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Quotes of the Day:
"The true measure of all our actions is how long the good in them lasts... everything we do, we do for the young."
- Queen Elizabeth II
“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, this you may not read; This you may not see; This you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.”
- Robert Heinlein
“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.”
- Socrates
1. The curtain protecting the dignity of Russia's military has been pulled back
2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 13 (Putin's War)
3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (13.09.22) CDS comments on key events
4. The rot runs deep in the Russian war machine. Ukraine is exposing it for all to see
5. China, India had agents working at Twitter, whistleblower says
6. Predictions of Putin’s Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
7. China’s Neighbors Are Navigating COVID-19, Beijing, and Washington
8. How the Army is tackling these six goals for future wars
9. Air Force Creates Special Warfare Program for Cadets to Help Fill Empty Spots
10. Twitter whistleblower reveals employees concerned China agent could collect user data
11. 'Don't Do It:' Senior Leaders Say Soldiers Should Stop Taking Mandatory Online Classes
12. A Hundred Wrecked Tanks In A Hundred Hours: Ukraine Guts Russia’s Best Tank Army
13. The War in Ukraine Isn't Over By a Long Shot
14. Walking the Talk in International Engagement and Security Cooperation
15. Navy quietly rolled back punishments for SEALs seeking religious exemptions to the COVID vaccine
16. Next Generation Leadership for Special Operations Forces
17. Opinion | The 4 factors that explain Ukraine’s extraordinary military success
18. Russia spent millions on secret global political campaign, U.S. intelligence finds
19. The Critical Moment Behind Ukraine’s Rapid Advance
20. Iran-Hezbollah Intelligence Center May Help Hamas Target Israel
21. Biden may be plotting to keep Congress out of the Iran nuclear deal
22. Why Did Russia Change Its Tune on the Iran Nuclear Deal?
23. Communist China’s Plot for World Domination (Book Review)
24. Hundreds of Filipino workers stranded on island amid dispute with U.S. contractor
25. Combine and Conquer: China and Russia Synchronize for Eurasian Hegemony
1. The curtain protecting the dignity of Russia's military has been pulled back
Interesting analysis.
Excerpts:
Whether Ukraine’s counteroffensive becomes decisive rests on how far its forces are now able to push: Would going for even more territory risk over-stretch? Or is Ukraine facing an enemy that simply has no more fight left in it? No matter how over-hyped Russia’s forces became during the chaotic decades of America’s war on terror, a military that needs North Korean shells and St Petersburg convicts is at best down to the bare minimum strength needed to protect Russia itself.
So what next? Unless we see a remarkable reversal, Russia’s bid to take all of Donetsk and Luhansk regions is over. Kherson is still the focus of sustained Ukrainian pressure. And suddenly, a return to the borders Russia stole in 2014 does not seem far-fetched.
The curtain protecting the dignity of Russia's military has been pulled back | CNN
CNN · by Nick Paton Walsh · September 14, 2022
CNN —
The tsar suddenly might have no clothes. It has been a startling week on both sides of the Ukraine and Russia border.
What’s left of the curtain protecting the dignity of Russia’s military has been pulled back, and it’s definitely not the second mightiest in the world.
Russia’s withdrawal from around Kharkiv – a planned “regrouping” that some state media didn’t even dare mention – is arguably more significant than its earlier collapse of positions around the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. These units had been dug in for months, defending their positions effectively – as CNN witnessed during weeks spent along the arterial roads north out of Kharkiv – and were at times literally minutes drive from the Russian border.
Ukrainian soldiers in freed territory in the Kharkiv region on September 12.
Kostiantyn Liberov/AP
That Moscow could not sustain a force so achingly close to its own territory speaks volumes about the real state of its supply chain and military. It is almost as if these retreating units ran back to a void, not to the nuclear power that in February expected to overrun its neighbor within 72 hours.
Secondly, Russia’s units do not appear to have effected a careful and cautious withdrawal. They ran, and left behind both armor and precious remaining supplies of ammunition. Open source intelligence website Oryx estimated that from Wednesday to Sunday, at least 338 fighter jets or tanks or trucks were left behind.
Pockets of Russian troops may remain to harass Ukrainian forces in the weeks ahead, but the nature of the frontline has irrevocably changed, as has its size. Kyiv is suddenly fighting a much smaller war now, along a greatly reduced frontline, against an enemy who also appear a lot smaller.
Abandoned munitions near Izyum on September 11.
Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images
Indeed, Russia’s army relies now on forced mobilization and prisoners for its depleted ranks. Ukraine has been quite surgical, hitting supply routes to cut off already exhausted units, detecting which were the least prepared and manned. It’s been staggeringly effective and speedy.
Members of Ukraine's State Security Service patrol an area of the recently liberated town of Kupiansk in the Kharkov region of Ukraine. September 10, 2022.
Ukraine's State Security Service/Reuters
'Everybody was running away.' Ukrainians in Kharkiv villages describe Russia's retreat
Whether Ukraine’s counteroffensive becomes decisive rests on how far its forces are now able to push: Would going for even more territory risk over-stretch? Or is Ukraine facing an enemy that simply has no more fight left in it? No matter how over-hyped Russia’s forces became during the chaotic decades of America’s war on terror, a military that needs North Korean shells and St Petersburg convicts is at best down to the bare minimum strength needed to protect Russia itself.
So what next? Unless we see a remarkable reversal, Russia’s bid to take all of Donetsk and Luhansk regions is over. Kherson is still the focus of sustained Ukrainian pressure. And suddenly, a return to the borders Russia stole in 2014 does not seem far-fetched.
A Ukrainian soldier pictured on September 12.
Kostiantyn Liberov/AP
For months, the received wisdom was that Russia would “never let that happen.” But now Crimea looks oddly vulnerable – connected to Russia by the land corridor that runs along the Azov Sea through Mariupol’s coastline, and an exposed bridge across the Kerch Strait. What remain of Moscow’s over-extended, exhausted, poorly supplied and equipped forces deeper in Ukraine could face the same lethal encircling as did its supply chain around Kharkiv.
However far Kyiv pushes now, we’ve had a sea change in the dynamics of European security. Russia is no longer a peer to NATO.
KHARKIV, UKRAINE - SEPTEMBER 11: Wrecked military vehichle of Russian army with "Z" letter sign on it is seen after Ukrainian army liberated the town of Balakliya in the southeastern Kharkiv oblast, Ukraine, on September 11, 2022. (Photo by Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Imagtes
Putin's Kharkiv disaster is his biggest challenge yet. It has left him with few options
Last week, Russia wasn’t even the peer of its NATO-armed neighbor – a power mostly in agriculture and IT as recently as December – that it has been slowly tormenting for eight years. The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense said on Monday that elements of Russia’s First Guards Tank Army – an elite unit intended to defend Moscow from any NATO attack – had been part of the chaotic Kharkiv withdrawal. They ran.
NATO member states’ defense budgets have been slowly edging toward the suggested 2% for years. But will those billions really be needed to face an army that needed shells from Pyongyang after just six months in Ukraine?
Ukrainian President's Office
'Without gas or without you? Without you': Zelensky's words for Russia as Ukraine sweeps through northeast
It would also be a mistake to misinterpret the silence inside Russia – a few critical analysts, politicians and talk shows aside – as a sign of a brooding, residual strength that’s about to be unleashed. This is not a system capable of looking at itself in the mirror. The Kremlin remains quiet on these issues because it cannot face the chasm between its ambitions and rhetoric, and the scruffy, hungry mercenaries it appears to have left stranded around Kharkiv.
The fact they do not speak of their errors amplifies them. The Ferris wheel that President Vladimir Putin opened in Moscow at the weekend does not become invisible when it breaks down and cannot turn. The same can be said of the monolithic and uncompromising strength Putin tries to project: when it breaks down, it is not in private.
In this handout photo taken from video released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Friday, Sept. 9, 2022, Russian military vehicles drive to the Kharkiv direction on a mission in Ukraine.
Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Ukrainian forces enter key city of Izium in a sign Kyiv's new offensive is working
The most flagrant foreign policy errors of the last centuries have been born of hubris, but Europe faces a series of stark choices now. Do they continue to push until Russia requests a peace that leaves its neighbors safe and the energy pipelines open again? Or do they retain the old flawed logic that a humiliated, wounded bear is even more dangerous? Would a possible successor to Putin – not that we know of one – seek a detente with Europe and prioritize the Russian economy, or prove their worth in another foolhardy, hardline act of brutish militarism?
This is also a key moment for non-proliferation and nuclear might in the post-Cold War era. What does a nuclear power do when it is vulnerable and lacking in convincing conventional might? Russia faces no existential threat now: Its borders are intact, and its military only hampered by a savage misadventure of choice. But it appears close to the limits of its conventional capabilities.
It would be a telling confirmation of the theory of mutually assured destruction that has always governed the nuclear-arms age, if weapons that could end the world as we know it remain off the table. It would also add to the possibility, raised again by the full-throated support of Ukraine by the West, that the horrors of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine have not irreparably damaged the West’s moral and strategic compass, and it is still not naive to hope to see those values in action.
CNN · by Nick Paton Walsh · September 14, 2022
2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 13 (Putin's War)
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-13
Key Takeaways
- The Kremlin has recognized its defeat in Kharkiv Oblast, the first defeat Russia has acknowledged in this war. The Kremlin is deflecting blame from Russian President Vladimir Putin and attributing it instead to his military advisors.
- The Kremlin is likely seeking to use the defeat in Kharkiv to facilitate crypto mobilization efforts by intensifying patriotic rhetoric and discussions about fuller mobilization while revisiting a Russian State Duma bill allowing the military to send call-ups for the regular semiannual conscription by mail. Nothing in the Duma bill suggests that Putin is preparing to order general mobilization, and it is far from clear that he could do so quickly in any case.
- The successful Ukrainian counter-offensive around Kharkiv Oblast is prompting Russian servicemen, occupation authorities, and milbloggers to panic.
- Russia’s military failures in Ukraine are likely continuing to weaken Russia’s leverage in the former Soviet Union as Russia appears unwilling to enforce a violated ceasefire it brokered between Armenia and Azerbaijan or to allow Armenia to invoke provisions of the Russia-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization in its defense.
- Ukrainian troops likely continued ground attacks along the Lyman-Yampil-Bilohorivka line in northern Donetsk Oblast and may be conducting limited ground attacks across the Oskil River in Kharkiv Oblast.
- Russian and Ukrainian sources indicated that Ukrainian forces are continuing ground maneuvers in three areas of Kherson Oblast as part of the ongoing southern counter-offensive.
- Russian troops made incremental gains south of Bakhmut and continued ground attacks throughout Donetsk Oblast.
- Ukrainian forces provided the first visual evidence of Russian forces using an Iranian-made drone in Ukraine on September 13.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 13
understandingwar.org
Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, Katherine Lawlor, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan
September 13, 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.
The Kremlin acknowledged its defeat in Kharkiv Oblast, the first time Moscow has openly recognized a defeat since the start of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Kremlin officials and state media propagandists are extensively discussing the reasons for the Russian defeat in Kharkiv Oblast, a marked change from their previous pattern of reporting on exaggerated or fabricated Russian successes with limited detail.[1] The Kremlin never admitted that Russia was defeated around Kyiv or, later, at Snake Island, framing the retreat from Kyiv as a decision to prioritize the “liberation” of Donbas and the withdrawal from Snake Island as a “gesture of goodwill.”[2] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) originally offered a similar explanation for the Russian failure in Kharkiv, claiming that Russian forces were withdrawing troops from Kharkiv Oblast to regroup, but this false narrative faced quick and loud criticism online.[3] The Kremlin’s acknowledgment of the defeat is part of an effort to mitigate and deflect criticism for such a devastating failure away from Russian President Vladimir Putin and onto the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the uniformed military command.
Kremlin sources are now working to clear Putin of any responsibility for the defeat, instead blaming the loss of almost all of occupied Kharkiv Oblast on underinformed military advisors within Putin’s circle.[4] One member of the Kremlin’s Council for Interethnic Relations, Bogdan Bezpalko, even stated that military officials who had failed to see the concentration of Ukrainian troops and equipment and disregarded Telegram channels that warned of the imminent Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kharkiv Oblast should have their heads ”lying on Putin’s desk.”[5] ISW has previously reported that the Kremlin delayed Putin‘s meeting with Russian defense officials immediately after the withdrawal of troops from around Kharkiv, increasing the appearance of a rift between the Kremlin and the Russian MoD.[6] The Kremlin’s admission of defeat in Kharkiv shows that Putin is willing and able to recognize and even accept a Russian defeat at least in some circumstances and focus on deflecting blame from himself.
Several members of the Russian State Duma expressed concern about the dire situation on the frontlines in Ukraine during the Duma’s first plenary meeting of its autumn session on September 13. Leader of the Russian Communist Party Gennady Zyuganov stated that Russia needs to announce full mobilization because the Russian “special military operation” is a war.[7] Zyuganov said that one can end a “special military operation” at any time, but that a war can end only in victory or defeat, and “we have no right to lose” this war. Leader of the “Fair Russia—For Truth” Party Sergey Mironov called for social “mobilization,” in which regular Russians would pay attention more to the war in Ukraine, rather than for full military mobilization. Leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party Leonid Slutsky also noted that Russia will continue to fight in the geopolitical “scrum” with the West. All three MPs had publicly advocated for Putin to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) before the February invasion and were instrumental in setting information conditions for the invasion itself.[8] The MPs also discussed a December date for the next hearing on a bill that will simplify the delivery of the semiannual conscription notices.[9] The bill, which is likely to pass, will allow Russian military recruitment centers to send out conscription notices via mail instead of presenting them in person and will oblige men who have not received a notice in the mail to show up at the local recruitment center anyway.[10]
The Kremlin is likely seeking to use the defeat in Kharkiv to facilitate crypto mobilization efforts. Zyuganov’s, Mironov’s, and Slutsky’s statements could be aimed at raising concern and patriotism among Russians to encourage them to get more involved in the war. The bill could further facilitate the ongoing crypto mobilization campaign, which aims to promote recruitment into contract service via deception, coercion, or promised financial rewards. Recruitment centers throughout Russia have been delivering unofficial summonses that look like conscription notices via mail and phone calls, but many men are aware that Russian law requires military recruitment centers to issue conscription notices in person.[11] Russian men who have responded to the unofficial summonses have recounted recruiters attempting to persuade or pressure them into signing a military contract. The bill legalizing mailed conscription notices will facilitate this dishonest practice. Both the bill and MPs’ statements may evoke fear of general mobilization among men, which could incentivize some to sign military contracts and receive financial bonuses for volunteering, as opposed to being conscripted and forced to serve without such compensation.
Nothing in the Duma bill suggests that Putin is preparing to order general mobilization, and it is far from clear that he could do so quickly. Large-scale conscription would very likely overwhelm the Russian MoD’s ability to induct, train, and equip new soldiers, particularly since the Russian training base appears to be strained in preparing the limited numbers of volunteer battalions currently being fielded. Russia would likely first have to expand its training base significantly, a time-consuming process, and then find and prepare for combat sufficient equipment to kit out large numbers of new units before it could even begin to handle a large influx of new conscripts. Widely-reported Russian materiel shortages suggest deep failures in the Russian military industry that would make generating the necessary equipment, ammunition, and supplies for a large conscript army very difficult. ISW has not identified any indicators that preparations for such activities have been ordered or are underway.
The Kremlin has adopted narratives that echo longstanding milblogger demands and complaints, suggesting that Putin seeks to appease and win back the critical milblogger community rather than censor it. Russian milbloggers have long complained about the Russian MoD and the military high command, and now the Kremlin state media is openly expressing dissatisfaction with the progress of the war and the lack of situational awareness of events on the ground.[12] Milbloggers are advertising Telegram channels covering frontline developments 24/7 and urging readers to subscribe if they “believe” in Putin.[13] Kremlin-controlled and Kremlin-influenced media are now openly calling for an intensive missile campaign against Ukrainian civilian critical infrastructure and transit routes, an idea with broad support among many milbloggers.[14] These new calls are a stark departure from the Kremlin‘s previous line claiming that Russian forces did not target civilian infrastructure, and this new narrative is earning the Kremlin public support among milbloggers. Slutsky’s statement at the Duma meeting pointing to the disinterest of most Russian civilians in the war echoes frequent milblogger complaints about the harmful side effects of conducting a limited war.[15]
Russia’s defeat in Kharkiv Oblast is causing panic among Russians in occupied Ukrainian territories, servicemen, and milbloggers. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence (GUR) reported that Russian authorities in Crimea urged their families to flee to Russia, while employees of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) are selling their homes on the peninsula and are urgently evacuating their families due to Ukrainian counter-offensives.[16] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that forcibly mobilized proxy units are suffering low morale and psychological problems.[17] Russian milbloggers are increasingly worrying about Ukrainian counter-offensives in different areas along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblasts frontline, and preemptively identifying vulnerable Russian positions.[18]
Russia’s military failures in Ukraine are likely continuing to weaken Russia’s leverage in the former Soviet Union. Armenia accused Azerbaijan of violating a Russian-brokered ceasefire and attacking Armenian forces along the Azerbaijan-Armenian border on September 13.[19] Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and convened a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) member states later in the day but did not invoke the CSTO’s collective security agreement, according to government readouts of both meetings.[20] The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not comment on whether the Kremlin would fulfill its CSTO obligations to Armenia if Azerbaijan continued to press its attack.[21] Russia’s hedging approach may damage Russia’s relationship with Armenia and with other CSTO member states, particularly If Russia cannot provide military or peacekeeping support.
The CSTO is a Russia-created and Russia-dominated intergovernmental military alliance that the Kremlin claims is about collective security, but typically uses to justify or further its hybrid war aims. The degraded Russian military likely does not have sufficient forces to enforce a ceasefire or to deploy additional peacekeepers to the area after six months of devastating war in Ukraine. ISW reported on March 13 that Russia pulled 800 personnel from Russia’s base in Armenia and elements of its Nagorno-Karabakh “peacekeeping deployment” to replenish early losses in Ukraine.[22] ISW has observed no redeployments to Nagorno-Karabakh or Russia’s base in Armenia since then.
Key Takeaways
- The Kremlin has recognized its defeat in Kharkiv Oblast, the first defeat Russia has acknowledged in this war. The Kremlin is deflecting blame from Russian President Vladimir Putin and attributing it instead to his military advisors.
- The Kremlin is likely seeking to use the defeat in Kharkiv to facilitate crypto mobilization efforts by intensifying patriotic rhetoric and discussions about fuller mobilization while revisiting a Russian State Duma bill allowing the military to send call-ups for the regular semiannual conscription by mail. Nothing in the Duma bill suggests that Putin is preparing to order general mobilization, and it is far from clear that he could do so quickly in any case.
- The successful Ukrainian counter-offensive around Kharkiv Oblast is prompting Russian servicemen, occupation authorities, and milbloggers to panic.
- Russia’s military failures in Ukraine are likely continuing to weaken Russia’s leverage in the former Soviet Union as Russia appears unwilling to enforce a violated ceasefire it brokered between Armenia and Azerbaijan or to allow Armenia to invoke provisions of the Russia-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization in its defense.
- Ukrainian troops likely continued ground attacks along the Lyman-Yampil-Bilohorivka line in northern Donetsk Oblast and may be conducting limited ground attacks across the Oskil River in Kharkiv Oblast.
- Russian and Ukrainian sources indicated that Ukrainian forces are continuing ground maneuvers in three areas of Kherson Oblast as part of the ongoing southern counter-offensive.
- Russian troops made incremental gains south of Bakhmut and continued ground attacks throughout Donetsk Oblast.
- Ukrainian forces provided the first visual evidence of Russian forces using an Iranian-made drone in Ukraine on September 13.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Ukrainian Counter-offensives—Southern and Eastern Ukraine
- Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Ukrainian Counter-offensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)
Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)
Ukrainian forces continued to consolidate gains in eastern Kharkiv Oblast on September 13 and are likely conducting ground attacks in northern Donetsk Oblast. Ukrainian forces likely hope to take advantage of recent gains in Sviatohirsk (just south of the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border 20km northwest of Slovyansk) to move east on Russian positions in Lyman, where Russian sources claim Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and BARS Special Combat Reserve forces are repelling Ukrainian attacks.[23] Russian sources also stated that Ukrainian forces are fighting around Bilohorivka (30km east of Lyman) in an attempt to pressure Russian defenses in western Luhansk Oblast and in the Lysychansk-Severodonetsk area.[24]
Ukrainian forces may be threatening Russian positions along the Oskil River, which Russian mibloggers have identified as the new frontline.[25] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian troops forded the Oskil River at Borova (about 30km northeast of Izyum and near the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast border), indicating that Ukrainian forces are continuing localized ground assaults to threaten Russian positions behind the Oskil River.[26] Russian troops are unlikely to be strong enough to prevent further Ukrainian advances along the entire Oskil River because they do not appear to be receiving reinforcements, and Ukrainian troops will likely be able to exploit this weakness to resume the counter-offensive across the Oskil if they choose.
Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)
Ukrainian forces continued counter-offensive operations in Kherson Oblast on September 13. Ukrainian and Russian sources indicated that Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks in three main areas along the Kherson-Mykolaiv frontline; northern Kherson Oblast just south of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border; western Kherson Oblast along the Inhulets River; and northwest of Kherson City. A Russian source reported that Ukrainian troops are consolidating positions in Olhyne (5km south of the Dnipropetrovsk-Kherson Oblast border) and preparing for attacks along the Arkhanhelske line toward Novopetrivka (5km south of Olhyne).[27]
Russian sources additionally discussed Ukrainian ground maneuvers in western Kherson Oblast near the Inhulets River, with multiple sources claiming that Ukrainian troops launched attacks on Davydiv Brid.[28] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian troops are regrouping near Sukhyi Stavok (10km southwest of Davydiv Brid) in order to attack toward Bruskynske, which lies along the T2207 highway that is supporting Russian positions in Davydiv Brid.[29] Ukrainian military officials also reported that Russian troops attempted to attack toward Bezimenne, just south of Sukhyi Stavok, indicating that fighting is occurring within the Sukhyi Stavok pocket.[30]
Ukrainian and Russian sources both discussed fighting northwest of Kherson City in the Ternovi Pody area. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that Russian troops attempted to attack along the Ternovi Pody-Lyubomirivka line, about 30km northwest of Kherson City.[31] Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting is ongoing near Ternovi Pody as Ukrainian troops attempt to move south toward Chornobaivka and the Kherson City area.[32] Advisor to the Ukrainian President’s Office, Oleksii Arestovych, claimed that Ukrainian troops took control of Oleksandrivka, 33km northwest of Kherson City.[33]
Ukrainian forces are additionally continuing an operational-level interdiction campaign to target Russian military, logistical, and transportation assets in southern Ukraine to support ground maneuvers along the Kherson-Mykolaiv frontline. The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Ukrainian aviation conducted 11 strikes against concentrations of Russian manpower and equipment throughout the day on September 13.[34] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that Ukrainian troops continued fire missions against Russian military and logistics assets throughout Kherson Oblast.[35] Social media footage from within Kherson City indicates that Ukrainian troops struck the suburbs of Kherson City on September 13 as part of the wider interdiction campaign.[36]
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) did not comment on Ukrainian actions in Kherson Oblast at all on September 13, despite an apparent uptick in Russian milblogger coverage of the offensive compared to the last few days.[37]
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort–Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in Donetsk Oblast on September 13 and made marginal gains around Bakhmut. Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner Group fighters took control of Mykhailivka Druha, a small settlement along the T0513 highway 10km southwest of Bakhmut.[38] Russian news outlet Izvestia claimed that Russian troops reached the suburbs of Bakhmut and occupied positions in the industrial zone on Bakhmut’s eastern outskirts.[39] Russian troops also continued localized ground attacks north and northwest of the Donetsk City area and conducted routine shelling along the Bakhmut and Avdiivka-Donetsk City frontlines.[40]
Russian sources are increasingly voicing concern that Ukrainian troops are pulling forces southwest of Donetsk City and near the eastern Zaporizhia Oblast frontline. A member of Zaporizhia’s occupation administration, Vladimir Rogov, claimed that the accumulation of Ukrainian forces in the Zaporizhia direction is “colossal” and unprecedented.[41] Russian milbloggers further claimed that Ukrainian troops are amassing near Vuhledar (45km southwest of Donetsk City), where they stated fighting is ongoing.[42] ISW cannot independently confirm if Ukrainian forces are indeed in this area, but the Russian milblogger discourse about the area southwest of Donetsk City indicates a pervasive sense of nervousness over perceived Russian vulnerabilities in Donbas and southern Ukraine.
