Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Dare to begin! He who postpones living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”

- Horace

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

- Isaac Asimov

Much like the quote “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others” is that democracy promotes the “triumph of mediocrity,” since its progress toward thought rarely moves faster than its slowest members. Yet, the alternative, despotism, might move faster around progress, typically leads to the “triumph of stupidity.” Weighing the two, mediocrity wins out. Those of us in a democracy, in wanting all its freedoms, must accept that it comes fully equipped with the inefficient pace of progress.

- B. H. Liddell Hart

1. Big pay raise for troops in defense bill sent to Biden. Conservatives stymied on cultural issues

2. Senate OKs compromise defense bill without culture war measures

3. President Zelenskyy Returns to Washington by Mick Ryan

4. Fulbright's "Knee-capping" of US Global Engagement, Part 2

5. Biden must be clear with China over cyberattacks

6. US special ops may be buying too many Armed Overwatch planes, says GAO

7. Most Americans Would Discourage Young People from Joining Military as Enlisted Service Members, Report Says

8. Not Just ‘Mowing the Grass:’ Unconventional Warfare in Somalia

9. The 2023 Urban Warfare Experts’ Christmas Wish List

10. How serious is the terror threat in Mindanao?

11. Setting the Record Straight: The KMT Defense Blueprint for Taiwan.

12. Analysis: There’s a big hole in China’s plan to boost the economy in 2024

13. There Is a Path to Victory in Ukraine

14. America’s Ukraine Problem

15. How the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza Is Changing Arab Views

16. Civil-Military Relations in Multinational Organizations

17. From Boycotts to Selfies: Asia’s Myriad Perceptions of Japan

18. Dismayed by Moscow's war, Russian volunteers are joining Ukrainian ranks to fight Putin's troops

19. Dare You to Watch the Civil War Trailer Without Hyperventilating

20. We’re in an epidemic of right-wing terror. Won’t someone tell the press?

21.

1. Big pay raise for troops in defense bill sent to Biden. Conservatives stymied on cultural issues

Compromise. The way our government is supposed to work.

Big pay raise for troops in defense bill sent to Biden. Conservatives stymied on cultural issues

AP · December 14, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House passed a defense policy bill Thursday that authorizes the biggest pay raise for troops in more than two decades, overcoming objections from some conservatives concerned the measure did not do enough to restrict the Pentagon’s diversity initiatives, abortion travel policy and gender-affirming health care for transgender service members.

The $886 billion bill was approved by a vote of 310-118 and now goes to President Joe Biden after the Senate had overwhelmingly passed it Wednesday. It is likely the last piece of major legislation Congress will consider before leaving for the holiday break, though negotiations continue on a bill to aid Ukraine and Israel and boost border security.

The spending called for represents about a 3% increase from the prior year. The bill serves as a blueprint for programs Congress will seek to fund through follow-up spending bills.

Lawmakers have been negotiating a final defense policy bill for months after each chamber passed strikingly different versions in July. Some of the priorities championed by social conservatives were a no-go for Democrats. Negotiators dropped them from the final version to get it over the finish line.

That did not go over well with some Republican lawmakers, though most did end up voting for a bill that traditionally has broad, bipartisan support. About twice as many Republicans voted for the bill as voted against it.

“You almost feel like a parent who’s sent a child off to summer camp and they came back a monster,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said in opposing the bill. “That’s what we’ve done. This bill came back in far worse shape.”

As an example, Gaetz said the House bill eliminated the position of the chief diversity officer at the Defense Department, but the final measure did not include that provision.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, chided the bill’s critics for what he described as an unwillingness to compromise.

“Apparently, you don’t like democracy because that’s what democracy is. You compromise and you work with people and you do it all the time,” Smith said.

Most notably, the bill does not include language sought by House Republicans to restrict gender-affirming health care for transgender service members and it does not block the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy, which allows reimbursement for travel expenses when a service member has to go out of state for an abortion or other reproductive care.

Republicans did win some concessions on diversity and inclusion training in the military. For example, the bill freezes hiring for such training until a full accounting of the programming and costs is completed and reported to Congress.

One of the most divisive aspects of the bill was a short-term extension of a surveillance program aimed at preventing terrorism and catching spies. The program has detractors on both sides of the political aisle who view it as a threat to the privacy of ordinary Americans.

Some House Republicans were incensed that the extension was included in the defense policy bill and not voted upon separately through other legislation that included proposed changes to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

The extension continues a tool that permits the U.S. government to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence.

U.S. officials have said the tool, first authorized in 2008 and renewed several times since then, is crucial in disrupting terror attacks, cyber intrusions and other national security threats. It has produced vital intelligence that the U.S. has relied on for specific operations, such as the killing last year of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri.

But the administration’s efforts to secure reauthorization of the program have encountered strong bipartisan pushback. Lawmakers are demanding better privacy protections for those Americans caught up in the monitoring. They wanted a separate vote on legislation making changes to the program.

“The FBI under President Biden has been weaponized against the American people and major reform is needed,” said Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont. “FISA should not be combined with our national defense. And it is unacceptable that leadership is bypassing regular order to jam members by forcing them to vote on two unrelated bills with one vote.”

Matthew G. Olsen, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, praised the passage of the extension.

He said: “We cannot afford to be blinded to the many threats we face from foreign adversaries, including Iran and China, as well as terrorist organizations like Hamas and ISIS,” or the Islamic State group.

Enough opposition to the bill had developed within the GOP ranks that it forced House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to tee up the defense policy bill for a vote through a process generally reserved for noncontroversial legislation.

Under that process, at least two-thirds of the House had to vote in favor of the legislation for it to pass, but going that route avoided the prospect of a small number of Republicans blocking it from the floor.

Consideration of the bill comes at a dangerous time for the world, with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and as China increasingly flexes its military might in the South China Sea.

On Ukraine, the bill includes the creation of a special inspector general for Ukraine to address concerns about whether taxpayer dollars are being spent in Ukraine as intended. That’s on top of oversight work already being conducted by other agency watchdogs.

“We will continue to stay on top of this, but I want to assure my colleagues that there has been no evidence of diversion of weapons provided to Ukraine or any other assistance,” GOP Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told lawmakers this week in advocating for the bill.

Ukraine’s supporters in Congress have argued that helping Kyiv now could prevent a wider war if Russia were to invade a member of NATO, the military alliance that maintains that an attack against one member nation is considered an attack against all.

The bill includes provisions by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., that says the president must get the advice and consent of the Senate or an act of Congress before withdrawing U.S. membership from NATO. That seems to have in mind former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, who has said he will continue to “fundamentally reevaluate” NATO’s purpose and mission.

On China, the bill establishes a new training program with Taiwan, requires a plan to accelerate deliveries of Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Taiwan, and approves an agreement that enables Australia to access nuclear-powered submarines, which are stealthier and more capable than conventionally powered vessels.

__

Associated Press staff writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

AP · December 14, 2023

2. Senate OKs compromise defense bill without culture war measures

Senate OKs compromise defense bill without culture war measures

By CONNOR O’BRIEN

12/13/2023 07:46 PM EST

Politico

The policy bill faces a tougher vote in the House, which could take place as soon as Thursday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans argued the compromise bill includes some conservative wins that they muscled through the Democratic-led Senate. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

12/13/2023 07:46 PM EST

The Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed compromise defense policy legislation after lawmakers struck a deal to drop hard-right provisions on abortion, transgender troops and other hot-button issues.

The blowout 87-13 vote tees the annual National Defense Authorization Act up for a vote in the House as early as Thursday morning to send the measure to President Joe Biden for his signature.

The $886 billion legislation — one of the few bills Congress reliably enacts each year — is the product of months of negotiations between the Senate and House Armed Services committees. And it is likely to be the last major piece of legislation that passes this year as Democrats and Republicans remain deadlocked over government funding and emergency aid to Ukraine and Israel.

Despite some last-minute hurdles thrown up by a handful of senators, the upper chamber cleared the measure with little obstruction. The bill, though, still faces conservative resistance in the House after leaders attached a short-term extension of federal surveillance powers, coupled with the exclusion of many of their social policy priorities.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the compromise bill “precisely the kind of bipartisan cooperation the American people want from Congress.”

“At a time of huge trouble for global security, doing the defense authorization bill is more important than ever,” Schumer said on the floor. “Passing the NDAA enables us to hold the line against Russia, stand firm against the Chinese Communist Party, and ensure that America’s defenses remain state of the art at all times.”

House and Senate leaders entered talks deeply divided. House Republicans narrowly passed a hard-right defense bill this summer with provisions to block or significantly limit the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy, coverage of medical treatment for transgender troops and programs to promote diversity and inclusion in the ranks. Democrats largely opposed the bill over those conservative add-ons.

The Senate sidestepped the most contentious issues and passed its own bill with bipartisan support. The measures from the House version were dropped in the negotiations — including language limiting funding for abortion access, transgender medical treatment and drag shows.

Still, top Republicans argued the compromise bill includes some conservative wins that they muscled through the Democratic-led Senate.

“It’ll focus the Pentagon more squarely on tackling national security challenges instead of creating new ones with partisan social policies,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said of the bill.

While many GOP-backed proposals attacking the Pentagon’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts were dropped, Republicans touted provisions included in the final deal that institute a pay cap and hiring freeze for defense employees dedicated to those programs.

The final bill also includes language supported by Republicans prohibiting the promotion of critical race theory and the display of unapproved flags at military installations, such as the pride flag.

Republicans, led by Senate Armed Services ranking member Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), also touted a provision that requires the Pentagon to develop a plan for what to do with unused border wall materials.

Skeptics of Ukraine assistance, who have argued that the Biden administration isn’t conducting enough oversight of weapons and equipment sent into the fight, also got a win as negotiators agreed to create a Special Inspector General for Operation Atlantic Resolve, the official name for the military response to Russia’s invasion.

There was still some angst among senators over the final deal that sparked protest votes.

Ahead of the final vote, senators blocked in a 65-35 vote a last-minute bid by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to strip out the four-month extension of federal authorities to conduct sweeping surveillance of foreigners’ communications, known as Section 702 authority.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado threatened to delay a final vote Wednesday in a push to convince leaders to finish border negotiations that could unlock stalled supplemental funding for Ukraine. Bennet backed off and allowed the vote to proceed after he received assurances from Senate leaders that talks were advancing.

The deal also includes a raft of provisions to implement the AUKUS submarine-sharing pact between the U.S., U.K. and Australia — including the transfer of Virginia-class subs — after a tough funding fight.

Wicker blocked the authorization of the sub transfers to Australia in a bid to secure passage of $3.4 billion in submarine industrial base funding in the emergency supplemental spending bill, alongside Israel and Ukraine aid. Under the final deal, the sub transfer wouldn’t take effect until a year after the bill becomes law.

The bill also greenlights a 5.2 percent troop pay raise.

POLITICO

Politico

3. President Zelenskyy Returns to Washington by Mick Ryan

Excerpts:

I hope and expect that some deal on U.S. aid will eventually be reached. But even if that is the case, the behaviour by U.S. legislators (and other countries parsimonious in their Ukraine support like Australia) will have a lasting impact.

This week proves to Xi and Putin that they are on the right track. It shows them the ‘east is rising, the west is declining’ message is no longer just a great narrative. It has provided additional proof (at least in their eyes) that this can be the reality if they just keep the pressure on the U.S, and other democracies.

I cannot imagine how grim the journey home for the Ukrainian President might be. A cold winter filled with Russian attacks on the ground and from the air awaits him on return to Kyiv. We have, collectively, failed President Zelenskyy and his people with the continuing delay in support. I hope we can do better in 2024.

President Zelenskyy Returns to Washington

An unsatisfying visit with a grim winter ahead

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/president-zelenskyy-returns-to-washington?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1198399&post_id=139761449&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=7i07&utm_medium=email

MICK RYAN

DEC 14, 2023

Image: President of Ukraine website

This week, President Zelenskyy again travelled to Washington DC to discuss assistance for Ukraine. He met with Congressional leaders as well as President Biden. From the perspective of the Ukrainians, and the current U.S. administration, it was not a very successful visit to Washington. Congress is yet to pass the funding bill that will see more assistance to Ukraine in 2024, as well as aid for Israel and Taiwan. As Politico described the situation:

Border negotiations wouldn’t be completed by the year’s end, meaning Zelenskyy will leave Washington no closer to guaranteed future support, despite his salesmanship around town.

As such, Zelenskyy returns home to Ukraine without any further commitments of U.S. aid beyond that which has already been approved. Therefore, what might be the key take aways from his visit?

First, it is clear that the adulation with which he was received during his Washington DC visit in December 2022 has largely evaporated. With recent polls indicating growing U.S. disinterest in supporting Ukraine, some members of Congress see little interest in supporting this issue if it impacts their electoral prospects.

Second, the centrality of U.S. support is under appreciated by many in Congress. While not taking away from the courage and sacrifice of Ukrainians, U.S. weapons and intelligence are critical to Ukraine’s war to defend itself and eject the Russians from Ukrainian territory. And with finite stocks of Soviet-era weapons and munitions, western (particularly U.S.) weapons and munitions will only increase in importance to Ukraine. European production is not going to cut it.

U.S. support also has important knock-on effects with allies. It provides an example for others to emulate, and if this doesn’t work, at least embarrasses Europeans and others into providing more assistance. Remember the tank debate last year, where British and American commitments were crucial to finally forcing the Germans to allow Leopard 2 tanks to be donated to Ukraine.

Physical support - weapons, money - provides the teeth for political commitments such as ‘we are in this for as long as it takes’ from the United States. Those ‘promises’, appreciated and taken at face value by the Ukrainians, are starting to increasingly ring hollow. The DC events have confirmed for Putin that drawing out the war is the right strategy for Russia. Expect this to be an even bigger part of his messaging in the lead up to the 2024 Russian ‘elections’.

So what else might we take from the Zelenskyy visit?

First, it is a tremendous information operations coup for the Russians. I imagine many senior Russians doing a vodka-fuelled jig at the sight of Zelenskyy having to return to Washington under such circumstances. They will be even happier that he returns home empty handed. The U.S. Congress has done more for Russian morale with their behavior than anything Putin has done all year. And, of course, the lack of more U.S. aid also improves Russia’s 2024 and 2025 prospects.

Second, some in Russia might take this as a sign of which way the wind is blowing for next year’s U.S. presidential elections think it is a bit premature, but some in Russia will be very keen to read it this way. Putin for one will be keen to have his friend Donald back in the White House.

Third, this will continue to fuel Chinese and Russian narratives about U.S. reliability. Both have strategies to carve off U.S. allies in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. China in particular is using systems destruction warfare to do this. Chinese and Russian narratives, coupled with the behavior of the U.S. Congress is seeing some in Europe and Asia questioning U.S. security commitments and reliability.

While many in Congress rightly believe China is the major threat, their actions against Russia have a direct impact on the China-U.S. strategic competition. Having China as priority one threat to deal with doesn’t mean it is the only threat the U.S. must address. In backing away from Ukraine, U.S. legislators are also hurting US military and diplomatic efforts in the Indo-Pacific.

There are many failures that have led to this point.

There has been a failure of politicians in the U.S., and the west more broadly, to clearly and continuously explain why supporting Ukraine is vital for Ukraine and all democracies. Western politicians have lost the art of explaining and persuading their citizens. There has been a need for a constant drumbeat of speeches about the war and the purpose of supporting Ukraine, which western politicians have not delivered.

There has also been failure by those who promised so much (explicitly & implicitly) from this year’s counteroffensive. The difference between the promise and what has occurred this year has led to shock among electorates even though such setbacks are normal on any path to victory.

There has been a failure of strategic patience by politicians and citizens in the west. It was clear last year that this would be a long war, even with western support. Unfortunately democracies now have little patience with doing the hard things needed to defend their own, and having the patience to see major undertakings through to the end. This lack of strategic patience, particularly in our long term strategic competition with China, could prove fatal.

Finally, the Zelenskyy visit to Washington DC this week was the result of a failure of leadership by the U.S. and European elites who still don’t seem to have internalized that the international security paradigm of the past three decades is dead. We now exist in a fast moving environment where there is a near existential threat posed by the quad alignment of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran (the bad guys can also have ‘quads’). This ‘bad quad’ has also developed into the Arsenal of Authoritarians.

But western decision making still occurs at a slow, low-risk pace. We have been too slow to drag ourselves out of the comfortable governing tempo of the 9/11 era.

I hope and expect that some deal on U.S. aid will eventually be reached. But even if that is the case, the behaviour by U.S. legislators (and other countries parsimonious in their Ukraine support like Australia) will have a lasting impact.

This week proves to Xi and Putin that they are on the right track. It shows them the ‘east is rising, the west is declining’ message is no longer just a great narrative. It has provided additional proof (at least in their eyes) that this can be the reality if they just keep the pressure on the U.S, and other democracies.

I cannot imagine how grim the journey home for the Ukrainian President might be. A cold winter filled with Russian attacks on the ground and from the air awaits him on return to Kyiv. We have, collectively, failed President Zelenskyy and his people with the continuing delay in support. I hope we can do better in 2024.

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4. Fulbright's "Knee-capping" of US Global Engagement, Part 2

Before we continue our discussions of Public Diplomacy, information and influence activities, Psychological Operations and joint operations in the information environment we should understand the history. Thanks to Matt Armstrnog for educating us on this important and misunderstood aspect.

I sent out Part 1 last month. You can access it here: https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/the-fulbright-paradox-how-the-relic

Conclusion:

In trying to increase knowledge of the legislation, I have stopped being surprised at the lack of information and misinformation surrounding the legislation, whether its history or its present form. The propaganda around the law, including why it is in its current form, is astounding, considering the legislation was intended to correct misinformation, counter disinformation, and address gaps in available information, and can be traced back to Fulbright.

Fulbright's "Knee-capping" of US Global Engagement, Part 2

A sort of deep dive into what the law was and how he changed it into the barrier it is today

https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/fulbrights-knee-capping-of-us-global?utm

MATT ARMSTRONG

DEC 14, 2023

In the spring of 2005, I sat in a university conference room attending a State Department public diplomacy official’s presentation about US public diplomacy. I didn’t know what this “public diplomacy” thing was. I had returned to the university the year before to complete an undergraduate degree in international relations. (I had dropped out in 1992, a different era for IR, for a career in technology that I subsequently left to return to IR.) Having the “what next?” conversation with the IR department head, he suggested I look at the new joint venture between IR and the communications school: a Master of Public Diplomacy. I signed up and was in class 0.5 that fall. The presentation was part of a publicity event, so to speak, for the soon-to-be-launched program.1

I learned that I had personally participated in public diplomacy as an exchange student in high school. In 1982, I went to Japan on student exchange, and my family hosted Japanese students twice.2 In 1984, I participated in a sports exchange (water polo) in Australia and New Zealand.3 But there was apparently much more to public diplomacy.

So there I was in this conference room fascinated by the details (as detailed as an overview for outsiders should or can be). Though I don’t recall the specifics of the PowerPoint or of the Q&A, it was interesting enough for me to ask for a copy. The response, replicated nearly precisely below, started a journey that continues today.

State Department Official: “No, I can’t give it to you. The State Department’s public affairs office needs to ‘scrub’ it first.”

Me: [A nonverbal huh followed by a verbal] “Why? What?”

State: “Because of the Smith-Mundt Act…”

Naturally, I had to find out about this Smith-Mundt thing. A clear narrative immediately surfaced. First, and this was generally foremost, it was an anti-propaganda law intended to prevent the US Government (as in the entirety of the government) from propagandizing folks at home. A second part of the narrative was that this law also enabled sending US “propaganda” abroad. Occasionally, there was a reference that the law had something to do with exchanges, but any such mention was almost always brief and clearly less interesting to the author than the informational side. This third point was surprisingly avoided by many writers, mostly journalists and law review writers, despite the official name of the legislation: the United States Information and Educational Act of 1948. Fourth, references to the Act were declarative and without citation or support. The meaning and purpose of the legislation were simply a known fact. Thus, any explanation was unnecessary.

However, as I dug deeper, I found that the commonly shared descriptions of the intent and purpose of the Smith-Mundt Act didn’t align with the evidence. However, identifying the gap between the alleged goal of the Act was not the same as understanding why the difference existed and how it became so established.

“Never since I have been in Congress,” Rep. Karl Mundt, Republican from South Dakota, remarked during a June 1947 debate of the Mundt bill, “have I heard such a disorganized collection of misinformation circulated about any one piece of legislation as about this legislation.”4 A law intended to engage global audiences to prevent the effects of misinformation, disinformation, and the absence of information was and continues to be the subject of astounding amounts of misinformation.

