Quotes of the Day:

“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”

- Aldous Huxley

“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than out own.”

- Marcus Aurelius

 From the Locke Society: On this day in 1632 (August 29): John Locke, who this organization is named after, was born. Commonly referred to as the “Father of Liberalism” many falsely claim that modern liberal ideals have roots in Locke’s philosophy. John Locke was not only a philosopher who influenced the Founding Fathers on the ideals of limited government and individual rights, but an advocate for the importance of an educated citizenry. In order for a free society to survive, citizens must be educated on the importance of freedom and the responsibilities of having freedom. In Locke’s Treatises of Government, he discussed the idea of a government that is formed by the people, but in order to have a competent and successful government, the citizenry must be educated, and educated well. Locke warned against allowing education to fall into corrupt hands as it will “not only deceive their Expectations and hinder their Knowledge, but corrupt their Innocence, and teach them the worst of vices.” The Locke Society has been born in his name to ensure that the freedom of our posterity is protected through a strong education that maintains the morals and principles of our virtuous nation.

1.  RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 29 (Putin's War)

2. The Candy Maker, The Cop, and The Fireman Fighting America's Shadow War

3. Jakarta gets ‘grey-zoned’ by Beijing

4. Arizona CBP agents seize enough fentanyl to kill 42 million people in latest border drug bust

5. Learned Helplessness: China’s Military Instrument and Southeast Asian Security

6. What are the prospects for stability across the Taiwan Strait?

7. Death in Navy SEAL Training Exposes a Culture of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs

8. Taiwan Says It Will Now Shoot Down Rogue Chinese Drones

9. U.S. Strategy and the Future of Money: Advancing U.S. Interests During a Financial Transformation

10. Kherson: Ukraine claims new push in Russian-held region

11.  The United States Is Behind the Curve on Blockchain

12. A post-dollar world is coming

13. Road to Nowhere: Debts Mount with China's Prestigious Silk Road Project

14. Afghanistan After Zawahiri: America's Counterterrorism Options in the New South Asia

15. One year after U.S. withdrawal, resistance to Taliban rule grows

16. Rafael Grossi Is the Last Man Standing For Nonproliferation

17. Mapping the Fall of Afghanistan

18. Pentagon's Plan to Reduce Civilian Harm May Not Work in Future Conflicts, Experts Say

19. Inevitable: Melting Greenland ice sheet will send seas nearly a foot higher, study finds

20. Fix and Expand the Interpreter Visa Program

21. Opinion | The U.S. military’s overdue reckoning with civilian casualties

22. Should democracies ever lie?

23. Remembering the Largest Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation in US History

24. How Ukraine Is Remaking War

25. Beijing’s Debts Come Due

26. Russia Confounds the West by Recapturing Its Oil Riches

27. US: Russia running into problems with Iran-made drones

28. If war is politics by other means…. …then what is a soldier?

29.  Are China and the US edging toward ‘Henry Kissinger’s war’?

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 29 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-29

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 29

Aug 29, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Angela Howard, Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 29, 10:15 pm ET

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

Ukrainian military officials announced the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast on August 29. Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces have broken through the first line of defenses in unspecified areas of Kherson Oblast and are seeking to take advantage of the disruption of Russian ground lines of communication caused by Ukrainian HIMARS strikes over many weeks.[1] Ukrainian officials did not confirm liberating any settlements, but some Russian milbloggers and unnamed sources speaking with Western outlets stated that Ukrainian forces liberated several settlements west and northwest of Kherson City, near the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River, and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border.[2] The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD), Russian proxies, and some Russian milbloggers denounced the Ukrainian announcement of the counteroffensive as “propaganda.”[3]

Many Russian milbloggers nevertheless reported a wide variety of Ukrainian attacks along the entire line of contact, and the information space will likely become confused for a time due to panic among Russian sources.[4] Russian outlets have also vaguely mentioned evacuations of civilians from Kherson Oblast, but then noted that occupation authorities in Kherson Oblast are calling on residents to seek shelter rather than flee.[5] ISW will report on the Ukrainian counteroffensive in a new section below.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi announced that the IAEA mission to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) left for the plant on August 29. Grossi specified that he is leading the mission but neither he nor the IAEA specified a timeline for the investigation.[6]

Russian sources continue to make claims likely intended to manipulate public opinion and the IAEA investigation. Several Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces shelled Enerhodar and shared photos allegedly showing the location where Ukrainian forces struck a nuclear fuel storage site on the territory of the ZNPP on August 29.[7] Ukrainian sources reported continued Russian shelling of Enerhodar near the ZNPP.[8] Russian sources claimed on August 29 that Ukrainian forces fired on the Khmelnitsky Nuclear Power Plant deep in western Ukraine and far from the front lines; Ukrainian authorities denied these claims.[9] Russian authorities also alleged that several IAEA members from the current mission will remain at ZNPP permanently, but ISW cannot confirm these reports at this time.[10]

Satellite imagery from August 29 provided by Maxar Technologies shows Russian combat vehicles apparently sheltering under ZNPP infrastructure very close to a reactor vessel.

Source: Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies

Key Takeaways

• Ukrainian military officials announced that Ukrainian forces began a counteroffensive operation in Kherson Oblast on August 29.
• International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi announced that the IAEA mission to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant left for the plant.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground assaults north of Slovyansk, southeast of Siversk, south of Bakhmut, and in western Donetsk Oblast.
• Russian forces continued efforts to advance around Donetsk City.
• Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast.
• Russian forces conducted a limited ground assault in northwestern Kherson Oblast.
• Russian federal subjects continued efforts to form new battalions, attract new recruits, and coerce conscripts into signing military contracts.
• Ukrainian partisan activity continues to threaten Russian occupation authorities’ control in occupied territories.

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

Ukrainian military officials announced that Ukrainian forces began a counteroffensive operation in Kherson Oblast on August 29 after severely disrupting Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) for weeks. Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Gumenyuk stated that Ukrainian forces “began counteroffensive actions in many directions” and have broken through the first line of defense in an unspecified area.[11] The Ukrainian operational group “Kakhovka” stated that Ukrainian forces have cut Russian GLOCs across the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast and called the situation a “brilliant chance to return [Ukrainian] territories.”[12] The “Kakhovka” group also reported that the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 109th Regiment and Russian airborne troops have left their positions in an unspecified area of Kherson Oblast, and Ukrainian wires claimed that these elements withdrew from their positions around Kherson City.[13] The DNR 109th Regiment had previously published an appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin in late June identifying itself as a forcibly mobilized unit, complaining that it had not been rotated away from the front line for rest, and decrying poor conditions on the frontlines.[14] Ukrainian military officials also released a DNR document dated July 24 that ordered the redeployment of the 109th, 113th, and 125th DNR regiments to Arkhanhelske, Vysokopillya, Zolota Balka, and Davydiv Brid in northwestern Kherson Oblast.[15] “Kakhovka” also shared footage reportedly of a Russian serviceman seeking shelter on the ground amidst heavy artillery shelling while saying that Ukrainian forces have broken the first line of defense on August 29.[16] Ukrainian officials did not discuss the directionality of Ukrainian counteroffensives.

Ukrainian and Russian officials called for civilians to evacuate or seek shelter in western Kherson Oblast on August 28-29. Ukrainian Kherson Oblast officials called on civilians to leave Kherson Oblast to get out of the way of Ukrainian forces and directed those choosing to stay in Kherson Oblast to seek shelter away from Russian military equipment.[17] Occupation authorities of Nova Kakhkovka, where Ukrainian forces have frequently targeted Russian military infrastructure and GLOCS, called on civilians to seek shelter due to extensive Ukrainian strikes on August 28-29.[18] Russian sources reported that Nova Kakhova occupation authorities do not plan to issue evacuation orders.[19] Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov stated that Russian forces evacuated their military hospital in Melitopol on August 29, indicating further fear of intensified Ukrainian activity even in rear occupied areas.[20]

The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) claimed on the evening of August 29 that the Ukrainian counteroffensive was a limited, failed effort, setting the tone for subsequent discussions of the counteroffensive in the Russian media space.[21] The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces suffered heavy personnel and equipment losses after trying and failing to advance in three unspecified directions in Kherson Oblast.[22] Deputy Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Interior Minister Vitaly Kiselyov claimed that the idea of a grand Ukrainian counteroffensive was propaganda and that Ukrainian forces only attempted a limited assault with two infantry battalions and one tank battalion, suffering heavy casualties in the attempt.[23] Russian milbloggers largely claimed that reports of a Ukrainian counteroffensive were overblown, fake, or likely to fail, claiming that Ukrainian forces have so far lacked the ability to break through Russian defensive lines in past counterattacks and remain unable to do so in new counterattacks.[24] These dismissive statements indicate that the Kremlin aims to maintain the façade of extensive Russian military successes in Ukraine.

Russian and Western sources claimed that Ukrainian forces liberated five settlements during the first day of the counteroffensive, but Ukrainian sources have not announced the liberation of any settlements at the time of this publication. An unnamed military official of an unspecified country told CNN that Ukrainian forces liberated Pravdyne (approximately 34km northwest of Kherson City), Novodmytrivka, and Tomyna Balka (both about 23km due west of Kherson City).[25] The official also stated that Ukrainian forces liberated Arkhanhelske on the eastern bank of Inhulets River and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border.[26] ISW cannot independently verify CNN’s report and will update its maps if and when more sources confirm the report. The Ukrainian official report about the withdrawal of the 109th regiment that operates in northwestern Kherson Oblast may suggest that Ukrainians have crossed the Inhulets River into Arkhanhelske. Several Russian milbloggers amplified a report from the Telegram-based milblogger Grey Zone (about 276,000 followers) that Ukrainian forces advanced 6km from their bridgehead over the Inhulets River and seized the Sukhyi Stavok settlement (approximately 7km west of Russian GLOCs along the T2207 highway).[27] Ukrainian Former Head of Foreign Intelligence Service Mykola Malomuzh made similar remarks about the liberation of Sukhyi Stavok.[28]

Ukrainian forces also continued to conduct missile strikes on Russian ammunition depots, GLOCs, and strongholds on August 28 and August 29.[29] Beryslav Raion Military Administration Head Volodymyr Litvinov reported that Ukrainian forces struck Russian manpower and equipment concentration point at the Beryslav Machine-Building Plant, resulting in a large fire at the plant.[30] Odesa Oblast Military Administration Spokesperson Serhiy Bratchuk also reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian command post near the North Crimean Canal just east of Nova Kakhovka, a Russian river crossing in Lvove (west of Nova Kakhovka along the Dnipro River), and an ammunition depot in Havrylivka (approximately 33km south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border).[31] Ukrainian Telegram channels also published footage reportedly showing a strike on the Antonivsky Bridge and a nearby barge.[32] Social media users published footage of reportedly Ukrainian strikes on a Russian ammunition depot in Nova Kakhovka.[33] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command noted that Ukrainian forces launched eight airstrikes at Russian strongholds and manpower and equipment concentration points along the line of contact on August 28.[34]

Russian forces are continuing efforts to restore their damaged GLOCs over the Dnipro River. Satellite imagery shows that Russian forces are attempting to build a pontoon crossing near the Antonivsky Bridge, which appeared to be halfway finished as of August 27.[35] Geolocated satellite imagery also showed that the Kakhovka Bridge is still out of service with strike holes on the critical junctures of the bridge.[36] Satellite imagery indicated that Russian forces are continuing to move military equipment mostly north toward Kherson City via the pontoon ferry.[37] Satellite imagery showed the movement of 100 Russian military vehicles as of August 25, with few moving south.[38] Such transfer of equipment via ferries is inefficient and vulnerable to further Ukrainian strikes. Russian forces reportedly continue to experience difficulties maintaining other GLOCs to southern Ukraine. Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko stated that Russian logistics efforts relying on Mariupol rail transit will likely falter in the following days due to lack of electricity, damage to station cranes, and flooding that hinders rail operation in Mariupol.[39]

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

• Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
• Russian Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
• Russian Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces conducted limited ground assaults north of Slovyansk on August 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces withdrew after attempting offensive operations toward Bohorodychne and Dolyna, 24km and 22km northwest of Slovyansk.[40] Geolocated footage posted on August 28 shows Ukrainian forces in Dolyna, indicating that prior Russian claims of capturing Dolyna were false.[41] Geolocated footage also shows Russian forces shelling Brazhkivka, 16km southwest of Izyum indicating that Russian forces have pulled back from this settlement to an unknown extent.[42] The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) claimed that Russian forces struck Slovyansk and Raihorodok, northeast of Slovyansk on the Siverskyi Donetsk River.[43] Russian forces continued shelling settlements northwest and northeast of Slovyansk.[44]

Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack southeast of Siversk on August 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces retreated after trying to advance toward Ivano-Darivka, 14km southeast of Siversk.[45] Russian forces conducted air and tube artillery strikes near Tetyanivka, across the Siverskyi Donets River from Sviatohirsk, indicating that Russian forces likely have not advanced to the west bank of the Siverskyi Donets northwest of Siversk.[46] Russian forces continued firing on Siversk and the surrounding settlements.[47]

Russian forces conducted limited attacks south of Bakhmut on August 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian forces’ attempts to advance toward Kodema and Zaitseve south of Bakhmut and east of the Bakhmut-Horlivka highway, likely to try to advance on Bakhmut from the south.[48] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) claimed on August 29 that DNR and Russian forces captured Kodema, but there is no evidence that Russian forces have advanced beyond the southeastern part of the settlement.[49] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces struck Bakhmut and Konstantynivka, 26km southwest of Bakhmut.[50]

Russian forces continued efforts to advance around Donetsk City on August 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces tried and failed to advance towards Pervomaiske and Nevelske to the northwest of Donetsk City and Mariinka to the southwest of Donetsk City.[51] Geolocated footage shows Russian and DNR forces advancing into Kamyanka, 11km northeast of Avdiivka.[52] Additional geolocated footage shows that Ukrainian forces maintain positions on the northwestern outskirts of Pisky, 15km northwest of Donetsk City, and that fighting is ongoing near Pisky.[53] Avdiivka City Military Administration Head Vitaliy Barabash stated that Russians only control one-half of Pisky as of August 29.[54] Russian forces continued firing on Avdiivka and the surrounding settlements.[55]

Russian forces conducted a limited ground assault in western Donetsk Oblast on August 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful ground assault toward Pavlivka, 30km southwest of Mariinka.[56] Russian forces continued firing on settlements along the line of contact.[57]

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast on August 29. Geolocated photos posted on August 29 show Rosgvardia Spetsnaz sweeping Udy, approximately 46km north of Kharkiv City, indicating that Russian forces have advanced within this settlement.[58] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched an airstrike near Nove, approximately 22km north of Kharkiv City, and continued conducting aerial reconnaissance along the Kharkiv City Axis.[59] The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Russian forces struck Oleksandrivka, southwest of Kharkiv City.[60] Russian forces continued to shell Kharkiv City and settlements to the north and northeast.[61]

Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)

Russian forces conducted a limited ground assault in northwestern Kherson Oblast on August 29. Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces failed to advance from Vysokopillya to Potomkyne in northwestern Kherson Oblast, south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border.[62] Russian forces struck Mykolaiv City and the surrounding settlements with Smerch and Uragan MLRS fire.[63] Geolocated footage shows a Russian strike landing near the Inhuletsky bridge in Mykolaiv City over the Inhulets River.[64] Russian forces continued shelling throughout the line of contact.[65]

Russian forces did not conduct any ground assaults in Zaporizhia Oblast and continued to fire artillery and MLRS rockets at Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on August 29. Russian forces continued air, rocket, and tube artillery strikes on settlements throughout the line of contact in Zaporizhia Oblast.[66] Russian forces fired on Nikopol, Marhanets, and Chervonohrihorivka, all on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River from Enerhodar.[67] Russian forces also targeted rear areas west and south of Kryvyi Rih.[68]

Geolocated footage and imagery showed a Russian coastal radar site, possibly an element of a nearby Russian 12th Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment S-400 battery, on fire overnight on August 28-29.[69] ISW previously reported that Russian air defenses activated in Cape Fiolent on August 28.[70]

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

Russian federal subjects (regions) continued to report on the formation, deployment, and training of volunteer units to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Republic of Bashkortostan Head Radiy Khabirov announced that the “Shaimuratov” and “Dostavalov” volunteer battalions deployed to Ukraine on August 29. The Republic of Bashkortostan announced recruitment efforts for the volunteer battalions in late May.[71] Head of North Ossetia Sergey Menyailo announced that North Ossetia will form the “Alagir” and “Nogir” volunteer battalions, in addition to the “Alania” Battalion that has been operating in Ukraine.[72] A Russian milblogger reported that the St. Petersburg “Kronstadt,” “Neva,” and “Pavlovsk” battalions; Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) “Bootur” battalion; and 200 Cossacks in the “Don” volunteer detachment began training with volunteers that returned from fighting in Donbas on August 17.[73]

Russian federal subjects are aggressively advertising military contract service to generate more recruits. Arkhangelsk Oblast Governor Aleksandr Tsybulskiy announced that the Arkhangelsk Center for Patriotic Education of Youth, alongside other Russian veterans’ organizations, created a 10-day preparatory course to prepare volunteers for military service.[74] The Radio Free Europe/Free Liberty branch in northwestern Russia Sever.Realii stated that it is assumed that those who pass the training will sign contracts with the Russian Armed Forces.[75] Local Novosibirsk outlets shared an image of an ad on the side of a bus in Novosibirsk for contract service with Wagner Group.[76]

Russian military units are reportedly coercing conscripts concluding their mandatory service into signing military contracts. Russian outlet Ridus reported that conscripts and their relatives have been complaining to a local military recruitment center in Tver Oblast that an unspecified military unit under its jurisdiction is coercing conscripts into signing military contracts via psychological pressure.[77] The military unit has been reportedly locking conscripts in a room without open windows or water to inflict psychological pressure and to coerce the conscripts to sign military contracts.[78] The Tver Oblast military recruitment center denied the allegations.[79]

Russian outlet Vedomosti reported that Rosgvardia detained two accomplices of “Right Sector” and Ukrainian forces in occupied Luhansk Oblast, further confirming ISW’s previous assessment that Russian authorities are deploying security forces to occupied Luhansk Oblast.[80] ISW previously assessed that Russian authorities are sending more security forces to Luhansk Oblast likely in response to waning support for the war and growing unwillingness to fight among Luhansk residents.[81]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Intensifying Ukrainian partisan activity in occupied territories continues to threaten tenuous Russian political control in occupied Ukraine. Likely Ukrainian partisans in western Kherson Oblast shot and killed Russian collaborator and former Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament) deputy Oleksii Kovalov in occupied Hola Prystan (15km south of Kherson City) on August 28.[82] Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov also reported four powerful explosions that destroyed unspecified Russian military targets in northern Melitopol on August 29.[83] Footage taken in Mariupol overnight on August 28-29 shows several far-off flashes of light and the apparent sound of automatic fire punctuated by larger explosions, which Fedorov suggested was a Russian attempt to shoot down a single Ukrainian drone.[84] Ukrainian Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, and Luhansk Oblast officials warned on August 29 of similarly intensifying partisan movements in occupied Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, and Luhansk Oblast.[85]

Russian occupation authorities will likely intensify measures to crack down on intensifying partisan activity amid fears of a Ukrainian counteroffensive in southern Ukraine. Advisor to the Head of Kherson Oblast Serhiy Khlan warned Ukrainians in Hola Prystan to expect larger Russian filtration efforts as part of a wider crackdown on Ukrainian partisan activities.[86]

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

[1] https://t.me/spravdi/16199; https://suspilne dot media/275881-pisla-udariv-zsu-na-hersonsini-rosijski-vijskovi-ne-hocut-jti-v-ataku-gumenuk/; https://www dot pravda.com.ua/news/2022/08/29/7365206/; https://t.me/stranaua/60519; https://t.me/stranaua/60547

[2] https://www dot unian.net/war/nastuplenie-vsu-na-yuge-general-obyavil-o-nachale-perelomnogo-etapa-11959248.html; https://t.me/stranaua/60536; https://t.me/milinfolive/89602; https://t.me/milinfolive/89602

[9] https://twitter.com/tass_agency/status/1563857773133185024?s=20&t=4f... dot ru/armiya-i-opk/15580731?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=smm_social_share; https://t.me/energoatom_ua/9261

[11] https://www dot unn.com.ua/ru/news/1992039-zsu-rozpochali-nastupalni-diyi-na-bagatokh-napryamkakh-pivdnya-gumenyuk

[13] https://t.me/spravdi/16199; https://suspilne dot media/275881-pisla-udariv-zsu-na-hersonsini-rosijski-vijskovi-ne-hocut-jti-v-ataku-gumenuk/; https://www dot pravda.com.ua/news/2022/08/29/7365206/; https://t.me/stranaua/60519; https://www.facebook.com/ouvKakhovka/video...

[28] https://www dot unian.net/war/nastuplenie-vsu-na-yuge-general-obyavil-o-nachale-perelomnogo-etapa-11959248.html

[30] https://suspilne dot media/275877-vtorgnenna-rosii-v-ukrainu-den-187-tekstovij-onlajn/; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/17779; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/17776

[54] https://suspilne dot media/275877-vtorgnenna-rosii-v-ukrainu-den-187-tekstovij-onlajn/

[65] https://t.me/mod_russia/19250; https://t.me/spravdi/16193; https://www... RWkHEnqRj4mV3fCJ7VPdoo3pFSPTrjCTJBcGgW9WcRl

[72] https://www dot kavkazr.com/a/glava-severnoy-osetii-poruchil-podgotovitj-imennye-bataljony-dlya-uchastiya-v-voyne-v; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-volunteer-units-an...

[76] https://nsk dot bfm.ru/news/11782

[77] https://www dot ridus.ru/news/388193

[78] https://www dot ridus.ru/news/388193

[79] https://www dot ridus.ru/news/388193

[82] https://www dot https://www dot pravda.com.ua/news/2022/08/29/7365147/; https://www.facebook.com/sergey.khlan/posts/pfbid02GbbHeFcvVoDVZeAB7NtHj... https://t.me/stranaua/60495; https://t.me/bazabazon/12971

understandingwar.org

2. The Candy Maker, The Cop, and The Fireman Fighting America's Shadow War

With Noah Shachtman as the editor of Rolling Stone we are seeing some interesting national security related pieces and of course Kevin Maurer is a long time DOD correspondent who has focused extensively on SOF.

There is a lot to parse from this article with good discussion potential at PME institutions as well as among policy makers.

There is a lot to parse from this article.

Photos at the link: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/niger-west-africa-american-special-forces-report-1396333/

The Candy Maker, The Cop, and The Fireman Fighting America's Shadow War

On the ground with American Special Forces taking on Islamic extremism in West Africa

Rolling Stone · by Kevin Maurer · August 28, 2022

At dawn, the first rays of the sun peek over the horizon, making the Sahel a Mars red. Skinny Nigérien soldiers in surplus American Marine desert uniforms buzz around in Land Cruisers with spray-painted camouflage. The trucks are packed with shovels, sleeping pads, and ammunition. The soldiers are part of the 1st Expeditionary Force of Niger (EFON), the country’s premier anti-terrorism unit. They clamber over piles of gear to mount Russian machine guns. Others tuck backpacks stuffed with snacks, blankets, and gear between ammunition and fuel cans. One truck has a dozen tires and a spare radiator strapped to the hood.

It’s mission-launch day, and the Nigérien soldiers are accompanying French paratroopers into dangerous areas controlled by the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), an offshoot of the terrorist group that has taken over parts of Iraq and Syria. ISGS gained international notoriety after it ambushed and killed four Americans in October 2017. For the past five years, its members have terrorized villages and shattered communities, stealing cattle and food, while burning homes and displacing almost 30,000 people, according to the United Nations. In June, ISGS-linked fighters killed 55 people in neighboring Burkina Faso. Two days later, eight Nigérien gendarmes were killed and 33 injured in an extremist assault on Niger’s side of the border. The goal of this late-spring mission was to stop these kinds of attacks and create stability so that displaced villagers could return to their homes.

Mike, a lanky major who works for a Midwestern candy manufacturer when he isn’t halfway around the world training foreign armies, arrives with fellow members of the American Special Forces team at the EFON camp to make final checks. For the past four months, U.S. Special Forces soldiers have trained the EFON on everything from infantry tactics to exploiting intelligence gathered on targets. While they are listed as citizen soldiers on paper, most of the team from the National Guard’s 20th Special Forces Group have active-duty experience fighting in Afghanistan and recently ran an anti-ISIS mission on the Syrian border.

The Special Forces soldiers — nicknamed Green Berets because of their unique headgear — fan out among the trucks. Team Sgt. Jason, a wiry, compact police officer from Minnesota, offers the Nigérien soldiers fist bumps as he patrols down the line of trucks.

“Good luck,” he says. “You’re ready.”

Jarryd and Drew go over what the Nigerien EFoN soldiers did, right and wrong, while practicing clearing a mock village, March 7, 2022. Andrew Craft for Rolling Stone

Watching them pack up for a mission is bittersweet, though. He and his teammates would jump at the chance to go with them to get feedback on the effectiveness of the mission, which to a soldier means finding the enemy and killing them. It is hard to measure effectiveness when you’re stuck on a base. When I ask the Special Forces soldiers if they’d like to go on the mission, none really answer. It’s like asking a lion if it wants to hunt.

For the Americans, 90 percent of their work is rehearsing, training, and advising. Sometimes, they will move out to a forward base in the area where the Nigériens are patrolling, but the Americans don’t follow the Nigériens to the target. Instead, advising is done via tablets and satellite phones.

That’s what Mike and Capt. Wahab, a rail-thin Nigérien officer leading the patrol, discuss quietly while another Green Beret double-checks a tablet to make sure it is functioning. It is Wahab’s link to Mike and the team back at their operations center.

“We’ll send you an update once we talk with the French,” Mike says. “Any questions or concerns?”

Wahab shakes his head no.

Nigérien cooks work their way down the convoy. The smell of exhaust hides the stink of fish as the soldiers spread sardines onto baguettes and then drizzle on the oil from the tins. Tossing the cans on the gravel, they hold on to the trucks’ roll bars with one hand and their breakfast with the other as the convoy starts to form into a long line and rolls toward the gate. Before Wahab’s truck leaves, he shakes hands with Mike and offers a salute.

“Allez,” he says, giving the order to move out. “C’est bon. Inshallah.”

Go. It’s good. God willing.

The convoy moves out, leaving the Americans behind in the dust.

Niger is not the country Americans imagine when they think about Africa.

Diori Hamani International Airport is modern, with a dinosaur skeleton in the lobby, but outside of the gates Niger becomes hot, dusty, and dangerous. There are no safari game parks or mountains to climb. There’s almost no tourism, and the landlocked country has a Level 3 travel advisory from the U.S. State Department: Reconsider travel due to crime, terrorism, and kidnapping.

The capital — Niamey (pronounced like Miami but with an N) — is congested with traffic and smog. At a stoplight, a police truck pulls up alongside with a dead man under a stray mat in the back. His arms are locked at 90-degree angles at the elbow from rigor mortis and his stomach is bloated. Outside of the capital, Niger is an endless desert. Mud compounds hug dried wadis in the villages. Trucks rumble along the lone paved road with goods piled six feet high and passengers tucked in among the cargo. Along the shoulder, children use carts pulled by donkeys to transport firewood and water jugs.

A former French colony that gained its independence in 1960, Niger is one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world. Obvious American interests like oil and precious minerals are absent. Subsistence farming and livestock make up Niger’s economy, with 80 percent of the population living in poverty, in part because of massive deforestation and oppressive heat from climate change.

Yet it’s become an integral piece of the West Africa counterterrorism mission, part of America’s still-ongoing war on terror. Predominantly Muslim Niger is threatened by Boko Haram — responsible for kidnapping 276 schoolgirls in April 2014 — from Nigeria to the south and Libya to the north; plus, one Al Qaeda and two ISIS affiliates operate not only in Niger, but also in neighboring Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Mali.

“What we’ve seen from international terrorist dynamics over the past decade and a half are they’d like to go to places that are undergoverned, sparse, and remote, and take advantage of operating space in order to spread their ideology,” a senior State Department official tells me.

Nigerien soldiers with the 1st Expeditionary Force of Niger (EFoN), the country’s premier anti-terrorism unit, head out for training after going over how to assault a target. Andrew Craft for Rolling Stone

That’s where the Special Forces come in. On any given day, elite U.S. soldiers are operating in 80-plus countries. These soldiers were created in 1952 to work by, with, and through native troops, but after toppling the Taliban in 2001, Special Forces and other special-operations forces like the Navy SEALs and the Marine Raiders became a panacea for the nation’s security problems — often the first in and last out, despite being made up of about 70,000 troops out of the more than 2 million in the U.S. armed forces.

American Special Forces teams first arrived in Niger in 2014, and teams have worked heel and toe to keep a constant presence, training and advising the EFON. But success in Niger is a zero-sum game. Victory means there can be no attacks on American soil. The mission is simply to keep a lid on a potential threat, but the Special Forces teams lack the resources or political will to eliminate or drastically change some of the root causes of extremism, namely poverty. Calling the absence of something a success is the kind of logic that keeps America fighting the same war for two decades and witnessing the mission creep to remote outposts in Niger.

“To understand success, we have to have the goal, which is to disrupt VEOs [violent extremist organizations] in the region,” Jason, the Special Forces team sergeant, tells me. “With that being said, success has been marginal. With VEOs operating in certain areas across the expansive Northwest Africa region, to be truly successful more personnel and assets would be needed; and a larger buy-in between the U.S. government and host nations would need to be agreed upon too.”

Based two hours north in Ouallam, the Indiana National Guard Special Forces team is a mix of firefighters, an Ivy League student, and a small-business owner. Most have active-duty experience, but unlike their Army siblings, these are citizen soldiers who put their civilian lives on hold for six months to train Nigériens. These Special Forces soldiers are unique in the special-operations community. They are selected in part because of their people skills. They’re rapport builders, and understand how to foster a connection in order to train locals. Half soldiers, half teachers. It’s a unique skill set that hasn’t been replicated in the special-operations community, despite numerous attempts.

Niger is one of the places where that skill set is being implemented. Relying on foreign soldiers to keep the pressure on terrorist groups is a bedrock of America’s War on Terror strategy. A military representative declined to provide specific funding amounts for the mission in Niger, but the U.S. spent close to $2 billion on African operations in 2020, with $160 million going toward West African missions. I spent a week with Special Forces in Niger to get the ground truth on this nearly decades-long mission and see if it is having any meaningful impact.

Stepping on the Special Forces camp is like going back in time to Afghanistan in the early 2000s. Surrounded by Hesco barriers, large wire squares filled with dirt, the camp has an outdoor gym, a rec building with video games and old airport paperback books, and a dining facility that serves pork adobe, fresh guacamole, and curry beef instead of the normal bland Army menu. For the team from the Midwest, with palates more accustomed to American cuisine, pizza night with imported sauce and pepperoni is essential.

When we arrive, Nick, an engineer-sergeant with all-American looks and the only French speaker, shows us around. It’s noon and the temperature is well over 100 degrees. Most of the team is either working in the air conditioning or resting. It is too hot to do anything outside, expect apparently work on your tan. The tour takes us to the top of the operations center, which offers a panoramic view of the scrubby desert outside of the base. Drew, a barrel-chested firefighter from Illinois, meets us on the roof, where the team keeps suntan lotion and Army cots. Startled by reporters on the roof, he looks at the metal staircase and then back at the cots and shrugs. He is committed now. Soon, Sam, an engineer-sergeant who owns an environmental-remediation company, joins him. Peeling off their shirts, they lay out on the cots and slather suntan lotion on their chests and arms.

Later, Jarryd, a lanky medic from New Orleans wearing a lobster-themed Hawaiian shirt, stops to talk to us about a medical clinic he and his fellow medic Josh — an MMA fighter from Minnesota — organized with some local doctors. The clinic has treated hundreds of local villagers, some who haven’t seen a doctor in years.

Jackson, a Special Forces soldier, plays handball with Nigerien EFoN soldiers at their camp near Ouallam, March 9, 2022. Andrew Craft for Rolling Stone

Don’t let the lobster shirts, tanning sessions, or medical clinics fool you. This is a dangerous mission. When the first teams arrived in Niger, in 2014, they went on missions with the Nigériens, but the focus that the Indiana team has inherited changed in 2017, when four members of the Fort Bragg-based 3rd Special Forces Group were killed in a deadly ambush in Tongo Tongo, a village near the Mali border. After raiding the ISIS camp, the 3rd Special Forces team and its Nigérien counterparts were attacked by more than 100 fighters. Before the ambush, Americans followed the EFON into the field. Now, Americans only move out to a forward base; all advising is done remotely. The safety measure allows the Green Berets some oversight but keeps them far from the action, making the whole mission feel “too risk-averse,” as one Green Beret complains to me.

Adam Grissom, a senior political scientist for the Rand Corp. who focuses on counterterrorism operations in Africa and the Middle East, says that for years there was a mismatch between what policymakers wanted special-operations forces to accomplish and the level of risk the nation was prepared to accept.

“After the Tongo Tongo ambush, that risk-reward relationship shifted, but now policymakers still expect special-operations forces to accomplish quite a bit while accepting essentially zero risk,” Grissom says. “That’s hard to do in real-world African conditions.”

But this divide between risk-averse policymakers and soldiers who carry out their orders is determining the future of the region, and may be influencing U.S. foreign policy. There is no appetite to send Americans en masse into harm’s way. Instead, Special Forces teams provide a small footprint, to create and advise a larger, native force capable of taking the fight to the enemy. The Niger mission arguably is a glimpse into the new American way of war.

“The EFON is extraordinary when considering the economic and geographic challenges Niger faces,” Rear Adm. Jamie Sands, commander of Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA), tells Rolling Stone. “Despite those challenges, the EFON and Nigérien leadership are extremely professional, focused, and committed to defending their nation. They are among SOCAFRICA’s best partners in our recent history.”

This is a sentiment echoed by the team to me soon after I arrive in Niger. They assure me the EFON is skilled and motivated, and that its mission could be successful.

“You can still mitigate risk while being aggressive,” Mike tells me when I ask him if the rules of engagement are too risk-adverse. “It’s a model. We’re not leading the fight. It is 100 percent their fight. It is the most bang for the buck.”

The team did get a mission approved that allowed them to leave the base to chase a specific target, Jason says. He declines to provide details on who the target was or if the mission occurred, but acknowledges the reins were loosened for one high-value target.

America’s aversion to casualties all but assures that Jason’s team and future units won’t be near the action, which puts even more importance on getting the training and rehearsals right. No small task. Having covered the military for more than 20 years, I’ve seen a lot of partner forces. For the most part, they are poorly equipped and lack discipline and motivation when the Americans aren’t around to give directions.

The first partner force I saw was in August 2003, in Baghdad. The Americans stood up a civil-defense force recruited to provide security in the Al Rasheed district. On the first day, the recruits arrived dressed like some Russian-mafia muscle — Yankees hats and track suits. The paratroopers lined up the recruits — mostly older men with beer bellies, or scrawny teens — and cajoled the Iraqis through a battery of jumping jacks, push-ups, and crunches. The scene was pathetic. Most quit soon after. When I returned a few months later, no one talked about the civil-defense corps.

That first impression of the Iraqis left me with two lessons. First, training a local force is a good briefing point for generals, but way harder to execute and for required units like Special Forces to be effective. Second, motivation is essential. If the American soldiers want it more than the locals, the partner force is doomed.

I didn’t expect any different from the EFON, despite the rave reviews.

It’s Monday morning and Green Berets George, Drew, Sam, and Jarryd head up to the plateau to start the training day. It’s less than a week before the EFON unit departs with French paratroopers and two weeks before the Green Berets will take another EFON unit on a 10-day operation.

The team takes a 10-minute commute over dirt roads. It passes a group of kids sitting on a cart piled high with firewood and pulled by a donkey. A group of women in colorful green-and-red robes shuffles along the shoulder toward the market in Ouallam, carrying containers on their heads or balanced on sticks across their backs. They shield their eyes from the dust as the trucks pass. The levels of poverty here is what makes the area such a wellspring for ISIS and Al Qaeda recruits.

The EFON is based on a high plateau overlooking the Tillabéri area of northwest Niger — about 60 miles from the Mali border. The empty landscape of baked earth stretches from the top of the plateau to the edge of the horizon, shimmering from the heat. In between, wispy brown bushes and dust kicked up by truck tires swirls around a crystal-clear blue sky. The soldiers live in a camp encircled by 10-foot-tall concrete barriers. Shipping containers in the middle are converted into a base kitchen. A playing field has two handball goals on either end. The Special Forces soldiers join the Nigériens in games once a week. It’s a mix of rugby, soccer, and basketball. Teams score one point by throwing the ball into the goal. Defenders can’t tackle, but they can stop an offensive player’s movement by grappling him from behind. The Nigérien soldiers use the game as physical training. The Americans use it to build rapport.

“It shows we’re not too good to relate,” Jason says. “It’s one way to span that cultural gap.”

But on Monday it is time to train.

Nigerien soldiers with the 1st Expeditionary Force of Niger (EFoN) practice assaulting a target at their camp, March 7, 2022. Andrew Craft for Rolling Stone

Drew, the suntanning weapons sergeant who has been deployed to Afghanistan a half-dozen times, organizes the team in a gravel parking lot. He wears the team’s desert camouflage trucker cap with a scorpion patch and team motto — “Non vi sed arte,” meaning “Not by strength by guile” — embroidered on the side. With dark Oakley sunglasses covering his eyes and a pistol on his belt, he climbs into the lead truck headed for the EFON camp.

