Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"In war--a country's hopes stagnate,
In war--her strong are slain.
In war--dark evils desecrate
Her council hall and fane.
In war--with wings of omen dark
Her wrongs and debts increase,
Prosperity and progress mark
The golden realm of Peace."
- Martha Lavinia Hoffman


“government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom—if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant.”
- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress


“It is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”
- George Washington, George Washington's Farewell Address



1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 28 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Remarks by President Biden on the Request to Congress for Additional Funding to Support Ukraine
3. Biden Asks Congress for $33 Billion to Support Ukraine
4. Pentagon Downplays $7B in US Military Equipment Left in Afghanistan
5. The story of Trevor Reed, the Marine veteran released in Russia prisoner swap
6. Russian spy chief says U.S., Poland plotting division of Ukraine
7. Ground-Based Intermediate-Range Missiles in the Indo-Pacific
8. Testimony on United States Special Operations Command’s efforts to sustain the readiness (SASC)
9. Russian soldier 'admits 25,900 troops have been killed in just two months of fighting' in call intercepted by Ukraine
10. America Needs a Comprehensive Compellence Strategy Against Russia
11.Russia’s Sarmat test underscores need to modernize US nuclear triad
12. The 'Mozart Group' Hopes To Save Ukrainians Trapped In A Steel Plant
13. How to Deter China from Making War
14. US Congress passes law to help Taiwan regain WHO status
15. Presidential Office slams local newspaper for slight against U.S. senator - Focus Taiwan
16. China says Nato has ‘messed up Europe’ and warns over role in Asia-Pacific
17. The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War
18. The Marine Corps' Intellectual Civil War
19. What is a ‘tactical’ nuke, and would Putin use one?
20. Going underground: Ukraine’s subterranean fighters
21. How Not to Invade a Nation





1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 28 (PUTIN'S WAR)
 RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 28
Apr 28, 2022 - Press ISW

Mason Clark, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
April 28, 5:45pm ET
Russian offensive operations in eastern Ukraine made minor advances on April 28. Russian forces attacking southwest from Izyum likely seek to bypass Ukrainian defenses on the direct road to Slovyansk. Russian forces continued shelling and minor attacks along the line of contact in eastern Ukraine but did not secure any gains in the past 24 hours. Additional Russian reinforcements continue to deploy to Belgorod to support the Izyum advance. Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol’s Azovstal Steel Plant continue to hold out against heavy Russian artillery and aerial bombardment, including the likely use of multi-ton “bunker-buster” bombs against a Ukrainian field hospital.
Ukrainian news outlet Defense Express reported on April 27 that Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov will take personal command of the Russian offensive in the Izyum direction.[1] Citing unspecified Ukrainian military sources, Defense Express stated that Gerasimov is already in-theater and will command the offensive “at the operational and tactical level” and claimed the Russian military failed to create a single command structure under Southern Military District Commander Alexander Dvornikov. ISW cannot independently confirm this report. However, ISW previously assessed that Dvornikov’s appointment as overall commander in Ukraine would not solve Russia’s command and control challenges and likely strain his span of control.[2] If confirmed, the appointment of Russia’s senior general officer to command tactical operations indicates both the importance of the Izyum drive to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the breakdown in the Russian military’s normal chain of command.
Key Takeaways
  • Russian strategic bombers likely targeted a Ukrainian field hospital in the Azovstal Steel Plant. The remaining Ukrainian defenders are likely running low on supplies.
  • Russian attacks southwest of Izyum likely seek to outflank Ukrainian defenses on the direct road to Slovyansk and have made tactical gains in the last 24 hours.
  • Russian forces continued tactical ground attacks and shelling along the entire line of contact in eastern Ukraine but did not secure any major advances.
  • Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin stated that the DNR will postpone local Victory Day celebrations planned for May 9 until “the complete victory and the expansion of the DNR" to control Donetsk Oblast, though the Kremlin remains likely to attempt to claim some sort of victory on May 9.
  • Russian forces conducted several locally successful attacks from Kherson toward Mykolaiv.
  • Russian and proxy forces continued to mobilize in Transnistria and set conditions for a false flag attack.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those 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 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.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time:
  • Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate supporting efforts);
  • Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv and Izyum;
  • Supporting effort 2—Southern axis;
  • Supporting effort 3—Sumy and northeastern Ukraine.
Main effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces increased the tempo of artillery and airstrikes against Ukrainian positions in the Azovstal facility on April 28 and directly targeted a Ukrainian field hospital.[3] Mariupol’s City Council and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that seven Russian Tu-22 strategic bombers struck the hospital with multi-ton “bunker-buster” bombs.[4] ISW cannot independently confirm this report, though Russian forces have targeted Ukrainian medical facilities and hospitals throughout the war. Azov Regiment Commander Captain Svyatoslav Palamar appealed to Kyiv “to take decisive action” against Russian forces, and Ukrainian defenders are likely running low on supplies.[5]
Russian forces are expanding occupation measures amid continuing Ukrainian partisan actions. Advisor to the Mayor of Mariupol Petro Andryushenko stated that Russian forces are posing as social services employees to collect information on Mariupol residents, and other local government sources reported that Russian forces continued widespread detentions of Ukrainian civilians.[6] The Ukrainian General Staff claimed Ukrainian Special Operations Forces and organized partisan groups destroyed a railway bridge in Yakymivka (near Melitopol) used to transit supplies from Crimea towards Mariupol on April 28, though ISW cannot independently confirm this claim.[7]

Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces continued tactical ground attacks and shelling along the entire line of contact in eastern Ukraine on April 28 but did not secure any major advances.[8] The concentrated use of artillery by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in April is one of the few major changes Russia has made to its operations compared to the early weeks of the war. Russian forces conducted a (failed) attack on Rubizhne on April 28 but largely shelled Ukrainian positions in the Severodonetsk region without conducting ground attacks.[9] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces concentrated on improving their tactical positions and preparing for offensive operations towards Lyman, 55 km west of Rubizhne.[10] Russian forces conducted several assaults west of Donetsk, attempting to advance on Solodke, Novomykhailivka, and Marinka; and Russian forces attempted to advance north of Mariupol in the area of Neskuchne and Vremivka.[11] ISW cannot confirm any territorial changes in these areas, however.
DNR Head Denis Pushilin stated on April 28 that the DNR will postpone local Victory Day celebrations planned for May 9 until “the complete victory and the expansion of the ‘DNR’ to the constitutional borders,” meaning the entirety of Donetsk Oblast.[12] Russian and proxy forces will likely continue steady offensive operations throughout May and possibly longer, though the Kremlin remains likely to attempt to claim some sort of victory on May 9.

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv and Izyum: (Russian objective: Advance southeast to support Russian operations in Luhansk Oblast; defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to the Izyum axis)
Ukrainian forces repelled continued Russian assaults west of Izyum toward Velyka Komushevkha and southwest on the road to Barvinkove. Russian forces launched assaults on Velyka Komushevkha (likely seeking to capture the south before pivoting south) and Nova Dmytrivka (on the direct road to Barvinkove).[13] Russian forces have made little progress in attacks directly southeast toward Slovyansk and will likely seek to bypass Ukrainian defenses by attacking further west. Ukrainian forces conducted a limited counterattack directly northwest of Kharkiv city on April 28, recapturing the town of Kutuzivka.[14]
Russian reinforcements and tactical missile systems continued to regroup in Belgorod on April 28. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that up to five Iskander-M ballistic missile formations are active in Belgorod Oblast, damaged Russian airborne units on the Izyum front are rotating back to Belgorod for refit, and elements of the 29th Combined Arms Army deployed to an unspecified location in Kharkiv Oblast.[15]

Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces conducted several locally successful attacks from Kherson toward Mykolaiv on April 28.[16] Russian forces captured the outskirts of Tavriyske and conducted assaults on the nearby settlements of Nova Zorya and Oleksandrivka, on the route to Mykolaiv.[17] Russian forces likely intend to capture the western border of Kherson Oblast and threaten Mykolaiv but are unlikely to be able to renew assaults on the city itself in the near future. Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks north towards Kryvyi Rih in the past 24 hours.[18]
Ukraine’s Operation Command “South” reported on April 28 that Russian forces are continuing to prepare to create a Kherson People’s Republic and intimidate the local population, though the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s local collaborationist government claimed there are no plans to hold a referendum in Kherson on April 28.[19] Russian authorities do likely intend to create some form of proxy republic in Kherson but may seek to mitigate protests and resistance from residents.

Russian and proxy forces continued to mobilize in Transnistria. The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that Transnistria is preparing to fully staff its military units and increase their readiness.[20] Ukraine’s Operational Command “South” reported on April 27-28 that Russia is “systematically” conducting provocations in Transnistria and creating the false threat of an attack from Ukraine.[21] Transnistrian President Vadim Krasnoselsky ordered Transnistria’s Ministry of Internal Affairs to “be ready for any scenario” on April 28, but (likely falsely) denied Moldovan government reports that Transnistrian authorities are preventing men of fighting age from leaving the region.[22]

Supporting Effort #3—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
Ukraine’s Border Guard Service reported Russian forces fired at border checkpoints in Chernihiv and Sumy Oblasts on April 27-28 but did not inflict any casualties.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff continued to report that Russian forces are highly unlikely to attempt a new offensive in northeastern Ukraine but are reinforcing the Russian border and are trying to fix Ukrainian reserves in place to prevent their redeployment to eastern Ukraine.[24]
Immediate items to watch
  • Russian forces attacking southeast from Izyum, west from Kreminna and Popasna, and north from Donetsk City will likely make steady but purely tactical gains against Ukrainian defenders.
  • Russian forces will likely attempt to starve out the remaining defenders of the Azovstal Steel Plant in Mariupol and will not allow trapped civilians to evacuate but may conduct costly assaults on the remaining Ukrainian defenders to claim a propaganda victory.
  • Russian forces are likely preparing to conduct renewed offensive operations to capture the entirety of Kherson Oblast in the coming days.
  • Russia may continue false-flag attacks in and around Transnistria or move to generate a more serious crisis in Transnistria and Moldova more generally.
[1] https://defence-ua dot com/army_and_war/gjerasimov_osobisto_komanduvatime_rashistami_pid_izjumom_dvornikova_vidsunuli_na_zadnij_plan-7125.html?; https://www.pravda.com dot ua/rus/news/2022/04/28/7342691/ ; https://censor dot net/ru/news/3337329/nachalnik_genshtaba_armii_rf_gerasimov_pribyl_v_izyum_smi.
[20] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/dlia-zabezpechennia-zainiatosti-naselennia-u-pmr-oholosyly-voienni-zbory.html.




2. Remarks by President Biden on the Request to Congress for Additional Funding to Support Ukraine

Excerpts:

The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen.
We either back the Ukrainian people as they defend their country or we stand by as the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression in Ukraine.
Every day — every day, the Ukrainians pay for the — a price with — and the price they pay is with their lives for this fight.


Remarks by President Biden on the Request to Congress for Additional Funding to Support Ukraine | The White House
whitehouse.gov · April 28, 2022
Roosevelt Room
11:13 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody. Good morning. I just signed a request to Congress for critical security, economic, and humanitarian assistance to help Ukraine continue to counter Putin’s aggression and — at a very pivotal moment.
We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom. And our NATO Allies, our EU partners — they’re going to pay their fair share of the costs as well, but we have to do this. We have to do our part as well, leading the Alliance.

The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen.
We either back the Ukrainian people as they defend their country or we stand by as the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression in Ukraine.
Every day — every day, the Ukrainians pay for the — a price with — and the price they pay is with their lives for this fight.
So, we need to contribute arms, funding, ammunition, and the economic support to make their courage and sacrifice have purpose so they can continue this fight and do what they’re doing.
It’s critical this funding gets approved and approved as quickly as possible.
You know, long before Russia lost i- — launched its brutal invasion, I — I made clear how the United States would respond. I predicted they would invade, and they surely did.

We said we’d not send U.S. troops to fight Russian troops in Ukraine, but we would provide robust military assistance and try to unify the Western world against Russia’s aggression.

I said I would impose powerful sanctions on Russia and that we’d destroy and develop — we’d destroy this myth that somehow they could continue to move without the rest of the world acting; that we’d deploy additional forces to defend NATO territory, particularly in the east, along the Russian and Belarus borders.
That’s exactly — that’s exactly what we said we would do, and we did.
But despite the disturbing rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin, the facts are plain for everybody to see. We’re not attacking Russia; we’re helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression.
And just as Putin chose to launch this brutal invasion, he could make the choice to end this brutal invasion.
Russia is the aggressor. No if, ands, or buts about it. Russia is the aggressor. And the world must and will hold Russia accountable.
Russia’s continued assault on — is yielding immense human costs.
We’ve seen — we’ve seen them leave behind horrifying evidence of their atrocities and war crimes in the areas they tried to control.
And as long as the assaults and atrocities continue, we’re going to continue to supply military assistance.

And I might note, parenthetically: You know, there’s a dinner this weekend to celebrate the press. Think of what the American press has done — the courage it has taken to stay in these warzones, the courage it has taken to report every single day.

I’ve always had respect for the press, but I can’t tell you how much respect I have watching — watching them in these zones where they’re under fire, risking their own lives to make sure the world hears the truth.

