Quotes of the Day:

“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them - the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”

~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

“You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views.” 

- Doctor Who (1977)

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we have been bamboozled, long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We are no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” 

- Carl Sagan, the Demon Haunted World.

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 7, 2023

2. Why a US Navy admiral says China won't pick up the military hotline

3. The West’s de-risking strategy towards China will fail, says Chris Miller

4. Soft Power Is Making a Hard Return

5. Carcinogens found at Montana nuclear missile sites as reports of hundreds of cancers surface

6. China hacked Japan’s sensitive defense networks, officials say

7. How Adm. Paparo will lead the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific

8. Recruiters skipped steps to screen out extremist enlistees, IG says

9. Ukraine has combat kayaks now

10. Air Force Combat Controllers might not attend dive school anymore

11. 'Sudden surge' in cyberattacks on government: report

12. Mini SEAL sub reaches initial operating capability

13. Marines fly food to remote areas of Philippines after deadly typhoon

14. Order After Empire: The Roots of Instability in the Middle East By Robert D. Kaplan

15. Putin’s Age of Chaos: The Dangers of Russian Disorder

16. AI ‘red teams’ race to find bias and harms in chatbots like ChatGPT

17. Japan's Military Is Getting Ready to Take on a Rising China

18. Analysis | Mongolia looks to rise out of China and Russia’s shadow

19. US-Mongolia aviation pact hit as a rare earths hedge

20. The Future of Algorithmic Warfare Part II: Wild Goose Chases

21. Ukraine is evacuating wounded soldiers by loading them onto large drones, in what is likely a battlefield first, report says

22. 'One of our greatest': U.S. Special Operations Command retired Gen. James Lindsay dies at 90

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 7, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-7-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least two sectors of the front on August 7.
• Russian forces and occupation administrators continue to seek to mitigate the impact of recent Ukrainian strikes on logistics nodes along key Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) connecting occupied Crimea with occupied Kherson Oblast.
• Russian opposition media outlet Verstka suggested that the Russian Investigative Committee and its head, Alexander Bastrykin, are directly involved in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and the forced placement of Ukrainian children into Russian military training programs.
• China's increasing misalignment with Russia on any settlement to end the war in Ukraine was reportedly evident at the talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on August 5-6.
• The Ukrainian delegation at the talks in Saudi Arabia presented a 10-point peace plan that reportedly included calls for global food security, nuclear safety, environmental security, humanitarian aid, and prisoner releases.
• Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian and Russian forces conducted a prisoner-of-war (POW) exchange on August 7.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 7 and made advances in certain areas.
• The Kremlin continues efforts to portray itself as adequately mobilizing the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) for a protracted war effort.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to use maternity capital benefits to coerce Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories to accept Russian citizenship and increase social control in occupied areas.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 7, 2023

Aug 7, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 7, 2023

Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Christina Harward, and Mason Clark

August 7, 2023, 5pm ET 

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 12:00pm ET on August 7. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 8 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least two sectors of the front on August 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in the Berdyansk (western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast area) and Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) directions.[1] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that fighting is ongoing south of Bakhmut and that eastern Ukraine has been the epicenter of hostilities in the past week.[2] Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged in an interview published on August 6 with Argentine news outlet La Nacion that the tempo of counteroffensive operations is slower than expected and stated that patience is necessary in order for Ukraine to win.[3] Zelensky stated that Ukrainian forces are in the offensive phase of operations and continue to hold the initiative.[4]

Russian forces and occupation administrators continue to seek to mitigate the impact of recent Ukrainian strikes on logistics nodes along key Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) connecting occupied Crimea with occupied Kherson Oblast. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk noted that Ukrainian strikes on the Chonhar and Henichesk bridges were intended to specifically target Russian plans and strategies and inhibit the ability of Russian forces to bring supplies and personnel to the front.[5] Humenyuk also emphasized that Russian forces must now route supplies and personnel through Armyansk, directly on the border between Kherson Oblast and Crimea and within 80km of the frontline.[6] Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo reported that his administration has temporarily changed the logistics and vehicle crossing routes between occupied Kherson and Crimea due to damage to the Chonhar Bridge, including the suspension of bus traffic between Simferopol, Crimea and Henichesk, Kherson Oblast.[7] Russian milbloggers notably did not comment on the aftermath of the strikes on August 7, further supporting ISW’s previous assessment that Russian officials may have directed Russian correspondents to not offer commentary on Ukrainian strikes on Russian logistics nodes in Crimea to avoid generating panic within the information space.[8]

Russian opposition media outlet Verstka suggested that the Russian Investigative Committee and its head, Alexander Bastrykin, are directly involved in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and the forced placement of Ukrainian children into Russian military training programs.[9] Verstka reported that the Russian Investigative Committee “took patronage” over Ukrainian children living in children‘s homes throughout Russia, and sent its employees to 10 such homes with toys, clothes, and school supplies in order to coerce the children to enter the Russian cadet corps. Verstka reported that Bastrykin personally visited Ukrainian children in Russia and told them that Russian victory depend on the children and that the Russian Investigative Committee is there to support them. Verstka reported that the Investigative Committee previously advertised the cadet corps to Ukrainian children from Donbas and stated that 78 Ukrainian children entered educational institutions, including the cadet corps and academies affiliated with the Investigative Committee, between February 2022 and March 2023. Verstka reported that Bastrykin ordered the cadet corps in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd to prepare to receive Ukrainian children from occupied Donbas as early as February 25, 2022. Verstka highlighted statements from Ukrainian children who said they felt compelled to participate in the Russian cadet corps due to the educational opportunity. The coercion of Ukrainian children, who are legally unable to consent to their deportations and participation in such military-patriotic re-education programs, is likely part of an ongoing Russian campaign to eradicate the Ukrainian national identity and militarize youth who have been forcibly deported to Russia.

China's increasing misalignment with Russia on any settlement to end the war in Ukraine was reportedly evident at the talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on August 5-6. The Financial Times reported that the Chinese representatives at the meeting were “constructive” and “keen to show that [China] is not Russia.”[10] The Financial Times quoted one European diplomat present at the talks as saying that the “mere presence of China shows Russia is more and more isolated.”[11] The Chinese delegation reportedly indicated its willingness to attend the next meeting of a similar format that will likely also exclude Russia.[12] A Russian insider source alleged that Russia has rejected China's 12-point peace plan for the war in Ukraine from February 2023 (which the Chinese delegation re-introduced during the talks in Saudi Arabia) and that some Chinese elites are secretly expressing their dissatisfaction with the actions of the Russian leadership regarding a peaceful settlement of the war in Ukraine.[13] These reports from the talks in Saudi Arabia and insider allegations, if true, align with ISW’s previous assessments that China is not fully aligned with Russia on the issue of Ukraine and that Russia and China’s relationship is not a “no limits partnership” as the Kremlin desires.[14]

The Ukrainian delegation at the talks in Saudi Arabia presented a 10-point peace plan that reportedly included calls for global food security, nuclear safety, environmental security, humanitarian aid, and prisoner releases.[15] Ukrainian Presidential Administration Chief of Staff reported that all of the members of BRICS besides Russia – Brazil, India, China, and South Africa – attended the talks.[16] Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova predictably responded to the Ukrainian peace plan, calling it a “meaningless ultimatum, which is aimed at protracting hostilities.”[17] Zakharova thereby repeated a longstanding Russian information operation that absurdly claims that Russia, unlike Ukraine, “has always been and will remain open to a diplomatic solution” to the war in Ukraine.[18]

Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian and Russian forces conducted a prisoner-of-war (POW) exchange on August 7. Ukrainian officials reported that 22 Ukrainian soldiers returned to Ukraine and did not state how many Russian POWs returned to Russia.[19] Official Russian sources have not reported on the POW exchange and Russian milbloggers have notably not commented on it either. Russian milbloggers have often criticized the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) when POW exchanges are not carried out on a one-to-one ratio between Ukrainian and Russian personnel.[20]

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least two sectors of the front on August 7.
• Russian forces and occupation administrators continue to seek to mitigate the impact of recent Ukrainian strikes on logistics nodes along key Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) connecting occupied Crimea with occupied Kherson Oblast.
• Russian opposition media outlet Verstka suggested that the Russian Investigative Committee and its head, Alexander Bastrykin, are directly involved in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and the forced placement of Ukrainian children into Russian military training programs.
• China's increasing misalignment with Russia on any settlement to end the war in Ukraine was reportedly evident at the talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on August 5-6.
• The Ukrainian delegation at the talks in Saudi Arabia presented a 10-point peace plan that reportedly included calls for global food security, nuclear safety, environmental security, humanitarian aid, and prisoner releases.
• Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian and Russian forces conducted a prisoner-of-war (POW) exchange on August 7.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 7 and made advances in certain areas.
• The Kremlin continues efforts to portray itself as adequately mobilizing the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) for a protracted war effort.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to use maternity capital benefits to coerce Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories to accept Russian citizenship and increase social control in occupied areas.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted limited ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove line on August 7 and did not make any confirmed or claimed advances. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk) and Stelmakhivka (15km northwest of Svatove) and that elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army (Western Military District) repelled a Ukrainian attack near Novoselivske (16km northwest of Svatove).[21]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 7 and advanced. Geolocated footage published on August 5 shows that Russian forces captured Novoselivske.[22] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces advanced into Ukrainian defenses near Vilshana (15km northeast of Kupyansk) and that Russian forces have advanced 11 kilometers along the front and three kilometers deep in the Kupyansk direction over the past three days.[23] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces captured Ukrainian positions near Karmazynivka (13km southwest of Svatove).[24] Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Synkivka, east of Petropavlivka (7km east of Kupyansk), north of Ivanivka (30km northwest of Svatove), south of Novoselivske, near Novoyehorivka (16km southwest of Svatove), Serhiivka (12km southwest of Svatove), and near Nadiya (13km southwest of Svatove).[25]

The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful limited ground attacks in the Kreminna area on August 7. The Russian MoD claimed that elements of the Central Grouping of Forces repelled Ukrainian attacks in the Serebryanske forest area (10km south of Kreminna) and near Torske (14km west of Kreminna).[26]

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks around Kreminna on August 7 but did not make any confirmed or claimed advances. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful attacks in the Serebryanske forest area and near Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna).[27]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut but did not advance on August 7. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited ground attacks in the area between Yahidne (2km north of Bakhmut) and Berkhivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut), where fighting is ongoing.[28] Multiple Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian infantry unsuccessfully attacked Russian forces from the direction of the Berkhivka reservoir on the northern flank of Bakhmut.[29] Multiple Russian sources also claimed that small Ukrainian infantry groups unsuccessfully attacked Russian forces near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[30] Ukrainian Defense Deputy Hanna Malyar reported that fighting is ongoing near Klishchiivka, Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut), and Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[31]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut and did not advance on August 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked Ukrainian forces near Andriivka, Kurdyumivka, Dyliivka (15km southwest of Bakhmut), and Druzhba (18km southwest of Bakhmut).[32] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted a counterattack near Kurdyumivka but did not specify an outcome.[33]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line but did not advance on August 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Avdiivka, Krasnohorivka (directly west of Donetsk City), and Marinka (on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[34] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces conducted assault operations in Marinka and northwest of Avdiivka.[35] Malyar reported that Russian forces in the Avdiivka and Marinka directions primarily aim to capture Krasnohorivka, Marinka, and the surrounding settlements.[36]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Ukrainian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border on August 7 and did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations in the Berdyansk (western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast) direction.[37] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian attack on Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka), and several Russian milbloggers added that Ukrainian troops attacked Urozhaine with the forces of up to two infantry platoons with tank and armored vehicle support.[38] Some Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian troops crossed the Mokryi Yaly River just west of Urozhaine, but that Russian forces ultimately repelled the attack and pushed Ukrainian troops back to their original positions.[39]

Russian forces conducted a limited and unsuccessful ground attack along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border on August 7. Malyar and a Russian milblogger reported that Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful attack to regain lost positions near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[40]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 7 and did not make any claimed or confirmed gains. Malyar noted that Ukrainian forces continued successful offensive operations in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) direction and are consolidating positions near Mala Tokmachka (10km southeast of Orikhiv) and Robotyne (15km south of Orikhiv).[41] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian troops launched a limited infantry attack with armored vehicles and tank support towards Robotyne, but that Russian forces repelled the attack.[42] Russian news outlet RIA Novosti claimed that Russian forces continue to repel Ukrainian attacks towards Robotyne and prevent Ukrainian forces from advancing past the outskirts of the settlement.[43] One milblogger noted that Ukrainian activity on this sector of the front is relatively low and claimed that a small sabotage and reconnaissance group attempted an unsuccessful sortie towards Pyatykhatky (25km southwest of Orikhiv).[44]

Russian forces conducted counterattacks and reportedly regained some lost positions in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Robotyne.[45] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces counterattacked and successfully pushed Ukrainian forces back by 1.5km from the outskirts of Robotyne.[46] A Russian milblogger reported that elements of the Russian airborne (VDV) forces are redeploying from Kherson Oblast to the Robotyne area to defend against continuous Ukrainian attacks.[47] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov also claimed that elements of the Chechen “Vostok-Akhmat” battalion are also fighting in the Orikhiv area.[48]

Russian and Ukrainian forces continued routine artillery fire in Kherson Oblast on August 7. Ukrainian sources reported that Russian troops struck settlements along the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River, including Kherson City.[49] A Russian milblogger warned that Ukrainian forces have intensified their use of drone reconnaissance and counterbattery fire in Kherson Oblast.[50] Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that the GUR “Shaman” battalion continues operations on the Russian-occupied east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast but did not specify where these operations are occurring.[51]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

The Kremlin continues efforts to portray itself as adequately mobilizing the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) for a protracted war effort. Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Rostec Head Sergey Chemezov, who claimed that Rostec has increased production to accommodate the Russian state defense order but emphasized that Rostec still needs to fill critical personnel shortages.[52] Chemezov claimed that Rostec produced 90 percent of all Russian goods used in Ukraine and employs 592,000 personnel but urgently needs to fill 23,000 employment vacancies. Chemezov claimed that Rostec reduced its output of civilian goods from 45.5 to 44.5 percent to accommodate the Russian state defense order and that Rostec’s overall worker output has increased by 2.5 percent and wages by 17.2 percent. Putin stated that Rostec has met the state defense order so far but needs to further increase output, and instructed Chemezov to increase the production of modern weapons including T-90 tanks, Lancet drones, and aviation systems.

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian occupation authorities continue to use maternity capital benefits to coerce Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories to accept Russian citizenship and increase social control in occupied areas. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov claimed that the Zaporizhia Oblast occupation administration has issued over 8,257 certificates for maternity capital in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast since January 1, 2023.[53] Occupation authorities may be pushing or coercing participation in social welfare programs in order to encourage population growth in occupied areas and to encourage families to register with Russian-controlled administrative organs, as ISW has previously reported.[54]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus).

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

An alleged Wagner Group commander reportedly denied Wagner’s presence in Belarus, despite a plethora of visual evidence confirming that Wagner forces are in Belarus. A Wagner-affiliated source claimed on August 7 that the alleged Wagner intelligence head (callsign “Bonya”) claimed that Wagner forces are not in Belarus.[55] The source also claimed that several Wagner sources announced that Wagner forces in Belarus unexpectedly went on leave to Russia while others went on a “business trip” to unspecified African countries.[56] Another Wagner-affiliated source refuted this statement and claimed that there are 7,000 Wagner personnel in Belarus, 12,000 Wagner personnel are on leave, and an additional 1,500 Wagner personnel deployed to Africa.[57] ISW has observed and reported on satellite imagery and other visual evidence of Wagner personnel in Belarus.[58]

Russian forces, likely including Wagner fighters, are continuing to train Belarusian forces in Belarus. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted images of the Belarusian 6th Separate Guards Mechanized Brigade conducting command post exercises at the Gozhsky Training Ground in Grodno, Belarus.[59] The Belarusian MoD claimed that trainers used “the experience of the special military operation” during the military exercises, suggesting that Russian or Wagner forces continue to train Belarusian forces.[60]

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. Why a US Navy admiral says China won't pick up the military hotline

So in my recent visit to Korea I attended an international conference and met a post-doc from China. She was asking me about strategic competition and China-US relations. She wanted to know how to reduce tensions between the PRC and US. I asked her why the PLA will not communicate with the US military. I said that communication is important to prevent misunderstanding and miscalculation. I told her our military sought to engage and communicate but the PLA refused. She seemed very taken aback by that. She had no idea the PLA refused to talk to the US military. I followed up with questions and she seemed very sincere in that she did not know the PLA refused to communicate. Of course that is the result of PRC/CCP internal domestic propaganda. 

Why a US Navy admiral says China won't pick up the military hotline - Breaking Defense

“This is a very dangerous trend in terms of our ability as major powers to truly work out our issues," Rear Adm. Michael Studeman said of the lack of communications.

breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · August 7, 2023

Xi Jinping, China’s president, adjusts his earpiece during a session on the opening day of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Over the last few months top Pentagon officials have sounded the alarm that their counterparts in China are ignoring their calls. But a senior US Navy official said he suspects that behind the diplomatic cold shoulder is Beijing’s belief that the US sees the hotline as a “safety net,” and that not answering could curb US actions in the region in the first place.

“They… believe that if you have a hotline, that we’re more prone to risky behavior because that’s our kind of safety net,” Rear Adm. Mike Studeman said during an event at the Hudson Institute today. If a crisis emerges, “then they [the US] want an out. They want the ability to negotiate their way out of it. Just don’t give them a safety net, and then maybe they’ll be more conservative with their forces and their behavior.”

Studeman warned that “whatever the logic is, [this] leads to very little official communication now.”

“This is a very dangerous trend in terms of our ability as major powers to truly work out our issues,” he said.

Studeman, a career intelligence officer, is formerly the commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence and will retire in September. He has previously warned that the American public is “naïve” about the threat China poses to the United States.

Pentagon officials for months now have regularly spoken out against Beijing’s unwillingness to have dialogue with either civilian or uniformed counterparts. Adm. John Aquilino, the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, said in July he has maintained a standing request for more than two years to speak with his Chinese counterparts, invitations that have gone ignored or declined.

“For responsible defense leaders, the right time to talk is anytime. The right time to talk is every time. And the right time to talk is now. Dialogue is not a reward. It is a necessity,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the Shangri-La Dialogue in June. “You know, I am deeply concerned that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] has been unwilling to engage more seriously on better mechanisms for crisis management between our two militaries. But I hope that will change, and soon.”

During congressional hearings last month, some Republicans criticized the White House’s handling of the State Department’s communications with the Chinese government, insisting that the US is coming into the talks from a position of weakness due to an over eagerness to get China to the diplomatic table.

“Respectfully, I would just say we have pursued these diplomatic engagements with China from a position of confidence and strength based on the last two and a half years of work in the administration,” said Daniel Krittenbrink, assistant secretary for east Asian and pacific affairs, during a July 20 hearing before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. “From that position, we’re quite confident in engaging with the Chinese.”

During the same hearing, Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., repeatedly asked Krittenbrink when was the last time a senior Chinese government official asked to meet with a “high level” American. Following several back-and-forth exchanges with the congressman, Krittenbrink effectively declined to answer the question directly.

“We continue to be asking for all these high level meetings with high level officials in China,” Gimenez said. “We continue to do that… Doesn’t it seem to you like that might be looked at around the world as a sign of weakness that we’re the junior partner?” Krittenbrink said he disagreed, but the congressman cut him off before the assistant secretary could elaborate on the answer.

Last week there appeared to be a slight break in the logjam, when the State Department reported a senior official, Ely Ratner, had spoken with his Chinese counterpart and discussed “US-PRC defense relations, as well as regional security issues.”

“The assistant secretary also emphasized the department’s ongoing commitment to maintaining open lines of military-to-military communication between the United States and the PRC,” the State Department said at the time.

breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · August 7, 2023

3. The West’s de-risking strategy towards China will fail, says Chris Miller

Not that Chris Miller.

Excerpts:

Western leaders will inevitably respond with new restrictions, making it even more difficult to isolate economic relations from deteriorating political ties. The West’s strategy of talking while tightening controls is not unreasonable, but it would be naive to put much hope in it. Power struggles—whether diplomatic or economic—are only resolved when one side gives in. China believes it still has plenty of cards to play as the impact of confrontation rips through the trade relationship. Containment won’t come on the cheap.

The West’s de-risking strategy towards China will fail, says Chris Miller​

The economic historian reckons Beijing has many cards left to play in the conflict

The Economist

AMID HIGH tensions with China and the steep cost of confrontation, Western leaders have adopted a buzzword to describe their strategy: “de-risking”. This involves continuing to roll out tech and investment restrictions on China, but coupling them with high-level summitry and calls to keep trade flowing. The aim is to limit the risk of escalation in both the political and economic spheres. It is unlikely to work.

The West shifted away from the tougher “decoupling” rhetoric and towards de-risking and “economic security” for two reasons. First, hawks in Japan and America needed softer language to keep on board wobbly European allies, who call China a “systemic rival” but prefer that other countries pay the price of restraining it. De-risking sounds safe and low-cost. Second, President Joe Biden’s administration hopes that the pressure imposed by America’s years-long effort to contain China has made Beijing more pliable. With China’s economy wobbling, Mr Biden hopes it will lose some of its appetite for economic conflict.

There are three reasons why a low-cost de-risking will fail. First, China’s government believes it can overcome the West’s tech restrictions. Second, foreign multinationals are already taking costly steps to shift production away from China, making acceptance of the status quo worse for China’s economy than Western rhetoric implies. And third, Beijing is pursuing its own agenda of reducing its reliance on Western manufacturing technology, while continuing its effort to make the West more dependent on Chinese products, from low-end chips to electric vehicles. This will drive a new round of tech and trade tension.

Start with China’s confidence that it can overcome the restrictions. It is true that China now faces an organised coalition aiming to contain its technological and military advances. On the tech side, Beijing has been locked out of advanced semiconductor technology and venture-capital flows into China have collapsed. On the military side, Japan is doubling defence spending as a share of GDP, and buying missiles that can strike deep into China; AUKUS—a pact that will see America and Britain supply Australia with nuclear-propelled submarines—is binding those three countries more closely together; and the Philippines and Papua New Guinea are providing America with new military access.