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground assaults in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 13 and continued routine shelling along the line of contact in Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts.[43] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian troops are preparing to attack from Orikhiv in the direction of Tokmak, indicating continued concern in the Russian information space regarding attempted Ukrainian advances all along the southern axis.[44]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Ukrainian forces provided the first visual evidence of Russian forces using an Iranian-made drone in Ukraine on September 13. Ukrainian forces either shot down or recovered fragments of an Iranian-made Russian drone in Kupyansk, Kharkiv Oblast. A Ukrainian servicemember shared Twitter imagery of a drone fragment labeled “M412 Geran-2," which may be the Russian name for Iran’s Shahed-136 kamikaze drone.[45] The Shahed-136 is a single-use drone that can actively search for targets after launch, rather than following a pre-programmed path to its target.
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)
The Kremlin had demonstrably intended to annex occupied Kharkiv Oblast prior to its liberation by Ukrainian forces in early September. The Ukrainian head of Derhachi Hromada, Vyacheslav Zaporenko, reported on September 13 that Russian forces had connected the village of Kozacha Lopan, Kharkiv Oblast to the Russian energy grid during the occupation.[46] Kozacha Lopan lies 10km from the Russian border and was one of the first towns Russian forces seized in late February. Connecting occupied Ukrainian territory to the Russian energy grid is an evident step toward complete economic and administrative integration of occupied and annexed Ukrainian territory into the Russian Federation. Ukraine’s counter-offensive in Kharkiv and southern Ukraine has likely forced the indefinite delay of Russian annexation plans.
Ukrainian partisans continued their attacks on Russian occupation officials on September 12. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Ukrainian partisans conducted an improvised explosive device (IED) attack on September 12 targeting the Russian-appointed rector of Kherson State University, Tetyana Tomilina, at her apartment.[47] The attack reportedly killed a Chechen bodyguard and led to Tomilina’s hospitalization. The Ukrainian Resistance Center emphasized that Tomilina “organized the illegal collection of personal data of students of the occupation pseudo-university" and was “responsible for the Russification of the region and propaganda.” Partisans also reportedly attacked a Russian patrol in Mariupol with explosives as the patrol tried to erase an “Ї” symbol that was painted on a building. The attack injured three Russian occupation personnel.[48] Ї, a letter found in the Ukrainian but not Russian alphabet, has become a Ukrainian resistance symbol since the invasion began.
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80KtVZUQGv4; https://mel dot fm/zhizn/povestka/6234198-yavka-v-voyenkomat-bez-povestki-borba-za-semeynyye-tsennosti-popravki-v-zakon--ob-obrazovanii--chto-; https://rutube dot ru/video/78f082a56936eaa6dccc9a6ba8d8a7cd/; https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1569070513909022720; https://...
[9] https://mel dot fm/zhizn/povestka/6234198-yavka-v-voyenkomat-bez-povestki-borba-za-semeynyye-tsennosti-popravki-v-zakon--ob-obrazovanii--chto-; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80KtVZUQGv4
[10] https://mel dot fm/zhizn/povestka/6234198-yavka-v-voyenkomat-bez-povestki-borba-za-semeynyye-tsennosti-popravki-v-zakon--ob-obrazovanii--chto-
[11] https://www.e1 dot ru/text/politics/2022/09/13/71648345/; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[12] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1569070513909022720; https://... dot ru/video/78f082a56936eaa6dccc9a6ba8d8a7cd/
[16] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/okupanty-zdiisniuiut-terminovu-evakuatsiiu-svoikh-rodyn-z-krymu-ta-pivdnia-ukrainy.html
[20] https://www.primeminister dot am/en/press-release/item/2022/09/13/Nikol-Pashinyan-Vladimir-Putin-Telephone-Conversation/; https://www.primeminister dot am/en/press-release/item/2022/09/13/Nikol-Pashinyan-meeting-CSTO/; https://odkb-csto dot org/news/news_odkb/na-vneocherednoy-sessii-soveta-kollektivnoy-bezopasnosti-odkb-obsudili-situatsiyu-v-svyazi-s-rezkim-/#loaded
[21] https://mid dot ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1829629/
[39] https://iz dot ru/1394470/2022-09-13/soiuznye-sily-podoshli-k-prigorodu-bakhmuta; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/8683; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/8678; https://... https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40313
[46] https://suspilne dot media/281285-kozacu-lopan-na-harkivsini-z-akoi-vtekli-okupanti-vidednaut-vid-rosijskogo-energopostacanna/
[47] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/09/13/u-hersoni-pidirvaly-kolaborantku/; https://glavred dot net/ukraine/v-hersone-partizany-vzorvali-kollaborantku-tatyanu-tomilinu-10408658.html; https://t.me/Bayraktar_News_UA/18832; https://www.kommersant dot ru/doc/5559412; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25825
understandingwar.org
3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (13.09.22) CDS comments on key events
CDS Daily brief (13.09.22) CDS comments on key events
Humanitarian aspect:
As of the morning of September 13, 2022, more than 1,132 Ukrainian children are victims of full- scale armed aggression by the Russian Federation, Prosecutor General's Office reports. The official number of children who have died and been wounded in the course of the Russian aggression is 383, and more than 749 children, respectively. However, the data is not conclusive since data collection continues in the areas of active hostilities, temporarily occupied areas, and liberated territories.
2,480 Ukrainian educational institutions were damaged due to bombing and shelling by the armed forces of the Russian Federation. Of them, 289 were completely destroyed.
In Donetsk Oblast, on the night of 12-13 September, the Russians shelled Slovyansk. 1 civilian killed, 1 wounded. Shells hit the agricultural technical college, 2 high-rise buildings, and 6 more buildings were damaged by the explosion.
1 two-story building was damaged in Kurakhiv hromada. Avdiivka has been subjected to massive shelling at dawn for several days. No victims were reported. In Toretsk, three people were injured due to nighttime artillery shelling. At least four houses were damaged. The Russians launched an airstrike on Siversk at night. One house was destroyed.
During September 12-13, the enemy shelled the Mykolayiv and Bashtan districts of Mykolayiv Oblast. No victims were reported. A private enterprise and a warehouse of the lyceum were damaged.
On September 13, the enemy shelled the Zaporizhzhya, Polohy, and Vasyliv districts of the Zaporizhzhya Oblast. Forty-two objects of civil infrastructure were damaged.
In Kharkiv Oblast the enemy shelled Lozova. The shelling destroyed a school, Oleg Sinegubov, head of the Oblast Military Administration, said. During the past day, the enemy massively shelled Kharkiv (1 killed, 6 wounded), Kharkiv district (2 wounded), Izyumsk district (1 wounded), Chuhuyiv and Kupyansk districts (2 killed).
Russian military shelled the Nikopol district of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast six times during the night. Shelling was carried out from "Grad" and heavy artillery. According to the head of the Oblast Military Administration, Valentyn Reznichenko, there were no casualties. Sixteen high-rise buildings, private houses, a stadium, outbuildings, and gas pipelines were damaged. The extent of the damage is still being determined.
In Sumy Oblast, during September 12, 18 enemy shelling from barrel artillery on the Esman community was recorded. And another 17 mortars and 6 self-propelled guns - in the Shalyginsk
community. After midnight, the Russians released 8 mines on the Esman community. In the morning, artillery shelling of the Khotyn community began.
In the liberated territories, up to two hundred war crimes committed by the invaders are recorded daily, reported by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The mine danger remains high in the liberated towns and villages. In total, more than seventy thousand square kilometers were mined in ten Oblasts.
According to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Russian occupiers are urgently evacuating their families from Crimea and Southern Ukraine. Representatives of the occupation administration of Crimea, FSB officers and commanders of some military units are secretly trying to sell their homes and urgently evacuate their relatives from the peninsula.
Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said that from September 6, Ukraine had liberated 300 towns and villages in the Kharkiv region. 3,800 square kilometers have been liberated. She later added that the actual number of liberated territories in the Kharkiv region is almost twice as much as she had previously announced. There will be details tomorrow.
The Russian military is preparing another attack on the Zaporizhzhia NPP. According to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, there may also be attacks on other nuclear power plants in Ukraine: "Unfortunately, we can already talk not only about the Zaporizhzhia NPP. The Russian aggressor is systematically and methodically shelling the entire energy infrastructure of Ukraine, and this, of course, may ultimately affect other nuclear facilities and other nuclear plants," Ukrainian intelligence said.
Operational situation
It is the 202nd day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to protect Donbas"). The enemy continues to concentrate its efforts on establishing control over the territory of Donetsk Oblast, maintaining control over the temporarily captured territories and disrupting the offensive of the Ukrainian troops in certain directions.
The Russian Federation's military-political leadership decided to intensify measures to damage the critical infrastructure of Ukraine. In this context, the enemy launched missile attacks on infrastructure facilities in Ukraine (first of all energy sector in Dnipro, Khmelnytskyi and Kharkiv) and military locations in Zaporizhzhya, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, and Donetsk, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts.
The enemy continued to inflict fire along the Ukrainian border in order to hinder the actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces; at least 4 artillery/mortar attacks were carried out on areas near Stukalyvka, Kindrativka, Stara Huta of the Sumy Oblast and Kozacha Lopan of the Kharkiv Oblast.
The morale of the invasion forces due to significant losses and reluctance to fight is significantly deteriorating, and the number of deserters in the enemy units is increasing.
As of the first decade of September, the units of the 1st Army Corps maintained destructive dynamics, which did not allow the units to carry out combat tasks in full. Thus, concealing the real state of staffing and military equipment is widely practised in brigades and regiments; most units have not undergone combat coordination and are unable to perform combat tasks, and the commanders of the lower levels of the corps ("platoon-company" level) are demoralized and are looking for ways to be released from military ranks and further leave [back] to the Russian Federation.
The command of the 2nd separate motorized rifle brigade of the 2nd Army Corps issued an order not to pay salaries to servicemen who are temporarily absent, in particular, who are undergoing [medical] treatment. Resumption of payments occurs only after the presentation of supporting documents and with the personal permission of the command.
Kharkiv direction
• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;
• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments, 11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.
The enemy focused its primary efforts on ensuring the withdrawal of a part of the units from the territory of the Kharkiv Oblast to the Russian Federation and further containment of counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces and their advance, in particular, towards the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. The enemy abandoned at least 148 units of military equipment in the de-occupied territories in the area of Izyum.
The Russian military focused its efforts on restraining the offensive actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, releasing additional units by retreating them from the border areas of the north of the Kharkiv region. The enemy also focuses on stabilizing the line of combat and preventing the loss of the territories captured by them in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. The issue of restoring the stable command of the troops remained relevant for the enemy.
As a result of the successful actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the enemy left Kozacha Lopan, Hlyboke, Strilecha, Vesele, Ternova, and Starytsia.
As a result of fleeing the operational encirclement in the area of Izyum, the enemy units of the 4th tank division (from Naro-Fominsk) of the 1st Tank Army left behind 39 T-80 tanks and 35 BMPs; units of the 2nd motorized rifle division (from Kalininets) of the 1st Tank Army left behind 47 tanks and 27 BBMs. In addition, the enemy tried to destroy some abandoned military equipment using artillery units.
Kramatorsk direction
● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;
● 252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.
The enemy provided support for the retreat of a grouping of Russian troops from the Izyum operational direction.
The enemy deployed eight additional checkpoints on the section of the H-21 highway between Shchastya and Starobilsk of the Luhansk Oblast to counter the infiltration of the Ukrainian sabotage reconnaissance groups into their rear.
Enemy units of the 1st Army Corps (Donetsk) mobilization reserve were withdrawn from the Kharkiv region and returned to the Donetsk region. In particular, the unit that performed tasks in Vovchansk, Kharkiv Oblast, was relocated to Yenakieve of Donetsk Oblast.
Donetsk direction
● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;
● Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet", 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.
The enemy shelled the positions of Ukrainian troops with tanks, mortars, barrel and rocket artillery in the areas of Sukha Balka, Mykolaivka Druga, Zaitseve, Soledar, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Vesela Dolyna, Yakovlivka, Vyimka, Vesele, Bilohorivka, and carried out an airstrike on the areas of Vesela Dolyna, Zaitseve, Yuryivka (with a helicopter), and New York (with a pair of Mi-24s).
The enemy 3rd separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps attacked in the direction of Semihirya, Zaitseve, the 6th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps – in the direction of Pokrovske and Bakhmutske; the 2634th rifle battalion of the mobilization reserve - in the direction of Pokrovske, Bakhmut. They failed to advance in all directions and retreated everywhere.
The Ukrainian Defense Forces successfully repelled enemy attacks in the areas of Zaitseve, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Krasnohorivka, Vodyane, Bezimenne and Novohryhorivka.
Zaporizhzhya direction
● Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;
● Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.
The enemy shelled the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces near Vuhledar, Prechystivka, Novoukrainka, Vremivka, Kamianske, Mala Tokmachka, Shcherbaky, Charivne, Nesteryanka, Orikhiv, Bilohirya, Zaliznychne, Temyrivka, and Novopole.
Kherson direction
● Vasylivka–Nova Zburyivka and Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line - 252 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 27, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.3 km;
● Deployed BTGs: 114th, 143rd and 394th motorized rifle regiments, 218th tank regiment of the 127th motorized rifle division of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 57th and 60th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division, 51st and 137th parachute airborne regiments of the 106th parachute airborne division, 7th military base of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 16th and 346th separate SOF brigades.
The operational situation is unchanged. Throughout September 11, 2022, the enemy continued to deploy a pontoon crossing in the area of the "Daryivskyi" road bridge.
Kherson-Berislav bridgehead
● Velyka Lepetikha – Oleksandrivka section: approximate length of the battle line – 250 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces – 22, the average width of the combat area of one BTG –
11.8 km;
● Deployed BTGs: 108th Air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault brigade of the 7th Air assault division, 4th military base of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 239th Air assault regiments of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331 Air assault regiments of the 98th Air assault division, 126th separate coastal defense brigade, 127th separate ranger brigade, 11th separate airborne assault brigade, 10th separate SOF brigade, PMC.
The enemy continued to strengthen the grouping of troops (forces) to restrain the counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. As part of this, the personnel of the 103rd rifle regiment of the mobilization reserve of the 1st Army Corps were transferred to the defensive positions in the area of Davydiv Breed and Vavylove.
The enemy attacked in the directions of Chkalove, Bezimenne; Zeleny Hai, and Novohryhorivka, but the Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled all enemy attempts to advance.
The enemy concentrated its efforts on restraining the counteroffensive actions of Ukrainian Defense Forces in the direction of Kherson and Beryslav, and organizing the logistical support of its grouping of troops considering the destroyed bridge crossings over the Dnipro and Ingulets rivers.
On September 11, 2022, the personnel of the enemy 1st rifle battalion of the 103rd rifle regiment of the mobilization reserve (RRMR) of the 1st Army Corps was removed from the checkpoints in the Kakhovka district and was ordered to move to strengthen the enemy grouping in the Davydiv Brid area. On September 12, 2022, about 220 personnel were moved in the Vavilove district (from the composition of the 2nd riffle battalion of the 103rd RRMR of the 1st Army Corps). However, 170 of 220 military personnel of the 1st rifle battalion refused to comply with the order; as a result, they were informed about their further transfer to the "penal battalion".
Ukrainian troops cut off the Beryslav - Davydiv Brid road, and the enemy command had to transfer reinforcements for their Veliko-Alexandrov tactical group through Borozensk (up to two companies, one of which is the tank, in total, up to 18-20 units of armored vehicles, a couple of refuelers and up to 4 trucks). The enemy managed to cross Ingulets from the south of the bridgehead with some units of the 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army and direct them to the north of the bridgehead.
One enemy BTG (probably from the same brigade) was noticed in the area of Dudchany, where it was setting up positions with a front to the north and northwest (up to 32 units of armored vehicles, six 152-mm self-propelled guns 2c3 "Akatsiya").
The enemy made 23 UAV sorties.
Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:
The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the sea and connect unrecognized Transnistria with the Russian Federation by land through the coast of the Black and Azov seas.
Along the southern coast of Crimea, there are four enemy cruise missile carriers. Up to 32 enemy Kalibr missiles are ready for a salvo.
Additionally, 14 other enemy warships and vessels of the auxiliary fleet of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla are at sea, providing reconnaissance and blockade of navigation in the Azov-Black Sea waters.
Four large amphibious ships are maneuvering near the southern part of the occupied Crimea. The rest of the amphibious ships (8 units) are in the ports of Novorossiysk and Sevastopol for replenishment and scheduled maintenance. There are no signs of preparation for an amphibious assault on the southern coast of Ukraine.
Enemy aviation continues to fly from Crimean airfields Belbek and Gvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 12 Su-27, Su-30 and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.
A caravan of seven dry cargoes left this morning from Great Odesa's ports for the Danube's mouth. Bulk carriers PROPUS, SUPER SAKA, SAFFET AGA, YASA TEAM, FANARIA, ferry GREIFSWALD and tanker ATA OCEAN carry 151 thousand tons of Ukrainian agricultural products. Another seven ships entered Ukrainian ports and were loaded.
In total, since the unblocking of the ports of Odesa, 129 dry cargo ships and tankers have left the berths and taken out 2 million 900 thousand tons of food.
During the day, the passage of the Kerch-Yenikal Strait in the interests of the Russian Federation was carried out by:
– to the Black Sea: 21 ships, three of them continued their movement in the direction of the Bosphorus Strait;
- to the Sea of Azov: 20 ships, in particular, three were moving from the Bosphorus.
The movement of these civilian vessels through the waters of the Sea of Azov has still been carried out with the automatic identification system's transmitters turned off, violating the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea of 1974.
Operational losses of the enemy from 24.02 to 13.09
Personnel - almost 53,300 people (+350);
Tanks – 2,175 (+7);
Armored combat vehicles – 4,662 (+22);
Artillery systems – 1,279 (+10);
Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 311 (0); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 165 (+3); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,469 (+6); Aircraft - 244 (+1);
Helicopters – 213 (0);
UAV operational and tactical level - 904 (+1); Intercepted cruise missiles - 233 (+17);
Boats / ships - 15 (0).
Ukraine, general news
President Zelensky's office has developed a draft security guarantee treaty for Ukraine. This agreement is proposed to be signed by the guarantor countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Poland, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Turkey, the Baltic countries, Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. The treaty provides for "a set of non-military guarantees based on sanctions", as well as the supply of military equipment, weapons and the development of a legislative framework that will allow the confiscation of assets to compensate for damage caused in connection with hostilities.
Ukrainian postal service "Ukrposhta" resumes delivery to de-occupied Balaklia just days after its liberation. Postal services, pensions and social payments will be delivered. It also starts delivery of the most necessary goods: medicine, food, clothing, building materials, household chemicals, children's goods, etc. Private postal service "Nova Poshta" resumed its services in Balaklia even sooner on September 12.
International diplomatic aspect
Estonian Defence Minister visited Kyiv and donated a mobile hospital. Overall, Estonia provided defence assistance worth €250 million, and it's championing in terms of aid to GDP share (0.83%). On the other hand, Germany scored 3rd place in financing defence aid (€3 billion) but is ten times less than Estonia's contribution in terms of its GDP (0.082%); it is in 13th place.
Despite the growing criticism from the allies and at home, the German government still rules out the possibility of tanks and IFV delivery [to Ukraine] for several reasons. Initially, it was justified by the unwillingness to cross the Kremlin's red line of starting the third world war. Moscow has been unhappy with anything the West supplied to Ukraine, calling it "crossing the red line" many times.
The second argument implied that Ukrainians needed too much time to acquaint themselves with the German equipment, and it was better to send them Soviet and Russian legacy systems from the CEE while replenishing them with tanks from the Bundeswehr inventories. So far, Poland and Greece haven't received anything under the swap scheme, while Warsaw donated hundreds
of tanks. Germany didn't allow Spain to send its Leopard tanks to Ukraine. It's reported that Rheinmetall has already renovated 14 Marder carriers to send to Ukraine and started the works on the next 14 ones. If required, 70 more could be prepared for delivery.
The third argument was about the agreement between the allies not to send tanks. However, after expressing gratitude for Germany's support of Ukraine, the US Embassy stated that "the decision on the type of aid ultimately lies with each country itself". The US calls on "all allies and partners to lend as much support as possible to Ukraine in the fight for its democratic sovereignty."
EU High Representative Josep Borrell called on European countries to double their efforts in support of Ukraine. "Who would have thought, when Putin started the war, that six months later, the Russian army would be on defence and retreating? This was made possible primarily thanks to the fearlessness and devotion of the Ukrainians to their country, and secondly, our help," he stressed. He called the member states to better coordinate efforts of reimbursing each other for weapons promised to Ukraine.
Catching up his French colleague, Olaf Scholz called Vladimir Putin. The Chancellor urged Putin to "come to a diplomatic solution as quickly as possible, based on a ceasefire, a complete withdrawal of Russian forces and respect for Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty."
In return, Olaf Scholz received a vast portion of alternative truth. Vladimir Putin "directed the attention of the Federal Chancellor to Ukraine's flagrant violations of international humanitarian law, the continuous shelling of cities in Donbas," leaving aside the fact that it was he who started the war eight years ago and turned it this year into devastation and human tragedy of a magnitude. Putin "described in detail the IAEA-coordinated measures to ensure the physical protection of the ZNPP" that Russia illegally seized and turned into a military site, targeting civilian objects in the [Ukrainian] city just across the river. The Russian president reiterated his disinformation about unjust shipments of Ukrainian grain and the difficulties for Russian exports. Vladimir Putin "emphasized that Russia has always been and remains a reliable supplier of energy resources and fulfils all of its contractual obligations." At the same time, Russia cut off all gas supplies to Europe, including Germany.
Russia, relevant news
According to the Association of Tour Operators of Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands no longer accept documents from Russian citizens for issuing tourist visas.
The flow of tourists from Russia to Europe has already decreased by 95%, ATOR reports.
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4. The rot runs deep in the Russian war machine. Ukraine is exposing it for all to see
The rot runs deep in the Russian war machine. Ukraine is exposing it for all to see
By Brad Lendon CNN8 min
View Original
For Russia, the numbers are catastrophic.
From Wednesday to Sunday, Vladimir Putin’s military forces saw at least 338 pieces of important military hardware – from fighter jets to tanks to trucks – destroyed, damaged or captured, according to numbers from the open source intelligence website Oryx, as Ukraine’s forces have bolted through Russian-held territory in an offensive that has stunned the Russians in its speed and breadth.
Ukraine’s top military commander claimed on Sunday that more than 3,000 square kilometers (1,158 square miles) of territory had been retaken by his country’s forces since the beginning of September. And for more perspective, just “since Wednesday, Ukraine has recaptured territory at least twice the size of Greater London,” the British Defense Ministry said Monday.
Ukrainian reports say Putin’s troops are fleeing east to the Russian border in whatever transport they can find, even taking cars from the civilian population in the areas they had captured since the start of the war in February.
In their wake they leave hundreds of pieces of the Russian war machine, which since Putin’s so-called “special military operation” commenced, has not come close to living up to its pre-war billing as one of the world’s great powers.
These Russian losses are the accumulation of a multitude of existing problems that are now colliding head-on with a Ukrainian military that has been patient, methodical and infused with billions of dollars of the Western military equipment that Russia cannot match.
