Quotes of the Day:
“You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100/Methuselah's Children
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it."
– Mark Twain
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
– Friedrich Nietzsche
1. Escape from Kabul: Inside the volunteer effort by US troops to rescue their families from Afghanistan
2. 36 officials, including five admirals, face potential discipline over Bonhomme Richard fire
3. Chinese hypersonic missile test unlikely to trigger arms race, experts say
4. ‘Black Hawk Down’ pilot Durant enters Alabama Senate race
5. Top official says cyber operations are ‘not just about the systems’
6. Israel and South Korea to boost collaboration on loitering munitions
7. It’ll Take More than American Military Might to Shore Up Taiwan by John Bolton
8. Colin L. Powell Embodied the American Dream
9. The Army is getting great power competition all wrong
10. A General Who Failed in War Assesses Risk
11. Why is Trump undermining his administration's historic China policies?
12. Border Patrol arrests at highest level ever: report
13. FDD | What Iran Has Learned From Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle
14. China 'Not An Olympian Power': Presumptive China Ambassador 'Confident' In US
15. The New Cold War – America, China, and the Echoes of History
16. The FBI searched properties in Washington and New York linked to a Russian oligarch
17. What that one scene in 'Saving Private Ryan' teaches us about complaining in the military
18. Soldier who helped secure Kabul airport with Toyota technical traded for dip gets promoted
19. The accused spy knew stealth was crucial from his work on submarines. He surfaced anyway.
1. Escape from Kabul: Inside the volunteer effort by US troops to rescue their families from Afghanistan
Escape from Kabul: Inside the volunteer effort by US troops to rescue their families from Afghanistan
Washington (CNN)An hour after a suicide bomb exploded outside the Kabul airport on August 26, killing 13 US service members and scores of Afghan civilians, Fahim Masoud, a US military intelligence officer, made a frantic call to his sister.
She, along with Masoud's parents and two other siblings, were in a CIA-organized bus navigating the crushing crowds and constant gunfire around the airport, desperately trying to escape Afghanistan.
Masoud, a Second Lieutenant in the Illinois National Guard, had just seen classified information suggesting another attack might be imminent. From his home in Virginia, he told his sister to hand the phone to the bus driver.
"I can't tell you where I'm getting this information," he told the driver. "But you need to get out of there."
For weeks, Masoud, a native Afghan who became a US citizen in 2015, had been working furiously to get his family out of Afghanistan. He'd rented a safehouse for them to hide out in and cold-called senior US military officials asking for help. Now, even in a bus sent by the CIA to help ferry them into the Kabul airport, his family seemed no closer to safety.
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In the end, there was no second bomb. Masoud's family, after spending close to 12 hours trying to get through dangerous checkpoints, eventually made it safely through a secret CIA-run gate on the north side of the airport.
Less than 15 minutes later, they were aboard a C-17 bound for Qatar. They are now safely housed on a military base in Virginia, waiting to be vetted before they can come to live with Masoud and other family members already in the US.
The successful escape of Masoud's family is one of countless informal rescue missions put together during the chaotic final days of the US withdrawal by a hodgepodge of current and former US officials with experience in Afghanistan.
Two months after the final US military plane left Kabul, some of those same people are still working tirelessly to extract family members of US service personnel stuck in Afghanistan -- all with what sources say is little or no official help from the US government.
Interviews with active-duty service members, former military officers and current lawmakers working on this issue reveal a deep level of frustration over the lack of formal government assistance. Lawmakers say they are in the dark about the best official avenue to help constituents who call asking for help. And military personnel with family stuck in Afghanistan say they've been left to figure things out for themselves.
"Nobody cares about my family"
Many of these troops, like Masoud, began as interpreters for the Americans, then immigrated to the US and joined the military, leaving family members behind in Afghanistan. Two service members who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity said their association with the US military has put their family at risk, and that things have only gotten more dangerous since the US left at the end of August.
With no embassy on the ground in Afghanistan, the Taliban in control, and a sclerotic immigration process widely seen as dysfunctional and far too slow, US service members are left to work the same ad hoc, do-it-yourself networks used by Masoud to rescue their families still there.
"The military says, 'family first, no one will be left behind,'" said one active-duty service member who told CNN he had received no help from the US government in evacuating his family members. But "nobody cares about my family," he said. "And nobody cares about people that were left behind."
US soldiers stand on the tarmac as an US Air Force aircraft (L) prepares for take off from the airport in Kabul on August 30, 2021.
Since there is no official government database tracking them, it's impossible to say exactly how many family members of American service personnel are still in Afghanistan. Estimates range into the hundreds.
"The system is essentially overwhelmed," said Masoud.
"I went into a panic"
After the fall of Kabul in mid-August, dozens of volunteer groups made up of current and former officials from all parts of US government emerged to help at-risk Afghans and US citizens escape the country. During the evacuation, many worked informally with the US military and intelligence services using WhatsApp and pay-as-you-go cell credits to coordinate meetup points and help small groups of evacuees get into the airport.
Masoud initially tried official government channels to get his family out, putting together a packet for what is known as a "P-2" visa. "Nothing happened," he said. In late August, he started getting desperate. He cold called Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley's office and Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the National Guard Bureau -- a Hail Mary move for such a junior officer. And he reached out to a former CIA officer for help.
Soon, Masoud started to get traction.
Hokanson assigned his executive officer to help, and together with the former CIA officer, Masoud began staying up late into the night calling US contacts inside the Kabul airport to try to organize a bus that could bring his family in.
Masoud directed his family to go to a gas station near the airport, where they waited for twelve hours amid nonstop gunfire between the Taliban and CIA-trained paramilitary units.
On August 26, "we worked our magic," Masoud said. The CIA dispatched a bus with a hired local driver to ferry his family to the airport.
What followed was another terrifying ten or twelve hours as the bus failed at each official entry point, turned back by the US-trained militia manning the checkpoints and buffeted by crowds and gunfire and chaos. Masoud, getting real-time updates from his sister on the bus's location, stayed in touch with a contact inside the gates. On the bus was also a child who was a US citizen, Masoud said, offering his family a perverse kind of insurance policy: if their bus was detained by the Taliban, American forces would come after the child with a US passport, he believed.
Afghans gather on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban's military takeover of Afghanistan.
When Masoud saw news of an explosion near Abbey Gate, he feared the worst. "I thought they had definitely been killed," he said. "I went into a panic."
After Masoud re-established contact with his sister and delivered his urgent warning to the bus driver, his CIA contact inside the airport directed the driver to go to the secret gate, now known as Glory Gate. There, once again, they ran into a roadblock: The State Department official manning the gate would not immediately allow them to pass without US passports or a visa.
Masoud, along with the former CIA officer and Hokanson's executive officer, all negotiated with the State official for what Masoud guesses now was a nerve-wracking 20 minutes before the officer finally verified their identities and let them in.
Once he knew they were safe inside the airport, a wave of relief washed over Masoud. He called the former CIA officer he had been working with and they both broke down on the phone, he said.
Masoud's family were able to flee Afghanistan aboard a C-17 bound for Qatar on August 26.
"I had never felt like that before," Masoud said. "I keep telling people I went through this essentially Kafkaesque metamorphosis. I cannot be the same person that I was anymore given what I went through."
"What can we do to get our people out?"
Over time, some of the task forces running jerry-rigged rescue efforts like Masoud's have formalized into volunteer-run nonprofits. Now, they work to charter aircraft to leave out of Kabul and, using some of the same tactics they employed during the evacuation, help other would-be escapees navigate over land to Pakistan.
Days after his family got out of Kabul, Masoud received calls from the offices of two US senators, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Tim Scott of South Carolina. Both offices had the same question: "What can we do to get our people out?"
Masoud couldn't believe it.
"I was like, wow, here is a United States senator's office calling a guy like me, who's a nobody, asking me how they could get people out. That's how desperate they were," he said. "It speaks of the lack of coordination that existed between the State Department and other government agencies or a place like Congress."
The State Department has formed a team to coordinate across government agencies and with outside groups to facilitate the departure of American citizens, legal permanent residents of the US and Afghans.
But a State Department official insisted that the government is limited legally in what it can do to help family members of US military personnel, absent action from Congress, according to a State Department official. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the State Department can assist only dependents under the age of 21 — meaning that the parents or adult siblings of US service members would need to turn to the slow and often frustrating Special Immigrant Visa process to be admitted.
Getting anyone out of Afghanistan these days remains an uphill battle. Most evacuation flights scheduled to depart Afghanistan last week were canceled, according to a State Department email sent to US citizens in the country, CNN reported. A few flights from Kabul to Doha carrying some US citizens have resumed this week, but it is unclear if any military family members were on board.
"It absolutely leaves many people in a situation of having to rely on other governments and [non-governmental organizations] to do this," said Rep. Jason Crow, a Democrat of Colorado who has been outspoken about the need to evacuate at-risk Afghans from the country. "Going back to August, the NGO community was one of the primary avenues of evacuation for folks, and that remains the case."
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), joined by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, speaks at a news conference on the ongoing Afghanistan evacuations, at the US Capitol on August 25, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Asked last week about stranded family members of military personnel, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin "remains committed to making sure that we continue to do everything we can to get our Afghan allies who want to leave Afghanistan to help get them out."
Kirby added that there is "not a US military component or element to that effort."
One current enlisted soldier whose parents and siblings are still trapped in Afghanistan and in hiding from the Taliban said trying to navigate the Pentagon's strict bureaucracy has been a dead-end endeavor.
"There has not been any specific instructions by the DOD. There has not been any official effort that we know of to help our families," said the soldier, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. He said he was aware of at least 20 other service members in the same position.
"Every single one of us brought this to our immediate superiors -- and I want to make a note that our immediate superiors worked and fought extremely hard in order to evacuate our families to safety and it made it pretty high up within our chain of command -- but we just don't know what happened when it made it higher up," the enlisted soldier said.
Rep. Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, has been among the most vocal members of Congress in the effort to rescue service members' family from Afghanistan. McCaul has been pressing the State Department and the Defense Department for more information on what they are doing to help the families of American service members.
"They've been very callous about this whole thing and I haven't seen a whole lot of concern or empathy at all about what's happening," McCaul said. "They just want to wash their hands of this and just move on."
On Sept. 10 McCaul sent a letter to both departments asking for more information. He didn't receive a response from the State Department until Oct. 19. "The Department of State shares Congress' interest in ensuring the family members of US service members are able to safely depart Afghanistan," said the letter, obtained by CNN. "While US government evacuation flights out of Afghanistan have ended, our commitment to US citizens, Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs), and at-risk Afghans in Afghanistan remains steadfast."
McCaul has yet to receive a response from the Defense Department.
When McCaul gets calls from constituents looking for help rescuing family members still stuck in Afghanistan, he often refers them to these private groups — with some success. Last Thursday, his office received word that two groups of service member family members whom he had been involved in helping were successfully evacuated out of Afghanistan, one into the UAE and one that escaped across the border into Pakistan, according to his office.
Hunted by the Taliban
For the service members whose families are still trapped inside Afghanistan, the terror is ongoing.
Both the service members who spoke to CNN and McCaul expressed deep fears for the safety of the family members left behind. McCaul noted that the Taliban have access to extensive manifest lists and biometric data on individuals who tried to get out in the waning days of the evacuation and were unable to, information that they inherited when the US pulled out and the Afghan military collapsed.
"The Taliban has all of this information, and they're currently hunting them down to kill them," McCaul said.
Taliban fighters from the Fateh Zwak unit storm into the Kabul International Airport, wielding American supplied weapons, equipment and uniforms after the United States Military have completed their withdrawal, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021.
The Taliban is also able to identify family members of US service members through their social media profiles, the enlisted soldier said.
"We posted our pictures on social media because we didn't see this day coming," he said. "We don't regret posting on social media because we're proud of everything that we did, but it puts our families in a very tremendously dangerous situation."
The other service member, who also spoke on background for fear of reprisal, said Taliban militants searched his family's house, looking for evidence of their ties to the United States. "They couldn't find any proof because luckily they got rid of my pictures, they got rid of everything" that could prove they had a child in the US military, he said.
Although some of his family members were able to get with the help of private efforts from veterans and others in the US, this service member is still trying to get others out of the country. Those family members are hiding for fear of becoming targeted for their connection to the United States, the service member told CNN.
"They can't go to work. They can't get out most of the time. Their kids can't go to school because they don't want to be compromised and they don't want to die," the service member said.
In hiding, these families are unable to work and are running out of money, in some cases living in tents or on dirt floors, Masoud and the enlisted soldier said. With winter approaching, their situation is becoming increasingly perilous.
Crow said the families should receive priority for rescue, not only because they are at heightened risk because of their association with the US military but also because their peril represents "a readiness and national security issue."
"If we have our servicemen and women who are focused and worried about their family members, as anybody would be, then that makes it harder for them to focus and do their job," he said.
The enlisted soldier said that since the fall of Kabul, he has been plagued by old nightmares of his brother being slaughtered by the Taliban -- recurring dreams that he had thought were behind him.
"Over the past two months, my spouse has woken me up multiple times because I was either screaming or she saw that I was really struggling and I was in pain while I was sleeping," he said. "I recovered somewhat over the course of the past few years but just recently, I can tell you that my mental state has deteriorated."
CNN's Alex Marquardt and Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report.
2. 36 officials, including five admirals, face potential discipline over Bonhomme Richard fire
Excerpts:
While the Navy has charged a junior sailor with starting the fire last summer, a command investigation lays blame for the botched response at all levels of command.
The investigation found that while the crew was not prepared to fight a fire while the ship was undergoing lengthy maintenance in San Diego on July 12, 2020, shore commands were also not ready to coordinate such an effort, and higher echelons failed to make sure such ducks were in a row before a junior sailor allegedly started the fire on purpose in a cargo hold.
“No single failure resulted in the loss of the ship, and thus accountability is not focused on any one individual,” the report states. “In some instances, there are errors of omission while others are marked with acts of commission.”
At the top list is Capt. Gregory Thoroman, the commanding officer of Bonhomme Richard, who is criticized in the investigation for failing to take charge when the ship was burning, but also for failing to ensure his crew and systems were up to snuff for such a nightmare scenario.
36 officials, including five admirals, face potential discipline over Bonhomme Richard fire
The Navy’s command investigation into the fire that destroyed the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard last summer stresses that failures to fight the fire lay across several commands and leadership levels.
That shared blame can be found in the report’s “accountability” section, which recommends disciplinary action against 36 Navy officials, from the amphib’s enlisted ranks up to the former three-star head of Naval Surface Force Pacific.
All told, five admirals are in Big Navy’s crosshairs for failures that led to the flattop’s loss.
“The total loss of a capital asset demands close examination of all personnel to produce fully-informed recommendations,” the section states. “Our rigorous assessment must not be impacted by rank, paygrade, or level of a responsible person, entity, or organization.”
Any disciplinary decisions will be made by the head of U.S. Pacific Fleet, Adm. Samuel Paparo, though service officials said there is no timeline for when such decisions will be made.
RELATED
While the Navy has charged a junior sailor with starting the fire last summer, a command investigation lays blame for the botched response at all levels of command.
The investigation found that while the crew was not prepared to fight a fire while the ship was undergoing lengthy maintenance in San Diego on July 12, 2020, shore commands were also not ready to coordinate such an effort, and higher echelons failed to make sure such ducks were in a row before a junior sailor allegedly started the fire on purpose in a cargo hold.
“No single failure resulted in the loss of the ship, and thus accountability is not focused on any one individual,” the report states. “In some instances, there are errors of omission while others are marked with acts of commission.”
At the top list is Capt. Gregory Thoroman, the commanding officer of Bonhomme Richard, who is criticized in the investigation for failing to take charge when the ship was burning, but also for failing to ensure his crew and systems were up to snuff for such a nightmare scenario.
