Quotes of the Day:

"But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity." 

- Herbert Butterfield

"Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue."

- Mary Wollstonecraft

"The first of earthly blessings, independence."

- Edward Gibbon

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 2, 2023 

2. Women’s Power Index

3. On Foreign Policy, the New Populists Are Old Declinists

4. Russia may stage terrorist attack on ZNPP to scare the world with consequences of war, politically influence Ukraine's counteroffensive – Volodymyr Zelenskyy

5. Exclusive: Zelensky calls Putin ‘weak’ and says Russian President’s power is ‘crumbling’

6. US recommends Americans reconsider traveling to China due to arbitrary law enforcement, exit bans

7. Top military court rules troops don’t have right to unanimous verdicts

8. The Pentagon policy bill’s next big stumbling block: Kevin McCarthy

9. ‘Political hostages’: Tuberville’s promotions blockade is about to hit the Joint Chiefs hard

10. Almost But Not Quite: Acting Commandant Will Face Limitations In Role

11. The Quad is key to countering China’s aggressive expansion

12. 'Putin's mistakes' giving US 'once-in-a-generation' chance to recruit Russian spies, says CIA director

13. In NATO’s new north, fresh chances to contain Moscow

14. America's front line of missile defense is straining under the demand of global threats

15. Navy cancels plan to force recruiters to work six days a week

16. Enough 'one trick ponies': Marine special ops specialists want industry help to fuse tech

17. ‘This capability didn’t exist 30 days ago’: How military exercises can drive software development

18. The state of the U.S. Navy as China builds up its naval force and threatens Taiwan

19. What Makes Putin and the World’s Autocrats So Resilient?

20. Climate Security is National Security

21. US can deter China invasion: Milley

22. Retired Green Beret Scott Mann examines ‘holistic horror of war’ in ‘Last Out’

23. Ukraine Doesn’t Need U.S. Contractors

24. Is it possible that Putin and Wagner played us all?

25. As a special forces veteran, I welcome Indigenous voices when it comes to defending Australia

26. In Small Victory, Signs of Grueling Combat Ahead in Ukrainian Counteroffensive

27. Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain

28. Burying the Dead with Dishonor — PART ONE (Special Forces in El Salvador)

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 2, 2023

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

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted counteroffensive operations in six sectors of the front on July 2 and made gains in some of these areas.
• Russian forces conducted another series of drone and missile strikes targeting southern Ukraine and Kyiv on July 2.
• The Russian MoD’s conflict with the milblogger community over a trivial combat operation may indicate that the Russian military command does not think it has any other successes to report to Putin amidst the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive.
• The Russian MoD’s attempt to overstate a potential tactical Russian victory near the Antonivsky Bridge and its efforts to restrict opposing information has backfired.
• Putin continues to face the choice of either siding with the Russian MoD to defend its weakened reputation or maintaining his support among pro-war ultranationalist milbloggers and their patronage networks.
• Russian and Ukrainian forces continued to engage in positional battles along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna frontline.
• Ukrainian and Russian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted limited offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast and have advanced as of July 2.
• Russian sources claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted limited offensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia oblasts border area.
• Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain limited positions in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near the Antonivsky Bridge as of July 2.
• Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Russian officials plan to create regional centers for the development of drones in Nizhny Novgorod as well as in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, and Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast.
• Ukrainian and Belarusian sources reported that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and other Belarusian officials and citizens are actively involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Belarus.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 2, 2023

Jul 2, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 2, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

July 2, 2023, 5pm 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 map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 12:30pm ET on July 2. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the July 3 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted counteroffensive operations in six sectors of the front on July 2 and made gains in some of these areas. The Russian Ministry of Defense and other Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in the Lyman direction, in the Bakhmut area, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front, in western Donetsk Oblast, on the administrative border between Zaporizhia and Donetsk oblasts, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[1] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty reported on July 2 that Ukrainian forces are continuing to make unspecified advances on the flanks around Bakhmut.[2] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces made unspecified gains southwest of Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[3] Geolocated footage published on July 1 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced northeast of Volodymyrivka (12km southeast of Vuhledar) in western Donetsk Oblast.[4] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations south and southwest of Orikhiv in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[5] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation deputy Vladimir Rogov claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced towards Russian trench positions near Robotyne (12km south of Orikhiv) and that there is ongoing close combat in these trenches.[6] Some Russian sources continue to describe these Ukrainian counteroffensive operations as smaller tactical operations than earlier Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.[7]

Russian forces conducted another series of drone and missile strikes targeting southern Ukraine and Kyiv on July 2. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched 11 missiles and eight Shahed drones at Ukraine, including three Kalibr missiles at Odesa and Mykolaiv oblasts.[8] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces intercepted all three Kalibr cruise missiles and eight Shahed drones.[9] The Kyiv City Military Administration reported that Ukrainian air defenses shot down all Russian Shahed drones targeting Kyiv, and Ukraine‘s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian forces shot down two drones over Mykolaiv Oblast.[10]

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is attempting to consolidate control over the Russian information space by undermining select Russian milbloggers who did not repeat the MoD’s desired framing regarding the claimed defeat of a Ukrainian presence on the east (left) bank Kherson Oblast on July 1. The Russian MoD claimed on July 1 and July 2 that Russian forces successfully repelled Ukrainian landings near the Antonivsky Bridge and disproportionally celebrated defeating a small Ukrainian landing on the eastern (left) bank of the Dnipro River.[11] Some Russian milbloggers, however, contrary to the MoD‘s reports noted that fighting is still ongoing and that Ukrainian forces maintained some positions near Antonivsky Bridge as of July 2.[12] A prominent Russian milblogger amplified a post on July 1 from an unspecified Telegram channel, which criticized several prominent Kremlin and Wagner-affiliated Telegram channels for contradicting the Russian MoD’s official narrative.[13] The post accused select milbloggers of spreading false information about the situation around the Antonivsky Bridge and other Russian MoD claims - ultimately accusing these channels of assisting Ukrainian “psychological operations.”[14] Russian milbloggers who contradicted the MoD’s report responded in turn by accusing the Russian General Staff of launching an attack on the Russian milblogger community.[15] These defiant milbloggers claimed that the Russian General Staff and the MoD previously attempted to open a criminal case against milbloggers in 2022 and claimed that milbloggers’ accurate coverage of frontline realities greatly undermines defense officials’ efforts to exaggerate Russia’s successes.[16] Some of these defiant milbloggers directly interact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it is likely that the Russian MoD seeks to censor some Kremlin-affiliated milbloggers out of a concern that these ultranationalists may expose Russian military failures to Putin during their monthly ”special military operations” milblogger working groups within the Kremlin.[17]

The Russian MoD’s conflict with the milblogger community over a trivial combat operation may indicate that the Russian military command does not think it has any other successes to report to Putin amidst the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive. One milblogger noted that Russian defense officials worry that milbloggers’ coverage of the war endangers their official positions and implied that the Russian MoD may be attempting to recover from the Wagner Group’s rebellion on June 24.[18] ISW previously reported that the Russian MoD may have exaggerated its victory in east Kherson Oblast to repair the reputation of the Russian ”Dnepr” Group of Forces and the Southern Military District (SMD), whose headquarters in Rostov-on-Don the Wagner Group surrounded a week before.[19] The Russian MoD has consistently exaggerated Ukrainian losses since the beginning of the full-scale invasion and may not be confident that such tired narratives are sufficiently offsetting the lack of any Russian progress on the battlefield as Ukrainian forces continue to make limited but steady advances in eastern and southern Ukraine.

The Russian MoD’s attempt to overstate a potential tactical Russian victory near the Antonivsky Bridge and its efforts to restrict opposing information has backfired. Russian milbloggers began to blame Russia’s military command for failing to provide Russian servicemen in east bank Kherson Oblast with boats and other supplies and generally accused the Russian MoD of lying about the situation on the frontlines for its own self-interested reasons.[20] One milblogger observed that the Russian MoD failed to provide Russian forces with more boats despite the fact that an acute and persistent Russian lack of patrol boats for littoral security has been widely known since at least April 2023, while another milblogger claimed that Russia should authorize the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to create a parallel control system over the Russian MoD to resolve bureaucratic problems.[21] The Russian pro-war community thus continues to criticize the Russian MoD even after Wagner’s failed rebellion and even as Prigozhin losses his platform in Russia.

Putin continues to face the choice of either siding with the Russian MoD to defend its weakened reputation or maintaining his support among pro-war ultranationalist milbloggers and their patronage networks. The Russian MoD had launched similar organized attacks against hostile milbloggers in July and October 2022 that did not result in milbloggers’ arrests or punishments for their criticism of the Russian military command.[22] ISW assessed that Putin was not interested in restricting the milblogger community as he valued its support for the invasion of Ukraine and instead increasingly co-opted select milbloggers by bringing them into the pro-Kremlin fold - likely in part to check the Russian MoD.[23] Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin had extensively used Russian milbloggers to promote his efforts to replace Russian MoD leadership with Wagner-affiliated officials prior to his rebellion, and Putin now faces the choice of censoring or appeasing Russian milbloggers in the aftermath of the rebellion.[24] Putin will need to restrict Russian milbloggers from criticizing the Russian MoD if he seeks to reestablish and reinforce the MoD’s credibility, but the MoD’s failures, struggles, and apparent pervasive dishonesty may make that task infeasible. Putin may thus instead decide to continue appeasing the milblogger community and scapegoating the Russian MoD for military failures in Ukraine, a far easier undertaking. That course of action could let Putin retain support for the war among the Russian ultranationalist camp at the expense of the Russian MoD. But that course of action also carries risk for Putin: the continued erosion of the MoD’s credibility could enable other ambitious Russian figures to promote their interests at its expense, as Prigozhin tried to do.

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted counteroffensive operations in six sectors of the front on July 2 and made gains in some of these areas.
• Russian forces conducted another series of drone and missile strikes targeting southern Ukraine and Kyiv on July 2.
• The Russian MoD’s conflict with the milblogger community over a trivial combat operation may indicate that the Russian military command does not think it has any other successes to report to Putin amidst the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive.
• The Russian MoD’s attempt to overstate a potential tactical Russian victory near the Antonivsky Bridge and its efforts to restrict opposing information has backfired.
• Putin continues to face the choice of either siding with the Russian MoD to defend its weakened reputation or maintaining his support among pro-war ultranationalist milbloggers and their patronage networks.
• Russian and Ukrainian forces continued to engage in positional battles along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna frontline.
• Ukrainian and Russian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted limited offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast and have advanced as of July 2.
• Russian sources claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted limited offensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia oblasts border area.
• Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain limited positions in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near the Antonivsky Bridge as of July 2.
• Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Russian officials plan to create regional centers for the development of drones in Nizhny Novgorod as well as in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, and Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast.
• Ukrainian and Belarusian sources reported that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and other Belarusian officials and citizens are actively involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Belarus.

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

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian and Ukrainian forces continued to engage in positional battles along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna frontline on July 2. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that elements of the Russian Western Group of Forces repelled two Ukrainian attacks near Novoselivske (16km northwest of Svatove) within the area of responsibility of the 1st Guards Tank Army (Western Military District).[25] The Russian MoD additionally claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Torske (13km west of Kreminna) and Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna) and stopped a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group near Kuzmyne (3km southwest of Kreminna).[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked Russian positions near Torske and Terny (15km west of Kreminna).[27] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces carried out unsuccessful offensive operations in the Nevske area (17km northwest of Kreminna) and south of Dibrova.[28] Russian sources reported that elements of the 1st Tank Guards Army continue to operate near Kyslivka (22km southwest of Kupyansk) and that elements of the 79th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion (2nd Luhansk People‘s Republic’s Army Corps) struck Ukrainian positions with drones in the Bilohorivka (13km south of Kreminna) direction.[29] Ukrainian Eastern Grouping of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty reported that Russian forces in Luhansk Oblast no longer engage in Wagner Group-style “meat assaults,” and are instead conducting reconnaissance operations and attacking in small platoon-sized groups on the Luhansk Oblast frontline.[30]

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

Ukrainian and Russian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks around Bakhmut on June 2. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced southwest of Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and unsuccessfully attacked from the northwest of Bakhmut.[31] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Bakhmut and Berkhivka (6km north of Bakhmut).[32] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty reported on July 2 that Ukrainian forces are continuing to advance on the flanks of Bakhmut.[33] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Minkivka (14km northwest of Bakhmut) and Bohdanivka (8km northwest of Bakhmut).[34] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces deployed reinforcements to the area near the E40 highway near Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut) and conducted unsuccessful assaults near Khromove (immediately west of Bakhmut) and from Berkhivka (6km north of Bakhmut) in the Bohdanivka direction.[35] Footage published on July 1 purportedly shows elements of the 11th Separate Guards Air Assault Brigade (VDV) operating on the outskirts of Bakhmut and the 4th Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd Luhansk People‘s Republic’s Army Corps) operating in an unspecified area in the Bakhmut direction.[36]

Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on July 2. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Avdiivka and Marinka.[37] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka) from Pisky (9km southwest of Avdiivka).[38] A Russian milblogger claimed on June 1 that positional battles are ongoing along the Opytne-Vodyane line (3-8km southwest of Avdiivka) and that Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted raids along the Sieverne-Vodyane road (6km west to 8km southwest of Avdiivka).[39] Footage published on July 1 purportedly shows elements of the ”Vladlen Tatarsky” UAV detachment of the Southern Military District operating near Niu York (23km northeast of Avdiivka) and elements of the 1453rd Motorized Rifle Regiment and 80th Reconnaissance ”Sparta” Battalion (1st Donetsk People‘s Republic Army Corps) operating near Pervomaiske and Lastochkyne (4km northwest of Avdiivka).[40] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Novobakhmutivka (13km northeast of Avdiivka), Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), Vodyane (8km southwest of Avidiivka), Pervomaiske, and Marinka.[41]

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

Ukrainian forces conducted limited offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast and likely made tactical gains as of July 2. Geolocated footage confirms that Ukrainian forces advanced northeast of Volodymyrivka (12km southeast of Vuhledar) as of July 1.[42] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian ground attack near Mykilske (3km southeast of Vuhledar.[43]

Russian sources claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted limited offensive operations in the western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblast border area on July 2. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian ground attack near Rivnopil (8km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[44] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also attacked in the Rivnopil area and recaptured unspecified positions.[45] The Russian “Vostok” volunteer battalion indicated that it is operating near the Yevhenivka area (25km southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[46]

Ukrainian forces reportedly continued counterattacks south and southwest of Orikhiv in western Zaporizhia Oblast on July 2. Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked Russian positions near Robotyne (13km south of Orikhiv) and captured the first Russian line of defense west of the settlement.[47] One Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces successfully repelled Ukrainian attacks overnight and during the day, however.[48] Russian sources claimed that the Russian 429th Motorized Rifle Regiment (19th Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) repelled small Ukrainian attacks near Pyatakhatky (24km southwest of Orikhiv) overnight.[49] A Russian milblogger indicated that the Russian 38th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade (35th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) is operating in the Luhivske area (16km southeast of Orikhiv).[50]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain limited positions in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near the Antonivsky Bridge as of July 2. The Russian MoD claimed on July 2 that Russian forces successfully destroyed all Ukrainian forces near the Antonivsky Bridge, but several Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain positions on the east bank.[51] Some Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces forced Ukrainian forces to withdraw from under the Antonivsky Bridge to the dacha area on July 1, and former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin claimed that an unspecified Russian commander was wounded during the engagement.[52] Girkin also claimed that unspecified elements of the Russian 7th Guards Air Assault (VDV) Division transferred from the Oleshky area (7km southeast of Kherson City) to an unspecified area in Zaporizhia Oblast, supporting Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar’s prior reports that Russian forces transferred most combat capable units from the Kherson direction following the start of the counteroffensive in early June.[53]

Enhanced Russian security measures likely continue to hinder Russian logistics from Russia to occupied Crimea and southern Ukraine.[54] Crimean occupation Transport Minister Nikolai Lukashenko stated that the traffic jam across the Kerch Strait Bridge increased to eight kilometers long as of 14:00 local time on July 2.[55] Lukashenko continued to blame the long wait on security measures at inspection points near the bridge.

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

Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Russian officials plan to create regional centers for the development of drones in Nizhny Novgorod as well as in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, and Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast.[56] Peskov stated on June 29 that these centers would produce both naval and aerial drones.[57] Peskov added that these centers would operate on the basis of a state transport leasing company but did not offer a timeline for their construction.[58]

Russian sources claimed that Russian officials are deploying a newly formed Armenian volunteer battalion to Ukraine.[59] Russian sources amplified pictures of the “Arbat” volunteer battalion attending a sendoff ceremony at the Armenian Cathedral of Moscow on July 2.[60] One Russian source speculated that the volunteer battalion includes Armenian citizens as well as ethnic Armenians from Russian-occupied Abkhazia.[61]

The mothers and wives of personnel of a mobilized regiment from Irkutsk Oblast released a video appeal on July 2 describing attritional conditions near Kreminna and blaming Russian commanders for indifference to their men.[62] The wives and mothers alleged that the regiment is suffering huge losses around Kreminna and that little less than a company remains of one of the regiment’s battalions.[63] The wives and mothers claimed that the regiment suffered heavy losses on June 19 when commanders failed to communicate with the personnel of the regiment during combat.[64] The wives and mothers alleged that Russian forces also did not attempt to evacuate killed personnel from the battlefield.[65]

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

Ukrainian and Belarusian sources reported that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and other Belarusian officials and citizens are actively involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Belarus. Belarusian opposition figure Pavel Latushka stated on June 28 that Lukashenko signed documents facilitating the deportation of children from occupied territories to Belarus and that there are currently five Belarusian summer camps and health resorts involved in the deportation campaign.[66] Latushka stated that Belarusian paralympian Alexei Talai, State Secretary of the Union State Dmitry Mezenstev, Belarusian fertilizer company Belaruskali CEO Ivan Golovaty, and Russian activist Olga Volkova are involved in the deportation of children to Belarus.[67] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on July 2 that Talai is the general director of the Russian “Believe in Yourself” foundation, which has organized the deportation of children from occupied territories to Belarus.[68] Lukashenko stated that the Belarusian government reached out to the Kremlin about the deportation effort and that it agreed to fund the children's allegedly temporary stay in Belarus from the Russian state budget.[69]

Russian officials are continuing to focus on infrastructure projects in occupied Kherson Oblast in a likely effort to further secure Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) in southern Ukraine. The Kherson Oblast occupation administration stated on July 2 that Russian repair workers have successfully restored 75 percent of the commercial seaport in Skadvosk, Kherson Oblast and plan to fully restore the port by the end of this summer.[70]

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

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Russian and Belarusian sources reported that the Wagner Group in Belarus will resemble the Wagner Group’s former organization prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[71] A Russian source reported on July 1 that the Wagner Group will continue to perform its normal missions in Africa, just operating from Belarus instead of from Russia.[72] An apparent Belarusian source additionally reported on July 1 that the Wagner Group will operate behind the scenes rather than as publicly as it did when it took up a larger role during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine; Wagner personnel will distance themselves from public media and Wagner activity will revert back to an opaquer domain of Telegram channels and Wagner’s human network.[73] The Belarusian source reported that this transition will take one-to-two months as Wagner transfers its heavy equipment to the Russian Ministry of Defense.[74] This source also reported that Russian authorities will not close the Wagner Group’s recruitment centers in Russia and that the Wagner Group will continue to recruit in Russia. It is unclear if any Wagner presence will remain in Russia or if the Russia-based Wagner recruitment centers will send new recruits to Belarus (or elsewhere). These sources did not touch on how - if at all - Yevgeny Prigozhin or his entourage will be involved in the future of Wagner Group.

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

2. Women’s Power Index

Please go to the link to view the interactive Council on Foreign Relations website with a wealth of interesting data.

https://www.cfr.org/article/womens-power-index?utm_source=tw_wfp&utm_medium=social_owned

Women’s Power Index

Find out where women around the world wield political power—and why it matters.

Interactive by Linda Robinson and Noël James

Last updated June 26, 2023 8:00 am (EST)

Created by CFR’s Women and Foreign Policy program, the Women’s Power Index ranks 193 UN member states on their progress toward gender parity in political participation. It analyzes the proportion of women who serve as heads of state or government, in cabinets, in national legislatures, as candidates for national legislatures, and in local government bodies, and visualizes the gender gap in political representation. 

Scroll down below the table to view a list of current female heads of state or government, learn why women's political representation matters, find additional resources on women's political participation, and read the methodology.

• able lets you customize the list of countries or regions to display.

How to Use the Index

• Use the to view data for one indicator at a time. Select the indicator you wish the map to display using the drop-down menu above the map.
• Use the to view data for all indicators together. The drop-down menu above the table lets you customize the list of countries or regions to display.

Current Female Heads of State or Government

Why Women's Representation Matters

Today, women around the world are running for political office in unprecedented numbers—and winning. Here is why it matters.

In the aggregate, women’s leadership promotes bipartisanship, equality [PDF], and stability. And when women make up a critical mass of legislatures—around 25 to 30 percent—they are more likely to challenge established conventions and policy agendas.

Common ground. Women are more likely to cross party lines to find common ground. A study of the U.S. Senate found that women senators more frequently worked across the aisle and passed more legislation than their male counterparts. For example, women U.S. senators from both parties joined together to negotiate an accord to end a government shutdown. Another study showed that women prime ministers and cabinet ministers are more successful in reaching compromises. In Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant women’s groups joined forces to establish a powerful political party that made progress across religious divides during the Northern Ireland peace efforts in the late 1990s.

Equality and social welfare. Women lawmakers are more likely to advocate for policies that support equality and social welfare [PDF]. Once they reach a critical mass in legislatures, results ensue: One study found an increase in expenditure on education. Another study linked the growing share of women in sub-Saharan African legislatures to increased healthcare spending and lower child and infant mortality. Parliaments with more women have passed more robust climate policies. During the pandemic, women-led governments responded with rapid, effective, and socially inclusive measures [PDF]. Parliaments with a higher share of women lawmakers are also more likely to pass and implement [PDF] legislation that advances gender equality.

Stability. Women’s inclusion at leadership tables promotes stability. One study found that, on average, a country is almost five times less likely to respond to an international crisis with violence when women’s parliamentary representation increases by 5 percent. Within countries, women’s parliamentary representation is associated with a decreased risk of civil war and lower levels of state-perpetrated human rights abuses, such as disappearances, killings, political imprisonment, and torture. Indeed, in post-conflict Rwanda, where over 50 percent of parliamentarians are women, lawmakers have supported inclusive decision-making [PDF] processes that promote reconciliation efforts at the local level. Women played leading roles in achieving peace in the Philippines and in shaping post-conflict constitutions around the world.

To be sure, electing women does not guarantee those outcomes. Holding political office is just the first step to wielding political power; in many countries, institutional structures and political systems still limit women’s ability to influence policy. Women are not a homogenous group, and not all women leaders will be cooperative, peaceful, or advocate for laws that strengthen gender equality. Being the first woman elected to a leadership position often means navigating previously male-dominated structures, which can translate into political caution rather than policy change.

In any event, evidence suggests that some hurdles are growing. As the number of women seeking office has increased, so has physical violence and online abuse [PDF] targeting women in politics. One study of women parliamentarians found that 44.4 percent [PDF] were threatened with death, rape, or physical violence. According to another study, women officials are targeted 3.4 times more often than men. Women have also been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic through unemployment, wage disparity, and declining managerial positions.

Nonetheless, these setbacks have motivated women in many countries to become politically engaged and to connect through burgeoning worldwide networks [PDF]. As the ranks of women leaders increase, they help to inspire and empower others to enter the political arena.

Additional Resources

• “Women in Politics: 2023,” UN Women and IPU
• Global Gender Gap Report 2023, World Economic Forum
• Women Peace and Security Index, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
• New Parline, a platform with data on national legislatures, Inter-Parliamentary Union
• #ShePersisted: Women, Politics, and Power in the New Media World, Lucina Di Meco, Wilson Center
• “Gender, Women, and Democracy,” National Democratic Institute

For more work from CFR scholars, see “Renewing the Global Architecture for Gender Equality,” by Ann Norris; “Women in the 118th Congress: Halting Progress, Storm Clouds Ahead,” by Linda Robinson; “Biden’s Progress on Women’s Rights: Good Start, But Not Fast Enough,” by Linda Robinson; “Women Under Attack: The Backlash Against Female Politicians” in Foreign Affairs, by Jamille Bigio and Rachel Vogelstein; “Other Nations Have Been Putting Women in Charge. Where’s the U.S.?” in the Washington Post, by Alexandra Bro and Rachel Vogelstein.

About the Data

Political parity score:

The political parity score (a number between 0 and 100) is an aggregate of women’s representation across five indicators of political participation: heads of state or government, national cabinets, national legislatures, national legislature candidates, and local legislatures. The index measures women’s representation, which refers to the numerical presence of women rather than women’s impact or policy preferences.

Each indicator was scored by converting the raw data into a ratio of women’s representation over men’s representation and then scaling the result to 100. Thus, if women hold 25 percent of the seats in a country’s national legislature, the country is given a score of 33.3 (25 divided by 75 scaled to 100) for the national legislatures indicator. The maximum score for each indicator is 100, which means that women make up 50 percent or more of the measured value for that specific indicator.

The aggregate score was then obtained by calculating the unweighted average of each of the five indicator scores (for those where data was available). For countries with the same score, we assigned them the same rank and left a corresponding gap in the index. Thus, if two (or more) countries tie for a position in the ranking, the position of those ranked below them is unaffected (i.e., a country comes in third if exactly two countries score better than it and fourth if exactly three countries score better than it).

The index will be updated on a quarterly basis with, when possible, new publicly available data. An increase or a decrease in a country’s relative rank does not necessarily mean that the country has improved or worsened its female representation in all—or any—of the five scored indicators. A change in a country’s aggregate score, however, means that women’s representation has changed in one or more of the five indicators.

