Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

- C.S. Lewis

“Some people do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions; and conclusions are not always pleasant.”

- Helen Keller

"Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think."

- Albert Einstein

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 2, 2023

2. Evan Gershkovich’s Arrest Marks a New Era of Hostage Diplomacy

3. Russia blames Ukraine for bomb that killed military blogger

4. Influential Russian Military Blogger Is Killed in St. Petersburg Bombing

5. Prominent Russian military blogger killed in St. Petersburg cafe blast

6. Finland Will Pack a Punch in NATO

7. Special Operations News Update - April 3, 2023 | SOF News

8. Putin’s Shakespearean Demons By Robert D. Kaplan

9. The U.S. Military's Great Relearning

10. In Defense of Denial: Why Deterring China Requires New Airpower Thinking

11. Elbridge Colby and Clausewitzian Diplomacy

12. Opinion: Canada must put Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on terrorist list under Criminal Code

13. Is Turkey about to ditch its Russian S-400 missile system?

14. Assad Will Return to Arab League Summit, Courtesy of Saudi Invite

15. Ruble Rumble – Offensive and Defensive Measures to Defeat Russia in the Economic Domain

16. Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence on US military sites-

17. It’s time for a reckoning with Chinese big tech

18. Report of the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness

19. Pentagon cyber policy post may stay unfilled during review

20. Our military is in a dangerous decline and this is the reason why

21. China warns Philippines not to give US more access to bases

22. On the front lines with the Free Burma Rangers

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 2, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-2-2023

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on April 2:

Russian forces continued limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.[27] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces made marginal gains northwest of Kreminna.[28]
Russian forces continued to attack Bakhmut and its environs.[29] Russian forces likely seized the AZOM plant in northern Bakhmut as ISW has previously assessed. Ukrainian forces conducted a missile strike on the plant on April 2.[30]
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.[31] Ukrainian Tavriisk Direction Forces Joint Press Center Spokesperson Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi stated that Russian forces retreated from unspecified positions in the Donetsk direction.[32]
Ukrainian forces conducted a HIMARS strike against a rail depot in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast, the third strike against the city in the past week.[33]
The UK Ministry of Defense assessed that a significant minority of Russia’s 200,000 casualties in Ukraine are due to poor discipline and training outside of combat, including due to excessive alcohol consumption and mishandling of small arms.[34]
Former Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) official Rodion Miroshnik denied ISW’s April 1 report citing Miroshnik that Russian authorities are deporting Ukrainian children to Russia under rest-and-rehabilitation schemes.[35] Miroshnik claimed that mothers and children from Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast went to Russian sanitoriums for medical treatment.[36] Miroshnik denied being closely affiliated with the current occupation regime, claiming that he has not served as advisor to the Head of the LNR for a year.[37] LNR People’s Militia Press Service called Miroshnik “advisor to the LNR Head” as recently as January 29, 2023, however.[38] Miroshnik claimed on his Telegram channel that he served as LNR Ambassador to Russia as recently as November 13, 2022.[39]

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 2, 2023

Apr 2, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 2, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko and Frederick W. Kagan

April 2, 8:45 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 an abbreviated campaign update today, April 2. This report discusses the assassination of prominent pro-war Russian milblogger Maksim Fomin (also known as Vladlen Tatarsky) in St. Petersburg on April 2. Fomin was one of the most significant Russian milbloggers with a Telegram platform of 560,000 followers and deep connections with the Wagner Group, the Kremlin, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), and the Russian nationalists who have been dominating the Russian information space since the start of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Fomin’s assassination at a Wagner-affiliated bar in St. Petersburg may reveal further fractures within the Kremlin and its inner circle. Fomin was a vocal critic of the Russian military command and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD). Fomin’s death marks the first high-profile assassination of an ultranationalist milblogger in Russia since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Unknown actors killed Russian milblogger Maksim Fomin in a deliberate and targeted attack during an event in a St. Petersburg bar reportedly belonging to Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin on April 2. Social media footage showed Fomin receiving a statue as a gift from a female audience member who introduced herself as a sculptor moments before the explosion.[1] Fomin was making a public presentation at the Street Food Bar #1 Café in downtown St. Petersburg. Russian authorities reported that the explosion killed Fomin and wounded 30 audience members who had gathered to listen to Fomin discuss his experience as a frontline correspondent.[2] The event was advertised as open to the public and had approximately 100 attendees. Prigozhin confirmed that he had offered his Street Food Bar #1 Café to the Russian ultranationalist movement “Kiber Front Z,” to hold Fomin’s event and other nationalist gatherings.[3] Witnesses stated that the woman who presented the statue to Fomin identified herself as Nastya and told the audience that the event’s security asked her if there was a bomb inside the statue during a Q&A session.[4] Witnesses noted that there was no security when entering the event, however, and that the explosion occurred within three to five minutes after the exchange between Fomin and the woman.[5] Russian Interior Ministry sources told Russian state media that the explosive may have remotely detonated and that the woman or other unknown individuals may have been responsible for this attack.[6] Russian state media published unconfirmed information that Russian police detained St. Peterburg resident Daria Trepova, who had previously been arrested for anti-war protests in February 2022.[7] Russian Interior Ministry sources also revealed that Russian special services had known about assassination plans against Fomin for a long time.

Russian officials and propagandists have accused Ukraine of staging a “terrorist attack” to assassinate Fomin. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused Kyiv of Fomin’s assassination and praised Russian milbloggers for their war coverage—seemingly ignoring the fact that Fomin and other milbloggers routinely criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA).[8] Russian propagandist Tina Kandelaki stated that Russia needs to punish terrorists who still have “power, water, working railways, restaurants, and internet”—likely referring to Ukrainians who survived the Russian missile campaigns against the Ukrainian energy infrastructure during the fall of 2022 and the winter of 2023.[9] Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan echoed Kandelaki’s calls for retribution against Ukraine for this assassination.[10] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian agents have likely been attending similar milblogger events, blaming the attack on Ukrainian special forces and the failures of Russian security.[11]

Prigozhin oddly stated on April 2 that he would not “blame the Kyiv regime” for the deaths of Fomin and Russian ultranationalist figure Daria Dugina, suggesting that Ukrainian agents were not in fact responsible.[12] Dugina was assassinated on August 20. Prigozhin noted that a group of radicals unaffiliated with the Ukrainian government may be responsible for such attacks. Advisor to Ukrainian Presidential Office Mykhailo Podolyak stated that Fomin’s death was a result of infighting and political competition among Russian actors.[13]

Fomin was a prominent figure in the Russian pro-war nationalist information space, although not more so than some others. Fomin was a Wagner-affiliated convict who escaped from prison in Donetsk Oblast at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Donbas in 2014.[14] Fomin also claimed to have served in proxy armed formations, regularly expressed ultranationalist views, and balanced his allegiance to Wagner with remaining loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Fomin attended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s event announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions on September 30 where he stated: “We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob everyone we need; Everything will be as we like.”[15] ISW also uncovered that Fomin had been involved with Islamic jihadist propaganda, likely in order to expand Russian recruitment efforts.[16] Fomin co-hosted a TV show with another prominent milblogger, appeared on Russian state media platforms, and participated in numerous Russian state broadcasts.[17] Fomin had also led numerous crowdfunding and recruitment campaigns, promoted violent militarism, and supported Putin’s ideology and maximalist goals to “denazify” and “demilitarize” Ukraine.

Fomin shared his ideology and activities with many other Russian milbloggers, however, and does not appear to have been a target worthy of special attention from Kyiv. A number of the milbloggers ISW regularly uses and cites are not only war correspondents, but also participants in efforts to fund, recruit for, and advance the Russian war effort through various parastatal and private organizations.[18] This cadre of milbloggers not only speaks to but also represents a constituency critical for Putin’s war effort. ISW has long assessed that the role these milbloggers play in all their capacities is a key factor explaining the surprising degree of tolerance Putin has hitherto shown them. Fomin’s assassination could be evidence that Putin’s tolerance toward these milbloggers, in general, is waning, but it could also have resulted instead from Fomin’s proximity to Prigozhin.

Fomin’s assassination at Prigozhin’s bar is likely part of a larger pattern of escalating Russian internal conflicts involving Prigozhin and Wagner. Fomin had attended another event earlier in the day without incident, so it appears that the attack was deliberately staged in a space owned by Prigozhin.[19] Advisor to Ukrainian Presidential Office Mykhailo Podolyak stated that Fomin’s death was a result of antifighting and political competition among Russian actors.[20] Some Russian political analysts also speculated that Prigozhin was supposed to attend Fomin’s event, although there is no confirmation of that speculation.[21]

Fomin’s assassination may have been intended as a warning to Prigozhin, who has been increasingly questioning core Kremlin talking points about the war in Ukraine and even obliquely signaling an interest in the Russian presidency, whether in competition with Putin or as his successor.[22] Fomin’s biography and behavior bear a resemblance to Prigozhin’s as both became prominent ultranationalist figures after being imprisoned and receiving pardons.

Russian officials may be intending to use Fomin’s assassination to drive the self-censorship of a growing Russian civil society questioning the progress of the war in bars. ISW previously observed FSB raids of bars in Moscow and St. Petersburg in March launched on the basis of accusations that individuals in those bars were providing financial assistance to Ukrainian forces and involving minors in “anti-social acts.”[23] Putin had instructed the FSB to intensify counterintelligence measures and crackdown against the spread of pro-Ukrainian ideology on February 28—an order that has been used to dismantle gatherings in Moscow and St. Petersburg bars. The Wagner-affiliated Kiber Front Z movement has been spearheading discussions about the war in Prigozhin-owned bars for months, and it is possible this high-profile assassination will discourage people from attending similar events. This attack may also be an effort to intimidate other Wagner-affiliated milbloggers.

The assassination is already deepening a divide within the Russian milblogger space, which may ultimately be beneficial to the Kremlin’s efforts to consolidate control of the information space. Prominent Russian milbloggers exposed the identity of a smaller milblogger publishing under the handle MoscowCalling who joked that the woman involved in Fomin’s murder was Dugina.[24] The milbloggers claimed that former Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) fighter Andrey Kurshin has been accusing Russia of war crimes in Ukraine using the handle MoscowCalling while residing in Moscow.[25] The milbloggers claimed that the Russian police and FSB have failed to prevent milbloggers such as Kurshin from fostering anti-government attitudes online, thereby allowing Ukrainian intelligence to stage attacks in Russia. The milbloggers also called for the arrests and executions of other milbloggers who have expressed similar views against Putin, his regime, and the conduct of the war.[26] The Kremlin may use such divisions to justify censorship of certain milbloggers who are vocal critics of Putin.

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on April 2:

Russian forces continued limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.[27] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces made marginal gains northwest of Kreminna.[28]
Russian forces continued to attack Bakhmut and its environs.[29] Russian forces likely seized the AZOM plant in northern Bakhmut as ISW has previously assessed. Ukrainian forces conducted a missile strike on the plant on April 2.[30]
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.[31] Ukrainian Tavriisk Direction Forces Joint Press Center Spokesperson Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi stated that Russian forces retreated from unspecified positions in the Donetsk direction.[32]
Ukrainian forces conducted a HIMARS strike against a rail depot in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast, the third strike against the city in the past week.[33]
The UK Ministry of Defense assessed that a significant minority of Russia’s 200,000 casualties in Ukraine are due to poor discipline and training outside of combat, including due to excessive alcohol consumption and mishandling of small arms.[34]
Former Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) official Rodion Miroshnik denied ISW’s April 1 report citing Miroshnik that Russian authorities are deporting Ukrainian children to Russia under rest-and-rehabilitation schemes.[35] Miroshnik claimed that mothers and children from Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast went to Russian sanitoriums for medical treatment.[36] Miroshnik denied being closely affiliated with the current occupation regime, claiming that he has not served as advisor to the Head of the LNR for a year.[37] LNR People’s Militia Press Service called Miroshnik “advisor to the LNR Head” as recently as January 29, 2023, however.[38] Miroshnik claimed on his Telegram channel that he served as LNR Ambassador to Russia as recently as November 13, 2022.[39]

Correction: ISW incorrectly called May 9 the “Soviet Labor Day” in its April 1 update. The correct holiday is “Victory Day.”

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/world/europe/russian-military-blogger...; https://t.me/fontankaspb/37122; https://t.me/rentv_news/90467 ; https://t.me/new_militarycolumnist/104740

[2] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/04/02/v-peterburge-v-kafe-evgeniya-prigozhina-proizoshel-vzryv-vo-vremya-tvorcheskogo-vechera-voenkora-vladlena-tatarskogo-po-predvaritelnym-dannym-on-pogib; https://t.me/rian_ru/198703

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/world/europe/russian-military-blogger...; https://t.me/cyber_frontZ/10718 ; https://t.me/concordgroup_official/678

[4] https://www.spb dot kp.ru/daily/27485.5/4742343/; https://twitter.com/the_ins_ru/status/1642563940730261506

[5] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/04/02/kakaya-to-poklonnitsa-podarila-statuetku-posle-etogo-proizoshel-vzryv

[6] https://t.me/rbc_news/71349

[7] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/02/interfaks-v-peterburge-zaderzhana-podozrevaemaya-po-delu-ob-ubiystve-voenkora-vladlena-tatarskogo

[8] https://t.me/MariaVladimirovnaZakharova/5126

[9] https://t.me/tikandelaki/14779

[10] https://t.me/margaritasimonyan/12806

[11] https://t.me/strelkovii/4388

[12] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/678

[13] https://twitter.com/Podolyak_M/status/1642571186293858304

[14] https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/reports/wagner-group-blogge...

[15] https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/16515

[16] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[17] https://smotrim dot ru/brand/69232; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-orvP4Q7sc; https://rutube dot ru/video/4ffe9cb95217642dc60712228a72f8a2/; https://rutube dot ru/video/80c57b5570fef5394b2981c93684089c/; https://rutube dot ru/video/4ffe9cb95217642dc60712228a72f8a2/; https://rutube dot ru/video/c2e73468f48064b1d27cfc42c91a3dda/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FizdFwONRP0

[18] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[19] https://www.severreal.org/a/v-peterburge-pri-vzryve-v-kafe-pogib-voenkor...

[20] https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1642641229564325888

[21] https://t.me/bbbreaking/152011

[22] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Offensive...

[23] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[24] https://t.me/rybar/45375

[25] https://t.me/rybar/45375 ; https://t.me/rybar/45373 ; https://t.me/holmogortalks/28131

[26] https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/22272

[27]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0gCzRisYpJfpPj5WWCbF...; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0gCzRisYpJfpPj5WWCbF...; https://t.me/wargonzo/11721; https://t.me/grey_zone/17998; https://t.me/sashakots/39144

[28] https://t.me/wargonzo/11721; https://t.me/grey_zone/17998; https://t.me/sashakots/39144

[29]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0gCzRisYpJfpPj5WWCbF...; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02MjCgquKZhGrxYzrQ2i...; https://t.me/readovkanews/55951; https://t.me/wargonzo/11721

[30] https://www.tiktok.com/@www.tiktok.com.badboy67/video/7217073078667316486 ; https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1642240653332566018 ; https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1642280032109228038;

[31]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0gCzRisYpJfpPj5WWCbF...; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02MjCgquKZhGrxYzrQ2i...; https://t.me/wargonzo/11721

[32] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/04/02/na-doneczkomu-napryamku-vorog-vidstupyv-iz-deyakyh-pozyczij/

[33] https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/22249; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/02/vsu-obstrelyali-lokomotivnoe-depo-v-melitopole-shest-chelovek-raneny; https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/1634; https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/1635; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://t.me/readovkanews/55970; https://t.me/readovkanews/55968; https://t.me/readovkanews/55966

[34] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1642407117049954307

[35] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[36] https://t.me/miroshnik_r/10905; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/10904

[37] https://t.me/miroshnik_r/10905

[38] https://t.me/sons_fatherland/10050; https://lugansk-news dot ru/society/2023/02/01/43376.html

[39] http://web.archive.org/web/20221113210635/https://t.me/miroshnik_r

Evan Gershkovich’s Arrest Marks a New Era of Hostage Diplomacy

The Wall Street Journal reporter is the latest in a growing list of Americans who have been detained by foreign governments on bogus or politicized charges, often to gain leverage with Washington

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-reporter-evan-gershkovich-russia-detained-hostage-diplomacy-f5545f85

By Louise RadnofskyFollow

, Warren P. StrobelFollow

and Aruna ViswanathaFollow

April 2, 2023 6:19 pm ET

More Americans in recent years have been detained by foreign governments on what the U.S. considers to be bogus or politicized charges than have been taken captive by terrorism groups or criminal gangs, according to U.S. authorities and private assessments.

The latest is Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested last week by Russian authorities and charged with espionage. The 31-year-old journalist who had covered the rapidly escalating new era of state hostage-taking has suddenly become the face of it.

John Bolton, who was national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, called Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest “an act of state terror,” calculated to put pressure on President Biden. “This is as targeted a hostage-taking as you can imagine,” he said.

