Quotes of the Day:
“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”
- John F. Kennedy in his 1963 Thanksgiving proclamation, issued before his death.
“Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.”
- William Faulkner
Proclamation of Thanksgiving
This is the proclamation which set the precedent for America's national day of Thanksgiving.
Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the Eighty-eighth.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State
1. For Afghan Refugees, a Choice Between Community and Opportunity
2. Army Whistle-Blower’s Lonely Death Highlights Toll of Mental Illness
3. Chinese Communist Party will outlive United States—state media editor
4. Over-the-Horizon Counterterrorism: New Name, Same Old Challenges
5. After 9/11, the United States Didn’t Fight a Twenty-Year War, but Twenty One-Year Wars. But What Does that Actually Mean?
6. The Taiwan Foreign Policy Fetish – OpEd
7. Philippines rejects China's demand to remove ship from shoal
8. CIA director warns Russian spies of ‘consequences’ if they are behind ‘Havana Syndrome’ incidents
9. U.S. Lawmakers Coming to Taiwan on Military-Focused Trip -Report
10. U.S. Invitation to Taiwan for Democracy Summit Tests Ties With China
11. Who was snubbed, who snuck through: Here's the list of invitees to Biden's democracy summit
12. Biden administration blacklists 27 companies over national security concerns
13. All options fraught with risk as Biden confronts Putin over Ukraine
14. Are our Intellectual Actions Aligned with our Security Challenges?
15. Senior U.S. officials present tougher stance ahead of Iran nuclear talks
16. Why the Marine Corps wants to tank National Guard recruiting efforts
17. Is the United States ready to take on China?
18. Trump Reportedly Approved Pentagon's ‘Irregular Warfare’ Campaign Against Iran Before Exiting WH
19. CIA Opens New Accessibility Storefront at Headquarters - CIA
20. Michael Flynn ups the conspiracy ante, says COVID released by "global elites"
21. A MACV-SOG Thanksgiving: When 6 commandos took on 30,000 enemy troops
22. Japan plans record boost to 'sympathy budget' for hosting US military bases: source
1. For Afghan Refugees, a Choice Between Community and Opportunity
While many Afghan refugees are thankful for their freedom today they are worried about so many families, friends, and fellow Afghans who continue to suffer under Taliban rule.
For Afghan Refugees, a Choice Between Community and Opportunity
Fremont, Calif., is home to a large Afghan enclave known as Little Kabul. On weekends, many Afghan families gather for picnics and walks.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
In resettling thousands of displaced Afghans, the Biden administration must weigh their need for support against the needs of the U.S. labor market.
Fremont, Calif., is home to a large Afghan enclave known as Little Kabul. On weekends, many Afghan families gather for picnics and walks.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
FREMONT, Calif. — Harris Mojadedi’s parents fled Afghanistan’s communist revolution four decades ago and arrived as refugees in this San Francisco suburb in 1986, lured by the unlikely presence of a Farsi-speaking doctor and a single Afghan grocery store.
Over the decades, as more refugees settled in Fremont, the eclectic neighborhood became known as Little Kabul, a welcoming place where Mr. Mojadedi’s father, a former judge, and his wife could both secure blue-collar jobs, find an affordable place to live and raise their children surrounded by mosques, halal restaurants and thousands of other Afghans.
“When I went to school, I saw other Afghan kids. I knew about my culture, and I felt a sense of, like, that my community was part of Fremont,” Mr. Mojadedi recalled recently over a game of teka and chapli kebabs during lunch with other young Afghans from the area.
But now, as the United States begins to absorb a new wave of refugees who were frantically evacuated from Kabul in the final, chaotic days of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, it is far from clear that a place like Fremont would be an ideal destination for them. Housing in the Bay Area city is out of reach, with one-bedroom apartments going for more than $2,500 a month. Jobs can be tougher to get than in many other parts of the country. The cost of living is driven up by nearby Silicon Valley. Even longtime residents of Little Kabul are leaving for cheaper areas.
The alternative is to send the refugees to places like Fargo, N.D., or Tulsa, Okla., where jobs are plentiful, housing is cheap and mayors are eager for new workers.
But those communities lack the kind of cultural support that Mr. Mojadedi experienced. The displaced Afghans would most likely find language barriers, few social services and perhaps hostility toward foreigners. Already, there are signs of a backlash against refugees in some of the states where economic statistics suggest they are needed most.
Homaira Hosseini is a lawyer and Afghan refugee who grew up in Little Kabul.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Harris Mojadedi’s parents fled Afghanistan after its communist revolution four decades ago and settled in Little Kabul.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Housing is out of reach for many in Fremont, with small apartments going for more than $2,500 a month. Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
“Are we setting them up to fail there?” Homaira Hosseini, a lawyer and Afghan refugee who grew up in Little Kabul, asked during the lunch. “They don’t have support. Or are we setting them up to fail in places where there aren’t any jobs for them, but there is support?”
That is the difficult question facing President Biden’s administration and the nation’s nonprofit resettlement organizations as they work to find places to live for the newly displaced Afghans. As of Nov. 19, more than 22,500 have been settled, including 3,500 in one week in October, and 42,500 more remain in temporary housing on eight military bases around the country, waiting for their new homes.
Initial agreements between the State Department and the resettlement agencies involved sending 5,255 to California, 4,481 to Texas, 1,800 to Oklahoma, 1,679 to Washington, 1,610 to Arizona, and hundreds more to almost every state. North Dakota will get at least 49 refugees. Mississippi and Alabama will get at least 10.
Where the refugees go from there is up to the resettlement agencies in each state. Sometimes, refugees will ask to live in communities where they already have family or friends. But officials said that many of the displaced Afghans who arrived this summer had no connection to the United States.
Many of the Afghan refugees who arrived in the U.S. this summer had no friends or family in the country.Credit...Kenny Holston for The New York Times
“These folks are coming at a time when the job market is very good,” said Jack Markell, the former Democratic governor of Delaware who is overseeing the resettlement effort. “But they’re also coming here at a time when the housing market is very tight.”
Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule
With the departure of the U.S. military on Aug. 30, Afghanistan quickly fell back under control of the Taliban. Across the country, there is widespread anxiety about the future.
“Our job is to provide a safe and dignified welcome and to set people up for long-term success,” he said. “And that means doing everything we can to get them to the places where it’s affordable, where we connect them with jobs.”
For Mr. Biden, failure to integrate the refugees successfully could play into the hands of conservatives who oppose immigration — even for those who helped the Americans during the war — and claim the Afghans will rob Americans of jobs and bring the threat of crime into communities. After initially welcoming the refugees, the Republican governor of North Dakota has taken a harder line, echoing concerns of his party about vetting them.
Haomyyn Karimi, a former refugee who has been a baker at an Afghan market in Little Kabul for thirty years, choked up at the thought of another generation of Afghan refugees struggling to build a new life in the face of financial difficulty and discrimination.
“They had lives in Afghanistan,” Mr. Karimi said through an interpreter during a brief interview at the Maiwand Market in downtown Fremont. “Their money was in banks in Afghanistan that are no longer available to them. So they’re literally starting with nothing.”
Haomyyn Karimi, center, has been a baker at an Afghan market in Little Kabul for thirty years.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
‘They need to find workers.’
The refugees are arriving at a moment of severe economic need — labor shortages across the country mean that communities are desperate for workers. In Fargo, where the unemployment rate is 2.8 percent, many restaurants have to close early because they can’t find enough workers.
“Everybody’s looking for people,” said Daniel Hannaher, the director of the Fargo resettlement office for the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which expects to receive several dozen refugees soon. “And, you know, it’s getting to the point now where everybody’s mad about the restaurants.”
The same is true in Tulsa, where the unemployment rate is 3.5 percent and dropping. G.T. Bynum, the city’s Republican mayor, told Public Radio Tulsa that he’s eager for the new refugees to see that Tulsa “is a city where we help each other out, whether you’ve lived here your whole life or you just got off the plane from Afghanistan.”
Financial help for the Afghan refugees flows through the resettlement agencies in the form of a one-time payment of up to $1,225 per person for food assistance, rent, furniture and a very small amount of spending money. An additional $1,050 per person is sent to resettlement agencies to provide English classes and other services.
Because refugees are authorized to work in the United States, much of the help is directed toward helping them find a job, Mr. Markell said. Refugees are also eligible to receive Medicaid benefits and food stamps.
Historically, refugees have quickly gotten to work in the U.S., without taking jobs from Americans.
About one in five new refugees to the United States finds employment in the first year of arrival in the country, a high rate among wealthy nations, according to a paper published by a trio of researchers at University College London last year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Employment rates for refugees to America jump sharply in the years that follow.
Sayed Mahboob, right, an elementary school teacher in Sacramento, Calif., often helps more recent Afghan transplants with paperwork as they settle in the U.S.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Ariana Sweets Inc. is a family-owned business in the Fremont area specializing in Afghan and Middle Eastern food.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Workers have been slow to return to jobs or industries they left in the pandemic, leaving many restaurants and retail stores desperate to hire.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Critics of high levels of refugee acceptance, including top officials in the White House under former President Donald J. Trump, contend that refugees compete with American workers — particularly for low-wage jobs — and dramatically reduce how much those existing workers earn.
The vast majority of empirical economic research finds that isn’t true. An exhaustive report published by the office of the chief economist at the State Department examined settlement patterns of past refugees to the United States, comparing the economic outcomes of areas where they did and did not settle. It found “robust causal evidence that there is no adverse long-term impact of refugees on the U.S. labor market.”
If anything, economists say, the current labor market makes it even less likely that refugees would steal jobs or suppress wages for people already here. U.S. employers reported more than 10 million job openings nationwide in August, down slightly from a record 11 million in July. Workers have been slow to return to jobs or industries they left in the pandemic, leaving many restaurants and retail stores desperate to hire.
Few, if any, previous waves of refugees have entered the country with such high labor demand across the country, or with the lure of worker-parched areas that could offer relatively high starting salaries for even inexperienced staff.
And places like Fargo and Tulsa offer cheaper housing, too. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Fargo is $730 a month, less than a third of what it is in Fremont. The average rent in Tulsa is $760.
A donation center at the Matt Jimenez Community Center in Hayward, Calif.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
‘Support is critical’
But some have concerns about sending the Afghans to places where there are few familiar faces and prejudice is more common.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
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Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be. One spokesman told The Times that the group wanted to forget its past, but that there would be some restrictions.
In Michigan, which is slated to get at least 1,280 refugees, stickers with the racist message “Afghan Refugee Hunting Permits” were posted in Ann Arbor by the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group.
In Oklahoma, John Bennett, the chairman of the state Republican Party, posted a Facebook video in which he rants about the dangers of Shariah, the Islamic legal code, accusing the refugees — without evidence — of being terrorists.
“Oklahomans, I encourage you to call and email the governor, call and email your legislators, and tell them: Do not allow Afghan refugees into Oklahoma,” Mr. Bennett said in the video.
“We’re going to see Islamophobia. We’re going to see xenophobia,” said Spojmie Nasiri, an immigration lawyer of Afghan descent who lives near Fremont. “We’re already seeing it.”
Spojmie Nasiri, an immigration lawyer who lives near Fremont, said she has been seeing hostility toward Afghan refugees.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
But Mr. Markell said most communities — including conservative, Republican-leaning ones — have been very welcoming. He credits the country’s veterans, who have overwhelmingly embraced the Afghans.
“When they are as vocal as they have been, it helps a lot with elected officials of both parties,” Mr. Markell said.
Advocates say that despite having a higher cost of living and fewer available jobs, established Afghan enclaves like Fremont can provide a much-needed support network.
The International Rescue Committee, which operates a resettlement office in Oakland, Calif., near Fremont, said it had established committees on housing, health, case management and legal issues even before the mass evacuation from Kabul this summer. The Oakland office is expecting at least 600 to 700 Afghan refugees to be resettled in the area.
Those who go to Fremont will find a raft of existing services thanks to the presence of an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 Afghans in the city: adult schools to teach them English; mental health services aimed at people from Afghanistan; and informal help from area mosques.
Some local banks in Fremont are partnering with the city to provide financial coaching.
Farid Noori, left, moved into an apartment in Fremont with his sons shortly after fleeing Afghanistan.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Afternoon prayer at Masjid Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, a mosque in Hayward, Calif., near Fremont.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Husna Massoud visits her great-aunt’s grave in the Muslim section of a cemetery in Hayward.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Hena Massoud and Husna Massoud help organize donations for recently displaced Afghans in Hayward.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
“That support is critical,” said Jordane Tofighi, the director of the Oakland office. “Some of the local mosques are doing food distribution. Some of the grocery stores have food pickup hours.”
Fremont also boasts social service agencies, including the Afghan Coalition, which have been catering to the community’s Afghan residents for several decades. Mizgon Darby, who works for the organization, has been pressing the resettlement agencies, local governments and the state to provide more financial resources for the latest wave of refugees.
“The question is, in these different areas that they are being settled into, who is the designated agency that is helping them in those cases?” Ms. Darby said during an interview in her Fremont office recently. “Who’s going to navigate for them or help them navigate?”
Mr. Karimi, the baker at the Fremont market, said he's hopeful that the latest wave of refugees will find the support they need to thrive in their new country. He said people like himself owe it to the new arrivals to support them with jobs, money and encouragement.
“If they want my blood,” he said, pledging his help for the new arrivals as tears streamed down his face, “I will give them my blood.”
2. Army Whistle-Blower’s Lonely Death Highlights Toll of Mental Illness
There is always more to the story. I hope the Major's death will help us to do better with the mental health of our service members, veterans, and their families. And really ew need to do better with society writ large.
Army Whistle-Blower’s Lonely Death Highlights Toll of Mental Illness
Ian Fishback revealed abuse of detainees during the Iraq war, but struggled after leaving the service. He died awaiting a bed at the V.A.
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Army Maj. Ian FishbackCredit...Rutgers University
By
Nov. 24, 2021
Ian Fishback saw the world as cleaved between the just and unjust, the exemplary and the erring. A scholar-athlete from a small town in northern Michigan, he chose the military as his path toward a principled life, and when the Army failed its own credo during the war in Iraq, he persisted in making the truth known.
Major Fishback, who had retired from the Army, died last week, in circumstances still unclear, alone and broke in a group home, convinced he was being persecuted by the very forces he had once embraced. He was 42.
The short life and needless death of Major Fishback underscore the costs of two decades of war far beyond the battlefields and the overall strain on the nation’s mental health system. He is one of many high-profile veterans of the global war on terrorism whose lives have ended in tragedy.