And without a drastic, and potentially unconventional intervention from Putin, the Ukrainian victories are likely to accelerate, analysts say.
Many of Russia’s problems – poor and inflexible leadership, sour troop morale, inadequate logistics and hardware beset by maintenance issues – have been evident since the beginning stages of the war more than seven months ago.
The Russian military’s hollow core – including tanks that were easy prey for Ukrainian ground troops and trucks that didn’t have the right tires to traverse Ukraine’s landscape – was quickly exposed by tactics ill-suited to the blitzkrieg Putin had planned.
Remember that 64-kilometer (40-mile) convoy that stalled on the way to the capital of Kyiv and was shredded by Ukrainian defenders?
As that convoy stalled, reports filtered out that Russian troops had significant morale problems – some didn’t even know they were in Ukraine, or if they did, why they were there. As the fighting intensified, Ukrainian forces targeted Russian leadership, killing generals and colonels who would have been expected to rally the Russian forces.
And the Russians certainly needed stronger leadership if accounts of troop hardships are to be believed.
Pavel Filatyev, a Russian paratrooper who fought his army’s capture of the Ukrainian city of Kherson earlier in the war, told CNN last month that his unit lacked even the basics during that operation.
“Several days after we encircled Kherson many of us did not have any food, water or sleeping sacks,” he said. “Because it was very cold at night, we couldn’t even sleep. We would find some rubbish, some rags, just to wrap ourselves to keep warm.”
And their armaments were substandard, he said.
“All of our weapons are from the times of Afghanistan,” where Russian forces fought from 1979 to 1989, he said.
The impact of Western arms donations
Meanwhile, Western arms have flowed into Ukraine, among them powerful advanced artillery systems like the HIMARS, or High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems.
The wheeled HIMARS offer what US manufacturer Lockheed Martin calls “shoot and scoot capability” – they can fire highly accurate rockets at targets about 70 to 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) away and then move quickly to avoid any counterstrike.
Ukraine has used them with devastating effect on Russian supply lines, ammunition dumps and command posts.
“Ukraine’s armed forces employed HIMARS and other Western systems to attack Russian ground lines of communication in Kharkiv and Kherson Oblasts, setting conditions for the success of this operation,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in a blog post on Sunday.
The pounding meted out by Ukrainian deployed HIMARS on Russian supply lines has been relentless, according to Western analysts.
“Ukrainian long-range artillery is now probably hitting crossings of the Dnipro (River) so frequently that Russia cannot carry out repairs to damaged road bridges,” Britain’s Defense Ministry said Monday.
Trent Telenko, a former quality control auditor for the US’ Defense Contract Management Agency who has studied Russian logistics, said Ukrainian forces used precision rockets fired from the HIMARS batteries to take out key large Russian arms depots near rail lines well back of the front lines.
This meant Russia had to use trucks to disperse artillery pieces and ammunition to smaller depots, making it more difficult to distribute, Telenko said. When Ukraine began its lightning offensive, Russia could not bring appropriate firepower to blunt the Ukrainian advance because its artillery was so dispersed, he said.
But the HIMARS and other powerful Western artillery systems shouldn’t get all the credit, ISW said. They were coupled with Ukrainian feints and ingenuity.
Last week Russia redeployed forces to the south to bolster its ranks ahead of a mooted Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson region, according to Ukrainian officials and footage of equipment moving through Crimea.
That opened the door for Ukrainian forces farther north.
“Kyiv’s long discussion and then an announcement of a counter-offensive operation aimed at Kherson Oblast drew substantial Russian troops away from the sectors on which Ukrainian forces have conducted decisive attacks in the past several days,” ISW said.
Once those Russian forces moved, the Ukrainian military probed for weak points in Russian lines, said Mark Hertling, a CNN analyst and former US Army general.
“What they have been able to do is conduct reconnaissance with a small force to find where to conduct a much larger breakthrough, pushing tanks and artillery through the holes in the Russian front and then getting into the Russian rear areas,” Hertling said.
Supplies for Ukraine to fuel its advance
The quick Russian retreat has enabled Ukraine to capture Russian arms, ammunition, fuel and supplies in those rear areas, said Telenko, adding that the addition of trucks and trains to the Ukrainian inventory will allow Kyiv to “supercharge” its advances.
Analysts have also noted the lack of Russian air support.
Richard Hooker Jr., a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, said last month that Ukraine has stitched together a force of older antiaircraft systems already in its inventory with supplies of US and German equipment and “largely sidelined Russian airpower.”
“Ukraine has been outstandingly successful in denying Russia air supremacy with extremely effective air defense and a strategy of ‘air denial,’” Hooper wrote on the Atlantic Council’s “Ukraine Alert” blog.
And Russian setbacks are just fuel for even more trouble ahead, a spiral of defeats that may be beyond Moscow’s ability to stop.
Mick Ryan, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Australian Army general, terms it “cascading failure” in a Twitter post. “Each battlefield loss and withdrawal leads to further failure,” he said.
As the options dwindle, so will embattled Russian morale.
As retreating forces move back, they’ll bring stories of their withdrawal with them. It will be all but impossible for the Kremlin to keep those stories from spreading within its forces and even to their relatives back home.
The territory Russia captured in Ukraine over seven months, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian casualties, has been lost in a week.
And Russia’s generals seemingly have no immediate answer.
Even when Putin’s forces were advancing, those advances were slow and grinding. And earlier in the war, Ukraine’s defenders never fled the way Russian troops have in the past week.
“The already limited trust deployed troops have in Russia’s senior military leadership is likely to deteriorate further,” the British Defense Ministry said on Monday.
The ministry’s report said the Ukrainian attacks had made it difficult for Russia to move replacement troops to the front lines.
Where does Moscow find replacements?
The big question is whether Russia has fresh trained troops to move forward.
In July, CNN reported that the call had gone out across Russia for more than 30,000 volunteers to join the war effort in Ukraine. The lure was big cash bonuses and no experience was necessary.
But Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia researcher at ISW, said those new recruits would likely be of little help on the battlefield as there would not be enough time to train them.
For instance, training a tank crew can take several months at a minimum and sometimes more than a year, experts say.
“Short-term training is unlikely to turn volunteers with no prior experience into effective soldiers in any unit,” Stepanenko said.
And those 300-plus Russian pieces of hardware left destroyed, damaged or abandoned on the battlefield over the past several days won’t be easy to replace either.
Russian industry has been hamstrung by Western sanctions. Russian arms depots have already been raided to replace earlier losses. And while large numbers of arms may remain in those depots, they are likely old and in need of repair or refurbishment, said Jakub Janovsky, a military analyst who contributes to the Oryx blog.
“In practice replacements are often much older vehicles – likely to suffer from reliability problems and with lower effectiveness in combat,” he said.
Moscow retains manufacturing capacity, but lacks the best components for what it might make, Janovsky said.
“Due to sanctions they might have to replace sensors and electronics with inferior alternatives – and the amount they can produce in the near term is a fraction of what they are losing. Those material losses … are not sustainable,” he said.
So advantage Ukraine, at least in the near term.
But Ryan, the former Australian general, remains cautious.
“It is too early to speak in overly triumphant terms. The Russians still have the capacity to respond. The south & east are still occupied by the Russians. The Ukrainians have won a significant victory, but there is still a war to be won,” he tweeted.
CNN’s Tim Lister, Josh Pennington, Darya Tarasova contributed to this report.
5. China, India had agents working at Twitter, whistleblower says
And we trust social media in the hands of people with this level of knowledge?
Excerpts:
Zatko said he was similarly “surprised and shocked” by an exchange with current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal about Russia — in which Twitter’s current CEO, who was chief technology officer at the time, asked if it would be possible to “punt” content moderation and surveillance to the Russian government, since Twitter doesn’t really “have the ability and tools to do things correctly.”
“And since they have elections, doesn’t that make them a democracy?” Zatko recalled Agrawal saying.
China, India had agents working at Twitter, whistleblower says
marketwatch.com · by Associated Press
Zatko told lawmakers that the social media platform is plagued by weak cyber defenses that make it vulnerable to exploitation by “teenagers, thieves and spies” and put the privacy of its users at risk.
Among the assertions from Zatko that drew lawmakers’ attention was Twitter’s apparent negligence in dealing with governments that sought to get spies a job inside the company. Twitter’s inability to log how employees accessed user accounts made it hard for the company to detect when employees were abusing their access, Zatko said.
Zatko said he spoke with “high confidence” about a foreign agent that the government of India placed at Twitter to “understand the negotiations” between India’s ruling party and Twitter about new social media restrictions and how well those negotiations were going.
Zatko also revealed Tuesday that he was told about a week before his firing that “at least one agent” from the Chinese intelligence service MSS, or the Ministry of State Security, was “on the payroll” at Twitter.
In a statement, Twitter TWTR, +0.80% said its hiring process is “independent of any foreign influence” and access to data is managed through a host of measures, including background checks, access controls, and monitoring and detection systems and processes.
Zatko said he was similarly “surprised and shocked” by an exchange with current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal about Russia — in which Twitter’s current CEO, who was chief technology officer at the time, asked if it would be possible to “punt” content moderation and surveillance to the Russian government, since Twitter doesn’t really “have the ability and tools to do things correctly.”
“And since they have elections, doesn’t that make them a democracy?” Zatko recalled Agrawal saying.
marketwatch.com · by Associated Press
6. Predictions of Putin’s Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
Be careful what you ask for. But this begs the question, if Putin was somehow ousted now, what would our next actions be? Have we war-gamed this out?
Predictions of Putin’s Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
The Russian autocrat’s end has been predicted, wrongly, for two decades.
By Mark Lawrence Schrad, a professor of political science at Villanova University.
Foreign Policy · by Mark Lawrence Schrad · September 13, 2022
There is a growing cottage industry among Russia watchers and international relations experts focused on the political demise of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s an understandable wish—but one that so far is rooted more in optimism about karmic justice than in reality. Virtually every Kremlin setback gets framed as “the beginning of the end of Putin” and his regime. The Russian Armed Forces’ recent disorganized retreat and “regrouping” in the face of a dramatic Ukrainian offensive have unleashed yet another wave of premature speculation about Putin’s impending doom, unbalanced by any consideration of the sources of his political resilience and stability, which have kept him in power through one political crisis after another.
The end-of-Putin genre is nothing new and includes (ultimately false) prognostications by all manner of respected journalists, academics, Russian opposition politicians, and even Western leaders. The predictions of Putin’s imminent demise have been around for almost the entirety of his rule.
After succeeding Boris Yeltsin as president in 2000, Putin’s popularity was bolstered by the dramatic growth of the Russian economy—an average of 7 percent per year for nearly a decade—but the tragically bungled government responses to both the 2002 Moscow theater siege and the 2004 Beslan school attack led to premature political eulogies for Putin.
Everything changed in 2008, when Putin’s invasion of Georgia, the global financial crisis, and the collapse in world oil prices wiped out $1 trillion in Russian stocks and led to an 8 percent contraction in GDP. More political obituaries heralded “the end of the Putin era”: Now that the dynamic Russian economy on which Putin’s legitimacy was based was dead and buried, surely his political career would be next. Yet thanks to sound economic policymaking, the Kremlin withstood the storm.
Still emerging from the Great Recession in 2011-12, the pro forma reelection of Putin and his United Russia party was rocked by anti-corruption protests in Moscow and across Russia. Billed as the greatest threat to Putin’s power to that point, experts, opposition politicians, and foreign leaders yet again united in dubbing it “the beginning of the end of Putin.” Using a combination of carrots and sticks—electoral transparency measures and selective repression—the furor subsided, and Putin endured.
The rhetoric ratcheted up once again in response to Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution in 2013-14, as Putin’s subsequent annexation of Crimea and proxy war in the Donbas would surely be “the end of Vladimir Putin.” Or Western economic sanctions and Russia’s crumbling economy would be his undoing. But on the contrary, Putin’s nationalist turn toward legitimacy through identity rather than economic performance seems to have solidified his rule even more.
When that furor subsided, it was the rising challenge of the anti-corruption crusader Alexey Navalny that prompted prognostications of the end of Putin in 2017. By 2018, pension reform would be the “beginning of [the] end of Putin’s regime.” In 2019, it was the election of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that “may be Vladimir’s downfall.” By 2020, both Russia’s dissatisfied youth and the Kremlin’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic were on deck to “topple Vladimir Putin.”
Putin’s escalation into a full-scale war of aggression in Ukraine this February unleashed an absolute tidal wave of end-of-Putin prognostications, most notably when—in his Warsaw speech in March meant to galvanize European unity—U.S. President Joe Biden ad-libbed: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Perhaps it was a gaffe saying the quiet part out loud, but Western leaders, experts, and Russian dissidents largely agreed: The invasion would be Putin’s undoing. Or maybe it would be the war crimes and atrocities in Bucha that would end Putin.
Add to that a telling flurry of claims that Putin was sick or dying—not based on any actual intelligence but long-distance diagnosis-by-photo. This was the ultimate form of punditry as karmic hope: a wish that the universe itself was punishing the Russian leader for his sins.
So it is not at all surprising that—as news of the haphazard retreat of Russian forces from the Kharkiv front pours in—we’re seeing ever more installments in the end-of-Putin literature. Foremost among them is a recent piece in the Atlantic by the acclaimed journalist and historian Anne Applebaum: “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory.”
While the piece begins with a levelheaded and persuasive consideration of the scale of Ukrainian advances and the surprising lack of fight in the retreating Russians, it veers into the end-of-Putin genre by surmising that Russia’s lackluster performance on the battlefield will topple Putin, somehow. The problem here is the same as it is for every article in this literature: The absence of causal mechanisms—the whos, whys, and hows of revolution—is ignored in favor of handwaving and passive voice. A Ukrainian victory is certainly possible. But that alone won’t spell Putin’s end. After all, plenty of dictators, from Saddam Hussein after the Iran-Iraq conflict and the first Gulf War to Vladimir Lenin after Russia’s botched invasion of a newly independent Poland, have survived losing wars they started.
Applebaum argues that Putin has gone all in on his so-called special military operation as the basis for his ruling legitimacy. “And when Russian elites finally realize that Putin’s imperial project was not just a failure for Putin personally but also a moral, political, and economic disaster for the entire country, themselves included, then his claim to be the legitimate ruler of Russia melts away. … We must expect that a Ukrainian victory, and certainly a victory in Ukraine’s understanding of the term, also brings about the end of Putin’s regime.”
She adds: “To be clear: This is not a prediction; it’s a warning.”
Is this the thing that truly, finally dooms Putin? Only time will tell. But 20 years’ worth of Putin outliving his supposed demise should give us pause. He has survived economic depression, international isolation, mismanagement of a deadly pandemic, botched terrorist responses, and an intelligence fiasco that led Russia into a bungled war—and he’s still here.
The lynchpin in most end-of-Putin arguments is the famously nebulous concept of “legitimacy.” As Applebaum writes: “It is inconceivable that [Putin] can continue to rule if the centerpiece of his claim to legitimacy—his promise to put the Soviet Union back together again—proves not just impossible but laughable.”
During the first decade of Putinism, it was Russia’s stellar economic performance that gave Putin popular legitimacy. But once growth gave way to stagnation with the global economic crisis and ensuing Western sanctions, we were told that his position was tenuous due to a lack of legitimacy. So Putin pivoted to nationalism and legitimacy through identity—maintaining popular support as defender of the Russian nation—an image that endures despite an increasingly disastrous political and economic track record.
As a concept, ruling legitimacy rests on the fundamental premise of Western democracy that sovereignty ultimately lies with the people, as expressed through elections. A democratic leader without popular support is of questionable legitimacy and likely faces perilous future political prospects. Yet both in theory and practice, simply applying “legitimacy” as it applies in democracies to nondemocratic contexts such as Putin’s Russia has been a recipe for disaster.
While popular legitimacy can indeed bolster an autocratic regime, autocrats have other mechanisms of control that democratic leaders do not: They can repress the opposition, co-opt dissent, and monopolize the media landscape to maintain power. Yet a common pathology of the end-of-Putin literature is that a disproportionate focus on popular legitimacy marginalizes consideration of the repression, co-option, and media control that modern autocracies are increasingly built on.
So even beyond the question of whether Putin is considered “legitimate” by his own people— and whether his sky-high approval ratings are indicative of such legitimacy—there’s no mechanism by which a loss of legitimacy offers a clean end to his power. Indeed, both Russian history and global history are full of autocrats of questionable legitimacy who endured for decades because they could rely on repression, co-optation of rival elites, and propaganda and control of information to bolster their rule.
The first Soviet dictator, Lenin, had a keen eye for regime weakness—not least because he was a former revolutionary. Both in Russia under the tsars and across Europe, he’d seen enough windows for political change open and then close again to realistically recognize that “a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation … [but] it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution.” For Lenin (unlike Karl Marx), revolutions didn’t just happen spontaneously; they had to be made. Whether for communist revolutions or any political change, human agency is necessary—the whos, whys, and hows—regardless of ruling legitimacy or other constructs.
The end-of-Putin genre is notoriously lax about how exactly political change happens and what role human agency plays in it. Pundits assume economic sanctions necessarily weaken the regime. Historians assume revolutions and coups in Russia’s past will repeat, that it is just a matter of which one. Security scholars point out that bad things have historically happened to dictators whose wars turn out badly, but again they are mum on specific causes.
Since Putin’s declaration of war, Western pundits have fantasized about the Russian people rising up en masse and overthrowing Putin. But the flurry of anti-war protests in February and March were crushed, protest criminalized, and opposition leaders have largely been imprisoned or have fled abroad, making scenarios of mass revolution against a leader still enjoying approval ratings above 80 percent seem awfully farfetched.
Another favored Western scenario for the end of Putin is a palace coup by Kremlin insiders, unnamed “elites,” or the military (despite the efforts of both Ukrainian and Russian experts in downplaying such expectations). But rather than rising up against Putin over the last six months of war, Russian elites have fallen into line. Instead of dreaming of greener pastures in the West, Russia’s oligarchs and political elites are increasingly resigned to the fact that their fates are tied to Putin and his regime: As one source at a sanctioned Russian state company told journalist Farida Rustamova, “They will not overthrow anyone, but will build their lives here.”
Nevertheless, this is Applebaum’s prognostication, too: “Russian soldiers are running away, ditching their equipment, asking to surrender. How long do we have to wait until the men in Putin’s inner circle do the same?” Anything is, of course, possible. But based on current evidence, or the lack of it, Westerners hoping for unnamed loyalists to plot to overthrow Putin will likely be waiting quite a while indeed.
In the end, trying to predict events of world-historical significance is a tough business, for pundits, politicians, intelligence analysts, and even well-read experts such as Applebaum. We’re all making causal inferences about an inherently unknowable future based on a necessarily incomplete reading of the past, all overlaid with our own cognitive biases. Even among experts in their fields, successful predictions are rare and failures far more numerous, as we’ve seen regarding the forever-impending political demise of Putin.
Then we add to that our own confirmation and hindsight biases, which color our predictions based more on what we want to see happen in a supposedly just world than on what is more likely to happen in an inherently unjust one. When it comes to foretelling the end of Putin, that would require tempering our hopes for comeuppance for the atrocities and injustices he has visited on Ukraine, with a broader consideration of the sources of autocratic stability—repression, co-optation, and media control—which are not reliant on our Western conceptions of legitimacy.
In confronting the repeated failures of the end-of-Putin literature, I’m reminded of the wisdom of the foremost demographer of Russia and the old Soviet Union, Murray Feshbach, who was both a mentor and a true friend. Relying on the old adage that “demography is destiny,” all manner of journalists asked him to foretell what the future held for Russia.
Yet he always demurred, noting that in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno there’s a special place in the eighth circle of hell reserved for sorcerers, seers, and prognosticators, with their heads wrenched around backward, forever looking back on their false prophecies. It’s a type of damnation we would all do well to avoid.
Foreign Policy · by Mark Lawrence Schrad · September 13, 2022
7. China’s Neighbors Are Navigating COVID-19, Beijing, and Washington
Excerpts:
Beijing often claims that it is at loggerheads with only the United States or that others who disagree with China are manipulated by Washington. But this trip reminded me of the narrowness of such a framework and the need to open the aperture of our perspective. The world does not face a dichotomous choice between Beijing and Washington. Beijing cannot persuasively claim that it is only the United States that has issues with its behavior or that Beijing must stick with zero-COVID because the only alternative would be no restrictions and U.S. levels of deaths.
Conversely, Washington has supportive friends in Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo, but they are developing their own approaches to China and to international affairs more broadly. And some of these approaches, such as leveraging China’s dependence and not just reducing the United States’ own exposure, are worth borrowing from. In short, the partnership is increasingly a two-way street, and that is broadly a good thing for all concerned.
China’s Neighbors Are Navigating COVID-19, Beijing, and Washington
Foreign Policy · by Scott Kennedy · September 13, 2022
An expert's point of view on a current event.
A long, strange trip through East Asia shows the region’s impressive steering skills.
By Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
People walk beneath cherry blossoms near the National Assembly in Seoul on April 9, after two years of the area being closed to the public for COVID-19 control.
People walk beneath cherry blossoms near the National Assembly in Seoul on April 9, after two years of the area being closed to the public for COVID-19 control. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
It ended up taking 153 days to get from my home in Virginia to Beijing. It used to take only 15 hours and had become so regular that it felt like a short commute across town. Not any longer. The age of COVID-19 brought global air travel to a standstill for more than a year, and China’s zero-COVID policy has continued to make the country almost as hermetically sealed as its fellow communist neighbor North Korea, with international arrivals down almost 80 percent.
In an era when mutual isolation has left the Beijing-Washington relationship badly imbalanced, I still felt it was critical to go. My destination was Beijing, but I had to go through San Francisco for a week of COVID-19 tests, then quarantine in Shanghai for three weeks, get approval to travel to Beijing, and then quarantine there for another two weeks. But I barely began my path through that daunting gantlet when my plans began to unravel. After an initial flight to San Francisco got caught up in the usual delays of personnel shortages and refueling, I was in the midst of taking my first of three PCR tests required to board my flight to Shanghai when the U.S. government issued a warning on April 8 advising against travel—and announcing the voluntary departure of the U.S. Consulate’s nonessential personnel—because of the harsh lockdown in the city.
As much as I wanted to board that flight, I ultimately followed the universal advice of friends and colleagues and made the painful decision not to. And it was a good thing I listened to them, as the Shanghai lockdown lasted two months. Residents suffered tremendously, and one traveling friend, an American lawyer who made it to Shanghai just before the advisory was raised, ended up sitting in a hotel there for six weeks and then, unable to do anything or see anyone, turned around frustrated and went home.
Not ready to throw in the towel, I pivoted to Plan B and decided to go on a “friends tour” instead and visit Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. If I couldn’t make it to China, I could get darn close, resume fieldwork and interviewing, and see firsthand how others look at China and the U.S.-China relationship.
But getting around Asia in the spring of 2022 was no picnic. There was a 10-day mandatory quarantine for all visitors to Taiwan and in Japan a three-day quarantine for arrivals from locales designated as high risk. Bureaucratic judgments hadn’t caught up with reality, as South Korea had long since passed its peak of cases, while Taiwan’s numbers at the time were increasingly rapidly—and were over 44,000 on the day I left—yet those arriving in Japan from Taiwan faced no quarantine, leading some South Koreans to argue intentional discrimination. (South Korea was removed from Japan’s quarantine list a few weeks later.)
But the stressful navigating and waiting were more than worth it once I was liberated and could go about these cities and meet with people. I racked up dozens of meetings over 22 days with officials, business executives, journalists, scholars, old friends, and host families.
This extended detour left me deeply impressed with these places’ navigating skills. I saw how effectively all three have managed the pandemic. Their responses have been led by their public health bureaucracies, many of whose leaders studied or worked in the United States. They’ve followed commonsense practices, including masking and social distancing.
