborne Corps.
Mennes most recently served as commander for the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, according to the release.
Cox most recently served as commander, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.
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14. Soldier with 10th Special Forces Group drowns while training in Florida
Training is hard and dangerous.
Soldier with 10th Special Forces Group drowns while training in Florida
A soldier died in a drowning accident Tuesday at the Army’s combat diving school in Key West, Florida, according to Army officials.
The deceased soldier was assigned to 10th Special Forces Group, according to press releases from the Army Combat Readiness Center and the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, commonly known as SWCS.
The SWCS press release and an Army official confirmed to Army Times that the training death occurred at the Army’s Special Forces Underwater Operations School, which is home to the service’s combat diver qualification courses. The school is located at Naval Air Station Key West and is part of SWCS.
The CRC has deployed a safety investigation team to take lead in the death investigation, CRC spokesperson Michael Negard said, also specifying that the death was a drowning.
The soldier who died was a staff sergeant, according to the SWCS release.
“The Staff Sergeant was a student in the Special Forces Combat Diver Qualification Course, and was participating in a conditioning exercise in the pool, which stresses the students’ cardio, respiratory and muscular endurance,” the release said.
“During the training event, the Soldier submerged and did not resurface. The cadre immediately entered the pool and found him unresponsive,” read the release. “The Dive Medical Officer attempted to resuscitate him, and he was transported to the Lower Keys Medical Center Emergency Room where he was pronounced dead following full medical intervention.”
In the release, SWCS officials described the course as “one of the most physically demanding courses within the Army” with “stringent safety protocols.”
SWCS will provide support counselors as needed for students and cadre at the dive school.
10th Group is headquartered at Fort Carson, Colorado, and has a battalion permanently forward-deployed in Germany.
Officials from 10th Group and 1st Special Forces Command did not immediately respond to inquiries from Army Times related to the accident.
15. Hidilyn Diaz says China team mad at her Chinese coach for not sharing extent of her strength
Another example of China believing all Chinese, regardless of citizenship or employment circumstances, should support China.
Hidilyn Diaz says China team mad at her Chinese coach for not sharing extent of her strength
Philippines’ Hidilyn Diaz competes in the women’s 55kg weightlifting competition during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Tokyo International Forum in Tokyo on July 26, 2021. (Photo by Vincenzo PINTO / AFP)
MANILA, Philippines — Weightlifting champ Hidilyn Diaz on Thursday disclosed that the China team supposedly got mad with her Chinese coach when he did not share with them the extent of the Filipino star’s strength, which led to her clinching the gold medal in the Tokyo Olympics.
“Team HD” weightlifting coach Gao Kaiwen was first tapped to join Diaz’s side, with the help of the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC), after she won gold in the 2018 Asian Games 53kg class.
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“Hindi makapaniwala ang China na ganito na ako kalakas, then siyempre si Coach din, hindi niya na-share sa China. Medyo nagalit kasi ang China din sa kanya kasi hindi niya na-share kung saan na yung lakas ko,” Diaz said in an interview with ANC.
(China couldn’t believe that I’m this strong, then of course, Coach did not share that with China. They were a bit mad at him because he did not share the extent of my strength.)
“Siyempre ang [sabi] ko, ‘bakit niya ishe-share?’ Nandito kasi siya para mag-work, to work for me para palakasin ako. So, siyempre mixed feelings ‘yun sa atin kasi nga dahil sa political, international [issue]…yung sea natin. Walang giyera, pero nai-representa ko ang Pilipinas, natalo ko ang China,” she added.
(Of course, I thought ‘why would he share?’ He’s here to work and make me stronger. There are mixed feelings, with the political, international issue [with] our sea. While there’s no war, I was able to represent the Philippines and beat China.)
Gao, a former head coach of the Chinese national women’s army team, had partnered with conditioning coach Julius Naranjo to build up Diaz’s strength for the Tokyo Olympics.
Diaz conquered the women’s 55 kilograms weightlifting competition in Tokyo, ending the Philippines’ 97-year quest for an Olympic gold medal.
The Zamboanga-born athlete also lifted a record-setting combined weight of 224kg and a Games mark of 127kg in clean and jerk.
But according to Diaz, China’s side did not expect her to lift that much weight.
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“Ang tingin kasi nila sa akin, for how many competition na na nagawa ko, ang total ko is 214 kg lang, 215, 212 at hindi nila nakita yung best ko. So, sabi nila, ‘Ay hindi, hindi yan mananalo, si Diaz, hindi yan, imposible yan.’ So nung laro, nabigla sila na malakas ako,” she added.
(For so long, with the competitions I participated in, they thought I could only lift a total of 214 kg, 215, 212 and they did not see my best. ‘No, Diaz won’t win, that’s impossible.’ So when the games came, they were shocked at how strong I really was.)
China is a weightlifting powerhouse. The country has won four gold medals and one silver–Diaz’s toughest opponent Liao Quiyun–so far in Tokyo.
“Kung makita niyo, five over five, ngayon siguro nine over 10, sa kanila lahat ng gold medal. Nai-sungkit ko ang isa, at may Olympic record pa…hindi ako makapaniwala doon,” she added.
(They usually clinch five out of five gold medals for example, but now, they only bagged nine out of 10. I was able to clinch one and I also set an Olympic record…I can’t believe it.)
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16. The predictable collapse of the Afghan Air Force is happening in real time
Excerpts:
Jack McCain, a former advisor to the Afghan Air Force and son of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has described the Afghan pilots whom he worked with as “brave beyond measure.”
“We often had occasions where those pilots would remain in a landing zone, under fire, so wounded could be loaded,” McCain previously told Task & Purpose. “They are asked to fly to the toughest places in Afghanistan, on a regular basis, and do so day in and day out. I’ve never seen the like.”
But with the Afghan Air Force running low on ordnance and desperate for maintenance, someone has to pick up the slack. For right now, that someone is the U.S. military.
The U.S. military is also prepared to have Afghan aircraft taken to a third country where they can be refurbished and repaired and then returned to the Afghan Air Force, McKenzie told reporters at a news conference in Kabul.
So far, U.S. government officials have not said publicly where that “over the horizon” maintenance of Afghan aircraft might take place. In the meantime, the remaining American contractors are using Zoom to teach Afghan maintainers how to repair their aircraft in anticipation of the final withdrawal of contractor support, J.P. Lawrence of Stars and Stripes recently reported.
“I’m not going to kid you and say it’s going to be easy,” McKenzie said. “It will be far more difficult than it was in the past. And we think we have a path to do that.”
The predictable collapse of the Afghan Air Force is happening in real time
None of this is surprising.
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About one-third of the Afghan Air Force’s 160 aircraft can no longer fly because they lack spare parts since the United States withdrew its contractors from the country, Afghan lawmaker Haji Ajmal Rahmani reportedly said during a recent webinar sponsored by the State Department Correspondents Association.
The Afghan Air Force has also run out of laser-guided precision munitions, Rahmani said.
None of this is surprising.
An Afghan Air Force UH-60A Black Hawk assigned to the 2nd Wing Afghan Air Force, conducts dust off landing practice on Dec. 10, 2018, as a part of Train, Advise and Assist Command-Air’s (TAAC-Air) mission at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. The mission of TAAC-Air is to train, advise and assist Afghan partners to develop a professional, capable and sustainable Afghan Air Force. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Maygan Straight)
Since then, the Afghan Air Force has become an effective fighting force. It currently has 162 aircraft, of which as many as 143 were mission-capable as of March 31, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report from April.
The Afghans have a fleet of aircraft that includes 23 A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft to provide close air support, the report said. Those A-29s replaced the Afghan Air Force’s Russian-made Mi-35 attack helicopters.
An Afghan A-29 pilot prepared for flight in the cockpit of his aircraft Sept. 10, 2017, at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Alexander W. Riedel)
Moreover, the Afghan Air Force has relied exclusively on contractors to sustain many of its American-made aircraft, including their Black Hawks and Super Tucanos. When the United States withdrew contractors from Afghanistan, it did not take long for mission-capable rates to plunge.
In fact, the U.S. military’s Train, Advise, and Assist Command – Air estimated that without contractor support the Afghan Air Force would be unable to keep their aircraft combat effective beyond a few months, Sopko said.
An Afghan Air Force member inspects a UH-60 Black Hawk as air crews prepare for their first Afghan-led operational mission on this aircraft May 8, 2018, Kandahar (U.S. Air Force photo/1st Lt. Erin Recanzone.)
Jack McCain, a former advisor to the Afghan Air Force and son of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has described the Afghan pilots whom he worked with as “brave beyond measure.”
“We often had occasions where those pilots would remain in a landing zone, under fire, so wounded could be loaded,” McCain previously told Task & Purpose. “They are asked to fly to the toughest places in Afghanistan, on a regular basis, and do so day in and day out. I’ve never seen the like.”
But with the Afghan Air Force running low on ordnance and desperate for maintenance, someone has to pick up the slack. For right now, that someone is the U.S. military.
The U.S. military is also prepared to have Afghan aircraft taken to a third country where they can be refurbished and repaired and then returned to the Afghan Air Force, McKenzie told reporters at a news conference in Kabul.
So far, U.S. government officials have not said publicly where that “over the horizon” maintenance of Afghan aircraft might take place. In the meantime, the remaining American contractors are using Zoom to teach Afghan maintainers how to repair their aircraft in anticipation of the final withdrawal of contractor support, J.P. Lawrence of Stars and Stripes recently reported.
“I’m not going to kid you and say it’s going to be easy,” McKenzie said. “It will be far more difficult than it was in the past. And we think we have a path to do that.”
More great stories on Task & Purpose
is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com, direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.
17. U.S. House bans funding for maps that depict Taiwan as part of China
Will we see a propaganda response from the PRC that says the US congress is abandoning the One China Policy?
U.S. House bans funding for maps that depict Taiwan as part of China - Focus Taiwan
Washington, July 28 (CNA) The United States House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a State Department and foreign assistance spending bill that included an amendment forbidding the use of any funds to create, procure or display maps that depict Taiwan as part of the People's Republic of China.
The amendment was raised by five Republican representatives -- Tom Tiffany, Steve Chabot, Scott Perry, Kat Cammack and Mike Gallagher -- and was passed in a bundle with a dozen of other amendments under unanimous consent.