“Never since I have been in Congress have I heard such a disorganized collection of misinformation circulated about any one piece of legislation as about this legislation.”

This is the second post in a short series tracing modern misinterpretations of the Smith-Mundt Act. The path does not start with the original legislative debates around the pending bill. No, the narrative can easily be traced to Senator J. William Fulbright and his statements and actions in the 1960s that culminated with his 1972 amendment to the Act.5 A 1985 amendment from Sen. Edward Zorinsky to close a “loophole” in Fulbright’s earlier effort reinforces the Arkansas Senator’s role. Zorinsky provided a memorable one-liner while arguing for his amendment: “The American taxpayer certainly does not need or want his tax dollars used to support U.S. Government propaganda directed at him or her.”6 While true, scholars have offered contorted arguments that this was a – if not the – original purpose of the Smith-Mundt Act. I’ll admit that I fell for this – with respect to the “a” purpose – until I did more research. While Zorinsky’s amendment led a federal court to rule that US Information Agency materials were exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests, the practical and philosophical source is Fulbright.

In a comment to the first post in this series, Lonnie Johnson questioned my assertion that Fulbright has had a “noxious influence” – I prefer deleterious – on US global engagement.

Matt’s task will be to document how the position of Fulbright – and Smith and Mundt in 1953 – can serve as pre-history for Fulbright’s 1972 amendment and then to document how Fulbright’s noxious influence has been a driving force in the “knee-capping of US global engagement” in the course of the fifty years since then.

The evidence to document how Fulbright’s actions continue to knee-cap US global engagement is clear and doesn’t require leaps of imagination or squinting hoping to transform one thing into another.

To answer the challenge, I will first show the original intent and text of the Smith-Mundt Act with specific attention to the elements that relate to Fulbright’s 1960s charges and, ultimately, his 1972 amendment. The resulting before and after contrast will show the inflection point caused by the Arkansas Senator’s blunt force attack on US global engagement.

I will not address the discrepancy between Fulbright’s position that USIA’s materials amounted to propaganda if available within the US, regardless of the content or who shared the content domestically or why, but it wasn’t propaganda when disseminated abroad. As the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concerned about “propaganda” and described as an “antipropaganda crusader,” it’s interesting – to me, at least – that neither he nor the people writing about this side of him expend much, if any, ink examining his views of how this “propaganda” may have affected the nation’s foreign relations.

I will also not discuss – beyond this paragraph – the blunt force and distracting use of the term “propaganda” by Fulbright, those who wrote about his “antipropaganda” efforts, and those writing about the Smith-Mundt Act. If propaganda is the intent to influence, as many hold, then this well-documented response is propaganda. If delivery through mass media is required, as some have held, then does the audience this note ultimately reaches surpass the threshold or not? Fulbright’s use of the term, like those writing about his “antipropaganda” efforts, is intentionally broad to cover everything, not just what he dislikes. The result contributes to the knee-capping as it’s guilt by association to an office or agency and not by any other measure.

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“Global engagement” is used here to include and go beyond “public diplomacy.” Public diplomacy is a term adopted – not coined! – in the 1960s to label the activities of an agency, specifically the US Information Agency, not in response to Fulbright’s attacks but for reasons related to the attacks. The result has been substantial confusion over what is and is not public diplomacy. “Only the State Department does public diplomacy,” a Defense Department official yelled at me during a conference in 2008. Since the Smith-Mundt Act in 1972 effectively only applied to USIA, it only covered “public diplomacy,” or did it? Today, the Act is not just invoked relative to the obvious legacy parts of USIA at the State Department and the US Agency for Global Media, but for a wide range of activities from departments and agencies across the government, despite the clear text on what agencies are subject to the Act.

The massive misunderstanding and misapplication of the Act as a so-called “firewall” to prevent the government (the rhetorical application is nearly arbitrary) from propagandizing the US public, a view propagated by government officials, journalists, scholars, and laypeople can be traced back to Fulbright’s 1972 amendment. Though your experience may differ, in my experience, outside of the State Department, the most common invocation of the Act is in the Defense Department world, despite being told DoD doesn’t do public diplomacy. Despite the passage of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which specifically declared the Smith-Mundt Act does not apply to the Defense Department, I continue to hear tales (as recent as a few weeks ago) of defense personnel invoking Smith-Mundt not to do this or that abroad because an American might see it. At the State Department, the Act is often invoked not to do something, something I’ve heard frequently and also as recently as a few weeks ago. The resulting narrative around the Smith-Mundt Act often fits the definition of propaganda and is always traceable to Fulbright’s 1972 amendment.

The Original Intent and Text

There are three points in the original Smith-Mundt Act and the debates preceding its passage relevant to the conversation here. First, we have the seemingly obvious authority for “an information service to disseminate abroad information” (Pub.L. 80-402 §2(1)). This was to authorize the Secretary of State, “when he finds it appropriate, to provide for the preparation, and dissemination abroad,” of information (Pub.L. 80-402 §501). The word “abroad” seems to have an obvious meaning. My early writings on the Act (before 2010) often argued that “abroad” was a prophylactic imposed by a Congress distrustful of the State Department. After all, in early 1946, the chairman of the House Rules Committee blocked the bill from proceeding because he and ten of the twelve committee members were against anything the State Department favored because of “Communist infiltration and [the department’s] pro-Russian policy.” Making sure his contempt for the department was not lost, the chairman added the department was “chock full of Reds” and “the lousiest outfit in town.” However, I was wrong, as I found through subsequent research.

“Abroad” had nothing to do with preventing domestic visibility of the content or preventing domestic competition. Such concerns from Congress and others, namely commercial print and broadcast media, of the State Department’s information operations, chiefly the radio operation, were addressed in plain text in other sections in the Act. Most of these have been forgotten, but include establishing commissions for timely and expert oversight, requiring content sourcing from private operators whenever possible, and non-compete and sunset clauses directing the department to recede as other sources of information become available. The last two are what I have consistently called out as the true anti-domestic propaganda parts of the Act, and these are with barely an exception, ignored by write-ups on the Act.7

For context, it’s important to know that even before the Mundt bill was introduced in January 1945, and through the deliberations on the iterations of the bill through January 1948, the State Department was under immense and growing pressure to be more transparent and accessible to Congress, the press, and the US public. The Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Relations was established in December 1944 to relocate communications from under the assistant secretary in charge of administrative functions to provide a single point of leadership for engaging and informing people both at home and abroad. This dual-hat responsibility of the Assistant Secretary did not change with the Act.8

The word “abroad” – as in “disseminate abroad” – was an explicit authority requested by the State Department; it was not an imposed restriction. Without this blanket permission, neither Congress nor the State Department were entirely sure where the department’s information service could operate under the existing hodgepodge of legislative authorities. Congress tried to remove “abroad” to clean up and shorten the text, after all, there was no debate where the information service was to operate. The State Department objected as it reasserted the need for the explicit authority the word granted.

Second, we have the key phrase “on request,” which also appears in Section 501 of the original Smith-Mundt Act, was how Congress directed the State Department to make available press releases and radio scripts in the English language to the press and Members of Congress. In the original text, this material was to be available “for examination.”

The “on request” requirement was later interpreted as requiring an act – merely a phone call early on but later perhaps an actual Act – of Congress to release the information for whatever purpose. Like “abroad,” the reason behind “on request” is not obvious. Congress originally wanted all of the materials disseminated abroad to be immediately available in English to exercise timely oversight, an artifact of their distrust of the department and the need to monitor this program, which some in Congress weren’t entirely sure was necessary. (“Not necessary,” I should point out, is not the same as the department will spew “propaganda.”) The State Department did not have a problem with the immediate access since there was nothing to hide. They also wanted to build support and awareness of the vast programs that most people in the US would never interact with. As the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs said in 1949 regarding Voice of America, “if you happen to get the program, the chances are that you would not recognize it” since the transmitters were pointed overseas and 85% of the content was not in English.

On making all of the materials available in English, the State Department raised an issue: it would need more money for additional translators and clerks to fulfill what was expected to be blanket requests from Congress and the press to provide what Congress agreed would be massive quantities of paper that would never be read. As such, the draft text was changed to “representative samples or specific individual press releases and radio scripts” to be available “upon request.” The text in the final was simplified right before the Senate approved the bill in mid-January – it passed the House in July – before the President signed it into law on January 27.

“On request” was a fiscal choice, not a prophylactic. Here is Sen. Alexander Smith, the Mundt bill co-sponsor, explaining the final form for the release of materials text:

The point of that was, the way it was worded before we might have had a deluge of requests from newspaper people for all of the releases, and unless they ask for specific things, specific samples, it seemed to us it was too broad and might cause a big expense and too big a burden.

Based on the discussions before and after the passage of the Act, it can be reasonably inferred that the focus here was on the radio operation.

In her 2012 paper on the Smith-Mundt Act, Emily Metzgar echoed my view then and now while also revealing a defect that permeates the narrative and discussions around the Smith-Mundt Act.

It is an irony of history that a senator whose name is associated so closely with international exchange programs and development of global awareness was in fact responsible for writing the law that keeps USIB [US International Broadcasting, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, etc.] materials beyond the reach of the American public, even today.9

Metzgar’s paper clearly focused on the broadcast operation of USIB, even if it was under the broad title “Public Diplomacy, Smith-Mundt, and the American Public.” Others also focus on the broadcasting element. See, for example, Weston Sager (“Apple Pie Propaganda? The Smith-Mundt Act Before and After the Repeal of the Domestic Dissemination Ban”, 2015) and Allen Palmer and Edward Carter (“Smith-Mundt Act's Ban On Domestic Propaganda: An Analysis of the Cold War Statute Limiting Access to Public Diplomacy”, 2006) who focus almost entirely on the broadcast operations of USIA and “public diplomacy.”10 However, you see the common perception in and out of government that the Act pertains to nearly every action, except those it doesn’t, with the separation, as I noted above, largely arbitrary.

What might have been different if the radio broadcasting operation had not been part of the Smith-Mundt Act? This is not a random counterfactual. The Mundt bill was a hodgepodge of authorities. Introduced by Mundt in January 1945 to authorize the exchange of teachers-in-training across the Pan-American Union planning to work in elementary and high schools, the State Department eagerly picked up the bill as a vehicle to not just expand exchanges but to support growing requests from abroad for US government (and US government-provided) experts to assist in everything from agriculture to civil aviation to road construction to census taking and so on. Mundt’s exchanges, expanded beyond primary schools to individuals and institutions at all levels, and the technical and scientific engagements were collectively the “interchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.” As the United Nations grew in importance, a declared objective of the bill was to emphasize and support the UN in the authorized information operations, though this was dropped late in 1947. The bill also provided for administrative flexibility for the State Department’s overseas operations, including building, renting, or buying facilities abroad, printing, supporting government personnel working outside of the US, permitting the contracting with foreign or domestic government agencies and intergovernmental organizations, and private agencies and individuals, and collecting funds from foreign governments to fund mutual program objectives (one example was Canada paying a share of an aviation project). Debates over the Mundt bill often centered on the ideological and informational threat posed by foreigners coming to the US and US citizens going abroad. One Congressman decried the Mundt bill’s exchange provisions as granting the Secretary of State supreme authority over the nation’s immigration laws. What the bill was not intended to do until July 1947 was to support a radio operation, aka the Voice of America, let alone a radio operation run by the State Department.

From November 1945, soon after the radio operation was sent to the State Department with the instruction of figuring out the future of said operation, through September 1947, it was the intent of the State Department, including successive Secretaries of State, and many in Congress to remove Voice of America from the department and place it in a non-profit organization. This foundation would be run by a full-time CEO (paid a market rate, by the way) who was overseen by a bipartisan Board of Trustees, whose members were nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.11

At the end of the 79th Congress, the Mundt bill (then called the Bloom bill) that failed to move in the Senate despite passing the House by a two-thirds vote, was intended to be complemented by a separate bill for this private entity funded by the government, at least initially. Mundt reintroduced the bill in May 1947 at the request of the State Department, which desperately needed the expansive authorities in the bill. The amended form, including keeping the radio operation at the State Department, was passed by the House 272-97 in June. The decision to not privatize the radio operation seems to have been a requirement of Sen. Smith to co-sponsor the bill, though he had the support of other Senators. In July 1947, Smith described his objection to the separation to colleagues this way:

I thought the proposal of the original Mundt bill tried to go much too far. They had in there a setup of an International Broadcasting Foundation which covered more ground than I felt we should cover, but I am happy to say that the Mundt bill as finally passed and as sent over to us here for our consideration cuts all that out, making no program of that sort, but simply provides for the activities which I will review in a minute of the State Department in this field, and puts the responsibility right in the lap of the Secretary of State, where it seems to me it belongs.

In September 1947, the State Department still hoped the controversial radio operation would be separated. The pending Mundt bill did not appear in the State Department’s list of pending legislative priorities – 24 of them – but showing up as #3 behind “Entry of Displaced Persons” and the “World Health Organization” was the International Broadcasting Foundation. The radio operation had been controversial from the start and had been at the root of a substantial delay in discussing the bill in early 1946 because of the Associated Press’s antagonism toward VOA, which many modern reviewers projected as distrust of the entire program.

We thus have a plausible counterfactual to consider how much of the “antipropaganda” narratives around the Smith-Mundt Act center on the foreign broadcast operations. Fulbright’s 1960s and arguments leading up to the 1972 amendment largely focused on the broadcast operation. In 1972, Fulbright’s argument centered on a USIA film, but we can easily imagine the movie-making would have gone into the IBF. Perhaps this is a fair place to note that in 1955, Fulbright said in a Senate hearing that he never supported creating USIA. Later, he would say he hoped it would last no more than a few years, ten at most.

In the 1967 hearing on the Informational Media Guarantee program, an add-on to the Smith-Mundt Act to assist US book, movie, and news publishers to access foreign markets (I won’t ask whether this is not “propaganda” because the source isn’t the government), the Advisory Commission on Information’s chairman, Frank Stanton, repeated the commission’s recently released recommendation to relax the “on request” standard to allow for more oversight and awareness of what the US government is saying and doing abroad. Fulbright’s objection focused on VOA, sometimes changing the subject to the not-relevant Radio Free Europe operation and Defence Department activities. He did, I should note, also mention other activities USIA personnel were involved with, like Pentagon press briefings, but that wasn’t his focus. His ire was focused when, in 1972, he said, “the Radios should be given their opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.”

Fulbright’s 1972 amendment in the Foreign Relations Act of 1972 (Pub.L. 92-352 §204) changed the clause on distribution. The clause directing that radio scripts and press releases be accessible now read, “Any such information…shall not be disseminated within the United States… but, on request, shall be available” to the media, “research students and scholars” (a post-1948 addition), and Members of Congress “for examination only.” The intent was crystal clear at the time: USIA material was not to be available for reuse or sharing or for any other purpose other than a quiet review.

In 1985, Sen. Edward Zorinsky, angered at USIA for a host of reasons, not the least of which was the USIA director using tens of thousands (?!?) of USIA’s funds for a home security system, closed what he called a “loophole” in Fulbright’s amendment. This (Pub.L. 99-93 §208 “Ban on Domestic Activities by the USIA”) tightened the restriction: “…no program material prepared by the United States Information Agency shall be distributed within the United States.” This change led a federal court to rule USIA materials were exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests, a ruling that came around the same time Congress relaxed the Foreign Agent Registration Act to drop labeling the source of foreign government information. In other words, as Congress applied the label of “propaganda” to USIA materials, it removed the label from foreign government materials.

Biden must be clear with China over cyberattacks

by Washington Examiner December 14, 2023 07:20 AM

Washington Examiner · December 14, 2023

The U.S. faces two escalating threats of war with China. First, the threat of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Second, the threat of a Chinese attack on the Philippines (a far more imminent concern than commonly understood).

But if war does come, Beijing senses that it has at least one major advantage. Namely, that Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party will need to pay little heed to the views of the Chinese people over the war. At the same time, Beijing will hope to manipulate U.S. public opinion in favor of a rapid cessation of hostilities on terms favorable to China. We're learning more and more about one way that Beijing would hope to pressure Americans to call for an early end to any war. And that's by China's strangling of key utility systems that Americans rely upon for their access to power, clean water, and communications.

INFLATION FALLS TO 3.1% IN NOVEMBER IN POSITIVE SIGN FOR ECONOMY

As reported this week, hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have compromised about two dozen critical infrastructure entities this year. The probing is part of a larger Chinese strategy to create division and panic in the United States should China take military action in Taiwan or the Philippines. The infrastructure targeted includes water utilities, ports, and oil pipelines.

These intrusions are the work of a Chinese government unit that cyberthreat analysts have labeled "Volt Typhoon." As Microsoft explained this spring, this particular group has targeted entities that "span the communications, manufacturing, utility, transportation, construction, maritime, government, information technology, and education sectors." Volt Typhoon's focus on U.S. Pacific-facing interests is notable. Guam, home to major U.S. military bases that would be crucial to any war effort, has been targeted alongside Hawaii, for example.

Volt Typhoon underlines Xi Jinping's evident preparation for cyberattacks targeting not just the U.S. military, but also the U.S. civilian population. This likely reflects the doctrinal Chinese military interest in creatively targeting an enemy's varied centers of gravity. If Americans can be made to believe that a far-away war is bringing too heavy costs at home, they may demand peace from their elected leaders. China is thus likely to employ cyberattacks against U.S. civilian interests in the earliest stages of any conflict. Alongside its ideological hatred for uncertainty, its fears over the geopolitical fallout of any war would motivate the Chinese Communist Party to secure victory as quickly as possible. As Sun Tzu put it, "In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns."

President Joe Biden has a responsibility to respond to this strategic threat. The president must make clear that the U.S. will respond in kind to any such attack.

Biden has not done so thus far. Indeed, Biden's deterrent response to these forms of attacks has been far from inspiring. Take the 2021 Colonial Pipeline hack, which crippled energy supplies on the U.S. East Coast. The Biden administration knew that the attack was carried out by Russian cybercriminals associated with the REvil organization. It knows that these individuals pay protection money to the Russian FSB and agree to avoid Russian-aligned targets. But instead of striking the group's servers and those of the FSB units known to supervise the group, Biden simply requested that the Russians take greater law enforcement action against it. Predictably, Russia's action has been only halfhearted and occasional at best. China may have learned a lesson from this timidity.

But the risk is clear. If Biden even indirectly facilitates Xi's belief that he can get away with targeting U.S. utilities, he risks Xi deciding to roll those dice the day that war comes.

Washington Examiner · December 14, 2023

6. US special ops may be buying too many Armed Overwatch planes, says GAO

The GAO report can be accessed here: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106283

This is a challenge for USSOCOM: e.g., quantifying effects of special operations. And when potentially erroneous assumptions are made it can have significant long term implications. This is even more of a challenge when assessing the correct force structure for personnel.

Excerpts:

But the study SOCOM performed to decide it needed 75 Armed Overwatch planes “relied on unproven assumptions” and didn’t justify a fleet of that size, GAO said in its report, titled “Special Operations Forces: DOD Should Slow Acquisition of Armed Overwatch Aircraft Until It Conducts Needed Analysis.”

When GAO ran the numbers on the commond’s force structure ratios and operational need estimates, it came up with a “substantially smaller” fleet size, though the watchdog did not say by how many.

US special ops may be buying too many Armed Overwatch planes, says GAO

Defense News · by Stephen Losey · December 14, 2023

WASHINGTON — U.S. Special Operations Command should reconsider its plan to buy 75 Armed Overwatch aircraft, a government watchdog said Thursday.

The Government Accountability Office recommended the command slow down its acquisition of the AT-802U Sky Warden, its choice for Armed Overwatch program, beginning in fiscal 2025 until SOCOM carries out a more thorough analysis for the fleet.

Armed Overwatch is a program to field flexible, fixed-wing aircraft that Air Force Special Operations Command could deploy to austere locations. The effort would require a relatively small logistical tail.

SOCOM in 2022 selected the single-engine, two-person Sky Warden, made by L3Harris Technologies and Air Tractor, for the program and expects to spend $2.2 billion to buy the planes through FY29. The Sky Warden is intended to carry out close air support; precision strike; and armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for counterterrorism operations and irregular warfare.

Air Force Special Operations Command considers Armed Overwatch useful to pressure violent extremist groups in areas such as Africa, where the airspace is essentially uncontested. The aircraft would take over missions now supported by the older and retiring U-28 Draco.

But the study SOCOM performed to decide it needed 75 Armed Overwatch planes “relied on unproven assumptions” and didn’t justify a fleet of that size, GAO said in its report, titled “Special Operations Forces: DOD Should Slow Acquisition of Armed Overwatch Aircraft Until It Conducts Needed Analysis.”

