Quotes of the Day:

"To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble."

- Mark Twain

"Ask yourself at every moment. Is this necessary?"

- Marcus Aurelius

"Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal aims of humanity."

- Leo Tolstoy

1. Hearts Beat Strongest in Response to Noble Ideals (remarks from the OSS Society President)

2. The Four Questions The U.S. Military Should Be Asking About Operation Swords of Iron

3. China stealing technology secrets -- from AI to computing and biology, "Five Eyes" intelligence leaders warn

4. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 22, 2023

5. Iran Update, October 22, 2023

6. Israel strikes across Gaza after allowing another small aid convoy into the besieged enclave

7. A price cap on Russian oil aims to starve Putin of cash. But it's largely been untested. Until now

8. US renews warning it will defend treaty ally Philippines after Chinese ships rammed Manila vessels

9. Americans Back Israel but Are Wary of Getting Pulled Into Conflict, WSJ-Ipsos Poll Finds

10. Israel-Hamas War Revives Interest in U.S. Production of Iron Dome Missiles

11.  Ike carrier strike group headed to the Middle East

12. We must ditch the ‘stalemate’ metaphor in Ukraine’s war

13. Testing of Navy SEALs May Unveil Scale of Performance-Enhancing Drug Use -- and Unleash Legal Battles

14. China outs yet another national as US ‘spy’, says he was groomed during visiting scholar stint

15.  Shooting for the moon: Army’s 2025 budget to reflect artillery revamp

16. How Will the IDF Handle Urban Combat? by David Kilcullen

17. How the CIA’s top-ranking woman beat the agency’s men at their own game

18. Special Operations News - October 23, 2023 | SOF News

19. House Chaos Imperils Reauthorization of Critical National Security Tool

20. Blinken, Austin Say US Is Ready to Respond if US Personnel Become Targets of Israel-Hamas War

21. A Catastrophic Success for Hamas?

22. Futile military solutions cannot solve political problems

23. America Is a Root Cause of Israel and Palestine’s Latest War

1. Hearts Beat Strongest in Response to Noble Ideals (remarks from the OSS Society President)

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/hearts-beat-strongest-response-noble-ideals

Mon, 10/23/2023 - 7:29am

(Editor’s Note: On 21 October 2023, The OSS Society held its annual William J. Donovan Award Dinner to honor the Office of Strategic Services and recognize historical and contemporary figures who embody the spirit of the OSS and national service. This year the following awards were presented:

The Ralph Bunch Award to Ambassador Anne Patterson

The Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Award to Tom Brokaw

The Jack Taylor Award to Admiral Joe Maguire

The William J. Donovan Award to CIA Director William J. Burns

What follows are remarks by the OSS Society President Charles Pinck introducing the awards and this year’s awardees. The Small Wars Journal believes these profound remarks deserve to be widely circulated.)

Hearts Beat Strongest in Response to Noble Ideals

By Charles T. Pinck

 "Hearts beat strongest in response to noble ideals."

These words were spoken by Dr. Ralph Bunche. Dr. Bunche was the first African American to receive a PhD in political science from an American university and serve as a state department desk officer.

He served in the OSS’ Research and Analysis Branch, predecessor to the state department’s bureau of intelligence and research.

Following the war, Dr. Bunche help draft the charter for the United Nations.

He negotiated the first peace agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors for which he received the Nobel peace prize in 1950.

We could use his expertise on the Middle East today.

Dr. Bunche spent the bulk of his career helping colonized nations become decolonized. He was one our nation’s greatest civil rights leaders.

Ralph Bunche’s heart beat strongest in response to the noble ideals of equality and freedom.

Ambassador Anne Patterson is one of our nation’s most distinguished diplomats. She has served with distinction in some of the of the most challenging diplomatic positions as ambassador to Egypt, Pakistan, Colombia, and El Salvador.

Paul Richter wrote that Ambassador Patterson has “gone to the hardest places and done the hardest things.”

Lt Gen Charles Cleveland wrote that “Ambassador Patterson is one of the unsung heroes of post-9/11 diplomacy.”

Ambassador Patterson’s heart beats strongest in response to the noble ideal of American diplomacy as a force for good in the world.

Like Ralph Bunche, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also served in the OSS’ Research and Analysis Branch, or as it called itself – the “chairborne division.”

Schlesinger was a historian, a social critic, and a public intellectual. The author of more than 20 books, he received the Pulitzer Prize twice. He served as a special assistant to President Kennedy and wrote the definitive account of his presidency.

Ambassador William Vanden Heuvel wrote that Schlesinger was “a great American patriot. He believed profoundly and wholeheartedly in Democracy, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. He was the powerful enemy of totalitarianism wherever it took root. He taught all of us the importance of history.”

Arthur Schlesinger’s heart beat strongest in response to the noble ideal of knowledge.

Tom Brokaw is one of our nation’s most distinguished journalists whose career with NBC news began in 1966. He covered some of the 20th century’s most momentous events: the rise of the 1960s counterculture; the assassination of Robert Kennedy; Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon; and the collapse of the soviet union. He has received every major award for his journalistic achievements.

No one has done more than Tom Brokaw to honor the “greatest generation,” a term he coined for his 1998 book of the same name – one of the most popular nonfiction books of the 20th century.

Like Arthur Schlesinger, Tom Brokaw has taught us the importance of history, too.

Tom Brokaw’s heart beats strongest in response to the noble ideal of truth and understanding.

Jack Taylor was our nation’s first sea, air, and land commando. Taylor served in the Oss Maritime Unit, precursor to the Navy SEALs.

In 1944, Taylor led the OSS’ deepest penetration mission into Austria. After evading the Germans for six weeks, Taylor and his team were captured by the gestapo. Tortured for months, Taylor refused to talk.

He was sent to the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp where he miraculously avoided four scheduled executions. He witnessed and meticulously recorded unimaginable atrocities committed by the Germans.

Following the war, Jack Taylor used the evidence he secretly gathered to testify at the Mauthausen camp trial. His testimony helped to convict 58 defendants.

Jack Taylor’s heart beat strongest in response to the noble ideal of justice.

Admiral Joe Maguire is one of our nation’s most dedicated public servants. After beginning his naval career as a Surface Warfare Officer in 1974, he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in 1976.

He was a qualified combat swimmer who commanded at every level, including as commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command.

After retiring from the navy in 2010 after 36 years in uniform, admiral Maguire served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center and as acting Director of National Intelligence, serving as the principal advisor on intelligence matters to the President and the National Security Council.

Admiral Maguire’s heart beats strongest in response to the noble ideal of service.

General William Donovan served in the united states military from 1912 to 1945; in the Justice Department as an Assistant Attorney General and the United States Attorney for the Western District of New York; as a personal emissary for President Roosevelt; as an assistant to the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg; as US Ambassador to Thailand; and as the founder of the Office of Strategic Services.

General Donovan’s heart beat strongest in response to the noble ideal of American Democracy and the institutions that have sustained it for nearly 250 years.

CIA director Bill Burns is one of the most distinguished diplomats in our nation’s history. He is only the second serving career diplomat to become deputy secretary of state and the first career diplomat to serve as director of CIA.

Over his 33-year diplomatic career, Director Burns has served as the us ambassador to Russia and Jordan; as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs; and as a Special Assistant to Secretaries Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher.

He is the recipient of three presidential distinguished service awards and the highest civilian honors from the Pentagon and the US Intelligence Community.

In his award-winning 2019 memoir, “The Back Channel,” Director Burns wrote that “we are in one of those plastic moments in global affairs that come along once or twice a century – a perfect storm in major shifts in the balance of power, and massive political, economic, technological, and environmental transformations.”

Navigating these tectonic shifts is the greatest challenge our nation faces.

General Donovan was instrumental in helping our nation navigate through the daunting challenges it faced during world war ii.

There is no one better suited to guide CIA through today’s transformative period than director burns.

His heart also beats strongest in response to the noble ideal of American Diplomacy as a force for good in the world, and the symbiotic relationship between diplomacy and intelligence.

This ballroom is filled with people whose hearts beat strongest in response to noble ideals.

These noble ideals that bind us together as Americans:

Equality

Freedom

Justice

Diplomacy

Knowledge

Truth

Understanding

Service

And, most importantly, Democracy.

Are much stronger than anything or anyone who tries to divide us.

Hearts beat strongest in response to noble ideals.

Charles T. Pinck

October 21, 2023

About the Author(s)

Charles T. Pinck

Charles T. Pinck is president of The OSS Society, a nonprofit organization founded in 1947 by General William Donovan that educates the American public about the importance of strategic intelligence and special operations to the preservation of freedom. It is planning to build the National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations to honor Americans who have served at the “tip of the spear” as our Nation’s first line of defense.

2. The Four Questions The U.S. Military Should Be Asking About Operation Swords of Iron

Excellent questions, as expected, from these two great thinkers.

Excerpts:

Can Low Tech Means Effectively Counter a High-Tech Force?

Have Militaries Gotten Any Better at Urban Warfare?

Is The U.S. Any Better at Thinking through Post-Combat Planning?

Israel’s Wars as a Warfighting Laboratory

Ultimately, it’s too soon to tell what the answers to any of these four big questions will be, but one thing is certain: there will be lessons from this conflict for the U.S. military. The early evidence suggests that some of the same issues that the U.S. wrestled with for the last two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan — guarding against strategic surprise, countering low-tech challenges advance military capability, fighting in urban areas and planning for post-combat issues — remain unsolved at least in the Israeli context. This, in turn, should prompt a degree of self-reflection for the United States as well. As the U.S. military watches the next days, weeks and potentially months unfold in Israel, U.S. planners should ask themselves: would we able to do any better? If not, then U.S. still has more learning to do.

Fifty years ago, the 1973 Yom Kippur War prompted the U.S. military to rethink its approach to modern warfare and the iconic doctrine of AirLand Battle. This conflict, too, may offer similarly profound insights. Whether the U.S. military chooses to learn these lessons, though, is another question for which we cannot yet know the answer.

The Four Questions The U.S. Military Should Be Asking About Operation Swords of Iron - War on the Rocks

RAPHAEL S. COHEN AND GIAN GENTILE

warontherocks.com · by Raphael S. Cohen · October 23, 2023

Operation Swords of Iron — the Israeli military response into Gaza, in the aftermath of the deadly, Hamas-led, Oct. 7th terrorist attacks — is likely still in its infancy. Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Chief of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi have all separately predicted that this will be “long war” as the Israeli Defense Force attempts to dismantle Hamas’ networks inside the Gaza Strip.

For American military observers of this conflict, this war, much like previous Israeli wars, will likely yield a host of lessons. And while it is still too early to say precisely what those lessons are— much less to what degree, if any, the United States military will internalize them — it is not too early to identify the right questions to be asking as the conflict unfolds. And while there is an almost infinite number of areas one could explore, there are at least four big questions that the U.S. military should be asking itself as it watches this war in Gaza unfold.

What Are the Roots of Strategic Surprise?

As a starting point, perhaps the most fundamental question to be asking is how Hamas was able to pull off an attack of the scale seen on Oct. 7, 2023, seemingly without any Israel gaining advanced warning or much in the way of effective response. The fact that Hamas was able to gain such strategic surprise at all is shocking, given Israel’s many advantages: a state of the art, billion dollar border wall, equipped with a range of sensors; a host of (until now) well-regarded and sophisticated intelligence services; and the inherent advantage the comes from looking at the same small piece of ground, controlled by the same adversary for decades, right next door.

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There have already been a number of attempts to answer what went wrong. Early explanations point to a series of operational and intelligence blunders—from failing to monitor some of Hamas communications, to clustering commanders in a handful of locations. For his part, Halevi has promised more than once that, when the war is over, “We will learn. We will investigate.” Shin Bet—Israeli domestic intelligence—head Ronin Bar has made a similar pledge.

And yet, this is not the first time Israel’s Defense Forces has been caught off guard. Fifty years ago, almost to the day, the 1973 Yom Kippur War found Egypt successfully breaching the Israeli line of defenses along the Suez Canal. Then, too, Israel was caught off guard, because it had rested on its laurels, in part due to its stunning success only six years earlier, during the 1967 Six Day War. In that war Israel had decisively defeated a much larger coalition of Arab states that were trying to eliminate the state of Israel by relying on tanks and airpower. In 1973, Israelis believed that their past success would carry on into the future. They were wrong.

One can only wonder whether Israel again suffered from a similar degree of hubris in the run up to the Oct. 7th attacks. After all, Israel had successfully contained and deterred Hamas in Gaza — mostly successfully — for the better part of two decades. Regardless of what Israeli intelligence did or did not intercept, or where Israel’s Defense Forces positioned its commanders on that day, the inability of both the intelligence services and military to imagine and anticipate such an attack could apply to the United States, as well.

Can Low Tech Means Effectively Counter a High-Tech Force?

Israel’s Defense Forces has long relied on leveraging its technological superiority to guarantee its military advantage. As the military arm of a “start-up nation,” the armed forces has been at the forefront of a series of military technological innovations — from active defenses for armored vehicles to its vaunted Iron Dome missile defense shield. The Gaza wall was meant to also be a demonstration of such innovations: A 20 foot high steel wall, reinforced with a concrete barrier dug below the earth, laden with an exquisite system of sensors, which are connected to large caliber machine guns that can fire automatically. The wall appeared to be a marvel of war technology.

In a brutal twist of fate, however, on Oct. 7th Hamas became the David to Israel’s Goliath. Where the Israelis had deployed sophisticated ground sensors linked by cellular towers that were tied to remote controlled machine guns and command posts, Hamas took down key cellular nodes with small drones carrying small munitions. Where Israeli had constructed a high, steel wall, Hamas breached it with basic explosives and bull dozers. Even Hamas’ paraglider attack is not sophisticated or new: other Palestinian militant groups employed a similar tactic, albeit on a smaller scale, some 35 years ago.

The next phase of this war will pit similarly high tech solutions against low tech problems. One of the key operational challenges the Israeli military faces — should it try to clear Gaza on the ground — is the Gaza Metro: a reportedly 500 kilometer labyrinth of tunnels underneath the strip. But, as much popular attention as the tunnels have received over the last few weeks, its worth remembering that tunnel warfare dates back to ancient times. The Israeli Defense Force, for its part, has been seized with developing solutions to the tunnel problem ever since the last major Gaza ground war, Operation Protective Edge. The military has developed a series of better detection mechanisms to locate the tunnels, as well as the use of robotics to survey them.

Ultimately, Operation Swords of Iron will test the “bang for the buck” a modern army receives from such high-end solutions, and to what extent they can be countered using cheaper, simpler technologies. These lessons will apply to the Israeli Defense Force, of course, but will also be relevant for the United States — another military that is similarly premised on the idea of technological silver bullets.

Have Militaries Gotten Any Better at Urban Warfare?

The challenge of how to fight in dense urban centers — without leveling them — has preoccupied military planners for decades. So far, the recent historical record here is dismal. In battles like Grozny, Fallujah, Sadr City, or Mosul, when armies met a determined adversary in an urban setting, the result has been, more often than not, sheer destruction. No wonder the U.S. Army was transfixed with the problem of fighting in megacities — densely populated urban centers of ten million people or more — for years.

With its two million plus inhabitants crammed into an area roughly the size of Philadelphia, Gaza will be a test case for how far militaries have come in solving this challenge. Over the years, Israel’s Defense Force has tried a variety of operational techniques. Operation Cast Lead, in 2008-2009, featured a relatively quick but deep push into Gaza. By contrast, Operation Protective Edge, in 2014, featured ground fighting along the periphery, as Israel sought to neutralize Hamas’ cross-border tunnel network. Still other Israeli attempts to control the Strip focused on airpower-only operations, like Pillar of Defense, in 2012.

Given Israel’s stated objectives of destroying Hamas and rescuing the 200 or more hostages held by Hamas or other groups, the Israeli military will likely have to mount a significantly more intense operation than it has in past. Already, Israel has claimed to have struck more than 4,900 targets inside Gaza points to both the more ambitious goals and the more aggressive military campaign this time around. Unfortunately, with estimates of thousands killed, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands displaced in Gaza, the early evidence also suggests that the military problem of how to fight in urban centers—without mass destruction—remains very much unsolved operational problem.

This war will likely only become more kinetic and, unfortunately, bloodier. If the Israeli military truly wants to clear Hamas’ vast tunnel system, Israelis will have to put significant amounts of ground combat power — tanks, mechanized infantry, artillery, mortars, engineers — on the ground, in order to go into buildings and underground. And while Israel has taken some measures to minimize civilian casualties, ultimately it’s going to be a test of whether Israel’s Defense Force—or any advanced military — can fight an urban war, achieve its strategic objective, and still leave the city intact, and its civilian population unharmed.

Is The U.S. Any Better at Thinking through Post-Combat Planning?

If there was one common refrain out of most every post-war analysis of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was a critique of the plan for what happens after the initial shooting phase ends. Ironically enough, this is one area where Israel should learn from the United States’ experience, as much as vice versa. While Israeli leadership from current prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down are unified in their desire to eliminate Hamas as a military entity, and prevent Hamas from returning to what it was, they thus far have yet to offer a plan on what comes next.

There are no easy answers here. Occupying Gaza risks saddling Israel with millions of hostile inhabitants and the daunting task of rebuilding what will in all likelihood be a shattered society. Withdrawing prematurely risks creating a power vacuum and leaving a cesspool of misery that will, in time, either beckon the return of Hamas or breed an equally malign actor. That’s a thorny strategic problem, and one to which Israel’s Defense Force, like many militaries, would prefer leaving to someone else to tackle.

But ultimately, the question of what comes after the shooting stops is not a question the Israeli military — or any military —can shirk, because it is fundamental to judging whether the war itself was a success or a failure. And so, rather than pass the buck, militaries need to plan for what comes next from the get-go, so that they can handle the transition as successfully as possible. Whether Israel’s Defense Force has internalized this notion of planning for what’s next, or be able to execute any better than the U.S. military did Iraq or Afghanistan, remains a very open question. One way or another, though, U.S. military planners will be looking at Operation Swords of Iron either as a case study in what a military did right, or yet another example of military short-sightedness.

Israel’s Wars as a Warfighting Laboratory

Even though Swords of Iron is likely still in its infancy, this war is shaping up to be a watershed moment for the Middle East, and for the United States’ role in the region. Depending on how the war turns out, it could have far-reaching consequences for Israeli-American relationship, U.S. attempts to broker Israeli-Arab peace, and U.S. attempts to deter Iranian aggression. The war will also yield a wealth of insights about the nature of modern combat that will occupy military analysts for years to come.

Ultimately, it’s too soon to tell what the answers to any of these four big questions will be, but one thing is certain: there will be lessons from this conflict for the U.S. military. The early evidence suggests that some of the same issues that the U.S. wrestled with for the last two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan — guarding against strategic surprise, countering low-tech challenges advance military capability, fighting in urban areas and planning for post-combat issues — remain unsolved at least in the Israeli context. This, in turn, should prompt a degree of self-reflection for the United States as well. As the U.S. military watches the next days, weeks and potentially months unfold in Israel, U.S. planners should ask themselves: would we able to do any better? If not, then U.S. still has more learning to do.

Fifty years ago, the 1973 Yom Kippur War prompted the U.S. military to rethink its approach to modern warfare and the iconic doctrine of AirLand Battle. This conflict, too, may offer similarly profound insights. Whether the U.S. military chooses to learn these lessons, though, is another question for which we cannot yet know the answer.

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Raphael S. Cohen is director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program at RAND Project AIR FORCE. Gian Gentile is deputy director of the RAND Army Research Division.

Image: Israeli Defense Force

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Raphael S. Cohen · October 23, 2023

3. China stealing technology secrets -- from AI to computing and biology, "Five Eyes" intelligence leaders warn

Video at the link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-stealing-technology-secrets-five-eyes-intelligence-leaders-warn-60-minutes-transcript/?utm

Excerpt:

Scott Pelley: You seem to be saying that the Chinese government is running a criminal enterprise.

Christopher Wray: Well, I would say the Chinese government, if they want to be a great nation, it's time for them to start acting like one. And that includes abiding by its own commitments not to steal innovation. That includes not exporting repression to other countries. That includes working with all of our countries and all the other countries that we work with all the time who have common threats, like cybercrime, fentanyl trafficking, money laundering. It means not working with criminals but rather working to uphold the rule of law.

China stealing technology secrets -- from AI to computing and biology, "Five Eyes" intelligence leaders warn

CBS News · by Scott Pelley

War in the Middle East has the FBI tracking more potential threats of terrorism in the United States. Tonight, the bureau's director, Christopher Wray, tells us his main concern is not an organized attack but lone actors inspired by the violence. We met Wray, Wednesday, for an unprecedented interview that included him and the intelligence directors of our english-speaking allies. Together, they know more about the threats in the world than perhaps anyone. They're known as the Five Eyes and they have never appeared in an interview together. They're doing it now because they're alarmed by China which they say is the greatest espionage threat democracy has ever faced. But given the war, we'll begin with FBI Director Wray on the threat of terror at home.

Christopher Wray: We have seen an increase in reported threats but vigilance is heightened right now just because of the fluid and volatile environment in the Middle East and the ways in which that could spin out in the U.S.

By the time we had gathered for our interview, it had already 'spun out in the United States.' In Illinois, a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death by a man enraged by the attack on Israel.

Scott Pelley: How do you stop that kind of thing?

Christopher Wray: The key that we found in stopping it more and more is trying to have the right eyes and ears out in the community. And so, what we need to have are people in the community. When they see something starting to go awry, calling law enforcement. And the attacks that we've been able to prevent over the years have almost always included somebody who's made that phone call. And the attacks that haven't been prevented have almost always had somebody who had that information, but for one reason or another, didn't make that phone call.

Five Eyes intelligence leaders 60 Minutes

About 30 Americans were killed in the Hamas Attack. Two American hostages were released Friday, which left 10 still missing. Sources tell us it's unclear how many of them may be hostages. Israel leads the hostage effort. The FBI is prepared to help.

Christopher Wray: We're gonna work closely with our partners, our Israeli partners, our U.S. embassy partners, the whole U.S. government to do whatever we can to ensure that those hostages come out safe. But make no mistake, this is a dangerous time.

We met Chris Wray with his fellow intelligence chiefs of the so-called "Five Eyes" -- from the left, Mike Burgess of Australia, David Vigneault of Canada, Ken McCallum of the United Kingdom and, at far right, Andrew Hampton of New Zealand. The "Five Eyes" alliance was formed after World War II to gather intelligence. But this was their first public appearance ever and they did it in Palo Alto, California, Silicon Valley, to make this point— the technology secrets that are about to change the world, in artificial intelligence, biology and computing are falling into the wrong hands — stolen — in a global espionage campaign by China.

Christopher Wray: The People's Republic of China represents the defining threat of this generation this era. There is no country that presents a broader, more comprehensive threat to our ideas, our-- our innovation, our economic security, and ultimately our national security. We have seen efforts by the Chinese government, directly or indirectly, trying to steal intellectual property, trade secrets, personal data-- all across the country. We're talking everything from Fortune 100 companies, all to smaller startups. We're talking about agriculture, biotech, health care, robotics, aviation, academic research. We probably have somewhere in the order of 2,000 active investigations that are just related to the Chinese government's effort to steal information.

Scott Pelley: But all countries spy.

Mike Burgess of Australia.

Mike Burgess: Yes, absolutely, all countries spy. Our countries spy. All governments have a need to be covertly informed. All countries seek strategic advantage. But the behavior we're talking about here goes well beyond traditional espionage. This scale of the theft is unprecedented in human history. And that's why we're calling it out.

Mike Burgess of Australia 60 Minutes

They were 'calling it out' this past week in private meetings with 15 top Silicon Valley executives and Stanford University.

Ken McCallum: This is not just about government secrets or military secrets. It's not even just about critical infrastructure. It's about academic research in our universities. It's about promising startup companies. People, in short, who probably don't think national security is about them.

Ken McCallum is director general of MI5, the U.K.'s FBI.

