Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Thus among the Chinese, the most ancient, and, from long Experience, the wisest of Nations, Honour does not descend but ascends. If a Man from his Learning, his Wisdom or his Valour, is promoted by the Emperor to the Rank of Mandarin, his Parents are immediately intitled to all the same Ceremonies of Respect from the People, that are establish’d as due to the Mandarin himself; on this Supposition, that it must have been owing to the Education, Instruction, and good Example afforded him by his Parents that he was rendered capable of Serving the Publick. This ascending Honour is therefore useful to the State as it encourages Parents to give their Children a good and virtuous Education. But the descending Honour, to Posterity who could have had no Share in obtaining it, is not only groundless and absurd, but often hurtful to that Posterity, since it is apt to make them proud, disdaining to be employed in useful Arts, and thence falling into Poverty and all the Meannesses, Servility and Wretchedness attending it; which is the present case with much of what is called the Noblesse in Europe."

- Benjamin Franklin quoted in "The US Founders and China: The Origins of Chinese Cultural Influence on the United States," by David Wang, (Access HERE)

"When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity."

- John F. Kennedy

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 22

2. White House: Russia's Wagner received arms from North Korea

3. Putin Should Be Scared: Wagner Group is Using North Korean Arms in Ukraine

4. EXCLUSIVE: TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists

5. More Money For Info Ops, Army Recruiting, Cyber In Omnibus

6. China’s Soaring Covid Cases Push Economic Activity Off A Cliff

7. How a Luxury Business Jet Was Transformed Into the World’s Most Sophisticated Spyplane

8. Strategy, not economics, should govern high-tech trade with China

9. Japan steps closer to global military power

10. Open Secrets - Ukraine and the Next Intelligence Revolution

11. Army School Honors Two Special Forces Soldiers

12. Joe Biden inches toward war with Iran, makes Israel full military partner

13. Ukraine's heavy artillery, not high-tech anti-tank missiles, is what stopped Russia's rush to Kyiv, experts say

14. Ukraine and the Carol of the Bells

15. Senate Reaches Breakthrough and Passes $1.7T Omnibus Funding Bill

16. Putin declares ‘war’ – aloud – forsaking his special euphemistic operation

17. Cybercom disrupted Russian and Iranian hackers throughout the midterms

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 22

Maps/graphics: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-22

Key Takeaways

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to refuse to treat Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an equal and sovereign counterpart, further indicating that he is not interested in serious negotiations with Ukraine.
Putin’s rhetoric is a part of an ongoing Russian information operation that denies Ukraine’s legitimacy as a sovereign state.
Putin amplified an existing Russian information operation designed to decrease Western security assistance for Ukraine.
Putin is continuing to absolve himself of responsibility for conducting a protracted war in Ukraine.
Russian Chief of General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov, attempted to revive a debunked Russian narrative that the Kremlin invaded Ukraine to preempt a fictitious planned Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Donbas and Crimea.
The Kremlin claimed that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited the frontlines in Ukraine for the second time in a week, likely to deflect criticism that Shoigu is not an involved wartime leader.
Wagner Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin continues to seek to elevate the importance of the Wagner Group to establish himself as the central figure of Russia’s ultra-nationalist pro-war community.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Rafael Grossi held talks with Russian officials on the creation of a security zone around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
Russian forces continued to conduct limited counterattacks along the Kreminna-Svatove line and Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in the Kreminna area.
Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka areas.
Russian forces are increasing security measures in Kherson Oblast and Crimea out of fear of Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.
A senior Russian official denied claims of a second wave of mobilization amidst ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts.
Ukrainian partisans continued to target Russian occupation authorities.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 22

Dec 22, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, George Barros, Madison Williams, Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan

December 22, 7 pm ET

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

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to refuse to treat Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an equal and sovereign counterpart, further indicating that Putin is not interested in serious negotiations with Ukraine. Putin did not react to Zelensky’s remarks to the United States Congress in Washington, DC on December 22, but instead oriented his December 22 press conference on US and Western influence over Ukraine.[1] Putin reiterated his boilerplate and false claims that the US and Western countries have intervened in Ukraine since the Soviet Union, driving a wedge in the supposed Russian-Ukrainian historic and cultural unity. Such statements are meant to suggest that Ukraine’s 1991 emergence as a sovereign state was a sham. Putin also restated Russia’s maximalist goal of “protecting” the Ukrainian people from their government, implying that Russia intends to force the Kyiv government to capitulate. Putin mentioned Ukraine as a state only to note falsely that Ukraine had barred itself from negotiating with Russia.

Putin’s rhetoric is a part of an ongoing Russian information operation that denies Ukraine’s legitimacy as a sovereign state. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Zelensky’s speech to the US Congress and the US transfer to Ukraine of the Patriot air-defense systems only “proves” that the United States is fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, and that there are no signs of readiness for peace talks.[2] Putin also implied that Russia had hoped that the West would coach Ukraine into abiding by the Minsk Agreements but instead was fooled by Kyiv. Such framing aims to disqualify Ukraine from future direct negotiations under the false premises that Ukraine violated the Minsk Agreements and that Kyiv is not an independent actor. Putin‘s and Peskov’s framing are components of an effort to persuade the United States and NATO to bypass Ukraine and negotiate directly with Russia over Zelensky’s head. This effort is very unlikely to succeed given repeated statements by US and European leaders regarding their determination that Ukraine will decide its own course. The Kremlin’s information operation is also likely meant to focus blame for ”protracting” the war on Zelensky’s supposed intransigence and thereby wear down US and European willingness to continue supporting Ukrainian efforts to liberate occupied Ukrainian land.

Putin amplified another existing Russian information operation designed to decrease Western security assistance for Ukraine. Putin falsely accused the United States of protracting the war in Ukraine by providing Patriot air defense systems and vaguely implied that these systems will not perform a defensive purpose.[3] Putin has been setting conditions for a protracted war long before the US decision to transfer Patriots to Ukraine, even stating on December 7 that the “special military operation“ would be a lengthy process.[4] The Kremlin has also long falsely framed any Western security assistance to Ukraine as an escalation.[5] The Patriot system will instead augment Ukraine’s ability to protect critical civilian infrastructure against Russia’s air and missile campaign, which is designed to inflict suffering on Ukraine’s civilian population. Patriot systems will interfere with Putin’s ability to hammer Ukraine into surrendering on his terms, which may be what Putin has in mind when he says that it protracts the war.

Putin is also doubling down on an effort to absolve himself of responsibility for conducting a protracted war in Ukraine. Putin made several statements that Russia seeks to end the war as soon as possible while simultaneously noting that Russia will not increase the pace of ”special military operation” because that would lead to ”unjustified losses.” Both statements are a part of the Kremlin’s consolidated effort to justify Putin’s costly war effort to Russian domestic audiences who are increasingly making greater sacrifices to fulfill the Kremlin’s unrealistic goals. The Russian military has not achieved any significant victories in Ukraine since the fall of Lysychansk on July 3. Putin and Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) officials have made numerous appearances and offered vague justifications for military failures in recent days, also likely in an effort to downplay the effects of the protracted war.

Putin’s use of the term “war” when regarding the invasion of Ukraine has prompted some confusion within the Russian information space. Putin had stated during the press conference that Russia seeks “not to spin this flywheel of a military conflict, but on the contrary - to end this war.” Putin used this word—war--instead of the phrasing “special military operation” when falsely accusing Ukraine of starting a war against its population in 2014. Putin’s mention of “war” prompted a few milbloggers to state that they have always used both terms interchangeably because “every thinking person knows that what is happening in Ukraine is a hot war,” despite the lack of an official declaration of war by Russia.[6] The confusion indicates that Putin’s limited war narrative may conflict with his presentation of the “special military operation” as a fight for Russia’s sovereignty while not being an official war.

The Russian Chief of the General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov, attempted to revive a debunked Russian narrative that the Kremlin did not plan to invade Ukraine in an effort to justify Russia’s war in Ukraine. Gerasimov publicly reemerged to brief foreign military attaches on December 22, stating that Russia had to launch the “special military operation” in response to the growing “neo-Nazi ideology” in Ukraine, and Kyiv’s (non-existent) active military preparations to liberate Donbas and Crimea in early 2022.[7] US intelligence had exposed the Kremlin‘s elaborate plan to stage a series of false flag attacks in eastern Ukraine in early February, attacks that the Kremlin intended to trigger and justify a war.[8] Gerasimov may be attempting to revive this nonsensical information operation to help justify the war to a domestic Russian audience. Gerasimov also noted that Russian forces are focusing most of their efforts on seizing Donetsk Oblast, which also signals a return to the pre-war narrative in a likely attempt to regain public support for the war. This statement is also inaccurate—Donetsk Oblast is the site of the only active Russian offensive operation, but the majority of Russia’s combat power is in other parts of Ukraine.

The Kremlin had refrained from publicly showing Gerasimov for almost ten months until December 17 and is likely attempting to reintroduce him as another figure responsible for the war as it heads into the second year of the invasion.[9] Gerasimov continued Putin‘s and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s explanations for mobilization and even attempted to explain away Russia’s withdrawal from right-bank Kherson Oblast as a preventative measure because of the ”threat” of a Ukrainian high-precision strike on the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. Gerasimov also claimed that Russia had stabilized the frontline along an 815km stretch of land. Gerasimov’s appearance is likely a continuation of the Kremlin’s recent efforts to rationalize the cost of war in Ukraine, rally support for a protracted war, and reestablish its preferred narratives.[10]

The Kremlin found it necessary to claim that Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu visited the frontlines in Ukraine for the second time in a week, likely to deflect criticism that Shoigu is not an involved wartime leader. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted a video on December 22 purporting to show Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu inspecting Russian troop positions near the front in Ukraine.[11] The Russian MoD is on the defensive in the Russian domestic information space. It does not have the informational initiative and is responding to popular criticisms about the Russian military’s shortcomings in the war in Ukraine. The Russian MoD likely felt it necessary to show Shoigu at the front lines because it had falsely claimed that Shoigu visited the frontline on December 18, when he actually visited Russian rear areas for a photo-op near the Crimea-Kherson border.[12] The matter became more embarrassing following Ukrainian President Zelensky’s real frontline visit to Bakhmut on December 20.[13]

Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continues to seek to elevate the importance of the Wagner Group in Russian military operations in Ukraine in order to establish himself as the central figure of Russia’s ultra-nationalist pro-war community. US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby reported on December 22 that the Wagner Group received an arms shipment from North Korea to help bolster Russian forces in Ukraine and that this indicates that the Wagner Group’s role in the war may be expanding.[14] Kirby reported on November 2 that North Korea is covertly supplying artillery shells to Russia.[15] Prigozhin denied Kirby’s reporting and claimed that North Korea has not supplied weapons to Russia for a long time.[16] Kirby also reported that Prigozhin is spending more than 100 million US dollars per month to fund the Wagner Group’s operations in Ukraine and that the Wagner Group currently has 50,000 personnel deployed to Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts recruited from Russian prisons.[17] Kirby stated that US intelligence believes that the Wagner Group plays a major role in offensive operations to capture Bakhmut and that more than 1,000 Wagner Group personnel have been killed in recent weeks in the Bakhmut area.[18]

Prigozhin is likely attempting to use his parallel military structures to provide the Russian military with capacities that the Russian military currently lacks in order to increase his influence. North Korea’s reported shipment of weapons to the Russian military using the Wagner Group as an intermediary may suggest that Prigozhin is attempting to use his private military company to secure foreign sources of weapons that would be more difficult for the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) to officially procure. Prigozhin is also likely committing a substantial amount of personnel and resources to the Wagner Group’s operations in the Bakhmut area in hopes of providing the Russian military with an operational success that has eluded the Russian Armed Forces in the Bakhmut area as well as the wider theater in Ukraine. ISW assesses that Prigozhin likely has ambitious political goals and seeks to capitalize on the Kremlin’s need for more capable forces to accumulate influence and appeal to the ultra-nationalist constituency he hopes to leverage.[19] Prigozhin will likely continue to expand the Wagner Group’s outsized role in the war in Ukraine in pursuit of these political goals.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Rafael Grossi held talks with Russian officials on the creation of a security zone around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). Grossi traveled to Moscow and met with a Russian delegation that included Rosatom head Alexey Likhachev on December 22.[20] Grossi reiterated the IAEA’s position that a safety zone around the ZNPP should be established exclusively to prevent a nuclear accident.[21] Rosatom stated that talks with the IAEA will continue based on an ”understanding of the need to reach a mutually acceptable text as soon as possible.”[22] ISW assesses that Russian officials are attempting to use the negotiations for the creation of a safety zone around the ZNPP to force the IAEA to accept Russian control over the plant and de facto recognize the illegal Russian annexation of occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[23] The IAEA Board of Governors has announced that it does not recognize the illegal Russian seizure and operation of the ZNPP, but the Kremlin will likely attempt to leverage the IAEA’s stated urgency to reach an agreement on the creation of a security zone to undermine that position.[24]

Key Takeaways

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to refuse to treat Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an equal and sovereign counterpart, further indicating that he is not interested in serious negotiations with Ukraine.
Putin’s rhetoric is a part of an ongoing Russian information operation that denies Ukraine’s legitimacy as a sovereign state.
Putin amplified an existing Russian information operation designed to decrease Western security assistance for Ukraine.
Putin is continuing to absolve himself of responsibility for conducting a protracted war in Ukraine.
Russian Chief of General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov, attempted to revive a debunked Russian narrative that the Kremlin invaded Ukraine to preempt a fictitious planned Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Donbas and Crimea.
The Kremlin claimed that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited the frontlines in Ukraine for the second time in a week, likely to deflect criticism that Shoigu is not an involved wartime leader.
Wagner Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin continues to seek to elevate the importance of the Wagner Group to establish himself as the central figure of Russia’s ultra-nationalist pro-war community.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Rafael Grossi held talks with Russian officials on the creation of a security zone around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
Russian forces continued to conduct limited counterattacks along the Kreminna-Svatove line and Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in the Kreminna area.
Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka areas.
Russian forces are increasing security measures in Kherson Oblast and Crimea out of fear of Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.
A senior Russian official denied claims of a second wave of mobilization amidst ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts.
Ukrainian partisans continued to target Russian occupation authorities.

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

Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian forces continued to conduct limited counterattacks to regain lost positions along the Svatove-Kreminna line on December 22. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces spokesperson Serhiy Cherevaty reported that Ukrainian forces repelled six Russian assaults on Ukrainian frontline positions in Luhansk Oblast.[25] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Novoselivkse (14km northwest of Svatove) and Stelmakhivka (15km northwest of Svatove).[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that there are ongoing positional battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the area of the Oskil River crossing near Dvorichna (54km northwest of Svatove).[27] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Ploshchanka (17km northwest of Kreminna) and Chervonopopivka (6km north of Kreminna).[28] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also conducted assaults near Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna) and in the direction of Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna).[29] Another Russian milblogger claimed that there are positional battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces south and southwest of Dibrova.[30]

Ukrainian forces reportedly continued counteroffensive operations in the Kreminna area on December 22. A Russian milblogger claimed that fighting is intensifying in the Kreminna area where Ukrainian forces conducted reconnaissance in force and probed Russian positions.[31] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted an assault in the direction of Kreminna.[32]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on December 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bakhmut; within 26km northeast of Bakhmut near Berestove, Yakovlivka, and Soledar; and within 31km south of Bakhmut near Opytne, Kurdyumivka, Ozarianivka, Mayorsk, and Niu York.[33] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults northeast of Bakhmut in the direction of Bakhmutske, Verkhnokamianske, and Vesele.[34] Another Russian milblogger claimed that battles between Ukrainian and Russian forces are ongoing near Soledar.[35] Geolocated footage posted on December 22 shows Ukrainian and Russian forces fighting southeast of Soledar.[36] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Wagner Group are advancing in the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut and that Ukrainian forces are planning counterattacks to push Russian forces out of Bakhmut.[37] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces spokesperson Serhiy Cherevaty reported that Russian forces have not conducted operations that have decisively broken through Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut and that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian assault groups that had momentarily broken through into the outskirts of the settlement.[38] A Russian journalist posted footage on December 22 from Andriivka (10km south of Bakhmut) indicating that Russian forces are in the settlement.[39] The Russian journalist claimed that elements of the Wagner Group were fighting Ukrainian forces in the vicinity of Klishchiivka, where Ukrainian forces have reportedly established good defensive positions.[40]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on December 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults within 27km southwest of Avdiivka near Krasnohorivka, Nevelske, and Marinka.[41] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces hold positions in the western part of Marinka.[42] The Russian milblogger also claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults within 37km southwest of Avdiivka near Novomykhailivka, Pervomaiskle, and Vodyane.[43]

Russian forces reportedly conducted limited ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on December 22. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults near Pavlivka (52km southwest of Donetsk City) and Prechistivka (59km southwest of Donetsk City) in western Donetsk Oblast.[44] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces also destroyed Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Solodke, Donetsk Oblast (32km southwest of Donetsk City) and Levadne, Zaporizhia Oblast (93km southwest of Donetsk City).[45] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued routine indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[46]

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

Russian officials stated that Russian forces are increasing security measures in left-bank Kherson Oblast and Crimea out of fear of Ukrainian counteroffensive operations. Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration Head Vladimir Saldo claimed that an intensive anti-sabotage operation is underway in occupied Kherson Oblast to counter Ukrainian sabotage groups attempting to cross the Dnipro River or the Dnipro-Bug estuary to the left bank.[47] Saldo added that Russian forces are constantly engaged in combat with Ukrainian forces in the area of the Kinburn Spit and claimed that Russian forces are repelling Ukrainian attempts to land on the spit. Crimean Occupation Head Sergey Aksyonov raised the level of the ”terrorist” threat in six Crimean areas along Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs): Armyansk, Dzhankoy and the Dzhankoyskyi Raion, Kerch, Krasnoperekopsk and the Krasnoperekopskyi Raion, and Leninisky Raion.[48]

Russian forces are increasing their naval activity in the Black Sea. Naval News analyzed satellite imagery that showed an increase in Russian submarine activity near Sevastopol, including the return of a Kilo-class submarine to base accompanied by a likely Raptor assault boat and a helicopter.[49] Naval News noted that Russia has four improved Kilo-class submarines in the Black Sea that are able to launch Kalibr missiles against Ukraine.