In Taiwan, the health minister holds a no-nonsense press conference each afternoon, where he announces the last day’s data on cases, hospitalizations, and deaths using simple charts placed on hand-held boards. And although all three maintained tight restrictions on travel through 2021, once the more virulent omicron variant emerged, they realized that their own versions of zero-COVID wouldn’t be sustainable. So, they doubled their vaccination efforts, obtained therapeutics, strengthened their health infrastructure, reset the public’s expectations, gradually opened their doors, and have tried to maintain normalcy as much as possible.
The results: Cases have gone up dramatically in 2022, but death rates have remained amazingly low, cumulatively around 0.2 percent in Japan and Taiwan and 0.1 percent in South Korea, compared with 0.6 percent in China and 1.1 percent in the United States. And while I encountered occasional griping, social trust has been boosted, and people who oppose vaccines are few and far between. Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist trained at Johns Hopkins University who helped crush SARS in 2003, was popular enough that Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen chose him to serve as vice president during her first term. He helped lead Taiwan’s early policy response to COVID-19 and left office still highly revered—such that there are rumors he could run for president in 2024.
The three stand in stark contrast to both China, which has kept deaths low but is unwilling to abandon its draconian zero-COVID strategy and utilize proven mRNA vaccines, and the United States, which has played a central role in developing vaccines but has lost over a million lives to the disease and seen social trust all but vanish. It is hard to conceive of Anthony Fauci being the uniting figure in the United States that Chen is in Taiwan.
When it came to dealing with China itself, people I talked to in all three countries expressed deep concerns about the country’s domestic politics and more assertive foreign policy under Chinese President Xi Jinping, mirroring polling data showing the favorability ratings of China steadily dropping among people in these and other countries. And the great majority I met were anxious but eager to cooperate with the United States on numerous fronts, including strengthening military deterrence, restricting technology flows to China, developing resilient supply chains, and pushing back on Chinese economic coercion. “Economic security” is the new ubiquitous buzzword in all three locales.
Yet at the same time, like sailors facing a stiff headwind, the United States’ East Asian friends are pursuing, to the extent possible, a more nuanced approach toward China than is popular in Washington. Whether talking with national security or trade officials, the rhetoric was decidedly less ideologically charged than in the United States. They tend not to see the challenge with China in such Manichean terms and are less fatalistic about the inevitability of a military conflict. They’re not surprised that Xi has thrown his political support behind Russian President Vladimir Putin, but they believe Xi is less likely to be as aggressive, including attacking Taiwan, because of how much he could lose should things go sideways.
This sky-isn’t-falling view derives at least in part from being relatively successful and united at home. I felt a sense of self-confidence, though not cockiness, in Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo that is far less common in Washington, save for campaign stump speeches.
The difference in domestic situations has a decisive effect in their preferred approach to handling China. All three want to reduce their dependence on China—with 42 percent of Taiwan’s exports headed for Chinese markets, 25 percent of South Korea’s, and 22 percent of Japan’s (compared with less than 9 percent of the United States’ exports)—but they are not at all on board with plans to decouple from or highly isolate the Chinese economy; half of Taiwan’s exports to China are semiconductors. Instead, they are trying to peacefully co-exist with China. They’ve effectively adapted to the rise of China’s economy by having significant protections for their own domestic manufacturing capabilities, so there is not a huge domestic constituency clamoring for decoupling. As one official in Taipei told me, “Trade with China won’t hurt Taiwan and fellow democracies.”
Moreover, they see interdependence as a two-way contest, in which they are trying to maximize whatever leverage they have with Beijing or Washington to keep China in check and limit its destructive behavior. I heard this in all three places, but it was most common in conversations in Taipei. Over the last few years, Taiwanese have begun to use the phrase “the spiritual mountain that protects the country” (huguo shenshan) in reference to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and the island’s dominance of global semiconductor manufacturing.
Originally meant to describe how TSMC was almost single-handedly boosting the Taiwanese economy and stock markets, it has gained the meaning among some as a kind of talisman that makes it far more likely that the United States would defend the island from attack to protect the industry. This is what Bi-khim Hsiao, Taiwan’s chief representative in the United States, meant when she said Taiwan’s goal is to maintain its “strategic relevance.” Similarly, a Japanese official told me their goal is to ensure the “indispensability” of their technologies.
But Japan has made an even more indelible mark on the region’s trajectory, persuading Washington and others to accept some of its ideas as useful complements to U.S. initiatives. It was Japan that invented the concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”; offered one of the first major alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (the Blue Dot Network); proposed the idea of “data free flow with trust” as a normative alternative to Chinese data practices; kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership alive and moving forward even after the United States backed out; and has pushed to coordinate technology restrictions while also maintaining extensive economic ties with China.
And Japan was pivotal in persuading Southeast Asian countries to join the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework not because it is in love with the idea—one Japanese official told me, frankly, that “it offers nothing attractive”—but because it wants to keep the United States economically tied to the region and involved in multilateral negotiations any way it can.
My unintended trip around the region made me much better prepared for when I would eventually get to China. The United States’ friends in Northeast Asia have much to be proud of. In fact, I was envious of their good governance and social cohesion.
Beijing often claims that it is at loggerheads with only the United States or that others who disagree with China are manipulated by Washington. But this trip reminded me of the narrowness of such a framework and the need to open the aperture of our perspective. The world does not face a dichotomous choice between Beijing and Washington. Beijing cannot persuasively claim that it is only the United States that has issues with its behavior or that Beijing must stick with zero-COVID because the only alternative would be no restrictions and U.S. levels of deaths.
Conversely, Washington has supportive friends in Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo, but they are developing their own approaches to China and to international affairs more broadly. And some of these approaches, such as leveraging China’s dependence and not just reducing the United States’ own exposure, are worth borrowing from. In short, the partnership is increasingly a two-way street, and that is broadly a good thing for all concerned.
Fast forward a few months, and several more PCR tests and flight itineraries later, the time has come to put these insights to good use. More than 150 days after I got on that frustratingly long flight to San Francisco, I finally touched down in a cloudless Beijing. A few hours later, after going through a makeshift maze overseen by staffers all in the same white plastic protective equipment, I checked in to my hotel and found my way to my home for the next 10 days. It has been a long, strange trip, but thanks to all the detours, I’ll be better prepared than I was several months ago for what awaits me when my quarantine door finally opens.
Scott Kennedy is a senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Foreign Policy · by Scott Kennedy · September 13, 2022
8. How the Army is tackling these six goals for future wars
How the Army is tackling these six goals for future wars
armytimes.com · by Todd South · September 13, 2022
For the Army to fight the way its top civilian leader envisions by the next decade, the organization must fulfill at least six objectives in that ever-shrinking window.
On Tuesday, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth ripped through those objectives for the Army of 2030 and what’s already in the works. She painted a future fight scenario that sounds as deadly — but even more complex — than what daily reports out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine show.
“The future will likely present complex, multi-access, combined arms fights,” Wormuth said at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Benning, Ga.
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That fight will play out on, “an expanded, noncontiguous battlefield that features dispersed forces.”
Those ground forces, unlike most of the major wars the Army fought over the past half-century will mean the service has to “pay attention to their sea flanks and air flanks,” she said.
To succeed, the secretary said, she expects the 2030 Army to “see more, farther and more persistently at every echelon than our adversaries.”
The secretary also wants the Army to converge hidden forces at optimal times, striking enemy targets. The third item was to “win the fires fight,” meaning strike from farther with more accurate munitions, both steel on target and cyber or electronic warfare tools.
The 5th Battalion, 4th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, was the first unit in the Army to receive the Mobile Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) system. (Capt. Jordan Allen/Army)
While those soldiers are shooting, she wants them protected, or the first three don’t matter, she said.
In those complex sensors, shooters and protection devices must be able to communicate, sharing data rapidly in the Army and with the rest of the good guys. If you’re counting, that’s number five.
Lastly, this future Army must sustain itself for post-combat operations, the protracted fight and fuel the rest of their partners, especially in the Pacific where the Army is the logistics overlord for all the services.
So far on the seeing and sensing side, she said new programs modernizing the Army’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems such as the multidomain sensing system that includes HADES, is one move.
Coincidentally, or not, the Army’s Program Executive Office for all things sensors, PEO Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, announced Tuesday agreements that support that exact program with a three-phase prototype project.
The 24-month contract is worth $49 million in total, according to the release. L3 Harris and Raytheon Applied Signal Technology are contracted for the project.
The prototype seeks increased performance and sensitivity for sensors at high altitude in the multi-domain sensing system, according to the release.
“The sensors resulting from MDSS Sensor Evaluation Program will first be used on the MDSS HADES,” the release reads.
Army Times interviewed officials at the PEO in early September, who shared context on the larger HADES or High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System. The program is worked jointly with PEO Aviation.
The platform is a civilian aircraft that the Army wants to use to coordinate theater-level sensing and joint targeting across vast distances.
Ronald “Boomer” Rizzo, deputy product manager for manned aerial reconnaissance surveillance systems told reporters at the event at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, that HADES development is being fueled by two testbeds doing real-world rotations now.
Those are the ARTEMIS and ARES and later ATHENA. First fielded a few years ago was ARTEMIS, currently flying in U.S. European Command. The “high-demand asset” runs as a kind of technology demonstrator. It flies for two to three weeks then returns to the United States for software and hardware upgrades.
The Army is testing the Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System, or ARES for short. (Army)
The testers fielded ARES in the Pacific to do the same a few months ago.
“All of this is to inform how we will ultimately build the HADES system,” Rizzo said.
Building off that will be the ATHENA “bridging” platform that will move legacy systems from turbo propeller aircraft to a modern, manned, business-class jet aircraft.
“We will also have a family of (unmanned aerial systems) that will do the same at the division, brigade and battalion level,” Wormuth said.
Sensing is not confined to the friendly, or not-so-friendly, skies.
Wormuth name-dropped the TITAN system, as well. It’s another platform fueled by work at PEO IEW&S, also discussed at the recent media event.
TITAN, Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, is a twofold ground platform project working to connect brigades, divisions and corps.
It combines all that data soaked up by sensors with artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to deliver the right information at the right time to the right decision maker anywhere on the battlefield.
Essentially, it delivers “deep sensing” from the ground.
Maj. Jermaine Wright, assistant product manager at PEO IEW&S, told reporters that the TITAN system combines four legacy systems — Advanced Miniaturized Data Acquisition System; Dissemination Vehicle; Advanced Remote Ground Terminal; and Tactical Intelligence Ground Station.
Keeping soldiers and their systems hidden but survivable means a tougher, faster “Armor Fist,” the secretary said. She highlighted recent work upgrading the Abrams tank, Bradleys and the upcoming Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle.
Those vehicles will enable fires supporters such as medical, engineers and logistics to keep up with their combat arms counterparts.
In the same lane sits the Mobile Protected Firepower, essentially a light tank, that saw a $1.14 billion contract awarded to General Dynamics in June for low-rate initial production.
Then there’s advancements in range.
The combined work to extend howitzer tubed artillery to push past 40 miles and other platforms capable of reaching 1,700 miles is a “real step forward in our fires capabilities,” Wormuth said.
And on the protection side, the Army’s first battalion of Mobile Short Range Air Defense, or M-SHORAD is headed to Europe next year, she added.
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
9. Air Force Creates Special Warfare Program for Cadets to Help Fill Empty Spots
Air Force Creates Special Warfare Program for Cadets to Help Fill Empty Spots
military.com · by Thomas Novelly · September 13, 2022
The Air Force has created a new program to help recruit and train college-aged ROTC and Air Force Academy cadets for special warfare jobs, which it has been struggling to fill amid the service's ongoing recruiting crisis.
"Historically, neither the Air Force Academy nor AFROTC filled all of their commissioning slots for Special Warfare, which down the road impacts mission readiness," Col. John Graver with Air Force Special Warfare said in a press release.
The Air Force's new program for cadets was tested at two-week Special Warfare Orientation Courses this summer at the Air Force Academy, according to a press release issued Saturday.
More than 60 cadets took part and went through exercises such as land and water fitness, troop leading procedures, small-unit tactics, decision making and personnel recovery missions, the service added.
One of the issues the service has faced with selection for special warfare is that many candidates have been physically underprepared to face the strenuous graded events that determine whether they can join the highly selected field, something the new course is designed to remedy.
The new program, which debuted this summer, comes as the Air Force faces its toughest recruiting environment in decades. Earlier this year, the service offered hefty bonuses -- up to $50,000 -- for its most challenging and dangerous jobs, such as special warfare operators.
Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, Air Force Recruiting Service commander, told Military.com in an April interview that getting young men and women to sign on the dotted line has been more difficult, and financial incentives help.
"Special Warfare is our toughest area to recruit," Thomas said. "We are looking for people who are uncommonly physically, mentally and emotionally strong. And we're looking for people who are attracted to the adventure and the challenge of being in our nation's Special Operations Forces."
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee personnel panel, said during an April hearing -- citing Pentagon information -- that just 8% of young Americans have seriously considered joining the military.
And only about one-quarter of young Americans are even eligible for service these days, a shrinking pool limited by an increasing number of potential recruits who are overweight or are screened out due to minor criminal infractions, including the use of recreational drugs such as marijuana.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown Jr., speaking last month at a Washington, D.C., think tank, said it's likely the service will hit its recruiting goals this year, but it will be very close.
"We are going to end up landing on fumes," Brown said at an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. "It'll drive some challenges as we go into fiscal year 2023. ... The workforce is a bit different today than when I got in."
Graver said in a press release that he hopes the new program will help younger cadets feel more confident in becoming Air Force special warfare operators.
"It's an extremely challenging and rewarding career like no other and it's one the country needs young men and women to go into," Graver said.
-- Thomas Novelly can be reached at thomas.novelly@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomNovelly.
10. Twitter whistleblower reveals employees concerned China agent could collect user data
This article and others focus too much on the Musk-Twitter issue rather than the real security problems.
Twitter whistleblower reveals employees concerned China agent could collect user data
Reuters · by Sheila Dang
Sept 13 (Reuters) - The FBI informed Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) of at least one Chinese agent working at the company, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley said during a Senate hearing on Tuesday where a whistleblower testified, raising new concerns about foreign meddling at the influential social media platform.
Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a famed hacker who served as Twitter's head of security until his firing in January, said some Twitter employees were concerned the Chinese government would be able to collect data on the company's users.
Twitter has come under fire previously for lax security, most notably in 2020 when teenage hackers seized control of dozens of high-profile accounts, including the verified profile of former U.S. President Barack Obama.
On Tuesday, Zatko's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed Twitter's security issues could be far more serious, alleging for the first time that the company was informed of agents of the Chinese government working at the social media firm.
Still, shares of Twitter rose almost 1% amid a sharp market selloff. The stock moves almost exclusively based on sentiment about whether billionaire Elon Musk will be forced to complete his $44 billion deal to buy the company, and the Tuesday gain suggested investors did not see any new details that could favor Musk's effort to abandon the deal.
And while Grassley, a Republican, wondered how Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal would keep his job if the allegations were true, many senators used the testimony to support legislation they had introduced to rein in the market power of Big Tech, with a few calling for immediate direct action against Twitter.
The allegations of a Chinese agent will pose a continuing public relations nightmare for Twitter, and investors will demand to know more, said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
During his testimony, Zatko referenced a Reuters story on Tuesday that detailed internal clashes between some teams that wanted to maximize the advertising revenue opportunity from Chinese advertisers and others who were concerned about doing business inside China amid rising geopolitical tensions. read more
"This was a big internal conundrum," Zatko said, adding the company was reluctant to turn away from China as the fastest- growing overseas market for ad revenue.
"In a nutshell, if we were already in bed, it would be problematic if we lost that revenue stream," he said.
Zatko said on Tuesday that in the week before he was fired from Twitter, he learned the FBI told the company an agent of China's Ministry of State Security, or MSS, the country's main espionage agency, was on the payroll at Twitter.
A Twitter spokesperson said the hearing "only confirms that Mr. Zatko's allegations are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies."
The spokesperson added that Twitter's hiring process is independent of foreign influence and access to data is managed through background checks and monitoring and detection systems.
1/5
Twitter Inc.'s former security chief Peiter "Mudge" Zatko is seated to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to discuss allegations from his whistleblower complaint that the social media company misled regulators, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., September 13, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Zatko said on Tuesday he recalled a conversation with another Twitter executive about concerns that a foreign agent was inside the company. The executive responded "Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more?"
LITIGATION AGAINST MUSK
Grassley noted that Agrawal refused to appear at the hearing for fear it could jeopardize the company's litigation against Elon Musk, who is also the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc (TSLA.O). Twitter and Musk head to trial next month over whether the billionaire's takeover deal should be completed.
Twitter shareholders approved Musk’s buyout of the company, Twitter said on Tuesday after a virtual special meeting of stockholders.
The San Francisco-based company sued Musk for terminating the agreement, while Musk countersued, accusing Twitter of misrepresenting the number of false and spam accounts on its service.
Little of what Zatko said appeared to be particularly helpful for getting Musk out of the deal, according to Ann Lipton, a professor at Tulane University Law School.
The deal contract excludes legislative changes that Congress might adopt and Zatko said fines by the FTC are priced into the business. Lipton said that suggests regulatory action against Twitter will not rise to the level of a material event that could nullify the deal agreement.
The lack of evidence to support Zatko's claims that Twitter did not have sufficient controls for spam bots also will not help Musk's legal team, which has used the issue in an attempt to end the deal, Ives said.
A Delaware judge ruled last week that Musk may include Zatko's whistleblower claims in his case against Twitter, but denied his request to delay the trial. read more
The Senate committee questioned Zatko over his claims that Twitter misled regulators about its compliance with a 2011 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over improper handling of user data.
Since then, Twitter has made "little meaningful progress on basic security, integrity and privacy systems," Zatko's complaint filed with regulators in July said.
Zatko's whistleblower complaint appeared to contain over two pages of links to supporting documents, such as emails between Zatko and Agrawal and an assessment of misinformation and disinformation on Twitter.
The number of documents was limited compared with those provided by Facebook (META.O) whistleblower Frances Haugen, who released thousands of pages of internal material.
Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas and David Shepardson in Washington; Additional reporting by Richard Cowan and Tom Hals Editing by Kenneth Li, Chris Sanders, Matthew Lewis and Chris Reese
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Sheila Dang
11. 'Don't Do It:' Senior Leaders Say Soldiers Should Stop Taking Mandatory Online Classes
I wonder how much developing and administering some of the online courses cost? Along with "don't do it," we also need say, "stop making them." Perhaps we could put the funds toward buying more ammunition for training.
Excerpts:
Army senior leaders want commanders to stop hounding their soldiers to complete the mandatory online training, part of a broader shift away from the Global War on Terrorism era and toward ramping up training for conventional warfare. That training is expected to be faster-paced and more complicated.
"I was a division commander for three years, and I never did this stuff," Gen. James McConville, the Army's chief of staff, told soldiers at a conference Tuesday, referencing the online training. "People actually do this stuff? You don't have time … and frankly, this is when senior leaders need to come in."
'Don't Do It:' Senior Leaders Say Soldiers Should Stop Taking Mandatory Online Classes
military.com · by Steve Beynon · September 13, 2022
Online, so-called mandatory training -- a set of roughly a dozen courses soldiers are typically tasked with completing annually that include training on securing military facilities and information, ethics, equal opportunity and safety courses -- is time-consuming. Some in the force view the courses as a distraction from more important tasks, like combat training.
Senior leaders have a solution: Skip the classes.
"Don't do it," Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston told soldiers at a conference Tuesday. "Set priorities for your organization and fight for it."
Army senior leaders want commanders to stop hounding their soldiers to complete the mandatory online training, part of a broader shift away from the Global War on Terrorism era and toward ramping up training for conventional warfare. That training is expected to be faster-paced and more complicated.
"I was a division commander for three years, and I never did this stuff," Gen. James McConville, the Army's chief of staff, told soldiers at a conference Tuesday, referencing the online training. "People actually do this stuff? You don't have time … and frankly, this is when senior leaders need to come in."
The classes are largely seen as a burden on the force, taking soldiers away from training and duties pertaining to their job, with most of the information covered in the online courses potentially included in more detailed training programs soldiers already must undertake. The online classes are also run off of clunky Defense Department websites that are known to crash often.
However, when it comes to some of the material covered in online classes, subject matter experts might not always be available to units for in-person training and certification, and the courses do provide a way for the Army to emphasize certain areas, like ethics, that can be important across a service member's career.
Not completing those courses isn't reflected on a soldier's record; instead, the data is usually shown exclusively in internal unit rosters for commanders to note who did the training. The only training that directly impacts the careers of enlisted troops are other lengthy online courses, needed to rise to the next rank.
"Is someone going to physically take that soldier [to complete the training]?" Grinston, the service's top enlisted leader, asked about forcing troops away from their regular duties. "It's usually the staff; it's rarely the battalion commander."
Army leaders want commanders to focus on other priorities, like a more difficult physical fitness and marksmanship test the service has rolled out, along with prioritizing tests for expert badges.
"What we have to do for junior subordinates is give them our priorities and make sure they have the time," McConville said. "Are you doing PT? Are you making sure your squads can do a night live fire?"
-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon.
military.com · by Steve Beynon · September 13, 2022
12. A Hundred Wrecked Tanks In A Hundred Hours: Ukraine Guts Russia’s Best Tank Army
A Hundred Wrecked Tanks In A Hundred Hours: Ukraine Guts Russia’s Best Tank Army
Forbes · by David Axe · September 14, 2022
A Russian T-80 burns following a Ukrainian drone strike.
Via social media
The Ukrainian army’s counteroffensive around the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine starting on Sept. 6 destroyed half of the best tank division in the best tank army in the Russian armed forces.
A hundred wrecked or captured tanks in a hundred furious hours. That’s how much destruction the Ukrainians inflicted on the Russian 4th Guards Tank Division, part of the elite 1st Guards Tank Army, the Russian army’s best armor formation.
Now the 1st GTA is retreating north in order to preserve what remains of its front-line divisions. But the damage the tank army has suffered could have lasting implications—and not just for Russia’s 200-day-old wider war in Ukraine.
The 1st GTA “had been one of the most prestigious of Russia’s armies, allocated for the defense of Moscow, and intended to lead counterattacks in the case of a war with NATO,” the U.K. Defense Ministry explained. “It will likely take years for Russia to rebuild this capability.”
The 1st GTA has been in the fight since the start. When Russia widened its war in Ukraine on Feb. 24, it initially aimed to capture Kyiv and unseat the Ukrainian government. The 1st GTA led the assault on the capital city—and also led the retreat a month later after the Ukrainians won the battle for Kyiv.
The survivors of the 1st GTA—in particular, two regiments of the 4th GTD as well as two regiments of the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division—redeployed to the front around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, just 25 miles from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine.
Five months later, the 1st GTA regiments still hadn’t made good all their losses. The 1st GTA “suffered heavy casualties in the initial phase of the invasion and had not been fully reconstituted prior to the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv,” the U.K. Defense Ministry stated.
And some 1st GTA elements, apparently including the 147th Artillery Regiment, later shifted to southern Ukraine in a desperate bid to blunt a Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast that kicked off on Aug. 30.
Damaged, divided, demoralized, cut off from reliable logistics owing to Ukrainian deep strikes on Russian supply lines and lacking effective air support, the 4th GTD and 2nd GMRD were no match for the Ukrainian dozen Ukrainian brigades, including the powerful 4th Tank Brigade, that attacked north, east and south of Kharkiv last week.
The Ukrainian 4th Tank Brigade’s T-72s and T-64s hit the Russian 4th GTD hard outside the city of Izium. By the time the Russian division retreated north toward the Russian border on or around Sept. 10, it had lost around 90 T-80U tanks that independent analysts can confirm.
That’s half the tanks the division would possess at full strength. The Ukrainians captured many of the T-80Us intact—and could fix them up, paint them with the Ukrainian army’s cross insignia and send them back into battle.