Ken McCallum: So we see the theft happening in a range of ways. One is that we see employees within those companies being manipulated. Often, in the first instance, they are not aware of what is happening. We have seen, for example, the use of professional networking sites to reach out in sort of masked, disguised ways to people in the U.K., either who have security clearance or who are working in interesting areas of technology. We've now seen over 20,000 examples of that kind of disguised approach to people in the U.K. who have information that the Chinese State wishes to get its hands on.

Christopher Wray: You have the biggest hacking program in the world by far, bigger than ever other major nation combined. Stolen more of our personal and corporate data than every nation, big or small, combined.

Scott Pelley: Are you saying that it is a threat to the way of life of democracies?

Christopher Wray: It is-- a threat to our way of life in a number of ways. The first is that when people talk about stealing innovation or intellectual property, that's not just a Wall Street problem. That's a Main Street problem. That means American jobs, American families, American livelihoods, and the same thing for every one of our five countries, directly impacted by that theft. It's not some abstract concept. It has flesh and blood, kitchen-table consequences.

Here's one example. When China stole the technology secrets of one American wind turbine company, the company lost its competitive advantage, sales collapsed and it laid off nearly 700 workers.

Scott Pelley: When you encounter a company that isn't sure that it wants to cooperate with you, what do you tell them?

Ken McCallum is director general of MI5, the U.K.'s FBI. 60 Minutes

Ken McCallum: I would say that if you are operating at the cutting edge of tech in this decade, you may not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you. And you would be reckless, not just with my secrets but with your own company's viability, with your shareholders' capital if you didn't think about what that means.

Christopher Wray: We all came into these meetings with the mindset of we want to figure out how we can better help protect you, your innovation, your intellectual property. They all came into the conversations with ideas of ways they can help us help them.

The intelligence chiefs told us Chinese companies are overseen by the Communist Party and, for many, espionage is a sideline on behalf of the PRC, the People's Republic of China.

Scott Pelley: Is the Chinese government building industrial sites in your countries that are actually covers for espionage operations?

David Vigneault of Canada.

David Vigneault: We have seen in the past, acquisition of land, acquisition of different companies where you, when you start to dig a little bit further, you realize that it's, there is another intent. And we have seen and blocked attempt by the PRC to acquire locations near sensitive, strategic assets of the country where we knew that the ultimate purpose was for spying operations.

David Vigneault of Canada 60 Minutes

Scott Pelley: And Director Wray, have you seen that in the United States?

Christopher Wray: We've seen a variety of efforts by Chinese businesses, in some cases state-owned enterprises, in some cases ostensibly private companies-- attempting to acquire businesses, land, infrastructure, what have you, in the United States in a way that presents national security concerns.

Including investigations, recently of Chinese companies purchasing land and building plants near U.S. military bases.

Christopher Wray: We welcome business with China, visitors from China, academic exchange. What we don't welcome is cheating, and theft, and repression.

Political repression is another target of the Five Eyes. They told us they're fighting China's meddling in elections and violence aimed at silencing Chinese dissidents living in their countries.

Christopher Wray 60 Minutes

Christopher Wray: We had a case that we-- that was indicted not that long ago where there was-- an actual congressional candidate who was very critical of the Chinese government. the efforts were initially to try to see if they could come up with dirt on the candidate to derail his candidacy. And then to try to concoct dirt, just fiction-- about the candidate. And then, if that didn't work, there was even discussion about the candidate befalling a horrible accident.

That candidate was Yan Xiong, a Chinese American who served in the U.S. military and protested China's crackdown on Hong Kong. Last year he lost the Democratic nomination in a New York congressional race. In court filings, prosecutors say a Chinese agent hired an American private investigator to discredit Yan, and left the investigator a voicemail saying, "…violence would be fine…beat him until he cannot run for election."

Scott Pelley: Is that the threat of violence in the United States that we face from the Chinese government?

Christopher Wray: We have seen over and over again efforts to really stop at almost nothing to intimidate people who would have the audacity here in the United States where we have freedom of speech to express criticism of the regime.

Scott Pelley: While we have the allies around the same table, let me ask this question. The catastrophe in the Middle East, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Chinese espionage on a scale that's never been seen before, are all of you stretched too thin?

Andrew Hampton: I think one of the strengths of the Five Eyes partnership is that we share some really fundamental values as countries and as agencies.

Andrew Hampton of New Zealand.

Andrew Hampton: Part of how you respond to that is by working together as like-minded countries. Part of how you respond to it is partnering across our own countries, as we've talked about, with community groups, with the private sector they're our biggest strengths.

Andrew Hampton of New Zealand 60 Minutes

For its part, China said this about the Five Eyes point of view: "We firmly oppose the groundless allegations and smears toward China..."

MI5's Ken McCallum told us never in his nearly 30 years in intelligence has the threat been so complex-- Iran, Russia, terrorism, but it was China that was the first to get the Five Eyes around this table—and before the eyes of the public.

Christopher Wray: I mean, essentially what you have with the Chinese government is the autocracy and oppressive regime of-- you know, East Germany combined with the cutting edge technology of Silicon Valley. And the combination represents a daunting first of its kind threat for the United States and for our allies.

Scott Pelley: You seem to be saying that the Chinese government is running a criminal enterprise.

Christopher Wray: Well, I would say the Chinese government, if they want to be a great nation, it's time for them to start acting like one. And that includes abiding by its own commitments not to steal innovation. That includes not exporting repression to other countries. That includes working with all of our countries and all the other countries that we work with all the time who have common threats, like cybercrime, fentanyl trafficking, money laundering. It means not working with criminals but rather working to uphold the rule of law.

Produced by Aaron Weisz. Associate producer, Ian Flickinger. Broadcast associate, Michelle Karim. Edited by April Wilson.

4. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 22, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-22-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces are funneling additional forces to the Avdiivka front despite ongoing challenges with frontal mechanized assaults and the failure of a renewed push on October 19-20.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 22.
• Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on October 22.
• The nationalist pro-war Russian information space is reckoning with the possibility of a major demographic decline by weaponizing anti-migrant rhetoric.
• A prominent Russian milblogger and frontline commander criticized Russian top-down censorship campaigns.
• Deceased Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin's ideological and rhetorical campaign against the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has largely become decoupled from the issue of the Wagner Group and appears to have outlived Prigozhin himself.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced in some areas on October 22.
• Russian authorities are intensifying mobilization efforts targeting Central Asian migrant communities.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to use cultural and education programs to forcibly Russify Ukrainian children.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 22, 2023

Oct 22, 2023 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 22, 2023

Karolina Hird, Angelica Evans, Christina Harward, Riley Bailey, and Mason Clark

October 22, 2023, 4:45pm ET 

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

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 12:30pm ET on October 22. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the October 23 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian forces are funneling additional forces to the Avdiivka front despite ongoing challenges with frontal mechanized assaults and the failure of a renewed push on October 19-20. Several Russian milbloggers claimed that there were no significant changes along the front in the Avdiivka direction on October 22.[1] Russian forces are likely once again pausing following a failed major push which suffered heavy losses. A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces “unexpectedly” counterattacked in the direction of Pisky (8km southwest of Donetsk City) and pushed Russian forces from positions in the area. Another milblogger stated that claims of Ukrainian advances near Pisky and Opytne (4km south of Avdiivka) are false.[2] Another Russian source allegedly serving in the Avdiivka direction claimed that Ukrainian forces did not conduct counterattacks in his unspecified sector of the front.[3] Geolocated footage published on October 21 indicates that Russian forces recently made marginal advances southeast of Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka).[4] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces have not completely cleared the Avdiivka waste heap area and that the area is currently a contested “gray zone.”[5]

A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger discussed difficulties that may be contributing to a “positional deadlock” for Russian offensive operations in the Avdiivka direction as of October 22.[6] The milblogger claimed that it is difficult to conduct maneuver warfare on a static front line with a large number of personnel and fortified areas on both sides. The milblogger noted that Ukrainian drones and other precision weapons have made armored vehicles increasingly vulnerable and have made ground attacks increasingly difficult. The milblogger also noted that Russian forces are facing difficulties in overcoming Ukrainian minefields near Avdiivka and are unable to completely destroy Ukrainian logistics, allowing the Ukrainian command to quickly transfer personnel to critical areas. Russian sources have previously claimed that Ukrainian defensive fortifications pose a significant challenge to Russian advances around Avdiivka.[7] These challenges are highly similar to those faced by Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine in the initial weeks of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive in June 2023. However, it remains to be seen if Russian forces have the capabilities and flexibility to adapt in some manner, as Ukrainian forces did following early setbacks in June 2023.

Ukrainian sources stated that Russian forces continue to transfer personnel to the Avdiivka direction to support offensive efforts despite heavy losses. Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Oleksandr Shtupun stated that the Russian military is deploying personnel from Russian territory directly to the Avdiivka direction to replace personnel losses.[8] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that the Russian military command has recently transferred several Russian regiments comprised of mobilized personnel to the Avdiivka direction, indicating that Russia likely does not plan to abandon operations in this direction.[9] Mashovets noted that the Russian military also transferred elements of the 57th Motorized Rifle Regiment (6th Motorized Rifle Division, 3rd Army Corps, Western Military District) to the Spartak-Yakolivka-Minerale-Kashtanove area (4km south to 5km southeast of Avdiivka).

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops continue offensive actions south of Bakhmut and in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) directions.[10] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Oleksandr Shtupun noted that Ukrainian forces maintained offensive pressure in western Zaporizhia Oblast despite active Russian hostilities in the Avdiivka direction.[11]

Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on October 22. Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces launched eight S-300 missiles, a Kh-59 missile, three Shahed-131/136 drones, and two drones of an unspecified type at targets in Ukraine and that Ukrainian air defenses destroyed the three Shahed drones and the Kh-59 missile.[12] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces struck the “Nova Poshta” terminal near Kharkiv City as well as Kostyantynivka, Donetsk Oblast with S-300 missiles.[13] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat specified that reports about drones of an unspecified type refer to makeshift Russian drones constructed from simple materials, which include engines acquired from AliExpress.[14]

The nationalist pro-war Russian information space is reckoning with the possibility of a major demographic decline by weaponizing anti-migrant rhetoric. The Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) published a new demographic forecast for the Russian Federation on October 20 that predicts that Russia's population will decrease to 138.77 million people by January 1, 2046.[15] Rosstat estimated that the rate of natural population decline will exceed 600,000 people per year between 2024-2032 but will slow to 400,000 people per year from 2032-2046.[16] Several Russian commentators seized on these statistics and warned that they portend “demographic catastrophe” if restorative measures are not undertaken immediately.[17] One Russian source blamed Russia’s declining population on migrants and called for ethnic Russians to immediately increase the national birthrate, as well as to automate many production systems to replace migrant labor.[18] ISW has previously reported on instances of vocal Russian nationalist enclaves within the pro-war information space amplifying anti-migrant rhetoric to explain away and try to remedy reports of Russian demographic transitions.[19] Such rhetoric is particularly noteworthy as the Russian force generation apparatus is increasingly exploiting migrant and other ethnic minority communities as a mobilization resource, which ISW outlines in the force generation section of today’s update.[20]

A prominent Russian milblogger and frontline commander criticized Russian top-down censorship campaigns. Russian “Vostok” Battalion Commander Alexander Khodakovsky claimed on October 22 that many Russians are dissatisfied with official reports and summaries about the war in Ukraine and urged Russian officials to report honestly about the frontline to garner wider public support.[21] Khodakovsky, who has consistently complained about problems affecting Russian combat operations, claimed that all of his statements are “inspected with increased scrutiny” given his official status.[22] Khodakovsky argued that one can “install filters on the central media” but cannot make people think a certain way.[23] Khodakovsky claimed that unspecified actors who are “embarrassed” by his statements are pushing Rosgvardia to take action against him for his criticisms.[24] Khodakovsky was appointed the deputy head of the Main Directorate of Rosgvardia in occupied Donetsk Oblast in February 2023 and commands Rosgvardia’s special rapid response and riot police (OMON and SOBR) in occupied Donetsk Oblast.[25] Khodakovsky‘s claim, if true, indicates that some actors may be trying to leverage Rosgvardia's likely concern about potential repercussions for Khodakovsky’s increasingly vocal criticisms, which have become more conspicuous as other Russian milbloggers engage in greater self-censorship over fears of running afoul of Russian authorities.[26]

Deceased Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin's ideological and rhetorical campaign against the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has largely become decoupled from the issue of the Wagner Group and appears to have outlived Prigozhin himself. Russian lawyer Kirill Kachur, whom the Russian Investigative Committee charged in absentia for embezzlement and bribery in 2022, claimed on October 22 that Prigozhin filed applications to the Russian Investigative Committee to initiate a criminal case against Russian Defense Minister Army General Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov for the “genocide of the Russian people, the murder to tens of thousands of Russian citizens, and the transfer of Russian territories to the enemy” before Wagner’s June 24 armed rebellion.[27] Kachur appealed to Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin to publicly address what has happened to these applications since Prigozhin’s death and concluded that Russians who support Prigozhin and his message should coalesce around the ideological principles Prigozhin espoused and push for the restoration of justice in Russian society.[28] Kachur’s invocation of Prigozhin’s ideological opposition to the Russian MoD suggests that the intense dislike for and disapproval of the MoD has outlived Prigozhin, even as the Wagner Group has disbanded as a centralized entity. A select camp within the Russian information space that aligns itself with Prigozhin’s hyper-nationalist pro-war, yet anti-MoD ideology will likely continue to launch informational critiques on the MoD and the Russian military command as the war continues.

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces are funneling additional forces to the Avdiivka front despite ongoing challenges with frontal mechanized assaults and the failure of a renewed push on October 19-20.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 22.
• Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on October 22.
• The nationalist pro-war Russian information space is reckoning with the possibility of a major demographic decline by weaponizing anti-migrant rhetoric.
• A prominent Russian milblogger and frontline commander criticized Russian top-down censorship campaigns.
• Deceased Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin's ideological and rhetorical campaign against the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has largely become decoupled from the issue of the Wagner Group and appears to have outlived Prigozhin himself.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced in some areas on October 22.
• Russian authorities are intensifying mobilization efforts targeting Central Asian migrant communities.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to use cultural and education programs to forcibly Russify Ukrainian children.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line and made confirmed advances. Geolocated footage posted on October 22 indicates that Russian forces advanced southwest of Pershotravneve (21km northeast of Kupyansk), southwest of Yahidne (22km southeast of Kupyansk), and east of Terny (17km west of Kreminna).[29] A Russian news aggregator claimed on October 21 that Russian forces achieved unspecified success in the Serebryanske forest area (10km southwest of Kremmina).[30] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on October 22 that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk), Ivanivka (20km southeast of Kupyansk), Nadiya (15km west of Svatove), Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna), the Serebryanske forest area (10km southwest of Kreminna), and Spirne (25km south of Kreminna).[31] A Russian milblogger claimed that the Russian MoD recently implied that Russian forces have gone on the defensive in the Kupyansk direction and near Torske (15km west of Kreminna), although ISW has not observed evidence of this claim.[32] Ukrainian military observer Konstantyn Mashovets reported that Russian forces temporarily halted offensive operations near Ivanivka in order to respond to reported Ukrainian advances towards Orlyanka (22km east of Kupyansk).[33] Mashovets reported that elements of the Russian 2nd Motorized Rifle Division (1st Tank Army, Western Military District) have reinforced Russian forces in the Kupyansk direction, and a Russian milblogger also claimed that elements of the Russian 1st Tank Army are repelling Ukrainian counterattacks in this direction.[34] Ukrainian Ground Forces Command Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Volodymyr Fityo stated that Russian forces are transferring reserves consisting mostly of Storm-Z convict recruits to the Kupyansk and Lyman directions.[35]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line but did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Synkivka, Ivanivka, Nadiya, Torske, the Serebryanske forest area, and Dibrova (7km southwest of Kreminna).[36] A Russian news aggregator claimed on October 21 that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Synkivka and Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna).[37]

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

Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks near Bakhmut on October 22 and reportedly advanced. Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that Ukrainian forces are intensifying their operations along the Bakhmut-Horlivka railway line and claimed that Ukrainian forces crossed the railway line north of Zelonopillya (12km southwest of Bakhmut).[38] The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Bohdanivka (5km northwest of Bakhmut) and Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[39] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces continued attempts to cross the railway along the Klishchiivka-Andriivka (7-10km southwest of Bakhmut) line on October 21 and 22.[40]

Russian forces continued ground attacks near Bakhmut on October 22 but did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Vasyukivka (16km north of Bakhmut), Bohdanivka, Khromove (immediately west of Bakhmut), Andriivka, and Druzhba (18km southwest of Bakhmut).[41] Ukrainian Ground Forces Command Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Volodymyr Fityo stated that Russian forces also attacked near Klishchiivka.[42] Mashovets stated that Russian forces, particularly elements of the 200th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (14th Army Corps, Northern Fleet) and the 331st Guards Airborne (VDV) Regiment (98th VDV Division), intensified activity in the direction of Bohdanivka, Yahidne (directly north of Bakhmut), and Khromove over the last few days.[43] Mashovets added that elements of the Russian 4th Motorized Rifle Brigade (Luhansk People‘s Republic [LNR] 2nd Army Corps) and 83rd Guards Air Assault (VDV) Brigade are counterattacking near Klishchiivka and Zaitseve (6km southeast of Bakhmut).[44] The Russian MoD published footage on October 22 claiming to show elements of the Russian 98th VDV Division operating on the northwestern outskirts of Bakhmut.[45]

Russian forces continued ground attacks near Avdiivka on October 22 and made a confirmed marginal advance south of Avdiivka. Geolocated footage published on October 21 indicates that Russian forces marginally advanced southeast of Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka).[46] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Keramik (10km northwest of Avdiivka), Stepove (3km northwest of Avdiivka), Avdiivka, Tonenke (5km west of Avdiivka), Opytne (3km southwest of Avdiivka), Nevelske, and Pervomaiske.[47] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also attacked near Novokalynove (7km north of Avdiivka) and advanced near Stepove.[48] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that elements of the 9th Motorized Rifle Brigade and 110th Motorized Rifle Brigade (both units of the Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] 1st Army Corps) unsuccessfully attacked in the Vodyane-Tonenke (5-7km southwest of Avdiivka), Vodyane-Netaylove (5-14km souhtwest of Avdiivka), and Pisky-Pervomaiske (8-11km southwest of Avdiivka) directions.[49]

Russian forces continued ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City on October 22 but did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled over 20 Russian attacks near Marinka, Krasnohorivka, and Pobieda (all on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City), Nevelske (directly west of Donetsk City), and Novomykhailivka (25km southwest of Donetsk City).[50] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Marinka and Novomykhailivka.[51]

Ukrainian forces did not conduct any claimed or confirmed ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City on October 22.

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

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts on October 22 and advanced. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces made marginal advances near Novodonetske (12km southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[52] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces continued attempts to occupy heights between Pryyutne (14km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) and Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) but did not specify an outcome.[53]

Russian forces conducted ground attacks in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on October 22 but did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Prechystivka (17km southeast of Velyka Novosilka), Zolota Nyva (11km southeast of Velyka Novosilka), Staromayorske, and Pryyutne.[54] Russian sources claimed on October 21 and 22 that Russian forces advanced near Pryyutne.[55] A Russian milblogger claimed on October 22 that Russian forces also counterattacked near Poltavka (28km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) and characterized the area as a new direction for Russian offensive actions.[56]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 22 but did not make any confirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) direction.[57] Russian sources, including the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Robotyne, Novoprokopivka (3km south of Robotyne), and Verbove (9km west of Robotyne).[58] A Russian milblogger claimed that small Ukrainian groups are conducting reconnaissance-in-force operations near Verbove.[59]

Russian forces counterattacked in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 22 but did not make any confirmed or claimed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Robotyne and Verbove.[60] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian Airborne (VDV) elements conducted successful counterattacks in an unspecified location in the Robotyne area.[61] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the 83rd Guards VDV Brigade is operating along the Myrne-Nesteryanka line (up to 12km northwest of Robotyne).[62]

Ukrainian forces reportedly maintain positions on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast as of October 22. Russian sources continue to claim that Ukrainian forces are operating in Krynky (30km northeast of Kherson City and 2km from the Dnipro River) and that fighting is ongoing near the settlement.[63] One Russian milblogger claimed that fighting is ongoing near Pishchanivka (13km southeast of Kherson City and 3km from the Dnipro River), although no other Russian source has made claims about fighting near Pishchanivka since October 19.[64] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that Ukrainian forces expanded their presence on the east bank and control positions from the Dnipro shoreline to the upper Konka River, although available visual evidence so far indicates that Ukrainian forces have a smaller presence on the east bank.[65] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced up to 5km between Oleshky (7km south of Kherson City and 4km from the Dnipro River) and Kozachi Laheri (22km east of Kherson City and 3km from the Dnipro River) after launching a larger-than-usual ground activity on the east bank on the night of October 17 to 18 but that Russian forces later pushed Ukrainian forces out of these positions.[66] The Russian MoD claimed on October 22 that Russian forces prevented Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups from crossing the Dnipro River near Prydniprovske (8km east of Kherson City), Tyahinka (30km east of Kherson City), and Krynky.[67] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Russian 70th Motorized Rifle Division (reportedly of the 18th Combined Arms Army), 810th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet), 177th Separate Naval Infantry Regiment (Caspian Flotilla), 126th Separate Coast Guard Brigade (22nd Army Corps, Black Sea Fleet), 8th Artillery Regiment (22nd Army Corps, Black Sea Fleet), and 127th Separate Reconnaissance Brigade (22nd Army Corps, Black Sea Fleet) are currently defending on the east bank.[68]

Russian forces continue to conduct a high number of airstrikes against targets on the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast as of October 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian aviation conducted airstrikes near Olhivka, Lviv, Tyahinka, Tokarivka, Ponyativka, and Barvinok in Kherson Oblast.[69] Kherson Oblast Military Administration head Oleksandr Prokudin reported that Russian aviation launched 12 glide bombs against settlements on the west bank on October 22.[70] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces launched 36 glide bombs over the past day.[71]

A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces launched an unspecified number of S-200 missiles at occupied Sevastopol on October 22.[72] Other Russian sources did not comment on the reported launches, but Russian Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir service Idel Realii reported that Russian authorities temporarily closed the Kerch Strait Bridge to traffic.[73] Occupied Sevastopol governor Mikhail Razvozhavev amplified air alert sirens for Sevastopol but did not comment on what activity the sirens were connected to.[74]

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

Russian authorities are intensifying mobilization efforts targeting Central Asian migrant communities. Russian opposition outlets reported on October 22 that Russian riot police conducted a raid on a mosque in Kotelniki, Moscow Oblast on October 20, detained several dozen worshippers, took them on buses to military registration and enlistment offices, and forced them to sign military service contracts.[75] Russian singer and TV show finalist Mamut Useinov stated that he was among the detainees and reported that Russian authorities threatened him and other detainees with imprisonment if they did not sign one-year military service contracts.[76] Useinov stated that authorities told the detainees that they would fight in Ukraine but did not specify a timeline for their deployment.[77] A Russian insider source relatedly claimed on October 22 that the Russian command sent an order to all departments of the Main Directorate of the Investigative Committee to “identify naturalized citizens of the Russian Federation who arrived from Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries and are evading military service” and demanded that the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) provide lists of the names and addresses of naturalized citizens from CIS states.[78] The insider source noted that the Investigative Committee and police are raiding hostels, apartments, catering units, and mosques using these lists and taking detainees straight to military registration offices.[79] Several Russian sources praised the raid, underlining intense xenophobic sentiment towards Central Asian migrants, and claimed that naturalized migrants have a duty to serve Russia.[80] Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin has notably pushed for the targeted mobilization of migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus, claiming that migrants have a "constitutional responsibility to protect the country that received them."[81]

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

Russian occupation authorities continue to use cultural and education programs to forcibly Russify Ukrainian children. Zaporizhia occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky stated on October 22 that 200 children from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast returned from a trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg with the "Cultural Map 4+85" program.[82] Balitsky claimed that over 2,500 children from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast will have participated in such cultural-educational programming by the end of 2023.[83] The "Cultural Map 4+85" program began in August of 2023 and operates under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Culture, which claimed that up to 10,000 children from occupied Zaporizhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts will take part in the program and visit Russian cultural sites.[84] Such programs appear to target school-aged children and teenagers and likely intend to Russify them while actively distancing them from their Ukrainian identities.