Russian forces continued to strike Ukrainian positions and civilian infrastructure in right-bank Kherson, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.[50] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces are continuing to shell residential buildings in Kherson City, and shelled Ochakiv just north of the Kinburn Spit.[51] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian air defenses shot down a Russian Kh-59 missile over Mykolaiv Oblast on December 22.[52]

Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian logistics on the occupied southern territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian manpower concentration point in Mykolaivka area, Skadovsk Raion (approximately 60km southeast of Kherson City), injuring up to 140 Russian servicemembers and destroying eight trucks with ammunition.[53]

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

A senior Russian official denied claims of a second wave of mobilization amidst ongoing covert mobilization efforts. Speaker of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation Valentina Matvienko stated on December 21 that there is no need for a second wave of mobilization.[54] Another opposition media source reported that mobilization covertly continues in St. Petersburg, where residents received summonses via mail as of at least December 19.[55] While Matvienko has no authority on the matter of a second wave of mobilization, continual evidence of ongoing covert mobilization efforts may indicate that there will be no official announcement of a second wave of mobilization because it is already occurring. The Kremlin may alternatively work to set information conditions to conduct a second wave of mobilization - possibly under the rubric of staffing new Russian divisions, as Shoigu proposed on December 21.[56]

The Russian State Duma passed the third reading of a bill on December 21 that will grant Russian servicemembers leniency on mandatory legal and debt-related deadlines.[57] This bill will pause legal proceedings, sentence enforcements, and debt collection -- excluding alimony -- for Russian mobilized troops, army volunteers, and contracted soldiers serving in Ukraine indefinitely.[58] Russian opposition outlet Meduza reported that similar deferrals will be available for people serving in the border-protection units of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).[59] Russian media outlet Dovod reported on December 20 that a study of Russian forces volunteers from Vladimir Oblast showed that two-thirds of those killed in Ukraine were debtors.[60] The Federal Bailiff Service of Russia database (FSSP) reported that 10 out of the 15 dead servicemen had debts totaling more than 5.7 million rubles, indicating that debt among Russian troops is high.[61] This finding supports ISW’s previous assessment that Russian ”volunteer” unit recruitment targeted financially vulnerable Russians.[62]

An independent report shows growing Russian popular resistance to the war. An independent Russian Human Rights project, OVD-Info, and opposition media source Verstka published data on December 21 that shows that Russian popular resistance to the conflict in Ukraine has broken a ten-year record for protests arrests in Russia.[63] These sources show that Russian officials have detained more than 19,440 protestors, given ”administrative punishments” to 4,000 protestors, prosecuted 400 protestors including 7 minors, and sentenced 50 protestors in courts.[64] Verstka noted that Russian officials have gone to great lengths to stifle protests and resistance to the conflict in Ukraine, including designating anti-war actions as extremism, but that the anti-war movement continues.[65]

Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin is considering allowing women convicts to join Wagner Group. The Deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Wegner asked Prigozhin to consider recruiting women from penal colonies to participate in the conflict with Ukraine as signalmen, doctors, nurses, and “to provide all possible assistance to our servicemen there.”[66] Prigozhin published Wegner’s request on December 21 and responded that he absolutely agrees with Wegner’s idea and hopes to recruit women to be ”not only nurses and signalmen, but also sabotage groups and sniper pairs.”[67] Prigozhin stated that he is facing resistance to the idea but will press on and that Wagner is ”working in this direction.”[68] Dr. Vera Miranova, a Russian-American scholar, interpreted Prigozhin’s enthusiasm about including women in Wagner as a potential indicator that Wagner is running out of male inmates to recruit to the frontlines in Ukraine.[69]

Supply shortages are contributing to tension between the Russian military and Russian security forces such as the FSB and the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardia). The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 22 that tension is rising between Russian security forces and the Russian military because Russian security forces have access to the supply chain before the military, meaning that the security forces select the best vehicles and other supplies while the Russian military receives what is left over.[70] Meduza noted that tensions have only worsened due to an unofficial ban on the transport of certain goods, such as vehicles, through Crimea.[71] The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) shared intercepted audio of a Russian servicemember telling his friend that Russian forces continue to lack military equipment -- despite what Russian media shows the Russian population -- and that Russian servicemembers are consequently deserting in droves.[72] A Russian source also reported that a unit of mobilized personnel in Moscow ended up in Luhansk Oblast without supplies, food, personal belongings, or the means of communication.[73] The source stated that multiple unit members ended up in the hospital due to frostbite.[74]

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

Russian occupation authorities continued to face partisan activity in occupied territories on December 22. Russian and Ukrainian sources confirmed that Ukrainian partisans killed Russian collaborator and self-proclaimed head of Lyubymivka, Andriy Shepta, in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack in Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast, on December 22.[75]

Russian occupation authorities are continuing to set conditions to forcibly evacuate Ukrainian citizens from occupied territories. Ukrainian sources reported on December 22 that Russian forces are intensifying strikes on civilian infrastructure and impairing the operations of social institutions to make civilian life unbearable in Vasylivka, Kakhovka, and Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast.[76]

Russian officials continued efforts to consolidate administrative control of occupied territories on December 22. Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin submitted candidates to serve as prosecutors in occupied territories to the Russian Federation Council on December 22.[77]

Russian occupation authorities continued to commandeer civilian hospitals to treat wounded Russian servicemembers on December 22. Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai stated on December 22 that Russian forces are housing wounded Russian servicemen in a children’s hospital in occupied Khrustalnyi, Luhansk Oblast, as there is reportedly no medical attention available elsewhere in the vicinity.[78]

Correction: An earlier version of this assessment incorrectly described Naval News as affiliated with the British Royal Navy. Naval News is an independent media outlet.

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

[1] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70170

[3] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70170

[7] https://telegra dot ph/Tezisy-vystupleniya-nachalnika-Generalnogo-shtaba-Vooruzhennyh-Sil-Rossijskoj-Federacii--pervogo-zamestitelya-Ministra-oborony-R-12-22 ; https://t.me/mod_russia/22834

[20] https://tass dot com/politics/1554575

[21] https://tass dot com/politics/1554575

[22] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/rosatom-says-talks-with-iaea-zapori... ; https://tass dot com/politics/1554365

[25] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/12/22/na-luganskomu-napryamku-znyshheno-93-okupanty-sergij-cherevatyj/

[38] org/a/news-bakhmut-cherevatyy-zsu/32189233.html

[57] https://sozd.duma(dot)gov.ru/bill/223501-8; http://duma.gov(dot)ru/news/56027/

[58] http://duma.gov(dot)ru/news/56027/ https://sozd.duma(dot)gov.ru/bill

[59] https://meduza(dot)io/en/news/2022/12/21/state-duma-adopts-law-to-pause-legal-proceedings-and-enforcement-action-against-troops-serving-in-ukraine;

[60] https://www.dovod dot online/dve-treti-vladimirskih-dobrovolcev-pogibshih-na-vojne-v-ukraine-okazalis-dolzhnikami/

[61] https://fssp dot gov.ru/; https://www.dovod dot online/dve-treti-vladimirskih-dobrovolcev-pogibshih-na-vojne-v-ukraine-okazalis-dolzhnikami/

[63] https://reports.ovdinfo dot org/no-to-war#1; https://data.ovdinfo dot org/svodka-antivoennyy-repressiy-devyat-mesyacev-voyny#1 ; https://verstka dot media/rekord-borby-s-protestami-za-vremya-voyny/?tg_rhash=86cf5f61f61288%3Futm_content%3Dfll

[64] https://reports dot ovdinfo.org/no-to-war#1; https://data dot ovdinfo.org/svodka-antivoennyy-repressiy-devyat-mesyacev-voyny#1 ; https://reports dot ovdinfo.org/no-to-war#1; https://verstka dot media/rekord-borby-s-protestami-za-vremya-voyny/?tg_rhash=86cf5f61f61288%3Futm_content%3Dfll

[65] https://verstka dot media/rekord-borby-s-protestami-za-vremya-voyny/?tg_rhash=86cf5f61f61288%3Futm_content%3Dfll

[70] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/22/u-rosiyan-na-hersonskomu-napryamku-konflikty-mizh-vijskovymy-ta-sylovykamy/

[71] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/22/u-rosiyan-na-hersonskomu-napryamku-konflikty-mizh-vijskovymy-ta-sylovykamy/

[72] https://gur dot gov dot ua/content/u-nas-mnoho-ochen-500-tykh-ochen-mnoho.html

[73] https://skat(dot)media/post/mobilization_moscow; https://t.me/mediaskat/11957

[74] https://skat(dot)media/post/mobilization_moscow; https://t.me/mediaskat/11957

[75] https://t.me/grey_zone/16294; https://t.me/VKhersone/9591; https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/22/na-hersonshhyni-likviduvaly-shhe-odnogo-kolaboranta/ ; https://ria dot ru/20221222/shtepa-1840631671.html; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/43918; https://www.facebook.com/sergey.khlan/posts/pfbid02P3vL5mxyUMjLxa2CmHUYC...; https://www.facebook.com/sergey.khlan/posts/pfbid08PHQtREZqG2pjh74B1RvJg...; https://t.me/readovkanews/49463

[76] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/22/rosiyany-gotuyut-masovu-deportacziyu-naselennya-nyzky-naselenyh-punktiv-na-tot/; https://www.facebook.com/sergey.khlan/posts/pfbid02GbYiPo6TBU23t4aJwupK7...

understandingwar.org

2. White House: Russia's Wagner received arms from North Korea

Win win for the Kim family regime and Wagner.

White House: Russia's Wagner received arms from North Korea

AP · by AAMER MADHANI and EDITH M. LEDERER · December 22, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House said Thursday that the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company, has taken delivery of an arms shipment from North Korea to help bolster its forces as it fights side-by-side with Russian troops in Ukraine.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said U.S. intelligence officials determined that North Korea completed an initial arms shipment that included rockets and missiles last month.

“We assess that the amount of material delivered to Wagner will not change battlefield dynamics in Ukraine,” Kirby said. “But we’re certainly concerned that North Korea is planning to deliver more military equipment.”

On Friday, North Korea again flatly denied it has shipped munitions to Russia, calling the U.S. accusation of arms transfers to Russia “the groundless theory” cooked up by “some dishonest forces.”

The White House has expressed alarm about Wagner’s growing involvement in the war as it has been particularly active in the eastern Donbas region. Kirby said in certain instances Russian military officials have even been “subordinate to Wagner’s command.”

Biden administration officials said with the arms sales to the private military group, North Korea is violating U.N. sanctions that ban Pyongyang from importing or exporting weapons.

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Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, called it “despicable” that Russia, a permanent veto-wielding member of the U.N. Security Council, which imposed the sanctions, is now using weapons procured from North Korea and Iran “to pursue its war of aggression against Ukraine.”

An unidentified spokesman at the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by state media that the nation “remains unchanged in its principled stand on the issue of ‘arms transaction’ between (North Korea) and Russia which has never happened.”

The spokesman didn’t mention Thursday’s U.S. assessment that North Korea sent an arms shipment to the Wagner Group. But he accused the U.S. of “criminal acts of bringing bloodshed and destruction to Ukraine” by providing it with a large amount of weapons, while repeating its support of Russia in the war.

“I would like to say that the Russian people are the bravest people with the will and ability to defend the security and territorial integrity of their country without any others’ military support,” he said.

Kirby said the U.S. now assesses that Wagner has some 50,000 personnel fighting in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts that the company has recruited from prisons.

The U.S. assesses that Wagner, owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is spending about $100 million a month in the fight, Kirby said.

Wagner Group mercenaries have also been accused by Western countries and UN experts of numerous human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced he had de signated the Wagner Group as an “entity of particular concern” for its activities in the Central African Republic.

Wagner has faced U.S. sanctions since 2017. The Commerce Department on Wednesday unveiled new export restrictions targeting Wagner in a bid to further restrict its access to technology and supplies.

The White House has repeatedly sought to spotlight intelligence findings that show Russia — struggling to maintain a steady supply of arms for its war in Ukraine and pinched by sanctions that are limiting access to key components for weapons manufacturing — has limited options to help it resupply weapons.

Russia has also turned to Iran to provide drones to use against Ukraine, and the Biden administration has expressed concern that Russia may seek to acquire additional advanced conventional weapons from Iran. The White House has previously said that Moscow turn to North Korea for artillery.

The British government also condemned Russia for Wagner arm’s purchase.

“The fact that President Putin is turning to North Korea for help is a sign of Russia’s desperation and isolation,” Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said in a statement. “We will work with our partners to ensure that North Korea pays a high price for supporting Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.”

North Korea has sought to strengthen relations with Russia as much of Europe and the West has pulled away from Moscow.

Friday’s statement was mainly meant to deny recent Japanese media reports that North Korea transported munitions to Russia by rail. The statement called the report “false” and “the most absurd red herring, which is not worth any comment or interpretation.”

Some experts say North Korea may be seeking Russian fuel as well as technology transfers and supplies needed to advance its military capabilities as it pursues more sophisticated weapons systems targeting the United States and its allies.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have heightened because of concerns about North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The North has carried out a series of weapons demonstrations, while the U.S. and South Korea held stepped up joint defense exercises.

Thomas-Greenfield said Wagner’s purchase “contributes to instability on the Korean Peninsula by giving the DPRK funds it can use to further develop its prohibited weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.”

“Russia is not only defending the DPRK as it engages in unlawful and threatening behavior, Russia is now a partner to such behavior,” Thomas-Greenfield added.

Lederer reported from the United Nations. Associated Press writer Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.

AP · by AAMER MADHANI and EDITH M. LEDERER · December 22, 2022

3. Putin Should Be Scared: Wagner Group is Using North Korean Arms in Ukraine

Putin Should Be Scared: Wagner Group is Using North Korean Arms in Ukraine

19fortyfive.com · by Peter Suciu · December 22, 2022

It was reported on Thursday that Russia’s Wagner Group – Vladimir Putin‘s super “elite” mercenary force – had to rely on weapons from North Korea.

“Wagner is searching around the world for arms suppliers to support its military operations in Ukraine,” John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told reporters.

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The private military company took delivery of the arms shipment to bolster Russian forces in Ukraine.

It is a sign of the group’s expanding role in the conflict.

“In certain instances, Russian military officials are actually subordinate to Wagner’s command,” Kirby added. “It’s pretty apparent to us that Wagner is emerging as a rival power center to the Russian military and other Russian ministries.”

Kirby said the U.S. has confirmed that North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery, including infantry rockets and missiles to Ukraine, which will be used by Wagner personnel.

The group – which is often described as Putin’s off-the-book troops – has emerged as a key player in the conflict in Ukraine.

Approximately 50,000 Wagner personnel are now deployed to Ukraine – including 10,000 actual contractors, and some 40,000 convicts who were recruited from Russian prisons. Ukrainian forces have also taken great efforts to target the Wagner Group.

The mercenary unit had previously expanded its global footprint since it was first raised in 2014. It has also been accused of war crimes in Africa, Syria, and Ukraine.

Armories of Terror

The revelations about the Wagner Group came just a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy’s historic visit to Washington – his first foreign trip since Russia launched its unprovoked invasion in February.

The fact that the Wagner Group has had to turn to North Korea also highlights that Russia is unable to meet the demands of the war effort. It increasingly relies on fellow pariah states for ordnance and other hardware.

This certainly explains the Kremlin’s ire over U.S. and other Western aid to Kyiv. Moscow is becoming increasingly outgunned as Ukraine is being supplied by the arsenals of democracy while Russia is relying on whatever it can get from the armories of terror.

U.S. assessment is that the amount of material being provided by North Korea would not greatly change the battlefield dynamics. The Russian and North Korean missions to the United Nations in New York have not commented on the news.

Sanctions Violations

The United States accused Pyongyang and Moscow of violating U.N. sanctions on North Korea and will share its information with the U.N. Security Council’s North Korea sanctions committee, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said in a statement on Thursday.