Speaking on the House floor on Wednesday, Tiffany said: "This is a common sense measure. As we all know, Taiwan has never been part of Communist China. The Taiwanese people elect their own leaders, raise their own armed forces, conduct their own foreign policy, and maintain their own international trade agreements."
"By every measure, Taiwan is a sovereign, democratic and independent country. Any claims to the contrary are simply false," he said.
Tiffany further argued that the U.S. should abandon the dishonest "One China Policy" that acknowledges "Beijing's bogus argument that Taiwan is part of Communist China," and while this amendment cannot achieve that, it will "at least require honest maps that stop perpetuating the 'One-China' lie."
The full spending bill, titled "Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2022," was passed with a vote of 217-212.
The bill now heads to the Senate, and if approved, it will then be sent to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.
(By Stacy Hsu and Chiang Yi-ching)
Enditem/cs
18. China names Xi ally, 'wolf warrior' as new ambassador to US
Excepts:
He has been a spokesperson for the ministry twice, gaining a reputation for being a vigorous defender of Chinese policies in the face of increasing criticism on the world stage.
The 55-year-old envoy is regarded as more combative than his predecessor in Washington, Cui Tiankai.
Qin began his career in diplomacy in 1988 and he spent several years at the Chinese Embassy in London. He is a fluent English speaker.
China names Xi ally, 'wolf warrior' as new ambassador to US | DW | 29.07.2021
DW · by Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com)
China has named Qin Gang, a 55-year-old hawkish diplomat, as the country's new ambassador to the United States.
"As two big countries different in history, culture, social system and development stage, China and the United States are entering a new round of mutual exploration, understanding and adaptation, trying to find a way to get along with each other," Qin told reporters on his arrival in Washington, D.C.
The new envoy vowed to bring US-China ties "back on track," according to a transcript released by the Chinese Embassy.
Qin tweeted from a new official account that he will begin a 14-day quarantine in residence and "get down to work soon."
What do we know about the new ambassador?
Qin served as one of China's nine vice foreign ministers from 2018 to 2021.
He also headed the Foreign Ministry's Protocol Department, where he worked directly with President Xi and accumulated extensive experience accompanying Chinese leaders on their overseas trips.
He has been a spokesperson for the ministry twice, gaining a reputation for being a vigorous defender of Chinese policies in the face of increasing criticism on the world stage.
The 55-year-old envoy is regarded as more combative than his predecessor in Washington, Cui Tiankai.
Qin began his career in diplomacy in 1988 and he spent several years at the Chinese Embassy in London. He is a fluent English speaker.
What is the current state of US-China ties?
Relations between the US and China have been strained in recent years, with both sides clashing on a wide array of issues, ranging from trade and technology to human rights and foreign policy.
President Joe Biden has continued Trump's confrontational stance, describing China as the preeminent challenge to the US.
In a recent meeting with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China would not tolerate what it considered US interference in its internal affairs and key development interests.
Sherman responded by saying that human rights are not just an internal matter and called on China to work with the United States on global issues as a responsible great power.
sri/nm (AP, AFP)
DW · by Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com)
19. Chinese Defense University Conceals Partnerships With U.S. Schools
Excerpt:
Beihang has partnered with the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Saint Mary's School of Law, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, according to the list. Course catalogs, social media, and other platforms from all five schools show varying levels of involvement between the American universities and the Chinese military university.
Chinese Defense University Conceals Partnerships With U.S. Schools - Washington Free Beacon
A leading Chinese military research university sanctioned by the U.S. government is concealing its ties to several top American schools.
Beihang University, one of China's leading universities for defense research and analysis, scrubbed public mentions of its international educational partnerships from its website minutes after the Washington Free Beacon accessed the page. An Internet Archive record of the list shows the Chinese school has teamed with more than 50 schools worldwide, including 5 American colleges and universities.
The Chinese university has an extensive history of aiding the Chinese military. Beihang, which is also known as the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is one of the seven foremost schools for defense research. Beihang has nine labs specifically devoted to incubating Chinese military experiments and spends 60 percent of its research budget on defense activities. Beihang's most alarming projects include fighter jets, satellites, and ballistic missiles, all platforms that Pentagon simulations identify as cornerstone elements in China's strategy to attack American allies in the Indo-Pacific. In 2001, a Department of Commerce export control order placed Beihang University on a blacklist for its involvement in Chinese rocket systems and drones.
Beihang's opaque relationship with American research universities fits a larger pattern of Chinese military-industrial cooperation with U.S. schools. The Free Beacon reported in January that institutions affiliated with the Chinese military funneled $88 million to American schools over the course of six years. The Trump administration cracked down on such relationships, strengthening accountability and transparency measures that forced colleges to divulge their ties with the communist regime. Chinese educational projects, however, have since begun targeting K-12 programming and university-level exchanges to fly under the radar of government watchdogs.
Beihang has partnered with the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Saint Mary's School of Law, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, according to the list. Course catalogs, social media, and other platforms from all five schools show varying levels of involvement between the American universities and the Chinese military university.
Beihang's American partners have also scrubbed past mentions of the Chinese school from their websites. St. Mary's Law School deleted multiple pages regarding its overseas relationship; one site remains in place detailing a summer exchange program with Beihang set to restart in 2022. The University of Michigan offers course credit exchanges primarily in math and engineering classes with Beihang, according to the school's web page. Two pages on Carnegie Mellon's website show cooperation between the two schools. The only evidence that remains of possible ties Columbia and Rose-Hulman have with the Chinese school are an export compliance sheet and a social media post, respectively.
A spokeswoman from St. Mary's Law School confirmed the school still cooperates with Beihang—except on programming because of national security concerns. None of the other four universities returned requests for comment.
Ian Easton, senior director at the Project 2049 Institute, told the Free Beacon that exchange commitments with schools tied to the Chinese military ignore the nature of the communist regime.
"The U.S. State Department has repeatedly said the Chinese Communist Party is a genocidal regime and a strategic rival," Easton said. "For any American university, collaboration with CCP-controlled research facilities should be considered a PR disaster waiting to happen. Past assumptions regarding the benefits of scientific exchanges with Chinese universities and labs have been falsified by tragic events that few anticipated, but with which all must now contend."
Beihang University did not return a request for comment.
Education watchdogs were also alarmed by the opacity of Beihang's work with American universities. National Association of Scholars senior fellow Rachelle Peterson said the educators must not allow Chinese financial support to interfere with national security.
"These are institutions whose judgment is clouded when it comes to matters involving China," Peterson told the Free Beacon. "China's military-civil fusion makes these partnerships highly alarming."
20. China’s New Ambassador to U.S. Is ‘Willing to Ruffle Feathers’
China’s New Ambassador to U.S. Is ‘Willing to Ruffle Feathers’
Qin Gang rose from working for a foreign news agency to becoming a trusted aide to Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.
Qin Gang, left, with Xi Jinping, center, China’s leader, as they toured a Boeing plant in Everett, Wash., during a 2015 visit to the United States.Credit...Pool photo by Jason Redmond
By
July 28, 2021, 6:29 p.m. ET
China’s new ambassador to the United States arrived in Washington on Wednesday — Qin Gang, a diplomat whose record of vigorously contesting Western criticism suggests that Beijing is steeling for extended tensions with Washington.
In his new role, Mr. Qin will be at the front of efforts by China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, to reshape China’s relationship with Washington, which has spiraled to its lowest point in decades. Beijing sees the Biden administration as continuing to challenge China’s rise, and it has pushed back against Washington’s efforts to rally democratic countries to its side.
Mr. Qin will most likely convey to Washington that Mr. Xi expects his country to be treated as a great power, reflecting a confidence that stems in part from China’s success in controlling the coronavirus epidemic. Chinese diplomats showed that emboldened posture this week in talks with the Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman, and in March, when they publicly sparred with Biden administration officials in an unusually rancorous opening encounter in Anchorage.
In a message on the Chinese Embassy’s website, Mr. Qin said that both countries should “treat each other with mutual respect and equality, and pursue peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.”
Unlike nearly all of China’s ambassadors to Washington since the 1980s, Mr. Qin has never specialized in dealing with the United States, nor has he been posted there previously. But as the head of the information office of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and later the chief of protocol, Mr. Qin appears to have won the trust of Mr. Xi and has regularly accompanied him during trips abroad and in meetings with foreign leaders.
“It’s a telling moment,” said Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official responsible for China.
“For the last 20 years you’ve had a string of America experts posted to Washington,” Mr. Thompson, who now teaches at the National University of Singapore, said in an interview. “Somebody whose career has been staked more on upholding the dignity and equal treatment of Chinese senior leaders will come to the job potentially with a different mind-set.”
During Mr. Xi’s visit to the United States in 2015, Mr. Qin was “willing to ruffle feathers without hesitation when he felt it was necessary,” said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was director for China at the National Security Council during Mr. Xi’s visit.
“Qin Gang was very attentive to how his leader would be portrayed and the image that his leader’s public appearances would send,” Mr. Hass said. “This was particularly the case around President Xi’s state visit to the White House.”
As ambassador, Mr. Qin will be navigating an increasingly thorny and politically charged relationship. Chinese diplomats have furiously denounced Washington’s sanctions over Mr. Xi’s hard-line policies in the far western region of Xinjiang and the city of Hong Kong. But they are also trying to find common ground on international threats like limiting global warming.
As the Biden administration has signaled it would continue to build alliances around the world to contest China, Mr. Xi has warned that Beijing should not be marginalized in global affairs, and is prepared to push back against Western pressure.
“The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us,” he said in speech marking 100 years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party on July 1. “Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people.”
Mr. Qin, 55, appears well suited to promoting Mr. Xi’s more muscular international stance.
His predecessor as ambassador to Washington, Cui Tiankai, vigorously defended China’s policies after taking that post in 2013, but distanced himself from the rancorous rhetoric and Covid conspiracy theories of some rising Chinese diplomats.
Mr. Qin has a milder manner than the “wolf warriors,” as China’s more combative diplomats who have recently come to the fore have been called. But as a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, he set an early example for China’s increasingly pugnacious response to Western pressure.
After graduating from the University of International Relations in Beijing, Mr. Qin worked as a news assistant at United Press International’s bureau in Beijing before joining the Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic corps in 1992. He gained prominence after he was appointed as a spokesman for the ministry in 2005, as China faced growing international tensions over human rights, as well as Beijing’s tough policies in Tibet and Xinjiang.
