Quotes of the Day:
"Also, as we look over the historical perspective, while World War II began in Europe, for the United States it began in the Pacific. It came from Asia. The Korean war came from Asia. The Vietnamese war came from Asia.
So, as we consider our past history, the United States involvement in war so often has been tied to our Pacific policy, or our lack of a Pacific policy, as the case might be.
As we look at Asia today, we see that the major world power which adopts a very aggressive attitude and a belligerent attitude in its foreign policy, Communist China, of course, is in Asia, and we find that the two minor world powers--minor, although they do have significant strength as we have learned--that most greatly threaten the peace of the world, that adopt the most belligerent foreign policy, are in Asia, North Korea and, of course, North Vietnam.
When we consider those factors we, I think, realize that if we are thinking down the road, down the long road--not just 4 years, 5 years, but 10, 15 or 20---that if we are going to have peace in the world, that potentially the greatest threat to that peace will be in the Pacific."
- Richard Nixon, Informal Remarks in Guam With Newsmen, July 25, 1969
“Armed conflict is a human condition, and I do not doubt we will continue to reinvent it from generation to generation.”
- Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force
“While the distribution of wealth and income need not be equal, it must be to everyone’s advantage, and at the same time, positions of authority and offices of command must be accessible to all.”
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
1. Biden sees Russia moving on Ukraine, sows doubt on Western response
2. Ukrainian civilians are inspired to train for a possible war with Russia
3. Most ‘Havana Syndrome’ Cases Unlikely Caused by Foreign Power, C.I.A. Says
4. CIA finds no ‘worldwide campaign’ by any foreign power behind mysterious Havana syndrome
5. Biden promises additional troops, sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine
6. Ukraine Needs Help Surviving Airstrikes, Not Just Killing Tanks
7. Newly Declassified Video Shows U.S. Killing of 10 Civilians in Drone Strike
8. Statement from Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Russian Aggression Towards Ukraine
9. Air Force Must Harden Pacific Bases Against Missiles, Secretary Says
10. Cyberattack on Red Cross compromised data of over 515,000 'highly vulnerable people'
11. Go Armie!: Green Beret-turned congressman names baby after his beloved branch
12. Fort Bragg changes name of road ‘incorrectly’ linked to top Confederate general
13. How Israel Should Handle the US-China Rivalry
14. FDD | U.S. Treasury Designates Additional Targets in Hezbollah Financial Network
15. The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots
16. Analysis: Russian troop build-up sparks unintended NATO renewal
17. Houthis launch aerial attack against UAE capital Abu Dhabi
18. FDD | Halkbank’s Supreme Court Appeal Will Delay Iran Sanctions-Evasion Case
19. ‘We Are Taiwanese’: China’s Growing Menace Hardens Island’s Identity
20. US approves transfer of American weapons from allies to Ukraine
21. China says it warned away U.S. warship in South China Sea, U.S. denies
22. How to Support a Globally Connected Counter-Disinformation Network
23. WHY RESPONDING IS LOSING - The Plays We Run (and the Plays We Don’t) to Defeat Disinformation
24. America’s Coming Age of Instability
25. The ‘Civil War’ Psy-Op
26. There Will Be Blood
27. Power struggle among Biden appointees gets personal over race
1. Biden sees Russia moving on Ukraine, sows doubt on Western response
This is of course problematic. I saw someone on social media say this is Biden's Acheson moment.
Biden sees Russia moving on Ukraine, sows doubt on Western response
- Summary
- Biden suggests smaller penalty for 'minor incursion' by Russia
- White House seeks to clarify Biden comments
- U.S. president open to third summit with Putin
WASHINGTON/KYIV, Jan 19 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden predicted on Wednesday that Russia will make a move on Ukraine, saying Russia would pay dearly for a full-scale invasion but suggesting there could be a lower cost for a "minor incursion."
Biden's comments at a White House news conference injected uncertainty into how the West would respond should Russian President Vladimir Putin order an invasion of Ukraine, prompting the White House later to seek to clarify what Biden meant.
"My guess is he will move in," Biden said of Putin at a news conference. "He has to do something."
"Russia will be held accountable if it invades - and it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about what to do and what to not do, et cetera," Biden said. "But if they actually do what they're capable of doing ... it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further invade Ukraine."
Russian officials have repeatedly denied planning to invade, but the Kremlin has massed some 100,000 troops near Ukraine's borders, a buildup the West says is preparation for a war to prevent Ukraine from ever joining the NATO Western security alliance.
Shortly after the nearly two-hour news conference ended, the White House stressed any Russian military move into Ukraine would elicit a tough response.
"If any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, that's a renewed invasion, and it will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our allies," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
But cyberattacks and paramilitary tactics by Russia "will be met with "a decisive, reciprocal, and united response," she said.
Republicans expressed concern about Biden's remarks.
"Any incursion by the Russian military into Ukraine should be viewed as a major incursion because it will destabilize Ukraine and freedom-loving countries in Eastern Europe," said Republican Senator Rob Portman.
SUMMIT 'A POSSIBILITY'
Biden said a third summit with Putin "is still a possibility" after the two leaders met twice last year. He said he was concerned that a Ukraine conflict could have broader implications and "could get out of hand."
- 1/5
- Snipers take part in military exercises at a firing ground of the Ukrainian armed forces in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, January 17, 2022. REUTERS/Anna Kudriavtseva
Speaking to reporters at length about the crisis threatening to engulf his presidency, Biden said he believed Putin would test Western leaders. The response to any Russian invasion, he said, would depend on the scale of Moscow's actions and whether U.S. allies squabbled over how to react.
Biden and his team have prepared a broad set of sanctions and other economic penalties to impose on Russia in the event of an invasion and the U.S. president said Russian companies could lose the ability to use the U.S. dollar.
Pressed on what he meant by a "minor incursion," Biden said NATO allies are not united on how to respond depending on what exactly Putin does, saying "there are differences" among them and that he was trying to make sure that "everybody's on the same page."
"Big nations can't bluff, number one. Number two, the idea that we would do anything to split NATO ... would be a big mistake. So the question is, if it's something significantly short of a significant invasion or ... just major military forces coming across. For example, it's one thing to determine if they continue to use cyber efforts; well, we can respond the same way," Biden said.
Biden said Putin had asked him for guarantees on two issues: that Ukraine would never join NATO and that "strategic" or nuclear weapons never be stationed on Ukrainian soil.
U.S. officials see limiting NATO expansion as a non-starter, but Biden noted there was little chance of Ukraine joining the alliance soon and he suggested there could be a deal under which the West might not station nuclear forces in Ukraine.
"We can work out something on the second piece," depending on Russia's own posture, Biden said.
Visiting Kyiv in a show of support, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russia could launch a new attack on Ukraine at "very short notice" but Washington would pursue diplomacy as long as it could, even though it was unsure what Moscow really wanted.
The Kremlin said tension around Ukraine was increasing and it still awaited a written U.S. response to its sweeping demands for security guarantees from the West, including a halt to further NATO expansion and a withdrawal of alliance forces from central and eastern European nations that joined it after 1997.
The pessimistic statements highlighted the U.S.-Russian gulf ahead of talks between Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday that one Russian foreign policy analyst called "probably the last stop before the train wreck."
Russia has also moved troops to Belarus for what it calls joint military exercises, giving it the option of attacking neighboring Ukraine from the north, east and south. read more
Eight years ago it seized Crimea and backed separatist forces who took control of large parts of eastern Ukraine, but it has consistently denied any intention of invading now.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Western weapons deliveries to Ukraine, military maneuvers and NATO aircraft flights were to blame for rising tensions around Ukraine.
- Reporting by Alexandra Alper and Steve Holland in Washington and Simon Lewis in Kyiv; Additional reporting by Matthias Williams, Pavel Polityuk and Natalia Zinets in Kyiv, Tom Balmforth and Dmitry Antonov in Moscow, Benoit van Overstraeten, Myriam Rivet and Tangi Salaün in Paris, Susan Heavey, Daphne Psaledakis, Tim Ahmann, Trevor Hunnicutt, Andrea Shalal and Heather Timmons in Washington; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Howard Goller
2. Ukrainian civilians are inspired to train for a possible war with Russia
Excerpts:
YEGOR SOBOLIEV: This is a very good way of being trained for people who do have jobs, do have families, older people. And I think this will change the situation with our security dramatically. Ukraine, like Israel, should be prepared for war for our independence every minute.
De Oppresso Liber - to free the oppressed. Or more appropriately to help the oppressed free themselves (or prevent themselves from being oppressed). Interesting analogy with Israel.
Ukrainian civilians are inspired to train for a possible war with Russia
January 19, 20225:14 AM ET
Russia's army is vastly stronger than even the new and improved Ukrainian armed forces, because of that Ukrainian civilians are training to fight a guerrilla war if Russian troops invade.
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
As Ukrainians prepare for a possible Russian invasion, citizens are volunteering for territorial defense battalions. In the capital, in Kyiv, people turned out every weekend for military training. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley went to watch.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: On the edge of a forest outside Kyiv, a group of about 60 men and women line up to begin six hours of military tactical training on a frigid Saturday morning. Civilian clothes are left inside cars parked along the dirt road. Dressed in battle fatigues and cradling guns, some of them wooden replicas, this group is ready for action. Yegor Soboliev says he signed up after Russian President Vladimir Putin began to move troops to Ukraine's border.
YEGOR SOBOLIEV: This is a very good way of being trained for people who do have jobs, do have families, older people. And I think this will change the situation with our security dramatically. Ukraine, like Israel, should be prepared for war for our independence every minute.
BEARDSLEY: Eastern Ukraine is already embroiled in a separatist war fueled by Russia. Civilians here reckon there's a 50-50 chance Russian troops will now invade. The deputy chief of this battalion, 50-year-old Vlas Honcharuk says these citizens need to be able to defend their cities block by block.
VLAS HONCHARUK: How do I feel now? A little bit tired but pumped up. Why I'm here? Because I'm Ukrainian. There's a war going on. Because Putin actually is the Hitler of 21st century. History repeats.
BEARDSLEY: Today, the trainees learn how to shoot and crawl in the forest. A partially constructed cement factory provides the perfect setting to practice urban guerrilla tactics.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
BEARDSLEY: Some volunteers already have a little military experience. Many are in their 40s and 50s and remember when Russians and Ukrainians were Soviet brothers. They say Ukraine did not have such a strong separate identity after independence in 1991, but now, thanks to Putin's military aggression and propaganda, says Honcharuk, a true Ukrainian nation is being forged.
HONCHARUK: Why they started this war? Because they don't even consider Ukraine as a proper nation.
BEARDSLEY: Fifty-five-year-old digital marketer and part-time diving instructor Oleksiy Vasylchenko says in 2014, when Putin took Crimea from Ukraine and stirred up the fighting in the East, he poisoned relations between Ukrainians and Russians, many of whom were still close after the Soviet collapse.
OLEKSIY VASYLCHENKO: A lot of my friends, my relatives, call me and say that we are fascists here because the Russian propaganda all the time says that Ukrainian is nationalist, is fascist, and they kill only because people speak in Russian language.
BEARDSLEY: Utter fabrication, he says, because everyone in Kyiv spoke Russian. But now, because of Putin, people are switching to Ukrainian, he says. They also now feel their values are closer to European values. Marta Yuzkiv, a doctor, says people feel they're fighting for something bigger.
MARTA YUZKIV: I would like to say that we are in danger now. So - and this is danger not just for Ukraine but danger for the whole democratic world. So - and I hope altogether we could stop Putin. And I know that all Ukrainian partners are supporting us in this effort, so we are grateful for this.
BEARDSLEY: Grateful for military help from NATO, she says. If Putin invades, that support would increase not only for the Ukrainian army but likely for the tens of thousands of highly motivated volunteers in Ukraine's territorial defense forces.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Kyiv.
3. Most ‘Havana Syndrome’ Cases Unlikely Caused by Foreign Power, C.I.A. Says
So what is the cause and how do we protect our officials working on behalf of the US overseas? Are we following a similar pattern here such as with Agent Orange, Gulf War Syndrome, and burn pits?
Most ‘Havana Syndrome’ Cases Unlikely Caused by Foreign Power, C.I.A. Says
A report concluded that most cases have environmental or medical causes, but the government remains focused on investigating two dozen incidents that remain unexplained.
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About 1,000 cases of the mysterious illness that initially appeared at the U.S. Embassy in Havana have been reported, but of those, the C.I.A. is now focusing on about a dozen unexplained incidents.Credit...Desmond Boylan/Associated Press
By
Jan. 20, 2022, 12:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. has found that most cases of the mysterious ailments known as Havana syndrome are unlikely to have been caused by Russia or another foreign adversary, agency officials said, a conclusion that angered victims.
A majority of the 1,000 cases reported to the government can be explained by environmental causes, undiagnosed medical conditions or stress, rather than a sustained global campaign by a foreign power, C.I.A. officials said, describing the interim findings of a comprehensive study.
The C.I.A. is continuing its investigation into two dozen cases that remain unexplained. Those cases, said a U.S. official briefed on the findings, offer the greatest chance of yielding clues to whether a foreign power is responsible for some of the unexplained health incidents that have plagued American diplomats and C.I.A. personnel in Havana and Vienna, among other cities.
In addition to those two dozen cases, a significant number of others remain unexplained, the official said.
The idea that Russia, China or Cuba was responsible for attacking hundreds of diplomats around the world was never backed up by any evidence that the Biden administration could unearth. But the F.B.I., the Pentagon and others continue to investigate whether a foreign power was involved in a smaller number of incidents, the U.S. official said. Clusters of incidents in Havana beginning in 2016 and some in Vienna in 2021, along with other individual incidents, remain a focus of such investigations.
The interim findings left many victims dissatisfied, particularly current and former officials who have been battling chronic ailments for years without being given a clear explanation. In a statement, a group of victims said the C.I.A. interim findings “cannot and must not be the final word on the matter.” The release of the findings, the victims said, was a breach of faith.
“The C.I.A.’s newly issued report may be labeled ‘interim’ and it may leave open the door for some alternative explanation in some cases, but to scores of dedicated public servants, their families and their colleagues, it has a ring of finality and repudiation,” the statement said.
William J. Burns, the director of the C.I.A., said the agency was pursuing a complex issue with “analytic rigor, sound tradecraft and compassion,” emphasizing that agency officers have experienced real symptoms.
“While we have reached some significant interim findings, we are not done,” Mr. Burns said in a statement. “We will continue the mission to investigate these incidents and provide access to world-class care for those who need it.”
The agency has never accused Russia or another power of being responsible, but some officials, particularly in the Pentagon, said they believed there was evidence of the involvement of Moscow’s spy agencies, and many victims concurred. When Mr. Burns traveled to Moscow in December to warn Russia against invading Ukraine, he raised the issue of the health incidents and said if Russia was found responsible, there would be consequences.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former C.I.A. officer who suffered Havana syndrome symptoms on a trip to Moscow in 2017, said it was critical to continue to investigate the cases that remain unexplained. Praising Mr. Burns’s efforts to improve care for injured officers, he added that the C.I.A. should not revert to a culture where victims were denigrated and dismissed.
“It took us 10 years to find Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Polymeropoulos said. “I would just urge patience and continued investigation by the intelligence community and the Department of Defense.”
Another victim, who asked that his name not be used because of his work for the agency, said the government had erred by pushing for more people to report ill health or unexplained symptoms. That brought in thousands of extraneous cases, the victim said, making it harder for the agency’s analysts to focus on the real cases.
The government official briefed on the findings said the effort to bring in large numbers of reports was not a mistake because it allowed the United States to speed up treatment for people suffering from symptoms. The effort also helped provide needed treatment to people with previously undiagnosed conditions, officials said.
C.I.A. officials said there was agreement within the intelligence community about the finding that the majority of Havana syndrome incidents were not the work of an adversarial power conducting a sustained campaign around the globe. Still, confidence in that assessment ranged from low to high across various intelligence agencies.
In addition to the C.I.A., an expert panel has been looking at classified information about the incidents. The panel, which has provided its findings to the government but is still finishing its report, explored technologies that could result, at least theoretically, in the symptoms being reported.
When made public, that report is expected to provide information on whether directed energy or microwaves could account for some of the unexplained incidents.
A directed energy weapon remains the hypothesis that a number of victims who have studied the incidents believe is most likely. Some of these current or retired officials believe government investigators have dismissed evidence they have collected of strange sounds or electromagnetic readings.
But late last year, officials said the C.I.A. had been unable to find any evidence that a directed energy device was responsible, neither intercepting communications from a foreign government that suggested the use of such a device or readings showing the presence of microwaves at the location of an incident.
The Havana Syndrome Mystery
Card 1 of 4
What is the Havana Syndrome? The mysterious illness, which has affected military officers, C.I.A. personnel and diplomats around the world, manifests itself in a host of ailments such as chronic headache, vertigo and nausea.
What is the source of the illness? Some officials are convinced that the symptoms are caused by Russian microwave attacks, but there is so far no evidence to support the theory. Outside experts have also suggested that the condition could be a psychosomatic reaction to stress.
Asked if directed energy or microwaves remain a leading theory for the cases still being investigated, an agency official said no potential explanation was being eliminated.
Of the cases that have been resolved, some had medical explanations, including previously undiagnosed conditions, while others were said to have had environmental causes, though C.I.A. officials did not offer examples. Some of the cases, officials said, were potentially related to the high stress of working at the C.I.A.
Some outside experts believe that stress has contributed to psychosomatic reactions or so-called functional illness. Many victims have found those explanations for chronic headaches and nausea offensive.
Last year, Congress passed a law compensating victims of Havana syndrome, and giving the government until April to devise a payment plan. It is not clear how the interim findings could affect that process. C.I.A. officials would say only that they were working on implementing the law, that their decisions were not yet due and that they were mindful of congressional intent to support officers reporting symptoms.
The statement by the victims said they hoped the interim report was not motivated by a desire on the government’s part to deny claims made under the act.
While some former officials said cases of similar injuries stretch back decades, the most recent spate of ailments began at the end of 2016, when C.I.A. officers and diplomats working in the U.S. Embassy in Havana reported strange sounds, pressure and then various ailments including nausea and debilitating migraine headaches.
Those incidents were followed by multitudes of reports in China, then in Vienna. Other reports have come in from around the world, including Russia, India and Vietnam.
A review released in 2020 by a team from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that a microwave weapon was the most likely cause of the injuries. Victims of the attacks had frequently pointed to various reports over the years about Russian research into directed energy weapons and the capacity of microwaves to cause brain injuries. But critics said that effort was incomplete because the Trump administration had not given the team access to classified information.
Many senior Trump administration officials, including leaders at the C.I.A., viewed the incidents skeptically, arguing that the evidence was insufficient to conclude that the mysterious incidents were attacks or that Russia was behind them. Some of those officials were influenced by an F.B.I. report that concluded the ailments were a kind of functional illness or stress-induced psychosomatic response.
The Biden administration took office with Mr. Burns and others pledging to get better treatment for victims for what they called the anomalous health incidents. They also started new efforts to study what had happened. They formed a new scientific review panel, led by the intelligence agencies, to examine all of the evidence, classified and unclassified. The C.I.A. formed a new cell, led by a veteran of the effort to find bin Laden, to figure out what happened.
The agency is now focused on two dozen.
4. CIA finds no ‘worldwide campaign’ by any foreign power behind mysterious Havana syndrome
CIA finds no ‘worldwide campaign’ by any foreign power behind mysterious Havana syndrome
The Central Intelligence Agency has determined that a foreign country is probably not mounting a global attack aimed at U.S. personnel who have reported painful and sometimes debilitating physical symptoms, a significant finding that could undermine some officials’ suspicion that Russia is to blame for a years-long series of mysterious illnesses.
“We assess it is unlikely that a foreign actor, including Russia, is conducting a sustained, worldwide campaign harming U.S. personnel with a weapon or mechanism,” said a senior CIA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the agency.
That leaves open the possibility that a foreign power could be responsible for cases that cannot be attributed to medical conditions or other factors, the official said.
Since the first cases of personnel suffering from symptoms including dizziness and headaches were reported at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016, government investigators have reviewed more than 1,000 cases of what officials have termed “anomalous health incidents,” the official said.
The symptoms, which are accompanied by sensations such as ringing in the ears, have come to be known commonly as Havana syndrome, and have been reported by intelligence, diplomatic and military personnel on every continent except Antarctica.
But the majority of those cases can be explained as the result of some preexisting medical condition or were caused by environmental or other factors, the official said, declining to specify the precise number.
Only “a couple dozen” incidents, which the official deemed “the toughest cases,” have no explanation as yet, despite months of investigation.
That small number of individuals will now be the focus of investigators’ attention, the official said. “Our work is continuing, and we are not done yet.
Pressure had mounted on the Biden administration to get to the bottom of the mystery after some former government personnel who have experienced the symptoms accused Trump administration officials of ignoring their plight or being too quick to dismiss their symptoms as imaginary.
Over the past year, more government personnel came forward to report symptoms, after their managers in the intelligence community, State Department and the military encouraged them to do so. That led to a flood of cases that had to be investigated, and most of those were attributed to some known cause, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.
The CIA established a task force to investigate the health incidents, led by a senior officer who previously played a key role in the agency’s successful search for Osama bin Laden.
In a written statement, CIA Director William J. Burns pledged to provide medical care for those who were afflicted, even if the cause of their illness remains unknown.
“We are pursuing this complex issue with analytic rigor, sound tradecraft and compassion, and have dedicated intensive resources to this challenge,” Burns said. “While we have reached some significant interim findings, we are not done. We will continue the mission to investigate these incidents and provide access to world-class care for those who need it. While underlying causes may differ, our officers are suffering real symptoms. Our commitment to care is unwavering.”
The Biden administration has sought to develop plans for providing compensation and improved medical care to those affected by the phenomenon.
Under the Havana Act, which President Biden signed into law in October, the administration has six months to establish a framework for making payments to individuals who have suffered from related health incidents.
But efforts to deal with the episodes had been complicated by officials’ inability to establish a clear diagnosis for a spate of symptoms that while sometimes debilitating are also common.
Officials said late last year they had detected no patterns among apparent victims, despite an extensive investigation by the CIA and other agencies.
While investigators had uncovered no hard evidence, some senior officials and lawmakers have maintained that Russia may be targeting U.S. personnel and their families with a powerful form of directed energy, either with the intent to surveil or inflict harm. Canadian diplomats have also reported being affected.
At his confirmation hearing in February, Burns promised to “make it an extraordinarily high priority to get to the bottom of who’s responsible for the attacks.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged in November to “do absolutely everything we can — leaving no stone unturned — to stop these occurrences.”