Within hours of his detention on Wednesday, the highest figures in the U.S. government denied the charges against Mr. Gershkovich, bluntly called for him to be freed and accused Moscow of targeting Americans. “Let him go,” Mr. Biden said to reporters on Friday.

“The Wall Street Journal demands the immediate release of our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, a distinguished journalist who was arrested while reporting in Russia,” the Journal said in a statement Saturday. “No reporter should ever be detained for simply doing their job.”

For Mr. Gershkovich, actions that might have once unfolded over weeks or even months have rolled out at a rapid clip under the brightest glare of attention. On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov conveying his “grave concern” over the detention.

Russia has said that it is acting in accordance with its own laws, with the Foreign Ministry saying that “it is unacceptable for officials in Washington and the Western media to whip up a stir with the clear intention of giving this case a political coloring.”

Current and former U.S. officials and other hostage-case watchers point out that Russia’s detention of an American journalist—for the first time in nearly four decades—is a brazen step, especially when accompanied by an accusation of espionage and coming amid growth in such cases around the world.

“There’s been a marked, a dramatically increased, taking of American hostages, and hostages in general that are journalists,” said former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who has a foundation that works with families of detained Americans to free them.

The James W. Foley Legacy Foundation counts 54 U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are deemed to be held hostage or wrongfully detained in 15 countries, including adversaries such as Cuba and allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The foundation is named after a U.S. journalist who was kidnapped by Islamic State and murdered in Syria in 2014.

While Russia isn’t the only country involved in the phenomenon, it is one that requires the U.S. to go toe-to-toe over individuals’ lives with a rival superpower on the opposite side of a shooting war in Europe.

Reporter Evan Gershkovich, detained on suspicion of espionage, is escorted to a car outside a court building in Moscow on March 30.

PHOTO: EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA/REUTERS

Since early last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. has found itself openly negotiating with Moscow for the release of three American citizens. Trevor Reed, a former U.S. Marine, was freed in a prisoner exchange in April 2022. Women’s basketball star Brittney Griner, arrested days before the invasion on drug charges, flew home after a swap in December. Another former U.S. Marine, Paul Whelan, was left behind on both occasions after a deal couldn’t be reached for him.

Now, there is a new name being factored into a complex human and geopolitical calculus: Evan Gershkovich.

Such incidents have become so frequent that the U.S. has created a bureaucratic machine to deal with them.

A 2020 law—named for retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran in 2007 and is now presumed dead—established 11 criteria for what could constitute wrongful detention of a U.S. citizen. All Americans are entitled to consular assistance if they are held overseas, but the designation of being held unlawfully—because as a U.S. citizen they were targeted for arrest, for example—triggers a different process.

The Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs becomes responsible for the case, and other resources are deployed as well. The Biden administration routinely declares it has “no higher priority than the recovery and return of Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad.”

In a strategy not possible with rogue groups that take hostages, the U.S. typically has diplomatic channels with foreign governments that open the way for negotiations.

But there are geopolitical risks at every turn. Cases typically involve legal charges, with countries insistent that they have to uphold the integrity of their judicial systems. And sending a military force to the rescue or paying a big ransom aren’t generally on the table when governments are involved.

The U.S. found itself in a geopolitical quandary in 2018 after asking Canadian authorities to arrest a celebrity Chinese businesswoman on charges related to U.S. sanctions on Iran. In what was widely viewed as retaliation, China arrested two Canadians and held them until 2021, when the U.S. agreed to a deal under which the woman was released.

Dealing with state actors “is so much more complicated” than dealing with rogue groups, said Diane Foley, the mother of James Foley and the founder and president of the foundation that bears his name.

Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who was detained and accused of espionage, holds a sign as he stands inside a defendants’ cage during his verdict hearing in 2020.

PHOTO: MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

Roger Carstens, who has held the position of Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs since 2020, has become the public face of detainee diplomacy. A former Army Ranger, he is praised by some families of Americans held overseas.

A lawyer who dealt with both the Trump and Biden administrations on behalf of detainees said that Mr. Carstens promptly returns text messages at all hours and is able to translate policy into messages that are comforting to families. At the same time, he is negotiating within a framework that he doesn’t control.

Every detainee case is different, and not all details are ever known publicly about how they are resolved. The sample size is small. Still, there is an emerging formula that has become apparent to some researchers, who say it can explain the varying nature of detainee diplomacy, depending on the country involved.

“My impression is that the stronger countries seem to be more interested in prisoner exchanges; that seems to be the approach of Russia and China in these cases,” said Danielle Gilbert, a fellow in U.S. foreign policy and international security at Dartmouth College who studies hostage taking and recovery, including by state actors.

“Weaker countries have a much wider range of things they are interested in when they hold Americans hostage or detain them for leverage, and that might be a whole host of geopolitical concessions,” she said.

That rule of thumb can explain how Americans have been brought home from countries such as North Korea, Turkey, Egypt and Myanmar in exchange for concessions that were less obvious or concrete than a prisoner swap. People who have worked on past cases have also described securing a release after the countries involved received attention from the U.S. president or gifts of humanitarian aid, Dr. Gilbert said.

That lays bare the Russian problem: When negotiating with the U.S., at least, it is interested mostly in a public prisoner trade, and no alternative such as the return of confiscated diplomatic property is likely to suffice.

When Ms Griner was detained on drug charges days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in mid-February 2022, experts warned that any deal for her would be complicated by an unswervable need for Russia to believe that it was receiving assets of comparable value.

Two-time Olympic gold medalist and WNBA star Brittney Griner is escorted to a courtroom outside Moscow in July.

PHOTO: YURI KOCHETKOV/SHUTTERSTOCK

That didn’t change over the months that followed, even as different combinations and calculations were mulled.

The U.S. took the unusual step that summer of openly pressing Russia to accept what it termed a “substantial proposal” for Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan— which people familiar with the matter said involved offering to release Viktor Bout, a prominent Russian businessman sentenced in 2012 to serve 25 years for arms dealing.

Russians repeatedly signaled that a two-for-one swap would never be sufficient. Ultimately, in December Mr. Bout was traded for Ms. Griner alone. There was no movement on a second candidate who could be exchanged for Mr. Whelan, who has been held since late 2018 on espionage charges he and the U.S. have consistently denied.

A similar pattern had been on display when Russia freed Mr. Reed, who was serving a nine-year prison sentence after being found guilty of assaulting two police officers. The U.S. deemed that he had been wrongfully detained.

Mr. Reed was swapped for Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko, who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2011 for conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. Washington tried but failed to obtain Mr. Whelan’s release then as well.

The templates of these two cases provide some idea of how negotiations between the U.S. and Russia might unfold over Mr. Gershkovich.

Ex-Marine Trevor Reed, who was detained in 2019 and accused of assaulting police officers, stands inside a defendants’ cage during a court hearing in 2020.

PHOTO: TATYANA MAKEYEVA/REUTERS

Mr. Richardson, the former governor-turned-hostage-negotiator, was involved in the Reed, Whelan and Griner cases, but isn’t currently involved in Mr. Gershkovich’s case.

He speculated that the Russians detained Mr. Gershkovich in part as a “tit for tat” in the wake of the recent U.S. charges against Sergey Cherkasov, whom the Department of Justice is accusing of acting as an illegal agent in the U.S. using a Brazilian identity. He also noted the worsening U.S.-Russia relations, and that Russia’s intense focus on espionage charges has increased.

“The espionage issues are the toughest to resolve, but you can resolve them,” he said.

Tensions within the U.S. over how to respond to hostage-taking have grown since the exchange of Ms. Griner for Mr. Bout on an airport tarmac in Abu Dhabi was watched around the world.

Ms. Griner’s celebrity fueled a large campaign around her detention that was directed at the U.S. government, exhorting it to pursue her release. It is a playbook likely to be deployed again and again.

“To get Evan out, what is needed is not just official channels, but nonofficial channels and a multi-pronged media campaign, like Brittney Griner, which was very effective,” Mr. Richardson said.

An underlying dilemma is unlikely to be resolved, even as it becomes more familiar: that negotiating for hostages encourages taking them.

Some U.S. officials, particularly at the Justice Department, argued against the exchange of Mr. Bout for Ms. Griner. They complained that it would give Russia an incentive to take more Americans, as well as that the cases were asymmetrical: Ms. Griner was convicted of carrying less than a gram of hashish oil into Russia, while Mr. Bout was accused of a career of arms trafficking.

Advocates for trading Mr. Bout, who included his sentencing judge, had pointed to the dwindling years on his sentence and the fact he had been charged as a result of a sting operation.

Some U.S. officials now believe their warnings were borne out in Mr. Gershkovich’s detention. For others, it is no longer a question of whether the U.S. will trade prisoners, but which prisoners it can identify as palatable enough to let go who are also sufficiently desirable to Russia.

Men leave the Lefortovo detention center where Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is being held.

PHOTO: YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

U.S. officials discussed some possible options soon after Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest, a person familiar with the discussions said.

At the Journal, Evan Gershkovich covered Russia’s detention of Brittney Griner, from the news of her arrest, through her legal proceedings and trial, and the protracted negotiations for her release, including in the days up to her return to the U.S. in December.

Late Saturday night, Brittney Griner was writing on Instagram about him.

“We must do everything in our power to bring him and all Americans home,” she wrote. “Every American who is taken is ours to fight for and every American returned is a win for us all.”

James T. Areddy contributed to this article.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com, Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com

3. Russia blames Ukraine for bomb that killed military blogger

Russia is tossing out a broad narrative - Ukrainian "special services," Navalny's foundation and the arrest of Darya Tryopova

Excerpts:

The National Anti-Terrorist Committee, a state structure that coordinates counterterrorism operations, said that the “terrorist act” against Tatarsky was “planned by Ukrainian special services” with the involvement of people who have cooperated with an anti-corruption foundation created by jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. It noted that the arrested suspect was an “active supporter” of Navalny’s group.

Shortly before the announcement, Russia’s Investigative Committee, the top state criminal investigation agency, reported the arrest of Darya Tryopova, a 26-year-old St. Petersburg resident suspected of involvement in the attack. Tryopova had been previously detained for taking part in anti-war rallies.

Russia blames Ukraine for bomb that killed military blogger

AP · by The Associated Press · April 3, 2023

Russia’s top counterterrorism body on Monday blamed Ukrainian intelligence agencies for the bombing attack that killed a well-known Russian military blogger who fervently supported Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

Russian officials said Vladlen Tatarsky, 40, was killed Sunday as he was leading a discussion at a cafe on the banks of the Neva River in the historic heart of St. Petersburg. Over 30 people were wounded by the blast, and 10 of them remain in grave condition, according to the authorities.

The National Anti-Terrorist Committee, a state structure that coordinates counterterrorism operations, said that the “terrorist act” against Tatarsky was “planned by Ukrainian special services” with the involvement of people who have cooperated with an anti-corruption foundation created by jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. It noted that the arrested suspect was an “active supporter” of Navalny’s group.

Shortly before the announcement, Russia’s Investigative Committee, the top state criminal investigation agency, reported the arrest of Darya Tryopova, a 26-year-old St. Petersburg resident suspected of involvement in the attack. Tryopova had been previously detained for taking part in anti-war rallies.

Investigators believe that the bomb was hidden in a bust of the blogger that the suspect had given to him as a gift just before the explosion.

According to Russian media reports, Tryopova told investigators that she was used as a carrier to deliver the explosive device, but didn’t know that it was hidden in the bust.

Witnesses said that the suspect asked questions and exchanged remarks with Tatarsky during the discussion. One witness, said the woman told Tatarsky that she had made a bust of the blogger but that guards asked her to leave it at the door, suspecting it could be a bomb. They joked and laughed, and then she went to the door, grabbed the bust and presented it to Tatarsky.

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A video showed Tatarsky making jokes about the bust and putting it on the table next to him just before the explosion.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, the state’s top criminal investigation agency, opened a probe on charges of murder.

No one publicly claimed responsibility, but military bloggers and patriotic commentators immediately blamed Ukraine for the attack and compared the bombing to last August’s assassination of nationalist TV commentator Darya Dugina, who was killed when a remotely controlled explosive device planted in her SUV blew up as she was driving on the outskirts of Moscow.

Russian authorities blamed Ukraine’s military intelligence for Dugina’s death, but Kyiv denied involvement.

Dugina’s father, Alexander Dugin, a nationalist philosopher and political theorist who strongly supports the invasion of Ukraine, hailed Tatarsky as an “immortal” hero who died to save the Russian people.

Reacting to Tatarsky’s death, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said late Sunday his activities “have won him the hatred of the Kyiv regime” and noted that he and other Russian military bloggers have long faced Ukrainian threats.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian millionaire owner of the Wagner Group military contractor spearheading Moscow’s offensive in eastern Ukraine, said he owned the cafe and handed it over to a patriotic group for meetings. He said he doubts the Ukrainian authorities’ involvement in the bombing, saying the attack was likely launched by a “group of radicals” unrelated to the government in Kyiv.

Since the fighting in Ukraine began Feb. 24, 2022, Ukrainian authorities have refrained from claiming responsibility for various fires, explosions and apparent assassinations in Russia. At the same time, officials in Kyiv have jubilantly greeted such events and insisted on Ukraine’s right to launch attacks in Russia.

A top Ukrainian government official cast the explosion that killed Tatarsky as part of internal turmoil.

“Spiders are eating each other in a jar,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote in English on Twitter late Sunday. “Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”

Tatarsky, who had filed regular reports from Ukraine, was the pen name for Maxim Fomin, who had accumulated more than 560,000 followers on his Telegram messaging app channel.

Born in the Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland, Tatarsky worked as a coal miner before starting a furniture business. When he ran into financial difficulties, he robbed a bank and was sentenced to prison. He fled from custody after a Russia-backed separatist rebellion engulfed the Donbas in 2014, weeks after Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Then he joined separatist rebels and fought on the front line before turning to blogging.

AP · by The Associated Press · April 3, 2023

4. Influential Russian Military Blogger Is Killed in St. Petersburg Bombing

I guess blogging is a dangerous act.

Influential Russian Military Blogger Is Killed in St. Petersburg Bombing

By Ivan Nechepurenko and Anatoly Kurmanaev

April 2, 2023

The New York Times · by Anatoly Kurmanaev · April 3, 2023

Vladlen Tatarsky represented a radical wing of pro-invasion bloggers and activists who backed Moscow’s war but also criticized what they saw as the flaws in the Russian Army.

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Russian police officers inspected the aftermath of the explosion at a cafe where the blogger popularly known as Vladlen Tatarsky had been giving a public talk.Credit...Associated Press

April 2, 2023

An influential Russian military blogger who called for an escalation of the war in Ukraine was killed when a bomb exploded in a cafe in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday, in what appeared to be one of the most high-profile attacks on a supporter of Moscow’s invasion.

The blogger, Maksim Fomin, who was more popularly known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was giving a public talk in the center of Russia’s second-largest city when the explosion ripped through Street Food Bar #1 Cafe, the Russian Interior Ministry and investigative authorities said.

Videos posted on social media showed Mr. Tatarsky receiving a small statue in his likeness onstage shortly before the explosion. An independent local news outlet, Fontanka, cited a witness as saying the blogger had received the statue as a gift from a woman who introduced herself as a sculptor called Nastya.

Another witness said Mr. Tatarsky had asked the woman to bring the statue to him, after she said she had been told she could not take it inside because of bombing fears, according to the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda. About 100 people had gathered at the cafe to listen to him speak about his experience as a military blogger, Fontanka said.

At least 25 other people were injured in the explosion, with 19 of them hospitalized, according to the city’s governor, Aleksandr Beglov.

Mr. Tatarsky represented a radical wing of pro-invasion bloggers and activists who backed Moscow’s war but also criticized what they saw as the flaws in the Russian Army. His death was the most high-profile attack on a prominent war supporter inside Russia since August, when a car bomb killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of an ultranationalist Russian supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin’s.

United States intelligence officials later said they believed the attack had been authorized by parts of the Ukrainian government, which denied any involvement.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, suggested that the attack was a sign of internal fractures in Russian society, in line with Kyiv’s usual description of acts of sabotage in Russia since the war began.

Vladlen Tatarsky in an undated photo from social media.Credit...Telegram, via Reuters

Mr. Podolyak wrote on Twitter: “Spiders are eating each other in a jar. Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”

Russian officials pointed the finger at the government in Kyiv, without directly accusing Ukraine of killing the blogger. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Mr. Tatarsky’s work had “caused hatred” of the Ukrainian government.

Sergei Neverov, deputy speaker of the Russian Parliament, said, “It is clear to everyone who is behind it.”

He wrote on the Telegram messaging app that the attack had been an attempt to terrorize Russian society, adding that it destroyed any prospect of a peace deal.

“We only saw one more proof that there’s no one to talk to Kyiv,” Mr. Neverov said. “They won’t reach their aims. We will not get scared.”

Some of Mr. Tatarsky’s peers immediately called for an escalation of strikes against Ukraine to avenge the attack.

“Are we going to wait until GUR carry out a terror attack in the Kremlin?” wrote another military blogger who posts under the name Notes of Veteran, using the acronym for Ukraine’s military intelligence. “Perhaps only then will there be strikes against centers of decision-making in Kyiv.”

