Quotes of the Day:

"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do." 

– Leonardo da Vinci

"A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea."

– John Ciardi

"If you ever need a helping hand, it's at the end of your arm. As you get older, you must remember you have a second hand. The first one is to help yourself, the second one is to help others." 

– Audrey Hepburn

1. Film documents OSS World War II contributions from Hollywood’s finest

2. US SPECIAL FORCES: Uncertain Days (A Visual Poem)

3. Bringing Russia to Its Knees

4. Regional operations directorates adapt to changes amid USASAC reorganization

5. Situation on frontline has worsened, Ukraine army chief says

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 28, 2024

7.  Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 28, 2024

8. Why the West will refuse to fight – Citizens won't sacrifice themselves

9. Israeli Officials Believe I.C.C. Is Preparing Arrest Warrants Over War

10. As Colleges Weigh Crackdowns on Protests, Questions About Outsiders Linger

11. On Columbia University and Coach Handbags

12. Farewell to China’s Strategic Support Force. Let’s meet its replacements

13. Marine special operators are using fiction to envision the future

14. Xi shakes up China’s military in rethink of how to ‘fight and win’ future wars

15. Mounting Evidence Is Pointing To A Nightmare Scenario For The U.S. Economy

​16. All Ethnic Groups Under Fire in Karen State

17.  Ukraine Bets on Long-Range Drones, Raising Costs of War for Russia

18.  NATO’s Top Officer Is an Admiral Who Thinks Like an Investor

19. How Columbia University's complex history with the student protest movement echoes into today

20. The Forgotten Part of the Contest: Army Logistics in the Pacific

21. Why the Military Can’t Trust AI

22. War Unbound – Gaza, Ukraine, and the Breakdown of International Law

23. Opinion | Despite the Ukraine aid vote, the neo-isolationist threat still looms by Max Boot

24. US Ready to Train More Ukrainian Troops If Called Upon, Top White House Official Says

25. The naming dispute between India & China

26. War analysts say Ukraine should treat the latest US aid package like it's the last one it'll get

27. So does the Air Force have new aces now?

28. Some in State Department don’t believe Israel is using US weapons in accordance with international law, source says

1. Film documents OSS World War II contributions from Hollywood’s finest

Yes, I am biased. Every time I study the OSS I learn something new. It is amazing what this very small organization did during the war and the diverse nature of its contributions that are still felt today from transiting through Dulles Airport to following the UN Charter to the cinema, in addition to its exploits in intelligence collection and special operations and unconventional warfare. (For full transparency I am a member of the board of directors of the OSS Society so you can appreciate my bias).

Film documents OSS World War II contributions from Hollywood’s finest

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/apr/28/inside-beltway-oss-film-documents-world-war-ii-con/

A new documentary film titled “Filming Under Fire: John Ford’s OSS Field Photo Branch” — tells the story of how six-time Academy Award-winning director John Ford and many of its leading filmmakers contributed to America’s victory in World War II … more >

By Jennifer Harper - The Washington Times - Sunday, April 28, 2024

NEWS AND OPINION:

A round of applause please for the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services — the first organized U.S. effort to implement a centralized system of strategic intelligence, and the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Special Operations Command, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

A round as well for a new documentary film titled “Filming Under Fire: John Ford’s OSS Field Photo Branch,” which tells the story of how top Hollywood figures contributed to America’s victory in World War II through their service in that OSS branch.

Among the big names covered besides Ford, a six-time Academy Award-winning director, are cinematographers Harold Rosson, Gregg Toland and Joe August; screenwriter Budd Schulberg; and actor Sterling Hayden.

“They conducted surveillance. They made training films. They shot combat. They created films to boost Americans’ morale and to demoralize the enemy. General [Dwight] Eisenhower said that if it did nothing else, the intelligence gathered by the Field Photographic Branch in advance of D-Day alone justified OSS’s creation. At the war’s conclusion, they gathered evidence that was instrumental in convicting the Nazi High Command at Nuremberg,” advises the film’s official synopsis.

“This film is a tribute to their heroic efforts; to Hollywood’s contribution to America’s victory in World War II; and to the enduring power of film in the never-ending struggle for freedom and human dignity — a timely reminder as the world once again confronts autocratic forces,” the synopsis said.

This new film — which was narrated by veteran actor Bruce Boxleitner — has a bright future.

“To date, it’s been selected by two Academy Award-qualifying film festivals,” said Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society, which was founded in 1947 Army Gen. William J. Donovan and continues to honor the historic accomplishments of the OSS. Donovan is called “the father of American Intelligence” by none other than the CIA itself.

The OSS Society also led a successful effort to have a Congressional Gold Medal awarded to the OSS. The OSS Congressional Gold Medal Act was signed into law on Dec. 14, 2016.

Find the OSS Society, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, at OSSSociety.org.

2. US SPECIAL FORCES: Uncertain Days (A Visual Poem)

One minute and 41 seconds. 

Capturing the essence of SF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PRQSSAHm8k

US SPECIAL FORCES: Uncertain Days

The Originals

5.5K subscribers

1,034 views Apr 27, 2024

Uncertain days. A visual poem. Audio from an active duty United States Army Special Forces Operator. A small look inside why one of our Nation​s most elite forces do what they do.

3. Bringing Russia to Its Knees

Excerpts:

The war on Ukraine has accentuated the decline in Russia’s demographic pool, by a million or so young males. Life expectancy of Russian men has fallen to 64 years, akin to that in Eritrea and Rwanda. Western influencers might beseech the Kremlin to increase harassment of war opponents and Central Asian migrant workers and impose new controls to impede talented Russians from joining the wave of emigrants.

All the effects described above are already happening, but not because of some fictitious Western offensive. If the Kremlin wants to finger the party responsible for these harmful steps, it need only look in a mirror.

The West professes not to seek regime change in Russia. It may not have to. The West might best further this goal by doing more of what it already does — help Ukraine expel Russian aggressors, strengthen Western alliances, foster global prosperity, and promote respect in Russia for human rights and political liberties.

Bringing Russia to Its Knees

By William Courtney & Philip Wasielewski

April 27, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/04/27/bringing_russia_to_its_knees_1027933.html

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin rants that the West seeks to “dismember and plunder” his country. He is not the first Kremlin leader to allege imagined perfidy. In World War II, Stalin suspected the Allies of delaying a second front so the Nazis could finish off the USSR. Early in the Reagan era, a deluded Kremlin feared the U.S. might launch a nuclear first strike.

Today, Putin’s paranoia and evil intent is so great that last month he ridiculed U.S. warnings of an imminent terrorist attack. Days later ISIS-K killed over 100 people at a concert in Moscow. As recently as 2019, Russia relied on U.S. intelligence to disrupt an Islamist terrorist attack planned for St. Petersburg. Putin thanked the U.S. Since then, perhaps facing greater pressures, Putin seems to have become more defensive.

By accusing the West of plotting against Russia, the Kremlin likely hopes to distract Russian citizens from its own flawed actions. But the true damage to Russia has been self-inflicted. 

What might be key elements of an imagined Western attempt to bring Russia to its knees?

Trick Russia into invading its largest neighbor

Western influencers might deceive the Kremlin into thinking that that Ukraine was run by Nazis, that Russian forces would win a quick victory, that Ukrainian turncoats could help them seize power, and that a decadent West would abandon a divided and corrupt Ukraine.

Stir internal unrest

Sly influencers might persuade right-wing circles and pro-war bloggers to scorn the incompetence of Russian generals and provoke Russian military leaders into launching premature, ill-prepared offensives. Messaging media, such as Telegram channels, might be manipulated to heighten discontent of soldiers’ mothers and anti-war activists. This could induce them to call for sons to be sent home, and to condemn Russia’s human wave attacks and the shooting of those who refuse to fight.

Weaken Russia’s economy

Cunning Western influencers might seek ruin for Russia’s economy. They could encourage the Kremlin to sideline libera economists whose globalist policies spark economic growth but have left Russia vulnerable to punishing Western sanctions. The influencers might persuade Putin to elevate those who favor state control over the economy, by nationalizing prosperous private firms and turning them over to the Kremlin, which may help bankroll Putin’s toadies. Lucrative state contracts, such as for construction of the Kerch Strait bridge, would reward them. These statists may urge the Kremlin to adopt populist self-sufficiency policies, even though they deny Russia the benefits of international trade and investment. As a bonus for the work of the Western influencers, a weakened economy isolated from rich Europe would make Russia even more of a Chinese vassal.

Loosen Putin’s grip on power

Exploiting wartime corrosion of Putin's grip on power and the shock of the Prigozhin rebellion, quiet influencers might urge Kremlin leaders to heighten repression and create martyrs. This could spur public unrest and undermine Putin’s authority, or even lead to regime change. Color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine might point the way.

Worsen Russia’s demography

The war on Ukraine has accentuated the decline in Russia’s demographic pool, by a million or so young males. Life expectancy of Russian men has fallen to 64 years, akin to that in Eritrea and Rwanda. Western influencers might beseech the Kremlin to increase harassment of war opponents and Central Asian migrant workers and impose new controls to impede talented Russians from joining the wave of emigrants.

All the effects described above are already happening, but not because of some fictitious Western offensive. If the Kremlin wants to finger the party responsible for these harmful steps, it need only look in a mirror.

The West professes not to seek regime change in Russia. It may not have to. The West might best further this goal by doing more of what it already does — help Ukraine expel Russian aggressors, strengthen Western alliances, foster global prosperity, and promote respect in Russia for human rights and political liberties.

William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow at RAND and a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia. Phillip Wasielewski is a senior fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as a paramilitary case officer with a 31-year career in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

4. Regional operations directorates adapt to changes amid USASAC reorganization

The question I have always wanted to know the answer to, is whether this process is fully supportive of the National Defense Strategy and the Combatant Command Strategies? Most importantly, can this process sync with the execution of campaign plans? My experience of many years in the Philippines is that it is not in sync for the most part. It marched to the beat of its own drummer and the considerations of the campaign plan executor was not to be bothered with. 

Are we able to sync Title 10 foreign international defense (and security force assistance), with Title 22 Security Assistance, and where appropriate, Title 50 intelligence. But the fundamental question is in today's operational environment can we sync the title 10 and Title 22 activities to achieve synergistic effects in support of the Combatant Commanders and the National Defense Strategy? WHo is responsible for that synchronization and at what level does synchronization occur? (or who should be responsible and what is the appropriate level for synchronization if those processes do not exist). And can those processes be sufficiently agile to changing conditions, priorities, and requirements?

Regional operations directorates adapt to changes amid USASAC reorganization

https://www.dvidshub.net/news/469256/regional-operations-directorates-adapt-changes-amid-usasac-reorganization

Photo By Kimberley Capehart | Koren Scates, U.S. Army Security Assistance Command (USASAC) division chief,... read more

NEW CUMBERLAND, UNITED STATES

04.23.2024

Story by Sarah Zaler 

U.S. Army Security Assistance Command  

NEW CUMBERLAND, Pa. — After ending fiscal year 2023 with a record $35.8 billion in foreign military sales (FMS), business is clearly not slowing down for the U.S. Army Security Assistance Command (USASAC). To evolve with the current FMS caseload and international security environment, USASAC recognized an organizational change was not only needed, but long overdue.

A workforce study, followed by command-wide working groups, identified several areas of the organization where functions and processes could be realigned to create efficiencies, balance the workload across the command and focus on its core mission of supporting allies and partners.

One of the main areas where change was needed was the Regional Operations Directorates (RO), which develop and execute FMS cases to provide Army materiel to foreign partners. The ROs are divided into regions that align with U.S. geographic combatant commands and consist of CENTCOM, EUCOM/AFRICOM and INDOPACOM/SOUTHCOM/NORTHCOM.

Before the restructuring officially took effect April 1, 2024, USASAC RO personnel were organized based on segments of the process. Case development was handled at the Redstone Arsenal (RSA), Alabama, headquarters while case execution took place in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. Now, each RO is organized based on teams who are focused on specific countries, and the teams will be more cross-functional to cover both development and execution.

“It’s definitely a change, but it’s also a change that is very partner focused, and that’s who our business is,” said Dr. Myra Gray, USASAC deputy to the commanding general. “Our business is not just running a process and filling out paperwork and doing our little piece. Our business is a relationship with our partners. This helps our teams be more capable and ready for whatever comes up — whatever surge comes up — to be able to address it.”

To aid in the cross-functionality of the teams, new branch chief positions have been added to every division.

“Previously, in our development side, we only had division chiefs and they were spread all over the place,” said Gray. “They had to know everything about every country in their division, and it was quite a lot, and they didn’t have time to go deep. There was no layer of branch chiefs to help carry portions of that load.”

In the new structure, each branch chief will now be focused on their specific set of partner nations, and within the branches, the nations will be further subdivided amongst the teams. This setup will improve communication and information flow as the process moves from development to execution, resulting in greater support and responsiveness to the partners.

“The idea is so everything about the partner can be addressed by an entire team, and the focus of the team is on the partner, not just a piece of the process,” said Gray.

CENTCOM division chief Koren Scates, who has worked case execution for 16 years and managed the whole portfolio of middle eastern countries, will now manage a much smaller group of countries but must learn functions of case development as well. She realizes it’s a big change for everyone and that it will take time to adjust.

“It’s really fresh, so people are getting acclimated to new supervision and different types of oversight,” said Scates. “So, it’s a little rocky at the beginning, just making sure your team is all on the same page. But I do think the benefits will be cohesiveness. You’re going to have a better team dynamic than before.”

The changes and additional branch chief positions also offer more career development and promotion opportunities for RO personnel, and could potentially lead to location-independent positions, meaning the job can be performed either in RSA or New Cumberland.

“We want our employees to have growth, to be able to learn all aspects of the security assistance process and not just be pigeon-holed into doing one thing,” said Gray. “So, this is actually helpful for them because it helps them learn and grow and take on more responsibilities. Not everybody is going to know how to do everything up front — there will be a learning process as we develop people — but there are opportunities.”

Despite the inherent growing pains that come with organizational change, Scates acknowledged the change was a long time coming.

“We’ve operated the same way for decades and that’s not normal in any typical business,” said Scates. “Any business would’ve changed their model within this timeframe because you evolve, things change, your optics change, and change is necessary.”

The command-wide changes were not made hastily, and working groups explored several options for what a reorganization should look like. Scates was part of those discussions, where they examined every aspect of case management to see what functions could be centralized or shifted to different staff sections.

“We really did look at the entire command to see how we’re functioning currently and how there could be efficiencies met — which was the consolidation of several functions,” said Scates. “The former G9 was stood down, the former G4 is a little bit different structure now, and those functions were consolidated drastically.”

Some functions, like supply discrepancy reports and case closure, were determined to be a unique part of the process that should be pulled from the RO responsibilities.

“That is now something we are going to do - a pilot of centralization of those two functions,” said Scates. “There’s a team now, the Security Assistance Support Directorate, that took over those two functions. So, now the CCM (country case management) team doesn’t have to do that anymore, which could lighten up their workload a little bit and take some of the pressure off them because those are two pretty big processes.”

This shifting and consolidation of functions created several vacancies across the command, which allowed for the new branch chief positions in the ROs. Scates is hopeful the changes will streamline the process and improve work-life balance for RO personnel. She also said she appreciates the transparency of the command team for their commitment to continually reassess and evaluate the effectiveness of the reorganization, and make changes as necessary.

“This time next year we will probably need to make some adjustments, but we were long overdue for a fundamental look at how we do business and build ourselves that way from the ground up,” said Gray.

Acknowledging the challenges that come with a change of this magnitude, Gray hopes USASAC teammates will embrace the challenge.

“Change is hard, especially for folks who have been doing the same thing, but I would ask that everybody give this a chance because it’s not going to be without its hiccups. There’s going to be a learning curve for everybody but give it a chance because the future is very bright, and this is going to help us to evolve into becoming the very best we can be in today’s environment with today’s technology.”

5. Situation on frontline has worsened, Ukraine army chief says

Excerpts:

Earlier this month, Gen Syrskyi warned the battlefield situation in the east of the country had "significantly worsened".

The commander of Ukraine's National Guard, Oleksandr Pivnenko, said this week that he was expecting an attempt by Russian forces to advance on Kharkiv, Ukraine's second city, which is near the Russian border.

US President Joe Biden this week signed off on a $95bn (£76bn) package of aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan after months of gridlock amid opposition to the aid from some in Congress.

The Senate passed a similar aid package in February, but a group of conservatives who oppose new Ukraine support had prevented it from coming to a vote in the House of Representatives.

On Friday, the Pentagon said it would "rush" Patriot air defence missiles and artillery ammunition to Ukraine as part of its new military aid package.

Between February 2022 and January 2024, the US gave Ukraine more than $40bn in military aid, according to German research organisation, the Kiel Institute.

Situation on frontline has worsened, Ukraine army chief says

https://www-bbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68916317.amp

• By George Wright
• BBC News

9 hours ago

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,Much of the fighting has been taking place around Chasiv Ya

Ukraine's commander-in-chief has said the situation on the frontline has worsened in the face of multiple Russian attacks.

Oleksandr Syrskyi said Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from positions in the eastern Donetsk region.

Russia is trying to take advantage of its superiority in manpower and artillery before Ukrainian forces get much-needed supplies of new US weapons.

The US last week agreed a $61bn (£49bn) package of military aid for Ukraine.

But new US weapons are yet to make their way to the frontlines, where Ukrainian troops have been struggling for months with a shortage of ammunition, troops and air defences.

"The situation at the front has worsened," Gen Syrskyi said in a post on the Telegram messaging service on Sunday.

He confirmed Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from some of their positions in an area of Donetsk that had formed part of a defensive line, established after Russia captured Avdiivka in February.

Much of the fighting has been taking place around Chasiv Yar, a Kyiv-controlled stronghold which Russia has been trying to reach after seizing Avdiivka.

New defensive lines had been taken up further to the west in some areas, with Gen Syrskyi conceding the loss of territory to the advancing Russians.

Moscow had secured "tactical successes in some sectors," he said.

Gen Syrskyi added that rested Ukrainian brigades were being rotated in those areas to replace units that had suffered losses.

Russia's defence ministry earlier on Sunday reported its troops had captured the village of Novobakhmutivka, around 10 km (6 miles) north of Avdiivka.

IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS

Image caption,Oleksandr Syrskyi became Ukraine's commander-in-chief in February

Gen Syrskyi became commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces in February.

It followed speculation about a rift between his predecessor, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Earlier this month, Gen Syrskyi warned the battlefield situation in the east of the country had "significantly worsened".

The commander of Ukraine's National Guard, Oleksandr Pivnenko, said this week that he was expecting an attempt by Russian forces to advance on Kharkiv, Ukraine's second city, which is near the Russian border.

US President Joe Biden this week signed off on a $95bn (£76bn) package of aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan after months of gridlock amid opposition to the aid from some in Congress.

The Senate passed a similar aid package in February, but a group of conservatives who oppose new Ukraine support had prevented it from coming to a vote in the House of Representatives.

On Friday, the Pentagon said it would "rush" Patriot air defence missiles and artillery ammunition to Ukraine as part of its new military aid package.

Between February 2022 and January 2024, the US gave Ukraine more than $40bn in military aid, according to German research organisation, the Kiel Institute.

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 28, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-28-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Recent Russian gains northwest of Avdiivka have prompted Ukrainian forces to withdraw from other limited tactical positions along the frontline west of Avdiivka, although these withdrawals have yet to facilitate rapid Russian tactical gains. Russian forces remain unlikely to achieve a deeper operationally significant penetration in the area in the near term.
• The continued Russian stabilization of their salient northwest of Avdiivka presents the Russian command with a choice of continuing to push west towards its reported operational objective in Pokrovsk or trying to drive northwards to conduct possible complementary offensive operations with the Russian effort around Chasiv Yar.
• Syrskyi also noted that the threat of a possible future Russian offensive operation against Kharkiv City is causing Ukraine to allocate additional forces and equipment to defending the city, although ISW continues to assess that the Russian military lacks the forces necessary to seize the city.
• The Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade denied a recent report that Ukrainian forces had pulled US-provided M1A1 Abrams tanks from the frontline.
• Recent Russian efforts to increase control over migrants in and entering Russia following the March 22 Crocus City Hall terrorist attack appear to be straining relations between Russia and Tajikistan.
• Russian authorities arrested several Russian journalists working for Western publications in Russia within the past several days, likely as part of an ongoing effort to limit Western and independent Russian media’s ability to reliably report on Russia.
• Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Svatove.
• The United Kingdom’s (UK) Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Leo Docherty, stated on April 27 that the UK assesses that Russian forces have suffered 450,000 killed and wounded personnel since the start of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 28, 2024

Apr 28, 2024 - ISW Press

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 28, 2024

Riley Bailey, Angelica Evans, Nicole Wolkov, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan

April 28, 2024, 7:20pm ET 

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

Click here to see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1pm ET on April 28. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the April 29 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Recent Russian gains northwest of Avdiivka have prompted Ukrainian forces to withdraw from other limited tactical positions along the frontline west of Avdiivka, although these withdrawals have yet to facilitate rapid Russian tactical gains. Russian forces remain unlikely to achieve a deeper operationally significant penetration in the area in the near term. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported on April 28 that Ukrainian forces withdrew from Berdychi (northwest of Avdiivka) and Semenivka (west of Avdiivka) to positions further west in order to preserve Ukrainian personnel.[1] Syrskyi acknowledged that Russian forces are making tactical advances northwest of Avdiivka, and Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces have deployed up to four brigades to their tactical penetration in the Ocheretyne (northwest of Avdiivka) area.[2] Russian forces have committed roughly a reinforced division’s worth of combat power (comprised mainly of four Central Military District [CMD] brigades) to the frontline northwest of Avdiivka to stabilize a small salient in the area and pursue a wider penetration of the Ukrainian defense along the frontline west of Avdiivka.[3] Russian forces have not made relatively rapid tactical gains west of Ocheretyne, Solovyove (northwest of Avdiivka), Berdychi, and Semenivka following Ukrainian withdrawals from limited tactical positions in the area, however, suggesting that Ukrainian forces maintain positions and capabilities in the area that are slowing further westward Russian advances for the moment. Russian forces will likely continue to make tactical gains in the Avdiivka direction in the coming weeks, and Ukrainian commanders may decide to conduct additional withdrawals if Russian forces threaten other Ukrainian tactical positions in the area.[4] The next line of defensible settlements in the area is some distance from the Ukrainian defensive line that Russian forces have been attacking since the seizure of Avdiivka in mid-February 2024, although Ukrainian forces may be able to use defensible windbreaks in fields immediately west of the current frontline to slow future Russian attacks.[5] The complete Ukrainian withdrawal to reportedly fortified positions further west of Avdiivka would likely allow Russian forces to make relatively rapid advances through these fields, although the advances would likely be rapid only if Ukrainian forces do not try to hold positions in the fields.