5. Biden promises additional troops, sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine
Biden promises additional troops, sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine
The United States will send more troops to eastern European NATO members, including Poland or Romania, if Russian President Vladimir Putin moves forward with an invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden said Wednesday.
Biden said the U.S. would not withdraw troops from former Soviet countries to de-escalate tensions with Russia, as he answered questions at a news conference to mark his one-year anniversary in office. Tensions have been growing in recent months amid a Russian troop buildup near the Ukraine border.
“We won’t permanently station,” said Biden, “but the idea we’re not going to we’re going to actually increase troop presence in Poland or Romania, et cetera, if, in fact, he moves because we have a sacred obligation on Article 5 to defend those countries, they are part of NATO.”
President Joe Biden speaks during a news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Biden said the US has “great concern” about what happens in Ukraine, even though it is not a NATO member, and that he believes Vladimir Putin doesn’t want full blown war in Ukraine. He also said he believes that Russia is preparing to take action on Ukraine, though he doesn’t think the Russian president has made a final decision. He suggested that he would limit Russia’s access to the international banking system if it did further invade Ukraine.
“I’m not so sure that he is certain what is he going to do,” Biden said. He added, “My guess is he will move in.”
Biden’s comments came hours after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a visit to Kyiv accused Russia of planning to reinforce the more than 100,000 troops it has deployed along the Ukrainian border and suggested that number could double “on relatively short order.” Blinken did not elaborate, but Russia has sent an unspecified number of troops from the country’s far east to its ally Belarus, which also shares a border with Ukraine, for major war games next month.
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A new Russian invasion of Ukraine could take place “at any minute,” a Ukrainian military official told Military Times Wednesday morning.
The U.S. president said he believes the decision will “solely” be Putin’s and suggested he was not fully confident that Russian officials with whom top White House advisers have been negotiating are fully informed about Putin’s thinking.
“There’s a question of whether the people they’re talking to know what he’s going to do,” Biden said.
Biden also suggested a “minor incursion” would elicit a lesser response than a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, saying “it’s very important that we keep everyone in NATO on the same page.” Biden later in the news conference sought to clarify that he was referring to a non-military action, such as a cyberattack, that would be met with a similar reciprocal response.
Ukraine, meanwhile, said it was prepared for the worst and would survive whatever difficulties come its way. The president urged the country not to panic.
Blinken’s visit to the Ukrainian capital came two days before he is to meet in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. That follows a series of inconclusive talks last week that failed to ease rising tensions.
Russian military activity has been increasing in recent weeks, but the U.S. has not concluded whether Putin plans to invade or whether the show of force is intended to squeeze the security concessions without an actual conflict.
Biden, who spoke with Putin twice last month, said he’s made it clear to him that Russia would face severe sanctions. Still, he said the decision for Putin could come down to “what side of the bed” he wakes up on.
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“We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.
“He’s never seen sanctions like the ones I promised will be imposed if he moves, No. 1,” Biden warned. “This is not all just a cake walk for Russia,” Biden said. “They’ll pay a stiff price immediately” and in the medium and long term “if they do it.”
In Kyiv, Blinken reiterated Washington’s demands for Russia to de-escalate the situation by removing its forces from the border area, something that Moscow has flatly refused to do. And, Blinken said he wouldn’t give Russia the written response it expects to its demands when he and Lavrov meet in Geneva.
Meanwhile, a top Russian diplomat said Moscow would not back down from its insistence that the U.S. formally ban Ukraine from ever joining NATO and reduce its and the alliance’s military presence in Eastern Europe. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow had no intention of invading Ukraine but that its demands for security guarantees were non-negotiable.
The U.S. and its allies have said the Russian demands are non-starters, that Russia knows they are and that Putin is using them in part to create a pretext for invading Ukraine, which has strong ethnic and historical ties to Russia. The former Soviet republic aspires to join the alliance, though has little hope of doing so in the foreseeable future.
United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken, second from right, attends a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Bankova, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Alex Brandon/AP, Pool)
Blinken urged Western nations to remain united in the face of Russian aggression. He also reassured Ukraine’s leader of NATO support while calling for Ukrainians to stand strong.
Blinken told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the U.S. and its allies were steadfast in backing his country and its democratic aspirations against Russian attempts to incite division and discord through “relentless aggression.”
“Our strength depends on preserving our unity and that includes unity within Ukraine,” he told Zelenskyy. “I think one of Moscow’s long-standing goals has been to try to sow divisions between and within our countries, and quite simply we cannot and will not let them do that.”
Zelenskyy thanked Blinken for the aid, which was approved in late December but not confirmed until Wednesday.
“This (military) support not only speaks to our strategic plans of Ukraine joining the alliance, but more importantly to the level of our military, our military supplies,” he said, referring to Kyiv’s desire to join NATO.
“Your visit is very important,” Zelenskyy said. “It underlines once again your powerful support of our independence and sovereignty.”
Zelenskyy released a video address to the nation on Wednesday evening, urging Ukrainians not to panic over fears of a possible invasion. But he said the country has been living with the Russian threat for many years and should always be prepared for war. He called on all Ukrainians, especially the elderly, to “breathe” and “calm down.”
Ukraine’s president also gave assurances that the country was strengthening its defense capabilities and doing everything possible to resolve the crisis through diplomacy.
“Ukraine doesn’t want a war, but must always be prepared for it,” Zelenskyy said.
6. Ukraine Needs Help Surviving Airstrikes, Not Just Killing Tanks
Excerpts:
Finally, efforts should also stepped up to provide short- and intermediate-range air defense systems. Indeed, Ukraine has asked for help in air defense and has already started fortifying critical facilities from air attacks, which suggests a correct understanding of Russian targeting and strategy. And the United States and other allies and partners have already begun discussed providing Patriot and Israeli Iron Dome systems, both of which would be of far more use than easily overflown man-portable missiles. These would be purely defensive air-defense systems and Moscow would be hard-pressed to argue they are destabilizing to the region. But this kind of assistance should not be counted upon in the very near term. Such systems would likely take months at best to approve, deploy, create infrastructure, and train local forces to use.
A Russian large-scale multidomain operation would be devastating for the Ukrainian military and people, and Ukraine should work to prevent that. But steps can also be taken to reduce the effects of the air and missile strikes that would likely lead off such an operation. Kyiv and its supporters must urgently take such steps.
Ukraine Needs Help Surviving Airstrikes, Not Just Killing Tanks
A Russian invasion would likely start with a punishing bombardment intended to induce quick capitulation.
Much of the Western discussion about helping Ukraine in the face of overwhelming Russian military advantage centers on relatively short-range weapons and tactics meant to enmesh an invasion force in the “next Afghanistan” or a “near certainty of hell”: for example, providing more Javelin anti-tank weapons, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and weaponized drones; or training Ukrainian forces and Ukrainian non-state groups to make improvised explosive devices. While such courses of action would impose costs, they would impose them on Russian and Russian proxy forces’ ground troops. These approaches do not consider the decisive role that Russian air and standoff missile strikes may play. If the Kremlin orders a large-scale move on Ukraine, it is likely to take the form of a multi-domain operation, beginning with air and standoff missile strikes that could prove decisive—and devastating—long before short-range defenses come into play.
A better approach starts with looking at the Russian military’s current strategy and doctrine, the forces it has amassed nearby, and the capabilities it has shown in recent conflicts. Many Russian concepts of operation emphasize a short and intense “Initial Period of War” that may produce decisive effects even before ground forces are fully committed. Standoff weapons—bombs, precision guided missiles—are unleashed against enemy forces and the infrastructure that sustains the fight: military bases, forward-deployed units, air defense sites, airfields, key transportation nodes, fuel depots, command-and-control targets, power plants, even local news organizations. The aim is to force the enemy government to capitulate quickly.
A large-scale Russian operation against Ukraine would likely be different from previous post-Soviet operations for several reasons. The Russian military has spent the past decade refining doctrine, reorganizing its forces, and updating its arsenal. It no longer relies on large numbers of poorly trained conscripts and ill-equipped ground forces as it did in Chechnya. Its modernization program was designed to avoid the kind of disorganized, stove-piped, ground-force dominant operation seen in Georgia in 2008. Even its “hybrid” incursions into the Donbass and Crimea in 2014 may be only partially illustrative at best.
The most illuminating illustration of current Russian tactics is probably its overt operations in Syria. But that expeditionary force was much smaller, designed only to support what Moscow claims is a counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism operation. At their peak, Russian forces in Syria were only a small fraction of the strike power that is permanently based and temporary deployed near Ukraine today.
The modernized and massive Russian military force that currently surrounds Ukraine on three sides can muster air and missile strikes that would likely overwhelm Ukrainian airpower and air defenses and severely damage military and other facilities. In particular, Russia’s Aerospace Forces, or VKS, are very different from a decade ago. They have new and modernized aircraft, along with better radar, communications, and targeting equipment. Pilots have generally flown more flight hours and received training in close air support and nighttime operations. And although they have little experience flying through hostile air defenses, 92 percent of VKS pilots have recent combat experience in Syria. The VKS also has adopted more effective countermeasures against man-portable or short-range air defenses such as Stinger missiles, including flying at higher altitudes.
Russia also fields standoff precision strike missiles that could strike any Ukrainian location from well inside Russian territory or the Black Sea. Weapons like the SS-26 short-range ballistic missile system, with a range of 250 to 350 kilometers, are already likely staging near Ukraine. Russia can strike from even farther away using the SSC-7 ground-launched cruise missile (400 to 500km), the naval SS-N-30A Kalibr land-attack cruise missile (1,500-plus km), or the strategic bomber-launched Kh-555 or Kh-101 cruise missile (2,000 to 4,000km).
Against this strike force, Ukraine can muster only Air Force and air defense systems that are limited in number, date to the Soviet era, and are based at a small number of facilities. Russian air or missile strikes could quickly render them combat-ineffective, even if they were not outright destroyed.
The VKS’ own integrated air defense systems would accompany Russian troops on the ground to protect them with short, intermediate, and long-range air defense systems. Russia could also move its advanced SA-21 system to certain border areas to complicate eastern Ukrainian airspace, to stop or degrade Western weapons transfers. For example, SA-21 systems equipped with the new 40N6 interceptor missile can hit targets out to 400km—and the distance between Kyiv and the Russian border near the Kursk area is around 300km. Such a deployment would threaten military and civilian aircraft operating out of large areas of eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea from Crimea.
What would help
It is highly unlikely that Kyiv’s supporters can provide enough materiel support to bridge the gap between Ukrainian and Russian military capabilities in a way that will deter Russian aggression in the near or intermediate term. Russia’s correlation of forces is simply too strong and Russian military assets can simply overfly or outrange many of tactical or short-range weapons like Stingers or Javelin systems by using modernized air power, standoff precision strikes, or outrange them the ground with long-range artillery. Nevertheless, there are near-term options left to support Kyiv and reduce the impact of these strikes to save lives and forces.
In the weeks ahead, Kyiv’s partners could help the Ukrainian military and government “ride out” air and missile strikes as best they can by consulting on dispersal plans for Ukrainian air defenses (as U.S. teams recently did) or hardening plans for other critical facilities, since these locations will almost certainly be primary and early targets for Russian strikes. Ukraine’s partners might share knowledge about Russian targeting strategy to assist Ukraine in building fortifications or establishing redundancy plans for critical command and control centers or military units, or detecting Russian cyber attacks or intrusions. Finally, Ukraine’s supporters could share real-time intelligence on Russian flight operations or missile launches. . Such information could be vital when minutes count for dispersal and survival.
Finally, efforts should also stepped up to provide short- and intermediate-range air defense systems. Indeed, Ukraine has asked for help in air defense and has already started fortifying critical facilities from air attacks, which suggests a correct understanding of Russian targeting and strategy. And the United States and other allies and partners have already begun discussed providing Patriot and Israeli Iron Dome systems, both of which would be of far more use than easily overflown man-portable missiles. These would be purely defensive air-defense systems and Moscow would be hard-pressed to argue they are destabilizing to the region. But this kind of assistance should not be counted upon in the very near term. Such systems would likely take months at best to approve, deploy, create infrastructure, and train local forces to use.
A Russian large-scale multidomain operation would be devastating for the Ukrainian military and people, and Ukraine should work to prevent that. But steps can also be taken to reduce the effects of the air and missile strikes that would likely lead off such an operation. Kyiv and its supporters must urgently take such steps.
Dara Massicot is a senior policy researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and a former senior analyst for the Department of Defense focusing on Russian military capabilities and strategy.
7. Newly Declassified Video Shows U.S. Killing of 10 Civilians in Drone Strike
You can access the drone footage at these links:
Raw Footage of Lethal Aug. 29 Kabul Drone Strike
By The New York Times•January 19, 2022
The New York Times is publishing the full, unedited 25 minutes of drone footage released as three video clips by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
New Video Shows Botched Kabul Drone Strike
By Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christoph Koettl, Evan Hill and Drew Jordan•January 19, 2022
High-Resolution Drone Video Shows Closer Angle of Kabul Strike
By Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christoph Koettl and Evan Hill•January 19, 2022
Newly Declassified Video Shows U.S. Killing of 10 Civilians in Drone Strike
Jan. 19, 2022
The New York Times obtained footage of the botched strike in Kabul, whose victims included seven children, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
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The New York Times obtained newly declassified military drone footage showing for the first time the U.S. strike on a car at a family home in Kabul on Aug. 29, 2021, that killed 10 Afghan civilians.
Jan. 19, 2022
WASHINGTON — Newly declassified surveillance footage provides additional insights about the final minutes and aftermath of a botched U.S. drone strike last year in Kabul, Afghanistan, showing how the military made a life-or-death decision based on imagery that was fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias.
The strike on Aug. 29 killed 10 innocent people — including seven children — in a tragic blunder that punctuated the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
The disclosure of the videos was a rare step by the U.S. military in any case of an airstrike that caused civilian casualties, and is the first time any footage from the Kabul strike has been seen publicly. The videos encompass about 25 minutes of silent footage from two drones — a military official said both were MQ-9 Reapers — showing the minutes before, during and after the strike.
The at-times blurry footage that operators were watching will continue to be scrutinized for new details about how the episode unfolded, while demonstrating the heightened risk of error that accompanies any decision to fire a missile in a densely populated neighborhood.
The military had been working that day under extreme pressure to head off another attack on troops and civilians in the middle of the chaotic withdrawal. It has said it believed it was tracking an ISIS-K terrorist who might imminently detonate a bomb near the Kabul airport. Three days earlier, a suicide bombing at the airport had killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops.
The New York Times obtained the footage of the strike through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against United States Central Command, which oversaw military operations in Afghanistan. The disclosure is likely to add fuel to a debate about the rules for airstrikes and protections for civilians in the era of drone warfare.
The videos — one of which is in grainy imagery, apparently from a camera designed to detect heat — show a car arriving at and backing into a courtyard on a residential street blocked by walls. Blurry figures are seen moving around the courtyard, and children are walking on the street outside the walls in the moments before a fireball from a Hellfire missile engulfs the interior. Neighbors can then be seen desperately dumping water onto the courtyard from rooftops.
A second drone captured high-resolution footage of the strike on Aug. 29, 2021 from another angle. The U.S. military mistakenly killed the Afghan aid worker Zemari Ahmadi and nine of his family members with a Hellfire missile.Credit...Department of Defense
The scenes unfolding on the video are murky. In retrospect, it is clear that the images were misinterpreted by those who decided to fire.
American operators on Aug. 29 had been tracking the driver of a white Toyota Corolla for about eight hours before targeting him in the mistaken belief that he was an ISIS-K member moving bombs. But the man was instead Zemari Ahmadi, a worker employed by Nutrition and Education International, a California-based aid organization.
The footage from one of the drones briefly shows what appears to be a blurry shorter figure in white next to a taller figure in black inside the courtyard as the car is backing in, about two and a half minutes before the explosion. Shuddering on the other drone’s footage, about 21 seconds before the explosion, suggests that might have been when it launched a missile.
The footage shows other figures of indeterminate height moving around the courtyard over several minutes as Mr. Ahmadi’s sedan backed into the compound, including one person opening the passenger door of the car just before the blast.
In the days after the strike, the military described a secondary explosion that it insisted supported the suspicion the car contained a bomb but later said was probably a propane tank. The footage shows a fireball from the blast, which expands about two seconds later, but it is tough to make out what is happening in the flare.
The heights of most figures inside the courtyard are difficult to determine because the footage was shot from overhead, making it harder to identify whether they might be children. The video with the better angle into the courtyard is in black-and-white and has lower resolution. The other video, which is in color, begins after the car was already backing in, but briefly shifts into black-and-white — apparently a thermal lens — at the moment of the strike.
Reached by phone, Emal Ahmadi, the brother of Mr. Ahmadi, whose daughter Malika was also killed in the strike, told The Times that he wanted to view the video himself, after having only heard descriptions from the military. “It will be difficult for me,” he said, “but I want to see it.”
Responding to a description, Hina Shamsi, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is representing the families of the victims and Nutrition and Education International, which employed Mr. Ahmadi, said the footage highlighted “a painful, devastating loss of 10 deeply beloved people.”
A botched airstrike in Kabul in August has prompted a closer look at the adequacy of protections for civilians in war zones.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Capt. Bill Urban, the spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, reiterated the Pentagon’s apology.
“While the strike was intended for what was believed to be an imminent threat to our troops at Hamid Karzai International Airport, none of the family members killed are now believed to have been connected to ISIS-K or threats to our troops,” he said. “We deeply regret the loss of life that resulted from this strike.”
The blurrier main video begins as the white car was approaching the courtyard, following the vehicle through several streets. It shows people moving in the courtyard several minutes before the strike, as the car stops and then backs in. A laser range-finder briefly appears about 70 seconds before the strike, and then returns and stays for the final half minute. Additional blurry figures are visible just before they are engulfed in flames.
The clearer video, which is mostly in color, starts as the car is backing in and reveals little about who was in the courtyard because of the angle from which it was shot. But it more plainly shows a figure opening the front-right door of the car just before the explosion, as well as children on the street outside the gated courtyard.
Both videos show people rushing to the site and throwing water onto the fire from nearby roofs. About 90 seconds after the strike, the higher-resolution color camera abruptly swivels away from the carnage to point at an unremarkable street scene nearby for the next five minutes.
The footage also underscores how drone operators may jump to the conclusion that any unknown people interacting with a terrorism suspect are likely fellow militants. In this case, even their suspicions about the suspect were wrong.
In November, the Air Force’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, released findings of his investigation into the strike, which found no violations of law and did not recommend any disciplinary action. The general blamed “confirmation bias” for warping operators’ interpretation of what they were seeing.
Officials have said that intelligence had indicated that an ISIS-K attacker would be driving a white Toyota Corolla, and that a certain building was a terrorist safe house. In fact, the building was the residence of the director of Mr. Ahmadi’s aid organization. But operators did not realize that error when Mr. Ahmadi headed to that building in his white Corolla — and from that premise over the next eight hours, they interpreted other mundane actions as threatening, too.
What Happened During the Botched Kabul Drone Strike
Card 1 of 4
A Times investigation. On Aug. 29, 2021, the U.S. military launched a drone strike against a car that officials said contained an ISIS bomb and posed an imminent threat to American troops at Kabul’s airport. But a video analysis by The Times cast doubt on that account.
When someone in his car retrieved a black bag from that building, the operators interpreted the bag as an explosive since the airport bomber had used a black backpack; in fact, it was his boss’s laptop. When several people later placed canisters in the trunk of his car, the operators saw more bombs; in fact, the objects were most likely water containers. And when there appeared to be a secondary explosion after the missile blew up the car, they saw evidence of a bomb; in fact, the military later said, it was most likely a propane tank.
A trove of military reviews of reported civilian casualty incidents in the air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria obtained by The Times revealed repeated instances of a similar confirmation bias.
“We know we need to improve situational awareness, communication between strike cells and nodes, and introduce a more robust process by which the analysis of intelligence can be scrutinized in real time,” Captain Urban told The Times in response to questions about confirmation bias.
The military initially announced that it had thwarted another planned attack outside the airport. But nearly everything that senior Pentagon officials claimed in the hours, days and weeks after the drone strike turned out to be wrong. A week after a Times video investigation showed that the man driving the car was Mr. Ahmadi, the Pentagon acknowledged that the strike had been a tragic mistake and no ISIS-K fighters had been killed.
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How a U.S. Drone Strike Killed the Wrong Person
A week after a New York Times visual investigation, the U.S. military admitted to a “tragic mistake” in an Aug. 29 drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children.