“There are many potential root causes here,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey, referring to Major Fishback’s decline. Mr. Malinowski was director of Human Rights Watch when he first met Major Fishback in 2005 and connected him with Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who also wanted to expose wrongdoing in Iraq.
“There is a veteran mental health crisis in this country, and there is a shortage of facilities and of helpers,” he continued. “We panic when we are running out of I.C.U. beds in America, but we accept that we don’t have enough mental health beds.”
A shortage of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric nurse practitioners across the United States has worsened during the coronavirus pandemic, mental health experts say, and lawmakers have struggled to find a solution. Staffing shortages at the Department of Veterans Affairs may have hampered access to care, possibly including for Major Fishback.
In 2005, as an Army captain, he revealed that fellow members of the 82nd Airborne Division had systematically abused detainees in Iraq. His allegations led to the passage of far-reaching anti-torture legislation championed by Mr. McCain.
Major Fishback, who served four combat tours in Iraq, later earned a doctorate, taught at West Point, and became a sought-after speaker on the subject of moral injury and military service.
In recent years, he also had paranoid delusions and deep depression, and was prone to outbursts that caused him to lose jobs and relationships. He oscillated between defiance about his fragile mental state and desperation as he searched for help, a dozen family members, former professional associates and friends said in interviews.
Since September, alarmed at his physical and mental deterioration, his friends and his sister had scrambled to move him from hospitals and low-income adult group homes where, they said, he was heavily medicated with antipsychotic drugs, to a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Battle Creek, Mich. Appeals on his behalf to the department went unanswered last week, they said. Major Fishback was found dead in his room at the group home after breakfast on Friday.
“He was always driven by a deeply humanistic sense that people deserve respect, in this case detainees,” said Nancy Sherman, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, who was deeply involved in trying to help Major Fishback over the last decade, including in the last week of his life.
She added, “He had an enormous sense of purpose and rigidity, and rigidity doesn’t make for resilience often.”
Major Fishback with his mother, left, and sister in 2003.Credit...Family Photo
As a young man, Major Fishback was known around his small town as a high achiever in school and sports — running hills with a backpack full of weights while others were content to do the slow jog, his sister, Jazcinda Jorgensen, said. He debated classmates over his strict moral code.
“He was a straight arrow in every way,” Ms. Jorgensen said.
A high school teacher, noting his qualifications and financial need, suggested the military, so he applied and was accepted to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
“He always had a real strong sense of morality and justice and thought it was best to use that as an officer,” his sister said.
He graduated from West Point with a Bachelor of Science degree in Middle Eastern studies in 2001 and served in the Army until 2014, including four combat tours with the 82nd Airborne and Special Forces.
In 2005, when he was an Army captain, Ian Fishback briefed Senator John McCain and Congressional aides on the torture of detainees in Iraq.Credit...Jamie Rose for The New York Times
One day in 2005, Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst and then a senior military adviser for Human Rights Watch, was clearing off his desk when his phone rang. The person on the other end said, “Hello sir, I am a U.S. Army officer, and I am concerned there has been torture of detainees in my unit,” Mr. Garlasco recalled. He added, “Needless to say, that piqued the interest.”
After numerous email exchanges, the two met at an Applebee’s restaurant in La Grange, Ga., where over iced tea Major Fishback described horrific abuse of Iraqi prisoners between September 2003 and April 2004 that included exposure to extreme temperatures, beatings and sleep deprivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja.
Major Fishback had appealed to superiors and even clergy for 17 months before he turned to Capitol Hill for help. “He said, ‘I want John McCain,’” Mr. Garlasco said.
A Human Rights Watch team took him to meet with the senator, who asked to see him alone.
The Detainee Treatment Act passed the Senate 90 to 9 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2005.
“It had to nothing to do with personal aggrandizement,” said Richard Fontaine, then an aide to Mr. McCain. “This was solely about trying to correct a deep flaw in American security policy.”
But Major Fishback struggled as he worked toward a master’s degree in philosophy and political science at the University of Michigan, which he earned in 2012. He met Ms. Sherman, the Georgetown professor, during his studies, and she became his confidante.
When she noticed that he was showing symptoms of paranoia, “I worried a lot,” she said. She helped him find a therapist.
He taught at West Point from 2012 to 2015, and was awarded his doctorate from the University of Michigan, but trouble continued, including altercations with students and faculty. “He was becoming argumentative,” said Noemi Ford, a psychologist and trauma expert, and the wife of a childhood friend who worked over the last week of Major Fishback’s life to get him into treatment.
Major Fishback with his ex-wife, Clara Hoisington McCormick, and daughter Dresden in 2011.Credit...Family photo via Clara Hoisington McCormick
In 2016 he was hospitalized for the first time, said Clara Hoisington McCormick, his ex-wife, whom he had met at West Point and married in 2001. (A subsequent short marriage also ended in divorce.) He was increasingly alienated from his military colleagues, she said. He had trouble building relationships.
Mr. Garlasco, too, was concerned. They had kept in touch intermittently over the years, and he considered Major Fishback a friend. “In 2018 I got an email that put the hairs up on my neck,” he said. “He said that people were after him.”
In July 2019, Major Fishback informed Mr. Garlasco in an email that the C.I.A. was after him, he recalled. “I was like, dude, call me.” Major Fishback was in Europe with a new position. “He said, ‘I am going to give classified information to foreign governments if you don’t get the C.I.A. off my back.’ It was there that I lost the thread.”
The job in Europe unraveled later that year.
Major Fishback returned to Michigan, but a series of fights there led to a court-mandated treatment stay, which he violated. He was arrested after an argument at a football game with an R.O.T.C. officer in September. Then came a series of stays at low-cost group homes while friends tried to get him into a Veterans Affairs hospital in Battle Creek.
“It was horrible to listen to him there,” Ms. Ford said. “He was crying. He said, ‘Can you help me? I can’t trust my family.’”
His friends started a GoFundMe campaign to pay for a high-end treatment center in Massachusetts. He began speaking slowly in phone conversations, said Ms. Ford, who attributed it to high levels of psychotropic drugs.
In an email, a patient coordinator for Veterans Affairs who saw him on Thursdays described his appearance as “alarming,” noting that the formerly fit Army major could barely walk and that his “arms were locked in a 90-degree position and he never changed his facial expression throughout our talk.”
“He had breakfast Friday morning,” Ms. Ford said, “and later they found him dead.”
The Battle Creek facility called his sister that day. Ms. Jorgensen said she responded: “It’s too late. He’s gone.”
“We are saddened over the loss of Army Veteran Ian Fishback and extend our sincere condolences to his family,” said Terrence Hayes, a spokesman for the department. “V.A. has been in contact with the Fishback family to offer support and any appropriate services to assist them during this time. V.A. remains dedicated to making sure that all Veterans get the care they need in a timely fashion.”
During a panel discussion in 2015, Major Fishback spoke about the notion of moral injury in war and the toll “that comes when you’re in a situation where you have to watch your back, so to speak, with the people you’re supposed to be able to trust and try to navigate that over time”
“Trying to maintain your own virtue, if you will, in the face of a really bad situation is very challenging,” he said
3. Chinese Communist Party will outlive United States—state media editor
Hopefully this kind of propaganda will backfire on the CCP. Maybe Americans will take this as a challenge and threat.
Chinese Communist Party will outlive United States—state media editor
Newsweek · by John Feng · November 25, 2021
The outspoken chief editor of a nationalistic Chinese newspaper tweeted on Wednesday that the country's ruling party would definitely outlive the United States, in a viral response to a quip by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
Hu Xijin of the Global Times quoted a headline in which Dimon said his Wall Street investment bank would outlast the Communist Party of China (CPC).
"I made a joke the other day that the Communist Party is celebrating its 100th year—so is JPMorgan. I'd make a bet that we last longer," the chief executive told a Boston College event on Tuesday. "I can't say that in China. They are probably listening anyway," he said in comments that he quickly withdrew the next day.
With Dimon's words having been plastered all over Chinese social media service Weibo, where nationalistic sentiment has left users particularly sensitive to remarks that could be regarded as insulting to China or its ruling party, Hu wrote in a post: "[Dimon] should think long-term. Because I bet the Communist Party of China will definitely outlive the United States of America."
The post, liked 12,000 times, was followed up with a similar tweet in English: "Think long-term! And I bet the CPC will outlast the USA."
In a statement released by the bank on Wednesday, Dimon withdrew the remarks. "I regret and should not have made that comment. I was trying to emphasize the strength and longevity of our company."
In another clarification, the JPMorgan CEO said: "It's never right to joke about or denigrate any group of people, whether it's a country, its leadership, or any part of a society and culture. Speaking in that way can take away from constructive and thoughtful dialogue in society, which is needed now more than ever."
In response to Dimon's quasi-apology, Hu said on Weibo: "The CPC is far more successful in its field than JPMorgan is in its own. As a CPC member, I can understand they want to associate themselves with the CPC's popularity."
In August, the Chinese government granted JPMorgan unprecedented full foreign ownership of a securities brokerage—a sign of the bank's clout in the eyes of the country's financial planners and another indication of major American financial interests in the Chinese market.
Dimon's wide-ranging interview on Tuesday also included not-so-subtle hints about China's future financial safety and its links to the CPC leadership's wider geopolitical ambitions in the region with regard to Taiwan.
He said tensions across the Taiwan Strait amounted to "saber-rattling," and that he didn't know anyone who believes "something's gonna go wrong in Taiwan." The straight-talking Dimon warned that a Chinese military operation to capture Taiwan "could be their Vietnam."
"Body bags in any country have an adverse effect at one point, particularly when the objective may be irrelevant," Dimon said. "And so I think people will be very careful about what they're going to do, and I think it would be very painful for the Chinese to do it."
On Wednesday, China's Foreign Ministry sought to downplay Dimon's remarks, with spokesperson Zhao Lijian calling relevant reports a "publicity stunt." Dimon's comments on Taiwan weren't among those shared on Weibo.
Chinese President Xi Jinping raises his glass after a speech by Premier Li Keqiang at a reception at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on the eve of China's National Day on September 30, 2021. GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images
Newsweek · by John Feng · November 25, 2021
4. Over-the-Horizon Counterterrorism: New Name, Same Old Challenges
Excerpts:
The United States has ended the war in Afghanistan and now must shift away from reliance on international humanitarian law, which is too permissive when it comes to civilian casualties, particularly in urban areas. Instead, the Biden administration must shift toward compliance with international human rights law, where lethal action is permitted only to stop a temporally imminent threat to life. This is a very narrow view of necessity compared to just war standards. The guidance should also adopt a narrower view of proportionality, where the benefits and harms arising from the use of force are measured directly in terms of human life rather than military advantage or, worse, nebulous national security interests. Reverting to the Obama-era “near certainty” requirement that civilians will not be harmed is a starting point, though holding to this standard will be difficult without on-the-ground information.
Finally, the Biden administration must not impose over-the-horizon operations on the Afghan people against their will. This implies that the United States must seek Taliban consent for eventual drone strikes in the country, even when it is unpalatable to do so. Regardless of how the Taliban came to power, the group is now the de facto representative of the Afghan people. If the Taliban tries to sabotage US counterterrorism operations, then it must be held accountable. But a worse outcome would be to operate without permission on Afghan soil. For law enforcement to have any chance at being successful, cooperation with regional partners is essential.
Even when over-the-horizon force meets these standards, the onus is on policymakers to explain how such operations make Americans, the Afghan people, and the world safer. The ease of killing remotely has made limited force a politically expedient option short of war, foreclosing serious debate on less harmful means of defeating threats. At the same time, overreliance on drone strikes to preempt terrorist threats has stretched the concepts of necessity and imminence to the breaking point, lowering the threshold for the use of force. The Biden administration has an opportunity to correct these mistakes and end not just two decades of forever war, but also the mindset that has allowed unlimited, limited force to replace it.
Over-the-Horizon Counterterrorism: New Name, Same Old Challenges - Modern War Institute
The withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan offers the opportunity for a recalibration in the use of force abroad in what is America’s truly longest war—the global war on terror. The Biden administration is poised to increase its reliance on “over-the-horizon” operations—a euphuism for drone strikes and special operations force raids—to ensure that Afghanistan does not, once again, become a safe haven for transnational terrorism. In a speech marking the end of the war in Afghanistan, President Joseph Biden portrayed limited force as a moral alternative to the forever wars, a strategic choice to address terrorist threats in a disordered and divided world. But this framing forecloses serious debate on whether the United States should be resorting to force at all and to what ends. If we are to truly turn the page on the 9/11 era, it is imperative to interrogate the antecedents, assumptions, and principles underlying the over-the-horizon approach. Doing so raises concerns about whether a shift to limited force can really end the forever war, but also points to moral insights that may better guide the “targeted, precise strategy” President Biden has promised.
The Arc of Limited Force
In many ways, the strategic shift in Afghanistan is more of a course correction than a break from the past. Some might say a rebranding. Successive US presidents of both parties have turned to limited force as a less risky, less costly option—in terms of blood, treasure, and public opinion—than conventional warfare. Along the way, policymakers have routinized, institutionalized, and legitimized limited force. Even the terminology has been sanitized to make limited force morally palatable; the United States used to worry about assassinations, but as the lexicon has shifted over time—from “rolling attacks” to “lethal, targeted action” and now to “over-the-horizon” strikes—that worry has receded.
In Afghanistan, the use of limited force predated the 2001 invasion. After the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the Clinton administration considered multiple policy options to respond to the perpetrators—Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda—who were operating in then Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. A ground war was ruled out due to the expected costs and perceived lack of support from the international community, while special operations force raids were considered too dangerous. Instead, the Clinton administration relied on a combination of limited force and transnational law enforcement, launching cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda targets as part of a plan to conduct “rolling attacks” where the need and opportunity arose. As a legal matter, the mainstream view at the time was that these strikes were a violation of international law. Strategically, the policy did not keep al-Qaeda at bay.
The 9/11 attacks propelled the United States into all-out war in Afghanistan and later Iraq, even as the Bush administration embarked on a parallel, covert drone war that continues today. The hasty passage of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) provided a legal blank check for these abuses, allowing President Bush—and subsequent administrations—to target al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and “associated forces.” Increasingly permissive legal interpretations of this authority, including the claim that it covered groups that did not even exist at the time when it was written, gave the president controversial power to target those deemed a threat to national security even outside official war zones. This mandate, as well as the subsequent 2002 AUMF, which authorized the invasion of Iraq, widened the aperture of the conflict and provided a legal justification for the ever-expanding use of force abroad.