“Motivation is key,” Drew tells me. “Unlike past partner forces, these guys want to train and fight.”

We’ll see, I think. My mind flashes back to Kandahar in 2010, and the time I watched a Special Forces team go door to door to roust an Afghan unit from the barracks to train. By the time they got everyone out of their bunks and ready, the training period was over.

The Green Berets arrive and park near a group of shipping containers. Climbing out of the truck, I spot a covered area. Sitting in a horseshoe pattern are 20 Nigérien soldiers gathered around an easel going over how to assault a target. AK-47s are draped over their chests. A few have Russian PKM machine guns or RPGs. Their uniforms are clean. A sergeant — another difference, as many foreign armies rely on officers to do the same jobs as sergeants in the American military — is giving the brief, and everyone appears as engaged as any American soldier getting the same brief at Fort Bragg.

Sitting in a nearby truck watching is Lt. Siedi, a boyish 29-year-old commander of the unit. He wears the same trucker cap and sunglasses as Drew. Unlike the Americans, he is slight and lean, with a baby face. He moves and speaks slowly, projecting a calm demeanor and the appearance of being in complete command of his men and situation. A native of Niamey, he attended military school and joined the officer corps after graduation. Serving with the EFON was a no-brainer, he says, because he wanted to serve with the best.

“I could be sitting in a cool office,” he tells me later. “But I am out here to defend my country.”

I ask him through a translator who he is fighting. Are they terrorists or just criminals? Siedi smiles. Both. When someone steals 100 cattle, it is difficult to figure out if it was a crime or someone financing jihad.

“They hide behind the fact they do jihad,” Siedi says, shaking his head. “Most of them are just bad guys looting the people.”

Sgt. Bashir barks orders at his fellow EFoN soldiers after exiting the aircraft during an air interdiction exercise, March 10, 2002. Andrew Craft for Rolling Stone

It’s Siedi’s unit to command, but the work is done by his sergeants like Bashir, a lanky 40-year-old squad leader with a goatee that has a few rogue gray strands. Bashir joined the army almost two decades ago. He first tells me it was because he wanted to serve his country, but after a little prodding, he admits it was because his school friends all went down to the recruiting office together. It was also a way to make a living, he says through a smile.

One of his first missions was along the border with Nigeria. He was stationed at an austere base when Boko Haram attacked from across the border. During the firefight, one of Bashir’s friends was killed and his army job became personal. He sought out the selection process for the EFON. His friend’s death motivated him to earn a spot. Bashir makes it clear that Niger is at war, a fact that is never far from his mind. That’s why, when the Americans arrive, his men are already focused on the day’s event because, the father of three knows, if he does his job there could be a future in Niger.

“My wish is for us to have security,” Bashir tells me, looking over my shoulder back toward Niamey — and his family. “If there is no security, there is no economy. There is nothing.”

With the briefing done, the Nigériens finish off the last of their energy drinks and get in formation. They walk in a line to the corner of the base and set up a security perimeter. Bashir, Siedi, and the other leaders recon the target — a pair of shipping containers converted into a kitchen — as the Green Berets spread out to watch the action.

Drew makes notes in a green notebook as the Nigériens set up support-by-fire positions with their machine guns, to cover the assault force moving toward the target. The attack starts with Nigérien soldiers making gunfire noises like kids playing in a backyard. They move in a line quickly toward the containers, guns up. It takes only a few minutes to overwhelm the cooks, who are busy making the afternoon meal. A few play dead, taking a break by dying, while others surrender and get searched for intelligence. Bashir’s men leave the dead on the ground, their arms and legs crossed, their T-shirts pulled over their faces.

“That looked really good,” Drew says. “You did it to the book standard.”

“If we do things in training,” Jarryd says after watching the EFON train the following day, “we are going to do things in habit. We’ve talked about a lot of things that we can correct — we’re always going to find things that we can do better.”

Monday is level-one stuff. The next day, Drew and his team run through more raid training in the morning, before bringing Siedi’s men over to the Special Forces compound for night training and to eat dinner.

“It’s taco Tuesday,” Drew tells them after the morning session. “You’re eating with us.”

The goal of the night session is to simulate how they’d get intelligence in the field. The team prepares a target package for a suspected roadside-bomb maker with aerial photographs and spotty intelligence reports for a site just outside of the gate. Drew sets up the role players in a dusty field where bricks and building material for the base are stored. Hidden on the role players is a SIM card, a map, and a pistol.

When the EFON arrives at the Special Forces camp, Drew and his team pull Siedi, Bashir, and the other leaders into a briefing room and provide them the target package.

“We’re going to drop a pin on the target,” Drew says. “Two to three buildings. Two to three people.”

The Nigériens split into two planning teams. Bashir and the other squad leaders study the intelligence. Using a sand table, they brief Siedi using toy cars to simulate trucks and matchboxes as buildings. Taking elements from both plans, Siedi comes up with a course of action and then forms up his men outside of the gate. Before they launch the attack, Drew stops them.

“We’re trying to make sure the lowest man knows the big scheme of maneuver,” Drew says. “Did anyone not understand the plan?”

No one raises their hand.

“Très bien,” Drew says. “It’s your show. We’ll stand back and see how you sort it.”

Drew, a Special Forces weapons sergeant, right, shakes hand and shares a laugh with a Nigerien EFoN soldier, March 8, 2022. Andrew Craft for Rolling Stone

Siedi’s men set up behind a sand berm and then flank the target from the right, using the brick piles as cover. The attack during daylight is successful, and the Nigériens enjoy chicken-fajita tacos and bean burritos before trying it again in the dark.

It is 8 p.m. and impossible to see anything without night-vision goggles. The Nigérien soldiers’ boots crunch along the gravel as they get into position behind the sand berm. Siedi sets up security positions and then leads them toward the target. The only sound is the clattering of their gear. The Nigérien soldiers are about 20 yards from the target when one of the role players — an American soldier working at the camp — spots them and turns on his flashlight.

The Nigériens rush the target — raising their rifles and yelling out commands to surrender. Taking the role players prisoner, they beat feet back behind the berm. Shining white lights in their faces, the EFON questions the role players, but fail to find any incriminating evidence. After a few minutes, Drew calls the exercise and gathers up the troops. They have failed, and I can tell Drew and the others are disappointed.

“We’re going to be blunt,” he says. “You missed some SSE.”

SSE — sensitive site exploitation — or the gun, SIM card, and map hidden on the target.

“This is my angry voice,” Drew says. “I want you to know. Once you clear the objective, you’re looking for more intel. It could be a map, guns, or a computer. I was not impressed by the way you searched the objective.”

Drew holds up the SIM card in a small plastic bag. He then holds up a bag hidden in the bricks.

“What’s this? It’s a SIM card,” Drew says. “It was in someone’s pocket. What’s in the bag? It’s a map. This is the stuff that will keep them detained.”

Once the EFON leaves the gates, there will be no one there to mentor. Tactically, the EFON is solid. But thoroughly collecting intelligence takes a unit from competent to lethal. Take the map and SIM card: Had this been a real mission, it likely had the phone numbers of other members of the terrorist or bandit cell. That kind of data is gold because America has made a living tracking terrorists by their phones. I’ve been on countless missions where the unit didn’t know the target’s name, only the code name for the phone.

By now, it is close to 10 p.m. The soldiers — both American and Nigérien — have been training since the morning. But no one wants to quit. Siedi and his men want one more try. The next time, they practically strip the prisoners to find the SIM card and map.

But the real game changer comes at the end of the week, when a pair of helicopters with a Niger flag painted on the bottom soar over the plateau. Since the team arrived in late 2021, they’ve been trying to pry loose helicopter support from the Niger government. In March, that support finally arrived.

Niger’s air force has a few combat aircraft in its inventory, including three ex-French army air corps Gazelle helicopters. The Gazelle takes the lead when the target — a white Land Cruiser — is spotted, and races to cut it off. Coming to a hover, it convinces the driver to stop by training its 30 mm cannon on the truck. The MI-171 comes next. It circles the plateau before landing nearby in a cloud of dust. From that dust, a line of Nigérien soldiers dash out and surround the Land Cruiser. Soldiers capture the two American engineers posing as bad guys while others search the truck.

The team started this training months ago using trucks. That was easy compared with getting on a helicopter and intercepting a vehicle. In real life, it is a lot of noise and dust. The rotor makes it impossible to hear, and the dust blinds everyone. The first runs are slow, tentative — the Nigérien air force getting comfortable with the mission. The next day, the Aerospatiale Gazelle spots the target and bears down. As the assault force lands, Jason checks his watch, and then checks it again when they have the driver in custody.

“Seven minutes,” Jason says, smiling. “That was great. They cut their time in half from yesterday.”

Planners in Africa talk about the tyranny of distance on the continent. Africa doesn’t get its due on maps. It is big, and getting around — because of a lack of roads and infrastructure — is hard. Jason says the team might get a report of terrorist activity in a village, but when they check the map, it’s a 10-hour drive.

That is if everything goes right. On one 36-hour convoy, the EFON had to change 37 flat tires. A helicopter solves both problems and allows the EFON to cover distances the enemy cannot. The helicopter gives the EFON wings — and saves on tires.

Bedu, one of Siedi’s deputies, says the U.S. training is making the EFON a better fighting force. Bedu wanted to be a lawyer before he joined the army. “I wanted to protect my country,” he says, as his men wait for their turn in the helicopter.

Now, 14 years later, he has a family and a two-year-old daughter in Niamey — another reason, he says, to fight. He thinks of her when he is on patrol. She is why he picks up a gun for a living. Leaving them every two months is difficult, but a reality in Niger as the country has been at war for as long as he can remember, and the skills he is learning from Drew and the other trainers will keep him alive.

“We are stronger than the bandits,” he says. “They give us the tools to help us be successful. When we are united, we’re strong.”

But I still couldn’t answer one nagging question: So what?

For the past few days, I have witnessed the EFON’s motivation and training. It has lived up to the team’s hype. But how is this small force — even with helicopters — going to bend the arc of Niger toward security and prosperity? It is hard to see how a dozen Special Forces soldiers and roughly 120 Nigérien commandos covering 200,000 square miles make a difference against an estimated 2,500 fighters aligned with either ISIS or Al Qaeda. Grissom, the RAND analyst, says it depends on how you define “difference.”

“It’s about limited investments aimed at limited reductions in risk to the United States,” he says. “We’re never going to ‘fix’ any of these societies because they aren’t ‘broken,’ just different. Best case, you’re going to prevent something bad from happening somewhere down the road. But that’s very difficult to prove — the attack that didn’t happen. So that raises the question of how you judge whether you’re accomplishing anything or not. As a strategist, I can say if you don’t do these things, the problem does get worse.”

Americans make several mistakes when they look at Africa through a military lens. More troops and holding ground are not essential to victory.

“While the EFON is clearly not big enough to control much more than their own neighborhood,” Grissom says, “I’d argue they’re an instrument that’s appropriate to how warfare works in that part of the world.”

Unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, where America sold freedom and nation building, the burden of victory falls on African nations to solve governance and economic issues, says Adm. Sands, commander of special operations in Africa. “We cannot expect them to do this alone, but the will of African nations, not U.S. military activity, is the key predictor of long-term success,” he says.

I arrived in Niger looking for answers only to run into the ground truth — the complex and confounding reality of a combat zone. On the micro-level, things were progressing. Years of constant Special Forces deployments appeared to have paid dividends. If the government of Niger leans in with helicopters, the EFON could theoretically keep the pressure on the terrorist groups operating within the Sahel.

Nigerien EFoN soldiers pray at the team’s camp near Ouallam before heading out for another round of training, March 8, 2022. Andrew Craft for Rolling Stone

But history tells us these advising missions are difficult and often take years to pay off. Colombia’s victory over the FARC can be traced to a decade or more of advising missions by Special Forces. American-trained Iraqi counterterrorism forces helped take Mosul back from ISIS. American training deployments are paying off in Ukraine, where superior weapons and tactics and motivation are overcoming Russian numerical superiority. The only concrete measure of success is eventually working yourself out of a job. Mission accomplished is when Special Forces are no longer deploying there.

But that’s not happening anytime soon in Niger.

“For the time being, we will have a steady presence here,” Jason tells me. “Working ourselves out of a job isn’t a concern.” Special Forces will have plenty to do well into the future. And he’s proud of the work. It was a partnership, he says, with a common goal of making the EFON an elite unit. “They worked with us,” he says, “not for us.”

Yet, at the end of the day, most of the risk is assumed by the EFON, a fact not lost on anyone, especially Bashir, who has spent his whole adult life taking a gun to work in order to feed his family. Americans come and go and the U.S. government’s ever-shifting ideas on what it wants Niger to be will change with each administration, but for men like Bashir, the stakes could not be higher. He isn’t training to fight for democracy or to keep enemies off his nation’s lands. He is fighting for something more tangible: survival.

“They don’t know if I will come home,” he tells me about his family waiting in Niamey. “Or if they saw me for the last time.”

Rolling Stone · by Kevin Maurer · August 28, 2022

3. Jakarta gets ‘grey-zoned’ by Beijing

Every time I see gray/grey zone I am going to repeat Matt Armstrong's message here: 

"Political warfare includes all measures short of war... for hostile intent through discrete, subversive, or overt means short of open combat... Whereas gray zone tells us where along a spectrum between war and peace activities take place, political warfare tells us why."

- Matt Armstrong

Excerpts:

An ideal response would involve Indonesian policymakers articulating a limited and attainable goal of pushing back against China in the North Natuna Sea. With measurable goals, Indonesia could better specify the appropriate tools to achieve them. But more importantly, Indonesia needs to integrate — not just coordinate — these tools of statecraft to properly respond.

None of these outcomes are likely to occur soon. Maritime ‘encounters’ and ‘crises’ between Indonesia and China will recur every now and then. China’s gradual inroads will continue even if Indonesia claims rhetorical victory in each instance. The underrated success of grey zone tactics lies in the strategic delusion that Indonesia is holding on to.

Jakarta gets ‘grey-zoned’ by Beijing

eastasiaforum.org · by Evan Laksmana · August 30, 2022

Author: Evan A Laksmana, NUS

China is subjecting Indonesia to maritime grey zone tactics — competitive acts between states short of all-out warfare — in the North Natuna Sea. China pursues these objectives in the knowledge that Indonesia will fail to properly respond.

The latest North Natuna Sea crisis between December 2019 and January 2020 saw the incursion of Chinese fishing vessels, backed by coastguard and maritime militia, into Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Indonesian maritime law enforcement officials claim these incursions have not stopped since then — they have simply become less publicised. China upped the ante in August 2021 after a Chinese survey vessel spent seven weeks conducting seabed mapping inside Indonesia’s EEZ.

Jakarta has been relatively silent on the matter despite up to nine Indonesian navy and coastguard patrol craft observing the encroachment under apparent orders not to intervene. A December 2021 Reuters report suggests that China has effectively crossed Indonesia’s ‘red line’ by demanding that Indonesia stop drilling in the area.

China believes that it has ‘overlapping maritime rights’ with Indonesia, according to its interpretation of an ‘informal understanding’ reached with Jakarta about maritime territory in the 1990s. But Beijing’s behaviour is less about waging a legal dispute than it is a gradual strategic push to get Jakarta to inadvertently or implicitly acknowledge China’s maritime rights. Now that China controls key strategic areas in the South China Sea, it feels more confident in pushing the envelope.

Hegemonic powers are expected to expand until they cannot take any further territory or face sufficient resistance — but Indonesia has failed to push back. Its diplomatic response to the incident was tepid, even if officials insist that they have conveyed their discontent privately. Its security response was also haphazard, inconsistent and largely symbolic. There is certainly no strong economic or political pushback from Jakarta.

Indonesian policymakers are unclear about the goal of pushing back against China. Some believe that getting China to renounce its ‘nine-dash line’ claims to the South China Sea is simply unattainable. Others like Indonesian President Joko Widodo prefer crisis resolution over prevention to avoid strategic noise crowding out his domestic agenda. Many believe that China’s behaviour is merely a law enforcement issue, not a strategic problem.

This lack of clarity is the first sign of strategic failure. Rather than pursuing a limited and achievable goal of stopping China’s illegal incursions into the North Natuna Sea, Indonesian policymakers settle for a diluted response. These hollow acts, such as holding a cabinet meeting aboard a warship, can be sold domestically as ‘strongly asserting’ Indonesia’s sovereignty.

Such muddled thinking is partly due to Indonesian policymakers’ insistence that the country does not stake a claim in South China Sea disputes. Indonesia has a strong bilateral relationship with China and its position in the South China sea is legally recognised under international law. This means Indonesian policymakers are prone to viewing grey zone incursions as short-term maritime law enforcement problems, rather than a wider strategic gambit by China.

The lack of clarity leads to a lack of strategic coherence needed to integrate a wider range of diplomatic, military and economic instruments into an all-out pushback against Chinese encroachment. Instead, Indonesia compartmentalises the problem by separating its bilateral ties with China from the North Natuna Sea issue, the South China Sea dispute and great power politics. This approach is ostensibly reasonable given the complexity of those issues and the fact that China is the most domestically polarising foreign policy issue of today.

The Indonesian elite are also increasingly dependent on the private benefits and public goods China provides, especially those extended during the pandemic. But as they worry more about public scrutiny over dealings with China, Indonesian strategic policy becomes less transparent. China’s grey zone strategy succeeds when there is a lack of transparency in Indonesia. Policymakers seem unable to conceive of the range of options between surrendering quietly or going to war over fisheries.

These flaws explain Jakarta’s failure to launch a meaningful response to Beijing’s grey zone tactics. Indonesian policymakers have yet to seriously contemplate the various options available, such as establishing minilateral maritime alliances or reviewing Chinese Belt and Road Initiative projects. But if Widodo is not interested in directing a strategic response, each stakeholder — from the navy and coastguard to the foreign ministry — will develop its own disparate plan of action.

An ideal response would involve Indonesian policymakers articulating a limited and attainable goal of pushing back against China in the North Natuna Sea. With measurable goals, Indonesia could better specify the appropriate tools to achieve them. But more importantly, Indonesia needs to integrate — not just coordinate — these tools of statecraft to properly respond.

None of these outcomes are likely to occur soon. Maritime ‘encounters’ and ‘crises’ between Indonesia and China will recur every now and then. China’s gradual inroads will continue even if Indonesia claims rhetorical victory in each instance. The underrated success of grey zone tactics lies in the strategic delusion that Indonesia is holding on to.

Evan A Laksmana is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He is also a non-resident fellow with the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He presented a version of this paper as part of a workshop on Grey Zone Operations in the South China Sea, organised by the China Programme of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, RSIS.

A version of this article was first published here in an Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies Paper.

eastasiaforum.org · by Evan Laksmana · August 30, 2022

4. Arizona CBP agents seize enough fentanyl to kill 42 million people in latest border drug bust

I have been told most of the precursor chemicals are legally shipped from China to cartels in Mexico where the fentanyl is produced for trafficking to the US. I think we should consider the fentanyl crisis as a line of effort in unrestricted warfare.

I hope the media will investigate and report on this.

Arizona CBP agents seize enough fentanyl to kill 42 million people in latest border drug bust

foxnews.com · by Adam Sabes | Fox News

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents seized an estimated $4.3 million worth of fentanyl pills on Wednesday evening.

The seizure happened in the Tucson, Arizona Sector when agents conducted a vehicle stop on a white Chevy Equinox and observed several duffel bags in the car, according to a press release. Agents also noticed that the female driver was "noticeably nervous as she was questioned." Another female was in the car, and both are U.S. citizens, according to officials.

CBP agents then searched the vehicle with her consent, and found three bags that contained packages wrapped in black tape, in addition to being coated in axle grease, according to the government agency.

It was later determined that the 340 packages of fentanyl pills weighed a total of 187 pounds and was estimated to have been worth $4.3 million.

ARIZONA CBP AGENTS FIND 14,000 FENTANYL PILLS HIDDEN IN CRUTCHES

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents seized an estimated $4.3 million worth of fentanyl pills on Wednesday evening. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

There was enough fentanyl pills to potentially kill 42,410,900 people, according to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.

The female driver of the car will face prosecution for drug charges and the case was handed to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, the press release said.

THOUSANDS OF 'RAINBOW FENTANYL' PILLS SEIZED AS AUTHORITIES WARN OF POSSIBLE NEW 'TREND' TARGETING KIDS

Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone said that the efforts of CBP agents to keep drugs off the streets is life saving.

"I am grateful for the incredible work by Border Patrol agents to keep drugs off our streets," said Sheriff Paul Penzone. "Their efforts will save lives and promote safety."

Nogales Port of Entry Director Michael Humphries tweeted on Wednesday that border patrol agents found 14,000 fentanyl pills that were stuffed into a pair of crutches that were being used by a pedestrian.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Arizona found 14,000 fentanyl pills inside a pair of crutches that were being used by a pedestrian. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

"CBP Officers at the Nogales POE discovered approx 14,000 fentanyl pills hidden in crutches being used by a pedestrian. During inspection, a CBP Officer found the crutches to be excessively heavy. K9 and X-Ray examination confirmed suspicions," Humphries tweeted.

Adam Sabes is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Adam.Sabes@fox.com and on Twitter @asabes10.

foxnews.com · by Adam Sabes | Fox News

5. Learned Helplessness: China’s Military Instrument and Southeast Asian Security

An important essay from two scholars who combine their expertise on China and Southeast Asia to provide excellent analysis.

I hope those intelligence analysts who are focused on the future security environment are watching and assessing Southeast Asia as China's "laboratory."

Excerpt:

In conclusion, China employs its military instrument in a manner that signals its disproportionate capabilities and intentions and in ways that awe regional states into acquiescing to Chinese interests, values, and interpretations of international law. Southeast Asia remains the PLA’s primary laboratory for the development of its joint forces and doctrine, which are then orchestrated with an array of other instruments of statecraft. As such, Beijing aims to reinforce a notion of learned helplessness, without actually engaging in open-ended kinetic operations.

Learned Helplessness: China’s Military Instrument and Southeast Asian Security

by Zachary Abuza and Cynthia Watson

August 27, 2022

Zachary Abuza and Cynthia Watson examine developments in the PLA’s Southern Theater Command and argue that Southeast Asia is the primary laboratory for the development of the PLA’s joint forces and doctrine.

nbr.org

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has developed a sophisticated toolbox to advance its national interest. The country’s growing and multifaceted military instrument is meant to signal, compel, deter, and engage in joint-kinetic operations. But most of all, it is meant to awe regional states into acquiescing to Chinese interests, values, and interpretations of international law. In short, it aims to reinforce a notion of learned helplessness.

Xi Jinping pledged at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in November 2021 not to seek dominance in Southeast Asia, saying that “China resolutely opposes hegemonism and power politics, wishes to maintain friendly relations with its neighbors and jointly nurture lasting peace in the region and absolutely will not seek hegemony or even less, bully the small.” Yet, China is operationalizing its doctrine of unrestricted warfare in the region, meaning that “any methods can be prepared for use, information is everywhere, the battlefield is everywhere, and that any technology might be combined with any other technology,” as well as that “the boundaries between war and non-war and between military and non-military affairs have systematically broken down.”

China is unlikely to escalate a conflict against Japan in the Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu Islands in China) or use force against Taiwan without having engaged in any recent kinetic military operations. Anything short of a clear-cut, decisive victory would be a political disaster for the Chinese leadership, undermining its legitimacy. That is what makes the PRC’s military modernization and force posture in Southeast Asia so important. Southeast Asian adversaries give China the opportunity to engage in kinetic operations against much weaker adversaries farther from its shores and in situations that, should things not go well, would be much easier to quickly de-escalate, away from the prying eyes of its nationalistic netizens.

THE SOUTHERN THEATER COMMAND: THE TEST LAB OF JOINT OPERATIONS

In February 2016, China reorganized the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), moving from inwardly focused military regions to new theater commands that are being trained, armed, and equipped to engage in joint operations against specific external contingencies. The Southern Theater Command is responsible for all contingency operations in Southeast Asia, including the entire South China Sea.

FIGURE 1

Within this command, the PLA has deployed two group armies (the 41st and 42nd, mainly along the border with Vietnam); one of its three naval fleets, which includes three submarine flotillas (eighteen submarines in total) and two destroyer flotillas (with eleven destroyers and nineteen frigates); three naval aviation divisions; two marine brigades; three air force bomber divisions and eleven fighter or ground-attack brigades; and four PLA Rocket Force brigades with conventional missiles (see Figure 1). The PLA Air Force and PLA Naval Air Force are both deployed with a compliment of long-range anti-ship missiles. The Southern Theater also commands “all CCG [China Coast Guard] and maritime militia ships conducting operations within China’s claimed ‘nine-dash line.’”

The PLA Navy’s Southern Fleet “continues to receive a higher proportion of advanced warships such as the Type 052D guided missile destroyer Yinchuan.” No other theater command has a larger naval component, including the Eastern Theater Command that is responsible for the liberation of Taiwan or operations in the Senkaku Islands.

Moreover, analysts have noted that the Southern Theater Command is the primary lab of joint operations and possesses new command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities. China is persistently willing to use its array of instruments to advance its interests. This willingness to pronounce its concerns and then deploy the military in a deterrence manner results from repeated coordinated deployments of multiple approaches to addressing its concerns. The following discussion examines developments in several key areas.

The militarization of features in the South China Sea. Despite Xi Jinping’s 2015 pledge not to militarize the six manmade islands in the South China Sea, China has maintained a significant presence to deny forcibly the exploitation of natural resources by other claimants and possesses significant ISR capabilities. No regional country matches China’s maritime domain awareness, ranging from over-the-horizon radars, coastal radar, signals intelligence capabilities, and line-of-sight capabilities. In addition, it has deployed a range of electronic warfare capabilities.

China’s militarization of the South China Sea has been increasing, including the apparent deployment of surface-to-air missiles. HQ-9Bs, for example, are already deployed in the Paracel Islands. China has deployed YJ-12B land-based anti-ship missiles, which have a range of nearly three hundred miles. Fiery Cross, Mischief, and Subi Reefs also have 10,000-meter runways. Although no planes are permanently deployed, the hangers, fuel, and ammo depots are all in place. In Subi and Mischief Reefs, the PLA has begun to base special mission aircraft, including KJ-500 electronic warfare aircraft and Z-8 helicopters. The PLA has also deployed KQ-200 antisubmarine warfare planes to Fiery Cross Reef.

In the Spratly Islands, China has begun deploying Type-22 missile craft. These small fast-attack craft were originally designed for brown water coastal defense, but the all-weather ports on China’s manmade islands allow the PLA Navy to use them in an offshore capacity. The craft are cheap to operate and already plentiful, with roughly 60 in the fleet. In short, they give the PLA Navy added presence at almost no cost.

The deployment of planes enables China to quickly attack anywhere in Southeast Asia. While its aerial refueling capabilities are not excellent, the islands offer the ability for ground refueling.

The most thorough open-source study of the military capabilities, by J. Michael Dahm, contends that despite the massive buildup of military assets, the main purpose of the manmade islands is not kinetic warfighting but to establish dominance in the information space. Their numbers, size, and hardened features mean that the United States would have to dedicate significant assets in a scenario involving armed conflict to render the islands ineffective for combat. No Southeast Asian country alone possesses the independent capabilities to do so.

China’s 2021 Coast Guard Law gives the CCG the ability to fire on ships and demolish structures on Chinese-claimed features. The coast guard is part of the PLA’s chain of command, ostensibly under the People’s Armed Police. Its sheer size gives the CCG an almost permanent presence in the most contested areas, such as Scarborough Shoal, Luconia Shoal, Second Thomas Shoal, Vanguard Bank, and the Kasawari gas field.

Missiles. While China’s maritime capabilities have garnered the most attention, the PLA Rocket Force also poses an increasing threat. The Southern Theater Command has nine separate units of short- and medium-range missiles. Several of the PLA Rocket Force units that are deployed in the command are equipped with the core of China’s anti-access/area-denial capabilities, the DF-21 long-range anti-ship missiles (known as “carrier killers”). To date, there is no open-source reporting that China’s DF-21 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), with a range of 3,000–4,000 kilometers, is deployed to the Southern Theater Command. Likewise, there have been no open-source reporting that China’s new precision IRBM (DF-26) or its anti-ship variant (DF-26B) has been deployed to Southeast Asia, though two DF-16Bs were successfully tested against a moving ship in the South China Sea in 2020. The PLA Rocket Force is building a large missile base on Hainan Island and has not been shy about announcing its anti-ship missile tests.

As mentioned above, China has likely deployed HQ-9B SAMS and J-12B land-based anti-ship missiles to the Paracel Islands. They have ranges of 160 and 300 nautical miles, respectively. The maritime version of the H-6J long-range strategic bomber, which is based in the Southern Theater Command, is armed with YJ-12 anti-ship missiles.

Submarines and autonomous underwater vehicles. China’s three submarine flotillas, comprising eighteen ships in total, pose different challenges for Southeast Asia. China has developed a new submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) with a range of 6,000 miles for its nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles as part of a rapid increase in the size of its strategic force. This marks a deviation from China’s traditional “minimum deterrent” posture. As Chinese strategists think that conflict with the United States is more inevitable, such a survivable second-strike capability is even more important. One of China’s two fleets of SLBMs is based in Hainan, and the bunkering of submarines in the deep waters of the South China Sea is key to the country’s second-strike capability.

China’s growing fleet of attack submarines has the ability to wreak havoc on Southeast Asian navies and commercial vessels in the region, as there is a dearth of antisubmarine warfare capabilities. Submarines have the added advantage of attribution, which could be very useful for China to send signals, without accepting responsibility and creating a ladder of de-escalation.

China dispatched a submarine rescue ship to help Indonesia following the tragic loss of a submarine and its entire 53-person crew. Although the salvage efforts failed, largely due to the depths at which the submarine had sunk, the operation was diplomatically effective, especially as China footed the entire bill, and provided an occasion for the use of the military instrument in a constructive and nonthreatening manner.

Chinese Sea Wing (Haiyi) autonomous underwater vehicles have been recovered now twice in Indonesian waters, which is a clear violation of Indonesia’s territorial sea. China has been developing a range of undersea unmanned systems of various sizes, ranges, purposes, and capabilities, including mine warfare and countermeasures, undersea cable inspection and tapping, and antisubmarine warfare.

Overseas bases. China’s 2019 defense white paper declared the need to develop more overseas basing facilities. China already has a naval base in Djibouti, and a second base is under construction in Tajikistan along the Wakan corridor. Earlier this year, China signed an agreement with the Solomon Islands that would give the PLA Navy a base in the center of the Pacific.

Within Southeast Asia, China already has an offshore signals intelligence facility on an island in the Andaman Sea controlled by Myanmar. But its first major military hub in the region will likely be in Cambodia. China dominates the short Cambodian coastline, wedged between Thailand’s Sattahip Naval Base, near Rayong in the Gulf of Thailand, and the An Thoi Naval and Coast Guard Base on Vietnam’s Phu Quoc Island. With much of the area under a 99-year lease, China built and operates the commercial port in Sihanoukville, which is the only deepwater port in Cambodia.

The Cambodian navy demolished two buildings that the United States had built for it at the Ream Naval Base. A two-acre Chinese section of the base is now being developed, under a 30-year lease enabling China to “post military personnel, store weapons and berth warships.” China is also building a military-grade airfield in nearby Dara Sakor. The 10,000-meter runway, as yet, has no commercial facilities; indeed Sihanoukville already has a commercial airport with excess capacity. There is also some evidence, including open-source commercial satellite imagery, that China has begun building a permanent naval base on the coast. Chinese dredgers are already present and operational.

In sum, China will have key ISR assets in place to monitor movements in and out of Thai and Vietnamese naval facilities, giving it maritime domain awareness over the Gulf of Thailand.

ARMS SALES

The growing military threat that China poses to Southeast Asia is not yet reflected in the region’s arms purchases. Instead, China has become a major arms exporter to Southeast Asia, largely competing with Russia and significantly displacing the United States.

Cambodia is completely dependent on Chinese arms, ammunition, and other defense subsidies. It is worth noting that China pays in large part for the educational training of the annual class of two hundred officers, including six-month field visits to China. PLA officers are advisers to the school. Indeed, the ties between the Cambodian and Chinese armed forces are so deep that Cambodian students lost their six slots to U.S. service academies in mid-2021.

However, the country that has become the most dependent on Chinese arms is Thailand. The reality is that despite a long and fruitful alliance (largely focused on Chinese aggression and Chinese support of Communist insurgencies), the United States and Thailand now have almost no shared threat perception. Indeed, the only thing that the military regime cares about is its own survival. To that end, Thai leaders have largely thrown their lot in with China.

In 2017, Thailand negotiated a $408 million deal for an S26T submarine, an export version of China’s Type 039A (Yuan class), with an option to buy two more.n 2020, the Royal Thai Navy announced its intentions to exercise that right and proceed with the purchase of two additional submarines, prompting a public outcry that forced the navy to suspend its plans. In July 2021, the parliament rejected the purchase. In 2022, the deal appeared to sink after Germany prevented the export of MTU396 diesel engines. When China offered to use indigenously built engines for the submarines, Thailand initially rejected the notoriously loud engines and demanded that the original contract be honored. China has also offered to sell two used Song-class submarines instead, an offer that was again rejected by Thailand. At the time of writing in August 2022, Thailand appears to have acquiesced to Beijing’s pressure and agreed to move ahead with the Chinese engines.

Thailand has purchased several naval vessels from China, including an amphibious landing ship. Thailand has also purchased armored personnel carriers and new main battle tanks. Indeed, there is now enough Chinese hardware in Thailand that China is building a maintenance facility. In sum, China has surpassed the United States to become Thailand’s largest weapons supplier. While Thai authorities may fear that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, it could be too late to reverse the trend.

Malaysia recently purchased four offshore naval patrol vessels from China, to defend territorial waters from Chinese encroachment. In the Philippines, the U.S. government has provided billions of dollars in assistance to the military since September 11, including planes and drones for basic ISR capabilities. Yet the Philippines exemplifies the strategic impact of China donating a small number of weapons in a timely manner. Just over a year after being elected, President Rodrigo Duterte announced, while visiting China, his intentions to end the alliance with the United States, catching everyone off guard. Though he did not follow through, China was quick to move. In May 2017, pro–Islamic State militants took over the city of Marawi and held off the U.S.-trained armed forces of the Philippines for five months. China delivered a consignment of 6,100 small arms during the siege, and Duterte himself was on hand to receive them, calling their provision “critical.”

In Myanmar, the junta will be increasingly dependent on China as the regime becomes more diplomatically isolated and the country teeters on the brink of economic collapse. China will be a lifeline for the generals and a vital source of weaponry. Myanmar has historically depended on Russia for arms. Yet, given the totality of Russia’s losses in Ukraine, exports of new equipment and spare parts to second- and third-tier clients like Myanmar will be low priority for Moscow. Thus, China is likely to pick up some of the slack in the region.

JOINT EXERCISES

Arms sales are an important indicator of interoperability and a sign of stability in an alliance or partnership. Alongside increasing arms sales to Southeast Asia, China has stepped up bilateral military exercises in the region. For example, the Royal Thai Armed Forces now hold more exercises with their PLA counterparts than with any other regional country, including recent air exercises at a time when Bangkok is hoping to procure the F-35 from the United States. Likewise, the PLA Navy held joint exercises with the Indonesian Navy in mid-2021, and the PLA has held at least three army exercises with the Cambodian military. Although joint exercises have clearly slowed down during the pandemic, they are likely to resume.

Conversely, even after Singapore and China inked their first defense agreement in 2008, security relations remain limited. China is keen to curtail Singapore’s routine military exercises in Taiwan and has demonstrated a willingness to violate international law to send clear signals. In 2016, for example, it seized nine Singaporean armored personnel carriers in Hong Kong that were in transit from Taiwan. That incident alone hampered bilateral exercises for several years. Nonetheless, China and Singapore signed the Agreement on Defence Exchanges and Security Cooperation in 2019, and Singapore’s navy held its first joint exercises in five years with the PLA Navy in January 2021.

In sum, while the pandemic set back China’s growing number of bilateral military exercises in Southeast Asia, Beijing’s intention of supplanting the United States is clear.

CONCLUSION: HOW MIGHT CHINA USE FORCE?

Although China has not fought a war since 1979, we have some understanding of how the PLA would employ force in a military conflict. This was most evident in the recent Taiwan Strait crisis. First, its force structure, logistics, and doctrine are ill prepared for a protracted conflict. Any war would need to be quickly executed. China’s objective would be to declare victory after humiliating its adversary and then to de-escalate the situation, offering its adversary a “golden bridge.”

Second, military force would be part and parcel of a larger whole-of-government approach that involves economic, diplomatic, and legal pressure. China would employ “unrestricted warfare” and fight across multiple domains, especially cyber.

Third, much of how China uses force would simply be to signal its intentions and capabilities, such as with the missile tests during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis. Any show of force would be overwhelming to explicitly highlight power disparities between China and its adversaries. Force would be used to cause immediate economic harm and signal resolve, though in such a way that any conflict could be de-escalated very quickly. The goal would be to create a sense of learned helplessness.

The air incursion over Malaysia’s exclusive economic zone in May 2021 is a case in point. China sent a formation of sixteen bombers and large transport planes toward Malaysia’s Sarawak State, passing right over a contested region in the South China Sea at Luconia Shoals where Malaysia’s state-owned oil company, Petronas, has defied Chinese intimidation and drilled for offshore oil. Indeed, Petronas was preparing to start drilling in another area, despite the near constant presence of the CCG. The PLA Air Force planes never entered Malaysian airspace. What they did was lawful, even though the act violated China’s own interpretation of international law. Other Southeast Asian states took note and made clear that they did not want the same thing to happen to them.

