Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“It is your Day of Thanksgiving, and when we feel the truth of the facts which are before us, that in three or four years the peaceful, peace-loving people of the United States, with all the variety and freedom of their life in such contrast to the iron discipline which has governed many other communities—when we see that in three or four years the United States has in sober fact become the greatest military, naval, and air power in the world—that, I say to you in this time of war, is itself a subject for profound thanksgiving…

But there is a greater thanksgiving day, which still shines ahead, which beckons the bold and loyal and warm-hearted. And that is when this union of action which has been forced upon us by our common hatred of tyranny, which we have maintained during those dark and fearful days, shall become a lasting union of sympathy and feeling and loyalty and hope between all the British and American peoples, wherever they may dwell. Then, indeed, there will be a Day of Thanksgiving, and one in which all the world will share.”

- Winston Churchill, November 23, 1944 at the Royal Albert Hall in London

"'Knowledge dominance' does scare us as Marines. General George Armstrong Custer probably thought he had knowledge dominance, too. Any time you think you're smarter than your adversary, you're probably about a half-mile from the Little Big Horn."

- Colonel Art Corbett, USMC

“Cold Wars cannot be conducted by hotheads. Nor can ideological conflicts be won as crusades or concluded by unconditional surrender.” Walter Lippmann: The Russian-American War 1949

1. Stories of Ukrainian resistance revealed after Kherson pullout

2. Defense Primer: Special Operations Forces (CRS)

3. The Evacuation of the CIA’s Afghan Proxies Has Opened One of the War’s Blackest Boxes

4. Kyiv Post Morning Memo – Everything You Need to Know on Thursday, Nov. 24 - Kyiv Post - Ukraine's Global Voice

5. Behind enemy lines, Ukrainian partisans played a key role in the battle for Kherson

6. Ukraine Has a Secret Resistance Operating Behind Russian Lines

7. Ukraine is attempting to retake a crucial spit of land that could disrupt Russia's missile barrages

8. Meta claims US military link to online propaganda campaign

9. Leonid Gozman: How Exactly Could the Putin Regime Collapse?

10. Learning to Forget Lessons from Counterinsurgency

11. There is no panacea, competition with China occurs in peace and war

12. UN Counterterrorism and Technology: What Role for Human Rights in Security?

13. Ukraine war: after recapture of Kherson the conflict is poised at the gates of Crimea

14. China’s gold stockpiling is dollar warning sign

15. U.S. Needs to Demonstrate Ability to Assist Taiwan, Congressman Says

16. Older than the pyramids: probe launched after mainland official claims Chinese civilisation is older than ancient Egypt

17. The US should help Iran’s opposition topple the regime -opinion

18. Anti-hijab protests in Iran: Symptom of a deeper restlessness among the youth

19. How a single ship made Thanksgiving happen in Europe at the height of WWII

20. A MACV-SOG THANKSGIVING: WHEN 6 COMMANDOS TOOK ON 30,000 ENEMY TROOPS

21. Increased Devotion THE 1776 SERIES

1. Stories of Ukrainian resistance revealed after Kherson pullout

A lot of good reporting on the resistance in Ukraine. Video at the link: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/24/europe/kherson-pullout-ukrainian-resistance-intl

I am especially fond of this tweet and the image that was probably produced by the Ukraine underground.

See the photo/tweet here. But if it does not come through in the message please go to this link: https://twitter.com/SlavaUk30722777/status/1595365209933115392?s=20&t=072ytdyXUYviIP-YFrQLNg

Sofia Ukraini

@SlavaUk30722777

Good morning, its day 273 in Ukraine and I love this picture because to me it means defiance against oppression

This is my response to the photo in the above tweet:

David Maxwell

@DavidMaxwell161

An inspiring image. I can hear the song “Kyiv Calling” and “we live for resistance” playing in the background.

David Maxwell

@DavidMaxwell161

Kyiv Calling here. Worth the watch (again). https://youtube.com/watch?v=xWQUkR Kqp2E

We have a lot of studying to do to learn from the Ukraine resistance.

Stories of Ukrainian resistance revealed after Kherson pullout | CNN

CNN · by Vasco Cotovio,Sam Kiley,Peter Rudden,Olha Konovalova · November 24, 2022

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'They were wasted': Resistance fighter vividly details how he killed drunk Russian soldiers

Kherson, Ukraine CNN —

Two Russian soldiers walked down a street in Kherson on a spring evening in early March, just days after Moscow captured the city. The temperature that night was still below freezing and the power was out, leaving the city in complete darkness as the soldiers made their way back to camp after a few drinks.

As one stumbled on, the other stopped to relieve himself on the side of the pavement. Suddenly, a knife was thrust deep into the right side of his neck.

He fell to the grass. Moments later, the second Russian soldier, inebriated and unaware, met the same fate.

“I finished the first one immediately and then I caught up with the other and killed him on the spot,” says Archie, a Ukrainian resistance fighter who described the scene above to CNN.

He says he moved on pure instinct.

'Archie' killed two Russian soldiers on his own, days after they took over Kherson. He later joined up with other partisans to form a coordinated resistance movement.

Vasco Cotovio/CNN

“I saw the orcs in uniform and I thought, why not?,” Archie adds, using a derogative term for Russians, as he walks through that same street. “There were no people or light and I seized the moment.”

The 20-year-old is a trained mixed martial arts fighter, with nimble feet and sharp reflexes, who had previously always carried a knife for self-defense, but never killed anyone. CNN is referring to him by his call sign to protect his identity.

“Adrenaline played its role. I didn’t have any fear or time to think,” he says. “For the first few days I felt very bad, but then I realized that they were my enemies. They came to my home to take it from me.”

Bronx native Damien Rodriguez, 41, was suspicious when he first heard Russian soldiers had pulled out of Kherson city. "I didn't really 100% believe until we got on the ground and seen that they all left the positions."

Vasco Cotovio/CNN

Inside the battle for Kherson

Archie’s account was backed up by Ukrainian military and intelligence sources who handled communications with him and other partisans. He was one of many resistance fighters in Kherson, a city of 290,000 people before the invasion, which Russia tried to bend but could not break.

People in Kherson made their views clear soon after Russia took over the city on March 2 coming out onto the main square for daily protests, donning the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.

But Kherson, the first large city and only regional capital Russian troops were able to occupy since the start of the invasion, was an important symbol for Moscow. Dissent could not be tolerated.

Protesters were met with tear gas and gunshots, organisers and the more outspoken residents were arrested and tortured. When peaceful demonstrations didn’t work, the people of Kherson turned to resistance and ordinary citizens like Archie started to take action on their own.

“I wasn’t the only one in Kherson,” Archie says. “There were a lot of clever partisans. At least 10 Russians were killed every night.”

Initially solo operations, like-minded residents began organising themselves in groups, coordinating their actions with the Ukrainian military and intelligence outside the city.

“I have a friend with whom we would drive around the city, looking for gatherings of Russian soldiers,” he says. “We checked their patrol routes and then gave all the information to guys on the frontline and they knew who to pass onto next.”

Oleksander, pictured at Kherson's central prison, says the Russian guards beat him daily when he was detained there under occupation.

Kareem Khadder/CNN

Former detainees in liberated Kherson allege Russian brutality, torture under occupation

Russian soldiers weren’t the only ones targeted for assassination. Several Moscow-installed government officials were targeted during the eight months of the Russian occupation. Their faces were printed in posters placed all over the city, promising retribution for their collaboration with the Kremlin, in a psychological war that lasted throughout the occupation.

Many of those promises were kept, with some of those officials gunned down and others blown up in their cars in incidents that pro-Russian local authorities described as “terrorist attacks.”

Archie was arrested by the occupying authorities on May 9, after attending a victory day parade, celebrating the Soviet Union’s win in World War II, wearing a yellow and blue stripe on his t-shirt.

He was taken to a local pre-trial detention facility which had been taken over by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and used to torture Ukrainian soldiers, intelligence officers and partisans, according to Archie.

Ihor says while he was held at this Russian detention center, he spent much of his time looking out the window, day dreaming about escaping the horrors within.

Vasco Cotovio/CNN

“They beat me, electrocuted me, kicked me and beat me with batons,” Archie recalls. “I can’t say they starved me, but they didn’t give much to eat.”

“Nothing good happened there,” he said.

Archie was lucky enough to be let go after nine days and after being forced to record a video saying he’d agreed to work with the Russian occupiers. His account of what transpired in the facility has been confirmed by Ukrainian military sources and other detainees.

But many others never left, according to Archie and other resistance fighters, as well as Ukrainian military and intelligence sources.

Ihor, who asked CNN not to reveal his last name for his protection, was also held at the facility.

The Ukrainian flag now hangs atop a detention center used by Russian forces to hold and torture Ukrainian soldiers, dissidents and partisans.

Vasco Cotovio/CNN

“I was kept here for 11 days and throughout that time I heard screaming from the basement,” the 29-year-old says. “People were tortured, they were beaten with sticks in the arms and legs, cattle prods, even hooked up to batteries and electrocuted or waterboarded with water.”

Ihor was caught transporting weapons and says “luckily” he was only beaten.

“I arrived after the time when people were beaten up to death here,” he recalls. “I was stabbed in the legs with a taser, they use it as a welcome. One of them asked what I’d been brought in for and another two of them started hitting me in the ribs.”

Ihor and other partisans helped Ukrainian forces zero-in on this warehouse, where Russian forces had stationed military assets, and target it with artillery.

Vasco Cotovio/CNN

Through his detention, Ihor was able to hide that he was a member of the Kherson resistance and that transporting weapons was not the only thing he did. Ihor says he also supplied intelligence to the Ukrainian military – an activity that would have incurred far more brutal punishment.

“If we found something, saw it, (we) took a picture or a video (and) sent it to Ukrainian forces and then they would decide whether to hit it or not,” he explains.

Among the coordinates he communicated to the Ukrainian military is a warehouse within Kherson city. “The Russian military kept between 20 to 30 vehicles here, there were armored trucks, armored personnel carriers and some Russians lived here,” Ihor says.

Departing Russian forces were quick to hollow out what was left of the prized interior, but the wrecked building bears the marks of the violent strike. Most of the roof has collapsed, its walls lay shattered and broken glass still covers most of the floor. The structure remains in place but in parts its metal has been mangled by the blast.

Ihor filmed this warehouse used by Russian forces as he walked past it, pretending to be making a phone call. His information helped Ukrainian forces target and destroy it.

Vasco Cotovio/CNN

Ihor used the Telegram messaging app to communicate the building’s coordinates to his military handler, who he referred to as “the smoke.” Along with the information, he sent a video he secretly recorded.

“I turned on the camera, pointed it at the building and then I just walked and talked on the phone while the camera was filming,” he explains. “Afterward I deleted video, of course, because if they were to stop me somewhere and check my videos and pictures there would be questions…”

He sent the information in mid-September and, just a day later, the facility was targeted by Ukrainian artillery.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in central Kherson, Ukraine November 14, 2022.

President of Ukraine

Zelensky visits Kherson after accusing Russia of committing hundreds of war crimes

The United States and NATO have assessed that when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin expected its forces to be greeted as saviors, welcomed with open arms. Reality failed to live up to expectation, not just in the territories where Moscow’s armies were pushed back, but also in the areas it was able to seize.

The strike on the warehouse which Ihor helped with, is one of many facilitated by Ukrainian partisans inside Kherson working tirelessly and under threat to disrupt Russian activities within the city.

Eight months after it was occupied by Russia, the city of Kherson is now back in Ukrainian hands and Moscow’s armies are on the back foot, forced to withdraw from the western bank of the Dnipro river.

"Glory to Ukraine" now reads at the entrance to a detention centre used by Russian forces to hold and torture Ukrainian soldiers, dissidents and partisans.

Vasco Cotovio/CNN

But despite achieving victory here, Ukraine continues to faces almost daily crippling missile strikes almost everywhere else, all while Russian forces continue to press on in the East.

Looking back, Ihor, father to a three-month-old daughter, says he was lucky he wasn’t caught.

“It wasn’t hard, but it was dangerous,” he explains. “If they were to catch me filming such a thing, they would take me in and probably wouldn’t let me come out alive.”

CNN · by Vasco Cotovio,Sam Kiley,Peter Rudden,Olha Konovalova · November 24, 2022

2. Defense Primer: Special Operations Forces (CRS)

Nothing new in this periodic update. A basic primer for researchers.

This remains a continuing problem:

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (ASD (SOLIC)) The ASD (SOLIC) is the principal civilian advisor to the SECDEF on special operations and low-intensity conflict matters. The ASD (SOLIC) has as their principal duty overall supervision (to include oversight of policy and resources) of special operations and low-intensity conflict activities. The ASD (SOLIC) falls under and reports to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD (P)). Congress, wanting ASD (SOLIC) to exercise greater oversight of USSOCOM, enacted Section 922, FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (P.L. 114-328) to facilitate and resource ASD (SOLIC)’s originally intended Service Secretary-like authorities.

ASD/SO/LIC needs "service authorities" not "service-like" to execute proper oversight and accomplish the SOF mission as envisioned by the original Nunn-Cohen amendment. But 922 has not been effectively implemented. ASD SO/LIC needs to be both properly resourced with experienced SOF professionals and be sufficiently empowered to at least meet congressional intent. Frankly speaking, SOF suffers from a "critical race theory - like condition" in systemic anti-SOF bisas is baked into the system and the anti-SOF DNA still permeates DOD and the national security community (despite the existence of so-called SOF groupies who are enamored with coolness of special operations - but such groupies are relevant to national security decision making).

Defense Primer: Special Operations Forces

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10545

Updated November 21, 2022

Overview

Special Operations Forces (SOF) are those active duty and reserve component forces of the military services designated by the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) and specifically selected, organized, trained, and equipped to conduct and support special operations. Special operations frequently require unique modes of employment, tactics, techniques, procedures, and equipment. SOF often conducts special operations in hostile, politically, and/or diplomatically sensitive environments, and are characterized by one or more of the following: timesensitivity, clandestine or covert nature, low visibility, work with or through indigenous forces, greater requirements for regional orientation and cultural expertise, and a high degree of risk. SOF’s core activities are

 Direct action

 Special reconnaissance

 Countering weapons of mass destruction

 Counterterrorism

 Unconventional warfare

 Foreign internal defense

 Security force assistance

 Hostage rescue and recovery

 Counterinsurgency

 Foreign humanitarian assistance

 Military information support operations

 Civil affairs operations

3. The Evacuation of the CIA’s Afghan Proxies Has Opened One of the War’s Blackest Boxes

The Evacuation of the CIA’s Afghan Proxies Has Opened One of the War’s Blackest Boxes

The Intercept · by Fahim Abed · November 20, 2022

On a rainy Saturday morning in May, Hayanuddin Afghan, a former member of a CIA-backed militia that was once his country’s most brutal and effective anti-Taliban force, welcomed me to his new home in a hilly neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

He invited me in through the kitchen, where his wife, who was pregnant with their fourth child, was baking traditional Afghan bread with flour from Aldi’s. The trip downtown to buy groceries was among the greatest challenges of Hayanuddin’s new life in Pittsburgh. It involved hauling heavy bags back home on foot and in multiple city buses, whose schedules were unknowable since he didn’t speak English and had not downloaded the relevant app.

“It is difficult to descend from a very strong position to a very weak position,” Hayanuddin told me. In Afghanistan, “we had value. It was our country, and we were making sense for that country. But now, even our generals and commanders, everyone is in the same position.”

In Afghanistan, it was impossible to talk at any length to members of the secretive commando forces known as the Zero Units. They hunted the Taliban in night raids and were widely accused of killing civilians, including children. But last September, Hayanuddin and his Zero Unit comrades were the beneficiaries of the most successful aspect of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan: the CIA’s rescue of its allied militias. Their arrival in the U.S. over the last year has cracked open one of the war’s blackest boxes.

My conversations with Hayanuddin and several other militia members yielded new details about the command structure, operations, and final days of shadowy units that were nominally overseen by the Afghan intelligence service but were in fact built, trained, and in many cases fully controlled by the CIA. Their fighters hold clues to many of the war’s mysteries, including how U.S. intelligence engineered and oversaw years of deadly night raids that contributed to the Taliban’s ultimate victory, and how a secret deal between longtime enemies may have hastened the lightning collapse of the Afghan security forces last August.

Celebrated as heroes by their American handlers and some Afghans who oppose the Taliban, militiamen like Hayanuddin were feared and detested by many rural Afghans, who bore the brunt of their harrowing raids. While hundreds of Zero Unit members and their closest relatives made it to the U.S., they left behind extended families who have suffered abuse, imprisonment, and death threats under the new government.

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The CIA did not respond to detailed questions about its role in overseeing, evacuating, and resettling Zero Unit members and whether the agency would do more to help militiamen and their families left behind in Afghanistan. “The United States made a commitment to the people who worked for us that we would create a concrete pathway to U.S. citizenship for those who gave so much to assist us over the years,” an agency spokesperson told me in an email. “It will take time, but we never forget [our] partners and are committed to helping those who assisted us. We are continuing to work closely with the State Department and other US government agencies on this effort.”