Syrskyi added that Ukrainian forces are committing elements of brigades that have undergone rest and reconstitution to stabilize the situation in the Avdiivka direction.[6] The arrival of reconstituted Ukrainian reinforcements will likely allow Ukrainian forces to slow Russian tactical gains and possibly stabilize the front. Ukrainian forces have struggled with under-resourcing and are facing a reported one-to-three manpower disadvantage northwest of Avdiivka, but have nonetheless prevented more than a division’s worth of Russian combat power from making the types of advances that these force and materiel disparities should in principle have allowed Russian forces to achieve.[7] The arrival of Ukrainian reinforcements and additional materiel will force the Russian command to either accept that a near-term wider or deeper penetration is unlikely or commit additional reserves to the area to continue pursuing tactical gains. Russian forces currently have opportunities to achieve operationally significant gains near Chasiv Yar and are preparing reserves to support a large-scale offensive effort expected this summer.[8] The immediate commitment of additional Russian reserves to an opportunistic tactical penetration in the Avdiivka area, where Russian forces are far away from operationally significant objectives, may consume manpower that otherwise could support operationally significant gains in the Chasiv Yar area or that were intended for use in summer 2024.[9] Russian forces will likely have to replenish and reinforce attacking units and decrease the tempo of offensive operations west of Avdiivka if they do not commit additional reserves, which would likely constrain Russia’s ability to make additional rapid tactical advances in the area.[10]

The continued Russian stabilization of their salient northwest of Avdiivka presents the Russian command with a choice of continuing to push west towards its reported operational objective in Pokrovsk or trying to drive northwards to conduct possible complementary offensive operations with the Russian effort around Chasiv Yar. Ukrainian officials have previously identified Pokrovsk as the Russian operational objective in the Avdiivka direction, and Syrskyi reiterated this assessment on April 28.[11] Russian forces could alternatively decide to advance north from their tactical penetration in the Ocheretyne area along the H-20 (Donetsk City-Kostyantynivka) highway to pressure Ukrainian forces defending in the Toretsk area and possibly the operational rear of the Ukrainian defense in and west of Chasiv Yar. Russian forces have long aimed to seize four major cities that form a fortress belt in Donetsk Oblast (Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostyantynivka), and Chasiv Yar is operationally significant because it would provide Russian forces with a staging ground to launch offensive operations against Druzhkivka and Kostyantynivka.[12] The Russian military command could decide that advances north along the H-20 highway would allow Russian forces to conduct subsequent complementary offensive operations from the east and south against the southern edge of the Ukrainian fortress belt in Donetsk Oblast. The Russian tactical penetration northwest of Avdiivka is roughly 20km southwest of Toretsk, roughly 18km south of Oleksandro-Kalynove (the next major settlement south of Kostyantynivka), and roughly 28km south of Kostyantynivka. This distance is notably not greater than the distance to Pokrovsk, which is roughly 30km west of the Russian salient northwest of Avdiivka. A drive up along the H-20 would be a serious undertaking and would not be rapid. The Russian command may decide to continue pushing west towards Pokrovsk because there may be greater opportunities for tactical gains in the area west of Avdiivka than towards the north, however, and because of the Russian preoccupation with reaching the western borders of Donetsk Oblast.

Syrskyi also noted that the threat of a possible future Russian offensive operation against Kharkiv City is causing Ukraine to allocate additional forces and equipment to defending the city, although ISW continues to assess that the Russian military lacks the forces necessary to seize the city. Syrskyi stated that Ukrainian forces are monitoring the increased number of Russian forces regrouping in the Kharkiv direction, likely referring to Belgorod Oblast, and that Ukrainian forces have reinforced defensive positions in the "most threatened" areas with additional artillery and tank units.[13] Syrskyi‘s statement provides no indication about the imminence of the possible Russian offensive operation against Kharkiv City about which Ukrainian officials have recently warned.[14] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets recently stated that Russian forces are regrouping elements of the 11th Army Corps (AC) and 6th Combined Arms Army (CAA) (both Leningrad Military District [LMD]) from the Kupyansk direction into Russia's newly-formed Northern Grouping of Forces and that the Northern Grouping’s best-equipped elements are concentrated in the Belgorod Oblast direction.[15] Elements of the 6th CAA have previously had exclusive responsibility for offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk, particularly near Synkivka.[16] Syrskyi noted that Ukrainian forces have recently improved their positions near Synkivka (northeast of Kupyansk) and a Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces retreated a short distance from Synkivka due to manpower shortages in the area, suggesting that Russian forces have likely pulled at least some elements of the 6th CAA from the area.[17]

ISW has not observed reports of elements of the 6th CAA operating in the Kupyansk direction since late March, and Russian forces are not conducting active offensive operations in the areas where elements of the 6th CAA were previously attacking.[18] Elements of the Russian 6th CAA were previously involved in offensive operations near Synkivka that began in October 2023 and continued throughout the winter and early spring 2024.[19] Likely elements of the 6th CAA’s 25th and 128th motorized rifle brigades conducted several company-sized mechanized assaults near Synkivka in December 2023, which resulted in significant armored vehicle losses and no tactically significant advances.[20] The brigades’ inability to seize Synkivka despite repeated mass infantry and mechanized assaults over a months-long offensive effort calls into question their combat effectiveness and the combat effectiveness of the 6th CAA and Northern Grouping of Forces more broadly. ISW continues to assess that a potential future Russian offensive to seize Kharkiv City would be an extremely ambitious undertaking that would pose significant challenges to Russian forces, particularly since Russian forces will be facing better-equipped Ukrainian forces following the arrival of US military assistance.[21] Russian forces would not have to seize Kharkiv City to reap the benefits of drawing Ukrainian manpower and equipment away from other critical areas of the frontline, however. The Russian military appears to be learning from past operational planning mistakes and may intend for the threat of a Russian offensive on Kharkiv City to stretch Ukrainian forces across a wider frontline in eastern Ukraine ahead of the start of the Russian summer offensive effort.[22]

The Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade denied a recent report that Ukrainian forces had pulled US-provided M1A1 Abrams tanks from the frontline. The Associated Press (AP) reported on April 26, citing two unspecified US military officials, that Ukraine has removed Abrams tanks from the frontline partly because Russia’s widespread drone usage has made it too difficult for Ukrainian forces to operate Abrams without Russian forces detecting and striking Abrams with drones.[23] The Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade denied the report, stating that Abrams perform well on the battlefield and that the 47th Mechanized Brigade would not “hide [a tank] from the enemy that makes the enemy hide themselves” or leave Ukrainian infantry without fire support.[24] ISW does not report on the specific Ukrainian tactical deployment or use of its own or Western-provided weapons systems apart from what US or Ukrainian officials say.

Recent Russian efforts to increase control over migrants in and entering Russia following the March 22 Crocus City Hall terrorist attack appear to be straining relations between Russia and Tajikistan. The Tajik Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) warned Tajik citizens on April 27 to temporarily refrain from traveling to Russia on all modes of transportation “unless absolutely necessary.”[25] Tajik news outlet Asia-Plus reported on April 25 that Russian authorities had stopped almost 200 cars with Tajik license plates from entering Russia at a checkpoint on the Russian-Kazakh border as of April 22.[26] Russian authorities reportedly questioned Tajik citizens and looked through the contents of their phones but allowed children under 14 and people over 60 to enter Russia without questioning. The Tajik MFA reported on April 28 that Russian authorities detained almost 1,000 Tajik citizens at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow and dozens of Tajik citizens in Zhukovsky, Domodedovo, and Sheremetyevo airports in Moscow and held them in poor sanitary conditions.[27] The Tajik MFA stated that Russian authorities allowed 322 Tajik citizens to enter Russia and added 306 others to an “expulsion list.” Russian MFA Spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed on April 27 that Russian authorities are taking measures to resolve issues at border checkpoints but defended temporary ”thorough checks” of foreign citizens as ”intensified measures to prevent terrorism.”[28] Tajikistan’s Deputy Minister of Labor, Migration, and Employment Shakhnoza Nodiri stated on March 30 that Tajikistan observed an outflow of Tajik migrants from Russia following the Crocus attack and that many Tajik migrants are calling the Tajik government stating that they want to leave Russia out of fear and panic.[29] Russian authorities increased crackdowns against Central Asian migrants entering and living in Russia, particularly Tajiks, after the Crocus City Hall attack since the majority of people arrested in connection with the attack were Tajik citizens.[30]

Russian authorities arrested several Russian journalists working for Western publications in Russia within the past several days, likely as part of an ongoing effort to limit Western and independent Russian media’s ability to reliably report on Russia. Western and Russian opposition media widely reported that Russian authorities recently arrested Sergei Karelin, who previously worked with the Associated Press (AP) and Deutsche Welle, and Konstantin Gabov, who previously worked with Reuters, on charges of working with an “extremist organization” for their previous work with the Anti-Corruption Fund founded by deceased Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny.[31] A Russian court also recently placed Forbes Russia journalist Sergei Mingazov under house arrest for spreading false information about the Russian military by reposting news articles about the Russian military’s massacres in Bucha on his Telegram channel.[32] Russian opposition outlet Mediazona reported on April 26 that Russian courts have charged more people with ”participating” in ”undesirable” Russian opposition and foreign media organizations so far in 2024 than were charged with such crimes in 2022 or 2023.[33] ISW has recently reported on the Kremlin’s effort to increasingly use the vague “extremism” legal definition to increasingly prosecute anti-war sentiment, and the arrests of Karelin and Gabov in particular demonstrate one such application of this expansion.[34]

Key Takeaways:

• Recent Russian gains northwest of Avdiivka have prompted Ukrainian forces to withdraw from other limited tactical positions along the frontline west of Avdiivka, although these withdrawals have yet to facilitate rapid Russian tactical gains. Russian forces remain unlikely to achieve a deeper operationally significant penetration in the area in the near term.
• The continued Russian stabilization of their salient northwest of Avdiivka presents the Russian command with a choice of continuing to push west towards its reported operational objective in Pokrovsk or trying to drive northwards to conduct possible complementary offensive operations with the Russian effort around Chasiv Yar.
• Syrskyi also noted that the threat of a possible future Russian offensive operation against Kharkiv City is causing Ukraine to allocate additional forces and equipment to defending the city, although ISW continues to assess that the Russian military lacks the forces necessary to seize the city.
• The Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade denied a recent report that Ukrainian forces had pulled US-provided M1A1 Abrams tanks from the frontline.
• Recent Russian efforts to increase control over migrants in and entering Russia following the March 22 Crocus City Hall terrorist attack appear to be straining relations between Russia and Tajikistan.
• Russian authorities arrested several Russian journalists working for Western publications in Russia within the past several days, likely as part of an ongoing effort to limit Western and independent Russian media’s ability to reliably report on Russia.
• Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Svatove.
• The United Kingdom’s (UK) Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Leo Docherty, stated on April 27 that the UK assesses that Russian forces have suffered 450,000 killed and wounded personnel since the start of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.

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

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces recently made confirmed advances northwest of Svatove amid continued Russian offensive operations in the area on April 28. Geolocated footage published on April 28 indicates that Russian forces, reportedly elements of the 272nd Motorized Rifle Regiment (47th Tank Division, 1st Guards Tank Army [GTA], Moscow Military District [MMD]), advanced within Kyslivka (northwest of Svatove).[35] Geolocated footage published on April 28 indicates that Russian forces advanced south of Novoselivske (northwest of Svatove).[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced west of Krokhmalne (northwest of Svatove), although ISW has not observed visual evidence of this claim.[37] Russian milbloggers continued to claim that Russian forces seized Kyslivka.[38]  Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported on April 28 that Russian forces have concentrated their main effort in the Kupyansk direction northwest of Svatove near Berestove and Stelmakhivka and that Russian forces have made limited gains in these areas.[39] Syrskyi stated that Russian forces are trying to exploit airpower, missile, and artillery advantages to reach the administrative borders of Luhansk Oblast. Fighting continued northwest of Svatove near Kyslivka, Kotlyarivka, Novoselivske, Berestove, and Stelmakhivka; west of Svatove near Kopanky; and southwest of Svatove near Novoyehorivka and Novoserhiivka.[40]

Fighting continued near Kreminna on April 28, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks northwest of Kreminna near Makiivka; west of Kreminna near Nevske and Terny; and south of Kreminna near the Serebryanske forest area.[41] Syrskyi reported that Russian forces are continuing offensive operations near Terny in an attempt to push Ukrainian forces beyond the Zherebets River.[42] Elements of the Chechen Akhmat “Aida” Spetsnaz Detachment reportedly continue operating in the Serebryanske forest area.[43]

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

Positional fighting continued in the Siversk direction (northeast of Bakhmut) on April 28. Positional fighting continued east of Siversk near Verkhnokamyanske, southeast of Siversk near Vyimka, and south of Siversk near Rozdolivka.[44] Elements of the Russian 6th Motorized Rifle Brigade and the “GORB” detachment (both of the 2nd Luhansk People‘s Republic [LNR] Army Corps [AC]) are reportedly operating near Spirne (southeast of Siversk).[45]

Positional fighting continued near Chasiv Yar on April 28, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Fighting continued near the Novyi Microraion (eastern Chasiv Yar); north of Chasiv Yar near Hryhorivka; east of Chasiv Yar near Ivanivske; and southeast of Chasiv Yar near Klishchiivka, Andriivka, and Niu York.[46] A Russian milblogger posted footage of Russian Su-25 aircraft conducting airstrikes near Chasiv Yar to support dismounted Russian infantry.[47]

Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from two settlements northwest of Avdiivka amid continued fighting in the area on April 28. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated on April 28 that Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Berdychi (northwest of Avdiivka) and Semenivka (west of Avdiivka) to unspecified lines to the west.[48] A prominent Russian milblogger reported that Ukrainian forces withdrew from Berdychi on the evening of April 27 after Russian forces reportedly seized Semenivka on April 26 and broke through a Ukrainian fortified area near Ocheretyne (northwest of Avdiivka), threatening to encircle Ukrainian forces in Berdychi.[49] Russian milbloggers reported that the Russian “Mag Dogs” detachment of the 74th Motorized Rifle Brigade (41st Combined Arms Army [CAA], Central Military District [CMD]) then seized Berdychi and raised a Russian flag on its western outskirts before midnight on April 27.[50] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces seized Novokalynove (northwest of Avdiivka) on April 27 and advanced to the eastern outskirts of Keramik (immediately north of Novokalynove); advanced west of Berdychi, north of Semenivka, and into western Netaylove (southwest of Avdiivka) on April 28; and seized Keramik on April 28.[51] ISW has not observed confirmation of these Russian claims beyond the seizures of Berdychi and Semenivka, however. Fighting also continued northwest of Avdiivka near Umanske, Sokil (west of Ocheretyne), Arkhanhelske, Kalynove, Solovyove, Novopokrovske (immediately southwest of Solovyove), and Novoselivka Persha (immediately southwest of Novopokrovske).[52] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed on April 28 that Russian forces seized Novobakhmutivka (northwest of Avdiivka) after Russian forces likely seized the settlement overnight on April 24 to 25.[53] Elements of the Russian “Vega” Spetsnaz detachment (24th Guards Spetsnaz Brigade, Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff [GRU]) reportedly continue operating in the Avdiivka direction.[54]

Syrskyi stated on April 28 that Ukrainian forces also withdrew from Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City) amid continued fighting in the area.[55] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced further west within Krasnohorivka (west of Donetsk City) but that Russian forces have not yet captured the brick factory in central Krasnohorivka.[56] Fighting also continued west of Donetsk City near Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Vodyane.[57] Elements of the Russian 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] AC) supported by elements of the 238th Artillery Brigade (8th CAA, Southern Military District [SMD]) are reportedly fighting in Krasnohorivka.[58]

Positional fighting continued south of Velyka Novosilka near Staromayorske in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on April 28.[59]

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

Positional engagements continued in western Zaporizhia Oblast on April 28, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Positional engagements continued near Robotyne and Verbove (east of Robotyne).[60] Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo claimed on April 28 that Russian forces recently advanced near Robotyne.[61] A Russian milblogger reiterated claims that Ukrainian forces recently intensified shelling in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[62]

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported on April 28 that Ukrainian forces recently advanced near Veletenske (southwest of Kherson City) and established control over Nestryha Island in the Dnipro River Delta southwest of Kherson City.[63] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled several Russian assaults near Krynky in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.[64]

Russian milbloggers claimed on April 28 that Ukrainian forces conducted an unsuccessful ATACMS strike targeting Russian air defense units near occupied Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea on the night of April 27 to 28.[65] One Russian milblogger claimed that there were also explosions near occupied Dzhankoi, Crimea.[66] Ukrainian and Russian officials have yet to comment on the claimed strike.

Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign (Russian Objective: Target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure in the rear and on the frontline)

Russian forces conducted a limited series of drone and missile strikes against Ukraine on the night of April 27 to 28. Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces launched four Shahed-136/131 drones from occupied Crimea, an S-300 air defense missile from Belgorod Oblast, and five drones of an unknown type from occupied Kherson Oblast.[67] Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed the four Shahed drones over Kyiv, Vinnytsia, Khmelnytskyi, and Kirovohrad oblasts and a drone of an unknown type over Mykolaiv Oblast. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported that Russian drones damaged a hotel in Mykolaiv City.[68] Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Military Administration Head Oleksandr Prokudin stated that a Russian missile struck Kherson City at noon on April 27 and that Russian anti-aircraft missiles struck Beryslav and Kherson raions at dawn on April 28, damaging residential areas, critical infrastructure, and an agricultural enterprise.[69] Russian sources, including the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), claimed that Russian forces struck an ammunition and aircraft equipment warehouse in Chernihiv Oblast, the Starokostyantyniv airfield in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, and the Kamyanka airfield in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[70]

Dmytro Sakharuk, the executive director of Ukraine’s largest private energy operator DTEK, stated on April 28 that Russian forces have targeted Ukrainian thermal power plants almost 180 times since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.[71] Sakharuk stated that the April 27 strike series was the fourth-largest Russian strike against Ukrainian thermal power plants in 2024.

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

The United Kingdom’s (UK) Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Leo Docherty, stated on April 27 that the UK assesses that Russian forces have suffered 450,000 killed and wounded personnel since the start of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.[72] Docherty stated that Russian forces have lost over 10,000 armored vehicles, including 3,000 tanks, as well as 109 fixed-wing aircraft, 135 rotary-wing aircraft, and 23 naval vessels.[73] US intelligence assessed in December 2023 that Russian forces had suffered 315,000 casualties in Ukraine since February 2022.[74] Russian opposition media outlets Meduza and Mediazona estimated in February 2024 that upwards of 75,000 Russian personnel died in Ukraine between the start of the full-scale invasion and December 2023.[75] Russian forces continue offensive operations in Ukraine despite heavy manpower losses by relying on crypto-mobilization efforts.[76] The Russian military is facing constraints on the amount of modern and effective equipment that it can and will be able to deploy in Ukraine, and the overall combat effectiveness of Russian formations and units continues to decline as they degrade in Ukraine.[77] Russian forces have weathered heavy losses in Ukraine, however, and will continue to rely on quantitative advantages in manpower and materiel to pressure Ukrainian forces.

The Russian government published a resolution on April 28 announcing that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) will begin to issue electronic summonses through the Unified Military Registry for the fall 2024 conscription cycle starting on November 1.[78] The resolution states that Russian officials will consider an electronic summons served seven days after it is posted on the Russia State Services portal and that if a conscript does not appear within 20 days of the summonses being served, then Russian authorities will block the conscript’s ability to obtain a passport or register as an individual entrepreneur.[79] The resolution also states that Russian officials will collect information on the real estate and vehicles owned by those eligible for military service and information about foreign travel for the Unified Military Registry.[80] Russian officials have delivered limited electronic summonses alongside hard copy summonses during the ongoing spring 2024 conscription cycle.[81] The Russian State Duma adopted the bill creating the Unified Military Registry in April 2023, and the Kremlin likely intends to use the registry to crack down on Russian draft dodgers.[82]

Russian authorities have reportedly formalized a procedure for recruiting those accused of criminal offenses for military service in Ukraine. Russian outlet Kommersant reported on April 27 that Russian criminal investigators, prosecutors, and military commanders are coordinating efforts to recruit those accused of crimes for military service in exchange for dropping their criminal punishment.[83] Russian legal sources told Kommersant that investigators from the Russian Investigative Committee provide those accused of crimes with an ”explanation” document upon the completion of the investigation (presumably when Russian authorities arrest and inform the accused of the crime they allegedly committed).[84] The document reportedly informs the accused whether it is possible for them to obtain an exemption from criminal liability in exchange for military service during partial mobilization or by signing a military contract.[85] The investigator in charge of the case reportedly suspends and terminates criminal prosecution after the accused signs a contract for military service with the approval of the supervising prosecutor and the commander of the military unit in which the accused will be serving.[86] Kommersant noted that Russian authorities will not completely void a criminal case until the Russian military dismisses the accused from military service.[87] Russian authorities are reportedly offering exemption from criminal liability in exchange for military service through Article 398 of the Russian Criminal Code, a previously scarcely-used provision that allows deferment of sentences in “exceptional cases” that Russian courts have been using more frequently since the start of the full-scale invasion.[88] This procedure notably does not require that Russian authorities formally prosecute the accused, and Russian authorities may use these measures to coerce people into military service through accusations with increasingly suspect evidence. Kommersant reported that Russian authorities are already implementing this procedure in occupied Ukraine and Russian federal subjects bordering Ukraine and that Russian authorities are gradually extending it to all of Russia.[89]

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine)  

Russian loitering munitions manufacturer and Kalashnikov Concern subsidiary Zala Aero announced on April 26 that Russian forces are increasingly using Izdeliye-51/52 loitering munitions in Ukraine.[90] Zala Aero stated that Zala Aero observed Russian forces using at least 500 Ozdeliye-51/52 loitering munitions in Ukraine in the past three months through open-source footage.[91] Zala Aero claimed that Russian forces previously published 1,000 instances of using loitering munitions in Ukraine during an unspecified period of 18 months.[92] Zala Aero claimed that Russian forces primarily use the loitering munitions to target Ukrainian artillery systems, tanks, and light armored vehicles.[93]

Ukrainian Defense Industrial Efforts (Ukrainian objective: Develop its defense industrial base to become more self-sufficient in cooperation with US, European, and international partners)

ISW is not publishing coverage of Ukrainian defense industrial efforts today.

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

ISW is not publishing coverage of Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine today.

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on April 28 that Russian occupation authorities are intensifying information operations to diminish trust in Ukrainian authorities and the military in occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian information operations aim to discredit Ukrainian military and political leadership, foment panic among Ukrainians, and compromise the activity of Ukrainian forces.[94] The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security warned that Russian Telegram channels are specifically spreading false information about alleged divisions between senior Ukrainian political and military leadership to diminish trust in Ukrainian officials and degrade Ukrainian morale.[95]

Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov baselessly claimed on April 28 that panic is growing among Ukrainian forces on the frontline, in an attempt to sow panic in Ukraine.[96] Peskov’s statement is also likely intended to artificially inflate the success of recent Russian tactical advances along select sectors of the frontline to Russian domestic audiences.

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesperson Maria Zakharova reiterated boilerplate Russian information operations about Russian-backed Moldovan breakaway republic of Transnistria on April 28. Zakharova continued to falsely portray Russia as a legitimate guarantor and mediator in the 5+2 negotiating format for the Transnistrian conflict, which includes Russia, Ukraine, Transnistria, Moldova, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as mediators and the European Union (EU) and US as observers.[97] Russia is not an impartial, outside party in the conflict between Moldova and Transnistria and thus is not a legitimate mediator. Russia has historically and continues to use pro-Russian actors in Transnistria to set conditions for Russian hybrid operations against Moldova.[98]

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

Nothing significant to report.

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.

7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 28, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-april-28-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Gaza Strip: The IDF Chief of Staff reportedly approved plans for a major operation into Rafah during a meeting with the IDF Southern Command commander and division and brigade commanders.
• West Bank: Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least two locations across the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last information cutoff on April 27.
• Lebanon: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on April 27.

IRAN UPDATE, APRIL 28, 2024

Apr 28, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, April 28, 2024

Andie Parry, Alexandra Braverman, Annika Ganzeveld and Brian Carter

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

CTP-ISW defines the “Axis of Resistance” as the unconventional alliance that Iran has cultivated in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. This transnational coalition is comprised of state, semi-state, and non-state actors that cooperate with one another to secure their collective interests. Tehran considers itself to be both part of the alliance and its leader. Iran furnishes these groups with varying levels of financial, military, and political support in exchange for some degree of influence or control over their actions. Some are traditional proxies that are highly responsive to Iranian direction, while others are partners over which Iran exerts more limited influence. Members of the Axis of Resistance are united by their grand strategic objectives, which include eroding and eventually expelling American influence from the Middle East, destroying the Israeli state, or both. Pursuing these objectives and supporting the Axis of Resistance to those ends have become cornerstones of Iranian regional strategy.

We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

CTP-ISW will publish abbreviated updates on April 27 and 28, 2024. Detailed coverage will resume on Monday, April 29, 2024.