When GAO ran the numbers on the commond’s force structure ratios and operational need estimates, it came up with a “substantially smaller” fleet size, though the watchdog did not say by how many.

SOCOM’s studies also made assumptions about the Armed Overwatch aircraft that didn’t reflect its expected capabilities or how it would be employed in operations, GAO said.

The office said documents and discussions with SOCOM officials showed the command had already decided it needed between 70 and 75 Armed Overwatch planes in 2019, two years before it started the necessary force structure analyses.

SOCOM also didn’t consider how changes to its mission, such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and possible reductions in force structure would affect its need for an Armed Overwatch plane, GAO said.

SOCOM also did not factor in whether changes in the Armed Overwatch plane’s capabilities would affect how many it would need to buy, GAO said. The Sky Warden plane on which SOCOM ultimately settled is more capable than the airplane the command originally envisioned for Armed Overwatch, which “could significantly change” how many planes it actually needs, the report said.

GAO did not rule out the possibility that the intended fleet of 75 may be fewer than SOCOM needs, since the proper analysis has not been performed. The office recommended SOCOM conduct a more thorough study of what it needs for Armed Overwatch. Until that analysis is done, GAO said, the Pentagon should require the command to only buy the minimum number of Sky Wardens needed to maintain its production line and support operational test and evaluation beginning in 2025.

The Defense Department agreed with GAO’s first recommendation and said it would analyze the force structure needed for Armed Overwatch.

The department partially agreed with the recommendation to temporarily limit Armed Overwatch acquisition, but said SOCOM will also consider whether it has enough aircraft to train the first cadre of aircrew to fly the Sky Warden and set up a training pipeline.

GAO said it agrees that training aircrews is an important part of setting up Armed Overwatch, but buying the right number of planes is important for SOCOM to set up its training plans and use personnel most efficiently.

SOCOM bought 16 Sky Wardens as of October 2023, and expects that number to rise to 28 aircraft by April 2024.

About Stephen Losey

Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.

7. Most Americans Would Discourage Young People from Joining Military as Enlisted Service Members, Report Says

Apologies for the snarky comment, but most Americans have not served in the US military. But unfortunately their perception is their reality, which is the reality they use to make their recommendations on service. We forget the meaning of the word service, I fear.

Most Americans Would Discourage Young People from Joining Military as Enlisted Service Members, Report Says | Military.com

military.com · by Drew F. Lawrence

Most Americans would discourage a young person close to them from enlisting in the military, but a wide majority would encourage them to join as an officer, according to a new Rand Corp. study published this week.

The study found that 54.4% of respondents would dissuade a 17-year-old relative from joining the military as an enlisted service member, though nearly two-thirds of Americans would encourage them to go the officer route, either through a service academy or the Reserve Officer Training Corps, also known as ROTC.

The study comes amid one of the worst recruiting periods the all-volunteer military has known, with most branches failing to meet goals for signing Americans up to serve. Meanwhile, Rand also analyzed public perceptions of veterans, which were "overwhelmingly positive," according to the report.

The report cited the services' current recruiting crisis as a reflection of public perception about the military, with dwindling confidence in the armed forces, the end of the war in Afghanistan, politicization of the military, and polarization of the general public all as contributors to wavering esteem for a typically bulletproof institution.

"At the same time, military propensity -- the likelihood that young Americans will enlist in the military -- and general confidence in the military are declining just as the number of veterans dwindles," the study said. "More than two years out from the end of the longest war in U.S. history, these trends raise important and pressing questions about public perceptions of the military and uniformed service."

The study found that Democrats are less likely than Republicans to encourage a young person they know to enlist in the military, but both are relatively on the same track in encouraging them to join via the officer route.

Rand also found that holding negative views about veterans is associated with a lower chance of encouraging a young person to enlist. Respondents who have served in the military themselves were more likely than their civilian counterparts to believe that most Americans look down on the armed forces, according to the study.

It measured certain veteran stereotypes, both negative and positive.

Some positive stereotypes included veterans being self-disciplined, loyal, practical and responsible. Negative stereotypes included being "cold," volatile and unsociable. Most Americans, depending on the stereotype measured, endorsed positive perceptions of veterans, though responses varied based on age and demographic.

Nearly 80% of respondents said that veterans were self-disciplined, while 20% said that veterans were aggressive.

"Negative stereotypes can lead to stigma and discrimination, which is the behavioral manifestation of such beliefs," the study said. "For example, if veterans are thought to suffer from war-induced mental illness, then individuals might avoid interactions with them. But stereotypes do not merely shape the perceptions and behaviors of those who hold them; they can also affect the stereotyped themselves, culminating most problematically in self-stigmatization."

The Rand report was somewhat at odds with another study from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which was published last month. It said that a slim majority of Americans would encourage friends and family to join the military.

Rand conducted its work for the report in February and June of 2022.

military.com · by Drew F. Lawrence

8. Not Just ‘Mowing the Grass:’ Unconventional Warfare in Somalia

I think the author is slightly misinformed here (though I think well intentioned). FID is not the longest-established SF mission unconventional warfare is.

Excerpts:

But while direct action continues, it is not the only doctrinal tool. Special operations forces (SOF) have been engaged on the ground since shortly after 9/11, often supporting partner forces. US efforts in Somalia have also built up the surrogate Somali SOF, Danab. The Danab SOF are in good shape, guarded from political turmoil and given enormous US resources, including for their families. But the remainder of the bitterly divided, less elite, “line” army is not. Supporting armies through foreign internal defense (FID) is the longest-established mission of Army Special Forces. FID aims to support a sovereign state’s army with SOF on the ground. The importance of this kind of mission set was highlighted when Captain William Doyle of 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) received the Silver Star for heroically restarting a Kenyan advance in Gedo in July 2015.

An interesting view of unconventional warfare here. Having been part of the working group that developed the (very compromise) current definition of UW I can say we did not take the author's view though the 'traditionalists" in the working group did. The traditionalists "won" the argument and the compromise was occupying power. Those of us who wanted a more modern interpretation of UW wanted (and still want to ) interpret it as any kind of occupying power to include a terrorist group and not solely as a traditional nation state. But I do agree with his description of doctrine as a guide.

Thus, while SOF are operating on the ground, FID can be almost completely counterproductive. When rural clans’ anger started to boil over at Al-Shabaab from mid-2022, US SOF and Bancroft private military contractor personnel were much better placed to support locally appropriate forces with greater motivation – because Al-Shabaab has long brutally oppressed the rural clans. I wrote about the potential of these local forces in an article published in mid-2020. Supporting the rural clansmen, a resistance movement fighting to throw the Al-Shabaab occupying power off their own lands, is almost pure unconventional warfare (UW), defined by the US Army as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power.” There is a mental adjustment that unfolds here; when UW was defined, the enemy was always expected to be an opposing state. But Special Operations doctrine is a guide for action, rather than a set of fixed rules. Al-Shabaab has occupied and oppressed rural clans in Somalia for decades, and is a designated foreign terrorist organization, so the change is logical.

So this article garnered some attention on Twitter/X today and one tweet mentioned Remote Area Operations. I think this is what Dr. Robinason was struggling for: Remote Area Operations is the UW inspired FID concept. Why the doctrine gurus removed this concept from FID operations I will never know but whomever is responsible should have to turn in his Green Beret.

Remote area operations are operations undertaken in insurgent-controlled or contested areas to establish islands of popular support for the HN government and deny support to the insurgents. They differ from consolidation operations in that they are not designed to establish permanent HN government control over the area.

Remote areas may be populated by ethnic, religious, or other isolated minority groups. They may be in the interior of the HN or near border areas where major infiltration routes exist.

Remote area operations normally involve the use of specially trained paramilitary or irregular forces. SF teams support remote area operations to interdict insurgent activity, destroy insurgent base areas in the remote area, and demonstrate that the HN government has not conceded control to the insurgents. They also collect and report information concerning insurgent intentions in more populated areas. In this case, SF teams advise and assist irregular HN forces operating in a manner similar to the insurgents themselves, but with access to superior combat support (CS) and combat service support (CSS) resources.

(From FM 3-05.202 Foreign Internal Defense 2007.) (NOTE: No longer in current FID Doctrine)

Not Just ‘Mowing the Grass:’ Unconventional Warfare in Somalia - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Colin Robinson · December 14, 2023

By Colin Robinson

In June 2022, US Army captain Sean O’Brien wrote that “mowing the grass” — continual degradation of Al-Shabaab leaders, effectively via airstrikes and small swift raids (in military doctrinal terms, direct action, or DA) — was the most useful option to avoid threats to US interests in Somalia. Since 9/11, the US has worked to deny terrorists any sanctuary in Somalia, which means ensuring stability across the whole country. Securing the sea routes around the Horn of Africa is also important. But many countries, including the US and close allies and regional partners, have struggled for decades to achieve this aim.

The civil war in Somalia began in the late 1980s as dictatorial repression tightened. Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate, gained prominence fighting the Ethiopian incursion of 2006, and is now the principal threat to stability. It has long been a tenacious enemy, car-bombing and illicitly taxing cities and dominating large swaths of rural Somalia. War and constant political infighting have so torn Somalia apart, O’Brien wrote, that the country is now “fractured,” with a “paralyzed” federal government. As a result, he warned, “‘Mowing the grass’ by continuously degrading al-Shabaab’s capabilities … is arguably the best option available—if not the only one.”

But while direct action continues, it is not the only doctrinal tool. Special operations forces (SOF) have been engaged on the ground since shortly after 9/11, often supporting partner forces. US efforts in Somalia have also built up the surrogate Somali SOF, Danab. The Danab SOF are in good shape, guarded from political turmoil and given enormous US resources, including for their families. But the remainder of the bitterly divided, less elite, “line” army is not. Supporting armies through foreign internal defense (FID) is the longest-established mission of Army Special Forces. FID aims to support a sovereign state’s army with SOF on the ground. The importance of this kind of mission set was highlighted when Captain William Doyle of 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) received the Silver Star for heroically restarting a Kenyan advance in Gedo in July 2015.

Moreover, Somalia has always been “fractured.” The concept of the unified sovereign state is a bedrock part of the way Americans see the world. America’s classical liberal values – individualism, liberty, freedom, and justice, among others, shape this view. But Somalis do not share that view, instead following very un-classical liberal values. In Somalia, as in Afghanistan, and indeed many parts of Iraq, a sovereign state is simply not seen as absolutely vital. Somali political life has never been governed by such formal institutions. Kinship ties – clan ties – at different levels have always been much more important, regardless of the official government structure. Every man has the right to speak in clan councils, which decide future actions. And Somali customary law prescribes collective reparation, rather than individual trials, for many crimes.

In part because the bedrock values are different, repeated efforts to strengthen the Somali National Armed Forces (SNAF) have produced very poor results. Despite the many countries who’ve contributed to training Somali troops, few remain in any formed units; enormous amounts of funding have produced few results. The horrendous devastation dictator Mohamed Siad Barre caused in the early years of the Somali Civil War, such as the destruction of Hargeisa in 1988, also seared distrust of centralized government into large parts of the national consciousness. Over 35 years of civil war since the late 1980s have meant that most Somalis see clan ties, not the national government, as their last refuge in times of need.

Al-Shabaab, accordingly, grew stronger in the first half of 2021, as a Somali president with dictatorial tendencies, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed “Faarmajo,” struggled to hold onto power. Joint Special Operations Task Force – Somalia and hundreds of contractor affiliates were tasked to train, advise, assist, and accompany “Somali National Army brigades,” largely loose collections of clansmen that fight and plunder for their clan aims, but receive national funding. The clansmen in these “Somali National Army brigades” are known to ruthlessly exploit their government status to move far beyond their own clan areas to pillage and oppress other clans. In the capital, there is almost no foundation for a centralised state to attain strong military capability, as national government departments are exploited by changing sets of rival warlord-politicians. They have little or no interest in building a state; instead, survival, power, and profit are the priority. Foreign internal defense can be a fool’s errand where local combatants have little genuine interest in building a state. Indeed, the threadbare façade of government in Mogadishu is often used to extract foreign money that is then diverted into private hands.

Thus, while SOF are operating on the ground, FID can be almost completely counterproductive. When rural clans’ anger started to boil over at Al-Shabaab from mid-2022, US SOF and Bancroft private military contractor personnel were much better placed to support locally appropriate forces with greater motivation – because Al-Shabaab has long brutally oppressed the rural clans. I wrote about the potential of these local forces in an article published in mid-2020. Supporting the rural clansmen, a resistance movement fighting to throw the Al-Shabaab occupying power off their own lands, is almost pure unconventional warfare (UW), defined by the US Army as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power.” There is a mental adjustment that unfolds here; when UW was defined, the enemy was always expected to be an opposing state. But Special Operations doctrine is a guide for action, rather than a set of fixed rules. Al-Shabaab has occupied and oppressed rural clans in Somalia for decades, and is a designated foreign terrorist organization, so the change is logical.

Continual direct action is a tool for Somalia, but not the only one. Solutions for Somalia in coming decades need not revolve around a central national government in Mogadishu. Distrust of any national government over the last 35 years of war since have reinforced Somalis’ historical tendency to rely on their clan ties. Trying to suppress clan ties to build up the national army has failed time and again. Despite headwinds, US direct action has fostered a competent Somali partner, the Danab SOF. But the foreign-supported SOF are the only truly useful central state forces. The rural clans, Danab SOF, and fragments of the SNA clan brigades supported by US and contractors, have inflicted real damage on Al-Shabaab. AU-authorized Ethiopian forces have only provided logistical support. This approach has not been tidy or consistent, works through collections of uniquely Somali cultural networks, and hardly resembles any US Army or Marine Corps doctrine, but it has worked. Significant ground has been gained in Galmudug in central Somalia. This kind of partnership reflects the way power is now held in southern Somalia’s federal system. It also recognizes and supports the central role clans play in rural life, and offers a better template for the future.

Supporting the downtrodden has been one of the core motivations of Army Special Forces since its creation in 1952. SOF are inherently innovative and adaptable. Here, adapting to support the downtrodden clans is the best way to succeed. Both direct action and unconventional warfare, together, offer the best option to damage Al-Shabaab and create more opportunities for stability in southern Somalia.

Dr. Colin Robinson is a Senior Researcher in African Studies and War Studies at Obuda University Budapest, and has worked multiple times previously for both the United Nations and the New Zealand Defense Force / Defense Ministry. He has been following Somali military issues since 2014, and spent 2018-2020 advising the European Union on Somali military assistance in Nairobi.

Main image: A Green Beret assigned to 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) trains alongside a Nigerian soldier participating in urban assault training during Exercise Flintlock 2018 in Agadez, Niger, April 14, 2018. U.S. Navy photo by MC3 (SW/AW) Evan Parker/Released)

9. The 2023 Urban Warfare Experts’ Christmas Wish List

More substantive than a traditional holiday reading list? On a serious note, I wonder how many of these items are in research and development for future fielding

Conclusion:

We believe strongly that urban battlefields represent the present and future of warfare. With the evidence increasingly suggesting that to be the case, it would be great to deliver some of these wishes so that our militaries are better prepared for the challenges they will inevitably face.

The 2023 Urban Warfare Experts’ Christmas Wish List - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by John Spencer, Jayson Geroux, Stuart Lyle · December 13, 2023

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Note from John Spencer, MWI chair of urban warfare studies: In the last three years there has been no shortage of urban warfare. The wars in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Israel have been and will be defined by urban battles. The increasing frequency and intensity with which cities are becoming battlefields requires new investments and ideas. Each year, the Urban Warfare Project produces a Christmas wish list of capabilities, ideas, and initiatives absent in the US a other militaries. This year, I invited fellow urban warfare scholars Major Jayson Geroux and Mr. Stuart Lyle to create a combined wish list.

A New Way of Conceptualizing Urban Operations. Militaries must stop thinking of cities as a special environment. Urban operations are pervasive precisely because the terrain is universal. One can find urban areas (and battles) within a full range of environments. Urban terrain can be juxtaposed alongside of—and even intermixed with—other environments like jungle, mountain and arctic, and desert. We should, therefore, treat training for urban operations as a foundational skill for militaries rather than a culmination point.

A US DoD Line Item for the Urban Operations Planners Course. For three years, the 40th Infantry Division has conducted a weeklong Urban Operations Planners Course to teach division and brigade staff members how to conduct large-scale urban operations (offense and defense) in dense urban areas. The course does not have a consistent or dependable funding source. Training for urban operations is important, as is the right equipment. But so is planning when faced with the unique considerations presented by urban environments. Resources are required to ensure those planning skills exist in our military formations.

More Urban Operations Courses. The 40th Infantry Division’s Urban Operations Planners Course includes non-US students, but it does not have the capacity to meet the needs of all allied and partner nations. There must be an equivalent course available to each of these militaries. Course offerings also need to be expanded to the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, as well as to specialized communities including, for example, special operations forces and judge advocates general. Nonmilitary stakeholders, like State Department foreign policy advisors, nongovernmental organizations, and even elected officials should also be included.

A NATO Urban Operations Center of Excellence. There are twenty-nine NATO centers of excellence for topics such as countering improvised explosive devices, mountain warfare, and security force assistance, and a further thirty-three partnership training and education centers covering topics such as chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons, peacekeeping, and special operations, and more. However, none is dedicated to urban operations. Building on sovereign national institutions, like the 40th Infantry Division’s Urban Operations Planners Course, the creation of a NATO Urban Operations Center of Excellence would help to cohere training and doctrine across the alliance and drive lessons sharing and research.

Fit-for-Purpose Equipment. Urban operations should be the driver for equipment requirements. The challenges of operating in urban environments is almost always treated as an afterthought for equipment design and procurement, with negative results. Basic urban-specific equipment such as ladders and breaching tools are seen as specialist items rather than standard equipment and are consequently less commonly available for training. Larger platforms are not designed for the terrain they are frequently operating in and we therefore too often have to rapidly procure or adapt equipment in theater (e.g., the TUSK kits for M1A2 Abrams tanks). All this costs time, blood, and treasure.

Cheap, Expendable Drones for All Squads. Urban environments can be full of unknown threats and challenges to military forces operating there, hidden across a labyrinth of three-dimensional terrain. Drones are needed at the lowest level of fighting formations for reconnaissance, security, strike, and even protecting civilians that, no matter the evacuation measures taken, are always present. These drones should be as expendable as ammunition, hardened against cyber threats, and under $1,000.

A Heavy-Duty, Remote, Armored Bulldozer. Historically, the bulldozer is a vital tool when attacking an enemy-held city. The bulldozer clears complex obstacles, creates logistical routes or axes of advance, and can withstand an enemy defender’s first blow. The Israeli military has an organic heavy-duty bulldozer, the D9, including variants that can be operated remotely. It has proved invaluable during urban operations, showing what an important capability it is for militaries who seek to be prepared for urban warfare.

More Subterranean Training Areas. Current events are demonstrating the need to have more and better subterranean training areas. Existing subterranean training areas are few and far between and are also severely lacking in variety. We can spend the large amount of money required to build them, but an alternative is to find existing disused subterranean systems in cities that can be utilized for training purposes. Either way, we all need more subterranean training areas.

Better Urban Representation in Professional Reading. Individual professional development matters. In an ideal world, a military service could make reading one urban-focused book a year mandatory. But achieving a similar outcome would be possible simply by encouraging every officer and every senior noncommissioned officer, regardless of branch or specialty, to include such books in their professional reading. Including relevant titles on professional reading lists is one way. Leader emphasis on the subject and the importance of self-study is another. Unit professional development sessions could be built around these books, as well, to spur important discussion. But there need not be book reports or presentations or anything formal associated with it. The act of reading is what matters. As Brigade General Rob Wooldridge, deputy commanding general of the 40th Infantry Division and the driving force behind their Urban Operations Planners Course, includes in his X profile, leaders are readers.

We believe strongly that urban battlefields represent the present and future of warfare. With the evidence increasingly suggesting that to be the case, it would be great to deliver some of these wishes so that our militaries are better prepared for the challenges they will inevitably face.

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War and coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.

Major Jayson Geroux is an infantry officer with The Royal Canadian Regiment and is currently with the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre. He has been a fervent student of urban operations and has been involved in urban operations training for two decades. He is an equally passionate military historian and has participated in, planned, executed, and intensively instructed on urban operations and urban warfare history for the past nine years. He has served twenty-eight years in the Canadian Armed Forces, which included operational tours to the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Afghanistan.