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Nothing significant to report.

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

Satellite imagery indicates that Russian forces are expanding facilities in Belarus to store previously reported nuclear weapon deployments to Belarus. The Wall Street Journal published satellite imagery on October 18 showing the construction of a hangar near Asipovichy meant to house Iskander cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.[85] The Wall Street Journal also reported that satellite imagery from the area shows the construction of facilities typical for Russian nuclear weapons warehouses.[86] ISW has repeatedly assessed and continues to assess that the forward deployment of these nuclear weapons will not critically change the Russian threat to NATO, and any Russian use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine remains extremely unlikely.[87]

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

5. Iran Update, October 22, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations:  https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-22-2023

Key Takeaways:

1. Palestinian militias continued attacks at their usual rate from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Palestinian militias increased their targeting of the Israel Defense Forces in these attacks, likely as part of their preparations to defend against a possible Israeli ground operation.
2. Clashes between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces in the West Bank dropped by roughly half.
3. Iranian-backed militants, including Lebanese Hezbollah, conducted 17 attacks as part of an ongoing attack campaign against Israeli forces and assets.
4. Iranian leaders have reached a consensus approving limited cross-border Lebanese Hezbollah attacks into Israel, according to Reuters. This report and others indicate that Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah are coordinating a carefully calibrated escalation to draw Israeli attention away from the Gaza Strip.
5. The Israel Defense Forces Air Force conducted airstrikes on the Damascus and Aleppo international airport runways. The Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry indicated that the airstrikes in Syria are part of an Israeli effort to prevent Iran from moving weapons into Syria and/or opening a front against Israel from there.
6. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Commander Brigadier General Esmail Ghaani arrived in Syria to monitor Iranian-backed militias on the Israel-Syria border, according to Israeli media. Ghaani previously warned Syrian President Bashar al Assad that Iran intends to use Syria as a second front if the war expands.
7. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—conducted a one-way drone attack on US forces at Ain al Asad air base in Iraq, marking the fifth consecutive day of attacks targeting US forces in the Middle East. These attacks are part of the Iranian-led effort to deter the United States from providing meaningful support to Israel.
8. The Houthi prime minister said that the Houthis will target Israeli ships in the Red Sea if Israel continues operations in the Gaza Strip after meeting with Palestinian militia officials in Sanaa, Yemen.

IRAN UPDATE, OCTOBER 22, 2023

Oct 22, 2023 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, October 22, 2023

Brian Carter, Andie Parry, Amin Soltani, and Nicholas Carl 

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. For more on developments in Iran and the region, see our interactive map of Iran and the Middle East.

Note: CTP and ISW have refocused the update to cover the Israel-Hamas war. The new sections address developments in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as noteworthy activity from Iran’s Axis of Resistance. We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Key Takeaways:

1. Palestinian militias continued attacks at their usual rate from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Palestinian militias increased their targeting of the Israel Defense Forces in these attacks, likely as part of their preparations to defend against a possible Israeli ground operation.
2. Clashes between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces in the West Bank dropped by roughly half.
3. Iranian-backed militants, including Lebanese Hezbollah, conducted 17 attacks as part of an ongoing attack campaign against Israeli forces and assets.
4. Iranian leaders have reached a consensus approving limited cross-border Lebanese Hezbollah attacks into Israel, according to Reuters. This report and others indicate that Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah are coordinating a carefully calibrated escalation to draw Israeli attention away from the Gaza Strip.
5. The Israel Defense Forces Air Force conducted airstrikes on the Damascus and Aleppo international airport runways. The Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry indicated that the airstrikes in Syria are part of an Israeli effort to prevent Iran from moving weapons into Syria and/or opening a front against Israel from there.
6. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Commander Brigadier General Esmail Ghaani arrived in Syria to monitor Iranian-backed militias on the Israel-Syria border, according to Israeli media. Ghaani previously warned Syrian President Bashar al Assad that Iran intends to use Syria as a second front if the war expands.
7. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—conducted a one-way drone attack on US forces at Ain al Asad air base in Iraq, marking the fifth consecutive day of attacks targeting US forces in the Middle East. These attacks are part of the Iranian-led effort to deter the United States from providing meaningful support to Israel.
8. The Houthi prime minister said that the Houthis will target Israeli ships in the Red Sea if Israel continues operations in the Gaza Strip after meeting with Palestinian militia officials in Sanaa, Yemen.

Gaza Strip

Palestinian militias continued attacks at their usual rate from the Gaza Strip into Israel on October 22. The al Qassem Brigades—Hamas’ militant wing—claimed responsibility for 12 direct and indirect fire attacks.[1] Saraya al Quds—the militant wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—claimed responsibility for another three rocket attacks.[2] This rate of attacks is consistent with the rate that CTP-ISW has observed in recent days.

Palestinian militias in the Gaza Strip increased their targeting of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), likely as part of their preparations to defend against a possible Israeli ground operation. Palestinian militias targeted a greater proportion of military targets relative to their overall attacks than at any point since October 18, when the militias targeted IDF positions near the Gaza Strip 15 times.[3] Palestinian militias launched eight direct and indirect fire attacks targeting the IDF on October 22.[4] They also fired mortars and rockets targeting Israeli cities and towns seven times. Al Qassem Brigades fighters separately killed one Israeli soldier and wounded three others during a firefight within the Gaza Strip.[5] The IDF said that the Israeli forces were searching for the bodies of missing Israelis and preparing for Israel’s ground operation.[6]

Recorded reports of rocket attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Recorded reports of rocket attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

West Bank

Clashes between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces in the West Bank dropped by roughly half on October 22.[7] CTP-ISW recorded nine distinct clashes.[8] Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade fighters clashed with Israeli forces in Qabatiya, close to Jenin, on October 22. The al Aqsa Martyrs‘ Brigade fighters used small arms and improvised explosive devices (IED) against Israeli forces.[9]

CTP-ISW recorded only two demonstrations in the West Bank on October 22, which is consistent with the number of demonstrations on October 21.[10] Hamas’ calls for protests in support of the Gaza Strip across the world did not generate increased protests in the West Bank.[11]

Israeli forces continued raids and arrests in the West Bank, arresting at least 46 Palestinians, including 27 active Hamas members and two PIJ military leaders, south of Jenin on October 22.[12]

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and marches in the West Bank.

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Iranian-backed militants, including Lebanese Hezbollah (LH), conducted 17 attacks as part of an ongoing attack campaign against IDF forces and assets on October 22.[13] These attacks are consistent with the increased rate of Iranian-backed attacks into Israel since October 15. This campaign creates opportunities for additional Iranian-backed ground attacks into Israel and increases the risk of further escalation, as CTP-ISW previously noted.[14] LH militants fired surface-to-air missiles at an IDF helicopter, marking the first use of air defense in Lebanon against the IDF since the start of the war.[15] The IDF intercepted a drone crossing from Lebanon into Israel—the first attempted drone infiltration from Lebanon since October 20.[16] The majority of attacks from Lebanon used anti-tank guided missiles against IDF forces and positions.[17] Israeli forces struck five ATGM squads in southern Lebanon on October 22.[18]  

The Israeli Defense Ministry expanded the civilian evacuation zone along the Israel-Lebanon border to encompass 14 additional towns.[19] Israel previously evacuated towns within two kilometers of the border.[20]

Several Iranian-backed militias are participating in the attack campaign against Israeli forces from southern Lebanon. The al Qassem Brigades fired multiple barrages of rockets at northern Israeli towns on October 15 and 19.[21] Saraya al Quds claimed four of its fighters have died in southern Lebanon since October 7.[22] LH has almost certainly approved these attacks given the extent to which LH controls southern Lebanon and coordinates with the other Iranian-backed groups operating there.

Iranian leaders have reached a consensus approving limited cross-border LH attacks into Israel, according to Reuters.[23] Two LH-affiliated individuals also told Reuters that the LH military activity around northern Israel is meant to ”keep Israeli forces busy but not open a major new front.” CTP-ISW cannot verify the accuracy of this report. It is consistent, however, with the IDF spokesperson stating that Iran has instructed LH to escalate against Israel and thereby impose pressure on the IDF while it prepares for ground operations into the Gaza Strip.[24] These reports indicate that Iran and LH are coordinating a carefully calibrated escalation to draw Israeli attention away from the Gaza Strip.

The IDF Air Force conducted airstrikes on the Damascus and Aleppo international airport runways on October 22.[25] Israel previously conducted multiple airstrikes on Damascus and Aleppo international airports on October 12 and 14, disrupting critical nodes through which Iran funnels military equipment and personnel into the Levant.[26] A senior official at the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry indicated that the airstrikes in Syria are part of an Israeli effort to prevent Iran from moving weapons into Syria and/or opening a front against Israel from there.[27] The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has long used commercial airliners affiliated with the Iranian regime for military transports to Syria throughout the civil war there.

Unidentified militants conducted an indirect fire attack into the Golan Heights following the IDF airstrikes on the Damascus and Aleppo international airports, possibly as symbolic retaliation. Israeli forces intercepted the fire.[28] This is a consistent response pattern to Israeli airstrikes into Syria since the war began. Unidentified militants launched indirect fire into the Golan Heights following the previous airstrikes.[29]

IRGC Quds Force Commander Brigadier General Esmail Ghaani arrived in Syria on October 21 to monitor Iranian-backed militias on the Israel-Syria border, according to Israeli media.[30] CTP-ISW cannot independently verify this report. Iranian-backed militias have concentrated in southern Lebanon and southwestern Syria in recent days as part of Iran-led preparations for the war to expand into a regional conflict.[31] An Iranian state-affiliated journalist previously claimed that Ghaani warned Syrian President Bashar al Assad on October 15 that Iran intends to use Syria as a second front if the Israel-Hamas war expands.[32] An unspecified Iranian intelligence official claimed that Iran would start a ”limited” ground operation from Syria into the Golan Heights and notably not from Lebanon if the situation escalates to protect LH.[33]

The rhetoric of the Lebanese prime minister and foreign minister diverged on the issue of Lebanon’s possible future involvement in the Israel-Hamas war. Prime Minister Najib Mikati expressed concern but indicated that the situation is returning to normal and that the Lebanese government is making every effort to keep harm away from Lebanon.[34] Lebanese Foreign Affairs Minister Abdallah Bou Habib contrastingly expressed concern about the outbreak of war in southern Lebanon based on Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip during an interview with al Jazeera.[35] Bou Habib called for a ceasefire but warned that Israel will in the event of a larger war erupting suffer far more losses than it did in the 2006 Lebanon-Israel war.

Recorded reports of rocket attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

 Iran and Axis of Resistance

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—conducted a one-way drone attack on US forces at Ain al Asad air base in Iraq on October 22, marking the fifth consecutive day of attacks targeting US forces in the Middle East.[36] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed nine drone and rocket attacks targeting US forces in Iraq and Syria since October 18.[37]  Four of those attacks targeted the Ain al Asad air base.[38] These attacks are part of the Iranian-led effort to deter the United States from providing meaningful support to Israel, as CTP-ISW previously assessed.[39] Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah threatened additional attacks against US positions on October 20.[40]

The Houthi prime minister said on October 22 that the Houthis will target Israeli ships in the Red Sea if Israel continues operations in the Gaza Strip after meeting with Palestinian militia officials in Sanaa, Yemen on October 21.[41] The Houthi prime minister also acknowledged on October 22 that the United States intercepted Houthi drones and missiles headed toward Israel over the Red Sea on October 19.[42] He claimed that some of the missiles and drones still hit their targets.[43] CTP-ISW has not observed any indications of a Houthi drone or missile strike within Israel, however. The Houthi prime minister is a southern Yemeni.[44] He is not part of the Houthi Movement’s inner circle, which is almost exclusively made up of northern Yemenis.[45]

IRGC-affiliated media is conducting an information operation asserting that Israel does not care about Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip. Tasnim News Agency recirculated a Hamas claim that Hamas sought to transfer two hostages to Israel but that Israeli officials refused to accept their delivery on October 22.[46] Tasnim similarly claimed on October 21 that Israel’s “clandestine goal” is to “cause the killing of captive Israelis,” according to “informed sources.”[47] Tasnim published the article in both Persian and English, which suggests that the messaging is intended for both domestic and global audiences.

6. Israel strikes across Gaza after allowing another small aid convoy into the besieged enclave

Excerpts:

The military said Monday that it had struck 320 militant targets throughout Gaza over the last 24 hours. It said it had destroyed anti-tank positions and other targets that could endanger forces preparing for “a maneuver in the Gaza Strip,” an apparent reference to a ground operation.

Tensions are also high in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where over 90 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, mainly during violent protests and gunbattles during military arrest raids. Two Palestinians were shot dead during a raid into the Jalazone refugee camp early Monday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

Israel strikes across Gaza after allowing another small aid convoy into the besieged enclave

AP · October 23, 2023

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli warplanes struck targets across Gaza early Monday, including in areas where Palestinian civilians have been told to seek refuge, after another small aid shipment was allowed into the besieged Hamas-ruled territory.

Israel has still not allowed any fuel to enter Gaza, where there has been a power blackout for nearly two weeks. Hospitals say they are scrounging for generator fuel in order to keep operating life-saving medical equipment and incubators for premature babies.

Israel is widely expected to launch a ground offensive in Gaza following Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 rampage into southern Israeli communities. Tanks and troops have been massed at the Gaza border, and Israel says it has stepped up airstrikes in order to reduce the risk to troops in the next stages.

Fears of a widening war have grown as Israeli warplanes have struck targets in the occupied West Bank, Syria and Lebanon in recent days. It has frequently traded fire with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, which is armed with tens of thousands of rockets.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told troops in northern Israel on Sunday that if Hezbollah launches a war, “it will make the mistake of its life. We will cripple it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the consequences for it and the Lebanese state will be devastating.”

Hezbollah’s political movement is part of Lebanon’s fractious government, but its fighters operate outside the state’s control. Israel heavily bombed Beirut’s airport and civilian infrastructure during a 2006 war with Hezbollah. Israel is meanwhile evacuating some communities on its own side of the border.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Israeli forces had wiped out eight militant cells in Lebanon over the past 24 hours and more than 20 since the start of the war, without elaborating.

More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed — mostly civilians slain during the initial Hamas attack. At least 222 people were captured and dragged back to Gaza, including foreigners. Two Americans were released Friday, hours before the first shipment of humanitarian aid.

More than 4,600 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. That includes the disputed toll from a hospital explosion.

Israel has carried out limited ground forays into Gaza, and on Sunday, Hamas said it had destroyed an Israeli tank and two armored bulldozers inside the territory it has ruled since 2007. The Israeli military said a soldier was killed and three others were wounded by an anti-tank missile during a raid inside Gaza.

The military said the raid was part of efforts to rescue hostages abducted in the Oct. 7 attack. Hamas hopes to trade the captives for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

On Saturday, 20 trucks entered Gaza in the first aid shipment into the territory since Israel imposed a complete siege at the start of the war. Israel allowed a second convoy of 15 trucks into Gaza on Sunday. Both entered from Egypt through the Rafah crossing, the only way into Gaza not controlled by Israel.

COGAT, the Israeli defense body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, said the aid was allowed in at the request of the United States, and included water, food and medical supplies. It said Israel inspected everything before it entered Gaza.

In a Sunday phone call, Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden “affirmed that there will now be continued flow of this critical assistance into Gaza,” the White House said in a statement.

Relief workers said far more aid was needed to address the spiraling humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where half the territory’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes. The U.N. humanitarian agency said the 20 trucks that entered Saturday amounted to 4% of an average day’s imports before the war and “a fraction of what is needed after 13 days of complete siege.”

The World Health Organization said seven hospitals in northern Gaza have been forced to shut down due to damage from strikes, lack of power and supplies, or Israeli evacuation orders.

The lack of fuel has also crippled water and sanitation systems. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering in U.N.-run schools and tent camps are running low on food and are drinking dirty water.

Israel repeated its calls for people to leave northern Gaza, including by dropping leaflets from the air. It estimated 700,000 have already fled. But hundreds of thousands remain. That would raise the risk of mass civilian casualties in any ground offensive.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israel “can’t go back to the status quo” in which Hamas controls Gaza and is able to threaten it, but that Israel has “absolutely no intent” to govern Gaza itself.

“Something needs to be found that ensures that Hamas can’t do this again, but that also doesn’t revert to Israeli governance of Gaza,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “It’s something that needs to be worked even as Israel is dealing with the current threat.”

Israel captured Gaza, along with the West Bank and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want all three territories for a future state. Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but Israel and Egypt have imposed a blockade of varying degrees since Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007.

Heavy Israeli airstrikes and shelling continued overnight across Gaza, the Hamas-run Interior Ministry said. It said airstrikes hit residential apartments in the town of Khan Younis and the Nuseirat refugee camp, both of which are south of the evacuation line.

The Palestinian Red Crescent medical service reported heavy overnight airstrikes near al-Quds hospital in Gaza City. Aside from patients, the hospital houses more than 12,000 displaced people, it said.

The Israeli military says it does not target civilians. It says Palestinian militants have fired over 7,000 rockets at Israel since the start of the war.

The military said Monday that it had struck 320 militant targets throughout Gaza over the last 24 hours. It said it had destroyed anti-tank positions and other targets that could endanger forces preparing for “a maneuver in the Gaza Strip,” an apparent reference to a ground operation.

Tensions are also high in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where over 90 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, mainly during violent protests and gunbattles during military arrest raids. Two Palestinians were shot dead during a raid into the Jalazone refugee camp early Monday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

___

Magdy reported from Cairo and Krauss from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Amy Teibel in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

___

Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

AP · October 23, 2023

7. A price cap on Russian oil aims to starve Putin of cash. But it's largely been untested. Until now

Excerpts:

That boycott forced exporters to send oil on monthlong voyages to Asia, instead of dayslong trips to Europe — essentially doubling Russia’s need for expensive shipping services.

Another cost is the “shadow fleet” of used tankers that Russia bought to dodge sanctions. It has only a third of the vessels it would need to completely sanctions-proof its oil shipments, said Craig Kennedy, an associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

That makes it hard for Russia to completely avoid Western-based shipping services.

Combined with the EU oil ban, the price cap has added $35 per barrel in costs for Russian exporters, U.S. officials say — money that doesn’t go to buy weapons and military equipment.

“The price cap is working,” says Nataliia Shapoval, vice president for policy research at the Kyiv school.

But Western allies “should take really urgent measures” to push oil from Russia’s shadow fleet back to mainstream shipping, Shapoval said.

To do that, the Stanford sanctions group says countries should demand proof of Western insurance before letting vessels pass chokepoints — now only recommended by the U.S. Treasury. Tanker owners also could be forced to take shipments only from approved oil traders based in sanctioning countries.

A price cap on Russian oil aims to starve Putin of cash. But it's largely been untested. Until now

AP · October 23, 2023

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — For months after Ukraine’s Western allies limited sales of Russian oil to $60 per barrel, the price cap was still largely symbolic. Most of Moscow’s crude — its main moneymaker — cost less than that.

But the cap was there in case oil prices rose — and would keep the Kremlin from pocketing extra profits to fund its war in Ukraine. That time has now come, putting the price cap to its most serious test so far and underlining its weaknesses.

Russia’s benchmark oil — often exported with Western ships required to obey sanctions — has traded above the price cap since mid-July, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars a day into the Kremlin’s war chest.

With Russia’s profits rising, the Israel-Hamas war pushing up global oil prices and evidence that some traders and shippers are evading the cap, the first signs of enforcement are appearing 10 months after the price limit was imposed in December.

But sanctions advocates say the crackdown needs to go further to really hurt Russia.

Reducing oil profits “is the one thing that hits Russian macroeconomic stability the most,” said Benjamin Hilgenstock, senior economist at the Kyiv School of Economics, which advises the Ukrainian government.

Oil income is the linchpin of Russia’s economy, allowing President Vladimir Putin to pour money into the military while avoiding worsening inflation for everyday people and a currency collapse.

Moscow’s ability to sell more to the world than it buys means it’s weathering sanctions far better than expected. Its economy will grow this year while Germany’s shrinks, the International Monetary Fund estimates.

Still, Russia’s main source of income is at risk from stepped-up enforcement. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned two ship owners last week, while U.K. officials are investigating violations.

Since the invasion began, oil sanctions have cost Russia $100 billion through August, said an international working group on sanctions at Stanford University. But most of that, economists say, stems from Europe’s ban on Russian oil, which cost Moscow its main customer.

“There are serious problems with the (price cap) policy, but it can work,” Hilgenstock said. “With some improvements, it can be very effective.”

Vessels owned or insured by Western nations “persisted in loading Russian oil at all ports within Russia” in recent weeks as prices rose above the cap, the Helsinki-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air said in a report last week. “These occurrences serve as compelling evidence of violations against the price cap policy.”

Russia’s oil income rose in September to some 200 million euros ($211 million) a day as global prices increased, the think tank said. Less oil available worldwide — with Saudi Arabia and Russia cutting production — pushed prices for Moscow’s key export grade crude to $74.46 last week, S&P Global Platts said. It’s been above $60 since July 11.

The price cap is meant to limit what Russia can earn without taking its supplies off the market. Doing that threatens a shortage that could drive up fuel costs and inflation in the U.S. and Europe.

It relies on a key fact of the shipping industry: many vessel owners, traders and most insurers are based in Europe or the Group of Seven major democracies that imposed the price cap. That puts those companies within reach of sanctions.

To comply, shipping companies need to know the price of Russia’s oil. The cap, however, requires only a good-faith disclosure on a simple, one-page document with the names of the parties and the price. The actual sales contracts don’t have to be revealed.

And that, analysts say, has been an invitation for unscrupulous sellers to fudge — and for some shippers to adopt a see-no-evil approach.

Suspicions about evasion grew when analysts noticed that oil from the Russian port of Kozmino on the Pacific Ocean — responsible for a relatively small share of Russia’s exports — was trading well above the cap. That was even though many of the tankers stopping there were Western-owned, primarily Greek.

There was little sign of enforcement action until last week, when the U.S. Treasury Department blocked a tanker owner in the United Arab Emirates and another in Turkey from dealings in the U.S. They’re accused of carrying Russian oil priced at $75 and $80 per barrel while relying on U.S.-connected service providers.

U.S. officials have warned insurers away from vessels that appear suspicious, a senior Treasury official told reporters last week. The department also issued recommendations to scrutinize transport costs and watch for red flags of evasion.

The U.K. Treasury says it is “actively undertaking a number of investigations into suspected breaches of the oil price cap.”

There’s another opportunity to sidestep the cap: the price is set as oil leaves Russia, not what’s paid by a refinery in, say, India. The oil may be bought and sold several times by Russian-affiliated trading companies in countries not participating in sanctions.

Excessive “transportation costs” may be added. The difference to the end price is pocketed by traders and stays in Russian hands, analysts say.

“The problem is that no one really has any oversight as to what happens after the point of loading,” said Viktor Katona, lead crude analyst at data and analytics group Kpler. “And there’s a reason why the shippers haven’t really complained or haven’t flagged any issues with the oil price cap — because it’s very easily circumvented.”

Russia’s top energy official, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, told Radio Business FM on Oct. 13 that the cap was “not only ineffective, but harmful; it can completely distort the entire market and has only negative consequences, including for consumers.”

Russia does not recognize the cap, and a decree by Putin forbids its inclusion in sales agreements, Novak said.

U.S. officials, on the other hand, point to the losses it has inflicted on Moscow when combined with Europe’s ban on Russian oil.

That boycott forced exporters to send oil on monthlong voyages to Asia, instead of dayslong trips to Europe — essentially doubling Russia’s need for expensive shipping services.

Another cost is the “shadow fleet” of used tankers that Russia bought to dodge sanctions. It has only a third of the vessels it would need to completely sanctions-proof its oil shipments, said Craig Kennedy, an associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

That makes it hard for Russia to completely avoid Western-based shipping services.

Combined with the EU oil ban, the price cap has added $35 per barrel in costs for Russian exporters, U.S. officials say — money that doesn’t go to buy weapons and military equipment.

“The price cap is working,” says Nataliia Shapoval, vice president for policy research at the Kyiv school.