Imagine if we weren’t getting that information. It’d be a different world. It’d be a different circumstance.
In the past two months, Russia launched its brutal attack and has moved weapons and equipment to Ukraine at — we’ve moved — we’ve moved weapons and equipment to Ukraine at record speed.
Thanks to the aid we’ve provided, Russian forces have been forced to retreat from Kyiv. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to try to come back, but they’ve retreated thus far.
The United States alone has provided 10 anti-armor systems for every Russian tank that is in Ukraine — 10 to 1.
We’re providing Ukraine significant, timely intelligence to help them defend themselves against the Russian onslaught.
And we’re facilitating a significant flow of weapons and systems to Ukraine from our Allies and partners around the world, including tanks, artillery, and other weapons.
That support is moving with unprecedented speed.
Much — much of the new equipment we’ve announced in the past two mon- — two weeks has already gotten to Ukraine, where it can be put to direct use on the battlefield.
However, we have almost exhausted what we call — the fancy phrase — the “drawdown authority” that Congress authorized Ukraine — authorized for Ukraine in a bipartisan spending bill last month. Basically, we’re out of money.
And so, that’s why today, in order to sustain Ukraine as it — as it continues to fight, I’m sending Congress a supplemental budget request.
It’s going to keep weapons and ammunition flowing without interruption to the brave Ukrainian fighters and continue delivering economic and humanitarian assistance to the Ukrainian people.
This so-called supplemental funding addresses the needs of the Ukrainian military during the crucial weeks and months ahead. And it begins — it begins to transition to longer-term security assistance that’s going to help Ukraine deter and continue to defend against Russian aggression.
This assistance would provide even more artillery, armored vehicles, anti-armor systems, anti-air capabilities that have been used so effectively thus far on the battlefield by the Ukrainian warriors.
You know, and it’s going to deliver much-needed humanitarian assistance as well as food, water, medicines, shelter, and other aid to Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s war, and provide aid to those seeking refuge in other countries from Ukraine.
It’s also going to help schools and hospitals open. It’s going to allow pensions and social support to be paid to the Ukrainian people so they have something — something in their pocket. It’s also going to provide critical resources to address food shortages around the globe.
Ukraine — Ukraine was one of the world’s largest agriculture producers. It typically grows 10 percent of all the wheat that’s shipped around the world.
Putin has asserted sanctions are blocking food from Ukraine and Russia getting on the market — the sanctions we’ve imposed on Russia. Simply not true.
Putin’s war, not sanctions, are impacting the harvest of food and disrupting the movement of that food by land and sea to nations around the globe that need it.
This funding is going to help ease rising food prices at home as well, and abroad, caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
It’s going to help support American farmers produce more crops like wheat and oilseed, which is good for rural America, good for the American consumer, and good for the world.
And this supplemental request will use the Defense Production Act to expand domestic production and reserve — and the reserve of critical materials — materials like nickel and lithium that have been disrupted by Putin’s war in Ukraine and that are necessary to make everything from defense systems to automobiles.
And I hope Congress — I hope Congress will move on this funding quickly. I believe they will.
I want to thank Congress — Democrats and Republicans — for their support of the people of Ukraine.
And next week, I will be in Alabama to visit a Lockheed Martin plant that manufactures the Javelin anti-tank missile we’ve been sending to Ukraine, and to thank the American workers — thank them — for producing the weapons that helped stop Russia’s advances in Ukrainian cities like Kyiv.
Their hard work has played a critical role in ensuring Putin’s strategic failure in Ukraine, and they should know that we know it.
In addition to this supplemental funding, I’m also sending to Congress a comprehensive package of — that will enhance our underlying effort to accommodate [hold accountable] the Russian oligarchs and make sure we take their — take their ill-begotten gains. Ha, we’re going to “accommodate” them. We’re going to seize their yachts, their luxury homes, and other ill-begotten gains of Putin’s kleptoc- — yeah — kleptocracy and klep- — the guys who are the kleptocracies. (Laughs.) But these are bad guys.
This legislative package strengthens our law enforcement capabilities to seize property linked to Russia’s kleptocracy.
It’s going to create new, expedited procedures for forfeiture and seizure of these — of these properties. And it’s going to ensure that when the oligarchs’ assets are sold off, funds can be used directly to remedy the harm Russia caused in their help — and help build Ukraine.
Additionally, yesterday, Ru- — Russia threatened two of our Allies with a cut-off of energy supplies.
While America has ended all Russian fossil fuel imports because we are able to use our vast support — supply of power in our country, some European countries have faced more challenges in reducing their reliance on Russian fuel.
Russia has long claimed to be, quote, “the reliable source of energy” for the world. No matter what the differences are, their customers are always going to be — be in good shape.
But these actions prove that energy is not just a commodity that Russia sells to help meet other countries’ needs, but a weapon it will use to deploy against those who stand against their aggression.
So, let me be clear: We will not let Russia intimidate or blackmail their way out of these sanctions. We will not allow them to use their oil and gas to avoid consequences for their aggression.
We’re working with other nations — like Korea, Japan, Qatar, and others — to support our effort to help the European allies threatened by Russia with gas blackmail and their energy needs in other ways.
Aggression will not win. Threats will not win.
This is just another reminder of the imperative for Europe and the world to move more and more of our power needs to clean energy.
In the United States, we’re doing that right now. Last year, we developed [deployed] more solar, wind, and battery storage than any year in our history — enough to power 56 million American homes.
Earlier this month, we acted to bolster the — our reli- –the reliance on our nuclear energy facilities, which generates more than half of our carbon-free power. And we’re just getting started. I look at this as a serious problem, but also an enormous opportunity — an opportunity.
Bottom line: All these actions we’ve been taking are about the truth — this truth: Investing in Ukraine’s freedom and security is a small price to pay to punish Russian aggression, to lessen the risk of future conflicts.
You know, throughout our history, we’ve learned that when dictators do not pay the price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and engage in more aggression. They keep moving. And the costs, the threats to America and the world keep rising.
We can’t let this happen.
Our unity at home, our unity with our Allies and partners, and our unity with the Ukrainian people is sending an unmistakable message to Putin: You will never succeed in dominating Ukraine.
Finally, we’re going to continue to deliver critical support to Ukraine. We must also not let our guard down in our fight against COVID-19 at home and abroad. That’s why I’m, again, urging Congress to act on my request for $22.5 billion in emergency resources so the American people can continue to protect themselves from COVID-19.
The reason we were so successful in the past is because I was able to work with drug manufacturers to order significant quantities of material we needed ahead of time to get in the front of the line. Without additional funding, we can’t preorder the amount of vaccines we need, and we risk losing our spot in line for vaccines that target multiple variants.
We’re running out of supply for therapeutics like antiviral pills that we desperately need.
Without additional funding, we’re unable to purchase the lifesaving treatment for the American people. We’ve donated more vaccines and treatments to the world than all other nations in the world combined. If the U.S. won’t do it, no one else is really going to step up and do it.
Without additional funding, the United States won’t be able to help stop the spread around the world and close off ongoing suppor- — sources of the supply chain disruptions.
Look, let’s get both of these critical tasks done. No delays, no excuses, just action now. Now.
Thank you all. Thank you.
Q Mr. President, what’s your message to refugees on —
Q Mr. President, how worried are you — how worried are you by — go ahead. No, you go.
Q Okay.
THE PRESIDENT: Watch your head, man. You’re going to get hurt. He’s turning that camera.
Q I’m in a tight spot here, Mr. President.
Q He’s a gentleman. Mr. President, I wanted to ask what your message is to Ukrainian refugees on the southwest border and those that are trying to flee Ukraine from the violence.
THE PRESIDENT: We have made a direct means by which they can get from Europe, from Ukraine, directly to the United States, without going through the southern border. In the meantime, in the southern border, we’re trying to work through and make sure they — it’s an orderly process, they’re able to get in.
But just so you know, we have said there’s no need to go to the southern border; fly directly to the United States. We set up a mechanism whereby they can come directly with a visa.
Q Mr. President, thank you. How worried are you by a growing number of Russian comments in the media and amongst some of their officials painting this conflict as actually already a conflict between NATO, the U.S., and Russia? And they’re painting in very alarmist terms, talking of nuclear weapons, saying it’s a life-or-death struggle, et cetera.
And just separately — well, connected to that: Lavrov himself self says it’s already a proxy war — not a direct war but a proxy war. So are either of those two things true? And do they worry you, those things?
THE PRESIDENT: They’re not true. They do concern me because it shows the desperation that Russia is feeling about their abject failure in being able to do what they set out to do in the first instance.
And so, it — I think it’s more of a reflection not of the truth but of their failure. And so, instead of saying that the — the Ukrainians, equipped with some capability to resist Russian forces, are doing this, they’ve got to say — tell their people the United States and all of NATO is engaged in — in taking out Russian troops and tanks, et cetera.
So, it’s — number one, it’s an excuse for their failure. But number two, it’s also, if they really mean it, it’s — it’s — no — no one should be making idle comments about the use of nuclear weapons or the possibility that they’d use that. It’s irresponsible.
Q Mr. President, back on the border, Title 42. A number of your Democratic friends are pressuring the White House
to maintain that policy. Can you give us a straight answer on whether you’re going to — whether you’re going to heed that request or you’re going to get rid of it?
THE PRESIDENT: I can give you a straight answer. We had proposed to eliminate that policy by the end of May. The Court has said we can’t so far. And what the Court says, we’re going to do. The Court could come along and say we cannot do that, and that’s it.
Q Mr. President, you say that this is not a proxy war, but Russia clearly disagrees. They say that war means war. So how concerned are you that they may start to act accordingly, even if you disagree?
THE PRESIDENT: We are prepared for whatever they do.
Q What options do you have to ensure Poland and Bulgaria have sufficient supplies of gas?
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, as you know, Poland has indicated they have significant reserves of gas that they have planned for, as does — not as much, but as does Bulgaria. And we have worked with our allies, from Japan on, to say that we may divert our sale of the natural gas that we’re sending to those countries and divert it directly to Poland and Bulgaria.
So, I — you know, that’s the most I can tell you right now.
Q Sir, how concerned are you about a recession, given the GDP report today showed a contraction of 1.4 percent in the first quarter?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m not concerned about a recession. I mean, you’re always concerned about a recession, but the GDP, you know, fell to 1.4 percent.
But here’s the deal: We’re also had — last quarter, consumer spending and business investment and residential investment increased at significant rates, both for leisure as well as hard products, number one.
Number two, the — we are — unemployment is the lowest rate since 1970. A record 4.5 million businesses were created last year. We’re in a situation where the — you know, we have a very different view than Senator Scott and Republicans that want to raise taxes on the middle-class families and want to include half of small-business owners in that.
So, I think we’re — what you’re seeing is enormous growth in the country that was affected by everything from COVID and the COVID blockages that we — occurred along the way.
Now, you always have to be taking a look. And no one is predicting a recession now. They’re predicting — or some are predicting there may be recession in 2023. I’m concerned about it, but I know one thing: that, you know, if our Republican friends are really interested in doing something about dealing with the economic growth, they should help us continue to lower the deficit, which we’ve done last year — over $350 billion.
They should be willing to work with us to have a tax code that is actually one that works and everybody pays their fair share. And they should be in a position where you shouldn’t be raising taxes on middle-class folks. You should be raising taxes on people who everyone acknowledges — and the vast majority of Republicans — aren’t paying their fair share.
I’ve said it a hundred times: You have — you know, 50 major corporations of the Fortune 500 companies made $40 billion last year and didn’t pay single penny. No one under our proposal making under $400,000 a year will see a penny in their taxes go up. Not one penny.
Q What do you think about tying COVID aid to Ukraine aid? Do you think COVID aid and Ukraine aid should be tied together in legislation?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I don’t care how they tie — how they do it. I’m sending them both up. I mean, I — they can do it separately or together. But we need them both.
Q Mr. President, Majority Leader Schumer said yesterday that you’re, quote, “getting closer” to using executive authority to cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt. Can you confirm that? What exactly are you looking to — plan to do here in the coming —
THE PRESIDENT: You mean my spokesman said that?
Q Majority Leader Schumer.
THE PRESIDENT: Look, number one, one of — the first thing we did was reform the system that was in place that didn’t work for anybody that allowed people to write off debt if they engaged in public service. We’ve almost a million — seven hundred and eighty-five — don’t hold me to the exact number; I’ll get the number — seven hundred and some thousand have had debt forgiven — their whole debt forgiven because of their work working in –either as teachers or other means by which they qualify. And we continue to make that easier.
Secondly, I am considering dealing with some debt reduction. I am not considering $50,000 debt reduction. But I’m in the process of taking a hard look at whether or not there are going to — there will be additional debt forgiveness, and I’ll have an answer on that in the next couple of weeks.
Thank you.
11:33 A.M. EDT
whitehouse.gov · April 28, 2022


3. Biden Asks Congress for $33 Billion to Support Ukraine

Excerpts:

The proposal, described by administration officials, includes, $20.4 billion in military and security aid, an additional $8.5 billion in economic assistance to help Ukraine respond to the crisis and provide basic services for its people and another $3 billion in humanitarian aid, including efforts to support the nation’s wheat crop and food supply.
Administration officials said it would also include “targeted funding” of an additional $500 million to address economic disruptions at home and abroad, particularly to help increase the production of crops such as wheat and soybeans.
Mr. Biden said the military aid “would provide even more artillery, armored vehicles, anti-armored systems, anti-air capabilities that have been used so effectively in the battlefield by Ukrainian warriors.”

Biden Asks Congress for $33 Billion to Support Ukraine
Package includes $20 billion in military and security assistance to maintain flow of weapons and ammunition to Kyiv
By Ken ThomasFollow
Updated Apr. 28, 2022 5:51 pm ET
WASHINGTON—Democratic and Republican lawmakers welcomed President Biden’s request for $33 billion to fund weapons and provide longer-term economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as the country’s conflict with Russia enters its third month.
The proposal, announced by Mr. Biden Thursday, is designed to back Ukraine’s war effort through the end of September. Lawmakers must now work out how to approve the aid while also trying to advance a package funding Covid-19 vaccines and treatments and resolving a dispute over U.S.-Mexico border policy.
“We either back the Ukrainian people as they defend their country or we stand by as the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression in Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said at the White House, terming it a “fight for freedom.”
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Does the proposed aid package offer the right amount of support for Ukraine? Join the conversation below.
Congress provided Ukraine earlier this year with $13.6 billion in military, humanitarian and economic aid as part of a broader spending bill, covering the first two months of the war. In his remarks, Mr. Biden said that money was nearly exhausted, requiring Congress to provide more to sustain Ukraine’s defenses.
White House officials said of the $3.5 billion in that initial package devoted to shipping weapons and ammunition to Ukraine’s military, about $250 million remains, making it important for Congress to act quickly.
Mr. Biden, who prepared the proposal after consulting with military and national security advisers, made the request to Congress as the U.S. and European allies prepare for a conflict that could continue for months.
Lawmakers, who returned from recess this week, backed the new proposal and said they were prepared to quickly approve another package of Ukraine aid. The House is out of Washington next week, putting off immediate action.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) said Congress would provide Ukraine “all they need,” saying the country “is fighting for freedom and democracy, not only in their own homeland but throughout the world.”
U.N. Chief Visits Ukraine; Trevor Reed Flies Home After U.S.-Russia Prisoner Swap
U.N. Chief Visits Ukraine; Trevor Reed Flies Home After U.S.-Russia Prisoner Swap
Play video: U.N. Chief Visits Ukraine; Trevor Reed Flies Home After U.S.-Russia Prisoner Swap
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is in Ukraine to meet with President Zelensky; Russia released U.S. citizen Trevor Reed in a prisoner swap as tensions run high between Moscow and Washington; President Biden is set to call for more aid to Ukraine. Photo: Gleb Garanich/Reuters
The proposal, described by administration officials, includes, $20.4 billion in military and security aid, an additional $8.5 billion in economic assistance to help Ukraine respond to the crisis and provide basic services for its people and another $3 billion in humanitarian aid, including efforts to support the nation’s wheat crop and food supply.
Administration officials said it would also include “targeted funding” of an additional $500 million to address economic disruptions at home and abroad, particularly to help increase the production of crops such as wheat and soybeans.
Mr. Biden said the military aid “would provide even more artillery, armored vehicles, anti-armored systems, anti-air capabilities that have been used so effectively in the battlefield by Ukrainian warriors.”
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The House on Thursday voted 417-10 to approve legislation to create a lend-lease agreement designed to speed up the transfer of military equipment to Ukraine, similar to what the U.S. did with Britain in World War II. The Senate passed the bill earlier this month.
PHOTO: GABRIELE MICALIZZI/CESURA
Already, the U.S. has sent nearly $4 billion worth of military equipment to Ukraine this year. The gear has ranged from small drones to helicopters to Javelin anti-armor and Stinger antiaircraft systems, and more recently, heavy artillery, including Howitzers.
The first batch of training on those Howitzers, which occurred outside Ukraine, is complete, a senior defense official said Thursday. Additional training, on a radar system the U.S. has provided and on armored personnel carriers, is either complete or under way.
The Howitzers, radar systems, small drones and other weaponry are tailored to the needs of the fight as it begins to unfold in the open terrain in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, the official said.
“We’re trying to send them systems that will help them with the fight in the Donbas,” the official said, “but that don’t require such an onerous training regimen that you have to take fighters out of the fight for too long.”
The Ukrainians have continually sought more and bigger weapons systems, including jet fighters and more advanced drones. They also have called for the U.S. and allies to maintain a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which Washington has rejected as potentially leading to direct conflict with Moscow.
The Ukraine aid garnered broad bipartisan support in Congress, but Republicans have urged Democrats to keep it separate from other spending priorities, such as a package funding Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, which has been stalled by a dispute over border policy.
The president—asked if he wanted the Democratic majority in Congress to combine the two funds in a single spending bill—said he was agnostic. “I don’t care how they do it,” he said.
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Democrats would like to combine the two requests. However, Republicans have insisted that any pandemic aid that moves through Congress must also include a vote sustaining Title 42, which allows Border Patrol agents to quickly turn away migrants at the southern border. Some Democrats have sided with Republicans in calling for a vote on Title 42, making the issue delicate for Democratic leadership.
“It’s enough for now,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) of the Ukraine aid request. Asked if it would be combined with Covid-19 aid, he said it should be done in a way that would help it pass quickly.
Lawmakers didn’t indicate that the emergency aid would need to be tied to any revenue generation.
“I’d like to pay for some of it, but this is truly an emergency and we’ve got a chance to deliver a decisive blow for freedom,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), noting he was glad to see Mr. Biden send the request to Congress.
In addition to the funding request, Mr. Biden is asking Congress to approve a legislative package targeting Russian oligarchs, including a measure that would allow forfeited funds to be used to help Ukraine.
Proposals in the package include creating a criminal offense by making it unlawful for a person to knowingly possess proceeds obtained from corrupt dealings with the Russian government; allowing for the forfeiture of property that Russian oligarchs use to evade sanctions; adding sanctions evasion to the definition of “racketeering activity” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO; and extending the statute of limitations to pursue money laundering prosecutions from five years to 10 years.
“This package of proposals will establish new authorities for the forfeiture of property linked to Russian kleptocracy, allow the government to use the proceeds to support Ukraine, and further strengthen related law enforcement tools,” a White House fact sheet says.
Mr. Biden’s remarks came as Russia has moved to cut off natural-gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. The president said both countries had gas reserves, and he has been in touch with U.S. allies to divert supplies to the two nations.
Natalie Andrews, Gordon Lubold and Alex Leary contributed to this article.
Write to Ken Thomas at ken.thomas@wsj.com
Appeared in the April 29, 2022, print edition as 'Congress Set to Take Up Aid Package'.


4. Pentagon Downplays $7B in US Military Equipment Left in Afghanistan

Excerpts (that are not widely reported):
But the official cautioned that the equipment being used by the Taliban is not the same as that used by U.S. and allied forces before they left Afghanistan.
"It's not state-of the-art stuff," the defense official said. "Everything that we provided to the Afghan forces was not on the same level as ours or those of our allies."
The official also said that even the higher-end equipment was unlikely to give Taliban forces much of a boost.
"The high-end equipment, the aircraft, the UAS [Unmanned Aerial Systems], the precision munitions for the aircraft … that's very dependent on maintenance," the official said, noting that many of those systems "suffered very poor readiness rates" even when U.S. forces and contractors were on the ground helping Afghan forces.
"A lot of this stuff is likely to quickly become nonoperational," the official added.
Pentagon officials also told VOA that only a sliver of U.S.-owned and -operated equipment was left behind when the last U.S. troops departed Afghanistan, estimating its value at just more than $150 million before it was destroyed or otherwise rendered inoperable.



Pentagon Downplays $7B in US Military Equipment Left in Afghanistan
April 28, 2022 7:52 PM
washington —
The fall of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan gave Taliban fighters access to more than $7 billion worth of American military equipment, according to data in a report submitted this week to U.S. lawmakers and confirmed by the Pentagon.
The findings, first reported by CNN, shed light on the extent to which Washington sought to build, support and maintain the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) as a counterbalance to the Taliban and terror groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State Khorasan.
The report also details the bounty of weaponry and equipment awaiting Taliban officials once the last U.S. troops left Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on August 30, 2021, nearly two decades after the first U.S. forces arrived.
According to the report and to the Pentagon, the just more than $7 billion of U.S. military equipment is what was left of $18.6 billion worth of weapons and other equipment provided to the ANDSF from 2005 through August 2021.
It includes aircraft, vehicles, munitions, guns and communication equipment, as well as other gear, "in varying states of repair," according to Defense Department spokesperson Army Major Rob Lodewick, who emphasized that the military hardware and gear was the property of the now defunct Afghan government.
"The $7.12 billion figure cited in the department's recent report to Congress corresponds to ANDSF equipment and not U.S. military equipment used by our forces," Lodewick said in a statement. "Nearly all equipment used by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan was either retrograded or destroyed prior to our withdrawal."
Top U.S. defense officials have repeatedly faced criticism from some high-profile lawmakers who have called on them to account for the U.S. pullout as well as the collapse of the U.S.-backed government.
"We all witnessed a horror of the president's own making," Senator Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this past September, calling the way events played out "avoidable."
"Everything that happened was foreseen," Inhofe said at the time. "President Biden and his advisers didn't listen to the combat commander. He didn't listen to Congress, and he failed to anticipate what all of us knew would happen."
Defense officials, however, sought on Thursday to defend the military's actions and downplay the significance of the $7 billion in U.S. equipment and weaponry left behind, some of which had been brandished publicly by Taliban fighters.
"We're not naive. … Obviously, that's happening," a U.S. defense official told VOA, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the report, which has yet to be released to the public.
But the official cautioned that the equipment being used by the Taliban is not the same as that used by U.S. and allied forces before they left Afghanistan.
"It's not state-of the-art stuff," the defense official said. "Everything that we provided to the Afghan forces was not on the same level as ours or those of our allies."

The official also said that even the higher-end equipment was unlikely to give Taliban forces much of a boost.
"The high-end equipment, the aircraft, the UAS [Unmanned Aerial Systems], the precision munitions for the aircraft … that's very dependent on maintenance," the official said, noting that many of those systems "suffered very poor readiness rates" even when U.S. forces and contractors were on the ground helping Afghan forces.
"A lot of this stuff is likely to quickly become nonoperational," the official added.

Pentagon officials also told VOA that only a sliver of U.S.-owned and -operated equipment was left behind when the last U.S. troops departed Afghanistan, estimating its value at just more than $150 million before it was destroyed or otherwise rendered inoperable.