Elected and appointed heads of state or government since 1946: The number of female heads of state and government between January 1, 1946, and June 1, 2023. We count female heads of state or government after World War II—when the world saw a wave of independence movements—and only include 193 UN member states. This list does not include monarchs or governors appointed by monarchs, acting or interim heads of state or government who were not subsequently elected or confirmed, honorary heads of state or government, copresidents, joint heads of state, heads of government of a constituent country, or women who were or are not constitutionally the head of government but rather serve or served in a position akin to a deputy to the president. In countries with collective heads of state, the list includes only presiding members (often called the chairperson).

This indicator was scored using the following methodology: The number of years since 1946 with a female head of state or government was divided by the number of years since 1946 with a male head of state or government. The male value was calculated by subtracting the female value from the total number of years since 1946 (seventy-seven). When a female head of state or government was suspended, we counted her time in office up until the date she was suspended, even if she officially remained in office (e.g., Park Geun-hye in South Korea and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil). If a country has had a woman head of state or government at the same time, we did not double count the time period. This data was collected using publicly available information and can be viewed in the map above.

Cabinets: Percentage of ministerial positions held by women, as of June 1, 2023. This data was collected by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and can be found in the UN Women’s and IPU’s Women in Politics: 2023 map. IPU collected data from national governments, permanent missions to the United Nations, and publicly available information. IPU’s count of the total number of ministers includes deputy prime ministers and ministers but excludes vice presidents and heads of governmental or public agencies. IPU includes prime ministers or heads of government if they hold ministerial portfolios.

National legislatures: Percentage of seats held by women in lower and upper houses of national legislatures, as of June 1, 2023. This data was collected by IPU.

National legislature candidates: Percentage of registered female candidates in the most recent elections to the lower and upper houses of national legislatures, as of June 1, 2023. This data was collected by IPU.

Local legislatures: Percentage of elected seats held by women in local government bodies, as of June 1, 2023. This data was collected by the UN Statistics Division (UNSD), a division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. See here for the data and here for a detailed explanation of UNSD’s methodology and data collection.

cfr.org · by Linda Robinson

3. On Foreign Policy, the New Populists Are Old Declinists

Conclusion:

Contemporary statesmen should look to the example of Ronald Reagan. Arming Ukraine presents a moment to rally allies, build our respective military-industrial bases, and counter Russia and China at the same time. This will require clear-eyed realism, moral clarity, and determination. The challenges are great, but the country has achieved harder things under more dire circumstances. Decline is a choice — one we can’t afford to make.

On Foreign Policy, the New Populists Are Old Declinists

By REBECCAH HEINRICHS & MATTHEW KROENIG

July 2, 2023 6:30 AM

Listen to article

The U.S. can — and must — confront Russia and China simultaneously.

Bottom of Form

The national-security threats to the United States are growing more numerous and varied, and Americans sense it. Even after last weekend’s attempted coup, Russia continues its unprovoked war on Ukraine and seeks to splinter NATO. China audaciously flew a spy balloon over the United States, and still threatens to invade Taiwan. Moreover, these nuclear-armed dictatorships are increasingly working together in a “no limits” partnership to threaten American interests. Despite the Biden administration’s appeals for de-escalation with Russia and a “thaw” in the frozen tensions with China, our adversaries respond with more aggression.

Republicans are the party of President Ronald Reagan, who won the Cold War by embracing the maxim of “peace through strength.” Reagan invested in American military power, armed those fighting our shared enemy, and rallied the free world to defeat the Soviet Union — all while avoiding a catastrophic hot war. These strategies would work well today.

Where Are the Fathers?

But there is a new vision that threatens to take the GOP and America down a different path. The “Asia First” approach maintains that Washington should focus on Asia, because America is overburdened and it must husband its resources to confront its most capable adversary — China. Prominent members of this group include Senators Josh Hawley and J. D. Vance. They oppose sending weapons to Ukraine because they argue these arms are needed to deter a Chinese assault on Taiwan. For them, leading the free world is the naïve stuff of Reagan and an optimistic, bygone era.

The necessary assumption undergirding this “Asia First” foreign-policy position is that Washington can no longer do it all, that America is in decline. But like past declinists and doomers, “Asia First” proponents are mistaken.

Today’s debate is an old one. In the 1970s, many believed that American power was stagnating and that the Soviet Union was ascendant. Rather than allow Moscow to surpass the United States, President Richard Nixon and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, believed the best course of action was to negotiate a détente with the Soviet Union to lock in parity between the two sides.

Reagan proved them wrong. He believed that America’s model of a free political system and open markets had inherent strengths and that the Soviet Union’s brittle, state-planned dictatorship was fundamentally flawed. He bet that if Washington took the gloves off and forced the Soviet Union to compete, Communism would collapse under its own weight. He was right.

Today’s declinists are as misguided as Reagan’s critics. The United States and its allies are stronger, and Russia and China weaker, than they think.

Washington and its allies have the necessary resources (if appropriately leveraged) to counter China and Russia simultaneously. The United States possesses 25 percent of global GDP compared to China and Russia’s combined 20 percent. If one adds formal treaty allies to the equation, the free world possesses nearly 60 percent of global GDP, a clear preponderance of power.

Like that of the Soviet Union before it, China’s state-led authoritarian model is brittle. By reasserting state control over China’s economy, Xi Jinping killed off China’s successful growth model. Xi’s aggressive foreign policy is also causing the United States and Europe to selectively decouple from the Chinese economy, kicking down the ladder that facilitated China’s rise. Economists increasingly say that China, once on a path to become the world’s largest economy, may now never get there.

Moreover, the more negative current trends are not immutable. The Asia Firsters point to a weak U.S. defense-industrial base that, after decades of neglect, is unable to produce the weapons the United States needs to deter adversaries and, if necessary, win a major war. But the answer is not to abandon important U.S. interests; it’s to rebuild the defense-industrial base with a sense of national purpose. As a percentage of GDP, U.S. defense spending is under 4 percent, putting it near historic lows. It could be doubled and remain below Cold War averages. Washington has agency, and with the right leadership, can reverse those trends. The solution is not to accept American decline, but rather to grow U.S. and allied military strength and wield power with prudence and skilled statecraft.

There is great media interest in the loudest voices calling for global disengagement and an end to support for Ukraine, but, fortunately, most Republicans remain firmly in the Reaganite camp. A new survey from the Reagan Institute shows that 71 percent of Republicans believe it is important for Ukraine to defeat Russia. Republican leaders on national-security committees such as Senators Tom Cotton, Roger Wicker, and Jim Risch, and Representatives Michael McCaul, Mike Rogers, and Mike Gallagher, argue that empowering Kyiv to defeat Russia strengthens, rather than weakens, America in its rivalry with China. Russia and China are in a deepening strategic partnership and a weakened Russia hurts China. Xi will be more hesitant to invade Taiwan if he sees Putin roundly defeated in Ukraine. In addition, U.S. military aid to Ukraine is prompting the defense industry to increase weapons-production capacity, which will have spillover benefits for Asia.

These leading Republicans do not criticize President Biden for being too supportive of Ukraine and tough on Russia. Rather, they correctly criticize the administration for pursuing a strategy of support for Ukraine’s defense that is aimless, indecisive, and risk-averse. Learning from the mistakes of the “forever wars” in the Middle East, they urge the United States to pursue a clear theory of victory, backed by ample resources, to help Kyiv succeed quickly and decisively.

Contemporary statesmen should look to the example of Ronald Reagan. Arming Ukraine presents a moment to rally allies, build our respective military-industrial bases, and counter Russia and China at the same time. This will require clear-eyed realism, moral clarity, and determination. The challenges are great, but the country has achieved harder things under more dire circumstances. Decline is a choice — one we can’t afford to make.

Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow and the director of the Keystone Defense Initiative at Hudson Institute. Matthew Kroenig is the vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a government professor at Georgetown University.

4. Russia may stage terrorist attack on ZNPP to scare the world with consequences of war, politically influence Ukraine's counteroffensive – Volodymyr Zelenskyy

I hope people do not get the chicken little or boy who cried wolf syndrome. When Russia attacks one of the nuclear power plants i t will be catastrophic.

Paradoxically, by exposing the Russian strategy it may prevent this action as we could all be inoculated against the "information effects." 

Russia may stage terrorist attack on ZNPP to scare the world with consequences of war, politically influence Ukraine's counteroffensive – Volodymyr Zelenskyy

https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/rosiya-mozhe-vlashtuvati-terakt-na-zaes-shob-zalyakati-svit-83993

1 July 2023 - 18:22

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy believes that Russia may resort to a terrorist act at the Zaporizhzhia NPP, which it occupies, to scare the world with the possible consequences of its aggression against Ukraine and create political influence on the counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian army. The Head of State said this at a meeting with media representatives after talks with President of the Government of Spain Pedro Sánchez in Kyiv.

"We have been saying for a long time that there is a serious threat. Because Russia is technically ready to provoke a local explosion at the plant, which could lead to the release of dangerous substances into the air. We communicate this very clearly. We are discussing all this with our partners so that everyone understands why Russia is doing this and puts pressure on the Russian Federation politically so that they don't even think about such a thing," Zelenskyy said, answering journalists' questions.

According to the President, the Russian occupiers are resorting to terrorist acts because their army has been showing weakness on the battlefield throughout the year. Therefore, the Russians are trying to stop Ukraine's defense forces with acts of terrorism such as blowing up the Kakhovka HPP dam or a possible local act of terrorism at the ZNPP.

In addition, Zelenskyy is convinced that the Russian Federation wants to show that its aggressive war against Ukraine is dangerous for the world. "So that people are afraid of it. So that later some partners, especially those skeptics, start politically stopping Ukraine, our counteroffensive actions," he said.

The Head of State said that Ukraine has been saying for a long time that the Zaporizhzhia NPP should be returned under the full control of the Ukrainian authorities. And it is also crucial that independent experts check everything at the time of the transfer of control over the plant to Ukraine. According to the President, the IAEA, which is a mediator and can involve other states, should play its role in this.

"Because there can be remote mines. Then to say that everything was fine under the control of the occupiers, but now there is a release. This is a very important moment," Zelenskyy said.

Answering journalists' questions about the prospects of Ukraine receiving F-16 aircraft, the President recalled that agreements had been reached on the creation of a coalition of countries that are ready to start appropriate training for Ukrainian pilots. Now, Ukraine is waiting for the schedule of these training missions, the Head of State said.

"We have agreed, pressed, and we have a coalition of countries ready to start training for Ukrainian pilots. There is no schedule of training missions. I believe that some partners drag it out. I don't know why they are doing it," Zelenskyy said.

5. Exclusive: Zelensky calls Putin ‘weak’ and says Russian President’s power is ‘crumbling’

Video at the link. I guess we have to wait until Wednesday for the full interview.

Exclusive: Zelensky calls Putin ‘weak’ and says Russian President’s power is ‘crumbling’

By Erin Burnett, Yon Pomrenze, Mick Krever and Victoria Butenko, CNN

Updated 6:01 AM EDT, Mon July 3, 2023

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/03/europe/zelensky-ukraine-putin-erin-burnett-interview-intl-cmd?utm

Editor’s Note: Erin Burnett’s full interview with Volodymyr Zelensky airs Wednesday July 5 at 7 p.m. ET.

Odesa, UkraineCNN — 

Vladimir Putin’s response to the armed Wagner rebellion was “weak” and the Russian President is losing control of his own people, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN in an exclusive interview.

Putin faced the greatest threat to his authority in two decades last month when the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, launched a short-lived uprising, claiming control of military facilities in two Russian cities and marching toward Moscow before he agreed to stand down.

“We see Putin’s reaction. It’s weak,” Zelensky told CNN’s Erin Burnett in Odesa, in an interview taped on Sunday.

“Firstly, we see he doesn’t control everything. Wagner’s moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions shows how easy it is to do. Putin doesn’t control the situation in the regions.”

“All that vertical of power he used to have is just crumbling down.”

Some Russians cheered on Wagner fighters as Prigozhin led the unprecedented challenge to Putin’s authority. Video geolocated and verified by CNN showed crowds cheering as the Wagner boss’ vehicle departed the southern city of Rostov-on-Don on June 24.

Zelensky said Ukrainian intelligence reports showed the Kremlin was measuring support for Prigozhin, and he claimed that half of Russia supported the Wagner boss and the paramilitary group’s mutiny.

After the short-lived insurrection, questions swirl over top Russian commander and Prigozhin

The interview with Zelensky comes at a critical time – not only in the wake of Prigozhin’s failed insurrection, but also weeks into Ukraine’s slow push to recapture territory occupied by Russia.

That effort has come under intense scrutiny from Western allies and on Saturday a US official told CNN the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Bill Burns, had visited Kyiv recently and met with Zelensky and Ukrainian intelligence officials.

Zelensky told CNN he was “surprised” to see his meeting with Burns reported in the media. “My communication with the CIA chief should always be behind the scenes,” he said. “We discuss important things – what Ukraine needs and how Ukraine is prepared to act.”

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Burns, a veteran diplomat, has become a trusted interlocutor in Kyiv, and has made several trips to Ukraine during the war.

“We don’t have any secrets from CIA, because we have good relations, and our intelligence services talk with each other,” Zelensky said.

“The situation is pretty straightforward. We have good relations with the CIA chief and we are talking. I told him about all the important things related to the battlefield which we need.”

CIA director met Zelensky on trip to Ukraine, US official says

Burns traveled to Kyiv before Prigozhin’s rebellion, which was not a topic of discussion, the US official told CNN.

Speaking at a news conference in Kyiv Saturday, Zelensky said Prigozhin’s rebellion had “greatly affected Russian power on the battlefield” and could be beneficial to Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

While the thrust of Kyiv’s efforts have focused on recapturing territory in the south and east of Ukraine, Zelensky told Burnett that his ultimate goal was to liberate Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 in violation of international law.

“We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet,” he said.

Asked whether there was any scenario under which there could be peace without Crimea, Zelensky said: “It will not be victory then.”

CNN’s Gul Tuysuz contributed to this story.

6. US recommends Americans reconsider traveling to China due to arbitrary law enforcement, exit bans

I am reminded of the Richard Gere film Red Corner (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119994/plotsummary/)

US recommends Americans reconsider traveling to China due to arbitrary law enforcement, exit bans

AP · by Published [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · July 3, 2023

BEIJING (AP) — The U.S. recommended Americans reconsider traveling to China because of arbitrary law enforcement and exit bans and the risk of wrongful detentions.

No specific cases were cited, but the advisory came after a 78-year-old U.S. citizen was sentenced to life in prison on spying charges in May.

It also followed the passage last week of a sweeping Foreign Relations Law that threatens countermeasures against those seen as harming China’s interests.

Other news

Flooding displaces 10,000 around China as Beijing gets a relative respite from sweltering heat

Flooding has displaced thousands of people around China as the capital had a relative respite from a sweltering heat wave.

Putin will speak with leaders of China and India in his first summit since the Wagner insurrection

President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is making a long-awaited trip to China this week

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing Thursday in an effort to thaw U.S.-China relations, a Treasury official said.

Japan crushes New Zealand to set up Asia Cup final against China

Five-time defending champion Japan has produced another commanding performance at the women’s basketball Asia Cup with a heavy 88-52 defeat of New Zealand in the semifinals.

China also recently passed a broadly written counterespionage law that has sent a chill through the foreign business community, with offices being raided, as well as a law to sanction foreign critics.

“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including issuing exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, without fair and transparent process under the law,” the U.S. advisory said.

“U.S. citizens traveling or residing in the PRC may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime,” it warned.

The advisory also said that Chinese authorities “appear to have broad discretion to deem a wide range of documents, data, statistics, or materials as state secrets and to detain and prosecute foreign nationals for alleged espionage.”

It listed a wide range of potential offenses from taking part in demonstrations to sending electronic messages critical of Chinese policies or even simply conducting research into areas deemed sensitive.

Exit bans could be used to compel individuals to participate in Chinese government investigations, pressure family members to return from abroad, resolve civil disputes in favor of Chinese citizens and “gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments,” the advisory said.

Similar advisories were issued for the semi-autonomous Chinese regions of Hong Kong and Macao. They were dated Friday and emailed to journalists on Monday.

The U.S. had issued similar advisories to its citizens in the past, but those in recent years had mainly warned of the dangers of being caught in strict and lengthy lockdowns while China closed its borders for three years under its draconian “zero-COVID” policy.

China generally responds angrily to what it considers U.S. efforts to impugn its authoritarian Communist Party-led system. It has issued its own travel advisories concerning the U.S., warning of the dangers of crime, anti-Asian discrimination and the high cost of emergency medical assistance.

China had no immediate response to the travel advisory on Monday.

Details of the accusations against the accused spy John Shing-Wan Leung are not available, given China’s authoritarian political system and the ruling Communist Party’s absolute control over legal matters. Leung, who also holds permanent residency in Hong Kong, was detained in the southeastern city of Suzhou on April 15, 2021 — a time when China had closed its borders and tightly restricted movement of people domestically to control the spread of COVID-19.

The warnings come as U.S.-China relations are at their lowest in years, over trade, technology, Taiwan and human rights, although the sides are taking some steps to improve the situation. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a long-delayed visit to Beijing last week and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is making a much-anticipated trip to Beijing this week. China also recently appointed a new ambassador to Washington, who presented his credentials in a meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House.

Other incidents, however, have also pointed to the testiness in the relationship. China formally protested last month after Biden called Chinese leader Xi Jinping a “dictator,” days after Blinken’s visit.

Biden brushed off the protest, saying his words would have no negative impact on U.S.-China relations and that he still expects to meet with Xi sometime soon. Biden has also drawn rebukes from Beijing by explicitly saying the U.S. would defend self-governing Taiwan if China, which claims the island as its own territory, were to attack it.

Biden said his blunt statements regarding China are “just not something I’m going to change very much.”

The administration is also under pressure from both parties to take a tough line on China, making it one of the few issues on which most Democrats and Republicans agree.

Along with several detained Americans, Two Chinese-Australians, Cheng Lei, who formerly worked for China’s state broadcaster, and writer Yang Jun, have been held since 2020 and 2019 respectively without word on their sentencing.

Perhaps the most notorious case of arbitrary detention involved two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who were detained in China in 2018, shortly after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer and the daughter of the tech powerhouse’s founder, on a U.S. extradition request.

They were charged with national security crimes that were never explained and released three years later after the U.S. settled fraud charges against Meng. Many countries labeled China’s action “hostage politics.”

AP · by Published [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · July 3, 2023

7. Top military court rules troops don’t have right to unanimous verdicts

Top military court rules troops don’t have right to unanimous verdicts

militarytimes.com · by Rachel Cohen · June 30, 2023

The U.S. military’s highest appeals court ruled Thursday that troops do not have the right to a unanimous verdict in criminal trials, upholding a disparity between military and civilian courts that dates back to the country’s founding.

The 5-0 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces means American service members remain the country’s only constituency not afforded the same constitutional rights as defendants in civilian courts.

“The lack of such a right has been a central component of a series of landmark Supreme Court military justice cases,” the judges wrote in the 19-page opinion. “It would be disingenuous for this court to ignore over a century of consistent guidance from the Supreme Court about the applicability of the Sixth Amendment to military trials.”

The decision affirms an earlier ruling by the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals in U.S. v. Anderson, a 2020 case in which Master Sgt. Anthony Anderson was found guilty of two counts of attempting to sexually abuse a child.

Starting in 2018, Anderson had sent lewd messages and photos to “Sara,” a fake 13-year-old created by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations on the anonymous messaging app Whisper. He also tried to discuss sex with a real 15-year-old female student at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, for which he was not charged.

Anderson’s defense counsel had asked the court to either require a unanimous vote for conviction, or to announce whether the vote was unanimous if the jurors found him guilty. The judge denied that request.

Anderson was convicted by a panel of officers and enlisted airmen. At least three-quarters of a court-martial jury must agree whether a defendant is guilty or not, per the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

He chose to be sentenced by the military judge and received 12 months of confinement; reduction to airman basic, the Air Force’s lowest enlisted rank; and a dishonorable discharge.

The Air Force appellate court later agreed with the judge’s decision not to require a unanimous conviction; Anderson’s team argued it violated his rights to due process and a jury trial afforded by amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Bill Cassara, a civilian lawyer representing Anderson at his court-martial, did not comment on the case by press time Friday.

Don Christensen, a retired Air Force colonel who served as the service’s chief prosecutor, said the verdict calls the military justice system’s fairness into question.

“Unanimous verdict is the gold standard of justice,” he said. “The military is kind of stuck in 1775 in the way they view this.”

Thursday’s ruling formally answers a question that has loomed over courts-martial since the country’s founding. Because of how the laws governing the U.S. military’s rules and responsibilities were written, the U.S. Supreme Court and uniformed judges view the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial as a feature of civilian courts, not the military justice system.

The U.S. Supreme Court first ruled in 1972 that convicting a defendant in a split decision violated the Sixth Amendment. The court banned non-unanimous verdicts in state criminal cases in 2020, leaving the military as the only jurisdiction that allows them.

Anderson’s team argued that because the Supreme Court hasn’t yet heard a direct plea on the matter, the military appellate court could step in to create a new precedent. But the judges didn’t buy it.

They pointed as far back as the 1775 Articles of War, which called for convictions by majority vote, and the subsequent U.S. Supreme Court cases that have nodded to that standard in rulings on civilian matters. A jury doesn’t need to issue a unanimous verdict to be impartial, they added.

Government lawyers have argued that split verdicts can be more efficient and avoid pressuring lower-ranking jurors to defer to their superiors to reach a consensus.

Christensen blasted those as outdated excuses, saying the military can afford to hold retrials in case of hung juries and should trust its members to do the right thing. He now works at Solomon Law Firm, which specializes in federal employment cases.

“We expect the lowest enlisted member in the military to be able to tell a four-star general that ‘I will not obey an unlawful order,’ ” he said. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask … that junior members would be able to push back against senior members if they didn’t think someone should be found guilty.”

Anderson’s team could still appeal to the Supreme Court as a last resort. But the panel rarely agrees to hear military justice matters, Christensen said. He believes the justices would side with the government in Anderson’s case.

Without resolution through the judiciary, it falls to Congress to mandate unanimous courts-martial verdicts. Failure to do so will continue to erode confidence in the military justice system, Christensen said.

“This is one of the last remaining issues … that both the defense and prosecution, when they’re being honest, realize … needs to be changed,” he said.

About Rachel S. Cohen

Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.

8. The Pentagon policy bill’s next big stumbling block: Kevin McCarthy

Politics or national security? Unfortunately they are inseparable.

The Pentagon policy bill’s next big stumbling block: Kevin McCarthy

By CONNOR O’BRIEN and JOE GOULD

07/02/2023 07:00 AM EDT

Politico

If the speaker loads up the bill with conservative measures, he could lose crucial Democrats.

The dilemma underscores the balance GOP leaders like Speaker Kevin McCarthy must strike between lawmakers on their right, many of whom rarely vote for the defense bill, and the Democrats they’ll ultimately need for any bill to become law. | Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo

07/02/2023 07:00 AM EDT

The Pentagon’s must-pass policy bill has been signed into law each year for six decades. House Democrats are worried Kevin McCarthy is about to muck it up.

The $886 billion National Defense Authorization Act could be where McCarthy makes his next concessions to conservative Republicans, letting them load up the bill with provisions that strip Biden-era personnel policies out of the military. But those provisions also run the risk of driving away Democrats whose support will be crucial to the legislation surviving a vote in a closely divided House.

GOP leadership is “getting pushed, and it’s not even by the majority of Republicans, it’s the extreme far-right MAGA extremists who are pushing for their narrow-minded agenda in the bill, and they’re trying to find the right balance,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Committee members from both parties locked arms in a blowout 58-1 vote last week to send the bill to the House floor, despite the inclusion of Republican-authored language to repeal the Pentagon’s chief diversity officer post, block funding for drag shows on military bases and create a special watchdog for Ukraine assistance.

Passing any bill in the House is tricky because of Republicans’ thin majority. Lawmakers on McCarthy’s far-right flank are pushing to use floor amendments to go even further to rein in Pentagon policies on diversity and climate change they contend distract the military from its main mission. McCarthy is still working to lower tensions with those conservatives who opposed his debt limit deal with President Joe Biden. But the more Republicans needle Biden through amendments, the less bipartisan support there’s likely to be for the bill.

The dilemma underscores the balance GOP leaders must strike between lawmakers on their right, many of whom rarely vote for the defense bill, and the Democrats they’ll ultimately need for any bill to become law. The bill must eventually pass a Democratic-led Senate and win Biden’s signature.

“There’s no question we can win if it goes to a vote” on the bill in its current form, Smith said. “It’s a question of how Kevin McCarthy wants to handle it.”

House Armed Services Chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) had a similar warning about overloading the bill with conservative priorities. Republicans’ narrow majority will test “this idea that all the conservative stuff that people like me would like to see in the bill can get on there,” he said.

“This idea that one party, particularly in divided government, can run over the other party — it’s just not realistic,” he said.

A partisan brawl is looming on the House floor, though, over Pentagon policies to cover travel costs and allow leave for troops seeking abortions. Republicans want to block it, but doing so would likely turn many Democrats against the defense bill.

More conservative proposals are piling up ahead of floor debate the week of July 10. Republicans have already filed a variety of proposals that restrict diversity and inclusion programs, limit punishment for troops who refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine, and roll back aid for Ukraine.

Another wildcard is the new conservative bloc on the House Rules Committee, which determines which of the new amendments will receive floor votes. McCarthy gave spots on the influential panel to three conservatives — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) — as part of his deal to secure the speakership. All three have typically voted against the Pentagon’s annual authorization bill.

Hundreds of amendments will likely be sent to the floor, and the new rightward tilt to the panel could mean more conservative proposals make the cut.

“I’ve had some members talk to me about bringing amendments, and I told them we have a whole new construct,” Rogers said. “Nobody knows how it’s gonna play out.”

Roy, a critic of increased defense spending, said he wants tough language in the bill curtailing diversity efforts, the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy and decades-old war authorizations.

“The NDAA is going to need to have some serious amendments if you’re going to want to get that thing moving,” Roy said. “I’m just not all that confident currently that we’re addressing the kinds of things that we need to address.”

Not everyone on the right agrees. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who doesn’t always vote for the bill, said he’s “as enthusiastic about this NDAA as I’ve been in my seven years here.” He is using several wins in the bill to attract conservative votes.

