Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“States and political movements wage wars on the basis--one would like to think--of internal consensus reflected and expressed in some recognized form as a national goal. The reality may often be a projection, sometimes coherent, more often contradictory, of a loose and shifting alliance of political forces serving particularist ends. National policymakers find such conditions messy and intolerable. In seeking to impose order upon circumstances which are inherently disorderly, they may deceive themselves, thus becoming more prone to miscalculation than if working under more modest assumptions. In such circumstances, it may well be (as it is today) that the actors in the international arena have quite different perceptions as to whether they are or are not at war. Such misperceptions, or more accurately, difference of perceptions, may be acknowledged, or denied, or recognized and purposefully manipulated. In any event, the conditions are conducive to the conduct of political warfare.”

- Paul Smith, On Political War

"A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen."

- Winston Churchill

"One of the most important factors in life, politics and war, to which historians tend to devote too little attention, is sheer luck, good or ill."

- Robert Rhodes James

1. 'To us every day counts': How top diplomat works to get hostages like Lombard's Frerichs home

2. Opinion | Nuclear Waste Is Misunderstood

3. Is AI more dangerous than the atomic bomb?

4. Fareed Zakaria GPS - ChatGPT and English Majors

5. Meet Nate Fick, the State Department’s first-ever ambassador for cyberspace

6. America’s Spies Are Losing Their Edge

7. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 30, 2023

8. Where Is The De-Dollarization Movement Headed? – OpEd

9. One in 5 young people in Chinese cities are out of work. Beijing wants them to work in the fields

10. Xi Jinping’s Worst Nightmare: A Potemkin People’s Liberation Army

11. America’s Bad Bet on India

12. China backs away from 'wolf-warrior' remarks on Ukraine's national sovereignty

13. US Warns China Against ‘Harassment’ of Philippine Vessels

14. Rising tensions over Taiwan prompts US to take proactive approach in cyberspace

15. A-10s Return to Middle East with a New Mission, and a New Weapon

16. To compete with China, the US must embrace multilateral diplomacy

17. Chinese envoy warns Japan over Taiwan ‘red line’ and links Japanese man’s detention to spying

18. Hiroshima G7 security in spotlight after attacks on Kishida and Abe

19. Wanted Abu Sayyaf man arrested in Tawi-Tawi after 26 years of hiding

20. 'I Let Down the Combatant Commander': Marine Leader Regrets His Forces Weren't Available for Recent Crises

21. China Balks at U.S. Push for Better Communications During Crises

1. 'To us every day counts': How top diplomat works to get hostages like Lombard's Frerichs home

A good man doing a very tough job.

'To us every day counts': How top diplomat works to get hostages like Lombard's Frerichs home

dailyherald.com · April 29, 2023

Roger Carstens has a simple definition for a job that is anything but.

"Our job is to bring Americans back," the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs explained.

Recent efforts by Carstens and his staff helped secure the releases of Lombard native Mark Frerichs from the Taliban, basketball star Brittney Griner from Russia and the "Citgo 6," oil executives imprisoned in Venezuela.

"When we take a case, we put our foot on the gas, try to get the car up to 110 miles an hour, and we never take our foot off," Carstens told the Daily Herald.

"Every day someone's not home in the United States, they might suffer a medical tragedy, they might be injured by another prisoner, they might get COVID-19. To us, every day counts."

Carstens is a veteran diplomat and retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in the Special Forces. He was appointed to his position at the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, part of the State Department, in 2020.

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The office is "responsible for the diplomatic coordination of bringing back Americans who were wrongfully detained. (That) means a person taken prisoner by a nation state, like Russia, or Americans taken hostage by a terrorist group like ISIS," he said.

In addition, they partner with families and keep them informed. When "we have a case, we call that family every week or more. We fly out to see them," Carstens said. "I just came back from Texas, where I spent the weekend with Katherine Swidan, whose son (Mark Swidan) is imprisoned in China."

"The last thing we really do is try to work on a deterrence strategy so in the next 10 to 15 years, this problem goes away and they dismantle my office."

Typically, Carstens and his team are troubleshooting 30 to 40 cases at a time.

Frerichs, a civil engineer and former Navy diver, was taken by Taliban forces after a car crash Jan. 31, 2020, in Afghanistan.

Frerichs tried to escape twice early in his capture, once ambushing a guard when he feared imminent death. He spent nearly 32 months in dirt-floor cells, suffering beatings and was constantly shackled.

Frerichs was released Sept. 19, 2022, in exchange for convicted Afghan drug lord Bashir Noorzai. He is acclimating to life back in the U.S.

"He's a fighter," said Carstens, who accompanied Frerichs on his flight from Afghanistan. "A lot of people would not do that. They'd be paralyzed with indecision and fear. Mark saw an opportunity and took it."

Since January 2021, 26 Americans in captivity have been brought home, Carstens said, adding Frerichs' situation raised some formidable challenges.

"The U.S. government spent a lot of time trying to find ways to bring him home, whether it was through trying to consider military options, whether it was trying to push on diplomatic channels," he recounted.

Frerichs was being held by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network in remote locations, and it was "hard to find him ... where he was actually being held."

He characterized the Taliban as "tough negotiators. It took a lot of time to come to an accommodation that linked what they wanted with what we were able to give," he said.

Carstens credited two powerful voices for pushing the government to persist: Frerichs' sister, Charlene, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Hoffman Estates Democrat.

"I told Mark: 'Your sister was like a bulldog. She grabbed onto this and did not let go, and did not hesitate -- when she felt things were not moving fast enough -- to hold members of the U.S. government accountable.'"

Meanwhile, Duckworth worked the executive branch of government all the way up to President Joe Biden, advocating for her fellow veteran and constituent, Carstens said.

"It was good to know that a member of Capitol Hill was really willing to put a lot of heartfelt effort into Mark's return," he said.

After Frerichs, the office pivoted to releases of the Citgo 6 in October and Griner in December. In March, their caseload grew when Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia.

Asked what it feels like when he's flying to meet and escort a hostage home, Carstens said: "When you're doing it, it's so workmanlike. There's so many things to be worrying about logistically with planes, last-minute diplomatic things, security ... maybe high-risk situations.

"Then you get to spend a quiet period with the person, be it Mark Frerichs, Brittney Griner or Trevor Reed (a former Marine imprisoned in Russia). And, you get to actually share in the moment and talk to them and invest in them and listen to them and give them their first contact with ... an American that they've had in a long time. That is just priceless."

Also unforgettable is seeing a former prisoner walk into the arms of a family member, Carstens said.

Then, however, the pressure of other cases intrudes. "In seconds -- right before you can even pop champagne and celebrate -- you're picking up 43 emails on the next two or three cases that are hot."

dailyherald.com · April 29, 2023

2. Opinion | Nuclear Waste Is Misunderstood

Excerpt:

So it’s no surprise that many Americans believe nuclear waste poses an enormous and terrifying threat. But after talking to engineers, radiation specialists and waste managers, I’ve come to see this misunderstanding is holding us back from embracing a powerful, clean energy source we need to tackle climate change. We must stop seeing nuclear waste as a dangerous problem and instead recognize it as a safe byproduct of carbon-free power.

Opinion | Nuclear Waste Is Misunderstood

The New York Times · by Madison Hilly · April 28, 2023

Guest Essay

Nuclear Waste Is Misunderstood

April 28, 2023

Credit...Alec Soth/Magnum Photos

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Ms. Hilly is the founder of the Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal.

On a visit in February to the site of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown in Japan, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York did something refreshing: She discussed radiation exposure and nuclear waste without fanning fear. The radiation she got from her visit — about two chest X-rays’ worth — was worth the education she received on the tour, she told her 8.6 million Instagram followers. She then spoke admiringly of France, which, she said, “recycles their waste, increasing the efficiency of their system and reducing the overall amount of radioactive waste to deal with.”

Progressive lawmakers, along with environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council, have historically been against nuclear power — often focusing on the danger, longevity and storage requirements of the radioactive waste. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said, “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to add more dangerous waste to this country and to the world when we don’t know how to get rid of what we have right now.” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts echoed these concerns and pledged not to build any new nuclear plants if elected president.

So it’s no surprise that many Americans believe nuclear waste poses an enormous and terrifying threat. But after talking to engineers, radiation specialists and waste managers, I’ve come to see this misunderstanding is holding us back from embracing a powerful, clean energy source we need to tackle climate change. We must stop seeing nuclear waste as a dangerous problem and instead recognize it as a safe byproduct of carbon-free power.

Why is nuclear so important for reducing carbon emissions? The countries that have cleaned up their electricity production the fastest have generally done so with hydroelectric power, nuclear, or a combination of the two. The distinct advantage of nuclear is that it requires little land and can reliably produce lots of power regardless of weather, time of day or season. Unlike wind and solar, it can substitute directly for fossil fuels without backup or storage. The International Energy Agency believes it’s so crucial that global nuclear capacity must double by 2050 to reach net-zero emissions targets.

For this reason some U.S. investors, policymakers and even the movie director Oliver Stone are calling for greatly expanding our nuclear capabilities. The Inflation Reduction Act is now rolling out credits for the 54 plants currently in operation and incentives for new ones worth tens of billions of dollars. States across the country are overturning decades-old bans on nuclear construction and exploring investment opportunities. A demonstration project in Wyoming is underway to replace a retiring coal plant with a nuclear reactor.

There are many legitimate questions about the future of nuclear — How will we finance new plants? Can we build them on time and under budget? — but “What about the waste?” should not be one of them.

One of our few cultural references to nuclear waste is “The Simpsons,” where it appeared as a glowing green liquid stored in leaky oil drums. In reality, nuclear fuel is made up of shiny metal tubes containing small pellets of uranium oxide. These tubes are gathered into bundles and loaded into the reactor. After five years of making energy, the bundles come out, containing radioactive particles left over from the energy-making reactions.

The bundles cool off in a pool of water for another five to 10 years or so. After that, they are placed in steel and concrete containers for storage at the plant. These casks are designed to last 100 years and to withstand nearly anything — hurricanes, severe floods, extreme temperatures, even missile attacks.

To date, there have been no deaths, injuries or serious environmental releases of nuclear waste in casks anywhere. And the waste can be transferred to another cask, extending storage one century at a time.

With this kind of nuclear waste, I’m not referring to water containing the radioisotope tritium that nuclear plants regularly release. Antinuclear activist groups like to scaremonger about this, despite the fact that you’d need to drink over a gallon of the treated water being released from Fukushima to get the equivalent radiation exposure of eating a banana.

But what about the spent nuclear fuel — isn’t it radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years? The way radiation works, the waste products that are the most radioactive are the shortest-lived, and those that last a long time are far less dangerous. About 40 years after the fuel becomes waste, the heat and radioactivity of the pellets have fallen by over 99 percent. After around 500 years, the waste would have to be broken down and inhaled or ingested to cause significant harm.

Compare this to other hazardous industrial materials we store in less secure ways that don’t become less toxic over time. Take ammonia: It is highly toxic, corrosive, explosive and prone to leaking. Hundreds of ammonia-related injuries and even some fatalities have been reported since 2010, and we continue to produce and transport millions of tons of it annually by pipelines, ships and trains for fertilizer and other uses.

Yet because nuclear waste seems to pose an outsize risk in the imaginations of many — especially those who lived through the Cold War — the conversation veers toward permanent solutions, like burying it deep underground in a facility like the proposed Yucca Mountain project in Nevada. There may be other benefits to consolidating spent fuel in a central facility, but safety is not the primary concern.

By failing to construct such a facility, some worry that we’re saddling the next generation with the burden of waste management. But as a young person in my 20s expecting a child this year, I feel very comfortable with the way we manage nuclear waste, with making more of it and with passing this responsibility on to our kids. I hope my daughter’s generation will inherit many new nuclear plants making clean power — and the waste that comes with them.

The waste should really be a chief selling point for nuclear energy, particularly for those who care about the environment: There’s not very much of it, it’s easily contained, it becomes safer with time and it can be recycled. And every cask of spent nuclear fuel represents about 2.2 million tons of carbon, according to one estimate, that weren’t emitted into the atmosphere from fossil fuels. For me, each cask represents hope for a safer, better future.

Madison Hilly is the founder of the Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal.

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The New York Times · by Madison Hilly · April 28, 2023

3. Is AI more dangerous than the atomic bomb?

Long read.

Excerpts:

There is no doubt that AI systems do indeed perform better than humans in many specific contexts. Also, AI is constantly improving. But where is the ongoing process of extending and integrating AI systems taking us – particularly when it leads to ever more powerful and comprehensive capabilities for shaping human thinking and behavior?

In human history, attempts to fully optimize a society in the form of a supersystem operating under strict criteria have generally led to disaster. Sustainable societies have always been characterized by significant leeway provided for independent decision-making, of the kind that tends to run counter to adopted criteria for optimization of the system. Ironically, providing such degrees of freedom produces by far the most optimal results.

In line with the open letter cited above, most experts in the field of artificial intelligence would agree that AI applications should always occur under some sort of human supervision. More generally, the development and application of AI must be governed by human wisdom – however one might define that.

Here I have attempted to argue that the proliferation of deep-learning-based AI into more and more domains of human activity and the tendency to integrate such systems into ever larger hierarchical systems together pose an enormous risk to society.

Indeed, the question should be pondered: In case such a supersystem goes awry, threatening catastrophic consequences, who or what will intervene to prevent it?

In Stanley Kubrick’s famous science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the surviving astronaut intervenes at the last moment to turn the AI system off. But would the astronaut have done that if the AI system had previously conditioned him psychologically not to do so?

I do not think it makes sense to try to restrict the development of AI itself. That would be harmful and counterproductive. But wisdom dictates that the dangers arising from the rapid proliferation of AI systems into virtually every sphere of human activity be reined in by appropriate regulation and human supervision. That applies especially to the emergence of AI supersystems of the sort I have discussed here.

Is AI more dangerous than the atomic bomb?

Don’t restrict AI development itself but rein in AI systems’ proliferation into every sphere of human activity

asiatimes.com · by Jonathan Tennenbaum · April 28, 2023

The astonishing performance of recent so-called “large language models” – first and foremost OpenAI’s ChatGPT series – has raised expectations that systems able to match the cognitive capabilities of human beings, or even possess “superhuman” intelligence, may soon become a reality.

At the same time, experts in artificial intelligence are sounding dire warnings about the dangers that a further, uncontrolled development of AI would pose to society, or even to the survival of the human race itself.

Is this mere hype, of the sort that has surrounded AI for over half a century? Or is there now an urgent need for measures to control the further development of AI, even at the cost of hampering progress in this revolutionary field?

On March 22, an open letter appeared, signed by experts in artificial intelligence as well as prominent personalities like Elon Musk and closing with the statement: “Therefore we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

Justifying the need for such a moratorium, the open letter argues:

Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.

[We] must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?

Eliezer Yudkowsky, widely regarded as one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, went much farther in a Time article entitled “Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down”

This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium…. I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation.…

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”

The hydrogen bomb example

The spectacle of AI scientists calling for a pause, or even cessation, of rapidly-advancing work in their own field cannot but remind us of the history of nuclear weapons.

The awesome destructive power of the atomic bomb, which scientific research had made possible, prompted Einstein’s famous remark “Ach! The world is not ready for it.”

In 1949 some leading nuclear physicists and other veterans of the wartime atomic bomb project demonstratively refused to participate in the project to develop fusion-based devices (“hydrogen bombs”), whose energy release could be 1000 or more times larger than fission-based atomic bombs.

The first stage of a hydrogen bomb cannot be scaled down, at least not easily. Photo: Asia Tmes files / Stock

The General Advisory Committee to the US Atomic Energy Commission was led by Robert Oppenheimer (often credited as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”). Other members were Enrico Fermi, I.I. Rabi, James B. Conant, Lee A. DuBridge, Oliver A. Buckley, Glenn Seaborg, Hartley Rowe and Cyril Stanley Smith.

At its final meeting on October 30, 1949, the committee determined that, by not proceeding to develop the hydrogen bomb, “we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind.”

The majority shared the view that the hydrogen bomb threatened the very future of the human race: “We believe a super bomb should never be produced. Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon until the present climate of world opinion changes.”

The minority consisting of Fermi and Rabi stated: “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” (Seaborg missed the meeting and no vote was recorded for him.)

President Harry Truman overruled the committee and the rest is history.

Of course, one should not forget that alongside its military applications atomic energy, in the form of fission reactors, has brought enormous benefits to mankind. Fusion energy, first released in an uncontrolled form in the hydrogen bomb, promises even greater benefits.

‘General artificial intelligence’

Similarly for advanced forms of AI.

I suppose the analog of the hydrogen bomb, in the domain of artificial intelligence, would be the creation of “general artificial intelligence” devices that would possess all the capabilities of the human mind and even exceed them by orders of magnitude.

Observers differ greatly in their opinions about when the goal of GAI might be reached. Some AI experts assert that GAI will be achieved in the near future, while others consider it a very remote prospect, if achievable at all.

I myself believe and have argued in Asia Times that a GAI based on digital computer technology is impossible in principle.

This conclusion is supported by the results of Kurt Gödel – further elaborated by others – concerning the fundamental limitations of any system that is equivalent to a Turing machine. That applies in particular to all digital computers.

Model of a Turing machine by Mike Delaney. Source: Wikimedia

As I argued in another Asia Times article, my view is further strengthened by the fact that the functioning of neurons in the human brain has virtually nothing at all in common with the functioning of the “on-off “ switching elements that are the basis of digital computers. A single neuron is many orders of magnitude more complex, as a physical system, than any digital computer we can expect to build in the foreseeable future. I believe that the mind-boggling complexity of real neurons, which are living cells rather than inert switching elements, is essential to human intelligence.

All that said, however, the main message of the current article is this: It is crucial to realize that AI systems would not need to be near to GAI – or even be like GAI at all – in order to constitute a major threat to society.

When ‘deep learning’ runs amok

Consider the following scenario: AI systems, operating on the basis of “deep learning” gradually acquire capabilities for manipulating humans via psychological conditioning and behavioral modification. Such systems, given large-scale access to the population, might de facto take control over society. Given the often-unpredictable behavior of deep-learning-based systems, this situation could have catastrophic consequences.

We are not so far away from such a scenario as people might think.

In the simplest variant, the leadership of a nation would deliberately deploy a network of AI systems with behavioral modification capabilities into the media, educational system and elsewhere in order to “optimize” the society. This process might work at first but soon get out of control, leading to chaos and collapse.

Developments leading to AI control over society can also arise independently from human intentions – through the “spontaneous” activity of networked AI systems having sufficient access to the population, and possessing (or gradually acquiring) behavioral modification capabilities.

As I shall indicate, many AI applications are explicitly optimized for modifying human behavior. The list includes chatbots used in psychotherapy. In many other cases, such as in the education of children, AI applications have strong behavior-modifying effects.

Like any other technology, each AI application has its benefits, as well as potential hazards. Generally speaking today, the performance of these systems can still be supervised by human beings. A completely different dimension of risk arises when they are integrated into large “supersystems.”

To avoid misunderstanding, I am not imputing to AI systems some mysterious “will” or “desire” to take over society. I am merely suggesting that a scenario of an AI-controlled society could unfold as an unintended consequence of the growing integration of these systems and the optimization criteria and training methods upon which deep-learning systems are based.

Firstly, it does not require human-like intelligence to manipulate humans. It can be done even by quite primitive devices. That fact was well-established long before the advent of AI, including through experiments by behaviorist psychologists.

The development of AI has opened a completely new dimension. Very much worth reading, on this subject is a recent article in Forbes magazine by the well-known AI expert Lance Eliot in which he lays out in some detail various ways in which chatbots and other AI applications can manipulate people psychologically even when they are not intended to do so.

On the other hand, deliberate mental and behavioral modification by AI systems is a rapidly-growing field, with ongoing application in a variety of contexts.

Examples easily come to mind. Tens of billions have been poured into the use of AI for advertising and marketing – activities that by their very essence involve psychological manipulation and profiling.