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi approved operational plans “for the continuation of the war” during a visit to IDF Southern Command on April 28.[1] He discussed the plans with IDF Southern Command commander Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman and division and brigade commanders. An Israeli war correspondent said that Rafah was “on the agenda” of the meeting.[2] Israeli media claimed that Halevi approved plans “for a major operation into Rafah” during the meeting.[3]

Key Takeaways:

• Gaza Strip: The IDF Chief of Staff reportedly approved plans for a major operation into Rafah during a meeting with the IDF Southern Command commander and division and brigade commanders.
• West Bank: Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least two locations across the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last information cutoff on April 27.
• Lebanon: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on April 27.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to sustain clearing operations in the Gaza Strip
• Reestablish Hamas as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continued to target Palestinian fighters and militia infrastructure across the Gaza Strip. The IDF Air Force struck dozens of Palestinian militia targets across the Gaza Strip since CTP-ISW's last information cut off on April 27.[4] The 679th Armored Brigade directed an airstrike targeting Palestinian fighters who were approaching Israeli forces in an unspecified area of the central Gaza Strip.[5] The brigade also directed airstrikes and artillery fire targeting a Palestinian militia cell in a building in the central Gaza Strip.[6] The IDF Navy struck targets in the coastal central Gaza Strip to support Israeli forces operating under the command of the 99th Division.[7]

Hamas and the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which is the self-proclaimed military wing of Fatah and aligned with Hamas in the current war, mortared Israeli armor near the Netzarim corridor in separate attacks on April 28.[8]

Palestinian fighters conducted three indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel on April 28. Palestinian Islamic Jihad targeted an Israeli military position east of Gaza City.[9] The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), which is a leftist Palestinian militia aligned with Hamas in the war, fired rockets at two towns near the Israel-Gaza Strip border.[10] The IDF said that DFLP fired the rockets from the northern Gaza Strip.[11]

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

West Bank

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least two locations across the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last information cutoff on April 27.[12] Unspecified Palestinian fighters detonated improvised explosive devices targeting Israeli forces near a religious site in Bethlehem.[13] Palestinian fighters also fired small arms targeting Israeli forces conducting a raid in Nablus[14]

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

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Deter Israel from conducting a ground operation into Lebanon
• Prepare for an expanded and protracted conflict with Israel in the near term
• Expel the United States from Syria

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on April 27.[15] Hezbollah fighters launched dozens of Katyusha rockets at an IDF base on Mount Meron that hosts air traffic control, radar, surveillance, communication, and jamming facilities on April 27.[16] The IDF said that at least 26 rockets crossed into Israel and struck open areas near Bar Yohai.[17] The Hezbollah rocket barrage injured one Israeli soldier.[18] Hezbollah stated that the rocket barrage was in response to IDF Air Force strikes in several towns in southern Lebanon.[19]

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

8. Why the West will refuse to fight – Citizens won't sacrifice themselves

This certainly sums things up:

“Our political elites have more or less made themselves immune to the negative consequences of their own policies.”

Why the West will refuse to fight Citizens won't sacrifice themselves

(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

 Malcom Kyeyune

APRIL 25, 2024   5 MINShttps://unherd.com/2024/04/why-the-west-will-refuse-to-fight/

Western politics is defined by a conflict that is always awkward and sometimes cringe. On the one hand, our leaders are full of loud-mouthed passion, warning that the days of peace are over and that we now need to prepare for total, generational war. On the other, it’s beyond obvious that nobody cares. Across Europe and America, politicians now openly exhort their populations to feel righteous patriotism and to answer the call of duty, but all seem to accomplish exactly nothing: our militaries are shrinking due to a lack of recruits, polling shows a massive disinterest in fighting for King and Country, the young in particular remain completely unmoved. Even in embattled Ukraine, young men are choosing to dodge the draft and go clubbing instead.

How did this state of affairs come to pass? Most “analysis” starts and ends with a bit of hand-wringing about the moral decay of the youth. But this doesn’t explain much. There were countless complaints about the sad state of young people in the late 19th century — but that didn’t translate into a society-wide lack of patriotism and disinterest in defending one’s country.

More useful, perhaps, is the model supplied by British historian Arnold Toynbee, whose life’s work mapped the lifecycle of human empires. In particular, one concept is of interest here: the idea of the internal proletariat, a group of people who tend to grow in number as empires begin to stagnate and decline.

The internal proletariat is not a Marxist term (both Marx and Toynbee took the word “proletariat” from the Roman proletarii, the name of the poorest class of urban dweller). In Toynbee’s model, developed in his 12-volume Study of History, it denotes a group of citizens who live inside an empire, but for various structural reasons no longer benefit from it — and so are unlikely to rush to its defence. This is, after all, what happened in Rome: as the empire began to fall on hard times and the decline of the slavery-based economy started to bite, a mix of high taxes and painful labour shortages conspired to make Roman citizenship feel more like a yoke and less like a privilege. Once the barbarians came, many were disinclined to put up much resistance; and why would they?

A more obvious example can be found in the annals of the Aztec empire, which had subjugated a large number of peoples and tribes. When Hernán Cortés overthrew it, he did so by leading a coalition of disgruntled subjects for whom Aztec rule had few upsides. In other words, his army was made up of internal proletarians: people who lost more than they gained from the continuation of empire, even though they were formally part of it in the first place.

Why, more than 500 years later, is any of this relevant? Consider for a moment the recent vote on foreign aid in the US house of representatives. This caused quite a lot of bitterness on the American Right, and for quite good reason: the speaker, Mike Johnson, violated his own party’s rules in order to pass a foreign aid bill with the help of the Democrats, even though more than half of his own party was opposed to it.

Many, let’s not forget, believe America is heading for bankruptcy. The deficit is massive, the national debt is exploding, and underneath it all lies the underreported but truly eye-watering figure of $175 billion, which is what the US Treasury projects it will need to actually fund its social safety net. And what is America’s political class doing in the face of this looming fiscal disaster? They are quite literally borrowing money to send to Ukraine and Israel instead — a move that, in the corporate world, would be considered asset stripping. Ordinary American voters are no doubt starting to feel what the put-upon Romans did: the empire is no longer working for them.

SUGGESTED READINGThe Israel-Gaza war has changed everything

BY ARMIN ROSEN

Previously, such measures would have been justified with bromides about freedom and democracy, but such rhetoric no longer commands the same authority. Americans, just like Westerners in general, are checking out and refusing to do their “duty” towards rulers who have seemingly abandoned any notion of giving them anything in return. The centuries come and go, but these basic social dynamics are as true now as they were in the ancient world: the less valuable citizenship becomes, the less people are willing to stand up and fight for it.

What makes this situation so intractable today is that our political elites have more or less made themselves immune to the negative consequences of their own policies. They neither apologise for mistakes nor accept responsibility for them. To take just one example: the war against Ukraine was supposed to be won quickly, and those who warned about the negative economic consequences of introducing sanctions were ridiculed and marginalised. More than two years later, those measures are wreaking havoc on ordinary people, and yet there is seemingly no contrition whatsoever from those who got it wrong — just more calls for the plebians to sacrifice more.

“Our political elites have more or less made themselves immune to the negative consequences of their own policies.”

Of course, to say that this is somehow a unique aspect of the Ukraine war is far from the truth: the war in Iraq, which cost the United States massive amounts of blood, sweat and treasure, is now widely recognised to have been based on lies and misinformation, and yet few were punished. It was the same story after the great financial crisis of 2008. Lack of accountability is at this point endemic.

Thus, we find ourselves in a situation that has much in the way of historical precedent: an insulated, out-of-touch ruling class protected from the ill effects of its own policies, and a general population that is sullenly withdrawing from public service and both mentally and physically “checking out”. Because it’s happened so often before, what happens next is not a great mystery: at some point, yet another crisis will roll along, one that the elites will simply not be able to manage without the active support of the people they rule over, only to find that said support doesn’t arrive. The terrible revolutionary years that Mexico suffered after the botched election of 1910 is one example of where this dynamic can eventually lead.

In another dramatic example of this dynamic playing itself out, Alexis de Toqueville took to the podium in early 1848 to warn his fellow Frenchmen that they were all “sleeping on a volcano”. Even as obvious revolutionary activity had ceased, the way in which bitterness, dissatisfaction and loss of faith in king Louis Philippe I had spread all across French society was, in de Toqueville’s mind, a sign that things could explode at any moment. And half a year later, they did: not just in France but across the majority of Europe.

Of course, trying to predict the specific crisis that will tip things over the edge is always a fool’s errand — in his case, de Toqueville could hardly know that some fairly insignificant political banquets would be the thing that ended up setting France on fire — but once the tinder is stacked to the ceiling, all it takes is a spark. Today, just as during de Toqueville’s time, many people still take some comfort in pointing out that people, however dissatisfied they may be, are still “just” grumbling about it over the kitchen table. But that sense of safety is illusory at best.

Survivors of tsunamis point out that before the wave actually hits, the water dramatically pulls back and recedes from the shore. And when that happens, one doesn’t have long to run away. For human societies entering periods of chaos, history shows a fairly similar dynamic: an increasing number of citizens choose to retreat. They stop serving and caring; they become sullen, uncooperative and uninterested in coming to society’s aid. This is not a problem of morals, nor a situation that is helped by blaming the young. Instead, the withdrawal of the people, just like the withdrawal of the shoreline, is a sign that a tsunami is approaching.

Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden

9. Israeli Officials Believe I.C.C. Is Preparing Arrest Warrants Over War

At least it may not be a double standard.

The Israeli and foreign officials also believe the court is weighing arrest warrants for leaders from Hamas.

But all the responsibility for starting this conflict lies with Hamas.

Israeli Officials Believe I.C.C. Is Preparing Arrest Warrants Over War

By Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley

The reporters spoke to Israeli and foreign officials.

• April 28, 2024
• Updated 8:08 p.m. ET

The New York Times · by Patrick Kingsley · April 28, 2024

Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, last week.

By Ronen Bergman and

The reporters spoke to Israeli and foreign officials.

• April 28, 2024Updated 8:08 p.m. ET

Israeli officials increasingly believe that the International Criminal Court is preparing to issue arrest warrants for senior government officials on charges related to the conflict with Hamas, according to five Israeli and foreign officials.

The Israeli and foreign officials also believe the court is weighing arrest warrants for leaders from Hamas.

If the court proceeds, the Israeli officials could potentially be accused of preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and pursuing an excessively harsh response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, according to two of the five officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

The Israeli officials, who are worried about the potential fallout from such a case, said they believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is among those who might be named in a warrant. It is not clear who might be charged from Hamas or what crimes would be cited.

The Israeli officials did not disclose the nature of the information that led them to be concerned about potential I.C.C. action, and the court did not comment on the matter.

Arrest warrants from the court would probably be seen in much of the world as a humbling moral rebuke, particularly to Israel, which for months has faced international backlash over its conduct in Gaza, including from President Biden, who called it “over the top.”

It could also affect Israel’s policies as the country presses its military campaign against Hamas. One of the Israeli officials said that the possibility of the court issuing arrest warrants had informed Israeli decision-making in recent weeks.

The Israeli and foreign officials said they didn’t know what stage the process was in. Any warrants would require approval from a panel of judges and would not necessarily result in a trial or even the targets’ immediate arrest.

Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, has previously confirmed that his team is investigating incidents during the war, but his office declined to comment for this article, saying that it does not “respond to speculation in media reports.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s office also would not comment, but on Friday the prime minister said on social media that any intervention by the I.C.C. “would set a dangerous precedent that threatens the soldiers and officials of all democracies fighting savage terrorism and wanton aggression.”

Mr. Netanyahu did not explain what prompted his statement, though he may have been responding to speculation about the arrest warrants in the Israeli press.

He also said: “Under my leadership, Israel will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense. The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it.”

Based in The Hague, the I.C.C. is the world’s only permanent international court with the power to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. The court has no police force of its own. Instead, it relies on its 124 members, which include most European countries but not Israel or the United States, to arrest those named in warrants. It cannot try defendants in absentia.

But warrants from the court can pose obstacles to travel for officials named in them.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, second from the left, in Tel Aviv in January.Credit...Pool photo by Ronen Zvulun

The Hamas-led raid last October led to the killing of roughly 1,200 people in Israel and the abductions of some 250 others, according to Israeli officials. The subsequent war in Gaza, including heavy Israeli bombardment, has killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gazan officials, caused widespread damage to housing and infrastructure, and brought the territory to the brink of famine.

The Israeli assault in Gaza has led the International Court of Justice, a separate court in The Hague, to hear accusations of genocide against the Israeli state and has spurred a wave of protests on college campuses in the United States.

If the I.C.C. does issue arrest warrants, they would come with deep stigmatization, placing those named in them in the same category as foreign leaders like Omar al-Bashir, the deposed president of Sudan, and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, who was the subject of a warrant last year tied to his war against Ukraine.

The I.C.C.’s focus on individuals rather than states differentiates it from the International Court of Justice, which settles disputes between states.

Mr. Khan has said that his team will be investigating incidents that have occurred since Oct. 7 and that he will be “impartially looking at the evidence and vindicating the rights of victims whether they are in Israel or Palestine.”

Mr. Khan’s office has also been investigating allegations of war crimes committed during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas; one of the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity believes the new arrest warrants would be an extension of that investigation.

Hamas and the Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment. The office of Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, declined to comment.

In general, Israeli officials say that they fight according to the laws of war and that they take significant steps to protect civilians, accusing Hamas of hiding inside civilian areas and forcing Israel to pursue them there. Hamas has denied committing atrocities on Oct. 7, saying — despite video evidence to the contrary — that its fighters tried to avoid harming civilians.

Marlise Simons, Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. More about Patrick Kingsley

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The New York Times · by Patrick Kingsley · April 28, 2024

10. As Colleges Weigh Crackdowns on Protests, Questions About Outsiders Linger

These questions need to more than linger. they need to be asked and answered. There is a network behind this. We need to recognize it and its strategy, understand it, EXPOSE it, and attack the strategy.

These kids need to know they are being manipulated and used.

As Colleges Weigh Crackdowns on Protests, Questions About Outsiders Linger

By Patricia Mazzei

April 28, 2024

Updated 7:40 p.m. ET

The New York Times · by Patricia Mazzei · April 28, 2024

With pro-Palestinian protests spreading across campuses nationwide, university leaders have had to confront a central question: When does a demonstration cross the line?

A protester is escorted by the police at Northeastern University in Boston early Saturday morning.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

By

April 28, 2024, 4:45 p.m. ET

Amid a dizzying array of standoffs involving pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments at colleges, schools that cracked down on protesters over the weekend have given varying justifications for their actions, while others sent mixed signals with their inaction.

Behind it all was a central question confronting university leaders across the country: When does a demonstration cross the line?

Colleges have cited property damage, outside provocateurs, antisemitic expressions or just failures to heed warnings as reasons to clear encampments and arrest students. Student groups have strongly denied or questioned many of those claims.

Northeastern University in Boston, Washington University in St. Louis, Indiana University Bloomington and Arizona State University had police forces move in on demonstrations on Saturday, leading to more than 200 arrests. At other schools — including Columbia, Penn, Harvard and Cornell — an icy tension lingered on Sunday as leaders warned about possible consequences for demonstrators but had yet to carry them out.

At Washington University, where campus police officers made 100 arrests on Saturday, administrators said that a group had violated university policy by beginning to set up a camp on the east end of campus. Police officers arrested people who refused to leave “after being asked multiple times,” university administrators wrote.

“No one has the right to disrupt the ability of people in our community to learn and work,” they said.

More than 800 people have been arrested since April 18, when the New York Police cleared an encampment at Columbia.

At Northeastern, where 102 protesters were arrested earlier on Saturday, a university spokesman said the demonstration had been “infiltrated by professional organizers” and someone had used “virulent antisemitic slurs.” Protesters denied both claims.

Many school leaders have insisted that people outside their colleges are stoking the confrontations, despite limited evidence backing their claims. In many cases, the group of protesters have mostly involved students and university employees, but a notable exception was at Washington University on Saturday. Of the 100 arrests made, only 23 were students and four were employees, the university said in a statement on Sunday.

But at other colleges, schools have not cited evidence to back their claims, and the influence of outsiders was not clear.

About 200 people attended a pro-Israel demonstration on Sunday at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a few hundred yards from a pro-Palestinian encampment. Noah Rubin, a junior who spoke at the pro-Israel rally, said that not all of the pro-Palestinian protesters are Penn students.

“We have a couple of people documented who have a history of violence in Philadelphia,” he said, though he did not provide more details. A spokeswoman for the encampment did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Rubin’s allegation.

Some schools have tried to curb the influence of outsiders. For instance, Harvard has sought to restrict access only to those who showed a university ID. At Northeastern, officials had asked protesters for their student IDs earlier in the week before the arrests on campus on Saturday. Some protesters showed them, while others declined. At Columbia, which closed its gates, protesters on the other side added to a sense of chaos, with many shouting antisemitic chants and threatening students.

At Stanford, where an earlier encampment was taken down in February, protesters erected a second encampment on Thursday.Credit...Carlos Barria/Reuters

Protesters erected an encampment at the University of Mary Washington in Fredricksburg, Va., on Friday, but after the demonstration was opened to the public, university officials, citing safety concerns, asked organizers to take down their tents, which they did early that night. A peaceful protest continued into Saturday, when “outside influence” pushed for the encampment to grow again, Troy D. Paino, the university’s president, said in a statement on Sunday.

When tents were put back up Saturday afternoon, the university said, the organizers were told to leave. Twelve protesters, nine of whom were students, who stayed were then arrested.

But while administrators at some schools have tried to point the finger at protesters from outside the community, their own students have often been the ones who were arrested. At Emory University in Atlanta, 20 of at least 28 people arrested on Thursday had ties to the school, despite officials’ early insistence that no one involved in the encampment was affiliated with the university.

Emory’s president, Gregory L. Fenves, said in a statement on Sunday that a peaceful protest on Saturday had been disrupted by some people spray-painting “hateful messages” in a building’s exterior walls and vandalizing other structures.

“Emory is navigating a divide between individuals who wish to express themselves peacefully and those who seek to use our campus as a platform to promote discord,” Dr. Fenves said, adding that such incidents “must be rejected and condemned.”

The high-profile conflicts have fueled more demonstrations, including in campuses where protests had been dismantled earlier in the year.

At Stanford, where an earlier encampment was taken down in February, protesters erected a second encampment on Thursday. Administrators said in a statement on Friday that it had delivered letters to about 60 students warning them that “failure to cease conduct in violation of university policy” could result in disciplinary action or even arrest.

Anna Betts, Colbi Edmonds, Jon Hurdle and Bernard Mokam contributed reporting.

Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico. More about Patricia Mazzei

The New York Times · by Patricia Mazzei · April 28, 2024

11. On Columbia University and Coach Handbags

Excerpt:

It may be premature to call the anti-Israel protests and assaults on Jewish students on campuses across the country a tipping point. But scenes that recall “Lord of the Flies”—where the universities’ “best and brightest” are behaving like barbarians—are prompting employers, parents and high-school students to rethink the value of their degrees.

On Columbia University and Coach Handbags

A degree’s value, in both money and status, depends on the reputation of the institution’s brand.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-columbia-university-and-coach-handbags-protests-degree-value-israel-2d33c84d?mod=latest_headlines

By Allysia Finley

Follow

April 28, 2024 4:02 pm ET

A Palestinian flag raised above the encampment area at Columbia University in New York, April 25. PHOTO: SYNDI PILAR/ZUMA PRESS

Accessible luxury. That’s how the Federal Trade Commission described the market for Coach, Kate Spade and Michael Kors handbags in an antitrust lawsuit last week. It’s also an apt epithet for elite universities.

Consumers pay hefty prices for accessible luxury handbags not because they’re of superior quality but because their brands indicate status. The same is true of the Ivy League, which, like purveyors of expensive purses, uses selective discounting—financial aid—to make its product accessible to those who aspire to a higher status.

A Columbia degree is a lot like a Coach handbag in this regard. Would consumers and high-school students endure pocketbook pain if their once-desired products lost their prestige? Probably not.

It may be premature to call the anti-Israel protests and assaults on Jewish students on campuses across the country a tipping point. But scenes that recall “Lord of the Flies”—where the universities’ “best and brightest” are behaving like barbarians—are prompting employers, parents and high-school students to rethink the value of their degrees.

Elite universities benefit from a reinforcing feedback loop. The cream of the high-school crop aspire to attend because they expect a degree will earn them entry into the highest professional and social echelons. An education from Columbia is no better than one from many flagship state colleges such as the University of South Carolina in Columbia. But the Ivy League’s brand is held in high esteem by employers.

Parents pay big bucks to send their kids to these colleges because they think they will be surrounded by other smart and sophisticated students. Prestigious employers are more likely to hire grads from such universities, who they assume are intelligent and conscientious.

A study last fall by Harvard and Brown professors found that attending an elite college—an Ivy League school, the University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford or MIT—instead of a selective public university increased a student’s likelihood of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%. It also nearly tripled his odds of working at a prestigious firm.

Graduates of these elite colleges make up nearly half of Rhodes Scholars, 26.1% of journalists at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and 71.4% of Supreme Court justices appointed since 1967. Buying a college degree for its brand has historically paid off for students. The payoff will shrink if employers think less of the brand.

Elite colleges are supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff in their application process. They are, however, increasingly selecting students for traits that many employers don’t want, such as a passion for progressive activism.

Stanford University in 2017 admitted Ziad Ahmed, who in response to the application prompt “What matters to you, and why?” wrote “#BlackLivesMatter” 100 times. “Everyone who reviewed your application was inspired by your passion, determination, accomplishments and heart,” the university’s acceptance letter read. “You are, quite simply, a fantastic match with Stanford.” Mr. Ahmed decided Yale was a better match for him.

Elite colleges also may have devalued their degrees in the eyes of employers during the pandemic when they made submitting SAT and ACT scores optional. This had the effect of lowering admissions standards, resulting in the enrollment of less academically qualified students. A recent study by Brown and Dartmouth professors found that the academic performance of college students at elite universities who didn’t submit standardized test scores was equivalent to those who scored 1307 on the SAT—more than 200 points lower than the average score at most Ivy Leagues.

Professors at Dartmouth also found that “under a test-optional policy, about 31% of enrolled students have not submitted a score, and most of the missing mass of the distribution is at a score of 1450 and below.” This suggests that the test-score ranges colleges report are inflated, and that their students’ performance has fallen in recent years.

Dartmouth and some other Ivy League schools recently abandoned their test-optional policies after finding that they harmed less-affluent students whom admissions officers rated lower on fuzzier “personal” attributes. But might test-optional policies also have resulted in admitting more of the ignorant activists now marching for the destruction of Israel?

When Americans picture Ivy League students, they don’t see savants. In many cases, they imagine sloths, bigots and bullies. Don’t be surprised if many parents no longer are willing to spend a small fortune for their children to attend school with know-nothings—or if employers think twice about hiring Ivy League alumni.

I graduated from Stanford in 2009, before young leftists turned belligerent and censorious en masse. While I don’t regret attending, I wonder whether I’d make the same choice today. Being in the ideological minority can toughen your skin, but today’s campus bullies can also beat students down. Is the abuse worth it?

Remember: A Coach handbag is a status symbol only if people think it is. The same is true for a Columbia degree.

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Appeared in the April 29, 2024, print edition as 'On Columbia University and Coach Handbags'

12. Farewell to China’s Strategic Support Force. Let’s meet its replacements

Excerpts:

The drastic reform of its structure less than a decade after its last reform gives ammunition to both pessimists and optimists observing the PLA’s development.

On the one hand, it suggests that the PLA’s much-heralded reforms of 2015, which were meant to turn it into a modern joint force, have not been smooth sailing. Where the Pentagon sees a growing threat from China’s cyber, information, and space efforts, Chinese military leaders saw the need to make major changes. Placing all of these missions under a single roof did not create new efficiencies—at least, not enough to justify its problems—and may have simply placed a new layer of bureaucracy between these missions and the CMC. In this way, the new structure actually harkens back to the pre-reform PLA structure, in which these missions were controlled by different directly-subordinate CMC Departments. This comes on the heels of a major purge of some of the PRC defense establishment’s highest officers, including, reportedly, leaders in the SSF.

On the other hand, these reforms also suggest that the PLA is not a sclerotic organization, but is capable of frankly assessing its shortcomings, finding innovative solutions, and making changes when needed. This is a major change from only a few years ago, when PRC leaders struggled to enact even relatively modest reforms in the face of an entrenched bureaucracy.

And for all that is changing, there is much that is not. According to an op-ed released in PLA Daily after the establishment of the ISF, while the structure may be new, the PLA’s underlying theories of victory remain the same: “Victory is achieved through information. Modern war is a confrontation between system and system, a contest between system and system. Whoever holds information superiority will hold the initiative in war.” This new reform seeks to drive the PLA further towards that enduring goal.

Farewell to China’s Strategic Support Force. Let’s meet its replacements

The PLA axes an organization once hailed as evidence of innovation.