Gaetz, who opposed McCarthy’s bid for the speakership, played a prominent role in the Armed Services Committee’s markup of the defense bill last week. He and other Republicans won votes on amendments to rein in diversity initiatives, climate change programs, drag shows on military bases and critical race theory.

“I’m working hard to convince House conservatives to support this NDAA,” Gaetz said in an interview. “There’s a lot to love. We are ending critical race theory in the military. We’ve taken a hatchet to the very harmful [diversity, equity and inclusion] initiatives that have emerged in very strange iterations. And we’re meeting the nation’s defense needs.”

Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who voted against the last defense bill, said Republican leaders should push hard to pass the policies that Gaetz and other conservatives have championed, along with similar proposals.

“It’s important that they have a seat at the table and not just lip service because I think they share the views of a lot of people, in my district anyway,” Burchett said.

Even when they were in the minority, though, Republicans supplied more votes for a compromise defense bill last year than Democrats. The narrow margin in the previous Congress gave Republicans leverage to include their priorities in the authorization bill — or keep some of Democrats’ priorities out. GOP negotiators saw some major wins, including a provision to repeal the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for troops.

Rogers, who is pushing to pass his first defense bill as Armed Services chair, carries a printout list of the 80 lawmakers who voted against the compromise bill last year. Of those, 35 were Republicans, a reminder that a portion of his party won’t support the bill regardless of GOP policy wins.

“You could have a cure for cancer in that bill, and they wouldn’t vote for it,” Rogers said.

Democrats worry that if the Republicans use amendments to target even more of Biden’s personnel policies, they’ll have to vote against the legislation, in spite of all the defense policies in the bill that they support. Republicans argue diversity and anti-extremism policies are hamstringing recruitment, yet Democrats contend those measures keep recruiting strong at a time the military can’t spare anyone.

Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) touted her provisions to expand mental health care and child care reimbursements in the defense bill, but warned more Republican-friendly measures on personnel issues would flip her to a “no.”

“If it is loaded down with amendments that restrict access to reproductive health care and that demonize our LGBTQ service members, if it’s loaded down with those amendments, it will be hard for me to vote for it,” McClellan said.

There’s a potential cautionary tale in separate Pentagon spending legislation that veered hard to the right and has run into trouble in the House. Democrats are uniformly opposing the GOP defense appropriations bill, which includes conservative riders blocking abortion services, transgender medical care, diversity initiatives, climate change programs and critical race theory. There was a party-line vote in committee that guarantees the bill will struggle on the House floor.

In the authorization bill, while there are some clear dealbreakers such as abortion, House Democrats haven’t yet drawn their red lines on other issues. But they’re confident the dynamics of the House give them leverage over what is included in the Pentagon bill.

“I think it’s going to be really difficult when we get to the floor,” Smith said. “The odds of getting a bill on the floor that Chip Roy’s going to vote for and any Democrats going to vote for are pretty remote, and they’re going to have to figure out that calculation.”

POLITICO

Politico

9. ‘Political hostages’: Tuberville’s promotions blockade is about to hit the Joint Chiefs hard

Sigh... 

‘Political hostages’: Tuberville’s promotions blockade is about to hit the Joint Chiefs hard

By PAUL MCLEARY

06/30/2023 03:26 PM EDT

Politico

Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s hold on military nominees is having a cascading effect on the Pentagon’s top leaders.

“Senator Tuberville is taking the military nominees as political hostages,” said Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine Corps major general. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

06/30/2023 03:26 PM EDT

An Alabama senator’s blockade of military nominations is about to hit a new phase, and it will have a major impact at the highest levels of the Pentagon.

Starting July 10, four members of the eight-member Joint Chiefs of Staff will begin retiring. And if Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade holds, it’ll mean half the chiefs — the leaders of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, along with the chair — will have no successor in place.

Without Senate-confirmed officers in those positions, those who will be tapped to fulfill their duties won’t be able to make major, strategic decisions for the future of their services. It also has a knock-on effect, as every officer waiting to replace that person will be in limbo down the chain of command.

The jam-up comes at an exceedingly complex time as the U.S. continues to supply Ukraine with weapons to beat back an increasingly unstable Russia, and contends with China as it continues its breakneck military modernization efforts.

“Senator Tuberville is taking the military nominees as political hostages,” said Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine Corps major general and former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director. “There’s just no getting around it, these are political hostages over a policy that he disagrees with by the current administration.”

Tuberville, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, placed the hold in protest of the Pentagon’s new policy that pays for troops if they need to travel to seek abortions. The move has halted the promotions of around 250 high-ranking military officers.

The number is growing and Tuberville says he has no plans to stop unless the Pentagon ends the policy or the Senate holds a vote on the issue.

“There are a number of things happening globally that indicate that we could be in a contest on any one given day,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told senators in March. “Not approving the recommendations for promotions actually creates a ripple effect through the force that makes us far less ready than we need to be.

“The effects are cumulative and it will affect families. It will affect kids going to schools because they won’t be able to change their duty station,” he added. “It’s a powerful effect and will impact on our readiness.”

Meeting with local leaders in Alabama this week, the senator said that he had “a 10-minute conversation with the secretary of defense and zero conversation from the White House, so if they think this is real important what they’re doing and I’m really hurting readiness, you’d think they would call me and say ‘coach could you come visit with us we’d like to work this out,’ zero communications.”

The problems for the Joint Chiefs start on July 10, when Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger presides over what is being called a “relinquishment of office” ceremony to hand leadership — temporarily — to his No. 2. That officer, Assistant Marine Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, has been nominated by the White House to succeed Berger.

Smith’s nomination has been approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but he will remain in limbo until the hold is lifted.

After Berger leaves, current Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville will step down around Aug. 9 when his tour ends, giving way to his second in command Gen. Randy George, who has also been nominated by President Joe Biden to succeed McConville.

Days later, current Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday is expected to relinquish command around Aug. 14, after which Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the vice chief of naval operations, would take over on an interim basis. Franchetti “would have the full authorities” of the office, said Cmdr. Courtney Hillson, a spokesperson for Gilday.

The biggest change comes on Oct. 1, when Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley is slated to retire. If his nominated replacement isn’t confirmed by then, he will hand over responsibilities to his vice chief, Adm. Christopher Grady.

The man tapped to replace Milley, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown, is provisionally set to appear for his nomination hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 11.

A day later, George is scheduled to receive his hearing to be Army chief of staff, followed on July 13, which has been set aside for the White House’s pick to lead the Navy. Those dates could be pushed back until the end of the month, before the August recess begins.

The name of Gilday’s replacement has not yet been announced, but Austin has recommended Pacific Fleet chief Adm. Samuel Paparo as the Navy’s next chief of naval operations, POLITICO has reported. In choosing Paparo, Austin passed over Franchetti, who would still have to assume temporary leadership of the Navy.

Tuberville’s hold is not final, and is more of a delaying tactic that forces Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to hold individual votes for each officer. But that process could take months.

And there’s little time for the Joint Chiefs, with just three weeks to go before Congress checks out for the summer, and with four nominations to consider. Plus, Schumer has resisted holding individual votes for only the Joint Chiefs, because doing so risks emboldening other senators to use Tuberville’s maneuver.

“You’ve got some significant holes that have been created in major commands,” Punaro said. “This is having a real negative impact on military readiness, there’s no getting around it.”

In the case of Brown, the nominee to replace Milley as Joint Chiefs chair, the amount of time he will have to prepare is dwindling sharply.

Milley has to be out by Oct. 1, so Brown would likely want to leave his current position as Air Force chief by early September to have time to integrate into the job. In 2019, Milley stepped down from his role as Army chief of staff on Aug. 9, giving him almost two months to prepare for the chair’s job, a luxury Brown is unlikely to have.

Staring down a long August recess in which nothing happens in Congress, and Tuberville’s hold that shows no sign of wavering, the Pentagon could be in for a long season of temporary office holders in meetings in the Tank, the secure meeting room the chiefs gather in to decide the direction of the department.

“As I look forward, I have never in my almost three decades here seen so many key military positions coming up for replacement,” Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said in March.

“If we cannot resolve the situation, we will be, in many respects, leaderless at a time of great conflict,” he warned. “So, I would hope we would expedite and move quickly on this front.”

POLITICO

Politico

10. Almost But Not Quite: Acting Commandant Will Face Limitations In Role

Excerpts:

The implications of not having a confirmed commandant for an extended period of time “are not ideal,” Smith said, while noting that senators have a right to place a hold on nominations.

“So this is not a ‘you shouldn't do that.’ That is not my place. That is politicizing the military for me to say that. So I don't. I will tell you if you do that, here's what happens,” he said.

Typically, new commandants issue planning guidance shortly after taking the helm, laying out their vision for the service for the next four years. Berger’s guidance, released in July 2019, was the first step in what became Force Design 2030. The 39th commandant is expected to address the future of that multi-year modernization effort in their guidance.

“So I or no one else can write a commandant’s planning guidance. I can give guidance to the force as the acting commandant, but it does not carry the same weight, quite, as commandant’s planning guidance,” Smith said.

Almost But Not Quite: Acting Commandant Will Face Limitations In Role

Gen. Eric Smith will have to juggle the Marine Corps’ top two positions when Gen. David Berger retires.

defenseone.com · by Caitlin M. Kenney

Gen. Eric Smith will have all the authorities of the leader of the Marine Corps when he steps in as acting commandant after Gen. David Berger retires July 10—except for an important few.

“I can't live in the house, can't use a security detail. I cannot write a commandant’s planning guidance because I am not the commandant. That 39th commandant is to be determined by the Senate, whoever that may be,” the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps told reporters Thursday at the Modern Day Marine Expo in Washington.

Smith will step into the role of acting commandant while also being the presumptive replacement. President Joe Biden already tapped him for the role, and the Senate Armed Services Committee considered the nomination in a hearing earlier this month. However, the full Senate—which is in recess until the day Berger retires—must still vote on the appointment. The service chief position is the most senior role so far to be affected by Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s hold on senior military and civilian nominees.

The implications of not having a confirmed commandant for an extended period of time “are not ideal,” Smith said, while noting that senators have a right to place a hold on nominations.

“So this is not a ‘you shouldn't do that.’ That is not my place. That is politicizing the military for me to say that. So I don't. I will tell you if you do that, here's what happens,” he said.

Typically, new commandants issue planning guidance shortly after taking the helm, laying out their vision for the service for the next four years. Berger’s guidance, released in July 2019, was the first step in what became Force Design 2030. The 39th commandant is expected to address the future of that multi-year modernization effort in their guidance.

“So I or no one else can write a commandant’s planning guidance. I can give guidance to the force as the acting commandant, but it does not carry the same weight, quite, as commandant’s planning guidance,” Smith said.

Even after stepping into the role of acting commandant, Smith will remain the assistant commandant, which will require him and his staff to juggle the work of both jobs.

“I will have to parse those duties out to this officer, this officer, this officer, so the synergy that happens in my office now, where I can control and cover down on deputy’s management action groups, deputy’s workforce councils, joint requirements oversight council—one person who ensures that there's synergy…in the Marine Corps message across all forums, that will be harder to maintain because it's parceled out to 4, 5, 6, 7 officers who also have full-time jobs,” Smith said.

“And they will then in turn have to parcel some of their things out to a colonel, who will have to parcel his stuff out or her stuff out to a lieutenant colonel. And you know, the ripple effect is actually pretty significant,” he said.

defenseone.com · by Caitlin M. Kenney

11. The Quad is key to countering China’s aggressive expansion

​Excerpts:

And the Quad’s large economies can help fellow Indo-Pacific partners de-risk their supply chains with respect to China, an issue many nations finally woke up to in the early days of the COVID pandemic when reliance on China for personal protective equipment put them in an extremely vulnerable position.

The foreign relations law recently enacted by the CCP signals Xi’s intent to retaliate economically whenever another nation dares cross him. We should respond by de-risking our own supply chains and helping others do the same.

Finally, we should remember that the Quad partnership is best seen as the beginning of a broader effort to create a critical mass of nations who wish to secure a free and open Indo-Pacific for years to come.

To that end, members of the Quad should continue to seek common cause with nations dedicated to freedom, such as South Korea or Taiwan, and build even stronger partnerships to oppose the CCP’s tyranny. If we do this, I have no doubt the Indo-Pacific will remain free, open, and prosperous for years to come.

​

The Quad is key to countering China’s aggressive expansion

washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

By Mike Pompeo - - Saturday, July 1, 2023

OPINION:

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) recent passage of its new foreign relations law underscores the threat to free nations dedicated to preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific.

The new law will strengthen CCP Chairman Xi Jinping’s ability to impose “countermeasures” on actions he deems threatening to his interests, furthering Xi’s goal of establishing a CCP-centric, CCP-led order in opposition to nations who wish to preserve peace, stability and freedom.

For four years, the Trump Administration kept the Chinese communist threat at bay, principally by working with our partners in Japan, India, and Australia to revitalize the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). At this time in history, embracing the Quad‘s model is even more important as we seek to oppose the CCP’s ambitions and maintain a truly free and open Indo-Pacific.

Since the end of the Cold War, a troubling trend of pursuing multilateralism purely for its own sake has developed. This pursuit has led to entirely predictable outcomes: Multilateral entities initially founded to safeguard shared interests and secure common objectives – like the World Health Organization (WHO) or the UN Security Council – have become corrupted by nations whose goals are hostile to those of free nations.

For instance, China used its power within the WHO to cover up its responsibility for unleashing the COVID pandemic on the world. Russia occupies the UN Security Council’s presidency, despite it currently waging a war of aggression against a sovereign nation. These problems illustrate a crucial point: when nations do not share our values and oppose our interests, we cannot expect them to be restrained by multilateral agreements or institutions.

While these outcomes might lead some to conclude that multilateralism is worthless, we in the Trump Administration saw things differently. We knew that partnerships were vital, but we also knew they only worked if we joined nations that truly shared America’s common interests and values such as human rights based on freedom of religion, speech and conscience. Thus, the new Quad was born.

The story of the Quad’s founding is one of persistence and creativity. Though initially launched in 2007, various disputes kept the partnership from gaining momentum and realizing its potential. This changed in 2017 when Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, saw the potential. Rightly regarded as the father of the Quad, he stood alongside the Trump Administration and reinvigorated the Quad as an important new tool for facing down Xi Jinping and the CCP.

Fortunately, we were blessed to have incredible leaders ready to work with us, including Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The formation of the Quad proved to be a testament to the enduring power of democracy to bring free peoples with shared interests together. It wasn’t just more multilateralism for the sake of it; it was a concrete step towards building a partnership between free nations who shared a positive vision for the Indo-Pacific. This is a lasting legacy of Abe, whose death one year ago was a tragedy. He is greatly missed today.

Now and in the future, the Quad’s importance cannot be understated. Quad members represent 23 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of global GDP. Each possesses a strong military and real diplomatic power, while the flexibility of the partnership gives it the ability to be effective across greatly varied lines of effort.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida did well in strengthening the defense and hosting the G7 Summit last May. As a Quad nation, Japan helped formulate the G7 Hiroshima Leaders Communique that says, “we reiterate the importance of a free and open Indo-Pacific, which is inclusive, prosperous, secure, based on the rule of law, and that protects shared principles including sovereignty, territorial integrity, peaceful resolution of disputes, and fundamental freedoms and human rights.”

Thus, Quad nations are well-positioned to collectively lead the way in confronting China’s military expansionism and economic aggression throughout the region. This is especially important in light of Xi’s open threat toward the nations of northeast Asia through its aggression toward Taiwan. Its strong navies can enhance maritime security cooperation across the Indo-Pacific, both through joint military operations and by securing the freedom of navigation in international waters that Xi Jinping claims as China’s sovereign territories.

And the Quad’s large economies can help fellow Indo-Pacific partners de-risk their supply chains with respect to China, an issue many nations finally woke up to in the early days of the COVID pandemic when reliance on China for personal protective equipment put them in an extremely vulnerable position.

The foreign relations law recently enacted by the CCP signals Xi’s intent to retaliate economically whenever another nation dares cross him. We should respond by de-risking our own supply chains and helping others do the same.

Finally, we should remember that the Quad partnership is best seen as the beginning of a broader effort to create a critical mass of nations who wish to secure a free and open Indo-Pacific for years to come.

To that end, members of the Quad should continue to seek common cause with nations dedicated to freedom, such as South Korea or Taiwan, and build even stronger partnerships to oppose the CCP’s tyranny. If we do this, I have no doubt the Indo-Pacific will remain free, open, and prosperous for years to come.

• Mike Pompeo served as the 70th secretary of state and as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in President Trump’s administration. He was elected to four terms in Congress representing the Fourth District of Kansas.

Copyright © 2023 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

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12. 'Putin's mistakes' giving US 'once-in-a-generation' chance to recruit Russian spies, says CIA director

I am surprised he would make this statement. On the other hand it could be useful. Even if it is not really a once in a lifetime chance, it may good to say this to make Putin fear everyone around him. Win win.

'Putin's mistakes' giving US 'once-in-a-generation' chance to recruit Russian spies, says CIA director

William Burns says the aborted mutiny was a challenge to the Russian state that showed the corrosive effect of Mr Putin's war in Ukraine.

Samuel Osborne

News reporter @samuelosborne93

Sunday 2 July 2023 10:17, UK

Sky News

Dissatisfaction over Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, underlined by Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin's armed mutiny, has created a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity for the US to recruit spies, the director of the CIA has said.

William Burns said the aborted mutiny was a challenge to the Russian state that showed the corrosive effect of Mr Putin's war in Ukraine.

Speaking at a lecture to the Ditchley Foundation - a charity focused on British-American relations - Mr Burns said dissatisfaction with the war was creating a rare opportunity to recruit spies, which the CIA was capitalising on.

Image: William Burns said the mutiny showed the corrosive effect of Mr Putin's war

"Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression," Mr Burns said.

"That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at the CIA - at our core a human intelligence service. We're not letting it go to waste."

In May, the Kremlin said its agencies were tracking Western spy activity after the CIA published a video encouraging Russians to make contact via a secure internet channel.

The video in Russian was accompanied by text saying the agency wanted to hear from military officers, intelligence specialists, diplomats, scientists and people with information about Russia's economy and leadership.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

0:20

Putin makes surprise appearance

Mr Burns said it was "striking" that Mr Prigozhin's mutiny was preceded by months of open attacks on Mr Putin's most senior military officers in videos in which he used a colourful variety of crude expletives and prison slang, which the Russian president did not answer in public.

"It is striking that Prigozhin preceded his actions with a scathing indictment of the Kremlin's mendacious rationale for the invasion of Ukraine and of the Russian military leadership's conduct of the war," said Mr Burns, who served as US ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 and was appointed CIA director in 2021.

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"The impact of those words and those actions will play out for some time - a vivid reminder of the corrosive effect of Putin's war on his own society and his own regime."

Mr Burns said the mutiny was an "internal Russian affair in which the United States has had and will have no part".

Image: Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin led the failed mutiny

Russia's future 'as junior partner and economic colony of China'

Earlier this week, Mr Putin thanked army and security forces for averting what he said could have turned into a civil war and has compared the mutiny to the chaos that ignited two revolutions in Russia in 1917.

The Kremlin has sought to project an image of calm stability since a deal was struck last weekend to end the mutiny, with Mr Putin discussing tourism, greeting crowds in Dagestan and discussing ideas for economic development.

But Mr Burns said the war has already been a strategic failure for Russia by laying bare its military weakness and damaging the Russian economy for years to come, while the NATO military alliance grows larger and stronger.

He said Russia's "future as a junior partner and economic colony of China" was being shaped "by Putin's mistakes".

Sky News

13. In NATO’s new north, fresh chances to contain Moscow

In NATO’s new north, fresh chances to contain Moscow

Reuters · by Anne Kauranen

TORNIO, Finland/KARLSKRONA, Sweden, July 3 (Reuters) - High above a railway bridge spanning a foaming river just outside the Arctic Circle, Finnish construction workers hammer away at a project that will smooth the connections from NATO's Atlantic coastline in Norway to its new border with Russia.

"We will be removing some 1,200 of these one by one," says site manager Mika Hakkarainen, holding up a rivet.

Until February 2022, the 37-million euro ($41 million) electrification of this short stretch of rail – the only rail link between Sweden and Finland – simply promised locals a chance to catch a night train down to the bright lights of Stockholm.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, that changed.

Now Finland is part of NATO, and Sweden hopes to join soon.

As the alliance reshapes its strategy in response to Russia's campaign, access to these new territories and their infrastructure opens ways for allies to watch and contain Moscow, and an unprecedented chance to treat the whole of northwest Europe as one bloc, nearly two dozen diplomats and military and security experts told Reuters.

"PUT RUSSIA AT RISK"

The Finnish rail improvements around Tornio on the Swedish border are one example. Due for completion next year, they will make it easier for allies to send reinforcements and equipment from across the Atlantic to Kemijarvi, an hour's drive from the Russian border and seven hours from Russia's nuclear bastion and military bases near Murmansk in the Kola peninsula.

Among forces based there, Russia's Northern Fleet includes 27 submarines, more than 40 warships, around 80 fighter planes and stocks of nuclear warheads and missiles, data collected by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) shows.

In a military conflict with NATO, the Fleet's main task would be to secure control of the Barents Sea and stop ships bringing reinforcements from North America to Europe through the waters between Greenland, Iceland and the UK.

That's something Finland can help NATO resist.

"It's all about containing those kinds of capabilities from the north," retired U.S. Major General Gordon B. Davis Jr. told Reuters.

Besides opening its territory, Helsinki is buying the right assets, particularly fighter jets, "to add value to (the) northeastern defence and, frankly, in a conflict put Russia at risk," he said.

Sweden's contribution will, by 2028, include a new generation of submarines in the Baltic Sea that Fredrik Linden, Commander of Sweden's First Submarine Flotilla, says will make a big difference in protecting vulnerable seabed infrastructure and preserving access – currently major security headaches, as the September 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines read more showed.

"With five submarines we can close the Baltic Sea," Linden told Reuters. "We will cover the parts that are interesting with our sensors and with our weapons."

Analysts say the change is not before time. Russia has been actively developing its military and hybrid capabilities in the Arctic against the West, partly under the cover of international environmental and economic cooperation, the FIIA's Deputy Director Samu Paukkunen told Reuters. Russia's defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Paukkunen's institute estimates Western armed forces are militarily about 10 years behind Russia in the Arctic.

Even with the losses that Russia has sustained in Ukraine, the naval component of the Northern Fleet and the strategic bombers remain intact, Paukkunen said.

NATO-member Denmark phased out its submarine fleet in 2004, part of a move to scale back its military capabilities after the end of the Cold War, and it has yet to decide on future investments. Norway is also ordering four new submarines, with delivery of the first due in 2029.

"It seems to me that we have some catching up to do, because we haven't done it properly for the last 25 years," said Sebastian Bruns, a senior researcher into maritime security at Kiel University's Institute for Security Policy.

"A WHOLE PIECE"

Both developments show how the expanded alliance will reshape Europe's security map. The region from the Baltic in the south to the high north may become almost an integrated operating area for NATO.

"For NATO it's quite important to have now the whole northern part, to see it as a whole piece," Lieutenant Colonel Michael Maus from NATO's Allied Command Transformation told Reuters. He chaired the working group which led Finland's military integration into NATO.

"With (existing) NATO nations Norway and Denmark, now we have a whole bloc. And thinking about potential defence plans, it's for us a huge step forward, to consider it as a whole area now."

This became clear in May, when Finland hosted its first Arctic military exercise as a NATO member at one of Europe's largest artillery training grounds 25 km above the Arctic Circle.

The nearby town of Rovaniemi, known to tourists as the home of Santa Claus, is also the base of Finland's Arctic air force and would serve as a military hub for the region in case of a conflict. Finland is investing some 150 million euros to renew the base to be able to host half a new fleet of 64 F-35 fighter jets, due to arrive from 2026.

[1/4]Construction workers are seen on a bridge over Raumo river in Tornio, Finland May 31, 2023. REUTERS/Janis Laizans

For the May manoeuvres, nearly 1,000 allied forces from the United States, Britain, Norway and Sweden filled the sparse motorways as they joined some 6,500 Finnish troops and 1,000 vehicles.

Captain Kurt Rossi, Field Artillery Officer of the U.S. Army, led a battery bringing in an M270 multiple rocket launcher.

It was first shipped from Germany across the Baltic Sea, then trucked nearly 900 km to the north.

"We haven't been this close (to Russia) and been able to train up in Finland before," Rossi said.

If there was a conflict with Russia in the Baltic Sea area – where Russia has significant military capabilities at St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad – the shipping lane NATO used for that exercise would be vulnerable. Finland relies heavily on maritime freight for all its supplies – customs data shows almost 96% of its foreign trade is carried across the Baltic.

The east-west railway link across the high north will open up an alternative, which could prove crucial.

"I think the Russians can quite easily interrupt the cargo transportation by sea so basically this northern route is the only accessible route after that," said Tuomo Lamberg, manager for cross border operations at Sweco, the Swedish company designing the electrification.

"NOTHING BEATS THEM"

But that risk, too, may recede when Sweden joins NATO.

Down beneath the Baltic Sea waterline, the submarine commander Linden shows a reporter the captain's quarters of the Gotland, one of four submarines currently in Sweden's fleet, which will bring NATO's total in the Baltic countries to 12 by 2028.

The Kiel institute expects Russia to add one to three submarines in the coming years, to bring its Baltic submarine total to four, along with its fleet of around six modern warships. Its capabilities at Kaliningrad also include medium-range ballistic missiles.

"This can be the loneliest place in the world," says Linden, who captained the vessel for many years. On a typical mission, which lasts two to three weeks, there is no communication with headquarters, he said.

The Gotlands, like Germany's modern Type 212 submarines, will be among NATO's most advanced non-nuclear submarines and can stay out of port for significantly longer than most other conventional models, the researcher Bruns said read more .

"I would say, without a doubt, that the Gotland-class and the German Type 212 are the most capable non-nuclear submarines in the world," said Bruns.

"There is nothing that beats them, quite literally. In terms of how quiet they are, the engines they use, they are particularly quiet and very maneuverable."