In many situations, however, an overwhelming show of force may not be sufficient, especially against a highly motivated opponent. Should China seek a relatively controlled conflict, it would likely be some sort of manufactured crisis against a Vietnamese-held feature in the Spratly Islands. While another full invasion and occupation is less likely, a Chinese operation to block the resupply of a Vietnamese-held feature would serve many Chinese interests.

First, a feature in the Spratly Islands would be a controlled environment for the PLA to test its joint warfighting capability, offshore logistical support, and communications, command, control, and intelligence capabilities. Second, China could control the information environment, being far enough away from the prying eyes of its netizens, in case the situation does not go well. Third, Beijing would have the ability to largely control the escalatory ladder and give Hanoi an offramp. Fourth, China would use the conflict as an opportunity to target Vietnam through concerted cyberattacks. Fifth, a series of manufactured smaller conflicts would be an important gauge of the international community’s response and help the PLA prepare for a large conflict with Taiwan.

In conclusion, China employs its military instrument in a manner that signals its disproportionate capabilities and intentions and in ways that awe regional states into acquiescing to Chinese interests, values, and interpretations of international law. Southeast Asia remains the PLA’s primary laboratory for the development of its joint forces and doctrine, which are then orchestrated with an array of other instruments of statecraft. As such, Beijing aims to reinforce a notion of learned helplessness, without actually engaging in open-ended kinetic operations.

Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College and an adjunct in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Cynthia Watson was a professor and dean at the National War College, before serving as the acting provost of the National Defense University prior to her retirement.

The views expressed here are the authors’ and do not reflect the opinions of the National War College, the National Defense University, or the U.S. Department of Defense.

Endnotes

[1] “Xi Says China Will Not Seek Dominance over Southeast Asia,” Associated Press, November 22, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/business-asia-beijing-xi-jinping-china-21e8b6187dd209b1d8ad428739602671.

[2] Qiao Liang and Xiangsui Wang, Unrestricted Warfare (Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 1999).

[3] U.S. Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Development Involving the People’s Republic of China (Washington, D.C., 2020), https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.

[4] Peter Wood, “Snapshot: China’s Southern Theater Command,” Jamestown Foundation, July 22, 2016, https://jamestown.org/program/snapshot-chinas-southern-theater-command.

[5] Nan Li, “The Southern Theater Command and China’s Maritime Strategy,” Jamestown Foundation, June 9, 2017, https://jamestown.org/program/southern-theater-command-chinas-maritime-strategy.

[6] Jeremy Page, Carol E. Lee, and Gordon Lubold, “China’s President Pledges No Militarization in Disputed Islands,” Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-completes-runway-on-artificial-island-in-south-china-sea-1443184818.

[7] J. Michael Dahm, “Beyond ‘Conventional Wisdom’: Evaluating the PLA’s South China Sea Bases in Operational Context,” War on the Rocks, March 17, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/03/beyond-conventional-wisdom-evaluating-the-plas-south-china-sea-bases-in-operational-context.

[8] Jeremy Page, Gordon Lubold, and Rob Taylor, “Deal for Naval Outpost in Cambodia Furthers China’s Quest for Military Network,” Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/secret-deal-for-chinese-naval-outpost-in-cambodia-raises-u-s-fears-of-beijings-ambitions-11563732482.

[9] “Update: China Continues to Transform Ream Naval Base,” Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, October 12, 2021, https://amti.csis.org/changes-underway-at-cambodias-ream-naval-base.

[10] Aubrey Belford and Prak Chan Thul, “Chinese Influence in Cambodia Grows with Army School, Aid,” Reuters, April 2, 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-china-military/chinese-influence-in-cambodia-grows-with-army-school-aid-idUSKBN0MT0SW20150402.

[11] Sarah Zheng, “Cambodia Cut from U.S. Military Scholarship Programme Due to China Ties,” South China Morning Post, July 2, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3139586/cambodia-cut-us-military-scholarship-programme-due-china-ties.

[12] Yohei Muramatsu, “Thailand’s Purchase of First Chinese Submarine Runs Aground,” Nikkei Asia, April 12, 2022, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Thailand-s-purchase-of-first-Chinese-submarine-runs-aground.

[13] “Engine Troubles Bring Sink-or-Swim Moment for Thailand’s Sub Deal with China,” Thai PBS World, April 5, 2022, https://www.thaipbsworld.com/engine-troubles-bring-sink-or-swim-moment-for-thailands-sub-deal-with-china.

[14] “Navy Insists on German Engines as Stated in Submarine Contract with China,” Nation (Thailand), March 3, 2022, https://www.nationthailand.com/in-focus/40012997.

[15] Jitsiree Thongnoi, “Thailand Likely to Deploy Chinese Submarine Engines to Avoid Showing Beijing ‘Signs of Weakness,’ Analysts Say,” South China Morning Post, August 16, 2022, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/article/3189072/thailand-likely-deploy-chinese-submarine-engines-avoid-showing-beijing.

[16] Xavier Vavasseur, “Fourth and Final LMS for Royal Malaysian Navy Launched in China,” Naval News, December 16, 2020, https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2020/12/fourth-and-final-lms-for-royal-malaysian-navy-launched-in-china.

[17] Karen Lema and Martin Petty, “Philippines’ Duterte Lauds China’s Help at ‘Crucial Moment’ in Marawi Battle,” Reuters, November 15, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-china/philippines-duterte-lauds-chinas-help-at-crucial-moment-in-marawi-battle-idUSKBN1DF1D9.

[18] “Thai Plan to Acquire F-35 Fighter-Jets Poses Dilemma for Washington,” Benar News, February 16, 2022, https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/thai/thai-plan-to-acquire-f-35-fighter-jets-poses-dilemma-for-washington-02162022142237.html.

[19] Brad Lendon, “China Drills Show Beijing Is Developing the Ability to Strangle Taiwan, Experts Say,” CNN August 8, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/08/asia/china-taiwan-military-exercises-what-we-learned-intl-hnk-ml/index.html.

[20] Mike Yeo, “China Sends 16 Military Aircraft over Disputed South China Sea Shoals Near Malaysia,” DefenseNews, June 1, 2021, https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2021/06/01/china-sends-16-military-aircraft-over-disputed-south-china-sea-shoals-near-malaysia.

nbr.org

6. What are the prospects for stability across the Taiwan Strait?

Conclusion:

The Taiwan issue thus constitutes a key node of the structural rivalry between the United States and China. Xi’s China is explicit that “Resolving the Taiwan question … is indispensable for the realisation of China’s rejuvenation” and appears less patient with the United States’ goal of maintaining its primacy in the region. In this tug-of-war, a democratic Taiwan has considerable agency and capacity to affect the dynamics of power in East Asia.

What are the prospects for stability across the Taiwan Strait? | Lowy Institute

A democratic Taiwan has considerable agency and

capacity to affect the dynamics of power in East Asia.

lowyinstitute.org · by Jade Guan

It is under debate whether we are heading towards a fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis. This month alone, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, China responded with unprecedented sea and air combat drills in six exercise zones around the island, and Beijing published a White Paper on the question of Taiwan’s reunification with China. This was swiftly followed by another US congressional delegation travelling to Taipei.

Although all the parties declare they want stability and warn the other sides to avoid provocation, each has been testing where it can go further. The possibility of maintaining stability across the Taiwan Strait looks less and less likely given the direction in which the key regional players are heading, namely China, Taiwan and the United States.

Prospect for China’s policy on Taiwan

China’s recent activities targeting Taiwan send out a number of messages.

First, the military exercises conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to test and strengthen its integrated combat ability could become a “new normal” across the Taiwan Strait, based on Beijing’s perception of further challenges to its “One China Principle” by Taiwan, the United States and US allies. Grey zone military operations will continue to be applied to subdue Taiwan. Additionally and probably more significantly, China will continue to develop its military capabilities, especially in nuclear weapons. Such a posture seeks to shape a situation where Taiwan’s independence and a war over the island is unthinkable.

In terms of lawfare, there is speculation that Beijing might promulgate a “National Reunification Law” after the 20th Party Congress.

Politically, the White Paper maintains the “One Country, Two Systems” framework is still applicable to pursue a peaceful reunification with Taiwan, but its appeal in Taiwan is in doubt. As analysts have noted, compared to the versions published in 1993 and 2000, the 2022 White Paper implicitly suggests that “Two Systems is subordinate to and derives from One Country” and that Taiwan would enjoy less autonomy after unification. If this interpretation stands, how operational is the framework when the majority of Taiwanese disapprove of it according to public opinion polls by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council in March 2022?

In terms of lawfare, there is speculation that Beijing might promulgate a “National Reunification Law” after the 20th Party Congress later this year that could stipulate measures and steps for China to proceed with national reunification including legal consequences for committing “serious crimes of secession”. Interestingly, the White Paper singles out Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities for having “adopted a separatist stance” as distinct from “the 23 million Taiwan compatriots”. If reunification were eventualised, legal consequences would all fall on “separatists”. Internationally, Beijing will continue its efforts to “institutionalise and normalise” its “One China Principle” as a universally accepted norm to legitimate its position on Taiwan and constrain Taiwan’s participation in intergovernmental organisations.

The United States and key ally Japan would play a major role in any Taiwan contingency. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida meets with US President Joe Biden at NATO headquarters, March 2022 (Adam Schultz/White House/Flickr)​

Taiwan’s agency

Taiwan’s politics and emphasis on democratic identity are key drivers of its significant agency and regional dynamism. The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995–96) was arguably triggered by the then President Lee Teng-hui’s “two-state theory” and public diplomacy manifested in his visit to Cornell University in the United States. The referendum campaign on Taiwan independence during the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian presidency rendered a backdrop for China’s 2005 Anti-Secession Law. Taiwan’s democratic identity has been vigorously promoted by the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen government to rally domestic and international support. It is predicted that her successor will continue this strategy after the next presidential election in 2024.

Why does Taiwan matter to the United States?

Although it does not have formal diplomatic relations with Taipei, the United States considers Taiwan “a key US partner in the Indo-Pacific” – located in the first island chain to block China from moving further into the Pacific. If the United States failed to support Taiwan under China’s pressure, US allies might question the country’s role and commitments in the region, particularly at a time when US power is perceived to be in relative decline.

The Taiwan issue thus constitutes a key node of the structural rivalry between the United States and China.

Ideologically, the United States views Taiwan as a successful model for democracy, making a strident contrast with China’s internal tightening under President Xi Jinping. The visits made by US congress delegations are thus a test for Taiwan’s global status under Chinese pressure and send a strong message to the world that others should not yield to Beijing’s demands.

Economically, Taiwan is the United States’ eighth largest trade partner as of 2021. It provides critical value in global high-tech manufacturing. As an example, in July this year, the United States proposed the “Chip 4” alliance, which would include Taiwan, with the intention of competing with China in the semiconductor industry and supply chain.

Geopolitically, the United States, with key regional ally Japan, will continue to support Taiwan and would play a major role in any Taiwan contingency. Washington is clear that its strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific have not been shifted by events such as the war in Ukraine, rather its alliance policy has been strengthened and “countering China” remains its strategic priority.

Chih-yu Shih, a political science professor at National Taiwan University, recently commented that the United States is seemingly pushing China towards unifying Taiwan by force. Shih argues that “what China pursues is a peaceful unification”. He suggests that the United States has seen that should China take military action, it would likely become bogged down, as Russia has in Ukraine. The United States in such a scenario would support and use Taiwan as a proxy in its great power rivalry with China, while avoiding direct conflict. In this regard, a proxy war over Taiwan between the Taiwanese and the PLA would be detrimental to China’s rise but in the strategic interests of the United States.

The Taiwan issue thus constitutes a key node of the structural rivalry between the United States and China. Xi’s China is explicit that “Resolving the Taiwan question … is indispensable for the realisation of China’s rejuvenation” and appears less patient with the United States’ goal of maintaining its primacy in the region. In this tug-of-war, a democratic Taiwan has considerable agency and capacity to affect the dynamics of power in East Asia.

This work by Dr Jade Guan is supported by a research fund she received from the 2021-22 Australian Strategic Policy Grants Program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent any organisation.

lowyinstitute.org · by Jade Guan

7. Death in Navy SEAL Training Exposes a Culture of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs

Oh no. And this comes out on the day of the USSOCOM change of command.

Death in Navy SEAL Training Exposes a Culture of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs

The elite force’s selection course is so punishing that few make it through, and many of those who do resort to illicit tactics.

nytimes.com · August 30, 2022

U.S. Navy SEAL candidates participating in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training in 2018, in a photo commissioned by the Department of Defense.Credit...Abe McNatt/Naval Special Warfare Command

CORONADO, Calif. — Kyle Mullen always had the natural drive and talent that made success look easy. Until he tried out for the Navy SEALs.

The 24-year-old arrived on the California coast in January for the SEALs’ punishing selection course in the best shape of his life — even better than when he was a state champion defensive end in high school or the captain of the football team at Yale.

But by the middle of the course’s third week — a continual gut punch of physical and mental hardship, sleep deprivation and hypothermia that the SEALs call Hell Week — the 6-foot-4-inch athlete from Manalapan, N.J., was dead-eyed with exhaustion, riddled with infection and coughing up blood from lungs that were so full of fluid that others who were there said later that he sounded like he was gargling.

The course began with 210 men. By the middle of Hell Week, 189 had quit or been brought down by injury. But Seaman Mullen kept on slogging for days, spitting blood all the while. The instructors and medics conducting the course, perhaps out of admiration for his grit, did not stop him.

And he made it. When he struggled out of the cold ocean at the end of Hell Week, SEAL leaders shook his hand, gave him a pizza and told him to get some rest. Then he went back to his barracks and laid down on the floor. A few hours later, his heart stopped beating and he died.

That same afternoon, another man who survived Hell Week had to be intubated. Two more were hospitalized that evening.

The SEAL teams have faced criticism for decades, both from outsiders and their own Navy leadership, that their selection course, known as Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training or BUD/S, is too difficult, too brutal, and too often causes concussions, broken bones, dangerous infections and near-drownings. Since 1953, at least 11 men have died.

For just as long, the SEAL teams, who perform some of the military’s most difficult missions, including lighting-fast hostage rescues and the killing of high-level terrorists like Osama Bin Laden, have insisted that having a bare-knuckle rite of passage is vital for producing the kind of unflinching fighters the teams need. Without BUD/S, they argue, there could be no SEALs.

Privately, they talk of training casualties as a cost of doing business. A former SEAL, David Goggins, wrote in his memoir about a sailor who drowned during his Hell Week. Soon afterward, he wrote, an instructor told his class: “This is the world you live in. He’s not the first, and he won’t be the last to die in your line of work.”

BUD/S is hardly the only dangerous selection course in the military. Many Army Special Forces soldiers and Air Force pilots have also died in training. But few if any courses have so high a rate of failure.

After Seaman Mullen died, the SEAL teams appeared to try to deflect blame from the course and frame the incident as a freak occurrence. Though Seaman Mullen had coughed up blood for days and had needed oxygen, the Navy announced that he and the man who was intubated were “not actively training when they reported symptoms,” and that neither “had experienced an accident or unusual incident” during Hell Week.

The official cause of death was bacterial pneumonia, but Seaman Mullen’s family says the true cause was the course itself, in which instructors routinely drove candidates to dangerous states of exhaustion and injury, and medical staff grew so accustomed to seeing the suffering that they failed to hospitalize him, or even monitor him, once Hell Week was over.

“They killed him,” his mother, Regina Mullen, who is a registered nurse, said in an interview. “They say it’s training, but it’s torture. And then they didn’t even give them the proper medical care. They treat these guys worse than they are allowed to treat prisoners of war.”

Seaman Mullen’s death immediately resurfaced the old questions about whether the curriculum of intentional hardship goes too far.

And soon those old questions were complicated by something new.

When the Navy gathered Seaman Mullen’s belongings, they discovered syringes and performance enhancing drugs in his car. The captain in charge of BUD/S immediately ordered an investigation, and soon about 40 candidates had either tested positive or had admitted using steroids or other drugs in violation of Navy regulations.

The Navy has not tied the sailor’s death to drugs. The service is expected to release reports on the training death and the drug use in the fall. A Navy spokesman declined to comment on Seaman Mullen's death or on allegations of widespread drug use, saying it would be inappropriate to do so before the reports are released and Seaman Mullen’s family is briefed on their findings.

Still, the prevalence of drugs at BUD/S has some men in the top reaches of the SEALs deeply unnerved — not just because drugs may have contributed to the death of a sailor, but also because they see their spread, and the lack of discipline and order it implies, as a threat to the entire SEAL organization that could grow in unpredictable and ugly ways.

Sailors who enter the program bolstered by steroids and hormones can push harder, recover faster and probably beat out the sailors who are trying to become SEALs while clean, said one senior SEAL leader with multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The inevitable effect, he said, is that a course designed to select the very best will end up selecting only the very best cheaters, and steadily fill the SEAL teams with war fighters who view rules as optional.

“What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?” said the leader. “A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an ethical decision?”

The Navy has so far been officially silent about the discovery of drug use at BUD/S. Details of Seaman Mullen’s death and the subsequent drug sweep, many of them reported here for the first time, are based on interviews with Navy leaders, medical staff, enlisted SEALs and recent BUD/S candidates. All of them spoke on the condition that they not be identified by name, because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Without comprehensive testing, there is no way to assess the full extent of the drug use in the program. But more than a dozen current and former candidates described a culture in which drugs have become deeply embedded in the selection course over the last decade.

SEAL candidates resting on the beach in Coronado, Calif., in 2018, in a photo commissioned by the Department of Defense. All sailors who want to become SEALs must survive a punishing gantlet of physical tests.Credit...Abe McNatt/Naval Special Warfare Command

SEAL leaders say they don’t have the authority to start a testing program to attack the problem. They formally requested permission from the Navy in June to start testing all candidates but are still awaiting a response.

Meanwhile, the drugs are there.

One young sailor who went through BUD/S in May said that many would-be SEALs had come to believe that the course was too hard to complete without drugs. Despite Seaman Mullen’s death, he said, some sailors were still using illicit performance enhancers — in particular, a group of unregulated supplements called SARMS that are difficult to detect.

It is hard to say what role performance-enhancing drugs played in one death when there are so many other complicating factors, said Dr. Matthew Fedoruk, the chief science officer of the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Even so, he said, the chemicals some sailors are relying on can interfere with the function of the heart, liver and other critical organs that are already under incredible stress from the brutal training.

If enough people in a community are doping, he said, it spreads risk even to those who are clean, as the level of competition rises and more people are pushed to exhaustion and injury.

“It makes it that much harder for the people doing the right thing to shine,” he said.

Navy leaders say they are determined to correct the problems. BUD/S now requires all candidates to be medically monitored for 24 hours after Hell Week, leaders have dialed back some of the most abusive course requirements, and several SEALs were quietly removed from instructor positions after Seaman Mullen’s death.

The Navy has made hundreds of changes over the years meant to improve safety and increase graduation rates. At the same time, the SEALs who run the course have quietly resisted anything they see as lowering standards. So no matter how much the Navy has tried to make BUD/S easier, it seems to only get harder.

In the 1980s, about 40 percent of candidates graduated. Over the past 25 years, the average has dropped to 26 percent. In 2021, it was just 14 percent, and in Seaman Mullen’s class this year, less than 10 percent.

When Seaman Mullen started BUD/S in January, it was his second attempt. His first try was in August 2021, and he had spent more than a year running, swimming and lifting weights to prepare. He lasted less than a day.

Instructors call the first three weeks of BUD/S the attrition phase, a maw of punishing exercise, frigid water and harassment meant to wash out anyone lacking strength, endurance and mental fortitude — individuals the instructors derisively call “turds.”

That first day, the instructors put candidates through a gantlet of running, crawling, situps and push-ups on the hot sand with no breaks, Seaman Mullen’s mother said. Late in the afternoon, the men were racing in teams, carrying 170-pound inflatable boats over their heads, when Seaman Mullen passed out.

He called his mother from an ambulance a short time later and explained that he had not had a drop of water all day. When he fell, he told her, an instructor hurled insults at his limp body and told him to get up. When he did not respond, medics measured his temperature at 104 degrees and sent him to the hospital with heatstroke.

Heatstroke, concussions, fractures, muscle tears and lung issues are common at BUD/S, one Navy medical employee at the SEAL training base in Coronado said, but the injuries are often dealt with internally that avoids scrutiny from outside the SEALs. Often, the employee said, injured candidates are encouraged to quit the course voluntarily, instead of being pulled out by medical staff, and their injuries are never formally reported to the Navy command that oversees workplace accidents.

Seaman Mullen was assigned to an internal recovery unit, where he had four months to mend before a second attempt at BUD/S. During that time, he helped care for other injured candidates recovering in the barracks, according to his mother, whom he called regularly for medical advice.

Many men were coughing up bloody fluid from a condition called swimming-induced pulmonary edema — a potentially life-threatening ailment that is so common among men training in the frigid water at BUD/S that SEALs refer to it casually by the acronym SIPE.

During his four-month wait, his mother recalled, Seaman Mullen started talking to her about performance enhancing drugs.

Men he met in the recovery unit were using steroids and human growth hormone, he told her, and he was considering it. He told her he would have to buy a used car as a place to stash the drugs.

“In all his years playing sports, he had never touched that stuff,” Ms. Mullen said. “I told him not to do it. But he ended up getting the car and sharing it with a bunch of guys.”

In interviews, SEALs report knowing of men who used drugs during BUD/S at least as far back as 2009. The Navy uncovered what the senior SEAL leader called “a steroid ring” in 2012. He said BUD/S began testing candidates that year, but the testing lapsed a few years later.

By 2016, former candidates said, drugs were back. That’s when 19-year-old Brandon Caserta went through BUD/S and told his father, Patrick Caserta, a retired Navy senior chief petty officer, that drugs were “rampant.”

“He refused to do them, but he said the guys that did definitely had an edge,” Mr. Caserta said.

Three weeks in, Seaman Caserta collapsed while carrying a boat. Instructors yelled at him to get up, and when he said he couldn’t, his father said, they made him quit the course. An X-ray later revealed a broken leg.

Candidates who don’t complete BUD/S often must serve out the remaining years of their enlistments in undesirable low-level Navy jobs. Seaman Caserta ended up manning a snack counter at a distant base.

“He really was disheartened,” his father said. “He felt like he’d been cheated out of something he had worked hard for.”

In 2018, Seaman Caserta left a note for his parents criticizing the Navy for its treatment of him and saying he did not want a military funeral, and then hurled himself into the tail rotor of a Navy helicopter.

In a perverse way, the drug problem at BUD/S is a natural outgrowth of the mind-set the SEALs try to cultivate, according Benjamin Milligan, a former enlisted SEAL who recently published a history of the force, “Water Beneath the Walls.”

The SEALs want operators who can find unconventional ways to gain an advantage against the enemy, he said in an interview.

“You want guys who can solve problems in war, guys who know how to play dirty, because war is a dirty game,” he said.

An often heard unofficial adage in the SEALs holds that, “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”

During BUD/S, he said, the “enemy” to be outfoxed is the course itself.

“No one can do everything the instructors ask, so you have to learn how to cheat to get through,” he said. “Everyone knows it happens. The point is to learn how to not get caught.”

“Basically, you are selecting for guys who are willing to cheat,” he added. “So, no surprise, guys are going to turn to drugs.”

“I said, go to the hospital right away,” his mother recalled. “He said, ‘No, ma, if you want to go to the hospital, they will make you quit first. Besides, it’s just SIPE.’”

Ms. Mullen said her son, on the advice of other SEAL candidates, started secretly taking the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, which was against Navy rules but used by SEALs as a potential treatment for SIPE. He recovered enough to keep training.

Then came Hell Week — days of cold-water swims and sand-pounding runs totaling over 200 miles, with only about five hours of sleep in five days. The SIPE came raging back, and the fluid pooling in his lungs started to drown him from the inside.

Seaman Mullen fell behind on runs, according to a candidate who was there with him, and instructors singled him out for what they call “remediation” — extra push-ups, situps and plunges in the freezing surf that may have made his condition worse.

He collapsed at one point, and an instructor kicked him repeatedly and told him to quit, the other candidate said. Instead, the sailor struggled back to his feet.

Navy medics are present for every moment of Hell Week and give candidates daily medical checks. Anyone whose vital signs show dangerous changes gets sidelined, a medical officer there said. But, the officer added, the medical staff avoids interfering with the pain and suffering that are the purpose of BUD/S.

In any other job, pushing people to exhaustion while fluid floods their lungs would seem reckless, but it has been happening in Hell Week for so long that the practice has come to seem somewhat normal, according to Mr. Milligan, the historian. He went through Hell Week in 2001 and said a man in his class who had fluid in his lungs was given medication through a nebulizer, a practice Mr. Milligan said was “not uncommon.” A few hours later, while the class was swimming in a human chain in a pool, the man slipped from Mr. Milligan’s grasp, sank to the bottom and died.

Seaman Mullen was determined to persevere. On Friday morning, at the completion of Hell Week, he and 20 other remaining men emerged from the freezing surf. He was too weak to walk on his own, so he staggered in the other candidate’s arms, his eyes filled with tears of joy and relief.

After a short speech by the admiral in charge came medical checks, and the class insisted that Seaman Mullen go first. The other candidate said he was stunned when his friend emerged from the check just five minutes later, saying he was told he was fine.

Seaman Mullen was coughing so much that he soon filled a 32-ounce Gatorade bottle with bloody sputum, according to his autopsy, but by then there was no one with medical training present to notice. The medical staff had gone home after Hell Week finished. Instead, according to the candidate and Ms. Mullen, who spoke to several of her son’s classmates who were there, the men were watched by newly arrived BUD/S candidates, called white shirts.

A few hours later, one of the white shirts called the medical staff phone to report an emergency, the candidate said, but no one picked up, so the white shirt called 911. When a civilian ambulance arrived, the medics found Seaman Mullen with no pulse, according to the autopsy.

In the months since, the family has pushed for accountability. The military is shielded by law from wrongful death lawsuits. Instead, Ms. Mullen says her goal is to have Congress impose independent oversight on BUD/S.

Officers in charge of BUD/S have removed some of the most punishing aspects of the course in recent months, clamping down on pre-dawn workouts and runs with heavy packs. Six hours of sleep a night are now required in all weeks but Hell Week, outside auditors have been brought in to watch instructors, and a higher percentage of sailors are now making the cut.

But on the beach, sailors say, the problems continue. A month after Seaman Mullen died, there was another close call. After late-night training in the frigid surf, one sailor — cold, wet, hungry and exhausted — started shivering violently, then became unresponsive while huddled in the arms of another sailor who was trying to keep him warm, according to two sailors who were there.

The sailors immediately called the BUD/S medical office, but once again, they said, there was no answer. They put their classmate in a hot shower, called 911 and were able to get him civilian medical help.

The next morning, the two sailors said, instructors let the class know they were not happy. To punish them for calling 911, the sailors said, the instructors made the class do long bouts of push-ups. Whenever anyone dropped from exhaustion, instructors made the man who had been treated at the hospital for hypothermia plunge again into the cold surf.

nytimes.com · August 30, 2022

8. Taiwan Says It Will Now Shoot Down Rogue Chinese Drones

​Are they rogue? Or is China deliberately penetrating Taiwan air space.? Surely Taiwan has the right of self defense if these are entering Taiwan air space. Is a miscalculation ahead?

Excerpts:

The drones seen in the recent video footage are clearly within Taiwanese airspace, but it’s easy to see how a drone skirting Taiwanese territory that was then shot down could lead to a serious international incident. Furthermore, the nature of spy flights is such that opposing sides very frequently disagree on where incidents take place as regards airspace ownership and appropriate response. With Beijing’s expansive claims over territory, the potential for such flashpoints only grows.

Interestingly, it seems that, at least to some degree, Taiwan’s previous approach to drone incursions was based on demonstrating restraint, likely to reduce the chances of such misunderstandings.

Indeed, in the wake of the second Kinmen drone video, which emerged on August 27, the Kinmen Defense Command told Taiwan News that its forces had responded according to the principle of “not starting a war lightly and not escalating a conflict.” How shooting down a drone fits into this posture is not quite clear, but it’s easy to see how Beijing would view it as a hostile act. Furthermore, the loss of a drone could give Beijing a reason to adopt an even more aggressive posture in a time of already heightened tensions.

Nevertheless, with the Chinese military’s use of drones having sharply increased in recent weeks, and especially with provocative drone flights over the outlying islands, whoever may be conducting them, it seems that Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense has made the decision to take a harder line in the future. To what degree this is intended as a response to the current tensions and the related questions over national security, is unclear. Still, it appears that Taiwan is now generally taking the drone threat much more seriously.

Taiwan Says It Will Now Shoot Down Rogue Chinese Drones

After a string of embarrassing incursions by Chinese drones over its outlying islands, Taiwan has vowed to shoot them down, if necessary.

BY

THOMAS NEWDICK

AUG 29, 2022 2:54 PM

thedrive.com · by Thomas Newdick · August 29, 2022

As its next move in the fast-developing challenge of Chinese drone incursions, the Taiwanese military has reportedly confirmed that it will, in the future, shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles that don’t respond to its warnings. The move comes after authorities on the self-governing island said they would deploy undisclosed domestically developed drone defense systems across its territory, which followed a highly public encounter between a Chinese drone and two Taiwanese soldiers, as you can read about more here.

According to a report from Taiwan News, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense yesterday announced that its forces would “shoot down intruding Chinese drones that fail to heed warnings.” Exactly what type of drone defense system is planned to be used in such scenarios is unclear, although The War Zone has already looked at some of the possible candidates.

A military drone during the Taiwanese Han Kuang military exercise, which simulates China’s People’s Liberation Army invading the island, on July 27, 2022, in New Taipei City, Taiwan. Photo by Annabelle Chih/Getty Images

What we do know is that the rules of engagement, as described, call for the Taiwanese military to act against drones in its airspace only after they ignore other measures to “drive away” the unmanned aerial vehicles. These include “sounding whistles, broadcasting radio warnings, and firing signal flares.” The last of these is something that Taiwan has done on a fairly regular basis since the current wave of drone incursions began in July. As for the other two, it’s highly questionable if these would have any kind of effect on the small, likely commercially available drone types that seem to have been encountered over Taiwan’s outlying islands. It is unlikely that UAVs of this type would be transmitting live audio let alone be equipped with radios able to transmit and receive voice communications.

It should also be noted that while the Ministry of National Defense reportedly mentioned shooting down the rogue drones, this may well not involve using a gun or missile, or even a net-based system to capture it. A range of other non-kinetic options are available that could similarly disable a UAV and cause it to crash.

A Sky Net anti-drone gun of the Republic of China Air Force during an anti-invasion drill in Chang-Hua, Taiwan, in May 2019. Photo by Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images

Also of particular interest is the fact that the latest announcement refers specifically to Taiwan’s outer islands, rather than the main island, around which Chinese manned aircraft of different kinds now also more regularly operate.

In particular, Chinese drone incursions have been taking place over the islands of Kinmen, also known as Quemoy, as well as the Matsu Islands. At their closest points, these are only around six miles from the coast of mainland China, but around 100 miles from the main island of Taiwan, making their defense extremely problematic. They have also long been the focus of Chinese military activity at times of tension, up to and including artillery bombardment. With the close proximity of these islands to the mainland, they would likely be among the first to be seized in a wider conflict with Taiwan, or they may even be taken as part of a separate operation.

A map showing the general locations of the islands of Kinmen and Matsu, just off the coast of mainland China. Google Earth

That the Kinmen Islands, in particular, are experiencing a Chinese drone ‘problem’ had become abundantly clear by August 16, when a drone appeared over the Lieyu Garrison Battalion on one of the islands of Kinmen.

The drone was variously described as belonging to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) or Chinese civilians, but Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense confirmed that imagery filmed from the drone, which showed its sentries throwing rocks or other objects at the UAV, was genuine.

The Kinmen Defense Command told Taiwan News that the drone “quickly flew away.”

Since then, however, more video has emerged showing another similar incident, also at a military lookout post in Kinmen’s Lieyu Township.

Again, first appearing on the Chinese Weibo social media platform, this video emerged on August 27 and shows Taiwanese troops scrambling to respond to the drone’s appearance. Soldiers are seen speaking into radios and pointing at the drone.

The Kinmen Defense Command again said that the drone involved was a civilian model, and that warning flares were fired at it. However, as we have observed before, an apparently civilian drone doesn’t rule out at least some kind of connection to the Chinese military or intelligence services.

The Kinmen Defense Command has also confirmed 23 intrusions by Chinese drones over Kinmen County since the controversial visit to Taiwan by U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi at the beginning of this month.

Incursions even by smaller unmanned aircraft could threaten sensitive areas on the islands of Kinmen and Matsu, both in peacetime and in a range of different conflict scenarios. At a basic level, their missions could include various types of surveillance, including testing reactions and response times of the defending Republic of China Armed Forces. At the same time, repeated incursions could also serve to tie up Taiwanese resources while providing a low-cost propaganda tool, apparently undermining Taiwanese defense efforts on the islands and highlighting their vulnerability to a Chinese invasion.

In a time of war in the Taiwan Strait, the PLA would almost certainly make use of its many different drone types and even smaller craft could potentially play a useful role, especially during the open stages of a conflict. They could be especially useful in efforts to degrade air defense systems that might be deployed on the islands, achieved both through the drone’s weight of numbers, kinetic effects, and potentially through jamming.

The very public nature of some of these recent incidents could well have prompted, in part, the Ministry of National Defense’s announcement of harsher measures against drones, although we don’t know when these are likely to start being enforced. Indeed, the ease with which these drones have apparently threatened the security of Taiwanese military facilities has resulted in much discussion, including about the seriousness of Taipei’s plans to defend the outlying islands against potential Chinese aggression.

A recent post on the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense Facebook page shows soldiers with a quadcopter drone superimposed and states that it will take “appropriate countermeasures immediately.” The nearest soldier appears to be armed with a flare gun, as used in recent drone encounters.

A close-up of the apparent flare gun. Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense Facebook page

As for the forthcoming drone defense systems, these are directed at a broader set of threats since they are intended to address not just the outlying islands but will be installed at 45 facilities across Taiwan up to 2026, according to the Ministry of National Defense. The investment is expected to amount to $141 million.

However, the particular vulnerability of the outlying islands is being addressed, with reports that military facilities in these locations will be “prioritized.” Next year, according to reports, Taiwan will acquire “five sets of drone defense systems and 232 jammer guns,” and it seems almost certain that at least some of them will be issued to units like those on Kinmen.

As long as civilian drones are being shot down, the potential for further escalation is probably limited. However, were Taiwan to shoot down a UAV belonging to the PLA, it’s unclear what the response from Beijing would be.

The drones seen in the recent video footage are clearly within Taiwanese airspace, but it’s easy to see how a drone skirting Taiwanese territory that was then shot down could lead to a serious international incident. Furthermore, the nature of spy flights is such that opposing sides very frequently disagree on where incidents take place as regards airspace ownership and appropriate response. With Beijing’s expansive claims over territory, the potential for such flashpoints only grows.

Special forces from the Republic of China Marine Corps during an anti-invasion drill in Kinmen island on May 25, 2019. Photo by Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images

Interestingly, it seems that, at least to some degree, Taiwan’s previous approach to drone incursions was based on demonstrating restraint, likely to reduce the chances of such misunderstandings.

Indeed, in the wake of the second Kinmen drone video, which emerged on August 27, the Kinmen Defense Command told Taiwan News that its forces had responded according to the principle of “not starting a war lightly and not escalating a conflict.” How shooting down a drone fits into this posture is not quite clear, but it’s easy to see how Beijing would view it as a hostile act. Furthermore, the loss of a drone could give Beijing a reason to adopt an even more aggressive posture in a time of already heightened tensions.

Nevertheless, with the Chinese military’s use of drones having sharply increased in recent weeks, and especially with provocative drone flights over the outlying islands, whoever may be conducting them, it seems that Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense has made the decision to take a harder line in the future. To what degree this is intended as a response to the current tensions and the related questions over national security, is unclear. Still, it appears that Taiwan is now generally taking the drone threat much more seriously.

Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Thomas Newdick · August 29, 2022

9. U.S. Strategy and the Future of Money: Advancing U.S. Interests During a Financial Transformation

We must be very concerned with our economic instrument of national power.  

This is a very detailed analysis and a strategy proposal.

Excerpts:

This strategy aims to protect the U.S. role in the global financial system, including by ensuring that any new blockchain-based system supports U.S. national security and prosperity within the international rules-based order. The United States should immediately strengthen and broaden the current payment system, to prevent an abrupt change and reduce the incentives for finalizing a new system. The United States should also shape the development of a new system that protects core U.S. interests, working closely with European and other allies to ensure that any new system mitigates risk in line with international norms by reducing the potential for money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and other malicious use of the system.

There is also a clear negative objective to this strategy: to prevent the development of a financial system that abruptly diminishes the U.S. role and reduces U.S. influence. A system that aligns the interests of the private sector with those of U.S. adversaries would present an immediate and challenging threat to the United States.

U.S. Strategy and the Future of Money: Advancing U.S. Interests During a Financial Transformation

Alyce Abdalla  August 29, 2022

thestrategybridge.org · August 29, 2022

Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked civilian and military students around the world to participate in our sixth annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy.

Now, we are pleased to present the First Place winner from Alyce Abdalla, a recent graduate of the U.S. National War College in Washington, D.C.