The European Union has also imposed sanctions on the Wagner Group, accusing it of clandestine operations on the Kremlin’s behalf.

Putin has previously said the group does not represent the Russian state but suggested that any private military contractors have the right to work anywhere in the world as long as they do not break Russian law. Of course, many of Putin’s actions could also be considered war crimes.

Author Experience and Expertise: A Senior Editor for 19FortyFive, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer. He has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites with over 3,200 published pieces over a twenty-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. You can follow him on Twitter: @PeterSuciu.

19fortyfive.com · by Peter Suciu · December 22, 2022

4. EXCLUSIVE: TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists

At this link is an NPR report with an interview with the FCC Commissioner who sees a complete ban on TikTok. It is very much with listening to as it complements the report below. When the transcript is published I will forward that as well (probably tomorrow).

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/23/1145170887/fcc-commissioner-brendan-carr-supports-a-total-ban-on-tiktok

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr supports a total ban on TikTok

December 23, 20225:08 AM ET

Heard on Morning Edition

More than a dozen states have banned Tiktok from government devices over security concerns. NPR's Leila Fadel talks to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr about the issues with the social media app.

EXCLUSIVE: TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists

Forbes · by Emily Baker-White · December 22, 2022

ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location using their IP addresses, as first reported by Forbes in October.

An internal investigation by ByteDance, the parent company of video-sharing platform TikTok, found that employees tracked multiple journalists covering the company, improperly gaining access to their IP addresses and user data in an attempt to identify whether they had been in the same locales as ByteDance employees.

According to materials reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance tracked multiple Forbes journalists as part of this covert surveillance campaign, which was designed to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company’s ongoing links to China. As a result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned.

“I was deeply disappointed when I was notified of the situation… and I’m sure you feel the same,” Liang wrote in an internal email shared with Forbes. “The public trust that we have spent huge efforts building is going to be significantly undermined by the misconduct of a few individuals. … I believe this situation will serve as a lesson to us all.”

“It is standard practice for companies to have an internal audit group authorized to investigate code of conduct violations,” TikTok General Counsel Erich Andersen wrote in a second internal email shared with Forbes. “However, in this case individuals misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data.”

Forbes first reported the surveillance tactics, which were overseen by a China-based team at ByteDance, in October. Asked for comment on that story, ByteDance and TikTok did not deny the surveillance, but took to Twitter after the story was published to say that “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,” and that “TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested.” In the internal email, Liang acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way, as Forbes had reported.

“This is a direct assault on the idea of a free press and its critical role in a functioning democracy.”

Randall Lane, the chief content officer of Forbes

The investigation, internally known as Project Raven, began this summer after BuzzFeed News published a story revealing that China-based ByteDance employees had repeatedly accessed U.S. user data, based on more than 80 hours of audio recordings of internal TikTok meetings. According to internal ByteDance documents reviewed by Forbes, Project Raven involved the company’s Chief Security and Privacy Office, was known to TikTok’s Head of Global Legal Compliance, and was approved by ByteDance employees in China. It tracked Emily Baker-White, Katharine Schwab and Richard Nieva, three Forbes journalists that formerly worked at BuzzFeed News.

“This is a direct assault on the idea of a free press and its critical role in a functioning democracy,” says Randall Lane, the chief content officer of Forbes. “We await a direct response from ByteDance, as this raises fundamental questions about what they are doing with the information they compile from TikTok users.”

After this story was published, TikTok spokesperson Hilary McQuaide said, "The misconduct of certain individuals, who are no longer employed at ByteDance, was an egregious misuse of their authority to obtain access to user data. This misbehavior is unacceptable, and not in line with our efforts across TikTok to earn the trust of our users."

“This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform has permitted TikTok engineers and executives in the People’s Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of U.S. users despite repeated claims to lawmakers and users that this data was protected,” Senator Mark Warner told Forbes. “The DoJ has also been promising for over a year that they are looking into ways to protect U.S. user data from Bytedance and the CCP — it’s time to come forward with that solution or Congress could soon be forced to step in.”

According to an internal email sent Thursday by Andersen, ByteDance found that several of its employees obtained the data of “a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter,” as well as a “small number of people connected to the reporters” through their TikTok accounts. The audit was conducted by the law firm Covington & Burling, which has represented TikTok in litigation against the U.S. government. Covington did not respond to a comment request.

In addition to the firing of TikTok’s Chief Internal Auditor, Chris Lepitak, who was suspended after Forbes’ initial report about the surveillance scheme in October, ByteDance fired two additional TikTok employees in the United States and China as a result of the findings. Lepitak did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “None of the individuals found to have directly participated in or overseen the misguided plan remain employed at ByteDance,” Andersen wrote in the internal email.

“This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform has permitted TikTok engineers and executives in the People’s Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of U.S. users despite repeated claims to lawmakers and users that this data was protected.”

Senator Mark Warner

The team that oversaw the surveillance campaign was ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department, a Beijing-based unit primarily responsible for conducting investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees.

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew wrote in his own email to employees, “We take data security incredibly seriously,” adding that the company’s Project Texas, which would limit China-based access to U.S. user data (and which was first reported by Baker-White at BuzzFeed News) was a “testament to that commitment.”

In 2021, TikTok became the most visited website in the world, but the app’s ownership by Chinese tech giant ByteDance has raised serious concerns about the company’s access to the personal information of millions of U.S. citizens, as well as its capacity to manipulate and influence user content. The company is currently negotiating a national security contract with the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), which will govern the way the Chinese-owned social media app handles Americans’ personal user data. The company has also sought to assuage concerns about ties to China by working to move some U.S. user information stateside to be stored at a data center managed by Oracle as part of Project Texas.

“In this case individuals misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data.”

Erich Andersen, TikTok General Counsel

Forbes reported in October that the same China-based ByteDance internal audit and investigations team that oversaw the surveillance campaign against journalists also investigated TikTok global security chief Roland Cloutier, a U.S. Air Force veteran, who was tasked with overseeing efforts to limit Chinese employees’ access to American user data. Cloutier stepped down in July 2022. At least five senior employees who led departments at TikTok recently left the company over revelations that they could not meaningfully influence decision-making, Forbes also found.

TikTok and ByteDance declined to comment on specific employee investigations or on the departures.

In August, Forbes additionally found LinkedIn profiles for three hundred ByteDance employees that showed they previously worked for Chinese state media publications. Twenty-three of the profiles appeared to have been created by ByteDance directors. At the time, ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks said the company makes “hiring decisions based purely on an individual’s professional capability to do the job. For our China-market businesses, that includes people who have previously worked in government or state media positions in China. Outside of China, employees also bring experience in government, public policy, and media organizations from dozens of markets."

ByteDance is not the first tech giant to use an app to monitor specific users. In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties. At the time, Uber acknowledged that it had run the program, called “greyball,” but said it was used to deny ride requests to “opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers,” among other groups.

Both Uber and Facebook also reportedly tracked the location of journalists reporting on their apps. A 2015 investigation by the Electronic Privacy Information Center found that Uber had monitored the location of journalists covering the company. Uber did not specifically respond to this claim. The 2021 book An Ugly Truth alleges that Facebook did the same thing, in an effort to identify the journalists’ sources. Facebook did not respond directly to the assertions in the book, but a spokesperson told the San Jose Mercury News in 2018 that, like other companies, Facebook “routinely use[s] business records in workplace investigations.”

But an important factor distinguishes ByteDance’s collection of private users’ information from those cases: TikTok told lawmakers in June that access to certain U.S. user data — likely including location — will be “limited only to authorized personnel, pursuant to protocols being developed with the U.S. Government.”

Brendan Carr, an FCC commissioner who called on Apple and Google to ban TikTok following the June BuzzFeed News report, said: “At the precise moment when TikTok is trying to convince U.S. officials that it can be trusted—when it has every incentive to ensure the security of user data—its Beijing-based parent company abused its systems to obtain data on reporters that are covering TikTok? This should be the final nail in the coffin for the idea that U.S. officials can trust TikTok.”

More Money For Info Ops, Army Recruiting, Cyber In Omnibus

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

Army communications would get a boost in the 2023 omnibus spending bill. Here, a soldier makes a medical evacuation radio call during the Georgia National Guard Best Warrior Competition at Fort Stewart, Ga., March 22, 2022. U.S. Army / Sgt. 1st Class R.J. Lannom Jr.

Get all our news and commentary in your inbox at 6 a.m. ET.

Defense Systems

Bill would also boost defense research funding once again.

December 22, 2022 05:14 PM ET

By Lauren C. Williams

Senior Editor

December 22, 2022 05:14 PM ET

Defense research and development spending would rise again in 2023 if the House approves the omnibus spending bill passed by the Senate on Thursday. The bill contains $136.7 billion for research, development, test, and evaluation funding, nearly $10 billion more than the Biden administration asked and $20.5 billion up from last year.

A quick look at defense tech investments for existing programs shows continued support for autonomous technologies across a myriad of platforms, money for cybersecurity, missions, and forces, and more funds for research and development.

Here are some other things that stood out:

Information operations would get $238.8 million for military information support operations, which is nearly $40 million more than requested. Most of that boost goes toward the info ops program at INDOPACOM.
Army recruiting and advertising would get $791 million, $100 above its request.
The Army would get $314 million for commercial-ready communications technologies, and got several program increases for high-frequency radios, and software and services for Joint All Domain Command and Control.
The Air Force was dinged around $5 million for being “early to need” on some of its JADC2 procurements for strategic command and control.
The Air Force’s cyberspace sustainment appropriations saw program increases in weapon system sustainment ($40 million) and cyber operations for base resilient architecture ($10 million). Relatedly, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency got $15 million more than requested for its joint cyber intelligence tool suite.
The Air Force also got $15 million for squadron-level 3D-print capabilities. There was no listed amount for this in the budget request, according to the bill.
Satellites are a major priority for the Space Force with $442 million committed to buying protected wideband satellites that will “provide resilient, jam resistant tactical communications to support warfighter needs.” Lawmakers want the Air Force secretary to deliver a funding plan for launch and operations.
Navy got $477.5 million for cyberspace activities in operations funds and a $19 million increase to the Pacific Multi-Domain Training and Experimentation Capability, a virtual training environment, under Combatant commanders direct mission support (a total $344.7 million).
The Navy also got more money to buy commercial off the shelf tech for supply chain risk management tools–a $12 million program increase out of an $810 million acquisition, logistics, and oversight budget.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense also got $2.4 billion in operations funding, which included a $50 million program increase to improve access to digital talent.
Operations funding for the Defense Department’s acquisition workforce development account nearly doubled from the requested amount, totalling $111.8 million. This includes a $3 million boost for diversity in STEM talent development under hiring and recruiting.
Congress wants the defense secretary and military chiefs to assess costs and propose potential locations for “establishing a Joint All Domain Training Center in the eastern half of the United States.”

Unanswered questions on innovation

The nearly $2 trillion government spending bill is expected to pass both chambers before the holidays amid looming concerns of prolonged stopgap funding, which can inhibit starting new efforts. However, appropriations seem to align with the Defense Department’s plans to buy and develop more innovative technologies as it prepares for potential conflict with China.

But Congress still had some questions, particularly with how the military services collaborate on innovation efforts via the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve Fund, or RDER.

The reserve was set up last year with $34 million for fiscal year 2022 as a way to quickly come up with the best prototypes across the services, combatant commands, and commercial companies.

The Pentagon requested $358 million for RDER in 2023, according to the bill. But lawmakers worry about the program’s “ability to synchronize experimentation” and align with program acquisition timelines. The agreement mandates the defense undersecretary for research and engineering and service secretaries to submit a report with a schedule and plan for RDER activities.

rage

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

6. China’s Soaring Covid Cases Push Economic Activity Off A Cliff

Graphics at the link.

China’s Soaring Covid Cases Push Economic Activity Off A Cliff

Traffic congestion slumped in major cities as people stay home
There are fewer flights and fewer people are taking the subway

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-23/china-s-soaring-covid-cases-push-economic-activity-off-a-cliff

ByBloomberg News

December 23, 2022, 12:57 AM UTCUpdated onDecember 23, 2022, 9:41 AM UTC

China’s soaring Covid infections are keeping people home and causing a slump in travel and economic activity, according to the latest high-frequency data.

Following the recent abrupt end to Covid Zero controls, more cities have been hit by an exit wave of infections in the past week, leading to crowded hospitals and queues at funeral parlors. That’s keeping people in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere from going out despite workers in some places being told to return to work even if sick.

Subway Usage Is Low or Plunging in Major Cities

Traffic steadied in Beijing but plummeted in Shanghai as infections spread

Source: Bloomberg

Note: data show 7-day trailing average; data is updated through Dec. 21

Several measures of mobility including traffic congestion in major cities, subway usage and the number of domestic flights have all slumped. In recent days subway passenger numbers have plummeted in cities including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xi’an and Nanjing as infections surged, while in Beijing, one of the cities that experienced the infection wave the earliest, subway usage steadied and picked up slightly over the past four days, although it is still around 80% below the level on the same period in 2019.

Congestion levels across 15 major cities are 56% below the level in January 2021, the benchmark used in an index compiled by BloombergNEF based on Baidu Inc. traffic data. That’s worse than during the lockdown of Shanghai and other cities in the spring. The only other time this year it’s been lower was in early February, when the Lunar New Year period saw factories and restaurants close and people leave big metropolises to return home.

“The spike in Covid-19 infection rates following the easing of mobility restrictions will still constrain economic activity in the December-January time frame,” which is consistent with the experience of other Asian economies, said Guan Yi Low, head of fixed income for Asia Pacific at M&G Investments.

Traffic Slows

Congestion level in top cities dropped to lowest since Lunar New Year

Source: Baidu Inc; BloombergNEF

Note: data updated through Dec. 21

The economy is set for more pain and uncertainty as the wave of infections spreads, with the lack of trustworthy statistics on cases and deaths making it difficult to predict when the outbreak might peak or start to wane. However, Chen Qin, chief economist at data consultancy MetroDataTech, forecasts the current wave of infections will peak between mid-December and late January for most cities, based on an analysis of online keyword searches.

Workers transport the body of a deceased patient at a fever clinic in Beijing, on Dec. 22.Source: Bloomberg

Activity at factories is probably plunging in December too, according to the emerging industries purchasing managers index, which is a leading indicator for the official and Caixin manufacturing PMIs.

The EPMI, based on surveys of companies in areas such as green technology and new energy vehicles, plummeted to 46.8 this month, the lowest level since April and below the 50-point threshold for contraction. Sub-gauges for purchases, employment and business expectations plunged the most.

Falling Again

A leading indicator for China's PMIs plunges to lowest level since April

Source: Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development, National Development and Reform Commission

Note: A reading below 50 indicates contraction, while anything above suggests expansion

Policymakers and economists are counting on consumers to be a major driver of any economic rebound after infections slow down next year. People piled up savings in 2022 due to Covid disruptions and the property crisis and getting them spending again will be key for an economy suffering from low business confidence, declining external demand and the persistent housing downturn.

An initial boost to consumer confidence from the shift away from Covid Zero has already faded, with consumer sentiment trending lower following a rebound earlier this month, according to a daily poll by US firm Morning Consult. “China is facing serious health and economic risks in the near term,” said Jesse Wheeler, economic analyst at Morning Consult. “Many would-be consumers will likely stay home and forgo certain activities to avoid exposure to the virus.”

Chinese Consumers' Sentiment Falls Back

Confidence boost from Covid reopening fades

Source: Morning Consult

A reopening-driven surge in domestic flights appears to have been short-lived, with people quickly cutting back on travel in the past week. The number of flights on Thursday fell to 42% of 2019 levels, according to provisional data from Chinese aviation data company VariFlight.

China Air Travel Activity is Volatile

Domestic flights rise on reopening and fall amid Covid infection spike

Source: Bloomberg, VariFlightPro

Note: Data includes Dec. 22, 2022 which is provisional

More Moviegoers

Cinemas and movie companies have suffered from Covid lockdowns and restrictions throughout the pandemic, but are now seeing the first meaningful improvement in box office revenue since the seven-day public holiday at the beginning of October, despite the Covid surge.

Terminal users can click on chart to enlarge.

Thanks to the debut of Walt Disney Co.’s Avatar: The Way of Water, the daily average box office climbed to over 50 million yuan ($7.2 million) from 17 million yuan two weeks ago, according to data from online ticketing platform Maoyan Entertainment.

— With assistance by John Liu, Yujing Liu, Jinshan Hong, Danny Lee, Lin Zhu and Tom Hancock

(Updates with consumer sentiment data.)

7. How a Luxury Business Jet Was Transformed Into the World’s Most Sophisticated Spyplane

I am surprised at how much press we are allowing about this asset.