Mr. Qin was adept at sparring with journalists during news briefings, sometimes responding to questions with sardonic mockery. He likened the Communist Party’s takeover of Tibet to Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of enslaved Black people. He chided journalists “not to report based on your delusions.” Asked in 2008 about “Chinese Democracy,” a hard-rock album released by Guns N’ Roses, Mr. Qin was dismissive.
“It’s my understanding that many people don’t like this kind of music because it’s too raucous and noisy,” he said to the journalist who asked about the album. “I’m guessing that you’re a mature adult, aren’t you?”
As a spokesman, Mr. Qin “never skirted around a question, and his attitude was clear-cut and forthright,” said a profile of him published in 2018 by his alma mater in Beijing, when he was promoted to deputy foreign minister. “He is not evasive and does not beat around the bush.”
Mr. Qin rose through the Foreign Ministry division that deals with Western Europe and later served as a senior diplomat in London. In the next stage of his rise — leading the information operations of the Foreign Ministry and then overseeing the protocol for leaders’ trips abroad and meetings with visiting foreign leaders — he focused on protecting the image of China and of Mr. Xi.
Mr. Qin’s appointment may refect that “the Chinese system seems to be in a phase of favoring unswerving loyalty to the party above diplomatic achievement,” said Daniel Russel, a former American diplomat who is now a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
As vice foreign minister, Mr. Qin has been a vocal defender of Chinese policies, summoning foreign diplomats in Beijing to express official displeasure with their governments’ statements on Xinjiang and other contentious issues.
“Internationally, there are some anti-China forces concocting all kinds of lies to contain China’s development,” he said last year at a reception organized by the German Embassy in Beijing, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “The 1.4 billion Chinese people will never agree to this.”
21. Time for a New Approach to Defense Strategy
Excerpts:
Critics will say that defense cuts of this magnitude would destroy the deterrent and warfighting capacity of the U.S. military and invite aggression. This is surely not true in terms of the revised strategy’s core goal—preventing comprehensive regional conquest. Even in the most demanding contingencies, existing limits on the projectability and sustainability of U.S. power mean that alternative approaches could deliver comparable amounts of firepower onto attacking forces in the first weeks of a conflict. Moreover, deterrence is a function of many factors other than the expected outcomes of a local fight. The trick is to promise enough losses to cast real doubt on the prospects for success, something that a slightly smaller U.S. force could surely do, while manipulating the larger strategic context to make aggression both unnecessary and unappealing. Finally, for distant contingencies, apart from helping to strengthen ally and partner defenses, the United States can get serious about “integrated deterrence” and assemble a wide range of threats besides deployed forces, from cyber attacks to economic warfare, to help discourage aggression.
Skeptics might also point to a seeming contradiction: These discrete and limited contingencies, I am suggesting, are not vital to the United States — yet the United States should preserve existing alliances and thus, at least in cases of formal treaty allies, remain committed to fighting them. But this paradox is inherent to the U.S. strategic situation, not any specific proposed strategy. The United States has important, but not vital, interests in contingencies that it can neither escape nor dominate. Simply walking away would be dangerous to U.S. credibility and regional stability. Buying a military capable of overpowering force projection would be financially ruinous and strategically provocative. Like it or not, the United States, like all great powers, confronts many issues that call for messy and uncomfortable balancing acts rather than crude binary choices. The truth is that the Defense Department and the services are already caught in this dilemma: Current budgets and forces do not come close to meeting the test of decisive success in these prospective wars, and have no prospect of doing so.
There are risks to a homeland-first approach and shift to a capabilities-based, resource-informed defense strategy aimed at the broader objective of preventing regional hegemony. But, today, U.S. defense planners are working heroically to prop up a zombie strategy that represents the worst of both worlds, neither safeguarding Americans from the things that most directly and urgently imperil their well-being nor assuring victory in distant wars. The United States can deliver the security Americans deserve and expect and achieve our most essential geopolitical aims while discovering new ways to deliver a decisive application of force far from home.
Time for a New Approach to Defense Strategy - War on the Rocks
It turns out that January 1991 may have been the most problematic moment for U.S. defense strategy since World War II. It certainly didn’t seem like that at the time, of course: U.S. forces had won a crushing victory against Iraq, and the brave and brilliant troops returned to waving flags and celebratory parades. But this success locked into place a brash vision for U.S. defense strategy: projecting technological dominance to the far corners of the earth to win, decisively and at relatively little cost, discrete and limited wars on the very doorstep of the adversary. The United States would henceforth assess the adequacy of its defense program based in large part on the demands of such contingencies and build many of its forces to suit their requirements.
It is easy to forget the radical ambition of this approach, reflecting as it did the defense strategy component of a claim to global primacy. It was taxing enough when dealing with second-tier militaries. Applied to world-class powers like Russia and China, it is a recipe for persistent means-ends imbalances, skewed defense programs, and misplaced emphasis in American grand strategy. Yet, it has become the firmly entrenched guiding paradigm of defense planning — one that, in its path-dependent hold on American thinking, obstructs a critical, and long overdue, conversation about the essential purposes of the U.S. national security enterprise.
That more fundamental debate should consider a radical proposition: that the United States should free itself from the tyranny of discrete localized contingencies as the cornerstone of national security planning and prioritize threats to the well-being of Americans while also preserving ample military capability to prevent broad regional hegemony by any hostile power. This is not a plea to withdraw from the world: The United States plays important deterrent and balancing roles in key regions, and it should sustain its pledges to help defend allies. China poses a rising threat to security in the Indo-Pacific, and the United States should lead efforts to respond. But the time has come to reassess the balance of the most demanding missions implied by those commitments with issues that more directly menace Americans — a change that would demand a new approach to defense planning.
Growing Risks to the Homeland
U.S. national security thinking, planning, and investment today is focused on the ability to flow war-winning levels of military power to distant corners of the globe to contend with potential aggression in highly demanding, localized contingencies directly adjacent to potential adversaries. While other roles and missions create important demands, the shape of the U.S. defense program is primarily inferred from the requirements generated by these potential conflicts and the war plans they generate. This is a function, in part, of the current scenario-based approach to defense planning, in which specific contingencies serve as the taproot of defense needs. Public debates over the adequacy of the U.S. defense program largely revolve around the demands of such contingencies, such as Taiwan and the Baltics.
The case for a reorientation away from this focus begins with a simple insight: The leading perils to Americans now come from sources other than foreign armies or major wars.
The United States faces no threat of direct conventional aggression. Americans are, on the other hand, menaced by accelerating climate change, which promises to trigger massive economic costs, chaos in weather patterns, displacement of Americans from the coasts, and deaths from hot weather. Americans remain at risk from pandemic disease, with a senior Center for Disease Control official recently admitting that the United States is “not where we need to be” for new outbreaks beyond COVID-19. Domestic and foreign terrorism is a continuing hazard, and Americans are threatened by low probability but extremely high impact risks like solar flares and asteroids.
Even in terms of the actions of hostile powers, the most common and urgent dangers come not from invasion or the outcome of distant wars, but from the manipulation of the U.S. information environment or asymmetric methods of attack. This includes the potential for large-scale cyber attacks and ongoing disinformation campaigns and ransomware events — which the U.S. government has now labeled as a hazard equivalent to that of terrorism. The United States is not prepared for this new world of information-related threats: Its “virtual territorial integrity” is at risk of being permanently compromised. The homeland faces potential hostile threats apart from information: The threat of biological catastrophes, for example, is only growing with the potential for engineered biological weapons.
Beyond their effect on Americans, these threats can nullify the very thing defense planners are busily trying to sustain — the U.S. ability to project power. Vulnerabilities to cyber attack and political manipulation could cripple U.S. force flow in crisis or war. More broadly, in any future conflict, adversaries may try to generate chaos in the American homeland to shock the United States into immobility. Exquisite power projection forces will do the United States little good if their use is stalled by anarchy at home.
The Avenues to Success in International Rivalry
Given the trends in emerging threats to the American people, a homeland-first strategy therefore seems imperative. But, even on the global stage, in the competitions with Russia and China that are unavoidably upon us in some form, winning today’s roster of distant wars is not the key to strategic success.
International rivalries are rarely determined by individual battles or even wars, especially ones that take place thousands of miles from a nation’s shores. Far more often, the larger rivalries and struggles for competitive positioning endure beyond specific clashes. The British Empire received a stinging defeat in the American Revolution but, 120 years later, arguably reached its zenith. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union intervened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan without a U.S. or NATO military response, but still failed in its larger strategic competition. Meantime, the United States only fought Korea to an unsatisfying tie and suffered an outright loss in Vietnam — but, just 15 years later, celebrated its victory in the Cold War.
U.S. rivalries with Russia and China will be most decisively shaped by the ability of each of the competitors to generate social, economic, and technological dynamism; preserve strong and sustainable finances; and gather a predominant group of friends and allies. They will not be determined by the outcome of the regional contingencies over which U.S. defense plans now obsess.
The situation would be different if these scenarios represented the first step of a prospective militarized expansion on the part of Russia or China. But nobody thinks Russia hopes to roll tanks to Berlin or Paris, or that the Chinese Communist Party is anxious to invade Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, or even Vietnam. In fact, the real situation is closer to the opposite: U.S. rivals today are preparing for war but hope to avoid it and have developed dozens of tools to advance their interests short of war, in part because they recognize the immense risks and costs that major conflict poses in the nuclear age.
U.S. grand strategy has long sought to keep any major region from being dominated by a hostile power. This remains a critical goal, but the regional wars that loom large in U.S. defense thinking are not the things that will decide such hegemony. In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan or a Russian incursion into the Baltics, nearby states would surely be sparked into military balancing and defense buildups. The United States could partner with them to ensure that these attacks destroyed, rather than turbocharged, the aggressor’s dreams of regional domination.
Indeed, one effect of the current focus on contingencies is to smother creative ideas about how to gain systemic advantages in these rivalries. The United States is operating on the path-dependent belief that winning a small, but hugely demanding, set of possible wars is the center of gravity of its global security posture. It is not asking bigger questions about its vital interests, its most critical strategic roles, or the opportunity to use bold geopolitical gambits to shift balances of power. Put simply: In much of the dialogue on U.S. national security strategy, operational military concerns tied to regional contingencies have displaced wider strategic thinking.