[explosion] In one of the final acts of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the United States fired a missile from a drone at a car in Kabul. It was parked in the courtyard of a home, and the explosion killed 10 people, including 43-year-old Zemari Ahmadi and seven children, according to his family. The Pentagon claimed that Ahmadi was a facilitator for the Islamic State, and that his car was packed with explosives, posing an imminent threat to U.S. troops guarding the evacuation at the Kabul airport. “The procedures were correctly followed, and it was a righteous strike.” What the military apparently didn’t know was that Ahmadi was a longtime aid worker, who colleagues and family members said spent the hours before he died running office errands, and ended his day by pulling up to his house. Soon after, his Toyota was hit with a 20-pound Hellfire missile. What was interpreted as the suspicious moves of a terrorist may have just been an average day in his life. And it’s possible that what the military saw Ahmadi loading into his car were water canisters he was bringing home to his family — not explosives. Using never-before seen security camera footage of Ahmadi, interviews with his family, co-workers and witnesses, we will piece together for the first time his movements in the hours before he was killed. Zemari Ahmadi was an electrical engineer by training. For 14 years, he had worked for the Kabul office of Nutrition and Education International. “NEI established a total of 11 soybean processing plants in Afghanistan.” It’s a California based NGO that fights malnutrition. On most days, he drove one of the company’s white Toyota corollas, taking his colleagues to and from work and distributing the NGO’s food to Afghans displaced by the war. Only three days before Ahmadi was killed, 13 U.S. troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians died in an Islamic State suicide attack at the airport. The military had given lower-level commanders the authority to order airstrikes earlier in the evacuation, and they were bracing for what they feared was another imminent attack. To reconstruct Ahmadi’s movements on Aug. 29, in the hours before he was killed, The Times pieced together the security camera footage from his office, with interviews with more than a dozen of Ahmadi’s colleagues and family members. Ahmadi appears to have left his home around 9 a.m. He then picked up a colleague and his boss’s laptop near his house. It’s around this time that the U.S. military claimed it observed a white sedan leaving an alleged Islamic State safehouse, around five kilometers northwest of the airport. That’s why the U.S. military said they tracked Ahmadi’s Corolla that day. They also said they intercepted communications from the safehouse, instructing the car to make several stops. But every colleague who rode with Ahmadi that day said what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves was just a typical day in his life. After Ahmadi picked up another colleague, the three stopped to get breakfast, and at 9:35 a.m., they arrived at the N.G.O.’s office. Later that morning, Ahmadi drove some of his co-workers to a Taliban-occupied police station to get permission for future food distribution at a new displacement camp. At around 2 p.m., Ahmadi and his colleagues returned to the office. The security camera footage we obtained from the office is crucial to understanding what happens next. The camera’s timestamp is off, but we went to the office and verified the time. We also matched an exact scene from the footage with a timestamp satellite image to confirm it was accurate. A 2:35 p.m., Ahmadi pulls out a hose, and then he and a co-worker fill empty containers with water. Earlier that morning, we saw Ahmadi bring these same empty plastic containers to the office. There was a water shortage in his neighborhood, his family said, so he regularly brought water home from the office. At around 3:38 p.m., a colleague moves Ahmadi’s car further into the driveway. A senior U.S. official told us that at roughly the same time, the military saw Ahmadi’s car pull into an unknown compound 8 to 12 kilometers southwest of the airport. That overlaps with the location of the NGO’s office, which we believe is what the military called an unknown compound. With the workday ending, an employee switched off the office generator and the feed from the camera ends. We don’t have footage of the moments that followed. But it’s at this time, the military said that its drone feed showed four men gingerly loading wrapped packages into the car. Officials said they couldn’t tell what was inside them. This footage from earlier in the day shows what the men said they were carrying — their laptops one in a plastic shopping bag. And the only things in the trunk, Ahmadi’s co-workers said, were the water containers. Ahmadi dropped each one of them off, then drove to his home in a dense neighborhood near the airport. He backed into the home’s small courtyard. Children surrounded the car, according to his brother. A U.S. official said the military feared the car would leave again, and go into an even more crowded street or to the airport itself. The drone operators, who hadn’t been watching Ahmadi’s home at all that day, quickly scanned the courtyard and said they saw only one adult male talking to the driver and no children. They decided this was the moment to strike. A U.S. official told us that the strike on Ahmadi’s car was conducted by an MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired a single Hellfire missile with a 20-pound warhead. We found remnants of the missile, which experts said matched a Hellfire at the scene of the attack. In the days after the attack, the Pentagon repeatedly claimed that the missile strike set off other explosions, and that these likely killed the civilians in the courtyard. “Significant secondary explosions from the targeted vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material.” “Because there were secondary explosions, there’s a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was explosives in that vehicle.” But a senior military official later told us that it was only possible to probable that explosives in the car caused another blast. We gathered photos and videos of the scene taken by journalists and visited the courtyard multiple times. We shared the evidence with three weapons experts who said the damage was consistent with the impact of a Hellfire missile. They pointed to the small crater beneath Ahmadi’s car and the damage from the metal fragments of the warhead. This plastic melted as a result of a car fire triggered by the missile strike. All three experts also pointed out what was missing: any evidence of the large secondary explosions described by the Pentagon. No collapsed or blown-out walls, including next to the trunk with the alleged explosives. No sign that a second car parked in the courtyard was overturned by a large blast. No destroyed vegetation. All of this matches what eyewitnesses told us, that a single missile exploded and triggered a large fire. There is one final detail visible in the wreckage: containers identical to the ones that Ahmadi and his colleague filled with water and loaded into his trunk before heading home. Even though the military said the drone team watched the car for eight hours that day, a senior official also said they weren’t aware of any water containers. The Pentagon has not provided The Times with evidence of explosives in Ahmadi’s vehicle or shared what they say is the intelligence that linked him to the Islamic State. But the morning after the U.S. killed Ahmadi, the Islamic State did launch rockets at the airport from a residential area Ahmadi had driven through the previous day. And the vehicle they used … … was a white Toyota. The U.S. military has so far acknowledged only three civilian deaths from its strike, and says there is an investigation underway. They have also admitted to knowing nothing about Ahmadi before killing him, leading them to interpret the work of an engineer at a U.S. NGO as that of an Islamic State terrorist. Four days before Ahmadi was killed, his employer had applied for his family to receive refugee resettlement in the United States. At the time of the strike, they were still awaiting approval. Looking to the U.S. for protection, they instead became some of the last victims in America’s longest war. “Hi, I’m Evan, one of the producers on this story. Our latest visual investigation began with word on social media of an explosion near Kabul airport. It turned out that this was a U.S. drone strike, one of the final acts in the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Our goal was to fill in the gaps in the Pentagon’s version of events. We analyzed exclusive security camera footage, and combined it with eyewitness accounts and expert analysis of the strike aftermath. You can see more of our investigations by signing up for our newsletter.”
A week after a New York Times visual investigation, the U.S. military admitted to a “tragic mistake” in an Aug. 29 drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children.Credit...By The New York Times. Video frame: Nutrition & Education International.
The Times sued for a copy of the surveillance footage starting five minutes before the drone began tracking the white car to five minutes after the missile strike, which would amount to about eight hours. It is not clear what happened to the remaining footage, a question that may be the subject of further litigation.
The botched strike has helped spur a closer look at the military’s targeting rules and the adequacy of protections for civilians in war zones after two decades in which airstrikes from remote-operated drones became routine — leading to recurring incidents in which civilian bystanders are killed.
The car that was targeted in the drone strike remained in the courtyard of the home weeks later.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Under the law of war, it can be legal to carry out strikes that kill some civilians, as long as they were not the intended target and as long as the anticipated collateral damage is deemed to be necessary and proportionate to the military aim. But the Defense Department has long said that it tries to minimize civilian casualties.
In November, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III declared that the military needed to do more to prevent them. The Pentagon has been developing new procedures intended to foster a culture that does more to prioritize minimizing civilian harm and are expected to announce such changes soon, officials said.
Still, with United States ground forces no longer in theaters like Afghanistan and Somalia and drawing down from Syria and Iraq, strikes on traditional or “hot” battlefields may be less frequent compared with so-called over-the-horizon counterterrorism strikes in poorly governed places where there are no American troops to defend on the ground — but where good intelligence may be even harder to come by.
The U.S. government has offered to resettle the relatives of the victims — and employees of the aid organization — and to make unspecified condolence payments to the families, Ms. Shamsi said, but they have received no compensation and are instead focused on leaving Afghanistan.
“We aren’t even discussing compensation because our clients’ safety comes first,” she said.
Ainara Tiefenthäler contributed reporting.
8. Statement from Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Russian Aggression Towards Ukraine
Batting cleanup...
Statement from Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Russian Aggression Towards Ukraine
JANUARY 19, 2022
•
President Biden has been clear with the Russian President: If any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, that’s a renewed invasion, and it will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our Allies. President Biden also knows from long experience that the Russians have an extensive playbook of aggression short of military action, including cyberattacks and paramilitary tactics. And he affirmed today that those acts of Russian aggression will be met with a decisive, reciprocal, and united response.
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9. Air Force Must Harden Pacific Bases Against Missiles, Secretary Says
Time and money. And of course the host nation.
Host nations want to limit space for the US military presence to have minimum impact on the local population (and politics). This is one of the main reasons for the base consolidation in Korea (and the creation of what Kim Jong-n calls the "fat target." This of course conflicts with sound military practice: to not only harden positions but also to disperse them in order to better protect them.
Air Force Must Harden Pacific Bases Against Missiles, Secretary Says
Today’s unhardened, undispersed hangars are easy targets for a new generation of Chinese weapons, Frank Kendall said.
The U.S. Air Force needs to spend more to protect its Pacific bases from Chinese missiles, Secretary Frank Kendall said Wednesday.
“They [China] have noticed it's quite obvious that we depend upon a small number of assets, including forward air bases, to conduct operations,” Kendall said Wednesday at a Center for a New American Security virtual event. “Because they're fixed, they're easily targetable, and they've built the assets to come after them. So we have got to respond to that.”
Historically, Air Force leaders have prioritized buying new aircraft over base defenses, which can include sophisticated anti-missile systems but can also mean dispersing and hardening hangars or even installing simple canopies to conceal the number and location of aircraft, Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, wrote in War on the Rocks.
Kendall has made protecting the Air Force’s forward bases one of his seven top priorities, which he first announced at Defense One’s Outlook 2022 in December.
“What I am trying to instill within the whole department is a sense of urgency about all of this … they're things we have to do to be successful,” Kendall said Wednesday.
He said the Air Force needs to move away from a small number of bases that concentrate aircraft within a few unhardened hangars.
“China has a formidable arsenal of conventionally armed long-range missiles that are significantly more accurate than the ones that the Soviet Union had during the Cold War and plans to fire them in a first strike to destroy U.S. forces on the land and at sea,” Pettyjohn wrote. “The Defense Department should ensure that American forces in the Indo-Pacific can survive this blow and generate combat power while under attack, which requires taking steps to increase the resiliency of U.S. military posture.”
In recent years, the Air Force has been using an Agile Combat Employment concept that calls for spreading out forces across more bases. The Air Force operates the bulk of its forces in the Pacific from nine bases, in Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Japan, and South Korea. But Kendall said more needs to be done.
“We have to be harder; we have to create some ambiguity for the enemy,” he said. “We have to use a combination of multiple locations and deceptions to do that. We have to have some level of defenses so that he has uncertainty about how successful this attack might be, and we have to basically change the equation fundamentally in terms of how much leverage there is in shutting down air bases.”
Kendall said this is “about allocation of resources, at the end of the day.” The Pentagon is expected to send its 2023 budget proposal to Congress in March.
“We just have a lot more to do, and we need to get on with it as quickly as possible,” he said.
10. Cyberattack on Red Cross compromised data of over 515,000 'highly vulnerable people'
Even the ICRC. What do these hackers think they can gain by targeting vulnerable people? What effects are they trying to achieve? Or are they targeting the contracting company to discredit it (and extort it) by attacking vulnerable targets?
Cyberattack on Red Cross compromised data of over 515,000 'highly vulnerable people'
CNN · by Sean Lyngaas, CNN
(CNN)A cyberattack on a contractor used by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has compromised the personal data of more than 515,000 "highly vulnerable people," including people separated from their families by conflict and disaster, the organization said Wednesday.
The hack has forced the Red Cross to shut down IT systems that support a program that reunites families separated by conflict, migration or disaster, the humanitarian organization said.
It's unclear who was responsible for the cyber incident, but the Red Cross said its "most pressing concern" was the potential for the compromised data to be leaked. There is no indication that has happened yet, according to the Red Cross.
"We are all appalled and perplexed that this humanitarian information would be targeted and compromised," ICRC Director-General Robert Mardini said in a statement.
The hack hit a Switzerland-based firm that the Red Cross pays to store its data, the humanitarian organization said without naming the firm. The compromised data came from at least 60 of the "national societies," or networks of volunteers and staff, around the world that the Red Cross uses as first responders to disasters.
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"As a first step, we will work with most concerned ICRC delegations and Red Cross and Red Crescent societies on the ground to find ways to inform individuals and families whose data may have been compromised, what measures are being taken to protect their data and the risks they may possibly face," Red Cross spokesperson Elizabeth Shaw told CNN in an email.
Shaw said that ransomware was not involved in the incident and that the Red Cross was working with "highly specialized" cybersecurity firms to respond to the hack.
Lukasz Olejnik, a former cyber warfare adviser at Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, told CNN that the incident "seems to be the biggest and most sensitive breach in history of ICRC and, probably, considering the sensitiveness, of all humanitarian organizations to date."
The Red Cross should consider asking governments that are party to the Geneva Conventions for help in recovering from the hack, Olejnik, who is an independent cybersecurity consultant, told CNN.
CNN · by Sean Lyngaas, CNN
11. Go Armie!: Green Beret-turned congressman names baby after his beloved branch
Better than a boy named Sue I guess.
Go Armie!: Green Beret-turned congressman names baby after his beloved branch
Congressman and former Green Beret Col. Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Florida, and fellow Army combat veteran Julia Nesheiwat got married in September.
And what should follow sweet nuptial bliss for this military couple but a 9 pound 5 ounce bundle of joy that they adoringly named after their beloved service branch: Armie.
Waltz’s new familial recruit reported for duty Jan. 7 and was welcomed with a tweet from his commanding officer, which read, “Go Armie! 9lbs 5oz on Jan 7th. Our hearts are full in the Waltz family.”
In a surprising turn of events, baby Armie was not photographed wearing the proper uniform of the day for his official portrait, though we suppose you could call his little striped blues ‘Armie’ mess dress.
There is no word yet whether Armie’s birth was part of his enlistment package or if he’ll seek a commission.
With a name like that, however, his first word is bound to be “HOOAH.”
Observation Post is the Military Times one-stop shop for all things off-duty. Stories may reflect author observations.
Rachel is a Marine Corps veteran, Penn State alumna and Master's candidate at New York University for Business and Economic Reporting.
Sarah Sicard is a Senior Editor with Military Times. She previously served as the Digital Editor of Military Times and the Army Times Editor. Other work can be found at National Defense Magazine, Task & Purpose, and Defense News.
12. Fort Bragg changes name of road ‘incorrectly’ linked to top Confederate general
Problem solved? If only all names were this "easy."
"Long Street" - the street formerly named "Longstreet."
Fort Bragg changes name of road ‘incorrectly’ linked to top Confederate general
The entrance to Fort Bragg is shown in this undated file photo. (Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images)
Fort Bragg’s Longstreet Road, which runs through the center of the North Carolina Army post, has been renamed as part of an effort to rid the military of names associated with the Confederacy, post officials announced this week.
The road, which is often associated with Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, stretches from Fort Bragg’s gated garrison section westward along its wooded training areas and will now be known as Long Street, officials said in a statement. Workers began changing signs along the route on Jan. 8 and are expected to complete the process by the end of the month, according to the statement.
The name change comes as U.S. military officials across the nation scrutinize posts for names and relics honoring those who served the Confederacy in the Civil War. A commission to study Confederate-linked names across the military was established by Congress in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which sets annual spending and policy priorities for the Defense Department. The commission is charged with providing Congress recommendations for name changes by October.
The Long Street change reverts the road back to its original name, which might have been inadvertently changed about a century ago, and in the decades since has become “incorrectly affiliated” with Longstreet, Fort Bragg officials said. Longstreet was one of the most prominent military leaders of the Civil War, a West Point graduate who fought for the United States in the Mexican-American War, but joined the Confederate cause after the Battle of Fort Sumter. He served as one of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s closest confidantes, according to the American Battlefield Trust.
The 82nd Airborne Division command group leads the division’s paratroopers on a run down Longstreet Road on Fort Bragg, N.C., during the kickoff event for the All American Week celebration in May 2009. (Staff Sgt. Michael Pryor/U.S. Army photo)
A recent look through historical records show Long Street was likely first identified as Longstreet Road in about 1918 or 1919 on installation maps of what was then Camp Bragg, likely due to “U.S. Geological Survey map simplification efforts,” post officials wrote in their statement.
“Long Street’s story is very interesting because it was originally named ‘Long Street’ well before, then Camp Bragg, was built,” said Army Col. Scott Pence, Fort Bragg’s garrison commander. “Returning the street name to its original heritage ensures that the installation’s history is properly retained for those who live and work on Fort Bragg.”
The naming commission’s work has proven controversial. Then-president Donald Trump, who vowed U.S. bases named for Confederates would not be changed under his leadership, vetoed the 2021 NDAA, citing the commission’s creation. Congress then overrode his veto, making it law.
Commissioners last year visited dozens of military sites across the United States to determine what changes they will recommended. They said they had received tens of thousands of suggestions for new names for posts.
Fort Bragg, named for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, is among at least nine Army posts expected to be identified for a name change once the commission completes its work.
Military officials, however, do not have to wait to make some changes. Pence said Longstreet Road is among eight streets on Fort Bragg that will receive name changes in the coming months because of Confederate ties. He said McKellars Road will be the next changed, but he did not identify the other six expected to be renamed.
McKellars Road is named for a family who owned land in the Fort Bragg area before the Civil War, but who had a descendant, Capt. John McKellar, who served in the Confederate army, the Fayetteville Observer newspaper reported, citing Fort Bragg's curator and archaeologist Linda Carnes-McNaughton.
Corey Dickstein
Corey Dickstein covers the military in the U.S. southeast. He joined the Stars and Stripes staff in 2015 and covered the Pentagon for more than five years. He previously covered the military for the Savannah Morning News in Georgia. Dickstein holds a journalism degree from Georgia College & State University and has been recognized with several national and regional awards for his reporting and photography. He is based in Atlanta.
13. How Israel Should Handle the US-China Rivalry
Excerpts:
As my colleagues Bradley Bowman and Zane Zovak noted recently in Foreign Policy, the Iran-China partnership only bolsters “Beijing’s burgeoning clout in the Middle East,” while also driving home “the reality that Washington’s great-power competition with China won’t occur in the Indo-Pacific alone.” Yet, the White House seems unconcerned. All the while, it is preparing to provide billions of dollars of sanctions relief to the clerical regime. This hardly seems logical from Israel’s perspective.
Meanwhile, Washington’s Gulf Arab partners are boosting their trade and security cooperation with China. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have increased arms purchases from China. Last week, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), all visited China to advance ties with Beijing. If there are serious American efforts to halt this activity, Israel has not seen them.
Nonetheless, Israel’s commitments to the United States regarding Chinese business deals remain firm. Chinese investments will receive the scrutiny required to ensure that Israeli technology is not wielded against the United States by its most dangerous adversary. The Biden administration has not exactly rewarded this. Right now, remunerations appear to include plans for enriching Israel’s most dangerous enemy, and maintaining double standards for its peers.
How Israel Should Handle the US-China Rivalry
by Jonathan Schanzer
Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden (L) inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing December 4, 2013. REUTERS/Lintao Zhang/Pool
Israel recently pledged that it will notify Washington about certain deals it strikes with China, and promised to reexamine those deals if the US raises concerns. The announcement came amid a campaign, launched first by the Trump administration but continued by the Biden administration, to enlist Israel in America’s great power competition with Beijing.
There are still some gaps to bridge. But the Israelis deserve credit for supporting the US-led effort. Unfortunately, Washington’s policy for other Middle Eastern nations is scattershot.
American efforts to prevent advanced military technology from finding its way to China are not new to Israel. The 1999 disagreement over Israel’s sale of Phalcon radar systems to China was a wake-up call for the Israeli defense industry. A similar flap in 2004 — over the proposed Israeli sale of upgraded Harpy unmanned aerial vehicles — pushed the Israelis to create an export control agency some three years later. Subsequent to that, China was largely a non-issue for more than a decade. But that changed with US assessments that some Israeli technology with possible military dimensions was flowing to Beijing.
To be clear, the Israelis were doing what many other countries were doing, including the United States. They were selling products to the world’s second largest economy. The Israeli government was certainly not intentionally conveying to Beijing any military technology that China could wield against American war-fighters. Rather, the Chinese were surreptitiously acquiring Israeli tech that had possible military applications, and then providing it to the People’s Liberation Army. This is all part of China’s Military Civil Fusion effort, which has helped fuel the most aggressive military modernization effort in the history of the People’s Republic of China. As a result of this modernization, the US military edge is rapidly eroding.
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January 19, 2022 12:13 pm
Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed last week in its latest World Report that Israel was a repressive regime, and called...
Seeking to contain China’s rise, Washington turned to its allies for help. Israel is key among them.
The government of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was somewhat resistant to a policy shift. As the longest-serving prime minister in his country’s history, the economic growth of Israel was one of the keys to his success. China accounted for more than $17 billion in trade with Israel, or roughly 4.3 percent of GDP, in 2020. This is not chump change for a tiny nation like Israel.
But with the change in governments in 2021, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid have worked to strengthen the foundation of the US-Israeli alliance. High level discussions in both Jerusalem and Washington have brought about a more effective modus vivendi between the two countries on China. Concurrently, Israeli business with China appears to be trailing off, thanks to Israeli entrepreneurs’ distaste for some of China’s dodgy business practices and the value they place on their relationship with the United States.
For Israel, the trick is to respond to US concerns while not needlessly creating an enemy in Beijing. Indeed, Israel already has enough enemies in the region. Creating friction with a rising superpower is something Jerusalem can ill afford. This explains why Jerusalem’s approach to Beijing will be different, at least in tone, than Washington’s. The Israelis want to respect American security concerns, while ensuring that legitimate business with China can continue apace. From all appearances, they are moving in the right direction.
Yet, one gets a sense that the Israeli concessions are too often unilateral and unreciprocated. Admittedly, Israel is the junior partner in the US-Israel alliance. One might expect Washington to sometimes throw its weight around. But it cannot be ignored that Israel is making these important compromises against the backdrop of an American push to return to the controversial 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Israeli officials (in this government and the previous one) have both warned that this deeply flawed agreement will fill Iranian coffers and enable the regime to better fund its terrorist proxies. Worse, it will grant Tehran a clear path to acquiring nuclear weapon.
In other words, Israel continues to cooperate with the United States on its top security challenge (China), while the Biden administration effectively ignores Israel’s concerns about its top security threat (Iran).
To make matters worse, Iran and China are strengthening their ties.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited Beijing last week to solidify a 25-year “comprehensive strategic partnership,” inked in March of last year, which will funnel billions of dollars in Chinese investments into the Iranian economy. This will make US sanctions against Iran less effective, and increase the chances that military action may be required to halt Iran’s nuclear advances. However, increased Sino-Iranian military cooperation could make that more difficult.
As my colleagues Bradley Bowman and Zane Zovak noted recently in Foreign Policy, the Iran-China partnership only bolsters “Beijing’s burgeoning clout in the Middle East,” while also driving home “the reality that Washington’s great-power competition with China won’t occur in the Indo-Pacific alone.” Yet, the White House seems unconcerned. All the while, it is preparing to provide billions of dollars of sanctions relief to the clerical regime. This hardly seems logical from Israel’s perspective.
Meanwhile, Washington’s Gulf Arab partners are boosting their trade and security cooperation with China. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have increased arms purchases from China. Last week, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), all visited China to advance ties with Beijing. If there are serious American efforts to halt this activity, Israel has not seen them.
Nonetheless, Israel’s commitments to the United States regarding Chinese business deals remain firm. Chinese investments will receive the scrutiny required to ensure that Israeli technology is not wielded against the United States by its most dangerous adversary. The Biden administration has not exactly rewarded this. Right now, remunerations appear to include plans for enriching Israel’s most dangerous enemy, and maintaining double standards for its peers.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the US Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is author of the new book “Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War” (FDD Press, November 2021).