“The execution of his duties created an environment of poor training, maintenance and operational standards that directly led to the loss of the ship,” the report states.
Capt. Michael Ray, Bonhomme Richard’s executive officer, is also listed because he was responsible for managing crew readiness, shipboard drills and damage control exercises, among other tasks.
“His failure to execute these responsibilities directly led to the loss of the ship,” the report states.
Command Master Chief Jose M. Hernandez is accused of failing at his job because he “occupies a significant role in every aspect of the ship’s readiness and mission accomplishment,” the report states.
Sailors evacuate the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard on the morning of July 12, 2020, in this photo included in the command investigation. (Navy)
Fifteen other Bonhomme Richard members are also on the accountability list, including the chief engineer and damage control assistant, although their names are redacted.
Some are included because they oversaw watch bills or stowage in the cargo holds where the fire first broke out.
The command duty officer of the day is criticized in the report for his slowness in calling away the fire, but the report notes that it was his first time serving in that role and that “his efforts were hindered by a crew that was not properly trained or prepared to respond to the casualty.”
“Additionally, as the Assistant Damage Control Assistant … he raised concerns about the readiness of the crew and the material condition of the ship in the months prior to the fire, but Bonhomme Richard leadership did not take effective mitigating nor corrective actions,” the report states.
A senior enlisted chief from the engineering department is on the list because he left the ship without permission while his duty section was on and returned just prior to turnover.
The highest-ranking officer to face potential discipline is retired Vice Adm. Richard Brown, who commanded Naval Surface Force Pacific until his retirement in August.
“As Commander, Naval Surface Force Pacific Fleet, he is responsible for the satisfactory accomplishment of the mission and duties to the ships assigned under his command,” the investigation states. “His failure in the execution of his duties contributed to the loss of the ship.”
Rear Adm. Scott Brown, Pacific Fleet’s maintenance officer, is also listed as he was responsible for oversight of all the command’s maintenance and modernization efforts.
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Brown’s counterpart at U.S. Fleet Forces Command, Rear Adm. William Greene, is also listed, although he is responsible for maintenance and modernization for Fleet Forces’ East Coast ships.
The commander of Navy Region Southwest, Rear Adm. Bette Bolivar, is listed as she is in charge of facilities such as Naval Base San Diego, whose officials are criticized in the investigation for botching the shore response to the fire.
Navy Regional Maintenance Center Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage ran the organization overseeing the Bonhomme Richard’s lengthy and pricey upgrades at the time of the blaze.
The report also lists the head of the Navy’s on-base fire and emergency services, as well as Capt. David Hart, who commanded the Southwest Regional Maintenance Center.
“The execution of his duties enabled an environment of substandard execution of fire safety practices, lack of adherence to written standards and ineffective execution of the mission that directly led to the loss of the ship,” the report states.
Six of his subordinates are also listed, but their names are redacted.
Naval Base San Diego’s commanding officer at the time, Capt. Mark Nieswiadomy, is cited for letting a culture of poor training and ineffective fire response flourish on his installation.
Geoff is a senior staff reporter for Military Times, focusing on the Navy. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was most recently a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at geoffz@militarytimes.com.
3. Chinese hypersonic missile test unlikely to trigger arms race, experts say
Excerpts:
It’s natural to want to avoid vulnerability to attack, Panda said, and so the U.S., Russia and China all invest in offensive and defensive missile capability.
“Our existing missile defenses are, I think, poor enough that China should really have no concern about their ability to penetrate using ballistic missiles,” he said. “They don’t need this capability.”
But, if the U.S. successfully delivers a more robust homeland missile defense and early warning detection capability through programs like the Next-Generation Interceptor and other layered homeland defense technologies, “deterrence is a lot shakier if you are sitting in Moscow or Beijing,” Panda said.
“So I think they’re interested in these kinds of exotic systems,” he added.
China’s technological ability to insert a hypersonic glider into low-earth orbit shouldn’t come as a surprise, Panda said, but the strategic rationale for a hypersonic glider is less clear.
Chinese hypersonic missile test unlikely to trigger arms race, experts say
WASHINGTON — The August test of a Chinese space-based hypersonic missile is unlikely to trigger an arms race, but could influence the White House and Defense Department’s effort to shape new missile defense and nuclear posture strategies, experts say.
Top military officials gave clues in the late summer and early fall that they knew this event, which was first reported by the Financial Times, was happening.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, the U.S. Northern Command chief, in a speech at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, in August, briefly mentioned China had “just demonstrated” a “very fast” hypersonic vehicle. At the time, he said he couldn’t provide more detail, but noted the demonstration would challenge current threat warning systems.
Based on news reports, the Chinese appear to have combined a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS, with a hypersonic weapon.
“The combination of those two technologies creates two problems for our detection and tracking capabilities,” Patty-Jane Geller, a policy analyst for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at the Heritage Foundation, told Defense News.
The first is that the U.S. can detect most large rocket and missile launches, but might not be able to track a glide vehicle throughout its entire orbit or even see the Chinese orbital system is armed with something like a nuclear hypersonic weapon, she said.
The second problem is that once the weapon is “deorbited” or deployed from the system, then the U.S. has to deal with tracking a hypersonic weapon, “which is a problem that we’ve already been facing because hypersonic weapons fly at low altitudes at obviously very fast speeds and can maneuver to its target, making tracking very difficult,” Geller added.
Though she noted it was only a test, Geller said the implications could be significant. Even though China isn’t necessarily explicitly developing a doctrine on preemptive strike, the test suggests it’s thinking about the possibility given that it’s experimenting with a capability that can evade early warning radars.
Still, “this doesn’t fundamentally upend strategic stability or deterrence,” Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Defense News. “Americans don’t like it, but the way that the deterrence is most stable is if each side is vulnerable to the other.”
It’s natural to want to avoid vulnerability to attack, Panda said, and so the U.S., Russia and China all invest in offensive and defensive missile capability.
“Our existing missile defenses are, I think, poor enough that China should really have no concern about their ability to penetrate using ballistic missiles,” he said. “They don’t need this capability.”
But, if the U.S. successfully delivers a more robust homeland missile defense and early warning detection capability through programs like the Next-Generation Interceptor and other layered homeland defense technologies, “deterrence is a lot shakier if you are sitting in Moscow or Beijing,” Panda said.
“So I think they’re interested in these kinds of exotic systems,” he added.
China’s technological ability to insert a hypersonic glider into low-earth orbit shouldn’t come as a surprise, Panda said, but the strategic rationale for a hypersonic glider is less clear.
“I think it would be a mistake to treat this test as the introduction of a new basing mode for China’s nuclear weapons; we don’t know if this is actually going to go anywhere,” Panda said.
He noted the test wasn’t a perfect success; the missile reportedly missed its target by several dozen miles.
The test could also have been experimenting with subsystems that could be used across a different set of missiles, according to Panda.
While both China and the U.S. are developing enhanced deterrence, “the test does not mark the start of a new arms race,” Panda said. He denied the test represents a new “Sputnik moment,” referencing the Soviet satellite credited with spurring a space race.
Influencing programs
Still, Roman Schweizer, an analyst at the Cowen Group, said the assessment has one thing in common with Sputnik, noting “great power competitions typically feature cycles of tech surprise and counters.”
The test could drive budgets, focus and prioritize resources and influence strategy changes, he said.
The U.S. has already invested billions in homeland ballistic missile defense, but China and Russia’s new systems “pose completely different challenges and would be extremely hard to defend in even limited salvos,” Schweizer said. “Space-based sensors and defenses will be critical.”
Heritage’s Geller agreed that a space-based tracking layer, already sought by the Pentagon, is key to seeing more threats in space. Programs like the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, she said, will be important to defend against threats from China.
Panda predicted the latest test will continue to drive existing defense programs, including hypersonic tracking from space and even hypersonic offensive and defensive capabilities focused on a regional level as opposed to strategic.
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It is possible the recent test could trigger more discussion on orbital defense, Panda said. The U.S. doesn’t claim to have any programs explicitly considered anti-satellite systems, although the SM-3 Block I missile was demonstrated against a satellite in 2008 as part of Operation Burnt Frost, he added.
Advancing with nuclear capability modernization in the U.S. is also critical to deter China, Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Defense News.
“The best response is to press forward with the modernization of America’s nuclear triad, including the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, deploying it as soon as possible,” he said.
With satellite imagery indicating China is building up possible nuclear silos and the recent space-based hypersonic test, Geller said she hopes the U.S. will take China’s nuclear threat seriously.
“This will affirm and hopefully prove that we do need to modernize our nuclear forces, rather than delay or cancel any of those programs,” she said.
Panda said the soon-to-be-released strategies “are all going to have to contend with what are pretty significant changes to how China thinks about its nuclear forces.”
Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defense News. She has covered defense in the Washington area for 10 years. She was previously a reporter at Politico and Inside Defense. She won the National Press Club's best analytical reporting award in 2014 and was named the Defense Media Awards' best young defense journalist in 2018.
4. ‘Black Hawk Down’ pilot Durant enters Alabama Senate race
‘Black Hawk Down’ pilot Durant enters Alabama Senate race
armytimes.com · by Kim Chandler, The Associated Press · October 20, 2021
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Mike Durant, best known as the helicopter pilot shot down and held prisoner in the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident, is joining the U.S. Senate race in Alabama.
Durant, now the founder and president of an aerospace company in Huntsville, announced his campaign Tuesday. He joins a crowded GOP field vying for the Republican nomination to the seat being vacated by retiring U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby.
“Between ridiculous vaccine mandates, trillions in spending, and constant assaults on innocent life and the 2nd Amendment, it’s clear that we need to mobilize people from outside of politics to step forward and serve,” Durant said.
Like other Republicans in the race, Durant expressed his admiration for former President Donald Trump.
“President Trump showed us what’s possible when outsiders step forward and take on the insiders and the politicians. I’ve spent my life either in service to my nation or focused on growing a successful business in Alabama. I’m not going to sit idly by while Joe Biden and the career politicians wreck the country I love. I’m signing up for one more tour of duty. I’m running for U.S. Senate,” Durant said.
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Durant was piloting one of two Black Hawk helicopters shot down by Somali militiamen in 1993 in the capital of Mogadishu. Television news reports at the time showed dead Americans dragged through the streets of the capital. Other video showed Durant’s bruised face as he was held by captors.
The subsequent rescue attempt was chronicled in the book “Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War” and the 2001 movie “Black Hawk Down.” Durant, who was released after 11 days of captivity, announced his candidacy with a video titled “God Made a Soldier.”
Shelby, 87, announced this year that he wouldn’t seek reelection to the seat he has held since 1987, igniting a messy GOP primary for the Republican nomination.
U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, former Business Council of Alabama president Katie Boyd Britt, Trump’s ambassador to Slovenia, Lynda Blanchard, and business owner Jessica Taylor are also seeking the GOP nomination.
Trump has endorsed Brooks in the race. Shelby supports Britt, his former chief of staff.
The primary is May 24.
5. Top official says cyber operations are ‘not just about the systems’
Excerpts:
To get better at linking cyber and information operations, Eoyang said intelligence is key.
“One of the challenges for us as we think about the cognitive domain is making sure that we are understanding the strategic orientation, goals and objectives of adversaries,” she said. “From that perspective we want to make sure that cyber operations fit into a broader strategic frame that makes sense in the regional context and the IO operations do the same.”
“One of the challenges that you see, especially as you think about the cognitive domain, is that it requires a lot of intelligence collection,” Eoyang continued.
“Because you have to really understand the other side, what they’re thinking, what their goals are,” she said. “That is one of those areas where as we think about how to go forward, as we switch from 20 years of counterterrorism focus to the great power competition and China as the pacing threat, we need to understand better and more deeply the intelligence context.”
...
Since gaining new authorities allowing Cyber Command to be more assertive and conduct significantly more operations, defense officials have said they don’t need further authorities. Eoyang agreed.
“It’s a question of execution of authority and how we posture ourselves to sustain and continue to operate and to make full use of those authorities,” she said. “There are many things that go into effective operations, authorities is just one piece of it. There’s also manning, resourcing, doctrine, all of these other things and all of that as we get more experience in the operational space, we can continue to evolve.”
Top official says cyber operations are ‘not just about the systems’
WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense is at an “inflection point” when it comes to cyberspace and cyber operations and must consider the role of the people behind cybersecurity systems, according to a top official.
With adversaries increasingly using cyber operations to undermine national security, whether by stealing intellectual property or conducting influence campaigns to sow discord among the American public, the Defense Department has moved to a more offensive approach. This was enabled by new authorities from Congress and the executive branch and culminated in the 2018 DoD cyber strategy.
As the Pentagon weighs how best to respond to and to deter ongoing digital onslaughts, the department is thinking more broadly about cyberspace operations.
“There is another aspect to this that’s not just about the systems. It’s really about the human beings behind the systems,” Mieke Eoyang, deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, told reporters during a Defense Writers Group breakfast Oct. 20. “How do we think about using cyber in ways that affect the adversary’s calculus, what is the effect on the cognitive domain and what is it that we as humans need to think about for a defensive mindset?”
The department’s understanding of cyber is evolving with more operational experience, she said.
To get better at linking cyber and information operations, Eoyang said intelligence is key.
“One of the challenges for us as we think about the cognitive domain is making sure that we are understanding the strategic orientation, goals and objectives of adversaries,” she said. “From that perspective we want to make sure that cyber operations fit into a broader strategic frame that makes sense in the regional context and the IO operations do the same.”
“One of the challenges that you see, especially as you think about the cognitive domain, is that it requires a lot of intelligence collection,” Eoyang continued.
“Because you have to really understand the other side, what they’re thinking, what their goals are,” she said. “That is one of those areas where as we think about how to go forward, as we switch from 20 years of counterterrorism focus to the great power competition and China as the pacing threat, we need to understand better and more deeply the intelligence context.”
The department, under what it has discussed as integrated deterrence, is taking a hard look at the role of cyber across other domains. Eoyang said this evolution in the department’s thinking will be clear in forthcoming documents such as the cyber posture review and cyber strategies.
She also said traditional models of understanding warfare don’t necessarily apply to the cyber sphere.
Cyberspace is ephemeral, she said, and using terms like warfare and domains — and even discussing cyber tools as “weapons” — isn’t accurate because the space can change so rapidly.
“When we think about warfare in all the other domains in which the department operates, air, maritime, land and even space, there is a geography and a location to that that allows you to target and think about boundaries, locations, bases, which is not the same as in cyberspace,” she said. “In cyberspace, it is a very ephemeral domain in many ways as people update their systems, as they patch vulnerabilities, transit within the domain is not necessarily linear. Some of that mental model of the physical domain in which the department operates for most of its warfare is not the same as in cyber.”
Cyberspace requires a new way of thinking, she said, noting a certain port will always be in the same location, but an IP address can disappear and reappear while programming languages can change.
This is one of the reasons for “constant contact” in the cyber domain, a pillar of the department’s cyber strategy. U.S. Cyber Command has sought to achieve this through persistent engagement, which involves challenging adversary activities wherever they operate.
“You have to constantly be in contact to be able to understand what the environment is like,” Eoyang said.
Since gaining new authorities allowing Cyber Command to be more assertive and conduct significantly more operations, defense officials have said they don’t need further authorities. Eoyang agreed.
“It’s a question of execution of authority and how we posture ourselves to sustain and continue to operate and to make full use of those authorities,” she said. “There are many things that go into effective operations, authorities is just one piece of it. There’s also manning, resourcing, doctrine, all of these other things and all of that as we get more experience in the operational space, we can continue to evolve.”