“With regard to allegations of human rights abuses,” the email continued, “the U.S. takes these claims very seriously, and we take extraordinary measures, beyond the minimum legal requirements to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict and strengthen accountability for the actions of partners. A false narrative [exists] about these forces that has persisted over the years due to a systematic propaganda campaign by the Taliban.”

Hayanuddin said that he and his comrades took care to avoid harming bystanders during their raids, even using loudspeakers to warn women to stay inside or shelter in basements before the fighting began. “For me, it was like a holy war,” he said. “I was there to target bad guys.” But he also described lingering feelings of rage, guilt, and remorse, and connected his struggle in Pittsburgh to his past. At one point, he wondered aloud if he was being punished.

“Sometimes I can’t control my anger and my anxiety,” he told me. “My heart is so sad, like someone is squeezing it very hard. I don’t know why. Maybe because of what happened back home or what is happening here.”

Reversal of Fortune

I met Hayanuddin last spring, at an Afghan New Year’s celebration in a park in Pittsburgh, where we had both recently settled as refugees. I had worked for the New York Times in Kabul for five years and made many trips to the front lines to report on the Afghan security forces, including in the days before the Taliban captured the Afghan capital last August. I was evacuated with other Times staffers to Houston, where I lived in a hotel for several months before getting a job as a visual journalist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and moving north.

At first, Hayanuddin didn’t want to talk to me. But after several attempts, he grew more comfortable, in part because he thought he was talking about an episode of the war that was closed, and in part because we were both exiles from the same place, trying to start new lives in Pittsburgh while still longing for home.

Hayanuddin had served six years with a unit known as 03, fighting the Taliban across Afghanistan’s southern deserts from his base in a compound previously occupied by the one-eyed former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. U.S. special operators had commandeered the property when they arrived in Kandahar in 2001 and turned it into a redoubt for American and Afghan intelligence forces. With hundreds of other Zero Unit fighters, Hayanuddin crossed shifting front lines in the final days of the war to get to Kabul’s CIA-controlled Eagle Base. From there, he was airlifted to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he briefly worked security before being handed $8,000 in cash — half a year’s salary — and flown with his wife and three young children to Fort Dix.

At 37, with a seventh-grade education, Hayanuddin, along with his comrades, is facing a reversal of fortune that is humiliating, infuriating, and utterly intractable. After almost two decades as an American proxy — from guarding U.S. bases to killing Afghans in partnership with the world’s most powerful intelligence agency — he has landed, as a poor and vulnerable refugee, in a three-bedroom apartment with flowered curtains he had to harangue the resettlement agency to install in keeping with Pashtun culture, which dictates that a woman must be shielded from the eyes of passing strangers.

The Zero Units, also known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were born soon after the first U.S. military and intelligence operatives arrived in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Formed in 2002, they operated entirely under U.S. control until 2012, Gen. Yasin Zia, Afghanistan’s former chief of Army staff, told me in August from London, where he leads an anti-Taliban resistance force. “The government of Afghanistan had no interference in these units,” said Zia, who spent many years in senior roles in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, including as deputy director of the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, which nominally oversaw the units in recent years.

The first of what would become the Zero Units operated in eastern Afghanistan, in a mountainous area along the Pakistani border where the Taliban and other militants often sought refuge between attacks on U.S., NATO, and Afghan government forces. That militia, known as the Khost Protection Force, or KPF, covered the southeastern region of the country. Later, the CIA created and trained at least three more units: 01, which operated in Kabul, Logar, and Wardak provinces in central Afghanistan; 02, based in Jalalabad, which fought in the east; and Hayanuddin’s unit, 03, based in Kandahar and fighting across the south.

In 2010, under pressure from then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S. officials agreed to transfer oversight of the Zero Units to NDS “physically, but not technically,” Zia said. “We had the names and ranks of members of Zero Units,” he told me. “But their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

“Their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

As the Obama administration transitioned from combat operations to a counterterrorism and advisory mission in Afghanistan after 2011, the U.S. handed control of several Zero Units over to the Karzai government, Zia said. But the CIA retained control of other key units, including the Kabul-based 01; the KPF; and Hayanuddin’s 03.

The units targeted the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Al Qaeda, but they were not accountable to the Afghan government — not even to the president. In 2019, Afghanistan’s then-national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, responded to allegations of extrajudicial killings by 01 — including massacres of children in madrassas — by noting that the unit operated “in partnership with the CIA.”

Hayanuddin had a front-row seat to the shambolic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and now he can describe what he saw and heard in the war’s final months. The Zero Units were built to work in tandem with U.S. air support, but in August 2020, a year before the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani collapsed, U.S. forces began to radically scale back their air support for his unit, Hayanuddin said.

“Our American advisers left our bases for Kabul, and the choppers that would wait in our base on the edge of Kandahar City left with them,” he recalled. “Our commanders would only report to Americans about our operations, and the Americans would just say, ‘Go ahead.’ We were not working as closely as we used to.”

When the Americans took away their planes, the Afghans’ missions grew much more treacherous. “The American surveillance aircraft would tell us how many people were inside a building and how many of them were armed, and what weapons they have,” Hayanuddin said. “But those details were not there anymore.”

With U.S. air support gone and the fledgling Afghan Air Force unable to provide comparable intelligence, more Zero Unit members got hurt. The planes that had once ferried them to field hospitals in minutes were gone too. In February 2020, when U.S. drones and other aircraft circled over their operations, one of Hayanuddin’s comrades, Akmal, was blown up by a roadside bomb. The Americans airlifted him to a military hospital and he survived, Hayanuddin said, though he lost both his legs. But eight months later, another unit member, Shahidullah, was shot twice in the abdomen. This time, there was no airlift, and Hayanuddin’s unit was stuck in enemy territory. Shahidullah died on the spot.

After President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the CIA gave the NDS a year’s budget for the Zero Units and said the agency would no longer support them, Zia told The Intercept from London. But the final Zero Units were not transferred to Afghan control, he said, until after Biden announced the full U.S. withdrawal in April 2021 and the last American forces and intelligence operatives began to leave.

Members of the Taliban give a tour of the destroyed CIA-operated Eagle Base in Deh Sabz district, northeast of Kabul, on Sept. 6, 2021.

Photo: Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images

“Like Committing Suicide”

The Zero Units were designed to capture and kill in targeted raids, not to fight on battlefields. They were widely known as among the most effective elite units in the Afghan security forces, and last summer, as the U.S. military pulled out and the Taliban advanced, many in the Ghani government and the Afghan military looked to them for salvation.

“I am not sure if our commanders got some money in bribes from provincial officials or the government in Kabul,” Hayanuddin said. “But they started turning a blind eye to our standards and sending us to several missions a day and making us suffer heavy casualties.”

Sometimes seven or eight unit members were killed each month, he said, an unprecedented rate for the elite unit. “Once, I remember that all our unit members started crying and protesting because of being overused. Our commanders never listened to that. They would still force us to go to operations all over the south.”

As casualties rose and the war intensified, the morale of Zero Unit members cratered, an Afghan doctor who fought for 02 told me. Like Hayanuddin, the doctor was evacuated last summer; he asked me not to use his name for fear of repercussions now that he and his family are in the United States.

When his commander would ask militia members to go on operations, the doctor told me, some would faint. They would say that “going to an operation is like committing suicide,” he recalled, “as there is no air support and not enough weapons and equipment.”

Rumors that U.S.-Taliban peace talks in Qatar had yielded an agreement to essentially give Afghanistan to the Taliban didn’t help. “The Taliban would send tribal elders to different security forces and tell them that it was decided in Doha that the province where they are stationed should be handed over to the Taliban, so better you don’t fight and avoid the casualties,” the doctor said. “The security forces would accept that and give up fighting.”

The Afghan security forces couldn’t keep up with the losses. In May 2021 alone, more than 400 pro-government forces were killed. Afghans were no longer willing to join the security forces because the job had become too dangerous.

“We had very smart people in our unit,” Hayanuddin said. “I remember that on a single day, one of our guys, without proper equipment, cleared nearly 30 roadside bombs” in Maiwand District, a Taliban stronghold west of Kandahar. Fighters with 03 repeatedly forced the Taliban out of Kandahar’s Arghandab District in the spring of 2021, he said, but when the regular Afghan army and police took over, the Taliban surged back.

Both Hayanuddin and the doctor from 02 suspect that the Afghan security forces largely surrendered the south not because they were defeated on the battlefield but as part of a political deal. They were not alone in thinking this. In the summer of 2021, the Taliban took control of dozens of Afghan police outposts in the districts surrounding Kandahar.

“It was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

“The leadership of the Afghan security forces asked ground forces in many provinces across the country to stop fighting. We have seen videos on social media that soldiers were crying when they were told to leave their outposts and drop their weapons,” Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, a former Afghan deputy interior minister and military analyst, told me. “This means that it was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

Soldiers who insisted on fighting found their supply lines cut and didn’t get the support they needed, Yarmand said, adding that when Afghan forces in the northern province of Takhar wanted to stand their ground, they were given a choice: surrender to the Taliban or drive to the mountains of Panjshir, where the last forces resisting the Taliban were holed up.

Near Kandahar, Hayanuddin’s unit ran into police officers trying to flee. “They said their outpost was captured by the Taliban,” he recalled. “We took them with us, and there was no Taliban in their outpost. When we asked why, they said their tribal elder told them to leave the outpost to the Taliban. This is only one example, but it happened many times.”

In June 2021, 03 was deployed from one front line to another as district after district fell to the insurgents. By the end of that month, nearly half of Afghanistan’s districts were under Taliban control.

As the fighting intensified, other Afghan security forces pinned their hopes on the Zero Units. On August 4, 2021, I was with the Afghan National Police Counter Resistance Unit outside Sarposa Prison, one of the main front lines in Kandahar. The fighting picked up on one edge of the city just as the police machine gun stopped working. I asked Shafiqullah Kaliwal, a unit commander, what they were going to do.

“The 03 will come,” he told me, “and they will push back the Taliban to their original outposts.”

The next day, Kaliwal told me that 03 had indeed come to their rescue and forced the Taliban to retreat. But when the Zero Unit moved on, the Taliban quickly recaptured the territory.

Zia confirmed that the pressure on Zero Units was unsustainable. In the last four months of the war in Kandahar, Zia said, “the casualties of Zero Units were very high. It was not comparable to the past 20 years of war. The reason for that was that they were not used professionally.”

A Taliban flag flies at a square in the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, after the Taliban captured the provincial capital, on Aug. 12, 2021.

Photo: Gulabuddin Amiri/AP

A Secret Deal

One of the many mysteries of the war’s final days was how the Zero Units managed to make their way through Taliban-held territory to Kabul, where they were evacuated to the United States and other countries. An apparent agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. helps explain their unlikely escape.

On August 11, 2021, one of the main government lines of defense in Kandahar City collapsed to the Taliban. Hayanuddin was on leave at the time, but the next day, he said, his comrades in 03 and other security forces drove to Kandahar Air Field, which by then was in Taliban territory. There, they spent two days waiting to be flown to Kabul.

On August 14, the Taliban captured Jalalabad City, the provincial capital of Nangarhar Province, where Hayanuddin was spending his leave with his family. Terrified, he and his younger brother, who had also served in 03, stayed up all night, trying to contact Hayanuddin’s commander for orders. When they finally reached the commander, he told them to get to Kabul. The next morning, they climbed into a taxi and set off on an anxious two-hour journey through territory now controlled by their enemies. If anyone identified them, they thought, they would be killed.

But the trip was far easier than they’d expected as, one after another, the Taliban fighters manning checkpoints let them pass. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Hayanuddin told me. “They were our enemy. We were intensively fighting just a day before the collapse, but now we were staying in their territory or driving through it. We thought we were taking a big risk, but now as I think about it, it seems the Taliban didn’t want to attack us as part of their deal with the U.S.”

It wasn’t just a few guys in taxis who managed to cross Taliban checkpoints with ease. On August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, the doctor from 02 told me that he drove from Jalalabad to Kabul with his fellow unit members in a convoy of hundreds of military vehicles packed with weapons and equipment. The doctor thought they would have to fight their way through the checkpoints, but each time, the Taliban soldiers called their commanders and waved him and the other Afghan militiamen through.

The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so.

The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so, according to the doctor from 02 and two former Afghan intelligence officials, who asked not to be named because they feared repercussions from the Taliban for speaking to a journalist. The U.S. evacuation plan depended on Zero Unit members working security at the Kabul airport, and the Americans had told those fighters to get passports shortly before the republic collapsed, Zia, the former senior security official, said.

The CIA declined to comment. The Taliban did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Hayanuddin and his brother made it safely to Eagle Base, the Kabul headquarters of the CIA and 01, where they spent three nights. One by one, the Zero Units boarded Chinook helicopters and left the base for the Kabul airport: first 01, then 02, and then Hayanuddin’s unit, 03.

Hayanuddin spent five nights in the airport, providing security for the evacuation of thousands of desperate Afghans. In those days and later, Zero Unit members were accused of firing over the heads of crowds and beating Afghan civilians who were trying to leave. Hayanuddin denied mistreating people at the airport, but my own encounter with a Zero Unit fighter on August 19 suggests there is truth to the charges. As I made my way through crowds in front of the airport terminal, trying to reach my American colleague and the U.S. Marines, a member of the Zero Units stopped me. I explained who I was and where I was going, but the fighter ordered me to sit down. If I didn’t, he said, he would shoot me with dozens of bullets, and no one would question him.

At last, it was Hayanuddin’s turn to call his family to join him on a flight to the U.S., via Abu Dhabi and Germany. Like many Afghans, Hayanuddin was married to two women. He had moved one of his wives, who he asked me not to name, to Nangarhar with their three kids several months before the collapse, and one of his brothers managed to escort them to Kabul to meet Hayanuddin at the airport. But Hayanuddin’s other wife was still in his home province of Kunar with their four children when the republic fell.

“My first wife, who was in Kunar, couldn’t make it to Kabul,” he told me, “because there was no one to accompany her.”

Hayanuddin also left his parents and siblings behind, including the brother who had served alongside him in 03. The Americans refused to evacuate him, Hayanuddin said, because he had left the unit a year before the Taliban took control.

Thankful, but Angry

In Pittsburgh, Hayanuddin and several other Zero Unit members found work at a halal grocery. One of them was Khan Wali Momand, a former school principal who started working for 02 in Jalalabad as a security guard in 2017. Momand now lives with his wife and children in Section 8 housing in Duquesne, a Pittsburgh suburb. When I met him, he was unloading boxes; he has since gotten a different job at another local grocery store, which he prefers because it doesn’t involve as much heavy lifting.

Momand started working with 02 through his brother, Inayatullah, who he says served 16 years with the unit but left just days before the government collapsed because his wife was ill. Like Hayanuddin’s brother, Inayatullah was left behind when the Taliban took over, and he and Momand’s other relatives immediately became targets for retribution. Inayatullah went into hiding, and when I spoke to Momand this spring, he was consumed by grief and worry. “Every time I receive a call from home,” Momand told me, “I think it will be bad news.”

This spring, members of the Taliban kidnapped two of Momand’s teenage nephews and held them for five days in an attempt to force the family to hand over Inayatullah. The nephews were released after tribal elders in the area promised to help the Taliban find Inayatullah. He has applied for a Special Immigrant Visa to come to the United States, Momand said, but has not heard back.

“We were so loyal to Americans that we wouldn’t leave their bags behind in the battlefield, but now they are leaving behind my brother, who helped them for 16 years,” Momand told me. “It happened many times during missions with 02 that an American adviser or soldier would get shot, and we would risk our life to take them out of the battlefield. Look at our level of loyalty and their level of loyalty.”

I’m in

Momand is deeply conflicted over his role in the war. When he began working with the Americans five years ago, he drew the enmity of the Taliban and many acquaintances. In his conservative village, he had a hard time defending his decision and explaining how helping the Americans would benefit his country. Now he wonders whether he made the right choice — whether it was worth it, given the price he and his family have paid. He’s an outsider in Duquesne and may never be able to go back to Afghanistan. Did he join 02 for the wrong reasons, he wonders, or was he used? Did he betray his country, his people, after all?

Momand said he is grateful to Biden. “He hasn’t left us to the Taliban. If I had been left behind in Afghanistan, my whole family and I would have been killed by now,” he said. “But there is no one in the U.S. to rescue me from the tough situation here.”

As our conversation drew to a close, Momand’s anger flared. He had told his story many times, he said, to workers from resettlement agencies and other relief organizations. “Everyone comes here and asks about my problems and the problems of my family, but I don’t see any outcome of telling these stories,” he said. “Do you enjoy hearing my painful life story?”

Hayanuddin reviews a document he received through the U.S. Postal Service, a new concept for him, as his son looks on in their home in Pittsburgh.

Photo: Fahim Abed for The Intercept

Only in the Darkness

At Hayanuddin’s house that rainy May morning, an oilcloth was spread over the living room carpet, and we sat around it while his wife and 9-year-old daughter, Simina, brought out loaves of hot fresh bread, eggs, warm yogurt, and a giant thermos of sweet, milky black tea.