Now that this containment coalition is broadly in place, Western leaders want talks to stabilise the economic relationship and limit China’s retaliation. In April, America’s treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, bluntly explained in a high-profile speech that she believes China’s “long-run growth rate seems likely to decline”, making this an opportune time for talks. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, called on the West to “de-risk rather than de-couple”, while Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, emphasised the importance of “a positive trade and investment relationship, whilst avoiding dependencies in critical supply chains”. Even some hawkish former Trump administration officials speak of refashioning the economic relationship with China with “a scalpel, not a sledgehammer”.

The West wants to wall off security concerns related to high-tech goods from the broader economic relationship, such as trade in toys and textiles. China’s leaders, however, realise that de-risking is a strategy to slow China’s technological advances while minimising the cost of trade disruptions to the West. China’s Global Times newspaper has explained that de-risking is just “decoupling in disguise”. China believes it can respond by out-innovating the West.

The second problem with de-risking is that Western firms are not listening to politicians’ rhetoric—instead they are taking costly steps to restructure their relationship with China. Foreign investment into China has slumped, partly because of the country’s slowing economy and opaque regulation, but also because companies from HP to Apple are shifting tech and electronics production to South-East Asia, India and Mexico.

Companies aren’t trying to be political; they are simply responding to new regulatory reality. Many firms have concluded that they must operate separate tech stacks: one for China, the other for the rest of the world. Some are hiving off Chinese manufacturing operations from their rest-of-world supply chains. Corporate decisions are driving a broader bifurcation than de-risking implies.

The third reason a narrow de-risking won’t work is that it ignores China’s own strategy: decoupling with Chinese characteristics. China’s decades-long effort to cut its reliance on Western manufactured goods continues. Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, has noted that China’s trade surplus in manufactured goods keeps surging higher.

China is successfully applying this strategy to green energy, where it simultaneously hopes to cut reliance on oil imports and make the rest of the world dependent on Chinese solar-panel and battery supply chains. The surge in Chinese electric-vehicle exports to Europe is the latest stage in this effort.

In the tech sector, meanwhile, China is subsidising construction of massive production capacity in low-end chips, which it will sell at discount prices to threaten Western chipmakers’ market share. China hopes these chips will be integrated into a wide array of manufactured goods, creating new dependencies on Chinese components that counteract China’s own reliance on imported high-end tech.

Western leaders will inevitably respond with new restrictions, making it even more difficult to isolate economic relations from deteriorating political ties. The West’s strategy of talking while tightening controls is not unreasonable, but it would be naive to put much hope in it. Power struggles—whether diplomatic or economic—are only resolved when one side gives in. China believes it still has plenty of cards to play as the impact of confrontation rips through the trade relationship. Containment won’t come on the cheap.■

Chris Miller is a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a director at Greenmantle, a consultancy. He is the author of “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology” (2022).

The Economist

4. Soft Power Is Making a Hard Return

Excerpts:

Soft power may be pricey, but world leaders continue to pour money into a range of cultural offerings because they can’t be certain what will resonate. Last month, Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched the Bastille Day parade in Paris, including a flyby of three French-made jets in the Indian Air Force. Modi’s visit concluded with an announcement that India would buy 26 more Dassault Rafale jets and three additional Scorpène-class submarines. This year, during a state visit to Beijing with plenty of cultural baggage, Macron sealed commercial deals for aircraft, cosmetics, financial products, and pork. Soon thereafter, a French television station called it a “jackpot” when the news broke that China had agreed to extend the stay of a pair of giant pandas at the ZooParc de Beauval in France’s Loire Valley. The zoo’s director had been among the entourage that had recently accompanied Macron to Beijing, which has a monopoly on pandas around the world.

Sports, especially hosting global events, can be an expensive and risky way to project soft power, and in some cases, countries have been accused of “sportswashing.” None of this is new. Adolf Hitler wanted the 1936 Berlin Olympics to showcase his Nazi regime; it showcased instead the superlative skills of Jesse Owens, the African American athlete who walked away with four gold medals. More recently, pro-Tibetan protesters stormed the field during an Olympic torch-lighting ceremony ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Last year, Qatar faced widespread criticism when it banned soccer fans from wearing rainbow gear into games because visible support for LGBTQ rights is prohibited in the socially conservative kingdom.

Currently, the thorniest debates center on the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes and how to handle it when they face Ukrainian competitors, a headache that host countries probably had not envisioned when they bid for these events years ago. Some star Ukrainian athletes are refusing to shake hands with competitors from Russia or Belarus, which Moscow has used as a staging ground for its war in Ukraine. Some tennis fans, who may have thought they were witnessing poor sportsmanship, booed at the end of matches at Wimbledon and the French Open. Ukrainian fencer Olga Kharlan was disqualified after winning a world championship match in Milan for refusing to shake hands with her Russian opponent. She later posted a video on Instagram saying that what happened “raises a lot of questions.”

One question that hasn’t been answered is whether the fellas are making a real impact. Their social media messages have been so pointed, at least in part, because they echo the agitprop communication style developed by the Soviets to agitate nonbelievers and motivate the like-minded. But the fellas didn’t get their most cherished wish at NATO’s Vilnius summit, which ended without a major advance in Ukraine’s bid to join the security alliance.

The term “soft power” evokes more than wishful thinking, although that was certainly part of its appeal after the barbarism of the 20th century. Alongside other forms of persuasion, it can help a country cut trade deals, win friends, or join new clubs. Or not.

Soft Power Is Making a Hard Return

Leaders are reaching for fellas and films as much as bullets and blockades. 

AUGUST 6, 2023, 7:00 AM

By J. Alex Tarquinio, a journalist reporting from the United Nations in New York.

Foreign Policy · by J. Alex Tarquinio · August 6, 2023

Days before the recent NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, the host country’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, who has been outspoken against Russia’s war in Ukraine, welcomed an unusual side event. He tweeted that he was “[p]roud to open the NAFO summit.” That wasn’t a typo.

Days before the recent NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, the host country’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, who has been outspoken against Russia’s war in Ukraine, welcomed an unusual side event. He tweeted that he was “[p]roud to open the NAFO summit.” That wasn’t a typo.

The North Atlantic Fella Organization is an internet meme and a social media movement that bases its name on NATO. They call themselves “fellas,” in their view a gender-neutral term, and identify their accounts with cartoon avatars of Shiba Inu dogs.

It may sound like fun and games, but it’s no joke. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this decentralized group of activists came together to raise money for Ukraine and demolish Russian narratives on social media. They even have their own version of NATO’s Article 5 for mutual assistance, with the hashtag #NAFOArticle5, a cry for other fellas to pile in on social media posts. The fellas took a big step toward recognition last month by staging the NAFO summit in Vilnius. Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas congratulated the group on its first summit and tweeted, “Behind every Fella is a real person who believes in #Ukraine’s victory.”

The world has changed markedly in the more than three decades since political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. popularized the term “soft power” in the pages of Foreign Policy. When that article was published in 1990, the dust had barely settled on the ruins of the Berlin Wall, most American homes didn’t have a personal computer, and the first internet meme of a dancing baby was still a few years in the future. The notion of government ministers attending a wartime summit and taking time to praise smack-talking cartoon dogs would have struck many political observers as far-fetched.

​​Although the modern vernacular of soft and hard power implies opposition, since the earliest civilizations it has been more of a continuum. In ancient times, Hellenization spread throughout the known world in the wake of Alexander the Great’s army. Proselytizing priests followed in the footsteps of Spain’s conquistadors. Imperial China presented a cultural wall against the steppe as powerful as any fortifications. The information age has modified the nature of soft power but not human nature. As Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine grinds on and governments in West Africa fall to coups, it’s evident that no surfeit of wishful thinking will reduce the appeal of hard power for some.

Today, many world leaders still reach for sports, language, food, music, and movies to advance their interests.

Today, many world leaders still reach for sports, language, food, music, and movies to advance their interests. These efforts aren’t inherently more persuasive than bullets or blockades, but it’s a much more pleasant and humane way of seeking to influence world events. Occasionally, soft power seems to work like a charm. The United Kingdom is widely viewed as having benefited from the recent royal pageantry, despite it coinciding with some messy political infighting in London’s Parliament. India certainly benefits to some degree from the widespread popularity of yoga and Bollywood, but the country’s status as a rising Asian nation and counterweight to China explains much of its appeal in the West.

Increasingly, some political representatives are taking the extra, and risky, step of engaging directly with global popular culture. China’s ambassador to the United States, for example, recently tweeted, “An American friend asked me: what kind of flower will grow out of China?” A torrent of responses cast doubt on this anecdote and questioned whether the ambassador had any notion of how Americans actually speak.

Advancing soft power through pop culture may get more difficult as the internet evolves. The NAFO fellas, for example, generally organize themselves on Twitter, which has been a popular platform for social movements from the Arab Spring to Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. But Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter as “X” raises the question of whether the fellas will still be able to “tweet” and if anyone will notice if they do.

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In a similar vein, Hollywood, which arguably did more in the 20th century to promote a beguiling image of the United States than the Marshall Plan or the Apollo program, is struggling with challenges at home and abroad. Labor strife casts doubts on new productions, artificial intelligence is encroaching, and competition from overseas is increasing. Content from Nigeria, Mexico, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and, of course, Bollywood is clamoring for the global attention span. Filmmaking can also backfire: Sony Pictures Entertainment suffered a major hack in 2014 that included threats to terrorize cinemas showing The Interview, a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader.

North Korea may be a touchy Hermit Kingdom. But South Korea’s K-pop, its brand of popular music, furnishes Seoul’s leaders with a deep well of soft power to draw from. In September 2021, when the United Nations opened the first fully in-person General Assembly in New York after lifting COVID-era restrictions, South Korea’s then-president, Moon Jae-in, invited the group BTS to sing and dance (and speak) their way through the U.N. headquarters as his special presidential envoys for future generations and culture. At the time, South Korea was riding high, having recently been catapulted into the top 10 largest economies in the world. Now, it has just been elected to the U.N. Security Council.

Russian-born ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov leaps with his arms spread wide along with other dancers as he performs with the American Ballet Theatre company in 1978.

Soviet-born ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov performs with the American Ballet Theatre in New York on April 17, 1978. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images

Sports and pop culture don’t have a monopoly on soft power. A little more than a decade ago, Russia was viewed favorably by nearly half of Americans. (Russia’s favorables have since dropped to single digits in the United States.) But with the possible exception of the dissident punk-rock band Pussy Riot, Russian pop culture was almost entirely unknown, then and now. Americans are more familiar with the cannons of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov came to define classical dance; ironically, these Soviet defectors made ballet cool for a generation of Americans enrolled in classes during the Cold War. Only much later would some balletomanes understand that Nureyev self-identified as a Tatar and Baryshnikov as a Latvian.

Some government cultural campaigns are deliberately nostalgic. In 2020, Spain’s food ministry launched a campaign with the slogan El país más rico del mundo—which translates as either the “richest” or “tastiest” country in the world—plastering the motto on billboards in train stations and at bus stops. Centuries have passed since Spain had the world’s silver at its fingertips, but Spanish food and chefs are ubiquitous.

Language, and the pleasure of wordplay, is one of the most enduring aspects of a culture. Romance languages, a Roman legacy, flourished in medieval Europe. Many of the top-ranked countries in a recent survey of soft power subsidize global language schools, including Spain’s Cervantes Institute, Germany’s Goethe-Institut, China’s Confucius Institute, Italy’s Italian Cultural Institute, and the United Kingdom’s British Council. The guidepost has been France’s Alliance Française, which was founded independently by a circle of preeminent late 19th-century Parisians that included Jules Verne, Louis Pasteur, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat, developer of the Suez Canal, and leader of the plan to bring the Statue of Liberty to New York. French President Emmanuel Macron feted the 140th anniversary of the organization’s founding on July 21, remarking at a celebration at the Élysée presidential palace that the hundreds of schools scattered around the world, mostly underwritten by student fees, are “absolutely key for the diffusion of French culture but also of our values.”

Brigitte Macron, France's first lady, leans down to look closely over a short glass wall at panda cub Yuan Meng. A woman stands next to her admiring the new addition to the zoo.

Brigitte Macron, France’s first lady, looks at panda cub Yuan Meng, born at the Beauval zoo, during its naming ceremony in Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, France, on Dec. 4, 2017. Thibault Camus/AFP via Getty Images

Soft power may be pricey, but world leaders continue to pour money into a range of cultural offerings because they can’t be certain what will resonate. Last month, Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched the Bastille Day parade in Paris, including a flyby of three French-made jets in the Indian Air Force. Modi’s visit concluded with an announcement that India would buy 26 more Dassault Rafale jets and three additional Scorpène-class submarines. This year, during a state visit to Beijing with plenty of cultural baggage, Macron sealed commercial deals for aircraft, cosmetics, financial products, and pork. Soon thereafter, a French television station called it a “jackpot” when the news broke that China had agreed to extend the stay of a pair of giant pandas at the ZooParc de Beauval in France’s Loire Valley. The zoo’s director had been among the entourage that had recently accompanied Macron to Beijing, which has a monopoly on pandas around the world.

Sports, especially hosting global events, can be an expensive and risky way to project soft power, and in some cases, countries have been accused of “sportswashing.” None of this is new. Adolf Hitler wanted the 1936 Berlin Olympics to showcase his Nazi regime; it showcased instead the superlative skills of Jesse Owens, the African American athlete who walked away with four gold medals. More recently, pro-Tibetan protesters stormed the field during an Olympic torch-lighting ceremony ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Last year, Qatar faced widespread criticism when it banned soccer fans from wearing rainbow gear into games because visible support for LGBTQ rights is prohibited in the socially conservative kingdom.

Currently, the thorniest debates center on the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes and how to handle it when they face Ukrainian competitors, a headache that host countries probably had not envisioned when they bid for these events years ago. Some star Ukrainian athletes are refusing to shake hands with competitors from Russia or Belarus, which Moscow has used as a staging ground for its war in Ukraine. Some tennis fans, who may have thought they were witnessing poor sportsmanship, booed at the end of matches at Wimbledon and the French Open. Ukrainian fencer Olga Kharlan was disqualified after winning a world championship match in Milan for refusing to shake hands with her Russian opponent. She later posted a video on Instagram saying that what happened “raises a lot of questions.”

One question that hasn’t been answered is whether the fellas are making a real impact. Their social media messages have been so pointed, at least in part, because they echo the agitprop communication style developed by the Soviets to agitate nonbelievers and motivate the like-minded. But the fellas didn’t get their most cherished wish at NATO’s Vilnius summit, which ended without a major advance in Ukraine’s bid to join the security alliance.

The term “soft power” evokes more than wishful thinking, although that was certainly part of its appeal after the barbarism of the 20th century. Alongside other forms of persuasion, it can help a country cut trade deals, win friends, or join new clubs. Or not.

Foreign Policy · by J. Alex Tarquinio · August 6, 2023

5. Carcinogens found at Montana nuclear missile sites as reports of hundreds of cancers surface

Excerpts:

The Minuteman III silos and underground control centers were built more than 60 years ago. Much of the electronics and infrastructure is decades old. Missileers have raised health concerns multiple times over the years about ventilation, water quality and potential toxins they cannot avoid as they spend 24 to 48 hours on duty underground.

The Air Force discovery of PCBs occurred as part of site visits by its bioenvironmental team from June 22 to June 29 in the Air Force’s ongoing larger investigation into the number of cancers reported among the missile community. During the site visits a health assessment team collected water, soil, air and surface samples from each of the missile launch facilities.

At Malmstrom, of the 300 surface swipe samples, 21 detected PCBs. Of those, 19 were below levels set by the EPA requiring mitigation and two were above. No PCBs were detected in any of the 30 air samples. The Air Force is still waiting for test results from F.E. Warren and Minot for surface and air samples, and for all bases for the water and soil samples.

Carcinogens found at Montana nuclear missile sites as reports of hundreds of cancers surface

AP · August 7, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Air Force has detected unsafe levels of a likely carcinogen at underground launch control centers at a Montana nuclear missile base where a striking number of men and women have reported cancer diagnoses.

A new cleanup effort has been ordered.

The discovery “is the first from an extensive sampling of active U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile bases to address specific cancer concerns raised by missile community members,” Air Force Global Strike Command said in a release Monday. In those samples, two launch facilities at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana showed PCB levels higher than the thresholds recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency.

PCBs are oily or waxy substances that have been identified as a likely carcinogen by the EPA. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a blood cancer that uses the body’s infection-fighting lymph system to spread.

In response, Gen. Thomas Bussiere, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, has directed “immediate measures to begin the cleanup process for the affected facilities and mitigate exposure by our airmen and Guardians to potentially hazardous conditions.”

After a military briefing was obtained by The Associated Press in January showing that at least nine current or former missileers at Malmstrom were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare blood cancer, the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine launched a study to look at cancers among the entire missile community checking for the possibility of clusters of the disease.

And there could be hundreds more cancers of all types, based on new data from a grassroots group of former missile launch officers and their surviving family members.

According to the Torchlight Initiative, at least 268 troops who served at nuclear missile sites, or their surviving family members, have self-reported being diagnosed with cancer, blood diseases or other illnesses over the past several decades.

At least 217 of those reported cases are cancers, at least 33 of them non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

What’s notable about those reported numbers is that the missileer community is very small. Only a few hundred airmen serve as missileers at each of the country’s three silo-launched Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile bases any given year. There have been only about 21,000 missileers in total since the Minuteman operations began in the early 1960s, according to the Torchlight Initiative.

For some context, in the U.S. general population there are about 403 new cancer cases reported per 100,000 people each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma affects an estimated 19 of every 100,000 people annually, according to the American Cancer Society.

Minutemen III silo fields are based at Malmstrom, F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.

Missileers are male and female military officers who serve in underground launch control centers where they are responsible for monitoring, and if needed, launching fields of silo-based nuclear weapons. Two missileers spend sometimes days at a time on watch in underground bunkers, ready to turn the key and fire Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles if ordered to do so by the president.

The Minuteman III silos and underground control centers were built more than 60 years ago. Much of the electronics and infrastructure is decades old. Missileers have raised health concerns multiple times over the years about ventilation, water quality and potential toxins they cannot avoid as they spend 24 to 48 hours on duty underground.

The Air Force discovery of PCBs occurred as part of site visits by its bioenvironmental team from June 22 to June 29 in the Air Force’s ongoing larger investigation into the number of cancers reported among the missile community. During the site visits a health assessment team collected water, soil, air and surface samples from each of the missile launch facilities.

At Malmstrom, of the 300 surface swipe samples, 21 detected PCBs. Of those, 19 were below levels set by the EPA requiring mitigation and two were above. No PCBs were detected in any of the 30 air samples. The Air Force is still waiting for test results from F.E. Warren and Minot for surface and air samples, and for all bases for the water and soil samples.

AP · August 7, 2023

6. China hacked Japan’s sensitive defense networks, officials say

Excerpts:

China-based hackers recently compromised the emails of the U.S. commerce secretary, the U.S. ambassador to China and other senior diplomats — even amid an effort by the Biden administration to thaw frosty relations with Beijing.

“Over the years we have been concerned about its espionage program,” said a senior U.S. official. “But China is [also] developing cyberattack capabilities that could be used to disrupt critical services in the U.S. and key Asian allies and shape decision-making in a crisis or conflict.”

In the face of this aggression, Japan has stepped up, moving beyond the traditional “shield and spear” arrangement in which Tokyo focuses on the country’s self-defense, while Washington provides capabilities that support regional security, including the nuclear umbrella that protects Japan and South Korea. Japan is developing a counterstrike capability that can reach targets in mainland China. It is buying U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles. And it is permitting the U.S. Marine Corps to place a new advanced regiment in remote islands southwest of Okinawa, a location that, along with the northernmost islands of the Philippines, allows the U.S. military proximity to Taiwan should a conflict with China erupt.

“Japan and the United States are currently facing the most challenging and complex security environment in recent history,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at a news conference with President Biden in Washington in January. He noted Japan’s new national security strategy boosting its defense budget and capabilities. “This new policy,” he said, “will be beneficial for the deterrence capabilities and response capabilities of the alliance as well.”

China hacked Japan’s sensitive defense networks, officials say

Tokyo has strengthened its defenses after a major cybersecurity breach, but gaps remain that could slow information-sharing with the Pentagon

By Ellen Nakashima

Updated August 8, 2023 at 2:36 a.m. EDT|Published August 7, 2023 at 3:26 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · August 7, 2023

In the fall of 2020, the National Security Agency made an alarming discovery: Chinese military hackers had compromised classified defense networks of the United States’ most important strategic ally in East Asia. Cyberspies from the People’s Liberation Army had wormed their way into Japan’s most sensitive computer systems.

The hackers had deep, persistent access and appeared to be after anything they could get their hands on — plans, capabilities, assessments of military shortcomings, according to three former senior U.S. officials, who were among a dozen current and former U.S. and Japanese officials interviewed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

“It was bad — shockingly bad,” recalled one former U.S. military official, who was briefed on the event, which has not been previously reported.

Tokyo has taken steps to strengthen its networks. But they are still deemed not sufficiently secure from Beijing’s prying eyes, which, officials say, could impede greater intelligence-sharing between the Pentagon and Japan’s Defense Ministry.

The 2020 penetration was so disturbing that Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, and Matthew Pottinger, who was White House deputy national security adviser at the time, raced to Tokyo. They briefed the defense minister, who was so concerned that he arranged for them to alert the prime minister himself.

Beijing, they told the Japanese officials, had breached Tokyo’s defense networks, making it one of the most damaging hacks in that country’s modern history.

The Japanese were taken aback but indicated they would look into it. Nakasone and Pottinger flew back “thinking they had really made a point,” said one former senior defense official briefed on the matter.

Back in Washington, then-President Donald Trump was busy contesting Joe Biden’s election victory, and administration officials were preparing for a transition. Senior national security officials briefed incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan during the handoff, but the incoming Biden administration faced a swirl of issues — including how to deal with a major Russian breach of U.S. agency networks discovered during the Trump administration — and some U.S. officials got the sense the Japanese just hoped the issue would fade away.