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
6. Israel and South Korea to boost collaboration on loitering munitions
Israel and South Korea to boost collaboration on loitering munitions
SEOUL – Major aerospace companies from Israel and South Korea have agreed to expand their partnership on deadly drone technology.
Israel Aerospace Industries, or IAI, and Korea Aerospace Industries, or KAI, signed a memorandum of understanding on Oct. 20 on a loitering munitions program for maximizing the effectiveness of strike missions against enemy air defenses, according to an IAI statement.
The agreement was made during the Seoul International Aerospace and Defense Exhibition 2021 (ADEX 2021) running Oct. 19-23 at an airbase in Seongnam, just south of Seoul.
“IAI is proud to continue expanding our collaboration with KAI, and share our combat-proven capabilities in the field of loitering munitions,” Yehuda (Hudi) Lahav, executive vice president of marketing at IAI said. “IAI is happy to partner with one of Korean’s leading companies, and to continue growing our collaboration with he local defense market and Korean industry leaders.”
KAI’s Chang Heon-han, executive vice president and head of future business division, said: “With the goal of leading the future of unmanned aerial vehicles, we are dedicated to developing next-generation unmanned aerial vehicle technology, and we will develop solutions that meet various customer needs.”
Loitering munitions combine the capabilities of drones and missiles by searching, identifying, attacking, and destroying targets. The new class of weapons system can be used to target especially sensitive and moving targets.
In March the two companies signed an initial agreement to collaborate on loitering munitions with regards to the South Korean Army’s pursuit of manned-unmanned teaming, or MUM-T, systems.
Under the scheme, a KAI-built helicopter would hover at distance while an onboard unmanned aerial vehicle searches for a target and strikes it immediately when necessary.
“The expanded cooperation between IAI and KAI will offer the South Korean military with new technologies, and will establish concrete cooperation plans through joint feasibility studies between the two companies,” the company statement said, referring to the Israeli company’s HARPY NGW and HAROP loitering missile as combat-proven in many nations around the world.
7. It’ll Take More than American Military Might to Shore Up Taiwan by John Bolton
It’ll Take More than American Military Might to Shore Up Taiwan
Team Biden needs a fuller strategy that includes international recognition and new regional alliances.
It begins by affirming that Taiwan is a sovereign, self-governing country, not a disputed Chinese province. It meets international law’s criteria of statehood, such as defined territory, stable population and the performance of normal governmental functions such as viable currency and law enforcement. Washington, Tokyo and others would be entirely justified to extend diplomatic recognition, and its attendant legitimacy, to Taipei.
The 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, the foundational statement of current U.S.-China relations, is effectively dead. The communiqué says that “the United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China,” and “doesn’t challenge that position.” Beijing warped these words to mean “one China run by Beijing,” a formulation the U.S. never accepted.
The reality the U.S. acknowledged in 1972 no longer exists. Taiwan’s National Chengchi University has polled the island’s people about their identity for 30 years. Between 1992 and 2021, those identifying as Taiwanese rose to 63.3% from 17.6%; those identifying as Chinese fell to 2.7% from 25.5%; those identifying as both Taiwanese and Chinese fell to 31.4% from 46.4%. (Some 2.7% didn’t respond, down from 10.5%.) The “silent artillery of time,” as Abraham Lincoln called it, will likely continue these trends. Taiwan’s citizens have made up their own minds: There is no longer “one China” but “one China, one Taiwan,” as Beijing has feared for decades.
Broader recognition of Taiwan’s status as an independent state would be extremely helpful in expanding politico-military alliances to buttress the island’s defenses against China. Yet Washington’s support may be insufficient to deter Beijing from attempting to subjugate Taiwan (or near-offshore islands like Quemoy and Matsu). Formal or informal alliances that include Taipei would show Beijing that the costs of belligerence toward Taiwan are significantly higher than China may expect.
One step would be forming an East Asia Quad, consisting of Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and America, complementing the existing Japan-India-Australia-U.S. Quad. Japan should welcome this development. Its decision makers increasingly understand that a Chinese attack on Taiwan is an attack on Japan. Both are part of “the first island chain” separating the mainland from the broader Pacific, and their mutual security is inextricable.
It would be harder to persuade South Korea to join in such an effort due to historical animosities toward Japan and other factors, but its people are nonetheless aware of the consequences of Taiwan falling to China. The 2022 presidential election is an opportunity to debate whether to stand with its neighbors or risk eventually living under Greater China’s suzerainty. Vietnam, Singapore, Australia and Canada could join this Taiwan-centric grouping in due course.
Taipei’s residual South China Sea territorial claims could be bargaining chips for closer relations with other partners, especially littoral states like Vietnam, the Philippines and Singapore. At this southern end of the first island chain, Taiwan’s navy could make material contributions to freedom-of-navigation missions. Taiwan is also developing increasingly important cyberwarfare capabilities and artificial intelligence.
Similar cooperation with Pacific island states would also enhance Taiwan’s reputation as a good neighbor. In addition, American and Taiwanese information statecraft in the Indo-Pacific and globally should expose China’s hypocritical behavior on climate change and Covid and its repression of Uyghurs, Hong Kong and religious freedom. Failure to counter Beijing’s extensive influence operations hamstrings efforts to constrain China and protect Taiwan.
Few Americans appreciate how critical an economic partner Taiwan is, especially its semiconductor manufacturing industry and its extensive trade links throughout the Indo-Pacific, all of which could support enhanced politico-military ties. Economic issues are important for regional countries and Europeans, who may be less willing to engage in military action. These countries should be reminded of China’s threat, including Beijing’s weaponizing telecommunications companies like Huawei and ZTE and its brutality in taking Canadians hostage in retaliation for the legitimate arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou.
More military assets supporting Taiwan are critical but potentially futile without a fuller American strategic vision, with buy-in from citizens and other like-minded countries. That vision must be broad, persuasive and implemented without delay,to ensure the sustained popular support needed to prevail.
Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.
8. Colin L. Powell Embodied the American Dream
Excerpt:
Colin Powell was a man of great humility and integrity. He is a true inspiration and a model not only for military leaders and diplomats but all Americans. In his 1981 inaugural address, President Reagan said, “Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes—they just don’t know where to look.” Colin L. Powell was a hero of our time. He will be sorely missed.
Colin L. Powell Embodied the American Dream
He devoted his life to public service as a soldier and statesman.
WSJ · by Paula Dobriansky
The trajectory of his life—from humble beginnings as a Jamaican immigrant’s son growing up in the Bronx to the highest levels of government—is a true American dream. His extraordinary career was marked by high achievement and lasting accomplishment. A professional soldier for 35 years, he led troops in combat during the Vietnam War. Powell subsequently became the national security adviser to President Reagan, a four-star general, and commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command.
The Reagan Institute describes his advice as “indispensable to many of President Reagan’s foreign policy triumphs—most significantly, bringing a peaceful end to the Cold War.” This was a true diplomatic masterpiece, ushering in a new global-security architecture and decades of American strategic pre-eminence. Powell also played a pivotal role in aligning U.S. military strategy with the changed geopolitical environment.
In 1989 President George H.W. Bush selected Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At 52, he was the youngest officer to serve in that position. In 2001 President George W. Bush appointed him as the first African-American secretary of state. Powell was the second person (after George C. Marshall ) to serve in both positions, at the pinnacles of the armed forces and of American diplomacy.
Powell’s national-security achievements spanned four decades. He helped the U.S. military put the trauma of Vietnam behind it, and he articulated what became known as the Powell doctrine–the notion that U.S. leaders should employ military force only when vital American national-security interests are clearly at stake and with widespread public support. He oversaw Operation Just Cause, which removed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in 1989.
Powell is credited, along with the elder President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, with the adroit military and diplomatic management of the coalition that ousted Iraqi forces from Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. His leadership was recognized with a Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A second Medal of Freedom was awarded on his retirement.
As undersecretary of state for global affairs, I had the privilege of working with Secretary Powell. He was my friend and mentor. His direct, transparent and inclusive management style was effective in carrying out administration goals and boosting morale at the State Department. Preparing for President George W. Bush’s first foreign visit—to meet Mexico’s President Vicente Fox —Powell contacted the State Department’s Mexico desk officers and invited them to join him in briefing Mr. Bush. Employees appreciated his direct outreach, which ignored department hierarchy and engendered an esprit de corps in the building.
Colin Powell was a man of great humility and integrity. He is a true inspiration and a model not only for military leaders and diplomats but all Americans. In his 1981 inaugural address, President Reagan said, “Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes—they just don’t know where to look.” Colin L. Powell was a hero of our time. He will be sorely missed.
Ms. Dobriansky is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center and vice chairman of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center. She served as undersecretary of state for global affairs, 2001–09.
WSJ · by Paula Dobriansky
9. The Army is getting great power competition all wrong
Daniel Davis challenges some long standing assumptions.
Excerpts;
Gen. Charles Flynn said these training teams are, “doing everything from [teaching] warfighting skills to command-and-control … to advise, assist and to enable our allies and partners in the region.” The purpose of these missions, he said, is to “give us some persistent presence in these countries that previously, we were not able to do.” Yet that’s part of the problem — the U.S. doesn’t need an Army presence in multiple Asian countries.
Maintaining such a presence does not improve the security of the United States, it doesn’t deter would-be adversaries and, in the vast majority of cases, it produces virtually no improvement in the armed forces of the recipient countries. What such missions can do is increase the chance the U.S. gets dragged into someone else’s war. We should not continue to apply strategies and tactics that have failed America going all the way back to the Vietnam War.
The U.S. Army does not need to go abroad in search of missions to make itself appear relevant. What it very much needs to do is focus on its core warfighting skills and hone its ability to fight and win battles that might crop up involving major opponents — in the defense of our country, rather than risk our soldiers getting dragged into fighting wars for other countries.
The Army is getting great power competition all wrong
Last week, Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of the U.S. Army Pacific, said he wants to “signal” strength to China by putting “boots on the ground” in Asia, “the most consequential region, at the most consequential time against the most consequential adversary.”
But rather than adopting an antagonistic stance, the purpose of the U.S. Army is first to deter any would-be adversary from attacking the United States, and failing that, to defeat them. Seeking confrontation with a competitor does not contribute to our security.
Now that the war in Afghanistan is over and the once-massive Iraq deployments are down to less than 3,000, it is time to reassess with fresh eyes what role the U.S. Army should play in our national defense. Current global security trends, key geography and the global proliferation of advanced military technology makes clear the U.S. Army’s role must evolve.
With most of the counterinsurgency fights now behind us, the Department of Defense must answer this key question: Is the U.S. Army too big, too small or about the right size?
The answer depends on what one believes the service should do. According to the Army’s current strategy document, the great power competitors of “China and Russia have implemented modernization programs to offset our conventional superiority, and the challenges they present are increasingly trans-regional, multi-domain, and multi-functional.”
To meet these specific challenges, the Army says its mission is to “be ready to deploy, fight and win decisively against any adversary, anytime and anywhere, in a joint, combined, multi-domain, high-intensity conflict, while simultaneously deterring others.” That focus and mission make a lot of sense in the current environment. What doesn’t make sense, regrettably, is what the Army is actually doing in support of that mission.
The purpose of any nation’s army is to secure its borders, protect its citizens and defend its vital national interests. In an era of great power competition, the primary purpose of the U.S. Army is to ensure the country is secure from direct threats posed by Russia, China, or any future adversary that may arise. What its purpose should not be is in going abroad in search of missions that give it the appearance of relevancy while doing nothing to make our country safer.
Free from the burden of fighting a perpetual war in Afghanistan, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said earlier this month the U.S. now needs “to be focusing on how does the Army contribute to enhancing our deterrent posture in the Indo-[Pacific Command] theater, because I see the China challenge as a now problem, in addition to a future challenge for us.”
Wormuth claims relationship-building is key for the U.S. Army to deter China in the Indo-Pacific region. She believes mentoring and training friendly militaries is the best way to build such relationships, and notes the U.S. is currently engaged in 10 such operations in the region.
Gen. Charles Flynn said these training teams are, “doing everything from [teaching] warfighting skills to command-and-control … to advise, assist and to enable our allies and partners in the region.” The purpose of these missions, he said, is to “give us some persistent presence in these countries that previously, we were not able to do.” Yet that’s part of the problem — the U.S. doesn’t need an Army presence in multiple Asian countries.
Maintaining such a presence does not improve the security of the United States, it doesn’t deter would-be adversaries and, in the vast majority of cases, it produces virtually no improvement in the armed forces of the recipient countries. What such missions can do is increase the chance the U.S. gets dragged into someone else’s war. We should not continue to apply strategies and tactics that have failed America going all the way back to the Vietnam War.
The U.S. Army does not need to go abroad in search of missions to make itself appear relevant. What it very much needs to do is focus on its core warfighting skills and hone its ability to fight and win battles that might crop up involving major opponents — in the defense of our country, rather than risk our soldiers getting dragged into fighting wars for other countries.
Daniel L. Davis is a senior fellow for Defense Priorities and a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.”
10. A General Who Failed in War Assesses Risk
A scathing commentary from Bing West.
Excerpts:
In 2014, President Obama pulled the plug on the massive nation-building advocated by McChrystal. By 2017, with only a few thousand U.S. troops in country and scant casualties, the U.S. military had imposed a sustainable stalemate: The Taliban held the countryside, and the government held the cities. However, that sensible small-footprint approach came too late. Two incompatible presidents, Trump and Biden, were stuck in the past, fixated on the gross overreach of the McChrystal strategy.
Yet incredibly, McChrystal in this book remains a true believer in his approach. U.S. soldiers, he writes, “sought to build roads, electrify towns and cities, aid agriculture, and assist the government in responding to the people’s needs.” He remains blind to the huge risk he ran and all that he lost by trying to do too much.
A General Who Failed in War Assesses Risk
General Stanley McChrystal in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2009. (Omar Sobhani/Reuters)
To judge from Stanley McChrystal’s new book, he remains blind to his error of ordering a strategy that his soldiers in Afghanistan could not comprehend or execute.
Risk: A User’s Guide, by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico (Penguin, 368 pages, $30)
In 1950, General MacArthur took a huge strategic risk that changed the course of the Korean War, landing Marines in the rear of the North Korean soldiers and forcing them to retreat. In 2010, General McChrystal took a huge strategic risk, deploying 100,000 troops across Afghanistan in a nation-building effort that led to our humiliating defeat after 20 years. McChrystal, a multimillionaire adviser to CEOs, has recently written a book titled Risk: A User’s Guide. What does McChrystal advise about taking risk?
Risk is the possibility of something bad happening because of either human decision or an act of nature. As individuals, we decide on the degree of personal risk involved in personal decisions, such as our investments and career choices. Individuals also impose the degrees of risk upon others: A CEO risks his corporation, and a commander risks the lives of subordinates in battle. Risk is ubiquitous in human nature and life, and so the author of a book titled “Risk” should begin by defining what type of risk he is writing about.
McChrystal fails to do that explicitly. But implicitly his book seems to be a college text intended for those who aspire to be corporate CEOs or military commanders. He begins by asserting that “the greatest risk to us — is us.” He suggests that, to mitigate risk, the reader must consider ten factors, including communications, timing, technology, and adaptability. Each factor is explained in a separate chapter, illuminated by historical references, mixing the author’s personal military anecdotes with those of others.
Inter alia, he cites the War of 1812, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Desert One (the failed raid into Iran in 1980), 9/11, the Alamo, Google, COVID-19, the Korean War, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, workplace diversity, the Cuban missile crisis, Confederate statues, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Blockbuster, Hurricane Katrina, Formula I racing, Nokia, and the Revolutionary War. Like ornaments on a Christmas tree, these examples are distributed throughout the book, which concludes with a ten-step exercise for the reader/student. At the end of the book, he concludes that leadership is the key to mitigating risk.