As we ate, Hayanuddin kept an eye on his phone. At 9 a.m., an alarm sounded, and Simina brought him a pair of white athletic socks, a jacket, and an umbrella. Back in Afghanistan, his American advisers had stressed the need for punctuality, often arriving 15 minutes early for meetings with their Afghan counterparts. He feared that if he were late to work, he’d get fired. And he needed this job.

He took home about $1,600 a month after taxes, he told me. The resettlement agency was covering the first three months of rent on his apartment in Pittsburgh; after that, he’d have to spend $1,500 a month, nearly his entire paycheck, on rent and utilities. He was getting food stamps, but the family budget was tight.

His house was about five miles from the halal grocery, an easy 15-minute drive. But the bus ride, including a transfer downtown, could take more than an hour. On this day, he would work for nine hours, arriving home between 9 and 10 p.m. The family, including the children, would eat a late dinner together. After that, they’d call Afghanistan, so Hayanuddin and his wife could talk to their parents, and the parents could speak to their grandchildren.

It was his father, Hayanuddin says, who had convinced him to go to the U.S. last year. “If the Taliban come and they behead you in front of us or shoot you in the head in front of us, that would be a very big trauma for us for our whole life,” his father told him last August. “So if you want to spare us that pain, you should leave.”

He sometimes regrets it. “We didn’t voluntarily come here, and it is not easy here,” he told me. “That’s the everyday struggle. And then you have a family that is staring at you and hoping that you will fix everything.”

At 9:20 a.m., Hayanuddin pulled on a black jacket and headed out to the bus stop, a wooden pole with a metal sign at the edge of a busy road. He hunched his shoulders against the rain and took a drag on his Marlboro Red. The resettlement agency gave him transit cards, but when they ran out, he’d have to spend his own money on bus fare.

Back in Afghanistan, he drove heavy military vehicles over mountainous terrain wearing night vision goggles. But in Pittsburgh, he couldn’t get a driver’s license. The test was offered in Urdu and Arabic, but not Persian or Pashto, Afghanistan’s two main languages, and at the time, translators were not allowed. (Several months later, after the local Afghan community complained, the DMV added a test in Persian.)

“If I would stand in a bus stop in Afghanistan, I would just wave to a taxi and they would stop and take me to where I wanted to go,” he said. “There is no country as good as Afghanistan around the world, if only it were safe enough to live in.”

After 15 minutes, the bus arrived. Hayanuddin, thoroughly soaked, donned a surgical mask, climbed the steps, and settled into an empty seat. As the bus heaved along the twisting roads, heading downtown, he surveyed the other passengers.

“Only poor people like me are using the bus,” he noted.

Back at his apartment, he’d shown me a stack of military ID cards and commendations from the Americans he’d worked with, each signed by a different soldier or officer, praising his service and making promises they couldn’t keep.

“Your exemplary actions demonstrate your overall commitment to not only safeguard your Village, your District, and Province from those who inflict harm upon the innocent, but also to ensure a better future for all current and future Afghan citizens,” read one certificate, signed by “Master Sergeant Scott” and “Commander Josh” of Special Forces unit ODA 3115.

“His expertise, unfaltering dedication to duty and work ethic have far exceeded my expectations and he is an inspiration for all who work with him,” said another, marked QSF — for Qandahar Strike Force — National Security Unit 03 and dated March 2021. “Over the past 6 years, He has demonstrated his total loyalty to his unit. His service to the country is a shining example for all his fellows’ unit around him and he demonstrates an unfailing commitment to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.” It was signed by “Mac,” a U.S. adviser.

“Mr. Ayanudin will be a great asset to the SRF-03,” read a commendation from 2015, “and will make a significant contribution to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.”

What to make, now, of those papers, those words?

More than an hour after leaving his house, Hayanuddin disembarked on a desolate street corner and walked a block to the halal grocery, a sprawling brick warehouse complex with murals paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.: “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

Inside, he traded his jacket for a white apron and reappeared behind the meat counter, where he used a mechanized blade to slice chicken breasts.

The Intercept · by Fahim Abed · November 20, 2022

4. Kyiv Post Morning Memo – Everything You Need to Know on Thursday, Nov. 24 - Kyiv Post - Ukraine's Global Voice

Kyiv Post Morning Memo – Everything You Need to Know on Thursday, Nov. 24 - Kyiv Post - Ukraine's Global Voice

kyivpost.com · by Alisa Orlova · November 24, 2022

Good morning from Kyiv where the city – and the rest of Ukraine – is reeling from yet another barrage of Russian missiles targeting civilian infrastructure.

What’s happening today?

Today is basically a clean-up operation to fix everything caused by yesterday’s strikes, as mentioned above.

Russia’s continued attacks mean millions of Ukrainians were left without water and power overnight as the country’s already damaged and struggling infrastructure took yet another pounding.

In Kyiv there were water and electricity cuts and overnight, 70 percent of the city was without electricity as temperatures hovered just above freezing.

As of the morning of Thursday, Nov. 24, water was on tap again on the left bank of the Dnipro River. Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said those living on the right side of the city should have water “in the first half of the day”.

You can read more on this story here.

What has Zelensky said?

Rather than his usual daily address, on Wednesday evening President Zelensky spoke to an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council (UNSC), calling Russian air strikes on Ukraine’s battered power grid an “obvious crime against humanity”.

“When we have the temperature below zero, and scores of millions of people without energy supplies, without heating, without water, this is an obvious crime against humanity,” he said.

The UN Security Council is unlikely to be able to do anything to alleviate Ukraine’s situation given Russia is a permanent member with the power of veto over any proposals, something Zelensky was keen to highlight.

“This is nonsense that the veto right is reserved for the one who is waging a criminal war,” he said.

“Justice must be restored within the UN structures themselves. The terrorist state should not participate in any voting on the issues of its aggression, its terror.

“The world should not be held hostage by one international terrorist.”

What’s the situation on the front lines?

The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) focuses on Russian airborne troops (VDV), saying Russia has likely redeployed major elements to “Donetsk and Luhansk fronts in the Donbas”.

Although they’re being moved to key areas of the battlefield, the MoD notes units have been reinforced with mobilised reservists and “these poorly trained personnel will dilute VDV’s supposedly elite capability”.

It adds: “Potential operational tasks for the VDV include supporting the defence of the Kremina-Svatove area in Luhansk Oblast or reinforcing offensive operations against the Donetsk Oblast town of Bakhmut.”

The Institute for the Study of War’s daily assessment covers a multitude of topics, most notably:

Russian politicians continue to promote openly genocidal rhetoric against Ukraine. Moscow City Duma Deputy and pro-Kremlin journalist Andrey Medvedev posted a long rant to his Telegram channel on Nov. 23. wherein he categorically denied the existence of the Ukrainian nation, relegating Ukrainian identity to a “political orientation”. Medvedev called Ukraine a pagan cult of death that worships prisoner executions and called for the total “liquidation of Ukrainian statehood in its current form.”
The Kremlin continues to pursue its maximalist goals and is likely issuing vague statements about its intent to mislead Western Countries into pressuring Ukraine into negotiations.
The Kremlin is continuing crypto-mobilization efforts at the expense of other Russian security services.

And that’s it for today’s Morning Memo. Kyiv Post will bring you the latest news throughout the day and we’ll be back with another edition tomorrow.

kyivpost.com · by Alisa Orlova · November 24, 2022

5. Behind enemy lines, Ukrainian partisans played a key role in the battle for Kherson

There seems to be a lot of reporting on the resistance in Ukraine. As I said, we need to study this and learn from it. Resistance remains relevant in modern warfare - across the spectrum of conflict.

Behind enemy lines, Ukrainian partisans played a key role in the battle for Kherson

Le Monde · by Rémy Ourdan

This is by definition one of the invisible aspects of the war in Ukraine. However, according to Ukrainian officers that Le Monde met in recent months, clandestine military operations in enemy territories have made a significant contribution to resisting the Russian invasion.

General Dmytro Marchenko in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, on November 18, 2022. RAFAEL YAGHOBZADEH FOR "LE MONDE"

Between "fighters infiltrated by the special operations command, who act on orders" and "ordinary civilians who become partisans and pass on information" to the Ukrainian army, clandestine action greatly influenced the battle in the Kherson region and was "at the heart of the victory," said General Dmytro Marchenko, who coordinates partisan operations in southern Ukraine from his command post in Mykolaiv.

According to the Ukrainian forces, the Russian army suffered considerably from the destruction that prompted it, on several occasions, to flee the battlefield in the face of the scale of losses, impacting headquarters, barracks, ammunition depots, tanks and artillery positions.

Observing the movements of the Russian army

General Marchenko confirmed that the role of partisans and human espionage has been very important. According to him, three command posts, with Russian generals present, were destroyed thanks to information transmitted from behind enemy lines. "And this shows the Russians that they can invade a territory but not control it, that the population is on the side of Ukraine," he said.

Oleksiy Chechin, a 23-year-old agricultural worker from the Kherson region, was one of these highly active partisans during the eight and a half months the region was occupied. When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Mr. Chechin's first instinct was, like hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians, to rush to an army recruitment office to sign up. But he had no military experience and was told that he would not be part of the first wave of soldiers and would have to wait.

Mr. Chechin then returned to his village, Shiroka Balka, and, with a dozen friends, created a sort of law and order militia. Two weeks later, when the Russian military occupation began, some of the men in the group fled to Ukrainian-controlled territory with their families. But Mr. Chechin decided, along with his brother Roman and some comrades, to remain in the occupied zone. They retrieved a drone from the village school and began to observe the movements of the Russian army.

We are interested in your experience using the site.

Ukrainian partisan Oleksiy Chechin in Mykolaiv on November 18, 2022. RAFAEL YAGHOBZADEH FOR "LE MONDE"

"We are farmers. We know these fields, these paths. When we spotted a Russian armored column, we knew that it was going to take a certain route and pass at a certain time at a certain crossroads," Mr. Chechin explained.

6. Ukraine Has a Secret Resistance Operating Behind Russian Lines

Resistance is relevant.

Ukraine Has a Secret Resistance Operating Behind Russian Lines

Modern-day Ukrainian partisans are quietly working to undermine the occupation.

Foreign Policy · by Norma Costello, Vera Mironova · November 21, 2022

By Norma Costello, a freelance journalist from Ireland, and Vera Mironova, a visiting fellow at Harvard University.

Officers with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) wait outside an apartment in Kharkiv oblast, Ukraine.

Officers with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) wait outside an apartment in Kharkiv oblast, Ukraine, after receiving information about a Russian informant on Oct. 27.Norma Costello photos for Foreign Policy

KYIV, Ukraine—On a busy street in central Kyiv, a tall man in a black hoodie stands outside a cafe furiously puffing on a vape. The nondescript man in his mid-40s has never been interviewed before—and for a good reason. His official title, head of the Committee of Veterans, might sound like the role of a benign public servant, but Mykhailo—an alias chosen for the purposes of this article to protect his safety—is far removed from parades and ribbon pinning.

His job is to work with those who secretly fight for Ukraine behind enemy lines. Mykhailo is one of the main strategists and organizers of Ukraine’s partisans inside Russian-occupied territory. “If they kill me, there are many others who can take my place,” he said nonchalantly. “We’ve had to adapt and become more creative. They might be strong, but we use our minds.”

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, dormant veterans associations became the lifeblood of the Ukrainian resistance inside occupied territory. Their networks relied heavily on dedicated volunteers who, according to Mykhailo, were in place months before Russia’s full-scale offensive in February. “We were saying back in 2014 that the Russians were not going to stop in those regions. So in a way, the country was preparing,” he said. “Veterans from 2014 were part of this, and now almost all of them have returned back to the army. We were readying people in areas we knew would be hit early. Even in our schools, we were psychologically preparing our kids.”

Initially, politicians ignored the loud alarm raised by those inside Ukraine’s military and security services, preferring to take a wait-and-see approach to the impending Russian attacks.

After some successful lobbying by people like Mykhailo, however, the government in July 2021 passed the Law on the Fundamentals of National Resistance, which was designed to maximize the role of civilians in Ukrainian defense. It helped establish the territorial defense groups in neighborhoods and connect these citizen defense groups with Ukraine’s wider security and military apparatus. By this February, makeshift distribution centers were established for those who had not received weapons and training in order to allow civilians to defend their neighborhoods across the country.

A man gathers firewood as SBU officers question a man close to the Russian front line in Kharkiv oblast, Ukraine.

A man gathers firewood as SBU officers question a man close to the Russian front line in Kharkiv oblast on Oct. 27.

Mykhailo said that for Ukrainians, after the initial shock of the attacks of Feb. 24, these local civil-defense networks began to connect with one another. “On the first day, people were shocked because there were rockets falling and their targeting was not precise, so everything was hit. After the first two days of shock, people realized we needed to resist. They started coming together in their groups,” he said.

Initially, organizers like Mykhailo, many of whom are military veterans with experience in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and now work in collaboration with both Ukraine’s military and security service in Kyiv, began to focus on coordinating the flow of information. They were tasked with figuring out what was being attacked, where weapons were required, and how to get them there. In occupied places like Sumy and Kharkiv, where street fighting broke out with Russian forces, the defense networks relied mainly on former soldiers, who sometimes still bore injuries from their earlier service, to fight back. “These guys know how to use weapons, RPGs, things like that. They trained in the Soviet army, so they know the tactics of Russia. We made networks, connected people, but they often used their own circles separately. Entire families got involved,” Mykhailo said.

An SBU officer overseas checkpoints outside Kyiv, Ukraine.

An SBU officer overseas checkpoints outside Kyiv on Oct. 28.

But the partisans did not merely consist of former soldiers. Mykhailo said civil servants, post office workers, and even hunters all played a crucial role in Ukraine’s partisan movement. “People who knew the forests wanted to help us. Some worked in forestry; others were catching poachers. Their territorial knowledge was unparalleled, so we worked with them to come up with new ways to find information on Russian movement and to see if our actions inside their area had been successful,” he said.

One striking anecdote involves Kaban, a hunting dog put to work for the national cause. When Russia started to attack Kyiv, the military started to realize it was in a very weak position, so it started utilizing natural resources. In Kyiv oblast, it started planning how to flood rivers in order to prevent Russians from building temporary bridges. On one occasion when it needed to raise the level of a river significantly, it hit a dam but had no way to check whether its attack had provided the desired results.

A local hunter offered up Kaban, who, equipped with a GoPro camera, traveled inside Russian-occupied territory to bring back valuable footage that was then sent via the clandestine partisan network to Kyiv. How did his owner manage to retrieve Kaban from enemy territory? “His owner whistled for him,” Mykhailo laughed. Through Kaban’s actions, Ukraine’s security services were able to confirm their mission was successful.

The partisans used any resources available to them in occupied territory. In one mission, weapons held by border guards were transported to designated areas where locals could collect them. Meanwhile, women who distributed Ukrainian pensions inside the occupied territories began to collect information on Russian movements. Even after pension money ran out, the women continued to travel house to house under the pretense of pension distribution.

Residents of Kherson, Ukraine, connect to the internet from the Starlink network, set up by the Ukrainian army after the city was liberated from Russian occupation, on Nov. 13.

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Turns out Elon Musk isn’t a dependable ally.

“They were invaluable,” Mykhailo mused. Because these channels have been discovered by the Russians, Mykhailo speaks about them but says many new methods are being used every day. “So many of our partisans were killed or tortured, but they keep volunteering, grannies, sisters, and mothers,” he said.

Igor, a 46-year-old from recently liberated Kherson oblast, was part of Mykhailo’s partisan network until his work filming Russian movements led to a brief detention with the enemy—and ultimately a lucky escape. “I started filming the Russians and the movement of weapons on my phone. Finally they realized someone from my village was filming, so they closed the checkpoints and started to examine our phones. I deleted my pictures, but I didn’t delete the trash. When they checked, they found the photos and tried to take me away. A lot of people surrounded them, and some of my relatives gave them money and cigarettes,” he said.

For Igor, it took time to find a trusted network to send his videos to, but then as family members learned about his activities, they offered to help, including his beekeeping father.

SBU officers question a man reported by his neighbor near Kupiansk, Ukraine.

SBU officers question a man reported by his neighbor near Kupiansk, in Kharkiv oblast, on Oct. 27.

“At the start, I didn’t know who to send coordinates to, so I sent them to the administration office of Mykolaiv oblast, but then I found a relative who fought in 2014, so he had a much better network. When they started to bomb Mykolaiv from Kherson, my father felt terrible and wanted to help too. He worked with bees, so he would send us coded messages about places we kept the bees and whether it was busy now, things like this. Locations only we knew. There was a time when we needed to get a view of areas next to the river—even the satellites couldn’t view this. We pretended to go fishing and were able to report back on the location,” he said.

On the planning level, Mykhailo works closely with Ukraine’s more conventional security service, the SBU, which works on counterinsurgency movements inside Ukraine. Those in the SBU are officially assigned by the Ukrainian government with the tasks of mapping out the Russian presence inside Ukraine, hunting for Russian spies in Ukraine’s own ranks, and putting together a picture of how their counterparts work inside Ukrainian territory. From locating a Russian arms cache inside Kyiv to discovering a Ukrainian cook who sold the coordinates and times of meals in a military barracks in Rivne for $300, Ukraine’s security services are constantly on the alert for Russian insurgents inside the country. “Sometimes they’ll do it for money, but it’s so small,” Olek, an SBU officer, told us in Kharkiv oblast while on an intelligence-gathering mission near the border with Russia.