The Problems with a Focus on Distant Wars
The focus on distant, localized contingencies as the lodestar of U.S. national security policy is therefore unwise. It is also unsustainable, for at least three reasons.
First, the endless requirements that pour from these scenarios generate an immense gap between means and ends in U.S. strategy. The refrain has been constant for two decades: The requirements of “the strategy” demand more capabilities than the U.S. military possesses. This argument was made about the 2018 National Defense Strategy, and it is being made about the new Biden administration budget. It is made about individual services: Witness the tough reception of the new Navy strategy and shipbuilding plan, which critics say will not deliver a fleet remotely big enough to meet U.S. requirements. The flywheel of scenario-based demands is placing the United States on a perpetually unfavorable cost imposition curve and institutionalizing a means-ends gap that can never be closed. Americans will spend trillions of dollars on defense — and, in a decade, will still be hearing about the U.S. inability to prevail, the continuing loss of “overmatch,” and the need to spend yet more.
Second, a national security strategy aimed at distant power projection to deal with exceptionally demanding localized conflicts places the United States on the wrong side of a fight with physics. As I have argued here before, threats to traditional means of projecting military power are greater today than in earlier periods of great-power rivalry. Combined with the unavoidable equations of distance and time, this means that the United States will not be able to get enough decisive power to the combat area in question quickly enough. This reality is hardly new: As James Lacey’s magnificent edited volume on great-power politics makes clear, the burden of “project[ing] force over great distances” has historically been a huge handicap for such powers. “In the future,” he concludes, “even if the United States remains vastly superior to any other state in total military power, it may find it progressively more difficult to win in the immediate vicinity of a near-peer competitor.”
Third, U.S. sustainment and defense industrial base capabilities are not capable of supporting a prolonged major contingency and have no prospect of doing so. Just seven shipyards build all U.S. Navy ships, leaving modest potential for surge production in the event of war. A recent Center for Strategic and International Studies study suggested that, across all services’ major weapons systems, it would take five years or more (sometimes vastly more) to replace the current inventory if large losses were suffered in a war. My RAND colleagues Bruce Held and Brad Martin recently argued here that U.S. strategic inter- and intra-theater lift and sustainment capabilities are inadequate. U.S. strategic mobilization capabilities have atrophied. These gaps would be eye-wateringly expensive to close.
Put Regional Wars in Their Proper Place
Despite these profound challenges, my argument is not that the United States should abandon its current alliances or its commitment to regional power balancing. U.S. defense planners should remain prepared to aid treaty allies threatened with attack or large-scale coercion. I am arguing for two things: a national security strategy that places the homeland first, and a capabilities-based defense strategy focused on building the best possible force within the resulting budget constraints to serve the more limited military goal of forestalling hostile regional hegemony, a force that would still be available to help allies defeat aggression. The resulting approach will not solve the challenges of distant power projection. No feasible strategy will do that. But it can help achieve two critical goals: fashioning a more sensible balance between homeland security and distant wars and, hopefully, forcing the Defense Department to finally get serious about transformative thinking.
The lead component of this approach would be domestic resilience against systemic risks, things such as climate change, disease, and severe weather. Investments could range from large-scale deployment of decarbonization technologies, to mitigating the now partly inevitable effects of global warming, to disease preparedness, to significant bolstering of infrastructure and the resiliency of often fragile power grids. Another part of the domestic protection focus would enhance resilience against hostile actions directed at the homeland. In this basket would be redoubled investments in cyber defense, expanded capabilities to deal with chemical and biological attacks on the United States, and investments in the informational and knowledge-based resilience of the population. It could also include tools to deal with long-range unmanned systems and other potential kinetic threats to American soil.
This approach would have an iron rule: Only when the demands of domestic resilience have been satisfied would the planning process turn to the requirements of foreign contingencies. Defining the thresholds for that sufficiency in these domestic missions will be challenging, but useful criteria are available. And, in many cases, from climate to information security to preparations for pandemics and biological attack, long lists of investments and policies await attention, things which could make a profound difference in U.S. preparedness.
Second, internationally, an alternative approach would place renewed emphasis on geostrategic gambits designed to shift the balance of power in the United States’ favor, and to make potential contingencies both less likely and less taxing. Examples could include peace treaties or arms control agreements to reduce the potential for major war (such as in Korea or Europe), diplomacy toward competitors with reassurances that reduce their perceived need to strike out, campaigns to preserve the favorable alignment of linchpin nations, and continued efforts to promote stronger defense and security programs from partners and allies. Given the natural hostility to Russia and China on the part of many countries, this is an area where the United States is playing to its geopolitical strengths rather than its power-projection weaknesses.
Third and finally, the upshot for defense strategy would be a resource-informed, capability-based (rather than scenario requirements-driven) strategy. The Defense Department’s task would be to take a still world-leading budget of perhaps $550–600 billion — trimmed to allow the new investments in domestic resilience and protection — and build the most effective, information-resilient, technologically advanced military possible, one designed in part to rapidly assist beleaguered allies in new ways. Several basic principles would guide such a defense strategy.
At its core would be a revised military objective: to prevent, along with friends and allies, any hostile power from achieving regional hegemony through conquest. U.S. defense strategy would seek to develop the core capabilities essential to defeat broad-based land or maritime aggression on a theater scale. The resulting force could still play a critical role in more demanding localized contingencies, but neither its composition, nor its investment strategies, nor its level of sufficiency would be held hostage to them.
This scaled-back core goal — preventing regional conquest, as opposed to ensuring victory in every limited contingency — is not as radical a shift as it may seem. Even the infamous 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, that table-pounding call for primacy, defined the essential U.S. military objective as seeking “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” Nor is the revised spending level out of line with pre-2001 practice: At the height of the Cold War in 1985, the U.S. defense budget, in 2021 dollars, was about $600 billion.
To achieve that goal, the new paradigm would be heavily oriented to supporting the self-defense efforts of allies rather than to empower the United States to take over the fight itself, offering a decisive added contribution to tilt the balance of a war. As a result, improving allied and partner capabilities would become a leading priority of U.S. defense strategy. (Such an approach can be more efficient: Given limits on U.S. power projection capacity, helping a partner buy 500 anti-ship missiles or unmanned aerial vehicles can be more operationally meaningful than if the U.S. military were to buy two or three times as many.) This would demand that U.S. forces get serious about interoperability, willingness to buy and co-produce systems that allies can use, and expanded peacetime engagements to build the basis for crisis and wartime collaboration.
This revised approach would also call for U.S. defense planners to identify a few select areas where the United States would seek to retain “overmatch” relative to potential adversaries, areas that provide decisive advantage in war. The most important example would surely be information architectures and resilience. Forces that build highly effective networks of sensing, shooting, and assessment that operate at machine learning speed — and keep them running through the storm of electronic warfare, cyber attacks, and disinformation that will descend in a future war — are likely to win. Other priority capabilities might include undersea warfare, sixth generation air combat systems, dedicated training and advisory units, a wide range of unmanned systems, and large magazines of precision weapons (including new, inexpensive models co-produced with allies).
Finally, this approach would free the up the Department of Defense to shift more emphasis toward emerging and transformational military concepts of operations and technologies rather than continuing to rely on well-worn ideas and legacy systems. The current paradigm and its requirement to be ready to “fight tonight” in a series of distant wars demand high levels of readiness and capacity which tend to have the effect of locking in current ways of thinking about warfare and suppressing experimentation and modernization. Despite some truly ground-breaking progress in impressive and hopeful pockets of creativity, the United States continues to treat potential conflicts as updated versions of century-old wars, while the gap between the rhetoric of U.S. defense policy (about transformation, agility, innovation, and so on) and the operational and institutional reality of inertia yawns wider all the time. One symptom of this inertia — indeed a classic warning sign of any dying paradigm — is the parade of abstract phrases, devoid of any precise meaning, which crowd U.S. strategy documents these days.
A more frugal approach would demand, and potentially energize, a new spirit of experimentation and innovation in defense. The U.S. military would have to do things differently, and both the Department of Defense and individual services could promote dialogues, contests, and planning processes to unearth all the incredibly creative ideas already rolling around their organizations, ideas that the oppressive weight of the current paradigm tends to quash. It would demand a real commitment to institutional reform, in everything from acquisition to personnel policies, and would force serious discussions about the distribution of missions across the joint force. Done right, this shift could inaugurate an era of transformational thinking at all levels of defense policy and strategy. (One example would be in the use of the reserve component, which has seen some innovative experiments but is crying out for a more comprehensive redesign.)
Critics will say that defense cuts of this magnitude would destroy the deterrent and warfighting capacity of the U.S. military and invite aggression. This is surely not true in terms of the revised strategy’s core goal—preventing comprehensive regional conquest. Even in the most demanding contingencies, existing limits on the projectability and sustainability of U.S. power mean that alternative approaches could deliver comparable amounts of firepower onto attacking forces in the first weeks of a conflict. Moreover, deterrence is a function of many factors other than the expected outcomes of a local fight. The trick is to promise enough losses to cast real doubt on the prospects for success, something that a slightly smaller U.S. force could surely do, while manipulating the larger strategic context to make aggression both unnecessary and unappealing. Finally, for distant contingencies, apart from helping to strengthen ally and partner defenses, the United States can get serious about “integrated deterrence” and assemble a wide range of threats besides deployed forces, from cyber attacks to economic warfare, to help discourage aggression.
Skeptics might also point to a seeming contradiction: These discrete and limited contingencies, I am suggesting, are not vital to the United States — yet the United States should preserve existing alliances and thus, at least in cases of formal treaty allies, remain committed to fighting them. But this paradox is inherent to the U.S. strategic situation, not any specific proposed strategy. The United States has important, but not vital, interests in contingencies that it can neither escape nor dominate. Simply walking away would be dangerous to U.S. credibility and regional stability. Buying a military capable of overpowering force projection would be financially ruinous and strategically provocative. Like it or not, the United States, like all great powers, confronts many issues that call for messy and uncomfortable balancing acts rather than crude binary choices. The truth is that the Defense Department and the services are already caught in this dilemma: Current budgets and forces do not come close to meeting the test of decisive success in these prospective wars, and have no prospect of doing so.