Photos at the link: https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/bombardier-challenger-650-spy-plane-1234787903/

How a Luxury Business Jet Was Transformed Into the World’s Most Sophisticated Spyplane

robbreport.com · by Michael Verdon · December 22, 2022

In a typical private airport, Leidos’ Artemis II would look unremarkable compared to the other business jets on the tarmac. But the Bombardier Challenger 650’s inauspicious white exterior disguises an interior not of luxury seating and woodwork, but server racks, advanced avionics and computer consoles. Instead of ferrying executives and high-net-worth individuals to distant cities, Artemis uses its antennas and computers to decipher enemy communications from 40,000 feet. The business jet was an off-the-shelf Challenger but the interior was a high-tech array designed by defense and technology firm Leidos.

According to Defenseone.com, the first Artemis (there are now two) has already seen action in the Ukraine War, making use of the aircraft’s ability to fly at high altitudes for long ranges. “These [planes] can see very far when operating at 40,000 feet,” Mike Chagnon, deputy group president of Leidos Defense Group, told the website. The concept behind this spy plane is very different from listening to enemy chatter on the battleground, and instead allows the military to monitor sophisticated communications from hostile nation-states at a safe distance.

In the last year, Artemis 1 has flown more than 370 missions to monitor Russian forces near the Ukraine border. “You’re flying basically in a mow-the-lawn-type pattern for 10 hours [and] you’re collecting massive amounts of data,” Chagnon said. The business jet flew an average of six days per week.

The Bombardier 6500 modified for the US Air Force. Courtesy Bombardier

The unarmed 650s don’t fly in “contested” airspace so can avoid hostile fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles. Instead, they use altitude and long-distance monitoring equipment to collect data.

Leidos has a second Challenger 650 in Virginia that has also been modified for the US Army as a technology demonstrator. L3Harris Technologies is also developing similar business jet intelligence aircraft called ARES.

The aircraft are taking part in the US Army’s High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES), a strategy for gathering high-flying intelligence. The idea is to replace the current turboprops that were used in the Afghanistan and Iraqi conflicts searching for roadside bombs and insurgents with a more advanced, less vulnerable aircraft technology. “They want multi-layer sensing capabilities from space to mud,” Chagnon told Defenseone.com. “This is the airborne layer.”

The Global 6500 Raytheon Sentinel. Courtesy Bombardier Defense

Leidos owns and operates the aircraft, but the Army is able to connect to the plane’s sensors via satellite to glean intelligence. Essentially, it is renting the airplanes by the hour since there is no long-term contract. “It benefits the government and it benefits the country,” Chagnon said. “We’re responsible for keeping the aircraft in the air. And they [the Army] no longer have to have that long logistics tail, which is sometimes the most expensive part of a government program.”

Leidos has also purchased two larger Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft that it intends to convert into spy planes for another Army competition called ATHENA-R. Its competitor L3Harris, working with MAG Aerospace team and Sierra Nevada, is also converting Global 6500s for the same spy-jet competition.

Modified Gulfstream special-ops aircraft. Courtesy Gulfstream

Airframe manufacturers like Dassault, Gulfstream, Embraer and others have long had relationships with militaries around the world. Bombardier opened its Defense operations at its former Learjet headquarters in Wichita, Kansas.

The company delivered a modified Global 6000 business jet to the US Air Force in a special-mission configuration to the its Battlefield Airborne Communications Node program. Last month, it began preparing another Global 6000 for the German armed forces. This will also be used to collect and analyze military signals from radar and radio systems.

robbreport.com · by Michael Verdon · December 22, 2022

8. Strategy, not economics, should govern high-tech trade with China

Conclusion;

From a strategic perspective, there is no amount of safe trade in high-tech with China. Indeed, the right amount is zero. As the Biden’s administration “China House” and trade restrictions demonstrate, strategy, not finance, must govern U.S. relations with the CCP. That is true for U.S. firms as well.

Strategy, not economics, should govern high-tech trade with China

BY BRADLEY A. THAYER, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 12/22/22 11:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/technology/3781511-strategy-not-economics-should-govern-high-tech-trade-with-china/

The Biden administration’s creation of a “China House,” the Office of China Coordination, in the Department of State could be a positive step forward to address the China threat. The office is tasked with providing information regarding the China threat and accelerating and coordinating the government’s reaction to it. Last year, the CIA created the “China Mission Center” to aid the Intelligence Community with direct resources, funding and personnel to counter Beijing’s expanding diplomatic, technological and military power.

However positive, these actions are overdue. Together, they indicate that the flame of strategic thought is not completely extinguished in Washington. Sadly, for decades it was. Wall Street and the United States government supported China’s economic growth in the disastrous belief that a wealthier, more prosperous China would be more democratic and peaceful, becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in the liberal international order. The camarilla of the “engagement school” held profoundly mistaken, naïve and misguided assumptions regarding the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Lamentably, these “experts” were completely divorced from an understanding of the motivations and objectives of the CCP, a strategic conception of U.S. national interests, and an understanding of the importance of the relative balance of power for securing America’s position as the world’s dominant military power. The consequence was a richer China that siphoned off its riches to increase its military might, technological prowess and diplomatic influence, and yielded a U.S. economy that was dependent upon China for critical manufacturing and goods, including pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment and antibiotics. Today, China is more prosperous, more bellicose, and more determined to supplant the liberal order and the U.S. position in the world.

Yet, in the face of Beijing’s rise, the engagement school remains robust on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and at government, think tanks, media and academe. Recent appeals for “just the right amount” of technological decoupling from China are profoundly misguided. This followed the October announcement by the Biden administration that it would impose export controls on advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment to weaken China’s semiconductor and artificial intelligence development. And in December, Biden placed 36 Chinese groups, most notably Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation (YMTC), on the “entities list” to hinder the ability of U.S. firms to export critical technologies to them, and 21 Chinese firms were listed as “foreign direct product rule” which means non-American companies are prohibited from exporting items with U.S. technological content.

There are three flaws of any effort to find a “Goldilocks amount” regarding hi-tech trade and technology transfer to China.

First, even to consider trade with the CCP is to lack an understanding of the odious nature of the regime. The CCP is uniquely vicious government that has killed tens of millions of Chinese citizens; perpetually violates human rights and presently is committing a genocide of Muslims in Xinjiang; lied about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitated its spread; and ruthlessly exploits people and the environment.

Most importantly, in 2019, the CCP formally declared a “people’s war” against the United States, explicitly indicating that it is the enemy of the U.S. and intends to defeat America and its allies. An understanding of the character of the CCP should compel anyone concerned with human rights to terminate connection with it and the entities it controls. And because the CCP is at war with the U.S., the U.S. is compelled to respond accordingly. This requires Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and all U.S. entities to decide whether they will assist the United States or the CCP to answer the dispositive question of the 21st century: Will this century be defined by the liberal international order or by the repression of communist China?

Second, understanding the China threat requires a change in mindset — we need to think like strategists, rather than financiers. With the defeat of the Soviet Union, the ideas, practices, understanding and training necessary for peer competition — not only how to defeat a peer competitor but how to prevent one from rising — were supplanted by the doyens of finance and foreign investment. The first rule of strategy is “do not fund your adversary.” Sadly, Western firms pursued investments in China, technology and knowledge transfer to Beijing, and permitted Chinese entities to raise funds on U.S. capital markets, including those with known or suspected ties to the People’s Liberation Army, to those directly and indirectly linked to the Muslim genocide, and to the CCP, since every Chinese entity needs the Chinese regime’s permission to exist.

The second rule of strategy is to possess an understanding of the relative balance of power. As ever more investment, technology and knowledge entered China, it grew year after year — and the U.S. grew relatively weaker as its wealth flowed into China, rather than investments within the U.S. or friendly states. The Chinese regime was strengthened and any hope for its liberalization or overthrow was lost. Trade with China in any advanced technology is helping Beijing dominate the commanding heights of semiconductors and AI. That weakens the U.S. military, economy and technological leadership, and in time will cost the U.S. its superiority.

Third, trade in high-tech with China is supremely foolish because of the risks any U.S. entity incurs. The Department of Homeland Security has released a significant advisory to American businesses warning of the risks associated with trade with Chinese entities. The advisory notes the persistent and increasing risk of Chinese government-sponsored data theft due to newly enacted Chinese laws, including the National Intelligence Law of 2017, Data Security Law of 2020, and Cryptology Law of 2020. These laws compel Chinese businesses and citizens — including through academic institutions, research service providers, and investors — to support and facilitate China’s government access to the collection, transmission and storage of data. In sum, they compel Chinese entities to permit spying by China.

Consequently, firms trading with China run a perpetual risk of state-sponsored data theft that accelerates the reduction of foreign competitors’ domestic market share. This also hastens China’s acquisition of technological dominance in critical markets, which long have been led by U.S., Japanese and European firms — including in aerospace, semiconductors, robotics, artificial intelligence systems, biometrics, cyber intelligence, genomics, pharmaceutical medicines, and sustainable/green energy materials.

From a strategic perspective, there is no amount of safe trade in high-tech with China. Indeed, the right amount is zero. As the Biden’s administration “China House” and trade restrictions demonstrate, strategy, not finance, must govern U.S. relations with the CCP. That is true for U.S. firms as well.

Bradley A. Thayer is director of China policy at the Center for Security Policy and the co-author of “Understanding the China Threat.”

9. Japan steps closer to global military power

Excerpts:

Despite its expanding horizons, Japan’s global military footprint remains limited so it can only be considered an incomplete great power.

How one characterises the nature of Japan’s power is not immaterial to policy. Hughes’ thought-provoking intervention in the debate challenges some of the entrenched assumptions and political euphemisms prevailing in current discourse.

Japan steps closer to global military power | East Asia Forum

eastasiaforum.org · by Thomas Wilkins · December 23, 2022

Author: Thomas Wilkins, University of Sydney

Realist international relations scholars predicted that after the Cold War Japan would revert to its ’normal’ position in the global hierarchy of great powers. In a seminal 1993 article, Kenneth Waltz asserted that ‘much in Japan’s institutions and behaviour supports the proposition that it will once again take its place among the great powers’.

According to most realist theorists, this entailed the reacquisition of archetypical great power military capabilities and an independent nuclear deterrent. But after decades passed and this prediction failed to eventuate, Japan specialists searched for explanations. They settled on Japan’s national identity as a ‘global civilian power’ and its ‘nuclear allergy’ — a consequence of the atomic bombings of World War II.

In his new book, leading scholar on Japanese security policy Christopher Hughes characterised Japan as a ‘global’ military power. He claims that ‘Japan is demonstrating all the indicators of becoming a more capable military actor and of going not just regional but also global in its military profile’. –

No claim to be a global military power is credible without the requisite defence capabilities. Hughes’ previous work tracked the steady remilitarisation of Japan. This began in the 1950s, when the Japan Self-Defense Forces were established and continued with periods of acceleration under former prime ministers Yasuhiro Nakasone, Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe.

Koizumi explicitly spoke of becoming a ‘normal’ country — implying that not being a great power was a condition of abnormality to be remedied. Abe certainly believed this when he affirmed that ‘Japan will never become a tier two country’. Under the ‘Abe doctrine’, Hughes argues that the process is reaching fruition.

Japan appears to be transforming into something more like the normal great power that realists predicted decades ago. The country has acquired many necessary accoutrements of typical great powers. The increased centralisation of security policy and the establishment of a National Security Council and National Security Advisor emulate the organisational structure and procedures of other great powers.

Japan has restructured its defence architecture and stated it will build a Multi-Domain Defense Force that will allow it to respond to threats from land, sea, air, space, cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. It has also sought to augment its military capabilities with the creation of an Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade, the retrofitting of its helicopter destroyers to take on fixed wing aircraft and increases in submarine, destroyer and air defence and strike capabilities.

Japanese policymakers have sought to eliminate constraints on the employment of such capabilities. The 2016 Peace and Security Legislation permits collective defence alongside allies and partners in several — albeit narrowly circumscribed — contingencies. The loosening of arms exports controls and proposed increase of the national defence budget to 2 per cent of GDP over time also signal paradigmatic shifts in Japan’s security posture.

Added to this is the emerging global dimension to Japan’s strategic policy. In addition to galvanising its defence alliance with the United States, Tokyo has built an impressive global network of strategic partners ranging from Australia, India and the Philippines in the Indo-Pacific to France and the United Kingdom in Europe, along with an institutional partnership with NATO.

Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Forces have also travelled further afield on military deployments across the Indo-Pacific and have established an overseas military base in the Horn of Africa. Japan has previously sent military forces on various peace keeping and anti-piracy operations and provided support for the US military intervention in Afghanistan.

While many observers may baulk at placing Japan in the same category as global military powers such as the United Kingdom and France — let alone the United States — Japan is going global with its military aspirations.

What makes developments in this direction more striking is the contrast with its prior strategic posture. Japan previously banned international arms exports, had a strict ceiling on its defence budget (1 per cent of GDP) and had no international defence partners outside of the United States. Japanese military forces were confined to defending Japanese national territory and had no global presence.

Hughes adopts the role of agent provocateur by encouraging readers to think more critically about how Japan’s defence posture and military capabilities are transforming. But there is a twist to Hughes’ apparent characterisation of a global military power. He contends that most of Japan’s globally orientated activities serve the purpose of drawing global allies and partners closer to its primary objective of homeland defence. If the price to pay for this is a more active contribution, it seems to be one that Tokyo is willing to pay.

Other countries view a better armed and more globally active Japan through different lenses. Supporters such as the United States and Australia welcome greater defence contributions from Japan. Yet China — which is in the midst of its own comprehensive military expansion — views any increase in Japan’s capabilities negatively.

Japan is clearly not yet a global military power in the way that the United States, United Kingdom or France are. The absence of offensive force projection capabilities such as strike aircraft carriers or long-range bombers and nuclear arms nominally disqualify it from this rank.

Despite its expanding horizons, Japan’s global military footprint remains limited so it can only be considered an incomplete great power.

How one characterises the nature of Japan’s power is not immaterial to policy. Hughes’ thought-provoking intervention in the debate challenges some of the entrenched assumptions and political euphemisms prevailing in current discourse.

Thomas Wilkins is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney and a Senior Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

eastasiaforum.org · by Thomas Wilkins · December 23, 2022

10. Open Secrets - Ukraine and the Next Intelligence Revolution

As anyone knows who reads my daily news, I am a great believer in the value of open source information.

Excerpts:

A new open-source intelligence agency would bring innovation, not just information, to the U.S. intelligence community by providing fertile soil for the growth of far-reaching changes in human capital, technology adoption, and collaboration with the burgeoning open-source intelligence ecosystem. Such an agency would be a powerful lever for attracting the workforce of tomorrow. Because it deals with unclassified information, the agency could recruit top scientists and engineers to work right away, without requiring them to wait months or years for security clearances. Locating open-source agency offices in technology hubs where engineers already live and want to stay—places such as Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle—would make it easier for talent to flow in and out of government. The result could be a corps of tech-savvy officials who rotate between public service and the private sector, acting as ambassadors between both worlds. They would increase the intelligence community’s presence and prestige in technology circles while bringing a continuous stream of fresh tech ideas back inside.

By working with unclassified material, the open-source agency could also help the intelligence community do a better and faster job of adopting new collection and analysis technologies. (The open-source agency could test new inventions and, if they proved effective, pass them along to agencies that work with secrets.) The agency would also be ideally positioned to engage with leading open-source intelligence organizations and individuals outside the government. These partnerships could help U.S. intelligence agencies outsource more of their work to responsible nongovernmental collectors and analysts, freeing up intelligence officials to focus their capabilities and clandestine collection efforts on missions that nobody else can do.

And there will still be many such missions. After all, even the best open-source intelligence has limits. Satellite imagery can reveal new Chinese missile silos but not what Chinese leaders intend to do with them. Identifying objects or tracking movements online is important, but generating insight requires more. Secret methods remain uniquely suited to understanding what foreign leaders know, believe, and desire. There is no open-source substitute for getting human spies inside a foreign leaders’ inner circle or penetrating an adversary’s communications system to uncover what that adversary is saying and writing. Analysts with clearances will also always be essential for assessing what classified discoveries mean, how credible they are, and how they fit with other, unclassified findings.

But secret agencies are no longer enough. The country faces a dangerous new era that includes great-power competition, renewed war in Europe, ongoing terrorist attacks, and fast-changing cyberattacks. New technologies are driving these threats and determining who will be able to understand and chart the future. To succeed, the U.S. intelligence community must adapt to a more open, technological world.

Open Secrets

Ukraine and the Next Intelligence Revolution

By Amy Zegart

January/February 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence · December 20, 2022

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a watershed moment for the world of intelligence. For weeks before the shelling began, Washington publicly released a relentless stream of remarkably detailed findings about everything from Russian troop movements to false-flag attacks the Kremlin would use to justify the invasion.

This disclosure strategy was new: spy agencies are accustomed to concealing intelligence, not revealing it. But it was very effective. By getting the truth out before Russian lies took hold, the United States was able to rally allies and quickly coordinate hard-hitting sanctions. Intelligence disclosures set Russian President Vladimir Putin on his back foot, wondering who and what in his government had been penetrated so deeply by U.S. agencies, and made it more difficult for other countries to hide behind Putin’s lies and side with Russia.