Introduction

The United States has enjoyed decades of influence over the international financial system thanks to the unique role of the U.S. dollar in the international economy. This dollar dominance could even be considered an element of U.S. power, underpinning a range of political and economic tools used by policymakers to advance U.S. strategic interests. The Chinese-led development of a payment process using Central Bank Digital Currencies threatens the current role of the U.S. dollar in the global financial system, with the potential to eliminate a significant source of U.S. power and prosperity. The U.S. dollar has been the dominant international currency since World War II, essential for international trade and economic stability—over 88 percent of international transactions involve U.S. dollars and over 55 percent of global reserves are held in dollars.[1] The U.S. dollar’s current role both reflects and contributes to the strength of the U.S. economy; any change to this role would have far-reaching effects on the United States, including complicating the financing of the U.S. government budget. China’s push for an international payment system using Central Bank Digital Currencies threatens to weaken U.S. security, hurt the U.S. economy, and decrease the effectiveness of U.S. policy tools.

Given this threat, the United States should aggressively strengthen the current international payment system, ensure U.S. sanctions policies do not accelerate the growth of an alternative payment process, and lead the development of central bank digital currency payments to shape international norms regulating a new blockchain-based system. New technology is almost certain to transform the current financial system; the challenge for the United States, as the dominant country in the current system, is to manage this inevitable transition in a way that best serves the U.S. national interest in the face of increasing competition from China.

U.S.-Dominated Financial System Threatened by Blockchain Alternative

The United States enjoys significant economic and political power from the dominant position of the U.S. dollar in the global financial system. Since the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, international trade has been based on using the U.S. dollar as the intermediary currency. Countries hold U.S. dollars in reserve for a range of reasons related to political and economic stability, including to cover payments for trade should their national currency weaken. No other currency has been able to compete against the dollar’s dominance, even with U.S. use of unilateral sanctions and restrictions. Blockchain technology, however, could offer a new solution by eliminating the need for an intermediary currency for international payments.[2]

Dollar Dominance Promotes U.S. Business, Oversight of Transactions, Access to Cheap Credit

Economists largely agree on the economic benefits of a global currency—U.S. companies do not have to worry about foreign exchange risk affecting their business decisions, as most international transactions are done in U.S. dollars.[3] The role of the dollar means that the SWIFT international payment system assumes that any foreign transaction is routed at some point through U.S. dollars, which makes it possible for the United States to block financial services based on unilateral U.S. sanctions, U.S. legislation against terrorist financing, and U.S. law enforcement decisions. This unique situation has also meant the U.S. monetary policy is not able to fundamentally change the market demand for U.S. dollars, and so U.S. policymakers cannot devalue the U.S. currency to make U.S. exports more competitive.[4] But consistent international demand for U.S. dollars also means that the United States can borrow internationally through loans denominated in U.S. dollars, a tremendous economic advantage over other countries.[5] The United States is able to offer very low interest rates, with returns on Treasury bills at just 1 percent in February 2022, for example, far lower than the inflation rate of 7.9 percent.[6] In essence, other countries pay the United States government for the opportunity to store U.S. dollars in their Central Bank reserves.

Increasing Use of U.S. Sanctions Policy Assumes No Threat to the Dollar’s Role

Other countries, even allies, have long resented the unique benefits the role of the U.S. dollar gives to the United States.[7] Both allies and adversaries have criticized the U.S. for its use of unilateral sanctions to create far-reaching effects on the international financial system.[8] The United States has increasingly turned to sanctions as the policy tool of choice to counter a range of violations of international norms, from an average of 435 additions to the sanctions list each year during the George W. Bush administration, to 533 per year under Obama, to 1000 under Trump.[9] The Biden Administration added 765 names to the sanctions list in its first year in office, and has relied heavily on sanctions to respond to Russia’s war against Ukraine.[10] U.S. sanctions affect almost 80% of Russia’s banking assets.[11] Individuals, companies, and organizations can be added to the U.S. sanctions list under a range of existing sanctions programs, underpinned by different U.S. legislation.[12] In general, once an individual or entity is added to the U.S. sanctions list, it is difficult to be removed, and sanctions programs last for decades, creating strong incentives for sanctioned individuals to seek alternatives to the U.S.-dollar denominated system.[13] Persistent, complicated sanctions have caused “de-risking” by international banks seeking to reduce exposure to even potential violations of U.S. sanctions, which also limits access to the international financial system by people who are not on the sanctions list.[14]

No Other Currency Can Replace the U.S. Dollar...

China, Russia, and other countries that have been subject to U.S. sanctions have actively sought alternatives to the U.S. dollar-dominated SWIFT international payment system, seeking economic independence from U.S. government interference. Even U.S. allies have criticized unilateral U.S. use of “secondary sanctions” that target any entity trading with a sanctioned entity.[15] China has sharply criticized and challenged the dominant role of the United States in the international financial system, arguing that the United States should not have the capability to unilaterally disrupt international trade and payments.[16]

But no other currency in the current system has been able to provide the political stability and economic benefits of the U.S. dollar.[17] Contenders such as the Euro and the Japanese Yen have not come close to replacing the dollar, and no country has the wide-ranging and sophisticated capital markets to compete with the United States.[18] China does not allow companies or individuals to freely move Renminbi in and out of China; its strict control of the exchange rate precludes the Renmini’s viability as a globally dominant currency.[19] China is therefore faced with the challenge of how to end U.S. dominance of the financial system without replacing the U.S. dollar with the Renminbi. Its suggestions to date, such as using the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights to create a new currency for global reserves, have not gained traction.[20]

Untitled (Jason Leung)

Adversaries have also sought alternative payment systems to avoid dollar interactions, as a means of avoiding the effects of U.S. sanctions. These systems, however, have been expensive and limited, reflecting the competitive incumbent advantage of the globally interconnected SWIFT system.[21] The Russian System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) for instance conducted just 2 million transactions in all of 2020, compared to the 41 million transactions per day in the Belgium-based SWIFT interbank transfer network, which includes over 11,000 institutions.[22] China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), launched in 2015, has not been an attractive alternative for international companies given its limited reach, though Russian banks cut off from SWIFT are now exploring the CIPS option.[23] Iran’s convoluted systems to avoid U.S. sanctions is an illustration of the significant costs incurred by U.S. sanctions, requiring an expensive and slow process using shell companies.[24] International banks face stiff penalties for allowing sanctioned individuals or entities to use their system, and often “overcomply” with U.S. sanctions.[25] In the current global financial system, the U.S. dollar is by far the most useful currency.[26]

...But a New System Could Eliminate the Role of A Global Currency

But cryptocurrencies, and specifically Central Bank Digital Currencies, could eliminate the need for any global currency in international financial transactions.[27] Over eighty percent of central banks are exploring options for government-backed digital currencies that could eliminate intermediary banks, which would sharply decrease the use of U.S. dollars.[28] While China banned all private cryptocurrencies in 2021, it launched its Central Bank Digital Currency now in use by 100 million people in 10 cities.[29] China’s system allows for surveillance of every transaction, in support of its domestic priorities, and China is contributing to the development of Central Bank Digital Currency international norms and standards by the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland.[30]

China is part of a small Bank of International Settlements working group, along with Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, that is developing a pilot program to use Central Bank Digital Currency exchanges to end the need for correspondent banks for international payments. The Bank of International Settlements estimates this new payment process could be instantaneous (as compared to a day or more via SWIFT) and cut the cost of international transactions by half.[31] This process would remove the role of a global currency from international financial transactions.

Industry Leaders Are Poorly Placed to Recognize Technology-Driven Disruption

Experience from other industries transformed by technology, such as journalism or photography, suggests that the dominant institution in the traditional industry is poorly placed to identify and exploit the new technology. Existing organizational incentives make it difficult for the dominant institution to accept and adapt to emerging technology. The United States is deeply invested in the international system that currently exists. In contrast to China’s early launch of a Central Bank Digital Currency, U.S. officials do not agree on whether the United States should issue a digital currency.[32] U.S. government expertise on cryptography, blockchain, and other cyber tools is not concentrated within federal agencies responsible for economic issues and financial sector priorities. The Biden Administration issued an Executive Order on the Responsible Development of Digital Assets on March 9, 2022, noting the sector’s $3 trillion value and calling for agency recommendations by September 2022 on the potential for a Central Bank Digital Currency and proposals for regulation of cryptocurrencies.[33] The Federal Reserve has not issued a position on whether such a currency is warranted, but has said any Central Bank Digital Currency should be “privacy-protected, intermediated, widely transferable, and identity-verified.”[34] There is no U.S. consensus on how to address digital assets and digital currencies, with disagreement on how to classify cryptocurrencies and how to maintain protections against money laundering and terrorist financing.[35] U.S. banks have resisted consideration of a new system that could eliminate the need for some of their financial services; one Harvard economist estimated the United States is at least a decade away from a launch of a Central Bank Digital Currency.[36]

Blockchain Could Merge Private Sector and Adversary Interests

If China succeeds in developing a fast, cheap, and reliable blockchain-based payment system, under the auspices of the Bank of International Settlements, the effects on the U.S. economy and its political influence would be rapid and intense. Any country affected by U.S. sanctions would have a strong incentive to use the new system, and so, even more importantly, would any profit-seeking private sector enterprise. A shift away from using correspondent banks would immediately remove the effectiveness of unilateral sanctions. It would also sharply decrease the demand for U.S. dollars, which would no longer be necessary for international transactions. The price, therefore, of a dollar would decrease – interest rates on Treasury Bills would have to be higher in order for the United States to borrow money. U.S. debt, already at historically high levels, would suddenly become more expensive to finance, which could sharply reduce U.S. economic growth, U.S. government spending, and U.S. political power.[37]

Bitcoin (André François McKenzie)

Political Aim—Reliable U.S. Leadership of the Global Financial System

This strategy aims to protect the U.S. role in the global financial system, including by ensuring that any new blockchain-based system supports U.S. national security and prosperity within the international rules-based order. The United States should immediately strengthen and broaden the current payment system, to prevent an abrupt change and reduce the incentives for finalizing a new system. The United States should also shape the development of a new system that protects core U.S. interests, working closely with European and other allies to ensure that any new system mitigates risk in line with international norms by reducing the potential for money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and other malicious use of the system.

There is also a clear negative objective to this strategy: to prevent the development of a financial system that abruptly diminishes the U.S. role and reduces U.S. influence. A system that aligns the interests of the private sector with those of U.S. adversaries would present an immediate and challenging threat to the United States.

Bolster Existing System While Leading the Development of A New One

Policymakers should consider two complementary approaches to address the threat to this element of U.S. power. First, the United States should strengthen the existing system and reduce incentives for the development of a new system in order to prevent an abrupt change to a new adversary-led system. Second, the United States should manage and lead the development of a new system based on international norms, through U.S. involvement in the development of a new blockchain-based system and increasing information about the risks of other payment systems. Increasing international understanding of the potentially exploitative nature of a system dominated by an authoritarian state also contributes to building support for U.S. influence in a new blockchain-based system.

Line of Effort 1: Strengthen and Invest in Existing U.S.-Dominated System

The United States should encourage use of the existing SWIFT system by investing in a program to accelerate payments and reduce transaction costs. This system is led by the G-10 central banks (Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, UK, United States, Switzerland, and Sweden), and the European Central Bank. A multilateral working group should consider what G-10 investments might decrease the costs of transactions and what new technology could accelerate completion of transactions. The United States should also consider multilateral a G-10 fund to contribute resources to strengthening the SWIFT program, with a goal of reducing the costs of transactions by 75 percent.

Line of Effort 2: Build Inclusivity of Current Payment System

The United States should make the current financial system as broad and inclusive as possible, and carefully consider the effect on the payment system before imposing any sanctions outside of those authorized by the United Nations. This recommendation does not suggest ending the use of sanctions; instead, it advocates for accounting for the long-term risk to the United States into the decision-making process regarding additions to the sanctions list. The U.S. government should consider and develop alternative policy tools to counter violations of international norms, preparing for circumstances where denouncing and deterring this activity is important but does not outweigh the costs of using unilateral standards. Alternative actions might include visa bans, cyber-connectivity consequences, and U.S.-based asset freezes to counter activities that do not meet the criteria for sanctions. The United States should also develop a range of positive incentives for cooperation. Certain sanctions will, of course, still be appropriate policy responses even under this new standard. Sanctions, in fact, will be more effective at imposing costs when used less frequently, as there will be increased credibility of the seriousness of U.S. action and fewer incentives globally to develop evasive alternatives.

Line of Effort 3: Shape New Blockchain-Based System

The United States should lead the development of a Central Bank Digital Currency payment process and related regulations in coordination with the existing G-10 countries involved with SWIFT, contributing $10 million to build U.S. leadership of this process. The United States should launch a SWIFT-based study of the potential for a Central Bank Digital Currency payment program, to ensure that a new system is developed by SWIFT, building on its existing network and experience.

As this work affects the core U.S. interest of prosperity, and to some extent security, the full range of U.S. tools should be used to secure this agreement to mitigate money laundering, terrorist financing, and U.S. law evasion. The European Union and its member states have a strong focus on data privacy, and should be considered natural allies to this work, as an authoritarian-led payment system would reinforce surveillance and control goals. The United States should promote data privacy, cybersecurity, and financial sector integrity.

The United States should also lead the global effort to develop a robust cryptocurrency sector, through efficient and appropriate regulation. Building on the March 9, 2022 Executive Order on Responsible Development of Digital Assets, Congress should consider legislation to clarify and streamline the regulation and promotion of this sector. This support for cryptocurrency and technological development also serves as an example of the freedom and innovation available in the United States, contributing to public messaging regarding a system run by a surveillance-focused authoritarian state.

As the center for cryptocurrency innovation, the United States should lead work to develop norms and standards for cryptocurrency use and regulation in line with the liberal international order—with data protection and privacy, transparency, and measures to counter illicit use of the international financial system by criminals and malicious actors. The United States should explore how to both protect privacy while also allowing for oversight to prevent illicit use of the global financial system.

Line of Effort 4: Track and Interrupt Illicit Use of Alternative Payment Systems

The United States should track the use of alternative payment systems that avoid U.S. dollars, in order to identify, deter, and stop illicit activity. Using this information, the U.S. government should coordinate international law enforcement engagement to stop illicit activity, including terrorist financing, money laundering, and sanctions evasion. The Treasury Department should work with the international Financial Action Task Force to ensure that illicit use and availability of alternative payment systems are added to its criteria for assessment of responsible financial systems. The U.S. government should also work with U.S. companies and international partners to explain the risks associated with involvement in alternative payment systems that seek to avoid U.S. legal oversight.

Risks and Assumptions

The United States has been slow to consider the development of a digital currency and faces the challenges of an incumbent dominant industry during the emergence of a potentially disruptive technology—the benefits and incentives of the current dominance can complicate efforts to investigate and advance potential disruptors. The U.S. financial sector benefits tremendously from the current system, with business services designed for the current payment processes. The U.S. government is accustomed to U.S. dominance of the financial system, as demonstrated by the frequent use of unilateral sanctions. These incumbent interests could prevent the U.S. from managing this new technology, which would allow China to dominate a new system.

This strategy, even if successful, risks a long-term decrease in U.S. oversight of, and U.S. dollar involvement in, the global financial system as blockchain becomes the basis of the SWIFT payment process. This use of blockchain-underpinned transactions would also lead to a decrease in use of U.S. dollars, but this strategy would manage the transition to slow the effect on the value of the U.S. dollar and include as much U.S. oversight and involvement as possible in the new system. Similarly, the strategy’s acknowledgement of the costs to the United States of unilateral use of sanctions might risk public criticism in the United States, given the relative popularity of this policy tool.

Counterarguments—Manage the Disruption

One potential critique of this strategy is that no digital currency or cryptocurrency can replace the U.S. dollar in terms of trust and reliability, an argument that rests on U.S. stability and power alongside a fundamental misunderstanding of how blockchain technology could change the payment system. It is not that cryptocurrency or China’s Central Bank Digital Currency would replace the U.S. dollar as the currency of choice; instead, there would no longer be a need for any international currency to serve as an intermediary in foreign transactions. The U.S. dollar might well retain its position as the global reserve currency, but the demand for dollars would still decline sharply as the financial payment system would no longer need an international currency to work.

Another argument against this strategy is that the United States should work against any use of blockchain technology in payment systems, and instead use its power to maintain the existing system. This approach would focus on the first part of the strategy, where the United States strengthens and modernizes the existing SWIFT payment process while ensuring it is as inclusive as possible. Advocates of this approach might suggest that the United States would “legitimize” the use of blockchain technology in international transfers by sponsoring the investigation into its use. This analysis is the common response of industry leaders facing disruptive technology. The Kodak corporation, for instance, invented digital photography in 1975, and even held the patent for this technology until 2007. But internally to the company digital photography was seen as a competitor of the Kodak monopoly on print photography, and the company blocked digital camera products in spite of growing market demand. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.[38] A strategy that fails to account for the potential efficiency gains of a new financial payment system runs the risk that the market demand for efficiency will be served by a system developed and run by a U.S. adversary.

Finally, it is possible that the new blockchain-based system, even if developed with U.S. leadership and within the SWIFT payment process, will also result in a decline in demand for U.S. dollars. This outcome depends on the technological process that is tested and developed, but certainly seems likely. In this case, the strategy would not prevent this technological change from affecting demand for the U.S. dollar; U.S. debt financing will still become more expensive, and the value of the U.S. dollar will decrease. But the strategy is designed to delay this process, manage the transition, and mitigate the potential for illicit use of the global financial system in line with international norms. The new system might not serve U.S. interests as well as the current one, but it would still be much more likely to serve U.S. interests than one designed and promoted by U.S. adversaries.

Alyce Abdalla is a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State, and a member of the National War College Class of 2022. The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, or the U.S. Government.

The Strategy Bridge is read, respected, and referenced across the worldwide national security community—in conversation, education, and professional and academic discourse.

Thank you for being a part of the The Strategy Bridge community. Together, we can #BuildTheBridge.

Header Image: Untitled (Timis Alexandra)

Notes:

[1] Carol Bertaut, Bastian von Beschwitz, Stephanie Curcuru, “The International Role of the U.S. Dollar.” FEDSNotes, October 6, 2021 https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/the-international-role-of-the-u-s-dollar-20211006.htm and “U.S. Dollar Share of Global Foreign Exchange Reserves Drops to 25-Year Low,” IMFBlog, May 5, 2021, https://blogs.imf.org/2021/05/05/us-dollar-share-of-global-foreign-exchange-reserves-drops-to-25-year-low/.

[2] “Multi-CBDC prototype shows potential for reducing costs and speeding up cross-border payments,” Bank of International Settlements, September 28, 2021, https://www.bis.org/press/p210928.htm.

[3] See for instance Benjamin J. Cohen, Currency Power: Understanding Monetary Rivalry, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 2015), 238.

[4] Anshu Siripurapu, “The Dollar: The World’s Currency,” Council on Foreign Relations, September 29, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/dollar-worlds-currency.

[5] Gabrielle Sierra, “The Dollar Privilege, Why it Matters,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 18, 2021, https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/dollar-privilege.

[6] U.S. Department of Treasury, “Daily Treasury Par Yield Curve Rates,” March 29, 2022,

https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?type=daily_treasury_yield_curve&field_tdr_date_value=2022. U.S. Department of Labor, “Consumer Price Index – February 2022,” March 10, 2022, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf.

[7] Daniel Drezner,“The United States of Sanctions,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2021, 154.

[8] Samantha Sultoon and Justine Walker, “Secondary Sanctions’ Implications and the Transatlantic Relationship,” Atlantic Council, September 2019.

[9] “2020 Year-End Sanctions and Export Controls Update,” Gibson Dunn, February 5, 2021. https://www.gibsondunn.com/2020-year-end-sanctions-and-export-controls-update/.

[10] Jason Bartlett and Euihyun Bae, “Sanctions by the Numbers: 2021 Year in Review,” CNAS, January 13, 2022, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/sanctions-by-the-numbers-2021-year-in-review.

[11] Marcus Lu and Christina Kostandi, “A Recent History of U.S. Sanctions on Russia,” Visual Capitalist, March 17, 2022, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-U.S.-sanctions-on-rU.S.sia/.

[12] For a list of the 35 general groups of current sanction programs see “Sanctions Programs and Country Information,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, available at https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/sanctions-programs-and-country-information, accessed April 14, 2022. The full list of sanctioned entities is available at “Sanctions List Search,” Office of Foreign Assets Control, Department of the Treasury, https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/.

[13] For a list of the statutes providing the legal basis for U.S. sanctions programs see “Financial Sanctions: United States Statutes,” U.S. Treasury Department. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/additional-ofac-resources/ofac-legal-library/united-states-statutes, accessed March 31, 2022.

[14] Tracey Durner and Liat Shetret,“Understanding Bank De-Risking and its Effects on Financial Inclusion,” Global Center on Cooperative Security, November 2015, https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/rr-bank-de-risking-181115-en_0.pdf.

[15] Jason Bartlett and Megan Ophel, “Sanctions by the Numbers: Secondary Sanctions” CNAS, August 26, 2021, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/sanctions-by-the-numbers-u-s-secondary-sanctions.

[16] Steven Ehrlich, “Not A Cold War: China Is Using A Digital Currency Insurgency To Unseat The U.S. Dollar,” Forbes, October 15, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2020/10/15/not-a-cold-war-china-is-U.S.ing-a-digital-currency-insurgency-to-unseat-the-U.S.-dollar/?sh=17f0789748a5.

[17] Cohen, Currency Power 161.

[18] Eswar Prasad, “Has the dollar lost ground as the dominant international currency?” Brookings, September 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/DollarInGlobalFinance.final_.9.20.pdf.

[19] "Will China’s Push to Internationalize the Renminbi Succeed?" CSIS, April 1, 2020. Updated August 26, 2020. Accessed March 29, 2022. https://chinapower.csis.org/china-renminbi-rmb-internationalization/.

[20] U.S. Department of Treasury, “FACT SHEET: How An Allocation of International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights Will Support Low-Income Countries, the Global Economy, and the United States,” April 1, 2021, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0095.

[21] See for example Samantha Hoffman et al, “The flipside of China’s central bank digital currency,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, International Cyber Policy Center Policy Brief Report No. 40/2020, October 12, 2020; “Russia Cultivates Alternatives to Western Financial Firms” The Economist, August 28, 2021; and Analisa Girardi, “INSTEX, A New Channel To Bypass U.S. Sanctions And Trade With Iran” Forbes, April 9 2019.

[22] Catherine Belton, Paritosh Bansal, and Megan Davies, “Analysis: SWIFT block deals crippling blow to Russia; leaves room to tighten,” Reuters, February 27, 2022. “SWIFT FIN Traffic and Figures,” SWIFT, March 29, 2022, https://www.swift.com/about-U.S./discover-swift/fin-traffic-figures.

[23] Elliot Wilson, “China’s CIPS Trapped in Swift’s Shadow” Euromoney, March 4, 2022, https://www.euromoney.com/article/29sh7rxz38y3j2kd7vmrk/treasury/chinas-cips-trapped-in-swifts-shadow.

[24] See for instance U.S. Department of Justice, “Iranian Nationals Charged with Conspiring to Evade U.S. Sanctions on Iran by Disguising $300 Million in Transactions Over Two Decades,” March 19, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/U.S.ao-cdca/pr/iranian-nationals-charged-conspiring-evade-U.S.-sanctions-iran-disguising-300-million and Ian Talley, “Clandestine Finance System Helped Iran Withstand Sanctions Crush, Documents Show” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2022.

[25] Sanne Wass, “Sanctions against Russia may prompt Iran-style de-risking by banks” S&P Global, March 3, 2022.

[26] Rebecca M. Nelson, James K. Jackson, and Martin A. Weiss, “The U.S. Dollar as the World’s Dominant Reserve Currency,” CRS Report, December 18, 2020.

[27] While both cryptocurrencies (such as BitCoin and Ethereum) and Central Bank Digital Currencies are managed through blockchain technology, the former has no centralized authority, whereas the latter is issued, managed, and backed by a government. See Ryan Haar, “The 10 Most Popular Cryptocurrencies,” Time Magazine, November 30, 2021, https://time.com/nextadvisor/investing/cryptocurrency/types-of-cryptocurrency/.

[28] Raphael Auer, Giulio Cornelli and Jon Frost, “Rise of the central bank digital currencies: drivers, approaches and technologies,” Bank of International Settlements working paper, No 880, August 2020.

[29] Laura He, “China's digital yuan could be used by athletes and visitors at the Beijing Olympics,” CNN Business, April 19, 2021.

[30] Charlie Campbell, “How China’s Digital Currency Could Challenge the Almighty Dollar,” Time Magazine, August 11, 2021.

[31] “Multiple CBDC (mCBDC) Bridge,” Bank of International Settlements, accessed March 29, 2022, https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/cbdc/mcbdc_bridge.htm .

[32] See for example: Speech by Member of the Federal Reserve System Board of Governors Christopher J. Waller “CBDC: A Solution in Search of a Problem?” at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, August 5, 2021. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/waller20210805a.htm.

[33] “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets,” The White House, March 9, 2022, https://www.whitehoU.S.e.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/03/09/executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-development-of-digital-assets/.

[34] “Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, January 2022, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/money-and-payments-20220120.pdf.

[35] Justin Muzinich, “America’s Crypto Conundrum,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021, 136.

[36] Dion Rabouin, “The U.S. Is Losing the Global Race to Decide the Future of Money—and It Could Doom the Almighty Dollar,” Time Magazine, September 21, 2021.

[37] James McBride and Anshu Siripurapu,” The National Debt Dilemma,” Council on Foreign Relations, October 1, 2021, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/national-debt-dilemma.

[38] James Estrin, “Kodak’s First Digital Moment,” New York Times Lens Blog, August 12, 2015. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-digital-moment/.

thestrategybridge.org · August 29, 2022

10. Kherson: Ukraine claims new push in Russian-held region

Kherson: Ukraine claims new push in Russian-held region

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By Leo Sands & Yaroslav Lukov

BBC News

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Ukrainian soldiers prepare artillery at the southern frontline near Kherson last month

Ukraine's military claims to have broken through Russia's first line of defence in the occupied Kherson region.

The reported push appears to form part of a long-awaited offensive being launched by Kyiv in an attempt to retake the country's south.

It follows weeks of Ukrainian attacks aimed at cutting off Russian forces there from main supply routes.

Russia's military has not commented on Ukraine's claim, but one official said this was "yet another fake".

"Ukrainian formations are suffering severe losses both in the south and in all other directions," said Sergei Aksyonov, the Moscow-installed head of Crimea - Ukraine's southern peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

The claims by both Ukraine and Russia have not been independently verified.

Russia has occupied large swathes of Ukraine's Kherson region since its invasion began on 24 February.

On Monday, Ukraine's Kakhovka operational group in the south said that one regiment of Russian-backed forces had left its positions in the Kherson region.

It added that Russian paratroopers providing the back-up had fled the battlefield.

Ukraine's Hromadske TV said three of its sources in Ukraine's military confirmed that the first line of defence had been broken.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian army spokeswoman Natalia Humeniuk said "any military operation requires 'silence' regime", urging Ukrainians to be patient.

"Our main efforts have been focused on destroying the enemy's ammunition storage bases. More than 10 of such bases were destroyed over the past week," she said.

But Ms Humeniuk refused to give any further details.

In a telegram post the Ukrainian military also claimed on Monday to have struck multiple targets in the region, including a factory in Beryslav and a Russian army post by the North Crimean Canal.

Kyiv officials claim to have used US-supplied Himars rocket systems to destroy three bridges crossing the Dnipro River, strikes it said would cut the Russian forces occupying Kherson off from weapons and troop reinforcements.

According to Western military sources, Kyiv's strikes on the river crossings are part of a targeted effort to isolate Russian troops on the right (western) bank of the river with the ultimate goal of recapturing the entire Kherson region.

Moscow relied on the bridges to resupply their troops stationed west of the Dnipro river, who are now at risk of becoming isolated from the rest of Russia's occupying forces.

Russian outlets also reported on Monday that Ukraine had struck targets in the Kherson region - but reported that the strikes had focused on civilian infrastructure.

Moscow-appointed regional official Vladimir Leontyev claimed on Monday that Ukrainian forces had shelled a hydropower plant and floodway in the Kherson city of Novaya Kakhovka, according to Russia's TASS news agency.

Its forces also claimed to have shot down three ballistic missiles and 21 rockets reportedly fired by Ukrainian forces.

Russia captured the city of Kherson and its surrounding region with relatively little resistance in the early days of the invasion.

The southern city, which had a population of 290,000 before the war, is the only regional capital to have been taken by Russian forces and is currently administered by Moscow-backed officials.

According to Russia's Tass news agency, officials in Kherson city have started moving forward with plans to hold a referendum on formally joining Russia, prompting accusations by the US that Russia could be preparing to illegally annex parts of occupied southern Ukraine.

Last month Russia said its military focus was no longer only on eastern Ukraine but on its southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia too.

Analysis by BBC's Hugo Bachega in Kyiv

Ukraine has long been expected to launch a major offensive to retake Kherson. We could be seeing the beginning of it, although any operation is unlikely to be easy.

Kherson has been under occupation since the early days of the war, and it's one of the largest Ukrainian cities in Russian hands.

For weeks, Ukrainian forces have repeatedly targeted Russian positions deep inside captured territory, away from the frontlines.

It's only been possible because of the sophisticated weapons supplied by the West - and it's having a destabilising effect on the invading forces.

The conflict seems to be at a deadlock, with neither side making significant gains. This could be about to change.

In a separate development on Monday, Russian-installed officials in the Zaporizhzhia region claimed that a Ukrainian missile strike punched a hole in the roof of a fuel depot at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

The claim has not been independently verified.

In recent weeks, both Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling Europe's biggest nuclear station, which was seized by Russia in early March. Moscow has kept Ukrainian personnel to operate the station.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the world narrowly avoided a radiation accident at the plant, blaming Moscow's actions for this.

An inspection team from the UN nuclear watchdog is expected to arrive at the plant later this week, the organisation's head says.

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11. The United States Is Behind the Curve on Blockchain

Excerpts:

To research those questions, U.S. national security players like the Defense Department, the National Institute of Science and Technology, or the National Security Agency could establish an interagency cross-functional team to explore the blockchain space and inform long-term blockchain policy. In addition, this team should most certainly include industry and academia experts. After a sprint, the team’s white paper or report should outline internal and external equities and detail blockchain courses of action tied to national security priorities.

Finally, in the near term, Department of Defense leaders should raise awareness among those evaluating and acquiring technology and communicate blockchain’s opportunities, risks, and vulnerabilities. Bolstered by improved blockchain and data literacy, Defense Department acquisitions professionals, technologists, and servicemembers can continue to innovate utilizing both current and emerging technologies. However, without a comprehensive understanding of blockchain technology, the United States risks contending in an information environment shaped by competitors and on an internet owned by the Chinese Communist Party. The United States should investigate blockchain technology and craft strategic policy today to compete successfully in tomorrow’s information environment.

The United States Is Behind the Curve on Blockchain - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Mike Knapp · August 30, 2022

The price implosion of digital images of cartoon gorillas and the collapse of the cryptocurrency market led to head-scratching and finger-wagging. The headlines generated by these crashes belie the significance of their technological infrastructure — blockchain. (Blockchain is distinct from the popular Bitcoin cryptocurrency: Blockchain is the broad, foundational technology while Bitcoin is a single application of the technology.) Blockchain is an enhancer and accelerator of technologies like additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence, loyal wingman autonomous aircraft, or space architecture. Those who misunderstand blockchain risk putting themselves behind the competition in today’s internet and tomorrow’s information environment.

Become a Member

The U.S. government views blockchain as a “technology of tomorrow” while competitors aggressively pursue efforts today to integrate blockchain, data, and the information environment. China is well ahead of the United States in blockchain policy, innovation, and implementation across society. To compete across all elements of national power, the United States requires a coherent, coordinated blockchain strategy and supporting policy. The Department of Defense should explore blockchain technology with the same earnestness as other emerging technology research to jumpstart that discussion. Blockchain is not a weapon system by itself — it is a critical enabling technology of the information environment. The challenge is not only educating more people inside the U.S. government about blockchain technology but also mastering blockchain and its applications as a nation first. Miscomprehending blockchain undermines U.S. competitive efforts across all instruments of national power and allows China the ability to shape tomorrow’s information environment.

Blockchain Basics

Blockchain is, at its most basic level, a unique way to store data. It is a subset of proven distributed ledger technology and utilizes cryptography to maintain a chronologically ordered record of transactions. This data record, or ledger, is a digital database shared and synchronized (i.e., distributed) among multiple nodes in a computer network without a central arbitration authority. A traditional database typically structures data into tables. Data tables, even if shared across multiple nodes in the network, require a central software arbiter to validate changes and promulgate the updated data set across the network. In this way, traditional databases can be visualized as “hub and spoke.”

In contrast, blockchain data is stored in blocks on an ever-growing chain. When new data is added to the existing data set, a new block forms. This new data block connects cryptographically to the previous chain of data blocks via a digital signature or “hash value.” This cryptographic hash value depends on both the new data and the previous chain of data blocks. New data blocks are then broadcast to all nodes in the network for validation and addition to existing, distributed copies of the blockchain. From an overall network perspective, nodes, not a central arbitration authority, can validate and trust all new and previous blocks of data simply because of the cryptographic hash values.

Notably, blockchain technology is not a new technology but rather an innovative combination of existing technologies: asymmetric key encryption (e.g., HTTPS) for identity creation, cryptographic hash values for data integrity, the Merkle tree cryptographic concept for chaining blocks of data together, and peer-to-peer networking (as used on file-sharing sites, like LimeWire) for distributed operations. Together, these allow blockchain to provide efficient, secure, “trustless” transactions without intermediary authorities.

Generally, blockchain networks are categorized as public or private networks. In public blockchain networks, anyone can join or participate. This type of network is more transparent and tamper-resistant due to its size, but it is harder to scale or change its governance. The popular Bitcoin or Ethereum networks, which enable the eponymous cryptocurrencies, are both examples of public blockchains.

Conversely, a private blockchain network is constructed so that one organization controls users’ access and level of participation. Although this type of network is smaller and less redundant, it generates efficiencies in transacting data. At the intersection of public and private networks is a hybrid network known as a consortium blockchain, a semi-private network governed by several organizations. Consortium blockchain networks are likely the best structures for emerging government or military applications. In fact, Deloitte estimates that 74 percent of new organizational blockchains are consortium blockchains. As the United States and its allies and partners rethink information advantage in a global environment, blockchain technology, supported by solid strategy and policy, should play a key role.

China’s Blockchain Efforts

China views blockchain technology as significant as other emerging technologies for industrial and economic development. In October 2021, Xi Jinping spoke to a Politburo study session on the digital economy: “Innovation in the Internet, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other such technologies has quickened [… and] is becoming a critical force in reorganizing global factor resources, reshaping global economic structures, and changing global competition structures.” China’s volume of blockchain-related patents highlights its efforts to dominate that technology: From 2015 to 2021, China filed nearly 33,000 patents while the United States filed just over 10,000 patents. China is not only incubating blockchain technology — it is accelerating its application to gain an enduring, first-mover advantage.

In December 2021, China’s Central Commission for Cybersecurity and Informatization issued its 14th Five-Year Plan, which highlighted blockchain’s importance across multiple fields, such as distributed identification, data exploitation, cloud-networking, and domestic digital innovation. To date, China has demonstrated concentrated blockchain efforts in six areas: First, China developed the digital yuan, a blockchain-based central bank digital currency. After two years of experimentation, China showcased the digital yuan at the 2022 Winter Olympics as a more secure (and traceable) payment method. Second, blockchain enables Shanghai’s smart infrastructure. Since 2019, the smart city program has facilitated road network management, public health efforts, energy generation, and pollution reduction via blockchain networks. Third, Chinese police integrate blockchain into investigations. Blockchain’s traceability and immutability help preserve electronic and physical evidence for criminal prosecutions. Fourth, China uses blockchain platforms to broadcast verifiable public-health information about COVID-19 to its citizens and reduce the possibility of misinformation. Fifth, the People’s Liberation Army is testing blockchain to manage personnel and pay records, reduce corruption, and “boost performance.” Finally, China uses blockchain technology to help monitor and control its population.

Most recently, Chinese authorities may have altered users’ COVID-19 status to false positives via a smartphone tracking app to prevent protests by forcing citizens into quarantine. This underlying blockchain technology assists police in gathering evidence of online dissidents and secures the Chinese social credit system. Yet China’s blockchain efforts look beyond domestic applications — China intends to build a global Chinese-controlled blockchain internet.

China’s Belt and Road initiative extends to blockchain. Intending to influence the world’s blockchain ecosystem, China launched its Blockchain-based Service Network in April 2020. The network serves as a low-cost, back-end infrastructure system for software developers to build blockchain applications. Similar to the popular Ethereum blockchain network, the Blockchain-based Service Network is intended to become “the blockchain internet” via a “cross-cloud, cross-portal, cross-framework, global infrastructure network” and serve as a platform on which to create new software applications. Indeed, the accompanying white paper emphasizes that “once the [Blockchain-based Service Network] is deployed globally, it will become the only global infrastructure network autonomously innovated by Chinese entities and for which network access is Chinese-controlled.” This network, coupled with the massive number of blockchain patents, supports “China Standards 2035,” China’s long-term attempt to set international standards in favor of Chinese interests. Congressional testimony from the Center for a New American Security underscores this danger: “Blockchain developers [in democratic countries] should realize that if they help build the [Blockchain-based Service Network], they are constructing the Chinese Communist Party’s new internet ecosystem.” Absent leadership from the United States and its allies or partners, China is poised to achieve the critical mass required to shape tomorrow’s internet along Chinese Communist Party standards. A Chinese version of tomorrow’s internet is unlikely to support a free and open flow of information.