But Western allies “should take really urgent measures” to push oil from Russia’s shadow fleet back to mainstream shipping, Shapoval said.

To do that, the Stanford sanctions group says countries should demand proof of Western insurance before letting vessels pass chokepoints — now only recommended by the U.S. Treasury. Tanker owners also could be forced to take shipments only from approved oil traders based in sanctioning countries.

___

AP reporter Josh Boak contributed from Washington.

___

Follow more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · October 23, 2023

8. US renews warning it will defend treaty ally Philippines after Chinese ships rammed Manila vessels

Excerpts:

“The Philippine government views the latest aggression by China as a blatant violation of international law,” Teodoro said. “China has no legal right or authority to conduct law enforcement operations in our territorial waters and in our exclusive economic zone.”

Marcos ordered an investigation of the high-sea collisions, Teodoro said, but he refused to disclose what steps the Philippine government would take.

“We are taking these incidents seriously at the highest levels of government,” he said, adding that the government called for a news conference to provide accurate facts. “The Chinese government is deliberately obfuscating the truth,” the defense chief said.

...

“The United States stands with our Philippine allies in the face of the People’s Republic of China coast guard and maritime militia’s dangerous and unlawful actions obstructing an October 22 Philippine resupply mission to Second Thomas Shoal,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement issued by its embassy in Manila.

It blamed the dangerous maneuvers by China’s ships for the collisions and added that they “violated international law by intentionally interfering with the Philippine vessels’ exercise of high seas freedom of navigation.”

The State Department also cited a 2016 arbitration ruling that invalidated China’s expansive claims to the South China Sea on historical grounds, including in Second Thomas Shoal.

Washington lays no claims to the disputed sea but has deployed forces to patrol the waters to promote freedom of navigation and overflight — moves that have angered Beijing, which has warned the U.S. to stop meddling in what it says is a purely Asian dispute.

US renews warning it will defend treaty ally Philippines after Chinese ships rammed Manila vessels

BY JIM GOMEZ AND SIMINA MISTREANU

Updated 5:06 AM EDT, October 23, 2023

AP · by JIM GOMEZ · October 23, 2023

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The United States renewed a warning Monday that it would defend the Philippines in case of an armed attack under a 1951 treaty, after Chinese ships blocked and collided with two Filipino vessels off a contested shoal in the South China Sea.

Philippine diplomats summoned a Chinese Embassy official in Manila on Monday for a strongly worded protest following Sunday’s collisions off Second Thomas Shoal. No injuries were reported but the encounters damaged a Philippine coast guard ship and a wooden-hulled supply boat operated by navy personnel, officials said.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. called an emergency meeting with the defense secretary and other top military and security officials to discuss the latest hostilities in the disputed waters. The Philippines and other neighbors of China have resisted Beijing’s sweeping territorial claims over virtually the entire South China Sea, and some, like Manila, have sought U.S. military support as incidents multiply.

After the meeting, Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro blasted China in a news conference for resorting to “brute force” that he said endangered Filipino crew members and for twisting the facts to conceal its aggression.

“The Philippine government views the latest aggression by China as a blatant violation of international law,” Teodoro said. “China has no legal right or authority to conduct law enforcement operations in our territorial waters and in our exclusive economic zone.”

Marcos ordered an investigation of the high-sea collisions, Teodoro said, but he refused to disclose what steps the Philippine government would take.

“We are taking these incidents seriously at the highest levels of government,” he said, adding that the government called for a news conference to provide accurate facts. “The Chinese government is deliberately obfuscating the truth,” the defense chief said.

The Philippines also plans to raise its alarm over the Chinese ships’ dangerous maneuvers in talks between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on a proposed nonaggression pact — a “code of conduct” — to prevent a major armed conflict in the South China Sea. Beijing is hosting the three-day negotiations starting Monday, two Philippine officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authority to publicly discuss details of the talks.

Teodoro said it was “very ironic” that China was hosting the talks that aim to prevent major conflicts at sea when they just committed “a blatant disregard of international law.”

The territorial conflicts involving China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have long been regarded as a flashpoint in a delicate fault line in the U.S.-China rivalry.

About five Chinese coast guard ships, eight accompanying vessels and two navy ships formed a blockade on Sunday to prevent two Philippine coast guard ships and two boats from delivering food and other supplies to Filipino forces stationed at Second Thomas Shoal aboard a marooned navy ship, Philippine coast guard Commodore Jay Tarriela said.

During the standoff, one of the Philippine coast guard ships and a supply boat were separately hit by a Chinese coast guard ship and a vessel. Only one of the two Filipino boats managed to deliver supplies to Philippine forces, Tarriela said.

The senior Chinese diplomat who was summoned by Philippine foreign officials repeated China’s assertion that the Philippine vessels intruded into Chinese territory.

“China once again urges the Philippines to take seriously China’s grave concerns, honor its promise, stop making provocations at sea, stop making dangerous moves, stop groundlessly attacking and slandering China, and to tow away the illegally ‘grounded’ warship as soon as possible,” Zhou Zhiyong was quoted as saying by the Chinese Embassy in Manila.

He was referring to the Sierra Madre, which serves as Manila’s territorial outpost at the shoal after being deliberately ran aground in 1999.

The Chinese coast guard on Sunday blamed the Philippine vessels for causing the collisions and said the Filipinos were carrying construction materials to strengthen their outpost at the shoal.

The U.S. and other allies expressed alarm over the Chinese action. Washington renewed a warning that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines under a 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including “those of its coast guard — anywhere in the South China Sea.”

“The United States stands with our Philippine allies in the face of the People’s Republic of China coast guard and maritime militia’s dangerous and unlawful actions obstructing an October 22 Philippine resupply mission to Second Thomas Shoal,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement issued by its embassy in Manila.

It blamed the dangerous maneuvers by China’s ships for the collisions and added that they “violated international law by intentionally interfering with the Philippine vessels’ exercise of high seas freedom of navigation.”

The State Department also cited a 2016 arbitration ruling that invalidated China’s expansive claims to the South China Sea on historical grounds, including in Second Thomas Shoal.

Washington lays no claims to the disputed sea but has deployed forces to patrol the waters to promote freedom of navigation and overflight — moves that have angered Beijing, which has warned the U.S. to stop meddling in what it says is a purely Asian dispute.

___

Mistreanu reported from Beijing. Associated Press journalists Joeal Calupitan and Aaron Favila contributed to this report.

JIM GOMEZ

Gomez is The AP Chief Correspondent in the Philippines.

twittermailto

AP · by JIM GOMEZ · October 23, 2023

9. Americans Back Israel but Are Wary of Getting Pulled Into Conflict, WSJ-Ipsos Poll Finds

Please go to the link to view the charts and graphics.

Summary from SEMAFOR: A majority of Americans think the U.S. should not take either side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a new Wall Street Journal/Ipsos poll. Only 3% said America should take the side of the Palestinians, however, with 42% favoring Israel — the highest level of support recorded since 2002.

Americans Back Israel but Are Wary of Getting Pulled Into Conflict, WSJ-Ipsos Poll Finds

Survey shows more in U.S. sympathize with Israelis than with the Palestinians, though younger Americans are more divided

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/americans-back-israel-but-are-wary-of-getting-pulled-into-conflict-wsj-ipsos-poll-finds-3abce44b

By Aaron ZitnerFollow and Annie LinskeyFollow

Oct. 22, 2023 8:00 am ET

U.S. public opinion is rallying behind Israel as it responds to the deadly attacks on its citizens by Hamas, the Islamist militant group, but the American appetite for a role in the war is limited, a new Wall Street Journal/

Ipsos poll finds.The poll found Americans drawing a sharp distinction between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is committed to the destruction of Israel, and the Palestinian people who live in Gaza and the West Bank. But it also found increased support for Israel, compared with prior surveys, in its decadeslong conflicts with Palestinians.

Some 42% in the survey said the U.S. should side with Israel, a record high dating to 2002, while 3% said the U.S. should take the Palestinians’ side. The share with favorable views of both the Israeli people and their government is higher in the new survey than in similar polls in recent years, though young people are much less supportive of the longtime U.S. ally than are older Americans.

At the same time, the survey found Americans reluctant to become engaged in the region. Some 52% said the U.S. shouldn’t back either Israel or the Palestinians in their long-running conflict. Just over half of Americans said the U.S. has a responsibility to support Israel in its war with Hamas.

In the Middle East conflict, do you think the U.S. should take Israel’s side, take the Palestinians’ side, or not take either side?

80

%

Not take either side

60

52%

42%

40

Take Israel’s side

20

Take the Palestinians’ side

3%

0

2005

2010

2015

2020

Sources: Wall Street Journal/Ipsos survey (Oct. 20); Chicago Council on Global Affairs/Ipsos surveys (June 30, 2002–Sept. 18, 2023)

And only 38% said the U.S. should commit American troops to help Israel if it is attacked by its neighbors—down from 53% in 2021 and a record low dating to 2010 in similar polling by Ipsos for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

“We’re seeing a number of Americans for whom this is a significant moment and a moment that calls for them to support Israel. But there is also still a large number of Americans who say, ‘It’s terrible, but it’s not our problem,’ ” said Chris Jackson, a senior vice president at Ipsos.

Americans in the survey felt less warmly toward Palestinians than Israelis. About half held a favorable view of Palestinians, compared with 75% who held a favorable view of the Israeli people. Some 41% said the U.S. has a responsibility to protect Palestinian civilians, compared with 54% who said so of Israeli civilians.

Thinking about the situation with Israelis and Palestinians these days, do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of each of the following?

2022 survey

75% favorable

The Israeli people

The Israeli government

55%

51%

The Palestinian people

Sources: Wall Street Journal/Ipsos survey (Oct. 20); Pew Research Center survey of 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7–13, 2022; margin of error: +/–1.5 pct. pts. (full sample)

Do you think the U.S. does or doesn’t have a responsibility to:

Protect Israeli civilians

42% doesn’t

54% does

Protect Palestinian civilians

41%

54%

The survey suggests that President Biden is largely in step with American public opinion in offering moral support to Israel and making a personal visit to the country last week. Beyond those gestures, the president has moved two aircraft carriers and other military assets to the region to deter enemies of Israel and is asking Congress for $14 billion in additional aid for the country, largely for weapons, while announcing $100 million in humanitarian aid for Gaza and the West Bank to help displaced and conflict-affected Palestinians.

Hamas, which the U.S. and European Union consider a terrorist organization, rules the densely populated and isolated Gaza Strip, from which it launched attacks into Israel on Oct. 7 that killed more than 1,400. It took control of Gaza in 2007 from the more moderate Palestinian Authority, which still governs the West Bank.

Khristopher Wells, 25, who lives near Richmond, Va., watched Biden’s Oval Office address on Thursday, in which the president argued that supporting Israel is in America’s national security interest. He feels the president did a good job communicating the stakes of the conflict. 

Wells, a Democrat, said that the Hamas attack had increased his sympathy for Israel. “They are the closest thing to a democracy, and we should try to help them out,” said Wells, who has a podcast. He supports the U.S. sending weapons to help “quash” the conflict, he said, adding that he worries that the U.S. will be at greater risk if the fighting spreads.

But he doesn’t want to see the U.S. send troops. “I personally don’t want to see American soldiers getting killed in the Middle East,” he said. 

Khristopher Wells, 25, a Democrat who lives near Richmond, Va., says the Hamas attacks have increased his sympathy for Israel but he doesn't want to see the U.S. send troops. Trevor Casper, 31, a Republican who lives in Idaho Falls, Idaho, said he opposes sending U.S. troops unilaterally but could support doing so as part of a multinational effort.

LAUREN CASPER; VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

Biden faces divisions within his own party and deep skepticism from younger voters, an important part of the Democratic base, over his support for Israel. The Journal/Ipsos survey, in fact, found that differences by age were sometimes larger than by political party in views of Israel.

Some 40% of respondents under age 30 said the U.S. has a responsibility to help Israel fight Hamas, far below the 73% of those ages 65 and older. Similarly, 40% of the younger voters but 72% of seniors held a favorable view of the Israeli government. Democrats were about evenly divided on both questions, with Republicans more firmly supportive of Israel and its government.

Republicans are also less likely than Democrats to feel a duty to protect Palestinians. Some 59% within both parties said the U.S. has a responsibility to protect Israeli civilians. But the share fell to 32% among Republicans when it came to protecting Palestinian civilians, while remaining essentially stable among Democrats.

The party divisions over support for Israel are a mirror image of the American interest in aiding Ukraine in its defense against Russian invasion. Democrats are largely unified in support of aid to Ukraine, while Republicans are divided.

Do you think the U.S. does or doesn’t have a responsibility to:

Support Israel in its war with Hamas

44% doesn’t

52% does

TOTAL

Under age 30

Ages 65+

Democrat

Republican

Push the parties in the Israel-Gaza conflict to negotiate

43% doesn’t

TOTAL

53% does

Under age 30

Ages 65+

Democrat

Republican

Work toward Palestinian statehood

66% doesn’t

TOTAL

28% does

Under age 30

Ages 65+

Democrat

Republican

Views of Israel could change as the war in Gaza unfolds, and Biden has taken on political risk by identifying himself so strongly with Israel, said Kori Schake, a senior National Security Council and State Department official under former President George W. Bush. 

“I do think the president has an enormous vulnerability should Israel launch a ground invasion that either engages in collective punishment of Palestinians or is not carefully discriminant about minimizing the consequences for civilians,” said Schake, who now directs defense and foreign policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. She said that in both his re-election campaign and in pursuing policy goals, Biden could have trouble sustaining liberal support.

The Wall Street Journal/Ipsos survey was conducted Oct. 18-20, while Israel and Palestinian groups were exchanging blame for a deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital that dominated television coverage. About 12% of respondents answered the survey after Biden’s address to the nation Thursday night.

The survey found a number of signs that Americans are skeptical of deepening their commitment to Middle East affairs. A mere 28% said the U.S. had a responsibility to work toward Palestinian statehood, a finding that Jonathan Panikoff, a senior intelligence official in three White House administrations, found to be a sharp departure from the era of former President Bill Clinton, who tried to foster a peace agreement that would create a Palestinian state.

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During a visit to Israel, President Biden said he believed Israel wasn’t responsible for a deadly blast at a hospital compound in Gaza. Israel and militants blame each other for the explosion. Photo: Avi Ohayon/Israel GPO/Zuma Press

Those efforts failed, and many Americans feel military interventions in the region since then failed as well, said Panikoff, who now leads the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank. The reluctance today to be drawn into the region “is a reflection of Americans feeling burnt out of U.S. involvement in the Middle East after 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

Americans remain open to a peacekeeping rather than combatant role in the region. A solid majority of 60% said they would back the use of U.S. troops as part of an international force to keep peace between Israel and the Palestinians, should one materialize.

But poll respondents were reluctant to engage U.S. troops even if Iran—one of America’s most potent adversaries—directly joined the fight against Israel, with 45% supporting troop involvement and 50% opposed.

“I think the Middle East has had enough unilateral U.S. intervention,” said Trevor Casper, 31, of Idaho Falls, Idaho. Casper, a Republican, said that he could more readily support sending U.S. troops to the region if they were part of a multinational effort. 

And he said that sending weapons would be justified if doing so could prevent a broader conflict. But he wants to be sure there is a limit. “Just throwing money at an issue does not solve things,” said Casper, an engineer. 

Casper said that believes Biden has so far taken the right approach to the conflict, though he said the conflict won’t likely have a major impact on who he backs in 2024.

Elizabeth Peterson, 62, who does call-center work in East Liverpool, Ohio, said the U.S. can’t afford the cost of more foreign engagements.

“The U.S. sticks its nose in too many other countries’ business or helps them too much,” said Peterson, a political independent. “I think we should take care of our own people, instead of sending money over to help other countries. Too many other countries rely on the U.S. too much.”

The survey included 1,409 U.S. adults drawn from Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a large panel created through random selection. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

Write to Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com and Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com

10. Israel-Hamas War Revives Interest in U.S. Production of Iron Dome Missiles

Excerpts:

The Pentagon’s push for more-sophisticated weapons and equipment to deter the perceived threat from China led the Army to favor the new U.S.-developed system seen as better able to tackle faster-moving cruise missiles over the bigger distances of the Pacific. 

The Army called Iron Dome an interim solution and didn’t buy more than two, opting for the different capabilities of Enduring Shield, even though it has yet to be fielded.

“These are some of the growing pains of neglecting air defense for way too long,” said Karako.

Rafael and RTX declined to comment on Tamir production rates or on any new U.S. facility.

The Pentagon already funds much of Israel’s Iron Dome production and expenses under an existing agreement between the countries, which lawmakers have said was another catalyst for U.S. production.

RTX already makes around 70% of the Tamir, according to the companies, and has been investing heavily in expanding its missile facilities around Tucson, Ariz., which analysts said was one possible site for a Tamir line.

The Marine Corps is also looking to acquire some Iron Dome systems as well as around 1,800 Tamir missiles, according to budget documents. 

Enduring Shield can be adapted to use other interceptors, including a version of the Tamir called SkyHunter.

Israel-Hamas War Revives Interest in U.S. Production of Iron Dome Missiles

U.S. invested in homegrown system better suited for potential conflict in Pacific than in Middle East

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/israel-iron-dome-missiles-production-ea06175f

By Doug Cameron

Follow

Updated Oct. 23, 2023 12:03 am ET

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The Iron Dome defense system has blocked thousands of missiles since 2011. Here’s how it works. Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

Israel’s war with Hamas has revived dormant U.S. interest in producing munitions for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, U.S. Army and industry officials said, a development that would help a U.S. regional ally resupply for future conflicts.

Any U.S. manufacturer of Tamir interceptors would take months to get moving. But with Hamas and Hezbollah firing hundreds of rockets at Israeli military sites and cities every day, Israel’s stockpile of interceptor missiles is dwindling.

The new interest in production of Tamir interceptor missiles for the Iron Dome system comes two years after the Army passed over the Israeli hardware in favor of a U.S.-made system it deemed better suited for conflict in the Pacific. 

Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system is one of the most battle-tested in the world, successfully destroying thousands of shells and rockets since its 2011 deployment and preventing mass civilian casualties.

Lights show Israel’s Iron Dome system launched to intercept missiles from Gaza. PHOTO: MOHAMMED SABER/SHUTTERSTOCK

“Iron Dome has proven itself over the years,” said Tom Karako, a missile defense researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s no slight that it can’t contend with an overwhelming number of threats.” 

To help out, the U.S. Army is now sending back to Israel two Iron Dome units it acquired three years ago, alongside more than 200 Tamir missiles the U.S. had stored in its arsenal. The two units had been deployed after being tested in Guam.

The mobile Iron Dome is Israel’s last layer of air defense and can intercept targets up to 40 miles away. Each of the 10 batteries covers an area of about 60 square miles, and includes a radar and control system to identify incoming threats and fire only on those expected to reach populated or vulnerable areas, limiting how many missiles are required.

‘Affordable mass’

The Tamirs use a home-produced rocket motor that hasn’t suffered the level of supply-chain disruption that limited production of Javelins and the advanced guided missiles the U.S. has sent to Ukraine.

“They have a very capable military and they have their own stockpiles,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush said earlier this month of Israel.

Meanwhile, militaries around the world, including the Pentagon and Israel, are moving to secure additional production of munitions. The vast consumption of artillery shells and guided missiles in Ukraine and of Tamir interceptors in Israel recently has honed defense officials’ focus on building “affordable mass”—a reliable arsenal of heavily used munitions.

How Israel’s Iron Dome works

1

4

Interception

Radar

The missile destroys the incoming rocket by exploding near it.

Identifies rocket shell.

Mobile control unit

2

Analyzes trajectory, estimates impact point and commands launch of interceptor missile.

Launcher

Each has 20 interceptor missiles

with a built-in radar seeker.

3

Source: Rafael Advanced Defense Systems

In 2020, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and 

RTX Corp. announced plans to build a factory in the U.S. to assemble Tamirs.But the following year, the Army passed over Iron Dome in favor of the Enduring Shield system made by U.S.-based Leidos, following a shoot-off in the New Mexico desert. Rafael and RTX’s new Tamir factory didn’t materialize.

The Pentagon’s push for more-sophisticated weapons and equipment to deter the perceived threat from China led the Army to favor the new U.S.-developed system seen as better able to tackle faster-moving cruise missiles over the bigger distances of the Pacific. 

The Army called Iron Dome an interim solution and didn’t buy more than two, opting for the different capabilities of Enduring Shield, even though it has yet to be fielded.

“These are some of the growing pains of neglecting air defense for way too long,” said Karako.

Rafael and RTX declined to comment on Tamir production rates or on any new U.S. facility.

The Pentagon already funds much of Israel’s Iron Dome production and expenses under an existing agreement between the countries, which lawmakers have said was another catalyst for U.S. production.

RTX already makes around 70% of the Tamir, according to the companies, and has been investing heavily in expanding its missile facilities around Tucson, Ariz., which analysts said was one possible site for a Tamir line.

The Iron Dome defense system is known for reducing the number of civilian casualties of warfare. PHOTO: ILAN ASSAYAG/JINI/ZUMA PRESS

The Marine Corps is also looking to acquire some Iron Dome systems as well as around 1,800 Tamir missiles, according to budget documents. 

Enduring Shield can be adapted to use other interceptors, including a version of the Tamir called SkyHunter.

Write to Doug Cameron at Doug.Cameron@wsj.com

11. Ike carrier strike group headed to the Middle East

Excerpts:

Along with the Ike and its strike group, a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, missile battery, as well as an unspecified number of Patriot missile battalions, are also being sent to the region, according to the statement.

Austin has also placed “an additional number of forces on prepare to deploy orders as part of prudent contingency planning, to increase their readiness and ability to quickly respond as required,” according to the statement.

The statement didn’t put a number to those additional forces, but the Pentagon announced this week that 2,000 troops have already been put on standby for quick deployment if needed.

“I will continue to assess our force posture requirements in the region and consider deploying additional capabilities as necessary,” Austin said in Saturday’s statement.

Ike carrier strike group headed to the Middle East

militarytimes.com · by Geoff Ziezulewicz · October 22, 2023

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has directed the Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group to steam to the Middle Eastern waters of U.S. Central Command as part of an effort to counter “recent escalations” by Iran and its proxy forces in the region, according to a statement released Saturday by the Pentagon.

The move will be the first time a carrier has operated in CENTCOM waters since the end of the Afghanistan war in August 2021.

Austin’s order follows the Navy destroyer Carney’s Thursday interception of cruise missiles and drones launched by Iran-allied Houthi rebel forces in Yemen and drone attacks against U.S. troops elsewhere in the region.

Carney’s intercepts of the ordnance, which Pentagon officials believe were heading toward Israel, potentially represents the first shots by the U.S. military in the defense of Israel during this conflict, which erupted after the Palestinian militant group Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed more than 1,300 Israeli civilians and at least 31 American citizens.

That conflict has provoked fears of a broader regional war involving Iran and its proxies.

Sailors assigned to the Navy destroyer Carney stand watch in the ship’s Combat Information Center during an operation to defeat a combination of Houthi missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles on Thursday in the Red Sea. (Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Aaron Lau/Navy)

Along with the Ike and its strike group, a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, missile battery, as well as an unspecified number of Patriot missile battalions, are also being sent to the region, according to the statement.

Austin has also placed “an additional number of forces on prepare to deploy orders as part of prudent contingency planning, to increase their readiness and ability to quickly respond as required,” according to the statement.

The statement didn’t put a number to those additional forces, but the Pentagon announced this week that 2,000 troops have already been put on standby for quick deployment if needed.

“I will continue to assess our force posture requirements in the region and consider deploying additional capabilities as necessary,” Austin said in Saturday’s statement.

U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria were attacked by drones this week, and the Pentagon reported minor injuries and the death of a contractor who suffered cardiac arrest during one of the attacks.

The Navy destroyer Carney shot down multiple missiles and drones fired by Iran-allied Houthi rebels in Yemen on Thursday in the Red Sea. (Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Aaron Lau/Navy)

The Eisenhower strike group left the East Coast last week, and was initially heading to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, where the carrier Gerald R. Ford and its strike group are already on station and have had their deployment extended.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that Carney’s work to intercept the Houthi attack Thursday took place over nine hours and involved the ship shooting down four cruise missiles and 15 drones.