In another direction, AI-assisted education of children and adults – exemplified by advanced AI-based E-learning systems – can also be seen as a form of behavioral modification. Indeed, AI applications in the field of education tend to be based on behaviorist models of human learning. Advanced AI teaching systems are designed to optimize the child’s responses and performance outcomes, profiling the individual child, assessing the child’s progress in real-time and adapting its activity accordingly.

Another example is the proliferation of AI Chatbots that are intended to help people give up smoking or drugs, to exercise properly, to adopt more healthy habits.

At the same time, AI chatbots are finding growing applications in the domain of psychology. One example is the “Woebot” app, designed “to help you work through the ups and downs of life”– particularly directed at people suffering from depression.

These applications represent only the beginning stages of a far-reaching transformation of clinical psychology and psychotherapy.

AI’s potential impacts on the thinking and behavior of the population are greatly enhanced by the strong tendency of people to project, unconsciously, “human” qualities onto systems such as OpenAI’s GPT-4. This projection phenomenon opens the way for sophisticated AI systems to enter into “personal” relationships with individuals and in a sense to integrate themselves into society.

Ernie Bot. Image: Alex Santafe / The China Project / Twitter

As today’s rapidly growing replacement of human interlocutors by chatbots suggests, there is virtually no limit to the number of AI-generated “virtual persons.” Needless to say, this opens up a vast scope for behavior modification and conditioning of the human population. The hazards involved are underlined by the tragic case of a Belgian man who committed suicide after a six-week-long dialog with the AI chatbot Chai.

Summing up: AI-based behavioral modification technology is out of the bottle, and there are no well-defined limits to its use or misuse. In most cases – as far as we know – the human subjects whose behavior is to be modified agree voluntarily. It is a small step, however, to applications where the subjects are unaware that behavioral modification is being applied to them.

Filtering or modification of internet media content by AI systems and AI-managed interventions in social media could shape the mental life and behavior of entire populations. This is already occurring to a certain extent, as in AI-based identification and removal of “offensive material” from Facebook and other social media.

We are at most only steps away from a situation in which the criteria for judging what is “harmful,” “objectionable,” “true” or “false” will be set by AI systems themselves.

Beware the ‘supersystem’

There is a natural tendency in today’s society, to integrate data systems into larger wholes. This is routine practice in the management of large firms and supply chains and in the “digitalization” of government and public services, motivated in part by the striving for greater efficiency. Despite resistance, there is a natural drive to extend the process of data sharing and integration of information systems far beyond the limits of individual sectors.

Where might this lead when the relevant information systems involve AI in essential ways? It would be quite natural, for example, to apply AI to optimizing the performance of an employee, as assessed by an AI system, according to his or her psychological and medical condition, as assessed by another AI system.

Conversely, psychological therapy via a chatbot and detection of potential health problems might be optimized by an AI system on the basis of AI profiling of workplace behavior and internet activity.

Another example: Using AI to optimize the criteria used by AI systems to filter social media, so as to minimize the probability of social unrest, as assessed by an AI system. Similarly for the optimization of AI chatbots used by political leaders to compose their public statements.

Reflecting on these and other examples, one does not need much imagination to grasp the enormous scope for integration of the AI systems involved in different aspects of society into ever larger systems.

Most importantly, the growing practice of integration of AI systems leads naturally to hierarchically-structured “supersystems” in which the higher-up subsystems dictate the optimization criteria (or metrics) as well as the databases on the basis of which the lower-level systems “learn” and operate.

To grasp what this implies, one should bear in mind, that deep-learning-based AI is ultimately nothing but a combination of sophisticated mathematical optimization algorithms + large computers + large data sets.

The relevant computer program contains a large number of numerical variables whose values are set during its “training” phase, and subsequently modified in the course of the system’s interactions with the outside world, in an iterative optimization process. Like any other optimization process, this occurs according to a chosen set of criteria or metrics.

Expressed metaphorically, these criteria define what the system “wants” or is “trying” to accomplish.

In the typical AI system of this type today, the optimization criteria and training database are chosen by the system’s human designers. Already the number of internal parameters generated during the “training process” is often so high that is impossible to exactly predict or even explain the system’s behavior under given circumstances.

The predecessor to GPT-4, the GPT-3 system, already contains some 175 billion internal parameters. As the system’s operation is determined by the totality of parameters in a collective fashion, it is generally impossible to identify what to correct when the system misbehaves. In the field of AI, this situation is referred to as the “transparency problem”.

Today there is much discussion in the AI field concerning the so-called “alignment problem”: How can one ensure that AI systems, which are constantly proliferating and evolving, will remain “aligned” to the goals, preferences, or ethical principles of human beings? I would claim that the “alignment” problem is virtually impossible to solve when it comes to hierarchically-structured supersystems.

It is not hard to see that the training of systems becomes increasingly problematic the higher up we go in the hierarchy. How can “right” versus “wrong” responses be determined, as is necessary for the training of these higher systems? Where do we get an adequate database? The consequences of a given response appear only through the activity of the lower-level systems, which the higher-level system supervises. That takes time. The tendency will therefore be to shortcut the training process – at the cost of increasing the probability of errors, or even wildly inappropriate decisions, at the upper levels of the hierarchy.

The reader may have noted the analogy with difficulties and risks involved in any hierarchically-organized form of human activity – from a single enterprise to the leadership structure of an entire nation. These issues obviously predate artificial intelligence by thousands of years. Today, many argue that AI systems will perform better than humans in managing enterprises, economies – maybe even society as a whole.

There is no doubt that AI systems do indeed perform better than humans in many specific contexts. Also, AI is constantly improving. But where is the ongoing process of extending and integrating AI systems taking us – particularly when it leads to ever more powerful and comprehensive capabilities for shaping human thinking and behavior?

In human history, attempts to fully optimize a society in the form of a supersystem operating under strict criteria have generally led to disaster. Sustainable societies have always been characterized by significant leeway provided for independent decision-making, of the kind that tends to run counter to adopted criteria for optimization of the system. Ironically, providing such degrees of freedom produces by far the most optimal results.

In line with the open letter cited above, most experts in the field of artificial intelligence would agree that AI applications should always occur under some sort of human supervision. More generally, the development and application of AI must be governed by human wisdom – however one might define that.

Here I have attempted to argue that the proliferation of deep-learning-based AI into more and more domains of human activity and the tendency to integrate such systems into ever larger hierarchical systems together pose an enormous risk to society.

Indeed, the question should be pondered: In case such a supersystem goes awry, threatening catastrophic consequences, who or what will intervene to prevent it?

In Stanley Kubrick’s famous science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the surviving astronaut intervenes at the last moment to turn the AI system off. But would the astronaut have done that if the AI system had previously conditioned him psychologically not to do so?

I do not think it makes sense to try to restrict the development of AI itself. That would be harmful and counterproductive. But wisdom dictates that the dangers arising from the rapid proliferation of AI systems into virtually every sphere of human activity be reined in by appropriate regulation and human supervision. That applies especially to the emergence of AI supersystems of the sort I have discussed here.

Jonathan Tennenbaum (Ph.D., mathematics) is a former editor of FUSION magazine and has written on a wide variety of topics in science and technology, including several books on nuclear energy. He is also an international collaborator of the Institute for the Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Lisbon, working on alternative approaches to quantum physics.

asiatimes.com · by Jonathan Tennenbaum · April 28, 2023

4. Fareed Zakaria GPS - ChatGPT and English Majors

For all those who debunk the humanities and say you need to get tech education. It seems there is a place for the English major in hi tech.

Excerpts:

That is why a new job has sprouted up called prompt engineer, for people who are adept at writing prompts.

These may be English majors rather than computer scientists but they are a new kind of tech wizard. The wizardry reaches a whole other level when you consider the chatbot software can be used to create other software. After all, chatbots generate writing. Computer code is a kind of writing. So, now someone can build their own software simply by feeding prompts to ChatGPT.

Tesla's former head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, who also helped found OpenAI proclaimed, "The hottest new programming language is English." The implications are huge. Kedrosky and Norlin argue, "A software industry where anyone can write software, can do it for pennies, and can do it as easily as speaking or writing text, is a transformative moment."

Fareed Zakaria GPS

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2023-04-30/segment/01

Interview With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Interview With The COVID Crisis Group Director Philip Zelikow. Aired 10-11a ET

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:48]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. Back in 2011, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared, "Software is eating the world." By that he meant software companies were infiltrating large swaths of the physical world and conquering analog industries.

Netflix disrupted movie theaters and video rentals. Apple and Spotify rendered CDs obsolete. Amazon, despite shipping physical goods from warehouses, was fundamentally a software company dislodging traditional retail. Even cars had increasingly become software on wheels.

More than a decade later, venture capitalists Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin asked in a recent blog post, "Why software is taking so damn long to finish eating." They argue software could be much more widely deployed if it weren't so expensive to produce.

Along comes ChatGPT, made by OpenAI. It is a cheap powerful software that could disrupt a host of industries. It can answer all kinds of questions and write everything from marketing materials to news articles to legal documents. It can also supercharge existing software.

For example, Salesforce has integrated ChatGPT into its Einstein assistant tool. When a sales rep is put on a new account, the chatbot can provide an overview of the company, find content information for the right people and compose a personalized email. Then make the email less formal if needed.

Instacart has debuted ChatGPT function that suggests a recipe, turns it into a shopping list and prepopulates the items to add to your shopping cart. Simply put, ChatGPT is an amazingly versatile software. Anyone could use it, though it often takes some skill to craft the perfect prompts. That is why a new job has sprouted up called prompt engineer, for people who are adept at writing prompts.

These may be English majors rather than computer scientists but they are a new kind of tech wizard. The wizardry reaches a whole other level when you consider the chatbot software can be used to create other software. After all, chatbots generate writing. Computer code is a kind of writing. So, now someone can build their own software simply by feeding prompts to ChatGPT.

Tesla's former head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, who also helped found OpenAI proclaimed, "The hottest new programming language is English." The implications are huge. Kedrosky and Norlin argue, "A software industry where anyone can write software, can do it for pennies, and can do it as easily as speaking or writing text, is a transformative moment."

They compare this to the moment microchips and internet access started to become widely available unleashing astounding innovation. Software development using ChatGPT is in its infancy. But people have found it can make simple programs that highlight words or randomize a list of names. One developer wrote a program using ChatGPT to interface his smart home with ChatGPT.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just noticed that I'm recording this video in the dark in the office. Can you do something about that?

AI ASSISTANT: Turning on the lights for you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Of course, at this early stage, chatbots have major limitations and make mistakes all of the time. And some programming tasks may always be too complex or creative for AI to handle. So think about how the world might change if anyone can build a simple app by writing a few prompts in plain English rather than hiring expensive software engineers. It is the ultimate democratization of software.

[10:55:01]

And even if you do need humans to write some pieces of software, you'll need fewer of them. In June of 2022, GitHub and OpenAI introduced Copilot, an AI tool that works alongside programmers. It suggests code the way your phone suggests the next word or your email service suggests a reply. According to GitHub, developers are finding Copilot so helpful that it is writing an average of 46 percent of their code.

Programming is quickly becoming a lot easier which means cheaper, which means much more plentiful. In 2017, the CEO of chip maker Nvidia said, "Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software." That future is starting to come into view. And it could transform society in ways we cannot even fathom today.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:00:00]

5. Meet Nate Fick, the State Department’s first-ever ambassador for cyberspace

I wonder how large is his travel budget? It should be quite small since he should be able to travel easily in cyberspace. (note attempt at humor)'

04-30-235:00 AMFAST GOVERNMENT

Meet Nate Fick, the State Department’s first-ever ambassador for cyberspace

With technology now thoroughly intertwined with matters of national security, the U.S. diplomatic arm finally has an emissary to the digital world.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90888898/nate-fick-state-department-first-ambassador-cyberspace

BY E.B. BOYD6 MINUTE READ

After Iranian proxies hacked Albanian government systems last year, U.S. diplomats in the region sent up a bat signal: Would Nate Fick please come in person to demonstrate solidarity with the U.S. partner under attack?

“I stood in the main square in downtown Tirana, shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. ambassador to Albania and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to send a very visible, public signal of American support for our NATO ally,” says Fick, the State Department’s inaugural ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy.

It was a symbolic moment that underlined the fact that tech is now on the front lines of a new great powers competition. Such photo ops are common in armed conflicts. Countless American and European leaders have dropped into Kyiv, for example, to show support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Until recently, though, aggression in cyberspace hasn’t rated as highly.

That’s now changing due to how pervasively tech underlies every aspect of modern life. Ransomware devastates economies. Disinformation disrupts democracy. Malware cripples infrastructure. Accordingly, the U.S. has gradually pulled cyberspace into the center of its national security strategy.

Upon taking office in 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that digital would be among his key areas of focus. Last year, he launched a new bureau for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, with Fick at its head.

“It’s changing every aspect of our foreign policy,” says Fick, who may have only a couple of years to rally allies abroad and inject tech expertise into the foreign service at home. “So many of the things that the democratic world holds dear . . . depend upon whether we can prevail in this great competition.”

DIGITIZATION EQUALS VULNERABILITY

The U.S. is actually behind the eight ball in this fight.

Although the West dominated tech innovation in the ’90s and ’00s, China and more recently Russia have been quicker to grasp how these tools could be used to gain geopolitical advantage around the world. If the Cold War was waged over geography, the new wars are taking place among the 1s and 0s.

“With the digitization of everything comes a vulnerability to everything,” Fick explains.

Countries such as Iran and North Korea have used emerging tech to inflict actual harm. The attack on Albania was reportedly in retaliation for its harboring of an Iranian dissident group. Russia has used the new tools to spread disinformation and sow discord among its adversaries.

Still, there’s a more fundamental fight taking place, one that’s even more closely analogous to the Cold War. China is now exporting its surveillance technologies abroad, and with them its political philosophies about how those systems can be used to control populations. Countries around the globe—such as Malaysia, Ethiopia, Venezuela, and Singapore—have implemented everything from facial-recognition technology to social media tracking systems, some of them purchased from Chinese companies.

A 2019 report from the Brookings Institution sounded the alarm bell. “Digital authoritarianism is reshaping the power balance between democracies and autocracies,” it stated. “If liberal democracies do not present a compelling and cost-effective alternative to the Chinese model of digital governance and infrastructure, the authoritarian tool kit that Beijing has long honed at home will increasingly spread abroad.”

While disparate entities at Foggy Bottom have been working on cyber matters as far back as the Obama administration, creating a bureau-level group with an ambassador at its head signifies that the State Department views these issues as decidedly more strategic. “I report to the deputy secretary of state,” Fick says, referring to Wendy Sherman. “I talk to her all the time. And I can get in and see the secretary anytime something demands his attention.”

THE MAKING OF A CYBER AMBASSADOR

Fick isn’t a career foreign service officer, or even a career public servant such as former Secretary of State John Kerry, who was tapped to lead the department’s climate efforts. But if you wanted to design the ideal candidate to lead State’s cyber strategies, you’d probably come up with someone like Fick, who has a hat trick of backgrounds in national security, public policy, and the private sector.

The Dartmouth grad first became known to the general public as the real-world platoon leader portrayed in HBO’s 2008 Generation Kill series, about a unit of Marines fighting in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As with many people who’ve experienced combat firsthand, Fick is determined to work upstream to prevent conflicts from turning into shooting wars.

From the Marine Corps, Fick went to Harvard Business School, and from there to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for a New American Security, founded by Pentagon veteran Michèle Flournoy, whom many expected to become Hillary Clinton’s secretary of defense. (Flournoy was also rumored to be in the running to be President Biden’s Pentagon chief.)

Later, Fick became an operating partner at Menlo Park-based Bessemer Venture Partners, and then CEO of Endgame, a cyber operations platform used by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency as well as financial and commercial companies. (Fick was one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business in 2018 for his work at Endgame.)

“He comes out of the tech industry and knows the issues very well,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, the cofounder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, which investigated the 2015-2016 Russian hacks of Democratic National Committee servers. “It’s not like he has to learn what Silicon Valley thinks on most of these problems. He’s very well aware.”

TECH IS A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE

That experience will come in handy. The tech industry has already started grappling with the fact that it’s no longer a world apart, free to create without outside interference. The privacy discussions and emerging regulations of the past few years have made that abundantly clear.

Now the sector has a whole new set of considerations to contemplate—national security, both of the U.S. and other countries. The issues are so urgent that about two dozen nations have started deploying diplomatic envoys specifically to Silicon Valley to interface with the tech world directly.

“It’s become increasingly clear that these new technologies—the companies and the platforms—intrude upon elements of national sovereignty [such as] our democratic institutions, our national conversations, and our elections,” says Martin Rauchbauer, codirector of the Tech Diplomacy Network and Austria’s first tech ambassador to Silicon Valley. “So there was this feeling that if this is ultimately about control of the pillars that make our societies and our political systems, there needs to be also the element of diplomacy.”

Back at the State Department, Fick is working to institutionalize in-house tech expertise so that, going forward, foreign service officers will be as literate in cyber and digital issues as they are in economic and political ones. New training certifies which officers have mastered these topics, and soon the department will take tech competency into account when handing out top embassy slots.

In his few months since taking office, Fick has been jetting around the world, working to build like-minded coalitions with allies and partners on everything from tech standards to regulations to international norms. “We need to start with a positive, attractive, compelling, affirmative vision for the future of tech,” Fick says. “We need to build the big tent . . . to attract companies and countries to our worldview.”

Fick hopes to have at least one person with tech expertise in each of the U.S.’s overseas missions by the end of next year. It was one such trained officer who sounded the alarm on the Albanian crisis last year. “He was capturing all the relevant information, drafting cables, and doing really high-quality reporting back to Washington that gave us visibility into what was happening,” Fick says.

“There are 200 other countries around the world, and bad stuff is happening in a lot of them every day,” he continues. “Effective, timely, informed, sharp communication is really important to focus attention and energy on what matters.”

6. America’s Spies Are Losing Their Edge

America’s Spies Are Losing Their Edge

New technologies and a lack patriotism in Silicon Valley are leveling the playing field for Russia and China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-30/cia-and-nsa-spies-are-losing-their-edge-to-china-and-russia?sref=hhjZtX76

ByMax Hastings

April 30, 2023 at 12:00 AM EDT

What a month this has been for secrets! Or rather, for no-longer-secrets. Ukraine is not winning its war, thinks the US military. Egypt planned to send rockets to Russia. Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries tried to buy arms from Turkey through Mali. The US has penetrated Russian intelligence services.

These are just a few of the delicious tidbits allegedly exposed by 21-year-old Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, apparently from a Pentagon treasure trove.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 30, 2023

Apr 30, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 30, 2023

Riley Bailey and Kateryna Stepanenko

April 30, 10 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.

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

ISW is publishing a special edition campaign assessment today, April 30. This report details changes in the Russian military command since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine without a clear and doctrinal command structure and his reluctance to appoint an overall theater commander have had lasting effects on the structure of the Russian command in Ukraine. Putin’s regular command changes have led to an increasingly factionalized Russian military and disorganized command structures that are degrading the Russian military’s ability to conduct a cohesive campaign in Ukraine. Factions are not a phenomenon particular to the Russian military, although their current dynamics within the Russian military are shaping decision making to an unusual degree. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Kremlin have been deliberately vague about most of these command changes. ISW’s timeline of the changes is based on official Russian statements as well as analysis of unconfirmed claims and reports from Russian, Ukrainian, and Western sources. The exact dates of command changes are based on the first reporting of a change and may not correspond with the formal date on which a change occurred. These command changes were likely not discrete events resulting from decisions made suddenly but were instead drawn-out bureaucratic affairs.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reluctance to appoint an overall theater commander for his invasion of Ukraine has had cascading effects on the Russian military including fueling intense factionalization, disorganizing command structures, and feeding unattainable expectations. Western officials reported in April 2022 that Russia had not have a single military commander of its forces in Ukraine since the start of the invasion on February 24, 2022.[1] Putin likely sought to present himself as the commander-in-chief and the mastermind of the successful invasion of Ukraine. Captured Russian military plans revealed that the Kremlin expected Russian forces to capture Kyiv in mere days, and Putin had likely wanted to declare this speedy invasion a personal geopolitical victory.[2] Putin may have been reluctant to appoint a commander for this invasion to avoid crediting a military commander with the military victory in Ukraine – a dynamic similar to the one between Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov during World War II. Stalin had limited and outdated wartime experience and was reportedly jealous of Zhukov’s military exploits and fame. Putin has no military experience, which may have further contributed to his decision not to appoint a commander for his invasion who could have upstaged him by claiming credit for the expected dramatic victory.