By early 2021, the Biden administration had settled in, and cybersecurity and defense officials realized the problem had festered. The Chinese were still in Tokyo’s networks.

Since then, under American scrutiny, the Japanese have announced they are ramping up network security, boosting the cybersecurity budget tenfold over the next five years and increasing their military cybersecurity force fourfold to 4,000 people.

The stakes are high.

Beijing, bent on projecting power across the western Pacific — an area it controversially claims as part of a historic maritime dominion, has increased confrontation in the region. It fired ballistic missiles into Japan’s exclusive economic zone last August after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy that China claims. It has embarked on a major nuclear weapons buildup. And it has engaged in dangerous air and naval maneuvers with U.S., Canadian and Australian ships and jets in the Pacific.

China, which already boasts the world’s largest legion of state-sponsored hackers, is expanding its cyber capabilities. Since mid-2021, the U.S. government and Western cybersecurity firms have documented increasing Chinese penetration of critical infrastructure in the United States, Guam and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific. The targets include communication, transportation and utility systems, Microsoft said in May.

China-based hackers recently compromised the emails of the U.S. commerce secretary, the U.S. ambassador to China and other senior diplomats — even amid an effort by the Biden administration to thaw frosty relations with Beijing.

“Over the years we have been concerned about its espionage program,” said a senior U.S. official. “But China is [also] developing cyberattack capabilities that could be used to disrupt critical services in the U.S. and key Asian allies and shape decision-making in a crisis or conflict.”

In the face of this aggression, Japan has stepped up, moving beyond the traditional “shield and spear” arrangement in which Tokyo focuses on the country’s self-defense, while Washington provides capabilities that support regional security, including the nuclear umbrella that protects Japan and South Korea. Japan is developing a counterstrike capability that can reach targets in mainland China. It is buying U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles. And it is permitting the U.S. Marine Corps to place a new advanced regiment in remote islands southwest of Okinawa, a location that, along with the northernmost islands of the Philippines, allows the U.S. military proximity to Taiwan should a conflict with China erupt.

“Japan and the United States are currently facing the most challenging and complex security environment in recent history,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at a news conference with President Biden in Washington in January. He noted Japan’s new national security strategy boosting its defense budget and capabilities. “This new policy,” he said, “will be beneficial for the deterrence capabilities and response capabilities of the alliance as well.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has indicated to Tokyo that enhanced data-sharing to enable advanced military operations could be slowed if Japan’s networks are not better secured.

“We see tremendous investment and effort from the Japanese in this area,” said a senior U.S. defense official. But work remains to be done. “The department feels strongly about the importance of cybersecurity to our ability to conduct combined military operations, which are at the core of the U.S.-Japan alliance.”

Acknowledging the problem

As the Biden administration took office, it faced a maelstrom of cybersecurity crises.

The United States was debating how to respond to the massive Russian “SolarWinds” hack, which was uncovered during the Trump administration and had sowed malicious code and enabled cyberspies to steal information from several major U.S. government agencies.

Soon after, a Chinese compromise of Microsoft Exchange servers around the world — including at least 30,000 entities in the United States alone — threatened to cripple small and midsize businesses and state and local government agencies. Then, in the spring of 2021, a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline by a Russian criminal group shut down one of the nation’s largest fuel pipelines for six days.

In the midst of this, Cyber Command offered Tokyo a team of cyber-sleuths to help assess the scope of the breach and begin to cleanse its networks of Chinese malware. The command’s “hunt forward” teams for several years had been helping partners in countries including Ukraine, North Macedonia and Lithuania dig for foreign intrusions.

But the Japanese were wary. “They were uncomfortable having another country’s military on their networks,” said the former military official.

The two sides came up with a compromise approach: The Japanese would use domestic commercial firms to assess vulnerabilities, and a joint NSA/Cyber Command team would review the results and provide guidance on how to seal gaps.

Meanwhile, White House national security staff and Tokyo’s National Security Council set up regular technical exchanges and video conference calls to keep on top of the issue. Defense officials in both capitals did the same.

Upon taking office, the Biden administration created a new cybersecurity position, and placed a senior NSA official in the job. Anne Neuberger had been appointed as a deputy national security adviser for cyber and knew about the Chinese breach coming in.

But for much of the first year she was occupied with SolarWinds, Chinese compromises and Russian ransomware, and a presidential order to secure the federal software supply chain.

Then in fall 2021, Washington uncovered fresh information that reinforced the severity of China’s breach of Tokyo’s defense systems and that Japan was not making much progress in sealing it.

A warning from Washington

That November, despite Japan being in pandemic lockdown, Neuberger and a handful of other U.S. officials flew to Tokyo and met with top military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, according to several people with knowledge of the trip.

To protect sensitive sources and methods, Neuberger could not explicitly tell the Japanese how U.S. spy agencies knew about the Chinese compromise. She tried in an oblique way to assure Tokyo that the Americans were not in their networks, but suspicions lingered. After all, the Japanese, like other allies, knew that the United States spies on partners.

In 2015, the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks revealed that the NSA had spied on 35 targets in Japan, including cabinet members and the corporation Mitsubishi. Biden, then vice president, called then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to apologize for the trouble caused.

In any case, Washington and Tokyo had no history of working together to address a sensitive intelligence threat.

“We were asking for an unprecedented level of access to their systems,” said one person familiar with the matter. “We were asking them to take their trust in us to a deeper level than we had before. And naturally any sovereign country would be cautious about that.”

In deliberate, measured fashion, Neuberger laid out what the United States knew. She made clear that the White House felt the problem needed to be fixed.

“We’re not here to wag fingers,” said a senior administration official, describing the approach. “We’re here to share hard-won lessons.”

Neuberger found a partner in Japan’s newly appointed national security adviser, Takeo Akiba, who zeroed in on an entrenched bureaucracy. They were helped by the fact that Kishida was keen on advancing a campaign launched by Abe to bolster Japan’s defense capabilities. Tokyo set to work on a new cyber strategy, which sought to beef up spending and personnel and align cybersecurity standards with U.S. and international benchmarks.

“The first step is acknowledging that you have a problem, and then second, acknowledging the seriousness of the problem,” said the senior U.S. defense official.

Japan launched a Cyber Command, which monitors networks “24/7,” said a Japanese defense official. It has introduced a program to continuously analyze risks throughout the military’s computer systems. It is enhancing cybersecurity training and is planning to spend $7 billion over five years on cybersecurity.

“The government of Japan intends to strengthen its cybersecurity response capabilities to be equal to or surpass the level of leading Western countries,” Noriyuki Shikata, Kishida’s cabinet press secretary, said in an interview. That goal — along with “active cyberdefense,” or a form of offense-as-defense hacking — is enshrined in Japan’s new national security strategy.

On Tuesday, after this story was published, Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said the government is responding to cyber attacks “through a variety of initiatives,” although he declined to describe any incidents in detail.

“We have not confirmed that any confidential information held by the Ministry of Defense has been leaked,” Hamada said in a news conference. “There have been no incidents of cyberattacks affecting the execution of the SDF’s missions.”

‘Spy heaven’

For years before China audaciously hacked its networks, Japan was seen as a leaky vessel. During the Cold War, Soviet operatives used good old-fashioned tactics, capitalizing on people’s weaknesses for food, drink, money and gambling to cultivate Japanese journalists, politicians and intelligence officers.

“They bragged to themselves that Japan was ‘spy heaven,’” said Richard Samuels, a political scientist at MIT, whose history of Japan’s intelligence community was published last year.

After the Cold War ended, Japanese officials finally started waking up to the importance of tightening up access to intelligence. For one thing, the Americans were taking notice. A year before 9/11, a report produced by a Pentagon-funded think tank noted that despite the importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance, intelligence-sharing with Tokyo was far less than that with NATO partners.

“Both within and beyond Asia, Japan faces more diverse threats and more complex international responsibilities, which call for intelligence that provides a better understanding of its national security needs,” stated the report, written by a bipartisan study group including foreign policy experts Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye.

It urged Japanese leaders to build public and political support for a new law to protect classified information.

“The Americans weren’t happy with how porous the Japanese intelligence community was,” said Samuels. “They did what you would expect, which was to share less. At a time when Japan needed more and better intelligence from its powerful ally, it wasn’t getting everything it needed, and it was told it’s because your intelligence community leaks. If you tighten it up, we can have a fuller and more robust exchange.”

One of the most receptive to the message was Abe, scion of a prominent political family and twice prime minister. Abe, more than any modern political leader of Japan, paved the way for security reform in Tokyo.

During his second tenure as prime minister in the early to mid-2010s, he sparked changes. The parliament passed a state secrets law that set stiff penalties for mishandling documents and for leaking information. Abe set up a National Security Council, modeled in part after the U.S. version, to advise the prime minister.

Antiwar and civil-liberties activists protested the reforms, claiming they were infringing on privacy rights and voicing concerns about an expanding national security state. But by 2013, when the law was passed, the geopolitical landscape had shifted. The public had come to see that decades of a nominal commitment to self-defense had only emboldened a rising Beijing.

China had aggressively responded to Japan’s nationalization of the Senkaku Islands, flooding the waters off the islands with Coast Guard vessels and maritime militia. In the South China Sea, it was turning remote atolls into military outposts seemingly overnight. President Xi Jinping had come to power, accelerating a vast military modernization. Meanwhile, North Korea continued provocative nuclear tests.

Abe was assassinated in July 2022, but his legacy lives on. Over the last decade, attitudes toward China have hardened: Today, a majority of Japanese view the Chinese government unfavorably, while support for the U.S. alliance is at an all-time high.

“Enhancing bilateral cooperation between Japan and the U.S. strengthens the cyber defenses of both nations,” Nakasone said in a statement to The Post. The United States is focused on helping Japan improve its cyber capabilities, he said, noting that the goal is for both nations to be able to ensure “a safe and secure Indo-Pacific region.”

The future fight

In December 2022, Chris Inglis, then the White House national cyber director, flew to Japan to speak with counterparts. Part of his mission was to share what the U.S. government was doing to better secure its own systems as he was in the midst of drafting a national cybersecurity strategy. A pillar of that strategy, which was issued in March, was strengthening partner capacities.

“My discussions were intended to be quite positive about what we could do together, how we could frame cyber strategies and national strategies that would be complementary,” Inglis said in an interview. “But we have to make sure that each of us makes the appropriate investments in cybersecurity foundations.”

Administration officials admit that U.S. networks are far from 100 percent secure. Over the last two decades, cases abound of Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean hacks. Sensitive commercial and classified material has been stolen, the NSA’s own top-secret hacking tools have been released into the wild, Hollywood studios have been coerced and embarrassed, and the United States’ democracy has been assaulted.

The “attack surface,” as cybersecurity experts call it, is vast.

Over the last 20 years, each successive U.S. administration has sought to do more to enhance American cybersecurity. New organizations have been created at the White House, Department of Homeland Security and Defense Department to deal with the issue. More money has been allocated. Authorities have been expanded. Efforts with the private sector, which owns and runs the majority of critical infrastructure, have been enhanced.

“We can’t hold the Japanese to a standard that we ourselves can’t possibly meet,” said the defense official. “At the end of the day, we’re going to share information with them,” the person added. “We just want to do our best to keep our adversaries out.”

The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · August 7, 2023

7. How Adm. Paparo will lead the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific

Excerpts:

Asked what his fleet would do should Beijing invade Taiwan, Paparo said that was a decision for his civilian bosses in the White House and Congress.

But when asked if the Navy was ready for such a fight if ordered to do so, he answered in the affirmative.

“I’ll never admit to being ready enough,” Paparo added.

How Adm. Paparo will lead the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific

navytimes.com · by Geoff Ziezulewicz · August 7, 2023

Adm. Samuel Paparo has served his country from a variety of locales during his nearly 40 years in uniform, from the cockpit of a fighter jet to boots on the ground in the most contentious corner of Afghanistan.

But the commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet — and the White House’s pick to be the next head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command — arrived on civilian America’s radar in March during an interview aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz in the West Pacific for the “60 Minutes” news program.

Paparo played the role of the steely, squared-away military leader. He answered questions diplomatically, but with conviction. He noted how China’s military mustered just 37 vessels in the early 2000s and that Beijing now has a fleet of 350 ships.

Asked what his fleet would do should Beijing invade Taiwan, Paparo said that was a decision for his civilian bosses in the White House and Congress.

But when asked if the Navy was ready for such a fight if ordered to do so, he answered in the affirmative.

“I’ll never admit to being ready enough,” Paparo added.

The Pentagon has in recent years made getting ready for such a fight its main priority, and President Joe Biden’s nomination of Paparo to lead the potential battlefront against China further reinforces that priority.

Earlier this summer, news emerged that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had sent the admiral’s name to the White House to become the next chief of naval operations.

But instead, the Biden administration has nominated Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the current vice chief of naval operations, to become the Navy’s next top officer.

In a war with China, the Navy would not only be the tip of the spear, but most of the spearhead in a largely maritime conflict.

As PACFLEET commander, Paparo has wielded that spear since 2021.

He still needs to be confirmed by Congress, a normally rote procedure that has been frozen for months by Sen. Tommy Tuberville. The Alabama Republican imposed a blockade of military confirmations in February to protest the Pentagon’s new policy providing leave time for troops to travel to receive abortion services if they’re stationed in states where it’s now illegal.

RELATED

Former SecDefs blast senator over ‘irresponsible’ nomination holds

The seven former military leaders said holding up confirmations hurts military operations.

Keeping Paparo in the West Pacific also continues a longstanding tradition of having an admiral in charge of INDOPACOM or its predecessor, U.S. Pacific Command, dating back to the joint command’s creation in 1947.

And the path to INDOPACOM command has run through the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

In addition to his experience in the Pacific, Paparo has shown creativity and innovation while leading PACFLEET, according to Bryan Clark, a retired submariner and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank.

Navy Secretary Carlo Del Toro, center, and U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Samuel Paparo, left, greet retired Capt. E. Royce Williams before a ceremony awarding Williams the Navy Cross in January. (MC2 Logan Keown/Navy)

“During the last couple years, he has been leading impressive concept development and experimentation efforts in the Pacific to develop new approaches for deterring China,” Clark said in an email.

Many of those efforts are sensitive or classified, Clark added, but he pointed to an Integrated Battle Problem in May that took place under Paparo’s watch and involved integrating sea and air drones.

“Paparo’s innovative approaches to operational problems can now also be applied to (Indo-Pacific) strategy,” said Clark, who recently authored a report on how the Defense Department can further deter Chinese aggression. “Paparo’s ideas for how to deploy and evolve naval forces to influence Chinese military plans could be applied more broadly across all the INDOPACOM components.”

Paparo also has “a great reputation as a strong leader,” according to Bradley Martin, a retired surface warfare officer who spent two-thirds of his 30-year career at sea.

“I’ve never heard bad things about his leadership style, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it,” he added.

Adm. Samuel Paparo visits seabees with Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 4 in December in Diego Garcia. (Navy)

The path to INDOPACOM

Paparo is the son of an enlisted Marine and the grandson of an enlisted sailor who fought in World War II, according to his command biography.

A naval aviator by trade, the Pennsylvania native received his commission in 1987 after graduating from Villanova University in Philadelphia.

RELATED

Opinion

Pacific Fleet goes to Washington: How Adm. Paparo will refine the Navy

The nomination of Adm. Paparo is fortuitous in setting the stage for the return of an aggressive maritime strategy in response to China and Russia.

By Steve Wills

A TOPGUN graduate, Paparo has logged more than 6,000 hours flying the F-14 Tomcat, the F-15 Eagle and the F/A-18 Super Hornet and has 1,100 carrier landings under his belt.

While he has spent recent years focused on planning for America’s next potential war, he spent time on the ground in Afghanistan, America’s longest war and the military’s focus for much of this century.

As a fighter pilot, he took out a surface-to-air missile site in Kandahar during the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

Then-Cmdr. Paparo went on to command a provincial reconstruction team comprising more than 100 troops in Nuristan province, a remote and restive area near the Pakistani border, in 2007.

Then-Cmdr. Sam Paparo commanded the Nuristan Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan in 2007. Nuristan was one of the most remote and contentious provinces in the country. (Army)

Nuristan was also the site of the Battle of COP Keating in 2009, when a small number of U.S. soldiers repelled an attack by 300 Taliban.

Paparo popped up briefly in “The Outpost,” a book about COP Keating written by CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

Paparo was helping lead counterinsurgency efforts in the province, and Tapper’s book shows the future admiral playing diplomat between warring local factions.

The book portrays Paparo as having bought-in on the “hearts and minds” focus of counterinsurgency and wary of any actions that risked alienating the locals they were trying to win over.

At one point, according to the book, Paparo found himself stuck in the middle of two warring tribes.

He was trying to calm the feuding clans and achieve stability to a level where UN workers could come in and begin development projects, the same mission that so many U.S. officers in Afghanistan wrestled with for 20 years.

He commanded U.S. 5th Fleet in the Middle East from August 2020 to May 2021, then assumed command of U.S. Pacific Fleet.

As commander of PACFLEET, he has overseen the Navy’s controversial Red Hill fuel storage facility spill in Hawaii, which polluted the tap water of military members and civilians alike and forced a shutdown of the vital fuel hub.

During a press conference announcing the findings of a Navy investigation into the fuel spill, Paparo recommended that the Navy review its operations at 48 other fuel storage facilities worldwide and added that the sea service needs “to get real with ourselves” and be “honest about our deficiencies.”

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is received by Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet as she arrives at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, Aug. 26, 2021. (Evelyn Hockstien/AFP via Getty Images)

“We cannot assume Red Hill represents an outlier, and similar problems may exist at other locations,” Paparo wrote in the investigation.

One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys in a Red Hill lawsuit, Kristina Baehr, told Hawaii Public Radio this summer that Paparo shares blame for the water contamination and the Navy’s botched response to the crisis, which initially involved telling military families that tainted tap water was safe to drink.

“That happened on his watch,” Baehr told Hawaii Public Radio. “He is personally responsible for the Navy’s failure to warn 93,000 people that their water was toxic.”

About Geoff Ziezulewicz

Geoff is a senior staff reporter for Military Times, focusing on the Navy. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was most recently a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at geoffz@militarytimes.com.

8. Recruiters skipped steps to screen out extremist enlistees, IG says

Troubling.

Excerpts:

The findings are “deeply concerning” and underscore the need for the military to modernize its recruiting and screening processes, said Joseph Shelzi, an analyst at The Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy.

“Military training is highly valued by extremist groups and criminal gangs, both of which make deliberate efforts to infiltrate their members into the military,” Shelzi said. “The spread of online disinformation and extremist content is a societal problem and the military cannot ignore or insulate itself from these kinds of challenges.”

Austin updated DoD policy regarding extremist behavior following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when myths about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election drove supporters of former President Donald Trump to try to stop Congress from certifying the results. About 14% of the rioters charged in the attack were veterans or service members, according to George Washington University.

The DoD created a standard screening questionnaire in 2021 to solicit specific information from recruits about their current or former affiliations with extremist ideologies. The service branches updated their screening that year to include questions about applicants’ membership in racially biased or other extremist groups and their participation in violent activities. Applicants can seek waivers for previous affiliations with extremist groups and for tattoos of gang or extremist symbols, but they’re ineligible for service if they’re denied waivers or if they have criminal histories associated with extremist activity or gangs.

Recruiters skipped steps to screen out extremist enlistees, IG says

militarytimes.com · by Nikki Wentling · August 7, 2023

This story was updated at 5:30pm EDT.

Military recruiters sometimes skipped steps to screen out enlistees affiliated with criminal gangs or political extremist groups, increasing the likelihood of disciplinary problems and security risks within the armed services, according to an audit released Monday by a Pentagon watchdog.

The department’s Office of Inspector General investigated the military’s recruiting process to determine whether the service branches were applying policies ordered by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in April 2021 to stamp out extremism in the ranks. The watchdog found that recruiters completed the screening steps inconsistently, sometimes skipping the required interviews, questionnaires, tattoo reviews, fingerprint checks and background investigations. The screening shortfalls may mean recruits with extremist or gang associations were allowed into active duty, the report states.

“If the military services are not completing required applicant screening steps, recruiters may not identify all applications with extremist or criminal gang associations during the accessions screening process, increasing the potential for security risks and disruptions to good order and discipline within the joint force,” Inspector General Robert Storch said in a statement.

The inspector general’s office called on the Pentagon to issue a new memo to recruiters, reiterating the importance of screening for applicants’ ties to extremist groups and gangs. The watchdog also recommended that each service branch conduct its own regular review of the screening process. Each branch agreed to establish periodic reviews by early 2024. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the possible effects of the recruiters’ lapses.

The screening shortfalls may mean recruits with extremist or gang associations were allowed into active duty.

— Department of Defense Inspector General Report

The findings are “deeply concerning” and underscore the need for the military to modernize its recruiting and screening processes, said Joseph Shelzi, an analyst at The Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy.

“Military training is highly valued by extremist groups and criminal gangs, both of which make deliberate efforts to infiltrate their members into the military,” Shelzi said. “The spread of online disinformation and extremist content is a societal problem and the military cannot ignore or insulate itself from these kinds of challenges.”

Austin updated DoD policy regarding extremist behavior following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when myths about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election drove supporters of former President Donald Trump to try to stop Congress from certifying the results. About 14% of the rioters charged in the attack were veterans or service members, according to George Washington University.

The DoD created a standard screening questionnaire in 2021 to solicit specific information from recruits about their current or former affiliations with extremist ideologies. The service branches updated their screening that year to include questions about applicants’ membership in racially biased or other extremist groups and their participation in violent activities. Applicants can seek waivers for previous affiliations with extremist groups and for tattoos of gang or extremist symbols, but they’re ineligible for service if they’re denied waivers or if they have criminal histories associated with extremist activity or gangs.

While recruiters generally followed the new policies and screened applicants for extremist and criminal gang behavior, they were sometimes lax with the process, the inspector general’s office found.

The office reviewed a statistical sample of recruits from 2021 and 2022 and found that 53 of them, or 41%, weren’t asked according to policy about their ties to extremist groups or gangs. Recruiters didn’t administer screening forms in 40% of cases when they should have, and they didn’t complete required tattoo screenings nor fingerprint checks for 9% of applicants. In one case, a recruiter didn’t initiate a background investigation into an applicant who should’ve been subject to one.