Carney had passed through the Suez Canal Wednesday and intercepted the missiles and drones in the Red Sea using SM-2 surface-to-air missiles, CNN reported.

The last time a Navy warship intercepted Houthi rebel launches was in October 2016, when fellow destroyer Mason executed countermeasures to stop an Houthi attack on the destroyer and other ships.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

About Geoff Ziezulewicz

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

12. We must ditch the ‘stalemate’ metaphor in Ukraine’s war

Conclusion:

A lot hangs on this war, which is precisely why it is so tempting to find the turn of phrase that allow us to turn away, that give us the sense that we are not involved. But we are.

We must ditch the ‘stalemate’ metaphor in Ukraine’s war

Financial Times · by Timothy Snyder · October 20, 2023

The writer is the Levin Professor of History and Public Affairs at Yale University, and author of ‘Bloodlands’

It is strange to leave Ukraine and then listen to how the war is described elsewhere. In a dynamic battlefield situation, no one talks about a “stalemate”. And yet back in the US, I hear the phrase all the time. How we speak drives how we think, and how we think drives what we do, or choose not to do. When we speak of the Russo-Ukrainian war as a “stalemate”, we misunderstand it, and prepare to make moral and strategic errors.

Show me your metaphor, and I will tell you your next move — or, in this case, your lack of one. In chess, a stalemate is a draw generated by the curiosities of the rules. For example, a player can only move the king, but in so doing would put the king in check, which is not permissible. In war, unlike in chess, the number of actors can change at any time. Western powers can supply Ukraine with weapons. If my friend can drop an extra three kings and half a dozen extra queens on the board, I am no longer facing a stalemate. It would be strange if my friend, holding those pieces in his hands, chose instead to say: “Tut, tut, stalemate.”

You might object that just dropping extra pieces on the board is not allowed in chess. Indeed not. The metaphor of a game limits how we think about the real world. That is the problem. In chess, the pieces just move: no one is concerned about feeding the horses, repairing the brickwork on the castles, or ensuring that the pawns are armed. This eliminates logistics. In this war, the Ukrainians rightly believe that their best chance has been to separate Russian invaders from their supplies. Giving Ukraine the weapons needed to do that is the most effective way of bringing things to a conclusion. Thinking in a chess metaphor limits our view to a narrow battlefield, and prevents us from doing what is necessary.

Ukraine is one of the world’s most important suppliers of food. Russia has sought to destroy its economy by mining farms, destroying ports and blockading the Black Sea. Amazingly, Ukraine has destroyed several Russian boats, pinned down Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and opened a lane for commercial shipping. This is the most substantial development in the war these past few months, which the “stalemate” metaphor has blocked us from seeing.

Chess pieces have fixed moves. Yet Ukraine survives by doing the unexpected. The opening of the Black Sea depended upon adapting existing weapons and building new ones. When I visited Ukraine last month, I met farmers who had modified tractors to serve as mine-clearing devices, and still got their crops in.

In chess, we do not ask why the first pawn advances or what is the purpose of the attack. Invoking a “stalemate”, we content ourselves with the mistaken estimation that the war has run its course and reached some neutral conclusion. But this depends upon Russian purposes. If Russia intends to eliminate Ukrainian society, as its politicians and propagandists keep telling us, then a given battlefield situation cannot be the end. If we stop thinking about how to get to victory, we implicitly join with Russia.

“Stalemate” distances us, makes us neutral judges of a game, allows us to be people without purposes and without a plan. We turn to the next crisis, the war in Gaza, without having drawn conclusions from this one. The most important must be this: our own metaphors have slowed Ukrainian victory, making lawless violence elsewhere more likely and harder to deal with.

The Ukrainians certainly have a theory of victory, and they have purpose. I no longer know anyone in Ukraine who has not lost someone. Soldiers speak openly of the horrors, and worry about their allies, but have no doubt about their aims: defending their country and a value they unashamedly name “freedom”. Visiting a rehabilitation centre last month, I listened to stories about loss and what it meant. Several of the men were volunteer fighters. They were not pawns, but people.

They were getting prosthetics, and their friends were dead, because of Russia’s attack — but also in some measure because of the west’s slow response. If the war is a “stalemate”, it goes on forever and there is nothing we can do. Thinking that way could get us to a world where Russia wins, more wars of aggression follow, the international legal order buckles, and the opportunities of the century slip away.

A lot hangs on this war, which is precisely why it is so tempting to find the turn of phrase that allow us to turn away, that give us the sense that we are not involved. But we are.

Video: Ukraine tech sector goes to war | FT Film

Financial Times · by Timothy Snyder · October 20, 2023

13. Testing of Navy SEALs May Unveil Scale of Performance-Enhancing Drug Use -- and Unleash Legal Battles

Testing of Navy SEALs May Unveil Scale of Performance-Enhancing Drug Use -- and Unleash Legal Battles

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · October 20, 2023

The Navy's Special Warfare Command is poised to begin regularly testing all Navy SEALs for performance-enhancing drugs next month, but the effort to root out the potentially dangerous substances could also lead the service into a legal minefield.

The move is being presented as a reasonable safety measure by the Navy following a highly publicized sailor death, reports of widespread abuse of the drugs in the SEAL training program, and damning investigations that painted a picture of instructors showing little regard for the safety of recruits -- often pushing them beyond their physical limits.

"This is really about just taking care of our damn people," Lt. Cmdr. Ben Tisdale, a spokesman for Naval Special Warfare, told Military.com in a phone interview Wednesday.

The announcement in September of the new drug testing program came more than a year after the death of Seaman Kyle Mullen, a recruit who had just completed the first leg of the training pipeline to become a Navy SEAL. Following his death, a stash of performance-enhancing drugs, including testosterone and human growth hormone, was found in his car, raising further concerns about whether the practice had become part of the elite community's culture.

In a statement provided to Military.com in September, the Navy said it would be testing for anabolic steroids, which the service defines as "any hormonal substance, chemically or pharmacologically related to testosterone, that promotes muscle growth;" growth hormones; blood-boosting agents; and any substances designed to mask steroid use.

According to Tisdale, leaders at the top of the Navy's special warfare community are "just making sure that we have effective operators" and their No. 1 concern is long-term health of service members.

"Folks who decide to take [performance-enhancing drugs] really put their teammates at risk because now they're dependent on a drug that may or may not actually work," Tisdale said. "At worst, it puts them in a position where, say, they're out in the field and they [can] crash or whatnot from this drug."

Military.com spoke with two experts who agree.

Dr. Matthew Fedoruk, the chief science officer of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, told Military.com in an interview last week that "in many cases, we don't understand the complex side effects of taking one or more of these substances, and if you're not doing it in a medically supervised way, I think there can be serious health consequences."

Similarly, Brad Martin, a former Navy captain turned senior researcher at the Rand Corp. think tank, told Military.com that putting SEALs in the "situation of relying on some substance is probably going to have an unexpected reaction" and "result in operational failures."

But Tim Parlatore, an attorney who specializes in representing military clients, says the new testing policy runs the risk of "severely damaging" the entire Navy special warfare community.

"It's going to take a lot of money, it's going to take a lot of resources, it's going to create a lot of distractions, it's going to negatively affect unit readiness," he said in an interview Wednesday.

Parlatore represents a number of special operators and, particularly, Navy SEALs. He represented Eddie Gallagher, the now-retired Navy SEAL who was accused of war crimes by his former colleagues during a tumultuous deployment to Iraq in 2017 but was ultimately acquitted of the most serious charges.

The special operations community uses drugs and substances "so they can perform at a higher level and be better at doing their job and killing bad guys and coming home safe," he said. "They're making a calculated decision that the taking of these legal substances will increase the likelihood that they are successful on the battlefield and they and their brothers come home safely."

Navy investigations and media reports have revealed that drug use is prevalent in the SEAL selection course, called Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL, or BUD/S. However, just how widespread their use has become either at training or in the fleet is not clear.

"If we've created missions where we need to have Navy people doing drugs, we need to reevaluate those missions," said Martin -- a sentiment that Tisdale said Rear Adm. Keith Davids, the head of Naval Special Warfare Command, "would 110% agree with."

Both Tisdale and Fedoruk also stressed that there are far more traditional -- and proven -- methods to ensure top performance.

"If you follow just good basic principles about diet, nutrition, sleep, working out routines ... you don't need this stuff to really be the ideal operator," Tisdale said.

He said that one of the reasons behind the new testing policy is to help determine "how big this problem might be."

The new testing policy is complicated by the fact that, unlike the illegal drugs the military already regularly tests for -- opiates, methamphetamines and marijuana, at least some of the performance-enhancing substances can be legal in certain circumstances and have legitimate medical uses.

Many of the substances that athletes and special operators can take to increase the amount of oxygen being carried to their muscles, train harder or recover faster are also treatments for diseases like anemia and chronic kidney disease.

The drug erythropoietin (EPO) is prescribed for patients in kidney failure, chemotherapy and other situations where there is loss of red blood cells and anemia. It is also one of the drugs that famously brought down the cyclist Lance Armstrong because it allows the body to make more red blood cells than normal which, in turn, means muscles get more oxygen, boosting stamina and performance.

Testosterone replacement has also been prescribed for troops who have experienced traumatic brain injuries that have harmed their ability to produce testosterone.

However, it's also a substance that can be taken to enhance muscle growth. In those situations, the side effects can be severe, including heart problems and risks of permanently shutting down the body's own production of the hormone.

The Navy's investigation into Mullen's death found that his heart was more than twice the normal size. Nine months earlier, an electrocardiogram had found no abnormalities, according to the Navy's investigation.

Medical experts cited in the investigation were split over whether his enlarged heart was a side effect of performance-enhancing drugs.

Ultimately, the difference between taking a substance for therapy versus performance enhancement is often in the amount and whether it's being taken in combination with other substances. Fedoruk said that it's that type of use that makes the practice dangerous.

"What there isn't out there [in terms of medical research is] what happens when you're taking more than the therapeutic dose or you're taking these things in combination together," he said, at one point calling the practice of creating various drug combinations a "pseudoscience."

Tisdale said that the newly announced testing policy, like the Navy's regular drug policy, allows for exceptions for drugs that are noted in a sailor's medical record, and leadership hopes this will encourage operators to come forward and disclose any prescriptions they may have received from civilian doctors.

"We've had numerous sailors come forward to their primary care physician, and say, 'Hey, I'm on this for whatever reason. I was prescribed it out in town,'" he said.

The new testing policy will start fleetwide in November, which brings with it possible positive results but also the specter of administrative punishments for sailors.

Parlatore says he's ready.

"I expect that a lot of people will be calling me," he said, adding that he's "already told my team to gear up for it."

The Navy has said that any sailor with a positive test result that lacks a justification will be processed for separation, but Parlatore doesn't think discharges will necessarily follow.

"Everybody who pops positive must be processed -- it doesn't mean that they actually have to be separated," he said.

Sailors with more than six years of service will go before a separation board made up of members of the command. Parlatore said that he's had cases "where the board has said, 'We believe that they did commit the misconduct -- that they did actually take this drug -- but we don't think that separation is warranted.'"

Regardless of the legal or career implications, the long-term consequences of allowing performance-enhancing drug use are not worth the perceived benefit, the Navy and experts say.

-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on X at @ktoropin.

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · October 20, 2023

14. China outs yet another national as US ‘spy’, says he was groomed during visiting scholar stint

Spy versus spy.

Perhaps this is China's attempt to counter US allegations of Chinese spying in the US.

But it also indicates one reason that would be in favor of allowing Chinese students to study in the US - it provides a potential recruitment pool. Hopefully many more recruits have not been detected.

China outs yet another national as US ‘spy’, says he was groomed during visiting scholar stint

• Suspect named Hou detained over ‘major espionage case’ at key defence and military industrial unit, CCTV show shared by state security ministry says
• Defence industry researcher is at least the fourth US ‘spy’ that China’s top anti-espionage agency has revealed details on since August

Orange Wang

+ FOLLOWPublished: 10:03pm, 22 Oct, 2023

He is at least the fourth US “spy” that China has revealed details on since August.

As “a key person involved in classified matters”, Hou was dispatched by his unit to a university in the United States as a visiting scholar in January 2013, and he was immediately on the radar of American espionage agencies.

Two months later, an American professor familiar with Hou introduced him to a man named “Jacob”, who was a US agent posing as a consulting company employee.

Over the next few months, “Jacob” frequently invited Hou out for entertainment in the name of consultation and even gifted him a DSLR camera, so their relationship “quickly warmed up” and they became “almost inseparable friends”.

“This is a routine tactic of US espionage agencies,” Wang Shuai, credited as a state security official, was shown as saying in the programme.

“Jacob often took Hou on sightseeing trips, treated him to upscale Western meals, took him to strip shows, to visit the CNN headquarters and to watch the Super Bowl,” Wang said.

On their eighth meeting, “Jacob” invited Hou to sign a contract as a consulting expert for his company, promising a payment of US$600 to US$700 for each consultation. Topics for consultation included hydrogen storage and photovoltaic materials. Hou provided Jacob with reports based on public information.

“These seemingly non-sensitive consultation projects are precisely their means to lure people,” Wang added.

In July 2013, when Hou’s wife and child visited the US, “Jacob” disclosed his true identity to Hou and began to pressure him, demanding that he maintain contact after returning to China. Hou said he agreed due to concerns for the safety of his family.

Before Hou left for China, Jacob trained him in methods of contact and introduced him to his boss in one meeting, who “brazenly promoted American values, belittled China’s developmental achievements, and attempted ideological infiltration on Hou”, a voice-over said in the programme.

Afterwards, Hou proactively reached out to the US side when travelling abroad and continued to provide them with China’s “state secrets”.

“Under the ideological infiltration, emotional wooing, and financial temptations of the US espionage agencies, Hou had meetings with four US espionage personnel over 20 times,” Wang said.

Hou has been charged with espionage and the case is still being processed in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, according to the programme.

In sharing the video, the state security ministry said espionage activities always go together with “deception, seduction and conspiracy” and called on the public to be vigilant.

The ministry also cited China’s counter-espionage law, noting that if an individual is coerced or deceived into joining a spy organisation abroad, as long as they report it promptly and show remorse, they will not be prosecuted.

On August 11, the ministry said it had arrested a 52-year-old employee of a state-run arms company who had begun working for the US Central Intelligence Agency while studying in Italy.

And in May, a court in eastern China sentenced US citizen and Hong Kong permanent resident John Leung Shing-Wan, 78, to life in prison on spying charges.

China urges public to join ‘grim and complex’ anti-espionage fight

“Western espionage agencies, with the US as the representative, overstretch the concept of national security, take [China] as the primary target in their work and are continuously increasing their efforts,” Bi Yanying, vice president of the University of International Relations in Beijing, said during the programme.

“The means by which [foreign] espionage agencies gather intelligence from us cover an even broader scope, and the methods they adopt are more covert and professional,” she said.

“[We should] encourage the public … to actively report related situations,” she added.

15. Shooting for the moon: Army’s 2025 budget to reflect artillery revamp

Excerpts:

The Army currently has a mix of towed and wheeled cannons in its portfolio. But with lessons learned from Ukraine and an eye on the Pacific, the service has a number of deferent modernization efforts underway, including under its Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) program. That program includes a mix of new munitions, a “supercharged” propellant and integration of a 30-foot, 58-caliber gun tube onto BAE Systems’ Paladin M109A7 self-propelled howitzer. The goal: launch 155-mm rounds out to 70 km, an increase from the current max range of up to 30 km.

However, ERCA platform development has encountered technical challenges during live fire testing, including excessive wear and tear on the cannon, and the Army needs to decide if it will move into production, revamp the design or abandon the platform for now. Bush explained that ERCA “difficulties” simply placed more “urgency” on the fires community to wrap up that comprehensive study.

“I’ve worked over the summer to try to kind of understand [all the parts of ERCA] in terms of time and costs to address them simultaneously,” he said.

“If the… 58-cal cannon solution can’t deliver on a timeline we want, what are the other options?” Bush later added. “That can be munitions…new munitions with old cannons and it can be different cannons.”

Shooting for the moon: Army’s 2025 budget to reflect artillery revamp - Breaking Defense

“If the… 58-cal cannon solution can't deliver on a timeline we want, what are the other options? That can be munitions…new munitions with old cannons and it can be different cannons,” said Army acquisition head Doug Bush.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque, Michael Marrow · October 20, 2023

A photo of an early Extended Range Cannon Artillery platform prototype. (US Army)

WASHINGTON — The US Army is grappling with just what mix of artillery capabilities it needs in its future arsenal, and industry is expected to catch a glimpse of that plan by the time the Biden administration delivers its budget request to Congress next year, according to a senior service official.

The analysis, also dubbed the tactical fires study, is expected to be wrapped up in time to help Army leaders sort through funding decisions before their fiscal 2025 budget request is finished, service acquisition head Doug Bush told Breaking Defense and another outlet on Oct. 11. That budget is traditionally delivered to Capitol Hill after early February,

“We’re going to get that [study] in time to inform our finishing of the [FY]25 budget,” he said, referencing documents that. “So, that is when you might see an output of what the strategy and the study tells us.”

The Army currently has a mix of towed and wheeled cannons in its portfolio. But with lessons learned from Ukraine and an eye on the Pacific, the service has a number of deferent modernization efforts underway, including under its Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) program. That program includes a mix of new munitions, a “supercharged” propellant and integration of a 30-foot, 58-caliber gun tube onto BAE Systems’ Paladin M109A7 self-propelled howitzer. The goal: launch 155-mm rounds out to 70 km, an increase from the current max range of up to 30 km.

However, ERCA platform development has encountered technical challenges during live fire testing, including excessive wear and tear on the cannon, and the Army needs to decide if it will move into production, revamp the design or abandon the platform for now. Bush explained that ERCA “difficulties” simply placed more “urgency” on the fires community to wrap up that comprehensive study.

“I’ve worked over the summer to try to kind of understand [all the parts of ERCA] in terms of time and costs to address them simultaneously,” he said.

“If the… 58-cal cannon solution can’t deliver on a timeline we want, what are the other options?” Bush later added. “That can be munitions…new munitions with old cannons and it can be different cannons.”

The study is also sorting through the wheeled versus towed artillery debate, in part because the latter has limitations but lighter units still need protection. While there are questions about just how much and which formations to place towed artillery, Bush said the service is also looking at using 120-millimeter mortars for lighter formations.

“With the right ammunition, get you very similar capability to a 105-mm,” he said, referring to a towed howitzer. “Does that make sense for light units?”

Options Abound

While options remain publicly fluid, Bush pointed towards what he said were several options for new 52-caliber cannons. One such option was on display at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, DC earlier this month: BAE Systems’ M109-52 prototype, which takes the Rheinmetall L52 main gun and integrates it onto an M109A7 howitzer.

Dan Furber, BAE’s Combat Mission Systems director of ground vehicle production, told Breaking Defense on Oct. 11 that the company has been working on the design for almost 18 months. Then this September, it was used for a direct fire demo on a “very short range.” The plan, he said, is to continue testing and produce a prototype that can hit targets out to the 60-kilometers range.

“I’m targeting the armored brigade combat team commander and their fight,” Furber said. “We really looked at augmenting the M109A7…. commanders [have] sensors that can look out to 60 kilometers and with the A7 they can only shoot out to 30: I’m trying to fill that gap.”

In addition to whole new platforms, the Army’s study is looking at a cheaper solution that could add capability to existing platforms: new, updated munitions.

As one example of the work in that area, Bush highlighted a new 155-mm round developed under the ERCA umbrella called the XM1155, which could be a candidate for “acceleration.”

“One way to get the range, perhaps sooner, would be munitions focused modernization now versus the cannon which can come later,” he added. “I think [XM]1155 is, in my view, worth pursuing. We just have to line up the requirement and then line up the money, but I think it makes sense.”

Two teams working on that new munition are moving ahead with development touting their progress: BAE and Boeing, with the latter partnered with Nammo on the project. Boeing’s shell is propelled by an airbreathing jet engine, whereas BAE’s uses standard propellants.

RTX was previously working on the weapon. However, a company spokesperson told Breaking Defense on Thursday that it “is not actively in the competition.”

A Fight Over Range

On the first day of the AUSA convention earlier this month, both BAE and Boeing published press releases touting record-breaking performances by their prospective XM1155 candidates, with BAE claiming a record for the “furthest distance an M109 Paladin ever fired a guided projectile.” BAE’s XM-1155-SC (sub-caliber) prototype was guided to its target by GPS, according to the release, and the shell’s goal was to hit “fixed and moving targets in contested environments at twice the range of existing cannon-launched precision guided munitions,” the company previously said.

Boeing too claimed its own record at the show, in its case for the “longest indirect fire test of a ramjet-powered artillery projectile” after its prototype launched from the ERCA platform. Boeing, which is partnered with Nammo on the project, said in the release that it previously set the same record in a test fire in December 2022, where that exercise used a 39-caliber cannon.

The confusing competing claims became more complicated when Jim Miller, BAE’s vice president of business development for combat mission systems, made bold assertions about BAE’s XM1155 shell in a briefing with reporters.

“We’re pretty confident we’ve got the record” for the M109 range, Miller added, emphasizing that the Army would have to perform the “tie break” on the assertion. Asked directly whether BAE believes they’ve beaten Boeing for the M109 record, Miller said, “We believe we did. Several times over. And we believe we’ve done it guided and they have not.”

Asked about Miller’s comments, a BAE spokesperson said “Our XM1155-SC test in April 2023 was fired from a tactically representative M109A6 (39 caliber length 155mm) using MACS [modular artillery charge system] Zone 5 and guided to and impacted the target. To the best of our knowledge, the XM1155-SC went further than any round fired from an M109.”

The BAE spokesperson also said that the company’s design “has proven success without special propellant charges and is capable of reaching extended ranges with current and future planned US Army armament systems. XM1155-SC is currently and will remain compatible with existing Army validated and tested propellant charges designed to meet barrel wear and firing rate requirements.”

Given available evidence, it’s difficult to compare the performance of the two defense giants. Without the raw ranges, which must be provided by the Army, it’s not clear which company’s shell may be capable of greater distance. And unless the Army discloses how each company’s prototype measures up to the service’s criteria, which is unlikely especially as the prototyping program is still ongoing, performance for other potential factors like precision and maintenance needs will remain unclear.

An Army spokesperson did not return Breaking Defense’s requests for comment.

For its part, Boeing plans to integrate Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) precision guidance technology for a future test, and when asked about BAE’s claims, a Boeing executive told Breaking Defense that range limitations prevented the company’s offering from going its full distance for the test announced at AUSA.

“We went to the physical limit of the range on this test. We have not shot at our maximum range yet,” said Jim Leary, executive director of business development for Boeing weapon systems.

Leary also highlighted what he said are the benefits of ramjet technology for reducing wear and tear on a platform — the logic being that “when heavy charges are used to boost traditional or sub-caliber munitions to achieve range increases, it can damage and reduce the lifecycle of cannons,” as opposed to a ramjet design “that requires much less charge” — as well as the “form factor” of a ramjet-powered shell that “gives it speed advantages that reduce time to target.

“We believe our offering is revolutionary, not just evolutionary, in artillery,” he added. “This is our ‘moon shoot’ for long-range precision fires and we’re proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in this co-developmental program with the Army so far.”

16. How Will the IDF Handle Urban Combat? by David Kilcullen

Excerpts:

Understanding the tactical difficulty of urban warfare adds context that Israel can use to evaluate the wisdom (or otherwise) of any full-scale ground assault in Gaza. IDF planners are likely concerned that once their forces are decisively committed to ground combat in Gaza, other regional players—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian-backed militias in Syria, or Iranian forces themselves—might attack Israel, creating a multi-front war. This possibility might prompt Israel to mount a preemptive strike on regional players before entering Gaza, but such a strike would be a high-stakes gamble.