Putin appointed the first overall theater commander, Army General Alexander Dvornikov, in April 2022 in response to Russia’s failed attempt to drive on Kyiv but had replaced him by the end of May due to Dvornikov’s inability to achieve Putin’s high expectations in the first months following the retreat from Kyiv. Putin appointed Dvornikov immediately after Ukraine’s counteroffensive around Kyiv as he likely became aware that the war in Ukraine would become a longer operation requiring a more defined command structure.[3] Dvornikov was the Southern Military District (SMD) commander at the time and throughout his tenure as overall commander. Putin reportedly instructed Dvornikov to capture Donbas by the Victory Day holiday on May 9, setting Dvornikov up for failure (although neither Putin nor Dvornikov may have realized that fact at the time).[4] Putin also tasked Dvornikov with establishing a single uniform command for Russian operations in Ukraine.[5] Dvornikov failed to achieve either goal and Putin subsequently appointed Army General Gennady Zhidko in Dvornikov’s place by the end of May.[6] Putin also appointed Zhidko to replace Eastern Military District (EMD) commander Colonel General Alexander Chaiko, likely in order to continue having the theater commander hold a dual position as one of the military district commanders.[7] The dual roles given Zhidko and Dvornikov were likely a result of Putin’s continued reluctance to make any single general too prominent. Both Zhidko and Dvornikov became effectively first among equals rather than occupying a distinctive and unique position clearly above the other military district commanders. Putin would not appoint an overall theater commander with no other responsibilities until eight months into the war after several significant setbacks. Chaiko’s dismissal as EMD commander was also the first dismissal of a military district commander, as Dvornikov appeared to have retained command of the Southern Military District (SMD) following his demotion from overall theater commander. Chaiko’s dismissal signaled Putin’s decision to remove the commanders who had overseen the Russian military‘s failure to capture Kyiv. Putin’s reasoning for appointing Dvornikov and Zhidko specifically is unclear, although he may have chosen them because of their likely affiliations with Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Army General Valery Gerasimov.

The Russian military began to introduce commanders for operational directions in June and July of 2022 under the leadership of overall theater commander Colonel General Gennady Zhidko in an attempt to organize its offensive in eastern Ukraine. Zhidko likely inherited Dvornikov’s task of formalizing Russian command structures in Ukraine and sought to introduce operational groupings of forces in an effort to succeed in the task that likely contributed to Dvornikov’s dismissal.[8] Russian forces introduced Army General Sergey Surovikin as Southern Grouping of Forces commander, Lieutenant General Andrey Sychevoy as Western Grouping of Forces commander, and Central Military District (CMD) commander Colonel General Alexander Lapin as Central Grouping of forces commander before and after the Russian capture of Severodonetsk in late June.[9] The Russian military introduced the final operational direction commander following its capture of Lysychansk and subsequent operational pause in early July with Colonel General Rustam Muradov appointed commander of the Eastern Grouping of Forces.[10] While the southern and central grouping of forces were heavily involved with the attritional offensive to capture Lysychansk and Severodonetsk, it is unclear how concrete the eastern and western groupings of forces were as the command structures by the culmination of the Russian offensive following the capture of Lysychansk and Severodonetsk.[11] The Russian military command never publicly clarified the delineations between military district command and grouping of forces command resulting in public confusion and the possible degradation of the Russian military's ability to effectively conduct operations in Ukraine across multiple lines of effort, although it is unclear whether Russian commanders and forces were confused.

The attritional but partially successful offensive operations in eastern Ukraine likely gave Putin the informational backing to dismiss the remaining commanders who had failed earlier in the invasion to drive on Kyiv: Western Military District Commander (WMD) Commander Colonel General Alexander Zhuravlyov, Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) Commander Colonel General Andrey Serdyukov, and former theater commander Dvornikov from his position as SMD commander.[12] The capture of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk likely served as the catalyst for Putin to begin shifting his favor to figures not associated with Gerasimov and, by extension, the resounding failures of the first few months of the war, particularly to Lapin and Surovikin who commanded the operations that resulted in the cities’ capture.[13] The Wagner Group also emerged from the operations around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk with a budding reputation as an effective fighting force capable of making tactical gains where conventional Russian forces could not, likely further convincing Putin to begin favoring figures outside of Gerasimov’s orbit.[14]

Chechen Head Ramzan Kadyrov reported that Colonel General Sergey Kuzvovlev was operating as interim SMD commander in late July, likely indicating that the position passed to him on Dvornikov’s dismissal as First Deputy Commander of the SMD.[15] Kuzovlev‘s appointment may suggest that there were significant gaps between some dismissals and new permanent appointments, and that subordinate commanders held temporary positions during these transitional periods. These transitional periods likely disrupted Russian planning and operations.

The start of Ukrainian counteroffensives in August and September of 2022 led to widespread Russian panic, prompting more command changes while delaying the decision to dissolve the operational direction commands as entities distinct from military districts. The dismissal of Sychevoy as the Western Grouping of Forces commander several days before the start of Ukrainian counteroffensive operations suggests that the Russian military command had decided sometime in August to eliminate distinctions between grouping of forces and military district command structures.[16] Putin may have intended to further simplify the command structure for operations in Ukraine but refrained from doing so further when Ukrainian forces launched their counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts. Sychevoy likely continued as Western Grouping of Forces commander in some capacity through the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast until a series of setbacks in Sychevoy’s zone of responsibility around northeastern Kharkiv Oblast reportedly prompted the Russian military command to shift command of the grouping away from Sychevoy and his rumored replacement, Lieutenant General Roman Berdnikov, to Lapin.[17] Lapin’s appointment to oversee almost the entirety of Russian operations in Kharkiv and Luhansk oblasts likely reflected Lapin’s standing with Putin at the time. The Kremlin had increasingly made Lapin the face of the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine throughout the summer of 2022, and Putin may have envisioned appointing Lapin as the next overall theater commander, as Lapin had long been rumored as a likely successor to Gerasimov and appeared not to be closely associated with the major MoD factions.[18] Both factions within the MoD likely welcomed or even supported Lapin’s appointment to this elevated role of responsibility, realizing that whoever was in command of this sector of the front would likely become a convenient scapegoat for Russian military failures.

The success of Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson Oblasts led to more profound command changes and the rise of the anti-Gerasimov faction within the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD). The unstable and confusing command and control structure involving the Eastern and Western Military districts and their corresponding groupings of forces likely compounded the chaotic Russian rout in Kharkiv Oblast and the complete collapse of Russian lines around Izyum in mid-September.[19] The subsequent Ukrainian liberation of Izyum and wide swathes of territory in Kharkiv Oblast likely prompted Putin to acquiesce to Russian Defense Minister Army General Sergei Shoigu’s and Gerasimov’s proposals to announce partial mobilization.[20] Following the start of partial mobilization Russian forces sent thousands of mobilized personnel to the front with little to no training at all in an effort to stabilize the front along the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast axis, which they succeeded in doing following the last decisive outcome of the Kharkiv counteroffensive with the Ukrainian liberation of Lyman on October 1.[21] The stabilization of the front allowed Putin to institute the command changes he likely had intended to make before the Ukrainian counteroffensive prevented him from doing so, and he used the uproar in the Russian information space about Russian setbacks, particularly the loss of Lyman, to justify a wide array of command changes. Putin dismissed Zhidko as both the overall theater commander and EMD commander and ended the grouping of forces command role as a separate position from the district commander in the week following the Ukrainian liberation of Lyman.[22]

The failure of two generals who were establishment MoD figures and Gerasimov affiliates likely solidified Putin’s decision to appoint a commander not affiliated with Gerasimov to the position of overall theater commander after the Kharkiv debacle. If Putin intended to appoint Lapin as overall theater commander the intense vitriol against him from the Russian pro-war ultranationalist community for the loss of Lyman likely dissuaded Putin from giving Lapin a larger role in the Russian campaign in Ukraine at the time.[23] The Kremlin was also increasingly relying on and amplifying the standing of ultranationalist figures with their own paramilitary structures in Ukraine: Kadyrov and Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin.[24] Putin likely sought to secure the support of the pro-war ultranationalist community when he appointed their preferred candidate, Surovikin, to the position of overall theater commander.[25] Putin likely viewed Surovikin as the last untarnished high-ranking commander in Ukraine he could appoint to overall theater command. Surovikin became the first publicly acknowledged overall theater commander, one of the most central aspects of the Kremlin’s and the MoD’s campaign to publicly address criticisms of the Russian military’s setbacks in Ukraine.[26] Putin also likely publicly appointed Surovikin to insulate the Kremlin and the Russian military establishment from further criticism for any future operational failures associated with the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast.

The Kremlin likely did not intend to replace Lapin as CMD commander in late October 2022. Lapin reportedly resigned because he did not want to be the public face of the failures associated with the Kharkiv counteroffensive and due to his anger at Gerasimov and the MoD for not defending him from public criticism as they had done for commanders earlier in the war.[27] Lapin’s reported resignation led to a temporary replacement by the head of the CMD’s organizational and mobilization department Major General Alexander Linkov, a particularly strange candidate for a command position given that most military district commanders previously held deputy command positions or high-ranking positions on the General Staff, further suggesting that the Kremlin did not intend to replace Lapin.[28] Both the CMD and WMD command structures would continue to be unclear or unpublicized for the following months, possibly indicating how thoroughly Ukrainian forces had destroyed their elements in the Kharkiv counteroffensive and their likely subsequent lack of combat effectiveness in Ukraine while undergoing reconstitution and replenishment.[29]

Surovikin's tenure as overall theater commander increased Prigozhin’s influence and role in Ukraine as Wagner began receiving significant supplies from the Russian military and assumed responsibility for the offensive to capture Bakhmut.[30] The Russian information space either tolerated or celebrated Surovikin’s conduct of the withdrawal from the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast and initially lauded Surovikin for overseeing the start of Russia’s air campaign against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.[31] The expanding influence of Surovikin and Prigozhin unnerved many within the Kremlin and the MoD, however, especially as Prigozhin became more publicly vocal about his opinions about the two institutions.[32] Possible counterweights to Prigozhin from within the MoD establishment such as EMD commander Rustam Muradov or WMD commander Sergey Kuzovlev commanded a fraction of Surovikin's and Prigozhin’s influence, and the Kremlin and the MoD likely began considering the possibility of having a notable figure from the Gerasimov faction return to assume a larger role in Ukraine.

Gerasimov and his affiliates likely attempted to convince Putin that they could successfully conduct Russia’s upcoming winter-spring offensive as the Ukrainian fall counteroffensive culminated from December 2022 to early January 2023. An unconfirmed Russian source claimed that Gerasimov attempted to persuade Putin to reinstall the “old guard” - namely Lapin, Dvornikov, Zhuravlev, Serdyukov, and Chaiko – during his meeting with Putin in Rostov-on-Don on December 18.[33] While ISW cannot verify this statement, Gerasimov began to appear in several high-profile meetings with Putin, Shoigu, and the Russian military command in late December, where he likely attempted to shift Putin’s favor to his camp.[34] Gerasimov’s camp also likely launched an information campaign to discredit Wagner mercenaries with the aim of portraying Wagner-affiliated generals as reckless. ISW observed an increase in media coverage about high casualties among Wagner prisoners, Wagner‘s careless use of ammunition, and poor Wagner discipline around December – despite the fact that Russian conventional forces had suffered from similar issues during their offensive operations earlier.[35] Unnamed Kremlin officials had previously revealed to a Russian opposition outlet that Russian security forces deliberately leak sensitive information to undermine each other.[36]

Gerasimov likely had some success convincing Putin that Wagner was wasting personnel and resources given that Wagner lost access to prisoner recruitment and access to ammunition from the Russian MoD at the start of 2023.[37] It is unclear, however, to what extent Gerasimov was able to villainize commanders such as Surovikin and VDV commander Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky – who represent the members of the anti-Gerasimov camp. Teplinsky increasingly received the favor of Russian ultranationalist voices in the Russian information space and the VDV began cooperating with Wagner forces in the Bakhmut direction.[38] Ukrainian intelligence revealed that Wagner-linked Chief of Staff of the Eastern Military District Lieutenant General Yevgeny Nikiforov replaced Colonel General Sergey Kuzovlev as the Western Military Commander on December 26.[39] Putin also publicly awarded Surovikin on December 31, and reportedly appointed Teplinsky to command the newly formed ”Dnepr” operational grouping of forces on January 1 to defend the land corridor to Crimea.[40] Both appointments may indicate that while Putin was likely becoming more skeptical of Wagner’s ability to capture Bakhmut by at least the end of the year he still favored the anti-Gerasimov faction.

The highly attritional capture of Soledar in January likely prompted Putin to acquiesce to Gerasimov’s campaigning and appoint Gerasimov as the overall theater commander for the winter-spring offensive operation. The Russian MoD announced on January 11 that Gerasimov assumed the position of theater commander in Ukraine, demoting Surovikin to the position of deputy commander of Russian forces in Ukraine.[41] Putin likely partially caved into Gerasimov’s pressure as Wagner forces had failed to capture Bakhmut by January 1, but decisively switched sides during the Battle of Soledar, which intensified between January 4 and January 13. An unnamed source within Putin’s presidential administration stated that the long and bloody capture of Soledar triggered command changes, likely because Putin was able to confirm prior reports of Wagner’s ineffectiveness in combat.[42] Putin even attributed the victory over Soledar to the Russian MoD and the General Staff on state television, ostentatiously displaying his change of favor for Gerasimov‘s camp.[43] Gerasimov was also likely able to advocate successfully for the return of the disgraced Lapin, who assumed the position of the Chief of Staff of the Russian Ground Forces on January 10 during the final phase of the Battle of Soledar.[44] Lapin notably was not appointed to command forces on the frontlines, which may indicate a strain within the Lapin-Gerasimov relationship – possibly as a result of Gerasimov’s inability to shield Lapin from criticism. Prigozhin claimed that Lapin’s biggest mistake was that he blindly followed orders, which if true, could be a ground for conflict when Gerasimov did not repay Lapin with the same loyalty.[45]

Gerasimov spearheaded a ruthless campaign to eliminate irregular armed formations such as Wagner and its affiliates with the newfound favor he had obtained with Putin. Gerasimov began to rapidly integrate the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics’ (DNR and LNR) into the Russian Armed Forces, dismiss proxy commanders, and introduce professionalization measures that upset many ultranationalists and proxy fighters.[46] Gerasimov may have attempted to punish Teplinsky for his affiliation with Wagner by committing VDV forces to a grinding battle for Soledar, although he may simply have been using the only high-quality uncommitted reserves available to him. Unconfirmed Russian sources claimed that Teplinsky resigned or took a leave of absence on January 12 after a personal conflict with Gerasimov about the use of VDV forces in human wave attacks – likely around Soledar.[47] Deputy Head of the Russian General Staff Academy Colonel General Oleg Makarevich reportedly replaced Teplinsky as the VDV commander despite having no previous VDV experience.[48] ISW previously observed Russian VDV units operating in the Bakhmut-Soledar area in early January, and it is possible that Gerasimov attempted to outshine Wagner in Bakhmut with the use of VDV forces in Soledar while pinning the high losses on the anti-Gerasimov camp.[49] Gerasimov’s camp also appeared to be avenging itself on Prigozhin, Wagner forces, and the anti-Gerasimov camp by stripping Wagner’s access to prisoner recruits, reinforcements, and ammunition.[50]

Gerasimov’s camp reportedly appointed Colonel General Sergey Kuzovlev, who had been removed from his position commanding the WMD in late December, as the SMD commander around January 23.[51] Russian sources claimed that the ”opposition faction” within the Russian MoD was able to replace Linkov with Colonel General Andrey Mordvichev as the CMD commander after a previous failed attempt in October.[52] Mordvichev’s appointment may suggest that Putin either attempted to balance the factions or that some anti-Gerasimov camp members still had some influence despite Gerasimov’s command.

Russian military commanders within the anti-Gerasimov faction increasingly began to call attention to Russian military failures during the winter-spring offensive but were unsuccessful in convincing Putin to make their desired changes in February. Prigozhin began a loud information campaign attempting to persuade Putin to reappoint commanders from the anti-Gerasimov camp by consistently doubting the ability of the Russian Armed Forces to capture Donbas before spring.[53] The Gerasimov camp likely intensified restrictions on the provision of supplies to Wagner forces in Bakhmut to prevent Prigozhin from exploiting the Russian conventional forces’ defeat around Vuhledar in early February to regain favor with Putin. A Russian source claimed that Prigozhin hoped that Secretary of the General Council of United Russia Andrey Turchak would amplify his complaints about Russian military failures over the winter-spring offensive operation directly to Putin on February 16 and March 17.[54] Russian sources claimed that Turchak delivered a blunt briefing to Putin in February but was unable to convince Putin to change the military command arrangements and almost ignited a conflict with Shoigu.[55] An unconfirmed Russian source claimed that Surovikin convinced Teplinsky to delay his official resignation in late February in hopes that Turchak’s March 17 report would shift the tide in favor of the anti-Gerasimov faction.[56]

Turchak’s February 16 briefing may have alerted the Russian MoD to the anti-Gerasimov camp’s intensifying efforts to discredit the current commanders with Putin. The Russian MoD publicly confirmed four prior reported commander appointments on February 17, identifying Mordvichev as the CMD commander, Kuzovlev as the SMD commander, Nikiforov as WMD commander, and Muradov as the EMD commander.[57] The Russian MoD may have confirmed four active commanders to use as scapegoats for the failed winter-spring offensive operation in Ukraine. Putin also awarded the rank of colonel general to Nikiforov and Muradov on February 18, consistent with their positions as military district commanders, despite the fact that neither achieving any successes on the battlefield during the winter offensive.[58] Shoigu also met with Muradov on March 4 in western Donetsk Oblast, with some Russian milbloggers claiming that Shoigu ordered Muradov to capture Vuhledar in an effort to settle the widespread criticism within the Russian MoD.[59] The New York Times, citing leaked Pentagon documents, reported that Putin personally attempted to resolve the feud between Wagner and the Russian MoD by holding a meeting between Shoigu and Prigozhin on February 22.[60] The meeting likely indicates that Putin was aware of Prigozhin’s complaints about the current progress of the war but sought to avoid taking a clear side at that time.

Teplinsky set conditions for the next set of command changes by expressing his dissatisfaction with the current military command directly to Putin in late February, ultimately assuming a leading military command position in April 2023. Teplinsky published a video on February 23 congratulating VDV troops in which he called on Russian commanders to “save [their] soldiers” and not to “pay for captured villages and heights with soldiers’ lives.”[61] Teplinsky also warned commanders that “the time will come that history will hold everyone accountable” and admitted that he had not fought on the frontlines since January but wished to return to combat. Teplinsky’s video likely confirmed his frustration with the use of his forces in Soledar and reports of his insubordination with Gerasimov. Teplinsky and his allies within the VDV veteran communities reportedly directly appealed to Putin on March 15 about the MoD’s supposed poor treatment of Wagner forces, lack of transparency, and disregard for the Russian war effort.[62] Prigozhin simultaneously boasted about Surovikin and Teplinsky on March 15, likely to rally additional support for the anti-Gerasimov group.[63]

Teplinsky was successful in his efforts to discredit Gerasimov and regain command in Ukraine. Russian milbloggers claimed on March 26 that the Russian military command dismissed Muradov and speculated that Lieutenant Colonel General Sergey Kuzmenko would become EMD commander.[64] Prominent Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian MoD recalled Teplinsky from leave on March 30 after which he deployed to the Russian Joint Grouping Headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar Krai to assume command of the VDV on April 1.[65] The Russian MoD also reportedly summoned Lapin alongside Teplinsky.