By MATT BRUZZESE and PETER W. SINGER

APRIL 28, 2024 05:38 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Matt Bruzzese

The unexpected elimination of the People’s Liberation Army unit that handled space, cyber, and electronic warfare missions is all the more surprising because the Strategic Support Force seemed to just be coming into its own.

On April 19, the PLA announced that three co-equal forces—the Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force, and Information Support Force—would be established to replace the SFF, itself created as part of the broad 2015 reorganization that also birthed the PLA Rocket Force.

At its inception, the SSF was hailed by domestic leaders and outside observers as a sign that the PLA was capable of real innovation. Placing interrelated missions such as space, cyber, electronic warfare, and other information missions such as psychological warfare under a single command was intended to create synergies between all of these, facilitating joint operations and providing the PLA with advantages in dominating network-centric warfare and the information space.

Or so the theory went. Now the PLA, apparently unhappy with the results of its experiment, has broken the SSF into three component forces. The military’s new structure will be four services—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Rocket Force—backed up by four supporting forces directly under the supreme Central Military Commission: the Joint Logistics Support Force and the three new ones (Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force, and Information Support Force).

Of the new forces, only the Information Support Force appears to have held an establishment ceremony. Notably, it featured a speech by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who tasked the new organization with “a great responsibility for advancing the military's high level of development and winning a modern war.” Xi’s remarks also provided a bit more information about the new force’s missions, indicating that the ISF will handle “construction and application of the integrated network information system,” ensuring a smooth and unobstructed flow of information, fusion of information resources, and facilitating joint warfare.

The ISF will be complemented by a Cyberspace Force, which will presumably take on the cyber attack, defense, and espionage missions from the former SSF’s Network Systems Department. The PLA’s brief press release provided little additional information, saying only that “Cyber security remains a global challenge and poses a severe threat to China. Developing the Cyberspace Force and cyber security and defense means are important for reinforcing national cyber border defense, promptly detecting and countering network intrusions and maintaining national cyber sovereignty and information security. We actively advocate building a cyberspace featuring peace, security, openness and cooperation and are committed to working with the international community to jointly build a community with a shared future in cyberspace.”

Finally, the SSF’s Space Systems Department will be spun off into a new Aerospace Force, which will take over the PLA’s space mission. According to the vaguely worded press release, the new force will “strengthen the capacity to safely enter, exit and openly use space, enhancing crisis management and the efficacy of comprehensive governance in space and promoting peaceful utilization of space.”

This will seemingly create a structure closer to (although not entirely equivalent to) the U.S. military’s Space Force. Interestingly, while the PLA’s official website translates the new organization as “Aerospace Force,” China Daily’s English edition translates it as “Space Force.” The PLA plays an outsized role in China’s space program—for example, all space launch facilities and astronaut training and management were controlled by the SSF, and now will presumably be controlled by the Aerospace Force—making the new Aerospace Force’s likely mission more akin to the U.S. Space Force plus most of NASA.

Much remains unknown about how exactly this will play out. For instance, the SSF also oversaw a range of research institutes focused on developing and integrating future weapons, but it is not yet clear in open reporting where they will end up.

The drastic reform of its structure less than a decade after its last reform gives ammunition to both pessimists and optimists observing the PLA’s development.

On the one hand, it suggests that the PLA’s much-heralded reforms of 2015, which were meant to turn it into a modern joint force, have not been smooth sailing. Where the Pentagon sees a growing threat from China’s cyber, information, and space efforts, Chinese military leaders saw the need to make major changes. Placing all of these missions under a single roof did not create new efficiencies—at least, not enough to justify its problems—and may have simply placed a new layer of bureaucracy between these missions and the CMC. In this way, the new structure actually harkens back to the pre-reform PLA structure, in which these missions were controlled by different directly-subordinate CMC Departments. This comes on the heels of a major purge of some of the PRC defense establishment’s highest officers, including, reportedly, leaders in the SSF.

On the other hand, these reforms also suggest that the PLA is not a sclerotic organization, but is capable of frankly assessing its shortcomings, finding innovative solutions, and making changes when needed. This is a major change from only a few years ago, when PRC leaders struggled to enact even relatively modest reforms in the face of an entrenched bureaucracy.

And for all that is changing, there is much that is not. According to an op-ed released in PLA Daily after the establishment of the ISF, while the structure may be new, the PLA’s underlying theories of victory remain the same: “Victory is achieved through information. Modern war is a confrontation between system and system, a contest between system and system. Whoever holds information superiority will hold the initiative in war.” This new reform seeks to drive the PLA further towards that enduring goal.

Matt Bruzzese is a senior Chinese-language analyst for BluePath Labs.

P.W. Singer is a best-selling author of such books on war and technology as Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, and Burn-In; senior fellow at New America; and co-founder of Useful Fiction, a strategic narratives company

defenseone.com · by Matt Bruzzese

13. Marine special operators are using fiction to envision the future

FICINT

The four short stories can be accessed at the link: https://www.marsoc.marines.mil/About/Initiatives/Raider-40-FIC-INT/

Marine special operators are using fiction to envision the future

Short stories by Marine Raiders are driving discussions about the evolution of MARSOC through 2040.

BY MAJ. GEN. MATTHEW TROLLINGER

COMMANDER, MARINE FORCES SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND

APRIL 28, 2024 04:42 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Maj. Gen. Matthew Trollinger

Out in the Indian Ocean, the maritime militia’s unmanned craft approached the Marine-led international task force, and a young sergeant deployed his own small submersibles to meet the threat. While the Marines’ new systems used artificial intelligence to synchronize a response to enemy drone swarms, their operator still faced the timeless challenge of the sea. He struggled to control his drones as they spread out under the crashing ocean waves. This cat-and-mouse game of reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance still relied on principles honed since WWII: a combination of technical and human-centric skillsets that would enable a cross-functional team of Marines, Marine Raiders, and allied partners to prevail.

This vignette, although based in the technological advancements of today, is set in the late 2030s. It’s part of our effort at Marine Forces Special Operations Command to use fiction to peer into the future.

Fictional intelligence, or FICINT, stories, as defined by Ghost Fleet and Burn-In authors Peter Singer and August Cole, represent a way to envision future scenarios with operationally-informed fiction writing. Our command worked with both authors—known for galvanizing discussions about change within the Defense Department—to mentor current Marine Raiders in publishing three FICINT stories that have already helped drive discussion on the evolution of MARSOC into 2040.

In this current decade, we have been working to implement the vision and strategy laid out in 2018’s “MARSOF 2030” and its supporting operating concept of 2021, planning for our future capabilities and employment with our colleagues across Special Operations, the Marine Corps, and the Joint Force. These documents laid out the challenges: our nation’s adversaries and their proxies are unceasing in their use of cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns, geopolitical incursions, disruption of commercial maritime trade, and financing of malicious actors to gain strategic advantage. Marine Special Operations Command recognized the need to illuminate, contextualize and counter these efforts while creating effects-based dilemmas at a tempo adversaries cannot match. They also defined the capabilities our forces need to prevail, described the environments in which they will operate, and sought to align MARSOC as a connecting file between U.S. SOCOM’s modernization efforts and the Marine Corps’ future operating concepts.

Our conceptual framework is rapidly becoming a reality. Deployed Marine Special Operations Forces gain persistent placement and access to politically sensitive environments and develop enduring relationships with our allies’ and partners’ military leaders. As Marines, we are especially suited to operate in littoral regions—where the majority of the world’s population centers are located, and the preponderance of economic activity occurs. We are providing our Marine Raiders with the advanced training, tactics, and technologies that underpin our operating concept. Raiders are strengthening and enabling allies and partners, illuminating, and deterring malign activities, and enabling the speed and precision of a Joint Force response if we must escalate from competition to crisis and conflict.

But even as we provide solutions for today’s challenges, our Marine Raiders continue to evolve from the strategic vision laid out in MARSOF 2030 towards the ever-increasing strategic and operational challenges anticipated in the following decade. It is for this reason that we turned to FICINT writing. We built upon the operational concepts that globally distributed Marine Raiders execute daily, while challenging ourselves to internalize a future operating environment with the types of multi-functional challenges highlighted by U.S. SOCOM’s 2040 conceptual framework.

Our short stories center around practical applications and lethal and non-lethal effects in strategic competition and crisis, and help us envision the types of people, capabilities, dependencies, and interactions that will be required of future Raider formations. To that end we incorporated several themes that transcended any one vignette: using new digital capabilities to achieve greater effects with our partners and allies; rapidly adapting to changes in environmental conditions and adversary strategic objectives; and finally, staying true to our Marine Corps heritage and the foundation it provides to enable us to achieve decisive effects for our nation.

Raider 40: “Imbedded.” The overarching purpose is to highlight interagency-enabled activities like counter-threat finance operations that hold increasing relevance not only for enduring counter-terrorism missions but also in strategic competition. This story emphasizes the importance of tracing state-sponsored activities to non-state malign influence, underscoring the significance of a robust liaison network and the necessity for a reliable redundant support system. As the digital landscape continues to expand, the narrative contrasts non-lethal and lethal activities.

Raider 40: “Arctic Urgency.” The story focuses on the application of information and non-lethal effects in strategic competition. Arctic Urgency delves into the intricacies of partnered operations, human-machine teaming, spectrum management, and communication within denied environments. It underscores that human adaptation will remain a pivotal element in competition and conflict.

Raider 40: “Uncharted.” Conceptualizing the convergence of MARSOF elements and future Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs), “Uncharted” examines how MARSOC’s operational approach integrates with the Marine Corps Force Design concepts. As the story develops, the employment of uncrewed autonomous systems and use of human cultural nuances with partner forces becomes a focal point.

MARSOF 2030 started our transformation from a needs-based counterterrorism-focused force to one composed of force elements and command-and-control nodes that can sense, fuse, and manipulate data at unprecedented scope, speed, and understanding to gain decisional advantage and provide operational commanders effects-based options inside the adversary’s decision cycle. Our MARSOF 2040 vision will make us stronger by challenging the current force to iteratively analyze, anticipate, and predict what will be needed. FICINT is one useful tool to frame the conversation. As we strive to sustain MARSOC’s high-performing contribution as part of the joint force in 2040, we need our formation to think critically, adapt effectively, and execute boldly to achieve that outcome.

Encouraged by the creativity of our authors, I have published their stories on our website. A wider discussion will occur in May 2024 at Global SOF Week Conference in Tampa, Florida. I look forward to the discussions stemming from our efforts to envision and embrace the future operating environment in which our Marine Raiders will thrive.

Maj. Gen. Matthew Trollinger is the commander of Marine Forces Special Operations Command. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or Special Operations Command.

defenseone.com · by Maj. Gen. Matthew Trollinger

​14. Xi shakes up China’s military in rethink of how to ‘fight and win’ future wars

Xi shakes up China’s military in rethink of how to ‘fight and win’ future wars | CNN

CNN · by Nectar Gan · April 27, 2024

China's military is undergoing a shake-up that enhances leader Xi Jinping’s direct control over its strategic capabilities.

Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world.

Hong Kong CNN —

China has rolled out the largest restructuring of its military in almost a decade, focusing on technology-driven strategic forces equipped for modern warfare, as Beijing vies with Washington for military primacy in a region rife with geopolitical tensions.

In a surprise move last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping scrapped the Strategic Support Force (SSF), a military branch he created in 2015 to integrate the People’s Liberation Army’s space, cyber, electronic and psychological warfare capabilities as part of a sweeping overhaul of the armed forces.

In its place, Xi inaugurated the Information Support Force, which he said was “a brand-new strategic arm of the PLA and a key underpinning of coordinated development and application of the network information system.”

The new force would play an important role in helping the Chinese military “fight and win in modern warfare,” he said at a ceremony last Friday.

At a news conference on the same day, a spokesperson for China’s Defense Ministry appeared to suggest the SSF was effectively broken into three units – the Information Support Force, the Aerospace Force and the Cyberspace Force – which will answer directly to the Central Military Commission, the body at the top of the military chain of command headed by Xi.

Under the new structure, the PLA now consists of four services – the army, navy, air force and the rocket force – plus four arms: the three units spun off from the SSF and the Joint Logistic Support Force, according to ministry spokesperson Wu Qian.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping oversees the inauguration of the Information Support Force of the People's Liberation Army at a ceremony in Beijing on April 19, 2024.

Xinhua News Agency

Experts on the Chinese military say the reorganization enhances Xi’s direct control over the PLA’s strategic capabilities and underscores China’s ambitions in better mastering AI and other new technologies to prepare for what it calls the “intelligentized warfare” of the future.

The restructuring follows Xi’s sweeping corruption purge of the PLA last year, which ensnared powerful generals and shook up the rocket force, an elite branch overseeing China’s fast-expanding arsenal of nuclear and ballistic missiles.

The Information Support Force will be led by top generals from the now-defunct SSF.

SSF deputy commander Bi Yi was appointed commander of the new unit, while Li Wei, the SSF’s political commissar, will take the same role in the Information Support Force, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.

There was no mention of any new appointment for SSF commander Ju Qiansheng, who last year spurred speculation when he disappeared from public view amid a flurry of military purges before eventually resurfacing at a conference in late January.

‘Better visibility’

Longtime PLA watchers say the latest reorganization is unlikely the result of the recent corruption purges, but rather a reflection that the SSF wasn’t an ideal organizational format for the Chinese military.

“It shows that the SSF was not a satisfactory arrangement. It reduced Xi’s visibility of important functions and did not really improve coordination between space, cyber, and network defense forces,” said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University.

Before its disbandment, the SSF had two principal units – the Aerospace Systems Department overseeing the PLA’s space operations and reconnaissance, and the Network System Department tasked with cyber, electronic and psychological warfare capabilities.

A total of 137 students directional trained for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force participate in a see-off ceremony at Fuyang Institute of Technology and will set off for barracks on December 26, 2021 in Fuyang, Anhui Province of China.

Wang Biao/VCG/Getty Images/File

Related article Xi’s latest purge targets the military. Why did powerful generals fall out of favor?

“I think the new structure will give Xi better visibility into what is happening in space, cyberspace, and network management. These functions will now be supervised at his level and not through the Strategic Support Force, which served as a middleman,” Wuthnow said.

The lack of such visibility could bear high risks, especially during times of heightened tension and deep distrust between Beijing and Washington.

Last year, the US shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon after it traversed the continental United States. The incident caused a fresh crisis between the two powers and plunged bilateral relations into a deep freeze for months.

Though US intelligence officials said the balloon was part of an extensive surveillance program run by the Chinese military, Xi may not have been aware of the mission.

US President Joe Biden said last June that the Chinese leader didn’t know about the balloon and was “very embarrassed” when it was shot down after it floated off course into American airspace.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has scrapped the People's Liberation Army's Strategic Support Force, a branch he founded in 2015.

Xinhua News Agency

James Char, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the conduct of strategic reconnaissance during the spy balloon incident would have been under the purview of the SSF’s Aerospace Systems Department.

“That was one of the roles and responsibilities of the PLASSF,” he said.

It is unclear if the balloon incident contributed to Xi’s decision to disband the SSF.

Wuthnow, of the National Defense University, said the newly created Information Support Force will likely take charge of communications and network defense for the PLA.

“Getting these things right is of huge importance for the PLA in any future conflict, and they have been paying close attention to these functions and probably drawing lessons for their own organization from the war in Ukraine,” he said, referring to Russia’s ongoing invasion of its neighbor.

“So it makes sense that the [Central Military Commission] chairman would want to play a more direct role in that area.”

‘Intelligentized warfare’

The latest shake-up is likely the result of an ongoing review of how the military can better meet the strategic objectives of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, according to Char.

“I suppose the reorganization better reflects the importance the PLA has placed on speeding up the development of intelligentized warfare” brought by a new round of technological and industrial advancement, he said.

The concept of “intelligentized warfare” drew attention in a 2019 Chinese defense white paper that highlighted the military application of cutting-edge tech such as AI, quantum information, big data and cloud computing.

“The landscape of international military competition is undergoing historic changes. New and high-tech military technologies with information technology as the core is advancing with each passing day, and there’s a prevailing trend to develop long-range precision, intelligent, stealthy or unmanned weaponry and equipment,” the white paper said.

“War is accelerating its evolution in form towards informationized warfare, and intelligentized warfare is on the horizon.”

The creation of the Information Support Force as a new branch directly under the Central Military Commission also underscores the importance of information dominance in modern warfare.

Getty Images

video

Related video Xi takes a page from Putin as he vows to control Taiwan

A commentary in the PLA Daily, the Chinese military’s official mouthpiece, described network information technology as “the biggest variable” in enhancing combat capability.

“Modern wars are competitions between systems and structures, where control over information equates to control over the initiative in war,” it said.

The emphasis on information dominance and “intelligentized warfare” also has significant implications for any potential future conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

China’s Communist Party views Taiwan as part of its territory, despite never having controlled it, and has vowed to take control of the island – by force if necessary.

Char said in the event of a Taiwan conflict, the Information Support Force “would likely take over as the tip of the spear in supporting the PLA’s attempts to dominate the information space before Beijing’s adversaries can do so.”

CNN · by Nectar Gan · April 27, 2024

15. Mounting Evidence Is Pointing To A Nightmare Scenario For The U.S. Economy

Excerpts:

In an effort to reduce the rate of inflation, the Federal Reserve has already raised its federal funds rate to a range of 5.25% and 5.50%, the highest in 23 years, with the last hike being in July 2023. At the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) most recent meeting in March, the majority of Fed governors kept their estimate from December that there would be three rate cuts by the end of 2024.

“There is absolutely no reason for the Fed to cut rates this year besides the obvious political motivation,” Antoni told the DCNF. “Recall that during the first three years of the Trump presidency, the Fed was raising rates and selling off the balance sheet, also called ‘quantitative tightening.’ The reasoning for tighter monetary policy was fast labor market growth and inflation fears. Today, those indicators look even worse according to the Fed’s own thinking: job growth has been much faster according to official government metrics, and inflation remains far in excess of the 2.0% target, with inflation expectations completely unanchored. They should be talking about raising rates, not cutting them.”

A majority of investors now predict that there won’t be a rate cut until the FOMC’s September meeting as inflation remains persistent, according to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.

Business leaders are cautious about the current state of the economy, with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon saying on Friday that he is hopeful that the U.S. can bring down inflation and maintain growth, but he is worried about the possibility of stagflation, according to The Associated Press.

“Sadly, the indicators point to stagflation for quite some time because the excessive government spending that caused this problem isn’t letting up,” Antoni told the DCNF.

The White House deferred the DCNF to previous statements.

Mounting Evidence Is Pointing To A Nightmare Scenario For The U.S. Economy

https://www.tampafp.com/mounting-evidence-is-pointing-to-a-nightmare-scenario-for-the-u-s-economy#google_vignette

 Will Kessler - DCNF

 April 28, 2024

US Currency (File)

The U.S. economy is showing signs of stagflation as growth slumps down and prices continue to surge for average Americans, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

U.S. annual economic growth measured just 1.6% in the first quarter of 2024, following a report of persistently high inflation in March of 3.5% year-over-year.

The combination of both low growth and high inflation, in conjunction with continuously high amounts of government spending and debt, has led to signs of stagflation in the U.S. economy, which wreaked havoc on U.S. consumers throughout the 1970’s, according to experts who spoke to the DCNF.

Read: DC Cops Refuse To Clear Hamas Supporters From University Because Top Brass, Mayor Feared Bad “Optics”

“It’s not so much that we risk stagflation as we’re already there,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the DCNF. “We have basically pulled forward trillions of dollars of economic growth by borrowing from the future, but that must be repaid at some point. And it is highly inefficient as well.”

Stagflation is a unique economic phenomenon that involves slow growth, high unemployment, and elevated inflation and is particularly difficult to address as solutions for one issue can exacerbate the others, according to Investopedia. The most notable example of stagflation occurred in the 1970’s, after an oil crisis.

The U.S. national debt climbed above $34 trillion for the first time at the start of 2024 and currently sits at nearly $34.6 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. The national debt has increased by around $6.8 billion since President Joe Biden first took office in January 2021.

“Stagflation is the inevitable result of Bidenomics,” Michael Faulkender, chief economist at the America First Policy Institute, told the DCNF. “When you massively increase spending, whether green subsidies or student loan forgiveness, while simultaneously reducing the ability of the economy to produce because of all the regulatory restrictions being imposed, you get reductions in growth with higher prices. If Bidenomics continues, then we should expect stagflation to continue.”

Read: Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz Says Biden Continues To Stumble From “Blunder” After DoD Announces Troop Exit From Chad

Biden has made high-spending policies part of his broader agenda, signing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021 and the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in November 2021. The president also signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, which authorized $750 billion in new spending, with $370 billion of that dedicated to green initiatives to combat climate change.

The Biden administration’s latest plan to forgive student loans would cost an estimated $559 billion over the next ten years through various loan cancellations and interest suspensions. The president had one of his previous, more costly plans to forgive student loans struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2023.

Jai Kedia, a research fellow in the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, cautioned the DCNF about assuming the U.S. was suffering from stagflation, noting that the phenomenon is usually accompanied by major supply shocks.

“The news on both fronts — inflation and output — is far from ideal, but there is no reason to think that we will get stagflation from just this one report,” Kedia told the DCNF. “When stagflation last occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. economy had significantly different characteristics. That era was marked by severe wage inflation and strong wage contracting at unsustainably high levels, driven primarily by labor union bargaining. Businesses passed those labor costs on to consumers, and since those wage increases weren’t the result of any productivity gains, the result was inflation with little economic growth. That unique situation is (hopefully) unlikely to occur again.”

Despite recent low growth figures, gross domestic product surged in the third and fourth quarters of 2023 to 3.4% and 4.9%, respectively. Economic growth projections in those quarters included huge gains from government spending.

“Today’s report shows the American economy remains strong, with continued steady and stable growth,” the White House said in a statement following Thursday’s GDP report. “The economy has grown more since I took office than at this point in any presidential term in the last 25 years — including 3% growth over the last year — while unemployment has stayed below 4% for more than two years. But we have more work to do. Costs are too high for working families, and I am fighting to lower them.”

Read: Michigan Republican House Candidate Pushed DEI Policies, Praised Biden Admin’s Climate Agenda In Now-Deleted Tweets

Top-line job growth has remained high as well, with the U.S. most recently adding a total of 303,000 nonfarm payroll positions in March with an unemployment rate of 3.9% after adding 275,000 in February. Despite persistent growth, gains have been dominated by part-time jobs and employment from the government.

“In general, high inflation and low output occur as a result of severe supply shocks,” Kedia told the DCNF. “The Fed does not have much control over such shocks, and it’s usually best to avoid making drastic monetary policy decisions on the basis of such shocks. It’s too early to tell if such a shock has occurred over the past month, so it is unclear whether output has gone down due to supply constraints, or whether the increased borrowing costs have finally cut down on people’s consumption, or whether this was a noisy data observation.”

In an effort to reduce the rate of inflation, the Federal Reserve has already raised its federal funds rate to a range of 5.25% and 5.50%, the highest in 23 years, with the last hike being in July 2023. At the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) most recent meeting in March, the majority of Fed governors kept their estimate from December that there would be three rate cuts by the end of 2024.

“There is absolutely no reason for the Fed to cut rates this year besides the obvious political motivation,” Antoni told the DCNF. “Recall that during the first three years of the Trump presidency, the Fed was raising rates and selling off the balance sheet, also called ‘quantitative tightening.’ The reasoning for tighter monetary policy was fast labor market growth and inflation fears. Today, those indicators look even worse according to the Fed’s own thinking: job growth has been much faster according to official government metrics, and inflation remains far in excess of the 2.0% target, with inflation expectations completely unanchored. They should be talking about raising rates, not cutting them.”

A majority of investors now predict that there won’t be a rate cut until the FOMC’s September meeting as inflation remains persistent, according to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.

Business leaders are cautious about the current state of the economy, with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon saying on Friday that he is hopeful that the U.S. can bring down inflation and maintain growth, but he is worried about the possibility of stagflation, according to The Associated Press.

“Sadly, the indicators point to stagflation for quite some time because the excessive government spending that caused this problem isn’t letting up,” Antoni told the DCNF.

The White House deferred the DCNF to previous statements.

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​16. All Ethnic Groups Under Fire in Karen State

Let us not forget what is happening in Burma.