A ground campaign in Gaza also carries strategic risk. Amid information warfare from Hamas and Iran, the destruction of property, civilian casualties, and the expulsion of the population—likely painted, at best, as ethnic cleansing—of an urban battle in Gaza could damage Israel’s moral legitimacy, forcing a political halt regardless of progress on the ground. U.S. soldiers and marines experienced this during the first battle of Fallujah in April 2004 in Iraq, when an international outcry forced the Bush administration to halt the battle despite significant progress, giving insurgents the breathing space to consolidate defenses before a second battle that November. Arguably, this political squeamishness cost American lives. But the strategic effect of lost moral legitimacy could be extraordinarily severe—both for Israel and for its allies, including the United States.

All of these factors suggest that a ground assault into Gaza is likely to be horrific, with dire consequences. But as every soldier knows, it may still be necessary—and it may start very soon.

How Will the IDF Handle Urban Combat?

Fighting Hamas in Gaza Will Be Difficult and Costly

By David Kilcullen

October 23, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by David Kilcullen · October 23, 2023

Although the details are still difficult to predict, it seems very likely that Israel will mount a land invasion of the Gaza Strip in the near future. If and when that happens, the campaign will feature several elements common to any large-scale, high-intensity urban battle. In the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Mosul, and Ramadi, the Philippine city of Marawi, the Ukrainian cities of Bakhmut and Mariupol, and many other places, military forces in this century have wrestled with the persistent complications of fighting in urban spaces.

A potential ground assault into Gaza would be no different. It would entail horrendously difficult tactical conditions, including room-to-room combat and tunnel warfare that would lead to massive casualties. It would require fighting on the ground, in the air, and at sea—fighting that must be done in a carefully synchronized fashion. Combat will be slow and grinding, and the resulting devastation will almost certainly test international support for Israel’s invasion. Israeli war planners are almost certainly considering these operational and strategic issues as they decide whether to invade, and—if they go forward—how best to proceed.

LAND, SEA, AND AIR

Most conflicts since the turn of the century have occurred in urbanized, networked, densely populated environments. This is because wars happen where people live, and the world has been urbanizing since the Industrial Revolution. Since 2008, more than half the global population has lived in cities, and experts predict that the world population will be 67 percent urbanized by the middle of this century. Moreover, human settlements cluster on coastlines, so urban conflicts require that forces operate on land and sea as well as in the air. As military forces field longer-range weapons, inland areas can increasingly be targeted with sea-based weapons, and land-based weapons can target ships at sea. In this sense, the whole eastern Mediterranean forms a single regional theater, influencing and influenced by events on the ground in Gaza.

In 2015, recognizing the growing importance of urban conflict, NATO commenced a project to study the enduring challenges of urbanization. The project involved multiple rounds of wargaming and experimentation, and it drew on work by 18 of NATO’s centers of excellence along with science and technology organizations within NATO and the Five Eyes alliance (which includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). It also examined the impact of emerging and disruptive technologies on future urban operations. NATO’s findings are a useful starting point for understanding conflicts like the one looming in Gaza.

NATO researchers called urbanized environments an “urban quad” because cities combine built-up terrain with a dense population, complex systems of infrastructure, and a networked, globally connected information environment. Fighting in such environments is characterized by friction, density, complexity, and threats that can emerge at any moment from any direction. Urban combat is slow, grinding, destructive, environmentally devastating, and horrendously costly in human life—especially for civilians. It involves house-by-house, block-by-block fighting that soaks up troops and firepower in enormous quantities, as every room, street corner, rooftop, sewer, and basement must be secured before the next can be taken. Such combat is particularly dangerous for junior combat leaders, who must constantly expose themselves in order to see, communicate with, and command their soldiers.

Urban warfare is supremely demanding. Specialists such as combat engineers, snipers, medics, heavy weapons teams, and drone operators are valuable and hence heavily targeted. Armored vehicles, including armored bulldozers, are critical and have played a key role in recent battles, such as those in Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq. Armor has also been critical in Bakhmut and Mariupol. Armored vehicles are highly vulnerable, however, unless accompanied by infantry to deal with antitank weapons, mines, and improvised explosive devices. Support from tanks is vital, in turn, for protecting infantry on the ground. Artillery, mortars, and rockets are needed to strike enemy reinforcements and hit targets further away. Modern militaries build a “kill web” of observers, sensors, and communications to feed targets to these longer-range weapons. Commanders try to achieve a combined-arms effect whereby enemies expose themselves to one threat—a drone or artillery strike from overhead, for example—as they seek to avoid another, such as a tank or infantry squad at street level. But this is far easier said than done.

Urban combat may appear land-centric, but in fact aerospace plays a critical role. Airstrikes—from piloted aircraft, drones, or robotic and autonomous systems including kamikaze drones and drones carrying explosive charges—are crucial to enabling forces to maneuver on the ground. This is because of the combined-arms effect: an enemy that disperses to avoid airstrikes becomes vulnerable to ground attack, whereas one that concentrates to fight another force on the ground creates a target for airstrikes. Likewise, surveillance and reconnaissance from air- and space-based sensors are critical to making sense of cluttered, complex urban environments. Space-based communications and navigation systems are fundamental for targeting and command. Cyber- and electronic warfare are also features of this environment.

Urban combat is slow, grinding, destructive, and horrendously costly in human life.

Sea-based systems are crucial as well. Together, warships, carrier-based aircraft, naval gunfire support, and sea-launched drones and missiles enable a force to maneuver by sea, remaining outside the urban environment while striking adversaries onshore. Sea control also allows the landing of amphibious or helicopter-borne troops in unexpected locations, dislocating an enemy’s urban defenses. A seaborne reserve can create flexibility for a ground commander, enabling freedom of maneuver in otherwise static urban battles. Sea denial—preventing adversaries from using the sea—may require land-based antiship missiles as well as surface ships, fast-attack craft, crewless surface vessels, or underwater drones. All these elements have been in play during recent battles in Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces made excellent use of them against the Russian navy in the Black Sea.

Both sides in the Gaza conflict have some or all of these naval systems. The Israeli navy possesses fast attack craft, missile boats, and patrol boats as well as larger warships and naval special forces. Hamas has its own maritime commando force, Nukhba, which led a seaborne raid on Zikim Beach in Israel during the opening moves of the attack on October 7, capturing a military base south of Ashkelon. More broadly, the importance of sea-based systems is evidenced by the U.S. Navy’s deployment of two carrier strike groups into the region, giving it the ability to shoot down incoming missiles targeting Israel (as U.S. warships have already done). A Chinese naval task group is also in the wider region, and Russian aircraft with long-range Kinzhal missiles are deploying over the Black Sea—well within strike range of naval forces operating off Gaza, including the U.S. aircraft carriers.

Back on land, for soldiers and civilians in the midst of urban fighting, the danger, the fatigue, the sense of perpetual threat from every direction, and the horror of close-range hand-to-hand combat all take an immense physical and psychological toll. Battles tend to be confused, fleeting (measured in seconds), and short-range, with targets often closer than 50 yards. Troops may be focused on the house or room they are fighting in, but at the same time they may also be targeted from a distance by mortar crews, snipers, and drone operators.

All this is well known to anyone with combat experience in the last 20 years. It is also, of course, very familiar for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), whose experience in urban battles in Jenin in the West Bank in 2002, southern Lebanon during the war with Hezbollah in 2006, and the Palestinian territories informs much recent thinking on urban warfare.

LIMITING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES

In Gaza, a key initial IDF objective was to separate Hamas fighters from civilians. This was partly to protect the population and partly to identify legitimate targets. But this is one of the hardest aspects of urban combat, given that enemy forces are often dug in and embedded in noncombatant populations that, whether or not they support the adversary, become human shields. Late last week, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the IDF spokesperson, stated that Israel’s “focus has shifted from precision to damage and destruction” in an effort to make Gaza untenable as a Hamas base. This suggests the IDF is placing less emphasis on avoiding civilian targets than before.

In any case, efforts to encourage civilians to leave through official crossing points or designated humanitarian corridors will only partly succeed if recent experiences in Marawi and Mosul are any guide. In both cities, attempts to create humanitarian corridors were hampered by terrorists who blocked civilians from leaving. IDF spokespeople have claimed that Hamas is blocking civilians from leaving today. Even when civilians try to leave, the destruction and chaos of urban combat make it extremely dangerous and difficult for them to do so, leading many to shelter in place. Despite its official shift from precision to destruction, the IDF in fact has a strong track record of seeking to avoid civilian casualties, including through pre-strike warnings and so-called “roof knocking,” in which low-yield or nonexplosive devices are dropped on rooftops to encourage civilians to leave before the main strike. In the event of a full-scale ground assault, we can expect the IDF to bring forward humanitarian and civil affairs teams to evacuate, screen, and support civilians while filtering out enemy fighters who are seeking to hide within the flow of displaced people. But such efforts can only do so much, and the chaos and uncertainty of battle frequently lead to mistakes that cost civilian lives.

Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Rafah (the three most heavily populated parts of the Gaza Strip) are mazes of multistory concrete and brick buildings that are often poorly constructed, rickety, and prone to collapse under artillery or airstrikes. This is hugely dangerous for trapped civilians, as well as for soldiers: damage to urban structures can limit troops’ ability to maneuver, blocking streets with rubble and channeling advancing forces into killing areas. This was one reason the battle of Mosul took so many months, as defenders fought amid the ruins, emerging from the wreckage to mount aggressive counterattacks, besieging headquarters and logistics installations from unexpected directions.

In Gaza, Hamas has spent almost two decades developing a dense network of defenses, including one of the most extensive hardened tunnel systems ever seen in urban combat, a web of underground passages that Hamas claims stretches more than 300 miles. Subterranean warfare, including in tunnels so close to the coast that they are periodically subject to flooding, will likely be one of the most challenging aspects of the battle. Robotic and autonomous systems, including drones capable of exploring tunnel systems and engaging enemies underground or underwater, can help clear underground passageways. Flooding, tear-gas, and other tools can also be critical when fighting in tunnels, basements, or interior spaces. But with noncombatants crowding into such spaces, these methods bring potentially catastrophic risks to civilians. Ultimately, there is no substitute for humans with weapons, sensors, specially trained dogs, and night-vision devices to clear such tunnels. It will be a difficult, deadly, and excruciatingly slow task.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Hamas is a technologically enabled, socially embedded force fighting on its home terrain. Its fighters operate in small networked teams that are armed with lethal weapon systems of the kind that, in recent memory, were largely only available to the armed forces of nation-states. Hamas’s tactics are likely to involve network defense: holding strongpoints to delay and disrupt IDF advances while keeping mobile forces in reserve, ready to counterattack or re-infiltrate cleared areas. They will make extensive use of military off-the-shelf weapons as well as booby traps and improvised explosive devices. Hamas has also already demonstrated its ability to fight a sophisticated information war to mobilize international support.

What started as a horrific attack on Israeli civilians, exploiting shock and surprise, is now likely to congeal into a grinding, slow, contentious, and costly battle in the air, on land, on the sea, and in cyberspace. In Gaza’s complex, cluttered, heavily populated and densely urbanized environment, it will be extraordinarily difficult to make sense of what is happening, even for those on the ground. The effect of emerging technologies, the enduring features of urban combat as identified by NATO—friction, density, complexity, and all-directional threats—along with the physical, human, informational, and infrastructure constraints that cities impose on military forces will all inform what is about to unfold.

Understanding the tactical difficulty of urban warfare adds context that Israel can use to evaluate the wisdom (or otherwise) of any full-scale ground assault in Gaza. IDF planners are likely concerned that once their forces are decisively committed to ground combat in Gaza, other regional players—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian-backed militias in Syria, or Iranian forces themselves—might attack Israel, creating a multi-front war. This possibility might prompt Israel to mount a preemptive strike on regional players before entering Gaza, but such a strike would be a high-stakes gamble.

A ground campaign in Gaza also carries strategic risk. Amid information warfare from Hamas and Iran, the destruction of property, civilian casualties, and the expulsion of the population—likely painted, at best, as ethnic cleansing—of an urban battle in Gaza could damage Israel’s moral legitimacy, forcing a political halt regardless of progress on the ground. U.S. soldiers and marines experienced this during the first battle of Fallujah in April 2004 in Iraq, when an international outcry forced the Bush administration to halt the battle despite significant progress, giving insurgents the breathing space to consolidate defenses before a second battle that November. Arguably, this political squeamishness cost American lives. But the strategic effect of lost moral legitimacy could be extraordinarily severe—both for Israel and for its allies, including the United States.

All of these factors suggest that a ground assault into Gaza is likely to be horrific, with dire consequences. But as every soldier knows, it may still be necessary—and it may start very soon.

• DAVID KILCULLEN is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales, CEO of the global research firm Cordillera Applications Group, and author of Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla. He was senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. General David Petraeus in 2007.

Foreign Affairs · by David Kilcullen · October 23, 2023

17. How the CIA’s top-ranking woman beat the agency’s men at their own game

How the CIA’s top-ranking woman beat the agency’s men at their own game

By Liza Mundy

October 21, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Liza Mundy · October 21, 2023

This article was adapted from “THE SISTERHOOD: The Secret History of Women at the CIA,” by Liza Mundy. Published this week by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.

In the early history of the CIA, marked by towering male figures like Allen Dulles, William Colby and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, few careers proved more remarkable — and unlikely — than that of a Southern blue blood named Eloise Randolph Page. Page anticipated the launch of Sputnik when just about everyone else was taken by surprise. She was the top female officer in the CIA’s clandes­tine service in the 1960s and 70s and the first woman to head a major overseas station. She was physically tiny but larger-than-life, reactionary but visionary, snobby but able to overcome patriarchal provincialism to wield unheard-of influence, at a time when the agency’s sexist culture ensured most women’s career tracks were limited to secretarial and clerk roles.

Born in 1920, Page began her intelligence career during World War II as a secretary at the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor. She was assigned to Donovan, the OSS chief, who liked to recruit from highborn families and must have been delighted that “Eloise,” as everybody called her, came from not only one such family, but two. The Randolphs and the Pages were two of Virginia’s oldest White families, with roots that went back to the origins of the common­wealth, and to slavery. “She was a classy woman,” as one female officer put it, “who belonged somewhere on a plantation.”

Page spent a couple of years keep­ing Donovan, a terrible administrator who said yes to everything and everyone, organized and on track. In 1945, she traveled to Belgium to join X-2, the only OSS unit granted access to Britain’s top secret “Ultra” code-breaking dispatches of Ger­man communications. There, Page identified adversary agents and kept track of them. By helping build a priceless roster of names of some 3,000 known or suspected spies for Axis countries and others, she advanced the United States’ still-nascent skills at “counterespionage” or “counterintelligence,” navigating the complex, hall-of-mirrors world of double agents and spy-versus-spy dealings.

She also worked with Swedish, French and Belgian counterparts to track Nazis and make sure they did not get away. Both liaison work and counterintelli­gence were jobs toward which women tended to be steered. Both were crucial, but not nearly as prestigious as on-the-street recruiting.

After the war — when many women were told to leave and make room for returning veterans — Page hung on, employing her wide acquaintance with scientists and academics to track technical ad­vances and wage a central contest of the Cold War: the scientific competition with the Soviet Union. On Oct. 4, 1957, Page was serv­ing as chief of the Scientific and Technical Operations Staff when the Soviets shocked the American public by launching the satellite Sputnik. The news media portrayed the Sputnik launch as a failure of intelligence, while members of Con­gress accused the CIA of being “asleep at the switch.” The actual failure was that of a male-dominated bureaucracy to listen to what a woman was trying to tell them.

According to an internal CIA study declassified in 2013, Page’s of­fice had compiled “dozens” of reports about Soviet plans to put a satel­lite in space, sourced from her “high-level contacts” in the scientific community. By May 1957, the agency well knew a launch was to occur, and roughly when. “It was to be between September 20th and Octo­ber 4th,” Page later stated in an interview. “We had everything else there was to know about it. We had the angle of launch, we had the date.”

But despite vigorous efforts, she could not get a gatekeeper — Jack White, head of a major committee in the Office of Scientific Intelligence — to accept what she was hearing. He dismissed the intelligence as Soviet disinformation. Page visited him to try to change his mind, warning him that “we are going to have an intelligence failure.” She bet White a case of champagne that the launch would occur, and after it did, she said, “You should have seen my office.” Full of champagne. Her office wrote a bang-up after-action report, and she received a letter from OSI saying that the information in it was “essential and indis­pensable.”

That Page succeeded at an agency where women were marginalized was not only because of her per­sistence but because she had spent enough time in backrooms to well know the darkest corners of Langley. From her time as a secretary, she accumulated her colleagues’ secrets. Of Donovan, she once said, “I had the goods on him, and I played it for all it was worth.” One case officer marveled, “She had the pictures on somebody,” — incriminating photos.

For all her apparent power, though, Page remained at a disadvan­tage. She exerted influence from a bureaucratic position rather than an operational posting. As she rose through the administrative hierarchy, Page gained wide say over budgets. Any baron who wanted funding for a covert operation had to get the go-ahead from Eloise. “She scared some of these men to death,” remembered Lee Coyle. “They were afraid to go into her office.”

“She was in a position like J. Edgar Hoover to make or break a per­son,” said an operations officer, Mike Kalogeropoulos. “She knew where the bodies were buried. She knew the real story about everything. No­body touched her.”

In 1978, Page became the first woman sent to head a major overseas CIA station, taking over as Athens station chief. “You would have thought the world was going to end,” recalled a CIA officer working in the inspector general’s office, who heard the chatter in the halls and beyond. “The reaction was so strong; it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how can this happen, this is a disaster, this can never be!’”

While it may have been, at least in part, a gesture toward equality or a reflec­tion of Page’s talents and deserts — the officer who promoted her, John McMahon, was seen as well intentioned when it came to women — in Page’s own view, her appointment represented a shrewd risk-benefit analysis by male rivals who wanted her out.

Nearing 60 years old, Page was dispatched to the CIA training facility near Williamsburg, Va., known as the Farm, almost four decades after she started her career during World War II. “She was five foot one, and skinny,” recalled Kalogeropoulos, who was beginning his own career at the same time. Kalogero­poulos found himself standing at the firing range behind a woman old enough to be his mother. “She fired and the gun flew right out of her hand. She went flying into the mud.” Page got up and tried again. Kalogeropoulos was deputized to “hold her shoulders as she shot, so she wouldn’t fall backward. I’m about 200 pounds, six feet tall, I’m holding this yellow-haired woman pointing down at the firing range.”

Rather than thank him, Page, upon learning his name, remarked that his surname was too Greek, and he should change it to Kellogg.

Kalogeropoulos’s first posting was to Athens, so he ended up work­ing for Page. She liked him, and he liked her; over sherry on Fridays, she shared her understanding of why she’d been sent abroad. The men “were trying to get rid of her,” she told him. In her former position overseeing policy, staff positions and funding, she enjoyed, they felt, too much power. The barons resented her ability to approve or reject their budget requests and disliked having to come to her and grovel.

Men at headquarters had been pressing Page for years to go over­seas, she told him. She had no real desire to serve in an overseas capac­ity and was able to put them off, saying she had to care for her aged mother. When her mother died, however, the pressure intensified. “They said, ‘You have to go, or we’ll cashier you,’” Kalogeropoulos re­membered her saying — meaning that they would find a way to ease her out altogether.

The agency’s barons offered her one of two stations: Canberra, Australia or Athens, which was more “operationally vibrant,” to put it mildly. Athens was a hard, risky assignment. Three years earlier, Athens station chief Richard Welch had been murdered by left-wing terrorists waging a guerrilla war against the right-wing Greek regime. He was succeeded by Clair George, another bigfoot chief who later would be implicated in the Iran-contra scandal and convicted of lying to Congress. “It was a horrible time in Greece,” one covert officer recalled. The top job here was not one for the faint of heart. “She picked Athens just to show them up,” said Kalogeropoulos.

The men at headquarters thought they were setting her up for failure. Greece was a patriarchal culture, and there were fewer women more conventionally feminine, and conventionally Anglo-American, than Page. She hated olive oil, detested lamb, favored sherry and cocktails over retsina or ouzo.

To everyone’s surprise, the Greeks embraced her. “They liked her because she was very nice to them,” Kalogeropoulos said.

But many aspects of her behavior were egregious. In Athens, there was a Black family who helped take care of her residence; Page required one of the children, a boy of 8 or 9, to salute anyone who entered. It was racist and objectionable in the extreme. The U.S. ambassador was appalled. Page didn’t care. She also ignored directives from headquarters if she disagreed with them.

Even as the Greeks embraced Page, some of the men in Athens Station chafed under her leadership. So they ran an operation against her, working with allies back in Langley. As a ploy, Page was summoned to headquarters to sit on a panel. During her absence, an emissary from Langley paid a visit to Athens Station. The emissary called the station’s officers in, one by one, and solicited criticism of her, assuring them he himself would replace her as chief. They said “she was inexperienced, she didn’t know squat, really trying to nail her to the wall,” Kalogeropoulos recalled.

When Page returned, she called the staff into the secure room and divided them into two groups. One group consisted of those who had ratted on her; the other, those who had not. She turned to the rats and “proceeded to tell everybody what they had said. It was supposed to be confidential, and she just — it was just incredible,” Kalogeropoulos re­membered. After that, he said, two case officers left the station. “She threw them out.”

None of this made her a revolutionary. She came from the same elite background as many of the men she worked with and shared their outlook along with their tactics. A hard-line anti-communist, she was right-wing to the point of being blinkered. When the conservative Greek govern­ment fell in 1981 and socialists took over, Page “wouldn’t let us report on it.” The radio silence out of Athens Station amounted to an intelli­gence failure.

After three years, Page completed her tour in Athens. Upon her return, she was shunted back into desk jobs — effectively put out to pasture. She went on to serve at the Defense Intelligence Agency, but never again in operations or at Langley. In her 2002 obituary in The Washington Post, an unnamed colleague summed Page up: “She was a perfect southern lady with a core of steel.”

Liza Mundy is a former Washington Post staff writer and the New York Times best-selling author of five books, including “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II.” [amazon.com]

The Washington Post · by Liza Mundy · October 21, 2023

18. Special Operations News - October 23, 2023 | SOF News

Special Operations News - October 23, 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · October 23, 2023

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: Sailors assigned to the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Carney (DDG 64) stand watch in the ship’s Combat Information Center during an operation to defeat a combination of Houthi missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, Oct. 19. Carney is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Aaron Lau)

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SOF News

White House Photo Compromise of SOF Operators. The White House has removed a picture (Task & Purpose, Oct 19, 2023) shared on social media that apparently showed President Joe Biden shaking hands with American special operators in Israel during his recent visit to the country. A White House spokesman says the photograph had been posted by accident.

NSW Drug Testing. The Navy’s Special Warfare Command is poised to begin regularly testing all Navy SEALs for performance-enhancing drugs next month, but the effort to root out the potentially dangerous substances could also lead the service into a legal minefield. (Military.com, Oct 20, 2023)

Berets of the Military. At one time there was the Green Beret worn by members of the U.S. Army Special Forces. In time, multiple colors of berets have emerged, and it seems almost everyone is wearing one now. “A guide to every beret worn by American service members”, Task & Purpose, October 19, 2023.

SOCOM Seeking New Urban Warfare Tools. The U.S. Special Operations Command is on the hunt for new non-line-of-sight targeting tools to help commandos fight in cities. The envisioned solution is to create new networks of sensors and supporting technologies that enable “virtual” line-of-sight targeting and allow commandos to remain in unexposed positions. (DefenseScoop, Oct 18, 2023)

U.S. SOCOM and Grenada. In the aftermath of Iran-Grenada, several congressional leaders took the initiative to reorganize the Pentagon’s special operations forces, culminating in the creation of U.S. Special Operations Command in 1987. “How War in Grenada Built U.S. SOCOM”, National Interest, October 20, 2023.

AFSOC’s SWTW. Five years ago, the U.S. Air Force took a significant leap forward in combat preparedness by establishing the Special Warfare Training Wing (SWTW), an evolution that addressed decades of training shortfalls and operational demands. The SWTW marked a paradigm shift, assuming control over an extensive network of squadrons and detachments. Notably, the wing superseded the former Battlefield Airman Training Group, extending its legacy of ground warfare specialization. “Special Warfare Training Wing: Five Years of Advancing Ground Combat Forces Training”, by Jennifer Gangemi, SWTW, October 19, 2023.