In submarine warfare, Linden said, the primary question is where the adversary is. A careless crew member dropping a wrench or slamming a cupboard door can lead to detection.

"We talk quietly on board," Linden said. "You shouldn't believe ... films where orders are shouted."

The Gotland is based at Karlskrona, about 350 km across the Baltic from Kaliningrad. With an average of 1,500 vessels per day trafficking the Baltic according to the Commission on Security and Cooperation In Europe, it is one of the world's busiest seaways – and there is really only one way out, the Kattegatt Sea between Denmark and Sweden.

The shallow and crowded seaway can only be accessed through three narrow straits that submarines can't pass through without being detected.

LISTENING POWERS

If any of the straits were to be closed, the sea freight traffic to Sweden and Finland would be hit hard and the Baltic states completely cut off. But with Sweden in the alliance, that becomes more preventable, because Sweden's submarines will add to NATO's listening powers.

Linden says the Gotland's crew can sometimes hear Russia's vessels. The range of sound travel varies partly depending on the seasons. In winter, he said, you can hear as far as the island of Oeland – just a bit further than the distance between London and Birmingham in the UK.

"You can lie outside Stockholm and hear the chain rattling on Oeland's northern buoy," Linden said. "In the summer you can hear maybe 3,000 meters."

By 2028, once Sweden takes delivery of a new design of vessel, this capacity will increase. The new design, known as A26, will allow submarine crews to deploy remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), combat divers or autonomous systems of some sort without putting the submarine or crew at risk, Bruns said.

"Depending on the mission it could be an ROV that safeguards a pipeline or data cable, it could be combat divers that go ashore in the cover of darkness, it could be almost anything."

That capacity will increase Sweden's scope to control comings and goings through the Baltic.

"If you count all the forces, with Germany in the lead and Sweden and Finland coming on board, all those have really shifted the balance in the Baltic Sea quite significantly," said Nick Childs, Senior Fellow for Naval Forces and Maritime Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

"It would make it very difficult for the Russian Baltic Sea fleet to operate in a free way," he said. "But it could ... still pose challenges for NATO."

Anne Kauranen reported from Tornio, Johan Ahlander from Karlskrona; additional reporting from Gwladys Fouche in Oslo, Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen in Copenhagen and Sabine Siebold in Brussels; Edited by Sara Ledwith

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Anne Kauranen

14. America's front line of missile defense is straining under the demand of global threats

Hgh demand, low density. Unfortunately we cannot mass produce effective missile defense.

America's front line of missile defense is straining under the demand of global threats | CNN Politics

CNN · by Haley Britzky · July 2, 2023

Washington CNN —

The US Army’s air defense units are among the most overworked in the US military, manning missile systems across the globe to provide around-the-clock deterrence against adversaries including North Korea, China, Iran and Russia.

In describing the problem to CNN, the Army’s most senior air defense officer, Lt. Gen. Dan Karbler, recounted something an Army sergeant told him recently: “Sir, it’s simple, pure math. We have more missions than we have air defense capability.”

As demands stack up with the war in Ukraine and amid looming concerns over a potential conflict with China, service leaders have been sounding the alarm that these critical missile defense units could be stretched too thin.

“It could get out of whack in a hurry if it’s not managed properly,” Maj. Gen. Brian Gibson, commander of the 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command in Hawaii, told CNN.

The situation became so severe that in 2020, the service conducted a survey of air defense soldiers and families, and have recently been working to implement changes to offload some of the pressure those soldiers and families are feeling.

The Army is offering $47,500 enlistment bonuses to attract more candidates for certain air defense jobs, including operating Patriot missile batteries. It’s also embedded mental health specialists into air defense units around the world in an effort to address what has emerged as a troubling side-effect of manning the front lines of America’s missile defense systems: burnout.

“Right now, the Army has directed that we put behavioral health specialists in the formations,” said Karbler, who is commander of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command. “We have them there, and they will become a permanent part of those organizations.”

Near constant deployment

The Army’s air defense branch is among the most frequently deployed branches of the service, with almost 60% of its total force deployed at any one time. On average, air defense soldiers were found to have less than a year at home after a year-long deployment, when ideally they should have two to three years at home after a year away. The Army has since brought that up to two years at home for every one-year deployment – Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s “red line,” according to Karbler.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, US air defense soldiers stationed in Europe have had to deploy with just hours’ notice to protect NATO’s Eastern flank and assist in training Ukraine. Meanwhile in the Pacific, the US military is increasing its presence in the region to prepare for a possible future conflict with China – while also maintaining its deterrence of North Korea. All of this is in addition to an ongoing mission in the Middle East, though the Pentagon has reduced some commitments in the region as partners have increased their own air defense capabilities.

In describing the problem to CNN, one senior Army air defense officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, “We have been overworked and undermanned.”

US Army air defenders with Bravo Battery, 5th Battalion, 7th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 10th Army Air Missile Defense Command, reunite with family and friends after a year-long deployment

Pfc. Yesenia Cadavid/U.S. Department of Defense

A

long with embedding mental health specialists, the Army is also working to stand up entirely new air defense units over the next few years.

Leaders are also increasingly focused on communicating with families early and often to help mitigate the unpredictable nature of the job, especially when the duration of deployments are extended out. One noncommissioned officer who deployed to the Eastern flank at the start of Russia’s invasion, Sgt. 1st Class Graham Kimmel, said he and his commander organized a newsletter for families, through which they shared photos of their deployed soldiers and information they could share so families felt up to date.

“We said they were going for six months, and now all of a sudden they got extended for nine months, or they’re going for nine months and got extended for 12 months, and in some cases got extended for longer than a year,” Karbler said of air defense forces. “That unpredictability really, really affected the soldiers and the families,” he added, “and was a significant contributor to stress on the force.”

No signs of slowing in the Pacific

In the Pacific, the strain is often felt by the sheer size of the region and the time and resources it takes to get from one place to another. In 2023 alone, US Army Pacific was expected to participate in 24 military exercises which are crucial to the US’ efforts in building relationships in the region, learning from one another, and strengthening partnerships in the chance that conflict does come to the Pacific.

Gibson explained that it can take a “massive amount of time” to get soldiers and equipment from place to place in the Pacific for exercises, and that there is “growing momentum” from partners in the region to “expand our scope and pace of exercises and operating together.”

That’s in addition to units often being ordered to a higher state of readiness because of activity in the region, like when North Korea launches a missile.

“I don’t see, today, any reduction in what potential adversaries are doing in the theater,” Gibson said. “I think there’s a real chance that it only continues to increase from actions that predominantly China and North Korea conduct. But Russia also has parts to play pretty significantly in this theater, especially in the maritime and air domain.”

‘Business is good for air defense’

Brig. Gen. Maurice Barnett, commander of the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command in Europe, put it simply: “Unfortunately, business is good for air defense.”

Indeed, the need for a strong air defense has been on display for the world to see in Europe as Ukraine has worked to thwart attacks by the Russian military since last February.

A Patriot missile mobile launcher is displayed outside the Fort Sill Army Post near Lawton, Oklahoma, on Tuesday, March 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Sean Murphy)

Sean Murphy/AP

Ukrainian troops impress US trainers as they rapidly get up to speed on Patriot missile system

And for the US soldiers tasked with providing defense of partners, as well as training Ukrainians to operate their own air defense systems, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Master Sgt. Carlos Retana, a Patriot Master Gunner, led the US Patriot training for Ukrainians in Europe after they trained at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The training was unlike anything he’d seen in his 23 years in the Army, Retana told CNN – not only because of the Ukrainian troops themselves, who ranged drastically in age and military experience from before the war, but also the very real consequences hanging over the training as a motivator for US troops to teach their Ukrainian counterparts everything they know.

Retana said ultimately, the US trainers were “praying that what we did was sufficient” in teaching the Ukrainians how to operate the Patriot and sending them back to the front lines.

“At the very end, it was bittersweet – it was happy that the training was complete, and that [the Ukrainians] were successful,” Retana said. “But it was also a very worrisome and heavy burden to think they’re headed into the wolf’s den … to go fight.”

Servicemembers assinged to Bravo Battery, 5th Battalion, 7th Air Defense Artillery, 10th Army Air Missile Defense Command, rest on a Patriot missile launcher on Aug. 9 in Slovakia.

2nd Lt. Emily Park/U.S. Department of Defense

Being that close to the Ukrainians’ mission reaffirmed how critical air defense is to the Americans conducting the training, Retana said, and made the increased demands on them worth it.

“It motivates people because it gives us meaning … You’re willing to go through a lot more when you believe that what you’re doing is meaningful.”

The demand of that mission has resulted in a decrease in how many exercises the US is participating in with partners in Europe, Barnett said, taking the total number from 18 to 12 this year. He added that the Army has to “look at creative ways to meet the mission requirements” – because at the end of the day, the mission requirements aren’t slowing down.

“Our number one priority, of course, is taking care of our people,” Barnett said. “But that’s only supplemented by we have a mission to accomplish here. And I don’t think the American people, nor our European allies, will take no as an answer.”

CNN · by Haley Britzky · July 2, 2023

​15. Navy cancels plan to force recruiters to work six days a week

Who came up with the brilliant idea to turn recruiters into galley slaves?

Navy cancels plan to force recruiters to work six days a week

navytimes.com · by Geoff Ziezulewicz · June 30, 2023

The Navy announced Friday that it is halting a plan to force the service’s recruiters to work six days a week.

That about-face comes a day after Navy Times reported that the service’s roughly 3,900 recruiters had been told they would have to work an extra day each week starting July 8, as the Navy and other branches grapple with a recruiting crisis.

An email that Rear Adm. Alexis Walker, the head of Navy Recruiting Command, sent to recruiters this week — obtained by Navy Times — informed them of the forced extra work time and called it “a warfighting imperative.”

But late Friday afternoon an admiral above Walker, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman, announced the six-day work week policy would not be going into effect.

In an email accompanying a statement by Cheeseman, Capt. Jodie Cornell, his spokesperson, said “the Navy is committed to providing a work-life balance for our personnel.” She declined further comment.

RELATED

Navy forcing its recruiters to work six days a week

In email to recruiters this week, Navy brass said the ball was in their court regarding when they can go back to a normal work schedule.

In his statement, Cheeseman does not specifically mention the six-day work week policy, but does note that the Navy had more contracts signed this past May than it did in May 2022.

“The reality is we have a projected shortfall, need a healthy pipeline of people enlisting, and need to grow our Delayed Entry Program,” Cheeseman said. “Our recruiters are the people who make that happen. We will continue to do everything to support our recruiters, adjust policy when we see an opportunity and remain focused on ensuring we have a force ready to fight.”

The Navy expects to fall short of its enlisted recruiting target of 37,000 recruits by between 6,000 to 7,000 bodies when this fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, according to the email Walker sent earlier this week.

The Navy barely made its recruiting quota back in fiscal 2022 and had to drain its delayed-entry pool of recruits to make mission.

“I am not being dramatic when I say that our inability to bring in the right numbers and types of people … impacts our ability to fight and win,” Walker wrote in his email to those under his command. “Recruiting is the prime mover — the thing that makes everything else go — for the entire Navy.”

Walker’s email also suggested that recruiters could go back to a regular work week if they brought in more recruits.

“I want to place the ball in your court and let you control how long we need to be” on a six-day work week, his email states.

About Geoff Ziezulewicz

Geoff is a senior staff reporter for Military Times, focusing on the Navy. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was most recently a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at geoffz@militarytimes.com.

​

16. Enough 'one trick ponies': Marine special ops specialists want industry help to fuse tech

Some very thoughtful perspectives from these critical skills operators.

Enough 'one trick ponies': Marine special ops specialists want industry help to fuse tech - Breaking Defense

Three MARSOC members, whose names were withheld for operational security, spoke at a panel about the tech they say they most critically need.

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · June 28, 2023

Sgt. Steven McKay, a data communications operator with 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion, communicates with operators in the field during the final exercise of the Marine Network Operators Course. This was the fourth iteration of the 13-week course.

MODERN DAY MARINE 2023 — If they could have just one piece of technology to overcome operational challenges, two Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) specialists said today it wouldn’t be a shiny next-gen weapon or vehicle, but hardware or software that would allow them to fuse the deluge of data into a single system and display.

“The back-end analysis, and the complexities of having multiple systems up and multiple applications, that’s definitely one of our biggest shortfalls,” a MARSOC special capability specialist told the audience here at the Modern Day Marine conference. “As we get into the operational use of some of these technologies, we have a plethora of them, most of which are one-trick ponies, per se — really good at doing one thing.”

FULL COVERAGE: Modern Day Marine

A second specialist, this one in communications, agreed, saying sometimes they’ll have a single laptop that only works with a single other piece of gear. (Three MARSOC panelists were not identified due to operational security concerns.)

“From servers to nodes to radios to what have [you], there are so many pieces of gear that we could be in charge of at any time, and it makes it 10 times harder when that gear just doesn’t communicate with other things well,” the second specialist said.

The second specialist envisioned a single graphical user interface (GUI) that would show everything at once. “If we had something like that, where all of these programs could talk and we didn’t have to jump from screen to screen to screen or device to device…”

Beyond annoyance, it was also a matter of logistics — each piece of equipment takes up physical space in shipping containers and command posts, making it that much harder to move quickly.

The panelists were sitting alongside MARSOC commander Maj. Gen. Matthew Trollinger, who also emphasized the need to assist special operators with the “cognitive demand” that comes with operating in a modern, data-rich environment.

“Anything that we can leverage to mitigate, lessen the burden on the individual, again, because I’m all about making sure people have what they need, or relieve them of something that they don’t need to have hanging over them or weighing them down,” he said. “How can we best leverage technology for the individual to get after what it is they need to do?”

The call for a single GUI, or display, recalls one key goal of the Pentagon’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort, which is being designed to fuse data from an array of sensors in a legible way for commanders. In November 2021, Army officials acknowledged they were “struggling” with data integration and display in their Project Convergence experiments designed to support JADC2.

Meanwhile, today a third MARSOC member, a critical skills operator who’s about to deploy to US Central Command’s area of responsibility, was the odd man out when it came to the piece of technology he’d want. The first to answer, he said he needed more quickly deployable, secure communications and friendly tracking for small units that are stealthy on the electromagnetic spectrum.

“Where we look into the conflict space and we’re dealing with people who are looking at the way we present ourselves in a spectrum, that would be one of the areas that I would say we need help,” the operator said. “When we look at Southeast Asia and those regions, the ability to hide in the noise is the number one thing I think we need to attack from my perspective.”

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · June 28, 2023

​17. ‘This capability didn’t exist 30 days ago’: How military exercises can drive software development

Hopefully we will see more of this.

‘This capability didn’t exist 30 days ago’: How military exercises can drive software development - Breaking Defense

breakingdefense.com · by Schuyler Moore · June 29, 2023

A U.S. Air Force B-1 Lancer conducted a mission flying from the UK to the #middleeast to build agility and interoperability between coalition partners and the U.S. (US Central Command)

Officials have long said that in ever-more interconnected military operations, the software that connects people and platforms is quickly becoming as critical as the platforms themselves. In the following op-ed, CENTCOM CTO Schuyler Moore dives into a recent exercise in the Middle East and what it teaches about the future of on-the-fly software development.

This month, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) conducted an unusual exercise.

The exercise, Digital Falcon Oasis, brought together a set of capabilities, participants, and processes that foreshadowed the future of digital warfare, and how we might train for that future. The exercise scenario sought to answer a simple, but challenging question: whether the Command could find, prioritize, approve, and neutralize 1,000+ targets that presented a threat to U.S. interests over a 24-hour period.

But alongside the traditional trappings of complex exercises, what really took center stage was the software and, critically, the ability to adapt it on the fly, whether it was supporting civilian intelligence analysts, airmen in the air operations center, or sailors on the maritime watch floor. The mid-exercise software adjustments reflected real-time feedback from participants and capability upgrades in the span of days, or even hours.

The exercise was just the latest evidence for what’s become abundantly clear about modern military operations: Software capabilities alone are necessary, but not sufficient. To make an impact, they must be integrated into exercises and operations, where they can be pressure-tested in realistic scenarios. They must also come with mechanisms to rapidly update based on user feedback. We must learn to adapt and update our tools while we fight, and exercises like Digital Falcon Oasis can provide the proving ground to build that capability and capacity.

Breaking The Fourth Wall

The daily morning briefs provided the first clue that the exercise was unusual.

In addition to traditional updates about operations for the day, the briefings included an “engineering update,” where software developers, service members, and civilian staff reviewed digital tools that would be integrated into operations for the day and highlighted priorities for the software development team to tackle in the coming week.

As the day progressed, team members would continue with their traditional exercise activities, providing briefings to senior stakeholders and executing a series of live-fire events that included a Bomber Task Force dropping live munitions in theater. But after each briefing, the Director of Operations would pause the team: “Time to break the fourth wall,” he’d prompt.

Service members and civilian counterparts would then discuss the digital tools they had just used, where they had met the mark, and where they’d fallen short. Software developers would frantically take notes, injecting themselves on occasion to ask a clarifying question, then retreat to their stations to work on updates that would often be seen within hours.

The exercise often felt like taking part in a multi-course dinner where, after each dish was served, the diners and kitchen staff would get together to discuss how the dish had been made, how the diners had like it, and what could be improved for later courses. The process could feel messy at times, but it was clear at the end that CENTCOM had taken part in a much higher quality dining experience than if participants had stuck with a static menu and dinner service.

“This capability didn’t exist 30 days ago.” Briefing after briefing, team members began with that preface. Team members watched their conceptual conversations with software developers rapidly transform into real software tools that they could use directly in the exercise, then watched those tools improve over the course of days or even hours as they provided feedback to the development team.

Team members learned how to provide critical feedback in terms that software developers understood and could act upon, and sometimes discovered that the problems required policy or process fixes, not technical ones. In turn, software developers became more educated about operator problem sets, discovered where software tools were or were not intuitive for the users, and learned how to integrate into the battle rhythm of an exercise.

This type of event combines software development best practices with the rigor and reality of military exercises. For digital tools that facilitate warfighting capability (such as targeting, air tasking, and operational planning), their development cycles must be anchored to realistic scenarios and testing – without it, developers risk building tools that don’t meet the practical requirements of the warfighter.

Software should not be treated as a static capability, where updates are expected to occur every few years at best. Military exercises provide the proving ground to test, iterate, and update software in the hands of real-world users and scenarios on the order of days or hours.

Digital capability development at CENTCOM will not end with Digital Falcon Oasis. The exercise is part of a quarterly series, and CENTCOM will execute two more Digital Falcon Oasis exercises before the end of 2023 – each building on the software evolutions that came before, and each pushing further toward a truly digital warfighting capability.

Schuyler Moore is the Chief Technology Officer of US Central Command (CENTCOM). She previously served as the Chief Strategy Officer of Task Force 59, US Naval Forces Central Command’s (NAVCENT) unmanned and AI integration organization. Schuyler also has previous experience in Congress, the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering, and the private sector.

18. The state of the U.S. Navy as China builds up its naval force and threatens Taiwan

At the risk of being chastised by my Army brethren, while it will take a joint force to successfully assist Taiwan in its defense, the Navy (and Air Force) will need to be first among equals.

​The video is at the link.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-navy-readiness-as-china-builds-up-naval-force-threatens-taiwan-60-minutes-transcript-2023-07-02/?utm​

The state of the U.S. Navy as China builds up its naval force and threatens Taiwan

CBS News · by Norah O'Donnell

The United States Navy helped secure victory in two world wars and the Cold War. Today the Navy remains a formidable fighting force, but even officers within the service have questioned its readiness.

While the U.S. spent 20 years fighting land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon watched China, its greatest geopolitical rival of the 21st century, build the largest navy in the world. China has threatened to use that navy to invade Taiwan, an important American ally.

As tensions with China continue to rise, we wanted to know more about the current state of the U.S. Navy, how it's trying to deter China, and as we first reported in March, preparing for the possibility of war.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: The Navy's always on alert. One third of the Navy is always deployed and operating at all times. The Navy's mustering right now about 300 ships, and there are about 100 ships at sea right now all around the globe.

Admiral Samuel Paparo commands the U.S. Pacific Fleet, whose 200 ships and 150,000 sailors and civilians make up 60% of the entire U.S. Navy. We met him in February on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz deployed near the U.S. territory of Guam, southeast of Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, or PRC.

Admiral Samuel Paparo 60 Minutes

Norah O'Donnell: You've been operating as a naval officer for 40 years. How has operating in the Western Pacific changed?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: In the early 2000s the PRC Navy mustered about 37 vessels. Today, they're mustering 350 vessels

In March, China's new Foreign Minister Qin Gang delivered a stern warning to the U.S.

He said that if Washington does not change course in its stance towards China, "conflict and confrontation" is inevitable.

This past August, when then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi became the most senior U.S. political figure to visit Taiwan in 25 years, China called it a "blatant provocation."

The People's Liberation Army fired ballistic missiles into the sea around Taiwan and encircled the island with aircraft and warships.

Norah O'Donnell: So are Chinese warships now operating closer to Taiwan after Nancy Pelosi's visit?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes.

The best guess anyone has about China's ultimate intentions for Taiwan comes from the CIA. According to its intelligence assessment, China's President Xi Jinping has ordered the People's Liberation Army to be prepared to take back the island by force by 2027.

Norah O'Donnell: And if China invades Taiwan, what will the U.S. Navy do?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: It's a decision of the president of the United States and a decision of the Congress. It's our duty to be ready for that. But the bulk of the United States Navy will be deployed rapidly to the Western Pacific to come to the aid of Taiwan if the order comes to aid Taiwan in thwarting that invasion.

Norah O'Donnell: Is the U.S. Navy ready?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: We're ready, yes. I'll never admit to being ready enough.

President Biden has declared four times, including on 60 Minutes, that the U.S. military would defend Taiwan, which is a democracy and the world's leading producer of advanced microchips.

• TOPGUN graduates compare the film to the real thing

To reach the USS Nimitz, we first traveled to America's westernmost territory, the island of Guam, in the middle of the Pacific.

Guam was taken by Imperial Japan two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. U.S. marines recaptured it two and a half years later, and the island, about the size of Chicago, became an indispensable strategic foothold in the Western Pacific, as it remains today.

From Guam, we boarded a Navy C-2 Greyhound. The Cold War-era transport plane takes people and supplies back and forth from land to the carrier. It was a short flight to the ship…

…and an even shorter landing

Before Admiral Paparo rose to lead the Pacific Fleet, he flew jets and graduated from the school known as "Top Gun."

Norah O'Donnell: When you talk about ships, what's the most powerful in the U.S. Navy?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: It's an aircraft carrier and its airwing is capable of 150 strike or air-to-air sorties per day, with at its surge levels, the ability to deliver 900 precision-guided munitions every day, and reloadable every night

Norah O'Donnell: So even though China now has the largest Navy in the world, they don't have anything like this in terms of aircraft carriers.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: They do not. But they're working towards it. And they have-- they have two operational aircraft carriers right now.

That's China's two diesel-fueled carriers, to the U.S.'s 11 nuclear-powered ones that can carry a total of about a thousand attack aircraft… more than the navies of every other nation on earth, combined.

Lt. Cmdr. David Ash: I'll tell you this: we are here to stay, right, in the South China Sea, and in this part of the world. And I think that's the message that we really want to convey to not only China, but the entire world. We will sail wherever international law allows.

Norah O'Donnell: Do you get briefed on China's growing military threat and the progress that their navy is making?

Lt. Cmdr. David Ash: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely we do. And they are making great progress in a lot of key areas.

Norah O'Donnell: The Chinese?

Lt. Cmdr. David Ash: The Chinese are, from a military standpoint.

This video, from weapons systems officer Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Carlton, shows his F/A-18 strafing ground targets with a machine gun on a U.S. weapons range near Guam.

The pilots on the Nimitz also conduct air-to-air combat or dogfighting drills daily.

USS Nimitz at sea 60 Minutes

Norah O'Donnell: How aggressive has China become in the air?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: Aggressive. And-- just some examples include-- unsafe, unprofessional intercepts where they move within single digits of feet of other aircrafts, flashing the weapons that they have onboard to the air crew of the other aircraft, operating in international airspace. Maneuvering their aircraft in such a way that denies the ability to turn in one direction. If they're safe and professional, then there's no problem. Everybody has the right to fly and sail wherever international law dictates.

Norah O'Donnell: But the Chinese are pushing that.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: They are pushing it.

China's increasingly aggressive moves in the Western Pacific — encroaching on territory, illegal fishing and building bases in the middle of the South China Sea-- have pushed nations like Japan and the Philippines to forge closer military ties to the U.S.… and earlier this year, Britain, the U.S. and Australia signed a landmark deal to jointly develop nuclear-powered attack submarines to patrol the Pacific.

This is how China and Taiwan appear on most maps.

This is how the Chinese Communist Party sees the Western Pacific, including the South and East China Seas from Beijing. Taiwan is the fulcrum in what China's leaders call "the first island chain," a constellation of U.S. allies that stretches across its entire coast. Control of Taiwan is the strategic key to unlocking direct access to the Pacific and the sea lanes where about 50% of the world's commerce gets transported.

Norah O'Donnell: China has accused the United States of trying to contain them. What do you say to China?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: I would say, "Do you need to be contained? Are you expanding? Are you an expansionist power?" To a very great extent, the United States was the champion for China's rise. And in no way are we seeking to contain China. But we are seeking for them to play by the rules.

China's navy, a branch of the People's Liberation Army, is now the world's largest. China is also using its 9,000 mile coastline to rewrite the rules of fighting at sea, as these images from Chinese state media show. Its military has invested heavily in long-range precision guided weapons, like the DF-21 and DF-26, that can be used to target ships.

China's People's Liberation Army rocket force calls them "carrier killers" and has practiced shooting them at mockups of American ships in the desert that look a lot like the Nimitz.

Norah O'Donnell: Since the United States has been operating in the Western Pacific, China's backyard, they've been developing missiles to attack our assets, haven't they? Specific missiles.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: Absolutely, yes. First I'll say the United States is also a Western Pacific nation. So it's not--

Norah O'Donnell: Guam--

Admiral Samuel Paparo: It's not China's backyard, it's-- you know, it is a free and open Indo-Pacific that encompasses numerous partners and treaty allies. And yes-- we have seen them greatly enhance their power projection capability.