The Bush years exposed the risks and challenges of relying on limited force in an amorphous and poorly defined conflict. In the absence of uniforms and battlefields, distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate targets required near omniscience, particularly as farmers became insurgents and vice versa, transitioning seamlessly between combatant and civilian status. The US approach to this problem was to target unidentified individuals in “signature strikes” based on suspicious patterns of activity, while counting all killed military-age males in the strike zone as “combatants.”
These challenges persisted during the Obama administration, even as it sought to impose strict restrictions on direct action. President Barack Obama increased transparency on the drone program, required “near certainty” that civilians would not be harmed, and expressed a preference for relying on law enforcement—capture, rather than kill, operations—to mitigate terrorist threats. But thorny legal issues surrounding detention at Guantánamo Bay militated against capture, and the war paradigm remained in place as the drone program expanded. Ultimately, President Obama conducted ten times more drone strikes than the Bush administration, with an average of one strike every 5.4 days, although this tempo slowed dramatically in his second term. The restrictions on direct action, meanwhile, were enshrined in policy guidance rather than law, with the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs still firmly in place.
The Trump administration followed suit, albeit with fewer safeguards and transparency measures. President Donald Trump even introduced targeted drone strikes into interstate relations with the January 2020 targeted killing of Iranian Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani in Iraq. This strike led the United States to the brink of war with Iran, indirectly resulting in the deaths of 176 civilians when Tehran mistakenly shot down an airplane in the period of heightened tensions that ensued. The Trump administration claimed the strike was legal under the 2002 AUMF, notwithstanding the fact that Soleimani—as an Iranian official—did not meet the criterion of a “continuing threat posed by Iraq.” Rather than ending the forever wars, President Trump demonstrated a broader willingness to ignore fundamental constraints on the use of force.
The upshot is this: President Biden has promised to end the forever wars, while pledging to continue over-the-horizon operations. Those claims are in clear tension. As the Biden administration contemplates the guidelines for over-the-horizon force—the long-awaited presidential policy memorandum guidance—it is time to revisit past assumptions about limited force, charting a new path of restraint that bends toward the ideals of law enforcement.
Not Quite War, but Not Law Enforcement Either
With the failure to achieve military victory in Afghanistan, the law enforcement paradigm has once more come to the fore. One of the purported main lessons from Afghanistan, as Mary Kaldor observes, is that terrorism should be addressed solely through policing and intelligence work, rather than war.
Yet transitioning to the law enforcement paradigm may prove difficult. In spaces of contested and fragmented order, law enforcement is extremely challenging, if not impossible, to carry out. In parts of Somalia, for example, the state has only tenuous control over its territory, where al-Shabaab remains resilient. In Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has taken advantage of the chaos ensuing from the civil war to improve its ability to launch attacks. In cases such as these, capture, arrest, and other nonlethal options often appear foreclosed. The same, one worries, will come to be true in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The Islamic State in Afghanistan trains and hides in remote mountain regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Is it only a matter of time until the group becomes a threat to the US homeland, like al-Qaeda of generations past?
Despite emphasis on cooperation with local partners, the Biden administration has signaled it will continue to strike targets that it deems pose a threat to national security. But without boots on the ground drone operators will rely on less reliable intelligence, resulting in greater epistemic uncertainty concerning the imminence of threats and identity of targets. The recent US drone strike that killed ten innocent civilians—including seven children—after mistakenly identifying an Afghan aid worker as an Islamic State facilitator, attests to this risk.
While all casualties in war are tragic, there is something particularly wrongful about these deaths despite cavalier claims, initially, that it was a “righteous strike.” It’s not just that the casualties occurred in a civilian, densely populated area—which, even in war, should have militated against the strike. The strike and the fallout raise questions as to whether the Biden administration is committed to tightening the Trump administration’s “reasonable certainty” metric, which was a watered down version of the Obama administration’s ethical guidelines, to guard against civilian harm.
If this strike was an anomaly, a misguided strike undertaken because of the real fear that US troops were at risk in a war zone that was winding down, then maybe we don’t need to worry too much about the over-the-horizon strategy. Mistakes, unfortunately, happen in the fog of war. But drone strikes ought to be immune to the fog of war. If Biden’s over-the-horizon foreign policy means taking strikes whenever broader US interests are at stake, then the end of the war in Afghanistan would merely be a shift to war by another name.
A future in which the United States maintains a steady pace of over-the-horizon operations might not technically be war, but to pursue this strategy would cause familiar problems. For starters, it would arguably represent the aerial domination of another people outside a declared war zone. Holding civilian populations perpetually at risk in order to guarantee our own safety, however, is morally problematic because it violates the principles guiding the just use of limited force. Moreover, the lure of previous iterations of the over-the-horizon paradigm turned out to be chimera. The idea was that the use of limited force would lead to a “tipping point” where terrorist groups were largely defeated and local law enforcement would suffice to deal with threats to international peace and security. Drone strikes would thus no longer be needed. However, despite claims from Obama that al-Qaeda was “on the path to defeat,” the tipping point never really came. The United States has continued to wage war on terror. Under President Trump, drone strikes surged, but with less transparency. Rather than a shift back toward law enforcement, the war paradigm has persisted.
The challenge that the Biden administration now faces is this: Will such a trend continue? Or will there be a committed shift away from the war paradigm?
The Way Ahead
As the Biden administration revisits its counterterrorism strategy for Afghanistan, it must learn from these past mistakes. In particular, any over-the-horizon strategy that claims to end the forever wars should address the following concerns.
First, policymakers must set clear strategic objectives for counterterrorism operations and articulate how over-the-horizon operations advance them. What does the administration seek to accomplish through the use of limited force? In the past, the use of limited force amounted to years of sustained counterterrorism pressure to disrupt threats to the homeland. Continuing with this approach will not end the forever wars. Recent research on the ethics of limited force suggests that limited force aims to deter, compel, or contain threats, while taking measures to restore the conditions needed for law enforcement. Limited force, in other words, must be deployed in concert with diplomacy and other policy tools in order to advance strategic, not merely tactical, ends. A recent speech by the assistant to the president for homeland security, Dr. Liz Sherwood-Randall, expressed something along this line, but we’ve heard such overtures before. To avoid past precedents, drone strikes need to become a reluctant last, as opposed to first, resort of over-the-horizon counterterrorism policy.
Second, even when limited force is used strategically, there must be stricter procedures in place surrounding target selection, identification, and verification. The worry is that the Biden administration’s over-the-horizon counterterrorism strategy will amount to more of the same old thing. However, the just war standards that used to govern actions in Afghanistan are no longer applicable because the war has ended. More restrictive criteria are needed.
While it may be impossible to have clean over-the-horizon strikes, steps can be taken to attenuate the risks. Individuals should not be targeted solely because they are (alleged) members of a particular group; there must be additional evidence that they qua individuals pose an unjust and imminent threat. In other words, individuals should be targeted only if they pose a threat to life, the threat is temporally imminent, and the use of force is necessary and proportionate. These instances, if they exist, will be rare. The amorphous views of imminence characterizing previous drone policies needs to be abandoned in favor of alternative policy tools that can mitigate terrorist threats in the medium to long term.
This means the United States must end the practice of status-based targeting and pattern-of-activity strikes—practices that led drone operators to target an aid worker who was carrying water jugs, not bombs near an alleged terrorist safe house. Instead, policymakers should be able to identify who it is targeting at all times and possess evidence (such as intercepts) that indicate that the target has both the intent and capability to carry out planned attacks. The United States defended this mistake as tragic but not illegal under the laws of war, but the ethics of limited force should be held to stricter standards when it comes to civilian casualties.
The United States has ended the war in Afghanistan and now must shift away from reliance on international humanitarian law, which is too permissive when it comes to civilian casualties, particularly in urban areas. Instead, the Biden administration must shift toward compliance with international human rights law, where lethal action is permitted only to stop a temporally imminent threat to life. This is a very narrow view of necessity compared to just war standards. The guidance should also adopt a narrower view of proportionality, where the benefits and harms arising from the use of force are measured directly in terms of human life rather than military advantage or, worse, nebulous national security interests. Reverting to the Obama-era “near certainty” requirement that civilians will not be harmed is a starting point, though holding to this standard will be difficult without on-the-ground information.
Finally, the Biden administration must not impose over-the-horizon operations on the Afghan people against their will. This implies that the United States must seek Taliban consent for eventual drone strikes in the country, even when it is unpalatable to do so. Regardless of how the Taliban came to power, the group is now the de facto representative of the Afghan people. If the Taliban tries to sabotage US counterterrorism operations, then it must be held accountable. But a worse outcome would be to operate without permission on Afghan soil. For law enforcement to have any chance at being successful, cooperation with regional partners is essential.
Even when over-the-horizon force meets these standards, the onus is on policymakers to explain how such operations make Americans, the Afghan people, and the world safer. The ease of killing remotely has made limited force a politically expedient option short of war, foreclosing serious debate on less harmful means of defeating threats. At the same time, overreliance on drone strikes to preempt terrorist threats has stretched the concepts of necessity and imminence to the breaking point, lowering the threshold for the use of force. The Biden administration has an opportunity to correct these mistakes and end not just two decades of forever war, but also the mindset that has allowed unlimited, limited force to replace it.
Daniel Brunstetter is an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. The author of dozens of publications on the ethics of war, his most recent book with Oxford University Press (2021) is Just and Unjust Uses of Limited Force.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Airman 1st Class Christian Clausen, US Air Force
5. After 9/11, the United States Didn’t Fight a Twenty-Year War, but Twenty One-Year Wars. But What Does that Actually Mean?
I doubt we will ever again see enlistments of "the duration plus six months" unless there is another world war. But I suppose the real debate is between individual replacements versus unit rotations.
But whatever you think, the concluding sentence is one that we should all take to heart. I am thankful that we do have so many of the dedicated servants still in uniform (and many in civilian clothes as well!)
Conclusion:
In any case, the point is not to argue that a rotational warfighting model is inherently bad—even if, in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, it clearly didn’t work. Rather, the point is this: we cannot afford not to learn from the past twenty years of wars. Too often, the passage of time chips away at an insightful reflection on the US military’s experience, or a sensible and useful distillation of complex subjects, or a narrative that pithily described an operational environment or strategic challenge, until it becomes detached from the deeper understanding on which it is founded and obscures any apparent need to dig deeper. It could be “twenty one-year wars.” Or it could be “fight tonight,” or “modernization,” or “great power competition.” What the US military needs most is dedicated servants who don’t stop asking what it means, challenging assumptions, recording their views, and continuing the discussion.
After 9/11, the United States Didn’t Fight a Twenty-Year War, but Twenty One-Year Wars. But What Does that Actually Mean? - Modern War Institute
It’s 5:31 pm on November 27, 2003. A US plane touches down at Baghdad International Airport—hardly a unique occurrence at the time. The two US Air Force pilots slow the aircraft and eventually bring it to a halt. This one, though, doesn’t sport the same dull gray paint job as the seemingly endless numbers of cargo aircraft ferrying supplies to the tens of thousands of US and coalition troops in the country and the materiel to fuel the war effort. This aircraft bears the distinctive, blue and white livery of Air Force One. President George W. Bush is onboard. He’s visiting US servicemembers for Thanksgiving.
Few observers at the time knew what a precedent Bush was setting. He would visit troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan several more times before leaving office. His successors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, would, as well. Nobody on the plane that day likely expected that US servicemembers would be deployed to America’s post-9/11 wars for another seventeen Thanksgivings. The Iraq War was eight months old, and while signs of the emerging insurgency were there, conditions hadn’t descended to the brink of full-fledged sectarian civil war, as they soon would. Perhaps a few people predicted that the US military would be in Iraq in substantial force for the better part of a decade (with follow-on troops in the country to support the fight against ISIS for another handful of years), but US officials certainly didn’t publicly expect such a long-term commitment. Meanwhile, the Afghanistan War existed on the comparative strategic periphery. The total number of US servicemembers there in late 2003 was about a tenth of the number in Iraq, casualties were relatively low, and the fighting was handled disproportionately by special operations forces. And yet, sixteen years after President Bush stepped off of Air Force One in Baghdad to share a turkey dinner with troops, President Donald Trump did the same thing with US forces in Afghanistan.
The first stop during Bush’s two-and-a-half-hour visit in 2003 was a dining facility, where about six hundred soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division and 1st Armored Division were gathered for dinner. If he had returned for Thanksgiving the following year, they would have been different soldiers from different units. The year after that, different ones again. This was a rotational war—a fact that would have lasting consequences on its conduct and results.
Sixty years earlier, in November 1943, if President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to share Thanksgiving dinner with the troops, he might have done so with soldiers wearing the same 82nd Airborne and 1st Armored Division patches that adorned the sleeves of Bush’s dinner companions in 2003. He would have found many of them along the Gustav Line in Italy. If he wanted to do so again the following year, he could have found the same units, with many of the same soldiers, still fighting in Europe—the 1st Armored Division in northern Italy’s Po River valley and the 82nd Airborne now in France.
The simplified narrative contrasting these two models holds that during World War II, American servicemembers knew they wouldn’t be going home until the war was won, while those who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only needed to look at a patch chart—essentially the master plan forecasting which units would deploy, when, and where—to see when they would be leaving and who would be replacing them. The reality is slightly more complicated, to be sure, but the general idea is accurate. After 9/11, America would fight its wars on a rotational model. Two decades of war. Two decades of new units arriving and experienced units leaving. Two decades of Thanksgiving dinners eaten by different men and women wearing different unit patches.
Why does this matter? As an observation, it’s hardly remarkable. It’s just another way of saying what many have already said: that the United States didn’t fight a twenty-year war in Afghanistan, but rather twenty one-year wars. This description has become so common that it’s difficult to pin down who said it first (although whoever did so likely cribbed from John Paul Vann’s description of the Vietnam War). But that’s the problem. It’s used as if its meaning is self-evident. It’s used so often that it risks losing whatever intrinsic explanatory power it once had, inching ever closer to an empty platitude that everyone accepts, nobody questions, and—worst—relieves of us our professional obligation to probe deeply into the reasons that twenty years of war, trillions of dollars, and thousands of fatalities and many more left wounded led to such middling strategic outcomes.