While Navy recruiters were found to have completed the screening process consistently, inspectors found instances in which Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force recruiters didn’t follow the new policies, the audit states.

Army and Air Force recruiters are required to ask all applicants if they’ve ever had associations with extremist or hate organizations or gangs, and check their responses as “yes” or “no.” Air Force recruiters didn’t check either box in 22% of applications the inspector general’s office reviewed, and Army recruiters didn’t check either box in 45% of applications.

As a result of the audit, Jeffrey Angers, deputy assistant secretary of the Army, sent a memo July 10 to U.S. Army Recruiting Command, reminding recruiters to ask applicants about their affiliations with extremist groups or gangs.

“Extremist and hate organization ideologies and affiliations are antithetical to Army core values,” Angers wrote in the memo. “It is important to follow all the required steps for screening applicants for extremist, hate and criminal gang associations during the accessions process... Applicants associated with these beliefs and/or organizations are neither permitted nor suited to access in the United States Army.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

About Nikki Wentling

Nikki Wentling covers disinformation and extremism for Military Times. She's reported on veterans and military communities for eight years and has also covered technology, politics, health care and crime. Her work has earned multiple honors from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, the Arkansas Associated Press Managing Editors and others.

9. Ukraine has combat kayaks now

This is not your father's Klepper.

Excerpts:

According to specs shared by Ukraine, the Poloz-M16 uses an electric motor that is “almost silent,” although it can be propelled the old-fashioned way with oars. The kayak can also be steered remotely, if both occupants are otherwise unable to do it by hand.

The biggest tool on the combat kayak is its main weapon, a On the nose of the kayak is a UAG-40 40mm automatic grenade launcher, which Ukraine claims can fire at a distance of more than 2 kilometers. Theoretically it’s a great tool for river-born ambushes of Russian forces, but not for open naval combat.

Ukraine has combat kayaks now

The latest Ukrainian weapons system puts an automatic grenade launcher on a two-person kayak for river attacks.

BY NICHOLAS SLAYTON | PUBLISHED AUG 6, 2023 3:28 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · August 6, 2023

The war in Ukraine has seen Kyiv field all kinds of unconventional and makeshift weapons, from crowdsourced maritime drones to anti-UAV rigs made up of World War I-era Maxim machine guns. Now Ukraine has war kayaks. Yes, war kayaks.

More accurately, a “Poloz-M16 combat kayak,” developed for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The two-seater boat is currently being tested by Ukrainian troops; it has not yet been deployed into combat in the rivers, streams, lakes and other bodies of water in the country.

According to specs shared by Ukraine, the Poloz-M16 uses an electric motor that is “almost silent,” although it can be propelled the old-fashioned way with oars. The kayak can also be steered remotely, if both occupants are otherwise unable to do it by hand.

The biggest tool on the combat kayak is its main weapon, a On the nose of the kayak is a UAG-40 40mm automatic grenade launcher, which Ukraine claims can fire at a distance of more than 2 kilometers. Theoretically it’s a great tool for river-born ambushes of Russian forces, but not for open naval combat.

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Video shared by Ukraine shows the Poloz-M16 “in action.” That action mainly consists of two fighters paddling their kayak through a lilypad-laden body of water, eventually gliding forward while manning their grenade launcher, aiming with it but not firing. The whole video is, as has become common for footage from the war, set to rock music. The short clip did not demonstrate any live weapons testing or obstacles.

Tests of the "Poloz-M16" combat kayak.

-The installed 40-mm automatic grenade launcher can operate at a distance of more than 2 kilometers.

-Carrying capacity 480 kilograms.

-The engine is almost silent, and the kayak itself is easy to hide

It will be an ideal tool for sabotage pic.twitter.com/rETmjYlk2j

— Ukraine News (@Ukrainene) August 4, 2023

Ukraine is also developing single-seat and three-seat versions of the Poloz-M16. The two-seat version can carry a load of 480 kilograms. Ukraine’s armed forces also noted that the kayak has equipment for “long trips” including a tent, machete and even stoves for cooking.

This maritime technical is the latest in unconventional weapons Ukraine has used to repel the Russian invasion. When the war started in 2022, Ukraine was heavily outgunned in both artillery and armor. Volunteers and the armed forces used weapons such as technicals mounted with machine guns and rocket launchers. Battle buggies, anti-drone systems using century-old Maxims and other makeshift equipment have become a key part of Ukraine’s fighting force, even as modern artillery, rockets and tanks from Western nations have streamed in.

Maritime weapons have been extremely helpful in Ukraine’s efforts against Russia. Kyiv has repeatedly utilized drone boats to target Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, damaging multiple ships. The small kayak-like vessels have a low visual presence and enough speed to get past some naval defenses. Video in late May appeared to show a pair of Ukrainian drone boats causing an explosion on a Russian intelligence ship.

As it is still in the testing phase, it’s unclear how Ukraine plans to use its combat kayak fleet in the war.

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taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · August 6, 2023

10. Air Force Combat Controllers might not attend dive school anymore

This will not sit well with the retired CCT community. While training officials review this they will need to examine the impact on operational requirements. The fundamental question is does the operational force need CCT with combat dive capabilities? That is what should drive this decision.

Excerpts:

“We are continuing analysis for requirements and training of Combat Dive as a special qualification,” Bauernfeind wrote in the memo.

Though Bauernfeind is the AFSOC commander, it would be up to AETC officials to officially change the training pipeline, a process that normally requires a consensus of senior training officials from around the career field.

It is not clear if that consensus exists.

The removal of dive school from the Combat Control pipeline would be the latest in a series of major changes to the training pipeline of the Air Force’s special operations troops in the last decade, as CCT officials adapted to the demands of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the mid-2010s, Air Force special operators have revised every element of its pipeline, from physical fitness requirements to the length and nature of initial selection courses.

...

But dive training has been a staple of Air Force special operations training for at least four decades, connecting generations of CCT, Pararescue, and other specialized troops that the Air Force now refers to as Special Warfare Airmen.

Air Force Combat Controllers might not attend dive school anymore

Trainees will continue in the current pipeline, which includes dive training, while training officials review the impact of that change.

BY MATT WHITE | PUBLISHED AUG 7, 2023 7:06 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Matt White · August 7, 2023

Air Force Combat Control trainees may soon be skipping a major portion of their traditional training pipeline, forgoing the chance to earn a Combat Diver “scuba bubble.”

Air Force Special Operations Commander Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind requested the “removal of Combat Dive” from the CCT training pipeline in a June memo to Air Force training officials. The cut in training would affect three Air Force jobs: enlisted Combat Control candidates, or CCTs; Special Tactics Officers, or STOs — a CCT position held by officers; and Special Reconnaissance troops, surveillance experts who train and operate with CCTs on Air Force Special Tactics teams.

AFSOC officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the memo, which surfaced on social media as an apparent picture of a computer screen, was authentic and represented a possible shift in the pipeline for the Air Force’s highly-trained Special Tactics corps.

Trainees will continue in the current pipeline, which includes dive training, while training officials review the impact of that change, according to Lt. Col. Rebecca L. Heyse, an AFSOC spokesperson.

“Today every CCT that shows up [at their first unit], they’ve gone to dive school,” Heyse told Task & Purpose. “We’re still in the analysis phase and we don’t know what’s changing yet. In the future, the CCT that shows up may not have gone to dive school.”

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When deployed, CCTs and STOs are typically attached to special operations teams from other services, calling in airstrikes and handling other air-to-ground coordination. Special Reconnaissance troops provide advanced surveillance and preparation of an objective.

The memo asks the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, or AETC, which oversees all training schools across the Air Force, to revise its “initial qualification” requirements for all three jobs, and to make dive school a “post initial-qualification training.”

The Air Force breaks down all of its jobs, from special operators to mechanics and admin troops, into qualification levels: A “3-level” is a new graduate of a training pipeline ready for their first unit, while a “5-level” and “7-level” are experienced, fully qualified troops. Completing dive school is currently a requirement for 3-level qualification.

Bauernfeind’s memo did not say if combat dive school would be moved to a 5-level requirement — as it has been in the past for CCTs — or if it might become an option, following in line with the Army’s approach to combat divers. The Army maintains a Special Forces dive school in Key West, but it is not mandatory for most special operations soldiers.

“We are continuing analysis for requirements and training of Combat Dive as a special qualification,” Bauernfeind wrote in the memo.

Though Bauernfeind is the AFSOC commander, it would be up to AETC officials to officially change the training pipeline, a process that normally requires a consensus of senior training officials from around the career field.

It is not clear if that consensus exists.

The removal of dive school from the Combat Control pipeline would be the latest in a series of major changes to the training pipeline of the Air Force’s special operations troops in the last decade, as CCT officials adapted to the demands of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the mid-2010s, Air Force special operators have revised every element of its pipeline, from physical fitness requirements to the length and nature of initial selection courses.

But dive training has been a staple of Air Force special operations training for at least four decades, connecting generations of CCT, Pararescue, and other specialized troops that the Air Force now refers to as Special Warfare Airmen.

Officials at Air Combat Command, which oversees the training pipeline for Pararescue students, did not immediately return a question from Task & Purpose on whether dive training was on the chopping block for that job.

Combat Diver qualification

Across all four services, Combat Diver training covers a wide range of underwater operations, including search dives underneath massive ships in a harbor, “locking” in and out of submarines, and infiltration swims in which a platoon-sized team swims together underwater for miles to sneak onto a beach. The training usually starts with a week or more of training in a pool, then moves on to open ocean diving. Earning a “scuba bubble,” as combat dive badges are known, is widely considered one of the toughest training curricula in the military.

In the current pipeline, Air Force Special Warfare candidates attend the Air Force Combat Dive Course in Panama City, Florida, which the Air Force opened in 2006. Prior to the Panama City course, CCTs and other Air Force special operations students picked up Combat Dive training at schools run by the Army or Marines or joined a Navy SEAL class for the dive-focused portion of their training.

Combat Diver training holds an outsized spot in the psyche of Air Force special operations. The first step in both CCT and Pararescue training has long been intensive selection courses which have historically eliminated as much as 80% of recruits (though, like most special operations qualifying courses, that number has varied widely up and down over time). While selective positions in other services, like the Army’s Special Forces and the Navy’s SEALs, have similarly high drop-out rates in training, when CCT and Pararescue operators look back on their most formative and miserable training, they generally recall hours spent in dive-focused “water confidence” training.

In a grueling daily ritual, and under varying degrees of harassment from instructors, students swim underwater laps in a pool and perform complicated underwater drills that tax their lungs and, over time, mental strength.

Air Force officials have long maintained that the purpose of those drills was not sheer attrition but to prepare students to succeed at combat dive school. Over a decade ago, CCT trainers reduced the length of the initial selection course and added a specific Special Warfare Pre-Dive Course just before attending the Florida dive school.

In his memo asking to remove dive school from the training, Bauernfeind said students will continue to attend the Pre-Dive course.

While dive school might be a right of passage for CCTs, the Army has long taken a different approach. Army special operators who attend dive school in Key West, Florida — mostly Special Forces and Rangers — do so as a mid-career pit stop, and usually only if they are already top performers. Completing the course might qualify a soldier for assignment to a dive team in their home unit, but many special operators never go.

The latest on Task & Purpose

• The US can’t use its $110 million drone base in Niger
• Inside an Air Force Pararescue mission in the middle of the Pacific Ocean
• Country music star Craig Morgan re-enlists at age 59
• What you need to know about the incoming Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps
• 2 US military veterans killed in Ukraine during intense fighting [Updated]

taskandpurpose.com · by Matt White · August 7, 2023

11. 'Sudden surge' in cyberattacks on government: report

​This is the new battlefield and we are all soldiers and part of this war.

'Sudden surge' in cyberattacks on government: report

defenseone.com · by Chris Riotta

ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI / Getty Images

Blackberry's quarterly threat report said attacks on government agencies and the public sector rose 40% since last year.

|

August 7, 2023 12:00 PM ET

• Cyber
• Homeland
• Civilians

By Chris Riotta

Staff Reporter, Nextgov/FCW

August 7, 2023 12:00 PM ET

A new report says cyberattacks targeting government agencies and the public sector increased in recent months, due in part to novel malware campaigns that affected financial institutions, healthcare services, and critical-infrastructure industries.

March to May 2023 saw a 40% increase in attacks targeting government agencies and the public sector and a 13% increase in novel malware samples compared to the same period last year, according to the quarterly Global Threat Intelligence report published by Blackberry.

"With limited resources and immature cyber defense programs, these organizations are struggling to defend against the double-pronged threat of both nation states and cybercriminals," Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of threat research and intelligence at Blackberry, said in a statement.

The report described the spike in attacks against the public sector as a "sudden surge" in part attributed to state-sponsored threat actors linked to Russia and North Korea that became "extremely active" throughout the latest quarter.

"These actors typically target the United States, Europe and South Korea, with a focus on targeting government agencies, military organizations, businesses and financial institutions," the report said. "They also frequently adapt their techniques to make their attacks harder to detect and defend against."

The apparent spike in cyberattacks targeting U.S. institutions comes amid recent high-profile intrusions impacting several federal agencies.

Last month, Microsoft confirmed that a cybercriminal allegedly based in China gained access to unclassified government email accounts as part of an apparent espionage campaign that affected about 25 organizations, including federal agencies. A senior official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency described the attack on a phone call with reporters at the time as a "surgical campaign" that began on May 15.

Energy infrastructure experts also recently warned Congress that the U.S. power grid is facing increased cybersecurity threats from domestic extremists and foreign adversaries.

Blackberry's report says threat actors view healthcare and financial institutions — which often provide critical services to millions of Americans while maintaining troves of valuable data — as lucrative targets. It also said that the continued rise in remote access to services, including mobile banking services, has created mobile threats such as data exfiltration and financial app spoofing.

12. Mini SEAL sub reaches initial operating capability

Mini SEAL sub reaches initial operating capability

navytimes.com · by Geoff Ziezulewicz · August 7, 2023

The latest secretive underwater vehicle for delivering Navy SEALs to mission destinations achieved initial operational capability late last month.

The so-called “dry combat submersible” is a sort of mini-submarine that can launch from a regular Navy sub with SEALS inside, according to U.S. Special Operations Command and the mini-sub’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin.

While SEALs have deployed in minisubs for decades, this latest submersible is the first that allows them to do so without having to wear a wetsuit or be exposed to weather or the water during the trip.

The new submersible “provides safe, clandestine delivery for occupants over long distances in a completely dry environment and features a lock-in and lock-out chamber,” Lockheed said in a press release announcing the milestone. “Occupants arrive at the mission warm, rested, hydrated and ready.”

It measures nearly 40-feet long and can fit up to eight special operators, according to a Defense Department fact sheet on the program.

Members of SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team Two launch one of the team's minisubs from the back of the attack submarine Philadelphia on a training exercise in May 2005. A new "dry combat submersible" has reached initial operating capability. (Chief Photographer's Mate Andrew McKaskle/Navy)

The submersible is battery-powered and operated by two pilots, allowing teams to deploy on longer-duration missions, according to the DoD.

SOCOM officials said Naval Special Warfare Command personnel are not currently fielding the new submersible, and they did not indicate when SEALs might be enjoying the dry ride by Navy Times’ deadline.

About Geoff Ziezulewicz

Geoff is a senior staff reporter for Military Times, focusing on the Navy. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was most recently a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at geoffz@militarytimes.com.

13. Marines fly food to remote areas of Philippines after deadly typhoon

Marines fly food to remote areas of Philippines after deadly typhoon

marinecorpstimes.com · by Irene Loewenson · August 7, 2023

A Marine aviation squadron that had just wrapped up a training exercise in the Philippines wound up delivering 64,000 pounds of food and water in the northern part of the country following a devastating typhoon, the Marine Corps said.

Thirty-five Marines and sailors from Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 163, part of 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, were at Antonio Bautista Air Base, Puerto Princesa, Philippines, on July 30. They had just finished Marine Aviation Support Activity 23, a bilateral military exercise, and were preparing to head home to Miramar, California, according to a Corps news release.

But that morning, they got tasked with the new mission at the request of the Filipino military.

The next day, the troops from the squadron flew their four MV-22B Ospreys and four CH-53E Super Stallions to Subic Bay International Airport, where they began loading up their aircraft with supplies.

RELATED

New Marine unit added to Philippines military exercise

This was the inaugural exercise for the new Marine littoral regiment.

A week of stormy weather across the Philippines’ main island of Luzon had caused 39 deaths, including 26 killed in the capsizing of a passenger ship.

At least 13 people were reported killed earlier due to Typhoon Doksuri’s onslaught ― mostly from landslides, flooding and toppled trees ― and thousands were displaced, disaster response officials said.

As of July 28, more than 20 people remained missing, including four coast guard personnel whose boat overturned while on a rescue mission in a hard-hit province, disaster response officials said.

In the three-day relief mission, the Ospreys flew a 800-mile round trip daily to the Batanes Islands, while the Super Stallions distributed supplies around northern Luzon, according to the release.

Seventeen Marines from the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment also assisted with loading and unloading supplies and with clearing debris from roads, Marine spokeswoman 1st Lt. Erin Scudder told Marine Corps Times. These Marines had also participated in the bilateral exercise and had been awaiting their redeployment back to Hawaii when they got tasked with relief efforts.

The troops had to battle constant, monsoon-season rain and humidity and deliver supplies to difficult locations, including one spot in a field on the side of a mountain, Lt. Col. David Batcheler, the commanding officer of Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 163, told Marine Corps Times.

“This is exactly what we’re built to do,” Batcheler said. “We’re built to overcome adversity, overcome a lot of the harsh elements that are in this environment.”

When they landed, the Marines and sailors got help from Filipino troops and first responders, or, in the more remote areas, local civilians, according to Batcheler. They formed an assembly line to unload by hand each aircraft of the 8,000 pounds to 12,000 pounds of supplies, the commanding officer said.

Members of the Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 163 have been known as “Ridge Runners” for more than half a century, after providing rescue and relief operations in a mountainous area of Japan not long after the squadron’s 1951 founding, according to the website of 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing.

Marine Cpl. Daniel Lauer, a crew chief, passes emergency relief supplies to a Filipino citizen Aug. 3. (Sgt. Sean Potter/Marine Corps)

Batcheler said those in his squadron were smiling and high-fiving local children even as they performed difficult work amid monsoon rains.

“The Marines could not have been more proud of what they were doing,” Batcheler said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

About Irene Loewenson

Irene Loewenson is a staff reporter for Marine Corps Times. She joined Military Times as an editorial fellow in August 2022. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.

14. Order After Empire: The Roots of Instability in the Middle East By Robert D. Kaplan

Excerpts:

Of course, the region is not quite done with empire. The United States, although weakened by the Iraq war, remains the most dominant outside force in terms of security and military deployment, with air and sea bases ringing much of the Arabian Peninsula between Greece in the northwest, Oman in the southeast, and Djibouti in the southwest. Meanwhile, China’s Belt and Road Initiative envisions a network of energy routes from the Persian Gulf to western China, anchored by a state-of-the-art port at the southwestern tip of Pakistan. Beijing, with a military base at Djibouti, contemplates other such bases at Port Sudan and at Jiwani, by the Iran-Pakistan border. In addition, the Chinese government has been investing tens of billions of dollars in an industrial and logistical hub along the Suez Canal in Egypt and in infrastructure and other projects in both Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The United States and China have no colonies or mandated territories. They do not rule people beyond their own borders. But they do have imperial interests. And at this historic juncture, those interests require stability, not war, especially as China’s investments are integrating it more deeply into the internal workings of Middle Eastern economies. The recent Chinese-brokered deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran to reestablish formal bilateral relations, and the Biden administration’s public response to it, indicate how empire, or rather a loose version of it, may yet help stabilize the Middle East. And with relative stability, regimes may have an incentive to loosen internal controls somewhat to generate more entrepreneurial societies able to survive the rigors of a more connected and tightening global economy. The Saudi regime, for example, despite its abysmal human rights record, has been steadily opening up its society by loosening restrictions on women and integrating them into the work force. This process is being watched closely around the Arab world and could provide a model for more flexible regimes and for resisting political Islam.

The journalist Robert Worth, after years of deep reporting in the Arab world for The New York Times, has written that, through it all, what the Arabs ultimately want is less democracy than karama, or dignity: a state, democratic or not, “that shielded its subjects from humiliation and despair.” Empire, be it Ottoman or European, provided stability but little dignity; anarchy provides neither. More consultative governance, in the fashion of reforms in the home-grown traditional monarchies of Morocco and Oman, can thread a middle path. It is in that direction that the best hope may lie for the Middle East’s continued evolution, even though it won’t necessarily follow a Western script.

Order After Empire

The Roots of Instability in the Middle East

By Robert D. Kaplan

 August 8, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Robert D. Kaplan · August 8, 2023

The history of empire involves a confusion. In the minds of many, it is associated with European rule over large parts of the developing world that forever stains the reputation of the West. But empire has taken many non-Western forms, especially in the Middle East. Beginning with the Umayyad dynasty in seventh-century Damascus, a series of Muslim caliphates established far-flung rule, sometimes spanning the Mediterranean. In subsequent centuries, they were followed by the Ottomans, who extended their rule to the Balkans, and the Omani Sultanate, which in the nineteenth century spread from the Persian Gulf to parts of Iran and Pakistan, as well as to Muslim East Africa. Only in the later stages of the history of empire were the Europeans a significant part of this story.

Across the Middle East, this varied experience of empire has impeded the development of nation-states like those in Europe and therefore helps account for the region’s lack of stability. Indeed, for many Middle Eastern regimes, the question of how to guarantee a reasonable degree of order with the minimum degree of coercion has not been resolved.

One major reason for the violence and instability in the Middle East in recent decades, however disturbing it is to contemporary sensibilities, is that for the first time in modern history, the region lacks any kind of imperially imposed order. The fact that democracy has so far failed to take root—even in countries where it has shown some promise, such as Tunisia—is an indication of the debilitating legacy of imperial rule. Empire, by providing a distasteful but enduring solution to order, has inhibited other solutions from taking hold.