Stuart Lyle is the urban operations research lead for the UK-based Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). His work is varied and has included designing force concepts for the British Army to improve effectiveness in urban combat. He led Dstl’s Future Cities study which looked at global trends in urbanization and their implications for military operations.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Airman 1st Class Luis A. Ruiz-Vazquez, US Air Force (adapted by MWI)

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by John Spencer, Jayson Geroux, Stuart Lyle · December 13, 2023

10. How serious is the terror threat in Mindanao?

I met some people from Marawi and Mindanao State University here in Manila last evening. They assured me that Marwai City was being rebuilt and restored to its former charm.

How serious is the terror threat in Mindanao? - Manila Standard

manilastandard.net · by Manila Standard · December 13, 2023

WITH the Islamic State already claiming responsibility for the deadly bombing at the Mindanao State University in Marawi City on Dec 2, authorities should move decisively to arrest the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

Investigators believe the bombing was the handiwork of the Dawlah Islamiyah-Maute Group that operates in Lanao del Sur.

If this suspicion is validated by the arrest of the perpetrators, then the government would do well to adopt a take-no-prisoners approach to end terrorist threat once and for all.

Another group now allied with the Islamic State is the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), a breakaway group of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

With an estimated 3,000 members after they severed ties with the MILF, and intent on pursuing their goal of a separate state through armed struggle, they represent a potent threat to peace and order in southern Philippines.

Every now and then the military and the police are still able to arrest probably inactive Abu Sayyaf members involved in atrocities many years ago.

We don’t really know if the Abu Sayyaf is still able to recruit members at this point, but poverty and social injustice, if not the lure of easy money from ransom payments, could still draw young Muslims to its fold.

How to stop terrorism in Mindanao?

There are no hard and fast answers to a complex problem arising from history and longstanding social divisions.

As a peace and order problem, terrorism requires the military and the police to take a mailed-fist approach to dismantle their organizational structure and logistical network.

But it is also a political and social problem that requires government interventions at the national and local levels.

National government agencies such as those involved in agriculture, trade and industry, labor and social work and development should actively take part in anti-poverty programs in the poorest regions in Mindanao. After all, poverty breeds discontent and rebellion.

The government has succeeded in forging peace agreements with the two biggest separatist movements in Mindanao, namely the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the MILF.

They can help convince those recruited by terrorist groups to renounce violence and go back to the social mainstream.

What is important is for the government to boost economic growth to reduce social inequality, and to deliver vital social services such as education and health to poor communities in southern Philippines.

This will deprive terrorist groups of fertile ground for them to take root and spread their ideology of hate and bloodshed.

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manilastandard.net · by Manila Standard · December 13, 2023

11. Setting the Record Straight: The KMT Defense Blueprint for Taiwan.

Excerpts:

KMT presidential candidate Dr. Hou Yu-ih, during his visit to the United States this past September, made clear to U.S. government officials and scholars that a KMT government will continue to invest in a strong national defense including deterrence capabilities. Defense spending, weapons systems acquisitions, and the length of compulsory service will all be threat-based. A Hou administration will not only uphold “continuity” in Taiwan’s defense strategy but will also inject innovative policy proposals to further expand cooperation in common security interests with Taiwan’s allies.

The KMT’s comprehensive defense policy includes the creation of a cabinet-level national defense council for civil defense and reserves mobilization, a common operations picture across our military services, improved C4ISRT, and investment in Taiwan’s asymmetric capabilities based on a rebalancing of where we invest and which defense systems we acquire.

Setting the Record Straight: The KMT Defense Blueprint for Taiwan.

thediplomat.com

Hou Yu-ih, if elected, plans to publish Taiwan’s first National Security Strategy within the first ten months of the presidency.

By Howard Shen

December 14, 2023

On December 1, in an op-ed for The Diplomat, the director of International Affairs for Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, Vincent Chao, deliberately distorted the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) position on compulsory military service. It misleads readers around the world who are eager to understand the issues that will determine the winner of Taiwan’s upcoming presidential election, and that is most unfortunate.

KMT presidential candidate Dr. Hou Yu-ih, during his visit to the United States this past September, made clear to U.S. government officials and scholars that a KMT government will continue to invest in a strong national defense including deterrence capabilities. Defense spending, weapons systems acquisitions, and the length of compulsory service will all be threat-based. A Hou administration will not only uphold “continuity” in Taiwan’s defense strategy but will also inject innovative policy proposals to further expand cooperation in common security interests with Taiwan’s allies.

The KMT’s comprehensive defense policy includes the creation of a cabinet-level national defense council for civil defense and reserves mobilization, a common operations picture across our military services, improved C4ISRT, and investment in Taiwan’s asymmetric capabilities based on a rebalancing of where we invest and which defense systems we acquire.

The DPP’s defense policy lacks an overall strategic blueprint and overemphasizes superficiality in terms of overall defense mobilization. The DPP plan does not address the plummeting retention rate and is out of touch – with its unpragmatic conscription plan severely impacting both voluntary servicemen and conscripts.

In furtherance of the “3D Strategy” – Deterrence, Dialogue, De-escalation – proposed by Hou, the KMT, in its conduct of defense policy, will uphold the principle of “strengthening national defense, deterring future conflict” to deliver an elite, valiant, and agile Republic of China (ROC) military. Hou’s vision for a stronger ROC national defense can be broadly divided into four policy categories: 1) laying out the strategic blueprint for ROC’s national security; 2) giving a pay raise to voluntary troops and expediting the conscription waitlist; 3) cultivating the foundation for national defense; and 4) prioritizing ten major development projects for deterrence.

National Security Strategic Blueprint

To maintain peace and security across the Taiwan Strait and stabilize the Indo-Pacific region, if elected, along with the governing 3D Strategy, we plan to release a “Republic of China National Security Strategy” within the first 10 months of the presidency. The NSS will outline national values and interests; current and future threats and challenges; necessary national capability priorities; and development responsibility and cost assessment.

The strategy will also concretize our 3D Strategy: delineating the Republic of China’s core objectives, national interests, elements of power, elements of strategy, force sizing metric, and regional approaches. It will cover cross-strait relations, foreign policy, national defense, people’s livelihood, energy, public order, and birth rate to promote prosperity, secure democracy, and strengthen security.

Voluntary Troops Pay Raise and Conscription Waitlist Expedition

The current government has failed to retain our voluntary troops. This June, the total number of personnel fell to 155,218. The retention of combat unit personnel is of grave concern; the ratios of actual strength to authorized strength in various combat units more often than not are below 80 percent. The authorized strength for the fiscal year of 2024 is 5,187 persons less than that of the fiscal year of 2023. We are down by 10 battalions without any fighting.

To reverse this downward trend, we propose a set of pay raises to express our gratitude to and honor our men and women serving in the military.

For Class I Combat Units, such as all companies under Army Infantry, Army Artillery, and Army Armor; Marine Corps (ROCMC); Navy Submariners; and Surface-to-Air Missile Command, every person will receive a pay raise of 10,000 NTD per month, including 8,000 NTD of “Combat Allowance” and 2,000 NTD of “Volunteer Allowance.”

For Class II Combat Units, such as all Battalion HQ Companies under Class I Units, every person will receive a pay raise of 7,000 NTD per month, including 5,000 NTD of “Combat Allowance” and 2,000 NTD of “Volunteer Allowance.”

All other voluntary troops will receive a monthly pay raise of 2,000 NTD.

We estimate the program cost would be 10.6 billion NTD per year, including 6.7 billion NTD of “Combat Allowance” and 3.9 billion NTD of “Volunteer Allowance.”

The current one-year conscription proposal is not backed up by a pragmatic plan. There is a lack of large-scale field training bases; the content of the training is more than often not fully implemented. Therefore, although the length of conscription is extended to one year, we will not see a general increase in strength in the near future.

For the conscripts, even before the conscription length extension, they would have to endure a long and tedious waitlist after registering with the military service section of their district office and before reporting to the barracks. We have yet to see any remedy for the problem.

We must simplify the enlistment process to minimize the wait time. We must combine conscripts’ civilian expertise with their military service. We must innovate our training content. We must increase our pay for those stationed on outer islands, such as those on Kinmen and Matsu.

National Defense Foundation Cultivation

A cabinet-level defense council for civil defense and reserves mobilization is badly needed to guarantee successful inter-agency cooperation for defense preparedness and mobilization. The placement of the current All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency in the Taiwanese bureaucratic hierarchy inherently impairs the agency to take charge of any defense ministry effort, let alone that of inter-agency nature.

We must improve our national military education, including incorporating modernized joint operations education and significantly increasing relevant educational budgets.

We have flagged 14 critical defense projects to continue deepening our military exchange with the United States. We should assist domestic defense companies in obtaining the Pentagon’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification for information security alignment, furthering Taiwan-U.S. defense industry supply chain cooperation.

To honor members of our military, we propose to elevate Armed Services Day to a national holiday: Armed Services Honor Day. We will also seek to expand the organization of the 100th anniversary celebration of the ROC Military Academy. We look to expand dormitory units for voluntary troops and their family members and conduct a general review of their benefits.

Ten Major Development Projects for Deterrence

President Chiang Ching-kuo’s Ten Major Construction Projects upgraded Taiwan’s infrastructure conditions and went hand in hand with our economic miracle and technological advancement. We propose Ten Major Development Projects for Deterrence to prepare ourselves for and deter People’s Liberation Army (PLA) adventurism. These projects include:

Developing and acquiring asymmetric capabilities of “mobile, stealth, intelligent, small-in-size, large-in-quantity” nature, which are difficult to detect and counter;
Combing network-centric warfare capabilities, a complete development of tri-force common imagery, and high-efficiency, high-efficacy C4ISRT system to shorten our defense’s Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop reaction time to just a couple hundred of milliseconds, to increase our Beyond Visual Range engagement capabilities, efficiency, and effectiveness;
Strengthening joint suppression operations capability against enemy military targets during a PLA use of force against Taiwan;
Enhancing critical defense infrastructure’s cybersecurity and backup capabilities;
Maintaining a high-efficacy, elite force, while phasing out equipment requiring too much manpower but producing insufficient firepower; Adjusting ground combat troops’ tactical gear to increase our body armor performance standards and taking U.S. military standards and PLA ammunition as reference;
Setting up wartime intelligence sharing mechanisms with friendly and partner countries to enhance our maritime and air interception capabilities;
Establishing professional urban warfare training bases; forming urban warfare professional units;
Elevating unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and anti-UAV capabilities;
Extending and continuing the indigenous submarine program, as submarine warfare is an integral part of our anti-PLA asymmetric capabilities first executed during the Ma Ying-jeou administration;
Linking our defense budget and spending with the level of perceived threat.

The KMT’s defense policies were previously addressed in detail at the October 2023 U.S.-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia. Chao himself was in the audience. He should know better than to distort our policies. Regrettably, Chao has chosen instead to misconstrue the KMT’s comprehensive defense planning.

The term of the next Republic of China (Taiwan) president, from 2024 to 2028, overlaps with Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping’s third term. Whether in Washington D.C., Tokyo, Canberra, or other capitals in the Indo-Pacific region, prudent policymakers know that the stakes are too high to rely on second-hand information filtered through a political agenda.

We suggest concerned policymakers contact the KMT directly to better understand our defense policies.

AUTHOR

Howard Shen

Howard Shen is assistant director of International Affairs for the Kuomintang. He previously served as deputy director of the Kuomintang Representative Office in the United States and deputy leader of the Kuomintang Youth League.

12. Analysis: There’s a big hole in China’s plan to boost the economy in 2024

Excerpts:

With a more “proactive” tone, policymakers may set “4.5-5%” or “around 5%” as the GDP growth target for next year, Hu said, broadly similar to the goal for 2023.

But other analysts questioned whether this level of growth could be achieved without stimulus measures directly targeting consumers, which was not mentioned.

“[There was] no hint for massive consumption support policies,” Citi analysts said Wednesday. “There was no detailed discussion on increasing household income.”

The world’s second largest economy is facing deepening troubles, with weak consumption a major drag.

Analysis: There’s a big hole in China’s plan to boost the economy in 2024 | CNN Business

CNN · by Laura He · December 13, 2023

Customers at a supermarket in Fuyang City, East China's Anhui Province, Dec 9, 2023.

CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Hong Kong CNN —

China’s top officials have pledged to put greater focus on economic growth next year, but the lack of measures to boost consumer demand could make it tough to deliver on that promise.

Beijing’s closely-watched annual Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC), which typically sets the tone for economic policy for the year ahead, ended late Tuesday with a commitment to “focus on the central task of economic development and the primary task of high-quality development,” according to a readout of the meeting.

“Next year, we must persist in seeking growth while maintaining stability, facilitating stability through growth, and building the new before breaking the old.”

The meeting, which was hosted by President Xi Jinping, was more “pro-growth” than in previous years, said Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie Group.

With a more “proactive” tone, policymakers may set “4.5-5%” or “around 5%” as the GDP growth target for next year, Hu said, broadly similar to the goal for 2023.

But other analysts questioned whether this level of growth could be achieved without stimulus measures directly targeting consumers, which was not mentioned.

“[There was] no hint for massive consumption support policies,” Citi analysts said Wednesday. “There was no detailed discussion on increasing household income.”

The world’s second largest economy is facing deepening troubles, with weak consumption a major drag.

Policymakers have repeatedly pledged to expand domestic demand and spur consumer spending. But there hasn’t been any large-scale stimulus, despite economists and government advisors calling for more aggressive measures.

“We think [the 5% level] would be very challenging to achieve, given the lingering growth headwinds and the modest policy support stance set in the Conference,” UBS analysts said. They predict growth will slow to 4.4% next year.

Morning commuters passing through a construction site in Beijing on Monday, October 30, 2023.

Stringer/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Fighting deflation

Besides consumption, falling prices are a major concern and policymakers seem to have acknowledged the problem for the first time in years.

China has been fighting weak prices for most of this year due to the property market slump and weak spending. Deflation is bad for the economy because consumers and companies may put off purchases or investments in anticipation of prices falling further. That in turn could further slow the economy, and create a vicious cycle.

“Total social financing and money supply should be in line with economic growth and the price target,” said the readout, referring to the total amount of financing to the real economy.

Increasing the supply of money is one tool central banks can use to fight deflation.

“It’s the first time for them to add ‘the price target’ [to the readout], ” Hu said. “In other words, monetary policy could turn more accommodative in the face of deflationary risks.” That would imply interest rate cuts to come in the months ahead, he added.

Last month, the Consumer Price Index dropped 0.5%, its biggest fall since the depths of the pandemic three years ago. The drop marked an acceleration in the rate of deflation from October, which fell 0.2% from a year earlier.

The Communist Party’s top officials said their number one priority was to build a modern industrial system with “technological innovation.”

A woman selects clothes at a shopping mall in Beijing on June 15, 2023.

Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images

Building is back?

The readout from the CEWC also removed the phrase “houses are for living in, not for speculation” for the first time since 2018.

Chinese leaders started using the phrase in 2016, when they began tightening rules for the property market. In July, the Politburo dropped the phrase from the statement of its monthly meeting, sending a signal that some property curbs could be lifted.

“Property market stabilisation takes on more urgency,” HSBC analysts said on Wednesday, adding that there are signs the property market crisis is spilling over to the broader economy, including to financial markets and consumer confidence.

In the statement, the CEWC reiterated the importance of resolving risks in “real estate, local government debt, and small and medium-sized financial institutions.”

The offices of Zhongrong International Trust, a company partially owned by Zhongzhi Enterprise Group, in Beijing on August 22, 2023.

Florence Lo/Reuters

The government will accelerate construction in three major areas — affordable housing, urban-village redevelopment and public infrastructure facilities — to shore up activity in the property sector, it added.

The real estate slump is at the center of many of China’s current economic problems. The industry, which has accounted for as much as 30% of the GDP, fell into crisis three years ago, after the government cracked down on developers’ reckless borrowing.

Home sales have plunged, and many developers are struggling with a cash crunch. Their debt woes have spilled over to the massive shadow banking system, including trust firms, which has lent extensively to developers over the years.

CNN · by Laura He · December 13, 2023

13. There Is a Path to Victory in Ukraine

(DMYTRO KULEBA is Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.)

Excerpts:

In the summer of 1944, in the weeks after the World War II Allies’ D-Day landing, the headlines in allied capitals were often pessimistic: “Allied Pace Slows,” “Delays in Normandy: Overcaution of Allies and Bad Weather Seen as Factors Upsetting Schedule,” “Terrain Slows Tanks, U.S. Officer Explains.” Even after Allied success in Normandy, the massive Operation Market Garden in the German-occupied Netherlands in September 1944 proved challenging. It had been expected to bring the war to a close but instead yielded limited successes and massive Allied losses. Yet pessimistic headlines and disappointing, even costly, setbacks did not cause the Allies to give up.

At the end of last month, I attended a NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels. What struck me most was the disparity between the mood inside the chamber and the mood outside it. On the sidelines, reporters opened their questions by asserting that the war had reached a “stalemate” and that “war fatigue” would cripple support, before wondering why Ukraine wouldn’t offer to trade territory for peace. Yet such defeatist narratives were absent in the official discussions, with ministers making a firm commitment to additional military aid and sustained support.

However prevalent a false narrative of attrition becomes, we should not allow it to set policymaking and our shared strategy on a disastrous course. Nor should we be duped into believing that Moscow is ready for a fair negotiated solution. Opting to accept Putin’s territorial demands and reward his aggression would be an admission of failure, which would be costly for Ukraine, for the United States and its allies, and for the entire global security architecture. Staying the course is a difficult task. But we know how to win, and we will.

There Is a Path to Victory in Ukraine

The Delusions and Dangers of Defeatist Voices in the West

By Dmytro Kuleba

December 14, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Dmytro Kuleba · December 14, 2023

It was almost two years ago that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As another winter of war arrives, voices skeptical of the country’s prospects are growing louder—not in diplomatic meetings or military planning sessions, but rather in news reports and in expert commentary. Most do not openly argue that Ukraine should simply give up its fight, but the pessimism, buttressed by supposedly pragmatic arguments, carries clear strategic implications that are both dangerous and wrong.

These skeptics suggest that the current situation on the battlefield will not change and that, given Russia’s vastly greater resources, the Ukrainians will be unable to retake more of their territory. They argue that international support for Ukraine is eroding and will plummet sharply in the coming months. They invoke “war fatigue” and the supposedly bleak prospects of our forces.

The skeptics are correct that our recent counteroffensive did not achieve the lightning-fast liberation of occupied land, as the Ukrainian military managed in the fall of 2022 in the Kharkiv region and the city of Kherson. Observers, including some in Ukraine, anticipated similar results over the past several months, and when immediate success did not materialize, many succumbed to doom and gloom. But pessimism is unwarranted, and it would be a mistake to let defeatism shape our policy decisions going forward. Instead, policymakers in Washington and other capitals should keep the big picture in mind and stay on track. A Ukrainian victory will require strategic endurance and vision—as with our recent counteroffensive, the liberation of every square mile of territory requires enormous sacrifice by our soldiers—but there is no question that victory is attainable.

Over nearly two years of brutal war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has upped the ante to the point that half-solutions are impossible. Any outcome besides a clear defeat of Russia in Ukraine would have troubling implications, and not just for my country—it would cause a global disarray that would ultimately threaten the United States and its allies, as well. Authoritarian leaders and aggressors around the world are keeping a close watch on the results of Putin’s military adventure. His success, even if partial, would inspire them to follow in his footsteps. His defeat will make clear the folly of trying.

STAGES OF VICTORY

Wars of this scale are fought in stages. Some of those stages may be more successful than others. What matters is the end result. In Ukraine, that means both fully restoring our territorial integrity and bringing those responsible for international crimes to justice—goals that are both clear and feasible. Meeting those objectives would ensure not only a just and lasting peace in Ukraine but also that other malicious forces around the world are not left with the impression that mimicking Putin will ultimately pay off.

The current phase of the war is not easy for Ukraine or for our partners. Everyone wants quick, Hollywood-style breakthroughs on the battlefield that will bring a quick collapse of Russia’s occupation. Although our objectives will not be reached overnight, continued international support for Ukraine will, over time, ensure that local counteroffensives achieve tangible results on the frontlines, gradually destroying Russian forces and thwarting Putin’s plans for a protracted war.

Some skeptics counter that although such goals are just, they simply aren’t achievable. In fact, our objectives will remain militarily feasible as long as three factors are in place: adequate military aid, including jets, drones, air defense, artillery rounds, and long-range capabilities that allow us to strike deep behind enemy lines; the rapid development of industrial capacity in the United States and Europe as well as in Ukraine, both to cover Ukraine’s military needs and to replenish U.S. and European defense stocks; and a principled and realistic approach to the prospect of negotiations with Russia.