Norah O'Donnell: How much do you worry about the PLA Rocket Force?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: I worry. You know, I-- I'd be a fool to not worry about it. Of course I worry about the PLA Rocket Force. And of course I work every single day to develop the tactics and the techniques and the procedures to counter it, and to continue to develop the systems that can also defend-- against them.

Norah O'Donnell: About how far are we from mainland China?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: Fifteen hundred nautical miles.

Norah O'Donnell: They can hit us.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes they can. If they've got the targeting in place, they could hit this aircraft carrier. If I don't want to be hit, there's something I can do about it.

U.S. Navy planners aren't just plotting how to evade China's rocket force, but also how they could effectively fight back. From the vicinity of Guam, none of the aircraft on this ship has the range to approach Taiwan without refueling in the air.S

Ships like the U.S. Destroyer Wayne E. Meyer, part of the Nimitz strike group, would need to sail much closer towards China to fire their missiles at any force invading Taiwan.

One naval scholar we spoke to likened it to a boxing match in which a fighter—in this case China-- has much longer arms than their potential opponent, the U.S.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: I'll give you a lot of examples where a shorter fighter was able to prevail-- over a long-arm fighter by-- being on their toes, by maneuvering, And we can also stick and move-- while we're developing those-- those longer-range weapons.

There is another area of modern naval warfare where the U.S. had a head start and retains a deep advantage over China.

Norah O'Donnell: I just noticed out of the corner of my eye.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: This is a 688 class, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine. This is the most capable submarine on the planet. You know, with the exception of the Virginia class, our newer class of submarines.

The exact number is classified - but our best estimate is that there are about a dozen nuclear-powered fast attack submarines patrolling the Pacific at any time. They are difficult to detect and track…something China is trying to solve.

Norah O'Donnell: How much more advanced is U.S. submarine technology than Chinese capability?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: A generation.

Norah O'Donnell: A generation.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: And-- by generation, think 10 or 20 years. But broadly, I don't really talk in depth about submarine capabilities. It's the silent service.

Since Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, China's military leaders have themselves been mostly silent and ignored efforts by the U.S. military to keep the lines of communication open – even when a Chinese spy balloon breached American airspace and was shot down by the U.S.

Norah O'Donnell: If the U.S. and Chinese militaries can't communicate over a Chinese spy balloon, then what's gonna happen when there's a real crisis in the South China Sea or with Taiwan?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: We'll hope that they'll answer the phone. Else, we'll do our very best assessment, based on the things that they say in open source, and based on their behavior to divine their intentions. And we'll act accordingly.

Norah O'Donnell: Doesn't that make the situation even more dangerous if U.S. and Chinese militaries are not talking?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes.

Several sources within the Pentagon tell 60 Minutes that if China invaded Taiwan, it could very well kick off in outer space, with both sides targeting the other's satellites that enable precision-guided weaponry. Cyber attacks on American cities and the sabotage of ports on the West Coast of the U.S. mainland could follow.

Norah O'Donnell: One recent-- nonclassified war game had the U.S. prevailing but losing 20 ships, including two carriers. Does that sound about right?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: That is a plausible outcome. I can imagine a more pessimistic outcome. And I can imagine a more optimistic outcome. We should be clear-eyed about the costs that we're potentially incurring

There are about 5,000 Americans on board the Nimitz. The ship is nearly half a century old. Given the Navy's current needs in the Pacific and because there's fuel left in its nuclear reactors, the carrier's life at sea is going to be extended.

Norah O'Donnell: Is it your hope that the power of the U.S. Navy, the force posture of the U.S. Navy, will deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: It's not my hope. It's my duty. In conjunction with allies and partners to deliver intolerable costs to anybody that would upend the order in violation of the nation's security or in violation of the nation's interests.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: The saying, which is, "Si Pacem, Para Bellum," which is, "If you want peace, prepare for war."

60 Minutes spent months talking to current and former naval officers, military strategists and politicians about the state of the U.S. Navy. One common thread in our reporting is unease, both about the size of the U.S. fleet and its readiness to fight. The Navy's ships are being retired faster than they're getting replaced, while the navy of the People's Republic of China or PRC, grows larger and more lethal by the year. We first asked the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Samuel Paparo, about this on our visit earlier this year to the USS Nimitz, the oldest aircraft carrier in the Navy.

Admiral Samuel Paparo: We call it the Decade of Concern. We've seen a tenfold increase in the size of the PRC Navy.

Norah O'Donnell: Technically speaking, the Chinese now have the largest navy in the world, in terms of number of ships, correct?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes. Yes.

Norah O'Donnell: Do the numbers matter?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes. As the saying goes, "Quantity has a quality all its own."

Norah O'Donnell: At some point, are they gonna reach numbers that we can't prevail over?

Admiral Samuel Paparo: I'm not comfortable with the trajectory.

Rep. Mike Gallagher: If you look at a map of the Indo-Pacific, one thing becomes clear. There's a lot of water on that map. And so ours has to be a maritime strategy.

Republican Mike Gallagher and Democrat Elaine Luria served together on the House Armed Services Committee in the last Congress.

Democrat Elaine Luria and Republican Mike Gallagher 60 Minutes

Norah O'Donnell: What is it about the U.S. Navy that has allowed the two of you to find common cause?

Rep. Mike Gallagher: I think we-- share a sense of the urgency of the moment. We see increasing threats from China in particular in the Indo-Pacific. We feel like we're not moving fast enough to build a bigger Navy.

Congressman Gallagher is a Marine veteran who represents Green Bay, Wisconsin. He chairs the new House Committee on China. He's concerned that under the Navy's current plan, the fleet will shrink to about 280 ships by 2027, the same year the CIA says China has set for having the capability to take Taiwan by force.

Rep. Mike Gallagher: So we will be weakest when our enemy is potentially strongest.

Rep. Elaine Luria: China's increased rhetoric and potential aggression against Taiwan, you know, we're gonna have to be ready to respond today with the forces we have today.

Former Congresswoman Elaine Luria represented Virginia Beach until this past January. An Annapolis graduate, Luria had a 20-year naval career before being elected to Congress.

Norah O'Donnell: What would you say the state of the U.S. Navy is today?

Rep. Elaine Luria: I think the Navy has not received the attention and resources that it needs over two decades. I mean, I served on six different ships. Every single one of those ships was either built during or a product of the fleet that was built-- in the Cold War.

Both Mike Gallagher and Elaine Luria have lobbied for government money for the shipyards in or near their districts, but they say this is less about jobs and more about national security.

Rep. Elaine Luria: If we don't get this right, all of these other things we're doing in Congress ultimately-- might not matter.

Rep. Mike Gallagher: If you think about what a coherent grand strategy vis-à-vis China would be, the hard power would be the most important part of that. And the Navy would be the most important component of your hard power investments.

Over the last two decades, the Navy spent $55 billion on two investments that did not pan out. The first was a class of Destroyers known as the Zumwalt. The futuristic fighting ships were supposed to revolutionize naval warfare. Thirty-two were ordered, but only three were ever launched. The cost of each ship, by one estimate, was upwards of $8 billion, making them the three most expensive Destroyers ever put to sea.

Another example is the Littoral Combat Ship or LCS, designed to be a fast all-purpose warship for shallow waters. Thirty billion dollars later the program ran aground after structural defects and engine trouble. Within the Navy, the LCS earned the unfortunate nickname, little cr**py ship.

Norah O'Donnell: The Navy's last few decades have been described as a lost generation of shipbuilding. Is that overly dramatic?

Rep. Mike Gallagher: I don't think so. We're still struggling to build ships on time-- on budget. And that's something we absolutely need to fix going forward.

This past March, we spoke with Admiral Mike Gilday at the Pentagon. He is the chief of Naval Operations and is responsible for building, maintaining, and equipping the entire U.S. Navy.

Norah O'Donnell: Is the Navy in crisis?

Admiral Mike Gilday: No, the Navy's not in crisis. The Navy is out on point every single day.

Norah O'Donnell: Is it being outpaced by China?

Admiral Mike Gilday: No. Our Navy's still in a position to prevail. But that's not blind confidence. We are concerned with the trajectory that China's on, with China's behavior. But we are in a good position right now-- if we did ever get into a fight against them.

Norah O'Donnell: How would you describe what China has been able to do militarily over the last 20 years?

Admiral Mike Gilday: The most alarming thing is the growth of not only their conventional forces but also their strategic nuclear forces, their cyber capability, their space capability, and how they are using that to force other nations'-- navies out of certain areas in the South China Sea-- instead of-- recognizing international law, they want to control where those goods flow and how.

Norah O'Donnell: What lessons did the U.S. Navy learn from some of the shipbuilding mistakes of the last 20 years?

Admiral Mike Gilday: I think one of the things that we learned-- was that we need to-- have a design well in place before we begin bending metal. And so we are going back-- to the past, to what we did in the '80s and the '90s, the Navy has the lead.

Toshi Yoshihara: There is a tendency among the great powers to look at each other's naval build ups with deep suspicion.

Toshi Yoshihara of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments may know more than any scholar in the west about China's navy.

Toshi Yoshihara: China will have about 440 ships by 2030. And that's according to the Pentagon.

Norah O'Donnell: Why is China able to build more warships more quickly than the U.S.?

Toshi Yoshihara: China has clearly invested in this defense industrial infrastructure to produce these ships, which allows them to produce multiple ships simultaneously, essentially outbuilding many of the western navies combined.

China's navy piggybacks on a booming commercial shipbuilding industry kept afloat by generous state subsidies, inexpensive materials and cheap labor.

In the United States, it's a different story.

After the Cold War ended, the shipbuilding industry consolidated and many of the yards where ships were both built and maintained closed down.

Norah O'Donnell: What do you see when you see China's shipbuilding program?

Admiral Mike Gilday: It's very robust.

Norah O'Donnell: Do we have enough shipyards?

Admiral Mike Gilday: No. I wish that we had more commercial shipyards. And-- over my career, we've gone from more than 30 shipyards, down to about seven that we rely upon on a day-to-day basis to build ships.

One of those yards is run by Huntington Ingalls Industries, which built the state-of-the-art new Ford-class aircraft carrier.

After controlled explosions in 2021, to prove it could withstand combat, the Ford got closer to deployment, six years late and billions of dollars over budget.

Ford-class aircraft carrier 60 Minutes

The Navy is not just struggling to build new ships on time. According to the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, there's a multi-year backlog repairing the ships in the fleet.

Admiral Mike Gilday: Our maintenance backlog is one of the primary things that I'm working on to correct. So just three years ago, we had 7,700 delay days. That is, extra days in a shipyard by ships when they weren't operational. We have cut that down to 3,000. We are not satisfied.

Norah O'Donnell: Maintenance delays mean sailors can't come home 'cause the ship that's supposed to replace them is not ready. It means longer deployments. It means away from your family more. That's a big strain on the workforce.

Admiral Mike Gilday: The more ships that we can have available to send at sea, alleviates many of those problems that you pointed out. Sailors join the Navy to see the world. And so it's my job to make sure that those maintenance delays go to zero and we can get those ships to sea as quickly as possible.

Norah O'Donnell: In the last year alone, at least 10 sailors assigned to ships undergoing maintenance or working at maintenance facilities have died by suicide.

Admiral Mike Gilday: It is a problem that we're taking very, very seriously. And down to every leader in our Navy, everybody has a responsibility to look out for each other, take care of each other, There is no wrong door to knock on when you need help.

Admiral Gilday says the U.S. Navy's main advantage over China is America's sailors. His goal is to modernize the U.S. fleet and have those sailors serving alongside hundreds of unmanned vessels by 2045.

Admiral Mike Gilday: I think unmanned is the future. And so I think that-- some 40% of our fleet in the future, I believe, is gonna be unmanned.

Norah O'Donnell: Are these, like, underwater drones?

Admiral Mike Gilday: Some of them are. Highly capable-- capable of delivering mines, and perhaps other types of weapons.

Admiral Gilday is talking about the ORCA - an extra-large unmanned undersea vehicle.

Norah O'Donnell: Can you say what it will do, or is that classified?

Admiral Mike Gilday: Well-- at a minimum, it'll have a clandestine mine laying capability. So it'd be done-- in a way that-- is very secretive-- but very effective.

Norah O'Donnell: But the GAO reports that it's already a quarter of a billion dollars over budget and three years behind schedule.

Admiral Mike Gilday: Uh, that particular platform is behind schedule. It's the first of a kind. When it delivers, I see a very high return on investment-- from that particular platform.

Norah O'Donnell: Because?

Admiral Mike Gilday: Because-- it will be among the most lethal and stealthy platforms-- in the arsenal of the U.S. military.

The Navy's total budget request for fiscal year 2024 is over a quarter of a trillion dollars, an $11 billion increase from last year. The focus is on China.

Norah O'Donnell: The U.S. defense posture is viewed as aggressive by the Chinese. The foreign minister just said, "Look, stop the containment. This may lead to conflict."

Admiral Mike Gilday: Perhaps the Chinese minister doesn't like the fact that the U.S. Navy is operating in collaboration with dozens of navies around the world to ensure that the mar-- maritime commons remains free and open for all nations. The Chinese wanna dictate those terms. And so they don't like our presence. But our presence is not intended to be provocative. It's intended to assure and to assure-- to reassure allies and partners around the world that those sea lanes do remain open. The global economy literally floats on seawater.

Produced by Keith Sharman and Roxanne Feitel. Associate Producer, Eliza Costas. Edited by April Wilson.

Norah O'Donnell is the anchor and managing editor of the "CBS Evening News." She also contributes to "60 Minutes."

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CBS News · by Norah O'Donnell

19. What Makes Putin and the World’s Autocrats So Resilient?

This requires reflection and deep study:

Excerpts:

But autocrats are proving more resilient these days. A regime survival playbook of sorts has emerged, with states combining lethal force and widespread arrests to halt protests, targeting opposition leaders with selective killing, jailing and exile, and allowing disaffected populations to leave.

Regimes from Belarus to China to Venezuela have also been cooperating more closely to withstand diplomatic pressure from the West, get around economic sanctions and employ increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies to keep track of dissidents.

In recent years, authorities in Belarus, Cameroon, Cuba, Hong Kong, Iran, Thailand, Nicaragua and Venezuela have all managed to put down widespread popular protest movements.

The incentives for dictators to leave power have also changed. In the past, a strongman might have been coaxed to take his millions of dollars to a cushy exile in southern France or the Caribbean. But that has become less possible with the rise of the International Criminal Court and the prospect of lifetime jail sentences.

None want to suffer the fate of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, who was bludgeoned to death by an angry mob. Putin himself has repeatedly watched the video of Gaddafi’s death, according to a 2019 book by Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns.

What Makes Putin and the World’s Autocrats So Resilient?

Regimes are cooperating more closely to withstand diplomatic pressure from the West

By David Luhnow​ ​​and Juan Forero

July 3, 2023 6:00 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-makes-putin-and-the-worlds-autocrats-so-resilient-b89c19de?mod=hp_lead_pos9

The recent mutiny in Russia revealed cracks in President Vladimir Putin’s regime and raised hopes in the West that his days in power were numbered. There are two reasons for caution: Autocrats have remarkable staying power and only rarely are replaced by a democratic government.

Images of hundreds of heavily armed men rumbling in a convoy toward Moscow raised the possibility that the man who launched the Ukraine war and has dominated Russian politics for more than two decades could lose power. It punctured Putin’s aura of invincibility and inevitability.

A week later, however, Putin is still in charge and his would-be rival, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is in exile.

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said last week. “The Russian state has been designed over 300 to 400 years to protect the czar.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, military dictatorships in South America gave way to democracy, Communist regimes fell and protest movements chased out dictators such as the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos. More authoritarian governments fell in the Arab Spring and the so-called color revolutions in former Soviet republics.

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The short-lived armed insurrection launched by Wagner paramilitary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin exposed cracks in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 23 years in power. WSJ’s Ann Simmons explains the risks to Putin’s regime. Photo: Gavriil Grigorov/Zuma Press

But autocrats are proving more resilient these days. A regime survival playbook of sorts has emerged, with states combining lethal force and widespread arrests to halt protests, targeting opposition leaders with selective killing, jailing and exile, and allowing disaffected populations to leave.

Regimes from Belarus to China to Venezuela have also been cooperating more closely to withstand diplomatic pressure from the West, get around economic sanctions and employ increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies to keep track of dissidents.

In recent years, authorities in Belarus, Cameroon, Cuba, Hong Kong, Iran, Thailand, Nicaragua and Venezuela have all managed to put down widespread popular protest movements.

The incentives for dictators to leave power have also changed. In the past, a strongman might have been coaxed to take his millions of dollars to a cushy exile in southern France or the Caribbean. But that has become less possible with the rise of the International Criminal Court and the prospect of lifetime jail sentences.

None want to suffer the fate of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, who was bludgeoned to death by an angry mob. Putin himself has repeatedly watched the video of Gaddafi’s death, according to a 2019 book by Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns.

Wagner forces’ advance toward Moscow in late June raised the perception of political instability in Russia. PHOTO: REUTERS

Not counting kings, emirs and other monarchs, the world today as at least 30 autocrats, leaders who steal elections or don’t hold them while using extrajudicial force to remain in power, said Moises Naim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Most are in Africa and Asia, but there are three in Latin America and two in Europe. Three command nuclear arsenals—Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

People in dozens of countries gained their freedom in the 1980s and 1990s, but progress has stalled since 2005. This past year was the 17th in a row that global freedom, as measured by Freedom House, a Washington think tank, has declined.

Once an autocrat such as Putin is embedded, rooting them out is extremely hard, political scientists say.

“The longer they stay in power, the bigger the network of patronage they establish, the harder it is to upset that network of patronage,” said Jonathan Eyal, international director at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “So it requires a fairly substantial jolt to rearrange.”

The obvious source for such a jolt is war. A sudden collapse in Russian lines in Ukraine could prove a big enough shock to shake the Kremlin. The longer the war drags on, and the worse Russia’s economy gets, the more difficult Putin’s position.

In 1986, a crowd in Manila cheered at an announcement that Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos had fled the country. PHOTO: SADAYUKI MIKAMI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Romania experienced widespread unrest in 1989 that culminated in the removal of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was later executed. PHOTO: DUSAN VRANIC/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Autocrats, however, rarely lose power during a war. Even if they suffer a major defeat, the historical record is mixed. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein lost the first Gulf War and survived a brief civil war to rule for another dozen years before the 2003 U.S. invasion.

On the flip side, the Falklands War led to the ouster of the military junta in Argentina, and Greece’s generals fell from power after backing a coup in Cyprus that led to a Turkish invasion in 1974.

The difference in those outcomes is telling. Hussein, like Putin, led a personalized autocracy built around a single figure as opposed to an institutional autocracy built around a party, military or royal family.

Personalized autocracies are harder to root out because the entire system is built around one person. They are also less likely to give way to a negotiated transition or democracy as a result, political scientists say. It is worth noting that China has transitioned recently from an institutional autocracy to a more personalized one under Xi.

In Nicaragua, 1980s Communist strongman Daniel Ortega, who often ruled with other high-ranking Sandinistas, gave way to elections under U.S. pressure. Now he is having an even longer run in power in a system designed not around an ideology or party, but around him and his wife.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein lost the first Gulf War and survived a brief civil war to rule for another dozen years before the 2003 U.S. invasion. PHOTO: REUTERS

Since the end of the Cold War, the typical autocrat who had governed a country for 20 years and was at least 65 years old ended up ruling for about 30 years, according to Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Erica Frantz, a professor of political science at Michigan State University. Personalized autocrats have lasted even longer: up to 36 years. Putin is 70 and has been in power for 23 years.

The pair also found that since the end of the Cold War, authoritarian regimes have outlasted 89% of the longtime leaders who died in office.

“After Putin, there will be Putin, it just depends which type of Putin,” said Stephen Hall, a professor of politics at Bath University and Russia expert.

An attempted coup or an uprising that fails can strengthen an autocrat’s hand. Following a failed coup in 2016, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan removed tens of thousands of military officials, civil servants, judges and governors, giving him greater control over the country’s institutions.

James Nixey, the head of the Eurasia-Russia program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, said he was told by a friend in Russia in the past week that the elites had consolidated around Putin and that it would be a mistake by the West to assume that the Russian leader had been badly weakened.

“While you never know for sure what’s happening behind the scenes, the evidence we have is that the secret services stayed with him, none of the elite seem to have defected, and he would appear to be in control,” he said.

Autocracies have helped each other. Cuba sent its own secret service agents to bolster the internal security service of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Putin supported President Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus when he faced down protesters in 2020-21. Lukashenko now has returned the favor by taking in Prigozhin.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro attended a military ceremony to decorate and promote army officers last month. PHOTO: ZURIMAC CAMPOS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, in a hat, after being sworn in at an airstrip in the capital city of Kampala in 2011. PHOTO: STEPHEN WANDERA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Across Africa, strongmen are increasingly turning to autocratic leaders such as Xi and Putin for alternatives to the Western pro-democracy narrative as well as the tools to stay in power, from Beijing’s money to fund infrastructure projects and surveillance technologies to keep opponents in check to the Kremlin’s military supplies and disinformation muscle. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni has relied on Chinese-built surveillance to keep tabs on rivals.

Autocrats in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Sudan and Mali have all been toppled by militaries, only to be replaced by other strongmen. In Sudan, a deadly power struggle between the two top generals, who worked together to topple long-serving despot Omar al-Bashir in 2019, has turned the capital, Khartoum, into an active war zone since April, uprooting nearly three million people from their homes.

If Putin is toppled, it is possible that an even more hawkish autocrat ascends to power, raising the likelihood of escalation with the West, Western officials say. So perhaps the most favorable outcome is that Putin’s war in Ukraine fails and that he is weakened and unable to project Russian force abroad, they say.

A deadly power struggle has turned the Sudanese capital of Khartoum into a war zone. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nicolas Bariyo and Max Colchester contributed to this article.

Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com and Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com

20. Climate Security is National Security

This will not go over well in some quarters.

Excerpts:

While the solution is obvious, it will cost billions of dollars to mitigate the effects of climate change on national security.

While no Pentagon-specific predictions are available, the Office of Management and Budget released a government-wide assessment warning that, for the rest of this century, the U.S. government could spend an extra $25 billion to $128 billion each year to deal with six types of climate-related disasters: coastal disaster relief, flood insurance, crop insurance, healthcare insurance, wildland fire suppression and flooding at Federal facilities.

Government officials are saying lots of the right things. But is it being done, and done quickly enough? As one retired official told us, “A plan without sufficient resources is hallucination.”

Climate Security is National Security

Our book argues the threat of terrorism was never an existential threat—but climate change is, and it requires more military attention and resources.

By ANDREW HOEHN and THOM SHANKER

JUNE 30, 202​3​

defenseone.com · by Andrew Hoehn

This essay is adapted from the authors’ book, Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats (Hachette, 2023).

The military mission was traditional, straight-forward, right from the manual: Navy warships would ferry some 1,200 Marines to the western Pacific, where the force would assault a hostile island. ­­As the ships advanced, Navy meteorologists tracked a gathering storm—at a safe distance, they judged. But by the time the winds reached catastrophic typhoon level, it had changed course, and the super storm slammed into the Navy and Marine forces at sea. Giant troughs scattered the warships from their formation. Howling winds made air operations and air rescue impossible. Communications were shredded.

The cascading effects of the extreme storm only grew worse, since years of climate change meant that local islands and the local populations, still recovering from previous mudslides, power failures, and broad infrastructure disruptions brought by other typhoons, could offer no safe port in this storm.

This “mission” occurred seven years from now, in October 2030, as played out in the first-ever war game conducted by the Navy and Marine Corps to assess the challenge that climate change is presenting to the military’s ability to carry out its mission. The table-top exercise, held in June 2022, garnered scant public attention, but it sounded a clarion across the maritime services.

The military does not have the luxury of debating climate change, a reality now adding a powerful, destabilizing force to fragile, unstable areas of the world. Once-in-a-century ocean storms happen several times each season. Drought prompts food shortages, civil unrest, mass migration. Island nations that once served as safe ports could vanish under rising seas. All of these complicate the Defense Department’s efforts to combat global instability, even as it has to admit that the American armed services are the world’s largest consumers of fossil fuels.

The enemy gets a vote, says a military axiom, and climate change is a new enemy.

“We are looking at the impacts of climate change because it makes us better war-fighters,” said Meredith Berger, assistant Navy secretary for energy, installations, and environment, who organized the climate-change exercise. “The Navy and Marine Corps must address climate change in our readiness and operations in order to maintain every advantage to fight and win.”

Our book makes case that, in retrospect, the threat of terrorism—even in the wake of the 9/11 attacks—was never an existential threat. Even on its best day, al-Qaeda never truly threatened the very existence of the United States. Yet this nation developed a zoom-like focus on counterterrorism, launching two “Forever Wars.” In contrast, climate change is an existential threat. And the response, at best, has been to sound an uncertain trumpet.

The climate war game played out in parallel to a larger disaster movie playing out across America and the world. It’s also a reality show.

Catastrophic wildfires no longer occur just in the hot summer season; they spark earlier and burn later. Military bases in the heartland find their runways unusable—not cratered by enemy ordnance, but covered by floodwaters. Major bases on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts—gargantuan Navy and Marine Corps installations critical to defense and force-projection—confront the near-certain threat of being inundated by rising seas. As the air gets hotter and wetter, warplanes and helicopters have a difficult time taking off, requiring them to burn even more fossil fuels for lift. Melting ice caps could release horrific pathogens that have been frozen in suspended animation for ages—and the Navy would be first to sail into, or stumble upon, them, as its warships explore regions of the Arctic newly accessible by retreating polar ice.

While the Defense Department came late to acknowledging and acting on risks posed by climate change to its installations and operations, the armed forces have come around, and are on the hunt for solutions.

It will take money, which has not yet been sufficiently earmarked. It will take attention, which is finally refocusing on this risk. But it can be done.