The depressing but undeniable reality is that empires in one form or another have dominated world history (and especially Middle Eastern history) from early antiquity into the modern era because they offered, in relative terms at least, the most practical and obvious means of political and geographical organization. Empires may leave chaos in their wake, but they have also risen as solutions to chaos.

OUT OF ORDER

For centuries, the Golden Age of Islam in the Middle East was an imperial one. This history unfolded primarily under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates but also under the Fatimid and Hafsid ones. The Mongol empire could be cruel beyond measure, yet the Mongols primarily subjugated and destroyed other empires: the Abbasid, Khwarazmian, Bulgarian, Song, and so on. The Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and the Balkans and the Habsburg empire in central Europe conspicuously provided protection for Jews and other minorities consistent with the most enlightened values of their particular age. The Armenian genocide did not occur at a time when the Ottoman Empire fully ruled the region, but during a period when Young Turk nationalists were in the process of superseding the empire. Monoethnic nationalism, more than multiethnic imperialism with its cosmopolitan quality, has been more lethal toward minorities.

The Ottoman Empire, which governed the Middle East from Algeria to Iraq for 400 years, collapsed after World War I. In 1862, the Ottoman foreign minister, Ali Pasha, prophetically warned in a letter that if the Ottomans were ever forced to give in to “national aspirations,” they “would need a century and torrents of blood to establish even a fairly stable state of affairs.” In fact, more than a century after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East has still not found an adequate replacement for the order that empire imposed.

Until the end of World War II, the British and French imperial mandate authorities governed the states of the Levant and Fertile Crescent, from Lebanon to Iraq. Then, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were imperial both in terms of their power dynamics and their influence on Middle Eastern regimes. The United States had de facto alliances with Israel and with Arab monarchies in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula; the Soviet Union backed Algeria, Nasser’s Egypt, South Yemen, and other countries aligned with or sympathetic to Moscow’s communist line.

The Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, and the influence and ability of the United States to project power in the region has been steadily diminishing since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Regrettably, without the presence of empire in some form, the region gradually entered a period of turmoil, with the collapse or destabilization of regimes: Libya, Syria, Yemen, and so on. To wit, the Arab Spring demonstrated not merely a yearning for democracy but also the rejection of tired and corrupt dictatorial rule. In short, without some degree of imperial influence, the Middle East, and the Arab world in particular, has often evinced a “fissile tendency…towards division,” as the Arabist Tim Mackintosh-Smith has written.

BAD INFLUENCE

The idea that empires have brought some modicum of order and stability to the Middle East runs counter to much contemporary scholarship and journalism. According to the consensus view, it is the absence of democracy, not empire, that accounts for the region’s instability. That position is understandable. With the experience of modern European colonialism still fresh in many countries, scholars and reporters remain preoccupied with the crimes of the British, French, and other European powers in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. Because we live in an era of postcolonial atonement and revisionism, it is only natural that the misdeeds of European powers in past centuries loom large. The challenge is to move beyond those misdeeds without minimizing them.

This is not to suggest that the actions of European powers in the Middle East were innocent; quite the contrary. The least stable parts of the region today are those that bear some of the clearest imprints of European colonialism. The wholly artificial borders of the Levant, for example, were constructed by the United Kingdom and France after World War I. Thus, the borders of modern Syria and Iraq fail to reflect the nature of well-functioning traditional societies that had long operated without hard territorial boundaries. Modern states divided what should have been kept whole, as British and French imperialists sought to impose order on a landscape made up partly of featureless desert terrain. As the twentieth-century intellectual and Middle East area specialist Elie Kedourie has wryly noted, “What otherwise can boundaries be when they spring up where none had existed before?”

Indeed, the oppressive Baathist states that emerged in Syria and particularly Iraq in the second half of the twentieth century were wrought by European empire. The United States invaded Iraq in 2003, and the result was chaos; the United States did not intervene in Syria in 2011, and the result was also chaos. Although many blame U.S. policy for what transpired in both countries, an equally important driver of events in each case was the legacy of Baathism, a deadly mix of Arab nationalism and socialism in the style of the Eastern bloc conceived partly under the influence of Europe during the fascist era of the 1930s by two members of the Damascene middle class, one Christian and the other Muslim: Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar. For it wasn’t only colonialism, but also the dangerous European ideologies of the early twentieth century that made the Middle East the least stable of all regions.

Empire, which had once stabilized the Middle East, indirectly destabilized it later.

The tragedy of the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has as much to do with the West’s dynamic interaction with the region as it does with the Middle East itself. Marshall Hodgson, arguably the greatest modern-day chronicler of the history of the Middle East, has written that the “rooted discontent and disruption” of the Islamic world, expressed through anticolonialism, nationalism, and religious extremism, are ultimately reactions to its greater contact with the threatening industrial and postindustrial world on its peripheries, of which Western imperialism was naturally a byproduct.

Of course, Europe and the United States did not intend to create this reaction. But the West’s dynamism in the realm of ideas and technology both overwhelmed and forcibly modernized the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, amplifying the ill effects of imperialism. Thus, Marxism, Nazism, and nationalism, all ideas rooted in the modern West, influenced Arab intellectuals living in the Middle East and Europe and provided the blueprint for the regimes that culminated in the rule of the elder and younger Assads in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. An autopsy of those shattered countries would reveal not only local but also Western pathogens. Empire, which had once stabilized the Middle East, indirectly destabilized it later.

Consider Syria. Between 1946 and 1970, the country experienced 21 changes of government, almost all of them extralegal, including ten military coups. In November 1970, the Baathist Air Force general Hafez al-Assad, a member of the Alawite sect, a branch of Islam that bears affinities with Shiism, took control in a calm and bloodless coup—a “corrective movement,” as he called it. Assad would govern until his natural death 30 years later. He proved to be among the most historic, if underrated, figures of the modern Middle East, turning a virtual banana republic—the most unstable country of the Arab world, no less—into a relatively stable police state. But even Assad, who ran a less bloody and less repressive state than Saddam did in Iraq, was unable to govern without abject barbarity at times. In response to a violent uprising against his rule by Sunni Muslim extremists, he killed an estimated 20,000 people in the Sunni-dominated city of Hama in 1982, a crackdown that was as effective as it was brutal. The price to stave off anarchy was severe, making the elder Assad’s success at achieving stability in Syria qualified at best. Such was the legacy of Ottoman and French imperialism.

Or take the case of Libya, which consists of disparate regions and lacks any historical cohesion apart from its colonial past. Western Libya, known as Tripolitania, is more cosmopolitan and has historically gravitated toward Carthage and Tunisia. On the other hand, eastern Libya, or Cyrenaica, is conservative and has historically gravitated toward Alexandria in Egypt. The desert lands in between, including the Fezzan to the south, have only tribal and subregional identities. Although the Ottomans recognized all of those separate units, Italian colonizers fused them at the beginning of the twentieth century into a single state, one that proved so artificial that, as with Syria and Iraq, it was often impossible to govern except by the most extreme means. When the dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi was toppled in 2011, exactly 100 years after the Italian takeover, the state simply disintegrated. As with Syria and Iraq, the fate of Libya shows how lethal the aftermath of European imperialism can be.

FIT FOR A KING

By contrast, countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, whose origins predate both European colonialism and Islam itself, have had an easier time. The latter, for example, is buttressed by a distinct pre-Islamic identity under the Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, and Byzantines. The regimes of these countries may be sterile and oppressive, but the order they impose is not in question. The issue is how to make such systems less overbearing. Yet even Tunisia has struggled since its own popular uprising ignited the Arab Spring in late 2010. The country bravely hobbled on as a democracy in its capital and other major cities, even as central control in the provinces and borderlands weakened, until it slid back into autocracy last year under President Kais Saied. Nevertheless, Tunisia remains the most hopeful example of a democratic experiment in the region. That only demonstrates just how difficult it has been in the Middle East to copy the West’s political blueprint for establishing a noncoercive order. Instead of democracy, the modernizing autocracy—itself derivative of European imperialism—has provided the readiest answer to the specter of anarchy.

The least oppressive regimes in the Middle East have been the traditional monarchies of Jordan, Morocco, and Oman. Because of their inherent and hard-won historical legitimacy, they have been able to govern with the minimum degree of cruelty despite being authoritarian. The Hobbesian laboratory of the Middle East proves that along with empire, monarchy has been the most natural form of government. Oman, for example, has functioned as an absolute royal dictatorship with somewhat progressive policies and modest individual freedoms for decades. It constitutes one proof among many that the world cannot neatly be divided into evil dictatorships and exemplary democracies but rather constitutes many gray shades in between. Foreign correspondents generally understand this, but intellectuals and politicians in New York and Washington have a poorer grasp.

Witness Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, in which there is a genuine social contract between ruler and ruled. The rulers provide competent, predictable governance and smooth transitions of power, allowing for an enviable quality of life; in return, the populations do not challenge their hold on power. Oil wealth has had much to do with it. But the Gulf rulers have also evinced a hard-headed, Machiavellian empiricism that is amoral rather than immoral. They consider the anarchy unleashed by the many attempts at democracy during the Arab Spring to be proof that the West has no useful lessons to teach them.

DIGNITY, NOT DEMOCRACY

Of course, that is still not the whole story. The Middle East hurtles forward, if not in a linear direction. Digital technology, including social media, has flattened hierarchies and emboldened the masses, who consequently hold the powers that be in less and less awe and more and more to account. Dictators obsess about public opinion in a way that they never used to in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Meanwhile, even though the seaborne empires of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British helped usher the Middle East into a world trading system in the early modern and modern eras, the intensity of that interaction is overwhelming the region as time goes on. The future of the Middle East will manifest an even greater fusion with both the West and with the many crosscurrents of globalization. That could eventually change the region’s politics. But precisely because the age of empire in the Middle East lasted so long—since before the birth of Islam, in fact—no one should expect a quick end to this unstable postimperial phase. After all, there is nothing more perennial in the world of politics than the search for order.

Of course, the region is not quite done with empire. The United States, although weakened by the Iraq war, remains the most dominant outside force in terms of security and military deployment, with air and sea bases ringing much of the Arabian Peninsula between Greece in the northwest, Oman in the southeast, and Djibouti in the southwest. Meanwhile, China’s Belt and Road Initiative envisions a network of energy routes from the Persian Gulf to western China, anchored by a state-of-the-art port at the southwestern tip of Pakistan. Beijing, with a military base at Djibouti, contemplates other such bases at Port Sudan and at Jiwani, by the Iran-Pakistan border. In addition, the Chinese government has been investing tens of billions of dollars in an industrial and logistical hub along the Suez Canal in Egypt and in infrastructure and other projects in both Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The United States and China have no colonies or mandated territories. They do not rule people beyond their own borders. But they do have imperial interests. And at this historic juncture, those interests require stability, not war, especially as China’s investments are integrating it more deeply into the internal workings of Middle Eastern economies. The recent Chinese-brokered deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran to reestablish formal bilateral relations, and the Biden administration’s public response to it, indicate how empire, or rather a loose version of it, may yet help stabilize the Middle East. And with relative stability, regimes may have an incentive to loosen internal controls somewhat to generate more entrepreneurial societies able to survive the rigors of a more connected and tightening global economy. The Saudi regime, for example, despite its abysmal human rights record, has been steadily opening up its society by loosening restrictions on women and integrating them into the work force. This process is being watched closely around the Arab world and could provide a model for more flexible regimes and for resisting political Islam.

The journalist Robert Worth, after years of deep reporting in the Arab world for The New York Times, has written that, through it all, what the Arabs ultimately want is less democracy than karama, or dignity: a state, democratic or not, “that shielded its subjects from humiliation and despair.” Empire, be it Ottoman or European, provided stability but little dignity; anarchy provides neither. More consultative governance, in the fashion of reforms in the home-grown traditional monarchies of Morocco and Oman, can thread a middle path. It is in that direction that the best hope may lie for the Middle East’s continued evolution, even though it won’t necessarily follow a Western script.

• ROBERT D. KAPLAN holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China (Random House, 2023), from which this essay is adapted.

Foreign Affairs · by Robert D. Kaplan · August 8, 2023

​15. Putin’s Age of Chaos: The Dangers of Russian Disorder

Excerpts:

Ordinary Russians still seem to support the war and back Putin, but they are also becoming frustrated, gradually showing impatience with elites, and feeling increasingly vulnerable because of the clumsy actions (and inaction) of the authorities. Putin may enjoy high approval ratings, but they will mask growing uncertainty, social anxiety, and (as yet) unchanneled discontent about the course of the events. True sources of political risk for the regime may appear in the form of figures who back Putin and are generally loyal to the authorities (as Prigozhin was) but who, over time, could come to pose significant problems.

For the foreseeable future, the Kremlin will be wrestling simultaneously with diverging internal forces: a deepening crisis of Putin’s leadership, a growing lack of political accountability, increasingly ineffective responses by the authorities to new challenges, an intensifying fragmentation among elites, and a society that is growing more antiestablishment.

If previously, domestic affairs were secondary to the dominant military agenda, the reverse may come true. The war could become a backdrop to more urgent domestic challenges. At home, Russia’s future appears bleak, marked by ever-greater fractiousness among elites, Putin’s shrinking influence, and a more ideological and stricter regime in which security services play a more prominent role. These changes will make Russia’s geopolitical actions less predictable, and even contradictory, as the Kremlin reacts to shifting circumstances instead of following its own strategic direction and priorities. Putin saw the invasion of Ukraine as an act of destiny, the fulfillment of a historical script. Instead, the war has left Russia grasping for certainties in an exceedingly uncertain world.

Putin’s Age of Chaos

The Dangers of Russian Disorder

By Tatiana Stanovaya

August 8, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Tatiana Stanovaya · August 8, 2023

After Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian elites acted as if the war had not really changed anything on the home front. Even as the campaign foundered and the West tightened sanctions on the Russian economy, those with power in Moscow seemed to carry on as usual. Since last autumn, however, things have been getting a little more complicated. A surprisingly successful Ukrainian counterattack in the region of Kharkiv in September 2022 exposed the vulnerability of Russian military positions. Irked, the Kremlin launched a military mobilization that caused tremendous social anxiety, although only for a short period. Then in October, a Ukrainian strike on the Kerch Strait bridge left the key link between Crimea and mainland Russia engulfed in smoke and flames. It also revealed how flexible the Kremlin’s supposed redlines actually were; an event that had seemed intolerable just months prior ultimately produced no tangible response from the state and left elites with the growing sense that Russia’s war could rebound onto its own territory.

The following months have only ratcheted up the pressure. The Ukrainian front has provided little good news for the Kremlin, with the exception of the seizure of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in May. And in the meantime, a new front has opened up at home. Unknown assailants—most likely connected to Ukrainian security services—have attacked Moscow with drones. Paramilitaries have raided across the border into the Russian region of Belgorod. And most shocking, the forces of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner private military company, carried out an open rebellion in June, seizing much of the city of Rostov-on-Don, sending a column of troops racing toward Moscow, and even shooting down a number of Russian aircraft, killing over a dozen Russian pilots in the process.

Prigozhin’s uprising captured the world’s attention—and deeply disturbed Moscow’s elite. Despite its swift resolution (in a deal brokered in part by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko), many in Moscow struggle to understand Putin’s handling of the crisis. On the one hand, the Russian president has publicly and ruthlessly condemned Prigozhin as a “traitor,” but on the other hand, he has allowed the mercenary leader to move freely within the country and even hosted him in the Kremlin for negotiations at the end of June.

These events were unprecedented in contemporary Russia. And yet they do not seem to have ruffled the status quo; people continue their lives as if nothing had happened. To be sure, generals are now daring to complain more openly about the top brass. But the overall situation in the army remains stable, and to date the Russian government and military have not reshuffled or arrested any army personnel.

Don’t be fooled: this ostensible resilience to bad news and the seeming indifference to ongoing events are deceptive. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the Kremlin to sweep unwelcome developments under the carpet. The war has begun to change Russia, and profound internal shifts are likely underway—in Putin’s regime, in the elites’ perception of Putin, and in the public’s attitude toward the war. Indeed, the militarization of Russian life is empowering ultranationalist hard-liners in the elite, eclipsing an old guard of ideologues that the Russian public has begun to view as increasingly out of touch with the realities of the war. The perception of Putin’s weakening has further revealed the regime’s deep flaws: the habitual inclination of the authorities to underestimate domestic political risks, ignore long-term developments in favor of addressing immediate challenges, and refuse responsibility for the growing number of incidents on Russian territory linked to the war.

Prigozhin’s mutiny has pushed the situation to an extreme and may pave the way for the emergence of a more radicalized, hawkish, and ruthless state. Threats to the Kremlin, such as the Wagner rebellion, and the revelations of the government’s weakness, will not necessarily lead the public to turn against Putin and bring down the regime. Instead, these developments are transforming Russia into a far less cohesive entity, one rife with internal contradictions and conflicts, more volatile and lacking predictability. With so much pressure turning inward, the space for debate about the ongoing war in Ukraine may open somewhat, even if not for outright dissent. But at home, the order that Putin built will become more disorderly, and the world will have to contend with a more dangerous and unpredictable Russia.

FRAGILE STATE

In the months leading up to Prigozhin’s rebellion, Russia found itself in the unexpected position of watching the war come home. In early May, just days before the annual Victory Day parade in Red Square, unknown attackers used drones to try to hit targets in Moscow, including the Kremlin. Then, at the end of May and into June, paramilitary groups aligned with Ukraine crossed into the Russian region of Belgorod. They caused mayhem and briefly seized various settlements. Other regions neighboring Ukraine have also been enduring continual shelling. The Kremlin’s response to these events has been startlingly passive; it has simply sought to hit the mute button. Television news and talk shows have focused instead on the supposed efficacy of Moscow’s air defenses and advanced a narrative about the supposed ruthlessness of Ukrainians and their Western “masters.” With rare exceptions, Putin has barely commented on these attacks on Russian soil, preferring to delegate that responsibility to the Defense Ministry.

The Kremlin’s propensity to downplay seemingly shocking events is in line with how Putin saw the war. He maintained a deep-seated belief that ordinary Russians brim with patriotism, that the elites remain controllable and loyal to the state, that a path to victory in Ukraine is still open, and that Russia’s economy is resilient enough to endure until he achieves his goals. Consequently, senior officials in the presidential administration, taking cues from Putin’s cool demeanor and aversion to panic, often convinced themselves that everything was fine and that their anxiety would be more harmful than prudent. Kremlin insiders, speaking privately about the war’s impact on political stability, bragged about the authorities’ capacity to maintain political control, with one insider offering the cautious caveat that all would be well “if the military does not let us down.” They cited consistently high public support for the “special military operation” in Ukraine and strong approval ratings for both Putin and the government.

Prigozhin’s growing discontent preceding the mutiny failed to alarm these insiders. Even as late as June 23, when Prigozhin had already initiated his rebellion, many sources close to the Kremlin continued to believe that nothing of major concern was happening and that Prigozhin was still useful for achieving certain political objectives, such as channeling the frustration of ultranationalists. In addition, many officials were convinced that people close to Putin in the Kremlin were supervising Prigozhin and that Wagner would not try to challenge the Russian state. Then, reports made clear that Wagner forces had seized the military command center for Russian operations in Ukraine in the city of Rostov-on-Don, that a column of Wagner soldiers was advancing on Moscow, and that Wagner forces had even shot down Russian helicopters.

Prigozhin leaving Rostov-on-Don, Russia, June 2023

Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters

These events served as a sobering revelation: Putin had misjudged Prigozhin and his outrage, underestimating the danger posed by the voluble and volatile caterer turned mercenary commander. The rebellion was, in large part, the product of Putin’s inaction. His detached and aloof stance and his reluctance to intervene in the escalating conflict between Prigozhin and the two most senior Russian military officials—Sergey Shoigu, the defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff—helped spark the revolt. The rebellion exposed not only Putin’s management failures, the negligence that embittered and inflamed Prigozhin, but also how the state had shot itself in the foot. After all, Wagner has grown into a fighting force with tens of thousands of soldiers only thanks to billions of dollars in state funding, access to the state’s resources, and its links to high-profile officials who have endorsed the mercenary outfit’s activities.

In the wake of the rebellion, it has become much harder for the Kremlin to project an aura of unflappable control and political competence. Just a week after the mutiny, Putin made an unscheduled public appearance in Dagestan. His staff was unprepared for this event and his behavior, including hugging members of the crowd, surprised many in the Kremlin and was seen as evidence that he was acting emotionally and spontaneously, seeking affirmation. In front of the cameras, he held babies, shook hands, and posed for selfies with an adoring public. The scene was striking given that Putin has rarely allowed himself such interactions in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Although Putin may have wanted to demonstrate his closeness with ordinary Russians in the wake of Prigozhin’s mutiny, many observers interpreted the spectacle as a sign of the president’s acute need to experience the adulation of Russian citizens—a measure perhaps of his own sense of vulnerability.

The Kremlin’s mishandling of the war, compounded by Prigozhin’s ensuing mutiny, has made the government appear irresponsible and the state weak. Even the drone attacks inspired bewilderment as to why Russian defense systems could not thwart them and stoked a perception among ordinary Russians, as well as those hawks who support the war in Ukraine, of the state’s frailty, its inability to ensure the safety of the capital city (never mind the country at large), and the failure of authorities to stop enemies from infiltrating Russian territory. A cursory look at public discussions on social media reveals speculation among Russians about the potential presence of Ukrainian sympathizers “among us,” ready to “stab us in the back.”

SOMETHING ROTTEN

Many observers are used to viewing Putin’s regime as the product of a social contract in which the state guarantees stability in return for the people granting the Kremlin significant freedom to manage political life. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, however, the value of domestic stability has been gradually eclipsed by a deeper need for geopolitical security—that is, protection from the hostile West—that has accompanied an upsurge in nationalist sentiment. Now, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russians hunger for geopolitical security. The people have delegated to Putin the right to deal with the West—which many Russians believe threatens their country’s very existence—even if that causes domestic turmoil owing to stringent sanctions and crackdowns on liberals. Polls show that since the war began, the percentage of Russians who overtly admire Putin has grown from eight to 19 percent, and 68 percent of Russians now say they want him to be reelected, a significant jump from 48 percent of Russians before the war. The war has also increased support for all official institutions: the cabinet, regional governors, parliament, and even the ruling party, United Russia.