5. The story of Trevor Reed, the Marine veteran released in Russia prisoner swap

The story of Trevor Reed, the Marine veteran released in Russia prisoner swap
marinecorpstimes.com · by Jake Bleiberg, The Associated Press · April 28, 2022
Trevor Reed’s nearly three-year imprisonment by Russia ended Wednesday when he walked off a Russian plane and onto an American one.
The Marine veteran’s release was half of an unexpected U.S.-Russia prisoner swap that came despite high tension between the two countries. It saw the U.S. turn over a convicted Russian drug trafficker for the 30-year-old Texan, who has maintained his innocence after being convicted on what a U.S. official decried as “laughable” evidence.
Here is a look at who Reed is, why he was imprisoned and what will happen now that he’s been released.
Who is Trevor Reed?
Reed was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in the mountains of Southern California, where he enjoyed fishing and participating in Boy Scouts, according to his family.
After graduating high school there, he returned to Texas for college but left before finishing his degree to join the U.S. Marine Corps.
He was based at Camp Pendleton, California, at one point, was deployed to the Middle East and also served in the presidential guard, providing security at Camp David in Maryland when Barack Obama was president.
He was photographed in uniform with Obama before being honorably discharged.
In 2017, Reed returned to college at the University of North Texas in Dallas, studying international relations and Russia — the native tongue of his girlfriend. Two years later, he traveled to Moscow for a summer of learning the language and visiting her family.
Reed wouldn’t leave the country for years.

Marine Corps veteran Trevor Reed, charged with attacking police, stands inside a defendants' cage during a court hearing in Moscow on March 11, 2020. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)
Why was Reed imprisoned?
A week before he was scheduled to return home, Reed attended a party where his family says he was encouraged to drink a large amount of vodka.
He became nauseous while sharing a ride home, got out of the car and began running around a busy street, prompting a call to the police.
Reed was charged with assaulting the officers who picked him up. Russian authorities alleged he grabbed the arm of the officer driving him to a police station, causing the officer to swerve into another lane, and that he elbowed another officer who tried to intervene. The then-28-year-old was jailed in Moscow for nearly a year before going on trial in 2020.
Russian investigators didn’t give Reed’s defense team video that was recorded inside the police car.
His parents expressed other concerns about the case, citing what they said was missing evidence and contradictory accounts by the officers. After Reed was sentenced to nine years in prison, the U.S. ambassador visited him behind bars.
“He’s been detained and convicted on evidence that is laughable,” U.S. Ambassador John Sullivan said in 2020.
How Reed’s family campaigned for his release
For years before Reed was released, his situation did not look hopeful. He fell ill in prison and geopolitics loomed.
With Russia’s war against Ukraine well underway, Reed’s parents told The Associated Press in March that they were worried the military conflict complicated any effort to bring their son home by potentially shutting lanes of communication.
“We’re concerned that those channels are closing, and we just want to make sure that they don’t all close and that there are hopefully multiple channels about multiple issues,” Joey Reed said.
The Reeds had pressed Biden administration officials to think creatively, for example by supporting a swap like the one that happened Wednesday, though they said the reaction had been cool.
Complicating matters was Reed’s own declining health in prison. He was coughing up blood and, at one point, went on a hunger strike.
“If this becomes long and drawn out, and they take over Ukraine, then the Western countries and the United States are going to be at odds with Russia for a long time,” Joey Reed said in the March interview. “That could lead to additional charges against our son, if he lives, and keep him there indefinitely, which is not uncommon in Russia.”
In early March the Reeds tried to connect with President Joe Biden, standing along the motorcade route during a presidential visit to Texas. When that didn’t result in a meaningful face-to-face interaction, they demonstrated outside the White House to seek a meeting with the president.
In late March, they got the meeting. Less than a month later their son was headed home.
What’s next?
Trevor’s parents said they’d spent Tuesday cleaning his room in anticipation of his return, making sure his bed was cleared of paperwork and other clutter so he’d have a place to sleep.
His health is an immediate concern — both Reeds were troubled by their son’s unsteady gait and how thin he looked as TV footage captured him walking, flanked by guards, from a van to the jet.
Beyond that, though, they said they anticipated him going back to school — he’d asked to be sent college books while in prison — to finish a degree and pursue a career with the federal government.
His parents expect Reed to have time for leisure, too. Assuming he reacquires a driver’s license that had expired while he was away, he should be able to tool around in his Jeep Wrangler with the top down, Joey Reed said, and to do the things that locals take for granted: visit a nearby wildlife animal park and watch the Texas Rangers play baseball.
Joey Reed said he and his son are also excited for the coming “Top Gun” sequel.
“I was still in Russia when they were supposed to come out,” he said, referring to time spent visiting his son. “And then they delayed it. And I said, ‘Trevor, they’re delaying this movie until you get out.’ And that’s exactly what has happened.”
Tucker reported from Washington.


6. Russian spy chief says U.S., Poland plotting division of Ukraine

So perhaps Russia's argument will be that if Poland can have their former possessions then Russia cna have theirs.

Excerpt:

"According to the intelligence received by Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, Washington and Warsaw are working on plans to establish Poland's tight military and political control over its historical possessions in Ukraine," Naryshkin said in a rare statement released by the SVR.

Russian spy chief says U.S., Poland plotting division of Ukraine
Reuters · by Reuters
LONDON, April 28 (Reuters) - Russia's foreign spy chief accused the United States and Poland on Thursday of plotting to gain a sphere of influence in Ukraine, a claim denied by Warsaw as disinformation aimed at sowing distrust among Kyiv's supporters.
Sergei Naryshkin, the chief of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), cited unpublished intelligence that he said showed the United States and Poland, NATO allies, were plotting to restore Polish control over part of western Ukraine.
"According to the intelligence received by Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, Washington and Warsaw are working on plans to establish Poland's tight military and political control over its historical possessions in Ukraine," Naryshkin said in a rare statement released by the SVR.

Poland denied the claim and said it was disinformation spread by Moscow.
"The lies about Poland's alleged plans to attack western Ukraine have been repeated for several years," said Stanislaw Zaryn, spokesman for Poland's special services coordinator.
"The aim of Russian propaganda is to foster distrust between Ukraine and Poland, to undermine PL-UA cooperation."
Poland has ruled some territories that are now part of Ukraine at different times in the past, most recently between the two world wars. Western Ukraine, including the city of Lviv, were absorbed into the Soviet Union at the end of World War Two.
The SVR said the United States was discussing with Poland a plan under which Polish "peacekeeping" forces without a NATO mandate would enter parts of western Ukraine where the chance of a confrontation with Russian forces was low.
The SVR, which after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union took on most of the Soviet-era KGB's foreign spying responsibilities, did not publish its evidence, and Reuters was unable to verify the accusation.
Poland is one of Ukraine's strongest supporters in its resistance to Russia's invasion, sending weapons across the border and taking in around three million Ukrainian refugees.
A senior Russian lawmaker, Senator Andrei Klimov, deputy chair of the Federation Council's Foreign Affairs Committee, also said on Thursday that Poland was planning to establish control over part of Ukraine. He gave no evidence for the claim.
Russia has been signaling for days that the conflict could end with a forced partition of Ukraine.
One of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest allies said this week that Ukraine was spiraling toward a collapse into several states because of what he cast as a U.S. attempt to use Kyiv to undermine Russia. read more
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation" to disarm Ukraine and protect it from fascists. Ukraine and the West says this a false pretext for an unprovoked war of aggression by Putin.

Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge Editing by Gareth Jones and Bill Berkrot
Reuters · by Reuters


7. Ground-Based Intermediate-Range Missiles in the Indo-Pacific

This is a very important national security issue (for the US and allies) but one that is very controversial and fraught with challenges - the host nations have a vote.

This is the first comprehensive analysis I have seen.


As an aside I wonder how the acronym "GBIRMs" is pronounced?


Ground-Based Intermediate-Range Missiles in the Indo-Pacific
Assessing the Positions of U.S. Allies

When the United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, it opened for itself the opportunity to develop and deploy ground-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km — what this report calls ground-based intermediate-range missiles (GBIRMs). But the U.S. withdrawal also sparked a debate regarding where the United States could deploy such missiles. This became a critical topic in the Indo-Pacific because China was never a signatory to the INF Treaty, enabling it to develop a wide array of capabilities that the United States was prohibited from fielding.
Considering this threat, the United States has been hoping to develop and deploy a new conventionally armed GBIRM to the Indo-Pacific, but how U.S. allies will respond to Washington's overtures to host GBIRMs is not clear.
The author analyzes the likelihood of U.S. treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific region—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and Thailand—hosting U.S. GBIRMs. Because these countries are unlikely to agree, the author also examines alternatives to permanently basing these missiles on allies' territories: (1) U.S. co-development of GBIRMs with and/or sales of GBIRMs to an ally for it to command and control, (2) U.S. deployment of GBIRMs to an allied territory in a crisis, (3) peacetime rotational deployment, and (4) deployment on Guam or one of the Compact of Free Association states. Because of drawbacks with each alternative, the author recommends a variation of the first: helping Japan develop an arsenal of ground-based anti-ship standoff missile capabilities.

Research Questions
  1. What is the likelihood that Australia, Japan, the Philippines, the ROK, and Thailand would agree to host U.S. GBIRMs?
  2. What are the benefits and drawbacks of potential alternatives to permanently basing U.S. GBIRMs on the territories of U.S. allies?
  3. Which alternative is the most feasible for the United States to pursue?
Key Findings
A U.S. strategy that relies on an ally agreeing to permanently host GBIRMs risks failing because of an inability to find a willing partner
  • As long as Thailand continues to have a military-backed government that pursues closer ties with China, the United States would not want Thailand to host GBIRMs — and Thailand would be highly unlikely to accept them anyway.
  • The U.S. alliance with the Philippines is in flux. As long as a president continues policies toward the United States and China similar to those of President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines is extremely unlikely to accept U.S. GBIRMs.
  • Chinese opposition to the ROK hosting a U.S. defensive missile system, the ROK's susceptibility to Chinese pressure, and a deterioration of U.S.-ROK relations suggest that it is highly unlikely that the ROK would accept U.S. GBIRMs.
  • Although Australia's strong historical ties with the United States means that the possibility that it would host U.S. GBIRMs cannot be ruled out, its historical reluctance to host permanent foreign bases and its distance from continental Asia make this unlikely.
  • Because of Japan's willingness to strengthen its alliance with the United States and bolster its defense capabilities, Japan is the regional ally that appears most likely to host U.S. GBIRMs. However, that possibility remains low.
Should the United States continue to pursue GBIRMs for the Indo-Pacific, the strategy most likely to succeed would be helping Japan develop an arsenal of ground-based, anti-ship missile capabilities
  • This would be the first step in a longer-term U.S. strategy to encourage Japan to procure similar missiles with longer ranges.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Introduction
Chapter Two
Cases
Chapter Three
Alternatives to Permanent U.S. GBIRM Basing on Allies' Land
Chapter Four
Conclusion

8. Testimony on United States Special Operations Command’s efforts to sustain the readiness (SASC)


The commanders' statements can be accessed at the hotlinks below.

I would like to highlight three excerpts from LTG Braga's (CG, USASOC) statement.  The first (and second) and last priorities are not technologically or equipment or weapons focused. Unfortunately I fear congress is focused more on buying things than supporting the training, education, and intellectual development necessary for irregular warfare campaigning and strategic influence through information advantage. I commend the USASOC CG for laying out these priorities and providing a clear and succinct vision for Army special operations. I also think his vision is completely nested in the National Defense Strategy

There should be no confusion that Army special operations is focused on irregular warfare (across the spectrum of conflict to include in high end conflict).


USASOC supports the Joint Force worldwide through irregular warfare campaigning for
integrated deterrence, while preparing for high-end conflict. ARSOF is vital to the Nation
because of our capability to provide asymmetric options with tailorable solutions and a
unique mindset to prevail in any conflict.

USASOC is operationally minded with responsibilities to man, train, and equip formations.
We are organized to conduct irregular warfare across the continuum of campaigning,
crisis, and conflict. USASOC’s persistent forward presence, flexibility, and relationships
provide the Nation with enduring asymmetric advantages. 

The seven modernization priorities for USASOC are: Irregular Warfare, Information
Advantage, Multi-Domain Operations Interoperability, Next Generation Precision Effects,
Unmanned Systems/Robotics/Artificial Intelligence, Next Generation Mobility, and
Enhanced ARSOF Soldiers. We synchronize within these priorities while remaining a
bottom-up driven organization. We have men and women on the ground identifying
problems and providing requirements. Whether we lead or support, USASOC serves as
a catalyst for innovation through our continued experimentation and operational use. We
are deliberate with our selective disclosure, knowing our initiatives drive adversary
decision cycles. 


To receive testimony on United States Special Operations Command’s efforts to sustain the readiness of special operations forces and transform the force for future security challenges
Subcommittee: SUBCOMMITTEE ON EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Time: 02:30 PM
Location: Russell SR-232A


  1. Lieutenant General Jonathan P. Braga, USA
  2. Commanding General, United States Army Special Operations Command

  1. Lieutenant General James C. Slife, USAF
  2. Commander, Air Force Special Operations Command

  1. Rear Admiral Hugh W. Howard III, USN
  2. Commander, Naval Special Warfare Command

  1. Major General James F. Glynn, USMC
  2. Commander, United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command






















9. Russian soldier 'admits 25,900 troops have been killed in just two months of fighting' in call intercepted by Ukraine

Probably some junior clerk in the J1 personnel section who is responsible for compiling the daily reports. Or good PSYOP. Either way, these reports should be exploited.


Russian soldier 'admits 25,900 troops have been killed in just two months of fighting' in call intercepted by Ukraine
  • Ukraine's secret service claims to have intercepted a Russian soldier's call 
  • In it, he says the Kremlin's troops 'have been f***ed up' with thousands killed 
  • Soldier puts true death toll at 25,900 - higher than Ukraine's estimate of 22,800 
  • British ministers told death toll is 15,000, but true figure may never be known  
PUBLISHED: 10:42 EDT, 28 April 2022 | UPDATED: 10:59 EDT, 28 April 2022
Daily Mail · by Chris Pleasance for MailOnline · April 28, 2022
A Russian soldier has been caught confessing that almost 26,000 troops have died fighting in Ukraine, according to a call intercepted by Kyiv.
'Our boys have been f***ked up, f***ing f***ed' the soldier tells a comrade in a transcript of the call posted online by Ukraine's secret service.
'The official tally is one thing, but I'll tell you now - 25,900 have died. That's in two f***ing months,' he adds.
In another part of the intercepted call, a second soldier talks about the harrowing death of one of his senior commanders.

Russia's military has lost 25,900 troops in just two months in Ukraine, according to a call by one of Putin's men intercepted by Ukraine (pictured, Russian soldiers tend to their wounded)

The soldier claims Putin's army has 'been f***ked up' by Ukraine's troops and that commanders are lying about the true scale of the disaster (pictured, soldiers in eastern Ukraine)
'The commander of the brigade flew in. His intestines were scooped up and put back in his stomach,' he says.
'They sent him off on a chopper. They took him to Russia, and that's where his heart gave out. '
Neither of the accounts can be independently verified, but the tally of dead roughly correlates with what Ukraine is claiming - that 22,800 Russians have been killed.
The account of a commander being killed - likely a colonel - also tallies with official data collected from Russia that suggests many high-ranking officers have died.
While the Russian government has given only infrequent updates on the number of deaths suffered by its armed forces, announcements by local governments and newspapers suggest at least 317 officers have died fighting.
That marks an extraordinarily large number of officers to lose in two months of fighting, and has likely contributed to Russia's poor battlefield performance.
Due to delays in reporting deaths, some dead being impossible to identify, and deliberate cover-ups, the true figure of officer deaths is likely to be far higher.

Ukrainian troops are pictured installing a machine gun on top of a tank during repair works after fighting against Russian forces in Donetsk

Ukrainians open fire on Russian positions using rocket artillery as they continue to battle Putin's forces in the country's east

Smoke rises over the train station in the Ukrainian city of Lyman, in Luhansk, as Russian forces bear down on the area earlier today
Russia is now into the third month of its 'special military operation' in Ukraine which was expected to last just days and end with the toppling of the government.
President Volodymyr Zelensky remains in control of the country and the Ukrainian military retains control over most of its territory, 63 days later.
Having failed in its mission to take Kyiv, Russia has retreated from the northern parts of Ukraine and refocused its efforts on seizing areas in the eastern Donbas region.
Heavy fighting is underway there today, with Ukraine saying Russia is trying to push south from a city called Izyum to Donetsk in order to encircle their troops.
At the same time, Russian forces are attacking into the city of Popansa - further to the east - to try and fix the Ukrainian defenders in place.
Further to the south, in Mariupol, members of the Ukrainian marines and Azov battalion are still holed up inside the Azovstal steel works - claiming Russia has used banned phosphorus bombs to try and flush them out.
To the west, in Kherson - the only major city captured by Russia so-far - explosions were reported overnight which took down a TV mast.

A member of the Ukrainian military rests on a bench in a forward position in a frontline village near Velyka Novosilka, Donetsk
The attack, which appears to have come from Ukraine, took Russian state channels which had been broadcast in the city off the air.
Meanwhile local officials delayed plans to hold a referendum in the city to create an independent republic, but did announce that the local currency will soon be swapped to rubles.
Even further to the west, in Transnistria - a breakaway region of Moldova occupied by Russian forces - locals reported being sent texts warning them that Ukraine could attack at any moment.
It comes after several explosions in the region took down TV masts and damaged government buildings.
Russia says it is 'alarmed' by the attacks, but Ukraine denies them - saying they have been staged in order for Moscow to justify spreading its war across borders.
Daily Mail · by Chris Pleasance for MailOnline · April 28, 2022

10. America Needs a Comprehensive Compellence Strategy Against Russia
 
An excellent tutorial and recommendations from Frank Hoffman.