So, what does it actually mean that the United States fought twenty one-year wars in Afghanistan (and another succession of such wars in Iraq)? Is it inherently problematic? After all, four runners on a 4×100-meter relay team will typically finish a lap of the track before a single runner can do so alone. Fresh legs and a lower heart rate take over, superior to the single runner’s increasing heart rate and tiring muscles. Why can’t a brigade combat team do everything it can and hand the mission over to a new unit before it exhausts its resources and combat power, with the fresh unit carrying the progress forward and building on it? In theory, it can. But the US experience over the past twenty years shows just how far practice can diverge from theory.
The rotational model led, with varying degrees of directness, to several key features that would define the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. First, it created a situation in which one unit would replace another, but with a vastly different approach. For the most part, a maneuver unit had only so much leeway in terms of selecting its objectives and the areas that it would prioritize. These typically were enshrined in the lines of effort defined by higher headquarters. But a commander who was wholly committed to the counterinsurgency model laid out in US doctrine from 2006 onward would lead a unit through a deployment that looked very different from one who held steadfast to the idea that US combat forces’ job was to close with and destroy the enemy. And here’s the thing: those two archetypes existed in both wars. The result was too many swings between kinetic and nonkinetic operations, key leader engagements and firefights, funding projects and launching raids.
Second, even where this wasn’t the case, even when lines of effort were consistent and their relative prioritization was generally unchanged despite the turnover in units, there were still challenges. For one, the US military largely wrote its doctrine for these wars on the fly. In many ways, doing so was a remarkable feat, but it also meant that many of the finer points—the details that don’t get captured in doctrine but the importance of which becomes extraordinarily apparent on the battlefield—lagged. This is why, for example, the Army was still producing intelligence officers in 2007 who were well prepared for a Fulda Gap scenario against a Soviet attack but decidedly less so for the social network mapping, pattern-of-life analysis, and both lethal and nonlethal targeting they would have to learn as soon as they deployed, where those were the capabilities that mattered. Battlefield problems were being solved with battlefield solutions, developed by units in contact with both the enemy and noncombatants, and much of that ad hoc knowledge was lost during the transition period between outgoing and incoming units. This issue was only compounded by a failure to digitally maintain hard-earned lessons that later units could easily access and learn from. Even if the same unit deployed again (which most did, and soon), they would be starting fresh.
Third, units became reactive in a way that didn’t account for broader contexts. What does a pair of bombs hidden in fruit carts in Lashkar Gah mean to a unit in the middle of its six-, nine-, or twelve- month deployment there? In my experience, it means a sudden fixation on fruit carts. What does it mean if you look at the entire history of the US-led war in Afghanistan and find an extraordinarily small number of bombs planted in fruit carts? Something very different. The US military entered a forest in Afghanistan in 2001, and another one in Iraq in 2003. And then we spent too many years in each successively and myopically focusing our microscopes on individual trees.
Fourth, the rotational model encouraged a focus on short-term goals. The cynical explanation for this is highlighted by a document that was making the rounds among Army officers in Iraq during my first deployment there. In it, an anonymous junior officer described his or her reasons for getting out of the Army. Among them were the differences between what the document defined as “GWOT officers” (those who commissioned and had served during the post-9/11 wars) and “‘90s officers” (those whose service predated those wars). The ‘90s officers, the junior officer lamented, viewed the wars as the proving grounds where promotions were earned—a deployment was the same opportunity for officers to demonstrate their capabilities as rotations at combat training centers had been previously. Why, then, would any officer undertake to achieve something that could not be completed during his or her deployment? Why give your replacement the credit? Even a more generous view of motives, though, yields an outcome that is not that dissimilar. Leaders who truly wanted to do something good during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wanted to leave knowing they had done so. How best to do that than to set goals that are achievable before redeployment? Existing in the middle of a long-term effort that already has poor metrics by which to gauge its success, without being able to pinpoint how you advanced the ball down the field, is hard.
There are certainly other negative impacts of the decision to deploy US forces in the manner that we did for the past twenty years. There might also be benefits. It’s hard to imagine, for example, a US populace that would have accepted long wars fought by soldiers and units deployed indefinitely, so the rotational model arguably gave US leaders the time to pursue long-term political objectives—even if that pursuit didn’t achieve much.
Of course, this model and its World War II counterpart weren’t the only options on the menu. In the Vietnam War, the individual replacement policy kept Army units largely in place in the country, with those units manned by a perpetual churn of new soldiers. Perhaps a model that similarly enabled institutional knowledge to be preserved, while also leveraging the comparative benefits of an all-volunteer force over a conscripted one, would have achieved more. In retrospect, though, the rotational model looks almost inevitable. Units were initially deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq for short periods of time because the specified objectives were presumed to be achievable in short periods of time. When they proved elusive—and when those objectives changed to incorporate what amounted to nation building—the US presence needed to be extended. One unit replaced another, inertia played its role, and twenty years passed. Ultimately, if Iraq and Afghanistan were the types of wars that could be won with enough weapons and enough people to fire them, rotating new units into each theater would have worked. But they weren’t those types of wars, and it didn’t.
In any case, the point is not to argue that a rotational warfighting model is inherently bad—even if, in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, it clearly didn’t work. Rather, the point is this: we cannot afford not to learn from the past twenty years of wars. Too often, the passage of time chips away at an insightful reflection on the US military’s experience, or a sensible and useful distillation of complex subjects, or a narrative that pithily described an operational environment or strategic challenge, until it becomes detached from the deeper understanding on which it is founded and obscures any apparent need to dig deeper. It could be “twenty one-year wars.” Or it could be “fight tonight,” or “modernization,” or “great power competition.” What the US military needs most is dedicated servants who don’t stop asking what it means, challenging assumptions, recording their views, and continuing the discussion.
John Amble is the editorial director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
6. The Taiwan Foreign Policy Fetish – OpEd
A view from Australia.
Conclusion:
Officials in Beijing have every reason to scoff at invocations of international law and its sacred bonds, especially when they come from a minister who shows no evidence of reading, let alone awareness, in the field. Australia has had, over the years, a rich history of reading international law the way any enterprising gangster and rule-breaker might wish to do. Bugging diplomats and representatives of a friendly, impoverished nation under false pretences for economic gain (East Timor); invading a country (Iraq) without any security justification in a crime against peace; and indefinitely locking up asylum seekers and refugees who arrive by boat, are all proud instances of how Australia, and the likes of Dutton, observe and disparage the ius gentium.
In this, the Taiwan fetish becomes a Cold War iteration in the haunted, twisted imagination of certain policy makers, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to the war drummers in the Morrison government. Nonsense flows easily when abstractions and hypotheticals can be passed around with such ease. Sweetly and pathetically, Australian politicians are again reminding us that blood lust, especially from those who have the least reason to fight, remains unquenchable.
The Taiwan Foreign Policy Fetish – OpEd
Australian foreign policy towards Taiwan, as things stand, is a distant fantasy in floating mist. There is little to connect them, but Australia’s political classes have a habit of fabricating relations with those it cares little for, nor understands, all in the name of forced obedience. For decades, a puppy loyal Australia has committed forces without condition or qualification, refusing to understand the circumstances of their deployment, or the people who they will either kill or die for. The result is an astonishing global deployment of personnel with admirable ignorance to theatres most of its citizens would fail to name.
The recent Taiwan fetish risks continuing this trend. Australia’s Defence Minister, Peter Dutton, is a figure who has fallen head over heels with the latest, potential casus belli. Known by the late and very mischievous Bob Ellis as the simian sadist, Dutton is adamant that Australia will find itself at war over a bit of real estate whose history he has no knowledge of. “It would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action,” Dutton recently told The Australian. “And again, I think we should be very frank and honest about that, look at all the facts and circumstances without pre-committing, and maybe there are circumstances where we wouldn’t take up that option, (but) I can’t conceive of those circumstances.”
In saying that it would be “inconceivable” that Australia would not find itself at war with the United States over Taiwan, the unimaginative, already pre-committed Dutton received the attention of China’s Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian, who called his comments “extremely absurd and irresponsible”, the mark of someone “obsessed with the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudices.”
Dutton’s execrable chest thumping was inspired by typically vague remarks from Australia’s paternal ally, who had recently promised, along with the United Kingdom, submarines with nuclear propulsion as part of the new AUKUS security agreement. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking at a New York Times forum earlier this month, was pressed, as previous occupants of his office have, on whether Washington would defend Taiwan in the event of a conflict.
Blinken’s response had a bit of everything: dovish caution, chicken hawk pretence, hypocritical babble. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which obligates the US to supply Taipei military equipment for reasons of self-defence but leaves the issue of a firm security commitment open, shaped his initial remarks. Making sure Taiwan had “the means to defend itself” was “the best deterrent against any very, very, very unfortunate action that might be contemplated by China.”
This did not prevent the United States from lending a hand to “sure that we preserve peace and stability in that part of the world”. A “unilateral action to use force” by any power would constitute a threat to that peace and security and, in that event, “many countries, both in the region and beyond … would take action in the event that happens.” US intervention would take place to defend that “international rules-based order” developed by Washington against those who dared challenge it, “whether it’s China or anyone else”.
In her November 23 speech to the National Security College at the Australian National University outlining the purpose of Australia’s foreign policy, Opposition front bencher Senator Penny Wong gave few surprises. As is often the case with the Australian Labor Party when suffering in opposition, painful, even constipated caution, is preferred over clarity and conviction. “We must expand the choices and options available to us, to enable management of differences without escalation of conflict.”
But Wong did, at the very least, venture towards some sane ground in taking issue with Dutton’s assertion that Australia would “join” a war over Taiwan with Washington with no conditions. This was “wildly out of step with the strategy long adopted by Australia and our principle ally.” While Prime Minister Scott Morrison had avoided “the same febrile language” as his defence minister, Dutton was “amping up war, rather than working to maintain longstanding policy to preserve the status quo – as advocated by the Taiwanese leader, Tsai-Ing Wen.”
Dutton, simmering and seething such observations, sallied with a rebuttal, encouraging all who cared to hear him that China-the-regional-monster was the problem, rather than his own particular lust for war. “The Chinese Communist Party has a presence in 20 different locations in the South China Sea,” he stated. There were “butting up against the Japanese shipping vessels in the East China Sea”. The international rule of law, Dutton proclaimed, “should prevail and people, including our country and every other country, should adhere to that law.”
Wong had been, according to Dutton, “irresponsible” and suggested that the Labor Party was “walking away” from the AUKUS security arrangement. The glue binding the three states, madly made and foolishly sought, has certainly increased the likelihood of Australian participation in any conflict with Chinese forces in the event the US are involved. The submarine promise is merely a sentimental, spectral hook.
Officials in Beijing have every reason to scoff at invocations of international law and its sacred bonds, especially when they come from a minister who shows no evidence of reading, let alone awareness, in the field. Australia has had, over the years, a rich history of reading international law the way any enterprising gangster and rule-breaker might wish to do. Bugging diplomats and representatives of a friendly, impoverished nation under false pretences for economic gain (East Timor); invading a country (Iraq) without any security justification in a crime against peace; and indefinitely locking up asylum seekers and refugees who arrive by boat, are all proud instances of how Australia, and the likes of Dutton, observe and disparage the ius gentium.
In this, the Taiwan fetish becomes a Cold War iteration in the haunted, twisted imagination of certain policy makers, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to the war drummers in the Morrison government. Nonsense flows easily when abstractions and hypotheticals can be passed around with such ease. Sweetly and pathetically, Australian politicians are again reminding us that blood lust, especially from those who have the least reason to fight, remains unquenchable.
Binoy Kampmark
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
7. Philippines rejects China's demand to remove ship from shoal
Is this the spark that ignites a bigger fire?
Excerpts:
Greg Poling of the U.S.-based Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which closely monitors the South China Sea conflicts, said China’s recent move may have been aimed at testing the response of the Philippines and its allies if it blockades the Sierra Madre anytime.
“I expect this will happen again and, eventually, China will make a concerted effort to maintain a blockade to force Manila to withdraw,” Poling said.
Philippines rejects China's demand to remove ship from shoal | AP News
AP · by JIM GOMEZ · November 25, 2021
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The Philippines’ defense chief rejected on Thursday China’s renewed demand that it remove its outpost on a disputed South China Sea shoal and said Chinese coast guard ships should leave the area and stop blocking Manila’s supply boats.
Philippine forces use a grounded warship, the BRP Sierra Madre, as an outpost on the submerged but strategic shoal that is at the center of an ongoing dispute with China.
Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said the Second Thomas Shoal lies within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines under the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which China has ratified. He said a 2016 ruling by a U.N.-backed arbitration tribunal also invalidated China’s claims to the busy waterway, leaving them without any legal basis.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the Philippines Wednesday to “honor its commitment” and remove its grounded vessel on Ren’ai Jiao, the name Beijing uses for the shoal, which Filipinos refer to as Ayungin. Chinese coast guard ships have allowed Manila’s boats to bring food and other supplies to Filipino forces at the shoal for humanitarian reasons, it said.
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But defense chief Lorenzana told reporters he was not aware of any Philippine government commitment to remove its navy ship, which has been grounded upon the shoal since 1999.
“We can do whatever we want there and it is they who are actually trespassing,” he said.
Chinese coast guard ships have surrounded the shoal in a years-long territorial standoff and tried to block Philippine supply boats in past years. In the latest confrontation, Chinese coast guard ships used water cannons to forcibly turn back two supply boats manned by Philippine navy personnel last week, sparking outrage and warnings from Manila.
Following the Chinese blockade, the United States said it was standing by the Philippines and reiterated that an armed attack on Philippine public vessels in the South China Sea would invoke U.S. mutual defense commitments under the two allies’ 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.
The Philippine navy successfully transported supplies and fresh personnel to the Sierra Madre this week then left without any major incident after Lorenzana talked with China’s ambassador to Manila. President Rodrigo Duterte, who has nurtured close ties with Beijing, angrily condemned the Chinese blockade in a video summit of Southeast Asian leaders with Chinese President Xi Jingping. Xi did not specifically react to Duterte’s remarks but said China will not bully its smaller neighbors.
It was the latest flareup of long-simmering disputes in one of the world’s busiest waterways, where China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have overlapping claims.
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President Joe Biden has assured U.S. allies that American forces will continue to patrol the disputed waters to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight and regional stability. China has warned the U.S. to stay away from what Beijing considers a purely Asian dispute.
Greg Poling of the U.S.-based Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which closely monitors the South China Sea conflicts, said China’s recent move may have been aimed at testing the response of the Philippines and its allies if it blockades the Sierra Madre anytime.