A native of eastern Ukraine, Mr. Tatarsky, 40, obtained Russian citizenship in 2021. His survivors include his wife, Ksenia. Local news outlets said he also had a son from a first marriage.

Mr. Tatarsky took the side of the Russian proxy forces when they occupied the city of Donetsk in 2014. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, he had advocated waging a total war against Ukraine and its population and called for the elimination of the Ukrainian state. He also denounced Russian activists and cultural figures who opposed the war.

He had posted news, opinion and pro-war propaganda to his 560,000 followers on Telegram. He was also a regular commentator on Russian state television.

Last November, when a Russian commander announced that Moscow’s troops would be pulled from the strategically important city of Kherson, Ukraine, Mr. Tatarsky was among Russia’s hawkish military bloggers and commentators who responded with despair, anguish and denial.

Mr. Tatarsky reacted to the news by saying in a post that Russia’s overall plan for war was “idiotic” and “based on disinformation.”

He was also one of the most prominent voices of an ultranationalist faction in the country.

“We want to kill every person dressed in the uniform of the enemy’s army,” he wrote in a Telegram post in January, after the Russian government proposed a brief cease-fire.

In recent months, he appeared to have grow increasingly pessimistic of Russia’s war prospects, saying that only a major overhaul could secure a victory.

He was critical of Russian military commanders and highlighted the problems of the Russian Army. In a recent video, he suggested that nothing would change if “you replace the defense minister or chief of the general staff.”

“We need to change the system,” he said.

The New York Times · by Anatoly Kurmanaev · April 3, 2023

5. Prominent Russian military blogger killed in St. Petersburg cafe blast

Excerpts:

Tatarsky supported the war in Ukraine and had gained popularity since the start of what Russia calls its “special military operation” by providing analysis and commentary.

Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, created his Telegram channel in 2019, naming it in honor of the protagonist of Victor Pelevin’s novel “Generation ‘P,’” according to Russian state news agency Vesti. He had since written several books.

Before that, in 2014, Tatarsky took part in fighting alongside Russian forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, according to Vesti, citing public sources, when Putin’s fighters first invaded the country.

Tatarsky had more than half a million followers on Telegram, and while he was aggressively pro-war, he had sometimes been critical of Russian setbacks in Ukraine.

In May last year, he told CNN that he was not criticizing the overall operation, rather “individual episodes,” and that he still believed Russia would achieve its goals in Ukraine.

Prominent Russian military blogger killed in St. Petersburg cafe blast | CNN

CNN · by Radina Gigova,Mariya Knight,Katharina Krebs · April 2, 2023

CNN —

A well-known Russian military blogger was killed in an explosion at a cafe in St. Petersburg on Sunday, officials said, in what appeared to be an audacious attack on a high-profile pro-Kremlin figure.

Vladlen Tatarsky died when a blast tore through the cafe where he was appearing as a guest of a pro-war group called Cyber Front Z. Authorities said they were treating the case as suspected murder.

At least 32 people were injured in the blast, with 10 in serious condition, state media Ria Novosti reported, citing the Russian Ministry of Health.

Investigators were questioning everyone who was inside the cafe, state media reported. Photos of the scene showed extensive damage to the building in which the cafe was located.

Russia’s Investigative Committee for St. Petersburg said it had opened a murder investigation. Investigators and forensic specialists were on scene, the agency said, and that it was working to establish the circumstances surrounding the explosion. Russia’s Interior Ministry also confirmed Tatarsky was killed in the blast.

On Monday, Russia’s Interior Ministry added a woman, identified as Daria Trepova, to a wanted list as a suspect “in the murder of military war correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky,” Russian state media TASS reported.

St. Petersburg’s prosecutor Viktor Melnik traveled to the scene to coordinate the actions of emergency services and law enforcement agencies, TASS reported.

Investigators and members of emergency services work at the site of an explosion at a cafe in St. Petersburg, Russia on April 2, 2023.

Anton Vaganov/Reuters

Reports: Explosive hidden in a ‘figurine’

Russian media reports suggested that Tatarsky may have been killed by a device hidden in a figurine presented to him by a woman before the blast. Russian state news media, citing law enforcement agencies and eyewitness accounts, said the woman was attending the event at which Tatarsky was speaking.

Ria Novosti quoted one witness as saying: “This woman sat at our table. I saw her from the back as she was turned away. When she gifted him the figurine, she went to sit in a different place by the window and forgot her phone at our table.”

The witness added: “The host at the stage took the figurine from the box and showcased it, Vladlen held it for a bit. They put it back and shortly after the explosion happened… I was running and my ears were blocked. There were many people with blood on them.”

The independent Telegram channel Astra Press quoted a witness as saying: “Everyone rushed to the exit when explosion happened. I myself saw the girl only until the moment of the explosion, when she gave a gift. She looked like an ordinary person.”

CNN is not able to independently verify the claims.

The blast occured during an event hosted by the “Cyber Front Z” movement, a pro-war Telegram society. “Dear friends and colleagues,” the group said in a post Sunday. “During our regular event in a cafe we rented, there was a terrorist attack. We took certain security measures, but, unfortunately, they were not enough. Our condolences to the families and friends of the victims.”

“Separate condolences to everyone who knew the wonderful war correspondent and our good friend Vladlen Tatarsky. Now we are cooperating with law enforcement agencies and we hope that all those responsible will be punished,” the post said.

Who was Tatarsky?

Tatarsky supported the war in Ukraine and had gained popularity since the start of what Russia calls its “special military operation” by providing analysis and commentary.

Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, created his Telegram channel in 2019, naming it in honor of the protagonist of Victor Pelevin’s novel “Generation ‘P,’” according to Russian state news agency Vesti. He had since written several books.

Before that, in 2014, Tatarsky took part in fighting alongside Russian forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, according to Vesti, citing public sources, when Putin’s fighters first invaded the country.

Tatarsky had more than half a million followers on Telegram, and while he was aggressively pro-war, he had sometimes been critical of Russian setbacks in Ukraine.

In May last year, he told CNN that he was not criticizing the overall operation, rather “individual episodes,” and that he still believed Russia would achieve its goals in Ukraine.

Tatarsky gained prominence after attending the ceremony in the Kremlin that marked the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions.

Sunday’s blast has echoes of the car bombing that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of influential ultra-nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin in August 2022. Alexander Dugin is credited with being the architect, or “spiritual guide,” to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Dugina and Tatarsky moved in the same circles, and they had been photographed multiple times together.

Accusations of blame

No evidence has yet been presented about who carried out the attack on Tatarsky, but Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed the finger at Ukraine, without citing evidence.

“Russian journalists are constantly experiencing threats of reprisal from the Kyiv regime and its inspirers, which are increasingly being implemented,” Zakharova said.

A Ukrainian official suggested the killing was due to in-fighting in Russia. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the President’s office, wrote on Twitter: “Spiders are eating each other in a jar. Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”

Zakharova paid tribute to Tatarskiy. “The professional activities of Vladlen Tatarskiy, his service to the Motherland aroused hatred among the Kyiv regime. He was dangerous for them, but boldly went to the end, doing his duty.” Zakharova said.

CNN’s Tim Lister and Taras Zadorozhnyy contributed to this story.

CNN · by Radina Gigova,Mariya Knight,Katharina Krebs · April 2, 2023

6. Finland Will Pack a Punch in NATO

Finland Will Pack a Punch in NATO

The last comparable boost to Western security was when West Germany joined in 1955.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/finland-will-pack-a-punch-in-nato-turkey-erdogan-sweden-military-us-burden-sharing-hungary-russia-e2fc0b?SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d

By John R. Deni

March 31, 2023 6:07 pm ET

Turkey on Thursday became the last North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally to authorize Finland’s entry into the alliance—a shift that has enormous political and military implications, nearly all of which will benefit the U.S. From America’s national-security strategy to trans-Atlantic burden-sharing, it’s difficult to overstate the significance of Finland’s NATO membership.

Long a buffer between Sweden and Russia, Finland has been an independent country only since 1917 and was previously controlled by the Russian Empire. Finns had pushed for independence for many years before the Russian Revolution gave them a chance to establish their national autonomy. Russia’s recent military encroachments on Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine revealed to Finns that Moscow still has imperial ambitions. The Kremlin apparently considers its borders with neighboring countries less as sacrosanct boundaries than as fluid frontiers. Unwilling to suffer the same fate, Finland moved swiftly through 2022 to apply for NATO membership and, after much Turkish foot-dragging, has finally made it in.

We’ve likely seen no comparable boost to the strength of Western security since West Germany joined the alliance in 1955. For starters, Finnish membership in NATO represents a major political victory in the strategic competition with Moscow. It’ll be hard for even the Russian propaganda machine to twist this into a win.

From a more practical perspective, NATO hasn’t gained such a militarily capable member since Spain joined in 1982. Although Finland has a relatively small active-duty force of roughly 30,000 troops, it’s backed up by a large reserve of citizen-soldiers. Every young Finnish man is required to perform military service. When fully mobilized, Finland can field a force of 280,000 with some of the most advanced artillery and tanks in the world.

Finland is far more strategically important than Spain vis-à-vis the threat from Russia. The new NATO member shares an 830-mile border with Russia that complicates any potential Russian aggression elsewhere in northeastern Europe. NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have long feared a swift Russian fait accompli attack. Before Finland joined, such an attack would have forced NATO to try to push military forces through the narrow Suwalki corridor separating Poland from the three Baltic states to eject Russian invaders. Now, Moscow must reckon with the prospect of NATO forces countering through Finland as well. In this way, Finland’s membership dramatically bolsters deterrence in Europe, making it clear to Moscow that any aggression directed against the Baltics is unlikely to succeed.

Admittedly, another implication of Finland’s lengthy border with Russia is that the alliance must now plan to defend it. But that effort is made easier by the Finns’ having already done so for decades. Prudently, the Finns and alliance officials have been talking informally for several months about how best to incorporate Finland into NATO’s regional military planning.

Between Finland’s geopolitical significance and military capability, it’s no exaggeration to say the country’s NATO membership has fundamentally altered the political-military picture of Europe.

This all will also likely take some of the alliance’s burden off America, which has long shouldered an inequitable portion. The latest U.S. national-security strategy makes clear that America will devote increasing attention and resources to the Indo-Pacific theater in coming decades. Getting Europe to take on more of its own defense is thus a top bipartisan priority in Washington, which Finland’s entry may eventually help enable.

For now, American national security is best served by maintaining and strengthening its robust role in European security and stability. To protect vital U.S. interests, America can and should continue to play a key leadership role as well as providing capabilities European allies still lack in sufficient quantity. But if a crisis emerges in the Indo-Pacific over the short run that compels the U.S. to focus more intently on Asia, NATO’s defense will be markedly stronger with Finland in the mix.

Despite the positive implications of Finland’s entry into the alliance, one piece of the puzzle remains missing—Sweden. Both it and Finland applied to join at the same time last year, but Turkey and its sidekick spoiler Hungary remain holdouts. Most observers chalk up Turkish reluctance to temporary electoral politics, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faces an uphill re-election campaign.

But his domestic political machinations are hurting alliancewide security. Sweden’s membership would make reinforcing the Baltics as well as Finland much easier. Its entry would strengthen the alliance’s military capabilities, further improve burden-sharing, and help consolidate security across the Baltic, the Arctic, and all Northern Europe.

Paradoxically for Mr. Erdoğan, Finnish membership carries one more significant implication—the alliance gains yet another strong advocate of Swedish membership.

Mr. Deni is a research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an associate fellow at the NATO Defence College and author of “NATO and Article 5.”

7. Special Operations News Update - April 3, 2023 | SOF News

Special Operations News Update - April 3, 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · April 3, 2023

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: East Coast-based U.S. Naval Special Warfare Operators (SEALs) transport a simulated patient as part of a medical training scenario during Exercise Trident 23-2 at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia, Nov. 13, 2022. Trident is a joint-maritime certification and validation mission readiness exercise directed to meet joint staff high-interest training issues for special operations and conventional force integration, interoperability and interdependence. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Katie Cox, November 13, 2022)

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

SOF News

SEALs – Photo Essay. The Department of Defense recently published some interesting photos of Naval Special Warfare operators training in the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. “Training Showcases SEALs’ Skills”, DoD News, March 30, 2023.

NSW and Women’s History Month. Over the years women have contributed to the NSW mission in a variety of ways. Learn more in “Naval Special Warfare commemorates Women’s History Month, honors women’s contributions to maritime special operations”, DVIDS, March 29, 2023.

Officer Assignment. Brig. Gen. Steven M. Marks, director of materiel, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-8, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., to director, J8, Force Structure, Requirements, Resources and Strategic Assessments, U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

Afghan Interpreter Now in Fayetteville. An Afghan interpreter who worked with Special Forces in Afghanistan has made it to Fayetteville. He fled his country in 2016 after being threatened by the Taliban. He spent many years in Greece as a refugee before coming to the United States at the beginning of the year. “Afghan interpreter for Special Forces, Marines faces new challenges in Fayetteville”, The Fayetteville Observer, March 29, 2023.

Ridge Runner Irregular Warfare Exercise. The West Virginia National Guard’s Ridge Runner Irregular Warfare program hosted European Allies and partners from the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland at Camp Dawson for a mid-planning conference for the upcoming exercise. The exercise is scheduled for May 2023 and will have participants from U.S. SOF units and foreign SOF units as well. Read more in “European partners, allies converge in West Virginia for Ridge Runner Irregular Warfare Exercise planning”, DVIDS, March 28, 2023.

Lithuanian AF Cdr Visits AFSOC. The commander of the Lithuanian Air Force spent time with the 193 SOW in March. The Pennsylvania National Guard and Lithuania are part of the DoD National Guard Bureau State Partnership Program – a 30-year relationship. “Lithuanian Air Force Commander Visits 193rd Special Ops Wing”, National Guard, March 27, 2023.

AFSOC Hosts President of Paraguay. In late March Hurlburt Field hosted President Mario Abdo Benitez. “Paraguayan President visits Air Force SOF hub”, AFSOC, March 31, 2023.

Best Ranger Competition. In April Ranger-qualified teams will compete in a series of grueling challenges to win the coveted title of Best Ranger. The two-man teams come from a variety of Army units. Teams can enter even if from other services; but they have to be Ranger-qualified. (Business Insider, Mar 31, 2023).

New Leadership at GB Foundation. Charles “Charlie” Iacono is the new president and chief executive officer for the Green Beret Foundation. The Green Beret Foundation provides all generations of U.S. Army Special Forces Soldiers and their families with emergency, immediate, and ongoing support. “Green Beret Foundation Announces New President & CEO”, CISION PR Newswire, March 27, 2023.

SOF’s X-Plane. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has established a program to develop a runway-independent X-plane for Special Operations Command.

“DARPA Developing X-Plane for Special Operations”, National Defense Magazine, March 27, 2023.
“DARPA Wants a Spec Ops Plane With Insane Characteristics”, Real Clear Defense, March 31, 2023.

Parachuting Deaths. Over the past decade there have been several parachuting accidents. However, despite the danger, parachuting remains a valuable method to put forces on the ground for important missions. “Another SEAL parachuting death highlights the inherent danger of US special operators’ go-to infiltration method”, Business Insider, March 29, 2023.

International SOF

French SF on Display. Elite French operators and a Belgian SF contingent presented their skills during a training and exhibition event at the Camp de Souge SF base in Bordeaux, France. The Special Operations Forces Innovation Network Seminar (SOFINS 2023) took place during 28-30 March. Read more in “French Special Forces at SOFINS 2023”, Joint-Forces.com, March 30, 2023. Watch a YouTube video about the event (in French) by DefenseWebTV (Mar 30, 2023).

Mexico’s Special Reaction Force. The Mexican Army’s special mission unit is the Fuerza Especial de Reaccion (FER) – one of four specialized elite groups. Javier Sutil Toledano reviews the history, mission, organization, equipment, training, and more. “La Fuerza Especial de Reaccion (FER): Mexico’s Special Reaction Force”, Grey Dynamics, March 29, 2023.

SOF History

USASOAC. On 25 March 2011, the U.S. Army Special Operations Aviation Command (Airborne) was provisionally activated as a new HQs under USASOC to provide the Commanding General with an element that serves both as a command and staff entity to advocate aviation issues for USASOC. It was created out of the need to separate the combat role of Army Special Operations Aviation (ARSOA) from the resourcing responsibilities.

M1911 .45. On March 29, 1911, the United States Army adopted the M1911. This is a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed, recoil-operated pistol chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge. It served as the standard-issue sidearm for the United States military for over 75 years, from 1911 to 1986.

UK WWII Intelligence Organization. April 1938 – SIS (MI6) creates Section D.

OIF. The fight for Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom began in the beginning of April 2003 twenty years ago. An Army University Press film describes the battle for the capital city. “Objective: Baghdad”, August 14, 2020, YouTube, 50 minutes. https://sof.news/video/fight-for-baghdad/

A Grunt with an SF Team in Iraq. An infantryman’s squad is tasked with providing security for a Special Forces team in Iraq. It wasn’t a bad assignment . . . for the short time it lasted. Read “Never Leave Karbala”, Carry the Gun, March 2023.