General McChrystal was the prime leader in the Afghanistan nation-building effort that resulted in America’s catastrophic and total withdrawal. As the commander of more than 100,000 American and NATO troops, he insisted upon a fantastical strategy. American troops would, he wrote in his memoir, “protect the people . . . from insurgent and collateral [U.S.] violence” and “from corruption and predation of the Afghans’ own government.” The “people” consisted of 8 million Pashtun tribesmen scattered in 10,000 remote villages, all hurtling headlong into the ninth century. As an embedded journalist, I found that our grunts on patrol were bewildered by what they were supposed to be accomplishing. General McChrystal, however, was unfazed by that reality. “I was asking soldiers to believe in something their ground-level experience denied them,” he wrote.
In denying the reality encountered by his own troops, McChrystal grotesquely overreached. The plain fact was that it would take decades for the Afghan military and political structures, riddled with corruption and institutionally fragile, to replace American soldiers scattered across the vast battlefield.
In 2014, President Obama pulled the plug on the massive nation-building advocated by McChrystal. By 2017, with only a few thousand U.S. troops in country and scant casualties, the U.S. military had imposed a sustainable stalemate: The Taliban held the countryside, and the government held the cities. However, that sensible small-footprint approach came too late. Two incompatible presidents, Trump and Biden, were stuck in the past, fixated on the gross overreach of the McChrystal strategy.
Yet incredibly, McChrystal in this book remains a true believer in his approach. U.S. soldiers, he writes, “sought to build roads, electrify towns and cities, aid agriculture, and assist the government in responding to the people’s needs.” He remains blind to the huge risk he ran and all that he lost by trying to do too much.
How can this be? The only hint lies in an interview he gave a few weeks ago: “I don’t think we sat around a table, ever, and talked about where’s this going to be in 20 years.” A generation of generals fought for two decades, and neither they nor the civilian officials asked where the strategy would take them! As commanding general, McChrystal could order a strategy his soldiers could not comprehend or execute, and no senior officer asked where that was leading. It is discomfiting to realize that ignoring manifest risk prevailed throughout a 20-year war.
One message from McChrystal’s book Risk is that a general personally risked nothing by losing a war. Instead, he emerged as a lavishly paid consultant to corporations, coaching them on managing risk. To judge from the book, he still does not recognize that he placed an enormously bad risk–reward bet.
The second message is that the Pentagon lacks a chief risk officer, and common sense. The McChrystal strategy of winning hearts and minds was a vast overreach, with scant chance of succeeding. Yet no Pentagon official demanded to know the odds of failure or the stakes of failure (losing a war). How can such a haphazard process be trusted to fight the next war?
Something to Consider
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A former assistant secretary of defense and combat Marine, Bing West embedded with dozens of platoons in Afghanistan and wrote three books about the course of that mismanaged war. @BingWest
11. Why is Trump undermining his administration's historic China policies?
Excerpts:
Republican and Democratic leaders must not allow external enemies to turn Americans against each other. Irresponsible and corrosive rhetoric by political leaders on both sides fosters distrust of U.S. institutions and rends the fabric of American society.
Trump is the most visible participant and target in this dangerous turn of events. Victimized during his entire presidency by false narratives alleging foreign meddling in his campaign and administration, Trump delivered his own fusillade of accusations against political opponents. Both sides went beyond the normal hurly-burly of American politics and recklessly chose to erode the people’s faith in the institutions that sustain our system of governance. This is dangerous territory and opens the door to intervention by America’s true enemies, who watch gleefully as Americans tear themselves and their system apart.
As a former president with tens of millions of followers, Trump has a special obligation to speak and act responsibly and with due regard for how his words and actions are perceived not only by Americans but by friends and adversaries around the world. He seems oblivious, for example, to the shocking effect of his recent statement suggesting that until the results of the November election are somehow reversed and he is magically returned to office, Americans should not participate in future elections. That is an abandonment of democracy and weakens the nation against the China threat his administration worked so effectively to counter. Hopefully, he will reconsider his approach and his opponents will do the same.
Why is Trump undermining his administration's historic China policies?
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · October 19, 2021
Former President Trump and his national security team accomplished more in four years to awaken America and the world to the Chinese Communist threat than did eight previous administrations over four decades.
Now, Congress is considering legislation that effectively would declare a new Cold War with China. The Strategic Competition Act, co-authored by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and James Risch (R-Idaho) is “an unprecedented, bipartisan effort to mobilize all United States strategic, economic and diplomatic tools … to compete effectively with the People’s Republic of China.”
It enshrines in legislative language the comprehensive bill of particulars against Beijing leveled by the Trump administration in a series of speeches led by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In October 2018, Pence charged that “Beijing is employing a whole-of-government approach, using political, economic and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence … benefit its interests in the United States [and] change the international order in their favor.”
At the Nixon Library in July 2020, Pompeo said: “America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries, just as the [Chinese Communist Party] has never ignored them. … We must start by changing how our people and our partners perceive the Chinese Communist Party. We have to tell the truth. We can’t treat this incarnation of China as a normal country just like any other. … [T]rading with China is not like trading with a normal law-abiding nation.”
Other Trump administration officials issued specific charges against China’s multiple violations of international law and norms on human rights, economics and security. Trump himself focused on the trade issue, imposed tariffs on Chinese products, and said he wanted a “fair and reciprocal” outcome to negotiations with China. In January 2019, he announced that “China must open its market to U.S. financial services, manufacturing, agriculture and other sectors. … Without this, a deal would be unacceptable!”
The Phase 1 trade deal did not accomplish all those goals before the pandemic and the U.S. election intervened. The Biden administration retained the Trump tariffs, urging Beijing to honor its limited Phase 1 commitments and advance the more substantive trade objectives sought by Trump and his team.
The Menendez-Risch legislation almost sets up a Congress-Executive Branch contest on who can be tougher on China: “There has been no shortage of discussion in recent years about the need to reimagine our nation’s competitive posture towards China. There has, however, been a lack of results — until today.”
That minimizes the revolutionary Trump administration initiatives on trade, Taiwan, the South China Sea, intellectual property and human rights. The Biden team has mostly ratified and adopted them, while alternately weakening and strengthening some elements — the recent security and nuclear submarine collaboration with Australia and the United Kingdom was a strategic breakthrough (though Washington seriously mishandled relations with France).
Passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the legislation will help keep this administration on a responsible national security path despite the natural inclinations of Biden and his major appointees. The authors see it as “the first of what we hope will be a cascade of legislative activity for our nation to finally meet the China challenge across every dimension of power, political, diplomatic, economic, innovation, military and even cultural.”
But it will take far more than a flood of new laws to meet the hydra-headed Chinese threat to the entire international system. The bill accurately describes Beijing’s goal as more ambitious than merely matching America’s economic and military might: “The PRC is reshaping the current international order, which is built upon the rule of law and free and open ideals and principles, by conducting global information and influence operations.”
To cope with the breadth of China’s existential challenge, America and like-minded countries must mount the kind of moral and ideological fervor — or at least awareness — that saw the Free World through the Cold War. But Beijing aims to keep the international community constantly off-balance and diverted from mustering a unified defense by pressing its advantage directly within Western countries.
As the bill warns, “The PRC is promoting its governance model and attempting to weaken other models of governance by undermining democratic institutions … and using disinformation to disguise the nature of the actions.”
That battle is now very much in the balance, and clearly winnable with the right exertion of vision and will from U.S. leaders and common sense and patience from the American people. But it will mean the political left and right in this country — and elsewhere in the West — must resist the allure of easy, often hate-filled, appeals from their own extremists who, wittingly or unwittingly, serve the purposes of foreign powers.
Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang know they cannot defeat the United States, separately or together, but they believe America can defeat itself by perverting its perceived strengths into self-generated weakness — when diversity and dissent become irreparable division, freedom of speech becomes an avenue of visceral attack, political rivals become mortal enemies, and each side sees the other as threatening the very survival of the republic. Foreign disinformation campaigns foster precisely such domestic distortions.
Republican and Democratic leaders must not allow external enemies to turn Americans against each other. Irresponsible and corrosive rhetoric by political leaders on both sides fosters distrust of U.S. institutions and rends the fabric of American society.
Trump is the most visible participant and target in this dangerous turn of events. Victimized during his entire presidency by false narratives alleging foreign meddling in his campaign and administration, Trump delivered his own fusillade of accusations against political opponents. Both sides went beyond the normal hurly-burly of American politics and recklessly chose to erode the people’s faith in the institutions that sustain our system of governance. This is dangerous territory and opens the door to intervention by America’s true enemies, who watch gleefully as Americans tear themselves and their system apart.
As a former president with tens of millions of followers, Trump has a special obligation to speak and act responsibly and with due regard for how his words and actions are perceived not only by Americans but by friends and adversaries around the world. He seems oblivious, for example, to the shocking effect of his recent statement suggesting that until the results of the November election are somehow reversed and he is magically returned to office, Americans should not participate in future elections. That is an abandonment of democracy and weakens the nation against the China threat his administration worked so effectively to counter. Hopefully, he will reconsider his approach and his opponents will do the same.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · October 19, 2021
12. Border Patrol arrests at highest level ever: report
Border Patrol arrests at highest level ever: report
The Hill · by Sarakshi Rai · October 20, 2021
Arrests by the Border Patrol are at their highest levels ever, The Washington Post reported early Wednesday, citing unpublished U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
The data also reportedly show that authorities detained more than 1.7 million migrants along the border during the fiscal year that ended last month.
Migrants from outside Mexico and Central America, including Haitians, Venezuelans, Ecuadorans, Cubans, Brazilians and migrants from dozens of other nations that the CBP categorized as “other,” accounted for 367,000 arrests, according to the Post.
Approximately 309,000 migrants from Honduras were also detained, along with 279,000 from Guatemala and 96,000 from El Salvador.
The Biden administration has increasingly relied on Mexican authorities to stem the flow of migrants headed northward to the U.S. border. But Mexico remained the single largest source of illegal migration during the latest fiscal year, according to the Post, with the Border Patrol arresting more than 608,000 Mexican nationals.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said earlier this year that the Border Patrol was likely to see a 20-year high in border crossings.
In August, Mayorkas described the situation as "one of the toughest challenges" the country faces.
"It is complicated, changing and involves vulnerable people at a time of a global pandemic," he said at the time, the BBC reported.
The number of migrants detained at the US-Mexico border in July crossed 200,000 for the first time in 21 years, government data also showed.
The latest developments come as the Biden administration continues to face pressure over the surge in migrants.
An AP-NORC poll in October found that 35 percent of respondents approved of Biden’s handling of immigration, down from 43 percent in April, when it was already one of his administration's worst-polling issues.
Despite the soaring number of migrants detained at the border this spring, President Biden said in a press conference in April that the flood of migrants in recent months was consistent with patterns that occur “every single, solitary year” in the winter months.
Customs and Border Patrol did not immediately get back to The Hill's request for comment on the Post's report.
--Updated at 10:53 a.m.
The Hill · by Sarakshi Rai · October 20, 2021
13. FDD | What Iran Has Learned From Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle
Excerpts:
There is a humbling lesson in all of this. Defeats do not exist in a strategic and political vacuum. Iran intends to capitalize on, not ignore, the lessons of the past two decades of conflict against America. So too, do American adversaries in the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, if there is any lesson to learn from the Cold War amid the era of great power competition, it is that while the direct conflict between the U.S. and USSR remained relatively cold—despite a few close calls—there were multiple hot spots and conflict zones around the world involving actors affiliated with both parties that could have quickly spiraled out of control. And in many instances, inferences about capabilities, intentions, and resolve were made and reapplied to other theaters.
Lest we forget, Iran had a 572-mile-long front-row seat to America’s way of war in Afghanistan. It even crossed that line multiple times to participate in the war by way of material support to the Taliban and attempts to buy off the government in Kabul. While the rise of the Taliban in 2021 presents Iran with new threats and opportunities, its ascendancy drives home two critical talking points for Tehran. First, that partnering with Washington will end in ruin, and second, that America was defeated in Afghanistan and can be defeated elsewhere, too. It’s up to the Biden administration to work with allies and partners to help reverse this impression, not to cement it.
As Washington again weighs sticks but only wields carrots on Iran, it ought not to forget that two decades ago, Iran was forced to restructure its atomic quest in what we now know was initially a crash program for five nuclear weapons. By most interpretations, U.S. military success against neighboring Iraq in mere weeks—the same Iraq that had taken Iran eight years to fight to a stalemate in the 1980s—was an outsized reason for the reorientation of Iran’s nuclear program and its faux-civilian veneer. The voluntary erosion of the U.S. military footprint from the region coupled with a JCPOA-centric Iran policy may just be the other “own goal” that the Islamic Republic needs from the Biden administration.
FDD | What Iran Has Learned From Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle
Like other adversaries, it is more emboldened, willing to take more risks, and appear less restrained by the prospect of American military power.
Wang Xiyue
American Enterprise Institute
fdd.org · by Behnam Ben Taleblu Senior Fellow · October 20, 2021
There are bitter lessons aplenty about America’s 20-year and $2 trillion Afghan excursion. There are equally as many about the U.S.’s botched exit from that country this August, which has been dubbed “Biden’s debacle” by formerly favorable international outlets. Yet neither the horrendous scenes from the rapid Taliban takeover, the glee of U.S. adversaries, nor the domestic political debates that the withdrawal has deepened have managed to slow America’s eagerness to head for the exits in the Middle East. Despite the fiasco, the Biden administration’s desire for a regional drawdown continues apace.
When President Joe Biden proclaimed on August 31 that the Afghan withdrawal mission was an “extraordinary success,” he meant it. Not far behind was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who called the airlift out of Kabul “an extraordinary effort” in his September 14 testimony to Congress.
That’s precisely because getting out of the way, no matter the facts on the ground or the wherewithal of the enemy to continue fighting, is fast shaping up to be a feature, not a bug, of the Biden administration’s approach to conflict zones across the Middle East. Nowhere is this truer than with respect to Afghanistan’s western neighbor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, whom Washington is trying to tempt back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
In fact, there is a direct line between the administration’s quest to resurrect the JCPOA and its Afghanistan exit. Both are borne out of a misguided belief that the region no longer matters and that the best thing Washington can do is de-escalate. The JCPOA is specifically desired by the Biden team to claim that an urgent (read: nuclear) threat inherited from its predecessor has been headed off and less time can be spent managing the Iran threat. Under such a scenario, the U.S. might “pivot” more assets, interests, and attention away from the Middle East to other parts of the world.
The problem? Iran’s nuclear escalation has become more than just a leverage- seeking exercise to get back to the deal. Tehran’s progress in enrichment purity and advanced centrifuge deployment coupled with its cost-free harassment, obfuscation, and pressuring of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) provides the regime with “irreversible” technical gains—which cannot be undone by resurrecting an accord that was weak even in 2015 to meet the nonproliferation challenges of 2021. There are also genuine and open-ended questions about the regime’s interest in JCPOA re-entry in the short term.
In both the Afghanistan and Iran-nuclear scenarios, the administration has explicitly chosen the option that diminishes the U.S. military footprint—and by default the threat of military force—while shedding most of its previous policy aims in the hopes of addressing a long-standing national security issue. Put differently, Washington is signaling that it doesn’t mind giving up the fight, a move which will invite more, not less, headaches.
Already, on at least three separate occasions since the U.S. left Afghanistan, Iranian officials have pressed their case for premature sanctions relief, hoping to build on their sense of America’s political desire for an agreement and an aversion to escalation and conflict. Perhaps this is why Iranian officials are more braggadocious about revealing their outright desire to expel America from the Middle East.