“I expect this will happen again and, eventually, China will make a concerted effort to maintain a blockade to force Manila to withdraw,” Poling said.
The World War II-era Sierra Madre is now effectively a shipwreck but the Philippine military has not decommissioned it. That makes the rust-encrusted ship an extension of the government and means any assault on the ship is tantamount to an external attack against the Philippines.
AP · by JIM GOMEZ · November 25, 2021
8. CIA director warns Russian spies of ‘consequences’ if they are behind ‘Havana Syndrome’ incidents
CIA director warns Russian spies of ‘consequences’ if they are behind ‘Havana Syndrome’ incidents
CIA Director William J. Burns delivered a confidential warning to Russia’s top intelligence services that they will face “consequences” if they are behind the string of mysterious health incidents known as “Havana Syndrome” afflicting U.S. diplomats and spies around the world, according to U.S. officials familiar with the exchange.
During a visit to Moscow earlier this month, Burns raised the issue with the leadership of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, and the country’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. He told them that causing U.S. personnel and their family members to suffer severe brain damage and other debilitating ailments would go beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior for a “professional intelligence service,” said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive conversations.
The warning did not assign blame for what U.S. officials are calling “anomalous health incidents,” or AHIs. The fact that Burns formulated the warning by saying “if” suggests that after four years of investigations across multiple administrations, the U.S. government remains unable to determine a cause of the unusual incidents. Nevertheless, the director’s decision to raise the possibility of Russian involvement directly to his counterparts in Moscow underscored the deep suspicion the CIA has of Kremlin culpability.
The CIA declined to comment on Burns’s warning to the Russians, which has not been previously reported. The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
Moscow has previously denied any involvement in the Havana Syndrome incidents, a phenomenon named after the Cuban capital where U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers first reported unusual and varied symptoms — from headaches and vision problems to dizziness and brain injuries — that started in 2016.
The main purpose of Burns’s trip to Moscow was to put the Kremlin on notice that Washington was watching its troop buildup on the border of Ukraine and would not tolerate a military attack on the country, officials said.
His appearance in Moscow at the behest of President Biden was designed to convey Washington’s seriousness. The CIA chief — a former deputy secretary of state and ambassador to Russia — has handled some of the president’s most sensitive missions, including senior-level engagement with the Taliban after its takeover of Afghanistan.
The inability to determine a cause of the health incidents has rankled members of Congress and infuriated the U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials who say they suffer from the affliction.
The Biden administration has sought to demonstrate that it is taking the cases seriously and has encouraged employees across the federal government to report any potential health issues they may be experiencing. In recent months, two senior U.S. officials were replaced after being accused of failing to take the incidents seriously enough: the CIA station chief in Vienna, where dozens of U.S. spies and diplomats have reported AHIs, and Ambassador Pamela Spratlen, the State Department’s top official overseeing Havana Syndrome cases.
After Spratlen’s exit, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appointed Jonathan Moore, a career diplomat, to head the Health Incident Response Task Force and another senior Foreign Service officer, Margaret Uyehara, to ensure that those affected by the ailment receive medical care.
Burns has publicly described the incidents as “attacks,” and some U.S. officials suspect they are the work of Russian operatives. Other officials have attributed them to a psychogenic illness experienced by individuals working in a high-stress environment. Those blaming Russia speculate that it could be using energy weapons to sicken U.S. personnel. Others have noted that there is scant evidence connecting the use of energy weapons to the symptoms reported.
In July, Burns placed a senior CIA officer who played a leading role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden in charge of the task force investigating the cause of the illnesses.
In August, two U.S. employees in Hanoi reported symptoms just before Vice President Harris arrived in the Vietnamese capital on an official diplomatic trip. The diagnoses delayed her visit by a few hours.
In September, an intelligence officer traveling with Burns in India reported symptoms of Havana Syndrome and required medical attention, current and former officials said. Some saw that incident as a message to CIA leaders that they, too, can be targeted anywhere.
More than 200 health incidents have been reported around the world in the past five years, on every continent except Antarctica, yet there is no clear pattern explaining them. In some cases, U.S. employees have reported symptoms related to Havana Syndrome but upon further diagnosis the ailments were attributed to other factors, said a senior administration official.
The mysterious incidents prompted rare bipartisan support behind the Havana Act, a bill Biden signed into law last month that creates a federal program to compensate U.S. diplomats, intelligence officers and other officials who have suffered traumatic brain injuries associated with Havana Syndrome.
“We are bringing to bear the full resources of the U.S. government to make available first-class medical care to those affected and to get to the bottom of these incidents, including to determine the cause and who is responsible,” Biden said at the signing.
The Havana Syndrome mystery adds another layer of complexity to the U.S.-Russia relationship as the Biden administration tries to determine whether Moscow’s buildup of troops along the border with Ukraine is muscle-flexing or the preamble to a full-scale invasion of the country.
The administration is seeking to de-escalate the situation amid calls from Republicans to send more military aid to Ukraine.
“We’re not sure exactly what Mr. Putin is up to,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last week
The past several weeks have seen a flurry of diplomatic contacts among U.S., Russian and Ukrainian officials. Besides Burns’s discussions with FSB and SVR officials, he also phoned Russian President Vladimir Putin while in Moscow and met with the head of Russia‘s national security council, Nikolai Patrushev. Blinken met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, this month, and a senior State Department official was recently dispatched to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
Shane Harris contributed to this report.
9. U.S. Lawmakers Coming to Taiwan on Military-Focused Trip -Report
U.S. Lawmakers Coming to Taiwan on Military-Focused Trip -Report
By U.S. News & World Report2 min
FILE PHOTO: A demonstrator holds flags of Taiwan and the United States in support of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen during an stop-over after her visit to Latin America in Burlingame, California, U.S., January 14, 2017. REUTERS/Stephen LamReuters
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Five members of the U.S. House of Representatives are expected to arrive in Taiwan on Friday for a short trip focused on meetings with the island's defence ministry, Taiwan's official Central News Agency reported on Thursday.
The trip comes as China has stepped up military and political pressure to assert its sovereignty claims over the island, spurring anger in Taipei where the government has vowed to defend Taiwan's freedom and democracy.
The report said the delegation would be made up of Mark Takano, chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, and Colin Allred, Elissa Slotkin, Sara Jacobs and Nancy Mace, and would also meet Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen.
Taiwan's Foreign and Defence Ministries declined to comment. The de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The five lawmakers are currently in East Asia on a Thanksgiving trip to Japan and South Korea.
It would be the second trip of lawmakers to Taiwan this month.
China's military conducted a combat readiness https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-opposes-us-legislators-visiting-taiwan-by-military-plane-state-media-2021-11-09 patrol in the direction of the Taiwan Strait earlier this month, after its defence ministry condemned a visit to Taiwan by a U.S. congressional delegation it said had arrived on a military aircraft.
The United States like most countries has no official ties with Taiwan but is the democratically-ruled island's most important international backer and arms supplier, to Beijing's anger.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Kim Coghill)
Copyright 2021 Thomson Reuters.
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10. U.S. Invitation to Taiwan for Democracy Summit Tests Ties With China
Excerpts:
Washington has in recent years sought to bolster Taiwan, increasing contacts among higher level officials and maintaining robust arms sales. Military cooperation has edged up, with the U.S. deploying a small contingent of soldiers to the island to train Taiwanese soldiers.
The moves have alarmed Beijing. The Communist Party leadership has vowed to take Taiwan by force if necessary to complete a reunification of the country. Beijing has for decades forced governments to choose between recognizing it or Taipei, isolating Taiwan and keeping it out of international agencies like the World Health Organization.
Last month, when China marked the 50th anniversary of the United Nations’ recognition of Beijing as China’s legal government, Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement touting Taiwan as “a democratic success story” and calling for broad support for its “robust, meaningful participation throughout the U.N. system and in the international community.”
Taiwan’s inclusion in the democracies summit is supposed to highlight its vibrant democracy and respect for human rights, Taiwanese and U.S. officials said.
“We believe that Taiwan can make meaningful commitments toward the summit’s objectives of countering authoritarianism, fighting against corruption, and advancing respect for human rights at home and abroad,” the administration official said.
U.S. Invitation to Taiwan for Democracy Summit Tests Ties With China
Biden administration is expanding push to raise Taiwan’s international profile opposed by Beijing
WSJ · by Courtney McBride and Alex Leary
The stepped-up engagement between the two has triggered consternation in Beijing. While China security specialists said the invitation from Washington isn’t precedent-breaking, it is likely to irk the Chinese leadership.
In a virtual summit meeting earlier this month, President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping discussed differences over Taiwan, but largely decided to look beyond that and other strains from human rights to security to cool down the hostility between the two powers.
Taiwan’s invitation to the democracy summit and a recent statement by Mr. Biden that he has considered a diplomatic boycott of February’s Winter Olympics in Beijing could mar the air of cooperation.
Mr. Xi, in their meeting, warned Mr. Biden against dividing the world into different ideologies and camps, saying it would bring back the dangers of the Cold War, according to the Chinese foreign ministry’s summary of the meeting.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday that China was opposed to the democracy-summit invitation and called on the U.S. to stop providing a platform for what he said were forces promoting Taiwan’s independence. “Playing with the fire of ‘Taiwan independence,’ you will eventually get burned,” Mr. Zhao said at a media briefing in Beijing.
A Biden administration official said the democracy summit didn’t come up during the Biden-Xi summit and that the administration’s position was that the U.S. would compete and disagree with China in some instances while cooperating on climate change and other global issues.
“Our China policy has been consistent since Day 1,” the official said. “These things are happening simultaneously with each other. It’s a multifaceted, complex dynamic.”
President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a virtual meeting Nov. 15.
Photo: JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund, said the inclusion of Taiwan doesn’t establish a precedent for treatment of Taiwan, noting Taipei was included in the global coalition to defeat the militant group Islamic State.
The Biden administration is also likely to have avoided crossing a Beijing red line by keeping Taiwan’s participation at a lower official level, Ms. Glaser said. Attendees for many countries will include heads of government. Taiwan will be represented by its de facto ambassador in Washington, Bi-Khim Hsiao, and by Digital Minister Audrey Tang, the Taiwan Foreign Ministry said.
“China will likely respond in some way, but it will not lead to a major setback in the relationship,” Ms. Glaser said. “Taiwan will not be referred to as a country, its president will not participate.”
Washington has in recent years sought to bolster Taiwan, increasing contacts among higher level officials and maintaining robust arms sales. Military cooperation has edged up, with the U.S. deploying a small contingent of soldiers to the island to train Taiwanese soldiers.
The moves have alarmed Beijing. The Communist Party leadership has vowed to take Taiwan by force if necessary to complete a reunification of the country. Beijing has for decades forced governments to choose between recognizing it or Taipei, isolating Taiwan and keeping it out of international agencies like the World Health Organization.
Last month, when China marked the 50th anniversary of the United Nations’ recognition of Beijing as China’s legal government, Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement touting Taiwan as “a democratic success story” and calling for broad support for its “robust, meaningful participation throughout the U.N. system and in the international community.”
Taiwan’s inclusion in the democracies summit is supposed to highlight its vibrant democracy and respect for human rights, Taiwanese and U.S. officials said.
“We believe that Taiwan can make meaningful commitments toward the summit’s objectives of countering authoritarianism, fighting against corruption, and advancing respect for human rights at home and abroad,” the administration official said.
—Chao Deng contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Courtney McBride and Alex Leary
11. Who was snubbed, who snuck through: Here's the list of invitees to Biden's democracy summit
Full list below.
Who was snubbed, who snuck through: Here's the list of invitees to Biden's democracy summit
With democracy in recession around the world, President Joe Biden made a campaign pledge to convene a summit of democracies in his first year in office to promote human rights, counter corruption and discuss ways to strengthen democracies against authoritarian models that have gained strength in recent years.
His first "Summit of Democracy" will convene virtually on Dec. 9-10, and now the administration is revealing who is invited -- 110 participants in total, from every corner of the globe.
Like any big party, there are some controversial invitees and notable exclusions, and the guest list has already sparked some anger.
Ann Wang/Reuters
A man cycles past a Taiwan flag in Taipei, Taiwan, Nov. 16, 2021.
Most controversially, the Biden administration invited Taiwan, which China considers a breakaway province and which most countries don't recognize as independent -- the U.S. included. The island nation has been self-ruled since 1949, flourishing into a vibrant democracy in recent decades, and the U.S. has drawn increasingly close to it politically and economically while still recognizing mainland Chinese government as the sole legal government of China and acknowledging its claim that Taiwan is part of China -- the so-called "one China" policy.
Beijing was already irked by the summit itself, which it has cast as an example of the U.S. using "the cloak of democracy" as "a cover, a tool... to advance its geostrategic goals." But the invitation to Taiwan brought an even stronger response amid months of high tensions across the Taiwan Strait, including repeated Chinese incursions into Taiwan's air defense zone.
"Playing with 'Taiwan Independence' will eventually lead to fire," warned Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian during a briefing Wednesday.
Biden has also courted controversy on that issue by telling reporters this year that the U.S. would come to Taiwan's defense if China invaded, despite a decades-old policy of leaving that question ambiguous. Instead, the U.S. has a commitment to boosting Taiwan's defensive capabilities, with the Trump administration announcing billions in arms sales in its final year.
Biden has continued to foster closer U.S.-Taiwan ties, including by holding a high-level economic dialogue this month and easing restrictions on meetings between U.S. and Taiwanese officials.
That's in part because he sees Taiwan as an important counter to China's authoritarian model in the region. Chinese leader Xi Jinping "doesn't have a democratic -- with a small 'd' -- bone in his body," Biden said in March, and he's spoken often about the competition between democracies and authoritarian governments as the test of the 21st century.
Lintao Zhang/Getty Images, FILE
Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Vice President Joe Biden, left, inside the Great Hall of the People on Dec. 4, 2013, in Beijing.
But that makes some of his administration's other choices controversial, given their own slide into authoritarianism -- or at least away from democracy -- including Brazil, India, the Philippines, Poland and Serbia.
Biden has yet to meet Brazil's far-right populist President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been accused of undermining democracy in Latin America's largest country and the world's 12th largest economy. Bolsonaro has sowed deep doubts about next year's presidential election and threatened to not accept the results, along with attacking the judiciary, political opponents and the free press.