SOF and PR Missions. The mission of personnel recovery of missing or isolated personnel has evolved over time. Many special operations units have performed this mission in the last several decades. Learn more in “No Man Left Behind: This Special Forces Mission Is More Important Than All the Others”, National Interest, October 18, 2023.

GSOF Europe. The Global SOF Foundation is holding a symposium in Europe from October 24-26, 2023 in Brno, Czech Republic. https://www.gsofeurope.org/

AFSOC’s T-AOS. The Air Force Special Operations Command is establishing five Theater Air Operations Squadrons. The units will regionally synchronize, integrate, enable, and selectively employ Air Force Special Operations Forces capabilities to increase advantage against national priorities and strategic competitors by providing multi-domain options for the Joint Force. “AFSOC’s Theater Air Operations Squadron”, SOF News, October 19, 2023.

International SOF

Israel’s Sayeret Matkal. One of the premier special operations units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has been in existence for decades. It has taken part in several hostage rescue operations since its inception. The Sayeret Matkal specializes in hostage rescue and reconnaissance missions. It is best known for its role in the 1976 Entebbe airport raid in Uganda that saved 102 hostages from Palestinian hijackers. “How Israel’s Sayeret Matkal Are Trained for Gaza Hostage Scenario”, Newsweek, October 16, 2023.

New Israeli SOF Command Center. Mossad and Shin Bet have set up an operations center to track down members of the Gaza-ruling terror group’s Nukbha forces. The center will be tasked with finding and killing members of the Hamas commando unit that led the terror groups raids into southern Israel on October 7, 2023. (The Times of Israel, Oct 22, 2023)

Ukraine’s Commandos. Lightening assaults by Ukrainian special operations forces are part of a larger campaign using drones and missiles to degrade Russian forces and demoralize the public. Some of these SOF raids have been against Russian forces on Crimea using jet skis to travel long miles over the Black Sea. “Inside the Commando Raids Unnerving Russia in Crimea”, The New York Times, October 22, 2023. (subscription) See also “Jet Skis: The Secret Weapon in Ukraine’s Commando War on Crimea”, Popular Mechanics, October 22, 2023.

ROKs New SOF Helos. Seoul has plans for significant upgrades to its tactical transport capabilities, with plans to buy 18 Special Operations Heavy Helicopters (SOHHs). (Flight Global, Oct 19, 2023)

SOF History

‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. The Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) has a number of AC-130Js that perform as aerial gunships in support of special operations forces. The beginnings of the gunship can be traced back to the Vietnam War when C-47 cargo planes were converted into AC-47 gunships. Read more in “Flashback: Puff the Magic Dragon: Development of the AC-47 Gunship”, Wright-Patterson AFB, October 20, 2023.

Nick Rowe Capture in Vietnam. On October 29, 1963, Captain James “Nick” Rowe was captured by the Viet Cong. He was a Special Forces officer and one of only 34 American prisoners of war to escape captivity during the Vietnam War. He would later help establish the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program taught to high-risk military personnel.

Urgent Fury. On October 25, 1983, Operation Urgent Fury took place in Grenada.

Hostage Rescued. In October 2020, U.S. special operations forces rescued Philip Walton, a US citizen living in Niger who was kidnapped. He was a Christian missionary who worked in Niger. No military personnel were injured during the operation. Several of the gunmen were killed. The rescue is credited to Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU).

Conflict in Israel and Gaza

War Update. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has conducted limited security operations in the West Bank as well as excursions into the Gaza Strip. The IDF air force is continuing its extensive bombing campaign against Hamas military targets. Various Palestinian militant and terrorist groups continue to launch missiles and rockets into Israel – bringing the total to about 6,900 since October 7th.

Hospital Strike. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that at least 500 people were killed in an explosion at a hospital on October 17. However, the real culprit seems to be an errant Hamas rocket fired from Gaza struck the al-Ahli al-Mamdani Hospital. Expert analysis of imagery and events indicates (Twitter) “with a high degree of confidence that Israel did not strike the hospital.”

Egyptian Border Crossing. At least two aid truck convoys have passed through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt to Gaza. Limited numbers of foreign citizens have passed through the crossing into Egypt from Gaza; however, Egypt has not opened the crossing to Palestinian refugees.

Hostages. Two U.S. citizens held hostage by Hamas were released and are now in Israel. The mother and daughter were taken hostage on the first day of the conflict. Qatar (DoS) and other nations in the region are conducting negotiations for the release of the hostages taken by Hamas.

Caution Notice to U.S. Citizens. The U.S. Department of State has issued a worldwide travel warning and provided information for citizens wishing to evacuate from Israel. “Latest Information for U.S. Citizens”, DoS, October 21, 2023. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/ea/situation-in-israel-2023.html

U.S. Force Posture Increased in Middle East. The Department of Defense is taking additional steps to further strengthen U.S. forces in the region, increase force protection for U.S. forces, and assist in the defense of Israel. Two carrier strike groups will soon be in the Central Command area of responsibility. Anti-aircraft and missile defense systems are flowing into region as well. (DoD, Oct 21, 2023) Rocket attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq have taken place; DoD reports no casualties. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and consulate in Erbil is now on reduced staffing. The Department of State has ordered the departure of eligible family members and non-emergency U.S. government personnel.

U.S. to Provide Humanitarian Assistance to Palestinians. President Biden announced that the United States is providing $100 million in humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. This funding will help support over a million displaced and conflict-affected people with clean water, food, hygiene support, medical care, and other essential needs. The United States provides humanitarian assistance through trusted partners including UN agencies and international NGOs. “U.S. Announcement of Humanitarian Assistance to the Palestinian People”, The White House, October 18, 2023.

U.S. Military Assistance. A constant stream of C-17 cargo planes is delivering military aid to Israel; most of the flights arriving from and returning to Ramsten AB, Germany. U.S. warships have intercepted missiles and drones launched from Yemen going towards Israel.

Evacuating U.S. Citizens from Israel / Gaza. The Congressional Research Service has published “Assisting and Evacuating U.S. Citizens Abroad During the Israel-Hamas Conflict and Other International Crisis”, CRS IF12515, October 20, 2023, PDF, 3 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12515

Ukraine Conflict

No End in Sight. The Ukraine-Russia conflict is dragging on. In the past several months neither side has made significant progress in the offensive campaigns. The slow, grinding Ukrainian counteroffensive has taken limited ground. At stake is the support of the Europeans and the United States as ‘war fatigue’ sets in. U.S. support for Ukraine is threatened by the actions of Republicans in the House of Representatives. Read more in “IntelBrief: No End in Sight, Hard Questions Ahead for Ukraine and Allies”, The Soufan Center, October 17, 2023.

ATACMs. Apparently, another long-range strike capability is now in the hands of the Ukrainian military. A limited number of U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMs) have been sent by the United States to Ukraine and have already been employed. With a range of 190 miles the missiles can attack Russian strategic targets like supply depots, airfields, and command posts. “Why Sending Ukraine ATACMs Will Help It Win in the Long Term”, by Jonathan Harman, Real Clear Defense, October 20, 2023.

Report – War Crimes in Ukraine. The Congressional Research Service has published a document that addresses war crimes and other international crimes in Ukraine, the U.S. and international responses to those crimes, and other associated issues and options for Congress. PDF, October 16, 2023, 38 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47762

Help Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel with spine injuries receive the healthcare options, education, and care they need.

National Security and Commentary

Former SF General on Hostages. Brigadier General (Ret.) Russ Howard explains the problem set of hostages and Iran in the context of the Israel – Gaza Strip conflict. He explains the difficulty in rescuing hostages and in navigating what is to be done with Iran . . . if that country is complicit in the terrorist attack on Israel. “IF”, Small Wars Journal, October 16, 2023.

UW, SF, and IW. Sal Artiaga reflects upon the evolving tapestry of global conflict and how unconventional warfare is deeply entrenched within the Department of Defense’s broader irregular warfare (IW) framework. “Unconventional Warfare: The Strategic Ingenuity of Special Forces in Shaping DoD’s Irregular Warfare Strategies”, LinkedIn, October 21, 2023.

Fact Sheet – 2023 China Military Power Report. This two-page report provides a brief synopsis of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to include capabilities, coercion, strategy, and more. DoD, October 19, 2023.

Report – Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2023. This annual report to Congress on China by the U.S. Department of Defense covers a number of topics to include PRC strategy, PLA forces, power projection, activities on China’s periphery, global presence, force modernization, and more. The section on China’s SOF can be found on pages 82-87. U.S. Department of Defense, October 19, 2023, PDF, 212 pages.

Finland – Applying Lessons to the Pacific. Euan Graham, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, recently attended a security conference in Helsinki. He believes that Indo-Pacific countries, including Australia and New Zealand, can learn a lot from the broad security focus of Finland. “Lessons from Finland for the Indo-Pacific”, The Strategist, October 23, 2023.

Karabakh Armenians – A Displaced Population. Since December 2022 the 120,000 Armenians residing in Nagorno-Karabakh have endured an economic blockade imposed by the Azerbaijan government. In late September 2023 Azerbaijan military forces took control of the Armenian-populated region resulting in a cease-fire that included the disarmament of the Nagorno-Karabakh’s self-defense forces and the region’s reintegration with Azerbaijan. More than 100,000 people have fled the region and have arrived in Armenia. Read more in Azerbaijan’s Retaking of Nagorno-Karabakh and the Displacement of Karabakh Armenians, Congressional Research Service, CRS IN12265, October 18, 2023, PDF, 4 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12265

Border Crisis. In an era of unprecedent migrant movement across the southern border and a severe housing shortage across the nation, the U.S. Department of State has established a mechanism to establish a ‘safe way’ across the border for migrants and refugees. “Announcement of Safe Mobility Office in Ecuador”, Department of State, October 19, 2023.

Backlog in Immigration Courts. More than 2 million cases are pending in U.S. immigration courts. This backlog has more than tripled since the start of fiscal year 2017. The effects of the backlog are significant and widespread. In particular, the backlog causes delays and poses challenges for noncitizens whose cases are being heard in immigration courts, as well as attorneys and immigration judges and court staff. Some noncitizens—including children and families—wait years to have their cases heard. The delays postpone decisions for vulnerable populations who may be eligible for protections, such as asylum. They also prolong the removal from the U.S. of those who do not have valid claims to remain. “U.S. Immigration Courts See a Significant and Growing Backlog”, U.S. Government Accountability Office, October 19, 2023.

Arrow Security & Training, LLC is a corporate sponsor of SOF News. AST offers a wide range of training and instruction courses and programs to include language and cultural services, training, role playing, and software and simulation. https://arrowsecuritytraining.com/

Afghanistan

Facebook and Surviving. One Afghan journalist has coped with the economic downturn and no job with selling traditional Afghan clothing online. Afghanistan Analysts Network, October 16, 2023.

Another Natural Disaster. A third earthquake, measuring 6.3 magnitude, struck an area close to Herat on Sunday, October 14, 2023. Over 100 have been injured with some deaths reported as well. The last two earthquakes flattened thousands of homes, killed over 3,000 people, injured more than 7,000, and displaced thousands. The United States is providing over $12 million in aid for Afghan earthquake relief. The Hindu Kush Mountain range lies near the junction of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.

Diversity Visa. Although a long short, some Afghans may be able to apply for a U.S. Diversity Visa and if lucky, find their way to the United States. Read more here: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrate/diversity-visa-program-entry/diversity-visa-instructions.html

Letter to Pakistan. #AfghanEvac organized an open letter to Pakistani leaders in October 2023. More than 150 Americans across the diplomatic, national security, and humanitarian sectors from the leadership level all the way down to volunteers signed on to send a clear message. The intent is to ask Pakistani leaders to not deport Afghans who have a pending or approved pathway to legal U.S. immigration. Open Letter to Pakistani Leaders, #AfghanEvac, October 17, 2023.

SOF News Book Shop

View our selection of books about special operations forces at the SOF News Book Shop.

Books, Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Podcast – More Reality Than Fiction. The Global SOF Foundation presents an interview with Jeffrey Fischer, a successful author of thrillers and an experienced journalist in international security with a 30-year military career. SOFspot, October 2023, 35 minutes. https://gsof.org/sofspot/

Podcast – The Battle of Hostomel. John Spencer from the Urban Warfare Project joins Paul in the G-Base to discuss a 21st century version of the Battle of Thermopylae; how 200 Ukrainian Guardsmen, defending the Hostomel Airfield, saved Kiev from falling into the hands of elite Russian paratroopers on the morning of 24 February 2022. Time and again, history informs us how a few determined warriors are able to overcome insurmountable odds and defeat an overwhelming adversary. The Pinelander Podcast, October 20, 2023. https://pinelander.podbean.com/e/episode-84-the-battle-of-hostomel-october-20-2023/

Video – SOF – Space – Cyber Triad. The AUSA 2023 Warriors Corner presented a panel discussion / presentation on “The Special Operations Forces (SOF) Space Cyber Triad – Enhancing Large Scale Combat Operations Now and in the Future”. DVIDS, October 11, 2023, 30 minutes. https://www.dvidshub.net/video/900044/ausa-2023-warriors-corner-special-operations-forces-sof-space-cyber-triad-enhancing-large-scale-combat-operations-now-and

Video – Soldier in Europe. This video shows the lives of soldiers and how they stayed alert and ready during peacetime in a time of Cold War. A historical “The Big Picture” black and white film. DVIDS, October 16, 2023, 30 minutes. https://www.dvidshub.net/video/900535/big-picture-soldier-europe

Video – Rotary Wing Parachute Jump. Members of Group Sustainment Battalion, 20th Special Forces Group conducted an airborne sustainment operation. Watch video here. DVIDS, October 14, 2023, 2 minutes.

Publication – Spotlight. The Irregular Warfare Center’s October 2023 monthly newsletter is now posted online. https://irregularwarfarecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023-10-IWC-Spotlight.pdf

Upcoming Events

October 24-26, 2023

GSOF Symposium Europe

Global SOF Foundation

October 30-31, 2023

34th Annual NDIA SO/LIC Symposium

National Defense Industrial Association

November 29-30, 2023

SOF & Irregular Warfare Symposium

Defense Strategies Institute

December 8, 2023

Winter Cruise

Combat Diver Association

December 8-10, 2023

2023 Civil Affairs Conference

Civil Affairs Association

SOF News is not a ‘money making’ enterprise; but we do have administrative, operating, and publishing expenses. Individuals and businesses provide the funds to defray these expenses. Their contributions are deeply appreciated. Learn how you can support SOF News.

sof.news · by SOF News · October 23, 2023

19. House Chaos Imperils Reauthorization of Critical National Security Tool

Conclusion:

Senior leaders in the IC have spent time over the last 18 months explaining the authority, testifying to Congress, and making their case in the media about the unique and critical value that Section 702 data provides, as well as explaining what they have done to remediate concerns related to how the IC (and FBI specifically) has implemented the program. It’s time for Congress and the White House to show us they’re serious about the threats we face, and to find a viable path forward for the existing, agile, and appropriate tool we have in Title VII of FISA. Our national security depends on it.

House Chaos Imperils Reauthorization of Critical National Security Tool

Published 10/21/23 08:00 AM ET

Vanessa Le

themessenger.com · October 21, 2023

Unprecedented chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives has wrought destruction: institutional legitimacy, policy priorities, and careers lie in its wake. But the dysfunction in the House, combined with the recent Hamas attacks in Israel, highlight one particularly imperiled hope that all Americans should be concerned about: reauthorizing Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a vital intelligence tool that provides over 60% of the material in the Presidential Daily Brief.

The U.S. is in a great power competition with China, has a near-peer adversary in Russia, faces cyber threats from sophisticated and persistent nation-state and solo actors, and — as Hamas’ recent attacks on Israel highlight — we are still fighting a multifaceted and global terrorist threat. The Biden administration, the Senate, and civil society must partner with whoever the new speaker is to reauthorize Title VII before it expires on December 31, 2023.

Title VII, and particularly Section 702, of FISA, allows the intelligence community (IC) to obtain electronic communications from U.S.-based service providers (think: your free email provider based here in the U.S.) if: (1) the person communicating is a non-U.S. person; (2) located outside of the United States (e.g., a Chinese government hacker in Beijing); and, (3) is believed to communicate foreign intelligence information (e.g., potential cyberattacks, terrorist plots, or counterintelligence operations).

In part because U.S. service providers are so dominant worldwide, Section 702 provides consistent, valuable, and unique insights: over half of the Presidential Daily Brief comes from 702-derived information. 702 can and does provide crucial insights into the plans and intentions of foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas. Not only does 702 data help keep America secure, but State Department officials like Brett Holmgren have noted how crucial 702 insights are to our intelligence diplomacy efforts and keeping our allies, like Israel, safe.

I have worked on and around 702 for almost a decade, starting my legal career overseeing Section 702 targeting, tasking, and compliance at the National Security Agency, working at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the 2018 reauthorization effort, and most recently leading the IC’s interagency effort at ODNI over the last two years. I don’t want to downplay the compliance challenges that the IC, or the FBI, in particular, have faced recently: Some of these things, like querying the names of members of Congress into 702 data, are ugly, bad mistakes.

Before the leadership ouster in the House, Americans were facing the prospect that this critical tool may lapse because Congress, the Executive Branch, and civil society couldn’t overcome their own rhetorical inertia. The current political climate combines a general distrust of the IC that has historically come from the political Left, and now also includes a post-Mike Flynn/Carter Page FISA concern coming from the political Right.

Now, with a Speaker of the House who may be lukewarm or openly hostile to reauthorizing Section 702, the IC needs to act fast to preserve this critical intelligence tool.

First, the IC should work with DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel and the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), if possible, to shore up the legal reasoning that would allow the IC to continue collecting data under the FISC-approved 702 certifications from last year, which would allow intelligence collection to continue until April, even if the law is not reauthorized before December 31. By proactively reinforcing this legal authority, they will have bought themselves four months of crucial intelligence insights, and more importantly, some time to calm the political waters and strike a deal with someone in the House of Representatives. This pathway becomes even more critical if the Speaker is someone who is openly hostile to FISA reauthorization.

Second, the White House Office of Legislative Affairs should be working with the House and Senate leadership and with the chairs and ranking members of the Armed Services Committees to find a legislative vehicle upon which 702 reauthorization could ride (probably the National Defense Authorization Act). Without a legislative vehicle that actually reauthorizes 702 so that it can become law, it won’t matter what reforms anyone puts forward from the right or the left.

Senior leaders in the IC have spent time over the last 18 months explaining the authority, testifying to Congress, and making their case in the media about the unique and critical value that Section 702 data provides, as well as explaining what they have done to remediate concerns related to how the IC (and FBI specifically) has implemented the program. It’s time for Congress and the White House to show us they’re serious about the threats we face, and to find a viable path forward for the existing, agile, and appropriate tool we have in Title VII of FISA. Our national security depends on it.

Vanessa Le served as Special Advisor to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence & Special Counsel to the General Counsel, ODNI, where she led an interagency effort to reauthorize FISA Section 702. She previously served as lead investigative counsel on the Senate Select Committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

themessenger.com · October 21, 2023

20. Blinken, Austin Say US Is Ready to Respond if US Personnel Become Targets of Israel-Hamas War

Blinken, Austin Say US Is Ready to Respond if US Personnel Become Targets of Israel-Hamas War

The U.S. announced Sunday that non-essential staff at its embassy in Iraq should leave the country

Published 10/22/23 11:28 PM ET|Updated 14 min ago

The Associated Press

themessenger.com · October 23, 2023

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Sunday that the United States expects the Israel-Hamas war to escalate through involvement by proxies of Iran, and they asserted that the Biden administration is prepared to respond if American personnel or armed forces become the target of any such hostilities.

“This is not what we want, not what we're looking for. We don't want escalation,” Blinken said. "We don't want to see our forces or our personnel come under fire. But if that happens, we're ready for it.”

Austin, echoing Blinken, said “what we’re seeing is a prospect of a significant escalation of attacks on our troops and our people throughout the region.”

He said the U.S. has the right to self-defense “and we won't hesitate to take the appropriate action.”

The warning from the high-ranking U.S. officials came as Israel's military response to a deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on civilians in communities in southern Israel entered its third week.

Israeli warplanes struck targets across Gaza overnight and into Sunday, as well as two airports in Syria and a mosque in the occupied West Bank allegedly used by militants as the war threatened to engulf more of the Middle East.

Israel has traded fire with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group on a near-daily basis since the war began, and tensions are soaring in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces have battled militants in refugee camps and carried out two airstrikes in recent days.

The U.S. announced Sunday that non-essential staff at its embassy in Iraq should leave the country.

President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meet with victims' relatives and first responders who were directly affected by the Hamas attacks, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023, in Tel Aviv.AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Blinken, who recently spent several days in the region, spoke of a “likelihood of escalation” while saying no one wants to see a second or third front to the hostilities between Israel and Hamas, which rules Gaza.

The secretary said he expects “escalation by Iranian proxies directed against our forces, directed against our personnel,” and added: “We are taking steps to make sure that we can effectively defend our people and respond decisively if we need to.” Iran is an enemy of Israel.

Blinken, appearing on NBC's “Meet the Press,” noted that additional military assets had been deployed to the region, including two aircraft carrier battle groups, “not to provoke, but to deter, to make clear that if anyone tries to do anything, we're there.”

President Joe Biden, repeatedly has used one word to warn Israel’s enemies against trying to take advantage of the situation: “Don’t.”

Meanwhile, trucks loaded with food, water and other supplies that Palestinians living in Gaza desperately need continued to enter the enclave on Sunday after a key crossing at the border with Egypt was opened a day earlier to allow humanitarian assistance to begin flowing.

But Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, said the situation in Gaza remained “catastrophic." She said even more aid needs to be allowed in.

She said her organization was able to feed 200,000 people dinner on Saturday “but that's not enough. That's a drop. We need secure and sustainable access in there, in that region, so we can feed people.”

Four hundred aid trucks were entering Gaza daily before the latest war, she said.

“This is a catastrophe happening and we just simply have to get these trucks in,” she said.

Biden, who was at his home on the Delaware coast, was briefed by his national security team on the latest developments, the White House said. Biden also discussed the situation during separate conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pope Francis.

Biden and Netanyahu talked about “the need to prevent escalation in the region and to work toward a durable peace in the Middle East," the White House said. Israel has promised a military ground invasion of Gaza to destroy Hamas.

Biden also convened a call with the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom to discuss the conflict. Among topics discussed, the White House said the leaders committed to working closely to keep the war from spreading, while seeking a political solution.

The State Department on Sunday ordered non-essential U.S. diplomats and their families at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and the U.S. consulate in Irbil to leave the country due to the heightened tensions. In an updated message to Americans in Iraq, the department said the security situation in Iraq made it impossible to carry out normal operations.

Austin and McCain spoke on ABC's “This Week.”

themessenger.com · October 23, 2023

21. A Catastrophic Success for Hamas?

Excerpts:

The greater the devastation Israel inflicts on the Palestinians in Gaza, the more likely that it will deliver the objective that Hamas’s October 7 operation has thus far failed to attain. If it overreaches, Israel will effectively follow in U.S. footsteps. After September 11, Bush declared that the nation’s “grief [. . .] turned to anger, and anger to resolution” and vowed that the “war on terror” would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Yet despite the significant blows Washington dealt to al Qaeda, Bush’s open-ended and sprawling interventions gave rise to numerous regional jihadi groups.

The lessons of September 11 were on Biden’s mind when he spoke of the “mistakes” the United States made in response to those attacks and cautioned “the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage.” Millions of people across the Middle East are already protesting in the streets. Given that many in the region harbor anger not only toward Israel’s Gaza military campaign but also against their own corrupt regimes, these protests threaten the fragile stability of the Middle East’s and North Africa’s governments, including those that have signed peace agreements with Israel.

Even though al Qaeda was unable to achieve a “decisive blow” through its September 11 attacks, bin Laden continued to describe them as “victories.” For now, Hamas will likely continue to double down on its rhetoric and sing the praises of its achievements. However, in the years after of his attack, bin Laden found that most regional jihadi groups proved to be a liability to global jihad, and that their indiscriminate attacks “repulsed” Muslims. Hamas, too, might be unnerved and potentially eclipsed if the conflict assumes a regional dimension.