Implications

Lacking a firm understanding of blockchain, the United States risks competing in an information environment dominated by China. There are serious implications for miscomprehending blockchain and its role in developing tomorrow’s internet. Currently, the internet is evolving from centralized data anchored by a handful of large, influential technology firms like Meta (formerly Facebook) and Google in what is known as Web 2.0. The next iteration, “web3,” features decentralized blockchain networks and disaggregated data. (To be clear, instances of web3 are in use today alongside Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 but are less widespread or obvious to end users.) Unsurprisingly, applications of future technology are difficult to predict. For instance, few predicted the asymmetric effects of social media influencers or envisioned the easy spread of misinformation at Web 2.0’s genesis. What misapplications, opportunities, or risks are not forecasted about web3? What are the unknown unknowns of a new blockchain internet and an unfamiliar information environment?

Blockchain is an enabling technology, not a panacea for competition in the information environment. For example, several nations (including the United States) are investigating blockchain technology to implement digital fiat currency or central bank digital currency, as China has already done with the digital yuan. On the positive side, creating a digital currency could streamline tax filing or the delivery of targeted stimulus programs. On the other hand, if a non-U.S. central bank digital currency or cryptocurrency quickly gains widespread adoption, could U.S. economic sanctions be rendered moot? North Korea’s 2018 theft of $250 million worth of cryptocurrency was an evasion of international economic sanctions. What does integrated deterrence look like with minimized financial sanctions? How is diplomatic or military power affected if America’s economic instrument of power is weakened?

Blockchain technology extends beyond financial applications, however. It occupies a critical space in the information technology and data landscapes. Blockchain enhances both cybersecurity and zero-trust architecture, a new model for designing networks. For example, the effects of a ransomware attack are blunted if data is distributed across multiple nodes in a blockchain. Additionally, blockchain can efficiently inventory software across an information-technology enterprise — an entire company or governmental department, for instance — so administrators can rapidly patch targeted machines when required. Moreover, as the U.S. government shifts to a zero-trust architecture, blockchain has shown promise in creating data stacks resistant to tampering, decentralizing public key infrastructure, and utilizing intrusion detection systems. Blockchained data combined with artificial intelligence could even validate data like GPS signals to counter adversaries’ spoofing attempts.

Without concerted U.S. developmental efforts, what are the consequences when national-security information systems utilize Chinese or a public blockchain infrastructure? The nascent Chinese Blockchain-based Service Network is an obvious blockchain infrastructure developers should avoid. However, commercially available public blockchains like the Ethereum network are more challenging to understand. Like the Blockchain-based Service Network, the Ethereum network is designed for developers to easily build applications on top of the software infrastructure. It is not likely that the Ethereum network is constructed maliciously. Also, less is known about whether the network has significant cyber vulnerabilities for U.S. government applications. Regardless, the network is experimenting with new code to position itself for mass commercial user adoption without considering U.S. national security standards. What happens if future government networks or commercial-acquired applications compute on a public blockchain network like Ethereum because no ready alternative exists?

By far, blockchain technology’s most considerable implications center around data. China views data as critical for competing in finance, industry, or even warfare. In 2013, Xi commented: “[B]ig data is the free resource of the industrial society. Whoever has a hold of the data has the initiative.” As the internet of things expands and data availability grows, blockchain offers a new framework to gather, disseminate, and exploit data. Instead of traditionally transmitting data back and forth between nodes for validation, trusted data could be broadcast to a network. This new network structure avoids the need for a central arbitration authority and generates overall network efficiencies. As an illustration, new cars could communicate directly with one another to avoid accidents or reduce traffic congestion. Those cars could also share their standardized and trusted data with a broad data ecosystem via blockchain, industries like food delivery, car insurance, civil engineering, and others. Blockchain is a new data-infrastructure paradigm, enabling other technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, and can support U.S. efforts to seize the initiative in data competition.

So, what happens when China leapfrogs the United States in the big data and blockchain sectors?

There is not yet a blockchain application that triggers immediate, widespread adoption of the technology or ushers in web3 at scale. China acknowledges this fact yet continues to prioritize blockchain development and promulgate the Blockchain-based Service Network in the country’s quest to exploit data and maintain the first-mover advantage. As one expert portends, web3 “would enable an internet of things where all digital things can communicate and transact with each other, enabling a new era of digital innovation and economic possibilities. But it would be an internet where China owns the underlying infrastructure.” Xi’s comments underscore that point: “The amount of information controlled has become an important indicator of a nation’s soft power and competitiveness.” Harnessing information has substantial implications for current U.S. economic and military advantages. China is looking “50 to 100 years in the future” by developing technologies today that support a vision of Chinese data dominance in the information environment. Getting blockchain right first is a national imperative.

Suggested Way Ahead

Blockchain and web3 development require a whole-of-nation approach. The commercial industry, rather than a government agency, will most likely deliver a use case or application that achieves critical mass for widespread blockchain adoption. However, competition with China necessitates clear governmental policy to secure freedom of movement in a web3 environment for the United States and its allies and partners.

A critical first step in negating Chinese influence in web3 is developing blockchain standards for commercial and government use. What protocol governs decentralized blockchain applications, and what ethics govern smart contract execution? Should a standard blockchain ecosystem be available to government and industry developers as an alternative to China’s sponsored Blockchain-based Service Network or the public Ethereum networks? The Department of Defense’s sponsorship of TCP/IP as a standard protocol for data delivery in 1982 serves as an example of effective policy for new technology with international implications. And in the near term, the United States should blunt efforts to shape blockchain standards to China’s advantage in international technology standards developing organizations. While several questions about blockchain’s tactical applicability for the military services remain, broader strategic policy questions must be settled in this burgeoning technology landscape, especially as blockchain will be a technology underlying future U.S. competitive efforts.

To research those questions, U.S. national security players like the Defense Department, the National Institute of Science and Technology, or the National Security Agency could establish an interagency cross-functional team to explore the blockchain space and inform long-term blockchain policy. In addition, this team should most certainly include industry and academia experts. After a sprint, the team’s white paper or report should outline internal and external equities and detail blockchain courses of action tied to national security priorities.

Finally, in the near term, Department of Defense leaders should raise awareness among those evaluating and acquiring technology and communicate blockchain’s opportunities, risks, and vulnerabilities. Bolstered by improved blockchain and data literacy, Defense Department acquisitions professionals, technologists, and servicemembers can continue to innovate utilizing both current and emerging technologies. However, without a comprehensive understanding of blockchain technology, the United States risks contending in an information environment shaped by competitors and on an internet owned by the Chinese Communist Party. The United States should investigate blockchain technology and craft strategic policy today to compete successfully in tomorrow’s information environment.

Become a Member

Maj. Mike Knapp is a U.S. Air Force pilot stationed in the Washington, D.C. area. These opinions are the author’s own and do not represent those of the Department of the Air Force or the Department of Defense.

Photo: OECD/Hervé Cortinat

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Mike Knapp · August 30, 2022

12. A post-dollar world is coming

This does not bode well for the US. We will cease being a superpower and we will experience devastating a economic crisis as we will no longer be able to pay our bills (by printing more money).

I would say the most important national security issue for the US is to protect our economic instrument of power and in particular the dollar as the reserve currency. Without that we will not be able to fund DOD at the current level.

A post-dollar world is coming

The currency may look strong but its weaknesses are mounting

Financial Times · by Ruchir Sharma · August 28, 2022

The writer is chair of Rockefeller International

This month, as the dollar surged to levels last seen nearly 20 years ago, analysts invoked the old Tina (there is no alternative) argument to predict more gains ahead for the mighty greenback.

What happened two decades ago suggests the dollar is closer to peaking than rallying further. Even as US stocks fell in the dotcom bust, the dollar continued rising, before entering a decline that started in 2002 and lasted six years. A similar turning point may be near. And this time, the US currency’s decline could last even longer.

Adjusted for inflation or not, the value of the dollar against other major currencies is now 20 per cent above its long-term trend, and above the peak reached in 2001. Since the 1970s, the typical upswing in a dollar cycle has lasted about seven years; the current upswing is in its 11th year. Moreover, fundamental imbalances bode ill for the dollar.

When a current account deficit runs persistently above 5 per cent of gross domestic product, it is a reliable signal of financial trouble to come. That is most true in developed countries, where these episodes are rare, and concentrated in crisis-prone nations such as Spain, Portugal and Ireland. The US current account deficit is now close to that 5 per cent threshold, which it has broken only once since 1960. That was during the dollar’s downswing after 2001.

Nations see their currencies weaken when the rest of the world no longer trusts that they can pay their bills. The US currently owes the world a net $18tn, or 73 per cent of US GDP, far beyond the 50 per cent threshold that has often foretold past currency crises.

Finally, investors tend to move away from the dollar when the US economy is slowing relative to the rest of the world. In recent years, the US has been growing significantly faster than the median rate for other developed economies, but it is poised to grow slower than its peers in coming years.

If the dollar is close to entering a downswing, the question is whether that period lasts long enough, and goes deep enough, to threaten its status as the world’s most trusted currency.

Since the 15th century, the last five global empires have issued the world’s reserve currency — the one most often used by other countries — for 94 years on average. The dollar has held reserve status for more than 100 years, so its reign is already older than most.

The dollar has been bolstered by the weaknesses of its rivals. The euro has been repeatedly undermined by financial crises, while the renminbi is heavily managed by an authoritarian regime. Nonetheless, alternatives are gaining ground.

Beyond the Big Four currencies — of the US, Europe, Japan and the UK — lies the category of “other currencies” that includes the Canadian and Australian dollar, the Swiss franc and the renminbi. They now account for 10 per cent of global reserves, up from 2 per cent in 2001.

Their gains, which accelerated during the pandemic, have come mainly at the expense of the US dollar. The dollar share of foreign exchange reserves is currently at 59 per cent — the lowest since 1995. Digital currencies may look battered now, but they remain a long-run alternative as well.

Meanwhile, the impact of US sanctions on Russia is demonstrating how much influence the US wields over a dollar-driven world, inspiring many countries to speed up their search for options. It’s possible that the next step is not towards a single reserve currency, but to currency blocs.

South-east Asia’s largest economies are increasingly settling payments to one another directly, avoiding the dollar. Malaysia and Singapore are among the countries making similar arrangements with China, which is also extending offers of renminbi support to nations in financial distress. Central banks from Asia to the Middle East are setting up bilateral currency swap lines, also with the intention of reducing dependence on the dollar.

Today, as in the dotcom era, the dollar appears to be benefiting from its safe-haven status, with most of the world’s markets selling off. But investors are not rushing to buy US assets. They are reducing their risk everywhere and holding the resulting cash in dollars.

This is not a vote of confidence in the US economy, and it is worth recalling that bullish analysts offered the same reason for buying tech stocks at their recent peak valuations: there is no alternative. That ended badly. Tina is never a viable investment strategy, especially not when the fundamentals are deteriorating.

So don’t be fooled by the strong dollar. The post-dollar world is coming.

Financial Times · by Ruchir Sharma · August 28, 2022

13. Road to Nowhere: Debts Mount with China's Prestigious Silk Road Project

Excerpts;

But the biggest test case is likely yet to come: In Pakistan, Chinese companies are building a $62-billion corridor to connect China's west with the Arabian Sea. The project is considered the crown jewel of the Silk Road Initiative and would allow China to expand its influence in South Asia in the immediate vicinity of its rival India, at least in theory. In reality, many construction projects are now lying idle. Furthermore, two children were killed in a suicide attack aimed at Chinese workers in the port city of Gwadar last year.

Not only does Pakistan struggle with terrorism, but it is also an impoverished country that has repeatedly been on the verge of national bankruptcy. The country's foreign currency reserves have also hit dangerous lows recently. In July, the International Monetary Fund approved a $1.2 billion rescue tranche. One month earlier, money flowed in from China, a new, $2.3-billion loan to prevent, or at least postpone, the next, arguably much larger, crisis in its immediate neighborhood.

Road to Nowhere: Debts Mount with China's Prestigious Silk Road Project

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is hoping to create new markets for his country and establish his legacy with the New Silk Road project. But has he bitten off more than he can chew? Debts are mounting – and not only in China.

By Georg Fahrion, Christoph Giesen und Laura Höflinger in Beijing and Bangalore

24.08.2022, 09.30 Uhr

Spiegel · by Laura Höflinger, Christoph Giesen, Georg Fahrion, DER SPIEGEL

The tower of Colombo can be seen from quite a distance. It's dome is clad in pink glass shaped like petals, while the shaft is of green concrete. Chinese companies built the Lotus Tower in Sri Lanka's biggest city as a symbol of Beijing's friendship and Sri Lanka's golden future: The island nation's economy was to blossom like a lotus flower.

Today, the tower looms over the city like a 350-meter admonition. The premises are either empty or remain unfinished, 10 years after the start of construction. The lighting is switched off at night, and the Lotus Tower stands in darkness, as do many of the city's streets. Sri Lanka has to save money.

DER SPIEGEL 34/2022

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 34/2022 (August 20th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.

SPIEGEL International

The South Asian country is bankrupt, with the government declaring insolvency in May. Sri Lanka owes creditors abroad more than $50 billion, and because the country can no longer pay for all the imports it needs, it is suffering through shortages of fuel, food and medicines. What Sri Lanka does have in abundance, however, are the many "white elephants," as they call the outsized construction projects that are neither economically productive nor necessary. Many were designed by Chinese companies, built by Chinese workers flown in and, above all, financed with Chinese loans – money from the Silk Road project.

Beijing Promised the World $1 Trillion in Investments

In 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping presented his vision of a "New Silk Road" for the first time. According to the propaganda, the whole world stands to benefit: New streets, ports and communications networks were to ensure more trade and prosperity. Officially, the program is somewhat clumsily called, "One Belt, One Road," or referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

In May 2017, the Chinese leadership hosted the official launch event, the Belt and Road Forum, in Beijing. Authorities cordoned off large parts of the city center as representatives from 130 countries gathered at the National Convention Center. It was said that China intended to invest $1 trillion around the world. In his speech, Xi painted an image of a networked world. Afterwards, state guests sung their praises for the Chinese. "President Xi deserves thanks for this initiative, which is very promising and timely," Vladimir Putin said. And Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even described it as an "initiative that will put an end to terrorism."

In truth, the initiative serves not least to salvage the Chinese economy. The growth model of the People's Republic reached its limit years ago, and to ensure that economic growth increases year after year, the state itself invests in roads, new airports and in the dense high-speed rail network. The result is a significant mountain of debt. The national railway alone has accumulated debts of almost 1 trillion euros. One important aim of the New Silk Road is to create additional markets for Chinese corporations.

According to a survey by the American Enterprise Institute, projects valued at $838 billion were underway by the end of 2021. The trillion-dollar figure targeted by Xi isn't far off. But numerous loans are at risk of default. A study by the analyst firm Rhodium Group estimates the total value of Chinese foreign loans that needed to be renegotiated in 2020 and 2021 at $52 billion. There have also been several reports about bridge loans that Chinese banks have granted to prevent payment defaults. Such emergency loans have been granted to Pakistan, Belarus, Mongolia, Argentina and Sri Lanka.

Those who have been granted a look at the books are shocked by the terms the government in Colombo has accepted.

For the leadership in Beijing, the threat of loan defaults comes at an inopportune time: The country's strict zero-COVID policy is weighing heavily on China's economy. And Xi is hoping to expand his power even further at the upcoming 20th party congress this fall. In such a politically sensitive phase, concerning economic news is even more unwelcome than usual, especially given that domestic debt is also becoming a problem. The real estate market is currently experiencing a severe crisis, and many construction companies are in the red. Thousands of Chinese are refusing to pay their monthly installments for apartments still under construction out of fear that the real estate companies will declare bankruptcy before the buildings are completed.

Sri Lanka owes between 10 and 20 percent of its outstanding debt to Chinese banks. These loans are not the sole reason for the country's crisis, which is largely homemade. Yet the loans still play a significant role in Sri Lanka's plight. The reason is that Chinese contracts differ considerably from those that the country has concluded with, for example, Japan or the World Bank.

Last year, researchers at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany succeeded in obtaining and evaluating secret BRI contracts from 24 countries. "China's practices make it difficult for countries that are in financial distress, due to the corona pandemic, for example, to get their debt situation under control," says Christoph Trebesch, the institute's research director.

Such is the case in Sri Lanka. Those who have been granted a look at the books are shocked by the terms the government in Colombo has accepted. Asanga Abeyagoonasekera has read some of these agreements as a government adviser. He says that in some cases, the interest rates agreed to were twice as high as the market rate. In other cases, experts had advised against construction, he says, but the buildings went ahead anyway.

Rice Is Stored at Sri Lanka's Ghost Airport

The best example is perhaps Mattala International Airport. The airport is located in Hambantota, a district, home to around 600,000 and a sizeable population of wild elephants. Unfortunately, the pachyderms have a habit of trampling the fence surrounding the tarmac.

Often, only one flight a day lands from the capital. Abeyagoonasekera, who has since joined the American think tank Millennium Project, describes it as a ghost airport. "At times, they stored rice there," he says. In addition to the rice fields, Hambantota now also boasts a cricket stadium with a capacity of 35,000 spectators, a huge convention center and a container port that China leased for 99 years in 2017. In return, Sri Lank received $1.1 billion in fresh foreign exchange reserves.

The port of Hambantota, in particular, has been the subject of an international debate in recent years. The term "debt trap diplomacy" has made the rounds, referring to a practice in which China showers recipient countries with loans and acquires strategically important infrastructure as soon as the debtors slip into default.

"The Belt Road is still a healthy initiative."

Victor Gao, Center for China and Globalization in Beijing

This hypothesis received significant attention in the Pentagon, but evidence for its veracity is rather thin. The original feasibility study for the report, after all, was prepared by a Canadian analyst who strongly recommended construction. Initially, Sri Lanka sought to bring India and the U.S. onboard as potential project partners. It was only when they declined that the Chinese emerged as a possibility. The Rhodium Group has also analyzed Chinese BRI loans in a series of studies. The conclusion: There are hardly any examples of Chinese corporations or banks simply taking over ports or rail lines. It is more frequently the case that renegotiation discussions are held, interest rates are reduced or loan periods are extended.

Now, new BRI projects have come under more intense scrutiny, as a recent study by Shanghai's Fudan University shows. For this study, Christoph Nedopil, an assistant professor of economics, examined deals concluded in the first half of 2022. In the past, a large share of the loans went to infrastructure projects, which the recipient countries backed with government guarantees. "That's not possible to the same extent now," says Nedopil. "Many of the Belt-and-Road partner countries are heavily indebted and can no longer afford it." As a result, not only the overall volume of orders that is shrinking. Also the nature of the projects is changing: Instead of building railroads or roads, loans are now more often used to natural gas or oil extraction.

"The Belt Road is still a sound initiative," says Victor Gao, once an interpreter for reform patriarch Deng Xiaoping and now vice president of the think tank Center for China and Globalization, and as such Beijing's favorite scholar on the issue. As evidence for BRI's success, Gao cites the fact that the U.S. and the European Union have launched their own global infrastructure programs. "Imitation is the best form of flattery," he says.

At most, he adds, problems are temporary. Because of the quarantine obligations associated with the coronavirus pandemic and the drastically reduced number of international flight connections, he notes that Chinese engineers and construction workers are no longer able to travel abroad so easily. "Many projects won't resume until people-to-people exchanges return to normal," he says. That could take years.

The fact that China is now recalibrating its initiative does not, however, answer the question of what will happen to the billions that are already on the brink of default. What if other recipient countries like Laos, Pakistan, Argentina or Egypt also slip into insolvency? These countries first suffered from the pandemic, and now they're being hit by the price shock for oil and food caused by the war in Ukraine.

Debt haircuts would be a difficult sell domestically in China. The New Silk Road is Xi's legacy. It has long since become part of the communist creed and has been enshrined in the party constitution since 2017. Also, the Chinese population isn't particularly understanding when large sums of money are forgiven abroad. One year after the big BRI summit, Xi invited African leaders to Beijing for the China-Africa Summit in September 2018. Nearly 50 leaders traveled to the event. When Xi announced $60 billion in Chinese economic aid, the internet censors could barely keep up with deleting angry comments. The general tone: Why is the government distributing money abroad rather than giving it to the Chinese?

But the biggest test case is likely yet to come: In Pakistan, Chinese companies are building a $62-billion corridor to connect China's west with the Arabian Sea. The project is considered the crown jewel of the Silk Road Initiative and would allow China to expand its influence in South Asia in the immediate vicinity of its rival India, at least in theory. In reality, many construction projects are now lying idle. Furthermore, two children were killed in a suicide attack aimed at Chinese workers in the port city of Gwadar last year.

Not only does Pakistan struggle with terrorism, but it is also an impoverished country that has repeatedly been on the verge of national bankruptcy. The country's foreign currency reserves have also hit dangerous lows recently. In July, the International Monetary Fund approved a $1.2 billion rescue tranche. One month earlier, money flowed in from China, a new, $2.3-billion loan to prevent, or at least postpone, the next, arguably much larger, crisis in its immediate neighborhood.

Spiegel · by Laura Höflinger, Christoph Giesen, Georg Fahrion, DER SPIEGEL

14. Afghanistan After Zawahiri: America's Counterterrorism Options in the New South Asia

A formatted version is at the link: https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/08/afghanistan-after-zawahiri/

A non-radical resistance movement: Who is assessing the resistance potential in Afghanistan? Or are we completely washing our hands of Afghanistan?

Excerpts:

Inside Afghanistan, the United States needs a non-radical resistance movement to prevail where it can to give Washington the ability to conduct not just extraordinary missions against the most select high-value targets, but also to have the larger infrastructure necessary for intelligence collection and surveillance against the plethora of terrorist threats already discussed.

Unfortunately, due to the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, there is little political will in the United States for major material support to anti-Taliban resistance groups. However, even a modicum of American political engagement and aid could be the difference between survival and submergence for these nascent anti-Taliban groups. Furthermore, it should also be understood that suggested steps are meant to help various ethnic groups and tribes only secure their own home areas to be free of Taliban rule and not an attempt to overthrow the Taliban regime entirely. Therefore, the first steps should be small ones and applied to help the Afghan resistance help itself and not become decisively engaged ourselves.

For starters, the State Department could engage with the various Afghan resistance factions and build on recent contacts between the NRF and the Supreme Council of National Resistance to Save Afghanistan to help unify all Afghan resistance groups against their common goal. This would be similar to the efforts with the Afghan resistance in 1981 that produced a political agreement for dozens of disparate groups to come together into a seven-party alliance, end internecine fighting, and concentrate on expelling the Soviets from their country. At a minimum, the State Department could at least stop making statements that, “it would not support violent opposition towards the Taliban government,” especially when the United States has not recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

Further US aid would help build anti-Taliban resistance groups into viable entities and would make these groups a more attractive option for former American-trained soldiers and police to join instead of the Islamic State. Many who have joined the Islamic State in Afghanistan, according to NRF sources I’ve spoken to, have done so only to protect themselves from Taliban retribution and because there are no other organized resistance groups in their area. In return for helping the resistance establish secure redoubts in Afghanistan, the United States would receive reciprocal support to reinforce and expand our existing counterterrorism infrastructure to prevent future terrorist attacks emanating from Afghanistan. Continued attrition of terrorist forces in Afghanistan and putting the Taliban on the defensive would also help protect Central Asian states and their important energy transportation corridors to the West from future Islamist extremist threats. The time to aid the anti-Taliban resistance for America’s own self-interests is now—while there is still a viable resistance to support.

Afghanistan After Zawahiri: America's Counterterrorism Options in the New South Asia - Foreign Policy Research Institute

fpri.org · by Philip Wasielewski

Despite the attention in Washington currently paid to developments in Ukraine and the Taiwan Strait, terrorism remains a threat to US national security. The recent counterterrorism strike against Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul highlights that the fight against al-Qaeda, among other groups, is not over, and that Afghanistan remains a safe harbor for many of the world’s terrorist organizations or their affiliates.

Going forward, the United States will need to continue to dedicate resources to detect and disrupt terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan. To do so, Washington needs to rebuild a coalition of allies opposed to violent Islamist extremism—both around Afghanistan and inside the country—who can provide intelligence and logistics support as needed, to help in that task.

Paratroopers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division prepare to board a U.S. Air Force C-17 on August 30th, 2021 at the Hamid Karzai International Airport. Maj. Gen. Donahue was the last American Soldier to leave Afghanistan ending the U.S. mission in Kabul. (U.S. Army photo by Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett, 82nd Airborne Public Affairs).

Introduction

The current national security horizon of the United States is dominated by the immense storm cloud of the Russian-Ukrainian War. Hovering behind it are other darkening shadows of possible Chinese aggression against Taiwan, Iranian and North Korean nuclear threats, and worldwide economic distress. Yet the threat from terrorism—or more precisely, the threat of violent Islamist extremist attacks against the US homeland and American interests—remains. While terrorist groups are diminished after two decades of US and partner counterterrorism efforts, many of the most dangerous organizations still exist and have a presence in Afghanistan.

A year after America’s precipitous and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the terrorism threat that brought the United States there in the first place still exists. While the United States and the Taliban regime have a common interest in defeating the Islamic State in Afghanistan, there is no other convergence of interests (or values) between Washington and Kabul. In fact, the Taliban is actively aiding America’s enemies. Afghanistan is home to numerous other terrorist groups sheltered and/or supported by the Taliban. Some of these groups (like al-Qaeda) have global ambitions, while others are focused on regional targets in India, Pakistan, and Central Asia.

Preempting terrorist attacks by any of these groups in Afghanistan remains a formidable task. Unlike in the 1990s, there is only one Central Asian state, Tajikistan, in opposition to the Taliban. Others have taken a neutral or “wait-and-see” stance towards the regime and are hesitant to support counterterrorism operations. Any strategy should take this evolving support (or lack thereof) from Central Asian states into account.

The recent successful drone attack in Kabul against Zawahiri seems to indicate that the counterterrorism infrastructure necessary to attrit al-Qaeda and its allies remains intact and capable. However, one shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from a single, successful operation. The United States does not currently have all of the resources, intelligence, access, and partners necessary to conduct a sustained counterterrorism campaign against the numerous other threats in Afghanistan.

The United States should also pause to consider that Zawahiri met his demise not in some remote area of Pakistan’s tribal areas but in the middle of Kabul. This after the Taliban assured the world that they would never again harbor terrorists. One must wonder, despite this great success, what else the Taliban and their partners are hiding from the world. A realistic appraisal of the Taliban’s intentions, capabilities, and reliability should underline the need for a robust counterterrorism infrastructure in the region commensurate with all of its various threats.

Map of Afghanistan. (CIA World Factbook)

The Current Terrorist Threat from Afghanistan

Major terrorist groups continue operating in Afghanistan. In addition to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, there are the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (or the Pakistani Taliban), the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harakat-ul-Mujahedin, Hizbul Mujahedin, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Katibat Imam Bukhari, and Jamaat Ansarullah, to name only the major groups.

The United Nations estimated in 2020 that al-Qaeda had between 400 to 600 fighters in Afghanistan. However, as counterterrorism expert Bill Roggio noted that same year, it is easy to undercount al-Qaeda’s fighting strength in Afghanistan. Many of its members are “dual hatted” as members of both the terrorist group and the Taliban or Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan . Furthermore, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, Hizbul Mujahedin, Harakat-ul-Mujahedin, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Jamaat Ansarullah, and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan all have strong al-Qaeda links, which is why together they were once referred to as al-Qaeda and the Allied Movements. These groups have fought together in the past, shared personnel when needed, and can quickly increase the strength of al-Qaeda as requirements demand. To these several thousand terrorist foot soldiers in the al-Qaeda constellation, there are also approximately 4,000 Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are global in their ambitions. The other groups in Afghanistan have regional jihadi goals. The Uighur-based East Turkestan Islamic Movement targets Chinese rule in Xinjiang; Hizbul Mujahedin, Harakat-ul-Mujahedin, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Lashkar-e-Taiba serve as Pakistani government proxies in their guerrilla war against India, especially in Kashmir; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and its splinter group Katibat Imam Bukhari are Uzbek jihadi groups; and Jamaat Ansarullah is an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan Tajik off-shoot dedicated to overthrowing the government in Dushanbe. The regionally focused al-Qaeda affiliates threaten US interests via their efforts to destabilize the nuclear armed nations of India and Pakistan, (despite Pakistan’s Janus-faced approach towards terrorism), and the oil- and gas-rich nations of Central Asia.

Women in burqa with their children in Herat, Afghanistan. (Arnensen/Wikimedia Commons)

Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State Are Rivals—For Now

The conflict between the Taliban and the Islamic State is not immutable. Ideological rivals can put hatreds aside and unite, if only temporarily, should circumstances require it for either survival or mutual benefit.

The dispute between the two parties in Afghanistan reflects part of the larger conflict between the Islamic State—formerly al-Qaeda in Iraq—and the main al-Qaeda franchise, but also internal Afghan jihadi dynamics. The schism has deep underpinnings, but circumstances could lead to a settlement or at least détente between the two groups.

This rivalry began in 2005 during the Iraq insurgency. Zawahiri publicly chastised the uber-violent activities of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It intensified in 2013 when Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, renamed al-Qaeda in Iraq as the Islamic State. Under Baghdadi, the Islamic State intervened in the Syrian civil war, to the consternation of the already existing al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front. This brought further rebuke from Zawahiri, who by this point was leading al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden’s death. After the Islamic State’s swift successes in June 2014 in western Iraq and eastern Syria, Baghdadi proclaimed this conquered territory a “caliphate,” thereby claiming spiritual and temporal authority over all Muslims worldwide. In 2015, Zawahiri, who had earlier cut al-Qaeda’s ties with the Islamic State over the conflict with Nusra Front, refused to endorse or subordinate his organization to the self-proclaimed caliphate.

The split between al- Qaeda and the Islamic State emerged in Afghanistan in February 2014. It started when nine al-Qaeda members defected to the Islamic State, and were soon joined by others from al-Qaeda, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and the Taliban. In January 2015, this group under the leadership of former Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan commander Hafiz Saeed Khan swore bay’a or fealty to Baghdadi, and were formally named the Khorasan Province of the Islamic State—signifying their area of operations extended across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan.

Part of the attraction of the Islamic State for Afghan and Pakistani jihadis was to be part of a new universal caliphate. The creation of the Islamic State in Afghanistan also exposed a simmering dispute between Salafi and Deobandi schools of Islamic thought in the Taliban movement. Since the founding of the Taliban, its leaders and scholars have adhered to Deobandism, a revivalist movement of the Hanafi school of Islam, traditional to Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. They suppressed Salafism, which comes from the Wahhabi revivalist movement of the Hanbali school of Islamist thought, which stresses a purer and stricter following of Islamic codes and traditions. This conflict is ironic when one considers the past influence of Wahhabism on Deobandism. In fact, two Deobandi forefathers, Shah Walliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) and Syed Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831), were influenced by Wahhabi theology during visits to Arabia. Shah Walliullah studied in seminaries in Mecca and Medina with the same teachers as Wahhabism’s founder Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab who was his contemporary. Syed Ahmed was exposed to Wahhabism during a hajj in the early 19th century. Upon his return to British India, his Wahhabist-influenced teachings would become a catalyst for the Deobandi movement. Despite this historical commonality, with the creation of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, those Taliban members who were attracted to Salafi vice Deobandi teachings finally had a home.

View of Panjshir Valley from Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Tomb. (Jim Kelly/Wikimedia Commons)

Theology, in part, helps fuel the divide today between the ruling Taliban and the insurgent Islamic State movement in eastern and northern Afghanistan. However, considerations of power are paramount. The Islamic State in Afghanistan, as part of the caliphate, believes it has the right to rule the country. The Taliban, for its part, spent twenty years struggling to gain power in Afghanistan, and is not about to give it up without a fight. Nevertheless, a mutual need to survive could motivate both to come to a modus vivendi. Despite some theological differences, the Taliban and Islamic State in Afghanistan have similar jihadist views of Islam (as does al-Qaeda). Furthermore, the Islamic State in Afghanistan faces the reality that since the Islamic State no longer holds any major amounts of territory or population, the caliphate now exists in name only. The Taliban, on the other hand, are the only Sunni Islamist group to control a sovereign state. Conversely, the Taliban face the reality that their hold on power is challenged by various resistance groups and a moribund economy. Survival will depend on coopting or conquering the resistance and delivering public goods to the Afghan people.

Some kind of compromise between the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan could help both Islamist parties to survive. With the demise of the divisive Zawahiri, a new al-Qaeda leader with better leadership skills might bridge past differences with the Islamic State to facilitate a reconciliation between the al-Qaeda and Taliban on one side and the Islamic State on the other. This would increase the odds of survival for their terrorist safe haven and reunify the jihadist movement. After all, the Taliban is in for a tough time with the international community now that there can be no denying its connection with al-Qaeda and it will need to be as strong internally as possible to face upcoming external pressure over this affair. If the Taliban and al-Qaeda ever reconcile with the Islamic State, the United States would face a united terrorist front in Afghanistan, the home of the greatest collection of Islamist terrorist groups in the world. Detecting and disrupting future possible terrorist attacks emanating from Afghanistan will require as many allies as possible. Fortunately, allies do exist.

Resistance to Taliban rule in Afghanistan is not limited to the Islamic State. Other resistance movements exist consisting primarily of ethnic Tajiks who wish to liberate their native regions from Taliban control as well as some Hazara and Uzbek elements wishing for the same. The Tajik-based resistance consists of several groups and is centered in the predominately Tajik areas of the Panjshir Valley, Badakhshan, Badghis, Baghlan, Kapisa, Kunduz, Parwan, and Takhar Provinces. Elements of the Hazara population with some support from neighboring Uzbek communities are strongly resisting the Taliban in the northern Balkhab district of Sar-e-Pul Province. There is also a nascent Uzbek resistance in Faryab Province. These movements are currently small, outnumbered, and poorly supplied. However, they have survived last winter’s harsh conditions, continue to fight, and offer the best option for an ally with whom the United States could conduct counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.

The Tajik Resistance to the Taliban

Ahmad Massoud (Wikimedia Commons)

The ethnic Tajiks of Afghanistan have traditionally been the natural foes of the Taliban and its terrorist allies. When the Taliban swept through Afghanistan in 1995 and 1996— conquering Kabul and 90 percent of the country—they were the main resistance group to survive in their enclaves in the Panjshir Valley and other areas of northern Afghanistan along with small pockets of Uzbek and Hazara forces. Led by the legendary guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who had fought the Soviet army to a standstill in the Panjshir Valley in the 1980s, these forces formed the United Islamic National Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, better known as the Northern Alliance.

Al-Qaeda assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001, but his organization provided the initial support to US forces entering Afghanistan after 9/11. American and allied forces were also later assisted by Uzbek and Hazara forces and various Pashtun tribes until the Taliban were thrown out of power and a new government created in December 2001. The legacy of this resistance forms the basis of the current main Tajik group opposed to the Taliban, the National Resistance Front (NRF) of Afghanistan.

In September 2019, Ahmad Massoud, the eldest son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, launched an anti-Taliban political movement, which he called the National United Front for Resistance, modeled on his father’s organization. He opposed US peace talks with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government. Ahmad Masoud, noticing the collapse of the regular Afghan army that spring, then announced the formation of the second NRF or “NRF II” of Afghanistan in May 2021. This move transformed the anti-Taliban political movement into an armed resistance group. After the Afghan army collapsed under Taliban onslaughts in the summer of 2021 and President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul on August 15, First Vice President Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud, with several thousand Tajik soldiers and policemen moved into the Panjshir Valley. Once there, Saleh, in the absence of Ghani, declared himself the “caretaker” president of Afghanistan. However, the Panjshir Valley was surrounded by the Taliban on three sides and fell after three weeks of fighting. Massoud and Saleh escaped by helicopter to Dushanbe. Their forces melted away into the mountains and reconsolidated in remote valleys.

Ahmad Massoud’s lineage, the NRF legacy of resistance, and the size of its forces active in Afghanistan make the NRF first-amongst-equals in the anti-Taliban resistance. Nearly a year since the fall of Kabul, approximately two to three thousand NRF fighters are conducting a guerrilla war in the Panjshir Valley and neighboring Baghlan Province under the overall command on the ground by former Afghan Special Forces officer Khalid Amiry. The Taliban reportedly still hold the central road through the valley, but not all of the side valleys and none of the mountainous regions. The main NRF commander in the Panjshir is Doctor Gulistan, a former National Directorate of Security chief in Badakhshan and Takhar Provinces, whose fighters are waging a traditional guerrilla warfare of hit-and-run strikes while being totally dependent on the local population for food and intelligence and on captured Taliban weapons and ammunition to arm themselves.