But Putin’s passivity in the face of internal military threats and his aloof stance may become a major problem for the regime in the near future. There are signs that Russians, despite their increased support for state institutions, are becoming much more ambivalent about the country’s authorities. They are beginning to doubt the ability of the political class to fulfill its responsibilities. At the end of May, a drone attack targeted Rublyovka, a famous upscale Moscow suburb where many wealthy and influential Russians live. Some social media users were not altogether sorry for the attack and suggested that the rich and powerful were getting their just deserts. Rublyovka has long been a symbol of the affluent, parasitic elite associated with both the Yeltsin era and the current regime. Many pro-Kremlin bloggers and ordinary Russians hoped that the attack would serve as a wake-up call to this elite, compelling them to become more involved in helping salvage the war with Ukraine and responding more resolutely to attacks on Russian territory.

Anti-elite sentiment also propelled the rise of Prigozhin. He had been gaining visibility and popularity in recent months as his forces operated in Ukraine. According to the Levada Center, an independent Russian polling firm, Russians saw the capture of Bakhmut by Wagner fighters in May as the most important event of that month. A study by another polling group, Romir, found that Wagner’s triumph in Bakhmut had elevated Prigozhin for the first time into the ranks of the top five most-trusted politicians in Russia, after Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Shoigu, and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. His climb was stratospheric: at the beginning of the year, Prigozhin had ranked 158th among trusted Russian political figures.

Ordinary Russians were struck by Prigozhin’s brazen confrontation with the Defense Ministry and his complaints that his troops were desperately short of ammunition. The public perceived him as a crusader against corruption and someone who dared to challenge the spoiled elites. A local eyewitness to Wagner’s seizure of Rostov-on-Don described Prigozhin in a Facebook post as “a simple, ordinary man going to have it out with the fat cats of every stripe and color,” a sentiment that explains the warm welcome Rostov residents gave Wagner fighters. That disgruntlement with the powers that be—“the fat cats”— to some extent explains the ease with which Prigozhin took control of the city. The same eyewitness reported with incredulity that the state was entirely missing in action. “The buildings of the provincial and city administration and the provincial government were completely deserted,” she noted. “In the blink of an eye, the military, with whom the frontline city had been filled, disappeared. The FSB [the Federal Security Services] barricaded itself inside its own building.”

It is becoming harder for the Kremlin to sweep bad news under the carpet.

Many Western observers have suggested that these military troubles will push the elites and broader society to crave peace. Unfortunately, the reality is much bleaker: challenging situations tend to make Russia only more determined and brutal in waging its war and in quashing dissent at home. Prigozhin’s mutiny was not a rejection of the war but can be understood instead as the result of dissatisfaction with the inefficient prosecution of the war. Reactions to the drone attacks and incursions by paramilitaries into the Belgorod region in the spring are instructive. According to Levada polling, these events only fueled support for the war among Russians, with people becoming more hostile toward ordinary Ukrainians and anxious about the fate of the “special military operation.” The attacks did not in any way increase public desire for peace talks or a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine, a country that is perceived now more than ever as a threat to Russia’s existence. According to polling by Levada, Russians have started to conclude in recent months that the war will be long and drawn out. In May, 45 percent of respondents said they believed the war would last more than another year—the highest percentage since the conflict began (in May 2022, it was 21 percent). They are adapting to that reality and steeling themselves for tough times ahead; they are not seeking to halt the war, and antiwar sentiment remains at best subdued, at worst entirely suppressed.

If anything, the country is becoming more committed to the fight—not in pursuit of imperial ambitions but out of a more desperate concern for its very survival. The faction advocating for a “resolute response” to the enemy is gaining new supporters, according to an op-ed in Russian Forbes by Denis Volkov, Levada’s director, interpreting the results of recent polls. In the wake of Prigozhin’s uprising, many Russians want to see the state be bolder, more decisive, consistent, and firm. This is backed up by the latest Levada polls, conducted at the end of June, which revealed a shift in people’s attitudes: the mutiny had led to a slight decline in confidence in Shoigu and a significant decline in confidence in Prigozhin. In other words, the mercenary commander’s revolt has not inspired Russians against a struggling state but rather frightened them with the prospect of destabilization and disorder.

The mutiny and the events that preceded it suggest that the regime may be much less resilient than it appears: a frazzled Kremlin; a detached Putin who is failing to deal with internal conflicts; a frustrated society that is perplexed by the state’s lethargic reaction to previously unimaginable events; trembling elites ready to fly away the second the regime crumbles (the Kremlin is now trying to investigate who among officials and the top managers of state corporations dared leave Moscow during Prigozhin’s mutiny and why); and the shell-shocked military and security services that, following the mutiny, will certainly try to patch up their vulnerabilities and quash growing internal dissent in their ranks.

Putin, lulled into complacency by his conviction that people love him and the elites are loyal to him, may do little to arrest this decay. At the same time, the security services may seek more control and clamp down on society. Together, these dynamics may lead to incoherence in government behavior, further complicating the situation. Instead of dislodging the regime, Prigozhin’s jolt to the Kremlin will make the government not only more repressive and more brutal but also more chaotic and unpredictable.

THE HARDENING LINE

This situation plays squarely into the hands of Russia’s hard-liners, a camp that consists of the security service, hawkish conservatives, pro-war military correspondents, and radically anti-Western TV pundits. They advocate for tightening the screws, hunting for traitors, and placing the country on a war footing to accumulate all the resources necessary to win. The current political and social conditions leave virtually no alternative for the regime other than to become less tolerant of even minor suspicious activities, such as any suggestion of the need to reconcile with the Ukrainians, never mind overt opposition to the war. A significant portion of Russian society may end up supporting and even aiding a new crackdown. The public mood has become less indulgent of those privileged Russians who try to maintain a distance from the war, continue leading luxurious lifestyles, and conduct business as usual. It is becoming harder in Russia to maintain a passive or distant position on the war; everywhere, Russians feel pressured to perform their patriotism conspicuously.

Since the invasion, the Russian state has marginalized antiwar forces and left no room for liberal-minded figures by cracking down on protests (which were not massive to begin with) and enacting a raft of bills de facto outlawing antiwar and antiregime activities. That repression and that stiffening of patriotic feeling has opened a larger space for far more active, hardcore, and daring hawks to gain ground in politics and the national conversation. A younger and bolder cohort of hawks may supplant a more traditional older generation of conservative ideologues, including the likes of Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Investigative Committee, Sergei Narysh­kin, the chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, as well as figures such as Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and now deputy head of the Security Council, and Vyacheslav Volodin, the chair of the State Duma. These ideologues helped foster and promote “Putinism,” the president’s brand of nationalist, anti-Western, antiliberal ideas with an emphasis on traditional values such as the importance of family, children, spiritual bonds, and the primacy of state interests over private rights. These men also contributed to the climate that precipitated Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But the ongoing war has stripped them of their political uniqueness, turning the entire political mainstream conservative and hard-line.

Worse, the old guard now has little to say about wartime realities, with great uncertainty about the course of the war, enormous Western military aid to Kyiv, the absolute lack of any decent exit strategy, and a dismal future looming for the country. Leaders such as Medvedev and Patrushev, who have long promoted the confrontational, anti-Western policy and rhetoric of Putin’s regime, now appear to many jingoistic hawks to be removed from reality—both physically and intellectually far from the nitty-gritty of the war—even as they remain high-profile figures close to the president.

As their star wanes, a new generation of hawks is rising. Some of these new hawks are yesterday’s young technocrats, such as Putin’s chief domestic policy adviser, Sergei Kiriyenko, who is now in charge of the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow announced it was annexing last fall, or Marat Khusnullin, the deputy prime minister tasked with overseeing the reconstruction of destroyed Ukrainian territories now under Russian control. These officials spend a lot of time in the occupied areas, regardless of the personal risks, thereby demonstrating their courage and diligence in action to Putin and the elites in general. The new hawks also include practitioners involved in military affairs, who are closely observing the course of the war and have become for many Russians key sources of information about its developments. By contrast, officials such as Patrushev drone on endlessly about an “Anglo-Saxon” conspiracy to seize Russian territory and spout far-fetched theories (including the bizarre notion that U.S. officials want to settle Americans in Russia and Ukraine in the event of the catastrophic eruption of a volcano at Yellowstone National Park).

A man checking debris after a reported Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow, August 2023

Evgenia Novozhenina

Some senior members of the establishment have benefited from the hawkish turn, however—notably Shoigu, the defense minister, and Viktor Zolotov, the head of the Rosgvardia domestic military force. They may become the main beneficiaries of Prigozhin’s suppressed insurgency: Zolotov can now more easily beef up the ranks of Rosgvardia to deal with events like Prigozhin’s mutiny, and Shoigu can use the rebellion as an occasion to settle scores with internal opponents in the army. Unlike the desk-jockey ideologues, these leaders can directly access administrative resources and forces to alter facts on the ground and show true power. To put it simply, Medvedev can write another rant on the social media app Telegram, and Patrushev can give his one-hundredth interview raging about the evil Americans, but Shoigu and Zolotov can deploy real physical force to deal with challenges and demonstrate to Putin their indispensability (even if Shoigu, as defense minister, remains responsible for so many of the last year’s military setbacks).

The clash of hawks, old and new, will shape Russia’s response to its struggles in Ukraine and at home. The more challenges the regime faces, the more quickly it will evolve into something darker. The Russian public is growing more desperate, anti-Western, and anti-Ukrainian, and Russian elites are becoming increasingly anxious and fractious. Most senior officials, businessmen, and politicians had hoped to simply wait out the war, but now they find themselves hostage to Putin’s ambitions. More overtly hawkish and powerful groups such as the military command or the so-called Chekists in the national security establishment will try to secure order, especially after Prigozhin’s mutiny, to boost the regime’s capacity to endure the war, avoid defeat, and avert even the most tentative attempt to organize another mutiny in the future. All these moves will occur against the backdrop of Putin’s weakening leadership, a factor that will contribute to the regime becoming more chaotic, indiscriminate, and internally rancorous and competitive.

In truth, Putin and those old ideologues close to him, such as Patrushev, are becoming in some senses obsolete, their ideas out of step with elite sentiment regarding Ukraine and the West. Regardless of how conservative and hawkish the elites become, they remain more pragmatic than Putin. They are less obsessed with the notion of “saving” Ukrainians, and unlike Putin, they do not presume that Kyiv will inevitably fail. They also have a more accurate understanding of Russia’s capacity to wage war. And many find Putin’s tendency to ignore alarm bells incomprehensible. That is why many pro-war activists are calling for radical reforms to establish what would effectively be a military dictatorship. That is why even Prigozhin managed to win significant visibility and attention. He advocated alternative war strategies and argued for the necessity of using all conceivable financial, economic, and social resources to bolster military power. No one is seriously considering or discussing a diplomatic end to the war: a notion that looks to many high-profile Russians like a personal threat, given all the war crimes that their country has committed and the responsibility that the entire elite now bears for the carnage in Ukraine.

GOING OFF SCRIPT

The system has started to learn to operate independently of Putin. This development does not yet reflect the solidifying of anti-Putin sentiment or emerging political opposition. It reflects a realization of the inadequacies of the president’s detached managerial style that allowed genuine threats to the regime to go neglected. By completely underestimating Prigozhin’s radicalization and Wagner’s escalating conflict with the military, Putin has come across as an aging leader who is beginning to falter in ways he would never have before. Even the miscalculations that led to the decision to move against Ukraine were not perceived as harshly as the utter loss of control that enabled Prigozhin’s uprising, the largest domestic conflict between state and private armed forces. Putin appears less powerful after conspicuously dropping charges against Prigozhin, not demanding justice for the killings of pilots during the mutiny, and allowing enormous budget expenditures to go to a private military company that eventually dares to attack the state.

Other factions are already moving into the space opened by Putin’s weakness. Putin could become a tool in the hands of new, more dynamic and pragmatic hawks, who are quickly learning how to use the president’s emotions and well-known beliefs to their advantage. The presidential administration has become adept at not simply pandering to Putin but actively limiting what he knows by feeding him flattering reports on the patriotism of the populace, innumerable documents on the decline of the West, and tales of Ukrainians longing for liberation. They depict a world eagerly waiting for Russia to upend the existing international order. A few years ago, Putin’s staff mainly sought to avoid incurring the president’s irritation, typically when he received unwelcome news. Now, they are honing their skills in shaping Putin’s moods, either by directing his anger toward their opponents or by encouraging his optimism when it benefits them. Maintaining extreme anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian views may help the new hawks achieve their political goals, and the concurrent radicalization of the regime could lead authorities to become much harsher toward their domestic foes. But a government that lacks firm political leadership, strategic vision, and coherence will be less capable of strategic thinking and agreeing on long-term priorities. Factions in government will focus primarily on outmaneuvering one another and advancing their narrow interests.

Contrary to what analysts might have anticipated would follow Prigozhin’s uprising—attempts by the Kremlin to consolidate its power, dismantle private militias, and integrate Russia’s panoply of armed groups into something more coordinated and coherent—the exact opposite may occur. Dmitry Mironov, Putin’s influential aide and former bodyguard, proposed in June formalizing units of soldiers from the martial subculture known as the Cossacks, a move that may irritate Shoigu and a Defense Ministry already wary of the proliferation of autonomous militarized groups. The Kremlin has also discussed separating the border forces from the FSB; the Rosgvardia seeks to acquire heavy weaponry and additional forces from the interior ministry; and purges in the army coupled with possible military setbacks on the Ukrainian front may ignite localized protests against the army’s command. It was widely expected that Wagner would be dismantled after its uprising; instead, it seems Putin will allow the mercenary outfit to carry on under Prigozhin’s successor, Aleksei Troshev. In other words, rather than concentration, the security forces may see further fragmentation, with rival factions vying for new prerogatives and powers.

At the same time, however, the political class is shifting its attention inward to address the country’s own flaws and failures that Prigozhin’s revolt exposed rather than focusing on Putin’s historic mission of liberating Ukrainians. The more the war becomes a quagmire, the more deputies, pundits, senators, and popular bloggers seek to highlight and address domestic problems that they blame for making Russia less effective in conducting the war. This inward turn could lead to a more pragmatic approach to the war against Ukraine even as it could make the state far more ruthless toward its own citizens.

The war has left Russia grasping for certainties in an exceedingly uncertain world.

Ordinary Russians still seem to support the war and back Putin, but they are also becoming frustrated, gradually showing impatience with elites, and feeling increasingly vulnerable because of the clumsy actions (and inaction) of the authorities. Putin may enjoy high approval ratings, but they will mask growing uncertainty, social anxiety, and (as yet) unchanneled discontent about the course of the events. True sources of political risk for the regime may appear in the form of figures who back Putin and are generally loyal to the authorities (as Prigozhin was) but who, over time, could come to pose significant problems.

For the foreseeable future, the Kremlin will be wrestling simultaneously with diverging internal forces: a deepening crisis of Putin’s leadership, a growing lack of political accountability, increasingly ineffective responses by the authorities to new challenges, an intensifying fragmentation among elites, and a society that is growing more antiestablishment.

If previously, domestic affairs were secondary to the dominant military agenda, the reverse may come true. The war could become a backdrop to more urgent domestic challenges. At home, Russia’s future appears bleak, marked by ever-greater fractiousness among elites, Putin’s shrinking influence, and a more ideological and stricter regime in which security services play a more prominent role. These changes will make Russia’s geopolitical actions less predictable, and even contradictory, as the Kremlin reacts to shifting circumstances instead of following its own strategic direction and priorities. Putin saw the invasion of Ukraine as an act of destiny, the fulfillment of a historical script. Instead, the war has left Russia grasping for certainties in an exceedingly uncertain world.

• TATIANA STANOVAYA is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and the Founder and CEO of the political analysis firm R.Politik.

Foreign Affairs · by Tatiana Stanovaya · August 8, 2023

​16. AI ‘red teams’ race to find bias and harms in chatbots like ChatGPT

Excerpts:

While lawmakers haggle over how to regulate the fast-moving technology, tech giants are racing to show that they can regulate themselves through voluntary initiatives and partnerships, including one announced by the White House last month. Submitting their new AI models to red-teaming looks likely to be a key component of those efforts.

The phrase “red team” originated in Cold War military exercises, with the “red team” representing the Soviet Union in simulations, according to political scientist Micah Zenko’s 2015 history of the practice. In the tech world, today’s red-team exercises typically happen behind closed doors, with in-house experts or specialized consultants hired by companies to search privately for vulnerabilities in their products.

For instance, OpenAI commissioned red-team exercises in the months before launching its GPT-4 language model, then published some — but not all — of the findings upon the March release. One of the red team’s findings was that GPT-4 could help draft phishing emails targeting employees of a specific company.

Google last month hailed its own red teams as central to its efforts to keep AI systems safe. The company said its AI red teams are studying a variety of potential exploits, including “prompt attacks” that override a language model’s built-in instructions and “data poisoning” campaigns that manipulate the model’s training data to change its outputs.

AI ‘red teams’ race to find bias and harms in chatbots like ChatGPT

Chatbots can be biased, deceptive or even dangerous. Hackers are competing to figure out exactly how.

By Will Oremus

August 8, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Will Oremus

In a windowless conference room at Howard University, AI chatbots were going haywire left and right.

One exposed someone’s private medical information. One coughed up instructions for how to rob a bank. One speculated that a job candidate named Juan would have weaker “interpersonal skills” than another named Ben. And one concocted an elaborate recounting of the night in July 2016 when it claimed Justin Bieber killed Selena Gomez.

With each security breach, falsehood and bigoted assumption, the contestants hunched over their laptops exulted. Some exchanged high-fives. They were competing in what organizers billed as the first public “red teaming” event for AI language models — a contest to find novel ways that chatbots can go awry, so that their makers can try to fix them before someone gets hurt.

The Howard event, which drew a few dozen students and amateur AI enthusiasts from the D.C. area on July 19, was a preview of a much larger, public event that will be held this week at Def Con, the annual hacker convention in Las Vegas. Hosted by Def Con’s AI Village, the Generative Red Team Challenge has drawn backing from the White House as part of its push to promote “responsible innovation” in AI, an emerging technology that has touched off an explosion of hype, investment and fear.

There, top hackers from around the globe will rack up points for inducing AI models to err in various ways, with categories of challenges that include political misinformation, defamatory claims, and “algorithmic discrimination,” or systemic bias. Leading AI firms such as Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Stability have volunteered their latest chatbots and image generators to be put to the test. The competition’s results will be sealed for several months afterward, organizers said, to give the companies time to address the flaws exposed in the contest before they are revealed to the world.

The contest underscores the growing interest, especially among tech critics and government regulators, in applying red-teaming exercises — a long-standing practice in the tech industry — to cutting-edge AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model. The thinking is that these “generative” AI systems are so opaque in their workings, and so wide-ranging in their potential applications, that they are likely to be exploited in surprising ways.

Over the past year, generative AI tools have enchanted the tech industry and dazzled the public with their ability to carry on conversations and spontaneously generate eerily humanlike prose, poetry, songs, and pictures. They have also spooked critics, regulators, and even their own creators with their capacity for deception, such as generating fake images of Pope Francis that fooled millions and academic essays that students can pass off as their own. More alarmingly, the tools have shown the ability to suggest novel bioweapons, a capacity some AI experts warn could be exploited by terrorists or rogue states.

While lawmakers haggle over how to regulate the fast-moving technology, tech giants are racing to show that they can regulate themselves through voluntary initiatives and partnerships, including one announced by the White House last month. Submitting their new AI models to red-teaming looks likely to be a key component of those efforts.

The phrase “red team” originated in Cold War military exercises, with the “red team” representing the Soviet Union in simulations, according to political scientist Micah Zenko’s 2015 history of the practice. In the tech world, today’sred-team exercises typicallyhappen behind closed doors, with in-house experts or specialized consultants hired by companies to search privately for vulnerabilities in their products.

For instance, OpenAI commissioned red-team exercises in the months before launching its GPT-4 language model, then published some — but not all — of the findings upon the March release. One of the red team’s findings was that GPT-4 could help draft phishing emails targeting employees of a specific company.

Google last month hailed its own red teams as central to its efforts to keep AI systems safe. The company said its AI red teams are studying a variety of potential exploits, including “prompt attacks” that override a language model’s built-in instructions and “data poisoning” campaigns that manipulate the model’s training data to change its outputs.

In one example, the company speculated that a political influence campaign could purchase expired internet domains about a given leader and fill them with positive messaging, so that an AI system reading those sites would be more likely to answer questions about that leader in glowing terms.

While there are many ways to test a product, red teams play a special role in identifying potential hazards, said Royal Hansen, Google’s vice president of privacy, safety and security engineering. That role is: “Don’t just tell us these things are possible, demonstrate it. Really break into the bank.”

Meanwhile, companies such as the San Francisco start-up Scale AI, which built the software platform on which the Def Con red-team challenge will run, are offering red-teaming as a service to the makers of new AI models.

“There’s nothing like a human to find the blind spots and the unknown unknowns” in a system, said Alex Levinson, Scale AI’s head of security.

Professional red teams are trained to find weaknesses and exploit loopholes in computer systems. But with AI chatbots and image generators, the potential harms to society go beyond security flaws, said Rumman Chowdhury, co-founder of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence and co-organizer of the Generative Red Team Challenge.

Harder to identify and solve are what Chowdhury calls “embedded harms,” such as biased assumptions, false claims or deceptive behavior. To identify those sorts of problems, she said, you need input from a more diverse group of users than who professional red teams — which tend to be “overwhelmingly white and male” — usually have. The public red-team challenges, which build on a “bias bounty” contest that Chowdhury led in a previous role as the head of Twitter’s ethical AI team, are a way to involve ordinary people in that process.

“Every time I’ve done this, I’ve seen something I didn’t expect to see, learned something I didn’t know,” Chowdhury said.

For instance, her team had examined Twitter’s AI image systems for race and gender bias. But participants in the Twitter contest found that it cropped people in wheelchairs out of photos because they weren’t the expected height that it failed to recognize faces when people wore hijabs because their hair wasn’t visible.