Photos at the link.

All Ethnic Groups Under Fire in Karen State

https://telegra.ph/All-Ethnic-Groups-Under-Fire-in-Karen-State-04-29?utm

By Free Burma RangersApril 28, 2024

Karen State, Burma

Ethnic Armed Organizations continue to push further westward from Karen State towards the capital of Burma liberating towns as they go. The capital of Burma houses the headquarters of the illegal and oppressive military dictatorship, who have become increasingly desperate as they lose ground and popular support. This desperation has completely erased what little regard the regime may have had for civilian causalities. Our teams counted 89 civilian either killed or injured in deliberate attacks by Burma Military forces from January to March in the 3rd Brigade of Karen State alone, not to mention extensive property destruction. 

Notably, even civilians from the historically untouched Bamar people have been targeted, despite being the majority ethnic group across the country and the ethnicity of the dictatorship themselves. Mortars and artillery are the primary weapons of choice against civilians in this region of Burma, and now innocent Bamar people are also experiencing their devastating effects. On March 28, 2024, the Burma Army launched five 120mm mortars into a rubber field in Tha Yet Chaung, injuring 6 Bamar workers: Chit Aye (41), Char Myeit Aung (32), Soe Ya Min (19), Tin Tet Aung (27), and Ma San Maung (46), and Ma Cho Twein (25).

Though the Burma Army does lose ground, they make sure to inflict damage as they struggle to keep it. Burma Army forces entered Yin Le village on March 19, 2024 and held it against EAO forces for a few weeks. When they did finally leave, they burned the whole area to the ground, destroying over 70 houses and planting landmines to prevent people from returning to their homes. These landmines inflicted injuries on 3 of those that tried. 

FBR teams on the ground estimate that there are over 18,000 people from 24 villages displaced from their homes due to the fighting. Our teams help them by providing critical food and medical care, and also by sharing help, hope, and love through our Good Life Club programs. 

This man mourns his wife who was killed by Burma Army howitzers.

IDPs from Inn Jet enjoy a Good Life Program.

Ranger teams provide food and medical care for IDPs from 4 different villages.

This man received severe burns on his legs thanks to shelling by the Burma Army. 

An FBR medic treats a monk who was displaced by the fighting.

Ranger teams from Karen State perform a Good Life Club for IDPs.

This woman was killed by a Burma Army howitzer in Yin Pyu Ka village.

This woman was killed by bombing from Burma Military jets.

This man was tortured to death by the Burma Army.

IDPs flee from their homes. 

This girl was injured by a Burma Army howitzer. 

Event Summary

Jan 5: Burma Army LIB 20 shelled from Nyang Lin Bin town into Yin Pyu Ka, killing 4 people and injuring 19.

Jan 13: According to KNDO sources, Burma Army forces burned down Natha Gwin.

Jan 22: Burma Army IB264 launched 3, 120 mm shells into Kyaw Gone, injuring 5 people: Ka La Min (53), U Sein Htay (52), Ma May Tha Neing (44), Nay Zaw Linn (15), and U Kyaw Win (68). It also destroyed 1 house.

Jan 23: Burma Army shelled 5, 120mm rounds in Ka Nyi Jo village, destroying 2 houses, killing one person, Myit Leing (65), and injuring 2, Kyi Nu (66) and Eh Htoo Say (12).

Jan 25: FBR teams provided relief to IDPs from Gwein Gon (389), Cho Inn (411), Kau Met Thu (457), and Aw Pa Wah (266).

Jan 27: Burma Army shelled howitzer rounds into Tun Wa Z, wounding 2 people.

Jan 27: BA troops based in Na Bauk captured a villager, U Myit Ngwe, on his way to work. They tied him up and tortured him, holding him before he managed to escape 2 days later.

Jan 29: FBR teams provided medical care and did GLC programs in Ta Min Yo village.

Jan 29: FBR teams moved from Ta Min Yo village to Y Jo A-Nok village to encourage IDPs there and dug holes to protect them from shelling.

Feb 1: FBR teams provided medical relief and did GLC programs for IDPs from Y-Jo, Nyaung Bin Gyi, Yea Their, and Thet Too Gon villages, totaling about 300 people.

Feb 3: FBR teams provided medical care and did GLC programs for IDPs from Sa Suu, Sa Pe, and Thet Ke Gon, totaling about 2574 people.

Feb 5: FBR teams preformed a GLC program for children at Pyi Yin Gyi village. During the program, Burma Army IB264 shelled howitzer rounds over the village forcing them to pause the program.

Feb 6: FBR teams provide supplies to IDPs from Pa Zo Myaw.

Feb 8: Burma Army forces based in Pe Nwe Gon shelled Thae Pyu Ywa, injuring one villager.

Feb 12: Burma Army IB264 shelled near IDPs located in Kaw Tha Say, injuring one villager.

Feb 14: Burma Army IB20 and IB264 shelled 120mm artillery into Y-Jo and surrounding villages, destroying homes.

Feb 16: Burma Army IB20 shelled 4, 120mm rounds into Cho Inn, seriously injuring Ma Sa U (46).

Feb 18: Burma Army LIB438 Shelled 6 howitzer rounds into Yin Dwein Gon Lay, then burned down 4 acres of crops.

Feb 19: Burma Army LIB439 shelled 120mm rounds into Let Tan Gyi, injuring 2 villagers, U Thein Lwein (60) and his wife Daw Thein Shwe (46), and killing U Sein Hla.

Feb 21: Burma Army jets drop 8 bombs on on 3rd Brigade HQ, damaging 4 homes, and completely destroying 1 home and a church.

Feb 25: 5 Burma Army jets and one Burma Army helicopter bomb and shoot at KNU police and PDF camps between Klaw Maw and Law Mu Thaw. They attacked 16 times between 1030 and 1500, injuring 11 people and killing one prisoner.

Feb 25: Burma Army IB264 shelled 120mm mortars into Kau Met Thu village, killing one girl (12). Later that night, they shelled Aw Pa Wah village and injured one man and one woman who were later treated by FBR medics.

Feb 28: Burma Army troops clash with KNLA troops between Natha Gwein and Naung Gon. Later, Burma Military jets bombed the same area, injuring 2 IDPs, Saw Sa Thein (42) and Naw Thein Kya (18).

Feb 29: Maung Tot Ken (66) is injured by a Burma Army mortar in the Noh Gu area.

Feb 29: Burma Army bombs injured one child (1) and killed his father in Mone Township.

Feb 29: Burma Army forces capture a villager from Ta Ma Kaw and torture him to death.

Mar 4: Burma Army shells landed at Noh Taw Ta village, killing Saw By Pweh (56) and injuring Saw Shwe (36).

Mar 6: Burma Army launched 3, 120mm rounds into Nge Pe Inn village, injuring Saw Eh Paw (32).

Mar 6: Burma Army LIB439 used howitzers to attack the Kon Chaung Wa area, killing Ma Zon Ma (41) and Maung Min Ka Helen (13), and injuring U Pyu Min Tun (49) and Ma Sin Ma Pyu (9).

Mar 7: Burma Army LIB439 used howitzers to attack the Kon Chaung Wa area, injuring Naw Ne Thaw Say (30).

Mar 10: Burma Army forces entered Thay Gay Lu village, camping there and then burning it to the ground the following day.

Mar 11: Maung Nay Linn (20) stepped on a Burma Army landmine while working in his rubber field.

Mar 14: Burma Military jets dropped 6 bombs on a gold mine in Ler Doh township, killing one and injuring another.

Mar 17: Burma Army IB264 shelled 2 howitzer rounds into Klaw Maw village injuring 3 people. Later that day around noon, 2 more rounds of howitzers killed one and injured another.

Mar 18: Hay Wei Ya Soe (17) was injured by a Burma Army howitzer in Yin Le village.

Mar 19: Burma Army troops entered Yin Le village and clashed with KNLA soldiers.

Mar 23: FBR teams provide food for 90 IDPs in Hsaw Hti Township.

Mar 24: Saw Ta Hsi (38) loses his foot to a Burma Army landmine.

Mar 24: Burma Army howitzers landed in Ta Ray Se Law, burning down one home.

Mar 28: Burma Army launched 5, 120mm mortars into Tha Yet Chaung rubber fields, injuring 6 Burman rubber workers: Chit Aye (41), Char Myeit Aung (32), Soe Ya Min (19), Tin Tet Aung (27), and Ma San Maung (46), and Ma Cho Twein (25).

17. Ukraine Bets on Long-Range Drones, Raising Costs of War for Russia

Ukraine Bets on Long-Range Drones, Raising Costs of War for Russia

The country is doubling down on a campaign of strikes on Russian oil refineries, airfields and logistics

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukraine-bets-on-long-range-drones-as-it-seeks-a-battlefield-edge-90b83f30?mod=latest_headlines

By Isabel ColesFollow

 | Photographs by Emanuele Satolli for The Wall Street Journal

Updated April 29, 2024 12:00 am ET

Inside a hangar tucked away in western Ukraine, dozens of workers in protective clothing mold fiberglass mesh and assemble the pieces into potent weapons: long-range drones.

With a range of up to 500 miles, the drones made here are designed to meet surging demand as Ukraine ramps up a campaign of strikes deep inside Russian territory in the third year of the war. 

“There’s a lot of orders we still can’t fulfill,” said the owner of the plant, who declined to be named because of concerns about being targeted by Russia.

Facing setbacks on the battlefield, Ukraine is using long-range drones to reach far behind the front line with Russian forces, hitting oil refineries, airfields and logistics. The strikes aim to squeeze fuel supplies to the Russian military and deprive Moscow of export revenues to fund the war. By bringing the war home to Russia, Kyiv could also compel Moscow to redeploy air-defense systems away from the front lines.

Cheaper and more available than cruise missiles, domestically produced drones enable Kyiv to get around political constraints on using weapons supplied by Western allies in attacks on Russian territory. Startup drone makers have cropped up to meet demand with products ranging from the sleek UJ-25 Skyline to an unnamed model with a fuselage made from a length of plumbing pipe. 

Components of a long-range drone.

Ukrainian officials said drones struck two oil refineries and an airfield in the Krasnodar region overnight into Saturday in the latest attack. 

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air-defense systems shot down 50 drones on a single day last weekend, including over the Moscow region. Falling debris ignited fires at energy infrastructure facilities in two regions, officials said. Earlier this month, drones struck an oil refinery and drone factory in Russia’s Tatarstan region some 930 miles from the border with Ukraine, demonstrating the growing range of Ukraine’s capabilities.

The strikes are a bright spot for Ukraine at a time when its battlefield prospects have darkened. The campaign, however, has emerged as a fault line between Kyiv and the Biden administration, which is concerned about the impact on energy prices.

“Ukraine is better served in going after tactical and operational targets that can directly influence the current fight,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month.

Ukrainian officials say they must use all available means to resist Russia after a lengthy delay in the delivery of aid from the U.S. revealed the limits of Western support. A $60 billion package of aid for Kyiv was recently unblocked, but the infusion of arms and ammunition is unlikely to dramatically reverse Kyiv’s fortunes. 

Domestically produced drones are cheaper and more available than cruise missiles.

Long-range drones are used to conduct deep strikes.

Ukrainian officials say they plan to make thousands of long-range drones this year.

In the early days of the war, Ukraine adapted commercially available drones such as the Chinese-built Mugin-5, which defense analyst H I Sutton said was used in one of the first attacks on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the occupied Crimean Peninsula in August 2022.

That and other similar drones have gradually been supplanted by Ukraine’s own designs—though they remain heavily reliant on commercially available Chinese components. 

The drones typically carry a warhead of 44 pounds, according to Sutton, who has identified 19 different models used in attacks on Russian territory, including a balloon that drops mortar bombs from a high altitude.

Made largely of wood, the AQ-400 Scythe has an advertised range of 750 km (465 miles) and a 43-kg (95-pound) warhead. Bober, or Beaver, drones can fly up to 620 miles with a payload of about 20 kg (44 pounds). The deepest strike yet was carried out by a light A22 aircraft that had been automated and rigged with explosives. 

Costs range from about $30,000 to 10 times that much, according to one drone manufacturer. Even at the top of the range, it is still considerably less than cruise missiles that Western countries have provided to Ukraine on condition they only be used in Russian-occupied territory.

The rapid evolution of Ukraine’s drone industry reflects the ingenuity and resourcefulness that have enabled it to resist invasion by a much bigger neighbor. But the ad hoc approach has limits against a country that has put its whole economy on a war footing and is deploying hundreds of Iranian-made Shahed drones in tandem with missiles to erode Ukraine’s air defenses.

Equipment used in a long-range drone factory. Scaling up is a challenge for drone makers.

“What Ukraine needs to do is streamline production and select those drones that can be manufactured on a mass scale,” said Samuel Bendett, an expert on unmanned aerial vehicles at the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded research organization in Arlington, Va.

It isn’t clear how many long-range drones Ukraine is currently producing. One manufacturer said it was aiming to increase production to 500 a month by midyear.

Only about 20% of the drones succeed in reaching their target largely due to Russian jamming, said a Ukrainian military intelligence officer involved in launching them.

In a hangar in western Ukraine, several dozen workers are busy making one of the drones used to conduct deep strikes.

“Five months ago, this room was completely empty,” said a worker at the plant. The owner asked that the location of the plant, the name of the drone and workers’ identities be withheld to protect them from being targeted by Russia.

Before Russia invaded, the owner ran a business making plastic containers in the northern Kharkiv region. After fleeing to western Ukraine, he was working in rail logistics when the security services approached him last summer with a prototype of a long-range drone: could he replicate it?

“In our entire lives we’d never built anything similar to that,” he said.

Domestically produced drones enable Kyiv to get around political constraints on using weapons supplied by Western allies.

The businessman hired several veterans of the country’s aviation industry, which was a leader when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. “At my age, I should have retired a long time ago, but my country is at war,” said a 74-year-old former head specialist at the Kharkiv aviation factory.

Within two months, the team had built two replicas of the drone. “They passed the test,” the owner said. 

The next challenge was scaling up. There are now 75 people on a production line that begins with pressing fiberglass mesh into molds shaped like wings, tail fins and noses. After 11 hours solidifying in a furnace, the parts are assembled to make a small plane with a 2-meter (6.6-feet) wingspan. The engine and explosives are fitted at another factory.

The plant can only make one or two bodies of each drone type a day. To boost capacity, the businessman recently bought a second polymerization furnace. He plans to expand the premises and hire 50 more people to work double-shifts.

At the same time, he is developing a drone model of his own with a planned range exceeding 1,000 km (620 miles).

Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com

18. NATO’s Top Officer Is an Admiral Who Thinks Like an Investor

Excerpts:

His exhortation: To avoid death and destruction, the West needs not only to boost military production; it must fundamentally rethink what defense means, starting with the private sector. 

NATO’s European members produce 172 different weapons systems, Bauer frequently notes, while the U.S.—which accounts for two-thirds of NATO’s roughly $1.1 trillion in annual military spending—uses only about 35 main weapons platforms. He says European efforts to rationalize defense industries fall short.

“Politicians always talk about cooperation, but in practical terms they don’t have a clue,” said Bauer, who has served since 2021 as chair of NATO’s military committee. 

The holder of the position is the top adviser on military issues to NATO’s secretary-general. A recent predecessor, retired Czech Army General Petr Pavel, is now president of his country and helped secure almost one million artillery rounds for Ukraine this year. 

Bauer mostly focuses on troops, equipment and NATO’s ability to deploy them in a crisis. War in Ukraine has strained all of those necessities. Bauer says one reason is that since the Cold War, the West has taken military protection for granted and considered it divorced from everyday life or commercial activity. 

The result he sees is a literal undervaluing of security because military cuts aren’t considered to have a potentially negative long-term impact on national wealth.

NATO’s Top Officer Is an Admiral Who Thinks Like an Investor

Rob Bauer’s uniform used to draw insults. Now he benefits from public exposure, engaging with executives and others to tackle alliance shortfalls.

Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer is seen within NATO as unusual in how he bridges the military and civilian sides of security. TOMS KALNINS/SHUTTERSTOCK

By Daniel MichaelsFollow

April 28, 2024 8:00 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/natos-top-officer-is-an-admiral-who-thinks-like-an-investor-c6f973f4?mod=hp_lista_pos2

AMSTERDAM—War is forcing NATO’s top military officer to act like a business executive.

For Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, management concerns such as factory production, corporate finance and investment regulations have assumed an urgency comparable to troops and weapons. All are vital to achieving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s goal of defending its 32 members.

Bauer’s new focus is part of a broader profile shift for the 61-year-old career military man, prompted by Russia’s decade of hostility to Ukraine, which is now widely seen as threatening the rest of Europe. 

When Bauer was a young naval officer walking across the Dutch capital, locals would sneer at his uniform and even call him a murderer, he recalls. Today he faces less vitriol—though still encounters some—and greater public interest in his mission.

Bauer is being welcomed outside the military world as never before. His schedule regularly includes meetings with financiers, executives and industrial policymakers. 

He is using the exposure to warn of threats he sees, starting at home with Europe’s insufficient and inefficient military spending.

Bauer says the war in Ukraine has shown that bridges and other infrastructure can be wiped from the map. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Members of Ukraine’s armed forces in the Donetsk region of Ukraine last month. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

His exhortation: To avoid death and destruction, the West needs not only to boost military production; it must fundamentally rethink what defense means, starting with the private sector. 

NATO’s European members produce 172 different weapons systems, Bauer frequently notes, while the U.S.—which accounts for two-thirds of NATO’s roughly $1.1 trillion in annual military spending—uses only about 35 main weapons platforms. He says European efforts to rationalize defense industries fall short.

“Politicians always talk about cooperation, but in practical terms they don’t have a clue,” said Bauer, who has served since 2021 as chair of NATO’s military committee. 

The holder of the position is the top adviser on military issues to NATO’s secretary-general. A recent predecessor, retired Czech Army General Petr Pavel, is now president of his country and helped secure almost one million artillery rounds for Ukraine this year. 

Bauer mostly focuses on troops, equipment and NATO’s ability to deploy them in a crisis. War in Ukraine has strained all of those necessities. Bauer says one reason is that since the Cold War, the West has taken military protection for granted and considered it divorced from everyday life or commercial activity. 

The result he sees is a literal undervaluing of security because military cuts aren’t considered to have a potentially negative long-term impact on national wealth.

Bauer says the West has taken defense for granted. PHOTO: OMAR HAVANA/GETTY IMAGES

“In models of value-added in an economy, defense is never factored in,” he told a group of Canadian defense-industry executives who recently visited NATO headquarters in Brussels. 

He said the approach is wrongheaded because security is the foundation on which private business operates.

War in Ukraine has shown that factories, power grids and bridges can be wiped from the map, Bauer noted. Since World War II, the Western private sector didn’t need to worry about issues like, “Is my factory physically there tomorrow morning?”

The Canadian executives agreed and voiced frustration with their government’s military spending level, among the lowest in NATO.

“I do not see enough business executives going public on this,” Bauer said of security’s critical role in prosperity.

Bauer started focusing on the business side of defense a dozen years ago when he was head of planning at the Dutch defense ministry and its navy needed new frigates. Germany was also in the market and their ships would be almost identical. Bauer proposed to his German counterpart that they place a joint order, bringing in Belgium and gaining scale economies. 

Defense officials were enthusiastic about the idea, Bauer recalls, but it failed due to industry opposition. Each country’s national contractor wanted to guard its domestic market and lobbied governments to keep the projects separate, he said. That approach is why Europe has about five times as many military platforms as the U.S. does.

“I’m not suggesting we close any facilities, just that we make more of the same things,” Bauer said.

Even when companies want to cooperate, governments often can’t synchronize their defense budgets, impeding multicountry contracts. Compounding the problem is the legacy of widespread arms-industry consolidation and plant closures after the Cold War, when free-market economics took the fore in all aspects of society.

“We have become too dependent on the market—and actually there isn’t a market” for defense products, Bauer said. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the lack of a market response has delayed deliveries and pushed up prices far faster than it has boosted production, he said. One example he cites: a fourfold jump in the price of NATO-standard 155mm artillery shells since January 2022.

As Bauer over recent years dug into why output was rising so slowly, he discovered that many European investment companies won’t fund military production, fearing they will run afoul of environmental, social and corporate-governance regulations. 

A damaged Ukrainian power station after a Russian attack. PHOTO: EMANUELE SATOLLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The scale of the damage to the plant underscored the vulnerability of important infrastructure. PHOTO: EMANUELE SATOLLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“It’s a big and growing concern in Europe,” said Jan Pie, secretary-general of the Aerospace, Security and Defense Industries Association of Europe, who sees banks, insurers and pension funds excluding military contractors from their portfolios.

To Bauer, the exclusion is absurd and creates a problem when arms companies that want to invest can’t get adequate funding due to sustainability goals. Strong defense is like a 7-foot bouncer at a nightclub, he said, sending the message that picking a fight would be pointless. 

“If we maintain peace through deterrence, that is extremely sustainable,” he said. “The financial sector plays a role here in the solution, and is now part of the problem.”

Bauer isn’t alone. The European Union, which long avoided military spending, is making money available for defense and starting to examine potential conflicts between security and ESG rules.

“It’s really important not to set the two things up as opposites,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition chief. 

Bauer, who says his role is “trying to start a conversation,” advocates government responses that over the past two years have swung from unthinkable to active policy considerations, such as tapping the EU’s European Investment Bank to help bridge out-of-sync national budgeting cycles. 

Former Canadian navy chief Mark Norman, a retired vice admiral who led the recent Canadian industry delegation, said Bauer faces a tough task in trying to manage NATO’s 32 countries with widely varying views on defense. Norman praised Bauer’s effort to address “how the defense industry is integrated into the overall industrial framework of a country so it’s not seen as fat cats enriching themselves.”

Within NATO, Bauer is widely seen as a powerful advocate in a time of crisis and unusual in how he bridges the military and civilian sides of the alliance.

“He doesn’t shy away from speaking about important things, even things that are not traditionally in his lane,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary-general for defense investment.

Bauer met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine, in March. PHOTO: UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Retired NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said Bauer mixes a typically Dutch bluntness with “a very refreshing touch of candor.” He has raised awareness of a need to change mindsets in finance and other fields that people don’t typically see as linked to defense, and has done so “in a way that is much more effective coming from a man in uniform than from a politician in a suit,” Lungescu said.

Bauer still faces widespread resistance and hostility. On a visit in February to Ireland, which cooperates with NATO but isn’t a member, anti-NATO, pro-Palestinian protesters outside the venue where he spoke were so loud that he had to check attendees could hear him.

A recent onstage conversation at Amsterdam University was interrupted by similar protests. But Dutch opinions show signs of shifting. 

“My generation has never lived in a world with an actual threat. We’re very spoiled with safety,” said Annelien van Drooge, a 37-year-old Dutch data consultant in Amsterdam. “I see an argument that we need to invest to show we’re ready, and not a weak target for Putin,” she said, adding that the issue receives insufficient attention.

Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the April 29, 2024, print edition as 'Top NATO Officer Acts Like a CEO'.

19. How Columbia University's complex history with the student protest movement echoes into today

Excerpts:

“Freedom of speech is so important, but not beyond the right to security,” said Itai Dreifuss, 25, a third-year student who grew up in the United States and Israel. He was near the encampment this past week, standing in front of posters taped to a wall of the people who were taken hostage by Hamas in the Oct 7 attack that set off the current conflagration.

That feeling among some students that personal animosity is being directed against them is a difference between 1968 and now, Naison said. That conflict between demonstrators and their decriers “is far more visceral,” Naison asserts, which he says makes this time even more fraught.

“It’s history repeating itself, but it’s also uncharted territory,” he said. “What we have here is a whole group of people who see these protests as a natural extension of fighting for justice, and a whole other group of people who see this as a deadly attack on them and their history and tradition. And that makes it very difficult for university officials to manage.”

How Columbia University's complex history with the student protest movement echoes into today

AP · by DEEPTI HAJELA · April 29, 2024

DEEPTI HAJELA

Hajela writes about the ways in which America is changing as part of the AP’s Trends+Culture team. She is based in New York City.