In response, the Taliban has conducted severe crackdowns against the local populace. Taliban atrocities against the civilian population have increased popular support for the NRF and have led to at least one defection. In the Panjshir’s Dara district a local Tajik Taliban leader named Malik defected with his forces to the NRF because of his disenchantment with Taliban treatment of local population to include torture and murder. On June 16, 2022, NRF forces downed a Taliban helicopter conducting resupply missions in the valley. In Baghlan Province, the NRF’s strongest presence is in Andarab district, but recently an NRF force under commander Baryali Sangen seized control of two towns in the Tajik-Hazara populated Khost wa Fereng district. Small NRF groups are also fighting in the Kishim district of Badakhshan and the Wersaf district of Takhar Province. The NRF’s near term political goal is to liberate the Tajik areas in the north from Taliban rule as they did under Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Taliban fighters in Kabul, August 17 2021. (Voice of America/Wikimedia Commons)

A separate Tajik resistance movement, the Freedom Front of Afghanistan, is based in Parwan province just north of Kabul, and led by former Afghan army chief of staff and acting defense minister General Mohammed Yasin Zia. Its members come predominately from the Shomali Plains region of the province and its operations concentrate on the now Taliban controlled Bagram airbase to include an early July rocket attack. The Freedom Front reportedly also has a presence in Baghlan, Kapisa, Kunduz, and Takhar Provinces and has conducted direct action missions against Taliban figures in nearby Kabul, against whom they have publicized bounties. There have also been reported assassinations of Taliban figures in Jalalabad but no group has taken responsibility for these actions. According to NRF sources, the NRF and Freedom Front are in communication on the battlefield and coordinate activities but each group is separate militarily and politically.

There are reportedly several other Tajik-based resistance movements in Afghanistan, such as the Freedom Corps led by Mohammed Jahish, which operates in Badakhshan and Baghlan Provinces, and several groups in northern Afghanistan related to the Jamiat-e Islami party of Tajik leader Atta Mohammed Noor, the former governor of Balkh Province, who sometimes refer to themselves as the High Council of Resistance. There is also a reported Liberation Front of Afghanistan, but little is known about it. None of these lesser Tajik-based groups operating in northern Afghanistan seem to have the organization or the military capability of the NRF or Freedom Front. However their presence indicates that among the Afghan Tajiks there is a willingness to resist, but that this resistance is not yet united. One of the reasons for this disunity is resentment amongst those Tajik leaders who did not serve in the Afghan government of former President Ghani against those Tajik leaders who did, such as Amrullah Saleh and General Yasin Zia.

Other Anti-Taliban Resistance

The next largest anti-Taliban resistance movement outside of the Baghlan, Panjshir, and Parwan provinces has been centered in Balkhab district, Sar-e Pul Province, whose population is a combination of ethnic Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks. In 2001, Balkhab was the last stronghold of Uzbek resistance to the Taliban. It is where Afghan Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum infiltrated into in May 2001 to fight the Taliban, and where a joint CIA-Special Forces team infiltrated into in October 2001 to support his efforts.

The resistance in Balkhab district originated with Mawlawi Mehdi Mujahid, a Hazara who joined the Taliban in 2019. Mehdi was born in Balkhab but recently served as the Taliban governor in the predominately Hazara province of Bamiyan. He revolted against the Taliban when they replaced him and other local Hazara Taliban leaders in the province with Pashtun Taliban commanders. Another reported source of conflict between the local Hazaras and the Pashtun Taliban is a dispute over control of the rich coal and copper resources of the area.

Serious fighting between Mehdi’s supporters in Balkhab and Taliban soldiers began in early June. Approximately 70 ethnic Uzbek fighters also reportedly joined their Hazara neighbors in this fighting. So did former Bamiyan governor Mohammed Tahir Zaheer, a Hazara leader, with an unknown number of supporters. Mehdi had been in contact with NRF leadership in Dushanbe but did not officially join their organization. However, his revolt benefited NRF operations since the Taliban had to transfer thousands of fighters from Panjshir to Balkhab.

The most recent reporting from Balkhab district indicates that the Taliban have retaken the district and killed Mehdi as he was trying to flee to Iran. However, NRF sources report to the author that Mehdi was captured and is still alive in solitary confinement in a prison in Herat, Afghanistan. Mohammed Tahir Zaheer did manage to escape to Iran.

In Faryab Province, another group of Uzbek Taliban clashed with Pashtun Taliban forces in January 2022, because they were trying to take control of the province away from local ethnic leaders. The situation in the province remains insecure for the Pashtun Taliban. In Badakhshan province, Taliban leader Qari Weqaas has also turned sides and is fighting against the Taliban. Finally, Hazrat Ali, the leader of the Pashai ethnic group located primarily in Laghman and Nangarhar Provinces, a mujahedin veteran of the Afghan-Soviet war and a major figure in liberating Jalalabad from the Taliban in 2001, is currently in Dubai but is reported to be in discussions with Ahmad Massoud.

There is very limited information about any anti-Taliban resistance in southern Afghanistan. There is a reported Pashtun-based resistance force, the Afghanistan Islamic National and Liberation Movement, led by former Afghan army Special Forces officer Abdul Mateen Sulaimakhail, but little is known about its size or operations, if any.

The limited resistance to Taliban rule in southern Afghanistan is not surprising because the Pashtun tribes are the heart of the Taliban movement. However, political differences have and still do exist amongst the numerous Pashtun tribes. In late 2001, with American support, several Pashtun tribal leaders such as Hamid Karzai (Popalzai tribe), Gul Agha Sherzai (Barakzai tribe), the brothers Abdul Haq and Haji Abdul Qadir (Ahmadzai tribe), and Atiqullah Ludin (Mashwani tribe) revolted against the Taliban; partly because of their dissatisfaction with Taliban rule and partly to ensure that any new Afghan government would include them. The same could happen again based on internal Pashtun politics and other motivations. For example, a key, if controversial, figure in Kandahar province was Afghan border police general Abdul Raziq (Achakzai tribe) who was assassinated by the Taliban in 2018. Since the Taliban takeover of Kandahar, many other of his family members have also perished. However, his brother, Tadeen Khan, has survived and is a sworn enemy of the Taliban. Blood feuds are powerful and persistent factors in Afghan politics and could help sway tribes and tribal leaders should the opportunity arise.

From left to right: Abdul Rashid Dostum, Haji Mohammed Mohaqi, and Atta Mohammed Noor. (Wikimedia Commons)

Separate from military efforts on the ground, an Afghan political organization uniting many former Afghan leaders is forming outside the country. On May 17 in Ankara, Turkey, at the residence of Afghan Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, approximately forty persons formed the Supreme Council of National Resistance to Save Afghanistan. Their goal is to resist the Taliban but also negotiate with them for political changes. The group included former jihadi leaders and political figures, including several Afghan women. This is a political grouping of various senior leaders such as Dostum, Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq (a Hazara), Atta Mohammed Noor (a Tajik), Abdulrab Rasoul Sayyaf (a Pashtun), Ismail Khan (a Tajik) and others, but it is not yet represented on the ground in Afghanistan by any armed forces. The NRF sent Hamid Wali Massoud, younger brother of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud and former Afghan ambassador to London, to observe the meeting and the two organizations are in contact but have not united. The most valuable service this council serves at the moment is as a grouping of the major Afghan political parties and uniting them to work together rather than at cross purposes.

A Marine with the 24th Marine Expeditionary unit (MEU) passes out water to evacuees during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, August 22, 2021. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell)

What Should the United States Do?

History shows—from the experiences of the White Russians after the Bolshevik revolution to the Cuban exiles who fled Castro’s dictatorship—that the longer a government-in-exile stays out of its native land, the less relevant it becomes to the remaining citizens of that country and the less likely it can return. This is especially true when they have been ejected by despots, who with time will establish coercive population control measures to destroy any type of resistance. However, another historical lesson is that political groups that have lost a power struggle but have maintained an armed resistance and presence in their homeland—such as Mao’s Red Army in the 1930s, Franco’s Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, or the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000—can eventually prevail.

The resistance against the primarily Pashtun Taliban is based on minority groups indigenous to Afghanistan’s northern border region with several Central Asian countries, which could serve as a sanctuary or conduit for outside support. Although most of these countries are hesitant to provide such support—in part from fear of possible Taliban retribution—they also have a vested interest to create a cordon sanitaire between their secular states and a radical Islamist state and its terrorist confederates in Kabul. As Central Asian specialist Bruce Pannier highlighted in his recent Foreign Policy Research Institute report, Northern Afghanistan and the New Threat to Central Asia, “The deteriorating situation in the region demonstrates the limits of Central Asian states’ security strategies, and highlights that they have few options in dealing with a new threat on their border.” Through sustained high level diplomatic engagement and security assistance that assists Central Asian states protect their borders with Afghanistan, hopefully the United States can influence these states to discretely serve as a sanctuary and conduit for support for anti-Taliban resistance groups whose success would benefit Central Asian security writ large.

Inside Afghanistan, the United States needs a non-radical resistance movement to prevail where it can to give Washington the ability to conduct not just extraordinary missions against the most select high-value targets, but also to have the larger infrastructure necessary for intelligence collection and surveillance against the plethora of terrorist threats already discussed.

Unfortunately, due to the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, there is little political will in the United States for major material support to anti-Taliban resistance groups. However, even a modicum of American political engagement and aid could be the difference between survival and submergence for these nascent anti-Taliban groups. Furthermore, it should also be understood that suggested steps are meant to help various ethnic groups and tribes only secure their own home areas to be free of Taliban rule and not an attempt to overthrow the Taliban regime entirely. Therefore, the first steps should be small ones and applied to help the Afghan resistance help itself and not become decisively engaged ourselves.

For starters, the State Department could engage with the various Afghan resistance factions and build on recent contacts between the NRF and the Supreme Council of National Resistance to Save Afghanistan to help unify all Afghan resistance groups against their common goal. This would be similar to the efforts with the Afghan resistance in 1981 that produced a political agreement for dozens of disparate groups to come together into a seven-party alliance, end internecine fighting, and concentrate on expelling the Soviets from their country. At a minimum, the State Department could at least stop making statements that, “it would not support violent opposition towards the Taliban government,” especially when the United States has not recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

Further US aid would help build anti-Taliban resistance groups into viable entities and would make these groups a more attractive option for former American-trained soldiers and police to join instead of the Islamic State. Many who have joined the Islamic State in Afghanistan, according to NRF sources I’ve spoken to, have done so only to protect themselves from Taliban retribution and because there are no other organized resistance groups in their area. In return for helping the resistance establish secure redoubts in Afghanistan, the United States would receive reciprocal support to reinforce and expand our existing counterterrorism infrastructure to prevent future terrorist attacks emanating from Afghanistan. Continued attrition of terrorist forces in Afghanistan and putting the Taliban on the defensive would also help protect Central Asian states and their important energy transportation corridors to the West from future Islamist extremist threats. The time to aid the anti-Taliban resistance for America’s own self-interests is now—while there is still a viable resistance to support.

Philip Wasielewski

Philip Wasielewski is a 2022 Templeton Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a former Paramilitary Case Officer who had a 31-year career in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

Daniel Byman, “The U.S. is pulling out of Afghanistan. Don’t expect an al-Qaeda reboot,” Washington Post, May 1, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/01/us-is-pulling-out-of-afghanistan-dont-expect-a-taliban-reboot.

Bill Roggio, “Analysis: Don’t trust estimates of Al Qaeda’s strength in Afghanistan,” Long War Journal, September 22, 2020, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2020/09/analysis-dont-trust-estimates-of-al-qaedas-strength-in-afghanistan.php.

Kathy Gannon, “Islamic State morphs and grows in Pakistan, Afghanistan,” ABC News, April 11, 2022, https://www.abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/islamic-state-morps-grows-pakistan-afghanistan-84007697.

Bill Roggio and Andrew Tobin, “Tajik terrorist serves as Taliban commander in northern Afghanistan,” Long War Journal, May 25, 2022, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2022/05/tajik-terrorist-serves-as-taliban-commander-in-northern-afghanistan.php.

William McCants, “How Zawahiri Lost al Qaeda: Global Jihad Turns on Itself,” Foreign Affairs, November 19, 2013, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/2013-11-19/how-zawahiri-lost-al-qaeda.

Thomas Joscelyn, “Al Qaeda chief calls for jihadist unity to ‘liberate Jerusalem,’” Long War Journal, November 2, 2015, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/11/al-qaedas-chief-calls-for-unity-to-liberate-jerusalem.php.

Catrina Doxsee and Jared Thompson, “Examining Extremism: Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP),” Center for Strategic and International Studies, September 8, 2021, https://www.csis.org/blogs/examining-extremism/examining-extremism-islamic-state-khorasan-province-iskp#:~:text=ISKP%20emerged%20in%202014%20with%20the%20defection%20of,local%20fighters%2C%20including%20a%20number%20of%20TTP%20commanders; Don Rassler, “Situating the Emergence of the Islamic State of Khorasan,” CTC Sentinel, March 2015, Bay’a Special Issue, Volume 8, Issue 3, https://ctc.usma.edu/situating-the-emergence-of-the-islamic-state-of-khorasan.

“Abdul Sayed, Islamic State Khorasan Province’s Peshawar Seminary Attack and War Against Afghan Taliban Hanafis,” Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor, Volume 8, Issue 21, November 20, 2020, https://jamestown.org/program/islamic-state-khorasan-provinces-peshawar-seminary-attack-and-war-against-afghan-taliban-hanafis/.

Charles Allen, God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Group, 2006).

Unless otherwise noted, this information is based mainly on interviews with intermediaries of the resistance in June and July 2022 by the author.

“Son of Afghan resistance hero criticizes ‘secretive’ U.S. Taliban deal,” Reuters, September 6, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-massoud/son-of-afghan-resistance-hero-criticizes-secretive-u-s-taliban-deal-idUSKCN1VR1FV.

“Afghan vice president says he is ‘caretaker’ president,” Reuters, August 17, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/india/afghan-vice-president-says-he-is-caretaker-president-2021-08-17/.

See Twitter feed from NRF spokesman Sibghat Ahmadi, https://twitter.com/sibghat_ah/status/1537864468180488193?s=21&t=iVZ50zDIQnmeS2a9behWaQ.

Stefanie Glinski, “Taliban Wage War Over Coal in Northern Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy, July 5, 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/05/taliban-afghanistan-coal-mining-resources-economy/.

Personal interview with a NRF representative familiar with events in Balkhab district and the NRF’s relationship with Mawlawi Mehdi Mujahid, late July 2022.

Christina Goldbaum and Najim Rahim, “The Blood Uprising Against the Taliban Led by One of Their Own,” New York Times, August 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/world/asia/afghanistan-uprising-taliban-mahdi.html; Correspondence between the author and two separate NRF sources, August 19, 2022.

Personal interview with a separate NRF representative, mid-July 2022.

Masood Farivar, “Afghan ‘Fighting Season’ Ushers in New Anti-Taliban Groups,” Voice of America, April 28, 2022, https://www.voanews.com/a/afghan-fighting-season-ushers-in-new-anti-taliban-groups6542148.html.

Saqalain Eqbal, “Ankara Gathering of Political Figures Forms the Supreme Council of National Resistance for the Salvation of Afghanistan,” The Khaama Press, May 19, 2022, https://www.khaama.com/ankara-gathering-of-political-figures-forms-the-supreme-council-of-national-resistance-for-the-salvation-of-afghanistan68391/.

Bruce Pannier, “Northern Afghanistan and the New Threat to Central Asia,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 13, 2022, https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/northern-afghanistan-and-the-new-threat-to-central-asia/.

“State Dept. undermines Afghan freedom fighters, condemning their fight against the Taliban,” Just the News, July 11, 2022, https://justthenews.com/world/foreign-desk/exclusive-state-dept-undermines-Afghan-freedom-fighters-condeming-their-fight; Bill Roggio, “U.S. State Department does “not support organized violent opposition to the Taliban,” Long War Journal, July 12, 2022, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2022/07/u-s-state-department-does-not-support-organized-violent-opposition-to-the-taliban.php.

fpri.org · by Philip Wasielewski

15. One year after U.S. withdrawal, resistance to Taliban rule grows

​Speaking of assessing resistance potential. Please go to the link to see the graphics, maps, and methodology. See the map of Afghan resistance at the link.

https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2022/08/one-year-after-u-s-withdrawal-resistance-to-taliban-rule-grows.php

One year after U.S. withdrawal, resistance to Taliban rule grows | FDD's Long War Journal

longwarjournal.org · by Bill Roggio · August 29, 2022

One year after the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, resistance to the Taliban’s brutal regime has organized in northern Afghanistan and is beginning to challenge the Taliban’s primacy.

Starting immediately after the U.S. left on Aug. 30, 2021, the Taliban sought to crush all remaining resistance to dominance over the country. By Sept. 6, the Taliban drove the remnants of the Afghan military and Panjshiri tribal militias underground or out of the country.

But since the early spring in 2022, organized resistance to the Taliban has sprung up in five provinces in northern Afghanistan (Badakhshan, Baghlan, Kapisa, Panjshir, and Takhar) and one province in the east (Nangarhar), led primarily by the National Resistance Front (NRF).

FDD’s Long War Journal, which closely tracked the Taliban’s slow march to seize districts and ultimately the entire country from 2014 to 2021, is actively assessing the military opposition to Taliban’s control of Afghanistan. [See Mapping the Fall of Afghanistan for the new Resistance map and new maps of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.]

Assessing the status of Afghanistan’s districts is extremely difficult, especially since the collapse of the Afghan government. It is far more difficult to obtain and corroborate information without a vibrant, independent press to verify claims by the Taliban and resistance groups. The Taliban has virtually eliminated a free press in Afghanistan.

Currently, LWJ assesses seven districts as contested (four in Panjshir, two in Baghlan, and one in Takhar) and 17 districts active with guerrilla fighting (five in Takhar, four in Baghlan, three in Panjshir, two in Badakhshan, two in Kapisa, and one in Nangarhar).

This assessment tracks only organized resistance. It does not include attacks claimed by the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province, a terrorist organization which is an enemy of the Taliban. Additionally, intra-Taliban disputes such as the brief conflict between the Taliban and Mawlawi Mehdi in Balkhab district in Sar-i-Pul in June are excluded. The Taliban swiftly put down Mehdi’s rebellion and he was killed two months later. Unclaimed or unverified attacks against the Taliban are also excluded.

While Taliban spokesmen and key leaders have naturally dismissed violent opposition to its rule as insignificant or non-existent, the group’s actions speak louder than its words. The Taliban has sent a large number of reinforcements into Panjshir and Baghlan in an effort to suppress the rebellion. The Taliban’s efforts have so far been unsuccessful. Hundreds of Taliban fighters are thought to have been killed in the fighting in the rough, mountainous terrain of the Afghan north.

In perhaps its most damning admission that the situation in the north is deteriorating, the Taliban appointed Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir as its military commander for Panjshir and Baghlan’s restive district of Andarab. Zakir, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay and head of the Taliban’s military commission, is one of the Taliban’s most effective military commanders [See LWJ report, Taliban Appoints Former Guantanamo Bay Detainee to Lead Fight in Panjshir.] Additionally, the Taliban appointed Mullah Mohammad Tayab Haqqani as the commander of police in Panjshir, and also created the Panjshir Brigade.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

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longwarjournal.org · by Bill Roggio · August 29, 2022​

16. Rafael Grossi Is the Last Man Standing For Nonproliferation

Excerpts:

Grossi must insist—loudly and publicly—that the agency will resist outside pressure and will not prematurely close its investigation.

Under a revived deal, the P5+1 would reportedly ask Grossi to issue a report on Tehran’s cooperation with his probe before the deal could be re-implemented. It will ultimately be up to the IAEA’s Board of Governors to vote on closing the matter. Even if Iran provides new or additional explanations to the IAEA that are not technically credible, the board can nonetheless vote to close the investigation. Grossi could be forced into the uncomfortable position of speaking out against such a move—in the face of enormous pressure from the world’s major powers to acquiesce.

If Grossi is unsuccessful, with a new deal in place and revenue flowing in, Iran can continue unmonitored, covert nuclear weaponization or missile-delivery activities—all while complying with the accord’s monitored caps on its ability to produce fissile material for weapons. Under the new nuclear deal, Tehran could emerge with a fortified economy and an unstoppable threshold capability to break out to nuclear weapons.

Grossi must insist—loudly and publicly—that the agency will resist outside pressure. He must make clear to the P5+1 that it should not prematurely close the agency’s investigation. It is time to ascertain once and for all whether Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful. All other issues, including a political nuclear deal, must remain secondary.

Rafael Grossi Is the Last Man Standing For Nonproliferation

Foreign Policy · by Andrea Stricker, Anthony Ruggiero · August 29, 2022

Argument

An expert's point of view on a current event.

Despite pressure from various sides, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency won’t let Iran off the hook.

By Andrea Stricker, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Anthony Ruggiero, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, holds a press conference at the agency's headquarters in Vienna, on March 1, 2021.

Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, holds a press conference at the agency's headquarters in Vienna, on March 1, 2021. JOE KLAMAR/AFP via Getty Images

“Grossi is still the main obstacle to the finalization” of a nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, proclaimed Nour News, an outlet frequently used by Iran’s supreme leader for unofficial commentary. Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), may in fact be the last man standing against a shorter, weaker version of the 2015 nuclear deal that would irreparably harm the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Despite imminent pressure from all sides, including Washington, Grossi is refusing to close his agency’s probe into Tehran’s suspect atomic activities to pave the way for the accord’s revival.

Iran demands the permanent closure of the IAEA’s four-year-old investigation before a new deal can unfold, aiming to keep its nuclear weapons work hidden from the prying eyes of inspectors. The IAEA has already given in once: In 2015, the so-called P5+1 group of countries—the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—joined the rest of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors in a unanimous vote to close the agency’s inquiry into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program. The IAEA, led by then-Director-General Yukiya Amano, took this step despite Tehran’s untruthful answers to the agency’s questions.

Thankfully, Grossi has refused to bow to political pressure and repeat his predecessor’s mistake. Now, he must prepare for a potential showdown not just with Iran, but also with the rest of the IAEA’s member countries, including those negotiating the new nuclear deal.

“Grossi is still the main obstacle to the finalization” of a nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, proclaimed Nour News, an outlet frequently used by Iran’s supreme leader for unofficial commentary. Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), may in fact be the last man standing against a shorter, weaker version of the 2015 nuclear deal that would irreparably harm the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Despite imminent pressure from all sides, including Washington, Grossi is refusing to close his agency’s probe into Tehran’s suspect atomic activities to pave the way for the accord’s revival.

Iran demands the permanent closure of the IAEA’s four-year-old investigation before a new deal can unfold, aiming to keep its nuclear weapons work hidden from the prying eyes of inspectors. The IAEA has already given in once: In 2015, the so-called P5+1 group of countries—the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—joined the rest of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors in a unanimous vote to close the agency’s inquiry into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program. The IAEA, led by then-Director-General Yukiya Amano, took this step despite Tehran’s untruthful answers to the agency’s questions.

Thankfully, Grossi has refused to bow to political pressure and repeat his predecessor’s mistake. Now, he must prepare for a potential showdown not just with Iran, but also with the rest of the IAEA’s member countries, including those negotiating the new nuclear deal.

Since 2018, the IAEA has been investigating Iranian activities related to the production of nuclear material at four sites in the early 2000s that the regime failed to declare at the time to the IAEA, as required by Iran’s safeguards agreement with the agency. This legal obligation stems from the regime’s adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which mandates the IAEA with important safeguarding duties to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The investigation is therefore not directly related to the 2015 nuclear accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Grossi must prepare for a potential showdown not just with Iran, but also with the other countries negotiating the new nuclear deal.

U.S. President Joe Biden seems so desperate to revive a weaker version of the 2015 deal that he would take a page from the Obama administration’s playbook and agree to temporary nuclear restraints while overlooking Iranian proliferation infractions. Tehran would get sanctions relief worth $275 billion during the first year of the new deal and more than $1 trillion by the start of 2030.

In June, after Iran had initially promised to cooperate with IAEA investigators, Grossi reported that Iran failed to provide “technically credible” explanations for the presence of uranium at three sites. He reiterated on Monday that the IAEA cannot settle its inquiry until Tehran obliges. He stated that the IAEA has a “legal obligation” to continue the investigation and needs to know where Iranian nuclear material and equipment in question are today. He said Iran must “give us the necessary answers, information, access to people and places so that we can clarify the many things that are still in need for clarification.”

In 2018, just before then-U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear deal, the IAEA received new information from Israel about undeclared Iranian nuclear sites. In early 2018, Israel seized a set of Iranian nuclear files detailing that Tehran had a robust nuclear weapons program up until 2003. The archive revealed that under international pressure, the regime downsized and better camouflaged its nuclear weapons activities in mid-2003.

In 2019 and 2020, the IAEA asked Iran for access to three Iranian sites, based on archive information and other evidence suggesting Iran had used or produced nuclear material there. Iran delayed access and tried to sanitize and remove evidence from the three locations, yet inspectors detected human-made uranium at all of them.

The nuclear archive indicated that one of the three locations, known to the IAEA as Marivan, was a former high explosive testing location relevant to nuclear weapons development. The archive revealed that a second location, known to the IAEA as Varamin, was a former pilot uranium conversion facility for nuclear weapons production.

A third location, an outdoor warehouse known as Turquzabad, was not mentioned in the nuclear archive. Israel, however, discovered and informed the IAEA about the site, which purportedly held equipment and nuclear material related to pre-2003 activities, including those carried out at Varamin. Iran moved cargo containers from Turquzabad and scraped the grounds before the IAEA asked for access, but the agency still detected the presence of uranium during its visit.

The IAEA also raised questions about Tehran’s activities at a fourth site, Lavizan-Shian, known to the agency as the former headquarters of Iran’s past nuclear weapons program. The IAEA, which learned about this location from the archive, did not request access to the site, which Iran razed in 2003 and 2004, but the agency reported in May that Iran had used the site to work on a uranium metal disc, a step in nuclear weapons development. The IAEA further said that it could not ascertain where the nuclear material once present at the site is today and found Tehran in breach of its NPT safeguards agreement for not disclosing this and other information.

Yet the archive indicates that the IAEA has far more to investigate than these four sites. The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nonproliferation group, has translated and analyzed the contents of Tehran’s archive and estimates that between 19 and 23 current and former Iranian sites require investigation to ascertain whether the regime maintains nuclear weapons activities banned by the NPT. Importantly, the archive also contains memorandums of meetings by senior Iranian officials discussing where and how to hide ongoing nuclear weapons activities. All of this merits serious international scrutiny.

The P5+1 have reportedly acquiesced to Iran’s last-minute demand to link the nuclear deal’s revival with the closure of the IAEA’s investigation. This is eerily similar to the P5+1’s misguided 2015 decision, as part of the nuclear deal’s original implementation, to close the earlier IAEA probe into the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program. In 2015, Amano’s role in ending the agency’s investigation provided the equivalent of a nonproliferation stamp of approval on the nuclear deal. But Grossi is unlikely to follow his predecessor’s flawed approach. He is now only person standing in the way of world powers willing to sacrifice the global nonproliferation regime for a second time.

Grossi must insist—loudly and publicly—that the agency will resist outside pressure and will not prematurely close its investigation.

Under a revived deal, the P5+1 would reportedly ask Grossi to issue a report on Tehran’s cooperation with his probe before the deal could be re-implemented. It will ultimately be up to the IAEA’s Board of Governors to vote on closing the matter. Even if Iran provides new or additional explanations to the IAEA that are not technically credible, the board can nonetheless vote to close the investigation. Grossi could be forced into the uncomfortable position of speaking out against such a move—in the face of enormous pressure from the world’s major powers to acquiesce.

If Grossi is unsuccessful, with a new deal in place and revenue flowing in, Iran can continue unmonitored, covert nuclear weaponization or missile-delivery activities—all while complying with the accord’s monitored caps on its ability to produce fissile material for weapons. Under the new nuclear deal, Tehran could emerge with a fortified economy and an unstoppable threshold capability to break out to nuclear weapons.

Grossi must insist—loudly and publicly—that the agency will resist outside pressure. He must make clear to the P5+1 that it should not prematurely close the agency’s investigation. It is time to ascertain once and for all whether Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful. All other issues, including a political nuclear deal, must remain secondary.

Andrea Stricker is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Twitter: @StrickerNonpro

Anthony Ruggiero is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the U.S. National Security Council during the Trump administration. Twitter: @NatSecAnthony

1​7. Mapping the Fall of Afghanistan

​Please go to the link for the interactive maps and extensive graphics and history. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2022/08/29/mapping-the-fall-of-afghanistan/

This will be a very useful resource for all researchers looking at the Afghanistan.

​

Mapping the Fall of Afghanistan

After the fall of the Afghan government and the Taliban seized control of Kabul on August 15, 2021, the remnants of the Afghan military regrouped in Panjshir and several neighboring districts in Baghlan. The Taliban defeated this last vestige of resistance by September 6, 2021. By the spring of 2022, resistance to the Taliban began to grow, primarily under the banner of the National Resistance Front. The Taliban has surged forces into Panjshir and neighboring districts to suppress the resistance, but so far has been unsuccessful in defeating it.

18. Pentagon's Plan to Reduce Civilian Harm May Not Work in Future Conflicts, Experts Say

Excerpts:

Using such an approach in a major conflict will mean “you’re going to be operating in environments where … connectivity between the leading edge of the combatant forces and the highest levels of command will be interrupted,” Deptula. “So you can’t stop the execution of operations. This is why it’s so important for the individual combatants to fully understand the laws of armed conflict.”

Conversely, adding more layers of approval to the targeting process will increase the amount of time it takes to make a decision and execute a strike, retired Col. Mark Gunzinger, the Mitchell Institute’s director of future concepts and capability assessments, said.

“That can lead to lost opportunities. That can lead to suboptimal operational results,” Gunzinger said. “And that could lead to actually more casualties, and not fewer.”

Beyond that, prioritizing the prevention of civilian harm over the accomplishment of military objectives could lead to a dynamic in which “the commanders and their staffs that do the planning for next day’s operations—they’ll be self constraining, in that the most important thing in the planning would be no collateral damage, rather than what effects do we need to make to achieve a battlespace objective, to get this over with,” said retired Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, the Mitchell Institute’s director of research.

Such a dynamic would extend conflicts, Stutzriem warned, with the potential for more civilian casualties as a result.

Pentagon's Plan to Reduce Civilian Harm May Not Work in Future Conflicts, Experts Say - Air Force Magazine

airforcemag.com · by Greg Hadley · August 28, 2022

Aug. 28, 2022 | By

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The Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan released Aug. 25 details nearly a dozen objectives creating institutions and processes to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties.

But critics say the plan’s objectives may do more harm than good, creating extra layers of bureaucracy for planners and operators to navigate, and that it won’t work in a large-scale conflict.

In a memo accompanying the release of the action plan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III called its objectives “ambitious but necessary,” and press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder told reporters that the plan will “enable DOD to move forward on this important initiative.”

Austin first ordered the drafting of an action plan in January, not long after a series of reports from the New York Times in late 2021 detailed the impact of airstrikes that led to hundreds of civilian casualties in the Middle East. Those reports followed the high-profile deaths of 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021, caused by an erroneous strike during the U.S. withdrawal.

Among the action plan’s objectives is the establishment of a civilian protection center of excellence; the incorporation of guidance for addressing civilian harm across the full spectrum of armed conflict into doctrine and operation plans; improved knowledge of the civilian environment and civilian harm mitigation capabilities and processes throughout the joint targeting process; and the creation of a steering committee to oversee the action plan’s implementation.

More practically, what that will entail for operators in the field is “having somebody or probably a group of people who are experts in this civilian environment, that are sitting next to the operators, the threat-focused intel folks, the lawyers, as they’re really developing whether it’s an individual operation or a campaign and building in this component of civilian harm throughout the overall process,” a senior defense official told reporters in a background briefing.

Among those who could be included in those plans are forward deployed experts from the new center of excellence, the official added.

Austin, Ryder, and the defense official all emphasized in their statements that the action plan is meant to be forward-facing—Austin called the reforms “scalable and relevant to counterterrorism operations and large-scale conflicts against peer adversaries.”

But retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, disagreed.

“I believe that this report and the recommendations that it contains are really backward-looking toward an era of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations,” Deptula said. “Conditions will be very much different in operations in a major regional conflict. That doesn’t mean that avoidance of, planning for, and having the understanding of how to execute operations while minimizing or avoiding civilian casualties changes in importance. It just means that the intensity of conflict is not going to allow for exquisite, centralized analysis for the prosecution of each and every target.”

Instead, the Pentagon should work to ensure that its operators and planners know and abide by the laws of armed conflict, particularly the principle of proportionality, Deptula said—in an attack for a military objective, any anticipated civilian harm should not be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”

Trying to create uniform processes and institutions that oversee all civilian harm reduction efforts also runs contrary to the Pentagon’s and Air Force’s philosophy of distributed control, added Deptula—Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. and others have said they want to fundamentally shift their approach to war by embracing “decentralized execution … It’s the aspect of being able to work small teams and trusting our Airmen to be able to do things.”

Using such an approach in a major conflict will mean “you’re going to be operating in environments where … connectivity between the leading edge of the combatant forces and the highest levels of command will be interrupted,” Deptula. “So you can’t stop the execution of operations. This is why it’s so important for the individual combatants to fully understand the laws of armed conflict.”

Conversely, adding more layers of approval to the targeting process will increase the amount of time it takes to make a decision and execute a strike, retired Col. Mark Gunzinger, the Mitchell Institute’s director of future concepts and capability assessments, said.

“That can lead to lost opportunities. That can lead to suboptimal operational results,” Gunzinger said. “And that could lead to actually more casualties, and not fewer.”

Beyond that, prioritizing the prevention of civilian harm over the accomplishment of military objectives could lead to a dynamic in which “the commanders and their staffs that do the planning for next day’s operations—they’ll be self constraining, in that the most important thing in the planning would be no collateral damage, rather than what effects do we need to make to achieve a battlespace objective, to get this over with,” said retired Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, the Mitchell Institute’s director of research.

Such a dynamic would extend conflicts, Stutzriem warned, with the potential for more civilian casualties as a result.

National Security

airforcemag.com · by Greg Hadley · August 28, 2022

19. Inevitable: Melting Greenland ice sheet will send seas nearly a foot higher, study finds

Inevitable: Melting Greenland ice sheet will send seas nearly a foot higher, study finds

USA Today · by Dinah Voyles Pulver

| USA TODAY

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Polar bears hang on to survival on southeast Greenland's coast

Polar bear researcher Kristin Laidre took these video clips while researching how the bears are surviving southeast Greenland's changing climate

Kristin Laidre/University of Washington

Even if the entire world stopped burning fossil fuels today, a new study finds the Greenland ice sheet would still lose enough ice to add nearly a foot to rising sea levels.

Melting over the past century has altered the ice sheet's equilibrium, according to the study led by two glaciologists at the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. For the ice sheet to correct that imbalance, it will lose an estimated 100 trillion tons of ice, adding at least 10.8 inches to global average sea levels.

That’s “a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” said Jason Box, a glaciology professor with Denmark's geological survey.

Greenland's contribution to sea level rise could be more than two feet within the century if the pace of warming continues, the authors reported in the journal "Nature Climate Change," even though the study doesn't attach specific time frames.

Many nations committed during the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change to hold the line on emissions to rein in rising global average temperatures, but it could be decades before the world reaches net zero emissions.

What's the takeaway?

William Colgan, a senior researcher at Denmark's geological survey, said the work is a "strong cautionary tale."

"If we can stop the warming to the point where we're not flickering around the 2012-type climate indefinitely, we can save ourselves a huge amount of potential sea level rise," he said. "We can reduce the harm and reduce the sea level rise."

Either way, the world is already on the hook for at least the 274 millimeters, roughly 10.8 inches, of sea level rise from Greenland, he said. “That’s going to come out over the next century, no matter what we do.”

That's their best case scenario, said David Bahr, a study co-author and glaciologist at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. "None of us who wrote this paper are going to be at all surprised when we blast right past that," he said. "It’s entirely plausible that it’s going to be twice as bad.”

It is "entirely likely" the sea level could rise an estimated 30 inches – a projection not out of line with previous forecasts, Bahr said. "That’s a very bad case scenario. We're talking about large portions of places like New York, Miami and Bangladesh disappearing."

What does melting ice have to do with sea level rise?

Greenland's melting ice has been a key driver of the 11-inch average sea level rise observed along U.S. coastlines over the past 100 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That rate has accelerated during the past 40 years.

Second only to the thermal expansion of warming ocean water, Greenland melting accounts for an estimated 20% of sea level rise, said Bahr.

Any additional melting from Greenland's ice sheet would be on top of whatever global average sea rise occurs from warmer oceans, melting glaciers and ice sheet melting in Antarctica.

The study's findings could mean higher sea level rise projections in the U.S., the authors said. The 10.8 inch estimate is slightly higher than the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change had projected last year as Greenland's contribution to sea level rise by 2100. Bahr said their projections for additional melt if more warming events occur in the future would result in "substantially higher sea level rise from Greenland."

What did researchers study?

They looked at the "snow line," the boundary between ice sheet areas exposed to melting and those that were not between 2000 and 2019. They also studied meltwater runoff, tidewater ice flow and snow accumulation.

The study is unique, the researchers said, because they used satellite measurements and personal observations rather than computer modelling typically used to make sea level rise projections.

They also looked at two extreme years, 2012 and 2018, both influenced by fluctuating pressures over the ocean known as the North Atlantic Oscillation.

During 2012, the negative phase of the oscillation pushed in excess heat and Greenland saw the greatest ice melt of this century so far. During a positive phase in 2018, colder air moved over the island's west side, suppressing surface melt.

If warmer conditions such as those of 2012 occur more often, the study's co-authors said Greenland's contributions to sea level rise could double or even triple.

What does equilibrium mean for the ice sheet?

The ice sheet is mapped in two zones: the upper area where snow and ice accumulates and the lower section, which receives less snow and includes the area that is melting.

When one area gets larger than the other, the ice sheet becomes out of balance, Colgan said. At this point, the melt zone is growing larger, and warmer temperatures are moving the line between the two zones upward, shrinking the top accumulation area.