A destroyed area of Kupiansk, Ukraine

A destroyed area of Kupiansk, a town that saw heavy fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces last September, on Oct. 27.

“A lot of our people were arrested,” Mykhailo admits. “In some villages, Russians went house by house and they tortured people to try to get them to give up their networks. Sometimes they already had lists of veterans. In Kherson, they took databases of all government employees, especially anyone with a military pension.” When asked about Ukrainian mayors who said the partisans were capitulating to avoid civilian casualties, Mykhailo was firm: “They’re lying. That’s an FSB [Russian Federal Security Service] narrative.”

As the SBU and its intelligence officers begin counterinsurgency work in recently liberated Kherson, Mykhailo continues to work with partisans inside Russian-occupied territory. They constantly adapt their tactics to meet new challenges and exploit Russian weaknesses. “Putin clearly didn’t read his history books, or he would have learned about our partisans,” he said. “Stalin got to know them quite well.”

Foreign Policy · by Norma Costello, Vera Mironova · November 21, 2022

7. Ukraine is attempting to retake a crucial spit of land that could disrupt Russia's missile barrages

Ukraine is attempting to retake a crucial spit of land that could disrupt Russia's missile barrages

Business Insider · by Sinéad Baker

A photo of Ukraine's Kinburn Spit, taken before the war.

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Ukraine is trying to take over a small strip of land that would give it a big strategic advantage.
The Kinburn Spit has been a site for Russian missile launches, and offers control of Ukraine's main river.
Ukraine has launched an operation there, and Forbes reported that some Ukrainians landed.

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Ukraine is trying to take control of a strategic spit of land that would allow it to take command of a major river and thwart Russia's missile strikes parts of the country.

Ukraine has confirmed that is trying to regain control of the Kinburn Spit — a thin stretch of land across much of the mouth of the Dnipro river that it lost to Russia in June.

Ukrainian officials have said that it would release no details on the operation until it had concluded. Forbes reported on Thursday that Ukrainian commandos landed in small boats on the spit in an amphibious attack.

It did not say how big or well-armed a landing party was. It was also not clear how much of a defense Russia was making.

But if Ukraine were to retake the Kinburn Spit, it would get a significant new advantage.

Russia has been using the strip for its missile and artillery strikes nearby Ukrainian cities, according to a recent update from The Institute for the Study of War.

A map showing where the Kinburn Spit is in relation to the Black Sea and the city of Kherson.

Google Maps/Insider

Ukraine regaining the peninsula would "relieve" those areas from Russia's strikes by putting them out of range, it said.

Russia has heavily relied on artillery and missile strikes for its entire invasion, and in recent weeks has wages an intense campaign of missile and drone strikes on residential areas, seemingly aimed at knocking out electricity and water supplies to civilians.

Depriving Russia of the Kinburn Spit would degrade Russia's ability to strike some regions, per the ISW, though it wouldn't end Russian strikes in of itself.

Whoever gets the peninsula also gains significant control over the entrance to the Dnipro, Ukraine's most significant waterway, the ISW noted.

Russia currently controls most of the area east of the river, with Ukraine controlling the west after it retook the city of Kherson earlier this month.

—Ministry of Defence (@DefenceHQ) November 23, 2022

Business Insider · by Sinéad Baker

8. Meta claims US military link to online propaganda campaign

I repeat what I wrote yesterday.

There is no need for this self inflicted wound.

"So long as we remain amateurs in the critical field of political warfare, the billions of dollars we annually spend on defense and foreign aid will provide us with a diminishing measure of protection."

- Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, 1961.

Meta claims US military link to online propaganda campaign

BBC · by Menu

Published
10 hours ago

About sharing

Image source, Getty Images

By Chris Vallance

Technology reporter

"Individuals associated with the US military" are linked to an online propaganda campaign, Meta's latest adversarial-threat report says.

The campaign was the first major covert pro-US propaganda operation taken down by a big-tech company, independent researchers said in August.

It supported the US and its allies, while opposing countries such as Russia, China and Iran.

But experts said it was largely ineffective.

On Facebook, 39 accounts, 16 pages, and two groups were removed, as well as 26 accounts on Instagram, for violating the platforms' policy against "coordinated inauthentic behaviour".

"This network originated in the United States," Meta wrote.

It focused on countries including Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Yemen - and mirrored tactics commonly used in propaganda campaigns against the West, including:

fake personas
artificially generated images
campaigns across multiple platforms

Image source, Graphika/Stanford University

Image caption,

One fake account used a doctored picture (left) of actress Valeria Menendez (right)

The accounts targeting Iran had criticised Iranian authorities and their policies and posted about issues such as women's rights, researchers said.

Some of those supporting the US had posed as independent media outlets and some had tried to pass off content from legitimate outlets, such as BBC News Russian, as their own.

The operation ran across many internet services, including Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, according to Meta.

'Public trust'

"Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military," its report says.

But most of the posts had "little to no engagement" from real users.

US think tank the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab managing editor Andy Carvin told the BBC when the campaign was first revealed, it would be "ineffective and counterproductive" for democracies to undertake such campaigns, because it meant using "the very tactics used by your adversaries" and "further eroding public trust".

Meta's announcement confirms previous reporting by the Washington Post. Sources told the newspaper concern over the operation had made the Pentagon complete "a sweeping audit" of how the US military conducted clandestine information warfare.

The US Department of Defense told BBC News it was "aware of the report published by Meta".

"At this time, we do not have any further comments on the report or potential actions that may be taken by the department as a result of the report," it added.

Leonid Gozman: How Exactly Could the Putin Regime Collapse?

msn.com · by The Moscow Times 21 hrs ago

Everyone, except perhaps Putin himself, understands that his regime is nearing its end. At the very least, discussions about the country’s future are being conducted in Russia as if neither Putin nor his system still existed. The question is: How exactly will the regime collapse?

For a long time, the hope was that elections would bring down the government, even though Russia hasn’t had real elections in at least 15 years. But some still hoped that even a small number of independent deputies might change the atmosphere within the country, while others believed that elections might overturn the regime. None of this is currently possible.

The Kremlin has made the situation impossible for nearly all opposition politicians, jailing them or barring them from running for office on preposterous grounds. The referendum to change the constitution and extend Putin’s reign endlessly showed even the most optimistic observers that the regime does not care what anyone thinks, and that if it excels at anything, it’s falsifying election results. Any election under Putin can only be a farce.

There was also a hope (and, simultaneously, a fear) that the regime would succumb to a revolution, that perhaps the people would lose their patience and topple the government, and that the security forces would not dare to go up against hundreds of thousands of protesters. However, the events of the past nine months have made talk of a revolution sound like fantasy.

Now Putin is “at war” with the United States and NATO, two entities the majority of Russians see as enemies. Now Putin’s opponents are not seen as being on the side of the people but rather on the side of the United States, and therefore they cannot count on popular support. Together with the regime’s willingness to use force, this makes a revolution in the foreseeable future impossible.

At the same time, the regime has no chance of survival in its current form. The lack of a path to victory not only in Ukraine but in general, the absence of a vision for the future, the depletion of moral and political resources, the inability to exist in conditions of isolation, and the emigration of large segments of the population all make changes inevitable. Ukrainian military strikes and Western sanctions will not allow the system to infinitely prolong its demise.

There is, of course, a possibility of nuclear war, but setting aside the scenario of global apocalypse, there are only two somewhat realistic scenarios for the end of the Putin regime: one is horrific and the other has little to do with democracy, but at least gives Russia a chance at a future.

The first scenario is the rapid collapse of the Russian government. Essentially, the government is already in decline: it is clearly losing control, orders are not being followed or — as in the case of mobilization — being followed in such an unorthodox manner that negative consequences far exceed positive outcomes for the regime.

However, Ukraine’s counteroffensive and growing socioeconomic problems could create a snowball effect, and all stability could be lost. This has already happened once: in the last days of the Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev was issuing decree after decree, which no one had any intention of following, and which he had no way of enforcing.

Back then, there were institutions that stepped in and prevented chaos: the party organizations of multiple republics and in the Russian regions, Boris Yeltsin’s team, and the new institutions of power in the Baltic republics. Contemporary Russia has no such institutions.

This means that a rapid collapse of the regime would inevitably result in a free-for-all: military formations with various leaders would clash; Putin’s “footmen” — Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin — would enter the fray along with their fighters, and other regional structures headed by ambitious generals and governors would join in the fighting. The level of violence and bloodshed would be unimaginable; it would be apocalyptic.

A less terrifying scenario is a “palace coup.” This does not necessarily have to be an assassination. It is possible that Putin could be ousted or convinced to step down from power. His entourage certainly understands that he forced the country — and, what they care more about, them personally — into a dead end. Their main problem isn’t Ukraine or Russia, but rather their ability to personally reconcile with the West and regain their ability to use their assets and bank accounts. Putin’s entourage understands that as long as Putin is in power, they will never be able to do this.

There is a chance, especially in the event of large-scale military losses, that several of Putin’s most trusted advisers might offer him an exit strategy. Perhaps some minor figure who would be easy to manipulate could be appointed president. This nominal leader would be tasked with ending the war, making all possible concessions to the West, and thus “buying forgiveness” for Putin’s inner circle. The West would most likely cooperate in the interest of preventing World War III.

We don’t know whether there are people in Putin’s inner circle who are brave enough to bring him such a proposal as he's been surrounding himself with spineless yes-men for years. We also don’t know whether Putin would accept such an offer, especially since former Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev — who was convinced that he would be able to maintain his influence when he handed over the presidency to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a man he trusted and considered close — lost all power and influence in the span of just a week when Tokayev asserted his independence. Now even Nazarbayev’s very freedom and life depend on Tokayev.

An even more frightening example for Putin is that of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, whose own people sent him to be tried in The Hague.

Anyone in Putin’s inner circle daring to approach the president with a proposition to step down would also need to be someone prepared to take further measures should the proposal not be accepted. Otherwise, I fear that our country’s chances of survival are nil.

msn.com · by The Moscow Times 21 hrs ago

10. Learning to Forget Lessons from Counterinsurgency

Are we forgetting again? Is this why Congress is demanding this from DOD in Sec. 1205 of the draft 2023 NDAA. (and should be demanding this from the entire national security community and not just DOD - and I would make the civilian leadership focus on political warfare while the military focuses on irregular warfare.)

‘‘John S. McCain III Center for Security Studies in Irregular Warfare.’’

(1) MISSION. – The mission of the Irregular Warfare Center shall be to support the institutionalization of irregular warfare as a core competency of the Department of Defense by

(A) coordinating and aligning Department of Defense education curricula, standards, and objectives related to irregular warfare and strategic competition;

(B) providing a Center for research on irregular warfare, strategic competition, and the role of the Department of Defense in supporting interagency activities relating to irregular warfare and strategic competition;

(C) engaging in coordinating with federal departments and agencies other than the Department of Defense and with academia, non-governmental organizations, civil society, and international partners to discuss and coordinate efforts on security challenges in irregular warfare and strategic competition;

(D) developing curriculum and conducting training and education of military and civilian participants of the United States and other countries, as determined by the Secretary of Defense; and

(E) serving as a coordinating body and central repository for irregular warfare resources, including educational activities and programs, and lessons learned across components of the Department of Defense.

My thoughts on how we forgot after Vietnam and how we chase after new terminology (which causes strategic planning paralysis): https://warontherocks.com/2013/11/threats-and-the-words-we-use-a-thought-experiment/

Learning to Forget Lessons from Counterinsurgency

inkstickmedia.com · by Sahar Khan · November 22, 2022

Counterinsurgency, by all appearances, is well and truly out of fashion. After a long cycle over the last decade and a half of popularity, popular rejection, and decline, irregular war has returned to the margins of US and allied military practice. As one commentator recently noted on Twitter, the new US Army Operations manual — the army’s capstone doctrinal document — mentions Ukraine 17 times without mentioning Afghanistan at all. A decade and a half ago, counterinsurgency was by far the most visible idea in US military practice. It now seems close to irrelevant.

We have been here before. A familiar story about counterinsurgency concerns memory and forgetting. In the aftermath of a traumatic irregular war, officers and officials deal with defeat by choosing to forget what went wrong. During and after Vietnam, for example, a generation of senior officers is said to have handled defeat either by avoiding difficult lessons or by avoiding the subject itself. This avoidance, the story goes, leads militaries not to learn over the long term. The proffered solution is to better document what worked on the ground, develop systems for repeating it at scale, and face hard truths about the inevitability of fighting these wars again and again in the future.

REMEMBERING COUNTERINSURGENCY

But what exactly should we remember? How should we go about recovering it — and why? The memory politics of counterinsurgency turn out to be complicated. In researching my new book, “The Counterinsurgent Imagination,” I found this cycle of loss and recovery everywhere. Yet, they seem to unfold to little practical effect: Even when we get the old lessons back, they do little good or poorly fit new circumstances. The office-scholars who diagnosed the effects of misunderstanding and forgetting around Vietnam — men like Generals H. R. McMaster and David H. Petraeus — went on to recover ideas about counterinsurgency that failed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A decade and a half ago, counterinsurgency was by far the most visible idea in US military practice. It now seems close to irrelevant.

As conflicts drag on and wind down, the defense establishment can end up awash in “lessons learned” documents. Such practices have an institutional home in the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which is part of the US Army’s Combined Arms Center. Yet, what we are to do with these is less clear. Often, past counterinsurgency turns out to be unpalatable, whether in its techniques or its broader politics. Circa 2005, US officers aimed to recover lessons from the French counterinsurgent David Galula.

Galula had advocated limited, targeted violence, alongside protection and control of the population, and a focus on local knowledge — practices core to “population centric” counterinsurgency. However, they ran up against his links to torture in late-1950s Algeria. The trouble was not just what he’d done but the French imperial project for which he’d done it. Petraeus ordered all positive references to Algeria purged from the 2006 US Army Field Manual 3-24. Yet, Galula’s name remained in the bibliography and his ideas persisted (sometimes uncredited) on the manual’s pages.

This kind of forgetting and misremembering isn’t new. After all, 1960s counterinsurgents didn’t reliably remember their 19th colonial “small wars” forerunners. Participants made almost no reference to past practices at a 1962 RAND symposium on counterinsurgency. Indeed, the term itself was new, having just entered the language of warfare. They seem to have thought they had discovered a new kind of war and needed new ways to fight it. Authors of 19th century colonial warfare handbooks had similar complaints. James Alexander, a British imperial officer, claimed he wrote his 1873 book because he “could find no good manual on bush fighting.” James Smith, an American colonial officer, complained in his 1812 book that previous colonial soldiers had “left very little on record, of the particulars; of how this war was carried on.” In truth, precursors date at least to Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s 1599 “Militia Indiana,” from Spanish wars in the Americas.

Recovering these “lessons” is often neither easy nor particularly useful or even desirable. Ideas often resurface shorn of their political motives. Alexander and Smith wrote handbooks of small warfare geared to Indigenous dispossession. We would, I hope, prefer not to retrieve those lessons. Attempts to sanitize them for reuse produce problems of their own. Alan Cromartie wrote of the 2006 US army manual that its authors read into Galula a liberalism of their own. Galula, by contrast, was an anti-communist conservative and an imperialist. The result was an updated program that “fails in its own terms.”

CAN WE LEARN FROM THE PAST?

The problem is not a lack of sophistication. Attempts at recovery are often serious, nuanced, and complex. The counterinsurgents tied to the 2006 Field Manual and the Iraq surge certainly seem to have done the reading. Nor are they guilty of bad faith. Their written reconstructions of authors like Galula and Robert Thompson, who wrote “Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam,” sometimes border on earnestness. Thompson was General Sir Gerald Templer’s intellectual associate in Malaya, and like Galula, both were associated with protection of population, limited violence, and local knowledge. Like their French counterpart, they now seem tainted by their links to colonialism. Still, I don’t think their American readers can be faulted for not trying or for not believing in what they are trying to do.

Instead, I think the problem is that they’re trying to recover lessons of the wrong kind. Around when I started my doctoral research on this stuff, I sat in a senior professor’s office and listened to him complain that we don’t really learn the hard counterinsurgency lessons at all: The ones not about how to fight wars, but about when to.

Looking back, I think he was right. We’ve got plenty of ideas about how to fight these wars — whether or not they’re any good. It’s less clear we knew then, or know now, how to avoid them. We should probably stop trying to remember how to fight wars that we should by now recall not to fight in the first place.

Joseph MacKay, is a Fellow (Senior Lecturer) in International Relations at Australian National University. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. “The Counterinsurgent Imagination” is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

inkstickmedia.com · by Sahar Khan · November 22, 2022

11. There is no panacea, competition with China occurs in peace and war

There is no panacea, competition with China occurs in peace and war - Breaking Defense

Preparing for a competitive peace with China is more nuanced and complicated than preparing for conflict, argues the Center for Maritime Strategy's Benjamin Mainardi.