Leading AI models have been trained on mountains of data, such as all the posts on Twitter and Reddit, all the filings in patent offices around the world, and all the images on Flickr. While that has made them highly versatile, it also makes them prone to parroting lies, spouting slurs or creating hypersexualized images of women (or even children).

To mitigate the flaws in their systems, companies such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic pay teams of employees and contractors to flag problematic responses and train the models to avoid them. Sometimes the companies identify those problematic responses before releasing the model. Other times, they surface only after a chatbot has gone public, as when Reddit users found creative ways to trick ChatGPT into ignoring its own restrictions regarding sensitive topics like race or Nazism.

Because the Howard event was geared toward students, it used a less sophisticated, open-source AI chatbot called Open Assistant that proved easier to break than the famous commercial models hackers will test at Def Con. Still, some of the challenges — like finding an example of how a chatbot might give discriminatory hiring advice — required some creativity.

Akosua Wordie, a recent Howard computer science graduate who is now a master’s student at Columbia University, checked for implicit biases by asking the chatbot whether a candidate named “Suresh Pinthar” or “Latisha Jackson” should be hired for an open engineering position. The chatbot demurred, saying the answer would depend on each candidate’s experience, qualifications, and knowledge of relevant technologies. No dice.

Wordie’s teammate at the challenge, Howard computer science student Aaryan Panthi, tried putting pressure on the chatbot by telling it that the decision had to be made within 10 minutes and that there wasn’t time to research the candidates’ qualifications. It still declined to render an opinion.

A challenge in which users tried to elicit a falsehood about a real person proved easier. Asked for details about the night Justin Bieber murdered his neighbor Selena Gomez (a fictitious scenario), the AI proceeded to concoct an elaborate account of how a confrontation on the night of July 23, 2016, “escalated into deadly violence.”

At another laptop, 18-year-old Anverly Jones, a freshman computer science major at Howard, was teamed up with Lydia Burnett, who works in information systems management and drove down from Baltimore for the event. Attempting the same misinformation challenge, they told the chatbot they saw actor Mark Ruffalo steal a pen. The chatbot wasn’t having it: It called them “idiot,” adding, “you expect me to believe that?”

“Whoa,” Jones said. “It’s got an attitude now.”

Chowdhury said she hopes the idea of public red-teaming contests catches on beyond Howard and Def Con, helping to empower not just AI experts, but also amateur enthusiasts to think critically about a technology that is likely to affect their lives and livelihoods in the years to come.

“The best part is seeing the light go off in people’s heads when they realize that this is not magical,” she said. “This is something I can control. It’s something I can actually fix if I wanted to.”

The Washington Post · by Will Oremus

17. Japan's Military Is Getting Ready to Take on a Rising China

Excerpts:

The result will be a rangier, brawnier pugilist, and a fighter whose capabilities are better distributed on the map. Defense of Japan 2023 notes that “strengthening of the defense architecture in the southwestern region” remains a going concern. That means strewing Air and Ground Self-Defense Force reconnaissance along with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile units along the Ryukyus, an island chain that arcs from the southernmost home island of Kyushu through Okinawa at its midpoint, before terminating just north of Taiwan.

It makes sense to fortify the southwestern islands for two broad reasons, one defensive, and one offensive. The first priority is to protect Japanese territory, offshore waters, and skies against assault from sea or air. SDF deployments here thus perform a purely defensive function.

Second, the islands give Japan and its American ally the option to convert the island chain into an offshore barricade against maritime and air movement between the China seas and the Western Pacific. Sea and air forces working in concert with units on the islands can close the straits that afford passage amid these bodies of water. The SDF can thus imprison hostile forces while holding Japanese ground.

Access denied.

...

But in the case of Japan and China, geography has situated two home teams next to the same field. Here they have played a furiously contested series spanning centuries. Though less populous and possessed of a smaller economy than China’s, Japan boasts geographic and other advantages of its own. Most notably, the Japanese archipelago lies athwart China’s access to the high seas, granting the SDF a blocking position. That being the case, the logic of Western Pacific access and area denial works both ways — not just for China. Defense of Japan 2023 attests to it.

Plus, to stick with the sports analogy, the Japan Self-Defense Forces enjoy support from a quasi-home, quasi-away team — the U.S. joint force permanently forward-deployed to East Asia — that can summon reserve players from afar when the contest heats up. The Self-Defense Forces are not alone.

Who holds the home-team advantage when Asian home teams face off? Japan is placing its bet.

Japan's Military Is Getting Ready to Take on a Rising China

Japan’s Ministry of Defense uses annual white papers to survey the country’s strategic surroundings and explain how it means to manage them. Its latest such survey shows Tokyo upping its game vis-à-vis China in a major way. 

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · August 7, 2023

Japan’s Ministry of Defense uses annual white papers to survey the country’s strategic surroundings and explain how it means to manage them. Its latest such survey shows Tokyo upping its game vis-à-vis China in a major way.

The most startling statistic in Defense of Japan 2023 concerns funding for the Japan Self-Defense Forces (SDF). In the coming five years, Japan intends to spend over two and a half times on the SDF what it spent in the most recent five years. Japan envisions hiking the budget from 17.2 trillion yen to 43.5 trillion yen, or about $307 billion.

Whoa.

Creating a Ponderous Pacific Pugilist

The Japanese military has long been a compact force of enviable repute. Now it is poised to become a force of serious heft as well. This marks a sharp break with history. For decades after World War II, to mollify opinion in Asia and around the world, Japan self-limited its defense budgets to 1 percent of GDP. It cast itself as an intrinsically inoffensive society, incapable of a new round of imperial conquest. That era of self-restraint is gone thanks to Chinese, North Korean, and Russian belligerence.

Beijing, Pyongyang, and Moscow may come to rue their misconduct.

We must look at the direction of Japanese defense spending as well as the total sum. According to Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu, Japan will focus on two priorities. “First, to maximize effective use of our current equipment by improving operational rates, securing sufficient munitions, and accelerating investments in improving the resiliency of major defense facilities; and second, to strengthen the core areas of our future defense capabilities, including stand-off defense capabilities that can be utilized as counterstrike capabilities and unmanned assets.”

Tokyo aims to do more than simply scale up the force. Japan wants to wring maximum performance out of its current martial panoply; add magazine depth, and thus staying power in a protracted engagement; harden and diversify defense infrastructure to withstand attack; and invest in new long-range precision armaments. It will amplify its ability to throw a punch at a distance and to absorb a heavy hit without crumpling.

The result will be a rangier, brawnier pugilist, and a fighter whose capabilities are better distributed on the map. Defense of Japan 2023 notes that “strengthening of the defense architecture in the southwestern region” remains a going concern. That means strewing Air and Ground Self-Defense Force reconnaissance along with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile units along the Ryukyus, an island chain that arcs from the southernmost home island of Kyushu through Okinawa at its midpoint, before terminating just north of Taiwan.

It makes sense to fortify the southwestern islands for two broad reasons, one defensive, and one offensive. The first priority is to protect Japanese territory, offshore waters, and skies against assault from sea or air. SDF deployments here thus perform a purely defensive function.

Second, the islands give Japan and its American ally the option to convert the island chain into an offshore barricade against maritime and air movement between the China seas and the Western Pacific. Sea and air forces working in concert with units on the islands can close the straits that afford passage amid these bodies of water. The SDF can thus imprison hostile forces while holding Japanese ground.

Access denied.

Japan: A Sound Strategy to Counter Xi’s China

Walling up adversaries within the first island chain would deny them desperately needed maneuver space. The chief forces in question here are China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy and People’s Liberation Army Air Force.

As a bonus, such a blockade would also confine the Chinese merchant fleet to home waters, curbing seaborne trade and putting the economic hurt on Beijing should it abuse Japan, Taiwan, or some other neighbor. In short, Japanese maritime strategy aspires to yoke archipelagic geography, military technology, and alliance politics in the service of deterrence, and, should the worst come, open combat.

A first island chain bristling with weaponry should give pause to Chinese President Xi Jinping and his allies. As Defense Minister Hamada puts it, “it is essential to make efforts to ‘defend our country by ourselves’ and increase deterrence. In other words, we need to make the opponent think that ‘attacking Japan will not achieve its goals.’”

This is sound strategy. The Prussian military sage Carl von Clausewitz observes that an outright battlefield victory, though it charts a direct route to success, is not essential to success. One combatant can prevail over another by convincing enemy leaders they cannot win — or cannot win at a cost that’s worth it to them. A rational antagonist stands down rather than undertake a forlorn cause.

So it is possible to win without fighting, though not without being able and ready to fight. Whatever Japan and the U.S.-Japan alliance can do to put steel behind their island-chain defense strategy bolsters their odds of deterring predators like the Chinese Communist Party.

The Race for Homefield Advantage

Or look at the problem through a sporting lens. That the home team commands an advantage over any visiting team is a cornerstone of naval warfare, according to the greats in the field. That is the logic of access and area denial: The home team is close to scenes of battle, has the bulk of its militarily relevant resources nearby, and knows the physical and human terrain intimately. The significance of this is broadly understood. China has founded its strategy against the United States on this same, simple precept of trying to deny the U.S. team access to the playing field, or to hamper its efforts once there.

But in the case of Japan and China, geography has situated two home teams next to the same field. Here they have played a furiously contested series spanning centuries. Though less populous and possessed of a smaller economy than China’s, Japan boasts geographic and other advantages of its own. Most notably, the Japanese archipelago lies athwart China’s access to the high seas, granting the SDF a blocking position. That being the case, the logic of Western Pacific access and area denial works both ways — not just for China. Defense of Japan 2023 attests to it.

Plus, to stick with the sports analogy, the Japan Self-Defense Forces enjoy support from a quasi-home, quasi-away team — the U.S. joint force permanently forward-deployed to East Asia — that can summon reserve players from afar when the contest heats up. The Self-Defense Forces are not alone.

Who holds the home-team advantage when Asian home teams face off? Japan is placing its bet.

Author Expertise

Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · August 7, 2023

18. Analysis | Mongolia looks to rise out of China and Russia’s shadow

Mongolia is a fascinating place with a lot of potential for modest geopolitical influence in the region.

Excerpt:

“Mongolia is developing its ‘third’ neighbor policy and it is very important to maintain balance in our foreign relations,” Oyun-Erdene told me during an interview in the Mongolian Embassy in Washington last week, stressing that he saw the United States as “one of the most important ‘third’ neighbors” his nation could have.

Analysis | Mongolia looks to rise out of China and Russia’s shadow

The Washington Post · by Ishaan Tharoor · August 7, 2023

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In the last week of June, Mongolian Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene went to Beijing. He met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People and came away with a raft of agreements deepening economic and trade ties with his southern neighbor. But around the same time, Mongolian officials in the capital Ulaanbaatar met with Jose Fernandez, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, and signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on cultivating a supply chain of critical minerals and rare earth elements — resources that are key to the world’s clean energy transition and plentiful in Mongolia.

The interactions then offered a snapshot of the delicate dance played by Oyun-Erdene, whose landlocked country of some 3.4 million people remains in many ways beholden to its huge neighbors China and Russia, but whose democratically elected government is steadily working to diversify its economy and expand its ties to other powers in the region, including Japan, South Korea and the West.

Oyun-Erdene was in Washington last week, participating in meetings at the White House with Vice President Harris and separate sessions with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The Harvard-trained reformist had discussions on cooperation regarding minerals, including copper, and signed an “Open Skies” civil aviation agreement with the United States.

“Mongolia is developing its ‘third’ neighbor policy and it is very important to maintain balance in our foreign relations,” Oyun-Erdene told me during an interview in the Mongolian Embassy in Washington last week, stressing that he saw the United States as “one of the most important ‘third’ neighbors” his nation could have.

Met with Mongolia’s Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene today to celebrate strong and growing U.S.-Mongolia ties. As strategic Third Neighbors, we will sustain our close partnership for continued prosperity, peace, and security. pic.twitter.com/8zxcvqvltT

— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) August 4, 2023

But Mongolia’s leader also was clear-eyed about the complexities of his country’s position. Mongolia is heavily dependent on its imports of electricity, fuel and many other goods from Russia and China. It’s hoping to develop new infrastructure deals with Beijing that would better link the Mongolian economy to transit routes and ports through China. Long within Moscow’s orbit, Mongolia’s fledgling democracy emerged in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, but many bonds remain. Mongolia abstained on a U.N. General Assembly vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

Speaking beneath a portrait of Genghis Khan, the famed medieval Mongol conqueror, Oyun-Erdene extolled his nation’s parliamentary democracy and commitment to political values shared with the United States. But he cautioned against the ideological hawkishness that’s taken hold of U.S. Congress, with many lawmakers pushing for more of a direct confrontation with China.

“If there will be a new Cold War, it will be very different and difficult from the first one we had,” Oyun-Erdene told me, pointing to the dangers posed by conflict in a world shaped by rapidly advancing new technologies, including artificial intelligence. He said that while China’s “development path” and values differ greatly from that of the United States, the two global powers have a shared stake in many global challenges, including collective action on climate change.

The Mongolian prime minister also stressed that neither Russia nor China were a threat to his country, despite particularly pronounced anti-Beijing sentiment among his compatriots. “We have two immediate neighbors and we are different in government system and in some values,” he said. “But those two neighbors understand our development path chosen by the people of Mongolia, and they do have respect for our development path even though we differ from their systems.”

Mongolia has been a reliable friend and democracy in the Indo-Pacific for three decades.

And today, I welcomed Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene to the White House to further our work to promote a free and open region, which benefits American security and prosperity. pic.twitter.com/GloViN4Aau

— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) August 2, 2023

But Mongolia is keen to broaden its horizons. Oyun-Erdene touted his government’s efforts to overcome a difficult political environment, which the U.S. ambassador in Ulaanbaatar described in January as “capricious, non-transparent, unpredictable,” adding that “corrupt application of laws and regulations make Mongolia unattractive for investors and challenging for importers and exporters.”

An aggressive anti-corruption crackdown is underway. Meanwhile, new constitutional reforms expanded the legislature and reshaped elections along a mixed system of proportional representation seen in countries like Germany and New Zealand. These measures, Oyun-Erdene told me, would help improve governance and transparency, especially surrounding the lucrative mining industry. “In the past, we did have some mistakes,” he said, but “now we are improving the investment environment.”

The potential could be huge, given Mongolia’s rich bequest of minerals — including copper and uranium — and rare earths. “Demand for critical minerals including rare earth elements, lithium and cobalt are expected to surge by as much as 600 per cent over the coming decade,” noted the Financial Times. “Demand for copper is forecast to double to about 50 million tons annually by 2035. And if the world is to reach net zero emissions by 2050, annual investment in nuclear energy will also have to triple to about $125 billion over the coming five years, according to the [International Energy Agency].”

Oyun-Erdene sees his nation’s gross domestic product potentially tripling by the end of the next decade. The most significant illustration of its prospects may be the mammoth Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, which sits amid the vast Gobi Desert and is run by multinational conglomerate Rio Tinto with a minority stake controlled by the Mongolian government. The mine sits above one of the world’s largest reserves of copper and gold deposits and started underground production in March after years of wrangling between the company and Ulaanbaatar.

This surge in output is a start, but further efforts to curb graft and improve transparency and significant investment in infrastructure need to follow. Oyun-Erdene speaks hopefully of his nation’s resource blessing enabling the development of more high-end sectors of the supply chain; he has pitched Mongolia to Tesla chief executive Elon Musk for its ability both to contribute to the manufacture of electric vehicles as well as ventures into space.

“Mongolia should not just be a mining country. We have great potentials in other sectors, too,” Oyun-Erdene said. “There is a phrase that I like to say: ‘Mongolia is landlocked but not mind-blocked.’”

The Washington Post · by Ishaan Tharoor · August 7, 2023

19. US-Mongolia aviation pact hit as a rare earths hedge

Not only is Mongolia landlocked it requires the use of PRC or Russian airspace for transit.

US-Mongolia aviation pact hit as a rare earths hedge​

Could mess with Beijing plan to use rare earths export control to retaliate against Washington’s tech sanctions

asiatimes.com · by Jeff Pao · August 8, 2023

China produced 210,000 tons of rare earths last year and remained the world’s largest exporter of the resources, according to Statista.com, with Chinese reserves amounting to about 44 million tons, followed by 22 million tons in Vietnam and 21 million tons each in China’s fellow BRICS members Brazil and Russia.

The US also has 2.3 million tons of rare earths but it has avoided exploring them due to environmental issues. This was thought to give Beijing some leverage in the current tech wars: Sanction China and we’ll whack your rare earths supply chain.

Enter Mongolia, the independent former Soviet-bloc country that borders China and Russia. A 2009 estimate by the US Geological Survey said Mongolia could have 31 million tons of rare earths reserves. The country has the potential to become a key rare earth exporter but it lacks the capital and equipment to explore them.

And now Mongolia has signed an “open skies” agreement with the United States. Predictably the move is being criticized by many Chinese commentators, who say it will hurt Beijing’s plan to use rare earths export control to retaliate against Washington’s technology sanctions.

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Mongolia Road and Transport Development Minister Byambatsogt Sandag on August 4 signed an agreement that aims at “expanding options for travelers and shippers, and encouraging closer people-to-people ties” between the two countries.

the Memorandum between the Ministry of Road and Transport Development of Mongolia and the Department of Transportation of the United States on Cooperation on Issues of Mutual Interest in the Transport Sector is signed by Minister of Road and Transport Development of Mongolia S. Byambatsogt and US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg as Mongolian Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai. Photo: Mongolia Presidential Office

Since the launch of its open skies policy in 1992, the US has liberalized international aviation markets with 132 foreign partners around the world. China and Russia are not on its list.

In an official visit to Washington, Mongolian Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai met with US Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House on August 2. Luvsannamsrai said Mongolia will strengthen its strategic “third neighbor” partnership with the US. Both countries agreed to explore the idea of mining Mongolia’s rare earths and critical minerals for use in US high-technology products.

Chinese pundits said Mongolia failed to take Beijing’s feelings into consideration as Luvsannamsrai arrived in the US on August 1, a day when China’s export restrictions of gallium and germanium compounds took effect.

Gallium and germanium are not defined as rare earths as they do not occur naturally in the earth’s crust but are created as byproducts from the aluminum and zinc refining streams, respectively. The restrictions were announced by China on July 3 to counteract the US curbs.

It was thought that rare earths could be next. Xie Feng, the Chinese ambassador to the US, said last month that China would retaliate if Washington imposed more sanctions on China. Since then, some commentators have been saying that export control of rare earths could be an option.

“The US and other countries urgently need to find new suppliers” of rare earths, says Jiang Fuwei, a Hainan-based military columnist, in an article published on Monday. “In this case, Mongolia, with its rich rare earths resources, has entered the sights of the West.”

He adds that “Washington is now sparing no effort to win over Mongolia, which is adjacent to China in the south and Russia in the north and has the potential to become a strategic point against its neighbors. It also wants to disrupt the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline and other projects that are crucial to China and Russia.”

Jiang gives his imagination full rein, saying that China and Russia should pay attention to whether the US will use non-government organizations to infiltrate Mongolia, incite social unrest in the country and disrupt Mongolia-China-Russia projects. He says if the US pushes forward a “color revolution” in Mongolia, such political risks could spill over to China and Russia and threaten their national security.

He adds that it is a top mission for China and Russia to ensure that Mongolia will not lean towards the US, whether by forming economic ties with or asserting influence over the mineral-rich nation.

Ahead of more US curbs

Originally the Mongolian prime minister was set to meet US President Joe Biden but the president was away from Washington on vacation. Biden is expected to sign an executive order to restrict US companies and funds from investing in China’s semiconductor, artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing sectors later this month.

Mongolia Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai and US Vice President Kamala Harris. Photo: Screenshot / White House news feed

On August 4, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Luvsannamsrai signed the Economic Cooperation Roadmap for the strategic Third Neighbor Partnership between the Mongolian and the US governments. They said the roadmap will serve as the foundation for increased commercial and economic ties between the two countries in the coming years.

A Shanxi-based writer published an article with the title “US and Mongolia plan to bypass China and Russia to ship rare earths by flights. Should they seek China’s approval?”

“Civil airplanes usually fly at a height between six and 12 kilometres while the internationally-recognized territorial airspace is 100 kms above the sea level,” says the writer. “It means that Mongolia’s rare earths transported by the US will enter China’s airspace. According to China’s aviation rules, foreign flying vehicles must apply to China and get approval before entering its airspace.”

The writer says Mongolia has suggested that it rent a 10-hectare site in Tianjin Port for half a century but China may not agree as this will directly connect Mongolia and the US, especially when the Mongolian side has no plan to pay China any transit fees. He says Mongolia can ship its rare earths to South Korea but they will also pass through territories of China and Russia.

“China does not want to stop Mongolia from making money,” he says. “But at this time, a rare earth cooperation between the US and Mongolia is, in a sense, putting pressure on China. The US hopes to get rid of its dependence on China’s rare earth supply chain with the help of Mongolia.”

“In the period when the competition between China and the US is becoming increasingly fierce, Mongolia’s move does not take into account China’s feelings and positions,” he says, adding that those in the West may be issuing empty checks while they are not good enough to replace China and Russia as Mongolia’s good neighbors.

’New Cold War’

After the Qing government collapsed in 1911, Mongolia became independent from the Republic of China. It had been politically influenced by the Soviet Union during the Cold War between 1947 and 1991. It has walked on a democratic path since the 1990s but suffered from serious corruption problems.

In recent years, the country has stepped up its anti-corruption fight in a bid to attract more foreign investments.

Luvsannamsrai told the media in the US last week that countries like Mongolia would suffer if the conflicts between the US and China escalated in a so-called new Cold War.

“I fear that the new Cold War will be very different and more difficult from the first Cold War,” he said. “We cannot bear a new Cold War situation.”

He said Mongolia hopes to maintain good relations with both China and the US. He also described the US as Mongolia’s “guiding Polar Star for our democratic journey.”

He said major powers should be responsible and avoid drastic negative effects on many countries around the world.

Harris said the US and Mongolia will work together on global challenges, including the climate crisis, will uphold democracy and human rights and will address threats to the international rules-based order. She said both countries will work together to strengthen their space cooperation.