14. FDD | U.S. Treasury Designates Additional Targets in Hezbollah Financial Network
Excerpts:
Under the Trump administration, the Treasury Department went after major Hezbollah financiers and multiple networks spanning the globe. In 2018, for example, Treasury issued over 30 Hezbollah-related designations, the most in a single year. Within the networks uncovered by those designations, there remain a number of big names and targets, especially in Africa, that Treasury has apparently chosen not to pursue.
In this context, Tuesday’s designations, and their precursors in September, come across almost as isolated measures, lacking a coherent rationale and unconnected to any strategic campaign to inflict damage on Hezbollah’s financial operations and overall infrastructure.
FDD | U.S. Treasury Designates Additional Targets in Hezbollah Financial Network
fdd.org · by Tony Badran Research Fellow · January 19, 2022
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on Tuesday on three Hezbollah members and financial facilitators along with their Lebanon-based travel company. These designations are an extension of sanctions OFAC issued last September against an illicit financial network run by senior Hezbollah official Hasib Hadwan (a.k.a. Hajj Zayn).
The three Hezbollah members whom OFAC targeted in its latest sanctions package are Adel Diab, identified as a Hezbollah member and businessman; Ali Mohamad Daoun, an upper-mid-level Hezbollah official; and Jihad Salem Alame, also identified as a Hezbollah member.
Next to Hadwan, whom Treasury identified in September as a senior official in Hezbollah’s General Secretariat, Daoun is the most senior Hezbollah official named in this network so far. Daoun is in charge of Hezbollah’s second district in southern Lebanon, a position he has held for over a decade. He routinely appears at party functions, at funerals of fighters killed in Syria (including family members from his hometown of ‘Adshit), and alongside senior members of the group’s high command.
Diab, meanwhile, is the founder and co-owner of several companies registered in Lebanon, including one with a branch in Erbil, in Iraq’s Kurdish region, according to Lebanon’s official business registry. OFAC designated only one of those companies, Dar al-Salam for Tourism and Travel, which Diab, Daoun, and Alame co-founded and co-own.
Tuesday’s targets are connected to the Hadwan network through Ali al-Sha’ir, whom Treasury designated along with Hadwan himself last September. Treasury’s announcement on Tuesday noted that Diab “has jointly owned assets with Ali Al Sha’ir, an assistant to Hizballah fundraiser Hasib Muhammad Hadwan, a member of Hizballah’s General Secretariat, who works with Hizballah Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah.”
Treasury’s latest designations add to the list of businesses owned by Hezbollah members and/or senior Hezbollah officials. On the one hand, the designations underscore the pervasiveness of Hezbollah in all facets of Lebanese society and in all sectors of the Lebanese business world.
While OFAC’s latest designations are not necessarily trivial, it remains to be seen how impactful they will be and exactly how significant this particular network is for Hezbollah’s financial operations. It is also uncertain whether Treasury will continue to sanction other components within the network.
Under the Trump administration, the Treasury Department went after major Hezbollah financiers and multiple networks spanning the globe. In 2018, for example, Treasury issued over 30 Hezbollah-related designations, the most in a single year. Within the networks uncovered by those designations, there remain a number of big names and targets, especially in Africa, that Treasury has apparently chosen not to pursue.
In this context, Tuesday’s designations, and their precursors in September, come across almost as isolated measures, lacking a coherent rationale and unconnected to any strategic campaign to inflict damage on Hezbollah’s financial operations and overall infrastructure.
fdd.org · by Tony Badran Research Fellow · January 19, 2022
15. The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots
Call sign "Watson?"
Excerpts:
For the moment, the pilot’s critique reflects the immaturity of the A.I. agents, which will need much more training if they are to become sophisticated enough to take on a real adversary. But it also harks back to what Justin Mock said at the AlphaDogfight Trials a year earlier: fighter pilots trust what works.
Since then, the teams had been developing and testing A.I. agents that could take on two adversaries simultaneously, a far more complicated task. They were also beginning to develop the tools that would enable them to advance to live flight. The first step was to integrate the L-39’s flight dynamics into the dogfighting algorithms and test them in drones. In the next few months, the program will be putting the A.I. agents into an airborne simulator, so that the pilots can experience g-forces, and see how that affects trust in A.I. “There’s a saying in the flight-test community: All models are wrong, some models are useful,” Ryan Hefron, the ACE program’s manager, said. “So we have to find the useful pieces.”
When I discussed some of these advances with Schnell, he said, “Everyone’s a hero in the sim.” The stakes are easy to overlook inside the O.P.L.’s hangar. Nobody gets hurt or killed crashing a virtual plane. “To truly trigger this trust equation we’re working on,” he told me, “you have to have another piece of metal coming right at you.”
The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots
Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?
By Sue Halpern
The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots | The New Yorker
On a cloudless morning last May, a pilot took off from the Niagara Falls International Airport, heading for restricted military airspace over Lake Ontario. The plane, which bore the insignia of the United States Air Force, was a repurposed Czechoslovak jet, an L-39 Albatros, purchased by a private defense contractor. The bay in front of the cockpit was filled with sensors and computer processors that recorded the aircraft’s performance. For two hours, the pilot flew counterclockwise around the lake. Engineers on the ground, under contract with DARPA, the Defense Department’s research agency, had choreographed every turn, every pitch and roll, in an attempt to do something unprecedented: design a plane that can fly and engage in aerial combat—dogfighting—without a human pilot operating it.
The exercise was an early step in the agency’s Air Combat Evolution program, known as ACE, one of more than six hundred Department of Defense projects that are incorporating artificial intelligence into war-fighting. This year, the Pentagon plans to spend close to a billion dollars on A.I.-related technology. The Navy is building unmanned vessels that can stay at sea for months; the Army is developing a fleet of robotic combat vehicles. Artificial intelligence is being designed to improve supply logistics, intelligence gathering, and a category of wearable technology, sensors, and auxiliary robots that the military calls the Internet of Battlefield Things.
Algorithms are already good at flying planes. The first autopilot system, which involved connecting a gyroscope to the wings and tail of a plane, débuted in 1914, about a decade after the Wright brothers took flight. And a number of current military technologies, such as underwater mine detectors and laser-guided bombs, are autonomous once they are launched by humans. But few aspects of warfare are as complex as aerial combat. Paul Schifferle, the vice-president of flight research at Calspan, the company that’s modifying the L-39 for DARPA, said, “The dogfight is probably the most dynamic flight profile in aviation, period.”
A fighter plane equipped with artificial intelligence could eventually execute tighter turns, take greater risks, and get off better shots than human pilots. But the objective of the ACE program is to transform a pilot’s role, not to remove it entirely. As DARPA envisions it, the A.I. will fly the plane in partnership with the pilot, who will remain “in the loop,” monitoring what the A.I. is doing and intervening when necessary. According to the agency’s Strategic Technology Office, a fighter jet with autonomous features will allow pilots to become “battle managers,” directing squads of unmanned aircraft “like a football coach who chooses team members and then positions them on the field to run plays.”
Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, told me that the ACE program is part of a wider effort to “decompose our forces” into smaller, less expensive units. In other words, fewer humans and more expendable machines. DARPA calls this “mosaic warfare.” In the case of aerial combat, Pettyjohn said, “these much smaller autonomous aircraft can be combined in unexpected ways to overwhelm adversaries with the complexity of it. If any one of them gets shot down, it’s not as big of a deal.”
All told, the L-39 was taken up above Lake Ontario twenty times, each sortie giving the engineers and computer scientists the information they need to build a model of its flight dynamics under various conditions. Like self-driving cars, autonomous planes use sensors to identify discrepancies between the outside world and the information encoded in their maps. But a dogfighting algorithm will have to take into account both the environment and the aircraft. A plane flies differently at varying altitudes and angles, on hot days versus cold ones, or if it’s carrying an extra fuel tank or missiles.
“Most of the time, a plane flies straight and level,” Phil Chu, an electrical engineer who serves as a science adviser to the ACE program, explained. “But when it’s dogfighting you have to figure out, O.K., if I’m in a thirty-degree bank angle, ascending at twenty degrees, how much do I have to pull the stick to get to a forty-degree bank angle, rising at ten degrees?” And, because flight is three-dimensional, speed matters even more. “If it’s flying slowly and you move the stick one way, you get a certain amount of turn out of it. If it’s flying really fast and you move the stick the same way, you’ll get a very different response.”
In 2024, if the ACE program goes according to plan, four A.I.-enabled L-39s will participate in a live dogfight in the skies above Lake Ontario. To achieve that goal, DARPA has enlisted three dozen academic research centers and private companies, each working on one of two problem areas: how to get the plane to fly and fight on its own, and how to get pilots to trust the A.I. enough to use it. Robert Work, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Obama Administration, and pushed the Pentagon to pursue next-generation technologies, told me, “If you don’t have trust, the human will always be watching the A.I. and saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got to take over.’ ”
There is no guarantee that ACE will succeed. DARPA projects are time-limited experiments, typically lasting between three and five years. Schifferle, at Calspan, told me, “We’re at the ‘walk’ stage of a typical ‘crawl, walk, run’ technology maturation process.” Still, it seems increasingly likely that young pilots will one day wonder how their fighter jet acquired the skills of a Chuck Yeager. When they do, they will be told about a refurbished Soviet-era warplane that was flown high above Lake Ontario by old-school pilots who were, in a way, writing their own obituaries.
As part of the effort to devise an algorithm that can dogfight, DARPA selected eight software-development companies to participate in the AlphaDogfight Trials, an A.I. competition that culminated with three days of public scrimmages in August, 2020. The prize was a flight helmet worn by Colonel Dan (Animal) Javorsek, who was in charge of the program until he returned to the Air Force last year. The contest was supposed to be held in front of a live audience near Nellis Air Force Base, in Nevada, but the pandemic relegated the action to an online event, hosted by the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins, and broadcast via a YouTube channel called DARPAtv. Justin (Glock) Mock, an F-16 pilot, offered play-by-play commentary. At one point, he told the five thousand or so viewers that the objective was simple: “Kill and survive.”
Each team took a slightly different approach with its A.I. agents, as the algorithms are called. EpiSci, a defense contractor based in Poway, California, mounted an effort led by Chris Gentile, a retired Air Force test pilot. The company broke the problem down into component parts, and used Gentile’s flight expertise to solve each step. “We start at the lowest level,” Gentile told me. “How do you control the airplane? How do you fly it and direct it to go left and right, all the way up to what tactics should we use?”
PhysicsAI, in Pacifica, California, fielded a four-man squad who knew next to nothing about aerial combat. They used a neural-network approach, enabling the system to learn the patterns of a successful dogfight and mathematically arrive at the maximum probability of a good outcome. “The problem we have to solve is like playing chess while playing basketball,” John Pierre, PhysicsAI’s principal investigator, said. “You’re taking shots while making split-second decisions, and it needs to be done in a way that human pilots can interpret what’s going on.”
During each contest, the A.I. agents, represented by dime-size airplane avatars, moved around a screen at a stately pace, mimicking the flight dynamics of an F-16. It wasn’t exactly “Top Gun,” but the algorithms were doing something that would have been impossible a year earlier: interacting with each other and adjusting their tactics in real time. As the agents battled it out, Mock compared the action to “a knife fight in a phone booth.”
In the decisive scrimmage, on day three, Falco, an A.I. agent created by Heron Systems, a boutique software company based in Virginia, competed against an A.I. agent developed by Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest defense contractor. The matchup drew the obvious David and Goliath comparisons—though this David had gone through about the same number of computer iterations as a pilot who trained all day, every day, for thirty-one years. After a few tightly fought rounds, Heron’s Falco emerged victorious. But there was a final contest: a seasoned F-16 pilot was going to take on Falco.
The pilot, dressed in an olive-green flight suit, sat in a high-backed gaming chair, his face obscured by a virtual-reality headset. He was identified only by his call sign, Banger. (His identity was concealed for “operational security.”) He’d trained with the team at A.P.L. beforehand, learning how to use the controls to guide his plane, and the V.R. headset to track his opponent’s vector of attack.
On a split screen, viewers could see what Banger saw from the cockpit. Another screen displayed a visual representation of the fight, as the planes—yellow for Banger, green for Falco—jockeyed for the best angle. About a minute in, each team aggressively rolled its aircraft, and Banger evaded the A.I. by dropping down to ten thousand feet. Falco came around and got off a series of good shots. Banger was down to four lives.
In the end, Banger failed to survive a single skirmish. He said, “I think technology has proven over the past few years that it’s able to think faster than humans and react faster in a precise pristine environment.” Banger also suggested that artificial intelligence might execute tactical maneuvers that pilots had been trained to avoid, such as flying too close to enemy aircraft and moving at speeds that would tax a human body. “I may not be comfortable putting my aircraft in a position where I might run into something else,” he said. “The A.I. would exploit that.”
Mock seemed pleased with the outcome. “You could look at this and say, ‘O.K., the A.I. got five, our human got zero,’ ” he told viewers. “From the fighter-pilot world, we trust what works, and what we saw was that in this limited area, this specific scenario, we’ve got A.I. that works.” (A YouTube video of the trials has since garnered half a million views.)
Brett Darcey, who runs Heron, told me that the company has used Falco to fly drones, completing seventy-four flights with zero crashes. But it’s still unclear how the technology will react to the infinite possibilities of real-world conditions. The human mind processes more slowly than a computer, but it has the cognitive flexibility to adapt to unimagined circumstances; artificial intelligence, so far, does not. Anna Skinner, a human-factors psychologist, and another science adviser to the ACE program, told me, “Humans are able to draw on their experience and take reasonable actions in the face of uncertainty. And, especially in a combat situation, uncertainty is always going to be present.”
In early May, I visited the Operator Performance Lab, at the University of Iowa, where members of the ACE program had gathered for a demonstration. O.P.L. is the creation of Tom Schnell, a Swiss-born professor of industrial and systems engineering. In his spare time, Schnell flies loops and rolls in an aerobatic plane above the cornfields of Iowa, but his expertise was, initially, in ground transportation. In the late nineties, a luxury-car company—Schnell won’t say which one—asked him to develop a way to measure how much people enjoyed driving its vehicles. Schnell attached sensors to drivers’ faces to detect the movement of small muscles around the mouth and eyes, which might indicate smiling or frowning, and electrocardiogram leads to monitor their heart. “I told them that if I was going to do this work they’d have to send me a fun car,” Schnell said of his early client. “And they did.”
Schnell soon found that each sensor came with its own proprietary data-collection system, which made it nearly impossible to analyze all the information at once. He built a common framework, which he named the Cognitive Assessment Tool Set, and began collecting the physiological data of people who operated all kinds of machinery. “They could be train engineers, or helicopter pilots, or people driving cars,” he said. The face sensors supplied one set of data points. So did a device that analyzed galvanic skin response—how much a subject was sweating. Another tool looked at blood-oxidation levels, which served as a proxy for mental workload.
In 2004, Schnell persuaded his department chair at the University of Iowa to buy O.P.L.’s first aircraft, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza. Within a few years, he had acquired a jet, and commercial airlines and the Air Force hired him to conduct studies on their pilots. “We did a lot of work on spatial disorientation,” Schnell said. This involved things like having pilots close their eyes during aerial maneuvers and then try to fly straight once they’d opened them again. By the time DARPA put out its request for proposals for the ACE program, in 2019, Schnell’s laboratory had more than a decade of experience capturing the physiological responses of pilots.
Persuading pilots to hand over the controls may prove even more elusive than developing A.I. that can dogfight. “It’s probably the paramount challenge we’re trying to tackle,” Ryan Hefron, the current ACE program manager, told me. Hefron, a thirty-eight-year-old lieutenant colonel with a doctorate in computer science, came to DARPA in 2021 from the Air Force Test Pilot School, where he was an instructor. As an example, he mentioned “Auto-GCAS,” an automated ground-collision-avoidance system that grabs the controls if a plane is in imminent danger of crashing. During testing, Auto-GCAS had a tendency to pull up suddenly without cause—what Hefron called “nuisance fly-ups.” The system has since saved at least eleven lives, but test pilots remained wary of it for years because of these early setbacks.
“There’s a saying in the military,” Peter Hancock, a psychology professor at the University of Central Florida who studies the effect of trust on technology adoption, told me. “Trust is gained in teaspoons and lost in buckets.” It’s not just an issue in warfare. In the most recent surveys conducted by the American Automobile Association, about eighty per cent of respondents said that they were not comfortable with the idea of autonomous vehicles. “Most of the drivers say that they want the current systems to work better before they can trust a fully self-driving system,” Greg Brannon, the director of automotive engineering at AAA, told me. “The percentage hasn’t moved much despite a lot of advances in technology, and that’s pretty shocking.”
To assess trust, psychologists typically administer surveys. “No one has ever come up with an objective measure of trust before,” Skinner said. DARPA hired SoarTech, an A.I. research-and-development firm based in Ann Arbor, to build a “trust model,” which aims to verify self-reported trust with the hard data from O.P.L.’s Cognitive Assessment Tool Set. “I think that’s how you do good science,” Schnell told me. “You take the best building blocks you have and put them together to answer very difficult questions. DARPA actually stepped up to the plate and said we want to know: ‘Are you trusting the avionics?’ ”
One of O.P.L.’s hangars, at the Iowa City Municipal Airport, was filled with secondhand aircraft that Schnell had purchased and retrofitted: two L-29 Delfins, a smaller cousin of the L-39, painted a glossy Hawkeye yellow; a hulking Soviet helicopter, purchased for about the cost of a Cadillac Escalade, upgraded with a full-color night-vision system that Schnell built himself. At the far end of the hangar was the simulated cockpit of a 737 jet which was the size of a studio apartment.
An Air National Guard pilot, on loan to O.P.L. for the day, lowered himself into another simulator, a rectangular metal shell that Schnell called “the bathtub.” Schnell hooked him up to electrocardiogram leads, in order to gather some baseline data. Until that morning’s briefing, the pilot knew only that he would be participating in a DARPA research project. Even now, as he adjusted his V.R. headset and fidgeted with controls that replicated an F-16’s, all he’d been told was that artificial intelligence would be controlling the plane while he played a rudimentary video game broadcast on his display panel. (A separate ACE effort is developing a more complex version.)
The game simulated the battle-management tasks that pilots are expected to conduct in the future; to win, the pilot’s eight blue planes had to shoot down eight red enemy planes. An eye tracker inside his helmet would measure when and for how long he looked up to see what the A.I. was doing, which could be considered an expression of distrust. He did not know that some of the simulated skirmishes were primed for him to win and others to put him and his aircraft in jeopardy. But, if he felt that the A.I. was about to do something dangerous, he had the option of stopping the engagement by “paddling off.” This, too, would demonstrate a lack of trust.
Ultimately, the idea is to supply pilots with more information about the A.I.’s next move, in order to elicit the appropriate level of trust. Glenn Taylor, a senior scientist at SoarTech, told me, “We’re building visual and other interfaces into the system to let the pilot know what the A.I. is doing, and give him or her enough information, with enough time, to know whether or not to trust it.” The researchers called this relationship “calibrated” trust. Phil Chu, one of the ACE program’s science advisers, told me, “If we can show pilots what the A.I. is going to do in the next four seconds, that’s a very long time.”
Trust will also be crucial because, with planes flying at speeds of up to five hundred miles an hour, algorithms won’t always be able to keep pilots in the loop. Hancock, the U.C.F. professor, calls the discrepancy in reaction time “temporal dissonance.” As an analogy, he pointed to air bags, which deploy within milliseconds, below the threshold of human perception. “As soon as you put me in that loop,” he said, “you’ve defeated the whole purpose of the air bag, which is to inflate almost instantaneously.”
In the “bathtub” at O.P.L., a computer relayed what the pilot was seeing in his goggles. As he turned his head to the right, a wing came into view; when he looked down, he could see farmland. A radar screen at the front of the cockpit kept track of the adversary, which, in the first skirmish, quickly gained an advantage, coming at the pilot from behind and preparing to take a shot. “Paddle,” the pilot called out, ending the skirmish. The computer was reset. One of Schnell’s graduate students, who helped design the experiment, counted down from three, then called “Hack” to start the next contest.
Forty minutes later, as the pilot left the simulator, he was greeted by Katharine Woodruff, a researcher working with SoarTech. Woodruff asked him about an incident in which he stopped the encounter even though he was not in imminent danger. “I had two decisions I could make,” he said. “To let it ride and see what happens or paddle off.” After a moment, he added, “I assessed that the bandit was starting to turn towards me. And so I paddled off.”
For the most part, Woodruff told me, the pilots in the study trusted the A.I. when it behaved appropriately and took over when it didn’t. There were a few exceptions: a pilot who had recently ejected from his plane was deeply suspicious of the technology. The thirty-year-old pilot whom I had observed thought that the autonomy “was cool,” but he paddled off even when his plane had the potential to achieve a good offensive angle. “I wanted to basically figure out my limits with the A.I.,” he told Woodruff. “What is too conservative, and what is going to get me killed. And then find that happy medium.”
Schnell’s graduate student, who can’t be named because he’s on active duty in the military, came over to listen to the debriefing. “You would be the perfect example of someone we’d need to influence, because—and I do not mean this to be rude at all—you completely violated the construct of the experiment,” he told the pilot. “You were deciding to not let the A.I. do the job that it’s put there to do, even though it was actually performing fine in the sense of not getting you killed. If we want to make you a battle manager in thirty years, we’d need to be able to push that behavior in the opposite direction.”
In 2017, the Future of Life Institute, an advocacy group focussed on “keeping artificial intelligence beneficial,” which counts Elon Musk as a member of its advisory board, released “Slaughterbots.” The short film imagines a world in which weaponized quadcopters about the size of a smartphone target political dissidents, college students, and members of Congress. “Nuclear is obsolete,” a Steve Jobs-like character tells an enthusiastic audience at the Slaughterbot’s product launch. “Take out your entire enemy, virtually risk-free.”
At the end of the video, which has been viewed more than three million times on YouTube, the Berkeley computer scientist Stuart Russell says into the camera, “Allowing machines to choose to kill humans will be devastating to our security and freedom.” Russell is among a group of prominent academics and tech executives, including Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Noam Chomsky, who signed on to a letter calling for a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.”
And yet artificial intelligence is already driving a worldwide arms race. In 2020, global spending for military A.I. was estimated to exceed six billion dollars, and is expected to nearly double by 2025. Russia is developing unmanned vehicles, including robotic tanks and surveillance systems. Last year, it was reported that Libya launched an autonomous drone that appeared to be equipped with “real-time image processing,” to identify and kill enemy fighters. Robert Work, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense, told me that intelligence suggests that China has turned decommissioned fighter jets into autonomous suicide drones that can operate together as a swarm. “That becomes an entirely new kind of weapon that’s extraordinarily difficult to defend against,” he said.