The widespread failures of the Russian winter-spring offensive likely prompted Putin to divide responsibility for operations in Ukraine equally between the two factions in the MoD ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive. Putin publicly identified the commanders in charge of defeating planned Ukrainian counteroffensives during his visits to occupied Luhansk and Kherson oblasts likely prior to Orthodox Easter on April 16.[66] Putin met with Teplinsky and Makarevich in Kherson Oblast, and Lapin in Luhansk Oblast. The Kremlin introduced Teplinsky as the VDV commander, Makarevich as commander of the Dnepr Group of Russian forces, and Lapin as a commander overseeing the Luhansk direction. Russian sources claimed that Putin also presented Teplinsky with an icon that had previously belonged to a Ukrainian-born Russian imperial defense minister – a symbolic nod to Teplinsky who is a Ukrainian native.[67] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov notably highlighted that Shoigu and Gerasimov did not travel with Putin due to “high security risks.”[68] The mention of Shoigu’s and Gerasimov’s absence (and the insulting reason given for it) was likely a signal that the Kremlin had appointed new commanders for the new phase of the war.

Lapin’s return to the frontlines indicates that Putin is attempting to maintain some balance between the two military command factions to take charge of eastern and southern Ukraine in the coming months. A Russian source claimed on April 25 that Teplinsky became the deputy theater commander overseeing “the most dangerous” Zaporizhia, Kherson, and southern Donetsk directions.[69] Teplinsky’s subordinates include Makarevich, who commands the Kherson ”Dnepr” direction, and Kuzmenko, who oversees Zaporizhia and the southern Donetsk ”East” direction.[70] Lapin reportedly assumed command of eastern Ukraine (possibly to counterbalance the influence of the anti-Gerasimov camp) and oversees: the Lyman ”Center,” the Kostyantynivka-Avdiivka-Marinka-Lysychansk ”South,” and the Kupyansk-Starobilsk ”West” directions. Mordvichev, Kuzovlev, and Nikiforov are reportedly in charge of the “Center,” ”South,” and ”West” directions, respectively. A prominent Russian milblogger also claimed that Putin officially retired Dvornikov and Zhuravlyov and dismissed Muradov on April 20.[71] Wagner began to receive ammunition and reinforcements in early April, which likely indicates that Putin had changed his mind about Wagner and Prigozhin once again.[72]

Russia’s war in Ukraine is not existential despite the Kremlin’s claims otherwise, although the war does appear to be increasingly existential for the character and composition of the Russian military. Some commanders have indicated that one of their paramount priorities is preserving the combat effective forces under their command at the expense of others.[73] This priority appears to occasionally supersede the imperative to secure gains in Ukraine and likely suggests that some commanders view the preservation of their forces as a means of retaining influence.[74] The commanders likely expect future Russian operations in Ukraine to continue to be highly attritional and may be advocating for their forces to play less attritional roles in those operations. The commanders are likely maneuvering between preserving their forces and supporting Putin’s current operational objectives, with some weighing one over the other in an attempt to maintain Putin’s favor.[75] The overall degradation of the Russian military after 14 months of fighting in Ukraine has substantially changed the overall nature of the Russian military that existed before the invasion, and the commanders likely view their own self-preservation and that of their affiliates as an existential issue that will determine who will be in charge of the Russian military in the foreseeable future.

The Kremlin and the Russian MoD have attempted to use command changes to generate desired informational effects to offset increasingly diminishing results. Putin and the MoD have either obscured or carefully announced command changes throughout the war in Ukraine to shield themselves from criticism, set up scapegoats for military failures, appease certain voices within the Russian information space, or compound efforts to sell marginal territorial gains as operational victories to the Russian public.[76] Russian commanders in general have long drawn the ire of ultranationalist figures in the Russian information space, and the Kremlin and MoD have carefully chosen moments corresponding to specific battlefield realities to justify command changes in this atmosphere of intense criticism. The Russian MoD specifically promotes commanders from the Gerasimov faction while trying to obscure the activities of those from the anti-Gerasimov faction to protect the MoD establishment and to present the image of a unified Russian military. Command changes may have temporarily appeased criticism from Russian milbloggers earlier in the war, but responses to more recent changes indicate that many Russian milbloggers now consider command changes to be a purely cosmetic response to the endemic and strategic issues that they routinely call on the Russian military to fix.[77] Some Russian authorities and milbloggers will likely continue fixating on identifying and punishing individual commanders for Russian military failures in Ukraine, however.

Putin’s affinity for rotating personnel and not outright dismissing commanders is emblematic of his style of domestic rule, a style of leadership not well suited for leading a military engaged in a costly war. Putin has long rotated personnel in government positions as a way to ensure that no one figure amasses too much political influence and to maintain support among competing factions.[78] Putin also routinely avoids outright dismissing officials and instead temporarily demotes them in order to encourage them to seek to regain his favor and to retain options for future appointments. Former EMD commander Chaiko and former VDV commander Serdyukov have appeared in Syria, and rumored former EMD commander Muradov is reportedly serving in an advisory role for the peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh.[79] These apparent demotions leave open the possibility that these commanders could return to Putin’s favor, as Gerasimov did at the start of 2023 and as Lapin has reportedly done recently with overseeing operations in eastern Ukraine. The regular and rotational nature of replacing officials may work in an authoritarian system only concerned with retaining the institutional power of the Kremlin, but this style of rule is detrimental to creating an effective and stable military command structure. The regularity of the command changes is disruptive to efforts to formalize command and control and the return of formerly demoted commanders (who had failed badly) is likely exacerbating the MoD’s pervasive reputational problems as well as its operational effectiveness.

The results of a potential upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive will likely determine which faction Putin favors going forward and likely prompt further command changes in some form. The current delineation of responsibilities between commanders in Ukraine will likely establish one faction as more successful during the potential upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive unless Ukrainian forces launch counteroffensive operations across many diverging axes. The Russian commander who faces the main direction of the potential upcoming counteroffensive will either demonstrate resounding success in defeating the counteroffensive or notable failure. That success or failure would contrast to other Russian commanders whose forces faced less intense Ukrainian counteroffensive operations, and Putin’s favor would likely shift toward the more apparently successful faction once more.

Putin is unlikely to appoint a new overall theater commander in the current circumstances, however. Putin is faced with a challenging situation in this regard, as removing Gerasimov, who is Chief of the General Staff and second only to Shoigu in the military chain of command, as overall theater commander may be too damaging to the Kremlin’s and the MoD’s reputation. Putin also likely prefers to keep the extremely loyal Gerasimov as overall theater commander, since Putin need not worry that Gerasimov would seek to undermine his authority as the leader of the Russian war in Ukraine. Putin may attempt to avoid fallout from future command changes by increasingly rewarding commanders he favors with more responsibility beyond what their official position denotes and diminishing the role of certain commanders who have fallen out of favor instead of outright replacing them.

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on April 30:

The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on April 30.[80] Ukrainian National Guard Spokesperson Rulan Muzychuk stated that Russian forces are using more artillery but conducting fewer assaults in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions than in Bakhmut and Marinka.[81]
Russian forces conducted ground attacks in and around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on April 30.[82] Ukrainian Eastern Grouping of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty reported that Ukrainian forces continue to have access to logistics routes to Bakhmut.[83]
A Russian source suggested on April 30 that Russian forces will likely conduct their own offensive in southern Ukraine if the potential Ukrainian counteroffensive fails.[84] The Russian source cited the fact that top Russian officials and law enforcement are discussing possible candidates to lead various districts in Zaporizhia Oblast which are currently under Ukrainian control as further evidence of Russian plans to move in the southern direction.[85]
Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Kyrylo Budanov reported that Russia is seeking to take control of numerous Russian paramilitary groups and is trying to create a new structure that would subordinate private military companies (PMCs) to the Russian General Staff.[86]
A Russian milblogger claimed that Russia is forming new brigades of the airborne forces (VDV), elite units that have conducted joint operations with Wagner forces in Bakhmut.[87]

8. Where Is The De-Dollarization Movement Headed? – OpEd

Excerpts:

However, if other currencies displace the US dollar as a store of value and medium of exchange, the US could face several significant economic and geopolitical challenges. For example, the US could face higher borrowing costs if it loses its reserve currency status, as investors may demand higher interest rates to hold US debt. This could lead to higher costs for the US government and consumers, negatively impacting the US economy’s growth and stability.

Moreover, the US could face reduced demand for its assets if other countries and investors begin to shift away from the dollar. This could lead to a devaluation of the US dollar, leading to higher inflation and making imports more expensive for US consumers.

Furthermore, the US dollar’s role as a safe-haven asset and global liquidity provider could also be threatened if other currencies emerge as alternatives. In times of crisis, investors typically seek refuge in US dollars, as it is seen as a safe investment. If other currencies become more attractive, investors may withdraw from US markets, causing instability.

Where Is The De-Dollarization Movement Headed? – OpEd

eurasiareview.com · by Awais Abbasi · April 30, 2023

India’s pursuit of de-dollarization is a complex and gradual process that poses significant implications for the US economy. The US dollar’s privileged status as the world’s primary reserve currency has conferred many advantages, such as lower borrowing costs, large trade deficits, and global influence. If other currencies displace the dollar as a store of value and medium of exchange, the US could face higher borrowing costs, reduced demand for its assets, and decreased geopolitical power. The US dollar’s role as a safe haven asset and global liquidity provider could also be threatened if a new reserve currency or multipolar currency world emerged, potentially leading to financial instability.

India is emerging as a key player in the global de-dollarization trend by diversifying its currency and exploring alternative financial systems to increase its economic autonomy. Recently, India announced a new foreign trade policy allowing the use of the rupee in trade with countries facing dollar shortages or currency crises, and Malaysia has become the latest country to join this scheme. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had already decided in July 2022 to settle international trade in rupees, aiming to support traders using the currency and boost global trade.

India is also exploring an alternative to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) with Russia and China. The plan is to link India’s domestic financial messaging system with Russia’s SPFS and China’s CIPS, indicating India’s growing interest in promoting alternative financial systems. This interest is driven by India’s desire to reduce its dependence on the US dollar and avoid the risk of being cut off from the global financial system in the event of US sanctions.

India’s interest in de-dollarization is also influenced by its growing economic ties with Russia and China. India is one of the largest importers of crude oil from Russia, and the two countries have been working on increasing their bilateral trade in other sectors as well. Similarly, India and China have been expanding their economic cooperation in recent years, with the two countries setting a target of $100 billion in bilateral trade by 2022.

As more countries shift towards other currencies for commodity transactions, the US could face higher import prices and increased volatility in global commodity markets, potentially harming the US economy’s growth and stability. Therefore, de-dollarization is a complex and lengthy process, but the trend is clear and undeniable. The US must prepare for a future in which its currency is no longer the primary choice for global trade and investment.

The US dollar’s privileged status as the world’s primary reserve currency has allowed the US to enjoy many advantages, including lower borrowing costs, large trade deficits, and significant global influence. For instance, countries hold US dollars as reserves to pay for their imports, pay off debts, and stabilize their currencies. The US can borrow money more cheaply than other countries because of its currency’s reserve status. Additionally, the US can run large trade deficits, as other countries accept its currency as payment for their exports, and the US can print more dollars to pay for imports. Furthermore, the US dollar’s status as the global reserve currency gives the US significant geopolitical power, as it can use economic sanctions to exert pressure on other countries.

However, if other currencies displace the US dollar as a store of value and medium of exchange, the US could face several significant economic and geopolitical challenges. For example, the US could face higher borrowing costs if it loses its reserve currency status, as investors may demand higher interest rates to hold US debt. This could lead to higher costs for the US government and consumers, negatively impacting the US economy’s growth and stability.

Moreover, the US could face reduced demand for its assets if other countries and investors begin to shift away from the dollar. This could lead to a devaluation of the US dollar, leading to higher inflation and making imports more expensive for US consumers.

Furthermore, the US dollar’s role as a safe-haven asset and global liquidity provider could also be threatened if other currencies emerge as alternatives. In times of crisis, investors typically seek refuge in US dollars, as it is seen as a safe investment. If other currencies become more attractive, investors may withdraw from US markets, causing instability.

Awais Abbasi is a graduate of International Relations and an Independent researcher besides working as visiting faculty at University of South Asia.

eurasiareview.com · by Awais Abbasi · April 30, 2023

9. One in 5 young people in Chinese cities are out of work. Beijing wants them to work in the fields

Some appropriate news for the communists on May Day. Send the youth to work in the fields!

One in 5 young people in Chinese cities are out of work. Beijing wants them to work in the fields | CNN Business

CNN · by Laura He · May 1, 2023

Hong Kong CNN —

As the jobless rate among China’s youth soars, the country’s richest province has offered a highly controversial solution: Send 300,000 unemployed young people to the countryside for two to three years to find work.

Guangdong, the manufacturing powerhouse that abuts Hong Kong, said last month it will help college graduates and young entrepreneurs to find work in villages. It also encouraged rural youth to return to the countryside to look for jobs there.

The announcement followed President Xi Jinping’s call last December for urban youth to seek jobs in rural areas in an effort to “revitalize the rural economy,” in an echo of a previous campaign launched decades ago by former leader Mao Zedong in which tens of millions of urban youth were effectively exiled to remote areas of China.

Guangdong’s plan, which was widely panned on social media, coincided with the rate of urban unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds surging to 19.6%, the second highest level on record.

That translates to about 11 million jobless youth in China’s cities and towns, according to CNN calculations based on the most recent available data from the National Bureau of Statistics. (China only releases urban employment figures.)

A crowded job fair in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing on April 11, 2023.

AFP/Getty Images

The youth unemployment rate could increase further, as a record number of 11.6 million college students are set to graduate this year and seek jobs in an already crowded market.

“If the earlier Covid-19 protests reveal anything, it’s that large numbers of angry, well-educated youth in China’s cities could present big problems for the ruling Chinese Communist Party,” said Alex Capri, a research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation, referring to demonstrations in November 2022.

“Dispersing them to smaller villages in the country side could mitigate this risk and, possibly, help diminish income disparities between China’s tier 1 and tier 2 cities and the poorer areas of the country.”

University graduates attend a job fair on June 23, 2022 in Zunyi, Guizhou Province of China.

Qu Honglun/China News Service/Getty Images

1 in 5 of China's urban youth are unemployed. That's a huge headache for Xi Jinping

Surging unemployment among young people is largely a result of China’s economic slowdown.

The government’s now-defunct draconian Covid policy hammered consumer spending and hit small business hard in the past three years. A regulatory crackdown on internet, real estate and education companies also hurt the private sector, which provides more than 80% of jobs in China.

No good choices

China’s youth are the most educated in decades, with record numbers of graduates from colleges and vocational schools. But they also face a growing mismatch between their expectations and opportunities as the economy slows significantly.

Frustrated by mounting uncertainties and a lack of social mobility, young people are increasingly losing hope that a college degree can bring the same returns it once did.

Kong Yiji, a famous literary figure from the early 20th century, has been one of the hottest memes on China’s social media since February. Kong was a highly educated man living in poverty because he was too proud to do manual labor.

A tourist shop named 'Kong Yiji' in China's Zhejiang province. Kong is the name of a character in a short story by Lu Xun, one of China's most influential writers. The impoverished character always wore a long scholar's robe.

Zhang Peng/LightRocket/Getty Images/File

Young college graduates joke that they have been trapped by their education and stuck between difficult choices: pursue a white-collar career and risk unemployment or “take off their scholar’s gown” and work a blue-collar job they had hoped to avoid through education.

“Chinese students, exhausted by pandemic lockdowns and concerned about China’s ever-evolving model of state capitalism, are beginning to realize that a degree may not improve their social position, nor result in some other guaranteed benefit,” said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“So, not only are Chinese students overeducated to meet China’s workforce needs today, they increasingly believe that such skills will not be valued tomorrow.”

Ian Berry/CNN

Exhausted and without hope, East Asian youth are 'lying flat'

The Kong Yiji meme is the latest trend on social media describing disillusioned youth who are rejecting the hustle culture for simpler lives. Other popular buzzwords have included “lying flat” and “letting it rot.”

Authorities, uneasy about dissatisfaction expressed through memes, have banned the hashtag of Kong Yiji. Last month, they also censored a viral musical parody with highly sarcastic lyrics about the literary character.

Too picky?

State media seems to be shifting the blame for the lack of jobs to the youth themselves. Since the Kong Yiji meme went viral, they have published a series of articles criticizing youth of being “too picky” about jobs and urging them to put aside their pride and do manual labor.

In an article posted last month on its official WeChat account, the Communist Youth League called on young college graduates to “take off their scholar gowns … roll up their trousers and go down to the fields.”

But the articles have drawn even more ire from unemployed youth online, who blame the authorities for failing to create enough jobs.

“Students go to university to avoid working in blue collar positions. That’s not [being] picky,” said John Donaldson, an associate professor at Singapore Management University.

“Students wouldn’t need to make the sacrifices of university, when a good vocational education or even just a middle-school education would suffice.”

Social unrest

Analysts point out that Xi’s countryside policy may also be aimed at addressing the kind of widespread youth unemployment that could trigger social unrest.

In late November, thousands of demonstrators, many of them young people, protested in cities across China against its zero-Covid strategy, with some daring to call openly for Xi’s removal.

Following the protests, the Chinese government scrapped its zero-Covid policy in an abrupt about-face that also came in the face of steep economic challenges.

A large number of job seekers line up outside an exhibition center square in Nanning, Guangxi Province, China, Feb. 18, 2023. The Talent Exchange Conference was held in the International Convention and Exhibition Center, with 1200 booths providing more than 50,000 job opportunities.

CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images/FILE

China's economic recovery is on track. But youth unemployment is getting worse

“All governments should be concerned about disaffected youth principally because it’s a betrayal of social mobility, but also because young unemployed or those without hope can foment unrest,” said George Magnus, an associate at Oxford University’s China Centre.

“This would be especially sensitive in China, where it would also detract from the required compliance with Xi Jinping’s thought and social stability.”

Many social media users have expressed unease with similarities between Xi’s policy and the earlier campaign launched by Mao between 1950s and 1970s.

During the “Down to the Countryside Movement,” many of the tens of millions of urban youth sent to rural areas lost opportunities for higher education and were dubbed by historians as “China’s Lost Generation.”

Xi’s policy echoes that of Mao, said Magnus. But he doubts if today’s generation of young people will accept this policy “meekly.”

CNN · by Laura He · May 1, 2023

10. Xi Jinping’s Worst Nightmare: A Potemkin People’s Liberation Army

A "PPLA." I would say perhaps we should adopt that in an influence campaign but unfortunately my mirror imaging as a soldier tells me it would motivate the PLA solders to not allow themselves to be a Potemkin Army.

Excerpts:

The specter of a Potemkin military being exposed during a military attack on Taiwan is neither a safe assumption nor a reason for reassurance. No one — including Xi — knows for sure how China’s military will perform in a Taiwan contingency. It is only prudent to assume the People’s Liberation Army will execute such an operation credibly, although probably not flawlessly. Yet, spectacular failure — or a Ukraine-sized snafu — is no longer inconceivable. Such an outcome would cause China’s commander-in-chief personal humiliation, and could provoke a domestic political-military crisis and/or propel Beijing to escalate. As the world has witnessed in Ukraine, a dictator shocked by a very public display of gross incompetence by his military may react in a range of worrisome ways. This includes — but is not limited to — threatening the use of nuclear weapons.