The disclosures were just the beginning. The war has ushered in a new era of intelligence sharing between Ukraine, the United States, and other allies and partners, which has helped counter false Russian narratives, defend digital systems from cyberattacks, and assisted Ukrainian forces in striking Russian targets on the battlefield. And it has brought to light a profound new reality: intelligence isn’t just for government spy agencies anymore.

Over the past year, private citizens and groups have been tracking what Russia is planning and doing in ways that were unimaginable in earlier conflicts. Journalists have reported battlefield developments using imagery from commercial space satellites. Former government and military officials have been monitoring on-the-ground daily events and offering over-the-horizon analyses about where the war is headed on Twitter. A volunteer team of students at Stanford University, led by former U.S. Army and open-source imagery analyst Allison Puccioni, has been providing reports to the United Nations about Russian human rights atrocities in Ukraine—uncovering and verifying events using commercial-satellite thermal and electro-optical imaging, TikTok videos, geolocation tools, and more. At the Institute for the Study of War, a go-to source for military experts and analysts, researchers have even created an interactive map of the conflict based entirely on unclassified, or open-source, intelligence.

Technological advances have been central to this evolution. It is, after all, the Internet, social media, satellites, automated analytics, and other breakthroughs that have enabled civilians to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence. But although new technologies have helped shine a light on Russian military activity, their effects are far from uniformly positive. For the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, new technologies are creating more threats at a far faster rate. They are dramatically increasing the amount of data that analysts must process. They are giving companies and individual citizens a newfound need for intelligence, so that these private entities can help safeguard the country’s interests. And they are giving new intelligence capabilities to organizations and individuals outside the U.S. government, as well as to more countries.

These shifts have been years in the making, and intelligence leaders are working hard to adapt to them. But anticipating the future in the new tech era demands more. Washington must embrace wholesale changes in order to understand and harness emerging technologies. It must, in particular, get serious about creating a new agency dedicated to open-source intelligence. Otherwise, the U.S. intelligence community will fall behind, leaving Americans more vulnerable to catastrophic surprises.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

When the Central Intelligence Agency was created, in 1947, the world was in an unusually precarious place. The allies had won World War II, but Soviet troops already threatened Europe. Repressive regimes were on the rise, democracies were weary and weak, and the international system was dividing into free spheres and illiberal ones. Amid this intensifying uncertainty and anxiety, the United States was called to lead a new global order. U.S. policymakers realized that they needed new capabilities for this role, including better intelligence. Centralizing intelligence in a new agency, they thought, would deliver timely insights about the future to prevent the next Pearl Harbor and win the Cold War.

In many ways, the present looks eerily similar to those early postwar years. The dog-eat-dog world of strong states using brute force to get what they want has returned. An authoritarian leader in Moscow is invading neighbors and again menacing all of Europe. Once more, democracies are looking fragile. The United States and its allies are engaged in yet another great-power competition—this time with China, a country whose rise looks less peaceful by the day, with its crackdowns on freedoms in Hong Kong, belligerent rhetoric about retaking Taiwan, and provocative military exercises that encircled the island. Even Marxism-Leninism is making a comeback. In China’s carefully choreographed 20th Party Congress, President Xi Jinping made it clear to party officials that ideology and personal loyalty were more important than continued economic liberalization. In case anyone missed the message, Xi’s economic reform-minded predecessor, Hu Jintao, was pulled from his chair and escorted out of party proceedings, perp-walk style, in full view of the press.

But looks can be deceiving. Thanks to technological innovations, the challenges of today differ greatly from postwar ones. Emerging technologies are transforming the planet in an unprecedented fashion and at an unprecedented pace. Together, inventions are making the world far more interconnected and altering the determinants of geopolitical advantage in fundamental ways. Increasingly, emerging technologies and data are major sources of national power, and they are intangible, harder to see and understand, and often created and controlled by companies, not governments. For the CIA and other intelligence agencies, understanding the geopolitical dangers and dynamics of the twenty-first century will likely be much harder than it was in the twentieth.

Near a Russian military helicopter, Horlivka Raion, Ukraine, September 2022

Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters

Consider the Internet. In the mid-1990s, less than one percent of the global population was online. Now sixty-six percent of the world is connected, from the far reaches of the Arctic to Bedouin tents in the desert. In the last three years alone, more than a billion more people have come online. This connectivity has already transformed global politics, for better and for worse. Social media has fueled protests against autocracies, such as the Arab Spring and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. But it has also empowered a new wave of government techno-surveillance led by Beijing and has enabled Russia’s massive disinformation operations to influence elections and undermine democracies from within.

Digital connectivity is not the only technology upending the world order. Artificial intelligence is disrupting nearly every industry—from medicine to trucking—to the point that one expert now estimates AI could eliminate up to 40 percent of jobs worldwide in the next 25 years. It is changing how wars are fought, automating everything from logistics to cyberdefenses. It is even making it possible for states to build unmanned fighter jets that could overwhelm defenses with swarms and maneuver faster and better than human pilots. Little wonder, then, that Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that whoever leads in AI development “will become the ruler of the world.” China has also made no secret of its plans to become the global AI leader by 2030.

Technological breakthroughs are also making it far easier for anyone—including weak states and terrorist groups—to detect events unfolding on earth from space. Commercial satellite capabilities have increased dramatically, offering eyes in the sky for anyone who wants them. Satellite launches more than doubled between 2016 and 2018; now, more than 5,000 satellites circle the earth, some no larger than a loaf of bread. Commercial satellites have less sophisticated sensing capabilities than do their spying counterparts, but civilian technologies are rapidly improving. Some commercial satellites now have resolutions so sharp that they can identify manhole covers, signs, and even road conditions. Others have the ability to detect radio frequency emissions; observe vehicle movements and nuclear cooling plumes; and operate at night, in cloudy weather, or through dense vegetation and camouflage. Constellations of small satellites can revisit the same location multiple times a day to detect changes over short periods—something that was once impossible. All these changes are leveling the intelligence playing field, and not always in a good way. In 2020, for example, Iran used commercial satellite images to monitor U.S. forces in Iraq before launching a ballistic missile attack that wounded more than 100 people.

Other technological advances with national security implications include quantum computing, which could eventually unlock the encryption protecting nearly all the world’s data, making even highly classified information available to adversaries. Synthetic biology is enabling scientists to engineer living organisms, paving the way for what could be revolutionary improvements in the production of food, medicine, data storage, and weapons of war.

In modern warfare, weapons don’t look like weapons.

Understanding the promise and perils of these and other emerging technologies is an essential intelligence mission. The U.S. government needs to know who is poised to win key technological competitions and what the effects could be. It must assess how future wars will be fought and won. It must figure out how new technologies could tackle global challenges such as climate change. It needs to determine how adversaries will use data and tech tools to coerce others, commit atrocities, evade sanctions, develop dangerous weapons, and secure other advantages.

But these important questions are becoming harder to answer because the landscape of innovation has changed and expanded, making inventions more difficult to track and understand. In the past, technological breakthroughs, such as the Internet and GPS, were invented by U.S. government agencies and commercialized later by the private sector. Most innovations that affected national security did not have widespread commercial application, so they could be classified at birth and, if necessary, restricted forever. Today, the script has flipped. Technological innovations are more likely to be “dual use”: to have both commercial and military applications. They are also far more likely to be invented in the private sector, where they are funded by foreign investors, developed by a multinational workforce, and sold to global customers in private and public sectors alike.

Those that are born in the private sector are more widely accessible and not as easily restricted. Artificial intelligence, for example, has become so prevalent and intuitive that high school students with no coding background can make deepfakes—AI-generated, manipulated videos that show people saying and doing things they never said or did. In March 2022, someone released a deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky telling Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms. More recently, deepfakes impersonating Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, have been used to dupe Ukrainian officials into revealing information about the war effort. McFaul deepfakes have become so pervasive that the real McFaul had to tweet warnings asking people not to fall for what he called “a new Russian weapon of war.”

These changes in the innovation landscape are giving private-sector leaders new power and national security officials fresh challenges. Power isn’t just shifting abroad. Power is shifting at home. U.S. social media platforms now find themselves on the frontlines of information warfare, deciding what is real and what is fake, what speech is allowed and what speech is not. Startup founders are inventing capabilities that can be used by enemies they can’t foresee with consequences they can’t control. Meanwhile, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are struggling to adopt critical new technologies from the outside and move at the speed of invention instead of at the pace of bureaucracy. Private-sector leaders have responsibilities they don’t want, and government leaders want capabilities they don’t have.

UP TO SPEED

Intelligence is often misunderstood. Although spy agencies deal with secrets, they are not in the secrets business. Their core purpose is delivering insights to policymakers and anticipating the future faster and better than adversaries. Clandestinely acquired information from sources such as intercepted phone calls or firsthand spy reports is important, but secrets are just part of the picture. Most information in a typical intelligence report is unclassified or publicly available. And raw information—secret or not—is rarely valuable on its own because it is often incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory, poorly sourced, misleading, deliberately deceptive, or just plain wrong. Analysis is what turns uncertain findings into insight by synthesizing disparate pieces of information and assessing its context, credibility, and meaning.

Intelligence insights are not always correct. But when they are, they can be priceless. When U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, it gave Washington critical time to help arm Kyiv and unify the West around a response. But it may soon become harder for spy agencies to replicate this success because the global-threat landscape has never been as crowded or as complicated as it is today—and with threats that move faster than ever. It is now more difficult for intelligence officers to do their jobs. After spending nearly half a century largely focused on countering the Soviet Union and two decades fighting terrorists, they today must confront a diverse multitude of dangers. They must deal with transnational threats such as pandemics and climate change; great-power competition with China and Russia; terrorism and other threats from weak and failed states; and cyberattacks that steal, spy, disrupt, destroy, and deceive at stunning speeds and scale. Intelligence agencies are, to put it mildly, overtaxed.

Technology makes today’s threat list not only longer but more formidable. For centuries, countries defended themselves by building powerful militaries and taking advantage of good geography. But in cyberspace, anyone can attack from anywhere, without pushing through air, land, and sea defenses. In fact, the most powerful countries are now often the most vulnerable because their power relies on digital systems for business, education, health care, military operations, and more. These states can be hit by big attacks that disable their critical infrastructure. They can be subject to repeated small attacks that add up to devastating damage before security officials even know it. China, for example, has robbed its way to technological advantage in a variety of industries, from fighter jets to pharmaceuticals, by stealing from U.S. companies one hack at a time, in what FBI Director Christopher Wray has called one of the greatest transfers of wealth in human history and “the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.”

The line between the wisdom of crowds and the danger of mobs is thin.

Russia has also used cyberattacks to great effect, proving that technology can allow malignant actors to hack minds—not just machines. Russian operatives created bots and fake social media profiles impersonating Americans that spread disinformation across the United States during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, polarizing the country and undermining its democracy. Today, China could turn Americans against each other without even using U.S. tech platforms. The Chinese firm ByteDance owns TikTok, the popular social media app that boasts more than a billion users, including an estimated 135 million Americans, or 40 percent of the U.S. population. Both Democrats and Republicans now worry that TikTok could enable the Chinese government to vacuum all sorts of data about Americans and launch massive influence campaigns that serve Beijing’s interests—all under the guise of giving U.S. consumers what they want. In today’s world of information warfare, weapons don’t look like weapons.

Because cyberattacks can happen so quickly, and because policymakers can track breaking events and get hot takes with the touch of a button, U.S. intelligence agencies also need to operate with newfound speed. Timeliness, of course, has always been important to spycraft: in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, U.S. President John F. Kennedy had 13 days to pore over intelligence and consider his policy options after surveillance photographs from a U-2 spy plane revealed Soviet nuclear installations in Cuba, and on September 11, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush had less than 13 hours after the World Trade Center attacks to review intelligence and announce a response. Today, the time for presidents to consider intelligence before making major policy decisions may be closer to 13 minutes or even 13 seconds.

But moving fast also carries risks. It takes time to vet a source’s credibility, tap expert knowledge across fields, and consider alternative explanations for a finding. Without careful intelligence analysis, leaders may make premature or even dangerous decisions. The potential consequences of rash action became evident in December 2016, when a news story reported that Israel’s former defense minister was threatening a nuclear attack against Pakistan if Islamabad deployed troops in Syria. Pakistan’s Defense Minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, quickly tweeted: “Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh. Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too AH.” But the original story had been fabricated. Asif had dashed off his response before finding out the truth. Satisfying policymakers’ need for speed while carefully collecting, vetting, and assessing intelligence has always been a delicate balance, but that balance is getting harder to strike.

NEED TO KNOW

Intelligence agencies must deal with a data environment that is vast, not just fast. The volume of information available online has become almost unimaginably immense. According to the World Economic Forum, in 2019, Internet users posted 500 million tweets, sent 294 billion emails, and uploaded 350 million photos to Facebook every day. Every second, the Internet transmits roughly one petabyte of data: the amount of data that an individual would have consumed after binge-watching movies nonstop for over three years.

U.S. intelligence agencies are already collecting far more information than humans can analyze effectively. In 2018, the intelligence community was capturing more than three National Football League seasons’ worth of high-definition imagery a day on each sensor they deployed in a combat theater. According to a source at the Department of Defense, in 2020, one soldier deployed to the Middle East was so concerned about the crushing flow of classified intelligence emails he was receiving that he decided to count them. The total: 10,000 emails in 120 days. These quantities are likely to grow. Some estimates show that the amount of digital data on earth doubles every 24 months.

And increasingly, intelligence agencies must satisfy a wider range of customers—including people who do not command troops, hold security clearances, or even work in government. Today, plenty of important decision-makers live worlds apart from Washington, making consequential policy choices in boardrooms and living rooms—not the White House Situation Room. Big Tech companies, including Microsoft and Google, need intelligence about cyberthreats to and through their systems. Most of the United States’ critical infrastructure is controlled by private firms, such as energy companies, and they also need information about cyber risks that could disrupt or destroy their systems. Voters need intelligence about how foreign governments are interfering in elections and waging operations to polarize society. And because cyberthreats do not stop at the border, U.S. security increasingly depends on sharing intelligence faster and better with allies and partners.

To serve this broader array of customers, the U.S. intelligence community is making unclassified products and engaging with the outside world to an extent it has not before. The National Security Agency, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies are now creating public service videos about foreign threats to U.S. elections. In September 2022, the CIA launched a podcast called The Langley Files, aimed at demystifying the agency and educating the public. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyzes satellite imagery and other geospatial intelligence, launched a project called Tearline—a collaboration with think tanks, universities, and nonprofits to create unclassified reports about climate change, Russian troop movements, human rights issues, and more. In 2021, the NSA began issuing joint advisories with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency detailing major cyberthreats, exposing the entities behind them, and explaining how firms could shore up their security. In October, these three agencies even released the technical details of the top 20 cyber vulnerabilities exploited by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. and allied networks, along with meticulous instructions about how to improve cyber defenses. The U.S. government is now also issuing advisories with foreign intelligence partners.

The success of this public-facing strategy has been on full display in Ukraine. It helped the United States warn the world about Russia’s invasion. It helped rally the West behind a fast response. And it continues to frustrate Moscow. Most recently, after Washington revealed intelligence indicating that senior Russian military leaders were discussing using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Xi issued a rare public warning against the “use of, or threats to use, nuclear weapons.” Xi’s “no limits” relationship with Putin suddenly had limits after all.

Crowd Surfing

In addition to more customers, technology has given U.S. intelligence agencies more competition. The explosion of open-source information online, commercial satellite capabilities, and the rise of AI are enabling all sorts of individuals and private organizations to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence.

In the past several years, for instance, the amateur investigators of Bellingcat—a volunteer organization that describes itself as “an intelligence agency for the people”—have made all kinds of discoveries. Bellingcat identified the Russian hit team that tried to assassinate former Russian spy officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom and located supporters of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Europe. It also proved that Russians were behind the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine.

Bellingcat is not the only civilian intelligence initiative. When the Iranian government claimed in 2020 that a small fire had broken out in an industrial shed, two U.S. researchers working independently and using nothing more than their computers and the Internet proved within hours that Tehran was lying. As David Albright and Fabian Hinz quickly found, the building was actually a nuclear centrifuge assembly facility at Iran’s main uranium enrichment site. The damage was so extensive that the fire may well have been caused by an explosion—raising the possibility of sabotage. In 2021, nuclear sleuths at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California used commercial satellite imagery to discover more than 200 new intercontinental ballistic missile silos in China, a finding that could signal historic increases in China’s nuclear arsenal.

A satellite picture of damage in Mariupol, Ukraine, October 2022

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty

For U.S. intelligence agencies, this burgeoning world of open-source intelligence brings significant new opportunities as well as risks. On the positive side, citizen-sleuths offer more eyes and ears around the world scanning for developments and dangers as they arise. The wisdom of the crowd can be a powerful tool, especially for piecing together tiny bits of information. Unbound by bureaucracy, open-source intelligence analysts can work quickly. And because open-source information is by definition declassified, it can be shared easily within government agencies, across them, and with the public without revealing sensitive sources or methods.