“We have caused the ice sheet to go out of equilibrium because we’ve melted it in all the wrong ways,” Bahr said. “We’re melting it faster than the ice can move downstream and replenish areas that are melting.”

The changes aren’t just apparent to scientists, Colgan added. Even casual visitors, such as wealthy tourists who take helicopter sightseeing tours, notice the freshly exposed rocks and retreating ice.

USA Today · by Dinah Voyles Pulver

​20. Fix and Expand the Interpreter Visa Program

​Excerpt:

Now, Congress can introduce and pass standalone legislation for the President to approve that establishes the Permanent SIV Program, having previously introduced similar legislation as a rejected amendment to the 2023 Defense Authorization Act. The ability to attract and retain foreign interpreters is of vital importance to both the State and Defense Departments, so advocacy from their senior leaders for such legislation will be both instrumental and logical. We owe our brave interpreters new and safe homes; a new and better permanent SIV program is a down payment on that debt.​

Fix and Expand the Interpreter Visa Program

The 2006 Special Immigrant Visa program, which helps Iraqi and Afghan interpreters and their families, desperately needs an overhaul and expansion to cover U.S. helpers elsewhere.

BY DOUG LIVERMORE

NO ONE LEFT BEHIND

AUGUST 29, 2022 10:49 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Doug Livermore

Back in 2006, Congress recognized that Iraqis and Afghan nationals who help U.S. forces in their countries deserve swift resettlement in the United States after they wind down their crucial and dangerous efforts. But resettlement has often been anything but swift—certainly not fast enough to help thousands of Afghans left behind when U.S. forces withdrew last year. Nor does the program help those who are helping U.S. forces fight terror groups in other countries. It is time for lawmakers to fix these problems.

Since the Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, program became law in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act, it has helped roughly 100,000 Iraqi and Afghan interpreters and members of their immediate families become lawful permanent residents of the United States. The law helps these people skip the years-long line for permission to enter our country and obtain the green card that allows them to stay and work here.

But the law, as the Congressional Research Service put it last year, has placed hard limits on the number of such visas and imposed deadlines for processing applications and doing security screening that the U.S. government has often been unable to meet.

Moreover, the budget for the SIV program is debated and appropriated annually, producing a state of financial unpredictability that has prevented the State and Defense Departments from dedicating the necessary resources and personnel to manage it efficiently and effectively.

These conditions create delays that can have deadly consequences for the applicants who await their chance to come to America.

But we should do more than improve the system for our Iraqis and Afghan helpers. We should expand it to help those who are helping us fight al-Qaeda, its splinter organization, the Islamic State in Syria and al-Sham, or ISIS; and other affiliated state and non-state actors across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

On battlefields where the insurgents are nearly indistinguishable from the civilians and the locals speak a complex and multi-dialectic languages, we make life-and-death decisions based on guidance provided by our interpreters. They endure every hardship with us, take all the same risks, and often make the same ultimate sacrifices.

On my second deployment to Iraq’s “Triangle of Death,” south of Baghdad in 2007, my interpreter Hamid Kaari Hilmi was killed by a piece of shrapnel that struck him in the head. We felt his loss as if he were an American soldier and placed his picture and name on our memorial wall at Fort Drum.

After I became a Special Forces soldier, I joined foreign internal defense missions against terrorist networks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, and the Central African Republic. Like our fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, these efforts would have been impossible without these brave interpreters. I have passable French, but few of the Congolese and Central African Army soldiers we trained and advised spoke anything besides local languages. In Mali, most of the ethnic Tuareg troops we were helping to hunt AQ in the Maghreb only spoke Tamashek.

Today, I am part of the effort to end ISIS’s quest for a physical caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Like our African helpers, locally hired interpreters in Syria are taking deadly risks and supplying crucial aid—and yet neither they nor their families are eligible for SIV visas.

In the last several months, No One Left Behind—a non-profit organization that advocates for former interpreters and U.S. government employees—has worked closely with several influential members of Congressional to push for a Permanent SIV Program. This new program would delegate authority to the Secretary of State to expand geographic eligibility to any combat area or foreign state in which an interpreter is harmed, persecuted, or threatened with physical harm in connection with their employment by the United States.

It also would remove the budgetary uncertainty that undermines the current program by establishing a permanent authorization with a multi-year appropriation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, such a permanent program would cost about $2.5 billion to fund over the course of ten years and admit some 30,000 qualified applicants and their eligible family members. By comparison, Congress approved a billion dollars just to provide further funding for the existing SIV program in 2021. And while the CBO score for the proposed Permanent SIV Program is better than that for the existing program, it also underestimates the potential long-term contribution of these interpreters and their families to the American economy.

It would consolidate and streamline the process by requiring companies and U.S. government agencies to preemptively provide to hired interpreters those documents required for the SIV process, remove redundant steps in the application process, reduce or eliminate many of the unnecessary fees, and allow for virtual interviews for applicants that are unable to reach a U.S. embassy—like many of those currently trapped in Afghanistan.

Now, Congress can introduce and pass standalone legislation for the President to approve that establishes the Permanent SIV Program, having previously introduced similar legislation as a rejected amendment to the 2023 Defense Authorization Act. The ability to attract and retain foreign interpreters is of vital importance to both the State and Defense Departments, so advocacy from their senior leaders for such legislation will be both instrumental and logical. We owe our brave interpreters new and safe homes; a new and better permanent SIV program is a down payment on that debt.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States government or any of its departments or agencies.

defenseone.com · by Doug Livermore

21. Opinion | The U.S. military’s overdue reckoning with civilian casualties

The Gallagher crimes will haunt SOF for a long time.

Excerpts:

“I believe that over 99 percent of the time, our Special Operations Forces did the right thing,” Clarke told me. “They made tough calls, and they dealt with the results afterwards. But mistakes inside our community are made sometimes. Humans are fallible.” The stresses were aggravated, he said, “because SOF’s capabilities were highly valued. We were spread pretty thin, constantly deployed throughout combat zones.”

After the Gallagher case made headlines in 2019, Clarke ordered a comprehensive review of SOCOM — SEALS, Army Rangers, Marine Raiders and other Special Forces. I described in a column last December how that review — and an intensive internal effort by SEALS commander Rear Adm. H. Wyman Howard III — helped restore standards within that elite Navy force.

America’s wars in the Middle East took a terrible toll. It’s good that one result is a new code that says, in the words of Austin’s directive last week: “The protection of civilians is a strategic priority as well as a moral imperative.” War changes countries, usually for the worse. But here’s one change that’s for the better.

Opinion | The U.S. military’s overdue reckoning with civilian casualties

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · August 28, 2022

When Gen. Richard D. Clarke retires this month as head of U.S. Special Operations Command, he will depart with a chest of hard-earned combat medals — but also with the recognition, now widely shared by his colleagues, that too many civilians died unnecessarily in America’s two decades of war in the Middle East.

This reckoning with the cost of war is overdue. For too long, the Pentagon rejected reports of civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria as false claims or enemy propaganda. But it’s an admirable quality of the U.S. military that leaders such as Clarke have now acknowledged that something went badly wrong in casualty assessments and are trying to fix it.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week announced a new plan for “civilian harm mitigation,” to avoid disasters such as the August 2021 strike in Kabul that was meant to kill an Islamic State terrorist but instead struck a van carrying an innocent nongovernmental organization worker and seven children. That was just one notorious incident. Senior Pentagon officials know there were dozens, maybe hundreds more.

For officers such as Clarke, who commanded the warriors at the sharpest point of America’s military spear, this rethinking of civilian casualties goes to the heart of their profession as soldiers. He told me in an interview Friday that he had come to recognize that avoiding civilian harm is both an operational and moral imperative. The United States cannot fight the way Russia is doing in Ukraine, oblivious to the civilian cost, and succeed.

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Clarke began our conversation by explaining the combat logic of avoiding civilian deaths. “If we work in and amongst the population in places like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, our people on the ground, usually with partner forces, have to be trusted to do the right thing,” he said. “We cannot create another generation of terrorists because we have been lax in our procedures and have unnecessarily harmed civilian bystanders.”

Clarke then talked about the moral cost, not simply for the victims, but for the Americans who pulled the triggers. “You injure the individuals who are calling in those airstrikes,” he explained. “They have to live with themselves the rest of their lives. Living with that can sometimes have long-term effects resulting in behavioral and psychological issues that I don’t want our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to have to go through.”

Clarke recalled the commander’s dilemma from his days as a two-star Army general when he oversaw U.S. and Iraqi troops pushing Islamic State fighters from the Euphrates Valley. He wanted to trust that Iraqi partners were accurate when they requested fire support against the enemy. “Time is of the essence, and you’re looking at targets through a soda straw to determine whether they are valid targets,” he recalled. Those assessments weren’t always right.

The Special Operations Forces that Clarke has led, known as “SOF” in Pentagonese, have carried the heaviest load in America’s Middle East wars. They did the toughest work of fighting and killing in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes, as in the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, the cycle of combat had a corrosive effect. Gallagher was convicted by a military court for posing in a trophy picture with the corpse of a dead Islamic State prisoner in Iraq. But he was hardly the only SOF warrior who crossed the lines in those 20 years.

“I believe that over 99 percent of the time, our Special Operations Forces did the right thing,” Clarke told me. “They made tough calls, and they dealt with the results afterwards. But mistakes inside our community are made sometimes. Humans are fallible.” The stresses were aggravated, he said, “because SOF’s capabilities were highly valued. We were spread pretty thin, constantly deployed throughout combat zones.”

After the Gallagher case made headlines in 2019, Clarke ordered a comprehensive review of SOCOM — SEALS, Army Rangers, Marine Raiders and other Special Forces. I described in a column last December how that review — and an intensive internal effort by SEALS commander Rear Adm. H. Wyman Howard III — helped restore standards within that elite Navy force.

America’s wars in the Middle East took a terrible toll. It’s good that one result is a new code that says, in the words of Austin’s directive last week: “The protection of civilians is a strategic priority as well as a moral imperative.” War changes countries, usually for the worse. But here’s one change that’s for the better.

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · August 28, 2022

22. Should democracies ever lie?

Debate this.

Conclusion:

There is no easy answer to questions like these, but they are ones that Australia will have to grapple with more often, especially as China becomes more assertive in Australia’s physical and information space. Without a strategic compass, Canberra could be driven by tactical needs and bureaucratic imperatives. To avoid this, Australia and other liberal democracies should think though and develop a more coherent concept for information operations.

Should democracies ever lie? | Lowy Institute

Is bending the truth sometimes necessary and justified in situations short of war?

lowyinstitute.org · by Ben Scott

Should liberal democracies ever tell lies?

That’s one of the questions raised by reports that Facebook and Twitter have recently taken down a web of accounts, originating in the United States, that were “covertly seeking to influence users in the Middle East and Asia with pro-Western perspectives about international politics, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Growing awareness of state-sponsored disinformation has prompted calls for West to rediscover the dark arts of information. For example Robert Gates, the former US Secretary of Defence and long-time CIA officer, argues that:

“Russia … mounted sophisticated hacking and disinformation campaigns to interfere in the 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the 2016 presidential election in the United States, and the 2017 presidential election in France. The United States possesses the same the technologies; it just lacks a strategy for applying them.”

But the myth of adroit US information operations winning the Cold War is largely a myth. Thomas Ridd’s definitive study of information war, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, shows that the US meddling with disinformation was very limited in scope and effect. He concludes that “for liberal democracies … being at the receiving end of active measures will undermine democratic institutions – and giving in to the temptation to design and deploy them will have the same result. It is impossible to excel at disinformation and at democracy at the same time.”

For as long as humans have been fighting, denial and deception has been part of warfare.

Canberra seems to agree. On 22 February the Department of Defence issued an unusually detailed press release describing the Chinese PLA Navy’s “lasing” of an Australian P-8A Poseidon, which concluded with the statement that “Australia does not engage in the spread of misinformation or disinformation.”

But is this completely true? For as long as humans have been fighting, denial and deception has been part of warfare. Another dramatised film, Operation Mincemeat, has just been released telling the true story of Britain’s brilliant use of a fake dead British officer to deceive the Germans in 1943. It would be surprising if Ukraine’s successful information operations were all strictly truthful. During a conflict, Australians would expect Defence’s Information Warfare Division to be similarly creative.

So, maybe the answer is that liberal democracies can lie during a war but never during peace time.

A Ukrainian tank driver at the front line in the Donetsk region on 19 August amid Russia’s invasion (Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)

But what about the “grey zone”? Most definitions of this murky area between peace and war put information war in the middle. The term is central to Australia’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update (although it wasn’t mentioned in the 2016 Defence White Paper). The grey zone encompasses Chinese manoeuvring for strategic advantage in Australia’s region; its incremental militarisation of disputed features in the South China Sea, its efforts to gain a military toehold in the southwest Pacific and PLA brinkmanship on the water and in the air.

This competition has spilled into the information space as Australia and China advance conflicting accounts of dangerous encounters, such as the February lasing incident. This is the context for the unusually explicit assertion by Australia’s Chief of Airforce Air Marshal Robert Chipman that Chinese anti-air capabilities in the South China Sea don’t “mean you can’t deliver military effects to achieve your interests when you are operating against China.”

How should liberal democracies engage in information war? Should they limit themselves to truth telling, public diplomacy and transparency campaigns. Or is bending the truth sometimes necessary and justified?

There is no easy answer to questions like these, but they are ones that Australia will have to grapple with more often, especially as China becomes more assertive in Australia’s physical and information space.

There is no evidence that the accounts suspended by Facebook and Twitter for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” were spreading fake news but they were using “fake personas” and posing as “independent media outlets”. Is there a meaningful difference? If not, how can any covert action be justified?

And what about cyber? Is there a valid distinction between disinformation and offensive cyber operations? The latter range from industrial sabotage through to the more subtle manipulation of data. The Australian Signals Directorate’s offensive cyber capability will triple in size over the 10 years. Although the main purpose of this capability is to support Australian Defence Force operations, it’s use is not limited to wartime.

Clearly, liberal democracies should, as Ridd advises, resist the temptation to disseminate disinformation in situations short of war. But in an intensifying competition short of war, it is not hard to imagine situations in which the benefits of doing so might outweigh the costs. For example, what if decisive Chinese action in the South China Sea or against Taiwan could be forestalled by dissemination of a fake news story, or by covert amplification of a true story?

There is no easy answer to questions like these, but they are ones that Australia will have to grapple with more often, especially as China becomes more assertive in Australia’s physical and information space. Without a strategic compass, Canberra could be driven by tactical needs and bureaucratic imperatives. To avoid this, Australia and other liberal democracies should think though and develop a more coherent concept for information operations.

lowyinstitute.org · by Ben Scott

23. Remembering the Largest Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation in US History

This will (and must) be studied for years to come.

Remembering the Largest Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation in US History - Air Force Magazine

airforcemag.com · by James C. Kitfield · August 29, 2022

Aug. 29, 2022 | By

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Aug. 30 marks the one-year anniversary of the end of Operation Allies Refuge (OAR), the final act in the longest war in U.S. history. Historians will long study the United States’ post-9/11 Global War on Terrorism and, in particular, the failed, two-decade effort to plant sustainable seeds of democracy in Afghanistan. Certainly as a coda to the conflict, OAR reflected the chaos, tragedy, and good-intentions-gone-awry that characterized so much of the Afghan War.

What was accomplished a year ago under the most challenging of conditions and pressures was largely overshadowed by a horrific suicide bombing that killed more than 170 people at Hamid Karzai International Airport, including 13 U.S. service members; an errant U.S. drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children; and by the dispiriting spectacle of flag-waving Taliban extremists sweeping to victory in Afghanistan 20 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

On this one-year anniversary, however, the fog of war that enshrouded so much of Operation Allies Refuge has largely lifted. Revealed beneath the chaos and tragedy is the largest non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) airlift in U.S. history, one that involved round-the-clock operations of nearly 800 military and civilian aircraft from more than 30 nations. In just 17 days, more than 500 U.S. Air Force Active, Reserve, and National Guard aircrews and hundreds of Air Force ground personnel helped evacuate a staggering 124,334 people, the vast majority of them Afghan nationals.

Heroism and great compassion were behind those unprecedented numbers. Airmen helped deliver three babies aboard C-17s during the operation, and dozens more were born shortly after their mothers landed safely at staging bases and temporary safe havens around the world. Air Force Aeromedical Evacuation teams and medics stood up “Operation Stork,” gathering the specialized personnel and equipment required to safely transport the roughly 20 percent of adult female evacuees who were pregnant. U.S. Air Forces in Europe and the 521st Air Mobility Operations Wing created passenger medical augmentation teams to attend to the needs of evacuees who were in many cases wounded and traumatized, and crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in flights of more than 450 passengers per sortie. Their efforts included multiple life-saving resuscitations inflight.

After the suicide bombing at HKIA, three Aeromedical Evacuation missions whisked 35 patients to care, saving the lives of the critically wounded. In all, 28 Aeromedical Evacuation missions conducted during OAR flew 177 patients to badly needed care. One of the C-17s from the 21st Airlift Squadron also carried the 13 fallen U.S. service members killed in the bombing home to Dover Air Force Base, Del.

For the one-year anniversary of Operation Allies Refuge, Air Force Magazine interviewed a number of the many Air Force participants, the better to remember their largely untold stories of bravery and compassion in the face of deadly chaos.

‘Not the Afghanistan We Knew’

Just days after the United States military had officially furled the flag on Operation Resolute Support in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III issued a vocal order on July 16, 2021, instructing the U.S. Air Force to deploy a personnel recovery task force (PRTF) to Hamid Karzai International Airport. The PRTF’s mission was to provide combat search and rescue in support of a U.S. non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) for tens of thousands of Afghans who had served as interpreters, drivers, and assistants to U.S. forces and diplomats.

The Pentagon avoided such a move for many months, concerned that a mass exodus would demoralize Afghan allies. The plan at the time was still to leave behind a large U.S. diplomatic presence in Kabul to support the Afghan government and security forces. In July, however, Taliban insurgents intensified an offensive that had already seen them capture more than a third of provincial capitals around the country. A new U.S. intelligence assessment that took note of those negative trends warned that the Afghan government could fall within the next six to 12 months, as opposed to the two- or three-year window that the intelligence community assessed only months earlier. That Afghan institutions might collapse in just weeks had not yet occurred to U.S. intelligence analysts.

Master Sgt. Brian Faulkner and Airman 1st Class Stephen Conklin, aerospace medical technician for the 127th Medical Group at Selfridge Air National Guard Base, Mich., remove stitches from an Afghan refugee, at the temporary housing facility medical clinic at Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy, following Operation Allies Refuge, Sept. 16, 2021. U.S. Air Force photo.

The day after Austin’s deployment order, the State Department announced Operation Allies Refuge, and the Air Force was directed to organize relocation flights for Afghan nationals and their families eligible for U.S. Special Immigrant Visas. In the classified briefing at the operations center for the 71st Rescue Squadron at Moody Air Force Base, Ga., the wing commander explained to the deploying Airmen that “the hair on the back of your necks should be standing up: This is not the Afghanistan we knew.”

Lt. Col. Brian Desautels was chosen to command the personnel recovery task force, which included combat search and rescue (CSAR) units and helicopters from Moody as well as Nellis and Davis-Monthan Air Force Bases. Along with many senior officers, Desautels had spent much of his career fighting America’s longest war, but in 20 years of operations in Afghanistan, U.S. Air Force units had become accustomed to operating out of large, secure military bases with abundant ground support such as Bagram and Kandahar airfields. At Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Kabul, the task force would operate out of a facility wedged into the middle of a sprawling capital of nearly 5 million people, with no hardened base support or dedicated security force. The task force would thus need to carry all the food, water, equipment, and expertise it would require in the coming weeks.

The deployment amounted to an unprecedented stress test of the Air Force’s agile combat employment (ACE) concept, with pressures few could imagine at the time.

“I had served in Afghanistan, so I knew what my commander was talking about in terms of the hair standing up on the back of our necks, but we are used to operating out of austere airfields and making the best of it,” Desautels said in an interview. He noted that the roughly 170 multi-mission-capable Airmen of the task force were wheels up in three C-17 “chalks” in less than 72 hours, arriving at HKIA within 96 hours of receiving the deployment order. By mid-August the PRTF had settled into a good battle rhythm, helping to evacuate on average 7,500 civilians each day. “We hit the ground running with a lot of focused energy, committed to giving 100 percent until our mission was complete.”

Then one morning in mid-August, Desautels entered the operations center at HKIA to find that Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, a Navy SEAL and the top U.S. commander in Kabul, was wearing his full “battle rattle” and carrying his M-4 rifle. There was also a new sense of urgency in the orders he barked. Taliban forces were sweeping into Kabul, and the U.S. Embassy had yet to be fully evacuated. As Desautels entered the operations center, an Army captain saluted and requested permission to abandon his post because they were taking so much sniper fire from nearby rooftops. He was given reinforcements from the PRTF team instead.

Desautels worked 27 hours straight and was grabbing a couple of hours sleep when he awoke to the sound of explosions and heavy machine-gun and automatic weapons fire. Jumping out of his rack, he grabbed two bug-eyed majors and headed for the operations center. There was screaming and multiple conversations talking over each other on the radio net. With the Taliban entering the capital virtually unopposed, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and Afghan Security Forces had melted away.

“Then the Taliban opened fire on the airport, and suddenly word came that the whole airfield was being overrun by thousands of desperate Afghan civilians,” recalled Desautels. “The whole perimeter was collapsing around us.”

‘I Couldn’t Help But Think of My Own Daughter’

After U.S. forces abandoned Bagram Airfield in July, chief medical officer and Air Force Col. Bruce Lynch and roughly 50 members of his staff relocated to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. As the top medical adviser for Adm. Vasely, he felt acutely the tension between a U.S. military command anxious to evacuate the embassy and a U.S. ambassador and embassy staff determined to keep the faith with their allies in the Afghan government.

“At the embassy. it was in the back of everyone’s mind that things weren’t going well for the Afghan government, and by early August when two or three major provincial capitals fell to the Taliban, you could read the tea leaves, but we didn’t want to abandon our Afghan partners and exacerbate their problems by making a hasty exit,” Lynch said in an interview. Working alongside an Afghan doctor he had met at Bagram, Lynch helped treat Afghan soldiers who were wounded defending Kabul, and the two physicians became close.

When Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, the embassy staff were finally hustled into helicopters and transported to HKIA. Given the incredible stress of the moment, Lynch was relieved to be greeted at the airport not by surly Turkish soldiers who were previously in charge, but rather by young U.S. Marines in full battle gear.

“On such a hectic day, it was quite a relief to get off the helicopter and be greeted by a bunch of U.S. Marines on the runway. That was calming to me,” said Lynch, who along with his team was ushered to the medical facility at HKIA that would serve both as their workplace and home for the next two weeks. Luckily the medical center was fairly new, with a well-equipped and modern emergency room, two operating rooms and an intensive care unit. Most important, the HKIA medical center was a hardened facility of brick and concrete with no exterior windows. Given the proximity of high-rise buildings surrounding the airport, it was a relief for the medical team not to feel they had a constant target on their backs.

Pods are established for evacuees at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Aug. 24, 2021. Military members established temporary lodging for evacuees from Afghanistan in support of Operation Allies Refuge. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Jan K. Valle.

In one of the conversations with the Afghan physician he had worked with at Bagram and the embassy, Lynch learned that the man had a 12-year-old daughter who was nearly the same age as Lynch’s own children.

“We were exchanging stories about our kids, and he told me that his daughter wanted to be a doctor like her father when she grew up,” recalled Lynch, who knew that a whole generation of young Afghan women and girls who had grown up with unprecedented freedoms in a fledgling democracy would soon be subjected to the medieval patriarchy of the Taliban. “In the back of my mind, I remember thinking that the options for his daughter’s future would be pretty grim under Taliban rule, and as a father, I couldn’t help but think of my own daughter in such a situation. It was a horrible thought.”

Later Lynch learned that neither the Afghan doctor nor his daughter were able to escape during the evacuation.

‘Rightly Concerned’

When the emergency call came in mid-August, Col. Colin McClaskey was on a mission in the Horn of Africa. As deputy commander of the Air Force’s 821st Contingency Response Group out of Travis Air Force Base, Calif., he led a unit that specialized in opening, operating, and, if necessary, closing airfields. His team included air traffic controllers, aircraft maintenance personnel, military police, fuel specialists, and logisticians. And the word came that the situation in Kabul was essentially going to hell, and they were needed there yesterday.

With the rest of his team already underway from the United States, McClaskey took a C-130 transport from Djibouti, Africa, to Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany. There he hitched a ride on a C-17 transport that was ferrying U.S. Army troops to Kabul, part of an emergency deployment of some 6,000 U.S. Soldiers and Marines being rushed to HKIA to try to secure the airport. After refueling in Kuwait, the C-17 approached the Kabul airport Aug. 15. Sitting in the cockpit in the right observer seat as the aircraft circled low over HKIA, McClaskey could hardly process what he was seeing. The airport looked like a crowded soccer stadium during a riot, with thousands upon thousands of people outside trying to cram through the various gates and thousands more running onto the tarmac and taxiways like they were a football pitch.

“I was talking to the aircrew and over the radio with members of my team already on the ground at HKIA as we flew low over the airfield,” said McClaskey. “I don’t know that there was anybody in that airspace that wanted to be on the ground with their team more than me at that moment. But as we talked through the situation very frankly, we all agreed that putting the aircraft down would risk both it and those people on the ground. In the end, we had to divert back to Al Udeid, and I can tell you [as we left], my folks on the ground were rightly very concerned about their physical security.”

‘We’re Staying’

“Everyone just calm the f*** down! We’re launching the iron, but we’re not flushing the whole team! We’re staying,” Lt. Col. Desautels shouted into the radio in the operations center, referring to the two HC-130 aircraft that were designated to fly his team to safety in the event of an emergency exfiltration. With the perimeter breached and thousands of Afghan civilians swarming the tarmac, the situation at HKIA was deteriorating by the second, and many people in the operation center and around the world via television footage were unnerved by what they were witnessing.

A C-17 Globemaster that had just landed at the airport to deliver a load of equipment and security forces were swarmed by hundreds of Afghan civilians before it could even offload its cargo. Faced with possibility of losing control of their aircraft and jeopardizing all those onboard, the pilots quickly taxied and took off, with Afghan civilians clinging desperately to the fuselage and wheel wells. The sight of Afghans falling as the C-17 gained altitude would become an iconic image of OAR, recalling photos of U.S. helicopters pulling desperate Americans and South Vietnamese off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975.

Just minutes later, Desautels had to make a life-or-death decision. In the event that HKIA was completely overrun not only by Afghan civilians but potentially Taliban fighters, he had promised his team he would get them out or “flush” them on the two HC-130 aircraft designated “Fever 11” and “Fever 12.” Now that the moment had apparently arrived, Desautels also understood that pulling his 170-person team, many providing airport security, would leave a critical gap in the airport’s already crumbling defenses.

“We had intelligence that the Taliban had liberated a nearby prison full of al-Qaida and ISIS fighters, so my team understood how critical we were to the base defense plan. So instead of flushing the team, I got permission from the CFACC [Combined Forces Air Component Commander] to launch the HC-130s from the taxiways, which is risky. Word came back that ‘the airport is not clear, take off at your own risk,’ and within seconds Fever 11 and 12 were airborne flying just 30 feet or so above the heads of the crowd on the runway.”

With the aid of air refueling tankers, the increasingly exhausted pilots of the HC-130s circled overhead for more than 13 hours, waiting to see if the U.S. military could regain control of the airfield. The alternative was to attempt an emergency extraction of the personnel recovery task force from a contested airfield.

‘A Gut Punch to Everyone’

Late in the afternoon Aug. 26, Lynch stepped out of the medical facility at HKIA for a breath of fresh air. The scene that greeted him outside was almost post-Apocalyptic. The shells of abandoned cars were scattered about, and piles of discarded suitcases, bags, mattresses, and the other detritus of lives torn asunder littered the area. A stench escaped from a nearby line of latrines that had not been emptied in days.

Due to intelligence indicating a possible suicide bombing attack on the airport, leadership had put the small hospital on lockdown for much of the day. Most of the doctors and nurses were sleeping at the facility after their shifts anyway, so they really had no place else to go. Then around 6 p.m., word came that there had been a suicide bombing across the airport at Abbey Gate, which U.S. Marines guarded against a swirling mass of as many as 10,000 Afghan civilians desperately hoping to be rescued. The mass of humanity provided an inviting target for the Islamic State-Khorasan terrorist who had packed his suicide vest with ball bearings for maximum lethality.

Lynch immediately activated the mass casualty plan his team had rehearsed many times. Yet no amount of planning could prepare them for the arrival of the first trucks carrying the wounded.

“When the first truck pulled up and we saw all of the Marines injured in the back, that was a game changer. That was a big shock to me personally and a gut punch to everyone. I don’t think any of us had seen so many American casualties from a single incident, and it was clear that four or five of the Marines had passed away already,” said Lynch. “But after stepping back for a moment, we had to jump-start ourselves out of the shock because so many wounded were coming in, and we had to be on our ‘A game’ to take care of all the patients.”

Enlisting the help of a group of Air Force pararescuemen, Lynch quickly established a triage point outside the facility. He walked up and down the lines of wounded, deciding who needed to be rushed into the emergency room, which patients had less severe wounds that could be treated elsewhere in the hospital, and who lacked a pulse and was beyond help.

During one of the longest nights of his life, Lynch realized that the small hospital was in danger of being overwhelmed, doubling up in the emergency room and treating 63 U.S. and Afghan wounded in the small facility. The staff had already confirmed 10 American fatalities, some having died on the operating table. In their mass casualty plan, they had anticipated having to treat patients without dog tags or easy identification, so they created packets for them and gave each one the name of a Hollywood celebrity. They quickly ran out of celebrity names and had to think of others.

By early morning, the last of the Aeromedical Evacuation flights transporting the wounded to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany lifted off. An exhausted Lynch looked around a hospital very much the worse for wear. He knew the team would have to find the energy to clean up and reset the facility in case the airfield was attacked again. After all, they were still in the middle of Kabul; the base was still surrounded by the Taliban; and other Islamic State-Khorasan terrorists were undoubtedly still out there plotting massacres.

Soon, medical corpsmen started showing up with blood donations, and Marines arrived to help clean the hospital, mopping floors, taking out the trash, and disposing of bloody bandages and sheets. That allowed Lynch and his team to get a little rest, but not much. Lynch knew that every day until their scheduled departure Aug. 31 would be more dangerous than the previous one.

‘An Opportunity to Actually Deliver Hope’

After flying four evacuation missions out of HKIA in a matter of days, C-17 pilot Lt. Col. Austin Street was on his first extended crew rest at Al Udied Air Base in Qatar. The ramp of the air base had been expanded to accommodate more than twice the number of C-17s as normal, one of many signs that the Globemaster had become the workhorse of Operation Allies Refuge. Roughly half of the Air Force’s entire fleet of 222 C-17s had been committed to the operation, and they would evacuate more than 79,000 of the more than 124,000 total evacuees, including roughly 6,000 Americans.

Street, commander of the 21st Airlift Squadron out of Travis Air Base, Calif., was asleep when the phone call came from the operations desk at Al Udied. There had been a mass casualty suicide bombing at HKIA, and he was designated to command an Aeromedical Evacuation mission to transport the wounded to Germany. But when Street arrived at the aircraft for the high priority mission, only one maintenance person was on site prepping the aircraft. He also learned that because the heat in Qatar had the effect of expanding jet fuel, he would have to launch without a sufficient fuel load to complete the mission. To make matters worse, some of the generators at HKIA had been targeted by saboteurs, meaning he would have to land at night without runway lights.

A three-day-old baby born to evacuee parents at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, receives phototherapy for a case of jaundice at 521st Air Mobility Operation Wing’s Hangar 5 prior to boarding a flight at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Sept. 2, 2021. Master Sgt. Steve Brooks shields her eyes from the sun. Brooks was a religious affairs Airman from the Alabama National Guard serving at Ramstein in support of Operation Allies Refuge. U.S. Air Force photo by Maj. Tania Bryan.

The Aeromedical Evacuation flight was so rushed that the two aeromedical transport teams and critical care air transport team onboard had to reconfigure the aircraft to accept wounded patients while underway to Kabul. No midair refueling tankers were in range. Once on the ground at HKIA, Street had to wait two hours on the tarmac with the aircraft engines running because some of the critically wounded passengers were just out of surgery and needed to be stabilized before transport.

Once again, Street took off without enough fuel to complete the mission and reach Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Initially air command-and-control could identify no tankers in range, but they finally located a KC-135 tanker on “strip alert” in the region. Street conducted a tricky midair refueling at night over the Black Sea, while in his cargo bay a critical care team performed emergency surgery on a wounded patient.

“I’ve flown the C-17 for 15 years, and that was not only the most important and significant mission I ever flew, it was also the most challenging,” Street said in an interview. At Air Mobility Command, he noted, their mission mantra is to ‘project power, and deliver hope.’ “Well, I’ve had lots of opportunities to project combat power into war zones, but I’ve rarely had the opportunity to deliver hope. That’s why I’m so proud of my crew for pushing through and overcoming the most challenging conditions I ever witnessed. This entire operation was an opportunity to actually deliver hope, not only to our own wounded, but also to all the Afghans trying to get out of Kabul. That allowed the American military to keep faith with many of those Afghans that we’ve built trust with over the past 20 years.”

‘An Eerie Feeling’

On the final day of Operation Allies Refuge, McClaskey led a skeleton crew from the 821st Contingency Response Group as they launched the final evacuation flights from HKIA. The suicide bombing days earlier had given his team a renewed sense of purpose, and they had worked around the clock to get as many Afghans out of the country as possible in what little time remained. Even in the last 24 hours of operations, they had managed to rescue 1,250 additional evacuees.

McClaskey and his team finally policed up the last remnants of equipment at HKIA, determined to leave nothing of combat usefulness for the Taliban fighters they could see all around the airport’s perimeter, their signature black-and-white flags unfurled. Everything that couldn’t fit into the rear of a C-17 was destroyed.

That evening under the cover of darkness, five C-17s would help the 82nd Airborne Division execute a joint tactical exfiltration, flying the remaining 800 U.S. personnel at HKIA, including the acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, to safety. The C-17s were supported by more than 20 orbiting aircraft stacked overhead, to include command-and-control, strike, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms.

When the ramp closed on his C-17 on Aug. 30, 2021, McClaskey knew his long Afghan War was over.

“At that point, I thought about the first time I flew into Afghanistan right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and how many subsequent birthdays I had spent flying to this country. I also thought about the thousands and thousands of Americans injured and killed there, some of whom I had flown out of there, and the countless lives and families changed as a result of this war,” said McClaskey. “It was an eerie feeling, and a lot to unpack. I’d spent my entire career fighting in these conflicts, and now it was all over. At that moment, I couldn’t wait to call my wife and tell her we were on our way home.”

James C. Kitfield is a contributing national security correspondent and author, and a three-time recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense.

Afghanistan

Air

airforcemag.com · by James C. Kitfield · August 29, 2022

24. How Ukraine Is Remaking War

Excerpts:

Ukraine will continue to be a proving ground. As U.S. Army Major Brennan Deveraux argued, the continuous influx of loitering munitions into Ukraine will put them “to the ultimate test,” as the weapons are introduced for the first time at a wider scale. Artificial intelligence is a much more immature technology; its use in the current conflict is still quite limited, with its most tantalizing applications—coordinating drone swarms or assisting human pilots in carrying out air operations—still on the drawing board. But in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the state leading in AI will become the “ruler of the world,” and since then, Russia has worked to advance its development of military AI-enabled capabilities. It is not impossible to imagine that Moscow could test more of them on the Ukrainian battlefield in the months or years to come.

Yet even if no further AI weapons are unfurled in Ukraine, the war has demonstrated how modern tools can disperse military power among millions of people. The democratized nature of this conflict is not without precedent. In On War, the famed military theorist Carl von Clausewitz told a similar tale from the nineteenth century. According to Clausewitz, when Austria and Prussia prepared to fight against France in the French Revolutionary Wars, they assumed it would simply be a matter of their armies versus France’s. They did not think they would be fighting against the whole of France’s population. But the French people were enthusiastic participants in the wars, and so Austria and Prussia faced the “utmost peril,” Clausewitz wrote, as the “the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance.”

The trap that Prussia and Austria fell into—simply measuring the balance of traditional forces—is the same one that contributed to the general belief that Russia would overtake Ukraine in a matter of days. But Russia hasn’t, in no small part because Ukraine has used general purpose technologies, developed by private sector firms, to expand both what it can do in war and who can do it. It has proved that a growing number of actors can acquire useful military technology. It has shown that states can fight in new arenas, with the help of civilian institutions and ordinary individuals. It has given itself more opportunities to succeed on what would otherwise be a lopsided battlefield. And in Ukraine’s fight for its own democracy, it has managed to democratize warfighting itself, setting a new precedent for twenty-first century warfare.

How Ukraine Is Remaking War

Technological Advancements Are Helping Kyiv Succeed

By Lauren Kahn

August 29, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Lauren Kahn · August 29, 2022

At the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, most experts expected that Kyiv would fall quickly. Ukrainian forces were fighting against a military that was bigger and better armed. Russia’s troops had more combat experience and funding. The question was not if Moscow’s forces would depose the Ukrainian government but when regime change would happen.

Of course, Kyiv didn’t fall. Instead, the Ukrainian military stopped Russia’s assault on the capital and forced a retreat. Russia downsized its initial mission from wholesale conquest, and the war now mostly consists of grinding offensives and counteroffensives in Ukraine’s east and south. The question is no longer how long Kyiv can hold out. It is whether the Ukrainian government can reclaim occupied land.