Please do not overlook this excerpt:
More covert but direct kinetic means will be necessary as this is a war of considerable attrition. Indirect modes of conflict via proxy forces are nothing new (e.g., El Salvador, Angola, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon). The use of proxy forces has a long history but also a growing salience in an era of strategic competition. One of the evolving modes of warfare that is suited for comprehensive compellence is “surrogate warfare.” In this mode of warfare, state’s avoid the use of their own soldiers as the primary bearer of warfare’s grave costs, and delegate it to proxy forces and the use of remotely fielded technological surrogates to better enable the state to manage the risks of modern conflict. They may also employ paramilitary forces for intelligence support for targeting critical nodes of the attacking force. For this conflict, this would mean the a greater use of allied tools for cyber warfare, greater intelligence sharing, and more unmanned precision strikes on key Russian operational centers and critical supply links inside Ukraine.
America Needs a Comprehensive Compellence Strategy Against Russia - Foreign Policy Research Institute
fpri.org · by Frank G. Hoffman
In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has formulated a unprecedented response. The coordination of transatlantic diplomacy, including the condemnation of Russia at the United Nations and the implementation of a massive sanctions package, is truly impressive. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has formulated a unprecedented response. The coordination of transatlantic diplomacy, including the condemnation of Russia at the United Nations and the implementation of a massive sanctions package, is truly impressive. The president’s recent request for an additional $33 billion from Congress in security, economic, and humanitarian aid for Ukraine demonstrates the seriousness of America’s commitment to European security.
While the White House should be applauded for its response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, this only tells part of the story. Indeed, none of these diplomatic initiatives would have been necessary had the United States and its allies successfully deterred Russia from attacking Ukraine in the first place. Deterrence failed because the United States and its allies signaled, in advance, that it was not prepared to apply direct military force in Ukraine. It did so because it was afraid of Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats. America’s risk calculus was framed by the fear of nuclear escalation and Washington’s overestimation of Russian military power.
While initial efforts to deter Russia have failed, the West should now pursue a different approach. Rather than deterrence, the United States should focus on compellence. A comprehensive compellence strategy toward Russia would entail the focused integration of covert and overt military power, as well as a greater efforts to conduct information operations inside Russia to weaken Putin’s fragile political control.
The goal of such a strategy could be to force Putin to stop the war, not merely help Ukraine stave off defeat. It strives to achieve this by raising costs to Moscow beyond sanctions and political isolation. The strategy would help the West coalesce around the objective of ending the war in the near term, but also forcing a negotiated conclusion to hostilities that would be more advantageous to Ukrainian and Western interests. The West’s aim should be to ensure Putin suffers an operational failure, not accede to Russia’s subjugation of Ukraine or some tortured negotiated compromise.
The Need for Compellence
Ukraine has, thus far, been brilliant in asymmetric tactics with creative applications of modern tools of warfare. Nevertheless, Russian forces have destroyed much of Ukraine’s infrastructure, while roughly 25 percent of the nation’s population is displaced and hungry. Without support from the United States and the West, Ukraine may still be unable to prevent Russia from achieving its new goals, which likely include seizing the entire southern coast of Ukraine, including Odessa.
With the opening of the new phase of the war in Donbas and the Black Sea coastline, both sides of the conflict are now engaged in a race of strategic and operational adaptation. The coming battles will be on different terrain, and require altered tactics and weapons than the initial fighting around Kyiv. This will be a very different battlefield and the results are not preordained. Which side learns faster and altered its strategy and force employment best will determine the course of this war in the second phase.
The Elements of Comprehensive Compellence
One month before the war started, FPRI’s Rob Lee argued that Moscow’s compellence strategy would include the use of military force directly against Kyiv or more likely by punitive raids deep into the eastern half of Ukraine. He argued, “By inflicting heavy losses on the Ukrainian military, taking prisoners of war, and degrading Kyiv’s defense capabilities, Russia could potentially alter Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s incentive structure sufficiently to induce painful concessions.” Despite Ukraine’s successful effort to turn back Russian forces around Kyiv, Russia’s compellence strategy has not yet failed. As a result, it needs to be undercut by NATO with a more comprehensive approach.
A robust U.S. counter to Moscow, what might be called comprehensive compellence, would build on the administration’s defense strategy concept of integrated deterrence to get Putin to alter his misguided effort in Ukraine. Compellence is normally a harder task historically than deterrence, but given Russia’s dysfunctional military effectiveness, the cost-benefit analysis for compellence in this case augurs for success.
Deterrence and compellence share some comment elements but are conceptually distinct. Deterrence seeks to persuade an adversary to not to take some action that it is capable of. On the other hand, compellence is an effort to persuade the opponent to stop some behavior or change its course due to the threat of coercive force or via incentives. Compellence is often needed in the wake of deterrence failure.
While America’s efforts to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine failed, a compellence strategy would have a greater chance of success. After Russia’s inept military campaign and Ukraine’s effective resistance, the balance of power now favors the United States and its allies. Russian losses on the battlefield and degraded economic strength due to sanctions make the military components of a Western compellence strategy even more credible.
A strategy of comprehensive compellence in support of Ukraine would have five elements or lines of effort.
Diplomatic and political
This element is already being aggressively pursued by the Biden administration in its political and economic isolation of Russia and its leaders. It has successfully made Putin a pariah in most circles, although China, India, and some other states are taking a different approach. The European Union and NATO have been energized and coordinated brilliantly. Efforts similar to the removal of Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council should be pursued, including the forthcoming G20 meeting this year. In any event, after a year or two of sanctions, Russia may be functionally dismissed from the G20 entirely depending upon the price of oil and natural gas.
In terms of a new initiative, Finland and Sweden should be offered swift approval of their applications for membership in NATO. While their applications are under consideration by NATO’s 30 member states, the United Kingdom and United States should offer Finland and Sweden immediate security guarantees to protect them from Russian threats. The application process has historically taken over a year, and Russia will undoubtedly apply coercive pressure against the applicants. Additionally, former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb should be made a NATO official with a chance to become the next secretary general when Jens Stoltenberg’s term ends in 2023. The North Atlantic Council might consider Amb. (ret.) Ivo Daldler’s proposal to admit Ukraine now. However, this would be resisted by key NATO members, and should be left to the final negotiations.
Informational
The ongoing war has stressed the importance of strategic communications, and Zelensky has proven to be extremely effective in the battle of narratives.
Moscow has employed its usual playbook of disinformation and propaganda, but to little discernable effect in Europe and North America. Russia continues to apply its concept of information confrontation against NATO and Ukraine. It persistently seeks to exploit identified vulnerabilities of democratic societies using cyber and information operations. Russia’s goal is to exacerbate existing societal, political, and military divisions. Key targets of this approach are the legitimacy of Ukraine’s government and NATO cohesion. Putin has been outdone by the determined and savvy Zelenskyy in this dimension of the conflict. However, Putin’s efforts gain more purchase in China, in democratic states like India, and parts of Africa.
Efforts to pierce the fog of disinformation inside Russia should be intensified. There are few sources for independent news inside the country, but a few techniques seem to still be working. Ukraine has taken a macabre approach with facial recognition technology to identify and contact the families of fallen Russian soldiers to inform them of the fate of their loved one. They have also constructed websites for families to gain information on the status of their family members fighting against Ukraine, and at the same time receive some perspective on the scale of the war that Moscow hides from its own citizens. In Kyiv, the Information Strategies Council of Ukraine, a coalition of activists and think tanks, sent emails and social media messages directly to 15 million Russian men of draft age. It has also targeted older Russians with different tailored messages, using historical references to stimulate a questioning of Moscow-generated news reports and propaganda.
Other methods to project factual narratives to more Russians from Russians outside the Kremlin’s control would probably be more effective. NATO and the European Union need to create the capacity to design and conduct an information offensive into Russia and overwhelm Putin’s control of information. Putin seems to be afraid of “fifth columns” at home. That vulnerability should be exploited more.
The U.S. Global Engagement Center has the mission to ‘‘lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government in countering foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.” It may be a model to build upon, but it will take a collective effort from European states to establish an ability to project truth into Russia, and penetrate Putin’s dominance of his domestic information ecosystem.
Russian cyber attacks against Ukraine have not been effective so far. However, Russian intelligence, particularly the GRU-supported Sandworm team, are persistently threatening Ukraine’s electricity generation capacity and its power grid. The Zelensky government is facing an ongoing surge in cyber activity at present. The West can do more to support the Ukrainians in this battlespace with both technical and intelligence support to ensure that their critical infrastructure is preserved and functional. The Ukrainians seem to be holding their own despite Russia’s presumed cyber dominance.
Military
The principal military stick in this strategy is supplied by the Ukrainians themselves, abetted by Western arms. This will have to be both accelerated and sustained during the next phase which is likely to involve intensive artillery and missile consumption. It will also require mass quantities of supplies, and enough drones to supplement the limited assets now flown by the Ukrainians. Recently, aid was increased by another increment. This new tranche of $800 million sounds enormous and the material is being delivered at an unprecedented timeline. Even with the recent presidential request of $33 billion in aid from Congress, it may be both inadequate and too late.
More covert but direct kinetic means will be necessary as this is a war of considerable attrition. Indirect modes of conflict via proxy forces are nothing new (e.g., El Salvador, Angola, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon). The use of proxy forces has a long history but also a growing salience in an era of strategic competition. One of the evolving modes of warfare that is suited for comprehensive compellence is “surrogate warfare.” In this mode of warfare, state’s avoid the use of their own soldiers as the primary bearer of warfare’s grave costs, and delegate it to proxy forces and the use of remotely fielded technological surrogates to better enable the state to manage the risks of modern conflict. They may also employ paramilitary forces for intelligence support for targeting critical nodes of the attacking force. For this conflict, this would mean the a greater use of allied tools for cyber warfare, greater intelligence sharing, and more unmanned precision strikes on key Russian operational centers and critical supply links inside Ukraine.
Finally, NATO’s posture has been prudently enhanced with the deployment of four new NATO battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. More needs to be done to prepare for cross-border contingencies. NATO should posture one or two division-plus sized forces outside Ukraine in case peacekeeping or armed humanitarian intervention is needed. One can anticipate that human security and disaster relief operations may be needed in short order given the scale of the destruction of Ukrainian energy, medical, and water supplies.
Economic
America and its allies have implemented a massive sanctions package against Russia. As a result, Russian finances may soon be in default and its economy could nosedive. More attention should be paid to Russia’s energy exports. As FPRI’s Chris Miller notes “if you want to hit Russia hard, you’ve got to go after energy. Everything else is really pretty small by comparison.” Since there is little support in some capitals for more intensive sanctions, there may be value in defining their duration and the conditions for tempering them.
Some have proposed that the West continue sanctions for as long as Putin remains in power. In essence, this is a call for regime change. Such a threat may not achieve much in real terms but it carries some risk since it directly challenges the Kremlin’s principal power center. It is highly unlikely to be accepted by German or French leaders. A more strategic approach would be to keep sanctions remain in place until Russian forces have departed all agreed territories and military commanders are turned in to appropriate authorities.
Comprehensive compellence should also include funding for Ukraine’s restoration. The Economist estimates the reconstruction tab for Ukraine at $200–520 billion. As some scholars have recently written, rather than simply freeze Russia’s hard currency reserves in Western banks, those currency reserves should be liquidated and put to use. These assets should be collected and transferred to the International Criminal Court in escrow for reparations.
The West should start proceedings to allot reparations to Kyiv from those funds. This would communicate to the Russian leadership that every day of destruction in Ukraine is simply another day of reconstruction in its future, which Moscow will pay for. Ideally, this might induce them to stop attacking and terrorizing civilians and operate within the law of armed conflict.
Legal
The West should purse indictments at the International Criminal Court for each division and Army commander whose area of responsibility is shown to have committed crimes against humanity and other violations of international law. Washington should also do the same for corporate and unit leaders of the Wagner Group, the mercenaries purportedly behind the Bucha massacre. Judicial proceedings may be far off, but the intent to prosecute needs to be clear now.
Now Is the Time for Compellence
The U.S. government should build on the opportunities that Ukraine’s tenacious defense has created, but with greater urgency and more force. Putin understands force, not nuance or the incremental allotments of weapons the West is providing. The initial strategy from the United States and its allies has been applied slowly and incrementally, and not as coherently messaged as a strategy of compellence. It has not forced Putin to recalculate expected benefits and evident costs. To date, the United States is reacting, and putting the onus of fighting all on the Ukrainians. NATO is explicitly not well postured to inject any significant combat power or humanitarian aid, it is only postured to defend NATO’s frontier and airspace.
The West needs to craft a comprehensive strategy with the explicit goal of compelling Putin to stop his aggression, not just merely keep Ukraine at the survival level. To date, U.S. statecraft has helped Ukraine buy time, but it has to be expanded to include the marshalling of greater military power in collaboration with its key allies. Ukraine can still be saved from protracted devastation, mass casualties, and an ignoble capitulation that merely extends Putin’s influence and weakens Europe. Russia can be compelled to limit its objectives and to stop its egregious violations of international law and return to diplomacy. It may be time for the United States and its democratic states to take Biden’s impressive speech in Warsaw to heart, and “Be not afraid.”

Frank G. Hoffman serves on the Board of Advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and currently is serving at the National Defense University as a Distinguished Research Fellow with the Institute for National Strategic Studies.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.
Likewise, the views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the position of the Department of Defense.
fpri.org · by Frank G. Hoffman

11. Russia’s Sarmat test underscores need to modernize US nuclear triad

Excerpts:
As Global Strike Command’s then-chief warned last year, Washington has “no margin left” to delay replacement of the Minuteman III, which entered service in 1970. Its service life was originally meant to last just 10 years but has been repeatedly extended. A further extension would not only be cost-inefficient but would risk eroding the reliability and credibility of the land-based leg of the triad.
Fortunately, the Biden administration’s fiscal 2023 budget request included $3.6 billion for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program. The administration’s forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review should similarly endorse the GBSD. Congress, for its part, should provide all necessary funding to ensure the GBSD’s on-time delivery by 2029.
ICBMs represent a vital component of America’s nuclear deterrent. They are the most responsive leg thanks to their high state of readiness, while their geographic dispersion complicates adversary targeting, forcing Russia or China to expend a mass number of nuclear-tipped missiles rather than simply concentrating on a few U.S. command centers, submarine ports and bomber bases. ICBMs also provide a hedge against any potential advancements in anti-submarine warfare that could threaten the survivability of the sea-based leg. Those characteristics of a modernized ICBM leg of the nuclear triad help deter adversaries from launching a nuclear attack in the first place, preventing nuclear war and making Americans safer.
Russia’s Sarmat test underscores need to modernize US nuclear triad
Defense News · by Anthony Ruggiero · April 28, 2022
Russia conducted its first flight test of the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile on April 20. The launch represents a notable milestone in Russia’s ongoing nuclear modernization designed to hold the American homeland at risk, underscoring the importance of modernizing the U.S. nuclear triad and associated nuclear command, control and communications system.
Russia’s Defence Ministry announced the Sarmat “was successfully test-launched from a silo at the Plesetsk state testing cosmodrome” in northwestern Russia. The test “confirmed” the missile’s “design characteristics” during “all phases of its flight,” the ministry declared, adding that its “practice warheads arrived at the designated area at the Kura proving ground on the Kamchatka Peninsula.”
Although Russia has conducted three Sarmat ejection tests since December 2017, this latest test was the missile’s first flight test.
The Sarmat is a three-stage, silo-based, liquid-fuel, heavy ICBM with a reported range of 18,000 kilometers. Dubbed “Satan II” by NATO, the missile is a Russian-built replacement of the Soviet-era SS-18 “Satan” ICBM, which is reaching the end of its life cycle. The Sarmat reportedly can carry a 10-ton payload consisting of 10-plus multiple independent reentry vehicles along with penetration aids used to evade missile defenses. Moscow says the new missile can also carry several Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles.
RELATED

In early February, executives from more than a dozen defense firms gathered virtually with top Pentagon leaders, including the defense secretary. At stake: the future of hypersonic weapons, one of the most hyped, debated and costly weapons initiatives in years.
The Sarmat has reportedly been under development since the 2000s but gained notoriety after being publicly touted during a March 2018 address by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader boasted that the Sarmat would be impervious to existing or potential missile defenses thanks to its short boost phase and extremely long range, which would allow the missile to travel over the North or South poles.
Missiles are often their most vulnerable during the boost phase, and most American missile sensors normally focus on threats traveling over the North Pole rather than the South Pole. Regardless, existing U.S. missile defense capabilities are focused on rogue states such as North Korea and stand no chance of defending against a massive Russian nuclear attack against the American homeland, reinforcing the need for a robust and reliable U.S. nuclear deterrent.
Moscow claims serial production of the Sarmat will commence this fall, and that the missile will begin combat duty with Russia’s 62nd Missile Division in Uzhur, Krasnoyarsk Krai, before year’s end, although that timeline is likely unrealistic.
The test itself was “routine” and “not a surprise,” as Pentagon press secretary John Kirby noted. Indeed, Sarmat’s flight tests have been delayed for years, making this test long overdue. That, however, did not stop Putin from calling the test a “momentous event,” vowing the missile “will be a wakeup call for those who are trying to threaten” Russia.
That provocative language follows several instances of nuclear saber-rattling by Putin both before and after Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Putin’s behavior stands in stark contrast with the Biden administration’s decision to postpone and then cancel a March 3 launch of an unarmed Minuteman III ICBM. The administration had already notified Russia and provided a notification for civilian air traffic. Kirby attempted to justify the postponement as an effort to ensure U.S. actions were not “misunderstood or misconstrued,” saying the decision demonstrated Washington is “a responsible nuclear power.”
Putin, however, may interpret such concessions by Washington as weakness and an indication that his nuclear saber-rattling is working.
Asked about the Minuteman III test during a March hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, recommended “that we maintain our normal set of operations.” Richard emphasized he needs these tests to “maintain confidence and reliability” in the 50-year-old Minuteman III, which faces growing reliability concerns as it nears the end of its service life. Another test is slated for later this year, which the administration should conduct as planned. That will remind Putin that the United States has the means to respond to a nuclear attack.
More broadly, the Sarmat test — not to mention China’s rapid nuclear expansion — underscores the need to modernize America’s own nuclear triad, including by urgently replacing the Minuteman III with the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, otherwise known as the LGM-35A Sentinel.
RELATED

A senior Chinese arms control official denied Tuesday that his government is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal.
As Global Strike Command’s then-chief warned last year, Washington has “no margin left” to delay replacement of the Minuteman III, which entered service in 1970. Its service life was originally meant to last just 10 years but has been repeatedly extended. A further extension would not only be cost-inefficient but would risk eroding the reliability and credibility of the land-based leg of the triad.
Fortunately, the Biden administration’s fiscal 2023 budget request included $3.6 billion for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program. The administration’s forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review should similarly endorse the GBSD. Congress, for its part, should provide all necessary funding to ensure the GBSD’s on-time delivery by 2029.
ICBMs represent a vital component of America’s nuclear deterrent. They are the most responsive leg thanks to their high state of readiness, while their geographic dispersion complicates adversary targeting, forcing Russia or China to expend a mass number of nuclear-tipped missiles rather than simply concentrating on a few U.S. command centers, submarine ports and bomber bases. ICBMs also provide a hedge against any potential advancements in anti-submarine warfare that could threaten the survivability of the sea-based leg. Those characteristics of a modernized ICBM leg of the nuclear triad help deter adversaries from launching a nuclear attack in the first place, preventing nuclear war and making Americans safer.
Anthony Ruggiero is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, where Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power and John Hardie is research manager and a research analyst.