But these features are also flaws. Open-source intelligence is available to everyone, everywhere, no matter their motives, national loyalties, or capabilities. Citizen-sleuths do not have to answer to anyone or train anywhere, and that invites all kinds of hazards. Volunteer analysts are rewarded for being fast (especially online) but are rarely punished for being wrong—which means they are more likely to make errors. And the line between the wisdom of crowds and the danger of mobs is thin. After a 2013 terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon killed three people and wounded more than 260 others, Reddit users jumped into action. Posting pet theories, unconfirmed chatter on police scanners, and other crowdsourced tidbits of information, amateur investigators fingered two “suspects” and the mainstream media publicized the findings. Both turned out to be innocent.

These weaknesses can create serious headaches for governments. When errors go viral, intelligence agencies have to burn time and resources fact-checking the work of others and reassuring policymakers that the agencies’ original intelligence assessments should not change. Accurate open-source discoveries can cause problems, too. Findings, for example, might force policymakers into corners by making information public that, if kept secret, could have left room for compromise and graceful exits from crises. To diffuse the Cuban missile crisis, for example, Kennedy agreed to secretly remove U.S. nuclear weapons from Turkey if the Soviets took their missiles out of Cuba. Had satellite imagery been publicly available, Kennedy might have been too worried about domestic political backlash to make a deal.

Open Relationship

U.S. intelligence leaders know that their success in the twenty-first century hinges on adapting to a world of more threats, more speed, more data, more customers, and more competitors. Their agencies have been working hard to meet these challenges by launching organizational reforms, technology innovation programs, and new initiatives to recruit top science and engineering talent. They have had some important successes. But these are difficult problems to overcome, and so far, the intelligence community’s efforts have been piecemeal.

The rate of progress is especially concerning given that the challenges are well known, the stakes are high, and intelligence weaknesses have been festering for years. Multiple reports and articles (including one in this magazine) have found that intelligence agencies are not keeping pace with technological developments. These reports point to an unfortunate reality. Washington cannot address its present challenges by making incremental changes to existing agencies. Instead, developing U.S. intelligence capabilities for the twenty-first century requires building something new: a dedicated, open-source intelligence agency focused on combing through unclassified data and discerning what it means.

Creating a 19th intelligence agency may seem duplicative and unnecessary. But it is essential. Despite Washington’s best efforts, open-source intelligence has always been a second-class citizen in the U.S. intelligence community because it has no agency with the budget, hiring power, or seat at the table to champion it. As long as open-source intelligence remains embedded in secret agencies that value clandestine information above all, it will languish. A culture of secrecy will continue to strangle the adoption of cutting-edge technical tools from the commercial sector. Agencies will struggle to attract and retain talent that is desperately needed to help them understand and use new technologies. And efforts to harness the power of open-source intelligence collectors and analysts outside government will fall short.

Even the best open-source intelligence has limits.

A new open-source intelligence agency would bring innovation, not just information, to the U.S. intelligence community by providing fertile soil for the growth of far-reaching changes in human capital, technology adoption, and collaboration with the burgeoning open-source intelligence ecosystem. Such an agency would be a powerful lever for attracting the workforce of tomorrow. Because it deals with unclassified information, the agency could recruit top scientists and engineers to work right away, without requiring them to wait months or years for security clearances. Locating open-source agency offices in technology hubs where engineers already live and want to stay—places such as Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle—would make it easier for talent to flow in and out of government. The result could be a corps of tech-savvy officials who rotate between public service and the private sector, acting as ambassadors between both worlds. They would increase the intelligence community’s presence and prestige in technology circles while bringing a continuous stream of fresh tech ideas back inside.

By working with unclassified material, the open-source agency could also help the intelligence community do a better and faster job of adopting new collection and analysis technologies. (The open-source agency could test new inventions and, if they proved effective, pass them along to agencies that work with secrets.) The agency would also be ideally positioned to engage with leading open-source intelligence organizations and individuals outside the government. These partnerships could help U.S. intelligence agencies outsource more of their work to responsible nongovernmental collectors and analysts, freeing up intelligence officials to focus their capabilities and clandestine collection efforts on missions that nobody else can do.

And there will still be many such missions. After all, even the best open-source intelligence has limits. Satellite imagery can reveal new Chinese missile silos but not what Chinese leaders intend to do with them. Identifying objects or tracking movements online is important, but generating insight requires more. Secret methods remain uniquely suited to understanding what foreign leaders know, believe, and desire. There is no open-source substitute for getting human spies inside a foreign leaders’ inner circle or penetrating an adversary’s communications system to uncover what that adversary is saying and writing. Analysts with clearances will also always be essential for assessing what classified discoveries mean, how credible they are, and how they fit with other, unclassified findings.

But secret agencies are no longer enough. The country faces a dangerous new era that includes great-power competition, renewed war in Europe, ongoing terrorist attacks, and fast-changing cyberattacks. New technologies are driving these threats and determining who will be able to understand and chart the future. To succeed, the U.S. intelligence community must adapt to a more open, technological world.

AMY ZEGART is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the author of Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence.

Foreign Affairs · by Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence · December 20, 2022

11. Army School Honors Two Special Forces Soldiers

Honoring two great American heroes from different eras. It was an honor to serve with Nate Chapman in Okinawa. It is gratifying to see him honored this way.

Army School Honors Two Special Forces Soldiers

vfw.org

Fort Bragg’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School held a ribbon cutting ceremony in June for two buildings named in honor of two of the most famous Green Berets in Army history.

The North Carolina school’s newly opened Chapman Hall, which was named in honor of Army Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Chapman, will house advanced skills and network courses, as well as headquarters for six companies and five different training battalions, according to an Army statement.

The campus’s other new building, Volckmann Hall, is named in honor of Army Brig. Gen. Russell Volckmann.

Retired Lt. Gen. Bennet Sacolick, former commander of the Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, speaks in front of the special warfare center on June 23 at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg. Officials at the school held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of Chapman Hall, named for Army Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Chapman, and Volckmann Hall, named for Army Brig. Gen. Russell Volckmann. Photo by US Army.According to the Army, Volckmann Hall will house the headquarters of the 1st Special Warfare Training Group (Airborne), the Army’s Warrant Officer Institute and the service’s Special Forces

Officer Course.

AFGHANISTAN WAR’S FIRST KIA

Chapman was a Special Forces communications sergeant.On Jan. 4, 2002, he was the first uniformed U.S. servicemember killed in the Afghanistan War. Chapman volunteered to be a part of the operation, according to official Army history. At the time, Chapman, an Ohio native, was a part of 3rd Bn., 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne).

Chapman, a career soldier, enlisted in the Army in 1988. He completed basic training and advanced individual training as an infantryman, as well as parachutist and Ranger training, at Georgia’s Fort Benning.

Chapman in 1989 participated in Operation Just Cause in Panama. He was assigned to A Co., 2nd Bn., 75th Ranger Regt. At the time, as a part of 3rd Bn, 47th Inf. Regt., Chapman participated in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm.

After returning stateside later that year, Chapman volunteered for Army Special Forces training, then graduated as a Green Beret in December 1992. As a Special Forces communications soldier, Chapman took part in the 1994-95 Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti.

GREEN BERET FOUNDER

Volckmann — a graduate of the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York — is considered by many to be a “founding father” of Army Special Forces. The former Army flag officer fought in World War II and the Korean War.

In the early 1940s, Volckmann was a part of the Philippines campaign, including the Battle of Bataan.

After the war, the then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower directed Volckmann to write the Army’s first counterinsurgency doctrine due to his experience in guerrilla warfare of WWII.

Volckmann later became the executive officer of the Special Activities Group — Far East Command. As XO, he directed guerrilla missions behind North Korean lines.

After the Korean War, Volckmann retired in 1957. He died in 1982 in his home state of Iowa.

This article is featured in the 2022 November/December issue of VFW magazine, and was written by Dave Spiva, associate editor for VFW magazine.

vfw.org

12. Joe Biden inches toward war with Iran, makes Israel full military partner

Excerpts:

"Israel brings some very unique capabilities in terms of their military component that they believe they can share with their Arab partners in the region," General Kurilla said in May in his Senate nomination hearing to become the next CENTCOM commander. Kurilla sees a closer military coalition between Israel and the Arab states over Iran. If he and other Pentagon leaders are successful in this goal, a region-wide military alliance will be brought to the Middle East.

"Finally, the U.S. military is openly reaping the benefits of Israel's military prowess and technology," says a Pentagon planner who has been involved in the Israel changes. "Openly ... that's the key word." The United States already deploys logistical support units, radar and an air defense unit in Israel, says the planner, granted anonymity to discuss classified matters. "Next up is more visits and joint training and eventually military bases and then a NATO-like military alliance. All in the name of Iran and Russia and the transition to major war. But will Israel's neighbors go along? Will all of the region unify to prepare for war with Iran? That's the major question."

Joe Biden inches toward war with Iran, makes Israel full military partner

Newsweek · by William M. Arkin · December 21, 2022

Preparing for any potential war against Iran, the Biden administration has formally elevated Israel in military planning. Israel's changed status comes as the U.S. military refocuses from the 'war on terror' to potential combat with the big four—China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

As Israel has become a full-fledged military partner, the U.S. intelligence community is also putting more emphasis on its Hebrew language program to spy on its number-one Mideast ally.

For the Pentagon, Israel is the most prized military and intelligence partner in the Middle East, with its vast combat experience and advanced technologies. With the end of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with the brokering of the Abraham Accords by the Trump administration, Washington sees an opportunity to incorporate Israel into a new regional alliance. The Accords established diplomatic relations between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors.

"Israel is coming out of the closet, allowed now to openly cooperate with the [U.S.] military while at the same time being denied access to another closet," says a senior intelligence official, referring to the world of American intelligence. The official, who requested anonymity to discuss military planning, says that for some things, such as targeting, exchanges are part of the new military alliance. But where U.S.-Israeli interests might diverge, such as counterintelligence against Israeli spying, or uncovering secrets about Israel's own nuclear arsenal, the United States has redoubled its collection efforts.

Joe Biden caught admitting Iran nuclear deal "is dead" in video

President Biden signed a major change of the biennial Unified Command Plan last year, codifying the change in Israel's position in U.S. military planning. The Unified Command Plan is the highest level document that determines every command's area of operations. UCP 2021 shifted Israel to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the command responsible for the Middle East from its previous assignment as part of European Command (EUCOM). European Command oversaw the military dimensions of the special relationship, working with the country to defend it in very specific circumstances against its neighbors.

According to the Pentagon, the previous system of special channels outside the Middle East allowed CENTCOM to build a coalition among Arab allies without having the complication of a relationship with Israel—a sworn enemy to many of those countries. But it segregated Israel from formally partnering with CENTCOM and contingency planning against a common enemy.

"CENTCOM will now work to implement the U.S. Government commitment to a holistic approach to regional security and cooperation with our partners," the Tampa-based command said after it was given responsibility over Israel. "The easing of tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors subsequent to the Abraham Accords has provided a strategic opportunity for the United States to align key partners against shared threats in the Middle East. Israel is a leading strategic partner for the United States, and this will open up additional opportunities for cooperation with our U.S. Central Command partners while maintaining strong cooperation between Israel and our European allies," the Pentagon announced.

US President Joe Biden and Israel's caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid sign a security pledge in Jerusalem, on July 14, 2022. MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Government sources tell Newsweek that behind the seeming bureaucratic adjustment, the new assignment is the most profound change for the U.S. military since Israel's founding. The hope, some might say pipedream, is to pave the way for a regional military alliance similar to NATO in Europe, not only to prepare for war with Iran but also thwart Russian and Chinese encroachment in the region.

Intelligence on Israel

New status and cooperation notwithstanding, Israel is consistently at the top of U.S. intelligence priorities.

Israel is a world military leader and an expert in many forms of modern warfare—air and missile defense, directed energy weapons such as lasers, and unmanned systems—that the Pentagon perceives are crucial in any future battle. Israel possesses nuclear weapons and has unilateral policies and plans against its adversaries that are of interest to the top decision-makers in Washington. In dealing with Israel, Washington has followed two, sometimes dueling tracks of cooperation and rivalry.

The CIA is responsible for relations with Israel's intelligence agencies—and with collecting information on the Israeli leadership. The U.S. armed forces are responsible for military intelligence on everything from Israel's technology to its capabilities and plans. Within the military, the NSA eavesdrops on Israeli communications—while also cooperating with its Israeli counterparts, who in term spy on its Arab neighbors and Iran.

About 1,000 qualified Hebrew linguists in the U.S. government work on questions related to Israel. Most of these Hebrew linguists have overt functions—in diplomacy, as defense attaches, and liaisons. But about one-third work in intelligence collection and analysis specifically related to spying on Israel. The NSA—responsible for signals intelligence—currently has some 250 Hebrew linguists who translate secure Israel government dispatches, military communications, and highly targeted cell phone traffic. A significant number also monitor and analyze Israeli press, social media and other open source communications in Hebrew. (Hundreds more Hebrew linguists work under contract, both at the NSA and other intelligence agencies, assisting government employees and members of the armed services.)

By 2025, according to intelligence sources, the number of qualified military Hebrew linguists is programmed to double. That number is increasing, according to intelligence documents and government sources, partly to service the increased cooperation.

Hebrew language intelligence training is centered at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where prospective linguists also learn Jewish and Israeli history, cultural studies, and historical and "modern antisemitism analysis." From there, the eavesdroppers go to Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, where the NSA operates its massive Middle East eavesdropping and analysis center in support of the military. (The most sensitive political intelligence is handled at Ft. Meade in Maryland.) Most Hebrew linguists in the intelligence field are assigned to these two bases, as well as to ship- and air-based collection platforms.

China Targets Israeli Technology in Bid for Global Dominance As U.S. Frets

Israel is a difficult country to spy on, not only because of its technical expertise and its routine focus on "operational security" against its neighbors and other adversaries. That means that it practices good communications and cybersecurity discipline and uses sophisticated cryptography in coding its messages. Much of the U.S. intelligence collection effort consequently is focused on micro-targeting of individuals (i.e., their cell phones, computers and other devices) where intelligence can be gleaned from more easily exploitable devices.

"The more that Israel is a credible military opponent of Iran, the very reason for this shake-up, the more that they are also suspect for the very capabilities that we are helping to create and improve," says the senior intelligence official who has worked on the relationship. "This is a case of 'keep your enemies close and your friends closer,'" the official says.

(Israel has consistently denied spying on the United States since relations were soured by the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, who pleaded guilty of selling military secrets to Israel, but allegations of different forms of espionage have continued over the years.)

Newsweek reached out to the Israeli Defense Forces for comment but had not received a response at time of publication.

Making friends

Only the amicable aspect of the U.S.-Israeli relationship was on show when chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley hosted his counterpart, incoming head of the Israeli General Staff Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi, at the Pentagon on December 5.

According to the Defense Department readout, the two discussed "coordination to defend against threats posed by Iran" among other issues. The meeting between the two military heads wound up a whirlwind of joint military activities in the past year since President Biden approved Israel's new status, including similar exchanges by high-level commanders, joint exercises and bilateral meetings regarding everything from cyber security to missile defense.

The December meeting followed a Washington visit by Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi, current chief Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, where he met with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. According to the White House readout of that meeting, their discussions "emphasized their shared determination to address security challenges impacting the Middle East, including the threats posed by Iran and its proxies."

American CENTCOM commander Gen. Michael ("Erik") Kurilla then went to Israel to meet with Kohavi, making his fourth visit in just seven months since he had become commander of CENTCOM. Calling the military alliance "ironclad," Kurilla said that the Middle East "is at the center of America's strategic competition with Russia and China." The true focus for CENTCOM, though, is Iran.

Speaking of Kurilla's visit, Kohavi said that the two countries were "developing joint military capabilities at an accelerated rate" against Tehran. According to the Times of Israel, the military-to-military exchange included discussion of the "joint use of force" against Tehran.

"Our mutual commitment is demonstrated on a weekly basis. We are operating together on all fronts to gather intelligence, neutralize threats, and prepare for various scenarios in either one or multiple arenas," Kohavi was quoted as saying.

As part of Kurilla's visit, he went to Nevatim airbase, which hosts Israel's new wing of American-made F-35i fighter jets, the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal, which the United States has sold to Israel. "Israel maintains a remarkably impressive airpower capability," Kurilla said at Nevatim.

Days after Kurilla's visit, U.S. Air Force and Israeli fighter jets took to the skies above the eastern Mediterranean Sea to practice combined operations. The Air Force package included KC-10 "Extender" aerial refuelers, planes that can extend the range of fighters for long-range strikes. (In March 2020, the State Department approved a possible Foreign Military Sale to Israel of up to eight KC-46 aerial refueling aircraft to give the country its own long-range strike capability.)

General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, made his fourth visit to Israel in mid-November, here visiting the northern border alongside commanding general of the IDF Northern Command, Major General Ori Gordin. U.S. Central Command

In addition to numerous visits and exchanges by other CENTCOM commanders, additional components of the U.S. military have also accelerated visits and training. The Army has increased air defense cooperation. This includes an updated Juniper Cobra exercise and a new Combined Air Defense Working Group. The Missouri National Guard has a training partnership with Israel. The U.S. and Israeli navies have increased their level of joint training and port visits. In January, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency and its Israeli counterpart also conducted a flight test of the jointly developed Arrow 3 missile interceptor. The military exercise Cyber Dome VIi was also held between the two nation's cyber commands earlier this month.