With these elements in place, our effort will bring marked progress on the frontlines. Yet that requires not veering off course and concluding that the fight is hopeless simply because one stage has fallen short of some observers’ expectations. Even with significant challenges, Ukraine has achieved notable results in recent months. We won the battle for the Black Sea and thereby restored a steady flow of maritime exports, benefiting both our economy and global food security. We’ve made gains on the southern front, recently securing a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River. And elsewhere, we have held off enormous Russian assaults and inflicted major losses on Russian forces, including by thwarting their attempts on Avdiivka and Kupiansk. Despite their gargantuan effort, Russian troops failed to secure any gains on the ground.

Indeed, over the last year and a half, the Ukrainian military has proved its ability to surprise skeptics. Against all odds, Ukrainian forces have liberated more than half the territory taken by Russia since February 2022. This did not happen with a single blow. After the liberation of Ukraine’s northeast in the first months of the war, we lost some ground in the east before regaining momentum—a sequence that demonstrates why drawing broad conclusions based on one stage of fighting is misleading. If the war were only about numbers, we would have already lost. Russia may try to outnumber us, but the right strategy, advanced planning, and adequate support will allow us to effectively strike back.

THE FALLACY OF NEGOTIATIONS

Some analysts believe that freezing the conflict by establishing a cease-fire is a realistic option at the moment. Proponents of such a scenario argue that it would lower Ukrainian casualties and allow Ukraine and its partners to focus on economic recovery and rebuilding, integration into the European Union and NATO, and the long-term development of our defense capabilities.

The problem is not just that a cease-fire now would reward Russian aggression. Instead of ending the war, a cease-fire would simply pause the fighting until Russia is ready to make another push inland. In the meantime, it would allow Russian occupying troops to reinforce their positions with concrete and minefields, making it nearly impossible to drive them away in the future and condemning millions of Ukrainians to decades of repression under occupation. Russia’s 2024 budget for the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, amounting to 3.2 trillion Russian rubles (around $35 billion), is clear evidence of Moscow’s plan to dig in for the long haul and suppress resistance to Russian occupation authorities.

Moreover, whatever the arguments that such a scenario would be less costly for Ukraine and its partners, the reality is that such a negotiated cease-fire is not even on the table. Between 2014 and 2022, we endured approximately 200 rounds of negotiations with Russia in various formats, as well as 20 attempts to establish a cease-fire in the smaller war that followed Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and occupation of Ukraine’s east. Our partners pressed Moscow to be constructive, and when they ran into the Kremlin’s diplomatic wall, they insisted that Ukraine had to take the “first step,” if only to demonstrate that Russia was the problem. Following this flawed logic, Ukraine made some painful concessions. Where did it lead? To Russia's full-scale attack on February 24, 2022. Declaring yet again that Ukraine must take the first step is both immoral and naive.

If the frontline were frozen now, there is no reason to believe that Russia would not use such a respite to plan a more brutal attack in a few years, potentially involving not only Ukraine but also neighboring countries and even NATO members. Those who believe Russia will not attack a NATO country after celebrating success in Ukraine should recall how unimaginable a large-scale invasion of Ukraine seemed just two years ago.

SUPPORTING UKRAINE IS NOT CHARITY

Skeptics also argue that supporting Ukraine’s fight for freedom is too expensive and cannot be sustained indefinitely. We in Ukraine are fully aware of the amounts of assistance that we have received from the United States, European countries, and other allies, and we are immensely grateful to the governments, legislators, and individuals who have extended a helping hand to our country at war. We manage the support in the most transparent and accountable way: U.S. inspectors of military aid to Ukraine have found no evidence of significant waste, fraud, or abuse.

This support is not, and never has been, charity. Every dollar invested in Ukraine’s defense returns clear security dividends for its supporters. It has enabled Ukraine to successfully rebuff Russian aggression and avert a disastrous escalation in Europe. And Ukraine has done all this with American assistance totaling roughly three percent of the annual U.S. defense budget. What is more, most of this money has in fact been spent in the United States, funding the U.S. defense industry, supporting the development of cutting-edge technology, and creating American jobs—a reason that some local business leaders in the United States have publicly opposed withholding or cutting military aid to Ukraine.

Moreover, while the United States is Ukraine’s top defense partner—and Washington’s leadership in rallying support for Ukraine has been exemplary and essential—the United States has hardly borne the burden alone. As NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, recently noted, other NATO members, including European countries and Canada, account for more than half of Ukraine’s military aid. A number of countries have provided more support as a percentage of GDP than the United States has: the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom. Germany's assistance continues to grow, making it Ukraine's largest European supporter in absolute terms.

Every dollar invested in Ukraine’s defense returns clear security dividends for its supporters.

Attempts by some skeptics to brand Ukraine’s fight for freedom as just another futile “forever war” ignore these facts. Ukraine has never asked for American boots on the ground. The deal is fair: our partners provide us with what we need to win, and we do the rest of the job ourselves, defending not only our borders but also the borders of global democracy.

The United States has spent decades, and hundreds of billions of dollars, building and protecting an international order that could sustain and protect democracy and market economies, thus ensuring security and prosperity for Americans. It would be foolish to give up on that investment now. If democracy is allowed to fall in Ukraine, adversaries of the United States will perceive weakness and understand that aggression pays. The price tag for defending U.S. national security against such threats would be many times higher than the one for supporting Ukraine and could spark decades of global turbulence with an uncertain outcome.

Scholars and analysts often warn of a World War III involving nuclear conflict between great powers. But they may overlook the risk of a world of smaller hot wars between states, with bigger powers feeling empowered to take advantage of their smaller neighbors—World Wars I, plural, rather than World War III. Without a common commitment to Ukrainian victory, Russian aggression could in hindsight mark the onset of such a world.

LISTEN TO UKRAINIANS

No country in the world desires peace more than Ukraine. It is not our side that wants this war to drag on indefinitely—Putin does. (We have a clear vision of the path to peace, as laid out in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ten-point Peace Formula.) And it is Ukraine that is paying the greatest price for this war. We are losing some of our best men and women every day. There is hardly a Ukrainian family that has not directly felt the pain of war. Our warriors have in many cases been serving for more than 20 months, stuck in muddy or icy trenches under daily Russian bombardment, with no return date in sight; the toll on civilians, whether enduring brutal airstrikes or occupation, keeps growing, and the horror of Ukrainian children being stolen and then “adopted” by Russian families for “re-education” continues to haunt us all.

Yet even with our suffering, weariness, and struggles, Ukrainians are not willing to give up, to opt for “peace” at any price. Eighty percent of Ukrainians oppose making territorial concessions to Russia, according to a recent survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. Another poll found that 53 percent of Ukrainians were prepared to endure years of wartime hardship for the sake of a Ukrainian victory. Ukrainians would not be ready to give up even in the event of a significant decrease in foreign military aid: polling in November by the New Europe Center showed that only eight percent of Ukrainians think that such a reduction should push us into negotiations with Russia. (Thirty-five percent said that a Russian willingness to withdraw troops from Ukraine would be the necessary condition for starting talks, and 33 percent said that under no conditions should talks begin at all.)

Western analysts who urge Ukraine to accept a hasty cease-fire on unfavorable terms neglect such views. For years, policymakers and experts in Europe and the United States failed to listen to Ukrainian warnings that both diplomacy and business as usual with Russia were no longer possible. It took a large-scale invasion and enormous destruction and suffering for them to recognize that the Ukrainian warnings were right. They should not fall into the same trap again.

ALLIES AT WAR

In the summer of 1944, in the weeks after the World War II Allies’ D-Day landing, the headlines in allied capitals were often pessimistic: “Allied Pace Slows,” “Delays in Normandy: Overcaution of Allies and Bad Weather Seen as Factors Upsetting Schedule,” “Terrain Slows Tanks, U.S. Officer Explains.” Even after Allied success in Normandy, the massive Operation Market Garden in the German-occupied Netherlands in September 1944 proved challenging. It had been expected to bring the war to a close but instead yielded limited successes and massive Allied losses. Yet pessimistic headlines and disappointing, even costly, setbacks did not cause the Allies to give up.

At the end of last month, I attended a NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels. What struck me most was the disparity between the mood inside the chamber and the mood outside it. On the sidelines, reporters opened their questions by asserting that the war had reached a “stalemate” and that “war fatigue” would cripple support, before wondering why Ukraine wouldn’t offer to trade territory for peace. Yet such defeatist narratives were absent in the official discussions, with ministers making a firm commitment to additional military aid and sustained support.

However prevalent a false narrative of attrition becomes, we should not allow it to set policymaking and our shared strategy on a disastrous course. Nor should we be duped into believing that Moscow is ready for a fair negotiated solution. Opting to accept Putin’s territorial demands and reward his aggression would be an admission of failure, which would be costly for Ukraine, for the United States and its allies, and for the entire global security architecture. Staying the course is a difficult task. But we know how to win, and we will.

DMYTRO KULEBA is Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs · by Dmytro Kuleba · December 14, 2023

14. America’s Ukraine Problem

Excerpts:

It is time for Washington, with or without its European allies, to begin pressing for an end to the war. That requires negotiation. The likely outcome, as Vance observed, would be Ukrainian concessions. The latter almost certainly would include some loss of territory and a form of committed military neutrality.

It is not Washington’s place to impose an agreement on Kiev, a process that undoubtedly would create enormous resentment. Rather, the U.S. and Europe should inform Zelensky of limits on Western aid and the consequent need to end the fighting. The allies should affirm to Moscow their willingness to accept Ukrainian neutrality, restore Russian funds, and reintegrate Russia as part of a reasonable settlement. After impeding peaceful negotiation at most every turn, such a process won’t be easy for the U.S., Europe, or the combatants. However, years more of conflict, in which Kiev suffers an increasing disadvantage, would be worse.

The Ukraine-Russia war is a tragedy, a crime committed by Russia, but only after the allies recklessly ignored Moscow’s oft-expressed security interests. Zelensky’s visit didn’t salvage Kiev’s fortunes, nor will Ukrainian threats against those who have spent nearly two years underwriting Ukraine’s military efforts. The allies need to turn from fueling conflict to promoting peace.

America’s Ukraine Problem

When your friends threaten you, they aren’t your friends.

The American Conservative · by Doug Bandow · December 14, 2023

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was back in Washington earlier this week begging for more money and guns. President Joe Biden offered his typical assurances of support, but otherwise, Zelensky’s reception was different than it has been in the past.

At the beginning, he was widely feted across the U.S. and Europe; politicians couldn’t wait to get their pictures taken shaking his hand. Fast forward through busted victory predictions, endless costly subsidies, bloody failed counterattacks, and mass Ukrainian casualties. Increasing burdens for the allies combined with diminishing prospects for Kiev have diminished support for Zelensky on both sides of the Atlantic. Backing Ukraine is no longer a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Instead, American and European officials are focusing more on their own peoples, and the importance of ending the conflict.

For instance, before Zelensky arrived the Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio was blunt: Kiev is going to have to negotiate and likely will lose territory. Accepting this outcome is in “America’s best interest,” he explained. Such sentiments still trigger wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments on a Biblical scale among Ukraine’s high-profile advocates. However, ever more members of the foreign policy establishment recognize that Vance is right, even if they still won’t publicly admit reality.

Washington’s influential Kiev lobby is running out of options. Plans to disable the Russian economy flopped. Hopes to oust Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, democratize Russia, and even break up the Russian Federation proved even more fantastic. Demands that China abandon its partner were ignored. Pursuit of global backing against Moscow crashed and burned amid the West’s many hypocrisies, including support for Israel’s oppressive occupation and indifference to Gaza’s mass civilian casualties.

Hysterical warnings that a victorious Russia would next conquer Europe and perhaps the rest of the known world, failed to rouse the public, belied by Moscow’s difficulty in defeating Ukraine. Bizarre attempts to sell military aid to Kiev as a jobs-creation program for Americans failed miserably. After all, almost any expenditure on anything else in the US would provide a bigger economic boost than sending bombs to Europe.

Now Ukrainians are warning that if Americans don’t agree to write checks to and risk soldiers’ lives for Kiev, Ukrainians won’t like us. They might turn against us. And who knows what might happen then. For instance, Denys Karlovskyi of the Royal United Services Institute warned:

A seeming failure of the Western allies to shield Ukraine from a second butcherous war is likely to make Ukraine’s population feel resentful and expended for the sake of ‘great powers’, just as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum is perceived by Ukrainians today. The task for NATO policymakers is to avoid making post-war Ukraine’s public sentiments grow anti-Western or, worse, isolationist. They must build a mutually beneficial security cooperation framework with Ukraine’s government and maintain current levels of Ukrainian public support for NATO and the E.U.

Although insulting, this is a truly wimpy threat. Ukrainians might grow “isolationist”? Does that mean they would stop asking for financial aid, military support, and security guarantees? That sounds a lot like Ukraine’s position before the allies backed the 2014 street putsch against the Yanukovych government. Ukrainians didn’t ask for anything special from Washington. The country looked east and west economically, held elections that flipped east and west, and avoided military commitments east and west. Corruption was rife and politics were ruthless, but, by refusing to commit themselves to either America or Russia, Ukrainians lived peacefully in a united country. That seems almost utopian compared to today.

Peace was good for the allies as well. The reason NATO never acted on the ill-considered 2008 Bucharest promise of alliance membership is because no one believed Ukraine was worth fighting over: a position evident even as Russia invaded. Ukrainians continue to request an invitation to join the alliance, which the U.S. and Europeans continue to withhold. The European Leadership Network recently explored Ukraine’s desire—or, more accurately, demand—for firm security commitments from the U.S. and Europe. NATO membership was preferred, but other options were considered. However, all would be dangerous for the West. For instance, “the Japan and South Korea models” or “the Israel model,” if rigorously implemented, would impose potentially substantial military burdens on the U.S.

Karlovskyi also posited an “anti-Western” Ukraine. That would be an ironic response after receiving substantial financial and military support against Moscow. However, while hostility toward the West would be unfortunate, the possibility is no reason for the allies to offer a defense commitment. Surely a defeated Kiev is unlikely to partner with Russia and attack the rest of Europe. Resentful Ukrainians could turn away economically. However, even though greater integration with Russia would be possible, the violent antagonisms unleashed by years of brutal warfare would persist. Europe would remain the most likely source of aid, investment, and trade for Ukraine. Indeed, Kiev is likely to be as dependent on the West after the conflict ends as during combat, whatever Ukrainians think about allied policy.

Yet Zelensky explicitly threatened Europe with ill consequences should it reduce support for his government. Ukrainian refugees there have so far “behaved well,” he allowed. Cutting assistance, however, could “drive these people into a corner.” In the Economist’s paraphrase, he warned that stopping the gravy train “would create risks for the West in its own backyard. There is no way of predicting how the millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries would react to their country being abandoned.”

Is he suggesting that those dependent on Europe for refuge—meaning safety and support—would endanger their status by, say, rioting across the continent? There would likely be little tolerance for such behavior. After all, diminishing government assistance for Ukraine reflects falling popular support for Ukraine. Already countries like Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia are putting the economic welfare of their own citizens before that of Ukrainians. Populism is again on the rise across Europe, and immigration is perhaps the top issue. The welcome mat for Ukrainian refugees could be swiftly removed.

Zelensky’s bizarre threat against those whose assistance he is seeking is yet another reason for the U.S. and its allies to base Ukraine policy on their own interests. When your friends threaten you, they aren’t your friends.

Nor is this the allies’ first such wake-up call. Last year, Zelensky attempted to lie NATO into war with Russia based on a Ukrainian missile strike on Poland. The American and Polish governments knew that the missile came from Ukraine. So, assuredly, did Zelensky. His desire to drag the U.S. into the conflict was predictable, even understandable, but highlighted the need to apply Ronald Reagan’s famed “trust but verify” dictum against Kiev as well as Moscow.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Doug Bandow

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

The American Conservative · by Doug Bandow · December 14, 2023

15. How the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza Is Changing Arab Views

Graphics at the link: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/how-israel-hamas-war-gaza-changing-arab-views

Excerpts:

As the bombardment of Gaza continues, this risk will only grow. In fact, even after the fighting ends, the region may remain more precarious. A new generation has now seen the horrors of the occupation on television and on social media, including tragic images of dead bodies and anguished families that they are unlikely to forget. Some percentage of them may choose to fund, join, or otherwise help armed groups fighting against Israel’s existence. The country’s politicians may think this war will make them safer, but Israel’s security will not increase because of the conflict.

The simple fact is that the Palestinian cause remains vitally important to the Arab world, and Israel cannot hope to simply defeat it with bombs. This issue has not lost its salience to a new generation. Despite what many Western (and some Arab) capitals may have assumed, Israel will not be able to make peace with its neighbors so long as the Palestinians do not have a state. In just 20 days, Tunisians’ views on the world shifted in ways that rarely happen even over the course of a few years. There is no other issue across the Arab world to which people feel so individually and emotionally connected.

This intensity is particularly striking given Tunisia’s domestic challenges. The state now has a GDP per capita that is lower than it was before the country’s 2010 revolution. And yet Tunisians still wanted less economic engagement with the United States. According to our data, by October 27, Tunisians preferred international engagement on the Palestinian cause over economic development by an enormous margin—59 percent to four percent.

If Israel and the United States seek genuine peace with the Arab world—rather than a cold peace with the repressive regimes that rule most of it—they must change their policies. They need to find a way to end the ongoing struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And that means all these groups must diligently work toward a fair and dignified future for the Palestinian people: specifically, a two-state solution. It is the only way to change the hearts and minds of neighboring populations and bring an end to the cycle of violence that has plagued the Middle East for the last century.

How the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza Is Changing Arab Views

Support Is Falling for America and the Two-State Solution—but Rising for Iran and Violent Resistance

By Michael Robbins, MaryClare Roche, Amaney A. Jamal, Salma Al-Shami, and Mark Tessler

December 14, 2023

Foreign Affairs · December 14, 2023

Since October 7, the latest onslaught between Hamas and Israel has claimed the lives of more than 15,000 Palestinians and over 1,200 Israelis. Scores more have been injured. The war has displaced more than 1.8 million Palestinians and left the fates of many of Israel’s people unknown; over 100 of those abducted in Israel remain hostages. Fighting has resulted in damage to 15 percent of the buildings in Gaza, including over 100 cultural landmarks and more than 45 percent of all housing units.

As many analysts have already declared, the high costs in Gaza have reverberated around the Arab world, reaffirming the salience and power of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in shaping regional politics. Yet it has been difficult to say exactly how much the attack has affected Arab attitudes—and in what particular ways.

Now, that is changing. In the weeks leading up to the attack and the three weeks that followed, our nonpartisan research firm, Arab Barometer, conducted a nationally representative survey in Tunisia in conjunction with our local partner, One to One for Research and Polling. By chance, about half the 2,406 interviews were completed in the three weeks before October 7, and the remaining half occurred in the three weeks after. As a result, a comparison of the results can show—with unusual precision—how the attack and subsequent Israeli military campaign have changed views among Arabs.

The findings are striking. U.S. President Joe Biden recently warned that Israel was losing global support over Gaza, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Since October 7, every country in the survey with positive or warming relations with Israel saw its favorability ratings decline among Tunisians. The United States saw the steepest drop, but Washington’s Middle East allies that have forged ties to Israel over the last few years also saw their approval numbers go down. States that have stayed neutral, meanwhile, experienced little shift. And the leadership of Iran, which is ardently opposed to Israel, saw its favorability figures rise. Three weeks after the attacks, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has approval ratings that matched or even exceeded those of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, and Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ.

Tunisia is but one country in the Middle East and North Africa, a region of vast differences, and this survey cannot tell experts everything about how people throughout the region think and feel. But Tunisia is about as close to a bellwether as one could imagine. In previous Arab Barometer surveys, Tunisians have had views similar to those found in most other Arab countries. The population is open to the West but is also open to other global powers, such as China and Russia. It is geographically removed from the immediate effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it has a history of direct involvement, including once housing the Palestine Liberation Organization. Analysts and officials can safely assume that people’s views elsewhere in the region have shifted in ways similar to the recent changes that have taken place in Tunisia.

Those shifts have been dramatic: rarely are changes of this magnitude seen in the course of a few weeks. But that does not indicate knee-jerk reactions on the part of Tunisians. If Tunisia’s people were changing their views simply because they supported Hamas’s actions, a major shift would have occurred within a day of the attack and then Tunisians’ opinions would have quickly stabilized. Instead, their opinions moved little-by-little on a daily basis over a three-week period, but significantly over the whole period of time. As a result, it is most likely that Tunisians’ views shifted not in response to Hamas’s attack but to the subsequent events, namely the increasing cost to civilians of Israel’s military operation in Gaza. Still, the war has certainly increased Tunisians’ support for Palestinian fighting. Compared with surveys taken before the October 7 attack, far more Tunisians today want the Palestinians to resolve their conflict with Israel via force rather than with a peaceful settlement.