The 4th GTD and 2nd GMRD—and by extension the whole 1st GTA—probably are unfit for further fighting. They could reconstitute, but with what and whom? The Kremlin’s urgent recruitment drive is faltering. And having written off more than a thousand tanks in Ukraine, the Russians might need years to bring depleted units back up to full strength.
The Ukrainian army by contrast has more tanks now than it did before the current counteroffensives, as it has captured more Russian tanks than it has lost tanks of its own.
Forbes · by David Axe · September 14, 2022
13. The War in Ukraine Isn't Over By a Long Shot
I rarely agree with Lt Col Davis (especially on anything he writes about Korea) but I agree that caution is still warranted before we declare victory and go home.
Excerpts:
I’ll repeat, it is entirely understandable and appropriate for Ukraine and its many Western supporters to celebrate this unqualified success north of Kharkiv. But its also necessary to understand this is a war, not a battle. The loss of Izyum and territory north of Kharkiv doesn’t signal the end of Russia any more than the successive losses of Mariupol, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk signaled Ukraine had lost the war. Those losses were major and costly for Ukraine, and this current victory by Kyiv is major and costly for Russia. But the war continues on.
...
One thing seems inevitable, however: Putin put his political life at grave risk to launch this war, and it seems unlikely in the extreme that he would stand passively by and allow his forces to be slowly squeezed out of Ukraine, imposing a major (and possibly fatal) defeat on him without making adjustments to try and regain the initiative. As Putin showed in his approach to the Chechen War, there is little he won’t do when he feels it is necessary to win on the battlefield.
It is, given the six-plus months of carnage imposed on Ukraine by the invading Russian army, entirely appropriate and reasonable to celebrate Ukraine’s big win north of Kharkiv. But this is war and I fear there will be much more death and destruction – and more successes and failures by each side – before this conflict finally comes to an end.
The War in Ukraine Isn't Over By a Long Shot
19fortyfive.com · by Daniel Davis · September 12, 2022
Last week, Ukraine caught the Russian military authorities entirely off guard when they launched a successful counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region. The operation was successful even beyond Kyiv’s expectations, having driven Russian forces from nearly all the territory north of Kharkiv and liberating settlements as far east as Izyum.
(Watch the author of this piece, retired U.S. Army LT. Colonel Daniel L. Davis discuss his work on the BBC.)
While it is entirely appropriate for Ukraine and its supporters to celebrate this achievement, it is essential to understand this doesn’t signal the war is even close to over. The outcome is still very much undecided, and much fighting remains.
Detailing the Offensive
On August 29, Ukraine launched its long-awaited offensive in the Kherson region.
The preponderance of evidence suggests that Ukraine’s attack suffered major casualties and achieved limited if any, gains.
In preparation for this long-discussed operation, Russia had sent several battle groups to the Kherson region to reinforce its positions, some of which may have come from the Kharkiv region.
On August 14, about three weeks before the Kharkiv offensive began, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported that “Russian forces are likely committing volunteer units … to the Izyum-Slovyansk line and are likely deprioritizing the axis in favor of defending positions in southern Ukraine.”
Officials from the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) told ISW that Russian troops near Izyum had been “redeploying to the Southern Axis in an effort to defend occupied territories in western Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts.” Russian troops in the Kharkiv region had been sparse since April.
Putin Redirects Troops, Ukraine Responds
When Putin prioritized the capture of the Donbas as his primary objective, the Kremlin conducted what’s known as “economy of force” missions in the north around Kharkiv and in the south near Kherson. The intent of the Russian missions in the north and south was to use as few troops as possible to keep the UAF tied up so that they could not move more troops to the Donbas to resist Russia’s offensive there. Russia then thinned its defenses even more in late August to deploy more troops to defend against the known offensive about to start near Kherson.
Zelensky took advantage of that move and likely intentionally deceived Russian intelligence into moving troops out of the Kharkiv region, believing there was no risk. As it turned out, that move was both good and bad for Ukraine. The additional Russian troops in Kherson appear to have helped Moscow’s forces inflict grievous casualties on the Ukrainian attackers in the Kherson region but fatally weakened Russian defenses in the Kharkiv region.
When the Ukrainian troops shocked the Russian defenders at the start of the Kharkiv offensive, the Russians began to surrender territory quickly. They not only had few troops left in the area, but those troops were mainly volunteers. Moscow began frantically sending reinforcements to try and stem the tide, but Ukraine advanced faster than Russia could get reinforcements in place. The Russian leadership was faced with a conundrum: order its troops to contest every meter of territory in an attempt to buy time for reinforcements to arrive, or evacuate the area and preserve its manpower for future fights.
They chose the latter. Russia not only surrendered Izyum without a fight but later evacuated nearly the whole of the territory they occupied north of Kharkiv all the way to the Russian border, up to 3,000 total square kilometers back under Ukrainian control. Many in the West are hailing this move as proving Ukraine is well on its way to winning the war and might even result in the downfall of Vladimir Putin. A little context might be helpful before making such sweeping judgments.
Too Early to Claim Victory
I’ll repeat, it is entirely understandable and appropriate for Ukraine and its many Western supporters to celebrate this unqualified success north of Kharkiv. But its also necessary to understand this is a war, not a battle. The loss of Izyum and territory north of Kharkiv doesn’t signal the end of Russia any more than the successive losses of Mariupol, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk signaled Ukraine had lost the war. Those losses were major and costly for Ukraine, and this current victory by Kyiv is major and costly for Russia. But the war continues on.
Russia still has an advantage in artillery, rockets, and air power. They still have more tanks and armored personnel carriers. And Putin’s troops still have control of nearly one fifth of Ukrainian territory. Further, Ukraine has likely expended the majority of its striking power in these twin offensives, suffered many casualties, and will require considerable replenishment and replacements before being able to go much further (there are reports that a smaller Ukrainian attack may be in the offing for Ugledar [southwest of Donetsk] but as of this writing none has materialized).
Ukraine Holds Its Ground
Zelensky appears to understand that the battle was important and meaningful, but not determinant. “The next 90 days,” he said, “will be more crucial than 30 years of Ukraine’s independence.” Support “for Ukraine in the war must be maintained,” he continued, specifying the continuing need for “weapons, ammunition, (and) finances.” Whether the West will continue providing significant quantities of all three of those requirements over the long term is an open question.
As I’ve written in these pages recently, there are stiff headwinds coming for Europe this winter, as there will likely be significant challenges with energy, potential energy rationing, and the increasing potential for a recession. Whether the West will be able to continue supplying the types and volumes necessary to enable Ukraine to continue making offensive progress is uncertain. What’s even more uncertain: Putin’s next move.
What is Putin’s Next Move?
One of the problems exuberant Westerners fail to consider is what Russia will do in response to this defeat in the Kharkiv region. It remains possible, though unlikely that Putin will continue without change and try to stick to his original plan of capturing the Donbas and not make any changes. For example, one possibility is that Putin will finally conclude that mobilizing his country for total wartime mobilization is necessary. Though such a move has significant risk for the Russian leader, launching a wartime mobilization also makes it possible that Russia could generate considerable new combat power later in 2023 and overwhelm Ukraine with sheer mass – something very much a part of Russia’s World War II heritage. Yet it is far from certain Putin will take that path.
One thing seems inevitable, however: Putin put his political life at grave risk to launch this war, and it seems unlikely in the extreme that he would stand passively by and allow his forces to be slowly squeezed out of Ukraine, imposing a major (and possibly fatal) defeat on him without making adjustments to try and regain the initiative. As Putin showed in his approach to the Chechen War, there is little he won’t do when he feels it is necessary to win on the battlefield.
It is, given the six-plus months of carnage imposed on Ukraine by the invading Russian army, entirely appropriate and reasonable to celebrate Ukraine’s big win north of Kharkiv. But this is war and I fear there will be much more death and destruction – and more successes and failures by each side – before this conflict finally comes to an end.
Expert Biography: Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.” Follow him @DanielLDavis.
19fortyfive.com · by Daniel Davis · September 12, 2022
14. Walking the Talk in International Engagement and Security Cooperation
Conclusion:
In the four areas mentioned above — information disclosure, Pacific pivot priorities, partner-of-choice policies, and “integrated by design” implementation — the separation between strategic words and tangible actions is stark and potentially harmful to U.S. objectives and interests. Yet, the solutions to these situations are relatively simple: quickly releasing a version of the National Defense Strategy to allies and partners and avoiding such an obvious omission in the future, carefully considering any force posture and funding allocation that could detract from frontline strategic competition, soundly educating the security cooperation workforce on the real intent and benefits of partner-of-choice policies, and rapidly seizing on real-world programs-of-record to fast-follow or truly collaborate with allies and partners. Bringing strategic talk and the walk into alignment would create a powerful signal to strategic competitors that the United States is pursuing actual integrated deterrence that acts across domains, theaters, and spectrums of conflict alongside of allies and partners. In this way, America’s walk and talk would speak loudly to anyone who would consider disrupting a free, open, and stable world order.
Walking the Talk in International Engagement and Security Cooperation - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by E. John Teichert · September 14, 2022
We are seeking to fill two positions on our editorial team: An editor/researcher and a membership editor. Apply by Oct. 2, 2022.
An old saying tells us that “actions speak louder than words.” Over the years, this aphorism has been transformed into catchy slogans such as “your walk talks and your talk talks, but your walk talks louder than your talk talks.” In national strategy, international engagement, and security cooperation, it is vitally important for a nation to say the right things: in its foundational documents, in its strategic guidance, in its formative policy, and in its priority proclamations. Yet, it is just as critical for its actions to align with its announcements. Otherwise, both words and actions risk being collectively dismissed and disregarded, while working at cross purposes to one another in ways that can be self-defeating to national objectives and interests.
Become a Member
The U.S. Department of Defense strives for consistency in its statements about strategy, priorities, objectives, and interests. Yet, in four important areas there remain lingering discrepancies between those words and the actions that should be supporting them: information disclosure to allies and partners; prioritizing the Indo-Pacific theater; partner-of-choice security cooperation policies; and a new approach to working with allies and partners given the name “integrated by design.” These incongruities, most of which have long-standing origins, erode national power, hinder the national intent, and squander resources. On the other hand, a carefully crafted consistency between strategic words and actions in international engagement and security cooperation would further the aims of integrated deterrence for the United States and its allies and partners alike.
An Information Disclosure Mismatch
American strategy acknowledges the preeminence and unique benefits of a broad and trusting network of allies and partners, but collaborative actions fall short in a critical way. The Interim National Security Strategic Guidance calls America’s broad and trusting network of allies and partners a unique advantage for America. The 2022 National Defense Strategy echoes those sentiments, calling allies and partners an unmatched network providing an “enduring strength that is critical to achieving our objectives.” In this strategy, allies and partners are at the core of integrated deterrence, fostering effectiveness across domains, theaters, and spectrums of conflict.
The unclassified fact sheet accompanying the 2022 strategy states that “the Department will incorporate ally and partner perspectives, competencies, and advantages at every stage of defense strategy.” Additionally, leaders in the department have directed the force to constrain the criteria for limited information distribution while defaulting to releasability. Unfortunately, that clear direction did not include incorporating ally and partner perspectives into the National Defense Strategy itself, which is classified in a way that prevents allies and partners from even reading it.
The page-and-a-half-long fact sheet promises that an unclassified National Defense Strategy will be forthcoming, but more than five months out from that promise, the allies and partners that are supposed to form the anchor of such a strategy are still waiting to see it. This major misstep is an example of a mismatch between American words and actions that telegraphs a fundamental lack of willingness to move beyond information disclosure limitations that have plagued collaboration and integration with allies and partners in the past. While an unclassified defense strategy is likely awaiting the White House’s release of a National Security Strategy, the lingering promise of a releasable defense strategy is frustrating allies and partners and undermining the credibility of a strategy that claims to put them at the forefront. This mismatch in the most foundational element of information disclosure demonstrates a weakness that should be addressed immediately for a U.S. strategy that seeks to be truly integrated with allies and partners in its creation and in its application.
A Lukewarm Pacific Pivot
American leaders have emphasized the need for a pivot to the Pacific for over a decade, but military alignment with these words has been slow to follow. In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton authored an article entitled “America’s Pacific Century.” In it she stated that “in the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systemic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values.” Eleven years later, the White House’s 2022 Indo-Pacific strategy calls the next 10 years the decisive decade. While Russia remains an acute threat, and others like Iran remain as persistent threats, the 2022 National Defense Strategy emphasizes that the People’s Republic of China is America’s most consequential strategic competitor.
The United States is an international power with a robust military presence that spans the globe. Additionally, strategic competition is not confined to one corner of the planet, and crises have been prevalent since Clinton’s writings in 2011. Yet, there are real tradeoffs that Washington must make to focus its long-term energy, attention, finances, manpower, and capability if it is to successfully prioritize the preeminent challenges of this decisive decade. This remains the case even and especially when pressing world events like the current war in Ukraine or the Islamic State’s assault on Iraq in 2014 demand immediate attention. The Department of Defense undertook a Global Posture Review in 2021 to consider shifts in force structure and placement, and the results are expected to be evident based on upcoming budget requests, force priorities, and regional laydowns. Yet, in the 11 years since Clinton’s claims called for a Pacific pivot, the results of such a shift in priorities have been only marginally felt across a force whose funding and posture are not substantially different from 2011.
The American force posture in the Middle East remains robust, with 40,000 to 60,000 military members still deployed to the region, and is worth considering carefully as a part of strategic competition. There are indeed important and legitimate reasons for a properly sized force in the Middle East. Though in each resourcing or force structure consideration, there is an opportunity cost for presence away from the immediate vicinities of the strategic competitors that requires smart and systemic American decisions. This is especially true because the force presence in the Middle East comes at a notable cost of bandwidth and margin due to its deployment tempo, sometimes drawing forces away from the Indo-Pacific and European theaters themselves. In the end, force allocation and funding must be considered as the constrained resources that they are, to enable a pivot to the Pacific that is intentionally developed and implemented instead of being a product of mere words on a strategic document. U.S. Central Command’s recent partnerships over posture concept may be the right pathway to resolve this priority mismatch.
Problems with Partner-of-Choice
The United States strives to be the security cooperation partner-of-choice through policy and practice, but sometimes this policy is conveyed in a way that creates a mismatch between its intent and its implementation. In providing a broad and trusted portfolio of security cooperation offerings through a total package approach, the United States creates long-term bonds with its allies and partners: enhancing interoperability, fostering communication and collaboration, providing effective systems for mutual benefit, and boosting its industrial base. Doing so also crowds out strategic competitors, preventing them from gaining similar advantages for themselves. While security cooperation with the United States is often an advantage for an ally and partner, if the programs are not properly structured, they can hinder a host nation and harm America’s relationship with them. Nevertheless, seeking to be a partner-of-choice with the right nations in the right circumstances offers strategic advantages alongside of mutual benefits.
There is, however, an important nuance to be considered in pursuit of policy and goals set forward by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Department of State. Sometimes the word preeminent is used to amplify the security cooperation partner-of-choice policy. Furthermore, this desire for preeminence can be translated, either through the words of strategic leaders or in the minds of security cooperation practitioners, as a pursuit of exclusivity. While U.S. defense contractors would undoubtedly love such zeal on the part of those managing security cooperation portfolios, this exclusivity can run counter to U.S. interests and objectives.
The National Defense Strategy calls for a joint force that is survivable and resilient. A robust and resilient force benefits from an expansive industrial base that includes the corporate capabilities and capacities of allies and partners. It also benefits from an expansive and diverse supply chain that cannot be severed with a single strike to a sole domestic source, while thriving through a broader set of capabilities stemming from multiple types of platforms that can operate together in an integrated and interoperable fashion. NATO’s aerial activity for the last six months along its eastern flank is a powerful example of such diversity. As a result, security cooperation education and training must emphasize these important nuances to help amplify the actual intent of security cooperation policy so as not to be confused with an exclusivity that could be harmful to U.S. interests.
Obstacles to Integrated-by-Design
In a recent engagement in the United Kingdom, United States Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown announced a new approach to security cooperation that he called “integrated by design.” This concept would lash together the United States with its allies and partners at the earliest possible stages of a strategy, project or program. Gen. Brown’s approach dovetails well into a defense strategy that directs the Department of Defense to “incorporate ally and partner perspectives, competencies, and advantage at every stage of defense planning.” And it does so with intentionality and forethought. The key to such a concept is implementation that actually overcomes a track-record that has tended to alienate allies and partners through a lack of American collaboration.
The Department of the Air Force is currently executing over 350 cooperative research, development, test, and evaluation agreements valued at $77 billion with its allies and partners. The other military services pursue similar agreements. Those early-stage investments in collaborative activity provide a strong foundation for the type of cooperation directed by Gen. Brown and the National Defense Strategy. Thus far, though, actual collaboration on program-of-record weapon systems has been lacking.
In April 2022, the U.S. Air Force announced an E-7 deal that could be a precedent-setting event by following a partner’s development of a weapon system instead of leading in its development. This system was developed through Boeing by the Australian military and is currently selected for service in the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Turkey. The details of the deal, however, demonstrate a pathway for the United States to be a slow follower — a very slow follower — funding the program through the Fiscal Year 2023 budget to deliver a single rapid prototype aircraft in 2027 for a system that was accepted into the Royal Australian Air Force inventory in 2010.
If “integrated by design” is to gain traction and turn words into actions, it needs to spur activity that is far closer to fast-following then slow-following. Quickly incorporating the Norwegian Joint Strike Missile, a capable anti-ship and land-attack missile, into the American F-35 inventory could be a great demonstration of such a concept and commitment. The effective incorporation of the Australian MQ-28 Ghost Bat drone into the Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems or as a part of the planned drone wingman competition could further these efforts as well. Such intentional fast-follower activities, and the willingness to work on early program development with allies and partners, would turn a worthwhile slogan into an effective and active strategy.
Walking the Talk
In the four areas mentioned above — information disclosure, Pacific pivot priorities, partner-of-choice policies, and “integrated by design” implementation — the separation between strategic words and tangible actions is stark and potentially harmful to U.S. objectives and interests. Yet, the solutions to these situations are relatively simple: quickly releasing a version of the National Defense Strategy to allies and partners and avoiding such an obvious omission in the future, carefully considering any force posture and funding allocation that could detract from frontline strategic competition, soundly educating the security cooperation workforce on the real intent and benefits of partner-of-choice policies, and rapidly seizing on real-world programs-of-record to fast-follow or truly collaborate with allies and partners. Bringing strategic talk and the walk into alignment would create a powerful signal to strategic competitors that the United States is pursuing actual integrated deterrence that acts across domains, theaters, and spectrums of conflict alongside of allies and partners. In this way, America’s walk and talk would speak loudly to anyone who would consider disrupting a free, open, and stable world order.
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Brig. Gen. E. John Teichert is currently transitioning from his position as the assistant deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for international affairs. His previous positions have included the senior defense official and defense attaché to Iraq, the commander of Edwards Air Force Base, and the commander of Joint Base Andrews. The views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Jimmie D. Pike
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by E. John Teichert · September 14, 2022
15. Navy quietly rolled back punishments for SEALs seeking religious exemptions to the COVID vaccine
I just took my third booster (and 5th shot) for the new Omicron variant yesterday. I went to a civilian provider because the new variant was not yet available at Fort Belvoir and I am traveling overseas again this weekend. I gladly get vaccinated.
Navy quietly rolled back punishments for SEALs seeking religious exemptions to the COVID vaccine
foxnews.com · by Kelly Laco | Fox News
Video
Rep. Waltz slams 'deplorable' conditions for unvaxxed Navy sailors: 'They've got to reverse this order'
Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., rips the decision to isolate unvaccinated sailors and force them to live in 'deplorable' conditions and weighs in on the one-year anniversary of 13 servicemembers killed in Kabul.
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EXCLUSIVE: The U.S. Navy quietly rolled back an order punishing SEALs who remain unvaccinated due to their religious beliefs, according to recent court documents.
The order, "Trident Order #12," disqualified SEALs seeking religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine from training, traveling for deployment and conducting other standard business. It was first issued on Sept. 24, 2021 by Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William Lescher, and all special warfare forces were initially expected to come into compliance with the vaccine mandate by mid-October 2021.
The order specifically said that "Special Operations Designated Personnel (SEAL and SWCC) refusing to receive recommended vaccines based solely on personal or religious beliefs will still be medically disqualified," meaning that SEALs were designated as "non-deployable" if they submitted religious accommodation requests.
The order was put on hold due to a preliminary injunction issued by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in early 2022 as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by First Liberty Institute and Hacker Stephens LLP on behalf of 35 active-duty SEALs and three reservists seeking a religious exemption to the mandate.
However, according to a new filing in the lawsuit, the Navy quietly rolled back Trident Order #12 on May 22, 2022, a few months after the injunction was issued.
NAVY SEALS SEEKING RELIGIOUS EXEMPTIONS TO VACCINE MANDATE FACING INTIMIDATION AND HARASSMENT, SOURCES SAY
Members of the Special Operations Team of the Cypriot National Guard and U.S. Navy SEALs participate in a joint military training in Limassol, Cyprus, September 10, 2021. REUTERS/Yiannis Kourtoglou
A communication order was circulated by the Navy on May 23 with the subject: "NSWC CLOSEOUT TO TRIDENT ORDER #12 - MANDATORY VACCINATION FOR COVID-19." NSWC refers to the Naval Special Warfare Command.
"This order rescinds reference A," it states, referring to "Ref A" as "Trident Order #12 on COVID-19 Vaccinations."
The May 23 communication order also said Navy commands "will continue to follow guidance, as appropriate, regarding COVID-19 vaccination, accommodation requests, and mitigation measures."
It is not immediately clear whether the Navy replaced the order with any other document or the reasoning behind Trident Order #12's termination. The Navy spokesperson told Fox News Digital, "The Navy does not comment on ongoing litigation."
According to a filing from plaintiff attorney Heather Gebelin Hacker to a Fifth Circuit clerk, the legal team representing the SEALs only became aware of the recession of the order on Sept. 1, months after it was rolled back.
"To the best of counsel’s knowledge, Trident Order #12 was not replaced. As the Court will recall, Trident Order #12 stated that SEALs who are unvaccinated due to religious beliefs are medically disqualified, though SEALs who are unvaccinated due to medical reasons are not automatically disqualified. Trident Order #12 also implemented the COVID-19 vaccine mandate at the command level for Naval Special Warfare forces, setting a deadline of compliance for October 17, 2021," the SEALs' legal team wrote.
U.S. Navy SEAL candidates participating in "surf immersion" during Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, California, May 4, 2020. U.S. Navy SEALs are undergoing a major transition to improve leadership and expand their commando capabilities. (MC1 Anthony Walker/U.S. Navy via AP)
"A copy of the order rescinding Trident Order #12 is attached to this letter. The rescission of Trident Order # 12 does not appear to affect the applicability of Navy or DoD-wide vaccine policies to NSW personnel—it just appears to remove the command-level direction," Hackeron continued.
The lawsuit representing unvaccinated SEALs, first reported by Fox News Digital in November, has since been amended to extend to a class action lawsuit encompassing all Navy service members seeking religious accommodation.
ADMIRAL WHO SAID UNVAXXED SEALS CAUSE 'IMMEDIATE HARM' TO NAVY ADMITTED NO COMBAT OPERATIONS AFFECTED
First Liberty's Senior Counsel and Director of Military Affairs Mike Berry told Fox News Digital, "Now that the Navy has rescinded this unlawful order, the only reason it won't allow our SEALs to get back to doing their jobs is because of their religious beliefs."
A health worker administers a dose of COVID-19 vaccine during a vaccination clinic in Reading, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) (AP)
"America faces many national security threats, and the Navy is suffering a historic recruiting crisis. There's no good reason to keep these trained and experienced warriors from serving," Berry said.
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In addition, during a recent deposition, Admiral Lescher, who issued the original Trident Order #12, stated he was "unaware" of any Navy SEAL combat missions that had been negatively affected by COVID-19, despite his earlier claim that the vaccine mandate was necessary for successful Navy operations.