A Catastrophic Success for Hamas?

How the Attack on Israel Could Backfire for the Group

By Nelly Lahoud

October 23, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Nelly Lahoud · October 23, 2023

Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks, which killed over 1,000 Israelis, provoked outrage around the world. Politicians from Washington to New Delhi condemned Hamas and offered condolences to the Israeli people. Leading politicians traveled to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The devastatingly high number of fatalities, relative to the size of Israel’s population, prompted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to describe the attack as “the equivalent of ten September 11s.”

Blinken is not the only official to invoke September 11 when discussing Hamas’s strikes. Across the world, officials and analysts—both those who support and those who oppose Israel—have drawn comparisons between the two operations. It is easy to see why. Both assaults killed record numbers of people in their respective countries. Both stunned the world. And both were intended to trigger a chain reaction of global magnitude. The founding leader of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, anticipated that September 11 would deliver what he termed a “decisive blow” to the Washington-led order and “destroy the myth of American invincibility.” Similarly, Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, declared that the October 7 operation would “herald the dawn of a great revolution” by setting in motion a global domino effect that would shatter “the invincibility” of Israel and end its occupation of Palestinian territories.

Bin Laden’s attack, for its part, did change the world. But it was not in the way he expected. Al Qaeda’s leader believed his attacks would prompt Americans to take to the streets, replicating the Vietnam antiwar protests, and demand the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Muslim-majority states. Instead, Americans united behind U.S. President George W. Bush, who sent troops to occupy Afghanistan, launched a wide-ranging “war on terror” that debilitated al Qaeda, and, eventually, invaded Iraq.

Hamas similarly believes that its attack will lead to regional escalation, culminating in the liberation of occupied Palestinian territories. Although it is too early to predict the longer-term consequences of Hamas’s October 7 operation, it is evident that the group was unprepared to handle the chaos that unfolded even during the operation itself. If the events that followed September 11 can serve as a useful analogy for the current crises, then the potential upheaval that might take place in the coming months is ominous for both Hamas and the entire region.

DREAMS AND DELUSIONS

In bin Laden’s mind, the September 11 attack was part of a greater plan. Al Qaeda’s leader wanted to compel the United States to withdraw its military forces from Muslim-majority states in order to weaken authoritarian regimes in these places, paving the way for jihadis to topple them and liberate Muslims who suffer under their oppressive rule. His ultimate goal was to resurrect the historical umma, that is, the global community of Muslims once held together by a common political authority.

Bin Laden’s plan, however, completely backfired. Contrary to his expectations, Washington quickly responded to the September 11 attacks by launching a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan to root out his group, and it largely succeeded. By December 2001, al Qaeda was shattered, and by late 2002, most of the group’s senior leaders were killed or captured. Al Qaeda’s second-tier leaders struggled to hide even in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where they eventually sought refuge. Their troubles were largely because of the CIA’s sustained and effective drone campaign over the region, which halted al Qaeda’s international terrorism.

Hamas is not al Qaeda, and its stated goal—liberating Palestine—is much more targeted than bin Laden’s sweeping vision. But in Deif’s statement announcing the October 7 attack, there are clear echoes of bin Laden’s vision of change. The Arabic name of the operation, “Tufan al Aqsa,” likely alludes to the global flood involving Noah’s salvation, found in both the Bible and the Koran: in the Koran, “Tufan” is the deluge that God unleashed to cleanse the earth of sins. “Al Aqsa,” meanwhile, refers to the mosque that represents Islam’s third holiest site. Located in the same place as the Temple Mount, one of the holiest places for Jews, al Aqsa has witnessed numerous clashes between the Israeli police and Muslim worshippers, particularly in recent years. Deif’s speech was punctuated by a provocative phrase—the “wrath of al Aqsa”—designed to enrage Muslims worldwide by recalling the frequent police raids on the mosque and the all-too-familiar images of worshippers being fired at with rubber bullets and stun grenades.

When he announced the launch of the October 7 operation, Deif expressed hope that operational success would set off a chain reaction beyond Israel, drawing the broader Middle East into a conflict for Palestinian freedom. He implored Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank to use all available means to target Jewish settlements, and he called on Palestinians inside Israel to “ignite the earth with flames beneath the feet of the oppressive occupiers.” He also appealed to Islamic “resistance” groups (which are distinct from jihadi groups) in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen “to unite with their brethren in Palestine.” Deif even predicted that, driven by their zeal to defend al Aqsa, “all Arab and Islamic powers will unite behind the Palestinians and sweep away the occupation.”

Hamas appeared genuinely stunned by the temporary collapse of Israel’s defenses.

But it has not taken long for Hamas to realize that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Though Deif’s fiery speech enjoined supporters to refrain “from killing the elderly and children,” the world learned of Hamas’s attacks through heart-wrenching images that show deaths in both demographics. The shocking photos prompted many states, including Israel’s main patrons, to endorse Israel’s intense retaliation, with the United States pledging to supply Israel with weapons.

In fact, the images from Hamas’s attack were so distressing that even some jihadi groups felt compelled to engage in information warfare to obscure the horrifying scenes. Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, for example, issued a public statement that claimed it “watched the mujahideen cover a Jewish woman to protect her modesty as they sheltered her children, assuring her that ‘we would treat you humanely for we are Muslims.’” In an interview with Al Jazeera, Saleh al-Arouri, one of Hamas’s leaders, asserted that the violence against civilians was not carried out by his group. Hamas fighters were “disciplined,” he said, but because of the rapid collapse of the “enemy,” civilian Gazans and other Palestinian factions crossed the border and engaged in indiscriminate killings and kidnappings. Khaled Mashal, Hamas’s leader abroad, made similar claims. In an interview with Al Arabi, he emphasized the group’s commitment to complying with international humanitarian law. To that end, he was confident that the group’s leadership in Gaza would release civilian hostages and those with dual nationalities once the fighting subsided and Hamas was in a position to coordinate with other factions.

Hamas’s commitment to international law is, of course, questionable. But the group appeared genuinely stunned by the temporary collapse of Israel’s defenses. In an interview with the New Yorker, Moussa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas political leader, said his group “never expected” to wreak the havoc it did. One anonymous diplomat told Al Monitor that Hamas’s success “surprised” the group—and worried it. “With two abductees, they could have negotiated with Israel for permission to build a seaport and freedom for hundreds of prisoners held in Israeli jails,” the diplomat said. “With more than 100 abductees, they will face the entire Israeli army inside Gaza.” What is more, judging by the public interviews Hamas’s leaders have given, they do not appear to know the total number of hostages Palestinian fighters captured, suggesting a lack of coordination among militant groups in Gaza. As of October 22, Hamas has freed two U.S. hostages, but the group may not be able to release all the nonmilitary hostages even if they wanted to.

The initial phase of what Mashal called a “calculated adventure” also appears to have turned into a grievous misadventure fraught with serious miscalculations. The global response that Hamas hoped to achieve has thus far fallen significantly short of its leaders’ expectations. Arab governments have criticized Israel’s retaliation, but they have not offered Hamas any support. Despite the ensuing clashes between Hezbollah and Israel along Israel’s border with Lebanon, both sides have been far more restrained than Hamas wanted. The group clearly banked on a more active role from Iran. In an interview with TRT Arabic, Abu Marzouk lamented that “there was no coordination with Iran” and regretted that Hezbollah’s military response “has been subpar.” Mashal shared this disappointment and bluntly called on Hezbollah to do “much more.” On October 19, one of Hamas’s armed wing leaders, Abu Obeida, even released a statement pleading for broader and more active engagement, urging Muslims to recognize “that this is the umma’s opportunity to defend its dignity and its al Aqsa and mobilize its people on the borders with Palestine.”

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Israel unleashed its wrath upon Hamas, and Gaza’s civilian Palestinian population has borne the brunt of the casualties. The country has also readied itself for major combat, calling up hundreds of thousands of reservists and massing them on Gaza’s borders. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Hamas had “made a mistake of historic proportions” and threatened to “exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.” His government began a siege—cutting off Gaza’s access to water, food, and fuel—that has made life for the strip’s stateless people into a living nightmare.

Despite Israel’s military might, the strategic objective of its current campaign is unclear. In light of the disastrous destruction in Gaza, Israel’s response will be judged not just by its enemies but also by its friends. Even U.S. President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly stated his “unequivocal” commitment to Israel’s security, also expressed his sorrow for “the tragic loss of Palestinian lives” and reminded Israeli leaders of the “critical need to operate by the laws of war.”

The greater the devastation Israel inflicts on the Palestinians in Gaza, the more likely that it will deliver the objective that Hamas’s October 7 operation has thus far failed to attain. If it overreaches, Israel will effectively follow in U.S. footsteps. After September 11, Bush declared that the nation’s “grief [. . .] turned to anger, and anger to resolution” and vowed that the “war on terror” would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Yet despite the significant blows Washington dealt to al Qaeda, Bush’s open-ended and sprawling interventions gave rise to numerous regional jihadi groups.

The lessons of September 11 were on Biden’s mind when he spoke of the “mistakes” the United States made in response to those attacks and cautioned “the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage.” Millions of people across the Middle East are already protesting in the streets. Given that many in the region harbor anger not only toward Israel’s Gaza military campaign but also against their own corrupt regimes, these protests threaten the fragile stability of the Middle East’s and North Africa’s governments, including those that have signed peace agreements with Israel.

Even though al Qaeda was unable to achieve a “decisive blow” through its September 11 attacks, bin Laden continued to describe them as “victories.” For now, Hamas will likely continue to double down on its rhetoric and sing the praises of its achievements. However, in the years after of his attack, bin Laden found that most regional jihadi groups proved to be a liability to global jihad, and that their indiscriminate attacks “repulsed” Muslims. Hamas, too, might be unnerved and potentially eclipsed if the conflict assumes a regional dimension.

• NELLY LAHOUD is an Associate Professor in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College and is the author of The Bin Laden Papers. The views expressed are her own.

Foreign Affairs · by Nelly Lahoud · October 23, 2023

22. Futile military solutions cannot solve political problems

The problem with this kind of thinking is that military operations are a political act. it is a mistake to be in favor of or in opposition to "military solutions." Authors like this create an "either/or" construct - military operations or political action but the fact is that they are "both /and '' and military operations and political action are mutual supporting and reinforcing. 

Excerpts:

The misplaced faith in military solutions prompts ever-increasing demands to expend more resources on weapons of war. While a polarized and dysfunctional U.S. Congress struggles to choose a speaker of the House, a congressionally appointed bipartisan panel has now called for intensifying our nuclear arsenal and preparing to fight a war with both Russia and China at the same time. 

Such thinking is not only delusional; it is dangerous. Preparing for war inevitably detracts from solving truly existential challenges. Greater military arsenals will not help solve the impending catastrophe of our climate, or the next worldwide pandemic, or the next global economic crisis. Nor will it alleviate the suffering of various people at home and around the world, suffering that leads to polarization and the search for extreme solutions. 

All too often, the search for such solutions leads to violence and war. We must work to convince those choosing such a path — whether stateless terrorists or global superpowers — that that road leads only to greater death and destruction. 

Futile military solutions cannot solve political problems

BY STEPHEN CROWLEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 10/21/23 9:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4266883-futile-military-solutions-cannot-resolve-political-problems/?utm

“War is politics by other means.” 

These words attributed to Prussian general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz have been repeated so often they now appear banal. But their truth should remind us that war is never an end in itself. War should only be undertaken when all other means have been exhausted. Even then, a realistic and achievable political outcome must remain clearly in view. Otherwise, even success on the battlefield will lead to failure. 

Whatever outcome Hamas thought it might achieve by carrying out such atrocities, the result will hardly be positive for the Palestinian people. The truly brutal attacks by Hamas on innocent Israeli citizens have now led to an almost inevitable reaction: a war to remove Hamas as a threat. Yet the military invasion of Gaza is already creating a humanitarian disaster, undercutting the widespread sympathy and support Israel received. Even if the leadership of Hamas is somehow eradicated, the resulting suffering of innocent Gazans will likely reinforce the grievances that led to Hamas. 

The terrorist attacks have been called “Israel’s 9/11.” That analogy should prompt a search for lessons learned. The earlier terrorist attack on the U.S. also led a reflexive military reaction: a prolonged “war on terror” with the invasion and intractable occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Innumerable lives were lost, and the threat from al Qaeda morphed into ISIS.

The same logic, sadly, is at work in the Russian war with Ukraine. Viewing NATO expansion as a threat, Putin sought a military solution — a full invasion of Ukraine in the apparent belief that his forces would take Kyiv within days. Such thinking was folly and delusion. Rather than deterring NATO expansion, Russia’s invasion prompted formerly neutral Sweden and Finland to join the alliance, and public opinion within Ukraine — formerly opposed to membership — swung decisively in favor of joining. 

But Western powers display their own folly in seeking a military solution. Ukrainians understandably want to repel their invaders. Debates in the West continue about whether the provision of HIMARS, F-16s, ATACMS, and Abrams and Leopard tanks will somehow lead to a decisive victory. Yet with Russian forces dug into rings of defensive positions, more sober analysis must ask what realistically can be gained through greater destruction and loss of life. Publics inevitably tire of war, especially those not immediately threatened but asked to sacrifice, as is already evident in the U.S. and Europe. Yet the Biden administration is apparently telling Congress that the war could last for three to five years – about as long as WWI’s futile trench warfare.

Then there is the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and China, where if pundits and politicians are to be believed we are slow-walking into an inevitable military confrontation over Taiwan. Unlike the war in Ukraine, this would be a direct clash between two nuclear states. Moreover, the U.S. and China are the world’s two greatest economic powers. An overt conflict between them could well lead to the mutually assured destruction of the global economy. 

The misplaced faith in military solutions prompts ever-increasing demands to expend more resources on weapons of war. While a polarized and dysfunctional U.S. Congress struggles to choose a speaker of the House, a congressionally appointed bipartisan panel has now called for intensifying our nuclear arsenal and preparing to fight a war with both Russia and China at the same time. 

Such thinking is not only delusional; it is dangerous. Preparing for war inevitably detracts from solving truly existential challenges. Greater military arsenals will not help solve the impending catastrophe of our climate, or the next worldwide pandemic, or the next global economic crisis. Nor will it alleviate the suffering of various people at home and around the world, suffering that leads to polarization and the search for extreme solutions. 

All too often, the search for such solutions leads to violence and war. We must work to convince those choosing such a path — whether stateless terrorists or global superpowers — that that road leads only to greater death and destruction. 

Stephen Crowley is a professor of politics at Oberlin College and the author of “Putin’s Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics between Stability and Stagnation.” 

23. America Is a Root Cause of Israel and Palestine’s Latest War

Conclusion:

If the end result of Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s current ministrations is merely a return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo, I fear that the rest of the world will look on, shake its head in dismay and disapproval, and conclude that it’s time for a different approach.

America Is a Root Cause of Israel and Palestine’s Latest War

How 30 years of U.S. policy ended in disaster.

Walt-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist20Stephen M. Walt

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

Foreign Policy · by Stephen M. Walt · October 18, 2023

As Israelis and Palestinians mourn the dead and fearfully await news of those now missing, the tendency to look for someone to blame is impossible for many to resist. Israelis and their supporters want to pin all the blame on Hamas, whose direct responsibility for the horrific attack on Israeli civilians is beyond question. Those more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause see the tragedy as the inevitable result of decades of occupation and Israel’s harsh and prolonged treatment of its Palestinian subjects.

Others insist there is plenty of blame to go around, and that anyone who sees one side as wholly innocent and the other as solely responsible has lost any capacity for fair-minded judgment.

Inevitably, arguing over which of the immediate protagonists is most at fault obscures other important causes that are only loosely related to the long conflict between Zionist Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. We should not lose sight of these other factors even during the present crisis, however, because their effects may continue to echo long after the current fighting stops.

Where one begins to trace causes is inherently arbitrary (Theodor Herzl’s 1896 book, The Jewish State? the 1917 Balfour Declaration? the Arab revolt of 1936? the 1947 U.N. partition plan? the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, or the 1967 Six-Day War?), but I’ll start in 1991, when the United States emerged as the unchallenged external power in Middle East affairs and began trying to construct a regional order that served its interests.

Within that broader context, there are at least five key episodes or elements that helped bring us to the tragic events of the past two weeks.

The first moment was the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath: the Madrid peace conference. The Gulf War was a stunning display of U.S. military power and diplomatic artistry that removed the threat that Saddam Hussein had posed to the regional balance of power. With the Soviet Union nearing collapse, the United States was now firmly in the driver’s seat. Then- President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, and an experienced Middle East team seized upon this opportunity to convene a peace conference in October 1991, which included representatives from Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, the European Economic Community, and a joint Jordanian/Palestinian delegation.

Although the conference did not produce tangible results—let alone a final peace agreement—it laid the groundwork for a serious effort to construct a peaceful regional order. It is tantalizing to contemplate what might have been achieved if Bush had been reelected in 1992 and his team had been given the opportunity to continue their work.

Yet Madrid also contained a fateful flaw, one that sowed the seeds of much future trouble. Iran was not invited to participate in the conference, and it responded to being excluded by organizing a meeting of “rejectionist” forces and reaching out to Palestinian groups—including Hamas and Islamic Jihad—that it had previously ignored. As Trita Parsi observes in his book Treacherous Alliance, “Iran viewed itself as a major regional power and expected a seat at the table,” because Madrid was “not seen as just a conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but as the defining moment in forming the new Middle East order.” Tehran’s response to Madrid was primarily strategic rather than ideological: It sought to demonstrate to the United States and others that it could derail their efforts to create a new regional order if its interests were not taken into account.

And that is precisely what happened, as suicide bombings and other acts of extremist violence disrupted the Oslo Accords negotiation process and undermined Israeli support for a negotiated settlement. Over time, as peace remained elusive and relations between Iran and the West deteriorated further, the ties between Hamas and Iran grew stronger.

The second critical event was the fateful combination of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The decision to invade Iraq was only tangentially related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though Ba’athist Iraq had backed the Palestinian cause in several ways. The George W. Bush administration believed that toppling Saddam would eliminate the supposed threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, remind adversaries of U.S. power, strike a blow against terrorism more broadly, and pave the way for a radical transformation of the entire Middle East along democratic lines.

What they got, alas, was a costly quagmire in Iraq and a dramatic improvement in Iran’s strategic position. This shift in the balance of power in the Gulf alarmed Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and perceptions of a shared threat from Iran began to reshape regional relationships in important ways, including by altering some Arab states’ relations with Israel. Fears of U.S.-led “regime change” also encouraged Iran to pursue a latent nuclear weapons capability, leading to a steady increase in its enrichment capacity and ever-tighter U.S. and U.N. sanctions.

With hindsight, a third key event was then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s fateful abandonment of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran and his adoption of a policy of “maximum pressure” instead. This foolish decision had several unfortunate effects: Leaving the JCPOA allowed Iran to restart its nuclear program and move much closer to an actual weapons capability, and the maximum pressure campaign led Iran to attack oil shipments and facilities in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia, to show the United States that its attempt to compel or overthrow them was not without costs and risks.

As one would expect, these developments heightened the concerns of the Saudis and increased their interest in acquiring nuclear infrastructure of their own. And as realist theory predicts, perceptions of a growing threat from Iran encouraged quiet but significant forms of security cooperation between Israel and several Gulf states.

The fourth development was the so-called Abraham Accords, in some ways a logical extension of Trump’s decision to leave the JCPOA. The brainchild of amateur strategist (and Trump’s son-in-law) Jared Kushner, the accords were a series of bilateral agreements normalizing relations between Israel and Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Sudan. Critics noted that the accords did relatively little to advance the cause of peace because none of the participating Arab governments were actively hostile to Israel or capable of harming it. Others warned that regional peace would remain elusive as long as the fate of the 7 million Palestinians living under Israeli control was unresolved.

The Biden administration continued along much the same path. It took no meaningful steps to stop Israel’s increasingly far-right government from backing violent actions by extremist settlers, which led to a surge in Palestinian deaths and displacements over the past two years. After failing to fulfill a campaign promise to immediately rejoin the JCPOA, Biden and Co. focused their main efforts on persuading Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for some sort of U.S. security guarantee and perhaps access to advanced nuclear technology.

The motivation for this effort had little to do with Israel-Palestine, however, and was mostly intended to keep Saudi Arabia from moving closer to China. Linking a security commitment to Saudi Arabia with normalization was primarily a way to overcome U.S. congressional reluctance to a sweetheart deal with Riyadh. Like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, top U.S. officials appear to have assumed that there was nothing that any Palestinian group could do to derail or slow this process or draw attention back to their plight.

Unfortunately, the rumored deal gave Hamas a powerful incentive to show just how wrong this assumption was. Recognizing this fact in no way justifies what Hamas did and especially the intentional brutality of the attacks; it is simply to acknowledge that Hamas’s decision to do something—and especially its timing—was a response to regional developments that were driven to a considerable extent by other concerns.

As I noted in my last column, the fifth factor is not a single event but rather the United States’ enduring failure to bring the so-called peace process to a successful end. Washington had monopolized stewardship of the peace process ever since the Oslo Accords (which, as the name implies, came about due to Norwegian mediation), and its various efforts over the years ultimately led nowhere. Former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama repeatedly declared that the United States—the world’s most powerful country in the full flush of its so-called unipolar moment—was committed to achieving a two-state solution, but that outcome is now farther away than ever and probably impossible.

These background elements are important because the nature of the future global order is up for grabs, and several influential states are challenging the intermittently liberal and inconsistently followed “rules-based order” that the United States has championed for decades. China, Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Iran, and others openly call for a more multipolar order, where power is more evenly shared. They want to see a world where the United States no longer acts as the so-called indispensable power, as one that expects others to follow its rules while reserving the right to disregard them whenever they prove inconvenient.

Unfortunately for the United States, the five events I just described and their impact on the region provide potent ammunition for the revisionist position (as Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to point out last week). “Just look at the Middle East,” they might say. “The United States has been managing the region by itself for more than three decades, and what has its ‘leadership’ produced? We see devastating wars in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. Lebanon is on life support, there is anarchy in Libya, and Egypt is lurching toward collapse. Terrorist groups have morphed and mutated and sown fear on several continents, and Iran keeps edging closer to the bomb. There is no security for Israel and neither security nor justice for the Palestinians. This is what you get when you let Washington run everything, my friends. Whatever their intentions may have been, U.S. leaders have repeatedly shown us that they lack the wisdom and objectivity to deliver positive results, not even for themselves.”

One can easily imagine a Chinese official adding: “May I point out that we have good relations with everyone in the region, and our only vital interest there is reliable access to energy. We are therefore committed to keeping the region quiet and peaceful, which is why we helped Iran and Saudi Arabia reestablish ties last year. Isn’t it obvious that the world would benefit if the U.S. role there declined and ours increased?”

If you don’t think a message like this would resonate outside the comfortable confines of the trans-Atlantic community, then you haven’t been paying attention. And if you are also someone who thinks that addressing the challenge of a rising China is a top priority, you may want to reflect on how the United States’ past actions contributed to the present crisis—and how the shadow of the past will continue to undermine the U.S. standing in the world in the future.

To their credit, over the past week Biden and his foreign-policy team have been doing what they do best, namely, managing a crisis that was at least partly of their own making. They are working overtime to limit the damage, prevent the conflict from spreading, contain the domestic political fallout, and (fingers crossed) bring the violence to an end. We should all hope that their efforts succeed.

But as I noted more than a year ago, the administration’s foreign-policy team are best seen as skilled mechanics but not architects, and in an era where the institutional architecture of world politics is increasingly an issue and new blueprints are needed. They are adept at using the tools of U.S. power and the machinery of government to address short-term problems, but they are stuck in an outdated vision of America’s global role, to include how its handling of its various Middle East clients. It is obvious that they badly misread where the Middle East was headed, and applying Band-Aids today—even if it is being done with energy and skill—will still leave the underlying wounds untreated.

If the end result of Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s current ministrations is merely a return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo, I fear that the rest of the world will look on, shake its head in dismay and disapproval, and conclude that it’s time for a different approach.

Foreign Policy · by Stephen M. Walt · October 18, 2023

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