Public opinion matters even in nondemocracies, where leaders must worry about protests, and these shifting views will reshape politics in the Arab world—as well as around the globe. The United States and its regional allies will have great difficulty expanding the Abraham Accords, which normalized ties between several Arab states and Israel. Washington may also lose the advantage in its contest with a rising China and a resurgent Russia. The United States could even find that many long-standing allies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates become less friendly toward the United States and more receptive toward its rivals as they seek to stave off their own regional declines. Since the attack, for example, both countries have welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin for his first visit to the region since the invasion of Ukraine.

The growing support for armed resistance could also have dangerous consequences. The war against Hamas has not yet led to a wider conflict, but Israel has had to fend off strikes from Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Middle East and North Africa overall are prone to instability. It is not hard to imagine how the current invasion could spiral or open the door to a future conflict. To stabilize the region, Israel and its allies must, therefore, find a way to end this war and then pivot, quickly, to peacefully resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ROCK BOTTOM

Arab Barometer, our academic research project, was in the process of conducting a wide-ranging issues survey with a random sample of Tunisia’s residents when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. We decided to use this timing to investigate how this event and the war that followed affected public opinion. Since we did not expect significant changes in the views of Tunisians prior to October 7, we first took the average opinion for the initial three weeks of fieldwork. We then looked at how public opinion changed in the weeks that followed. Since the sample size is relatively small on each given day of our post–October 7 analysis, we made our estimates of how people felt at any given time using three-day moving averages of public opinion. This means that each data point represents an estimate on the day of the survey and the two days prior. (Although the last day of fielding was November 4, October 27 was the last day enough daily interviews were collected to provide sufficient data for meaningful analysis.)

After plotting this moving average, we calculated a best-fit line for interviews conducted before and after October 7 to understand what changes, if any, resulted for each question. This line helped show how Tunisians’ views shifted in real time. Our ultimate estimates for the change in public opinion, however, focused on two numbers. The first is the average view of Tunisians prior to October 7. The second is the level of support based on the average from the best-fit line for October 27.

There were many shifts. Yet the largest had to do with perceptions of the United States. In the 1,146 interviews carried out before the October 7 attack, 40 percent of Tunisians had a positive or somewhat positive view of the United States, compared with 56 percent who had an unfavorable opinion. But after the war in Gaza began, that quickly changed. By the end of our fieldwork, only ten percent of Tunisians had a positive view of the United States. Eighty-seven percent, by contrast, had an unfavorable impression. Before October 7, 56 percent of Tunisians wanted closer economic relations with the United States. Three weeks later, that number had fallen to 34 percent. Biden was never particularly popular in Tunisia, with an approval rating of 29 percent before October 7. But after Israel began its campaign—and Biden declared there were “no conditions” on U.S. support—his favorability rating fell to just six points.

Correlation, of course, does not mean causation. But in this case, it is hard to see an alternative explanation, particularly given the steady, daily shift in Tunisian opinion. The war was by far the biggest news event that took place during the survey, and other responses made it clear that Tunisians were thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as they evaluated the United States. When Tunisians were asked which U.S. policies are most important to them in the Middle East and North Africa, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rose dramatically after October 7—from 24 percent to 59 percent. By comparison, the number of Tunisians who answered “economic development” fell from 20 percent to four percent.

So far, worsening opinions about the United States have not directly translated into gains for China and Russia, both of which have stayed neutral in the war. Prior to the Hamas attack, 70 percent of Tunisians had a positive view of China; by October 27, that figure had increased by a modest five points. The number of people who wanted warmer economic relations with China dipped from 80 percent to 78 percent, within the margin of error. Before the attack, 56 percent of Tunisians held a favorable view of Russia compared with 53 percent at the end of our research. The share of people who wanted closer economic ties to Moscow went from 72 percent to 75 percent.

But there are signs that China, at least, could win greater support at the expense of the United States. When asked before October 7 whether Beijing or Washington had better policies toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a third of Tunisians preferred China’s policies to the United States’. By the end of our polling, this figure had risen to 50 percent. (The share of Tunisians preferring U.S. policy went from 13 percent to 14 percent.) When asked whether China or the United States had better policies for maintaining regional security, the results were similar. Before October 7, the number of people who preferred Chinese policy rose from 31 percent to 50 percent. The percentage of Tunisians who preferred U.S. policy fell from 19 percent to 12 percent.

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

Great powers are not the only states that Tunisians now view differently. The population’s attitude toward a number of regional powers also shifted after October 7. Much like shifts in opinion toward Washington, the changes largely track with how these states treat Israel.

Consider, for example, Saudi Arabia. In the period leading up to the attack, there was widespread speculation that Riyadh would normalize relations with Israel. As anger at Israel built among Tunisians in the weeks following October 7, their views of Saudi Arabia also darkened—with the country’s approval rating dropping from 73 percent to 59 percent. Similarly, the percentage of Tunisians who wanted closer economic relations with Saudi Arabia fell from an average of 71 percent to 61 percent. MBS’s approval rating declined from 55 percent before the attack to 40 percent by October 27. These changes are especially notable given that Tunisian President Kais Saied, who enjoys high approval ratings at home, has very close links with MBS.

The questionnaire did not include direct queries about the United Arab Emirates, which normalized ties with Israel in August 2020. But it did ask about MBZ’s foreign policies, and the results proved very similar to those for MBS. Before the October 7 attack, MBZ’s policies were seen favorably by 49 percent of Tunisians. By the end of the fieldwork, that figure had dropped to a third.

Views of Turkey, by contrast, were largely unchanged. Ankara has long sought to highlight and empathize with the plight of the Palestinians, albeit from the sidelines, and 68 percent of Tunisians had a positive view of Turkey both before and after the attack. Views of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s foreign policy declined from 54 percent to 47 percent, but the number of people who wanted a closer economic relationship with the country increased, going from 57 percent to 64 percent.

Still, the war in Gaza did not seem to improve the views of Turkey among Tunisians, perhaps because its condemnation of Israel was relatively constrained. But one country’s leadership did seem to benefit: that of Iran. The Islamic Republic is ardently opposed to Israel’s existence, and it cheered on Hamas’s attack. In an appeal that surely resonated with Arab public opinion, on October 17, Khamenei called for an end to the bombing of Gaza and labeled Israel’s actions a “genocide.” Although the survey did not include views toward Iran itself, it did ask about the foreign policies of Khamenei, and approval clearly went up. Prior to the attack, just 29 percent of Tunisians held a favorable view of his foreign policies. At the end of our fieldwork, this figure had risen to 41 percent. The jump in support was most notable in the days following Khamenei’s October 17 statement.

And then there is Israel itself. Even before the attack, Tunisians had an extremely unfavorable view of Israel—just five percent of people rated the country positively. As a result, the country’s decline to effectively zero percent was not much of a fall at all. But opinions about normalization did shift. Normalizing ties with Israel was never popular, yet after the attack, what little support there was had completely dissipated. On October 7, 12 percent of people supported normalization. By October 27, that figure hit just one percent.

Views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also changed in important ways. Before October 7, when asked about their preferred means of solving the conflict, 66 percent of Tunisians favored a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, whereas 18 percent favored an alternative diplomatic path, such as a single state with equal rights for all or a confederation. Just six percent of Tunisians chose “other,” the vast majority of whom proposed armed resistance to Israel’s occupation, possibly entailing the elimination of the state of Israel. But by the end of our fieldwork, only 50 percent of Tunisians supported the two-state solution. Those in favor of a one-state solution or a confederation fell by seven points combined. The biggest gain was the “other” category, which increased by 30 points to 36 percent. Once again, the vast majority of these Tunisians wanted continued, armed resistance.

BREAK THE CYCLE

Tunisia is geographically remote from Israel, and its population’s growing appetite for an armed resistance is unlikely to directly affect the war. But if other Arab states have had similar shifts in opinion, fighting on Israel’s borders could flare further. And in all likelihood, anger at Israel has grown even more in countries closer to the conflict or in those housing more Palestinian refugees, such as Jordan and Lebanon. The potential for greater violence is, therefore, serious. The Middle East and North Africa, after all, are plagued by more ongoing conflicts than any other part of the world.

As the bombardment of Gaza continues, this risk will only grow. In fact, even after the fighting ends, the region may remain more precarious. A new generation has now seen the horrors of the occupation on television and on social media, including tragic images of dead bodies and anguished families that they are unlikely to forget. Some percentage of them may choose to fund, join, or otherwise help armed groups fighting against Israel’s existence. The country’s politicians may think this war will make them safer, but Israel’s security will not increase because of the conflict.

The simple fact is that the Palestinian cause remains vitally important to the Arab world, and Israel cannot hope to simply defeat it with bombs. This issue has not lost its salience to a new generation. Despite what many Western (and some Arab) capitals may have assumed, Israel will not be able to make peace with its neighbors so long as the Palestinians do not have a state. In just 20 days, Tunisians’ views on the world shifted in ways that rarely happen even over the course of a few years. There is no other issue across the Arab world to which people feel so individually and emotionally connected.

This intensity is particularly striking given Tunisia’s domestic challenges. The state now has a GDP per capita that is lower than it was before the country’s 2010 revolution. And yet Tunisians still wanted less economic engagement with the United States. According to our data, by October 27, Tunisians preferred international engagement on the Palestinian cause over economic development by an enormous margin—59 percent to four percent.

If Israel and the United States seek genuine peace with the Arab world—rather than a cold peace with the repressive regimes that rule most of it—they must change their policies. They need to find a way to end the ongoing struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And that means all these groups must diligently work toward a fair and dignified future for the Palestinian people: specifically, a two-state solution. It is the only way to change the hearts and minds of neighboring populations and bring an end to the cycle of violence that has plagued the Middle East for the last century.

MICHAEL ROBBINS is Director and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer.
MARYCLARE ROCHE is Director of Technology and Innovation at Arab Barometer.
AMANEY A. JAMAL is Co-Founder and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer, Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.
SALMA AL-SHAMI Salma Al-Shami is Director of Research at Arab Barometer.
MARK TESSLER is Co-Founder and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer and the Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

Foreign Affairs · December 14, 2023

16. Civil-Military Relations in Multinational Organizations

Excerpts:

This piece is only a small corner of the author’s ongoing research in applying a civil-military lens to NATO’s history. It is as readily applicable to strategy development in the early Cold War as it is to studying operational control during the 2011 Libya intervention. Beyond NATO, such an approach would be useful in exploring the strategies and operations of the UN, EU, AU, or any other structured multinational organization with both civilian and military components. Each of these organizations sits on a trove of underutilized primary sources, sources that are vital to understanding their internal dynamics and how they shaped the course and outcome of any number of conflicts.

Beyond the wider application of the analytical frame, there remains the urgency in collecting as much data as possible on these organizations as time goes on. As already noted, a digital dark age is coming, if it is not already here, that will stymy research into multinational organizations for years. Oral history projects with adequate attention (and funding) will be vital to circumvent the byzantine and outdated declassification standards of these large organizations. Without such structured collection, there will not be enough evidence to apply a civil-military lens to in the first place.

Civil-Military Relations in Multinational Organizations

Davis Ellison December 13, 2023

thestrategybridge.org · December 13, 2023

“If I must make war, I prefer it to be against a coalition.”

–Napoleon[1]

Two months after the collapse of Kabul, NATO published a fact sheet on lessons learned from its experiences in Afghanistan that proclaimed, “NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan demonstrates the immense strength of Allies working in pursuit of a common goal.”[2] This statement seems to imply that NATO somehow succeeded in Afghanistan by holding itself together politically. This statement is indicative not just of how coalitions of states conduct war, but more importantly by how multinational organizations do so.

Much of the coalition warfare seen in the past thirty years has not been conducted by coalitions per se, but rather by organizations such as NATO, the UN, and the European and African Unions. While much has been written on this type of warfare from a state-centric, international perspective, little has actually been written from an organizational, multinational perspective. This is especially the case of NATO, which is almost universally dominated by descriptions of U.S.-European bilateral relationships. These organizations, however, have their own internal dynamics that have significant impact on the outcomes of operations. Whether NATO in Afghanistan or the UN in Rwanda, these dynamics center primarily on the relationships between civilian and military authorities.

How can civil-military relations be used as a lens for us to understand the outcomes of wars in which multinational organizations are involved? This piece uses civil-military relations as a guide (rather than a strict framework) and the specific case of NATO to show the benefit of applying this approach. It shows, using the example of NATO in Afghanistan, how civil-military dynamics within the organization itself structured the campaign and impacted the alliance’s strategy and operations.

Reading Multinational Civil-Military Relations

There is a gap in scholarship on the relationships between the civilian and military authorities within multinational organizations. Few studies on civil-military relations theory consider NATO, and few studies of NATO explicitly explore its civil-military dynamics. This lacuna has created an ahistorical impression that such relationships either do not really exist, or that they are far less consequential than the bilateral relationships that exist within organizations.

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Civil-military theorists since the middle of the twentieth-century have largely ignored NATO. Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz make a few references in their foundational studies, while more recent studies by Peter Feaver or Risa Brooks make no substantive reference at all.[3] Indeed, the most recent Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations contains no substantive treatment of NATO, the UN, or any other organization. This despite their near constant presence in every conflict since the end of the Cold War. An excellent, though dated, exception to this is Canadian author Douglas Bland’s theoretical work and historical study of the NATO Military Committee.[4]

Conversely, much of the literature on NATO is heavily focused on state-centric sources that essentially reduce the history of the alliance to a presidential history of the United States. Some of this can be ascribed to the largely unquestioned presumption that what happens in Washington is what happens in NATO. Both in practice and in the literature this is untrue. Additionally, there is a dearth of sources on NATO’s internal dynamics. The NATO Archives are far behind most national archives in terms of disclosures. The historical office of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) has not made any documents available past 1958. From personal research experience, however, this is only an excuse, as numerous national declassified and released sources provide detailed and lengthy considerations on NATO’s internal work, though that is itself often only until the mid-1990s. Again, exceptions to this include Ryan Hendrickson’s 2006 book on the role of the NATO Secretary General, which explicitly includes civil-military relations in its analytical frame.[5] The work, however, is outdated and some cases are now contradicted by more recently available archival sources.

In both the theoretical and empirical literature, there is also a significant U.S.-centrism. Hew Strachan lamented this in his own considerations on civil-military relations, noting how the near-ubiquitous Huntingtonian constitutional framework of civil-military relations is predicated on the unique situation of the United States in the early- to mid-1950s. Timothy Andrews Sayle’s 2019 book on NATO, while comprehensive in its coverage of the Cold War, is almost exclusively focused on Anglo- and Franco-American relations (with some added German focus as well).[6] While certainly consequential, this largely misses the role of the integrated, multinational staffs that work(ed) on a permanent basis both in Europe and North America. Focusing on the disputes between Charles de Gaulle and Lyndon Baines Johnson or Tony Blair and George W. Bush hardly scratches the surface of NATO.

Fully comprehending the civil-military relations of multilateral organizations requires accessing and understanding a broader array of primary sources. Importantly, this involves comparative and cross-archival research between national and international sources. For example, one internal NATO study on organization received only short mention in U.S. and NATO documents, but has a fully detailed folio available within the UK National Archives at Kew. Such is also seemingly the case for the UN and other organizations. This also puts a particular premium on conducting new interviews with officials from these organizations, an urgent effort by scholars of NATO and other organizations as archival sources will begin to wear thin in the coming decades. Indeed, there is a risk of a digital dark age in studying these organizations as the avalanche of digital evidence is either automatically destroyed or held behind classification barriers in perpetuity.[7]

Applying the New Prism: The Case of NATO in Afghanistan

A particularly apt case for the application of the civil-military lens is the NATO missions in Afghanistan. Why did NATO fail in Afghanistan? Most look to failings in Washington or London, or maybe to the failures of interagency processes inside the country itself. Few have looked to NATO itself, the organization that did in practice command a significant portion of the Afghan efforts, particularly training. An excellent example of some coverage on this front has been the Danish scholar Sten Rynning’s work on NATO’s organizational learning during and after the war.[8] There is room for more.

Applying the lens of NATO’s civil-military relations lends a new angle on understanding the alliance’s failure to defeat the Taliban. Both the Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” release, newly conducted interviews by this author, and underutilized secondary literature paint a picture of an alliance that overly deferred to the optimistic (and sometimes untruthful) military authorities in Kabul and elsewhere, both on strategy development and in operational-level information related to Afghan troop readiness.

In the development of NATO strategy, the civil-military divide is especially clear. NATO largely deferred to Washington in the strategic direction of the Afghan campaigns, though on at least one notable occasion there was an attempt by NATO civilian staff in Brussels to assert some control over the alliance mission. The development of the Comprehensive, Strategic Political-Military Plan (CSPMP), led by the NATO International Staff between 2007 and 2008, aimed to provide a comprehensive set of multinational objectives around which the NATO staff in Kabul could cohere their efforts. As it was ultimately a product agreed upon by all of the NATO countries, it was bureaucratically quite the achievement in Brussels.[9]

General Stanley McChrystal in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2009. (Omar Sobhani/Reuters)

There was one small issue. When the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander at the time, General Stanley McChrystal, received the CPMSP, he and his staff considered it useless and did not take it into account when setting strategy for the ISAF mission. Theo Farrell’s work on the war states frankly: “McChrystal’s team found the NATO strategic plan to be pretty useless as a source of guidance for their redrafting of the ISAF campaign plan.”[10] The seeming casualness with which a military commander in the field dismissed the political strategy agreed by his civilian superiors would, in most national contexts, likely lead to accusations of insubordination or an inappropriate flexing of military power. This was not the case in NATO.

Would McChrystal or his followers embracing the CSPMP made any significant difference in the outcome in Afghanistan? It is unlikely. The CSPMP is only one indicative episode in which the relationship between Kabul and Brussels was deeply and structurally flawed and lacked effective civilian oversight. It also highlights a reluctance for field commanders to engage with senior civilians who are not in theater on matters of strategy. There is little evidence, however, that the military commands in Kabul would have found a capable partner in Brussels. As the next example shows in clear form, the military effort vastly outweighed the civilian in terms of staff sizes and authorities.

On Afghan readiness reporting, the situation was little better than in the formulation of strategy. Primary source evidence shows a clear and lengthy pattern of overly-optimistic and occasionally outright false reporting to Brussels from the military missions in Kabul. For a number of reasons, be it careerism or simply naivete, the ISAF and Resolute Support Mission (RSM) commands passed flawed or false information up the chain of command from Kabul to Joint Force Command-Brunssum, to SHAPE, which would then be agreed by the Military Committee, which would only then be presented to the civilian authorities in the North Atlantic Council and the supporting International Staff. By this stage, the reporting had been massaged and pushed into an acceptable form by the military authorities of NATO, while it was received by a NATO Operations Division staff of often fewer than five staffers. In Kabul itself the NATO Special Civilian Representative for Afghanistan (SCR), notionally the civilian counterpart to the ISAF commander, played no role in overseeing the content of the periodic reports sent to Brussels. There was, in effect, no civilian control of the NATO ISAF and RSM missions.

This dynamic has since been confirmed by NATO’s former Assistant Secretary General for Operations John Manza, writing that “reports from the field were often overly optimistic and watered down as they climbed the chain of command.”[11] Official reports from the UK, the Netherlands, and from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction all confirm the same trend.[12] Past field research at ISAF headquarters also suggests the same.[13] What becomes abundantly clear from this evidence, and considered within a civil-military perspective, is that NATO officials were hugely deferential to military officers and did not adequately oversee the Afghan missions. This failure by NATO’s political leadership, both in Kabul and in Brussels, to adequately hold military reporting to account and oversee the development of the Afghan forces directly contributed to the collapse of Afghan forces in 2021.

A Call for More

This piece is only a small corner of the author’s ongoing research in applying a civil-military lens to NATO’s history. It is as readily applicable to strategy development in the early Cold War as it is to studying operational control during the 2011 Libya intervention. Beyond NATO, such an approach would be useful in exploring the strategies and operations of the UN, EU, AU, or any other structured multinational organization with both civilian and military components. Each of these organizations sits on a trove of underutilized primary sources, sources that are vital to understanding their internal dynamics and how they shaped the course and outcome of any number of conflicts.