While the Biden administration still hopes that U.S. adversaries and allies alike read the past two decades of war as a marker of American resolve, it’s more likely that despite the sacrifice of more than a generation of U.S. and coalition servicepersons, the gains of the past two decades will be blurred by more recent images from the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban reconsolidation. This is made plain in the commentary of Iranian officials who do not feel any inclination to concede.
On the balance sheet for adversaries, as expected, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has framed the U.S. departure from Afghanistan as “a lesson for all countries,” and noted that the Taliban is back in power despite America’s early goal of regime change in Kabul. Not far behind is Iran’s chief of staff of the armed forces, Maj. Gen. Mohammad-Ali Bagheri, who proclaimed that the manner of the U.S. withdrawal was proof “of America’s accelerating decline.” More bluntly, Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, said in his first U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) address that, “Today, America is not exiting Iraq and Afghanistan, but is expelled.” Further afield, Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Iran’s chief regional proxy, Lebanese Hezbollah, also weighed-in alleging the episode was a “moral downfall for America,” and that Washington, “evacuated the dogs who worked in the security forces, but not those who aided them.”
U.S. regional partners and allies appear justifiably spooked. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for instance, has reportedly been partaking in direct and bilateral talks with the Islamic Republic amid reports that the U.S. is removing missile defenses from the region. The talks, which have been acknowledged, likely aim to change how Riyadh is seen by the Biden administration, but also read as another sign of hedging on Iran, a move driven by fears that Washington may not come to the aid of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf in the event of a potential conflict with Iran.
Prior to this, the UAE had begun to hedge on Iran policy as early as 2019 after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) downed a U.S. drone over international waters and before it attacked oil installations in eastern Saudi Arabia using drones and land-attack cruise missiles. Then-President Donald Trump opted against kinetic action in both instances. During that time, the emirates instead elected to engage in a maritime security dialogue with the Islamic Republic and began to draw down its forces in Yemen where, along with Saudi Arabia, they had faced Iran’s newfound partner, the Houthi rebels.
Last but not least, while U.S. diplomats continue to talk with Israel about a Plan B on Iran, one person’s Plan B may not read like another’s. At the time of this writing, Washington has yet to make the necessary public shift toward aggressively countering Iran through steps that would represent a de minimis diplomatic interest in using pressure against Tehran.
No matter the political spin in Washington, America’s adversaries today, like Iran, are more emboldened, willing to take more risks, and appear less restrained by the prospect of American military power than before. This point was driven home by the commander of the IRGC, Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, who proclaimed that, “The America of today is not the America of the past 10, 20, or 30 years.”
There is a humbling lesson in all of this. Defeats do not exist in a strategic and political vacuum. Iran intends to capitalize on, not ignore, the lessons of the past two decades of conflict against America. So too, do American adversaries in the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, if there is any lesson to learn from the Cold War amid the era of great power competition, it is that while the direct conflict between the U.S. and USSR remained relatively cold—despite a few close calls—there were multiple hot spots and conflict zones around the world involving actors affiliated with both parties that could have quickly spiraled out of control. And in many instances, inferences about capabilities, intentions, and resolve were made and reapplied to other theaters.
Lest we forget, Iran had a 572-mile-long front-row seat to America’s way of war in Afghanistan. It even crossed that line multiple times to participate in the war by way of material support to the Taliban and attempts to buy off the government in Kabul. While the rise of the Taliban in 2021 presents Iran with new threats and opportunities, its ascendancy drives home two critical talking points for Tehran. First, that partnering with Washington will end in ruin, and second, that America was defeated in Afghanistan and can be defeated elsewhere, too. It’s up to the Biden administration to work with allies and partners to help reverse this impression, not to cement it.
As Washington again weighs sticks but only wields carrots on Iran, it ought not to forget that two decades ago, Iran was forced to restructure its atomic quest in what we now know was initially a crash program for five nuclear weapons. By most interpretations, U.S. military success against neighboring Iraq in mere weeks—the same Iraq that had taken Iran eight years to fight to a stalemate in the 1980s—was an outsized reason for the reorientation of Iran’s nuclear program and its faux-civilian veneer. The voluntary erosion of the U.S. military footprint from the region coupled with a JCPOA-centric Iran policy may just be the other “own goal” that the Islamic Republic needs from the Biden administration.
Wang Xiyue, a graduate student and former hostage in Iran, was most recently a Jeane Kirkpatrick fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). The views expressed are their own. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Behnam Ben Taleblu Senior Fellow · October 20, 2021
14. China 'Not An Olympian Power': Presumptive China Ambassador 'Confident' In US
Excerpts:
Burns then ticked off where China has confronted allies and partners, from India to Vietnam, the Philippines and others in the South China Sea, against Japan in the East China Sea and Australia.
China is “a country of extraordinary strength, but it also has substantial weaknesses and challenges — demographically, economically, politically,” Burns said. “We should have confidence in our strengths, American strengths; confidence in our business community, in our innovation community, in our universities; in our ability to attract the best students from around the world; confidence in our unmatched military, in our first rate Foreign Service, and civil service; confidence in our values that stand in brilliant opposition to China’s authoritarian regime. We will succeed.”
China 'Not An Olympian Power': Presumptive China Ambassador 'Confident' In US - Breaking Defense
Top Senate Foreign Relations Republican sounds alarm after "China's test [...] of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment system," saying it would "allow the PRC to completely circumvent US early warning capabilities and increase the vulnerability of the continental US to a nuclear attack."
Nicholas Burns, career US diplomat and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, testifies before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in 2017. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON: In a distinct break with past rhetoric about China, the presumptive ambassador told Congress today that China is “not an Olympian power” and faces “substantial challenges.”
Nicholas Burns, one of America’s most respected career diplomats, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today that while Beijing claims the East is rising and the West is in decline, he’s “confident we can prove them wrong.”
Senatorial rhetoric about the latest version of the Middle Kingdom at the nomination hearing was vigorous but prudent. There was much talk of “strategic competition,” especially in the realms of advanced technology, biology, trade and national security.
“There should be little doubt that the right basic framework for thinking about our relationship with China today is strategic competition,” Chairman Bob Menendez told Burns. “Not because that is necessarily what we want, but because of the choices Beijing is making.”
US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, (L) speaks to Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing during a meeting at the Diaoyutai government guest house on November 2006 in Beijing. (Photo by Elizabeth Dalziel-Pool/Getty Images)
On the crucial issue of nuclear weapons, Burns, clearly reflecting the Biden administration’s thinking, told senators that China is “blasting past” its decades-old commitment to a minimum nuclear force as “they’re rapidly” building up their nuclear arsenal.
Republicans on the committee kept pointing to a recent report in the Financial Times that China had tested a Fractional Orbital Bombardment system with a hypersonic glide vehicle. Earlier, Breaking Defense had reported startling comments by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall about the Chinese having such a capability.
Today, the test appeared to be confirmed by the committee’s ranking member, Jim Risch, who also criticized the Biden administration’s reaction to the test and to the large number of recent PLA flights into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone.
“We have also seen a lot of unclear messaging, including recent allusions to a Taiwan agreement. And despite China’s massive and unconstrained nuclear build-up, the administration is considering a sole purpose nuclear declaratory policy that would put US allies at immense risk and shake confidence in US deterrence commitments,” Risch said. “This issue is even more important given China’s test this past weekend of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment system carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle. Such a system would allow the PRC to completely circumvent US early warning capabilities and increase the vulnerability of the continental US to a nuclear attack.”
Risch was presumably referring to the FT report that was published over the weekend, but said the test actually took place in August. The ranking Republican told Burns he looks “forward to hearing how you plan to address all of these challenges and to help us win this competition.”
Elsewhere today President Joe Biden was asked if he was concerned about Chinese hypersonic missiles, to which the president said, “Yes.”
Back in the hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz, another GOP member of the committee, said helping Taiwan defend itself against “a serious Chinese military incursion” would be “one of the most important steps we can and should take” on Capitol Hill. Cruz plans to introduce what he called the Taiwan Arms Act, designed to raise Taiwan’s status for arms sales “to that of our closest allies and partners.”
One of the most challenging diplomatic and public challenges the US will face is China’s increasing use of prescriptive challenges to US allies. They first rolled them out most publicly in Australia, where the Chinese used Australian TV News Channel 9 in November last year to leak what have become known as the 14 Grievances.
“At the top of the list are decisions to ban Huawei from the rollout of the 5G network, foreign interference laws, and calling for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19,” the channel reported at the time. “One official said to 9News, ‘Why should China care about Australia?'”
The American equivalent are the Two Lists, which Risch mentioned. “China has said it won’t work with us on anything until the United States gives in to the demands of its Two Lists. You and I discussed those lists yesterday, and some here hope to be able to see those lists,” Risch told Burns.
They were first presented to Beijing presented to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in July. They include demands that the U.S. must not criticize China’s domestic system or its policies toward Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also requires that all US sanctions and export restrictions be lifted.
Burns did not sound as if US policy would be to meekly face the rising hegemony and agree to the demands.
“Finally, and crucially, we will challenge Beijing, where we must, including when it takes actions that run counter to American values, and American interests and actions that might threaten the security of the United States, or allies and partners or undermine the rules-based international order,” Burns told the committee. “The PRC seeks to become the most powerful country economically, politically, and militarily in the Indo-Pacific. We have to stand with our allies and our friends to uphold a free and open Indo-Pacific, including by maintaining America’s commercial and military superiority in 21st century technologies.
“We also have to hold the PRC accountable for failing to play by the rules on trade and investment, including its theft of intellectual property, use of state subsidies, dumping of goods and unfair labor practice practices. These hurt American workers, and they hurt American businesses,” he said.
Burns then ticked off where China has confronted allies and partners, from India to Vietnam, the Philippines and others in the South China Sea, against Japan in the East China Sea and Australia.
China is “a country of extraordinary strength, but it also has substantial weaknesses and challenges — demographically, economically, politically,” Burns said. “We should have confidence in our strengths, American strengths; confidence in our business community, in our innovation community, in our universities; in our ability to attract the best students from around the world; confidence in our unmatched military, in our first rate Foreign Service, and civil service; confidence in our values that stand in brilliant opposition to China’s authoritarian regime. We will succeed.”
15. The New Cold War – America, China, and the Echoes of History
Excerpts:
There are thus, in the United States, no exclusively foreign affairs. Because Americans proclaim their ideals so explicitly, they illustrate departures from them all the more vividly. Domestic failures such as economic inequality, racial segregation, sexual discrimination, environmental degradation, and top-level extraconstitutional excesses all go on display for the world to see. As Kennan pointed out in the most quoted article ever published in these pages, “Exhibitions of indecision, disunity and internal disintegration within this country” can “have an exhilarating effect” on external enemies. To defend its external interests, then, “the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”
Easily said, not easily done, and therein lies the ultimate test for the United States in its contest with China: the patient management of internal threats to our democracy, as well as tolerance of the moral and geopolitical contradictions through which global diversity can most feasibly be defended. The study of history is the best compass we have in navigating this future—even if it turns out to be not what we’d expected and not in most respects what we’ve experienced before.
The New Cold War
America, China, and the Echoes of History
Is the world entering a new cold war? Our answer is yes and no. Yes if we mean a protracted international rivalry, for cold wars in this sense are as old as history itself. Some became hot, some didn’t: no law guarantees either outcome. No if we mean the Cold War, which we capitalize because it originated and popularized the term. That struggle took place at a particular time (from 1945–47 to 1989–91), among particular adversaries (the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies), and over particular issues (post–World War II power balances, ideological clashes, arms races). None of those issues looms as large now, and where parallels do exist—growing bipolarity, intensifying polemics, sharpening distinctions between autocracies and democracies—the context is quite different.
It’s no longer debatable that the United States and China, tacit allies during the last half of the last Cold War, are entering their own new cold war: Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared it, and a rare bipartisan consensus in the United States has accepted the challenge. What, then, might previous contests—the one and only Cold War and the many earlier cold wars—suggest about this one?
The future is, of course, less knowable than the past, but it’s not in all respects unknowable. Time will continue to pass, the law of gravity will still apply, and none of us will outlive our physiological term limits. Are similarly reliable knowns shaping the emerging cold war? If so, what unknowns lurk within them? Thucydides had such predictabilities and surprises in mind when he cautioned, 24 centuries ago, that the future would resemble the past but not in all respects reflect it—even as he also argued that the greatest single war of his time revealed timeless truths about all wars to come.
Our purpose here, then, is to show how the greatest unfought war of our time—the Soviet-American Cold War—as well as other prior struggles, might expand experience and enhance resilience in a Sino-American rivalry whose future, hot or cold, remains unclear. That history provides a framework within which to survive uncertainty, and possibly even thrive within it, whatever the rest of the twenty-first century throws our way.
The benefits of boundaries
Our first known is geography, which continental drift will in time alter, but not in our time. China will remain chiefly a land power, beset by an ancient dilemma. If, in search of strategic depth, it tries to expand its perimeters, it is likely to overstretch its capabilities and provoke resistance from anxious neighbors. If, to regain solvency, it contracts its perimeters, it risks inviting in enemies. Even behind great walls, uneasy lie the heads of those whose boundaries remain unfixed.
The United States, in contrast, benefits from boundaries that geography has determined. That’s why the United Kingdom, after 1815, chose not to contest its offspring’s primacy in North America: sustaining armies across 3,000 miles of ocean would have been too costly even for the world’s greatest naval power. Geography gave the Americans hybrid hegemony: control of a continent and unimpeded access to two vast oceans, which they quickly connected with a transcontinental railroad. That allowed them to develop the military-industrial means with which to rescue Europeans in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War from the attempted continental consolidations they confronted.
Why, though, from so safe a perch, did the Americans undertake such daunting commitments? Perhaps they looked in the mirror and feared what they saw: their own example of a country dominating a continent and its oceanic approaches. The trigger warning was Russia’s completion of its trans-Siberian railroad in 1904, a slapdash project soon overtaken by war and revolution—but not before eliciting the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder’s portentous warning that “heartland” control of Eurasian “rimlands” could empower new and globally ambitious forms of hybrid hegemony. President Woodrow Wilson had that prospect in mind when he declared war on imperial Germany in 1917, and President Franklin Roosevelt took the argument one step further in 1940–41, insisting—correctly, historians have now confirmed—that Adolf Hitler’s ultimate target was the United States itself. So when the American diplomat George Kennan, in 1947, called for “containing” an emboldened World War II ally, the Soviet Union, he had long legacies on which to draw.
Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) evokes similar concerns. The “belt” is to be a network of rail and road corridors across Eurasia. The “road” will be sea routes in the Indo-Pacific and, if global warming permits, also in the Arctic, sustained by bases and ports in states made friendly by the BRI's “benefits.” Nothing Germans or Russians ever attempted combined such ambition with such specificity: China seeks hybrid hegemony on an unprecedented scale. Which brings us to our first unknown: What might that imply for Eurasia and the world beyond?
Xi’s world order
There’s a remarkable record, over the past three centuries, of offshore balancers thwarting aspirants to onshore domination: first Great Britain against France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then an Anglo-American coalition against Germany twice during the first half of the twentieth century, followed by a U.S.-led coalition against the Soviet Union in the second half. It’s too easy to claim that maritime states project power without generating resistance, for if that were the case, colonialism would still thrive. But the relationship between geography and governance is clear enough to be our second known.
Continents—North America excepted—tend to nurture authoritarians: where geography fails to fix boundaries, harsh hands claim the right and duty to do so, whether as protection from external dangers or to preserve internal order. Liberty, in these situations, is decreed from the top down, not evolved from the bottom up. But that holds such regimes responsible for what happens. They can’t, as democracies regularly do, spread the blame. Autocracies that fall short—such as the Soviet Union—risk hollowing themselves out from within.