The American president, for his part, has embraced Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, which prides itself as the world's largest democracy. But democracy monitors like the U.S. think tank Freedom House say India's democracy is increasingly marred by pressure on human rights groups and journalists, limits on political and civil liberties, especially for minorities, and an increase in violence and religious strife -- which Modi's government has denied.
While some critics have questioned why countries that have seen democratic backsliding were invited, a top U.S. diplomat said the administration was focused on "countries that we assess set a high bar for themselves and for others and that demonstrate will and progress on renewing democratic values, policies, and institutions."
Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, greets Chinese President Xi Jinping during their bilateral meeting on Nov. 13, 2019 in Brasilia, Brazil.
"Our goal in this effort is to be as inclusive as possible within logistical constraints," Uzra Zeya, under secretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights, said last week, adding the list was meant to be "a regionally diverse set of well-established and emerging democracies."
But the Biden administration did draw the line somewhere -- excluding other troubled democracies like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Hungary, as well as authoritarian governments with nominal elections like Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
Perhaps most notably absent is Turkey, a NATO ally whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become increasingly autocratic -- cracking down on dissent, the independent judiciary, the press, elections and any political opposition. While Biden and Erdogan have met and said they're interested in repairing U.S.-Turkish ties, it's unclear how the country will respond to being snubbed.
Anadolu Agency via Getty Images, FILE
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, and President Joe Biden pose for a photo during a meeting at the NATO summit at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels on June 14, 2021.
It’s also stark to review the list by region. Only two Middle East countries made the cut, for example -- Israel and Iraq, whose young democracy has struggled with foreign influence, corruption and violence. Tunisia, once the lone success story of the Arab Spring, is now not invited after its president froze parliament, sacked the prime minister and began ruling by decree this summer.
None of the countries in Central America's Northern Triangle -- where Biden has called for massive U.S. investment -- were invited in a sign of how they've been difficult partners in his calls for improving the quality of life there and decreasing migration from the region.
Only 16 of Africa's 54 countries made the cut. Sudan, where a transition to democracy that brought hope was derailed by a military coup, did not make the list.
While the summit will focus on democracy's recession in Latin America or Africa, or its large absence from the Middle East, it is also expected to hit on American democracy, which has seen its own troubles in recent years, including the unfounded attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election led by former President Donald Trump.
Julio Cortez/AP, FILE
Violent insurrections loyal to President Donald Trump try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a Swedish think tank, reported on Monday that the U.S. has fallen "victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale."
Biden's Secretary of State Antony Blinken has leaned into that criticism, mentioning it on trips overseas as he encourages other countries to strengthen their democracies: "Democratic backsliding is not just an African problem. It's a global problem. My own country is struggling with threats to our democracy, and the solutions to those threats will come as much from Africa as from anywhere," he said in a major address in Nigeria last week.
But critics have also seized on it to say the democratic model doesn't work -- an idea Biden says he is out to prove wrong.
That will require his summit to be more than a photo-op. Zeya, the senior State Department official, said participants have been encouraged "to make and fulfill concrete commitments" related to defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption and promoting human rights -- while the White House has said Biden will hold a second summit in 2022, hopefully in-person, to take stock of countries' progress.
ABC News's Karson Yiu contributed to this report.
Here is the full list of the invited participants, according to the State Department:
Albania
Angola
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Australia
Austria
Bahamas
Barbados
Belgium
Belize
Botswana
Brazil
Bulgaria
Cabo Verde
Canada
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Democratic Republic of Congo
Denmark
Dominica
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Estonia
Fiji
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Grenada
Guyana
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Kenya
Kiribati
Kosovo
Latvia
Liberia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Malta
Marshall Islands
Mauritius
Mexico
Micronesia
Moldova
Mongolia
Montenegro
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands
New Zealand
Niger
Nigeria
North Macedonia
Norway
Pakistan
Palau
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Samoa
Sao Tome and Principe
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Slovakia
Slovenia
Solomon Islands
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Suriname
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Timor-Leste
Tonga
Trinidad and Tobago
Tuvalu
Ukraine
United Kingdom
Uruguay
Vanuatu
Zambia
12. Biden administration blacklists 27 companies over national security concerns
Excerpts:
"Today's actions will help prevent the diversion of U.S. technologies to the [People's Republic of China]'s and Russia's military advancement and activities of non-proliferation concern like Pakistan's unsafeguarded nuclear activities or ballistic missile program.
"The Department of Commerce is committed to effectively using export controls to protect our national security."
The blacklisted companies include eight technology entities that are being prevented from using U.S. technologies for supporting certain Chinese military applications, such as counterstealth and countersubmarine actions, and the ability to break encryption or develop unbreakable encryption.
Biden administration blacklists 27 companies over national security concerns
By Danielle Haynes
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said the blacklisting would safeguard national security interests. Photo by Ken Cedeno/UPI | License Photo
Nov. 24 (UPI) -- The Biden administration on Wednesday blacklisted an additional 27 companies and individuals from China, Japan, Pakistan and Singapore, citing national security and foreign policy interests.
The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security added the organizations to its entity list, which requires a license for the export or transfer of some items in response to unethical behavior or that which otherwise threatens U.S. national security.
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"Global trade and commerce should support peace, prosperity, and good-paying jobs, not national security risks," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.
"Today's actions will help prevent the diversion of U.S. technologies to the [People's Republic of China]'s and Russia's military advancement and activities of non-proliferation concern like Pakistan's unsafeguarded nuclear activities or ballistic missile program.
"The Department of Commerce is committed to effectively using export controls to protect our national security."
The blacklisted companies include eight technology entities that are being prevented from using U.S. technologies for supporting certain Chinese military applications, such as counterstealth and countersubmarine actions, and the ability to break encryption or develop unbreakable encryption.
Sixteen entities and individuals in China and Pakistan were named for contributing to Pakistan's nuclear activities or ballistic missile program.
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And three affiliates of Corad Technology Limited -- a Chinese company already on the entity list -- were added for being involved in the sale of U.S. technology to Iran's military and space programs, North Korean front companies, and China's defense industry.
The Commerce Department said that in addition to the blacklistings, it added one organization in Russia -- the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology -- to the Military-End-User list because of its production of military products. The list requires a license from the Bureau of Industry and Security for certain exports.
13. All options fraught with risk as Biden confronts Putin over Ukraine
Are there ever any options in the national security realm that are not fraught with risk? Even doing nothing is a risk.
The fact that we have to state the obvious - that all options are fraught with risk - really describes our strategic weakness. - we still seek the silver bullet, the magic solution. We want antiseptic war. And we seek the "perfect plan" do not want to have to accept risk.
We have to learn to choose with the hard right over the easy wrong. That of course requires decisive leadership. I am glad I am not in charge because I do not know what is the hard right. But I feel for those who have to make these decisions.
All options fraught with risk as Biden confronts Putin over Ukraine
Analysis: Moscow presents Washington with a no-win situation: capitulate on Ukrainian sovereignty or risk all-out war
Joe Biden is preparing for a virtual summit with Vladimir Putin with the aim of fending off the threat of another Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The summit has been previewed by the Kremlin. The White House has not confirmed it, but a spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said that “high-level diplomacy is a priority of the president” and pointed to the teleconference meeting with Xi Jinping 10 days ago.
The head of Ukraine’s defence intelligence agency, Brig Gen Kyrylo Budanov, told the Military Times on Saturday that Russia had more than 92,000 troops around Ukraine’s borders and was preparing for an attack in January or February.
Others argue that the threat is not so imminent and that Russia has a lot to lose by invading Ukraine, but few if any experts would rule out an invasion entirely.
In confronting Putin over Ukraine, every policy option available to Biden is fraught with risk.
In a statement on Wednesday commemorating the Holodomor famine in Ukraine of the early 1930s, Biden restated “our unwavering support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine”.
Such statements of support are meant as a deterrent, but each time they are repeated they heighten the dilemma that Biden will face if Putin calls his bluff.
“What I am worried about, frankly, is that if we, the United States, continue to make ironclad commitments to Ukraine, and get ourselves in a position where we are obliged to defend it, or not to defend it and look completely weak, we will be putting ourselves in a very difficult position,” said Rajan Menon, professor of political science at the City University of New York.
CNN has reported an urgent policy debate inside the administration over whether to step up deliveries of weaponry such as Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Some in the administration argue such weapons would raise the costs of any Russian military incursion and thereby influence Putin’s calculations. Others warn it would represent a dangerous escalation, and drive the fears of a US or Nato attack that are at the base of Russia’s aggressive military stance.
“You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” said Fiona Hill, former senior director for European and Russian affairs in the national security council.
Hill helped prepare Donald Trump’s summits with Putin and advised the Biden team before his first meeting as president with the Russian leader in June. She said new talks were urgent and essential, but also involved traps that Biden would have to avoid.
“The problem right now is the way that Russia is framing the Ukraine issue as a very stark choice: the United States capitulate on Ukrainian sovereignty – over the heads of not just Ukraine but also of Europe – or risk all-out war,” Hill said.
She added that the Kremlin had long wanted to return to the cold war paradigm of the two superpowers sitting down and deciding on spheres of influence.
One of the possible solutions being floated is for Russian fears to be assuaged by ruling out future Nato membership for Ukraine as well as putting limits on its military capabilities, but Hill argues that would make a nonsense of Ukraine’s sovereignty, setting a damaging precedent.
“We can have a virtual summit. We can have the sit-down with the United States and Russia, but Ukraine can’t be on the bargaining table. We can talk about strategic stability but we’re not in a position to bargain away Ukraine,” Hill said. “And it can’t just be the United States. The Europeans have to take this seriously.”
Menon, co-author of a 2015 book, Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, suggested that the imminent threat is being exaggerated. He said there were already 87,000 Russian troops in the region abutting Ukraine well before the current crisis, and that region is broadly defined. Some of the troops are more than 430 miles 700km from the actual border.
“Even if one assumes that Russia could throw 100k troops into battle, it would not have the numerical advantage (generally calculated at 3:1) to overwhelm a Ukrainian army which, for all its faults, is now better trained and equipped and has better morale than it did in 2014,” he said.
“Plus, the further west Russia pushes, the more it will stretch its supply lines, risk hit-and-run attacks that seek to disrupt them, and encounter areas with larger proportions of (unfriendly) ethnic Ukrainians. These problems, and the fact that Putin would be burning all bridges with the west by invading Ukraine are either ignored or given short shrift in the prevailing narratives here.”
That does mean that Putin would not ultimately launch an invasion if Russian red lines were crossed, Menon said.
“We should not think that, push comes to shove, when they say we will not allow Ukraine to join Nato .. that they’re just bluffing. I don’t think they’re bluffing at all.”
14. Are our Intellectual Actions Aligned with our Security Challenges?
Ouch. A brutal critique.
Are our Intellectual Actions Aligned with our Security Challenges?
I guess climate change caused defeat in Afghanistan
That is, of course, a subject question. However, there are objective facts that stand independent of that subjectivity.
Where you are in time and place is important. In the area of national security, disconnects and discontinuities in time and place caused by a desire for reality to be what we want it to be consume the finite resources of time, money, and focus from actions to address what reality actual is.
Denial fed by delusional distractions, as it were.
Take a moment to back up a bit and think about the top national security concerns of 2021. What do they signal to you as the most important parts of the United States’ national security infrastructure needs to invest their time, money and reputation on?
Well meaning people can differ in how they rack and stack things, but let me grab the Top-3 from my seat the provinces:
1. Strategic impact of the national humiliation following our defeat and negotiated surrender in Afghanistan.
2. Expanded Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific and expanded global influence.
3. Growing Russian hostility in Eastern Europe and her near abroad.
Honorable mentions could include sectarian and religious based conflicts in Africa, domestic logistics and manufacturing short comings, and other actionable national security adjacent challenges could be put in the top-3.
So, let’s say you find yourself just inside a month after the national humiliation in Afghanistan in late August and you have an opportunity for the US Navy’s top four institutions of higher learning; Naval War College, Naval Post Graduate School, Marine Corps University, and the Naval Academy to come together – not a common occurrence - to have a “Combined Naval Address” on a topic of great concern. What would you want them to invest their professional capital in?
By all means, I invite you to watch it – you paid for it.
Just fair warning – this isn’t what it is billed to be. You have an intro by a PMP CDR followed by the reading of a prepared statement by the President of the U.S. Naval War College, then they hand it over to serial Australian TED entrepreneur Saul Griffith whose major skill seems to be able to sell hyped companies that get people excited enough to buy them, only to realize once the ayahuasca trip wears off that … well … perhaps big-ass kites as wind turbines might actually not be all that great of an idea.
That’s it. Funded by the Naval War College - I assume the speaker is paid for. I do wonder how much.
Even better we find that the Barrows Fellows from the Marine Corps University will spend all year studying <checks notes, this the year we were defeated in Afghanistan by the Taliban> ... climate change.
The General Robert H. Barrow Fellowship seeks to explore and understand different aspects of security and strategy as it relates to great power competition.
Great. Wonderful. Timely.
For those who don’t have the time to watch the whole thing, Griffith, looking like he just got off a ayahuasca trip himself, spends a few minutes telling everyone - shocking - that DOD's largest energy use is jet fuel.
We know.
He then spends most of the next 3/4 of an hour reading repackaged slides my kids were shown after the Al Gore movie in middle school weaved in with a recant of standard issue neo-pagan climate grift that has nothing to do with anything impacting any maritime service - much less "great power competition." No, this is mostly about turning residential civilian America electric - not a military concern.
As sure as the sun and moon rises and sets, the climate changes. It always has and always will. I own property 2-hrs drive inland from here half of which is beach sand - as it used to be a beach.
My state used to be twice the size it is today during the ice age when the shore was far to the east of where it is now.
The question that is unknown is the extent of human cause. Without knowing that, can't do a cost benefit analysis of what needs to be done on what timeline that really make a difference - and the models are simply garbage. The ones from 20-yrs ago are no better than the ones we have now.
All the above paragraph can be argued, sure, but what you cannot argue is that this - in the fall of 2021 - is this something that is deserving of this kind of effort by the US Navy. Somewhere? Sure. All four of our major higher education institutions?
Do you even know what a military is?
It would be comical if not so farcical.
We are a nation with serious challenges this decade. We and our Navy needs to act as serious as they are.
15. Senior U.S. officials present tougher stance ahead of Iran nuclear talks
Senior U.S. officials present tougher stance ahead of Iran nuclear talks
WASHINGTON - Senior U.S. diplomatic and military officials are presenting a notably tougher posture ahead of next week's latest planned round of talks surrounding Iran's nuclear program. The officials' positioning comes as Israel and U.S. disagreements over negotiations are growing increasingly public.