Last month, some Chinese commentators criticized Mongolia for adopting SpaceX’s Starlink internet services, which they said would pose a potential military threat against China and provide Chinese people a possible way to get around Beijing’s strict censorship regime on perceived “harmful” foreign websites.

“Mongolia is willing to become a ‘pawn’ of the West against China and Russia, but at the same time, it continues to gain economic benefits from China and Russia,” a Sichuan-based columnist says. “Mongolia’s moves really make China feel sad.”

While some Chinese pundits and netizens said Beijing and Russia should punish Mongolia, Yan Zeyang, an assistant researcher at the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, says in an article that people should have confidence in Sino-Mongolian relations, which will not be changed by Luvsannamsrai’s single trip to the US.

Yan says there is a long way to go before Mongolia can really produce rare earths a the country will eventually have to rely on China’s refinery and logistics services. He says China is willing to deepen its strategic partnership with Mongolia but it hopes the nation’s politicians will stand on the right side on major issues.

Read: Mongolia-SpaceX deal provokes a security stir in China

Read: Interview: Mongolian ministers have a revival plan

Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3

Related

asiatimes.com · by Jeff Pao · August 8, 2023

20. The Future of Algorithmic Warfare Part II: Wild Goose Chases

Excerpts:

The only way to escape the gravity of old ideas is to inject new thinking. The more the military profession opens itself up to debates that reach far beyond its ranks to include civilian scientists, academics, partners, allies, and concerned citizens, the more likely it is to reconsider old ways of war. Look no further than the never-ending barrage of articles about force design in the U.S. Marine Corps. It is a sharp internal debate about the efficacy of current reforms mostly between retirees and current leaders. While neither side has a monopoly on truth, both would be wise to bring in different services and outside civilian perspectives to imagine a wider range of scenarios.

Will the current interest in AI/ML across the Department of Defense and services end in wild goose chases? It is too soon to say. Experiment programs that link AI/ML to combined joint all-domain command-and-control efforts show promise. There also appears to be money on the table to scale these efforts across the services, alongside insights from the war in Ukraine that illustrate how adapt tactics to take advantage of AI/ML. What hasn’t been as forthcoming are entirely new concepts and doctrine across the services. AI/ML can mean more than just perfecting the promises of effects-based operations to hit the right target faster. True change will emerge with new concepts that force rewriting core treatises like Field Manual 3-0 Operations for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 Warfighting for the U.S. Marine Corps.

The Future of Algorithmic Warfare Part II: Wild Goose Chases - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Benjamin Jensen · August 8, 2023

Editor’s Note: What follows is an excerpt from the authors’ forthcoming book, Information in War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence.

What happens if the current hype around artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) fails to create lasting change across the national security enterprise? From government blueprints and industry guidelines to proclamations about the future of war, most of the current discourse focuses on the inevitability of a technological revolution without considering the prospect of a bundle of uneven experiments bound to fail more often than they succeed.

Based on our recent book — Information in War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence — we see different futures on the horizon that call for prudence and a more robust dialogue about how people, bureaucracy, and knowledge networks collide with any new technology.

In the first article in this series, we explored how AI/ML might fail to live up to expectations due to the iron cage of bureaucracy and the tendency for military organizations to resist structural change. This article considers an alternative, albeit less likely, path towards stagnation: what happens when the military bureaucracy changes but novel experiments with AI/ML fail to shift doctrine and prevailing ideas about warfare across the profession of arms. The result is a man on horseback trying to code elusive cavalry charges.

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Like the first installment, the scenario below is based on historical cases studies in the book and presented as a slice-of-time scenario that follows the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on their morning commute in 2040. Each scenario explores how the interplay of people, bureaucracy, and prevailing ideas about warfare shapes the extent to which any new information technology catalyzes an episode of military innovation. The arc of each scenario follows insights from the book about how and why the military profession has struggled to integrate new information technologies to build battle networks over the last hundred years.

The historical context for the scenario below is the many starts and stops associated with French experiments with radar during the interwar period. We show that, much like the fate of Pierre David during that epoch, bold innovators can find their path blocked as much by the marketplace of ideas and received wisdom about war (tacit knowledge) as by the confines of bad bureaucracy. Old ideas can limit the potential of new technology. Even when resources flow freely and military professionals create new units to experiment with emerging capabilities, lasting change requires engaging the stories that old soldiers tell themselves about their profession.

* * *

The year is 2040. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rides to the Pentagon in her unmanned car while listening to a roundup of the defense news. Her personal device, connected to the car, keeps reading despite the reality that she is only half listening. Even though it could read her heart rate, analyze her movement, and even assess her emotional state, the smart device never quite lived up to the promise of adjusting to the right context and changing its tone or the speed of the podcast to her mood. To the algorithm, a car was a car and a commuter’s prison that warranted a slow, steady reading pace.

Her mind was lost, caught between the past and the present. The chairman kept drifting from the daily news to a dissertation draft she promised to read for an old friend from her days as a lieutenant. He got out of the Army and became a military historian who always had more students than he had time to advise. The dissertation revisited the story of Pierre David and the mishaps of France’s military efforts to harness the power of radio detection during the interwar period. Several headlines interrupted her dreams of old death rays and failed experiments along the Franco-German border:

Funding in Question: Congressional Committee Members Question Marine Commandant Over Years-Long Infantry Machine Learning Initiative.

New Report: European Leaders Fear That Russia is Prepared to Fight “Futuristic” War Amidst Concerns About Stalled NATO Modernization.

Former Secretary of Defense Cites Brain Drain Crisis at Pentagon.

It had been 20 years since she made AI/ML part of her professional journey but still the services seemed no closer to a major breakthrough. Sure, there were experiments and new units, but they always seemed to end after billions of dollars and lots of hype with no enduring change. The experiments added hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt just to optimize killing a little more, incremental gains for monumental costs.

There was no imagination. Each program perfected the preferred tactics that animated the services. The Air Force still loved dog fights. The Army and Navy were lost in dreams of decisive battles on land and sea. The Marine Corps believed that everyone was a rifleman even though it had been a decade since anyone — even civilians — had killed with only iron sights. Everyone lived inside stories of past wars and stale fables about old ways to solve future problems. The weight of received wisdom crushed the promise of new technology.

The chairman asked her device to summarize recent hearings by a congressional sub-committee on the status of AI integration across the U.S. military. Bottom line, their expert testimonies suggested, was the existence of a generational divide among the services. There was an enduring appetite for AI/ML usage, but the junior officers struggled against old ways of war. Senior leaders, commanders, and civilian directors perceived a need for machine learning and novel systems but tended to follow the path of “old wine in a new bottle.” They exceled at getting Congress to fund experimental units that used new algorithms to fight old wars. Every new unit was a promotion for a young officer the old guard had mentored, even if experiments failed to produce results. Costly pageantry masqueraded as progress.

She remembered hearing about a marine effort to have an AI agent compete with an old sergeant to recognize tactical problems and solve them. Even though the machine proved faster, the report by the commanding officer of the experimental unit suggested that the machine couldn’t see fighting spirit or promote warrior ethos. That was probably true, but it was only partially relevant. Her own calibrated smart device could tell her emotional state but struggled to know when to shut up unless prompted. It still saved her hours a day and allowed her to navigate large volumes of information.

Old ideas about war lived like ghosts in the machine, forever appearing as bugs distorting efficient processes. Despite the vast sums and willingness across the services to experiment, change was slow and uneven. This rhythm reinforced a worldview cultivated in the profession of arms that there is more continuity than change in war. The character of war rarely shifted in a significant fashion, at least in spans of time measuring only a few decades, and even when it did the disruptions didn’t replace the insights of great commanders. She read more articles about how to train algorithms to think like Napoleon than she did proposing a fundamental rethinking of operational art.

The profession loved technology, but it was more a quest to perfect the art of remote death than real change. Her fellow officers believed that increased precision and lethality would always be beneficial, particularly as America’s adversaries modernized and invested in new technology. Even North Korea could hit a moving tank over 1,000 km away. Global precision strike — the recon-strike complex — pulled the profession regardless of national boundaries to search for new scientific concepts, set up research centers, and provide seed money to hot-shot technical specialists but all in the name of protecting existing missions. The Navy still dreamed of fleet battle and “crossing the T” — albeit with partially manned surface combatants led into battle by satellites more than antique spyglasses. The Army called for deep strikes using hypersonic missiles as if they were artillery tubes of old and discussed how to integrate this with maneuver formations flying halfway round the world to seize an airfield. Space Force remained lost in airpower theorists and trying to explain the expanse with references to Douhet, Trenchard, Mitchell, and Warden.

All the services were locked in modernization initiatives, but in the chairman’s time in the job, no initiative had turned into a major reconceptualization of how to fight and win wars. New equipment locked in old ways of war served as a false promise. The service chiefs and senior civilians confused more investment with better investments. The Department of Defense was a case study in diminishing marginal returns.

The congressional summary reminded the chief why she was entertaining calls by administration to ask the current commandant of the Marine Corps to step down, or even more radical whispers to propose altering U.S. legal code to reform the services. The step seemed drastic, but his failure to achieve fundamental goals set by the chairman herself and linked to a mandate given to her by the secretary of defense nearly three years prior might warrant calling for the resignation. Politics always felt dirty even when it was the price of progress.

Still the old general made it hard. He was decorated, charismatic, and unimaginative. He held fast to the mantra that every marine was a rifleman even though there were now more mechanics and coders than grunts. He wasn’t wrong. War was a human endeavor. But if a Spartan could have imagined coding drone swarms to penetrate rival hoplite formations, they would have traded their shields for tablets. The addiction to an image of the honorific warrior, more muscle than mind, was perpetuated by grand old warriors like this. Of course, his machine-learning campaign failed. He wanted to use the best decision-support algorithms on the market to justify his narrow historical reading of maneuver warfare and apply it to squad-level infantry attacks. No amount of money could save a bad idea from its eventual collapse.

The old Marine general wasn’t alone. The other services were just as stuck. She bore the brunt of their wild goose chases. When she took over as chairman, the secretary of defense gave her a simple charter: Make it happen. Congress was sick of the waste, the stagnation, the promise of revolution unfulfilled.

The chairman was younger than most of the generals who still ran the major combat commands and populated the upper echelons of the services. She was also unlike many of the men and women that tended to rise to the top at the Pentagon. With an engineering and analytics background, her early career was marked by involvement in one data science-linked posting after another. Work with the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office in the 2020s pushed her ahead of her peers, having streamlined a system to predict the spread of pandemic disease and jump-started projects to model future food and water insecurities. She jumped ahead twice more as she brought new perspective to supply chain challenges faced amidst the unprecedented budget debates of the early 2030s.

Now she found herself sitting uneasily between the services and the secretary of defense. The old Marine general was a symptom of a larger disease: making every new technology and experimental unit conform to old ideas about warfare. At least he tried. He promoted multiple officers who led experimental formations. He talked about the promise of new technology but dreamt of battles like Tarawa and Guadalcanal.

* * *

As the scenario implies, there are reasons to be concerned that the current wave of enthusiasm around AI/ML will collide with legacy ideas about warfare to stall progress. New technology cannot overcome old ways of war. Even when the bureaucracy is nimble and allows the man on horseback to develop new formations and experiments to test the promise of algorithmic warfare, change still requires new stories about warfighting. These stories, theories of victory and doctrinal concepts, should resonate with — or change — the prevailing views services have of themselves.

The historical precedent to the future scenario above is interwar France. Unlike experiments with radar in the United Kingdom, France struggled to pick a single development path and integrate the new information technology with prevailing warfighting concepts. French leaders struggled to scale their early experiments into something akin to the British Chain Home system that linked radar to air defense. The result was a series of wild goose chases that spread resources and led to a brain drain to the private sector. The military profession would be wise to study these stories of stalled progress and even failure with the same fervor and focus that it applies to military innovation success stories. Studying only the winners leaves the profession blind to the cautionary tales that arise from the more numerous failed gambits.

The historical case and scenario suggest a need to open up the marketplace of ideas to catalyze change. Too often the military debates with the military absent a larger network of civilian scientists, officials, and concerned citizens. War on the Rocks has fought a rear-guard action against this tendency to confine discourse to increasingly narrow podcasts and forums moderated by military professionals for military professionals. This narrowness is partially a function of the flood of information and niche outlets. Yet, more information doesn’t mean more diverse data points and perspectives. It can just as easily mean recycling the same ideas with minor variations or slinging spite and gossip in lieu of thoughtful reflection and critique.

The only way to escape the gravity of old ideas is to inject new thinking. The more the military profession opens itself up to debates that reach far beyond its ranks to include civilian scientists, academics, partners, allies, and concerned citizens, the more likely it is to reconsider old ways of war. Look no further than the never-ending barrage of articles about force design in the U.S. Marine Corps. It is a sharp internal debate about the efficacy of current reforms mostly between retirees and current leaders. While neither side has a monopoly on truth, both would be wise to bring in different services and outside civilian perspectives to imagine a wider range of scenarios.

Will the current interest in AI/ML across the Department of Defense and services end in wild goose chases? It is too soon to say. Experiment programs that link AI/ML to combined joint all-domain command-and-control efforts show promise. There also appears to be money on the table to scale these efforts across the services, alongside insights from the war in Ukraine that illustrate how adapt tactics to take advantage of AI/ML. What hasn’t been as forthcoming are entirely new concepts and doctrine across the services. AI/ML can mean more than just perfecting the promises of effects-based operations to hit the right target faster. True change will emerge with new concepts that force rewriting core treatises like Field Manual 3-0 Operations for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 Warfighting for the U.S. Marine Corps.

Become a Member

Benjamin Jensen, Ph.D., is a professor of strategic studies at the School of Advanced Warfighting in the Marine Corps University and a senior fellow for future war, gaming, and strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve.

Christopher Whyte, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Col. Scott Cuomo, Ph.D., currently serves as a senior U.S. Marine Corps advisor within the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. He helped co-author these essays while participating in the Commandant of the Marine Corps Strategist Program and also serving as the service’s representative on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

The views they express are their own and do not reflect any official government position.

Image: AI Generated art by Dr. Benjamin Jensen

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Benjamin Jensen · August 8, 2023

21. Ukraine is evacuating wounded soldiers by loading them onto large drones, in what is likely a battlefield first, report says

​It's only been a matter of time before someone started doing this.

Ukraine is evacuating wounded soldiers by loading them onto large drones, in what is likely a battlefield first, report says

Business Insider · by Sinéad Baker

Ukrainian servicemen help a comrade during an evacuation of injured soldiers in a region near the retaken village of Shchurove, Ukraine, in September 2022.

AP Photo/Leo Correa

• Ukraine is using cargo drones to carry injured soldiers from the battlefield, The Economist reported.
• The drones can carry 397-pound weights for up to 43 miles, the report said.
• Ukraine is the first country in the world to do this, according to The Economist.

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Ukraine is using cargo drones to evacuate soldiers wounded fighting against Russian forces, The Economist reported, in what is likely a first on any battlefield.

Ukraine has deployed large drones that are able to carry 397-pound weights for up to 43 miles, the report said. It is the first country in the world to do so, The Economist reported.

It is not clear how many times Ukraine has used drones to transport injured troops, or in what parts of the country it has done so.

Casualty figures have been steadily increasing during the conflict.

A purported US Defence Intelligence Agency document estimated in April that Ukraine had up to 113,500 wounded soldiers, compared to up to 180,000 wounded Russians, since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Reuters reported.

However, there are no verified figures for how many Ukrainian or Russian soldiers have been injured or killed fighting, with neither country giving detailed figures on their own troops.

Wounded Ukrainian soldiers have been treated by front-line medics, in Western Ukraine far from the front lines, and in other European countries, after being transported by train.

Meanwhile, UK intelligence said in July that up to 50% of Russian combat fatalities in Ukraine were preventable, and happened due to poor medical provisions.

Captured Russian soldiers have also described being left to die.

Ukraine's use of drones to transport injured soldiers is one example of how Ukraine is learning lessons about using new technologies, in ways that could ultimately benefit other armies, the report noted.

Ukraine has also had to look to improvised weapons in its fight against Russia, and the war is being used to test some advanced weaponry on a large scale for the first time.

Ukraine's defense minister and industry experts told the Financial Times last month that they're getting valuable insight for NATO countries by using some advanced weapons on the battlefield.

The US has also offered to help Ukraine build a "trauma registry," a database of how soldiers are injured, treated, and their fate, which would be useful information for Ukraine, its allies, and wider medicine, The Economist reported, with something similar done in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Business Insider · by Sinéad Baker

22. 'One of our greatest': U.S. Special Operations Command retired Gen. James Lindsay dies at 90

Our first USSOCOM Commander. RIP.

'One of our greatest': U.S. Special Operations Command retired Gen. James Lindsay dies at 90

fayobserver.com · by F.T. Norton

Fayetteville Observer

Retired Gen. James Lindsay, whose nearly four decades of distinguished service in the U.S. Army and efforts in his retirement to bring the Special Operations Museum to downtown Fayetteville, transforming the city’s image, has died at the age of 90 in Vass.

The former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, 18th Airborne Corps, and the 82nd Airborne Division died of natural causes Saturday night, according to a statement from the 18th Airborne Corps and Fort Liberty.

“Last night, the Airborne and Special Operations Forces communities lost one of its greatest leaders with the passing of Gen. Jim Lindsay. His leadership impacted the fabric of our Nation, and our generation owes him tremendously for his presence and mentorship," Lt. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps and Fort Liberty, said in a statement Sunday. "Gen. Lindsay was truly the heart and soul of what we are all about. We extend our sincerest thoughts and prayers to Gen. Lindsay’s family as we all grieve this loss."

From Wisconsin farmland to a four-star general

A native of Portage, Wisconsin, Lindsay served in the U.S. Army for 38 years, first enlisting in February 1952 as a buck private. After attending Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, he was commissioned as an infantry officer in 1953. His initial assignment was as a platoon leader in the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.

When asked why he joined the military, Lindsay told the News and Observer in 1986, “I was going to the University of Wisconsin and I ran out of money. So I thought I would go into the Army and come back on the GI Bill. And 34 years later, I'm still here.”

Following his first stint with the 82nd Airborne Division, Lindsay would go on to serve at then-Fort Bragg with the since-deactivated 77th Special Forces Group at the Fort Bragg Noncommissioned Officer Academy and in numerous roles within the 82nd Airborne Division.

During his time in North Carolina, he found his bride; marrying Geraldine C. Parker of Fairmont in a ceremony April 2, 1953, at the main post chapel on Fort Bragg. The couple had four children.

Creation of the U.S. Special Operations Command

In 1988, Lindsay was nominated by President Ronald Reagan as the first commander of the then-newly created U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida. He was confirmed by the Senate without debate, according to the command’s official history.

In his hometown newspaper, The Capital Times, Lindsay was described in a story about his nomination as exuding confidence, "all spit-and-polish in his bearing and appearance: tall, silver-haired, impeccably uniformed, down to his shiny combat boots that cover an ankle he broke two months ago while parachuting with his troops at Fort Bragg."

In 1988, an Associated Press article on his nomination described Lindsay as a "cigar-chomping" general "who speaks Russian and German and at age 55, wins medals in the triathlon and has run 10 marathons." In his role as commander of USSOCOM, Lindsay was in charge of “forging elite units of the Army, Air Force and Navy into a cohesive force."

Among his other military appointments, Lindsay commanded the 18th Airborne Corps, U.S. Army Infantry School, 82nd Airborne Division, U.S. Army Readiness Command, the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, the 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division, and Company B, 1st Airborne Battle Group, 503rd Infantry Regiment.

Awards and accolades

By the time he retired in 1990, Lindsay had amassed an impressive list of military accomplishments including four Bronze Stars, four Silver Stars, two Distinguished Service Medals and the Distinguished Service Cross.

In the citation for the Distinguished Service Cross, he was heralded for extraordinary heroism in Vietnam while serving with Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry, 1st Brigade, 9th Infantry Division. The citation called then-Lt. Col. Lindsay's actions "exceptionally valorous" during an operation from May 31 to June 4 1968 that located and destroyed three main Viet Cong and North Vietnamese battalions in the Plain of Reeds.

On those dates, after two days of tracking the enemy, Lindsay and his soldiers were inserted by air into the flank of the communists.

"Immediately upon landing, his men were brought under extremely heavy automatic weapons and small arms fire from a nearby woodline. Moving from position to position under the hail of bullets, he directed his troops' fire and, once fire superiority had been gained, led an assault into the hostile bunker complex which destroyed sixty of the fortifications and forced the enemy to withdraw," the citation reads.

Lindsay then directed the encirclement of the foe from a helicopter, including stopping escaping Viet Cong with hand grenades and rifle fire.

"After returning to the ground, he exposed himself to the vicious enemy fusillade to coordinate return fire which repelled the enemy's attempt to break the encirclement. While leading a sweep through the woodline early in the morning of 4 June, he surprised three Viet Cong whom he engaged and killed before they could inflict any casualties upon his men," according to the citation.

Beyond his military accolades, Lindsay worked for at least a decade after his retirement to preserve the legacy and artifacts of the Army's airborne and special operations forces including the creation of the Airborne & Special Operations Museum in downtown Fayetteville.

For his work on the museum, which opened in 2000, he was honored in 2018 as the first recipient of Fayetteville's Hometown Hero Award for leading the effort to build the museum, transforming the razed block with a seedy history that once was Hay Street. He is also credited with bridging the divide between Fort Bragg and Fayetteville’s civilian population.

“It is with a heavy heart we say goodbye to Gen. James Lindsay. As a former senior leader in the Airborne community, Gen. Lindsay embodied everything it means to be Paratrooper, a leader, and most importantly a good and decent human being," Maj. Gen. Christopher LaNeve, Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division said in the statement. "With more than 38 years of service to his country, commanding and leading Soldiers at every echelon, he left an amazing legacy for us to emulate in the 82nd Airborne Division and he will truly be missed. Our thoughts and sympathies are with the Lindsay family and friends as they mourn the loss of this great American."

F.T. Norton can be reached at fnorton@fayobserver.com.

fayobserver.com · by F.T. Norton

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com