The Ukraine war, in particular, has focused U.S. military attention on missile defense and counter-drone operations, both of which are areas of expertise for the Israel military. This summer, for example, the U.S. and Israeli navies conducted the bilateral exercise called Digital Shield to test out future unmanned "swarming" and artificial intelligence warfare.

Kurilla, formerly commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, has been a fan of increasing the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. "We can take large pieces of terrain and rapidly identify hundreds of targets, prioritize them based on a high priority target list that determines which ones we should strike with the resources that we have," Kurilla said in May. "... That happens in seconds versus what would take hours normally, or sometimes even days to be able to develop these targets. And it's doing it in real-time at the edge in our command posts and not being tied just back into a garrison computing environment."

As part of its new status, Israel has also participated in a number of multinational exercises, including the American-led Rim of the Pacific 22 exercise in Asia and Global Sentinel 22, a war game focused on space warfare. Neither of those two exercises included any other Mideast nations, though military sources say that such match-ups will soon include both Israel and Arab states as participants.

Bahrain, one of the Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel, has allowed Israeli government and military delegations to visit and work with the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet, which is based there. Last December, an Israeli government national security delegation arrived in Bahrain to meet at Fifth Fleet headquarters, an unprecedented visit. In March, Fifth Fleet commander Vice Adm. Brad Cooper also hosted Lt. Gen. Kohavi at its headquarters.

The U.S. and Israel navies held Digital Shield in the Gulf of Aqaba in September, focusing on the latest technologies and techniques of unmanned systems and artificial intelligence. Conducted by the new Task Force 59, based in Bahrain, the exercise included Devil Ray T-38 and Saildrone Explorer unmanned surface vessels. U.S. Navy

Israel as partner

Israel has always been a perplexing country for the U.S. military: in war plans, it was a country to be defended in the case of the big "if" but never acknowledged as such. As a result, Israel was treated as special, different and secret, assigned to a command outside the Middle East. After the Israel-Arab war in 1973, the oil embargo that followed, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution, the idea of creating a special command for the region solidified into a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force. To help defend U.S. interests in the region, the new Florida-headquartered CENTCOM was set up with President Ronald Reagan's approval in December 1982, but because of the complexities of the region EUCOM retained responsibility for the so-called "confrontation states of Israel, Syria and Lebanon" as well as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.

That arrangement remained in place until 9/11 and the start of the war on terror, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested that Israel, Syria and Lebanon be added to the CENTCOM portfolio. Everyone except the Air Force rejected the idea, arguing that change might influence the "peace process" and that EUCOM and Israel had built a strong working relationship. Overruling the generals and admirals, Rumsfeld came up with an end-run, getting President George W. Bush to agree to move Syria and Lebanon to CENTCOM. Only Israel would stay a part of the European command.

With the end of the war on terror, at least formally, the Joint Chiefs again took on the question of Israel. An African Command had been created and was now responsible for North Africa, leaving Israel as the sole anomaly. What is more, CENTCOM needed relevance in the post-terrorism world of military planning. The discussions were already underway when President Biden took office. Military sources agree that the Abraham Accords facilitated the change, even if the main objective behind the renewed military alliance was focused on Iran.

"Israel brings some very unique capabilities in terms of their military component that they believe they can share with their Arab partners in the region," General Kurilla said in May in his Senate nomination hearing to become the next CENTCOM commander. Kurilla sees a closer military coalition between Israel and the Arab states over Iran. If he and other Pentagon leaders are successful in this goal, a region-wide military alliance will be brought to the Middle East.

"Finally, the U.S. military is openly reaping the benefits of Israel's military prowess and technology," says a Pentagon planner who has been involved in the Israel changes. "Openly ... that's the key word." The United States already deploys logistical support units, radar and an air defense unit in Israel, says the planner, granted anonymity to discuss classified matters. "Next up is more visits and joint training and eventually military bases and then a NATO-like military alliance. All in the name of Iran and Russia and the transition to major war. But will Israel's neighbors go along? Will all of the region unify to prepare for war with Iran? That's the major question."

Newsweek · by William M. Arkin · December 21, 2022

13. Ukraine's heavy artillery, not high-tech anti-tank missiles, is what stopped Russia's rush to Kyiv, experts say

The King of Battle.

Ukraine's heavy artillery, not high-tech anti-tank missiles, is what stopped Russia's rush to Kyiv, experts say

msn.com · by insider@insider.com (Michael Peck) 1 day ago

Ukrainian troops fended off a Russian advance on Kyiv in the first weeks of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Coverage of the fighting often focused on the role of anti-tank missiles in stopping that advance.
But it was "massed fires" from artillery units that enabled Ukraine to turn back Russia's tanks.

Ukraine has wrecked Russia's invasion plans, and these game-changing weapons have helped them do it

Western countries have sent Ukraine a variety of weapons to help it fend off Russia's invasion.
At various stages of the war, certain systems have proven to be decisive and critical for Kyiv.
These weapons include anti-tank weapons, drones, and rocket artillery systems.

Throughout Russia's war in Ukraine, Western countries and NATO allies have outfitted Kyiv's forces with various weapons and combat systems to help them not only stop enemy forces from advancing but at times actually drive them back.

Among these weapons are shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and mobile rocket launchers — game-changing systems that have helped Ukraine derail Russian President Vladimir Putin's campaign, whether it was defending Kyiv in the early spring or keeping Russian forces at bay in eastern Ukraine over the summer.

The US is the largest provider of security assistance for Ukraine. According to a November 23 Pentagon assessment, the Biden administration has committed over $19 billion in military aid since Moscow invaded on February 24. The next-highest contributor is the UK, which has committed £2.3 billion ($2.7 billion) as of early November.

Additional sources of firepower committed to Ukraine include Germany, Turkey, Australia, and Canada, among others.

"There's been several weapons systems that Western security partners of Ukraine have provided that have played a crucial role," George Barros, an expert with Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War, told Insider. "If it were not for Western security assistance to Ukraine, Russia would've already won the war."

Here are some of the game-changing weapons that have helped Ukraine spoil Putin's invasion plans and even turn the tides of the war.

Shoulder-launched anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons

During the early stages of the war, invading Russian forces quickly advanced on the Ukrainian capital city, Kyiv, after Russia spent months of gathering troops and equipment along the border. In the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance, Putin's troops were, however, forced to withdraw from the region and refocus their efforts on eastern Ukraine.

In these early days and weeks, shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles — like the UK-provided Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW) and US-provided FGM-148 Javelin — became crucial tools for Ukraine to defend against approaching armor and tanks.

These weapons were "very important to provide individual Ukrainian soldiers firepower to be able to defeat Russian armor as they were approaching during the initial phase of the invasion," Barros said.

The Pentagon estimates that Russia has lost half its main battle tanks in Ukraine.

Another important shoulder-launched weapon was the FIM-92 Stinger, which is an American-made portable air-defense system. These weapons, Barros said, were capable of downing Russian helicopters and aircraft conducting airborne assault operations.

Among some other systems, such as artillery systems, these three lightweight weapons helped Ukrainian forces defend Kyiv and other regions in the early days of the war.

Small arms and ammunition

Although they have received far less attention than some other weapon systems, certain small arms and their ammunition were critical for Ukraine early on in the war. These weapons were used to arm members of the Ukrainian armed forces and territorial defense units, as well as some civilians.

"It's not a sophisticated system or anything like that, and it's not uniformly standard, but that aid was very important during the initial phase of the invasion as well, because it was very unclear exactly how far the Russian invaders would get," Barros said.

According to a late-November Department of Defense fact sheet, the US had committed over 11,000 grenade launchers and small arms, as well as more than 104,000,000 rounds of small arms ammunition.

Kyiv's forces have used a variety of small arms, some from the West and some of alternative origin. These include rifles, submachine guns, light machine guns, sniper rifles, and handguns manufactured domestically and also abroad in Austria, Israel, and even Russia.

By contrast, many Russian reservists troops have arrived in Ukraine with what Western intelligence has called "barely usable" rifles. Some carry Soviet-era weaponry, which Britain's defense ministry previously said was kept in poor storage conditions.

Bayraktar TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicle

As the war in Ukraine pivoted to a new phase, one of brutal artillery battles and grinding attrition in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drone became a decisive weapon for Kyiv's forces, though it also saw successes early on.

This famed unmanned combat aerial vehicle — which saw action aiding Azerbaijan in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict — has been highly regarded by global militaries and even had a multi-year-long wait to obtain one. These systems became legends in Ukraine, even inspiring songs that went viral.

The TB2 drone allowed the Ukrainians to carry out precision strikes and target vulnerable Russian positions and have been used to destroy military equipment like tanks, howitzers, and infantry fighting vehicles.

For example, the TB2 was used successfully during Ukraine's efforts to recapture Snake Island in the Black Sea, where ground communication lines were unavailable. The drones were used to target occupying Russian forces, who eventually decided that they could no longer hold their positions.

Barros said that "this is a tactic that, frankly, the Ukrainians have used very effectively ever since they've had access to precision munitions that are capable of striking deep into critical vulnerable Russian areas."

HARM air-to-surface anti-radiation missile

In the late summer, Ukraine launched a lightning-fast counter offensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region — liberating thousands of square miles of territory previously occupied by Russian forces.

One weapon that helped here was the US-supplied AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM), an air-to-surface missile that can hunt and target enemy radar systems.

Ukraine used these missiles to threaten and hamstring Russian air-defense radars and systems, before going on to deploy tactical aircraft in what Barros described as a "limited but effective capacity."

"The Ukrainians," he said, "were able to use the HARM missile to strike Russian air defense assets in the Kharkiv area of operations. Not a lot of people talk about the HARM, but it's sort of a very specific tool for a very specific job, and the Ukrainians were also able to use that well."

High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS)

Perhaps the most prominent of Ukraine's game-changing weapons is the US-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).

These systems, which were much-sought-after by Kyiv, are long-range and high-precision rocket launchers capable of striking targets up to 50 miles away with the munitions provided by the US, though they have the ability to strike farther. With GPS-guided rockets, these weapons have been able to target Russian command posts, ammunition depots, and bridges.

Ukraine celebrated the arrival of the HIMARS in June, and the systems quickly became revered among top Ukrainian officials and the country's armed forces because they were so effective at a time when the war was a fast becoming a WWI-style artillery duel. The HIMARS gave Ukraine range beyond the M777 Howitzers provided by the US earlier in the conflict.

"The HIMARS stopped the bleeding in eastern Ukraine with regards to the rolling Russian offensive that was picking up steam in sort of late spring, early summer," Barros said, pointing to two specific examples where these weapons proved to be a "game changer" on the battlefield.

When the HIMARS arrived in Ukraine, Russian forces were relying on an artillery superiority to obliterate Ukrainian defensive positions in various small towns. They would then press forward into the area and "slowly sort of systematically grind their way" deeper into Ukraine, Barros said.

For this to work, Russia needed lots of artillery near their firing positions, Barros added. But Ukraine was able to use their HIMARS to target Russian ammunition depots that were providing Moscow with the consistent artillery ammunition needed to sustain a high volume of firepower.

HIMARS also played an important role during Ukraine's campaign to retake territory in the southern Kherson region, Barros said. There, Kyiv used this weapon to successfully strike a handful bridges — cutting off bands of Russian troops and creating a logistical headache for Putin.

According to an assessment of the war by the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, the introduction of the HIMARS — as well as the US-made M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System — into Ukraine "can be seen as the point where the Russian offensive on Donbas ended and the war entered a new phase."

In the first days of the Ukraine war, when Russian armored columns seemed poised to capture Kyiv, the world watched outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainian troops use an array of missiles to fend off Russian tanks and decimate Russian convoys — or so it seemed.

Many people believe the initial Russian offensive was halted in large part by Ukraine's diverse arsenal of anti-tank missiles. This included Ukrainian-designed Stuhna-Ps, laser-guided weapons fired from Turkish-made TB2 Bayraktar drones, and US-made Javelins and British/Swedish-designed NLAWs.

In reality, it was Ukrainian artillery that frustrated the Russian advance, according to a Royal United Service Institute report on lessons of the Ukraine war.

"Despite the prominence of anti-tank guided weapons in the public narrative, Ukraine blunted Russia's attempt to seize Kyiv using massed fires from two artillery brigades," according to the British think tank's report, which assesses the fighting between February and July.

© Dmytro Smoliyenko / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images Ukrainian troops fire a howitzer in the Zaporizhzhia Region on December 16. Dmytro Smoliyenko / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images

The problem isn't that anti-tank missiles are ineffective against tanks, said Jack Watling, who coauthored the study.

Load Error

"The problem is that it is not economical or practical to have enough of them concentrated in one area to actually blunt a large armored thrust," Watling told Insider.

Ukraine had about 9,100 anti-tank guided missiles at the start of the war, plus a smaller number of launchers, according to Watling. This was enough to pin down Russian armor, hit targets of opportunity, and engage Russian tanks from beyond the range their cannons.

However, "delivering large volumes of fire against concentrated units is best achieved by artillery," Watling said. "This was what destroyed the most Russian equipment and killed the most Russian soldiers."

Watling stressed that this is not a matter anti-tank missiles vs. artillery.

"You need both. However, much of the international discussion suggested that the task could be completed with one alone," Watling told Insider. "And of the two, having sufficient artillery is more important in terms of destroying the enemy in high-intensity warfare."

In addition, the line between tanks and anti-tank missiles has become blurred. Many Russian tanks — and Ukrainian tanks, which are upgraded Soviet-era designs — are designed to fire anti-tank guided missiles from their cannons.

The US experiment with this kind of missile-launching tank in the 1970s was a failure: The M551 Sheridan and M60A2 "Starship" were less than popular, in part because their Shillelagh missiles were finicky and the tank had to remain stationary while the missile was in flight.

But the Ukraine conflict has seen plenty of tank-launched missiles, according to Watling.

"Those who are arguing that tanks were obsolete because of ATGMs probably didn't appreciate how many missiles in the conflict have been launched out of the barrels of tanks," Watling said. "This is because the tanks have the sighting systems to acquire the targets and because they can sit in positions to overwatch more safely while guiding a missile to target."

However, Ukrainian man-portable ATGMs were able to nullify Russian tank-launched missiles to some extent.

Ukrainian missiles "could engage at middle distance beyond the range of tank cannon but within light of sight," Watling said. "Being able to engage at that range was important because it forced the Russians to hold off or to press home an attack, since they couldn't sit safely at that distance and use their barrel-launched ATGMs."

Perhaps this shouldn't be a surprise.

Early in the war, when the fighting was more fluid, drones and missiles generated all the buzz, but the fact is that Ukraine had a limited number of missiles when the war began and a lot of foreign weapons didn't begin to arrive in significant numbers until weeks after Russia invaded.

Had Russia been able to seize Kyiv in the first week or two, those Western arms might have arrived too late to save Ukraine.

Despite being outnumbered and outranged by Russian howitzers and rockets, Ukrainian artillery disrupted clumsy Russian armored columns that were making narrowly focused attacks with over-concentrated forces that impeded each other.

As the Russians drove on Kyiv in March, "this unfavorable battlefield geometry made it impossible for the Russians to build up significant momentum, as they came under sustained and intense artillery fire throughout the month," the RUSI report noted.

Now that the fighting is more static and the operations by both sides are more methodical, old-fashioned artillery — leavened with newer systems such as HIMARS rockets — has emerged as the decisive weapon.

Anti-tank missiles are still vital, not least to protect the artillery from marauding tanks. As combined-arms warfare has long taught, a successful army needs a variety of mutually supporting weapons.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds a master's in political science. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

msn.com · by insider@insider.com (Michael Peck) 1 day ago

14. Ukraine and the Carol of the Bells

Excerpts:

The U.S. has helped Ukraine with hard power by supplying weapons, intelligence, and other necessities on the battlefield. Washington should now help Kyiv with soft power. No amount of tanks or ammunition can overcome the centuries-old cultural institutions or spirit of Ukraine’s artists. Washington and its allies can promote the preservation and continued growth of Ukraine’s cultural legacy, which is integral to its autonomy.

Next time you hear "Carol of the Bells," turn up the volume. Even as he plans his next assault on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin can hear it.

Ukraine and the Carol of the Bells

by Ivana Stradner December 22, 2022 06:00 AM

Washington Examiner · December 22, 2022

"Carol of the Bells" is perhaps one of the most famous Christmas songs in history. It’s hard to go through a Christmas season without hearing it in stores, public squares, or even commercials. What most Americans don’t know is that the classic tune has Ukrainian origins.

Exactly 100 years ago, the Ukrainian National Chorus first performed the piece in the United States at New York’s Carnegie Hall as part of a cultural diplomacy mission. It was part of an effort to assert Ukrainian independence shortly before the fledgling Soviet Union quashed it. Today, as Ukraine fights to preserve its independence and Vladimir Putin attempts to rewrite Ukrainian history to deny its distinctiveness, the story of this beloved carol is more relevant than ever.