The United States, too, is testing the use of swarming drones. In an experiment last April, a drone swarm attacked a naval vessel off the coast of California. In October, the Skyborg program, an Air Force project to build autonomous aircraft to serve alongside F-35 pilots, tested two drones in live flight. Skyborg drones will be able to detect ground and air threats, identify suitable “kill” targets, and aim weapons for an optimal strike. The actual decision to “employ lethality,” as the Air Force calls it, will remain in the hands of a human pilot. But, in 2020, the Air Force’s chief scientist, Richard Joseph, cautioned that “we have some other questions to answer. How much autonomy do we want for a system that can deliver lethal force, and especially one that’s moving at machine speed?”
In a paper published last April, Robert Work wrote that A.I.-enabled systems “are likely to help mitigate the biggest cause of unintended combat engagements: target misidentification.” The U.S. military has repeatedly promised that improved technology would enhance enemy targeting. The results have been mixed. In 2003, during the Iraq War, an early autonomous weapon, the Patriot missile, inadvertently shot down a British fighter jet, killing both pilots, and a Navy plane, killing that pilot as well. A subsequent Pentagon report concluded that the human operators had given too much autonomy to the missile system. In a recent examination of thirteen hundred classified reports of civilian casualties in the Middle East, the Times characterized the American air war as “a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.”
Pettyjohn, of the Center for a New American Security, told me that the military is currently developing autonomous systems to help identify targets. “And that’s one of the things that A.I. still struggles with,” she said. “It’s still a really hard thing to do—discriminate in the air when you’re ten or twenty or thirty thousand feet in the sky.” In 2018, researchers at M.I.T. and Stanford found that three popular A.I. facial-recognition systems often failed to identify the gender of women with dark skin. Two years later, a Congressional Research Service report noted that “this could hold significant implications for A.I. applications in a military context, particularly if such biases remain undetected and are incorporated into systems with lethal effects.”
Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of more than a hundred and eighty non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the World Council of Churches, has urged nations to adopt a legal treaty controlling the use of lethal autonomous weapons. The U.S. is not among the nearly seventy countries that have so far signed on. “It’s not just about banning a particular weapon, like we ban land mines or chemical weapons,” Bonnie Docherty, a lecturer on human-rights law at Harvard Law School and a senior researcher in the arms division at Human Rights Watch, said. “This is an effort to preëmpt the development of a technology that could alter the way wars are fought in a really dreadful way.”
The D.O.D.’s position on lethal autonomous weapons, established in 2012, requires a human decision-maker to remain in the loop to an “appropriate” degree. David Ochmanek, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, whose former office at the Pentagon drafted the 2012 directive, told me, “It does not, in fact, prohibit the development of autonomous weapons.” Rather, he added, “it puts in place a number of processes for review and safeguards. The commander has to be able to intervene and turn on the autonomy and turn it off as needed.”
Ochmanek sees the development of autonomous weapons as a matter of deterrence, particularly against large-scale acts of aggression, such as Russia invading NATO territory or China invading Taiwan. “Can autonomy in different manifestations enable us to credibly believe we could defeat an invasion of this type?” he said. “The answer to that question is very much yes.”
In Niagara Falls last spring, as the L-39 was flying over Lake Ontario, the ACE program’s scientists and engineers gathered for their regular quarterly meeting. In a session with the groups competing to design the dogfighting algorithm, Chris Gentile, of EpiSci, emphasized that the program was not creating lethal autonomous weapons: “What we are doing is building tools to enable pilots to execute decisions more effectively.” But, as artificial intelligence ramps up the speed of decision-making, the question ultimately may be why have a human in the cockpit at all. “The Defense Department will tell you that they’re not going to have totally autonomous systems,” Pettyjohn told me. “But I have a hard time imagining, when everything is premised on making decisions faster than your adversary does, how people can actually be in that loop.”
In late September, I observed another trust experiment at O.P.L. For much of the day, a veteran pilot sat in the cockpit of one of the L-29s, which Schnell had turned into a flight simulator. Wearing a V.R. headset, he performed the battle-management role as the A.I. fought a series of scrimmages. Like the young pilot I’d watched the previous spring, he was asked to rate his trust in the A.I. while his biometric and flight data were recorded. But this time, instead of using pre-scripted scenarios, he was dogfighting with the three A.I. agents that had survived elimination: those developed by Heron Systems, PhysicsAI, and EpiSci.
Toward the end of the day, the parameters of the experiment were changed. The pilot was allowed to paddle off, fly the plane manually, then, when he felt that it was safe, cede the controls back to the A.I. According to Lauren Reinerman-Jones, a senior scientist at SoarTech, the researchers’ expectation was that, if the pilot lost the first scrimmage, it would take several more to recover trust. But, if he won the first fight, his trust in the A.I. would carry over to subsequent scenarios. Then, if he lost the final scrimmage, trust would decrease, but to a lesser degree—in coffee cups rather than buckets.
Four computers were positioned next to the plane. One recorded what the pilot was seeing in his headset. Another graphed his physiological responses, which were translated into various types of trust processing, each represented by a different-colored line. Reinerman-Jones explained that a brown line, displayed above the rest, aggregated the data into a crude rendering of the trust model she and her colleagues were developing. Woodruff sat nearby, with a computer on her lap and a recorder in hand. Every minute or so, she’d ask the pilot to assess his trust in the A.I. Almost invariably, he said it was high.
But during his debriefing he expressed some frustration with the experiment. In one scrimmage, his plane and the adversary’s chased each other around and around—on the screen, it looked like water circling a drain. The pilot told Woodruff that, though he let the A.I. keep fighting, “I know it is not going to gun this guy anytime soon. In real life, if you keep going around like that you’re either going to run out of gas or another bad guy will come up from behind and kill you.” In an actual battle, he would have accepted more risk in order to get to a better offensive angle. “I mean, A.I. should be so much smarter than me,” he said. “So if I’m looking out there, thinking I could have gained some advantage here and A.I. isn’t, I have to start asking why.”
For the moment, the pilot’s critique reflects the immaturity of the A.I. agents, which will need much more training if they are to become sophisticated enough to take on a real adversary. But it also harks back to what Justin Mock said at the AlphaDogfight Trials a year earlier: fighter pilots trust what works.
Since then, the teams had been developing and testing A.I. agents that could take on two adversaries simultaneously, a far more complicated task. They were also beginning to develop the tools that would enable them to advance to live flight. The first step was to integrate the L-39’s flight dynamics into the dogfighting algorithms and test them in drones. In the next few months, the program will be putting the A.I. agents into an airborne simulator, so that the pilots can experience g-forces, and see how that affects trust in A.I. “There’s a saying in the flight-test community: All models are wrong, some models are useful,” Ryan Hefron, the ACE program’s manager, said. “So we have to find the useful pieces.”
When I discussed some of these advances with Schnell, he said, “Everyone’s a hero in the sim.” The stakes are easy to overlook inside the O.P.L.’s hangar. Nobody gets hurt or killed crashing a virtual plane. “To truly trigger this trust equation we’re working on,” he told me, “you have to have another piece of metal coming right at you.”
An earlier version of this article misquoted Paul Schifferle.
16. Analysis: Russian troop build-up sparks unintended NATO renewal
A Russian backfire? Unintended consequences for Putin?
If anyone was conducting an information and influence activities campaign against Putin I would recommend using this for themes and messages: Putin's strategy is failing - instead of weakening NATO he is strengthening it.
Analysis: Russian troop build-up sparks unintended NATO renewal
NATO flag is seen during NATO enhanced Forward Presence battle group military exercise Silver Arrow in Adazi, Latvia October 5, 2019. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins/File Photo
- Summary
- NATO summit in Madrid in June could raise troop levels
- Russian President Putin has demanded NATO retrench
- U.S. warnings of invasion change NATO's calculus
BRUSSELS, Jan 20 (Reuters) - Russia's troop buildup near Ukraine is galvanising NATO defences in Europe that President Vladimir Putin wants to dismantle, giving the alliance a sense of renewal after failures in Afghanistan.
Despite intense diplomacy with Russia, the United States and its NATO allies say they cannot consider demands that Moscow is making for security guarantees while it masses troops near its neighbour's border and holds live-fire exercises in Belarus.
Instead, Western officials, diplomats and former officials say NATO - created in 1949 to deter the Soviet threat - is obliged to consider reinforcements that go against Putin's demand that the alliance must not expand further eastwards.
Neutral countries Finland and Sweden, which have deepened collaboration with the Western alliance, have restarted a debate about joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
French President Emmanuel Macron has offered to send troops to Romania, an offer welcomed by Romania's president, and there is the prospect of more NATO troops being sent to the Black Sea region and the Baltics.
Although NATO is under no treaty obligation to defend Ukraine, as the former Soviet republic is not a NATO member, the tensions with Russia have united member states around what one former alliance official called "a common sense of purpose".
It is a turnaround for an alliance criticised internationally following the chaotic Western withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, which one German politician called NATO's "biggest debacle" since its creation.
"One of the things that's so striking to me about this is that ... Russia's actions have precipitated exactly what President Putin says he wants to prevent," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters this week before leaving for Ukraine, where he said support for NATO membership had grown.
"Certainly NATO's defensive posture, we'll have to strengthen even further," Blinken said.
That could entail more NATO troops, ships and planes in the Black Sea area and in the Baltics and shifting from a strategy of rotating troops to a permanent force presence there, including more U.S. soldiers and weapons.
"I think the U.S. moving additional capabilities to Europe now is definitely in the works, because the situation demands it," said Lithuanian Defence Minister Arvydas Anusauskas.
Troop decisions could happen as early as a NATO summit in Madrid in June, diplomats and officials said, although any pull-back by Moscow would be likely to give pause.
Russia rejects U.S. accusations that it is preparing to invade Ukraine and says it is free to train its troops anywhere on its territory. Moscow accuses NATO of threatening the stability of Europe with its policy of offering membership to Ukraine and Georgia, which Russia considers its backyard.
The Kremlin demands that NATO retrench behind what were its boundaries before central and eastern European nations joined from 1997.
ONCE 'OUT OF BUSINESS', 'BRAIN DEAD'
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the alliance lacked a meaningful role, with one U.S. senator, Richard Lugar, quipping that NATO needed to look beyond collective defence and go "out of area or out of business".
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 created bitter disputes between Washington, Berlin and Paris. As recently as July 2018, Donald Trump, then U.S. president, threatened to pull out of the alliance. NATO-member Turkey has pursued its own, often- conflicting, foreign policy in Syria and Libya. Macron once described NATO as "brain dead".
Former NATO officials see a clear link between Russian aggression and allied unity in an often-fractious organisation of 30 member states with different perspectives and priorities.
Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 set in motion NATO's biggest modernisation since the Cold War. NATO sees itself duty-bound to defend itself in the Baltics through to the Black Sea - Russia has a base in Kaliningrad and has missiles in the Black Sea area that can cover huge areas.
European allies, Turkey and Canada have increased defence spending by $260 billion since 2014, according to allied data.
Ten NATO allies meet the goal of spending 2% of economic output on defence, up from just three in 2014. NATO has also stood up a new spearhead force of 5,000 troops.
"There's no doubt about it: the Russians are uniting NATO around a common sense of purpose," said Jamie Shea, a former senior NATO official now at the Friends of Europe think tank in Brussels. "Given the situation, NATO really has no choice."
Additional reporting by Simon Lewis in Washington and Andrius Sytas in Vilnius, Editing by John Chalmers and Timothy Heritage
17. Houthis launch aerial attack against UAE capital Abu Dhabi
Excerpts:
Despite the previously mentioned strikes, the UAE has largely avoided attacks by the Houthis over its role in the Saudi-led conflict in Yemen. However, Monday’s event can be viewed as a warning by the Houthis and it’s main backer, Iran, that the UAE’s vital industrial facilities and sensitive sites are vulnerable to repeated attacks, similar to what Saudi Arabia has experienced after its intervention in the Yemen conflict almost seven years ago.
Houthis launch aerial attack against UAE capital Abu Dhabi | FDD's Long War Journal
A statement made by Houthi spokesperson Yahya Sare’e claimed credit for the Iranian proxy group’s attacks on several sites in the United Arab Emirates on Monday which resulted in the killing and wounding of civilians.
“In retaliation to the escalation of the US-Saudi-Emirati aggression, the armed forces carried out a special and successful military operation which targeted the airports of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the oil refinery in Mussafah in Abu Dhabi, and a number of important and sensitive Emirati sites and facilities,” Sare’e tweeted.
Sare’e said the attacks consisted of ballistic missiles and drones. He also warned the Houthis would expand its attacks if the UAE continued its “aggressive escalation” against Yemen.
“The successful operation was carried out with five ballistic and winged missiles and a large number of drones. The armed forces warn foreign companies, citizens, and residents of the UAE enemy state that they will not hesitate to expand the bank of targets to include more important sites and facilities during the coming period. UAE will be an unsafe state as long as its aggressive escalation against Yemen continues,” Sare’e said.
Sare’e later tweeted Zulfiqar and Quds-2 missiles were used in the attacks, including Samad-3 drones.
A statement made by the Saudi-led coalition said three bomb-laden drones were used in the attacks against Abu Dhabi International Airport and two economic facilities. That information contradicted the claim made by Sare’e about the number of sites attacked as well as the number of drones and missiles used by the Houthis in the strikes.
The coalition statement also said the coalition intercepted eight bomb-laden drones that were launched towards Saudi Arabia, but did not specify if it occurred during the UAE attacks.
Although it is too early to verify exactly how many drones and missiles were used, the attacks bore similarities to previous high-profile strikes claimed by the Houthis in the region.
In 2019, the Abaqiq attack in Saudi Arabia was claimed by the Houthis as diplomatic cover for Iran. It is unclear if the same situation occurred in Monday’s attack or if the Houthis were truly responsible.
Monday was not the first time the Houthis have claimed an attack inside the UAE.
In 2018, the Houthis claimed an attack using a Samad-3 drone against Abu Dhabi International Airport.
The previous year, the Houthis claimed responsibility for attacking the Barakah nuclear reactor in the Gharbiya region of Abu Dhabi.
Both attacks were denied by the UAE.
Two days before Monday’s attacks, a cartoonist for a Houthi linked newspaper, al-Thawra, published a caricature depicting the targeting of Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. The publication was taken down from the author’s Facebook page shortly after the attacks.
Despite the previously mentioned strikes, the UAE has largely avoided attacks by the Houthis over its role in the Saudi-led conflict in Yemen. However, Monday’s event can be viewed as a warning by the Houthis and it’s main backer, Iran, that the UAE’s vital industrial facilities and sensitive sites are vulnerable to repeated attacks, similar to what Saudi Arabia has experienced after its intervention in the Yemen conflict almost seven years ago.
Joe Truzman is a contributor to FDD's Long War Journal.
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18. FDD | Halkbank’s Supreme Court Appeal Will Delay Iran Sanctions-Evasion Case
Conclusion:
The American justice system’s commitment to prosecuting Halkbank to the full extent of the law, along with the Turkish officials who facilitated the Islamic Republic’s sanctions-evasion schemes, would send an important signal. Washington’s commitment to denying impunity to Tehran’s accomplices would encourage other foreign banks to comply with U.S. sanctions and improve their anti-money laundering controls. Halkbank’s timely prosecution would also incentivize other defendant banks to settle cases by cooperating with U.S. prosecutors, implementing reforms, and paying fines as required by their deferred prosecution and/or non-prosecution agreements with U.S. authorities.
FDD | Halkbank’s Supreme Court Appeal Will Delay Iran Sanctions-Evasion Case
fdd.org · by Aykan Erdemir Turkey Program Senior Director · January 19, 2022
A U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday that Halkbank, a public lender majority-owned by Turkey’s sovereign wealth fund, can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court without having to defend itself in a Manhattan federal court for the bank’s alleged role in helping Iran evade U.S. sanctions. This decision is a win for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his ongoing attempts to delay a potentially embarrassing jury trial, which could expose further details of his complicity in Tehran’s sanctions-evasion schemes.
Since October 2019, Halkbank has taken numerous actions to scuttle the case that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York has brought against the lender in a six-count indictment. The prosecutors charged Halkbank with fraud, money laundering, and sanctions offenses, accusing the bank of helping Tehran transfer $20 billion worth of restricted funds, with at least $1 billion laundered through the U.S. financial system.
In November 2019, Halkbank and its lawyers refused to acknowledge the indictment or to obey a legal summons to appear in court. After U.S. prosecutors in January 2020 asked U.S. District Judge Richard Berman to impose escalating fines that could total up to $1.8 billion after eight weeks if the bank failed to respond to criminal charges, Halkbank reversed course and pleaded not guilty two months later. In June 2020, the bank made a bid to press Berman to recuse himself, which he refused in August 2020.
That same month, Halkbank claimed that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act shields the public lender from prosecution in the United States. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected that claim last October. Yet on December 21, the bank filed a motion with the appellate court for a stay of the trial pending a petition to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appellate court’s decision conflicted with Supreme Court precedents by greenlighting “the first criminal trial of a foreign sovereign in [U.S.] history.” Federal prosecutors opposed Halkbank’s motion on January 3, stating that it “does not identify a ‘substantial question’ likely to result in Supreme Court review, let alone reversal.” The prosecutors added that the bank “has not established good cause sufficient to outweigh the public interest in a speedy trial of this matter.” The appellate court sided with Halkbank, however, delaying the trial until the Supreme Court decides whether to take up the case.
If four of the nine Supreme Court justices find grounds to grant a review, it would be a win for Erdogan’s delaying tactics. Even if the Supreme Court eventually rules that Halkbank is subject to prosecution in U.S. courts, a lengthy court process would save the Turkish president and his inner circle from potentially embarrassing revelations by delaying the jury trial until after Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for next year. In response to Friday’s ruling, Halkbank shares, which had lost over 96 percent of their value in U.S. dollars, falling from an all-time high of $10.63 per share in 2013 to just $0.34 by the end of 2021, climbed more than 8 percent on Monday.
The American justice system’s commitment to prosecuting Halkbank to the full extent of the law, along with the Turkish officials who facilitated the Islamic Republic’s sanctions-evasion schemes, would send an important signal. Washington’s commitment to denying impunity to Tehran’s accomplices would encourage other foreign banks to comply with U.S. sanctions and improve their anti-money laundering controls. Halkbank’s timely prosecution would also incentivize other defendant banks to settle cases by cooperating with U.S. prosecutors, implementing reforms, and paying fines as required by their deferred prosecution and/or non-prosecution agreements with U.S. authorities.
Aykan Erdemir is a former member of the Turkish parliament and senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he also contributes to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from Aykan, the Turkey Program, and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow Aykan on Twitter @aykan_erdemir. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Aykan Erdemir Turkey Program Senior Director · January 19, 2022
19. ‘We Are Taiwanese’: China’s Growing Menace Hardens Island’s Identity
Excerpts:
Taken together, these frustrations have only steeled the Taiwanese resolve against the Chinese Communist Party. The global criticism of China for its handling of Covid and its repression at home rekindled a longstanding debate in Taiwan about dropping “China” from the island’s official name. No action was taken, though; such a move by Taiwan would have been seen by Beijing as formalizing its de facto independence.
To young people like Ms. Li, it was also unnecessary. Independence to them is not an aspiration, it is reality.
“We are Taiwanese in our thinking,” she said. “We do not need to declare independence because we already are essentially independent.”
‘We Are Taiwanese’: China’s Growing Menace Hardens Island’s Identity
Jan. 19, 2022
More than ever, Taiwan defines itself by its democratic values. Beijing’s military and diplomatic threats only reinforce the island’s separateness.
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Li Yuan-hsin, right, with her husband and daughter at a day care center in Chiayi, Taipei. Ms. Li is among the more than 60 percent of the island’s people who identify as solely Taiwanese.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Jan. 19, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET
CHIAYI, Taiwan — When Li Yuan-hsin, a 36-year-old high school teacher, travels abroad, people often assume she is Chinese.
No, she tells them. She is Taiwanese.
To her, the distinction is important. China may be the land of her ancestors, but Taiwan is where she was born and raised, a home she defines as much by its verdant mountains and bustling night markets as by its robust democracy. In high school, she had planted a little blue flag on her desk to show support for her preferred political candidate; since then, she has voted in every presidential election.
“I love this island,” Ms. Li said in an interview. “I love the freedom here.”
Well over 90 percent of Taiwan’s people trace their roots to mainland China, but more than ever, they are embracing an identity that is distinct from that of their Communist-ruled neighbor. Beijing’s strident authoritarianism — and its claim over Taiwan — has only solidified the island’s identity, now central to a dispute that has turned the Taiwan Strait into one of Asia’s biggest potential flash points.
Taipei in October. More than ever, Taiwanese are embracing an identity that is distinct from that of mainland China, a shift that is partly generational.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
To Beijing, Taiwan’s push to distinguish itself from the mainland poses a dangerous obstacle to the Chinese government’s efforts to cajole, or coerce, Taiwan into its political orbit. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, warned in October against the trend he sees as secession: “Those who forget their heritage, betray their motherland, and seek to split the country will come to no good end.”
Most of Taiwan’s residents are not interested in becoming absorbed by a Communist-ruled China. But they are not pushing for formal independence for the island, either, preferring to avoid the risk of war.
It leaves both sides at a dangerous impasse. The more entrenched Taiwan’s identity becomes, the more Beijing may feel compelled to intensify its military and diplomatic campaign to pressure the island into respecting its claim of sovereignty.
Ms. Li is among more than 60 percent of the island’s 23 million people who identify as solely Taiwanese, three times the proportion in 1992, according to surveys by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University in Taipei. Only two percent identified as Chinese, down from 25 percent three decades ago.
Wang Yu-lan, right, and her son, Lee Tien-hsiang, looking at photos of past trips to China. To Ms. Wang, who fled the mainland decades ago, being Chinese is about celebrating her cultural and familial roots.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Part of the shift is generational — her 82-year-old grandmother, Wang Yu-lan, for instance, is among that shrinking minority.
To Ms. Wang, who fled the mainland decades ago, being Chinese is about celebrating her cultural and familial roots. She paints classical Chinese ink landscapes and displays them on the walls of her home. She spends hours practicing the erhu, a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument. She recounts stories of a land so beloved that her grandparents brought a handful of soil with them when they left. She still wonders what happened to the gold and silver bars they had buried beneath a heated brick bed in Beijing.