Rob Malley, the Biden administration's special envoy on Iran, told Ben Rhodes's "Pod Save the World" podcast that "everything we're hearing from Iran's new team leads me to be rather pessimistic" ahead of the seventh round of indirect talks on the 2015 nuclear deal set for the end of November.
Meanwhile, the commander of U.S. Central Command told Time magazine that Iran is "very close" to enriching uranium to weapon-grade levels and the U.S. is prepared for military action if necessary.
The sexual abuse scandal blowing up the Haredi world. LISTEN
"The diplomats are in the lead on this, but Central Command always has a variety of plans that we could execute, if directed," General Kenneth McKenzie told the magazine.
"They're very close this time," he said. "I think they like the idea of being able to break out."
Should Iran enrich enough uranium for a nuclear bomb, it would still need over a year to develop the capability of actually delivering it, McKenzie said. But he also noted that Iran has already shown its missiles are able to strike targets with precision: "The one thing the Iranians have done over the last three-to-five years is they built a very capable ballistic missile platform."
Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, commander of US Central Command, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee, September.Olivier Douliery/Pool via REUTERS
McKenzie's comments came ahead of the resumption of talks toward a new nuclear deal next week, and a day after Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Israel would not be bound by another deal. In January, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, chief of staff of Israel's military, said it would be a mistake for the U.S. to return to the deal and that military action had to be on the table.
On Tuesday, the head of the United Nations' atomic watchdog met with Iranian officials, saying Wednesday that the negotiations in Tehran had been inconclusive.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors remain unable to access surveillance footage and face greater challenges in trying to monitor Tehran’s rapidly growing uranium stockpile, some of which is now enriched up to 60 percent purity — a short technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.
Under a confidential agreement called an “Additional Protocol” with Iran, the IAEA collects and analyzes images from a series of surveillance cameras installed at Iranian nuclear sites. Those cameras helped it monitor Tehran’s program to see if it is complying with the nuclear deal.
Iran’s hard-line parliament in December 2020 approved a bill that would suspend part of UN inspections of its nuclear facilities if European signatories did not provide relief from oil and banking sanctions by February. Since February, the IAEA has been unable to access imagery from the surveillance cameras.
Under the deal, the IAEA also placed around 2,000 tamper-proof seals on nuclear material and equipment. Those seals communicated electronically to inspectors. Automated measuring devices also provided real-time data from the program. Inspectors haven’t been able to access that data either, making the task of monitoring Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile that much more difficult.
The agency also has sought monitoring of activities at a centrifuge parts production site near the northern city of Karaj. The IAEA has had no access there since June after Iran said a sabotage attack by Israel considerably damaged the facility and an IAEA camera there.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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16. Why the Marine Corps wants to tank National Guard recruiting efforts
Interesting 2d and 3d order effects of decisions. But the real question is can and will these decisions change USMC culture? Are we going to have an "older" Marine Corps? Should we want one?
What will this do to the huge USMC "lobby" that exists in the civilian world? "Once a Marine, always a Marine" has served the Corps well over its history. Will there be fewer Marine veterans in elected office in the future? And think about the contributions across business and academia (as well as government) from young Marines who serve four years and after they learn about life in the Corps go on to make great contributions outside the military. It would seem that mathematically we will have a smaller pool of young Americans who have been positively influenced by an enlistment in the USMC and will go on and do great things for America. At a time when we think more Americans would benefit from public service or military service, are we reducing the opportunities and reducing the numbers who will actually experience military service?
Why the Marine Corps wants to tank National Guard recruiting efforts
As a result, the National Guard and other services have seen Marines fresh off a first enlistment as fertile recruiting ground, allowing the Guard to swell its ranks with already experienced troops.
The practice is so common the Army National Guard even has recruiters specifically trained and tasked to recruit prior service Marines.
But as the Corps looks to field an older more experienced force, it wants that to change.
“If we do our job right, they’ll never go to the Army or the National Guard to begin with,” Maj. Gen. Jason Bohm, the commander for Marine Corps Recruiting Command, told reporters on Monday.
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To make up for lost advantages, the Corps is focusing on making each Marine better than their near-peer equivalent.
On Nov. 3, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger released his talent management vision aimed at improving retention by treating Marines “like human beings instead of inventory.”
For those who left the Corps just to realize the grass is not always greener in the Army combat uniform, the Corps wants you back.
“Quite often, not to disparage any of the other services, but we do hear from (prior service Marines) saying ‘This isn’t quite what I expected, is there any chance I can come back?’” Bohm said.
There already are methods for prior service Marines to return to the Corps, but Bohm said it was not particularly easy.
The Corps will look to streamline that process and welcome the lost sheep back into the Marine Corps’ fold.
The Corps also will improve its efforts to inform Marines who are getting out on ways they can reenter the force if circumstances allow them to return or if they simply change their mind about getting out.
“We are certainly going to maintain contact with those people,” Bohm said.
At least for now the Army National Guard does not seem to expect much to change on its end.
“The Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention Force always seeks to recruit and retain the best available talent for the Guard,” Christina Mundy said on behalf of Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention in a Tuesday email.
Marine Corps Times has previously asked the National Guard for numbers on how many prior service Marines it enlists each year and has not heard back.
While the Marine Corps is looking to improve overall retention, the Corps is planning to downsize over the next few years and has completely eliminated certain military occupational specialties.
In 2021 the Corps had an authorized active-duty end strength of 181,200 Marines. By 2030 the Corps looks to shrink the active duty force to roughly 174,000 Marines, the smallest the Corps has been since 2002.
To slowly reduce numbers while improving retention the Marine Corps expects that it will reduce its recruitment goals.
Berger said the Corps needs an older and more mature force to handle the increased complexities of a potential war against a near-peer opponent.
On the future battlefield Marines will have more responsibilities pushed down to lower levels than ever before.
”The machine gunner who is also corpsman, a medic, also has to be able to talk to MQ-9 UAVs and bring in ordnance and understand the satellite connection that is required to do that,” Berger told reporters in early November.
The Corps is also leaning on updated science that shows people do not fully mature until they are in their early to mid-twenties and that peak physical performance does not happen until someone is in their late 20s.
“We based our force on an assumption that (18 to 20-year-olds) were indestructible supermen,” Berger said. “Turns out it’s not. We don’t peak physically or cognitively until our late 20s.”
“We can’t have a force full of 18 to 21-year-olds,” Berger said.
17. Is the United States ready to take on China?
Is the United States ready to take on China?
Yesterday at 11:02 pm
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Retired in 2019 as the chief of staff of Special Operations Command Central, He is on the adjunct faculty of the Joint Special Operations University & a fellow of the Modern War Institute. He also teaches courses overseas to officers from countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Is the United States ready to take on China?
Tonight’s virtual meeting between President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, produced little progress for a relationship that has deteriorated precipitously in the last few years. The problem with this outcome is that what the United States envisions as modest diplomatic success – perhaps Xi’s reference to Biden as “my old friend” and the comparison of the two countries as ships that must navigate the same ocean without colliding – is a state of play that benefits China while further endangering US interests. This may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s a view that reflects the recent history of the Chinese Communist Party. To understand what course China is on (continuing the nautical analogy) one must look back over the last 26 years to 1995, and an incident referred to as the Third Taiwan Straits crisis.
In that year, after saber rattling on the part of China over a planned visit by the Taiwanese premier to the United States (for a college reunion), the Clinton administration dispatched a carrier battle-group and a Marine Expeditionary Unit to transit the Taiwan straits. In response, the Chinese Government went ballistic – literally – firing missiles across the strait and threatening to turn the strait into a “sea of fire” should the United States try this stunt again.
So far, par for the course. The Chinese government was simply saving face while the US had successfully employed a modern version of gun boat diplomacy to emphasize strategic interest. But then the US started to backpedal, ceding the advantage in this geo-political game of chicken, never to recover it again. President Clinton announced that inclement weather had forced the carrier group to take that course, thus implicitly conceding China’s claim to the straits. And China resolved never again to show weakness when it came to Taiwan.
26 years later, the “sea of fire” threat is real. China can now destroy a carrier battle group with long range missiles before it is even remotely within aircraft range of Taiwan. As for a Marine Expeditionary Unit – though it pains me as a US Marine to admit it – Chinese advances in military capability have rendered amphibious warfare obsolete. Even if by some fluke, Marines reached a point from which they could launch an amphibious assault, the infantry who landed would lack the ability to communicate and would rapidly be carved into penny packets by long range precision weapons and drones. Thereafter their preoccupation would become simply survival. Xi knows all this – and it must be a source of considerable satisfaction to him, as it is to his countrymen who have found in recent years a new basis for muscular patriotism.
While the United States has been involved in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last 20 years China has stolen the march on us, developing weapons across the physical, electro-magnetic and cyber domain that are designed to remove any US military advantage and turn the shibboleths of our military culture into exorbitant and obsolete caskets.
China watchers tend to insist that Xi does not want to go to war for Taiwan, the costs across the board would just be too high. But perhaps this is a Western view that does not take into account that high cost does not necessarily mean prohibitive in the language of the CCP. By word and deed, Xi has imbued the question of Taiwan with almost mystical impetus. The CCP now appears to subscribe to a form of dialectical determinism in which One China is its only feasible destiny.
At the same time, China’s perception of the US stance vis a vis Taiwan is that the United States lacks the resolve to go to war if China threatens to invade Taiwan “You care more about Los Angeles than Taipei” one Chinese admiral was quoted recently as saying. He is most certainly right, but now is the time to remove any doubt from the minds of Xi Jinping and his colleagues: Washington will intervene on Taiwan’s side against any form of Chinese Communist aggression. Strategic ambiguity on the part of the United States, and a blinkered approach to national security has led to a balance of power in the Pacific region that is weighted towards China.
What can be done? Well, it will take determined and bipartisan effort to get our house in order – from presenting a determined diplomatic front to focusing military readiness on this fight. Pentagon officials may claim that we are already on this path, but there is no straight-line correlation between defense budget and readiness.
Congress needs to prioritize readiness over constituent kick-backs – although here the culture is so deeply ingrained that it may require new legislation to fix. And it is also culture, this time within the US military that precludes a single-minded pursuit of a joint force that prepared for this fight. Senior officers will have to cast aside their preoccupation with weapons and platforms upon which they have established their reputations – the carriers, strike fighters, and other exorbitantly expensive vessels designed inadvertently now to carry humans – with all that humans require by way of protection and comfort – to their deaths. It will mean making drastic changes in recruiting and training and doctrine.
Equally important, it will mean some very clear messaging on the part of this administration. There has been much speculation recently in the US press about whether the US would be willing to go to war for Taiwan. If China believes that the US lacks the will to do so, then it is just a matter of time until Taiwan is assimilated into China.
Why is this a bad thing – well, aside from the loss of life and disruption to the world’s economy, Taiwan has become, in a sense, the frontline for democracy in the 21st century — the implications of its loss would be far reaching and profound. Since China has become the leading trading partner for most countries in the Pacific region, security is primarily what the US offers its partners. Taiwan’s annexation by China would relegate the United States to being a bit player in the Pacific region – perhaps even globally.
Washington may tout today’s meeting as a milestone on the road to détente – but it would be unwise to subscribe to such a view. A détente based on strategic ambiguity is more likely to lead to war than a determined show of resolve. Xi is likely biding his time before choosing to steer his ship directly at that of his “old friend”. When that happens, it will be the United States that must face the choice between deserting Taiwan with all the probable ramifications for US standing in the world, or risk stepping off the precipice into a conflict in which China holds all the cards.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Newslooks.com
18. Trump Reportedly Approved Pentagon's ‘Irregular Warfare’ Campaign Against Iran Before Exiting WH
Here is Sputnik's interpretation of the Yahoo News article on the alleged covert action and irregular warfare plans toward Iran during the Trump administration.
It is interesting how Russia propaganda interprets the article (and attempts to use the Yahoo news report to attempt to undermine the US - and DOD and CIA). It is careful to couch everything by crediting the Yahoo News report so that it does not look like Russian propaganda. Kind of proves Lenins's and Stalin's claims about capitalism - the west (bourgeois) will sell us the rope we use to hang it.
Trump Reportedly Approved Pentagon's ‘Irregular Warfare’ Campaign Against Iran Before Exiting WH
by Svetlana Ekimenko
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Svetlana Ekimenko
The report comes as indirect negotiations are set to begin on reviving the 2015 deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Iran, which had been exceeding JCPOA limits on its nuclear program after the US exited the accord, demands verifiable removal of Washington’s sanctions plus assurances it would not violate the pact again.
Donald Trump approved a secret Pentagon campaign to conduct sabotage, propaganda and other covert operations targeting Iran when his presidency had entered its final month, according to former senior administration officials cited by a report in Yahoo News.
The last-minute decision is said to have been prompted by the fact that the “Joint Staff and CIA were obstructing everything,” a source was cited as saying.
The reported 200-page package of options involved “things that would cause the Iranians to doubt their control over the country, or doubt their ability to fight a war.” The campaign was to be led by the military’s Special Operations forces.
23 November, 11:45 GMT
The plan, inherently tailored to avert a military conflict with Tehran, was purportedly developed by top officials within the military’s Special Operations Command and Central Command, as well as senior civilians within the Defense Department.
“It’s a very detailed escalation ladder. It’s not like all of a sudden you go from zero to 60,” said a former official, adding that some aspects of the multi-pronged campaign were designed not be executed until the US and Iran were “just at the brink” of war.
All aspects of the “irregular warfare” plan were said to have been scrutinised by Pentagon legal personnel, particularly regarding the “legality” of sabotage, and “whether this [campaign] constituted acts of war.”
FILE PHOTO: The logo of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is shown in the lobby of the CIA headquarters in La..
© Jason Reed
Another aspect of the plan that Pentagon lawyers reportedly focused on were actions that might increase “the likelihood of provoking war,” an ex-defence official was quoted as saying.
The Pentagon had required approval from the president to move forward with the “irregular warfare” campaign because, while not including targeted killings, there was a likelihood Iranians might die during proposed “kinetic” acts of sabotage, claimed the report.
Sources are cited as claiming that many aspects of the plan did not formally require presidential permission, yet their execution was ostensibly impeded by some within the United States Department of Defense, especially within the Joint Staff.
According to the report, Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of US Central Command, was in favour of targeted Iran-focused actions, while Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tended to procrastinate, allegedly “sitting on the package”.