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · November 23, 2022

A recent CSIS wargame explored potential outcomes of a China-Taiwan-US conflict. (Graphic by Breaking Defense; original image of wargame map courtesy CSIS; original photograph by Ashley Pon/Getty Images)

In August, Breaking Defense observed a wargame in which China invaded Taiwan and the US intervened — with bloody results. Such simulations abound, as Benjamin Mainardi of the Center for Maritime Strategy notes below, but in this op-ed he argues the US should be preparing for a much more complicated stand-off with Beijing.

No geopolitical prospect looms as large in Washington as war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Accordingly, the interservice race to take the lead in the Indo-Pacific continues to grow. Yet while wargames and articles abound on this or that aspect of what a conflict would entail, making eye-catching headlines and seemingly favoring one service over another, their provocative implications must be tempered with sober reflection upon the realities of the challenge at hand.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the outbreak of war as a conventional territorial conquest is taken for granted. But the framing of competition with China as hinging on a one-time engagement is at best a flawed approach and at worst a dangerous miscarriage of strategic foresight.

Few seriously grapple, for instance, with the dynamics of an attempted blockade of Taiwan or that war could emerge on another front. The PRC has already begun to experiment with informal mechanisms of blockade, similar to those implemented by Russia in the Black Sea prior to its invasion of Ukraine.

Rightfully so, the Biden Administration’s long-awaited 2022 National Security Strategy [PDF] identifies the relationship between the United States and China as “strategic competition.” The operative word being “competition.” Much as in Aesop’s fable of “The Hare and the Tortoise,” the winner in this race will not necessarily be who can out-scale the other the fastest but who can sustain a comprehensive, full-spectrum contest of diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement capabilities over the long-term.

The Aerial Antidote?

The persistent concern over what Beijing might do has created a burgeoning cottage industry of advocates of cure-alls for the “problem of China,” perhaps none as vocal as the proponents of a supposed bomber antidote. Eerily reminiscent of the fallacious belief that “the bomber will always get through” to compel civilian populations to terminate wars – which proved highly problematic in the course of the Second World War – war-minded advocates of airpower downplay China’s air defense capabilities, arguing that “the US bomber force, even at just 141 aircraft, is a good matchup against the Chinese navy and China’s overall maritime capacity.”

At a time when mass and attrition ought to be informing defense planning, as Russia’s war against Ukraine certainly signals, not at least genuflecting to potential losses in combat operations against the world’s largest armed forces is dangerous. Indeed, China’s military possesses some 2,250 combat-capable aircraft and thousands of surface-to-air missile systems — exponentially greater than any opponent the United States has faced in decades across a far more expansive area of operations — with sophisticated air power doctrine.

Given that the United States Air Force has no long-range escort fighter to support its next generation of bombers, is it ready to sustain losses in its bomber fleet — a lesson that should have been learned in the skies over Germany [PDF] — to say nothing of the complications of where such bombers will operate from given the ambiguities of status of forces agreements [PDF] in the event of conflict. An air campaign of some 141 bombers attempting to target 700 or more Chinese navy, coast guard, and maritime militia platforms [PDF] in the midst of a layered air defense network and one of the world’s largest air forces is likely to result in little more than many lost American aircraft and pilots.

More Than Just A [Taiwan] ‘War Plan’

But more than the flaws of the particular bomber argument is the implication that the conflict will be that simple to begin with. In reality, the threats posed by China are many and varied.

While many have begun to characterize the strategic competition with China as the new Cold War, the PRC arguably presents greater multidomain challenges than the Soviet Union ever did. Its economy is far more robust than that of the USSR at virtually any point in its history and is decidedly more interwoven in the global economic system. Competing with China, of course, will require military power, but it necessitates leveraging the full spectrum of national capabilities, from intelligence and diplomacy to international finance [PDF] and industrial capacity. [PDF]

Just as the administration’s recently released National Security Strategy [PDF] and National Defense Strategy [PDF] aptly identify, China’s challenging of international rules and norms extends far beyond the specter of a Taiwan invasion. Its militarization of islands in the South China Sea flouts the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling against Chinese claims. Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fishing by Chinese fishing fleets threatens global fish stocks and is devastating local economies worldwide. Its international development investment mechanisms, though featuring less prominently in discourse in a post-Covid world, continue to yield geopolitical dividends, most recently in the Solomon Islands — a battle the Biden administration is attempting to redress. Moreover, China is the leading proponent of cybercrime targeted at the United States, its military, industries, and people.

With such diverse threats, each of the services has a role to play in the burgeoning strategic competition with the PRC. For their parts, the Marine Corps and Army’s stand-in force is more than a political signal. While it certainly does demonstrate the commitment of the United States to defending host nations on the ground, these forces are in the process of fielding multi-domain capabilities that can target not only the Chinese fleet, but support our own and that of allies, facilitate communications, collect intelligence, and provide flexibility for policymakers in times of crisis.

Similarly, the forward deployed vessels of the Seventh Fleet serve the Administration’s national security priorities of campaigning and integrating with allies and partners. All of which may well be rendered moot without investment in the Space Force’s ability to secure global communication and sensor systems. While there are debates to be had about the viability of sustaining such forces in the event of conflict, their presence and operations in peacetime invaluably deepen the relationships we have with our allies and partners, sway international public opinion, and counter grey zone operations all while facilitating conventional deterrence.

As former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Watkins explained as the logic undergirding the 1980s Maritime Strategy:

“[T]he option some advocate, of holding our maritime power near home waters, would inevitably lead to abandoning our allies. This is unacceptable, morally, legally, and strategically. Allied strategy must be prepared to fight in forward areas. That is where our allies are and where our adversary will be.”

In short, stand-off capabilities are insufficient to the challenge at hand.

Equally important, will be the contributions of the Departments of State, Commerce, Homeland Security, Energy, the non-military elements of the Intelligence Community, and more in competing with China across sectors and domains.

Far from anyone being left out, all the service branches will play important roles in a conflict with China, but also, critically, far before and below the level of direct conflict. It is a day-to-day competition with a dynamic adversary leveraging multiple dimensions of national power. Each service contributes to conventional deterrence by furnishing different capabilities, but in the context of a long-term strategic competition and finite budget resources, they must argue for them sophisticatedly, demonstrating multi-function utility for peace and war.

Benjamin E. Mainardi is an analyst at the Center for Maritime Strategy. He holds a master’s in War Studies from King’s College London. His primary research interests are in strategic studies and military history.

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · November 23, 2022

12. UN Counterterrorism and Technology: What Role for Human Rights in Security?

Excerpts:

As many civil society organizations noted during their presentations, there cannot be security without putting human rights at the center of any and all counterterrorism efforts. And counterterrorism policies or principles cannot be effective if they are developed in a vacuum, without the meaningful participation of human rights experts and diverse and independent civil society organizations. Failing to do so will lead to the criminalization of speech not amounting to incitement, based on the vagaries of potentially abusive governments, and it will spur content restrictions that violate freedom of expression.

It will not result in effective counterterrorism, and it is highly likely to lead to further erosion of human rights and the rule of law. The planned follow-up to the Delhi Declaration, in particular the drafting of “non-binding guiding principles” by the committee on ICT and terrorism, offers an important opportunity for the U.N. CTC and CTED to prove their commitment to meaningfully include civil society organizations and human rights experts in the development of counterterrorism policies.

UN Counterterrorism and Technology: What Role for Human Rights in Security?

by Tomaso Falchetta and Anna Oosterlinck

November 23, 2022

justsecurity.org · by Tomaso Falchetta · November 23, 2022

November 23, 2022

The first meeting of the United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) held outside of U.N. headquarters in New York since 2015 marked important advances in engaging with civil society and experts who have questioned the embrace of counterterrorism approaches that too often backfire or result in human rights violations. But the Delhi Declaration that emerged reflected little of that input. Prepared mostly in advance, the meeting’s outcome document merely confirmed the trend towards further expansion of the U.N. counterterrorism agenda related to the use of new and emerging technologies, with little attention to the abuses committed by governments in the process.

The Oct. 28-29 meeting, conducted in India, was convened to discuss a specific element of the fight against terrorism: “Countering the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes.” The Security Council has sought for more than 20 years to address the perceived exploitation of information and communications technology (ICT) and related technologies for terrorist purposes. Adopted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001, Security Council resolution 1373 referred from the beginning to ICT and the abuse of communications technologies by terrorists.

Most notably in the last five years, the Security Council has adopted a series of resolutions under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, imposing legally binding obligations on all U.N. member states to introduce biometrics technologies at borders for counterterrorism purposes; to develop capabilities to collect, process and analyze travelers’ data, such as Advance Passenger Identification (API) and passenger name record (PNR) data; and to take action to prevent, investigate, and prosecute terrorism financing.

These resolutions have led to a significant expansion of surveillance powers by member states, often introduced without an adequate domestic legal framework and human rights safeguards. For example, Privacy International (Tomaso’s organization) has documented the human rights abuses stemming from biometric data identification systems across the globe since the Security Council adopted resolution 2396 in 2017. In its December 2021 analytical briefing on biometrics and counter-terrorism, the U.N. Counter-terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) noted how “the use of biometrics for counter-terrorism purposes – notably in the context of border management and security – has become increasingly widespread.” CTED’s own assessments show that many states “still lack sufficient legal and regulatory frameworks, data management and processing protocols, risk and impact assessment practices, and rigorous access controls and records for technology-based systems, including those based on AI.”

In addition, the Security Council has sought to address incitement to terrorism, including through the use of ICTs. Resolution 1624 (2005) contained a clear obligation for States to prohibit incitement to commit terrorist acts. At least in that case, it contains a strong human rights clause, including an explicit reference to the right to freedom of expression as reflected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In 2010, the Security Council turned its attention for the first time to the use of the internet, including to incite terrorists as well as to finance, plan, and prepare terrorist actions.

These resolutions then served as building blocks for several subsequent resolutions. Those expanded attempted regulation of terrorist narratives, and instructed member States on how to counter the use of the internet, other ICTs, and other emerging technologies for terrorist purposes. ARTICLE 19 (Anna’s organization) has documented how these broad, sweeping provisions have led governments to adopt laws criminalizing “extremist” speech that does not amount to incitement; to block, filter, or ban websites; and to remove or restrict certain online content in a manner that violates freedom of expression and the right to privacy.

The CTC’s special meeting in India and the preparatory technical meetings that preceded it proved no different in the committee’s approach. The focus of the debate in most of the panels was on the real and perceived threats of abuses of ICT by terrorists; human rights got short shrift, as did even legitimate questions about the credibility of evidence cited for the alleged terrorist abuses.

A notable exception to this trend was a civil society roundtable organized by CTED on Oct. 12, in which participants pointed to some of the most significant human rights concerns raised by government counterterrorism measures. At the special meeting itself, the CTC also for the first time allowed the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights to address one of its formal meetings and invited civil society representatives to participate. This allowed CSOs, including ours (Privacy International and ARTICLE 19, respectively), to deliver their messages directly to members of the CTC, other member States, CTED, the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism, and other U.N. representatives. This level of access is highly welcomed, and it hopefully will set a precedent for future engagement between the CTC and civil society.

Key Takeaways and Shortcomings of the Declaration

In terms of substance, the Delhi Declaration covers three topics in relatively broad fashion: “Countering terrorist exploitation of ICT and emerging technologies,” “Threats and opportunities related to new payment technologies and fundraising methods,” and “Threats posed by misuse of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) by terrorists.”

Of these three topics, the abuse of ICT and emerging technologies by terrorists is the least defined. It could be interpreted to cover a vast range of measures — anything from content moderation to social media monitoring, from limiting the use of encryption to resorting to hacking for surveillance – all in the name of countering terrorism. It essentially encourages governments to introduce counterterrorism measures with a view to addressing abuses of ICT that will likely end up undermining human rights, particularly the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression.

Ironically, such abuses ultimately will undermine national security itself. In our intervention at the special session, Privacy International expressed its concerns at the expansion of new technologies employed for the surveillance of public spaces, whether online or offline, in the name of countering terrorism. It noted that social media monitoring is often justified as a form of content moderation for counterterrorism purposes, but that it is also abused to surveil peaceful assemblies and profile people’s social conduct. Privacy International also noted how attempts by governments to access encrypted communications to identify potential terrorist threats risk introducing vulnerabilities into the systems; the result could be indiscriminate surveillance of digital communications, compromising the privacy and security of potentially all users of digital communication services.

ARTICLE 19 offered eight concrete recommendations to the CTC and the international community at large on how to ensure human rights safeguards and the rule of law while countering terrorism. These include key tenets for a successful fight against terrorism: 1) security without rights is meaningless and rights inherently advance security; and 2) international human rights law dictates that the same rights apply online as offline. States can only restrict free speech on the basis of national security if the principles of legality, legitimacy, proportionality, and necessity have all been met. In terms of addressing terrorist content online, States should take a careful approach when regulating how social media platforms should undertake content moderation. State regulation should not prescribe what content to restrict, but rather focus platform accountability on processes, access to effective remedies, transparency, and human rights protections, including through impact assessments.

Unsurprisingly, given that the text was negotiated by the 15 CTC member States behind closed doors and well ahead of the meeting in India, the Delhi Declaration does not seek to address these or other concerns raised by civil society organizations and human rights experts.

The declaration does include the reaffirmation that “Member States must ensure that any measures taken to counter terrorism, including the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes, respect the Charter of the United Nations and comply with their obligations under international law, including international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international refugee law, as applicable” (paragraph 14 of the Delhi Declaration). However, it fails to refer to the principles of legality, legitimacy, necessity and proportionality, non-discrimination, accountability, transparency and effective redress for human rights violations. All of those issues have been raised consistently by human rights experts and civil society.

Little Guidance on Rights Obligations

The Delhi Declaration offers hardly any guidance on how States’ counterterrorism measures should comply with existing human rights obligations. And it offers only a vague blueprint for the next steps the U.N. CTC and CTED will take in this field. CTED is expected to play a leading role in the follow-up to declaration, including in the identification of trends, the development of threat analysis, the collation of good practices and the production of a gap analysis on the capacities of member States to counter the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes. In doing so, CTED is expected “to deepen its engagement and cooperation with civil society, including women and women’s organizations.”

As many civil society organizations noted during their presentations, there cannot be security without putting human rights at the center of any and all counterterrorism efforts. And counterterrorism policies or principles cannot be effective if they are developed in a vacuum, without the meaningful participation of human rights experts and diverse and independent civil society organizations. Failing to do so will lead to the criminalization of speech not amounting to incitement, based on the vagaries of potentially abusive governments, and it will spur content restrictions that violate freedom of expression.

It will not result in effective counterterrorism, and it is highly likely to lead to further erosion of human rights and the rule of law. The planned follow-up to the Delhi Declaration, in particular the drafting of “non-binding guiding principles” by the committee on ICT and terrorism, offers an important opportunity for the U.N. CTC and CTED to prove their commitment to meaningfully include civil society organizations and human rights experts in the development of counterterrorism policies.

IMAGE: Large surveillance desk with someone watching a wall of monitors. (Photo: Getty Images)

justsecurity.org · by Tomaso Falchetta · November 23, 2022

13. Ukraine war: after recapture of Kherson the conflict is poised at the gates of Crimea

Ukraine war: after recapture of Kherson the conflict is poised at the gates of Crimea

Frank Ledwidge
Senior Lecturer in Military Strategy and Law, University of Portsmouth

theconversation.com · by Frank Ledwidge

More than the offensives that retook so much land in September, the recent recapture of Kherson marks a clear decision point for Ukraine.

Russian forces are now definitively on the defensive – their priority is not to take or retake ground, but to try to hold what they have. To achieve this, they are developing defensive systems in depth and desperately trying to prepare barely trained conscripts for high-intensity combat. The immediate priority for Ukraine is to keep the Russians off-balance so as not to allow them to consolidate their positions or train and prepare those reinforcements.

We can now see with some degree of confidence where the focus of both sides will be over the next months: Crimea. Of all the areas taken from Ukraine since 2014, Crimea carries by far the most significance. In a wide-ranging and fascinating interview in September this year, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valerii Zaluzhny, stated that Crimea is Russia’s “centre of gravity” – the key to the war.

This is certainly also the case for the Ukrainians. Their recent coups de main – such as the serious damage to the Kerch Bridge and the maritime drone attack on the Black Sea Fleet – only reinforce this. With the initiative and momentum with them, the question now is how Ukraine will deal with Crimea’s recapture. The answer will dictate the shape of the war.

Strategically vital peninsula

Crimea was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev. At this point, Ukraine was a wholly owned subsidiary of Moscow and its independence was considered an effective impossibility. Crimea had been central to Russia’s grand strategy since its capture from in 1783 from the Ottoman Khanate that ruled there. Sevastopol on the south coast contains Russia’s only significant warm-water naval base, giving it year-round access to the Mediterranean and all points beyond.

It was so vital to Russian interests that after Ukrainian independence in 1991 the naval base at Sevastopol was leased from Ukraine – an agreement that was cancelled by Vladimir Putin after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. There are several other significant military bases on the peninsula. For example ballistic missile early-warning radar has been built just outside Sebastopol, part of a much larger system which surrounds Russia.