Mitigating the effects of climate change will require a whole-of-government approach and a redefinition of national security to embrace a more panoramic set of risks. Examples? In advance of the brutal civil war in Syria, drought played a key role in prompting migration to urban areas, which put pressure on the Assad government, whose political institutions were overwhelmed. This only exacerbated latent tensions between ruling Alawites, a minority, and the majority Sunnis.

Iran and Iraq and Lebanon have suffered street protests over high energy prices and lack of water. While climate change was not the only driver—those nations are wracked by poor governance, corrupt political institutions and feeble infrastructure—rising global temperatures have worsened those shortages and prompted migration from rural to urban areas, where local services cannot provide sufficient food and water. The same drivers are at play in the conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most-populous country, over the Tigray region, and in Somalia.

World Bank analysis out to 2050 describes a horrific rise in climate-related migration, with these projections: East Asia and the Pacific, 49 million people. South Asia, 40 million. North Africa, 19 million. Latin America, 17 million. Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 5 million. By far the most catastrophic situation is in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 86 million climate-related migrants predicted by 2050.

On Oct. 7, 2021, the Defense Department offered its clearest statement ever acknowledging the risks of climate change to national security and to the military’s ability to carry out its mission: “Climate change is an existential threat to our nation's security, and the Department of Defense must act swiftly and boldly to take on this challenge and prepare for damage that cannot be avoided,” said Defense Secretary J. Lloyd Austin III.

Austin spoke in conjunction with the release of the Pentagon’s new “Climate Adaptation Plan.” Despite the strong public statements, senior officials told us that many of the specific details remained to be worked out over coming months and years.

Along with DOD’s plan, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the intelligence community’s assessment of the risks through 2040, while the Department of Homeland Security released its own report on climate-related risks—the first collective statement on the climate threat from these three national security agencies.

In a welcome step, DHS announced that applications for state and local preparedness grants will require an assessment of the impact of climate change; the agency also warned that expanding access to the Arctic will certainly increase competition for fish and minerals. Nobody is yet calling it the new Great Game, but the major players operating in the Arctic—militarily and economically—are the United States, Russia and China.

Interestingly, the risk of climate change may offer a way for Western allies to blunt China’s growing economic and military influence in the western Pacific. China is all about expanding its influence and trade, but is a huge polluter with little effort to mitigate climate change in its foreign and national security. In that gap is a space for the United States, Australia, and other allies to step ahead of China.

Just days after Australians elected a new government in 2022, the new deputy prime minister—dual-hatted as defense minister—visited Washington. Richard Marles previously held the government portfolio for Australia’s relationship with the Pacific, so he knows the large nations and tiny island states well. He described how families from small island nations in the western Pacific pool their money to send their children to school in Australia, knowing they may never have a home to come home to as the ocean, little by little, swallows their land.

To compete with China in the region, it is up to Australia, the U.S. and other partners to focus on “dealing with the issues that actually matter to these countries” Marles said. The policy focus for Australia, the United States and like-minded nations, he said, should be on the impact of climate change, “and in doing that, I am confident that we will be the natural partner of choice for the countries of the Pacific”—and not China.

Here at home, the challenge is acute for the National Guard. The Guard mission today truly is biblical: fire, famine, pestilence. Add in a modern Horseman of the Political Apocalypse: urban unrest and riots. The Guard’s orders for humanitarian support, natural disaster support and support to civil authorities all are growing at the same time.

Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, used to talk about the hot summer fire seasons. “Well, they kind of run year-round now,” he said.

There is an added risk in piling climate-related operations on the Guard: it could strain the forces’ ability to operate with the rest of the armed services, even keeping it from fully serving its traditional role of “Strategic Reserve” for the Pentagon.

The Navy also faces a climate-change threat beyond important real estate becoming submerged under rising seas. It’s something straight from a science fiction novel, one set on a melting polar ice cap that releases horrific pathogens. “In addition to the role of potential emerging diseases as the environment changes and perhaps new pathogens appear, we’ll continue to reinforce our surveillance of emerging diseases,” said Rear Adm. Bruce Gillingham, the Navy surgeon general. “We’ll continue to be very vigilant there.”

Energy resources are a tool essential to military operations—but they also are a weapon, as we have seen with Russian threats to cut off natural gas supplies to Europe in retribution for sanctions over the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Dependency is death for the military, so the Pentagon must accelerate efforts in the field of synthetic fuels, as well as solar power (many Marine units in the field light their tents this way), and longer-lasting, less-heavy batteries. Hybrid electric motors can use 20 percent less fossil fuel, and so a shift is required.

These adaptations will be no less dramatic than historic transitions from wind to coal and then coal to oil and then oil to nuclear-powered warships.

Lessons from these experiments could help the military create more independent operations in the field, lessening the logistics trains that offer tempting targets to an adversary as well as increasing energy consumption for transporting supplies over long distances.

While the solution is obvious, it will cost billions of dollars to mitigate the effects of climate change on national security.

While no Pentagon-specific predictions are available, the Office of Management and Budget released a government-wide assessment warning that, for the rest of this century, the U.S. government could spend an extra $25 billion to $128 billion each year to deal with six types of climate-related disasters: coastal disaster relief, flood insurance, crop insurance, healthcare insurance, wildland fire suppression and flooding at Federal facilities.

Government officials are saying lots of the right things. But is it being done, and done quickly enough? As one retired official told us, “A plan without sufficient resources is hallucination.”

Andrew Hoehn is the RAND Corporation’s senior vice president for research and analysis; he formerly served as a top strategist for the Department of Defense. Thom Shanker is director of the Project for Media and National Security at George Washington University; he previously was a New York Times reporter and editor.

defenseone.com · by Andrew Hoehn

21. US can deter China invasion: Milley

Mon, Jul 03, 2023 page1

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2023/07/03/2003802552?utm

US can deter China invasion: Milley

AVOIDING WAR: As Xi appears undecided on an invasion, countries have time to make sure that every day Xi wakes up, he says: ‘Today is not that day,’ Milley said

• Staff writer
• 
  
•  
•  
• The US and its allies can deter China from invading Taiwan so long as they retain military superiority, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley said.
• Voice of America quoted Milley as telling the National Press Club in Washington on Friday that Beijing can be dissuaded from launching military action against Taiwan as long as the US and its allies are able to maintain their military advantage over China.
• “The faster we move out, the faster we can retain military superiority, then I believe the theory of the case is we are more likely than not to deter war from happening, and if war does happen, we will prevail,” Milley said.
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US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley speaks at the National Press Club in Washington on Friday.

• Photo: Screenshot from C-SPAN’s livestream
• Voice of America also quoted Milley as saying that there is no indication that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has decided to attack Taiwan by 2027.
• That gives the US and other countries time to show Xi that the use of force would be a bad idea, he was quoted as saying.
• “You want to make sure that every single day, President Xi wakes up and says: ‘Today is not that day,’ and that that decision never comes,” he said.
• Milley also addressed criticism over the approach the US takes on Taiwan and China, reiterating that the US and its allies have the capacity to support Ukraine and Taiwan.
• “It’s not ... a zero-sum game. It’s not like that,” he said, adding that “there are other allies and partners out there [to help Taiwan]. It’s not just the United States.”
• Milley in his speech also said that the US military needs to modernize to compete with China.
• “I think the United States military needs to accelerate our modernization,” he said. “And it’s not so much just the actual modernization, but it’s the acceptance of the idea that future war, the fundamental character of war, is actually changing in really significant, radical ways.”
• “If we, the military, don’t adapt ourselves, our doctrine or tactics or techniques, our leader development, our training and talent management, but also the weapon systems — if we don’t do that, then we won’t have a military that’s capable of operating in that future operating environment,” he said.
• “So our task ... [is] to maintain our current decisive advantage, our lethality and readiness, our competence, by optimizing these technologies for the conduct of war, and we do this not to conduct war, but to deter great-power war,” he said.
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22. Retired Green Beret Scott Mann examines ‘holistic horror of war’ in ‘Last Out’

Retired Green Beret Scott Mann examines ‘holistic horror of war’ in ‘Last Out’

Stars and Stripes · by Brian McElhiney · July 2, 2023

The cast of “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,” from left, Bryan Bachman, Heather Corrigan, Scott Mann, Lenny Bruce, Chris Vetzel and Cooper Mann, onstage at a performance of the play in San Diego in May 2023. The play, written by former Green Beret Scott Mann, tells the story of a Green Beret who is trapped between his family obligations and his mission in Afghanistan as he struggles to ascend to the mythical warrior afterlife of Valhalla after getting hit with a roadside bomb. (The Heroes Journey)

Storytelling helped Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann deal with post-traumatic stress after serving in the Afghanistan War and retiring in 2012. A decade later, it’s helping him — and others — deal with the fallout of that war all over again.

In August 2021, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan and the U.S. scrambled to evacuate its allies and citizens, former Green Beret Mann was busy launching the film version of his play, “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,” on Amazon. The play, written by and starring Mann, tells the story of a Green Beret who is trapped between his family obligations and his mission in Afghanistan as he struggles to ascend to the mythical warrior afterlife of Valhalla after getting hit with a roadside bomb.

But Mann soon switched gears, founding Task Force Pineapple with other veterans to help more than 1,000 Afghan refugees escape Kabul.

“It was all-consuming until my wife had my best friends stage an intervention somewhere around October after the collapse, and I stepped away from it and got myself healthy again,” Mann said recently from his home in Tampa, Fla. “I was not in a good place … coming out of the Pineapple experience, and even writing the book (“Operation Pineapple Express,” published in 2022) because interviewing all of those folks that made it, those folks that didn’t, the veterans. I have interviewed just hundreds of veterans — iconic special operators — and watching them weep in front of me and telling me that they’re never gonna let their son join the Army, and just the moral injury that I felt and so many of my peers who fought this war for 20 years felt and the families. So there was a lot of just heaviness coming out of that.”

Around this time, Mann got a call from actor, musician and veterans advocate Gary Sinise. Sinise had seen the film version of “Last Out” through mutual friend and songwriter John Ondrasik, better known as soft-rock piano balladeer Five for Fighting.

“He was struggling, Scott, with … what did we do and why did we do it, and he was losing friends who were committing suicide, and terrible different things were happening,” Sinise told Stars and Stripes in May. “Much like the guys back in Vietnam — the veterans that I met back in the ’80s who wrote a play called ‘Tracers’ because they were struggling with their own service and coming home from that war to a divided nation and a nation really that had abandoned them. The healing play that they’d made was very, very positive for them, and Scott did the exact same thing.”

Scott Mann as Master Sgt. Danny Patton and Lenny Bruce as Kenny Suggins perform a scene from “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret” in San Diego in May 2023. (The Heroes Journey)

The partnership with the Gary Sinise Foundation has led to a summer tour for “Last Out” that kicked off with performances in San Diego and Phoenix, Ariz., and continues through October with stops in Sioux Falls, S.D.; Franklin, Tenn.; Milwaukee and Topeka, Kan. Along with a preview show at Sinise’s Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago — where Sinise presented the Vietnam-era play “Tracers” in the early ’80s — these are the first performances of the play since COVID, and more significantly, since the end of the war in Afghanistan.

“When Gary called me and said, ‘You know, Scott, this reminds me a lot of Vietnam,’ I was walking in the driveway … and I just kind of fell apart on him,” Mann said. “And I’m like, ‘Gary, it is a lot like that. And if we don’t do something, we’re on the front end of a mental-health tsunami.’ I mean, I told Congress this when I testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee about Pineapple. I was like, you guys don’t understand; I mean, you’re talking about 73% of the Afghan War population feels betrayed. This is really bad, and on top of all, the suicide rate. So coming back to the play, when Gary brought that up, we both agreed that this was a preexisting asset that could be put into play right now to help veterans make meaning out of their lived experience while simultaneously showing politicians and civilians the impact.”

Mann wrote the play over several years and premiered it in Tampa in November 2018. At the time, Mann and his team of actors and crew — all veterans and military family members with little to no theater experience — “thought it was a one-time thing,” according to the play’s website. But audience reaction led Mann to mount a 16-city, 28,000-mile tour out of a U-Haul van in 2019 through his nonprofit, The Heroes Journey.

“Last Out” was originally developed as a one-man show with Mann starring as career Green Beret, Master Sgt. Danny Patton. But as the story progressed, Mann knew he had to involve other characters — namely, Patton’s best friend and fellow Green Beret Kenny Suggins (portrayed by Lenny Bruce, also a former Green Beret who served in Afghanistan with Mann), wife Lynn (Heather Corrigan) and son Kaiden (Cooper Mann, Mann’s son).

Cooper Mann and his father, Scott Mann, backstage at a show in San Diego in May 2023. (The Heroes Journey)

While not directly autobiographical, much of the play is based on Mann’s own experiences. Suggins is based on Clifford Patterson, one of Mann’s closest friends who was killed on 9/11 at the Pentagon. And Lynn Patton takes inspiration from Mann’s wife, Monty Mann, and her experiences at home while Mann was in Afghanistan.

“I started asking my wife questions about what happened when I was gone, what happened when I was deployed, and at first she was resistant — almost agitated about it,” Mann said. “At this point I’d been retired for seven years, and she’s like, ‘Why are you bringing this stuff up? I don’t want to talk about this.’ And there were times when we would kind of go at it. And then finally she told me, ‘Babe, I had to keep all this from you to keep you alive; I really don’t want to do this.’ And I said, ‘Well I think if we can put this out there, it’s going to validate what you and a lot of other family members did.’ ”

That seems to be exactly what has happened. Audiences, often made up of veterans and family members not just from the recent Middle East wars, but stretching back to Vietnam, Korea and World War II, participate in “talkbacks” at the end of the show, sharing their own experiences with Mann and each other.

“We had the sister of a Green Beret sergeant major, she stood up and she said, ‘You guys told me in two hours what my baby brother has been trying to tell me for five years,’ ” Mann said. “And so you see these families sitting together looking at the war from each other’s perspective, because the way the play works is the protagonist, Danny the Green Beret, he’s stuck between his living room and his fire base after being severely wounded, and so he can’t ascend. And so you see both, and the audience is affected by that in a very profound way because a lot of the home front stuff, no one really understands or knows.”

Scott Mann performs as Master Sgt. Danny Patton in “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret.” “My vision was that I could tell a story kind of like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with body armor, in a way that the audience could really go for the ride and feel what it’s like to say goodbye to your wife at the airfield, to feel what it’s like to hold your buddy in your arms in his final moments because he did what you asked him to do,” Mann said. (The Heroes Journey)

But the play also was written for civilians to help them understand “the holistic horror of war,” as Mann describes it.

“I’m a father of three boys. My oldest son a few years ago told me he was gonna join the Army and he wanted to be a Special Forces guy, and that just hit me right between the running lights,” Mann said. “Because at that point we were over there, we were in this war that — most people didn’t even know that we were there. … I can’t tell you how many times people would say to me in airports, ‘We’re still in Afghanistan?’ And now my son’s gonna go fight a war that I didn’t finish. That for me became something that I felt like that had to be fixed, that had to be adjusted.

“… My vision was that I could tell a story kind of like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with body armor, in a way that the audience could really go for the ride and feel what it’s like to say goodbye to your wife at the airfield, to feel what it’s like to hold your buddy in your arms in his final moments because he did what you asked him to do,” he continued. “The things that go with combat that most people don’t know. To see a military spouse watch a news report with no dialogue in a scene, and just fall to her knees and scream — I mean, it rocks the civilians to the core.”

That mission seems even more important now with veterans struggling with how the Afghanistan War ended. Mann hopes to continue touring the show in partnership with the Gary Sinise Foundation, and plans to film the show in a live setting, a la the filmed version of “Hamilton.”

“The irony in all of this is that we’ve been telling stories — warrior storytelling — since we’ve been fighting wars,” Mann said. “I mean, if you look at most of Shakespeare’s plays, that’s what they do. And civil society has used storytelling as the primary way to bring veterans home from war, in every civil society on the planet, and we’ve lost that.”

The cast and crew of “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret” huddle before a show in San Diego in May 2023. (The Heroes Journey)

Stars and Stripes · by Brian McElhiney · July 2, 2023

23. Ukraine Doesn’t Need U.S. Contractors

Provocative title that will upset many. 

However a main point of the author's is that training the Ukrainian military (or any military ) in our image is folly.

My view:

4. Assessment - must conduct continuous assessment to gain understanding - tactical, operational, and strategic.  Assessments are key to developing strategy and campaign plans and anticipating potential conflict. Assessments allow you to challenge assumptions and determine if a rebalance of ways and means with the acceptable, durable, political arrangement  is required. Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it.   Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.

https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html

Ukraine Doesn’t Need U.S. Contractors - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Rudy Weisz · July 3, 2023

As an aspiring Green Beret in the U.S. Army Special Forces Qualification Course, I was taught how to prepare a program of instruction for an indigenous partner force. I learned to assess which aspects of our partner’s organization and tactics are working and retain them, even if they differ from our own. This was a lesson I only glimpsed as a young infantry lieutenant in Ukraine, and one I years later lucidly observed in Afghanistan after having earned my Green Beret.

As a result, I was perplexed to see Erik Kramer and Paul Schneider — both Green Berets with deployments to Afghanistan like me — advocate a training approach for Ukrainian forces that forgets this lesson. In “What the Ukrainian Armed Forces Need to Do to Win,” Kramer and Schneider recommend that Western contractors provide thirty-day training sessions to Ukrainian forces. Kramer and Schneider identified a lack of mission command and combined arms maneuver, ineffective training, ad hoc logistics and maintenance, and poorly employed special operations forces as major factors that “could hinder the success of the ongoing offense” and, indeed, the entire war effort. Taken together, it would seem like the Ukrainian military isn’t getting anything right. Kramer and Schneider’s solution: Western contractors providing thirty-day train-the-trainer sessions with Ukrainian light infantry battalions. This strategy, they boldly claim, will tip the scales in Ukraine’s favor and ensure victory, as “history has shown how a well-trained and properly led military can beat a poorly trained army.”

Become a Member

Not only does this approach ignore lessons from the Special Forces Qualification Course, it also ignores the Ukrainian military’s prophecy-defying accomplishments. Kramer and Schneider make no case for why Western contractors could do better than NATO has in guiding Ukraine’s military modernization, nor does their plan rectify the issues they identified. It is also possible that, as owners of a limited liability company that provides Western military training, they are overly optimistic about the potential impact of their services.

Instead, the U.S. military and NATO partners should continue training Ukrainian forces, as they have since 2015. That assistance ranged from developing a noncommissioned officer corps to teaching mission command, tactics, first aid, and how to counter improvised explosive devices, among many other things. That training paid off in February 2022 and continues to pay dividends today.

Give Ukraine Its Due

The Ukrainian Armed Forces have vastly improved since 2015. As Col. (ret.) Liam Collins noted last spring, beginning in 2016 Ukraine undertook massive reforms in “command and control, planning, operations, medical and logistics, and professional development of the force.” Speaking to command and control specifically, Collins observed that “Ukrainian military thinking that now allows for junior leaders to make battlefield decisions” contributed immensely to repulsing the Russian advance early in the war. Collins’ assessment is grounded in deep experience advising Ukrainian forces. In fact, in contrast to many, Collins predicted the Ukrainians would not collapse immediately upon being invaded.

U.S. military and NATO trainers contributed to these changes. As a lieutenant with the 173rd Airborne, I was in the first iteration of Operation Fearless Guardian in 2015, where we trained two companies and a battalion staff of the Ukrainian National Guard at Yavoriv Training Area. Training included squad and platoon live fires, medical training, counter–unmanned aerial systems, and troop-leading procedures. Since then, throughput has increased to five battalions trained per year, and the scope of training has expanded. Meanwhile, the 10th Special Forces Group and others helped the Ukrainian military develop their own special operations forces with skills ranging from small-unit tactics to unconventional warfare. Additionally, the British military has trained nearly 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers in everything from logistics to artillery employment.

It is worth pausing here for a moment to remember that Ukraine began to earnestly modernize and improve its forces only nine years ago. The Ukrainian military of today would be unrecognizable to the Ukrainian military of 2014. Meanwhile, some other post-Soviet countries have been working toward Westernization for twice as long and still have a way to go. In this context, their progress is remarkable, and expecting the Ukrainian Armed Forces to already fully resemble a Western military is folly.

Crucially, the efficacy of U.S. and NATO training has been amply demonstrated in Ukraine’s battlefield successes. In the opening salvos, Ukrainian forces saved Kyiv from occupation. Then, last fall, the Ukrainians swept the Russians back, regaining over 6,000 square kilometers in a two-week offensive. At present, Ukrainian forces are making steady, albeit slow, gains as their newest offensive takes shape. Describing a recent Ukrainian thrust, one Russian prisoner of war said the Ukrainians “opened on us with tanks, mortars, artillery,” followed soon after with infantry who dismounted on their objective from MaxxPros. That sounds like combined arms maneuver and well-executed echelonment of fire. This all stands in stark contrast to how events unfolded in 2014 in Crimea and the Donbas.

Though there hasn’t been much reporting on it, the Ukrainian military app GIS Arta, nicknamed the Uber of Artillery, has succeeded on account of a culture that welcomes mission command and innovation. GIS Arta connects target identifiers (drones, reconnaissance elements, and front-line troops) with target destroyers (armed drones, artillery, and mortar teams) to rapidly eliminate Russian forces. Once a target is identifiedOnce a target is identified and pushed to all finishing elements within range, any fire support officer or equivalent can immediately elect to fire and destroy. GIS Arta has enabled Ukrainian forces to put rounds on target within sixty seconds of identification.

To take just one more example, Ukrainian soldiers have quickly mastered the Patriot missile system. The Ukrainians were fully trained on the system within a few weeks at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Other Ukrainian units were also trained on Patriot systems in Europe alongside German and Dutch military trainers. Not much later, the Ukrainians reportedly shot down a Kinzhal hypersonic missile using a Patriot battery.

Problem-Solution Mismatch

Even if Ukrainian forces weren’t already demonstrating such success, Western contractors would still not be the solution to their problems. Kramer and Schneider argue that the crux of the problem is culture. Senior Ukrainian officers, they say, are steeped in a Soviet-era mindset that precludes mission command, which in turn prevents combined arms maneuver as a tactical approach. If this is the case, thirty-day train-the-trainer rotations focused on light infantry battalions will fix nothing.

First, the target of their program appears to be junior and mid-level leaders in light infantry battalions (though at other points they suggest that whole brigades could rotate through their program). Yet this is the cohort that already embraces mission command, according to the authors’ own observations. How will training them in mission command change anything if senior leaders are still too risk-averse and ossified to try something new? Second, building a strong noncommissioned officer corps — a critical component of mission command and maneuver warfare — takes time and deep investment. Ukrainian units have already been training at the battalion level and below, to include combined arms and force-on-force training. But, to paraphrase an Army Special Operations Forces truth, a robust noncommissioned officer corps can’t be created after a crisis occurs.

Second, ad hoc logistics and maintenance problems cannot be solved in thirty days. Kramer and Schneider write that “maintenance is based on cannibalization, horse trading between units, and battlefield recovery.” This, in turn, determines “how armor, mechanized vehicles, and artillery are used in combat,” where combined arms maneuver is shunned. But this assessment does not consider the context and character of the fight in which the Ukrainians find themselves. Perhaps their approach to maintenance is driven by an effort to evenly spread scarce resources. Or, perhaps these tactics are a rational calculus to protect their high-value assets when there is no guarantee replacements or repair parts will come, especially given uncertain Western support. Maybe instead this approach is a product of the dilapidated equipment Western countries are sending to Ukraine. What’s more, these logistics issues are larger than the battalion or brigade level, and so better training at those levels will not make these issues go away.

Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan, some in the U.S. military appear to have concluded that the lessons from that conflict have no utility in the world of great power competition. Yet there are lessons in the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s recent report that are transferable to Ukraine. Consider lesson two from the report, which deals with timelines. According to the special inspector general, “the U.S. government consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan, and created unrealistic timelines and expectations.” Kramer and Schneider risk making the same mistake when they assert that cultural and organizational problems can be solved with a series of month-long train-the-trainer events.

Finally, it is important to openly address Kramer and Schneider’s conflict of interest. They write that the training Ukraine needs “could be carried out by Western contracted military instructors, working with Ukrainian military veterans.” They are co-founders of Ukraine Defense Support Group, a limited liability company that provides military training and employs “Western and Ukrainian businessmen, [and] Western military veterans.” This background could lead them to overestimate the capability of military contractors to hand Ukraine victory over Russia.

Another Approach

If NATO assistance isn’t cutting it, then there is another proven method for training forces in the midst of war that does not require contractors. Early in the North Africa campaign, the British army was losing terribly to the Nazis, suffering a “string of defeats” from 1941 to 1942. In his paper “Dangerous Changes,” Kendrick Kuo attributes these failures to the British army’s mistaken belief that armored units alone could decisively defeat the enemy. Thankfully, the British learned from their mistakes. Following the battle of Alam el Halfa in late summer 1942, “British forces reorganized and trained for almost two months.” British army leadership identified the errors in their tactics and retrained on the “correct principles” from World War I. Kuo writes that General Montgomery “reorganized and retrained the infantry, armor, and artillery to carry out coordinated set-piece battles that were fit for the Western Front.” In their next engagement, at the Second Battle of El Alamein, the British army overwhelmed Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Seven months later, in May 1943, the Axis forces in Africa were defeated. Over a year into the Ukraine war, the Ukrainians are likely the best positioned to identify their own tactical shortcomings and adapt accordingly, just as the British did in World War II.

At the start of that first rotation of Operation Fearless Guardian back in 2015, some of my Ukrainian partners were skeptical of what we could offer and saw the exercise more as a friendly exchange of experiences. At the end of those two months, they were sold. By 2019, my 10th Special Forces Group colleagues would return from Ukraine and tell me how eagerly the Ukrainians approached training with the U.S. military.

Today, Ukraine is performing admirably in a tough fight for its very survival, far beyond many commentators’ expectations. To get here, the Ukrainian Armed Forces undertook significant reforms and made tremendous strides in modernization. Though it surely is imperfect, the existing training model with NATO ought to continue as it has demonstrated efficacy, even if the Ukrainian Armed Forces don’t fully resemble a Western-style military.