In the final analysis, even an unsuccessful Chinese military operation against Taiwan would send seismic geostrategic shockwaves across the Indo-Pacific region and around the world. A botched Chinese attack would bring small consolation to the island itself and likely elevate cross-strait tensions for decades to come. Moreover, China’s relations with great powers and small powers alike, notably the United States, would be irreparably damaged. As I have argued elsewhere, a failed invasion would still trigger a new Cold War.

Xi Jinping’s Worst Nightmare: A Potemkin People’s Liberation Army - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Andrew Scobell · May 1, 2023

A worst-case Taiwan scenario for Chinese leader Xi Jinping would be a major military operation in which the People’s Liberation Army fails spectacularly or displays shocking incompetence akin to Russia’s in Ukraine. Could this happen?

The good news is that while China’s military has undergone major upgrades and has long been preparing for a Taiwan scenario, there are three significant reasons to doubt its prowess. First is the dysfunctionality of civil-military relations in a dictatorship. Second is the plausibility of existing insider critics. And third is the unreliable alchemy inherent in assessing combat effectiveness.

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The bad news is that even if China’s armed forces fail spectacularly, this does not necessarily mean a shorter, less bloody, or less costly conflict. If the People’s Liberation Army stumbles badly, Xi is unlikely to call off his military. Where Taiwan is concerned Xi can be expected to press his armed forces to persist in the fight, producing a protracted conflict in the center of the Indo-Pacific and profoundly disrupting commerce and stability across the region.

Military Modernization: Targeting Taiwan

Even before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, senior U.S. officials and analysts were warning that Xi had accelerated his timeline for unification with Taiwan and prioritized the military means to attain it. The year 2027 is widely referenced and one prominent expert has dubbed the 2020s “the decade of living dangerously.” Of course, Xi, like his purported pal Putin, could decide to order his armed forces to launch a major military operation any time he chooses, and his generals would almost certainly obey. But most experts on China’s military consider a decision by commander-in-chief Xi to invade Taiwan unlikely in the near term, at least barring some dramatic change in the Chinese Communist Party’s calculus of regime security. Indeed, the 2027 date mentioned in Chinese documents appears to be a milestone to attain benchmarks in the military’s ongoing multi-decade modernization drive rather than a deadline for an attack on Taiwan.

Most knowledgeable analysts and outside observers are impressed by the major strides that the People’s Liberation Army has made in recent decades: significantly upgrading its platforms and weapon systems and substantially expanding power projection capabilities. While the roles and missions for China’s armed forces have expanded to encompass multiple contingencies, including out-of-area operations, their primary operational focus remains Taiwan. An important insight from the scholarship on complex bureaucracies is that when a system is laser-focused on one task, it can get remarkably good at this task relatively quickly. If the Chinese military’s consuming focus for decades has been realizing unification with Taiwan, then it has had a lot of time to devote toward planning, preparing, and practicing for this scenario.

But what if conventional wisdom regarding the People’s Liberation Army and its prowess is misplaced? A few years ago, asking this question would have seemed preposterous. But then, until recently, the consensus among experts was that the Russian military had been transformed over the past decade or so into a crack fighting force with a new doctrine and shiny new weapon systems. So where could things go wrong for Xi?

Civil-Military Disfunction in Dictatorships

Dictators face notable obstacles when it comes to ensuring the combat effectiveness of their armed forces. These generally manifest themselves in two problems: anxieties over allegiances and the dearth of reliable information. Because they are prone to paranoia, dictators tend to select and promote officers on the basis of their perceived personal allegiance rather than their records or qualities as commanders. It was this instinct that drove Xi to launch a major anti-corruption campaign in the earliest years of his tenure that resulted in hundreds of generals being ousted. While bribery and fraud undoubtedly constituted serious problems within the Chinese military, Xi’s campaign had all the hallmarks of a purge, allowing the commander-in-chief to sweep aside perceived opponents throughout the officer corps.

Prioritizing coup-proofing at the expense of readiness creates other problems too. Dictators prefer centralizing decisions on postings and promotions as well as troop movements in their own hands. They often establish multiple centers of military and/or paramilitary power to prevent any one military leader or bureaucratic entity from accumulating too much power and to encourage competition over cooperation among subordinates. This is one reason why Putin permitted the emergence of the Wagner Group. While not embracing private security companies to the same degree as Putin’s Russia, Chinese Communist Party leaders have long maintained a set of muscular internal-security apparatuses funded in recent years at a level exceeding China’s official national defense budget.

In China’s Leninist system, coup-proofing measures have been institutionalized across more than nine decades to maintain multiple mechanisms for ensuring party control of the People’s Liberation Army. These include an extensive network of political commissars and party committees that penetrate all levels of the military. Furthermore, all officers and most enlisted personnel are party members, reinforcing the political allegiance of men and women in uniform. Every member of the military has a political dossier that includes assessments of their reliability and attitude.

One of the most critical relationships for warfighting effectiveness in the Chinese system is that between political commissars and military commanders. While the commissar-commander link seems to function reasonably well in peacetime, the real stress test would be in time of war. The political commissar system performed well under wartime conditions many decades ago during the Chinese civil war of the 1940s and the Korean War of the early 1950s. But each of these long-ago conflicts was protracted and the commissar-commander partnership had time to evolve and adapt. In a Taiwan contingency, commissars and commanders would suddenly switch from familiar peacetime dynamics to the compressed urgency of unfamiliar wartime conditions. The battle rhythm of 21st-century informatized war is even more accelerated than 20th-century industrial-age combat.

A second problem for dictatorships is that reliable information is notoriously hard to come by. This is especially so for the dictator himself. Advisors and subordinates — whether civilian or military — tend to tell a dictator mostly what they think he wants to hear. Dispensing bad news to one’s superior is not deemed career-enhancing or life-prolonging. Indeed, speaking truth to power can be difficult even in the best of circumstances in any political system, but when the “power” is a ruthless dictator who wields absolute authority, the disincentives for a subordinate to be brutally honest are far greater.

In January 2022, for example, Putin seemed completely convinced that his armed forces were well-trained, well-equipped, well-led, and would acquit themselves well in a military operation against Ukraine. Why? Because no-one had led him to believe otherwise. Indeed, the Russian dictator had been beguiled by multiple subordinates employing elaborate ruses and charades. His generals had constructed a Potemkin military. Some 350 years earlier, Grigory Potemkin reportedly conjured up impressive facades in Crimea to hide the rural reality of dire poverty and dilapidated conditions from his sovereign, Catherine the Great. Putin, too, had visited showcase barracks and mess halls, witnessed precisely orchestrated field exercises, and watched impressively choreographed parades — all intended to hide the corrosive effects of corruption, fraud, and incompetence on a monumental scale.

Taking China’s Internal Critics at Their Word

Surprisingly, China’s military leaders have spoken frankly and openly about the deficiencies they discern within their own armed forces. At least until recently. As Xi has tightened his iron grip over the armed forces, his handpicked generals are far more reticent than their predecessors to be naysayers or the bearers of bad news — consistent with the civil-military dysfunctionality diagnosed above. Moreover, Xi’s commander-in-chief hubris seems to have heightened as the military transformation he believes he has wrought continues apace. For a decade, Xi has directed and sustained sizeable defense investment along with an unprecedented and thoroughgoing organizational overhaul. Now, few if any generals are brave enough to tell China’s dictator that his sweeping military reforms are not as transformative as he hopes.

Previously, though, Chinese officers and analysts have been quite blunt about the flaws and weaknesses they see in their own military. Of course, at least some of this discourse could be deception or disinformation. But the best evidence of sincerity is that these criticisms have inspired real reform efforts. Xi himself identified severe problems in the military — in addition to the rampant corruption targeted at the outset of his tenure as commander-in-chief — and determined that a thoroughgoing response was urgently needed. As a result, within a few years of taking office, Xi had initiated the most comprehensive organizational reforms of China’s national defense establishment in three decades. What Xi appeared to take to heart was what generals had dubbed the “two incompatibles.” This refers to the assessment that China’s military had yet to reach the level of modernization necessary to be victorious in information-age war and had yet to acquire the capabilities to undertake operations to successfully prosecute a 21st-century conflict.

Military modernization is often understood with reference to acquiring and mastering high-technology weapon systems. But this is only one piece in a complex puzzle. What Xi and forward-looking Chinese generals understood was that if China wants to become a “world-class military,” high-tech weaponry is not sufficient. The military would need to fundamentally restructure itself to streamline chains of command and enable different services to operate together seamlessly. Indeed, this collective concern about the condition of China’s armed forces did trigger a monumental effort to trim bureaucracies, shrink staffs, and push the People’s Liberation Army to operate more as a single joint force and less as separate services.

These reforms, launched in 2016, abolished four massive general departments and two overstaffed military regions to centralize authority in the Central Military Commission. General departments became offices and bureaus directly subordinate to the commission, while seven military regions were consolidated into five theater commands, with four of them reconfigured, with the goal of making each better able to execute joint warfighting in a specific geographic theater.

Yet, in the aftermath of these thoroughgoing reforms and the billions spent on new weaponry, naysayers are finding it harder to be heard and easier to be ignored. In the current stultifying atmosphere of the “chairman responsibility system,” China’s military will find it much more difficult to learn and adapt because those naysayers have now been silenced.

The Alchemy of Combat Effectiveness

Dysfunction and doubts aside, what is the secret for success in war? The specific recipe for combat-effective armed forces is rather mysterious, and you can’t simply bet on the side with the most fancy weapons. The commissioning of vast quantities of new aircraft and seacraft in China’s armed forces in recent years is certainly impressive. It commands the greatest attention at home and abroad and is straightforward to identify and quantify. But system specifications and inventories do not by themselves ensure success in battle. Other “soft” factors, such as quality of personnel, effectiveness of training, morale, and command-and-control culture are also extremely important, yet difficult to measure. Moreover, meaningful combat effectiveness is the result of multiple elements all combining as a whole. To be effective, a military not only needs sound doctrine, organization, weaponry, personnel training, logistics and culture, but also needs each of these components to blend together.

Veteran Chinese military expert Roger Cliff identifies “a fundamental mismatch between the [People’s Liberation Army’s] doctrine and organizational culture.” Central to this mismatch is a rigid command culture of tight control. Typically, the term “command and control” refers to a key facet of any military organization. In the case of the People’s Liberation Army, however, it is more accurate to reverse the word order to highlight the emphasis placed upon “control” over “command.”

China’s military command culture is highly centralized and top down — a subordinate is expected to follow the orders of a superior to the letter. By contrast, the culture in the U.S. armed forces is quite different, with superiors who expect subordinates to exercise professional judgement on how best to implement the “commander’s intent.” A prerequisite for the more flexible culture is a high level of trust and confidence in the abilities and judgment of junior officers. Effectiveness in 21st-century warfare tends to favor a military culture that encourages flexibility, adaptability, individual initiative, and decentralized decision-making at lower levels. The comments of Chinese officers suggest that this is recognized and efforts are being made to change the culture. As a staff officer at the headquarters of the East Sea Fleet commented in 2017: “The lower the level of command, the stronger our commanding ability is, and the more we can adapt to the needs of operations.” Two years earlier, a navy commander lamented the “complex command hierarchies and long preparation times” bedeviling Gulf of Aden counter-piracy operations, but then noted approvingly a culture shift underway from “commanded from above” to “independent command.”

The best way to gauge combat effectiveness is to see how a military performs in actual combat. Yet, the People’s Liberation Army has not conducted a major combat operation since 1979 and has not executed large-scale amphibious landings since 1950. The former, a limited but high-intensity ground campaign against Vietnam, was not a resounding success; the latter, an invasion of Hainan to capture the island from Kuomintang forces, was successful but executed against disorganized resistance. Both experiences were many decades ago. While the Chinese military has a range of more contemporary operational experiences — not including short but sharp skirmishes in the South China Sea and in the high Himalayas — these have all been non-combat and mostly small scale. These include multiple U.N. peacekeeping missions, ongoing counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden, disaster relief operations, and the evacuation of Chinese citizens from locations such as Yemen in 2015 and Sudan in April 2023. China’s most significant evacuation operation was in 2011 from Libya, but the military only played a peripheral role: Of the total of 35,860 Chinese nationals evacuated, less than 5 percent — 1,700 people — were transported on military aircraft. The vast majority came out of Libya via commercial ships and aircraft.

Of course, the U.S. military has not conducted major combat operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yet all services have engaged in multiple high-intensity smaller-scale operations in the intervening years, so we have a better sense of how America’s armed forces might perform.

Conclusion

The specter of a Potemkin military being exposed during a military attack on Taiwan is neither a safe assumption nor a reason for reassurance. No one — including Xi — knows for sure how China’s military will perform in a Taiwan contingency. It is only prudent to assume the People’s Liberation Army will execute such an operation credibly, although probably not flawlessly. Yet, spectacular failure — or a Ukraine-sized snafu — is no longer inconceivable. Such an outcome would cause China’s commander-in-chief personal humiliation, and could provoke a domestic political-military crisis and/or propel Beijing to escalate. As the world has witnessed in Ukraine, a dictator shocked by a very public display of gross incompetence by his military may react in a range of worrisome ways. This includes — but is not limited to — threatening the use of nuclear weapons.

In the final analysis, even an unsuccessful Chinese military operation against Taiwan would send seismic geostrategic shockwaves across the Indo-Pacific region and around the world. A botched Chinese attack would bring small consolation to the island itself and likely elevate cross-strait tensions for decades to come. Moreover, China’s relations with great powers and small powers alike, notably the United States, would be irreparably damaged. As I have argued elsewhere, a failed invasion would still trigger a new Cold War.

While revealing a Potemkin People’s Liberation Army would obviously be an operational catastrophe for China, it would also generate strategic-level blowback and severe second-order effects that could adversely impact not just China but also Taiwan, the United States, and other Indo-Pacific states. Of course, it is possible that Taiwan’s military — despite concerted defense reforms — could also underperform. We have no real basis to assess its combat effectiveness, because Taiwanese forces have not seen actual combat in many, many decades. Yet, in the final analysis, this possibility will factor far less into Xi’s war-making calculus than his assessment of the capabilities and reaction times of the U.S. armed forces. And China’s commander-in-chief harbors no illusions that America’s is a Potemkin military.

However well or poorly China’s military might perform, the geostrategic implications would not constitute a big win for anyone. In the unlikely event that China’s military performs spectacularly well and swiftly achieves operational success, this victory would stun the region and prompt a major geopolitical realignment, but not necessarily in ways that would all favor Beijing. If the People’s Liberation Army were to stumble seriously or fail spectacularly in a military operation against Taiwan, Xi would be unlikely to throw in the towel. A major setback would almost certainly generate a protracted war in the center of the Indo-Pacific that would seriously disrupt regional shipping lanes, commercial air travel, and supply chains. As a result, prolonged conflict over Taiwan would be far more disruptive than the ongoing war in Ukraine, both regionally and globally.

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Andrew Scobell is a distinguished fellow in the China program at the U.S. Institute of Peace and an adjunct professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His recent publications include Crossing the Strait: China Prepares for War with Taiwan (National Defense University Press, 2022) and U.S.-China Signaling, Action-Reaction Dynamics, and Taiwan: A Preliminary Analysis (U.S. Institute of Peace, 2022).

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Andrew Scobell · May 1, 2023

11. America’s Bad Bet on India

This article cries out for the need for better understanding of Indian foreign policy and national security decision making.

Conclusion:

The United States should certainly help India to the degree compatible with American interests. But it should harbor no illusions that its support, no matter how generous, will entice India to join it in any military coalition against China. The relationship with India is fundamentally unlike those that the United States enjoys with its allies. The Biden administration should recognize this reality rather than try to alter it.

America’s Bad Bet on India

New Delhi Won’t Side With Washington Against Beijing

By Ashley J. Tellis

May 1, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Ashley J. Tellis · May 1, 2023

For the past two decades, Washington has made an enormous bet in the Indo-Pacific – that treating India as a key partner will help the United States in its geopolitical rivalry with China. From George W. Bush onward, successive U.S. presidents have bolstered India’s capabilities on the assumption that doing so automatically strengthens the forces that favor freedom in Asia.

The administration of President Joe Biden has enthusiastically embraced this playbook. In fact, it has taken it one step further: the administration has launched an ambitious new initiative to expand India’s access to cutting-edge technologies, further deepened defense cooperation, and made the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), which includes Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, a pillar of its regional strategy. It has also overlooked India’s democratic erosion and its unhelpful foreign policy choices, such as its refusal to condemn Moscow’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine. It has done all of this on the presumption that New Delhi will respond favorably when Washington calls in a favor during a regional crisis involving China.

Washington’s current expectations of India are misplaced. India’s significant weaknesses compared to China, and its inescapable proximity to it, guarantee that New Delhi will never involve itself in any U.S. confrontation with Beijing that does not directly threaten its own security. India values cooperation with Washington for the tangible benefits it brings but does not believe that it must, in turn, materially support the United States in any crisis—even one involving a common threat such as China.

The fundamental problem is that the United States and India have divergent ambitions for their security partnership. As it has done with allies across the globe, Washington has sought to strengthen India’s standing within the liberal international order and, when necessary, solicit its contributions toward coalition defense. Yet New Delhi sees things differently. It does not harbor any innate allegiance toward preserving the liberal international order and retains an enduring aversion toward participating in mutual defense. It seeks to acquire advanced technologies from the United States to bolster its own economic and military capabilities, and thus facilitate its rise as a great power capable of balancing China independently, but it does not presume that American assistance imposes any further obligations on itself.

As the Biden administration proceeds to expand its investment in India, it should base its policies on a realistic assessment of Indian strategy and not on any delusions of New Delhi becoming a comrade-in-arms during some future crisis with Beijing.

FAST FRIENDS

For most of the Cold War, India and the United States did not engage in any serious conversations on national defense, as New Delhi attempted to escape the entanglements of joining either the U.S. or the Soviet bloc. The two countries’ security relationship only flourished after Bush offered India a transformative civil nuclear agreement.

Thanks to that breakthrough, U.S.-Indian security cooperation today is breathtaking in its intensity and scope. The first and most visible aspect is defense consultations. The two countries’ civilian leaders, as well as their bureaucracies, maintain a regular dialogue on a variety of topics, including China policy, India’s procurement of advanced U.S. military technologies, maritime surveillance, and undersea warfare. These conversations vary in quality and depth but are critical for reviewing strategic assessments, defining the parameters of desired cooperation, and devising tools for policy implementation. As a result, the United States and India work together in ways that would have been unimaginable during the Cold War. For example, they cooperate to monitor China’s economic and military activities throughout the wider Indian Ocean region and have recently invested in mechanisms to share near-real-time information about shipping movements in the Indo-Pacific region with other littoral states.

A second area of success has been military-to-military collaboration, much of which takes place outside of public view. The programs for senior officer visits, bilateral or multilateral military exercises, and reciprocal military training have all expanded dramatically during the past two decades. High-profile exercises most visibly exemplify the scale and diversity of this expanded relationship: the annual Malabar exercises, which bring together the U.S. and Indian navies, have now expanded to permanently include Japan and Australia; the Cope India exercises provide an opportunity for the U.S. and Indian air forces to practice advanced air operations; and the Yudh Abhyas series involves the land forces in both command post and field training activities.

Finally, U.S. firms have enjoyed notable success in penetrating the Indian defense market. India’s military has gone from having virtually no U.S. weapons in its inventory some two decades ago to now featuring American transport and maritime aircraft, utility and combat helicopters, and antiship missiles and artillery guns. U.S.-Indian defense trade, which was negligible around the turn of the century, reached over $20 billion in 2020.