12. The 'Mozart Group' Hopes To Save Ukrainians Trapped In A Steel Plant



The 'Mozart Group' Hopes To Save Ukrainians Trapped In A Steel Plant
newsy.com · by Sasha Ingber
Just staying alive has become a battle for Ukrainian civilians and fighters holed up in a steel plant in the besieged port city of Mariupol. A commander in the massive Azovstal compound says they're running out of food, water, and medicine as Russia's attacks continue.
Now, Newsy has learned of a nascent effort to rescue civilians there, which include women and children.
NEWSY'S SASHA INGBER: I've been told that the Mozart Group was planning to evacuate people in the steel mill in Mariupol. Can you tell me about that?
MOZART GROUP FOUNDER AND CEO ANDY MILBURN: Well, here's the honest answer to that: We are prepared to. Yes. But there are, you know, the Ukrainian government, Ukrainian military has to give us the thumbs up because we're going to work through them. We have to work through them. It's going to take a little bit of time to get approval.
Former U.S. Marine Andy Milburn recently started the Mozart Group with other retired special operations officers. The name is a play on a Russian private military company called the Wagner Group, which has been linked to Moscow's military intelligence service and numerous atrocities abroad.
He says the Mozart Group has no ties to the government, and that there are about 50 to 60 volunteers in the country at a time, funded solely by individual donations. They're working with the Ukrainian military; providing training, mine clearance, medical support and evacuations.
INGBER: With Mariupol surrounded by Russian forces and the Russian forces inside the city, that steel plant completely surrounded — how would the Mozart Group be able to enter and then safely evacuate those civilians and those fighters who have decided not to stand down?
MILBURN: Yes, Sasha, you know I can't say that. I'm sure you have Russian fans too. So I'm certainly not going to answer it. Let me just say that there is, there's no guarantees that our plan will succeed. And no one here is overall, you know, no one here is saying, 'Oh, yeah, this is going to be a cinch.' What we are saying is that there are ways to do such a thing. And I'm afraid the only way we can find out if they're viable is by trying them. But it's better than not trying at all.
Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed "in principle" to the U.N. and Red Cross evacuating civilians at the plant after he met U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in Moscow. But obstacles could continue. Earlier this month, a Red Cross convoy said it had to turn around because of danger on the ground.
Meanwhile, the identities of Mozart Group members are concealed, out of concern for Russia’s aggression.
"They have gone after our website numerous times. They have shut down our funding streams. You can see there have been and they've done that either through actions in the cyber spectrum or through complaints about the fact that we are collecting donations through GoFundMe or Fundy," Milburn said. "We're very wary. We don't take the same route twice. We don't walk back alone at night, and some of us soon will be armed for self-protection."
He says they're also conducting information operations on Russian soldiers and their families, to try to influence their morale, but declined to explain how. Still, he says, these volunteers aren't fighting, unlike the mercenaries from Russia's Wagner Group who have massed in Ukraine.
"We are not fighters," Milburn continued. "We're not on the line pulling the trigger. We are not mercenaries, certainly not by any definition of mercenaries. And there is nothing, this is really important, there is nothing that we do that is not in line with U.S. foreign policy. We are training, equipping and assisting the Ukrainian military. We are not killing Russians here."
He says the new group will last at least as long as the war and there will still be so much to do after, whenever that day comes.


13. How to Deter China from Making War


Just a question I have wondered for a long time: Does China want war? And if so, why? To what end?

Of course if we think and argue the answer to the first question is no, then I would recommend we heed Sun Tzu's advice: "Never assume the enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."

Excerpts:
In short, there is no substitute for studying the prospective foe to see what makes it tick and how we can calibrate our actions and forces to achieve that combination of capability, determination, and belief of which Kissinger writes, and to convince its leadership that aggression is a hopeless cause or would entail unbearable costs, in keeping with Clausewitz’s formula for bloodless victory. Always start with the classics when plotting strategy.
In short, the second nuclear age abounds with complexities and hazards. This is the backdrop against which we and our allies must try to deter China from using its option of last resort. We have the mixed blessing to live in interesting times.
How to Deter China from Making War
19fortyfive.com · by ByJames Holmes · April 29, 2022
Editor’s Note: These remarks were made by Dr. James Holmes at the Strategic Deterrent Coalition Symposium, Mystic, CT, April 28, 2022 – Even though this is a conference mainly about nuclear deterrence, it’s important to note that strategic deterrence vis-à-vis China involves far more than doomsday weapons. The Chinese Communist Party has resolved to make geostrategic gains with the least amount of physical force possible. Preferably party chieftains want to intimidate Asian neighbors without warfare; they want not to fight, and pursue their aims accordingly. Therefore, deterring China in the “gray zone” and the conventional arena is strategic deterrence. I will say a few words about each category of deterrence before moving on to nuclear deterrence in the “second nuclear age” we see taking shape around us. The late, great military historian John Keegan declared that the distinctions between levels of war are “elusive” and “artificial,” and I will proceed in his free-flowing spirit today.
I have two favorite devices for thinking about how to deter, no matter which level you’re talking about. First, there’s Henry Kissinger’s formula. Kissinger sees deterrence as a product of multiplying three variables, namely capability, resolve to use that capability to carry out our deterrent threat, and the adversary’s belief in our capability and resolve. So there are elements of human and material military excellence; political willpower; and the ability to communicate our strength and resolve to an opponent inclined to defy our threats. If we make believers out of our opponents, we will deter them. But Kissinger reminds us that if any one of those variables goes to zero, so does deterrence. We can be military titans, utterly resolute, and still fail to deter if the opponent disbelieves in our capability, resolve, or both.
And then there’s Carl von Clausewitz, not normally known as a theorist of deterrence or coercion. But he does tell us there are three ways a contender can win, and only the first necessarily involves defeating the enemy on some battleground and imposing terms. The second involves putting the enemy in a hopeless position, and the third involves convincing the enemy he can’t prevail at a cost he can afford to pay, or is willing to pay. These operate in peacetime strategic competition as well as wartime. If we put a rational opponent in a hopeless or unaffordable position, he should desist from actions we forbid. This to me adds texture and dynamism to Kissinger’s formula. It brings the opponent’s fluctuating cost/benefit calculations into the mix rather than just explaining that we should make ourselves strong and determined in hopes of cowing our opponent into inaction.
Now let’s put these ideas from the greats to work in three domains, namely the gray zone, conventional aggression, and the nuclear realm –
First, gray-zone aggression. China has set out to make the South China Sea in particular into sovereign territory where Beijing makes the rules—just as it makes laws and policies governing what happens on dry land within China’s borders. It has loudly and repeatedly proclaimed “indisputable sovereignty” over some 80-90 percent of that body of water, sovereignty meaning state ownership of territory. It has used the China Coast Guard and a maritime militia embedded in the fishing fleet as its implements of first resort to enforce its version of the rules, the idea being that if you claim territory is your own, you should go ahead and start policing it as though sovereignty were already an established fact. It backstops these paramilitary implements with the overwhelming sea, air, and missile power wielded by the People’s Liberation Army. No Southeast Asian military can stand against the PLA, everyone knows it, and this translates into deterrent and coercive leverage for Beijing.
And Chinese forces have the advantage of always being there. China is always on the scene in force in the South China Sea these days, and yet the United States and other outsiders have opposed its gray-zone operations through intermittent operations such as freedom-of-navigation cruises. The come-and-go approach is not enough. You have to be there—and stay—to compete with any hope of success. Otherwise we show up, make our demonstration, and go away. We vacate the field of competition and turn it back over to the Chinese. This is no way to prevail in any contest.
To improve our competitive position we should look at gray-zone competition through the eyes of a Philippine or Vietnamese fisherman, and design operations to give that person solace as he goes about his trade. We need to add rungs to our escalation ladder, giving ourselves options apart from standing idle or taking up arms. In Kissinger’s terms, we need to display formidable capability where it matters most, giving confidence to allies and friends and implanting fear and doubt in the minds of our adversaries. If they doubt they can get their way by increments, they will either deescalate to routine diplomacy in regional waters, or they will escalate to violence—and brand themselves the aggressor in the eyes of Asian and world opinion.
Now, I am skeptical that we can deter China forevermore through such measures. The party leadership has too much invested in making offshore waters Chinese property; it has tied this quest to national sovereignty and dignity, rousing deep passions. And Xi Jinping has staked his personal prestige on it in the eyes of the Chinese people, making it hard to back down. But in Clausewitzian terms, we can try to put China in what Communist Party leaders see as a hopeless situation, or a situation in which the costs of prevailing are unbearable. Being deterred will be Beijing’s least bad option.
If we and our regional partners can do that long enough on a day-by-day basis—if we can arrange things so that Xi wakes up each morning, reads the morning news, and tells himself today is not the day—then good things could happen over the long term. Xi is not a young man; we might outlast him, and perhaps a more enlightened successor might come along. This is a long game, and we have to be on the field of competition armed with lots of escalatory options if we and our partners hope to prevail against Beijing’s effort to subvert and rewrite the law of the sea bit by bit.
Second, conventional aggression. So conventional deterrence on our part plays directly into deterrence in the gray zone. It degrades that backstop to the efforts of the China Coast Guard and maritime militia. It also sows doubt in Chinese Communist Party minds about their ability to prevail in a conventional conflict, most likely in the Taiwan Strait or the East China Sea. To bring one more concept from Clausewitz into this discussion, Beijing is tacitly playing with the U.S. “value of the political object” calculation vis-à-vis these potential battlegrounds. Clausewitz tells us, in effect, that how much a contender wants its goal—its “political object,” as he calls it—determines how much it spends on that goal, and how long it keeps on spending. The “magnitude” of the effort is the rate at which a contender spends relevant resources such as treasure and military lives, and the “duration” of the effort is how long it lasts. Just like in basic physics, the rate multiplied by the time gives you the total amount of something—in this case, the cost you have to pay for your goal.
The problem is that the price is not fixed. China can manipulate calculations at the Pentagon and the White House. In the case of Taiwan, it could try to drive down the value of the island to the United States, convincing our leadership that saving it from invasion is not an especially worthwhile cause. Hence Beijing’s incessant efforts to dishearten the Taiwanese populace, military, and government. If Taiwanese are too fearful to defend themselves, Xi can ask under his breath, why should Americans do it for them?
China can also drive up the magnitude of the effort for Washington by constructing potent anti-access and area-denial defenses to exact a fearsome price from the U.S. joint force. And it has done just that. As U.S. Marine commandants like to say, we now have to fight to get to the fight, and will pay a price even before we get to the battlefield. If America’s superpower standing in the world depends on sea power, Xi can, again, under his breath, ask President Biden and Secretary Austin whether it’s worth risking our place in the world for the sake of a small island populated by 23 million people under the shadow of a rival superpower. Xi might hope they gauge the opportunity costs of bucking China’s will as unacceptable, and thus stand aside or at least hesitate during a cross-strait war. Either way, Washington grants Beijing time to accomplish its aims before others intercede.
How do we deflate such an effort to dishearten our leadership and society? It’s simple—although Clausewitz tells us the simplest thing is difficult in strategic competition and warfare. We must maintain conventional forces capable of prevailing against Chinese anti-access defenses on China’s home ground. We must keep our regional partnerships strong, not just with Taiwan, but also with other stakeholders such as Japan, and show China it will confront a strong, united coalition rather than a single isolated foe. And we must make the case to the American people that Taiwan matters. This is an easier case to make now that Russian aggression against Ukraine has made clear the fate small states may suffer in a might-makes-right world. If we do this—if our show of combined capability and resolve impresses Xi and his lieutenants—then he may desist from rolling the iron dice. We will have disheartened our adversary while giving heart to allies and friends.
Chinese Nuclear-Powered Ballistic Missile Submarine.
And third, nuclear gamesmanship. Around the turn of the century Paul Bracken, a professor at the Yale School of Management, made popular the notion that the world had entered into a second nuclear age, and that Asian military power would be a prominent feature of it. A decade ago my friend and coauthor Toshi Yoshihara and I put together a volume for Georgetown that accepted Bracken’s premise and looked at various entrants into the second nuclear age as well as gatekeepers of the first. Our goal was to project what their nuclear strategies might look like.
The basic premise underlying the second-nuclear-age thesis is that there are now fewer nuclear weapons in the world, but there are more nuclear-weapon states; they come in many different shapes, sizes, force structures, and cultures; and they are situated near one another geographically, making one-on-one deterrence elusive. Look no further than India and Pakistan, which made their entry to the nuclear club by virtue of near-simultaneous nuclear tests in 1998. Nuclear-armed China is a factor in atomic diplomacy in South Asia by virtue of its borders with embattled Kashmir and Jammu. Or there’s North Korea, which borders nuclear-weapon states Russia and China as well as South Korea, a beneficiary of U.S. extended deterrence. Moreover, the North glares at Japan, another beneficiary of U.S. extended deterrence, across the Yellow Sea and Sea of Japan. New entrants are building up their doomsday arsenals, while oldtimers use arms control to stabilize the military balance among themselves, and try to figure out how to hold down newcomers. Dynamism prevails—in sharp contrast to the relatively stable East/West balance of terror from the Cold War.
Now, China is one of five officially recognized nuclear-weapon states, having detonated an atomic device in 1964, some years before the Nonproliferation Treaty codified the principle of nuclear nonproliferation in international law. It belongs to the first nuclear age in that strict chronological sense. Nevertheless, in our Georgetown volume we depict China as a nuclear newcomer. During the late Cold War decades it got by with a “minimum deterrent” force of some 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles, on the logic that if the People’s Liberation Army had enough ICBMs to ensure that one got through an adversary’s defenses, adversary leaders would deem that amount of damage intolerable and stand down. Deterrence would hold.
Chinese President Xi Jinping. Image Credit: CCP.
It was starting to become apparent a decade ago, and has become glaringly obvious in recent years, that there China’s nuclear strategy and forces have undergone a discontinuity. No longer do familiar trendlines from the first nuclear age hold. We are seeing something new as the PLA dramatically expands its land-based ICBM inventory. The Pentagon now estimates that China could field at least 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. By sheer numbers, this marks a paradigm shift from minimum deterrence. China has also fielded an invulnerable second-strike capability in the form of its first working class of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, the Type 094. These developments mark such a radical break from the first nuclear age that we designated China a newcomer to the second.
Look at the geometry of deterrence in terms of geography and alliances. China is a nuclear-armed, hybrid land/sea power occupying the rimland between the Pacific Ocean and the Central Asian heartland. Adjoining it on land are fellow nuclear-weapon states Russia, North Korea, India, and Pakistan, while it faces off to the east against U.S. allies or partners along the first island chain. And in fact, it faces off against the United States, a resident power in the Western Pacific since 1945. Atomic diplomacy is a fact of life around much of the Chinese periphery. This makes it exceedingly hard for the allies to design a deterrent strategy toward, say, North Korea. Because of physical proximity, China is apt to interpret anything the allies do to deter Kim Jong-Un as covertly aimed at China. Communicating intent to Beijing is hard at the best of times, and more so when nuclear weapons are involved. Kissinger and Clausewitz might well despair of the attempt.
And then there are alliances. China is at least loosely allied with Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan, an entente that occupies a crescent sweeping from European Russia around the East Asian rimland and terminating in the Arabian Sea. This continental entente faces outward along interior lines toward the United States, its allies, and the “Quad,” a maritime consortium that occupies an outer crescent that runs from the Aleutians, down the first island chain through Japan and Taiwan, and around the South China Sea rim, terminating in the western Indian Ocean. This U.S.-aligned entente is on exterior lines, looking into the Eurasian rimlands. And it features an informal but increasingly intimate partnership with India on the subcontinent, since the Quad aims at curbing China’s ambitions at sea.
It behooves us to study the dynamics within each coalition as we try to craft a strategy that deters China without being unduly escalatory. For example, to what extent does Beijing egg on Pyongyang or Islamabad to make trouble for U.S. partners? How, if at all, does India—a nuclear-armed nonaligned nation that now tilts toward the United States yet insists on remaining on good terms with regional adventurers like Russia and Iran—figure into deterrence vis-à-vis China through its efforts in the Quad? Such are the vagaries of the second nuclear age.
Andrew Krepinevich has taken to calling the new nuclear age a “tripolar” nuclear age. He is right, but I fear he understates the volatility of this brave new world. There is a U.S.-China-Russia strategic triangle to be sure, but many other newcomers to the nuclear club intersect with and complicate deterrence among these three, as do aspirants to nuclear-weapon status such as Iran. Will newcomers accept the logic of mutual assured destruction, as nuclear-armed states did during the first nuclear age, or will perverse incentives induce them to roll the dice in times of trouble? If they do gamble, even with tactical weapons, they could embroil their partners or neighbors in horizontal escalation on the map as well as vertical escalation toward a strategic exchange.
J-10 Fighter.
So how do we deter a China that has broken so sharply with its nuclear past, at a time of growing volatility in the international system? By threatening what General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party, and Chinese society treasure most. Xi calls this the “Chinese Dream,” his banner for a packet of domestic and foreign policies designed to make China great again after its long “century of humiliation” spanning from the First Opium War in the late 1830s until victory in the Chinese Civil War and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Making China’s dream come true demands vibrant industry at home, centered mainly on economic hubs along the Chinese coastline. Providing an increasing standard of living for more and more of the Chinese people is how the Communist Party justifies its rule. In turn China must have commercial, diplomatic, and military access to the Western Pacific and points beyond to complete the supply chain, mainly at sea. The United States, its allies, and its friends occupy the first island chain and are positioned to block that access should they choose to do so. This is what I have called a “Great Wall in reverse” strategy designed to block maritime movement between the China seas and Western Pacific, imprisoning the merchant fleet and the People’s Liberation Army Navy within. If, instead of a glorious image of national rejuvenation, we can cast the image of a barren economic wasteland into the minds of Xi, his advisers, and ordinary Chinese, we may well deter them, on the logic that being deterred is less awful than seeing the national project come to ruin.
Down on the operational and force-design levels, the PLA Navy surface fleet commands outsized importance in Beijing, in large part because the Imperial Japanese Navy demolished the Qing Dynasty navy in 1895, wrested away Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands in the aftermath of that war, and displaced China from its accustomed place atop the Asian pecking order. Rebuilding a great navy is essential to China’s dream. Threatening today’s surface fleet with destruction could reawaken painful historical memories and exert a powerful deterrent effect. Similarly, it appears that the PLA Navy intends to use the South China Sea and possibly the Bohai Sea as bastions for its SSBNs. If so, we can use that information to help devise counterstrategies and deployments for maximum effect. And so forth.
In short, there is no substitute for studying the prospective foe to see what makes it tick and how we can calibrate our actions and forces to achieve that combination of capability, determination, and belief of which Kissinger writes, and to convince its leadership that aggression is a hopeless cause or would entail unbearable costs, in keeping with Clausewitz’s formula for bloodless victory. Always start with the classics when plotting strategy.
In short, the second nuclear age abounds with complexities and hazards. This is the backdrop against which we and our allies must try to deter China from using its option of last resort. We have the mixed blessing to live in interesting times.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfighting, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
19fortyfive.com · by ByJames Holmes · April 29, 2022


14. US Congress passes law to help Taiwan regain WHO status
Nationalist China was a founding member of the WHO. The PRC claims original membership but the WHO was established before the PRC came into existence in 1949.