Commentary

McRaven on Ukraine and Other Topics. The former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is asked about Ukraine, the U.S. defense budget, and China. “Fast Five With Retired U.S. Navy Adm. William McRaven”, Aviation Week, March 27, 2023.

Limiting IW Authority. Katherine Yon Ebright has a different take on the use of irregular warfare methods by U.S. special operations forces. She argues that the IW authorities should be limited – which would diminish the options and effectiveness of SOF organizations. “Congress Should Limit, Not Expand, Irregular Warfare Authority”, Just Security, March 30, 2023.

Maximizing IW. Four contributors to an article argue the United States lacks the concepts and associated doctrine for its IW capabilties to achieve their potential in strategic competition. The Pentagon has ignored the “human domain”. Our adversaries – China, Russia, and others – recognize the human domain as a critical area of competition. “Maximizing the potential of American irregular warfare in strategic competition”, The Hill, March 31, 2023.

IW in Strategic Competition. Read about key insights from the Irregular Warfare Initiative and Joint Staff J7 Office of Irregular Warfare Essay Contest. “Innovative Thinking on the Role of Irregular Warfare in Strategic Competition”, Irregular Warfare Intitiative, Marcy 27, 2023.

IW and Medial Care. An interesting article states that the Department of Defense should establish new policies and institute organizational changes to increase the US medical sphere of influence within the context of irregular warfare. “Strenghtening the Medical Sphere of Influence Through Guerilla Trauma Systems and Covert Medical Intelligence Networks”, by Mason H. Remondelli, Irregular Warfare Initiative, March 30, 2023.

Upcoming Events

April 5-6, 2023. San Diego, California

Warrior West

ADS

April 14-16, 2023. Fort Benning, Georgia

Best Ranger Competition

May 8-11, 2023. Tampa, Florida

SOF Week

USSOCOM

May 16-18, 2023. Fort Bragg, NC and via Zoom

Geostrategic Symposium 2023

USASOC

May 22-26, 2023. Indianapolis, Indiana

Special Forces Association Convention

May 31, 2023. Ijamsville, MD

6th Annual Golf Tournament

Three Rangers Foundation

SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, or defense then we are interested.

Books, Pubs, and Reports

GAO Report – DoD Active-Duty Recruitment and Retention Challenges, U.S Government Accountability Office, GAO-23-106551, March 28, 2023. According to the DoD, only a quarter of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 can meet military service requirement – such as education and physcial fitness. PDF, 2 pages. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-106551.pdf

Armor. The Winter 2023 issue of the mounted maneuver journal for tankers is now out and available online. Some interesting articles in this issue on security force assistance, NATO allies, the future of land battlefield and armor, and more. PDF, 40 pages, DVIDS. https://www.dvidshub.net/publication/issues/66502

Sentinel. The April 2023 issue is now available online. This publication by Chapter 78 of the Special Forces Association has some great articles about past and current Special Forces. These include the award of the Medal of Honor to Col. Paris Davis, 18D training, an SF hangout called Charlie Mike’s Pub (Fayetteville), a book review, helping the Montagnards of Vietnam, a visit to Hanoi, and the upcoming Special Forces Association Convention.

Paper – Preliminary Lessons from Russia’s Unconventional Operations During the Russo-Ukrainian War. Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), March 2023, PDF, 39 pages. View or download here.

Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Podcast – Chuck Ritter on The Pinelander. Podcaster and Green Beret Chuck Ritter visits the G Base to discuss past, current, and future issues Topics include Afghanistan, the Q course, leadership, and future of the Regiment. Ritter was formerly the co-host of the Pineland Underground and a former member of the 3rd Special Forces Group. March 24, 2023, one hour.

Podcast – TE Lawarence: Understanding Irregular Warfare’s Cultural and Human Terrain, March 21, 2023, 33 minutes. Talking Strategy Podcast. RUSI. Listen here.

Podcasts

SOFCAST. United States Special Operations Command

https://linktr.ee/sofcast

The Pinelander. Blacksmith Publishing

https://www.thepinelander.com/

The Indigenous Approach. 1st Special Forces Command

https://open.spotify.com/show/3n3I7g9LSmd143GYCy7pPA

Irregular Warfare Podcast. Modern War Institute at West Point

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/irregular-warfare-podcast/id1514636385

sof.news · by SOF News · April 3, 2023

8. Putin’s Shakespearean Demons By Robert D. Kaplan

I spent some time reading Robert Kaplan's latest book this weekend. It is a short but powerful read. From the preface: "Of course, once order is imposed, the task is to make it less and less tyrannical. The Founders of the American Revolution grappled with this issue and had fierce debates over it. That order has no substitute, and yet also carries grave dangers, is one reason why the Greeks saw the world as deeply imperfect and yet beautiful.``

But the first two paragraphs of the book on page one are something we should all reflect upon (and it provides a very useful frame of reference for reading all of Kaplan's work).

“40 years as a foreign correspondent have taught me that, while an understanding of world events begins with Maps, it ends with Shakespeare. Maps provide the context for events in the vast backdrop on which they are acted out. But the sensibility required for understanding those events – the crucial insight into the passions and instinctual political leaders – is Shakespearean.

Geography is required for the study of culture in civilization, which constitutes the accumulated experiences of different peoples inhibiting particular landscapes for hundreds if not thousands of years. That cultural traits and tendencies cannot easily be qualified by contemporary political science does not reduce their importance. The map, in other words, is the foundation of all knowledge…” - Robert Kaplan

To complement Kaplan's ideas I recommend reading Charles Hill's book on Grand Strategy to trace literature's impact on grand strategy through history. And I keep handy the late Colonel John Collins' (aka the Warlord) book on Military Geography.

Putin’s Shakespearean Demons

Imagine the condition in the heart of Europe today had NATO’s boundaries stayed frozen after 1989.

By Robert D. Kaplan

April 2, 2023 5:22 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/putins-shakespearean-demons-russia-ukraine-war-nato-expansion-eastern-europe-germany-peace-80652c8d

Geopolitics will take you only so far in explaining foreign affairs. The more important element is Shakespearean. Ukraine is a perfect example.

Ukraine is engulfed by Russia on the north and east, its history and language entwined with its neighbor’s. But the greater part of the story concerns the personality of Vladimir Putin. The geopolitical argument that Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was expanding completely disregards the Russian leader’s Shakespearean demons.

Mr. Putin’s decision to invade represented not the collective thinking of the Russian elite but his own thoughts. Many oligarchs and security heavies near him were as surprised by the decision as people in the West. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, pressed by an oligarch to explain how Mr. Putin could have planned such an invasion without his inner circle knowing, reportedly replied: “He has three advisers. Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

Given Mr. Putin’s paranoia, isolation and delusions of grandeur, the question arises: Would Europe today be at peace with Mr. Putin’s Russia had NATO not expanded east after the Cold War and had there been a Western guarantee of recognizing Russian interests in Ukraine? Certainly not.

The explanation for this lies in what would have been the internal situations of the states of Central and Eastern Europe—from Estonia south to Bulgaria and including Poland and Romania—had none of them joined NATO or the European Union. Having suffered nearly a half-century of communism, and in many cases having lacked a robust middle class before Nazi and Soviet occupation, those former Soviet bloc countries might have remained basket cases, with poverty-stricken rural areas and nasty, unstable politics in the capital cities. That would have left all or most of them vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s mischief.

One of the biggest canards in Washington is that the U.S. would have been better off without NATO enlargement. Take Moldova, a country that is Romanian-speaking and part of historic Greater Romania, yet never admitted to NATO or the EU. Romania has become a strong and stable state for the first time in its modern history, under NATO and EU tutelage and despite the Stalinist ravages of the Ceaușescu decades. But Moldova is weak and tottering—and a likely victim of destabilization by Mr. Putin’s Russia. Without NATO and EU expansion eastward over the decades, there might now be a few Moldovas between Germany and Russia.

Success in foreign policy isn’t only about the good things that happen but also the bad things that don’t happen. What hasn’t happened in Europe because of NATO expansion is broad-based instability. Imagine the condition in the heart of Europe today had NATO’s boundaries remained frozen after 1989.

NATO and the EU have created many durable bureaucratic states with reliable militaries in Central and Eastern Europe able to do their part to withstand Russian aggression. The West has grown in both economic and political might. Thus the business of World War II and the Cold War has been closed.

Hungary flirts with authoritarianism and Bulgaria is a weak state, but they are the fixable exceptions. If Russia’s military situation in Ukraine were to deteriorate dramatically, it is possible that the opportunistic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would re-embrace the EU and its democratic standards. NATO expansion throughout Central Europe was virtually inevitable because of the decisive and one-sided way the Cold War ended, just as the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s encouraged the West to expand NATO to Romania, Bulgaria and Albania so that they wouldn’t be stranded on the other side of the Balkan battlefields.

Put another way: Had the West not expanded NATO and the EU to the east, we would now be fighting for Poland instead of for Ukraine and Belarus, as Mr. Putin surely would be breathing down the neck of every country between Berlin and Moscow. Ukraine would long ago have been under the heel of the Kremlin. Germany would have drifted further toward neutralism, requiring a close relationship with Russia not only for natural gas but to manage its borders with Poland and the Czech Republic—had those countries not become members of NATO and the EU and been susceptible to greater Russian influence.

We are now fighting to complete the Intermarium, Latin for “between the seas.” That is, the Baltic and Black seas—a belt of democratic states, from Estonia in the north to Ukraine in the south, to protect against Russian imperialism. We owe this post-World War I concept to the Polish statesman Józef Piłsudski, who envisioned it as a defense against Germany, too. Germany is now a longstanding ally. With Russia defeated in Ukraine, the purpose of the Intermarium will have been accomplished. This is all about geopolitics until it is all about Shakespeare, since a Russia without Mr. Putin would, however unstable, at least have some possibility of becoming a normal country.

Let’s not forget Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, another Shakespearean character, without whose charisma and dynamic leadership Ukraine might never have mustered the will to resist Russia on the battlefield. Geopolitics gets you only so far.

Mr. Kaplan holds a chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is author, most recently, of “The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power.”

9. The U.S. Military's Great Relearning

Conclusion:

Confucius had his Great Learning; the Sixties generation suffered through its Great Relearning. From now on let’s take our martial philosophy more from ancient China than 1960s San Francisco.

The U.S. Military's Great Relearning

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · April 2, 2023

Last week the amphibian pundit CDR Salamander had some tart words for Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley. General Milley recently held forth on the Ukraine war, maintaining that “a big lesson learned” from the Russian invasion is “the incredible consumption rates of conventional munitions” even in a limited regional conflagration. A war in Korea or the Taiwan Strait would consume far more.

A major war means a major expenditure of ordnance. Who’d’ve thought?

Sal traces this “gobsmacking” statement from America’s top-ranking uniformed military officer to faulty wargaming, and there’s doubtless truth to that. Any system of logic is founded on assumptions that can be neither proved nor disproved within the system. They’re taken as self-evident, much like the “givens” from which students try to work proofs in grade-school algebra or geometry.

Assumptions are powerful things. If they’re deeply flawed, a game based on them tends to produce results incongruent with reality. Garbage in, garbage out.

But I think it’s worth revisiting some larger candidate explanations for the Pentagon’s evident obtuseness toward the need to have a sizable armory of munitions on hand should a major regional war break out. One is philosophical. It comes from novelist Tom Wolfe, who wrote an amusing piece titled “The Great Relearning” in 1987. Wolfe recounted walking around San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in 1968, while the Sixties were in full swing, complete with hippies propounding all manner of novel doctrines about politics, society, and life.

In fact, reported Wolfe, denizens of Haight-Ashbury had decided they had nothing to learn from millennia of human history and traditions. For them it was Year Zero, when the enlightened would shake off the dead hand of the past and build a brave new world from scratch. And they were serious! To the extent that they forwent such commonsense practices as basic hygiene. Modern San Francisco saw the reappearance of sicknesses not seen for decades or more. Deliberate forgetfulness will do that to you.

It turned out that oldtimers weren’t that benighted after all. Hippies had to undertake a Great Relearning, reacquainting themselves with the storehouse of knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Common sense—the highest form of wisdom for thinkers like Aristotle—had to make a comeback.

The U.S. military isn’t a bunch of smelly hippies, but it is undergoing a Great Relearning of its own. Its Year Zero was 1991-1992, when the Soviet Union folded up shop and Washington started casting about for a post-Cold War strategy. The nation and the armed forces convinced themselves that the end of military history was nigh, with the main adversary gone and no new one on the horizon. U.S. Navy leaders instructed the sea service to reinvent itself as a “fundamentally different naval service” that had little need to fight a peer enemy that—naval history having ended—would never appear on the high seas.

Until one did.

In short, the armed forces are relearning timeless verities such as: your magazines need to be full of ordnance in case a fight comes along; regenerating combat power demands a vibrant industrial base at home; logistics matters, and any competent foe will menace U.S. resupply routes; and, most elementally, there will always be a next challenger for regional or world supremacy. Welcome and enjoy an interregnum after a successful competition, but never kid yourself. The next big thing is coming sooner or later, so it’s better to stay in a competitive frame of mind rather than be compelled to rediscover old truths in the midst of a fresh struggle, when it might be too late.

But end-of-history thinking alone can’t account for America’s post-Cold War myopia. Armed services were undergoing a change from depending mainly on gunfire to depending mainly on missiles by the late Cold War. Unlike World War II, when industry could mass-produce untold quantities of low-tech armaments in short order, it takes time to manufacture high-tech precision arms, not to mention the heavy expense to purchase even a single round. Keeping the magazine full, in other words, is a different problem than in relatively low-tech ages of yore. That technological changeover, coupled with the perceived diminished need for military might, generated a vicious cycle in which budgeteers applied constant downward pressure on the inventory of weaponry needed to battle a peer antagonist. The post-9/11 brushfire wars only distorted U.S. martial priorities further.

Confucius had his Great Learning; the Sixties generation suffered through its Great Relearning. From now on let’s take our martial philosophy more from ancient China than 1960s San Francisco.

Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · April 2, 2023

10. In Defense of Denial: Why Deterring China Requires New Airpower Thinking

Excerpts:

The United States has the world’s most powerful air force, but it would be a colossal strategic blunder to persist with an offensive air superiority strategy and thereby cede its greatest advantage — the strength of defense in 21st-century air warfare — to China. “If the mutual denial of air superiority is an advantage for the United States,” as Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements of the U.S. Air Force, concludes, “then we need to have a military that can achieve mutual denial, even at the edges of the battlespace, even on the doorstep of our adversaries.”

But defense, as the Prussian miliary theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously argued, should be active and not passive. In the event of a conflict, the Air Force should make denying air superiority to China its first priority. At the same time, the Air Force ought to weaken Chinese forces, employing mainly stand-off strikes and longer-range attacks. When the tide has turned, as Clausewitz advises, the Air Force might then unleash the “flashing sword of vengeance” and make the “sudden powerful transition” to offensive air superiority. To make that happen, however, the Air Force will need first to make air denial a core mission. The decision to give primary responsibility for air defense to other services encourages the Air Force to continue to prioritize air superiority and offensive strike missions. It is time for a course correction.

In Defense of Denial: Why Deterring China Requires New Airpower Thinking - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Maximilian K. Bremer · April 3, 2023

“There was a distinct difference between the objectives of the opposing sides,” Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, reflected on the Battle of Britain. Whereas the German military sought to end the war by invading across the English Channel, he explained, “Now, I was trying desperately to prevent the Germans from succeeding in their preparations for an invasion … I had to do that by denying them control of the air.”

Dowding employed an airpower strategy known today as air denial, in which a military force aims to deny operational freedom to an adversary’s air force without necessarily being able to control that airspace. Applying this asymmetric strategy today could succeed in deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Air denial is not a new strategy, but neither is an alternative based on air superiority and penetrating strikes. It is a way to use the U.S. Air Force and surface-based air defenses to increase Chinese government perceptions of the uncertainty and risks inherent in an invasion without potentially provoking nuclear escalation. This approach is controversial to many in the Air Force because this strategy upends decades of Air Force doctrine. But that doctrine was based on using aviation offensively, which may be unwise in a Taiwan scenario.

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In War on the Rocks, Caitlin Lee recently presented an updated version of the Gulf War paradigm for deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan — and argued against our preferred strategy of air denial. She argued that in a future conflict next-generation combat drones should operate inside the range of China’s air defense missiles to “sense and detect invasion forces and kill targets of opportunities” so crewed assets can “deliver firepower at volume.” She rejects air denial as a viable alternative approach for air combat. She called this approach “unproven” and fundamentally flawed.

The future of U.S. Air Force strategy is a debate worth having, particularly given the high stakes. While Lee is correct to call on the Air Force to field a better mix of crewed and uncrewed systems, we nonetheless remain unconvinced by her objections to making air denial a core mission. Instead of trying to symmetrically match (or even overmatch) China, air denial pits U.S. strength, that it is on the strategic defensive, against China’s main weakness, that it has to go on the offense to seize Taiwan.