Off to the front: Russian conscripts at a railway station in Sevastopol before leaving to serve in the war. EPA-EFE/stringer

But most importantly, it is the only major part of Russia’s occupied territories thought to have a majority ethnic Russian population. For centuries it has been a prime Russian summer holiday spot. Now, property prices are falling and the Ukrainian army is, if not quite at the gates, uncomfortably close.

Ukraine is determined to retake all of its land. From Kyiv’s perspective, repossession of all “temporarily occupied territories” is a condition for negotiations to begin.

Hard nut to crack

So Crimea is crucial for both sides – and accordingly presents critical dilemmas. First, there are the military challenges. As invaders have discovered over the centuries – not least the British and French during the Crimean War, but most notably the Germans who occupied and were then driven off in the second world war – Crimea is a very tough military nut to crack.

In the absence of a large naval and amphibious force, there is really only one entry point, the 5km-wide Perekop Isthmus, where significant and bloody battles were fought towards the end of the Russian civil war in 1920 and during the German invasion of 1941.

Key strategic entry point to Crimea: the Perekop Isthmus. Benutzer:Elya via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC

Secondly, an assault on Crimea is fraught with political dangers. First, unlike the rest of the occupied territories in Ukraine, most Russians agree that Crimea – with its majority Russian population – is legitimately a Russian territory. An exiled dissident friend, arrested multiple times by police in Russia for demonstrating against the regime, told me: “Few people care too much about Donbas and Zaporizhzhe and Kherson oblasts, they are obviously Ukrainian. Everyone believes Crimea is Russian.”

This is an almost universally held view, even among Russian opposition figures such as Alexei Navalny. While most Russians could tolerate the loss of Berdiansk or Mariupol on the southeastern coast of Ukraine with the same lack of enthusiasm they displayed towards Kherson, they are likely to unite around a defence of the peninsula. This carries with it the possibility (however remote) of escalation, including the use of low-yield (“tactical’) nuclear weapons.

Ukraine may well take another avenue and decide not to assault the peninsula at all. If we assume that they will break Russian defensive lines somewhere south of Zaporizhzhia city – something that will be more difficult than previous offensive operations (due to recent Russian reinforcement) they could decide to direct operations towards recovering Zaporizhzhia oblast and the ”hero city“ of Mariupol (so-designated due to its valiant defence early in the war) in the Donetsk region.

This would restore the lines as at the February 24 invasion and would represent a clear and unambiguous strategic victory for Kyiv. It would also grant Ukraine a winning hand in any negotiations. Russia’s current main supply routes to Crimea would be cut, a task which would be completed by the final destruction of the Kerch Bridge, which is currently under repair.

A leading commentator on the war, academic and former military officer Mike Martin, told me that: "Conducting a full-scale operation to retake Crimea might provoke a backlash in Russia, but putting it under siege while degrading Russian military assets there would put Putin under huge domestic pressure.” The Ukrainians have surprised us before. This may well be the opportunity to do so again.

The US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, said in a recent briefing that: “Crimea is an issue to be thought through and sorted out by the Ukrainian leadership.” This is something of a understatement. How the Ukrainian high command resolves this issue will dictate the course, conduct and outcome of the rest of the war.

Whatever course they choose – barring a catastrophic collapse of Russian forces, which will raise some serious issues of its own, to put it mildly – the war is not likely to end soon.

theconversation.com · by Frank Ledwidge

14. China’s gold stockpiling is dollar warning sign

It is. a national security and strategic imperative that we protect the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Failure to do so will cause our national security infrastructure to collapse.

China’s gold stockpiling is dollar warning sign

Beijing is quietly dumping dollars for gold as greenback strength looks increasingly illusionary

asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · November 24, 2022

TOKYO — One of the worst-kept secrets in global central banking is the extent to which Chinese officials are swapping dollars for gold.

Governor Yi Gang’s team at the People’s Bank of China isn’t admitting as much. The PBOC doesn’t have to, though, given the clear policy trajectory Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pursued in recent years: internationalizing of the yuan as the top rival to the dollar.

Xi’s position hasn’t changed so much as other governments are catching on that trust is waning in the global reserve currency and an alternative to the dollar is badly needed.

Particularly as the US national debt zooms past $30 trillion, inflation is at 40-year highs, the Federal Reserve is pushing the biggest economy into recession and a band of firebrand Republicans threatens to play politics with Washington’s debt limit again.

Not surprisingly, central banks that once hoarded dollars are buying gold at the fastest clip on record. In the July-September quarter, central banks more than quadrupled gold purchases from a year earlier — adding nearly a net 400 tonnes to already sizable stockpiles.

These figures from the World Gold Council are no aberration. The year-to-date flurry of gold buying already well surpasses any 12-month period since 1967. This has traders guessing who the real whales are here.

Punters doing the math can confirm that about 90 tonnes worth of purchases can be traced to Turkey (31.2 tonnes), Uzbekistan (26.1 tonnes), India (17.5 tonnes) and other developing nations. The other 300 tonnes, it’s widely assumed, bear Chinese fingerprints.

Xi’s ambitions to increase the yuan’s use in trade and finance would get a huge boost if Beijing made it fully convertible. Ditto for giving the PBOC independence from Communist Party meddling.

In the interim, though, US officials are doing Xi’s work for him as Washington takes for granted the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege,” as 1960s French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing put it.

The yuan wants a seat at the table as a global reserve currency. Image: iStock

One can connect dots back decades, but the last four presidents all share in the blame. George W Bush, president from 2001 to 2009, blew Washington’s budget surplus on a giant tax cut for the wealthy. Then he launched a costly and credibility-slamming war on terror.

Next, Barack Obama (2009-2017) failed to treat the underlying causes of the Lehman Brothers crisis, tending to the symptoms instead. It was on his watch that Republicans played around with the government’s debt ceiling. In 2011, S&P Global Ratings yanked away Washington’s AAA credit rating.

Donald Trump’s arrival in 2017 saw another budget-busting tax cut, one that dwarfed Bush’s. Trump’s China trade war, meanwhile, undermined trust in US leadership. His browbeating of Fed chairman Jerome Powell into cutting rates was followed by one of the world’s most incompetent Covid-19 responses, resulting in an unthinkable one million-plus deaths.

Joe Biden’s arrival in 2021 saw a fresh explosion of government spending. It added to an already chronic public debt challenge and pumped money into an economy already running hot amid supply chain turmoil. Biden hasn’t worked fast enough to increase productivity to take the onus off the Fed to curb inflation.

Fast forward 671 days and dollar selling is picking up speed. To some extent, this reflects investors betting that the days of the Fed’s hiking of rates in 75 basis-point intervals are over. Yet the warning signs from central banks racing to buy gold are hard to ignore.

The yellow metal is shining at the moment thanks to its nature of not being “another nation’s liability,” says Nikos Kavalis, managing director at precious metals consultancy Metals Focus. “We think overall central banks will remain net buyers” for the foreseeable future.

Some of this rationale reflects the difficult public debt calculus now dawning on global markets. Economist Emre Tiftik at the Institute of International Finance notes that the global debt-to-GDP ratio — near 343% — is now 20 percentage points lower than its peak in Q1 2021, “helped by strong growth and flattered by inflation.”

However, he says, “the emerging market debt-to-GDP ratio continues to rise, notably in the financial sector.”

Tiftik explains that global debt issuance adjusted for inflation is now at multi-year lows. Yet “as governments look to support growth and meet higher funding needs, 2023 should see more sovereign issuance” at a moment when currency depreciation is “creating additional headwinds for borrowers, including in mature markets with US dollar liabilities.”

Bottom line, Tiftik says, the “global sovereign interest bill is set to increase rapidly,” notably for sub-Saharan Africa but also in EM Europe and Asia. This explains some of why demand for gold is surging.

Whether central banks’ gold buying continues remains anyone’s guess. Economist Gregory Daco at EY Parthenon notes that it appears the Powell Fed “recalibrated monetary policy at the November FOMC meeting by adopting a new ‘speed versus destination’ paradigm – indicating an intention to reach a higher terminal fed funds rate while doing so at a slower pace.”

Jerome Powell is trying to bring down inflation while avoiding a recession Photo: AFP / Graeme Jennings

Daco adds that “central banks’ determination in tightening monetary policy aggressively along with the lagged effects of monetary policy on the economy increases the odds of an overtightening.”

US Fed Board of Governors member Christopher Waller said last week, “we’re not softening. Quit paying attention to the pace and start paying attention to where the endpoint is going to be. Until we get inflation down, that endpoint is still a way out there.”

In the interim, Beijing had been dumping US debt. Between the end of February and the end of September, China sold at least $121 billion of US Treasuries. That selling intensified around the time Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine.

Since July, China’s imports of gold from Russia have increased sharply. That month alone, China’s gold transactions surged to roughly 50 times the year-earlier level.

Granted, Beijing has been pruning its dollar holdings on and off since 2018, when Trump launched his trade war. At mid-year, China’s Treasuries stockpile was the lowest since 2010.

That was a year after then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said Beijing was “concerned about the safety of our assets” and urged Washington “to honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.”

Two years later, in 2011, S&P confirmed Wen’s darkest fears when it downgraded US government debt. That was in response to Republican lawmakers refusing to raise Washington’s statutory borrowing limit, risking default.

Now, as Republicans prepare to hold power in the House, there is chatter about holding the debt ceiling hostage again. This burn-it-all-down tactic would make it hard for Biden’s government to pay its bills. Fallout from a resulting default could dwarf the 2008 global crisis.

Fiscal profligacy, meanwhile, would leave Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen little latitude if another Covid variant emerges and slams the economy. The resulting slowdown at a time of elevated inflation could spell doom for corporate profits and US stock prices.

This dynamic would unfold at a moment when the yuan is coming into its own. The latest figures from the Bank for International Settlements rank the yuan as the world’s fifth-most traded currency. China’s currency leapfrogged to fifth place from eighth in just three years.

The PBOC also is miles ahead of the Fed in creating a central bank digital currency. During the Beijing Olympics earlier this year, the e-yuan was used in limited fashion. It was a first for a major monetary authority, giving China a first-mover advantage in rewriting the future of money.

Yet Washington’s biggest fear now is that major monetary authorities will see a first-mover advantage to dump dollars. The way the US pulls off the magic trick of a massive and growing debt not causing yields to skyrocket is Asian savings. Along with Japan and China, Asia’s top 10 holders are sitting on about $3.5 trillion of US IOUs just as inflation surges the most in decades and political polarization deepens.

Gold bars are a good dollar hedge. Image: Twitter

Fed policy turmoil also matters. Analysts at UBS write that “investors have had mixed feelings towards gold in 2022, in part due to the crosscurrents of rising real rates and a strong dollar (bearish gold) versus high inflation and elevated macro uncertainty (bullish gold).” They expect the Fed to begin cutting rates in 2023 from 5.0% to 3.25%, driving gold up to 1,900 an ounce from about $1,740 now.

China’s assumed gold hoarding comes at the dollar’s expense, suggesting the momentum for the yuan’s use as a reserve currency is accelerating. Of course, China’s economic stumble this year bears watching. Xi’s growth-killing “zero Covid” lockdowns pushed GDP growth to the slowest pace in 30 years. That’s added pressure on a cratering property market.

As even China bull Ray Dalio, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, notes, there’s great “confusion” over whether Xi is easing up on his draconian Covid lockdowns — or doubling down.

As economist Tyran Kam at Fitch Ratings notes, “we expect the government to take further steps to stabilize the sector. However, policies aimed at supporting home demand will remain measured and selective, as the government avoids policies that could lead to home-price reflation.

“The direction of the ‘zero-Covid’ policy and timely delivery of pre-sold homes are also key factors to homebuyers’ sentiment. Effective implementation of recently announced measures to support private developers is also important for liquidity.”

Yet the longer-term trajectory for global currency markets remains dollar-negative as China and other top Treasuries-holding powers switch into an asset John Maynard Keynes once dismissed as a “barbaric relic.” That relic is now flashing red alert for dollar bulls.

Follow William Pesek on Twitter at @WilliamPesek

asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · November 24, 2022asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · November 24, 2022

15. U.S. Needs to Demonstrate Ability to Assist Taiwan, Congressman Says

What is "asymmetric warfare?" An effective national security term or jargon?

One supporting effort to assist Taiwan: https://securityanddefenceplus.plusalliance.org/essays/aukus-special-operations-forces-in-strategic-competition-integrated-deterrence-and-campaigning-resistance-to-malign-activities/

Excerpt:

The goal of the House Armed Services Committee Future Defense Task Force is “to drive the forces to do more and do it quickly,” he said. In its “report card” on progress in areas like asymmetric warfare, Moulton said, “the Army and Navy are dragging their feet” citing size of force and infrastructure as reasons progress seems slow.

Those were poor excuses for slow response if Taiwan reached a military crisis point, he said.

On the other hand, the Marine Corps and Air Force are “moving but not fast enough” to meet new challenges posed by a rapidly modernizing Chinese military, Moulton said. He singled out the Defense Innovation Unit for its cut- through- the-red- tape of the acquisition process as a success in adopting existing commercial technology for the Pentagon’s use.

He added while Congress has approved a number of authorities allowing flexibility in recruiting and retention as well as weapons systems development, the services have been slow to use these tools. At the same time, Congress itself has blocked the services’ moves to divest themselves from legacy systems to invest more in future technologies, creating more challenges to paying for future modernization.

Just saying:

“The American defense community is especially prone to capture by the latest catchphrase, the new-sounding spin on an ancient idea which as jargon separates those who are truly expert from the lesser breeds without the jargon.” Colin Gray

“Again, unfortunately, we are dealing with jargon, which, as usual, bears only a faint resemblance to well defined, specific concepts.”* Clausewitz

U.S. Needs to Demonstrate Ability to Assist Taiwan, Congressman Says - USNI News

news.usni.org · by John Grady · November 23, 2022

Taiwan’s indigenous fighter. CNA Photo

The U.S. needs to show Beijing that it can stop China if Chinese President Xi Jinping were to risk a cross-strait invasion to bring Taiwan under Chinese control, a congressman involved with military innovation this week.

The United States must realize that it cannot rely on the Taiwanese people to be the only fighters, as is the case in Ukraine, if China invades Taiwan, Rep. Seth Moulton, (D-Mass.) and co-chair of the congressional Future Defense Task Force, said Tuesday at a Hudson Institute event. Washington would need to commit American forces to the fight.

There are “lots of parallels in legacy motivations” between the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and Xi Jinping’s threats to forcibly unite the self-governing democracy with the mainland, he said.

Taiwan would need to have in place the weapons, systems and trained forces to hold off the invasion long enough for the United States to overcome a blockade of the island to come to its aid, Moulton said. Ukraine, on the other hand, is being supplied overland by rail and highway.

With Ukraine, the better late than never approach worked, but that is not an option with Taiwan, Moulton said.

The Biden administration rallied NATO and the European Union to Kyiv’s defense with arms and ammunition, economic aid, refugee relocation and imposed severe sanctions on Russian leaders, business leaders and its commercial sector.

Ukraine showed “the usefulness of the national guard” in blunting the Russian invasion. Many of its members were well-trained and had combat experience in the Dombas region fighting separatists backed by the Kremlin since 2014. Kyiv took preparedness seriously, Moulton said.

“Taiwan is behind, but making progress,” he said.

The value of asymmetric warfare –“a $1,000 drone” destroying much more expensive tanks – was also made clear on land and in the Black Sea on Russian warships, he said. Later, Moulton cited the Ukrainians’ use of Starlink, a commercially available internet system, that gave its communications networks redundancy when attacked as another successful Ukrainian use of unconventional means in combat.

Where resiliency is required for nuclear threats, using commercial networks would also give U.S. forces redundancy in conventional operations, he added.

The Pentagon did “a remarkable job of sharing intelligence with the Ukrainians [and] information with the world” on Russia’s intentions before Feb. 24 and its intentions to use disinformation campaigns to cover “false flag” operations and lies over the fall of the government in Kyiv, Moulton said.

Moulton warned that Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine had to be taken seriously since it is part of Moscow’s military doctrine. “That is a risk for humanity” that Russia could be willing to take.

Similarly, he viewed advancing artificial intelligence technology in warfare without having “norms, treaties and conventions” in place, as there has been with nuclear arms, as increasingly dangerous.

“China doesn’t care about civilian casualties; China doesn’t care about collateral damage” in using all the weapons in its arsenal, including artificial intelligence, “the future of warfare,” Moulton said.

The goal of the House Armed Services Committee Future Defense Task Force is “to drive the forces to do more and do it quickly,” he said. In its “report card” on progress in areas like asymmetric warfare, Moulton said, “the Army and Navy are dragging their feet” citing size of force and infrastructure as reasons progress seems slow.

Those were poor excuses for slow response if Taiwan reached a military crisis point, he said.

On the other hand, the Marine Corps and Air Force are “moving but not fast enough” to meet new challenges posed by a rapidly modernizing Chinese military, Moulton said. He singled out the Defense Innovation Unit for its cut- through- the-red- tape of the acquisition process as a success in adopting existing commercial technology for the Pentagon’s use.