There are risks to a homeland-first approach and shift to a capabilities-based, resource-informed defense strategy aimed at the broader objective of preventing regional hegemony. But, today, U.S. defense planners are working heroically to prop up a zombie strategy that represents the worst of both worlds, neither safeguarding Americans from the things that most directly and urgently imperil their well-being nor assuring victory in distant wars. The United States can deliver the security Americans deserve and expect and achieve our most essential geopolitical aims while discovering new ways to deliver a decisive application of force far from home.
Michael J. Mazarr is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. The views expressed here are his own.
22. Fully Fund the Guam Defense System
Excerpts:
So, what’s to be done? Congress should fully support the Guam Defense System requests for this year and not delay action until the next budget cycle.
The combatant command closest to the threat from China has made clear what is urgently needed to defend Guam and deter China, and the Missile Defense Agency submitted its analysis to the Office of the Secretary of Defense weeks ago. Congress should not deprive the military of what it clearly needs just because the Defense Department decided to ignore a statutory requirement and fail to submit a report.
Beijing’s missile threat to Guam is growing, and there is no time to waste. Congress should act.
Fully Fund the Guam Defense System - War on the Rocks
BRADLEY BOWMAN AND MARK MONTGOMERY
The Biden administration talks tough when it comes to competing with China and taking the necessary steps to reinforce America’s defense posture in the Indo-Pacific. However, it is not clear whether the administration is prepared to match resources with words. Following an anemic defense budget proposal, the Biden Pentagon is now ignoring — or, at least, slow-rolling — analysis that makes clear that the Guam Defense System represents an essential and urgent priority for American forces in the region.
House appropriators cut funding this month for efforts designed to protect American citizens and U.S. military bases in Guam from an increasingly formidable Chinese missile threat. The appropriators say they support improved missile defenses for Guam, but they cited the Pentagon’s failure to submit a required report that was due on May 1 as part of the justification for the cut. That is a short-sighted rationale given the rapidly growing missile threat from the People’s Liberation Army and the Pentagon’s persistent lack of responsiveness to Indo-Pacific Command’s repeated requests for funding to better defend Guam. The decision to cut funding also runs counter to the congressional authorizers’ commitment to improving defenses in the Pacific.
If these cuts are retained in the final legislation, they will delay the delivery of vital capabilities desperately needed to address both current Chinese ballistic and cruise missile threats and hypersonic capabilities Beijing is expected to deploy by 2026. That would leave Guam vulnerable longer than necessary and invite aggression from Beijing.
Congress should provide full funding for the Guam Defense System, consistent with the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. At a minimum, Congress should authorize and fund preparatory measures necessary for any new missile defenses in Guam, whether the Guam Defense System or another system. Those measures should include the environmental impact statement and the completion of site surveys on Guam, as well as pushing forward research and development efforts related to the many sensors, weapons and warheads required. This includes the Glide Phase Interceptor, Standard Missile-6 systems, long range precision strike systems, and the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System.
China’s Missile Threat Against Guam
Indo-Pacific Command calls Guam the “most important operating location in the Western Pacific” — one the United States “must fight from” but “must also fight for.” It is easy to see why. Besides the roughly 170,000 U.S. citizens living there, Guam is home to Anderson Air Force Base, a submarine base, a new Marine Corps base, and numerous logistics and prepositioned stores.
U.S. military forces in Guam are not just a necessary forward-deployed capability. They also represent a powerful symbol that America is a Pacific power and is willing and able to defend its interests in the region. In the event of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere, Beijing knows that the U.S. military will need facilities on Guam to project military power and sustain it once there.
China fields a number of ballistic and cruise missiles that can target Guam. The new commander of Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. John Aquilino, told Congress in March in advance of his nomination hearing that Beijing has sprinted to improve the “range, survivability, accuracy, and lethality” of its missiles. China’s arsenal includes the land-based Dong Feng-26, a road-mobile intermediate-range ballistic missile sometimes called the “Guam killer.” They also possess cruise missiles that could be launched at Guam from any direction using H-6 bombers, submarines, or surface warships. And Beijing is also developing a hypersonic glide vehicle that could target Guam when employed in conjunction with a ballistic missile such as the Dong Feng-17.
Aquilino’s predecessor at Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Phil Davidson, warned last year that the missile threat to Guam will only get worse by 2026 and “will require us to have a much more robust capability than the combination of [the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense system], which is deployed there now, and an Aegis ship in response can provide.”
That is why Indo-Pacific Command has made clear in successive annual reports to Congress that the Guam Defense System represents the combatant command’s top unfunded priority. The system would provide a 360-degree persistent and integrated air defense capability for Guam. That would better protect Guam and free up Aegis-equipped warships needed elsewhere.
The Department of Defense has completed (but not delivered to Congress) a study that will inform what the Guam Defense System architecture will actually look like, but it will probably consist of a land-based version of the Aegis Combat System, a solid-state radar, Mark 41 Vertical Launching Systems, and Standard Missiles (SM-2, SM-3, and SM-6). These elements could be integrated — via the Command, Control, Battle Management, and Communications System — with the Patriot Missile Defense System, the existing Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in Guam, and perhaps the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor as well as other potential sensors and shooters distributed throughout Guam and nearby islands.
In other words, the Guam Defense System is a hybrid solution, not a carbon copy of the Aegis Ashore system the U.S. military has deployed in Romania and is building in Poland. Describing this system, therefore, as Aegis Ashore only paints part of the picture and has created some confusion.
In a July 9 op-ed, Adm. (ret.) Harry Harris, himself a former commander of Indo-Pacific Command, reiterated the urgent need for improved missile defenses for Guam. But Harris also expressed concern that an Aegis Ashore system modeled on the ones in Romania and Poland would be inadequate.
Therein lies a major point for Congress to understand. Indo-Pacific Command and the Missile Defense Agency do not seek to copy and paste the Aegis Ashore systems from Europe for Guam. To be sure, there will likely be some similarities, but there would also be many differences in the system built in Guam, based on the island’s geography and the different missile threats the system would seek to address.
To begin with, the Guam Defense System would be a distributed system, making it more survivable. Moreover, Vice Adm. Jon Hill, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, has suggested that key components of the system in Guam could be underground or mobile. “There are ways to do that,” Hill said last month. “It’s not a big stretch.”
Harris also argues that an “essential attribute” of the system in Guam will be an open architecture “to ensure interoperability of current and future radars and interceptors across the services.” He also emphasizes that it should be “persistent, scalable, robust enough to tackle the full spectrum” of missile threats to Guam.
Here’s the point: What Harris says Guam needs is what the hybrid Guam Defense System solution will, in fact, provide.
The Aegis system has already integrated many sensors and weapons, and others could be added quickly. As a result, the Guam Defense System hybrid solution would be able to defend against ballistic missile threats and cruise missile threats (with the right sensors). Moreover, an aggressive effort is already underway to ensure Aegis systems can cope with hypersonic threats. The Guam Defense System could also be used to command and control supporting offensive systems, which could be mobile and dispersed throughout Guam and nearby islands. This mix of offensive and defensive systems would make the defense infrastructure in Guam more survivable and a more effective deterrent against China.
Anticipating Counterarguments
Some may respond to this analysis by suggesting that Beijing could simply overwhelm any new missile defenses on Guam.
There are several problems with that argument. At its core, accepting this argument would essentially leave an American territory populated by 170,000 U.S. citizens dangerously and increasingly unprotected. Setting aside the moral and political implications of such a position, failing to address growing missile threats to Guam would turn the island into a hostage China could use to coerce Washington to not respond to Beijing’s aggression in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere.
In such a scenario, Beijing could make clear that any U.S. response in the Taiwan Strait would force the People’s Liberation Army to pummel Guam with missiles. Having failed to take sufficient action to defend Guam, American leaders would be forced to take that threat seriously. This is not some outlandish scenario and is actually similar to the first vignette of concern cited by the bipartisan congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission in its 2018 report.
Failing to respond to the growing missile threat to Guam also ignores one of the principal purposes and benefits of missile defense. One of the great benefits of missile defense is that it creates doubt in the minds of potential adversaries as to whether an attack would accomplish its key objectives. By doing so, missile defense increases the chances that an aggressor may not undertake the attack in the first place.
Missile defenses can provide valuable time to launch a more effective and potent counter-offensive. The aggressor’s missile barrage may eventually destroy most of its targets, but the protection missile defenses provide, even if only temporally, forces an adversary considering aggression to contemplate the costs a counterattack would inflict. In those ways, missile defenses contribute to what is called deterrence by denial (the aggressor is not confident it can achieve the desired objectives) and deterrence by punishment (the aggressor fears the counterattack might be too costly) — both of which incentivize an adversary to not launch the attack in the first place.
And, to be clear, no one is arguing that the “as built” Guam Defense System will be a missile defense panacea for all time. It would be an important first step that can be implemented in a timely fashion in response to a specific emerging threat. Over time, the Guam Defense System can and should be modernized iteratively with improved hardware and software — both defensive and offensive.
What Congress Should Do
So, what’s to be done? Congress should fully support the Guam Defense System requests for this year and not delay action until the next budget cycle.
The combatant command closest to the threat from China has made clear what is urgently needed to defend Guam and deter China, and the Missile Defense Agency submitted its analysis to the Office of the Secretary of Defense weeks ago. Congress should not deprive the military of what it clearly needs just because the Defense Department decided to ignore a statutory requirement and fail to submit a report.
Beijing’s missile threat to Guam is growing, and there is no time to waste. Congress should act.
Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He spent nearly nine years working in the U.S. Senate, including six years as the top defense advisor to Sen. Kelly Ayotte, then the senior Republican on the Armed Services Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee. He has also served as a U.S. Army officer, Black Hawk pilot, and assistant professor at West Point.
Mark Montgomery is the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He previously served as policy director for the Senate Armed Services Committee under the late Sen. John S. McCain and is a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy.
23. Americans and the Dragon: Coalition Warfare from the Boxer Rebellion to the Future Battlefield
"Keep up the fire!" (the motto of the 9th Infantry Regiment - I was once a proud member of the regiment when it was in Korea).
Americans and the Dragon: Coalition Warfare from the Boxer Rebellion to the Future Battlefield - Modern War Institute
As Sino-American relations come under increased strain, scholars, civil authorities, servicemembers, and strategists have theorized about how the United States can bring various instruments of national power to bear against the People’s Republic of China. Some have speculated, channeling concerns of the National Defense Strategy Commission, that armed conflict with China might spell decisive defeat for US forces. Preoccupation with the pacing threat of the century has even infiltrated popular print culture. The novel 2034 is a New York Times bestseller and has captured scores of readers through its gripping, Tom Clancy–esque tale of great power war. Too many of these considerations, in imagining some unrealized future, fail to offer historical perspective; they neglect the fact that the United States has deployed forces to China before.