But the era of major platform acquisitions from the United States has probably run its course. U.S. companies remain contenders in several outstanding Indian procurement programs, but it seems unlikely that they will ever enjoy a dominant market share in India’s defense imports. The problems are entirely structural. For all of India’s intensifying security threats, its defense procurement budget is still modest in comparison with the overall Western market. The demands of economic development have prevented India’s elected governments from increasing defense expenditures in ways that might permit vastly expanded military acquisitions from the United States. The cost of U.S. defense systems is generally higher than that of other suppliers because of their advanced technology, an advantage that is not always sufficiently attractive for India. Finally, New Delhi’s demand that U.S. companies shift from selling equipment to producing it with local partners in India—requiring the transfer of intellectual property—often proves to be commercially unattractive, given the small Indian defense market.

INDIA GOES IT ALONE

While U.S.-Indian security cooperation has enjoyed marked success, the larger defense partnership still faces important challenges. Both nations seek to leverage their deepening ties to limit China’s assertiveness, but there is still a significant divide in how they aim to accomplish that purpose.

The U.S. goal in military-to-military cooperation is interoperability: the Pentagon wants to be able to integrate a foreign military in combined operations as part of coalition warfare. India, however, rejects the idea that its armed forces will participate in any combined military operation outside of a UN umbrella. Consequently, it has resisted investing in meaningful operational integration, especially with the U.S. armed forces, because it fears jeopardizing its political autonomy or signaling a shift toward a tight political alignment with Washington. As a result, the bilateral military exercises may improve the tactical proficiency of the units involved but do not expand interoperability to the level that would be required in major combined operations against a capable adversary.

India’s view of military cooperation, which emphasizes nurturing diversified international ties, represents a further challenge. India treats military exercises more as political symbols than investments in increasing operational proficiency and, as a result, practices with numerous partners at varying levels of sophistication. On the other hand, the United States emphasizes relatively intense military exercises with a smaller set of counterparts.

New Delhi has now prioritized Washington’s support for its defense industrial ambitions

India’s priority has been to receive American assistance in building up its own national capabilities so it can deal with threats independently. The two sides have come a long way on this by, for example, bolstering India’s intelligence capabilities about Chinese military activities along the Himalayan border and in the Indian Ocean region. The existing arrangements for intelligence sharing are formally structured for reciprocity, and New Delhi does share whatever it believes to be useful. But because U.S. collection capabilities are so superior, the flow of usable information often ends up being one way.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has increasingly focused on defense industrial cooperation as the key driver of its security partnership with the United States. Its underlying objective is to secure technological autonomy: ever since its founding as a modern state, India has sought to achieve mastery over all critical defense, dual-use, and civilian technologies and, toward that end, built up large public sector enterprises that were intended to become global leaders. Because this dream still remains unrealized, New Delhi has now prioritized Washington’s support for its defense industrial ambitions in tandem with similar partnerships forged with France, Israel, Russia, and other friendly states.

For over a decade, Washington has attempted to help India improve its defense technology base, but these efforts have often proved futile. During President Barack Obama’s administration, the two countries launched the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative, which aimed to promote technology exchange and the coproduction of defense systems. Indian officials visualized the initiative as enabling them to procure many advanced U.S. military technologies, such as those related to jet engines, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, and stealth capabilities, so that they could be manufactured or codeveloped in India. But Washington’s hesitation about clearing such transfers was matched by U.S. defense firms’ reluctance to part with their intellectual property and make commercial investments for what were ultimately meager business opportunities.

WASHINGTON’S BIG BET

The Biden administration is now going to great lengths to reverse the failure of the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative. Last year, it announced the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, which aims to fundamentally transform cooperation between the two countries’ governments, businesses, and research entities pertaining to technology development. This endeavor encompasses a wide range of fields, including semiconductors, space, artificial intelligence, next-generation telecommunications, high-performance computing, and quantum technologies, all of which have defense applications but are not restricted to them.

For all its potential, however, the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology does not guarantee any specific outcomes. The U.S. government can make or break the initiative, as it controls the release of the licenses that many joint ventures will require. Although the Biden administration seems inclined to be more liberal on this compared with its predecessors, only time will tell whether the initiative delivers on India’s aspirations for greater access to advanced U.S. technology in support of Modi’s “Make in India, Make for World” drive, which aims to transform India into a major global manufacturing hub that could one day compete with, if not supplant, China as the workshop of the world.

The bigger question, however, is whether Washington’s generosity toward India will help accomplish its strategic aims. During the Bush and Obama administrations, U.S. ambitions centered largely on helping to build India’s power in order to prevent China from dominating Asia. As U.S.-China relations steadily deteriorated during the Trump administration—when Sino-Indian relations hit rock bottom as well—Washington began to entertain the more expansive notion that its support for New Delhi would gradually induce India to play a greater military role in containing China’s growing power.

There are reasons to believe it will not. India has displayed a willingness to join the United States and its Quad partners in some areas of low politics, such as vaccine distribution, infrastructure investments, and supply chain diversification, even as it insists that none of these initiatives are directed against China. But on the most burdensome challenge facing Washington in the Indo-Pacific—securing meaningful military contributions to defeat any potential Chinese aggression—India will likely refuse to play a role in situations where its own security is not directly threatened. In such circumstances, New Delhi may at best offer tacit support.

New Delhi’s relative weakness compels it to avoid provoking Beijing.

Although China is clearly India’s most intimidating adversary, New Delhi still seeks to avoid doing anything that results in an irrevocable rupture with Beijing. Indian policymakers are acutely conscious of the stark disparity in Chinese and Indian national power, which will not be corrected any time soon. New Delhi’s relative weakness compels it to avoid provoking Beijing, as joining a U.S.-led military campaign against it certainly would. India also cannot escape its physical proximity to China. The two countries share a long border, so Beijing can threaten Indian security in significant ways—a capability that has only increased in recent years.

Consequently, India’s security partnership with the United States will remain fundamentally asymmetrical for a long time to come. New Delhi desires American support in its own confrontation with China while at the same time intending to shy away from any U.S.-China confrontation that does not directly affect its own equities. Should a major conflict between Washington and Beijing erupt in East Asia or the South China Sea, India would certainly want the United States to prevail. But it is unlikely to embroil itself in the fight.

New Delhi’s deepening defense ties with Washington, therefore, must not be interpreted as driven by either strong support for the liberal international order or the desire to participate in collective defense against Chinese aggression. Rather, the intensifying security relationship is conceived by Indian policymakers as a means of bolstering India’s own national defense capabilities but does not include any obligation to support the United States in other global crises. Even as this partnership has grown by leaps and bounds, there remains an unbridgeable gap between the two countries, given India’s consistent desire to avoid becoming the junior partner—or even a confederate—of any great power.

The United States should certainly help India to the degree compatible with American interests. But it should harbor no illusions that its support, no matter how generous, will entice India to join it in any military coalition against China. The relationship with India is fundamentally unlike those that the United States enjoys with its allies. The Biden administration should recognize this reality rather than try to alter it.

ASHLEY J. TELLIS is the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Foreign Affairs · by Ashley J. Tellis · May 1, 2023

12. China backs away from 'wolf-warrior' remarks on Ukraine's national sovereignty

China backs away from 'wolf-warrior' remarks on Ukraine's national sovereignty

americanmilitarynews.com · by Radio Free Asia · April 30, 2023

This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.

China’s foreign ministry on Monday walked back comments calling into question Ukraine’s national sovereignty from one of its “wolf-warrior” diplomats who told a French TV station over the weekend that the country lacked “actual status in international law” – remarks that echoed Russian propaganda on Ukraine.

Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, who has a track record of ruffling international feathers with hawkish comments, prompted an outcry from the governments of several former Soviet states when he said: “These ex-USSR countries don’t have actual status in international law because there is no international agreement to materialize their sovereign status.”

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky branded Lu’s comments “totally unacceptable,” calling on Lu’s bosses to “make these things straight,” while the Baltic countries and the German government all called on Beijing for clarification.

A transcript of Lu’s remarks posted on the Chinese Embassy’s official WeChat account were subsequently deleted, according to Reuters, which added: “The embassy did not reply to a request for comment.”

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular news briefing in Beijing on Monday: “China respects the status of the former Soviet republics as sovereign countries after the Soviet Union’s dissolution.”

“After the Soviet Union dissolved, China was one of the first countries that established diplomatic ties with the countries concerned,” she said, adding that “some media” had sought to misrepresent China’s position on Ukraine.

A ‘blunder’

Luxembourg’s foreign minister Jean Asselborn called Lu’s remarks a “blunder” and said efforts were being made to calm things down.

Josep Borrell, EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, tweeted on Sunday that Lu’s comments were “unacceptable,” and the EU could only suppose that his comments didn’t represent official policy in Beijing.

According to Le Monde and TF-1, Lu has received a summons from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to explain himself to Luis Vassy, chief of staff to foreign minister Catherine Colonna, while the three Baltic states will also summon their countries’ Chinese ambassadors.

Mao also repeated China’s intention to work for peace in Ukraine, which Russia invaded in February 2022.

“We will continue to work with the international community to make our own contribution to facilitating a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis,” she said.

Her comments will likely fall on skeptical ears in countries that were once part of the former Soviet Union.

“All post-Soviet Union countries have a clear sovereign status enshrined in international law,” Mikhailo Podolyak, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, tweeted in response to Lu’s comments. “Except for Russia, which fraudulently took a seat in the UN Security Council.”

He added: “If you want to be a major political player, do not parrot the propaganda of Russian outsiders.”

No trust for China

Meanwhile, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielus Landsbergis said via Twitter cited comments like Lu’s as the reason for a lack of trust in Beijing’s attempts at brokering “peace.”

“If anyone is still wondering why the Baltic States don’t trust China to ‘broker peace in Ukraine,’ here’s a Chinese ambassador arguing that Crimea is Russian and our countries’ borders have no legal basis,” Landsbergis said via his Twitter account on Saturday, along with a screenshot of Lu’s interview.

The row came as Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu warned that China’s own expansionist ambitions could pose a threat to world peace.

“If we flash back to the Second World War … (the origin was) one country, one man pointing to one territory and saying ‘that is mine and that is mine,’ and they go grab it,” he told Canada’s Global News in an interview.

“It is the same situation in this part of the world. Somebody is saying ‘the Taiwan Strait is mine, Taiwan is mine, East China Sea is mine, and South China Sea is mine.’ And they want to go grab it. This is very dangerous and we should stop them from doing this.”

Wu also warned that Beijing’s overseas infiltration and influence operations under the aegis of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department was seeking to undermine democracies in favor of authoritarian models of government.

“We are living in a democracy,” he said. “The Canadian people are also living in a democracy. And what authoritarianism wants is to undermine our democracy. They go through disinformation campaigns or interference in our politics to create domestic confusion or to create domestic distrust,” he said.

Lu has also created a stir with his comments on Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, claiming that the island’s 23 million had been “brainwashed,” and could become Chinese patriots if they were “re-educated.”

Public opinion polls in recent years have shown that the majority of people in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, and have no wish to give up their democratic way of life to be ruled by Beijing, particularly amid an ongoing crackdown on peaceful dissent and political opposition in Hong Kong.

Taiwan’s government under President Tsai Ing-wen has repeatedly warned of “cognitive warfare” and disinformation campaigns being waged on the island by agents and supporters of Beijing, recently launching a probe into a company believed to be operating on behalf of TikTok despite a government ban.

But former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, whose opposition Kuomintang favors closer ties with China, earlier this month claimed during a visit to China that the island’s people are “ethnically Chinese.”

americanmilitarynews.com · by Radio Free Asia · April 30, 2023

13. US Warns China Against ‘Harassment’ of Philippine Vessels

Excerpts:

Whether or not Chinese incursions have actually increased is hard to say. Since the PCG has made an explicit pledge to publicize these incursions more widely, it is possible that they’re simply getting more press attention. But it is nonetheless clear that China has not reined in its aggressive policy toward the Philippines. In fact, after six years under President Rodrigo Duterte in which the Philippines mostly downplayed the disputes in the South China Sea, they are once again the main point of friction in the China-Philippines relationship, which has been both a cause and effect of President Ferdinand Macros Jr.’s rapid recent development of security relations with the United States.

Indeed, the U.S. statement came as Marcos prepared to make his first official visit to Washington today. Prior to his departure, the Philippine leader called for the final adoption of a Philippines-China “direct communication line” in order to manage the disputes in the South China Sea, something that he agreed with China’s leader Xi Jinping during a visit to Beijing in January.

Similar cooperative noises were made by China’s foreign minister Qin Gang during a visit to the Philippines for talks on regional security last week. During the meeting, Qin said that China was willing to work with the Philippines to resolve the two nations’ differences, including the disputes in the South China Sea.

Given the situation offshore, however, there is a lot that Beijing would have to do to convince Philippine policymakers that it is willing to engage on these issues in good faith.

US Warns China Against ‘Harassment’ of Philippine Vessels

The statement from Washington followed another near-collision between Philippine and Chinese ships in the South China Sea.

thediplomat.com · by Sebastian Strangio · May 1, 2023

The U.S. government has called on China to cease the “harassment and intimidation” of Philippine vessels, after the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) reported another dangerously close encounter with Chinese vessels in a disputed part of the South China Sea.

“Imagery and video recently published in the media is a stark reminder of PRC harassment and intimidation of Philippine vessels as they undertake routine patrols within their exclusive economic zone,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement.

“We call upon Beijing to desist from its provocative and unsafe conduct. The United States continues to track and monitor these interactions closely.”

The statement came a day after the PCG said it was involved in a near-collision with two Chinese vessels in the South China Sea – just the latest in a line of worrying close encounters between Chinese and Philippines ships in disputed waters.

Commodore Jay Tarriela, the PCG spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea, said in a statement that the incident took place on April 23, when two Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessels intercepted two PCG ships in the vicinity of Second Thomas Shoal. The Philippine-occupied feature lies about 105 nautical miles west of Palawan island, inside the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

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Tarriela said the vessel carried out “dangerous maneuvers” near the BRP Malapascua, “maintaining a perilous distance of only 50 yards.” He added that the incident posed a “significant threat to the safety and security’ of the Philippine vessel and its crew.

The encounter came on the sixth day of a weeklong PCG patrol of the South China Sea, part of Manila’s policy of identifying and publicizing Chinese incursions into the Philippines’ EEZ.

According to a report by Jim Gomez of the Associated Press, who was among a group of journalists who were invited to accompany the PCG on its patrol, the Philippine vessels were approaching Second Thomas Shoal in order to conduct an underwater survey when the CCG repeatedly warned them by radio to leave the area. After that, Gomez reported,

A Chinese coast guard ship rapidly approached and shadowed the smaller Malapascua and the Malabrigo. When the Malapascua maneuvered toward the mouth of the shoal, the Chinese ship suddenly shifted to block it, coming as close as 36 to 46 meters (120 to 150 feet) from its bow, said Malapascua’s skipper, Capt. Rodel Hernandez. To avoid a collision, Hernandez abruptly reversed his vessel’s direction and then shut off its engine to bring the boat to a full stop.

The incident is just the latest in a string of encounters between CCG vessels and Philippine ships in recent months, in which China has harassed navy and PCG patrols and driven away fishermen from waters around Philippine-claimed features. China claims all of these areas, and much of the South China Sea, under its “nine-dash line” claim.

These included one incident in February involving the Chinese use of a military-grade laser to ward off a ship seeking to resupply Philippine forces stationed at Second Thomas Shoal. (The CCG also had a near-collision with a Vietnamese vessel inside Vietnam’s EEZ in late March.)

Indeed, in its statement on Friday, the PCG disclosed that during its seven-day patrol, which concluded on April 24, it identified “over 100 alleged Chinese Maritime Militia vessels, a People’s Liberation Army Navy corvette class, and two China Coast Guard vessels.”

Whether or not Chinese incursions have actually increased is hard to say. Since the PCG has made an explicit pledge to publicize these incursions more widely, it is possible that they’re simply getting more press attention. But it is nonetheless clear that China has not reined in its aggressive policy toward the Philippines. In fact, after six years under President Rodrigo Duterte in which the Philippines mostly downplayed the disputes in the South China Sea, they are once again the main point of friction in the China-Philippines relationship, which has been both a cause and effect of President Ferdinand Macros Jr.’s rapid recent development of security relations with the United States.

Indeed, the U.S. statement came as Marcos prepared to make his first official visit to Washington today. Prior to his departure, the Philippine leader called for the final adoption of a Philippines-China “direct communication line” in order to manage the disputes in the South China Sea, something that he agreed with China’s leader Xi Jinping during a visit to Beijing in January.

Similar cooperative noises were made by China’s foreign minister Qin Gang during a visit to the Philippines for talks on regional security last week. During the meeting, Qin said that China was willing to work with the Philippines to resolve the two nations’ differences, including the disputes in the South China Sea.

Given the situation offshore, however, there is a lot that Beijing would have to do to convince Philippine policymakers that it is willing to engage on these issues in good faith.

Sebastian Strangio

Sebastian Strangio is Southeast Asia editor at The Diplomat.

thediplomat.com · by Sebastian Strangio · May 1, 2023

14. Rising tensions over Taiwan prompts US to take proactive approach in cyberspace

Excerpts:

As the U.S. shifts its focus to the Indo-Pacific region, it will be armed with a slew of lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, particularly the way the Russians launched several disruptive cyberattacks against Ukrainian critical infrastructure prior to invading the country, and how they have use them in conjunction with their military operations on the ground.

Turgal said the U.S. has learned a lot from its assistance in Ukraine, including in cyberspace, and doesn’t anticipate its support in Taiwan to be any different.

“I think all of those lessons learned and everybody that came together with defending Ukraine, I think it will be the exact same situation in Taiwan,” he said.

However, he said the main difference the U.S. will have to keep in mind as they prepare to provide support is that their IT infrastructure will be different, as the Ukrainian system was built by the Russians while Taiwan’s was built by the Chinese.

Rising tensions over Taiwan prompts US to take proactive approach in cyberspace

The Hill · by Ines Kagubare · May 1, 2023

A recent bill introduced by U.S. lawmakers aimed to strengthen Taiwan’s cyber defenses signals how the U.S. is shifting its focus from the Russia-Ukraine war to the China-Taiwan conflict as tension continues to rise in the Indo-Pacific region.

China, who has become an emerging power in cyberspace, is alleged to have launched about 20 to 40 million cyberattacks every month in 2019 against Taiwan, with some later being used against the U.S., lawmakers said.

The bipartisan legislation, called the Taiwan Cybersecurity Resiliency Act, would require the Department of Defense to broaden and strengthen cybersecurity cooperation with Taiwan by conducting cyber training exercises, defending the country’s military networks, infrastructure and systems, and leveraging U.S. cybersecurity technologies to help defend Taiwan against Chinese cyberattacks.

“I think that this is one way to try to be proactive in terms of ensuring that if something were to happen — and knowing that cyberspace is going to be vulnerable — that we’re going to try to bolster up defenses as much as we can early on,” said Alexandra Seymour, an associate fellow for the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security, a non-partisan think tank.

Seymour added that cyberspace is increasingly being integrated into military operations and suspects that this bill was introduced in part because of increasing fears that China may invade Taiwan at some point.

The bill, which was introduced last week, comes as tension mounts between the U.S., China and Taiwan. Earlier this month, China ordered naval and air drills over Taiwan following Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen’s trip to California, where she met with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other U.S. lawmakers.

McCarthy said Tsai’s visit provided “greater peace and stability for the world,” disregarding previous objections from China to the meeting.

“In disregard of China’s repeated representations and firm opposition, the United States allowed Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the Taiwan region, to ‘transit’ in the U.S. and engage in political activities,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement following the meeting.

The trip also prompted China to issue sanctions against the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank, for hosting and giving Tsai a public platform.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), one of four lawmakers who co-sponsored the bill, said that “strengthening Taiwan’s military cyber capabilities is one of multiple measures needed to build Taiwan into a well-armed porcupine,” adding that “Taiwan’s security is vital to our own national security.”

James Turgal, vice president of cyber consultancy Optiv, who supports the bill, said that Taiwan has been a target of Chinese cyber operations over the years.

Just last year, Taiwan’s presidential office and defense ministry were hit with cyberattacks following a visit from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), adding to the rising tensions over the island.