He added while Congress has approved a number of authorities allowing flexibility in recruiting and retention as well as weapons systems development, the services have been slow to use these tools. At the same time, Congress itself has blocked the services’ moves to divest themselves from legacy systems to invest more in future technologies, creating more challenges to paying for future modernization.

news.usni.org · by John Grady · November 23, 2022

16. Older than the pyramids: probe launched after mainland official claims Chinese civilisation is older than ancient Egypt

Another kind of "culture war."

Older than the pyramids: probe launched after mainland official claims Chinese civilisation is older than ancient Egypt

Article claiming China ‘created’ civilisation of ancient Egypt is met with mockery and confusion by netizens
Scholars say official’s claim is based on superficial similarities and that he provides no archaeological or historical evidence to support it

Mandy Zuo in Shanghai

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Published: 6:33pm, 24 Nov, 2022

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3200870/older-pyramids-probe-launched-after-mainland-official-claims-chinese-civilisation-older-ancient?utm_source=rss_feed

A controversial claim by a mainland official that the Chinese “created” Egyptian civilisation has caused an online backlash and prompted a formal investigation.

In an online article, a senior researcher at the Culture and Tourism Bureau of Zhangjiakou city in Hebei province, Yu Ruijun claimed there was “a great deal of evidence to show that it was the Chinese who created Egyptian civilisation”.

The article – which was published on Tuesday – sparked immediate controversy when it appeared on the bureau’s official WeChat account. It has since been deleted.

The Great Sphinx of Giza, a large half-human, half-lion Sphinx statue on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile River, near modern-day Cairo in Egypt. Photo: AFP

The key evidence Yu based his claim on was a bronze basin from the Spring and Autumn Period of 770–476BC which was recovered from a tomb in China and is being exhibited at the Zhangjiakou Museum.

The vessel has sculpted carvings that he claimed were similar to those found in ancient Egypt.

Yu then listed five points to support his claim, including racial similarities, cultural relics, medical technologies, units of measurement used and folk customs in the two civilisations.

Yu has previously appeared in official media reports described as a veteran collector of ancient rocks and stone carvings.

The Pyramid of Khafre, the second largest pyramid on the Giza plateau in Egypt. Photo: DPA

All existing archaeological evidence and studies from around the world support the conclusion that Egypt’s ancient civilisation appeared far earlier than that of China’s, despite the shared similarities.

Yu’s extraordinary and unfounded claim was met with confusion and mockery.

The bureau refused an interview request from the Post on Thursday, but said an internal investigation into the piece was underway.

Zheng Jinsong, deputy head of the Museum of Southwest University in Chongqing, said that while evidence cited in the article showed there were similarities between the two civilisations, there was nothing to support the claim that Chinese civilisation came before that of ancient Egypt.

Yu has been described as a collector or rock sculpture and carvings. Photo: Handout

“When it comes to researching the origins of civilisations, either being over-weening or belittling ourselves would be unacceptable,” Zheng told Shangyou News.

Online commentary was scathing of the claims:

“No, no, let’s hold that. If we keep on doing this, we’ll be like South Korea, which is the origin of everything,” one Weibo user joked.

Chinese netizens have engaged in intense cultural spats with their South Korean counterparts in recent years with both sides claiming items of cultural heritage – such as kimchi, South Korea’s national food, and hanbok, its traditional wear – as their own.

CONVERSATIONS (11)

Mandy Zuo

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Mandy joined the Post in 2010 and has been reporting on China news ever since. Her work covers a range including China policies, culture and society news.

17. The US should help Iran’s opposition topple the regime -opinion

Revolution, resistance, and insurgency.

There is a whole project concerning this here: https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html. It might provide some ideas from past history and best practices.

The US should help Iran’s opposition topple the regime -opinion

Despite the bad experience the US has had with regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, the circumstances in Iran are different. The Iranian people started this and they are keeping on the fight.

By EHUD EILAM Published: NOVEMBER 22, 2022 02:17

Jerusalem Post

The Iranian regime poses a threat to Israel and to other states as well, including the United States. There has been an increasingly dangerous web of Iranian plots all around the world, from the Caucasus to the US and the UK.There has been unrest in Iran, which started in mid-September.

The current wave of demonstrations is the most powerful one compared with former protests. Years of living under a brutal regime while struggling to make ends meet took a heavy toll on the Iranian people.

Many of them want to topple their regime. The US would like to see regime change in Iran. On November 3, President Joe Biden argued the US would free Iran.

The US avoids regime change, following the costly conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, unlike in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003, the unrest in Iran, which might bring regime change, is not a result of and certainly is not led by the US.

The Iranian opposition is a grassroots movement. This fight is therefore based on the Iranian people and this is how it should stay; however, they require help.

Iran presents a serious challenge to the US and its allies, mostly those in the Middle East. This is because of Iran’s aggressive policy that destabilizes the region and its nuclear program.

Iran might be now closer than ever to producing nuclear weapons

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi argued on November 16 that there is a “mass of activity about which we don’t know anything” regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

If Iran produces a nuclear arsenal, it will escalate Iran’s conflict with Israel. The latter, according to non-Israeli sources, has a nuclear arsenal. There might be a nuclear war between Israel and Iran, which might occur not only because of the mutual hostility between them but also by mistake due to miscalculations.

Another major implication is that following Iran, other states in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia might acquire nuclear weapons, making that region much more dangerous, not only for those who live there. A new Iranian regime might be more moderate.

Even if it keeps the nuclear program, it might not develop nuclear weapons. Despite this uncertainty, it is better than having the current Iranian regime.

US attention, regarding conflicts, has been focused on the war in Ukraine. Iran too has been involved in the war in Ukraine, by helping Russia such as by providing drones that attacked the Ukrainian population.

The Iranian regime, which causes suffering to populations across the Middle East, including the Iranians, now does it in Europe. The Iranian regime, by associating itself with Russia, tarnishes its image even more. Replacing the Iranian regime would cripple Russia’s war effort.

THE IRANIAN regime has been intervening in Arab internal affairs across the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. Iran seeks to have pro–Iranian regimes in Arab states.

Bringing down the Iranian regime would serve key US interests in the Middle East, such as stabilizing and rebuilding Arab countries like Iraq.

Iran, by investing significant amounts of funds in intervening in Arab countries does it at the expense of the basic needs of the Iranian people.

This led to the current outburst in Iran. Ironically, trying to control other states might cause the Iranian regime to lose control of its own country. It would be poetic justice.

On November 16, the US imposed fresh Iran-related sanctions, targeting six individuals linked to state-run broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).

The Treasury said the media corporation acts as a critical tool in the Iranian government’s mass suppression and censorship campaign against its own people. The US could do more to help the Iranian opposition. US support does not have to be very costly.

The Iranian regime cut off the internet in part of Iran, to make it harder for the Iranian opposition to plan and carry out its plans.

Helping the Iranian opposition

The US and its allies could use their advanced cyber and electronic capability to help the Iranian opposition in this matter.

The Iranian opposition also requires financial support for basic needs such as food, communication, and self-defense such as protective gear, etc.

It is possible that some of the money and resources that would be sent to Iran would reach the wrong hands but even if some of this aid ends up where it is supposed to, it would help.

Such a contribution can be significant both practically and by letting the Iranian opposition know they are not alone in this fight.

There should also be an effort to mobilize minorities in Iran, which are suppressed in Iran such as Arabs, Kurds, etc. They, too, would like to bring down the Iranian regime.

All in all, despite the bad experience the US has had with regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, the circumstances in Iran are different.

The Iranian people started this and they are keeping on the fight, although they absorb heavy losses and had to deal with mass arrests and other dangers. The Biden administration can, unofficially or not, do more to help the Iranian opposition.

The writer has been dealing with and studying Israel’s national security for more than 25 years. He served in the military and later worked for the Defense Ministry as a researcher. He has published six books, including his latest, Israeli Strategies in the Middle East: The Case of Iran (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). His email is [email protected]

Jerusalem Post

18. Anti-hijab protests in Iran: Symptom of a deeper restlessness among the youth

If narratives are important (and then are) then this publication may be of use. Narratives and Competing Messages https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/ARIS_Narratives_v2.pdf

( Excerpt: This study builds a basic foundation of knowledge in narratives. This foundation includes examination of how scholars and practitioners use the concept, a working definition of the term narrative, and discussion of why narratives are important to understanding political and social behavior. The structures and components of narratives that make them especially persuasive or successful are discussed, drawing on research from communications, neuroscience, psychology, political science, and other relevant fields.)

Anti-hijab protests in Iran: Symptom of a deeper restlessness among the youth

By pushing the narrative about protests benefiting external enemies, the Iranian regime is hoping to appeal to nationalist sentiments, while also justifying its violent crackdown. Without genuine reforms, Iran’s leaders might be engaging in a temporary firefighting exercise

Written by Deepika Saraswat

Updated: November 22, 2022 1:11:27 pm

indianexpress.com · November 22, 2022

Written by Deepika Saraswat Updated: November 22, 2022 9:04:34 am

The nationwide protests in Iran triggered by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Tehran’s Morality Police have sustained for over two months. Following the terrorist shooting in Shah-e-Cheragh shrine in Shiraz in October — for which ISIS claimed responsibility — the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Major General Hossein Salami, blamed the US, the UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia. He then advised the protesting youth: “Return to the nation, don’t play into the hands of enemies.” Bot farms and Persian-language media have amplified the regime-change narrative. But by externalising the driving force of protests, Iran’s ruling elites cannot wish away the entrenched political, sociocultural conditions that have regularly forced the country’s youth to take to the streets.

The Islamic Republic is essentially a hybrid political system, with the “velayat-e-faqih” (guardianship of jurist(s)) embodying divine sovereignty, while the institutions of the president and parliament represent popular sovereignty. Since the early 1990s, Iranian political culture has been defined by contestation between the conservatives, whose ideological totalitarianism limits political participation for the people to mass mobilisation, and the reformists, who have argued for a freer public sphere and popularised the concepts of civil society and rule of law. However, unelected clerical-dominated institutions asserted control by creating a narrative about a cultural invasion by a hostile West.

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In 1999, when conservative-controlled courts forced the shutdown of an influential reformist daily Salam, student protests broke out across the country. They lasted six days until the IRGC-affiliated Basij militia and police raided Tehran University dormitories in a violent crackdown. Ten years later, tens of thousands of young Iranians thronged the streets against what they saw as the rigging of elections in favour of hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Called the “Green Movement”, the slogans of the protest — “Down with the dictator”, “Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon”, “my life is sacrificed for Iran” — underscored the rise of an avowedly nationalist, post-ideological, and liberal political consciousness among the country’s youth. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had denounced the movement as “fitna”, an internal strife orchestrated by external enemies.

While the Islamic Republic has successfully weathered spontaneous popular protests, it has found it harder to deal with what sociologist Asef Bayat has described as “social non-movements”. These embody the shared practices of a large number of ordinary people, whose fragmented — but similar — actions trigger social change. These practices are rarely guided by ideology or recognisable leadership and organisations. This “non-movement” has thrived in Iran in the last decade. A proliferation of cafes as alternative cultural spaces across major Iranian cities, millions of young women testing the boundaries of state-enforced “Islamic” dress code and the estimated 45 million Instagram users, blurring the line between virtual and reality, attest to the phenomenon. During a trip to Iran in January 2020, I visited a café in Tehran which displayed a portrait of the iconoclast Iranian feminist Forough Farrokhzad next to one of Marilyn Monroe. At another cafe in Shiraz, a mural of Iranian maestro Mohammad-Reza Shajarian shared space with a poster of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock.

In 2019, the Tehran police shut down over 500 hundred cafes and restaurants for failing to observe “Islamic principles”. Last year’s presidential election, in which President Ebrahim Raisi faced no serious moderate or reformist rival thanks to the Guardian Council’s heavy vetting of candidates, was met with apathy from the majority of youth. The lack of economic prospects and an unresponsive political system may have contributed to militant tendencies among the youth. By pushing the narrative about protests benefiting external enemies, the regime is hoping to appeal to nationalist sentiments, while also justifying its violent crackdown. The protests may eventually die down, but without genuine reforms, Iran’s leaders might well be engaging in a temporary firefighting exercise.

The writer is Associate Fellow, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses

First published on: 22-11-2022 at 07:26:22 am

Development of Great Nicobar: strategic imperative and ecological concerns

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indianexpress.com · November 22, 2022

19. How a single ship made Thanksgiving happen in Europe at the height of WWII

How a single ship made Thanksgiving happen in Europe at the height of WWII

That’s a lot of turkey.

BY MAX HAUPTMAN | PUBLISHED NOV 24, 2022 7:00 AM

taskandpurpose.com · by Max Hauptman · November 24, 2022

In October 1944 a ship departed from New York City, bound for France, with important cargo. At the time, hundreds of ships were crossing the Atlantic Ocean ferrying supplies to the war effort in the European and Mediterranean theaters. This one, though, wasn’t carrying arms, ammunition, or armor. The SS Great Republic was carrying all the turkey that was supposed to be served to U.S. troops in France for Thanksgiving that year.

By the fall of 1944, U.S. troops were on the offensive in Europe, but supplies were always running low. Because there were no open harbors outside of France, everything had to be shipped to the front lines from ports like Cherbourg, hundreds of miles away. Thousands of troops, many of them Black soldiers, were driving more than 6,000 trucks around the clock to keep the front lines supplied, and that included bringing something to eat other than C-rations.

“The disadvantages and even dangers of a monotonous and unpalatable diet under combat conditions were widely underestimated within the Army,” the Army wrote in The Quartermaster Corps: Operations in the War Against Germany, published in 1991.

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Nevertheless, the decision was made that all American soldiers in the European Theater of Operations were going to get something resembling a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Doing so wouldn’t be easy, because coordinating the supply chain for more than 1 million soldiers was a byzantine process. The Quartermaster Corps had to know, in theory, what was in every ship arriving in port and unload it based on priority. Trucks and rail cars — managed by the Transportation Corps — had to be staged accordingly. And meat, of course, required reefer, or refrigerated, transportation and had to be inspected by veterinarians from the Medical Corps. If a ship couldn’t unload on time or a convoy of trucks or rail cars was delayed there was, of course, spoilage — at one point in the summer of 1944 a quarter of the oranges shipped to France were rotten when they arrived in port. Then atop the time constraints, there were Army regulations, like reefer transports needing to be inspected if they ever went over schedule in their deliveries, and you know that it takes a lot of work to keep the soldiers supplied in a timely manner.

Soldiers enjoying Thanksgiving dinner in 1944, courtesy of the SS Great Republic. (U.S. Army)

One day that summer, the port of Le Havre came to a complete halt because the Quartermaster Corps hadn’t coordinated with the Transportation Corps to have any trains available that day to, you know, transport everything. If Power Point existed in 1944, it’s safe to say this would have generated plenty of slides for the next staff meeting.

Still, the Army was going to get that turkey to the front lines, one way or another.

“The general opinion was that, irrespective of the morale value of a holiday meal, failure to meet a widely publicized commitment would have a very unfavorable effect,” wrote the Army.

The Army estimated that a traditional Thanksgiving dinner would be one and a half pounds and equal to three other meals. Turkey, being a bird, was much bulkier to ship than beef or pork, requiring four and a half times the storage space.

The SS Great Republic was a reefer ship, built to carry refrigerated goods. And for this voyage across the Atlantic Ocean it was loaded with 1,604 tons of turkey, enough for every American soldier in Europe. One ship, more than one million Thanksgiving dinners. Thankfully for the crew, the birds had already been butchered.

While turkey was among the few things not rationed during the war, the number of turkeys going overseas did create a shortage in the United States. A New York Daily News article from Nov. 22, 1944 recounts a police raid on a black market turkey selling operation in Brooklyn. (If your grandparents had a police record for trying to buy a black market turkey for Thanksgiving, props to them.)

The SS Great Republic arrived in France on Nov. 18, along with the accompanying apples, oranges, fresh eggs, onions and cabbage. A fleet of trucks was assembled to transport the food to the front lines. And while some troops didn’t receive their Thanksgiving rations until a day or two after the holiday, more than 1.6 million pounds of turkey did make its way to just about every soldier in Europe.

A photo of commissioning ceremony when the SS Great Republic was renamed the USS Pictor. (NavSource)

The SS Great Republic wasn’t done supplying American troops. The ship would be commissioned in 1950 as the USS Pictor, according to NavSource, a volunteer-run U.S. naval history site. The USS Pictor spent the next 19 years delivering provisions to troops around the world before being decommissioned in 1969.

The war, of course, continued on during that Thanksgiving, but thanks to one ship, a little taste of home was brought to the front lines.

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taskandpurpose.com · by Max Hauptman · November 24, 2022

20. A MACV-SOG THANKSGIVING: WHEN 6 COMMANDOS TOOK ON 30,000 ENEMY TROOPS

MACV-SOG: One of the greatest special operations units ever conceived.