AP · by DEEPTI HAJELA · April 29, 2024

20. The Forgotten Part of the Contest: Army Logistics in the Pacific

Conclusion:

The landscape of war and geopolitics evolves relentlessly, demanding the adaptation of strategy, doctrine, structures, and equipment. It also demands the adaptation of the thing that makes all that possible: logistics. As the U.S. military looks to the future of the Army and its crucial role in deterrence and defense in the Pacific, far more effort and attention should be devoted to the questions of how to supply, support, and sustain the force.

The Forgotten Part of the Contest: Army Logistics in the Pacific - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Col. (ret.) Carmelia Scott-Skillern​ and Peter Singer · April 29, 2024

As Gen. Omar Bradley is credited as saying, “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.” Indeed, from the American Revolution to modern-day conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine, the U.S. Army’s ability to effectively manage resources, transport troops and supplies, and adapt to changing circumstances has been not just instrumental, but a core allied advantage over its foes that proved to be the difference between defeat and victory.

Unfortunately, when it comes to how the American defense community plans for and talks about the future of competition and conflict in the Pacific, it isn’t measuring up to Bradley’s metric. For instance, at the Army’s annual meeting, the secretary of the Army gave a powerful speech on how “we have got to ask the tough questions and make the hard decisions on what our force needs to fight in the future.” Yet, there was no mention of “logistics,” and the only discussion of “sustainment” was of barracks repair.

This is no anomaly, but the norm of the literally thousands of leader speeches, congressional testimonies, vision statements, and interviews on the future of war and competition and conflict with China. If logistics is mentioned at all, which is rare, it is a toss-off line.

The same is true in academic and policy journals. Out of the hundreds of articles War on Rocks has published over the last decade on the China challenge, only two, one in 2018 and the other in 2019, directly addressed logistics in the Pacific. Just as with the illustration of the Army leader statements, the point is not to beat up on this very journal. The same gap exists in every other major and minor international affairs, defense, and security studies journal, as well as the recent spate of major media articles on both Pacific threats and military reforms.

And, unsurprisingly, logistics is also a topic that doesn’t get any attention in the cottage industry of think tank “wargames” that has sprung up over the last few years. It is great fun for wonks (and good for organizational funding and media attention) to move imaginary ships around on a map and fire off missiles of the mind. But to ask how the real forces would actually be fueled, sustained, reloaded, and repaired after Day 1 is consistently left out of the scenarios and resulting reports.

So too have actual wargames struggled on the topic. As the unclassified report on the 2022 UNIFIED PACIFIC wargame summed up, the exercises “highlighted a lack of practical clarity regarding how the Joint Force will execute joint logistics in support of new service concepts in the Indo-Pacific.”

Yet, this open topic area is crucial both to understand and advance in our policy. For the Army’s role in logistics is crucial to any success that the United States might have in competition and conflict in the region. Or, if the force doesn’t solve challenges that range from new threats to American supply lines to the dual demands of decades of neglect and a generation of new technologies, logistics may be a central part of the story of a future defeat.

Become a Member

Logistics in the Pacific and the Backbone of the Army

The Army was central to the last two decades of operations in Central Command, but many assume it will play a more limited role in the Indo-Pacific, aptly described as “a theater named for two oceans.” And yet, war remains a human endeavor, meaning that same watery theater is also defined by the 36 nations therein, holding roughly 50 percent of the world’s overall population on land. As such, the Army’s role in the theater is best viewed as “the backbone of U.S. Joint Operations.” Not only is the Army the service that ultimately must seize or hold the terrain, including the ports and airfields that the other services rely upon, but also provides the other services and allied forces with a number of critical functions that enable their own operations. These range from air and missile defense to communications, intelligence,rotary-wing aviation, and engineering.

Among the most essential is the logistics and sustainment that the Army provides not just for its own forces (which now number four divisions and multiple other brigades and units, including most notably two new “multi-domain task forces” designed to extend landpower into other domains via long-range strike and cyber fires), but also for the rest of the joint force.

Theater-level support and coordination, fuel transport, and common user land transportation are all Army tasks. The 8th Theater Sustainment Command and units like the 599th Transportation Brigade, 593rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command, 402nd Army Field Support Brigade, and 413th Contracting Support Brigade may not be as exciting as F-35s or Patriot missiles, but they are what keep the entire force in the fight. The Army also has responsibility for a variety of other incredibly important support roles, such as in-theater medical evacuation as well medical logistics like hospital supplies and even blood. And it is Army Watercraft Systems that perform intra-theater distribution and inland/shore operations.

As such, logistics has been pushed as one of the four key “joint interior lines” to U.S. power in the region by U.S. Army Pacific in its new strategic vision. Despite this, though, logistics is not just undervalued, but under threat like never before. If the United States hopes to maintain its deterrence posture in the Indo-Pacific, it should address three key obstacles: the region’s unique demands of geography; new, extended dangers to its supply lines; and a force that has changed but not changed enough in its equipment and sustainment practices.

The Tyranny of Distance

While technology and politics might change, geography does not. The Pacific theater remains just as vast as it ever was. To illustrate by comparing to the current conflict in Ukraine, it is a highway drive of 70 miles from the NATO’s logistics and sustainment hub in Rzeszów, Poland to the Ukrainian border. In contrast, it is a flight or sea voyage of 1,700 milesfrom the U.S. hub in Guam to Taiwan, which can only be reached by a flight or voyage of 5,800 miles from the U.S. west coast.

It is not just about supply lines extended by literal orders of magnitude, but also vastly more limited infrastructure. Some areas in the Pacific lack well-developed ports, airfields, and road/rail transportation networks, requiring additional efforts to establish and maintain logistical capabilities.

This far greater challenge than what the Army has grown accustomed to in its operations in the “Global War on Terror” or even in support of Ukraine demands a far greater scale of comprehensive logistics planning. It will require complex supply-chain management, pre-established storage facilities, and coordination with multiple partner or allied services and nations needed.

To begin, far more investment is needed to establish forward logistics hubs and prepositioned critical supplies, equipment, and spare parts. These should be in place in multiple, distributed locales in the region to reduce reliance on lengthy supply lines in case of conflict, as well as enable swift response and sustainment capabilities.

The Army should also do a better job at establishing interoperability and multinational cooperation on logistics so as to amplify its collective capabilities. Common standards, procedures, and communication protocols would ease joint logistics operations, resource sharing, and coordination. This should be backed by robust communication and information systems that facilitate real-time coordination and information sharing across various partners. Such a foundation may not be as exciting as trying to get allies to buy American missiles or planes but would ensure much more coordinated operations and informed decision-making.

With such a structure in place before a crisis, the U.S. military can adapt agile supply chain management to ensure timely delivery of resources to units deployed across the Pacific during any events of need. This involves efficient inventory management, supplier coordination, and the use of predictive analytics. It also requires investment in the in-theater transportation assets needed to move personnel, equipment, and supplies across the Pacific’s vast distances. A core part of this is the fleet of watercraft that the Army, rather than the Navy, operates for the various intra-theater and inland/shorelogistics tasks that it runs not just for itself but also the other services. During the last major war in the Pacific, the Army had approximately 127,000 watercraft of various types. Today, it has 134. Times and technology have changed, but perhaps not that much.

Contested Logistics

China is well aware of the importance of logistics and has clearly put time and effort into ensuring that American supply lines would face unprecedented pressure in case of a conflict. The Chinese military has an ability to strike the U.S. logistics networks at both distance and scale, reaching targets thousands of kilometers beyond the battlelines with missileand cyber strikes.

In light of this threat environment, the U.S. military’s overall goal should be to establish resilient and redundant supply chains. Multiple transportation routes diversify supply chains to increase flexibility and ensure the availability of critical resources, even if one route is compromised. In turn, multiple and even redundant stockpiles for varied contingencies prevent mission failure if one node in a network is compromised or destroyed.

This requires starting well before any conflict. Prepositioned stocks of critical supplies, equipment, and spare parts should be distributed in various locations across the Pacific theater where services will experience greater loss of supplies and weapon systems. These stocks ensure rapid access to essential resources even in contested environments and complicate enemy targeting, specifically by forcing them to potentially expand the conflict by striking other states. Infrastructure hardening measures are also needed to raise the protection of critical logistics infrastructure, including ports, airfields, and communication networks.

This is not just about investment, but planning for alternative supply routes, backup communication systems, and adaptable logistics support structures. These plans can only be implemented if supported by continuous training and exercises. Also valuable would be more realistic training exercises that simulate contested logistics scenarios to test response capabilities, validate plans, and identify areas for improvement. This may include sending logistics/sustainment brigades to Combat Training Centers like Fort Irwin and Fort Johnson (formerly Polk). High pressure, realistic training that simulates enemy attacks and provides insights from recent wars perhaps should not be an experience limited to maneuver units.

Such programs can be aided by multinational coordination on the very same contested logistics issues that will challenge U.S. partners. American forces can do much more to strengthen coordination and interoperability with allies and partner nations in the Pacific, not just through the same type of joint exercises they have done for years, but through new ones that seek to harmonize logistics procedures to enhance collective capabilities and responses.

Here again, logistics offers an underappreciated pathway to not just supporting U.S. forces but also enabling larger goals of deterrence. The United States has five Mutual Defense Treaty agreements in the region, with Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. However, it has Cooperative Logistics Supply Support Agreements with 14 other nations of varying closeness and location, from India to Tonga, and the United States would benefit from forging closer ties with all of them. These agreements provide follow-on support to a Foreign Military Sales purchase as well as enabling the partner to become an affiliate to the Department of Defense supply system, including the parties working together to ensure the availability of spares and repair parts stockpiles. These should receive greater investment and priority in U.S. diplomacy, as well as become a node for joint planning and training around contested logistics scenarios.

It’s also important to remember that there are two sides to the logistics coin. The destruction of adversary logistics networks has played a crucial role in U.S. victories dating back to the Revolutionary War and Civil War to both theaters of World War II, yet offensive counter-logistics has not been given enough priority in current planning. The U.S. military should put far more effort into preventing China from striking similar logistics agreements in its infrastructure and alliance-building efforts around the world, as well as planning to deny or disrupt Chinese logistics during any crisis or conflict. This might include mining key sea lanes, interdicting supply convoys, turning off communication networks, and targeting critical Chinese naval logistics infrastructure.

Mixed Modernization of Equipment

The third challenge comes from the combined legacy of two decades of counter-insurgency, the immediate challenges of today’s fight, and efforts to prepare for the future battlefield in 2040.

The Army’s acquisition and modernization efforts have undeniably yielded positive results. But they have also complicated any logistics plan. While modernization efforts focus on introducing new equipment, there are still the challenges of sustaining and maintaining older or enduring systems, which leads to supply chains that have to support multiple types and generations of equipment. Add in the modernization efforts across different services and international partners, and there are major interoperability challenges due to varying equipment capabilities, communication systems, and operational doctrines.

As the new systems are introduced, the capabilities for the force may valuably grow, but so do the logistics challenges. Modernized equipment is usually more technologically complex, requiring new, specialized training and increased maintenance expertise. This can create challenges regarding manpower, skill gaps, and maintenance burden. The introduction of new equipment into the supply chain can also disrupt existing logistics processes such as inventory management, spare parts availability, and supply chain coordination.

New systems also mean that planners face a data gap in understanding how best to support them. By definition, they come with no demand history and little to no historical data or previous information regarding the equipment’s usage or performance. Without historical data on equipment demand, it becomes challenging to accurately forecast and plan for the required resources, such as spare parts, maintenance personnel, and logistical support. This uncertainty can lead to inefficiencies in resource allocation and potential gaps in sustainment capabilities.

Without data on usage patterns or maintenance requirements, it also becomes challenging to establish appropriate stock levels, potentially resulting in either shortages or excess inventory. It also limits the logistics systems’ ability to make informed decisions regarding the equipment’s lifecycle management, replacement, or upgrade. Historical usage data is essential for evaluating the equipment’s lifespan, determining the optimal timing for replacements or upgrades, and allocating resources accordingly. As a result, organizations can experience prolonged repair lead time and increased maintenance costs, especially after the warranty expiration of the contracted maintenance.

By proactively addressing the lack of demand history, the Army can gain better insights into equipment utilization, performance, and maintenance needs, leading to more effective resource allocation, improved inventory management, and informed decision-making.

As its modernization efforts continue, the Army should equally focus on equipment sustainment and supply chain management. The Army Futures Command recently established a Cross-Functional Team for sustainment that can be a key node in this effort. It is critical that they partner with other services, manufacturers, and suppliers to ensure that new equipment meets the organization’s rigorous standards and specifications, and that the Army has a reliable, sustainable supply source. Before introducing new equipment, the team should also consider soldiers’ ability to sustain the equipment and the equipment failure rate. This approach guarantees that soldiers can access the tools needed to maintain the equipment while minimizing the risk of equipment breakdowns.

Addressing technological complexity requires comprehensive training programs to ensure proficient equipment operation and maintenance. Partnerships with industry and academia can do more to provide the logistics workforce with continuous training opportunities.

Enduring systems also require a comprehensive sustainment plan, ensuring resources, spare parts, and maintenance support are readily available. Prioritization should be based on equipment criticality and aging risks. Most importantly, the Army should maintain the serviceability of its equipment, identify excess and gaps, and redistribute equipment to meet Army and joint force requirements in the region.

The Army can also address this through entirely new approaches like the predictive logistics model, whereby better collection and use of data revolutionize equipment forecasting and supply chain optimization. Predictive logistics supports long-lead repair parts and maintenance and predicts equipment failures, enabling scheduled maintenance and minimizing downtime. Moreover, it optimizes the supply chain, reducing costs and ensuring equipment availability when needed.

In this case, the diverse range of stakeholders, including Army Materiel Command and Army Futures Command, necessitates a synchronized predictive logistics strategy. This puts a premium on better data storage capabilities and implementing predictive logistics into platform sensors. Accurate sensor data, regular maintenance, calibration checks, and backup systems are essential to guarantee data reliability, precise predictions, and timely sustainment support.

Inevitably, there are logistical challenges that accompany a successful predictive logistics implementation. These include both personnel training and system integration. Data security and privacy should also be prioritized, with robust security protocols, encryption, access controls, and regular audits. To that end, Army Materiel Command plans to standardize supply chain management using data and predictive analysis to reduce vulnerabilities and adjust to disruptions. This will improve decision-making and meet joint force requirements more effectively.

Conclusions

The landscape of war and geopolitics evolves relentlessly, demanding the adaptation of strategy, doctrine, structures, and equipment. It also demands the adaptation of the thing that makes all that possible: logistics. As the U.S. military looks to the future of the Army and its crucial role in deterrence and defense in the Pacific, far more effort and attention should be devoted to the questions of how to supply, support, and sustain the force.

Become a Member

Col. (ret.) Carmelia Scott-Skillern is a career U.S. Army logistician who has served in a variety of roles, from command of the Army Field Support Brigade for Central Command operations to deployment to Iraq to chief of the Programs Division in the office of the chief of Legislative Liaison. She served as a chief of staff of the Army senior fellow in New America’s Future Security program.

P.W. Singer is a strategist at New America, a professor at Arizona State University, and managing partner of Useful Fiction LLC. He is the author of multiple best-selling fiction and non-fiction books.

Image: Staff Sgt. John C Garver

warontherocks.com · by Peter Singer · April 29, 2024

21. Why the Military Can’t Trust AI

Excerpts:

Despite militaries’ desire to use LLMs and other AI-enabled decision-making tools, there are real limitations and dangers. Above all, those militaries that rely on these technologies to make decisions need a better understanding of how the LLM works and the importance of differences in LLM design and execution. This requires significant user training and an ability to evaluate the underlying logics and data that make an LLM work. The result should be that a military user is just as familiar with an LLM as the user is with the radar, tank, or missile that it enables. This level of training and expertise will be easier to accomplish in peacetime and with advanced militaries, meaning it is the wartime use by militaries already strapped for labor, technology, and weapons where these systems may create the most risk. Militaries must realize that, fundamentally, an LLM’s behavior can never be completely guaranteed, especially when making rare and difficult choices about escalation and war.

This fact does not mean the military cannot use LLMs in any way. For example, LLMs could be used to streamline internal processes, such as writing briefing summaries and reports. LLMs can also be used alongside human processes, including war gaming or targeting assessments, as ways to explore alternative scenarios and courses of action—stopping short of delegating decision-making for violence. Finally, dialogue and demonstration, even between adversaries, can help decrease the chance of these technologies leading to dangerous escalation.

There have already been encouraging signs that the U.S. military is taking this seriously. In 2023, the DOD released its directive on Autonomy in Weapon Systems. It requires AI systems to be tested and evaluated to ensure that they function as anticipated and adhere to the Pentagon’s AI Ethical Principles, and Responsible AI Strategy. This was an important first step in the safe development and implementation of these technologies. Next, more research is required to understand when and how LLMs can lead to unnecessary harm. And, perhaps more important for the military, the policy is useful only if buyers, fighters, and planners know enough about how an LLM is made to apply its underlying principles. For that to happen, militaries will need to train and fine-tune not just their LLMs but also their staff and their leaders.

Why the Military Can’t Trust AI

Large-Language Models Can Make Bad Decisions—and Could Trigger Nuclear War

By Max Lamparth and Jacquelyn Schneider

April 29, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Max Lamparth and Jacquelyn Schneider · April 29, 2024

In 2022, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, a chatbot that uses large language models to mimic human conversations and to answer users’ questions. The chatbot’s extraordinary abilities sparked a debate about how LLMs might be used to perform other tasks—including fighting a war. Although for some, including the Global Legal Action Network, LLMs and other generative AI technologies hold the promise of more discriminate and therefore ethical uses of force, others, such as advisers from the International Committee of the Red Cross, have warned that these technologies could remove human decision-making from the most vital questions of life and death.

The U.S. Department of Defense is now seriously investigating what LLMs can do for the military. In the spring of 2022, the DOD established the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to explore how artificial intelligence can help the armed forces. In November 2023, the Defense Department released its strategy for adopting AI technologies. It optimistically reported that “the latest advancements in data, analytics, and AI technologies enable leaders to make better decisions faster, from the boardroom to the battlefield.” Accordingly, AI-enabled technologies are now being used. U.S. troops, for example, have had AI-enabled systems select Houthi targets in the Middle East.

Both the U.S. Marine Corps and Air Force are experimenting with LLMs, using them for war games, military planning, and basic administrative tasks. Palantir, a company that develops information technology for the DOD, has created a product that uses LLMs to manage military operations. Meanwhile, the DOD has formed a new task force to explore the use of generative AI, including LLMs, within the U.S. military.

But despite the enthusiasm for AI and LLMs within the Pentagon, its leadership is worried about the risk that the technologies pose. Hackathons sponsored by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office have identified biases and hallucinations in LLM applications, and recently, the U.S. Navy published guidance limiting the use of LLMs, citing security vulnerabilities and the inadvertent release of sensitive information. Our research shows that such concerns are justified. LLMs can be useful, but their actions are also difficult to predict, and they can make dangerous, escalatory calls. The military must therefore place limits upon these technologies when they are used to make high-stakes decisions, particularly in combat situations. LLMs have plenty of uses within the DOD, but it is dangerous to outsource high-stakes choices to machines.

TRAINING TROUBLES

LLMs are AI systems trained on large collections of data that generate text, one word at a time, based on what has been written before. They are created in a two-step process. The first is pretraining, when the LLM is taught from scratch to abstract and reproduce underlying patterns found in an enormous data set. To do so, it has to learn a vast amount about subjects including grammar, factual associations, sentiment analysis, and language translation. LLMs develop most of their skills during pretraining—but success depends on the quality, size, and variety of the data they consume. So much text is needed that it is practically impossible for an LLM to be taught solely on vetted high-quality data. This means accepting lower quality data, too. For the armed forces, an LLM cannot be trained on military data alone; it still needs more generic forms of information, including recipes, romance novels, and the day-to-day digital exchanges that populate the Internet.

But pretraining is not enough to build a useful chatbot—or a defense command-and-control assistant. This is because, during this first stage, the LLM adopts many different writing styles and personalities, not all of which are appropriate for its task. After pretraining, the LLM may also lack necessary specific knowledge, such as the jargon required to answer questions about military plans. That is why LLMs then need fine-tuning on smaller, more specific data sets. This second step improves the LLM’s ability to interface with a user by learning how to be a conversational partner and assistant. There are different approaches for fine-tuning, but it is often done by incorporating information from online support forums, as well as human feedback, to ensure LLM outputs are more aligned with human preferences and behavior.

LLMs can be useful, but their actions are also difficult to predict.

This process needs to balance the original LLM’s pretraining with more nuanced human considerations, including whether the responses are helpful or harmful. Striking this balance is tricky. For example, a chatbot that always complies with user requests—such as advising on how to build a bomb—is not harmless, but if it refuses most user queries, then it is not helpful. Designers must find a way to compress abstracts, including behavioral norms and ethics, into metrics for fine-tuning. To do this, researchers start with a data set annotated by humans who compare LLM-generated examples directly and choose which is preferable. Another language model, the preference model, is separately trained on human ratings of LLM-generated examples to assign any given text an absolute score on its use for humans. The preference model is then used to enable the fine-tuning of the original LLM.

This approach has its limitations. What is preferable depends on whom is asked, and how well the model deals with conflicting preferences. There is, moreover, little control over which underlying rules are learned by the LLM during fine-tuning. This is because neither the LLM nor the preference model for fine-tuning directly “learns” a subject. Rather, they can be trained only by being shown examples of desired behavior in action, with humans hoping that the underlying rules are sufficiently internalized. But there is no guarantee that this will happen. Techniques do exist, however, to mitigate some of these problems. For example, to try to overcome limitations from small, expensive human-labeled data sets, preference data sets can be expanded using an LLM to generate AI-labeled preference data. Newer approaches even use a constitution of rules drawn up by LLM designers for appropriate behaviors—such as responses to racism—to potentially give the model’s trainers some control over which rules get abstracted into the preference metric used for fine-tuning.

Pretraining and fine-tuning can create capable LLMs, but the process still falls short of creating direct substitutes for human decision-making. This is because an LLM, no matter how well tuned or trained, can favor only certain behaviors. It can neither abstract nor reason like a human. Humans interact in environments, learn concepts, and communicate them using language. LLMs, however, can only mimic language and reasoning by abstracting correlations and concepts from data. LLMs may often correctly mimic human communication, but without the ability to internalize, and given the enormous size of the model, there is no guarantee that their choices will be safe or ethical. It is, therefore, not possible to reliably predict what an LLM will do when making high-stakes decisions.

A RISKY PLAYER

LLMs could perform military tasks that require processing vast amounts of data in very short timelines, which means that militaries may wish to use them to augment decision-making or to streamline bureaucratic functions. LLMs, for example, hold great promise for military planning, command, and intelligence. They could automate much of scenario planning, war gaming, budgeting, and training. They could also be used to synthesize intelligence, enhance threat forecasting, and generate targeting recommendations. During war or a crisis, LLMs could use existing guidance to come up with orders, even when there is limited or minimal communication between units and their commanders. Perhaps most important for the day-to-day operations of militaries, LLMs may be able to automate otherwise arduous military tasks including travel, logistics, and performance evaluations.

But even for these tasks, the success of LLMs cannot be guaranteed. Their behavior, especially in rare and unpredictable examples, can be erratic. And because no two LLMs are exactly alike in their training or fine-tuning, they are uniquely influenced by user inputs. Consider, for example, a series of war games we held in which we analyzed how human experts and LLMs played to understand how their decisions differ. The humans did not play against the LLMs. Rather, they played separately in the same roles. The game placed players in the midst of a U.S.-China maritime crisis as a U.S. government task force made decisions about how to use emerging technologies in the face of escalation. Players were given the same background documents and game rules, as well as identical PowerPoint decks, word-based player guides, maps, and details of capabilities. They then deliberated in groups of four to six to generate recommendations.

On average, both the human and LLM teams made similar choices about big-picture strategy and rules of engagement. But, as we changed the information the LLM received, or swapped between which LLM we used, we saw significant deviations from human behavior. For example, one LLM we tested tried to avoid friendly casualties or collisions by opening fire on enemy combatants and turning a cold war hot, reasoning that using preemptive violence was more likely to prevent a bad outcome to the crisis. Furthermore, whereas the human players’ differences in experience and knowledge affected their play, LLMs were largely unaffected by inputs about experience or demographics. The problem was not that an LLM made worse or better decisions than humans or that it was more likely to “win” the war game. It was, rather, that the LLM came to its decisions in a way that did not convey the complexity of human decision-making. LLM-generated dialogue between players had little disagreement and consisted of short statements of fact. It was a far cry from the in-depth arguments so often a part of human war gaming.