Rudy Weisz is an Army Special Forces officer and General Wayne A. Downing Scholar currently pursuing his master’s degree at The Fletcher School. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not represent the views of the U.S. Army or Department of Defense.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Rudy Weisz · July 3, 2023

24. Is it possible that Putin and Wagner played us all?

​Hmmm...​

Is it possible that Putin and Wagner played us all? - New Vision Official

Prigozhin’s wagner, state funded, and his catering business relies heavily on state contracts. It is, therefore, hard to see Wagner biting the hand that feeding it.

newvision.co.ug

By Abbey Kibirige Semuwemba

As a former student of the hospitality industry myself, I got excited a few days ago seeing a well-rounded chef cooking up something deadly in Russia in a heartbeat.

But, there's this feeling in me that the so-called attempted coup by the Wagner group (made up of mainly ex-Special Forces) might have been staged by Putin himself.

I'm not underrating Progozhin because of his former occupation as a mere cook/chef. After all, Pol Pot was a cook, too - he did wonders for Cambodia and fertilized the countryside with lots of human bodies.

Prigozhin's wagner is state-funded, and his catering business relies heavily on state contracts. It is, therefore, hard to see Wagner biting a hand that's feeding it. Putin himself allowed Wagner to set up a shadow command and supply chain inside Russia.

Secondly, the outcome of that short uprising has largely benefited Putin. Prigozhin is retiring and will stay in Belarus.

Putin has basically put the genie back in the bottle - the Wagner group would have been difficult to contain after the Ukraine war. Some of Wagner’s fighters will now be absorbed into the Russian military, and this will give Russia a boost in the number of experienced and disciplined soldiers.

The Wagner weapons will be transferred to the Russian military. Now, decide for yourself whether Russia is strengthened or weakened.

Anyway, it was incredible for us to believe that a private army was capable of defeating a large, recognized government military. It is like Blackwater PMC of USA taking down US Army, Air force, Navy and space force. Prigozhin was in the midst of an advance to Moscow and was less than 130 miles from the capital city when he announced he had halted his troops.

The history of Russia, including modern episodes since the fall of the USSR, clearly indicates that the Russian military has no qualms about shooting at civilians if necessary. It was, therefore, odd that the Wagners took over Southern Military Command Headquarters without a struggle.

Meanwhile, Russia was still able to launch missile attacks on Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine as the uprising was going on inside Russia. Unbelievable!

Please, don't get me wrong; the Ukraine war seems to be a good incentive for a coup against Putin, but Russia has been through a far worse crisis back in 2008 which put much more strain on Putin's close elite allies due to recession. Still, nobody managed or even seemed to attempt to contest Putin's authority. Since then, he further solidified his rule and disposed of his potential rivals.

If you can make the king bleed, people will cease to believe in him, but nothing happened to Putin personally, apart from the uprising, making him look a bit weak. He still didn't show panic during the uprising.

In fact, the day of the attempted coup, on the TV show “Good Morning, Little Ones!”, children were being taught how to wash hands. A brass orchestra performed military songs on federal TV stations to mock Prigozhin’s Wagner troops.

In Moscow, authorities announced a counter-terrorist operation, but where were the terrorists? Oh, they were held up about a thousand miles south.

Honestly, It was odd that Prigozhin's forces apparently approached Moscow on a highway without being destroyed. I would have thought that the FSB (or FSO subunit of FSB, which protects the Kremlin) would do or say something, but they didn't.

Putin is a seasoned spy who knows how to protect himself. The first thing to remember here is that if a coup was really in the works against Putin, the best chance for it to succeed would be if no one knew about it. But Wagner broadcasted their intentions to remove Putin in advance, and then a few hours later, they were retreating.

So, is it possible that Putin was deceiving NATO? Is it possible he wanted to see who was still loyal to him and who wasn't?

The tricks of deceiving the enemy isn't something unusual. For instance, another seasoned spy in Uganda, Museveni, did so during the Luwero Bush War in the early 1980s. Apparently, the NRA would reportedly dress in UNLA uniforms, kill a few people, and then blame it on the then Obote government.

Hitler also did a similar trick when he was looking for a reason to attack Poland. His pretense was to protect Germany from Polish incursions, when poles attacked a German radio station inside Germany. It was, in fact, the Schutzstaffel (SS) dressed as poles who carried out the attack, then shot concentration camps (KZ) inmates and left them in German uniforms.

However, Putin declaring Prigozhin, a traitor on TV, didn't give a lot of room for maneuvers. So, till Prigozhin is dead soon, I won't believe any more stuff about a coup against his boss. The Wagner chief is now in Belarus - its hard to believe that Prigozhin abandoned his forces to exit Russia in a deal he can’t enforce.

There is nothing the rest of us can do except eat popcorn and wait for the next Putin and NATO moves as we continue to pray for peace.

newvision.co.ug

25. As a special forces veteran, I welcome Indigenous voices when it comes to defending Australia

As a special forces veteran, I welcome Indigenous voices when it comes to defending Australia | Tim Robertson

Sussan Ley’s fear-mongering highlights our propensity to dismiss ancient knowledge

The Guardian · July 1, 2023

As the Indigenous voice to parliament debate evolves towards the referendum, we are seeing more questions about potentially inappropriate influences over executive government.

Last week it was the deputy opposition leader, Sussan Ley, asking if the voice would be able to make representations to the chief of the defence force on military acquisitions or the location or operation of military bases.

While the debate focuses on the potential benefits to Indigenous Australians and the limits of power of the constitutional amendment, there is another more central issue the question raises.

Australia Day, link roads and tax policy: the voice debate can only get better outside parliament

Read more

Why are we so afraid of the voice offering advice to executive government, specifically about defence and national security? Assuming the advice will not have to be followed, as the government assures, Indigenous voices may provide a valuable perspective.

Our military campaigns have resulted in catastrophic loss in Afghanistan and questionable invasions of Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries.

We have damaged many lives, allegedly committed war crimes and spent huge amounts of resources in extended campaigns, the national impacts of which are still unfolding.

Most importantly, we lost our latest war alongside the world’s most powerful military when we retreated from Afghanistan. The enemy who defeated us was comprised of Indigenous forces operating in a land they know intimately.

We should not be reluctant to take advice about the defence of our own country from Indigenous people. The Australian conflicts between Indigenous groups and settlers require far more research and understanding from all perspectives.

I argue it was an invasion by any military assessment, and I am content that doesn’t make me a bad Australian. Unlike most Australians, the ancestors of Indigenous Australians knew what it is like to be invaded on their own land.

We can listen to those voices when considering the next possible invasion of the land we now share.

We can listen to the Indigenous soldiers in our ADF reserve who patrol northern Australia as regularly as any conventional unit.

Are we really so blindly arrogant as a nation and so content with our military campaigns that we would not listen to Indigenous voices on how to work in our remote lands and how to respectfully defend our great country?

Ley’s question, which was designed to make a fear-generating political point, highlights our inclination to dismiss Indigenous knowledge and gravitate to our western ideas.

Yet our limited efforts to fully understand Indigenous forces of other countries were a significant factor in our national military failures. The 20-year campaign in Afghanistan evolved eventually to a focus on training and understanding the local Indigenous forces. Unfortunately, the Taliban did it better.

These types of military and security operations are fundamental in modern and complex geopolitical contests. This is not virtue signalling.

It is practical and integrated campaign planning. That is why military forces are focused on developing unconventional warfare, or the “art of resistance”.

In Australia we have redeveloped a national focus on these capabilities, working with Indigenous military forces across northern Australia and our neighbours.

David Kilcullen, an expert in unconventional warfare, writes of the need to understand Indigenous forces and the value of their support to national resistance and defence. Including Australian Indigenous voices alongside western-centric processes would be valuable.

New Australia v old Australia: a yes vote on the voice is a vote for the future | Megan Davis

Read more

The voice should focus on improving the lives of Indigenous Australians. But it can be more than that. It can be about us creating more national confidence to follow our own path in all our efforts, including security and defence. Alliances and military technology are important but I believe Indigenous Australians also have a perspective worthy of respect and attention.

If we listen to them a little more and the US a little less, perhaps we can develop military campaigns which engender more pride and less embarrassment.

Perhaps this could help resisting advances from superpowers, just as the Taliban did and the Ukrainian people are doing now.

Of course, this should be developed in a way that is aligned to our ideals and without the brutality and extremism of the Taliban. But these objectionable characteristics of our enemy do not justify ignoring the military lessons of our loss.

Indigenous voices bring a valuable perspective that I will always heed, whether I am patrolling with them in northern Australia or working with them to improve our national resistance and resilience.

Tim Robertson is a former special forces soldier with diverse experience in wars and contests across 25 years in numerous countries

The Guardian · July 1, 2023

26. In Small Victory, Signs of Grueling Combat Ahead in Ukrainian Counteroffensive

In Small Victory, Signs of Grueling Combat Ahead in Ukrainian Counteroffensive

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Yurii ShyvalaPhotographs by David Guttenfelder

Reporting from Neskuchne, Ukraine

• July 2, 2023

The New York Times · by Yurii Shyvala · July 3, 2023

Ukrainian soldiers in June at the entrance of a destroyed school that Russians had occupied in Neskuchne before the village was abandoned.

Expecting a quick retreat, a volunteer Ukrainian unit instead faced two days of tough resistance from dug-in Russian forces.

Ukrainian soldiers in June at the entrance of a destroyed school that Russians had occupied in Neskuchne before the village was abandoned.Credit...

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and

Photographs by David Guttenfelder

Reporting from Neskuchne, Ukraine

• July 2, 2023

The Ukrainian soldiers thought the Russians would quickly retreat from Neskuchne, a tiny village in southern Ukraine, especially after a concerted artillery barrage and a rocket strike on their headquarters.

Instead, the Russians dug in, fighting for two days before giving up the village last month, leaving their dead decaying on the roadside and piles of expended ammunition around their makeshift defenses.

The Russian defeat, on June 9, was Ukraine’s first win in a prolonged counteroffensive that is well into its fourth week but moving at a slower pace than expected. In that respect, the battle for Neskuchne served as an early warning that Kyiv’s and the Western allies’ hopes for a quick victory were unrealistic and that every mile of their drive into Russian-occupied territory would be grueling and contested.

The devastated area around a public school in Neskuchne. Ukrainian infantry soldiers from the 129th Territorial Defense Brigade recaptured the village from Russian forces last month.

The dayslong battle was fought largely by a contingent of volunteer fighters who attacked on foot, not by the large, NATO-trained brigades equipped with Western tanks and armored troop transports that military analysts thought would lead the long-awaited advance.

Soldiers who described the fighting, along with visual evidence of the battle still scattered around Neskuchne two weeks after it ended, made clear that Ukraine’s success had hinged on ingenuity that helped catch the Russian forces off guard.

In the days after Neskuchne’s “liberation,” which was announced on June 10, Ukrainian forces have managed to retake several villages farther south. But since that early string of victories, Ukraine’s offensive has been slow. Ukrainian forces have been mired by staunch Russian defenses, mounting casualties and field after field of land mines.

The battle for Neskuchne pitted about 70 Ukrainian troops from the 129th Territorial Defense Brigade against roughly 150 Russian soldiers from the 60th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, as well as a contingent of Russian inmates-turned-soldiers known as the Storm Z unit.

“We had to liberate house after house,” said Valeriy, a soldier from the 129th brigade, who took part in the fighting and, like others in this article, is being identified only by his first name for safety reasons. “At the beginning of the counteroffensive, we thought there were no more than 20 of them.”

Military equipment and clothing lying in the rubble of a school that Russians had occupied.

Russian ammunition and a grenade in the ruins of the school.

Neskuchne, a village of some 500 people, had been occupied by the Russians since the early months of the war, leaving ample time for Moscow’s forces there to dig in. The terrain around the village — a gradual rise to the west and the Mokri Yaly River to the east — meant that Neskuchne acted as a gateway to a string of villages to the south. In short: There was only one way in, and one way out.

The Russians knew this, and they expected that a Ukrainian advance into the village would be supported by tanks and other heavy equipment down its main, north-south road. Ukrainian soldiers who took part in the battle said that the Russian defenses had consisted of anti-tank mines and stockpiles of anti-tank missiles, some of which still remained in the Russian headquarters that was seen by The New York Times.

But the attack, at least in its early stages, did not incorporate “combined arms,” or the NATO military strategy of coordinating artillery fire with troop and tank movements that is often cited by Western military analysts and U.S. officials as critical to Ukraine’s counteroffensive success.

Ukrainian soldiers in the destroyed school in Neskuchne.

Instead of using tanks, which could easily be seen from the air or heard on the ground, the Ukrainians entered the village quietly, on foot and in small groups of infantry, after a World War I-style artillery bombardment.

Unlike the mass saturation of artillery fire common in that war, however, Ukraine’s strike on Neskuchne also incorporated a guided rocket attack. The rockets, fired by U.S.-supplied HIMARS, hit the Russian headquarters — a command post in the village’s northeast corner that had once been a school — and damaged the building but failed to destroy it.

Most of Neskuchne’s roughly 200 homes and shops are single-story structures that are common in rural Ukraine, which meant the two-story school was strategically important for any kind of defense. Much of the battle for the village centered on routing the Russians from the school, Neskuchnenska, which had closed down after the invasion.

A destroyed bus outside the school.

Russian soldiers from the 60th brigade had prepared the building for any kind of attack, boring passageways between the classrooms so soldiers could move around without exposing themselves to gunfire — a tactic that Islamic State fighters employed during the 2017 battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul. The defenders also set up their barracks in the basement and carved holes in the walls for machine guns.

One machine gun nest, constructed in a stairwell with sandbags and a small firing slit, pointed toward the north-south road that provided the only access to the village. The position was littered with hundreds of shell casings, a clear indicator that the school remained occupied and defended following the HIMARS strike.

“After the headquarters was hit by HIMARS rockets, they continued to defend themselves,” said Dmytro, a soldier with the 129th brigade who also took part in the battle. Only after using more artillery “did we manage finally to drive them out of the school,” he said.

After the initial artillery barrage, which was focused on destroying land mines placed around the village’s outskirts as well as the Russian defenders within, dozens of Ukrainian soldiers fanned out from Neskuchne’s northwestern corner, navigating overgrown yards and smoldering debris. Then they attacked.

A Ukrainian soldier passing by destroyed homes and cars in Neskuchne.

The Ukrainians communicated through walkie-talkies as they advanced, while staying in contact with drone pilots flying small, off-the-shelf devices. The drones proved essential as the battle dragged on: The Ukrainian troops relied on the drone pilots and those monitoring the battle over a video stream to communicate — using Starlink satellite internet — with the artillery battery supporting the attack.

On the second day of fighting, the 129th brigade was reinforced with an additional 20 soldiers from a nearby tank brigade as it struggled to dislodge the Russians.

The battle all but ended on June 9, when the Russian forces retreated under the threat of being surrounded. More than a dozen Russian soldiers were killed and wounded, and the Ukrainian soldiers said that some had drowned while trying to flee across the Mokri Yaly River. At least six Ukrainian soldiers died in the fighting.

“The Russians did not leave their positions until the last minute,” Dmytro said. The Russians left a stockpile of ammunition, machine guns, rifles and artillery shells. The war booty has since been divided up among the Ukrainian units that took part in the battle.

Russian weapons seized from liberated villages during the operation to recapture Neskuchne.

Now, the front line is roughly five miles from Neskuchne. The distant thud of artillery is a near-constant soundtrack, mixed with the bark of outgoing rounds from firing positions around the village.

Almost every house in Neskuchne is either damaged or destroyed, and the last person who lived there was evacuated after the battle. Unfed cats roam the streets. The school is a burnt, damaged shell of a building. The small bits of evidence that it was once a place of learning include tattered book pages on the floor, a charred Ping-Pong paddle and a half-deflated soccer ball tossed among the grenades, gas masks and discarded bandages for sucking chest wounds.

The Russian defeat in Neskuchne was Ukraine’s first win in a prolonged counteroffensive.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a Ukraine correspondent and a former Marine infantryman. @tmgneff

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: In Small Victory, Signs of Slog Ahead in Ukrainians’ Counteroffensive

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The New York Times · by Yurii Shyvala · July 3, 2023

27. Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain

Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain 

Russia is incubating a cottage industry of new digital surveillance tools to suppress domestic opposition to the war in Ukraine. The tech may also be sold overseas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/technology/russia-ukraine-surveillance-tech.html

Credit...Illustration by Mark Harris; Photographs by Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Aaron Krolik, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano 

Aaron Krolik, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano have investigated Russia’s use of surveillance and censorship technology for the past two years. 

July 3, 2023Updated 6:46 a.m. ET 

As the war in Ukraine unfolded last year, Russia’s best digital spies turned to new tools to fight an enemy on another front: those inside its own borders who opposed the war. 

To aid an internal crackdown, Russian authorities had amassed an arsenal of technologies to track the online lives of citizens. After it invaded Ukraine, its demand grew for more surveillance tools. That helped stoke a cottage industry of tech contractors, which built products that have become a powerful — and novel — means of digital surveillance. 

The technologies have given the police and Russia’s Federal Security Service, better known as the F.S.B., access to a buffet of snooping capabilities focused on the day-to-day use of phones and websites. The tools offer ways to track certain kinds of activity on encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal, monitor the locations of phones, identify anonymous social media users and break into people’s accounts, according to documents from Russian surveillance providers obtained by The New York Times, as well as security experts, digital activists and a person involved with the country’s digital surveillance operations. 

President Vladimir V. Putin is leaning more on technology to wield political power as Russia faces military setbacks in Ukraine, bruising economic sanctions and leadership challenges after an uprising led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner paramilitary group. In doing so, Russia — which once lagged authoritarian regimes like China and Iran in using modern technology to exert control — is quickly catching up. 

The Federal Security Service building on Lubyanka Square in Moscow in May. The F.S.B. and other Russian authorities want stronger technologies to track the online lives of citizens.Credit...Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

“It’s made people very paranoid, because if you communicate with anyone in Russia, you can’t be sure whether it’s secure or not. They are monitoring traffic very actively,” said Alena Popova, a Russian opposition political figure and digital rights activist. “It used to be only for activists. Now they have expanded it to anyone who disagrees with the war.” 

The effort has fed the coffers of a constellation of relatively unknown Russian technology firms. Many are owned by Citadel Group, a business once partially controlled by Alisher Usmanov, who was a target of European Union sanctions as one of Mr. Putin’s “favorite oligarchs.” Some of the companies are trying to expand overseas, raising the risk that the technologies do not remain inside Russia. 

The firms — with names like MFI Soft, Vas Experts and Protei — generally got their start building pieces of Russia’s invasive telecom wiretapping system before producing more advanced tools for the country’s intelligence services. 

Simple-to-use software that plugs directly into the telecommunications infrastructure now provides a Swiss-army knife of spying possibilities, according to the documents, which include engineering schematics, emails and screen shots. The Times obtained hundreds of files from a person with access to the internal records, about 40 of which detailed the surveillance tools. 

One program outlined in the materials can identify when people make voice calls or send files on encrypted chat apps such as Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp. The software cannot intercept specific messages, but can determine whether someone is using multiple phones, map their relationship network by tracking communications with others, and triangulate what phones have been in certain locations on a given day. Another product can collect passwords entered on unencrypted websites. 

These technologies complement other Russian efforts to shape public opinion and stifle dissent, like a propaganda blitz on state media, more robust internet censorship and new efforts to collect data on citizens and encourage them to report social media posts that undermine the war. 

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Alisher Usmanov in 2018. Mr. Usmanov once partially controlled Citadel Group, a conglomerate that owns many of the firms building surveillance technology.Credit...Sputnik/Reuters

They add up to the beginnings of an off-the-shelf tool kit for autocrats who wish to gain control of what is said and done online. One document outlining the capabilities of various tech providers referred to a “wiretap market,” a supply chain of equipment and software that pushes the limits of digital mass surveillance. 

The authorities are “essentially incubating a new cohort of Russian companies that have sprung up as a result of the state’s repressive interests,” said Adrian Shahbaz, a vice president of research and analysis at the pro-democracy advocacy group Freedom House, who studies online oppression. “The spillover effects will be felt first in the surrounding region, then potentially the world.” 

In one English-language marketing document aimed at overseas customers, a diagram depicts a Russian surveillance company’s phone tracking capabilities. 

Beyond the ‘Wiretap Market’ 

Over the past two decades, Russian leaders struggled to control the internet. To remedy that, they ordered up systems to eavesdrop on phone calls and unencrypted text messages. Then they demanded that providers of internet services store records of all internet traffic. 

The expanding program — formally known as the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM — was an imperfect means of surveillance. Russia’s telecom providers often incompletely installed and updated the technologies, meaning the system did not always work properly. The volume of data pouring in could be overwhelming and unusable. 

At first, the technology was used against political rivals like supporters of Aleksei A. Navalny, the jailed opposition leader. Demand for the tools increased after the invasion of Ukraine, digital rights experts said. Russian authorities turned to local tech companies that built the old surveillance systems and asked for more. 

The push benefited companies like Citadel, which had bought many of Russia’s biggest makers of digital wiretapping equipment and controls about 60 to 80 percent of the market for telecommunications monitoring technology, according to the U.S. State Department. The United States announced sanctions against Citadel and its current owner, Anton Cherepennikov, in February. 

“Sectors connected to the military and communications are getting a lot of funding right now as they adapt to new demands,” said Ksenia Ermoshina, a senior researcher who studies Russian surveillance companies with Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto. 

The new technologies give Russia’s security services a granular view of the internet. A tracking system from one Citadel subsidiary, MFI Soft, helps display information about telecom subscribers, along with statistical breakdowns of their internet traffic, on a specialized control panel for use by regional F.S.B. officers, according to one chart. 

Another MFI Soft tool, NetBeholder, can map the locations of two phones over the course of the day to discern whether they simultaneously ran into each other, indicating a potential meeting between people. 

A different feature, which uses location tracking to check whether several phones are frequently in the same area, deduces whether someone might be using two or more phones. With full access to telecom network subscriber information, NetBeholder’s system can also pinpoint the region in Russia each user is from or what country a foreigner comes from. 

Protei, another company, offers products that provide voice-to-text transcription for intercepted phone calls and tools for identifying “suspicious behavior,” according to one document. 

Russia’s enormous data collection and the new tools make for a “killer combo,” said Ms. Ermoshina, who added that such capabilities are increasingly widespread across the country. 

Citadel and Protei did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Mr. Usmanov said he “has not participated in any management decisions for several years” involving the parent company, called USM, that owned Citadel until 2022. The spokesman said Mr. Usmanov owns 49 percent of USM, which sold Citadel because surveillance technology was never within the firm’s “sphere of interest.” 

VAS Experts said the need for its tools had “increased due to the complex geopolitical situation” and volume of threats inside Russia. It said it “develops telecom products which include tools for lawful interception and which are used by F.S.B. officers who fight against terrorism,” adding that if the technology “will save at least one life and people well-being then we work for a reason.” 

A diagram from one corporate document shows how data is collected by an internet service provider and funneled to a local branch of the F.S.B.

No Way to Mask 

As the authorities have clamped down, some citizens have turned to encrypted messaging apps to communicate. Yet security services have also found a way to track those conversations, according to files reviewed by The Times. 

One feature of NetBeholder harnesses a technique known as deep-packet inspection, which is used by telecom service providers to analyze where their traffic is going. Akin to mapping the currents of water in a stream, the software cannot intercept the contents of messages but can identify what data is flowing where. 

That means it can pinpoint when someone sends a file or connects on a voice call on encrypted apps like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram. This gives the F.S.B. access to important metadata, which is the general information about a communication such as who is talking to whom, when and where, as well as if a file is attached to a message. 

To obtain such information in the past, governments were forced to request it from the app makers like Meta, which owns WhatsApp. Those companies then decided whether to provide it. 

The new tools have alarmed security experts and the makers of the encrypted services. While many knew such products were theoretically possible, it was not known that they were now being made by Russian contractors, security experts said. 

Some of the encrypted app tools and other surveillance technologies have begun spreading beyond Russia. Marketing documents show efforts to sell the products in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as Africa, the Middle East and South America. In January, Citizen Lab reported that Protei equipment was used by an Iranian telecom company for logging internet usage and blocking websites. Ms. Ermoshina said the systems have also been seen in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. 

For the makers of Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, there are few defenses against such tracking. That’s because the authorities are capturing data from internet service providers with a bird’s-eye view of the network. Encryption can mask the specific messages being shared, but cannot block the record of the exchange. 

“Signal wasn’t designed to hide the fact that you’re using Signal from your own internet service provider,” Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, said in a statement. She called for people worried about such tracking to use a feature that sends traffic through a different server to obfuscate its origin and destination. 

In a statement, Telegram, which does not use end-to-end encryption on all messages by default, also said nothing could be done to mask traffic going to and from the chat apps, but said people could use features it had created to make Telegram traffic harder to identify and follow. WhatsApp said in a statement that the surveillance tools were a “pressing threat to people’s privacy globally” and that it would continue protecting private conversations. 

The new tools will likely shift the best practices of those who wish to disguise their online behavior. In Russia, the existence of a digital exchange between a suspicious person and someone else can trigger a deeper investigation or even arrest, people familiar with the process said. 

Mr. Shahbaz, the Freedom House researcher, said he expected the Russian firms to eventually become rivals to the usual purveyors of surveillance tools. 

“China is the pinnacle of digital authoritarianism,” he said. “But there has been a concerted effort in Russia to overhaul the country’s internet regulations to more closely resemble China. Russia will emerge as a competitor to Chinese companies.” 

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul. @paulmozur 

Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent based in Europe, where his work focuses on digital policy and the intersection of technology and world affairs. @satariano 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/technology/russia-ukraine-surveillance-tech.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

28. Burying the Dead with Dishonor — PART ONE (Special Forces in El Salvador)

Some little known history.

Burying the Dead with Dishonor —

PART ONE

https://www.specialforces78.com/burying-the-dead-with-dishonor-part-one/

The charred remains of U.S. Huey helicopter shot down by Marxist FMLN rebels over El Salvador in January 1991. Two of the three crew members survived the crash but were brutally executed on the ground after their capture. (Photo: El Diario de Hoy — San Salvador)

By Greg Walker (ret)

USA Special Forces

Forward

In late February 1981, then Executive Secretary to Mr. Richard V. Allen at the Reagan White House, L. Paul Bremmer III, submitted a working paper commissioned by the National Security Council regarding “The Way Ahead” regarding what would become the 10-year proxy war in El Salvador.