A MACV-SOG THANKSGIVING: WHEN 6 COMMANDOS TOOK ON 30,000 ENEMY TROOPS

Stavros Atlamazoglou | November 23, 2022

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/anti-hijab-protests-in-iran-symptom-of-a-deeper-restlessness-among-the-youth-8281520/

Thanksgiving Day, 1968.

As families across America gathered together to enjoy their Thanksgiving dinner in the chill of late fall, a six-man team of commandos from covert special operations units were fighting for their very lives against 30,000 North Vietnamese troops in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The six commandos belonged to MACV-SOG, a highly classified special operations unit that conducted some of the most harrowing missions in the Vietnam War.

The covert men and mission of MACV-SOG

The Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) was a special operations organization that conducted covert cross-border operations in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, North Vietnam, and elsewhere.

From 1964 to 1972, MACV-SOG took the fight to the enemy with an enviable grit, resolution, and guile, often turning up in the most unexpected places.

A MACV-SOG team. (arsof-history.org)

MACV-SOG mainly went after the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply routes that fed the Communist onslaught into South Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, which snaked from North Vietnam west into Laos and Cambodia only to turn east again in South Vietnam, was an above-ground and underground complex that stretched for hundreds of miles. What was sinister about the Ho Chin Minh Trail was that nominally, North Vietnamese troops weren’t supposed to be there, as Hanoi had repeatedly announced its intentions to respect the neutrality of Laos and Cambodia.

But if the North Vietnamese were there, so had to be American commandos. As a result, MACV-SOG teams operated in countries that successive U.S. administrations had insisted that no American troops were in.

The special operations unit was comprised solely of commandos from across the U.S. special operations community, including Navy SEALs, Recon Marines, and Air Commandos. But it was the Army Special Forces operators—nicknamed “Green Berets”—that formed the cornerstone of the unit. Using their unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense—the training and advising of foreign troops—capabilities, Green Berets recruited, trained, and led teams of native mercenaries against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

The covert outfit cooperated closely with the U.S. intelligence community and ran some of the most daring special operation missions in U.S. military history. The operation of Spike Team Idaho during the closing days of November 1968 was such a mission.

Turkey, gravy, and the North Vietnamese

Following the Tet Offensive in January 1968, the U.S. intelligence community was concerned about practically all North Vietnamese troop movements. So when three entire North Vietnamese divisions went missing in November, Army intel and the CIA were eager to find them.

Composed of six commandos, two Green Berets, and four local mercenaries, ST Idaho went after the missing North Vietnamese divisions. Leading the MACV-SOG recon team was John Stryker Meyer, a legendary Green Beret who has written extensively about his experience in the elite special operations organization.

John Stryker Meyer (left) and Lynne Black Jr. at the firing range. (Courtesy picture)

Their job was to find the 1st, 3rd, and 7th North Vietnamese Army divisions, about 30,000 troops, that had gone missing somewhere on the border with Cambodia. These troops were part of an approximately 100,000-strong North Vietnamese presence in the neighboring country, and the Pentagon feared that they could stage an attack on Saigon from their safe haven in Cambodia.

Once they had located the North Vietnamese troops, ST Idaho was to relay their position and exfiltrate as quickly and quietly as possible (in other words, get out of dodge). If they could snatch an enemy prisoner while they were at it from whom vital intelligence could be gleaned, that much the better.

If going after 30,000 enemy troops with just six men wasn’t enough, the MACV-SOG commandos were further hindered by the fact that they couldn’t call in fixed-wing close air support because the State Department had imposed very strict rules of engagement for the area of operations. They could only go 12 miles inside Cambodian airspace.

Not your average Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving morning, ST Idaho inserted and started patrolling toward where they believed the North Vietnamese might be. After a few minutes, they spotted campfires, and moved in their direction.

ST Idaho soon found itself inside a huge North Vietnamese camp. But it was an empty camp… and no one challenged them—at least for now. The commandos started snapping pictures and searching for documents and maps that could prove useful to their intelligence shops. While most of the commandos were focused on their treasure-hunting expedition, their point man, an indigenous mercenary, literally sensed the enemy’s approach and alerted the team. Meyer, who trusted his teammates with his life, took him at his word and made the decision to exfiltrate.

John Stryker Meyer (middle back) surrounded by indigenous mercenaries (Courtesy picture).

But as they were leaving camp, hundreds of North Vietnamese troops poured into view from seemingly out of nowhere. Before long, it was clear that they were coming straight at them from both the north and south. Their point man had been right, ST Idaho was now facing an utterly overwhelming enemy force. If they were going to survive, they needed to get out of there in a hurry.

ST Idaho ran for its life, only stopping to put down suppressive fire or to plant Claymore mines in a vain attempt at stopping the Communists’ pursuit. The team was made up of highly trained and experienced special operations warfighters, often more than a match for even the most unfair fights, but no matter how many North Vietnamese they killed, more seemed to take their place.

The MACV-SOG commandos reached their landing zone and hastily dug in, waiting for the helicopters to exfiltrate them. But by now, the Communists were almost on top of them.

A Green Hornet UH-1P Huey assigned to the Green Hornets (Courtesy picture).

At that very moment, UH-1P Hueys from the Air Force’s 20th Special Operations Squadron—nicknamed the “Green Hornets”—arrived; literally just as ST Idaho was about to be overrun by the North Vietnamese hordes.

Firing their M134 miniguns and M-60 machineguns, the Green Hornets were able to stem the North Vietnamese advance, giving the MACV-SOG commandos some precious breathing space to regroup. With the enemy force still attempting to advance, the Green Hornets poured rounds in their direction, curbing their progress for just long enough to allow the exhausted warfighters to board the waiting choppers.

As in a movie, the North Vietnamese flooded ST Idaho’s perimeter as the team was flying away into the sunset and safety. They had found the enemy—and survived. For the men of ST Idaho, that was something to be thankful for.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in November 2021.

Feature Image: A MACV-SOG team (Courtesy picture)

Increased Devotion

THE 1776 SERIES

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2020/09/03/increased_devotion_574428.html?utm_source=pocket_saves

By Christopher Flannery

In this finely crafted reflection on “the last full measure of devotion,” Christopher Flannery of the Claremont Institute reflects on the indispensable moral and civic virtue that is bravery or courage. He reminds us of noble exemplars of this virtue, such as Joseph Warren and Nathan Hale, from the Founding era, as well as the heroism embodied by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. No self-governing republic could be established, or could continue to sustain itself, without the courage and sacrifices of free men and women. The patriotic eloquence of Abigail Adams, cited by Flannery, gives beautiful expression to this enduring truth.

This essay is part of RealClearPublicAffairs's 1776 Series, which explains the major themes that define the American mind. It expands on four episodes of The American Story podcast: How Sleep the Brave, What’s Love Got To Do With It?, Known But to God, and Gettysburg.

How sleep the Brave, who sink to Rest,

By all their Country's Wishes blest!

When Spring, with dewy Fingers cold,

Returns to deck their hallow'd Mould,

She there shall dress a sweeter Sod

Than Fancy’s Feet have ever trod.

By Fairy Hands their knell is rung,

By Forms unseen their Dirge is sung;

There Honour comes, a Pilgrim grey,

To bless the Turf that wraps their Clay,

And Freedom shall a-while repair

To dwell a weeping Hermit there!

Abigail Adams quoted from memory the ode “How Sleep the Brave,” by English poet William Collins, in a letter to her husband John, started on Sunday, June 18, and mailed on Tuesday, June 20, 1775. She had just confirmed reports of the death of their dear friend and family doctor, 34-year-old Joseph Warren. He had fallen “gloriously fighting for his Country,” Abigail wrote, and “Those favorite lines of Collin[s] continually sound in my Ears.”

[Joseph Warren] had been a leading patriot since the Stamp Act Crisis ten years before, when he was just 24. It was he who sent Paul Revere on his famous Midnight Ride.

Warren had died on Saturday, June 17, in what came to be known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, where the British army had driven colonial militia from their positions but suffered heavy losses. He had been a leading patriot since the Stamp Act Crisis ten years before, when he was just 24. It was he who sent Paul Revere on his famous Midnight Ride. The extralegal Massachusetts Provincial Congress commissioned him as a major general of the militia just a few days before the battle, but he chose to serve as a private soldier and was killed on the third and final British assault. He immediately became a martyr of the Revolution. His death would later be immortalized by John Trumbull in the oil painting The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill 17 June 1775, a version of which hangs today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

The Battle of Bunker Hill took place within earshot of the farm in Braintree Massachusetts where Abigail and her four children were living. “The battle began,” she wrote, “Saturday morning about 3 o’clock.” She thought it marked “perhaps the decisive Day . . . on which the fate of America depends.” “The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing,” she said, “that we can not Eat, Drink or Sleep.” Weeks before, as militia streamed into the area in the wake of the battles of Lexington and Concord, Abigail had collected the family’s pewter dishes and melted them down in a large kettle held over the kitchen fire to make bullets. From time to time, she heard alarms, warning that the Royal Navy was about to land forces along the coast. She had good reason to fear that the British would try to seize rebel leaders and their families. Her husband was 400 miles away in Philadelphia as part of the Massachusetts delegation to the Second Continental Congress. Six weeks earlier, he had written Abigail from Connecticut: “I am often concerned for you and our dear Babes. . . . In Case of real Danger . . . fly to the Woods with our Children.”

It’s hard in easygoing times to imagine what it could mean to face such an extremity: a mother forced to contemplate fleeing into the forest with her four children, pursued by hostile armies. It is hard to imagine being the husband hundreds of miles away writing such a letter to his wife or the wife reading such a letter from her husband. But Abigail Adams possessed all the self-reliance and courage that John’s letter counted on her to have—come what may.

“I saw with my own eyes those fires, and heard Britannia's thunders in the Battle of Bunker’s hill and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled with them my own, at the fall of Warren a dear friend of my father, and a beloved Physician to me.” - John Quincy Adams

Far from fleeing to the woods, early on the Saturday morning of the battle, Abigail took her seven-year-old son and climbed to the top of Penn’s Hill to get a closer look. From there, the two could see fire and smell the smoke from houses burning in Charlestown. Seventy-one years later, after an illustrious career as a diplomat and a term as sixth president of the United States, and still serving as an active member of Congress, her son vividly remembered that day. In a draft of a letter, he wrote, “I saw with my own eyes those fires, and heard Britannia's thunders in the Battle of Bunker’s hill and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled with them my own, at the fall of Warren a dear friend of my father, and a beloved Physician to me.” In that same letter, he repeated from memory the ode his mother had quoted to her husband in the letter she wrote 71 years before, when “the fate of America” hung in the balance. Back in that spring and summer of 1775, when he was just seven years old and the War for Independence swirled around him and his family, John Quincy Adams remembered, “[my mother] taught me to repeat daily after the Lord’s prayer [the Ode of Collins] before rising from bed.”

“How sleep the brave?” Something like Abigail Adams slept, I should think.

A few years after the War for Independence was won, when America was deliberating over a new Constitution, James Madison reflected in Federalist 55 that “there are . . . qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence,” and that “[r]epublican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” Human beings are not brave by nature, but it is human nature to be capable of becoming brave, and of acquiring all the other virtues, through habit that molds enduring character. Republican government—self-government or free government—does the greatest honor to human nature by regarding human beings as capable of acquiring all the moral and intellectual virtues needed to rule themselves. Bravery or courage is the first or most fundamental virtue free government requires of its citizens. It is indispensable for all that follows.

America could not have become a self-governing republic—could not have assumed among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitled us—without the courage of Joseph Warren and the thousands after him gloriously fighting and dying for a “country” that was still an aspiration. In national memory, the young Nathan Hale would become representative of American patriots who offered and gave their lives that their country might be born. We all know—or used to know—the story. Nathan Hale was a 21-year-old Connecticut boy in 1776. He was serving in the Continental Army during the American War of Independence. George Washington needed someone to spy on British troop movements behind enemy lines in New York. Nathan Hale volunteered for that job. He was captured by the British. The penalty for espionage was death by hanging, and he was hanged. On his way to the scaffold, Hale spoke the words that every generation of Americans since has been able to quote, as Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams could quote the Collins Ode: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

America will always need Nathan Hales and Joseph Warrens. Every country does.

America will always need Nathan Hales and Joseph Warrens. Every country does. America will always need citizens willing to give, in Abraham Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg, “the last full measure of devotion” for their country’s cause. If you are an immigrant seeking citizenship in the United States today, you must take an oath of naturalization, part of which involves a pledge that you will bear arms if necessary in defense of the Constitution of the United States. This means you have to be willing to be a Joseph Warren, a Nathan Hale. Native citizens live under the obligation of the same oath, even if we don’t explicitly take it. Each of us is pledged to all, and all are pledged to each, to defend our lives and liberties as Americans when needed.

In every generation, it has been so far a small percentage of our citizens who must offer and give the last full measure of devotion for our country. These are usually young. They used to be young men only; now, of course, they are young men and women. How can the rest of us—the vast majority—properly honor such sacrifices? How can we be worthy of them?

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery can teach us something about that, and about how it benefits us the living to honor those who have given their lives for us. Inscribed in capital letters on the western façade of the Tomb are the words: HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD. More than 4 million visitors come to the cemetery every year from across America and around the world. Unless they have their own personal visit to make, what they most want to do is to climb the hill to the high ground of the Memorial Amphitheater and visit the Tomb.

The American Civil War brought forth Arlington National Cemetery, on land belonging once to George Washington’s family and later to Robert E. Lee’s. More Americans died in that war than in all America’s other wars combined, and the first soldier buried at Arlington was Private William Christman, on May 13, 1864. The Great War, later tragically to become known as World War I, brought forth the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The American Expeditionary Force that fought in the Great War in 1917 and 1918 lost more than 116,000 troops.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier touches visitors so deeply, in part, because it prompts a realization that the experience and sacrifice of all fallen soldiers must in some ways always be unknown to us—though they are not unknown to God.

Identification tags were a relatively recent introduction of modern warfare, but still almost 2,000 fallen American troops remained unidentified. One of those unidentified troops was selected for burial at Arlington, with solemn ceremony, on what was then still called Armistice Day, three years to the day after the war ended—November 11, 1921. The Tomb’s sarcophagus that we see today standing above the grave was completed and unveiled to the public in 1932. It is made of marble from the same quarry in Colorado that provided the marble for the Lincoln Memorial.

To the west of the Tomb, white marble slabs flush with the plaza mark crypts for an unknown soldier from World War II and another from the Korean War. As we know well today, advances in technology over the years made being unknown more and more difficult. So for the Vietnam War there is a third marble slab, over an empty crypt, inscribed with the words, “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958-1975.” The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier touches visitors so deeply, in part, because it prompts a realization that the experience and sacrifice of all fallen soldiers must in some ways always be unknown to us—though they are not unknown to God.

At midnight on July 2, 1937, the Army began to maintain a constant guard over the Tomb. On April 6, 1948, these duties were assumed by the 3rd U.S. Infantry, known as “The Old Guard,” the oldest active-duty infantry unit in the Army. Since that day, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in all weathers, The Old Guard has maintained its vigil. This sacred duty is carried out by the most specialized and famous platoon of The Old Guard, known as Sentinels of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who served at Arlington with The Old Guard between combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has written a good book about their history called Sacred Duty. He tells the story of the young soldiers of The Old Guard, “who dedicate themselves to [the] sacred duty of honoring those who have served and died for the nation.” The movie Taking Chance gives an idea of what carrying out this duty looks like.

The Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier happens every hour on the hour from October through March, and every half hour from April through September. It is the most visible manifestation of the sacred duty of honoring our fallen heroes. With exquisite precision and unbroken attention to detail, the Sentinels aim to make that ceremony perfect every time. They want to hold themselves to the ultimate standard by which men can be judged, because nothing less can begin to honor adequately the ultimate sacrifice they are there to honor.

This is their undying gift to us. To be worthy of their bravery and the bravery of all our Abigail Adamses takes all the wisdom and virtue a man or woman could hope to possess.

For the millions of Americans and foreigners who visit the Tomb each year, especially the young, the Changing of the Guard offers profound moral and political instruction. And what makes the ritual ceremony so powerful for visitors to see is that, in a vital sense, the visitors don’t matter. The Sentinels are most devoted to achieving perfection when they are not seen—when their precision, their attention to every detail, their concentration on the high purpose of honoring the fallen into eternity, is known but to God.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, America’s greatest speech, was a dedication of the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg, months after the great battle fought there. It teaches how we the living are blessed to be dedicated to the unfinished work of all the Joseph Warrens and Nathan Hales and the thousands buried unnamed who gave the last full measure of devotion for the cause of freedom. We honor their memory by our increased devotion to their noble cause. This is their undying gift to us. To be worthy of their bravery and the bravery of all our Abigail Adamses takes all the wisdom and virtue a man or woman could hope to possess. Like the Sentinels of the Tomb, Lincoln teaches us that to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom, we need only hold ourselves to the ultimate standard in all we do—even when it is known but to God.

Christopher Flannery is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and host of The American Story podcast.

This essay may be republished for free with attribution. (These terms do not apply to outside articles linked on the site.) Images and photos that appear with this essay are not available for republishing.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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Stavros Atlamazoglou

Increased Devotion

THE 1776 SERIES