In the summer of 1900, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, a militant, antiforeign society, took root in China’s northern provinces and overran the imperial seat of Peking (present-day Beijing). Commonly called Boxers, they were religious zealots who practiced ancient forms of mysticism, self-flagellation, and martial arts in an effort to make themselves invincible to Western weapons. As a militia, albeit one that lacked a central and unified command, the Boxers sought to end foreign commercial, industrial, and religious influence in China. They routinely slaughtered Western Christians (whom they regarded as “foreign devils”) as well as indigenous Chinese who converted to, and proselytized on behalf of, Christianity. In 1900, Boxers enjoyed official sanction in the Manchu court as Qing officials—powerless to suppress the group, and simultaneously lacking a modern, twentieth century–style military with which to deter foreigners—felt their power slipping away.
In response to the crisis, a combined force of US sailors, soldiers, and Marines participated in a multinational coalition to save from annihilation the American and European diplomats in China, their families, and thousands of Chinese converts to Christianity. From the top down, this coalition little resembled joint, multinational military efforts of later conflicts. France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, and the United States committed sizeable contingents of soldiers to land operations but all exercised independent commands that sought to act in unison through coordination and synchronization. Councils of war proved suitable for coalition naval commanders in the initial phase of the campaign.
Upon the land, however, unity of action was more complicated. Joint doctrine did not exist in 1900. Ground forces laboring to relieve their besieged legations in Peking did not operate under a multinational, unified field general staff, making combined interoperability especially challenging. Difficulties in communications compounded problems. Whereas admirals in the Bay of Chihli (Bohai Bay) enjoyed seamless communication with one another and an unbroken line of telegraphic communications with the outside world via Chefoo (present-day Yantai), Tongku (present-day Tanggu), and Nagasaki (Japan), land component commanders enjoyed no such luxury, and sometimes even lacked translators to facilitate coordination across staffs in action.
Further complicating the situation was the somewhat unusual employment of American military forces. American sailors and Marines conducted the first land operations before elements of the 9th and 14th US Infantry Regiments arrived from the Philippine Islands. The piecemeal arrival of maritime and land forces throughout the campaign tested American logistical flexibility; it compelled US troops, like their allies, to consolidate whatever initial gains they made in the campaign and to phase their tactical actions so as to preserve combat effectiveness, protect their force, and not strain supplies.
In light of the conditions that shaped it, the China Relief Expedition was a pivotal moment for the American profession of arms. Like military operations in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, the campaign in China enabled the successful implementation of comparatively new military technologies that demonstrated marked advances from those employed in the US Civil War and, in the European context, the Franco-Prussian War. At the level of small arms and tactics, for instance, the China Relief Expedition was a conflict of bolt-action, magazine-fed rifles, smokeless powder, and dispersed firing lines that prefigured how American infantry would fight in France in 1918. Beyond small arms, improvements in field weapons were also apparent. The Americans used Colt and Gatling machine guns in China, and their breech-loading artillery, among the best of all the coalition field guns, provided excellent fire support in every phase of the campaign.
US soldiers who fought their way to Peking from the coast encountered fierce local resistance and endured some of the most brutal marches in the annals of American warfare. Repulsed at the Battle of Tientsin (present-day Tianjin), Americans were forced to take cover from heavy artillery and small arms fire in ditches; waist-deep in brackish, bloody water, they waited until darkness to evacuate their wounded and withdraw. After-action reports from the company to regimental echelons are replete with references to dehydration, severe strain, and sunstroke. During the march from Tientsin to Peking, conducted in August, troops suffered for lack of water in the hottest month of the year, and at a moment in the campaign when operational tempo was critical, since communication with the legations was broken and coalition forces feared that terrible fates had befallen their countrymen. Suffering from heat, men drank freely from the Pei-Ho River, a main artery for military supplies, though it contained numerous floating bodies upon which dogs fed from the riverbanks. Major General of Volunteers Adna Romanza Chaffee, commander of American ground forces and a former Comanche fighter long accustomed to the arid and unforgiving American Southwest, described the heat of the march in his official report as “very great.” The expedition’s chief surgeon wrote that at least one soldier dropped dead in an engagement while en route to Peking not from enemy bullets but from heat exhaustion.
Combined, coalition forces numbered some seventeen thousand troops, exceeding the size of a US Army corps in the American Civil War but less than that of a typical US Army division in World War I. Given the comparatively small size of their expeditionary force—two infantry regiments (the 9th and 14th US Infantries), one artillery battery (Light Battery F, 5th US Artillery), one cavalry troop (of the 6th US Cavalry), and a lone battalion of Marines—the Americans depended upon their Japanese, Russian, and British allies for certain capabilities across the combat arms, as well as for military intelligence. Japanese forces proved especially adept at reconnaissance and urban warfare on the march from Tientsin to Peking, often sweeping villages of opposition before the Americans—whose position in the order of march was to the rear of the column—could get into action. Not once did Americans assume the tactical initiative.
Nevertheless, American officers drew useful lessons from the China campaign, as well as from the experiences of coalition partners in the Far East, that shaped their profession of arms in meaningful ways. US servicemembers were quick to note the capabilities of their coalition counterparts, and left detailed accounts of partner nations’ military forces. Much of this experience informed professional discourse on shaping the future of US forces and joint operations. On subjects ranging from surgery and medical treatment to amphibious landings and coastal fortifications, American sailors, soldiers, and Marines published informative and instructive essays in professional periodicals. Taken as a whole, these essays reflect a capable, inquisitive, mature, and technically minded officer corps whose grasp of joint military operations was nothing short of impressive. From their experience, US soldiers also concluded that the land component commander needed a proper staff that could be maintained without depriving line regiments of good officers. For such a staff to be assembled promptly—and function properly—without compromising the combat effectiveness of the force, line units needed their full complement of officers, and staff departments an increase in personnel.
The strategic and operational environments that conditioned the success of the informal, allied coalition in 1900 are fundamentally different from those in which civil-military authorities, planners, and strategists must function today. While the logistical and sustainment aspects of the US military intervention in China in 1900 are perhaps instructive for future operations, geopolitical conditions in East Asia in the historical present are different from those in the early twentieth-century context. The military situation is also dramatically different. In 1900, the near-total absence of Chinese naval capability ensured that coalition powers enjoyed unimpeded access to the Chinese coast from which they could land troops, horses, mules, ordnance, and provisions. Such conditions no longer exist.
The character of any future struggle with China is difficult to predict with certainty. And as one practitioner has argued recently, future naval operations against China, especially in the event of a conflict that threatens Taiwanese sovereignty, are likely to be mounted from a posture of strategic defense; as a result, naval activity may more closely resemble convoy escort operations undertaken by maritime forces in the Atlantic Ocean to sustain Great Britain in the early years of World War II. It is believed, though uncertain, that the United States still enjoys advantages in military capabilities across all domains necessary to achieve overmatch against China; more apparent is that the degree to which the United States enjoyed tactical overmatch in 1900 is a relic of the distant past.
Even so, the China Relief Expedition offers lessons sure to enrich any study of war. From the doctrinal perspective, the march undertaken by American soldiers and Marines from Tientsin to Peking demonstrated clearly how land component commanders must calibrate operational tempo and phasing to meet force protection demands, enhance endurance, extend operational reach, and prevent premature culmination. Colonel Aaron Simon Daggett of the 14th US Infantry Regiment gave articulation to these principles when he recollected that no soldier, no matter how skilled, was combat effective if he could not “be at the right place at the right time,” or, if at the proper place, “so exhausted as to be unable to render service.”
Another lesson that emerges from the China experience of 1900 is that no matter how diligently and carefully a commander may try to shape an operational environment, often he or she will confront a fluid military problem to which that commander must adapt. First to encounter this hard truth in China was the British admiral Edward H. Seymour, whose railroad-based expedition to relieve Peking was met with almost-total disaster. Major General Chaffee learned a similar lesson. Chaffee arrived in China in late July, after much of the 9th US Infantry Regiment and US Marines present had already engaged the Boxers and imperial Chinese forces at the Battle of Tientsin. He was then compelled, on the ground, to organize a staff and to resupply his force in a matter of days. These facts testify to the volatility of military operations even in theaters where the United States enjoys advantages in unit organization, weapons, and the impedimenta of war. In 1900 China, the American land component commander needed to comprehend the operational environment and achieve national strategic objectives under circumstances he inherited but over which he exerted little direct control. Even so, Chaffee persisted under severe conditions and managed, in the end, to execute the strategic guidance he received from the US War Department.
At its height, the China Relief Expedition failed to assume the character or stature of a large-scale war between nation states that enjoyed parity in economic strength, military capabilities, and technology. One historian has written that the Boxer War was but one installment in America’s “savage wars of peace”—a so-called “small war” that furthered the inexorable “March of the Flag” into the Pacific. United States diplomats and military personnel maintained that theirs was a military expedition to protect American citizens in Peking. In light of this, and in the near term, they limited the application of military force to Boxers who sought to obstruct those national interests.
Despite its smallness, however, the conflict presented coalition forces with real elements of complexity. The need to establish a base of supply at Tientsin—and to secure a strong line of communications—for a march on Peking compelled coalition naval commanders to capture several Chinese forts at Taku, a tactical action that prompted the Manchu court to declare war against the various coalition nation-states. Thus, a combined rescue operation featuring occasional armed conflict with nonstate actors broadened and resulted in pitched battle with Boxers and imperial forces.
The China Relief Expedition concluded with a successful military occupation that portended the end of the Qing Dynasty. For lives lost and damages suffered to their commercial interests, coalition nations obliged China to pay a substantial indemnity of 450 million taels (approximately $333 million in 1900 exchange rates) in gold and at four percent interest over thirty-nine years. In all, this amounted to a whopping $700 million. In 1908, the United States remitted its portion of the indemnity—the first nation of the informal alliance so to do—on the condition that funds be directed toward education: first, for Chinese students in the United States, and second, for the creation of the Ch’inghua University in Peking.