Beyond the wider application of the analytical frame, there remains the urgency in collecting as much data as possible on these organizations as time goes on. As already noted, a digital dark age is coming, if it is not already here, that will stymy research into multinational organizations for years. Oral history projects with adequate attention (and funding) will be vital to circumvent the byzantine and outdated declassification standards of these large organizations. Without such structured collection, there will not be enough evidence to apply a civil-military lens to in the first place.

Davis Ellison is a PhD Candidate in the King’s College London Department of War Studies and a Strategic Analyst at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. His research is on civil-military relations within and between NATO’s institutions.

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Header Image: NATO Flags at North KIA, Kabul Afghanistan, 2017 (Tyrell Mayfield).

Notes:

[1] Ole R. Holsti, P. Terrence Hopmann, John D. Sullivan, Unity and Disintegration in International Alliances (New York, NY: Wiley, 1973), 22.

[2] “Foreign Ministers address lessons learned from NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan”, NATO, December 1 2021, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_189512.htm?selectedLocale=en.

[3] Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil–Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957), 357; Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 314–17; Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Risa Brooks, Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War, ed. Risa Brooks and and Daniel Maurer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

[4] Douglas L. Bland, The Military Committee of the North Atlantic Alliance: A Study of Structure and Strategy (New York: Praeger, 1990).

[5] Ryan C. Hendrickson, Diplomacy and War at NATO: The Secretary General and Military Action After the Cold War (St. Louis, MO: University of Missouri, 2006).

[6] Timothy Andrews Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

[7] Matthew Connelly, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets (New York: Pantheon Books, 2023), 347–75.

[8] Sten Rynning and Paal Sigurd Hilde, “Operationally Agile but Strategically Lacking: NATO’s Bruising Years in Afghanistan,” LSE Public Policy Review, May 2, 2022, 1–11; Sten Rynning, “Still Learning? NATO’s Afghan Lessons beyond the Ukraine Crisis,” in NATO’s Return to Europe: Engaging Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond, Edited by Rebecca R. Moore and Damon Coletta (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2017).

[9] Diego Ruiz Palmer, “NATO Review - NATO’s Engagement in Afghanistan, 2003-2021: A Planner’s Perspective,” NATO Review, June 20, 2023, https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2023/06/20/nato-s-engagement-in-afghanistan-2003-2021-a-planners-perspective/index.html.

[10] Theo Farrell, Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan 2001-2014 (London: Vintage, 2017), 284–85.

[11] John Manza, “I Wrote NATO’s Lessons from Afghanistan. Now I Wonder: What Have We Learned?,” Atlantic Council (blog), August 11, 2022, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/i-wrote-natos-lessons-from-afghanistan-now-i-wonder-what-have-we-learned/.

[12] “Missing in Action: UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan, First Report of Session 2022–23” (London: UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, May 17, 2022), https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/22344/documents/165210/default/; “Between Wish and Reality: Evaluation of the Dutch Contribution to Resolute Support” (The Hague, Netherlands: Ministry of Foreign Affairs Policy and Operations Evaluation Department, March 2023), https://english.iob-evaluatie.nl/publications/reports/2023/05/19/dutch-contribution-resolute-support; Krisanne Campos, “Lessons Learned Record of Interview - Unnamed NATO Official” (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, February 23, 2015), background_ll_01_xx_brussels_02232015, The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/.

[13] Farrell, Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan 2001-2014, 374.

thestrategybridge.org · December 13, 2023

17. From Boycotts to Selfies: Asia’s Myriad Perceptions of Japan

Excerpts;

Washington should appreciate that South Korea’s negative views, though critical to understanding regional dynamics, are not representative of the entirety of Asia. South Korea’s historical grievances with Japan are deeply rooted and complex, but they contrast with the generally positive or positive-trending perception of Japan in other areas, such as Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Policies and strategies involving Japan should not be established on a baseline of Seoul’s perspective. Currently, Washington appears to be prioritizing reconciliation between Tokyo and Seoul for this reason, with far less focus on supporting Japanese security initiatives in the rest of the region. This is likely the result of a decades-long relationship of trust between Washington and Seoul and vocal activism by Koreans and Korean-Americans dissatisfied with Japan’s attitude towards reconciliation. These views are real and important, but a one-size-fits-all approach will forgo the opportunity to forge more effective and nuanced regional partnerships.

Indeed, Washington’s understandable desire for Japan and South Korea to cooperate more on regional security may paradoxically benefit from a de-prioritization of that strained bilateral relationship. Promoting the common goods that Japan can provide to the region as a whole may ultimately prove a more effective focus. This approach would give space for Tokyo and Seoul to continue their slow and uneven process of mutual trust-building, while allowing the United States to emphasize more positive examples of Japanese regional leadership.

Finally, Japan’s experience shows that the United States should approach its role in the Indo-Pacific with a sense of humility. American policymakers should recognize that in many Asian countries the United States is seen not just as an external actor but as a participant in historical memory. This perception calls for a diplomatic strategy that is sensitive to the historical experiences and current sentiments of each nation. Humility in this context means acknowledging past negative American actions across the region, such as U.S. conduct during the Vietnam War or involvement in backing authoritarian regimes in the Philippines and Indonesia. Japan’s rebounding popularity in Southeast Asia suggests that respectful and empathetic long-term dialogue can yield results. Such an approach would enhance U.S. credibility and effectiveness in fostering cooperative security arrangements in a critical region.

From Boycotts to Selfies: Asia’s Myriad Perceptions of Japan - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Ryan Ashley · December 14, 2023

As an instructor on Indo-Pacific security, the most common question I receive from students, ranging from undergraduates to senior military officers, is: Why do some countries in Asia still deeply resent Japan, while others display a warm fondness towards Tokyo?

Layers of nationalism, politics, and historical memory make sweeping generalizations about “Asian” perceptions of Japan meaningless. In South Korea, vigorous youth-led campaigns to boycott Japanese goods underscore this enduring legacy of animosity and mistrust. In Taiwan, President Tsai Ing-wen faced mixed reactions for tweeting in Japanese during her 2020 reelection campaign, but is credited with gaining support from the island’s “pro-Japan” progressives by doing so. Meanwhile, in Thailand and the Philippines, I have observed young students casually snapping selfies with the Japanese “rising sun” flag while enjoying a cone of matcha ice cream or eating sushi.

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This dynamic is not just of interest to scholars of Asian foreign relations — perceptions towards Japan have a direct impact on regional security. With the United States championing Japan’s growing security capacity as part of its larger Indo-Pacific strategy, Washington should clearly understand the diversity of regional views towards Japan. Tokyo’s bolstered security posture has been met with profound skepticism in Seoul, complicating security cooperation in critical areas like the East and South China Sea. This strain in relations stands in contrast with Taiwan and Southeast Asia, which both welcome Japan’s new security presence with fewer reservations. Indeed, even countries in Southeast Asia that favor close economic and political ties with China, like Cambodia, are not communicating much skepticism towards an increased Japanese security presence in their region. Exploring these divergent and somewhat paradoxical views of Japan’s security policies today — as well as the history behind them — can help Washington to craft more nuanced and effective security policies for the Indo-Pacific.

Historical Memory

To understand the nuanced views of Japan in Asia, it is essential to delve into some of the region’s complex disagreements over “historical memory.” Indeed, in the United States, most perceptions of Japan’s history in Asia are shaped by Japanese actions in Northeast Asia, mainly the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria, and China. From its annexation of the island of Taiwan (then Formosa) in 1895 to the end of the war in Asia in 1945, the Empire of Japan left a legacy of imperialist domination, cruelty, and blood-soaked atrocities. Japan’s brutal practices included forced labor, the establishment of the “comfort women” system of sexual slavery, the suppression of local languages and cultures, and the gruesome medical experiments conducted by Unit 731 on Korean and Chinese subjects. These events still play an emotional and active role in Korean and Chinese politics today, especially due to some perceptions that Japanese political, educational, and social institutions seek to deny or understate these events.

An often-ignored aspect of this history is the ignoble role of the West. Powers like the United States and the United Kingdom mostly tolerated Japan’s expansion into Korea, only beginning a belated campaign of political and economic pressure against Japan following its invasion of the Republic of China. Western acquiescence, epitomized by the 1905 Taft-Katsura Memorandum, which essentially sanctioned Japan’s control over Korea in exchange for non-interference with American rule in the Philippines, still fuels resentment in South Korea. Further still, America’s post-war policies towards the region, which included promoting a rehabilitation of Japan as a newly democratic and free society, met particular skepticism in South Korea.

Taiwan’s history with Japan, starting with its annexation following the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, makes it the former territory with the longest memory of occupation. Japan subjugated the peoples of Taiwan in a similar, albeit perhaps less brutal, manner to that seen in Korea and China. But circumstances changed following Japan’s defeat in 1945. After a brief period of relative peace and stability, Taiwan found itself hosting the defeated Nationalist forces of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and under the authoritarian direct rule of the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-Shek. That rule was punctuated by the “white terror,” a period of brutal suppression of perceived communist or disloyal forces on the island. The echoes of this period are still felt in Taiwanese politics today and, in most cases, represent a more powerful and emotional scar of historical memory than those left by Japan.

In Southeast Asia, the experience of Japanese occupation during the 1940s was often just as brutal as in Korea and China, but briefer. Imperial Japan governed territories like the Philippines and Singapore through a lens of harsh ethnic grievance, with any opposition to Japanese rule perceived as a racial betrayal of Tokyo’s “Pan-Asian” vision. However, Japan’s role in displacing Western colonial powers led to mixed reactions in the wider region, with some leaders in countries like Thailand and Indonesia viewing Japan as a perhaps unwelcome but convenient liberator from European hegemony. Post-war, as Japan’s influence in the region evolved from military occupation to economic engagement, views of Japan actually worsened due to perceptions of commercial neocolonialism. Indeed, some of the largest anti-Japanese protests in Asia’s history, such as the 1974 “Malari” anti-Japanese riots in Indonesia, were more motivated by frustrations over post-war Japan’s economic policies rather than any wartime conduct. Yet, following a period of economic reform and the foreign policy shifts of the 1977, specifically the “Fukuda Doctrine” of outreach to Southeast Asia, views of Japan improved dramatically in the region.

Japan’s Expanding Regional Security Role

While these perceptions have long impacted Asia’s international relations, their relevance to regional security is particularly distinct today. Japan, once devoted to a foreign policy that eschewed hard security as a tool of national power, has steadily reasserted its security presence in Asia in recent years. Motivated by an increasingly unstable and insecure strategic environment, Tokyo is once again a central player in regional security developments.

Indeed, security leaders in Tokyo speak of Japan as a “front line” state, surrounded by aggressive Chinese territorial claims on its lands, a newly revanchist Russia to its north, and frequent provocative North Korean missile tests. As an island country, dependent on imports for most of its raw materials and energy needs, Japanese national security documents are today publicly stating what had long been taken for granted in private: The country needs to maintain secure access to sea lanes to safeguard its supplies of critical resources. This has sparked a series of ambitious Japanese security initiatives, largely through an unprecedented bolstering of the Japanese Self-Defense Force’s combat capabilities and an increased network of capacity building and training support missions in Southeast Asia.

Many countries in the region share Japan’s concern about China’s rise and share Japan’s strategic alignment with the United States. Yet their responses to Tokyo’s new security policies nonetheless vary based on their historical memory and unique domestic politics. As such, they deserve consideration on a more specific basis.

South Korea: Unsolved Historical Questions and Domestic Political Incentives

In the case of South Korea, skepticism towards Japan remains first and foremost about historical memory and the perception that Japan has not properly atoned for its past actions. Yet the existence of such grievances also creates a domestic political incentive for “Japan-bashing” in South Korea. This phenomenon has been well documented by scholars such as Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider, who argue that the manipulation of historical narratives is often used as a tool by political elites to consolidate domestic support, define national identity, and rally populist public opinion. These tactics are typically associated with the Korean political left, who prioritize rapprochement with North Korea over security coalition building with neighbors aimed at deterring Pyongyang.

Thus, under the current conservative President Yoon Suk-Yeol, there are mostly positive headlines about the Japanese-South Korean relationship, motivated by Seoul’s outreach to Tokyo over shared security priorities. These headlines have been accompanied by a series of positive gains now locked in by political agreements. But it is worth remembering that Seoul-Tokyo ties typically fluctuate between highs and lows, and the lack of a lasting agreement on perennial memory issues like comfort women and forced labor imply that, sooner or later, relations will return to a low point.

Against this backdrop, the historical role of the West, which today largely backs an increased Japanese security presence in the Indo-Pacific, could also prove multi-faceted. Support in European and North American capitals for expanding Japanese role as a security provider in Asia may soothe some anxieties in Seoul. However, it may also bring up echoes of the West’s historical ambivalence toward Korea’s subjugation by others.

Taiwan: Changing Views with a Changing Identity

Yet Taiwan, which also suffered decades of occupation, lacks South Korea’s domestic political incentives for criticizing Japan. As Taiwanese politics increasingly represents an independent (i.e., non-Chinese) political identity, views of Japan are decoupling from those on the mainland and in South Korea. This process of identity formation has led to a reevaluation of historical narratives, including those concerning the Japanese occupation. Indeed, Japan-bashing is perceived in Taiwan as a particularly mainlander perspective, not a native or “Taiwanese” one. Native Taiwanese, referring to those who lived on Taiwan prior to the retreat of Chinese Nationalist forces to the island in 1949, even factored Japanese aspects into their identity, as evidenced by the use of the Japanese language by protestors to determine Chinese versus Taiwanese identity during the anti-Nationalist “228” protests in 1947. As described by Taiwanese anthropologist Huang Chih-Huei, the experience of Nationalist rule led many native Taiwanese to feel that “the earlier colonizers turned out to be the better set,” leading to an embrace of the Japanese aspects of their identity.

These mixed attitudes towards Japan extends to the current generation. A 2022 survey found that a significant majority of the younger population held favorable views of Japan, and most named Japan as their “favorite” country. Scholars like Huang-Chih Chiang and Yeh-Chung Lu have noted that the younger generation in Taiwan tends to associate Japan with positive aspects like advanced technology, cultural richness, and even democratic values, rather than with the colonial past. This shift is also reflected in the island’s foreign policy toward Japan and bilateral economic ties, which are increasingly influenced by Taiwan’s ongoing efforts to forge a distinct identity separate from China. In this way, the younger generation’s inclination towards a Taiwanese identity, as opposed to a Chinese one, has inadvertently facilitated a more positive reassessment of the historical Japanese influence on the island.

Certainly, pragmatism also underlies Taiwan’s favorable view of Japan, particularly regarding defense. A 2021 poll by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation revealed that over 70 percent of Taiwanese would welcome Japanese support in the event of a military conflict with China. This statistic highlights a strategic dimension to Taiwan’s positive perception of Japan, acknowledging Japan’s potential role as a critical ally in ensuring the island’s security.

Southeast Asia: Pragmatism and Economic Focus

Unique geopolitical and historical factors in Southeast Asia have led to a more positive attitude towards Japan than in much of Northeast Asia. To be sure, even this claim risks straying into the realm of generalization. However, reliable polling, such as ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s survey of Association of Southeast Asian Nations elites, demonstrates a substantial majority of Southeast Asian leaders viewing Japan favorably, with around two-thirds regularly expressing confidence in Japan’s role in providing regional security and promoting stability. This positive perception is deeply rooted in economic ties and strategic partnerships that have evolved significantly since the mid-20th century.

The Fukuda Doctrine, as mentioned above, marked a symbolic turning point in Japan’s approach towards Southeast Asia and helped to overcome regional perceptions of economic neocolonialism. Motivated by flagging relations with the region and concern over Washington’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China, Japan’s new doctrine emphasized “heart-to-heart” relations, including mutual understanding, trust, and equal economic partnership. This policy paved the rhetorical road to more mutually beneficial economic relations between Japan and the region, by sparking by a dramatic increase in Japanese investment following the 1985 Plaza Accords and Tokyo’s substantial financial support to countries affected by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. As a result, views of Japan’s economic presence evolved to focus less on neocolonial extraction and more on value added, rebuilding trust among Southeast Asia’s elites and citizenry alike. This trust was pivotal in overcoming the deep-seated skepticism that stemmed not just from wartime conduct but, perhaps even more so, from post-war predatory economic practices.

Thus, in the realm of security, Southeast Asia’s stance towards Japan has been pragmatic but largely positive. During my fieldwork in the region, security leaders from Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia have told me there is a prevailing regional belief that the historical context of World War II has lost its relevance in the modern era. Japan’s consistent focus on development assistance, economic partnership, and respect for the sovereignty of Southeast Asian nations has solidified its standing as a trusted and valued partner in the region. Beyond positive poll numbers and personal conversations, this trust is evident in Japan’s growing security relationships across Southeast Asia. These include the recent agreement to negotiate a Reciprocal Access Agreement with the Philippines, signing of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with Vietnam, and a potential $3.6 billion sale of stealth frigates to Indonesia.

Conclusion

When shaping policies in the Indo-Pacific region, Washington should be attuned to the nuances of historical memory. By appreciating the historical context of Japan’s relationships with countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and Southeast Asian nations, external actors can more effectively navigate the region’s complex web of affinities and enmities.

Washington should appreciate that South Korea’s negative views, though critical to understanding regional dynamics, are not representative of the entirety of Asia. South Korea’s historical grievances with Japan are deeply rooted and complex, but they contrast with the generally positive or positive-trending perception of Japan in other areas, such as Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Policies and strategies involving Japan should not be established on a baseline of Seoul’s perspective. Currently, Washington appears to be prioritizing reconciliation between Tokyo and Seoul for this reason, with far less focus on supporting Japanese security initiatives in the rest of the region. This is likely the result of a decades-long relationship of trust between Washington and Seoul and vocal activism by Koreans and Korean-Americans dissatisfied with Japan’s attitude towards reconciliation. These views are real and important, but a one-size-fits-all approach will forgo the opportunity to forge more effective and nuanced regional partnerships.

Indeed, Washington’s understandable desire for Japan and South Korea to cooperate more on regional security may paradoxically benefit from a de-prioritization of that strained bilateral relationship. Promoting the common goods that Japan can provide to the region as a whole may ultimately prove a more effective focus. This approach would give space for Tokyo and Seoul to continue their slow and uneven process of mutual trust-building, while allowing the United States to emphasize more positive examples of Japanese regional leadership.

Finally, Japan’s experience shows that the United States should approach its role in the Indo-Pacific with a sense of humility. American policymakers should recognize that in many Asian countries the United States is seen not just as an external actor but as a participant in historical memory. This perception calls for a diplomatic strategy that is sensitive to the historical experiences and current sentiments of each nation. Humility in this context means acknowledging past negative American actions across the region, such as U.S. conduct during the Vietnam War or involvement in backing authoritarian regimes in the Philippines and Indonesia. Japan’s rebounding popularity in Southeast Asia suggests that respectful and empathetic long-term dialogue can yield results. Such an approach would enhance U.S. credibility and effectiveness in fostering cooperative security arrangements in a critical region.

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Ryan Ashley is an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force with extensive operational experience in East Asia and Japan and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He is also a lecturer with the Air Force Special Operations School. He has previously published on East Asian security and international relations with War on the Rocks, Nikkei Asia, and The Diplomat.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent those of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

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warontherocks.com · by Ryan Ashley · December 14, 2023

18. Dismayed by Moscow's war, Russian volunteers are joining Ukrainian ranks to fight Putin's troops

Dismayed by Moscow's war, Russian volunteers are joining Ukrainian ranks to fight Putin's troops

BY VASILISA STEPANENKO

Updated 2:05 PM GMT+8, December 14, 2023

AP · December 14, 2023

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ignited into war, back in Moscow, a young Russian who now goes by the name of Karabas was plunged into despair. Shocked by images of what was happening to Ukrainians in Russian-occupied areas, he decided to act — against Russia, his home and country.

Karabas said he knew that what he was doing was drastic. He packed his bags and decided to find a way to get to Ukraine to join the ranks of Kyiv’s troops fighting Russian forces.

It took him almost a year to make it happen.

Today, he is part of the Siberian Battalion, a unit made up of Russians who have joined Ukrainian military ranks to fight against their homeland, hoping someday to help oust Russian President Vladimir Putin. Its members hail mostly from ethnic minorities from Russia’s far east.

Members of the pro-Ukrainian Russian ethnic Siberian Battalion practice at a military training close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. Ukraine’s military has formed a battalion of soldiers made up entirely of Russian citizens who want to fight against Russian invasion.(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

“I was disillusioned with my own people,” recounted Karabas, who like other fighters in the battalion spoke to The Associated Press on condition that only his military call sign be used.