Lescher, who serves as the Navy's second-highest ranking uniformed officer, stated in a sworn declaration before the Supreme Court earlier this year that allowing unvaccinated SEALs will cause "immediate harm to the Navy" and "to the national security of the United States" and could be considered a "dereliction of duty."
Kelly Laco is a politics editor for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Kelly.Laco@Fox.com and on Twitter: @kelly_laco.
foxnews.com · by Kelly Laco | Fox News
16. Next Generation Leadership for Special Operations Forces
I still need to digest this study some more. Perhaps because I cannot put myself in the shoes of a Gen Zer I have some trouble seeing the issues. I think if you queried every generational combination since WWII you would find disparities of views. I do think it is very helpful to survey the Gen Zers and understand their views and take them fully into account. So I am very appreciative of this work. But I am not sure that we are not doing that or that we cannot have different views on leadership based on experience level.
Excerpts:
To understand if or how leadership styles may need to change to motivate younger generations of special operators, we conducted about 30 discussions with current and past senior SOF leaders and experts on special operations. These individuals ranged from colonels to four-star generals and admirals, as well as the civilian equivalents. We reviewed empirical and theoretical research, as well as popular narratives and informed opinions, about the characteristics, traits, and attitudes of younger generations. And we reviewed writings by military strategists and futurists on projected requirements of military leadership on future battlefields. We then compared leadership traits identified as important to SOF, important to younger generations, and important to success on the future battlefield using a model known as the “paradoxical trinity of leadership.” In this model, leadership is considered through the combined lens of leaders, followers, and the context in which they interact.
...
If ASD(SO/LIC) and SOCOM take the steps we recommend here, the force would be on firmer footing for the deliberate, thoughtful development of future SOF leaders. As Gen. Richard Clarke stated in his 2022 congressional posture hearing, SOCOM’s “commitment to high ethical standards, engaged leadership, and maintaining accountability within SOF is critical to sustaining the trust earned over decades.” These findings and recommendations should help the SOF enterprise as it seeks to maintain that commitment by developing and sustaining high-quality, relevant, and effective future leaders.
Next Generation Leadership for Special Operations Forces
lawfareblog.com · by @jjschroden · September 12, 2022
Special operations forces (SOF) are at an inflection point. Operationally, they are rebalancing from an overwhelming focus on countering terrorist groups to a mix of that mission and others designed to support the military’s new emphasis on integrated deterrence of China. Generationally, SOF are now composed of a sizable fraction of millennials, and they are beginning to welcome members of Generation Z into their ranks. As popular narratives surrounding millennials make clear, younger generations of adults may have leadership styles and preferences that differ markedly from those that came before them. Given that SOF are a multigenerational force, we sought to understand how senior special operators think about leadership, what young adults want from their leaders, and how the qualities of military leadership may need to change to match the challenges of future battlefields. Ultimately, our study at the CNA Corporation is meant to help senior special operators better understand the needs of younger SOF and the strengths and weaknesses of different leadership styles across generations.
To understand if or how leadership styles may need to change to motivate younger generations of special operators, we conducted about 30 discussions with current and past senior SOF leaders and experts on special operations. These individuals ranged from colonels to four-star generals and admirals, as well as the civilian equivalents. We reviewed empirical and theoretical research, as well as popular narratives and informed opinions, about the characteristics, traits, and attitudes of younger generations. And we reviewed writings by military strategists and futurists on projected requirements of military leadership on future battlefields. We then compared leadership traits identified as important to SOF, important to younger generations, and important to success on the future battlefield using a model known as the “paradoxical trinity of leadership.” In this model, leadership is considered through the combined lens of leaders, followers, and the context in which they interact.
By comparing views of SOF leadership across the three elements of this model, we identified 11 leadership traits that spanned all three categories, as shown in the figure below. These 11 traits are character, creativity, flexibility, determination, competence, being a relationship builder, trustworthiness, being a problem-solver, approachability, empowerment, and being a risk-taker. While our research remains preliminary and should be viewed as suggestive—as opposed to conclusive—to our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has codified a set of leadership traits for U.S. special operations forces.
Comparison of SOF leadership traits across the leadership trinity
In addition to identifying the set of traits that overlap the three elements of this leadership model, we arrived at five additional findings about the current state of SOF leadership in our study.
Our first finding is that SOF do not appear to have a consistent philosophy of leadership. The operators and experts we interviewed were roughly split regarding whether they believed SOF have a consistent theory of how best to lead their troops. The most prevalent philosophy cited by those who thought SOF had one was mission command, but this was named by less than a third of our interviewees. Two additional facts support the idea that there is no single special operations philosophy of leadership. First, while doctrine pertaining to special operations exists within each of the military services, these publications do not address leadership of SOF or special operations. There is also a joint publication for special operations, but it similarly does not discuss SOF leadership. Second, special operators are professionally developed as members of both the SOF enterprise and their military service (e.g., Army, Navy)—and there is no overarching philosophy of leadership spanning the services either.
Our second finding is that SOF do not have a codified set of leadership traits. Our comparative analysis identified 11 traits that span the SOF leadership trinity, but even the most cited trait (character) was named by less than half of the special operators and experts we interviewed. This lack of consensus runs counter to the Army and Marine Corps, each of which have very detailed doctrinal publications that address their desired leadership traits (in contrast, the Air Force has a less detailed nondoctrinal publication on leadership and the Navy lacks formal guidance on its desired leadership traits).
While the 11 traits that we identified as spanning the SOF leadership trinity model do not constitute an official set, our third major finding was that they nonetheless align well with the traits we identified as being applicable to leading millennials and Gen Zers, as well as traits deemed likely suited for success on future battlefields. The top four (character, creativity, flexibility, and determination) and seven of the top 10 traits cited by operators and experts also appeared in our literature reviews for followers and context, the other two elements of the trinity model. Thus, even though SOF do not have a formally articulated set of desirable leadership traits, we found that those they informally describe as being important to them seem generally well aligned to the future of the SOF leadership trinity.
That consistency of traits notwithstanding, our fourth finding is that development of SOF leaders is notably inconsistent across the force. For example, the special operators with whom we spoke had as mixed a set of experiences with professional military education (PME) as could be imagined. Some had received extensive PME, while others had little to none. Some described the PME they received as high quality and helpful, while others described it as essentially useless. Further, roughly half of the operators we interviewed said they had mentors who helped them through their careers, while the other half described learning by doing and emulation of leaders they admired as mechanisms for their development. Our research suggests that this inconsistency in leadership development is misaligned to the expectations of millennials and Gen Zers, who are the most well-educated Americans in history. Millennials and Gen Zers are also reported to desire mentor/teacher-style leaders and organizations that invest substantially, directly, and clearly in them as individuals. Experts writing on the demands of the future battlefield identified a requirement for military leaders to become more intellectual, analytic, and technically knowledgeable to be successful. These demands also suggest a requirement for deliberate, continued education and mentorship of future SOF leaders.
Our fifth finding is that the evolution of SOF leadership traits is aligned only partially with the requirements of younger generations and the future operating environment. Some of the experts we interviewed thought that interpersonal skills, the ability to build relationships, intelligence, and awareness of special operators had improved over the course of their careers, and that SOF are more transparent today in explaining what they do and why they do it, both privately and publicly. Others said SOF leaders have gotten worse at holding operators—and each other—accountable for their actions. These leaders also cited a decrease in good order and discipline, overemphasis on the special or elite nature of SOF, and over-reliance on throwing resources at problems rather than thinking creatively or unconventionally about solving them, as negative trends in SOF leadership.
In comparing these responses to what the literature had to say about how to lead younger generations and the requirements of the future operating environment, we found that the perceived improvements cited by SOF leaders align well to future requirements for operators who are more educated, analytic, perceptive, collaborative, and transparent in what they do. The perceived shortfalls they cited, however, do not align. In particular, the perceived decline in SOF accountability runs counter to the emphasis of millennials and Gen Zers on ethical, values-driven leadership. Additionally, while increased emphasis on the elite nature of SOF may appeal to younger generations—based on research showing steadily increasing rates of narcissism—some of the operators we interviewed saw the focus on the elitism of SOF as a negative trend. Other negative trends cited by some SOF leaders, such as declines in good order and discipline and less creative (more resource-centric) problem-solving tendencies, also appear to run counter to the requirements of the future battlefield.
Based on these findings, we offer four specific recommendations for consideration by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the Pentagon’s office for civilian oversight of SOCOM—the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, (ASD(SO/LIC)).
First, we recommend that SOCOM identifies and publishes a leadership philosophy for special operations. Given the general disunity among responses that we got from SOF experts on this topic, SOCOM could, in principle, start virtually anywhere in creating such a philosophy. Based on our work, however, we recommend that it consider moving beyond mission command—which focuses primarily on a hierarchical approach to leadership—and develop a leadership philosophy more akin to the “Team of Teams” approach articulated by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his co-authors in their book of that title. Such an approach, which is more aligned to collective models of leadership, seems more likely to be optimally suited to the ways in which SOF typically operate, to the complexity of the future battlefield, and to the less hierarchical and more decentralized leadership preferences of today’s younger generations.
Second, we recommend that SOCOM develops and codifies a set of desired leadership traits focused on the SOF leadership trinity. Our study represents an initial exploration into what these traits should be, so we suggest that SOCOM should build on those in the context of its own analysis of future SOF operating concepts, future battlefield requirements, and future leadership preferences of young special operators. We recommend that as SOCOM does so, it examines some of the noteworthy findings of our comparative analysis and their implications for SOF leader development. One of these is the presence of transparency as a desired leadership trait in the followers and context categories of the leadership trinity but the absence of it in the traits cited to us by special operations leaders. SOCOM should then use this list of leadership traits to drive its efforts (and those of its subordinate elements) to develop future SOF leaders in a consistent, coherent, and deliberate way.
Third, we recommend that ASD(SO/LIC) assesses the adequacy of SOF PME and mentorship opportunities. By law, SOCOM relies on the military services for formal PME and it has little sway over the content of those programs. That should not, however, prevent it and the ASD(SO/LIC) from assessing the adequacy of those programs for the needs of special operators and leveraging forums such as the Pentagon’s Special Operations Policy and Oversight Council to advocate for necessary changes. A formal review of available PME could also help the Joint Special Operations University further tailor the courses that it offers to fill gaps specific to special operations that these schools are missing. We also recommend that ASD(SO/LIC), in conjunction with SOCOM, catalog and assess the adequacy of mentorship programs across the SOF enterprise. We did not detect a desire from any of the sources we examined for a formal assignment of mentors to new special operators; the general view was that mentorship relationships are best developed organically. The formation of such relationships, however, shouldn’t be left to chance, since there are ways to encourage their development (for example, developmental networks and “mentoring constellations”).
Finally, we recommend that SOCOM reinforces efforts to improve accountability. Fixing the conditions that led to consistent ethical lapses and making lasting changes to SOF culture—as described in SOCOM’s Comprehensive Review completed in 2019—require sustained attention. In reviewing literature pertaining to the desires of millennials and Gen Zers, we identified a focus on accountability and values-based leadership as being critically important. Accountability was also one of the five leadership traits articulated in a recent high-level publication by joint and service enlisted leaders as being required for future senior enlisted service members. Such accountability is likely to be demanded by Congress, and it also seems likely to be demanded by younger generations of special operators. It is, therefore, worth addressing now for special operations.
If ASD(SO/LIC) and SOCOM take the steps we recommend here, the force would be on firmer footing for the deliberate, thoughtful development of future SOF leaders. As Gen. Richard Clarke stated in his 2022 congressional posture hearing, SOCOM’s “commitment to high ethical standards, engaged leadership, and maintaining accountability within SOF is critical to sustaining the trust earned over decades.” These findings and recommendations should help the SOF enterprise as it seeks to maintain that commitment by developing and sustaining high-quality, relevant, and effective future leaders.
Note: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of CNA, the Department of the Navy, or the Department of Defense.
lawfareblog.com · by @jjschroden · September 12, 2022
17. Opinion | The 4 factors that explain Ukraine’s extraordinary military success
Excerpts:
First, Western aid has been vital. President Biden’s decision in June to supply Ukraine with High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) was a turning point.
...
A key difference in Ukraine — and the second factor explaining its extraordinary success — is the unity of the Ukrainian people behind Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.
...
The third factor that explains Ukraine’s success is the ingenuity, skill and fighting spirit of its armed forces.
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The fourth and final factor that explains the war’s unexpected course is the corruption and stupidity of the Putin regime.
Opinion | The 4 factors that explain Ukraine’s extraordinary military success
The Washington Post · by Max Boot · September 12, 2022
Last week, I wrote that Ukrainian forces had the initiative and Vladimir Putin was losing his “war of choice.” Little did I know how true that was. When I wrote that column, attention was focused on Ukraine’s offensive in the south toward Kherson. That attack is making only incremental gains, but in the past week, Ukraine has launched a surprise offensive in Kharkiv province that has achieved lightning progress in the northeast.
The internet is full of images of jubilant Ukrainian civilians being freed from the yoke of Russian occupation. In all, Ukrainian forces claim to have liberated more than 1,000 square miles of territory (more than the land area of Los Angeles and New York combined), and the offensive is not over yet. Especially significant has been the liberation of key railway and logistics nodes such as the Ukrainian city of Izyum that were used to support Russian operations in the eastern Donbas region.
This is the biggest Ukrainian victory since the successful defense of Kyiv in the conflict’s early days. Putin’s plans for a three-day war have turned into a nearly seven-month slog. How is it that Ukraine has been so successful at besting its larger neighbor? I see four factors at work.
First, Western aid has been vital. President Biden’s decision in June to supply Ukraine with High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) was a turning point. The long-range rockets allowed the Ukrainians to target Russian ammunition depots and command posts. The more recent U.S. decision to send High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARM) allowed the Ukrainians to hit Russian air defense radars, giving Ukrainian drones and manned aircraft greater freedom to support a ground offensive. Meanwhile, antiaircraft guns such as Germany’s Gepard allowed Ukrainian forces to keep Russia aircraft at bay. Washington has also shared critical intelligence with the Ukrainians.
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But remember: Afghan forces also received tons of Western military equipment, and it did not avert their collapse last summer. That’s in large part because they were fighting for an unpopular and corrupt regime.
A key difference in Ukraine — and the second factor explaining its extraordinary success — is the unity of the Ukrainian people behind Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. His decision to stay in Kyiv in the war’s early days, at considerable risk to his life, secured his place in the pantheon of great wartime leaders. But it’s more than Zelensky: Ukrainians are fighting to defend their democracy and their right to self-determination.
Putin, the Butcher of Bucha, has tried to break Ukraine’s will to fight with barbaric attacks on civilians, but, just as with Hitler’s bombing of London, his tactics have backfired by uniting his victims against him. If Ukrainians need any motive to keep fighting, it is supplied by the grisly atrocities that Russian forces commit wherever they go.
The third factor that explains Ukraine’s success is the ingenuity, skill and fighting spirit of its armed forces. They have been retooled since 2014 into a force that, like their Western counterparts, empowers lower-level commanders to make independent decisions in contrast to the centralization of authority in the Russian ranks. What the Ukrainians have done — transforming their military to incorporate vast quantities of unfamiliar foreign weapons while engaged in heavy combat operations — is akin to rebuilding an airplane while in flight. Their tactical skill has been on repeated display this past week. By advertising their Kherson offensive, they induced the Russians to move troops from the east to the south, thereby opening up the east for a surprise attack.
The fourth and final factor that explains the war’s unexpected course is the corruption and stupidity of the Putin regime. Russian commanders have squandered their material advantages through incompetent leadership aggravated by terrible intelligence. In their original attack on Kyiv, the Russians displayed an inability to conduct fast-moving offensive operations. The Ukrainians are now showing them how it’s done.
The only thing the Russians have been good at is massing artillery to pulverize everything in their path, but the HIMARS neutralized the Russian artillery advantage by interrupting the supply of shells. That brutally exposed all of the invaders’ deficiencies. Once again, last week the Russians were caught with their pants down: They did not anticipate the Kharkiv offensive. The Russians will be hard put to recover because their forces have been too small and too overstretched from the start, and they have suffered heavy losses over the past six-plus months.
Of course, we should not swing from one extreme to another. It was once widely assumed that the war would result in a rapid Russian victory and, when that didn’t happen, that it would devolve into a stalemate. But as I wrote on June 29, “while the war in the east appears deadlocked, a military stalemate can break with shocking rapidity.” That has now happened, and it is a joy to watch the Ukrainians advancing.
But we should not assume that Ukraine will now simply roll unopposed to victory. Russian forces could collapse, but Ukrainian forces could also become overstretched or Putin could finally order a total mobilization — or even use tactical nuclear weapons. War, for good and ill, is an inherently unpredictable business.
The Washington Post · by Max Boot · September 12, 2022
18. Russia spent millions on secret global political campaign, U.S. intelligence finds
Recognize the strategy, understand it, EXPOSE it (as we are doing here). and attack it (with information and a superior political warfare strategy).
Excerpt:
“By shining this light on Russian covert political financing and Russian attempts to undermine democratic processes, we’re putting these foreign parties and candidates on notice that if they accept Russian money secretly we can and we will expose it,” the official said.
Matt Armstrong tweeted an important perspective on this article (and the above excerpt) and his comment is one which we must very much reflect on.
Matt Armstrong
@mountainrunner
"on notice" our complacency at defending the peace & working to deny political warfare successes is tiring. We are so myopic and cannot fathom natsec is more than kinetic military might. We have so many unintegrated, marginalized, barely funded, ill-regarded tools available.
Russia spent millions on secret global political campaign, U.S. intelligence finds
The Washington Post · by Missy Ryan · September 13, 2022
Russia has secretly funneled at least $300 million to foreign political parties and candidates in more than two dozen countries since 2014 in an attempt to shape political events beyond its borders, according to a new U.S. intelligence review.
Moscow planned to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more as part of its covert campaign to weaken democratic systems and promote global political forces seen as aligned with Kremlin interests, according to the review, which the Biden administration commissioned this summer.
A senior U.S. official, who like other officials spoke to reporters Tuesday on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence findings, said the administration decided to declassify some of the review’s findings in an attempt to counter Russia’s ability to sway political systems in countries in Europe, Africa and elsewhere.
“By shining this light on Russian covert political financing and Russian attempts to undermine democratic processes, we’re putting these foreign parties and candidates on notice that if they accept Russian money secretly we can and we will expose it,” the official said.
Countries where such activities were identified included Albania, Montenegro, Madagascar and, potentially, Ecuador, according to an administration source familiar with the matter.
Officials pointed to one Asian country, which they declined to name, where they said the Russian ambassador gave millions of dollars in cash to a presidential candidate. They said that Kremlin-linked forces have also used shell companies, think tanks and other means to influence political events, sometimes to the benefit of far-right groups.
The senior official said the U.S. government detected an uptick in Russian covert political financing in 2014. The review did not address Russian activities within the United States.
Assessments by both U.S. spy agencies and a bipartisan Senate investigation concluded that Russia under President Vladimir Putin launched a campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election to assist then-candidate Donald Trump.
The publication of details about the Kremlin’s alleged political influence campaign comes as the United States expands its military support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, now in its seventh month.
Since early this year the White House has taken the unusual step of repeatedly releasing declassified intelligence related to Moscow’s intentions and actions related to Ukraine, part of an attempt to push back on Putin’s ambitions there and counteract what U.S. officials have described as Russian disinformation operations.
A State Department démarche Monday to U.S. embassies in more than 100 countries described the alleged Russian activities and suggested steps the United States and its allies can take to push back, including sanctions, travel bans or the expulsion of suspected Russian spies involved in political financing activities.
The cable, which officials provided to reporters, said that Russian political financing was sometimes overseen by Russian government officials and legislators, and had been executed by bodies including Russia’s Federal Security Service.
The démarche also named Russian oligarchs it said were involved in “financing schemes,” including Yevgeniy Prigozhin and Aleksandr Babakov.
Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef” after making vast sums in Russian government catering contracts, was charged by U.S. officials in 2018 with attempting to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections. He has been linked to the private military firm Wagner and is wanted by the FBI.
Babakov is a Russian lawmaker allegedly involved in a financing a far-right party in France.
Moscow has used cryptocurrency, cash and gifts to shape political events in other countries, often employing accounts and resources of Russian embassies to do so, the cable said.
“In the coming months, Russia may increasingly rely on its covert influence toolkit, including covert political financing, in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia in an attempt to undermine the efficacy of international sanctions and maintain its influence in these regions amid its ongoing war in Ukraine,” it said.
U.S. diplomats are briefing counterparts in other countries about the activities, which American officials believe could go far beyond the nations and sums that have been identified.
“We think this is just the tip of the iceberg,” the senior official said. “So rather than sit on the sidelines, we are sharing these response measures.”
U.S. officials are also asking partner nations to share their own information about Russian financing to help the U.S. government attain a fuller picture of what Russia is doing.
While the review did not address Russian influence efforts in the United States, the senior official acknowledged that issue remains a major challenge requiring continued work to safeguard the U.S. political system and elections.
“There’s no question that we have this vulnerability as well,” the official said.
Paul Sonne in Washington contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Missy Ryan · September 13, 2022
19. The Critical Moment Behind Ukraine’s Rapid Advance
I listened to Eric Schmitt discuss this on The Daily on NPR yesterday. He provides some very good analysis in 22 minutes here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/podcasts/the-daily/ukraine-russia-war-counteroffensive-kharkiv.html?action=click&module=audio-series-bar®ion=header&pgtype=Article
The key point seems to me to be the proactive sharing of intelligence based on plans to be executed. The US was able to focus on intelligence sharing to support the campaign plan the Ukrainians had devised. The wargaming of the Ukrainian plans also provided the Ukrainians with the information necessary to adjust their plans to achieve success.
The Critical Moment Behind Ukraine’s Rapid Advance
- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/us/politics/ukraine-russia-pentagon.html?utm
Ukrainian soldiers near the Kherson front this month.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
By Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/us/politics/ukraine-russia-pentagon.html?utm
WASHINGTON — The strategy behind Ukraine’s rapid military gains in recent days began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials about the way forward in the war against Russia, according to American officials.
The counteroffensive — revised this summer from its original form after urgent discussions between senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials — has succeeded beyond most predictions. Ukrainian forces have devastated Russian command and control, and appear poised to capitalize on their advances in the northeast of the country and in another campaign in the south.
The work began soon after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told his generals he wanted to make a dramatic move to demonstrate that his country could push back on the Russian invasion. Under his orders, the Ukrainian military devised a plan to launch a broad assault across the south to reclaim Kherson and cut off Mariupol from the Russian force in the east.
The Ukrainian generals and American officials believed that such a large-scale attack would incur immense casualties and fail to quickly retake large amounts of territory. The Ukrainians were already suffering hundreds of casualties a day in what had become a grinding conflict. The Russian forces were experiencing similar losses but were still inching forward, laying waste to Ukrainian towns in the eastern region of Donbas.
Long reluctant to share details of their plans, the Ukrainian commanders started opening up more to American and British intelligence officials and seeking advice.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to Mr. Zelensky, spoke multiple times about the planning for the counteroffensive, according to a senior administration official. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior Ukrainian military leaders regularly discussed intelligence and military support.
And in Kyiv, Ukrainian and British military officials continued working together while the new American defense attaché, Brig. Gen. Garrick Harmon, began having daily sessions with Ukraine’s top officers.
Time was of the essence, U.S. and Ukrainian officials believed. To mount an effective counterattack, the Ukrainians needed to move before the first snow, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would be able to use his control of gas supplies to pressure Europe.
Editors’ Picks
This account of the lead-up to the counteroffensive is based on interviews with multiple senior American officials and others briefed on the classified discussions between Washington and Kyiv that helped Ukrainian commanders shape the battle. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the talks.
American officials were hesitant to judge the full impact of the counteroffensive, anxious to see how it continues to play out. For now, Kyiv has the advantage.