When viewing the wide sweep of coalition warfare throughout history, the campaign of 1900 appears, upon first glance, to be a comparatively minor affair. For the Americans, however, it was a success and proved an important moment in the evolution of their warfighting capabilities. In addition to furnishing lessons of military science, the expedition demonstrated to authorities in Washington and commanders in multiple theaters of military operations that they could manage strategic risks in Asia and execute simultaneous campaigns—in the Philippine Islands as well as in China—that required extensive sustainment efforts.
But in a larger sense, no consideration of future international relations with China can escape the history of 1900. If the China Relief Expedition is forgotten in the annals of American warfare, and if historians of US wars have in large measure neglected the conflict, still its consequences have endured and doubtless shape how China imagines its place in the emerging international order. It is doubtful that China will patiently suffer another such humiliation. To the contrary, the People’s Republic of China’s relentless pursuit of modernized, first-strike nuclear capabilities (evinced by recent construction of intercontinental ballistic missile silos), her numerous shipbuilding projects, and her increasingly adversarial—if not hostile—posture toward nations in the Asian community suggest that China looks actively to reverse the history of 1900 on the global stage. There are also concerns that the US Navy lacks the readiness to counteract Chinese ambition. All the more reason, then, for Americans to remember the China Relief Expedition: not because it provides a blueprint for some future war, but because from it they can perceive how high the geopolitical stakes have risen, note how and to what degree the proverbial tables may have turned, and peer into the glass to see how devastating a different kind of military confrontation with China could prove in the end.
Mitchell G. Klingenberg, PhD, is a historian in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College. He is the author of a monograph-length case study on the China Relief Expedition and is currently at work on a biography of US Major General of Volunteers John Fulton Reynolds.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or of any organization with which the author is affiliated, including the US Army War College.
24. China’s Sputnik Moment? How Washington Boosted Beijing’s Quest for Tech Dominance
Excerpts:
The ripple effects of Chinese technological success will be felt beyond China. For one thing, they will shape American politics. A Beijing less dependent on U.S. products will feel less apprehensive about retaliating against American firms, giving it license to respond to perceived affronts. For another thing, technological dominance will shift the Chinese leadership’s calculations on Taiwan. Beijing knows that any armed invasion of the island would prompt U.S. sanctions that could inflict great pain on the Chinese economy. Greater self-reliance would deflate the threat of those sanctions and remove a deterrent against military action.
The economic consequences of Chinese technological dominance on the United States would be no less significant. For the most part, U.S. technology firms have stayed a few steps ahead of their Chinese competition. But they might fall back as their sales dip and as Beijing launches a more powerful drive to replace them. If China comes to dominate semiconductor production in the way it has dominated solar panels, then the United States will have lost its last crown jewel in manufacturing as the products become commoditized and profits disappear.
At this point, no effort on behalf of the U.S. government can deter China’s state from its end goal of industrial self-sufficiency. But Washington can still change the calculations of private Chinese tech companies. Many of these businesses would rather not have to reinvent their tools and find new suppliers and would likely stick with U.S. technologies if given the chance. The United States should therefore roll back its most punitive restrictions on the Chinese technology sector, lest it force some of the most innovative companies in the world to work within their domestic tech ecosystem. At stake is the future global center of technological innovation: Washington should know better than to fuel its greatest competitor.
China’s Sputnik Moment?
How Washington Boosted Beijing’s Quest for Tech Dominance
In 2016, AlphaGo, a computer program developed by machine learning experts in London, beat the world’s top players of the classical Chinese board game Go. It was a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence: AlphaGo had demonstrated an unprecedented capacity for intuition and pattern recognition. That a Western program had been the first to achieve this AI feat prompted some commentators to declare that China had experienced a “Sputnik moment,” an event that would trigger widespread unease in the country about its perceived technological lag. Indeed, China has had a Sputnik moment in recent years—but it wasn’t prompted by AlphaGo’s victory. Rather, since 2018, tightening U.S. trade restrictions have threatened the viability of some of China’s biggest firms, fueling anxiety in Beijing and forcing Chinese companies to reinvent the U.S. technologies they can no longer access.
The Chinese government has long had twin ambitions for industrial policy: to be more economically self-sufficient and to achieve technological greatness. For the most part, it has relied on government ministries and state-owned enterprises to pursue these goals, and for the most part, it has come up short. In semiconductor production, for example, China has barely crossed the starting line. Rather, China’s private entrepreneurial firms have driven the bulk of the country’s technological success, even though their interests have not always aligned with the state’s goal of strengthening domestic technology. Beijing has, for example, recently begun cracking down on certain consumer Internet companies and online education firms, in part to redirect the country's efforts towards other strategic technologies such as computer chips. This has meant that China’s most impressive technological achievements—building state-of-the-art capabilities in renewable energy, consumer Internet services, electronics, and industrial equipment—have as often been driven in spite of state interference as they have because of it.
Then came U.S. President Donald Trump. By sanctioning entrepreneurial Chinese companies, he forced them to stop relying on U.S. technologies such as semiconductors. Now, most of them are trying to source domestic alternatives or design the necessary technologies themselves. In other words, Trump’s gambit accomplished what the Chinese government never could: aligning private companies’ incentives with the state’s goal of economic self-sufficiency.
A MIXED BAG
The Chinese state has intervened in the economy since the early days of the People’s Republic. In addition to its famous five-year plans, the first of which was implemented in 1953, the government developed several discrete plans explicitly focused on advancing its technological capability. For decades, industrial policy mostly consisted of empty statements. The 1990s, in particular, saw the government issuing a series of industrial policies that functioned as aspirational goals rather than binding targets and, unsurprisingly, achieved little.
As the economist Barry Naughton has noted, the turning point came with the implementation of the government’s “medium- and long-term plan for science and technology” in 2006. In stark contrast to its lackluster execution of previous industrial policies, Beijing devoted substantial financial and administrative resources to the plan. The State Council, China’s highest administrative authority, outlined the development of 16 “megaprojects,” each under the mandate of a designated ministry, and directed $5 billion to $6 billion to these efforts every year—something that had not occurred under any previous policy. Although a few of these megaprojects did make small inroads, the program as a whole spent large sums without appreciably improving the country’s technological capabilities.
As it happened, however, the medium- and long-term plan turned out to be a warm-up exercise for China’s evolving industrial policy. In 2010, the State Council unveiled another initiative, which designated emerging technologies, such as electric vehicles and next-generation computing, as the drivers of economic growth. By then, the global financial crisis had shaken Beijing’s purse loose, and the government began lavishing resources on favored projects. In addition to direct financial support, the Chinese government has helped domestic technology companies through other means—by using government buying power, for example, to increase demand for solar panels.
But the centerpiece of the Chinese state’s industrial planning apparatus is the “Made in China 2025” plan. Announced in 2015, the plan highlights ten high-tech industry segments in which Chinese firms should make breakthroughs, and it sets self-sufficiency targets in striking detail. One advisory document, for example, specifies that Chinese semiconductor production ought to reach between 49.10 and 75.13 percent of the domestic market size in 2030, that domestic industry should master extreme ultraviolet lithography by 2025, and that the country should be producing multicore central processing units for computer servers by 2030. Such specific targets bring to mind the days of China’s planned economy, when the state micromanaged all industrial output.
Made in China 2025 triggered a fierce backlash among many industrialized countries, which were wary of China’s efforts to dominate advanced technology. Having failed to anticipate this reaction, Chinese leaders subsequently tried to dismiss Made in China 2025 as an aspirational planning exercise developed by overly confident academics. But by then, the state had already released a stream of plans focused on advancing select technologies—such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence—as well as enormous proposals for direct subsidies, cheaper access to capital, and investments from public-private funds. Beijing had already showed that it was keen not only to catch up on the technologies of the past but also to dominate the industries of the future—and that it was willing to spend vast sums to get there.
China is now undertaking a whole-of-society effort to improve domestic technology.
What has China really accomplished with these plans? If the country’s recent industrial policy programs had reached fruition, the country would be a technological giant today—but it is not. Chinese tech firms have mastered the production of certain goods, including renewable power technologies, electric vehicles, high-speed rail supplies, heavy machinery, and automotive parts. China is at the fore of 5G network deployment, boosted by Huawei’s strength in mobile networking equipment.
But on bigger-ticket items that are explicit government targets, such as semiconductors and aviation technologies, China’s industrial policy has failed. Long-term programs devoted to semiconductor development have yielded a few modest successes but have mostly resulted in floundering companies that are nowhere near the cutting edge. The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), China’s answer to Airbus and Boeing, is years behind schedule in its development of a new fleet of planes. China has worked for decades to develop a car brand that can rank among the world’s top automakers—but its car companies have had difficulty producing anything that consumers in developed countries actually want to buy.
Even the success stories require caveats. When Chinese companies master a product, they often end up turning it into a commodity, tanking profits across the board—including for themselves. Chinese companies may dominate the solar panel industry, but the market is so fiercely competitive that few companies make much profit. China may be at the fore of high-speed rail, too, but it has accomplished this by requiring foreign companies to turn over sensitive technologies to potential competitors, embittering many foreign partners. And many of China’s leading companies are still critically dependent on U.S. technologies.
In other words, Chinese central planning has not defied economic gravity and proved that the government knows better than the market. There is a meaningful difference in China between companies that are formally designated as part of the state system and those with entrepreneurial founders: state-owned enterprises, such as COMAC, China Telecom, and China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, or Sinopec, are not the country’s most globally competitive firms. Successful Chinese firms, such as ByteDance (the company behind TikTok) and DJI (a top consumer drone manufacturer), have grown around the state sector rather than out of it. State-owned companies are insulated from real market competition and treat their private counterparts with jealousy, sometimes wielding state power to squeeze them out of existence. More often than not, reliance on government spending results in lazy firms surviving on subsidies rather than private firms capitalizing on state assistance.
It is true that Chinese industrial policies have had some success. China today is a huge market featuring a growing number of dynamic firms. A large manufacturing base trains many workers to produce sophisticated technologies. China’s enormous size has facilitated competitive state procurement infrastructure, which has hastened some strong technological advancements, as it has, for example, in solar power. But these policies have not propelled China to the lead in foundational technologies such as semiconductors—and the government has had little to do with the direct achievements of China’s largest technology firms. The private Internet giants ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent are the only companies that can look upon their Silicon Valley counterparts as peers. In hardware, the entrepreneurial firms DJI, Huawei, and Lenovo are the only Chinese companies developing cutting-edge consumer products.