“That is why I wanted to come here ... and fight for a free Ukraine,” he added.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Karabas said he was dismayed by how most Russians he knew either blindly supported Putin or were indifferent to the war.

Sometimes, Karabas said his grief felt so overwhelming, he would break down and cry.

Unlike other volunteer units in Ukraine that have Russian nationals — such as the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps — the Siberian Battalion is officially part of the regular Ukrainian army.

Its fighters undergo lengthy security checks, which sometimes take up to a year, before they are trained and deployed to the front lines in eastern Ukraine, which has seen some of the most ferocious fighting of the war and where Ukrainian and Russian forces are locked in a grinding battle for control.

Karabas went to Armenia first. There, he sought out Ukrainian friends and learned the language, which he now speaks fluently, refusing to utter a word in his native Russian.

A member of the pro-Ukrainian Russian ethnic Siberian Battalion practices at a military training close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. Ukraine's military has formed a battalion of soldiers made up entirely of Russian citizens who want to fight against Russian invasion.(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Members of the pro-Ukrainian Russian ethnic Siberian Battalion practice at a military training close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. Ukraine's military has formed a battalion of soldiers made up entirely of Russian citizens who want to fight against Russian invasion.(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

On Wednesday, at a training exercise outside Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv, over a dozen Russians from the battalion fired their machine guns during a firing practice, sprinkling cartridges all over the snow blanketing the ground.

Fighters in the battalion from eastern Siberia hope a Ukrainian victory will bring them one step closer to dismantling Moscow’s political control over their region, among the poorest in Russia. Those from the area’s Yakut and Buryat ethnic communities complain of racism and oppression in Russia, which has driven some activist calls for independence.

Another Russian fighter, who goes by the call sign Holod, openly says he wants Putin’s administration removed from power.

“When this happens, we can talk about victory,” he said. “Russia will at least cease to be a source of sudden aggression.”

A member of the pro-Ukrainian Russian ethnic Siberian Battalion practices at a military training close to Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. Ukraine’s military has formed a battalion of soldiers made up entirely of Russian citizens who want to fight against Russian invasion.(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Russians like Karabas left their entire lives, including families and friends, behind. They first had to escape to a third country before they could travel on to Ukraine but they say they had no other choice.

Integration into the Ukrainian forces was a lengthy process, they said — their documents were scrutinized, and if they passed this step, they were questioned at length upon arrival in Ukraine.

The battalion, which numbers a few dozen, was created six months ago. Ukrainian military leaders are hopeful more will come to join its ranks and based on applications that have come in so far, they are aiming to have a 300-man-strong battalion of Russian fighters.

Some from the battalion have already been deployed near Avdiivka, a Ukraine-controlled city in the Donetsk region, which Putin’s forces have long tried to overrun.

Karabas says “there must be tens, hundreds of thousands of” other Russians like him, willing to fight with Ukraine.

“I think we should have a lot more (Russian fighters),” he said.

AP · December 14, 2023

19. Dare You to Watch the Civil War Trailer Without Hyperventilating

Oh no.

View the trailer at the link: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/watch-civil-war-trailer-without-hyperventilating/?utm

Dare You to Watch the Civil War Trailer Without Hyperventilating

denofgeek.com · by David Crow · December 13, 2023

In the summer of 2021, the organization Bright Line Watch released the research from their latest poll, and it left American political scientists stunned. The organization, which was founded essentially to study the stress being placed on American democracy in the 21st century, was no longer simply asking American voters about their confidence in the economy or current leadership, but whether in fact they would like to see their state or region of the U.S. secede from the Union. According to the group’s first major poll released months after the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt, where a mob of Donald Trump supporters tried to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, more than a third of Americans seemed happy to see their community secede from the United States. And, perhaps less surprisingly, that number nearly doubled depending on geography and political affiliation.

Overall, 37 percent of respondents indicated a “willingness to secede,” while a deafening 66 percent of Southern Republicans—hailing from a region that already tried it once—liked the idea of secession.

Normally, this is the kind of sobering study that would rarely find its way on Den of Geek, yet it seems inescapably necessary to think about while watching the trailer for Alex Garland‘s newest film, Civil War, which you can view below.

A genre auteur in his own right, with Garland having written and directed two instant sci-fi cult classics in Ex Machina and Annihilation in the 2010s, as well as writing the screenplays for 28 Days Later and Sunshine before that, Garland is the type of filmmaker whose name piques immediate interest for a certain type of cinephile. Yet for his latest effort, which is housed at the mercurial tastemaker indie label A24, the filmmaker returned neither to sci-fi or his recent dabbles in outright horror.

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Civil War appears on the surface to be a grim speculative fiction about where the country could be headed in years or decades if current political winds pick up speed. The film also marks a reunion of sorts for fans of his productions, with Nick Offerman, Sonoya Mizuno, and Cailee Spaeny all appearing in the film (with Offerman as an ominous American president) after starring in Garland’s limited sci-fi series, Devs. The film also stars real-life couple Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst, whose last collaboration was Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. Which is to say the odds seem good that the screenplay delivered something special.

Obviously Civil War is a work of stylized fantasy, not least of all because it imagines for its seceding states the unlikely bedfellows of Texas and California. Nonetheless, the series seems to be set a few years down the road after an authoritarian government has turned on its citizens and journalists. A line in the trailer even states, “They shoot journalists on sight in the capital.” We are a long way from such naked despotism, but there are definitely political forces today that are extremely hostile to the press… giving it all an air of queasy prescience.

To bring it back to that 2021 poll, at the time it seemed many Americans who were asked that question may have forgotten the history lessons of the United States between 1861 and 1865. In which case, this film might offer an eerie reminder of where such a mindset leads, and how one person can say “we’re Americans” to a man holding a gun. “What kind of American are you?” he responds.

Civil War is in theaters on April 26, 2024.

denofgeek.com · by David Crow · December 13, 2023

20. We’re in an epidemic of right-wing terror. Won’t someone tell the press?

Revisionist history or accurate reporting? Mother Jones reports, you decide.

We’re in an epidemic of right-wing terror. Won’t someone tell the press?

More than a decade of media malpractice enabled January 6. Has the media learned its lesson?

RICK PERLSTEIN

Mother Jones · by Rick Perlstein

In These Times/Shutterstock

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This article first appeared inInTheseTimes magazine’s special issue on the spread of the far Right.

“Violence is a part of America’s culture,” the Black Power militant H. Rap Brown once said. ”It is as American as cherry pie.”

Another equally American tradition is looking away from the problem when it comes from the Right.

As researchers have repeatedly found, the Right is where political violence in America overwhelmingly originates. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies—an eminently respectable, bipartisan think tank—right-wing political violence accounted for more than 90 percent of all attacks or plots in the first half of 2020, far outpacing terrorism from any other source since 1990. And since 2020, it’s gotten increasingly worse. A Reuters investigation published in August found that U.S. political violence is worse than it’s been at any point since the 1970s. Of the 18 fatal acts of political terrorism they counted since the Jan. 6 insurrection, only one came from the “Left” (involving a Democratic county official who allegedly murdered a reporter investigating him for corruption).

But you would never know this from listening to the mainstream media for most of the past three decades. And as calls to violence metastasize into a routine component of Republican politics—as when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee made the H. Rap Brown-like declaration that, should criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump continue, 2024 will be the last U.S. election “decided by ballots rather than bullets”—that denial may soon be among the biggest problems we have.

Americans “hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political culture disagreements,” I wrote in the conclusion of my 2008 book, Nixonland. The book is about how the shape of those disagreements was forged in the crucible of the 1960s. The reviews were good, including a kind notice in the Washington Post. But the Post’s reviewer, Elizabeth Drew—a longtime Washington correspondent dating back to the Nixon era—took exception to that particular passage, about a divided America’s mutual hate. She thought the author “becomes carried away and pushes his theme too far.”

She must not have been reading what I was reading while I was finishing the book.

During a single month in 2007, a bomb was defused at an Austin, Texas, abortion clinic; a Liberty University student was arrested with napalm bombs he planned to use against people protesting Jerry Falwell’s funeral; the FBI raided a three-county, far-right Alabama terror ring that was plotting to massacre Mexican immigrants with a stockpile including 130 grenades and a rocket launcher; and an anti-immigrant militia member was apprehended at a rally in Washington, D.C., carrying an M1 rifle and a map with lines pointing to the speaker’s platform.

The problem might have been that my reviewer was getting her news from sources like the Post, which didn’t run a word on any of these foiled terrorist plots. I learned about them from “alternative” media. It’s a sad state of affairs for a nation when “alternative” translates to accurate and “mainstream” to blinkered.

This sort of mainstream media denial goes back a long way. After the Oklahoma City bombing, speculation that Muslim jihadists were responsible saturated mainstream media. New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal wrote, “Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working.” After news broke that a homegrown Christian was responsible for the bombing, mainstream voices still strained to blame anything except the Right’s gathering forces of hate against the federal government.

Right-wing political violence accounted for more than 90 percent of all attacks or plots in the first half of 2020, far outpacing terrorism from any other source since 1990. And since 2020, it’s gotten increasingly worse.

When the Post profiled Timothy McVeigh in 1995, it cited his parents’ divorce as one possible motivation for his terrorism—ignoring the fact that he was part of a movement that, by the mid-1990s, included more than 850 anti-government militia groups, and that its rhetoric was echoed by “mainstream” conservatives. In 1995, shortly before McVeigh’s attack, a National Rifle Association mailer excoriated federal agents as “jack-booted government thugs” who wear “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” as they “attack law-abiding citizens.” The prior summer, G. Gordon Liddy—who’d transformed himself from Watergate felon to one of the Right’s top talk radio stars—broadcast a show in which he advised listeners to “hunt down and kill” agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms with “head shots.”

At the museum in Oklahoma City that memorializes the bombing, a political cartoon on the wall encapsulates this denial: One reporter asks, “How many hurt?” Another answers, “260 million Americans”—the entire U.S. population in 1995. The crime, in other words, was to be understood as the product of forces entirely alien to American politics and its longstanding traditions.

That stubborn and dangerously naïve myth has a great deal to do with how unprepared the nation was for Jan. 6, 2021, from the police tasked with protecting the Capitol to the journalists who should have seen it coming.

Had the mainstream media done its job a decade earlier, when the Tea Party movement was sweeping the nation, things might have turned out differently.

That the media did a terrible job of explaining what the Tea Party was and how it functioned, right from its founding in the spring of 2009, is clear from the movement’s Wikipedia entry, which describes the Tea Party as focused on lower taxes, national debt and decreased government spending. That’s how the movement was almost universally reported, after all, on network news, in cable outlets like CNN and in newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

It’s also not true.

If Tea Party members had actually cared about lowering taxes, after all, they should have venerated Barack Obama, whose Making Work Pay tax cut, passed the first month of his presidency, promised lower income taxes by an average of $1,200 annually for the 97 percent of Americans who paid payroll taxes. If they cared about debt and the deficit, they shouldn’t have idolized Ronald Reagan, who sent both through the roof.

While the media depicted the Tea Party as nonideological—as one headline read, “Look to Your Left, Look to Your Right … Everyone Is a Tea Partier!”—it was, in reality, a classic reactionary formation that viscerally hated all forms of liberalism. The media credulously repeated poll findings that 40 percent of Tea Partiers called themselves “Independents,” omitting the fact that many refused to identify as Republican simply because they instead identified as John Birchers, Ron Paul supporters, or other factions beyond even the GOP’s fringe. The movement also was deeply intertwined with Stewart Rhodes’ far-right Oath Keepers.

Rhodes is now a federal prisoner, sentenced in May to 18 years for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government in the January 6 plot. In 2008, Rhodes was a libertarian Yale Law School graduate, former Ron Paul campaign staffer and columnist at the survivalist magazine S.W.A.T. A retired Army colonel wrote a letter to S.W.A.T. proposing that active duty and retired military and police were the nation’s best defense against a New World Order takeover, to which Rhodes agreed. Rhodes’ column in response—warning that if “Hitlery” Clinton was elected, the government would “go house-to-house to disarm the American people and ‘black-bag’” anyone who resisted—was the seedbed of the Oath Keepers. When Obama won the Democratic nomination, Rhodes simply slotted Obama into the same scenario.

Rhodes held the Oath Keepers’ first “muster” on April 19, 2009, because it was the anniversary of the start of the American revolution—which was also the date McVeigh chose for his atrocity. There, law enforcement and military personnel pledged to refuse 10 specific orders should they be issued from their commanding officers, including “disarm[ing] the American people” and “subjugat[ing] any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union” (a nice nod to slavery’s 19th-century defenders).

One of Rhodes’ first followers, Daniel Knight Hayden, had already been arrested for a series of tweets he posted eight days earlier, promoting a Tea Party rally scheduled for Tax Day at the Oklahoma State Capitol. The rally, Hayden suggested, would mark the opening salvo of a new civil war, in which he was “willing to be the FIRST DEATH.”

It’s a sad state of affairs for a nation when “alternative” media translates to accurate and “mainstream” media to blinkered.

As the Tea Party grew, Rhodes became a fixture on its circuit, recruiting cops and soldiers as Oath Keepers from Tea Party rally stages. He received such a warm reception from this supposedly “fiscally centered” movement that he apparently couldn’t accommodate all of the requests for his appearance. That July 4, he sent dozens of surrogates across the country to speak in his name. One was a YouTube militia star, Charles Dyer (aka July4Patriot), who urged fellow veterans to use their military training to become “domestic terrorists.” When Dyer was arrested in January 2010 for raping his 7-year-old daughter, authorities found an arsenal in his home that included a grenade launcher pilfered from a military base.

This militia/Tea Party convergence was an important story, you might think. But it’s not one you could find in mainstream media. In the Tea Party’s first year, the New York Times gave it saturation coverage; one of its reporters even published a book about the movement. But the Times noted the Oath Keepers only once in its news pages, and in passing.

CNN covered the Oath Keepers more frequently—but seemed almost to celebrate it. Correspondent Jim Acosta, who appeared to find Rhodes charming, teased his report from the Oath Keepers’ 2010 Las Vegas convention as an introduction to “a group of soldiers … that believes their allegiance to the Constitution is what’s front and center.” He reassuringly concluded: “They’re not really a militia.”

You had to turn to alternative media to go deeper.

When Mother Jones’ Justine Sharrock covered the same 2010 Oath Keepers convention, she reported how the group was planning to take over the Tea Party from what they termed “asshole RINOs.” Sharrock also found that, far from being a mere Constitution-lover, one featured speaker was a leader of a movement claiming county sheriffs have the power to contravene federal law. In upstate New York’s Fort Drum, Sharrock reported on a young soldier who spent his off-hours drilling his six-man Oath Keepers cell so they would be prepared to fight fellow soldiers who had not yet awakened to the threat when the time came, which he was sure would be soon.

When Sharrock reminded the soldier that Rhodes’ oath was a call to refuse tyrannical orders rather than wage civil war—to lay down weapons, not take them up—the soldier told her to “read between the lines”: “They have to be careful because otherwise they will be labeled as terrorists.”

In 2011, In These Times ran a dispatch noting that Flathead Valley, Mont.—the Oath Keepers’ home base—was becoming a refuge for violent far-right insurrectionists who overlapped with the state’s “particularly virulent Tea Parties.” In an online discussion about the murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, In These Times reported, the president of one local Tea Party group requested an “instruction manual.”

By 2022, a year after the January 6 attacks, Acosta had become a primetime CNN anchor. He teased the following story: “Federal prosecutors are presenting new evidence to a jury that Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes called for a, quote, ‘bloody war’ to keep then-President Trump in office after his 2020 election defeat.”

In a different timeline, in which Acosta and his mainstream media colleagues did a better job a decade prior, maybe that story would’ve had a different ending.

The man perhaps most responsible for building and sustaining the lunacy that produced January 6—the one individual who embodies the overlap between Tea Party and Oath Keepers—was hiding in plain sight, every night on Fox News. Glenn Beck’s primetime preachments of the dark liberal conspiracy to undermine the United States were uncannily similar to Rhodes’ Oath Keepers arguments. Most importantly, Beck was himself a Tea Party hero. In one poll, 25 percent of the movement’s adherents named Beck the figure they trusted most—their Walter Cronkite, if Walter Cronkite had his own political organization.

Beck’s political organization was the (now defunct) 9/12 Project. One of its organizers was a woman named Nighta Davis, who believes abortion is part of a plot to eugenically eliminate Christians. Davis was at the 2010 Oath Keepers convention—as Mother Jones reported but CNN did not—planning a program of outreach to the mainstream Right, which culminated in meetings attended by several members of Congress and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed.

On Sept. 12, 2009, Beck held a massive “tea party” on the National Mall. Rhodes was on its planning committee, and his Oath Keepers were there in force.

The next summer, Beck published The Overton Window, a book depicting a cartel from the highest echelons of business, politics and the military plotting a totalitarian coup. The first step was brainwashing the masses with concepts like “social justice” and “the common good,” then expanding the “malleable voter base and agenda support by granting voting rights to prison inmates, undocumented migrants and select U.S. territories, e.g. Puerto Rico.” Then, after their Reichstag fire—obliterating Las Vegas by nuclear bomb—Americans would be too spiritually denuded to resist. Except, of course, the brave cadres of a group that suspiciously resembled Beck’s 9/12 Project, who save the world just in time.

Beck called the book a novel. But in an afterword he detailed how aspects of the plot had already taken place and instructed readers to think of the book as training, the way “fighter pilots often use flight simulators to train for real combat.” On Independence Day 2010, the book debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Two weeks later, a Beck fan named Byron Williams engaged in a shootout with police, who picked him up for speeding on his way to San Francisco to “start a revolution” by murdering employees of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU—nodes on Beck’s infamous conspiracy chalkboard. Kenneth B. Kimbley—arrested around the same time for building homemade grenades in preparation for when “the government started rounding up the patriots”—was another Beck fan, as his lawyer noted in his defense: He’d just been following what his idol “typically states on the air.”

Had mainstream media ignored Beck? Hardly. Ten months earlier, Time magazine had Beck on its cover, calling him “a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies—if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn’t, necessarily; he’s just asking questions.”

A jocular profile, accompanied by a jocular portrait: Beck blowing a raspberry at the reader. He was “the hottest thing in the political-rant racket,” a talented “entrepreneur of angst” who “lit up the 5 p.m. slot in a way never thought possible.” As politics, Time noted, it was “sort of a train wreck—at once powerful, spellbinding and uncontrolled.” But as “melodrama,” it was “thumping good stuff.”

It’s worth noting that part of that thumping good stuff—both from Beck’s oeuvre and Rhodes’ movement—was a prediction of the cunning pretext the bad guys would use to rob American patriots of their liberties, their fortunes and their guns: a pandemic. You may recall that a foundational argument of 2020 election deniers was that Democratic states used Covid-19 as a pretext to change election rules to Joe Biden’s benefit.

And that completes the story mainstream media missed: More than a decade ago, a cadre of armed military and police personnel took an oath rooted in a conspiracy theory that a globalist cabal was working to steal Americans’ democratic birthright. That narrative was then mainstreamed on the most-watched “news” show on cable TV. And then a Republican presidential candidate exploited the narrative to mobilize a citizen army to steal back the White House after losing the election.

Now, nearly three years later, what should we expect the media establishment to have learned from missing an origin story of January 6? That much of Trump’s constituency understands violence as a central tool for achieving their political aims.

But has the media learned it?

This September, in Española, N.M., as Indigenous activists protested the reinstallation of a statue honoring a conquistador, a man in a MAGA hat named Ryan Martinez allegedly started shooting. One of the activists, a Hopi man named Jacob Johns, was shot and required emergency surgery. When investigators questioned Martinez, he began laughing. He asked whether the police could just let him go.

Omitting political violence from political coverage is an abdication of basic journalistic responsibility. Horse-race reporting has its place. But it won’t matter much if the men in the MAGA hats blow up the horse track.

You can read all about the shooting in the Guardian, but the New York Times did not find the story fit to print. The Washington Post waited over a month. I wonder if anyone in either newsroom understands this sort of thing as an urgent part of the story of the 2024 elections.

Forces are gathering on the Right that see their political aspirations as something worth killing for. When the likes of Mike Huckabee proudly announce the idea of bullets over ballots as an inevitability, media that omit the mounting potential for political violence from their political coverage are abdicating basic journalistic responsibility. It’s certainly as important as totting up who can be expected to caucus for whom in Iowa, or who’s winning over Virginia’s soccer moms.

Horse-race reporting has its place. But it won’t matter much if the men in the MAGA hats blow up the horse track.

Mother Jones · by Rick Perlstein

21.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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."

Access NSS HERE

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