Deterrence by Denial Versus Air Denial

The policy debate about conventional deterrence in the Indo-Pacific employs two distinct usages of the term “denial” — “deterrence by denial” and strategies of “denial.” The former term originated in the nuclear deterrence literature to distinguish between “deterrence by punishment” and “deterrence by denial.” Deterrence by punishment threatens to impose unacceptable costs if an attack occurs. Deterrence by denial relies on convincing an adversary that an attack is “infeasible or unlikely to succeed.”

The 2022 National Defense Strategy stresses deterrence by denial, calling on the Department of Defense to “develop asymmetric approaches and optimize our posture for denial” in order “to deter aggression, especially where potential adversaries could act to rapidly seize territory.” The debate in the Air Force is how to begin to implement this approach. There are two schools of thought. The first views air dominance and the ability to defeat China’s air force as a necessary condition for deterrence. “Unless the United States and its allies can achieve the strength necessary to defeat both Chinese aggression in Asia and Russian aggression in Europe in near simultaneous time frames,” Lt. Gen. David Deptula (ret.) argues, “we cannot hope to deter our rivals.”

To deter China, some analysts argue, the United States needs to credibly threaten to sink China’s invasion fleet inside the first island chain “within 72 hours.” Doing so would require the Air Force to “not just gain air superiority,” as David Ochmanek argues, “but to actually reach into this contested battlespace … and find the enemy and engage” its forces. To attain this type of air superiority, U.S. forces would have to attack China’s formidable integrated air defense systems, including key targets on the mainland such as air bases, radar sites, air defenses, and possibly command-and-control facilities.

This approach confuses deterrence by denial with the ability to completely and quickly defeat an adversary. It assumes threatening military defeat is the only way to deter an adversary, rather than a way — and not necessarily the best way — to posture the Air Force for deterrence by denial. Moreover, it is anything but an “asymmetric approach” against a peer or near-peer competitor, given it seeks to directly combat China’s strengths rather than attack its power-projection weaknesses.

The strategy of air denial, in contrast, would focus on limiting China’s ability to gain and exploit air superiority in offensive military operations. Air denial draws upon the British naval theorist Sir Julian Corbett’s distinction between military strategies of control, aimed at securing freedom of action within a military domain, and strategies of denial, which seek to prevent an adversary from gaining such control. Chinese military writings consistently make the point that offensive amphibious and maritime operations are unlikely to succeed without air superiority — a supposition supported by the fact that modern amphibious operations have succeeded only 14 percent of the time without air superiority. It would thus be prudent to try and create doubt in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s mind about China’s ability to attain air superiority in such a contingency.

An air denial strategy economizes force by employing sufficiently large numbers of smaller, cheaper weapons in a distributed way. The air defender aims to survive the initial enemy air and missiles strikes and then keep the airspace contested. A doctrine of “volumetric defense” underwrites air denial. This concept employs defense in depth — both laterally (planar distance, or range) and vertically (altitude) — which forces an air attacker to penetrate into what Air Combat Command’s Gen. Mark Kelly described as “layer upon layer upon layer” of air defense systems. The U.S. Navy employs a similar “layered air defense” approach to protect its carrier battle groups, effectively creating a bubble of denial around the carrier through the employment of weapons at different ranges and altitudes.

While combatants have posed high- and low-altitude air threats in past wars, the difference today is that the combination of technological advancements and declining costs is increasing the mobility, range, density, and expendability of modern air defense systems. This opens new and more effective ways for the defender to contest both the lateral and vertical airspace. Volumetric defense consists of a mix of different cyber effects, sensors, platforms with air-to-air missiles, and surface-mobile long- and medium-range surface-to-air missiles. These systems defend the approaches from the “blue skies,” where high-end fighters and bombers typically operate. To avoid these dangers, adversary aircraft could try to fly low to evade radar detection. However, this tactic will send them directly into a thick inner layer of air defenses, protected by thousands of anti-aircraft guns, missiles, drones, and rockets.

Each of these layers is mutually supportive but not entirely dependent on the others, making it much harder for an attacker to defeat volumetric defense. To gain air superiority, China’s military would need to defeat every layer of the defense, covering both different ranges and altitudes. As long as the United States and its allies maintain an air defense “force in being,” however, the airspace would remain contested above China’s invading forces. This threat bolsters deterrence by denial.

In her piece, Lee suggests that an air denial strategy would rest mainly on the use of “large numbers of small, short-range, inexpensive [commercial] drones” and warns, “the outcome of America’s next war won’t be decided by quadcopter dogfights.” This is not what we argued in War on the Rocks or elsewhere. We maintain that surface-based air defenses constitute the foundation of an effective air denial strategy, even though other services currently have primary responsibility for air defense and the ownership of systems like the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. Given the centrality of air defense and denial to the future of air control, the Department of Defense should reconsider existing service roles and missions. It should also move to develop and field smaller and more mobile systems with shorter redeployment times — equivalent to their Russian and Chinese counterparts — in order to make them harder to find and kill. At the same time, swarms of lower-cost drones might open additional possibilities for air defense. Like barrage balloons in World War I and II, swarms of drones could be used to “mine” the low-altitude airspace as a point defense measure or as a means of channeling attacking aircraft into narrow flight corridors, forcing them to run a gauntlet of surface-to-air missiles and other air denial weapons.

Contests for air control are growing both more complex and challenging than in the past, when the outcome of air-to-air battles turned mainly on the high-end fight occurring in the blue skies between attacking formations and defending fighters. This was the case in the 1940 Battle of Britain or between attacking aircraft and surface-to-air missiles in most conflicts since the Yom Kippur war in 1973. Instead, to gain air superiority against today’s air defenses, an attacker has to defeat every layer of air defense, covering both different ranges and altitudes. The United States and its allies ought to exploit the defender’s advantage.

Air Denial Is a Proven Strategy

The Air Force faces the challenge of devising a strategy to deter Chinese military aggression under the nuclear shadow. War with China over Taiwan could lead to a nuclear exchange, particularly if Washington strikes targets on mainland China, prompting China to retaliate in kind. U.S. airpower strategy therefore needs to effectively deter a Chinese attack without committing the United States to mainland strikes and risking a dangerous escalation at the outset of a conflict. Whereas air denial meets both criteria for deterrence success, a strategy oriented around offensive air superiority and large-scale, deep-penetration strikes both lacks credibility and increases escalation risks.

First, the air dominance approach weakens U.S. deterrence by assuming a high level of risk. Put simply, it presumes that the United States can succeed in gaining and maintaining air superiority inside the first island chain. This is a presumption that lacks credibility, given both China’s formidable mix of long-range precision strike and air defense capabilities and home-field advantage against the United States. As a result, the deterrent value is marginalized. Lee, in her piece, concedes it will be “difficult” for the Air Force to gain and maintain air superiority against China, but she offers no theory of victory for securing it. Uncertainty about the outcome of the air war strengthens deterrence only when it increases the risks for the attacker. Instead it has the opposite effect when it magnifies risk for the defender, because deterrent threats become less credible.

Beijing needs to believe the United States has both the capability and resolve to carry out its threats. Mobile ground-based air defenses are inherently harder to find and destroy than attacking aircraft because the ground is more favorable to cover and concealment than a featureless sky. The Air Force has never fought an air war against a near-peer adversary equipped with an integrated and mobile air-defense system, but the few times it confronted mobile air defense assets, like during the “Scud hunt” in 1991 and the 1998 to 1999 Kosovo war, it struggled to find and destroy them. In addition, new and emerging technologies continue to grow the power of defense. Modern air defenses are increasingly dense, with more types and greater numbers of weapons systems, and because these systems are also cheaper and easier to build than the attacker’s missile-carrying fighters and bombers, the defender might be able to sustain high losses. Because air warfare increasingly favors mobile surface-based air defenses over attacking aircraft, a strategy of air denial has a higher likelihood of success than one that requires overcoming it.

The air dominance approach discounts the dangers of pursuing such a risky course of action. Penetrating heavily defended Chinese airspace would likely result in heavy losses. A proposed solution is to pair next-generation combat drones with crewed platforms. However, these drones will not be “attritable.” Such high costs might cast doubt in Chinese minds on the willingness of the United States to follow through on its threats, owing to allied or domestic political opposition. Moreover, if U.S. efforts to gain air superiority and rapidly defeat Chinese invasion forces should fail, they are apt to fail catastrophically and endanger the Air Force’s capacity to sustain a defensive war of attrition. All of this works to undermine deterrence.

Rather than assume all the uncertainty and risk by trying to symmetrically gain and maintain air superiority inside China’s anti-access/area-denial capabilities, a more effective approach would be to transfer those same uncertainties and risks onto the Chinese strategy. With air denial, deterrence would turn on the question of whether China’s leadership was confident that they would be able to gain and maintain air superiority above their invading forces — a much harder problem for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force to confidently crack.

The Battle of Britain ought to serve as a model. In 1940, the Royal Air Force adopted an air denial strategy to successfully deter an amphibious invasion of the home islands. Consistent with air denial, the essence of the Royal Air Force’s strategy was to remain an air force in being — or in the words of Dowding, to “carry on for some time” by dispersing fighter wings across the country and employing them with economy and efficiency. If Britain’s fighters could hold out through the summer of 1940, Dowding calculated, the Germans would be forced to either invade in autumn’s bad weather or without the necessary air superiority.

Put simply, Britain’s air denial strategy confronted the Germans with the prospect of failure and thereby deterred a German invasion attempt. In September, when German dictator Adolf Hitler decided to “postpone” the invasion, he cited the Luftwaffe’s failure to achieve “the complete destruction of the enemy’s fighter force” as his main reason. Though air denial did not deter the Luftwaffe’s attacks on Britain, the dynamics of deterrence continued to play out. The Battle of Britain was a close-run thing, but it showed that air denial, particularly if the defender can sustain the attrition rates, could effectively dissuade an adversary form launching an amphibious invasion.

Second, the air dominance approach runs serious escalatory risks. By adopting an offensive approach, the United States is likely to intensify the security dilemma between China and the United States and its allies and partners in the region, and thereby accelerate arms races in the region. Even though Washington’s motives are defensive, an offensive concept of air operations might still appear threatening to China and convince its leaders that they have no choice but to act first. The likely result would be a highly destabilizing action-reaction cycle, in which all sides aggressively pursue a conventional first-strike advantage. This dynamic is particularly destabilizing, as the events of July 1914 illustrate, because perceptions of a first-strike advantage can create incentives for preemption in a crisis and thereby raise the likelihood of conflict.

Should such a conflict occur, the pursuit of U.S. air dominance would then raise the risks of inadvertent nuclear escalation. Some advocates of this approach envision the United States striking targets on the Chinese mainland. “We should not be self-deterring,” Deptula admonished, calling offensive military operations in Chinese airspace an “option that should remain in play.” America’s political leaders, however, are likely to see it as too risky and provocative, especially at the outset of a conflict. As Caitlin Talmadge points out, China’s nuclear and conventional capabilities, particularly its nuclear early warning and command-and-control networks, may be intermingled, which means strikes on China’s offensive and defensive missile capabilities would almost certainly erode significant components of China’s strategic nuclear deterrent and, in turn, put Chinese leaders in a dangerous “use-it-or-lose-it” situation. Moreover, if Beijing believes that the United States is unwilling to run such risks, U.S. threats would lack the credibility to deter a conflict. In contrast, the inherently defensive nature of air denial would reduce the risks of escalation.

Make Air Denial a Core Air Force Mission

The United States has the world’s most powerful air force, but it would be a colossal strategic blunder to persist with an offensive air superiority strategy and thereby cede its greatest advantage — the strength of defense in 21st-century air warfare — to China. “If the mutual denial of air superiority is an advantage for the United States,” as Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements of the U.S. Air Force, concludes, “then we need to have a military that can achieve mutual denial, even at the edges of the battlespace, even on the doorstep of our adversaries.”

But defense, as the Prussian miliary theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously argued, should be active and not passive. In the event of a conflict, the Air Force should make denying air superiority to China its first priority. At the same time, the Air Force ought to weaken Chinese forces, employing mainly stand-off strikes and longer-range attacks. When the tide has turned, as Clausewitz advises, the Air Force might then unleash the “flashing sword of vengeance” and make the “sudden powerful transition” to offensive air superiority. To make that happen, however, the Air Force will need first to make air denial a core mission. The decision to give primary responsibility for air defense to other services encourages the Air Force to continue to prioritize air superiority and offensive strike missions. It is time for a course correction.

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Maximilian K. Bremer is a U.S. Air Force colonel and the director of the special programs division at Air Mobility Command. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense and/or the U.S. Air Force.

Kelly A. Grieco (@ka_grieco) is a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an adjunct associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Maximilian K. Bremer · April 3, 2023

11. Elbridge Colby and Clausewitzian Diplomacy

Excerpts:

“The arsenal of democracy is being depleted in Europe,” Batchelor noted. And Colby remarked that if current trends continue China will have nearly twice the number of warships as the United States by 2028. “Our defense industrial base,” Colby said, “is in sorry shape . . . relative to the scale of the problem.” If Taiwan falls, Colby opined, it will be a “disaster” for the United States. The Biden administration and a lot of Republicans who think the main focus of our national security policy should be Ukraine have created this “grim” situation. We cannot “do” Ukraine, China, Iran and North Korea simultaneously, according to Colby.

Russia’s strategic partnership with China makes the challenge greater and more complex, but as our commitment to Ukraine grows and we pour more money and resources into Eastern Europe, we move away from the Clausewitzian concentration of resources at the Asian center of gravity. Difficult and uncomfortable choices have to be made. Priorities have to be set. Otherwise, we risk falling into a two-front war that could strain our resources to the breaking point and result in World War III.

Elbridge Colby and Clausewitzian Diplomacy

By Francis P. Sempa

April 03, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/04/03/elbridge_colby_and_clausewitzian_diplomacy_891393.html

Amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island (LHD 8), aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68), and USS Chung Hoon (DDG 93) perform expeditionary strike force (ESF) operations, Feb. 15, 2023 in the South China Sea. Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (NIMCSG) and amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island (LHD 8) with embarked 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit are conducting joint ESF operations, representing unique high-end war fighting capabilities, maritime superiority, and power projection, demonstrating the U.S. commitment to our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Navy photo by MC3 Kendra Helmbrecht)

Appearing on John Batchelor’s always informative podcast, former Trump national security official Elbridge Colby makes three important points about the current challenges posed by Russia in Ukraine and China in the western Pacific: first, China’s geopolitical ambitions go well beyond Taiwan and the western Pacific and reach across Asia into Africa and even Latin America; second, China’s challenge to America’s global leadership dwarfs Russia’s regional aggression in Ukraine; and third, the United States does not have unlimited resources and should not wage a two-front war in Eastern Europe and the western Pacific. The United States must strategically pivot to Asia.

Colby served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development in the Trump administration, and played a key role in drafting DoD’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which shifted strategic planning toward great power rivalries instead of peripheral conflicts. He is co-founder of the Marathon Initiative whose stated mission is to “develop the diplomatic, military, and economic strategies the nation will need to navigate protracted competition with great power rivals.” He is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (2021).

Colby told John Batchelor that the American media’s focus on the war in Ukraine has magnified the relative importance of that conflict in comparison to the major challenge we face in the Asia-Pacific and beyond from China. Colby understands that war--even a Cold War--should be approached with Clausewitzian principles, especially a focus on the enemy’s “center of gravity” and a “concentration” of resources at the “decisive point.”

Clausewitz in his famous On War defined the center of gravity as “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends” and “the point against which all our energies should be directed.” In today’s Cold War, the center of gravity is China and the Indo-Pacific, not Eastern Europe. Matt Pottinger, who served as Deputy National Security Adviser in the Trump administration, and John Pomfret, the former Beijing Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, conclude in a recent Foreign Affairs piece that Beijing is preparing for war. Pottinger and Pomfret note the opening of several National Defense Mobilization offices” across China, the passage of a law to enable the PLA to “more easily activate its reserve forces and institutionalize a system for replenishing combat troops,” and four recent speeches where President Xi Jinping “described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.’” Xi, they conclude, “is clearly willing to use force to take” Taiwan.

Colby notes that China’s strategic ambitions go “well beyond Taiwan,” and those ambitions are manifest in China’s military posture in the South China Sea and its acquiring of ports and bases in the Indian Ocean, Africa, and even Latin America. China, he says, seeks a “hegemonic position in Asia and from that . . . vantage global preeminence.” Today, Colby says, Europe is important but “it is considerably less important than Asia.” And America’s power is not unlimited. We must make “tough choices” and prioritize the challenges we face. We must, he remarked, “prioritize the primary theater,” which is Asia, not Europe.

Batchelor and Colby discussed the charges of isolationism being leveled against those political officials and strategists who view the Asian theater as strategically more important than Europe. Colby noted that the “old guard” foreign policy establishment--which includes GOP leaders in Congress--are Atlanticists or neo-interventionists (he mentions John Bolton) who act as if there are no limits to American power. But Colby also criticized libertarians like Sen. Rand Paul who go too far in the other direction. We must “husband our resources,” Colby says, and approach the world with “conservative realism.” And conservative realism today means an Asia-first foreign policy. The stakes are greater in Asia than in Europe.