TOO FAR?
The limitations of Chinese central planning did not stop Made in China 2025 from setting off alarm bells in Washington. In the final week of Barack Obama’s presidency, the White House released a plan to defend U.S. primacy on semiconductors. By the time Trump took office, there was a broad bipartisan appetite to confront predatory Chinese business practices.
Many of the Trump administration’s early actions to that effect made sense. China requires domestic firms to invest in overseas businesses to acquire the technologies they lack at home, a policy that has stoked fears that China could end up owning large chunks of the U.S. technology sector. After the state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup, a semiconductor company, made a brazen bid in 2015 to acquire Micron Technology, the last American memory-chip maker, the Trump administration responded in 2018 by stiffening the process by which it reviews foreign investment in domestic companies. Congress and the White House granted the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States new authority to block foreign investments in sensitive technology companies. The Department of Justice also channeled more resources into prosecuting the theft of trade secrets. And the Office of the United States Trade Representative detailed China’s unfair economic practices and created the legal basis for tariffs on certain Chinese products outlined in Made in China 2025.
Had the Trump administration stopped there, the response would have constituted an appropriate plan to protect U.S. firms from predatory Chinese practices. But it went much further, putting in place an extensive export-control regime that weaponized U.S. dominance of technologies such as semiconductors to cripple Chinese firms. Because these sanctions deprived Chinese companies of access to American-made components, they threatened the viability of Chinese firms even in their domestic market.
China’s state and its leading firms are working together so that no Chinese firm is at the mercy of U.S. trade policies.
When the Trump administration banned the sale of critical U.S.-made parts to the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, for example, its operations collapsed as a result. It did the same to Fujian Jinhua, then China’s leading memory-chip maker, which subsequently failed, too. The bloodletting reached its peak in the final days of Trump’s presidency. The U.S. Department of Commerce had by then added the Chinese firms DJI, Hikvision (a video security company), Huawei, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) to its list of entities that, for national security or foreign policy reasons, have restricted access to U.S. technology. The White House also issued executive orders intended to ban TikTok and WeChat in the United States, but the language was so broad that it might have prevented any American person or firm from interacting with each of their parent companies.
The White House reserved its most intense firepower for Huawei. The Commerce Department wrote a highly complex rule for Huawei alone, asserting extraterritoriality on all items sold to the company that are based on U.S. technologies, even if they were produced by foreign firms overseas. This restriction has prevented Huawei from working not just with U.S. companies but also with many of its Chinese, Taiwanese, and European vendors, leaving it in a precarious position. Today, the company is unable to procure new components and has been forced to rely on its dwindling stockpiles to sustain operations. Huawei’s smartphone sales are collapsing, and in response, the company has pivoted to far less lucrative low-tech endeavors, such as automotive parts and fish farming technologies.
AN UNLIKELY UNION
Beijing watched with anger as the Trump administration successively labeled its companies national security threats and imposed severe restrictions on them. China’s foreign ministry repeatedly pledged to take “all necessary countermeasures,” while the nationalist news outlet The Global Times promised retaliation against Apple, Boeing, Cisco, and Qualcomm.
But Beijing’s actions have not matched its fierce rhetoric. Far from doing unto Apple what the U.S. government has done unto Huawei, the Chinese government has, for the most part, continued to roll out the red carpet for foreign firms. Tesla, for example, was granted an unprecedented license to establish a wholly owned auto production plant in Shanghai. It is clear why Beijing wants to maintain good relations with U.S. firms: they are major employers in China, continue to provide critical technology, and act as a moderating force against the hawkishness of the U.S. government.
At the same time, Beijing is pushing hard for technological self-sufficiency. Top officials including President Xi Jinping have discussed the importance of improving “indigenous innovation” and gaining control over “chokepoint technologies.” The 2020 Central Economic Work Conference, an annual meeting that sets the national agenda for the Chinese economy, identified advancements in science and technology as the top two economic priorities of 2021—neither of which had ever been discussed independently in this forum before, let alone taken the top spots. Greater state funding will almost certainly follow—far more than the $5 billion to $6 billion spent on Made in China 2025. And for the first time, China’s drive for technological self-sufficiency is being matched by private-sector efforts, thanks to U.S. trade restrictions.
The ripple effects of Chinese technological success will be felt beyond China.
China’s entrepreneurial companies have sometimes benefited from the state’s largess and protection, but they have also worked to keep the state at arm’s length. In order to be truly competitive globally, firms such as Huawei and Alibaba have decided that they need to use the best components on the market, many of which are American made. China’s leading tech companies rely on U.S. technologies to sell some of the best smartphones, computers, and Internet services in the world. A Huawei phone, for example, has a Chinese-designed processor but otherwise uses American hardware in quantities comparable to the iPhone. If Huawei had followed the government’s directives to buy domestic, it would not have become the behemoth it is today, nor would it be suffering so deeply from U.S. trade restrictions.
Leading entrepreneurial firms can no longer ignore the state’s commands to source products domestically, however. Enhanced U.S. export-control measures have made that decision for them and united China’s government and its leading firms in a shared goal: to pursue technological and industrial self-sufficiency so that no Chinese firm is at the mercy of U.S. trade policies. By imposing restrictions on American products, the U.S. government has inadvertently done more than any party directive to incentivize private investment in China’s domestic technology ecosystem.
Washington is right to target Chinese firms that are obvious military actors or complicit in human rights abuses. But the sweeping nature of the Trump administration’s sanctions did not suggest a careful selection process. Rather, they gave the impression that the United States would punish any Chinese company that achieved success. Chinese firms are no longer sure if they can depend on U.S. products—or if they will be added to another opaque government blacklist and face potential collapse. U.S. export controls have already encouraged other foreign firms to exploit anxieties around U.S. sanctions by marketing themselves as more reliable vendors. And they have created a perverse incentive for some American firms to move production overseas in order to maintain access to China’s enormous market.
U.S. sanctions against Chinese technology companies have deeply offended many in China, especially given their perceived arbitrary criteria and severe effects. Many engineers at top companies such as ByteDance, DJI, and Huawei have studied and worked in the United States and were bewildered by claims that their work constituted a threat to U.S. national security. Chinese officials scratched their heads when the Pentagon declared that the Chinese electronics firm Xiaomi had ties to the military; some joked that Xiaomi was in American crosshairs because the company’s founder, Lei Jun, contained the character for “soldier” in his name. Now that Huawei’s phones are difficult to find in stock, every consumer in China knows that U.S. restrictions have started to bite. It is not unusual, these days, to see people on the Beijing subway watching video explanations of the semiconductor supply chain.
Square in Shanghai, China, May 2020
Aly Song / Reuters
THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT
China’s true Sputnik moment has been its realization that it cannot count on the United States to supply its technology—and that it must cultivate domestic alternatives. Washington bristled at Beijing’s ambitions for semiconductor self-sufficiency and then proceeded to punish Chinese companies naive enough to depend on American technologies. U.S. companies are now facing uncomfortable questions on whether they can be counted on to be reliable suppliers. For all the complaints about Xi’s efforts to drive “offensive decoupling,” it is the United States, not China, that is forcing Chinese firms to abandon American products—and now these companies are pursuing domestic self-sufficiency with a vengeance.
The combined efforts of China’s state drive and its innovative industry will accelerate the country’s technological advancement. In the 1960s, integrated circuits were developed when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was willing to pay any price for technology that could send astronauts to the moon and bring them safely back. Today, the U.S. government is putting Huawei in NASA’s position: a cash-rich organization willing to pay for critical components on the basis of performance rather than cost. Smaller Chinese companies that previously never stood a chance of selling to Huawei are now sought after as vendors, and they receive infusions of cash and technical expertise that will accelerate their growth. Private and state-owned chip manufacturers are ramping up their operations. Once siloed industries now collaborate in the service of tech innovation: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for example, has begun coordinating regular sessions that bring together math professors and private companies. China is now undertaking a whole-of-society effort to improve domestic technology, specifically around what Chinese leaders think will drive not only economic growth but also geopolitical power.
Is all of this enough to make Chinese industrial policy work this time around? It is likely that in a decade, China will have made greater technological advancements under the U.S. export-control regime than it would have had the United States not forced China’s leading companies to buy from weak domestic firms. Had the United States implemented necessary but measured reforms—strengthening the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and prosecuting intellectual property theft—and stopped there, Made in China 2025 would have likely played out in the usual way, with inefficient state-owned enterprises and government ministries taking the lead rather than innovative tech firms.
But this time is different. True, China has big technological hurdles to overcome, including weak basic research, ambiguous intellectual property protections, and excessive bureaucratic meddling. Yet the United States cannot assume that China’s leading firms will stay down forever: companies are rushing to fill the demand that U.S. firms can no longer supply. Chinese firms have to reinvent only certain wheels, with many simply working to recreate technologies that already exist. And no U.S. restriction can change the fact that China is an enormous market loaded with entrepreneurial talent and technical expertise.
The ripple effects of Chinese technological success will be felt beyond China. For one thing, they will shape American politics. A Beijing less dependent on U.S. products will feel less apprehensive about retaliating against American firms, giving it license to respond to perceived affronts. For another thing, technological dominance will shift the Chinese leadership’s calculations on Taiwan. Beijing knows that any armed invasion of the island would prompt U.S. sanctions that could inflict great pain on the Chinese economy. Greater self-reliance would deflate the threat of those sanctions and remove a deterrent against military action.
The economic consequences of Chinese technological dominance on the United States would be no less significant. For the most part, U.S. technology firms have stayed a few steps ahead of their Chinese competition. But they might fall back as their sales dip and as Beijing launches a more powerful drive to replace them. If China comes to dominate semiconductor production in the way it has dominated solar panels, then the United States will have lost its last crown jewel in manufacturing as the products become commoditized and profits disappear.
At this point, no effort on behalf of the U.S. government can deter China’s state from its end goal of industrial self-sufficiency. But Washington can still change the calculations of private Chinese tech companies. Many of these businesses would rather not have to reinvent their tools and find new suppliers and would likely stick with U.S. technologies if given the chance. The United States should therefore roll back its most punitive restrictions on the Chinese technology sector, lest it force some of the most innovative companies in the world to work within their domestic tech ecosystem. At stake is the future global center of technological innovation: Washington should know better than to fuel its greatest competitor.
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.