The meeting, held on February 18th, was chaired by the Deputy Secretary designate and attended by, among others, Dr. Ikle from the DoD, General Pustay (JCS), General Schweitzer (NSC), and Mr. Jackson (CIA). Its content would be declassified on June 6, 2006 (FOO-002-#2430).

This working paper would become the foundational document for the U.S. involvement in El Salvador. Its goal was to successfully circumvent the coming campaign from having to comply with the 1973 War Powers Resolution (P.L. 93-148). The WPR required that Congress be notified before U.S. Armed Forces could be introduced into hostilities or situations where imminent involvement in hostilities was clearly indicated by the circumstances, and that the President submit to Congress a report of such an introduction within 48-hours after such introduction of Forces had occurred.

“Firm rules of engagement would be required to prevent any blurring of the distinction between ‘trainer’ and ‘advisor.’ Nevertheless, inadvertent involvement would certainly still be a possibility…If U.S. [military] personnel to get caught up in direct hostilities, we might have to withdraw them or alternatively address the terms of the War Powers Resolution,” wrote Bremmer.

The interdepartmental group offered another distinct observation. “…the fall of the government of El Salvador would represent a major reversal for the United States. “We might have been able to maintain a posture of indifference toward the fate of that government had it not been for the large scale and blatant external support for the insurgents…particularly not in our own hemisphere, of permitting a government to fall because we have denied it legitimate means of self-help while the insurgents have received unlimited assistance from communist countries [Italics mine].”

The 1981 working paper specifically implied although it does not state that any and all combat engagements involving U.S. military personnel, particularly the Army’s Special Forces and their supporting elements, would be deliberately denied, covered up, and if needed the circumstances of both the wounding or killing of such personnel by either accident or enemy fire would have to be hidden from the Congress and American public.

This included “body washing” or creating a cover story as to how an American “trainer” may have died and where, and what he was doing at the time of his death. The 1981 working paper concludes with this statement. “In the present circumstances, the proposed deployment of MTTs (Mobile Training Teams) to regional commands in El Salvador does not appear to involve imminent risk of hostilities. However, such a deployment would increase the exposure of U.S. personnel to such a risk. In this regard, the U.S. personnel would be in close physical proximity to potential hostilities, and the company of Salvadoran personnel who might become engaged in hostilities. The War Powers Resolution defines an ‘introduction’ of U.S. Armed Forces as including the coordination or accompanying of foreign forces in hostile situations.”

In 1996, after a ten-year grassroots political campaign organized and executed by both active duty and retired Special Forces personnel who had served and fought in El Salvador, the Congress authorized the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal and appropriate combat awards and decorations for all those U.S. personnel, all Services, who participated in the war.

“Requiem for a Friend” — https://www.specialforces78.com/requiem-for-a-friend/

Shot down, captured, and executed

A tragic and violent incident on 2 January 1991 received increasing media attention as the facts surrounding the capture and execution of two U.S. Army aviators became known. Marxist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) brought down a U.S. Huey assault helicopter with small-arms fire. The gunship carried two crewmen and Lieutenant Colonel David H. Pickett, commander of the 4th Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment, based in Honduras. According to U.S. Army aviation crews who served in El Salvador at the time, FMLN guerrillas executed Pickett and his crew chief, PFC Ernest G. Dawson Jr., minutes after their helicopter auto-rotated down outside the little village of La Estancia.

While the UH-lH was airborne, ground fire wounded the senior pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Daniel S. Scott; he died of these wounds sometime during or after the crash. The ensuing killings occurred about 20km northeast of San Miguel, only several klicks from the Honduran border. Pickett and his crew were returning to Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras from a staff visit to American flight and ground crews stationed in El Salvador. Pursuing a shortcut route, the Huey had flown from San Miguel toward San Francisco Gotera, then moved north-east toward the town of Corinto. By this approach they could reduce flight time and slip inside the established “Green Three” route into Honduras, leading directly to Soto Cano.

“The doctor who performed the autopsies had access to the debriefing. He told us it appeared the crew chief was shot first,” recalled a CWO 2 “Bob Bailey.” “Pickett apparently made the decision to run for it and was peppered with AK-47 fire at close range.” (Author’s Note: Some U.S. Salvador veteran aviation crewmen providing information on this and related incidents requested anonymity for security reasons; where noted, such sources are identified here by noms de guerre).

An aviation accident investigation team from Fort Rucker, Alabama, flew to El Salvador to evaluate the incident, per Army regulations. According to “Bailey,” this team’s report “was never released to the aircrews in El Salvador. This was fairly unusual, as all crash reports are circulated among the pilots so we can learn why a crash took place.”

Pickett’s helicopter had been armed with two M60 machine guns, but these were strapped to its floor rather than mounted. At the time, policy for airframes flying in Honduras called for positioning the guns in this manner.

It was after this incident that authorities determined a need for an ongoing airborne support unit in El Salvador, and it fell to B Company of the 4th Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment, to provide such an asset even as the war was beginning to be brought to a diplomatic conclusion.

Aircrew from B Company, 4/228th. relaxing between missions. Calling themselves “Danger Pigs, …these crews flew countless taskings in support of the Salvadoran war effort. UH-1H choppers were known by their crews as “pigs” (a loving term). Here door gunner Cory Brua holds AN/PVS-6 night-vision goggles mounted on his flight helmet. Such gear permitted U.S. night operations whereas, at the time, Salvadoran air crews did not have such equipment. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

“They wanted to cover it up,” confirmed one flyer, known here as CWO 1 “Jim Miller,” “But it was definitely shot down.” It was commonly known among those serving in-country that Pickett’s aircraft had taken ground fire from a confirmed concentration of FMLN forces and indeed had crashed almost on top of the guerrillas after being hit. After the tragedy, Army aviation crews began flying in tandem to cover and, if necessary, recover one another if forced or shot down during flight. All American helos flying in El Salvador were ordered to fly with mounted guns carrying live rounds in the chambers; B Company, 4/228th, was selected to provide air and ground crews in support of the U.S. MilGroup operations in El Salvador. 

Door gunners from the 193rd Infantry Brigade in Panama were assigned to B Company in force after the executions. Air crews from B Company flew the body-recovery mission to Pickett’s crash site, where they came under intense ground fire from FMLN guerrillas; the U.S. gunners returned fire and completed their mission. It was found that Pfc. Dawson, promoted to SP4 after his death, was killed with a single bullet to the back of his head. Pickett had witnessed this murder and attempted to escape. The autopsy report states the colonel was hit with some 15 to 20 rounds, including at least one which passed through his hand and then struck his face. 

According to “Bailey,” who spoke with the doctor conducting Pickett’s autopsy, the conclusion was that the colonel tried to cover his face with his hand even as guerrillas fired point-blank at him. After the deaths of Pickett, Dawson and Scott, the 4/228th renamed several facilities at Soto Cano for the dead aviators. For example, the former Camp Blackjack (home to the 228th) is now known as Camp Pickett. 

Today, Colonel Pickett’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery overlooks the El Salvador memorial in Section 12. His father, after a hard-fought battle with the Army, was successful in seeing a posthumous POW medal awarded in his son’s memory. Recent developments in May 2023 between the Secretary of Defense’s Office and the Human Resources Command at Fort Knox see renewed effort being made, at Secretary Lloyd Austin’s express direction, to review and facilitate the same award for Earnest Dawson.

SP4 Dawson’s surviving family members were quietly pleased to learn of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s direct involvement to see their loved one’s sacrifice finally acknowledged with a posthumous Prisoner of War medal. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

July 15, 1987 — More lies as families grieve

On 15 July 1987, a UH-1H helicopter under the operational control of the U.S. MilGRP, crashed while attempting to return to Illopongo after aborting a MEDEVAC mission. According to the crash report filed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, pilot errors and poor weather during its attempted landing were at fault.

At 80-plus knots the UH-1H crashed into the hillside above Lake llopango and some fifty meters below the ridgeline. Onboard were two Special Forces medics enroute to the National Training Center (CEMFA) in La Union. Gunfire there had severely wounded SSG Tim Hodge, an SF adviser in the neck; and he required immediate evacuation.

The aircraft and its crew were assigned to Joint Task Force Bravo, stationed at the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras. However, the air crew was assigned to support operations in El Salvador and was based at Illopango Air Base. Task Force Bravo predated the 228th Aviation Regiment’s service in El Salvador. Originally many in El Salvador believed the aircraft had been struck by an FMLN shoulder-fired, Soviet-made SA-7 or SA-14 antiaircraft missile. However, pilot error was stated as the cause of the crash by the investigative team from Fort Rucker. Today, that conclusion rings hollow based on newly discovered information.

Six Americans were reported killed in the crash: Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Lujan, a decorated Special Forces officer and the OPAT for CEMFA in La Union; Lt. Col. James Basile, deputy commander of U.S. MilGrp El Salvador; First Lieutenant Gregory Paredes, the co-pilot; Chief Warrant Officer John Raybon, a pilot whose resume included flying for the DELTA counter terrorism unit as an aviator with the “Night Stalkers”; the crew chief, PFC Douglas Adams; and SF medic, Sergeant First Class Lynn Keen. SFC Tom Grace, also a medic, was the sole survivor.

(Photo courtesy Ms. Judy Lujan)

Learn more about LTC Joseph L. Lujan, who was killed in the crash of the UH-1H on 15 July 1987.

(Photo courtesy SSG Tim Hodge)

Learn more about SSG Timothy Hodge, severely wounded by gunfire at the National Training Center in La Union, LTC Lujan had taken the place of the senior US Army Medical MTT Officer on the UH-1H helicopter which was sent to evacuated him.

Circumstances of the crash were immediately hushed up

The only survivor, severely injured, was SFC Thomas Grace. Both Keen and Grace worked at the National Military Hospital in San Salvador where they assisted in treating wounded Salvadoran soldiers. Keen was posthumously awarded a Meritorious Service Medal (MSM), the peacetime equivalent of the Bronze Star. Keen’s award was a continuation of the flawed awards policy dictated by the USGOV after Sgt. 1st Class Greg Fronius was killed in action in March 1987. Fronius died rallying Salvadoran troops under attack at the 4th Brigade’ s headquarters at El Paraiso. The “Green Beret” sergeant was confronted by three FMLN sappers who shot him, and then murdered him by placing an explosive charge under his body and then detonating it.

Sixty-four ESAF troops were killed during this attack, with another seventy-nine wounded; only seven guerrillas were reported killed. Fronius is credited with stalling the enemy assault, as guerrillas overran the compound after ESAF officers abandoned their troops. His team leader, now retired Gus Taylor, recommended Fronius for a posthumous Silver Star; the proposal was bitterly fought over in Panama and at the Pentagon. In the end, Fronius was awarded a posthumous MSM and a Purple Heart with 3 U.S. general officers signing off that “no mention is to be made of combat” regarding Fronius’ death.

This represented the awards policy hinted at in 1981 in Bremmer’s classified working paper. It was a policy that became the norm and applied to U.S. military personnel fighting and dying in El Salvador, a policy shrouded in shame, deceit, and dishonor.

What truly happened at CEMFA / La Union and at Lake Illopango

In March of 2023, this author began revisiting the circumstances of the shooting of Special Forces adviser, SSG Timothy Hodge, in La Union that prompted the U.S. helicopter piloted by Chief Raybon and Parades to be launched from San Salvador, and the subsequent abortion of that mission and deadly crash.

That investigation continues. However, the Fort Rucker accident investigation FOIA has already been fulfilled and a growing number of the family members of those lost as well as others who until now have remained silent, are for the first time being shared in this initial story for the Sentinel.

Army aviation-support personnel at Illopongo Air Base change the engine after a precautionary landing near Limpa River by a U.S. helo. These personnel kept U.S. assault helicopters flying, despite hits from enemy small arms and everyday mechanical problems. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

Salvadoran “Llama” prepares to lift fully armed SF advisers into Chalatenango area, long considered a guerrilla stronghold. This photo was taken in 1980.(Courtesy Greg Walker)

And the information received to date is disturbing when compared to the official reports and media releases at the time. Examples of this include:

• LTC Joseph Lujan had accepted an offer made in Washington, DC, to serve a one-year tour of duty in El Salvador as the OPAT for the National Training Center in La Union. In a phone call to his wife shortly after that meeting, and perhaps with a premonition, he told her “I’ve just made the worst decision of my life.”
• In the official accident report issued by Fort Rucker it is states the U.S. helo aborted its medevac mission 12 minutes after departing the LZ at 1st Brigade in San Salvador. This due to extremely bad weather. The report offers this did not affect the MEDEVAC of Tim Hodge as a Salvadoran helo had launched from San Miguel, just a 20-minute flight away from La Union / CEMFA and was already transporting the wounded soldier to the military hospital in San Miguel. However, it has now been learned the initial request for a Salvadoran MEDEVAC was rejected in San Miguel with the comment “We don’t fly at night.” According to retired Special Forces medic Morgan Gandy, who provided combat life-saving care to Hodge at CEMFA, the UH-1H that came from San Miguel was clearly a CIA aircraft with U.S. crew onboard.
• Ms. Judy Lujan, LTC Lujan’s widow, filed a complaint with CID at Fort Bliss, Texas, as she was not convinced her husband’s remains had indeed been recovered as reported to her. A CID agent there called her back and offered LTC Lujan’s remains had been properly identified at Gorgas Army Hospital in Panama. When she asked how they were identified she was told “by his medical and dental records.” Ms. Lujan informed the agent that was impossible. When asked why, she replied “I have his medical and dental records here!” The next day CID was at her door demanding the records from her. They had been sent to her by a point of contact in El Salvador her husband had left for her to call in case he was killed or disappeared. Along with the records she received his green beret, and a pair of his dog tags with blood stains on them.

LTC Lujan’s family was told his remains could not be viewed as they were burned beyond recognition. However, the Fort Rucker report and several pictures purported to be of the helo’s wreckage, said to have been located on the hillside into which it crashed, clearly show the fuselage did not burn. The trees and ground are not burned. And the diagram purported to show where each body was found is likewise not described as having been burned. The aircraft flew directly into the hillside at such speed that, per the Rucker report, ALL those onboard but one were thrown from the aircraft, their safety harnesses and belts tore away due to the force of the Huey’s impact.

A close friend of Chief Raybon and former crew chief likewise shared that Raybon’s remains were likewise labeled as non-viewable. 

Even more puzzling is an Aviation Safety report identifying another UH-IH, the wreckage of its tail boom and rotor along with the aircraft’s ID number clearly visible, having crashed on the same date and year as the helo LTC Lujan was on…its wreckage in water at Lake Illopango. As of late May 2023, the Command at Fort Rucker offers it has and knows nothing about this second helicopter.

At left, Fort Rucker accident report photo of alleged tail boom of the crashed UH-IH. Note the wreckage is purported to be on land, and the tail boom is positioned so its ID number, unlike the 1993 picture of the same wreckage, is not visible. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

From the Fort Rucker accident report — the main fuselage of Chief Raybon’s MEDEVAC helo where it came to rest 33 feet below the ridgeline on approach to Illopango Air Base, El Salvador. The investigation showed the Huey’s engine was operating at maximum power when the crash occurred. This indicates a possible evasive effort to avoid a now known second UH-1H, possibly being flown by CIA contractors, departing the air base under extreme weather conditions. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

Provided to this author in 1993, the tail boom and rear rotor of the UH-IH that crashed on July 15, 1987, is clearly visible in water (Lake Illopango). The airframe’s ID number is likewise visible. This single picture and the date it became available is believed to be a CIA operated UH-1H that may have collided with the original MEDEVAC Huey piloted by WO2 Raybon that night. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

At left, Fort Rucker accident report photo of alleged tail boom of the crashed UH-IH. Note the wreckage is purported to be on land, and the tail boom is positioned so its ID number, unlike the 1993 picture of the same wreckage, is not visible. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

From the Fort Rucker accident report — the main fuselage of Chief Raybon’s MEDEVAC helo where it came to rest 33 feet below the ridgeline on approach to Illopango Air Base, El Salvador. The investigation showed the Huey’s engine was operating at maximum power when the crash occurred. This indicates a possible evasive effort to avoid a now known second UH-1H, possibly being flown by CIA contractors, departing the air base under extreme weather conditions. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

Another highly credible source, an American who served in El Salvador and as an Agency employee, former Marine Force Recon (Vietnam) veteran, Mr. Harry Claflin, shared with this author that as of 1992, when he finally left El Salvador, the fuselage and those onboard who were killed had not been recovered from Lake Illopango. Is Claflin referring to the mystery helicopter Fort Rucker knows nothing about? Claflin, who trained and led the highly effective GOE, or Special Operations Group, as well as the Salvadoran Airborne Battalion, is quite familiar with the National Training Center in La Union.

“I was at CEMFA after the attack there. I was on the immediate reaction team. It was always on alert. It can be launched in less than 20 minutes. I was in the battalion commander’s chopper. We went after the G’s that were running up the railroad track. They were headed for the hills.

“In the late 80’s there were so many things going on at Illopango it was not possible to know everything and I had my plate full with the GOE training at the different Brigades. Some of what was going on was best not to know anything about. I tried to stay away from Hangar Five and what the ES Airforce S-2 was up to. Sometimes you can know too much and wind up dead. After spending ten years being on the inside I found it was not healthy to get involved with some things. I was at the DAO’s house one evening to celebrate a new class of cadets that had just graduated and General Bustillo [the Salvadoran Air Force commander] saw me there. The next day he called me into his office and told me to remember where I worked and lived and not get too close to the Americans.”

Claflin, the only American to have been commissioned as an officer in the Salvadoran military (as a captain), was busy in 1987.

“During that time frame the only person I worked with was Mark Cardwell who was my direct contact with the Agency. 87 was a busy year for me with a lot of catch-up work from being in Nicaragua for 8 months, 4 in the North training CONTRA and 4 months in the South training the FDN. My world was very compact and I did not pay a lot of attention as to what other units did or did not do. I went to the monthly meeting that MilGrp held at the embassy in San Salvador…to stay in the loop… As you know the Agency had a base of operations on an island off the coast of El Salvador [Tiger Island]. If the Agency was involved you will never find out what happened for sure.”

Setting the record straight – No fallen comrade left behind

In 1998, SFC Greg Fronius’ family received their loved one’s posthumous Silver Star at the largest awards and decorations ceremony held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for the 7th Special Forces Group, since the Vietnam war. Additional long-overdue combat awards were made to include fifty Combat Infantry and Combat Medical badges. This the result of the 10-year grassroots political campaign to see the U.S. Congress reverse historical course on the subject and authorize our war in El Salvador as an official U.S. military campaign.

Using the information gathered by those of us involved in that campaign, LTC David Pickett’s father, himself a retired Army colonel, was later able to force the Army to recognize and then authorize his son’s posthumous POW medal. A similar effort by SP4 Dawson’s family, which did not have the kind of horsepower and knowledge of the system as Pickett’s father did, has to date not seen the same just due awarded their son. In early April of this year a concise documentation packet petitioning Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III was sent to the SECDEF – asking he and his staff to review this case and to step in and correct this grotesque manipulation of this 20-year-old black service member’s ultimate sacrifice.

In 1996, Ms. Judy Lujan, escorted by the sole survivor of the crash that killed her husband and 6 others, attended the dedication of a memorial to those Americans and Salvadorans killed during the war in El Salvador at Arlington National Cemetery. When interviewed by the Washington Post she said this. “Judy Lujan, wife of Army Lt. Col. Joseph H. Lujan, was told her husband died in 1987 when the helicopter carrying him crashed into a hillside during stormy weather. But the Army never produced her husband’s personal effects or photographs of his corpse, despite her repeated requests, she said yesterday. “I can’t get on with my life, I can’t do anything, until I know for sure he’s dead,” she stated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/05/06/public-honors-for-secret-combat/f764f45e-1b75-4e8c-8c32-94844434d5e0/

Arlington National Cemetery Memorial Ceremony —

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3uy8Ey23Is&t=5s

When I asked Ms. Lujan if she has ever received her husband’s personal effects…his watch, his wedding ring…she replied she has not. “I was told, when I asked for these, that they had been ‘washed down the drain’ during her husband’s alleged autopsy in Panama.

Judy Lujan has never remarried.

A warning from our past

“The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.”

Calvin Coolidge, 1920.

IN THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF THE SENTINEL–

The never before released details of the wounding of SSG Timothy Hodge, A Company, 3/7th Special Forces Group (ABN), in his own words — and the true account of how 6 Americans lost their lives in their attempt to save him.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR — Greg Walker is an honorably retired “Green Beret.” Along with Colonel John McMullen he founded the Veterans of Special Operations — El Salvador in 1989. https://www.specialforces78.com/requiem-for-a-friend/

A veteran of the war in El Salvador and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Greg’s awards and decorations include the Legion of Merit, 2 awards of the Combat Infantryman Badge, the Special Forces Tab, 2 awards of the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, and most recently the National Infantry Association’s Order of Saint Maurice.

Mr. Walker is a Life member of the SFA and SOA.

Today Greg lives and writes from his home in Sisters, Oregon, along with his service pup, Tommy.

The author in La Union, El Salvador, 1984. (Courtesy Greg Walker)

July 1st, 2023

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3 Comments

1. 
   
2. steve stratton July 1, 2023 at 05:05 - Reply
3. Looking forward to part-two. Are you thinking of expanding this into a book on this time in Special Forces history?
4. Steve

• 
  
• Greg Walker July 1, 2023 at 18:53 - Reply
• Steve – In 1994 I wrote “At the Hurricane’s Eye – U.S. Special Operations Forces from Vietnam to Desert Storm”. I included a chapter on El Salvador and have written quite a bit on the subject since. I don’t see myself authoring a specific book along the lines that you mentioned – I’m content with being able to present stories such as this one in the Sentinel but I appreciate your kind thought.
• I would only add that the two-part series’ title refers to the policy set in Washington DC at the onset of the war. On the ground there are countless examples of courage, ethical behavior, and honor on the part of the vast majority of the U.S. advisers. In DC, however, there are far too many examples of just the opposite when it came to our injured, wounded, and KIA.
• DOL!

1. 
   
2. Kevin M. Higgins July 1, 2023 at 15:58 - Reply
3. There was honor, not dishonor, on the night of July 15, 1987, in El Salvador.
4. I was the Brigade Advisor for the 3rd Military Zone, San Miguel, El Salvador, the night six US soldiers died in the UH1H helo crash.
5. When SSG Hodge was wounded at the CEMFA (National Training Center) in La Union, the Team SGT called me for a Salvadoran Army medevac helicopter. The Salvadorans had three UH1Hs in San Miguel, 18 miles from La Union. We were the closest aviation assets available. As I ran to the Salvadoran Operations Center, I saw the Salvadoran helicopter already lifting off for La Union to get SSG Hodge.
6. The Salvadoran helo brought SSG Hodge to the San Miguel Regional Military Hospital. The hospital was 200 meters down the hill from me. I met the medevac helo as it landed.
7. The San Miguel Regional Military Hospital was the best option for SSG Hodge. The hospital had competent and experienced trauma care. During this period of the war, the Salvadoran Army suffered eight casualties a day, mostly due to mines and booby traps. There were two 7th Special Forces Group 18D’s permanently assigned to the hospital operating room on 45-day rotations.
8. A helo flight to San Salvador, on the other hand, would not have been prudent. San Salvador, the capital, was 50 miles from La Union. SSG Hodge was in critical condition, and those extra minutes saved by landing in San Miguel were crucial. The month of July is the rainy season in El Salvador, and there was cloud cover that evening. The Salvadoran pilots had no guarantee of making it to San Salvador.
9. There were eight 7th Special Forces soldiers with SSG Hodge in the San Miguel Hospital for that night and into the next morning. That included my three-man team, the two 18Ds, and three of SSG Hodge’s CEMFA teammates that accompanied him from La Union on the helo medevac.
10. I was on the phone that night, an open line, with MILGP US Embassy as they activated the MILGP UH1H medevac from San Salvador.
11. Dr. Romero, Director of the San Miguel Regional Hospital, said, “Don’t send your helo. SSG Hodge must be stabilized. If you try to move him now, he will die. He won’t be stabilized before tomorrow morning.”
12. MILGP said, “LTC Basile (MILGP XO) is coming anyway. He wants to get the US helo into position. Make a pot of coffee. The crew will sleep in the extra bunks in your intel center. They’ll be on standby. The minute the doctors give them the green light, they’ll move SSG Hodge to higher-level care. ”
13. CW2 John D. Raybon, a former Special Forces NCO, volunteered for the mission, “I am piloting this flight,” he said. “That is one of our guys.” A few minutes after CW2 Raybon lifted off from San Salvador, he got caught in the clouds and crashed into the Cerro de las Pavas, below Cojutepeque.
14. SSG Tom Grace, 18D, survived the crash. The other six crew members and passengers perished.
15. SGM Grace was my 3/7 Battalion S-3 SGM from 1994-96. He later became CSM, 3/7 SFGA.
16. Grace said, “I was the junior passenger on the helo that night. That’s why I got stuck in the hell hole, the wind tunnel. But that seat saved my life. The last thing I remembered was entering the clouds. We couldn’t see our hand in front of our face.”
17. The next morning, JTF Bravo, Soto Cano, Honduras, sent their medevac helo and surgical team to the San Miguel Hospital to evacuate SSG Hodge. The Soto Cano US Army surgeon said, “The Salvadoran doctors and the 18Ds did superb work.”
18. After the Soto Cano helo lifted off, the 15 Salvadoran officers assigned to San Miguel stopped me during the day to express their condolences for the loss of six US soldiers in the helo crash. They said, “Two LTCs got on a helicopter in the middle of the night in San Salvador to come to the rescue of one of their soldiers. There is no army like the US Army.”
19. COL (R) Kevin M. Higgins
20. San Vicente, El Salvador (Oct 83-August 84)
21. San Miguel, El Salvador (Sep 86-March 88)

​

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com