US Congress passes law to help Taiwan regain WHO status
The US House of Representatives has unanimously passed legislation calling on the State Department to submit a plan to help Taiwan regain its observer status at the World Health Organization (WHO) in a rare show of bipartisan cooperation.
The House passed the bill 425 to 0 on Wednesday, after it passed the Senate last August. It will now go to the White House where President Joe Biden is expected to sign the measure into law.
Taiwan is excluded from most global organisations such as the WHO, the United Nations health agency, because of objections from Beijing, which considers the island part of its territory and not a separate country.
The measure directs the secretary of state to establish a strategy for obtaining observer status at the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO.
Taiwan was stripped of that status in 2017, after Tsai Ing-wen was elected president.
Beijing sees Tsai as a separatist and has stepped up pressure on the island since she took office, seeking to limit Taipei’s participation not only in the WHO but in other non-political organisations such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
The number of countries with which Taiwan has maintained formal diplomatic relations has also shrunk since Tsai became president – with just 15 states currently recognising Taipei over Beijing.
Urging support for the bill, Democratic Representative Gerry Connolly praised Taiwan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that it had only 37,000 confirmed cases despite a population of 23.5 million, and that it shared expertise and donated protective equipment internationally.
“Taiwan’s leadership and contribution to global health security demonstrate why it ought to be part of the general conversation on public health,” he said.
Taiwan’s foreign ministry expressed its thanks for the US support, saying the government was continuing efforts to be able to take part this year.
China has already indicated it will not support Taiwan’s participation at this year’s assembly.
Taiwan campaigned hard for an observer seat at the 2021 assembly but was unsuccessful.


15. Presidential Office slams local newspaper for slight against U.S. senator - Focus Taiwan




Presidential Office slams local newspaper for slight against U.S. senator - Focus Taiwan
focustaiwan.tw · by > Chinese Version
Taipei, April 28 (CNA) The Presidential Office on Thursday issued a strong-worded statement to criticize a Taiwanese newspaper for suggesting that U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham had visited Taiwan in mid-April to do business.
The Taiwan-based United Daily News (UDN) ran a report on Thursday saying that Graham, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, had "forcefully" talked Taiwan's government into buying commercial aircraft made by the American manufacturer, The Boeing Co., during his recent visit to Taiwan.
Graham led a congressional delegation to Taiwan on April 14-15 for a brief visit, during which he met with President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and other top government officials.
The report was based on two public statements made by Graham. During the delegation's meeting with Tsai at the Presidential Office on April 15, Graham said he hoped Taiwan would buy Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets.
The senator from South Carolina relayed this message once again in a statement on April 22, saying: "I'm hoping in the coming weeks that Taiwan will announce that they're going to buy twenty-four 787 wide-body jets made by Boeing."
"That would be a US$8 billion package," he said. "It would be a tremendous boost to Boeing in South Carolina, and I'm hoping Taiwan will make that decision."
The UDN report added that Taiwan's state-owned China Airlines had been reserved about whether it would make such a purchase, citing unknown resources.
In its statement, Presidential Office Spokesperson Xavier Chang (張惇涵) said the news organization had more than once run reports suggesting U.S. officials or politicians had come to Taiwan to do business, labeling them as businessmen and showing no respect to them.
It is common for lawmakers from democratic nations to care about particular industries in their country and speak in favor of them, Chang said, commenting on Graham's statements.
He said, however, that any acquisition or investment projects by the Taiwanese authorities should go through professional assessment and be conducted according to law.
The spokesman added that the UDN's report served no good to Taiwan's relationship with the U.S.
In a separate statement, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said that the UDN report contained misleading information and would harm the partnership between Taiwan and the U.S.
Taiwan and the U.S. are close economic partners and bilateral trade and investment have been booming, MOFA noted, adding that such a relationship had contributed to Taiwan's economy and the prosperity of the Indo-Pacific region.
MOFA urged the newspaper to uphold professionalism and provide accurate information to the public.
(By Teng Pei-ju)
Enditem/ASG
focustaiwan.tw · by > Chinese Version

16. China says Nato has ‘messed up Europe’ and warns over role in Asia-Pacific

So is China afraid the opposite would be true in Asia? (Of course NATO has not messed up Europe and in fact has successfully protected it and allowed Europe to prosper). Is this an indicator that China is afraid of a stronger European security effort in Asia?


China says Nato has ‘messed up Europe’ and warns over role in Asia-Pacific
In response to British foreign secretary’s warning that Beijing must ‘play by the rules’, ministry of foreign affairs says Nato is stirring conflict

The Guardian · by Helen Davidson · April 29, 2022
China’s ministry of foreign affairs has accused Nato of messing up Europe and stirring up conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region, after the UK’s foreign secretary told China it should “play by the rules”.
In a speech at Mansion House in London on Wednesday, Liz Truss renewed calls to boost Nato in the wake of the Ukraine war, and said the coordinated moves to isolate Russia from the world economy proved that market access to democratic countries was no longer a given. Truss also delivered a direct warning to China.
“Countries must play by the rules. And that includes China,” she said.
On Thursday Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, dismissed Truss’s comments and accused Nato of demanding other countries abide by basic norms while it has “wantonly waged wars and dropped bombs in sovereign states, killing and displacing innocent civilians”.
“Nato, a military organisation in the North Atlantic, has in recent years come to the Asia-Pacific region to throw its weight around and stir up conflicts,” Wang said.
“Nato has messed up Europe. Is it now trying to mess up the Asia-Pacific and even the world?”
In her speech Truss said Nato had to pre-empt threats in the Indo-Pacific and extend its outlook to democracies outside its membership, like Taiwan, which Beijing claims is a breakaway Chinese province it must retake. She suggested China’s economic rise – now the world’s second largest economy to Britain’s sixth – could be targeted.
“[China] will not continue to rise if they do not play by the rules. China needs trade with the G7. We [the Group of Seven] represent around half of the global economy. And we have choices,” Truss said.
“We have shown with Russia the kind of choices that we’re prepared to make when international rules are violated.”
China has refused to condemn the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one of its closest allies, drawing criticism and urgings from European and other governments to use its influence on Moscow. A recent China-EU summit was reportedly strained as Chinese representatives rebuffed pressure by European counterparts to help end the war. Premier Li Keqiang said Beijing would pursue peace “in its own way”.
Beijing firmly opposes linking the Ukraine war to its relations with Moscow and has said it will defend the rights of Chinese individuals and companies. On Thursday Wang said China’s position on the conflict had been “consistent and clear”.
“We have always made independent judgments based on the merits of the case,” he said, adding no further detail.
Truss has previously accused China and Russia being “aggressors working in concert”, telling Australian media she couldn’t rule out China using Russia’s invasion as an opportunity to launch its own act of aggression.
The Guardian · by Helen Davidson · April 29, 2022

17. The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War

I defer to the Ukrainian experts for an assessment of this history.

But this powerful conclusion resonates with me:

Ukrainians assert their nation’s existence through simple acts of solidarity. They are not resisting Russia because of some absence or some difference, because they are not Russians or opposed to Russians. What is to be resisted is elemental: the threat of national extinction represented by Russian colonialism, a war of destruction expressly designed to resolve “the Ukrainian question.” Ukrainians know that there is not a question to be answered, only a life to be lived and, if need be, to be risked. They resist because they know who they are. In one of his very first videos after the invasion, when Russian propaganda claimed that he had fled Kyiv, Zelensky pointed the camera at himself and said, “The President is here.” That is it. Ukraine is here.

The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War
For centuries, the country has lived in the shadow of empire. But its past also provides the key to its present.
April 28, 2022
The New Yorker · by Timothy Snyder · April 28, 2022
When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.
Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency a decade ago. In 2012, he described Russia as a “state-civilization,” which by its nature absorbed smaller cultures such as Ukraine’s. The next year, he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were joined in “spiritual unity.” In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, he argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.
As the objects of this rhetoric, and of the war of destruction that it sanctions, Ukrainians grasp all of this. Ukraine does have a history, of course, and Ukrainians do constitute a nation. But empire enforces objectification on the periphery and amnesia at the center. Thus modern Russian imperialism includes memory laws that forbid serious discussion of the Soviet past. It is illegal for Russians to apply the word “war” to the invasion of Ukraine. It is also illegal to say that Stalin began the Second World War as Hitler’s ally, and used much the same justification to attack Poland as Putin is using to attack Ukraine. When the invasion began, in February, Russian publishers were ordered to purge mentions of Ukraine from textbooks.
Faced with the Kremlin’s official mixture of fantasy and taboo, the temptation is to prove the opposite: that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is eternal, that it is Ukrainians, not Russians, who are always right, and so on. Yet Ukrainian history gives us something more interesting than a mere counter-narrative to empire. We can find Ukrainian national feeling at a very early date. In contemporary Ukraine, though, the nation is not so much anti-colonial, a rejection of a particular imperial power, as post-colonial, the creation of something new.
Southern Ukraine, where Russian troops are now besieging cities and bombing hospitals, was well known to the ancients. In the founding myth of Athens, the goddess Athena gives the city the gift of the olive tree. In fact, the city could grow olives only because it imported grain from ports on the Black Sea coast. The Greeks knew the coast, but not the hinterland, where they imagined mythical creatures guarding fields of gold and ambrosia. Here already was a colonial view of Ukraine: a land of fantasy, where those who take have the right to dream.
The city of Kyiv did not exist in ancient times, but it is very old—about half a millennium older than Moscow. It was probably founded in the sixth or seventh century, north of any territory seen by Greeks or controlled by Romans. Islam was advancing, and Christianity was becoming European. The Western Roman Empire had fallen, leaving a form of Christianity subordinate to a pope. The Eastern (Byzantine) Empire remained, directing what we now call the Orthodox Church. As Rome and Constantinople competed for converts, peoples east of Kyiv converted to Islam. Kyivans spoke a Slavic language that had no writing system, and practiced a paganism without idols or temples.
Putin’s vision of “unity” relates to a baptism that took place in this setting. In the ninth century, a group of Vikings known as the Rus arrived in Kyiv. Seeking a southbound route for their slave trade, they found the Dnipro River, which runs through the city. Their chieftains then fought over a patchwork of territories in what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and the northeast of Russia—with Kyiv always as the prize. In the late tenth century, a Viking named Valdemar took the city, with the help of a Scandinavian army. He initially governed as a pagan. But, around 987, when the Byzantines faced an internal revolt, he sensed an opportunity. He came to the emperor’s aid, and received his sister’s hand in marriage. In the process, Valdemar converted to Christianity.
Putin claims that this messy sequence of events reveals the will of God to bind Russia and Ukraine forever. The will of God is easy to misunderstand; in any case, modern nations did not exist at the time, and the words “Russia” and “Ukraine” had no meaning. Valdemar was typical of the pagan Eastern European rulers of his day, considering multiple monotheistic options before choosing the one that made the most strategic sense. The word “Rus” no longer meant Viking slavers but a Christian polity. Its ruling family now intermarried with others, and the local people were treated as subjects to be taxed rather than as bodies to be sold.
Yet no rule defined who would take power after a Kyivan ruler’s death. Valdemar took a Byzantine princess as his wife, but he had a half a dozen others, not to mention a harem of hundreds of women. When he died in 1015, he had imprisoned one of his sons, Sviatopolk, and was making war upon another, Yaroslav. Sviatopolk was freed after his father’s death, and killed three of his brothers, but he was defeated on the battlefield by Yaroslav. Other sons entered the fray, and Yaroslav didn’t rule alone until 1036. The succession had taken twenty-one years. At least ten other sons of Valdemar had died in the meantime.
These events do not reveal a timeless empire, as Putin claims. But they do suggest the importance of a succession principle, a theme very important in Ukrainian-Russian relations today. The Ukrainian transliteration of “Valdemar” is “Volodymyr,” the name of Ukraine’s President. In Ukraine, power is transferred through democratic elections: when Volodymyr Zelensky won the 2019 Presidential election, the sitting President accepted defeat. The Russian transliteration of the same name is “Vladimir.” Russia is brittle: it has no succession principle, and it’s unclear what will happen when Vladimir Putin dies or is forced from power. The pressure of mortality confirms the imperial thinking. An aging tyrant, obsessed by his legacy, seizes upon a lofty illusion that seems to confer immortality: the “unity” of Russia and Ukraine.
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In the Icelandic sagas, Yaroslav is remembered as the Lame; in Eastern Europe, he is the Wise, the giver of laws. Yet he did not solve the problem of succession. Following his reign, the lands around Kyiv fragmented again and again. In 1240, the city fell to the Mongols; later, most of old Rus was claimed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then the largest state in Europe. Lithuania borrowed from Kyiv a grammar of politics, as well as a good deal of law. For a couple of centuries, its grand dukes also ruled Poland. But, in 1569, after the Lithuanian dynasty died out, a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was formalized, and the territories of Ukraine were placed under Polish jurisdiction.
This was a crucial change. After 1569, Kyiv was no longer a source of law but an object of it—the archetypal colonial situation. It was colonization that set off Ukraine from the former territories of Rus, and its manner generated qualities still visible today: suspicion of the central state, organization in crisis, and the notion of freedom as self-expression, despite a powerful neighbor.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all the forces of Europe’s globalization seemed to bear down on Ukraine. Polish colonization resembled and in some measure enabled the European colonization of the wider world. Polish nobles introduced land-management practices—along with land managers, most of whom were Jewish—that allowed the establishment of profitable plantations. Local Ukrainian warlords rushed to imitate the system, and adopted elements of Polish culture, including Western Christianity and the Polish language. In an age of discovery, enserfed peasants labored for a world market.
Ukraine’s colonization coincided with the Renaissance, and with a spectacular flowering of Polish culture. Like other Renaissance thinkers, Polish scholars in Ukraine resuscitated ancient knowledge, and sometimes overturned it. It was a Pole, Copernicus, who undid the legacy of Ptolemy’s “Almagest” and confirmed that the Earth orbits the sun. It was another Pole, Maciej of Miechów, who corrected Ptolemy’s “Geography,” clearing Ukrainian maps of gold and ambrosia. As in ancient times, however, the tilling of the black earth enabled tremendous wealth, raising the question of why those who labored and those who profited experienced such different fates.
The Renaissance considered questions of identity through language. Across Europe, there was a debate as to whether Latin, now revived, was sufficient for the culture, or whether vernacular spoken languages should be elevated for the task. In the early fourteenth century, Dante answered this question in favor of Italian; English, French, Spanish, and Polish writers created other literary languages by codifying local vernaculars. In Ukraine, literary Polish emerged victorious over the Ukrainian vernacular, becoming the language of the commercial and intellectual élite. In a way, this was typical: Polish was a modern language, like English or Italian. But it was not the local language in Ukraine. Ukraine’s answer to the language question was deeply colonial, whereas in the rest of Europe it could be seen as broadly democratic.
The Reformation brought a similar result: local élites converted to Protestantism and then to Roman Catholicism, alienating them further from an Orthodox population. The convergence of colonization, the Renaissance, and the Reformation was specific to Ukraine. By the sixteen-forties, the few large landholders generally spoke Polish and were Catholic, and those who worked for them spoke Ukrainian and were Orthodox. Globalization had generated differences and inequalities that pushed the people to rebellion.
Ukrainians on the battlefield today rely on no fantasy of the past to counter Putin’s. If there is a precursor that matters to them, it is the Cossacks, a group of free people who lived on the far reaches of the Ukrainian steppe, making their fortress on an island in the middle of the Dnipro. Having escaped the Polish system of landowners and peasants, they could choose to be “registered Cossacks,” paid for their service in the Polish Army. Still, they were not citizens, and more of them wished to be registered than the Polish-Lithuanian parliament would allow.
The rebellion began in 1648, when an influential Cossack, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, saw his lands seized and his son attacked by a Polish noble. Finding himself beyond the protection of the law, Khmelnytsky turned his fellow-Cossacks toward revolt against the Polish-speaking, Roman Catholic magnates who dominated Ukraine. The accumulated cultural, religious, and economic grievances of the people quickly transformed the revolt into something very much like an anti-colonial uprising, with violence directed not only against the private armies of the magnates but against Poles and Jews generally. The magnates carried out reprisals against peasants and Cossacks, impaling them on stakes. The Polish-Lithuanian cavalry fought what had been their own Cossack infantry. Each side knew the other very well.
In 1651, the Cossacks, realizing that they needed help, turned to an Eastern power, Muscovy, about which they knew little. When Kyivan Rus had collapsed, most of its lands had been absorbed by Lithuania, but some of its northeastern territories remained under the dominion of a Mongol successor state. There, in a new city called Moscow, leaders known as tsars had begun an extraordinary period of territorial expansion, extending their realm into northern Asia. In 1648, the year that the Cossack uprising began, a Muscovite explorer reached the Pacific Ocean.
The war in Ukraine allowed Muscovy to turn its attention to Europe. In 1654, the Cossacks signed an agreement with representatives of the tsar. The Muscovite armies invaded Poland-Lithuania from the east; soon after, Sweden invaded from the north, setting off the crisis that Polish history remembers as “the Deluge.” Peace was eventually made between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy, in 1667, and Ukraine was divided more or less down the middle, along the Dnipro. After a thousand years of existence, Kyiv was politically connected to Moscow for the first time.
The Cossacks were something like an early national movement. The problem was that their struggle against one colonial power enabled another. In 1721, Muscovy was renamed the Russian Empire, in reference to old Rus. Poland-Lithuania never really recovered from the Deluge, and was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795. Russia thereby claimed the rest of Ukraine—everything but a western district known as Galicia, which went to the Habsburgs. Around the same time, in 1775, the Cossacks lost their status. They did not gain the political rights they had wanted, nor did the peasants who supported them gain control of the black earth. Polish landowners remained in Ukraine, even as state power became Russian.
Whereas Putin’s story of Ukraine is about destiny, the Ukrainian recollection of the Cossacks is about unfulfilled aspirations. The country’s national anthem, written in 1862, speaks of a young people upon whom fate has yet to smile, but who will one day prove worthy of the “Cossack nation.”
The nineteenth century was the age of national revivals. When the Ukrainian movement began in imperial Russian Kharkov—today Kharkiv, and largely in ruins—the focus was on the Cossack legacy. The next move was to locate history in the people, as an account of continuous culture. At first, such efforts did not seem threatening to imperial rule. But, after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War, in 1856, and the insult of the Polish uprising of 1863 and 1864, Ukrainian culture was declared not to exist. It was often deemed an invention of Polish élites—an idea that Putin endorsed in his essay on “historical unity.” Leading Ukrainian thinkers emigrated to Galicia, where they could speak freely.
The First World War brought the principle of self-determination, which promised a release from imperial rule. In practice, it was often used to rescue old empires, or to build new ones. A Ukrainian National Republic was established in 1917, as the Russian Empire collapsed into revolution. In 1918, in return for a promise of foodstuffs, the country was recognized by Austria and Germany. Woodrow Wilson championed self-determination, but his victorious entente ignored Ukraine, recognizing Polish claims instead. Vladimir Lenin invoked the principle as well, though he meant only that the exploitation of national questions could advance class revolution. Ukraine soon found itself at the center of the Russian civil war, in which the Red Army, led by the Bolsheviks, and the White Army, fighting for the defunct empire, both denied Ukraine’s right to sovereignty. In this dreadful conflict, which followed four years of war, millions of people died, among them tens of thousands of Jews.
Though the Red Army ultimately prevailed, Bolshevik leaders knew that the Ukrainian question had to be addressed. Putin claims that the Bolsheviks created Ukraine, but the truth is close to the opposite. The Bolsheviks destroyed the Ukrainian National Republic. Aware that Ukrainian identity was real and widespread, they designed their new state to account for it. It was largely thanks to Ukraine that the Soviet Union took the form it did, as a federation of units with national names.
The failure of self-determination in Ukraine was hardly unique. Almost all of the new states created after the First World War were destroyed, within about two decades, by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or both. In the political imaginations of both regimes, Ukraine was the territory whose possession would allow them to break the postwar order, and to transform the world in their own image. As in the sixteenth century, it was as if all the forces of world history were concentrated on a single country.
Stalin spoke of an internal colonization, in which peasants would be exploited so that the Soviet economy could imitate—and then overtake—capitalism. His policy of collective agriculture, in which land was seized from farmers, was particularly unwelcome in Ukraine, where the revolution had finally got rid of the (still largely Polish) landholders. Yet the black earth of Ukraine was central to Stalin’s plans, and he moved to subdue it. In 1932 and 1933, he enforced a series of policies that led to around four million people dying of hunger or related disease. Soviet propaganda blamed the Ukrainians, claiming that they were killing themselves to discredit Soviet rule—a tactic echoed, today, by Putin. Europeans who tried to organize famine relief were dismissed as Nazis.
The actual Nazis saw Stalin’s famine as a sign that Ukrainian agriculture could be exploited for another imperial project: their own. Hitler wanted Soviet power overthrown, Soviet cities depopulated, and the whole western part of the country colonized. His vision of Ukrainians was intensely colonial: he imagined that he could deport and starve them by the millions, and exploit the labor of whoever remained. It was Hitler’s desire for Ukrainian land that brought millions of Jews under German control. In this sense, colonial logic about Ukraine was a necessary condition for the Holocaust.
Between 1933 and 1945, Soviet and Nazi colonialism made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world. More civilians were killed in Ukraine, in acts of atrocity, than anywhere else. That reckoning doesn’t even include soldiers: more Ukrainians died fighting the Germans, in the Second World War, than French, American, and British troops combined.
The major conflict of the war in Europe was the German-Soviet struggle for Ukraine, which took place between 1941 and 1945. But, when the war began, in 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany were de-facto allies, and jointly invaded Poland. At the time, what is now western Ukraine was southeastern Poland. A small group of Ukrainian nationalists there joined the Germans, understanding that they would seek to destroy the U.S.S.R. When it became clear that the Germans would fail, the nationalists left their service, ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 and 1944, and then resisted the Soviets. In Putin’s texts, they figure as timeless villains, responsible for Ukrainian difference generally. The irony, of course, is that they emerged thanks to Stalin’s much grander collaboration with Hitler. They were crushed by Soviet power, in a brutal counter-insurgency, and today Ukraine’s far right polls at one to two per cent. Meanwhile, the Poles, whose ancestors were the chief victims of Ukrainian nationalism, have admitted nearly three million Ukrainian refugees, reminding us that there are other ways to handle history than stories of eternal victimhood.
After the war, western Ukraine was added to Soviet Ukraine, and the republic was placed under suspicion precisely because it had been under German occupation. New restrictions on Ukrainian culture were justified by a manufactured allocation of guilt. This circular logic—we punish you, therefore you must be guilty—informs Kremlin propaganda today. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has argued that Russia had to invade Ukraine because Ukraine might have started a war. Putin, who has said the same, is clearly drawing on Stalin’s rhetoric. We are to understand that the Soviet victory in the Second World War left Russians forever pure and Ukrainians eternally guilty. At the funerals of Russian soldiers, grieving parents are told that their sons were fighting Nazis.
The history of the colonization of Ukraine, like the history of troubling and divisive subjects in general, can help us get free of myths. The past delivers to Putin several strands of colonial rhetoric, which he has combined and intensified. It also leaves us vulnerable to a language of exploitation: whenever we speak of “the Ukraine” instead of “Ukraine,” or pronounce the capital city in the Russian style, or act as if Americans can tell Ukrainians when and how to make peace, we are continuing imperial rhetoric by partaking in it.
Ukrainian national rhetoric is less coherent than Putin’s imperialism, and, therefore, more credible, and more human. Independence arrived in 1991, when the U.S.S.R was dissolved. Since then, the country’s politics have been marked by corruption and inequality, but also by a democratic spirit that has grown in tandem with national self-awareness. In 2004, an attempt to rig an election was defeated by a mass movement. In 2014, millions of Ukrainians protested a President who retreated from the E.U. The protesters were massacred, the President fled, and Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. Again and again, Ukrainians have elected Presidents who seek reconciliation with Russia; again and again, this has failed. Zelensky is an extreme case: he ran on a platform of peace, only to be greeted with an invasion.
Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way, dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.
The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.
Ukrainians assert their nation’s existence through simple acts of solidarity. They are not resisting Russia because of some absence or some difference, because they are not Russians or opposed to Russians. What is to be resisted is elemental: the threat of national extinction represented by Russian colonialism, a war of destruction expressly designed to resolve “the Ukrainian question.” Ukrainians know that there is not a question to be answered, only a life to be lived and, if need be, to be risked. They resist because they know who they are. In one of his very first videos after the invasion, when Russian propaganda claimed that he had fled Kyiv, Zelensky pointed the camera at himself and said, “The President is here.” That is it. Ukraine is here.
The New Yorker · by Timothy Snyder · April 28, 2022