Ms. Wang was nine when she landed in Taiwan in 1948, part of the one million or so Chinese who retreated with the Nationalists during China’s Civil War with the Communists. The island is about 100 miles off China’s southeastern coast, but to many of the new arrivals, it felt like another world. The Chinese settlers who had been there for centuries — and made up the majority — spoke a different dialect. The island’s first residents had arrived thousands of years ago and were more closely related to the peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific than to the Chinese. Europeans had set up trading posts on the island. The Japanese had ruled over it for 50 years.
Ms. Wang and the other exiles lived in villages designated for “mainlander” military officers and their families, where the aroma of peppercorn-infused Sichuan cooking mingled with the pickled scents of delicacies from southern Guizhou Province. Each day, she and other women in the village would gather to shout slogans like “Recapture the mainland from the Communist bandits!”
Old photos of Ms. Wang, including one from her wedding. Ms. Wang was 9 when she landed in Taiwan in 1948.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Over time, that dream faded. In 1971, the United Nations severed diplomatic ties with Taipei and formally recognized the Communist government in Beijing. The United States and other countries would later follow suit, dealing a blow to mainlanders like Ms. Wang. How could she still claim to be Chinese, she wondered, if the world did not even recognize her as such?
“There is no more hope,” Ms. Wang recalled thinking at the time.
Ms. Wang and other mainlanders who yearned to return to China had always been a minority in Taiwan. But a few generations later, among their children and grandchildren, that longing has morphed into a fear of Beijing’s expansive ambitions. Under Mr. Xi, Beijing has signaled its impatience with Taiwan in increasingly menacing ways, sending military jets to buzz Taiwanese airspace on a near-daily basis.
When nearby Hong Kong erupted in anti-government protests in 2019, Ms. Li, the schoolteacher, followed the news every day. She saw Beijing’s crackdown there and its destruction of civil liberties as evidence that the party could not be trusted to keep its promise to preserve Taiwan’s autonomy if the sides unified.
The rainbow village in Taichung, Taiwan, one of the settlements built for Chinese soldiers and their families who fled to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Ms. Li’s wariness has only grown with the pandemic. Beijing continues to block Taiwan from international groups, such as the World Health Organization, a clear sign to her that the Communist Party values politics above people. Taiwan’s success in combating the coronavirus, despite these challenges, had filled her with pride.
Watching the Tokyo Olympics last year, Ms. Li felt indignant that athletes from Taiwan had to compete under a flag that was not their own. When they won, the song that played in venues was not their anthem. Rather than Taiwan or Republic of China, their team carried the name Chinese Taipei.
Taken together, these frustrations have only steeled the Taiwanese resolve against the Chinese Communist Party. The global criticism of China for its handling of Covid and its repression at home rekindled a longstanding debate in Taiwan about dropping “China” from the island’s official name. No action was taken, though; such a move by Taiwan would have been seen by Beijing as formalizing its de facto independence.
To young people like Ms. Li, it was also unnecessary. Independence to them is not an aspiration, it is reality.
“We are Taiwanese in our thinking,” she said. “We do not need to declare independence because we already are essentially independent.”
Antigovernment protests in Hong Kong in 2019.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
That emerging confidence has now come to define Taiwan’s contemporary individuality, along with the island’s firm embrace of democracy. To many young people in Taiwan, to call yourself Taiwanese is increasingly to take a stand for democratic values — to not, in other words, be a part of Communist-ruled China.
Under its current president, Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwan government has positioned the island as a Chinese society that is democratic and tolerant, unlike the colossus across the strait. As Beijing has ramped up its oppression of ethnic minorities in the name of national unity, the Taiwan government has sought to embrace the island’s Indigenous groups and other minorities.
Taiwan “represents at once an affront to the narrative and an impediment to the regional ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party,” Ms. Tsai said last year.
Many Taiwanese identify with this posture and have rallied around the countries willing to support Taipei. When Beijing imposed an unofficial trade blockade to punish Lithuania for strengthening ties with Taiwan, people in Taiwan rushed to buy Lithuanian specialty products like crackers and chocolate.
Students visiting the Armed Forces Museum in Taipei in October. Beijing’s claim over Taiwan has solidified the island’s sense of being separate from the mainland.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Democracy isn’t just an expression of Taiwan’s identity — it is at its core. After the Nationalists ended nearly four decades of martial law in 1987, topics previously deemed taboo, including questions of identity and calls for independence, could be discussed. Many pushed to reclaim the local Taiwanese language and culture that was lost when the Nationalists imposed a mainland Chinese identity on the island.
Growing up in the 1980s, Ms. Li was faintly aware of the divide between the Taiwanese and mainlanders. She knew that going to her “mainlander” grandparents’ house after school meant getting to eat pork buns and chive dumplings — heavier, saltier food than the Taiwanese palate of her maternal grandparents, who fed her fried rice noodles and sautéed bitter melon.
Such distinctions became less evident over time. Many of Taiwan’s residents are now proud of their island’s culinary offerings, whether it is the classic beef noodle soup — a mix of mainland influences unique to Taiwan — or bubble milk tea, a modern invention.
In Taiwan’s effort to carve out a distinct identity, officials also revised textbooks to focus more on the history and geography of the island rather than on the mainland. In school, Ms. Li learned that Japanese colonizers — whom her grandmother, Ms. Wang, so often denounced for their wartime atrocities — had been crucial in modernizing the island’s economy. She and her classmates learned about figures like Tan Teng-pho, a local artist who was one of 28,000 people killed by Nationalist government troops in 1947, a massacre known as the 2/28 Incident.
Liberty Square in Taipei in October. The square is a vast plaza where people often gather to play music, dance, exercise and protest.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Now, as China under Mr. Xi has become more authoritarian, the political gulf that separates it from Taiwan has only seemed increasingly insurmountable.
“After Xi Jinping took office, he oversaw the regression of democracy,” Ms. Li said. She cited Mr. Xi’s move in 2018 to abolish term limits on the presidency, paving the way for him to rule indefinitely. “I felt then that unification would be impossible.”
Ms. Li points to Beijing controls on speech and dissent as antithetical to Taiwan.
She compares Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which she visited in 2005 as a university student, with public spaces in Taipei. In the Chinese capital, surveillance cameras loomed in every direction while armed police watched the crowds. Her government-approved guide made no mention of the Communist Party’s brutal crackdown in 1989 on pro-democracy protesters that she had learned about as a middle school student in Taiwan.
She thought of Liberty Square in Taipei, by comparison, a vast plaza where people often gather to play music, dance, exercise and protest.
“After that trip, I cherished Taiwan so much more,” Ms. Li said.
20. US approves transfer of American weapons from allies to Ukraine
Excerpts:
It's unclear when the weapons will arrive in Ukraine.
Earlier this week Blinken visited Ukraine where Ukrainian officials thanked him for US security assistance. But Ukrainians have also routinely sought additional military support.
US approves transfer of American weapons from allies to Ukraine
CNN · by Kylie Atwood, Jennifer Hansler and Alex Marquardt, CNN
(CNN)The State Department told Congress that it has approved export licenses for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which will allow the countries to transfer US-origin weapons to Ukraine, according to an administration official, a State Department official and a congressional aide familiar with the matter.
This move comes as the Biden administration warns that Russia could invade Ukraine at any point, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the Kremlin has plans for sending more troops to the Ukrainian border.
The approvals -- which occurred in recent days -- are a signal that the US is looking to inflict a greater cost on Russian President Vladimir Putin if he goes forward with the invasion. Biden said Wednesday he expects Putin will "move in."
The State Department cited close coordination with European countries and Ukraine when asked about the export licenses transfer.
"European allies have what they need to move forward on additional security assistance from Ukraine in the coming days and weeks," said a State Department spokesperson. "We are in close touch with our Ukrainian partners and our NATO Allies on this, as well as utilizing all available security cooperation tools available to us including expediting authorized transfers of US origin equipment from other allies and partners via our Third Party Transfer process and Excess Defense Articles from DoD inventories, among other mechanisms."
It's unclear when the weapons will arrive in Ukraine.
Earlier this week Blinken visited Ukraine where Ukrainian officials thanked him for US security assistance. But Ukrainians have also routinely sought additional military support.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
CNN · by Kylie Atwood, Jennifer Hansler and Alex Marquardt, CNN
21. China says it warned away U.S. warship in South China Sea, U.S. denies
China says it warned away U.S. warship in South China Sea, U.S. denies
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The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold, forward-deployed to the U.S. 7th Fleet in the Indo-Pacific region, transits the Philippine Sea, June 14, 2018. Sarah Myers/U.S. Navy/Handout via REUTERS
BEIJING, Jan 20 (Reuters) - Chinese forces followed and warned away a U.S. warship which entered waters near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, the country's military said on Thursday, but the U.S. Navy denied the ship had been warned off.
The Southern Theatre Command of the People's Liberation Army said the USS Benfold "illegally" sailed into Chinese territorial waters without permission, violating the country's sovereignty, and that Chinese naval and air forces tracked the ship.
"We solemnly demand that the U.S. side immediately stop such provocative actions, otherwise it will bear the serious consequences of unforeseen events," it added.
The U.S. Navy rejected the idea that the Benfold was warned away but appeared to confirm the ship was operating in the area, saying the mission reflected the U.S. Navy's commitment to defend freedom of navigation.
"The PRC's statement about this mission is false," 7th Fleet spokesman Mark Langford said in a statement. The 7th Fleet is part of the U.S. Navy's Pacific force.
The Benfold was conducting what the navy called a freedom of navigation operation "in accordance with international law," the statement said. The ship then "continued on to conduct normal operations in international waters."
The U.S. Navy frequently carries out such missions in the South China Sea to challenge Chinese territorial claims.
"The United States is defending every nation's right to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows, as USS Benfold did this week. Nothing the PRC says otherwise will deter us," the statement further added.
China has established military outposts on artificial islands in the waters of the South China Sea, which are crossed by vital shipping lanes and also contain gas fields and rich fishing grounds.
The South China Sea has become one of many flashpoints in the testy relationship between China and the United States, with Washington rejecting what it calls unlawful territorial claims by Beijing.
China claims large swaths of the South China Sea. Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines all have overlapping claims.
Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Additional reporting by Martin Pollard; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell and Frank Jack Daniel
22. How to Support a Globally Connected Counter-Disinformation Network
Conclusion:
The solution to disinformation is not to substitute government power for that of tech giants, or to leave it to the tech giants in the hope their platforms don’t trample the truth. Regulating speech and online expression presents many dangers to democratic ideals and freedom of expression. The COVID-19 pandemic and the global acceleration of illiberalism have resulted in a wave of government censorship, borne of a combination of authoritarian leanings and government frustration with rampant online disinformation. Civil society can step into this breach in effective ways, both to warn governments of the perils of such laws and to serve as a check on the power of social media firms. But this vision for a powerful, networked response to meet the global disinformation challenge will fail if the organizations at the front lines are not equipped with the right tools.
How to Support a Globally Connected Counter-Disinformation Network - War on the Rocks
From undermining democracy to inciting genocide, the global dangers of disinformation on social media are now well known. But despite countless calls for better legal regulation or intensified content moderation, the efforts of governments and social media companies to combat this threat have proven either woefully inadequate or dangerous to democratic practice.
The problem is that we have been looking for the solution in the wrong place. Civil society, not governments or social media companies, can best diminish disinformation. But these civil society organizations need equipping, and their tools need sharpening. A powerful, networked disinformation threat should be met with a powerful, networked response. This means more data access, more training, and a more entrepreneurial approach to support groups around the world that are already on the front lines. By providing this support, ideally in a more coordinated fashion, donors and research organizations can help make these groups even more powerful in their response.
Governments and Tech Companies Aren’t the Solution
While Americans often point to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election as the moment social media disinformation became a problem, the rest of the world was already worried. Political disinformation has impacted elections in every region. Hate speech has led to violence and genocide in Burma, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. Authoritarian states’ systems of propaganda have amplified conspiracy theories about the pandemic and encouraged intimidation of Western scholars.
As civil society groups have pioneered their own responses, social media platforms are struggling with how to regulate themselves, and governments are struggling with how to regulate these platforms. Some governments have rapidly developed their own counter-disinformation capabilities. The Department of Defense, for example, has begun to prioritize counter-disinformation, with U.S. Special Operations Command focusing on adversarial disinformation operations outside of wartime. Sweden, in turn, has established a Psychological Defense Agency to counter foreign influence operations.
The risk, however, is that government agencies are naturally inclined to prioritize national security over values in their decision-making. When governments, militaries, and law enforcement agencies expose disinformation, they inevitably focus on its threat to national interests. When the United States, European nations, or Taiwan publicize Chinese-sourced information operations that undermine Taiwan’s sovereignty, the content of and intention behind their outreach focuses on maintaining cross-straits stability or ensuring Taiwan’s security. However, civil society organizations — like, say, Taiwan’s Doublethink Lab — will focus on a broader value set and on defending Taiwan’s information environment as a whole.
The worst approach for democratic governments would be to act like the trolls and conduct covert, inauthentic operations of their own. Such a response is antithetical to the values of democracy, and can end up being counter-productive or generating a mixed bag of positive and negative results, as past in-depth research has shown. Foreign governments often lack the credibility that local civil society has, a point emphasized by a study meant to advise the French government’s counter-disinformation work.
Domestically, intensive government regulation of the online environment quickly faces difficult trade-offs between freedom of expression and censorship. It’s natural for government policymakers to want to “do something” in the face of unfolding information threats. However, government’s proper role in defending the information space revolves around empowering credible non-governmental voices, ensuring a level and competitive playing field for information to flow freely, and developing the highest possible transparency standards for traditional and social media organizations. Establishing “fake news” laws and other heavy-handed regulatory measures risk further politicizing truth and enabling the state’s capture of media.
In light of these concerns, some advocates have suggested that the solution is better self-regulation by social media companies. Facebook (now under the name Meta) houses the largest content-moderation operation of any social media platform in the world, involving at least 15,000 people. But despite this, it has not succeeded in stemming the tide of disinformation. Part of the problem is that Facebook spends a meager 13 percent of its resources moderating non-U.S. users, although they constitute 90 percent of its global user base. But critics have also identified deeper issues that cannot be addressed with more money or people. “Self-regulation” regularly falls victim to conflicting business and safety motives, creating an insurmountable problem for content moderation. Simply relying on the social media platforms’ civic integrity operations to play both judge and jury has failed, as the leaked Facebook Papers clearly showed.
One promising alternative is “middleware” solutions, which allow civil society organizations to take on investigatory, adjudication, and monitoring roles within social media platforms. Alongside others, programs at Stanford are leading the way in thinking through the mechanics of how this “middleware” could supplement — and even serve as a deciding factor in — regulation of the online information environment. Another organization, founded by ex-Facebook employees, has sought to unite civic integrity professionals in developing high standards and solutions to monitor and respond to disinformation. These civic initiatives all have the same goal in common: remove the platforms as the sole monitors, decision-makers, and enforcers of content decisions.
The information space — online news, social media, and traditional media — should be made safe for democracy. Reliable, authentic information is critical to transparent, accountable governance and to citizens’ ability to exercise their civic rights and responsibilities. Platforms and governments are simply not set up to prioritize democratic values over business or national interest considerations.
Civil Society Can Best Tackle Disinformation
The global campaign against disinformation should have civil society at its core. Modern, entrepreneurial, and collaborative civil society organizations have proven more effective and sustainable than other alternatives in serving as global watchdogs and countering the influence of authoritarians and hate speech. Because of their efforts, a new global vision for fighting disinformation is emerging: a loosely connected web of hyper-local organizations that constantly learn from one another, are equipped with response tools by funders and research organizations, and enjoy genuine access to and power within social media platforms and regulatory bodies.
Civil society organizations designed to counter social media disinformation are sprouting up nearly everywhere in the world, even amid threats of increasingly closed or illiberal societies and authoritarian pressures. One organization has counted 117 different types of interventions operating just in Europe and Eurasia. A second research project catalogued more than 280 different types of interventions in over 80 countries, while yet another was able to survey 53 organizations (but acknowledged there was a much larger field). The National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies produced research that identified 175 counter-disinformation organizations. New organizations are being founded at a rapid pace, and existing foundations and development organizations are focusing more on these information space threats. The difficulty of precisely mapping the field shows just how dynamic it is.
These civil society organizations are sophisticated, nimble, and collaborative. My organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, recently concluded a months-long set of workshops to help connect some of the most innovative organizations, including those outside the United States and Western Europe, and highlighted some of their work in an essay series.
Civil society organizations are harnessing the power of technology and advanced media-monitoring tools. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute used an algorithm derived from third-party companies to map a wide range of inauthentic accounts coordinated with Chinese Communist Party officials and outsourced “disinformation-for-hire” firms. U.S.-based research firm Graphika used its in-house advanced machine-learning algorithm to map disinformation networks, such as one amplifying disinformation about COVID-19 and harassing public health officials. Slovakian think tank Globsec developed polling, focus groups, and surveys to measure the vulnerability of regional democracies to foreign influence operations. Code for Africa developed PesaYetu, a data visualization tool for journalists and activists to hold local officials accountable for disinformation they peddle about governance and city services.
The global information space is a muddled maze of longstanding and emerging social media platforms, offline peddlers of falsehoods and truths, and state-backed propagandist outlets intermixed with independent, journalism-minded ones. Counter-disinformation responders are wading into this milieu through adaptive and entrepreneurial methods. In the Czech Republic, self-titled “elves” are intentionally using decentralized groups of citizens to fight online disinformation from Russia and elsewhere. In a nod to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the Center for International Media Assistance documented satirists and humorists throughout the world exposing disinformation by laughing their way through it with their audiences. Organizations like 263Chat, AfricaCheck, and the Continent are using chatbots, on-demand podcasts, and new business models to infuse independent media voices and fact-checking into closed messaging apps, like WhatsApp, that are beginning to populate Africa’s social media landscape.
These organizations increasingly play well with others, too. Some are highly collaborative across borders, and others are interdisciplinary in their approach. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab has trained analysts (called “Digital Sherlocks”) on five continents to detect and monitor disinformation in their online environments. Code for Africa has spawned new localized digital and civic tech initiatives in 20 countries on the African continent, and equipped newsrooms with digital forensic analysis and cybersecurity training for outlets under pressure from illiberal or authoritarian governments. Sydney’s Australian Strategic Policy Institute International Cyber Policy Centre brings together experts from different disciplines, such as computer science, engineering, political science, area studies, and mathematics. Interdisciplinary organizations have developed some of the more ground-breaking studies that have led to significant impacts and platform takedowns.
How to Help Civil Society Organizations Succeed
If local civil society organizations should be at the core of a global counter-disinformation response, where do Western funders, platforms, and governments fit in? These entities should play to their strengths in this global network: their size, financial and human resources, analytic capabilities, and global reach.
First, local civil society groups need more data access. A small outfit in, for example, Indonesia or Bolivia best understands how local populations consume information, but often lacks the analytical tools to sort through the maze of social media information to effectively map the environment in front of them. The analytical tools that bigger counter-disinformation organizations have at their disposal need to be made available to these smaller organizations. Existing initiatives should be scaled up in order to reach deeper into the Global South. Platforms should further expand the data-sharing partnerships that civil society organizations have called for and find ways to provide more immediate, real-time access to threat networks that Facebook and other platforms are increasingly disclosing. Platforms should avoid prioritizing the largest, U.S-based organizations in allotting this treasured access and ensure that a bigger group of civil society organizations from developing regions are even more integrated.
Additionally, new government counter-disinformation and intelligence agencies have a wealth of data and tools for analysis that need to be unlocked for civil society. Huge new military, foreign affairs, and intelligence programs that map the information environment and monitor foreign and social media platforms should afford some level of access for counter-disinformation civil society organizations. As they gain more platform and government access, these organizations should maintain strict autonomy when it comes to their editorial decision-making and staffing. Independence should remain the hallmark of civil society.
Second, local civil society groups need more training. Many find themselves outmatched by domestic and foreign disinformation networks. The pace of change set by disinformation networks, as well as the proliferation of new platforms open to their manipulation, is relentless. Civil society organizations need to be at the cutting edge. U.S.-based organizations have published helpful guides and best practices for other groups, but local organizations need even more direct support, curricula, and education. A survey of global counter-disinformation organizations by researchers at the National Endowment for Democracy and the Oxford Internet Institute found that many counter-disinformation groups outside of America and parts of Europe lacked training in the data and social science fields that their Western counterparts had. Not only will highly skilled organizations be more effective, they will also be able to maintain higher standards and as a result serve as more credible messengers of truth.
Third, funders need to act more like venture capitalists. Venture capitalists are often unafraid to fail. They think of their investments more as seed money or down payments and less as transactions that immediately pay a benefit. Funders from governments and prominent foundations need to operate in the same way. Like disinformation operations themselves, measuring the impact of counter-disinformation efforts can be difficult, and the payoff can sometimes come in the long term. Micro-managing funded projects from afar in order to produce X outcome from Y program can lead to poor results and even distrust between funders and local organizations. Funding needs to be long-term and flexible so local organizations can adapt to new threats and sustain operations in more closed, authoritarian settings.
Finally, funders, both new and established, need to find ways to avoid fostering an overly competitive landscape among civil society organizations. A more formal mechanism could help provide some of the above-mentioned resources to groups around the world in a more systematic fashion.
The solution to disinformation is not to substitute government power for that of tech giants, or to leave it to the tech giants in the hope their platforms don’t trample the truth. Regulating speech and online expression presents many dangers to democratic ideals and freedom of expression. The COVID-19 pandemic and the global acceleration of illiberalism have resulted in a wave of government censorship, borne of a combination of authoritarian leanings and government frustration with rampant online disinformation. Civil society can step into this breach in effective ways, both to warn governments of the perils of such laws and to serve as a check on the power of social media firms. But this vision for a powerful, networked response to meet the global disinformation challenge will fail if the organizations at the front lines are not equipped with the right tools.
Kevin Sheives, @KSheives, serves as the associate director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy. He spent nearly 15 years in various China-focused positions in the State Department, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, and the House of Representatives. He has published on disinformation, authoritarian influence, and China in Nikkei Asia, The Diplomat, Pacific Affairs, and through the International Forum.
23. WHY RESPONDING IS LOSING - The Plays We Run (and the Plays We Don’t) to Defeat Disinformation
Wed, 01/19/2022 - 8:29pm
WHY RESPONDING IS LOSING
The Plays We Run (and the Plays We Don’t) to Defeat Disinformation
By Alan Kelly
With France’s recent report that it engages in disinformation, media and think tanks have been quick to wag a finger. The Washington Post urged President Biden to avoid the slippery slope of offensive rhetorical warfare and The Aspen Institute called for a national response strategy to counter it. These were the echoes of repeating and principled pleas to take the high road in a low road game.[1]
From the Pentagon to the CIA snickers might have been heard. Information after all is an essential munition in any state’s arsenal, particularly today with the reach and resources of online media and the playing field it flattens. To join in games of perception without deception is like competing with half a playbook. Literally, as I’ll explain.