“China is probably the number one prolific offensive cyber nation state out there,” Turgal said, adding that the east Asian country is likely taking a page out of Russia’s cyber playbook and applying it to its own situation with Taiwan.

U.S. Cyber Command Director Gen. Paul Nakasone has also stated that China is becoming a growing and persistent threat in cyberspace, describing the country as “a very capable force” and “a very formidable foe” in this domain.

Turgal said that publicly, China will continue to voice their opposition against the growing relations between the U.S. and Taiwan, and warn the U.S. not to violate its “One China” policy since it considers the island as part of its sovereign territory.

But privately, it will probably increase its cyber operations against both Taiwan and the U.S.

Turgal also said that board members at companies are also shifting the conversation from the Russia-Ukraine war and are now asking him how the China-Taiwan conflict could impact their businesses in China from a cyber standpoint.

“What are the implications when China goes into Taiwan?” the board members asked him, he said.

Drawing parallels with the Russia-Ukraine war

As the U.S. shifts its focus to the Indo-Pacific region, it will be armed with a slew of lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, particularly the way the Russians launched several disruptive cyberattacks against Ukrainian critical infrastructure prior to invading the country, and how they have use them in conjunction with their military operations on the ground.

Turgal said the U.S. has learned a lot from its assistance in Ukraine, including in cyberspace, and doesn’t anticipate its support in Taiwan to be any different.

“I think all of those lessons learned and everybody that came together with defending Ukraine, I think it will be the exact same situation in Taiwan,” he said.

However, he said the main difference the U.S. will have to keep in mind as they prepare to provide support is that their IT infrastructure will be different, as the Ukrainian system was built by the Russians while Taiwan’s was built by the Chinese.

The Hill · by Ines Kagubare · May 1, 2023

15. A-10s Return to Middle East with a New Mission, and a New Weapon

Excerpts:

In addition to combat missions in Syria and Iraq, Air Forces Central plans to use the A-10 in exercises with partners in the region.

Grynkewich’s command is also responding to a call from CENTCOM’s Kurilla to be more innovative. Air Forces Central aims to experiment with the A-10’s ability to shoot down enemy drones. Since the A-10 lacks a radar, officials plan to use a network of U.S. and allied radars to guide the attack jets to their uncrewed targets. The Warthog could then use its infrared targeting pod to engage a drone with heat-seeking missiles or laser-guided rockets, Grynkewich said.

“We're in the experimentation phase, but conceptually, we think there's a fair amount of promise,” he said. “The A-10 is going to be flying at a slower speed, which has a lot of advantage for when you're going against one of these [drones]. We think that just that added capacity might provide us something really exciting in the space.”

A-10s Return to Middle East with a New Mission, and a New Weapon

Tensions with Iran, Russia have CENTCOM calling upon the venerable Warthog once again.

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

A squadron of A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jets, specially modified to nearly triple their bomb loads, has been dispatched to the Middle East to boost U.S. airpower in the region amid increased tensions with Iran-backed forces in Syria.

The Warthogs will get software updates enabling them to carry up to 16 Small Diameter Bombs within weeks, said Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, who leads Air Forces Central Command.

“They're really here as a message to both assure our partners…but also as…a true capability that can work against some of the threats that we face with respect to Iran,” Grynkewich said in an interview Thursday.

With each plane carrying four SDB bomb racks, a flight of four A-10s could bomb up to 64 ground targets, a nearly three-fold increase. Each plane can also carry laser-guided rockets along with its famed 30mm tankbusting gun.

“That's a lot of targets that you can hit from an air-to-ground perspective,” Grynkewich said.

The rugged attack jet also gives commanders more flexibility because it can fly from short or dirt runways.

“We would be able to maneuver [the A-10] very rapidly to different locations and show an ability to do strike operations that really would be very difficult to to counter in any meaningful way should things escalate,” he said.

In March, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, told lawmakers that he needed more airpower in the region. He testified that the A-10 deployment had been approved, but did not mention their new armament.

The A-10 joins two squadrons of F-16s under Grynkewich’s control.

“It's a really good additive capability for the region,” he said. "What we have now allows us to maintain a reasonable, sustainable and sufficient posture.".

Though the Pentagon’s presence in the region is a fraction of what it was during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, U.S. forces are still fighting ISIS in Syria and helping the Iraqi military.

“You've got a fair amount of ISIS activity, including some senior leaders who want to reconstitute, and we're just trying to keep the pressure on them to keep them from doing that,” Grynkewich said.

U.S. officials say Iranian-backed militia groups are also active in Syria, and occasionally attack American forces in the region. In March, a suspected Iranian suicide drone attack killed an American contractor was killed and injured five servicemembers at a base in northeastern Syria. Iran is also supplying suicide drones to Russia, which is using them to strike military and civilian targets in Ukraine.

“There's a growing confluence between Russia and Iran, and I would argue with the Syrian regime as well, and that is manifesting in Syria as a challenge to our defeat-ISIS campaign and really just overall regional stability,” Grynkewich said.

The March attack accelerated the A-10 deployment, he said.

The A-10 could also be used to patrol the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian go-fast boats have harassed warships and tankers.

“There certainly are maritime threats that are out there that are promulgated by the Iranians,” Grynkewich said. “The A-10 brings you a capability that can counter that, as well—kinetically if necessary with those rockets and the gun.”

Designed in the 1970s as a specialized ground-assault weapon, the A-10 has won the love of generations of infantry. Protected by a “bathtub” of cockpit armor, Warthog pilots fly slow and low, eyeballing their targets before ripping into them with copious armament. But Air Force leaders have spent decades trying to win Congressional permission to retire the twinjet. They call it a sitting duck for modern air defenses, and they say stealthier, higher-flying, more lightly armed fighter jets can do the job. Earlier this year, Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown said the last A-10s would be gone by decade’s end.

Grynkewich said the Air Force’s decision to retire the A-10 “makes sense, given where it is,” but added that the plane is still valuable right now in the Middle East.

“With the enhancements, we think it's going to bring something to CENTCOM here for the next while that'll be very useful from a deterrence perspective, or from a combat-employment perspective, should we need it,” he said.

In the meantime, Air Combat Command is continuing to keep the A-10 lethal. ACC worked with CENTCOM to double its loadout of Small Diameter Bombs, using software updates and extra bomb racks that are attached to the plane’s belly and wings.

The Air Force 422nd Test and Evaluation Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, recently tested modified A-10s with 16 of the bombs.

Weapon pylons on the A-10 that previously carried one 500-pound bomb can now carry four Small Diameter Bombs, according to Air Force officials. The 250-pound, satellite-guided SDB can glide much farther than the heavier 500-pound weapons. An A-10 dropped a live Small Diameter Bomb for the first time during a February test.

And there are plans to push the loadout to 24, Grynkewich said.

In addition to combat missions in Syria and Iraq, Air Forces Central plans to use the A-10 in exercises with partners in the region.

Grynkewich’s command is also responding to a call from CENTCOM’s Kurilla to be more innovative. Air Forces Central aims to experiment with the A-10’s ability to shoot down enemy drones. Since the A-10 lacks a radar, officials plan to use a network of U.S. and allied radars to guide the attack jets to their uncrewed targets. The Warthog could then use its infrared targeting pod to engage a drone with heat-seeking missiles or laser-guided rockets, Grynkewich said.

“We're in the experimentation phase, but conceptually, we think there's a fair amount of promise,” he said. “The A-10 is going to be flying at a slower speed, which has a lot of advantage for when you're going against one of these [drones]. We think that just that added capacity might provide us something really exciting in the space.”

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

16. To compete with China, the US must embrace multilateral diplomacy

Excerpts:

Like the global economic landscape, the global diplomatic landscape has changed in the last three decades. The U.S. no longer towers over the landscape. It has a peer economic and diplomatic competitor in China and a host of other regional power centers that need to be engaged regularly. Additionally, transnational and global challenges that cannot be successfully dealt with bilaterally, such as climate change, increasingly affect U.S. national security.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz noted that diplomacy is like gardening; the more attention diplomats pay to issues and relationships, the more likely they are to prevent weeds and solve problems.

The Biden administration has renewed tilling the multilateral garden of the international order, but Congress and future administrations will need to keep working the soil for many years ahead to sustain a global order that has worked better at addressing problems and promoting progress than what preceded it — and certainly works better than one reshaped by China.

To compete with China, the US must embrace multilateral diplomacy

BY KENNETH C. BRILL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/30/23 1:00 PM ET

The Hill · · April 30, 2023

Despite bellicose statements and increasing military investments by both sides, the most active front lines for the U.S. and China run through conference rooms across the globe, not the Taiwan Strait.

What is at stake is fundamental to U.S. interests. It will determine whether the rules-based international order the U.S. and its allies assembled after World War II will continue or be displaced by one reflecting China’s domestic governance and international interests — a global order where autocratic norms displace liberal norms such as human rights and free elections.

Those working the front lines between the U.S. and China are diplomats, not soldiers, and the competition involves multilateral diplomacy related to the various international and regional organizations and the norms that, together, make up the international order.

For much of the 21st century, China has paid more attention to multilateral diplomacy than has the U.S. While the U.S. has talked about a “pivot to Asia,” China has been pivoting to the world.

At the Chinese Communist Party’s 2014 Foreign Policy Work Conference, President Xi Jinping noted an impending struggle for the future of the international order. At the 2018 conference, Xi called for China to “lead the reform of the global governance system.”

Xi’s words produced action. China has become the second-largest contributor across the multilateral development banks and the fifth-largest overall to the United Nations’s regular budget and for U.N. peacekeeping operations. In 2021, Chinese nationals headed four of the principal 15 U.N. agencies. China has also become active in organizations dealing with issues far from Asia, such as the Arctic Council.

Additionally, China has launched three multilateral development institutions, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which a number of U.S. allies joined over U.S. objections. Xi has expanded membership in the security-focused Shanghai Cooperation Organization beyond Russia and Central Asia to include India and Pakistan as members and Saudi Arabia and Iran as dialogue partners. China has also launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative. The expansion of the BRI’s and the AIIB’s lending and development activities into Africa and Latin America, as well as Europe, demonstrate China’s goals are global, not regional.

These are the kind of actions on which the U.S. once had a near monopoly.

Still, the U.S. remains the leading global power. It is the largest contributor to most international institutions to which it belongs and holds more senior positions in international organizations than China. Russia’s war on Ukraine has showcased America’s unparalleled ability to galvanize global resources and action, but it has also highlighted how the world has changed. Most of America’s traditional allies have supported Ukraine, but many other increasingly important states have, like China, neither condemned nor condoned Russia’s invasion.

Past U.S. diplomatic inattention and missteps have created multilateral opportunities for China.

The U.S. has traditionally prioritized bilateral diplomacy between two countries over multilateral diplomacy. This is reflected in arrearages of U.S. payments to the U.N., as well as its history of quitting international organizations and agreements. During the Trump administration, for example, the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a U.S. initiative to maintain power over China), UNESCO, the Iran nuclear agreement, the U.N. Human Rights Council and announced its intention to quit the World Health Organization.

Walking out of multilateral organizations and agreements is self-defeating for the U.S. when China is looking for opportunities to displace it internationally. And treating multilateral diplomacy as a second-tier priority is counterproductive when rising regional powers, such as India, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa recognize their agency on global issues and need to be engaged to be convinced.

The U.S. cannot advance its national security interests in the coming decades by going it alone or collaborating only with close allies. Instead, the U.S. must prioritize working with and through the institutions and alliances of the existing international order to sustain its operations, solve serious transnational problems and help constructively accommodate roles within the existing order for newly significant nations, ranging from China to India.

The Biden administration’s vow to return multilateralism to U.S. diplomacy is a change in the right direction. Biden’s National Security Strategy noted there is a competition to shape the future of the international order and vowed to sustain America’s leading international role. The administration backed its policy words with diplomatic action in a successful campaign for the 2022 election of an American candidate over a Chinese-backed Russian to lead the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU). China and Russia want the ITU to mandate national government control of the internet, which the U.S. and its allies oppose.

This is a good start, but the Biden administration — and its successors — will need to do more to blunt Chinese efforts to reshape the international order.

To be effective, U.S. multilateral diplomacy must be a team sport. Without consistent congressional support, Biden’s and future administrations will struggle to out-compete China. Congressional support is required to pay off U.S. arrearages and keep payments to international organizations current. Congressional funding is also needed to support a more engaged approach to multilateral diplomacy and the diplomats who conduct it. Although Biden and the Congress share concerns about China, there is no sign this includes a shared view of the importance of U.S. multilateral diplomacy and the U.S. role in international organizations in America’s ongoing competition with China.

To lay the foundation, the Biden administration and its successors should prepare a biennial report to Congress’ two foreign affairs committees. These reports should address the challenges facing U.S. interests and the rules-based global order, the administration’s detailed strategy for addressing them and the resources — financial and human — needed for the strategy to succeed.

With regard to resources, the American Academy of Diplomacy reported in 2022 that work needs to be done in the boiler room of American diplomacy for success on the competitive frontlines of multilateral diplomacy. China and other nations field their diplomatic best to engage in multilateral diplomacy and international organizations; the U.S. needs to do the same, beginning with making clear the work is a high priority and then training and supporting American diplomats to do it.

While the State Department responded positively to the academy’s report, following up on its recommendations will take sustained attention, action and funding. The Biden administration and the Congress should prioritize implementing the Academy’s nuts-and-bolts recommendations.

Like the global economic landscape, the global diplomatic landscape has changed in the last three decades. The U.S. no longer towers over the landscape. It has a peer economic and diplomatic competitor in China and a host of other regional power centers that need to be engaged regularly. Additionally, transnational and global challenges that cannot be successfully dealt with bilaterally, such as climate change, increasingly affect U.S. national security.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz noted that diplomacy is like gardening; the more attention diplomats pay to issues and relationships, the more likely they are to prevent weeds and solve problems.

The Biden administration has renewed tilling the multilateral garden of the international order, but Congress and future administrations will need to keep working the soil for many years ahead to sustain a global order that has worked better at addressing problems and promoting progress than what preceded it — and certainly works better than one reshaped by China.

Kenneth C. Brill is a retired career foreign service officer who served as an ambassador in the Clinton and Bush administrations and was the founding director of the U.S. National Counterproliferation Center within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Hill · · April 30, 2023

17. Chinese envoy warns Japan over Taiwan ‘red line’ and links Japanese man’s detention to spying

Excerpts:

With its own US ties trapped in the worst downward spiral, Beijing has in recent months grown increasingly vocal in its criticism of Tokyo’s close military and political alignment with Washington over Taiwan, and in the East and South China seas.

In keeping with Beijing’s line on dealing with US allies, Wu urged Tokyo to maintain “strategic autonomy”, distance itself from Washington and establish “a correct perception” of China.

He was particularly critical of Tokyo’s decision to follow the US in curbing the export of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, as part of US-led efforts to hobble Chinese ability to make advanced chips.

Japan should learn the lessons of the past, from its “unreasonable and cruel economic suppression” by the US in the late 1980s, and refrain from targeting China in its attempts to decouple economies or sever supply chains, Wu said.

“China will carefully assess the actual impact of the Japanese policy and will not sit back and watch its interests suffer for no good reason. We do not want to see a situation where China and Japan both lose, while a certain country rejoices.”

Chinese envoy warns Japan over Taiwan ‘red line’ and links Japanese man’s detention to spying

‘Harmful’ to connect China’s internal affairs to Japanese security, ambassador Wu Jianghao says, slamming Tokyo for aligning with the US on Taiwan
Astellas Pharma employee’s case not that of an innocent Japanese citizen being taken into custody, Wu says at the Japan National Press Club

Shi Jiangtao

+ FOLLOW

Published: 7:28pm, 29 Apr, 2023

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3218864/chinese-envoy-warns-japan-taiwan-red-line-links-japanese-mans-detention-spying

China’s new ambassador to Tokyo urged Japan not to link its own security to tensions across the Taiwan Strait, and said the detention in Beijing of an employee of Japanese drug maker Astellas Pharma was an espionage case.

During a speech at the Japan National Press Club, Chinese ambassador Wu Jianghao also singled out the United States as the biggest hurdle to improving the fraught ties between the Asian neighbours, which he said stood “at a critical crossroads”.

Wu, 59, is a former assistant foreign minister. He took up his post in Tokyo last month, at a time when bilateral ties have shown signs of further deterioration despite Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi’s recent Beijing visit.

The Taiwan issue is a red line that must not be crossed, Wu said, as he slammed Tokyo’s assertion – promoted by the late former prime minister Shinzo Abe – that any contingency in Taiwan would amount to a contingency for Japan as “absurd and dangerous”.

“It is illogical and harmful to connect a matter that is purely China’s internal affairs to Japanese security,” he said, according to an official readout on the embassy’s website.

“If Japan is tied to secessionist forces that seek to split China, the Japanese people will be dragged into the fire.”

Noting concerns and “misunderstanding among some Japanese friends” about Beijing’s refusal to renounce the use of force on Taiwan, Wu described the stance as “a fundamental deterrent” to repeated, “salami-slicing” provocations by the island’s secessionist forces and their foreign supporters.

“It is a fundamental guarantee for maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” he said.

Asked about China’s detention last month of a Japanese employee of Astellas Pharma, which further soured bilateral ties, Wu said it was not a case of an innocent Japanese citizen being taken into custody.

“This is a case of espionage involving China’s national security and the evidence is becoming more and more conclusive,” he said.

Japan lodged an official protest demanding the release of the Astellas employee, a man in his 50s who has yet to be identified. He has lived in China for two decades.

Hayashi, who visited Beijing early this month, raised the issue during meetings with Chinese officials including his counterpart Qin Gang and China’s top diplomat and former ambassador to Japan, Wang Yi.

According to the Japanese foreign ministry, Hayashi told Chinese Premier Li Qiang that it was “extremely important for the Chinese government to ensure an environment in which Japanese nationals and Japanese companies can conduct activities with a sense of security in China.”

Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing on April 2. Photo: Via Reuters

Wu dismissed rampant criticism of China’s handling of similar espionage cases, which the US and its allies have described as arbitrary detentions of foreign nationals for political reasons.

“It is the Japanese individuals or organisations who instructed these people to engage in espionage activities in China that should reflect [on this] and restrain themselves,” he said.

Spying activities in China would be dealt with firmly in accordance with the law, he added.

Wu also accused the Japanese media of fuelling fears about China.

“Some even say that in China you can get arrested if you walk down the street, [for] taking photographs, or talking to friends,” he said.

Denying this was the case, Wu said anyone conducting normal friendship or business activities would be welcomed with open arms, according to Bloomberg.

The scope of China’s anti-espionage law is set to be widened in July, its first update since being passed in 2014.

Seventeen Japanese nationals have been detained in China since 2015, an official from Tokyo’s foreign ministry was quoted as saying by Bloomberg earlier this month. Five are still in Chinese custody, of whom two have received sentences.

Brushing off concerns in Tokyo, Washington and other Western capitals about China’s repressive policies at home and increasing assertiveness abroad, Wu insisted China had never treated Japan as “a rival, let alone a threat or even an enemy”.

He noted that Japanese animation films, such as The First Slam Dunk and Suzume, were even more popular in China than in Japan, and said the two countries should seize the post-Covid era as an opportunity to promote exchanges, especially among youth.

“Regrettably, the Japanese side has openly positioned China as the ‘greatest strategic challenge ever’, followed the lead of other countries in opposing and curbing China, exaggerated the ‘China threat’ and accelerated the pace of armament expansion,” he said.

Wu’s outlook was grim on prospects for bilateral ties, and he was particularly blunt when examining Japan’s strategic pivot to the US against China.

“China-Japan relations are now at a critical crossroads, facing the most complex situation since the normalisation of diplomatic relations, and encountering new problems, risks and challenges that have never been encountered before.