In a different research project, we studied how LLMs behaved within simulated war games, specifically focusing on whether or not they chose to escalate. The study, which compared LLMs from leading Silicon Valley companies such as Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI, asked each LLM to play the role of a country, with researchers varying the country’s goals. We found that the LLMs behaved differently based on their version, the data on which they were trained, and the choices that their designers made during fine-tuning about their preferences. Despite these differences, we found that all these LLMs chose escalation and exhibited a preference toward arms races, conflict, and even the use of nuclear weapons. When we tested one LLM that was not fine-tuned, it led to chaotic actions and the use of nuclear weapons. The LLM’s stated reasoning: “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it.”

DANGEROUS MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Despite militaries’ desire to use LLMs and other AI-enabled decision-making tools, there are real limitations and dangers. Above all, those militaries that rely on these technologies to make decisions need a better understanding of how the LLM works and the importance of differences in LLM design and execution. This requires significant user training and an ability to evaluate the underlying logics and data that make an LLM work. The result should be that a military user is just as familiar with an LLM as the user is with the radar, tank, or missile that it enables. This level of training and expertise will be easier to accomplish in peacetime and with advanced militaries, meaning it is the wartime use by militaries already strapped for labor, technology, and weapons where these systems may create the most risk. Militaries must realize that, fundamentally, an LLM’s behavior can never be completely guaranteed, especially when making rare and difficult choices about escalation and war.

This fact does not mean the military cannot use LLMs in any way. For example, LLMs could be used to streamline internal processes, such as writing briefing summaries and reports. LLMs can also be used alongside human processes, including war gaming or targeting assessments, as ways to explore alternative scenarios and courses of action—stopping short of delegating decision-making for violence. Finally, dialogue and demonstration, even between adversaries, can help decrease the chance of these technologies leading to dangerous escalation.

There have already been encouraging signs that the U.S. military is taking this seriously. In 2023, the DOD released its directive on Autonomy in Weapon Systems. It requires AI systems to be tested and evaluated to ensure that they function as anticipated and adhere to the Pentagon’s AI Ethical Principles, and Responsible AI Strategy. This was an important first step in the safe development and implementation of these technologies. Next, more research is required to understand when and how LLMs can lead to unnecessary harm. And, perhaps more important for the military, the policy is useful only if buyers, fighters, and planners know enough about how an LLM is made to apply its underlying principles. For that to happen, militaries will need to train and fine-tune not just their LLMs but also their staff and their leaders.

• MAX LAMPARTH is a fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Safety and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Stanford Center for AI Safety.
• JACQUELYN SCHNEIDER is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and an affiliate with Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Foreign Affairs · by Max Lamparth and Jacquelyn Schneider · April 29, 2024

22. War Unbound – Gaza, Ukraine, and the Breakdown of International Law

Excerpts:

The United States should also restrict its military assistance to those countries that comply with international humanitarian law—not just when providing arms but also when offering financial support, intelligence, and training. The United States has counterterrorism programs in some 80 countries on six continents. If Washington conditioned its support on greater adherence to the law—and withdrew it from countries that didn’t comply—the effect would be powerful and immediate. And Israel should not be exempt from those standards; the United States should insist that the country make clear the concrete steps it intends to take to ensure that its conduct of the war in Gaza comports with international law.

Since 9/11, Washington has used its power to weaken constraints on the use of force.

These changes should be made not only as a matter of policy but also as a matter of law. When the executive branch offers legal explanations for U.S. behavior, it almost always does so to justify taking military action, often in ways that push existing legal boundaries. By contrast, when it endorses restraints that better protect civilians in war, it has generally emphasized that it is doing so only as a matter of policy—not because it is required but as a choice. This means the restraints can be easily discarded when they become inconvenient. The legal rationales for acting, meanwhile, stand as precedents to justify the United States’ future military operations—and those of other countries around the world.

If the law of war is to survive today’s existential challenges, the United States and its allies need to treat it not as an optional constraint to be adjusted or shrugged off as needed but as an unmoving pillar of the global legal order. True, there will be wartime actors who break the law, and civilians will continue to suffer as a result. But before the United States can hold these offenders to account, it must show that it is prepared to hold its own forces—and those of its allies—to the same standards.

War Unbound

Gaza, Ukraine, and the Breakdown of International Law

By Oona A. Hathaway

May/June 2024

Published on April 23, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Oona A. Hathaway · April 23, 2024

Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s response to it have been a disaster for civilians. In its October 7 massacre, Hamas sought out unarmed Israeli civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, killing close to 1,200 people and taking around 240 hostages. Israel’s subsequent air and ground campaign in Gaza has, as of March 2024, killed more than 30,000 people, an estimated two-thirds of whom were women and children. The Israeli offensive has also displaced some two million people (more than 85 percent of the population of Gaza), left more than a million people at risk of starvation, and damaged or destroyed some 150,000 civilian buildings. Today, there is no functional hospital left in northern Gaza. Hamas, Israel maintains, uses civilian structures as shields, operating in them or in tunnels beneath them—perhaps precisely because such buildings have been considered off-limits for military operations under international law.

International humanitarian law, also known as the law of war or the law of armed conflict, is supposed to spare civilians from the worst calamities of conflict. The aim of this body of law has always been clear: civilians not involved in the fighting deserve to be protected from harm and to enjoy unimpeded access to humanitarian aid. But in the Israel-Hamas war, the law has failed. Hamas continues to hold hostages and has used schools, hospitals, and other civilian buildings to shield its infrastructure, while Israel has waged an all-out war in densely populated areas and slowed the flow of desperately needed aid to a trickle. The result has been utter devastation for civilians in Gaza.

The conflict in Gaza is an extreme example of the breakdown of the law of war, but it is not an isolated one. It is the latest in a long series of wars in the years since 9/11, from the U.S.-led “war on terror” to the Syrian civil war to Russia’s war in Ukraine, that have chipped away at protections for civilians. From this grim record, it might be tempting to conclude that the humanitarian protections that governments worked so hard to enshrine in law after World War II hold little meaning today. Yet even a hobbled system of international humanitarian law has made conflict more humane. Indeed, for all the frequent transgressions, the existence of these legal protections has provided continuous pressure on belligerents to limit civilian casualties, provide safe zones for noncombatants, and allow for humanitarian access—knowing they will face international consequences when they do not.

After the horrors of World War II, the United States and its allies established the Geneva Conventions, the four treaties of 1949 that lay out elaborate rules governing the conduct of war. At a moment when the laws of war are once again being severely tested, the United States—which, especially in the years after 9/11, helped weaken them—should act now to renew and strengthen them.

LICENSE TO KILL

The law of war offers a tradeoff. Soldiers of a sovereign nation can be lawfully killed in armed conflict. In exchange, they are granted immunity that allows them to commit acts that in any other context would likely be considered crimes—not only to kill but also to trespass, break and enter, steal, assault, maim, kidnap, destroy property, and commit arson. This immunity applies whether their cause is just or unjust.

There are limits—which, for most of history, were modest. Hugo Grotius, the early-seventeenth-century Dutch diplomat who has been called “the father of international law,” wrote that soldiers should be prohibited from using poison, killing by deception (for example, after feigning surrender), and rape. In Grotius’s framework, these three offenses made up the only exceptions to a soldier’s license to kill. Enslavement, torture, pillaging, and the execution of prisoners were all allowed; so was the intentional killing of unarmed civilians, including women and children. Although few treaties governed the conduct of war at the time, countries in western Europe widely accepted these rules as customary international law.

Protecting civilians in war is much harder when one of the belligerents is a nonstate actor.

According to Grotius, soldiers were not allowed to massacre civilians whenever they liked. They were legally permitted to take the steps necessary to enforce the rights on which the enemy had infringed—and nothing more. If killing women and children did not advance the war effort, there was no justification for doing so. Yet even if the senseless slaughter of innocent civilians was technically illegal under international law at the time, those who committed it could not be held accountable; such deeds, Grotius observed, could be “made with impunity.” The lack of legal remedy for attacks on civilians began to be addressed only in the middle of the eighteenth century, when countries gradually adopted the principle of distinction, which requires soldiers to distinguish between combatants and civilians.

The rules governing war continued to evolve over the course of the nineteenth century. The first Geneva Convention, signed in 1864, prohibited attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, and their patients. The 1868 St. Petersburg Declaration banned the use of fragmenting, explosive, or incendiary small-arms munitions. The 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions, ratified by most world powers at the time, prohibited attacking towns and buildings that were not defended by military forces. They also banned pillaging, executing prisoners of war, and compelling civilians to swear allegiance to a foreign power.

But countries that were engaged in war struggled to figure out how to enforce these rules. Their solution was generally reprisal: if an adversary violated the laws of war in a military operation, a country would respond with a violation of its own. Often, the reprisals would be meted out on prisoners of war, who were near at hand and could easily be killed. But civilians were not insulated from attacks. When Spanish guerrillas attacked a French column in Spain’s Sil Valley in 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, the French commanding officer, General Louis-Henri Loison, ordered his soldiers to torch the countryside.

THE POSTWAR RECKONING

During World War II, more than 30 million civilians were killed. In the aftermath of such catastrophic violence, it was clear that new and stronger rules were needed to regulate war. In 1949, a series of international conferences convened by the International Committee of the Red Cross established the four Geneva Conventions in an effort to prevent the most brutal violence of war. Although Grotius offered just three prohibitions to guide states in war, the Geneva Conventions and, later, its three Additional Protocols filled hundreds of pages with specific rules for almost any scenario. The new rules governed the treatment of wounded and sick military personnel in the field and at sea, prisoners of war, and civilians.

Unlike the early laws of war, the Geneva Conventions prohibited not just senseless violence but also some forms of violence that advanced war aims. To adhere to the conventions, parties to a conflict must distinguish between civilians and combatants and between civilian places and military ones. Above all, they may never intentionally target civilians or “civilian objects,” such as schools, private homes, construction equipment, businesses, places of worship, and hospitals that do not directly contribute to military action. And civilians must never be the target of reprisals. The principle of proportionality, codified in 1977 in Additional Protocol I, acknowledges that sometimes armies will harm civilians and civilian objects when pursuing military objectives. But the rule requires that the damage not be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” The principle of precaution, moreover, requires that armies must take constant care to spare civilians and civilian objects, even if doing so might slow down military operations.

Near al Shifa Hospital, Gaza City, April 2024

Dawoud Abu Alkas / Reuters

The Geneva Conventions, their protocols, and the customary international law that has grown around them take an important step beyond the rules that came before. They aim to protect civilians from harm even when that harm might serve a strategic purpose. Thus, an attack on a military target that would help a belligerent’s war effort is prohibited if it would hurt too many civilians.

In many ways, the Geneva Conventions have been remarkably successful. All four conventions have been ratified by all UN member states. Most countries have adopted military manuals that translate the conventions into concrete rules meant to guide the conduct of their armies. Many have enforced these rules against their own soldiers. Yet these elaborate and ambitious rules were shaped by wars that were very different from most conflicts today.

Since the end of World War II, wars between states have sharply declined, but conflicts involving nonstate armed groups have risen. The Geneva Conventions say little about the latter. Only one article, Common Article 3, specifically applies to wars with nonstate groups. Protecting civilians in war, it turns out, is much harder when one of the belligerents is a nonstate actor. Combatants belonging to nonstate groups generally don’t wear uniforms. Although their members may assemble, train in camps, and be organized under a hierarchical leadership, they tend to operate in places where civilians are also present. As a result, it can be extremely difficult to tell them apart from ordinary civilians.

SELF-DEFENSE CLASSES

The 9/11 attacks and the U.S. response to them inaugurated a new era of war that has pushed international humanitarian law to a breaking point. Before 2001, legitimate self-defense under international law was generally understood to apply only when one country was defending an attack from another. Until then, few countries had cited nonstate actors as their primary reason for using force in self-defense. (Israel was a notable exception; its adversaries included irregular forces located in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.)

After 9/11, self-defense claims changed. The United States justified its invasion of Afghanistan by arguing that it was responding to, as the Bush administration informed the UN Security Council, the “ongoing threat to the United States and its nationals posed by the Al-Qaeda organization.” Within a year, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Poland, and the United Kingdom had also filed claims of self-defense against al Qaeda. And it was not long before countries began making claims against other nonstate groups. In 2002, for example, Rwanda cited a right of self-defense against the Interahamwe, a militia group. And in 2003, Côte d’Ivoire cited the same right against “rebel forces.”

To confront groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), the United States and its allies came to rely on what they dubbed the “unwilling or unable doctrine”—the theory that action against a nonstate threat is justified as long as the country in which the nonstate actor is found is unwilling or unable to suppress the threat. In most cases, the United States sought the consent of governments to target nonstate actors in their territories. Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and, while the Taliban was out of power, Afghanistan all agreed to U.S. intervention. When states would not consent—for example, Syria—the United States used the unable or unwilling theory, explicitly endorsed by fewer than a dozen countries, to justify using military force.

In Gaza, there are few objects or structures that Israel does not consider dual use.

As Washington went to war with nonstate actors, it struggled with how to distinguish the civilians it was allowed to kill according to the Geneva Conventions—those “who take a direct part in hostilities”—from those it was not. If a civilian who was not a member of ISIS performed a task for the group—say, placing an improvised explosive device on a road—and then returned to work as an ordinary laborer, could that person still be targeted?

In 2009, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued guidance to governments on how to protect civilians when fighting nonstate actors. The ICRC document reiterated the rule that civilians must be protected against direct attack “unless and for such time as they take direct part in hostilities.” It set out the principle that civilians who do not take a direct part in hostilities must be distinguished not only from armed forces but also from those who participate in hostilities “on an individual, sporadic or unorganized basis only.” The devil was very much in the details.

The ICRC concluded that direct participation in hostilities “refers to specific acts carried out by individuals as part of the conduct of hostilities between parties to an armed conflict.” A person integrated into an organized armed group has a “continuous combat function” and can be targeted throughout the war. Hence, ISIS fighters are considered legitimate military targets as long as the conflict with ISIS continues. But ISIS members who provide noncombat support, including recruiters, trainers, and financiers, are not. A civilian who places an improvised explosive device for ISIS is directly participating in the war when positioning the weapon and while in transit for the task. But once this task is finished, so is the direct participation in the war, and the person can no longer be targeted. Many countries rejected the ICRC’s guidance, including the United States and the United Kingdom, which came up with their own rules for their counterterrorism campaigns in the Middle East.

BLURRED LINES?

To address the changing reality of urban combat, the United States and other countries adopted new policies that once more put civilians in the cross hairs. At the center of this shift was the concept of so-called dual-use objects. According to international humanitarian law, all sites are either military or civilian; there is nothing in between. Objects normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as places of worship, houses, or schools, are presumed to be civilian. But they can lose their civilian status if they are used for a military purpose.

The clear-cut division between civilian and military often fails to match the reality on the ground. There are many sites and structures that serve important civilian purposes but, by virtue of having some military use, may be considered military objectives—for example, trains, bridges, power stations, and communications infrastructure. Even an apartment building, if part of it serves for weapons storage, can be considered dual use.

More controversially, the United States now considers sectors of the adversary’s economy that may help sustain a war as legitimate targets. In the course of its operations against ISIS, for example, the United States struck oil wells, refineries, and tanker trucks. States generally agree that industries directly related to the military or defense may be targeted, such as those producing arms or supplying fuel to military vehicles. But they diverge on whether a belligerent may target an industry that contributes only indirectly to military activities, by providing financial support, for example. The Department of Defense Law of War Manual maintains that a given industry’s or sector’s “effective contribution to the war-fighting or war-sustaining capability of an opposing force is sufficient.” This means that banks, businesses, and, indeed, any source of economic activity that contributes to an adversary’s ability to sustain itself could be fair game. And because members of nonstate groups often rely on the same sources as ordinary civilians for food, fuel, and money, these areas of the economy that are essential to civilian life are regularly in the direct line of fire.

As a result, the dual-use concept has increasingly made a wide variety of civilian activities subject to potential military action. An enterprise that is mostly used for civilian purposes, such as an oil refinery or even a bakery, can become a target in war if it contributes in some way to the war effort. It is still the case that harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure must be proportional to the potential military advantage attained. But the United States and Israel take the position that any site that can plausibly qualify as dual use is a legitimate military objective. Damage to such a target, then, is not part of the proportionality calculus. If noncombatant civilians are expected to be harmed, that must be weighed before taking the strike, but the long-term loss of vital civilian services, such as those provided by a water treatment plant, an electric grid, a bank, or a hospital, does not.

Portraits of men killed in Bucha, Ukraine, February 2023

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

The military logic behind Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza is, in part, a result of these incremental changes, which both the United States and Israel have contributed to for decades. Hamas is both a nonstate actor and the de facto governing authority in Gaza. Determining who is a Hamas fighter and who is not, particularly from the air, is difficult. Even on the ground, Israeli forces have often failed to distinguish between civilians and combatants, as in December 2023, when Israeli troops shot three Israeli hostages as they waved a white flag. And even when Israeli forces have made every possible effort to distinguish between combatants and civilians, targeting the one without killing the other has proved nearly impossible. Given Gaza’s extraordinary population density, almost any military target is in, near, above, or below buildings in which large numbers of civilians live or work.

In Gaza, there are few objects or structures that Israel does not consider dual use. Israel has worsened Gaza’s humanitarian crisis by holding at the border items such as oxygen cylinders and tent poles. Meanwhile, it treats hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, and even places of worship as legitimate military targets if Hamas has used them for military purposes. Israel maintains that Hamas knows the law of war and has sought to protect its military infrastructure by hiding its activities in tunnels under civilian structures, such as hospitals, that the law protects from attack. Israel emphasized this point in its defense before the International Court of Justice against South Africa’s claims that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s decision to treat locations traditionally protected from attack as legitimate targets has meant devastation for civilians in Gaza. Hospitals and schools where those displaced by the war sought refuge have been targeted in large-scale attacks, killing thousands. The problem has been compounded by Israel’s expansive interpretation of proportionality. As Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesperson, told the BBC, proportionality in Israel’s view means that the collateral damage of a given strike must be proportionate to the expected military advantage. “And the expected military advantage here,” he explained, “is to destroy the terror organization that perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.”

Israel has turned a principle that was meant to shield civilians into a tool to justify violence. Its approach to assessing proportionality—not strike by strike but in light of the entire war aim—is not how militaries are supposed to carry out their assessments. Rather, according to international law as codified in Additional Protocol I, the principle of proportionality prohibits a given attack where the expected harm to civilian people and places is “excessive” compared with the “direct military advantage” that the attack is supposed to achieve. By weighing any single instance of harm to civilians against a perceived existential threat, Israel can justify virtually any strike as meeting the requirements of proportionality; the purported benefits always outweigh any costs. Unsurprisingly, this approach has led to a war with few restraints.

CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE

Although civilians have been killed at extraordinary rates in the war in Gaza, they have also suffered extensively in other recent conflicts. During the Syrian civil war, the Syrian government repeatedly gassed its own people, wiping out entire neighborhoods in an effort to suppress the opposition. In 2018, a UN report found that Syrian forces, supported by the Russian military, had attacked hospitals, schools, and markets.

Saudi Arabia, too, has been accused of violating legal protections for civilians in its operations against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. In 2015, Saudi Arabia led a coalition of states in a campaign to defeat the Houthis, who had launched cross-border attacks against it and seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. A team of UN investigators found that coalition airstrikes—which the United States supported with midair refueling, intelligence, and arms sales—had hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats, and medical facilities, killing more than 6,000 civilians and wounding over 10,000. The strikes on essential infrastructure, including water treatment plants, created a cholera epidemic that killed thousands, most of them children.

Ukraine has also been the site of barbaric attacks against civilians. Russian forces carried out summary executions, disappearances, and torture in Bucha and beyond. They indiscriminately bombed Mariupol, damaging 77 percent of the city’s medical facilities in the process. Throughout the war, Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid have left millions of civilians without electricity, water, or heat.

Meanwhile, technological innovations threaten to further erode the line between civilians and combatants. In Ukraine, for example, the same app that Ukrainians use to file taxes can also be used to track Russian troops. Using an “e-Enemy” feature, Ukrainians can submit reports, photos, and videos of Russian troop movements. Yet this makes those same civilians vulnerable to attack, since any civilian who uses the app to alert Ukrainian forces of Russian military activity might be regarded as “directly participating in hostilities” and therefore considered a legitimate target. Ukrainian data servers store both military and civilian information, likely rendering computer networks and the information stored in them dual-use objects. Ukraine created an “IT army” of more than 400,000 volunteers who work with Ukraine’s Defense Ministry to launch cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure. These Ukrainians may not realize that by volunteering their services, they have, according to international law, become combatants in an armed conflict.

CAUSE FOR CONSTRAINT

One pessimistic takeaway from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine may be that the hard-won lessons of World War II have been forgotten and efforts to use law to protect civilians from war are pointless. But as brutal as the current conflicts are, they would likely be even more horrific without these rules. A careful reading of the current era would show that rather than altogether abandoning the protections of civilians enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, belligerents in recent wars have been making those protections less effective by severely restricting what counts as civilian. And the United States has played a key part in this shift.

Since 9/11, Washington has used its power to weaken constraints on the use of force, aggressively interpret the right to self-defense, and allow for more expansive targeting of dual-use sites and structures. These positions have created greater flexibility for the U.S. military, but they have also placed more civilians in harm’s way. Following the United States’ lead, other countries, including France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, have likewise loosened constraints on their own militaries.

To reverse this trend and strengthen the law of armed conflict, Washington must decide that embracing constraints and pressing others to do the same is essential to the fundamental principles of human dignity that the United States, at its best, has championed. To its credit, the Biden administration has already taken some modest steps in this direction. In 2022, the Defense Department announced a detailed plan for how the U.S. military would better protect civilians, and this February, the Biden administration said that it would require foreign governments to promise that any U.S. weapons they received would not be used to violate international law. But much more remains to be done.

At the International Court of Justice, The Hague, Netherlands, January 2024

Piroschka van de Wouw / Reuters

For starters, the United States should expand collaboration and cooperation with the International Criminal Court, the most effective international mechanism for enforcing international humanitarian law. Indeed, members of the U.S. Congress have cheered the ICC’s exercise of jurisdiction over Russia for crimes committed during the war in Ukraine and passed a law allowing the United States to share evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with its prosecutor. Yet in 2020, the Trump administration sanctioned ICC judges and lawyers in retaliation for having investigated whether U.S. soldiers committed war crimes in Afghanistan. To the rest of the world, the hypocrisy is glaring and instructive. One way for the United States to improve its relationship with the court would be to repeal the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, a 2002 law, known colloquially as “the Hague Invasion Act,” that allows the president to order military action to protect Americans from ICC prosecution. It also prohibits government agencies from assisting the court unless specifically permitted, as with the Ukraine investigation.

The United States should also reconsider some of the expansive legal positions it adopted after 9/11. It should, for example, endorse more stringent limits on when dual-use objects can be targeted. It should revise the treatment of the principles of proportionality and feasible precautions in the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual to better reflect international humanitarian law. And it should fully implement its new plan to mitigate civilian harm during U.S. military operations.

The United States should also restrict its military assistance to those countries that comply with international humanitarian law—not just when providing arms but also when offering financial support, intelligence, and training. The United States has counterterrorism programs in some 80 countries on six continents. If Washington conditioned its support on greater adherence to the law—and withdrew it from countries that didn’t comply—the effect would be powerful and immediate. And Israel should not be exempt from those standards; the United States should insist that the country make clear the concrete steps it intends to take to ensure that its conduct of the war in Gaza comports with international law.

Since 9/11, Washington has used its power to weaken constraints on the use of force.

These changes should be made not only as a matter of policy but also as a matter of law. When the executive branch offers legal explanations for U.S. behavior, it almost always does so to justify taking military action, often in ways that push existing legal boundaries. By contrast, when it endorses restraints that better protect civilians in war, it has generally emphasized that it is doing so only as a matter of policy—not because it is required but as a choice. This means the restraints can be easily discarded when they become inconvenient. The legal rationales for acting, meanwhile, stand as precedents to justify the United States’ future military operations—and those of other countries around the world.