18. The Marine Corps' Intellectual Civil War

Conclusion:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would do well to sponsor a series of war games that would compare the joint and Marine Corps concepts. Single war games do not validate anything, but a series of four or five might give a good evaluation of the relative merits of both. The results might even challenge the strategic concept of defending the islands. Warfighting strategy is too important to be left to a single service.

The Marine Corps' Intellectual Civil War
military.com · by 28 Apr 2022 Military.com | By Gary Anderson · April 28, 2022
Gary Anderson is a retired colonel who served as the director of Marine Corps Wargaming. He retired as the chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.
The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.
It is almost unheard of for retired Marine Corps general officers to criticize the policies of the sitting commandant, but three have recently done so. They joined Former Navy Secretary James Webb in criticizing Gen. David Berger's Force Design 2030 plan to revamp the Corps' warfighting strategy. Retired Gens. Charles Krulak (a former commandant himself), Jack Sheehan and Anthony Zinni penned an April 22 editorial in The Washington Post criticizing the new strategic vision. They appear to speak for a much larger group of retired general officers.
This is not a group of reactionary Colonel Blimps; they represent some of the most innovative minds that the Corps has produced in a half century.
Berger's vision, which he is actively pursuing, is to concentrate the Marine Corps' attention on China. He hopes to disrupt China's anti-navy, access denial strategy designed to foil U.S. power projection in that region. The concept calls for having Marine Corps units occupy islands in the South China Sea to counter China's attempt to dominate that body of water using long-range anti-ship and anti-air missiles.
The intent is to assist the Navy in disrupting the Chinese reconnaissance strike-complex that is designed to deny U.S. naval and Air Force access to the South China Sea. Once that is accomplished, U.S. and allied forces would be able to operate more freely. To buy a new range of capabilities, Berger is divesting the Marine Corps of many of its legacy combat systems. Most notably, he wants to mothball tanks. But also on the chopping block are helicopters and much of the Corps' tubed artillery, as well as some heavy engineering and logistics assets.
The four-star critics make some telling arguments against Berger's strategic direction. They point out that overspecialization against China degrades the Marine Corps' traditional mission as a force ready to rapidly deploy anywhere in the world, and that the discarded systems would be useful in surprise conflicts such as the one in Ukraine. They also point out that most of the new systems that Berger wants to buy already are prevalent in the Army, Navy and Air Force. They also observe that the new vision was not coordinated with the combatant commands, the Joint staff, or the nations laying claim to the target islands. There are also concerns regarding the feasibility of resupplying forces once engaged.
Focus on a specific potential enemy is not new to the Marine Corps. Marines developed their expertise in amphibious warfare in the years between the two world wars specifically to conduct operations in an expected conflict with Japan. Even then, there was internal debate over the wisdom of this approach.
At the time, the Marine Corps had been involved in small wars in the jungles of the Caribbean and Central America. The concept of being America's "force in readiness" was already deeply ingrained in the Corps. However, the difference between then and now is that the capabilities developed to conduct amphibious warfare were additive. The Corps divested itself of nothing to develop amphibious tractors, shore party organizations, and the use of carrier-based aviation as artillery early in landing operations before big guns could come ashore. Today, significant equipment has been retired without guarantees on investment.
Berger's defenders argue that the current Ukrainian conflict proves that tanks are obsolete. However, despite their success in tank killing, additional tanksm along with jet fighter-bombers, top the Ukrainian wish list for military aid as fighting ratchets up in the Eastern theater of that conflict.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations came to the realization that China has become a near-peer regional military threat, and the Marine Corps should be congratulated for giving serious thought to that fact. However, before further mothballing more hardware, the service should consider an approach that could realize the useful parts of Berger's vision while avoiding a nasty resource fight with the other services and maintaining the ability of the Marine Corps to fight in unexpected contingencies worldwide.
III Marine Amphibious Force on Okinawa is the organization tasked with carrying out Berger's strategy. An alternative would be to configure III MEF as a joint task force headquarters with augmentation from the other services to carry out early operations to disrupt China's anti-access strategy, with the Marine Corps' new littoral regiments as the nucleus for sub-joint task forces.
The other services would provide the long-range missiles and anti-air capabilities that the 2030 vision requires. III MEF has configured as a joint task force nucleus for real-world joint missions (mostly humanitarian) before and routinely participates in joint exercises in that capacity. This would ease friction with the other services and the combatant command outside of the Indo-Pacific theater.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would do well to sponsor a series of war games that would compare the joint and Marine Corps concepts. Single war games do not validate anything, but a series of four or five might give a good evaluation of the relative merits of both. The results might even challenge the strategic concept of defending the islands. Warfighting strategy is too important to be left to a single service.
military.com · by 28 Apr 2022 Military.com | By Gary Anderson · April 28, 2022


19.  What is a ‘tactical’ nuke, and would Putin use one?


It may be time when theories will be tested. I am afraid they may be found wanting. The current situation makes mutually assured destruction seem like a sane course of action.

What is a ‘tactical’ nuke, and would Putin use one?
Some experts say there’s really no such thing. All experts agree: This is uncharted territory.

Global Security Reporter
April 29, 2022
grid.news · by Joshua Keating
Just in case you were wondering, Vladimir Putin has nuclear weapons.
Almost from the moment he launched his war on Ukraine, Russia’s president has repeatedly made not-so-subtle references to Russia’s nuclear arsenal and warned Western countries of his willingness to use it. He did so yet again on Wednesday at a speech in St. Petersburg. “If anyone decides to meddle in ongoing events and create unacceptable strategic threats for Russia,” he warned, “they must know our response will be lightning-quick. We have all the instruments for this, ones nobody else can boast of. And we will use them, if we have to.”
The speech came a few days after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a televised interview that while Russia was seeking to avoid nuclear war, “the danger is serious, real. And we must not underestimate it.”
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Putin’s nuclear threats have been somewhat effective — the threat of nuclear escalation is a big reason why NATO countries have avoided taking certain retaliatory steps, such as imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would risk direct combat with the Russian military — but only up to a point. Western countries are now training Ukrainian troops on their soil and providing Ukraine with aircraft and increasingly heavy weaponry, measures that were seen by many as dangerously escalatory just a few weeks ago.
There are also fears that Putin could use one of his “instruments” on the battlefield in Ukraine if the war continues to go poorly for the Russian military. In a speech earlier this month, CIA Director William Burns warned that “given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed that Russia might use a nuke on the battlefield in a CNN interview.
Aside from the Kremlin’s vague threats, there’s no evidence Russia is planning to use a nuclear weapon, but the mere possibility is sobering. This would mark a turning point not just in the war in Ukraine, but in world history. A nuclear weapon has not been used in war since 1945, and never in a world where other countries could retaliate with nuclear weapons of their own. And experts who spoke with Grid say that euphemistic terms like “tactical nukes” and “low-yield nukes” should not obscure the damage such a weapon would cause or the larger risks it would create.
As Shannon Bugos, a senior policy analyst at the Arms Control Association, told Grid, “A nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon. Once you’ve introduced a nuclear weapon onto the battlefield, that’s the endgame. There’s no coming back.”
“Tactical” nukes: A distinction without a difference?
What exactly is a “tactical nuclear weapon”? For starters, some military experts don’t think the distinction is useful at all. As then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis put it in congressional testimony in 2018, “I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon.’ Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer.”
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The term “tactical” is often used to imply that the bomb is smaller or less powerful, but this is misleading at best. Some “tactical” warheads in the U.S. arsenal have yields of around 100 kilotons. That’s smaller than some of the larger bombs available today, but still massive: The bomb used on Hiroshima had a yield of just 15 kilotons.
Russia is thought to have some lower-yield weapons, around the 10-kiloton range. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider that the port explosion that destroyed much of downtown Beirut in 2020 was less than 1 kiloton.
In the current conversation, “tactical” nuclear weapons are distinguished from “strategic” ones, but the difference has less to do with the bombs themselves than how they would be used. Strategic warheads typically refer to those which the U.S. and Russia would fire at each other’s territory in the event of an all-out nuclear war. The target is the enemy’s society, not just its military. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the textbook example. A “tactical” weapon, on the other hand, would be used for some specific gain in the theater of war. “A tactical nuclear weapon is basically a weapon that you would use to gain advantage, get some advantage on the battlefield or on the theater of operations,” said Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia’s nuclear forces at the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research.
A tactical nuclear weapon could be used for a task like destroying an enemy tank column or a large target like an airfield. Nuclear depth charges designed to destroy submarines or the nuclear-armed missile defense system that the Soviets deployed around Moscow would be other examples of “tactical nukes.” They are generally thought of as having shorter range. A nuclear missile fired from a ground-based artillery system, like the Russian Iskander launchers that have been deployed around Ukraine, would generally be considered tactical.
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies who agrees there’s “no such thing” as a tactical nuclear weapon, said the distinction was in large part created by U.S.-Russian arms control agreements like the 2009 New START treaty: “Those agreements only cover stuff that goes on [intercontinental ballistic missiles] and submarines, and heavy bombers. And so we call those ‘strategic.’ Sometimes you’ll hear people say ‘non-strategic,’ instead of tactical, which basically means everything that’s not covered by the strategic arms agreements.”
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According to some estimates, Russia may have between 1,000 and 2,000 of these non-strategic weapons.
Would Russia use one?
“If you look specifically at the current war, the fact of the matter is that there are no plausible tactical missions for nuclear weapons,” said Podvig. “There are no massive tank columns moving toward Luhansk or aircraft carriers to destroy. There is no way that Russia could gain advantage on the battlefield [with a nuclear weapon.]” The only plausible mission for nukes, he said, would be a Hiroshima-style “strategic” attack meant to force Ukraine to surrender.
As for what would lead Russia to resort to such an attack, some analysts believe, based on the statements by Russian analysts and officials, that the country has an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy, in which it would use nuclear weapons to force surrender, compensating for disadvantages on the battlefield or to avoid an imminent defeat. It should be pointed out that this is not the official Russian doctrine, which states that first use of nuclear weapons is permissible only “when the very existence of the state is under threat.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov referred specifically to this doctrine in an interview with PBS in late March, saying, “We can use and we will actually use nuclear weapons to eliminate the threat for the existence of our country.”
Podvig pointed out that “there is wiggle room there to interpret that broadly. It’s not like someone will be arguing this in court.”
Ultimately, one man will decide what constitutes a threat to the state. Putin’s narrative on the war in Ukraine, after all, is that Russia is defending itself from NATO aggression, and he has often framed the conflict in existential terms for Russia. This doesn’t mean he will use his nuclear weapons, but it’s not hard to imagine how he would make the case that doing so was necessary for the state’s survival. There’s a reason the White House quickly walked back President Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff remark last month that Putin “cannot remain in power.”
What happens next?
If Russia used a nuclear weapon, no matter how small, “tactical” or “strategic,” and no matter what the target, it would shatter a taboo that has been in place for almost 80 years, and it’s far from clear what would happen next. Ukraine’s Western allies would be under pressure to respond in kind, but using a nuke in response to a nuke risks a chain of escalation that could end in Armageddon.
Slate journalist Fred Kaplan has reported that the Obama administration once considered a scenario like this in a war game simulating a Russian invasion of the Baltic nations, in which Russia used a low-yield nuclear weapon to turn the tide after a battlefield setback. While the generals in the war game favored a nuclear response, Colin Kahl, then Biden’s national security adviser, now undersecretary of defense, argued for diplomatic and economic pressure to isolate Russia.
Both options, and a wide range of responses in between, are likely to be heard if worse comes to worst. The world would be in uncharted territory. As Lewis pointed out, “we’ve all fought the same number of nuclear wars. Zero.” And written doctrines, past precedent and war games are of very limited use in guessing how one would play out. “It’s not rational to use a nuclear weapon,” said Lewis. “It’s not rational to retaliate with a nuclear weapon. None of this is rational.”
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
grid.news · by Joshua Keating

20. Going underground: Ukraine’s subterranean fighters

Are any of our former tunnel rats still around? Tunnel warfare has to be among the worst of conditions.