The State of the War
One critical moment this summer came during a war game with U.S. and Ukrainian officials aimed at testing the success of a broad offensive across the south. The exercise, reported earlier by CNN, suggested such an offensive would fail. Armed with the American skepticism, Ukrainian military officials went back to Mr. Zelensky.
“We did do some modeling and some tabletop exercises,” Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s policy chief, said in a telephone interview. “That set of exercises suggested that certain avenues for a counteroffensive were likely to be more successful than others. We provided that advice, and then the Ukrainians internalized that and made their own decision.”
The stakes were huge. Ukraine needed to demonstrate that this was not going to become just another frozen conflict, and that it could retake territory, for the morale of its people and to shore up support of the West.
Throughout August, at the behest of Ukrainians, U.S. officials stepped up feeds of intelligence about the position of Russian forces, highlighting weaknesses in the Russian lines. The intelligence also indicated that Moscow would struggle to quickly reinforce its troops in northeast Ukraine or move troops from the south, even if it detected Ukrainian preparations for the counteroffensive.
“We saw the fact that the Russians actually relocated a lot of their best forces down to the south in preparation for the other counteroffensive that the Ukrainians kicked off,” Mr. Kahl said. “So we had reason to believe that because of the persistent morale challenges, and the pressure of the Ukrainians, that there might be pockets of the Russian military that are a little more brittle than they appear on paper.”
Instead of one large offensive, the Ukrainian military proposed two. One, in Kherson, would most likely take days or weeks before any dramatic results because of the concentration of Russian troops. The other was planned for near Kharkiv.
Together Britain, the United States and Ukraine conducted an assessment of the new plan, trying to war game it once more. This time officials from the three countries agreed it would work — and give Mr. Zelensky what he wanted: a big, clear victory.
What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
Learn more about our process.
But the plan, according to an officer on the general staff in Kyiv, depended entirely on the size and pace of additional military aid from the United States.
Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that had used older Soviet weapons, exhausted most of its own ammunition. Learning how to use new weapons systems in the middle of the war is difficult. But so far the risky move has proved successful. More than 800,000 rounds of 155-millimeter artillery shells, for instance, have been sent to Kyiv, helping fuel its current offensives. The United States alone has committed more than $14.5 billion in military aid since the war started in February.
Before the counteroffensive, Ukraine’s armed forces sent the United States a detailed list of weapons they needed to make the plan successful, according to the Ukrainian officer.
Specific weapons, like the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, are having an outsize effect on the battlefield. The satellite-guided rockets fired by these launch vehicles, called GMLRS, each contain a warhead with 200 pounds of explosives and have been used in recent weeks by Ukrainian forces to destroy more than 400 Russian arms depots, command posts and other targets, American officials said.
More recently, Ukrainian forces have put American-supplied HARM air-launched missiles on Soviet-designed MiG-29 fighter jets, which no air force had ever done. The missiles have been particularly effective in destroying Russian radars.
“We are seeing real and measurable gains from Ukraine in the use of these systems,” General Milley said last week in Germany at a meeting of 50 countries that are helping Ukraine with military and humanitarian aid. “They’re having great difficulty resupplying their forces and replacing their combat losses.”
Ukrainian and American officials said the now weekly or biweekly Pentagon announcements of new shipments of weapons and munitions from American stockpiles have given Kyiv’s senior commanders the confidence to plan complex simultaneous offensives.
“The importance of Western military support is not just in specific weapons systems, but in the assurance and confidence that the Ukrainians can use in their future planning,” said Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, who recently returned from Ukraine.
As Ukrainian soldiers moved into areas in the northeast over the weekend, Russian forces crumbled. In some places around Kharkiv, Russian troops just walked away from the battle, leaving behind equipment and ammunition, according to U.S. defense officials.
The Kherson attack was never a feint or a diversion, according to people briefed on the plan. And it has succeeded in forcing Moscow to delay sham votes on whether parts of the Kherson region want to join Russia. But, as expected, the counteroffensive is moving more slowly given the much higher number of Russian forces there compared with Kharkiv.
Eventually, Ukrainian officials believe their long-term success requires progress on the original goals in the discarded strategy, including recapturing the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, cutting off Russian forces in Mariupol and pushing Russian forces in Kherson back across the Dnipro River, American officials said.
Russia has been weakened. By failing to detect Ukraine’s buildup around Kharkiv, the Russian military has demonstrated incompetence and shown that it lacks solid intelligence. Its command and control have been decimated and it is having trouble supplying its troops, giving Ukraine an opening in the coming weeks, U.S. officials said.
While Ukraine may have an opportunity to recapture more territory in the east, U.S. and Ukrainian officials say the south is the most important theater of the war.
“Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are likely potential objectives,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CNA, a defense research institute. “We might see further Ukrainian Army operations to achieve breakthroughs there in the future.”
The plan that emerged from the midsummer discussions relied heavily on U.S. intelligence and high-tech weaponry. But American officials insist that credit for the offensive lies fully with Mr. Zelensky and the Ukrainian military, which led a relatively small force in Kharkiv to an outsize victory.
“No one is spiking the football yet,” Mr. Kahl said. But, he added: “I think it really demonstrates to the world that the Ukrainians are capable of conducting complex, offensive operations.”
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine, and Michael Schwirtz from New York.
20. Iran-Hezbollah Intelligence Center May Help Hamas Target Israel
Excerpts:
The very fact that Hamas is actively cooperating with Iran and Hezbollah is significant. A decade ago, Hamas leaders left Syria in protest after years of close cooperation, owing to the Iran-backed military campaign against Sunni and Palestinian fighters in the Syrian civil war. Rapprochement reportedly began in 2017, when Hezbollah officials held talks with senior Hamas officials amid reports of a resumption of Iranian funding for the group. Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri led several Hamas delegations to Iran and Lebanon in 2017. By 2018, the Israeli mission to the United Nations charged that Arouri was collaborating with Iran and Hezbollah to establish rocket-launching facilities in Lebanon with the goal of drawing Israel into a two-front conflict, with attacks from Gaza and Lebanon in the future.
Since then, Hamas has made observable advances in surveillance and technology capabilities. Hamas has also started to produce rockets and unmanned aerial vehicles with help from Hezbollah. The establishment of the nerve center appears to be an attempt to build on this activity. It certainly fits with the overall Iranian strategy of cultivating proxies and then seeking to enhance control over them. Indeed, the raison d’être of the IRGC-QF is to export the Iranian revolution this way. Of course, Hamas denies it is an Iranian proxy. But there is no denying that Hamas has consistently received significant financial, military, and technological assistance from Tehran since the group’s inception in the late 1980s.
Much more needs to be gleaned about this nerve center, but the coordination between Iran and its proxies is clear. What is unclear are the center’s specific plans.
Since the 2006 Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah, Israelis have assiduously avoided renewed conflict in Lebanon for fear of unleashing chaos amid the country’s economic and political unraveling. However, between Hezbollah’s existing arsenal of at least 150,000 rockets, its buildup of lethal precision-guided munitions, and increasing evidence of an Iranian-operated fusion center that coordinates military activity against Israel, a clash appears increasingly inevitable.
Iran-Hezbollah Intelligence Center May Help Hamas Target Israel
Foreign Policy · by Jonathan Schanzer · September 13, 2022
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Growing evidence points to a joint communication center in Beirut that coordinates activities in the region.
A child points at a mural depicting Palestinian fighters and a captured Israeli soldier in Gaza, on Dec. 11, 2021.
A child points at a mural depicting Palestinian fighters and a captured Israeli soldier in Gaza, on Dec. 11, 2021. SAID KHATIB/AFP via Getty Images
In the wake of the May 2021 Gaza war between Israel and Hamas, reports in Israel suggested that Iran helped the terrorist group out of a Lebanon-based nerve center or joint operations room. Reports concerning this nerve center are scarce. However, what is known is cause for significant concern, particularly if the goal is to prevent future conflict in the Middle East.
Hezbollah leaders confirmed the existence and operation of the nerve center via the pro-Hezbollah, Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen television network. Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem claimed that the nerve center provided “sensitive and influential intelligence.” Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah also confirmed that Hamas received intelligence through this structure.
One representative of an Arab intelligence agency told me in July that he believed that the nerve center was virtual, with no fixed location. This assertion was also made by the Middle East-focused website, The Cradle. Israeli officials, however, believe there is a physical location in Beirut. This would corroborate journalist Ibrahim al-Amin’s claim that the center was visited twice by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) commander Esmail Qaani during last year’s fighting in Gaza.
The founding of the nerve center dates back to 2019, according to al-Amin, the editor in chief of the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar, which is widely associated with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. The project was born of Iran’s perceived need to coordinate among various factions of the “axis of resistance” to thwart Israeli military plans for the next major conflict—a likely reference to what Israel Defense Forces Chief of General Staff Aviv Kochavi’s “victory workshop” held in February 2019. However, the activation of the nerve center likely did not occur until the 2021 Gaza war.
The nerve center, according to the Hezbollah-owned al-Manar website, includes representatives from the IRGC-QF, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Some sources, such as the Palestinian Sama News Agency, claim that as many as 12 Palestinians factions—including splinter groups from Fatah and the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine—also participate. At minimum, Palestinian groups maintain communications, as asserted by Muhammad Sinwar, a member of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades—Hamas’s military wing—and brother of Gaza-based Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.The very fact that Hamas is actively cooperating with Iran and Hezbollah is significant.
There is no evidence to suggest that the nerve center maintains ongoing operations. Rather, it is likely active during times of escalation and dormant during periods of calm. For those calm periods, Hezbollah has a Palestinian affairs office that routinely interfaces with various violent groups.
Based on available information, the primary purpose of the nerve center appears to be intelligence-sharing. Specifically, the nerve center provides Hamas with aerial intelligence derived by Hezbollah and the IRGC, perhaps through reconnaissance drones dispatched from Lebanon and Syria. Several have been targeted by Israeli air defenses in recent years, according to news reports. One focus of this reconnaissance effort appears to be mapping the movement of Israeli forces. This may have helped Hamas avoid an Israel Defense Forces ambush on the group’s tunnel network in the 2021 war. Reports also suggest that the nerve center provided Hamas with better capabilities to conduct “sensitive hacking operations” against Israel.
Nasrallah stated that “all the information we had was provided to the Palestinians through the joint operations room.” Sinwar similarly acknowledged these intelligence flows. Al-Akhbar further asserts that it was the “information and coordination that saved the whole axis, primarily Gaza, from a great nightmare if the enemy’s plans succeeded.” Again, this is likely a reference to the Israeli plan to target a labyrinth of Hamas tunnels in Gaza. This kind of public bravado by Iran and its proxies has become rather common in recent years; bragging about the center’s supposed achievements in public is likely part of Hezbollah’s psychological operations.
The nerve center may have other functions related to Tehran’s proxies in the region. For example, it may have helped transfer weapons or material to Gaza during the 2021 conflict, according to Israeli officials I have met over the last year. According to al-Manar, the center may also have facilitated the travel of several Hamas leaders to Lebanon. According to the Israeli nongovernmental organization Alma, which tracks Hezbollah activities, the nerve center may have helped coordinate the language used by the various Iran-backed factions in the media during the war.
The very fact that Hamas is actively cooperating with Iran and Hezbollah is significant. A decade ago, Hamas leaders left Syria in protest after years of close cooperation, owing to the Iran-backed military campaign against Sunni and Palestinian fighters in the Syrian civil war. Rapprochement reportedly began in 2017, when Hezbollah officials held talks with senior Hamas officials amid reports of a resumption of Iranian funding for the group. Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri led several Hamas delegations to Iran and Lebanon in 2017. By 2018, the Israeli mission to the United Nations charged that Arouri was collaborating with Iran and Hezbollah to establish rocket-launching facilities in Lebanon with the goal of drawing Israel into a two-front conflict, with attacks from Gaza and Lebanon in the future.
Since then, Hamas has made observable advances in surveillance and technology capabilities. Hamas has also started to produce rockets and unmanned aerial vehicles with help from Hezbollah. The establishment of the nerve center appears to be an attempt to build on this activity. It certainly fits with the overall Iranian strategy of cultivating proxies and then seeking to enhance control over them. Indeed, the raison d’être of the IRGC-QF is to export the Iranian revolution this way. Of course, Hamas denies it is an Iranian proxy. But there is no denying that Hamas has consistently received significant financial, military, and technological assistance from Tehran since the group’s inception in the late 1980s.
Much more needs to be gleaned about this nerve center, but the coordination between Iran and its proxies is clear. What is unclear are the center’s specific plans.
Since the 2006 Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah, Israelis have assiduously avoided renewed conflict in Lebanon for fear of unleashing chaos amid the country’s economic and political unraveling. However, between Hezbollah’s existing arsenal of at least 150,000 rockets, its buildup of lethal precision-guided munitions, and increasing evidence of an Iranian-operated fusion center that coordinates military activity against Israel, a clash appears increasingly inevitable.
Jonathan Schanzer is the senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Twitter: @JSchanzer
21. Biden may be plotting to keep Congress out of the Iran nuclear deal
Excerpts:
The Iranians pay close attention to the sentiments of Congress — in fact, Iranian officials frequently cite objections from Congress as reasons against rejoining the JCPOA. Even if the effort fails, this vote would send an extraordinary message to the regime and the international business community that any deal struck would not survive by any future Republican administration. Ultimately, it is risk-averse businesses and their leadership, not politicians, who make investment decisions.
This vote and its message would severely temper any economic investment in Iran (having a similar effect to sanctions), could prove to be a death knell for these misguided negotiations and would set the stage for the next administration to take a stronger approach.
Biden may be plotting to keep Congress out of the Iran nuclear deal
BY MATTHEW ZWEIG AND GABRIEL NORONHA, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 09/12/22 2:30 PM ET
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
The Hill · by Brett Samuels · September 12, 2022
Negotiators from Iran, the United States and the European Union have once again nearly concluded indirect talks over the “final text” of a nuclear deal. Like the 2015 deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the new deal imposes temporary restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for broad sanctions relief. Though the talks appear to have reached another impasse, they could rapidly conclude in the coming weeks if Iran decides to show flexibility.
As it prepares to market the deal to a skeptical Congress, the Biden administration has hinted that negotiations in Vienna did not result in a new agreement, but merely all sides returning to compliance with the JCPOA. This may seem likely a purely semantic point but may actually be a calculated effort to avoid a congressional vote after a review of the nuclear deal, as required by the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA).
In May, the State Department Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley pledged to submit any prospective agreement with Iran for congressional review. INARA specifies that within five calendar days after reaching any agreement with Iran relating to its nuclear program, the president must transmit the full agreement to Congress. INARA also lays out procedures for congressional review and an expedited process for voting on the deal if Congress so chooses.
The Biden administration may still be hoping to avoid a congressional vote by claiming that it is merely returning to the JCPOA, which went through the INARA review process in 2015. Thus, the White House may try to argue that, while they are submitting the text of an agreement for review there is no need for Congress to vote on it again. Democratic leadership in Congress may be tempted to indulge in such an argument and use their majority positions to avoid a tough vote as the midterms approach. That would be a dereliction of Congress’ important oversight role.
The authors of INARA anticipated chicanery from the executive branch. Congress enacted the law in 2015 while the JCPOA was in the final stages of negotiations. Once the Obama administration made clear its intent to circumvent Congress and not submit the agreement as a treaty, lawmakers of both parties demanded a say, noting the scale of U.S. commitments under the deal. An overwhelming majority of Congress — 98 senators and 400 House members — ultimately voted to pass INARA, thereby ensuring their ability to review the agreement. Crucially, Congress took pains to define the term “agreement” broadly to prevent the Obama administration from circumventing lawmakers.
Under INARA, the term “agreement” means an agreement “related to the nuclear program of Iran that includes the United States, commits the United States to act, or in which the United States commits or otherwise agrees to act, regardless of the form it takes.” The president must transmit that agreement regardless of whether it is legally binding or merely a political commitment. Finally, the administration must transmit additional materials related to any agreement, including annexes, appendices, codicils, side agreements, implementing materials, documents and guidance, technical or other understandings, and any related agreements.
The terms of the new agreement with Iran are not yet public, but reportedly involve substantial amendments to the JCPOA. That should not be surprising. The Trump administration pulled out of the JCPOA more than four years ago, so Washington and Tehran cannot just flip a switch and go back to the way things were.
From a statutory point of view, reentering a substantially amended agreement effectively amounts to “reaching an agreement” under INARA, thereby triggering the law’s transmittal and review requirements.
During the period in which Congress reviews and votes on the new agreement, the administration cannot provide sanctions relief from measures imposed by Congress, which greatly curtails the administration’s flexibility in providing Tehran immediate, unobstructed benefits. That is one reason the administration wants to get around INARA. They have apparently found another way: according to leaked audio from the lead Iranian negotiator, prior to submitting the deal to Congress the Biden administration will simply lift or suspend three executive orders relating to Iran.
We reconstructed the details using other public Iranian and U.S. government documents and found that this would result in the lifting of over 170 sanctions on critical Iranian banks, terrorists and foreign sanctions evaders. This includes sanctions relief for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, and senior IRGC generals responsible for the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing and the 1994 AMIA bombing.
If the Biden administration enters the deal without due consideration and action by Congress, House and Senate members could initiate a lawsuit against the president. According to the Congressional Research Service’s 2014 study, based on the Supreme Court’s guidelines in Raines v. Byrd, individual members of Congress have legal standing against the executive branch when they have suffered an “institutional injury” that amounts to vote nullification in the past or future. Since INARA lays out the procedure for voting on nuclear agreements and provides an expedited vote, a court may find that evading the law amounts to vote nullification.
If members of Congress filed suit against the administration for injunctive relief, it could delay further sanctions relief, would raise the profile of the JCPOA’s deficiencies and draw attention to provisions in the deal that the Biden administration may be hesitant to publicize. It could also prove as a useful dilatory tool to permit a full accounting of the hidden concessions and side deals rumored to come, such as a widely-reported $7 billion hostage payment for the release of 4 American citizens — a rumor the administration has denied.
Judge rightly halts Arizona’s anti-democratic effort to limit filming police misconduct Webb: Creating a medical crisis
The Iranians pay close attention to the sentiments of Congress — in fact, Iranian officials frequently cite objections from Congress as reasons against rejoining the JCPOA. Even if the effort fails, this vote would send an extraordinary message to the regime and the international business community that any deal struck would not survive by any future Republican administration. Ultimately, it is risk-averse businesses and their leadership, not politicians, who make investment decisions.
This vote and its message would severely temper any economic investment in Iran (having a similar effect to sanctions), could prove to be a death knell for these misguided negotiations and would set the stage for the next administration to take a stronger approach.
Matthew Zweig, former senior advisor at the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Special Representative for Syria Engagement and senior professional staff member at the House Foreign Affairs Committee is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy. Gabriel Noronha is a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and previously served as the State Department’s special advisor for Iran from 2019-2021. He also served in the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2017-2019.
The Hill · by Brett Samuels · September 12, 2022
22. Why Did Russia Change Its Tune on the Iran Nuclear Deal?
Conclusion:
Russia, the Islamic Republic, and Tehran’s Shiite militias fought alongside each other in Syria. The growing strategic ties between Moscow and Tehran mean that the Islamic Republic’s access to billions of dollars may lead to more and bolder intervention in Ukraine. As Russia’s international isolation continues to grow, Moscow will find the mere possibility of such support invaluable.
Why Did Russia Change Its Tune on the Iran Nuclear Deal?
The growing strategic ties between Moscow and Tehran mean that the Islamic Republic’s access to billions of dollars may lead to more and bolder intervention in Ukraine.
The National Interest · by Saeed Ghasseminejad · September 13, 2022
In late August, Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s chief nuclear negotiator in Vienna, urged the United States and Iran to “successfully overcome their last differences as soon as possible” in order to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. This encouragement contrasts with Moscow’s position in March, when it called for the exemption of Russian-Iranian trade from international sanctions against Russia as part of a final atomic agreement. The Kremlin’s demand ground the talks to a halt.
Six months later, Moscow’s worries about its energy sector have become particularly pressing, as European countries have pledged an energy boycott of Russia by the end of the year. In 2021, members of the European Union (EU) imported 2.2 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil from Russia. Normally, Russia’s oil exports to the EU give Moscow political leverage over it. But a boycott means that EU countries will be looking to import oil from other countries, including the Iranian oil that the nuclear deal would add to the market.
According to an estimate by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, during the first year of a resuscitated agreement, Iran could export 2 million barrels per day of its crude, around one million barrels more than what it exports now. Per the Islamic Republic News Agency, 38 percent of Iran’s crude oil export in 2017 went to Europe. Since then, due to U.S. sanctions against Iran’s oil industry reimposed by the Trump administration in 2018, Europe has not bought any oil from the country.
If the share of Iran’s oil exports to Europe relative to its total oil exports goes back to its 2017 level, it will give Europe access to 800,000 bpd of newly arrived crude oil. As a result, the deal has the potential to decrease Russia’s leverage over the European Union and allow European countries to decouple themselves from Russian oil with less pain this winter.
In light of this reality, why has the Kremlin changed its tune on the nuclear deal?
The answer is likely that Russia’s assessment of the costs and benefits of the accord has changed. Even if the agreement reduces Russia’s leverage over Europe, Moscow may benefit from the revival of the accord in five ways.
First, Western sanctions have limited Moscow’s access to the international banking system. If Washington lifts banking sanctions on Iran, Moscow can access the international financial network through Iran. Tehran, a key partner to Moscow, has years of experience in sanctions-busting, which it can use to assist Moscow.
Second, the sanctions relief in the deal enables a $10 billion contract between Moscow and Tehran to build a nuclear site in Iran. The deal has remained dormant due to sanctions. However, the new nuclear deal will provide Iran with resources to pay Russia.
Third, with the expired sunset of the UN arms embargo against Tehran, Russia can now sell Tehran a wide array of conventional weapons that may be worth billions of dollars. For years, Iran has expressed its intention to buy modern weapon systems from Russia. However, sanctions and Iran’s lack of financial resources, among other things, have prevented such deals so far. With Iran’s access to tens of billions of dollars and Russia’s international isolation, Tehran’s wish list may finally become reality.
Fourth, over the last few months, Tehran and Moscow have engaged in extensive negotiations to expand their cooperation in the energy sector. Iranian officials are on the record confirming that Tehran and Moscow, as part of a new nuclear deal, may swap oil as a way to bypass sanctions against Russia. In fact, Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom signed an early-stage $40 billion oil and gas deal with Iran in July. While the return of the Islamic Republic to the oil market can increase pressure on Russia, the two sides seek to mitigate those negative effects through cooperation.
Finally, a massive injection of cash into Iran’s coffers means that Tehran may be able to offer more help to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Tehran has already provided robust military and diplomatic support for Moscow’s invasion. In a recent meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei expressed support for the Kremlin’s decision to go to war. In April, the Guardian reported that Russia was using Iranian-made weapons smuggled through Iraq. In August, U.S. officials said that Iran had begun shipping scores of combat drones to Russia for use in the war.
Russia, the Islamic Republic, and Tehran’s Shiite militias fought alongside each other in Syria. The growing strategic ties between Moscow and Tehran mean that the Islamic Republic’s access to billions of dollars may lead to more and bolder intervention in Ukraine. As Russia’s international isolation continues to grow, Moscow will find the mere possibility of such support invaluable.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor on Iran and financial economics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Iran Program and Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). Follow Saeed on Twitter @SGhasseminejad. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
The National Interest · by Saeed Ghasseminejad · September 13, 2022
23. Communist China’s Plot for World Domination (Book Review)
Conclusion:
During Cold War I with the Soviet Union, there were plenty of people — especially liberals — who derided notions that the Kremlin’s leaders sought world domination. They did, but Ronald Reagan understood this and took effective steps to place the Kremlin on the geopolitical defensive and implemented policies that brought about the demise of the Soviet Union. There will be those during Cold War II with China who will be equally dismissive of claims that China wants to dominate the world. But Easton’s bona fides are supported by the likes of Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, Aaron Friedberg, and Toshi Yoshihara — all serious and scholarly China watchers. If they recommend Easton’s book, it should be read and studied by America’s policymakers. Easton bases his contention on the words of the CCP’s leaders. And China’s geopolitical actions — its aggression in the South China Sea, its military threat to Taiwan, its Belt and Road Initiative, its massive military buildup, and its strategic partnership with Russia — are fully consistent with Easton’s dismal prognosis.