“The arsenal of democracy is being depleted in Europe,” Batchelor noted. And Colby remarked that if current trends continue China will have nearly twice the number of warships as the United States by 2028. “Our defense industrial base,” Colby said, “is in sorry shape . . . relative to the scale of the problem.” If Taiwan falls, Colby opined, it will be a “disaster” for the United States. The Biden administration and a lot of Republicans who think the main focus of our national security policy should be Ukraine have created this “grim” situation. We cannot “do” Ukraine, China, Iran and North Korea simultaneously, according to Colby.

Russia’s strategic partnership with China makes the challenge greater and more complex, but as our commitment to Ukraine grows and we pour more money and resources into Eastern Europe, we move away from the Clausewitzian concentration of resources at the Asian center of gravity. Difficult and uncomfortable choices have to be made. Priorities have to be set. Otherwise, we risk falling into a two-front war that could strain our resources to the breaking point and result in World War III.

Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21^stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, The American Spectator, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a former contributing editor to American Diplomacy. Mr. Sempa also writes a monthly column for RealClearDefense including his latest "America Misses the Power Objective" and America Sleepwalks Into War with Russia."

12. Opinion: Canada must put Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on terrorist list under Criminal Code

Opinion: Canada must put Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on terrorist list under Criminal Code

Toby Dershowitz, Tzvi Kahn, and Katie Romaine , Special to National Post

Published Mar 30, 2023 • Last updated 2 days ago • 3 minute read

nationalpost.com · by Special to National Post

Wreckage from Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 lies on the ground near Shahedshahr, Iran, on Jan. 8, 2020. Photo by Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg

“Excuses.” That’s how Hamed Esmaeilion, the former spokesperson for the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, recently described Ottawa’s rationales for refusing to sanction Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) pursuant to Canada’s Criminal Code. He’s right. It’s long past time for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to act.

Esmaeilion has a stake in the outcome. His wife and daughter died in 2020 when the IRGC shot down Ukrainian International Airlines Flight PS752 shortly after takeoff from a Tehran airport, killing all 176 passengers on board, including 85 Canadian citizens and permanent residents. A Canadian judge ruled in 2021 that the attack was “intentional” and an “act of terrorism.”

That’s par for the course for the IRGC. Founded in 1979 at the outset of the Islamic Revolution, the IRGC is a paramilitary force charged with preserving and advancing the regime’s radical Islamist values. The IRGC’s foreign operations arm, known as the Quds Force, trains, funds, and arms Iran’s terrorist proxies across the Middle East, including the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Syrian regime, and Yemen’s Houthis. It conducts terrorist attacks, takes hostages, and plots assassinations throughout the world.

The IRGC’s volunteer Basij militia and related IRGC intelligence agencies enforce Tehran’s harsh religious restrictions at home. These organizations have played a key role in violently suppressing nationwide protests. They enforce the regime’s mandatory headscarf laws, the primary trigger for the unrest that began in September.

In other words, the IRGC meets the basic definition of a terrorist organization: It deliberately deploys violence against civilians to achieve political and religious ends.

Ottawa seems to grasp that reality to some degree. In October, it designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization pursuant to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, thereby denying more than 10,000 IRGC officers and senior members access to Canadian territory. And since September, Canada has imposed several rounds of sanctions against Iranian human rights abusers, including multiple IRGC leaders.

Yet Trudeau has stopped short of the most impactful step he could take: designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization pursuant to Canada’s Criminal Code, which would dramatically increase economic and political pressure on the group. What accounts for Ottawa’s reticence?

Trudeau hasn’t publicly explained his reasoning. But in November, Attorney General and Justice Minister David Lametti argued that since the 125,000-strong IRGC relies on mandatory conscription, a Criminal Code designation would punish innocent Iranians who lacked any choice but to serve. Yet Ottawa could resolve this concern.

Rather than applying a blanket criminalization of all conscripts, Ottawa could use a Criminal Code designation as the basis for requiring economic institutions and travel agencies to apply enhanced due diligence of draftees before engaging in transactions with them. In this respect, Ottawa could give special consideration to older IRGC members who served, through no choice of their own, in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War and are unlikely to pose a threat today. If a former IRGC member feels unfairly targeted in a particular case, Canada could allow the conscript to appeal.

In this context, Thomas Juneau, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, suggests Trudeau may oppose an IRGC designation because enforcing it would require a considerable amount of resources from Canada’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. That’s true, but also beside the point. A potential inability to fully enforce the designation doesn’t mean that Ottawa should simply let a terrorist organization off the hook in its entirety.

Another possible reason for Trudeau’s inaction: He may believe that the IRGC’s status as a state actor precludes a Criminal Code designation under Canadian law. Yet there is a precedent for this sort of designation. As Andrew House, the chief of staff to former public safety minister Vic Toews, points out, the Taliban bears a Criminal Code designation even though it governs Afghanistan.

The downing of Flight PS752 was a watershed moment in Canadian-Iran relations that demands a forceful response. Designating the IRGC pursuant to the Criminal Code would be one more step towards long-overdue justice for Esmaeilion and Tehran’s many other victims, who continue — so far in vain — to demand Trudeau’s elementary recognition of reality. No more excuses.

Toby Dershowitz is senior vice president for government relations and strategy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Tzvi Kahn is a research fellow and senior editor at FDD. Katie Romaine is a government relations associate at FDD. Follow the authors on Twitter @TobyDersh, @TzviKahn, and @Katie_Romaine. FDD is a Washington, DC-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

nationalpost.com · by Special to National Post

13. Is Turkey about to ditch its Russian S-400 missile system?

Is Turkey about to ditch its Russian S-400 missile system?

by Sinan Ciddi

March 29, 2023 02:56 PM

Washington Examiner · March 29, 2023

Turkey's acquisition of the Russian-manufactured S-400 missile air defense system in 2019 (in place of United States or NATO-manufactured equivalents) resulted, not only in Turkey being booted out of the F-35 program but also in the imposition of U.S. sanctions.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has brushed away international criticism and called the S400 a "done deal." This single acquisition has poisoned Ankara’s relationship with the West and prevented Turkey from being able to acquire alternative platforms to the F-35 from the U.S., namely the F-16.

TO UNDERSTAND TURKEY'S 2023 ELECTIONS, THINK IRAN 2009

However, Haluk Gorgun, Turkey’s chief of Aselsan — the country’s leading defense manufacturer — recently stated, "We are making air defense systems. We don’t need S-300s, S-400s." That a leading defense manufacturer close to Erdogan would make such a public statement, published in a leading newspaper that is pro-Erdogan, suggests that Turkey may be signaling its intent. If so, then this is most likely to happen following Turkey’s elections on May 15.

Assuming that Erdogan retains power, he has already informed U.S. authorities that he is interested in a rapprochement with Washington.

This intention was made clear by a recent opinion piece published by Ankara’s ambassador to Washington. More importantly, Erdogan’s spokesman recently paid a visit to Washington trying to outline all the areas in which Washington and Ankara could work together in Erdogan’s third presidential term. In that regard, Turkey’s divestment of the S400s would be a significant gesture. In the long list of items that divide Washington and Ankara, the S400 is at the top of the list. It would be Erdogan’s hope that such a gesture would allow Congress to lift its objections to selling Turkey F-16s and remove sanctions.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently informed the U.S. Senate that Turkey was a "difficult ally," largely representative of the administration’s position that it would like to sell new fighter jets to Turkey.

However, the list of American grievances against Ankara is long, and one gesture will not likely be enough. Turkey continues to be a spoiler inside of NATO. Although it recently approved Finland’s application for NATO membership, it still blocks Sweden. In Europe, Erdogan continues its belligerent and hostile stance towards Greece and Cyprus over maritime borders in the eastern Mediterranean. In Syria, the Turkish military threatens on a daily basis the security of the Syrian Democratic Forces and the U.S. military, who are jointly fighting the Islamic State.

Erdogan is on a widespread charm offensive and desires to rebuild many bilateral relationships which he single-handedly destroyed in the last ten years.

This can be seen in the cases of Israel, Egypt, the Gulf, and Saudi Arabia. In each instance, he has reached out to turn a page with regional leaders by offering tokens of policy change in the hopes of overcoming Ankara’s isolation. However, in each instance, his tokens may not be sufficient to rebuild substantive ties. For example, with Israel, although diplomatic representation to the ambassadorial level has been re-established, Erdogan falls short of making good on a key Israeli demand: the expulsion of Hamas from Turkey.

U.S. ties are understandably high on Erdogan’s list.

He is likely calculating that Putin is politically weakened and a post-election climate in Turkey can allow him to finally ditch his S400s. That said, the U.S. should also not be brainwashed into thinking that Erdogan is re-anchoring Turkey into the western fold. There are many more outstanding demands that Ankara needs to address before F-16s are sold to Ankara. One could argue that putting a long list of demands in front of Erdogan may deter and anger him, and in the event that he doesn’t get F-16s, he may turn to other countries to make the purchase-possibly adversaries.

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Possibly, but one has to remember that if the opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu wins, he would likely undo a lot of Erdogan’s policies discussed above that divide the beleaguered allies.

Sinan Ciddi is a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power. Follow Sinan on Twitter @SinanCiddi.

Washington Examiner · March 29, 2023

14. Assad Will Return to Arab League Summit, Courtesy of Saudi Invite

Assad Will Return to Arab League Summit, Courtesy of Saudi Invite

fdd.org · by Elizabeth Robbins · April 2, 2023

Latest Developments

Saudi Arabia, which will host the annual Arab League summit next month, plans to invite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to attend the gathering in Riyadh. The pending invitation marks a major reversal in Saudi policy and a milestone for Assad as he seeks diplomatic rehabilitation despite his ongoing atrocities. According to Reuters, which first reported the news, Prince Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, will travel to Damascus in the coming weeks to personally deliver the invitation.

The Arab League suspended Syria in 2011 and imposed sanctions on the country as a result of the Assad regime’s violent suppression of protests. Saudi Arabia was one of several countries that provided weapons and funding to Assad’s opponents in the civil war. The Biden administration recently signaled its acceptance of normalization with Assad. “Our basic message has been if you’re going to engage with the regime, get something for that,” explained Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs, last month.

Expert Analysis

“This is a victory for Russia and Iran, not just Assad. Moscow and Tehran are determined to show Assad will pay no price for his crimes, nor will anyone hold them accountable for participating in the atrocities. The Saudi position is deeply regrettable and affirms their lack of concern for human rights, but the far greater disappointment is that the Biden administration has been promoting normalization despite paying lip service to the cause of accountability for the Assad regime.” — David Adesnik, FDD Senior Fellow and Director of Research

“Normalizing Assad’s terror is not merely morally repugnant but will not serve the safety and security interests of those who welcome the war criminal into the Arab League. The administration should double down on enforcement of existing U.S. sanctions on the Assad regime and work with the EU and others to do the same. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have already begun to send a strong message to the administration and to those who would look the other way in the face of Assad’s war crimes that impunity will not be tolerated.” — Toby Dershowitz, FDD Senior Vice President for Government Relations and Strategy

Saudi Moves Follow UAE, Oman

For a decade, the only foreign capitals Assad visited were Moscow and Tehran. Then, last year, he paid a surprise visit to Abu Dhabi, reflecting the Emirati government’s quiet multi-year push for normalization. This year, Oman also welcomed Assad, after becoming the first Gulf Arab state to return its ambassador to Damascus in 2020. The Saudi invitation to Assad follows reports that the two states are in the process of restoring diplomatic relations. Shortly after that news broke, Damascus and Riyadh affirmed they were discussing the restoration of consular services.

In Congress, a Bipartisan Push for Biden to Stand Up for Human Rights

For more than a year, a bipartisan coalition in Congress has been warning President Biden that tolerating or promoting Assad’s normalization would damage American interests. On March 23, the top Democrats and Republicans on the foreign affairs committees in both the House and Senate objected to “the disappointingly slow pace of sanctions under the Caesar Act,” a human rights law that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in late 2019. A year earlier, the same top lawmakers warned Biden to avoid “tacit approval of formal diplomatic engagement with the Syrian regime.”

Related Analysis

“Under Pressure From Congress, Administration Sanctions Syrian Narco-Traffickers,” FDD Policy Brief

“A Strategy to End the Systematic Theft of Humanitarian Aid in Syria,” by David Adesnik

fdd.org · by Elizabeth Robbins · April 2, 2023

15. Ruble Rumble – Offensive and Defensive Measures to Defeat Russia in the Economic Domain

Download the 52 page monograph at this link: https://www.fdd.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/fdd-monograph-ruble-rumble.pdf

April 3, 2023 | Monograph

Ruble Rumble

Offensive and Defensive Measures to Defeat Russia in the Economic Domain

fdd.org · · April 3, 2023

John Hardie

Russia Program Deputy Director

Peter Doran

Adjunct Senior Fellow

Foreword

By Juan C. Zarate and Elaine K. Dezenski

Russia’s unprovoked and barbaric war on Ukraine has been met with a coordinated financial and economic campaign against Russia by the United States and most major economies around the world. The domain of economic and financial power is now front and center as a core dimension of the confrontation with Russia.

Though there has been much focus on the recent sanctions response, this confrontation with Russia has been underway for many years, stoked by Russian aggression, kleptocracy, and malicious activity through both state and non-state actors. Indeed, the Kremlin, Russian oligarchs, and state-sanctioned militants and hackers have been attacking the West for years — promoting rampant money laundering, ransomware attacks, corruption, and theft. Russia has used the energy sector and other facets of its economy as a sword and shield in any confrontation with its neighbors. Russia is waging hybrid warfare.

The Russian invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine — along with the sanctions and asset hunts imposed in response — have served to reveal clearly the economic and financial dimensions of this conflict.

As the fighting in Ukraine drags on, the economic and financial measures intended to weaken Russia’s ability to wage war will become an even more important part of the Western response. Western weapons and Ukrainian courage have allowed Kyiv to defend itself and retake large swathes of territory. But prevailing in the economic domain will require a sustained, concerted, and strategic effort from the West. Striking the delicate balance of allowing Russia to supply oil and gas and other necessary goods to global markets while reducing the Kremlin’s revenues is a key design of the current sanctions regime, and it is a difficult balance to maintain.

Washington and its allies have powerful economic tools at their disposal. The most important global currencies and countries are aligned in the financial isolation of Russia. European economies have untethered from Russian energy dependencies and have imposed significant sanctions and trade restrictions. The alternate markets willing to do business with Russia, like China and India, are negotiating deep discounts and are wary of getting too close to the taint of Russian atrocities and sanctions evasion. And many in the private sector have divested, departed, and distanced themselves because the reputational and illicit financial risks of doing business in or through Russia are simply too high.

Washington has maintained a delicate bipartisan consensus on the need to wield such tools aggressively to isolate the Russian economy — and a core group of large democratic economies have followed suit. At least for now, there is a broad inclination to rely on non-kinetic tools of economic statecraft and coercion rather than force.

To maximize the leverage of an economic and financial pressure campaign, more aggressive offensive and defensive measures are necessary. This requires a recognition that the economic and financial domain is now an arena of direct conflict with Russia. Sanctions and other measures should be wielded as part of a concerted strategy to undermine Moscow’s war efforts and economy for the long term — not simply as tools to react to the latest Russian aggression or malign activity. With sufficient political will and a strengthened coalition, the United States can wear down the Russian war machine and hamstring its ability to harness malign finance to destabilize democratic governments and evade sanctions and export controls.

The stakes could not be higher. Russia seeks not only to alter its western border but to undermine the U.S.-led world order. Russian victory in Ukraine would reinforce the instincts for impunity for all revisionist, authoritarian regimes. A Russian economic counter-offensive against the West could hobble transparent and open trade, embed corruption in governments worldwide, and compromise free elections. If allowed to evade sanctions and create new channels of economic and financial activity, Russia could enable an alliance of financial rogues connected by their desire to undermine the U.S.-led financial and commercial order.

A message of deterrence to others must also be sent. Indeed, countries that are tempted to mimic Russia’s use of brutal force to achieve expansionist goals of territorial domination and national identity (China, for example) need to see the painful economic and financial effects of isolation.

This monograph highlights essential steps the West should take to tighten the screws on Russia’s economy and federal budget. It is time to expand the sanctions campaign against the Russian financial sector, including by targeting Moscow’s alternative to the SWIFT messaging system. Targeting sanctions evasion must expose and close front companies, shadow fleets, and rogue entities — and the enabling intelligence services — that facilitate Russian illicit activity. Washington also needs to increase pressure on Russia’s energy sector, most notably by increasing diversity of supply and delivery, reducing dependence on Russian nuclear exports, and adjusting the oil price-cap mechanism to ensure its effective implementation. More and more, the Russian economy needs to be isolated for its malign activities. Third countries, financial centers, and the private sector need to understand the real risks of doing business with and depending on Russia.