China’s post–Cold War leaders, having compulsively studied the Soviet example, sought to avoid repeating it by transforming Marxism into consumer capitalism without at the same time allowing democracy. They thereby flipped what they saw as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s greatest error: permitting democracy without ensuring prosperity. This latest “rectification of names”—the ancient Chinese procedure of conforming names to shifting realities—seemed until recently to have succeeded. The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s post-Mao pro-market reforms solidified support for the regime and made China a model for much of the rest of the world. Xi, on taking power, was widely expected to continue along that path.
The study of history is the best compass we have in navigating the future.
But he hasn’t. Instead, Xi is cutting off access to the outside world, defying international legal norms, and encouraging “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, none of which seems calculated to win or retain allies. At home, he is enforcing orthodoxy, whitewashing history, and oppressing minorities in ways defunct Russian and Chinese emperors might have applauded. Most significant, he has sought to secure these reversals by abolishing his own term limits.
Hence our second unknown: Why is Xi undoing the reforms, while abandoning the diplomatic subtlety, that allowed China’s rise in the first place? Perhaps he fears the risks of his own retirement, even though these mount with each rival he imprisons or purges. Perhaps he has realized that innovation requires but may also inspire spontaneity within his country. Perhaps he worries that increasingly hostile international rivals won’t allow him unlimited time to achieve his aims. Perhaps he sees the prevailing concept of world order itself as at odds with a mandate from Heaven, Marx, or Mao.
Or it could be that Xi envisions a world order with authoritarianism at its core and with China at its center. Technology, he may expect, will make human consciousness as transparent as satellites made the earth’s surface during the Cold War. China, he may assume, will never alienate its foreign friends. Expectations within China, he may suppose, will never find reasons not to rise. And Xi, as he ages, will gain in the wisdom, energy, and attentiveness to detail that only he, as supreme leader, can trust himself to provide.
But if Xi really believes all of this, then he’s already losing sight of the gaps between promises and performance that have long been Catch-22s for authoritarian regimes. For if, like Gorbachev’s predecessors did, you ignore such fissures, they’ll only worsen. But if, like Gorbachev himself, you acknowledge them, you’ll undermine the claim to infallibility on which legitimacy in an autocracy must rest. That is why graceful exits by authoritarians have been so rare.
the roots of resilience
Democracy in America has its own gaps between promises and performance, so much so that it seems at times to suffer from Brezhnev-like paralysis. The United States differs from China, though, in that distrust of authority is constitutionally mandated. The separation of powers secures a center of gravity to which the nation can return after whatever bursts of activity crises may have demanded. The result is what evolutionary biologists call “punctuated equilibrium”: a resilience rooted in rapid recovery from unforeseen circumstances. China has it the other way around. Respect for authority permeates its culture, but stability is punctuated by protracted upheavals when authority fails. Recovery, in the absence of gravity, can require decades. Autocracies often win sprints, but smart investors put their marathon money on democracies. Our third known, then, is sharply different roots of resilience.
The pattern emerges clearly from the two costliest civil wars of the nineteenth century. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 took some 20 million Chinese lives, about five percent of the population. The American Civil War of 1861–65 killed 750,000 combatants, 2.5 percent of a much less crowded country. And yet by the testimony of its current leaders, China after the Taiping Rebellion underwent decades of turmoil from which it emerged only with Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949. The United States, by that same account, recovered quickly enough to join the European predators victimizing China at the end of the nineteenth century and has continued doing so ever since. Leave aside issues of accuracy in this view of history. Our point is that Xi’s growing reliance on this narrative and the nationalism it stokes implies an inflammability in Chinese culture that is currently useful to the regime—but that might not be easily extinguished.
Autocracies often win sprints, but smart investors put their marathon money on democracies.
Hence our third unknown: Can Xi turn internal outrage on and off, as Mao did repeatedly during his years in power? Or is Xi locking himself into the same dependence on external hostility without which Joseph Stalin, as Kennan put it in 1946, did not know how to rule? Because nothing could reassure such a regime, Kennan insisted, only cumulative frustrations would convince Stalin or, more likely, his successors that it was in their best interests to alter their system’s worst aspects. That strategy depended, however, on neither side setting deadlines: Kennan carefully pointed out that it would never have worked with Hitler, who had a fixed timetable, dictated by his own mortality, for achieving his aims.
Mao, craftily, gave his regime 100 years to recover Taiwan. Xi has ruled out passing that problem from generation to generation, although he has not yet set a date for resolving it. Nonetheless, his increasingly aggressive rhetoric adds to the risk that the Taiwan issue could cause a Sino-American cold war to become hot, for the United States has deliberately left its own Taiwan policy unclear. All of which eerily evokes how Europe went to war in 1914: an ambiguity of great-power commitments combined with the absence of an escalation off switch.
ANOTHER LONG PEACE?
Except that we have, in the Cold War, an intervening known to draw on: how that conflict transformed itself into a “long peace.” The first half of the twentieth century offered no support for the idea that great-power rivalries could be resolved peacefully. “A future war with Soviet Russia,” the American diplomat Joseph Grew predicted in 1945, “is as certain as anything in the world can be certain.” What allowed the Cold War superpowers to escape that prospect, and how relevant are those circumstances today?
One answer is that history itself during those years became prophecy. Given what most leaders had experienced in a second world war, few anywhere were eager to risk a third. It helped also that those in Washington and Moscow, if for different reasons, saw time as an ally: the Americans because the strategy of containment relied on time to thwart Soviet ambitions, Stalin because he expected time to produce fratricidal capitalist wars that would ensure proletarian revolutionary triumphs. Once Stalin’s successors realized the extent of his miscalculations, it was too late to reverse their effects. The Soviet Union spent the rest of the Cold War failing to catch up.
But what if determinations to avoid the next war fade with the memories of the last one? That’s how some historians have explained World War I: a century had passed without a European great war. Does it matter that three-quarters of a century now separate American and Chinese leaders from the great wars of their predecessors? Americans have had some combat experience in the “limited” and “low-intensity” conflicts in which they have been involved—with decidedly mixed results—but the Chinese, except for their brief invasion of Vietnam in 1979, haven’t fought any significant wars for more than half a century. That may be why Xi, with his “heads bashed bloody” rhetoric, seems to celebrate bellicosity: he may not know what its costs can be.
Taiwanese military exercises near Pingtung, Taiwan, April 2010
Nicky Loh / Reuters
A second way in which historians have explained the “long peace” is that nuclear weapons suppressed optimism about how wars might end. There’s no way to know for sure what deterrence in the Cold War deterred: that’s a history that didn’t happen. But this in itself suggests a balanced lack of resolve, for whatever Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy may have said publicly, neither wanted to die for Berlin. Instead, they accepted a walled city inside a partitioned country in the middle of a divided continent. No grand design could have produced such an oddity, and yet it held up until the Cold War evolved its own peaceful, if equally unexpected, end. None of this could have happened without nuclear capabilities, for only they could put lives on the line simultaneously in Washington and Moscow.
So what about Washington and Beijing? Even with recent enhancements, the Chinese deploy less than ten percent of the number of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia retain, and that number is only 15 percent of what the two superpowers had at the height of the Cold War. Does this matter? We doubt it, given what Khrushchev achieved in 1962: despite a nine-to-one disadvantage in nuclear weapons, he deterred the post–Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that Kennedy had been planning. The United States has lived ever since with its own adjacent anomaly: a communist island in the middle of its self-proclaimed Caribbean sea of influence.
It’s even less plausible today that the United States would use nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan, for that island is more important to Beijing than Cuba or Berlin ever was to Moscow. Yet that implausibility could lead Xi to believe that he can invade Taiwan without risking a U.S. nuclear response. China’s growing cyber- and antisatellite capabilities may also encourage him, for they bring back possibilities of surprise attacks that the Cold War’s reconnaissance revolution seemed, for decades, to have diminished.
What would Xi do with Taiwan if he captured it?
But then what? What would Xi do with Taiwan if he captured it? The island is not Hong Kong, an easily controlled city. Nor is it Crimea, with a largely acquiescent population. Nor are other big islands in the region—Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand—teetering dominoes. Nor would the United States, with its unmatched power-projection capabilities, be likely to “sit idly by,” as the Chinese might put it: “ambiguity” means keeping options open, not ruling out any response at all.
One such response might be to exploit the overstretch that comes from China’s forcefully expanding its perimeters, the self-created problem that once plagued Moscow. Suppressing the “Prague Spring” was simple enough for the Soviet Union in 1968, until military morale plummeted when the Czechs made it clear to their occupiers that they didn’t feel “liberated.” The Brezhnev Doctrine—the commitment to act similarly wherever else “socialism” might be at risk—alarmed more than it reassured the leaders of other such states, notably Mao, who secretly began planning his 1971 “opening” to Washington. By the time the Soviet Union invoked the doctrine again, in Afghanistan in 1979, it had few allies left anywhere and none on whose reliability it could count.
Xi’s threats to Taiwan could have a similar effect in states surrounding China, which may in turn look for their own “openings” to Washington. Extravagant Chinese claims in the South China Sea have already increased anxieties in that region: witness Australia’s unexpected alignment with the Americans and the British on nuclear submarines, as well as India’s expanded cooperation with Indo-Pacific allies. Central Asians may not indefinitely ignore repressions of Tibetans and Uyghurs. Debt traps, environmental degradation, and onerous repayment terms are souring recipients on the BRI’s benefits. And Russia, the original source of early-twentieth-century concerns about the “heartland,” could now find itself surrounded by Chinese “rimlands” in Asia, eastern and southeastern Europe, and even the Arctic.
All of which raises the possibility that American unipolarity may end not with a precarious Sino-American bipolarity but with a multipolarity that restrains Beijing by making assertiveness self-defeating. Metternich and Bismarck would have approved. So would a crafty American Cold Warrior who, following their example, hoped to deploy a similar strategy. “I think it will be a safer world and a better world,” President Richard Nixon told Time magazine in 1972, “if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other.”
varieties of surprise
Our final known is the inescapability of surprises. International systems are anarchic, theorists tell us, in that no component within them is fully in control. Strategy may reduce uncertainty but will never eliminate it: humans are fallible, and artificial intelligences will surely be also. There are, though, patterns of competition across time and space. It may be possible to derive from these—especially from the Soviet-American Cold War—categories of surprises likely to occur in the Sino-American cold war.
Existential surprises are shifts in the arenas within which great powers compete, for which neither is responsible but that endanger them both. U.S. President Ronald Reagan had this in mind when he surprised Gorbachev at their first meeting, in 1985, with the claim that a Martian invasion would force the United States and the Soviet Union to settle their differences overnight: Weren’t nuclear weapons at least as dangerous? Martians haven’t yet arrived, but we do face two new existential threats: the accelerating rate of climate change and the almost overnight outbreak, in 2020, of a global pandemic.
Neither is unprecedented. Climates have always fluctuated, which is why it used to be possible to walk from Siberia to Alaska. Thucydides described the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC. What is new is the extent to which globalization has accelerated these phenomena, raising the question of whether geopolitical rivals can collaboratively address the deep histories that are increasingly altering their own.
International systems are anarchic and no component within them is fully in control.
The Soviet-American Cold War showed that cooperation to avoid catastrophe need not be explicit: no treaty specified that nuclear weapons, after 1945, would not again be used in war. Instead, existential dangers produced tacit cooperation where negotiated formalities almost surely would have failed. Climate change may present similar opportunities in the Sino-American cold war, even if COVID-19 has so far spurred only Chinese abrasiveness. The point should be to keep landing sites for Martian equivalents open—not to welcome existential problems but to explore whether collaborative outcomes can result from them.
Intentional surprises originate in efforts by single competitors to startle, confuse, or dismay their adversaries. Surprise attacks, as on Pearl Harbor, fit this category, and intelligence failures can never be ruled out. The Cold War’s greatest surprises, however, arose from reversals of polarity, of which Mao was a master. When he leaned east, in 1949–50, he blindsided the Truman administration and opened the way for the Korean War and a communist offensive in Asia. When he leaned west, in 1970–71, he made the United States an ally while rendering the Soviet Union vulnerable on two fronts, a disadvantage from which it never recovered.
That’s why an American “opening” to Moscow might someday turn it against Beijing. The original Sino-Soviet split took two decades to develop, with the Eisenhower administration seeking to speed the process by driving Mao into a mutually repulsive relationship with Khrushchev. Xi’s BRI may be accomplishing this on its own with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long complained about U.S. “containment” of Russia. Chinese “containment,” from the Kremlin’s perspective, may ultimately become the greater danger.
A wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, May 2015
Sputnik Photo Agency / Reuters
One other form of intentional surprise comes from supposed subordinates who turn out not to be. Neither Washington nor Moscow wanted the offshore island crises of 1954–55 and 1958: Chiang Kai-shek, in Taipei, and Mao, in Beijing, made them happen. The communist leader Walter Ulbricht’s warnings of an imminent East German collapse forced Khrushchev to provoke the Berlin crises of 1958–59 and 1961. Smaller powers pursuing their own agendas derailed Soviet-American détente in the 1970s: Egypt by attacking Israel in 1973; Cuba by intervening in Africa in 1975–77; and Hafizullah Amin in Afghanistan, whose reported contacts with U.S. officials triggered a self-defeating Soviet invasion in 1979. None of this, though, was unprecedented: Thucydides showed Corinth and Corcyra doing something similar to the Spartans and the Athenians 24 centuries earlier.
The potential for tails wagging dogs in the Sino-American cold war is already evident: rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait have resulted as much from changes in Taiwanese politics in recent years as from deliberate decisions in Washington or Beijing. And while China is trying, through the BRI, to create a system that maximizes its power, it may end up building, through its relationships with insecure and unstable regimes, just the sort of inverse dependency that vexed the Cold War superpowers. That can be a formula for volatility: history is full of instances in which local actors embroiled larger powers.
Finally, there are systemic surprises. The Cold War ended in a way no one at the time had expected: with the sudden collapse of a superpower and its accompanying ideology. Two visionaries who had foreseen such a possibility, however, were that doctrine’s mid-nineteenth-century founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Capitalism, they were sure, would eventually destroy itself by creating too great a gap between the means of production and the benefits it distributed. Kennan, a century later, turned Marx and Engels upside down. The gap between productive means and distributed benefits would instead, he insisted in 1946–47, bring about the collapse of communism within the Soviet Union and its post–World War II satellite states. Kennan didn’t welcome what finally happened in 1990–91: the implosion of the Soviet Union itself was too great a disruption in the balance of power even for him. But he did understand how stresses within societies can themselves greatly surprise.
No one can predict when some new geopolitical earthquake might occur: geological earthquakes are difficult enough to anticipate. Geologists do know, however, where to expect them: that is why California gets earthquake warnings but Connecticut does not. Does the very brittleness of authoritarian regimes—their strange belief in the immortality of top-down command structures—leave them similarly vulnerable? Or does the entrenched recalcitrance of democracies—their resistance to being commanded—pose even greater dangers to them? Only time will tell, probably sooner than we expect.
strategy and uncertainty
This aggregation of knowns, unknowns, and surprises leaves us with the historical equivalent of a three-body problem: given the coexistence of predictability and its opposite, we’ll know the outcome only when we’ve seen it. Strategy, however, doesn’t have that luxury. Its success requires living with uncertainties, of which the future will not be in short supply. The strategy of containment, although imperfect in its accomplishments and at times tragic in its failures, did successfully manage its own contradictions while buying the time necessary for those within the Soviet system to become obvious, even, in the end, to its own leaders.