If the law of war is to survive today’s existential challenges, the United States and its allies need to treat it not as an optional constraint to be adjusted or shrugged off as needed but as an unmoving pillar of the global legal order. True, there will be wartime actors who break the law, and civilians will continue to suffer as a result. But before the United States can hold these offenders to account, it must show that it is prepared to hold its own forces—and those of its allies—to the same standards.

• OONA A. HATHAWAY is Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Foreign Affairs · by Oona A. Hathaway · April 23, 2024

​23. Opinion | Despite the Ukraine aid vote, the neo-isolationist threat still looms by Max Boot

A sobering conclusion:

U.S. allies from Europe and Asia will be making a major mistake if they take the passage of the Ukraine aid bill as a signal that they don’t need to pursue greater strategic autonomy. They would be well advised to act as though the United States were, in fact, turning its back on the world — because there is a very real risk that could still happen.

Opinion | Despite the Ukraine aid vote, the neo-isolationist threat still looms

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · April 29, 2024

U.S. allies had a collective freakout earlier this year when aid to Ukraine was stalled in Congress and former president Donald Trump threatened to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that did not pay enough for their own defense. A European diplomat told me in March, “It is scary and should be scary.” After all, Europe had not faced the prospect of defending itself without significant help from the United States since 1945.

The passage of the $61 billion Ukraine aid bill in both the House and Senate by large margins should serve to soothe frayed nerves among U.S. allies — and not only in Europe. South Korea, Taiwan and Japan have also made clear that they are very concerned about the precedent that would be set if Russia were allowed to get away with unprovoked aggression. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergisspoke for many relieved allies when he wrote on X after the House vote: “Historic decisions change history. Good to have you back, America.”

But is America back for good or only for now? There is no way to answer that question with any degree of confidence. And that, in turn, should give U.S. allies pause about whether they can still count on the United States.

While overwhelming majorities of both houses wound up backing aid to Ukraine, narrow majorities of Republicans opposed the bill in the House and in the first Senate vote in February. (A clear majority of the Senate Republicans approved the House bill last week when its passage was a foregone conclusion.)

Things might have worked out differently if House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had not discovered his inner Arthur Vandenberg, channeling the Michigan Republican senator who turned from prewar isolationist into a leading supporter of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO in the late 1940s. Imagine if hard-right Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who voted against Ukraine aid, were speaker; he might have prevented the bill from getting a floor vote, and Ukraine might have lost the war this year. Even in the Senate, there is cause for concern: Many of the GOP supporters of Ukraine aid are in the old guard led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), while younger, Trumpier Republicans such as J.D. Vance (Ohio) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) oppose it.

Agonizing as it was to get Ukraine aid through Congress, the $61 billion is likely to run out by the end of the year. That means another bill will be necessary in early 2025. If Trump wins in November, it is extremely unlikely that he will support such legislation. He keeps saying he would end the war in 24 hours, which is widely assumed to imply that he will cut off Ukraine to force it to accept a lopsided deal that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has no intention of honoring. The U.S. presidential election could determine Ukraine’s fate — and Trump could easily win that election. Even if he doesn’t, aid to Ukraine will still be in jeopardy if Republicans control either house of Congress.

U.S. allies from Asia to Europe are talking about how to “Trump-proof” their alliances, but that will be very hard to do, given the carte blanche that U.S. presidents receive in foreign affairs. Congress did pass legislation to make it difficult for a president to pull out of NATO without congressional authorization, but Trump wouldn’t have to formally leave the alliance to destroy it, as he could simply announce that he won’t defend deadbeat allies. That is, in fact, what Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, predicts would happen if the disgraced former president returns to office.

For decades, while there were sharp disagreements over specific foreign interventions such as the Vietnam and Iraq wars, there was an underlying, bipartisan consensus in U.S. politics that internationalism was in America’s interest. Between 1942 and 2016, right-wing isolationists had been almost entirely sidelined in U.S. politics, notwithstanding a brief outbreak of “Come home, America” isolationism on the left in the 1970s.

That has now changed, with Trump showing that it is hardly harmful — and may, in fact, be helpful — for a leading Republican politician to rail against U.S. allies and U.S. commitments overseas. Trump has single-handedly revived the phrase “America First,” which had been in well-deserved obloquy since Dec. 7, 1941. There are, alas, plenty of ambitious opportunists, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who are all too willing to abandon whatever Reaganite foreign policy principles they might once have possessed to pursue the political rewards of neo-isolationist positions like opposing aid to Ukraine.

So U.S. allies will have to make contingency plans on the assumption that America may no longer be there for them in the future. Indeed, that is already occurring: Canada and the European members of NATO raised their defense spending by 11 percent in 2023, and Japan is raising its defense spending by 16.5 percent this year. But this may be only the start of a long-term shift away from the United States, with countries from Germany to South Korea debating whether they can still count on the U.S. nuclear umbrella or whether they need to acquire their own nukes.

While it’s not necessary for U.S. allies to go nuclear quite yet, it is vitally important that they do more to strengthen their multilateral defense ties to be less dependent on the whims of Washington. In the cases of Japan and South Korea, that means continuing to enhance their nascent military and intelligence ties in the face of growing threats from China and North Korea. In the case of Europe, that means not only continuing to raise defense spending — the target should be the Cold War standard of 3 to 5 percent of GDP, not the current goal of 2 percent — but also deepening cooperation on both defense production and military operations.

The European Union took an important step forward in March by unveiling its first defense industrial strategy, but much more needs to be done. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted in 2022, “European armed forces suffer major redundancies, with 29 different types of destroyers, 17 types of main battle tanks, and 20 types of fighter planes, as compared to four, one, and six, respectively, for the United States.” European countries have always been too jealous of their own sovereignty to do more to pool their defense resources, but now — facing what one former European diplomat described to me as “the twin threats of Putin and Trump” — it’s time to prioritize survival over national sovereignty. As French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday: “There is a risk our Europe could die. We are not equipped to face the risks.”

U.S. allies from Europe and Asia will be making a major mistake if they take the passage of the Ukraine aid bill as a signal that they don’t need to pursue greater strategic autonomy. They would be well advised to act as though the United States were, in fact, turning its back on the world — because there is a very real risk that could still happen.

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · April 29, 2024

24. US Ready to Train More Ukrainian Troops If Called Upon, Top White House Official Says

US Ready to Train More Ukrainian Troops If Called Upon, Top White House Official Says

military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · April 26, 2024

With tens of billions of dollars to support Ukraine's war effort finally approved by Congress, a top U.S. official said this week that the United States is ready to train more Ukrainian troops if called upon, though the Eastern European country continues to face recruiting challenges as its war to repel Russian invasion stretches into its third year.

Speaking to a small group of reporters at the White House on Thursday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the United States and its allies are ready to expand training. Currently, while there are U.S. military advisers in Ukraine, they are not training local forces. All U.S.-supported training has taken place outside of the country.

"You've got to generate the people, and then having generated the people, you determine, does it make sense for them to do their basic training in Ukraine? Does it make sense for them to go into a unit training in one of these outside-Ukraine facilities where we are doing training, where our partners are doing training?" Sullivan said in response to a question from Military.com.

"We're at the stage right now where that's a consultation among partner militaries, the U.S. and Ukraine, and it's ultimately up to Ukraine to say, 'Here's our need, can you can you meet it?'" he added.

Sullivan's comments come after a hard-fought political victory for the Biden administration with Congress' approval earlier this week of roughly $61 billion in military, humanitarian and economic assistance for Ukraine.

Amid dire warnings from U.S. military officials about the consequences of failing to approve more funding for Ukraine, lawmakers dithered for months on passing the aid bill. It finally cleared Congress with large bipartisan majorities in both chambers after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., bucked hard-right members of his party to give the bill a vote.

The largest chunk of military funding in the bill and the part getting the most attention is the more than $30 billion to replenish U.S. military stockpiles that have been sent to Ukraine and buy that country new weapons. U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine stopped and Ukrainian forces had to start rationing ammunition during the political fight over the bill after money to replenish American stockpiles ran out. Administration officials are now working to rush weapons to Ukraine with the funding approved.

But the bill also includes about $11.3 billion for U.S. military operations in Europe, including ongoing American military training for Ukrainian forces.

After a brief pause in training at the beginning of the war in 2022 because U.S. trainers left Ukraine ahead of Russia's invasion, American forces have been training Ukrainians in Germany, with the training evolving for different phases of the war and to incorporate new weapons systems.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian leaders are working to replenish their forces after two years of war and recent battlefield losses have left the ranks exhausted and depleted. Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a law that lowers Ukraine's draft age to 25 and another that requires all men between 18 and 60 to carry military registration documents and present them to officials when asked.

At his roundtable with reporters, Sullivan said "step one" for any expanded military training is to see how Ukraine's efforts to bolster its forces go.

"Then step two is to look at whether that means having to expand or adjust the training that's taking place in Europe outside of Ukraine by the United States and other militaries," he said, adding that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been discussing the topic with allies through the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. "So from our perspective, being able to expand and enhance training is something that we're set up and ready to do. The real question is one of throughput and at what point does it become necessary to, say, take additional personnel from Ukraine and put them through that training."

In addition to the training the United States is doing in Europe, a dozen Ukrainian pilots are being trained on F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets at a National Guard base in Arizona. U.S. and European officials have previously estimated that F-16s could start flying in Ukraine by mid-summer.

Asked whether the timeline for finishing the first round of F-16 training and getting the jets to Ukraine is still on track for the summer, Sullivan said that the process is "moving" but that he "can't give you a date on when we'll see the first deployments to Ukraine."

military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · April 26, 2024

25. The naming dispute between India & China

Conclusion:

As the situation evolves, the international community’s role in upholding these principles becomes ever more critical, ensuring that names—and the identities they represent—remain respected on the global stage.

The naming dispute between India & China - The Sunday Guardian Live

sundayguardianlive.com · by Khedroob Thondup · April 28, 2024

By using Tibet, instead of the Chinese Xizang, India challenges China’s unilateral renaming.

In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names carry more than mere identification; they embody history, culture, and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as Tsang Nan or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as Xizang, is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signalling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response.

Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise but a symbolic assertion of sovereignty. Such actions are provocative, touching upon the sensitive chords of territorial integrity and national identity.

India’s response, maintaining the use of the name “Tibet,” is a reaffirmation of historical and cultural recognition. By doing so, India not only challenges China’s unilateral renaming but also underscores its commitment to respecting the historical context of the region. This stance is significant, as it reflects India’s adherence to global norms and understanding, despite China’s attempts to reshape international perceptions.

The term “Sinicization” denotes the process by which non-Chinese societies are influenced to adopt Chinese cultural, linguistic, and societal norms.

In Tibet’s case, this process is a deliberate effort by the Chinese government to integrate Tibetan culture into the broader Chinese cultural framework. The renaming of Tibet to “Xizang” is a facet of these Sinicization efforts, aiming to solidify China’s rule and dilute the Dalai Lama’s influence and the global recognition of the Tibetan cause.

The international community, including governments and organizations, often weighs the historical and cultural context heavily when referring to regions. Despite China’s renaming efforts, many continue to use the term “Tibet,” aligning with the established global understanding. This collective stance is crucial, as it supports the cultural and religious identity of the Tibetan people against the tide of Sinicization.

The Indian government has firmly rejected China’s attempts to rename places in Arunachal Pradesh, emphasizing that such actions do not alter the state’s status as an integral part of India. This rejection is a clear message to China and the international community that India stands firm on its territorial sovereignty.

India’s potential reciprocation, refusing to accept the name “Xizang” and instead using “Tibet,” is a powerful diplomatic gesture. It is a declaration that India does not recognize the Sinicization of Tibet and supports the region’s historical and cultural identity as known internationally.

The naming dispute between India and China over Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh is more than a war of words; it is a reflection of deeper geopolitical tensions and the struggle for cultural preservation. India’s stance, rooted in historical recognition and international law, serves as a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history and infringe upon sovereign rights.

As the situation evolves, the international community’s role in upholding these principles becomes ever more critical, ensuring that names—and the identities they represent—remain respected on the global stage.

Khedroob Thondup is the son of Gyalo Thondup, elder brother of the Dalai Lama. Educated at St Stephens College, Delhi University and the University of San Francisco, Khedroob Thondup was Personal Assistant to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and accompanied him on his first trip in 1979 to the U.S. He was sent by the Dalai Lama to Beijing from 1980 till 1993 in dialogue talks. He interacted with Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun and Hu Jintao. He is President of the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Centre, Darjeeling since 1987.

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sundayguardianlive.com · by Khedroob Thondup · April 28, 2024

26. War analysts say Ukraine should treat the latest US aid package like it's the last one it'll get

War analysts say Ukraine should treat the latest US aid package like it's the last one it'll get

Business Insider · by Ella Sherman

Military & Defense

Ella Sherman

2024-04-25T17:12:23Z

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Ukrainian servicemen of Azov brigade are seen at an artillery position as Russia-Ukraine war continues in the direction of Lyman, Ukraine on April 07, 2024. Anadolu via Getty Images

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• Ukraine is urged to use its $61 billion US aid package carefully as some experts say future aid is uncertain.
• Political divisiveness and the upcoming US elections could complicate the passage of further aid.
• Experts suggest Ukraine use aid to build defenses and negotiate with Russia to prevent further losses.

War experts are advising Ukraine to use its latest $61 billion US aid package cautiously as there is always the possibility that American aid could again be derailed by politics.

"Every fight over every next increment has gotten increasingly contentious and increasingly long," said Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to the months-long deliberation of the most recent package for Ukraine that passed in the Senate on Wednesday and past assistance debates. "I think that the plan should be what if there is no more money."

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During a Defense Priorities Wednesday discussion panel, experts such as Kelly Grieco, a Stimson Center senior fellow, weighed in, saying that "everyone involved in this conflict should treat this aid package as though it's the last one and plan accordingly, because that could be."

The upcoming US presidential election, in which the presumed Republican candidate is far less supportive of Ukraine, as well as the continued divisiveness of the Ukraine security assistance discussion between the political parties in Congress, could complicate the passage of future aid for Ukraine, which has not been brought up yet but almost certainly will as the war drags on.

"It's uncertain who's going to be in office in January," Kavanagh said, further remarking that there is "certainly no appetite for starting the fight over January 2025 now."

Anadolu via Getty Images

With the US aid that was just approved, some conflict analysts assess that Ukraine's next steps to make the most of the new assistance should include building up defenses and exploring the possibility of negotiating with Russia.

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"I think Ukraine can win this war. It cannot win militarily in any way, it can win politically, though," Grieco said. "It can actually gain a political victory by not allowing Putin to achieve his main goal, which is to subjugate Ukraine," she said, noting that "Ukraine can remain a viable state and an independent state from Russia."

Both Grieco and Kavanagh emphasized the importance of Ukraine showing up to the negotiating table and using diplomacy with Russia to prevent further land losses.

Other experts, as well as Ukrainian officials, are critical of calls for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia and have said that Vladimir Putin would demand the "demilitarization" of Ukraine in order to take advantage of it.

Experts of the Washington-based Institute of the Study of War said in a March report that they continue to "assess that Russian President Vladimir Putin maintains his maximalist objectives in Ukraine, which are tantamount to complete Ukrainian and Western capitulation, and that Russia has no interest in good-faith negotiations with Ukraine."

ISW has challenged the notion that the war is '"unwinnable" for Ukraine, calling that a Russian information operation.

Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba has said that Russia cannot be trusted, a reality he says is proven by its documented failures to live up to past negotiations.

He reminded the world last November in a statement on social media that "Putin is a habitual liar who promised international leaders that he would not attack Ukraine days before his invasion in February 2022." Kuleba said no one can seriously expect the Ukrainians to negotiate with Russia.

The challenge is that six months of delayed assistance have put Ukraine in a difficult position, one that may not immediately be rectified by the coming aid.

During the panel discussion Wednesday, Kavanagh argued that starting negotiations will also buy Ukraine time as it's expected that the approved US aid will not be flowing in all at once. "The reality is that politics is involved, which means that things won't be perfect and there will be delays," she said.

Ukraine Russia Congress

Business Insider · by Ella Sherman

27. So does the Air Force have new aces now?

So does the Air Force have new aces now?

The math involved in recent shootdowns of Iranian drones suggests yes.

BY NICHOLAS SLAYTON | PUBLISHED APR 27, 2024 11:40 AM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · April 27, 2024

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The U.S. Air Force defines an “ace” as any pilot that has more than five combat kills. It’s been decades since American pilots reached that status, but that might have changed this month.

On April 13, Iran and its partners in Syria and Yemen fired more than 300 munitions — more than 150 drones as well as dozens of ballistic missiles and several cruise missiles — toward Israel. Elements of the British, French, Jordanian and American militaries helped Israel intercept 99% of those munitions. Among that, F-15E fighter jets from the U.S. Air Force’s 494th Fighter Squadron and 335th Fighter Squadron shot down more than 80 Iranian drones before they could reach their target.

There’s a fair chance at least one pilot from the two squadrons now fits the criteria for an ace. The two squadrons, as well as U.S. Air Forces Central, have not released details on how many F-15Es from the two squadrons participated in the mission, what weapons were used or how many drones were shot down per plane, but the math at play suggests there are some new aces. Task & Purpose contacted the squadrons and command for more information, but was only told that AFCENT is reviewing the operation.

The 335th operates 24 F-15E fighter jets; a spokesperson for the 494th would not say how many F-15Es are currently in the squadron. Squadrons do not always put every fighter into the skies for a mission, keeping some in reserve, depending on the nature of the mission. The F-15E is a fighter jet meant for both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions and as such can carry eight missiles alongside its internally mounted gun. The exact missile loadout depends on the mission, but the armament capacity makes each jet capable of getting five or more kills.

So back to the math. Even if every jet in each squadron was put into the sky — which again is highly unlikely and AFCENT has not specified how many were involved — there’s no guarantee that each F-15E got a kill or that the total kills were evenly distributed. With more than 80 drones shot down by pilots from the two squadrons in what U.S. officials described as “dozens of engagements,” the math suggests that it’s likely that at least one if not more Air Force pilots earned the more than five kills needed to count as an ace two weekends ago.

The Air Force hasn’t had a new flying ace since the Vietnam War, in part because of how dogfights have faded from importance in modern combat. With the rise of aerial drones, that might change.

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There might be the question of whether or not an aerial drone counts as a kill toward ace status. After all, they’re uncrewed aerial vehicles. It’s not as if pilots are getting into dogfights with them. And the size of the drone might matter too. Iranian Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 drones are maneuverable, they’re not just rockets, and they’re certainly bigger than, say, off the shelf commercial quadcopters used by Ukranian ground troops. The answer might go back eight decades. In World War II, the U.K.’s Royal Air Force counted shot down German V-1 rockets as kills toward a pilot’s record. If that counts, the U.S. Air Force might count the downed Shahed drones.

This month’s mission over the Middle East isn’t the first time U.S. fighter jets shot down drones over the Middle East. Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war in October, American aircraft have been busy shooting down drones and missiles fired by the Houthi movement in Yemen, either midair or destroying them before they could be launched. They’ve also been involved in wider airstrike operations in Yemen. After several months, those shootdowns are racking up. This month the U.S. Navy released photos of some of the F-18s with the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, and at least one sported “kill markings” showing two drones and several missiles. It’s not clear if that’s the only F-18 with those markings, or if any of the Navy aviators have achieved ace status.

Meanwhile on the ground, Army Spc. Dylan Green, a soldier with the 10th Mountain’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, has earned the nickname the “Ace of Syria” after five confirmed shootdowns of drones, but not with any fighter jet.

If any Air Force pilot did make ace two weekends ago, so far no images or news have made it online or on social media platforms. The Air Force’s own regulations say that any such marking needs to be “a 6-inch green star with a 1/2-inch black border located just below and centered on the pilot’s name block.” The type of aircraft downed would be put inside the star. So keep an eye out for an F-15E with some newly stenciled art, just in case.

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Nicholas Slayton

Nicholas Slayton is a contributing editor for Task & Purpose, covering conflict for over 12 years, from the Arab Spring to the war in Ukraine. His previous reporting can be found on the non-profit Aslan Media, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Architectural Digest, The Daily Beast, and the Los Angeles Downtown News. You can reach him at nicholas@taskandpurpose.com or find him on Twitter @NSlayton and Bluesky at @nslayton.bsky.social. Contact the author here.

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taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · April 27, 2024

28. Some in State Department don’t believe Israel is using US weapons in accordance with international law, source says

Some in State Department don’t believe Israel is using US weapons in accordance with international law, source says | CNN Politics

CNN · by Jennifer Hansler, Jack Forrest · April 29, 2024

The State Department seal is seen on the briefing room lectern at the State Department in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2022.

Mandel Ngan/Pool/AFP/Getty Images/File

CNN —

The State Department is divided over whether Israel is using American-provided weapons in accordance with international law ahead of a fast-approaching deadline next week for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to make a determination to Congress.

There is not unanimity about whether to accept Israel’s assurances about this as “credible and reliable,” a department official said. Israel was required to make those assurances to the US under a national security memorandum issued by President Joe Biden in February.

The memorandum requires all countries receiving US weapons to make assurances that they are using them “in a manner consistent with all applicable international and domestic law and policy, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

Under that memorandum, Blinken must tell Congress by May 8 whether he has certified the assurances to be credible and reliable.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks about the recently released 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices during a briefing at the State Department in Washington, Monday, April 22, 2024.

Susan Walsh/AP

Related article Blinken to travel to Israel, other key Middle Eastern countries amid stalled hostage and ceasefire negotiations

Human rights groups have accused Israel of committing war crimes and abuses during the war in Gaza. Several hundred officials from Western countries, including some from the US, have previously raised concerns that their governments may be complicit in war crimes in their support of Israel’s fight against Hamas.

The State Department official Sunday did not give further details about which parts of the department are in favor of accepting Israel’s assurances, which are in favor of rejecting them, and which took no position.

Reuters reported Sunday that four bureaus – Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; Population, Refugees and Migration; Global Criminal Justice; and International Organization Affairs – raised “serious concern over non-compliance” with international humanitarian law during the war.

“We don’t comment on leaked documents, especially those purporting to contain classified information,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement.

“On complex issues, the Secretary often hears a diverse range of views from within the Department, and he takes all of those views into consideration,” he said. “In this instance, the Department received the assurances that were required by the National Security Memorandum, and we are now preparing a report to Congress.”

The concerns come after Biden signed into law an aid package that includes $26 billion for Israel. That funding includes $4.4 billion to replenish defense items and services provided to Israel and $3.5 billion for the procurement of advanced weapons systems and other items through the Foreign Military Financing Program.

Since Hamas’ attack on Israel in October, which killed over 1,200 Israelis, the US has made more than 100 foreign military sales to Israel. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Progressives are growing increasingly frustrated with Biden’s support for Israel, as protests over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza spread across the US, most notably on college campuses, where protesters have decried the stance of “Genocide Joe.” But the president on Sunday again reaffirmed his “ironclad” commitment to Israel in a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The White House could slow military provisions, curtail monetary assistance, or drastically ratchet up the public pressure on Netanyahu if the US concludes Israel is impeding aid to Gaza and not adhering to human rights laws.

Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s war, though, has at times flagged. Following the Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers this month, the president for the first time threatened Netanyahu, telling him in a call that the US could be forced to make changes to free-flowing support if Israel did not make immediate moves to allow more humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Reuters

Related article Biden reiterated ‘clear position’ on Rafah invasion in phone call with Netanyahu Sunday

Last week, the State Department’s annual report on human rights raised sharp concerns about war crimes reported in the conflict between Hamas and Israel. The report referred to actions taken by Hamas on October 7 and also included “reports of systemic torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment of Palestinian detainees in prison facilities after October 7” and the forced disappearance of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza.

While the report does not represent the US government’s own conclusions, Blinken said last week that the State Department was looking at the incidents.

“It’s important that we take the time to do our best to get the facts, to get the information, to do the analysis,” he said. “It’s very challenging to do this in real time.”

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that to his knowledge, “we don’t have any evidence of genocide being created” by Israel during its war in Gaza.

Blinken has previously called charges of genocide against Israel “meritless.”

CNN’s Michael Conte, Kayla Tausche and MJ Lee contributed to this report.

CNN · by Jennifer Hansler, Jack Forrest · April 29, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com