Going underground: Ukraine’s subterranean fighters
Ukraine’s resistance is leveraging a long and storied history of tunnel warfare to hold Russian invaders at bay
asiatimes.com · by Paul J Springer · April 28, 2022
Faced with the prospect of sending Russian troops into subterranean combat, Vladimir Putin demurred. “There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground,” he told his defense minister on April 21, 2022, ordering him to cancel a planned storming of a steel plant in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
While Putin’s backup plan – to form a seal around trapped Ukrainian forces and wait it out – is no less brutal and there are reports that Russians may still have mounted an offensive on the site, Putin’s hesitancy to send his forces into a sprawling network of tunnels under the complex hints at a truth in warfare: Tunnels can be an effective tool in resisting an oppressor.
Indeed since the war began in February, reports have emerged of Ukrainian defenders using underground tunnel networks in efforts to deny Russian invaders control of major cities, as well as to provide sanctuary for civilians.
As an expert in military history and theory, I know there is sound thinking behind using tunnels as both a defensive and offensive tactic. Such networks allow small units to move undetected by aerial sensors and emerge in unexpected locations to launch surprise attacks and then essentially disappear.
For an invader who does not possess a thorough map of the subterranean passages, this can present a nightmare scenario, leading to massive personnel losses, plummeting morale and an inability to finish the conquest of their urban objective – all factors that may have factored in Putin’s decision not to send troops underground in Mariupol.
A history of military tunneling from ancient roots
The use of tunnels and underground chambers in times of conflict is nothing new.
The use of tunnels has been a common aspect of warfare for millennia. Ancient besieging forces used tunneling operations as a means to weaken otherwise well-fortified positions. This typically required engineers to construct long passages under walls or other obstacles. Collapsing the tunnel weakened the fortification. If well-timed, an assault conducted in the immediate aftermath of the breach might lead to a successful storming of the defended position.
One of the earliest examples of this technique is depicted on Assyrian carvings that are thousands of years old. While some attackers climb ladders to storm the walls of an Egyptian city, others can be seen digging at the foundations of the walls.
Assyrian engraving of the siege of an Egyptian fort. Image: The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-SA
Roman armies relied heavily upon sophisticated engineering techniques such as putting arches into the tunnels they built during sieges. Roman defenders also perfected the art of digging counter-tunnels to intercept those used by attackers before they presented a threat. Upon penetrating an enemy tunnel, they flooded it with caustic smoke to drive out the enemy or launched a surprise attack upon unsuspecting miners.
The success of tunneling under fortifications led European engineers in the Middle Ages to design ways to thwart the tactic. They built castles on bedrock foundations, making any attempt to dig beneath them much slower, and surrounded walls with moats so that tunnels would need to be far deeper.
Although tunneling remained an important aspect of sieges through the 13th century, it was eventually replaced by the introduction of gunpowder artillery – which proved a more effective way to breach fortifications.
However, by the mid-19th century, advances in mining and tunnel construction led to a resurgence in subterranean approaches to warfare.
During the Crimean War in the 1850s, British and French attackers attempted to tunnel under Russian fortifications at the Battle of Sevastopol. Ten years later, Ulysses S. Grant authorized an attempt to tunnel under Confederate defenses at the siege of Petersburg, Virginia. In both cases, large caches of gunpowder were placed in chambers created by tunneling under key positions and detonated in coordination with an infantry assault.
Tunneling in the age of airpower
With warfare increasingly relying on aircraft in the 20th century, military strategists again turned to tunnels – undetectable from the skies and protected from falling bombs.
Listening in under enemy lines during the First World War. Photo: adoc-photos / Corbis via Getty Images / The Conversation
In World War I, tunneling was attempted as a means to launch surprise attacks on the Western Front, potentially bypassing the other side’s system of trenches and remaining undetected by aerial observers. In particular, the Ypres salient in war-ravaged Belgium was the site of hundreds of tunnels dug by British and German miners, and the horrifying stories of combat under the earth provide one of the most terrifying vignettes of that awful war.
During World War II, Japanese troops in occupied areas in the Pacific constructed extensive tunnel networks to make their forces virtually immune to aerial attack and naval bombardment from Allied forces.
During amphibious assaults in places such as the Philippines and Iwo Jima, American and Allied forces had to contend with a warren of Japanese tunnel networks. Eventually, they resorted to using high explosives to collapse tunnel entrances, trapping thousands of Japanese troops inside.
The Viet Cong tunnel networks, particularly in the vicinity of Saigon, were an essential part of their guerrilla strategy and remain a popular tourist stop today. Some of the tunnels were large enough to house hospital and barracks facilities and strong enough to withstand anything short of nuclear bombardment.
Diagram of typical tunnel structure in Cu-Chi, Vietnam. Image: Didier Noirot / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images/ The Conversation
The tunnels not only protected Vietnamese fighters from overwhelming American airpower, they also facilitated hit-and-run style attacks.
Specialized “tunnel rats,” American soldiers who ventured into the tunnels armed only with a knife and pistol, became adept at navigating the tunnel networks. But they could not be trained in sufficient numbers to negate the value of the tunnel systems.
Tunnels for terrorism
In the 21st century, tunnels have been used to facilitate the activities of terror organizations. During the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, military operatives soon discovered that al-Qaida had fortified a series of tunnel networks connecting naturally occurring caves in the Tora Bora region.
Not only did they hide the movement of troops and supplies, they proved impervious to virtually every weapon in the US-led coalition’s arsenal. The complexes included air filtration systems to prevent chemical contamination, as well as massive storerooms and sophisticated communications gear allowing al-Qaida leadership to maintain control over their followers.
And tunneling activity in and around Gaza continues to provide a tool for Hamas to get fighters into Israeli territory, while at the same time allowing Palestinians to circumvent Israel’s blockade of Gaza’s borders.
Soviet tunnels and Ukraine
Many of the tunnels being utilized today in Ukrainian efforts to defend the country were built in the Cold War-era, when the United States routinely engaged in overflights of Soviet territory.
To counteract the significant air and satellite advantage held by the United States and NATO, the Soviet military dug underground passages under major population centers.
These subterranean systems offered a certain amount of shelter for the civilian population in the event of a nuclear attack and allowed for the movement of military forces unobserved by the ever-present eyes in the sky.
These same tunnels serve to connect much of the industrial infrastructure in Mariupol today – and have become a major asset for the outnumbered Ukrainian forces.
Other Ukrainian cities have similar systems, some dating back centuries. For example, Odesa, another key Black Sea port, has a catacomb network stretching over 2,500 kilometers. It began as part of a limestone mining effort – and to date, there is no documented map of the full extent of the tunnels.
In the event of a Russian assault on Odesa, the local knowledge of the underground passages might prove to be an extremely valuable asset for the defenders.
The fact that more than 1,000 entrances to the catacombs have been identified should surely give Russian attackers pause before commencing any attack upon the city – just as the tunnels under a steelworks in Mariupol forced Putin to rethink plans to storm the facility.
Paul J. Springer is Professor of Comparative Military Studies, Air University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
asiatimes.com · by Paul J Springer · April 28, 2022



21. How Not to Invade a Nation

This is one helluva conclusion:
But for now, the current Russian campaign plan resembles the initial invasion plan in a microcosm, and it will likely suffer from many similar problems. It suggests that the Russians have truly forgotten everything they and their Soviet predecessors ever knew about how to fight mechanized warfare on a large scale. And it means that, despite being outgunned, the Ukrainians have a real chance.

How Not to Invade a Nation
Russia’s Attack on Ukraine Is a Case Study in Bad Strategy
April 29, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Frederick W. Kagan and Mason Clark · April 29, 2022
At the outset of the invasion, the odds favored Russia to defeat the Ukrainian armed forces, seize Ukraine’s capital, and establish a pro-Russian government. The Russian military comfortably outnumbered Ukraine’s, and its military technology was more advanced. Russia’s GDP was nearly ten times the size of the Ukrainian economy, and its population about triple that of its neighbor’s. Many analysts expected that, after being largely conquered, Ukrainians would launch a protracted insurgency that might defeat the Russians over time. But few believed Ukraine could stop the invasion in a conventional war.
And yet Ukraine has held on. Russia’s assault on Kyiv stalled within a month and failed entirely shortly thereafter. Moscow did not topple the Ukrainian government, and its invasion was halted not just around Kyiv but also along the southwestern coast. Russia has withdrawn its battered forces from around the capital and from large swaths of northeastern Ukraine, covering its defeat with claims that it was simply refocusing its efforts to the Donbas. Russian troops have made more progress in this region but only slowly and at the cost of many casualties. The Russian invasion grinds on, but Kyiv and other swaths of Ukraine will be free when it finally ends.
Russia’s invasion has come up short for many reasons. Ukrainian heroism and remarkably intelligent and adaptive fighting techniques are major ones. Russia’s failure to prepare for serious Ukrainian resistance and, therefore, to develop supply systems that could support a prolonged assault on northern Ukraine is another. But none of these factors—alone or together—explain Russia’s stunning failure to achieve its initial objectives. Instead, analysts must consider a problem for Russia that is far more fundamental: its invasion plan itself was shockingly bad.
Successful military campaigns usually follow several central principles. Military leaders must choose the most important objective and then assign the right amount and right kind of military forces to ensure its achievement. Rather than trying to do everything at once, they must prioritize and sequence operations to make achieving this objective as easy as possible. And they must design campaigns to make sure that they will bring the combat power necessary to win the war’s last battle and to attain their political objectives.

Russia’s invasion plan was shockingly bad.

Russia knows these principles well. Indeed, the Soviet Union perfected many of them over the course of decades, and the post-Soviet Russian military inherited and further developed these doctrines to conduct large-scale mechanized warfare. But in Ukraine, it violated every one of them. Russia’s invasion was sweeping and unprioritized rather than sequential and deliberate. It mismatched its forces to tasks and gave Ukraine’s defenders clear ways to fight back. In fact, Russia’s design choice was so poor that the invasion would have likely failed even if the supply arrangements had been sound.
Russia may yet win the next phase of the war. Its military leadership seems to be learning from its logistics problems in its new campaign in eastern Ukraine. It can concentrate more forces on a smaller area. Its overall reserves of manpower and equipment, although surprisingly depleted, remain larger than Ukraine’s. But Russia’s military leadership seems not to have rediscovered how to follow proper campaign design principles, a fact that is already compromising its renewed offensive. It may again lead to failure.
EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE
The initial Russian objective was to seize Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities, remove the current Ukrainian government, and impose a new regime beholden to Moscow. Russia’s first and overwhelming objective, then, should have been taking the capital, and a sound campaign plan would have prioritized this aim and subordinated actions elsewhere. The collapse of the Ukrainian government and the destruction of the Ukrainian military forces defending it, after all, would likely have unhinged Ukrainian defenses elsewhere, making the conquest of eastern and southern Ukraine much easier.
But that’s not what Russia did. Instead, it also set out to secure the territory of Luhansk and Donetsk regions, known as oblasts, for the Moscow-controlled Luhansk and Donetsk’s “People’s Republics,” and it tried to establish a land bridge connecting the northern Crimean Peninsula with Russia itself. Russia did attack south from Belarus and its own territory toward Kyiv with large forces, but it also sent a large contingent of troops to seize the city of Kharkiv (which is 250 miles to the east), another large force to drive into Luhansk oblast even farther east, still another to seize Mariupol, and a final large concentration to take Kherson, Mykolaiv, and ultimately Odessa—all at the same time. In short, the Russians made the mistake of trying to conquer everything they wanted in Ukraine simultaneously.

Conquering Kyiv was entrusted to Moscow’s least-trained and worst-equipped mechanized forces.
Russian forces would have attacked in the south and east even in a well-designed campaign, but for a different purpose. Their aim should have been to trap Ukrainian forces in fights in those areas to prevent them from rushing to Kyiv and interfering with the decisive battle. To accomplish that objective, Russia’s initial attacks in the south and east should have used much smaller forces and pursued much more limited territorial objectives than they did in reality; doing so would have allowed the Russian military to concentrate its best troops and the most combat power on the difficult task of seizing the capital. Instead, Russia assigned its premier armored force—the 1st Guards Tank Army, which is optimized for a rapid offensive using tanks and armored personnel carriers—to attack the eastern city of Sumy, about 190 miles from Kyiv. Conquering Kyiv was then entrusted to the troops of the Eastern Military District, the one with the least-trained and worst-equipped mechanized forces.
Russia might still have seized Kyiv if it had been able to reinforce the Eastern Military District with good troops. A soundly designed campaign (one consistent with Soviet and Russian military theory and doctrine) would have kept some forces in reserve for precisely such a purpose. But the Russian military committed all its available forces trying to achieve all its objectives simultaneously, leaving no meaningful reserve. When the drive on Kyiv bogged down, the Russians had to cast around for whatever reinforcements they could find. They compounded their error by rushing those reinforcements piecemeal into the fight, rather than pausing to cohere effective groupings, fueling tactical failures that led to Russia’s final defeat outside the capital.

Russian operations elsewhere in Ukraine replicated these flaws. Southern Military District forces in Crimea attacked at once along three diverging axes—to the west toward Kherson and Mykolaiv, with the intention of continuing on to Odessa; to the east toward Mariupol; and to the north toward Zaporizhzhia. These attacks did not support one another—separate groups of Ukrainian troops defended Kherson and Mykolaiv, Mariupol, and Zaporizhzhia, and so attacks in one direction did not threaten Ukrainian defenders in the others. And splitting Russia’s forces deprived all three axes of the strength they needed to truly achieve their objectives. Russian troops took Kherson relatively quickly, but they failed to take Mykolaiv or find another way toward Odessa. The offensive toward Zaporizhzhia was halted about 40 miles south of the city. Russia eventually seized most of Mariupol, but only at a horrific cost. Had the Southern Military District focused on each campaign sequentially, it might have made much more rapid and significant progress.
DESIGNED TO FAIL
After having failed in the north and across much of the south, Russia has begun a new phase of the war focused on capturing the east while holding on to the parts of southern Ukraine and the Kharkiv region it has already taken. Moscow has concentrated its remaining forces for attacks along four main axes in the Donbas—from Izyum to the southeast; from the area around Rubizhne to the west; from Popasna to the west; and from Donetsk to the north. The fifth large concentration of Russian forces has just declared victory in Mariupol, although fighting continues. Some of those forces have already begun moving north to join the fight in the western Donbas while others try to finish securing Mariupol.
But so far, the apparent design of this campaign appears to share important flaws with Russia’s initial operation. For one thing, it again seeks to achieve all of Russia’s objectives simultaneously: seizing the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as well as the rest of Mariupol, in a single campaign in the next few weeks. For another, Russia is operating along multiple axes of advance that are not mutually supportive. Separate groups of Ukrainian forces defend against each axis, and the Russian attacks are too far apart for any combination of them to threaten the same Ukrainian troops (at least for now). Finally, the Russians are committing all available forces to the fight from the outset. They do not appear to be retaining mobile reserves to reinforce advances that stall.
This Russian campaign does have important advantages over the initial invasion. It is occurring in a smaller area, one that allows Russia to fight against a part of Ukraine’s military rather than spreading its forces out against the whole of the Ukrainian armed forces. The four major axes of advance are also roughly along the radius of a semicircle that stretches from Izyum to Donetsk, which means if Russian forces can make enough quick progress, their attacks will become complementary as they converge.

George Barros / Institute for the Study of War
But it remains unclear if the Russian military sees these advantages, if it seeks to use them, or if it can. The natural path for Russian forces looking to encircle Ukrainian troops in the pocket around Popasna, Rubizhne, and Severodonetsk would be to advance from Izyum southeast toward Slovyansk, and from the area around Russian-occupied Debaltseve northwest along the same highway to Slovyansk. But although Russian forces around Izyum have been trying to drive toward Slovyansk, they have somewhat oddly begun pushing out to the west, away from the rest of the Russian forces operating in the Donbas rather than toward them. On the southern arc of the semicircle, Russia has thus far not sought to drive northeast from Debaltseve—possibly because of difficult terrain and stubborn Ukrainian defenders—and has instead launched an attack from Donetsk north through Avdiivka. This route is superficially more attractive than routes closer to Debaltseve because it leads through more open countryside. But it is about 30 miles west of the Slovyansk-Debaltseve highway, and it could require Russian forces to cross 50 to 100 miles of Ukrainian defenders without the support of other Russian attacks.
Ultimately, these errors may not be decisive. Strategy isn’t everything, and the real strength and combat power of Russian forces may matter more than the geometry of planned advances. Conversely, Russia could correct these mistakes in their campaign planning and still fall short: the fact that the Russians are trying to remedy their critical logistical flaws, for example, does not mean they will succeed in doing so. There are plenty of other factors that will also help shape the outcome, including the flow of Western equipment to Ukraine and the ability of the country’s exhausted defenders to keep resisting Russian advances.
But for now, the current Russian campaign plan resembles the initial invasion plan in a microcosm, and it will likely suffer from many similar problems. It suggests that the Russians have truly forgotten everything they and their Soviet predecessors ever knew about how to fight mechanized warfare on a large scale. And it means that, despite being outgunned, the Ukrainians have a real chance.

Foreign Affairs · by Frederick W. Kagan and Mason Clark · April 29, 2022



V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
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