It did this chiefly by combining simplicity of conception with flexibility in application, for even the clearest of destinations may not always, or even often, reveal the paths by which to reach them. It may be necessary, for example, to cooperate with Stalin to defeat Hitler, or with Tito to resist Stalin, or with Mao to confound Brezhnev: not all evils are equally so at all times. Nor are arms buildups always bad or negotiations always good: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan employed both to begin transformations of the adversaries confronting them. Kennan distrusted such elasticities in the pursuit of containment, but it was precisely this maneuverability that ensured the strategy’s safe arrival at its intended destination.
A second way in which containment succeeded was by treating spontaneity as a strength. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was as much a European as an American creation, in striking contrast to its Moscow-dominated rival, the Warsaw Pact. Nor, outside of Europe, did the United States insist on ideological uniformity among its friends. The objective instead was to make diversity a weapon against a rival bent on suppressing it: to use the resistance to uniformity embedded within distinctive histories, cultures, and faiths as a barrier against the homogenizing ambitions of would-be hegemons.
A third asset, although it didn’t always seem so at the time, was the American election cycle. Quadrennial stress tests for containment unnerved its architects, upset sympathetic pundits, and alarmed overseas allies, but they were at least safeguards against ossification. No long-term strategy can succeed if it allows aspirations to outrun its capabilities or capabilities to corrupt its aspirations. How, though, do strategists develop the self-awareness—and the self-confidence—to acknowledge that their strategies are not working? Elections are, for sure, blunt instruments. They are better, though, than having no means of reconsideration apart from the demise of aged autocrats, the timing of whose departure from this world is not given to their followers to know.
There are thus, in the United States, no exclusively foreign affairs. Because Americans proclaim their ideals so explicitly, they illustrate departures from them all the more vividly. Domestic failures such as economic inequality, racial segregation, sexual discrimination, environmental degradation, and top-level extraconstitutional excesses all go on display for the world to see. As Kennan pointed out in the most quoted article ever published in these pages, “Exhibitions of indecision, disunity and internal disintegration within this country” can “have an exhilarating effect” on external enemies. To defend its external interests, then, “the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”
Easily said, not easily done, and therein lies the ultimate test for the United States in its contest with China: the patient management of internal threats to our democracy, as well as tolerance of the moral and geopolitical contradictions through which global diversity can most feasibly be defended. The study of history is the best compass we have in navigating this future—even if it turns out to be not what we’d expected and not in most respects what we’ve experienced before.
16. The FBI searched properties in Washington and New York linked to a Russian oligarch
The FBI searched properties in Washington and New York linked to a Russian oligarch
Federal agents stand in front of a home connected to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
FBI agents executed search warrants Tuesday at properties in Washington, D.C., and in New York City that are linked to the prominent Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
At a stately residence located in Northwest Washington near several embassies, FBI agents could be seen outside, and authorities had cordoned off the property with yellow police tape.
Agents also searched a property in New York, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
It was not immediately clear what investigators were looking for, but the two people said the searches are part of a criminal investigation.
A spokeswoman for Deripaska, Larisa Belyaeva, told the Russian news agency TASS that the FBI searched two houses that belong to the businessman's relatives.
Deripaska made his fortune in metals in Russia in the 1990s, and U.S. officials say he is closely aligned with the country's president, Vladimir Putin.
Their relationship was detailed in special counsel Robert Mueller's report from his investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia interference in the election.
In 2018, the U.S. Treasury slapped sanctions on Russian metals magnate Oleg Deripaska and six other Russian oligarchs as well as Russian companies and government officials. Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
The Senate Intelligence Committee also scrutinized Deripaska in its own report on Russia's 2016 election interference.
"The Committee found that Deripaska conducts influence operations, frequently in countries where he has a significant economic interest," the panel's report said. "The Russian government coordinates with and directs Deripaska on many of his influence operations."
The Treasury said Deripaska claims to act on behalf of the Russian government. It also said he has been investigated for money laundering and has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals and taking part in extortion and racketeering.
"There are also allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman, and had links to a Russian organized crime group," the Treasury report said.
Deripaska sued the U.S. government over the sanctions. In his lawsuit, he called the allegations against him "nothing more than false rumor and innuendo" and said they are rooted in decades-old attacks from his business competitors.
This summer, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed the case.
NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre contributed to this report.
17. What that one scene in 'Saving Private Ryan' teaches us about complaining in the military
It is one of the great scenes from the movie with a good lesson.
What that one scene in 'Saving Private Ryan' teaches us about complaining in the military
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Editor’s note: This article was originally published on March 4, 2021.
Welcome to That One Scene, a semi-regular series in which Task & Purpose writers wax nostalgic about that one scene from a beloved (or hated) military movie.
When done right, something as simple as airing a grievance can rise to the level of art.
You’ll find no better evidence of this than among rank and file service members. After being given a bullshit assignment, say, painstakingly creating a PowerPoint presentation for a full-bird colonel that everyone is going to sleep through, a particularly disgruntled soldier, sailor, airman or Marine can turn their frustration into a masterful soliloquy about senior commanders who say they want the ‘ground truth’ but somehow think they can get it from a series of slides instead of, you know, going outside the wire.
Did the first sergeant order a bunch of Marines to fill sandbags, then realize they actually needed to fortify a different location three miles away, so those bags will have to be emptied, then refilled over there? Well, there will likely be a profanity-laden-TED-Talk about the gross misuse of taxpayer-funded manpower coming to the smoke pit in the near future.
Service members forced to attend a mandatory family fun day on their first Saturday off in weeks? Expect to overhear some choice words about why retention is such a challenge these days. Did the platoon sergeant order his soldiers to check in three times a day, every day (even weekends) after getting back from a long and rough deployment downrange? There’s a good chance that someone in that unit will burst into a tirade about how the military will entrust them with millions of dollars in equipment and empower them to make life and death decisions, but the moment they’re back in garrison the flak and Kevlar come off, and the baby diapers go on.
If complaining is an art form — and it most certainly is — then the U.S. military is the Juilliard School of Bitching.
As Nick Nolte famously pointed out in The Thin Red Line, another World War II movie, this time about the Pacific Campaign, complaining goes hand-in-hand with military service: “The only time you worry about a soldier is when he stops bitching.”
But there are some basic ground rules to follow if you hope to distinguish your frustrations from run-of-the-mill whining, and something more memorable. There’s no better on-screen example of how to do that than this scene from Steven Spielberg’s 1998 World War II drama “Saving Private Ryan”:
The moment comes early on in the film. After the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach — which is worthy of its own scene breakdown, and that’s why we did exactly that — Capt. John Miller, played by Tom Hanks, is ordered to take a squad of Rangers and head into an active warzone on a “public relations mission,” as he calls it.
The objective: find and bring home Pvt. James Ryan, a paratrooper who dropped somewhere into Normandy on June 6, 1944. Unbeknownst to him, Ryan’s three brothers were killed in separate operations. To spare his mother the anguish of losing all of her children to the war, the powers that be mandated Ryan be found and brought home at all costs.
The mission poses a moral question, not just for the audience, but for the soldiers who are given the task: Is it worth the risk to endanger the lives of eight men to save one in the hopes of minimizing a family’s grief? The question isn’t one I can answer. But it’s the driving theme of the entire film and one that’s never fully resolved, though by the time the credits roll, the hope is that it was worth the incredible cost.
Immediately after setting out, one of the more vocal Rangers, Pvt. Reiben (played by Edward Burns) addresses the squad and asks: “Do you want to explain the math of this to me? Where’s the sense of risking the lives of the eight of us, to save one guy?”
While Reiben is most definitely complaining, he’s mostly laying the groundwork for what’s to come; setting the stage if you will, so that the rest of the squad can chime in.
Wade, the squad’s medic does, and points out that Reiben should “think of the poor bastard’s mother” to which Reiben replies that they’ve all got mothers, “shit, I bet even the captain’s got a mother,” he says, before backtracking. “Well, maybe not the captain, but the rest of us got mothers,” alluding to the mystery of their leader’s background.
It’s your run of the mill grumbling and whining at this point: Soldiers airing their grievances after getting a bum assignment, though in this case ‘suicide mission’ is more apt. Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies), a linguist and a new-join to the squad tosses out an Alfred Tennyson quote — wrong crowd, bud — and is quickly mocked by Pvts. Mellish (Adam Goldberg) and Caparzo (Vin Diesel).
However, the bar is significantly raised when Pvt. Jackson, or ‘Bumpkin’, the unit’s southern-twanged sharpshooter chimes in.
“By my way of thinking, sir, this entire mission is a serious misallocation of valuable military resources,” Jackson begins.
“Well, it seems to me, sir, that God gave me a special gift; made me a fine instrument of warfare… Well, what I mean by that sir, is that if you were to put me and this here sniper rifle anywhere up to, and including, one mile of Adolf Hitler with a clear line of sight, sir. Pack your bags, fellas, war’s over. Amen.”
As Miller points out in the midst of the speech: “this is the way to gripe.” Jackson’s monologue is performative, yet contains a kernel of truth. He may be exaggerating his own abilities — though seeing as he speedily acquires, shoots, and kills a German sniper during a later battle, there might be something to his boast — he still raises a good point. Sending a squad of well-trained, battle-tested Rangers stomping around France to aimlessly search for one soldier out of thousands during an active invasion with an uncertain outcome sounds exactly like “a serious misallocation of valuable military resources.”
Or in the words of Mellish and Caparzo it’s “FUBAR,” military slang for “fucked up beyond all recognition.”
With his rant over, Jackson perfectly demonstrates one of the golden rules of any successful complaint: Make it entertaining. Whether it’s with gallows humor, or outright bravado, if everyone is laughing and smiling darkly, you’re doing it right. It has the benefit of letting everyone within earshot know you think this is a terrible no good very bad idea, without bringing folks down by pointing out that you’re all probably going to die for no good reason.
The second part of the scene lays out when to gripe, and who to gripe to. While complaining may be a constant of military service — and if social media is any indicator, of life in general — there’s a time and place for it.
After Jackson wraps up his masterful rebuke of the top brass for sending them on this wildly dangerous wild goose chase, Reiben remains unconvinced, and so he asks Miller, a captain, if he sees any issues with the plan.
“I don’t gripe to you, Reiben,” Miller explains. “I’m a captain. There’s a chain of command. Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me. I gripe to my superior officer, so on, so on, and so on. I don’t gripe to you. I don’t gripe in front of you. You should know that, as a Ranger.”
And Miller’s not wrong: Leaders shouldn’t be whining to their troops, in large part because they’re the ones giving the orders everyone’s grumbling about in the first place. In much the same way as shit rolls downhill in the military, “gripes go up” the chain of command, as Miller points out.
Undeterred, Reiben presses on: “Say you aren’t a captain, or I’m a major. What would you say then?”
To which Miller brilliantly responds with a straight face: “Well, in that case, I’d say this is an excellent mission, sir, with an extremely valuable objective, sir, worthy of my best efforts, sir. Moreover, I feel heartfelt sorrow for the mother of Pvt. James Ryan. And I’m willing to lay down my life and the lives of my men — especially you Reiben — to ease her suffering.”
Ultimately, the scene, much like complaining in the military, is about camaraderie more than anything else. Contrary to popular belief, or what your CO tells you, and regardless of conflicting scientific studies about how complaining is bad for your health, or good for your health — one thing is certain, bitching is most definitely good for the soul, and good for morale.
Very rarely does anyone complain as loudly and with as much style, as the soldiers in “Saving Private Ryan” do with the intention of actually convincing anyone to change their mind. Rather, it’s to let everyone know that you know it’s bullshit and invite them to join in on calling it what it is.
To underscore that point, the scene ends with the Rangers marching on in slightly better spirits. Concerns raised. Venting done. Now it’s time to get that damn private and bring him home, hopefully before some general decides they should go on a search and rescue mission for a beloved unit mascot last seen in the Ardennes Forest.
More great stories on Task & Purpose
is the Deputy Editor of Task & Purpose and a Marine veteran. He oversees daily editorial operations, edits articles, and supports reporters so they can continue to write the impactful stories that matter to our audience. In terms of writing, James provides a mix of pop culture commentary and in-depth analysis of issues facing the military and veterans community. Contact the author here.
18. Soldier who helped secure Kabul airport with Toyota technical traded for dip gets promoted
Quite a story. Good initiative by SPC Al Lami.
Soldier who helped secure Kabul airport with Toyota technical traded for dip gets promoted
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A U.S. Army soldier who helped secure the Hamid Karzai International Airport during the withdrawal from Afghanistan by training other soldiers how to use a Toyota technical’s anti-aircraft gun — after they’d traded two cans of dipping tobacco for it — was recently promoted.
During an on-the-spot promotion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Alsajjad Al Lami was promoted from private first class to the rank of specialist by Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville. Al Lami was one of the soldiers who was recently profiled by Task & Purpose for their actions during the chaotic evacuation of Americans and Afghans from the country as the Taliban consolidated their power and swept into the capital of Kabul.
In the video, McConville can be heard joking with Al Lami, as he asks if he’s ever met a “four star” general, as he hands the soldier a challenge coin.
— SMA Michael Grinston (@16thSMA) October 20, 2021
“First I’m going to give you a coin, okay?” McConville says in the video, which was posted to Twitter by the Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston. “Here’s the deal with that coin. You get to keep that coin if you finish your tour successfully. But if you get in trouble and you don’t finish your tour successfully, you have to come to the Pentagon and give me it back. I’m not going to get it back, am I?”
To which Al Lami replies “no sir.”
Al Lami was one of the soldiers with 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment who landed at the Kabul airport early on during the evacuation efforts and immediately set about establishing security — which is a euphemistic way of saying that they did a lot of grunt work setting up and then manning guard posts and bolstering those defenses. And those defensive measures were crucial. On the other side of the airport’s walls, armed Taliban fighters operated openly, at times within 30 meters of U.S. troops, if not far closer.
Spc. Alsajjad Al Lami. (Courtesy of U.S. Army)
Because the mission’s urgency required that the soldiers deploy quickly, and in enough force to secure the area, that left little room on transport aircraft for heavier equipment, like gun trucks. Though often used for mounted patrols or convoy operations, vehicles like MRAPs and M-ATVs can function as a static defense — a fighting position — and serve as both a visual deterrent and provide fire support in case of an attack.
That said, soldiers are nothing if not resourceful, and they can make due in most any situation. When they noticed that a group of Afghan troops were preparing to leave — and abandon their Afghan National Army Toyota Land Cruiser, along with its Russian-made 14.5mm ZPU-2 anti-aircraft gun — they decided to make a deal.
What two cans of dip and a little rank and file ingenuity can get you. (Courtesy of U.S. Army)
“There were two guys standing by the truck, and we asked them if they had the keys,” Al Lami said. “They were like, ‘Yeah we do have the keys.’ And they gave us the keys for two cans of dip.”
However, the keys alone wouldn’t have made much of a difference, had Al Lami not been there. Born in Iraq, the 25-year-old Al Lami had to complete a mandatory service obligation in Iraq’s military, though he only ended up serving for six months before leaving for college in the U.S.
Because of his time in the Iraqi Army, Al Lami knew how to use the truck’s weapon system — from firing, to loading, to barrel changes — and was able to teach his fellow soldiers. For days, the pickup truck with its ZPU-2 was used by American troops at the airport as a show of force to the Taliban fighters on the other side of the gate.
“Demilitarizing” the ZPU-2 by welding the gun’s barrel. (Courtesy of U.S. Army)
“It’s hard to imagine the stars aligning any more perfectly for Bravo Company than they did on Aug. 17,” Task & Purpose’s Haley Britzky wrote on Oct. 12. “They had the keys to the Toyota mounted with an anti-aircraft gun, which was making the Taliban roughly 100 feet away think twice about stepping out of line. And they had a paratrooper uniquely qualified to teach the rest of them how to operate it: Al Lami knew how to work the ZPU-2 thanks to his short stint in the Iraqi military.”