At the same time, the West must also redouble its fight against the malign financial and commercial activity Russia and its proxies use to influence democratic countries, weaponize corruption, support rogue regimes, and evade sanctions and export controls. The United States must continue to improve financial transparency, including by properly regulating key enablers of malign finance by Russia and other threat actors. The Treasury and Commerce departments will need to be adequately equipped to lead this fight. Finally, Western democracies must help bring potential allies back into the fold — convincing India, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, among others, that economic ties with the West are worth more than risky ventures and backroom dealings with Moscow.

If Washington and its allies can maintain global consensus and harness the formidable tools at their disposal, they can help defeat the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine and severely diminish its capacity to wield malign influence worldwide. Doing so will ultimately weaken Russia’s capabilities, while reinforcing the strength of Western sanctions and the U.S.-backed financial and economic order.

Juan C. Zarate

Chairman of FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power

Former Deputy Assistant to the President, Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism, and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes

Elaine K. Dezenski

Senior Director and Head of FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power

Former U.S. Department of Homeland Security official and Senior Director at the World Economic Forum

Illustration by Daniel Ackerman/FDD

16. Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence on US military sites-

A friend flagged this for me and provided this comment:

Shocking. It has been reported that China had a quantum camera onboard that was able to map a kilometer underneath the ground -- thus allowing them to schematically photograph our underground nuclear minuteman missile facilities.

Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence on US military sites- NBC News

Reuters · by Reuters

April 3 (Reuters) - A Chinese balloon that flew across the United States was able to gather intelligence from several U.S. military sites, despite the Biden administration's efforts to prevent it from doing so, NBC News reported on Monday, citing two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official.

The balloon, controlled by Beijing, was able to make multiple passes over some of the sites in February, at times flying in a figure-eight formation, NBC cited the officials as saying.

"The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images," NBC cited the officials as saying.

U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment.

At the time, U.S. officials played down the balloon's impact on national security.

The balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy vessel, spent a week flying over the United States and Canada early in February before being shot down off the Atlantic Coast on President Joe Biden's orders.

The Chinese balloon incident prompted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing and further strained relations between Washington and Beijing.

Reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington and Juby Babu in Bengaluru, Editing by Louise Heavens and Bernadette Baum

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Reuters

17. It’s time for a reckoning with Chinese big tech

Excerpts:

Most western social media companies are banned from China, and the CCP has been progressively tightening its grip over Chinese tech companies, making it very difficult for them to deny links to the party. The crackdown has been heavy handed; entrepreneurs have been arrested or forced from their jobs at the helm of companies they started. Laws and regulations have been introduced to tighten control over data.

The government has started taking ‘golden shares’ in its tech giants. The CCP already has a ‘golden share’ in ByteDance and is reportedly taking a similar stake in Alibaba and Tencent. The stakes are typically small – perhaps one per cent – but gives the party a significant say over day to day management – particularly the content they provide to millions of Chinese people.

There are signs that the crackdown may be easing. Rumours abound that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce platform, who all but disappeared in 2020 after he criticised the country’s regulators, may be rehabilitated. While Chen Datong, once one of China’s top chip investors, was abruptly released last month after eight months in detention, for alleged financial irregularities. He too may well be welcomed back to the fold as the party tries to boost China’s battered economy. It is a strange way of fostering innovation and Chinese techies may well conclude that public scrutiny by western law makers is vastly preference to the sinister capriciousness of the CCP.

It’s time for a reckoning with Chinese big tech

The Spectator · by Ian Williams · April 2, 2023

Coffee House

Ian Williams

2 April 2023, 4:42pm

Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

It has been a bumpy week for China’s beleaguered technology giants. They are under increasing scrutiny overseas, and the communist party continues to tighten the screws on them at home. In many ways they are also their own worst enemies.

The UK has become the latest government to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok from government devices over security concerns. Parliament has also banned the app from its network. This follows similar bans from the European Union and 11 countries, including France, New Zealand, Denmark and the US. Western lawmakers are unconvinced by TikTok’s often cack-handed attempts to distance itself from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, and that company’s obligations to the Chinese communist party.

TikTok called Parliament’s move ‘misguided,’ and said it was ‘based on fundamental misconceptions about our company’.

But for Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, it was just a start. ‘It was a relief to see it happen,’ she told me. ‘It should have been a wider ban, and the reality is we are still not acting effectively enough on tech-authoritarianism.’ TikTok has spent lavishly on expensive lobbyists and lawyers to press its case and pounce on any criticism in western capitals. But on the evidence so far, it has not been money well spent.

In Washington, TikTok’s lacklustre CEO, Shou Zi Chew, faced hostile questioning from US lawmakers. ‘Let me state this unequivocally, ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,’ he claimed to widespread scepticism.

The company also claimed implausibly that its incorporation in the Cayman Islands shields it from Chinese legal obligations to help CCP security agencies, and that even if asked to hand over data it would not do so. That certainly didn’t convince Rob Joyce, the head of the US National Security Agency’s cybersecurity arm. He labelled the app a ‘Trojan horse’. ‘Why would you bring that capability into the US when the Chinese could manipulate the data we see to either include the things they want to present to our population – divisive material – or remove the things that paint them in a bad light?’ he asked.

And TikTok’s efforts to distance itself from the CCP have been damaged by the Chinese government itself. The Ministry of Commerce in Beijing said it would ‘strongly oppose’ any attempt to force the sale of TikTok from ByteDance and warned that the company’s secretive recommendation algorithm is subject to Chinese export tech controls – effectively making it an issue of national security.

That algorithm – the secret sauce at the heart of app – is highly contentious. Whereas on Twitter or Facebook users are mostly served content from accounts they subscribe to, on TikTok the videos can come from anywhere. The precise recipe of the algorithm is not known, but the app’s data collection is particularly zealous, and ranges from the type of videos watched, the duration, likes, comments and sharing, to user data, such as age, gender and location, as well as browsing habits. While ByteDance does employ engineers abroad, control is firmly in the hands of secretive China-based teams, who have been experimenting with advanced inputs including facial and voice recognition and sentiment analysis.

Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, deploys this tech to censor content and promote Communist Party propaganda. ByteDance claims that it does not censor its international version and TikTok has offered to allow third-party inspections of the recommendation algorithm. The fear is that while it might not be massaged as blatantly as in China, there is ample room for more subtle manipulation.

The company’s track record is not particularly encouraging. In 2021, it agreed to pay $92 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging it illegally tracked users and shared biometric data from photos and videos, without their consent. The data, which included face scans, was allegedly shared with third parties, some in China. The company denied any wrongdoing. Late last year, ByteDance admitted that the TikTok app had been used to spy on journalists as part of an internal leak investigation.

TikTok claims that its data on western users is ringfenced, kept on servers in Singapore and the US. However, its terms and conditions explicitly state that entities located in China are allowed ‘limited remote access to information described… to provide important functions’.

TikTok’s next move appears to be to appeal over the heads of governments to the massed ranks of users of the app – around 23 million a month in the UK, and 150 million in the US. This is one reason Alicia Kearns wants the parliament ban to turn into a national conversation about data. She told me with some satisfaction about a visit to Uppingham School in her Rutland and Melton constituency.

‘They asked me: “Are you mad, why are you trying to block TikTok?”. There were 40 or 50 students in the room, but the end of the night 10 of them said, “I’m coming off”. They were horrified by what I told them, and it was fascinating to watch.’

TikTok is not the only Chinese tech firm to face headwinds over recent days. Security researchers identified potential malware in the Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo, giving it unauthorised access to user data, days after Google suspended it from its Android app store. Pinduoduo rejected the claims. While Binance, now the world’s largest crypto exchange, was accused of hiding substantial links to China. The company had claimed to have left the country after a 2017 ban on cryptocurrencies, and repeatedly denied it was a Chinese company, but the Financial Times alleged that it maintained significant links. The precise nature of Binance’s link to the Chinese state is not clear, and the company claims the report was ‘dramatically mischaracterising events’.

At a Summit for Democracy in Washington this week the US announced international guidelines for curbing exports of technology that could be used by authoritarian nations to violate human rights.

Most western social media companies are banned from China, and the CCP has been progressively tightening its grip over Chinese tech companies, making it very difficult for them to deny links to the party. The crackdown has been heavy handed; entrepreneurs have been arrested or forced from their jobs at the helm of companies they started. Laws and regulations have been introduced to tighten control over data.

The government has started taking ‘golden shares’ in its tech giants. The CCP already has a ‘golden share’ in ByteDance and is reportedly taking a similar stake in Alibaba and Tencent. The stakes are typically small – perhaps one per cent – but gives the party a significant say over day to day management – particularly the content they provide to millions of Chinese people.

There are signs that the crackdown may be easing. Rumours abound that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce platform, who all but disappeared in 2020 after he criticised the country’s regulators, may be rehabilitated. While Chen Datong, once one of China’s top chip investors, was abruptly released last month after eight months in detention, for alleged financial irregularities. He too may well be welcomed back to the fold as the party tries to boost China’s battered economy. It is a strange way of fostering innovation and Chinese techies may well conclude that public scrutiny by western law makers is vastly preference to the sinister capriciousness of the CCP.

The Spectator · by Ian Williams · April 2, 2023

18. Report of the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness

Read the entire report at his link: https://starrs.us/report-of-the-national-independent-panel-on-military-service-and-readiness/

Introduction and purpose below.

Report of the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness

30 March 2023

STARRS Chairman of the Board LTG Rod Bishop, USAF ret, is a member of the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness panel that just issued its new report. Read below or read the PDF.–

Data collected by the panel indicates a growing politicization of the military, where politicization is defined as the imposition of policies, programs, and messaging designed for political, not military, reasons.

Politicization of the U.S. military risks dividing groups into factions while detracting time, resources, and focus on the priority mission: to prepare and train the force to fight and win in combat.

Politicization can lead to a decline in both American public trust in the military—which, in turn, negatively impacts recruiting efforts—and the military’s readiness to fight and win wars.

The panel concluded that the human elements of training, discipline, cohesion, confidence, and morale critical to fighting and winning in war are under severe duress due to a prioritization of a political agenda that distracts from the warfighting mission and diminishes trust in military leadership.

Evidence indicates that appointed Pentagon political leaders are dragging divisive progressive social justice ideologies into an institution that, for 248 years, has sought to remain apolitical and neutral.

I. Introduction

The National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness was commissioned and announced by the president of The Heritage Foundation on October 13, 2022.1

The panel conducted research, held meetings, and wrote this report during the period of November 16, 2022, to February 20, 2023.

The panel consists of the following eight members, listed below in alphabetical order, except for the chairman. They were selected based on their demonstrated devotion to and concern for national defense, their experience with the U.S. military, and their expertise regarding the U.S. Armed Forces’ capabilities. Their biographies can be found in Appendix A.

Congressman Michael Waltz (R–FL), Chairman
Mr. Mike Berry
Lieutenant General (Retired) Rod Bishop Jr., USAF
Ms. Rebeccah L. Heinrichs
Mr. Jeremy Hunt
Mr. Earl G. Matthews
Lieutenant General (Retired) H. R. McMaster, USA
Ms. Morgan Ortagus

Purpose

The panel’s mission was

(1) to identify personnel policies and practices within the Department of Defense (DOD) that, by reason of their political orientation or other potential for divisiveness, reduce military readiness, impede military recruiting, and undermine retention; and

(2) to recommend actions necessary to ensure that the Armed Forces are prepared to protect the nation for the foreseeable future.

The primary audience for the panel’s final report are the policymakers in Congress, Administration officials, and the American public.

19. Pentagon cyber policy post may stay unfilled during review

Pentagon cyber policy post may stay unfilled during review

c4isrnet.com · by Colin Demarest · March 31, 2023

WASHINGTON — A newly created senior cyber oversight position at the Department of Defense will likely remain unfilled until the end of the year at the earliest, as the Pentagon works with an outside group on the officeholder’s responsibilities and objectives.

A federally funded research and development center, or FFRDC, was selected to examine the assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy role, carved out by the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, according to John Plumb, the assistant secretary of defense for space policy and the principal cyber adviser to the defense secretary.

While the ball is already rolling, results aren’t expected for months, Plumb told members of the House Armed Services Committee on March 30. The Rand Corporation is involved in the assessment, the cybersecurity publication The Record reported.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican at the head of the Cyber, Information Technology and Innovation panel, said at the hearing he’s disappointed by the timing.

“I’m confident that the Senate is ready to rapidly confirm a nominee,” he said. “I’ve had many conversations to that effect.”

Hackers probing contractors for path to Pentagon, DISA chief says

The NSA and FBI in October said hackers infiltrated an unnamed defense industrial base organization and made off with sensitive information.

A deputy assistant secretary for cyber policy already exists. The position is held by Mieke Eoyang.

Interest in and spending on cyber has boomed in recent years. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2024 budget blueprint includes $13.5 billion for so-called cyberspace activities, such as zero-trust implementation. The sum is nearly 21% more than the FY23 ask.

The assistant secretary gig may include aspects of electronic and information warfare, according to Plumb, who described the forthcoming review as “deliberate.”

“What we are doing is following the template that was used to create my current position, ASD for space, which is putting an FFRDC on contract to examine what is the proper structure, are there different pieces required, what things should be in this,” said Plumb, who was confirmed in March 2022. “That is on contract now. We expect that the study should be done around September. But we are moving forward on it.”

About Colin Demarest

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

20. Our military is in a dangerous decline and this is the reason why

Our military is in a dangerous decline and this is the reason why

foxnews.com · by Rep. Michael Waltz , Dr. Kevin Roberts | Fox News

Video

World chaos started with Biden's Afghanistan debacle: Rep. Mike Waltz

Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., reacts to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Milley saying there is nothing the U.S. can do to stop China's nuclear program on 'America Reports.'

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

The U.S. Armed Forces have one mission: to protect our nation from foreign enemies. Our troops are as committed to that mission as ever before. But according to a bracing new report, our warriors’ ability to do their job is being undermined by civilian leaders more interested in woke indoctrination and partisan politics than warfighting readiness.

"The Report of the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness" is an urgent warning about creeping politicization at the Pentagon and its corrosive impact on America’s national defense. As the report details, the Biden administration’s whole-of-government embrace of woke politics is becoming a dangerous distraction for servicemen and women who signed up to protect and defend, not virtue-signal.

The top-line statistics compiled in the report are jarring.

Public confidence in the military is falling precipitously, and even military families – from which most recruits come – are less likely to recommend military life. (iStock)

Last year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent. They expect this year to be even worse. The Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps began the new fiscal year in October 50 percent below their normal recruiting numbers. Public confidence in the military is falling precipitously, and even military families – from which most recruits come – are less likely to recommend military life.

What explains the decline? According to a November poll, the most common explanations included "military leadership becoming overly politicized" and "so-called ‘woke’ practices undermining military effectiveness." Another survey found that 65 percent of active-duty servicemen and women are concerned about politicization, including the woke training programs and equity-minded reduced physical fitness standards.

Troop retention rates are falling, too, and for the same reasons. As the report notes, "the perception that non-warfighting missions are distracting senior military leadership may alienate experienced, skilled and knowledgeable warfighters, incentivizing their early departure[.]"

Video

It’s no coincidence that the Heritage Foundation’s latest annual Index of U.S. Military Strength rated our Armed Forces preparedness "weak."

Up and down the ranks, Team Biden’s DEI-focused initiatives are degrading the warrior ethos, "grounded in values such as courage, honor and self-sacrifice," on which military morale, respect and success depend.

The Department of Defense touts its "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" agenda like a third-tier college, apparently unaware that the institution they lead is "by design, exclusionary to ensure its readiness."

Politicized initiatives like DEI always spawn enormous bureaucracies that distract the rank-and-file from their real jobs. The military is not immune. A report on the Navy compiled for members of Congress observes that, today, "non-combat curricula consume Navy resources, clog inboxes, create administrative quagmires, and monopolize precious training time."

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks during the 19th International Institute for Strategic Studies, Asia's annual defense and security forum, in Singapore, June 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Danial Hakim)

Biden’s DOD sometimes seems more interested in culture-war activism than combat training and lethality. The Pentagon now pays for abortion travel expenses, on-base pride celebrations, and drag queen story hours.

Their 2023 budget requested $34.2 million to conduct a witch hunt for "extremist" – which in Biden-world translates as "conservative" – political activities in the ranks. Even DOD’s own study showed less than .005 percent of the 2 million active military personnel were linked to extremist activity.

China, Russia, North Korea, Iran... there is no shortage of real threats to deal with, and real challenges are coming. Since the Biden Pentagon continues to focus on make-believe ones, Congress must step in to restore the military’s warrior ethos and warfighting readiness.

Video

The "Report on Military Service and Readiness" proposes several urgent reforms. DEI should be excised from the Department of Defense, and political initiatives redirected to combat readiness. Physical fitness standards should be designed to protect the American people, not to accommodate demographic quotas.

Military readiness does not just win wars – it deters them. With war raging across the Atlantic and a Cold War heating up across the Pacific, now is not the time to forget that, least of all because of juvenile political distractions.