Whether such things draw shock or stifled laughter the proliferation of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, etc. renews questions of how democracies influence ethically. Should information and the certain guns that fire it be remade and muted to suit free society? Should its uses be banned outright or at least limited for educational and defensive purposes? It’s a tough sell because the weaponization of information can compromise principles of transparency and fair play.[2]
When it comes to information the U.S. strategy and indeed that of most developed democratic countries has been to promote its power to protect a position than of its power to prosecute it. Consider the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) whose stated purpose is “to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation.” Whether at the hands of domestic or global actors the American script is that it shall respond to, not aggress, deceptive information and campaigns.
France, however, appears ready to play. It sees the advantages of information’s inherent asymmetry and for its curiosity it will develop skills that meet bad actors on their asymmetric terms and understanding of how to enlist what in France’s case is a celebrated and notably peaceable citizenry.
Used as a defensive function, can information win wars of words? In my experience, no. Not without an offensive component. We are fooling only ourselves to think so. Here is why:
From my perches in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., and through a score of global engagements in business, government and academia, I’ve systematically researched and curated a complete, practice-based taxonomy of the fundamental strategies that underlie influence (see figure 1). Details of its conception and evolution are detailed in my book, The Elements of Influence, and subsequent white papers.[3]-[4]
Like chemistry’s table of elements or biology’s phylogenetic tree the ambition of the taxonomy is to identify, organize and characterize the most basic strategies of communications, marketing, media, military and government intelligence, politics, sales and other members of the influence industry.[5] Its value is to give analysts, strategists, managers and commanders of information programming an objective and precise view of the typically invisible moves and motives that underly persuasion-based campaigns, not just the sentiment and messages we routinely mine to edify communicated content. For the purposes of stratcom and IO operatives, this model also reduces the plethora of TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures) by distilling the strategies that underly non-kinetic conflict.
Figure 1. Developed with Fortune 100 companies, military units, and leading universities, the Taxonomy of Influence Strategies, above, is a first-of-a-kind ontology featuring 23 strategies observed in communications, finance, marketing, media, military and government intelligence, politics and sales across professions, governments, regions, customs and cultures. Shown is a revision (update 3.2) to the original framework.
There are myriad breeds of actors, inside and outside our borders, whose rhetoric and strategies aim to disinform. But there is one overarching characteristic these persuaders have in common: Their plays as described in figure 1 are designed to destabilize the agendas of others as much as to defend their own. Their game and mindset is offense. They are activists, exploring and employing all corners of the table.
For Democrats one such actor is former U.S. President Donald Trump whose frenetic use of influence plays relies on their participation of his rivals. His narratives are designed not simply to excite a restive political base but to infuriate and deliberately activate his opposition. My blogs and essays, which detail Trump’s handiwork, suggest that counter-intuitive strategies of encouragement, not mainstream strategies of mitigation, could have and can still accelerate and suffocate his provocative campaigns.[6]As such, Trump is an expert practitioner of the Label, Decoy, Preempt, Call Out, Peacock and Bait—plays from my taxonomy that are not usually run with the intent to respond to or counter pesky opponents.
For Western allies another actor is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Increasingly more like Sun Tzu than Clausewitz, Putin’s plays also use resistance to achieve his political purposes. As illustrated in figure 2, my analysis with Dr. Christopher Paul, “Decoding Crimea: Pinpointing the Influence Strategies of Modern Information Warfare,” suggests that the Putin regime is an improving, dynamic practitioner of hybrid warfare, particularly in the realms of information and influence.[7]
Figure 2. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea was achieved in part through strategies of influence (aka "plays”) that complemented a coordinated, conventional ground war. This analysis, published through the NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence, reveals two constellations of plays by Russian planners—covert strategies that conditioned Western opponents (lower left) and, more predictably, others that confronted them with obvious intent (upper-right).
NINE PLAYS RESPONDERS RUN (SOMETIMES TOO MUCH)
Despite the rise of what might be called managed information or more colloquially spinformation there is in my experience a persistent preference to deal with it by reacting to it. In my private sector work this is due largely to the strength of lawyers whose obedience to case law and legal judgments deemphasizes public opinion and the comparatively weak communications and PR counterparts whose servitude to reputation tenets and social purpose deemphasize competitive advantage. In my more limited experience in the public sector I see similar behaviors. In any case, the result is what I observe to be a widely held and misguided instinct to disengage from or minimize competitive actors and their influence programs, particularly the activists and terrorists (foreign and domestic, state and non-state) that are keen to disrupt companies and governments.
Figure 3. Shown in color against the Taxonomy of Influence Strategies are nine of 23 plays that are typically employed to meet and mitigate competitive influence programs and operations. Despite their popularity, this subset is notably defensive and often helpful to rival actors. Shown in gray are nine other plays that are often ignored by responding players but more capable of creating and maintaining strategic advantage in narrative conflicts.
As shown in figure 3, there are nine plays that responders and prone to run. Each has its merits, but as a group they constitute a conservative playbook that in my view increases risk. Because they are cautious, they only bend and blunt a hostile operation and, sometimes worse, provide enough resistance to stoke instead of starve an enemy’s agenda. In short, responsive players are an enemy’s best friend because they serve as a useful foil.
Below are brief summaries of these influence strategies with insights and examples to illustrate their downsides. Further insight into each of these influence plays can be found in Standard Guidance, a resource of options and expert tips distributed across the online information cards of each of the 23 plays of the online taxonomy. These include risks, rewards, profiles of actors that employ each play, conditions for running, decoding, countering or complementing them, and case examples.
When you hear government officials reciting the benefits of COVID vaccinations you’re witnessing a straight-faced framing strategy called Inform. And you know it’s not working, certainly not for a large segment of resisters and vaccine deniers because the play is too easy to counter. It neither positions, re-positions nor de-positions. It relies on a target’s willingness to be educated…and we know how that’s going lately. See details of the Inform strategy here.
Another member of the framing family is Invoke, the strategy most favored by advertisers, publicists and other storytellers because it attaches symbols, idols and emotions to the people and things they’re selling. Think of the images of freedom that American truck brands “invoke” to communicate power and independence. It’s usually a low-risk strategy, but when cited issues or ideas are too extreme the result can backfire. Consider how activists have attached all manner of peril to the problem of global warming and yet are failing to mobilize the masses. Their analogies are so out-sized as to be unrelatable. See details of the Invoke strategy here.
As a response strategy, Filters are ever-present, mostly for the fact that the instinct to edit, consciously or otherwise, is endemic to advocacy. But this conditioning play is fraught with risk because it empowers a player to frame not simply state a truth. Unless the omission is inconsequential the play can do far more to damage the playcaller’s credibility. Think of the fallen soldier who is honored for battlefield heroics but later found to have died by friendly fire. However tragic, the soldier’s story is the victim of filtering. See details of the Filter strategy here.
From teenagers to press secretaries, the diverting strategy called Deflect is also instinctive. And while it might buy a player time it commits them to an avenue whose return to truth can be circuitous at best. Imagine the embattled politico or celebrity whose rival has revealed their misdeed. It may be embarrassing, perhaps worth turning from, at least for a while. But imagine, too, the liberating, offensive potential of a confession. Here’s what actually happened has far more power than I can’t recall. See details of the Deflect strategy here.
Another diverting play, the Recast, is similarly reflexive. When the point or agenda of an opponent needs to be repositioned it’s a tempting play to run…and it’s always a good look to the bosses. But Recasts can also promote a tit-for-tat that often produces rhetorical gridlock. More important, Recasts can reek of spin. When an Eastern country eyes a western neighbor allies might warn of a wanton land grab. The Eastern story would be different of course. It would recast any annexation of a once-loyal proxy as reclamation of a native motherland. See details of the Recast strategy here.
When a rival is effective yet inferior it’s tempting for the bigger player to ignore it, perhaps by way of the play called Pass. But when the punch lands, the pressing play called Declare often emerges principally because it has the patina of engagement but preserves a player’s authority, or tries to. Consider a government whose hate crime laws have been called into question by insignificant but vocal voters. The dictated response might be, We have no tolerance for any acts of hate. We unequivocally respect all people, regardless of race, creed, color... See details of the Declare strategy here.
In as much as the play called Invoke joins two players, the strategy called Reject serves to separate them. When politicians sidle up to famous figures, they’re borrowing notoriety to build their own. But if the object of their affection falls from grace, they’ll be subject to the Reject, the play that puts distance between what one player once thought was what or where they wanted to be. See details of the Reject strategy here.
The play called Challenge is another strategy that confronts, though more polite and usually inclusive of player and playee. Religious leaders are given to this strategy when, for instance, they beseech their flocks, Let us love one another. Most Challenge plays are low risk but suffer for that very fact: They are often carried out more for optics than results. See details of the Challenge strategy here.
A fourth strategy that confronts, the Contrast, puts a premium on logic and history. Where it fails responders, however, is that the settings in which it’s played can be driven more by emotion and the moment than facts and figures. Think of the pharmaceutical company whose research requires the testing of dogs and rabbits; they are sure to the target of animal rights activists. The Contrast is often the play of those who think they know better. It puts what’s empirically true ahead of what’s emotionally touchy. Though seemingly safe, it’s the strategy that can do more to activate disinformation than diminish it. See details of the Contrast strategy here.
NINE PLAYS RESPONDERS AVOID RUNNING (BUT SHOULDN’T)
So, what’s the answer? Is it that we should abandon what I call high-fit strategies and take up those that are high-friction? Should we loosen our collective ethical belts and be more aggressive? Or endorse the plays that compete, not just comply? The downsides are withering, but consider what operators forego by ignoring so many neglected plays. The plays below (shown in gray in figure 3) are in my experience effective strategies for defeating competitive influencers, particularly those that wage campaigns of disinformation (i.e., that lie).
Sitting at the far left of the Condition-Control-Confront strategy spectrum, the play called Ping it used to probe. Like its neighbor the Float (aka, trial balloon) it has the advantage of subtly nudging targets in a preferred direction and gauging their reaction. It’s a low-engagement strategy that can budge what’s sometimes immovable, a safe way to feel out a hostile environment. See details and examples of the Ping strategy here.
The fashionable framing play called Label is useful for positioning and figuratively pasting to a bad actor’s forehead an ill-gotten motive (e.g., Fake news!). To the responsive mindset, this play often seems more capable of provoking a competitor than simply de-positioning them. Indeed, a well-applied sound bite can incur the wrath of enemies, but if the Label is apt and accurate it’s hard to peel off. See details and examples of the Label strategy here.
A strategy of diversion, the Disclose, can be a powerful inoculant to negative accusations. Yes, it often forces an actor to play a hand they might rather not play but getting the bad news out first can control the time and place of a rhetorical bomb’s detonation. Lawyers hate it because it establishes culpability. Communicators love it because it builds credibility. See details and examples of the Disclose strategy here.
Another strategy that diverts, the Decoy, (aka, red herring or ruse), is clever, asymmetric and often unethical. After all, Decoys are typically employed for less than mutual benefit. When set and minded well, they send rivals down blind alleys and waste resources they’d otherwise heap upon the decoy-setter. See details and examples of the Decoy strategy here.
Like Disclose, the play called Concede limits the harm of an accusation or wrongdoing. It takes away the oxygen that bad actors require to verbally or symbolically damage a player’s brand or reputation. It’s another play that lawyers and communicators are bound to debate because it can generate both guilt and accountability. See details and examples of the Concede strategy here.
The play called Crowd is for copycats, not leaders. But when you need the company of others to mask your own shortcomings, or just hide behind, it can be handy. The Crowd forces rivals to attack your associates, too, not just you. See details and examples of the Crowd strategy here.
The Preempt is a strategy that boy scout types might frown upon. But to co-opt, i.e., preempt, an idea, especially when it’s about to be used to hurt you, can be crucially advantageous. It offers the double reward of debiting your enemy’s influence accounts while crediting your own. See details and examples of the Preempt strategy here.
Provoking plays like the Call Out might seem impolitic and in violation of the fashion to go high when others go low.[8] But to categorically rule it out is limiting, especially when a bad actor’s spin merits a public tongue lashing. See details and examples of the Call Out strategy here.
More than any of the taxonomy’s 23 strategies the Bait requires deep understanding of how the play will be countered by a target and countered back by the baiting player. It is also ethically packed. As its definition states, Baits compels a targeted player to work against their self-interest. Though mean it may seem, this provoking strategy should not be mothballed; its ability to draw out and confront competitors is like no other. See details and examples of the Bait strategy here.
There’s more to learn in the calling and running of influence plays than most know or are willing to practice and perfect. The Taxonomy of Influence Strategies illustrates that engagement is not binary. Analysts, strategists, managers and commanders of information programming don’t have to pick between defense or offense, passivity or aggression, high roads or low roads. The elements of influence are many and nuanced. They come in three modes and six families that are populated by 23 unique plays that when smartly employed move minds and markets, ethically and in honor of democratic precepts. Perhaps most important, in the face of epidemic hyperbole and deception, this framework offers us a rational, objective and universal language for winning, not just managing the information wars that are here and that are coming.
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Copyright © 2005-2022 Playmaker Systems, LLC. All rights reserved.
All figures and indicated trademarks are owned by Playmaker Systems.
U.S. No. 8,245,157
[5] Simplified models such as the BEND, 4D and 5D frameworks, follow a similar decoding convention:
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BEND: Laurie Fenstermacher and Katie Larson, “Multi-Source Insights for Discernment of “Competition” Threat,” Proc. SPIE 11423, Signal Processing, Sensor/Information Fusion, and Target Recognition XXIX, 114230S (May 8, 2020); doi:10.1117/12.2564517, https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2564517
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4D: Ben Nimmo, “Anatomy of an Info-War: How Russia’s Propaganda Machine Works, and How to Counter It,” StopFake.org, May 19, 2015, https://www.stopfake.org/en/anatomy-of-an-info-war-how-russia-s-propaganda-machine-works-and-how-to-counter-it/
- 5D: Larissa Doroshenko and Josephine Lukito, “Trollfare: How to Recognize and /fight Off Online Psyops: It starts by understanding common tactics: distort, distract, dismiss, deny and dismay,” Defense One,
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Dec. 15, 2021, https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/12/trollfare-how-recognize-and-fight-online-psyops/359777/
[8] Quotation: “Rising above is like walking over the playing field, staying irrelevant, and watching the marketplace go by.” “Taking the high road is like never driving on it at all.” Alan Kelly, The Elements of Influence: The New Essential System for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand, and Buzz, New York: Dutton, 2006 and Plume, 2007, p. 289. https://www.playmakersystems.com/playmaker-system/book-the-elements-of-influence/
Alan Kelly is president and founder of Playmaker Systems, LLC, based in Bethesda, Maryland. He is the author of the landmark book, The Elements of Influence: The New Essential Systems for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand and Buzz, and a charter member of the Information Professionals Association. Kelly can be contacted at akelly@playmakersystems.com and followed on twitter @playmakeralan. View his full biography here.
24. America’s Coming Age of Instability
An ominous warning.
In this sense, American politics may come to resemble not Russia but its neighbor Ukraine, which has oscillated for decades between democracy and competitive authoritarianism, depending on which partisan forces controlled the executive. For the foreseeable future, U.S. presidential elections will involve not simply a choice between competing sets of policies but rather a more fundamental choice over whether the country will be democratic or authoritarian.
Finally, American politics will likely be marked by heightened political violence. Extreme polarization and intense partisan competition often generate violence, and indeed, the United States experienced a dramatic spike in far-right violence during Trump’s presidency. Although the United States probably isn’t headed for a second civil war, it could well experience a rise in assassinations, bombings, and other terrorist attacks; armed uprisings; mob attacks; and violent street confrontations—often tolerated and even incited by politicians. Such violence might resemble that which afflicted Spain in the early 1930s, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, or the American South during and after Reconstruction.
American democracy remains at risk. Although the United States probably won’t follow the path of Putin’s Russia or even Orban’s Hungary, enduring conflict between powerful authoritarian and democratic forces could bring debilitating—and violent—regime instability for years to come.
America’s Coming Age of Instability
Why Constitutional Crises and Political Violence Could Soon Be the Norm
When Joe Biden was sworn in as president a year ago today, many Americans breathed a heavy sigh of relief. President Donald Trump had tried to steal the election, but he had failed. The violent insurrection he incited on January 6, 2021, had shaken the United States’ democratic system to its core, but left it standing in the end.
One year into Biden’s presidency, however, the threat to American democracy has not receded. Although U.S. democratic institutions survived the Trump presidency, they were badly weakened. The Republican Party, moreover, has radicalized into an extremist, antidemocratic force that imperils the U.S. constitutional order. The United States isn’t headed toward Russian- or Hungarian-style autocracy, as some analysts have warned, but something else: a period of protracted regime instability, marked by repeated constitutional crises, heightened political violence, and possibly, periods of authoritarian rule.
CLOSE CALL
In 2017, we warned in Foreign Affairs that Trump posed a threat to U.S. democratic institutions. Skeptics viewed our concern for the fate of American democracy as alarmist. After all, the U.S. constitutional system had been stable for 150 years, and reams of social science research suggested that democracy was likely to endure. No democracy even remotely as rich—or as old—as the United States’ had ever broken down.
But Trump proved to be as autocratic as advertised. Following the playbook of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Viktor Orban in Hungary, he worked to corrupt key state agencies and subvert them for personal, partisan, and even undemocratic ends. Public officials responsible for law enforcement, intelligence, foreign policy, national defense, homeland security, election administration, and even public health were pressured to deploy the machinery of government against the president’s rivals.
Trump did more than politicize state institutions, however. He also tried to steal an election. The only president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, Trump spent late 2020 and early 2021 pressuring Justice Department officials, governors, state legislators, state and local election officials, and, finally, Vice President Mike Pence, to illegally overturn the election results. When these efforts failed, he incited a mob of his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol and try to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s win. This two-month campaign to illegally remain in power deserves to be called by its name: a coup attempt.
As we feared, the Republican Party failed to constrain Trump. In a context of extreme political polarization, we predicted, congressional Republicans were “unlikely to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors who reined in Nixon.” Partisan loyalty and fear of primary challenges by Trump supporters outweighed constitutional commitments, undermining the effectiveness of the system’s most powerful check on presidential abuse: impeachment. Trump’s abuses exceeded Nixon’s by orders of magnitude. But only ten of 211 Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the failed coup, and only seven of 50 Republicans in the Senate voted to convict him.
Trump proved to be as autocratic as advertised.
American democracy survived Trump—but barely. Trump’s autocratic behavior was blunted in part by public officials who refused to cooperate with his abuses, such as Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, or who refused to remain silent about them, such as Alexander Vindman, a specialist on the National Security Council. Many judges, including some appointed by Trump himself, blocked his efforts to overturn the election.
Contingent events also played a role in defeating Trump. The COVID-19 pandemic was his “Katrina moment.” Just as President George W. Bush’s mishandling of the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane eroded his popularity, Trump’s disastrous response to the pandemic may have been decisive in preventing his reelection. Even so, Trump very nearly won. A tiny shift in the vote in Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania would have secured his reelection, seriously imperiling democracy.
Although American democracy survived Trump’s presidency, it was badly wounded by it. In light of Trump’s egregious abuse of power, his attempt to steal the 2020 election and block a peaceful transition, and ongoing state-level efforts to restrict access to the ballot, global democracy indexes have substantially downgraded the United States since 2016. Today, the United States’ score on Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index is on a par with Panama and Romania, and below Argentina, Lithuania, and Mongolia.
MOUNTING THREATS
Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election did not end the threat to American democracy. The Republican Party has evolved into an extremist and antidemocratic party, more like Hungary’s Fidesz than traditional center-right parties in Europe and Canada. The transformation began before Trump. During Barack Obama’s presidency, leading Republicans cast Obama and the Democrats as an existential threat and abandoned norms of restraint in favor of constitutional hardball—the use of the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law. Republicans pushed through a wave of state-level measures aimed at restricting access to the ballot box and, most extraordinarily, they refused to allow Obama to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016.
Republican radicalization accelerated under Trump, to the point where the party abandoned its commitment to democratic rules of the game. Parties that are committed to democracy must, at minimum, do two things: accept defeat and reject violence. Beginning in November 2020, the Republican Party did neither. Most Republican leaders refused to unambiguously recognize Biden’s victory, either openly embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” or enabling it through their silence. More than two-thirds of Republican members of the House of Representatives backed a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the 2020 election, and on the evening of the January 6 insurrection, 139 of them voted against certifying the election. Leading Republicans also refused to unambiguously reject violence. Not only did Trump embrace extremist militias and incite the January 6 insurrection, but congressional Republicans later blocked efforts to create an independent commission to investigate the insurrection.
Although Trump catalyzed this authoritarian turn, Republican extremism was fueled by powerful pressure from below. The party’s core constituents are white and Christian, and live in exurbs, small towns, and rural areas. Not only are white Christians in decline as a percentage of the electorate but growing diversity and progress toward racial equality have also undermined their relative social status. According to a 2018 survey, nearly 60 percent of Republicans say they “feel like a stranger in their own country.” Many Republican voters think the country of their childhood is being taken away from them. This perceived relative loss of status has had a radicalizing effect: a 2021 survey sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute found that a stunning 56 percent of Republicans agreed that the “traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to stop it.”
The threats to American democracy are mounting.
The Republican turn toward authoritarianism has accelerated since Trump’s departure from the White House. From top to bottom, the party embraced the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, to the point that Republican voters now overwhelmingly believe it is true. In much of the country, Republican politicians who openly rejected this lie or supported an independent investigation into the January 6 insurrection have put their political careers at risk.
The newly transformed Republican Party has launched a major assault on democratic institutions at the state level, increasing the likelihood of a stolen election in the future. On the heels of Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign, his supporters have launched a campaign to replace state and local election officials who certified the 2020 election—from secretaries of state down to neighborhood precinct officers—with Trump loyalists who appear more willing to overturn a Democratic victory. Republican state legislatures across the country have also adopted measures to restrict access to the ballot box and empower statewide officials to intervene in local electoral processes—purging local voter rolls, permitting voter intimidation by thuggish observer groups, moving or reducing the number of polling sites, and potentially throwing out ballots or altering results. It is now possible that Republican legislatures in multiple battleground states will, under a loose interpretation of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, use unsubstantiated fraud claims to declare failed elections in their states and send alternate slates of Republican electors to the Electoral College, thereby contravening the popular vote. Such constitutional hardball could result in a stolen election.