Communist China’s Plot for World Domination - The American Spectator |
spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · September 13, 2022
Communist China’s Plot for World Domination
Ian Easton sounds the alarm about an existential threat to our way of life.
September 12, 2022, 11:04 PM
Xi Jinping at press conference in Berlin, Germany, July 5, 2017 (360b/Shutterstock)
Earlier this year, Ian Easton, a former China analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses and currently senior director at the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank that focuses on U.S. security interests in the Indo-Pacific region, wrote a book titled The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy. In his author’s note, Easton describes the book as an analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “plan for world domination.” Easton contends that a close reading of President Xi Jinping’s speeches — some of them never before translated — reveals that that CCP is committed to spreading China’s communist totalitarian model of rule around the world.
Easton makes clear in the book that China’s goal of “world domination” does not envision Chinese armed forces conducting a long series of military invasions with “hordes of tanks, and fascist storm troopers swarming across the map” and “goose-stepping into fallen capital cities.” The CCP’s global strategy, he explains, “is much more sophisticated” than Hollywood visions or American novels of World War III. Instead, the CCP’s strategy involves “a protracted campaign of silent invasions to replicate on a global level what it sees as its own superior system.” The CCP’s geopolitical goal is a “totalitarian world order” led by China.
Easton’s book shows that the CCP took to heart Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s prediction that the capitalists would sell communists the rope with which communists would hang the capitalists.
Easton calls the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “the armed wing of the Communist Party.” It is the “largest military on earth and probably the single largest and most sophisticated intelligence collector in human history.” And he shows the integral ties between the PLA and Chinese “businesses” that in reality serve the CCP and its policy goals. Unlike capitalist enterprises, Chinese firms serve Beijing’s rulers, not private shareholders. So when American companies and firms do business with Chinese counterparts, they are really doing business with the CCP. Easton calls this “China’s Military-Civilian Fusion,” which presents opportunities for the PLA to “infect” American electronics during peacetime and wartime. It is no accident, as Marxists like to say, that strategists envision World War III beginning with Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. military facilities. Easton worries that China may achieve — if it already hasn’t — the ability to control foreign electronic networks.
In a sense, Easton’s book shows that the CCP took to heart Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s prediction that the capitalists would sell communists the rope with which communists would hang the capitalists. And Easton doesn’t buy the notion proclaimed for years by members of the American foreign policy establishment that China’s leaders have abandoned communism and adopted state capitalism to support the regime’s political legitimacy. In a recent article in the Diplomat, Easton reveals speeches where Xi stated that “realizing communism has been the party’s supreme ideal and ultimate objective” and that “realizing communism is an objective that happens … in stages, one step at a time.” He also urged CCP members to “struggle for communism our entire lives.” These remarks were made in 2017 and 2018. Easton also notes that Xi “has repeatedly called [Karl] Marx ‘the greatest thinker in human history.’”
The reason so many Western observers believe China has abandoned communism, Easton explains, is because “Since the late 1970s, China’s government has gone to great lengths to encourage a foreign perception that Marxism and Leninism were all but dead and China would gradually assimilate into the post-war international order and become a ‘responsible stakeholder.’” This has enabled China to “gain access to the international system without being changed by it,” Easton writes. He calls this effort — begun by Deng Xiaoping — ”a campaign of global infiltration.”
Easton describes the Central Party School of the CCP’s 2020 textbook (which, he notes, was not translated into English), titled The Fundamentals of Xi Jinping Thought on Chinese Socialism in a New Era. The book is used in nearly 3,000 training centers in China, in which “students are indoctrinated and prepared for leadership positions in government, society and business.” The training centers groom China’s elite and “mold the minds of future national leaders.” The textbook teaches that “the global economy and global markets” must be state-controlled. Free-market capitalism will be replaced by the socialist economic model, which will organically unify the market and the state. Xi Jinping thought as manifested in the textbook, Easton writes, aims to spread communism throughout the globe. “China’s foreign policy and all its strategic actions abroad — everything the CCP seeks to do and have in the world — is reportedly guided by this vision,” Easton writes. This is Xi’s “China Dream.”
Easton in his book presents a vision of what the world would be like for Americans and all other supplicants to the CCP’s world order. The CCP has constructed a “brutal system of repression through forced labor, brainwashing, systematic rape, sterilizations, invasive birth control, and other forms of cruel and unusual punishment” in China, especially against the regime’s dissident groups, such as the Uyghurs. It is an “Orwellian system” that uses technology, social media, computers, cellphones, televisions, and artificial intelligence to hyper-intrusively control the lives of its citizens. That is the system Xi Jinping wants to spread across the globe. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: China Moves to Buy Off Africa)
Easton credits the Donald Trump administration for finally deciding “that the American people had a need to know about the national security threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party” after years of successive U.S. administrations attempts to “engage” China to join the rules-based international order. In 2019, Trump’s national security team — including the national security adviser, FBI director, attorney general, secretary of state, and secretary of homeland security — launched what Easton calls a “coordinated information blitz on a scale not seen since the 1980s” that sought to awaken America and the West to China’s threat. It was a concerted effort to “peer into the minds of our strategic rivals,” Easton writes. But it got sidetracked by dubious impeachment efforts and the controversial 2020 election. Easton’s book is an attempt to get this effort back on track. But there is little sense that the Biden administration — for all of its tough talk — understands the existential nature of China’s threat.
During Cold War I with the Soviet Union, there were plenty of people — especially liberals — who derided notions that the Kremlin’s leaders sought world domination. They did, but Ronald Reagan understood this and took effective steps to place the Kremlin on the geopolitical defensive and implemented policies that brought about the demise of the Soviet Union. There will be those during Cold War II with China who will be equally dismissive of claims that China wants to dominate the world. But Easton’s bona fides are supported by the likes of Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, Aaron Friedberg, and Toshi Yoshihara — all serious and scholarly China watchers. If they recommend Easton’s book, it should be read and studied by America’s policymakers. Easton bases his contention on the words of the CCP’s leaders. And China’s geopolitical actions — its aggression in the South China Sea, its military threat to Taiwan, its Belt and Road Initiative, its massive military buildup, and its strategic partnership with Russia — are fully consistent with Easton’s dismal prognosis.
24. Hundreds of Filipino workers stranded on island amid dispute with U.S. contractor
Excerpts:
Diego Garcia is the largest island in the Chagos Archipelago, a British territory that has been leased to the United States for the past five decades solely for operating a military base. Strategically located due to its proximity to the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, Diego Garcia serves as a naval logistics, communications and refueling hub. Aircraft operating from Diego Garcia have been active in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The islands’ native population, the Chagossians, were expelled by British and U.S. forces in the late 1960s and early 1970s to clear the way for development of the military base. The British government has barred the Chagossians from returning, citing defense and security interests.
But the lack of a local population has meant that contractors for the U.S. Department of Defense have had to rely on overseas workers, primarily recruiting them from the Philippines.
Hundreds of Filipino workers stranded on island amid dispute with U.S. contractor
The Washington Post · by Katie McQue · September 14, 2022
Hundreds of Filipino workers are marooned at a U.S. military base on an island in the Indian Ocean because of a dispute between their employer, a major American contractor, and the Philippine government over their wages, according to employees and Philippine officials.
The Philippine government alleges that Kellogg Brown & Root, also known as KBR, has canceled regular charter flights from the Camp Thunder Cove base on Diego Garcia to the Philippines since the start of this year as a form of “emotional blackmail.” Philippine officials, who have told KBR that it must raise employee pay to meet the U.S. federal minimum wage rate, says the company is pressuring employees to continue working at current wages.
The suspension of chartered flights, however, may not be the only, or even main, factor keeping some Filipino workers on Diego Garcia, located more than 1,000 miles off the southern tip of India. Several Filipino employees said they were reluctant to leave the island for home visits, fearing that either the company or their own government would prevent them from returning to their jobs if the wage disagreement was not settled.
In statements to The Washington Post, KBR denied that the suspension of flights was linked in any way to the wage dispute and initially said it “canceled the charter flights at the request of the U.S. government to help prevent COVID-19’s spread.” In a subsequent statement, the company said there have been no chartered flights since late last year due to a lack of demand from workers wanting to travel, adding that no employees have been unable to leave the island because of a lack of flights.
KBR had previously chartered flights about every three months that transported between 200 and 250 workers between the base and the Philippines. Workers said in interviews that KBR representatives told them the suspension of charter flights this year is because of the wage dispute.
More than 1,200 civilian employees at the base had been unable to travel earlier in the pandemic because of coronavirus flight restrictions, and many have not left Diego Garcia for more than three years, workers said.
Families have been divided. One worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity fearing retribution, said he has never met his daughter, who turned 3 earlier this year. “I’ve only ever seen her on video calls,” he said. Another KBR employee said she has not seen her 3-year-old since the child was a few months old.
“KBR has been preventing them from returning to the Philippines to be with their families unless they sign an extension of their contract based on the old minimum wage rate,” said Bernard Olalia, undersecretary of the Philippine Department of Migrant Workers. “In effect, KBR is employing emotional blackmail by making their return to the Philippines conditional on their agreeing to an onerous contract. Not only is this unlawful, but it also violates the basic rights of these Filipino workers.”
Philip Ivy, KBR’s vice president of global marketing and communications, rejected the accusation. “Charter flights never had anything whatsoever to do with Philippine wage requirements, and if anyone were told that, it would have been inaccurate. We know of no employee who was told this,” he said.
Ivy said that military flights connecting the base — a highly strategic American outpost that supports U.S. Navy and Air Force operations — with Japan and Bahrain have continued to operate and that Filipino employees are able to take these flights, with the cost of their onward travel to the Philippines covered by KBR. “When the availability of seats on military flights is insufficient and the volume of passengers both ways warrants a charter flight, one is scheduled,” he said.
But three employees said in interviews that seats for contract workers on military flights are scarce and that KBR has not offered clear information about requesting a seat. There are no commercial flights serving Diego Garcia.
“It didn’t have to go this far,” said a 33-year-old KBR worker on the island who also spoke on the condition of anonymity fearing he may lose his job. “We are stuck here because of the minimum wage issue. Everyone is upset, but we don’t have a choice.”
Another KBR employee said the wage dispute is keeping the company from being able to hire new workers. “If the charter flights were running, people will leave and this could impact their operations. That is what they are afraid of,” said the employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity fearing retribution.
Tensions between the Houston-based contractor and its employees have been rising since the Philippine government demanded in October 2020 that companies on the base pay their Filipino workers the U.S. federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. The Philippine government sets minimum wages for its citizens who work abroad via agreements with employers, job recruiters and other governments, and at times bans migration to countries it considers to be mistreating its nationals.
KBR, which employs more than 1,200 mostly Filipino workers at Diego Garcia as clerks, warehouse workers and in other semiskilled jobs, kept pay rates unchanged. Many employees have continued to be paid at an hourly rate of about $5.25 per hour, four workers said.
Ivy said KBR is not underpaying its employees and already meets the standard set by the Philippine government. “Minimum total compensation for our Filipino employees exceeds the mandated hourly rate when housing, food, medical coverage and other benefits are added in,” he said in a statement. Nor, he said, do employees have to sign an extension of their existing contract to leave for vacation.
To raise employee pay, Ivy said, “KBR asked the [U.S.] Department of Defense if it would reimburse KBR for the cost of the additional wages and the government declined.”
Cmdr. Katie Cerezo, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Navy, said its contract with KBR is a fixed-price agreement. She said the Navy values the work done by Filipinos at Diego Garcia and that the specifics of employment are between KBR and its workers.
While the vast majority of KBR’s employees on Diego Garcia have traditionally been Filipino, the company is now trying to hire workers of other nationalities, according to its statement.
KBR employees said their employment is vital for supporting their families in the Philippines and that losing their jobs would be devastating.
“I have a family to feed. Life in the Philippines is so hard,” said one worker, who sends money home every month to his parents and siblings. “It’s better to have this job than nothing, especially now [that] the cost of living in the Philippines is getting higher.”
While the workers are eager for higher pay, they said that Diego Garcia is a desirable place to work and live. They said their accommodations are good and they can spend their days off using sports facilities and going to the beaches.
Diego Garcia is the largest island in the Chagos Archipelago, a British territory that has been leased to the United States for the past five decades solely for operating a military base. Strategically located due to its proximity to the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, Diego Garcia serves as a naval logistics, communications and refueling hub. Aircraft operating from Diego Garcia have been active in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The islands’ native population, the Chagossians, were expelled by British and U.S. forces in the late 1960s and early 1970s to clear the way for development of the military base. The British government has barred the Chagossians from returning, citing defense and security interests.
But the lack of a local population has meant that contractors for the U.S. Department of Defense have had to rely on overseas workers, primarily recruiting them from the Philippines.
The Washington Post · by Katie McQue · September 14, 2022
25. Combine and Conquer: China and Russia Synchronize for Eurasian Hegemony
Excerpts:
A tug of war is taking place with neutral Asian countries. The U.S. and China are at the front of each side, and Russia is throwing its weight behind the latter. Europe’s ability to back Washington is limited at the moment as it faces a devastating energy crisis. To prevail in this struggle, the U.S. needs to focus on the countries that can conceivably swing to its side. India, Thailand, and the Philippines are three examples. They have all participated in military exercises with American troops, harbor skepticism about China’s long-term ambitions, and benefit from partnerships with Washington.
South Korea and Japan are also increasingly threatened by Beijing’s rise and have demonstrated a strong willingness to join forces militarily and economically with the U.S. Trying to please dictators as President Donald Trump did when he visited North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is an unfruitful strategy. Kim’s newfound belligerence is a testament to the short-lived nature of rapprochement with authoritarian leaders. The U.S. must avoid spreading itself too thin, focusing instead on countries of strategic importance that have expressed disillusionment with either Russia or China’s regime. Washington’s goal should be to include more countries in economic or security initiatives like President Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, incentivize trade with the West, and encourage more military cooperation with Asian countries.
The U.S. can and should drive a wedge between its principal adversaries and enlist more Asian allies in its fight against authoritarian hegemony over Eurasia.
Combine and Conquer: China and Russia Synchronize for Eurasian Hegemony
By Axel de Vernou
September 14, 2022
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/09/14/combine_and_conquer_china_and_russia_synchronize_for_eurasian_hegemony_853388.html
The “no limits” partnership established between Russia and China this February had been decades in the making. It was not an abrupt strategic shift for either country. Both have long envisioned cooperation with their Asian neighbors as a means of constructing an anti-American bloc in Eurasia. To accomplish this goal, Russia has become rhetorically, militarily, and geopolitically synchronized with China.
Beijing’s Defense Ministry justified the recent military drills around Taiwan by calling them a “solemn deterrent against collusion and provocation between the U.S. and Taiwan.” During the 10th Moscow Conference on International Security held last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin labeled Nancy Pelosi’s trip to the island as “part of the purpose-oriented and deliberate US strategy designed to… sow chaos in the region and the world.”
Putin did not stop there, however. His criticism encompassed three continents and one ocean as he accused Washington of igniting conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America while destabilizing the Indo-Pacific. The Kremlin concluded that this was another example of “thoroughly planned provocation.” The phrase echoed not only the Chinese Defense Ministry, but also a March 2022 People’s Daily article which argues that Washington is constantly “provoking ideological conflicts” across the globe.
Russian and Chinese declarations evoke the idea that the West, particularly the United States, is bent on fomenting conflict and animosity with rising powers— not the other way around. This allows them to frame their military and energy-based cooperation as defensive initiatives. Chinese troops recently joined their Russian counterparts in a series of drills to underscore the solidarity of their February pact, which opposes “the United States' Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region.” The first pipeline capable of sending gas directly from Siberia to Shanghai will soon reach its completion.
While Russia and China may currently have their eyes locked on regional struggles, this will not distract them from their long-term shift toward the Indo-Pacific.
China’s persistent border disputes with India since the 1950s, its claim to the Senkaku Islands in 1970 following the discovery of oil in the region, its occupation of the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam in 1974, and several crises in the Taiwan Strait represent decades of expanding influence in the Indo-Pacific. Consequently, Moscow has had to pay greater attention to the region despite the war on its hands to align its policies with its ally.
Russia’s pivot predates the “no limits” partnership between CCP leader Xi Jinping and Putin by more than a decade. In 2010, Lavrov penned a piece for International Affairs arguing that the world is entering the “Asia Age” and that Russia would “benefit from developing mutually advantageous cooperation with ASEAN.” Two years later, to reinforce this grand strategy in advance of the 2012 elections, Putin wrote, “We see before our eyes not only the rise of China and India, but the growing weight of the entire Asia-Pacific [r]egion.” At the 2013 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin anticipated today’s Sino-Russian energy rapprochement by acknowledging pipeline infrastructure and railway projects connecting the Far East to China.
Shortly thereafter, Russian policy followed through with Lavrov’s advice. 2014 marked an unprecedented shift in the number of bilateral meetings between the Kremlin and Asian countries within ASEAN, many of which enjoy access to Russia’s diverse array of natural resources and comparatively stronger economy. Friendly relations come naturally either thanks to bilateral relationships established during the Cold War or because both sides have compatible objectives. A joint statement issued last year by Vietnam and Russia, for example, outlined a plan for military, educational, political, technological, and trade-based cooperation moving forward. Unsurprisingly, Vietnam has failed to condemn Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Indeed, Moscow’s turn to the Indo-Pacific cannot be viewed separately from its westward invasion. To guarantee support for his military incursions abroad, Putin has woven a web with all strings attached to the Kremlin. Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar have joined Vietnam in keeping quiet about Ukraine. China and North Korea did not have to think twice before siding with one of their closest allies. Thailand and the Philippines, despite their strong relationship with the United States, have gone no further than occasionally expressing dismay at the humanitarian element of the crisis. Ties between Russian and Thai royal families stretching back to the late 19th century dissuade Bangkok from erring from Moscow’s playbook. For all these countries, important parts of their economy are sufficiently dependent on Russia or China so that the costs of condemning the Kremlin far outweigh the benefits.
Russia’s strategy of rounding up Asian countries goes far beyond the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. It is also about energy. Russia is preparing for a world where its trading partners and oil and gas importers in Europe are replaced by Asian customers. During an August 2022 meeting on developing the shipbuilding industry, Putin spoke with executives from a variety of companies and governmental departments to consider their perspective in his modernization plans.
Russia’s Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov explained that the Zvezda shipyard in the Far East “has already completed the first Aframax-class tankers and is building LNG [liquified natural gas] tankers and product carrier ships for the Northern Sea Route,” a path that runs entirely through Arctic waters. Dominating the Arctic is yet another way Russia intends to pivot to the Indo-Pacific. Novatek, Russia's second-largest natural gas producer, is spearheading the Arctic LNG 2 project to gain “access to the Atlantic Basin and Asia-Pacific markets,” according to their website. During the same shipbuilding meeting, the Chairman of Novatek’s Management Board emphasized that 80 percent of the LNG produced from the Arctic project will be directed toward the Indo-Pacific while only 20 percent will go to the West. “The fewer tankers we have, the more LNG will go to the West. This is wrong and creates additional risks,” he added. Following China’s footsteps by undertaking a coordinated shift toward the Indo-Pacific aligns with Putin’s plan to abandon integration with the West.
As Russia builds a coalition of Asian countries, it is simultaneously challenging the American alliances that oppose Moscow's ambitions. The Quad is the most flagrant example. Moscow has exploited India’s presence in the forum to slow its progress. As it does with many ASEAN countries, Russia has built on its long-standing cooperation with India to secure a crucial ally. The Soviet Union supported India with defense technology to counterbalance China starting in the 1960s. Putin has framed his recent 10-year defense cooperation pact with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a continuation of both countries’ historic amity.
As Russia aligns with China to oppose the United States, though, India is being pulled in two different directions. Sino-Indian border conflicts have persisted for nearly six decades and New Delhi is well aware that Beijing has no intention of accommodating its rise on the continent. A fundamental misunderstanding that has systematically been repeated since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that India is logically turning a blind eye to the conflict in Eastern Europe because China is a more imminent threat. If Russia is pooling so many resources into its invasion, it must be more preoccupied with European rather than Asian affairs, this line of thinking goes.
This is not necessarily so. Moscow began rerouting its exports toward Asia to disconnect from the West even before the war in Ukraine. Although the Kremlin has manipulated certain statistics about Russian imports and exports after February 24, the numbers leading up to that date are more reliable. For instance, according to an article from Russia Briefing, 42.2% of Russian exports were sold to Asian countries in 2020, catching up to the 49.3% sent to Europe. The article concludes that “Russian businesses should be studying these trends and conducting analysis on where and how they can generate market penetration into Asia – as the demand begins to eclipse that in Europe.”
Moscow’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific will have to encompass industries beyond gas and oil because these will require an arduous transition. The infrastructure that has traditionally sent gas to Europe cannot be abandoned overnight, and it will be difficult to connect it to the nascent Power of Siberia project. Novatek’s battle for the Arctic described above has seen its fair share of setbacks. After attempting to construct its LNG pipelines with Russian technology, “extensive technical troubles” caused the Kremlin to revert to Western parts. Moreover, Russia’s turn to Asia comes at a time of pressing industrial shortage. “With a favorable exchange rate, we are now trying to close the need for equipment and components as soon as possible where Russian production, simply due to a shortage of capacities, is not able to promptly meet domestic demand,” Manturov said during an August 2022 interview with Interfax.
As a result, other industries have had to step in to provide short-term relief to Russia’s economy and keep the focus on Asian markets. This year, Russia has become Vietnam’s main meat supplier, with the value of meat exports surpassing $100 million. The Kremlin is also seeking to boost agricultural trade to a variety of Asian countries, including Myanmar, Singapore, and Vietnam. Finally, Moscow is sending its surplus gold reserves to China, raking in $108.8 million in July 2022 which can more easily be spent on war operations.
The Asian and European theater are becoming increasingly inextricable from one another. As the United States contemplates a potential crisis in the Taiwan Strait, it must not diminish its aid to Ukraine: the more Russia squanders its resources in Eastern Europe, the less it will be able to shift to the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, if Washington impedes Russia’s penetration of Asian markets, it can foil the Kremlin’s long-term goal of building a robust anti-American bloc on the continent.
A tug of war is taking place with neutral Asian countries. The U.S. and China are at the front of each side, and Russia is throwing its weight behind the latter. Europe’s ability to back Washington is limited at the moment as it faces a devastating energy crisis. To prevail in this struggle, the U.S. needs to focus on the countries that can conceivably swing to its side. India, Thailand, and the Philippines are three examples. They have all participated in military exercises with American troops, harbor skepticism about China’s long-term ambitions, and benefit from partnerships with Washington.
South Korea and Japan are also increasingly threatened by Beijing’s rise and have demonstrated a strong willingness to join forces militarily and economically with the U.S. Trying to please dictators as President Donald Trump did when he visited North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is an unfruitful strategy. Kim’s newfound belligerence is a testament to the short-lived nature of rapprochement with authoritarian leaders. The U.S. must avoid spreading itself too thin, focusing instead on countries of strategic importance that have expressed disillusionment with either Russia or China’s regime. Washington’s goal should be to include more countries in economic or security initiatives like President Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, incentivize trade with the West, and encourage more military cooperation with Asian countries.
The U.S. can and should drive a wedge between its principal adversaries and enlist more Asian allies in its fight against authoritarian hegemony over Eurasia.
Axel de Vernou is a sophomore at Yale University studying Global Affairs.
26.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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