There are several reasons for Ukraine’s surprising success. The Russian military’s logistical incompetence, its puzzling inability to secure early air superiority, and low troop morale all played a part. So did Western support for Ukraine and the sheer tenacity of the country’s soldiers. But these explanations do not tell the full story. The Ukrainian military deserves recognition not just for its troops’ motivation but also for its technical savvy. It has used cutting-edge technologies and adapted existing capabilities in creative new ways, on and off the kinetic battlefield. It has deployed loitering munitions—missiles with the ability to stay on station until an operator locates a target—and modified commercial drones that can destroy Russian troops and equipment on the cheap. It has tapped commercial satellite data to track Russian troop movements in near real time. And Kyiv has wisely used artificial intelligence, in conjunction with this satellite imagery, to create software that helps artillery locate, aim, and destroy targets in the most efficient and lethal manner possible.

Ukraine’s success with these technologies doesn’t come because the tools are fancier or more complex than the ones Russia has deployed. Quite the contrary. Many of the technologies that Ukraine has used are very affordable and simple to deploy. In fact, the convenience of these tools is precisely what makes them so powerful. Because its technology is easy to operate, Ukraine can draw on soldiers with little training and even ordinary civilians to win on the battlefield. In doing so, the country has highlighted a bigger trend in warfare, one with implications that extend beyond this conflict: the democratization of military power. Ukraine’s tools have expanded the warfighting beyond the physical battlefield—and beyond traditional military and state actors—to allow everyday citizens, private companies, and civilian institutions to help in the fight. It’s a trend that will change how other countries conduct wars moving forward.

PEOPLE POWER

The conflict in Ukraine is an outlier. Most major modern wars have been between powerful states and weak states, between two weak states, or between states or nonstate actors. But unlike Iraq and the United States, both Russia and Ukraine are large countries with well-equipped militaries. As a result, the Ukrainian steppes have been transformed into a proving ground for next-generation technologies and military innovations.

Most significant, the conflict in Ukraine represents a sort of coming of age and maturing of many advanced technologies previously thought of as more niche, from drones to loitering munitions to commercial satellites. That’s because Ukraine has wielded them with visible success. The country, for instance, has upended conventional wisdom that drones will struggle to operate in the face of air defenses. It has proved that commercially owned or open-source data are, in fact, accessible and useful sources of battlefield intelligence.

Consider Ukraine’s deployment of Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones. The TB2 is an unlikely hero: cheap, hard to hide, and plodding. But these drones have been very successful at neutralizing even slower or stationary targets, such as towed artillery or armored vehicles. In March, for instance, Ukraine used the weapons to attack a Russian military convoy north of Kyiv with vicious efficiency, helping force Russia’s retreat. It deployed a TB2 to transmit the coordinates for and film the sinking of a Russian rescue tug. Ukraine has also creatively turned the drone’s weaknesses into assets; the loud, lumbering weapon served as the perfect distraction for the Moskva’s air defenses while Ukraine reportedly took the ship out with two Neptune missiles.

The Russian-Ukrainian war is also the first conflict in which both sides are using artificial intelligence, particularly machine- and deep-learning algorithms. Russia has used artificial intelligence to carry out cyberattacks, to create deepfake videos that show Zelensky surrendering, and to promote other pro-Russian propaganda. Ukraine, meanwhile, has been using facial recognition technology to identify Russian operatives and soldiers, combat misinformation, and—with the help of the U.S. military—generate models of Russian tactics and strategy that it can use for analysis and strategic planning. (It is important, however, to note that neither Russia nor Ukraine has used true AI-enabled weapons, such as a weapon that could select and engage targets without human direction; no state has.)

The conflict in Ukraine represents a coming of age for many advanced technologies.

The underlying basis for most of these technologies originates in commercial and academic sectors, allowing them to be rapidly developed and distributed. This has made it easier for Ukraine to field a wider array of military capabilities and find more operators. For as little as $600, ordinary Ukrainians have used 3D printers and cheap fragmentation grenades to turn toy drones—the kinds typically used for taking dramatic aerial Instagram photos—into a platform for carrying out stealthy, short-range precision attacks. The volunteer Ukrainian drone squad Aerorozvidka, for example, has used commercial drones to drop small bombs onto the sunroofs of Russian vehicles. In early June, a 15-year-old boy also used a toy drone to help the Ukrainian military direct strikes against an approaching Russian convoy. Even this year’s Eurovision song contest played a role in drone warfare: Ukraine won by a landslide, and the country’s artist sold his trophy online to purchase three Ukrainian-produced PD2 drones.

As the Eurovision sale shows, Ukraine has used digital technologies to create and then tap into what Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, called “a worldwide audience that wants to help.” Volunteer hacker armies have employed their digital savvy to shut down Russian websites. Ukraine’s Digital Ministry has been able to secure access to private, civilian-owned satellite networks and real-time, high-resolution imagery, and it is pressuring private tech companies such as Apple, Google, Meta, and Twitter to restrict access and shut down operations in Russia. (Peter Singer, a professor at Arizona State University and a senior fellow at New America, called this campaign the geopolitical equivalent of “canceling.”) Ukrainian citizens have digitally broadcast footage of the fighting, including over TikTok, to help their country’s war planners.

The ultimate result of all these changes is a dramatic diffusion of warfare, one that makes the traditional means of measuring the balance of forces far less relevant. Most of the world was persuaded that Moscow would win its invasion because when they counted up the number of tanks and soldiers Russia and Ukraine had, the former clearly outpaced the latter. But in this new era of warfare, such figures are just one part of the calculus.

PROVING GROUND

Many of the technologies that Ukraine has used are not entirely new to warfare. The TB2 drone, for example, was wielded effectively by Azerbaijan against Armenia throughout the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020. Loitering munitions have existed for years, if not in the sophisticated form that they do today. The Israeli Defense Forces used multiple machine-learning-based algorithms to identify targets during its 2021 operation in Gaza. And although technology is important, it is not a silver bullet. Ukraine can’t win simply because its air force has lots of TB2 drones, loitering munitions, or a digitally savvy population. Emerging systems will not do away with tanks or render current supply chains, operational concepts, stockpiles, and force doctrines irrelevant.

But Ukraine’s widespread and successful use of newer systems is placing emerging tech into the military mainstream. There’s a reason why global demand for the TB2 has suddenly skyrocketed. Countries such as Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates have reportedly started the process of purchasing the drone after seeing its impact in Ukraine, making its manufacturer Turkey’s top defense and aerospace exporter. Even larger players are becoming fans of Ukrainian-used systems. France, for example, has suddenly fast-tracked an order of U.S.-made Switchblades—a loitering munition that Ukraine has deployed to kill Russian troops. And Ukraine has demonstrated to the world that these technologies can be effective when used in tandem with other capabilities or when deployed in roles that go beyond their initial intended uses.

Modern tools can disperse military power among millions of people.

Ukraine will continue to be a proving ground. As U.S. Army Major Brennan Deveraux argued, the continuous influx of loitering munitions into Ukraine will put them “to the ultimate test,” as the weapons are introduced for the first time at a wider scale. Artificial intelligence is a much more immature technology; its use in the current conflict is still quite limited, with its most tantalizing applications—coordinating drone swarms or assisting human pilots in carrying out air operations—still on the drawing board. But in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the state leading in AI will become the “ruler of the world,” and since then, Russia has worked to advance its development of military AI-enabled capabilities. It is not impossible to imagine that Moscow could test more of them on the Ukrainian battlefield in the months or years to come.

Yet even if no further AI weapons are unfurled in Ukraine, the war has demonstrated how modern tools can disperse military power among millions of people. The democratized nature of this conflict is not without precedent. In On War, the famed military theorist Carl von Clausewitz told a similar tale from the nineteenth century. According to Clausewitz, when Austria and Prussia prepared to fight against France in the French Revolutionary Wars, they assumed it would simply be a matter of their armies versus France’s. They did not think they would be fighting against the whole of France’s population. But the French people were enthusiastic participants in the wars, and so Austria and Prussia faced the “utmost peril,” Clausewitz wrote, as the “the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance.”

The trap that Prussia and Austria fell into—simply measuring the balance of traditional forces—is the same one that contributed to the general belief that Russia would overtake Ukraine in a matter of days. But Russia hasn’t, in no small part because Ukraine has used general purpose technologies, developed by private sector firms, to expand both what it can do in war and who can do it. It has proved that a growing number of actors can acquire useful military technology. It has shown that states can fight in new arenas, with the help of civilian institutions and ordinary individuals. It has given itself more opportunities to succeed on what would otherwise be a lopsided battlefield. And in Ukraine’s fight for its own democracy, it has managed to democratize warfighting itself, setting a new precedent for twenty-first century warfare.

• LAUREN KAHN is a Research Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Foreign Affairs · by Lauren Kahn · August 29, 2022

25. Beijing’s Debts Come Due

Excerpts:

China’s trade partners have a large stake in the outcome of the internal Chinese debate. For most of the global economy, the way China grows matters at least as much as how fast it grows. China relied on exports, rather than a rebound in household consumption, to drive its recovery from the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2019. With a shift in global demand toward goods putting upward pressure on prices everywhere, countries around the world have tolerated (if not always warmly welcomed) the increased supply out of China. China’s trade surplus was expected to fall naturally as COVID-19-related disruptions eased globally and in China.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, the latest trade data show that China’s external surplus is rising on the back of weakness in China’s imports. Over the summer, the world economy was lucky, as China’s slowdown reduced demand for commodities when the global economy was struggling to adapt to a reduction in the supply. But this doesn’t mean that the global economy can make up for a sustained shortfall in China’s own ability to generate demand for the industrial goods that its economy can now produce in large quantities.

Back in 2009, China’s economy was able to pivot away from exports toward domestic real estate investment to mitigate the global fallout from the U.S. housing crisis because China’s financial system was strong enough to support this shift. Plus, China needed more housing and modern infrastructure. Today, China could not reverse that pivot with a large move away from real estate and back to exports without significant disruption, in part because its share of the global economy has roughly tripled in the years since the global financial crisis. The scale of the lost domestic activity from real estate that would need to be made up through a shift in global demand toward Chinese goods is just too big, and China’s trading partners themselves are often struggling with their own debt challenges.

China can try to manage a permanent downshift in real estate investment by taking steps to sustain and strengthen household demand and by finding new ways to help the industrial sectors that have relied on excessive property investment retool to meet internal consumer demand. Above all, Chinese government officials need to accept this difficult truth: rising internal debt and the end of a period of unusually high investment means that China’s historic growth surge is most likely a thing of the past.

Beijing’s Debts Come Due

How a Burst Real-Estate Bubble Threatens China’s Economy

By Brad Setser

August 30, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Brad Setser · August 30, 2022

The Chinese real estate sector is teetering. The largest private Chinese developer has defaulted on its external bonds. Most developers are struggling to refinance their domestic bonds. Home prices have gone down for the last 11 months. New construction is down 45 percent. The most acute stress can be traced back to developers who raised large sums by preselling yet-to-be built apartments. Some, however, failed to set aside reserves to guarantee the completion of these units, and households that took out mortgages to buy these homes have threatened to stop paying.

China’s real estate crisis poses financial risks, but it is ultimately a crisis of economic growth. Since the development and construction of new property is estimated to drive over a quarter of the country’s current economic activity, it is not difficult to see how a temporary downturn in the property market could become a prolonged economic slump.

The country’s state-backed financial system can still take large losses and thus avoid a financial meltdown. One state-backed institution can put money into another state institution, limiting the chance that losses on lending to a failed property firm will lead to the collapse of its creditors and trigger a cascade of defaults. The Chinese government can ask state-backed developers to complete building projects abandoned by private developers, providing financial help through the state policy banks. Pervasive government intervention isn’t the best way to run an economy over time, but the presence of institutions with deep pockets can prevent the destabilizing withdrawal of all financing to the property market.

As a result, China likely will not suffer a crisis that recalls the U.S. Great Recession of 2008. But that doesn’t mean the Chinese economy is in the clear. A new growth engine won’t automatically replace the boost that the property sector traditionally provided. If China elects to goose growth by increasing exports—as it has done in the past—that could have serious implications for countries around the world struggling to find their economic footing after the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Ant, Not the Grasshopper

China’s banks, trusts, and other financial institutions have lent huge sums to China’s property developers, to households looking to buy apartments, and to local governments building public infrastructure even as China’s big policy banks financed construction projects around the world as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. China’s financial system could do both kinds of lending without borrowing large sums from the rest of the world, thanks to the country’s enormously high domestic savings rate, which has averaged about 45 percent of its GDP over the last 20 years. By contrast, most large economies save about 25 percent of their GDP; before the pandemic, the high-saving Asian economies other than China generally saved about 30 percent of their GDP. Only oil-exporting economies generate comparable levels of national savings to China, and they usually do so for only a brief period after a large and unexpected rise in the price of oil.

Saving is often considered a virtue and the absence of significant external debt gives China more options for managing the current property slump. External credit, especially external credit to banks, is often withdrawn quickly during a market downturn. Domestically raised funds, in contrast, are generally stuck inside China.

But too much saving helped create China’s current financial difficulties, as it fostered an economic environment where China’s rapid growth effectively required increasing domestic debt. To understand why, it helps to remember that the counterpart of high savings is low domestic consumption. As a result, China’s rapid growth over the last 20 years has rested on either the ballast of exports or periodic bursts of investment.

China will not likely suffer a crisis that recalls the U.S. Great Recession of 2008.

Before the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s internal debt-to-GDP ratio was stable, as China could reign in its financial sector while stunning export growth propelled China’s economy and industrial development. Export-led growth minimized debt risks inside China but was destabilizing to the rest of the global economy. It led to job losses in the manufacturing-intensive parts of the European and U.S. economies; the United States was able to overcome the drag on demand from large external deficits only through an increase in household borrowing that proved to be globally destabilizing. Put simply, it was one of the factors that helped spark the 2008 recession.

After the global financial crisis, China maintained its rapid growth while its trade surplus shrank through extraordinary investment in property and infrastructure. Mobilizing such high investment required higher domestic borrowing as well. In the ten years following the global financial crisis, China’s internal debt-to-GDP ratio rose from around 150 percent to well over 250 percent of GDP. In essence, the debts of households, local governments, real estate developers, and state firms have all increased faster than their incomes. Ultimately, that is a risky dynamic.

That said, China’s central government debt has been stable: the country’s debt is less than 20 percent of its GDP—far below that of the world’s other major economies. China’s central state unambiguously has a large role in China’s economy, but that is because it backs most large Chinese banks and many investment funds. The Chinese government doesn’t collect a lot of tax, nor does it spend a lot on social benefits: China has not created a national system of unemployment insurance, does not offer high-quality universal health care, and limits the public services available to Chinese workers who move from rural areas to more prosperous coastal cities.

The result is an unusual mix of financial strengths and weaknesses. The central government in Beijing owns some of China’s most profitable companies, and it backs the healthiest part of China’s financial system, namely the big national banks. It has little direct debt. Local governments, however, are carrying substantial debt and have a weaker revenue base. They are also indirectly responsible for the many state firms that have been created to finance local infrastructure projects, and they back many of the weaker locally owned banks.

China’s central government doesn’t want to cover all losses from the real estate bubble.

The big property developers, meanwhile, carry staggering debt. The market borrowing of the largest private property developer, Evergrande, is around $100 billion. If all its promised apartments and unpaid bills are counted, the company owes an estimated $300 billion. Its peers have only slightly smaller balance sheets. China’s total debt isn’t a problem for an economy that saves as much as China does—the real problem is that the wrong parts of the economy are carrying most of the debt and will have difficulty repaying.

Still, China will likely manage the immediate financial risk that its property downturn has created. Some of the weaker property developers may not pay all their debt on time and in full. But China’s central government has the capacity to protect important institutions that lent to the big property developers. Beijing can also help local governments that will need to rescue local banks so they can support locally important firms.

China’s central government doesn’t want to cover all losses, however. Too much help would fail to teach a lesson to those who lent to the most poorly managed property developers, and that could potentially lead to a new round of risky behavior. At the same time, the central government cannot allow all the big property developers to fail simultaneously. It also cannot allow losses on past investment projects to stop the flow of new infrastructure financing because China’s economy would seize up from unpaid bills and stalled building projects. Unemployed urban workers and angry buyers of unbuilt apartments would threaten social and political stability. A restructuring of the debts of the developers is inevitable—but that restructuring must be combined with steps to help the financial system bear the associated losses and make sure the flow of credit to the economy doesn’t stop completely.

A New Model

In addition to avoiding a severe financial crisis, the Chinese government also needs to find a new growth engine to replace the ballast the property sector used to provide. Specifically, household consumption needs a jolt. COVID-19 lockdowns have taken a toll, and falling property prices could lead worried households to cut back on spending just when the overall economy needs more consumer demand.

This means China must shift to a new model for delivering stimulus by providing help directly to households. China’s persistently low consumption reflects the insecurities created by limited social benefits, high income inequality, and the burden low-income households carry because of a tax system that raises the bulk of its revenue from consumption taxes and poorly designed payroll taxes. In the long term, China needs a stronger national system of social insurance—in particular, more spending on public health and a better system of unemployment insurance—that is financed by higher progressive income taxes collected by the central government.

In the short run, China simply needs to shore up its existing system for providing social services and income support by transferring more revenue to local governments. China has historically kept central government borrowing down by shifting the fiscal burden to local governments. But this approach now risks the country’s financial stability. Local government revenues are under pressure from the property downturn, as they have relied extensively on land sales to property developers to help cover their budgets. The path to a healthier economy—one driven more by household consumption and less by state-guided investment—currently runs through an increase in the central government’s budget.

China, however, has been reluctant to move away from its existing model. The country’s top leadership views direct support for household spending as unproductive, and the finance ministry has consistently resisted running large central government budget deficits. The Chinese government’s recent announcements suggest that it wants to try to restart growth by authorizing more local investment in infrastructure and displacing imports with Chinese technology. But the high-wire act required to keep China’s economy moving without a more stable base of increased domestic consumption will only get more precarious over time.

Global Implications

China’s trade partners have a large stake in the outcome of the internal Chinese debate. For most of the global economy, the way China grows matters at least as much as how fast it grows. China relied on exports, rather than a rebound in household consumption, to drive its recovery from the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2019. With a shift in global demand toward goods putting upward pressure on prices everywhere, countries around the world have tolerated (if not always warmly welcomed) the increased supply out of China. China’s trade surplus was expected to fall naturally as COVID-19-related disruptions eased globally and in China.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, the latest trade data show that China’s external surplus is rising on the back of weakness in China’s imports. Over the summer, the world economy was lucky, as China’s slowdown reduced demand for commodities when the global economy was struggling to adapt to a reduction in the supply. But this doesn’t mean that the global economy can make up for a sustained shortfall in China’s own ability to generate demand for the industrial goods that its economy can now produce in large quantities.

Back in 2009, China’s economy was able to pivot away from exports toward domestic real estate investment to mitigate the global fallout from the U.S. housing crisis because China’s financial system was strong enough to support this shift. Plus, China needed more housing and modern infrastructure. Today, China could not reverse that pivot with a large move away from real estate and back to exports without significant disruption, in part because its share of the global economy has roughly tripled in the years since the global financial crisis. The scale of the lost domestic activity from real estate that would need to be made up through a shift in global demand toward Chinese goods is just too big, and China’s trading partners themselves are often struggling with their own debt challenges.

China can try to manage a permanent downshift in real estate investment by taking steps to sustain and strengthen household demand and by finding new ways to help the industrial sectors that have relied on excessive property investment retool to meet internal consumer demand. Above all, Chinese government officials need to accept this difficult truth: rising internal debt and the end of a period of unusually high investment means that China’s historic growth surge is most likely a thing of the past.

• BRAD SETSER is the Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Foreign Affairs · by Brad Setser · August 30, 2022

​26. Russia Confounds the West by Recapturing Its Oil Riches

The opening paragraph says it all:

Russia pumps almost as much oil into the global market as it did before its invasion of Ukraine. With oil prices up, Moscow is also making more money.

Russia Confounds the West by Recapturing Its Oil Riches

Moscow is raking in more revenue than ever with the help of new buyers, new traders and the world’s seemingly insatiable demand for crude

By Joe WallaceFollow

 and Anna HirtensteinFollow

Aug. 29, 2022 10:05 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-confounds-the-west-by-recapturing-its-oil-riches-11661781928?utm_source=pocket_mylist

Russia pumps almost as much oil into the global market as it did before its invasion of Ukraine. With oil prices up, Moscow is also making more money.

Demand from some of the world’s largest economies has given Russian President Vladimir Putin the upper hand in the energy battle that shadows the war in Ukraine, and has confounded the West’s bid to cripple Russia’s economy with sanctions.

Sales are booming in Russia’s export market, the world’s largest in crude and refined fuels. And new trade arrangements have given Mr. Putin cover to use natural-gas exports as an economic weapon against Ukraine’s European allies. Before the war, Russia supplied Europe with 40% of its gas. It has since throttled flows through the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany and other conduits, driving prices higher and putting pressure on European households and businesses.

Oil revenue more than makes up the difference. “Russia is swimming in cash,” said Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance. Moscow earned $97 billion from oil and gas sales through July this year, about $74 billion of that from oil, she said.

The country exported 7.4 million barrels of crude and products such as diesel and gasoline each day in July, according to the International Energy Agency, down only about 600,000 barrels a day since the start of the year.

The Flow of Russian Oil

Although many European countries and the U.S. have reduced their imports of Russian oil, countries in Asia and the Middle East are buying more, which has helped Russia maintain its oil export levels.

Russian shipments of crude oil and products

Middle East and

North Africa

2019

2020

2022

2021

North America

South

Asia

East Asia and Pacific

Covid-19 pandemic

January 2019

6.2 million barrels

a day

August 2022*

6.0 million barrels

a day

Ukraine invasion

Europe and Central Asia

Sub-Saharan

Africa

Latin America

and Caribbean

Not specified

*As of Aug. 20

Source: Vortexa

Andrew Barnett/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Even with the dip in oil exports, Russia has earned $20 billion in average monthly sales this year compared with a $14.6 billion monthly average in 2021, when economies were recovering from the pandemic crash. Shipments were rising again in August, data from ship-tracking firm Vortexa show.

Russia’s oil-market resilience has drawn a mixed reaction in Washington, which is juggling two conflicting goals: Tamping down inflation with increased global oil supplies, and keeping economic pressure on Mr. Putin.

Oil prices, which spiked past $130 a barrel in the first weeks of the war, have settled around $100 in recent weeks. While still higher than a year ago, the retreat has brought down gas-station prices in the U.S. and Europe.

Russian energy sales have flourished by finding new buyers, new means of payment, new traders and new ways of financing exports, according to oil traders, former Russian industry executives and shipping officials.

“There came a realization that the world needs oil, and nobody’s brave enough to embargo 7.5 million barrels a day of Russian oil and oil products,” said Sergey Vakulenko, an analyst and former Russian energy executive.

After buyers in the U.S., the European Union and their Pacific allies cut back their Russian oil imports, much of it went to nations in Asia that have declined to take sides in the conflict.

An unexpected market has been the Middle East. Exports of Russian fuel oil, a lightly refined version of crude, now go to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, often stopping in Egypt en route.

The Russian oil is either burned in Saudi power stations or exported from Fujairah, a U.A.E. port and hot spot for blending Russian and Iranian oils to conceal their provenance. This is oil that before the war was shipped to U.S. refiners.

The Russian imports, purchased at a discount, free state giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co. to export its crude at market prices. “The Saudis are happy to take their oil and sell it rather than burning it,” said Carole Nakhle, chief executive at consulting firm Crystol Energy.

The arrangement adds supply to the global oil market, helping put a lid on prices. “This is a win-win situation for the Russians and even, I would say, for the Europeans and the U.S.,” Ms. Nakhle said.

It also strengthens Russian ties with the Middle East, where Mr. Putin is capitalizing on friction between the Saudis and the Biden administration. Riyadh, joined with Moscow in a cartel known as OPEC+, has resisted U.S. pressure to pump more crude. That has propped up prices, helping Russia during the months when its oil traded at a significant discount.

Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said last week OPEC could cut oil production, rebuffing U.S. pressure to open the spigots and instead sticking by Moscow.

Loose labeling

In most cases, Russian oil is legal to buy and sell. The U.S. and EU designed sanctions on the financial system that allow payments for oil to flow to non-sanctioning countries, as well as keep energy prices from rising further.

Many Western institutions, including banks and commodity trading houses, went beyond what was required by law and said they would cut back or stop any transactions that touched Russian oil. That left smaller traders to facilitate Russian exports when such firms as Glencore PLC and Gunvor wound down their handling of oil produced by Russia’s state-backed Rosneft Oil Co.

These smaller players moved personnel to Dubai and Singapore to skirt short-lived EU sanctions on dealing with Rosneft, said traders and industry executives.

To help obscure its oil-trade workarounds, Moscow ended monthly updates on oil production and other data, making it difficult to gauge activity. Often, Russian port documentation no longer details where the country’s oil is heading and who is shipping it, according to traders.

Middlemen move Russian oil from one ship to another while at sea, an expensive maneuver that both disguises its origin and fills vessels too large to reach Russian ports on the Baltic Sea. Traders say it is likely done to ensure that financial institutions, mindful of sanctions and damage to their reputations, don’t withdraw funding and insurance for the shipments.

Iranian, Venezuelan and now Russian fuel oil is stored in the trading hub of Fujairah and intentionally disguised, according to oil traders. One trader in Switzerland said he was offered fuel oil that, based on characteristics such as its sulfur content, was clearly Russian. The label said otherwise.

A cargo ship moored in the port of Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, in 2019.

PHOTO: KARIM SAHIB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The rewiring of the oil market stabilized the Russian energy industry after the fear of sanctions struck early in the war. Western buyers and European lenders that bankroll commodity markets froze out Russia. Earlier this year, traders predicted daily Russian exports would fall by as many as 3 million barrels.

China, Turkey and Middle East nations quickly stepped up their purchases, taking advantage of discounted prices and opening lucrative new trade routes for Russian crude. Some refine Russian oil and make profits exporting it to the West as gasoline and diesel.

India is now Russia’s best customer. Companies there, under government orders, went from near-zero Russian oil imports to almost a million barrels a day within weeks of the Ukraine invasion.

Imports have ebbed recently because of refinery maintenance work, said an executive at state-owned Indian Oil Corp., but the company signed a contract with Rosneft to lock in supplies until 2028.

“Russian oil will find its new way into India, China and other markets,” said Evgeny Gribov, who in March resigned as an executive at Lukoil PJSC, Russia’s second-biggest oil producer. “And even sold at a discount it is more than enough to continue fueling the war.”

Shadow war

In the long run, Russia will struggle to remain a top-tier oil supplier, said analysts and current and former energy executives. There are physical limits on how much Russian crude that refiners in India and China can take. And, as Russian machinery ages and access to Western software is lost, sanctions that ban technology imports cloud future energy prospects.

Winter will test the resolve of Moscow and its adversaries. On Dec. 5, the EU is due to phase in an embargo on Russian oil and a potentially punishing ban on insuring and financing Russian oil cargoes. If enforced, which some traders and analysts doubt, the measures would significantly escalate efforts to handicap Russia’s economy.

The U.S. and its allies have largely spared such restrictions to avoid driving energy prices higher.

Arkady Gevorkyan, an analyst at Citigroup, said Russia might struggle to find new buyers for about 1.25 million barrels of the crude and fuel exports that currently head to Europe each day. Livia Gallarati of Energy Aspects said Russia’s daily output of crude and a related fuel known as condensate could drop some 2 million barrels by March next year.

A Rosneft gas station operates beside the Gazprom building in Moscow. Building windows were lighted in the shape of a Z in May, showing support for Russian forces in Ukraine.

PHOTO: YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Washington is trying to coax Brussels into restrictions that would limit Russian oil revenue without driving up prices. The U.S. wants the EU to bar insuring cargoes only if they don’t comply with a per-barrel price cap. The aim is to shrink Mr. Putin’s war chest while keeping prices from new highs.

“We don’t want Big Macs being sold in Moscow,” a senior Treasury official said. “We want cheap oil flowing through the Baltic.”

Some traders and analysts are skeptical and there has been little progress since Treasury proposed the price-cap idea in June.

Proceeding with the EU’s proposed restrictions would reveal the continent’s willingness to absorb economic pain on behalf of Ukraine. Many believe Moscow would respond by cutting Europe’s natural-gas supply, which of late has flowed at around 20% of capacity on the Nord Stream pipeline, to zero.

“Vladimir Putin has put mutually assured destruction on the table,” said Helima Croft, head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.

Write to Joe Wallace at Joe.Wallace@wsj.com and Anna Hirtenstein at anna.hirtenstein@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 30, 2022, print edition as 'Russia Confounds the West By Regaining Its Oil Riches'.

27. US: Russia running into problems with Iran-made drones

US: Russia running into problems with Iran-made drones

AP · by AAMER MADHANI · August 30, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia has faced technical problems with Iranian-made drones acquired from Tehran this month for use in its war with Ukraine, according to Biden administration officials.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. intelligence assessment, did not detail the “numerous failures.” They added that the U.S. assesses that the delivery of Mohajer-6 and Shahed-series unmanned aerial vehicles over several days this month is likely part of a Russian plan to acquire hundreds of Iranian UAVs.

The Associated Press reported last week that Russia had recently obtained hundreds of Iranian drones capable of being used in its war against Ukraine despite U.S. warnings to Tehran not to ship them. The Washington Post first reported that Russia has faced technical problems with the Iranian drones.

Russian operators continue to receive training in Iran on how to use these systems, which can conduct air-to-surface attacks, electronic warfare and targeting, on the battlefield in Ukraine, the officials said.

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The Biden administration last month released satellite imagery indicating that Russian officials visited Kashan Airfield on June 8 and July 5 to view the Iranian drones. At the time, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan asserted that the administration has “information that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with several hundred UAVs.”

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Facing economic sanctions and limits on its supply chains due to its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is turning to Iran as a key partner and supplier of weapons. Russian aircraft was loaded with the UAV equipment at an airfield in Iran over several days this month before the weaponry was flown to Russia, the officials said.

White House national security council spokesman John Kirby told reporters earlier Monday that the administration had “no update” on whether the drones had been delivered. He added that the U.S. has has “seen nothing that that gives us a sense of comfort” and that “the procurement, and delivery is still looming, is still in the offing.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein-Amir Abdollahian, said last month that Tehran had “various types of collaboration with Russia, including in the defense sector.”

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“But we won’t help either of the sides involved in this war because we believe that it (the war) needs to be stopped,” he said.

The administration officials confirmed details of Iran supplying Russia with drones at a moment when the White House is also trying to prod Tehran to resume its compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal.

The administration last week c ompleted its review of Iran’s comments on a European proposal to restart the agreement that was brokered during President Barack Obama’s administration and scrapped by in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump in 2018.

AP · by AAMER MADHANI · August 30, 2022

28. If war is politics by other means…. …then what is a soldier?

​This may seem like an unusual message but bear with me.  

Below is a short entry at the Carrying the Gun website (just like most of them). It links to a video at this link. ("A soldier is a political tool, nothing more." #metalgearsolid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EV9M5arpCc​_​

Please watch the video. It is only 1 minute 49 seconds. Reflect on the message about what a soldier is. This is from a video game. Most people reading my messages do not play video games (I do not) so we do not really know what kind of messages are being transmitted to our youth. A national security analyst from Taiwan briefed us a couple of years ago about how China is making huge investments in the video game industry and developing video games for worldwide use. Video games have a larger audience than all our major sports events combined (e.g., Super Bowl, World Series, March Madness, etc) but on a daily basis. The Chinese companies (under state direction and control??) are developing and controlling narratives. We should ask what message in the video at the link that is being transmitted to our youth? What are the effects? 

Video games are an important platform for influence operations and most of us have no idea what is taking place in that information and influence space. 

​

If war is politics by other means…

https://carryingthegun.com/2022/08/29/if-war-is-politics-by-other-means/

 CTG video  August 29, 2022 1 Minute

…then what is a soldier?

29. Are China and the US edging toward ‘Henry Kissinger’s war’?

Are China and the US edging toward ‘Henry Kissinger’s war’?

BY JOSEPH BOSCO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 08/30/22 10:00 AM ET

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

The Hill · · August 30, 2022

Henry Kissinger was present at the creation of contemporary U.S.- China relations and assiduously nurtured them through eight U.S. administrations and five Chinese rulers over half a century. But now he is concerned that the fruition of his long-entrenched engagement policies could lead to a Sino-U.S. war with “catastrophic” global consequences. Yet, during a Wilson Center interview in September 2018, Kissinger acknowledged no inherent flaw in the approach that strengthened China’s communist regime and weakened the West.

“[A]t the beginning, we made a number of deals, which, in purely economic terms, seemed to be balanced in favor of China … because we thought growth in Chinese strength compensated for that imbalance in the Soviet Union. We felt we had an obligation, for the preservation of peace and stability, not to make the transformation of China such a goal that it would stop everything else,” Kissinger said in that interview.

But he and President Nixon also made a consequential security “deal”: The U.S. would show good faith by withdrawing the 7th Fleet from the Taiwan Strait and begin removing forces from Taiwan, in exchange for China allowing Nixon’s historic visit.

Kissinger now argues that mounting China tensions are due not to shortsighted policies but to unpredictable extrinsic factors such as sophisticated new technologies, and an unsophisticated foreign policy approach during the Trump administration that the Biden team essentially has continued.

Consistent with his ultra-realist rationale, he eschews the role of ideology or personality — except on the American side — relying instead on the mechanistic geostrategic model of rising-power-versus-established-power dynamics.

The fact that China is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party with its special worldview seems of no interest to Kissinger: “I don’t consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it’s my view.”

America might as well be confronted by a modern version of the Ming Empire, rather than by a protege and former junior partner of Joseph Stalin’s America-hating Soviet Union, now reconstituted as a “no-limits strategic partner” of Vladimir Putin’s America-hating revanchist Russia.

Even applying the realpolitik model, however, Kissinger accepts Beijing’s denial of any intention to replace the United States as global hegemon, seeking only its rightful place at the international table. He told Chatham House in March 2021, “My analysis of Chinese purposes is not that China is determined to achieve world domination, whatever that means.”

The noted historian and strategic thinker seems not to hear in China’s claim the echoes of Adolf Hitler’s assurances in the 1930s.

Strategic insouciance shows in his oft-repeated description of Washington’s and Beijing’s approaches to negotiations as “pragmatism” versus “process”: “The Americans have a list of things that they want to fix in the immediate future; the Chinese have an objective towards which they want to work. So we both can learn from each other.”

The statement appears oblivious to China’s objective since the communists took power. Starting with Mao Zedong’s War of National Liberation, through its co-invasion of South Korea in 1950 and combat involvement in South Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, Beijing has been committed to defeating American interests and values at every opportunity and in every strategic venue — economic, military, technological and geopolitical.

Western experts, following Kissinger’s lead, are quick to invoke China’s “century of humiliation” but fail to recall more recent Chinese history. A seasoned intelligence official, for example, told a large Pentagon meeting in the 2000s that Chinese forces had never fought against Americans.

For five decades, Kissinger held important access and influence with Republican and Democratic administrations and was able to preserve the unbalanced framework of the U.S.-China relations he negotiated with Mao and Zhou Enlai, and reinforced with each of their successors.

That changed with the arrival of President Trump’s team of clear-eyed realists determined to arrest and reverse the decline of U.S. power vis-à-vis both Russia and China. For the first time, Kissinger’s representations of benign Chinese intentions fell on deaf ears. He lamented at the Wilson Center in September 2018, “I wish I had been invited, on some occasion, to tell President Trump … about my strategic views of that relationship.”

Our problem, he said, “is not to find allies around the world with which to confront China.

This particular approach of beginning a new administration with finding an additional ally against a country with which we should have a cooperative relationship is simply not correct. … Neither China nor America need allies to fight each other.”

In May 2021, Kissinger compared the China policies of the Trump and Biden administrations: “The language still has an adversarial character but I think the circumstances are better now, [not] as if the isolation of China was the principal objective of American foreign policy.”

Last November, he told CNN, “Everyone wants to be a China hawk” — though not Kissinger himself. After President Biden again said America would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack, Kissinger told the recent World Economic Forum, “The United States should not by subterfuge or by a gradual process develop something of a ‘two-China’ solution, but that China will continue to exercise the patience that has been exercised up until now.” These words evoked his 2007 warning to Taiwan at the Asia Society: “China will not wait forever.”

Kissinger also urges a downgrading of the issue of Taiwan’s independence in favor of the larger U.S.-China agenda: “A direct confrontation should be avoided and Taiwan cannot be the core of the negotiations because it is between China and the United States.” Yet, he repeatedly has recounted that, in 1972, Beijing would discuss nothing else until the Taiwan question was resolved to its satisfaction.

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He opposes a human rights focus as not only a distraction but — incredibly — an unwelcome threat to the survival of the Chinese Communist Party: “We should not use the human rights issue as a deliberate issue to undermine the existing structures, because if we do that, we will be in a permanent confrontation,” he said in May 2021.

But we have long been in a permanent confrontation with Communist China, always on the defensive. Given the consummate failure of Kissinger’s engagement policies and the need to avoid all-out kinetic war, going on the offensive to achieve peaceful regime change in China is the only escape from the world’s dangerous dilemma. An overt and covert information campaign directed at the people of China, with whom America has no quarrel, urgently needs to begin.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.

The Hill · by Mike Lillis · August 30, 2022

​

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com