“The Pentagon sat on it, refusing to take any action on it, because it didn’t want to,” said the former official,” a former defence official was cited as saying.
“The allegations here simply aren’t true,” a spokesman for Milley was cited as saying in response to the report.
As for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Iran Mission Center, it was lambasted as doing “nothing” on Iran, according to former senior administration official.
“We would get briefed on all these wild, elaborate plans for various operations that never occurred,” said Victoria Coates, who served as deputy national security adviser for Middle East and North African Affairs.
View of the Tehran, Iran
Finally, Donald Trump’s national security officials are said to have concluded that the CIA likely did not possess capabilities to carry out the types of covert action sought by White House policymakers.
Reacting with “supreme disappointment”, Trump is said to have acknowledged at the time that it would fall to the incoming Joe Biden administration to carry out the “shadow warfare” plan. It is unclear, said the report, whether the Democratic POTUS now occupying the White House has pursued the Trump-approved operations.
In this Handout photo made available by the EU delegation in Vienna shows Diplomats of the EU, China, Russia and Iran at the start of talks at the Grand Hotel in Vienna on April 6, 2021. - The US will participate in discussions in Vienna to try to save the international agreement on Iranian nuclear power. However, they will not be at the same table as Tehran and it is the Europeans who will serve as intermediaries between the two parties, in the hope of achieving concrete results after two months of impasse.
The report comes as the US is to resume indirect talks with Iran on 29 November in Vienna on a resuscitation of the 2015 deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which former US President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018, claiming that Tehran was in violation of its terms. The US had immediately reimposed stringent sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Days before the resumed talks in Vienna, Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have agreed to maintain communication and dialogue to find “common ground” and achieve positive results after the nuclear watchdog’s director-general, Rafael Grossi, visited Tehran, meeting with the country’s nuclear chief, Mohammad Eslami, early on Tuesday.
US officials, claims the report, will now be facing the need to determine whether the aforementioned Trump-approved Pentagon campaign could jeopardize nuclear deal talks with Tehran or steer the Istamic Republic towards an agreement.
There has not been any official comment on the report from either the Department of Defense or the CIA declined to comment.
19. CIA Opens New Accessibility Storefront at Headquarters - CIA
CIA Opens New Accessibility Storefront at Headquarters - CIA
November 24, 2021
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) welcomed officers to the opening of its Accessibility Storefront last month, part of the Agency-wide effort to ensure all officers have the resources and accommodations needed to fully support the mission.
The Storefront aims to provide an array of specialized accommodations to create a more accessible workplace for all of CIA’s officers. This will enhance officers’ ability to access tailored resources by offering the option to test various assistive technologies to find which best suits their individual needs. Additionally, the Storefront will offer products such as ergonomic chairs.
Not only will the Storefront serve as a resource to support officers’ ability to contribute to mission, but officers’ will have the opportunity to complete trainings and consultations at the installation with full access to individual accommodations.
“The Storefront is among the first of its kind in the IC and is a tangible reminder that accessibility is mission imperative,” said CIA’s Chief Operation Officer (COO) Andrew Makridis at the Storefront’s ribbon-cutting. He added that “CIA is a pioneer in this space and will continue to champion accessibility efforts.”
The Storefront is part of strategy to create a more equitable workplace by strengthening accessibility across the Agency.
20. Michael Flynn ups the conspiracy ante, says COVID released by "global elites"
I hate to send this out on Thanksgiving but I know many people believe in what retired LTG Flynn says. While most of us will write this off as another fantastical conspiracy theory I predict this will have legs among the QAnon crowd and beyond. We laugh it off at our peril.
Michael Flynn ups the conspiracy ante, says COVID released by "global elites"
Newsweek · by Aila Slisco · November 24, 2021
Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn lamented that "global elites" would soon unleash a new manufactured virus during a recent interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Flynn is pictured during a rally protesting the 2020 presidential election results in Washington, D.C., on December 12, 2020. Tasos Katopodis/Getty
Michael Flynn is pushing an evidence-free conspiracy theory that claims COVID-19 was released by a mysterious group of "global elites" who may be preparing to "impose" a new virus on the world.
Flynn, best known for a short stint as former President Donald Trump's national security adviser, made the remarks during a recent interview on The Alex Jones Show. Flynn told host Alex Jones that there would be a planned surge of COVID-19 despite sleuthing by "digital warriors" having uncovered the "truth" about the virus, although no credible evidence that would prove the sinister plot has been publicly presented anywhere.
"We're going to see an uptick in other aspects of the COVID," Flynn said. "There might even be another form of a SARS that's imposed on the international system ... because their little plan with COVID didn't work because too many people in the world of what I call the digital warriors, or the citizen journalists that are out there, they are fighting for the truth."
"The truth has been exposed about all the COVID tyranny that we are facing," Flynn continued. "So, I think what we're gonna see is potentially another type of virus that's imposed on the public. And I hope that that's not the case, but I've seen some indications of that in some of the statements by some of these global elite type of people."
Beyond creating "COVID tyranny," Flynn did not indicate what was the ultimate goal of the supposed elites involved in the pandemic-creating plot. He also predicted that the country's economy would soon be plunged into an intentional "controlled depression" and that the government would "shut down" all communications, although he conceded that "these are the worst-case scenarios."
During a different interview earlier this week, Flynn said that he was "not convinced that we are going to have national elections in 2022," claiming that Democrats would artificially tank the economy to stop Republicans from winning in the midterms. He said that Democrats hoped to "put people around the country under control of the federal government more and more and more over the coming year."
Flynn has also been heavily associated with the baseless pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that a "deep state" controlled by satanic child-trafficking Democrats are locked in a secret battle with the former president. Flynn recently refuted claims from some QAnon followers that he practiced satanism. A short time later, he drew backlash after calling for theocracy by insisting that the U.S. should have only "one religion."
Flynn, a proponent of 2020 election conspiracy theories, has also advocated in favor of a military coup that would reinstate Trump to the White House by force. His time as part of the Trump administration lasted only weeks, having quickly resigned following reports that he lied about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He later pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI but was pardoned by Trump before he could be sentenced.
Newsweek · by Aila Slisco · November 24, 2021
21. A MACV-SOG Thanksgiving: When 6 commandos took on 30,000 enemy troops
Some Thanksgiving history to recall. Arguably one of the greatest special operations units ever created.
Just as in 1968 there are Americans conducting operations around the world today.
Photos at the link.
A MACV-SOG Thanksgiving: When 6 commandos took on 30,000 enemy troops
Thanksgiving Day, 1968.
As families across America gathered together to enjoy their Thanksgiving dinner in the chill of late fall, a six-man team of commandos from covert special operations units were fighting for their very lives against 30,000 North Vietnamese troops in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
The six commandos belonged to MACV-SOG, a highly classified special operations unit that conducted some of the most harrowing missions in the Vietnam War.
The Covert Men and Mission of MACV-SOG
The Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) was a special operations organization that conducted covert cross-border operations in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, North Vietnam, and elsewhere.
From 1964 to 1972, MACV-SOG took the fight to the enemy with an enviable grit, resolution, and guile, often turning up in the most unexpected places.
MACV-SOG mainly went after the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply routes that fed the Communist onslaught into South Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, which snaked from North Vietnam west into Laos and Cambodia only to turn east again in South Vietnam, was an above-ground and underground complex that stretched for hundreds of miles. What was sinister about the Ho Chin Minh Trail was that nominally, North Vietnamese troops weren’t supposed to be there, as Hanoi had repeatedly announced its intentions to respect the neutrality of Laos and Cambodia.
But if the North Vietnamese were there, so had to be American commandos. As a result, MACV-SOG teams operated in countries that successive U.S. administrations had insisted that no American troops were in.
The special operations unit was comprised solely of commandos from across the U.S. special operations community, including Navy SEALs, Recon Marines, and Air Commandos. But it was the Army Special Forces operators—nicknamed “Green Berets”—that formed the cornerstone of the unit. Using their unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense—the training and advising of foreign troops—capabilities, Green Berets recruited, trained, and led teams of native mercenaries against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.
The covert outfit cooperated closely with the U.S. intelligence community and ran some of the most daring special operation missions in U.S. military history. The operation of Spike Team Idaho during the closing days of November 1968 was such a mission.
Turkey, Gravy, and the North Vietnamese
Following the Tet Offensive in January 1968, the U.S. intelligence community was concerned about practically all North Vietnamese troop movements. So when three entire North Vietnamese divisions went missing in November, Army intel and the CIA were eager to find them.
Composed of six commandos, two Green Berets, and four local mercenaries, ST Idaho went after the missing North Vietnamese divisions. Leading the MACV-SOG recon team was John Stryker Meyer, a legendary Green Beret who has written extensively about his experience in the elite special operations organization.
Their job was to find the 1st, 3rd, and 7th North Vietnamese Army divisions, about 30,000 troops, that had gone missing somewhere on the border with Cambodia. These troops were part of an approximately 100,000-strong North Vietnamese presence in the neighboring country, and the Pentagon feared that they could stage an attack on Saigon from their safe haven in Cambodia.
Once they had located the North Vietnamese troops, ST Idaho was to relay their position and exfiltrate as quickly and quietly as possible (in other words, get out of dodge). If they could snatch an enemy prisoner while they were at it from whom vital intelligence could be gleaned, that much the better.
If going after 30,000 enemy troops with just six men wasn’t enough, the MACV-SOG commandos were further hindered by the fact that they couldn’t call in fixed-wing close air support because the State Department had imposed very strict rules of engagement for the area of operations. They could only go 12 miles inside Cambodian airspace.
Not Your Average Thanksgiving
On Thanksgiving morning, ST Idaho inserted and started patrolling toward where they believed the North Vietnamese might be. After a few minutes, they spotted campfires, and moved in their direction.
ST Idaho soon found itself inside a huge North Vietnamese camp. But it was an empty camp… and no one challenged them—at least for now. The commandos started snapping pictures and searching for documents and maps that could prove useful to their intelligence shops. While most of the commandos were focused on their treasure-hunting expedition, their point man, an indigenous mercenary, literally sensed the enemy’s approach and alerted the team. Meyer, who trusted his teammates with his life, took him at his word and made the decision to exfiltrate.
But as they were leaving camp, hundreds of North Vietnamese troops poured into view from seemingly out of nowhere. Before long, it was clear that they were coming straight at them from both the north and south. Their point man had been right, ST Idaho was now facing an utterly overwhelming enemy force. If they were going to survive, they needed to get out of there in a hurry.
ST Idaho ran for its life, only stopping to put down suppressive fire or to plant Claymore mines in a vain attempt at stopping the Communists’ pursuit. The team was made up of highly trained and experienced special operations warfighters, often more than a match for even the most unfair fights, but no matter how many North Vietnamese they killed, more seemed to take their place.
The MACV-SOG commandos reached their landing zone and hastily dug in, waiting for the helicopters to exfiltrate them. But by now, the Communists were almost on top of them.
At that very moment, UH-1P Hueys from the Air Force’s 20th Special Operations Squadron—nicknamed the “Green Hornets”—arrived; literally just as ST Idaho was about to be overrun by the North Vietnamese hordes.
Firing their M134 miniguns and M-60 machineguns, the Green Hornets were able to stem the North Vietnamese advance, giving the MACV-SOG commandos some precious breathing space to regroup. With the enemy force still attempting to advance, the Green Hornets poured rounds in their direction, curbing their progress for just long enough to allow the exhausted warfighters to board the waiting choppers.
As in a movie, the North Vietnamese flooded ST Idaho’s perimeter as the team was flying away into the sunset and safety. They had found the enemy—and survived. For the men of ST Idaho, that was something to be thankful for.
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Stavros Atlamazoglou
Greek Army veteran (National service with 575th Marines Battalion and Army HQ). Johns Hopkins University. You will usually find him on the top of a mountain admiring the view and wondering how he got there.
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22. Japan plans record boost to 'sympathy budget' for hosting US military bases: source
The different strategic (and economic) calculus between Japan and South Korea.
Japan plans record boost to 'sympathy budget' for hosting US military bases: source - The Mainichi
The Japanese prime minister's office is seen in this 2019 file photo taken from a Mainichi Shimbun helicopter. (Mainichi)
TOKYO -- Japan is moving to boost the annual "sympathy budget" for hosting U.S. military bases by a record 50 billion yen (approx. $434 million)-plus to the high 200-billion-yen range from fiscal 2022, a Japanese government source told the Mainichi Shimbun.
The hefty increase is based on government views that the Japan-U.S. alliance must be reinforced in the face of China's growing military might, and is intended to strengthen Japan's defensive capabilities, the source said.
Japan earmarked 201.7 billion yen (about $1.75 billion) in fiscal 2021 for the sympathy budget. The largest previous year-on-year increase in the budget was 30.4 billion yen (around $264 million) in fiscal 1993.
Tokyo and Washington are set to broadly finalize a special agreement in early December that establishes the basis for Japan covering the cost of hosting U.S. bases. The amount will be added to the fiscal 2022 budget draft which is expected to be confirmed by a Cabinet decision by the end of 2021. The new special agreement will run from fiscal 2022 to 2026. Previous base-hosting budgets mainly covered utilities and labor costs, among other items, but officials are considering adding bills for Japan-U.S. joint exercises to the latest edition.
Japan has hitherto been reluctant to significantly boost the sympathy budget due to the country's fiscal woes. However, the government decided to go ahead with the large increase this time in response to the increasingly severe regional security environment, including China's expanding military capabilities. The fiscal 2022 total may top the previous high of 275.6 billion yen (about $2.4 billion) set in fiscal 1999.
The sympathy budget was first implemented in the fiscal 1978 budget, rising to that fiscal 1999 peak before steadily declining, as the effects of the Cold War and the bursting of Japan's economic bubble set in. It hit a low of 184.8 billion yen (about $1.6 billion) in fiscal 2014, rising again ever since. However, the largest hike from fiscal 2015 on was 5.1 billion yen (approx. $44.3 million). The year-on-year increase in the fiscal 2021 budget was 2.4 billion yen (around $20.9 million).
The base cost framework agreement in effect now expired at the end of fiscal 2020. The terms were extended for a year, as the United States had just gone through a change of presidential administration. In April 2021, the leaders of Japan and the U.S. stated in a joint declaration that they would strengthen Japan's defenses. Negotiations on the new cost framework have been ongoing since.
(Japanese original by Shu Hatakeyama, Political News Department)
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