The U.S. business community, historically a core Republican constituency, has done little to resist the party’s authoritarian turn. Although the U.S. Chamber of Commerce initially pledged to oppose Republicans who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, it later reversed course. According to The New York Times, the Chamber of Commerce, along with major corporations such as Boeing, Pfizer, General Motors, Ford Motor, AT&T, and United Parcel Service, now funds lawmakers who voted to overturn the election.
The threats to American democracy are mounting. If Trump or a like-minded Republican wins the presidency in 2024 (with or without fraud), the new administration will almost certainly politicize the federal bureaucracy and deploy the machinery of government against its rivals. Having largely purged the party leadership of politicians committed to democratic norms, the next Republican administration could easily cross the line into what we have called competitive authoritarianism—a system in which competitive elections exist but incumbent abuse of state power tilts the playing field against the opposition.
IMPEDIMENTS TO AUTOCRACY
Although the threat of democratic breakdown in the United States is real, the likelihood of a descent into stable autocracy, as has occurred, for example, in Hungary and Russia, remains low. The United States possesses several obstacles to stable authoritarianism that are not found in other backsliding cases. Take Hungary under Orban. After winning election in 2010 on an ethnonationalist platform, Orban and his party, Fidesz, packed the courts and the electoral bodies, suppressed independent media, and used gerrymandering, new campaign regulations, and other legal shenanigans to gain advantage over the opposition. Some observers have warned that Orban’s path to authoritarianism could be replicated in the United States.
But Orban was able to consolidate power because the opposition was weak, unpopular, and divided between far-right and socialist parties. Moreover, with the country having only recently emerged from totalitarian rule, Hungary’s private sector and independent media were far weaker than their American counterparts. Orban’s ability to quickly gain control of 90 percent of Hungarian media—including the largest independent daily and every regional newspaper—remains unthinkable in the United States. The path to autocracy was even smoother in Russia, where media and opposition forces were weaker than in Hungary.
Rather than autocracy, the United States appears headed toward endemic regime instability.
By contrast, an effort to consolidate autocracy in the United States would face several daunting obstacles. The first is a powerful opposition. Unlike other backsliding countries, including Hungary, India, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela, the United States has a unified opposition in the Democratic Party. It is well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable (it won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections). Moreover, due to deep partisan divisions and the relatively limited appeal of white nationalism in the United States, a Republican autocrat would not enjoy the level of public support that has helped sustain elected autocrats elsewhere. To the contrary, such an autocrat would face a level of societal contestation unseen in other democratic backsliders. As Robert Kagan has argued, Republicans may seek to rig or overturn a close election in 2024, but such an effort would likely trigger enormous—and probably violent—protests across the country.
An authoritarian Republican government would also face a much stronger and more independent media, private sector, and civil society. Even the most committed American autocrat would not be able to gain control of major newspapers and television networks and effectively limit independent sources of information, as Orban and Russian President Vladimir Putin have done in their countries.
Finally, an aspiring Republican autocrat would face institutional constraints. Although it is increasingly politicized, the U.S. judiciary remains far more independent and powerful than its counterparts in other emerging autocracies. In addition, U.S. federalism and a highly decentralized system of elections administration provide a bulwark against centralized authoritarianism. Decentralized power creates opportunities for electoral malfeasance in red—and some purple—states, but it makes it more difficult to undermine the democratic process in blue states. Thus, even if the Republicans manage to steal the 2024 election, their ability to monopolize power over an extended period of time will likely be limited. America may no longer be safe for democracy, but it remains inhospitable to autocracy.
UNSTABLE FUTURE
Rather than autocracy, the United States appears headed toward endemic regime instability. Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections and severe conflict between presidents and Congress (such as impeachments and executive efforts to bypass Congress), the judiciary (such as efforts to purge or pack the courts), and state governments (such as intense battles over voting rights and the administration of elections). The United States would likely shift back and forth between periods of dysfunctional democracy and periods of competitive authoritarian rule during which incumbents abuse state power, tolerate or encourage violent extremism, and tilt the electoral playing field against their rivals.
In this sense, American politics may come to resemble not Russia but its neighbor Ukraine, which has oscillated for decades between democracy and competitive authoritarianism, depending on which partisan forces controlled the executive. For the foreseeable future, U.S. presidential elections will involve not simply a choice between competing sets of policies but rather a more fundamental choice over whether the country will be democratic or authoritarian.
Finally, American politics will likely be marked by heightened political violence. Extreme polarization and intense partisan competition often generate violence, and indeed, the United States experienced a dramatic spike in far-right violence during Trump’s presidency. Although the United States probably isn’t headed for a second civil war, it could well experience a rise in assassinations, bombings, and other terrorist attacks; armed uprisings; mob attacks; and violent street confrontations—often tolerated and even incited by politicians. Such violence might resemble that which afflicted Spain in the early 1930s, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, or the American South during and after Reconstruction.
American democracy remains at risk. Although the United States probably won’t follow the path of Putin’s Russia or even Orban’s Hungary, enduring conflict between powerful authoritarian and democratic forces could bring debilitating—and violent—regime instability for years to come.
25. The ‘Civil War’ Psy-Op
Another view on the political violence and instability warnings.
And of course the irony here is this is also an excellent PSYOP piece doing what it accuses others of doing (and real geek-speakers know it is PSYOPand not psy-op).
Excerpts;
Granted, some on the Right speculate about the possibility or desirability of a “national divorce.” But they are in all cases proposing a peaceful way out of the present impasse—a parting that would be, if not necessarily amicable, at least orderly and bloodless. It’s one thing to argue that such is not possible; that’s a reasonable position, though one I think weaker than its alternative. It’s another to accuse advocates of national divorce of advocating or wishing for violence. That’s simply a lie.
So what’s going on? Two things, I think—one conscious, the other less so.
The conscious effort is what’s known in national security geek speak as a “psy-op,” a.k.a., a “psychological operation.” These are coordinated efforts to use propaganda, disinformation, truth and half-truth, to influence the target’s thinking in ways favorable to those behind the op. It’s not simply propaganda; that is, not Tokyo Rose merely telling American Marines they’re destined to lose. Seemingly fact-based lies are an essential element to a psy-op. Think Tokyo Rose telling Marines about to hit the beach that an American carrier has been sunk when it hasn’t.
Psy-ops can have many objectives, demoralization being the most common. But they can also be used to prep the ground for other operations, to create opportunities that otherwise might not present themselves.
The ‘Civil War’ Psy-Op › American Greatness
Psychological operations can have many objectives, demoralization being the most common. But they can also be used to create opportunities that otherwise might not present themselves.
Regime propaganda is so ubiquitous that even if, like me, you make no effort to seek it out and even take steps to avoid it, you can’t help but notice that our masters have fastened onto a new narrative: the coming “civil war.”
This was the crux of all the maudlin, dishonest January 6 retrospectives, of several “think pieces,” and at least three new books: America is facing a second civil war and it will be started by the Right.
Really? With what? In one of his more lucid moments, Joe Biden himself noted that the disaffected on the Right have no chance of taking on the United States government without F-15s and nukes. Like the blind squirrel finding a nut, the old man was onto something. The government’s overwhelming advantages in technology, firepower, manpower, money, transportation, supply networks, surveillance tools and much else would be so lopsided as to make the military buzzword “asymmetric” a grim joke. Think, instead, Bambi versus Godzilla.
To fight a civil war, you have to organize. But organizing is all but impossible for those who genuinely dream of taking on the state. The U.S. government is incompetent at many (most?) of its assigned responsibilities. But it’s quite good at keeping tabs on any hint of “right-wing” “insurrectionary” impulses. That task is made much easier by the fact that there is so little such activity to monitor—so little, in fact, that the feds increasingly feel compelled to incite it.
It would be hard to hide a mass movement of people gearing up to fight a civil war. Do you see one anywhere? I don’t. If there were one, don’t you think the feds would be all over it? Of course they would. And don’t you think regime media would be blaring about it 24/7? Again—of course. This is a classic case of a dog not barking. Silence is confirmation that nothing is happening.
Organization, like civil war, requires elites. Indeed civil wars, like all wars, are fought between two opposing factions of elites. Even backwoods insurgencies have leaders. Where are the elites poised to lead red America in a civil war? Who are they? There is Trump to be sure, and regime propaganda insists that he’s a modern-day Jeff Davis-Robert E. Lee hybrid. But this is the same Trump who spent January 6 tweeting. The real elites made sure that was his last day on that platform—and then impeached him for the second time. The real elites—Republican and Democrat alike—wish he would crawl into a hole and die. Trump may have tens of millions of committed followers. But a real civil war requires generals and colonels and captains and lieutenants and sergeants. Go ahead—name some. I’ll wait.
Granted, some on the Right speculate about the possibility or desirability of a “national divorce.” But they are in all cases proposing a peaceful way out of the present impasse—a parting that would be, if not necessarily amicable, at least orderly and bloodless. It’s one thing to argue that such is not possible; that’s a reasonable position, though one I think weaker than its alternative. It’s another to accuse advocates of national divorce of advocating or wishing for violence. That’s simply a lie.
So what’s going on? Two things, I think—one conscious, the other less so.
The conscious effort is what’s known in national security geek speak as a “psy-op,” a.k.a., a “psychological operation.” These are coordinated efforts to use propaganda, disinformation, truth and half-truth, to influence the target’s thinking in ways favorable to those behind the op. It’s not simply propaganda; that is, not Tokyo Rose merely telling American Marines they’re destined to lose. Seemingly fact-based lies are an essential element to a psy-op. Think Tokyo Rose telling Marines about to hit the beach that an American carrier has been sunk when it hasn’t.
Psy-ops can have many objectives, demoralization being the most common. But they can also be used to prep the ground for other operations, to create opportunities that otherwise might not present themselves.
That’s what’s going on now. The regime wishes to crush all actual and potential opposition. To do this, it needs to criminalize dissent. But doing that runs against the letter and spirit of the great charters of American liberty, and against the grain of the American character. To do what they want to do requires changing public opinion. Or, more specifically, it requires wearing down Americans’ inborn resistance to censorship and political persecution.
But as much as Americans hate those things, they also hate and fear even the prospect of terrorism, civil strife, and domestic conflict. Here we come to another dog resolutely not barking. There is no terrorism, civil strife, or domestic conflict—at least not coming from the Right. Yet the Department of Justice recently created a “domestic terrorism unit” to target “those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.”
Read carefully that unusually candid statement. They aren’t going after actual terrorists or terrorist acts. I suppose they would if they could find any. But there aren’t any to be found. So instead they’re targeting motives, animus, and ideologies—i.e., ideas and feelings, not actual acts.
The closest thing they have is January 6—an unplanned, unarmed, inchoate protest in which the only victims of violence were protesters. The regime is trying to brainwash everyone that January 6 was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. But it’s not working—three-quarters of Americans think it was “a protest that went too far”—so the regime needs a Plan B.
And that’s to sow disinformation of a coming “civil war.” Historians, philosophers, and survivors of civil wars all agree that they are the worst of all wars. Hence the desire to avoid them is understandably overwhelming, justifying (in many minds) almost any measures, including many that would be unthinkable absent the alleged threat. If the regime can stoke enough fear of an imminent civil war, suddenly all kinds of draconian measures that are presently out of the question will become possible.
For this reason, there is perhaps no more urgent rhetorical task right now than to demonstrate, repeatedly, the falseness and dangerousness of this narrative. In that respect (as in many others) Julie Kelly remains a national treasure.
Typically, the first rule of a psy-op is that you do not talk about the psy-op. And that remains the case with this one—to a point. But interestingly, regime voices have chosen this moment not merely to acknowledge the existence of psy-ops but to praise and recommend their use to further regime ends.
That may be a coincidence. Or it may emanate from an uncharacteristic sense of self-awareness on the part of the ruling class. Certainly some of them believe the nonsense that the Right is yearning and preparing for civil war. But just as certainly, many do not. The second rule of a psy-op is that those mounting it must be able to distinguish truth from falsehood. It’s possible that some who know they’re lying feel bad about it, at least on some subconscious level.
It’s also possible, even likely, that many elites intuit that if a civil war were to come, they would bear the lion’s share of the blame: for despoiling middle America for decades, and then for demonizing decent, normal people for daring to object to their despoilation. One way to cope, psychologically, with the guilty conscience that may arise from harming so many for so long is to contrive rationalizations for why the victims are evil and deserve it.
The truth is that for the last 50 years, and accelerating greatly over the last 10, America’s elites have relentlessly divided the country, strip-mined its institutions, leeched its wealth, and attacked a large portion of its people. Those actions, taken together, may be said to be almost a recipe for civil war. Perhaps the smarter elites have concluded that such a war is now inevitable and they want to get a jumpstart on assigning blame. A cynical person (not me!) might wonder if civil war is not exactly what the ruling class wants and is trying to provoke.
We might therefore analogize every fresh provocation to those feds who apparently entrapped some very imprudent men into trying to kidnap the governor of Michigan. They want you not just to talk about civil war, but to begin taking concrete actions that they can insist are preludes to war. Then they will have free rein to impose ever more censorship, surveillance, no-knock raids, computer and records seizures, asset confiscation, frivolous (but deadly serious) criminal charges, endless pretrial detention, and draconian sentences for misdemeanors and noncrimes.
So my advice is: don’t give them any excuse. Be careful what you say and do. You may complain: “But it’s unfair that a stray comment might be used to throw me in federal lockup while leftist allies can loot and torch whole cities and get off scot-free.”
Indeed it is. But this whole system, this whole regime, is unfair—to you. That’s the whole point of it.
26. There Will Be Blood
I participated in this podcast this week.
There Will Be Blood
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Retired Green Beret Col. David Maxwell discusses paramilitary options against Russian invaders in Ukraine, while former US-Iran nuclear deal negotiator Ernest Moniz offers perspective on new talks with hardliners. With Jeff Stein and Jeanne Meserve.
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http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/
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27. Power struggle among Biden appointees gets personal over race
Power struggle among Biden appointees gets personal over race
A clash over race and social status has roiled a panel of Biden administration appointees entrusted with overseeing military cemeteries and war monuments, after a former U.S. ambassador and retired Marine who is Black was replaced as the group’s chairman by a White retired general, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with nine people familiar with the matter.
John L. Estrada, the former ambassador, was elected chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission on Nov. 9, but commissioners disagreed over how long he would hold the post. Estrada and at least two other commissioners believed he would serve indefinitely through the Biden administration. But the majority of the group said that they had agreed that they would vote on the role again if the White House appointed another member to a last, vacant commissioner position, and that they expected that retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a high-profile CNN news analyst, would join their ranks within days.
Estrada, while serving as chairman, wrote in a Dec. 9 email to all of the panel’s 10 other commissioners that the issue was “divisive,” saying he had been asked by people outside the group whether his race was a factor. Estrada had just become the first person of color, immigrant and enlisted military veteran to become chairman. He came to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago at age 14, and rose to become the senior-most enlisted member of the Marine Corps through the height of the Iraq War.
“I have had questions presented to me on whether this has to do with race, me being enlisted or immigrant born,” Estrada wrote to the other commissioners. “I never answer, but it does make me wonder.”
The comment irritated other commissioners, according to emails obtained by The Post and interviews with Estrada and other officials familiar with the argument. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying the subject remains highly sensitive.
Hertling was elected by a majority of commissioners to replace Estrada on Dec. 15, after being appointed to the last open spot on Nov. 30, ABMC officials said. Estrada said in an interview that he is disappointed and frustrated. Other commissioners — including those supporting and opposing Estrada’s chairmanship — said they are dismayed by how personal the issue became.
“I can’t believe that this thing is happening at this day and time when we keep talking about equality and fairness,” Estrada told The Post. “These guys really pushed me to the limit. So yeah, it did make me wonder.”
The discord cuts against President Biden’s promise to bring order to government after the turmoil that often plagued his predecessor’s administration. It also highlights simmering tensions in the military about the social standing of enlisted personnel and the comparatively small number of officers who oversee them.
The White House declined to comment, beyond saying that the president had no role in deciding who would chair the commission.
The dispute threatens to undermine what is typically a staid, sacred and nonpartisan mission of remembering Americans who died in the line of duty, said David Urban, a former Army officer who chaired the commission under President Donald Trump. He called the infighting “truly sad.”
“This drama,” he said, “gives a black eye to the Biden administration, the ABMC and all of those involved.”
The group, mostly appointed by Biden on Sept. 29, have a diverse array of experiences and backgrounds. Estrada, 66, is one of several people of color on the board, and he campaigned for Biden. Hertling, 68, retired in 2013 as the commander of U.S. Army Europe and now works as an adjunct professor at Rollins College in Florida and at CNN, where he has criticized Trump for a lack of empathy and backed Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Other members include Medal of Honor recipient Florent Groberg, retired generals and Amy Looney Heffernan, the Gold Star wife of a Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan.
Although the commissioners are unpaid, they oversee an organization that has nearly 500 full-time employees and a budget of about $84 million. Formed after World War I, it is responsible for the care of hallowed grounds at the sites of dozens of major American battles overseas, including Normandy and Belleau Wood in France, Flanders Field in Belgium and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
The dispute, in part, appears to have originated with a miscommunication between the White House and Hertling.
After leaving the full panel empty for the first eight months of his presidency, Biden appointed 10 commissioners on Sept. 29, leaving the final position vacant and naming Hertling as the group’s secretary. While commissioners weigh in on policy matters, the secretary is a full-time job with a salary of $172,500. Hertling said in an interview that he was interested in being a part of the commission, but was “kind of surprised” to be appointed secretary instead of commissioner and did not know what the job entailed.
For a few weeks, Hertling received briefings and began to learn the job, he said. The retired general said he did not realize that there were ethical requirements for the position that prevented him from having other employment, until he was told by government lawyers that he would need to file a financial disclosure form.
“I said, ‘Oh, man,’” Hertling recalled. “The main driver of me wanting to be on this commission or doing anything for the government — and I specifically told people this — is I don’t want to be paid. I’ve had a great, four-decade-long career in the military, and I don’t want to be paid for any government positions. That’s where it became a sticking point.”
Those who retire from the military after at least 20 years of service receive a pension from the federal government, with annual compensation rising substantially based on rank and years of service.
Hertling told the commission’s full-time senior officials that he would need to resign as secretary but was interested in filling the last vacancy on the 11-member panel, he said.
When the commission met for the first time on Nov. 9, Hertling was still the secretary, meaning he could not be named chairman. Robert Dalessandro, a full-time career employee who serves as deputy secretary, told commissioners that the White House had made a mistake and that Hertling could be reappointed to join them on the board instead, several commissioners said.
Estrada said that before the first meeting, Dalessandro made calls to some commissioners asking them to support Hertling becoming chairman. Considering that Hertling was not yet a commissioner, Estrada said he found that “underhanded” and decided to pursue the chairmanship himself.
Dalessandro denied Estrada’s claim, saying in an interview that he notified commissioners that Hertling would be stepping down as secretary and was interested in returning as the commission’s eleventh voting member.
“I probably said there was an error,” Dalessandro said. “The bottom line was that the White House was not aware that he did not want to continue that employment” as secretary.
The White House declined to address several questions seeking clarity about the situation, including whether the administration believes that Estrada was treated unfairly or whether officials had made a mistake in appointing Hertling as the commission’s paid secretary.
Hertling resigned as secretary Nov. 9 and was reappointed as a commissioner Nov. 30. He will not be required to pay back the federal government for drawing a salary while having outside income, Dalessandro said. At the rate set, that amounts to about $10,000.
“He did the job,” Dalessandro said. “That’s the short answer.”
The first vote for chairman occurred in an executive session, and commissioners said that no minutes were kept to memorialize whether Estrada’s selection was meant to be permanent or temporary. Open government experts say it is advisable to take minutes to ensure there is clarity and a common understanding for what occurred in a meeting.
Darrell Dorgan, a current commissioner and enlisted Army veteran who served in Vietnam, said in the closed session that Estrada was making history in a couple of ways, and that if the board was going to swap chairmen it needed to do so carefully or the decision could attract media attention, two commissioners said. Dorgan declined to comment.
After Estrada raised questions via email about the motivation for his removal as chairman, a retired admiral on the board, Michael Smith, responded emotionally.
“I hoped we could discuss this calmly,” he wrote to the full panel. “But just because we might have different memories is no reason to ‘wonder’ or ‘question’ if I am racist, don’t value enlisted members or disrespect immigrants.”
Smith added that if Estrada did not withdraw his remarks, Smith “may not be able to serve on this Board” with him. In an interview, Smith said that he talked with Estrada on the phone later and that Estrada told him he was not accusing him of being racist.
“Part of it for me was I’m so honored to be in this position, and we’d only had our first meeting,” Smith said. “It’s an honor to take care of the fallen. Let’s focus on that.”
Another commissioner, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Daniel Woodward, wrote to the group that he “had no hidden agenda or ulterior motive” in seeking a second vote for chairman.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are derailing,” wrote Woodward, the emails show. “We have among us a Gold Star spouse, a Medal of Honor Recipient, and we are distinguished civilian and military leaders. We can and must be better than this.” He said in an email to The Post that he stands by his comments.
Hertling replaced Estrada on Dec. 15. The commission said it would not release the vote because it was held in executive session and is thus exempt from public scrutiny. But several commissioners said it was 6 to 3 in Hertling’s favor, with Estrada and Hertling not allowed to vote.
Among those voting for Estrada were Dorgan; Bud Pettigrew, a Marine veteran active in Democratic politics in Nebraska; and Raymond Kemp, a retired Navy SEAL who left the military as a fleet master chief, a senior enlisted position, four commissioners said. At least two people of color — Groberg and Gail Berry West, a retired lawyer and wife of former Army secretary Togo West — voted for Hertling, the commissioners added. Each declined to comment.
Commissioners who voted against Estrada said they were disappointed that he brought race into the discussion. One said, “He is trying to manufacture that he was chairman in a permanent capacity” and that media attention on the situation is making “a mountain out of a molehill.”
One of Estrada’s supporters on the board disagreed. He is a man of integrity and justified in his anger, that commissioner said.
Estrada, Hertling and other commissioners all said that they can continue to work together. But raw feelings remain.
Estrada said White men have led the commission for its entire 99-year history. Hertling, he said, could have “stepped up and shown leadership” and backed Estrada becoming chairman, especially because Estrada also served on the commission during the Obama administration and Hertling did not.
“Am I qualified for it?” Estrada said. “Damn right I’m qualified for it!”
Hertling said he was interested in the chairmanship in part because of his Army experiences at the commission’s cemeteries in Europe.
“If he still feels the same way, I can’t do anything about that other than to say that we’re going to build a team,” Hertling said. “I’ll try to understand him a little better if he says he still feels that way.”
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.