As the evacuation drew down, the Toyota technical was loaded into a U.S. transport plane and shipped to Kuwait where it’s awaiting final approval to be brought back to the U.S. and showcased at the 82nd Airborne Division War Memorial and Museum.
In a previous statement to Task & Purpose, Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the 82nd Airborne Division commander, said that the truck and the story it tells is “emblematic of the grit, discipline, and extreme competence” of the U.S. soldiers who served at the airport during the chaotic and often tragic withdrawal.
“This truck will sit at the 82nd Airborne Museum so that our Paratroopers, their families and future generations to come will know that when faced with a mission of unprecedented scope and complexity, the Paratroopers rose to meet this challenge,” Donahue said.
More great stories on Task & Purpose
is the Deputy Editor of Task & Purpose and a Marine veteran. He oversees daily editorial operations, edits articles, and supports reporters so they can continue to write the impactful stories that matter to our audience. In terms of writing, James provides a mix of pop culture commentary and in-depth analysis of issues facing the military and veterans community. Contact the author here.
19. The accused spy knew stealth was crucial from his work on submarines. He surfaced anyway.
I see what the headline editor did there.
The accused spy knew stealth was crucial from his work on submarines. He surfaced anyway.
For years, the aspiring spy had gone to remarkable lengths to protect his identity and evade detection.
With a cash-bought burner phone, he created an anonymous email account that could send encrypted messages, according to the FBI, then waited to use it.
To avoid suspicion at his job developing America’s most advanced submarines, he allegedly snuck sensitive documents out for years, a few pages at time.
The Navy veteran’s work for the U.S. government had taught him to spot the clues that betray insider threats, and, according to an FBI affidavit, he would later brag that “we made very sure not to display even a single one.”
But now, after all that caution, the foreign officials Jonathan Toebbe believed he was negotiating with were pushing him to do the one thing he’d been avoiding: come out into the open.
At first, Toebbe — a nuclear engineer and father of two who lives in Annapolis, Md. — pushed back in encrypted email exchanges detailed in the affidavit. “Face to face meetings are very risky for me,” he wrote, “as I am sure you understand.”
A month later, he protested again, “I am sorry to be so stubborn and untrusting, but I cannot agree to go to a location of your choosing.”
But eventually — after a series of trust-building exchanges that involved a secret signal at a Washington, D.C., building and a deposit of $10,000 in cryptocurrency — Toebbe relented.
For almost a decade, Toebbe, 42, who held a top-secret security clearance, was part of the multibillion-dollar effort to build submarines that could remain submerged and undetected for the longest time possible.
The documents he allegedly smuggled out contained schematic designs for one of the Navy’s most advanced boats — the Virginia-class submarine — with a nuclear reactor that could run for 33 years without refueling.
In this world, stealth was everything. And yet, despite all that technological sophistication, every submarine becomes vulnerable the second it surfaces.
On June 26, Toebbe drove to West Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Accompanying him was his wife, Diana Toebbe, 45, a private-school humanities teacher beloved by students and known among friends for her intelligence and liberal politics. They brought with them a tiny data storage card, wrapped in plastic and hidden inside half of a peanut butter sandwich, filled with secrets that they allegedly hoped to sell.
After years of staying submerged, Toebbe and his wife were surfacing. And unbeknownst to them, the FBI was watching their every step.
‘Duty and honor’
When the U.S. government announced the couple’s arrest on espionage charges last week, it filed a 23-page affidavit in support of a criminal complaint. Packed with technical notes, it also contained details as riveting as any spy novel.
There are sly exchanges, red herrings and misdirection. Traps are set, evaded, then baited again.
Left unanswered in all the plot twists: What drove a suburban engineer and his schoolteacher wife to try to sell secrets to a still-unidentified country.
In many ways, the Toebbes were an unlikely pair to stand accused of turning against America. Both came from devoted military families.
“We strongly believe in duty and honor,” said Jonathan’s father, Nelson Toebbe, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Medical Service Corps, who declined an interview.
In addition to Jonathan’s father, his grandfather served in the Navy during World War II, and his great-grandfather was a veteran of World War I. And Jonathan himself served five years on active duty as a Navy nuclear engineering officer and more than two years in the Navy Reserve.
Diana’s family was similarly filled with veterans.
In World War II, her grandfather served on four different submarines in the Pacific, according to relatives and public records. He volunteered for dangerous assignments that tested just how long and deep the boats could stay submerged, relatives said, and passed on his love for submariner culture to his son, Douglas C. Smay, Diana’s father.
Smay served mostly on surface-level naval vessels instead of submarines, but he created a memorial to honor submariner veterans called “52 Boats,” named for the number of submarines lost in World War II.
As a teenager in Southern California, Jonathan Toebbe was one of the top students at Upland High School.
“When I found out he’d become a nuclear scientist,” said one former classmate, one of several people who spoke about the Toebbes on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about their recollections. “that didn’t strike me as unusual at all.”
The Upland yearbook devoted an entire article to Jonathan during his sophomore year, ticking off his involvement in varsity swimming, water polo, the honors program, Eagle Scouts and church.
“When asked what his goals in life were, he replied that ‘one goal in life is to be the best at whatever I do,’” the article said.
Even as a teenager, Diana had a passion for progressive causes.
For years, she was one of the few White students at her school, riding a bus daily from her affluent suburban neighborhood to attend a magnet program in downtown San Diego still struggling with integration.
As a 16-year-old, she lamented to a local newspaper the stark inequalities in funding and pointed out her school’s walkways draped with chain-link fencing. “This looks like a prison,” she said. “Grass — is that so much to ask for?”
It was at Emory University that the couple met and fell in love.
Jonathan, three years younger, was in the graduate program for physics. Diana was in Emory’s PhD program for anthropology.
Among anthropology doctoral students — all crammed into the department’s tiny basement office — Diana was known for her desire to challenge the field’s assumptions about gender and race, according to several former professors and students.
Drawing on her own struggles with anxiety disorder, she wrote a prize-winning paper about how obsessive-compulsive behaviors were not so different than other ritualized behaviors condoned by society.
She was a study in contradictions. A black belt in martial arts who loved knitting. A staunch feminist who attended Renaissance fairs in the archaic garb of peasant women.
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But something about her appealed to Jonathan.
“It was their shared intelligence,” said a relative on Diana’s side of the family.
In her dissertation, Diana began her acknowledgments by thanking her “forever first, my husband Jon, who acted as my midwife during the painful birth of this work.”
They married in 2003, according a marriage certificate from DeKalb County, Ga., and two years later moved to Colorado, where both took jobs as science teachers at the high-priced, private Kent Denver School.
In 2008, Jonathan began pursuing a second advanced degree, in nuclear engineering, at the well-regarded Colorado School of Mines, where a classmate recalled him as easygoing and an avid Dungeons & Dragons player.
But he left the program for the Navy in 2012 after becoming a parent. His professors bemoaned losing him as potential doctorate student, said the classmate, who now works in the federal government and spoke on the condition of anonymity. But Jonathan said he had a family to support and needed to make much more than he was getting on a graduate student stipend.
When they first arrived in Colorado, the couple bought a four-bedroom newly built home in Aurora for $268,500. But four years later, Jonathan and Diana were struggling to make payments, according to documents filed by their lender against them. In August 2010, they were forced to sell the home at a loss for $206,000.
“The Navy was offering him a job. It was a good deal. Trained nuclear engineers — there aren’t a huge number of us,” said the classmate. “And he was probably one of the smartest guys at the school.”
After moving to the Washington area, for the next nine years, Jonathan specialized in nuclear power and was eventually assigned to the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, which oversees the nuclear reactors used to power more than 60 aircraft carriers and submarines in the naval fleet. He was never deployed by the Navy, nor did he serve on any ships, according to service records and court documents. Toebbe ended his active-duty service in 2017 but remained in the Navy Reserve until 2020.
Meanwhile, Diana taught at the Key School in Annapolis, where tuition runs as high as $31,050 a year. She was a meticulous teacher who pushed students to think differently, said former students and their parents. But she was also warm and encouraging, becoming a mentor to many girls.
The couple bought a modest house for $430,000 in 2014 in Annapolis’ Hillsmere Shores, where residents have their own private marina with direct access to a river and a beach. Their two kids went to Diana’s private school, which allows children of faculty members to attend tuition-free.
“They had money. They both worked hard. It’s not like they were having difficulty with the bills,” said a close relative of Diana’s.
On Facebook and Instagram, Diana chronicled their life together — photos of a potato casserole she baked, a beach vacation, and a video of her children playing in costumes. She posted knitting tutorials on YouTube, coaching her viewers with generous dollops of encouragement.
“If you’ve gotten this far, well done. I’m really, really proud of you,” she tells first-time knitters halfway through one of the videos. “You should take a second and give yourself a pat on the back.”
Her husband kept a lower profile online.
It’s a science fiction novel that runs nearly 1,000 pages and spans three generations. The book begins with a young Navy captain in World War II and moves in time to the present day, when his grandson, a hacker, embarks on a mission to build a place where encrypted data can be exchanged without scrutiny.
The key to keeping that data haven running, it turns out, is a sunken Nazi submarine.
‘Risking my life’
Jonathan Toebbe’s own saga began on April 1, 2020, with a brown envelope with four U.S. postage stamps, according to the affidavit.
Toebbe allegedly sent the package anonymously, with a return address in Pittsburgh, to an unidentified foreign government. Inside were sensitive U.S. Navy documents and instructions on how the country — believed by many national security experts to be a U.S. ally — should reply using an encrypted email service.
For almost nine months, the receiving country held on to the package before it apparently handed it over to the FBI on Dec. 20, 2020.
Six days later, an FBI agent — posing as a foreign spy handler — reached out to Toebbe at the anonymous email address he provided.
Toebbe was cautious at first. In his reply, he avoided any details that might give away his identity, simply calling himself “Alice,” a common placeholder name in cryptographic circles.
When the supposed foreign official asked him to meet face-to-face with a “trusted friend” — someone with a “gift … to compensate for your efforts” — Toebbe knew better.
“I am uncomfortable with this arrangement,” Jonathan wrote on March 5, 2021, according to the affidavit. “I propose exchanging gifts electronically, for mutual safety.”
He asked his new friend for $100,000 in Monero, a cryptocurrency popular with cybercriminals that conceals the sender, receiver and even the amount exchanged.
“I understand this is a large request,” he said. “However, please remember I am risking my life for your benefit and I have taken the first step. Please help me trust you fully.”
In the five months that followed, Toebbe and his handler engaged in delicate negotiations. His emails adopted a vulnerable tone that laid bare his dilemma: his need to remain hidden was pitted against worries of offending his new friends or losing their interest.
The handler suggested using a neutral location as a place for dead drops: “When you visit the location alone, you retrieve a gift and leave behind the sample we request.”
But Toebbe did not want the foreign government picking the location.
“I am concerned that using a dead drop location your friend prepares makes me very vulnerable,” he wrote. “If other interested parties are observing from the location, I will be unable to detect them. … I am also concerned that a physical gift would be very difficult to explain if I am questioned.”
But the handler kept insisting that the foreign government select the dead drop’s location. And Toebbe kept resisting.
“I must consider the possibility that I am communicating with an adversary who has intercepted my first message and is attempting to expose me,” he said. “Would not such an adversary wish me to go to a place of his choosing, knowing that an amateur will be unlikely to detect his surveillance?”
So, Toebbe proposed that his handlers fly a “signal flag” atop a building their country controlled in Washington, D.C., over Memorial Day weekend — to prove they were who they claimed.
Yes, that can be arranged, his handler replied.
On Monday, May 31 — after the FBI coordinated with the country to put the signal in place — Toebbe wrote back elated. He’d seen the signal and was finally willing to surface.
“Now I am comfortable telling you,” he said. “I am located near Baltimore, Maryland. Please let me know when you are ready to proceed with our first exchange.”
On June 26, at 10:41 a.m., Jonathan and Diana appeared at the appointed location in Jefferson County, W.Va. Earlier that month, according to the affidavit, Toebbe had been sent $10,000 in Monero cryptocurrency.
FBI agents watching the site described Diana standing three feet away from her husband, working as his apparent lookout as he placed into the dead drop the peanut butter sandwich they’d brought containing a 16-gigabyte SD memory card.
Encoded on the card, the FBI said, were details on the nuclear reactor used on one of the Navy’s most advanced U.S. submarines — a $3 billion ghost in the water, capable of launching cruise missiles from behind enemy lines.
Over the next four months, the FBI agent posing as spy handler arranged for three more dead drops. At the bureau’s instruction, Jonathan and Diana drove to Pennsylvania in July with an SD card hidden inside a sealed Band-Aid wrapper. In August, Jonathan traveled alone to Eastern Virginia and deposited an SD card concealed in a chewing gum packet.
With each successful drop, Jonathan’s emails grew more relaxed and effusive.
“You can not [imagine] my relief at finding your letter just where you told me to look!” he wrote in one.
“One day, when it is safe, perhaps two old friends will have a chance to stumble into each other at a cafe, share a bottle of wine and laugh over stories of their shared exploits,” read another.
Asked if he was working alone, Jonathan responded, in what the FBI said was an apparent reference to Diana: “There is only one other person I know is aware of our special relationship, and I trust that person absolutely.”
He dangled the possibility of more than 11,000 pages of sensitive documents to follow. For a price of $5 million in cryptocurrency, he said, he would deliver it all.
But, he added, he was aware of the risks.
“I have considered the possible need to leave on short notice,” he wrote. “Should that ever become necessary, I will be forever grateful for your help extracting me and my family. … We have passports and cash set aside for this purpose. I pray such a drastic plan will never be needed. ...”
On Saturday, Oct. 9, those fears were realized.
While making their fourth and final drop in West Virginia — a year-and-a-half after he first contacted the foreign country — Jonathan and Diana finally came face to face with handlers they had been working with all along: Agents from the FBI, who promptly arrested them.
‘Not the person I know’
The Toebbes have now been charged with conspiracy and communication of sensitive government records to a foreign nation. If convicted, they could face life in prison.
At a hearing scheduled for Wednesday in federal court, a judge will determine whether to continue detaining them.
The nuclear submarines Jonathan worked on are built to carry deadly payloads. Some are armed with tomahawk missiles, others with nuclear warheads capable of leveling entire cities.
Now, in the wake of the couple’s arrest, their lives have imploded.
On Diana’s Instagram, photos of her children have been overrun by strangers posting expletive-laden condemnations of the entire family.
“Say goodbye to the kids forever,” reads one with a laughing emoji.
“Your name will be added to the list of American Traitors: aldrich ames, robert [Hanssen] ...”
“Hanging, firing squad, electric chair…??”
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Those who know Jonathan and Diana are struggling to reconcile the couple in the affidavit with the couple they once admired.
“This is not the person I knew. The warm, funny, crazy smart woman who cared and stuck up for other people,” said one friend who’s known Diana for more than a decade.
She refused to speak by name, like dozens of other friends, co-workers, former teachers and students contacted for this story, who fear being associated with accused spies.
The greatest bewilderment was voiced by relatives, who are worried not only about Jonathan and Diana but also the fate of their two children.
“People in the family are having a hard time processing it,” said Jonathan’s cousin, Mark Slaughter, who has served as a Marine sergeant and Army captain. “There’s nothing here that makes sense.”
Both sides are trying to figure out how best to care for the children, deliberating which relative could take them in if Jonathan and Diana are imprisoned for years.
“I worry whether the kids will ever be able to heal or move on from this,” said one relative. “Imagine what it’ll be like for them to grow up with that Toebbe name hanging over them. No matter what their parents may or may not have done, those children are innocent.”
Alice Crites, Alex Horton, and Moriah Balingit contributed to this report.
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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.