The American people need patriots to step up, to meet our rivals, and defend our country and values. Those in uniform on bases around the world already have. Now those on Capitol Hill need to do their part.

Kevin Roberts is president of The Heritage Foundation.

Republican Michael Waltz represents Florida's 6th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committee. He is also a Green Beret veteran of the war on terror in Afghanistan, a former White House counterterrorism policy adviser and author of the book "Warrior Diplomat: a Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan."

foxnews.com · by Rep. Michael Waltz , Dr. Kevin Roberts | Fox News

21. China warns Philippines not to give US more access to bases

China warns Philippines not to give US more access to bases

americanmilitarynews.com · by Radio Free Asia · April 2, 2023

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

Granting the United States greater access to Philippine military bases will drag the Southeast Asian nation into “geopolitical strife,” China’s embassy here has warned, claiming the move is part of a plot to contain its growing regional influence.

The embassy issued the statement a day after MaryKay Carlson, the American ambassador to Manila, said in an interview on Philippine television that the expanded access to local military facilities was meant to allow U.S. forces to respond quickly to humanitarian needs in the region.

Washington aims to “secure its hegemony and selfish geopolitical interests” by continuously upgrading its military presence in the Philippines by gaining access to more bases for military deployments, the Chinese Embassy said.

“Whereas the U.S. claims that such cooperation is intended to help the disaster relief efforts of the Philippines and some Americans even tout the EDCA sites as driver[s] of [the] local economy, it is plain and simple that those moves are part of the U.S. efforts to encircle and contain China through its military alliance with this country,” said the statement released by the embassy on Sunday.

In 2014, The Philippines and the United States signed the EDCA, or Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which supplemented the Visiting Forces Agreement of 1999. The VFA provides legal cover for large-scale joint war games between the two longtime allies.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Manila declined comment.

In February, the allies announced that Manila had agreed that American forces would have access to four more Philippine military sites they did not identify, bringing the total to nine at present.

While no names were mentioned, a governor of an area at the northern tip of Luzon island that directly faces Taiwan – Manuel Mamba of Cagayan province – testified before a Senate inquiry that he believed his jurisdiction had been selected. Another northern province, Isabela, has been identified by the local press, citing their own sources.

“If the new sites are located in Cagayan and Isabela, which are close to Taiwan, does the U.S. really intend to help the Philippines in disaster relief with these EDCA sites? And is it really in the national interest of the Philippines to get dragged by the U.S. to interfere in the Taiwan question?,” a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy said in the statement.

“To bundle the Philippines into the chariots of geopolitical strife will seriously harm Philippine national interests and endanger regional peace and stability,” the statement warned.

The Philippines, which observes a “one-China policy,” had earlier said it was closely monitoring the developments in the Taiwan Strait, because thousands of Filipinos could be placed in danger if China moves to invade the island, which it considers a renegade province. There are some 150,000 Filipinos in Taiwan, the third largest contingent of migrant workers there.

U.S. envoy Carlson, in an interview broadcast over GMA television in Manila on Saturday, declined to identify the new military bases under the expanded EDCA sites, but said they may be announced “within the next several months.”

The sites, she said, were chosen to help protect the livelihoods of Filipino fisherfolk as well as to help in humanitarian crises.

Carlson stressed that the Americans “stand at the ready to work with Philippine allies” amid continued Chinese harassment in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

“We have your back. Our mutual goal is to deter conflict, not to instigate conflict,” the ambassador said.

Contested waterway

Meanwhile, the Chinese Embassy stressed that contrary to accusations by the Philippines, U.S. and other countries, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea was not being impeded.

Beijing accused Washington of stirring up trouble in the region and driving a wedge between China and the Philippines.

“When talking about free and open waterways, what the U.S. has in its mind is actually the freedom of rampage of its warships in the South China Sea. The U.S. military has been coming all the way from the other side of the Pacific to stir up trouble in the South China Sea and ganging up with its allies from other parts of the world to flex [its muscles] in the South China Sea,” it said.

“We need to focus on cooperation and development, and truly safeguard, promote and build peace, stability, prosperity of our region and bring more tangible benefits to people of our two countries,” it added.

China and the Philippines have overlapping claims in the South China Sea, along with Taiwan and the Southeast Asian nations of Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

americanmilitarynews.com · by Radio Free Asia · April 2, 2023

22. On the front lines with the Free Burma Rangers

The Eubank family is truly doing the Lord's work as they say.

On the front lines with the Free Burma Rangers

Relief group funded by US Christian donors provides assistance and hope to displaced populations in Myanmar’s war-torn Kayah state

asiatimes.com · by Thierry Falise · April 3, 2023

Renowned photojournalist Thierry Falise recently returned from a month in Myanmar’s Kayah state, a front line in the nation’s raging civil war. This is the second article of a two-part series. Read part 1 here.

KAYAH, Myanmar – Thoo Rey’s body lies under a foil blanket in a field hospital. The 24-year-old Karenni man’s open eyes and mouth reflect the stupefaction that only a brutal and unexpected death can bring.

His killing was precisely that. Two hours before, he was walking in his abandoned village in Kayah state’s Demoso district to fetch personal belongings when shrapnel from a mortar launched a few kilometers away by the Myanmar Army hit him fatally in the neck.

His name is now among the estimated 3,000 civilians killed by Myanmar security forces since the February 1, 2021, democracy-suspending coup. Before his death, Thoo Rey was among the countless internally displaced people (IDPs) who have fled their villages and moved to more secure ground mostly in forest and hill areas across civil war-wracked Kayah state.

The body of Htoo Rey, a 24-year-old ethnic Karenni, lies under a foil blanket in a field hospital. The young man was killed by shrapnel from a mortar fired by the Myanmar military while returning to his abandoned village to pick up personal effects. Photo: Thierry Falise

Free Burma Rangers, the only foreign relief group to work with IDP communities from inside Kayah, estimates the state’s number of IDPs at 300,000. In the two years since the coup, hundreds of villages and hamlets have been deserted by their inhabitants, FBR says.

The IDPs have fled mortars and airstrikes, the proximity of fighting and the sinister threat of the Myanmar army’s imminent arrival in their villages. The army has destroyed and burnt down more than 1,100 houses since the coup, according to the Karenni Human Rights Group (KHRG), an independent rights monitoring group.

Soon after this correspondent’s trip, the Myanmar military launched a new offensive in a visited area in which 22 villagers, including three Buddhist monks, were massacred in southern Shan state near Kayah state’s border.

Wandering through these ghost villages, it is clear that people had only enough time to lock their doors and close their front gardens with bamboo barriers before fleeing. Forgotten drying cloths hang covered in dust while bananas are left to rot on thirsty trees. All around, unattended rice fields are overrun by wild cacti and other invasive vegetation.

Traces of Myanmar military mortars and airstrikes testify to the junta’s civilian-targeting violence. At an intersection on a road close to Demoso, a woman shows a crater left the previous night by a mortar that landed on a volleyball court just a dozen meters from an IDP makeshift market.

“They launched five bombs, including one from a drone. Two people were injured, one badly, who was transported to Luke Hospital (a field facility run by the resistance in the jungle). Nowhere is safe for us,” she laments.

The Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, has put a particular target on Christian minority places of worship. In Daw Ngay Khu, a village in Hpruso township, stands the bombed and burnt-out remains of a church named St Matthew’s.

A jumble of twisted corrugated plates and steel beams litter a floor surrounded by naked walls on the brink of collapse. Somehow, the bell tower and its cross remain intact. In another region further south, bombs and gunfire from a Myanmar military airplane have reduced a Catholic chapel to rubble.

The remnants of a Catholic church in Kayah state that was destroyed by a Myanmar military airstrike. Photo: Thierry Falise

IDPs are omnipresent across Kayah state. In nearly every valley, along every road and in every forest on the side of every hill visited by this correspondent, green tarpaulins labeled “Made in Korea” serve as roofs for makeshift bamboo houses and huts.

One of these IDP communities has settled along the Pawn River, in the state’s center. Here, around 900 civilians, mostly farmers from Loikaw, Kayah state’s capital district, are split into four “sub-camps.”

“We have made the long way in vehicles, ours or rented, a year ago,” explains Byar Reh, a 63-year-old man who is chief of Camp 4. “Before the coup, we had a lot of freedom, we were happy.”

Apart from the precious water from the river, this area, a dramatically dry plateau, lacks the resources for basic survival. “Here the soil is very poor, the only crop that grows is sesame. We have to pay a rent to the land’s owner, we send the production to Loikaw,” he adds.

“Life is very difficult,” confirms Boe Mya, a 35-year-old widow with six children. “In my village, I grew rice and raised cattle. Here for the food we have to rely on other people.”

In other communities, IDPs have managed to organize a basic economy. “People grow vegetables, raise pigs and chicken, fetch woodfire that they sell to each other but it’s still very limited”, comments a community leader.

Schools, clinics and other services such as water supply are provided by local opposition groups, mainly the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) and Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF). Sometimes, when the security situation allows, families return to their abandoned homes to tend a field or care for their cattle.

“It can be very risky, Burmese [Myanmar] soldiers plant landmines in the villages and if they see you, they will capture and kill you,” says camp leader Byar Reh. “I know a family of five who had returned to their home, they were spotted and caught. The father and son-in-law were killed; the mother, daughter and grandchild were released later.”

People sit in front of a makeshift house in an Internally Displaced People (IDP) settlement erected in a narrow valley. Since the February 1, 2021, military coup, between 200,000 and 300,000 people have fled their homes in Kayah state. Photo: Thierry Falise

Tensions can also rise between IDPs and neighboring villagers. Although there is a strong tradition of mutual assistance in these ethnic territories, sometimes competition for resources – water, food, wood – erupts into conflict. “There are cases where villages have asked IDPs to move to other locations,” acknowledges a Karenni leader.

It does not help that IDPs get very little aid from outside. United Nations agencies and big international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are conspicuous by their absence. (Sporadic aid in 2022 from Save The Children and World Vision were mentioned by some IDPs).

Material assistance is essentially provided by a handful of local NGOs and the FBR, a Christian-led multi-ethnic humanitarian service movement founded in 1997 and financed mostly by Christian private donors from the US.

FBR provides education for administering basic medical assistance, media reporting and other humanitarian functions and is staffed mostly by young volunteers. They come mostly from ethnic minority armed groups, but since the coup, the FBR has taken in Bamar (Myanmar’s ethnic majority) members from the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) and other opposition groups.

“Amongst the 250 graduates in 2022, there were almost 40 Bamar ethnics. This is the very first time, it’s encouraging”, says David Eubank, a 62-year-old former US Army Special Forces soldier who serves as FBR’s founder and director.

After a two-month training in a camp near the Thai border, teams of “Rangers” – as they call themselves – are sent all over the country to assist displaced and oppressed populations.

In Kayah state, FBR teams move from camp to camp to offer material and moral help to IDPs, including medical consultations where medics examine patients and deliver basic treatment and medicine, distribute food, blankets and other emergency equipment.

A medic member of the Free Burma Rangers gives a tooth filling to a man from an Internally Displaced People (IDP) settlement. Photo: Thierry Falise

and perform the Good Life Club (GLC), three-hour entertainment shows aimed at children involving theater plays, games, songs and raising health awareness skits that end with the distribution of cloths and candies.

“In two years, only in Kayah state, we have provided at least 12,000 tarpaulins, food and other material assistance to IDPs and helped to evacuate 100,000 of them with our own vehicles or by providing gas,” adds Eubank.

As for GLC programs, “they bring hope and love, tools for an abundant life, body and soul, we want to give the kids some tools, spiritually to have courage and hope, physically to understand sickness and health and be strong bodies”, says 54-year-old Karen Eubank, David’s wife and GLC’s creator.

At the same time, FBR members often face extreme danger on the frontline. FBR medics provide first aid to casualties – they have saved lives by amputating injured soldiers and civilians in the field – while media-trained staff document ongoing situations and send reports to the outside world. Since the coup, 18 Rangers have lost their lives due to Myanmar military fire.

Aung Zay Ya is one of the leading GLC hosts, a “career change” he says he would have never imagined. Before the coup, the 26-year-old Burmese citizen of Chinese origin was making a comfortable living as a mechanical engineer in a Yangon company equipping Ferrari and Lamborghini for wealthy Burmese.

“Two weeks before the coup, I had signed a seven-year contract with my boss that was going to send me to Singapore to complete my degree and then come back to Myanmar to work. Then the coup came. I was not really interested in politics, but the killing of young protestors in Yangon pushed me to join the underground movement,” he says.

A medical consultation is set up in a narrow valley near an Internally Displaced People (IDP) settlement by the Free Burma Rangers. Photo: Thierry Falise

After months of wandering from place to place, he landed in a FBR training camp where his talent was spotted and nurtured. “This is my revolution,” he adds. “At the beginning, I only wanted to win, but now I don’t care about winning or losing, I only want to help the people.”

Other young revolutionaries tell similar tales. Doris, a 25-year-old female Karenni, had an international sporting career before joining the youth revolution. In 2013, at the age of 16, she won a bronze medal in the 800-meter competition at the Southeast Asia Games.

“Before the coup,” she smiles, “I was a professional athlete within a military federation. After, I joined the KNDF and then a FBR training. As a FBR Ranger, I can serve everything, evacuate the injured and help the medics on the frontline, participate in GLC programs.”

FBR also provides financial assistance to individual projects such as the Nway Oo Guru Lay Myar social welfare group founded by Khin Sandar Nyunt, a 35-year-old Bamar anthropologist from Yangon. The group’s flagship project is an alternative education center built on a Pawn River bank.

“I want a revolution not only on the battlefield but also in education,” she says. “Here, in one year, our 18 teachers – full and part-time – have already given an alternative curriculum in Karenni and English languages to more than 165 young students. We teach them organic farming, music, arts and crafts. At the beginning, I was upset but now I have hope, I believe that it will take two or three more years for the revolution to succeed.”

Within IDP communities, the Myanmar junta’s official justification for their brutal campaign against civilians – fighting “terrorist groups” threatening the country’s unity – is a tired refrain that lacks credibility.

Free Burma Rangers members perform at a Good Life Club (GLC) session, a three-hour entertainment show mainly aimed at the children, in an Internally Displaced People (IDP) settlement. Photo: Thierry Falise

Wisaysha, a 43-year-old Karenni woman, found shelter in an IDP camp last year after her husband and two other men were stabbed to death by Myanmar soldiers and thrown into a latrine while returning to their village to retrieve belongings. “I don’t know why they do that,” she cries. “They are hungry with power, they just want to oppress the people.”

Indeed, the future is still bleak for Kayah state’s IDPs. As long as the Myanmar military stays on the offensive and maintains its threats against civilians, there is little chance they will return to their villages any time soon.

Boe Mya, the widow from the Pawn River IDP settlement is under no illusions: “We hope to return, but the Burmese [military] have the power and we disagree with them, so…”

Theirry Falise is a long-time photojournalist based in Bangkok, Thailand. The text and photos in this report are his copyright and may not be reproduced in any form without his express permission.

asiatimes.com · by Thierry Falise · April 3, 2023

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

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 2, 2023

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Evan Gershkovich’s Arrest Marks a New Era of Hostage Diplomacy

The Wall Street Journal reporter is the latest in a growing list of Americans who have been detained by foreign governments on bogus or politicized charges, often to gain leverage with Washington

Russia blames Ukraine for bomb that killed military blogger

Russia-Ukraine War

Zelenskyy to visit Warsaw to meet with Poles, Ukrainians

Ukrainian official offers plan for a Crimea without Russia

War-crimes warrant for Putin could complicate Ukraine peace

Ukrainian court puts an Orthodox leader under house arrest

Influential Russian Military Blogger Is Killed in St. Petersburg Bombing

Prominent Russian military blogger killed in St. Petersburg cafe blast | CNN

Reports: Explosive hidden in a ‘figurine’

Who was Tatarsky?

Accusations of blame

Finland Will Pack a Punch in NATO

The last comparable boost to Western security was when West Germany joined in 1955.

Special Operations News Update - April 3, 2023 | SOF News

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Putin’s Shakespearean Demons

Imagine the condition in the heart of Europe today had NATO’s boundaries stayed frozen after 1989.

The U.S. Military's Great Relearning

In Defense of Denial: Why Deterring China Requires New Airpower Thinking - War on the Rocks

Elbridge Colby and Clausewitzian Diplomacy

Opinion: Canada must put Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on terrorist list under Criminal Code

Is Turkey about to ditch its Russian S-400 missile system?

Assad Will Return to Arab League Summit, Courtesy of Saudi Invite

Latest Developments

Expert Analysis

Saudi Moves Follow UAE, Oman

In Congress, a Bipartisan Push for Biden to Stand Up for Human Rights

Related Analysis

Ruble Rumble

Foreword

Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence on US military sites- NBC News

It’s time for a reckoning with Chinese big tech

Report of the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness

I. Introduction

Purpose

Pentagon cyber policy post may stay unfilled during review

Our military is in a dangerous decline and this is the reason why

China warns Philippines not to give US more access to bases

On the front lines with the Free Burma Rangers