PUTIN ADMITS 'EXTREMELY DIFFICULT' SITUATION IN RUSSIAN-OCCUPIED PARTS OF UKRAINE

In 1916, Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych wrote the piece as a winter folk song and named it "Shchedryk." After the establishment of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918, Ukraine’s president, Symon Petliura, wanted to promote Ukrainian culture internationally to garner support for his nation’s independence. In addition to introducing Americans to Ukraine through songs like "Shchedryk," the Ukrainian National Chorus handed out brochures with Ukrainian symbols and sang their national anthem. In 1936, American composer Peter Wilhousky added English lyrics to the song and renamed it "Carol of the Bells." From then on, "Shchedryk," a symbol of Ukraine’s struggle for independence, became embedded in American culture.

In many ways, "Carol of the Bells" is today an anthem of the Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s assault on Ukraine. It undermines the false narrative that Ukraine is a historical part of Russia.

Indeed, in an article Putin wrote in 2021, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," the Russian strongman falsely claimed that Ukraine has always been within Russia’s "same historical and spiritual space." "Carol of the Bells" refutes this. It (among many others) demonstrates how Ukrainian culture dates back centuries prior to the emergence of Russia.

Putin understands this quite well. As of mid-November, the Ukrainian government had recorded 529 instances of destroyed "objects of cultural heritage and cultural institutions of Ukraine" across 11 regions. Putin’s attack on culture has also led to the silencing of Ukrainian artists. PEN Ukraine’s webpage, "People of Culture Taken Away by the War," documents dozens of artists, writers, and other cultural figures killed either by Russian attacks or felled while defending Ukraine.

This September, Russian troops killed Ukrainian conductor and composer Yuri Kerpatenko after he refused to participate in a concert in support of Russia’s annexation of Kherson. Ukrainian artist Liubov Panchenko, a popular artist during the 1960s, died of starvation during Russian troops’ recent occupation of Bucha. Panchenko dedicated her life to preserving and sharing Ukrainian culture. During the Soviet era, she integrated Ukrainian elements into her art and refused to stop promoting Ukrainian culture, even when Soviet officials told her to. Russia has also detained Ukrainian artists Ihor Kozlovsky and Volodymyr Valenko, who dared to combine art and activism to shape public support for Ukraine.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The U.S. has helped Ukraine with hard power by supplying weapons, intelligence, and other necessities on the battlefield. Washington should now help Kyiv with soft power. No amount of tanks or ammunition can overcome the centuries-old cultural institutions or spirit of Ukraine’s artists. Washington and its allies can promote the preservation and continued growth of Ukraine’s cultural legacy, which is integral to its autonomy.

Next time you hear "Carol of the Bells," turn up the volume. Even as he plans his next assault on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin can hear it.

Ivana Stradner is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow her on Twitter @ivanastradner. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Washington Examiner · December 22, 2022

15. Senate Reaches Breakthrough and Passes $1.7T Omnibus Funding Bill

Senate Reaches Breakthrough and Passes $1.7T Omnibus Funding Bill

Measure now heads to the House ahead of Friday's shutdown deadline.

defenseone.com · by Eric Katz

The Senate on Thursday passed 68-29 a $1.7 trillion funding bill to set line-by-line spending levels at every federal agency across government, bringing Congress one step closer to setting appropriations for the remainder of fiscal 2023 and avoiding a shutdown Friday evening.

Congress worked late into the night Wednesday and reconvened Thursday morning before striking a deal on a series of votes that led to the final passage of the sprawling spending package. The Senate held votes on more than a dozen amendments reflecting both Democratic and Republican priorities before approving the bill, which now heads to the House. While Republicans in that chamber overwhelmingly oppose the measure, it is expected to win approval there as soon as Thursday and receive President Biden’s signature before the upcoming deadline.

The Senate had hoped to wrap up Wednesday ahead of winter storms across the country, but those plans hit a snag when Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, demanded a vote on his amendment to keep the pandemic-era border security policy known as Title 42 in place. The initiative—which allows the Homeland Security Department to quickly expel many migrants crossing the border without an opportunity to claim asylum—was set to expire Wednesday, but the Supreme Court paused that from taking place as it weighs hearing a related lawsuit. Lee said he would only accept an up-or-down vote on the amendment that would require a simple majority for passage, but Democrats balked at the proposal for fear it would win sufficient approval and make the overall omnibus bill dead on arrival in the House.

The two sides ultimately agreed to allow for a vote on a separate amendment, put forward by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Jon Tester, D-Mont., which would have also preserved Title 42 but provided for massive funding and hiring surges at agencies such as Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection field operations, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Executive Office of Immigration Review. Both that and Lee’s amendment failed. Title 42’s expiration is expected to put significant strains on federal resources at the border, though the Biden administration has repeatedly said that by moving personnel and surging other operations it will be able to handle the expected uptick in migrant crossings.

The underlying spending package provides an overall increase to non-defense discretionary spending of about 5.5% for a total of $773 billion, while Defense spending is set to soar by 10% to $858 billion. While Democrats failed to achieve their goal of equal funding increases on the two sides, the bill would achieve key priorities for both parties. Those include adding significant personnel and other resources for border agencies.

An agreement on the omnibus bill had evaded appropriators for months as they sought a compromise on the top-line funding level and the defense and non-defense spending levels. They reached an agreement last week and subsequently scrambled to fill in the details. Negotiators released the text of the omnibus early Tuesday morning and rushed to find an agreement on which agreements would receive votes and the timing of final passage. While some lawmakers bemoaned the condensed schedule, the looming snowstorm and the appeal of getting home for the holidays created an opening for all 100 senators to go along with the expedited timeline.

Negotiations went late into the night on Wednesday before an agreement on the timing of the vote was reached on Thursday, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., threatening to force a vote on Friday if a scheduling deal could not be struck. That created new drama as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., previously set Thursday as his deadline to support the omnibus over a short-term measure. Eventually, Schumer announced another postponement would not be necessary.

“We have an agreement now,” Schumer said from the Senate floor Thursday morning. “It’s taken a while, but it’s been worth it. I appreciate the cooperation of everyone here.”

On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnnell, R-Ky., implored his party to back the measure, suggesting it was “not a close call” as it would cut non-defense, non-Veterans Affairs Department spending when adjusting for inflation.

“There are literally two options before us,” McConnell said. “Number one, we can pass this bill, give our service members and commanders the resources they need, flip the president’s budget request on its head and actually cut baseline non-defense, non-veterans spending in real dollars, while we’re at it, or we can fail to pass this bill and give our armed forces confusion and uncertainty.”

The House will have a narrow margin to approve the bill, with Republican leadership whipping opposition to it. The slim Democratic majority will likely prove sufficient to get the measure across the finish line, however, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on Thursday morning her “hope” was her chamber could wrap up that evening.

“We’re waiting to see how long the debate goes there,” Pelosi said, referring to the Senate and noting that it takes several hours after Senate passage before the House can call a vote. “We want people to go home, and as you know there are storms across the country. So hopefully that will be a motivation for expedited discussion.”

defenseone.com · by Eric Katz

16. Putin declares ‘war’ – aloud – forsaking his special euphemistic operation

Putin declares ‘war’ – aloud – forsaking his special euphemistic operation

The Washington Post · by Mary Ilyushina · December 22, 2022

RIGA, Latvia — After nearly 10 months of war, but referring to the brutal invasion of Ukraine instead as “a special military operation,” Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday finally called it a “war” for the first time, setting off an uproar among antiwar Russians who have been prosecuted for merely challenging the Kremlin-approved euphemism.

“Our goal is not to spin this flywheel of a military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war,” Putin said during a televised news conference following a government meeting on Thursday. “This is what we are striving for.”

Exactly what Putin has been striving for has been a subject of much consternation and debate, especially in Ukraine, where thousands have been killed and cities have been flattened, and in Western capitals that have sent billions in weapons and economic aid to Kyiv to help the country withstand Russia’s aggression.

Putin has alternately said that he is seeking to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, to “liberate” Russian-speaking regions in the southeast of the country, and to stop NATO countries, especially the United States, from trying to destroy Russia. He has denied wanting to conquer the country and topple the government, an assertion undermined by his failed effort to invade and occupy Kyiv.

What Putin had not said until Thursday was that the fighting in Ukraine, whatever the goal, is, in fact, a “war.”

Putin used the term “special military operation” in his early morning announcement on Feb. 24, the day his full-scale invasion began. It seemed be an effort to stress that what was about to unfold would not drastically affect the lives of ordinary Russians. Instead, he sold the idea of a limited operation conducted by a small number of professional soldiers.

After several days of antiwar protests in Russia and critical coverage in the last few remaining independent media outlets, the Russian authorities rushed to suppress criticism and effectively mandate the use of “special military operation” by passing draconian laws to prohibit “spreading fakes” and “discrediting” the army, which essentially made it illegal to call the war a “war.”

Mass protests were crushed and many Russians fled the country fearing prosecution. The few remaining activists who took to the streets to do solo pickets were immediately swept away by the police and fined, even some who held up blank pieces of paper.

By October, Russian law enforcement had initiated nearly 5,000 administrative cases based on the new laws, meaning the defendants were likely given hefty fines. And there were more than 100 criminal cases in which those prosecuted faced sentences of up to 15 years in prison.

In early December, one opposition politician, Ilya Yashin, was sentenced to eight years and six months in prison on charges of “spreading false information” after he dissected Russian atrocities in the city of Bucha, near Kyiv, in an effort to debunk the official Kremlin line that those reports were staged or fabricated to smear Russia.

Yashin’s sentence was the harshest to date under the new laws. In July, Moscow municipal lawmaker Alexei Gorinov was sentenced to seven years in prison on similar charges after he opened a public meeting with a moment of silence for those dying in the war.

On Thursday, critics of Putin and his war, reacted furiously to the president’s utterance of the word “war.”

“Alexei Gorinov was sentenced to seven years for calling the war a war at a meeting of the council of deputies,” tweeted Georgy Alburov, an exiled ally of the jailed Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. “Vladimir Putin today also publicly called the war a war at his workplace. So either release Gorinov or put Putin in jail for seven years.”

Most independent media have been forced out of the country, and hundreds of thousands of Russians fled what the Kremlin called “a partial mobilization” that disrupted Putin’s promise of a swift and successful war that won’t affect the livelihoods of civilians.

The laws have been enforced selectively to target longtime Putin critics, while pro-war hawks and state television propagandists are allowed to criticize Russian military commanders for heavy battlefield losses and even use the word war without penalties.

Nikita Yuferev, a municipal lawmaker from St. Petersburg who fled the country for his antiwar views but can still perform the official duties of his mandate remotely, said on Thursday that he had written a complaint against Putin, asking Russia’s prosecutor general to investigate the president’s statement.

“There was no decree to end the special operation, and no war was declared,” Yuferev tweeted. “Several thousand people have already been prosecuted for such words about the war, so I’ve sent a request to the authorities to charge Putin with spreading fakes about the army.”

The move is symbolic and will not be acted upon by law enforcement. But it underscores how selective prosecution has become the norm in the Russian judicial system under Putin’s rule, with different standards in place for citizens depending on their level of support for the president.

Pro-war Russian commentators have been permitted to level withering criticism at the Russian military and its commanders over battlefield losses and other missteps, including a botched mobilization of 300,000 new soldiers.

In his remarks on Thursday, Putin dismissed the U.S. decision to supply Ukraine with its most advanced air defense weapon, the Patriot missile system, which was formally announced by President Biden during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Washington on Wednesday.

Putin described the move as an insignificant development. “Patriot is a rather old system and does not work like our S-300,” he said, referring to Russia’s mainstay air defense system. “We’ll just keep it in mind and there will be an antidote,” Putin said. “We’ll knock down Patriots.”

Putin on Thursday also repeated his oft-made assertion that the United States and NATO were responsible for the conflict in Ukraine, saying: “It all started in 2014 after the coup d’etat provoked by the United States.”

Asked if he felt the “operation” has been going on too long, Putin replied with a Russian idiom about how big goals are achieved little by little — the latest sign he has no plan to end the war that he is now willing to call a war. “The intensification of hostilities leads to unjustified losses,” Putin said. “And as they say, ‘The hen pecks grain by grain.’”

The Washington Post · by Mary Ilyushina · December 22, 2022

17. Cybercom disrupted Russian and Iranian hackers throughout the midterms

Good work. Thank you Cybercom.

Cybercom disrupted Russian and Iranian hackers throughout the midterms

U.S. conducted offensive cyber operations to counter state-sponsored cyberattacks, including new ‘Hunt Forward’ missions

By Ellen Nakashima

December 22, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · December 22, 2022

U.S. Cyber Command has begun to make routine use of offensive cyber actions to defend the nation, taking aim this fall at Russian and Iranian hackers before they had a chance to disrupt the midterm elections, according to three U.S. officials.

The 13-year-old command took down the digital platform of a Russian troll farm in the 2018 midterm elections to prevent it from seeding material on American social media sites intended to agitate the already divided electorate and to diminish confidence in the election.

Then in 2020, Cybercom moved against Iranian hackers working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, shortly after they launched an operation posing as a far-right group to send threatening emails to American voters.

This year, the command’s Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) went after many of the same foreign entities, including those affiliated with the Russian and Iranian governments and their proxies, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

In a media roundtable this month at Fort Meade, Md., Gen. Paul Nakasone, who heads both Cybercom and the National Security Agency, the world’s most powerful electronic spying agency, talked about how Cybercom went on the offense during the midterms, though he did not specify targets.

“We did conduct operations persistently to make sure that our foreign adversaries couldn’t utilize infrastructure to impact us," said Nakasone. “We understood how foreign adversaries utilize infrastructure throughout the world. We had that mapped pretty well. And we wanted to make sure that we took it down at key times.”

Nakasone noted that Cybercom’s national mission force, aided by NSA, followed a “campaign plan" to deprive the hackers of their tools and networks. “Rest assured,” he said. “We were doing operations well before the midterms began, and we were doing operations likely on the day of the midterms.” And they continued until the elections were certified, he said.

“This is what ‘persistent engagement’ is,” he added. "This is the idea of understanding your foreign adversaries and operating outside the United States.”

In a joint statement, the two agencies said: “We do not comment on cyber operations, plans or activities and wouldn’t speculate where and who those cyber operations were directed towards.”

Maj. Gen. Joe Hartman, who leads the Cyber National Mission Force, in a news conference Monday sought to demystify offensive operations. “It is certainly one of the things we do on a daily basis," he said, explaining that his team targets the tools a hacker needs to conduct attacks: a computer, an internet connection, malware.

“We do everything we can to make it hard for our adversaries to use that ecosystem to threaten the U.S., allies and partners," he said, speaking at a ceremony to raise CNMF to the status of a “sub-unified” command, similar to Joint Special Operations Command.

Nakasone noted that although there were “plenty of foreign influence operations” in the midterms, compared to previous elections "there was a lessened degree of activity.” He did not elaborate on why that may be the case, for instance, whether it’s because Russia was occupied elsewhere or because of CNMF’s actions.

He did say, however, that he did not see new tactics or tools. “And I saw the same foreign adversaries that I’ve seen before, a lot of the same ones — the proxies and the elements of the Russian and Iranian governments that do this type of work,” he said.

One strategy that Nakasone has carried out is “hunting forward," or examining the computer systems of foreign partners, at their invitation, to look for malware and other tools that adversaries such as Russia use. “When we go to a foreign country, we want to see what adversaries are doing on other networks which might impact us," he explained.

Then Cybercom or NSA shares the malware with cybersecurity companies so they can help their clients in the broader private sector detect and remove it from their networks. “The exposure becomes an antidote,” he said. "I am trying to make it as costly for our adversaries to operate in terms of their time, money, and focus.”

CNMF carried out hunt forward operations in Ukraine at the beginning of the year before Russia’s February invasion, in Lithuania in the spring and Croatia in the summer, officials said. In total the force has deployed 38 times to 21 countries since 2018, officials said.

“Hunt Forward missions give you an ability to understand the importance and the fortitude of what your partner is dealing with," Nakasone said. "It also allows them to up their game with the security of their networks.”

Nakasone said CNMF told him in January that the cyberthreat to Ukraine was “really serious" and that at the team’s urging, the Ukrainians were moving to shore up defenses. “They’ve done a lot of work to look at the critical infrastructure and move data from inside Ukraine to cloud storage outside of the country,” he said.

Hartman said that since the invasion, CNMF and Ukraine’s cyber defenders have exchanged “thousands” of digital warning indicators to help Cybercom learn more about adversaries and Ukraine to thwart cyberattacks.

In the days leading up to the invasion, Russia scanned Ukrainian networks, disrupted government websites and satellite communications capability, and targeted the energy grid and transportation infrastructure, Nakasone noted.

But the combination of better defense, enabled by heightened information sharing between Ukraine and its partners, as well as smart tactics like moving data to the cloud, helped Kyiv withstand Russia’s cyberattacks.

Not to say there’s no future risk.

“This is an adversary that is not through,” Nakasone said at the Reagan National Defense Forum earlier this month in California. “And we remain very, very vigilant.”

The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · December 22, 2022

18.

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 DemocracPhone: 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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