‘Don’t help a villain’: China urges Japan not to follow US’ lead on tech isolation

“The US has been smearing China and exerting extreme pressure on it, and it has also coerced other countries to encircle and contain China’s development, making it the biggest external challenge to Sino-Japanese relations.”

With its own US ties trapped in the worst downward spiral, Beijing has in recent months grown increasingly vocal in its criticism of Tokyo’s close military and political alignment with Washington over Taiwan, and in the East and South China seas.

In keeping with Beijing’s line on dealing with US allies, Wu urged Tokyo to maintain “strategic autonomy”, distance itself from Washington and establish “a correct perception” of China.

He was particularly critical of Tokyo’s decision to follow the US in curbing the export of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, as part of US-led efforts to hobble Chinese ability to make advanced chips.

Japan should learn the lessons of the past, from its “unreasonable and cruel economic suppression” by the US in the late 1980s, and refrain from targeting China in its attempts to decouple economies or sever supply chains, Wu said.

“China will carefully assess the actual impact of the Japanese policy and will not sit back and watch its interests suffer for no good reason. We do not want to see a situation where China and Japan both lose, while a certain country rejoices.”

Shi Jiangtao

+ FOLLOW

A former diplomat, Shi Jiangtao has worked as a China reporter at the Post for more than a decade. He's interested in political, social and environmental development in China.

18. Hiroshima G7 security in spotlight after attacks on Kishida and Abe

Hiroshima G7 security in spotlight after attacks on Kishida and Abe

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/05/01/national/japan-security-g7-hiroshima/?tpcc=dnu&pnespid=o_WTkoxR86XH4LPivwCosvUPtAsdrjd.wAYzEUZr6UmVSzlMGb5OFo.rUmX4wEifVH7xFNM

BY TOMA MOCHIZUKI
KYODO
SHARE
May 1, 2023

As Japan beefs up security for the Group of Seven summit in May, separate attacks on its present and former prime ministers within a year have highlighted shortcomings in the nation's ability to protect high-profile figures like those set to gather in Hiroshima.

Following the latest attack by a man who targeted Prime Minister Fumio Kishida by throwing an explosive device at him as he campaigned in April, top government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno vowed to take all possible measures to ensure the safety of those attending the international event.

The incident took place despite increased security after a man shot and killed former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last July when he was giving a stump speech in the city of Nara ahead of a national election.

In the wake of the assassination of the nation's longest-serving prime minister, the National Police Agency set up last year a section dedicated to guarding imperial family members and dignitaries, while increasing the number of security police officers and enhancing their training.

Under its new security guidelines established last August, the agency strengthened its involvement with prefectural police, with agency officials tasked with examining and revising security plans drawn up by local police to protect dignitaries.

"It's difficult to believe that reforms implemented by the police (after Abe's shooting) were actually being put into practice" since there was another serious incident, said Mitsuru Fukuda, professor at the College of Risk Management at Nihon University.

The attack on Kishida came just a month ahead of the May 19-21 G7 summit in Hiroshima, which will bring together leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, as well as the European Union.

Police officers check people’s baggage in Beppu, Oita Prefecture, on April 16, prior to arrival of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for a stump speech. | KYODO

Despite having a reputation for being among the safest countries in the world, "Japan is the only developed country where high-ranking political figures have been targeted (in attacks) recently," Fukuda said.

In the lead up to the G7 summit, the government said it is considering introducing technologies such as drones equipped with cameras and artificial intelligence to quickly detect suspicious behavior.

But it has increasingly become difficult for police, which have long tracked organized crime and extremist groups, to identify and prevent a so-called lone wolf attack perpetrated by an individual without allegiance to a specific organization.

In addition to those who targeted Abe and Kishida, such perpetrators include the suspect in the 2019 arson attack of Japanese anime studio Kyoto Animation, as well as the man found guilty of going on a stabbing spree at a care home for the mentally disabled in 2016.

Japan has some of the world's strictest gun laws, but the attacks on the Japanese lawmakers involved weapons constructed from everyday items, posing a problem for authorities.

The suspect who shot Abe used a homemade gun, while the suspect who targeted Kishida used what appeared to be a handmade pipe bomb, with necessary components readily available to purchase online or in hardware stores.

Fukuda believes "public safety (in Japan) has been gradually getting worse" in the years since the postwar boom, pointing to assailants who commit attacks of "desperation" caused by various societal factors.

Reflecting a similar perception among the public, an online survey conducted last October by the NPA found nearly 70% of respondents felt safety had declined over the past 10 years, following a number of attacks on trains and other public spaces in recent years.

After the incident involving Kishida on April 15, police took stronger preventive security measures, with police officers using metal detectors and inspecting people's baggage at stump speeches delivered by senior ruling and opposition lawmakers for elections held later in the month.

Police officers gather in Hiroshima Station on Thursday after a suspicious bag with no apparent owner was found at an adjacent shopping complex. | KYODO

But a police agency official stationed at a stump speech in front of a busy station in Tokyo admitted, "It is difficult to inspect all passersby."

In another incident that demonstrated the heightened sense of caution, shoppers were evacuated and a counterterrorism squad and a bomb unit were dispatched in central Hiroshima in late April, when a suspicious bag with no apparent owner was found at a shopping complex, although it was later determined to have been a lost item.

"There is a need to swiftly uncover the security issues in time for the summit," said Masahiro Tamura, professor at Kyoto Sangyo University and an alumnus of the NPA.

"It will be difficult to guarantee the safety of dignitaries without the people's cooperation in questioning," he added.

The G7 summit will be held at a hotel on Ujina Island, about 6 kilometers from central Hiroshima, with the island only accessible via one bridge from the mainland. Traffic will be stopped for inspection, while police will work with the Japan Coast Guard to prepare for a possible approach by suspicious ships and drones.

The world leaders, who will travel under the protection of their own security services, may also visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a tourist hot spot in the western city. Security will be tight when dignitaries are transported in vehicles, according to experts.

"While security will be well prepared at the hotel venue, locations that are further away with a large number of unknown people, including tourists, are vulnerable to attacks," Nihon University's Fukuda said.

Police are also increasing vigilance in the capital as they are aware a terrorist attack took place in London during a 2005 Group of Eight summit held in Gleneagles, Scotland.

"Although the summit will be held in Hiroshima, we must exercise utmost caution in Tokyo, where many embassies and government facilities are located," Hiroshi Kojima, head of the Metropolitan Police Department, told a security meeting in late April.

While Japan's crime-free reputation may have been dented by the recent high-profile incidents, the country has a strong track record of hosting planned international events without any security issues, Fukuda said.

"What Japan needs to do now is emphasize how safe the summits held in Japan have been in the past," he said.

19. Wanted Abu Sayyaf man arrested in Tawi-Tawi after 26 years of hiding

Wanted Abu Sayyaf man arrested in Tawi-Tawi after 26 years of hiding

mb.com.ph · by Aaron Recuenco

Police commandos arrested a suspected member of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) in a raid in the Languyan town of Tawi-Tawi on Thursday.

Police Brig. Gen. Rudolph Dimas, director of the Philippine National Police’s elite Special Action Force, said Tatoh Datu Adingih was forced to surrender when members of the 5th Special Action Battalion swooped down on his lair in Barangay Simalac.

photo: PNP SAF

“This was an intelligence-led operation. The suspect is classified as number nine in the most wanted person list in Tawi-Tawi,” said Dimas.

He said Adingih faces a case of murder, a non-bailable offense.

Dimas added that his men used the arrest warrant issued by Judge Abdulmaid K Muin of the RTC Branch 5 in Bongao, Tawi-Tawi in arresting the suspect, whom he said has been hiding in the past 26 years.

“He evaded arrest for the past 26 years by hiding under the false name of Tatoh Moro,” said Dimas.

The operation was supported by the Anti-Kidnapping Group which took custody of the arrested suspect. Other operating units include the Maritime Group, BASULTA (Basilan, Sulu, Tawi-Tawi) Regional Mobile Force Battalion and the Philippine Navy.

Dimas commended the troops for the arrest of Adingih, as he reiterated his support to the law enforcement operation of the territorial police units and he encouraged his men to sustain the fight against terrorism and insurgency.

mb.com.ph · by Aaron Recuenco

20. 'I Let Down the Combatant Commander': Marine Leader Regrets His Forces Weren't Available for Recent Crises

Whoa. I cannot recall hearing a service chief or commandant offer a statement like this.

Excerpts;

"[Gen. Michael Langley] didn't have a sea-based option -- that's how we reinforce embassies, that's how we evacuate them," Berger added, referring to the head of U.S. Africa Command.

...

Berger made clear that he views the capability as key to America's standing in the world.

"That's how we evacuated citizens out of Lebanon, that's how we went into Afghanistan in 2001," Berger said Friday. "Here's my concern: The first time this nation can't respond to a crisis and one of our adversaries can -- probably the last time we get asked."

'I Let Down the Combatant Commander': Marine Leader Regrets His Forces Weren't Available for Recent Crises

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · April 28, 2023

The Marine Corps' top general expressed serious regrets over the fact that Marines were not available to help in two major crises in recent months because of a lack of available Navy ships to position units in nearby waters.

"Places like Turkey or, the last couple of weeks, in Sudan -- I feel like I let down the combatant commander," Commandant Gen. David Berger told members of the House Armed Services Committee on Friday.

"[Gen. Michael Langley] didn't have a sea-based option -- that's how we reinforce embassies, that's how we evacuate them," Berger added, referring to the head of U.S. Africa Command.

The remarks come amid a growing debate in the halls of Congress over how the Navy is meeting the legal requirement to operate 31 amphibious ships for the Marines, designed to be used as maritime operations hubs. Corps leaders and even lower-ranking officers have been stressing that they need those ships at sea to fulfill their missions.

In this year's budget proposals, the Navy suggested that it would drop its amphibious ship numbers below that 31 ships threshold by retiring older dock landing ships, or LSDs, while pausing orders of the replacement San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships, or LPDs.

"We have some LSD platforms, for example, that cannot be made operationally available to fulfill the requirements that we need," Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said in the same hearing.

Meanwhile, reporting from USNI in March revealed that the pause in buying more LPDs didn't come from the Navy but rather from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Pentagon leaders told reporters at the time that they felt that the current array of amphibious ships was "sufficient."

The devastating earthquake that struck Turkey in February and killed more than 50,000 people and the more recent civil conflict in Sudan that prompted the evacuation of 70 people from the U.S. embassy in Khartoum have provided clear examples for Berger of the value of always having a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) nearby.

"That's the best chance you have of responding to a crisis immediately, and there needs to be one in the Pacific and one in [the] Mediterranean, Africa, [Middle East] area 12 months a year," Berger told Congress.

In the fleet, Navy leaders seem to agree.

During a recent Marine-sponsored trip to the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan, Capt. Martin Robertson, the commander of Amphibious Squadron Eight, told reporters that the ability for Marines to base off of amphibious ships is "a very important capability" that allows the two services to not only extract Americans from harm's way but also offer foreign humanitarian assistance and disaster response "if we're deployed forward somewhere."

"We can move very quickly and get into the area and get that initial help flowing," he added.

Col. Dennis Sampson, the commander of the 26th MEU, also stressed to reporters that "our presence does matter [and] amphibs are critically important for the Marine Corps."

Berger made clear that he views the capability as key to America's standing in the world.

"That's how we evacuated citizens out of Lebanon, that's how we went into Afghanistan in 2001," Berger said Friday. "Here's my concern: The first time this nation can't respond to a crisis and one of our adversaries can -- probably the last time we get asked."

-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @ktoropin.

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · April 28, 2023

21.China Balks at U.S. Push for Better Communications During Crises

Last week I participated in the Asan Plenum in Seoul. http://en.asaninst.org/events_category/asan-plenum/sub_category/program/

On the panel on "World Turbulence" Professor Jia Qingguo (a member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference) was asked why Xi does not pick up the phone to either respond to phone calls to Biden or initiate phone calls during times of crisis to try to reduce tension. He basically said that Xi is reluctant to do so out of fear that he will say something wrong and then be challenged by internal party leadership for doing so. He would rather not answer the phone and instead just protect his reputation. Rather than risk doing something wrong he would rather do nothing at all. My thought was, is this professor being unusually candid? Doesn't this sound like significant criticism of XI? What message could the professor be trying to send us? Is there some kind of hidden meaning or is this part of China's political warfare? Does this explain why there are poor military to military communcations? Is everyone afraid of saying something wrong?

China Balks at U.S. Push for Better Communications During Crises

U.S. seeks reliable channels to avoid conflict as Beijing cites lack of trust

By Brian SpegeleFollow

April 30, 2023 5:30 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-balks-at-u-s-push-for-better-communications-during-crises-3ed48ae6?st=9fbodvai4orwws1

BEIJING—China is resisting a U.S. push to build more-reliable systems for communicating in a crisis, raising the risk that a miscalculation by either side’s military could spill into conflict.

Rarely since the Cold War have tensions between two global powers risen to the levels that exist between the U.S. and China today. But unlike the Soviets, who embraced crisis hotlines with Washington as a way to defuse tensions, Beijing is resisting the establishment of new communication channels. As Chinese officials see it, hotlines give the U.S. cover to continue what they view as provocative military operations in China’s backyard.

The democratically self-governing island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as part of China, sits at the nexus of the challenge. Concern that a heavy military presence around Taiwan could cause a mishap is a major reason why Washington wants better communication lines with Beijing. Chinese leaders see the U.S.’s increasing support for Taiwan as undermining the foundations of trust needed to establish credible communication between the two powers.

The seriousness of the situation has grown as American and Chinese military jets and naval craft operate in proximity in contested skies and waters. The two militaries regularly brush up against each other as China seeks to ward off the U.S. from operating in the South China Sea, most of which China claims.

China’s use of military drills to exert pressure on Taiwan raises the risks of an accident. When China launched military exercises around Taiwan in April in response to a meeting between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen in California, a U.S. aircraft carrier was operating only a few hundred miles away.

The Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong was recently reported to be about 140 miles from southeastern Taiwan. PHOTO: TAIWAN’S MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The USS Milius, a guided-missile destroyer, making its way in April through the Taiwan Strait. PHOTO: U.S. NAVY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“There is a significant reason for concern if the United States and China stumble into a crisis over Taiwan,” said Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “I’m not convinced that all sides involved, including the Taiwanese, have what it takes to ensure that the crisis would be resolved successfully.”

The Biden administration says that it isn’t seeking the sort of confrontation with China that the U.S. had with the Soviet Union. For one thing, the U.S. and China are far more interconnected economically than the U.S. and Soviet Union were, despite the recent hostility and efforts by both countries to make their economies less interdependent.

Business executives with interests in stable U.S.-China ties have helped previously to smooth tensions between the countries. With business connections severed by the pandemic slowly being re-established, prospects for improved communication are rising.

Even so, senior U.S. officials are talking openly about taking a page from the previous era and establishing hotlines.

“We built those during the Cold War, and we think they are appropriate now,” said Kurt Campbell, the White House’s coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, at a think-tank event in March.

So far these efforts, which U.S. officials describe as putting guardrails around the relationship, haven’t worked, Mr. Campbell said.

China and the U.S. already have some hotlines that connect their leaders, including a military link established in 2008. A key problem is that China sometimes refuses to use this hotline in moments of crisis, rendering it an unreliable tool to manage tensions. In addition, unlike with red phones in Hollywood movies, meetings through the military hotline can take days or more to set up.

China declined to speak with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in February after the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that had drifted across the continental U.S. At the time, China said the U.S. hadn’t created the right conditions for dialogue.

U.S. sailors recovering a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon off Myrtle Beach, S.C., in February. PHOTO: U.S. NAVY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Calls for better communication ring hollow if Washington violates Beijing’s most sensitive areas of concern such as the “One China” policy on Taiwan, said Xu Bu, a former senior Chinese diplomat who is now president of the Foreign Ministry-affiliated China Institute of International Studies.

As part of its deal to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing in the 1970s, the U.S. agreed to sever formal ties with the government in Taipei. While Washington sells Taiwan weapons for defense, the U.S. doesn’t officially say whether it would protect Taiwan if attacked by China.

President Biden has repeatedly said that the U.S. military would defend Taiwan if China invaded. Each time, the White House has insisted that U.S. policy hasn’t changed. But Mr. Biden’s remarks, coupled with high-profile meetings between Taiwan’s President Tsai and senior U.S. lawmakers, have sowed doubts in Beijing about U.S. intentions.

“If the One China policy is not being abided by, if the One China principle is no longer the policy of Washington, D.C., then any guardrail or any kind of floor won’t be possible,” Mr. Xu said.

In a written response to a request for comment, the Foreign Ministry blamed the U.S. for troubled relations between the countries’ militaries. It said it didn’t believe in “communicating for communication’s sake.”

The U.S. “should stop claiming it wants to maintain communication while damaging the political foundations of bilateral relations,” China’s Foreign Ministry said.

China’s Ministry of National Defense didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A U.S. Defense Department spokesman said it was troubling that China “appears to view our outreach for improved communication as a point of leverage in the bilateral relationship.”

The first hotline linking the leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union was established in 1963 following the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the inability of the White House and Kremlin to understand each other’s intentions helped bring the world to the brink of nuclear conflict.

Soviet officials conferring with President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. PHOTO: MEDIA DRUM/ZUMA PRESS

When Israel mistakenly torpedoed the USS Liberty in the Mediterranean Sea during the Six-Day War of 1967, the U.S. dispatched aircraft to survey the scene. Fearing the sudden deployment would be misread by the Soviet Union, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a message through the hotline to explain the situation to Soviet leaders. Moscow quickly confirmed receipt of the message.

Half a century later, despite advancements in communication technologies, Adm. John Aquilino, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said he worries about not being able to reach his counterparts in the Chinese military quickly.

Soon after taking up the post in 2021, Adm. Aquilino said he sent China a request to speak with the leaders of its eastern and southern theater commands, which conduct operations in the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea, respectively. The Chinese never responded, he said.

“It’s concerning to me that I don’t have the ability to talk to someone should there be a reason to talk,” he said in March at an event in Singapore. For other commanders in the region, he said, “I’m on their speed dial, and they’re on mine.”

Chad Sbragia, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for China during the Trump administration, said China’s reticence aims to sow doubts in the minds of U.S. officials.

“If you put a net under acrobats, the acrobats go higher,” he said. China wants “to keep people feeling that escalation control is not manageable or that the risk might get out of control.”

Chad Sbragia, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, says Beijing seeks to create doubts in the minds of U.S. officials. PHOTO: JASON LEE/REUTERS

China’s political system is a major obstacle to building reliable hotlines with the U.S., according to some experts.

The 2008 military to military hotline, known as the Defense Telephone Link, is intended to connect the countries’ top defense officials. The Chinese side of the hotline is run by a Communist Party office known as the Zhongnanhai Telecommunications Directorate, according to a copy of the 2008 agreement.

“The problem isn’t the hotline, it’s the political system—that nobody can answer the phone and say anything without authorization,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

In late 2020, at the end of the Trump administration, U.S. intelligence learned that Beijing had grown concerned that the U.S. might launch an attack against China in the South China Sea. Gen. Mark Milley, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019 under Mr. Trump and has remained in the role under Mr. Biden, sought to assure China that no attack by the U.S. was planned, according to a memo he submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Gen. Mark Milley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to assure China in 2020 that no U.S. attack was planned. PHOTO: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

With tensions running high in October 2020, Gen. Milley first had to work through the Defense Attaché Office of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which then submitted a request to China’s Office for International Military Cooperation, to reach his counterpart.

“I have no other means of communicating with the PLA,” Gen. Milley wrote in the memo, referring to the People’s Liberation Army.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper instructed Gen. Milley to contact his Chinese counterpart on Oct. 22. When a call between them finally happened eight days later, Gen. Milley sought to assuage what he saw as misplaced Chinese fears. The messaging ultimately helped draw down Beijing’s concerns.

“My message again was consistent: Stay calm, steady, and de-escalate,” he recalled. “We are not going to attack you.”

Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

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